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).

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?

Kids don’t fake it well, but they’ll try if you ask them, or they’ve got their ‘photo smile’ they’re used to rolling out when a camera appears. You’ve got to get past that and let them get comfortable and/or distracted by something else before you’ll have the chance to capture something more meaningful.

Of course, even though you’re taking a picture of them, you’re also saying something about you if it’s an image with some intention behind it. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but it might be something you hadn’t thought much about. Even if you’re just reacting to what you see in front of you and shooting spontaneously (sometimes especially because of that), what you choose to shoot and what makes you press the shutter at that instant and not another can show a lot about you.

This might not be the most practical bit of advice, but all I’m suggesting is that you ask yourself ‘what is this picture about?’ as well as ‘what is this a picture of?’.

2) Go low or high

Shooting from above lends a vulnerable air.

If you stand up and shoot from your normal height, you’ll get a bunch of shots with a slightly unflattering angle and no real energy to them.

They’ll look like the way you see your child most of the time.

So I recommend getting down to their level.

That might mean scuffing the knees of your trousers, but it’s worth it as it gives you a clearer and more immediate way in to their world.

One exception to this is a shot where you stand right over the boy or girl and get them to look up at you.

This lends the kid a vulnerable air and can look very sweet.

The other exception is to get below them – easiest when they’re climbing on stuff in a playground.

Even if they’re not very high off the ground, if you squat down so they’re above you, include lots of sky and no ground, and you’ve given your little adventurer a more heroic look.

Either way, don’t just stand there and shoot.

3) Get in tight

Figure out what’s the most important thing in the picture, and fill the frame with that.

That sounds obvious, but when we look at things with our eyes we tend to filter out the periphery without really thinking about it. The same goes with looking through a viewfinder or a screen on the back of a camera.

Cutting out the clutter simplifies and strengthens this image.

If you’re only looking at the most important thing, you might not notice at the time that there’s a bunch of other stuff in the frame. But you will notice when you look at the image later. So get into the habit of checking what else you’re including in the frame before you press the shutter.

If you don’t need the material to show some context, zoom in to the important thing (often a face) to cut out the clutter. This can be zooming with your camera, or if you’re using a prime lens (one that doesn’t have a zoom), you’ll have to ‘zoom with your feet’ aka walk in closer.

Some of the time you can do this in the camera, and get a perfectly composed image straight off. But I’m not that good, especially if I’m chasing after a child, so cropping (and some of the other adjustments you see) can obviously be done after the fact, too.

4) Don’t leave much headroom

If you’re taking a photo of a single child, it might seem most natural to put the kid’s face in the middle of the frame. Many cameras’ autofocus feature encourages this, as you put the thing you want to focus on in the middle of the frame, then press the shutter half way down to focus.

If you take a picture like that, you’ll obviously get a lot of background in the space above the child’s head. And because the face only comes halfway up the frame, it won’t be very large.

But (related to the get in tight point above) there’s something much more satisfactory about having the top of the head near the top of the frame. The face is larger, there’s less distraction above the head and it looks like you meant it. The easiest way I can tell the difference between someone who’s just taking snapshots and someone’s who’s thinking about what they’re doing is that there’s no room above people’s heads in the photos they take.

5) ‘The centre is for God’

So you’ve got the top of the head near the top of the frame. But the kid still has an equal amount of space on either side of them. Sometimes this works, if its a powerful symmetry you’re after.

Most of the time however a better option is to recompose the shot so the key element is on one side or the other. As photography teachers say, ‘the centre is for God’.

How do you decide? If the subject is looking in one direction then giving them more room to look into often feels better. The same with motion – if someone’s moving across the frame, then space ahead of them to move into lends the scene some dynamism. Sometimes the more practical matter of cutting out something distracting will dictate which side the subject be.

This ties into the famous ‘rule of thirds’ you’ve probably heard of. Simply put, it’s more visually dynamic to align key elements in your image along imaginary divisions of the frame into three horizontal and three vertical areas. Placing things at the intersection of these lines is particularly strong.

The first shot is OK, but the boy is right in the middle of the frame with a bunch of room above his head. Some cropping tightens things much more satisfactorily.

