This is the final image from last night:

I’ve totally lost all perspective; I’ll see how it goes down in class.

Our theory module, meanwhile, is called ‘Technologies and the Self’. Here’s an excerpt from the first week’s required reading material:

Martin Heidegger has shown how modern science and technology are essentially defined by this mathematical character, and how this decision to decide things in advance of their appearance according to a pre-established criterion differentiates the modern scientific attitude from any scientific attitude which preceded it. Modern science is not simply mathematical in the sense of the application of numbers to nature - the Greeks, Egyptians, and Babylonians had already done so much earlier; it is also, and more profoundly, mathematical in its decision to regard nature as essentially numerical in character, and to subject the very appearance of things to numerical conditions. Galileo, speaking of the book of nature, says, for example, that ‘…[it] is written in the mathematical language,’ and in this respect what counts and matters about things is no longer how we sense them and make sense of them but how they accord with the web of mathematical relations we have already established for them.

Mustn’t pre-judge. Mustn’t pre-judge.

Screw it, I’m going to pre-judge. To the extent that I have any clue what the above means, it seems to get the scientific method backwards. Which, based on last year’s theory modules, is pretty typical.

In a few weeks, Lacan! He of the famous the-square-root-of-minus-one-equals-the-erectile-organ gibberish. Maybe he’s more sensible in other fields, though. Mustn’t pre-judge.

We started the flash photography course last Friday, and so far it’s fantastic. It’s pretty much Strobism, but with über-credentialed lighting experts right there and available for questioning. The first half is on digital SLR - finally - and after that it’s onto medium-format transparency film, which is quite frankly evil, as transparencies give you zero room for error: if your multiple-flashgun exposures are even slightly out, they’ll look awful. But they make up for evilness by being beautiful¹: medium format film is 5 inches wide, and as transparencies are positive images - think slides, but three times bigger - you get wonderful little high-definition images without printing anything. I’ve never tried anything medium format before, so I’m looking forward to this.

Our homework for this week is to take one photo using direct / bounce flash, but to make it good. This is also vindictive in the extreme. Sure, one photo sounds easy, but in practice nothing’s ever quite right. The very fact that it’s not much work means it’s a lot of work, if you see what I mean.

My traditional reaction to these projects is to start off planning something wildly ambitious, then realise it’s unworkable and so come up with something waaayy simple, then decide it’s too boring and quickly figure out something inbetween as the deadline approaches. I had an idea this evening that seemed about right, and it ended up taking two hours of crawling around in loft insulation. I now itch like hell. I’ve also lost all perspective on the resulting image - hopefully it’ll seem ok in the morning…if it does, I’ll blog it and see what other people think.

1. can’t see anything wrong with this philosophy [↩]

It’s back to uni this Friday, and I’m looking forward to it. We go straight into a studio photography module that focuses on flash lighting, which should be great. I’m a big fan of available light photography, where available light is defined as any goddamn light that’s available¹ - I’ve been interested in flashes since long before uni, and have been playing about with² the strobist methodology for over a year, so that’ll hopefully help. We start with digital SLRs, then move onto medium format film. I’ve never used anything larger than 35mm, and it’ll be interesting to see the quality differences. 

My tutor’s introductory email said:

the first session will involve shooting film stills - so please consider the genre you might aim to emulate and dress, and bring props, accordingly

My first thought was obviously ’superheroes’. I’m sure I can talk everyone else into it.

As regular readers may have gathered, I’ve been a bit introspective and whiny lately, so I’m looking forward to having proper things to think about. It’ll also be good to get some new project shots going. I love my little niece, but she’s completely taken over my Flickr stream this summer, and baby shots are only so interesting if you’re not a relative

This term is also the first time anything counts toward my degree - everything last year was just practice. But this week saw the first person drop out of the course, which is a shame. There were 20 of us, but we once spoke to a 3rd year student whose class had dwindled to 6. Eek. Hopefully this doesn’t mean it’s about to get much tougher.

