Category: Camera Stuff

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Last Batch

Professional Photographer Cork
Photography Old School

My small stock of film finally lost its space in the Freezer at the weekend.  In fairness it’s been there a few years at this stage and we have a glut of frozen blackberries that had higher priority.

I think I have a couple of rolls of standard colour neg film in the fridge but this was the ‘special’ collection of film which I’ll never be able to get again.  In particular I remember when I bought that last batch of HIE it was very hard to find any that was still fresh.  I’m not sure if you can still get the Velvia but certainly it’s very hard to get processed last time I tried (and that’s years ago).

I came to digital photography at an ideal time – the D3 generation of sensors was the tipping point where digital overtook film in pretty much all practical applications at 35mm or smaller.  While there was still an advantage to studio medium format at the time that’s pretty much gone at this stage.

So I never had to struggle with a film / digital mix.  I didn’t have to deal with lots of compromises in final image quality for the convienience and flexibility of digital.

But I still love film and would love to find more excuses (and time) so shoot some.

There is something in buying film that filled me with expectation and excitment about what you might create.  It’s like buying an artist’s pad of fine paper and a new pencil.

There’s a thrill of endless possibility and potential.

The world has moved on and digital has changed the way we take photographs forever – and mostly for the better.  We do tend to over-shoot and under-think, we don’t get to enjoy your images in the physical way we used to with printed film but we have the opportunity to experiment, learn, develop, create and share more than ever before.

The essence of good photography doesn’t change with the medium.  The proliferation of photographs in the world just highlights the difference between good and bad (because there’s a lot more bad) but the value of the good is under threat.

I’ll find a new home for my antique film and hope that when I finally find a worthy project for it it’ll still be capable of rendering images in its unique way.

For the record, Kodak HIE is an infra-red (IR) sensitive film what, when used with a suitable filter, was capable of recording reflected light in the IR spectrum.  So you get these wonderfully eiree landscapes with black skies and bright folliage (and ghostly portraits).  I love IR in the Irish Landscape but a couple years ago I converted a D70 to only record IR and moved to digital for that too.  IR photography is very experimental and it’s a lot easier with digital – although no way as much fun.  Fuji Velvia is a high quality slide film which renders strong, bright colour with very little grain.

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All Prints are Hand Printed In-House

Professional Printing of Professional Images
Handprinted 12×18 prints produced in-house

In a digital age many people are still surprised that by far the majority of my photographs are delivered as prints.

I think it’s part of a full professional service that you get a professional product and not something that’s not ready for you to enjoy.

Most of my customers share the appreciation for a good print and they deserve to make the most of their images once we went to so much effort to create them together.

About two years ago we brought our printing in-house.  That means that every thing up to a 20″ print (A2 paper size) is printed in-house.

It’s a quality thing.  It’s about being in control of the whole end-to-end process of delivering my images to my customers.  A lot of effort goes into capture (taking the picture with the best equipment and with optimal settings, good composition and great engagement) and then the post-processing of images to make them shine, so why would I give up the transfer of all that perfection to someone else.

And there is a huge variation to printing.  Between the mapping of colour to ink and paper types to the handling and mounting of the prints, there are a lot of subjective decisions which I don’t want to leave to chance.

So bringing printing in-house was a big step.  Not only buying a good printer but choosing paper stocks and learning how to get the best from my end-to-end set up.

I call it ‘hand printing’ because it’s a craft process.  It may be less ‘hands-on’ than the traditional film/paper/chemical proccesses which I grew up with but in actual fact the inclusion of the computer is all that’s changed.  The level of control and the ambition to create the perfect print is the same.  The ability to print exactly how you see your print in your mind is the same.

Every print we produce goes through the same process.  Each is printed on archival, acid free, fine art papers.  The ink-paper combination is designed to last for generations if properly looked after.  I also print on more specialist matt papers if it suits the image and the application.  Each print is checked (and re-worked if necessary) and mounted in quality framers mounts.

If you choose a framed print, we can supply custom-made frames from a local framer or a small range of stock frames (also sourced locally).

You can also buy the high resolution images and produce your own prints – they cost about the same as print of equivalent resolution – but we can’t stand over the quality of the printer you choose.

How you display your images has a huge impact on whether you get to enjoy them.  My images of your family deserve the best and our in-house process is designed to do just that.