6) The part for the whole

Sometimes parts of a subject are all that’s needed to communicate something more clearly than the whole.

We’ve also seen those baby portraits of just the soles of a new-born’s feet – a detail that shows the vulnerability and delicacy of the new life.

So look for telling details rather than trying to show the whole scene.

The details might be hands working on something for example, or maybe you leave out the child entirely and show a little of what they’ve been up to.

7) Landscape or portrait?

In other words should you keep the camera horizontal, or turn it through 90 degrees so it’s vertical. A non-committal ‘it depends’ on this one. A head and shoulders shot fits more naturally into vertical frame – it’s not called ‘portrait’ for nothing – but even for this type of image there are occasions when you’d want to break this rule.

For example, if there’s a gorgeous background behind the kid, you might want to show more of that, or taking a  shot of a kid sitting on a bench in horizontal alignment would communicate their small size. The long horizontal of the bench emphasised by the horizontal alignment, and contrasting with the smaller vertical form of the kid. (And you’d put the kid over to one side of the bench, right?).

I’ll be writing more tutorial posts like this in the future, so feel free to let me know (in the comments or via email) if there’s particular problems you’re having, or questions you’d like answered.

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.

Upgrading my 20,000 image library meant I fell foul of the apparent memory leak problem that seems to beset the new version.

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.

1) Switched to 32-bit mode.
This should be as easy as checking the box in the Get Info pane, but along with a lot of folks, that box didn’t appear for me until I’d booted the machine in Safe Mode, and then restarted in normal mode again.

It seems users who got a boxed version (like me) were more likely not to see the 32-bit mode checkbox

2) Created a new library

3) Switched off Faces
Under Preferences, there’s an option to disable this. The heavy processing required to scan all the faces in a large library can lead to runaway memory problems.

4) Restored from an Aperture 2 vault
Since my main library had been banjaxed by my first attempt, I went with restoring from a vault. Which is yet another reason why having at least 2 extra copies of your libraries (with one at an offsite location) is a good idea.

Aperture 3 told me it would have to update the vault because it was from an older version, and it took a long time, but everything came in properly.

Other options

Other folks seem to have enjoyed success deleting previews, recreating thumbnails and rebuilding the database of their version 2 library before updating.

And others still have exported projects one at a time, and imported them into a new Aperture 3 library.

And finally, there have been people (probably the silent majority) who have had no trouble at all.

Macworld has some troubleshooting tips, with useful links to follow for particular symptoms.

But it’s unacceptable that a product on which so many people rely on for their livelihoods was released with this kind of problem in it.

The Green/Magenta box issue

As well as the memory leak – new in Aperture 3 – there’s an old problem that’s been afflicting some Aperture 2 users who were using Snow Leopard that hasn’t been fixed.

When making adjustments, some or all of your image suddenly turns into a crazy geometric patchwork of green or magenta lines and blocks.

This too is well known on the support forum, but there’s yet to be a solution.

Spoiling the ship for a ha’peth of tar

There are lots of great new features in Aperture 3 – including the crucial issues of non-destructive local adjustments, and comprehensive presets that I talked about in my comparison of Aperture 2 and the Lightroom 3 beta.

But it’s a shame that the first thing most people are going to hear about the new version is how flaky and unusable it is.

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.

If you run a large studio where you can employ someone to do website updates for you, maybe that’s not such a big deal. But if you’re a single-person operation like so many photographers this lack of comfort with the internet is a big handicap.

Episode 2 – “I don’t want to spend more time in front of the computer”

Another week, another training session for a photography client. This time we were talking through the functionality that Photoshelter offers, and its system of Archives and Galleries. As I explained how to upload images I could see I was losing the guy. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I’ve been thinking that maybe I’ll make a change to something completely different. I don’t want to spend any more time in front of a computer.’

It wasn’t just the prospect of uploading images that made him think of a career change – he admitted being ambivalent about the website project as a whole in the face of declining stock income, so I asked him what he thought he’d be doing instead.

‘More teaching, workshops, you know’. This isn’t a bad idea but it too will probably require web skills and a commitment to be an active participant online. In the same way as you won’t escape book-keeping by opening another business, you won’t escape the computer by moving from being a shooter to a teacher.

