At the end of the educational [...]]]> From my perspective as a photography teacher, I see how aspirational professionals view photography, and I’m a part of how it’s taught. It’s a massively changing industry at the moment which makes it a moving target as far as teaching is concerned, but it keeps us on our toes.

At the end of the educational year, I thought I’d share a few perspectives on some trends I’ve noticed.

Quality: The tricky thing about quality is that it needs a frame of reference. If you’re 18 and you’ve never experienced film or the quality of a medium format image, and you’ve grown up with dodgy Photoshop techniques and jpgs, then how do you evaluate your work in regards quality? I push quality from day one, but I’m beginning to realise quality means very different things to people because of different frames of reference. I need to find a way to standardise everyone’s frame of reference at the start of the year so we can all appreciate quality for what it can be.

Methodology: The problem with where we are at with digital is that it’s been so haphazard. There are so many techniques, so many experts, so many ways of doing things, so many sliders…. What is missing however is a solid methodology. This comes back to quality. It’s always going to be a bit hit and miss without a consistent methodology to guide the capture and processing of an image. How to develop that methodology is the hard bit. So many experts with competing claims…

Facebook legends: This is the scariest one. I’m starting to perceive a trend that students think one year education and a Facebook page is enough to make them a professional. They couldn’t be more wrong. Everyone has a camera these days, which makes everyone a pseudo photographer. So the only way to become a professional is to actually be able to clearly differentiate your work; to stand out from the crowd (and that crowd is massive now). A two year Diploma is just the start on the road to becoming a true professional, which probably requires another half decade of experience on top of the formal study and a whole lot of effort and talent to be even in the mix.. There is such an overwhelming amount of mediocre photography out there. Let’s commit to not contributing to that as best we can. Let’s commit to a professional approach and a long term view; to build a broad skill set that will bring us above the masses.

Processing / Editing: These are two different things. Processing is about taking the data the sensor has collected and turning that data into pixels of the highest quality. It’s about good contrast, colour correction, levels, correcting for any lens flaws etc. It’s not artistic, it’s technical. Editing on the other hand is where we interpret the image. but there’s absolutely no point being creative on top of a technically weak image. It’s just makeup on a pig. Photoshop is not an emergency ward for grievously wounded images!

Digital manipulation: Everyone has an opinion. I’m admittedly a bit of a purist. I like what Photoshop makes possible, but I want to keep my work in the realm of photography. I think it’s dangerous to merge photography with illustration. I think the way we are going cgi will do us all out of a job in a decade. There is a clear trend towards convergence with technology, and the arts have always embraced mixed media. But looking at the 2011 Australian Professional Photography Awards, I think it’s a bit scary what they’re rewarding. I would have called the Photographer of the Year, the Digital Photoshop Artist of the Year. I think the distinction is important. Photoshop should be subjugated to the needs of photography, not the main game. I think it’s a slippery slope when you realise that a lot of the work we are seeing commercially are composite images with very little basis in reality. How we use Photoshop requires a lot of thought and is a philosophical and political position.

The blown out look: There is a ‘trend’ for overexposed shots, particularly in the wedding and portrait industry. How on earth did that happen? How can you have a trend for blown out highlights? It’s madness. Let’s just throw away all detail in our highlights and call it a trend… Please don’t go there.

Lighting: One final one. The strobist movement has done wonders for students. So many photographers starting out have a lot better understanding of lighting and off camera flash than they did 5 years ago. A lot of students now have flashes and triggers and even studio lighting, something that was basically unheard of 5 years ago. This is a positive development the way I see it.

OK, back to the trenches…

I came across this little story watching one of the best episodes of Mad Men I’ve ever seen (Series 4, Episode 8). It impressed me so much I’ve transcribed it, and printed it out and stuck it to my fridge. Now a blog could be seen in some ways as a [...]]]>

Image courtesy http://www.flickr.com/photos/katmary/

I came across this little story watching one of the best episodes of Mad Men I’ve ever seen (Series 4, Episode 8). It impressed me so much I’ve transcribed it, and printed it out and stuck it to my fridge.
Now a blog could be seen in some ways as a virtual fridge, so I’m gonna stick it here as well, since there’s not much activity on here at the moment.

I hope you appreciate the sentiment, and that it’s as much as an epiphany for you as it was for me.

The Wind & The Sun

“Aesop has a fable about the wind and the sun.
The wind and the sun had this competition to see if they could get a traveller’s coat off.
So the wind blows fiercely on him, but the traveller just pulls his coat tighter.
But the sun shines down on him, warmer and warmer, and the traveller just takes it off.”

