How to photograph a school play

Your child is in the school play, the star performer, but will your photos be stellar? This blog explains how to take great photos without flash.

First of all, you need a DSLR camera, your iphone or point and shoot camera will be too 'noisy' given the poor lighting conditions or it will try to compensate by triggering the flash thus disrupting the performance. Your lens should be able to zoom as much as possible e.g. use a 18-200mm lens rather than a 18-55mm lens. I normally use a 70-200mm lens.

Secondly, you need to change the metering mode of your camera to spot metering. Your camera takes a reading of the ambient light levels in order to calculate exposure but typically in a play, your child is illuminated against a dark background and your camera's light meter is tricked into thinking your child's face is dark so the camera will overexpose the scene and your child's face will be 'burnt out'.

Thirdly, you need to set your camera to manual mode. Then select at least 1/180th second for shutter speed because the actors are typically moving on stage and a shutter speed slower than this will result in blurred faces. Also set the widest aperture your lens offers (e.g. f4 v f22) - you need a wide aperture because the scene is dark and the wider the aperture, the more light will reach your camera's sensor which is necessary to avoid noise. Finally, let the ASA 'float':  I generally find the ASA floats between 2500 ASA and 6400 ASA when I set the shutter speed at 1/250th sec and the aperture at f2.8.

Fourthly, you need to decide if you want more than one actor in the frame and if you do, you need to hold the camera very still, focus on one actor and then without moving the camera, focus on the other actor/actors you want in the frame.  This is because when your aperture is wide open (e.g. f4)  there is a very shallow depth of field so it's unlikely anyone other than the actor you are focussing on will be sharp.

When you get home,  merge the two images into one using a program like Photoshop. The photos below demonstrate the before and after results using this technique.

Photo 1 - the girl is in sharp focus but no one in the background is

Photo 2 - the boy is sharp but the girl is blurred

The merged photo - both actors are in sharp focus

Photo 1 - the boy is in sharp focus but the girl isn't

Photo 2 - the boy is not in focus but the girl is

Merged photos - the boy from photo 1 has been combined with the girl from Photo 2

Portrait photography - the three pleases

On the weekend I photographed a twelve year old girl. Superficially she was a child but the looming clouds of adolescence weren't that far off so what to photograph?

Her mother preferred her as a child to an adolescent so the following photo was perfect for her.

The child wanted to be dark and mysterious so loved the following images:

I, on the other hand, am really interested in photographing what she will become when her features mature so I preferred the following photos:

So when photographing, always remember the three pleases - please the client (the one who buys your images), please the sitter and please yourself and all will be happy!

How to avoid making difficult choices when choosing prints from your photographer.

Today I received an order for composite prints from the mother of a bride and I thought I would showcase them as they are a lovely way of solving the problem of which images to choose for framing - why choose one image when four can fit in the same frame?

Once a client has done the hard part, choosing the images, I design the layout to best suit them bearing in mind who they are for.

A gift for her husband

A gift for her son and his fiancée

A gift for her daugher

Why weekend amateur photographers should be thanked by professional photographers

There is a lot of angst amongst some professional photographers at the moment - will the profession survive the onslaught of the weekend wannabes, amateurs who don't give up their day job during the week who then undercut the hapless professionals on the weekend?

The argument is that equipment is so good and so cheap that the market is dead. But are professional photographers as vulnerable as some fear?

Firstly, good equipment isn't cheap - a good lens costs in excess of $2000,  my standard zoom costs $3000, and a good camera body is $3000+. The computer at the studio also has to be fast so it can process images (think $3000+) and the software has to be at least Photoshop and Lightroom ($1200+). To ensure your clients get stunning images, you have to edit your images on a high end computer monitor which is properly calibrated ($3000). As for printing, a good A2 printer costs around $3000. So when you add up all the $3000s, and allow for a backup camera and other lenses and flashes, you can easily spend $20,000.

But is the high outlay actually visible in the results?  Buying a camera doesn't make you a photographer, knowing how to use the equipment is essential but if you are expert in using your gear, the results can be priceless.

As a society we are fully aware of how we present on camera and how we generally fall far short of desirable body and face types given how saturated we are with 'perfect' images by the media. This means we fear the camera and brace us ourselves whenever we see one - the result tends to be stilted artificial imagery.

To return to true photography, which for me is about capturing tenderness, images should be candid.

I think this type of photography can only be achieved in circumstances where the subject is oblivious to the camera which means not using flash and using a telephoto lens.

But events such as weddings and 21st birthday parties often have lighting which is less than ideal and I typically shoot at 6400 asa (most amateur cameras' results look very grainy above 1600 asa or two stops slower), 1/180sec and at f2.8 (most amateur camera's zooms would be f5.6 at this zoom length or two stops slower). In short, I am able to take photos in light conditions at least four times worse than what a typical camera could achieve.

The other way I prevent people from putting on their camera face is by taking along a portable light studio to weddings and parties. Since very few people have been photographed in a studio, they don't know what they will look like so they don't tend to fear the results. An added bonus of my studio lights is that they produce a beautiful light which makes people look great. True, the images aren't candid but they are very high quality and completely beyond the realm of amateur photography.

In conclusion, there will always be a market for excellent professional photography and the encroachment of amateurs has only been at the expense of mediocre professional photographers.  I embrace the amateurs because they keep me on my toes and that can only be good for both my business and my clients.

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".

How to get more work from clients by ignoring their requests

I am currently designing a website for a brilliant award winning restaurant in Sydney, nilgiri's, owned and managed by Ajoy Joshi.

