Neil Danton

Fortunately, we both managed to avoid a soaking, although I came pretty close to it.

A second look at the back-story to creating a fairly simple editorial image. Nothing remarkable in the image as such, pretty standard fare for an editorial feature in a sunday newspaper. Fairly shallow depth of field to focus on the “widget” (yep did the reverse image as well, with the subject in focus and the “widget” out of focus).

It’s the setting-up that I’m detailing…

The subject is an engineer and the “widget” is part of a system that assists visually impaired people with swimming. Anyway, the sunday newspaper in question really wanted a image taken in a swimming pool environment and a local leisure centre were happy to oblige us – but we could only have access before they opened for the day (no cameras or phones allowed in swimming pool areas nowadays).

OK fine then. “What time are you open to the public?”

“7am”

“and what time do the staff open-up?”

“06:30/06:40″

Now that in itself wouldn’t be a problem, nice early start, get shoot done, off for breakfast.

One small fly in the ointment – having experienced shooting swimming competitions, I know that generally it takes AT LEAST an hour, sometimes longer, for all the metal, glass and electronics in a camera to adjust to the very high humidity in an indoor pool area.

So three conditions then. Opening time (fixed), kicking us out time (fixed), camera equipment fogging up (hmmm, maybe a variable there).

I had to make a choice on equipment at 6am and stick to that choice. The gear was put into the passenger foot-well of the vehicle and I drove to the pool with the vehicle heater on full blast. Happened to be in a period of fairly warm & humid weather which rarely happens here. Brilliant, I’m wearing shorts & a t-shirt and the heater thinks it’s mid-winter.

Arrived at the pool, almost fell out of the vehicle which, even with the windows open, was like being in a greenhouse by then, left the heater on until the moment we gained access at 06:40, and then carried the gear inside wrapped in a fleece!

The pool area was fairly hot, but the actual pool is covered with a canvas overnight so the humidity wasn’t over-bearing. By the time the canvas had been reeled in we were set to go, 5 or 6 images and we were done, just as I could feel the humidity starting to rise from the water.

No fogging on camera or lens, and exited the leisure centre at 06:59

Above is my preferred image, but the paper used this one:

Think that’s the earliest I’ve done a shoot, done post-processing, transmitted to picture desk, had breakfast, and all by 8am!

TTFN

A couple of editorial portraits coming up on the blog this week, just to show a little of the back-story behind a seemingly simple portrait.

Some of the requests you get have your brain going around in circles. This portrait for a sunday newspaper was of a lady writing a thesis on mental health and the differences in how it relates to men & women.

Them: “We need something that depicts that ideally”

Me: “Oh OK (WTF?). Sure (WTF?). I’ll see what I can figure out (what the, what the, WTF?)”

Simple then. An image of something that’s not solid, or tangible or quantifiable.

I arranged with my subject that the best time for me to do the shoot was during the coffee-break at the conference she was at.

I had an hour to get there, set-up and dream up an image.

I took a couple of straight portraits as back-up (the safety shots) and then commissioned a couple of conference delegates for the background of just about the only thing I could dream up:

Not too sure what else I could have done! What do you think?

TTFN

Had a (very) quick shoot recently with these two mad-uns who were heading off to Finland to take part in the Wife Carrying Championships.

It was very quick because they were going to be travelling from Ireland to Finland BY ROAD and had just collected their camper van and were running a bit behind schedule, and I was under pressure to get to another assignment.

Literally a 5 minute shoot then, but I love the quality of light that the Ranger Quadra kicks out.

TTFN

A lot of business people don’t have much time available for a portrait session. More time might be allocated if it was for their own corporate or commercial use, but when it’s an editorial shoot for a Sunday newspaper you have to work fast.

This was for the Business section of a Sunday newspaper and the feature usually calls for an upright (portrait) image so that’s what I shot, but I also shot each image horizontal (landscape) as well. Requirements have a habit of changing.

Subject was the Chairman of a company that produces bed-side medical gizmo thingamajigs and fortunately the company have a mock-up hospital room with the device.

Slightly tricky lighting for this, as the “monitor” didn’t show up very well in the very bright ambient light level in the room, so for once too much light was the problem.