Episode 3 – “This sort of thing is just not my thing”

Later in the week I got a call from another photographer I’d done a small amount of web work and some Aperture consulting for. The photog’s Aperture library had been on his computer’s hard drive, and he was running out of room. And he didn’t have it backed up. I’d moved the library to an external drive, set up another drive as a backup vault for him and talked him through the pros and cons of off-site and online backup strategies.

But that was a while ago and now he was having some more trouble. Turned out he had unearthed an earlier version of Aperture on his machine I hadn’t know about and had created a new library in the old version of the application and his photos were split across the old new library and the new old library.

‘This sort of thing is just not my thing’, explained the photographer. Again, if he had someone in the office to worry about this, maybe this would be OK, but he doesn’t, so it’s not. Being able to find your work instantly, and being comfortable that it’s securely backed up is crucial, whether it’s your thing or not.

The Architects analogy

My wife is an architect, and when she went to architecture school, they all still drew their sets of plans by hand. But early in her professional career, AutoCAD arrived and even though she’d not learned it in college, she knew she had to jump into this because this was now what architects needed to do.

Some people her age and older jumped with her, but others didn’t. So now they need to pay people to work on their sets for them, and they never learned even how to make changes themselves. They’re at a tremendous disadvantage.

For photographers, people thought that moving from film to digital was the big shift that pro photographers would have to adjust to in their careers – the equivalent of the architects’ move from drawing on paper to AutoCAD. And it was a major change.

But in some ways it was just a different way of doing the same stuff – getting the image from your camera to the client. The market the client and photographer were in hadn’t changed that much, nor had the way the photographer connected with the client.

What you need to know now

But I think the biggest change the pro photographer will face is just becoming apparent now. The market – stock, editorial, commercial, wedding – is changing drastically. Some sectors in decline, like the newspaper business, but they’re all being recreated in unpredictable and exciting ways. Much of the communication, marketing and day to day work across all markets is now online – which requires a new set of skills.

Running a photography business has always been about a lot more than being a good photographer – and all the clients I’ve mentioned here are way better photographers than I’ll ever be – but now the list of skills required is different.

Here’s a partial list the biggest gaps I see in my completely unscientific experience of working with a range of photographers over the last few years:

• solid grasp of digital workflow, including captioning and keywording, backup strategies and the pros and cons of different file formats and sizes
• knowledge of monitor calibration issues and color profiles
• moderate internet skills (everything from using search engines effectively to email and discussion board etiquette)
• ability to update your own website with text and images (including an ability to write clearly)
• moderate social media skills (you don’t have to be tweeting ten times a day, but you should be able to asses which social media platforms could help you and how you could start using them)
• a good grasp of how your particular markets are changing, and how you can adjust

Dane Sanders, in his valuable book Fast Track Photographer, describes a Grumpiness scale, which outlines how likely a pro is to look at a list like the one above and complain that ‘It wasn’t like that in my day. All these kids coming in, stealing our work. Why can’t I just take pictures.’ (or words to that effect). I think that attitude is obviously a problem, but I think the bigger problem is skills gap among some photographers.

To their credit, the first two photgraphers I’ve talked about here manfully got over their initial discomfort with WordPress and Photoshelter and have been making changes to their sites themselves. And the good news is that there are plenty of resources available for people like them who want to learn some of the other required skills.

But if you’re an established pro or a newcomer to the industry and you don’t at least make an effort with this stuff, you’re going to struggle.

Even my entrance into the world of technology came because I could write – in this case, training materials teaching people how to use Microsoft products (God help me).

This might seem like a lot of wasted time, or at best lots of irrelevant experience.

But since I’ve been pursuing photography more seriously over the last four or five years, I’ve come to see that a lot of the things I learned writing have been very useful when I have a camera in my hand.

Learning to See

A good writer is observant – you can’t tell a convincing story if you miss the important stuff. And often what’s important are subtle changes to the ordinary that most people don’t see.

For a journalism article, it might be a telling quote, and for a photograph it might be way the light catches a face just so, but you need to be paying attention to catch these things.

