Neil Danton

I don’t do a post every time I document a new arrival at Fota Wildlife Park, honest, but it’s not every time I do it that I get the front page of the Irish Times with one of the images!

Time is tight at the moment as I’m in headless-chicken mode with so many shoots on, so this is just a slammer post as I’m a day (or even two) late with posting here.

This is the latest arrival – an as yet unnamed baby male giraffe with his mother Sapphire:

That was the Irish Times splash, and here’s another of him having a rather awkward looking run-around:

You lookin’ at me?:

TTFN

OK, so that post title might be meaningless for non UK/Ireland residents, you might have to use the big G to search for Compare the Meerkats to get the connection

Always delighted to go and shoot the new residents at Fota Wildlife Park. The only problem with the location of their home is that it’s only possible to shoot them through either perspex or a chain-link fence. I chose the fence. All things considered then, I’m not too unhappy with the results.

It’s fascinating to watch meerkats for a good period of time. It was quite a time too. Ideally I wanted two of them together to relate to the story, but they don’t stay in one spot for very long, apart from the one on guard-duty. It stays in one spot on the look-out for predators, while the others get on with their business.

I was there just before Valentine’s Day. On that basis the rest of this post will de-generate somewhat.

“I’m expecting a card. Where’s the postman?”:

“He’ll be along any minute now. Is that him?”:

“Maybe he’s delivering to the tradesmen’s entrance. That’s over there isn’t it?:

“What about airmail. D’ya think it might be arriving by airmail?”:

“You keep an eye out that way, and I’ll look…”:

“Here he comes, HERE HE COMES, this is definitely him”:

“Wayhay! I got a card”:

“Aww, thanks for my card, you’re the best”:

TTFN

I was asked to come up with a creative idea to promote the Irish Wheelchair Association’s Angel-pin day. This is a flag-day where lapel pins are sold to the public to raise funds for a charity.

Sometimes with charities they think some kind of personality and a brochure or flyer and that’s more than enough for newspapers to be falling over themselves to publish the image. There’s too much of the same old shite year after year promoting the same event, and picture editors get sick of looking at it. Not just them, me too. I prefer to push myself with ideas, and fortunately my client appreciates that:

It’s the second year I’ve been asked to dream up something for this worthy cause. Last year I decided on a very dark background:

This year I thought I might go with white-seamless instead. Then (as I tend to do unless dragged back to reality) I started to go overboard and decided that EVERYTHING should be white. Should be simple enough to light, white people wearing white clothes against a white background. *Why do I do this to myself*

Fortunately in this case I’m lucky enough to work with a client who appreciates and supports me. I dream this shit up, and leave him to sort out everything apart from the photography side of things.

Here’s another from the shoot:

My male model, for those not into sport or perhaps not from Cork is dual (hurling & gaelic football) player Eoin Cadogan. My female model is 6 year old wheelchair user Laoise.

**For people who aren’t familiar with Irish names, rough pronunciations are Owen & Leesha**

Last one for now and possibly my favourite because of Laoise’s impish smile:

Finally a shout-out to everyone that made it possible:

Obviously Eoin Cadogan for being brave enough to risk the ribbing he’ll get. He’ll probably never speak to me again.
Laoise and her family.
Thos O’Leary of the IWA for doing all the organising and logistics.
Stacy Corkery of Bare Minerals located in Brown Thomas for doing the make-up.
Norina O’Callaghan at the Silver Springs Moran Hotel for her assistance (not forgetting the staff too).

There will be a behind the scenes slideshow coming next, and also a post regarding white seamless (you’ve been warned. Go on holiday, emigrate, disconnect the interwebthingy). Wow, 3 posts from one shoot. I wish I could do that every time.

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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.

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So, having gobbed-off recently with a sarcy note on LinkedIn and my Facebook page, I thought I’d better explain myself some more.

For those of you who didn’t see my note it related to this (allegedly) true comment I spotted somewhere:

“Heard from a director of PR for a large company. She said one photographer’s excuse for some portraits they shot where people’s skin looked green was caused by the fluorescent lighting where the shoot was done”.

