How important is it to have a fancy expensive camera to take good pictures? To what degree does the quality of your kit have a bearing on your images? It’s an interesting question, and naturally I have an opinion on this! I’ll attempt to illustrate this with a few examples. You can click on any of these images for a larger version.

1. Lavender

This image was taken in late Summer in the gardens of a country house. The main feature I wanted with this shot was a tiny depth of field, and by that I mean the amount of the scene that is sharp either side of the point of focus. The background and foreground are completely blurred, and there are beautiful out of focus highlights in the distance where the sunlight directly hits the grass. Depth of field is completely controllable if you can change the aperture setting on the lens. More on this later . . .

2. Helvellyn

This shot shows the opposite. With this image everything in the scene needs to be sharp. If the rocks in the foreground are blurred the image loses impact, and if the background is blurred we’ll not be able to pick out any detail on the far ridge. For this image a large depth of field is very important.

3. Tour of Britain

This image is all about shutter speed. A slow speed of around 1/15th of a second was required to blur the cyclists as they sped around the corner. Having said that, I also wanted lots and lots of depth of field so that you can see the faces in the distance of the spectators, and the detail in the buildings and the clock tower.

4. The Vortex

The Vortex is a water sculpture at Seaham Hall Hotel which fills and drains on a 20 minute cycle. A higher shutter speed was required here to capture the motion of the water.

5. Linden Hall Skylight

This is what you see at Linden Hall if you stand in the inner hall and look directly up. This image needs exposure compensation as this is a prime example of how a camera’s in built meter will be fooled into exposing what is outside the window rather than the detail inside.

6. Vintage Fashion

This image is an example of a classic aged cross processed look, created in Photoshop to mimic the old Kodachrome slide films from the 1970′s.

So, where am I going with this? My point is that the camera and lens that you use in your photography is sometimes the least important thing, but other times the most important. It depends entirely on what you want to achieve, and why you are taking the image in the first place. The images illustrate one main point, and that is control. It doesn’t matter whether you have a five grand Nikon D3S or a £20 purchase from eBay, the main thing is that you have control over your images.

There are more people taking photographs in the world than ever before, but of all these people there are far fewer who actually understand what they are doing than in previous decades. For example, there’s a new generation of photographers out there using the iPhone and it’s ‘Hipstamatic‘ application to take images in an old analogue style, and I think that generally this is a good thing. It re-introduces a classic era of photography to a new audience which is great, but it doesn’t teach you anything about light.

A fixed aperture lens of f2.8 and a computer controlled processing engine means that the ‘camera’ actually makes all the decisions. The camera is the clever part, rather than the photographer, and in reality it severely limits any real creativity. You actually end up with very similar looking images to the other 2 million Hipstamatic users out there. If you’re not bothered about this and all you want is convenience and some fun, quirky shots for the family album then there’s no problem, but if you’re reading this blog in the first place I suspect you would rather have a little more control?

I’ve seen articles about trendy photographers who have shot an entire wedding on an iPhone before. A great PR stunt for Apple, but a reasonably competent photographer would get better images using 35mm film and a twenty year old camera with a decent standard lens along with a little thought and creativity.

It’s exactly the same principle if you are a photographer in a studio using the same lighting setup with the same camera settings as you did for the last fifty shoots. You’re not thinking about the light anymore because you don’t have to, but it means that you’re not moving forward with your photography and you’ve stopped learning. And regardless of experience, nobody out there knows it all.

Ultimately, the camera you use isn’t that important in the grand scheme of things, it’s the thought process that is. Fully automatic cameras / phones make us lazy, so if your camera doesn’t give you the control you want, and you really want to improve, then perhaps it’s time to change it to one that does. If it does, then it’s time to start using it to it’s full potential.

This is the second part of my ‘Going Vintage’ post, where I discussed my thoughts of images with a vintage feel to them.

The idea was to try to recreate that old style of image from a digital workflow, but I left it with this paragraph:

“There’s just one thing that’s not quite right though. To me it’s just a bit too, well, digital. To really do it right, and to really capture the feel of a vintage image we’ve got to shoot it on film.”

A good place to start if you haven’t read part 1 is here. If you have read this part though then here we go!

So then, in order to shoot on film we need to source some basic equipment. A bid on eBay got me a very good condition Nikon F801s film SLR from 1990 for a mere £19.99 – fantastic value as this camera was worth almost a grand in it’s day! Another ten minutes of Google searching later and I had a couple of rolls of AGFA Precisa 35mm transparency film heading my way.