1. this comment ripped straight from Joe McNally’s The Moment It Clicks [↩]
2. I was recently told that ‘playing’ is not an appropriately professional word, to which I say: pretentious businesswank bullshit. Nobody ever learnt anything without playing around. I’m sorry that ‘business’ despises anything indicating people are anything more than ultra-efficient money-making automatons, but this is how things are, and I can’t be arsed figuring out nonsense concepts of pseudoreality for the sake of don’t-make-me-think ‘professionalism’. The advisers were trying to be helpful, which was nice, and I don’t have anything against them, but I’m not currently not in a position that I need to play such stupid games, so I won’t. Ah, I feel better now. [↩]

I like Life Posters. They look good on the wall, and make great presents. But before today they were irritating to make.

A couple of years ago I put one together for Dad’s birthday. It wasn’t a fun process. I wanted a seamless grid of non-cropped images, and I couldn’t find anything to generate it for me. I didn’t have Photoshop at the time, so I needed cheap/free options. Picasa 2 could build collages, but only by cropping each photo to a square. Everything else could generate contact sheets, but with ugly gaps between the images, particularly when I mixed portrait and landscape shots. I also struggled with spatial concepts - if the final output has a ratio of 3:2, would a 9×6 grid of 3:2-ratio photos fit properly? This confused the hell out of me, and I kept getting it wrong. In the end I only used landscape images, and managed a seamless grid after a lot of trial and error with the XnView contact sheet generator. If I did it again, I’d just build it manually in Photoshop.

Except now I don’t have to, because the new Picasa 3 beta has extra collage options that make life much, much easier. Its ‘mosaic’ collage will arrange any photos into a fixed ratio, without gaps or cropping. That’s pretty clever. I’d love to see the algorithms figuring that out. I made this in two minutes, using images from my enormous ‘To Flickr’ folder:

I think that makes for a much more interesting poster. It has both portrait and landscape images, and all neatly arranged without whitespace. Picasa also handled the different aspect ratios: there are some square images in there, and even a 5-image panorama (it’s above DJ monkey). The layout isn’t fixed, either - you can hit ’shuffle photos’ to produce a different design.

But Picasa has another trick up its sleeve. It lets you choose various aspect ratios for the collage, but it always produces images with a long-side length of 5120px. So there’s a lot of leeway for large prints.

For example, a portrait A4 mosaic is 3621×5120px (with a default setting of 72dpi). If you print this on A4 you’ll get 451dpi, which is very, very high (300dpi is magazine quality). In fact, you could easily use it for A3, where it comes out at ~300dpi. So A3 isn’t officially supported, but works anyway. And this obviously applies for all the other ratios.

Dad’s life poster was made into a 30″x20″ canvas print, for which I had to supply a 200dpi jpeg. Picasa’s 3:2 export produces a file that’s 170dpi at 30″x20″, and imho you could get away with resampling for the final 30dpi. And if you want anything larger than 30″x20″, you’re probably not using Picasa.

Sadly you can’t specify a custom size (although see the last bullet point for a potential way around this), but there’s a fair range of ratios built in:

• 5×8
• 9×13
• 10×15 (so, 2:3)
• 13×18
• 20×25 (4:5)
• A4
• Square
• 4:3
• 16:10
• 16:9
• 5:3
• Desktop resolution (which, interestingly, also exports to a long-edge of 5120, so you could conceivably fudge this to get any ratio you want. Unless this is a bug.)

I think this will be very useful. I’m impressed with the mosaic collage anyway - the maths behind that must be pretty daunting - but defaulting to a large export is a very nice feature. Thanks, Google.

I’ve just discovered Newsweek’s blog devoted to Olympic photographers - they’re detailing everything that goes on behind-the-scenes, and it’s fascinating. The amount of effort needed to get decent shots is ridiculous. They have to pre-approve and sign every bit of kit in and out of the country, to start with (this guy took a month to plan and a day to pack all his gear, which is apparently normal), then there are forms for everything, vast numbers of officials to negotiate, and if you want to set up a remote camera, you sometimes have to put it in place a week beforehand - with all the correct safety precautions, of course. In the first two days one of the main photographers got 7hrs sleep.

