Rick’s Rants and Raves

It seems like it has been forever since her last track meet. Today, Emily finally got to compete in her second track meet. I took some pictures, and she learned some lessons (drinking a lot of gatorade right before a race is not a good idea). More notably: she got 2nd place in the long jump in her first time ever competing in that event, and she bettered her 800m time by 6 seconds, despite drinking too much before the race. Much as I want her to do well, she really has to do and learn this stuff for her self. Much as I want to be uber dad-coach, that isn’t what she wants from me. She wants me to be supportive and helpful, not pressuring and intense.

I also remembered just how lucky I was as a kid, and by extension, just how lucky my kids are. At least one of my parents (if not both) were at every track meet, I believe, from 7th through 12th grade. If they missed a meet (I don’t think so), it was incredibly rare. Though I know I didn’t spend a lot of time hanging out with my parents during those meets, in hind sight it added comfort and support to my experience. I knew they loved me because they showed it by being there for me to celebrate the victories, and to help with the character building experiences. My parents, and Emily’s parents, continue this trend.

Anne, Nathan, Grandma (Grandpa not pictured)

In planning for my recent trip to Chicago, I knew I’d be at the House of Blues as part of the G-Force conference entertainment. Just before the trip, I figured out that Maggie Speaks (thanks honey!) would be performing, and I knew this would be a great opportunity to shoot a band in a larger venue with more professional lighting than I’ve typically been shooting. So I set about trying to jam what I considered to be minimum gear into a smaller-than-normal camera bag (similar to this one). Here’s what I took:

• Nikon D60 with 35mm f/1.8 lens
• 70-300mm lens in bag
• Cactus wireless triggers
• Lumopro LP120 flash
• 4 extra AA batteries
• 1 extra SD card
• 1 extra camera battery
• remote shutter release
• knock-off “multi-joint tripod” that looks like a gorilla-pod.
• umbrella swivel (for additional range of motion if the flash was mounted on the gorilla-pod)
• ear plugs

I ended up using everything in the bag during the trip.

When we arrived at the House of Blues,  Maggie Speaks was already on the stage, with just their two vocalists sitting on stools, with a keyboard player. My coworkers and I made our way to a balcony left of the stage about 20 feet above the dance floor. I quickly scarfed some food, set up the flash (at full power, due to the distance to the stage) near a coworker, and headed down to the empty dance floor.

They sang some ballads as the crowd got food and drink, then took a short break for a set change. I went back up to my friends, ate a bit more food, had a beer, chimped a bit, then headed back down for the next set with the full band.

I shot for a while from the empty dance floor, and the songs were decidedly more upbeat than the previous set. I suspected the dance floor wouldn’t be empty for long. I wandered around the venue a bit, trying the capture the band from various angles. I started to get frustrated that my remote flash wasn’t firing consistently and eventually headed back to change the batteries.

I enjoy the challenge of shooting music performances, but I especially like trying to get decent shots of drummers. In my early work**, I discovered that they were notoriously hard to capture. They tend to be in the back, furthest from any light, with people and drum kits in front of them. At the House of Blues, I had the advantage of height. I went to the second balcony, and shot down on the drummer, while my flash (full power) was pointed at him from the second balcony, left of the stage.

Technically speaking, this is one of the best I got of the drummer. Unfortunately, his expression is a bit blank. Though I captured him, I didn’t really capture his spirit. More learning to do.

I continued to have problems with my flash triggering, despite the fresh batteries, so I decided to move it closer to the stage, in case the problems were with distance and signal interference. I set it on a speaker stack to the right of the stage and got much better performance out of it during the final set.

The conference organizers had hired a professional photographer to shoot the whole conference–I’d seen him at other events. When I saw him milling around the crowd at this event with both his cameras, and pro-level lenses ($6k under each arm), I felt a serious twinge of jealousy. But his assignment was to shoot the crowd having fun, not the band. So I decided to have a little fun shooting him.

I later showed him this picture and he immediately asked if I would send it to him.

