I’ve decided to aim for the Wedding, Portrait, Autombile and Architecture markets as a starter for 10 – a the former are probably where the money’s at, the latter being things I actually enjoy doing. So you look back through 4 years of work and suddenly realise how much you’ve shot in that time. I got the 5D on the 27th feb 2006 and have probably shot on average 100 shots a day since! So the sheer bulk of what you need to look over is quite outfacing.

Then you realise that your photography has changed over time – both in style, subject and processing. In 2006/2007 I had the saturation slider to the max, lots of landscapes and a few weddings to fish shots from. So do you use shots from the past which you are pretty happy with, but know you’d not shoot any more? It’s tough one to answer, so I’ve copied shots to a new folder ready to get critical on!

I think the next big problem is that the site I’m building is hopefully going to get people to buy stuff off me or hire my services… so you really have to take a step back and look at it objectively, which is something I’ve not really done before. When you’re taking shots as a hobby, even as a semi-pro, I don’t think what you put on your website is that critical as your mortgage doesn’t depend on it – on my current website, I’ve got stacks of shots of people getting drunk, and to my mates that’s the best part of the site! So now it’s case of whittling down to a few shots of each genre that portray where I’m going… so do I just pluck from the last year or last 6 months even? Tricky.

The other thing I’ve noticed, as I’m looking at the older photos as “normal” people see them – moments in time, nostalgia, seeing people I’ve not seen for ages, and it’s quite refreshing as I usually look at shots as a photographer would and am more concerned about the composition and lighting! I remember taking them, it was a period when I was out most nights learning new things every day, trying anything and everything just to see what works. A lot of duffs of course, but I kinda miss that childlike wonderment you get when you’re new to something.

Ah well, the nostalgia must continue I guess – 2007, here I come!

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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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Speech of Scholey from James Burns on Vimeo.

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It’s that time of year when the 4Togs (well, the 3 least-hairy 4Togs, anyway) like to pack up their bags and head for pastures new.

So, whilst Mark is chained to his desk (which he quite enjoys, apparently), the rest of us are upping sticks and heading to Newquay for some sun, sea, surf and shandies. You can expect a variety of daftness over the course of the next week as we share our adventures with you all.

We welcome audience participation, as always, so if you have any suggestions on where to go, what (or who) to see, or adventures to have – please let us have them. So far, all I’ve managed to come up with is a day out as the Pyrites of Penzance

Watch this space… The frolics start Sunday!

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I had such a weekend in Jersey where I shot about 400 shots of random stuff in 4 days,  mainly in boozers or walking between them. Getting anything that’s meaningful from that is more of a challenge than any dedicated weekend in the lakes with your kit bag and 20 hours a day. All I had was a 5D, 24-105, 3stop ND Grad and a lensbaby with the pinhole adaptor fitted (by accident, thought it had the normal optic in – arse!). 

I think you need to try to tell a story where possible, avoid posing everone, look for moments to arise naturally rather than force them into action and gradually people will just accept that you’re taking shots and act naturally. Avoid flashes too, just attracts attention and blinds people, may even set off a fit if you’re not careful. 

So I got the shots back and just cropped and used some actions that I happened up on once – one grainy mono, one Grunge Rock – no more, not much point in doing too much processing as I was story telling, not trying to get an award in some photo magazine or anything… 

Here’s a few I quite like anyway

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For those of you who don’t know what a Zone Plate is, look no further than here.  

So the effect of a pinhole camera is pretty well known, really small aperture (F177) which has no optics, creates a dreamy yet recognisable image on your sensor. I found that you could just about hand hold in bright sunshine at ISO1600, but you really needed something like the sun in shot to use as a compositional aide. You can see less through this baby than an IR filter.

But the results are a beauty, faded colours, ideal for those card manufacturer’s that like pastel images for smoochy cards, or maybe for a bored photographer looking for a new edge.. albeit a blurred edge

I tried out the optic on some bull rushes and on a field of yellow oil seed rape. Here are some nice images for you…

So the Zone plate

As you can see, the effect is basically “abstract watercolour”! It’s very dreamy and gives a really warped effect on reality. I can see it being useful for flower shots in good light, you’d end up with lots of stronger colours making a nice blobby thing. It’s F19 and you can see outlines of things when looking through the view finder and it’s definitely hand holdable in good light. It’s pretty far from a traditional photo, I’m not sure I’d be using it at a wedding or anything like that, but for still life or generally getting something totally bizarre, it’s quite good fun. 