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Portraits

One of my favourite quotes relating to what I do has to be:

If you want to photograph a man spinning, give some thought to why he spins. Understanding for a photographer is as important as the equipment he uses. – Margaret Bourke-White, Portrait of Myself by Margaret Bourke-White

This comment resonated with me before I really understood it.

The more I look and try to understand truely great photographs and how they were created, the more I see that the level of understanding in your subject is key.

The difference between a ‘Portrait’ and a simple picture is that a Portrait captures an essence of character and in so doing stimulates an emotional response in the viewer – whether it’s an empathy or a more negative reaction.

Generating that response, creating a rappor and engaging your subject creating a Portrait requires more than just camera skills.  In fact many of the greats of portraiture weren’t great camera operators but their personalities and creative vision allowed them to create some astonishing portraits.

And I don’t think that this is limited to portraiture.  Looking at Landscape work and stuff like Thom Hogan’s wildlife courses and many other fields it’s clear that a fundamental understanding of your subject and how it tends to behave gives you an advantage in being in the right place at the right time in good light to capture that decisive moment.

So, I’ll add a more recent quote from Thom: ‘Frankly, planning, preparation, and patience tend to gain me more than what the camera makers are gaining in their latest tweaks.’

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About Photography

I’m always interested in reading what other photographers have to say.  To be perfectly honest a lot of them don’t make a bag of sense but sometimes you find something that resonates with your own personal experience and expresses it in a way that you can’t.

“Photography is one percent talent and ninety-nine percent moving furniture”

Attributed to Arnold Newman by Annie Leibovitz.

There’s loads of these on Photography Quotations.  Generally I don’t have the time and patience to go through this site to look for stuff but it’s handy to check something (I can’t stand mis-quotes).  This one isn’t there though so we’ll have to trust Annie.

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Essential Camera Gear

After a couple of years of missing out, we finally got to go back to Courtmacsherry this year for the horse riding on the Strand.

The View from the Stands

It’s a great event and there are loads of great photos waiting there for anyone who is bold enough to take on covering it: horses galloping at full speed through sand & water; riders covered in muck; the odd horse loosing the steering on the corners; even a serious looking spill and of course the spectators make it too!

But you either have to commit to covering it or not.  The view from the stands just doesn’t cut it (as you can see from my pic).  And I was there for a family day out, not to disappear off on to the beach on my own for the afternoon.

There were a few photographers who did commit to the sands: definately a few press-pros amongst them. I reckon they got some great pics.

But all of them lacked one essential bit of kit for an event like this: wellies.

In fairness one guy had a high-vis vest and good walking boots but all the horse-people (who had been here before) had wellies.  Another guy got inventive with plastic bags but that just didn’t work out and he got mucky in the end.

So what’s my point?  Good preparation, research and planning are an important part of a successful photography assignment.  You might get lucky and get something wonderfully spontaneous but your chances of good photographs improve on an regular basis if you do your homework and get in the right spot and have a good idea what might happen next (preferably with good light).

Of course you need the skills to capture it once you’re there too.

And some camera gear – but too often the attention is on the camera gear and not the things that let you get in the right spot – in this case it was simply a pair of wellies!

And how do I know?  I did a session by a stream in Glengarriff with a small fella who loved to throw stones.  The place to be was in the water just beyond where he was throwing so that he faced me.  But I brought my walking boots – great for mud (which is what I predicted) but not great for wading out into the stream.  That day I needed my wellies and I missed a couple of shots I would have liked to get because I didn’t have them.

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Enjoy your Holidays

We’re just back from our annual holidays – so apologies to anyone who was looking for me in the last couple of weeks – I’m back now and rapidly catching up!

Holidays are a great time take pictures: more time, new locations, everyone relaxed and happy.

I’ve always been an avid watcher of people – I think that’s a big part of my photography – and holidays are always a great time for that too.  Combine that with the camera geek in me and you get someone who enjoys watching people using cameras and observing their behaviour.

This is normally passive enough – I’m not judging, I’m observing and sometimes learning. But more than once this holiday I got a little dumbfounded by people chimping.  Now I’ve nothing against chimping per se. The great thing about digitial is the ability to check your settings instantly.

My problem with it is that while you’re doing it you’re not doing anything else – and personally I didn’t come on holiday to chimp.  I came on holiday to take pictures, to spend time with the family and to experience somewhere new (although not necessarily in that order).