“And the moral is?”

“Kindness, gentleness and persuasion wins where force fails.”

If you like getting up at 3am, this is what I’d recommend….

I remember a book of the same name. I never read it, as I was too busy… (boom boom)

But I’m feeling the sentiment of late. There never seems to be enough time. Everything has to be done in a hurry. Or in my case, there is not enough [...]]]>

I remember a book of the same name. I never read it, as I was too busy… (boom boom)

But I’m feeling the sentiment of late. There never seems to be enough time. Everything has to be done in a hurry. Or in my case, there is not enough time allocated (read money) for me to do the things I need to do. Hence the hurry. If I have 26 hours to do a job that takes 40, corners are going to be cut. Or I’m going to be working for free. Unfortunately, it tends to be the second one…

It extends to my kids. They don’t know how to relax. They are bored as soon as they are not being entertained. We work with this all the time, trying to get them to read, to play, to do anything other than tv and computers. Those two we limit, almost ruthlessly. In fact we don’t even have a tv. But of course we have a computer, and entertainment is never far away. The removal of the TV helps, but other things crowd in for space instead. We don’t have gaming consoles either. We do have a PlayStation 2, which is suitably antiquated and we only have a few games, and this if also limited. But still there’s a feeling that we are all living life at a frantic pace, without the time for peace or relaxation.

And as mentioned, it’s not just my kids. I find it hard to slow down myself. I’m in the groove. I’ve been running fast for so long, I am wondering if I would know what to do if I was to go somewhere without internet access and something to research or prepare or administer.

But then I think of books, and a crack opens in my mind. That’s what I’d like to do to slow down. Long walks, good long books (literary novels), music, a good glass of wine, a long chat. All these things are what I crave. But how to pay for the slow life, when I barely get by living the fast life?

I wonder how many feel like me. I’m sure there’s a relatively high percentage of discontent amongst the citizens of modern life. How could there not? But who has figured out the art of slowing down? I read the blogs, the books. I’ve done Ekhardt Tolle. I get it. I really do. But how do I get it? How do I pay for it?

Photography seems like a powerful current, one that will pull me along as long as I let it. It’s fun, it’s creative, it’s awesome, but it’s so… fast. It’s so… computer based. It’s so… digital. I remember when I was 21 and I was thinking of moving to Perth and going to University to study horticulture. I imagine life might have been very different. Not neccesarily better. I’m smarter than that. There is no greener grass in retrospect. Perth is in a drought. But perhaps the signs are there. I need a week off. To unwind. To relax. Take that walk, read that book. Turn that bloody computer …

It was a pretty decent play.

Too many times [...]]]>
With many types of photography (studio and art photography particularly come to mind) the value of pre-visualisation and pre-production is enormous. Many photographers starting out don’t spend enough time on the preparation side of a shoot, and it’s often in that prep work that the value of a photograph is decided.

Too many times (way too many times) I have seen students come into the studio with basically no preparation at all. They know what their subject is, and they have their camera with them, but that’s as far as it goes. What I’m talking about is at a totally different level. I’m talking about someone coming in to the studio with their props, their lighting plan, their colour scheme worked out, and their shooting tech sorted – like what f stop they’ll be shooting at, what lens they will be using, and basically having the finished shot in their minds eye, so they can walk in, set up the lights, props and the model, shoot it, and get close to what they had envisaged.

That’s at the heart of it – envisioning a shot. Pre-visualising it. Seeing it in your head. Seeing the colours, the lighting, the pose, the mood, the props… all that. The closer you can get to what you WANT to shoot BEFORE you shoot it, the closer you will get to the desired result. And that result will be about 10 times better than a shot taken just trying your luck in the studio. That doesn’t mean there isn’t room in the studio for experimentation or serendipity. There are always lots of things to be discovered in the studio by trying different things. But what I’m talking about is having a plan before you start to shoot.

Let’s look at a particular shoot and analyse what sort of pre-visualisation and pre-production went into it, and why and how it helped the overall success of the shot.

The shot above is one I took recently of my boy, Eddie, in his cricket gear (see some more on my blog). It was originally inspired by a photo I saw (a close up of lips with hundreds and thousands on them – thanks Hannah). One day it dawned on me that hundreds and thousands would be a good way to tie in the concept of “junior cricket” to the shot. Anyone who knows anything about cricket knows cricketers often wear zinc on their lips and under their eyes (they are out in the sun all day). So hundreds and thousands in place of the zinc – hey presto – a great little prop to tie the concept in.

