Fionnuala started kindergarten today, and even though she’s been going to preschool for a couple of years, there’s no denying that her first day of real school is a landmark.
She’s been increasingly excited as the day approached, and was the first one down this morning, anxious not to be late.
I wanted to get a shot of her getting ready herself, to show both her growing independence and how little she still looks to us. That contrast between growing up and still being a so young seemed to be what today was about.
Wearing her new strawberry socks (held back for today) and sitting at the top of the stairs, this one gets close to what I was after.
I had the wrong lens on for this really (the 24-105mm f/4L). It’s pretty dark in the hall, so I had to push the ISO up and there’s still a little motion blur on her fingers. I also adjusted the exposure compensation down 1/3 of a stop – partly to get me a faster shutter speed, but mainly to show that it wasn’t bright in the hall (and play up some of that reflected light on the concrete from the bathroom window at the back). A ‘perfectly exposed’ shot here would have looked too bright to me, and I didn’t mind losing the shadow detail around her skort.
Hand-held at 1/10 sec is not recommended, but the image stabilization seems to have helped quite a bit. A fast lens (like one of the primes I normally use) would have been the better choice for a faster shutter speed, and blurred the background a little more, but we were just heading out the door. Sometimes you just have to get the shot with whatever you can.
Details: Canon 5D, AV mode, 1/10 sec, f/4.0, 47mm, ISO 1600, -1/3EV. Aperture work: slight crop, noise reduction, manual white balance adjustment, vignette added, shadows and highlights tweaked.
It’s been a busy summer here, with lots of web work and a trip back to England. But we’ve had some time to relax a little.
Here’s Fionnuala on the fake grass in her golf attire. She hits a ball with a piece of PVC pipe into our rock-covered drop inlet. I’ve no idea how she learned about golf, but her version is pretty accurate.
I like the simplicity of this image’s composition, with strong angles, lots of the green offset with the splash of colour in the stripey socks. And the fact that she’s got her shoes on the wrong way round.
Image info: Canon 5D, EF 50mm f/1.4, ISO 250, f/5.6, 1/50
Just had a few days in Southern California, which included some Disneyland time, as you can see from the above shot our our daughter at the end of a busy day.
As a confirmed Disney sceptic before I first went to the park last year, I’m now something of a zealous convert.
This is partly because the whole thing makes my daughter so happy, which is hard for a parent to argue with.
But it’s partly because I’ve been thinking a lot recently about running companies based on core passions and painstaking implementation, and few organizations do that as well as Disney. (more…)
On Saturday my friend Ned and I got together to explore an idea I’ve been kicking around for a while. ‘Wouldn’t it be great,’ I thought, ‘to help photo enthusiast parents take better photos of their kids?’
I’d bring my stuff over as if it was a shoot I was hired for, but as well as taking photos myself, I’d also help Ned with his images.
A photo from when the trip was a vacation: Glendalough, Co. Wicklow.
As you’re probably aware, a malicious Icelandic volcanic ash cloud has gummed up the works good and proper over here in Europe. No flights across 20 countries since Thursday. We’re supposed to leave Dublin tomorrow (Monday) but our flight’s one of the many that just never happened.
We’re rebooked on Thursday, but it’s anyone’s guess at this stage if that flight’s going anywhere either.
It sounds nice to be forced to stay longer, but it’s not a vacation if you can’t go home. Especially if you’re traveling with a four year old.
We’ve scored some accommodation for the next couple of nights, and I’ll have internet access intermittently for emergency work, but if you could send happy thoughts my way (and tell Aer Lingus to offer some actual customer service) that would be nice.
One from a birthday party last week. The party was held in a funky roller rink that was alternately pitch dark or neon-lit, so I despaired of getting any decent shots, especially as the kids were whizzing by on skates or scooters. But there’s something about candlelight you just can’t beat.
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I’ve had a bit of photog-crush on Atlanta music photographer (and much more) Zack Arias, every since I watched his great Transform video.
Here he is at Photocamp Utah with an hour of funny, honest and inspiring advice to would-be photographers. Standouts for me were his commitment to being a good photographer not a good photoshopper, being good to your clients and getting over your shyness – ‘People are the only people who pay’.
It took longer than I’d planned, but I’m now fully set up for some off-camera lighting adventures.
Some AlienBee triggers (the CST and CSRB, if you’re interested) and one of the Starving Student kits from Midwest Photo Exchange saw me right, and while I’m definitely a newbie at this, it turns out that some of what I’d already read made sense when I started to practice yesterday.
My aim (at least at first) with the strobism is to use it to make it look like I haven’t really used artificial light – a simple one light set up, working to support natural light.
