When Rick got his porsche he posted an I Phone photo of the thing on Facebook and it looked pretty decent… for a snap shot,  but it gave me the idea of taking some dramatic shots using old iconic Mancuanin locations. He’s from Manchester, that explains the location.

So on my way back from giving a talk on HDR at the Welshot academy night in Chester, we stopped at Castlefield and had a drive around to get some shots.

With all the strobist stuff I’ve been doing I did think about clever lighting, but really, I’d need to practice lighting cars with speedlites before trying it on a proper car, so I relied on old faithful - HDR.

I keep HDR simple these days – use Av mode for exposure, meter with Matrix mode, use AEB to get my 3 shots (each 2 stops apart) and rapid fire mode to get the 3 shots out as fast as I can. On a bright day, it takes no longer than single shot.

So that’s what these shots are – simple HDR, a mix of Tone Compression and Details Enhancer tone mapping and a lot of dicking around in Photoshop.

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Well as it was snowing over the weekend, I thought I’d get out for a bit with the camera.

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Well are you? As I sat here on a cold winter’s day, watching the snow fall outside, I got to thinking, always a dangerous thing to do. I was thinking about technical aspirations and what we are sometimes missing.  All too often the drive for technique and mastering a set of skills can have a negative effect on your photographs. How so? Well, obsessing about technique and the perfect f-stop to use for a given lens can start to limit us into a formula, one that gets applied rigorously to all our shots. Whilst they might have technical perfection, and beauty, they become a monotony of the same shots. We stop thinking about what’s in front of us and more about technique, and so  the connection with the subject (and so in turn with the viewer) wilts and fades into the background. This is aptly demonstrated on the photo forums that populate the internet. A concentration on technique, rather than narrative and content, dominates. Even those that you would think would know better fail to appreciate content and narrative (or see its importance), instead they seem to think in terms of technique only.

This is the problem I have with one of the masters of photography, Ansel Adams.  Whilst there is no doubting his expertise and technical prowess, I feel that such things actually hinder his images. In my early days of discovering photography, I held his work in high esteem; the skill was something to aspire to, however, as I learnt more my interest in his photographs waned. Why did this happen? Well, I began to see a sterility in his work, Adams’s assertion that: “We can have craft without art, but we cannot have art without craft” was a double edged sword. His rigorous application of his craft actually becomes a barrier to interacting with the photographs he produced. When viewing his images all you can hear is his voice and expression. The technique overpowers and sublimates the narrative in the image; you end up looking at the technique, not the subject. To me, this makes his work like propaganda, there is no debate/dialogue with his work, you either agree with it or you don’t. I’m not saying that something has to be flawed to have a narrative, it can help yes, but the content of the image should be the main point of focus (sorry) not the technique you use. As I’m forever telling clients at work when they are asking us to create a ‘successful website’, “Content is king”. Without it, you can have the most well designed, thought out site, but if there’s nothing there for the user to engage with, well you might as well not bother. When you can marry technique and content you get some wonderful work such as that of Jack Spencer.

This engagement with the viewer is something that TV companies have recognised, the draw that reality TV shows have. Despite the lack of polish and to some extent content, there is a narrative there that draws in the viewer, inviting the viewer to be part of the story itself.

This engagement with the viewer got me to thinking about portraits. Taking for example the Taylor-Wessing portrait prize (was Schweppes portrait prize), every year a common theme amongst the shots chosen, is bored looking teenagers staring off into the middle distance. There are rarely any genuinely happy looking portraits. Why is this? Well I think it does come down to engagement and narrative. A neutral or pained expression seems to draw in the viewer, it throws up questions and scenarios. Whereas a happy expression seems to act like a block to that, we don’t question them as much.  For some reason the darker emotions speak to us more strongly, we empathise and feel compassion for those that appear to be troubled or in extreme circumstances, yet seem to dismiss those that are happier. Lets bring back happiness into portraiture, but do it so that people engage more; it’s not easy but something that would in itself be rewarding.

Can you do that?

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Well, a couple of weeeknds ago i went to a Roller Derby Match, the Rainy City Roller Girls vs Leeds Roller Dolls, for their War of the Roses bout…

To make things awkward for myself, I was shooting on film, and mostly the 45mm Tilt and Shift, so Manual Focus on a reasonably fast paced event. Had a great time and good to have a play with film again,  some Kodak Tri-X 400 and Ilford Delta 3200 (super grainy!).

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Well I’ve posted about Monkeys in photographs, so how about an ape behind the  camera?

Nonja is  an orangutan at Vienna Zoo, that has been given a specially modified camera. It dispenses a raisin every time she presses the shutter and then uploads that picture automatically. Hmm I sometimes think some people need a camera that delivers an electric shock to make them think about what they’re taking and is it worth the pain? (me included sometimes).

Nonja has a Facebook page too, there’s some interesting shots there and worth a browse through, and a fair few that have a composition device that i really like namely:breaking the frame.

From PetaPixel.

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January. People don’t give it much thought, other than the occasional shudder of dread. After the build-up to Christmas and the alcoholic anti-climax that is New Year, the only thing that most people associate with January is cold weather and an unwelcome return to work.

We at the 4 Togs Blog are sympathetic to your feelings. We don’t want you to feel lost and alone, cold and unhappy. First of all, we’d like to remind you that there is a cause to celebrate in January – My birthday falls fairly squarely in the middle of the month and I’d like to invite your participation in celebrating with me, no matter where you are! However, with a view to the fact that a birthday is but one day, Matt has devised a plan to keep you occupied and happy the whole month through: The return of the 31-day Photo Challenge.