That was the start – the idea. Then I started imaging how I was going to light it. I know he would be wearing his whites, so I started by thinking about contrast and visual impact. I ended up deciding on a blue background to give good contrast to the clothes and his blond hair. I also wanted a gradient in the background so I had to figure out how to achieve that. Then I thought about how to light the subject itself. I knew that for some shots he would be wearing his cricket helmet, and so this led me to thinking of lighting that would get in under the helmet. I also wanted the lighting to reflect the mood of the shot. Low key contrasty lighting seemed to me the wrong approach so I went with a frontal beauty light style, a type of light that would get in under the helmet and also give that bright and youthful, energetic mood I was chasing. It was also a good choice to clearly light the hundreds and thousands. They had to be an obvious key point in the shot. Also thinking of the lighting, I knew a way to make the catch lights be dominant in the lower half of his eyes, without it looking like the lighting was dominantly coming from below.

Finally, I thought about the posing and props. I knew the back of his bat was red and the handle green, and I’d decided on blue for the background. Then I had the opportunity to buy him new batting gloves for his birthday the week before, and so I looked at the colours available and ended up going with the green ones to match the green of the bat. Seems like a lot of colours, but in my mind I could see the dominant colours would be white and blue, with red and green accents. RGB anyone? Primary colours and a good combination.

So on the day, I set up the lights, first the background, and then the front lights. I didn’t use a light meter at all (shame on me I know) but I’m familiar with the studio lights and I hardly even had to tweak the lights from their initial settings. This was also because I’d thought about my camera settings and had already decided I would shoot at 1/125th, f8 @ 100ISO. The important figure there obviously is the f8. That would give me my lens’ sweet spot as far as sharpness went and also give me enough depth of field to carry my model. I’d also set the lights based on this setting and got it close to right the first time because I knew what sort of output I’d need from them to get f8.

So when I’d set the lights up, the next step was to introduce the model. He stepped into the frame, and the very first shot looked just like this. Well it was very different in some ways (he had his helmet on), but what struck me when I looked at that first image was that all my pre-visualisation and pre-production had paid off and delivered the very image that I had seen in my mind for the previous few weeks of planning. It wasn’t an epiphany or anything, but it was a powerful moment nonetheless.

So if you’re not planning your shots and can’t see them before you take them, start trying to do just that. You might be surprised what lands in your camera! Hit me in the comments if you can tell me how I got the gradient in the background

This DSLR wireless monitor takes the video or still photo feed from any DSLR camera or video camera and sends it wirelessly to a seven inch or 10″ portable, battery powered monitor.  Pretty cool really. Read about it at www.robertbenson.com/blog

Star ratings are one of the two most powerful tools we have in our digital workflow (the other being keywords)!

Suck that sentence up for a few seconds. Do you know why?

Basically, it’s because with keywords and star ratings, a database (catalog software, Lightroom library module etc) can sort our photos [...]]]>

Star ratings are one of the two most powerful tools we have in our digital workflow (the other being keywords)!

Suck that sentence up for a few seconds. Do you know why?

Basically, it’s because with keywords and star ratings, a database (catalog software, Lightroom library module etc) can sort our photos in a matter of seconds in the most powerful manner possible. With a couple of clicks we could sort 20,000 photos and filter them down to our absolute ‘best of’ folio collection or find those priceless photos of our dog eating our shoes. Without keywords and ratings, we have 20,000 photos to look through…

So they are very powerful. But HOW they are applied is equally important, and it is this subject I want to expound upon, after seeing some very famous and influential photographers (Scott Kelby and more recently David DuChemin) totally stuff it up. The influence these guys have is expansive, and not something I can compete with obviously, but I have to do my bit to remedy the situation…. More after the jump.

Star ratings are now a defacto standard. They are ubiquitous. Bridge, Lightroom, Aperture, Expression Media, IDimager, iView you name it. Star ratings are part of the XMP metadata core. Even Windows supports them natively. So support is not an issue. Unlike Lightroom’s Flags for examples, the usage of which Scott Kelby suggests is a better idea! Huh? Sure Scott. Let’s all spend countless hours ranking our photographs, and then lock ourselves into one single software solution for all time instead of using an already existing and much superior solution that is cross platform and application…

But even more important than support, star ratings are the only type of file based metadata that deals with how good an image is. That means that star ratings alone can help you sort your massive collection of images and filter them down to your very best, your best, or even your worst. All with a few clicks. But it all depends on HOW you apply star ratings. If you whack a 5 star rating on all your best images, as Kelby suggests (and even David DuChemin had done as I could see on his recent CreativeLive seminar), then you’ve just gone and thrown the power of star ratings out the window.

