Product shoots are a mixed bag

Hand puppets for children, seriously.

Kathryn @ Torrey Pines

Ok, so more insights on dance photography.

Lets start with silhouettes ( which are apparently harder to spell than to shoot ). Shooting silhouettes is great, mostly because it's easy. Why fight the sun by trying to light your subject, am I right? No worrying about flash recycle times, maximum sync speeds, or all of those other things I hate about using a speedlite.

So it's as easy as exposing for the sunset and you'll get a shutter speed plenty fast enough ( even at ISO 250 ) to freeze the awesome dance action.

There are obviously a lot of ways to retouch silhouettes, but these in particular I haven't modified very much. I would have liked to get even more contrast in the original exposure to make Kathryn's figure silhouette-out entirely but there is a huge bluff at Torrey Pines that reflects the sun back towards the water.

We worked for awhile with this sheer fabric thing and got a few good shots. The wind was blowing hard enough that we had to cooperate with it. It looks pretty cool but I've seen it photographed better.

Note: I spent a lot of time staring at the sun during this shoot which I do not recommend. When I got tired of it I just started shooting from the hip and hand-held just inches off the sand. The wide lens and low angles help dramatize the landscape and dancer.

Heres an alternative using the sun as key light rather than backlight. As long as you keep your model facing the sunset it works pretty well and there are plenty of opportunities for profiles with dance.

Kathryn teaches ballet and it shows in her dance. Shes so trained and reliable that she can reproduce the same leap for me five times so I can get the timing right. And like a good actor, it's great to be working with a dancer who can both improvise and take direction.

And let me mention how freezing it was... We finally had to give up when Kathryn's feet got so cold she couldn't point her toes anymore. She was a really good sport about the whole thing. You can see in the background that this was not a particularly popular time to be prancing around in the surf.

I probably could have kept more footprints out of the sand also but I'm not a perfectionist.

Jason & Jen's engagement @ Balboa Park

I headed out to Balboa Park this past Sunday to shoot some engagement portraits for Jason and Jen:

Jason planned a surprise vacation from Colorado to pop the question here in San Diego, which he did the night before our shoot. Unfortunately the weather wasn't typical of San Diego ( and they did get out of town before the storm ), but we made the most of the last overcast hours of the day.

Their personalities and smiles helped keep the mood lighthearted and we quickly covered a lot of locations.

I did my best to provide the historical background of the

park... "Who was Balboa? Umm.." and I felt I gave a pretty good tour.

Engagement shoots can be challenging for a variety of reasons but I find striking a balance of candid and conceptual ( cheesy ) shots is the most difficult. Trying to shoot two different styles simultaneously is a tough state of mind to maintain. I'm always just trying to give my clients variety so they're left with options in the editorial process.

Another challenge is to capture the personalities and character of people who you've had very little interaction with. This is a talent I've had success in refining. I can generally have people laughing at themselves ( or me ) within just a few minutes.

At the end of the day it's all about getting people animated and looking like they love each other! ( A lot of engagement photographers are so avant garde these days their subjects don't even appear to like each other. But thats a rant I'll save for later... )

Book Recommendation: The Tao of Photography

I would never recommend a book that I haven't read, and this one I thoroughly enjoyed. The Tao of Photography ( Gross, Shapiro ) is a hybrid of a text and coffee table book including lots of full page images as examples as well as exercises to develop one's photo-chi.

The authors reference the work of several famous photographers but place a lot of emphasis on Henri Cartier Bresson. All the examples and discussion are based on the black and white process, but the concepts can easily be extrapolated to a color format.

Photography is actually a great way to practice mindfulness. It is in all truth an art form based on how to look at things. This book does a good job of convincing the reader to break down guidelines for what makes a 'good' subject, or even a 'good' photograph. There is almost no discussion of the technical aspects of cameras, but instead an emphasis on process and composition.

Being someone who has studied photography up and down, I can say that this book provided a refreshing new way to think. It helps put motivation and sense of purpose back at the forefront of shooting.

Available at Amazon. And you can get it used for under $10.

Katie and Kevin Tritch - Jan 9th 2009

I had a great day Saturday shooting the wedding of Katie & Kevin Tritch down here in sunny San Diego. To say that this was a beautiful wedding wouldn't begin to do it justice. These are the kinds of events where I'm challenged to make sure everything looks as amazing in the camera as it does in reality.



