Photography

Photographing Live Music and Working with the Situation You are Given.

Concerts are designed specifically to be a listening experience where you get to hear music coming out in it’s rawest form. Instead of having a compressed sound file play out of your speaker you have the true source in front of you blasting the sound for the entire room to move to. This experience however is not built for photography.

The lighting is often dim, made to be highly stylized for the audience’s enjoyment but not so much for a camera sensor. You are confined to a space where you can’t get up close and personal with the subject, whether you’re in the pit or back stage. You’re compositions needs to be tight in order to keep gear and moving band member out of the way to get the shot. So at the end you just have to work with whatever you’ve been given and try to get the best shots possible.

The first thing you have to keep in mind when shooting live music is time. Major bands will normally only give you 3 songs to shoot and then you’re done. Others are just short set list where they only get 3 songs to begin with. The main way around this is to not only shoot when the band is playing. You should be willing to shoot during the set up, between songs and get the band members interactions between songs. The one thing you always have to do as a photographer is to be ready for anything and capture the moment.

The time tip is relatively situational being that if you’re shooting a smaller band you might have more than 3 songs. But one thing you will have to deal with is the lack of space to work with. If you’re in the photo pit with tons of other photographers you have multiple things you need to consider; Where are all the other photographers, What gives you the best shooting lanes to get a variety of shots and what lens you want on your camera. In the pit the best lens choice that I can think of personally is a 70-200 2.8 to give the sense that you’re right there up close to them with your shots. However using a wide angle can be useful in order to get the entire band in frame and give the photo grander context. But at the end of the day you got to do the best with what you got.

The biggest pain in the ass is going to be getting photos of the drummer. The drummer is all the way at the back of the stage with the worse lighting and with the most of amount of thing in your way. If you are able to get good shots of the drummer more power to you but it’s one of the most difficult things to shoot and often they are out of the way of the action.

So we discussed getting your shots in and getting them composed properly now how do we get the proper exposure. Most shows are going to have terrible lighting. Most show lighting is built around to be a visual experience but it doesn’t translate well on camera. The two work around to this problem is high ISO and processing the images in black and white. Shooting at high ISO will of course bring in the grain and cause problems in the color detail. So when the light is so dim and giving off strange colors the the sensor can’t process, well black and white is a great solution.

Just because the lighting is a challenge doesn’t mean you can’t use it creatively. When a show does use some kind of creative lighting can cause creative flaring and even hair line highlights. and when processing in black and white it you don’t have to worry about the tones.

The main thing to remember is to have fun and not every shot is going to be perfect. You’ll take some good ones some bad ones but every now and again you’ll get some great ones. You just got to keep shooting.

Live Music Photo Editing

By request of a close friend of mine I went to shoot a live performance of his band. Concert photography can be complicated and difficult because it backs you into corners and the lighting is usually sub par. So with careful edits you can make or break these photos. Watch my Lightroom editing process in the video.

First Travel Photography Experience

I don’t get out of New Mexico very often. Theirs the occasional trip out to Texas to visit family members but for the most part I’m stuck in the land of Enchantment (or Entrapment depending on who you talk to.) So when taking a trip out to Virginia to visit my girlfriend’s family and friends I figured it would be an excellent opportunity to step into the world of photography.The first rule you normally hear in terms of travel photography is travel light. This mentality has been what given rise to mirrorless camera systems, but unfortunately all I have is a full frame DSLR and a set of 3 lenses to go with it (and other miscellaneous.) in retrospective I could have left my Flash and my 70-200 at home but it was one of those things that you just can’t account for.

Virginia is completely the opposite of Albuquerque. The roads are winding as opposed to on a grid, the whether was cold and gloomy as opposed to hot and bright and somehow the food felt empty. (Seriously I didn’t know I could miss food so much.) But the whether was the most visual part. You don’t get Snow in New Mexico (or at least not this much.)

The backwoods area of where I was staying got up to 6inches of snow which in South Western standards. It’s not something that I’m particularly used to and it offered a different set of scenery that I never get out in New Mexico.

Other than being in Virginia I got to see some the surrounding areas. The first was going up to Annapolis Maryland to see my cousin and we got to see the bay and the Naval Academy.

