I’m in the process of migrating the whole of my web site to WordPress.
And I’m doing it live, in phases so it might look a bit weird over the next few weeks. Please bear with me, it’s getting there. But there were sections that looked pants on your phone and I need to fix that.
So the main site is now be hosted on WordPress. I am steadily moving all the old content over to new pages and a new Gallery plug in. I then need to refresh some of the content – especially the images which go back some years now (but still look good!)
I’ve been sending out a few reminders to families who had sessions but not ordered prints.
I’ve never really done that before. I never want to put people under pressure. In fact I try to turn around a proof gallery as quickly as possible and then leave it to clients to come back to me. As with most things in life, everyone is different: some people come back straight away and want it sorted; for by far the majority of people with young families, life takes over and they put it to one side, fully intending to come back it. And in fairness most people do get around to it sooner or later.
Christmas is usually a trigger. Or the anniversary of the event. Or the next child’s communion or confirmation.
And look, I know what it’s like. You should see my ‘to do’ list. So I really don’t mind, as long as they eventually do come back. The one thing I don’t like is lovely pictures taken and forgotten forever.
But I do think that for some people, if they leave it too long, they are reluctant to come back to me for the sake for pure embarrassment. Please don’t feel that way.
So if you are one of the lucky clients who got an email this week, I hope you don’t think I’m nagging or badgering or trying to make a sale. I haven’t sent out reminders before because I don’t want to come across as pushy.
I just got that ‘disc full’ warning and had to kick off my periodic archive process: moving files from my working drive to the archive drive. Generally I keep images not yet printed handy on the working drive so I came across a number of sessions not yet printed.
But every session is kept on archive. It’s a time-consuming process but one which I think is vital for a professional service. Your images are always available, whenever you need to come back to them. Going back to 2008.
What kit do you take on holiday? Do you just go with the phone and try to do justice with the semi-wide angle and reasonable image quality? Do you bring ‘all the gear’ and have to deal with getting on as hand luggage and lugging it around all the time?
I think I’ve finally hit on the best compromise (for me, for general holiday stuff anyway): I picked up the wide angle lens for my trusty, compact Nikon J5. It’s a very capable 1″ sensor and a pretty neat lens. The camera community never really loved the Nikon 1 series but neither had they anything bad to say about the image quality (or the focusing system – which was pretty ahead of itself). The biggest issue was price – and the second hand market has resolved that one!
So I pretty much took all my holiday snaps with this one combination. I’m a lover of the wide angles anyway and it suits most scenic work and it gives a different perspective to the standard views of most well-known places.
Nikon J5 + 6.7-13mm – the happy walk-around. Image straight out of camera
Nice to see someone as enthusiastic about IR as me. Maybe time to dust off the converted D70. I did mine myself a long time ago and is very low-tech by comparison to his Fuji. The big difference with converting a more modern camera is that you can get live-view to show you what the IR is doing. My D70 is more trial and error. The Fuji also has a black and white mode which gives you live preview of what it’ll look like in mono (though there is something fascinating about the colour IR)
St Anne’s at Shandon in Colour IR. Took a bit of perspective adjustment in LR (and still not sure it’s right). Shame the fish doesn’t stand out more.
After an nice quiet Christmas Break, it’s nice to be taking photos again. I had a very lovely, short portrait session yesterday in the Hayfield Manor (great location as always and even nicer – or me anyway – that it too is quiet at the moment). And today, with the sun out, I just wandered out of the office with one of my less used cameras and walked the Marina.
I have realised that it’s easy to disappear into the Internet when you are stuck at home: too many gear sites; too many photos of exotic locations; other people’s ‘interesting’ lives.
It’s easy to forget that I actually just like taking photos, and the camera is just a tool that enables that (and one camera or lens might do that better than another).
And most of all, we are blessed to live in Cork. If you care to look, there is something interesting to photograph all over the place!
St Vincent’s Bridge and Bachelor’s Quay, Colour Infrared
Nice sunny morning yesterday and cloud was forecast for later in the day so I went out early with the infrared converted D70. This camera has a opaque filter installed over the sensor instead of the normal AA filter, so it only uses the part of the sensor that’s sensitive to the infrared end of the spectrum.
