THE MUSINGS OF AN OBSESSIVE PHOTOGRAPHER

In his regular piece for Going Digital, Dave Muscroft writes about his experience during a lifetime as a professional photographer.

Numbers, statistics, and back to basics

Oldest, most expensive, millions….

On the right is the oldest shot I have in my files.......shot around 1969 with an old family happy-snap camera, probably on a family day out to Derbyshire. Little did I know then that I would be shooting this exactly this kind of image a decade later with the intent of sending it to a picture syndication agency in London. They then sold my shots all around the world. Though by the time I’d sold enough ‘feature’ pictures I would actually asking those people if the pony could sit in their car !

Again, little did I know that they would still be sending me the occasional (though very small !) cheques 30 years later for those old fun feature images !

So you think camera's are expensive ? On the left here is an example of the pro SLR I was using 30 years ago, the Canon F1. It was about £1000 even then. Just the body only, no motordrive, no automation.......BUT you could knock nails in with it ! The beautiful little machine on the right is the Olympus OM1, my first really good SLR. I can't remember how much it was in 1974, but this mint example still demonstrates the sweetest sounding shutter of all time.
By the way, the 135mm/f2 on the Canon is one that I actually used back in the early eighties. I'd sit by the goalmouth on my aluminium camera case waiting for Sheffield-whoever to score with it. This would be in all weather’s of course. There was a joke among sports snappers at the time that Hakuba (the maker of the said ali cases) was Japanese for piles !
So my feeling is that around a grand for an all-singing all dancing ‘do everything’ SLR nowadays can't be bad !

Canon have recently announced a significant milestone by celebrating the production of its 50 millionth EF lens for its renowned EOS range of cameras, marking over 20 years of innovative technology. That’s an awful lot of glass……and I must have bought dozens of them myself since my first in about 1990.

The lenses we covet most can cost a fortune it seems. And they are way better than in the old days. But in reality our most powerfully creative tools are the eyes we view the world with, and the mind which edits the information our eyes collect.

It’s not about sophistication of your camera, or having the best lens (though I’ll freely admit it helps the creative process along !)       

YOU start that process as soon as you decide to move on from ‘P’ (supposedly meaning ‘programme’, but I’ll let you fill in an alternative P word). Then working through the technical aspects of how best to deliver your chosen subject to the image processor (all via the most marvelous and mysterious ‘processor’ ever made….your mind)  and carrying on with working on viewpoint, angles, timing, and finishing with post production : editing, cropping, enhancement (b & W ?).

Sometimes successful picture taking can be as much about what shouldn’t be in the shot. Next time you’re out on location why not develop the habit of editing in the viewfinder to simplify, clarify and so produce a more powerful image.

All this reminds me of a charming phrase which Jan attaches to herself in her earlier days in photography……..’All gear and no idea !’

And finally, back to the real point of all this ….. some images ;

It’s so easy to shoot at best picture postcard images while on holiday.......and that’s after we've annoyed our families by taking ages looking for shots.

Getting into the nooks and crannies of southern France has been my passion for years now. This is one of my favourite hidden gems in the market town of Pezenas. I take my photography holiday guests here as an antidote to the usual and well known tourist haunts.

And later in post production I explore how to best present the image (this time in black and white).
We all love to capture the real flavour of our holiday destination, and pictures like this are really tempting to try and achieve, but if you're like me then it can be a little scary pointing your camera at strangers in strange places. You never quite know what reaction you're going to get! I'm in the Caribbean this time, in a market wondering how to get shots of colourful local people. I opt for the camera hanging by its neck strap at waist level, and my hand casually covering the shutter button. With the auto focus turned off the camera is prevented from 'hunting' for somewhere to focus (with the focus pre-set to the middle distance). I then set a medium aperture of f11 to get plenty in focus on my wide zoom. This lets me remain inconspicuous while clicking away merrily, once in a while checking what I'm getting on the screen. This is one of my favourite travel shots ever, and it vividly brings back the scene to me.

More little techniques like this are what I show my photography workshop guests when we’re in France, though I like to refer to them as WOCC’s……‘weapons of creative capture’ (though I nicked the phrase from a much more creative friend of mine).

Obsession

It had never occurred to me that I was an ‘obsessive photographer’ until Jan attached the term to me.  However, I’m desk bound like lots of us due to the snow at the moment, and having just returned from a sledging outing in the field next door with my wife and kids I am reminded yet again of how my mind works:

Day 1 of snow…. went sledging with my boys like any dad would.

