So, my apologies, to, well, everyone I know. I’m afraid that I’ve decided on a project. Or rather, a Project. Quite a long one, in fact, and of decidedly indeterminate length.

To backtrack: someone asked me at the weekend why, other than having a little more time on my hands, I had decided to start the blog up again. The answer is that I am going through one of my periodic rekindlings, a resurgence of love for the form. I’m buying photo books again, I’m looking at photographs by others, and I’m taking more photos. Just not the photos that I thought I’d be taking.

Photography is a funny old thing. It’s hard to pin down why you like a particular subject, or genre, and, as it can be such a technical exercise, often difficult to tell the difference between photographs that you admire and those that you like. And I have, slowly, come to the conclusion that I’m actually a portrait photographer. Of sorts.

Certain photographs move me. My wife, as ever, managed to work out what kind years ago: we would go in holiday, and she would always complain that my photographs didn’t show any people. They were always of things, buildings, landscapes. I, of course, used to pooh-pooh these complaints, confident in the knowledge that I was A Photographer, and she probably just didn’t understand the aesthetic brilliance of my work.

She was, of course, completely right.

All of the photographs that I like, or nearly all, are of people. I buy books of formal portraits and look at the photographs to relax. I don’t even read them for the lighting information or technical mastery – I’m looking for the connection, between subject and observer, or sitter and photographer, or even just the photographer’s vision. And, as such, it strikes me that I should probably be shooting that, if it’s what strikes a connection with me.

So, enough of the two veg, and on to the meat of the matter. My project is to take portraits of people who come to my house. It’s a simple as that. I’m going to do it on 6×6 black and white film, square format, with a Bronica SQa. I’m going to take a maximum of one roll per sitting per person, which means twelve shots, and hopefully around half an hour with a willing subject. I also want it to be a collaboration, where we work together to get a portrait that we both like.

What I’m not going to do is take lots of photographs in the hope of something useable showing up. I’m not going to be able to preview what I’m doing, other than using a digital camera as a “digital Polaroid” to get lighting. I’m also not going to try and get concept photographs like the one above (which I took on what is now an ageing Nikon D200 when I was testing lighting set ups). I don’t want photographs that will look cool on a Flickr stream. I want to hang them on a wall, and enjoy them.

Hopefully, everyone will enjoy both the process and the result, and I’ll get better at something that I love. So, again my apologies if you know me. But at least you’ll get a nice photograph out of it.

Incidentally, everyone that I’ve mentioned it to seems to like the idea.

Apart from my wife.

I wrote a post some time ago about off-camera lighting, with the promise that I would “let you know if anything interesting develops.” Well, I’d hardly say that anything actually interesting has come about but, given my last post, I thought that this might be a good time to take a look at the topic. I’m certainly far more comfortable with the whole subject than I was two years ago.

First things first. I’m talking here about flash photography. All photography is, of course, about off-camera lighting – most of the time an unimaginably large, nuclear fireball about 8 light minutes away (note – photographers spend a lot of time attempting to replicate the Sun. Especially somewhere like England, where it’s something of an endangered species.) There is something quite magical about off-camera flash. You can entirely change everything about your subject with a brief burst of light that is, to all intents and purposes, invisible to you, but all that your camera sees. Don’t believe me? Take a look at this.

If you know your stuff as a photographer, you know that (apart from ISO, or “film speed”) you have two options for controlling your exposure. Aperture (the size of the hole in your lens that light can get through) and Shutter Speed (how long you let the light in for). So far, so good. If you’ve bought an SLR and ever taken it off Program mode, you are almost certainly following me. However, adding flash messes with that steady relationship in rather counter-intuitive ways.

And here’s why: flash is quick. I mean, super-quick. Much faster than your fastest shutter speed. Thousands-of-a-second fast. So, if you use flash, it doesn’t care about your shutter speed (although, don’t, in general, try it above 1/250 of a second. Don’t ask why; just don’t.)

