but not now…

Almost all of the products that I have photographed this year have been for web sites, especially for use in Amazon shops, and they are all needed on a plain white background,

even white products like wedding dresses!
Or in this case white tubing.

I have found that web sites like Amazon have very specific requirements for how white and what size the image file should be, but once the requirements are known it is easy to select appropriate lighting and background material for the photography. I also use a Photoshop technigue to “finish” the background. I finally use software for an “unsharp mask” to give the image some lift.

The other major change over the old days is that the images are uploaded to a web gallery for client approval where needed or even instant collection, saving days compared to film processing and printing proofs. I will start photographing these thermostats soon and in a few hours the client will be able to upload them to his web shop ready to sell.

I had better start then

Of all the books on my shelf this is probably the one that I dip in and out of the most.

It is an inspirational book containing a wide range of photographic styles and has given me a good starting point when working in an unfamiliar style. I find browsing this book is usually followed by getting my lights out.

The book is very much a practical guide about how to light photographs. This works by showing you 100+ photographs with an accompanying 3D effect lighting diagram, these diagrams show the wide range of equipment used, flash, scrims, reflectors, even the sun and how they were used. There is even a good glossery of lighting terms for those do not know their scrim from their flats. The introductory text for each section, portraits, fashion, glamour is short and informative.

Although this book will be useful for those with a studio and lighting equipment the quality of the photographs and the modelling will inspire anyone who wants to photograph people. It is a great book for students of photography and a useful resource for those that teach it. Pro or amature is has something for us all.

Would I recommend this book?
Yes, I brought it and am happy to recommend it.

PS
Unusually, it is also worth mentioning the publisher Rotovision for the high quality of their photographic books the three that I have read, have all been well designed, informative and printed to a high quality.

I remember the book Michael Langford, Basic photography fondly for its easy, informative style. I hated my time at school as a child and I was not looking forward to the academic side of the RAF photography training especially chemistry!. But I loved the training. Because of Langfords approach to the subject I understood what I was reading, it made sense to me and it carried across to the practical training easily. I actually read the book for fun and photography came alive for me.

Recently I spotted the 8th edition, Langfords Basic photography on a shelf (I originally studied with a 1971 edition) and decided to take a trip down memory lane.

I am pleased to say that the content and style of the book is very similar to my original, except of course for the digital section

The book is made up of sections (see below) which flow together well when reading, building on the previous sections well, although you can just read the bits that you need and it still works well. Photography for me is a fascinating mix of craft, the technical, and creativity and this book covers both aspects well. The scope of this book is very, very wide covering everything from composition, colour balance, image stabilised lenses, sensitometry, Scheimpflug, chemical formulae to megapixels and interpolation.

The book claims to be aimed at the “serious photographer” which seems fair. There is not doubt in my mind that this should be “the” book for photography students but almost all serious photographers will get a lot from this book. It is great revision and an interesting read for those of us who have studied photography, for those that haven’t it will be full of “aha” moments. Please do not be fooled by the word basic, this book is suitable for the complete, enthusiastic, beginner but you will also find lens formulae and circles of confusion if you wish dig deeper.

This is not a book that will show you how to be a glamour photographer or a landscape photographer but it will teach you the skills that all photographers need as a solid base for their photography.

I enjoyed my trip down memory lane and If I could only recommend one photography book it would be this one, and then with disregard to the “only one rule” I would pair it with Langfords advanced photography. I will certainly keep both on my book shelf.

Langford’s Basic Photography: The Guide For Serious Photographers By Michael Langford, Anna Fox And Richard Sawdon Smith

Book sections;
What is photography?
Light, how images are formed.
Lenses, controlling the image.
Cameras, using film.
Using different focal length lenses, camera kits.
Digital cameras.
Lighting, principals and equipment.
Organising the picture.
Films and filters.
Exposure measurement.
Film processing.
Black and white printing.
The digital image, post production.
Finishing and presenting work.

During a telephone conversation a friend complained to me that when he was photographing people he had trouble getting them all in focus, by all he meant from the tip of their noses to the back of their heads.

I said that he did not have enough depth of field, he went unusually quiet.

The phrase “depth of field” simply refers to the part of a photograph, from the nearest to the furthermost points from the camera, that is in acceptable focus. In my friends case a whole head. The eagle eyed will have spotted the word acceptable above, I will come back to that.

