July 2013 - Storyteller

Concert photography: Better known as the Black Hole

by Stanley LearyJuly 31, 2013December 30, 2022Off Camera Flash

Huey Lewis and the News 1982 in Greenville, NC

At least I found ONE photo for the paper

I remember being in the darkroom, looking through my concert photo shoot, and struggling to find one image I could give to the editors.

When I was photographing bands in the 1980s, I was starting this career. Every time I pushed that button, it cost me about 50¢ to 75¢ a photo. The cost depended on if I was shooting black and white, color negative, or color transparency film. It was standard for me to avoid a concert with only a handful of keepers’ images.

The learning curve for me was pretty steep compared to today. You had to wait to see your results.

With film, the time from me taking the photo to see if it was usable was a few hours at best and, usually with color transparency, a couple of weeks.

I should have written down all my camera settings and, when looking at the photos, know what I did, but I didn’t. So I knew the shutter speed was too slow, and my images were not sharp.

The camera’s metering systems were not as sophisticated as today. So getting a good reading on the face of the singer using a spot meter in your camera that we have today was not on those Nikon FM or FM2 cameras I had back then.

I was shooting tungsten color transparency film since tungsten temperature lights lit most stages. I was shooting ISO 160 being pushed to ISO 320. I had a Nikon 80-200mm ƒ/4 lens and got a few usable images back then.

I made a lot of mistakes in those first five years. Sometimes I hunted through contact sheets for just one image that could run in the school paper. I remember a time or two handing in photos that were slightly out of focus or had more motion blur than I should have.

The Attic in Greenville, NC, had a good number of rock bands come through, and since it was such a small venue, the lights were closer, and the light was decent. However, the light wasn’t much better when the school had concerts like the Charlie Daniels Band.

I was getting very few usable images in those days. But, you see, shooting in the bright sun was much easier than going into some nightclubs where the light was scarce.

Even with today’s cameras, you will not walk into the venue and walk out with all your photos in focus, sharp, and well lighted because of the new cameras. So I am drawing upon all those years of mistakes today. I am showing up with lights in my car, so I can get to set up as needed.

When I went to Swayze’s in Marietta, GA, to photograph a boy band, I walked into worse lighting than I had in the 1980s. So, after trying to shoot with the available light, I went to the car to get some strobes. I knew that was the only way to get usable images like the one above of the bass player from the band Late Night Reading.

Here is the overall shot of the stage showing their lighting. I had a few photos in focus because they were a punk band. They didn’t stay still like some bands. Their heads were banging as fast as the music. My experience told me to shoot the available light and get all I could see without lights before setting up lights. Too many photographers jump too quickly to strobes and try to shoot at low ISO all the time.

What I learned through the years

If I had not been shooting bands on stage for years, I would not know what stage lighting should look like. I realized some concerts; the bands paid attention to the lighting. Huey Lewis and the News, the lighting was excellent. For a Rita Coolidge concert, the lighting was great. For the Charlie Daniels band not so great. With Charlie Daniels wearing a hat and the light from above, he never had a good morning on his face.

Later, when I didn’t use a flash to photograph Marc Brousard, I was equally screwed until he looked up into the light as here below.

Knowing what good light looks like makes it much easier to understand how to create it later with strobes or hot lights. I learned from shooting stage lighting that I wanted good morning on the performer’s face, which often meant a light that wasn’t being blocked by hats.

I have learned to consistently shoot the available light first before adding lights.
I learned that the light changes as the artist move around the stage. So sometimes the light is excellent, and sometimes it sucks–depends on your timing and luck.
I try to shoot faster shutter speeds for sharp photos. Then, of course, I may experiment with slower shutter speeds to show motion, but when I do, I know that is what I am looking for in the photo.
I shoot more variety of shots today–wide, medium, and tight photos.
I shoot the reaction to the stage as well as the stage.
I shoot each type of shot until I have some variety, not just a photo here and one there.

While shooting what is on stage from different angles can give your clients some variety, what happens off the stage is just as compelling when put into a package.

You don’t get credit for lighting professional productions as a photographer. However, not getting good skin tones and technically in-focus, sharp, and well-exposed photos will keep you from making a living in this profession.

By shooting the crowd, you are visually capturing how they sound. The group is into it if they are good, as we see above, with their hands in the air. Getting people up and dancing is another way to show how the music moved people. The point is the action isn’t always on the stage.

I can tell you from my earlier years I didn’t know how to shoot the crowd’s reaction to the music. That is one of the best signs of the seasoned pro–broad coverage.

I am thrilled when the light is excellent, like when I photographed the comedian Tim Hawkins. My job is so much easier. I don’t have to light the stage. You don’t get credit for the lighting if you have great shots at venues like this.

