Countless resolutions have been made in the holy city of Varanasi

Here we are at the end of a long, sometimes difficult and ultimately rewarding journey. Last year I resolved to create a 365 photo project with a difference – not just an image a day but a phototip of some kind a day. Some were easier than others but along the way I tried to cover a wide range of areas that would appeal to photographers of all levels, from the beginner first starting out to the seasoned professional. Making a photographic resolution and following through on it is a test of patience and discipline at times, but it’s worth it in the long run. I’ll write more about the whole process in a couple of weeks after I’ve had a chance to decompress a bit. For now though, let me ask you this.

What is your photographic resolution(s) for the year 2011?

If you feel really brave, drop a note mentioning it in the comments below and I’ll make sure to stay in touch with you and see how you’re progressing over the year.

Not sure what to do? Here are a few suggestions.

• A 365 project.
• Contact a potential new client every working day.
• A new personal project each month.
• Embrace multimedia and/or video.
• Create a portfolio worthy image each month.
• Seek out new avenues for your work.
• Begin learning a new style or genre of photography.
• Put on an exhibition.
• Start a photography club.
• Just an organisation such as IGVP.
• Apply for a photography grant.
• Step outside your comfort zone in some way.
• Take positive steps in your marketing with a telesummit such as Clarion Call 2011.

The list could be endless. The only thing limiting you in 2011 is your imagination and your dreams. So what are you waiting for? Get out there, create evocative images, tell compelling stories and make it a year to remember. Happy new year.

That was the 365th and final Daily PhotoTip in this series. If this post was useful to you, why don’t you subscribe to my feed, leave a comment and share it with your friends. You can also get access to exclusive content and special offers by subscribing to my newsletter. Sign up today. Thank you.

Fireworks

With the new year fast approaching, one thing you can count on seeing over the next couple of days is fireworks. So how do you go about photographing fireworks?

Well, the good news is that it’s quite easy but there are a few things you’ll need. First, make sure that you have a camera that can be operated manually. Look for a “B” or bulb setting. You’ll also want to be able to focus manually. If you leave autofocus on and try to take photos like that, it’ll just hunt for something to lock onto in the black sky and you won’t get anything. Once you have the camera, you’ll need a sturdy tripod. This is a must as we are going to have exposure times of a few seconds and any camera shake will ruin the picture. Some kind of remote release is required as well. It doesn’t matter if it’s wired or wireless, as long as it’ll let you trip the shutter without needing to touch the camera.

t doesn’t matter how many auto modes your camera has. All those little icons of flowers and mountains are useless for fireworks. With your lens set to MF, focus on something in the distance. Once you are happy, recompose so that the camera is pointing to the area of sky where the fireworks will be but make sure you don’t change the focus. You may not need to do this if you are in an area with buildings, bridges etc.

With your ISO set to 100, shutter set to B, aperture between f8 and f16 and remote release in hand you are ready. Selecting an aperture between f8 and f16 gives you plenty of depth-of-field, and the shutter at B allows you to leave the shutter open for as long as you like. Press and hold the release button once to start the exposure and let go to stop it. A little trial and error may be required, so take as many shots as you can, with differing shutter times. If you can see the place where the fireworks are being launched from, you could try opening the shutter when you see the launch and closing it when the firework goes out. Or, you could leave it open and catch a few bursts of fireworks on the same exposure – hold a black card in front of the lens between bursts to cut down on any stray light.

Good luck and remember to stay safe and warm when you’re out photographing fireworks on these cold winter nights.

That was the 364th Daily PhotoTip. If this post was useful to you, why don’t you subscribe to my feed, leave a comment and share it with your friends. You can also get access to exclusive content and special offers by subscribing to my newsletter. Sign up today. Thank you.

Yoga in the stream.

Every year, at around this time, the various media outlets out together their “best-of” features. Spending some time going through any of these can probably teach any photography a lot about composition, light, and storytelling. Most people I know love these features and you can easily spend a long time with each of them. For today’s phototip, I’ve collected links to best of 2010 features from a wide range of media sources. Grab a cup of coffee, sit back and enjoy some of the world’s most stunning photography from a busy year.