Architectural photographers will often want as much of their subject as possible in focus from the foreground detail two feet away, from the camera, to the farthest visible point.

There are times that we do not want all of a subject in focus, for instance in fashion photography having your model in focus against an out of focus (blurred) background is often desirable.

The main factor controlling depth of field is the size of the aperture that the lens is set to, the aperture being the hole in the lens that the light passes through, the smaller the aperture = more depth of filed.

The size of the hole/aperture is referred to as the “F” number or “F” stop, F numbers are typically:
f32, f22, f16, f11, f8, f5.6, f4, f2.8, the smallest aperture being f32 through to the largest aperture at f2.8

My friend was working with a telephoto lens at f4 which will give a very limited depth of field at the distance he was working at.

So the solution for my friend was to work at a smaller aperture ie f5.5 or f8

To give you some examples, using my camera which is a full frame DSLR and a 70mm lens.

If I focus on a point 6ft away using an aperture of F2.8:
I will have a range of acceptable sharpness of 5ft 9ins to 6ft 2ins
a mere 5ins (12.7 centimetres)

If I focus on the same point 6ft away using an aperture of F22
I will have a range of acceptable sharpness of 4ft 10 inches to 7ft 10ins a larger 3ft (91 centimetres)

For landscape photographers, using a 24mm lens (wide angle).
If I focus on a point 2ft away using an aperture of F32
I will have a huge range of acceptable sharpness of 1 ft (30. cm) to Infinity.

For fashion photographers, using a 200mm lens (telephoto).
If I focus on a point 30ft away using an aperture of F2.8
I will have a range of acceptable sharpness of 29ft 5′ins to 30ft 7′ins,
which is only 14 inches (35cm), which would mean that a model would be in focus but almost everything else is out of focus, really making the model stand out.

I did mention above that we are discussing acceptable sharpness, if you are making small prints or only showing your images on the internet you will have a different idea of sharpness than a photographer making very large fine art prints or prints for exhibition stands. This brings us to the wonderfully named “circles of confusion and hyperfocal distance” which I will cover in a separate post.

PS

In answer to the question….
“can I get more depth of field if I use a 50mm lens instead of my 100mm lens”

Well, no..
If you are photogaraphing a person for a portrait and you want only head and shoulders using your 100mm lens,  switching to a 50mm lens will not gain you more depth of field because you will have to move the camera closer to the sitter which will actually mean that you have the same depth of field as with the 100mm lens.

Simply put, regardless of the lens focal length if the subject is the same size in your photograph and the F number is the same you will have the same depth of field.

Digital cameras and the internet changed all that. For me the first sign that I could add stock photography to my income stream was when I found Alamy.com. I already owned a pro spec digital camera so for no real extra cost I could shoot stock photographs and upload them to the Alamy website where they would then be available to buyers quickly.

Alamy also broke the mould by not editing the content of the images, photographers could make the photos that they wanted to and as long as they were up to Alamy’s strict quality control all was fine. Even now most photolibraries edit the content of the images photographers submit so a human decides if your photographs are saleable before they even get to the market place. Alamy lets the buyers decide.



I have to admit that like many photographers I initially took a lazy approach to shooting stock, I gave them my full attention technically (as Alamy demand) but I shot a lot of “well maybe it will sell” images. Amazingly some photographs did sell, which woke me up.



I started to think and plan my stock photography a bit more carefully, no more grab shots, and sales improved I’m pleased to say. Over three years I did market research and I increased the number of  photographs that I have on Alamy to 2300. My sales have been regular and the income was especially useful during a long bout of illness when I was unable to work. I have a long term goal of getting 10,000 photographs on line but that will take me years to achieve.

So all good news then

Well no, Alamy is an evolving beast, in an evolving marketplace, and goalposts are ever moving. For instance the way that photographs should be keyworded (the photographers responsibility) has changed, meaning that I have had to wade through Alamy’s clumsy software to re-keyword a couple of thousand images more than once, very time consuming. The promised bulk editing software from Alamy is still eagerly awaited (as of Feb 09).

