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!

Home Sweet Home

Well I'm back in the land of Oz after a pretty relaxing time in Guam and Japan - well at least as relaxing as it can be with two adrenaline-junkie toddlers! What with waterslides, snorkelling, windsurfing, giant obstacle courses, baseball, video game arcades and other general adventures I think we managed to tire them out pretty well.

I'd show you some photos but I haven't got that far in my post-processing yet. In the meantime I thought you might be interested in the kind of gear I travel with and my workflow. It's pretty much the same whether I'm on assignment for a client, a self-assigned stock shoot or on holiday. We photographers are never really on holiday anyway!

I had a pretty minimal kit (for me) this time around and carried it in a Lowepro shoulder bag. Just a single body, 10-22 wide angle, 24-70 and 70-200. All f2.8's except for the 10-22. I limited myself to one flash as well as an infrared trigger as I always prefer to use my flash off-camera whenever possible. I have a small hard-drive/card reader gadget that lets me download cards during the day if I fill them all up but this time around I didn't need it. It also doubles as a back-up drive for my images. I also had a polarising filter for each of the three lenses as well as my trusty old Manfrotto tripod and a cable release.

These days I travel with a small 10 inch Acer notebook. It's a groovy aqua colour and is just the right size to fit into my little day pack. I don't have Photoshop installed on it because I don't like to do any post-processing whilst I'm away. Maybe I'm just weird but when it comes to the end of the day I just wanna sit down with a good meal and a cold drink and not spend hours looking over pictures. I know when I've got what I need and don't need to start playing around with pictures until I get home.

Which isn't to say I don't look at stuff. I have Expression Media loaded on and I download all my images on to the netbook and then catalogue them. I cull out any obvious mistakes and add metadata to the rest - copyright info, location, any pertinent keywords. I find that if I do this on a regular basis (usually every day), whilst it doesn't take long it saves a lot of time trying to remember names and places afterwards.I then back up those images on to external hard drives just for safety's sake.

When I get home I load everything on to the main computer and start working on them in Camera Raw. I leave the copies  on the netbook and external hard drives until I've finished finessing the images and make permanent back-ups, then they can be deleted from their temporary homes on the netbook and external hard drives.

And that's about as complicated as I like to get! I'm sure if you're on an advertising shoot with a tight deadline you must have to work a lot more quickly and process images on-site but not many of my clients really demand that. So I keep it light, simple and leave myself ample time to enjoy time away from the photography.

Stay tuned for some pictures from Guam and Japan!

Keeping it natural

You'll have to excuse the lack of posts in the last week or so. Between hanging with the kids on the water slides in Guam, and watching them play baseball with the local kids here in Japan I've been flat out having fun!

Today I was out and about doing one of my favourite things - checking out the giant bookstores here in Sapporo.

There's one thing about Japan that we photographers love. They love their photography. There are rows and rows of books and magazines on every aspect of photography. I can spend hours just looking through all the different books and being inspired by the incredible imagery from both professional and amateurs alike.

I'd never really thought that much about what it is about Japanese photography that appeals to me so much but today it kind of hit me.

I was looking through a book which had the winners of an annual photo competition and something immediately struck me. So I picked up some more magazines and found the same thing. It is almost as if Photoshop had never been invented, or at least never made it this far East.

The overwhelming majority of images look like they've never seen the inside of a computer. Which of course is not true because if you look at all the captions a lot of it is shot digitally (although medium format film nature photography is huge over here). But even the images shot digitally are processed to look as natural as possible. A lot of it could have been shot on trannie film and you'd never know the difference.

I was having a look at the technical section in the bookstore and expecting to find a horde of Strobist-style flash tutorials in amongst the thick tomes on landscape photography, nature photography, portrait photography and umpteen hundreds of camera manuals. Nothing. Zilch, zip, nada. I found one book that purported to talk about small flashes but it wasn't very in-depth at all. It seems like the off-camera flash phenomenon hasn't even taken off here. Japanese photographers love their light to come from that great big yellow ball in the sky and they are incredibly skilled at finding it in various shades, form and colour.

