Neil Danton

Pan-fried, with pea risotto and wholegrain mustard sauce:

One of the signature dishes at Costelloe’s Malthouse restaurant in the beautiful West Cork town of Clonakilty.

Along with another, Clonakilty black pudding salad:

Shot for an editorial feature

The only drawback to photographing food is having to resist the temptation to eat the subject before the shoot is done

TTFN

Sunday newspaper supplement: “Could you take a trip down to West Cork tomorrow?”

Me: “Sure, what do you need?”

Them: “A whale skeleton”

Me: (thinking): WTF?; (saying): “Oh,… OK. Um, no problem”

Very tricky lens selection as the whole thing is so long. Pic above is with a 15mm fish-eye. You know, fish, whale, fish-eye lens. Didn’t happen to have my whale-eye lens with me (and yes I do know a whale isn’t a fish!).

There’s also too much negative space in the image with a 24mm:

The feature the images (actually one in the end) were for was on community projects. Some time back the poor creature had been washed-up and stranded on the nearby beach and despite a lot of effort in trying to save it, had died there. The local community decided that rather than burying it, they would clean up the skeleton and create a marine artefact.

So I arrived at the location and very quickly started to hate the whale.

Poor creature hadn’t ever done me any harm, whales don’t tend to harm anyone really. OK so if you were a shark you might keep your distance, they’re not overly friendly to sharks, but that’s about all. Oh, and seals & penguins I suppose. They’re just unfortunate to be on the menu.

The reason for my dislike was purely the location. The skeleton had been placed into a concrete “bunker”, so shaded from above, and the way the sun was positioned, just creeping around a line of trees, the front third of the skeleton was in really strong sunlight and the middle and rear thirds in deep shadows. This is going to be a nightmare to light.

There’s only one way this was going to work and that’s kill-off all the ambient light and light the whole thing myself. Piece of cake when it’s just the skeleton, not so easy when there are people to light as well. Got away with it though:

Stayed with a 24mm lens for that image. Using a 15mm with 3 people, especially if they are anywhere near the edge of the frame would produce horrendous distortion. It’s not too bad to use though when it’s a younger person, and you can keep them near the centre of the frame:

In two of the images it’s possible (I now realise!) to spot one of my lights. Can you see them?

TTFN

It must be time for One From The Archives.

From April 2006, environmental testing of stream and river quality. Taken at the Shournagh River. You wouldn’t want to fall in and swallow a mouthful really, and it looked so clean as it was flowing.

TTFN

…or things you’ll probably never see again.

My intention was to start an occasional series of blogs entitled: One From The Archives, and I was looking for something else in fact, when I came across this:

It was shot on 17th May 2004 and was, I’m assuming, for an editorial piece on rising fuel prices (nothing new there then) when petrol was fast approaching the €1.00 mark per litre

Add another 50% to that and we’re just about right for today’s prices

As a footnote, the filling-station isn’t even there anymore. It was on the Western Road in Cork, between Jury’s Hotel (now the River Lee Hotel) and the gates of University College Cork.

TTFN

Leaf nothing to chance. Yew need willow power to get to the root of the problem

OK I’ll stop now

Quick post about a quick editorial shoot for the business section of a “Sunday”. Treemetrics provide 3D scanning of forests and the software to maximise the yield from it. Saves wastage, saves trees. *Obviously* the pic ed wanted something with a tree in then

Fortunately the guys knew a suitable location and the tree in this shot would have been just a tiny bit spooky later in the day or at night. Looks like something in a Harry Potter film or a cartoon where a tree comes to life (I know, I need to get out more)

TTFN

I wandered down to beautiful West Cork recently to do a shoot for the home supplement of a Sunday newspaper. The story was centred around what B&Bs are doing to add value to the B&B experience. In this case it was providing different courses while enjoying a stay, and in particular this one was song-writing in the company of a musician. A guitar playing, piano playing, drummer in fact. The list of who he’s worked with is a bit like a who’s-who of the music world, but includes being tour drummer with Ronnie Wood.

