My Space

There is nothing quite like it. Standing in your own space, a space that you have created (with the help of a housemate or two) and that is completely at your disposal. Standing in a space where you cannot be touched, where nothing can affect you and knowing that you are in your element.

There isn't much demand for a studio photographer in Grahamstown. I have only once heard someone say that they specifically wanted to have studio photos done, and even then it was managed without the use of a studio. But, nonetheless, I wanted to have one. I wanted to have this space to myself where I could bring people to create a little world of my own imaginings. For the moment, it is small. For the moment it is nothing more than a backdrop, a black stool, two lights and a tripod. But I can see it in a month, a year, a few years time. I can picture myself slowly gathering props, am already gathering them, and building a space not just for myself but for my clients as well.

I can see myself learning, gradually at first but ever faster with the experience that I gain, how to control the light, how to manipulate the background, how to direct people and make myself the master of the space. For now I am still shy, still coming to terms with what needs to be done. For now, I am still capturing the moments as I see them instead of creating them with my directions. For now, I am watching, learning and slowly becoming comfortable with what needs to be done. I am slowly learning how to tell people what to do, what will look best. It is a slow process, but it is happening.

I am making mistakes, I am realising what looks good and what doesn't, what light to use for which complexions, what poses to ask for and which to avoid. I am learning behind the camera and in front of it. I am gaining experience and confidence slowly but surely and am reaping the rewards in the forms of Thank-You's and Wow's. There are still moments when I look at the photos that I have taken and see what could have been done better, but that in itself  is a learning step and one that I am happy to take. I am coming into my own, adapting, shaping both myself and those around me to the point where I can have things as I want them to be, and this is the one area where that is achievable. In this area of my life, I can make sure that everything goes according to plan, where in most other areas I don't have control.

This is my place of control. This is where I get to show off myself, my skill. This is where I feel most comfortable. So... SAY CHEESE!

Photo Storage

As any good photographer knows, taking photos takes up a lot of space. On an average day, I can easily take a gig or two of pictures, and on an important day (weddings and the like) you can imagine that it would be closer to five or eight gigs. The trouble is that I only have a 500gb harddrive on my laptop and, as you might imagine, that is not going to last very long. In fact, I am surprised that it has lasted me this long considering that I have been at this for a good two years now. So what do you do when your photographs start taking over?

The most obvious answer would be to get an external. This would be the simplest solution, but certainly not the cheapest. I don't know about elsewhere, but in SA a good, big hard drive would cost somewhere in the range of a grand and a half. And then  you have the trouble of what if the thing gets stolen. Certainly not ideal, and a very real  possibility! In addition, hardware breaks and you do not want it breaking with your lifes work on it.

The next idea (in some minds) would be online storage. This works well because it negates the need for spending money on hardware and circumvents the whole theft issue. Of course, this can also cost a pretty penny and, if you are in SA, will take up a lot of time and a lot of bandwidth, which is a rare and valuable commodity - I work in the IT industry, I know. ;) I could spend days, weeks and months uploading all of my gigs worth of photos onto websites, but then I would be left with slow browsing or a big bill.

My answer to this solution was a lot simpler, but also a bit more hazardous (or so I found out today anyway). I rifled through my photos, picking out ones that I have edited and ones that I want to re-edit and, once I had gone through all of my photos from 2011 and 2012, extracting the precious gems as I went, I resized everything else. I found a decent resizer (Faststone works VERY well and very quickly) and I went through the folders in their entirety minimising them all to a decent but not great 1280 x 800 size. In so-doing, I managed to save 80gb so far, allowing for a whole lot of sessions that I wouldn't have managed otherwise. AND there is still more for me to do and more space to save.

But of course, this answer comes at a price as well. The price, in this case, being what happened this afternoon. I got a call from a friend. They wanted my photos for a publication. He had specifically recommended me, since I had taken photos for him before and had provided them with low res images to show examples of my work. They wanted high res images. So I came home at 5pm and started rifling through the edited pictures. Nothing. I found a good pile of high res watermarked versions, but those just wouldn't do. And, it turned out, the originals were too small to be of any use. There could be no re-editing and there could be no salvaging the situation. I ended up managing to crop out and clone out the watermarks in some of the images, but some are going to be lost.

So, it turns out that every plan comes with its advantages and disadvantages. If you have money and time to spend, there are ways to get it done, but for me... I at least have some space for more photos, and I  won't be making my mistake again any time soon!