I decided to try a spot of cross processing. This is where a colour transparency film is processed in colour negative chemicals (C41 rather than E6) or vice versa. The result is a high contrast image, usually with increased grain and strange colour shifts. It’s true, you can do all of this in Photoshop these days, but I really believe that film has a unique feel to it. It’s not as sharp as what a good digital SLR camera can produce (at least a 35mm scan isn’t, medium format definitely is), and it requires a little more thought when calculating exposures, but it has lovely tones and graduations between light and shade.

As mentioned, the film I chose to use was a colour transparency film, so the main thing to remember is that exposure is absolutely critical. If you mess it up there’s no recovery in Photoshop – it’s either on the film or it’s not, it’s as simple as that. Over or under exposure by as little as half a stop can have a huge impact on the final image, and there really is a very narrow margin of error.

Film choice is the biggest single factor in how the final image is going to come out when cross processed. Fuji films tend to produce quite strong green casts, whereas Kodak produces super vivid colours. The film I used was Agfa Precisa which is a classic film for cross processing, but it’s now no longer made in it’s original form. The best stocks were the European made versions, but the current stocks are made in Japan, probably by Fuji, so it tends to take on more of that Fuji feel.

The only way to find out which film works best for you is to try them out! Once you do this you tend to learn how they perform best. Some films work better over exposed by a stop, some better under exposed, some give really punchy colours, others retain skin tones while still giving interesting colours shifts, but you don’t know til you try them!

My conclusion? I really enjoyed shooting on film again. Everything from the sound of the motor drive as the film advanced down to the fact that you can’t see a preview on the back of the camera. You tend to think a lot more, as every shot you take makes the remaining shots on the film more valuable. I was even reminded of the excitement as I managed to squeeze 37 exposures from my 36 exposure film!

The images were very contrasty, as I expected, and quite grainy too – which to be honest is a characteristic of film that I really like. The shadows have a definite green hue to them, especially in images where the exposure was a little on the low side. Exposure is critical – over do it and you blow the highlights, under do it and the shadows turn green and block out. Accuracy is so important.

Overall, I have to say I like it! Whether it does give a vintage feel is debatable, I think that in twenty years time when the film dyes have aged a bit perhaps it will! It does give a unique feel to the images though, and I’ll certainly run a roll of film through alongside my digital kit on subsequent photoshoots. Next time I’ll perhaps try a combination that reproduces skin tones a little more accurately, but it’s not a bad starting point.

Next time I’ll try a different brand of film and see how the results compare, or maybe shoot some classic Kodak Tri-X black and white. There’s a whole new world out there now waiting to be revisited, and it’s one I’m very excited about!

Technical info: images taken on a Nikon F801s camera with a Nikon 85mm lens on Agfa Precisa colour transparency film.

The film was processed in C41 chemicals by Digitalab in Newcastle upon Tyne and scanned to CD.

Of all the elements to consider when taking a photograph, the one that’s often the most overlooked is shadows and highlights.

Often this is because it’s something that the camera can’t control for you. Modern autofocus is incredibly accurate so it’s rare that an image is blurred, and advanced multi-zone metering systems cover almost every lighting scenario you can imagine. However, the key to creating a great portrait is controlling where you put the light and where the shadows fall, and this is something that your camera cannot do for you.

Shadows are incredibly important in portraiture as without them your image appears flat. Shadows show form and shape, highlight features, smooth out imperfections and give a real 3D feel to your image – and Photoshop isn’t required, you can get it all right in camera, just the way it should be. The image above is a good example of this, so let’s look at how it was put together.

The first thing to consider is your light source, and where you put it. You need to get the light source off the camera, ideally to one side and a little higher than the level of the lens. Next the light source needs to be softened, as direct flash is far too harsh.

We’re aiming for the softest possible light in order to give us smooth, gentle transitions from light to shade. In order to achieve this we need to enlarge the light source and place it as close to the models head as we can. As we’ve said many times before in this blog, a large light source close up gives the softest light, whereas a point source far away (like direct sun) gives the harshest.

We shot this image with a large softbox to the left of the model angled at 45 degrees both horizontally and vertically. We arranged the pose so that this light illuminated the far side of her face, and we were very carfeul to make sure that the position of this light was able to produce catchlights in both eyes, not just the one nearest the light. The softbox also gives us great directional control of the light, so we can keep light spill on the background down to a minimum. We gently filled in some of the shadows on the right hand side with a white reflector, and using a light meter set the appropriate exposure.

