Decorating the British Consulate Residence...

Most people who know me know that I spent several years growing up in England, from age twelve to eighteen. My parents and three sisters still live there today. Every time I go back for a visit, I always do a lot of shooting, often going away for a few days on my own to shoot. I've sold some of these pictures for book covers, some as fine art prints or posters, and one even went on a national ad campaign for bottled water a couple years ago. For a long time, I thought of approaching the British Consulate (like an embassy but smaller) here in Chicago and seeing if I could decorate their walls with some of my prints.

The years went by and I never made contact with anyone about my idea. Then about three months ago I bumped into a friend I hadn't seen for a few years, who now works at the Consulate. I told him of my idea, and a month later, I was in Chicago talking with them about putting some prints up. The Consulate is in the Wrigley Building, but they have a penthouse apartment where the Consul General (the Director) lives, and has receptions for people wishing to do business in Britain, as well as British groups coming to Chicago. It's in a great location, just off Michigan Avenue, sixty stories up, with a panoramic view of the city.

Last night, thirteen prints made their debut at a party to mark the British elections, where about 150 guests gathered to mingle, eat fish and chips, sausage rolls, drink British beer and watch the results come in. These are the largest prints I've ever had made, including two 16x48 inch panoramas, a 36x48 print and a triptych of 20x30 prints.

The prints will be on view for at least the next three months. Unfortunately, the suite is private so you'll have to enjoy them from the gallery I've posted. I'm always looking for other venues to show my work; if interested, send me a message.

View the prints and price list here.

Lighting

I was asked by a new commercial client today if it'll be necessary to set up lights for a shoot we're doing. I know the location will be bright enough to shoot without any additional lights, but I responded that we may use them anyway. Here's why...

Photography literally means 'drawing with light'. Think about it– without light, whatever you're taking a picture of won't be visible. As a photographer, I'm always faced with decisions about how to photograph a particular subject. Should I use available light, or light with my portable strobes (variable powered flashes)? How will the light fall on my subject? Will they be backlit? How will I light up the background so it doesn't go dark? If I'm using available light, will the color be off due to mixed sources (all lighting emits different colors- tungsten light bulbs are yellow, fluorescents can be green or light yellow, and halogens defy normal colors)? Will the available light complement my subject, or should I use supplemental lighting to define my subject?

Yesterday I did a shoot for a client that will go on the cover of a magazine. This was an important shot, probably to be seen by 100-150,000 people, and the cover will set the tone of the magazine. Put a bland picture on the cover and people may not open the magazine. Put a quality picture on the front and readers will associate that quality with the organization producing the magazine. I wanted it to look really sharp and draw attention to the woman who was the cover model. Bland lighting wasn't going to cut it. In the end I used three lights– two on the woman and one bounced off the ceiling, lighting up the colorful background. It took more time to set up and shoot the picture, but the effort was justified by the final result.

And that brings me to my point. The magazine client and I have been working together for many years and we almost always use additional lighting. Another client of mine has a tight budget (ok, all my clients do...) and wants to squeeze the most out of my time while we're shooting together. We rarely use my lights, often moving quickly from shot to shot without time to think about making things look any better. Basically, we're shooting snapshots with little thought about lighting. There are times this works ok, but most times, unfortunately, the pictures don't look like anything special. Image is everything, and for better or worse, people will judge your business by the image you portray. If the images of your business are classy, well executed and eye catching, your customers will look at your business that way too. There are times when I won't want to use additional lighting and natural light can sometimes be perfect for the job, but for the best quality, take the time to create your images, don't just let them appear.

The first shot was used for placement, to see where the subject would stand and how the background would appear; the second will be the cover shot. BTW, extra space above her head and around the edges will be used for the magazine masthead and additional copy.

Nice Portrait

Got a call to shoot a college student, the vice president of the student government, for the college magazine. Usually when I get these calls, the setting and concept for the picture is all left to me. After reading a draft of the article, I decided to place her in their SG meeting room. I decided to use three lights, two to light the room and one on the subject, placed in a softbox. Met the subject yesterday, and she suggested holding her gavel, something she used in all her meetings. We spent about an hour all together, lighting and shooting the picture.