Ajoy Joshi making paneer in a cooking class

 Integral to the website's design are images as they are a very efficient way of explaining nilgiri's which is far more than a simple restaurant - it offers cooking classes, a chef's table (a dégustation dinner presented personally by Ajoy), a Tiffin Room, external catering, hosting of functions, a spice shop, a range of simmer sauces, a Sunday Buffet etc. Consequently, I have been busy photographing nilgiri's.

Recently Ajoy asked me to create twelve framed images for the four private rooms at nilgiri's -  each room has a theme, Earth, Fire, Air and Water and consistent with these themes, I could have supplied Ajoy with images like those below:

Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia

Bondi Wave

Waterfall, Cradle Mountain Lake St Clare National Park

Glacier, Chamonix, France

Bay of Fires, Tasmania

But I reconsidered Ajoy's request - instead of themed images which would have effectively given me a captive audience, something every photographer desires, why not use the images I had already taken of nilgiri's to create a series of internal advertisements for the restaurant? To do this, all I would have to do is add a suitable caption to each image. So that diners could read the text and appreciate the images without having to peer closely, I made the prints A2 sized. As an added bonus for myself, I inserted my website address below each image.

The twelve framed images were delivered on a Tuesday and were an instant hit - diners in the Private Rooms found out that nilgiri's offered cooking classes etc and asked their waiters to tell them more. The waiters were thrilled as instead of having to break the ice with the diners, the images were doing it for them.

On Thursday Ajoy ordered eight additional images as he was confident the framed images would pay for themselves in no time at all.

The moral of this blog is to understand first and foremost that your commercial clients are buying images not as collectors of your art but because they think the images will boost their businesses and the more they are convinced your images will meet this purpose, the more work you will get from them. Yes, I could have chosen not to subjugate my own ego to the needs of my client, and quite happily given what Ajoy initially asked for, but by truly appreciating his needs, Ajoy is already a repeat customer of my work.

Wedding album design - how page backgrounds can enhance your images

This article came out of my frustration with page backgrounds when designing wedding albums. I would place a terrific image onto a page but fearing the background would swamp or detract from the image I would make the background neutral, perhaps colouring it by sampling a colour from the image in the hope of making the background harmonise with the image. 


But the wedding pages were dull, and try as I might, I could not find any primers to help me work out a set of rules. So this blog is about how to design backgrounds which unify and enhance images in a wedding album.


This blog could not have been written without the assistance of Peter Travis, Australia's foremost colourist, whose knowledge of colour is as great as his ability to explain how colour and layout can shape our perception of images.




1. Use of background colour as a metaphor


The front cover of my album was a stunning image which had predominantly dark tones.

 The image size and shape was constrained by the type of album - whilst the album had 15" x 11"landscape dimensions, the front cover image was debossed (recessed) and its size was restricted to 7.5" x 6 ". The background of the image was the material used for the front cover.


When I originally chose a background I wanted a dark brown colour since I wanted to use leather and it only came in dark tones which I thought would make the image too sombre given it was already quite darkly toned.




Instead, I chose a light cream album cover that was consistent with the lighter tones of the bride's dress and got the following result.

But I should have stuck to my guns and gone for a dark background because metaphorically, a dark background is more appropriate. What do I mean?  A wedding focusses on a couple and had I thought about the dark tones and the boxy dimensions of the image, then metaphorically, the couple is in a private box at the opera, she looking down at the stage below and he looking at her. So if the background to the image is dark, this reinforces the 'private box' nature of the image as per the image below.

2. Use backgrounds to emphasis the dimensions of the image

If your image has landscape proportions, then you should have a similarly proportioned background in order to emphasis the 'rectangularity' of the image.  This follows the principle that repetition of image shapes is pleasing to the mind. This sounds easy to accomplish, particularly in a landscape dimensioned wedding album but what if your image is portrait dimensioned?

The spread below is from my original design:

As you can see, the left image is portrait dimensioned but the page isn't. By extending the background of the right image over to the left page, and by having skinny vertical columns either side of the image on the left page, the background becomes more in line with the dimensions of the image.

Other techniques to enhance the images include using a thin white line to break up the slabs of background colour to make it more interesting -there is nothing worse than acres of a single colour as background to a double spread. I also bleed the left image to the top and bottom margins of the page to avoid the sense that the image is hemmed in or constricted by the page.

3. Give images a sense of direction and movement to make them satisfying to the viewer


Different shapes convey direction differently. A circle gives the viewer no sense of direction, a square a little bit and a rectangle most of all. Similarly, the placing of a shape on a page affects the sense of movement; somehow, a rectangle placed more to the left than to the right of a page gives the viewer a sense the image is travelling.  To understand these concepts better, contrast a circle placed dead centre in a page with a rectangle to the left of a page. Somehow, if images are too centred, they became neutral and static but if they are off-centre, they have a sense of movement which makes them more interesting to look at and their shape (rectangular as opposed to circular) enhances the interest by giving them directionality.


In the first spread below, the left page picture is square and almost centred but I wanted to convey the sense of movement - after all , the bride is being ushered by her father to the awaiting groom!

In the final spread, I have made the left image rectangular and placed it off-centre. I have also extended the background of the left page to make the right image more vertical and have added a thin white vertical line to add interest to the background which would otherwise be two slabs of colour.

4. Use graduated backgrounds to counter brightness of less important objects

Our eyes naturally go to the brightest part of an image. In a wedding, this is likely to be the bride's dress but the bride's face is more important and the image should somehow direct the viewer to her face. 

 The background can lessen the impact of the bright white dress and increase the visibility of the bride's face if it is graduated so the lighter part of the background 'washes' out the impact of the dress whilst the dark part of the background emphasises the bride's white face.

The following two pages show how a graduated background subtly reduces the impact of the bride's 

wedding dress.

In conclusion, don't play safe when considering backgrounds for your images and your wedding albums will be the better for it.