Over the last twenty years I have worked with a lot of models, and I have heard some photographers and many of the general public refer to models as dump blonds, but what is the truth in my experience.
Well for the start 99.9% of models are very hardworking. No matter if their degree students studying to become doctor’s (as was one of my models) or simply modelling for a little extra cash, or want to be a professional model as there long term career; modelling is not easy.
Try standing in front of bright studio lights, producing an expression that the photographer or director has asked for and maintaining it while the studio lights pump kilo-watts of light into your face.
Its challenging work and does require skill. As far as brightness, well models typify the general public some are very intelligent and retire at twenty five after establishing a model agency and selling up to the highest bidder and others are just girls trying to make a living.
All are hard working and in general I think models are above average in intelligence, they certainly tend to have good heads for business, and know what they are doing, where they want to get to and how they are going to get there.
Saturday was a full and busy day shooting for clients. We in the full swing of wedding season now.
Sunday was a little more relaxed. After a bit of shopping in the morning we hit the garden and harvested the remains of the peas and broad beans. It’s been a much better year for them then last year.
We also had a major weed of the front garden.
The early evening drove me back to the computer to do more editing while Caroline supervised the chickens while they did there bit of gardening.
I have been shooting digital now for nine years. In that time I have a growing collection hard drives.
From a fairly early stage I standardised on LaClie Rugged Firewire drives, ranging from 160 GB to 1 TB, as up to now I have always had Mac Laptops.
I also have three mains powered desktop drives, A old 1 TB LaClie which I now keep my best photographs on as DNG format. A Drobo Array used as a backup target, and my new drive which is a G-Tech EV Thunderbold2 with two 1 TB drives configured at RAID0.
I still have a few things to consider and thats where I put things on the new machine. At the moment my main Lightroom Library is on the internal storage and I have placed all the photographs on the fast Thunderbolt2 external array, and have a 1 TB USB3 drive split into two partitions, one as a Time Machine target for backup and the other holding my iTunes Library.
My oldest LaClie drive is also attached and is set as a Lightroom import backup target and also as a catalogue backup target.
With just the G-Tech and USB drive my office is now silent and I can hear the birds out side.
The Drobo is quite noisy and but gets used once a month for backups.
Interestedly before I bought an extra Thunderbolt2 to Firewire converter and the new Thunderbolt drive; I connected directly into the Drobo and daisy chained everything off that. It definitely slowed things down and I also thought I had a finder issue and spent sometime trying to diagnose the issue.
On boot up my finder would hang for about two minutes before I could use it. It turned out only to do this when the Drobo was connected, so I do wonder if the Drobo is ready for replacement.
A couple larger cheap USB drives also have a copy of all my photographs on, one of these I keep in the office in Lincoln and the other at home, they get swapped and updated monthly so if the worst should happen I still have my work.
Cloud storage also plays its part. I tend to use Dropbox as its available on all the platforms I use from Linux, Mac and Window, plus my phone. I stick a copy of my Lightroom library here.
While I was in Lincoln Cathedral on Saturday photographing and listening to the orchestra, I tried out a number of different shots and styles, some of which worked better then others.
This shot was taken with a Leica M8 and 50mm Summilux at f/6.7 and 1/8 second.
The slower shutter speed does mean its not tack sharp, but I do find it a pleasing image if one that has not quite worked as I wanted.
My first shot of these scene was sharp but thats in the reject pile; the reason is I shot it wide open and you cannot make out the background. This one while not so sharp, you can at least make out the background.
This picture I feel teaches me three things, its not necessary to have a sharp picture to have a pleasing picture, a lesson I have mentioned before here in this blog. Two, while shooting wide open with a fast lens is an overused style over the last few years, its does not always work and that depth of field is not only a relationship of aperture but also of where you are focusing; the close you focus the less depth of field you have. Lastly noise, I shot the Cathedral photographs with my old Leica M8 which with its CCD sensor has significant noise above 640 ISO and that is generally the limit I shoot with it, but in situations where you have good light ISI 640 while producing noise, the noise is not objectionable.
Its been a couple of months since I was last in Lincoln to do some photography. This weekend I was lucky enough for it to be the Lincoln Busking Weekend. We also had orchestra practice in the Cathedral, so I got to listen to that as well, which was quite a treat.
Its another film Friday! Yes, one of the downsides of me having a new scanner is that I get to show you some of my old work. This was taken about ten years ago and is from a period where I was teaching Caroline how to develop Black & White film, something that we enjoy but have not done in at least eight or nine years, but is something I want to get back into.
I hate the argument about what is best film or digital, its like asking a painter what is best, water colours or acrylic, there different and both a valid art form and craft.
The camera I think was a Nikon FM2n, the film was Ilford HP5 Plus rated at its standard ISO 400.
Canon A1 Fujichrome Slide Film Taken in the late 1980’s
I am slowly getting the hang of film scanning. Getting everything clean is the first and major step, after that is relatively simple.
I am using SilverFast which came free with my scanner.
