A piece I wrote and photographed for New Mexico Magazine has appeared in the December issue – and getting the shots was a bit more intrepid than the work I normally do.

Back in March, I went up to a snowy field beside the Brazos Pass in northern New Mexico to talk to and photograph Stuart Penny, who teaches snowkiting – a fast-growing and exciting winter sport.

The snow was really deep – one step the crust on top would support you, but the next you’d be post-holing up to your crotch in the white stuff.

Stuart was teaching a class, and I hung out for a while watching him instruct his pupils on how to harness the wind to have them zooming across the the snow.

When the class was over, we talked about the sort of shots I wanted and how to get them. I wanted some wide establishing shots to show what the sport was about (both in landscape and portrait formats to give the designers options when it came to layout), some close-up portraits and then some shots of him in the air.

I’d not shot snowkiting before, so beforehand I’d checked online to see what other photographers were doing with it. This gave me a sense of some of the issues I’d face, and helped me visualize what I’d be looking for. One of the ideas I liked was getting the kiter in the air with the sun in the shot, too (shown here in the upper of my two beautiful sketches).

One question was that for the activity to make sense to people who’d not seen it before (like most of the New Mexico Magazine readers), I needed to show the ground, Stuart and the kite – shown in the lower of the two sketches.

Shots of him in the air without the ground or the kite would work well as supplementary images, but wouldn’t tell the whole story. I knew that this piece was likely to run only on one page (two if the images were good enough), so the establishing shots and portraits were the must-haves.

So with all this preparation, Stuart and I quickly came up with a plan. Based on the direction of the winds, he showed me how he’d go aways a little, turn around and then come straight at me. He said he’d stay on the ground for a couple of passes, before going round again and getting airborne.

‘I aim to go straight over your head,’ he said calmly. ‘I probably won’t hit you, but just in case, be ready to get out of the way quickly.’

This could be a problem, as running wasn’t an option. I figured if I had to, I could just fold myself over face down in the snow.

Stuart nailed his passes, and as he flew over my head I racked my 24-105mm lens as wide as I could and kept shooting (click on any of following images for a larger versions).

The snow acted as a great reflector throwing light up into his face, so even with the sun behind him, the images worked well.

Not a normal day at the office for me, but one I greatly enjoyed.

Here’s what that sketch of a snowkiter airborne with the sun turned into:

And I like this one with Stuart looking at us with snow coming off the back of his board.

And finally, the man on the ground:

The text of the article is here.

And you can learn more about Stuart on his site.

This time, I look at the pros and cons of mirrorless cameras. The article begins:

Up until recently, there were two main paths you could take when choosing a digital camera. As we know, point and shoots offer affordability, small size and convenience, but the trade-offs are limited manual options and constrained image quality.

You can read the rest of the analysis over at Digital Photography School.

A little while ago, I was happy to be asked to photograph a Bar Mitzvah party for a young man named Sam (pictured above),  held upstairs at the Santa Fe Community Convention Center. I’d done a headshot session for Sam before, and it was nice to see him and his parents again, especially on such a happy occasion.

It was a great evening, with a lovely setting up on the terrace of the Center, and a mixture of Sam’s school friends and older family friends and relatives as guests.

Photographing parties events like this is nerve-wracking to a degree, and being there as a professional is very different from just firing off some images as a guest.

There’s an obligation to get good shots of everyone there if it’s a small enough party (as this was) while also trying to get excellent shots of the key folks and key moments. Sometimes it’s the little details or less than crucial events that really tell the story of the party, so you have to look out for those too. And not get in people’s way, while they’re enjoying themselves.

On the other hand, it’s an honour to be invited into people’s special occasions, and the guests tend to be in a good mood and looking good, and are very tolerant of a photographer they don’t know milling about.

It’s hard work, but I was happy with the results I got, and more importantly, so were Sam and his parents.

I was delighted to be booked to photograph an evening of the q-bio conference in Santa Fe this weekend.

Held at St John’s College, but organized by the Center for Non-Linear Studies at Los Alamos National Laboratory, the event explores cellular information processing and ‘is intended to advance predictive modeling of cellular regulation’ – (no, I don’t really know what that is either, but everyone there obviously did).

Some photographers see these kind of jobs as a bit dull – the photos matter to the organizers and attendees, but they’re not that exciting to the photographer. I don’t agree.

My natural curiosity and my willingness to explore what you can produce under specific constraints always makes me look forward to the shoot. If you think you’re going to get just ordinary images, then you probably will, but if you’re open to trying things, and genuinely interested in what’s going on, then you’ll do better.

