Shooting with a purpose

It's great to just wander around in the world taking photos as you go. Once in a while you happen to be in the right place at the right time to get an interesting shot.  However, I find that those opportunities are rare.  To me, the point of photography is more communicating a message than just making pretty pictures.  Don't get me wrong, I like pretty pictures.  Love 'em, in fact.  But I suppose the journalist in me is always looking for something else going on.  The image should pull you into the story and make you wonder what is going on - maybe fill in the blanks for yourself.  Take this series of shots, for example.

My daughter and her husband were visiting yesterday, and at some point decided to break out the instruments and play a little music.  Guitar and banjo, in the old time style.  They are both good musicians and it's great to hear them play together, particularly when they are working on an original composition, like they were when I took these shots.

Now, I was really just playing around with my Olympus PEN camera with a Nikon 50mm lens, shooting totally manual, and I decided to use one of the built-in art processes and get some grainy black and white shots.  But when I looked at the proofs, I decided I would string them together like this to try to communicate a little bit of what making music is about.  You can begin to understand a little when you look at this arrangement.  It's fun and it's work.  Music demands some precision, and of course skill, but the point is to have fun creating something ephemerically beautiful.  You weave a tapestry of auditory color that hangs in the air for a moment and then exists only in your memory.  And when it's over, both the performer and the listener walk away a little richer.

Olympus PEN E-P3 review

I recently purchased an Olympus PEN E-P3 mirrorless micro four-thirds (m43) camera to carry around with me.  I know most of my photographer friends use DSLRs now, as do I, but there are times when I have needed a decent camera with me and did not have the ability to lug all that DSLR equipment.  See the photo for my reasoning...

As you can see, the D300 with grip and 17-55 f/2.8 is a monster compared to the PEN with it's pancake 17 mm f/2.8.  The PEN is not a shirt-pocket camera, but I can pretty much carry it wherever I go and get good photos with it.

There are a number of m43 cameras out there.  Prior to purchasing the PEN, I tried a Fuji x100, for example.  I absolutely loved the retro styling (it resembles the Leica M9) and many of the features, but the cost ($1200) combined with the inability to change lenses (the X100 has a 35 mm) just made it a no-go.

I also compared a number of other cameras in the m43 world, and finally decided the PEN was approximately equivalent to all of them for the price, and with a suitable adapter, I can attach most of my old Nikon film camera lenses (see photo).

This shows my old Nikon 50mm f/1.8 attached to the PEN.  It's a great combination and the quality is fantastic.  The 17 mm lens (35 mm equivalent) is ok - perfectly serviceable, but the quality of the Nikon is clearly superior.  The 50mm converts to 100mm so it's a perfect portrait lens.

So how is the quality of the images out of the PEN?  Very good.  The sensor is 12.3 mp but of a previous generation build, so it's a little noisy in high ISO operation.  There are a lot of comparison reviews floating around on the web, so check those out for extreme pixel peeping.  Your mileage may vary.

I will give one comparison to demonstrate a practical head-to-head in an actual photo situation.  I was writing an article about a local business with some neat new technology and I had to get a quick shot to go with the copy.  I loaded up my D300 with SB800 flash and I also brought along my PEN so I could determine if it was good enough to use professionally if I didn't have the larger rig with me.  Below is a comparison shot of the two images I took.

D300 image SOOC, jpg, 1/160, f/5.0, ISO 400, 20mm (30mm eq)

PEN image SOOC, jpg, 1/60, f/2.8, ISO 500, 17mm (35mm eq)

The D300 shot was taken with flash while the PEN was not.  Both shots are directly from the camera converted from raw to jpg using Adobe Camera Raw without any processing.  The Nikon image is wider because the PEN at full sensor is in the 4:3 proportion.  I used 160 shutter on the D300 so I could set the white balance to flash and eliminate contributions from the overhead fluorescent lights.

So, in my opinion, either of these images is useable with only minor sharpening and contrast adjustment that I do in post.  In fact, I sent both of them to the editor and let him decide which one to use.  The PEN is no replacement for a quality DSLR, but quality and practicality make it a very nice tool to have in the bag, and definitely is a lower-cost option for those who would like to move up from a point and shoot to something with more flexibility.

I won't go into all the cool features of the PEN camera controls.  But most importantly, I can shoot raw and I can shoot fully manual.  There is no optical viewfinder (you have to use the nice live view screen), but I can tell you the touch to focus aspects of the control are a dream.  There is no need to focus lock and recompose a shot - just touch the area of the screen where you want the focus to be, and the camera takes a photo.  Done.

For about the same price, you can now apparently buy a Panasonic Lumix GX1 which is a very similar camera, but which has slightly better high ISO performance and a 16 mp sensor.  I think either of these cameras is worthy to be in the bag with your gear, and unless you need the high IQ of a D3 or 5D Mark II, you can make great photos with these mirrorless cameras.  In fact, I would go so far as to suggest that the next generation of pro cameras will dispense with the bulky and expensive pentaprism optical finders and look more like the Leica M9.

Stagg Bowl Again!