I love the fencing shots here, both technically and aesthetically. That can’t have been easy - the sport is so fast that snapping the moment of contact must be a nightmare. I always enjoy watching the fencing, but I’m guessing I’ve already missed it…There are also great shots showing the violence of judo.

The current top post is devoted to women’s beach volleyball. It’s possibly telling that my eyes went straight to the tech details:

Shot on an 85mm f1.2 at a 1000th of a second

Ye gods. I’d have to sell my car to get a lens like that. Via Shoot the Blog.

Said to me this afternoon:

You used to be such a quiet child until you got into photography and people started taking their clothes off for you.

Do you think they were from the future?

I really like Rachel Hulin’s photography linkblog Shoot the Blog. It’s a neverending stream of ooh. She updates a lot, and always with things I’ve yet to see elsewhere. I haven’t decided whether she doesn’t link to the schmancy art projects, or if she’s so good at humanising them that I don’t notice; but whatever, she finds a huge amount of down-to-earth, genuinely interesting work.

Like this. Sheep portraits. Sheep portraits! You’re thinking ‘that sounds baad’, right? Well, you’re wrong:

Who’d have thought you could capture the personality of a sheep? I once tried this myself, but I ran out of ram¹.

1. the half-finished results are on ewetube [↩]

A publisher wants to use one of my flickr photos in an upcoming book. It’s an image of a Scientology tent I saw in London a couple of years ago. The publishers emailed to ask permission to print it, and in return I’d get a free copy of the book. I’ve had two similar requests before, and I gave permission to both. But this time I don’t know what to do.

I know there’s a school of thought amongst photographers that this is taking away their livelihood. This argument generally applies to microstock websites, which have enormous image databases of every subject imaginable, and sell non-exclusive rights very cheaply. Some photographers claim microstock loses them business, as clients who would previously have commissioned specific shots can now get generic images for a fraction of the price.

But this isn’t a microstock shot, and I can’t imagine the publisher would have paid someone to go out and photograph a Scientology tent. Also, and I’m sorry if this sounds callous, I’m really not bothered about the death of old-and-busted business models. Times change. If someone wants a specific photo taken, they’ll still need a photographer. I don’t see that microstock is malicious or unfair to anybody, and there are approx. a million photographic career paths that aren’t affected by microstock. So I’m happy to reject that argument.

I guess I’m confused by the economic rights and wrongs. I mean, the photo was a quick snapshot into which I put no effort or work. But they clearly see some value in it, and I’m sure some would say it’s fair they pay me¹ if they’re going to make money off it. But thats somewhat mercenary. I can see the logic, and I don’t mind anyone else taking such a position, but I don’t see the moral duty to do so. I’m not going to get paid either way, and if it adds something to their book, what’s the harm? Like I said, I put no work into the picture, and I don’t see that it took any great learned skill to produce, so why shouldn’t I let them use it? I wouldn’t be losing out, as far as I can see. But maybe if I said no, they’d go pay someone else, so saying yes would be unfair on them. But that’s just stupid. Argh.

Also, they say it’s a book about a Scientologist of 22 years who’s now left the ‘religion’, so it sounds like an expose of some sort. If this is the case, great - I’m happy to help the anti-Scientologist cause. But what if it’s not? What if it’s actually pro-Scientology? I don’t want to help evil cults in the slightest.

There’s also no current mention of the photo being credited to me, which was the case in the other two books. Hmmm.

Anybody have a strong opinion either way?

1. which I’m sure they wouldn’t, but that’s irrelevant atm [↩]

(This follows on from a post yesterday)

Succinct review: It rocks!

Longer review: I have two monitors. One is a 21″ widescreen Dell and one is a 15″ Samsung which I pilfered after my parents’ accounts assistant retired. The former is a high-quality monitor by average-consumer standards, the latter is decidedly not. I was intrigued as to how they’d fare when calibrated properly, and once the spyder arrived I eagerly unpacked it, read through the instructions and installed the software. Immediately there was a problem: it jumped straight onto my secondary monitor, and wouldn’t move. The only way around this was to disable the monitor, which was probably sensible anyway. I plugged in the calibrator and the software prompted me to hang the unit over the screen:

The obvious first reaction is ‘OMGHEADCRAB‘. The second is ‘what’s it going to do, then?’. I started the calibration process, and it spent the next eight minutes displaying varying shades of red, green, blue and grey. It told me to remove the unit, then said ‘I’m done’ and showed a before/after switch. I flicked it.