The solution was to kill-off all the room lights and set the exposure so that some detail was visible on the display. The rest of the scene is completely lit by a small amount of light coming through the blinds-fitted window, and an Ezybox softbox.

Total time from walking my gear in the door was 20 minutes to set-up, shoot and dismantle. That gave me 7 different images in 3 different locations. If I go any faster I’ll have the job done before I get there – and I can just sit at home all day drinking coffee.

TTFN

Anyone who makes a comment about that title referring to me is in deep trouble.

It’s the shape of the image, which is required to fit full-page width “above the fold” of a Sunday newspaper, specifically the Money section. Takes a bit of thinking about.

The last 3 Money section front-pages I’ve shot for this particular newspaper have all needed to be capable of being cropped to “letter box” shape, and they’ve also all involved children of one size or another.

The latest was the youngest though:

TTFN

I’ve photographed some famous people, some unknown people, some Very Important People, both those who really are VIP and a few who are only legends in their own minds. I’ve photographed royalty, presidents, Taoisigh (Prime Ministers of Ireland) and lots and lots of common-or-garden people just like me.

Recently was the first time I can ever remember that I was nervous about photographing my subject.

It didn’t help that I only had half an hour notice as he just happened to be in Cork City at a meeting regarding his up-coming exhibition and I had to squeeze in this shoot before the other two I had that day. Then the classic three drops of rain and the traffic comes to a standstill in the city factor, meant I was 20 minutes late for the appointment before I even started, and I’m NEVER late usually.

Whether he was actually in the slightest bit bothered I’ll never know, but he certainly didn’t seem at all concerned and after an all too short chat (about 4 hours too short as far as I was concerned) I knocked-out a couple of quick portraits in the (very short) time I had available.

My subject was music photographer Fin Costello.

You might not know the name, but I’m sure you’d know some of his images. He’s been a photographer since the late 60s and shot The Stones, Kiss, Pete Townsend, Cat Stevens, Peter Gabriel, Robert Plant, Phil Lynott and many others. His portfolio is like a who’s who of the music industry.

The shoot was for a magazine supplement in a Sunday newspaper but it was much too early to have his exhibition images at the shoot, so much as I’d have liked him with some of his work, it wasn’t to be:

A brilliant photographer but just as importantly (maybe more so), a true gentleman.

His Pictures in Rock exhibition will be at the Cork Vision Centre from 2nd June – 28th July. I haven’t seen the exhibits but it’s highly recommended anyway!

TTFN

Had an assignment recently for one of the Sunday newspaper magazines to feature some images of an art exhibition.

It was in the Crawford Art Gallery in the city, which has 2 main gallery sections, the light bright section, and the dark moody section and on the way there I was wondering which one the exhibition would be in, obviously from the point of view that more light = less work for me. Which section was it in? Yep, you got it, it had to be the dimly lit section.

Apart from some exhibits of paintings & drawings which might be interesting but are very err, flat, one of the pieces I had to get was a sculpture. At least there’s some form to that.

Two minor problems: very low light levels and the colour-balance of the lighting. This was the result of my first test shot on daylight white-balance:

Nice huh?

I tried tungsten white balance but that wasn’t exactly correct either:

so I ended up setting a custom white-balance and throwing up a flash with a white-shoot through umbrella and just giving the scene a little “pop” of flash to give some shape to the exhibit:

TTFN

…and other light modifiers.

This post is pretty long as it seemed to grow legs of it’s own and get bigger and bigger as I wrote it, so grab yourself a coffee or your preferred choice of alcoholic beverage and sit down and relax for a while…

I’ve been getting quite a lot of hits on this-here blog from search terms that refer to umbrellas or white umbrellas or shoot-through umbrellas or combinations of the above.

So, if the whole idea of using umbrellas is confusing you, I’ll try and give you the idiot’s guide to using them (the idiot being the person giving the guide, not you) and in the process try and cover as many of the queries as I can.

Our cousins across the water may need to substitute “flash” for “strobe” from here-on as that’s the term they generally use for a hot-shoe flash.

First up I need to explain that if your camera has one of those green-spot settings – otherwise known as “use this setting and let’s all hope the camera will work out WTF I’m shooting and give me incredible images” – then I probably can’t help you, because you need to start taking control.

