It’s the camera, not the photographer

One of the issues facing professional photographers today is the sense among the public at large that professional photography is an expensive luxury that serves little purpose other than to lighten people’s wallets.

It’s a view that has gained traction among the general public particularly since digital cameras have become readily available at reasonable cost. Suddenly, everyone can take a picture. And because you can view the result immediately, if it doesn’t come out right, you can take it again. And again. And again. And again… until you get it right, or at least close enough.

The shroud of mystery that surrounded photography has been lifted - all you need is a good camera. And the more expensive the camera, the easier it is to take professional quality images.

Now - and I can tell you this, because you read this blog and have thereby demonstrated that you are a person of great taste and blessed with a high degree of photographic appreciation and intellect - the general public shouldn’t be trusted.

I’m sorry, but it’s true.

A photographer’s ability to produce at great image is for a large part utterly divorced from the quality of the camera they have. I’m not saying that better equipment can’t help a photographer who knows what they are doing produce better photographs - that’s a completely different issue. What I’m saying is that give a professional a cheap standard camera and they will still be able to come up with the goods.

Likewise, give a member of the pubic the latest DSLR uber-megapixel wonder machine and chances are they won’t be able to get it to start.

Look at it this way - Lewis Hamilton could get my old Toyota four-door round the Nurnberg Ring quicker than I could get his McLaren out of first gear. I’d have the superior car; he’d produce the superior result.

Let me illustrate all of this with some family photographs from our recent break in Co. Kerry.

This is Emily, my daughter.

The Most Stunningly Beautiful Three-Year-Old Girl in the World - (c) Roger Overall 2008

I took the picture, and while I admit that the raw material I was working with is pretty good, the photograph is pretty good as well. It should be. She’s gorgeous and I’m a professional. Great eye contact, perfect rule-of-thirds composition and good symmetry there between the toy cat and the cat on her T-shirt. Nice.

Let’s see how an amateur gets on with the same camera and the same subject. I should point out that it’s a good camera, not the latest model, but capable of producing wonderful pictures nevertheless. And of course, we have the same stunning little girl.

Self-portrait - (c) Emily Overall 2008

It’s a self-portrait by Emily, and quite honestly it’s rubbish. Okay, she’s three years old and the fact that she can even operate one of my cameras is frankly astonishing - but still, it’s a pretty poor effort. Clearly, my photograph of her is far superior.

And this is Emily’s attempt at photographing her mummy.

Mummy - (c) Emily Overall 2008

Shocking.

And this is her picture of me.

Daddy - (c) Emily Overall 2008

I’m barely in focus, for pity’s sake. And let’s not get into the whole thing of making your subject look their best.

This sequence of photographs should have laid to rest once and for all the myth that expensive cameras will produce great images regardless of who is pressing the shutter.

Of course, if I really, really try very hard indeed, I can get a shocker out of my cameras as well.

Hair - (c) Roger Overall 2008

Wedding Day - 5th July 2008

Just back from a great short break in Kerry. I’m off again tomorrow for four days, this time to take time out to look at the business and plot the next 12 months. I’ll be back by the middle of next week. The rest of the month will be taken up shooting weddings and food. Happy days!

Meanwhile, here’s a quick picture from last Saturday’s wedding.

Technically, you could poke holes in it. Blown highlights like 1950s Bikini Atoll real estate, for instance. Nonetheless, it tells a good story and that’s primarily what documentary wedding photography is all about. Moreover, I personally really like it; and it’s my blog; so there…

A Bright Future Together - (c) Roger Overall 2008

Wet Day

Summer Wedding, Co. Cork, Ireland - (c) Roger Overall 2008

Wedding Day

It rained today. The kind of rain that makes you wary of running over fish as you’re driving along the road. The kind of rain that makes you wish you lived somewhere very dry - like the sun. The kind of rain that would make water itself go and and look for somewhere to shelter. That sort of rain. Just so we’re clear on the matter.

aaaA

Basically, I’m saying it was wet. And by “it” I mean everything. Including me. Soaked.

aaaA

In fact, it rained so hard, the bride and her bridesmaids had umbrellas up inside the vintage Volkswagen minibus they rode to the church in.

Aaaa

Now that that is out of my system, here are a few favourites from a wedding I shot a few weeks ago. On a dry day.

(c) Roger Overall 2008. All Rights Reserved.

(c) Roger Overall 2008. All Rights Reserved.

(c) Roger Overall 2008. All Rights Reserved.

(c) Roger Overall 2008. All Rights Reserved.

(c) Roger Overall 2008. All Rights Reserved.

(c) Roger Overall 2008. All Rights Reserved.

(c) Roger Overall 2008. All Rights Reserved.

(c) Roger Overall 2008. All Rights Reserved.

(c) Roger Overall 2008. All Rights Reserved.

(c) Roger Overall 2008. All Rights Reserved.

(c) Roger Overall 2008. All Rights Reserved.

Wedding Day

It’s been incredibly busy over the last few weeks, so I haven’t been able to post as much as I’d like. Nor will there will be any let up this week. I’ve got two weddings this weekend and I’m trying to clear the decks before we take a short holiday next week.

