Wedding Abuse

Wow, I thought I had seen everything already at weddings, but this one is pretty bad.  Hopefully the couple at least get their money back.  I imagine the video of the ceremony provided pretty clear evidence of how poorly they were treated.  We get to see a lot of things at weddings as photographers, as does everyone that provides services at weddings.  I'm sure I could write a book already and I've only finished my second full year.  One of the skills I've learned that we bring to the table is to provide a calming influence on the day.  Often times we get looked too for advice on how to pin flowers, how makeup should look, how to tie a wedding dress and on the timing of the day if there is no wedding planner involved.  When things go wrong I find we can do a lot to help calm everyone.  The first words out of my mouth are a very trained "no problem, we'll work it out."  Developing skills outside of just photographic ones can go a long way to making customers happy and remember the great experience they had with you.  A great experience leads to referals. 

We've been working with a model lately developing some different looks for her porfolio.  We wanted to get away from the traditional fashion looks that filled her book, so we went with sports and leisure type of images.  It has been a lot of fun actually getting them done at the local pool and skating rink.  So much fun that we are going to do it all again for a day of themed shoots in November.  This work all comes from our connections in Model Mayhem. It has been very worth it so far for us to get out there in that world of photography.   

This model met us before hand with her mom which I was grateful for.  It is important for me to protect the integrity of our brand and us as photographers.  One of the unfortunate things about Model Mayhem is that there are litterally hundreds of seedy photographers on there just to meet pretty girls.  I'm not even sure we should call them photographers.  Having your model come to meet and shoot with you with a friend or family member helps put them at ease, helps keep everything on the up and  up, and protects you as a photographer from any allegation of general creepiness.  Plus they can be very helpful holding reflectors or lights!  When a model asks if he or she can bring a friend, say yes, if they don't ask and you don't know them then ask them to bring someone. 

I wanted to mention an App that I added to my iPhone and iPad for model releases on the spot.  It is called Easy Release.  I can't recall how much it cost, but after a short setup process it has some built in releases for photographers that can be filled out on the spot, signed on the iPhone or iPad and emailed directly to the photographer and model or person.  I have found it very helpful.  No remembering paper releases, no pens, nothing.  Highly recommended App.

We were just hired for a video shoot, our first one, this week.  I guess I'll be putting those new skills to the test very soon!  I'm kind of excited about it, but also nervous.  Sort of like I was before my first wedding.  I'll be sure to put up the video once it is done at the end of November.

Lens Rentals, White Balance and the Steady Tracker

I haven't blogged in about a week, which is unusual for me, but I do have an excuse to offer and that is that we have been renovating our studio like mad men for the past month.  That and some photo shoots at odd hours ( 5am and 10pm) have been keeping me very busy.  I wanted to put out a post though and I promise that in another week or so there will be more regular posts.  Plus in November look forward to us finally doing our first podcast, something that has been put to the back burner out of necessity.

Being busy has been great.  I really enjoy it, but it has also been tiring.  That leads me to talking about outsourcing.  About a year ago my wife and I hired someone to clean our house for us.  At Vivid, Adam and I are talking about hiring someone to design our photo books for us in 2011.  I also hired someone to clean my gutters and power wash my house this year.  There was a time when I hated the idea of outsourcing anything in my life, but now I've come to realize that when work is going well for me and my spouse that we need to get some help or family time will simply disappear.  There are times, especially during the busy summer wedding season, when I'm pretty much shooting weddings, editing and working and can barely find time to mow my lawn let alone spend quality time with my eight year old daughter.  I hate that.  While photography is my passion, my family is my life.  So I've come to be at peace with the idea of paying someone else to free up some time for me.  When it comes to photographic outsourcing, both Adam and I don't want to give up the creative aspects of the job.  That is what makes us happy and what we feel makes us different than other photographers.  It creates our 'look.'  We also won't outsource marketing because the people out there that will be most passionate about selling our photography is us, and only us.  But for non-creative tasks like designing photo books for clients, filling print orders, boxing up products, etc we feel completely at ease with paying someone to help out.  We are also hiring an assistant for next year to help with lighting and be an extra set of hands on photo sessions and weddings.  This will help us be more efficient and allow us to take more jobs that we have turned away in the past.  I mention all this to get some of you thinking about outsourcing.  Getting yourself to a place where you are OK with hiring someone to help out can actually make you more productive, happier and keep you focused on the jobs you should be focused on like creating images and marketing yourself.



