Loch Ness – it’s fable, mystery and myth precedes itself.

Whilst abroad a few weeks ago, I had a conversation with a group of Italian travellers who asked where I was from. Inverness, in the Highlands of Scotland, was my answer. This was received by blank faces all round, then a sudden spark from one of the group ” ah, the Loch Ness monster “. Wherever you go in the world, it seems that the story of the Loch Ness monster has been heard and it is by this that Inverness is marked.

When Steve and I began our new business together, we decided that as part of this business we should embark on our own personal project work. Work that inspired us, keeps us fresh and continuing to explore new ideas and simply, just shooting.

For someone who has a love of water and landscape photography, photographing Loch Ness seemed like an obvious subject matter!

The project began in June and will be ongoing this year.Although it will most likely evolve as time goes on, my initial concept for the project was to capture the many aspects of Loch Ness – it’s tranquility, wildness, drama and serenity.

Over the coming months we will be posting updates on this project at regular intervals. Where and how the images were shot, including technical aspects and, of course, the end results!

Last year was busy, really busy! For me personally, it involved the forming of Parallel57, moving from the central belt to Inverness, opening our new studio, all whilst looking after my two young children in the midst of a very busy wedding season.

It’s easy for anyone, particularly those who are self employed, to forget to take a rest and regenerate!

The most obvious way to rest is to have a holiday, take some time out and relax, catch up on sleep and just switch off.

Yet, another way to rest is actually to work on something that excites you, something that you have a passion for, but often have very little time for.

Landscape and travel photography is my passion. I am lucky in that I am, and always have been, absolutely sure of that. So, if the answer to ” what are you passionate about ? ” doesn’t come naturally to you ….. take a little time out to think about what it was that first inspired you to pick up a camera. What images do you love looking at, feel inspired by?

I have a strong belief that in order to keep running your business effectively and happily, you need to hold on to your enthusiasm and your passion.

So, what would you like to shoot if you had no reason to, no commission?

If you can find the answer then try and make time to shoot for yourself. Your passion will show in the resulting images and also serve to strengthen your commissioned photography.

As for me, I am just back from a holiday in Morocco, and you may be able to guess that I packed my D700 and a 70-200mm lens when I went!

There’s no point in having a beautiful or fast website if no-one can find it. Search engine optimization, or “SEO” is the (often dark) art of increasing your website ranking with Google, Bing, Yahoo and the others. WordPress makes this process fairly easy, but you need to put in just a bit of effort to get the most from what it can do.

These two plugins will help enormously:

SEO Friendly Images

The metadata (i.e. words) attached to the images you upload to your website can make a big difference to your search engine ranking, especially if you’re a photographer! If you don’t write optimum alt and title tags for each image you upload, or if you’re not even sure what those things are, you’re missing out on a chunk of SEO potential.

The reality, though, for social photographers, who tend to upload a LOT of images, is that they simply don’t have time to manually write effective alt and title tags for every photo.

Good news! This plugin does it for you! All you have to do is give the image an appropriate filename (i.e. with relevant keywords) when you export from Lightroom, or Aperture, or whatever photo management software you’re using; this plugin takes care of the rest. Make sure to read the plugin instructions carefully, which you only need to do once, then you can leave it to work its magic.

WordPress SEO

This plugin is like an SEO ecosystem. It combines nearly all the different elements of SEO in one place, and it’s created by a highly respected SEO expert.

There’s not much point me explaining it all here. What you should do is install it, then click the new SEO tab you see in the vertical menu bar, then click the “Start Introduction Tour” button at the top of the WordPress SEO: General page. This explains it all, and pretty simply too.

To Finish…

There’s a whole lot more to SEO, like having compelling visual and written content, and encouraging visitors to link to your site. But what these plugins will do is automate what would otherwise have taken you quite a lot of time, which means the time you do put into SEO can be more specific and productive.

In a competitive industry where clients frequently base decisions on their experience of your website, you need your site to be as snappy as possible. The web turns us into impatient five-year-olds – if it doesn’t do something interesting right now, we move on.

These three WordPress plug-ins will make your website faster, which means your visitors will be happier. (Not sure what a plugin is, or how to install one? Click here.)

Quick Cache

WordPress runs on a database and databases have to do stuff before they spit out pages. They’re “dynamic”, which sounds good, but it actually means you have to wait for the dynamism to finish dynamizing before you see the results. This takes time and your visitors don’t have much time.

