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.

Great Sphinx at Giza in Egypt

I hadn’t planned to be away so long. Some delays are planned. I had planned, for example, to look again at the arrangements for my web presence.

This was actually suggested to me by a comment made earlier by Mary who was looking at such things as hosting and domains.

I’ve been on the web for several years now, and it seemed a good idea to me to look again and work out which of my websites I wanted to keep to and which I didn’t, and also of course I’ve changed my system of working from standalone websites to, what are known as content management system approaches.

Maybe later I’ll be looking at how the Internet and computing in general affect the life of a stock photographer.

Another problem I had was that just by accident, I actually deleted one of my databases.

How I did it. I don’t know, lots of us do it. Luckily I had a backup.

What I didn’t take into account was a raging tooth infection, which has kept my dentist occupied with my root canals for some time.

So coming back to the actual meat of the blog, I posted a picture which I think shows what you might call an iconic image.

Almost everybody knows the great Sphinx at Giza so the question is, if you are going to be a travel photographer, is this the kind of picture you should be taking or perhaps something quite different?

One of the great things, of course, about digital photography is that it doesn’t always have to be an either or matter.

I’ll give you an example. Many many years ago, I spent several months in Peru trying to take pictures of all the great sites there.

And I clambered around places like Machu Picchu with my Bronica, with two backs for shooting colour transparency film and black and white.

The main problem was that in Peru in general, and certainly in these isolated circumstances, I had hardly any film.

So when I got to Machu Picchu I think I had about two rolls of colour film and I was fairly certain that they would be very difficult to process in country.

Now this, of course, was a pity for me as it meant I had a very restricted ability to shoot my pictures.

Nowawadays things are quite different.

With a digital camera, you have the possibility of choosing and shooting hundreds of different types of picture and this means that often you can take both the iconic pictures, the pictures that everybody recognizes that you think are so great but which you soon find hundreds of other photographers have taken with similar images, or you can choose to take those pictures which capture the everyday life, and changing times of the people.

I personally find these more interesting.

Now as I’ve been asked a lot about travel photography and as travel photography takes into account a very very wide range of photographic skills, I’ve decided in this blog to devote a number of posts entirely to travel photography now and then.

And perhaps at some stage, and I can put all these posts together and make them into an e book. Let’s wait and see.

For the moment, good shooting and I’ll be there to show the other kind of picture.

Just one small point, although this picture is a fairly standard shot, there is something which is perhaps slightly different about it photographically.

See if you can think what.

I’ll give you a clue:

The mega pixel dimensions of this photo, before I reduced it for the web were 3362 x 3161.

Now I’m going to go straight into a couple of pictures and for one of them I’m going to continue my theme of mirror images because I think I can combine an example of personal photography and another take on mirror images.

The point here I think is that like many other photographers, I’m fascinated by certain themes or leitmotivs in my photography and one of my recurring preoccupations is with shadows.

This was brought to me again quite recently as I was walking down a street in Rome, Italy and the sun was shining over the awning of a shopfront and then the sun disappeared for a moment and the whole scene was transformed, all the borders, dark areas, all the three dimentional aspects disappeared all I was left with was a whitish wall and a rather tawdry awning.

This emphasized again to me how fleeting shadows are and of how connected they are with the literal interpretation of photography as “painting with light”.

It’s also connected to the days when I used to practice non-camera photography. Because of course when you’re interested in photography personally you don’t have to bother about the types of technical restrictions imposed by a number of commercial agencies and clients. You can shoot pictures on plastic lens cameras, on Lomos, you can use pin hole cameras which you’ve made yourself and if you set things up properly you don’t need a camera at all.

But, once you get into stock photography, editorial photography or advertising photography or any photography where there’s a client, you have to meet the client’s demands. Some clients these days are extremely undemanding which is causing trouble in the world of commercial photography because many people now are looking for free or low cost photographs and they don’t necessarily have any understanding or care of what good pictures are.

So, the first photo I’m going to look at in detail is of the shadow of a light in my kitchen. I think I said before that I like to get up early and in this case I was standing making a cup of tea when I saw that the early morning sun had come through my window and made an image or shadow of my kitchen light on a cupboard door. It was a graphic pattern but then it clouded over and all was lost.

I waited two or three days and at last I was rewarded by a similar pattern of sunlight. I’d already decided to take the photo, if you like, in two parts because in this particular picture I wanted to emphasize total symmetry. This doesn’t mean of course that I think there’s some rule about symmetry or that symmetry is in itself a good thing, I just felt that it suited the pattern here.

Also I felt that by using this technique I could make a picture with a much higher pixel count and therefore a better quality of definition than by shooting the whole thing. In other words what I did was I used a medium telephoto setting on my 80-200 zoom lens to take only one half of the shadow.

Later in the computer I created a separate layer for the image, increased the canvas, made a duplicate of this half and then flipped it over and then gradually joined the two halves together until I had made a composite of the two identical halves – in other words, a mirror image.

Now this is what I consider to come in the ‘personal’ pictures category. I don’t have any obvious view of whether it would sell as a stock picture. It certainly hasn’t yet, but it might. So this is the sort of picture I might take largely to please myself and with what you might call the artistic part of me.

Now when it comes to stock pictures it’s like a lot of things. The world is full of very good photographers who go for one reason or another to what some people think are exotic places – of course not necessarily exotic to the people who live there. Exotic only to the sort of people who look at and buy pictures.

And this means that what you might call the travel area of stock photography is incredibly overcrowded. I think I can say that I’ve been around the world quite a bit.

I’ve lived and worked in and visited several countries in Europe, Asia and Arabia and I can say that many of the pictures that I’ve taken in these countries sell.

As I live in Bulgaria I find that I can do better than most European based photographers for this particular country and there is some interest in it.

MayDay dancers in Sofia

So I’ve taken a steady stream of pictures near to home and of course it’s the case that if you live in any other country you can do the same.

I find that pictures of Britain sell pretty well as well.

Buckfast Abbey in Devon

However it does seem to me quite important to create what you might call a more niche based approach – pictures which perhaps many people would consider hardly worth taking.

For this reason I’ve taken a number of pictures which a lot of people might think of as boring or ugly or perhaps simply unpictorial if there is such a word and an example is the picture of a cockroach.

This is a picture which needs a certain degree of expertise and suitable equipment.

I took this picture on the kitchen balcony of my house in Ibra in Oman and this type of cockroach – though some people say they’re not cockroaches – are plentiful over there coming largely through the vents in the air conditioning system.

If you find the need to change your air conditioner you might find yourself with a very large number of these beasts.

Perhaps the obvious point with stock photography is that provided the technical requirements are met, somewhere there’s a market for a picture of just about anything that you can see in the world today and it doesn’t necessarily have to capture the excitement of your heart or you mind.

Quite lot of people have expressed an interest in stock photography. So I think for my next post I might have a look at a picture or pictures which have been successful in stock terms and have appealed to me personally.