Who your friends are

It's interesting who your friends are. And sometimes the people who have your back are not necessarily the ones that you think it'll be. But when somone offers to break knee caps for you, and you know that they mean it, then you know that they've got your back!!

Getting lost on a 'road trip'

Well, road trip may be a bit of an overstatement . . . but we did get a wee bit lost. On Saturday I headed out with some wedding photographer friends to go and find the car museum just off the N1. We did most of it right but apparently missed a small but crucial turn and ended up on a random road with a randomly awesome field and randomly awesome derelict couple of houses. Just your average photo outing :)

If you'd like to see more of my landscape pics you can see them here. They are, like these, at a fairly low res to allow for faster loading.

A photographer is more than their price tag

This post is a rant. If you're not in the mood for reading someone else's crap (i.e. mine) please be warned!
I've just been looking at a wedding photographer's website and their work. On their site I can see evidence of four wedding shoots. Count that: one, two, three, four. They're advertising a 7 hour shoot for R10 000. Fair enough they're adding in a few extras . . . but really!! R10 000 for someone with four shoots under their belt. I also see evidence of portrait shoots, but what worries me is that the portrait shoots are not of the same calibre as the wedding shoots. So I wonder - are the weddings shot by the same photographer? Or were the weddings shot as assistant to a really good photographer - someone who likely set up the shots, chose the location, the lighting, the mood? I have to admit, I'm so angry I could spit. What ever happened to working your way up from the bottom? How does someone with four weddings justify a starting rate of R10 000? It pisses me off because I see a lot of people assuming that this is an easy industry and an easy way to make money! And if people walk in with four weddings and want to charge R10 000 then how is the average client meant to judge what's fair and what's not?  All too often people assume that if the price is high the quality has to be good . . . that is so not the case!
And as a post script of sorts: the photographer whose site I was on: the shots all look like they come off a 50mm lens. One lens. R10 000 for a wedding shoot. F*ck'n hell!
A second post script: each of those four weddings featured had about 10 to 15 shots. I kid you not.

Food Photographer

I've recently been doing food shots for a couple of hotels and restaurants and it's been really cool. So yesterday morning and then today at lunch time I got a bee in my bonnet and just felt like shooting some of the things that Dan and I have been cooking. It's been a seriously lazy weekend - one of my last free weekends before the wedding season hits in earnest and apart from going to a friend's birthday on Friday I've done as little as humanly possible . . . except eat, cook and watch movies. And take the occasional food photo.

So yesterday I woke early and decided to make flapjacks. First I made coffee and then I did flapjacks. Dan normally does the flapjacks in our household. While I'm a pretty good cook I absolutley suck at baking, or baking type cooking . . . it scares me and flapjacks scare me. It was a moment of bravery that led to the scaling of the flapjack mountain. Though, I did have help. Half way through preparations Dan woke from his deep slumber and slumped downstairs. Soon as I saw him I asked if he'd do the actual cooking and flipping of the flapjacks. And when they were done . . . they were just beautiful.

And the recipe comes from a cook book for children so I figured that even I should be able to get somewhere with it. 

At lunch time(ish) Dan's mom popped through. My mom-in-law rocks. She's the type of mom-in-law who pops round and brings food and goodies with her - which is especially fabulous if you're having a lazy as possible weekend and you don't want to leave the house more than what's absolutely, utterly necessary. She brought with her bread, chocolate (yumm), doughnuts and fillet.

There's a tradition in Dan's household that on your birthday you get fillet steak. Specifically, you get old man steak. Which is flambed in brandy and served with a cream, mushroom and rosemary sauce that's had the fillety flambed juices added to it. I once got the recipe for it from Pegs (mom-in-law) but I've subsequently lost it. It was Dan's dad's birthday and anniversary of his death recently (he died ten days after his birthday) and I wondered if that's why Pegs didn't bring us fillet steak (even on a subconscious level). So this afternoon I made my homage to old man steak. You'll see the pics for it aren't great . . . but I wasn't going to stuff about getting the shot right when that was waiting for me to tuck in.

