Fantastic FNQ photo Friday

Mossman Gorge is one of my favourite rainforest spots in the whole of north Queensland. Located just north of picturesque Port Douglas, Mossman township itself is a quaint little country town with a pub or two, sugar train tracks and some lovely trees that form a giant botanic guard of honour over the road out of town on the northern side.

But for nature lovers the real appeal is just outside of town in the beautiful Mossman Gorge. Many brave souls take a dip in the water even during the winter months when it has to be one of the coldest bodies of water in the country! I was looking for a different way to capture the swimming hole when my friend Dave decided to go for a dip. He's Victorian what can I say?

So I decided to photograph him underwater with a slow shutter speed to give a sense of movement and motion to an otherwise static image. If you take a look at my other photographs of Mossman Gorge you can see why I love this place so much.

Back up for air!

Apologies for the scarcity of blog posts recently. Things have been very busy for me with assignments, stock sales and just coming to the end of my second Photographer's Intensive course. On top of that throw in weekly baseball games (and practice!) for my two little boys, school parades and regular skate park outings and - where has August gone?

Anyway I will try and be a bit more regular around here so that there's something regular to see and you don't all wander away to the dpreview site for your gear fix. :)

A kind of a theme for me this past month has been passion and practice. I've been exploring multiple flash work with both TTL and radio triggers to light interiors and I'm loving it. I find if I'm not constantly practicing both new and tried techniques I quickly get stale and settle into the known without pushing my own boundaries.

I had a couple of editorial portrait assignments where I got to push my off-camera flash beyond my usual style as well as pushing myself through the challenge of finding something new and interesting to appeal to my students every Monday and Tuesday for four weeks.

So it's been crazy busy but in a really good sort of way. I hope you've all been out practicing and honing your photography and feeding your own passions in life and all is well with the world. Stay tuned for a return to regular programming!

Cairns photo course in August

Well the dates are set for my second Photographer's Intensive and things are all ready to go for an August of intensive photography immersion here in Cairns.

Over the period of a month we’ll have a series of four hour lectures, running two days a week at Hambledon House in Edmonton. The days are:

8/9 August

15/16 August

22/23 August
29/30 August

and the lectures will run from 10-2.

The cost of the full month’s tutorials will be $550 (incl GST).

In between lectures there will be an online discussion group and area to post pictures so that you can get critique from the other members of the group as well as full access to myself. I will be available all month to answer questions and personally guide you to improving your photography.

With a small number of students (maximum 10) we will be able to tailor the course so that you get the most benefit out of your four weeks. To really learn what you need to to improve your images. We’ll concentrate on the technical side of things to the extent that it helps you improve the creative side of your art. To create photographs that share your own vision and way of interpreting the world.

Starting with topics such as lenses, light, flash, photographing strangers and developing it from there we will definitely cover a lot of ground. And this is where the inspiration for the intensive came from.

I received a lot of feedback over the years from people that they enjoyed my weekend workshops but wanted something that lasted longer and helped them keep up the momentum and enthusiasm. This is it.

For those who don’t know me I have been a professional travel photographer for more than a decade. I am represented by Lonely Planet Images and my pictures have been featured in more than 50 of their guidebooks ranging from Thailand to Tokyo, from Nepal to Southern Africa and lots of places in between. My images have been published in magazines such as National Geographic Traveler and TIME (US) and I have been teaching photography workshops for most of that 10 years.

What past students have said:

Hi Paul

I just wanted to say how much I enjoyed the photography course we have just completed.  I must say at first I was a bit worried about the length going for 2 days a week over four weeks but in the end I found myself wishing it went for longer.  Not only was it most informative but you made it very interesting.      Your passion for photography is quite infectious and your willingness to share your extensive knowledge made it a pleasure to be a part of.   

I now have reinvigorated my love for photography and I look forward to being a part of another one of your courses sometime.  Thanks again.

