Neil Danton

…the passing of photographer Charles Moore last week at the age of 79.

Who? some might say.

Charles Moore was the photographer whose images are often credited as helping to push through the 1964 Civil Rights Act in the U.S. His monochrome images from the late 50’s and early 60’s have become almost iconic now, although at the time he was just doing what photojournalists do – record events. Starting with the Montgomery Advertiser in Alabama and moving on to shoot for Life Magazine, he started documenting Dr Martin Luther King as a preacher, before he became publicly well-known.

Since I heard of his death I had seen several announcements that only contained a couple of his images. Finally though I came across an excellent piece by National Public Radio (NPR), which in addition to featuring a dozen images, contains a video interview with the photographer, recorded in 2005 that contains many additional images, and the story behind them. Featured images include many showing the significant moments of the civil rights struggle, including fire-hosing and using dogs to attack demonstrators, beatings, and covering the Klan.

Images by Charles Moore and video interview directed by Daniel Love and produced by Kenneth Love are on this link to NPR Picture Show – Charles Moore.

The video is just under half an hour. Well worth a look to remind ourselves of a era that seems almost unbelievable now.

Such a gentle man to record such horrific violence. Rest in peace.

TTFN

…the Distribution.

So now that the shoot is over and the images have been created, what to do with them? Or more importantly, how to get them to the publications that might use them?

Firstly, who is going to distribute them. Normally there will be 3 choices:
1) The photographer.
2) The client.
3) An intermediary, usually a PR person or agency, who may or may not be the client anyway.

Personally it doesn’t matter. If it’s not me, then I like to ensure that 2) or 3) actually know the correct distribution route, which we come to next. There are sometimes sneaky little secret routes that may be given to trusted photographers, that won’t generally be given out to anyone else. Special email addresses for instance (not that I’m a big fan of emailing images).

Secondly, the route. Again there are 3, one of which is commonly known, the second isn’t, and the 3rd is an additional one that I use. Not exclusively you understand. There are other photographers in the world that use the same method . Often I’ll use a combination of all three routes.
1) Email
2) FTP
3) Download

There are pluses and minuses to all of the above.
1) Email – In smaller publications this can be an effective method. Images and text (press release for instance) may be handled by the same person. In larger publications there can be a couple of downsides. Images and text need to go in different directions. Images are handled by the “picture desk”, who have little or no interest in press releases. Text or press releases will be handled & adjusted to fit the publications style, by a journalist or sub-editor, who have little or no interest in images.

Email systems at larger publications are also often automated, so that the attachments (images) are automatically stripped out of an email and put onto the picture system. The email is then automatically dumped, so don’t put any important information in the body of the email, because it might never be seen. Also, don’t attach a separate file (word doc or similar) to the email, as this could cause everything to be dumped. Some of the auto-email systems will even review the image(s) first, to see if it has IPTC information, and if not, it’s straight in the dump pile again. Yet another problem can be the reverse of the auto-system, in that if you send to an email address that is not the correct person, or is not manned due to sickness, holiday or a long lunch, the images may not be seen until it is too late.

Other disadvantages are the limitation in quantity and file size of images that can be attached, and the speed of transfer. It’s called email because that’s what it was designed for – mail, as in a letter. It’s not called eDHL or eUPS because it was never designed to send huge packets of information like images, so it can be painfully slow at times when sending a lot of images.

2) FTP – (stands for File Transfer Protocol). This a method where a virtually unlimited number of images can be sent directly from one computer (server) to another. In the example we are interested in, it means that the images arrive on the publications’ picture system almost the instant they are received.

Disadvantages – you can’t send any other type of file (like a press release) as the file will be rejected if it is not a recognised image file-type. Only available to photographers that the publication know and trust.

Advantages – very, very fast. Almost twice as fast as email, and direct to the people that are interested in images.

3) Download. For some publications I have an arrangement where they can download images from my archive.

Disadvantage – not instant. Before the images can be downloaded, they have to be uploaded! That can sometimes cause a delay before they are available, but for non-urgent distribution it’s a good method.

Advantages – images are available 24/7. Images can be made available that are much higher file size (and therefore quality) than can be attached to an email.

That’s about it really. The only other thing to remember is basically a sum of this and all the other parts of this series. The image-receiving side of large publications receive thousands, yes thousands of images every day. For a national newspaper in this country, around 2-3,000, and this is a small country. (A popular magazine in Europe, like e.g. Germany’s Stern, will receive 7-8,000 EVERY DAY). These images are being supplied on subscription from agencies, or because they have been commissioned by the publication, or because they have been sent in speculatively.

