Beyond the obvious

Looking through photo-enthusiast's portrait photographs on the Internet I notice that nearly everyone goes for a very tightly framed shot with prominent head and shoulders or face. If there is any space in the frame the photographer often gets a comment along the lines, I would have cropped the top or side or whatever. The purpose of this blog post is to suggest that while Robert Capa's maxim, "if your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough," is definitely worth keeping in mind, you can really enrich a portrait by using the environment to help tell the story. I'm not saying anything new here and anyone who studies the work of the "father of the environmental portrait", Arnold Newman, will immediately see that his sitter's face is often quite small in the composition - stuck in the bottom right corner or off to one side of the frame. Arnold intelligently and creatively used the whole context to enhance the image. Editorial phot...

Portrait of Vincent, a real craftsman who makes and repairs musical instruments with enormous care, love and dedication. And he doesn't use any software to do it. Click the image to see a larger version. The topic of which RAW converter to use for your digital images files is as hot as ever on the Internet. A while back I wrote an article comparing different packages and I've seen that the article is regularly read. So for those of you who are curious here's a little bit about my latest experiences. I used Lightroom 1 from when it came out and quickly became a big fan. All my digital workflow went through Lightroom and Photoshop for the final processing. About a month ago two things happened. I got a laptop and I've ended up using it for most of my work. And I decided to give Lightroom 3 beta a try on my new laptop. Now I know Lightroom is Beta and all that but the slowness of opening an image, waiting for it to render sharply on the screen and run through each proces...

Well here we are on the brink of 2010 and I wanted to wish you all a Happy, Creative, Prosperous and Healthy New Year. You may have noticed that my blog has been a little quiet lately. All the usual excuses apply; been incredibly busy including doing two business films. Looking back at the article I wrote on 31 December2008 , it seems just as relevant today. As I had predicted 12 months ago, video has become increasingly important and integrated in the photographers armoury. Twitter really took off, but as a marketing tool I have yet to be convinced that for most photographers it can generate sales and seriously impact the bottom line. As with everything there are of course a few exceptions but for most photographers... the verdict is still out. The message I have for this year is that fads come and go. Photographers, creatives and marketers will keep chasing the next big idea. But the things that really matter, still matter and always will; authentic vision, individuality, clear crea...

This summer we came across a remembrance ceremony in Flanders where some of the bloodiest fighting during the World War One took place. I photographed Magda as she listened to the speeches, the Last Post and a moving rendition of the Belgium anthem. We remembered our friend killed in Afghanistan as well as all those men and woman lost in wars around the world. Magda has written a blog illustrated with her images taken during the ceremony. Till soon, Paul www.indigo2photography.co.uk

Here's some high level advice which will strengthen your photography and boost your creativity. There are so many things to keep in mind when you take photographs. To help you I've tried to distill the essential elements. If you keep four things in mind all the rest should fall into place. And these four elements come from just two things: creativity and execution. Before discussing creativity, let's take a look at execution; visualizing your image and then making it happen. The three things you need to keep in mind are: light, composition and colour (LCC). I include grey values under colour here although black and white are not scientifically speaking colours. In most circumstances photographers are reacting to what they see in front of them. You can't run through a mental checklist of hundreds of items before taking an image. So just keep LCC in mind. Simple right? How you execute the image - shutter speed, aperture, point of view, use of flash etc will all be determi...

Candid portrait of Willy. Click on the image to see a large version. Before working on the portrait of Willy above I spent an afternoon desk bound carefully retouching another portrait in Photoshop. It got me thinking about how many hours I spend working on images in front of the computer. The conclusion: way too many! All around us we are inundated with images that strive to portray human perfection, from the sublime to the ridiculous in some cases. Just take a look at Photoshop disasters to see what I mean. How many books, articles, tutorials are there showing you how to smooth skin, remove the faintest wrinkle, whiten the eyes, change the jaw line and the list goes on till nobody looks like themselves anymore in a photograph. Well I'm declaring myself out of that particular race for unnatural perfection. Keep it real, raw and natural. If you've got laughter lines it's because you earned them and you should be proud of them. As for the photography: get it right in camera...

The Abbey ceiling on the Mont St Michel, Normandy, France presents and extreme exposure challenge. Do histograms on your camera's LCD really matter and what benefits could you derive from understanding your histogram? First though, what is a histogram? At it's most basic level it is a graphic representation that uses a bar graph to show the proportionate distribution of the pixels in your image, ranged from black on the left to pure white on the right. In other words the bars that peak the highest in your histogram show that there are a lot of pixels with that particular tonal value in your image. If most pixels are on the left of your histogram your image is mostly dark. If on the other hand the longest bars are on the right then most of your picture is bright. Simple. So if the bars are all heaped up on the right hand side then your image is 'clipped' in the highlights, which means there are tones of pure bright white. Another phrase commonly used is that you have are...

