A dog day afternoon

Back in 2008, I wrote about the ‘ugly button’, a unique setting to any camera I pick up that makes anyone who stands infront of my lens gain 2 stone and look like they’re sitting on something uncomfortable.

Strangely, when photographing animals, the ugly button doesn’t come into effect. For some reason I take much better pictures of birds/animals/plants than I do of people. This theory was put to the test yesterday, when I had the brilliant opportunity to get some shots of one of my wifes colleagues and his dog, Ed.

Ed is a gorgeous, three year old labradour with loads of energy, even more so when given a massive chunk of Nairn beach, white sand, sunshine, water and lots of willing helpers to play with him.

There are lots of things to consider when photographing dogs and I learned the hard way, having taken hundreds of pictures of our beloved German Shepherd, Jye who sadly died a few years ago. The photos I took are all we’ve got left of Jye, and I didn’t realise at the time how important the shots would become. Everytime I look at some of the photos, I’m hit with a wave of regret that I didn’t take more/expose better/get Jye to do this/that/the next thing that made her such a special dog.

5 things I consider when photographing animals.

1 – Get low.

Unless you’re extremely short or have an elephant for a pet, you’re going to be taller than your furry friend, everyone has hundreds of shots of themselves shooting down on an animal. It doesn’t look natural and you gain intimacy in a shot by getting the animal to make eye contact with you, or at least have the eyes on the same plane as the lens. Alternatively, stand on a slope and get the animal to come either ‘uphill’ or ‘downhill’ to you, this will force the dog to look up/down and can make for some intresting angles.

2 – Get the light right.

Furry things tend to have glossy coats. Especially in bright conditions, you run the risk of over-exposing parts of the animal where the light is bouncing off their coats. Dial down your exposure compensation, I shot everything on the beach yesterday with at least -0.3 exposure compensation and in some cases getting down to -1 and even -2 in places. This will make the shot look dark when you’re reviewing them on the camera, but you can recover dark shots, blown highlights are blown highlights unless you have an uber-camera with uber-cabilities.

3 – Long and tight is (usually) right.

Dogs move about a lot and tend to focus on things in their immediate vacinity (sticks/people/other dogs etc) so a zoom lens with a decent reach is a good way to go. I don’t find a tripod hugely useful when photogaphing animals because they move about faster than I can adjust the tripod. So a medium zoom lens, something in the region of 50-200mm that you can keep stable in your hands works best for me. Get nice and tight on the subject so the animal fills a good chunk of the frame, you need a bit of context but don’t lose sight of the fact that you’re photographing the dog.

Note the word usually in the comment above, throw a few wide shots into the mix as it will give a set of photos some depth.

4 – Do something!

Get the animal to do something, there’s nothing more boring than “Dog sitting and owner standing”, it doesn’t really tell a story and due to the height difference, it doesn’t’ really work on a compositional level either. Throw things for the dog, roll about with the dog, get the dog to jump/bark, it doesn’t really matter, just do something!

5 – Be creative when post-processing

Something I’ve been guilty of in the past is spending hours on landscape shots and minutes on portraits. It’s true that good portrats should stand on their own merit, but try black and whte, try ‘colour popping’ a subject, try a frame or a creative crop and if you’ve followed rule 2, you’ll need to balance the light and recover any dark bits in the shot.

So there you go, I’m pretty happy with the 100 or so shots that I took yesterday, you can see the whole selection on Picasa and a few choice ones on Flickr (Thanks to the 15,000 people who have already visited my Flickr site, all visitors and comments greatfully received).

Frosty Things...

A nightmare few weeks, family illness, work and a host of other things have conspired against me getting out with the camera and also blogging.

After what felt like the wettest, most miserable autumn in history, my corner of Scotland finally moved into winter over last weekend. As result we got frost, lots and lots of frost. We got frost on frost, which makes for photographic gold, especially after weeks of rain.

So off I went for a jaunt around the river. The key thing to remember when taking pictures of frost is white balance, white is actually a really complicated colour photographically, depending on the ambient light in your composition, your camera can struggle to get ‘real’ white. This is where white balance comes in. I have a lovely feature on my trusty E-510 that enables me to balance my whites by taking a shot of something I know is white, like a piece of white paper. So you take a snap of the paper whilst in the field and that automatically calibrates white based on the paper. This is fine, provided the light doesn’t change, in which case things can get a little weird and you need to re-calibrate.