Similarly if you are using flash in ETTL mode (that’s the Canon term, not sure about Nikon or others) or automatic flash control, some of this stuff won’t work either. From what I can gather, the Nikon auto-flash seems better than the Canon, but I’m not changing brands now, and I rarely use auto-flash anyway. That’s just me, old fashioned. OK just old.

Using flash, whether it’s the hot-shoe type or the bigger studio type, is all about you controlling the light you want for your subject, rather than letting the light control you. When I use lights everything is in manual mode. The camera’s exposure, and the flash output, but not usually the camera focus, although I do revert to that on occasion.

An umbrella is just a light modifier and the circumstances in which you use light modifiers are so varied and diverse that it’s more than I can cover in a single post, I’d need to write a book *ding – lightbulb moment*.

There are however some generalisations. Mostly there’s hard light and soft light (and you use modifiers to get the “soft” bit). Then there’s directional modifiers, basically converging or concentrating, and the opposite of diverging or spreading.

Umbrellas generally fall into the spreading and softening category, although it’s not always as simple as that. There are shoot-through umbrellas (usually white), and reflective umbrellas (usually white, silver or gold). My preference is white shoot-through, for a couple of reasons:

Haven’t written so much for a long time without throwing in some images, so here goes:

This is a reflective silver umbrella. It’s a very small one, for head-shots or half-length portraits:

and with the flash firing:

Same thing, but the gold version:

and with the flash firing:

White shoot-through umbrella opened ready for action:

and with the flash firing:

There are also many other light modifiers of course. The ones I use are a couple of different soft-boxes, one a tiny Lumiquest mini soft-box that fits on a 580EX flash, and a 60cm (2ft) Ezybox soft-box that fits into the front pocket of my gear roller-bag. Bigger is nearly always better, but not when you always work on location and are 99% of the time on your own without an assistant. I also (occasionally) use a snoot, which is a cone-like device to really concentrate the light into a small area, often used by glamour or fashion photographers behind and to the side of a subject, just to light the hair. Not what I use it for!

Here’s a few examples of different light modifying…

First up, outside, no light modifier:

Outside with a 60cm soft-box:

and outside with 2 white shoot-through umbrellas:

Moving inside, shot with a mini beauty dish (hard light):

Inside with a softbox (soft but quite concentrated light):

and inside with 2 white shoot-through umbrellas (softened light and sprayed everywhere!):

and again:

No I haven’t suddenly started doing family portraits, that was shot for the Money section of a Sunday newspaper!

I mentioned a snoot earlier, this is one that’s designed for small flash instead of studio lights:

and can be fitted with a grid to concentrate light even more:

Here’s an example of an image shot with a snoot:

and one shot with a snoot fitted with a grid:

So back to the original “hit list” of search terms by which people came to my blog, and some answers:

TTFN

One light, one lens, one camera, 6 images, 15 minutes (includes handshake and setting up light). It wasn’t me that was under time pressure!

Paul Kerrigan, Corner Forward (usually) on the Cork team. Shot for one of the Sundays a few days before the National Football League final against Mayo:

Single flash (strobe), with no modifier or softening. He’s male, he’s young, it was outdoors. He can take hard light.

TTFN

It’s always strange to be in a sports stadium on non-match days. I’m used to being in Páirc Uí Chaoimh when there are anything from 10-45,000 people in the place, so to be there with just my subject (and the grounds-man out on a tractor cutting the grass) was slightly surreal.

I was on assignment for one of the “Sundays” and my subject was former Cork hurler and All-Star Sean(ie) McGrath.

Of the 7 or 8 images I made, these were my favourites:

For the first one I wanted something… not melancholy but maybe, reflective. Days gone by and all that, looking out towards the pitch..

Started off with this as the lighting with just the small amount of natural light that comes into the tunnel, so that wouldn’t quite do:

Never mind, I have an app for that. Oh no that’s something else. I have a flash (strobe) for that. One flash with a snoot on top of the steps out to the left. Don’t want to light up the whole stadium, just enough for top-half of the body. A small change to to the working aperture and we were nearly there:

Et voila, the result:

Whady’all think? Load of crap? OK, moving on..

One-light again, 580EX flash with a 60cm softbox:

..and finally, one-light with a mini beauty dish – no need to light the sliotar (ball) too much, just him:

TTFN