Book covers featuring photographs by Magda Indigo. Click on the image to see the large version. Today publisher Harper Collins officially launched three books, Romeo & Juliet, Pride & Prejudice and Wuthering Heights, all featuring book cover photographs by Magda Indigo (aka my dear wife). Needless to say I'm rather proud that her images were chosen for these classic novels. In the last three months Magda's images have been chosen for seven different books by a variety of international publishers. With the quality of her work she deserves every success in my opinion, and it seems that some pretty renowned art directors in the book publishing industry agree. Anyway I wanted to share this little bit of news with you and take the opportunity to brag about my favourite photographer, who I just happen to be married to. If you'd like to see more of her work head over to our website www.indigo2photography.co.uk and there are links from her portfolio page to a lot of her...

Sunflowers in the wind. Autumn is here in the Northern hemisphere and the days are getting shorter. Time to catch up on some reading. To help you discover something of interest I've compiled a list of some of my most popular articles that get read every day. Maybe there'll be something here that you find helpful or interesting. Photographer's need people skills The standard lens Practical tips and basic dos and don’ts of camera gear The difference between digitally manipulated portraits and traditional portraiture There are two types of photographers Is professional photography still a viable career? Don't use your camera on manual settings Linux photography What is copyright in photography? Overcoming creative block and self doubt Has the internet affected our appreciation of photographs? Beware of wide-angle distortion in portrait photography Do you speak light? Indigo2 website revamped That's all ...

Honfleur, France. Finally had some spare time and got round to revamping our website , updated our bios, added new galleries, pruned the links page and added a page listing some of our clients. I would welcome your feedback which can be sent using the contact form on our site. Till soon, Paul www.indigo2photography.co.uk

I meet a lot of photographers and often the same questions come up so I decided to write this little guide of practical wisdom gleaned over many years as a photographer. Always make sure your camera is set to standard settings at the start of a shoot. I call this zeroing my camera. For me that means IS0 100; AWB; single shot; centre autofocus point; F4; Aperture Priority; matrix metering; RAW etc. When I arrive for a shoot my camera is always set up in the same way, and batteries are fully charged and memory cards formatted. From the standard setting I then set the camera up to suit the particular requirements of the photo shoot. Lenses Always keep a UV or skylight filter on your lens. Replacing a scratched filter is a lot cheaper than replacing a lens Leave the lens cap off when you’re at a shoot. Putting it on and taking it off will just slow you down, causing you to miss shot Use a lens hood. Lens flare seriously reduces image quality. Only take the hood off when storing the came...

Seaside, Whitby, UK. An invitation to discover the subtle details from the crack in the paving to the pink crocs. Click on the image to see a larger version. Seaside conversation - interrupted, Whitby, UK. Click on the image to see a larger version. Most photographs are viewed on screens at low resolution and quite small pixel sizes. Is this affecting the way we look at photographs in general and in particular our ability to appreciate the finer nuances in images? The way we experience images in different media affects our perception. When viewing photographs on the internet we click through very quickly to the next image. Pick up a large beautifully produced photo book and you are likely to spend a lot more time looking at each image. High resolution prints entice the viewer to look at the detail and explore an image. Large photographs hung on a gallery wall invite the viewer to spend even more time discovering every aspect of the image. Nothing beats a beautifully produced original ...

Leanne, actor and dancer, UK (click image to see large version). In every walk of life the way you deal with people is incredibly important and can determine how successful you become. Photography is a people business. Even if you primarily take pictures of inanimate subjects – cars, food and architecture – you will still be dealing with a lot of people to make your shoots work. When it comes to photographing actors and models your people skills are even more important. I’d like to share a story with you that made me quite sad and inspired writing this blog. We’ve recently been doing headshots for actors, like Leanne above, and I kept hearing the same thing. Most actors wanting headshots need them for a casting, for their book and their headshots have to be regularly updated. This means they experience different photographers. Sometimes they work with a photographer provided by an agency and other times they search for a specialist headshot or portrait photographer who knows what agent...

Pierre, framer and artist, Ostend, Belgium. “Photography is my passion,” is an often used phrase. I’ve noticed that many amateurs are particularly enthusiastic about being photographers and dream of turning professional. But when you look at a survey like the one done by jobsrated.com the reality of being a professional photographer hits home. You may be forgiven, after reading professional photographer’s blogs that every single one of them is as happy as pig in the mud. However in the survey which rated the top 200 careers photography only came in at number 125 behind jobs like bookkeeper (39), librarian (43), typest/wordprocessor (54), cashier (110) and telephone operator (115). “Moving further down the rankings reveals an eclectic mix of jobs which either suffer from intense physical demands, such as veterinarians and construction machinery operators, or, as in the case of photographers, post mediocre scores in work environment and stress while offering exceptionally low pay,” w...

