johnrochaphoto.net

A Stroll in Boris Gardens, Sofia, Bulgaria

Is this a travel photograph?

I suppose it depends if you believe that a travel photograph can be taken, where you live, even more or less just across the road from where you live in your own backyard so to speak.

In other words, to take a travel photograph does the photographer have to travel? And does he or she have to travel any particular distance?

This is something I think worth thinking about because the stereotype of travel photography is where somebody visits some far-flung location and brings back pictures to their home turf.

Now, obviously lots of people live in these places and quite likely there are photographers living there too.

And if you go to any country – go to Greece – go to Italy – go to China anywhere you’ll find that the local photographers have been busy.

Many manuals on travel photography advise you to look at the local postcards so that you can see the standard views.

Really, that’s just a thought, but I’m not dealing with this photograph just as whether or not it’s a travel photograph but because it’s got people in it.

You can have a lot of views about people in pictures.

I suppose many of you have stood in front of some well known world site – I well remember many years ago standing in front of the Nine Dragon Screen Wall in the Behai Park in Beijing in China while crowds and crowds of local Chinese stood in line to have their photographs taken.

Sometime they roped me in to photograph their groups.

And I was just hoping there might be just a moment when I could take a photograph with nobody in it.

As it happened I was successful and I was quite pleased about this because I wanted a photograph simply of the wall itself.

I also remember many many years ago when I was very young photographer, and I was a member of various photographic clubs and societies, and there was a lot of discussion there about how people brought scale to the picture.

How people in just the right position would make the picture

How the right kind of people for example, some old peasant walking down the track in Tuscany rather than somebody in jeans and a baseball cap would give the appropriate local colour.

I also read in the photo press about how successful photographers would take their family members around with red coats on so that they could ask them to pose discreetly in various parts of the picture.

All of this deals with what you might call the aesthetics and integrity of photography.

This blog is at least partly concerned with Stock Photography.

One of the great problems in Stock Photography is people.

It’s a simple problem.

The stock photo that is the most successful is the one that can be used in every possible circumstance. It can be used in both editorial contexts – that is in newspapers and magazines where it is considered reasonable and acceptable to have people in the picture going around their everyday business and they have no cause for complaint and in commercial contexts.

If, however, a photograph is used in a more commercial context and particularly in advertising, then you simply can’t have a photograph of a recognizable person unless that person has actually given their consent to be photographed and has a clear understanding of the particular rights of the photographs.

Let me give you an example.

I remember reading of a photographer who had not done this when he described how he took a picture of his friend, a young woman, and later on, it was published in a newspaper with an advertisement for birth control pills.

If I remember rightly this young woman was a devout Roman Catholic and she was very very unhappy about this and quite rightly so. Being a friend she didn’t sue!

So the rule is no people in photographs, unless they have signed a Model Release.

A Model Release is a legal document, where people clearly and explicitly say that they have agreed that the photograph can be used in certain contexts.

Quite often the contexts have to be specified quite clearly.

Now, it’s fairly obvious there are going to be some problems if you go in for people photography.

There are those, I suppose, who believe that if you take a picture of a mountain shepherd in Bulgaria. or a camel rider in Egypt, that is unlikely that they are going to either see their photographs used for publicity or that they are going to complain about it.

On the other hand, even if you could talk to them and get them to sign a form it might be very, very difficult unless the form were in a language they understood.

And this is where there’s only one or two people.

When there’s a whole bunch of people it’s clearly quite impossible to get a model release from all of them.

So one of the things that you sometimes have to do is to see how you can take a photograph with no people in it.

My photograph has I think three people in it.

Usually the rules of commercial photography are that the people should not be recognizable.

(Anybody who has seen the cult Antionini film, “Blow Up” with David Hemmings playing the fashion photographer will know that recognizing people in photographs taken in parks can be quite a tricky business.)

If we take the three people concerned in my picture, you might argue that the figure sitting on the bench on the left could not be recognized but I would not want to be on the receiving end of a legal argument on that.

The two men walking along the path in front of the trees are clearly recognizable.

Now the question is, how can we get rid of them?

There are whole range of choices and some of them are made possible only now that we have come to the age of digital imaging.

What are the options now?

Once again, I could wait.

The trouble with waiting is that while some people disappear from the viewfinder frame, other people soon appear and if your pictures takes in a very wide sweep, it’s really quite difficult to wait for a moment when there are no people there.

If you have somebody sitting on a bench, and you don’t want them to be in the picture, one of your choices is to wait until they move

This might be a very long time and meanwhile of course, the whole lighting situation might have changed.

If the people are walking along it seems to me that there are a number of options that you can take.

The most obvious way of dealing with people in a picture is to use various copying and cloning techniques to take them out.

This needs quite a high level of skill and if the people are fairly prominent in the picture it really isn’t easy to do this in a way that makes it absolutely undetectable.

So, I think that now that we have digital imaging there might be other ways of dealing with this problem.

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.