Why? There are actually several reasons. One is that you have no room for growth as a photographer. And hey, we all grow, no matter our age or professional status. So the first rule of thumb is to give yourself room to grow. Personally, I think most photographers can suffice with using just 1,2, and 3 stars for their collection. If you are really, really good, maybe you could use 4 stars for your absolute best of collection – you know, like your 50 signature shots. Basically everyone can leave the 5 star rating for when they have 10 years more growth and a 100,000 more images to sort through. Because this brings me to the second important way to use star ratings. The real power of a rating system is when it is a ratings pyramid, with the best images at the top being relatively scarce in relation to the total number of images in the catalogue. Again, if you have 20,000 images and 10,000 of them are rated as your best shots, it’s not going to help you much. If instead you have 200 images out of that 20,000 rated as your 3 or 4 star images, then there is a powerful and realistic representation of the best of your collection. So keeping the right proportions is important, and will keep your ratings pyramid in the right shape. Otherwise you might end up with a ratings light bulb, much less useful…

In his last book on Lightroom, Scott Kelby’s less than stellar advice was to rate all your good photos as 5 stars and delete the rest… I have to say I nearly fell over when I read that (luckily I was sitting down at the time). Then he went on to suggest that you shouldn’t even use ratings and that Flags in Lightroom was a better idea… Sheesh.. I imagine Peter Krogh would be frothing at the mouth at this.

So there you go. As part of your workflow, you should review your shoots and apply star ratings across the entire shoot. If you are using CR2 or NEF or other proprietary RAW file format, the information will sit in the xmp sidecar file. If you are using DNG as your RAW format, the star ratings will be written directly into the file. A possible rating system could look like this: 0 stars for shots you don’t want to delete, but are nothing special. Up to 50% of your personal work might get no star. 1 star would be a decent shot. 2 would be an excellent shot, and 3 stars would be reserved for your absolute best. A more thorough explanation and breakdown of this system can be found in Peter Krogh’s The Dam Book, or on the dpbestflow website.

If I give this photo the title "Marriage" is suggests a story

I’ve been interested in all forms of communication for as long as I remember. From songs, stories, poems, books, movies, photographs and other visual arts, I was always engaging in art and story. But not all forms of communication [...]]]>

If I give this photo the title "Marriage" is suggests a story

I’ve been interested in all forms of communication for as long as I remember. From songs, stories, poems, books, movies, photographs and other visual arts, I was always engaging in art and story. But not all forms of communication are the same. Anything but, in fact. Indeed, the differences are often greater than the similarities.

Take writing. Over a decade ago I undertook a communication degree at the University of  Technology Sydney (UTS), majoring in Writing & Contemporary Cultures. I absolutely love writing. It’s very specific. It’s full of details. It evokes imagination. It creates and peoples amazing worlds. During my degree I also took photography electives to rekindle my slightly lapsed but lifelong love of the static image as an art form.  And I found it was very interesting to study writing and photography at the same time. The differences intrigued me. They were so utterly at odds with one another.

A few years later I was again drawn into going back to school, this time to take a Diploma of Photography. I wanted to dig deeper into that form of communication as I had done as a teenager, only this time in a more structured way. To make a long story short, I thrived with this form of communication, and now enjoy it as much or more as writing. And here we get to my subject for today’s rant. More after the break…

What are the differences between photography and other forms of communication such as writing or movies? Movies, in many ways, and despite their visual form, share more with writing than they do with photography, but it’s probably fairer to say that movies inhabit a space of their own, sharing bits of both worlds. Stills photography is very dissimilar to writing, except for the fact they both tell stories. Photos however have very limited scope or space to tell the story. We could imagine the photo is the opening paragraph of the story. It sets the scene and gives us all sorts of detail, but only about a split moment in time. So how do we move the story forward – how do we introduce the plot? How do we continue on from the opening paragraph? Enter ambiguity. Let’s have a look at how ambiguity can be used in photography.

