Next time, I'll follow her lead and just bring the point and shoot

Every now and again someone who sees some of my work tells me, ‘Your pictures are really good, you must have a really good camera.”

I know they mean well, but it’s a bit like telling Lionel Messi that his football boots must cost a lot, or a chef that she must have a really good stove.

Most of the time, it’s not about the gear, it’s about the intent and skill with which it’s used. You could put me in a Formula 1 car but I’m not going to set any lap records around the Nürburgring.

The right tool for the job

I’m just back from a week’s vacation in California with the family. I took hundreds of photographs, almost exclusively with the intent of helping me remember the good time we were having. I had no time or inclination to get more serious than that, and it shows in the pictures. I like lots of them, but I don’t think they’re anything special.

I used my 5D Mark II and the 24-105mm f/4L. It’s a great combination – I recently shot a whole feature assignment for a magazine with it – but it was massive overkill for family shots in Legoland.

By the end of the second day of lugging it around, I would gladly have swapped it for a Canon G12, Panasonic Lumix LX5 or a bunch of other decent point-and-shoots. The images would have been more than good enough and my back would have thanked me.

I’m not going print my family shots very large, the light was bright and so long as I shot RAW I could easily make any minor processing adjustments. Given my intentions and constraints, a smaller camera would have worked a lot better. I might not have been able to shoot in burst mode to get decent images of my wife and daughter as they sped by on a roller coaster, but that’s about the only concession I would have had to make.

If I’m taking my time and am serious about the images I’m working on (especially if someone’s paying me), or if the environment is tricky in some way, then I’ll follow Samuel Jackson’s advice in Jackie Brown: ‘The Canon 5D Mark II – the very best there is. When you absolutely positively gotta kill every image in the room, except no substitute.’ (at least I think that’s what he said, more or less).

But you don’t need such firepower a lot of the time, and the camera’s not going to create great images if the person behind it isn’t really trying.

So yes, I do have a really good camera, but I still take bad pictures with it. And I take much better pictures with a less good camera – some of my favorite images were taken with my old Rebel XT and the plasticky 50mm f/1.8, and I love some of my iPhone shots.

Where’s the Un-Suck button?

The takeaway from this is two-fold. Firstly, a good camera isn’t going to get you good images by itself. I know this sounds obvious, but I also know how long I’ve spent poring over camera and lens reviews, when I could have been taking photos with the camera I already have, or learning something from a good e-Book (this one on black and white processing is great, by the way).

The second conclusion is that (fortunately), the things that will get you good images don’t cost very much – intention, time, practice, experience, patience, thought.

Canon and Nikon don’t sell those, just like there’s no Unsuck button in Photoshop, and they do take effort to acquire but they’re light, cross-platform and you always have them with you.

But sometimes you’re just taking photos of your kid like a normal civilian; and that’s OK too.

My Dad, Jim Moore. Photo by yours truly when I was in college I think.

On this Father’s Day, it’s time for a quick look at just three of the many things I learned from my Dad, all of which are related to photography in some way.

1) Follow your folly

Before I was born, my Dad was a jazz musician. He played on cruise ships that went around the world in the 1950s and 60s. Pretty cool, right? This was a working class boy from Wealdstone in west London – not known as a hotbed of the jazz scene – but despite the many reasons not to, he earned a living playing summer seasons in English seaside resorts before taking to the high seas for some amazing experiences.

Even back on shore working a regular job as my sister and I were growing up, he’d still play semi-pro gigs on a lot of Saturday evenings. I fondly remember him doing a quick soundcheck in the hall by the front door as the football results came in on Saturday evening.

He’d play the theme from the kids’ TV programme The Wombles before loading the car up with the big Vox amp and electric bass and heading off to play at a dinner dance somewhere.

I was in a band in college, and still plink on the guitar a little bit, but the larger lesson he taught me is that it was worth taking a punt on what you really wanted to do, even if you have to hold down a day job too.

2) Old Ektachrome slides make the world look great

Safely back in Buckinghamshire from his travels, Dad had a bunch of slides he’d taken on his adventures. On rainy weekend afternoons we’d occasionally get out the little slide viewer (that kind of looked like this one) and go through some of the boxes.