Anyway, with white paper in hand, I managed to get some winter-themed shots. When everything is covered in frost, I find it gets both easier and harder to take a good photo. The tree in todays picture was one of my better attempts, the challenge (once again) is composition, whilst this shot shows the tree in all it’s chilly glory, you don’t really get an idea of just how thick the frost was. But I like it, you can see the whole bunch on my Picasa photo stream and the best of them on my flickr stream.

In other news, I’ve been approached to contribute some photo’s to a local website and I really like feel like I’m slowly starting to raise my photographic profile within the local community. Which is nice.

Finally, much kudos to JT and his brilliant “Simply Superb Swans” website. He’s just posted some great photo’s of ‘a year in the life’ of the River Nairn and it’s inhabitants. I love the documentary style of the pictures, interspersed with some really creative photos. Well worth a look…

Unsure if I’ll get another chance to blog before Christmas, so have a good one and barring further crises, I’ll be back on the blog in the New Year :)

Photo Objectives & why they (sometimes) don't matter

It’s been a slow month photographically. I had a great week off at the end of October; we spent a couple of days ina Aviemore, staying at the brilliant Hilton Coylumbridge. It’s one of my favourite hotels, feels more like a little community than a hotel, the food is brilliant and the a few days there is a great way to relax and get away from it all.

Photographically, Aviemore is a real treasure chest of opportunities. It has one of the largest arboreal forests left in Scotland, which looks stunning in autumn, the gorgeous Loch Morlich, which nestles in the forest and I haven’t got onto the pleasing pointy-ness (not a word, but should be) of the Cairngorm mounting range.

But the Gods of photography did not smile on me. Low cloud and crappy weather conspired against me and I struggled to get any decent shots. Photographing autumn colours is a real skill by the way. My mate Ted has nailed it, as have many other photographers, the challenge is composition, you have the dilemma of getting the blaze of autumn foliage in enough detail, coupled with the challenge of giving the shot some context. I struggled with this, especially given the flat, dull, damp weather conditions. In fact, my favourite shot of the time spent there is a black and white one, taken on one of my dawn strolls. I went out with the objective of shooting landscapes, sunrises and mountains, but came back with this shot and a few of the forest. I’ve talked before about setting objectives when you go out with the camera, but sometimes it pays to be flexible with that objective if the conditions/environment isn’t right. The shot below was taken in RAW at ISO 200 & F22 about 20 minutes before sunrise. This aperture slows the shutter and creates that the blurred water effect, but by shooting in Aperture (A) mode, your camera does the hard work of exposing correctly. The black and white treatment came from using photoshops black and white sliders to balance the shot. I’m really pleased with this one.

Okay so that was Aviemore, not great for photos, but a perfect, relaxing trip away. November to date has been a wash out, almost constant rain and very few crisp, frosty mornings or that lovely hard, clear afternoon light. Just rain, rain, rain. I managed to dodge the showers a few weeks ago and got out and about to shoot sunsets. Once again, the sunset wasn’t great so instead I turned my attention to other things, namely the swans on the river. You can read more about Nairns swan community and other wildlife at this great blog. Another Black and White shot, this time using Nik Colour FX pro to balance the colours.

So the moral of the tale? Set yourself goals when you head out with your camera, but be prepared to change your objective if the environment conspires against you. Not much of a message, but then I’m not much of a photographer! I guess a better message would be to keep taking pictures and enjoy it.

My highlight of the week (and my real reason for blogging today), the brilliant folks at http://www.gurnnurn.com/ have featured my photos not once, but twice this year. Huge kudos to them, not only for having a most excellent community blog, but also for having a very discerning taste in photographers!

A grand day out...

It’s been a slow month for me photographically; work and family commitments have conspired against me and meant that I haven’t had much time to get out and about with the camera.

That all changed this week, with a long weekend off work and a chance to get out to the area around Cannich, a beautiful part of the world, especially at this time of year, with the autumn colours in full swing. The trees looked amazing and we were lucky with the weather, brilliant blue skies and unseasonably warm for October, which is usually a horrible, damp month in Scotland.

We went up to Dog Falls, which is where todays two shots come from, the first is a close crop of some oak leaves that were just waiting for a gust of wind to blow them off the tree, I loved the contrast between the gold leaves and the blue skies, I’ve done nothing to this photo except crop it a bit. Photography is easy when you’ve got great subject material like this!