So by character or by training, writers notice all kinds of things that others don’t – a trait that’s also invaluable in photography.

Showing Only What’s Important

A common mistake among people just starting with photography is to show everything in a photo. They might want to photograph someone enjoying their first sip of Guinness after a hard day, but their photograph includes half the pub.

Which is kind of like a writer of the same scene describing what everyone in the bar looked like, the names of all the drinks on offer and how many beer mats were stacked up near the pumps.

Not everything matters the same amount, and knowing what are the important things in what you’re communicating is key.

Writers might do that with careful editing of a first draft, stripping away the irrelevant and polishing what’s left. Photographers have less time to do it in the capture (but some later cropping might help), but it’s a different application of the same skill.

Part for the Whole

Related to the previous point, there’s a classic writerly device where you use a small detail to represent a larger idea – synecdoche it’s called if you’re being precise. And it’s something that really helps in photography.

In the pub example above, maybe you don’t even show the whole drinker’s face, or the whole pint. A detail of the fingers round the top of the coldly glistening glass as the beer settles might be all that’s needed.

To do this well you need to stop asking ‘What is this a picture of?’, and start asking ‘What is this picture about?’.

The Dramatic Moment

As well as spotting details that carry weight, a good writer has an eye for that key dramatic moment – the point at which time stands still.

To my mind these come in two flavors. Either it’s the one moment that is a crystallization of an emotion – the utmost point of joy, sorrow, reflection, bravery . . .whatever. Or it’s the point at which everything changes, where there’s no going back to how things were before.

This is obviously related to Cartier-Bresson’s idea of the decisive moment - the point in time and space where the camera captures the perfect representation of an event.

Some of this is luck, of course, but some of is practice and a feel for how events unfold. There are times when I’ve been working on an article or a section of the book when I’ve been watching events unfold and I get a sense that what’s happening at that exact moment is the key, that I need to remember this or get it down on paper right away.

I get that with the camera too, where there’s a strange sense of anticipation of an event, and when it happens it’s like the Universe went out of its way to arrange things for you. Just make sure you don’t miss it.

Telling Stories

If there’s one thing a writer should be good at, it’s telling stories – arranging material so there’s a flow from beginning to end.

A single image can tell a story, though often it captures that crucial dramatic moment (see above), leaving the viewer to fill in the back story or speculate about the future. That’s a great thing, but it’s a sequence of photos can more obviously have a narrative drive.

David duChemin has a great outline of how this can work in his book Within the Frame, but a version of the approach goes like this:

• establish the scene with a wide shot to give context
• follow up with some activity shots to show what happens there
• add in some details to flesh out the environment
• show the decisive moment shot that captures the essence of the place or event
• leave with a final image that suggests closure or shows the way to the future

In its own way, this is a pretty good model for a piece of writing too.

Knowing when to break the rules is as important as when to follow them, of course, but photographers should definitely be thinking about narrative as much as writers are.

Words and Pictures Together

When I was on a recent journalism assignment for New Mexico Magazine, writing about a week-long cattle drive in Roswell, NM, I spent a long time talking to Chuck West, the photographer who accompanied me.

He wanted to know what I was going to write about, so he could make sure he covered it with his images, and I wanted to know what he was taking pictures of so I could write about it.

We were really asking the same thing – what have you seen that strikes you as important? What sense can you make of all this? The details, the story, the decisive moments, the part-for-the-whole vignettes . . . we were communicating in different media, but there could be no real communication without observation and reflection. We each noticed particular things and then arranged a story around them based on what we thought was important.

You can’t write or photograph well without there being a thought behind the act, and that thought is driven by careful observation.

Would I like to write and photograph a single topic, to try both media to communicate the same ideas? Yep, that would be great, although the concentration required for each is a little different, and it might be hard to do both at the same time.

But being able to communicate the same conclusions across the two media would be a great opportunity.

Clearing the Vision

The similarities of writing and photography for me are captured in a quote of Ansel Adams:

“Through the art of brush, pen, and lens … we possess a swift and sure means of touching the conscience and clearing the vision.”

Which is why my photography business is called Clearing the Vision. We see so much – just can’t stop ourselves without closing our eyes – and miss almost all of it.

