Episode 3!

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Here’s what we’re talking about on this episode

• What’s the best F Stop for flare and solid blurry backgrounds.
• What to do with a screaming baby at a kids shoot. How to calm them down.
• Lifestyle photography. How do you pose things so that they look more candid?
• What software do you use for work flow?
  
• I have a lot of gear. What gear do you bring on shoots?

Transcription!

Dave: Welcome to the next edition of Potluck Photo. I’m Dave Biesse.

Taylor: And I’m Taylor Jackson, and Potluck Photo is the place where we answer all of your questions submitted by Twitter at @potluckphoto. We cram as many questions photography-related as we can into this little podcast and just kind of go from there.

Alright, I guess getting into the first question. It’s just a general kind of inquiry about f-sops (?) and kind of what’s the best for flare and what do you suggest for achieving blurry backgrounds and that type of stuff, so I guess Dave, do you want to start it off?

Dave: Okay. A great thing I learned about flare recently – not that recently, but a few years back that I previously didn’t have an appreciation of – is if you’re shooting with the sun being very close to being in your field of view or in the shot; if you’re shooting at like an F 2.8 or an F4 (?), you’re going to get a huge glow of white fuzz, where if you shoot at an F11 or F22 – and obviously compensate with your shutter speed – you’ll actually get a starburst instead.

And that goes the same for shooting night scenes, like when you’re shooting night portraits. So basically you’re going into smaller aptitude and then numbers align (?) like F11, F22 gives you a starburst with long lens rather than that glow. (*I’m not 100% sure if I have this transcription right.)

Taylor: I’m going to sidetrack us for a second and talk about light painting. I don’t know, you did this a couple weeks ago where you just set up the camera on a tripod and crank it up – if you’re at F11, it’ll give you that nice starburst – and set it at like a three-second shutter, and that’s just the right amount of light that you need, and go around with some flashlights and pane that type of stuff.

Dave: Totally. I was shooting in an abandoned – well, the old Kodak headquarters for Kodak Canada and we cruised in there and we didn’t want one too many exposures because it’s pitch black inside, but like an F11 and you just go around, and as you paint, you walk around with a video light or a torch or whatever and as you paint the walls, zap shows up.

If you don’t know what painting with light is, check it out – Google that, and you’ll see some pretty cool stuff.

Taylor: So it’s whenever you see floating letters or just cool colours that obviously shouldn’t be there. Or if you’ve ever Jeff Newsom’s orb or circular things that I don’t think – well, some people probably know how he does them, but . . .

Dave: They’re a bit of a mystery to everyone else.

Taylor: Yep, they’re a mystery. And he does amazing, amazing painting with light and yeah, I just think it’s really cool.

Dave: Totally.

Taylor: And another thing: on the small scale for concerts and stuff like that, whenever I was shooting them, if I was shooting kind of close up [or in] close proximity with bands that have a little more energy, I would typically drag the shutter just a little bit – or actually pre-drag it – and set my flash to rear curtain so it fires whenever the shutter closes. And then just let a little bit of light in there and get a bit of blur, and then recompose the shot and hit it with my flash at the very end. That way, it will freeze out the singer or whoever overtop all of the light and blur that’s going on behind him.

Dave: Yeah, that looks really good.

Taylor: It’s fun to play around. I don’t know, it gets a little tired, I suppose, and looks a little amateur-ish at times, but for the most part, it’s just fun to do – it’s just something fun.

Dave: Totally.

Taylor: Alright, and I guess the second part of that was: “what’s the best for blurry backgrounds?”

Dave: Yeah, I think especially when people are newer to photography, they often try to achieve that really buttery, blurry background look with a sharp subject, and really the easiest way to do that is to use pro-lenses – like two grand plus lenses. On Canon, they’re called L-series – what are they called on Nikon?

Taylor: Just lenses.

Dave: Just nice lenses, because all Nikon’s lenses are good.

Taylor: Yep, all Nikon are good for the most part.

Dave: But yeah, basically using those pretty expensive bits of glass.

Taylor: They just let a lot more light in.

Dave: F2.

Taylor: So the more light you’re letting in, typically the blurrier the background’s going to be, kick out for you.

Dave: And we could go on and on about the physics of lights and aperture.

Taylor: Yes, because we are physics professors.

