Tag Archives: Shop Talk

A lesson in travel photography (or “how I learned my lesson”)

November 22, 2009 7:27 pm ⋅ 2 Comments ⋅

Who doesn’t love to travel? I know I sure do! I, like a lot of travel lovers, do not get to do it as much as I would like to. Everyone likes to take photos when they travel. When a photographer goes on vacation, photography can become the most important thing. More important than experiences

Three years ago, I up and took a voyage to England. Alone. You can read a little about it here. Besides the fact that I was already in love with the Motherland before I set foot on British soil, I knew the main purpose of my trip was photography, photography, photography. I owned a dSLR, but I was so high and mighty that I didn’t take it. I documented my entire trip on film. There were times when camera malfunctions made me second-guess this decision, but I don’t regret leaving the digital camera back in Mississippi while I went to England. In the end, I was glad I’d gone to England on my own because when you are a photographer on vacay, it can be difficult to juggle your desire to photograph with being fair to your traveling companions. I could stop and go as much as I want, come and go as I pleased, all to suit my photographic needs.

Both the issue of film vs. digital and how to get in satisfying photography while traveling with others cropped up for me recently. I traveled with about 7 of my friends to St. Louis, Missouri for a quick visit. I, being me, left my nice digital SLR at home and opted instead to take my Nikon FE and Holga 120N. I didn’t stock up on film before I left for Missouri because I figured I could just do that when I got up there. When some of my friends realized I didn’t have my digital camera, they were both perplexed and slightly disappointed because they new the limitations of film might hamper the volume of photos I could take on the trip. I was somewhat offended that my artistic vision for documenting our time in St. Louis was being questioned. Then some things happened along the way that caused me to learn my lesson.

I am very stubborn about using film rather than digital in most areas of my photography. However, I’m going to have to admit now there are some drawbacks to basing yourself in film photography. For example, when my friends and I arrived in St. Louis, it was getting late in the day and the sunlight was fading fast. We went to the zoo, and there were definitely certain shots I couldn’t get because I had a slow film speed, 100 ASA, loaded in my camera. Sure, I am quite pleased with some of the photos I DID get, but the scope of my photography that first night in the STL was not what it should’ve been.

Nikon FE and Holga 120N at the St. Louis Zoo. 

Tragedy struck my plan of being too cool for school and do only film photography in St. Louis: I actually LEFT my wallet at the restaurant where we’d stopped for lunch on our way to St. Louis. Cape Girardeau, Missouri. I discovered this when I went to stock up on film and had no way of paying for it. D’oh! My lack of preparedness bit me in the rear. Yes, Amanda Raney did go out of town with only one roll of 35mm film in her possession. Oh how the mighty have fallen…

I ran out of film pretty early in the day Sunday morning. Before we’d even left our super cool hotel, in fact! And we still had hours of St. Louis awesomeness to enjoy before going home. What’s a girl to do??

Nikon FE and Holga 120N at and around the hotel Sunday morning

All was not lost, thanks to the darling Annie who decided I should use her point-and-shoot digital camera while we spent our last few hours in St. Louis before going back to Memphis. I’m sure she knew not being able to take photos like I wanted was just eating me up inside. If you think I’m uppity about not using my dSLR for everything, you should see how uppity I normally am about my ever having to use a point-and-shoot digital! Once again, I had to learn my lesson: some camera is better than no camera at all. And guess what: that little camera of Annie’s wasn’t half bad! It performed well, I’d say. We went to the St. Louis Art Museum, the galleria, and a cool pizza joint for lunch. I ended up being quite pleased with a lot of the photos. Just gotta know how to get the best out of these little cameras.

Further adventures in STL, taken with Annie’s Sony Cybershot 

For the events that unfolded with my photography in St. Louis, I am taking the “all’s well that ends well” viewpoint. I didn’t come back with a portfolio stacked with shots of that city, but I came back with a lot of fun (and some quite nice) shots that fulfilled my need to do photography while traveling.