Among my time in Annapolis I also got the opportunity to do some street photography in the area.

It was rather interesting to be in a different area with crowded streets to actually take pictures. Street photography isn’t something that you can do that often in New Mexico where the streets aren’t crowded and you would stick out like a soar thumb with a large DSLR.

Another place I got to see is the nations Capital in Washington D.C. One thing that I discovered when I was their is that taking photos of the monuments is difficult. I’m not well versed in landscapes and architecture photography so I didn’t quite get what I wanted out of the photos.

However the more interesting thin that I had done was going the the museums of natural history press-10 .

Animals, Dinosaurs and ancient humanity was everything and getting photos of them was incredibly fun.

Overall we get it was a fun experience to get to do something I don’t get to do where I’m from and get photos I don’t get to take in New Mexico. But all in all I’m glad to be home.

Lightroom Editing: The Tara Portraits.

I’ve recently decided to start doing some editing videos using light room to show my editing process. What I like to do, what I don’t like to do and just goof around with the differen’t things I can do with photos.

I’m probably going to start being less formal in these just so I can bring out more of my personality out. There are so many tutorials out there these days that I don’t necessarily want to do what everyone else does.

This is also a part of an Adobe Student Rep program that I’m doing this semester so if you want to get a month free trial of Adobe Creative Cloud you can click this link http://adobe.ly/1jr9L5U and you’ll get access to all of adobe’s creative software to take for a test drive.

Fitting in time for photography.

Trying to be creative during a college semester can be extremely difficult, especially when all the classes you are taking are the University core requirement and you have a part time job that are not exactly designed to stimulate your need for creative production. This becomes incredibly prevalent for photographers who think to themselves on a regular basis, “I would rather be out shooting.”As opposed to whatever political science class that you’e sitting in. If this is the situation that you find yourself in the only advise that seems plausible is to make time to go shoot every once and a while. This can be fairly hard to do sometimes but if you can pull it off it can be extremely rewarding.

A few weeks ago in Albuquerque it finally felt like winter had fully kicked in with overcasting clouds and a light amount of snow which at first doesn’t seems too conducive for photography but I though to myself that if the overcast kept up it would be perfect for a mid afternoon shoot downtown. Sadly I misjudged New Mexico’s ability to stay consistent weather wise and it went back to being in the mid 60’s with bright sunny skies. However that didn’t stop me. I put out a post on facebook if anyone wanted to take part in a impromptu photo-shoot down town and like most statuses it go a handful of likes but not a huge response. However one person did happen to respond.

Tara, a friend of mine that I have done photos of several times in the past was the only one who responded to the call so we arranged to meet up down town to snap off some shots in some of the back allies, parking grarges and other interesting locations in the down town area.

One thing you’re always going to find in any downtown metro area is various degrees of street art and graffiti which can always be a great back drop for urban style portraits. Whether they are just a bunch of random tags some hooligans put behind random buildings or if they were beautiful works or art by a local artiest it’s always a great scene to add to your photos. The thought of shooting in back alley’s can seem a little bit sketchy but if you play it smart and don’t draw a whole bunch of attention to yourself you’ll be just fine. People will often leave you alone if you leave them alone. Especially when you’re shooting.

One thing that should be kept in mind at all times is lighting. Being that this was done in the middle of a bright day it was important to find shaded areas to get nice even lighting. There are of course other techniques and styles you can use to manage the light but the important thing is that you do what you feel works best for what you want to do.

The most important thing with being out on a shoot is to have fun really. If this was in anyone a more professional shoot with the photos having a more distinct purpose I would have taken in more seriously but this shoot really was for the sake of having fun. Tara is a relaxed and easy going person to be around and it made shooting with her all the more simple. You don’t have to get into insane director mode and you don’t have to be picky you just have to shoot.

I’m not only doing random portraits over the semester either I’m also doing freelance work with my universities independent student news paper so I also get to do that kind of photo work which is really exciting. Hopefully I get to do more photos in the near future.

