We take photographs of our children for one main reason – to capture memories of the people we love. Images help us remember what they were like when they’re all grown up and living half a world away (like me – sorry, Mum).

Most of our memories get spun into stories – “Remember the time, when . . .?’ we ask each other, and the story we tell puts our loved one in context, as their actions reveal more about them.

And so while photos are a great way to trigger these stories, there are other techniques that can incorporate photos and also deepen the experience as well. Recently, I’ve been thinking more and more about different types of digital storytelling.

Just looking at individual photographs on our screens doesn’t fulfill all the potential current technology offers, and we don’t get a narrative flow that adds up to more of a story. Printed albums work because the images build on each other, and have a rhythm that is more rewarding for the person looking at them.

Digital productions with images, music, voiceovers and video can have a similar and even richer effect, and are becoming ever easier to do. There’s not even a good word for what these things are – slideshows, multimedia pieces . . . but whatever you call them, I’m becoming increasingly convinced they are a valuable tool.

A while ago, I produced this video of my daughter answering some questions, interspersed with some images. It was simple but I think it worked pretty well.

I’m still finding my way in producing these, but as another experiment, this time I went out with my daughter on an ‘explore’ in the arroyos and hillsides in our neighborhood. Where normally I might just grab the camera, shoot some stills and let them sit on my hard drive or post a few to Flickr for the family, this time I was intent on shooting some video as well as stills, and putting it together into a little package – that you can play above (if you haven’t already).

The video I shot is pretty ropey – the 5D Mark 2 produces excellent quality, but it’s only as good as the shaky-handed poor-focussing person holding it, but for something casual like this, I’m not too fussed. For real paying work I’d have it locked down on a tripod with a good microphone attached.

There are new skills to learn in creating this sort of work, of course. Some are technical – importing and editing video, dropping in music and stills – but the harder skills involve getting a sense for pacing and balance. How to tell a story well in this new medium.

But I can see plenty of uses for this approach – from children and family shoots, where you include some video too, through to commercial sessions, where you’re building a welcome video for the client’s site with some interview footage, music, video and stills.

Let me know your thoughts on this type of package, especially if you’ve tried it yourself. I’d love to see some good examples, too.

Why do we why find it so hard to do the things we know we should do? I don’t even mean exercising or eating the right things here – I’m just thinking about taking photographs.

As keen photographers of whatever stripe, you’d think we’d be out the whole time firing off shot after shot, especially now there’s no immediate cost to shooting one more digital image.

But I’ve found that unless I have a paying job, the cameras might stay in their bag from one week to the next. And the longer this goes on, the more grumpy I get.

So I came up with a two-fold plan to counteract this. The first stage was to buy the Olympus EPL-2 (part of the PEN series) and the Panasonic 20mm f/1.7 pancake lens and leave them in my laptop bag, so I’d always have a camera with me.

This stage wasn’t completely necessary, but I did leave the big lad at home more than I’d bring it, unless I was going out to shoot something specific.

The second step was to set myself a challenge to post eight images every week to a new Tumblr site I set up, called 8 Days a Week. A photo project was born

I thought that I’d be likely to fail if I made myself shoot every day, but I still wanted to make taking photographs into a habit, so delivering eight images every Monday seemed reasonable. That way, if there were three or four good shots from one day, and none for a couple of days, my system was flexible enough to deal with it.

I’m into my fourth week now, and it’s amazing what a feeling of obligation can do for you, even if it’s self-imposed. Our dog comes to the office with us most days, so I grab the camera while she’s getting her lunchtime walk, and at other times too I’m looking for images in a way I wasn’t before.

No Pressure

Most of the time I’m not thinking about whether the images are good or not, I’m just getting them in the camera, and I’ll worry about quality later. That way, there’s no pressure on me to produce – I can just follow my nose.

And coming up with only 8 images each week that I’ll be sharing with the world doesn’t seem that frightening.

Often it seems I don’t have the willpower to make myself do things when my internal resistance tells me that I have to work or that there’s no point taking these stupid shots anyway.