I recently put in my Christmas card order so we can send out our annual greetings and wishes to friends and family.  As a photographer I find great joy in creating something a little different for people to get in the mail.  My wife, kid and I posed for this image in our front driveway and it is on the front of our cards this year.  Not something that anyone else will have, and that makes me happy.  Thanks Adam for taking the photo!

In a recent blog post I mentioned that I had rented a lens from Lens Lenders in Canada.  If I had my way I'd own about another $50,000 in lenses right now that I regularly lust over, but that simply isn't a reality for me right now.  Renting lenses can be a very economical way to get a specialty lens for a project or job instead of forking over the full price for a purchase.  I've rented lenses on two occasions now and both times it was a very enjoyable experience.  Lens Lenders in Canada were great with their service.  I used the lens (a lens that would otherwise cost about $2300) and sent it back with no hassle.  Fantastic, and if it isn't a lens you will use very often a real money saver which we could all use most days.

Over the past week we've been doing some model shoots, thanks to my new shiny Model Mayhem account which has created some nice connections with people in my community.  I'm glad I finally joined.  The two shoots we did recently were in an ice rink and a swimming pool.  Each place had tricky lighting and while I've photographed in both locations numerous times, I took my white balance very seriously on these shoots as skin tones were super important.  I used two different methods.  On the session in the skating rink I used a grey card that I simply took a photo of before each shoot with a particular lighting.  Then later in Lightroom I used the eye dropper tool to correct a perfect white balance.  Of course I shot in RAW so white balance was a snap to fix.  I then just copied the White balance of the one corrected image and pasted that setting to each of the images that had the same lighting.  To do this you just hit the 'Copy' button on the bottom left in Lightroom and select 'White Balance' from the check boxes that appear.  Then flip over to Library mode and select all the photos in grid view that you want to apply the correction to.  Then select the 'Photo' drop down menu from the top and then 'Develop Settings' and then 'Paste Settings.'   This is on a Mac though, not sure if it's exactly the same on a PC.

At the swimming pool we faced some really tricky lighting.  There were a lot of windows, but thankfully we were there at 10pm so we didn't have to deal with daylight spilling in.  One part of the pool had older tungsten lights and the other had newer fluorescent lighting.  We gelled our flash with a CTO gel to match the tungsten lighting which worked well and did not gel with the fluorescent.  I find with fluorescent lighting that some bulbs are very green while others are daylight balanced and others just all over the map.  It can be hard to nail down.  So for this situation I busted out my Expodisc which I haven't used in a long while and did a custom white balance for each shot setup.  On the Olympus E3 you just put it on the lens, hold the Fn button and hit the shutter button.  You then just hit OK and it assigns it to Custom 1 (or you can select a different number, up to four different ones) and it changes your white balance to that automatically.  On the 5D mk II you put it on the lens, take a photo of it, then go into the menu and find the custom white balance feature and select that.  Find the photo you just took and press OK.  It then saves it as the custom white balance setting.  Then you scroll your WB button over to that setting and your good.  You have to set your camera to manual focus to take the photo with the Expodisc on it on both cameras.  I do find though that this works very very well and is deadly accurate.  Faster to do on the E3, but still pretty simple on the 5D.  I wish I had bought a larger Expodisc.  I have the 67 mm one and I should have bought the biggest one as you can just rest it over your lens if it is too big, but a smaller one won't fit over a larger lens element which meant I had to change lenses to get the white balance.

Recently I bought myself a Steady Tracker Ultralite for use while filming video on my 5D mk II.  I researched lots of different options, but the Steady Tracker was affordable and from the samples I saw pretty effective.  It does not have a gyro which is a downfall, but for my limited use I still feel it will be a good product and it comes in at about a third of the price of its nearest competitor.  I still plan on making this winter a video training ground for myself, but I don't want to dump thousands of dollars on gear for the experiment.  I've tried the Steady Tracker once since I bought it and it was very easy to use.  Also it was super easy to setup which is good for me as I hate reading instructions!  I'll be sure to put up some sample video soon.

Well, that is about it for blogging tonight.  I appreciate you dropping by.  If you like this blog please share it with your friends by clicking the Facebook link on the right or the Twitter button on the bottom of the page.  Thanks!  I'll leave you with one more film scan that I did.  One of my favourites of my kid recently playing with her cousins on the steps of a church in the small town of Wauchope Saskatchewan this summer. Taken with the Olympus OM-4t and 135mm f2.8 lens on Ilford black and white ISO 400 film.