One of the major limitations in photography is that you have a single frame to tell a story. You have no supporting text, no context and very limited time to make your statement (they say at an exhibition, you have app. 3 seconds gaze per image). Now of course these are generalisations. There are such things as triptychs, photos do have titles and sometimes supporting essays, and context to boot. But generally, an image must stand alone and communicate its message in very quick time indeed. And with purely visual language. As with written language there are conventions, cliches, social understandings and other devices that can assist in the telling, but nonetheless, a photographer has to use an entirely different form of story telling to the author.

Ambiguity is one such way to draw the viewer in. As in writing, a truism is this:  Show, don’t tell. And surely it is better to show instead of patronisingly and all too specifically spell out the message. But that’s in writing. In photography, being overly detailed and specific is, in a sense, very difficult. One can rely too heavily on cliche perhaps to tell too simplistic a story, but with photography I often find the greater difficulty is in telling enough. A way I find that the best story tellers approach this difficulty in photography is to lead the viewer into a story but leave a large enough dose of ambiguity as to leaver the viewer caught up in the story but left, without resolution, to  stand and ponder the direction or possible outcome of the situation he or she finds himself engaged in. To reinforce the writing analogy it’s like writing a book with a great opening chapter which sets up the story and introduces us to the conflict at the heart of the tale, and then we turn the page to find… just blank pages.

So in a way, photographers need to learn to turn its greatest limitation into a strength. Instead of trying to tell the story as we would in traditional oral or written form, we need to use the greatest strength of visual imagery, which is clearly impact, to draw in our prey, lure and entice them with enough story to engage them, and then leave them floundering in front of the picture, forced to use their imagination to find some form of resolution or closure, before moving on.

To do this we need to leave some clues, some gaps, some elements open to interpretation to entice the viewer to begin to start to construct the story further in their head. We all love stories. They are a deep a part of us as anything. We just need something to latch on to to carry it forward. If it’s all told for us, then the story is over.

So leave a few clues, introduce some conflict or contradiction. Don’t spell it out too clearly, and let the viewer take a ride…

Let’s look at the image I posted at the top of the article. Whether or not it’s the best photo ever taken is not important (kidding, I definitely know it’s not the best photo ever taken.) But let’s analyse the story.

OK, what have we got here? We have a natural environment, right down to a naked women. The ONLY man made element in the frame is her wedding ring. (And yes it’s on her right hand – in some cultures, this is the hand used). What else we got. We have the water of course – lots of it. She is in the water, which in itself could signify lots of things. But she doesn’t look like she’s just taking a dip. She’s naked for starters. And she looks sad. Or troubled. She’s hugging herself and we can’t see her eyes. Is she crying? What has happened in her life? As I wrote on the caption of this shot at the top of the post, if you gave this a title, for example, Marriage, it would all by itself lead people towards a certain story line. Quite a different story no doubt than if we called it, say, “Cleansing”, which might lead us entirely down another path. But these titles only work as they do because there is a lot of ambiguity in the shot itself, and the story is hard to pin down.

Here’s another example. I call it Feet First.

Loads of ambiguity here. We can see that someone is lying down in a fire blackened forest. All we can see is their feet and legs. We can’t even see their upper torso or arms. Do they have any? Are they dead? Is it a man?  (probably, judging from the apparent size of the feet, and the way the jeans sit). What’s the significance of all this? And why in a forest? And what about all the regrowth? Is that supposed to tell us something?

I think a photo like this (one of my absolute favourites by the way and a Silver with Distinction winner at the 2007 APPA Awards) has got so much more to say by being ambiguous than if we could see a huge knife sticking out of him or something obvious like that. I didn’t want to constrain this photo into a straight-jacket of a story. I wanted people to be curious. Its original context was a folio called Still-Life and instead of having a title (Feet First) it had a quote beside it, as a way of leading people in. The quote was this:

“Life is a pilgrimage.
The wise man does not rest
by the roadside inns.
He marches direct to the
illimitable domain of eternal bliss,
his ultimate destination.”

Swami Sivananda

Not as ambiguous perhaps as some other text, but not specific enough either to know precisely what’s going on. OK, it’s very leading. And that was as it was meant to be.

So to recap. I consider ambiguity a very powerful tool to facilitate storytelling in photography. Use the visual impact of a photo to capture a viewer, using its ability to clearly show setting and initial story. Consider also using a title or quote to lead the viewer in a certain direction, and finally, whether you use a title or not,  make sure there’s enough ambiguity in the shot to give the viewer some room to construct the story further. Make sense? Hit me in the comments if you want to discuss it further.