Dave: But we won’t because we don’t know enough about it.

Taylor: Yeah, the easiest way is I guess the actual depth of field is controlled by the focal length as well as the amount of light that’s being let in. So even if you have a lens that is maybe a 5.6 or something like that – if you zoom it all the way and say it’s a 300 ml zoom – you’ll still get a pretty nice blur. The only issue is that you have to honestly be like a football field away to do so.

Dave: And keeping the subject along that off that background as well. And an easy way to do that is to have the subject relatively close to you – like maybe 20 metres away from you – and then the background 50 to 100 metres away, you generally get more relative (blur ?).

Taylor: Yeah, it’s just gone.

Dave: Totally.

Taylor: Alright – onto the next question here.

Dave: What have we got? I should be keeping track of this. Alright, so we’ve got somebody doing their first baby shoot and they’re worried about a screaming baby and how to calm them down. That is a good question because basically if you’re going to do a kids, babies, pets, they’re going to bark, they’re going to cry, they’re going to [do whatever], but you’re going to hit issues with that so patience is obviously the main thing – making the environment comfortable for them.

So she said a baby shoot, I’m don’t know how old the baby is, but especially with newborns a nice, warm cozy environment with some gentle, soothing noise – some ambient noise – can really help. And not using flash, I think makes a big difference too, so if you can use available light for babies that’s ideal so they can sleep – in the shade, obviously, not direct sunlight – in a nice, warm room.

Taylor: Yep, easy. I’ve kind of went the other direction where I don’t typically shoot newborns. I did this thing called six to 36 where I’d shoot kids between six months old and 36 months, and I just found that by the time they were able to sit up, I really liked photographing before they were actually aware that they were being photographed. Once they get to that point where they can start giving you those awkward looks like “why are you taking my picture?!” . . . at that point, it wasn’t that much fun for me anymore because I just don’t have a strong connection with young kids like that. If you can put toys or something in front of them when they just kind of hang out there and they’re happy, you can just do your own thing and just throw a 50 mil lens on there or something like that.

Alright, onto the next question here. I guess it’s for both of us: “Lifestyle photography. How do you pose things so that they look more candid?”

Dave: Huge thing – no matter who you’re shooting, what age group, whatever it is, I think if there’s people involved, treat them as people, not as subjects. It’s sort of a given, but as photographers we tend to be thinking about our gear and what lens we’re going to use and what the light’s doing and stuff like that – but don’t verbalize that, and really just treat your clients as best you can. That often means sharing a drink. Say if you arrive for a family shoot at someone’s house and they offer you a drink, take it, sit down, don’t bring your camera gear in, get to know them, have them feel comfortable having you in their home long before setting up gear and stuff.

Taylor: Absolutely. I realize that I have a little bit of a warm-up period as far as my creative mind goes, and I will spend most of the first 20 minutes of any shoot just talking with them and maybe snap a few pictures, stop at a few different locations. And as far as my style goes, I just walk around with people. I just pick a nice starting location and whatever we find in the area we find. I don’t really heavily pose anyone, so my candid photos are kind of more candid – or I call it “forced photojournalism”, where it’s like “yeah, just go hang out over there, I’ll tell you if you’re doing something wrong”. And for the most part, people just really embrace that – it’s the type of clients I attract, too; that they know that that’s what it’s going to be, so maybe they’re a little more comfortable in front of the camera. So I just kind of interject things.

Dave: I love how you don’t try to sell it at all – you’re just like “this is going to be really forced, but . . .”

Taylor: Oh, I tell them straight up how awkward it’s going to be. Like, “this is going to be really awkward, I’m going to make everybody just like talk about whatever” and take pictures. The awkwardness of the situation – as long as you present it correctly – will actually result in a lot of really good smiles and people having a good time because of how awkward the situation is, so you’re not just like “so talk”.

Dave: And the awkward kind of turns into laughter after a while, doesn’t it?

Taylor: Yep, because people come up with the randomist stuff – it’s great.

Dave: I was just going to comment on that. So in terms of having people feeling candid as well, I think a great thing to do is –going back to that thing of not worrying about what shots you’re getting – [for the] first, honestly, ten minutes of shooting a portrait session, I literally don’t plan to use a single one of those shots because the clients are going to be most stressed during that first ten minutes, unless you aren’t. If you’re not thinking “okay – I’m connected to trying to get these shots now”, and you know your best stuff’s going to come between ten minutes and the hour, like if you’re doing an hour-long session, it’s all going to come in the second half, right?