But I am a creature of habit, and if I can persuade myself that I’m just messing around anyway, I can sneak in some shooting before the resistance knows what’s happening. That, and it’s fun.

You can see all three weeks’ work here, or on the Clearing the Vision Facebook page

Do you have routines or customs that get you out shooting when you otherwise wouldn’t? Let me know in the comments section below, I’d love to hear them.

Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about what children’s photography is actually about. You’d think it has a simple answer – it’s about taking photos of kids (duh).

That’s what we do, but that’s not why we do it, whether we’re professionals or taking photographs of our own children. Clients of mine say they want the photographs for a number of reasons – for holiday cards, to send to the grandparents, to mark a birthday, but I think what they really want is to tell the story of their child at a particular time in their life, and (even more importantly) to show how much they love them.

That’s certainly why I do an annual photo session with my own daughter every Fall (here are some images from 2009′s session). We use the same place – our kind neighbor’s lovely garden – and over time these images will build up to an ongoing record of her as she grows and changes.

We want her to look good in the photographs, of course, but more, we want to look authentically like her which is a little different. When I’m showing clients the photographs from their sessions, I can sometimes predict the images they’re going to love, but just as often they see in some of them something about their child that I can’t see (because I don’t know them well enough). It might be a facial expression (‘that’s so him’) or an activity, but it’s something that means more to them than I could have predicted.

Which is why I don’t shoot in a studio and pose the children – I want them to be really them, not to be little models for the afternoon, so they look like themselves when the images come off the camera.

Deepening the Experience

If parents want to tell the story of their child, then still images are definitely one excellent way.

But I’ve also been looking at incorporating video into the mix too. So for this year’s shoot with my daughter, I asked her a few questions on camera, and edited her answers together with some stills.

The real value is not so much in her answers (though these will be nice to have in a few years’ time), but in watching her answer them. Hearing her voice, seeing how she moves – these are the things that bring her to life. The video elements, together with the stills, tell a richer story about her than the stills alone.

Not Hard to Do

This approach is something you can do easily – I shot the video on my Canon 5D II, using an external microphone (that wasn’t quite close enough to my daughter), but you could use any number of video shooting devices for it – iPhone, Flip, whatever. So long as it’s locked down on a tripod or something else similarly stable, you’ll be fine.

As with still photography, look for a spot where the light is relatively even and where the subject will looking out from shade to a brighter area, to get some catchlights that will make their eyes twinkle.

I edited it on iMovie on my Mac, using a free music track sourced from the great Vimeo music library.

I thought about stripping out the voice track and running her answers over some more photographs, but her facial expressions and reactions to the questions were so good that I just kept the audio and video together for the answers, and ducked the level of the audio track up for the photographs, and down for the video.

The grandparents completely loved it, and Fionnuala enjoyed the video session too. Definitely something to do for next year too. I’ll still be taking any number of still images, but I’m happy with the way the impromptu video session came out.

And if you’ve got some examples of a similar hybrid approach you’ve made yourself or seen elsewhere, I’d love to take a look at them.

A few years ago we consumed our photographs mostly in physical form – a few on TV or in movies but the vast majority in newspapers, books, magazines and billboards. And most of these we saw at a pretty good size.

Now, we get most of our images through the internet, and a lot of them we see are very small, at least initially. This is the curse of the thumbnail.

Read Simple

When we look at a page of thumbnails, some are obviously easier to ‘read’ at a small size than others. The simpler the image, the more it makes sense to us when we can’t see much detail. So simple images with tight crops, strong contrast and bold colors stand out. More complex composition and subtle palettes tend to get lost at this size.

Here’s a page from Flickr’s Explore section recently – my grab is reduce from actual size, so the effect is even greater, but which images are the most immediately compelling? For me, it’s the doll and the railway tracks. I can clearly discern what they’re about.

Some make almost no sense at all seen at this size – the bottom right dusty mechanical thing, for example.

So we gravitate towards the images we think we understand. This is a natural response when we don’t have enough detail to work out what we’re looking at – nobody likes to be confused.