• AFP World Cup – AFP’s round up of the best World Cup images.
• Associated Press – AP’s best of 2010 news photos.
• Billboard – The best of the music and entertainment world from Billboard.
• The Big Picture – Boston.com’s famed photo blog has a three part series for 2010. Part 1. Part 2. Part 3.
• CS Monitor – More than 50 000 frames on five continents went into this best of from the Christian Science Monitor.
• Denver Post – The Denver Post’s Plog is constantly posted great photo blog content. Here’s their round up of the year.
• Foreign Policy – Afghanistan 2010 – FP Magazine has a great selection of images from Afghanistan taken throughout the year.
• Greenpeace – The Greenpeace International Pictures desk have posted their selection of the best from the environment organization’s photographers.
• LIFE – Life Magazine needs no introduction and their 2010 best of is full of quality imagery.
• New York Times – 2010′s best photographs in the eyes of the New York Times.
• Reuters – Reuters were probably the first major media organization to post their best of the year.
• Time Magazine – Time often provides a few different categories in their roundup. This is for the best portraits.
• Wall Street Journal – WSJ has soem great images. I particularly like the opening one.

Follow the links above and they’ll keep you occupied for quite a while. Plenty of inspiration and education to be had.

That was the 363rd Daily PhotoTip. If this post was useful to you, why don’t you subscribe to my feed, leave a comment and share it with your friends. You can also get access to exclusive content and special offers by subscribing to my newsletter. Sign up today. Thank you.

Testing the waters.

Video. It’s a whole other discipline that has opened up to photographers over the past couple of years with the advent of HD DSLR cameras such as the Canon 5D Mark II. A lot of people rushed out to get these cameras and dived straight into video. A few succeeded and started making rich and involved video features while others shot a bit of shaky video, tried to edit it into some cohesive presentation and ultimately stuck with still photography.

A third group, of which I include myself, bought cameras of this sort solely for the still photography features. I bought a 5D Mark II two years ago and didn’t even bother finding out how to enter video mode for the first few months. It just didn’t interest me in the slightest. And when I did finally open the manual and decide to find out how to use the video mode, all I did was learn what buttons to push. I probably spent about 10 minutes with it and that was it. Fast forward another three months and I went out one late summer day in 2009 and shot some video for a couple of hours but didn’t ever get around to editing it into anything and it still sits in a rough format on a couple of hard drives.

This year working with the team at FirstZoom Studios, I saw how they use DSLR video, with custom rigs, big tripods, external monitors and long nights in front of a computer editing it. The results were great but I was definitely glad it was them not me doing it. I like traveling light, and the idea of lugging around all that extra gear is a bit of a turn off. Great if video is your main purpose but for my creative needs where photography comes first, it’s a little impractical.

Recently however, I decided I wanted to give it a go. I’m not sure why but probably for a combination of reasons. When I recently created my multimedia bio with Soundslides Plus, after converting it for a YouTube upload, a friend asked me why I didn’t make it in HD. The only reason was that the Soundslides Plus online video converter doesn’t do that, and understandably so. The software is essentially for multimedia slideshows not HD video. But the comment spurred the idea to create a HD version and for that, I turned to Premiere Pro. With the help of some lynda.com tutorials, I gave myself a 4 hours crash course in how to use it and was able to put together the bio in HD. So far, so good, Why not go a step further and try some motion?

So I did. Last week I’d organized a photoshoot out near a waterfall with a few photographer friends and 2 models. We were aiming for a yoga theme with one, and an outdoors / hiking theme with the other. While some of the other photographers were shooting the models, I wandered around shooting some HD video. I didn’t take any special equipment with me – it was all either handheld or shot on a monopod.

Looking at the videos the next day on the computer, it seemed that there’d be enough usable footage to out together a behind the scenes type video. Some of it was a bit shaky but some of ith was fairly steady, even the handheld stuff. After that, it was simply a matter of creating a timeline – and here I actually started with video from the end of the shoot and finished with stuff from the beginning. A bit of searching around for some Creative Commons licensed music that would be appropriate and it came together fairly easily. Take a look at it below.

All in all, it was a lot of fun to make and I’ve already had some good feedback and a few new ideas have come to me. I’m looking forward to exploring this field some more.

That was the 361st Daily PhotoTip. If this post was useful to you, why don’t you subscribe to my feed, leave a comment and share it with your friends. You can also get access to exclusive content and special offers by subscribing to my newsletter. Sign up today. Thank you.

One of the secondary subjects in an ongoing project.