The lighting effect you see in this image is known as Rembrandt lighting (no prizes for guessing why) and is characterised by a gentle triangle of light under the eye on the shadow side of the image. It’s quite easy to do with minimal equipment, and is a good example of how the simple things often work best.

Often as photographers we push ourselves too hard and ultimately end up complicating our images, so it’s a good thing to strip it back sometimes and re-assess exactly why you want to take the image. Often we don’t need a flashy studio with thousands of pounds worth of kit, and our model doesn’t need hundreds of pounds worth of outfits and lingerie!

A portrait like this one is ultimately about beauty, and over complicating it with too much light, props and post processing simply isn’t the right thing to do.

To demonstrate this here is the RAW file straight off the camera with no processing, no skin softeners, no colour tweaks, airbrushing or exposure changes. The warmth in the image was provided by an orange gel on the flash head.

If we were to produce this as a final image then we would possibly increase the saturation slightly, but by thinking about our lighting at the time of taking the image we find that there is very little left to do to it. We decided that black and white would be nice, so a quick conversion in Lightroom then a gentle crop and we’re sorted.

A digital workflow is without doubt a good thing. It’s fast and flexible and opens up far more opportunities to the photographer than working in film can.

A single digital file can be processed in many more ways than a roll of film stock. There’s a variety of software packages available for processing digital images. These vary hugely in price and quality, and so are available to most photographers in one form or another.

The daddy of them all is Photoshop, but there are also packages such as the excellent Lightroom and Apple’s Aperture on the market. Alongside these applications are a variety of plug-ins available which offer a very user friendly way to stylise images in a pre-defined way.

For example, you may be looking for a 1960′s black and white, or perhaps a trendy cross processed effect. How about an antique sepia, or maybe a polaroid? They are all there, and with the right software can be applied with a single click of the mouse. This is a great time saver, and offers the less experienced digital user a large range of output styles that they otherwise may not be able to achieve.

However, as usual there is a problem. By using these plugins there is the risk of losing your individuality. You no longer take full control of your images, but the software applies a pre-programmed set of actions written by somebody else. As a result, images from different photographers all begin to look rather similar.

I’ve seen most of these plugins before, I’ve used a couple of them in the past but am now beginning to move away from them. I’ve found that often when looking at other photographer’s work I’ve been able to pick out which combination of plug-ins and software has been used, and I don’t want this to be the case with my work. I don’t want it to look like everyone elses, I want my own style to come through – not that of a software company in California.

It’s important to think about your photographs and what you intend to do with them before you shoot them. This is much more prefereable than taking images and then deciding which plugin to apply to them, and letting the software make the decisions for you. I prefer to visualise the entire image and then set up lighting and exposure accordingly.

For example, I may visualise a black and white shot so I’ll quite literally imagine that I’m shooting with black and white film, and I’ll arrange my lighting accordingly. When I go into the digital darkroom I’ll apply the same principles as if I was developing prints in a conventional darkroom. There’ll be dodging and burning going on, maybe a bit of push processing, in fact a whole range of techniques. I’ll take care of each step of the processing myself though, I don’t want to leave it all up to automated software. I would rather spend more time on each image and just get it right.

Everybody has their own idea of what makes a good image, but in my opinion there are a few techniques that must be used with care, otherwise your image is in danger of looking cliched. I’ve listed them below and I’ve included some examples where I’ve used these techniques succesfully – you can click on them for a larger view. Note that there are always exceptions to the rule, the comments below are a general opinion.

• Vignettes
  This is where the corners of the image are darkened, and the idea is to draw the attention to the main subject of the photograph. Done subtley it can look great, but if applied in the wrong situation can ruin an image. A good example of when not to use one is on an image with grey sky in the corners. Vignettes are usually applied most succesfully in studio portraiture, where the background lighting is arranged in such a way that immediately behind the subject’s head is light, but the light drops off in the corners. Applying this digitally in post production must be done with care though.

  Generally speaking, I think that if you can see there is definitely a vignette in the image then it’s probably too strong. The image on the right has a very gentle vignette, and this works because it follow the shape of the subject and looks natural.