I was pleased with the lighting especially. The key to a good photo is almost always in the lighting. I could've taken an easy route and just shot her in front of one of the campus buildings in natural light, but that wouldn't provide any context to what she's all about, and what the article says about her, as well as being a pretty dull picture. We had a good rapport and shot over sixty pictures in several different poses.

Landscape Photography- Acadia National Park

Each autumn now, for the past three years, I've been traveling up to Maine to spend a week photographing Acadia National Park. This was my fourth trip, and I learned a lot about my equipment, how I approach photography, and myself.

Acadia is a small park, with only about 40 miles of paved roads, and all contained on the relatively small Mount Desert Island. Each morning I woke up at 5am (4am my time), and left my motel at 6:00 to be in place for dawn half an hour later. After the sun rose at 6:50, I'd spend the rest of the day searching for new things to shoot. Here's what I learned:

* landscape photography is better when you don't shoot everything at f16. F2.8 is far more creative and interesting, and f1.8 is even better.

* once the sun peaks out, the best light is done for most of the rest of the day.

* always carry a compass and know where the sun will set and where it will rise. Use it throughout the day to determine where the sun will be when the light is perfect, and what it will light up.

* I need to get a larger rectangular filter holder to cover the 16mm setting on my wide angle lens. Now I have a full frame digital camera (Canon 5DMk2), my widest angle is 16mm instead of 21mm with my 1.3X crop cameras.

* when shooting at the coast, get tide charts to know when the waves will be peaking.

* after a day of rain, streams turn into hundreds of small waterfalls.

* the pre-dawn light is a beautiful blue, twenty minutes before sunrise.

* when I'm thinking of what to shoot next, I don't really want to eat anything, and have small snacks throughout the day instead of any meals. I often don't think of food for several hours. I love to sleep in, but when faced with the prospect of shooting the dawn, I can wake up at any time of the night. Sunrise is almost always better than sunset.

* shooting in a location where tens of thousands of pictures are taken each day, it's a challenge to do something different. Having shot four times there now, it was much harder to see worthy subjects. But I think my images are better for the extra thought that went into them.

I love flying into Bangor Airport; there are only two or three gates and it's much quieter than any other public airport I've flown into. Upon arriving, it was fun to go into the small store there and see one of my pictures on the cover of Bangor Metro magazine. I had a three page spread of my Acadia work inside the magazine. I was going to pick up a few extra copies when I left, but alas, October was gone, replaced by November.

Changing Business in a Bad Economy

It's been a strange year professionally for me. A year ago I watched as others struggled with the effects of a souring economy; I read stories about several photographers packing it in after years of being in business. It wasn't until about April when things started to slow down for me. My biggest client saw their revenues way down and slashed their marketing budgets dramatically. Consequently, I lost a client I'd had since 2001, as the first client dropped their services completely. Six months later, everyone has been more careful about where they spend their money, and business has been down for me about 50% as a result.

But while work has been down, some smaller jobs have kept me busy, as well as several personal projects and other clients, both old and new. While some photographers I know are getting out of the business, I'm excited about some new directions I'm heading in. In the past year, I've been doing more stock photography, and traveled to five different national parks (Shenandoah, Rocky Mountain, Arches, Canyonlands and Acadia) to work on photos. Next October I plan on leading my first photo tour to Maine to shoot in Acadia, with ideas for more trips and teaching photography in the works. I've done more fashion shoots, working with professional models, which makes a nice change from many of the people I normally shoot for marketing campaigns ("I hate having my picture taken..."). And while I've always relied on getting my own work and promoting myself, I'm seriously looking at the idea of getting a rep to help promote my business, negotiate contracts (my most hated part of my job), and land new and bigger jobs.

Stay tuned; the future is looking bright.

