johnrochaphoto.net

Archive for January, 2008

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.

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Among my resolutions for blogging this year was some discusion on working methods and equipment. Of course this could cover a lot of ground but the impetus for this post was when a friend of mine who’s not a photographer commented on my use of studio flash.

The problem for her seemed to be how the flash could fire at the right time when the flash and the camera were not connected. We seemed to back in the era of flash powder when the the photographer would uncap the the lens manually and ignite the powder.

This got me thinking. It is a sort of magic and it also emphasizes some of the facts about my working methods.

Before I went digital I used cameras from Yashica, Rollei, Zenza Bronica and Konica which all had an outlet for a flash cable. Beastly things they were too with wires getting in the way and the contacts often failing.

Of course many cameras are still produced with flash contacts for external guns but as I mentioned before light weight is important to me so I bought a Canon D350 SLR without an external contact – though of course it has a flash shoe.

As an added problem it seems that many modern electronic cameras do not like the high trigger voltages produced by many flashguns manufactured in previous years.

I wanted to be able to use all the flashguns I possessed including my old Colorflash 100 studio light which must be over 20 years old now and has no sophisticated controls but does the job of producing light.

Anyway I looked around and it seemed my best option for off camera flash was to use some sort of flash trigger. I had some idea about these and had already realised that some were based on infra-red and some on radio technology.

For my purposes I decided against infra red as with this technology you need a clear path between the receiver and transmitter. With radio technology there can also be problems as the flash can be fired from other sources using radio transmission. So nothing’s perfect.

Anyway, here in Bulgaria where I live there’s not the same range of photo equipment available as in some other European countries and so I decided to see what I could find in the UK.

Just by chance I came across a company called studioflash.co.uk who advertise on the internet.

I’d better say now that I had no prior contact with this company so I was astonished with what followed.

I decided to buy a unit called MiniMagic which seemed to be inexpensive and simply made.

I ordered online but at some point the order failed – probably – because the payment system was not available in Bulgaria at that time.

I emailed studioflash.co.uk with my problem and was surprised at the response.

The guy who emailed me – was it Ray? I can’t remember now said, “I can see you’ve entered the details in my system so I’ll send you the unit and you just send me a cheque when you get it”.

That’s what I call service. I received the unit safely and sent the cheque promptly – it was the least I could do.

Now none of this matters if the unit doesn’t work but it does. Here it is.

The construction is lightweight and there’s no lock on the foot but I haven’t found these points a problem.

Bottom line is, provided the two AAA batteries are fresh the unit does the job. I use it connected directly to my Chinese built studio flash and have slave units on other flashes I use at the same time.

It’s great to have a reliable system without trailing wires so I strongly recommend you give this or a similar unit a try.

Update – I see on the website there are new units with a more rugged construction and a choice of channels.

Of course this deals with how to get a flash working these days. But the central question is, why use flash? What are the special qualities of flash as a light source and how best to use it. That’s for another time.

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In my first blog of this year I started to look at mirror images.

Just in case it’s not clear what I mean it’s when I take an original image and then taking only half of that image flip it over to provide a symmetrical image by joining the two halves.

So why should we do this?

there are a number of reasons and I’m planning to have a look at some of them in posts to come.

Some reasons are aesthetic and some are technical.

One more thing is that this is a technique that refines as time goes by and results in a whole range of unique images.

I came upon this idea quite by chance in my pre digital days. Clearly though it’s possible to print images like this mostly it depends on digital manipulation.

Here’s how it started for me.

It was in the 1970s and I was staying in Munich, one of Germany’s finest cities. I decided to try to get a view over the Olympic park by climbing to the top of the Olympic tower at night.

It was cold and windy and I just hoped my tripod – a Slick 88 – was sturdy enough for the job. At the time I was using a Konica Autoreflex with a 70-150 mm Tamron zoom lens with separate zoom and focus rings.

Looking over the parapet I saw the illuminated building of the BMW works, one of the landmarks of Munich, with its tower built like the cylinders of a car engine.

I took several shots and then decided to try some in camera long exposure zoom shots.

I’m assuming many photographers will understand this technique but in a nutshell what happens is that you zoom the lens from wide to tele or tel to wide at the same time as giving a long exposure. This technique is easier with a two ring zoom as there’s less chance of shifting the focus.

Anyway I was pleased with some of my images and decided to work on this technique.

The day came when I decided to make the move to digital imaging – originally by scanning my films.

I bought a Minolta scanner and suddenly I found I was able to manipulate my images in ways that were impossible before.

Here’s one of the resultant images.

What had started out as a record shot of a cityscape at night became an abstract image.

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