Taylor: I have one exception to that – it’s happened to me once. A couple was driving from an hour away to Toronto and I was right in the middle, and they were like “we have half an hour, can we do our engagement session in this half hour?” and I was like, “yeah, that’s fine we’ll just pick an okay location”. And I don’t know – they weren’t that serious, they wanted one photo from it, and it ended up that they were about 20 minutes late. So we had ten minutes to do this photo shoot, and just the amount of compression on the amount of time we had just really made everything click and I got as many photos out of that ten minutes as I typically get out of an hour, and it was just amazing.

I guess it was the couple as well, that they were really aware of their bodies and I didn’t really have to step in and be like, “okay, turn this way a little bit”. And they just kind of rocked it and I laid on the shutter and I took like, 300 photos in ten minutes.

Dave: Awesome. So what have we got here? Next question. So somebody’s asking: “What software do you use for work flow?”

So I think Taylor and I are on the same page as this, as are many other – I think especially wedding photographers just dealing with sheer volume. Rather than going straight to Live Room (?) for the download, we’ve downloaded Photo Mechanic. If you don’t know what Photo Mechanic is, just Google it – it’s pretty much like a standard line piece of software that doesn’t do much other than make selections of your photos.

Taylor: I think it can, [but] I don’t think I’ve utilized anything other than that, because that’s what it’s best at. It just loads up those jpeg previews so fast.

Dave: Yeah, so you can edit like a whole wedding in real time – there’s no load time going from photo to photo, so it preloads as you move through it. And when we talk about preloading, it’s not like Bridge or Lightroom where it sort of preloads over an hour.

Taylor: It’s like you select the picture and then it takes three or four seconds for it to actually pop up, it’s just kind of instant as soon as you hit the key.

Dave: So pretty much you can be downloading as well, and it will be showing your images while the download’s happening.

Taylor: Or even for same-based slide shows. I’ll just pull it straight from the card, and I’ll just go through and mark on the card, and it’s a little slower, but at the same time I don’t have to spend that 15 minutes or whatever dragging photos on via USB.

Dave: And a tip for that – just in terms of actual workflow there: the way I like to edit is actually – again, I’m talking about weddings here guys, but portrait sessions, you probably want to keep a larger percentage – for weddings I only keep a third of what we shoot, so I pretty much assume everything’s going to get deleted. But I go through everything, obviously, and save shots, so it’s a reverse way of looking at it. So I sort of use my one to save shots, use my two to mark it as portfolio and use my three to [. . .]. So I select everything – make it a three – and then work backwards to save a third of it. It just means I’m doing less keystrokes, and I’m flying through my work a little bit faster. So I know some people like to hold on to the other two thirds of their stuff, but I personally prefer to keep space down and backing up and all that stuff.

Taylor: And from there, if I’m editing I outsource – we both outsource a lot of our editing – just because, again, of sheer volume, and it’s a lot more fun to spend most of your time shooting and less of your time playing with buttons in front of your computer.

Dave: Totally.

Taylor: And if I am editing something, from there it’s straight up lightroom, and I’ll do all of the basic corrections in there, make sure all of the exposures are nice and proper and it’s kind of a 90% finished file at that time. And then I have a Photoshop droplet – I have three of them – and they’re usually pretty good, too. [They’re] exactly what you’d see on my blog, and what I’d give the clients, and it’s just kind of drag and drop. Like, if I want a black and white, it just goes in that droplet and you can even key them off. But for the volume that I’m doing – if I’m editing my own stuff – it’s usually an engagement shoot or something like that, so I’ve already seen the photos and it’s just kind of drag, drop – that type of thing. Photoshop droplets.

Dave: Sweet. Do we have any more questions?

Taylor: Alright, last question I guess.

Dave: Yeah, you want to take this one?

Taylor: I can attempt to: “I have a lot of gear. What gear do you bring on shoots?”

