Jack Russells

Some time ago, I went to an East Lothian beach with my sister’s Jack Russell, Billy. Here are the shots I brought back.

Product photography

A friend who runs his own design and marketing company recently asked me if I’d be interested in doing a product shoot for a client - a sugar manufacturer called Plantation Reserve. He had redesigned the packaging and needed shots for the company’s relaunched web site.

I was keen to try something different and although I’d photographed guinea pigs and rotting fruit on a white background, this was a different challenge altogether.

Professional product photographers will have a studio set-up with a table, table-mounted lights, booms and a light tent. Not being in the business, I had to improvise so on the morning of the shoot, I went to a haberdashery in Lewisham to buy a couple of sheets of material, one black, one white. Perfect for doing a seamless background.

I pushed a table against my son’s cot, draped the sheet over the side of the cot and onto the table surface, which created a very credible “seamless background”.

The brief was to get several different shots, including three different bags of sugar, a metal tin, piles of sugar, close-ups of sugar granules, sugar on a wooden spoon and sugar pouring from a spoon.

Without specialist equipment, I had to improvise with the lighting too.

I originally tried lighting using off-camera flash through white umbrellas but this didn’t suit the product. Bare flash produced much sharper results. The problem was with positioning and securing them.

In the end, I put the camera on a tripod, used the 10 second timer, and moved around the table with the flash, trying different angles and distances from the subject.

I was pretty pleased with the results in the end. The pick of the bunch ended up on the Our products page on Plantation Reserve’s web site.

Other images from the shoot below:

Wedding photography at Old Wardour Castle, Wiltshire

Stage-fright

Nerves - or stage-fright - is integral to most public performance and professionals learn to live with it. Better than that, they learn to harness it. Pavarotti used to vomit before every gig but that didn’t stop him from belting out a tune once on stage.




As everyone knows, stage-fright is the result of pumping adrenalin. Adrenalin increases your heart rate, so you can run quickly from a famished bear or another caveman come to bash your brains in with a dinosaur’s tibia. Before going on stage, the prehistoric part of your brain - the little node at the top of the stem buried in there since time immemorial - tells you that the audience are as much a threat as the marauding caveman and you slip into fight-or-flight mode. But seeing as you’re standing on stage about to sing at your school assembly or make a speech for your daughter at a her wedding, neither fighting or flighting are an option. Unless you can find a way to deal with that adrenalin, your body is going to look like it’s getting ready for this primordial purpose: flushed, sweating, shortness of breath and you’re going to experience unnecessary and damaging stress.

Stand-up comedy

A couple of nights after Tim and Abbey’s wedding, I was chatting to a friend about public speaking. At work (my 9-5 job) that day I’d delivered a presentation to a training course of fifty people and I was telling him about how nervous I felt before I went ‘on stage’.

It turned out, my friend used to do stand-up comedy and was well aware of stage-fright. He told me that in the world of stand-up, there was a well-known phenomenon (and I forget its name) which is when a comic has a great gig and his next gig flops. He got too flushed with confidence following his success and the next night he wasn’t scared enough to get the adrenalin pumping, and his performance suffered.

The key, they say, is to find the balance. Inevitably, there’s a theory you can look up on Wikipedia and it’s called the Yerkes-Dodson Law.

Wedding photography is a performance

What’s all this got to do with wedding photography?

Well, wedding photography is a performance too. You’re a professional, you have to prepare for the big day and you have a routine to want to execute in a high-pressure environment. People have high expectations of you and you don’t want to let them down. Like a stand-up comic, you don’t ever want to experience the mortification and career ramifications of ‘flopping’ on the big stage.

The difference is that the wedding photographer is not the main attraction. You don’t go to a wedding to observe the wedding photographer. Ideally, no one should care who he/she is or what they are doing. This is vital remember, and it’s the key to getting through the day without incident.

Don’t fall into the font

I want to do the best job I can and naturally I was nervous before Tim and Abbey’s wedding. But as I get more experienced I am learning to channel those nerves into positive energy, helping me to focus on the hundreds of little things that need to be executed to shoot a wedding to a high standard.

If you don’t deal with the enormity of it, there’s more of a chance you’re going to do someting bad. You may have seen the video on YouTube of the photographer backing down the aisle, shooting the departing bride and groom, toppling into the font at the back of the church. Whatever happens, you don’t want to be that guy.

Make your mistakes early and make them minor

Everyone makes mistakes, so keep them to a minimum and don’t let them be disastrous. At this wedding, I made a couple of fairly minor but potentially damaging clangers early on and in retrospect it was nice to get them out of the way early.

Both happened at the hairdressers where Abbey, her mother and her bridesmaid were getting their hair done. One of the first things I did was ask Abbey a question that at the time I considered vital to my itinerary.

“What time are you getting your make-up done?”

“It’s already done!” she said, graciously. I should have noticed that, shouldn’t I?

Abbey then told me that her bridesmaid, Kirsten, was upstairs having her makeup done. Another effect of adrenalin is you don’t listen properly. Your ears are prioritising listening for the enemy. A few minutes later, I stride into a back room where a young woman was having her hair washed. I thrust out my hand and said, “Hi, I’m the photographer. Kirsten I take it. Don’t mind me,” and I started taking pictures.