The way I am working is as follows.
Step One clean and mount the film and scanner plate
Select Frames and delete all to get rid of the old frame settings
Select Pre-Scan, at this point it does a basic scan
Select Frames, Find Frames and select the appropriate film holder, in this case Filmstrip 35mm
I then select my resolution 6400 ppi for film and then select the film Vendor, film type and ISO.
Then its a tweak to the Midtones to make the files a little flatter and easier to working on post production, I use +5.
Select Copy settings to all frames
Now for the time consuming part.
Zoom into the first frame and adjust the frame to capture all the image
Tweak the histogram if necessary
Go to next frame and repeat
Once all frames are done I then select batch scan and have it uniquely number each file and place them in a watch folder.
Its then over to Lightroom where I configure Auto Import. I have found the the default developer settings I use for my Nikon DSLR are a good starting point and I have Lightroom add the current date to the scans filename.
I now go off and have a cup of coffee and leave the computer to do its stuff, the scanner putting the images into the watch folder and then Lightroom automatically importing them, adding some developer settings and meta data and adding them to my main Catalogue image store. If you have a lot of images to scan you can then use this time to prepare your next batch of scans. The Epson V850 came with two sets of holders for each main type of film, 35mm mounted slides, 35mm film, medium format and 5 x 4 large format.
Sometimes we need a bit of inspiration in our photography, generally we have the bad habit of buying new photography gear instead of trying to challenge ourselves with a new project.
A good thing to turn too, is close ups and details, it was one of the things I worked on during the recent photowalk.
All pictures taken with a Olympus OM-D M10 lent to me by OlympusUK.
Well the weekends are getting back to normal now and photography is coming back to the fore; I have some wedding photography coming up and hope to get into town with the Leica for a bit of street photography again as well as some medium and large format landscape.
For this weekend it was backups first. Updating the external Drobo with all my Lightroom data, and also copying it to a big portable Lacie Rugged drive to take down to the office on Monday. I have one down there all ready with all my data except for this months work.
I like to have a copy off site just in case the worst should happen.
I have also been having a go at batch scanning 35mm Black & Film which I may blog about later.
While my disks are getting worked hard i’ll be popping round to the local school as there having a school fate to raise money. I’ll be taking the Leica M8 and ‘street shooting’ round the local stalls.
There seems to be a lot of interest in Street Photography currently. With that comes lots of advice on what camera you should use and what lens.
From my previous article on whether you are a fisherman or hunter, the other main consideration is your lens and camera choice which can make a big difference.
The definitive camera for Street Photography has for a long time been the Leica M film camera, pre-focused its silent and deadly.
Today many would say the Ricoh GR with its small form factor and its snap focus ability is one of the top contenders and certainly if you can accept the lack of viewfinder its certainly up there. The other top contender is of course the Fuji X100, with its optical viewfinder and fast f/2 35mm equivalent lens, its another top choice.
But why not an SLR, well there are easily spotted and mark you out as a ‘photographer but one of the smaller bodies and a pancake lens is an option, the other option is of course a long lens and picking your subjects off from a distance.
Leica M8 50mm Summicron
The current mirrorless cameras with their tillable rear screens are also another good potential, allowing waist level composition and not alerting your subject as you raise the camera.
Leica M4, Summicron 35mm Ilford Delta 400
But what about the lens?
Olympus OM-D E-M10 14-150mm
Well the above shots were taken with 24mm, 35mm and 50mm on a Leica M8 or a film full frame Leica M4, and a superzoom on an Olympus OM-D E-M10; the shot below was taken with a Nikon V1 with a fixed 10mm (28mm equivalent) lens.
Nikon V1 10mm f/2.8
While a telephoto zoom can be useful especially when combined with a waist level viewfinder ie the tilt rear lcd screen, traditionally a fixed length wideangle or 50mm standard has been the one to go for.
If you use a fixed length prime for any length of time you get to instinctively know the angle of view and can then take pictures that much quicker. With a camera with fast autofocus or decent manual focus and the ability to manual prefocus.
So what should you use, well once again its down to you. Do you have an affinity with the longer lens or a wide angle. Does the thought of getting in close with a 28 or 35mm thrill you or terrify you. Do you like to rely on autofocus, or manual zone focus. Finally the body, SLR, rangefinder, mirrorless what best suits you?
Leica M8
In my case I most enjoy a Leica rangefinder with 35mm lens, but I possibly get better results from a mirrorless camera with either a fixed wide angle or telephoto zoom. If I look through my back catalogue of photographs you will find that the majority of good Street Photography was taken with the Leica but that is just because I generally carry the Leica with me more often and that is possibly the most important point.
Its the camera with you that gets the shot, and which camera do you prefer to carry? for some thats an SLR for others a mirrorless, for me a Leica and for many looking at flicker that would be an iPhone.
Over the last twenty years I have worked with a lot of models, and I have heard some photographers and many of the general public refer to models as dump blonds, but what is the truth in my experience.