Most of the picture systems that these publications use are a constantly scrolling and updating view of the newest-to-arrive 30-50 images, viewed as small thumbnails.

In order to stand out, I hope this series has pointed you in the right direction to getting the images you will need.

Previously: PR Photography 101 pt05 The Caption

TTFN

…is not a camera setting to be used when shooting Caucasian people

This is one of the settings that a lot of people ignore, leaving a camera on “Auto” because they don’t understand it, or are just a teeny bit frightened of it.

I have no intention of going into too much detail about it at the moment, as it’s just a way of quickly referencing a couple of tricks I use on occasion, to jazz-up an image when I’m looking for something a little different.

Truth be told, I forgot to write today’s post, and so this is being done in a panic, waaay too early in the morning, before I head out for a busy day.

Before I go on then, a quick explanation of white balance (WB):

Light has a colour temperature. You might not think so, but that’s because the human eye is a wonderful creation, far more intelligent than all the electronics that camera manufacturers can jam-in to the latest cameras. When, for instance, the human eye receives a scene that isn’t natural daylight, it compensates for any colour shift and still displays white as white so it appears that the scene is “normal”.

Cameras can’t do that. Adjusting the WB setting on the camera tells it what is really white. The “auto” setting can do it to a certain extent, but not completely.

Light varies in colour temperature from warm to cold, with different types of light in different situations giving a different temperature. Even outdoor daylight varies, depending on whether it is sunlight, cloudy, shade etc. The “value” of the light is measured in Kelvin, with daylight being very roughly 5,000 to 6,000. Camera “Auto” can usually cope from about 3,000 to 7,000, but can still give differing results between one shot and the next. That’s why about 90% of the time it’s better to set the WB manually. At least then, even if the setting is slightly wrong, all the images are going to be wrong in exactly the same way, and can be easily fixed in post-production. Manually setting the WB allows a far greater range, from about 2,000 to 10,000.

An added complication is artificial light, tungsten & fluorescent, have a tint to them. Un-corrected, a scene lit with tungsten lighting will appear to the camera to be yellowy-orange, while a scene lit with fluorescent lighting will appear green.

When using flash as a primary light source it doesn’t matter an awful amount. Portable flash (strobes) are daylight balanced, so that will eliminate much of the problem.

Oh dear, I said it wasn’t going to get techie, and it’s starting to, so I’ll head myself off at the pass and move on.

The whole (original) point before I got distracted, was that occasionally I use a little trick to change the background of an indoor scene. This little trick (and the 2nd one I’ll mention in a moment) have to be used sparingly otherwise they start to look ridiculous.

Trick 1 then is to set the camera to tungsten WB when in daylight, or a mix of artificial light and daylight, which has the effect of turning the scene blue. Of course any people in the scene turn blue as well, even if it’s not very very cold. The solution to that is to light them with flash, and fire the flash through a coloured gel. In this case it’s a CTO gel that I use. CTO = Colour Temperature Orange, orange being the opposite end of the colour spectrum to blue. Oh dear, getting techie again.

So, turn an industrial scene with dubious lighting blue, light the subjects with a gel-covered flash shooting through a white umbrella, et voila:

Used sparingly it gives another option to change a scene.

Another trick, again occasional use only, is to use a wacky lens. In this case I mean a fisheye. You can usually tell when someone gets one of these as a new toy, because every image they produce will look like someone has bent every straight line in the world. I use mine 3 or 4 times a year I’d say, no more, but sometimes it works:

That’s it, got to run…

TTFN

…the Caption –

is not a Press Release!!!

No no no no no, and NO. Did I mention “No”?

It may vary with small-circulation publications, where one man, a small dog and a packet of fruit pastilles are putting the whole publication together, but any publication which is large enough to have a picture editor do not want to see “PR speak” in an image caption.

Any of the following, which may have been included in the press release, do not need to be detailed in a caption:

“Exciting”, “Wonderful”, “Fantastic”, “Not to be missed”, “Sensational”, “Brilliant”.

A journalist or sub-editor can take the facts from a breathlessly-excited press release and translate them into copy that fits with the publication’s style, but the image editors don’t want to read through the BS.

To quote from Sgt Joe Friday in the classic old American TV series Dragnet: “All we want are the facts ma’am”.

