Why a great picture is still important in business.

A couple of years ago I started taking driving lessons (better late than never) and so I went online to look for an instructor.
As you can probably imagine there were a huge number of choices in my area. I eventually decided on one after a few hours of looking.
Was the choice based on pass rates? Nope.
How about a really impressive website? Not so much.
Maybe the price? No... Well ok, maybe a little bit but this still wasn't my main reason.
I chose the instructor who looked friendly in her picture. My reasoning being that I was going to have to spend hours in a car with her so it needed to be someone who I could get along with (and as it turned out I needed two tests this time a lot longer than I was expecting...).

Your business works hard at projecting the right image, from it's website through to flyers and brochures and even how staff dress, but there are still a whole bunch of businesses that end up with photographs of their staff that are little more than (or in some cases exactly the same as) snapshots that belong on Facebook. What do they say about you?

An example. I was at a music festival and my friend's son took a picture of me in a helmet he'd just bought that happened to match the T shirt I was wearing at the time.


Pretty right? This went straight up on Facebook and caused a large amount of hilarity. Fair enough. It's a snapshot taken at an event, people want to see silliness. But would you hire this guy to take your wedding photographs?
How about this one:

 

Better. Nice lighting, a bit of gentle photoshopping (not that I'm vain or anything) and presenting a much better, professional image. This is the portrait I use for my LinkedIn and Twitter profiles.

The thing that a lot of people forget is that a photograph can say an awful lot about you. The subconscious cues really do have an effect on the viewer.

Lets look at angles.

I took both of these portraits on the same day using the same equipment but they have a very different effect. The one on the left is taken from a slightly lower angle. this emphasises the strength of the jaw, closes the eyes a little and makes the subject seem much more dominant and perhaps a little aggressive. On the right, from an angle that is much more level with the eyes he seems more approachable, more friendly (for the record he's a really nice guy, not scary at all).
So what does your photograph say about you?

If you want to have some great portraits taken I'm currently running a competition to win a day of photography for your business for free. There are also other prizes of discounts.
Details here http://bit.ly/NJLzHQ
You just need to send me a DM on Twitter or an email to enter.

Little scam alert

For the last half hour or so I've had 'David', his supervisor 'Charlie' and a third senior supervisor (whose name I didn't even bother to remember) all with very strong Indian acents trying to tell me that my computer was seriously infected with malware and files that hamper my internet and all sorts of horrible things!
I was dubious to say the least (hey, my Norton antivirus is bang up to date on its definitions) but went through the process with them just to see what they would do.
I asked repeatedly what the error message consisted of, they couldn't tell me - Clue 1.
I asked what the name of the malicious file was. Apparently a really serious W52 malware that I couldn't find on any search - Clue 2.
They got me to hold down the windows key and hit R - which brings up the run window and then got me to start up my event viewer (this is a little program that lets you see all the litle messages that go in the background of your computer). They talked me through (about five times really slowly) how to filter the list so that I could see lots of scary looking red exclamation marks and yellow warning triangles.
I gasped as they showed me my error logs on event viewer!
I shuddered at how my antivirus wasn't protecting me!
I shrieked when told that I was told that online shopping sites actually aren't secure and they download malicious files to my computer!
He then, very politely, directed me to a site www.windowspccure.com and asked me to login so that he could help me deal with all the horrible internet nasties that had made it onto my computer - and there was Clue 3.
I asked him to wait as the web page was loading (yet more evidence that my computer is being eaten at by nasty little gremlins!) and I did a quick google search.
Guess what, there have been a few scams done in exactly this way over the last couple of years.
All of them originated from India, all of them asked you to login to a website so they could take control of your pc and help you with your problems - presumably one of which is that you have too much money and they'd like to relieve you of that burden.
I didn't login to their site, told them I knew it was a scam and hung up.