What do you do when things don’t go according to plan? If you’re on assignment or involved in a particular project and something crops up to cause a change in scope, can you adapt? Will you be able to cover the changes that occur or will the whole thing have to be scrapped? There’s always the risk that things won’t go according to plan, and the bigger and more involved the particular project is, the higher the risk that something will happen to derail or alter it.

In mid-November I began shooting an environmental project. Originally, it had about a 6 week timescale to shoot and edit into a multimedia production, with an early January publishing date aimed for. There were a number of components to it including background research, interviews with experts, and a variety of different subjects to be photographed. Everything was progressing smoothly, although poor weather was making a few shots tough to get. Fortunately, enough time was budgeted so that the likelihood of getting at least one good, blue sky day for shooting was high. After the first couple of weeks produced rainy and cloudy conditions everyday it was getting a bit frustrating but eventually I knew that the weather would cooperate and it did.

With those shots mostly in the bag, it was time to move on to the next subject in the project and here’s where the snag occurred. One of the subjects of the story disappears at the end of summer and doesn’t make a reappearance until the following spring. With a mid-November start and a planned late December finish, that meant decisions had to made as to whether to publish without this particular subject, or delay the project and wait until mid year in 2011 to publish. What to do?

I first carefully evaluated all the imagery that I already had and all that was still possible to shoot at this time of year. I then looked over the original scope to decide whether the missing subject was important enough to warrant a delay. In this case, the whole project was a self-assigned project and thus it made the decision easier to make. The January publication deadline was one I had given myself and so it could easily be altered and that’s what I chose to do. I feel that waiting until next summer to be able to shoot this last subject and include it will ultimately make the whole project stronger. That said, it wouldn’t have been too difficult to have gone with what was possible now as the main scope of the assignment is covered. If this was an outside-assigned project and the deadline couldn’t be pushed back until summer, it still would have been more than possible to produce a strong package that met all the requirements. The luxury of having the ability to delay is great but not at all necessary. The key point to keep in mind is that anything can happen that causes plans to change and you have to be able to cope with those changes if and when they occur.

That was the 360th Daily PhotoTip. If this post was useful to you, why don’t you subscribe to my feed, leave a comment and share it with your friends. You can also get access to exclusive content and special offers by subscribing to my newsletter. Sign up today. Thank you.

You don't have to go all the way to Varansi, India to tell a story. November 2001

As it’s Christmas Day, today’s will be a quick tip.

A recent Depth of Field podcast that Matt Brandon did with Brian Storm of Media Storm concluded with Brian saying about photography that “it’s better than it’s ever been”. And it is. Never has it been so easy for so many to shoot, create and publish compelling photographs, video and multimedia. So get out there and do it. Take your camera and tell a story. Any story. You can find them everywhere. The worst that will happen is that it will suck. That’s okay. If it does suck, keep going. Tell another story and keep going until it doesn’t suck. Simple. Start something new today.

That was the 359th Daily PhotoTip. If this post was useful to you, why don’t you subscribe to my feed, leave a comment and share it with your friends. You can also get access to exclusive content and special offers by subscribing to my newsletter. Sign up today. Thank you.

Kanchenjunga and the Eastern Himalaya, October 2002. Fuji Velvia.

At first you may think that only working photographers need to be concerned with promoting themselves but you could easily argue that any photographer who wants their work seen by others needs to spend a bit of time promoting themselves. There are as many different reasons and goals for doing it as there are ways to do it but a few stand head and shoulders above the rest as proven methods to success. Let’s take a look at a few.

Most photographers want their work to be seen. It may be just by your friends and family or it may be by art buyers at some of the world’s top ad agencies. What is common to both is that you have to do some self-promotion in order to get your work seen. If it’s just your family and friends that you’re showing photos to, it’s pretty simple. All you need do is give them a call or send an email saying “Hey, take a look at my latest pics”, or attaching some photos and a link in an email.

If you’re after a wider audience, you may look at uploading to Flickr. There are lots and lots of photos on Flickr and other photo-sharing sites, so simply uploading them is often not enough. You need to let people know that they’re there. Adding other photographers as contacts is a passive way to do this, as contact relationships are usually reciprocal and so your photos will appear the “Your Contacts” section of others. Going a step further, you can join groups and add photos to them. A lot of groups encourage commenting and the awarding of virtual prizes which all serves to have people look at your photos as long as you do the same to theirs. Other options at this level include posting them to public albums on Facebook, or in photo threads on various forum sites.