• Cross Processing
  This is an old technique where film stock was processed in the ‘wrong’ chemicals, giving wacky colour shifts and changes in contrast. It’s extremely popular in fashion photography, and done well can look amazing. There’s a danger though of taking it too far, and having colour shifts which change the subjects skin tone from a lovely natural colour to yellow or even green.

  Each image needs to be taken on it’s own merits when cross processing, so applying a pre-configured plugin is never really satisfactory. This shot has had a little cross processing treatment, but I’ve been careful to make sure that the skin remains skin coloured and the lovely blonde hair remains blonde rather than a hue of light green.

• Selective Color
  This is usually a black and white image where the colour element is painted back in. The cliched example of this is the bride in black and white with her flowers in colour. This technique has been abused terribly over the last decade, and is generally a huge post production ‘faux pas’.

  As with all techniques though, there are exceptions and there are examples of this being done extremely well. We’ve used it a couple of times, the image on the right is a rare example of it being successful but generally we steer clear of it.

• Skin Softening
  This is where the skin is blurred slightly but the rest of the image stays sharp. This is generally a good thing, as if applied gently it gives a lovely, soft tone and removes bumps and imperfections. Beware though of taking this too far and ending up with a model who looks plastic. There’s still got be texture left in the skin or it just doesn’t look right. I’ve written a blog post already on airbrushing image, click here to read it.

• Iris Enhancement
  Whitening the eyes of your subject has been around for decades. Always be subtle when doing this, if you go over the top your subject can look very scary! I don’t particularly like this effect so don’t use it. You can show the natural beauty in the eyes by simply lighting correctly.

• Random Photoshop Filters
  This is where filters are used just because they are there! Things like swirls, motion blurs, lens zooms and that kind of thing all have their place, but shouldn’t be used to try and rescue a mediocre image and make it useable. Again, not my scene.

For me, I’m moving away from these presets and am now keeping it all much more personal, and much more my own style. I want to control my images myself, not have a software package do it for me. It’s true that plugins are good time savers, but I’m not interested in that. All I’m interested in is the final image, and I won’t compromise on quality.

To produce top quality images photographers must now be as proficient in their digital darkrooms as they were in their traditional darkrooms in previous years. This involves learning a new range of techniques to ‘hand print’ images, rather than taking your ‘film’ to the ‘minilab’ for them to develop for you!

The image at the top of this page uses some of the techniques covered in this post but in a rather subtle way. There’s a little skin softening applied, but not too much – you can still see texture and tone and the smooth finish is more to do with good makeup application than digital processing.

There isn’t a digital vignette as the directional lighting applied was controlled to darken the top corners but not the bottom ones. There’s a small amount of blue added to the shadows, and the warmth in the models skin has been applied using a light orange gel on the studio flash when the image was taken.

Most hotels go through a bedroom refurbishment programme. How often they do this depends on how busy they are and how much abuse the rooms get every day. Eventually that marked wallpaper needs replacing, the worn carpets need throwing out and the paintwork on the windows needs a going over.

This gives us an ideal opportunity to photograph them looking their best for the hotel brochure, and this is what we’ve done for Matfen Hall. The newly refurbished ‘room 12′ goes live on the system on Monday morning, so over the weekend we headed up there to grab a shot.

The room is on the corner of the building and has two large windows, one facing east and the other facing north. This is a good start – if the window was facing south and it was a bright, sunny day then we would have all sorts of problems with harsh, direct sunlight, especially at this time of year. As it turns out it was overcast and quite dull. This gives us a lovely quality of light, just not much of it!

The way to overcome this lack of light is to introduce our own and control it, but ideally blend it with the existing ambient light. This is a shot of the room with no additional lighting and exposed for the tungsten lamps.

This is the exposure I need if I want to make sure that these lights are visible in the final image. If I use too much additional light from my studio flash heads then it will kill this ambient light completely, and this isn’t what I want. It will actually look as though the bedroom lights are turned off.

The first step is to set up the main light. I put this in the same place that the majority of the natural light comes from, and that’s the large window to the right of the image. This light has a huge shoot through umbrella on it, the aim being to use a large light source to replicate windowlight, and to work alongside the windowlight that already exists. The result is the image below:

Note how the ambient light and this main light are balanced, you can still see the light emitted from the tungsten bulbs in the room. This isn’t a bad start, but there are a couple more things we need to take care of. The shadows to the bottom left of the image need filling as it’s a little dark in there. The small amount of light that is there comes from a smaller window positioned to the bottom left of the image. Another studio flash head was placed here, but this time we used a lower power setting and an umbrellabox. This allows us more directional control, and means that we can direct light quite accurately just to the area we want to fill. If we used a shoot through umbrella then this light would scatter everywhere. Here’s what we get:

A subtle difference, but necessary. So, that’s the main light and the fill light set up – we’re just about there. There’s just one more thing that needs looking at, and that’s the lighting in the bathroom through the door at the back. It’s a bit too dark in there at the moment and because of this the image is a little flat. We set up a small hostshoe flash on a lighting stand with a radio remote, and fired it on half power through another shoot through umbrella.

