Learning to lighting has done a lot for my photography. It’s not just gaining a new appreciation for light of all kinds, but also the fact that lit photographs have cause me to think about photographs differently. I used to be a much more reactive photographer - I would just be waiting for moments to happen in order to capture them. Now, I’ve become a little more thoughtful about what I want to the end picture to look like, even in situations that are fairly fast moving. Improving my grasp of composition is definitely something that I am working on.
My favorite book on photographic composition was “Photographic Composition by Tom Grill and Mark Scanlon. At least it was until I read Michael Freeman’s The Photographer’s Eye: Composition and Design for Better Digital Photos. The entire first chapter is all about framing, which is the most extensive treatment that I’ve seen so far. In addition to a treatment of the usual compositional elements, there’s also a chapter on design basics, which I definitely needed some help with (and probably still do). Perhaps the best chapter of all is the last one on process, where Freeman walks through a case study or two, showing how he prepared and then composed a picture in a photojournalistic setting. Learning someone else’s thought process always seems to yield a bump up for me, much more so than just learning the straight mechanics.
Of course, with all things photographic, it’s not enough to read the book and understand it. The trick is putting it all into practice.
A good way to learn something is to to hear multiple people give their views. Recently both David Hobby (the Strobist) and Zack Arias (Mr. OneLight) have written posts on the use of umbrellas with off camera lights.
Long time readers will know that my girls embarked on a series of videos starring their guinea pig, Chatterboy. Julie facilitated this by getting the girls a blog for Guinea Pig TV. For a variety of reasons, Guinea Pig TV has been on hiatus, until a few days ago when the crew put up a new episode, inspired by the Seattle Flickrites’ escapades with Chase Jarvis.
A little more than a year ago, I gave myself a birthday present and took Zack Arias’ OneLight workshop when it was here in Seattle. I had been reading David Hobby’s Strobist blog for some time, but there was something about the time that I spent at the OneLight that brought it all together for me. If I know anything about lighting at all it’s in large part because of David and Zack. Zack has been working on rebranding himself, and has just launched a new blog. I’ve already subscribed, and if you’re interested in lighting, you should too.
David Goodger asked if I would take some photographs for the conference while I was at PyCon, to which I happily agreed. So fair warning that if you come near my camera, you may end up in my Flickr stream.
I haven’t been taking as many photographs as I would like recently. One thing I have managed to find some time for is some new photography books. Several of the photography blogs that I read have been talking up Joe McNally’s book “The Moment It Clicks”. McNally is a very accomplished magazine photographer, and the book is an accumulation of his experience in 30 years of shooting. There are over 100 little section in the book. Each section begins with a short quote/quip, and is accompanied by a full page photograph along with a full page explanation of the lesson, and often times an explanation of exemplar photograph.
Several other reviewers, including David Hobby, reported getting the book and then staying up way too late reading it cover to cover. I was sorely tempted to, but there was just too much information to do that. There’s an enormous amount of content and when I finished I was grateful for all the experience that I had just run by my eyeballs and brain. This is a book for working shooters, and if you don’t put the stuff to work, you won’t really get the value out of the book. The challenge for me, and I suspect many others, will be translating these short pithy lessons into a part of our regular photographic practice. Since we’re reading a condensation of 30 years of Joe McNally’s life, there’s no telling how long that will take. But at least now we have something that we can turn to periodically to remind us.
Even better, McNally has started a blog that picks up where the book left off.
Over the last several months, the Seattle Flickr Strobists have been cranking it up. This past Sunday was another crazy inflection point for us. In November, the “cheap” studio space that we had been using for shoots closed, and people started looking for some kind of indoor space to shoot in. The space of choice has been an underground parking garage. At the same time, David Hobby, author of the Strobist blog, hooked us up with A-list professional photographer Chase Jarvis. Chase hosted a bunch of us at his studio to find out what we’ve been up to and to explore ways that he could give back to the community by helping us.
So on Sunday, instead of shooting in an underground garage, Chase arranged for us to shoot in Hangar 30 at the old Sand Point Naval Airfield, which is now part of Magnusnon Park in Seattle. This was a very large event for us, 50+ phtographers, 12 models, and almost all of Chase’s crew. There were at least 16 separate lighting setups, ranging from single speedlight on sync cords all the way up to several big studio strobe setups, and everything in between. I was involved in organizing the shoot, trying to make sure that we had enough setups (this is complicated because of all the different wireless trigger systems), and arranging for enough models. It looked like there was going to be so much organization required that I basically resigned myself to not taking any pictures myself. It’s a testament to the nature of the Seattle Flickr community that the setups did end up self organizing (after a bunch of on-line pre organization), and Jennifer stepped in and took over the management of the models during the shoot.