Probably more of a fine art tool than a traditional photographic lens – but that’s just it, it’s not a lens! It’s a zone plate and that uses diffraction rather than refraction

Just awaiting my 21mm ultra wide adaptor and I’ve got everything I need for my lensbaby

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They make the lens vignette like hell on the 5D when you bend the lens lots, so much so that you get black circles forming in shot, so most of these are using minimal bend. the Wide adaptor makes all your straight lines bendy too, which I quite like. The Long lens enables you to stand in a street and get portraits of people walking towards you without them looking at you. I’ve not got Scholey’s nerve to actually ask people for their portrait just yet! So I stood on streets for a few minutes looking as though I was shooting architecture and because people didn’t see me raise the camera as it was already at my eye, they just carried on with their normal business. 

Here’s a selection from the stroll anyway

I think they are both good additions to the fleet, maybe I should have been shooting on F5.6 or F8 to get a bigger sweet spot, these are all F4 as I’d left most of the apertures at home by accident! 

If you to end up getting a lensbaby and you know me, ask for a go with them before you go and buy them, you may or may not find them useful and it could save you £50!

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The triggers worked really well, managed to get a reasonable distance away and still get the speedlites to fire.

Here’s 3 shots, 2 from some lovely steps down to what looks like a basement fire escape – that was full of cans, duvets and a strong aroma of urine…. lovely The zig-zaggy one is near the old entrance, it’s a bike shed believe it or not! I used a flash either side of Dave to light him, then had one poinging towards me to just light the edges of the bike rack so I only saw the zig zag. 

Quite an interesting location and very handy for those piss-poor light shoots  - just take the flashes and make your own light! 

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"Is this the real life?....."

I did a wedding at the end of March last year, that was rained off and I had to shoot indoors with limited space and lots of people trying to barge past… 

12 months on and I did another at the end of march, and this time it’s ideal kite flying weather! Hats blowing everywhere, so we had to go inside again!

I got them on the stairs of this lovely old hall, had a strobe up the top of the stairs pointing down onto everyone, and one to the left filling the faces…. which was fine most of the time, but the 580EX 2 seems to have a power-off setting and when I’d set a shot up with lots of people in, like this, the bloody thing had powered itself down!

Still, I got quite a few Bohemian Rhapsody style shots like this, which may even find their way into their book for a laugh!

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They are also likely to have spent a king’s ransom on things like mega telephoto lenses which are needed to make the lovely, cuddly little furry animals look bigger.

However, recent studies have shown that once a photographer goes down this route, there is a huge risk of their equipment becoming flawed and producing out of focus, or “disappointingly soft” images. Rather like the luxury car manufacturers BMW producing cars with indicators that appear not to work.

This is especially noticeable with smaller birds, like the robin, blue tit and thrush. Charles Sussex from “Small Birds are Great” magazine has seen this trend over the years. He said “I receive huge numbers of photographs from our readership and most of them are pretty darn soft. These £5000 lenses are usually tack sharp, you see them used at sporting events and they are amazing, but point them at a little bird and they just look awful”.

Others have put the problem down to the auto-focus system not working on small birds – Helen Back from the National Trust’s “lovely animals” department said that “we see hundreds of photographers each day, many snapping at the deer in parks and getting a fantastic shots, but very few seem to be able to get a shot that’s not embarrassingly bad”, she went on “this must be down to faulty auto focus systems on these new fangled DSLR cameras. They seem to pick anywhere but the bird’s eye, often the branch just in front of the bird is selected, or maybe a passing plane in the sky beyond”.

Either way, it the problems are real and in evidence all over the newsagent’s shelves and the web, where, according to Charles Sussex, the norm is to have “pretty bloody awful” shots of small birds that are “badly exposed”, “out of focus” and just “uninspiring”.

Both Canon and Nikon deny any known issues with their lenses or autofocus systems.

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