When I'm 84

A Multi-Cultural BBQ, hosted by Little Brothers Friends of the Elderly non-profit, "committed to relieving isolation and loneliness among the elderly." A friend asked me to volunteer-photograph the event. There were lots of volunteers: drivers, to pick up elderly folk from their homes and transport them to the party; servers, to bring food from the buffet to the less mobile elders; cooks, to make enough food for about 100 people.

The elders look forward to events like these long in advance. I could tell that they took care in selecting their outfits and doing their hair. In their 80s and 90s, I looked at their faces and tried to imagine what they looked like as young adults. Many elders actively wanted their photo taken, and called me to them. One woman exclaimed happily: "Oh good, now I have a photo to share with my daughter and grandchildren."

Group shots were tricky. To gather a group for a picture meant asking elders to get up; which looked far too effortful. Seated around a table, I prefer not to take a group photo with such large gaps between people. Thus, I invited volunteers to stand in between seated elders - more fun in numbers of course, but also better for composition.

A Brief Diversion On Why Dogs Are Great

We come here several times a week. A mere 10 minutes walk from home, we come to a human-planted forest, almost a hundred years old. The trees are showing their age; looking rather barren, and it might even be creepy if I didn't have the company of Charlotte. But with her trotting alongside, it's a beautiful walk amongst moss covered trees, casting long shadows in the late afternoon. Having a dog makes being the sole human (in a room, on a running trail, in a forest, on the sidewalk late at night) a much better experience. It's not that she could protect me; she's a girly girl, afraid of cardboard sheets. Maybe partly it's that she looks like she could protect me, though I'd sooner bite someone than she would.

It's her happy, carefree presence, and knowing she would accompany me anywhere.

I want to learn to control flare spots. It would be nice to be able to use them in composition. I don't actually have any control over them yet. Just so happens that in this case they are pointing right at Charlotte. I like when things are back lit, and have a halo of light surrounding their form. Being fluffy, her halo is easy to see.

Tops Of Heads Are Unnecessary

I really like those glasses frames! In a head shot, where you can't see much in the way of fashion, and don't want to overwhelm with facial/ neck accessories, unique glasses frames can lead a viewer to linger a little longer on a photo. Not to mention, these frames do a great job of framing her eyes. However, there is the issue of glass glare. In the shade, facing away from the sun and reflective surfaces there wasn't too much, but I used photoshop to sample her skin and eye tones and painted over the glare, building layers using low-opacity digital paint.

I didn't know this until I googled it today, but the industry standard size for headshots is 8"x10". Some cropping required. When cropping (or composing photos), don't be afraid to cut off the top of people's heads; the most boring part of the (front view of the) head. Viewer's minds will automatically fill in the arc of the crown, anyways. Often, it's more visually compelling to get closer to the face than to include all the head or hair.

Way back when, while event photographing, I cut off the top of a guy's head. He looked at the digital image at the back of my camera and protested. Why is the top of my head cut off?! Personally, I think he had issues because he was particularly tall. But rather than to explain the aesthetic virtues of my compositional style, I just took another pic, including all of his scalp. He was happy.

Unexpected Cheesecake

Prior to my session with his older sister, this 6 year old had overheard the mention of photo shoot, and was upset that he too didn't get a photo shoot. His distress was easily remedied; I took a few quick shots of him also. He knew how to smile just enough - often little kids give too big a smile, and look overly cheesy, or even pained.

After the photo shoot, I was generously presented with a homemade cheese cake, compliments of my client's mom. As I've pointed out, there are some perks to photographing, but this perk, dare I say, takes the cake! haha! That was probably too direct a pun, huh. Sorry, it's late.

Newsboy Hats Scream Loudly For Sepia Tone

When I think of newsboy hats, I think of the times of Oliver Twist, of small street urchins dirtied by chimney soot and industrial revolution smog, all of which I picture in Sepia tone.

An urchin she is not! Her purple newsboy hat served as a fashion statement of course. She also wore a pink dress and clutched a yellow stuffed toy, so the sepia monotoning helped de-distract the bursts of colors too.

Seven family members were present in addition to the baby, and all of them piled behind me to entertain her. It was extremely effective to have such an enthusiastic entourage of essentially, photo assistants. She was generous with smiles, shooting them every which way, showing off her baby teeth.

Watermelon Love

Do your teeth hurt? He wasn't even asked to hug the watermelon. He just wandered over and hugged it of his own accord, alternating between squatting beside it and resting his head on it, giving it kisses and draping himself over the entire form. This behavior was so cute, I put down my grilled corn on the cob and Korean green onion pancake to retrieve my camera. I couldn't stand it. Must photograph.

I went to a 100 day birthday party for a baby (the flapper baby, featured earlier), and was enthusiastic to meet new subjects. I've decided that I would like to take more pictures of kids with food. Preferably produce, or perhaps bread (also in an earlier post). Not say, cooked food. Food with full forms and rich colors. Maybe when Fall comes around, I may suggest apples as a prop.