Kind regards

Warwick Bourguignon

'Paul's course is well worth doing, no matter what your interests are. 
It was really enjoyable and a great learning experience.  He is an
excellent teacher and had plenty of time for individual queries and
critiques.  We covered so much, including flash photography which I'm
now hooked on!  The spread of the sessions over a month worked really
well, allowing time to practice in between.  This course has opened up
so many new photographic opportunities for me - I am so glad I did it!'
Jackie Hammer, Cairns

 

So if you think you’d like to improve your photography and really delve into your creative possibilities and would like to find out more please contact me at info at dymond dot com dot au  or check out my website .

It's not about how many mediocre frames per second you take.

Now I'm still in my 30's (by the hair of my chinny chin chin mind you!) but I grew up in the pre-digital era. And while there's a lot of things about the film workflow that have simply gone by the wayside, there's one habit that I've never wanted to shake. And that's placing a value on each individual image I shoot.

I took this photograph on a month-long trek through the Nepalese Himalayas with my wife. We started walking after a short bus ride out of Kathmandu, hiked all the way up to the Gokyo Valley near Mt Everest and back to a little town called Lukla where we caught a plane home.

We went without porters or helpers of any kind - just the two of us with small daypacks on our backs filled with clothes, water purification tablets and film for our cameras. Seeing as neither of us are exactly body builders the amount of film we could physically carry was limited. In my case it was 25 rolls of Fuji Velvia. Think about that for a second. That's a mere 900 pictures for a whole month in the most picturesque place on earth.

But that's the situation I was in and I had to live with it. What it did mean was that I had to be very particular about what I photographed and what I didn't. I didn't shoot willy-nilly in the hope that I would get something good. I stopped, I waited, I anticipated. I valued each and every single time I pushed the shutter.

And I think that thinking has partly been lost in the digital era. Because the individual images themselves are pretty much low cost, and we often have the attitude that we can delete what doesn't work, we tend not to value each individual image as much.

I see it in both the amateur photographic world as much as the professional world. Go to Flickr and you'll see 50 different variations of the same photo. Vertical, horizontal, different focal lengths. There's probably two maybe three wonderful images and the rest is mediocre in comparison.

In the commercial world I see it when photographers offer to supply the client hundreds of pictures from a shoot. But how many of those pictures will ever see the light of day? The reality is not many. If the client has a good eye then they will pick out the best and use those, or they might let their graphic designer do it. Either which way the photographer would be doing their client a much better service by perfecting and presenting only the really fantastic shots and letting the other stuff fall into the virtual trash bin.

At the end of our photographic lives we won't be remembered for how many times we pushed the shutter. We won't be remembered for all the nearly-there pictures we took (at least I hope so!). We want to be remembered for the amazing images we took. Don't be so quick to take as many pictures as you can in as short a space of time as you can. Give situations time to develop and learn to click the shutter when the best of the best appears in front of you.

Just because pushing the shutter thousands of times a day may not be costing you much money it could be costing you a lot more.

Go on through to my Nepal photo gallery to see more images shot slowly and decisively on film.

Why the digital photographer should get paid more than the film photographer.

This image was shot on Fuji Velvia slide film. In fact this whole campaign shot for Quicksilver Cruises was shot on film. As the photographer I would pre-purchase the film and then once the job was over I would hand the film into the lab and come back the next day to pick it up. Then all I had to do was take it in to the client with a light box and loupe (if they didn't have one) and we would pick out the best shots to be used in the campaign.

And that was how simple film photography was for the photographer. Of course it meant you had to get your exposures smack on target or else the image was useless, and you never really knew what you had until the film came back so there was always an element of risk that isn't so prevalent in digital photography.

But in terms of handling and charging it was a pretty easy process. You would charge a certain amount per roll shot and developed, which included a small mark-up for profit and also to cover the time needed to pre-purchase, drop and pick up the film from the lab and other incidentals such as the electricity needed to keep the film cold.

Of course the expenses for the client didn't stop there. All those individual little pieces of transparency film had to be put into digital 1's and 0's for them to be printed and that cost a lot of money. Depending on how big you needed the scan you could pay up to $40 per image - more if there was post-processing work needed. None of that got paid to the photographer because we (for the most part) didn't do it.

