If you’ve recently had a Communion and you’ve no photos to show for it then it’s not too late.
We do a lot of First Holy Communion sessions after the event. It’s a great chance to dressed up again and get the pictures you missed out on on the day.
The kids always enjoy re-living the day getting dressed up again and it can be scheduled to suit you so there’s no pressure – you can relax and enjoy the whole photoshoot experience.
We can do the session at Home or in a Studio Setting depending on how formal you want to go. But all these sessions are designed to be fun for everyone and you can see that in the images we produce.
So give me a buzz if you want to get some lovely memories of your special day now that the dust has settled – 021 4293714 or rob@roblambphoto.com
I’m pretty much up to date with the communion pictures at this stage so anyone who has had communion pictures taken should have either a proof sheet (for Gallery Sessions) or a booking for a viewing session.
For anyone who can’t make it in we can provide on-line viewing of your images but it’s better if you can come in and see them in their full glory for the first time. I can also answer your questions about sizing, framing and how the communion packages work.
There’s a lot going on this time of year but some lovely pictures come out of First Communions whether it’s a Gallery session, a session with the family at home or some of the less formal pictures – like those from the Our Lady of Lourdes Communion last weekend.
It’s a lovely time for the kids and a great time to capture all the excitement and innocence of the day.
The IR-converted D70 hasn’t been out for a while. Years in fact. The battery was so flat it had completely reset. It was one of my phases: the IR phase. Like the Fisheye phase I guess every photographer has these.
But over the last few years I’ve been focussed on my core skills as a portrait photographer and that’s all about traditional people skills and natural looking tones. I think classic portraiture endures whereas the latest trendy-faddy look will always date.
I’ve always been fond of the IR landscape look – those dramatic black skies! I just don’t shoot that many landscapes. And it hasn’t exactly been IR weather.
Today was better though and with a full day in the office in the offing I took 15 minutes out in the sun at lunchtime to see if the D70i still worked (it was a DIY job afterall). I decided to just go out there and shoot what I saw in a very familiar location. No real analysis, just image instinct.
I think it’s worth doing a bit more with the IR landscapes. You need to get the balance between the IR look and good composition. They are remarkable because of the IR thing but you need to use it to make a good image (and avoid the snowscape look). I just ned a few more sunny days and a little time to get out there!
I don’t do video, I’m a stills guy. I like a good movie – one with a good story – whatever the genre. But I prefer to tell stories myself using still images.
I am however a Swimmer and after a few years out of the pool as my kids have got more into swimming then I’m getting more involved myself.
So I guess it was only a matter of time before my interests came together: swimming, image capture, techy stuff.
When I met Garry I was inspired by his drive to improve the swimming ability of everyone he talks to. He’s more baldy-headed about swimming than even me!
We’ve now teamed up to provide technical analysis for freestyle swimmers. I’ve learned a lot about video in the process and the product is now matured. I’ve learned to ‘truck underwater’ and all about high frame rate capture. I’ve found some great free tools for editing video (and some crap ones). I’ve had a lot of fun and learned more about swimming in the process.
If you’re a mature swimmer and interested in improving your freestyle technique, check out video analysis cork for information on the analysis and development sessions.
It’s not exactly creative video – I’ll leave the wedding videos to the pros – but I’ve loved the technical challenge of getting this right.
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.
To me there seemed to be a whole bag of stories relating to this bus, the people on it, the people who own and maintain it, where it’s been and what it’s doing outside St Mary’s on a Thursday morning.
And I’d love to know. And I’d love to photograph them.
But what came over me as I walked past the bus was a familiar old feeling of intrusion. It’s one I used to feel when I saw something like this on my holidays – I was fascinated, I knew there was a great story waiting to be told, I could even see some captivating photographs waiting to be taken, but I was inhibited by not wanting to intrude: I had no real right to pry for the sake of a good photograph.
My curiosity isn’t stronger than someone else’s privacy.
I thought that perhaps this would change now I do this for a living. I’m a full-time professional photographer now. But clearly for me that doesn’t give me the right to be nosey for a photograph no-one has asked me to take. Even if it will be fantastic.
Maybe it’s my English background. No doubt many other stunning photographs have been created without such qualms. Maybe the people concerned would have been more than happy to tell me their story and let me photograph them.