So, what does this mean? It means that, in full daylight, you can cut out all the light apart from the light that your flash is giving out, which is exactly what Zack Arias has done in the link above. He will have done something like put his shutter speed at 1/250, and his aperture nice and small, around f16. Try that now – point your camera at a shady wall with the following settings: ISO 100, 1/250, f16. You’ll get black, or something close to it. Now imagine that you had a light source that just didn’t care about your shutter speed, and could paint in light wherever it wanted? See how that could work? You would have complete control over what was lit, and what wasn’t, and the quality of the light, and how hard or soft it was, and so on and so on.

That’s why Anton Corbijn gets paid £40,000 for a photoshoot*, and you (or I) don’t.

So, to come back to my last post. You’ll note that there is, essentially, no dark shadow anywhere, nor is there an evidence of motion blur from my caffeine-addled hands. Both of these things are deliberate (although the expression is purely fortuitous. I’ve no idea how I produced something that cute). Let me run through my thinking:

1) The light from a bare bulb above one’s head is, most of the time, not a pleasant light source for photography. It’s too small, and too feeble, therefore unnatural and prone to camera shake.

2) By shooting at a small aperture, fast shutter speed and low ISO (probably f5.6, 1/200s and ISO 200, I’d guess), I essentially took a photograph which would come out black.

3) I added the light I wanted by firing off a flash. Remember, flash doesn’t care about shutter speed, as it goes faster than any shutter you’ve got, so I just need to pump enough light at that f5.6/ISO 200 to register an image.

4) I fired it off-camera. Flash from on top of a camera, fired indiscriminately, looks like – well you know. You’ve done it any number of times at parties. That pasty zombie look.

5) I decided that I wanted light that came from everywhere, eliminating deep shadow. So, I used the white room around me. I fired the flash at the ceiling; this effectively gave me a huge, soft light source (as opposed to the tiny, hard light source that comes from aiming a flash directly at a subject). The light also bounced around the white walls, filling in from the sides as well. In the photo above, shot ten minutes later, I used the shower curtain as a massive diffuser, but the principle is the same.

6) I checked the back of the camera, having taken a test image. It was too bright, so I closed the aperture to about half it’s original size, letting less of the flash light in. Turns out that this was perfect. Well done me.

7) Took a few photographs.

8 ) Made my Mum happy by sending one to her.

And that’s the process. Hope you enjoyed it. In an unusual gear post in the near future, I’ll let you know what equipment I used.

*true story. In a former life, I worked at Warner Music, for David Gray’s label, Eastwest Records. Anton Corbijn took some photos for us of Mr Gray, and I saw the invoice – that’s not bad for an afternoon’s work. And yes, the photographs looked amazing.

So, those few of you who follow me will have noticed that I’ve been a little, well, absent. Those who know me will probably guess why. Those who don’t can probably surmise from the photograph that accompanies this post: it turns out that two children under two actually take rather a lot of time out of one’s day, time that might otherwise be spent, say, blogging.
Nevertheless, time is not the only reason. It turns out that, with the arrival of the progeny, my photographic focus has shifted somewhat. I started this blog in order to push myself to take more photographs. It turns out that it wasn’t a blog I needed, but children.

I would estimate that 90%, if not more, of my photographs since my son was born two years ago have been, well, of my kids. I’m getting pretty good at it. The problem is, of course, that these are personal, and not really for public consumption. Please don’t get me wrong; I don’t mean that I don’t want people to see them – I’m not one of those who believes that posting photographs of one’s children is somehow going to lure paedophiles to the warm glow of one’s home. That way madness lies.

No. I simply mean that it’s boring. Grandparents love photos of Noah and Holly, Uncles and Aunts to a certain extent, and friends can cope with a few here and there. But, frankly, I doubt you could care less. So, with a dearth of interesting images, I rather dried up.
So, although I can’t promise that I’ll not post photographs of my little gene-bearers, I’ll try to expand my repertoire a little. I’ve. Even thinking about photography a bit, and a couple of blogs have got me thinking as well. Maybe I’ll treat you to a couple of my more choice bon môts.