Why would fluorescent lighting make skin look green? Bear with me and I’ll explain in a mo’. For now just accept that it does, and if it’s tungsten light it will make skin look orange, but there are ways to stop this happening. One is to overpower or eliminate the effect of the ambient light in a situation by killing it with flash and using flash as the primary light source. The other is to correct the colour by adjusting the White Balance in-camera.

My gobby comment was that the photographer should have corrected this. I wouldn’t dream of shooting Corporate Portraits without using proper lights (flash or studio-lights) so maybe it really was that the photographer didn’t know what they were doing. As in all professions, there are “pros” and there are Pros.

On reflection though it could also have been that the budget or time allowed were insufficient to do a proper job. If the client’s attitude was “Come along and take a few snaps, our budget is 50 bucks” then maybe they got what they deserved. There is a difference between taking a photo, and creating an image. If the time/budget was actually the case, then apologies to the photographer. Partly.

Partly, because the photographer should have realised that if the time/budget wouldn’t allow for doing a professional job, then maybe they should have walked away from the invitation to do the job in the first place. Nothing positive has been achieved. A pissed-off client. No chance of future work for the photographer from that client, and a bad reputation for the photographer with everyone that the client speaks to about the shoot.

So what is this White Balance thing then?

Well, it’s not a reference to the ability needed by a Caucasian person to unicycle on a high-wire across the Grand Canyon. No, it’s a function thoughtfully provided by the manufacturers of digital cameras that enables the colours in digital images to reproduce correctly. It does this by ensuring that the white in an image is, how can I put this…. white.

Spookily, if the white is white (and the black, black) then the other colours will, like brain-washed zombies in a cult, follow along and be correct also. In the “olden days” of film, we had to do this by using filters in front of the lens. It can be done in post-processing as well, and is much easier and more accurate if shooting RAW rather than JPEG, but why bother doing it on every image after it’s been shot, when you can eliminate the problem at the shooting stage by getting it correct at the time?

So why is this necessary in the first place? Well the problem is colour temperature. The combination of the human eye and the brain is a wonderful thing. When the eye sees something white in an environment where the ambient light is affecting it, the brain says “Hang on a second, I know that’s white” so it “appears” white to us.

Cameras on the other hand, although nowadays jammed full of electronics, aren’t that clever. Score one point for us versus the machines.

So what’s Colour Temperature? 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 expression “In the cold light of day” comes about for a reason. In early morning the “daylight” is colder than it is in the afternoon but they are both “Daylight”.

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 wildly 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.

Most camera manufacturers though provide a way of correcting this problem, and it’s one of the most under-used features of a camera even amongst Pros, the White Balance setting. Standard settings are usually provided for Auto, Daylight, Shade, Cloudy, Tungsten, Fluorescent, Flash, Degrees Kelvin and the Mother of all settings – Custom WB.

The Tungsten & Fluorescent settings are great if indoors and the scene is TOTALLY lit by that type of light. It starts getting complicated if daylight is mixing with the artificial light. Similarly, the flash setting is only used in a studio situation when all the light on the scene is lit by studio lights. Portable flashes (strobes) are daylight balanced anyway so are perfect for fill flash outdoors. The Kelvin setting can (although I never have) be used for example in a theatre, where the colour temperature of the lighting is known. Every time I’ve ever asked, nobody knows.

The saviour of all mankind therefore cure for the problem is the Custom White Balance Setting. Do you want me to explain that? OK then, here we go:

It’s very complicated which is why so few people use it. Set the WB to Custom. Shoot something white (A4/letter sized piece of paper for example). Review the image on the camera. Set camera to use that image for White. Takes all of 30 seconds. Told you it was complicated.

We want an example. We want an example, I hear you cry. OK then. I’ll really show-off with this one to prove my point.

This (spookily convenient) image was taken on Saturday evening. It’s basketball (obviously) in a stadium where the light sources are: Tungsten AND Fluorescent AND SODIUM. Try and let the camera sort that out on Auto! Sodium lights are the ones you find in old gymnasia, the ones that glow with an awful orange colour and produce horrendous colour-casts. No flash used, just the stadium lighting. No colour change done in post-production.

EDIT: I was going to use an image here that wasn’t shot by me but reproduced from the publication it was used in. However I decided that wasn’t quite fair, so I’ve tried to replicate what that image looked like with mine, altered to suit. Despite my best efforts though, this isn’t as bad as an image looks like when shot on auto. No REALLY.

