not stopping at the second hurdle

In the pre-digital camera era, purists would rage about never cropping images, somehow believing that the 35mm format was the perfect aspect.  These purists would claim that they had framed the perfect image before they clicked the shutter in order to produce an immaculate print. 

In the digital era, more images are being taken than ever before and many photographers have adopted this purist approach, unconsciously or otherwise. They look at their images and are disappointed by them. Or maybe they are disappointed by themselves, feeling that as amateur photographers they are incapable of taking outstanding images.

A more positive approach is to regard the image as a rough diamond which needs to be cut and polished in such a way as to maximise its potential. Enhancing images is best be done in Adobe Lightroom; its bigger brother Adobe Photoshop is far too complicated to learn for most photographers.

The photos below demonstrate the polishing of one image. All enhancements were done in Adobe Lightroom under ten minutes.

more musings on portraiture

I think I'll struggle with portraiture for as long as I am a photographer. The extraordinary challenge of capturing the essence of a person. At the moment I am mulling over the term subject - as soon as someone is your subject, they are effectively trapped and/or controlled so there is no chance whatsoever that they will be revealed. How can a prisoner ever be themselves? A slightly extreme analogy but very rarely do I see a revealing portrait in circumstances fully controlled by a photographer.

To some recent images and why I think they work.

Males are generally not good at not doing things so if they are engaged in a task of their own making, they'll reveal themselves. The trick for the photographer is to be ready by anticipating the technical requirements of the image.

 The image below, taken at a wedding, succeeded technically  because it has frozen the sitter (1/350th of a second), knocked out the background (200 mm, f8.0). The image succeeded aesthetically because of the beautiful contrast between the foreground and background. The image succeeded as a portrait because it is so vivacious.

The portrait may also have succeeded because I had met and chatted to him the day before at the wedding rehearsal in the church.

And just after the wedding ceremony, I photographed him skylarking and this enabled our rapport to develop, at no stage did I try to control or censure what he did and this may have given him the freedom to play, to be himself.

Factory photography and why it isn't portraiture

My daughter's school "photo" of her year turned up recently.  To call it a photo is wrong - made of flimsy paper, it felt like a shoddy photocopy. As for capturing a unique moment, it was anything but that - instead of being Year 9 2010, it could easily have been Year 11 1992.

Yet parents like me bought the photo, but were they buying it out of nostalgia for a time when school portraiture had value?

I had a similar experience when I went house hunting last weekend. Actually, it wasn't so much house hunting but house peeping because a house I had always admired was open for inspection and I couldn't resist a peek.  Inside the house, expected to go for $4.5m, were hideous portraits presumably of the various offspring.  It wasn't so much that the subjects were ugly (they weren't) but there was nothing beautiful about the photos - dull light, thoughtless background and no engagement of the subject with the photographer. The images had the feel of photos taken with a mobile phone, only those are usually spontaneous and the subject is laughing or putting on a party face. But the the photos in the grand house were taken by an eminent photographer, one who proudly signed each one.

So what's gone wrong? Why do people, even those with considerable assets, put up with such mediocrity? For me an appropriate comparison is factory farming. Not so long ago all chickens were organic, and they were a treat, not cheap, not to be thoughtlessly consumed daily. Overtime chickens became cheaper  as their rearing became mechanised to the current era where they are ubiquitous, cheap and devoid of taste. Yet we continue to consume them.

So it is with portrait photography. If we take the example of school portraits, they are often run by large commercial studios and typically, the photographer who turns up at school is a photographer in name only. A bit like calling a burger fryer at McDonalds a chef. The photographer is on a schedule, this school today, another tomorrow, so the individual portrait sessions are set up with standard lighting, a tedious artificial background used since the 1970's and there is nominal interaction between the photographer and the sitter.  Then the image is printed on thin measly paper and apparently, a portrait has been created.

I thought about this recently when I had to photograph five chefs and three front office staff for nilgiri's, an award winning Indian restaurant in Sydney. On average, I spent eleven minutes photographing each person .

