Neil Danton

…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

…the Shoot.

So, you’ve figured out what you need publicity for, and you’ve booked the photographer, but take a step back for a moment and just review whether you actually need your own photographer.

There is another way to get your event/launch/whatever covered, and that’s to organise a photo-call where you invite media publications to send their own journalist and/or photographer.

The advantage: Costs you nothing in terms of outlay.
The disadvantages: 1) Nobody turns-up. Publications will rarely give a commitment, let alone a guarantee, that they will send someone along. Even if you get a grunt of commitment, whoever has been assigned to come along could well be diverted. 2) The images are only going to the publications that send someone, not distributed to wherever you would like. 3) You might not get the type of image used that you would really like. In the event of someone tripping over, pulling a stupid face or any other slightly embarrassing incident, that could be the image that’s used. 4) You will have no usage of images for your own purposes.

If you decide to commission your own photographer, then BEFORE you actually arrange the shoot you should really be discussing the best time of day/week/month with your photographer, because they should be able to advise you on that. It can make a huge difference in getting images used. Your photographer should also know the best time of day/week/month to actually release (distribute) the images for best effect too.

If you go with your own photographer then there is no need to invite publications to send their own person as well. One thing guaranteed to wind them up is if they send someone and then find out they would have received images anyway, when their own person could have been doing something else useful. If you do send notification of an event, then also inform them that images will be supplied. They do appreciate that information.

Also, unless it’s the red carpet at the Oscars which wouldn’t be the same without a battery of cameras, more than one camera is going to distract the subject(s). There is little worse than seeing 2 or more people in an image and they are looking in different directions.

In addition to the timing, your photographer should also be able to help with advising who to put into the images, and who not to! It’s a subtle art.

Lastly, have a discussion with your photographer about ideas for the shoot well in advance of the actual time. It may be that other factors need to be organised in advance. It’s somewhat surprising the amount of time and effort goes into organising an event/launch/whatever, but the thought process regarding the photography, the one thing that will probably be remembered, is reduced to making a booking and commissioning the photographer and expecting something miraculous to happen.

Personally I start thinking up ideas the moment I receive a commission, some work out, some don’t, but a little interaction and ideas from the client works wonders too. Modern camera equipment is fantastic but doesn’t yet come equipped with a magic wand that gets the images used front-page.

If both the client and the photographer are trying to think up something interesting in advance, then there is a far greater chance of a successful outcome.

Previously: PR Photography 101 pt 03 The Photographer
Next up: PR Photography 101 pt 05 The Caption

TTFN

…the Photographer.

You are on your own on this one. Of course I could make it easy for you and just suggest you use me, but I only work on recommendation. By that I don’t mean I need to be recommended to you, I mean you need to be recommended to me.

Only kidding! .

Mostly…

OK, so apart from recommendation, there’s always the interwebthingy where you can do a search, bear in mind that that it’s worth going down at least a couple of pages, instead of the top 2/3 entries. The top few results may not be the best photographers, they might just be good at SEO. This always assumes they have a web-site or blog. They might not have a web-site or blog? Oh come on, it’s 2010, it’s pretty much essential to have one, unless… they are sooo good, or sooo famous they don’t need to advertise themselves at all, or unless the quality of the images is just a tad embarrassing?

So you’ve found their web-site/blog, what’s the quality like? That’s a question on 2 levels:

What’s the quality of the web-site like? Does it look like something that’s been knocked up from a €10 template, or is it something that looks professional, so the photographer probably is.

What’s the quality of the images like? Are they in focus and correctly exposed? (Oh, you’d be surprised). Are they creative, innovative and any other ‘ive you can think of? Does it look like what you are looking for them to do might just be a step-beyond what they exhibit at the moment? It’s easier for a competent photographer to adjust from creative images to something more simple, than it is to go the other way. Is there variety, or is it all the same tired ideas over and over.

Is there a good range of recent images. It’s easy to blab about hypothetical commissions and how great one is. Where’s the “proof of the pudding”? Are the images you can view from paid commissions, where a client has trusted the photographer and paid a fee, or is it all images shot for personal projects or their portfolio?

What you are mostly going to need is someone who can work fast, be professional, and produce great results time after time, even when there’s not much to create images from. One of the main differences between wannabees & amateurs, and a professional, is the ability to think-up something fast, under time-pressure. To work quickly and accurately.

While we are on the subject of using a professional, are you sure the person you are thinking of using is one? Anyone can promote themselves as a professional, but only the real professionals will have bothered with the cost of Public Liability and Professional Indemnity insurance. Easy to check of course, just try and book them for a commission that takes place between 9-5, Mon-Fri. Use an amateur that got a nice camera for Christmas, and it might be amateur results that you get. It could be very difficult to explain the results to your boss and even more difficult to re-arrange that one-chance photo-shoot.

When you’ve found a professional, do they really know how it all works with regard to getting images “placed” in publications? Do they know all the picture editors, and some of the journalists as well? Sometimes it’s not what you know…..

Lastly, what’s their personality like? Actually let’s not run before we can walk. Do they have a personality? Not something you can detect from a web-site, it’s going to need at least a phone call and maybe even a face-to-face. Remember that you might be putting this person in front of your CEO, or they will be your representative when the VIP/Dignitary arrives, so someone that can conduct themselves in a professional manner might enable you to keep your job a little longer!

Lastly, yes I know I’ve already said lastly, so this is lastly lastly. It’s like p.s. and then p.p.s. It’s my rules and I make them up as I go along.

Lastly lastly, can they provide references? Be a little cautious if the referee and the photographer have the same surname! Quality references. Blue-chip companies or institutions, not just the local grocer (sorry local grocer).

Finally (look I can’t go through that Lastly thing again), the fee. Does it include everything you need from the shoot, or is a low-price to get the commission, and then you are going to get stung for “extras”, which are actually “essentials”. I despair sometimes when a phone call starts with “How much…?” It usually means “If you’re the cheapest…”

Does cheapest get you best, or even adequate? Do you drive the cheapest car on the market, or drive the one that’s appropriate for your requirements?

Previously: PR Photography 101 pt 02 The love-hate relationship
Next up: PR Photography 101 pt 04 The Shoot

TTFN

…metaphorically and literally.

When on a commission I normally try and get the “safe” shots first, and then go for something more interesting. In this instance though, because of the timing being rapidly approaching dusk, I went the other way around.

This commission was to create some images for the launch of the Ashbourne & Purcell cup-finals week-end. These are competitions for 3rd level institutions (University age) in the sport of Camogie. Camogie is the ladies form of the men’s game of hurling with a few subtle rule changes. It looks a bit vicious with lumps of wood being flailed around, but has less injuries caused than Gaelic Football.

As always I was trying to think up something that would be a little bit different and when they sky started turning nice I knew I had the shot in mind.

So in reverse order of timing, the standard shot:

Two-light, no modifiers.

The slightly more interesting shot:

One light, white shoot through.

The nice sky (and the “oops missed shot”):

and the, well you decide:

Two-light, no modifiers.

TTFN