Yes, I’m the kind of guy who uses the phrase bon môts. I don’t apologise for it.

A couple of notes on the photograph above, jut so that it’s something a little more than just a photo of my newest offspring. Holly was being changed in a smallish, all-white bathroom. It was dark outside, so the only available light was a tungsten bulb above her – not the greatest circumstances for a great photo.

So, what’s a photographer to do? She was in a great and photogenic mood, so I did something that I haven’t done for ages – I turned to a splash of off-camera flash. I took a flashgun and put it on the toilet (I know – classy). I attached a wireless trigger (I’ll go into these at a later date, but basically they are little widgets that allow you to be up to 100m away from the flash, as opposed to attaching it to the top of the camera) and aimed it at the ceiling. The light bounced off the ceiling and all the walls, nicely approximating that “it’s everywhere” light you’d get by mounting a whole load of strobes around your subject. I set the camera on full manual (no reliance on the camera’s metering – I relied on experience and had the exposure nailed within two test shots) and from then on, I fired away.

As I said, I’m getting pretty good at this photographing-the-children lark…

The fact is, it’s much better than the photographs that I took with my big, serious camera of exactly the same location, twenty four hours later. I’ve included mine below. Distinctly average, and this is probably the best. The fact is, my thirteen year old nephew went out with a camera with which he had no experience, and, with nothing but a fresh eye, ignored all of the obvious, picturesque shots, and returned with a set of photographs which blew mine out of the water.

Congratulations, JJ. Damn you.

Clearly, some of have a talent for this kind of stuff. And some of us are just hacks.

They are, of course, landscape and wildlife photography.

Now, I’m not one for labels. However, labels are necessary, if only as a shorthand. “I’m a landscape photographer” tells your audience volumes, even if it is stunningly imprecise. However, I think that we can spot photographs which fall into these categories pretty easily. There are photographers, and photographs, which transcend these categories, of course, but the categories remain useful.

I have, perhaps, taken three or four landscape photographs of which I am proud in ten years of photography. Not a great hit rate. Both of these categories suffer from the same problem, namely that people believe that a photograph of a beautiful thing perforce creates a beautiful photograph. This is, of course, poppycock. I would no more expect my saying the words “I saw a beautiful sunset yesterday” to convey the grandeur of that sunset than I would expect a poorly through through photograph. You would be surprised how many photographers do not realise this – or, perhaps, if you have been subject to endless holiday snaps, you won’t.

I would say that my hit rate for wildlife photography is even less impressive, serving essentially as a visual note to myself saying, “I saw this thing, on this date.” Little more. It is only recently that I took a “wildlife” photograph of which I am happy. Please note the inverted comas. This photograph is as constructed as you get; a tame owl, the tamest that the birds of prey centre had, that had been brought out for us to pet. This photograph says more about portraiture than it does about wildlife. Nevertheless, I’m happy with it. The elements came together perfectly, and the arrival of a small child, silhouetted in a doorway and and framed in a pupil, made an otherwise unremarkable photograph something, I would hope, just a little more remarkable. Well, worthy of a small remark, at least.

A week or two after taking this photograph, I received a book of Nick Brandt Photographs. Now there’s a wildlife photographer who takes a good portrait.

I’m sorry. It turns out that keeping up a consistent blog is hard, and conflicts rather strongly with the twin concepts of “fatherhood” and “spare time.” Those very few of you who have subscribed to this blog, my apologies, and thanks for your patience. I’m going to try and get back on track, perhaps aiming for three blog posts a week.

Stay tuned.

What I do insist upon, however, is that they get a fast prime. It’s the surest way I know to make your photographs look better. Lose the flash, think about composition, be inconspicuous. It’s a winning formula.