So what is my conclusion in all of this? When you, as a photographer, are going somewhere special, you have to assess the purpose of your trip. Is this a trip that is going to be based mostly around photography? If so, how is this going to work out if I’m traveling with others who are not mainly interested in doing fine photography while we’re away? Even if I had had all the film in the world while I was in St. Louis, I wouldn’t have been able to do everything I wanted to photographically because I was with people whose purpose was to hang out with friends in a different city, not pack in as much photography as possible.

I had to learn that maybe it’s okay that I go out of town with my friends and have a main purpose of just being with my buddies. When I access the purpose of future out of town trips, I will decide if it’s to hang out with my friends, or if I’m planning on coming back with a body of work from that city. After my experience in St. Louis, if the answer is “my main purpose is to just have fun with my friends,” I’m honestly just going to throw my digital camera and maybe a small 35mm camera in my bag to take care of the type of photography I’ll do while I’m away.

It was my first time to travel to St. Louis and I just LOVED the city. I was just DYING because there were so many awesome things I saw and I wanted to capture in photos. It just wasn’t practical this time around. I resigned myself that I would be “forced” to go back to STL another time specifically for a photo excursion. Oh, the things I’ll do for my work!

Posted in: camera equipment, friends, informational, travel photography ⋅ Tagged: , , , , , ,

Bokeh Wednesday

November 18, 2009 8:41 pm ⋅ Leave a Comment ⋅

It’s been awhile since I’ve done a Bokeh Wednesday, but here it goes:

Since I’ve had my Pentax K20D, I have really been missing the ability to do macro shots. For my Nikon D50 (my previous dSLR) and my Nikon film cameras, I have something called macro extension tubes to do close-up work. I mainly use this type of photography for my food photos, but it occasionally comes in handy in other areas as well. Essentially these extension tubes screw onto your lens, and create a distance between the film plane (or in the case of digital, the image sensor) and it causes the lens to focus more closely than normal (there is a more scientific explanation for this, but I am not well-versed in science or mathematics. Alls I know is that the tubes work!) You can stack tubes of different heights together to make your lens focus closer and closer – and it can get REAL close, folks, if you use more than one tube. I generally don’t do this because it’s just not my thang. However, macro tubes have really defined my food photography (there I go again, giving away my secrets…) I love ’em. Both my new Pentax-mount tubes and the ones I used on my Nikon bodies (which, incidentally, were designed for a whole nother lens mount called m42 which I have an adapter to make fit on Nikon, but that’s another topic for another day) are manual focus, generic tubes. They’re cheap as chips. I paid around $10 for the m42 tubes and abotu $12 for the new ones I just got for the Pentax.

I thought I should bake something to show off/test out the new tubes. I made pumpkin muffins. I even tried out my new snowflake silicone muffin “tin” (not really a tin since it’s not metal, eh?) I sprinkled some powdered sugar on top to add interest for the photo. I say the new extension tubes work pretty well! This was taken with the shortest tube attached – I told you it’ll get ridiculously close if you put on more than one. Look how close just the shortest one got us!

Of course, the more closely you focus on something, the more shallow the depth of field is going to be. That means with extension tubes, your depth of field is going to be WHOA shallow. You’d have to really close your aperture down to get much in focus. I don’t want too much in focus, so I keep my aperture pretty wide for this stuff.

So that’s it for this Bokeh Wednesday. Shallow depth of field AND pumpkin muffins? Mmmmm. Doesn’t get much better than that!

Posted in: informational ⋅ Tagged: , , , , , , ,

“The Stories BEHIND the pictures”

November 12, 2009 5:00 pm ⋅ 4 Comments ⋅

Along with being a place for my photographic observations and AWESOMENES, I feel like the Shoot With Personality (SWP) blog is a place for the stories behind the pictures.

There are a number of places on the internet where folks see a lot of my photos, such as Flickr or Facebook. Most of my photos you see on here aren’t exclusive to SWP. However, I enjoy the SWP blog as a venue for giving you behind the scenes insight into these photos.

For example? If you know me on Flickr or Facebook, you may see the following photo:

And you may get bits of the story behind this and the other photos of my friend Jason from this session. But you won’t hear the whole story if you see these photos somewhere besides this blog.

