johnrochaphoto.net

Archive for the ‘Conversation - advice and tips’ Category

I started my photo website before I started blogging and understandably quite a few people contact me through my site and I’ve just realised there are a number of differences in the sorts of questions that people ask.

I suppose it might be because my site is clearly divided into photographs which are personal and for stock photography.

Now of course it may seem a bit strange in a way that I’ve had little to say about stock photography in particular but one or two people have asked me have asked me about stock photography and also what is the difference between what I might call my personal work and stock work.

Of course in many cases there isn’t any difference. I just love photography and many of my favourite personal pictures have turned out to be good stock sellers.

Nevertheless there is a difference in some cases and so I thought I might try to show some pictures every now and then which would show the particular aspects of my personal and stock photography.

As far as stock photography is concerned I’ve been involved in stock photography for a long time. The first stock agency I worked with was the Keith Jones Picture Library. Now as far as I can see this doesn’t exist any more. For a while I was with Barnabys and interestingly this turned up when I was looking for something quite different and I think it’s incorporated into the Mary Evans Picture Library.

Another agency was called the Northern Picture Library and as far as I can see it’s also disappeared and the name is used by a pop group which shows just how things have changed. For some time I was with the Freelance Photographers Guild in New York which I think has probably been incorporated into Getty.

This just shows how the stock photography business has gone up and down partly as agencies tried to move or perhaps not to move into the digital age. I had my fingers burnt very badly with an agency which accepted transparencies and changed them into digital works.

At the moment I’m with two all digital agencies. I’ve been a few years now with Alamy which is an interesting operation – I might have something to say about that – quite a lot of photographers are interested in an agency that has no internal formal editing procedure, and I’ve also recently joined an agency called Photoshelters.

I might comment on this in the future. This is an agency with editors and so far they seem happy enough with the small sample I have given them.

As far as the stock market is concerned it’s changing very very rapidly. So many pictures are used now online in websites and blogs and these pictures don’t have to be as large as pictures for print because of the nature of computer screens and the need to show quickly. people get very bored waiting for pictures to load.

Also a lot of people today have digital cameras.

Partly my thinking is coloured by the fact that when I started out in stock photography it was considered that the minimum equipment was a medium format camera using either colour transparency film for slides on the light box or monochrome film for black and white prints.

This meant two largish cameras or one camera with interchangeable backs. So I bought into the Bronica system – I still have my Bronica, backs and lenses. I’ve taken them to the top of Macchu Picchu and along the Silk Road and on various other journeys. Sadly, Bronica is no more the last models coming in 2005.

But it all means that when photographers look at pixel count and point out that the Canon range includes cameras with 21 mega pixels it’s still all in comparison with the traditional 35mm camera when they compare quality.

When you’re accustomed to the quality of medium format it’s a bit of a shock to work with cameras that have 8 or 12 pixels though it’s important to remember that the type of picture produced with a digital camera is different in all sorts of ways.

Talking about lenses is a pretty dry business and of course testing and trying lenses is a time consuming process but there’s absolutely no point in any of this unless it leads to better or different pictures.

I suppose I’m like a lot of photographers who get fed up with people saying, ‘Ah you must have a good camera’ or ‘Your camera takes good pictures’.

My approach to what you might call the technical side of photography is rather practical. A lot of my photos are taken for editorial or stock use and so I have to meet the standards of the client. For my own personal pleasure I’m happy to use old cameras, pinhole cameras and also practise some types of non camera photography.

Now going on with trying out new lenses I was talking about ‘thinking digital’ and these two concepts combined for me a lot when I decided to cover the Rose Festival in Kazunluk. I’ve spoken about this before but as I live in Bulgaria and I’m a stock photographer, I like to return again and again to the same places and build up a collection of images which enables me to provide a good coverage of an area or an event.

One of the things I like to do is to attend festivals. Now this particular festival celebrates roses and the rose industry and is mainly a one day event with a few days before and after with some associated activities.

Because so much depends on a single day I’ve found it’s worth planning ahead and thinking digitally.

I also decided this year to try out my new lenses and particularly my Canon 100mm macro lens in its secondary role as a telephoto lens. This is something that macro lenses are extremely good for, having fast focusing, the ability to cover distances from a few inches to infinity and having a wide aperture is a great help.

Shooting with prime lenses is rather different than using zooms. For me I suppose the main point is that you have to think in advance of how big an image you want in your viewfinder before you press the button.

With a zoom lens you can stand in one position and simply zoom in or out to make the image larger or smaller.

With a fixed lens if you’re too near or too far away it’s too late. Too near and your image not only fills the frame but goes outside it, too far and your image is too small.

This smallness in the frame is one of the first points in thinking digital because it’s fairly obvious that moving from, in my case, medium 6×6 format to an 8.5 megapixel digital camera creates a few differences and difficulties.

So even the best modern digital cameras can’t produce the image size of film cameras. They do have different characteristics but it’s quite difficult to get a good quality, large image. So what can we do about it? How can we get larger images without interpolation?