I started off with a few general views of the interior & exterior of the property:

Then it was down to the more interesting but slightly difficult concept of how to convey music, peace & tranquility and anything else I could throw into the mix. A bit awkward when’s there’s no sound in a still image!

The location of the property was right on a cliff edge, and I mean right on the edge, so that was a natural place for an image:

The main room where the course will be run was another:

I was still missing something though, even if I wasn’t too sure what it was. I wanted something extra to add to an image. Then I remembered a “prop” I’d met earlier.

My musician’s daughter is Summer by name and summer by nature and after a quick check that it was OK to include her in an image, I asked her if she liked to dance and let her off to do her own thing while her father played:

It took about 3 frames to get the right shot with enough movement in the dress to show it’s not posed:

I just love that image.

TTFN

In the portion of my life where I still shoot as an Editorial Photographer, I’m often shooting business people, mostly for a couple of sunday newspapers.

It’s always a challenge to avoid the man-in-suit-with-laptop, or man-with-folded-arms type portraits, which need to be saved up for emergencies, as sometimes they really are just about the only thing it’s possible to do! However, I try my damnedest to avoid them.

So here’s a quick business portrait shoot where I managed to create a couple of images without using the “last resort”.

This CEO has a business, which although based in deepest, wildest West Cork is a global operation and there are clocks on the wall showing the various time-zones with some of the countries where they operate, so the first image I wanted to create was going to include those.

This was the starting point light-wise at the aperture, ISO & shutter speed combo I wanted to shoot at:

First thing to fix is the light on the background. Nothing too directional, just a 580EX flash firing into a white shoot-through umbrella, camera right (probably around 1/4 to 1/2 power, sorry, I’m a bit like a chef that cooks “by taste”, there’s not too many rules!).

That takes the background from this:

To this:

Next is to light the subject. This would be a 60cm (2ft) Ezybox soft-box, again with a 580EX fired through it, camera left:

In order to get the right perspective I used an 85mm lens, which meant I was pretty much jammed up against a wall, on my knees, but using any wider-angle lens would have “lost” the clocks.

Here’s a very approximate lighting diagram:

Still trying to avoid the “last resort” we managed to find another location for a 2nd image. Just the soft-box for this one. Get it back far enough and it’s going to light plenty of the general area as well:

Nice and relaxed. Nothing worse than business portraits that are too stuffy, or where the subject looks wooden (usually because they’re scared stiff of having their portrait taken!).

Oh, I didn’t leave the CEO sitting there all the time while I set up lights. The first image wasn’t actually shot first. It was a misfire from the Pocket Wizard on-camera when I started shooting for real.

*That’s because you hadn’t switched it on Neil*

Sshhhh

TTFN

Not that I’m religious in the slightest, but this particular church was no longer operating as such and had instead been converted into a magnificent home, which I was shooting for a sunday newspaper supplement.

The thing with property shoots is always the issue of that old converging verticals problem. This (if you don’t know) is what happens when you point a camera upwards to include all of a building or structure in the frame. Works the other way too if you point a camera downward, but then it’s diverging verticals of course.

The human eye corrects this automatically. Actually the human eye doesn’t do much I suppose, it’s the brain that corrects it . Cameras aren’t that smart though. Strike one for man versus the machine.

This is a typical, but not extreme version of what happens:

and this is more like we see it:

The two main ways of correcting the problem are either to use a specialist tilt/shift lens (which I did have with me), or to correct it afterwards with some special software in post-production. That’s the route I chose on this occasion for speed. Tilt/shift lenses are great, but they are a bit fiddly and time consuming and I needed a LOT of images from this particular shoot, and not as much time available as I would have liked.

Here’s a couple more bits of detail of the exterior:

and some of the interior:

It’s also quite nice to include some detail when possible:

Oh, and the view from the belfry:

I didn’t dare ask the price the place was on the market for..

TTFN

…do it my way.

