I hope that this will not come across as pompous or arrogant.

One of the most difficult elements when it comes to looking at images we have taken is separating what is in the image from the emotions that surrounded its creation. Unless we can do this effectively then we will not only not see the image as others see it, but also will not be able to accept any negative comments about it.

This fact was clearly demonstrated this week during a discussion on the Facebook Group I belong to.

A women posted a link to her photographic website where she was offering her services to shoot portraits and weddings. After someone else commented about the use of the music on the site I decided to have a look.

The pricing model she was using was rather unusual and comments like “my kid will be in tow” and I can only shoot for a maximum of 4 hours quickly confirmed the suspicion that she was an amateur looking to earn a little pocket money on the side, rather than a professional.

It was her wedding section that really got my attention. It contained a lot of images (around 60 I would guess) but when you looked at them it was not hard to see that there were only two weddings. Now everyone has to start somewhere so I am not knocking her on that regard. It was the quality of the images.

One in particular took my eye (as it was large) and showed a bride and her father. Composition was good but the father had his eyes shut. Several others also showed issues with eyes.

When I stated in a comment that it was an image that I would have been rejected, she got really defensive and snotty. She stated that his eyes were shut because of the angle of the sun, and that the bride really loved it. She then deleted the thread from Facebook.

Now there is an important element here. With wedding photography the bride and groom are your customers and quite frankly provided that they like the shots then the opinion of other people (especially photographers) really doesn’t matter. However when she posted the image on her website it was no longer for the benefit of the bride and groom. It was trying to show her ability as a photographer. Therefore it was the end image that needed to stand on its own.

While she would have been aware of the emotions of the day and the bride’s reaction to the image, I only saw an image of a guy with his eyes closed. If sun was the issue then I would have expected a photographer to work around the issue. Without the emotion I saw images that would not encourage me to recommend her to shoot a wedding.

It is the same when we come to competition images. The judge doesn’t care that you had to get up before dawn, tramp 6 hours, fit a million sand flies to get that picture. They are only interested in what the image portrays to them.

This is going to sound like a bit of a rant but I really don’t get the logic behind the modern rule that tourists must all take photos of themselves standing in front of tourist locations. Now when I stand on a cliff, or in front of monument, I like to shoot just that. I don’t need a mugshot of myself to prove that I was there. In fact in some locations I prefer to avoid having people in the shot if I can avoid it.

It started a number of years ago with the Japanese and we laughed when we saw them do it. But now it seems to have spread to all nationalities.

I am sure the rise of Facebook and the desire to get profile images is partly to blame.

There appear to be two very different groups.

There are those will cellphones who are not quite so disruptive, as they tend to hold the phone at arm’s length so they don’t take up much space.

It is those with proper cameras that are most annoying when they position someone on one side of a path and then stand on the other and completely block it. On our recent trip to Australia we even had people arranging whole families with complete disregard to the chaos it was causing around them.

So my plea is simple. Think of others while on holiday.

Just how easy we have it with digital cameras and photoshop was brought home to me today.

My wife Vicky is doing a photography course at the Learning Connexion this term and is using film which she has to process themselves. Of course this means that her images are in black & white. She was supposed to produce a body of work on a theme and she chose “reflections”. While she is quite a good photographer she was struggling a little with seeing things in black & white.

After lunch we both decided to head outside and work on her project. It has rained most of the morning and we figured that the puddles that were likely to be formed on the  concrete sections at the Trentham racecourse would offer good possibilities.

I took along my digital and we worked slowly through the shots she wanted to take. She would estimate the camera settings she wanted to use. I would then put them into my camera and with it set to deliver a B&W image take a shot. If she was happy with the result she would then take a shot on the film camera. The only tricky thing we ran into was compensating for the crop sensor effect.

We then headed up to Akatawara Cemetery and obtained some reflections using the backs of some highly polished marble headstones.

What was a real pain was that when she was lining up a shot she would often tell me that she didn’t like something in the shot, and could I move it. This included rubbish bins, tables and chairs, and not to mention branches on trees. Shooting in digital we wouldn’t have bothered knowing that we could simply clone it out in photoshop.

The images below are a sample of the ones I took. Vicky’s film images came out good as well, even though some might say that the technique is slightly cheating.

Last Saturday I spent most of the day at photoshoots that involved 3 models in 3 set ups and came away with only two images. Now it wasn’t a total failure caused by gear failure. Rather I was acting as an assistant and the shoot was being conducted by Sharyn Reeve (www.bySharyn.com).

Sharyn is a very talented Wellington photographer and Photoshop wiz. We have done a few shoots together one of which she was brave enough to be my model.

Now anyone who knows me, knows that I have been shooting for a number of years, and have a reasonable portfolio of images. So they may be wondering why I was assisting on a shoot, when that is often synonymous with students. Put simply to learn and also because I enjoy shoots.

You don’t always need to be behind the camera to learn at a shoot. In some ways it is often easier to learn if you are not behind it because generally when you are there you are concentrating on getting the shot. What I tend to learn most from Sharyn is posing techniques, and more importantly the instructions to get particular facial expressions. What I hope I am able to give back to her to suggestions on light setups and poses. Sharyn is also not one of those photographers who will not take on board any suggestions (unlike other photographers that I will not name).

