Sussex Photographer Bernie Greene scratching out a tune while trying not to fall off the roof

Been thinking about my business, my blog and my future.

Every day I read several blogs by other photogs and have been doing so for at least two years. I am on several mailing lists to do with photography. I go to trade shows and attend seminars. I do something active to do with photography every day. But I don’t yet have a thriving photography business. And I want one.

I’ve been using the internet since 1992. I became a pretty hot software developer and all round IT guy mostly through the help available through the internet. I have developed a lot of confidence in the people who use it. For the most part they are very keen to help out anyone who asks for help on any subject. That is an incredibly powerful resource and I have used it a lot to get answers to thousands of questions. I have answered a lot of other people’s questions too but not nearly as many as I’ve asked.

I still love development work but I am increasingly more passionate about image making and more importantly image making as a profession. So I’ve been using the internet to learn about photography both technically and as a business. I have learnt a lot and now it is time to put it all together.

So I decided about the turn of the year to get my photography business truly established this year. I wrote out a plan as far as I could see at that time of what it would take and the steps needed to make progress. This website was one of those steps.

That plan has been a tremendous boost. It tells me what I should be working on and just knowing that means I have things to do every day that should advance my business. Little by little things are beginning to happen. Prospects for portraits are finding out about me. Prospects for collaborative work are becoming aware of what I do. People are subscribing to my blog feed. My work is being seen.

So why might I regret this post later? Because this post is my declaration of independence; it is my public commitment that I am putting myself out there as a photographer who intends to create a flourishing, prospering business doing what I love. It marks my decision. So if a year from now I’m working at the drive-thru window at McDonalds you will be quite justified in driving by and making snarky comments and having “Would you like fries with that?” as my only response.

If there is a chance I may regret it why am I doing it? Oddly enough the main reason for it is so that I don’t regret it. Not only do I know I have made this commitment but you do too and some of you will be checking back now and then to see how I’m doing. Will you be checking back?

Two great friends Ann and Farouk (see their site here) agreed to act out one of my darker fantasies on Sunday night. I had several shots in mind but the weather (at least -50 in London) put paid to that idea in a hurry. Managed to grab this before hands were shaking so hard as to overcome the image stabilizing.

If there is a hero or villain in you and you’d like to take part in one of these types of sessions let me know. I would prefer it if you were in London or the South-East of England. I am based in Sussex but will travel for a good project.

Same session. Before.

I like the idea and the pose but the sky is just an interruption and the image lacks crispiness.

Here’s the after.

A bit more of a ’70s album cover look. Some people might be offended by this type of shoot taking place in a graveyard. It wasn’t the intention to offend anyone. I’ve always been fascinated by them. They are timeless places. This one in Forest Row, Sussex, is a pretty good example.

I’ve been told to put my before and after images in that order so here is the before first.

It isn’t particularly exciting. But I’d been imagining the end result for about a week before we did the shoot which, I might add, took place this very morning at about 7:15 AM. An outrageous time to be up and about let alone after having got up, splashed some water, got dressed, then driven to pick up Aled, then driven to the site. I was amazed at how easy I found it even without coffee.

I like the pose, the expression and the light. The face is a bit burnt out and the background lacks detail in some places and has too much in others. It also lacks the essential rock star punch for an image of this sort.

So after a little processing, actually quite a bit and I didn’t note all the details, we come to this.

Way more than I’d normally use but I think it works in this context. What say you?

I saw the news about the new Apple iPad and instantly thought it would be an amazing device for showing my portfolio. I have actually gotten work as a result of showing some portfolio pics on my Sony Ericsson w580i and that has a pretty small screen. The iPad is just a little bit smaller than a 10×8 print!

I love Apple design but have yet to buy a single product from them. This is quite likely to be the first even though it lacks several features I would have liked. As Scott Kelby says, “It isn’t what it does it is HOW it does it”.  Jeff Revell has a good post on it too. In fact these two are the best I’ve seen so far.

It took around 29 attempts to get the pose right. I bashed my shin on the chair several times in the rush to get into position. I’m happier with it than I thought I would be.

Here’s the almost straight out of camera. Actually it went through Camera Raw first and was then cropped a little. But you can clearly see what was done in the processing.

Above is the finished result and it took a bit of work. It started with simple removal of dirt marks on the background and general cleanup. There were curves, colour balance and saturation adjustments.  Lots of dodging and burning. Noise removal after the crop and a final high pass filter to add more pop. I’m quite happy with the result but it also shows how a little on axis fill would have saved some work in post.

Below is the straight out of camera image.

David Hobby of Strobist has been banging on about “on axis fill” for a while and I finally remembered I wanted to play with the idea a little when I was in a situation that might warrant it. That situation came up last Saturday when I was looking at my sleeping son Josh.

Last Saturday was a cold January day in London and we were comfortably warm and inside at the time. There was no sun to be seen. But I thought I would try and create some sunlight and use on axis fill to balance it with. “On axis” is a fancy way of saying that the fill light was coming from pretty much the same point of view as the lens. I was in fact using the on camera flash.

I was also using an SB-24 as the “direct sunlight”. This was gridded and snooted and placed a few yards away at camera right and was pointing at his face. I don’t remember the power setting but it was probably around 1/4.

I wanted to shoot with a fairly open lens which was set at f5.6 and I established the exposure for that aperture was 1/25sec at iso 200. Then I just shot away adjusting the on camera fill flash from -2

up to plus 2

and several stages in between. The difference in mood is striking.  In the end I prefered the first setting (top picture) in this situation. The degree of fine tuning possible is really good and I am very happy with this first experiment. I used the same technique in the earlier post on Alex though I wasn’t going for a naturally lit looking shot there.

I’m just done with the processing on the above image of Alex. I like it. I hope he does too.

Below you can see the image as it appeared straight out of camera. So rather than describe everything I did in the processing I’ll let the two images speak for themselves.

I knew what I wanted the final result to look like and I also knew that I would need to remove a bunch of distracting detail from the original. The result is pretty close to what I had in mind.  I don’t mind using photoshop to get the result I wanted but it would have been faster if he had just changed his clothes in the first place.

More than half a lifetime ago I attended an art college where I studied photography. Now things may have gotten better since then but I somehow doubt it. Most of the students, myself included, were at college to avoid work and for the social life of a student. Hey what is youth for?

In my two years I was shown a dazzling array of techniques but was not required nor even inclined to master any of them. read on