Thailand Again

I am still going through and re-editing photos from my trip to Thailand, and today's one comes from our trip to Big Buddha on Koh Samui. It was our first day on the island and it had been an exhausting 14 hour trip to get there, but we were not about to give in and go to sleep! Instead we decided to see one of the sights and do a little shopping while we were at it.

This was the original photograph. The sky was overly cloudy and did not make for a particularly appealing backdrop, drowning out the colour and leaving the image rather bland. The Big Buddha himself was dull and lifeless and not at all the Buddha that I remember him to be.

This is the first edit using Picasa. You can see that the colour was rendered rather well with the backdrop becoming white, which (to be fair) isn't necessarily a bad thing in my  opinion. It was a bad day for photo taking, but the blown out aspect does not extend to the statue itself and works to bring the Statue to the  main point of focus. I do find the two objects on the bottom right of the picture to be distracting as is the pole coming up behind Buddha's head.

And this is the final edit done in Photoshop. The colour is not quite as bright as it was in Picasa, but this is intentional. This is more the colour that the actual statue was rather than the overstated gold that came out from the Picasa image. I was also able to use Photoshop to edit out the parts of the image that I found to be distracting. This was done very simply with a clone tool to clone the white area towards the top of the screen and to the right of the pole by Buddah's head and carefully place the white over the areas that I found to be distracting, leaving a clean image of Buddha over the white background. Had I not been there myself, I  would not have known that this was the skyline. This may make the image seem overly fake or generic, but I feel that considering the circumstances of the weather, it was the best that could be done in this instance.

What do you think?

Post Processing

There is an advert that comes onto South African radio (or at least Algoa FM) fairly often. It is an advert for Kodak, and it is one that strikes a chord every time I hear it. It is an elderly woman talking about her wedding day, the day her daughter was born and (today) the day her granddaughter is born. And she says in this wistful voice that when they come out of the delivery room, she will be there with her camera. Which is all wonderful and beautiful. Only the ad ends off saying "It's only a photo when it's printed". It is such a beautiful advert, but that line gets me every time. It strikes a chord, of course, because I don't print many of my photos. I have collections of them stashed on  my computer. I want to print a portfolio, but that takes time and money that I just do not have.

And it brings up the topic of what exactly constitutes a photograph. It sounds easy, but everyone has a different say. Some people would say that only a printed picture is a photograph and that, until it is printed, it is still nothing but an image. Which is true to some extent, but I think that having it printed does not suddenly make it photography worthy. Some would say that once it has been captured it is a photograph and anything done to the picture thereafter is changing it so that it no longer constitutes a photograph but art instead. But isn't photography an art in any case? Where does the line get drawn between creating art with your camera and creating art through post-processing. Some people would say that HDR photography stops being a photograph and becomes something else, a compilation of photographs, a merging of artworks. I was watching a most interesting video about how an image of Imogen Heap was created using the merging of various photographs and the layering of them, one over another, until the original picture was almost unrecognisable.

So where do I sit on the topic? I think that a photograph is a fluid concept. I believe strongly in post-processing, since I like to make my images pop, stand out. While I could spend forever trying to get details in camera perfect, I would far rather touch up minor imperfections later than waste time trying to get it perfect on the spot and missing an opportunity to capture a moment. I think that some people can take the post-processing a bit far, but I don't think that stops the image from being a photograph. Any image that comes  out of a camera is a photograph, and every  photograph is a work of art, an expression of self. You just have to find the right way to express what you want that image to show.

Over the next few weeks, I am going to be doing a lot of re-editing of photos. I am trying to structure the photographs that I have taken over the last two years, and there are thousands of them to go through. I have grown in my editing, from making simple changes in Picasa to starting serious editing in Photoshop, and I am hoping that the changes in vision will come across. You can expect to see some comparisons over the next few weeks, starting with this image from my vacation in Thailand:

This is a temple within Wat Phrat Kao in Bangkok, Thailand. To get to this golden statue, you need to wait  patiently in the long queues and even then, you are only able to walk through the room without stopping. No flash photography is permitted, which meant that the photograph needed to be taken within a split second without stopping to position myself for the best angle and with throngs of people around me. This is the photograph out of camera, the only editing being the resizing of the image.

This was my first attempt at editing the image in Picasa. The aspect that I wanted to bring out was the golden statue and the platform surrounding it. I certainly managed to draw attention to the colour, but the background behind it is very much in shadow and there is still a lot of distraction at the front of the image. At the time of editing the picture, I was very against cropping images, feeling that their size should always remain relative. This is something that I have grown out of. I now realise that there is no reason for the size to be stagnant. What is more important is symmetry and removal of obstacles that draw the eye away from the subject  of your image. And so, I tried to bring this across more in my final edit.