When we click on the thumbnail we can understand, there’s often not that much more to explore when we get to the larger version. Being a simple image isn’t necessarily a bad thing – if that’s what you wanted to say and the image achieves this, then that’s fine.

But what if the photographer wanted to say something that took a bit more explaining? By jumping on the thumbnails of the simpler images, we’re often missing fantastic images.

Here’s a grab from my Flickr contacts recently:

From this selection, I might choose one of the concert images to look at larger. But I’d be tempted to skip over the black and white one second from the left on the top row,  because I can’t make it out at that size. Which would be a shame, as it’s a fantastic night time view of Mount Rushmore.

Similarly this is one of my favorite images from this summer (in thumbnail format):

Taken at my daughter’s ‘wizarding camp’ (they made their own cloaks, hats, spell books, wands and rings), it just doesn’t read well as a thumbnail.

But viewed large (as it is below), there’s enough detail for your eye to move around the shot, with the face of the girl on the right being the key element, contrasting with the ordered lines of the rest of the kids facing the other way. Compositionally, it’s not brilliant, but it rewards spending a little time with it.

If you’re as good as Jeff Ascough, however, with great composition that balances elements and leads the eye, seeing patterns as people move through a wedding, then your images really shine under careful examination of large versions. But seen among a bunch of other thumbnails, you might pass over them.

Trouble begins at home

To counter this, photographers are increasingly displaying their images as large as they can online. 1000 pixels wide is not uncommon in photo blogs (such as one of my new favourites Shoot Tokyo), and portfolios often include full-screen slideshow options.

The increasingly popular photosharing site 500px uses much larger thumbnails than Flickr (which has a real whiff of a dead man walking at the moment). But as long as there are web pages, there’ll be small online images, which do some of our images a disservice.

But the problem starts before the images even make it to the computer. We’re all so used to reviewing our images first using the small LCDs on the back of our digital cameras, and these have the same drawbacks as online thumbnails. Simple close-ups read better at that size than more complex compositions.

We like the reassurance that we’re on the right lines as we shoot, but when we respond positively to images that look good on the back of a camera, we (subconsciously I’m sure for most of us) gravitate towards taking those type of shots in the first place.

Think wide and deep

When I started shooting portraits, my first response was definitely like this – get in tight to the face, blur the background and be done with it. There’s nothing wrong with this approach, except if it’s your only approach.

Now I consciously try and look for compositions that show more of the subject and more of their environment. These often take more time to frame correctly – there’s a thin line between distracting clutter and evocative surroundings – and of course the subject’s face is smaller in the frame.

It’s harder to tell if these are working just by looking at the LCD after I’ve taken the image, but of course photographers for decades didn’t have this luxury and had to wait until they got back to the darkroom to see what they’d got. They had to see the shot in their mind before they made the image, rather than just trying a bunch of stuff and seeing that it looked like immediately afterwards.

We would do well to follow this approach. Slowing down when we shoot, visualizing shots in advance, instead of being led solely by the instant feedback from the LCD. We should start thinking a little wider in our compositions, and a little deeper when it comes to evaluating both our images, and other people’s when we see them online. Let’s lift the curse of the thumbnail.

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.

Shooting film seems to be enjoying something of a renaissance, especially among young people of the hipster persuasion. Loyal readers will remember a recent blog post where I promised to dig out the old film camera my Dad had given me more than 20 years ago. I did, and here’s what I learned (or relearned) about the joys and frustrations of shooting film.

Note that this is based on running a roll of Ilford XP2 through a (not very good even at the time) Canon 1000, photographing a kids’ summer camp presentation – depending on what you shoot and with what film camera, you might end up with very different results.

1) Film still looks gorgeous

Partly thanks to the great developing and printing from the Camera Shop of Santa Fe (although they’re not cheap), the images came out looking contrasty and very attractive. I shot in black and white, and the skin tones were smooth and there was a nice touch of grain in the shadows.

You could probably fuss in Aperture or Lightroom to get the same sort of results from shooting digital, but this saved me all that effort, and the prints had that indescribable film quality. Sometimes there’s something a little too squeaky clean about the technically perfect files DSLRs put out today.