Photographing Albuquerque Comic Con: The Challenges of Low Light and Crowded Spaces

This past weekend was Albuquerque Comic Con (ACC) and as previously mention I went to to cover the event in a photographic fashion. This year the event was being held at Hotel Albuquerque down in Old Town and while it was a great venue it came with some of the hardest conditions to shoot in. 2 factors played into making this assignment challenging .1) The lighting was awful. It was a dimly lit hotel all over the show floor using mainly tungsten light bulbs with some areas letting natural light in through windows. 2) Incredibly tight spaces with a large turnout made crowding and moving about the area difficult. Both situations were manageable however with just a little know how, patience and letting go of some nit picky things.

The main thing I needed to figure out was how I was going to deal with the low lighting. Being that the light was so low I pushed the ISO to 6400 on my D600 and was shooting at a wide open aperture. The workhorse lense I was using all day was my 85mm f1.8g and it pretty much never came off the camera body. Ideally I would have liked to stop down to f2.8 or f3.2 to get some added sharpness and depth of field but I needed all the light I could get so wide open at 6400 was where I had to go.

OnTheFloor-7

As a result I had to sacrifice keeping slight amount of grain out of the images and the risk of missing focus on the subjects in order to get properly exposed images and cut down on motion blur. As an added bonus for shooting at f1.8 I created some excellent Bokeh (out of focus areas) to cause awesome subject isolation. Now a lot of other photographers that were there covering the event were handling the low light differently by using a flash. There is nothing wrong with using a flash but I personally don’t like using an on camera flash that is going to cause some awkward shadows in the background and not to mention being that I wasn’t there shooting in an official capacity I didn’t want to draw too much attention to myself while I was on the floor. (Note: I was aloud to shoot this event I just wasn’t there for a publication or affiliated with the con itself.)

So the main thing I did to handle the crowded spaces was to stick with my already tried and true style of shooting candidly/journalistically. As previously mentioned in a past article on convention photography you see that a lot of people will stop the cosplayers in the hall and ask them to pose or take a photo with someone else. At this event especially it caused some problems with blocking traffic and resulted in some missed opportunities to capture moments as opposed to posses. So by shooting in aperture priority and high ISO and keeping tabs on what shutter speeds I was getting I just kept shooting on the go. There were times when I would miss focus or get some annoying backlighting messing up my exposure but for the most part this style served me well. I couldn’t quite nail focus on every shot I took but being that I was shooting candidly and not posed portraits I didn’t lose much sleep over not having the sharpest image possible.

Now it wouldn’t have been a convention if my cosplay friends hadn’t asked me to take some portraits of their cosplays. This is how the final challenge of the con took place, finding a secluded area to shoot that has useable lighting. Long story short I was able to find a place outside with no people around to get some portraits of my friends. Now I could lower my ISO to low and noise free levels and stop down my aperture to f3.5 and f4 to get that added sharpness.

OnTheFloor-3

Overall it was a great event and I got some stellar images out of the whole thing. So far I’ve been getting incredible feedback and it’s always great to shoot cosplay.

Convention Photography Tips.

Well the annual Albuquerque Comic Con (ACC) is right around the corner and chances are if you are attending (assuming you live anywhere near albuquerque and you’re into that kind of thing) you’re going to see a large number of photographers and regular patrons out with their DSLR’s, Smart Phones and point and shoot cameras taking pictures of everyone in a costume. I’ve shot quite a few of these comic book/anime conventions like the Albuquerque Comic Expo (ACE) and smaller ones like Con Jikan, and have seen other peoples photos from said conventions and I have noticed some trends in the photos taken at these events. Some of them good some of them bad and others are in the grey area of photography that is personal preference and style. So here I want to give some tips on how to get some of the best images at these conventions. (Note: These are all personal opinions on what you should do. I am in no way an authority on Con photography nor do I claim to be and the thing about photography is that we all find our personal styles and vision in the craft. I’m just giving you guide in what I like seeing in my personal images when I cover events like this)

Tip #1 Shoot Candidly.

Candid photography at these kinds of events is one of the most underrated styles of photos and people miss out on the opportunity of capturing rare moments that you’ll never get to see in regular day to day life. Where else are you going to capture Members of the Justice League mingling with the Avengers, Joker and Harley Quinn going up an escalator dressed as Batman and Robin or Rick from the Waking Dead eating a cheeseburger in a dining hall? The answer is nowhere else.