This is my final attempt at editing to image. You will notice that a lot more detail has been brought out from the background, but there are less distractions due to the way that the image is cropped. The people in the front have been removed as has the statue to the right, to allow for symmetry as a rule of thirds would not have worked in this instance, the left hand side of the image has been cropped as well. The statue itself is placed towards the centre of the image with the head almost precisely one third of the way through. though the colour isn't as vibrant as in the initial edit, it is also not as harsh in places (like the bottom of the platform) and I feel that it makes for a much more rounded image which brings out the fascinating nature of the temple rather than just focusing on one aspect on  its own.

Watch this space for more editing advice to come while I sort through the photos from the last two years and make some adjustments as I go.

Learning by Doing

Birthday Bash

Ruanthai, Grahamstown

I tend to be a planner. I like to have an idea in mind of exactly what an event is going to be like, what angles I am going to be able to take from and what photos I am going to be taking. I have lists. I like everything to be perfectly in order. And that, as a photographer, is a terrible idea.

There are times when things don't go according to plan. There are times when the light just isn't right, when your subjects just aren't co-operating and when your lists get blown away by the wind. Weather changes, things come up and there is nothing that you can do about it. You just have to be prepared to roll with whatever comes your way. Which I find difficult to do, but seem to be getting some practice with.

Take for example the birthday party that I was hired to photograph over the weekend. I was given weeks of notice. I had my gear packed and ready for whatever lighting I might have come across. I felt prepared. I arrived early. I got the prepping shots, the details down to a tee. And then things started heading a little south.

I had been hired for an hour to take photos at the start of the birthday dinner before the guests settled in to their meal, while they were still milling around and having starters and chatting. But it turns out that the one person who wanted photos of everyone, the birthday boy himself, had a family emergency and was going to be late. So I ended up being a photographer in a room filled with people who didn't particularly want to have their photos taken. Everyone was chatting, eating, mingling with each other and there I was, on the outskirts, snapping away wherever possible. People tended to hide their heads when the camera turned in their directions and duck out of my gaze. Which makes the job of documenting the party more than a little difficult.

I tend to like candid shots more than posed ones - shots that bring out the light in people without their even knowing about it. Which is difficult in a room with less than ten people when you are the one with the big camera. Everyone knows who you are photographing and when. And if they don't want to have their photograph taken, it makes it very difficult. But I managed nonetheless. It turns out that some of the best photos of the evening were the candid ones, the posed ones feeling, at times, a little too posed.

 

 I have learned my lesson. You'd have thought that I would have learned it way back at my first wedding shoot, but I consider it learned now. You can prepare for weeks, months, maybe even years. But in the end, when you are photographing people, nothing can prepare you for how they will react and what will happen. You've just got to be ready for whatever comes your way. 


I never ended up getting a single photograph of the birthday boy - he arrived an hour after I had to leave. But I consider this to be a learning experience. I consider this to be a test of what I can make of a difficult situation. I consider myself ready.

Seven Super Shots

I have been feeling down lately. In fact, it goes beyond that really. I have been feeling depressed, run down and nostalgic. You know those moments where you wonder if the choices that you made in your life were the right ones? Yeah, I have been feeling a lot  like that recently. And I have been looking for something to cheer me up.

And then I came across a challenge that was posed by my friends over Neil and G Go Walkabout, a couple that I met and became friendly with in Korea. It is, above all, a photography challenge. But it is also a challenge that allowed me to indulge in the nostalgia in a way that does not actually make me feel sad, but in a positive light. 

All of the photos were taken over the last two years and all with my Canon 550D, and some are not as good as others, but they all bring back fond memories. Which, I think, is what I need right now.

A photo that takes my breathe away

I still remember taking this photograph, standing on a wooden ledge overlooking the islands of Tongyeong, South Korea at sunset. I remember thinking to myself how peaceful the world was, how beautiful it can be, and this is still one of my favourite shots from my year in Korea. I like to think that it kind of epitomises the year that I spent there.

A photo that makes me laugh/smile

One of those technically not so good photos that I was talking about earlier, but oh does it make me laugh. This was taken during my trip to Durban last month, when I got to see Robyn for the first time in what felt like forever. And Robyn has this amazing energy about her. She goes out of her way to make you happy, and just thinking about this whole day makes me happy. This photo makes me happiest of all though. Love you Robyn, you monkee.

