Today I shot a ‘post christening’ session in the studio. In a nutshell, the parents wanted some photos of their son in his outfit, and here is a small sample.
The young man looking happy & content.
Some back to basic framing, making use of negative space.
Finally, he had enough.
So, his parents stripped him & we got some nudies.
I’ve finally finished refreshing the layout of my website, stage 1 at least. The main changes to note are:
- same colour scheme as the blog
- all images displayed are random, refresh the page for a new selection
- smarter “behind the scenes” coding
Check out my new photography website, or browse the boring old one here
Stage 2 is the difficult one, that’s updating the images and the gallery. Some of the images displayed on my website are more than seven years old, shot on film & scanned !!!!!! Can you spot them?
Today I picked up my new business cards, what do you think?
Now quite a bit of thought went into these cards, which I’m proud to say I designed myself using photoshop.
Front: I believe all photographers business cards should have an image on them, I mean why have just words, pictures of equipment, a strip of film or something like that, you’re a photographer so use this opportunity to show of your work. I used on of my favourite images and one I have received a lot of positive feedback on, not to mention becoming a finalist in a competition I had entered it in. I kept the information on the front to a minimum, the image actually takes up the entire card, some basic contact information is overlayed on top of the wall.
Rear: My original design included a list of the events I photograph, it listed: weddings, christenings, baptisms, event, families, portraiture, corporate, product, real estate, etc, etc. My final design as you can see omitted all these leaving white space or room for notes. This is just as important as the card itself. If you don’t believe me, just go through all the business cards you have kept and see how many have additional information written on them either by yourself or the person that gave it to you.
Many times there’s something additional I want to add when I meet someone and give them my card, writing down my suggestion for a digital camera, the web address of one of my regular haunts, one of my favourite restaurants, or even an on-the-fly quote.
Business cards are an inexpensive and very effective form of marketing, and here’s a few quick tips for you:
- always give 2 cards, one for them to keep (with the notes you wrote on them) and one they may pass onto someone they know (with notes of their own).
- give 4-5 cards to your clients with their final product. Since they’re happy with your work they’ll have no problems passing your contact information onto their family and friends.
- keep them in your wallet, camera bag, car, home, studio, lunch box. No matter where you are, make sure you never have to say “I don’t have one with me”.
I’m still a bit of a kid when it comes to gadgets, & couldn’t wait to start playing with my new toys being remote flash triggers. Unfortunately for my family, they had to put up with my testing and playing.
A remote flash trigger, is used to fire a flash that is not connected to the camera. If anyone has seen me work, you will have noticed that I’m a fan of using and off camera flash, usually with a long cord. These remote triggers will allow me some more creativity, flexibility and options when shooting. Here are some examples of what I can achieve with these.
My wife, cooking a delicious dinner (and telling me to go play somewhere else). The foreground of this image is lit using the ambient light from the kitchen, a tad underexposed however it suits the picture. The flash is sitting on the bench top behind her, giving her a “rim light” around her body & hair.
With a remote trigger, you can also place the flash into objects & confined areas. This will give the illusion of a light source from somewhere unexpected. My young one looking into his backpack.
And of course, the very old trick of making it look like the light source is coming from the computer screen. In all images of someone working on a computer, you can guarantee that the glow coming from the computer screen was generated by a remote flash.
Wow, what happened to March? Can’t believe how quickly it’s passed, been too pre-occupied with many things & before you know it April is here. My birthday was even last month & that day passed just like any other.
There was a couple of personal projects that just had to be done, I was on a very tight timetable with a lot to do. After a number of 15 hour days and help from family, finished on time.
There was also the Greek Festival of Sydney, which I wanted to attend. As luck would have it, never made it.
Inspired by a mate, New York Photographer Christos Hountas who updated his website recently, I have also started making changes to my website. They are still in “development” mode and I won’t make any promises as to when the new site will be on-line. What I can say is the colour scheme & layout will be very similar to my blog, however the look, feel & navigation will be similar to what I currently have. The website & blog will be more integrated, with links & references between the two seamless. More importantly for clients, I will be implementing a new on-line gallery as well as information & resource pages however these will be available some time after the new site is on-line. If you have any idea’s or suggestions, feel free to drop me an e-mail, use either the contact page from my main web-site or post a comment here.
Photography wise I have been busy as well. I have experimented with some high-key shots using multiple flash units, something I want to try with a bride however since the setup takes time (something which is usually scarce on a wedding day) I need to have the setup process down to a fine art otherwise it ain’t gonna happen. I even managed to shoot a couple Greek Orthodox Christenings, the first was twin boys, James & Peter (Dimitri & Panayi) followed by another boy, Jamie (Dimitri). One of the options I provide to clients is to provide them the images I shoot on CD/DVD that have been batch converted straight out of the camera, no additional editing or fine tuning on my behalf. This is great for parents as it allows them to pick & choose which pictures they want to print at their own leisure, and also saves them dollar$ as they don’t pay for my time to convert & print for them.
The drawback to this is that I find myself almost a month later I have not gone through the images in detail to pick, edit & post images for my blog. If you have followed my previous posts, I like to select about four to six images from each job, maybe stick to a theme, things I like, photographs that caught my eye, things that made me laugh, whatever.
Today, I have just done a very quick scan & picked just one picture. It’s one of the twins (James) in sitting in the baptismal Font.
I picked this one because this shot was actually quite difficult to get. If you have ever been to a Greek Orthodox Christening, at the time I took this photo, you have the Priest holding the child in the Font, the godparent is standing right next to him, next to the godparent you have the Priest’s assistant. To add to the chaos (apart from the fact it was a twin christening), I also had two over zealous paparazzi to deal with. I don’t have an issue with family & friends shooting around me, I’ll even help them out if I have time. To get this image I had to hold the camera over heads & shoot blind, relying on the autofocus to do it’s job & my experience to ensure I had the framing about right (hence the square crop ;-).
Recently, I received an e-mail from Carol Myers, representing the St Nicholas Centre. Firstly, I will highly recommend you visit this website, there is some great information, for example, I had no idea where the tradition of why stockings are hung on Christmas eve came from, now I do 
Anyway, here is an extract of the e-mail she sent me:
St Nicholas Center, a non-profit with US tax-exempt status, exists solely to spread the word about St Nicholas and to help people understand who Santa Claus really is. We provide information about the saint, customs from around the world, and a large variety resources for churches, schools, and families to use to celebrate his feast day. There is also a section for children with on-line activities.
Carol has a simple request, if I had any photo’s of churches dedicated to St Nicholas and if she could use them on the website. Although I didn’t, I promised that when in the area I would take some for her.
Today, on the way home from a twin christening (more on that when I post process the images), I stopped to take a few quick shots.
The Greek Orthodox St Nicholas in Marrickville, Sydney, NSW.
Technically, this photo was taken at the wrong time of the day, next time I have to ensure I’m in the area first thing in the morning, however this will suffice until then.
On another note, I want to point out why I really hate power lines, apart from the fact they look ugly and people get killed on them, have a look at what they do to architecture pictures.