If you aren’t looking for candid shots however I’m going to let you in on a little secret: You don’t necessarily have to pull the cosplayers over. In my experience if you go around shooting at a convention if a cosplayer sees you have a camera pointed at them they’ll stop and pose for you. I know, crazy right? It’s quite the change of pace from candid shooting in public where if someone sees a camera pointed at them they get skittish and shy or sometimes even paranoid. It’s actually rather gratifying to know they want to have their photos taken. If you choose to shoot this way I would recommend using a short telephoto like and 85mm lens of even a 70-200 so you don’t have to be getting in their faces. It’s not a nessesaty, just a suggestion.

Tip #2: You don’t have to get the whole costume in frame

This is just a personal pet peeve of mine and I realize that not everyone agrees with me but I get annoyed when I see people get a mediumly wide shots of a cosplayer to get the entire costume frame. It throws off the composition, You’re getting a lot of things going on in the background that are going to be distracting and over all you just don’t get a very good photo. I might be guilty of overusing tight shots I will admit but once again a tighter shot helps keep your composition clean and makes it easier to blow out the background. Now I know many cosplayers will spend weeks and sometimes even months putting their costumes together and they want to show off their work but if they really want to show off they’ll get a photographer to do more professional portraits in them as opposed to just getting images done on the convention floor.

Tip #3 Publish and Share

These days copyright and having images stolen or appropriated is a problem, and sharing them online on places like Flickr or Facebook can be a little risky but in my experience putting the images up and letting people find and tag themselves in their photos has been a huge help in getting my images out there and letting people see my work, and more often than not the response has been incredibly positive. Sure a lot of the times people will only praise the subject in the photo and not the person who took it but if you do quality work people will recognize that and appreciate that and that leads to networking and establishing credibility.

These have just been a couple of tips that you can take to heart if you ever find yourself shooting at a convention. Feel free to try them, or ignore them as you see fit but remember that the important thing is to go and shoot. These Conventions can be fun, exciting and even exhausting but you can get amazing images and meet unique people that you won’t find anywhere else. I look forward to seeing what ACC has in stores for me and am looking forward to getting more images to add to my portfolio. If you are attending I hope to see you there and if you ever get the chance to shoot at a convention I would encourage you to do so. It can be incredibly rewarding.

Family Photography: Patience is a Necessity.

Patience is one of the most underrated qualities a photographer can have when it comes to shooting. Especially when it comes to shooting some difficult subjects, in this case children. Children seem to have this unlimited tank of energy that is feeding into their motors at all time. A quality that I feel most adults still envy. But because of this constant energy it’s impossible to get them to hold still and keep them in one place long enough to get a shot.

This weekend I was asked to do a shoot with someone I’ve worked with before and get photos of her and her daughter. The little girl in this situation was a perfect example of the previously mentioned motor with an infinite fuel tank. To the mother in this situation it seemed like a lost cause getting her to hold still and get photos but I assured her that I could get in done. When I shoot photos I’m looking for moments as opposed to posses and this shoot was a great example of that. As opposed to getting the images you would see out of a sears portrait studio I want to capture the interaction between the subjects and try to bring out relationship between a mother and her young daughter.

Containing a child’s personality is like trying to catch a bullet with your bare hands. The best you can do is get the child to feel like they’re playing along. While at a local park it can be very easy for a child to get distracted but instead of looking at this as a frustrating situation you should look at it as an opportunity to capture a great moment. There is nothing more nostalgic than a child treating the whole world as it’s playground.

I’ve always had more fun with photography by keeping it organic. Let things happen in front of you and you can capture things that are unique and different as opposed to something that feels staged and orchestrated. Why should shooting portraits be made to feel like your trying to make a family look happy. If you can get the right kind of interaction you will just naturally bring out that happiness by just letting them be themselves. To them mother it can be frustrating to handle a hyperactive child but it is still plain to see the love and care she has for her daughter.