Stepping things up from there is the blog. It seems that pretty much everybody has a blog these days and blogging can be a great way to create a bit of buzz around your work. Of course, it’s not simple enough to just create it, again, you need to promote it if you want people to see it. Some people create blogs only for their family and friends but most are probably after some good traffic and comments on their blogs. Submitting your blog to the various search engines, promoting it via blogging communities and competitions, and posting links in social media networks are all good methods of making it known.

Entering prestigious competitions offers some opportunities for self-promotion but you’ll be up against others here and it won’t work unless you are creating and entering some very strong work. The more prestigious the competition, the better the payoff in terms of name recognition for you there is if you win or place highly but the harder it is to do so.

Working photographers need to use a range of methods in order to self-promote. No one single method will work, rather, it’s the combination of approaches that brings success. For those of you in the field of professional photography, you’ll need to use good research, cold calling, email marketing, direct mail, portfolio showings, social media, referrals, follow-ups, creativity and more. This is where you can really benefit from programs such as Clarion Call 2011 that bring together industry experts to offer advice and pathways to success.

Whether it’s a little or a lot, most photographers will find themselves doing some self-promotion. You may already be doing it and not even realize it.

That was the 358th Daily PhotoTip. If this post was useful to you, why don’t you subscribe to my feed, leave a comment and share it with your friends. You can also get access to exclusive content and special offers by subscribing to my newsletter. Sign up today. Thank you.

Yoga at the falls.

A year in photos. It’s often a difficult task to go back through the work you’ve photographed over the past year and choose your favorites but it’s also a rewarding and even necessary exercise. Images resonate differently for different reasons and your favorite photographs may not necessarily be the “best” photographs. Situations associated with different images make it a somewhat subjective effort and that’s probably for the best. It’d be pretty stupid to select an image as a favorite if it didn’t grab you emotionally in some way, no matter how well executed it was. As we approach the end of the year, spend a bit of time reviewing the past twelve months of your photography and make your own list. You may be surprised with what you choose, especially in regards to some of the earlier photos that you probably have a slightly more objective view towards now than the recent ones. After the jump you can see my 12 choices for the year, one for each month, with a few words about each.

Before we go there, have you signed up for Clarion Call 2011 hosted by Selina Maitreya yet? It starts with 5 short videos on building your photography business, and moves to a 2 day telesummit in February with some of the industry’s leading experts. Best of all – it’s free. Sign up here.

January

January’s choice comes from the Thaipusam festival at Batu Caves in Malaysia. This is an image that has grown on me throughout the year. I really like the interplay between highlights and shadows in this photograph.

February

The lantern festival is a traditional park of Chinese culture and at the small mountain town of Pingxi in Taiwan, they traditionally release sky lanterns to celebrate the occasion. It has become so popular that as well as individuals releasing their own, there are coordinated mass releases of 100 at a time. This is a long exposure capturing them as the soar skyward.

May

Back to the land of culture for May, with this photograph of a lion dance being taken at the Guandu Mazu temple on the outskirts of Taipei. The occasion was to mark the birthday of Mazu, the Chinese Goddess of the Sea.

June

June was probably the month I created the fewest photographs for show. Partly because I did a lot of private client work that the licensing agreements made don’t allow display of in this format, and partly because I did quite a bit of teaching so was just shooting for demonstration purposes to students in the workshops and lessons. This photo of Simon was from one of those workshops.

October

October saw the annual LGBT Pride Parade take place in Taipei. This is the largest pride parade in Asia and even the rain couldn’t stop the colorful celebration. All ages from the very young to the elderly took part in a celebration of diversity.

November

This photograph was taken at an environmental protest march against a planned chemical factory that promises to threaten the existence of Taiwan’s humpback dolphins as well as being a toxic risk to local faremrs and residents. I love this guy’s expression.

December

Wrapping up the year, this photograph is from a shoot a few days ago. I’ve had the idea to do something like this for a while and it finally got arranged last weekend. It has also spurred a few more creative ideas which I’ll look at in 2011.

So there we have it. 12 photographs for 12 months. It’s been a fun year of photography with lots of great locations, subjects, workshops, models and other photographers. I hope yours has been equally good. I’ll leave you with a slideshow of the entire year which I encourage you to embed in your own blog if you like.

That was the 357th Daily PhotoTip. If this post was useful to you, why don’t you subscribe to my feed, leave a comment and share it with your friends. You can also get access to exclusive content and special offers by subscribing to my newsletter. Sign up today. Thank you.