But the best thing about doing this professionally (for me) is that people ask you to photograph them and tell their story. It’s the asking that makes the difference.
So I shot this ‘from the hip’ without the people on the bus noticing and went about my own business. That probably says a lot about me but I’m OK with that.
We sent flyers into St Anthony’s School today about availability for the Confirmation on the 10th April and the Communion on the 27th April.
We’re available for Gallery Sessions and sessions at home or on location (Hotels, Restaurants etc) on both days although we are starting to get booked up for the 27th already.
The range of sessions and packages is designed to be flexible to allow you to get Quality Professional Photographs on your child’s day. We’ll make sure you get a great momento of your family looking their best.
If you have a Confirmation or First Communion at St Anthony’s this year, give us a call to enquire about a session to suit you – 021 429 3714
If you’d like to arrange a session to mark the event on another day then that’s no problem – often people prefer to get the pictures taken when they can be more relaxed. All the same options for sessions and packages are still available.
With the other posts here on the blog, the information about the sessions and the packages are slipping down the main page so I’ve now anchored a link to the top of the navigation bar to make it easier to find.
So on my morning off I went off to drop in on friends who have just opened up a food business on Popes Quay. It’s a long time since I walked that quay and I was stopped in my tracks on the steps of St Mary’s. Something about these steps drew me in and I took out the camera and the 24mm lens and took a few pictures.
It’s one of those occassions where the light and the geometry of the steps – newly wet from a shower – just stuck me.
Now it’s no surprise to most people that I prefer people to architecture. People are just more interesting and the more time you have with someone the more interesting they become and my challenge in life is to convey that character in a photograph. And I’d normally be looking at a shot like this and looking at who to put into the frame to make it make sense and where to put them.
But I quite like this image. I tried it in black and white but it looked too much like a drawing.
On a technical note, not much has been done with this image. I made some adjustments in Lightroom to even out some minor distortion in the 24mm prime lens, adjusted contrast and colour and that’s about it. The intention is just to sligtly exagerate the natural flatness of the tone of the stone work and contrast with the colour of the doors. I decided not to clean up the gum, the cigarette butt or anything else.
After much talking about it, I finally took the morning off today. In true BBC style, here’s how my morning shaped up in numbers:
1 Person wandering around town with only a very short list of things to do. Looking around in the sun between the showers and enjoying being in the City
3 Great Ideas for new photo projects which may never happen (must write them down)
5 Photographers meeting up for breakfast
15 minutes late to meet them because I had to go into the office first
25 Days left to catch the Terry O’Neill exhibition at Wandsworth Quay and the City Council Offices – go see, great to see these images in real print
32 Photographs taken whilst wandering the streets of Cork. I decided to bring the camera in case I saw something and pulled it out at St Mary’s on the North Quays. More of these later.
205 Minutes out of the office. Not much but great value.
3,000 euro for the Terry O’Neill print I had my eye on.
I didn’t count the number of businesses which had closed since I was last in the City – but I did notice a good few new ones as well.
OK so our bit of snow didn’t last that long. The kids threw a few snowballs on the way to school and then it was gone by lunchtime.
So I’ve had to gone back into the Archive to find something topical:
Snowboy – Jan 2010
Two side stories on this one:
We have a canvas print of this at home but I couldn’t find the file anywhere so I went back to the original Archive file for the RAW file and put it through Lightroom. What I find interesting is that second time around I didn’t do a whole lot more to the file than I did about 3 years ago when the picture was taken. I’m not a big Photoshopper: I try to get everything right in camera. All files get corrected: White Balance, Exposure and Tonal Adjustments. I will go at anything that distracts from the main subject – whether that’s controlling bright areas or cloning out odd things here and there. But that’s about it. The tools are better three years later but the aim is pretty much the same.
When I started the laptop this morning to pull this file off the Archive, it didn’t start first time and went into Recovery. A (long) time after it came back and I sighed with relief. But I got a slight fright. Everything in the office is backed up but I treat the laptop as something of a temporary store. But there probably are some things on there that aren’t fully protected (mainly personal stuff). Also the disc is pretty full. So today has become IT day with a series of backups and disc purges in place across both machines. Followed maybe by a little maintenance. Computers are great but you have to look after them!
