Taken by my wife

Here’s a pro-tip for anyone wishing to improve their photography, no matter the device: pay attention to your background. Above, a picture my wife created as part of a set to commemorate a new set of soap she received from Haldecraft. She called this “Han has a bad feeling about this.” In this case, the story is more about the background than the foreground–Han, “The Roguish Smuggler”,  is being watched by a barely visible Darth Vader, standing with a  AT-AT. I really like this image BECAUSE it tells a story, and has multiple meanings in it. In this particular case, the background is what makes the image. But the concept of ‘pay attention to your background’ can be applied to most any photograph, and is what pro photogs spend an enormous amount of money on: getting the background to look exactly the way they want.

And there are some easy ways to deal with messy backgrounds, in order of easy to costly:

• Get a higher or lower angle on the subject. This will usually cause the subject to be cast against the ground or the sky, respectively.
• Remove distracting elements. The above was taken in my son’s room, which is totally full of distracting elements. My wife created this photo, paying attention to not only Han and the soap, but also the elements behind Han. She had to remove the detritus to get just the background she wanted.
• Hang a background of some sort. This is where you may think you’ve got to spend some money, but for big objects (e.g. people) it can be as easy as a sheet or blanket you’ve already got on hand. For smaller objects like flowers, a black or white shirt can do wonders to isolate a subject.
• Buy a lens with a large aperture, or (way cheaper) use the blur function in Instagram to isolate the subject.

My favoritists people ever. They are there to support me though thick and thin and just will be crazy when we are hanging out but always support me and believe in me. I have no idea how I will live without them next year! I will love you all forever and ever.

This was my shot of a group of 8th graders at the end of their final middle school dance (pics on Facebook and Flickr). One of them reposted it to Instagram with the above description, providing me with the perfect example for why I shoot those dances. I do it for them. I do it to document their fun and their relationships, and to capture a nano-second of their rapidly changing lives. This was the single most important lesson that I learned the first time I shot a dance–that it isn’t about the photography. They don’t care about my light set up, or the depth of field, or the focal length. They care about the result: the people in the image. Of all the volunteers at the dance, I’m pretty sure I have the best job.

Kids waiting in line for me to take their picture.

There are about a thousand different challenges when I shoot bands in bars. From crappy (or non-existent) stage lighting, to arrangement of the performers, to behavior of the fans, to musician interaction, to sound-guy attitude–every shoot/performance is unique. And that’s part of what I love about the process.

In this particular venue, Lounge 62, the stage light was high-quality modern LEDs… on the floor. So the performers had that spooky under-lit glow. And they were standing in front of frosted glass windows, so the first performers were contrast-killing back-lit. For later performers, I decided to strap a flash to a central support post in the seating area of the bar. But my normal strap was about 12 inches too short to go all the way around the “post”, so I had to get a much longer one from my car. Fortunately, getting permission to hang the flash on the post was a cinch.

With the flash in place, I had a second set of decent performance shots but there wasn’t a lot of cross-musician interaction. The most challenging member of the band to shoot, was, of course, the drummer. He was almost always in the shadow of the lead singer. Such are my challenges.

The third group to perform had some great interactions, especially between the lead singer and guitar player. There was clearly some connection between them, so I kept waiting to capture those moments. But the moment has to be at a time when my flash isn’t casting a nasty microphone shadow, and I have to have the shot composed, ready to capture the moment. Sometimes I can start to pick up on rhythms in the performance–not the notes played on the instrument, but in the way the musicians are moving and feeling the music. Some times the rhythm and the light and the composition all fall into place. I was poised, a little behind the stage, shot ready, waiting. When I saw the shot develop through the viewfinder, and pressed the shutter release, I thought I had just captured the best shot of the night. When I glanced at the LCD a moment later, I knew it was the best shot of the night. It was not the image above (sorry, just yankin’ your chain there!). It was this one.