Actually, I’m looking forward to this, not least because I’ll be able to go to work without a huge camera bag on my shoulder. Also because there’s nothing like  teaching to make you put your own ideas in order…

Some of what I’ll say to them is in previous posts here (Thoughts on small cameras #1 and #2). This post is a little of the rest…

Yesterday evening I bumped into a neighbor who is also a photographer. We got to chatting and he told me how he finds it more and more difficult to photograph people these days. Wherever he goes, as soon as he gets out his camera, he’s faced with either hostility or demands for money. Now, although I have experienced both and agree that working in public is getting more and more difficult, I haven’t got to the point where it’s become an insurmoutable obstacle.

That said,  I find myself more and more at ease using compact cameras, simply because I get left in peace and the quality you can get from them these days is quite extraordinary.  Take the picture above: I visited the recent Christian Boltanski exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris with no intention of taking pictures but had my Canon G11 in my bag, saw this, made a picture and then a 76 x 114 cms Laserlab print of it which looks absolutely stunning. Yes, 76 x 114 cms (paper size) at 305 dpi.

I made the print to take it (along with some others) to my class.  I want to show what is possible with even a compact camera. If I have time I’ll even add some prints from my iPhone. The idea being that the camera they have is going to limit their output far less than their understanding of what they might do with it. I’ve never had a camera that limited me more than my own lack of ability.

Giving the class some thought, I realized that I didn’t want to dwell on technique. Of course there will be some of that but what of use can you really teach  beginners in a few hours?

I’m going to start with the idea that photography isn’t, in the end, about cameras or technique: it’s about ideas. I’m going to explain that no amount of shooting pîctures can replace having a clear idea of why you are making a photograph and what notion or emotion (or both) you want to convey with it. If you are – as they will be – making images to provide an account of an event, you need to ask yourself what exactly it is you are trying to tell with your photographs and then make sure that they contain that information.

Example: a man talking to an audience. Photograph the man or the audience alone and you haven’t made an account of the event at all.  You might know the two images  are elements of the same event but neither are adequate illustrations of it.  You would need to link them with text and my theory is that in many ways,  the weaker the picture, the longer the caption. Seems obvious to you? Great, skip this and go take some pictures…. But having seen some of the work of the people I will be teaching it’s clear to me that, beyond any technical limitations, the real weakness of their pictures is simply that they do not fulfill their intended function.

I think it’s important to understand the difference between a “souvenir” photo which has to contain just enough information to act as a reminder of a moment for those who participated in it and a photograph that functions as an adequate illustration and evocation of that event for a viewer who wasn’t there.  As a professional photographer I work on the basis that my audience isn’t those who already know and are interested in my subject. They are already won over. My audience should be those who are ignorant and don’t care. It’s their attention I need to try to capture.

If, in the space of a few hours, I can get my students to (begin to) make pictures that contain what they need to contain to fulfill their purpose as tools for communicating ideas, then I will have achieved something useful. Then we can begin to talk about technique.

I suppose I had better start by saying that I was delighted to be asked to do both. It’s clear to me that my clients are going to increasingly migrate to web-based publication and that they are going to need still and moving images. Being able to do both, providing quality within a reasonable budget is going to be one of the major challenges of the (my) near future. But that’s not the whole story: shooting video is interesting and stimulating. More than anything else, that’s what motivates me.

When I started keeping a diary during working trips, I noticed that my pictures got better. Why? Because I was putting into words what was best conveyed by words and only using photography for what was best conveyed as a photograph. Video adds another dimension to this separation: what requires sound and movement can be recorded as video, what works best as a still can become a photograph. To this extent I believe that shooting both can improve each.

As my policy is not to repeat here what you can easily find better elsewhere, I’m not going to say anything about technique. Again, Google is your friend. There are masses of websites that deal with the tecnical apsects of using video-enabled DSLRs.

What I do want to do here is share a “Note To Self “, a kind of auto debriefing after my job. I’ve mentioned before that, no matter how good your preparation, there are things you can only learn when working, in real-world conditions. There’s simply no substitute for experience. Here are some of the things I learned shooting both photos and video in a professional context. Some, with hindsight, are pretty obvious, others less.

Prepare! Prepare! Prepare!

If you are going to shoot video you need a plan and you need to stick to it, at least to ensure that you have the basic structure of your film. Then you can improvise. Serendipity and photography go well together, serendipity and video far less.