The organizers wanted photographs of the biologists enjoying pizza and beer after the daytime sessions, then heading in to take part in the evening events.

These included a brilliant talk (complete with songs) by iconoclastic Israeli scientist Uri Alon, who gave a compelling account of the need to acknowledge the subjective and emotional side to life as a researcher.

You don't expect a guitar in a science lecture, but Uri Alon's not the average scientist

And then the attendees broke out into the poster sessions, where their fellow delegates put up posters outlining their projects and then discuss them long into the night.

The organizers used the images as part of a slideshow at the banquet held on the final evening of the conference, and will use them in print and online publicity for next year’s event.

One of the joys of being a photographer is being invited into a world you’d normally never venture into to. This is what drew me to print journalism – just for a little while, you get to explore what other people’s lives are like, and try to understand things enough to tell an interesting and accurate story about it. The same is true with photography.

Attendees talking through and debating their projects with other delegates in 'poster sessions'

• do you have an event you’d like photographed professionally? I’d love to talk to you about it.

For the day that’s in it, I thought I’d put together a quick gallery of some images I made the last time we were in Ireland. As you might know, I grew up partly in Ireland, went to college there and lived there all the way through my 20s.

A bunch of my aunts and cousins are there, and I’m Irish enough to understand a pub order of ‘One Guinness and a glass of Guinness, please.’

So enjoy the day, and the photographs.

I normally keep the website and Facebook page for Clearing the Vision focused on children’s photography – my own, and how you can improve yours.

But I thought I’d just alert you to my new store on Etsy, where I’m selling some of my other type of work – more personal fine art work.

I’ve been fascinated by clean bold colors and patterns in my photography for a long time, and the work in my store shows a lot of that.

There are also a couple of more traditional landscapes, although most of the time I’ve no idea what I’m doing when trying to create a landscape.

The images are priced at $30 for 8 x 12 size, but I’m happy to take custom orders for different sizes or different paper types (I normally print on professional E-surface paper, but most of these look good on metallic papers, too).

So take a look around, and spread the word if you think you know someone who might like this sort of work.

> Here’s another link to the store.

Thanks very much.

WPPI

Here are the key things I came home with:

1) 15,000 is a lot of photographers

Sometimes it can seem like you’re ploughing quite a lonely furrow when you’re a photographer, so it was nice to feel like I actually have a tribe. And a large one at that – around 15,000 of us all in the one place. It meant the queues could be long, but the pre-board system worked well, and I was never turned away from any of the non-preboarded classes I turned up for.

2) You need to love the business side of things

If you’re doing this as a living, then you have to love doing all the other stuff besides shooting that goes along with running a business. I chose a lot of business and marketing-oriented classes because I want to able to keep doing this job for the long term, and unless I keep clients coming in and making a profit by making them happy, I won’t be able to keep the doors open very long.

So unless you look forward to calculating your overheads and your cost of goods sold and working on a marketing plan and remembering to renew your insurance, then you’ll be miserable as a pro shooter. But if you want to embrace all that stuff, then climb aboard.

I’d already been running my own web design business for six years, so I knew this going in, but it’s worth bearing in mind that you won’t be shooting gorgeous kids all day.

3) Other people’s weddings and family images can make me cry

Most of the speakers showed some of their work, regardless of the topic they were talking about – we’re photographers, after all, so show us some images. I think it’s a sign that I’m in the right job that some of these slideshow made me tear up – photos of random strangers getting married, or families I’ll never meet.

These images tell the story of the most important things in our lives – our family and what they mean to us. It sounds really corny, but what we do when we photograph these things really does matter. So I’m not ashamed I got a bit emotional over it.

4) The Trade show was surprisingly resistable, except for the gorgeous books and albums

I thought it’d be risky to let me loose on the floor of the giant trade show, but actually I didn’t spend too much time there.

The Sigma guys were friendly but didn’t make me change my opinion of their reliability after my recent bad experience with their 24-70 f/2.8. I told them about it and they shrugged – “Sometimes it’s the camera, you know?”
“Even if every other lens you’ve ever tried is fine with it?”
“Yep. We can calibrate the lens to work with that camera, though.”
“But then you can’t use that lens with any other body, right?”
“Right.” The guy didn’t seem too bothered with this unsatisfactory state of affairs.

I’m not slagging Sigma for being rubbish – in fact, what’s frustrating is that I’ve heard great things about some of their lenses and would like to try them – I’m slagging them because it seems you can never be sure if any particular copy of their lenses will work with your particular camera. And they know that.