I guess [this is from] somebody looking to simplify the amount of stuff that they bring. And for me, I’ll bring one camera body, I’ll have a backup in the car and unless it’s something very, very specific like architecture, I might bring more wide-angled lenses and that type of thing. But for most general day-by-day stuff, I have this Sigma 20 mm 1.8 that you can’t really use below 2.8, but it’s nice and wide and it works full-frame so that’s why I use that. From there I have a 35 F2, a 50 mm and a 135, and those are kind of the four lenses that I’ll just bring with me everywhere.

Dave: And how do you carry your stuff?

Taylor: A lovely little shoot-sack.

Dave: Yeah – so keep it lightweight and comfortable, and you know you’re stuff’s not going to get nicked. Charlotte and I drag around a Tamarak I think it is? It’s like a suitcase with the wheels. So we do that, [and] obviously you can shake your gear a little bit if you drag it over hard soil so you’ve kind of got to lug it, but because it’s two of us shooting we’ve got twice the gear, basically.

But the one thing I always suggest to everyone that sort of asks is pick a lens for a session – you know, if you’re doing a portrait session you can pretty much shoot everything with either one nice long lens or maybe two lenses.

Taylor: I did an entire session yesterday with my 135 – just because I had the room where I could just back up if I needed to.

Dave: It helps, right? It helps for the couple [because] they’re not thinking, “what’s wrong with us? Why is he looking at his gear?” you know what I mean? Because I think it just takes that element of blockage between [you out].

Taylor: Yeah, because once you’re set up, I have kind of a shade setting and a sun setting and I knew both shutter speeds in my head, and I just flipped back and forth between them – keeping it nice and easy.

Dave: Yeah, one guy challenged me to do that last year – Justin [ . . . ] you guys may know him, he’s a still motion shooter now, and he often does sessions with a 50 mm lens, or kind of limits the distance he’ll go just to try things. Like, not for every shoot, but obviously if you want to create constraints for yourself, you’re often forced to find a new creative zone in your mind and in your thought process. So like, going to the middle of a parking lot and saying, “we’re going to shoot within one block of this – I don’t want to walk all over the city, I don’t want to drive from location [to location]” because there’s often a ton of stuff that you can do: shooting down, shooting up, etc.

Taylor: And there’s sort of that “creative under constraint” [thing] where you just actually become creative and you spend less of your time wandering around looking for cool stuff to stick out. It’s kind of like “alright, we’ve got to make this work”, and then it usually does work because it’s just that simplification of everything.

I had somewhere to go off that, but I forgot. Oh! John Michael Cooper – he has done some very, very unique things where he was the first one – that I know of – that taped over his LCD on the back of his – I think it was a – 5D at the time. I think he popped a 256 card in there, so he only had however many photos. He shot raw – I believe he shot raw, at least – because he was just mimicking film and that’s how he covered a day. He was second or third shooting for somebody – probably wouldn’t want to put that entire strain on actually shooting as a main photographer, but I thought it was really cool, and he thought in his brain [that] it was like a failure, but he got some amazing stuff that I would’ve been 100% happy with. But to him, he was just like “yeah, it was a failure”.

Dave: But you kind of have to fail to grow, right?

Taylor: Exactly.

Dave: And another thing John was saying – we went down to Mystic last year, and if you don’t know what Mystic is . . . Mystic is awesome. Just Google Mystic Connecticut and you’ll find it. If you can get to that, it’s an amazing sort of workshop, seminar, hangout, like three days of partying and just good times, and it’s really intimate. It’s a bit different than some of the bigger conventions [which] are too big, and [they’re] about selling product. But with these guys, there’s maybe four booths of actual sponsors and it’s not like you’re getting sold a bunch of stuff, so it’s just a really cool social networking thing.

But I was just going to say that [Michael] was talking about how he challenges himself. He says, “I’m shooting 80% portrait at the moment, so I want to rethink that”. So he decided that he was going to shoot 80% landscape for a wedding, and it made him think in a totally different way. He loves that vertical look, but if you want to change your mindset, you kind of have to force yourself sometimes.

Taylor: You keep fresh that way, too. You have to do something different. If you just do the same thing every week, you’re going to burn out and hate it, so it’s kind of pushing creativity and that kind of stuff.

Dave: Well thanks for listening to another week of Potluck Photo. We’d love to hear your feedback questions at @potluckphoto on Twitter, and we look forward to chatting soon.

Taylor: Yep – see you later.

Tagged as: business, fstops, gear, kids, lifestyle photography, software, workflow