How to Arrange A Bunch of Rectangles in a Tidy Way

And here's the family version. It is tricky, fitting those rectangles together. It makes me very agitated to see rectangles not line up properly. I actually learned to do this way back in high school, when I did my Art "A-levels". For those of you familiar with the British system of schooling, you'll know it's like doing Hogwart's NEWTs (Nastily Exhausting Wizarding Tests). OWLs (Ordinary Wizarding Levels) are the equivalent of "O-levels" which are done after 5th year of secondary school (middle+high) and "A-levels" are done after 7th year. FYI we had "houses" too, like Griffindor etc. I was in Hillary; we were named after explorers.

Anyways, when I did art A-levels, we had to do 2 months of prep - sketches, explorations of composition, experimentation of materials, and then present all those works (maybe 20 or so) on 2 standard sized poster boards. The final exam was to spend 20 hours (over 4 or 5 days) creating the grand finale piece, a cumulation of all that research.

And now I am digressing far from my original point, but what the heck here's my final piece. My preparatory sketches consisted of realistic drawings in color pencil and pencil of the different components, then trials in abstraction. This is in color pencil. My art teacher back then said I should pursue art as a career. I said Nah I'm Going to Be A Biologist (I also did Biology A-levels). Look what happened.

So! Those 20 sketches had to be neatly arranged and pasted onto poster boards. This is when I first learned to line up rectangles. To achieve a tidy look, make sure the outer edge of all your rectangles (ie, those edges closest to the border of the poster) line up to create a big rectangle. This creates an illusion of a frame enclosing all the images. Ideally, the gaps between the rectangles should be of equal width. It takes some puzzling, and it makes it easier if you have more images than will actually fit in your rectangle, so you have choices and don't have to force things or crop stuff weirdly to make it fit. I only had to crop one pic; that in the bottom left. All the others have the same ratio of width to height. This composition has the added challenge of balancing color with non-color pics, close-ups with not-so-close-up, and candid and non-candid.

This One Is Better

Consider the previous version a draft, a collection of images to be potentially used. I wanted a mix of color and B&W, some close-ups, some body shots, some posey some candid. The selected photos have simple backgrounds - I have other photos of babies with toys, or on quilts - for an ad, I opted to avoid eye distraction. Limited color palette.

Had to crop images in rectangles so that they fit nicely with each other. Staggered the pics so that each photo created its own border - e.g. had I put 2 pics with green grass in the background, the individual pic outline would be harder to define, and thus less tidy looking. Put a generous white mat around the whole thing, to give it a framed-picture-like presence.

Happy Baby Pics

I'm putting together a baby photography ad for Craigslist. My current ad is more general - "family" photography, including babies, kids, couples, individuals. I figured I ought to do some audience targeting, and now I've done enough shoots that I have a wide selection of pics for each of those categories. I have enough to make separate ads for (1) babies, (2) toddlers and (3) families.

I've done some light investigation into Baby Photographing Companies. They work in hospitals, so they can offer photo packages to parents as soon as babies are born. It looks like those photographers require some salespersonship experience, and pay is based on commission. Hmm, well I'm going to press on with being my own photography boss for now.

Boston Wedding

For those of you that know this couple, you are lucky to have a sneak preview of 2 wedding photos! When the couple gets back from their honeymoon, they can publish the others. Which I have yet to edit.

The wedding was at the Harvard Faculty Club in Cambridge. The campus of course provided nice east-coasty backdrops. There was not much time for couple photos however - we had the wedding party + close relatives in tow, which reduces photo efficiency. The couple poses and I take a few photos. Then, I wait for 4 other point and shoots to take the same photo, before shuttling to a new location. All that extra shooting time adds up, and usually there's little time allocated to portraits as it is. This all just means I have to think faster - find good backdrops, set up poses, compose pics.

I like the above candid, where you can see all the reactions to the bride. If only the guy in the back wasn't squinty. Maybe a cut and paste job will do the trick (the photo I took after this one featured the same scene except people were post-apex of delightedness and he was smiling). Anyways, I made the pic sun-shiney yellow on purpose.

Happy Birthday USA

I hope everyone had a great 4th of July! I was in Boston, the city which reputedly has the best 4th of July fireworks in the USA. I believe it! We had a patch of grass staked out (literally, delineated by stakes) on the Esplanade (park-like, level area along water on which people can promenade; maybe you knew that already, I didn't!) along the Charles River, as of July 4th morning. I arrived at 2:30pm, and the fireworks didn't start until 10:15pm or so. But there was plenty to do; the wedding party I came along with had brought board games and snacks. Along the esplanade there were food vendors, music, lively people watching, sing-a-longs with Neil Diamond and American anthems medley by the Boston pops orchestra.