Do not rely on someone who is not a photographer or videographer to do your preparation for you. They will miss things. It’s not their job and what they miss can easily compromise yours.

(Note – Golden Rule Of Photography, learned while I was working as a assistant to photographer Terence Donovan, a long time ago: if they can mess it up, they will).

Any delay or obstacle will slow you down twice as long because you are doing twice as much work.

The range of things that might delay or obstruct your production will be doubled if you shoot video as well as photographs. An interviewee who simply freezes in front of the camera, someone who starts a loud conversation in a nearby room when you are recording sound, light that changes during your shot… You need to allow for extra contingency time. If you don’t have it “in the can” on the day of the shoot, you can’t make it up when you get home.

Your DSLR needs to be kitted out especially for video: ND filters, a microphone in the hotshoe, an LCD magnifier to check focus, probably a tripod with a video head… The list goes on…  All of which needs to be removed from the camera if you are going to switch from video to stills. You can’t seamlessly go from one ot the other. What you really need is two cameras, one for stills and the other for video. But that rather defeats the purpose of using a “hybrid” DSLR. It also increases the investment you need to make in equipment and, as a consequence, what you need to charge for your services to recoup it.

Investment: here’s the sticking point. You are shooting photos and video. To be able to offer both services requires equipment, software, storage space (video files are enormous) and training.  You need to be able to get a return on that investment, especially because by adding moving images to your offer you have dramatically increased the amount of your rapidly-obsolescent equipment. Are your clients going to see video as a supplementary service they will pay extra for or as a cost-free bonus? I made a list of the jobs I was doing. It included producer, grip, assistant, sound recordist, editor, colorist…

The extra equipment you are using for video has to be transported and all that extra data generated needs to be backed-up. Both require effort and time. My shoot went well but there were moments when I really felt I needed an assistant with me, not least because time spent worrying about logistics is time not spent connecting with your subject. Photography, it has taken me a long time to learn, is all about relationships. In the end, it’s the quality of those reationships that  appears in your work. This is a constant problem: I’m paid to make images yet the conditions I work in often mean that I spend more time on peripheral activities than actually shooting. You get used to it but it’s not ideal… Of course, this is not specific to photo and video shoots but adding video to the mix accentuates the problem.

Time: video takes a very, very long time. Time to back up your data, to view the rushes, to even begin to get an idea of how you are going to edit everything together.  Then to make a provisional edit and submit it for review. With photographs it’s fairly simple: you edit and  then process the raw files to generate the best quality delivery JPEGs for the client. It takes time but ultimately it’s up to the client to decide how to exploit the images to their best advantage. With video you can’t just deliver the rushes. The work is coherent only when it has been given form through editing which adds a whole new level of complexity to the process.

I was lucky. I was with people I enjoy working with and the discussions over my provisonal edit were rewarding. In fact, I really needed external input to see how I could put the piece together. Which leads me to my last point: video requires a very close collaboration between all concerned. The end result will only be as good as the quality of that collaboration. See? Video is all about relationships, too. Only more so.

What’s the link between all that and a photograph of the Umbrian countryside sunset? None!

This picture was made for a commissioned story about a militant group of electrical technicians who reconnect people they consider to be suffering unreasonable hardship after having had their power supply unfairly cut off.

All the elements are here: the lady, her baby, the empty hearth, the heater that’s not working.  On a job like this I have a pretty clear idea what I need in my picture. In this case I had to evoke the consequences of having no electricity or gas – being unable to heat or cook or wash with warm water – and  show that real people were involved. From my briefing, I knew that only one picture would be used and that it would be a horizontal.

Whenever I can (which is surprisingly often) I explain to the people I’m photographing exactly what I’m hoping to achieve and why. I also ask if they are happy with what I propose doing and if they have any suggestions as to how it might be done better.  It took me a long time to learn that I do not have a monopoly on good ideas…

Apart from the fact that this method seems to be the most courteous and effective way of working, it also comes from the realization that I can never really know that much about my subjects.

Normally, I am just passing through, given the task of producing a graphic object – a photograph – of a situation that is intended as a vehicle for certain ideas. What these ideas might be depends partly on me but largely on the person that is commissioning the work.  First and foremost a photograph (or any other creation) tells the story of its own origins. I may be given a greater or lesser degree of creative freedom but, in the end, the client always has an intention for the work I produce.