What a caching plugin does is make static versions of your pages. It takes a snapshot of the results of all that database churning and when someone comes by it serves up the snapshot instead, which can be much, much faster.

There are several different caching plugins. I tried a few while building this site and Quick Cache worked best. It’s ridiculously simple and it is, as it says, quick. Others are possibly more powerful, but they’re a devil to get working properly, so unless you’re a proper geek use Quick Cache. And if you do nothing else after reading this post, do install this one – it will have the biggest impact on your website speed.

WP Minify

My dad’s a wonderful man, but he takes a reaaaaaalllllllly long time to say anything (he refuses to get a computer so he’ll never know I told you this). He inserts long pauses and ums and ahhs and … oh, you know … time to find … Just. The. Right. Word. And he spreads all this across several installments.

Computer code can be just like my dad, which it has no right to be! That’s where WP Minify comes in. It chucks out all the stuff that isn’t actually saying anything, and makes the rest go like a racing commentator.

Amazon S3 for WordPress with CloudFront

This one’s more complicated. The previous two you just set and forget. This one needs some work, and costs a few pence a month, but it’s well worth it. What it does is arrange for your photos (JPEGs) to be served from an Amazon server instead of your web host’s server. This has two benefits.

The first is like adding an extra tap to your bath. Your bath fills up more quickly with two taps filling it than one. Your web page is like a bath; web servers are like taps. If you deliver your web content from more than one server at the same time your page fills up more quickly.

The second is that your visitors are served images from the Amazon Cloudfront server closest to them, and because Amazon servers are dotted all around the world your international visitors will have a snappier experience.

You’ll need to set up an Amazon Web Services (AWS) account with S3 and Cloudfront but there are some very user-friendly guides out there, like this one. When you’ve opened your AWS account, install this plug in and follow the instructions. Sorted.

SEO

Almost all the other plugins we have are for Search Engine Optimization. But you must be exhausted by now, so we’ll save that for later.

Photographing dancing at a wedding (or any other event) is about as challenging as it gets. Lots of people moving quickly in virtual darkness pushes your camera to its limits and beyond: autofocus rarely works, the background turns into an infinitely black cavern, the flash overexposes or underexposes or both. It can be a nightmare.

On the other hand, the potential for great images is everywhere. People are pretty unguarded by the time the dancing comes along, and you can get shots that really embrace the atmosphere of the event.

Assumptions

Before we get to the solution, we’re assuming that:

1. You have a camera you can manually set aperture, shutter speed, focus, iso, and flash output settings.
2. The idea of manually controlling your camera’s settings doesn’t give you palpitations.

If neither of those is you, this will probably be of limited value…

The Solution

Okay, here’s what we suggest (and what we do) along with rationale:

1. Turn off your flash. You’ll turn it back on later, but we don’t want it to interfere with the next steps.
2. Put on a wide-angle lens. On our (full-frame sensor) cameras we use from 14 to 24mm. With a wide-angle lens the images make you feel like you’re immersed in the dancing – a part of it and not a passive observer.
3. Set your aperture to around f/5.6 – f/8. This provides the depth of field you’ll need to keep your subjects in focus.
4. Set your shutter speed to between 1/4 and 1/30 second. A slower shutter speed makes more background blur as you shoot – experiment and adjust to suit the context and your tastes. (Hint: a slower shutter speed also allows for a lower ISO setting in the next step, which makes your shots less vulnerable to sensor noise).
5. Set your ISO to bring the exposure meter to about 1 – 1.5 stops under what your camera tells you it should be. In other words, as you adjust the ISO, look at the exposure meter indicator through your camera’s viewfinder. When the indicator is around the -1.5 mark you’re about right. Take a test shot and what you should see is a somewhat underexposed background – darkish, atmospheric, definitely not a big black hole.
6. Set your focus to manual. Move to between 0.5 and 1 meter from an object that you can clearly see through the viewfinder and manually focus on it. (Hint2: The wider your lens the closer to the dancers you should be.) What you’ve done is prefocus your lens – be careful not to knock this setting out as you shoot.
7. Put your flash on. We use a speedlight turned up at 45 degrees with dome diffuser attached. This isn’t essential but it does give a slightly softer light and it’s a bit less dazzling. Now adjust your flash output manually so that it perfectly illuminates people the same distance away as your prefocused setting.