E5 in Iceland

Back to Film

So I bought a film scanner today, the Epson V600 with the film tray.  It took me a while to get it to behave but now I'm very happy with it.  This shot was taken sometime this year with my Olympus OM-4 and 135mm f2.8 lens.  I used Ilford XP2 Super ISO 400 film.  I love it.  You just can't beat the organic feel, and now that I can conveniently access my analog photos and put them on my computer (yes I absolutely still print them all), I think I might just go ahead and shoot even more film.  

Canon 24-70 f2.8 vs Olympus 14-35 f2.0

About a month ago I had the chance to rent the Olympus 14-35 f2.0 lens from Lens Lenders in Canada.  I was curious about the lens and how it would compare to the similar focal length of my favourite Canon lens, the 24-70 f2.8 (remember the Olympus has a 2x crop factor).  So the Canon is slightly wider with the Olympus starting at 28mm equivalent but the Olympus zoom is a full stop brighter.  This isn't meant to be a dpreview like scientific comparison.  More of a seat of the pants comparison by someone that used the lenses in the real world.

I used the Olympus lens for a week, but it saw most of its use on a day we had a Bridal model shoot.  I've shown those photos before but I'll show some again as they make a useful comparison.  On the day I used the Olympus lens on an E3 and the Canon lens on a 5D mk II.  They were the only lenses I used all day.  As you can see in the photo above each lens is remarkably similar in size.  They also weigh about the same.  Neither is image stabilized of course, but Olympus has that in camera, with the Canon you don't get any benefit from stabilization which is unfortunately often the case.  

Forgive all the dust on the Canon lens in this photo, I promise I cleaned it after I saw this!  As you can see the front lens element on the Olympus is larger without increasing the diameter of the lens.  Both lenses by the way are really well constructed and feel like quality pieces of craftsmanship.  The Canon lens has been my favourite one of the brand since I bought it, easily beating out my 50mm f1.4 and my 20mm f2.8 (which vignettes like crazy!).  I was ready to just assume that the Olympus lens would outperform the Canon lens though as I'm used to perfection from Olympus glass.  In practice I do notice slight vignetting on the Canon glass quite often.  It's easy to fix in post if I want, but it does add a step to processing images.  The image I shot on the day of modelling isn't a great example of it though, so you'll just have to trust me that on repeated use the Canon does suffer from vignetting.  

I chose two images to compare.  Here they are both unprocessed directly exported as a jpg from Lightroom.  Both shot at f8.  

Canon 5D mk II and 24-70 f2.8 lens

Olympus E3 and 14-35 f2.0 lens

You see?  No bright skies that day so you won't notice the possible dark corners as much.  Both lenses are very sharp.  They also are both fast to focus.  I never struggled with either grabbing focus as needed quickly and accurately.  Functionally they are both a pleasure to use.  

Here are the same photos, cropped in a corner of the frame:

Canon lens bottom right of frame.

Olympus lens bottom left of frame

There is more detail to be shown in the Canon file because of the location.  The Canon lens is impressively sharp in the corners in my opinion.  One of the reasons I've always liked the lens.  The Olympus is also razor sharp.  In fact I'd argue it is almost sharper in the corners than in the middle.  A word about distortion here.  I didn't notice any distortion at all in the Olympus lens. None.  In the Canon lens there is distortion, kind of a pin cushion type where it puffs in the middle and curves in at the sides.  The beauty of Lightroom 3 is that this lens is automatically profiled in the software and with one click the distortion is fixed immediately.  

Canon file in the middle of the frame.  Focus was set on the left of this, on the bride.

Olympus file in the middle of the frame.  Focus was set directly on the Brides torso.

As I'm used to, the Canon files are easier to push around in post than the Olympus raw files.  You just get more latitude out of the data and they stand up better to being pushed around with a heavy Photoshop hand.  Right out of camera though I always prefer the Olympus files for better colour and a near perfect feel for what I was looking for.   Here are the final processed images:

Canon Final Image

Olympus Final Image

As you can see, the Olympus file is much closer to the original image.  The Canon file needed some work to suit my tastes, but I was able to get a lot of detail out of the sky in post and did some dodging and burning on the Bride and ground to suit what I wanted from the final look.  