It was a good opportunity to also test out some new gear that we had purchased recently. On Saturday Sharyn had a new 150cm Octobox Softbox and I had a new lighting boom. We were both surprized that we could use a speedlight inside of the octobox after a studio strobe decided to play up. The boom proved really useful when Sharyn wanted an hair light that was lower than the model rather than having it angled down. It is also a good opportunity to double up our gear to produce better results and also the extra pair of hands come in handy with setting light modifiers.

I will leave Sharyn to actually blog the details of the shoot on her page at http://photos.bysharyn.com/blog.

Yesterday I was watching a rerun of a session that New Zealand photographer Sue Bryce did a couple of months ago as part of a workshop on www.creativelive.com. In the particular section she was talking about marketing your business and particularly how to promote through social media, websites and blogs.

She was a firm advocate of the benefits of blogging, but she did state that you needed a clear idea of what the purpose of the blog was. She also stated that she thought that most photographers blogs were actually aimed at other photographers, rather than clients, and that they were simply an exercise in self gratulation. Sues own blog can be found at http://www.inbedwithsue.com/blog/.

This really got me thinking about this blog and where it had developed without really a clear goal. It started as an extension to the posts I was making on my Facebook page as I wanted to provide context around the images I was taking. It has now moved to include the various articles and random thoughts that I have from time to time. Most of these are aimed at other photographers.

I had also wanted to create a website and using a blogging engine was the simplest way to achieve that.

Now as photography is my passion, rather than something I am trying to make money out of, this blog does not focus entirely on getting work. However this is not to say that I do hope that by showing examples of my work through it, that work will not come my way.

In fact I am a firm believer in karma and that by helping others through this blog that the good will be returned to me in some form. I have certainly found that connections I have made with people have resulted in good things happening.

I would be interested in your own thoughts on this.

The image with this post was a competition entry for a contest run at Wellington Photographic Society where we were given a range of objects to incorporate in images.

I take part in a Facebook group that acts as a support for photographers around the country. The group mainly consists of people new to photography and therefore the questions pop up time and time again about what gear they should buy. Most already have a usable DLRS and a couple of lenses, but seem to have got into the mindset that they need to spend a lot of money to get better. I have decided to call this “the gear trap” because unfortunately there is no 100% guarantee that if you have better gear you will get better photos.

In a series of posts I am going to offer some advice on various pieces of equipment, starting with lenses.

If you buy an entry level DSLR camera then it will always come with a lens attached. If you buy in the higher end then you will often have the choice of a body only purchase. The lens that is attached to a camera, when part of the purchase, is generally referred to as a “kit” lens. Depending upon the package you have bought you may have a single lens or a couple of kit lenses. They will span a focal length from 18mm to 300mm. Kits lenses are generally made out of plastic including the parts that we refer to as “glass” which is why they are light and also fairly robust. While we tend to think of them as cheap if you break one you will discover that they can cost up to $500 to replace.

Now when people on the Facebook group start talking about buying lenses it is generally with the goal of replacing their kit lenses.

So what is wrong with a kit lens.

If you are buying a camera from the likes of Canon, Nikon or Sony then put simply “nothing”. For the most part they will take excellent images and even perfect images if the person operating the camera knows what they are doing. More expensive lens will have a better optics (but not so much that it will be noticeable in most pictures), will focus and track faster and normally will have an aperture that can go larger. However how much that is of use to you depends upon what you are doing.

So before you reach for the credit card to buy that new lens consider the following:

1. How well do you know the operation of your camera? Put bluntly if you have no idea what the effect of shutter speed, aperture and ISO have in getting images then putting a better piece of glass on the camera is not going to make a blind bit of difference to the majority of the end results.
2. Work out a clear idea of what it is you will be shooting the most and then see if you can shoot it with the gear you have. When I started shooting it was mainly sports that took my fancy. The 70-300mm lens I had with my camera was more than adequate shooting my daughter play netball or to capture the local club rugby game, but it failed miserably when I tried to capture her in roller skating competitions. The difference between the sports was that there was less light in the indoor environment. The answer was a 70-200 F2.8 lens in this case.But on the other hand most of my model shoots were in the studio under lighting that I could control. I was shooting mostly at F8 so didn’t need a lens capable of F2.8 and so I shot with the lens that came with the camera for nearly 3 years. It is still used a lot for these types of shoot.
3. Are there other ways to improve the final result? A lot of poor images are often the lack of light rather than issues with optics quality. While better lenses generally allow you to operate in lower light, the same results can be achieved by introducing other light sources. Your camera’s built in focus doesn’t actually know what it is seeing when it focuses. Rather it is looking for the point where the contrast is the colours is at it’s strongest. This is why cameras have problems focusing when the light is lower.
4. Determine what your upgrade path is likely to be for bodies. Until around 10 years ago pretty much any SLR lens that came from a manufacturer would fit and work on the other bodies that they made. This is no longer the case. While the higher end lenses specifically designed for full frame camera will generally work on crop sensor bodies, lens designed specifically for crop sensor bodies may not work on full frame cameras. Also not all cameras (especially entry level ones) have the lens focus motor built in so they require the lens to have its own motor. There is little point in buying a whole lot of lenses that will not work later if you plan to move to full frame at some stage, because the lenses are likely to outlast the body.

Finally if you do decide that you want to go with better glass then a great start is with a 50mm F1.8. They are relatively cheap at just under $200, are quite fast and enable you to go into low light situations. And because you can’t zoom them you need to think about where you place yourself and move to get the shot.