Of course, by this time, the crowd was on the dance floor en force, and I was getting buffeted this way and that by drunk dancers. One large woman either didn’t notice that she was about to knock me over, or was intentionally trying to give me a hint that non-dancing-photographers were not welcome within her gravitational pull.

I moved off the dance floor and started trying to capture the band with the crowd that was immensely enjoying the show. This was really difficult given my current flash position, but I really love this capture.

All-in-all, it was a great performance, and the performers really seemed to be enjoying themselves. The crowd had a great time. Right at the end of the show, I shot the crowd and stage from my balcony home base, where my coworkers had stayed all night.

At the end of the show, we returned to the hotel bar, Kitty O’Shea’s, where I showed our sales person some of the pics I’d taken on the back of my camera. He was so impressed, he introduced me to one of the conference organizers and they started asking me about getting the pics. Flattered, I immediately agreed. “Can you give me your memory card?” she asked. Uh, no way in hell, I thought. I replied more politely that I would be happy to e-mail them the photos. I stayed up way too late finding shots I thought they would like to see.  The next day, some of my shots were part of a slide show shown to all the conference participants who weren’t too hung over to miss the 8:30AM session.

It was a great time, and very flattering to see my shots in the same slide show as the pro they had hired to shoot the event.

Last, but not least, I put together this shockwave slide show of some of the shots as a teaser for the band. Maybe, just maybe, they’d like to see more and would be willing to pay me a wee bit for the pics.

** “early work” means 9 months ago. Yes, I realize that’s a lot like having a 5 year old say “When I was little…”

I went to Chicago last week for a Genesys user group conference, G-Force. After dinner on the first night, we retired to Kitty O’Shea’s, an Irish pub on the first floor of the hotel we were in. I had brought a small camera bag with a couple of lenses and a flash with me, and I decided to acknowledge my inner photography nerd and carry it with me everywhere during my time at the conference. I noticed a small amount of band equipment (amps, mixers, guitars, etc) as we wound our way to a table, but assumed that they wouldn’t be playing on a Wednesday night. We found a table and ordered some pints and talked shop and not-shop. At some point I became aware that I was hearing a uilleann pipes amid the din of conference goers, and I immediately excused myself from the table.

I found the Irish duet that goes by Moore and Broaders (Pat Moore and Jimmy Broaders) playing authentic Irish tunes and I set about shooting them.

Initially, I started using my Jive Thirty-Five trying to shoot them using ambient only. But I quickly acknowledged to myself that there was hardly any light in their nook (the above shot being taken at 1600 ISO, f/1.8 and 1/6 sec) and set up a flash on a section of nearby (unpatronized) bar.

I liked the results much better this way.

I felt pity for them as I watched them perform–I seemed to be the only patron to acknowledge their existence. Their “crowd” was a bunch of conference goers with corporate Amex cards who were there to drink, not listen to an Irish duet.

The next evening, we returned to Kitty O’Shea’s again, after enjoying Maggie Speaks. I watched Moore and Broaders perform a bit, and shot a few more pics just before their set ended. This time I’d attached my flash on a pole just above head level.

I chatted with some nearby patrons who were actually at the pub specifically to see Moore and Broaders (describing them as “exquisite”), and I felt just a bit less pity (the majority of patrons still didn’t care whether they played or not). I later googled the duo to find that, evidently, they’ve been playing at Kitty O’Shea’s at least since 1998. I no longer feel pity for them. They are clearly in this for the long haul, and hopefully enjoying what they’re doing despite the frequently ambivalent business travelers.

Last week I was able to attend a photography class, “How to Photograph Anyone” led by Clay Blackmore. Prior to receiving an e-mail from MPEX about the event, I’d never heard of Clay, but the price, $25, was hard to pass up. The class was advertised as helping everyone gain confidence in their ability to shoot portraits (something I desperately needed), and was scheduled for 5 hours in two sessions (with a dinner break). I signed up for the class as soon as I could confirm the time was open on our family calendar.

Even after signing up for the class, I remained ignorant of Clay’s work. This was primarily due to the fact that life has been pretty busy. I arrived at the class not really knowing what to expect. Right at the start, Clay started telling us about his history in photography. This was fine for a couple of minutes, but it quickly started to feel like a lot of name dropping, and he was genuinely astonished that we weren’t all agape at the photographers he’s worked with.

