The drive for more good photos in the world

As you may know, in addition to my family and children’s photography work, I’m also a web designer. Juggling this combination has been tricky at times, and it’s felt like I’ve not given the photography side of the business the attention it’s deserved.

So after a particularly busy year of web work that’s left me tired and not very happy, I’ve decided that it’s time to commit myself and my time more fully to the photography.

Simply put, my aim is that there should be more good family and children’s portraits in the world. And here’s how I think I can help, in my small way:

1. Hiring me for a portrait session – if you’re in or around Santa Fe or Albuquerque (or would like to cover my travel expenses to wherever you are), I’ll come to you for a portrait session. This is the core of what I do and I love it.
2. Hiring me for a workshop – again, if you’re local and if you’re interested in improving  your own photography skills (especially shooting your own children), this is a great way to move from snaps to photographs you can be proud of.
3. Reading the blog and getting involved – I’m going to be ramping up the useful tips and techniques aimed at parents who aren’t in the vicinity who want some solid advice. And so it’s not me talking all the time, I’d love your comments, questions and suggestions as we build this resource.

There’ll be other things happening too, including a new look and structure for the website – but that’s the overall plan.

As I carry out this shift, I’ll also be blogging about the move from being less than happily self-employed to what I hope will be a more considered and self-fulfilled way of doing things. You can follow my progress (complete with lots of my photographs) over at When If Not Now.

The Pet Parade – working with children and animals

It’s Fiestas time in Santa Fe, one of the highlights of which is the  Desfile de los Ninos, also known as the Pet Parade. Originally an occasion for children to bring their pets to be blessed by the priest, it’s broadened into a relaxed and funky parade including high school bands in fancy dress, chickens in cages, some amazing costumes and still a large number of children and pets (including this year chickens, rabbits, cockatoos, ferrets, cats and lots of dogs).

Shooting a parade like this sounds as if it would be easy with all the great spectacles on offer, but it can actually be tricky. The first problem is that you can’t move around too much – I had my spot on the side of the parade route and that was about it. So choose wisely and watch the direction of the sun – I was almost shooting straight into it today, which wasn’t ideal (but I was right outside the door to our office, so at least I had hot coffee).

Another problem is that there’s likely to be a lot of visual clutter. Your naked eye filters out the messy background when you see a cute dog dressed up like a cowboy, but the camera will also show the random feet and the white line on the street that your eye glossed over. The other people in the parade (and the other people watching it from across the street) make it hard to get clean shots (especially if you can’t move around to edit them out). You can shoot wide open (in other words with a lowest number aperture your lens can deliver) to create a narrow depth of field, blurring the background, but this brings up another problem – lens choice:

Sometimes you want an wide-ish establishing shot – to show a whole group of folks as they approach, for example. Other times, it’s the little details that stand out. This mixture is a good approach, but that calls for a range of maybe 28mm – 200mm or more on a full frame camera (around 18mm – 130mm on a crop sensor). That’s a big ask of any single lens especially if you want some good sharpness wide open.

In other years I’ve swapped between my 24-105mm f/4L and 70-200mm f/4L on one body, but that’s a bit of a pain, so this year I cheated and used two camera bodies, putting the 70-200mm on my old backup Rebel XT and keeping the 24-105mm on my 5D. The downside was that I looked like a newspaper shooter, but the upside was that I had the equivalent of a full-frame range of 24-320mm at my disposal.

I wasn’t trying hard to capture decent shots of every group that passed, just photograph the things that grabbed me the most.

Here’s a selection from this year’s parade, with a few from earlier years thrown in for good measure.

First day of Kindergarten



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.

Golf shoes

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

Happy 4th July

My daughter on the way to the Pancakes on the Plaza event in Santa Fe. Happy 4th to all my US friends.

Back from the Rodeo

A few shots from today’s visit to the Rodeo de Santa Fe matinee.

The evenings are better for flattering light, but not so great for a five-year old who’d been playing soccer at 8am.

And I got to wear my cowboy hat, which is quite the big deal for an Englishy-Irishy guy like me.