Things to remember:
Don't for goodness sake login to that Windows PC Cure website on the link above.
If you allow someone to have remote access to your computer they will be able to get hold of all your records, bank data and any other little juicy bits and pieces you have on there.
Microsoft does not do cold calling regarding anything, much less any error reports that come through to them.
Your computer will have a whole list of little things going on if you look at Event Viewer, the majority of which are no big deal.
Make sure your computer is virus protected (yes even you Mac users given the discovery of the first Mac OSX virus - details and removal tool here ).

Please pass this on and lets put these scammers out of business.

Q: What do you do on a cold Sunday afternoon?

A: Take some retro style pictures of your wife... Well that's what I do anyway.

Yep, that's why I do this.

I'm just in the process of getting prepard for my first ever wedding fair on Sunday ( The East Midlands Wedding Show , if you're in the area drop by and say hi) and amongst all of the decision making on what to wear and how to present myself I've been sorting out which pictures to show.
The albums were decided on weeks ago (hey, getting stuff custom made in Italy isn't an overnight thing), the flyers are just right and the canvasses look really cool so it's all down to what I'm going to be showing on my nice big monitor slideshow.
Looking back on some of the pictures from the last few weddings I've done I started smiling, even had a giggle at a few. I got reminded that encouraging 230 people to do jazz hands for a photograph just so I could get them smiling and enjoying having their picture taken was a huge amount of fun.

I really like looking at the pictures, I know the happy couples do too. It's nice to be involved in what is a really romantic occasion with (usually) some laughs thrown in.
That's why I do wedding photography and it's nice to remind myself of that.

An inspiration? Me? Gosh. And why a red dress is important.

There's a bit of back story with this one, so I hope you're sitting comfortably.
A couple of weeks ago a rather nice man came round to my house from RSG Portable Appliance Testing (who are very reasonably priced, efficient and get back to you promptly - no, I'm not on commision) to do the tests on my gear to make sure it's all safe. So while he was doing lots of technical things I made him a coffee and we got chatting.
He mentioned his girlfriend was just doing an online photography course and was having a few issues with portraits. I said that she should drop me a message if she needed a little chat so a few days later she did.
So on Saturday I picked up a few things and droppped round to her flat.
She seemed a little nervous at first but we got talking about a few things and some silly jokes later we got into the reason I was there. Her dad is into photography and she wanted to learn some more herself so she went to a local photography club (which she found to be quite stuffy) and with the course that she was doing she was finding some of it a bit difficult.

Now just to be clear - I'm a firm believer that if somone is trying to teach you something and you don't understand it it's not your fault it's their's. They need to find a better or different way to explain it so it makes sense to you. End of. Looking briefly through the course materials it seemed like there was a lot of space taken up saying what to do, but not really a massive amount of detail on how to do it well.

So anyway, we got to talking about portraits and she showed me some printouts of her assignment, which was to take two with natural light and two with artificial light. The natural light ones actually weren't too bad, the artificial light ones were less succesful, but they all had a similar problem which is quite common when people first start taking portraits. Their faces, particularly their noses, were slightly distorted. They seemed out of proportion, you ever had that? Well there's a very easy fix.

Step back and zoom in
This is going to sound really stupid but if something is closer to you it looks bigger. We all know this. So when you're taking a photograph if you have the camera really close to the person's face anything that sticks out towards you will become bigger in the final shot. The nose is a common one, but if they have angled their head up a bit the chin will look a lot broader (actually a good sneaky trick to make men look like they have a strong jaw too if used carefully).

So we chatted some more and she said that her pictures weren't as sharp as she'd like them to be. I asked to see her bridge camera and noticed it was already in manual mode. Yay! She had the confidence to take the training wheels off and make all the decisions herself.
I had a look at the pictures on her laptop (and zoomed right in) that she wasn't happy with and saw the problem she was having wasn't with the focus but parts of the picture that should be dots (pores in the skin for example) were actually very short lines, again a common issue but easy to solve.