Now with the advent of digital we do it all. Even though we don't need to provide the film any more we instead need to provide CF cards, computers, hard drives, DVDs and the security of back-ups to ensure that those vitally important files aren't accidentally lost or destroyed. We need to have accurately profiled monitors to ensure the colours are what the client expects. We need to be knowledgeable about colour spaces and gamuts, CMYK and RGB and file formats such as TIFF, DNG and JPEG.

These are all costs that we never had in the film days. Hell if your computer could run your word processing software and get you on to the internet that was enough. All these extra things cost extra money to buy and maintain. Digital cameras need to be replaced more often than film cameras ever needed to be.

And now that we're the lab we need to spend more time in front of the computer to make sure that those files look absolutely amazing for our clients. Not to mention the time (ie money) needed to educate ourselves every time a new piece of software comes out. The days of being able to shoot wonderful pictures and then pop off to the pub for a beer while the lab did their thing are long gone.

And if you don't charge for that stuff you're actually making less money than you would have done shooting film! So before you get into that mindset that it doesn't cost you any money to shoot digital once you've bought the stuff - think again. And explain it to your clients. They'll understand. They're not paying more money over all for digital because they do save on the film and developing costs. All that's happened is that instead of paying their local scanner or graphic designer to do their digital work they're paying you.

So either feed those costs into your CODB and thus your creative fees or add it as a line-item in your quotes so that clients know and understand the costs involved. The choice is yours but if you work together with your clients we can all collaborate to ensure that everybody comes out a winner.

Click on the link to see more of my film images from around the world.

Fantastic FNQ photo Friday

I recently had an article published in the latest edition of Mercedes Magazine - a beautiful glossy publication given for free to owners of Mercedes Benz cars.

The story was on the Southern Atherton Tablelands and one of the first places I visited was the tranquil Babinda Boulders. Only a short drive south of Cairns this town was famous for its sugar mill, which unfortunately closed down earlier this year.

But for visitors, of even more interest is the beautiful swimming hole and the national park surrounding it. The waterhole is at an entrance to the Boulders which is a spectacular landscape of giant rocks and steeply dropping rivers surrounded by thick tropical rainforest.

For this image I had my camera in an Ewa-Marine bag. It's like a big plastic PVC bag with screws to keep it tight and you'd think it was dodgy as all get out but it works brilliantly. I always keep this on me when out and about just in case there's an excuse for me to jump into some beautiful waterhole somewhere and take photos.

Pop over to my website to see more images of  the Babinda Boulders.

Are we taking it all a little too seriously?

Taking a few weeks off gave me a chance to read a few photo blogs, take a look at a few photo forums and just generally do some photo reading that I don't generally have time for.

And after a bit of perusing I came away with the overwhelming feeling that there's a lot of really anxious photographers out there.

Sure there's the obvious ones who are turning pro and worried about how to get work. But there's a huge number of amateurs out there who are fretting and gnawing their fingernails about things such as their vision.

I often tell my students that once you attain a certain level of technical proficiency - ie you get stuff in focus when you want to, use the aperture you want to get the effect you imagined and get your exposure and composition good, well everything above that is kinda subjective.

It's art people. It's meant to be subjective. Just because 100 people on Flickr tell you it's great doesn't make it so. Likewise just because that same 100 people might tell you it's crap doesn't make it so. It really is very subjective and at the end of the day the person you have to please more than any other is yourself.

When it comes to vision the simplest path to finding your own is to know yourself. Understand what you really love to photograph and how you like your images to look. You don't need to box yourself into any one particular style though. Musicians, painters, poets. They all change their style over the course of their lives. Why should photographers be any different?

My advice? Get as good as you want technically and once you've got that down then go out and shoot whatever takes your fancy. And I mean whatever. Don't think about whether it's right or wrong, good or bad. Just photograph it and if it's fun, if it makes you happy - well keep on photographing it. If it doesn't then stop and find something else. One of the worst questions I get asked is "what should I photograph?". If you don't know that then you've got a lot bigger problems then finding your vision!