In my earlier career as a writer it was my job to sort through all that and present what really mattered elegantly and succinctly with words. And now it’s my job to do it with a camera. But while some of the craft might be different, I think the crucial skills are the same.

If you’re taking pictures of boys, you have to move fast. The brothers I did a portrait shoot of recently in White Rock were no exception –  aged nearly five and seven, they were chasing around like mad, clambering over boulders and not very interested in me at all.

Which is how I like it. We’d chosen the crags at White Rock as their family likes to climb, and giving the boys space to be themselves seemed a much better idea than cramming them into smart clothes and a studio.

So I came up from Santa Fe, while the family came down from Los Alamos, and we climbed down the rocky path to the base of the crags.

It worked out really well – we had a great time and crucially got some  good shots of the boys.

Their mother Rachael was very happy with the shoot: ‘We are so pleased! The pictures of the boys really capture them in their element and being 110% boy–so great! There are some close-up pics in particular that are fabulous and really look like we ‘see’ the boys’.

That’s the aim – a relaxed experience at the shoot, leading to images that capture something authentic in the children.

I’ve just signed up for mpixpro.com, having been a very satisfied customer of their prosumer mpix.com printing service.

I’m impressed so far. They offer a ood range of products (including prints on fine art paper, and some funky looking acrylic prints).

Their site seems to be set up so that you can direct clients there to see all the product and print options, but without showing the prices. That way, if you’re adding markup (which you should be as a pro shooter), your clients won’t see that, but they can make informed choices about what they’d like.

Mpixpro also provide white-label PDFs which describe the different product types. If you put them on your own site, it would give clients lots of useful information without getting the in way of your own branding and service. Nice.

The calibration prints are on the way, but if they’re as spot-on as my previous mpix jobs have been, I think I might have found my new printing home, after much shopping around. Turns out it’s the big brother of the place I already loved.

I’m writing the first draft of this post at sea, on the way back to Los Angeles after a week’s cruise to the Mexican Riviera.

Cruising wouldn’t be my first choice of holiday, but family obligation dictated we go, so I brought along my camera stuff, and thought I’d share with you what I learned from my experience – some tips and advice for the keen photographer on a cruise.

1: Bring all your gear

Unlike the holidays I normally take, once you get to the ship, you’re not going to have to lug your bags anywhere. So pack as much camera stuff as you can, so you’ll have everything you might need.

In my case that was a Canon 5D, an EF 24-105mm f/4L, an EF 17-40 f/4L, an EF 50mm f/1.8 II, and an EF 85mm f/1.8 USM. I also brought a laptop, an external drive with my Aperture library on it, a second drive for backing up the vault, and even a mouse for easier computing.

2: Go long

As we were sailing away from San Pedro habour, I realised that with all my gear, I’d made a mistake. I should have brought a longer lens as well – which in my case would be my 70-200mm f/4L.

There’ll be a lot of times when taking pictures of things from the ship that a longer lens would really help. There’s a chance you’ll see some wildlife (whales, interesting birds . . . ), or want to get tight on something on shore as you come into port, so if you’ve got a big lad with you, so much the better.

In my case, when my daughter played with dolphins at an adventure centre in Puerto Vallarta, cameras were restricted to an area a long way away from the pool (at least partly so the centre could make tons of money from the (not very good photos) they shot. If I’d had the 70-200mm with me, I’d have done well.

3: Go stealth

Face it, even if you think you blend in while you’re ashore, you’re still probably recognisable as one of those folks who just got off the big boat anchored in the bay.

So it’s only prudent to make sure you keep your expensive camera gear out of sight most of the time. My Lowe Pro Slingshot bag is great, but you don’t need a lot of knowledge to spot it as a big camera repository. Instead, pack a regular small backpack, and stick the camera and maybe one other lens in there, when you want to be more unobtrusive.

It’s the same advice I’d give wandering around any American or European city too, lest people think I’m singling out Mexico.

4: Avoid the organized tours

To take photos, you have to be walking around. And you can’t do that on an air-conditioned tour bus (although the people in front of me on one coach were having fun taking pictures of the Sams’ Club and Home Depot stores we passed). Unless you’re heading to a particularly photogenic spot, skip the organised tour of the town and head off on your own.