Shutter Speed
Some of the portraits she'd taken it were in quite dark conditions so she'd looked at her light meter, adjusted her settings and then taken the shot. All good so far. The problem was that, looking at the data for the picture on her computer, she had set the shutter speed far too slow (in the case of the one I looked at it was about a third of a second). If you're taking a photograph of a person and you're hand holding the camera it's a good idea to have a reasonably fast shutter speed, anything from 1/50 of a second and up, so you don't risk a slight blur when you take the picture or if the person moves a little. It also depends on the lens you're using and how good you are at keeping the camera really still but this is a reasonable rule of thumb.
Now you can go slower than this but you would need to experiment with what works for you.

So after that she had a look in my camera bag (lust shining in her eyes) and then I told her how much it all cost (starting her wondering what the hell she's gotten herself into with this photography thing).
We talked about her next assignment, which is to recreate a photograph she likes and had a quick browse through some of the ones already done by other people on the course... Hmmmm.
I reckoned she could do better than most of them.

 After some looking around online and talking about what sort of thing she liked and how to see where the light was coming from in the shots (hint - look for the reflections in the eyes and where the shadows are falling) I suggested she tried to recreate one of my favourite portraits:

Gloria Swanson by Edward Steichen for Vanity Fair - 1924

It does require some care and attention to detail, particularly with where the focus is and where the light is falling on the subject, but is doable without huge amounts of expensive lighting equipment.

So I left her feeling pretty happy and excited and went home to the pile of washing up I ought to have done earlier (my wife puts up with a lot).

Later that day she posted on Facebook that she'd had an inspirational afternoon, I got a kind of warm fuzzy feeling from that, and what did it cost me?

A little petrol and a couple of hours.

This got me to thinking. I like helping other people, I like the feeling it gives me so why don't I do it more often?

I've seen an idea floating around online started by The Bloggess involving the travelling red dress. Essentially it boils down to women giving themselves a boost by wearing an absolutely beautiful but thoroughly impractical red dress (imagine going down to the supermarket in a red ballgown on a Wednesday afternoon for no other reason than to feel wonderful).
The dress then gets handed on to someone else and they do it too. I liked the idea so much I've liked the Travelling Red Dress Facebook Page and offered to donate my services as photographer for a red dress day.

I'll let you know how it all turns out.

A little side project

So anyway, my wife has been struggling with her barely functioning laptop for quite some time. It kept misbehaving, doing impressions of a moody teenager and having a tantrum for no reason and generally dying on her when she least expected it.
So this year in the January sales she got a new one.
It's shiny.
It's red.
It actually functions as something other than a doorstop.
In short, it works.
So she made a simple request for me to video her destroying the old one, giving vent to all those frustrations that had built up over the many many months of trying to coax some life out of it.
Then she turned her back for one second and I'd done a storyboard, scouted locations, thought through her makeup and wardrobe and had a great idea about the song I wanted the destruction to occur to.
So, after spending a long time editing it all together I present the End of the PoS.

Thanks go to Tova for being generally wonderful and wearing not a lot in very chilly weather and to the lovely chaps who are Talanas for allowing me to use their carefully thought out and meticulously performed music for what is, in essence, actually pretty silly.
Hope you like it.

I love breasts not cryptic messages

What bees can you get milk from?
Boo bees (boobies... get it? Just me? Oh. ok then.)

I like breasts.
I like them in all different shapes and sizes.
I like to photograph them like this:

The amazing Jess Abidde

So far no surprises right? This is pretty common. I mean, you just have to watch everyone's favourite Aunty Gok for a few minutes before you realise that even gay men love breasts.
Women love breasts. They talk about them, support them, dress them up and decorate them and yet somewhere in that wonderful place that is Facebook there is yet again a campaign to put out cryptic messages that in some way are supposed to help them.
You may well have seen a few odd status updates on Facebook - well more odd than usual - with no explanation as to what they mean. I'm not here to spoil the current game but in the past it's involved posting barnyard animals and locations around the house (where the ladies in question kept their handbags but the last part wasn't included so all we got was 'I like it by the bed.' or 'I like it next to the sofa.' the animals one I still don't quite understand).
Men are supposed to be kept in the dark about this, as the message being circulated says 'It's time to confuse the men again (not that it's really hard to do ;])'
Leaving aside the glaring sexism of that statement, I have one question.