Again, it’s a subtle difference, but it’s these incremental steps that makes an image better. Now that we have all of the power ratios set and the lights in the right place we can get to work. We shot a series of images, bracketting exposures and slightly changing angles. We then processed the final RAW files in Adobes outstanding ‘Lightroom’ and using the ‘curves’ and ‘vibrance’ controls gave the image a little more punch.

And so we have it! It’s another example of how you can’t rely on the ambient light to get the image you want. It’s often not enough to just work with what’s available, sometimes you need to add your own light, but always in a natural, sympathetic way.

We’ve been photographing food again, this time at the AA Rosetted restaurant at Eslington Villa in Low Fell, near Newcastle upon Tyne.

They’ve recently been reviewed by the local press, and were asked for an image of the restaurant to go alongside the article. We decided to create an image where the main subject is a dish from the menu but you also get a feel for how pleasant it is in the restaurant itself.

Luckily for us the restaurant has windows on three sides, so there’s plenty of natural light. This is a good starting point, but on it’s own isn’t really enough to give us the shot we want.

We arrived at the restaurant mid morning, unpacked the kit and then took an ambient meter reading. We want to try and utilise as much of this ambient light as we can, as this gives us a nice, even, natural fill light. It wasn’t quite bright enough for what we wanted though, so the flashguns were unpacked.

Food always looks best when lit from behind, so the first flash was set on a lighting stand behind and to the left of the table which the food was positioned on. We couldn’t have the light directly behind it as the light stand would be visible in shot. We used a shoot through umbrella to give a nice, soft light which spreads over a large area.

We set the power of the flash to be slightly stronger than the ambient light, so enough to light the table but not completely overpower the rest of the scene. In effect we’re using the flashgun as a main light and then the ambient light as a fill light. We also placed a large, white reflector in front and to the left of the plate of food. The front right of the plate was lit quite nicely by the window light, but the left hand side needed a little help.

This by itself would create a reasonably good image, but we want to make more of the actual restaurant, and the background was looking a little dull compared to the well lit table of food. The ambient light from the window just wasn’t quite punchy enough. A second flash was placed on a lighting stand, another shoot through umbrella was used, and the power set to provide a little more light for the background of the shot. It doesn’t overpower the natural window light or the tungsten lamps on the ledge though.

What we end up with is an image that lights the food well, is sympathetic to the ambient, but fills in the background where the light is lacking. The exposure takes into account the trees in the garden, which can be seen through the windows. While we didn’t want these sharp, we also didn’t want them completely under or over exposed.

It’s often overlooked, but the background of photographs can play a crucial part of the success of the overall image, so it needs some attention and thought.

It’s a balancing act, but it’s another example of how flexible it can be using manual hotshoe flashguns on lighting stands. The ease of use, portability and no requirement for mains power makes it an ideal choice for this kind of photography.

You can click on the images in this post to see larger versions. We’ve included two of the many final versions, and also a shot of the lighting set up at top of the page.

For those interested in the technicalities we used a Fuji S5 Pro with a Sigma 30mm f1.4 lens (at f4, ISO 200), and an exposure of 1/40 sec. The flashguns were the excellent manual only Lumopro LP160, mounted on standard lighting stands with a lastolite hotshoe adapter, which allows us to add an umbrella (a Westcott shoot through). The flash power settings were calculated using good old mathematics after taking an ambient reading on a Sekonic light / flash meter.

This post follows up a previous one talking about a new plan of mine to build a lightweight portable lighting set-up which can be used just about anywhere. You can read this post here if you’ve missed it. I ended the post with a promise to test the idea out and see how it all works, and this is the result of that test.

I’ve been working quite a lot recently with studio lighting, and I enjoy the total control that it gives me over the final image. The plan I have though is to use portable flashguns on studio stands rather than mains powered studio flash heads. The flashguns will still be radio triggered, and still fired through the same modifiers as the studio heads (such as softboxes and umbrellas), but can they deliver the quality of light that the studio heads do? I suspected that they could, and I’ve been proved right.