Day 2 …… took the Canon.

Day 3…….took the camera and shot the video that I hadn’t thought to shoot the day before.

Day 4…… still sledging, but my stock photographer alter-ego kicks in like Mr. Hyde to my Dr. Jekyll. I have to go and do a ‘better’ sledging shot.

My usual favourite, almost default (and more of that later) technique to lift a shot out of the ordinary is to go telephoto. So I duly trudge through the snow to the scene of the action toting my 70-200mm plus my latest toy a 2x converter. I take up position half way down the black run and dial in my default ‘action’ settings of 400 ISO, AV auto exposure (AF-C on Nikon) set to widest aperture (then checking that this leaves me with a shutter speed at least equivalent to the focal length to virtually guarantee shake-free exposures), continuous shooting, AI servo auto focus, and training my mind's eye on where is the best vantage point.  All that was left to do then was hope the AF tracked quickly enough and that the three screaming loonies (and out of control dog) missed me !

The shot you see here was duly printed that same afternoon and replaces an outdated family memoir in our lounge.

The point is, once creating a better image kicks in its about as easy to get out of your bloodstream as malaria!

So be warned.

Last year I led my first Reportage Event courses and location photography weekends, and let me say that photography is alive and well at Going Digital!  I’d had some doubts, having seen a fair amount of pretty unimaginative, and just plain uninteresting work elsewhere amongst the amateur digital photography community.

The point of these hands-on courses is to demonstrate how to work the subject, be in the right place at the right time, and to capture memorable images.

My challenge, to both reportage day course and residential guests in Derbyshire and France, is to start their view of the subject in front of them beyond the mere recording of the scene rather than sometimes move on to that.

The habit of starting from outside the confines of mere recording is essential! Otherwise photographers (as different from people who can merely point anything from a ‘phone to an SLR) will continue to be devalued.

I also helped out by enabling student guests to extend their minds’ eye by loaning them my telephoto kit (as above) and this seemed to trigger a spate of purchases by then fellow telephoto perspective enthusiasts. Having a personal preferred approach to favourite subjects can really help to give your images a distinctive, even professional-looking feel, and extra edge in fact.

Guest Isla produced the most incisive example of great subject interpretation by sheer quality of observation (see the ‘feet’ shot). She also went home to buy her own telephoto lens having caught the ‘telephoto perspective’ bug !

Wynn showed just what can be done with compact cameras…… his expert use of his two compacts has been a real eye-opener ! I always appreciated that mine could deliver the same quality as my pro SLR in a merely point and shoot situation, but I never actually tried to emulate my usual working of the subject (that we're now all turned on to!) with it.

His telephoto shot, from the same spot as my 400mm (and nearly £4000’s worth of kit) was exactly the same as mine!  Lots of his other images taken that day at Chatsworth House look like the best of SLR subject interpretation. All in different ways, they disprove my previous  thinking that compacts are inferior in handling capability to SLR's.

Guest John sent me this great shot of a squirrel in his garden, which he then had published in his local newspaper. Wildlife photography is his passion, and this shot demonstrates yer again that you don’t have to go far from your lounge to take great pictures!

Moving on to France was very much the same scene, with the addition of stunning blue skies and sunshine (plus wine of course!). Guest Brenda produced a stunning, again telephoto perspective, image of Millau Bridge’

Default actions…………when shooting, for instance, action subjects it’s a really good idea to pre-set the controls as I outline above. This is just the same as you would put your headlights on your car when driving at night, and take off the handbrake and put it into gear, look in the mirror and indicate when setting off…….. but you do all these things on ‘autopilot’ when driving because they’re second nature. Having a list of default settings for particular subjects can take the brain-ache of ‘how shall I best get this shot’, and more importantly leaves your minds eye free to achieve the real goal of capturing your next ‘killer image’ !

I’m looking forward to welcoming you to your choice of GD Reportage, location or French Workshop.  We all need to be able to look forward to better weather and getting out there with our cameras.

“Mama don’t take ………

………my Kodachrome away” went the song by Paul Simon in 1975. I remember the song vividly, many, many years later because with hindsight it was the background music to my formative years.   Now I can say that the end of an era has arrived because Kodak (latterly known as the ‘yellow god’ after the colour of its film boxes, and its place at the top of the market) announced yesterday that they were ceasing to produce the iconic slide film after 74 years production.

The film's ability to produce rich vibrant colours made it a favourite among professionals and amateurs alike, as well as being the ‘must use’ film specified by many editors.    I haven’t used it for about 15 years, which shows how far back this muse goes !