Competition for sales in now fierce, the ease and low cost of shooting stock which I saw as an advantage also worked for everyone else, there are currently 14.99 million stock photos on Alamy and that number is growing fast. Amazingly Alamy’s 15 million images are a drop in the ocean of stock photographs available for sale via the likes of Getty, Corbis, imagefile etc.



The average price for a photograph has tumbled as a result of the huge amount of photographs available, good old supply and demand.

However, despite all of the downsides I like Alamy and I will keep making images for Alamy. I usually shoot stock photographs during quiet times and the more images that I have the better, the photographers with 10,000 + photographs on Alamy are still doing fairly well, but I will also start looking at niche markets and making photographs for them as well. (see my thoughts on Trevillion).

I first came across Trevillion Images in a magazine article where the high quality of the photography was mentioned.

I browsed Trevillion.com and was impressed by the photographs there, in fact the quality of the work seemed way beyond what I could produce. I am a commercial photographer used to producing images to a brief, timetable and budget which often  can be different to making photographs for pleasure. I say for pleasure because the images on Trevillion are obviously commercial but they also go beyond that. The images are fine art photographs of the type that photographers make for the sheer joy of the creating beautiful images.

I resolved to start making photographs for fun again and hope that some would suit Trevillion.  Some time later I had a CD of images to submit…. Trevillion were very gentle when they rejected my images and they left the door open for future submissions.

During a commercial shoot with a model I spotted an opportunity to use the location for “fun” images, the model was enthusiatic so we made a small series of images which I submitted to Trevillion.



Much to my amazement and pleasure some of the images were accepted and I duly sent the high resolution files. In a short time there were some of my images in the Trevillion web site. I felt surprisingly proud, that my work had moved up a notch.

An even bigger surprise was how quickly sales were made and my first cheque arrived. The images were licensed for use as book covers  (Trevillion images main market). Over time I have added images to the Trevillion library and although I only have a few (25) images online amazingly I have had sales, which says a lot for the high quality of Trevillion images sales efforts.

Would I recommend Trevillion images to other photographers?



Absolutely, they are easy to deal with, they do make sales but best of all they have helped rekindle my love of photography.

Trevillion Images

It was while looking for an easy way to create and manage a website that I first came across Smugmug.com, I have to admit that the name almost put me off looking further, which would have been a mistake.

Smugmug offered what I was looking for, I could build and update galleries of photographs quickly and easily, I could customise the look to match my branding and I could show or hide individual galleries which I knew my clients would love. I could also upload unlimited photographs without extra charges…. unlimited, sounds too good to be true…

…but an email from the Smugmug team in answer to my questions confirmed that I could upload as many photographs as I wanted to. It seemed that Smugmug could offer even more than I was originally looking for.

As I could sign up for a free trial without a credit card I decided to give it a try.

With little effort, or skill, I have built my website based on the templates, including information pages, public galleries and password protected galleries for clients. A visit to the excellent forum taught me how to add my logo and customise the look of the galleries and pages.  I suspect someone who is a little more technically minded could do wonderful things with the customising options. I should also add that the tech support is the best that I have had anywhere, essential as I am a photographer not a techie.

If I wanted to I could use my own domain name and remove the Smugmug branding, order prints, I could add video and utilise the unlimited bandwidth, the list goes on.

But the very best thing for me is my images are now backed up off site, like most photographers (I hope) I backup my images, I use external hardrives but ensuring that photographs  are also stored off site is tricky or would be without Smugmug. To be frank this one feature alone would make my Smugmug account worth having.

Smugmug and work
I usually undertake photographic commissions on location without my clients being present, when I get back to the office I run the photographs  through Lightroom and then upload low resolution proof images to a password protected gallery and the high resolution photographs to an archive gallery. When the client has selected the images they need I move the chosen images to a client download gallery, it is actually easier to do than describe. For my wish list I would like to lock (from download) or unlock (for download) individual images.

Unlocked Galleries Page – click to enlarge

Locked Galleries Page – click to enlarge

Conclusion
I am impressed with the features that Smugmug offers, the technical support and the great value for money. If you need a easy to set up website and/or a very good back up option from a reliable service with excellent support, Smugmug should be the first place that you look.

If you sign up I can even save you $5, simply use the following voucher code, qNJmKQXKIG3Qg.(note I get a few dollars off my account costs as well.)

http://markbaigent.smugmug.com/