Now, all that may seem obvious or of little consequence, so why mention it here?

Because when that idea is fully integrated into the way I interact with the people I’m photographing, we can actually begin to work together. I remain an outsider but at least this is acknowledged by both parties. I have little control over how an  image I produce will be used or what the journalist I’m working with will write.  Neither can I guarantee that the image published will bring any tangible benefit to the people portrayed. What I can hope for  is that they will feel that it is an honest representation arrived at through a collaborative process.

That, of course, is when things go well…

This was originally intended to be a technical post. Another one about using small cameras. Better get back on topic…

I went (to the other end of France for this photograph) fully equipped: two DSLRs, some lenses, a handful of flashes and a Ricoh GRD2 compact camera.

I always have a mental list of things I want to try out on jobs. Testing stuff at home just isn”t the same and often brings me to  the wrong conclusions. It’s only when you try things out in real working situations that you can draw any conclusions applicable to… real working situations. Here I was curious to see whether I could get a publishable picture with the Ricoh. I knew that the file size and quality would be perfectly acceptable. That’s no longer an issue. What I didn’t know was whether I would be able to work fast enough or whether the 28mm (equivalent) fixed focal length lens would be a problem. I was also interested to see how my subject would react to such an “amateur” looking piece of equipment. Sometimes the choice of camera is determined by how people react to it, rather than reasons of image quality.

(Side note: I regularly wonder whether I could do a whole reportage job with just a small bag full of compacts).

So I did a first series of pictures with a DSLR, trying to get something spontaneous but nothing really worked. There was no spontaneity because (see above) I was just a stranger passing through. There’s little worse than fake intimacy.

A different approach then: explain exactly what I wanted, why we should try to organize the picture together, with the common goal of getting an effective illustration.

It worked. Although I showed the (happy) client the DSLR photographs it was obvious beyond any doubt that this was the one we should use.

One key to getting good images from compact cameras is not to associate their small size with speed of use. A deliberate approach, using the LCD as if it were the ground-glass screen of a view camera , gives me better results. Instead of finding yourself with a slow compact you suddenly have a very fast view-camera. It’s a question of attitude.

The final photograph was lit with off-camera bounce flash, triggered from the Ricoh with a PocketWizards.

Story. There was a French lady photographer I admired very much. In one of her (to my eyes) beautiful books she credited her printer his laboratory. When an advertising agency I was working with said they had a contract with that printer and that lab, I was delighted to be “forced” to work with him. Until, that is, as I returned for the third time the mediocre print he had made for me, I was told that he simply couldn’t afford to spend the time required to get the result I wanted. I would be better off scanning the negative and doing the Photoshop work myself. Which is what I have done ever since (except that the scanning, happily, is now a thing of the past).

With digital, little has changed. From time to time, clients will ask why I can’t just deliver files out of the camera. After all, digital is supposed to be fast and they don’t re-work their own snapshots…
The answer is simple: the files, as they come out of the camera – at least any camera I have owned – are simply not finished. For me they are like negatives, the starting point from which I will create the finished image. On any job I do each photograph is opened individually and corrected. Sometimes just a little, other times massively. Always something. It’s the only way I know to maintain quality. My life would be far easier if I didn’t have to do this but it just goes with the territory.
This picture was taken in Brittany. I was on holiday and from the diningroom table could look out every day onto the beach. I had the idea of this picture in my head for a long time and one day all the elements – the clouds, an agitated sea, a lone swimmer – came together. But that was, literaly, only half the picture. I then, just as with a negative in those “old days” needed to coax the photograph I had in mind out from the original raw file (from a Ricoh GX100). In this case it was done by processing the original in Lightroom, doing additional work in Photoshop and then returning a TIFF file back to Lightroom for final tweaking. This “round-tripping”, Lightroom – Photoshop – Lightroom is something I do quite a lot. I find that it’s easier to ensure image-to-image consistency in a large batch of work when I do the final export from Lightroom.
Why show you this picture in particular? Because the difference between the original and the finished image is so great that it illustrates clearly what I’m talking about. And, simply, because it is an image I am particularly fond of.
On the same topic, the Italian laboratory 10B that has put together some interesting pages here.

The unretouched version -