When dusk arrived I set up my tripod and wide angle lens. Camera on shutter priority, I focused on a distant spot across the river
(approximating how far I thought the fireworks might be in the sky), then set my shutter speed at 1.6 seconds. A guess, but it worked! I varied between 0.8 and 2 second exposures. I didn't bother looking through my camera - I wanted to witness the fireworks Not through a lens, so I just clicked the shutter button every so often, making minor adjustments in where the lens was pointing. This was undoubtedly the best view I've ever had of fireworks - no trees, buildings, heads or clouds in the way. Reclining on the grass, front row seat... I don't think any other fireworks experience will compare.

Commit a Random Act of Kindness

The yellow-sailed boat was claimed by a particularly big wave. I saw the sail peek out from the foam briefly, before another hungry wave sucked it into the ocean. The boy had been running from the wave at the time, and didn't witness its disappearance. Not to be discouraged, he ran up to his little brother, who was digging in the sand, and comandeered his boat instead. With new boat in hand, a wave knocked the wave running boy over, and doused him. The wave receded and he lay in the sand in shock (I didn't photograph this), deciding whether or not to cry. Next thing he knew, a stranger, a slightly bigger boy aged 8 or so, hefted him up, asked if he was OK, patted his back and guided him back to dry shores. I was pleasantly surprised at this random act of kindness from a kid. I guess my point is that photographing affords many people watching opportunities.

I will be away from my blog for a few days as I travel east for the holiday weekend. I will be back July 6th, with many photos to share. Happy July 4th week, and happy photo taking!

Camera Bath Time

Silhouette photos - always fun to do, especially with such a spectacular coastline sunset at my disposal! I'd just finished a different set of photos involving chasing small boys who were darting in and out of the water and flinging sand around. I was aghast to find that I had a salt-water flecked dirtied lens (lens filter, to be more precise - a protective circle of glass that covers the lens) and that little specks dotted ALL of my photos. ARGH. I will have a lovely time editing all of that out of my kid pics.

I took the major specks out of this pic. They wery very obvious against the light sky. I thought about taking the lens flare out (the 2 light dots) but decided to leave them. Looks less polished this way.

I went home and cleaned my lens filter using a glasses cleaning kit. Have to make sure there are no sand bits before wiping otherwise I could drag a sand particle around the glass and that wouldn't be helpful at all. I took some test pics and some dots were Still There. It turned out that my sensor was dirty, and that's a part of the camera that's deep down in the depths of the camera body, never exposed to the light of day except through a lens. No idea how it got dirty.

To access the sensor, the camera lens mus be removed and the settings placed on indefinite exposure (go to Manual settings, change exposure time to "bulb", press shutter down for as long as you want sensor exposed). Doing this, I delicately q-tipped 2 dots of sticky dust off the sensor (looks like a little reflective rectangle). All is well again. Whew.

Next Generation

I made a trip to Oakland today, to visit some family friends that some of you readers will no doubt recognize. Yes, they do now have Three kids! And yes, how they have grown! I try not to be that grown up that exclaims to kids about how big they've gotten. I remember being exclaimed over as a kid, and I didn't understand the big deal. The exclaiming became predictable and unexciting. Well, as a family of five, they are a perfect subject for me! The hard part is that the 2 girls know me, and would rather have me play with them, than have me take photos of them playing.

Where Has My Drawing Callus Gone?

I haven't drawn an animal in months. I haven't drawn anything in ages. It's been too long. I've been asked to create a t-shirt design for a team of biologists and such participating in Centennial Resurvey of the San Jacinto Mountains. I am to include a few animal friends, like the Gray Vireo, Flying Squirrel and Yellow Legged Frog. At this point, I think the perched Vireo should be switched out for a flying Vireo, to match the dynamism of the other animals, but this depends on whether I can find a photo of a flying Vireo or not. As much as I would prefer not to, I am working from photos. These are quick sketches, to be developed.

I couldn't remember where I'd put my bristol (nice thick smooth paper - good for later inking over pencil) pad, and my pencils were not in my forefront writing/illustrating implement jar (I have about 7 such jars on my desk, stuffed with pens, markers, brushes, rulers, scissors etc). Definitely feeling rusty, but it felt good to get back to my art roots. I must draw more, for myself. If only I had time.

Break In The Clouds II

Hokkaido. No, I wasn't there. But here's a photo, quite freshly taken... consider this a second post in a series about Breaks in the Clouds. The original is to the right. It must have been an amazing sight at the time, but when it comes to the photo, the awe is left largely to our imaginations.