Part of the story for this photos series is about how I and my co-workers sometimes have too much time on our hands and like to blow off steam by taking ridiculous pictures in one of the studios that isn’t being used for clients at that moment.

Another part of the story is, there was this sign that was made by someone in our department as a reminder for another member of our team. Jason liked the sign and kept it for himself. It was good for a laugh. Then, I had this flash of inspiration before work yesterday, and let Jason know that I had envisioned photographing him holding the sign whilst wearing his prescription Ray Ban sunglasses. Killer. This is how it looked in my head when I thought it up:

I knew I would be posting these online at Facebook, as kinda goofy pictures for our friends to see. I upped the comedic anty though, when I had another flash of inspiration: I could say that the photos of Jason with the “Stay Calm” sign were photos for a public service ad campaign, similar to one running in Memphis called “Chill, don’t kill.” This campaign includes both TV commercials and billboards throughout the city.

It would probably be a better story if I could say “So I had this brilliant idea: I’ll take pictures of Jason as a spoof on the Chill, don’t kill ads!” and proceeded to do so. But I really didn’t think of it until after I’d already taken the pictures.

Yet another aspect to these particular photos is the type of portrait session they would be considered if Jason had been one of my customers as a portrait photographer. It’s called the “black-and-white” session (duh) and, along with the “white-on-white” session, is the only type of portraits I took during my stint as senior portrait photographer that I actually felt were “Amanda-style.”

When I first began the portrait studio job, I struggled because all these studio lights and posed photos felt like the polar opposite to my normal, photojournalistic/documentry-style of shooting. Having to pose my subjects felt counterintuitive for me. However, there was something about the black-and-white and white-on-white portraits that felt like they answered the question “if Amanda were going to do pictures in a studio, what would they be like?” (not that I or anyone else have ever asked that question.)

It’s been strange for me to be producing SO much photographic work all summer, but none of going into my online portfolio. This is due to the fact that a) most anyone who was a customer here was under the age of 18 and I’d need permission to post their photos online and b) the studio pretty much owns the rights to said photos, not me. I wanted to show you guys what I learned on summer vacation though. Which is one reason I chose to shoot the “Stay Calm” session of Jason in the black-and-white style. Jason’s not a minor and my job doesn’t own the rights to these! I’m free to show them to you!


Ray Charles? I had said something ridiculous, and Jason threw his head back in laughter.
Posted in: Uncategorized ⋅ Tagged: , , ,

J’aime les détails? Moi aussi!

September 18, 2009 7:03 pm ⋅ Leave a Comment ⋅

J’aime les détails is  apparently French for “I love details.” Which I do. I don’t actually know French, btw, aside from “répéter s’il vous plaît” and “moi aussi”  – I remember that from the six weeks of French I took in 11th grade before dropping public school and becoming homeschooled. I only know this “I love details” phrase in because I am a member of a Flickr group by the same name. I love posting photos to this group because it made me realize how many photos I take are of details rather than of something in its entirety. I usually go in close to show just the particular part of whatever I am photographing. I could give you lots of examples of this (look at this week’s Bokeh Wednesday, for instance) However, I will show you with a couple of photos I took yesterday whilst on my break from work.

I was at Borders looking for a certain book (which they didn’t have in stock.  Boo.) On my way back to my car, I noticed something odd about a drain grate in the parking lot. There appeared to be something sort of hay-like wrapped around part of the grate. I grabbed my Pentax K20d with 50mm/2 lens and took a couple of shots.

This shot is alright. I liked it because I purposefully included the raised relief of  “Memphis”  at the bottom.

But, I like this version of the photo better. I got in closer with my camera for a tighter shot. I think it puts more attention on the bit of this grate that I thought was interesting – the grass or hay that was wrapped around the center. That’s what caught my eye in the first place and what I thought should be the more obvious subject of the shot.

So, for any of you would-be photographers out there, I highly suggest shifting your perspective from “the big picture” to the more fine details of whatever you’re shooting. It’s my favorite thing to do, and all you Shoot With Personality, Jrs. out there might like it as well!

Posted in: informational, shop talk ⋅ Tagged: ,