It turns out my Dell is pretty good. The before/after warmed up the display a little - everything went slightly more orange than before - but nothing major. I didn’t care - the point was to get a calibration and put my mind at ease, and whether the adjustment was big or small was irrelevant. And now this was done - great! The software automatically told my Dell to use the spyder2express colour profile, and that was that. But the niggling voice at the back of my head said ‘how do you know? It’s a cheap calibrator - how can you be sure it’s done a good job?’. So I came up with a plan to test it.

The next step was calibrating the Samsung. This would generally be problematic as the spyder2express only supports one monitor - it will overwrite its previous profile if you re-run the calibration, and the files can’t be simply renamed in Windows Explorer¹. But I knew you could be sneaky and install the Microsoft Color Applet. This Control Panel extension gives you more sophisticated control over colour profiles, including the ability to rename them. So I renamed the Dell profile², then disabled my main monitor and ran the calibration on the Samsung.

This time: massive difference. The before/after button took me from cool blue to warm orange. 24h later I’m still noticing that the display is very different.

Now, two monitors provide a good test of the spyder’s abilities - since both monitors are calibrated, I should be able to put the same image up on both screens and see no difference. This was the moment of truth: if the colours are identical, the unit works as advertised. If they’re off, its quality is variable. And how much it’s off indicates how good a unit it really is. So I fired up the Lightroom 2.0 Beta, with its swish multi-monitor support, and opened a photo on both monitors simultaneously.

Result: to my eyes, identical. I could see contrast differences between the monitors, but there was no difference in the colour. Brilliant. I spent ages playing around in Lightroom, changing white balances and whatnot, and it remained consistent no matter what I threw at it.

Yesterday afternoon I took the spyder to my parents’ office. My Dad’s monitor is notoriously bad - the colours have always been washed out, and I have to keep its brightness low to prevent photos posterising. I was skeptical the spyder could do much with it, to be honest, but ran it anyway. The before/after showed a huge difference. Everything was again much warmer, but somehow less bright, too. I checked out his Picasa and photos looked much, much better, but I also found I could up the brightness much more without any posterising. I’m amazed at the difference. Mum’s monitor was better, and became a little warmer, but nothing too drastic. I brought up the same flickr page on both machines, stepped back, and they looked exactly the same. Excellent.

I was worried the spyder would be a disappointment. I was prepared to pay to get better colors than before, but I was hoping it wouldn’t be just mediocre. And it isn’t - I really couldn’t ask for anything more. I suppose the final test comes when I send some images off to the sRGB printers, but I’m confident - if it can produce perfectly matching colours on my monitors, there’s no reason to think it’s not matching the specifications. I spent most of today editing photos from my niece’s Naming Day last weekend, and it’s great to know that my parents will be seeing the same colours I am.

A bit more geeky stuff follows.

Continue reading ’spyder2express review’

1. possibly - I’ve seen conflicting reports about this [↩]
2. I kept getting in-use errors, so I actually ended up copying the profile in Windows Explorer, then renaming this copy in the Applet [↩]

Colours are annoying, particularly when you’re messing around with digital photos. If I email a photo to ten people at ten different computers, they’re all going to see slightly different colours. This is because every monitor has unique quirks in its colours. It’s a trade-off of non-professional consumer hardware, and is perfectly reasonable - most people don’t need to worry about how exactly their photos will appear on other machines. Unfortunately, I am no longer one of those people.

For example, I want to make a Blurb book of my Year 25 photos, and I’d obviously like the colours I see on-screen to be very close to the final result. Now, Blurb print their colours according to the sRGB standard. sRGB is a widely-used database of colour values: any two printers, if calibrated to this database, should print the exact same colour if I say ‘dudes, print me some green’. And computer monitors can be calibrated too - if I can ensure the green on my monitor matches the green in the sRGB specification, problem solved! But my monitor isn’t calibrated - I have no idea how well the colours on my screen match the sRGB colours. If my monitor is rubbish at green and displays them darker than it should, I’m going to get a Blurb book in which all the greens are too light.