When we get back from our holiday, I’m away again for another four days on my annual business retreat - four days that give me the space to look hard at the business to see where we need to improve our service to you and our business life for ourselves. As a result, there won’t be any new posts until the middle of the month.

***UPDATE*** Well, not quite the middle of the month. See above. I just can’t stay away.

Meanwhile, here are two lovely moments from the most recent wedding that I photographed. To me they are the essence of documentary wedding photography. You just know what these two think of each other.

Cast of a Thousand Colours

A few weeks ago, one of the brides whose wedding I’m photographing this year sent me an email with a really good question. She wanted to know whether the colour of her bridesmaids’ dresses would be exactly the same in all of the pictures taken on the day.

The short answer to this question is “No”.

Or “Yes”.

“Maybe” and “Possibly” are also valid answers.

Confused? You’re not kidding.

[At this point, the more sensible readers among you should stop reading. This isn't going to get very exciting. I'm also going to cut some corners in a bid to keep it simple ]

What this bride has strayed upon here is a topic that makes most photographers cry - even the really butch ones. It’s called colour temperature, and different light sources each have a different one.

The simplest example is the ordinary light bulb that you have in your bedside lamp at home. It will give off an orange glow. Now, you’re probably thinking, “No it doesn’t”. In fact, it looks white - especially if you look straight at the bulb for long enough for it to permanently burn itself onto your retina. The reason it does is because the human eye-brain combination is pretty good at filtering out the colour cast and giving it a more neutral tone.

Another example: those strip lights in the office? Green. Again, you don’t see this because your eyes and brain are filtering. They are able to adjust so that the sheet of white paper on your desk looks white.

In fact, our eyes are so flexible that if you throw both of those light sources together, you’ll still see everything in a neutral light, regardless of the horrid mix of colour temperatures going on.

Our eyes and our brains are things of marvel. So are film and digital cameras, but when it comes to colour temperature they are pretty stupid. Putting it very simplistically, they can only see one colour temperature at a time and give it a neutral look. Give them two different light sources and they’re in trouble. Something has to give and you’re going to end up with a colour cast from one or other of the light sources.

This has always been an issue for photographers, but in the days of film it didn’t bother most of us. We simply left it to the lab to sort out at the printing stage. Film was (mostly) balance for daylight and the lab could sort out most colour problems for us using magic or potions or something.

Now that most photographers are shooting digital, things have become a little more complicated. Digital cameras come with incredibly flexible white balance settings that allow photographers to set the colour temperature in camera for each picture. Even better, if you want to you can work your camera in such a way that you can adjust the colour temperature afterwards on the computer.

Nevertheless, the same problem remains that you have to pick a single colour temperature for the image, which is a pain if you’ve got a number of light sources. Churches can have striplighting (green), bulbs (orange) and daylight coming in through the windows (blue). Look at the following series of pictures - all the same, but with a different colour temperature applied.

The top left is how the camera saw the scene. Pretty ugly. Top right is what happens when I processed the image as if it had been lit by strip lighting only. Not pretty either. Bottom left is the same picture processed as if the scene had been lit by daylight only. Yuk. Finally, the bottom right picture is processed as if the lighting scheme were tungsten only (light bulbs). Better, but still not great.

And just see what happens to the bridesmaid’s dress in all four - utterly different colour in each one.

At this point, I get all smug because I convert a good many of my files to black and white. No colour, no colour cast. Result.

Bringing it back to the question posted by the bride, you can see that photographers can correct for the colour cast of a single (dominant) light source, but that it becomes much harder in a mixed environment, especially as the ratios of multiple light sources can change from frame to frame. So, no the colour of the bridesmaids’ dresses won’t look the same in all of the pictures.

On the other hand…

Technology allows us to get pretty neutral results using all kinds of gadgets and tricks. The simplest is to take a test shot of a piece of neutral coloured card, preferably grey or white, and use that as your guide later on in post-production. There are other devices to help you get a neutral colour. So, yes the colour can be the same in all of the pictures.

Except…

That only works if you know that your subject isn’t going to move around in relation to the various light sources or that the ratio of those light sources isn’t going to change. You could get a great reading in a church that has daylight and fluorescent strip lighting, but what happens when the sun goes behind a cloud outside? The light mixture changes and along with it the overall colour temperature.

The classical wedding photographers have an advantage here over us documentary photographers. They are setting up shots and posing you all the time, so they can give you a grey card to hold at the start of each set up.

When you’re covering a wedding in documentary mode and you’ve got several dozen different colour temperatures throughout the day, it is impractical to be taking grey card readings for all of them. We could pin a grey card to you, but that’s not going to make anyone popular.

Sometimes, you don’t want to get rid of the colour cast. The orange cast from light bulbs, or for that matter an open fire, can look gorgeous, so why filter it out?

So, we’re back to “No”. And along the way, we’ve touched upon “Yes”, “Maybe” and “Possibly”.