It’s never been easier to communicate; phone, email, text, instant messaging and traditional post. Information flows freely back and forth in blogs, magazines, tweets, forums, websites, podcasts and videos – the channels are many and varied. However when I look at what is communicated I wonder about the real value of much of this information. When someone announces on twitter that they had a cheese sandwich and cup of coffee for lunch, I have to ask, “Who on earth cares?” I certainly don’t. By the way I plucked this example from thin air, so if you tweeted about your lunch please don’t take it personally. Then there’s the endless regurgitating and recycling of information. I just did a quick search on Google for the ‘golden mean in photography’ and got 1,280,000 hits. Anyone who thinks they can add anything of value by writing about this topic again needs their head examined – total waste of time. But I bet right now there are people researching the golden mean by reading some of those...

Part of our old Hasselblad system in its case Many of us photographers get a little carried away with all the cool gadgets, equipment and cameras. We end up with lots of stuff – sometimes causing mild distress to our partners. Fortunately my wife is also a photographer although she takes a very practical approach to equipment. I’m definitely the Magpie in our family. So I’ve ended up with truck loads of cameras and gadgets. And guaranteed when I open a photo magazine tomorrow I’ll see something else that ‘I need’. I’m sure that many of my readers will be nodding their heads wistfully at this stage. All sounds a bit familiar eh. But sometimes all of this stuff can get in the way of good photography. I remember seeing a photographer in the street a while back with a backpack, a camera bag in each hand and a tripod, and two cameras dangling round his neck. The poor chap could hardly move, never mind capture the action on the street. He decided to go for a tripod shot and then spent 15 min...

The traditional wisdom is to shoot portraits on lenses ranging from 85mm to 120mm focal length when using a 35mm film or full frame DSLR camera. The reason is simple. You avoid distortion, and because of the slight compression produced by a telephoto lens the portrait tends to be more flattering. However, in the world of photojournalism and reportage style photography wide-angle lenses are commonly used to give the viewer a feeling of being right in the middle of the action. Nowadays in everything from weddings to corporate work, photographers reach for their wide-angle lenses and because we see so many images in magazines, books and online most people have grown accustomed to wide-angle distortion. It has become more acceptable to see celebrities, politicians and people featured in news stories looking slightly distorted. I say more acceptable because we’ve gotten used to it. But at the same time I’d like to urge you to be cautious about how you use your wide-angle when it comes to ph...

The prow of a fishing boat is caught in evening sunlight, as dark storm clouds approach. Note the warmth of the low sunlight, the contrast against the sky, the texture of the hull and the interesting shadows on the mast. This is a straight shot from the camera, without any enhancement in image manipulation software. Light is the language of photography. To express yourself well and communicate you need to be able to speak with light. Light determines what you see (and what you don’t see); the mood of an image; colour and tone. Light can be loud and brash or soft, gentle and soothing. It can wrap around something or cut across it as hard and sharp as a Samurai sword. People have probably been writing about the qualities of light and how to use it in relation to photography from the moment the first print was made. Google “light in photography” and you will get millions of hits (well actually 68,800,000 hits to be entirely accurate). In the past I’ve been complimented for explaining thin...

In view of my comments in my previous blog , this is an interesting articl e. Danish judges in a prestigious competition have rejected a photographer's images as being over processed from RAW. The images were changed dramatically from the original versions. The judges have raised an interesting debate about RAW processing, especially regarding photo-journalistic images. Read the article here and see the images for yourself. Cheers, Paul www.indigo2photography.co.uk Follow me on twitter

When I visit just about any photo sharing website I am confronted with all manner of photographic horrors that induce in me anything from mild irritation to out-loud swearing. Everyone has their own taste. Overall my blog is nice and warm and positive in tone but for once I’ll let out the dark side and tell you which types of photographs I hate and why. Within each category there will be exceptions of course, because the first rule of photography is that there are no absolute rules except the first rule. In no particular order then... Bad HDR Over 90% of HDR images are absolute rubbish. They’re flat, lacking in contrast and it often looks like someone has smeared black pixels across the highlights and mid-tones. HDR generally looks unnatural and cartoonish. It produces bland pictures with no sense of light; without mood. Everything is on display, depriving the image all quality and character. In contrast (no pun intended) non-HDR images do not give up all their secrets. The viewer ...