So the question becomes, how do I ensure that I’m seeing the right colours? How can I calibrate my monitor? It’s possible to alter the colour balance in Windows, but that doesn’t help - Windows only knows it’s telling the monitor to display green, it can’t tell what colour my monitor is actually showing.

Thankfully, there’s an easy solution: I need to buy a hardware calibrator. This is a device that physically looks at the monitor while the computer displays a pre-determined series of colours. The accompanying software analyses the calibrator’s data and determines the difference between the theory and the reality. Then comes the clever bit - it adds a layer between the image and the monitor, called a colour profile. So your photo says ‘I am green’, then the colour profile says ‘right, I know that this particular green will come out too dark, so I’m going to tell the monitor to display a lighter green - one that will show a truly representative colour’. The photo isn’t changed at all, but the colour profile ensures you’re seeing the correct colours¹.

Unfortunately, a decent hardware calibrator costs £130. I can’t justify that for something I’m going to use once. But I’ve had various paying photo jobs recently(!), and I’ve become increasingly paranoid that colour-matching will bite me in the ass at some point. What if my not-too-shabby-but-getting-on-a-bit Dell 2004fpw is way out? I’ve had pictures printed before and they’ve been close enough, but what if the lab optimised them to fix the problems?

Then I discovered the Spyder2express hardware calibrator.

It’s a cheaper version of the £130 recommended-everywhere Spyder2. It only supports one monitor. There’s little in the way of configuration. But the reviews say it does a good job and actually uses the same hardware as its more expensive siblings - it’s the software that’s crippled, and the results aren’t necessarily as good as the fancier models. It also has the major advantage of ‘only’ costing £62 inc. delivery.

My paranoia got the better of me. I didn’t want the worry, and I figured pretty-close-but-not-perfect was much better than hope-things-turn-out-ok. I bought one. It arrived this morning.

Now, I knew this wasn’t going to be the most exciting purchase ever, and I was preparing myself for the anticlimax. I figured I’d use it once, then sit there looking at my £65 and wonder whether I’d made a mistake. Review tomorrow.

1. this always reminds me of the Hubble space telescope, which had a problem with its mirror after it was first launched, meaning it produced fuzzy images. They couldn’t replace the mirror in situ, so they designed a filter that exactly reversed the mirror’s flaw, and stuck it between the mirror and the CCDs. It worked. [↩]

The Big Picture displays images of current events, but large enough to fill your browser window. It sounds obvious, but simply having big images makes a hell of a difference to their impact. The front page selects one image, but each post contains 15-20.  Good places to start might be Daily Life in Sadr City, Mississippi Floodwaters and an Indonesian mud volcano (accidentally created during drilling, it’s now destroyed 10,000 homes). It’s not all depressing, though - there’s also a rain-soaked Euro 2008 match, weather conditions on Mars and helicopter shots of an uncontacted tribe in Brazil.

My first couple of university projects didn’t go well. The workbooks showing my thought processes, or not, were godawful, and the teachers didn’t like them or my images. My first project mark was 47 - a third and frowned upon - and the second 62, pulled up by a better workbook, but still not hot on the images. My overall timekeeping had been appalling, with the last week of both projects very stressful, and I really needed to get my act together for the new year.

So it’s now June, with the second term all finished, and I think I improved. I managed to organise myself better, and it was certainly less stressful, but by deadline day I’d lost all perspective on quality. I had no idea what the marks would be like, and wasn’t relishing finding out. They turned up on the uni intranet in the last couple of days, and I’ve had a nervous few seconds between email receipt and loading the page. I’ve written it up below, as much as a reminder for me as anything. Hopefully this isn’t too wanky of me.