You’ll need to make sure you printed out a good map before you leave home, as the ones from the cruise lines just tell you where the shopping is. In Mazatlan for example, we had to use some precious onboard internet minutes to download a good map of the old town (which I copied onto my iPhone for bringing with us).

Walking will let you get a real sense of the place you’re in – even if you’re only there for a couple of hours.

5: People not landmarks

In my shots from Mazatlan, the most successful ones included some of the locals going about their business – like the school party heading round the corner used above, or the guy below getting his shoes shined.

Shots that are just buildings only really tell part of the story.

6) Watch the ship’s photographers at work

They might be seen as hacks by more snooty shooters, but ship’s photographers work their asses off. Studio portraits aren’t really my thing, but it was instructive watching them work through a range of poses with a family or a couple, keeping everything light and friendly while knocking out a bunch of respectable shots in no time.

When things are quieter, they’ll often be happy to chat – especially if they see you’ve got a decent camera yourself. They crank out a lot of work with no chance of overnighting a replacement lens or light, so ask them what gear they rate and rely on

7: Not just for trips ashore

It might seem there’s not much scope for taking good photos on board the ship, but that’s not necessarily true. Bring a fast prime with you to formal nights and get some nice shots of your party looking good.

It’s hard to capture the scale of these ships while you’re on them, but the atrium and the long sight lines of the promenade decks might be good places to start.

8: Catch up on some keywording and organizing

Chances are your access to the Internet will be limited (and expensive) while you’re on board ship, but if you’ve got your laptop with you, it’s the perfect opportunity to catch up on some of the admin work photographers hate.

I sorted through a bunch of recent (and not so recent) images while I was away – rating all of them, and captioning and keywording those I was going to upload to stock houses or my own site. I tidied up the project I use as my Inbox in Aperture, and put the images in the right place.

It’s not very exciting work, but if you’ve got a bit of time it can be a very useful thing to get done.

Final thoughts

Like I said, it’s not my first choice of vacation, and from a photography point of view going on a cruise has some drawbacks compared to a land-based holiday.

For example, you’ll seldom be in the ports you visit at sunrise or sunset, so you’ll miss the best light. And unless the whales come calling, sea days might might be a bit dull.

But there are also some good opportunities to take some good shots and try things out in a new environment.

Slideshow

Here are my picks from the trip:

Who says Flickr doesn’t generate business? The Lensic Performing Arts Center here in Santa Fe got in touch recently to see if they could use a couple of my images to promote their Nuestra Música show this Friday.

Apparently there just aren’t that many good photos of legendary New Mexico musician Antonia Apodaca kicking around and they found mine on Flickr. One lesson from this is to make sure your images are tagged usefully, as you never know who’s looking.

Another lesson is that you should always carry your camera with you – I got the shots at a lunchtime concert on the Santa Fe Plaza while I was having a picnic with my wife and daughter. I took them with my (since retired) Rebel XT, and my (long-since sold) cheapo EF 28-105mm USM lens.

Here’s the postcard, but it was also on the print ad, and it’s on the front of the program, too. Looks like a good show.

Now the dust has settled from my opening in a local cafe, here are some details on how I sorted out the practicalities – in case they’re useful for other folks facing the somewhat daunting task of organizing your first show.

1) Find your location

I was very lucky in this regard. I go to Java Joe’s North pretty regularly (especially for a Friday morning latte and breakfast burrito), and have enjoyed looking a bunch of the artwork they have up, which changes every month.

I asked them how you get a slot, and it turns out all you do is ask. I showed Dave the owner some of my Moo Cards as I didn’t have my portfolio with me, and he said that was fine. I was signed up for the next free slot – a few months in the future.

Your experience will vary of course, but cafes, restaurants, public libraries and even supermarkets (Whole Foods do exhibitions, for example) are all places to try outside the full-on art gallery circuit (which is not an option anyway in lots of places).

