I took this shot of my daughter about to fall asleep in her mother’s arms in an almost dark room, handheld, no flash, ISO 2000, 1/80 sec, f1.4 (naturally!) using a Canon EF 35mm f/1.4L lens
Photography business: end of a hobby?
Recently, I had an opportunity to closely compare two different types of commercial photo assignments, both within the same day. On a Saturday morning, I was invited to tag along for a children’s baseball league photoshoot, and in the afternoon, I photographed a final game in the local (adult) rugby league. The first type of a gig has potential for much higher financial payoff, but the second one (rugby action) is more fun to shoot and generally requires a much more creative approach.
The children’s league photoshoot was an impressive example of super-efficient commercial photography. The photographer relied heavily on the assistants, who posed the teams and the individual children, and the actual shooting was done in a rapid-fire mode, so even the youngest kids (3-4 year old) did not have a chance to whine, which they typically do in a queue for a photo with Santa Claus at a local shopping mall, for example. The trade-off is that there was literally no time to interact with the models, and I am fairly certain that all 300 portraits will come out looking nearly identical. I did not think that it was possible, but this photoshoot made taking photos of children sitting on Santa’s lap look like a creative endeavor.
In contrast, shooting the rugby action in the afternoon had a very spontaneous feel to it. The energy of the players was contagious, and the opportunities for interesting shots were unpredictable. From the commercial standpoint, the financial payoff of the rugby game coverage was far from certain. Despite that, I was sure that even if not a single picture would sell, I would not regret shooting the game.
I read somewhere that starting a photo business is a sure way to ruin a perfectly good hobby. I do hope that there is a balance, though. Fortunately, at this point, I do not need to take assignments where photography is traded as a pure service, an exchange of the photographer’s time for money. Recently, time has become so precious that I would definitely choose a more interesting assignment over a better paying one.
Chinque Terre: persistent vacation
Browsing through photographs from Italy taken in the summer of 2009, I realized that photos prom Chinque Terre still make me feel as if I was standing at the cliff overlooking Vernazza only yesterday. This is surprising, because usually it takes only a few days after returning home for the “vacation mode” to give way to the daily routine.
During the first couple of days after coming back from our first trip to Europe, it became obvious that my being “off-line” for a few weeks did not result in any particular disasters neither at work nor at home. On the contrary, I felt re-calibrated in terms of my personal and research interests and priorities, so I made a resolution to maintain this “vacation” mindset in daily life. Well, it didn’t work. Instead of being simpler, life became progressively busier.
There is a joke, told to me by a colleague, which describes this situation very well. To paraphrase it: I would like to be a bus driver, because there would be no loads of undriven buses waiting for me after a vacation.
In this sense, an academic job is nothing like bus driving…
However, a glimpse of that Zen post-vacation state can evidently be triggered by a visual image. In this particular case, I was looking for a picture for a photo contest on Flickr and opened a Lightroom library with thousands of photos from our 2009 trip to Czech Republic and Italy. It is always pleasant to browse through old photographs, but the ones from Chinque Terre had a particularly strong effect. These five colorful seaside towns that cling to the cliffs are strikingly beautiful, and the whole region has a romantic atmosphere, which makes it one of the most popular tourist destinations. Visually, I had no reference point for the Liguria landscapes in my prior experience – they are truly unique and seem to be frozen in time centuries ago. Seeing these images, even on a computer screen, even several years later, instantly forced my brain to disengage from the daily “treadmill mode”. This is an example of a picture that is worth a thousand words – there is a tremendous amount and depth of information, including the underlying emotional content, that can be transmitted visually.
At the moment, we are planning a trip to Côte d’Azur, often referred to as the French Riviera, later this summer. It will be our second European trip with Anna. She is 18-months-old now, so she will not remember any of it in a conventional sense, but I wonder if looking at our photographs a few years later would stir up some memories or feelings. I am packing the photo gear just in case.