My brief was to create portraits that would show off the team to the diners since the images would be hung in the restaurant. I interpreted this brief to mean photos that would make the diners feel good about the restaurant so they would be more likely to return. In other words, if the portraits were mechanical,  the sitters would look wooden but if the sitters looked passionate, confident and happy, then the diners would think the restaurant staff were proud of what they did. In short, if the warmth of the sitters was forced or lacking, the portraits would fail to sell the restaurant to the diners.

What did I have to do to achieve the portraits I was after? Firstly, in advance of the session, I had to be totally confident about the lighting setup - it had to allow flexibility (the staff were of different heights and would stand). So I spent two hours getting the light right to produce two lighting setups- one open, the other 'Rembrandtish'.  I used Swiss Elinchrom BXRI 500  lights with a large softbox on right, a smaller one on left and a reflector in front. These lights are wirelessly controlled which meant no worrying about tripping over cables. They are also 100% reliable and produce beautiful light. This meant I never had any doubt during the sessions - if I had, the subjects would have sensed my anxiety and not relaxed.

When each staff member arrived, I explained what I was trying to achieve - my message was simple, if you don't look happy, the clients won't  come back and the restaurant would fail- nothing like a bit of pressure but done with humour, it made them realise that we had a common objective, to make the restaurant look good, and one that couldn't be achieved by me alone. In short, their  unique personality was vital.  Then I asked them about themselves, where they came from in india, if they had kids etc. None of this interfered with the shoot, it didn't take long but it created a dialogue and in so doing, stopped the subjects feeling like they were in a police identification parade.

The results are the photos below which I turned into posters to give diners more relevant information. Needless to write, they are printed on beautiful thick (270gsm) lustrous paper made in France.

In summary, if you are not moved by the portraits you have commissioned, stop using the photographer who created them because the fault lies not in you but them! As for the cost, my granny had a very wise saying "quality is remembered long after the price is forgotten".

Mug shots

George Sabados is the founder of GS Roasting, a wholesale coffee roastery in inner-city Sydney, and to the chagrin of many coffee aficionados, he doesn't retail coffee, though that maybe about to change hence me being commissioned to photograph him for several websites currently under wraps.

George not only roasts coffee, he is a coffee judge of international renown and is an expert in turning around cafes. He is also a great bloke and happiest when not buttoned up in a suit.

So many roles means that one photograph cannot do. George needed three photos, as a good bloke you would want to engage to sort out an underperforming cafe, as a gun coffee roaster and as a coffee consultant.

So how to produce three distinct images in an hour? George's office wasn't glamorous, a computer station, reams of paper, invoices, standard lighting, nothing you would want to see so when I set up the shoot in his office, I avoided the CEO at his desk look (which works if the CEO has a magnificent oak bureau but not if it's an Officeworks $99 special) and went for a very simple shoot - just George and the innocuous venetian blinds behind him.

To warm him up, get him used to the camera, I asked him to wear a casual shirt. Initially he sat at his desk but George is a doer, happiest when he is working. Once standing, the photos started to work but a problem, George was even too casual in the first photo notwithstanding you immediately smile when you look at it. The solution, not a reshoot but a tight crop - thanks to high end full frame DSLR cameras, you can get a fantastic image even if you use 1/5th of the frame.


Then to the suit shot. The whole point of wearing a suit is that it disguises your individuality - the term "suit" doesn't exactly conjure up a fun guy so as a photographer, there's no point fretting if the image doesn't 'sing' and give you visions of winning the Pulitzer Prize. Maybe if I had spent a day tricking up the lighting, I could have got a memorable result but instead, I got the suit shot.



I then focussed on what I really wanted to photograph - an environmental portrait of George, his environment being a bespoke coffee roaster that has allowed him to produce exalted coffee blends. The circumstances of this part of the shoot weren't ideal - roasting was about to begin in five minutes so the workers were loading beans and preparing boxes and a forklift truck was whizzing around alarmingly close to my gear. Worse still, a machine had just broken giving George and his offsider, Rudy, a major headache. So a quick two light set up, a naked strobe lighting the roaster and a flash umbrella lighting George.