Once again this year, Virginia Media Services will be providing photography of the game for the Old Dominion Athletic Council.  We had to miss it last year due to the gigantic freak snowstorm that blocked I-81 for most of two days, just as the Virginia Tech students were trying to get home for the holidays.  Here's a link to a photo from the game held in 2008.  The same two teams, Mount Union and UW-Whitewater, seem to end up in the championship every year, and 2010 is no exception.  Here's another action shot from the game.  Here's a small fan, and here's another sort of participant.

Weather will be cold but otherwise not too bad.  Come to the game!

Texture application

Here is an example of taking a poor photo and dressing it up with some judicious cropping and application of texture.  The image on the right was taken at dusk using a point-and-shoot camera.  The colors are muted and there is a lot of noise in the photo due to the low light conditions.  I cropped to move the boat out of the exact center of the frame, and to use the cluster of flowers on the left as a balance.  There was not much tonal variety in the original shot, and the application of texture, while warming the image, did not improve the tonality.  I really liked the dark moodiness of the edited photo, but the boat was pretty much lost in the background so I applied a mask to increase the level and bring it up a little, and also added a slight warming tone over just the boat.  It helped separate the boat from the background without totally spoiling the mood. You can see a larger version of the final processed image here. The other version is a watercolor conversion of the same image, just to see how it would be different.  I like it, but it loses some of the dark spookiness.

Photo to art conversion

Final 'artistic' version

Original Point-and-Shoot photo

While I would normally use a more sophisticated technique to convert photos to photoshop painting, I set this one up for a friend who did not own the full Photoshop program to demonstrate what is possible using PS Elements and some textures.  The process starts with the key step of simplifying the photo to remove tiny details.  A low-res point-and-shoot image is often ideal.  Use a blurring technique to remove the details if possible, but at the very least resize the image to a low resolution - around 72 dpi is fine.  Next apply a combination of filter effects which should at least include a watercolor effect.  Then obtain a 'watercolor texture' and apply it to the image to render the paint stroke effects.  Finally, apply a texture overlay of watercolor paper, etc., to give it an authentic presentation.  I always wanted to paint, but never had any talent in that direction.  Digital image processing programs such as PS Elements can almost make you look like a painter.  See more on the flickr page  http://www.flickr.com/photos/vamedia/

PR shots demonstrate crop and texture

Original Shot unedited

Final Shot

Here is a sample of a PR image taken for Brian Muller, local bluegrass and jazz musician.  Two processes were performed on the original shot.  First, the image was cropped to convert the original digital frame to an 8" x 10" format for use in promotions and to tighten the focus on the musician.  The shots in the studio are generally left a little wide so that I can crop to suit during post-production.  Second, I added a little texture overlay to the image which warmed it slightly and created a little more flatness while simultaneously smoothing and vignetting the backdrop.  There is a slight loss of contrast in the result, but for printing purposes, that is often desirable.

Social Media: A tool, not THE tool

It's been truly amazing to see how social media marketing has risen in prominence over the past few years. First, MySpace started a trend and then FaceBook opened up to public users instead of being restricted to .edu email addresses. That's when the floodgates opened.

Savvy marketing folks, and especially those self-proclaimed SM gurus who got ahead of the curve, began to explore the rules and push the envelope of the new channel. Once it was enough to have a good website, but now the website is probably the third thing the potential customer will see with your name on it, the first being your tweets and the second being your FaceBook page.

I don't think this situation is inherently good or bad -it's just a result of the continuing development of the now almost universal (except in China) online experience. But I already see abuses, if we can call them that, by the so-called gurus who lure internet advertising novices into their chatty lair with horror stories of how company x went out of business because they didn't tweet.

For example, I have personally seen one of these self-ordained SM priests visit the following atrocity on their clients. They think it's all about traffic, so naturally they have learned some tricks to increasing it. They set up multiple websites with blogs, and then set up multiple Twitter accounts. Finally, they set up a network of other SM 'experts' and they begin to engage in a giant twitter party.

First, the 'guru' will write a blog about something useless, full of irrelevant links to unrelated sites, some of which belong to the guru. Then the guru will tweet about the blog using twitter account 1. Then the same guru will retweet using twitter account 2. Then guru will get back on account 1 and thank account 2 for the retweet, after which account 2 replies, don't mention it, etc. This can go on for ten cycles or more, and eventually branches out to other 'gurus' who have clandestine agreements with guru1 for mutual assured retweeting.

I gotta tell you, when I see this sort of thing going on, I know one thing for sure: the object of the original blog post, presumably a customer paying for the SM exposure using guru1, has nothing to say, and nothing to sell me. If this is the best they can do with advertising, then I will never purchase their products.

I know this seems a bit harsh, but it's still about return-on-investment, and many companies' marketing directors are now emerging from their traditional PR caves and asking what all the money they are paying to the SM zen masters is getting them.

Two links if you want to do it right. First, read this blog post from a guy in the business, who gets it. Then, check out the website of this online marketing company, RYP Marketing.

The 'RYP' in the name stands for "Raise Your Profits". That's what I'm talkin' about!