The ceremony was held on the USD campus ( Katie's alma-mater ) in The Immaculata chapel. Everything was stress free from the start and I've rarely seen an event run so smoothly.

I had my friend Mike Patterson of Oalian Photography help me out with shooting the ceremony and following portrait session. He rounded out my focus on the traditional shots by getting candids and alternative angles whenever possible. Working with a 2nd shooter can really alleviate some of the pressure of working on such a tight schedule. The only real drawback is having another thousand images or so to manage. ( I left this wedding with 56 gigs of photographs ) Some photographers may disagree with me, but shooting everything in RAW is the best policy if you've got the storage media.

Around sunset the whole gang headed down to the Naval Submarine Station in Point Loma for more photo ops and the reception. I had never been on the base ( or shot a Navy wedding before for that matter ). It was a perfect venue with a deck that opened to the ocean.











Now I've said that I've seen some families that know how to party before but the Kavanaugh / Tritch clan might top them all. The dance floor was raging with a bunch of uniforms and even grandma. By the time I headed out around 10pm there was no sign of anybody slowing down.

When working an event doesn't feel like work at all you know you've got a great gig. Thanks Katie & Kevin!

1st Fashion shoot of the year with Megan

I headed out to the open space preserve with Megan yesterday morning to keep my fashion shooting skills sharp and spend some time with my new Canon 7D.

A few observations on the camera first. Having to compare this with my old 5D is a tough standard to follow, especially considering that the 7D retails for $1,000 less.
The fact that the new 7D is not a 'full frame' camera had me kind of bummed but the decision to buy finally came down to $$. The smaller sensor in the camera means working with a 'conversion factor' of 1.6x, or basically multiplying the focal length indicated on any lens by 160%. I did my best to find the bright side of this fact and the answer was hidden in my EF 50mm f1.4. ( 50mm x 1.6 = 80mm ) I now own an 80mm lens for portraits! Of course the optics won't have the exact benefits of a real 80mm lens, but it is one way to save about $1,600 on Canon glass!
So in summary I was pleased to be working with a more appropriate focal length than my previous standard of 50mm.

Now for the bad news... I'm not the first new 7D owner to quickly realize that this camera has problems in it's redesigned auto-focus system. There is nothing worse than getting your images on a monitor and realizing that they're just barely soft enough to be unusable. The jury is still out on the nature of the problem but I've read all over the net about possible solutions involving manually tuning focus, firmware updates, and custom function workarounds.
Several buyers have exchanged their 7D bodies ( even twice ) with no improvement in the autofocus system and in the meantime Canon has yet to propose a solution ( or even admit a problem exists ) .

So the moral here is... Don't go out shooting a whole wedding on your brand spanking new camera without testing it! I have a wedding tomorrow and I couldn't be more pleased with myself that I set up a test shoot. Also, I'm not getting attached to this thing. Yes it's new and flashy and it shoots HD video, but if the AF system is shoddy I'll return this thing first thing Monday morning.

Megan was a great model and a true pleasure to work with. Being a photographer herself makes it even more embarrassing for me to have committed one of the most seemingly amateur mistakes in the book. Fortunately she was consistent and delivered her best which shows in the images that did come out sharp.

San Felipe New Years 2010

Just sharing a few images from this year's trip to San Felipe.
To see more check out this gallery:
http://www.robertsonexposure.com/galleries/sfan10/index.html












These dogs were hanging out at the fireworks trailer. This brown one was cool but the black one in the background tried to bite my heel. It's bound to happen one of these days.



This is my friend Arturo who owns a hardware store downtown. His band, Agave Blues, performs around town almost every night of the week. A new bar opened outside town called the JollyMon and this picture is from their New Year's eve performance.

I don't think you can get these over sized sparklers in the states. They're pretty fun to photograph because the sparks come out sharp even though I'm hand-holding a five second shutter speed.

One of my other favorite San Felipe pastimes is taking walks (drinking beer) in the desert at sunset. I could tell earlier in the day that this was going to be a good sunset and it turned out to be possibly the best one I've seen. The color show kept going after the sun went down for at least an hour.

Happy 2010!

Digital archiving – how safe are your pictures?

It hasn't been long now since digital photography has been the standard for both professional and casual photographers. Digital files have replaced celluloid negatives and raised a whole new discussion of archiving

techniques.