It’s not always the death of a deal when someone demands copyright that you’re not prepared to give-up.

A big part of the problem is that people often don’t understand what the assignment of copyright actually means and I’m speaking here about people who may not really understand it fully. They’ve heard the word and wrongly assume that they need copyright in order to use the images.

There are clients though, people, institutions, usually in the Editorial world, who fully understand it and are just trying to exploit photographers with a “rights grab”.

I was contacted a while back by a non Ireland based magazine to do an editorial shoot for them and the conversation COULD have gone like this:

Them: “(1) We’d like you to shoot x amount of pictures of y subject at z location. (2) The fee would be abc, inclusive of travel, and (3) we expect assignment of copyright”.

Me: “(1) Shooting x images of y is no problem and z isn’t that far considering that (2) abc is a fair and reasonable fee. (3) Go fuck yourselves”.

That would have been that then. End of story and end of commission.

The “them” part of the conversation above is real. The “me” part was actually changed to “Well I never actually assign copyright because it’s not necessary. What image-use do you actually require?”

After uncovering the client’s exact requirements, I sent an email outlining my terms for doing the shoot, and shortly afterwards received the picture editor’s agreement and confirmation of commission.

Begs the question then, why the copyright issue in the first place?

a) It could be that “someone”, usually in the finance department, who doesn’t actually have a clue about copyright law, decides it would be a great idea to demand copyright in all cases. That leaves the picture editors in a difficult position to fulfil their role and they bend the rules in order to work in the real world.

b) It works in enough cases to justify it. Not enough people stand up for their rights for fear of losing commissions.

I have to confess I was slightly surprised at the positive response I received. This was a division of a big, I mean BIG publisher and the interwebthingy abounds with tales of photographers working for another division having enormous battles over usage rights.

In the end I did the shoot and emailed the invoice. Almost immediately I got a response from the picture editor and so I thought “here we go”. In actual fact though, it was helpful instructions regarding a couple of items to change on the invoice in order to get the fastest routing through “the system”.

I still had the feeling this would be one of those invoices that despite the clear terms & agreement of 30 day payment, would be a case of waiting for 120 days and then chasing many times before having to send a shittygram and threat of legal action in order to get paid.

Yesterday the fee was transferred into my bank account before the due-date. Just goes to show.

TTFN

Using the sun as a backlight is a common thing to do, but what about when it’s pitch-black night-time? Here’s something that’s a lot trickier to do than you might think from the resultant image.

Sometimes you get stuck having to create an image when you’re pretty low on options with the location. In this instance, it was evening-time and dark, there was nowhere indoors that lent itself to be a reasonable backdrop and all I had outside was a field. OK it was a pitch. Not a pitch at a big stadium where the stands might be suitable to place a subject, no, just a pitch. OK it was a field then.

The one thing it did have was the pitch floodlights. There you go then – artificial sun! Sometimes they can work well. They provide a backlight to separate the subject from the background, which obviously on a pitch at night is… the sky. The black sky. The floodlights give something to feature in the side of the image as well.

The bit that makes it tricky is the floodlights are so powerful, it’s pretty difficult to focus accurately. One of the few occasions where having a camera-mounted flash might have been handy. The focus-assist feature (a pulse of infra-red light) would have come in handy. I didn’t have one handy though, so I switched to manual focus. Now that takes me back a bit!

The thing about big floodlights like that, is that at some point, even though you don’t realise you are doing it, you will look directly at the floodlights and then you can’t see anything at all in your nearby field of vision for about 5 minutes until the light-spots in your eyes fade away. It’s only when it’s too late do you realise you’ve done it. Very similar to walking down the street and suddenly you get a whack on the back of the head from your partner, and you didn’t even realise at the time but on reflection, yes you had actually had a tiny glance at the pretty girl who had walked past.

My excuse is that I’m a photographer and I’m looking for potential models. The fact I only work with models a few times a year doesn’t count for much though. In total I’m pretty sure I’ve been whacked more times than I’ve worked with models.

TTFN