Simon on an extended background.

Do you want to shoot a full length portrait of somebody in a controlled environment but have the final image displayed in a landscape format? If so, what’s the best way to go about it? You could choose a suitably wide lens, or backup a sufficient distance and compose the shot in a landscape orientation. As long as the background was okay for your purposes this would achieve the desired results but it would come with limitations. Fortunately, there’s a better and easier way to do it that will give you much more detail in your final image.

Should you decide to use the landscape orientation as mentioned above, you’d end up with an image that had a lot of empty space surrounding a relatively small subject. Essentially you’d have a lot of wasted pixels because chances are, if you’re in a controlled studio environment, you’ll be shooting on a seamless backdrop or a cyclorama wall and so you’ll have a nice, even background of a single color. White is probably the most common although in the example here I’m using a shoot that was done on black seamless. Regardless of what color it is, the point is that you’ll be wasting a lot of pixels on a single color background that could be better used for your subject.

Instead of using landscape orientation, use your camera in a portrait orientation, and fill as much of the frame as you can with your subject. It doesn’t have to be a complete filling of the frame but the more space the main subject occupies, the more pixels will have usable information and the more you can do with the photo. Here’s my original shot.

As shot in portrait orientation.

For sake of demonstration, I’m going to output into a wide, panoramic image as in the image above. You don’t have to go this wide if you don’t want to. Open the photo in Photoshop and make sure the background color in Photoshop is set to match your background in the photo. In this case that’s easy because my background is black. You can set the color in the toolbar – the default is black foreground and white background. Once your background is set to the correct color, take the crop tool (keyboard shortcut – C) and extend the crop outside the actual image canvas. If all you want to do is make it wider, the easiest way is to constrain the whole image inside the crop box and then simply drag the left or right side out as far as you like. Once you’re happy, simply hit enter and it will fill the extra space with the selected background color and you’re done. Save it at it’s new proportions and output as necessary.

Crop to enlarge the background.

That was the 356th Daily PhotoTip. If this post was useful to you, why don’t you subscribe to my feed, leave a comment and share it with your friends. You can also get access to exclusive content and special offers by subscribing to my newsletter. Sign up today. Thank you.

My good friend Sanjay and his family.

The holiday season is well and truly upon us and it’s probably the one time of year when the most snapshots are taken. To a lot of photographers, a snapshot is a big no-no, almost a dirty word in fact. Thinking like that though is a mistake because a snapshot is not as Ansel Adams says “a simple a statement as some may believe”. It is much more representative than that and as such, has a value and an importance of its own.

We tend to think of a snapshot as a poorly composed, poorly executed photograph of something or somebody. When the snapshot is of a person or group of people, we probably imagine red eye due to on-camera flash and washed out features. A lot of the time, that’s true. Snapshots do exhibit those qualities in a lot of photographs. But does it matter?

I say no, it doesn’t. A snapshot by its very nature is not intended to be a great work of art. You’re not creating them to hang on the wall of a fine art gallery or advertize something of a Times Square billboard. You’re taking a snapshot to remind you of something. It will represent something to you and probably the people in the picture and functions as a momento of an occasion or souvenir of an event. The value is in the memories that arise upon viewing it years down the track not the photographic quality of it.

Ask yourself what’s better – getting a quick, poorly composed shot of a passing event or miss it entirely because you’re too busy choosing the perfect settings and looking for the perfect angle? Next time you watch a sporting event on TV, look at the crowd in the stands and all the flashes going off on their point and shoot cameras and cameraphones. Do you think they are going to get a great shot of the action from where they are? No, of course not. Will it matter to them when the look back on the photos later? No, of course not.

Looking back at the photos later will instantly transport them back to the game and bring up all the associated memories that go along with that. And that’s where the value lies. The same will happen to you and your snapshots. As we gather together with family and friends over the coming days to celebrate Christmas and the New Year, don’t worry so much about getting the perfect shot. For every person that sets up remote flashes in the living room before the kids wake up on Christmas morning (and if you can do that, give it a try – check this tutorial at Strobist for how), thousands more will just grab the point and shoot and use that and be equally happy with the results. Sometimes, the memories are more important.

That was the 355th Daily PhotoTip. If this post was useful to you, why don’t you subscribe to my feed, leave a comment and share it with your friends. You can also get access to exclusive content and special offers by subscribing to my newsletter. Sign up today. Thank you.