Dog years: beauty of old age
My 14-months-old daughter is fascinated with dogs – small and large, puppies and old ones. We met this 16-years-old west highland white terrier while walking at the Willows Beach yesterday. I was carrying a 300 mm f4 lens with a 1.4x extender and took a few shots of him. I realized what makes old dogs so photogenic – they don’t move around too fast!
Total recall: better memories through image post-processing
A recent BBC article argues that doctored images alter our memories and, consequently, affect our behavior in a very real way. Personally, I don’t find this surprising, but it brings up an interesting question about post-processing photos that is not aimed at creating hoaxes, but simply enhancing the visual impact or expressing the photographer’s impression (after all isn’t that what “Impressionism” is about?)
Here is an example. I took this photo of a warbler running through the undergrowth in a very dark and shady part of a park (a small forest, really). I wanted to practice shooing with a Canon EF 300mm f/2.8L IS USM lens
When I opened the exceedingly grainy (due to the expanded ISO range) shot on the computer, it looked really underwhelming. So I decided to try pushing the post-processing much farther than I would normally do. After boosting the color saturation of the feathers and selectively decreasing the contrast and the saturation of the background, I was able to see the details in the bird that were not visible in the original scene. I like this (arguably, “overcooked”) image better than the (higher fidelity) original. This is how I’d like to remember this little bird – full of color.
We might actually be on the way to altering reality for the purpose of creating better memories (think “Total Recall”
A baby and a telephoto lens: a sandboxing challenge
In computer security, the term “sandbox” refers to separating running programs. In contrast, here I am talking about keeping up with a 14-months-old baby playing in an actual physical sandbox, while trying to photograph her with a telephoto lens.
Last week, while my wife was immersed in a marathon exam marking session, my daughter and I went for a walk in the Mount Douglas Park. I took the camera with a Canon EF 300mm f/2.8L IS USM lens
To take appealing pictures of children, one should generally try bringing the camera down to the same level with them whenever possible. The playground at the Mount Dog park is perfect for this, as it has a sloping lawn on one side. I could simply walk down the lawn and become effectively closer to the level of the sandbox, without having to lay down on wet grass.
But here is the sandboxing challenge. As of about two weeks ago, my daughter became exceedingly mobile, as she somehow decided that crawling is not cool anymore and discovered her ability to run very fast by tilting her body in the general direction of travel and allowing her legs to try to keep her from falling. Normally, my wife and I can catch up with her quite easily to keep her from crashing into various objects, eating things that should not be eaten, and destroying flowers and houseplants. This time, however, there were two issues: a) it was just me looking after her, and b) the fixed 300 mm focal length forced me to stay at least 10 meters away from her while taking pictures. My daughter was delighted at her apparent independence and ran around the playground. I was glad when she decided to sit down and play with the sand. Just as I thought that my little photo session was going on brilliantly, she decided to check what this sand substance tasted like and put an entire handful of it in her mouth. It all happened in less than a second, while I was left to passively observe it from the opposite end of the sandbox, through my long telephoto lens.
Fortunately, she didn’t find the sand particularly tasty and spit out most of it right a way. I spent the next fifteen minutes or so getting the rest of the sand out of her little mouth. Letting her chew on a wet tissue did the trick. Such are the challenges of photographing children….
Shooting sports: high adrenaline and higher ISO
I had a chance to get involved in some sports photography last couple of weekends. I was helping Armando Tura, who shoots regularly for the University of Victoria VIKES. We started with field hockey and rugby, trying out Canon EF 300mm f/4L IS USM
It was at a basketball game the following weekend where I was really pushed out of my comfort zone. The ISO range that I had to push my camera to was mind-boggling to me. Note: a 5D Mark II
After the basketball, which was by far the most challenging action I ever shot (with a possible exception of a horse race at dusk at the Palio di Siena), a swimming competition was relatively easy. The action is considerably slower, and the paths of the athletes are more predictable. Photographing swimming events has it’s own challenges, though. Mainly, the vantage points at the side of the pool are limited, and the flashes cannot be used, because they interfere with the metering equipment used by the event officials. A final note: keep your camera warm and in the bag before entering the pool area, otherwise the high humidity will cause the lens to fog up.