How does this raise awareness for Breast Cancer?

Posting what essentially boils down to a massive non sequitur doesn't really help make everyone aware that breast cancer is an important health issue that involves all of us. Not only should men who are lucky enough to have regular contact with women's breasts know what to look for but should also know what to look for in themselves.
Yup. That's right. Men get breast cancer too. The incidence is less than 1% of the female rate but it still exists. Should men be excluded from this issue?

So I'm stating it nice and clearly. I care about the health of the woman I love. I care about the health of my friends. Stop all this silly childish nonsense on Facebook and actually say something useful.
Instead of being random post these and get involved:
Breast Awareness - What to look for
Like the Breast Cancer Care Facebook Page
Take part in a Breast Cancer Care Fundraising Event

New Camera! Errrrrrrmmm, eh?

A little before Christmas I went along with a bunch of friends to go and see the Red Bull Racing team event in Milton Keynes. A little chat with one of them went along these lines...

I got my camera out with what I affectionately call Lenscalibur on the front (a pretty big really cool lens).

Her - Oh, I just got a new camera. I should have brought it along. You could've shown me how to use it. I don't really know what to do with it.
Me - Oh, sure no problem. Quick question, did you read the manual at all?
Her - No of course not. (looking at me like I'd started to dribble.)
Me - Riiiiiight.

This seems pretty common with people I talk to so I figured it was about time to share a few tips for those of us who were lucky enough to get a new camera this year.

1) Embrace your inner geek and read the manual.

Yes all of it. No you're not allowed to skip the boring bits, they're character building. Sit with the camera there while you're reading and try out the different buttons and switches so you know where they all are. It won't bite (much).

2) Go take a lot of pictures.
Sounds pretty obvious right? The thing is that if the camera only comes out occasionally you're not going to remember what everything does. Practice so that when you need to take a picture at a party you can get it set up right and start shooting rather than having that “Smile... No wait, hang on a sec, that didn't work... Let me just try this... I'll just be a minute...” thing that we've all come to know and grimace through.

3) Take lots more pictures (but in different situations).

Ok, so this looks a lot like number 2, but there's a subtle difference. Your camera will probably have a setting for all sorts of different things like landscapes, portraits, pets, fireworks, indoors, wet Thursday afternoons... Well maybe not the last one, but if you deliberately put yourself in those different sort of places to take particular shots you're going to see how it all works.

Done all that? Great! You know how your camera works now right? Awesome.
Sneaky trick time...

Half pressing the shutter.
Picture the scene... You're in the pub. The camera comes out to immortalise everyone's advanced state of refreshment and they all dive on top of each other in the corner to pose with stupid grins. You point the camera, say smile and then you all wait for an eternity for the shot to happen. This results in very fixed smiles, a glazed look in the eyes, someone getting bored and moving out of shot and generally all that stuff that we've come to love seeing on Facebook pages.

But there is an answer.

Get everyone roughly where you want them. Now press the shutter button but only halfway down. The camera wakes up, does it's little focussing thing and decides if you need the flash. Essentially it gets itself all ready (most cameras, including point and shoot jobs, work like this – you may well find it in the manual that you carefully read under focus locking or something similar).

Don't move your finger.

Now shout at everyone to smile, push your finger all the way down and boom! The picture gets taken without all that tedious waiting around.

Incidentally here's a couple of shots I took from the Red Bull day.

You can find out more at the Red Bull Racing website

And for those of you that are interested here's a picture of Lenscalibur, isn't it pretty?

More sneaky tricks (and maybe a few different pictures) coming soon. I am going to be updating this blog on a much more regular basis so if there's anything you'd like to know just drop me a message or leave a comment.
I'll do my best to help.