Rick’s Rants and Raves

We were at the Chautauqua Institution over Independence Day, and surprisingly, this was the first time I’d ever really attempted to photograph fireworks. I brought the tripod, and mounted the camera with 70-300mm lens on it. As I was setting it up, a woman nearby asked if I worked for the newspaper. Uh, nope. I just like to pretend I know what I’m doing. I set the lens to manual focus,  took a few test shots, fiddled with the settings until I saw what I liked (above was 2 second exposure at f/7.1, 200 ISO) then sat down and remotely triggered the shutter for a bunch more. At some point I messed with the focus, which blew about 15 shots, but I still ended up with about 25 keepers.

John Williams is a face painter and this man is dedicated to his art form. He spent hours each day painting the faces of any kid that was willing to wait in line for it. And he did it all for free. I took a number of pictures one afternoon attempting to capture the process and the interest of the other kids. When my daughter’s friend, Zoe, pictured above, got in line as the light was fading fast, I decided to set up a flash. In this case, I strapped it to a pillar of the porch right behind the artist with my DIY diffuser. I’m really pleased with several of the results.

One of the other facets of being at Chautauqua on Independence Day was that the flags were out in force. On of the flags was massive, maybe 30×20 feet, and I thought it would make a fun background for the girls to play in.

I tried to make some sunset portraits, practicing earlier work I’d done in the Strobist Lighting 102 series. Since we were on vacation, I didn’t have an umbrella, and didn’t bother attempting it with my DIY diffuser. I also didn’t have a light stand, so I mounted it on my tripod. The hair light is coming from another flash mounted on my paint pole monopod held in place by a voice activated light stand who got a portrait for her troubles. I had brought the paint pole with the intention of putting the camera on it to get high perspectives, but I never saw anything that I felt would benefit from the added height. At least it got used once. Anyway, the thought that comes to my mind with these portraits is that I still need to work on finessing the light rather than using my brute force technique at lighting a subject. This particular portrait would have benefited from a slower shutter speed to bring in more ambient sky light.

Twice during the week I woke early to attempt to capture sunrise over the lake. I saw great blue herons both times, but only managed to capture a decent shot the first time. My first attempt at a trite sunrise picture was from a dock near Miller Bell Tower, and as such I was pretty much in the water with no foreground interest except for the slightly choppy water. After I was frustrated enough with my attempts, I turned around to leave and saw the sunrise over the lake reflected in these glass doors. I like the composition better than anything else I shot that morning.

On my second attempt, I was able to capture a much more dramatic sky, and I was more aware to capture some foreground interest. I think I need to edit this one just a little bit to make the sailboat more visible. But for now, I love how the sky looks like it is on fire.

Rainy days at Chautauqua are a lot of fun for me photographically. The lighting is much softer, and people are no longer walking around squinting. As a thunderstorm was in full downpour, I grabbed an umbrella and the camera and went to shoot the crowd at the arts festival that was on-going. I imagined that I’d see people hunched under umbrellas while shopping in tents. I thought it might be a fun shot. I like this one. When I was crouching to get the shot, umbrella close at hand, in the rain-shade of a tree, a woman said to her companions “There’s someone dedicated to getting a shot”. Yup. Sometimes. I dearly love the shot above as a prototypical Chautauqua moment. No where else in my daily life will I see someone riding a bike with a golf umbrella in the rain.

I’ve finally had a chance to see all the photos of Lance and Laura’s wedding. I’ve exchanged a few e-mails with the photographers since then on a couple of different topics, and I requested permission to reproduce a couple of their images in a follow-up blog post. They requested that I not use them in that way, that they were for the bride and groom, and honestly they’d prefer to not have their work all over someone else’s blog. I think technically I could still use a couple under fair-use, but since I asked, and they declined, I’ll have to speak in generalities. So, this is going to be an awkward post about photography without photographs. But for family or friends that see this, I’m not critiquing Lance or Laura’s choice of photographer. Many of these critiques fall under “style” and this couple definitely are not my style. If Lance and Laura are happy with their photos for the price paid, then excellent. My own wedding photographs (many years ago) are horrible, but we got what we paid for–a recently turned pro friend who needed practice (badly).