And I find that by taking away this element from their photography they tend to concentrate much more on the content of the image. The subject rules. Emotion, moment, capturing a fleeting glance, a smile. You look at the pictures and say 'what a great moment', not 'what great post-processing skills'. And I find that really refreshing and almost nostalgic in its simplicity.

And all the years I've been coming here I'd never really thought about it before but now that I have it's really hit me. So today's book purchase was one of the many fantastic books by nature photographer Hoshino Michio. He was tragically attacked and killed by a grizzly bear in Kamchatka a few years ago now, but he is without a doubt one of my all-time favourite photographers. You can feel his love for nature permeate every single one of his images. And I feel it every time I look through a Japanese photo magazine.

It's nice to remember that not everything has to be put through Photoshop to be a great image.

Fantastic FNQ photo Friday

Lake Barrine is one of the beautiful crater lakes up on the Atherton Tablelands, about an hour or so south-west of Cairns. The Tablelands is close in distance but a lot way away in temperature from the tropical coast. At this time of the year when we're complaining about it dropping down to 11 centrigrade they're down to 0 with frosts!

The best time to be at the lake is in the early morning when hopefully you'll get some lovely mists across the water. The ducks are out on the water, the pythons aren't yet awake and it's beautifully quiet.The rainforest walk around the perimeter is simply stunning, although there are only a few places where you get a clear view out over the lake which is a bit disappointing.

The image above is of the teahouse on the shores of the lake. It's been run by the same family since the 1920's and the boat there takes people on a wonderful one hour tour around the crater lake. On my trip out I spotted pythons galore, bearded dragon lizards sunning themselves, a pair of mating black snakes and lots of waterbirds.

I'd definitely recommend a trip up there to see the lake, and don't forget to indulge in the lovely scones, jam and cream!

Have a great weekend!

Finding the balance between family time and camera time

One of the hardest things as a photographer is family vacations. If you've got kids then you'll know what I mean straight away. If you've got a partner who doesn't love their photography as much as you do then you'll be nodding your head in agreement. If you have neither then you're probably not sure what the fuss is all about.

The fuss starts when you start to get shutter button withdrawal symptoms. Mine start usually about two or three days after not having a camera in my hand and creating some images. But you're torn. You want to go off by yourself for a few hours and capture the local architecture at twilight but that impinges on getting the kids fed and to bed, or breaks up the booking at that romantic little local diner down the road.

In other words you have to abandon your family or siginificant other if you want to create anything more than 'been there, done that' snapshots. So here's what I do. I don't know if it's the best way to do things and if other people have suggestions I'm all ears. So far this seems to work for me.

The most important thing I find is to include your family in your photography as much as possible. But it's not enough just to have them stand with their hands held out looking like they're holding the Eiffel Tower in their palm. If you don't put as much effort and creativity into pictures of your family as you do your other 'more important' pictures then they're going to feel pretty left out.

Make it fun. Show them what a blast photography can be. The photo above is me and my youngest son going down a slippery slide at Takino Park, on the outskirts of Sapporo. In order to bribe my way into a little bit of 'me time' photographing the birch trees in the forest I kept him entertained with multiple (multiple, multiple, multiple!) turns down the slide. All the time with me holding a camera and a wide-angle lens above my head and shooting as we went down.

Killing two birds with one stone. Well three really. My son had a blast both sliding and looking at the photos afterwards (let's try that again with a different lens Daddy!). I got some really fun pictures of stuff that I don't usually photograph, and created some great memories to boot. And my wife (at the bottom of the picture) got a break from looking after the kids. Everybody wins.

So whenever I go away on a trip with my family I always try to fit them in to my photography as much as possible. When they can see images that far outshine the point-and-shoot efforts that most family albums contain, and when they can have a blast taking part in the shoot then they're much more inclined to let me go off on my own and do 'work photography' as my boys call it.

One more hint as to what not to do: never try to hold your family up while you wait for the best light, the perfect opportunity, the search for a better angle. If they're not actively involved they'll be bored and no matter how exciting the resulting pictures, all they'll remember is how boring it was for them and you'll be in the doghouse again. Keep them involved, keep them excited, create exciting pictures for them to remember your holiday by and she'll be apples (Australian for you'll be doing well!)

If you'd like to see how I balanced family and "work photography' on this particular day you can take a look at the Takino Park, Sapporo images on my website.