I’d like to focus on two approaches and one of them takes me back to my old black and white days because one of the advantages of digital is that the photographer has a great deal of control so various things can be done.

One obvious approach to thinking digitally is to create a library of images for use in other images. A common example is skies. Like many photographers I shoot a lot skies. One glory of digital is that the number of pictures is limited only by your memory card and storage. You can immediately check the exposure and erase images that are not good enough. This means that you can build up a large library of skies, backgrounds, textures and detailed images which you can incorporate into you final images.

This idea of incorporating bits into an image can lead to a great deal of controversy because a lot of people believe that the camera cannot – or perhaps should not, lie. Somehow a photograph is reality.

I think this a perfectly legitimate approach to photography but it’s clear that a lot of photographers have taken a quite different view. Some photographers like Oscar Gustav Rejhandler, Henry Peach Robinson and Man Ray in different ways have attempted to simulate reality by attempting to make photographs look like something else – i.e. paintings, or to make something else like a painting look like a photograph.

This doesn’t have to be dishonest or deceitful. Few people looking at Man Ray’s photo of an iron with pointed screws coming from the sole plate would think that it was ‘real’. They might of course believe that the image was not created by photographic manipulation or montage but by making a model first.

The problem arises mainly when images are produced which do not give any clues as to how they were created and yet are in fact created by using manipulative techniques. For example a photographer might take a picture of a flower in a studio and then cut it out and place it on a sky background.

Is there anything wrong with this? Not at all in my opinion. As I say it’s exactly what I used to do in my black and white days. I had a book which was my bible at the time on Printing by Pearlman and would shade and dodge and burn and replace skies. Skies are a particular bugbear for black and white photographers because of the difficulty in getting a correct tonal range when using film.

Sometimes I would cut out images from other photos, sandpaper the edges of the photo paper to make the joins less apparent, stick the image down with rubber solution and then rephotograph the result.

I would also use double exposures and other in camera techniques to manipulate the images.

Using modern digital techniques this approach is much easier if you have the technical knowledge but it’s nothing new.

With this freedom comes responsibility. I think it’s quite wrong for example to have ‘news’ photographs where relevant information has been radically altered and still try to pass them off as ‘real’ or ‘true’.

In my own work I always clearly label in my captioning or description where I believe I have digitally manipulated the images.

This can be a bit of a problem.

Most digital photographers who post process pictures in an imaging programme will apply certain basic corrections using levels or curves or just hitting the autocorrect button.

Doing that changes the image? My view is that calling an image digitally altered or enhanced goes beyond these basic changes.

Among the changes I have in mind are making mirror images, creating reflections with or without specialist software programmes, inserting moons into night scenes and so on.

I’m going to give a few examples right here using some of my most successful manipulated pictures.

My first example dates from my pre-digital days and was produced entirely in-camera using a Cokin Mask attachment.

For this photo I photographed the grapefruit for the first exposure on a red background using a yellow filter. For the second photo I took a picture of my girlfriend’s eye. I use the yellow filter so that the human flesh and the grapefruit would blend together better This is the final result.

Acid Look

No digital wizardry here.

My next photo was taken using both film and digital cameras and the images were many years apart.

Cycling through the attractive countryside of Canton Berne in Switzerland very early one morning I passed a cafe which had not opened yet. It’s distinctive red topped tables were still folded down and provided a compelling image which had some success in photo magazines at the time.

I also took close ups of one table and over the years I have scanned this image, masked it, cut it out and combined it with other images for different effects to create many different versions.

This version combines one table top which had been replicated many times, with a sky image from Bulgaria and the shadow of park chair in England.

Five Red Table Tops

One outcome of this technique is that the final image is much bigger than each original and so provides a large high quality image.

Clearly these images are not ‘real’ or ‘true’ but hopefully without being pretentious I’d like to take an artist’s freedom to render what I ’see’ in my mind.

So back to the completely digital days of this year’s Rose Festival in Kuzunluk.

This was the second time for me. I had anticipated some problems but there were some I didn’t think of in advance.

For example I might be wrong but I think that the first time a few years ago the actual picking of the roses was quite early in the morning starting before 9 o’clock.

This time looking at the programme I found it would be from 10 o’clock onwards and this meant that it would fall into that dreaded time of day when for many photographers no photography is possible! That is. midday, when the harsh light of the bright sun high in the sky makes some types of photography difficult.

One of my solution was like this. I went out in the evening the day before the picking and in the softer evening light photographed some of the dancers and other festival characters in the city square. Many of these people were relaxed and expecting to be photographed so I took some pictures of them here.

Here is a picture of one of the young folk dancers in the flattering evening light.

Folk Dancer with a Yellow Scarf

One further step was to photographs details, especially eyes, simply with a view to using them in my midday images to replace the dark, harshly shadowed eyes with the much more attractive images from the evening before.

Here is a example of a masked street dancer before and after.

Masked Dancer – before and After

There will be people who will shout ‘foul!’ This may be so but at the very least this type of manipulation pre-dates the digital era.

Since I last posted I’ve looked around a few other blogs.