The second shot is of the river. The viewing galleries for the waterfall are really stupidly placed, you can’t get a good shot of the falls themselves, I took this shot from a bridge about 200 yards down from the waterfall, what makes this one special is that stunning tree on the right. As I’ve talked about in the past, knowing what to crop is still a challenge for me. I could have just kept the tree in frame, but instead opted to give the tree some context by including the river and the shore. I think it works. This one got a saturation boost to bring out the colours a little and also some added contrast, I could have gone nuts with HDR and massive amounts of post-processing, but I don’t think it would add anything. Comments appreciated as always.

You can see the full set of shots from my day out on the Picasa stream, along with some choice picks on Flickr. Next week looks set to be a good one, we’re off to Aviemore for a well-deserved break for a couple of days, the autumn colours there should be really nice.

Dpreview, Ranting, Competitions and Publication

It’s been a good week. Not a lot of time to get out and about with the camera, but a few bits of good news for me on the photographic front.

In order to try and take my photography to the next level, I’ve been entering a few online photo competitions, flickr is all well and good as a channel to share your pictures, but if you actually want your shots critiqued by your peers, then competitions is the way to go.

It’s been a while since I’ve ranted so….

Dpreview.com, a brilliant, free website for all things photographic, the content is fantastic and the lengths that the guys go to in order to test the gear is amazing, and provides me with more than enough information about the latest camera gear.

Whilst the content generated by the owners of dpreview is excellent, the forums have gone down hill massively in the last few years (inline with the massive increase in people using DSLRs to make photos). For someone in IT, the Dpreview forums are really interesting, we often talk about digital moderation and control of information in my job and it’s typically viewed as a kind of draconian thing that makes peoples jobs more difficult.

Dpreview shows what happens if you don’t moderate forums. The Olympus forum in particular can be a very unpleasant place to live. If users identify issues with their equipment and ask their fellow forum members if they’ve encountered the same problem, they are typically derided and accused of trolling. Very few pictures are posted and a great deal of forum space is wasted by people simply moaning about other forum users. This is what happens when you don’t moderate. But, there are some incredibly talented photographers on dpreview and some wonderfully helpful people who give their time, advice, loans of equipment and knowledge to help others. The good is dramatically outweighed by the dross because there is no moderation, and that makes them almost unusable as a source of information. Some of the posters on dpreview might read this and then they’ll comment at the bottom of this blog about how much they disagree with me…you get the idea….except that you won’t because I moderate my comments!

The example I’ve used to illustrate this in the past is this one. In this case, one of the dpreview developers has posted a fascinating article on the evolution of a forum post. Showing how it grows and digresses and goes off at tangents. If you’re remotely interested in how people use the internet to communicate, it’s fascinating. If you scroll to the bottom, you’ll see how the dpreview community responds to it….basically by deriding, disagreeing and moaning. That’s why I don’t spend much time in the forums.

Away from the forums, Dpreview has introduced ‘Challenges’, effectively a way for users to set up and moderate their own competitions on a subject of their choice. This can be anything from a content specific challenge like ‘pictures of road signs’ to a technique like ‘Black and White’ or ‘HDR’, even equipment specific challenges like ‘Shots taken with a D90’. The challenges are opened, pictures are submitted and then the shots are judged by the community. It’s dpreview, so the same people that can be found moaning about the forums are also moaning about the challenges, but I think they are super.

I’ve entered 2 pictures so far, in the first I came about 100th out of 200 and the second one finished 39th out of 183. The standard of photography in the challenges is fantastic, and I’ve learnt an awful lot just by looking at other competitors in the challenges. It’s great fun, and for me it feels a lot more inclusive than the forums.

So that’s cool, in other news, my employer has approached me and asked to use some of pictures in a brochure! Okay, it’s unpaid, but it’s still getting my pictures out there and is enormously flattering. In still other news, one of my prints sold at a charity auction for about £60 so that’s cool as well.

I get told all the time that people ‘love’ my pictures and they are ‘excellent’ but when people are willing to reach for their wallets for my photos or rating them highly in competitions, well that’s praise indeed.

Just enough time to mention this weeks picture. I went back to the beach this weekend with my tripod to do some more water-blurring type stuff, the above shot is the best of the bunch. Enjoy.

Promiscuous fingers

I vaguely remember wittering on about setting yourself challenges or themes when out shooting. It helps focus the mind a little and forces you to take pictures of things you normally wouldn’t.