So if you’re going away this summer, think about what you might be missing going on around you before you spend too much time looking at the back of your camera.

Take a look when you’re back in the Hotel: not while standing in the middle of road; not while standing in the middle of something really interesting (if you think you missed the shot, take another rather than missing it again while you check).

OK, I’m glad that’s off my chest.  I should really post some more pictures.

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NASA and Me

There’s lots of interesting media stuff out there about the NASA’s Shuttle Programme as it draws to a close.  Interestingly enough they’ve only just got an image of the Shuttle docked to the ISS after all these years. Pics are on NASA’s site.  I guess it never dawned on me that this would be hard to get – but you can’t just slip out the back door of the ISS and take a snap of the whole thing!

The pictures where taken by Italian astronaut Paolo Nespoli ‘as he left the International Space Station in May in a Soyuz capsule to return to Earth’ (originally from the BBC).

Now I’m not really a space nerd, but the space shuttle first launched when I was a kid and I remember  watching the Challenger disaster on Newsround in shock.  I had models & toys of of the Moonraker Shuttle (whatever happened to those Dad?) during my ‘James Bond’ phase (my early, impressionable days of cinema!).

The Shuttle was something that captivated me as a child and it’s wierd that it’s ending.

There is another Ironic Echo here though: Nespoli left on a Soyuz.  He has a pretty cool (and very unique) Flickr page as well which in includes pictures of it – visually it hasn’t changed since it was first launched.

My Dad took a school trip to Russia in the ’80s (I’m sure there’s a longer story there) and be brought back an Airfix-style model of the Soyuz.  So long before the ISS started being built, Shuttle and Soyuz came together in by bedroom!

OK, techy diversion almost over.  I found this link about the most expensive cameras ever sold.  Mad stuff.

There’s a NASA connection here too: amongst the rare Leicas are some Nikon and Hasselblad cameras built for NASA.  The commentry one of the Hasselblad’s states that ‘most of them were left on the Moon. Only their backs found their way home.’  So once Virgin works out how to get tourists to the Moon, there’s a little reward waiting for the first to make it back there!

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SHARK ATTACK

I think we're going to need a bigger boat

Life is pretty hard for Lego Men in our house and things have got worse since the steady arrival of Pirates at Christmas and a recent Birthday.

Today however, while the girls were at Mass, a Man-Eating Shark turned up.

Thankfully there are still a few Heroes out there:

Our Centurian to the Rescue

For anyone interested, the Shark is mostly made of blue bricks that have been part of the Lego box since before I started playing with it.  I assume my sisters once had a house with a blue roof?

These pics are also part of the on-going trial of the Nikon 50mm f1.2 AIS (and my ability to focus it manually!).  More on the search for the ‘perfect 50’ to come.

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Analogue Holidays

The Lomography Spinner 360 at work

We all need a break.  You’d think that I’d take a break from taking pictures over the holidays wouldn’t you?  Well, no.  I usually take the opportunity over the hols to shoot some film.  Yes, film.  Old school stuff.  But I find the practice of shooting film slows me down and forces me to take more time over taking a picture which is no bad thing.

So I smiled to myself packing my extra ‘take home for the hols’ bag on Christmas Eve:

  • My spare D700 to come home – not exactly state of the art anymore but it still takes stunning images in many very demanding conditions.
  • My ‘new’ Hasselblad 500C – the market seems to have fallen out of medium format on eBay recently and I picked one up for the experience of using a larger image circle.  Formerly the Pro Photographer’s Work Horse and still a lot of great glass and film area to play with.
  • My new Lomo Spinner 360 – how much fun can you have with a 35mm negative?  Regular readers will know I’m a Lomo fan and this was on special before Christmas.

We had a lot of fun with the spinner in the snow on Christmas Eve – some of them even came out!  Remember that ‘wait and see what you got’ feature that you have with film?

I ran my first ever 120 film through the ‘blad on New Year’s Day – need to find someone to develop it now!

If there’s a message from this then it’s to do some personal work as well as all that other stuff: have some fun and enjoy your cameras – all of them.  Each has its strengths and stretching your mind to use each for something different is good for your creativity.

Have a Happy New Year.  Be creative and make some time to enjoy yourself a little more than you did in 2010.