The one sort of thing that did have be salivating at the trade show, however, were the albums and books. Here was a great chance for me to actually handle the merchandise. The albums and books I loved the most were the simplest and most upscale. The Asukabook coffee table style bound books were lovely, as were those from Iris Book.

I’m not a fan of the super thick pages, glossy lay-flat flush mount style that seemed much in evidence, but the books of matted prints from finao (acutally made by Seldex) were also beautiful. To me, presenting the images from a shoot in a beautiful book makes so much sense – it frees the digital files from just sitting on a hard drive or disk somewhere, and creates an object that tells the story of that family and child at that particular moment in time. Love it.

6) If we’re not thinking about video now, we should be

David McLain gave an excellent talk about how he incorporates video into the stills work he does. It looked refreshingly straightforward, and didn’t require tons of extra gear and lighting (“I’m allergic to that stuff, man,” was David’s comment).

Thinking of ways to capture small snippets of video at the same time as you’re shooting the stills (with the same camera of course, which means the same control over depth of field) makes a lot of sense.

Conclusion

I’m still sorting through all my notes, but I had a great (if tiring) time, and have a lots of new stuff to work on as a result of all I learned. I’ll definitely go again, and when I do I’m bringing the largest business cards I can find. I threw my card into the bag with all the other photogs in pretty much each of classes, and didn’t win a single thing.

Las Vegas is loud. Super loud. As soon as you get off the plane there’s neon and slots in the airport concourse.

Then you arrive at your hotel (in my case the monstrously large MGM Grand), and you see the full range of first-world humanity walking through the casinos, and it’s not a pretty sight. Brides in their dresses walk past frat boys carrying drinks the size of hockey sitcks, toddlers run by Asian couples dressed to the nines, and an old man smoking a pipe wanders past a guy in shorts and wife beater.

I’m one of the folks with the lanyards round their neck – conference attendees. I’m at the Wedding and Portrait Photographers International conference until Wednesday.

It’s the end of Day 1 and I’m knackered – party from an early start to fly in this morning. Both the talks I’ve attended so far were good, in different ways. The first by Jared Platt and the second by Jason Aten.

First up was smart, thoughtful and acerbic Jared Platt. His talk, called ‘The Photographer’s Eye’ was more conceptual and less immediately practical than many here (I’m guessing – his was my first one ever), as he stressed that we won’t get hired for our technical ability, but for our eye and instinct. Here’s a quick overview (he’ll forgive me if I’ve garbled what he was saying).

He outlined five elements to consider that will help you distinguish your work from others – including Uncle Bob with his new DSLR (which is capable of doing 90% of what yours can do).

1) The Thing Itself (here we have an advantage as portrait and wedding photographers, because our clients already love what we’re shooting). But Platt argued, the best thing we can do is make sure the images are about our subjects not about us being too precious.

That said, how we handle the other elements will determine whether anyone else responds to our images:

2) How we see the subject - our vantage point: creating depth and energy, making best use of the light, make sure this image is clear: all these depend on our vantage point.

3) How we frame the subject – here’s where we lie the most, argues Platt. But inclusion or omission, we make the world of the image what we want it to be. Busy, lonely, calm or unsettling – much of this is done with framing. Peace comes from leaving room in the frame for the subject to breathe, energy and dissonance from cropping tight (especially to the point of leaving bits of people out of the frame entirely.

4) What details we show – as details suggest the story.

We can’t every really know from only looking at an image what happened – and our clients already know the story. But it really helps to tell your version of the story while you’re showing them the images, to show why this image matters and remind them of the feeling behind it. And Platt made a good point when he pointed out that photographers’ blogs are an excellent way of letting other people know the story of a particular shot – by including the image and some text explanation it brings out the narrative that the image by itself is incapable of telling.

5) When we shoot it – the exact moment we choose to shoot is the final piece. He gave a couple of nice examples of waiting for passers-by to enter his shot to make it exactly what he wanted.

He finished by stressing that photography is about curiousity and seeing the world in our own way. That’s why we get hired, and why our photographs look different to everyone else’s.

I’ll blog on Jason’s much more practical but very useful talk later. Right now my brain’s about to turn to mush. More tomorrow.

The second part of my end of year round-up (see the first part here), this time featuring the work I’ve done for clients this year. From children’s shoots to work at the Santa Fe International Folk Art Market.

Happy New Year to everyone, and here’s to a great 2011 with better children’s photographs for everyone!

My picks from my personal work in 2010 – trips to Ireland, a rodeo and adventures with my daughter make up most of the images.

You should also check out the client favourites slideshow for my children’s portrait and other work this year (when it’s up). And Happy New Year!