In fact while you might be able to get the same effect processing digitally, what’s interesting is that I probably wouldn’t have gone as far with the processing if I were doing it. There’s a lot of solid black in them, which I would have shied away from, trying to keep some of that shadow detail. Just goes to show there’s no such thing a perfect histogram, just good images.

2) You pick your shots more carefully

It’s true that firing off a load of shots on a DSLR can yield some great results that you just couldn’t get any other way – especially in sports photography, for example. But sometimes the ‘spray and pray’ approach is just replacing thoughtfulness with a numbers game. Rather than slowing down and choosing your moment carefully, you just shoot a ton in the hope that you’ll get something good.

When you’re paying more than 50c each time you press the shutter (and swapping rolls is a bit of a pain), you’re definitely less trigger happy.

I normally reckon on a 25% selects rate when I’m shooting digital – in other words of fifty images I make, around 12 of them I’ll like well enough to do some processing work on and/or show to the client if it’s a paying job.

With my roll of 36, I’d say I was happy with at least two-thirds of them. A good lesson in slowing down and being more careful.

3) It’s still a pain in the behind

Friends wanted some of these photos from the camp. So I had to get the film developed (with extra CD of digital files because I don’t have a scanner or the time to scan the files) pronto. We’re so blasé about shooting digital and being able to have the results across the world in minutes that we forget how amazing it is.

And there’s no bumping up the ISO because you’ve moved inside or it’s getting dark. And knowing that you’ve only 36 frames before you have to swap rolls is always praying on your mind. That and the fact that you can’t see what you’ve got until potentially days later – no chimping here, of course.

4) Digital’s sort of cheap

While it costs to develop a roll of film in a way it doesn’t for the same number of digital shots, there’s an interesting side argument here. A pro-grade film body such as the Canon EOS 1N can be picked up on eBay for less than $300. A new 5d Mark II is around $2500. I know it’s not comparing like with like, but you could buy and develop a lot of film for the difference for $2200, and you wouldn’t need to upgrade in another three years.

The cost of clicking a shutter on a digital camera appears cheap, because it’s free at the point of use, but the total cost of ownership starts to look a lot more expensive when you factor in the actual costs.

Worth the effort

I was pleased with the images I took and enjoyed the experience of shooting film again. It’s worth doing even if you end up concluding how glad you are you never have to shoot film any more. But for me it was more rewarding than that, making me think about how I shoot, and also reminding me how good film can look.

I’m not saying I’m going back to shooting film exclusively, or even very often. But throwing a decent film body in the bag when the conditions are right – outside daytime portrait session for example – might not be a bad idea.

In one of my other lives, I’m a journalist and writer. I used to write for The Irish Times in Dublin, I’ve published a book of travel writing (it’s a lasting regret that it has no photographs in it, but at the time I was taking rubbish photos), and I now write for New Mexico Magazine and other places at times. (I outlined what I learned about photography from being a writer here).

I’m storyteller when I’m stringing words together. And I’m increasingly realizing, they key to good images (at least of the style I prefer) is to be a good storyteller when you’ve got a camera in your hand.

A good picture, or a set of pictures, tells a story. Images can be beautifully lit and technically perfect, but if they doesn’t say something, then what’s the point?

Everything in the image needs to contribute to the narrative you intend. Sometimes what you’re trying to say is simple – this is a happy girl – but for more complicated events, it’s worth having a think about how best to get your message across: what to include and what to leave out.

Imagine you’re talking to a friend

Ashley Biggers, my talented editor at New Mexico Magazine recently made a suggestion about a travel piece I’m writing for her, which is also appropriate to making images at an event or portrait session:

‘Imagine you’re excitedly telling your friend about the best parts of your visit. What would you say?’

This gets to the heart of the matter – you wouldn’t start at the beginning and give equal importance to every last thing you did (‘First I drove there, then I parked the car, then I put on my coat . . . ‘), but you also wouldn’t spend all your time talking about one aspect of the event.

So in photography terms, you wouldn’t photograph everything, or only take lots of the same sort of photographs.