Now, don’t fret. Your wedding pictures are most likely going to look absolutely fantastic from a colour temperature point of view. However, over the course of the day you will see slight differences in colours of things like dresses. Don’t sweat it. They are going to be minimal.

We Are One

I started this blog a year ago today. One of my friends had suggested that a blog would be very good for business. I couldn’t see it myself. What would I write about for a start?

A year on and I’m wondering why I didn’t knuckle down sooner. This blog has been great for me.

It allows me to give couples information about myself, about documentary wedding photography and about wedding photography in general in a format that they can access when it suits them. It’s also allowed me to showcase recent work far more quickly than I ever could have on a regular website, giving couples a really good idea of my style. As marketing tools go, it’s pretty good.

I can also see how people are finding me, be it through referrals from other websites or from search engines. It also shows me what search terms bring readers here. Frankly, it’s frightening.

The number one search term that brings people here is “Bride Burning”. That’s right, most people end up here because they’re searching the web to see how they can get combustible on their wife - and not in a good way.

The second place search term (”Altarnarrative”) isn’t even close in numbers. Let me put this into a geographical context, just so you understand the magnitude of scale we’re talking about here. If the summit of Everest is where “Burning Bride” is at, the search term “Altarnarrative” is a foot off the bottom of that trough in the Pacific around the Philippines - whatever it’s called, you know the really deep one about 11 kilometres straight down, we’re talking The Abyss territory here.

And what have we here at number three, only fractionally off second spot? “Burning Bride”.

Oh for goodness’ sakes.

All right, let’s just wheel them all out: “Burning Bride Photography”, “Bride Burnings”, “Bride Burning Pictures”, “Someone Burning” and “Bride Burning Wedding Photographer” have all directed people here in the past year. Weirdos.

What else? “Airline Pilots” scored quite well, along with “Eye Makeup” and various combinations of “Balloons” and “Girls”. “Jeff Ascough”, “John Michael Cooper” (obviously) and “Donagh Glavin” all got a good look in.

The other statistic that is interesting is the number of people reading the blog. In June of last year, the blog was viewed 26 times, but that was a very short month if you think the blog didn’t start until the 26th. In July last year, viewings had risen to 174 views. The blog now averages a steady 700 views a month. That isn’t spectacular, but the main purpose of this blog isn’t to attract tens of thousands of readers. It’s aimed more at those who are thinking of booking me for their wedding or those who are looking for a wedding photographer in my part of the world (the southwest coast of Ireland). I can hand on heart say that the blog has brought me bookings.

It has also been a tremendous amount of fun to do and I’ll continue with it for quite a while yet. On to year two!

***UPDATE*** Good God, where are my manners? I want to add a big “Thank You” to everyone who’s taken the time to read the blog. If the counter were still stuck on 0, I’d have given up a long time ago. Thanks so much.

Wedding Day

The general manager of the Garryvoe Hotel took one look at me today and said: “I’m seeing more of you than my wife!”

That’s not quite true, but you can understand his point.

Stephen is also the general manager of the Bayview in Ballycotton, which was the venue for Friday’s wedding, and just across the bay from Garryvoe. And for some reason a lot of my couples this year are hosting their reception in the Garryvoe Hotel, so I’m seeing Stephen once a week at the minute.

Regular readers will know that I have a soft spot for the Bayview/Garryvoe double act, and that Stephen and I have a bit of history - in a good way: The Waiting Game.

Anyway, as I’m writing this, today’s couple will be enjoying great service, great food and great fun.

The pictures you see here are from a wedding I photographed couple of weeks ago. No prizes for guessing where the reception and dinner were hosted.

Wedding Day

A quick picture from yesterday’s wedding, which took place at the hotel where Anne and I held the reception of our own wedding: the Bayview Hotel, Ballycotton, Co. Cork. A truly great venue. Oh, and a lovely couple yesterday too.

Between you and me
(c) Roger Overall

Elephant Bride

One of the nice things about what I do is the contact that I keep with some of my brides after their wedding. And in some cases, they go on to pretty special things.

I photographed Mary Powys’s wedding last year. At the time, she was working for an electronics company. It was a job she didn’t especially enjoy, so she decided to do something about it. She quit and is now looking after the Ireland and UK tour of a herd of Asian elephants. The tour aims to raise awareness for the need for wildlife corridors that connect areas of viable habitat in an increasingly urbanized world. Without them, the future of the Asian elephant looks pretty bleak. (Click here to learn more: Elephant Family).

Mary’s elephants aren’t real. Instead, they are life-size replicas, made from artificial foliage and wire frames, and they’ll be turning up at locations around Ireland and the UK over the next few months, including Selfridges in London and the Electric Picnic music festival here in Ireland.

Today they were in Fota Safari Park, just down the road from me, and Mary asked me to take some promotional pictures.

We took some shots of children enjoying the replicas and also brought one of the smaller models over to the lemurs. Neither children nor Lemurs are great respecters of installation art, but they do make for a great photo op.

I also shot a quick pic of Mary with some of the 13 elephants on tour.