There have been pros and cons to the transition to 'digital negatives' and I've gathered the following tips to share some responsible practices for archiving your digital files. It would be a catastrophe to my business for me to lose a clients work before delivering it, and equally as devastating to lose sentimental family photographs. These basic principles apply to pros and amateurs alike.

Fun fact: Ansel Adams lost up to a third of his early work to a fire in his San Francisco studio in 1937. Film stock used to have a nitrate base which was extremely flammable and could auto-ignite from exposure to heat or even static. At least today our storage media are not spontaneously combustible.

To begin with lets address a few risky practices. The absolutely most irresponsible way to store your pictures is on your cameras flash media card. I've seen far too many people who still have snapshots from last Christmas on their camera. Those images could be gone as easy as the camera being lost or stolen or deleted as a group with just a few button strokes. Please don't let me catch you doing this or you'll be in for a lecture. Get into the practice of regularly downloading the images to a hard drive or taking your flash card into a photo lab to have them transferred to disc or printed.

Now speaking of hard drives... they have a list of problems of their own. As a

general rule try to store your images on a separate drive or partition than your system drive ( where your operating system is installed ). This way if something goes wrong with your computer it's much easier to recover your files. ( I don't keep anything besides OS and program files on my C:\ drive )

Hard drives cannot be trusted. None of them. It doesn't matter how much you pay or what kind of guarantee they carry because when they break you're left with very few options. Professional data recovery rates are profane and often have no correlation to the difficulty of the job at hand. It's best to just plan ahead and cover your own bases by keeping redundant copies of your images on at least two hard drives. This can be set up with RAID mirroring ( the simultaneous writing of everything to two identical drives ), or automated with a variety of backup programs. A free and easy solution I've used in the past is SyncBack by 2BrightSparks - a free version is available. The biggest advantage of the digital negative is that it can be copied with no loss of quality, so take advantage of that fact.

What if your computer is stolen or destroyed by fire? Well it's likely that all of

your hard drives will be too, including your copies. To protect yourself against these situations you'll need to employ a form of off-site backup using an internet connection. There are several paid services which make setting up off-site backup simple, like Mozy.com Firesafe, bolt-down hard drives are also an affordable option. They're even waterproof so they'll survive the fire department hosing down your house. ( IoSafe makes a good one )

( I should point out here that I'm never compensated in any way to make product endorsements. I'm just offering a starting point if you're interested. )

If this is all starting to seem excessive its probably because you're hearing it from me. I'm absolutely paranoid about losing the work I've put so much time into. It's also probably why I have over three terabytes of hard drives hooked up to my computer and redundant copies hidden in various places to avoid total theft.

If you don't feel the need to take your photo archiving to the extreme a solution might be as simple as regularly making some prints of your favorite images. In many ways a photographic print is more permanent than a digital negative.

With a little planning most of your digital archiving can be automated using free or affordable solutions. The day something goes wrong you'll be glad you did.

Reflections on Jewelry photography

I had a jewelry shoot yesterday and I was quite pleased with the results. With jewelry you never know what kinds of materials you're going to be working with; shiny, opaque, transparent, or any combination of those in the same piece.

Aside from making the piece look good, communicating both the design and function are the priorities.

Working with such small subjects is a test of my patience, as well as the amount of 'styling' involved. Food is worse though.

A good macro lens is critical for getting as close to the subject as you'll need to be. The trade off of course is going to be your depth of field. I was using my Speedotron strobes to get enough exposure to use f22 and still having to work very cautiously with focus.

Patience is a requirement. 30 pieces took me 5 1/2 hours.

Almost forgot about Kalalau

I somehow forgot to share my slides from this year's trip to Kalalau valley on Kauai. The full set of 100 images or so is available here:

Kalalau Slides 2009

Without captions it might be a little hard to tell what you're looking at, so watch carefully for the Polynesian archeological sites and secret jungle gardens.

This portrait is of Biff, the self proclaimed tour guide of the valley. The bluff we're on for this photo has to be the best vista point for watching the sun set and it's not bad for photo ops.

Speaking of Kalalau sunsets, here is one of my favorites from this trip:

I've collected a lot of images over my five trips to Kalalau but somehow I never come away feeling like I've gotten the whole story on film. I guess the obvious lesson here is that it just isn't possible. One day I'm going to compile some photos and stories into a short book but there is still more to be learned.