The Canon lens amazes me really.  It is an imperfect lens, but still my absolute favourite from Canon so far in admittedly minimal experience with the brand.  The Olympus lens just didn't surprise me.  It did exactly what I thought it would.  This lens holds together well wide open at f2.0, is sharp right to the corners, does not distort and is fast to focus.  I like both lenses a lot.  They are both dream lenses of a quality any pro would be happy to own and use.

The Canon lens can be bought for about $1500 Canadian in most stores.  The Olympus lens is considerably more expensive at about $2400 Canadian.   Both lenses come with lens hoods, bags and are weather sealed, though I expect the Olympus lens would be happier in the rain than the Canon.  At least I won't trust my Canon lens in the rain as it doesn't carry the wet pedigree that the Olympus does.  Though with Olympus once again letting slip in an interview that they may abandon four thirds, or plan too once micro four thirds cameras catch up in the technology (probably meaning fast focusing) of a traditional DSLR, it is hard to swallow the bill for a lens that may soon be extinct no matter how awesome it is.  

The Olympus lens isn't high on my must own lens list as I have that range covered by my full frame camera which is a more natural wide angle system.  Of course if I ever saw it on discount somewhere, I'd likely be tempted.  

Photographer House Parties

So what exactly do photographers do when they have people over to their house?  I don't know, but I can tell you what I did this summer, I set up studio lights on my front driveway along with some furniture 'borrowed' from inside.  After the Scott Kelby photo walk we decided we hadn't had enough and four of us photo types came back to my place, set up some studio strobes and took some family photos in front of my garage door just for giggles.



Above you can see me setting up a light while my daughter tries to convince our rather large family cat to take part.  My neighbours officially think I'm out of my mind, but that suits me fine, they aren't far off.
Thing is, I ended up with a pretty fun photo to put on the front of this years Christmas cards.



As you can see, the cat decided not to participate.  If you are curious about the camera bling hanging from my shoulder, it is my Olympus OM-4t film camera with the 135 f2.8 lens.  Yes, I did put a Pocket Wizard on it and use it for a couple of photos of some of the other families there and it worked brilliantly.  Of course I had to use a light metre, but that was all part of the fun.

I've been reading a book that promises to coach still photographers to learn videography over the past week or so.  I'm only on chapter four but so far so good.  I have promised myself to learn videography this winter and this was one of the first steps.  I also bought a Rode professional external microphone.  I'm sure more gadgets will be on the way, but I honestly don't want to invest too much in the video gear. A Hoodman Loupe and some sort of portable stabilizing rig are pretty much all I want.  My end goal is to incorporate video in slideshows for next years wedding clients and also to do some short video documentary type features on people (under 5 minutes).  We'll see how it goes, and I'll be sure to put up some of my early works so you can follow my struggles.  One of the main things turning me off video in the past has been editing it, but that seems to be getting better for me already as I've been playing with iMovie more.  I may move over to Final Cut, but I'm not sure yet.

That's it for now.  We are still renovating our studio.  I'll have to put up some photos here soon as we are now to the point where painting is starting.  We've removed all the debris from the space and cleaned it all up and patched the walls.  We also removed all the old nasty carpeting.  It has been interesting how many people we have had approach us already about doing some studio work for them.  I didn't expect it to open up so many doors from people looking for studio work, but now that I reflect on it, most photographers work on location now so possibly the studio is 'different' again.  Definitely so if you aren't providing the look people get in big box store photo studios.  We were most excited about having a client meeting and showcase area, but hopefully it proves to be an even bigger bonus.  We did pick up one more wedding for this year after thinking our year was done after we booked a last minute December job from a young couple.  That was pretty exciting as is all work you get when you least expect it.  Winter weddings aren't exactly plentiful in Canada!

Ned Bunnell Makes and Appearance

I've always found Pentax fascinating as a company.  Like Olympus they are tiny in the world of photography relative to Canon and Nikon, but they make some really compelling products.  Ned Bunnell, their USA/Canada President recently gave a video interview at Photokina.  Unique to Presidents of camera companies Ned always impressed me with in that he interacts so well with his customers and even has a photography blog.  But the blog has fell out of regular updates lately and I thought maybe he had given up with public interaction until I saw the video below.  His comments are interesting, if you are at all interested in the business of cameras it is worth a listen.



We are still renovating our studio, it is going slowly of course.  Don't renovations always take longer than you think they will?  I'll try and post photos soon.

Wedding Photography, a Booking Video

I didn't make this video, but it is funny.