That can be summed up as Who What When Where and Why.

Before I go through those, just a brief rewind to explain exactly what a caption is, because not everyone knows. I’ll try not to get too “techie” here, but the basics need to be understood.

Prior to the invention of digital cameras, photographers used to shoot film (imagine that!). The process of getting an image onto the page of a publication included making a print, which was used to make up the page of said publication. The caption (or detail) regarding the content of the image, was literally written out onto a label, and stuck to the back of the image. That way, anyone who came across the print could just flip it over and read whatever the image was about.

Then technology moved on and via a very unwieldy and painful process (before the interwebthingy and broadband) images started to be transmitted via telephone lines for faster delivery to publications (newspapers being the prime example of the need-for-speed). Trouble was, you couldn’t transmit a label through a phone line, so having the information regarding the content of the image somehow had to be transmitted along with the digital version.

Along came a bunch of brainy people including newspapers, agencies and software gurus, and created the IPTC. While that sounds like the abbreviation for a Trade Union, in fact it stands for International Press Telecommunications Council. This led to the standard method of including a caption, EMBEDDED INTO a digital image, known as the IPTC or Metadata information. With the appropriate software, anyone could now read the information relating to an image, including photographer details, copyright, and the “facts ma’am”, as detailed above.

This leads to an important point regarding PR images. In larger publications a press release and an image may go in different directions but will need to be tied back together at some time, so need to refer to each other. More on that in pt06 – The Distribution.

So what does the IPTC information look like? I’m glad you asked, because I’m going to show you. It depends on the software you are using to view, but basically all the information will be available, just in different formats.

The version I’ll show you is from the software I use to sort, select and caption my images – Photo Mechanic by Camera Bits. For me, and many pro’s worldwide, this is the bees-knees of photo software for fast editing. There are of course other types of editing software, and I’ve used quite a few, but for me Photo Mechanic is the daddy of them all.

This is a view of the application open on my desktop computer:

If we zoom in a little and highlight one image we are going to look at:

We can then click on an icon to see the IPTC info. This is the lower half that contains nothing of interest at the moment:

and this is the top half that contains the caption:

So back to the point of Who What Where When & Why. If we zoom in further to just the Caption field…

The “Who”:

The “What”:

The “When”:

The “Where”:

The “Why”:

On occasion, where an image might not be accompanied by a press release it is acceptable to include further information than the basics. Personally I add this after the main caption and my own details, and clearly label it as “EXTENDED CAPTION:”.

Remember that at the end of the day, the caption is the information that should be displayed underneath or at the side of an image in a publication. A novel is not necessary. In most publications there is generally only sufficient room for a couple of sentences – at most.

Previously: PR Photography 101 pt 04 The Shoot
Next up: PR Photography 101 pt 06 The Distribution

TTFN

…Don’t They?

Apologies if you’ve just used a search-engine and are looking for the 1969 Sydney Pollack directed film about a dance marathon, but this is nothing to do with it.

This is about me shooting horses, actually more about shooting a horse-trainer, and only shooting with a camera.

I was assigned last week by one of the “Sundays” to head out into the countryside early on a very cold morning to shoot a feature on former jockey, now trainer, Jim Culloty. Jim won many races as a jockey, including the Cheltenham Gold Cup three times in succession aboard Best Mate.

I met up with the journalist and we arrived together, so while the interview was taking place, I was off scouting locations and setting up lights.

By the time the interview was finished, I had my shot-list sorted out in my head, and lights set-up in two locations.

First up was a shot in the Yard, one-light with a mini softbox:

Then there was an archway that led from the Yard to the Gallops and I wanted something there. This was going to be quite difficult to balance the daylight coming into the arch from the Yard, with the darkness underneath the arch itself. I had set-up two lights on stands behind the conveniently located doors that hid them, both firing out towards the entrance at about 45deg. As best I could guess I had the power about right, at least that’s what the images of the back of my hand were telling me!

I had my subject lead a horse through the archway, and believe it or believe it not, I’d nailed the flash-power with the 1st image:

I made another couple in different locations, here’s one:

The one that was used was actually taken in one of the stables, no lights, just subject interacting with one of the horses. Out of about 6 frames I chose this one to transmit and it was used pretty-near full page width:

That was it. 15 minutes to set-up lights, 20 minutes shooting, 5 minutes to pack-up lights and 30 minutes & 20 miles down the road before I could feel my fingertips again.

TTFN