What to Bring....

My friend Scott recently posted on his Facebook page that he would be going on a trip somewhere with the family, and wondered what gear he should bring. Scott is what I would call a 'keen amateur' and has just bought a digital camera for the first time. I didn't plan on spending an hour replying to his post, but I get asked similar questions often. Here's what I wrote:

Ok, I'll give it a shot... first off, the one GLARING thing I see that's missing, is a camera body cap. Sounds very innocuous, but with that missing, all the dust from the air and your carpet are wafting onto your sensor. (I'm assuming here that the black camera is your digital camera, though maybe you're using the digital to take the picture). In any case, keep that camera covered all the time, and change lenses quickly. You'll be very frustrated when you come back and find dust spots all over your pristine skies. Then you'll spend days or even weeks getting rid of them on the computer. I know– it's happened in the past to me. Get a bulb to blow off the sensor regularly. Some Sensor Swabs (about $50/ pack) are useful too, but most dust can be blown off with a bulb. Price for a bulb ~ $15.

Do you have something, like a laptop, to backup your pics to each day? You may also want to backup the pics to DVD-RWs, that way you have them in two places if one fails. When I go to Maine each Fall, I put the pictures each day onto a portable HD, then onto a DVD-RW. I've never needed the DVDs but if the drive goes out on me, I'm OK. Price for a few DVD-RWs ~$25.

I'd leave one backup camera in your hotel room/ suitcase and not even get it out unless your main camera fails. No point bringing another camera on a hike when the chances are slim that you'll have camera failure. Pack lightly, though don't leave out the essentials.

If you're shooting in the daylight hours (8am-6pm) you may not want your tripod, but I'd STRONGLY encourage you to get up an hour before sunrise and stake out a place to shoot the sun coming up. Shoot a couple sunrises and sunsets and you won't want to shoot during the day, the light is so harsh and boring. Most great landscape pix are shot within an hour of sunrise or sunset. The quality of light is so much better. When I go to Maine, I spend most of the day (after shooting the sunrise) figuring out where the best sunset shot will be. Bring a compass and figure out where the sun rises and sets, then use that during the day to determine where the best locations are for future pix. Bring the tripod- it's bulky and unwieldy, but you'll have sharp pictures, and be glad you brought it. Price for getting up early- Free– and a little missed sleep, which you won't even notice once you see how beautiful the landscape is at that time.

Make sure you have more than one memory card; get the biggest ones you can afford, at least 4GB should be ok for a day's shooting, depending on your shooting style. I do a lot of panoramas, some of which require 15-25 images for one shot, so I've been known to shoot 8-10GB in a day.

A 2X lens converter sounds good, but most (even my $300 Canon 1.4X) will degrade image quality a little, so I usually don't recommend them. Depending on the wildlife you're shooting, you may be able to patiently just walk closer to your subject. When I shot some bears out East last week, I was able to get within twenty feet (ok- these were small bears!). Deer and elk are usually easy to shoot if you move slowly and use your 80-200 zoom. Open the aperture all the way to throw the background out of focus.

A very useful accessory that a lot of landscape photographers use now is a bubble level that mounts to your hotshoe and helps you get straight horizons. Price ~$20. (http://www.adorama.com/TPBLS.html?searchinfo=bubble+level)

The graduated ND is pretty useful. You can get around it by shooting two images, one for the sky and one for the foreground, then combining in PS, but it's better to get one shot in-camera. My Singh-Ray ND filter cost $100. Lee makes good ones too. A filter holder would be handy too though you can get by without one.

When you get to where you're going, visit the visitor center and gift shops and see what locations are photogenic- what scenes are in all the postcards and posters? Look at the photography coffee table books from the area; read the captions to find out where they were taken, then visit those places.

Hope that helps Scott! Look forward to seeing what you come up with!

After about two months of re-scanning and hunting down old prints, etc, the latest version of my fine art website has been launched. It's the eleventh re-working since my first site in 1996. Enjoy.