Let’s cover the benefits of this style of photography. Firstly, there’s portability. Two hotshoe flashguns weigh much less than two studio flash heads, and you don’t need to carry mains cables as they are battery powered. The second main benefit is that of cost. A suitable manual flashgun can be picked up for £50 if you don’t already have one, a lighting stand with a hotshoe adapter costs as little as £25 (it doesn’t need to be heavy duty as it’s only holding a flashgun) and a set of radio triggers can be bought for £20 on eBay. A small shoot through umbrella will be around £20, throw in £15 for a charger and set of batteries and you’re all done for £130.

Now we’re all set up and ready to go I had three main questions I wanted answering. The first was just how good a quality of light can you get out of a flashgun compared to a studio light. The second was how quickly the flashes would recycle – would they keep up with the speed that I shoot at. Finally, I wanted to know how easy it was to shoot without the built in modelling lights that the studio heads have – it’s always much easier to focus in a bright environment with modelling lights on rather than in dim light with flashguns.

Regarding quality of light, I can’t really see a difference between the light that the studio heads produce compared to the flashes.

I set my flashguns to shoot through a large umbrella, and if I set the flashgun’s diffuser to the wide setting I’ve found that it can quite easily fill the umbrella with light. Placing this large light source as close to the subject as possible gives a lovely soft light. I found that I used the flash on various power settings, but usually between one quarter and one sixteenth of full power.

This was perfect as it means that the batteries last longer, and the recycle times are fast. I shot over 500 images in this test shoot and the flash only failed to recycle twice, and the same set of rechargeable batteries lasted the full session.

The camera’s autofocus system seemed to cope reasonably well in the lower light. Had I been using studio lights I would have switched the modelling lights on to help, but my flashguns don’t have these so I had to focus in ambient light. Now and then the autofocus assist light on the camera would kick in to help out, but generally it handled it well.

The big plus point for me is portability and ease of set up. I carried just two bags to the shoot, the first was my usual camera bag and the second contained my light stands and umbrellas.  Moving the flashes around once they were set up was so easy, and they aren’t restricted to being near a mains socket so there’s considerable freedom in where you shoot.

In this instance the flashguns were more than powerful enough for what I needed. For jobs where a high output isn’t required but speed is of the essence I can definitely see myself reaching for the speedlites and travelling light rather than heading for the studio.

If you’re looking at photographing food then a good place to start is a search on the internet. If you do this you’ll probably find these recurring ‘top tips’.

They are:

• Don’t use flash, use natural light
• Get the camera on a tripod
• Use a wide aperture (to blur distracting parts of the image).

I was asked to head down to Seaham Hall to photograph a couple of dishes from their nationally renowned ‘White Room’ restaurant. It doesn’t get much better than this, if you’re going to photograph food you might as well photograph something like the quality of the cuisine that’s produced here.

It’s all a question of timing though. I know how hard chefs work at this level and the long hours they put in, so it helps if you can fit in with their busy schedule. Through the day they tend to be running a lunch service and preparing for the evening. After 6pm is generally well out of bounds, so the best option to shoot is just as the kitchen is about to close. I arrived at 9pm when the bulk of the main courses had already been sent – this allowed the chef time to prepare the two dishes for me and then get himself home for a reasonable hour.

Contrary to the opening ‘top tips’ in this post I decided to use flash, not use a tripod, and use a smaller aperture to keep the whole dish in focus – after all, the rules are there to be broken! My new motto in photography is ‘learn to light everywhere’. I really believe that we should be able to turn up to any location at any time with any brief and from that be able to produce a good image.  So it’s dark outside and there is no natural light, there’s a restaurant service going on in the room next door so the lights are low and there’s not an abundance of power outlets? This shouldn’t matter, we should still be able to deliver the goods. As usual with posts in this blog you can click on any of the images for a larger version.

There’s nothing wrong with using flash for food photography, it’s just that daylight is the easy option. The trick is to modify the light to make it softer. I admit that using on camera flash is a recipe (if you’ll pardon the pun) for disaster, and it’s likely it’s this kind of flash that the various websites offering advice suggest avoiding. I’ve recently taken to using hotshoe flashes, lighting stands and umbrellas as a portable studio set up (you can read more about this here), and that’s what I chose to use here. No power sockets required, easy to transport through hotel corridors and quick and quiet to set up (and break down).