2) Choose your work

I wanted the photos I showed to have some thematic link, so it wasn’t just a bunch of disparate shots (however good they might be individually). But I also wanted to do a bit of stealth marketing too – showing the sort of work that might get me the odd commission or two.

So I fixed on the geometric urban abstracts that I do, and (cheating a little) also included three black and white kids’ portraits. I showed the portraits on a different wall from the others to keep them separate.

It worked well, as people could see what I was about pretty easily. I know we don’t like to be pigeon-holed, but I also think it makes sense to tell a good story with the work rather than try to show every sort of photography you’ve ever done. (But this is my first show, of course, so you probably know better yourself)

3) Print away

I send my images out for printing – for the simple reason that I don’t have a good photo printer. I chose Mpix as I’ve used them before with success, and have heard really excellent things about their customer service. They offered 8″ x 12″ metallic prints for $4.99 a time. The metallic prints are borderline cheesy to be honest, and I wouldn’t recommend them for color pictures of people or landscapes (which rules out pretty much everything), but for my slightly abstract/geometric stuff, they worked really well.

Metallic paper is also a good option for black and white images, lending a silver look to the whites.

4) You’ve been framed

I showed twelve images, so that’s a bunch of frames – for me, the priciest part of the endeavour. I shopped around, and read reviews and American Frame – americanframe.com – were the folks I went with, because they were among the cheapest, offered a free mat, and other photogs had had good experience with them.

The best thing was everything was custom, so I could get the mat opening exactly where I wanted it, and there’s an online tool you can use to see what you’re going to get (including your own images). Less than $30 a frame for custom size, custom mat, back board and perspex – still a fair bit of money up front, but a lot cheaper than other places and I got exactly what I was after.

5) If you build it

Everything came from American Frame very well packed, and even though I was novice, I had no problem putting the frames together. On the advice of a certain person I live with, I first tried taping the photos to the back of the mat. This was partly to make adjustments easily, and partly to make the whole thing recyclable in the future.

It was a nice idea, but made it hard to stretch the photos tight enough so they were completely flat. Especially given the metallic paper and the large areas of pretty flat color in the pictures, any little bumps were really obvious.

So Plan B was to spray mount them to the foamcore back board – probably what I should have done in the first place. It was much easier and presented a tidy impression all round.

6) Guerilla marketing

I didn’t have a real ad budget but I put the word out in number of ways. The online stuff – Facebook, the Flickr Groups I hang out on, email shot to all my friends, announcements on my site and Twitter feed – was easily done and had a real impact.

I also got some postcards printed up from Moo.com. I put some of these up around the place – in the Library, in a couple of other cafes I frequent, at the gymnastics studio my daughter goes too. One of my former students saw one of these so I know it had something of an effect. I kept a bunch of the cards for leaving in the cafe where the show was – takeaways for people who liked the work and might want to contact me.

I also made sure to submit the opening to our local alternative paper – the Santa Fe Reporter. They don’t include every event listing they receive, but I was l lucky enough to get mine in. Not sure whether that will encourage anyone to go and check them out, but it definitely can’t hurt, and it also checked the box about being professional about it all.

Even though I was doing it all on a shoestring, I wanted it look like I knew what I was doing and was taking this seriously.

6) Hang and enjoy

I had help with the hanging, which was great. Firstly it’s a lot easier to have someone else tell you if the pictures are level or not. Secondly, I had a sense of a good order for the images, but the second opinion was very valuable, and improved the order of things.

I also put up an artists’ statement – which gave some background on me and the work, together with contact details and some information on custom prints.

Upshot

I sold one print on the day, and while I haven’t sold anything since (the pictures are still up for another couple of weeks), I’d definitely declare the whole experience a success.

I enjoyed the opening, and got a chance to ‘come out’ as a photographer to some of my friends who might not know how hard I’ve fallen for all this over the last couple of years.

It’s been great to hang out in the cafe and watch people take the time to walk their way down the line of photos as they’re waiting for their drink order. They’re most unlikely to buy anything but sales were only an incidental part of my objective. It’s great to have my work out there for random people to stumble upon, and I feel like part of doing the work is showing it in a number of ways.

And since my wife has her eyes on a few of the prints for home, we’ve also ended up with some art for the walls in our den.