• First of all, they completely abused the dutch tilt. The whole idea with tilting the frame is to throw it a little off-balance, to convey motion, or unease. If it were used to show a flower girl running around guests at the reception, that would be perfect. Bride and groom at the altar? Uh, not so much. That’s what I mean by abused–fully 70% of their delivered photos made use of this technique. And of those, nearly all of them were badly done. Personally, I would recrop most of them if possible.  Here’s an example (not from the wedding) of a poorly done dutch tilt–there was no reason to tilt the frame.
• I mentioned that they were using external on-camera flash that seemed to be bouncing off of nowhere. Looking at the results, I can see some bounced light in the bride’s preparation (small room with white ceilings, ideal use of the technique). But in the formals in the sanctuary, there is nothing but incandescent ambient lighting hitting the subjects.
• Some of the formal portraits would have benefited from off-camera flash.  To their benefit, the formals were shot in the chancel of the church with pretty powerful overhead floods that provided pretty decent lighting for most of the shots. However, if subjects were just a little too far back and the light was feathering off, they were a bit too shadowy for my tastes. The unfortunate perfect example is the formal picture of the bride and groom–3200 ISO, 1/80 and f/6.3 and were pretty dark under the eyes, no catch lights and very soft focus. Oh and heavy vignetting.
• Almost all of the formals have been vignetted pretty heavily in Photoshop. Many of the rest have a little vignette but it isn’t as heavy handed as the portraits. I don’t care for the vignette personally, but at least it was used appropriately.
• They benefited greatly by having two shooters throughout the event. They really did an excellent job of capturing the breadth of the wedding party and guests. They did a very nice job of capturing details and special moments that I think would have been more challenging with a lone photographer.
• My only other complaint is that it took them a month to post-process the files (difference between file modified date and exif picture taken date). I understand that they had a card fail during post, and I think that delayed their processing as they tried to recover the lost data. But still, a month seems like a long time.

Finally, I’ll share a few of the pictures that they took of me and my family. There’s no exif copyright data so that I can protect them from my scathing not-even-a-pro-photog-never-shot-a-wedding-one-man’s opinion. In the pictures they took of us, you can see a couple of my complaints.

This year our vacation at the Chautauqua Institution was the second hottest in memory (for us). As a result, my memory of the week is a bit foggy, seeing as how my brain as a bit baked from the experience. Pictures have been posted to Flickr. I promise to write more later.

Yeah, I took a bunch of pictures at Comfest 2010. I even had great narratives to tell about a lot of them. I was reasonably pleased with the set, despite some technical challenges with a new camera. One of the narratives was about how there were lots and lots of photographers at Comfest. I walked away from shooting a band after I took this shot.

I’m not a competitive person, and I didn’t want to be the third photog distracting the crowd. So I walked away and deleted the few shots I’d already taken. Not. Worth. It.

But that didn’t stop me from shooting a number of other bands. And other details. And experimenting.

I introduced myself to Rob, another photographer I’d seen at events like this in the past. We chatted a bit, exchanged cards, then went our separate ways. He’s shooting “for himself” just like me, with a bit of side income to help fund the gear.

After I’d finished all my post processing and uploading, I went to send Rob an e-mail, and thought I’d see if he had posted pictures from Comfest. He has. And his photography is amazing. In fact, if you haven’t gone to look at my Flickr set, don’t bother. You’ll get a much better taste of Comfest, and of the performers, from his set. His pictures don’t need narratives–they speak for themselves.

Tonight I had my ego rightfully smacked down a bit. I have a long way to go. Don’t worry about me though. My ego always seems to return to its slightly-larger-than-nomal size.