Some things are just more important than other things, and you’ll get excited over some things and not others – so keep asking yourself what those key things are and make sure you show them clearly.

Telling the story of a party

Our daughter had her sixth birthday recently, and chose a princess theme for party (naturally).

My wife had spent a lot of time and effort preparing the room for the party, going so far as to build a castle facade with working doors (she’s an architect).

As I photographed the event,  I wanted to make sure I set the scene with the images, as well capturing the key events.

When we look back in years to come, some of what we’ll want to recall will be the way the whole thing looked, not just tight shots of our daughter.

So if I’m telling you about what the party was like, I’d start with ‘The room looked amazing. We had tons of balloons all over the ceiling.’ (as you can see from the photograph at the top of this story)

‘There were princess sceptres to decorate. And Miss F’s mum made a fabulous castle facade with working doors and ramparts and stuff.’

‘Each time a new guest arrived, Miss F closed the door and then got really excited when they knocked and asked to come in. And all the princesses looked so cute sitting down at the table in their ‘castle’.’

‘They went outside and our older friend read them princess stories.’

If the photographs do their job, then the text descriptions are unnecessary – and the images add some details and visual appeal that the words don’t contain.

I have the obligatory photographs of my daughter blowing out the candles as well, but some of these wider shots (all taken with a 35mm lens) tell a more complete story of the day.

So don’t be afraid to shoot wide, and imagine you’re talking to someone about the highpoints of the event you’re photographing.

Recently I took photographs at my daughter’s ballet class, and really enjoyed the experience.

So when I arranged to take photographs of her class’ dress rehearsal and performance, I was looking forward to it immensely, but it threw up a new set of challenges that I had to deal with.

The practice studio had been bright, spacious and very easy to shoot in. I could follow the girls around, changing my point of view to get the light I wanted or minimize some background clutter.

The location for the performance on the other hand (the theatre of the Scottish Rite Temple in Santa Fe) was dark and cramped (at least around the stage).

Gorgeous and fascinating. no doubt, but dark and I couldn’t move around at all.

At least for the dress rehearsal, I was able to squat down just off the stage, but that’s where all the girls from the other classes were waiting, so it was all a bit tight.

Allegra Lillard, the amazing Director of Dance for Joy, kept everything moving smoothly and energetically, but like any dress rehearsal there was some waiting around.

Even sitting up against a wall waiting for their turn, there’s something hugely endearing about little girls in full ballet outfits. My daughter’s class were models of patience until it was time to practice the grand finale – the first time they’d been up on stage with all the other (older) classes.

They were a little nervous going on to the stage, but soon reveled in their place in the limelight.

Practicing their own number came next, and they ran through it like small seasoned professionals.

If the rehearsal was tricky, then getting shots on the day was going to be even harder.

The house lights would be down, so the gorgeous space was even darker, and I was confined to my seat in the fourth or fifth row.

But I brought the camera anyway, and hoped for the best – the rich warm stage set and lavish surroundings were too good to miss, when combined with little ballerinas.

The ratio of keepers to rejects wasn’t that great, but I was very happy with those I got.

Four tips for capturing ballet

1) Choose your moment - in any performance, there are moments of stillness that are worth looking out for.The image above left captures a point when my daughter had momentarily struck a pose – it was the end of one gesture, just before the start of another move, and as such it has a strength that works well. It’s certainly possible to get a great shot in mid-twirl or run (and these would communicate more dynamism than poise), but it was the quieter moments that appealed to me (and they’re easier to get right, especially if the light’s dodgy).

2) Tell the whole story – With children, you want to tell the story of their whole experience, not just the performance. So the shots of waiting around, being ushered onto the stage, or their big smile afterwards at the curtain call are all as valuable as your images of their performance itself. With older children or adults, you might want to emphasize the performance itself (their technique or form,  or timing with the other dancers). But with younger kids, the imperfections of their performances make their personalities shine through.

