My thoughts on the craft, the process and the subjects
Leading the children by playing with them in such a way that they would be well-positioned with respect to the camera makes a huge difference in child photography. This leading has to be done by someone other than the photographer. My wife is very experienced in this role, as she knows what angles and types of shots would work well for the pictures. As a result, my favourite pictures from today’s outing are of her playing with the kids.
An unexpected aspect of sharing photos on Flickr or other social media and offering them for sale as stock images is realizing that some of the most popular photos (in terms of the number of views, sales, etc.) are not my personal favourites. I believe that this is a feature of broadcasting to a very large audience, as opposite to “narrow casting” to a small community of personal friends, who generally have similar tastes and interests to my own.
Otherwise, I find that even if the image has some of the components that can potentially make it interesting, such as motion and emotion, if the audience cannot relate to or immediately recognize the subject (e.g. the Eiffel tower or the Great Wall of China), their engagement in terms of views, shares over social media, etc. will be limited.
When two important photo shoots happen on the same day, as it was in the case of this year’s the banquet for our university’s graduating athletes and the university graduation party, production planning and efficiency of operation become tremendously important. My associate Armando is very skillful in planning and running shoots like this, and over the past few years I have benefited tremendously from his experience by being able to experiment with new shooting styles, lighting setups and workflows, while having the safety net of his expertise in case the experiments would not yield desired results.
With the two events happening back-to-back, we had to exercise economy of motion in terms of the setup and logistics. Fortunately, we had enough studio flashes, light stands and light modifiers to set up three photo booths at the same time. We started by preparing the setup for the graduation party and then moved to the banquet location a couple of city blocks away, where each of us was running a separate photo booth for different parts of the ceremony. In between the mandatory portraits of the award recipients, we were able to take candid shots of the students, speakers at the podium, eat dinner and pack up the gear when the work at one of the booths was finished.
Overall, this year, we managed to balance the efficiency with being able to enjoy the events themselves. Of course, this would not have been possible without the help of six additional friends, who came out to help with the graduation party shoot. They did everything from taking the actual photos to managing the crowd of students of various degrees of sobriety. During the banquet, which was a formal event running according to a tight script, the crowd control aspect was naturally taken care of.
It was a long night, but as usual, the interaction with the students outside of classroom, their youthful energy and enthusiasm about our photography left us with a positive feeling.
The theme of this year’s graduation party of our university was “Under the stars.” In the spirit of involving people in photography, we did some compositing right in front of the students, showing them the post-processing steps and asking for feedback along the way. We were using their portraits, which were taken just minutes earlier and super-imposing them on starry backgrounds. Instead of using a conventional photo booth approach that involves props, a backdrop with some (cheesy) images on it, and minimal post-processing, we wanted to try a more artistic process, which would limit the students’ choices in terms of poses, but would produce higher quality (arguably, still cheesy) images.
In terms of the workflow of the entire photo shoot, selection of the portraits from the sets of five or six still presented the main bottleneck, even though this year we had two computers operating at the same time (compared to one last year) and had a substantially smaller number of photos taken of each group of students. This is not surprising, as culling of raw images is the major time-consuming stage of any photography project, whether the clients are involved in it or not.
There is something inherently fascinating in the images that document a production process, whether it is a photo shoot production, a dance rehearsal or the inner workings of the kitchen in a local pizzeria. Glimpses of the stages of the process that are typically hidden from the consumers of the final product (lighting tests, the work of a makeup artist, baking of the pizza bases, etc.) create a sense of an exclusive access to the viewer.
Sometimes, all it takes to capture some interesting behind-the-scenes shots is pulling out a smartphone while sitting at the bar in a pizzeria, but at other times, it requires advanced planning and a dedicated photo/video setup. What often prevents us from seeing the candid photo opportunities in everyday activities is getting caught up in a mental plan instead of being present and aware of the action as it is actually unfolding. Perhaps, consciously documenting the process, in addition to focussing on its results, can help balance presence and productivity – two aspects of everyday life that are often difficult to reconcile.
Throughout a learning process, it is important to be conscious about which advice to follow and which to ignore. Here, “ignoring” does not mean not noticing it, but rather choosing not follow it, upon processing the information that comes with it.
Just as important is to know when to voice an opinion or criticism and when to withhold it. This notion is particularly important in teaching. Sometimes, too much feedback can either discourage or mislead the student about his/her learning process. More importantly, certain things cannot be transmitted by words or even visual example – they have to be discovered and mastered through personal practice.
I find that effort spent on self-editing my comments on other photographer’s images, reviews of other colleagues’ research papers, my lecture notes, etc. translates between these and other areas (e.g. practicing with novice kendoka). Ultimately, this capacity for restraint is based on being sufficiently present at the moment when my opinion is formed in order to realize that this opinion by itself is only a part of the overall communication and teaching/learning process, and as such does not automatically has to be made available to others. There might (or might not) come time when the opinion will be needed. Then, it would have benefited from being effectively formulated and delivered.
…These thoughts came to mind after I heard an interview with Amanda Palmer, and, being fully aware of the irony, I decided to put them into the blood post right away. In my defence, this is not an advice, just some notes to self…
A fast lens, such as Canon’s 85mm f1.2L II USM
The advantage of shooting from far away using a longer focal length is that an equivalent motion of the subject causes smaller apparent displacement on the sensor of the camera (think about the classical example of an airplane appearing to move very slowly when viewed from far away, while a bicyclist at 1 m away shooting through your field of view in a fraction of a second.) Because the apparent displacement is small, the optics has to be only slightly adjusted to track the subject.
The bottom line is that a longer but slower (higher minimum f-number) lens will produce noisier images, but will yield a higher success rate in terms of the number of sharp images. Therefore, for a critical photo shoot, I would start with the 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II USM
Selecting shutter speed for kendo photography is difficult, because the action is very uneven and explosive. Most of the time, the kendoka are relatively motionless, but the peak of the action is extremely fast and unpredictable (in fact, being unpredictable is part of the game.) The fact that the action usually takes place in a dimly lit gym makes matters even worse, so increasing the exposure time as much as possible is necessary for keeping the noise levels within reasonable limits.
During today’s kata seminar, I experimented with various shutter speeds and found that a setting around 1/650 sec is a reasonable compromise for capturing both the slow- and the fast-moving phases of the action. I was shooting with a 85mm f1.2L
I think that ability to clearly formulate what makes something or someone good, i.e. significantly better than average in the specific field, is crucial for making progress in one’s own development and for creating meaningful contributions.
In particular, I find that Japanese martial arts, such as kendo, offer a nearly perfect model for many other areas of human activity. Te reason for this is that nearly everything that we do involves interactions with other people, which can be modelled, at some level of fidelity, as conflicts of varying intensity. Kendo exemplifies an ultimate level of conflict, with all its characteristic elements. After all, it represents a fight to the death.
One lesson from kendo that applies to most areas where continuous improvement of some skill or ability is needed is that a combination of two factors can serve as a fairly reliable indicator of whether someone has a potential to become good at what he/she does: quantity and quality of practice. Quantity is self-explanatory. By quality, I mean presence, conscious engagement with the subject of the activity.
For the next high-volume photo shoot at our university’s graduation party, my associate and I decided to give very close directions to the students, whom we are going to photograph, which would drastically limit their choices of available poses. Our hope is tat this would expedite the overall process of running the photo booth and improve the experience of the students by eliminating the stress of choice.
With any photo shoot that involves many people, there is a potential for turning it into a sort of production line, without any creative element. To avoid this, we will try to remain conscious of having fun, interacting with the students, and involving them in the process of creating an artistic composite image in just a few minutes.