So I did some editing. First thing was to increase the contrast, by a lot. Then further enhanced contrast using levels. Next, burned (darkened) in the clouds, and dodged (lightened) the light beam area. Then increased color saturation, in particular, bringing out the greens and blues so that the clouds are now moody slate instead of smoggy colored, and the shrubbery covered hillside is now emerald green. Vignetting (the dark edge) the whole thing obliterated the foreground trees, but I was OK with that. Now the only vegetation in color is that lit by the light beam. I lost some of the vertical ray detail as well as some lighter colored cloud. But I think the final effect is worth the sacrifice.

Light as a subject is particularly hard to capture. With my light pictures, I don't try to document what I see - it's impossible. Instead, I take photos knowing they will be heavily edited - or reinterpreted, into a different image. I don't do that with my people portraits - I enhance/improve/optimize, but I don't reinterpret. Editing the light/landscape photos feels more like making art than editing people photos. Then again, I've not tried pushing the boundaries of my people photos, since with my portrait work, people want to look good - but normal. Not moody and blue hued.

Flapper Baby

I've decided that one of the cutest baby poses is on the belly, propped up on arms. Particularly good for showing off head accessories. She's just about 2.5 months old. I've learned a lot about baby development, now having photographed so many. Well at least, those developmental aspects that have anything to do with camera posing, like smiling (really young babies seem to do less of this), lying on belly, sitting up, crawling, vocalizing, throwing, toddling, tantruming, and running.

Another make-shift studio - white sheet draped over the sofa in the back, blue sheet in the foreground, all facing a large window. I was too, on my belly and propped up on elbows, crammed in a corner with parents crouched on either side of me (ducking low so as not to block light), waving toys and making happy sounds. I'm sure we looked funny. I'd look bemused too.

Fun Times with New (to me) Equipment

This is where the "Step and Repeat" photographer hangs out. In front of the logo banner and red carpet. I've done this kind of assignment before, but never with studio lighting! My fellow photogs (below) were kind enough to lend me their equipment and set things up for me. There are three flashes, and 2 walkie-talkie things called Pocket Wizards. One PW, the transmitter, is attached to my camera, where the flash would usually sit. The other PW, the transceiver, is attached to one of the flashes - the one called the Master. The other 2 flashes are called Slaves. So when I take a photo, the transmitter tells the transceiver that it's time to flash, and at the same time, the transceiving Master flash tells the Slaves (via infra-red, or something) to flash, All At The Same Time!! So awesome.
To test the flash set up, photogs stand in as subjects, so here are some tester pics of my new photog friends. Sorry about the inconsistent white balance (it's salmony pink on the left, blush pink on the right).

The flash flashes into a white-ish umbrella, which serves as a huge diffuser. Even with the flash set at 1/16 its usual output, the umbrellas put out a nice poof of bright light.

So why "step and repeat"? Step forward, take a photo, next subject, step forward, take another photo.... took 940 photos in front of this banner over 5 hours.

5.5 hours and a 2 lb camera

It's been a long time since I covered an event. This was a women's shopping event, for which ladies pay for a ticket to get discounts off boutique fashions, accessories, beauty products, girly alcoholic beverages, make up, spray tan, hair updos, etc etc.

As "roaming photographer" (as opposed to "step and repeat photographer" - you'll learn about what that is tomorrow) I had a LOOONG list of subjects to cover including: "Check-in tables, wide shots - min 5 shots, Signage - min 5 shots, Crowd at bar - wide shot min 10-20 shots, Bartenders Serving - min 10-20 shots, Girls at bar - min 10-20 shots..." as well as "Girls posing with individual goodie bag items - min 3 shots for every item on content list). So, I had to recruit shoppers to pose with items. Fortunately, some were more than happy to model.

Impulse Decision (Nothing To Do With Shoe Shopping or Dog Adoption)

I was driving home on the 280, post redwood shoot. It was clear in San Jose, but as I headed north, I could see the thick cloud cover building over the mountains to the west - almost certainly meant that SF would be enshrouded in clouds also.

Almost 8pm, just past Palo Alto, extremely hungry and very tired, I saw a break in the clouds over a Crystal Spring reservoir, east of Half Moon Bay. It was glorious, even from my car. And I just so happened to drive by a sign for Next Exit: View Point. An impulsive decision. I took the exit and wound my way up to the crest of a hill, grabbed my camera and ran to the view point, as sooner or later the clouds would close.































The same view framed three ways. The first emphasizes the clouds, the second the tree, and the last - actually, I pay most attention to the foreground texture of the weeds. The last composition feels a bit unbalanced (left heavy? however I prefer this to a centered image), but it is the least cliche (rays of light over water? tree silhouette? everyone's been there, done that). There might be a story to this third one - if only I had a person or dog in the photo.

As I headed back to the parking lot, another person dashed out of his car with his camera, and walked swiftly to the viewpoint. We were the only people on the wind-chilled, darkening hilltop, and I didn't speak to him, but how odd that I understood what compelled him to delay dinner, pull off the freeway and lose oneself for a few moments.