There was the Sydney Harbour Bridge; there was Dad with his double bass standing under a Sunset Boulevard sign in LA (how strange that fifty years later my in-laws would live just off Sunset in West LA). Backlit by the viewer, the skies in the slides looked a deep deep blue, the exotic locations tantalising, and my Dad cut a dashing figure (jazz men always look dapper).

3) Letting your kids commandeer a present can be worth it

One Christmas when I was a teenager, my Dad got a SLR as a present from Mum. It was a sturdy East German Praktica and it came in a light brown bag with a shoulder strap. Mum also bought a little introduction to photography book.

I don’t know how interested Dad was in photography, to be honest (up to that point most of our family photographs were from a succession of cheap Kodak point and shoots), but I pored over the book, and Dad kindly let me use the camera quite a bit.

Exhibit A - from a trip to Brittany in c. 1992. Clean strong landscape.

I can’t remember what kind of lens it had on it – definitely manual focus though. I ended up using it more than my Dad, but disaster struck when it was stolen while I was taking a shower in a Venice youth hostel while on a trip during college.

I reported it stolen and with the insurance money (based on a generously inflated estimate for replacement from the local camera shop) we bought one of the first autofocus Canon EOS 35mm cameras (a Canon EOS 1000 with a Sigma zoom).

By this stage I’d basically commandeered the camera with my Dad’s blessing, and I pootled around running plenty of rolls of Ilford XP2 film through it – black and white film that can be processed using standard C-41 colour processing systems.

Now when I look back at the images, I’m still proud of some of them, and they clearly show the twin paths that most of my work has taken. First (see Exhibit A above) is the clean almost abstract landscapes that I sell on my Etsy store, and second (see Exhibit B below) is the photojournalism-style children’s portraits that people hire me to shoot.

It would take me nearly 20 years to come back to these two types of work and take them more seriously, but there was definitely a seed sown in the early 90s, thanks to that camera.

Beautiful cousin Sarah c. 1993, taken in our Aunt Pauline's front room. Sarah graduated from architecture school last year, and it's a bit embarrassing for me that it's take most of her life for me to realise I should be taking more photographs like this one.

I still have the old EOS 1000, and after a pause when a) I mistakenly thought the camera was irreparably borked and b) I foolishly had my head turned by succession of rubbish digital point-and-shoots, it was that camera I picked back up when my daughter was born – the first step on the path that’s brought me here.

So have a good Father’s day, Jim Moore. And thanks for the loan of the camera. Think I’ll get a new battery for it and shoot some rolls of XP-2  with it, for old time’s sake.

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.

It’s Sunday evening and we’re all tired, but happily home from our quick trip up to Red River, NM for some cross-country ski-ing.

The main aim was for herself (pictured above) to enjoy the experience enough that we could go again, and I’m pleased to say it worked out well.

This was her first time, and I’m only a couple of sessions ahead of her. So I’m stiff and sore – I somehow managed a pretty spectacular wipe-out on a slope so slight you’d have needed a spirit level to be sure it wasn’t actually flat – but I’m looking forward to the next trip too.

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!

Just a brief note to wish everyone a peaceful and enjoyable holiday period. It’s been a great year for me, and I’m really looking forward to 2011.

Best wishes,

David

Every organization needs a creation myth that encapsulates its core values and beliefs. Here (with a bit of help from Google, and with my tongue more or less in my cheek) is the CTV creation myth. Hope you like it.

(sorry for the terrible pun). We were down at the Balloon Glow at the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta last night. It was great, considering all the thousands of people who come out to see balloons not take off.

It’s also a volatile environment if you’re trying to take photos. Tons of people, increasing darkness, and changing lighting situation by the second. You can’t shoot manually, because when you meter correctly on one glowing balloon, the one next to it then starts firing up and it’s twice as bright as it was. But if you use autoexposure, in the split second between when you metered and when you shoot, the light has changed anyway.

So it’s a bit of a crap shoot, but when you get lucky, there can be some great results. Here’s a quick selection.

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.

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.