See more photos from these events here.
Chess as Art
It is generally accepted that photography can be art, that is, an artist can express him/herself through it, and others can recognize this expression in the photograph. Likewise, a martial art can be an art ( hence, the term). What about the game of chess? It shares many aspects with martial arts, except, perhaps, the physical one. There is conflict, strategy, tactics, pressure, discipline. Arguably, these concepts can be appreciated only by observing the dynamics of the game as it is being played out. But is it really true? Are there inherently beautiful chess positions? Perhaps, they are not unlike beautiful mathematical formulae, which can be appreciated even by someone with a fairly limited knowledge of he subject.
For a while, I had an idea for this project: to try to take artistic photos of famous chess positions – not to attempt to document the game, but to simply treat it as a still life. So here is my first experiment. I used a 100 mm macro lens to photograph this still life with our new maplewood-and-ebony chess set that Svetlana and I bought during our recent visit to Munich.
This is the position at the move number 16 of the 1945 United States vs. Soviet Union radio match between Denker (White) and Botvinnik. Often used as a classic example of a relative pin applied early in the game, this layout is a result of a flurry of tactics unleashed by Black, who constantly shifted the focus of his attacks, and daring sacrifices by White. This is a partial view (not showing all pieces – as I mentioned, the intent is not to document the position) of the middle-game seen from the White camp. Do you feel the drama?
What happened next? 16. …Qc7. And White did not last long.
Zip lining with a GoPro HD Hero 2
In the end of July, I went on a zip line tour in Whistler, while Svetlana and Anna took the grandparents up the mountaintop in the gondola.
I never done zip lining before, so I had to consider which photo gear to take with me. I definitely wanted to take my GoPro HERO
Our group of six people (a couple from Vancouver, a father with twin girls from Cobble Hill, and me) assembled in the foyer of a building in the Lower Village, filled out the forms stating that we subscribed to the impending dangers and general foolishness willingly, and went to receive our harnesses and helmets from the Ziptrek hut near the Blackcomb gondola. I requested a “GoPro helmet”, which had a plate for the camera mount
I also brought a chest mount, as I thought that the video from the helmet mount would be too shaky. The chest mount proved to be completely useless, though, because the harness would block the entire field of view of the camera. I did try it on the first line ( the entire tour consists of several lines, each with a different length, speed,and views), after which I moved the camera to the helmet. The footage was not as shaky as I expected, so a helmet mount is definitely the way to go for shooting zip lining videos.
Another thing to consider is the battery life. The entire tour lasted about three hours, but I turned the camera off between the actual rides, so it was running for about one hour. In the end, the battery was nearly drained. I did carry a spare, fully-charged battery, and although I did not have to use it, I would have had to, if the tour had been a little longer. It is easy to underestimate how power-hungry a GoPro camera is, especially with an LCD BacPac
The result of my zip lining adventure is this video, which I edited down to about four minutes.
Back in Dublin after two years
When I was leaving Dublin two years ago after staying there on sabbatical for three months, I didn’t think that I would return to this city soon. Actually, I already new about the conference planned for the summer of 2012, so I did know that I would be back. This time, we came together with my wife and our 9 months-old daughter. It was our first big trip with her (you can read about the actual travel in this post).Walking around the city brought back a distinct feeling of deja vu. During my sabbatical stay, I developed a personal sense of the city that is different from a typical tourist’s impression that I have after visit a city for a few days. In Dublin, I remembered which shortcuts to take while walking under the rain with my view obstructed by the sea of umbrellas, the best shops to buy bread, my favourite pubs and restaurants… It really felt like I lived there for some substantial period of time. I felt that it was “my Dublin”.
This was a surprising feeling. Two years ago, I did not think that Dublin was one of my favourite cities, but now it certainly feels this way.