When you start, you will be terrified when you show up at events with little or no light. You will make mistakes and lots of them. Most likely, the people hiring you don’t know how difficult the job is. They hired you to shoot.

You will be sick as you edit your work, hoping you have enough images to show the client and pray they are satisfied enough.

As you get more experience, your anxiety will diminish. You will come to jobs with more gear for those difficult moments you anticipate. You now know how bad it could get.

Just know all professions have a lifecycle that you grow into becoming a veteran.

The lifecycle for the professional photographer

First five years–Lots of mistakes and primarily the way we learn
Second five years–Still making mistakes, but now learning to round out our coverage
Third five years–Have a style that is established that is professional.
Forth five years–Nailing most assignments and not just delivering what is expected, but now experimenting with stretching beyond
Fifth five years–Going after new markets and often trying new things to add to our portfolio of skills.

You will notice that every five years, you will have mastered a new skill you started and added this to your portfolio of skills. This is because to remain competitive, you add a new skill every five years and take about five years to perfect it.

Some skills that you might add over time

Lighting with hot shoe flash
Using studio strobes in a studio setting
Portrait Lighting
Product lighting
Location lighting
Video

Checklist for Sharp Photos

by Stanley LearyJuly 29, 2013February 2, 2024Photography

Nikon D4, 28-300mm [85mm], ISO 800, ƒ/8, 1/400

Squeeze the shutter — Don’t punch the shutter release

Keep the camera as still as possible. If you can shoot with a tripod, all the better. If you can shoot with a monopod. One of the biggest reasons most people’s photos are not sharp is camera movement.

Shutter Speed and Focal Length work together.

If you are paying attention to which lens you have on your camera and how this affects your shutter speed, your photos may be more sharp than they are. The rule of thumb is to turn your lens into a fraction and use that to set your shutter speed. Put one over the focal length and then use the shutter speed closest to that as the slowest for hand-holding the camera.

A 200mm lens should give you 1/200 shutter speed. A 50mm should be held at least 1/50. If you do not have 1/200 and the closest shutter speed is 1/250, use this, and don’t go under 1/125.

Nikon D4, Sigma 120-300mm ƒ/2.8 with Sigma 1.4 converter, ISO 900, ƒ/5.6, 1/2000

Subject Speed

Photographing a building versus a race car is a big difference. You can have a shutter speed that lasts for hours and not affect the sharpness of a photo, but stopping a bullet in flight might require 1/10,000 to freeze the action. I had always heard 1/500 to stop action. From my personal experience, the razor-sharp photos of sports tend to be about 1/2000 for me.

Aperture

The depth-of-field you choose can make a photo appear out of focus even if it is in focus. For example, when you shoot at ƒ/two and the subject is 15 inches from the lens, the sharp area in front and behind the point you are focusing on is most likely less than an inch. However, move that subject to 15 feet, and your depth of field may now be a foot or more. Find the balance between ƒ/16, keeping everything in focus and wide open ƒ/2.8 with great Bokeh throwing the background out of focus. I often shoot ƒ/four on a Nikon 400mm ƒ/2.8 to get more usable images. Focus Miss On many cameras today, you can have multiple focus points. My Nikon D4 has 51 different points for focusing.

Depending on my focus mode, it is either more straightforward to focus or more difficult. The point is that people often need to tell the camera where to focus. When doing portraits, I use the eyes as my focus. If they are turned slightly to the camera, one eye is closer than the other, and I always try to get the closest eye in focus. This is when I may change my aperture to be sure they are both in focus.

With Nikon Capture software, I can check where I was focusing later and see if I missed my focus. After using this to help me, I realized I needed more focus due to me and not the camera’s capability.

96:one “We Believe” Farewell Concert Historic Sanctuary

Post Processing

I use either PhotoShop unsharp mask or Lightroom to sharpen the image for how it is being used. Most images could use just a little sharpening. If you overdo the sharpening, it will not look good. A little will give it a bit of a sharpness “kick.” Use a small radius (perhaps a pixel or less) and a large amount.

Most photos are only processed with sharpening once I export out of Lightroom.

If I post the photos to the web, I choose the setting here when I export Screen and Standard.

You can make other choices when you export paper quality and influence your choice.

Success as Independent Photographer—Requires People Skllls

by Stanley LearyJuly 26, 2013Photography

According to the Portland Business Journal, people skills are described as:
• Understanding ourselves and moderating our responses
• Talking effectively and empathizing accurately
• Building relationships of trust, respect and productive interactions.

Running a successful business requires good people skills. I think the Portland Business Journal has it right when they describe what it is.

Earlier I wrote here about where my time goes as a photographer. The majority of my time is spent using people skills to engage with: 1) potential clients; 2) clients or 3) subjects.