But what brand, I’m always asked. They seem so similar!

Well yes, they are. Which gives a pretty clear indication that it doesn’t matter which brand. If you’re looking to go pro one day, yes it matters. Then there a number of reasons to pick one brand over another. But otherwise? Nikon, Canon, Olympus, Pentax, Sony. They’re all good cameras. They’ll all do what you need. They all have deceptively similar spec sheets, perhaps with the exception of video. I’m a Nikon man, so people assume that I’m going to recommend a Nikon. That is more an accident of circumstance however, and in actual fact I’m pretty brand agnostic The low end Nikons don’t autofocus with the faithful 50mm 1.8, for example, so it’s not Nikon all the way. You won’t be a better photographer for having picked a Nikon over a Canon, or any brand over another. You will be better by using it.

I, like all photographers who don’t have the benefit of, or who don’t heed, good advice, learnt this the hard way, by spending a lot of money on useless rubbish. I’m still prone to it, of course, but I’m a little better informed nowadays. And some of it is tax deductable.

So, here’s my advice. I you are interested in getting a DSLR to try your hand at photography a little more seriously, and you genuinely want to improve, do the following.

1) Buy a low end body. The second up in the range is often a good plac to start – still cheapish, but it’ll allow you to grow without restriction.

2) Get the kit zoom. Then take it off, and put it somewhere safe. You’re not going to improve all that quickly with it on.

3) Buy a cheap, fast prime. Nikon and Canon both make decent, cheap 50mm 1.8, and I know that Nikon makes a cheapish 35mm 1.8, which would be perfect. I don’t know about other brands, but hopefully they have similar offerings.

Erm, that’s it. Don’t take that prime off until you are much more confident with te camera. At first it will be limiting, but soon it will be liberating. And don’t be tempted to take it off. Learn to live with it. Trust me on this one, even if you choose not to believe me at the moment.

Now that you’re free of the shackles of choice, enjoy the extra time spent taking photographs!

In any case, my liking for this little camera is in no way diminishing (I have since had a little go on the first m4/3 camera, the Panasonic G1. More on this in another post.). I thought someone out there might be interested in how it works as a landscape camera. And the answer is, erm, quite well, actually.
One thing that I did not (for some reason) expect it to do well was a long exposure. So I thought I’d test it out. I got hold of a cheap IR filter, which, along with the fact that the e-p1 has a pretty effective IR filter (God, I haven’t explained that well. Perhaps I shall someday) means that exposures with it are quite long. The photograph above was shot with the kit lens at its widest setting (14mm) at f6.7, with the shutter open for 20 seconds. The camera locked up for about another 20 seconds, for noise reduction voodoo. The results, as far as I’m concerned, are absolutely great. I’m not going to go into 100% crops and the like, but I can tell you that it is sharp, noise free, and generally beautiful. I’m pretty gobsmacked, actually. Now, I’m not by any means a big landscapist, but if I were, I suspect I’d be ecstatic with this result. Certainly, the tonality in the above image is, to my eye, lovely. You may well not like the image itself; I do, in fact, and I normally hate my landscapes. But I think it’d be quite hard to fault the tonality of the thing.

The upside of this is that I am finding more and more applications in which the e-p1 is far more than adequate, and I am picking up and carrying around my dirty great D700 less and less. It’s not something that I was expecting, to be frank, and it’s very pleasing indeed. A little less philosophy in this post, I’ afraid, and a little more photo geekery. Hope that’s not too off putting – if anyone wants to pop back in a few posts time, I might have some proper camera prn for you. I gave in and tricked it out a bit (with a purpose, I promise…)

I have mentioned before that the iPhone has essentially unlimited depth of field. Practically speaking, under most circumstances, this is true. But not always. The photograph above has had a bit of colour correction done, but other than that, nothing. You can produce out of focus areas, but bear in mind that the flowers and grass in the foreground are about an inch from the camera. Not the most versatile of cameras, but it just goes to show – don’t take generalities as absolutes.