3) Think both wide and narrow – It’s tempting to think you should just go with the longest lens you have, but you might miss some good compositions that way. I shot with my now-standard combination of two bodies, one with with a 35mm f/2 and one with an 85mm/f1.8 on the other.  It partly depends how far you are from the stage as to what your focal length options should be, but you’ll want to be able to capture most of the width of the stage for the shots of the whole group. You’ll also want enough length for picking out individual poses and expressions.

4) Keep the shutter speed as high as you can – to freeze the movement (unless you’re going for a nice deliberate blur to communicate movement), then you’ll want to keep the shutter speed above 1/100 at the slowest. Some of the above images were shot at around 1/100 sec f/2 or f/3 at ISO 1000, with the ISO being pushed up to 4000 for some of the performance  shots. I’ll take some digital noise on an otherwise sharp image than a noise-free shot of messy blur. So bump up the ISO and/or shoot as wide open as you can (i.e using a lower f-number to let in more light)

If you’re a digital photographer, then you’ve likely got hard drives full of images. Some of them you’ve hardly looked at since they were imported, while others you’ve slaved over in processing, and shared widely online.

But until you’ve printed them out, your images haven’t lived a full life.

It’s been busy here over the last few weeks as I shot and printed the preschool class photos and ‘day in the life’ project images, as well as ballet rehearsal and performance images. Client orders came in, and got turned into boxes containing prints, books and other goodies.

It underlined to me how much I enjoy making the images I make real. Here are a few product ideas that went down well recently:

1) The Luxe Book

For me, a custom-designed high-end book-bound album is the ultimate way to the tell story of a child at a certain age, or an event or class, for that matter. We’re wired for stories, and the ordered collection of images creates a narrative that draws you in.

I use Japanese-produced books from asukabook.com that offer amazing print quality and feel great in the hand. Imagine the most beautiful fine art coffee-table book you’ve ever seen, and now imagine your family’s images in that book. Consumer-grade self-fulfilled books (from Blurb.com, for example) offer a great way to get images into print, but Asukabooks are something else again (and are only available through approved professional photographers and designers). If you’re in Santa Fe, give me a shout and I’ll be happy to show you one of our samples.

As objects that you’ll enjoy for a very long time I think they’re unmatched. They work really well for families who want a lasting record of their session but aren’t the type of folks to display large wall art (which seems to be a regional thing – I know it happens elsewhere, but people here don’t go for a large family group print to go above the fireplace).

2) The Mini Accordion Book

Wallet-sized prints are great for carrying around, or giving to other family members, but they’re easily scuffed or dog-eared. A nice solution to this portable gallery problem is the small fold-out concertina book. The ones we use offer an elegant matte finish to the paper, a choice of silk covers and little magnetic closure so they don’t open up in a handbag. Grandmas love them as small portable brag books.

We get ours from ProDPI.com (professionals only again, I’m afraid), who do an excellent job of the printing and putting together.

3) Coil Bound Books

Pros often use these as proof books to show clients all the images from a big event to help them decide which ones they’ll order larger or include in a custom-designed book. They’re regular 4 x 6s or similar sizes printed on pro-grade photo paper then punched and coil-bound. With one image per page (I like mine with a border) they’re quick and relatively inexpensive to produce. For the Gentle Nudge day in the life shoot and the ballet rehearsal shoot, I had a book printed up so the parents could flick through all of the images easily.

I hadn’t planned it, but I got some orders for the whole book. For a self-contained event, like a party, for example, they make a nice object. Not as formal or beautiful as a custom-designed and printed book, but nice nonetheless. Ours come from ProDPI, but Mpix.com and Shutterfly.com both offer something similar, and you don’t need to be a pro to buy from either of those.

4) Any size print

People seem to study physical prints in a way they don’t look at the same image on screen. I really enjoyed handing out the 8 x 10 class photos to some of the parents on the last day of school and watching them pore over the faces. Larger is better, but even it’s just a set of 4 x 6s, I really believe it’s worth getting prints made regularly.

But if you’re going to print them, promise me you won’t take a disk to the local Walgreens or Target (if you’re in the US – if you’re elsewhere then I’m sure you have similar neighborhood pharmacies or one-hour print shops). You’d be amazed how differently different labs will print the same image, and it’s worth spending a little extra to get something you’re going to be happy with.