It sticks in my mind because it was the best  slide film available when I started snapping, and every roll came with a really useful information slip telling clueless teenagers like me what the exposure should be under various outdoor conditions. Now, since my little rangefinder camera had a very dodgy match-needle exposure meter on the top plate, it was really useful to be told that ‘in bright sunlight the exposure is  60sec. At f8’ (using Kodachrome 25 ISO film).  I carry such standard exposures (Note 1) with me to this day (in fact its written through me like I was a stick of Blackpool rock !)

Extrapolated to other film ‘speeds’ it allowed me to expose countless (probably thousands) of rolls of film in my travels around the world without recourse to my trusty (and by then) completely reliable and accurate hand-held meter. I’d simply know that if the sun was fairly high in the sky then the exposure was 250sec. At f8 on my standard film of 100 ASA Fujichrome (Note 2).

In film days, snappers also had to choose a particular film for an individual subject or end use. My stock cupboard sometimes had a dozen different types of film in it……. Colour slide (for editorial reproduction), colour negative to produce prints, black and white for newspapers. And all of varying sensitivities ranging from 100 to 1000 ASA.  Back in the nineties, if I wanted a colour print from a slide, a 10”x8” print (of often rather dodgy quality) would cost me a tenner ! I still have a portfolio of favourite shots with 20”x24” prints costing £50 each. Current technology may be confusing, but it has its uses !

Oh yeah, that’s all very interesting (I hope) you might say. BUT what has that got to do with the rest of us in this digital age ? I’m also nowadays almost totally reliant on the computer that my lenses are attached to. Indeed I’ve just upgraded my Canon, and I think it’s the bees knees, the wasps doo-dads, in fact every set of erogenous zones of every flying insect you might think of.

Our equipment does a lot of work for us, but isn’t infallible. Take the instance of the wedding photographer who rued the day that he set the ISO at a very high level for a dimly lit interior, and then nipped outside into bright sunshine for his next shot, while also turning on his flash to fill in harsh shadows. If he’d been taking notice of the four-figure shutter speed flashing in the viewfinder and consequently being over-ridden by the flash, (which reduced it to 250sec.) so that the exposure was too much by many stops, he would have realized why he was getting an almost white image on his camera screen !

What happened was the high ISO gave him an exposure of 8000sec, but the flash would only synchronise up to 250sec. And his resulting exposure was 5 full stops out ! And to make things worse, with the very high workload of a typical wedding he stood looking stupidly at said screen for rather longer than was comfortable !

You might be starting to guess which ‘P’ ( for plonker in this case, and see Note 3) hadn’t been keeping up with the the numbers and hadn’t gone back to a ‘default’ camera setting (Note 4)after he’d set up something out of the ordinary ? Yep, it was me.

The moral is:  there’s lots of automation in our cameras, but blind reliance on it can be risky.

‘Clever’ though the box of tricks is, your most vital pieces of equipment are your eyes, or rather the grey matter behind them. These are our primary controls in picture making. It’s very easy nowadays to concentrate on getting the most out of the equipment, and lets face it, that’s a big enough task in itself.

I’ll be pointing out some simple ways to find your way through the maze of options available to us all in future articles.

Capturing the spirit of your subject (sometimes with an odd or alternative viewpoint or approach) is the real challenge, and the satisfying end result of harnessing modern technology. Sometimes it’s as simple as deciding what shouldn’t be in the shot. We should all edit in the viewfinder to simplify compositions, and to produce more powerful images. This applies to the professional working for a specific client (or like me very often shooting ‘stock’ library images) and also to amateurs wanting to catch the eye of, perhaps, a camera club competition judge.

I would urge you also to be passionate about what you shoot ………you must be interested in the subject ! What presses your buttons ? Go shoot it.  Be known as ‘the guy who shoots…’

By the way, I recently downloaded Paul Simon’s snappers’ anthem from i-tunes. Funny how old memories match up with new technology eh ?

Oh, and Kodachrome had to be posted back to kodak in the little (yellow) return envelope that it came with. It took up to a week to get back to you.

Note 1. There were some other ‘standard’ exposures I used in the old days to take the guesswork out of shooting ; one was ‘night shots (of city lights for instance) are a minute at f8 at 100 ASA’. And with a bit of bracketing slide film often enough came out OK.  BUT the exposure for a ‘night’ shot of the moon is also 250/f8 at 100 ISO. I spent some time staring at my screen (yes, again) scratching my head a few years ago when I’d wrongly ‘guessed’ that because I was shooting at night that the exposure should be one ‘standard’ setting rather than the other !