The premise is simple: Pick a camera, pick a lens. Take a photo each day for all of the 31 days of January and upload them, daily, to our Facebook group. Beyond that, there are no rules other than the ones that you choose to impose upon yourself. Some people like to try and maintain a theme through their images… Others are just happy to maintain the goal of taking one picture a day.

So, think of it as an early gift for you all. Please take a look at the Facebook page and sign up – we’d love to have your participation!

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To say that I have a very strong dislike of using a camera with a screen instead of a viewfinder would be an understatement! I find them an obstacle to getting an image.  I’ve always said that the job of a camera is to not get in the way of taking a photo. Some technical limitations, handling/size issues make using certain kit hard or near impossible for certain tasks, and for me using a screen instead of a viewfinder almost always will do that.

There are several issues to a screen, a refresh lag, as what you see has to be processed via the camera’s on-board processor and then displayed to you, so by the time you see something on the screen that moment has passed, making it harder to capture a specific moment. However, for me the bigger obstacle is how we interact with a screen in comparison to a viewfinder. It can be boiled down to a simple phrase: We look through a viewfinder, we look at a screen.

While using a screen it is invariably held away from the face, by about a foot (or more if you are an arm length shooter). What this means is that our attention is focused down onto the screen (we look at it) rather than the scene we are trying to photograph. The screen holds our attention in a way similar to a television, especially the bigger brighter screens they are almost worse for this than the small screens on old compacts. The proximity of the screen to our face also means that when we want to look at the subject properly we have to shift the camera and wait for our eyes to refocus, slowing things down.  The viewfinder, on the other hand, is something we look through and as such does not get in our way. We observe what is going on, without having our attention distracted by looking at a small object in our hands. The camera becomes more of an extension of ourselves, part of our vision, allowing us to focus our attention on the subject we wish to photograph rather than the physical object in our hands that has to be observed and monitored.

The use of the screen on compacts, is one thing that I find frustrating, as I search for a decent digital rangefinder equivalent, oh how I wish i had the cash for a leica M9. The new micro 4/3 compacts are very promising, especially those that have an electronic view finder as well as a screen on the back. Having had a quick play with the Panasonic GF1 and it’s viewfinder I found it ok, but not great. Like all EVFs there is still the lag on what you see, making you have to adjust your shooting style more, and it was a little small and low-res. The new EP2 is interesting with it’s EVF which i thinks is a better size and resolution. For those compacts that are aimed at a photographers market more than just a mass consumer one, I wish that the companies would introduce a decent optical viewfinder, especially on the cameras like the Ricoh GR-D, which has a fixed lens, so should be even easier!

All this said, I do have a bit of a fascination with screens also. The proliferation of camera phones, and digital compacts has created something of an obsession for me, taking pictures of other people taking pictures, but at the same time, seeing what they are looking at. When I’m out at fairs or parades I seem to have some sort of compulsion to capture these tiny views of a scene. It’s a love/hate thing.

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I’ve not got kids, I’ve forgotten how their minds work, I just remember getting very bored very quickly when I was one and am always conscious of that when I’m lucky enough to have a couple of kids to photograph.

It is a darn shame the world would see you burn in hell before let you point a camera at a child, but I got lucks last sunday when Kat from work asked me to photograph her little bundles of joy in Leeds. They really are one of the best subjects to capture, inhibitions are low, moods swing fast, they are full of energy and really responsive to requests..

So they turned up in Park Square, leeds – right in the middle of the financial area, what a place to shoot – it was about 3:30, so ambient light was pretty much gone. So I set up to strobes, pretty high up on 1/16th power and a wide angle (24mm) to get a decent coverage. I got them sat on the bench and asked them to pose… got some funny faces then that “slightly bored” look….

So time to think Ade…

What do you do?

Well I asked who could jump highest… got the 17mm lens, led on the floor and got them jumping in front of me.

I’d won them back – after a few jumps, I just invited them to “play” on the path, simple, no instructions. “Do the red arrows”, that manoeuvre where the planes pass each other, but appear to be on a collision course. So they did that and started running like posessed animals. Fantastic… then I realise that my 24-105 F4 can’t AF on them, they’re moving way to much to contemplate manual focus… so out with the 70-200 F2.8 and put the camera in in Servo AF, so you can lock on to them and follow them around..

I get about 5 shots, then even F2.8 wasn’t working… the AF assist beams don’t work when you’re using radio transmitters either…

So do I tell them to stop? Pose in a place I can focus on them? Risk losing them to bordham?

Nah – what’s the fastest focussing lens in my bag… a Lensbaby V2. Just squeeze and click…

So that;s what I used for 40 minutes – entertained them by changing the apertures and showing them the stars and flowers in the background, they were well into it.

After about an hour of shooting I’d filled a 4 gig card, they looked goosed and we’d all had an enjoyable session.

So you look at the technique…

• a couple of lights set up, one at 3PM, one at 8 – the kids were rarely in position to get “correct lighting”….
• manual focus lensbaby….lots of blurry stuff…

It’s all wrong isn’t it, not professional at all…

You then give a disc to their mum and the next day you get the feedback… they loved them, all of the family around the computer for ages having a right laugh.

Too many shots from childhood are staged, kids having to pose and look unnatural, not character at all – you remember more about the jumper the kid’s wearing than what they were like. With this technique, if you can call it something so grand, I’ve managed to capture 2 kids being kids, which I think is something they’ll really enjoy looking back on in 20 years time – or on their 21st birthday when Kat drags the photos out and embarasses them!

Here are a few shots from the shoot – mostly unprocessed except in Capture One

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