Usually when we light a subject with studio lights (or flash) we position the lights in front of the subject – this sounds logical, in fact even obvious, but with food photography you tend to find that you get the best results positioning the lights behind the item. We used a 105cm diameter shoot through umbrella on a lighting stand with a Lumopro flashgun set on half power positioned behind the dish, triggered by a radio remote. In front of the dish was a Lastolite reflector which bounced some of the light back in to gently fill shadows. An aperture of f8 was used to keep everything in focus.

Sometimes I like to select a wide aperture for food photography as this blurs the background, but the White Room is so called for a reason. White table cloths, white plates, white napkins – it’s white! In this contemporary venue there is no colour except for the food, so it doesn’t make sense to blur it as it’s really the only detail in the whole shot. Had there been background detail I may have thought differently, but this wasn’t the case.

So, the usual rules now apply. A larger light source closer to the subject produces a softer light, so the shoot through umbrella is positioned as close to the dish as we can without it intruding into the frame. We light from behind the dish and reflect back in to fill the shadows. We’ve set the white balance on the camera before hand but it doesn’t really matter as seeing there is only one light source and we’re shooting in RAW we can adjust this in post production. The vibrance of the image is increased a little in Adobes excellent ‘Lightroom’ software, and that’s it! We’re done!

Looks good enough to eat? I think so, and if you would like to sample the finished item then I would recommend a visit to Seaham Hall – its an experience to be savoured, that’s for sure.

We’re all lottery winners. Every single one of us who has ever lived has won the ultimate prize – we’ve been given a life.

If our parents had decided to conceive a child even a day later then we simply wouldn’t exist, somebody else would instead, and that would be our chance gone forever. Not only are we fortunate enough to have won this billion to one chance of existence, but we’re also alive right now! Today! Here!

Well, that’s the philosophical part of this post out of the way, but I must admit that I find this concept mind boggling. Some people have a fairly carefree attitude to life, and assume that it’s just a path we go through and we’ve all been given a divine right to exist, but after realising this isn’t really the case I have to admit my whole attitude to life, and work, changed.

There’s always a lot of talk about the work / life balance – this is generally about the priorities a person attaches to their work and personal life, and whether this is in fact a balance or weighted in one direction. Individuals now work longer and harder than ever before, and it looks like we’ll be retiring much later too, so it’s more and more important to think long and hard about what we do for a living.

Let’s do some maths now. The average working day is eight hours long. Lets throw another hour in there for commuting which makes it nine. We probably sleep for an average of eight hours, which brings us to seventeen hours,therefore seven hours left over. In these seven hours we have to cook a meal, manage a household (and maybe a family), carry out DIY and maintenance and more. We’ve got the weekend too, which is when most people relax and enjoy themselves, but the point I’m eventually getting to is that considering the amount of time we spend at work, and the number of years we are going to work, isn’t it important to actually enjoy what you do?

I’m very lucky in that I love the job that I do, so much so that I would probably do it anyway even if I didn’t need to work for a living. When I was at school choosing a career path I was warned about following a career in photography and design as it was so competitive. I took this advice and followed a different route for ten years before realising that I had made a mistake. I spent a couple of years retraining and then took the plunge and started a business, and it’s the one I still run today.

One of the most interesting things about what I do is the variety of people that I meet and work with. More often than not they run a small business just as I do, and I think that they have the same ideas and outlook as me too. This attitude to work means that the work they do isn’t just eight hours of the day they reluctantly spend making a living, but is literally a part of their life that they enjoy and that means so very much to them.

Because of this I think that a small business should always be given a chance. They are so involved and passionate because it’s all about them – they are not just a cog in a machine but in fact are the machine. I see how much their work means to these people every day on Twitter, and they seem more engaged with their clients and others in their region than many of the larger businesses.

It would be naive of me to suggest that only small businesses are passionate about their work, ultimately it comes down to the individual. However, us small businesses deserve a chance, so bear us in mind next time you need a quote for your project – we might pleasantly surprise you!

Summer is on it’s way out now, so as a farewell to the season I’m giving away twelve images taken this year for use as desktop wallpaper.

The preview images are below, just click on them to see larger versions. The full size files are 1920 x 1200 pixels at 72 dpi so are ready to go for most widescreen displays.

To download a zip file of full size images click here, or click the icon on the right.

Enjoy!