My daughter Fionnuala was happy to help out as a model (so long as she got to take some pictures too). And I found another willing model – our loco cat Colin Feral.
Both of these shots have natural light coming from one side, balanced with the flash (through an umbrella) on the other side.
I can definitely see how this will be useful in some of the more challenging interior locations I find myself in (and outdoors, too I’m sure).
Santa Fe might not have been as hard hit as some parts of the US, but the recession hasn’t left us entirely alone. These pictures were taken on a walk around the downtown area yesterday.
Getting down to their level invites you into the kid's world.
I’m always pleased if you hire me to photograph your children, but most people don’t live in Santa Fe or Albuquerque, and based on the ‘teach a man to fish’ theory I’m keen to share what I’ve learned with as many people as possible
I think everyone can take better pictures of their kids, regardless of the camera they have or their experience.
So here is the first in a series of tips for taking better photographs of children.
None of these first tips require adjusting your camera’s settings in any way except zooming in and out.
I’ll get to more technical tips later, but often the biggest improvements come from taking a more thoughtful approach to what you’re photographing.
And that won’t cost you a penny in new gear.
1) What are you trying to say?
As the photographer and writer David du Chemin points out, a good photograph isn’t just a picture of something, it’s a picture about something. This might sound like splitting hairs, but bearing this in mind is the single biggest thing that will improve your photographs. You can have all the technical craft in the world, unless you know what you’re trying to capture and communicate then your photos won’t have much to say.
Which is why I don’t like formally posed shots very much because arranging people in a pattern and making them smile often only says ‘they made us smile, and look how awkward we are’.
You know your own children better than anyone. What is it about them that you find fascinating or that melts your heart? What is it in their character makes them you, and how do you feel about that? It could be as simple as wanting to show how beautiful you think they are, or how funny. Or you might love the serious concentration they devote to their painting. Whatever it is, that’s a good place to start. Imagine you were a photojournalist given the job of producing a set of images that showed some key aspects of your child – what are the activities, moods or emotions you’d like to communicate? (more…)
Here in Santa Fe, the snow’s finally melting (most of it off our roof and into our spare room, but anyway) and today was the first time that my daughter and I could hang out under the portal outside our living room without gloves, hats and snowboots.
I’ve been busy with web work recently, for which I’m grateful, but I’ve not been shooting as much as I should. So the camera’s been sitting there reproachfully, but today I grabbed it when we went outside.
And of course, it was taking photos of my daughter that got me excited about photography again so chatting away to her while I took some shots was nicely revivifying (which is hard to spell, but I think that’s the word I want).
I ran this shot through one of Aperture 3′s cross-processing presets for extra contrasty and saturated goodness. Now that Apple have released version 3.0.1, Aperture seems stable enough that you can actually use it without worrying about crashes all the time, and its new features are impressive.
UPDATE MARCH 2010: the release of the Aperture 3.0.1 update seems to have fixed many of the reliability problems. I’m back running in 64-bit mode with Faces working, and things haven’t crashed horribly for a while. YMMV.
After a long wait for the release of Aperture 3, I ignored my own rule about waiting until the first incremental update of new software before installing it. Big mistake.
First I was told I hadn’t enough room on my HD to complete the update – it had filled the spare 35GB on my MacBook Pro internal drive with a giant swap file.
Then the whole machine would hang while Aperture 3 performed some mystery ‘processing’ work on my images. I had no idea if my library was intact, and no way of actually using the product for real work.
The Fix – sort of
Thanks to the useful advice from fellow sufferers on the Apple Aperture Support forums, I binned my first attempt, and cobbled together a solution. I’ve no idea if these will work for you, and hopefully there’ll be an update along soon that will help us all out, but here’s what got me working again.
Sometimes the younger generation seem to get a handle on all this more quickly
As a photographer, Apple Aperture consultant and web designer for photographers, I spend a lot of time helping other pros.
Recently three episodes have shown me how drastically the photography business is changing, and what range of skills are required to run a successful photography business.
Episode 1 – “WordPress is hard”
I’d just finished a site for a client and had carried out a training session on how to use WordPress to keep the site up to date. The next day I got a call from the flustered photog who had spent the afternoon trying to add one article. ‘This is much harder than I thought it was going to be,’ he explained.
I have some sympathy – for people who’ve never spent any time around a website before, the admin panel and functionality of a content management system takes a little getting used to. But part of his difficulty was that he lacked even basic web skills such as knowing how to copy a link from the address bar of a browser and paste it in somewhere else. This lack of familiarity with what are for many everyday habits made everything else much harder.