If the sun went behind thin cloud I would increase the exposure by one stop. Thicker cloud meant two stops

Note 2. Recently a fellow Going Digital tutor pointed out to me that I was using the ‘old fashioned’ scale of ASA rather than the current  one of ISO.  Sorry, but I’ve been referring to ‘ASA’ for 30-odd years and the habit is rather hard to kick. The number still indicates exactly the same sensitivity to light, by the way.

Note 3.  ‘P’ also stands for programme, as we all will remember from the days when we used to use this laziest of  ‘get it more-or-less right most of the time’ settings. Though to my mind the letter P is more appropriately attached to the other word !

I’m sure you’ve moved on permanently from ‘P’ having been on Going Digital courses !

Note 4.  A default camera setting is a good idea, to set back on the camera every time you put it back in your bag, or having set it to something extreme. My default is 200 ISO/AV auto/ f5.6./ single shot drive/ one-shot AF/ high resolution.

A good default for weddings is to set the 'high speed synch' setting on your flashgun !

What Happens If...................

Its been a long while now since I scared myself rigid with the thought  'What happens if the big wide world stopped buying photography ?' This rather random scrap of mental scaremongering first occurred to me about thirty years ago, when I was first becoming comfortably established as a self-employed snapper. I remember that I was driving to a job at the time, probably for one of the nationals (newspapers that is) who were my bread and butter at the time.

I really can't explain where the thought came from, but it was probably triggered by the feeling that things were going a little too well, though I can't especially remember myself being a deep thinker at that age. I introduce myself to you on this philosophical note because the current feeling amongst professionals is that  'everybody seems to think they can take a picture nowadays', and in some ways that's true. With, for instance images from camera phones regularly filling the pages of newspapers and magazines, it might seem to be a fair supposition that professional photographers are a threatened species.

But, here's the thing, and whether we're amateur or pro. If you work hard at and demonstrate  to others your commitment to real quality, originality and flair in the images you produce, plus reliability and integrity, then you'll always stand out from the crowd. In this way you'll achieve what others don't, whether it's at your camera club competition, snapping family and friends, or in earning a living.

The basics are always the same, whether with the black and white film I had loaded when I had that thought three decades ago, or the card in your digital compact or DSLR you've just bought. The tricky bit nowadays is getting past the initial thought that photography is easy in the digital age. Then the shock that it is actually bloody complicated - inside a camera now they are really a computer with a lens on the front, and just pointing and shooting doesn't get you any better results than a Kodak Brownie did for your grandad!  Sobering thought innit! In the end, its all about the shot.  In this, my first effort at entertaining you, I hope to tell you a little about just how challenging and fun photography has been for me.

As I write, I suspect that these ramblings are triggered by my first guest visits to Going Digital courses. Some people who know me well would quip that its a bit late for me to get to grips with doing things properly!

We all like the new toys we've got, but the instruction manuals don't get us very far do they ? If also you're like me, then a 'how to' book on technique is about as useful as a tripod in a rowing boat. There's nothing better than someone who has the knack of explaining all that techy stuff showing you how to do it.

I'm just about to take a course on how to use a sister programme to Photoshop. I must admit that I opened up my new version of Lightroom and quickly went and hoovered the house (much to my wife's surprise) rather than have to get my head round a new bunch of hieroglyphics myself.

What keeps me sane though is knowing that there's another great subject just waiting for me round life's next corner. And just let me demonstrate how picture taking can vary between the purely random and the totally planned, by explaining how the two shots here were taken.

The Canal Du Midi in the Languedoc region of France (where Rick Stein cruised a few years ago sampling the local cuisine and wines, and where I have followed with avid enthusiasm) is somewhere I have spent many hours trying to capture its visual 'flavour'. This, my favourite shot, and I came across it by accident while in transit to another destination. Its shot on my three year old compact (the only camera I had with me at the time).  It's literally point and shoot, on full auto (that's the only way I use my compact) and took seconds to line up and compose.

The image of the bridge at Millau, one of the most awesome structures I have ever photographed, I planned in my minds eye having seen a TV documentary of its construction. The shot involved driving for an hour, stopping (illegally) by the side of the autoroute, climbing over a fence, hiking along a track, fine tuning correct position and camera  technique and then shooting variations on the shot you see here. Both have been published. Both have equal merit. And they are as chalk and cheese.