A photo that makes me dream

This could be anywhere. It could be a desert, it could be an ocean. Those people c ould be anyone - it is almost impossible to tell who they are if you don't know them. And I like to look at the photo and imagine myself in the Namibian desert or at some exotic coastline instead of just Kenton On Sea. Boring old Kenton on Sea, which apparently is not quite as boring as it may seem.

A photo that makes me think

This photograph was taken at the Uitsig Animal Rescue Centre in Cape Town. And this is a rescued dog. Looking at him always makes me wonder what kind of life he must have led, what kind of people he must have had and what kind of people would give up on such a beautiful, wonderful creature. He was so incredibly friendly and loving, and it just hurts to think of him as an abused animal, though that is what he is, because it is hard to think that anyone would want to hurt such a beautiful animal.

A photo that makes my mouth water

My first meal in Thailand was at the restaurant of the Mimosa Spa and Resort. I had never had Tom Yum soup before, and this Chicken Tom Yum was my first experience of real Thai food (as in made in Thailand rather than just bought at a Thai restaurant). And it was incredible. I could have eaten it all day. I certainly ate every bite  of this despite the spiciness (I am such a sucker when it comes to hot food). It was totally worth it!

A photo that tells a story

This photo was taken during the Grahamstown slutwalk. For those who do not know what a slutwalk is, it is a protest that happens around the world that supports the fact that women should not be judged by how they dress, and that dressing in a certain way does not promote or warrant rape. This was one very brave woman who turned  up to the event in lingerie to make a statement, the only one that I saw. And I thought that she was absolutely amazing and that the image made the perfect statement for the event.

A photo that I am most proud of

It's a weird one to be proud of, and it may just be that I am particularly proud of it right now in this moment. This photo was taken only a week ago in Grahamstown at the abandoned train station. It is the first HDR photo that I have taken and really loved. But that is not why I am proud of it. It's because, when I look at it I think of my Mom's dad who passed away while I was in Korea, my grandfather who adored trains, who studied them and collected them, and who I think would have absolutely loved this photo. And that makes me proud of it. The thought that grandad would be proud of me for taking it.

And now is the point where I am going to pose this challenge to other photographers and other people out there. There are a couple of people that I would like to specifically direct the challenge at, but I think that anyone who enjoys photography should participate. I know I found it to be both fun and worthwhile, and I got to rumage through the photos that have been taken  over the last year which is always a worthwhile effort.

So, some people I would like to direct the challenge at are Shaina from Foodie Getting Fit and Nikita from SnowPony on Parade in addition to some others who will be tagged on Facebook. Let me know when they have been posted - I look forward to seeing them!

Studio Time

As any reader of this blog may know, one of the big exciting things that I have been looking forward to (in terms of photography) recently was getting my own studio. After months of waiting and preparing, it has finally happened!

The wheels were set in motion by Grant's parents, who came down for Shaun (aka. Bob)'s graduation in April. They came bearing late birthday presents of studio lights, and I was absolutely thrilled. It was the best birthday present that they could possibly have gotten me! And it was a countdown as to when we could get started. There were things to do, places to go, people to see, and it was most annoying because I just wanted to get a photography studio set up!

And then there was a blissful long weekend of nothing that was planned. And it was perfect. We spent Friday morning finding the equipment, only to find that we weren't quite sure what was needed. So we returned on Saturday morning a little more prepared and bought a lot of PVC piping. We then started trying to fit it together to make a frame for the backdrop. Which, we quickly found out, wasn't sufficient. We needed more piping and, it being Grahamstown on a weekend, the shops were all closed. So we returned on Monday morning to get more piping and to get a backdrop, and by Monday afternoon it was done!! I had a functioning backdrop that was not about to fall over any time soon, a simple stool for subjects to sit on and lighting to brighten it all up. The only thing I didn't have was a volunteer.

Edit: I spent about half an hour this evening trying to put together a diagram of the backdrop, but my paint skills are failing me. If you would like to hear about how exactly it was put together, please feel free to drop me an email or leave a message and I will let you know.

It took a while to rectify the shortage of volunteers, but after much convincing and promising of lunch and movies, I convinced Katherine to come in and give it a try. And she was lovely about it! Didn't mind at all sitting under the boiling hot studio lights (considering that it was cold, it was probably the most comfortable place to be in any case), didn't mind us moving things around her or the fact that the cat also decided that the chair was the perfect place to be and refused to budge off her lap. And this resulted in studio photos! The first, and hopefully not the last! Wonderful photos that I am absolutely thrilled with considering how much work still needs to be done.

Let me know what you guys think! Also... who's next?