If you are insecure then you are going to have to take some risks and get out of your shell or find another career, because your success will be directly connected to your people skills.

Nikon D2X, Sigma 120-300mm with 1.4 converter, ISO 400, ƒ/4, 1/5000

Understanding ourselves and moderating our responses

Understanding ourselves is really about knowing our elevator speech. Why do I want to talk to you and what is my objective. You have to know what you want to accomplish or you will be unintelligible to people.

It isn’t all about you either. You have to learn to moderate your responses so that you are connecting to people and what is important to them.

Centenary assistant coach Adam Walsh talks to Justin Glenn (33) during timeout against Georgia Tech during the first half at Alexander Memorial Coliseum. [Nikon D2X, Sigma 120-300mm, ISO 400, ƒ/7.1, 1/200, 4 Alienbees B1600 with sports reflectors, Pocket Wizards used to trigger them]

Talking effectively and empathizing accurately

The first time I talked about anything with people, I made mistakes. I analyzed what I did and why it failed. I started reading books and going to seminars to learn how to be more effective on whatever I was trying to do.

I went through premarital counseling and discovered this alone didn’t prevent mistakes. It was through mistakes I became more effective and developed more empathy. You see others made mistakes with me and hurt me.

When I did my first few jobs I discovered people abused me if I didn’t have a good contract in place. I learned to communicate expectations I understood from the client and my expectations and have them written for both of us to sign.

When I first contacted people I was asking do you have any jobs for me. Today I research clients more and come to them with ideas of how I could do something for them. I learned over time to learn what was important to others more than what was only important to me. I was learning to empathize.

Nikon D2X, Sigma 18-125mm, ISO ISO 400, ƒ/7.1, 1/350

Building relationships of trust, respect and productive interactions

I have learned that the more people get to know me the more they trusted me. The more transparent the better my business became. I also learned over time that too transparent and letting people hear your thoughts all the time can backfire. It took years of mistakes to learn how to have more productive interactions.

I learned the more I was helping the client get what they needed or wanted helped me to pay my bills.

I learned that you can share your expertise carefully and they client will appreciate your thoughts. The balance was learning to live with their choice when I didn’t agree with their choices. I was learning to respect their thoughts and opinions.

Even when clients told me they thought I was the expert didn’t mean they would always do what I suggested. What I learned was they were listening and sometimes the timing wasn’t good for reasons I didn’t know.

I started to watch years later my ideas being done by clients. I also learned to not have to get the credit all the time. When they would come back to me later with an idea that I had given to them, I was learning over time to smile and tell them what a great idea.

I also learned to share a little of my personal life when appropriate with clients. I found that they wanted to know about my family, just not all the time.

If you want to be a successful photographer, then develop your people skills.

Nikon Firmware Updates: Two Main Places to Check

by Stanley LearyJuly 25, 2013Nikon D4

First go here to check for your camera’s firmware updates. It will look like the screen capture above minus the red arrows. However those two arrows direct you to those two updates you need to check on: 1) DSLR & 2) Distortion Control Data.

Here are the shortcut links for you:

Firmware download links: Mac | Windows

Installation instructions: Mac | Windows

What is barrel and pincushion distortion?

from Nikon’s website
– Barrel distortion normally affects images shot with wide angle lenses and results in an image that appears to have details that bow outwards, away from the centre of the image.
– Pincushion distortion normally affects images shot with telephoto lenses and results in the image appearing as thought it is being pulled towards the centre.

An example of Barrel Distortion

An example of Pincushion Distortion

Nikon D4

You need to know what firmware you have on your camera. Check your manual, but for the most Nikon DSLR just go to the wrench icon and then look for firmware.

Here I am showing you the screen that shows up once you have downloaded the firmware update and put this on the memory card and then into the camera. When you go to firmware it will ask if you want to update.

Here you can see that I updated my Lens Correction from 1.004 to 1.009.

If you attach your flash as I did on my camera and check firmware you will have four different software updates possible.

What do all these refer to on the Nikon D4

A: I/O processor
B: Expeed processor
L: Lens Distortion Control Data
S: Flash

If you shoot RAW the RAW file doesn’t have the corrections, but the JPEG thumbnail does have the corrections. For the most part if you use Nikon Capture, Adobe PhotoShop or Adobe Lightroom you can apply these corrections to the RAW file there.

Flash

The Flash I had on the camera for the 5.002 firmware was my Nikon SB-900.

Photographer Public Speaking Tips

by Stanley LearyJuly 23, 2013visual storytelling

Next month I am speaking at Grandfather Mountain’s Camera Clinic. As I was preparing for this, I realized each time I speak I am trying to improve over the time before.