A great deal is said about depth of field, incidentally, often by people who know est to nothing about it. I do not pretend to. I have a pretty good idea how it works in practical situations, and that’s good enough for me (and, unless you’re a scientist whose interests are something other than the visual, it should be good enough for pretty much anyone). You would be astonished how people get themselves tied up into knots about it, though. They’ll tell you  that a m4/3 camera is inherently not as good a full frame camera because “it doesn’t have as shallow a depth of field.” Well, that is, and it isn’t true. The fact is, even the smallest sensors (and you don’t get much smaller that the iPhone’s) can be forced to appear to have a very shallow DoF. And I suspect that a number of people have no idea at all about the practicalities of the issue.

Like so many things on the internet, it’s just not worth getting worked up about. Feel free to flame in the comments…

You may have noticed in the last post that the images that accompanied it had been manipulated to a certain extent. Just a little tweaking, but the black and white pictures, for example, had been run through a film grain/spectral response reproduction program, and had a border added to them to suggest darkroom printing. The colour photographs just had the border added.

I went through a phase of adding film borders to my digital images, thinking, I suppose, that it would make the images themselves more interesting. I was wrong, of course, and I’ve since learnt that it’s the photograph itself that counts. The question remains, however, as to whether attempting to replicate analogue processes has any validity, aesthetically.

The reason that I’ve been taken with this particular look is down to a wedding photographer whose blog I follow, Jeff Ascough. He’s pretty well renowned, and is somewhat famous for his reportage photography. He used to shoot his weddings with a couple of Leicas. This is, firstly, very cool, and, secondly, gave his work a certain look, which I would imagine has become something of a trademark. He now shoots digital, but goes to quite some lengths to reproduce the look of film, with sets of custom actions to approximate the tonal range, using higher isos than is necessary to introduce an element of noise, and borders to give the look of hand prints. It strikes me that this is a perfectly valid use of the technology, and his care of the images certainly shines through.

Similarly, I have a project on the go where I have combined different formats of film, and used more than one digital camera. I feel pretty happy with emulating black and white film here to give some consistency across the project, simply so that the viewer is not jarred by the aesthetic differences between photographs, which I feel would distract from the experience.

But what about changing things just for the individual image? I did it with my nightime shot here, and actually I think that the border is over the top. It detracts from the shot, and offers little to enhance it. I did it as a shortcut to approximate the look of street photography(i.e. the look of film from a 35 mm rangefinder), and it strikes me as cheating, as trying to give the photograph an impact which it should be able to earn on it’s merits, not by standing on the shoulders of other, similarly presented photographs.

Take exhibit A, above. I’ve added a much less in-your-face border, and used a grain-replication program (It’s hard to see at this size. Take a look at the grey area in the house window in the background – you may be able to see it there.). Let’s be honest, I’ve added little to the photograph, have I? My feeling is, oddly, that the addition of grain adds something of some significance, in the way that tweaking curves would, but the border crosses the boundary into artifice. Perhaps it’s a matter of subtlety; the former is not something that you would notice, but, like a good film soundtrack, makes all the difference. The latter is overt, making a statement, and as such announces itself, drowning out something of the image.

However, if I were to print a negative in the darkroom with a sloppy border, I’d feel completely justified. So what’s the difference? And what about the image from this post? The border there is created from the full area of which my film scanner is capable, which exceeds the boundaries of the frame on the left and rioght. I find myself wishing it had a similar effect at the top and bottom, as well. So what if I artificially added a film border, perhaps scanner from another frame, to this image? Would that be legitimate?

It’s something of a minefield, but in the final analysis, I suspect it’s only important in that pursuing these effects it is likely only to detract from my taking of images themselves. It’s often a little too easy (as I suspect it always has been) to allow ourselves to be swayed from what is good by what is fashionable, new or gimmicky. I’ll try and stick with good.