The fillet was magnificent (done just over rare) and the mash was gorgeous: while the potatoes were boiling I added two teaspoons of Dijon mustard and a table spoon of honey. The sauce was loosely based on the old man steak sauce and also loosely based on a sauce my Dad made last weekend. I fried button mushrooms in butter with garlic and rosemary sprigs. Once the mushrooms had released their liquid I added Nomu's liquid beef stock (Nomu stock absolutely rocks) and then I put in about 2/3s of a tub of cream and just let it boil away. It probably could've boiled down for longer but I was hungry and Dan was hungry so I started the steaks and oh my god they were good!!

 You can see more pics from my lazy weekend in this blog post on my site, and there are more food pics that I've shot here. Enjoy :) .

Early Morning Drive

So I'd intended to go into Durbanville and out the back end into the surrounding countryside - I was in search of cows - but I ended up going through the Du Toit's Kloof tunnel and through its grime into the sunshine on the other end. I'd love to shoot in the tunnel. I'd love to take a scraping from it's thick black walls. But I'd need a gas mask. And I have a feeling it's illegal to stop. And I watched a double tanker petrol truck come through and it had a fire emergency truck that had to follow it. So I drove through to where the sun was up in the other side, stopped for coffee at a dodgey little hole in the wall and then came back over the Du Toit's Kloof pass. I passed baboons - a troupe of about thirty - with the alpha at the back sheperding his females with their clinging babies across the road. And I got yelled at by a big farmer in a Toyota bakkie for stopping on a blind corner (the things we do to avoid making roadkill of wildlife and to get a good photo!) I didn't get any good photos of the baboons - it would've involved getting out the car again and that big boy alpha looked pretty fucking mean. But I got a change to pull over a few times on the pass - I love those rest stops - they always look like relics from the 50s and 60s. And then I saw the coolest limo I've seen in ages. The number plate said Baby Lim and the front end of it was made from what looked like an old Mazda. The back end definitely came from a late 80s early 90s Toyota Corolla. And the middle bit was of an indeterminate origin, but the central door had lights around it, like you'd put up around a vanity mirror. I was way too scared of the mean men inside to ask them if I could photograph their ride but I am wondering if it was worth being safe instead of grateful for a really cool photo.

Enjoy the pics. I was feeling fairly dark this morning. Hence the exposures. If you'd like to see more of my landscape photographs have a look at my website.

Photography Lessons: Aperture and Light 2 (working with aperture priority)

Okey dokey. So you should've taken a few pics in aperture priority. And hopefully - because you're an observant visual person - you should've noticed a few things. The first one is slightly harder to spot than the second but I'm going to start there anyway.

A large aperture (low number) throws the background and some of the foreground out of focus.

A small aperture (high number) keeps the the foreground, middle ground and background sharp.

Why is this important? Because of the artistic control it allows you. (Images to follow during the week!)

The second thing should be fairly obvious: there's a relationship between the aperture setting and your shutter speed.

(Shutter speed is how fast or how slow the shutter in your camera opens to let in light. If it opens slowly you let in more light, if it opens quickly you let in less light. Shutter speed is not assbackward like your apperture settings so a big number = a fast speed and a small number = a slow speed.)

If you've been working in aperture priority then you should've noticed inside your camera that each time you change your aperture there's an opposing change in your shutter speed. The relationship is a very simple one.

As you let in more light through your aperture so your shutter speed will slow down to let in less light.

As you let in less light through your aperture so your shutter speed will increase to let in more light.

Why does it do this? Because your camera is determining the ideal exposure for you. It assumes that you'd want everything at about 17% grey. Don't ask me who decided it should do this, but I suppose they had to have some form of standard and 17% grey is what they went for.

So here's your camera with it's built in predisposition towards a light grey. When you have your camera in aperture priority it assumes that you want that photograph to be it's beloved light grey. So every time you change your aperture to let in more light, the camera will change your shutter speed to counteract the extra light you've just let in and it will increase the shutter speed effectively cutting off that extra bit of light. If you change your aperture to let in less light your camera counteracts the impending gloom by lowering the shutter speed to let in more light.