Continue reading ‘First year results’

There’s currently a lot of fuss about photographers’ rights. Increasing numbers of photographers seem to be getting hassled for no good reason, and there’s little sign of it stopping. Obviously this a bit of a worry, but I want to make sure I understand all sides of the argument.

I try to look at the evidence skeptically, and the leaning I fight against is actually towards authority. In my experience the lone warriors battling against the injustices of authority are more likely to be jerks than heroes, so I look at their arguments first. And it’s often hard to find rationales amongst the fetishising of Orwell. Honestly, the way for the government to get rid of these people is to create an MMORPG of 1984¹. But if you ignore all the libertarian fantasies and slippery-slope talk there are lots of people asking a valid question: why shouldn’t people be allowed to take photographs in any public place?

The standard answer is, obviously, security. People who want to do Bad Things use photographs to help them plan. Ok. If they want to win me over, I need to be convinced that banning photography is a) effective and b) fair. Does it actually stop people Planning Things? Can I personally still apply for a permit to photograph inside St. Pancras? I think there’s a chance they may have a point, annoying to me as it may be, so I’ll at least hear them out.

Then along comes Bruce Schneier:

Since 9/11, there has been an increasing war on photography. Photographers have been harrassed, questioned, detained, arrested or worse, and declared to be unwelcome. We’ve been repeatedly told to watch out for photographers, especially suspicious ones. Clearly any terrorist is going to first photograph his target, so vigilance is required.

Except that it’s nonsense. The 9/11 terrorists didn’t photograph anything. Nor did the London transport bombers, the Madrid subway bombers, or the liquid bombers arrested in 2006. Timothy McVeigh didn’t photograph the Oklahoma City Federal Building. The Unabomber didn’t photograph anything; neither did shoe-bomber Richard Reid. Photographs aren’t being found amongst the papers of Palestinian suicide bombers. The IRA wasn’t known for its photography. Even those manufactured terrorist plots that the US government likes to talk about — the Ft. Dix terrorists, the JFK airport bombers, the Miami 7, the Lackawanna 6 — no photography.

Ok, you win. Banning photography on security grounds is clearly bollocks. See his post for his - very interesting - take on why governments go down this road.

Still. People do themselves no favours. Check out this much-lauded ‘documentary’. It’s an odd little thing, contrasting the director’s angry encounter with a Community Support Officer with an internet petition supporting photographers’ rights. The latter turned out to be massively exaggerating the impending legislative threat, but the former is presented as if to say ‘but look, isn’t it all dreadful’.

Here’s what happens. The guy’s filming ’some ordinary street shots’ in the centre of London, in a heavy crowd, and he picks out a passing Community Support Officer. He tracks him with the camera for a few seconds, getting very close to the guy’s face (you’ll see how we know this in a minute). The CSO stops walking and asks him to stop filming, then reaches and puts his hand over the lens. Guy immediately launches into ‘you’ve assaulted me!’, and they have a competition to out-haughty each other over what right he has to carry on filming.

Now, the CSO is clearly out of line. There are no rules forbidding filming in a public place². He does himself no favours. But I think there’s dickery on both sides of the camera.

I suspect it comes from the attitude of Me vs The Man. The CSO isn’t a person, he’s the embodiment of Authority, and so doesn’t get common courtesy. There are a lot of people who, if you shove a camera in their face, will get uppity and put a hand over the lens. Me, I could give a damn, but I’ve got friends my age who insist I keep Flickr photos on heavy-privacy settings. Lots of people get very funny about privacy, including most of the aforementioned Orwell nuts - look at all the fuss over Google Street View. No, the CSO shouldn’t have done it, but he’s an actual person, not an automaton, and people make mistakes.