We had several surprise guests, including David Hobby himself, as well as my friend James Duncan Davidson, which made for a great deal of fun. Both David and Chase have written posts about the event from their perspectives (David’s post, Chase’s post - Chase’s folks have done a cool video also.), and Duncan has written his perspective as an “outsider”. After the shoot was over, we all went back to Chase’s studio for conversation as well as many rounds of Guitar hero. Here’s a summary from the Flickrites’ own Guitar Hero, Danny Ngan.
I feel very, very fortunate to be a part of this community, especially at this stage of its development. It feels very much like it did when I got involved in the (relatively) early days of the Apache Software Foundation. There is an incredible amount of energy, sharing of knowledge and equipment, and the blossoming of friendships. The last five months have been wonderful - I almost can’t imagine how things will be a year from now.
Since people stepped up to help, I did end up shooting after all. Seattle wedding photographer Sarah Rhoads and I were working with a model who had a formal dress that could pass as a wedding dress. I want to try my hand at shooting some weddings, so this was a perfect opportunity to do something that would be close to a bridal portrait session. After a break to allow other people to shoot on our setup, I wanted to do a different setup and pose, so I started messing around with equipment, digging in my bag, etc. The next thing I know, Chase is like “do you want me to hold a light or something”? For the next 15 minutes, Chase (and sometimes his assistant Scott) held my lights, suggested a setup change, and just generally worked with me. It was amazing just watching Chase and Scott adjusting the lights even before I could tell them what adjustment was needed. It was a great opportunity, and gave me a whole new perspective on how professionals work, and how attuned it is possible to become.
Here’s one of the shots from that session:
Be sure to check out Duncan’s “making of shot” which is embedded in the comments.
Thanks to Chase, David, Duncan, and all the Seattle Flickrites!
I’ve been using Photophlow a fair amount over the last few days - It’s been pretty fun, although the real value will come if we manage to use it for shoot planning or review, which hasn’t happened yet.
One thing that I’ve noticed is that having Photophlow open in a browser while I’ve got other webapps running tends to make the overall experience a bit less nicer. So taking a page from Travis Vachon, I created a Prism (Webrunner) application for Photophlow. This lets you run Photophlow as a standalone application, in a container which is essentially a custom version of Firefox. You can get the webapp here. You will also need a copy of Prism to make this work.
Last night, Scoble mentionedPhotophlow on Twitter. I went over to see the site and then begged and pleaded for an invite - and got it. Photophlow is kind of like an IRC customized for dealing with Flickr photos. There is a global chat room, each user has his or her own chat room, and there is a chat room for every Flickr group. Within a chatroom, people can search Flickr photos and the room can follow along to see what they are searching. You can select photo out of the search, which will be transmitted to the room. There are some other features, like turning off the following of other people’s searches and turning off people’s ability to see what you searched for.
The Photo 2.0 angle
People like David Hobby and Chase Jarvis have been talking about (and living out) “Photography 2.0″, where there is massive sharing of photographs and photographic information. One of the things that I’ve often wished for is the ability to talk (in real time) to someone to get/do a critique of a photo. I think that this is something that happens best in real time. You could do that via IM and hyperlinks. You might even be able to do that via IM group chats, if all the people in the critique were using the same IM system. (It’s 2008, IM vendors). The value that I see in Photophlow is having a realtime way of talking about photos in a group. It would be even better if there was a way to annotate the photo being broadcast at the moment, so that you could focus attention on particular parts of a photograph. We’ve been doing some interesting group photo stuff here in Seattle lately, and I definitely think that Photophlow is something that could really help with some of the things we have done, as well as some of the things we are thinking of doing. Besides annotation tools, I would also like an easy way to log/archive a whole chat session or parts of a chat session.
The Web 2.0 angle
Photophlow is technically interesting for a number of reasons. It’s an app that’s built entirely on top of another web applications’ API. And it’s pretty substantial. There’s a lot going on here - a lot of AJAX, and API calls to Flickr. The app feels kind of pokey because it’s pushing the limits of what can be done in Javascript. Indeed, if I run Photophlow in Safari 3 instead of Firefox, the performance is noticeably better. This is a situation that we also see in Chandler Server. It’s going to be interesting to see how well this is able to scale up.
Photophlow is also pushing the limits of how some people think of using a web application. It’s designed to be used a lot and in a highly interactive fashion. I know that I would probably keep chat rooms for my personal group, the Seattle Flickr Meetups group, and the Strobist group open all at once if I could. The designers have also built in bridges to IM notification and to allow you to Twitter from within Photophlow. Too bad their isn’t a way to get a Twitter stream instead of an IM notification - but that’s more a limitation of Twitter than of Photophlow.
I bet that you could do some of what Photophlow does with a custom IRC bot. But I also bet that it would be substantially less accessible to people who are photographers first and computer users second (or third, or what have you). Then again, maybe here’s another opportunity for VOIP…
If you haven’t gotten into the beta yet, there’s a short tutorial video.
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