When you're in AV mode and you look at your exposure reading in your camera you'll see that it always stays right in the middle, 'perfectly' exposing your images to 17% grey no matter what changes you make.

So what's the problem.

Essentially that you're not in control of the decision making process. And that, of course, not everything in this world is 17% grey. Photograph black on black or white on white in aperture priority and you'll have an exposure that is wrong. In the case of black it will be too light; in the case of white it will be too dark.

The other problem with letting your camera determine the shutter speed is that eventually you will end up with a shutter speed that is simply too slow for either your ability to hand hold your camera or too slow to capture your subject's movement.

Most people can hand hold at a 60th to a 30th of a second (depending on the size and heaviness of their camera and lens). Very occassionally when I'm feeling particularly zen I can get away with an 8th of a second. I wouldn't recommend this if you're on a job though . . . and I have to admit to a belief that I'm shooting in between heart beats . . . and yes I'm a nut job and I did watch a Discovery showcase on Olympic ski shooters who shoot in between heart beats and the idea that I do something similar makes me feel extra special at night! ;)

But at an 8th of a second chances are your breathing and heartbeat are going to make the camera shake. At a 5th of a second, or at 3 seconds, or 30 seconds, you can absolutely depend on that happening unless it's on a tripod. If the camera shakes you don't get a sharp image - you get fuzzy crap. Fine for the occassional art piece but not fine for most commercial applications.

Also, if you want to freeze your subject in motion then you have to make sure that your shutter speed is moving faster than they are. Imagine you're trying to take a photograph of someone running towards you and you want that picture to be crystal sharp. In almost all lighting conditions you'd need to be shooting at upwards of 200th of a second to make sure that their movement is sharp.

For me, I like AV mode because it's a great way to learn what aperture does: it controls your depth of focus; and because it begins to show you how aperture relates to shutter speed. Beyond a learning tool though I've never really found it helpful and even shooting on weddings when you have to be extrememly quick in making exposure decisions I don't use it.

So the ultimate goal with these lessons is to gain control of the camera, not to let it control you. The next lessons will be on shutter speed, and then the third member of our triumvirate, ISO. In the meantime go back to shooting in AV mode and this time shoot specifically for the following:

1. A high aperture where everything is in sharp focus (easiest outside with relatively bright light if you're shooting in AV mode). Whatever you decide to shoot make sure that it makes sense for the subject to have such a high level of detail.
2. A low aperture where you specifically throw your background out of focus. Again, make sure that it suits your subject to not have all areas clearly defined.
3. Try and shoot in dark areas and take note of what happens to your ability to hand hold your camera. (And shoot without flash!).
4. Try and shoot a fast moving subject under relatively low lighting conditions - what happens to your ability to keep the image sharp? Look out for great accidents on this one, where the blur works for you instead of against you.

Monitor Callibration - how to test if your monitor is properly callibrated?

This is something that I've always struggled with - whenever I read anything about it I get bored senseless and fall asleep! By the time I've woken up the world has moved on and my monitor is still deliriously uncallibrated.

So I thought I'd post on a few photography forums for some help. I asked for short sweet and simple. So far the best has to be: "Get a Spyder". Which leaves me to wonder how an arachnid is going to fix my computer.

No, I'm not that stupid, but I am that facetious. I don't really know what a Spyder is or how it works which is partly what I was hoping to get out of posting in the first place.

In desperation I re-searched for Spyders and screen callibration and came across this dandy article http://www.imaging-resource.com/ARTS/MONCAL/CALIBRATE.HTM on how to check if your screen needs callibration (I'm happy to say that I didn't fall asleep and the world has not moved on and left me behind). I haven't read the link on that page about Spyders (I am weary of a creeping sloth that seems to slither over me when my mouse goes near the link) but I think it might be worth brazening out. I'll let you know if I make it through alive!