Green foliage tends to reflect more IR, blue skies block out a lot so they go extra dark. And the D70 sensor colour sites tend to get a bit confused. Most notably, the jpegs do this browny-black / blue / white feel but the RAW images have a distinctly red hue (of the same capture). Normally I’d do a black and white conversion to normalise all that but the colours are often interesting.
Everything looks kinda spooky. Love the really dark skies.
But although the IR-effect can make everything look more interesting, the image still needs to be interesting to make it work. It’s tempting to take some very simple compositions just to enjoy the IR-effect but really you still need to work the composition.
It’s just that certain elements are different. For example. you can’t let the white grass take over, whereas you’d often leave a good bit of green grass in a shot to balance things out.
Also using the ancient D70 is fun. You’ll constantly read about how new models make older cameras into trash but that’s nonsense. The D70 was a great camera in it’s day. Sure it’s lower res, lower DR, has a tiny screen, is slow and less effective autofocus. But it is by no means unusable and actually works really well for scenic images. It has a very satifying ‘clunk’ to the shutter and there’s something nice about having small files to work with for non-critical work.
Just an update on the current state of Lockdown 3.0
I’m here if you need me. A lot of what I normally do isn’t possible under the current restrictions but like many small businesses I’m trying to keep trading as much as I can.
I have some Commercial work still on: Product Photography, Digital Reproduction and Fine Art Printing can all be done safely without contact.
I am still processing print orders from Family, Communion and Confirmation sessions from last year (and the year before, and the year before that!)
So it’s a good time to look out those proofs and think about finally getting prints.
But I’m not in the office full time. I’m here when I need to be – generally mornings after the school drop (or after I make sure my home schooler is out of bed). So if you want to call in it’s best to phone to make sure I’m in the office when the time suits you – 087 683 8511
It’s no problem coming in to do something or meet you.
Otherwise I’ll be in my pink chair, drinking coffee in my garden – which is starting to spring to life again
I have put the three most popular values up on the site but you can also customise your voucher by adding value in €10 units.
Vouchers are effectively a pre-pay for the a session and include products up to the value selected. Or they can choose to take the value of the voucher as a credit against another product like larger Framed prints, Tryptichs, Storyboards or Albums.
You can of course still phone or email me to get more info on vouchers and purchase them direct from me: 087 683 8511 rob@roblambphoto.com
I do so many headshots these days that I set myself the lockdown project of trying a self portrait (again). I even bought a remote release to make it easier.
It’s going to take a bit more work.
Apart from the normal ‘oh god do I look like that’ thing (and a few more grey hairs), just being alone is weird: no one to do what I do for everyone else. But I guess that’s in the nature of a selfie.
In fairness there are a few in there that are worth looking at in more detail. I’m not gone on the studio feel but this is where I was today.
But I think I’m not really sure what mood I was going for today – and TBH not really in the mood. And there was no one there to ‘make the magic happen’ except me.
I didn’t realise this was going to be so difficult.
A lot of lens filters pretty much died out with film: all those weird coloured filters you used with black and white film, fancy 1970s effects filters, even gradient filters (for most people). All can be replicated in post production. Doing it in post just makes it easier – and saves wrecking a good capture with poor filter choice.
But one filter still has a place in my bag: the circular polariser. That’s because some of the effects of the polar filter can’t be replicated in post. It works in three dimensions to affect a 2D capture.
It came in handy this week for what should have been a pretty standard external view of an office building. With low sun on the building, the windows had strong reflections that wiped out the branding on the window.
Polarising the light largely removed those reflections. The reflected light as a particular orientation which can be removed by the filter if you rotate it to the correct plane.
Can’t do that in photoshop!
Now we can also now see the crap in the window of the apartment above – and I’ll have to remove the bird poo in photoshop. But the branding is now clear.
The other main use of the Polarising Filter is to saturate your skies. Now that you can do that in Photoshop but the filter gives you a head start.
I do get questions about filters and this is it: just the Circular Polariser. And buy a good one.
People are still sold UV filters to protect their lenses. Hopefully you spent as much as you could afford on a good lens that has coated elements throughout to optimise the image and reduce internal reflections. So why put a cheap bit of plastic (or even more expensive glass) on front and undo all that? Unless there is a real chance that something nasty is going to get on your front element: salt spray, mud, snow – or you are up a proper mountain – use your lens hood to protect your lens.
If you are a serious landscape photographer then you probably should learn to use gradient filters. But for us mere mortals, we shoot RAW and apply a gradient filter in Lightroom.