And that’s it. All you have to do now is hold your camera the prefocused distance from your subjects and shoot. Because your settings are manual the camera won’t have to hunt for focus, exposure or flash output. It’s immediately responsive and you should be able to capture a collection of really good dance shots.

Advanced Tips

1. Hold the camera high above people’s heads and shoot down, or at waist height and shoot up, for compositional variety.
2. Get in there and dance with them! (Your flash freezes action even when the camera is moving quite quickly.) Dancers usually respond enthusiastically if you dance too.
3. If the background light is predominantly tungsten you’ll get better results if you “gel” your flash. Higher end speedlights come with different colour gels and a special holder. If you don’t have one you can buy them here. The gel you want is CTO Full (Colour Temperature Orange). This matches the colour temperature of your flash to the background tungsten lighting. Make sure you put this on before you adjust the flash output (it absorbs about 1 stop of flash power), then set your camera’s white balance to tungsten… Or (Advanced Advanced Tip!) manually set your white balance Kelvin to around 3250 for warmer skin tones.

Binnie and David were married on Bonfire Night 2011 at the Torridon Hotel.

The scene is basically pitch black, momentarily illuminated each minute or so by fireworks. How do you successfully photograph something like this?

The obvious thing to capture at a fireworks display are the fireworks. And what you normally get is a lovely kaleidoscope of colours…and the backs of people’s heads. But after watching this scene for a few moments I realised that the most interesting thing was actually people’s faces and reactions.

So having taken a few “safety shots” of the fireworks I decided to take on the challenge of photographing people in almost complete darkness!

Having come straight from the speeches there wasn’t time to set up off-camera lighting (which would have spoiled the atmosphere anyway). So this shot was taken with no flash, no tripod, one 24 mm prime lens at f/1.4 on a Nikon D700 body, 1/25th sec at ISO 5000. The camera was set to manual exposure, auto focus, and I was crouched low to help steady the camera with my body.

My thinking behind these settings was that to capture anything at all in the dark without flash means using the highest ISO you can get away with, along with the widest aperture. For shutter speed I predicted that with a 24mm lens and a steady hand, 1/25th sec would be about the slowest I could comfortably go.

Because you can’t focus in the dark I had to wait for a firework to go off and then use its light to pre-focus by pressing the focus button half way down to lock it. Then I simply had to hold and wait for the next firework to come along to shoot the frame.

And I love the result! Sometimes to capture a unique image you just need to take a chance and experiment. Make sure you get those safety shots first though!

This is Julie and Dennis. They married last summer and their wedding was the first at which Margaret and I did both photography and filming. It went well. A steep, steep learning curve…but it went well!

This year we’ll be doing a lot more filming, and we plan to trace our journey on this blog. We’ll share as much as we can about what we discover. We’re thinking of things like pre-production, vision (in a philosophical sense), gear, and post-production. We’ll not pretend to be experts – we’ll just do stuff, analyse it, share it, and hopefully get better as we go.

If you’re doing, or thinking of doing, the same, we invite you to join us on the journey.

We focused our presentation on how and why we run the Photobooth at weddings and decided the best way to explain it was to actually run a Photobooth during the talk. It was lots of fun!

Here’s an online copy of the Powerpoint presentation.

Our plan is to use this blog to share some of the stuff we know. Without the sharing of others we wouldn’t even be close to where we are now. Mostly these people are strangers out there in web space, people like David Hobby, Joe McNally, Chase Jarvis, Drew Gardner, Neil Van Niekerk, and others. We’re quietly grateful to them. And we believe in a kind of educational/social karma – that you somehow get back what you willingly give – so this is where we hope to reciprocate. We’re busy with assignments, and we both have families, but between those things there should be time…

Seems to us that there are some gaps in the educational photographic blogosphere, especially in terms of specific post-production tips and tricks. Things like how do you get the best from Lightroom when you’re shooting high volume assignments? What techniques are there for getting the best from the people you photograph? How do you get the natural look? Both of those are biggies that we’ve grappled with, and gradually refined, and now we’re pretty good.

But what about you? What would you like us to share? Use the comments or send and email. We’ll listen and if it’s manageable we’ll build it in to the schedule.