Gratitude

This shouldn't be a long post, or at least I don't intend for it to be one. Though, knowing me, I might end up rambling like I am right now and the post may end up being ridiculous.

There is nothing like the feeling that you get from a client's appreciation.

Every time I take photographs for someone, I like to watch them looking through them. I always wish that I had my camera with me to capture their expressions (perhaps I should start bringing it) - their smiles when they find a photograph that they truly love, their laughter and the appreciation that they feel, because words can hardly ever bring express their sentiments as well as their faces can. Of course, this works in the reverse as well. There is nothing more harrowing than watching someone flip through the photographs that you laboured over for hours in shooting and post production without so much as a polite grin. Both types of clients (almost) always thank you before heading on their way, but it is not quite the same as seeing how much they really appreciate what you have done.

For someone like me who is inflicted with terrible self-doubt and fear that she will never measure up, appreciation really does mean a lot and criticism is always taken badly. This is why I was particularly touched by what happened to me yesterday.

I have been hired on a number of occasions to take photographs for the Rhodes University Chamber Choir. It is always a little awkward for me to photograph their performances because they always perform in the same location (the Rhodes Chapel) and the photos end up looking very similar, not to mention that it is awkward photographing an event where everyone is supposed to be watching the choir and there you are clicking away distractedly and getting in the way. I have always felt that my presence has been an unwanted one - distracting both the choir members and the audience, but have tried my best to capture the events without too much distraction. I try to take pictures when the choir are at their loudest so that my clicks won't be heard, I try to stand by pillars and out of sight where possible of the audience and I try to capture the feeling of the events without taking away from them.

Yesterday, I was hired by the choir again to capture their Champs Elysses performance, which was wonderful as usual. And before the event started, one of the ladies from the choir came up to me. I froze, not knowing what to expect.

"I wanted to talk to you about something."
Oh no, my mind immediately panicked. She's going to tell me off for getting in the way. She's going to ask that I back off. She's going to be furious with me for one reason or another.
"We have never really spoken before now. But I wanted to say..."
I braced myself for the impact of whatever was to come.
"...Thank you."
I must have looked like an absolute moron, because I just stood there gob-smacked, not knowing what to say.
"I don't think that you are appreciated by us, but I wanted to let you know that I really do appreciate what you do. After seeing how other photographers have acted, when we were considering getting someone else to do this concert, I told them 'NO! It has to be Lara.' So... thank you."

For the rest of the recital, whenever she walked past me, she would give me a private smile and thank me. And it felt... inspiring. It is all too easy to feel like you are doing everything wrong, whether in your photography or just in your life in general, and the assurance that, even if just this once, you are doing things just right makes all of the difference.

Fashionista

The experts say that part of becoming professional in photography is to find your niche. You need to narrow down your field so that you don't become a jack of all trades, but a master of none. I have always found this difficult to do, but I have found it particularly difficult when it comes to portraiture. 

There are different kinds of portraits that a person can take of course, and these range from different lighting situations (flash vs. natural, etc), to different locations (studio vs. outdoors), to different subjects and different themes. What it boils down to is the question or "What are these photos being taken for?" The biggest difficulty that I find is in the difference between "regular" portraiture and fashion portraiture. In my mind, the two are incredibly intertwined. When taking a person's portrait, I am always trying to focus not only on the person, but trying to bring out their clothing and what their choice of clothing says about them. I understand that fashion portraiture will tend to emphasise the clothing more than the person themselves, but I like to think of it as a combination of the two.

Take the shoot that I did last weekend as an example. A friend asked me to take some photographs of one of some of the scarves that she had knitted in an effort to promote an ebook that she is working on and to sell patterns for those items. Of course, taking photos of a scarf lying on a table is not nearly as interesting as taking photos of them "live" so to speak. So she called in a favour from a friend, and voila! There was a model to pose for some photos. When it came to deciding where the photos would be taken, it was a fairly easy decision. We wanted somewhere natural, somewhere a scarf-wearing person might be found frollicking. And so we walked down the street to a field and started the session.

The emphasis for the photos was clearly supposed to be on the scarves, that much had been made clear, but taking a photo of just the scarf was not going to draw attention. And the photos that were taken ended up being less about the scarf itself and more about the sophistication of the design, the fashion mixed with the feeling. I wanted the photos to have warmth, to have emotion. I wanted feeling to come across in them and I think that it did.

In the end, and I may be rambling to get to this point, but I feel that it is a point worth making, I find that you cannot put what you do into a little box. You need to bring parts of your photographic experience in to whatever it is that you do. You cannot have fashion photography without a sense of the people involved, you cannot have portraiture without bringing an aspect of fashion photography into it as well. It is not as easy to separate the two as you may think.

 What do you think of the photos from the weekend session?

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.