Many years ago Dennis Fahringer asked me to be a guest instructor in the Youth With A Mission Photography School. The very first time I spoke to the group I felt like I was not connecting with the class. By the end of the week teaching I was connecting. If you would like to attend that school Dennis Fahringer created a web page for all your questions here.

What I learned during that first time teaching in Kona, Hawaii were a few things. If you find yourself asked to do public speaking to groups here are some tips that I found have worked for me.

Break your talk up into segments. Think of beginning, middle and end or like chapters of a book.

Example of your work

I believe the very first thing people need to hear and see from me is what I do. This is why I am often asked to speak.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMUlWq7EImY]
Create a visual elevator speech. I’m sure you are familiar with the concept of the “elevator speech.” The idea is that — if you are asked what you do for a living or what your company does — you should be able to give a complete, compelling answer in the time it takes to ride an elevator to your destination.

I have many small multimedia presentations and one of those is a 2-minute elevator speech. I like to start with this and then quickly show one of my most recent multimedia presentations to warm up the audience.

This approach helps establish my credentials and why I am speaking to the group on a topic.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEgIfIMyrK0]
Your Story

While people are interested in what you do, they are equally interested in your story on how you came to this career.

If you were in the audience you will have noticed that I first had you look at a screen for about 7 minutes showing my work with just a brief setup for the multimedia shows. You will now notice that I have gone to a black screen and now visually shifted your attention from the screen to me talking.

Rather than just telling my story I engage the audience with my story. Since I am usually talking to adults, I tell the group how I didn’t talk at all until I was three years old and this was a major concern for my parents. I ask them what this often means about a child. Usually someone in the audience knows the answer—I most likely am autistic.

Autism is a disorder of neural development characterized by impaired social interaction and verbal and non-verbal communication, and by restricted, repetitive or stereotyped behavior. The diagnostic criteria require that symptoms become apparent before a child is three years old.
—Wikipedia

I then share how ironic it is that someone with autism is a professional communicator. After a few comments on how I still have some quirks in my personality due to autism I find the audience is much more sympathetic and appreciative that I have been so open.

This takes about seven minutes to share.

My topic

I try my best to keep my core presentation to 18 minutes. Why? Well I think the TED talks format seems to resonate right now with most audiences.

TED curator Chris Anderson says:

It’s long enough to be serious and short enough to hold people’s attention. It turns out that this length also works incredibly well online. It’s the length of a coffee break. So, you watch a great talk, and forward the link to two or three people. It can go viral, very easily.

The 18-minute length also works much like the way Twitter forces people to be disciplined in what they write. By forcing speakers who are used to going on for 45 minutes to bring it down to 18, you get them to really think about what they want to say. What is the key point they want to communicate? It has a clarifying effect. It brings discipline.

Often this is when I go back to the projector and setup the topic with establishing first there is a problem.

Then I follow it with a solution.

Next step is I establish another problem.

Then I follow it with a solution.

This method is great for moving people through the subject to me showing my problem solving techniques and solutions I have come up with for the problems I see in the industry.

I learned this technique from Nancy Duarte who uncovered the structure of great storytelling.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nYFpuc2Umk]

Questions

I try to allow for about 10 minutes of questions at the end of my talks. If no one is asking questions, I go into my Socratic method to get them thinking and ask questions to the audience on the topic.

I hope this helps you when you prepare to give your next speech.

Need a speaker?

Give me a call if you need a speaker for your next event.

What to include or leave out of a photo

by Stanley LearyJuly 22, 2013Nikon D2X

Nikon D2X, 70-200mm, ISO 100, ƒ/20, 1/8 Tripod Used

I really enjoy photographing science and technology. When I go into a lab I am often having to create the photo.

Lighting Diagram

In these photos we were wanting to show the tools this manufacturer makes to help with clear retainers. The difficulty in the photo was to show the blue flame to heat up the tools so they can make adjustments to the clear plastic retainers. This is why I used a tripod to keep the camera still during the 1/8 shutter speed exposure.

I used a soft box to light the subject and tools. I used a separate light with a blue gel for the background.

The elements that I included was the square plastic which was used to make the retainer the technician is holding. I have included the different trimming tools and the Dental Burner used to heat the tools.

Nikon D2X, 70-200mm, ISO 100, ƒ/20, 1/8 Tripod Used

I also gave the client another version without the technicians face and the background light was turned off. I had the plastic square placed to help separate the clear retainer from the background.

Every type of photo should cause the photographer to think about what to include and exclude in a photograph. You can do this by moving around the subject, your lens choice and how close or far away you choose to be from the subject.

What needs to be in the photo? You should always be asking this question and being sure your composition helps to guide the audience to the important parts in the photo.