The woman said, “You can take pictures if you like but I’m nothing to do with the wedding.”

D’oh!

Two very minor little clangers but surely enough to potentially worry the bride, listening in. The most important day of her life. A big financial investment. Is the photographer she decided upon a complete doughnut? Is he capable of getting through the day?

P.P.P.P.P

Mistakes, clangers, minor insults and proper career-ending disasters, like falling into the font, can be mitigated with good planning.

As the saying goes - “P.P.P.P.P” - Proper Planning Prevents Poor Peformance? I had already decided to be super anal for Tim and Abbey’s wedding and in the end, it paid off. Despite these early minor rattles, I did my photography at the hairdressers, looked at my plan, which told me I had to go back to Old Wardour Castle within the hour, and so I went through the motions. I’d done the thinking-ahead. My job was to execute and my overly-detailed itinerary was my guide and my fallback.

The Plan

Wiltshire is over a hundred miles from my home, so I knew early on in planning for this wedding that I would be staying overnight somewhere. (That “somewhere”, it turned out, was a Travelodge near Stonehenge.) Plus, as I had to be in multiple locations several miles apart along windy country roads, I wanted to plan as much as possible to ensure I was where I was supposed to be.

In the week before the wedding, I sat down and I wrote it all out, by the minute, so that I knew where I’d be at any time of the day. I also knew the type of shots I wanted to get at each stage of the day. I had a good idea of the kind of backgrounds I could shoot against. I knew the restrictions placed upon wedding photographers by Wiltshire Council by heart (no shooting during the legalese, the signing of the register or the declarations - and stay at the back of the pews, out the way) I had even thought about the direction of the sun at different times of the day.

It was the first time I’d done it to this level of detail and I’m glad I did.







A job well done

In the end, having turned the nerves to my advantage and focused on my plan, I feel I did a really good job for Tim and Abbey, and their feedback (thankfully) confirms this. Of course, it is always their day. They are the centre of everyone’s attention and will be as long as the wedding photographer does his job and stays in the background.

Wedding photography at Dirleton Castle

I had the pleasure of photographing Jackie and Jaimie’s wedding, and their daughter Niamh’s naming ceremony, on 9 April at the Dirleton Castle in East Lothian, and afterwards at Craigielaw Golf Club.


I’d known Jackie for many years; her brother is a good friend of mine. So I was really pleased to be asked to shoot her wedding.

This was far from an easy shoot. It was an usually warm and sunny day, which is great for the bride and groom but for the photographer this usually means an extra few beads of sweat expelled in trying to find suitable light. The outdoor shots were often an exercise in finding shade.

Contrast issues

The most tricky area was the ceremony which took in the cellar of the castle. The harsh mid-day night flooded in through the window spaces but much of the action took place in shadow, giving me some nasty contrast issues. Obviously, if I’d had complete control over everything (which is of course never going to happen for a wedding photographer) I would have had king size bedsheets pinned up at the big window spaces, but without that, it takes a bit of extra work at the camera.


I had to spent a lot of time switching exposure modes between spot and Canon’s pattern mode, whilst as often as possible trying to keep the light in each shot consistent. I don’t mind shooting directly into the sun and it’s easy shooting your subject, facing the light, standing against a dark wall (expose for the face and let the background go dark).

The tricky bit is when bride and groom are facing each other with the sunlight at one of their backs. You get a wide contrast that makes your sensor strain to accommodate your incompetence as a photographer and one face lit, the other in shadow. Not great when you’re supposed to be capturing the happy couple’s sacred vows.

My solution, unsurprisingly, was to use bounce flash. Expose for the face lit by the direct sun and bounce the flash, in ETTL mode, so that it lights up the subject’s face standing opposite. This allowed me to get the type of shot below which I think really does justice to the bride at one of the key points of her day: the vows. Any issues with colour balance, from the flash bounced off the light brown stone, were fairly easily fixed in Photoshop, although the light naturally gave a fairly pleasing tone, so there wasn’t much to be done.


Outside afterwards, the it was all about wrestling with the harsh, direct sunlight. It’s not a huge problem at Dirleton Castle because there are some lovely old trees in the gardens which is where we headed for the bride and groom portraits. When I couldn’t get to shade, for instance at the front of Craigielaw for the formals, I shot into the sun as much as possible and dabbed the subjects with flash. Actually, I pretty much blasted them with flash to balance the strong sunlight.

Family portraits

I’ve been distracted by my day job recently, which has made it difficult for me to devote as much energy to my business as I would have liked. Things have hopefully clearing up and now I’m looking forward to 2011 and making more wonderful pictures for my clients!

On Sunday I did a photo shoot for a young family who live nearby in South East London. I don’t advertise as a family or baby photographer but when Nickesha emailed and asked whether I’d photograph her with her husband and two month old baby, I was was keen to do it.

Here are a few images from the shoot.

I don’t have a studio so I was relieved to find a blank white wall in their kitchen and lots of white space to bounce flash around in. Many shots subsequently have a “studio look”, which is what the client was looking for.

I really enjoyed it and Nickesha and her family were a joy to shoot. I’m looking forward to doing more of the same in 2011.