Choked By Digital

I have mentioned before how Jeff Ascough gives no choice as to what final photo's are given to his clients. I would love to have the confidence to do this. Just yesterday a client asked to see all the photo's I had taken in black and white in colour. Like a lot of photographers that shoot a lot of black and white, I have already decided a shot will be either black and white or colour at the point of shooting it. Its a shame then that clients often ask to see the image in a different way to what was actually visualised in the first place. When I used film only there was no choice for the client. If the images were black and white they were shot on black and white film and that was that. I then had a medium format camera which I shot anything I visualised in colour.
Nobody complained and nobody asked for it any other way.
The problem sometimes is that in some extreme low light situations I can be shooting at high iso's and therefore the noise can only look good in black and white.
In colour the noise appears in coloured speckles and in black and white it appears not much different from 35mm film grain. I rarely use any noise reduction as this softens the image and can end up giving a sharp picture a smudged painterly look.
So digital has given the client a choice that they were never qualified to have. I will soon be getting a D3 as this camera can shoot photo's with next to no noise even at speeds of 3200. Problem solved then, or is it? It can also shoot at 6300 and even crazy iso's way above that I never even considered would be possible (25600). So I know for my wedding work at times I will be pushing those iso's to their limit to capture images which would never have been possible before. I will be capturing even more stunning images but I am no further forward as I will still end up with a lot of images that are shot only to be in black and white.
Even these crazy iso's that show noise will be acceptable in black and white wedding and portrait work. In colour however they will still be prone to the hot pixels that glow like a farmers wart on the end of his nose!
So what do I do? For now I can only advise my clients to leave the images as they are, but the choice remains theirs.
For now!

The Man Behind The Curtain(The Wizard of Oz)

For years now I have owned a book by a french photographer called Jean-Francois Jonvelle. I had always admired the photo's that were in this book because they were of gorgeous girls in very ordinary situations and in my eyes beautiful photos. If you google him you will see what I mean. In my mind these were all girls that were either his friends or even more, something much more intimate. In my past I have seen many moments with girls I have been close to that I have either captured or missed, much like the images I admired in this book.
Looking at such beauty of a woman while she is just lying on her bed in the morning. As she dries her hair, puts her makeup on or just looks at you in a certain way, surely this is something that a photographer would feel they needed to capture! Much the way I do any of my photography I have always believed the capture of a moment is of the utmost importance in my art.
When I first looked at jonvelles book I completely admired these photographs and envied him in a way to have had these moments with so many different women and captured them rather than being lost in the moment.

Imagine my surprise when I saw some behind the scenes photo's of the very photo's I admired so much, only to see a makeup artist, assistants, huge reflectors and some studio lighting.

I have never been a big fan of THE MAKING OF this that and the other. I am a big fan of Movies but I really dont want the illusion spoilt by seeing the Strings so to speak.

Jonvelle has some lovely images, but I'm afraid I would rather have kept my illusion that these were moments captured rather than posed portraits.

A Place of Quiet

As I sit here in the childrens section in the local library I can't help noticing how things have changed. Obviously I'm not here to read the childrens books, but my little girl is choosing her weekly books.
Rather than the peace and quiet of the library when I was a boy, there are children here fighting with swords. Not real swords of course but the foam kind which still sting if you get wacked with the end. I know this because I somehow got involved in a sword fight with some kids. I feel a bit like Arnie in kindergartden
cop and I'm built in quite a similar way to him also!
Its a far cry from my thoughts of what my visit to a library would be all about. My ideal library visit I would be using one of those machines twiddling buttons to flick through pages of a newspaper from 1941 only to see a photo of myself and realise I was some kind of immortal!
But instead I sit here with a toy crown on my head and a sword on my knee.
Maybe I am immortal after all!

Tears of a clown (Soft Git)

I was editing one of my weddings until about midnight last night and as usual after I have finished I watched the slideshow along with music ect. I couldn't believe it! I actually started to well up a bit! Its such a romantic day a Wedding and even though a lot of marriages end these days (like mine did), that one day does need to be captured as its really the happiest day of a lot of peoples lives.

Its quite a responsibility for any photographer, and I will never understand couples that decide to just get a friend who has just done a bit of photography, rather than a professional photographer.

The digital age has caused this more than anything. Just having a look in our local paper in the wedding section, you rarely see the same photographers credited in each issue.

I'm pleased that even after around 15 years of doing weddings, I have not been a casualty due to so many so called photographer around.

I have also noticed that everybody seems to love photography now! I remember when I used to be on a night out about 10 years ago and I think sometimes I was the only one in a club with a camera.

Since digital, it seems everyone has a camera out with them. At weddings is where you see the amateur enthusiasts in full flow. Some of them have better cameras than me.

But as I keep going on about! I could do better on a funsnap! Funsnap, Funsnap FUUUNNNSNAAAAP!