I use a pro lab for most of my printing needs, but on the regular consumer side, I’ve had good results with Shutterfly and especially Mpix.com which a branch of a big pro printing lab, so you might want to give them a try. Smugmug the photo sharing site run by people I have a lot of time for recommend BayPhoto, so they’re another suggestion.

Whether it’s the high-end coffee-table book or an envelope of floppies, I’d urge you to free your images from the backlit screen one way or another.

Gratuitous baby shot from a recent party to welcome Milana to our community. It was shot with (spoiler alert) my new camera, though.

I completely agree with David duChemin that gear is good, but vision is better. That said, here comes a partly gear-related post.

Regular readers will remember I recently had a clear out of some of my lenses that I wasn’t using regularly.

At the time, I thought my most likely purchase with the money would be a swish 35mm f/1.4 lens, but as I thought more about it, and picked up some more tips and ideas at the WPPI conference, a new plan emerged.

It was cemented after I did a recent baby shoot in quite a dark house (images to follow when the clients have seen them). The low-light capabilities of my old 5D were beginning to cause me problems.

Firstly, even when using the center focus point (which is almost always the only focus point I use) it would hunt for focus in low light. It was a bit of a problem when I did the Tumbledown party portraits, but even more of an issue this time. And the baby wasn’t exactly speeding around – had it been a fast 2-year-old, then I’d have been in even more trouble.

Secondly, when I reviewed the images afterwards, I wasn’t that happy with the noise generated at the high ISOs I’d had to employ. It would be fine for smaller prints, but larger ones would show it.

So I wanted a camera with better noise control at high ISOs, and more reliable focus. And I wanted to try shooting with two bodies at the same time, to minimize the time spent changing lenses. (Oh, and HD video was also something I wanted to play with.)

Throw in a great price I found for a Canon-refurbished body, everything was pointing towards a new body instead of a high-end lens.

Shooting with two cameras at once

So I’m now the proud owner of a Canon EOS 5D Mark II (which means Canon will be announcing the 5D Mark III any day now), and one of the first things I wanted to try was shooting with both it and my old 5D at the same time (light conditions permitting).

Instead of the 35mm f/1.4 for $1400, I’d also picked up the Canon EF 35mm f/2 for around $300 (although Amazon are currently showing it as much more expensive – perhaps due to the disaster in Japan?), and so with my daughter as my willing test subject I took some shots at home before we went exploring through the arroyo and hillside across from our house.

The 35mm shows the situation - a girl in an improvised tent

The 85mm shows the tender moment - the girl and her knitted mouse.

The 35mm f/2 was on the 5D and the 85mm f/1.8 on the 5D II.

The idea is that you can tell a wider range of stories with both the wide angle lens and the classic portrait lens at your disposal more or less instantly with no lens swapping.

This, while still getting the prime lens image quality and being able to shoot at the kind of apertures that primes offer that zooms don’t – ie. under f/2.8.

I really liked the flexibility it gives me, while still making me thing about how I’m composing the shot, and what I’m trying to say with each image.

It’s obviously not quite as quick as just sticking a zoom on one camera body, but I welcome the constraints and love the image quality I can get while still being flexible.

Next steps for the two-camera approach

Using two cameras, you can prepare for all sorts of situations with by choosing different lens combinations.

Again the 35mm shows the girl in her context (while still getting some background blur)

Press photographers often go with a medium zoom (say 24-70mm) on one body and and a longer zoom (say 70-200mm) on the other, to give them instant access to a really wide range of focal lengths.

The 35mm and 85mm setup would be good for weddings and other events as well as the environmental portraits I was doing here. Or stepping it up to a 50mm and a 135mm for sports work could yield good results too.

Having two large cameras hanging off you isn’t very discrete, and I’d only really do it if I was somewhere specifically for the purpose of taking photographs – it’s not a casual set up.

But I’m happy with the way it worked out, and looking forward to adding it to my arsenal on a real shoot.

Grab the 85mm, and you get the quick portrait when the moment's right.