There is nothing wrong with trying to get the perfect image but sometimes if you try to force it you’ll never get that image. If you show some patience and look for the right moment the perfect image will come to you. That being said you should also still go out and shoot. If you constantly sit there and wait for it to happen you’ll miss out on opportunity elsewhere. Sometimes you won’t even know you’ve captured a moment till after you got it. Sometimes you just need to dive in but you don’t have to do it with guns blazing.

Taking the New Camera for a Spin

As I had previously mentioned in my last post I have recently upgraded to a full frame DSLR. There are a lot of advantages of having a full frame camera such as High ISO performance, getting the true focal length out of your lenses and just better overall image quality. I’ve yet to use it for a shoot but I took it to Old Town to just feel around with the functionality of the camera.

The first thing I instantly noticed was the focal length of my lenses. When I originally shot on my D5100 which was a DX sensor, meaning that it had a 1.5 crop factor on every lens I used. This means my 50 F1.8g worked like a 75mm lens my 85 F1.8g was closed to being a 130mm lens and my 70-200 2.8 worked more like a 105-300mm lens. On this new full frame camera all these lenses look a lot wider to me. Now My 85 looks a lot closer to what my 50 used to be on my old camera. This is really forcing me to get closer to my subjects and thinking more carefully about my composition. Now this acquisition has encouraged me into looking at getting a wide angle lens and I am currently looking at the 28 F1.8g to give me the wide angle on this camera but that might be later down the line.

another benefit I’ve seen in the full frameness of this camera is how the Raw files turn out. I do all my post processing in Lightroom and the high ISO performance on top of getting all the information off the sensors has been great during post processing. Some files that go in a little over or underexposed are easily tweaked and the color tones I’m able to get is far superior that I ever got out of my DX camera.

Going forward I’m looking forward to things I can do with this camera in portraits and shooting the candid/journalistic situation that I like throwing myself into. The other features of the camera work up to satisfaction for me as far as frames per second in continuous burst, the build of the camera and the focusing system is quicker than anything I had in my last camera so all is well in photography land with my new camera.

Last Shoot with my First DSLR

Almost a year ago I got myself a Nikon D5100. I had originally gotten the camera for video purposes so that I could film better quality YouTube videos but through associations and professional opportunities I learned to use it as a proper camera and learned the ins and outs of the camera settings, Manual operations and the rules to follow (and break) in photography in the Year that I had the camera I also invested in full frame, Wide aperture lenses and other pieces of equipment thinking that they will be good now and great when I choose to upgrade. Well I’ve officially upgraded and gotten myself a refurbished D600, full frame DSLR.

The day before the new camera was delivered I decided that I was going to send it off with shooting a random set with my close friend Yasamin.

Yasmine does not have any real modeling experience to speak of and as such is a very shy person when the camera pointed at her. That being said she is one of the more energetic people I’ve ever worked and this was an excellent opportunity to work on my directing skills which is one of my weakest tools in my photography utility belt.

Being that she is such a high wired individual I had to approach this as not so much as telling her what to do but more along the lines of how I wanted her to behave. When I’m shooting portraiture I don’t like to spend and extensive amount of time positioning the subject into exactly where I want them to be. Instead I like to have them just flow freely and position themselves while I look for the best spot and the best moment to get the shot I want. Does it work every time: No but it’s more enjoyable way to shoot in my mind. This method has been great when I’ve worked with models who have been doing this line of work for quite a long time and know how to control their body language and expressions well in front of the camera. However this method isn’t nearly as effective when working with a more inexperienced model and proved to be a challenge. However after some trial and error I started to get the best out of the subject by just harnessing her personality.

This shoot proved to be a very fun way to send off a camera that has served me well over the last year and we’re both ready to move on to bigger and better things. Although it can be a smart idea to keep your older bodies as back ups I’m selling my D5100 to a friend of mine who actually owns and operates a local magazine out here in the land of enchantment and has some big plans for the camera. Me on the other hand will begin adjusting to shooting on a full frame camera where my focal lengths are going to start looking quite a bit wider and the noise in the photos are going to be a lot less noticeable. I’ve enjoyed growing as a photographer over this last year and I’m looking forward to what this next year brings me and my new camera.

TCK-Media

Realize Your Vision