Then, given that it’s happened, the sensible thing is not to launch into ‘you’ve assaulted me’. This is clearly is not going to help. Also - and forgive me if I’m misinterpreting the strength of his hand against the camera - but get a grip. He’s clearly saying it for show. Of course you should be assertive, but it’s possible to state your rights without going on the attack and turning the situation into a competition. How many disagreements have ever been resolved reasonably when both sides go all macho? Doesn’t happen. I’m not saying the guy should have apologised, but something along the lines of ‘what reason is there I can’t film here?’ should resolve the situation much more effectively. The CSO demands to see some ID, which is obviously not ok (and a red flag to a bull), and the guy tells him he has a perfect right to film and he needs to know the law better. The encounter isn’t going to recover from this. Getting all haughty and looking for an argument - I love the oh-so-affronted ‘what’ when the (admittedly totally out-of-line) CSO tells him to ’shut up’ - isn’t helping anyone, it’s just advertising. How is the CSO going to react next time he sees someone filming? If the next guy is me, I’m going to have far less chance of a reasonable outcome because someone else didn’t behave properly.

I don’t think that video is a good example of anything. CSOs shouldn’t act like that, but neither should photographers. The guy filming possibly lost his cool in the situation, but I’m not sure it’s the best advert to put out there. I’d say there are very, very few situations where politeness isn’t the most effective solution, no matter how big a jerk you’re dealing with.

I don’t think photographers should put up with being hassled on the street. And we should campaign to point out the flaws in the arguments for doing so. But the us-and-them mentality isn’t productive either.

1. you’d never win, of course [↩]
2. well, it’s possible you might need a permit in some situations, but not commercially [↩]

I just finished a book called Shooter, by photojournalist David Hume Kennerly. I picked it up after seeing it recommended by Mr Hobby, and it’s one of those rare books that never gets boring.

This is because Kennerly has had quite the life. Assuming it’s all true, I’m astonished he’s not long dead. He started out photographing fires for his local paper, then became a general news photographer in Los Angeles, hairing to the scene of any and every crisis and somehow talking his way into its centre. Then it was some years in Vietnam, where he had countless close shaves involving bullets, from all sides, and eventually won the Pulitzer Prize. After Vietnam he became close friends with Gerald Ford, resulting in his being appointed official White House Photographer, with pretty much unfettered access to the administration. Then…well, it continues.

The guy must have the charm of the devil. Many of his stories involve him cajoling someone into helping him, or running into an old colleague/friend who gets him through the door. An introduction The Digital Journalist says Kennerly makes it seem effortless, but it’s actually extremely hard work:

In his address book he carries not only contact numbers, but birthdays, and will religiously send cards to the people he has photographed from locations all over the world.

And this is all very he-did-what?! But then comes the biggest surprise of all, when, during his time with President Ford, he turns 28. Bastard.

I imagine every reader finds themselves daydreaming about dropping it all and following in Kennerly’s footsteps. It’s the life you want to have had - not necessarily before you’re, you know, thirty, that’s just taking the piss - but reality seems to suggest could never happen. I don’t think I’m suited to photojournalism - 25 and I still get nervous making phone calls, baby - but I found myself thinking of local papers I could apply to.

I looked him up on Wikipedia this afternoon, and was a bit nervous. The book was published in 1979. There have been a lot of wars since then, and someone’s luck can only last so long - had he made it? I was happy to discover he’s still going, and his website has images of Rumsfeld touring Abu Ghraib, so he’s clearly still in the thick of it. Amazing.

I can’t recommend Shooter enough. It’s nicely written, totally inspiring if you’re into that kind of thing (but light on the technical aspects if you’re not) and generally enthralling. I defy you not to finish it liking the guy.

A snoot is anything that funnels light. Put one over a camera flash and you can accurately direct light into a particular area of a photo. I’d never really tried the technique until last week, when I assembled one at great expense by rolling up a card-dealing tablemat from my magician days. I’ve just got around to editing the results, and they’ve turned out better than I expected…I altered the contrast and exposure, but there’s no other Photoshopping on these:

These are the best of over 350 shots¹ and were more by chance than any vision in my head, but I’m pleased nonetheless. I’d only thrown the ’snoot’ into my bag as an afterthought, but I’ll certainly be taking it with me from now on. Next time I’ll try to properly take control of background by using the ambient light as fill.

I’m coming up with a plan for improving my portraits. I have some more kit (hopefully) arriving tomorrow that should be Fun Times…More on that when I’ve had a chance to play.

1. two very nice people bought me an 8gig memory card for my birthday, and it’s coming in very handy [↩]