Clay’s work is, from what he told us, primarily in portraiture. It seems the bulk of his income comes from the well heeled Jewish community of the Mid-Atlantic as he showed us frame after frame of astonishing wedding parties, followed by massive bar and bat mitzvahs. He’s also got a decent breadth of other work, but he told us his income mostly comes from these events. And he shoots these events incredibly well. His attention to detail is astonishing, and his posing and composition are stellar.

The first session (with one break) turned out to be more like four hours rather than the three that were scheduled, but the huge majority of it was spent on showing us his work, with little detail as to how he made a picture. When he demonstrated portrait techniques on members of the class, he moved very quickly and assumed a pretty decent level of knowledge. A year ago, I would have been lost. As it was, my knowledge was just right–I understood the technical details that he glossed over and could pay attention to the softer skills that he demonstrated (“always use their first name”) as he posed and lit a subject.

The crux of the class was going over one lighting pattern, two essential poses (basic and feminine), and three camera positions. This was his “Photography 1, 2, 3″.

He also talked about his method for getting a shot set up: “Pose, light, refine, shoot”. He would put the subjects in the basic poses he wanted them in. Next he would add lights to get the basic exposure levels and alignments. Next, from behind the camera, he would refine the subject(s) poses until he got the look he wanted, maybe even adjusting lights just a bit (usually with assistants). Then he would shoot. This technique worked very well for ambient light or high-end studio strobes with modeling lights. For a DIYer like me, it could also be achieved, somewhat, with utility work lights and homemade softboxes. His “pose, light, refine, shoot” would be a little more difficult with flash only. It would be more like “pose, light, shoot, chimp, refine, chimp, etc”. Now, certainly he chimped while he shot, but clearly his technique was more geared at film since he worked really hard to compose the shot before ever pressing the shutter.

The above two paragraphs were covered in the class in probably 45 minutes during the first 4 hour session. The rest of the time was spent a) name dropping, b) showing us his work very quickly with no real detail on the “how”, c) showing us several commercials that he’s made for his sponsors, and d) showing us 10 minutes of the movie Shine to help us understand that photography takes practice, e) hocking his $160 DVD set and f) a touch of Christian inspirational theology (“read psalms when you really need some encouragement”). At the end of the session, I was very tempted to not come back for the second. However, we were told that he had arranged for a couple of models to come in, and there would be a lot more shooting.

Clay spent the second session demonstrating the portrait techniques with our young couple. During this 2.5 hour session, he spent a sizable chunk of time, probably 90 minutes teaching portrait photography. He encouraged people to gather around him as he worked with the models and had members of the class help out as grips, moving light gear and backgrounds around. Again, his attention to detail in the posing really showed, as was his great camera-side manner. The models were great sports and did pretty well following his direction. I finally pulled out my camera, as others did, to capture the setup and the results.

The other 60 minutes of the session were spent reviewing the photographers he’s worked with, showing us a couple more commercials, selling his DVD, and more Christian inspirational theology. We finished at about 9:30PM.

Other random comments/bits-o-wisdom he conveyed during the class:

• address people by first name
• when arranging a group, put slim people in front, heavy in back
• move furniture to the middle of a room, so that isn’t against a wall. It makes the room look bigger.
• light facial defects (scars, moles, etc) directly, rather than from the side. Shadows will accentuate the problem.
• when shooting a face in the 2/3 view, i.e. turned to the side just a bit, make sure the far eye has some flesh holding it in from the camera’s perspective.
• never photograph someone who is leaning backwards
• never broad light a broad

All in all, it was worth my time and the money spent. I think I got enough detail about the portrait setups, and enough encouragement on camera-side-style (it really is OK to direct a model/subject to get just the right look). However, he was also mentioning that he was going to be coming back to Columbus for a more intensive multi-day workshop with a smaller group of people. Given that this workshop was roughly 40% portrait photography, and 60% other stuff, I’m not sure I’d find it beneficial for the presumably much steeper price.