Cat was in Inverness on Friday, getting her hair cut, a process that takes about 3 hours, so it was a good chance to take some pictures of one my favourite cities. The challenge was to take some shots of Inverness that hadn’t been taken before. As the capital of the Highlands, Inverness is a real tourist hotspot and must be one of the most photographed cities in Scotland.

Recently I’ve also been taking 100s of shots of the same thing. on my recent trip to Dunrobin Castle, I must have taken 200 shots of the falconry display and almost using my SLR like a point and shoot, just firing off shot after shot in the hope that one would work out. I think I kept about 10 shots of the display, a keeper rate of just 10%.

My trigger finger is getting dangerously promiscuous.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with that, especially with wildlife, but the good photos were taken more by luck than judgement, and this somehow feels like I’m ignoring all the things I’ve learned over the past few years. With this in mind, I set myself the target of only taking 50 shots of Inverness, and then refining that number down to 25, a ‘keeper’ rate of 50%.

It’s really hard! Amazing how quickly bad habits get ingrained, I started by wandering up to Inverness Castle, to see if there was anything there that would make an interesting shot. The Castle also serves as a courthouse and council building, and it’s a rather squat, utilitarian building that isn’t too photogenic up close. Despite my eyes telling me there wasn’t a shot there, I decided to waste 5 of my precious shots on things that I knew wouldn’t make the cut. Curse my finger!

I then looked away from the castle itself and at the surrounding area, a brilliant panorama of the city and the hills and trees etc. That cost me a further 10 shots, but I really thought about each one. The ever brilliant Scott Bourne and Rick Sammon tell me every 10 days on their Photofocus podcast to ‘make pictures not take pictures’ and I think it’s finally sinking in!

Then it was down around the river, over the bridge and back up the other side, passing the architecturally interesting Eden Court theatre (pictured below). There goes another 10 shots. Down a nice alley and then into a church and I spent the last of my precious shots taking pictures of church spires and graves etc.

I’m really pleased with my final selection. Instead of spending hours choosing which shots to choose and perhaps sharing half of them…I was left with just a handful of pictures that I knew were okay. You can see the shots on my Picasa stream.

Now, I’m not advocating taking this approach on every trip out with the camera, I can visit Inverness anytime and take the shots I might have missed. If you’re at a wedding or an event that will only happen once, then fill every memory card you possess, but as an exercise in self discipline it’s really useful.

What are your thoughts – are your fingers getting promiscuous?

Panos, Owls and Lochs

Sorry for the lax blog posting this week. Other stuff keeps getting in the way!

Anyway, last week was a good one. Off fishing on Wednesday to Loch Lunndaidh in the hills above Golspie, a beautiful location with views out over the Dornoch Firth, great photography and 2 fish caught. Todays first picture comes from there, it’s a 6 shot panorama that’s been stitched in Photoshop and then blasted with lots of contrast.

Originally, we’d planned to go camping on Thursday and Friday, but rain stopped play and we headed off instead to Dunrobin Castle, also near Golspie. The castle itself was a bit of a disappointment for me due to the fact that you couldn’t take photographs inside the castle. No explanation was provided as to why this was the case, and you could take pictures outside. Considering I’m paying to look at their castle, I’m at a loss to understand why I couldn’t photograph it…stupid. Added to which, you only got to see a small part of the Castles interior and whilst what you saw was pretty cool, I would have liked to have seen more…also it wasn’t that interactive, I like picking things up and it just wasn’t like that.

Anyway, the gardens were amazing, brilliant topiary and ornamental stuff, which made for great photographic fodder, also the castle has its own falconer who does a couple of displays every day. These are fantastic, and worth the admission price for that alone. Andy Hughes is charismatic, funny and amazingly knowledgable about birds of prey. He actively hunts game with his birds and they are all incredibly trained and in amazing condition. You can get really close to them and I must have taken about 300 shots of the display and the birds afterwards.

This shot of ‘Plop’ the Barn Owl was taken with my 50-150mm lens, I was trying to get close ups of the owls face so was shooting at an aperture of about f6.0. By complete luck, I managed to keep the face sharp and blur the movement of the wings. I’m really pleased with the shot, but it was more by luck than judgement on my part!

Finally, Friday took us to Loch Achonachie at the top of Strathconon, with the weather improving, we were able to get back out fishing, and the final shot is of our little boat on the shore of the loch. It’s processed using my now fairly standard black and white workflow, I’m quite pleased with it.

The full set from this weeks shooting can be seen on the Picasa stream.

Anyway, off to do some shooting out and about in Inverness tomorrow…hopefully that will bring some nuggets.