Looking at some old favourites and seeing if there are any tips to pick up. One thing that struck me was that there are quite a few bloggers who blog every day or every week.

I don’t think I can do that.

It might be possible to have a picture a day or something but I find it necessary to spend some time thinking things over and of course in my own life since I last posted I’ve been ill (not very badly), spent a month or so in England on mainly family business and I’ve been looking all the time to find photo subjects with stock photography in mind.

So I thought for this post I could probably continue where I left off with lenses. Mainly from the point of view of how my ideas on lenses have changed since I went over to digital capture and of course most important how they can effect the kind of photographs I take.

So I’ve been spending some time and, unfortunately, some of my hard earned money on updating my lens lineup so I thought I might share some thoughts on why I’ve chosen the lenses I have. Not a a formal review but a how they fit in with my photo practice.

These are the lenses that I’ve acquired in the last few months.

Canon EF 100mm f2.8 USM
Canon EF 70-300mm f4-5.6 IS USM
Sigma 10-20mm f4-5.6 EX DC HSM
Tamron SP AF28-75mm F/2.8 XR Di LD

Canon, in common with other companies has different lens lines and this can be confusing.

Top of the line are the L series. The main problem for me is that the very solid construction means that these lenses can big and heavy. I’m looking for a good level of construction, optical quality and the features I need.

The only one of these lenses I’ve used for a while is the Canon macro so I can give a few comments. The web is full of reviews so this is only a personal view. One important point is that Canon equipment is freely available in Bulgaria where I live.

First impressions were of solidity. It’s a bit on the big size for me. But this actually conceals one of the main benefits. All the focussing and movement is internal so the lens does not get longer and nothing rotates.

This means that a polarizing filter is not a problem. Another great benefit is if you want to hold the lens up against glass or wire netting. I use a rubber lens hood in these situations both to protect the lens and to prevent reflections. It’s really great to be able to focus without worrying about lens movement.

The autofocus is lightening fast and there are two settings depending on how close you are. Of course with a lens of this sort good manual focussing is important and this Canon is very well equipped.

Now all reviews score this lens very highly on a full frame film or sensor and on a cropped sensor the overall definition is excellent. It seems to be good at all apertures but it’s always worth finding the “sweet spot”. I plump for f11. This provides a good depth of field but without the problems of diffraction at smaller apertures.

Of course, in practical terms many macro subjects are three dimensional so a flat field is not all important.

A macro lens of this kind also makes a great short/medium wide aperture telephoto.

I’ve found the Canon performs well in both these roles.

Here are some examples.

I looked around the garden in England and came across a number of spiders nests with lots of babies. Many of these were inaccessible or very dark.

One nest was on a fence near a wall where I could balance the camera to avoid shake. It was still quite windy and the light quality was variable. I decided to use manual exposures and take a number of pictures with the in-camera flash to provide mixed lightening.

I sellotaped a tube of white paper over the flashgun to provide diffusion and I also made a reflector of cardboard covered with kitchen foil to lighten the shadows.

One of the great joys of digital capture is that you can take large numbers of shots and experiment freely. From about a hundred attempts only a few were satisfactory. Here is one of my better examples.

Baby Spiders

For the second type of shot I decided to try out the Canon macro lens at the Rose Festival in Kazanluk.

Over the years I’ve covered quite a few festivals with great results. The first festival I can remember was the May Day Hobby Horse Festival in Padstow in Cornwall in England. For one day of the year this tiny village is crammed with visitors as the Hobby horse is lead through the streets by the teazer.

The Rose festival at Kazanluk here in Bulgaria is another of my favourites. Over a weekend at the beginning of July each year this town is also filled with visitors. The main events include the choosing and crowning of the Rose Queen, the picking of the roses in the Valley of the Roses just outside the town and the march from the valley through the town where folk dancers and figures in traditional costumes and masks dance through the streets.

Roses are big business in Bulgaria as these roses provide a good amount of the perfume used in the international cosmetics industry.

From the photographic point of view most of the participants who come not just from Bulgaria but adjoining Balkan countries expect to be photographed and the danger is that they might pose too much.

A word of warning – if you plan to visit book early because the hotels are all booked by international tour groups with the Japanese particularly in evidence.

Festivals like this are heavily weather dependent. In the days before the festival there were heavy storms. Luckily the three days of the festival provided clear weather.

Here is one of the main problems. None photographers believe bright sunlight is the best for photography but experienced photographers know that harsh contrasty lighting is almost impossible to handle even when shooting RAW.

What’s to be done. On the day of the rose picking I saw the local press photographers trying the usual expedients which included flash to fill the shadows, posing groups in the shade, using backlighting together with flash.

For posed groups these techniques work pretty well but it’s more difficult if you’re looking for a candid record.

I believe that “thinking digital” is part of the solution. In fact it’s so important that It’s worth a separate post.

My first solution was to go out into the city square in the late evening when the light was more diffused and see if I could capture some of the dancers there.

Here is an example.

Rose Festival Dancer

This means that I am well satisfied with the Canon macro as an addition to my lens lineup and it also panders to my traditional preference for prime lenses over zooms.