Here’s the one I produced using Custom WB:

See the difference?

Apart from the White Balance, the difference is I care. It was “only” a sports assignment. Pretty much anything would be, and is, used in some of these publications. It meant dragging myself out on a Saturday night to earn a fraction of what I’d earn on a Corporate or Commercial commission. I just can’t do anything slap-dash though. I believe that as an Editorial Photographer my clients should receive the same care & attention as when I’m wearing my other hat as a Corporate Photographer, regardless of the detail of the shoot, the complexity of the shoot, or the fee. That’s just the way I am, barking mad conscientious to the point of being pedantic.

So let’s leave the Little Green (or orange) Men on Mars where they belong.

I bet you never realised I knew about all this stuff. I’m not just a pretty face you know.

*Nobody in a million years would ever describe you as a pretty face*

Shuddup.

TTFN

One of the nicest shoots I get to do on a fairly regular basis is to document the new arrivals at Fota Wildlife Park. Here is the latest, a baby Lar Gibbon:

There’s usually two things you need for photographing animals, a big lens and patience.

I had to wait a while for mother & baby to emerge from their den, but had the close-up shot of baby fairly quickly. It then took quite some time to get a shot of mother & baby together. Due to the way baby is carried, I ended up with lots of shots where baby’s face was visible, or mother’s face was visible, but not both together that was clear enough that I was happy with the shot.

After a while though, when mother went to investigate some new leaves for breakfast, they moved into a good position and I had the shot I wanted. As soon as it happens, I just get a 6th sense that I’ve nailed it:

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Not the Pelican Brief which was a movie, and it’s not called the Pelican Run, it’s called the Cheetah Run. (This post follows on from a recent one about last year’s run entitled Runners in the Park).

It’s a road-race through Fota Wildlife Park, but I wasn’t going into the Cheetah area to create an image, so I chose Pelicans instead, as they don’t have claws. Like the title of the movie though, I’ll be brief, so here it is:

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Had great fun last week at the launching of a couple of Currachs. A currach is a traditionally built wooden framed Irish boat, usually covered in canvas nowadays although animal skins or hide were used in the past.

When I say launch, I mean literally:

That was the smaller of the two, a Boyne Currach, sometimes referred to as a Coracle. They are paddled from the front with an action I can only describe as similar to stirring a giant pot of paint:

The larger Owey Island Currach was a bit heavier so had a slightly more sedate launch. The moment of truth as it entered the water:

The boats were built by students at the Crawford College of Art & Design under the guidance of the good folks at Meitheal Mara and in particular Pádraig Ó Duinnín. Meitheal Mara (ma-hal ma-ra) translates roughly as Workers of the Sea, and is an organisation that build boats in the traditional way and also trains people to do the same.

Will it might have made an interesting image if one or the other had sunk on it’s maiden voyage, I’m glad to report neither did:

The only danger in sinking would have been from filling up with the incessant rain that we had that day.

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Fota Wildlife Park to be exact.

I’ve a busy day with four shoots and the last one will be to cover the Cheetah Run, a 4 mile road-race through the park, so here’s a couple of images from last year’s event.

Now any dope can photograph a mass-start, or a race finish, but it takes a special kind of dope to think up something different. Fortunate then that I was available:

Or as one of the newspapers that used this image titled it:

Caution: zebra crossing

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…even the ash cloud.

Pedro and Mo are finally united in love after the ash cloud banjaxed their plans to be together.

Pedro moved to Cork from France and Mo was supposed to join him seven weeks later from England, but flight cancellations caused by THAT volcano’s ash cloud over Europe meant she couldn’t get out via Heathrow.

Two weeks after she was supposed to join him, they are finally together.

Pedro and Mo are…….. Black Howler Monkeys:

The Black Howler Monkeys are the first new species to arrive at Fota Wildlife Park in 2010 and live on a island opposite the penguins in the park.

The Black Howler Monkey is one of six species of Howler Monkey, who can be found in central South American bush savannah, deciduous and semi-deciduous forests. The male is black, while the female is brown or gold.

TTFN