Faceifi lets you identify people using photos

'Why can't I find out more about somebody from just a photograph?' That was the question that started Faceifi, which is a bit like a social directory where you identify people using images of them rather than by name. That makes it an actual, digital facebook, I suppose. The theory goes Faceifi helps you to control your online identity. You create a Facifi profile by uploading at least five photos of yourself and providing a link that tells people more about you. The link can direct to Facebook, Twitter, a blog, or anywhere you like. Using the Faceifi database anyone can search for you, either by looking for your image or by using a photo of you that they have, and then find out more about you from your link. Yep, if you have a Faceifi profile and someone snaps a picture of you on the Tube, they can find out whatever you've chosen to share. And that's not creepy. At all.

Right now, Faceifi has a desktop and an iOS interface, with an Android version in the works. It's also planning on expanding what users can share, for example with a short biography, and introducing in-app messaging. But it doesn't have very many users, which means that at present you're unlikely to find the person for whom you're searching. That has the potential to change as and when more people sign up to Faceifi, but will they?

I can't say that I'll be signing up for Facifi anytime soon. Sometimes, I rather appreciate being nothing more than a face in the crowd.

What do you think? Useful, or just a bit over-indulgent?

(Headsup to The Next Web)

Photographing people who wear glasses

My brother has worn glasses full time for absolutely years, which has meant that I learned how to photograph him wearing them to avoid hideous green glare rather intuitively. I probably did have to think about it at some point, but I don't really remember and now I just seem to do it. That was until this week, when one of the students at Photocritic Photography School piped up and asked me what he should do when he has a portrait subject who wears glasses. For lots of reasons, the answer is never 'Ask your subject to remove them,' so what do you do?

Look at the light

The most obvious problem that glasses will present to you is that they reflect light. Instead of seeing straight through spectacles' lenses and into your subject's eyes, you'll have a unpleasant, usually green-tinged, reflection glaring back at you.

Going back to GCSE physics, we know that the angle of incidence (or the angle at which light will hit someone's glasses) is equal to the angle of reflection (or the angle at which the light will bounce back off the glasses). If light is coming in at an angle of 31° to the normal of your subject's glasses, it'll bounce off at 31° on the other side of the normal*. There's a helpful diagram here.

Consequently, if your light source is too close to your camera the light has a much greater chance of bouncing straight off your subject's spectacles and into your camera's lens. And if the light is coming from straight behind the camera and your subject is looking straight back at the camera, you haven't got a cat's chance in hell. But the upshot is: know where your light is coming from.

* The normal is an imaginary line running perpendicular to the plane of the glasses.

Altering angles

Minimising glare is easiest by one of three means:

• move your light source
• move your subject
• or move your camera

By shifting your light source or yourself, you can alter either the angle of incidence, and therefore reflection, or take your camera out of the firing line. Sometimes, though, your light source can't be shifted (say, when it's the sun) and you moving might not be an option. Then it's down to your subject.

Tilting and turning

If your subject tilts her or his head downwards, just by a few degrees, not by much, it'll be sufficient to adjust the angle of the light and prevent a reflection bouncing back into the camera lens. Or she or he could turn fractionally away from the light source; not enough to wreak havoc with your shadows, but enough to prevent that horrible glare.

When you ask subjects to tilt their heads or change the angle of their shoulders, you might find that their spectacle frames begin to encroach into the view of eye. At this point it becomes a trade-off between reflection obfuscation and frame obfuscation. You need to decide where your tipping point is.

Quit posing

If you opt for more candid shots, you'll be able to capture your subjects looking away or looking down and doing it naturally but still without any nasty reflections.

Go with it

Sometimes, you just have say that the glare is there and it's better to have a photo with a reflection than no photo at all!

Setting up a scream-triggered photobooth - because whyever not?

If anyone had wandered along to the Maker Faire in the Elephant and Castle area of London (yes, it's really real; no, there are neither castles nor freely roaming elephants but both would be a vast improvement) on Saturday they would have found me, and the London division of Team Triggertrap, asking people if they wouldn't mind awfully screaming at the top of their lungs for us. Seriously.

You see, we'd set up the Triggertrap ScreamGrab studio because we reckoned that people summoning the exhaustive energy to scream like bellows, and then releasing it in one extended Aiouuuuuuu! would make for fantastic portraiture. And it would give Triggertrap with the sound threshold set to Very Loud Indeed™ a rather good workout. We weren't wrong!

Have a look at these if you need convincing:

And the rest you can see on Triggertrap Flickr stream.

Inspired? Want to know how we did it, so that you can give it a go yourselves? Read on!

The basics

At the least, what you need to do is to get an audio trigger that will take a photo when the volume hits a certain level, and a camera. In our case, we decided to use the Triggertrap Mobile app, but we discovered to our horror that the app itself was way too sensitive: Even with the sensitivity threshold all the way to the top, you didn’t really have to put your back into the scream to trigger the camera (in fact, speaking normally was loud enough to snap a shot). Uh-oh.

In the Android version of the app, there’s a separate slider for sensitivity, but we don’t have that level of control over the iOS app (and I did want to use the iPod Touch I had brought along, so that I wouldn’t have to tie up my phone all day).

After a spot of last-minute panicking, we discovered that there was a very simple, and delightfully low-tech solution to this: I simply stuck a small piece of packaging tape over the microphone on the iPod Touch. Hacky? Well, yes, but who cares – it did the trick!

With the tape in place, we were able to use the sensitivity slider to fine-adjust the triggering threshold. Perfect for what we were trying to do!

In theory, with the app configured and hooked up to the camera using a connection kit, that’s all you need to get the photo. Stick it on a tripod, and you’re good to go – really, everything else is showmanship. But to turn this into a far more fun experience, for us and for our sacrificial victims, we turned it into much more of a show.

The kit

For the ultimate ScreamGrab experience, I set up with the following:

• Canon EOS 6D set to manual exposure & manual focus
• Tripod
• Triggertrap Mobile Dongle + connection cable
• iPod Touch (connected to power, to make sure it didn't die)
• Tripodclamps clamp to hold the iPod Touch in place (so that your screamers can see how loud they need to scream)
• Canon ST-E2 flash trigger
• 2x Canon Speedlite 580EX II flashes
• 2x light stands
• 2x white umbrellas

What I did

Let's start with the lighting: I added a Canon ST-E2 infra-red flash transmitter to the camera’s hotshoe, and I set up a couple of Canon EX580 II flashes on super-cheap lighting stands with umbrellas. I fired the flashes on manual output (1/16 each), then set up the camera in manual exposure (1/180 second and f/10, ISO 640) and manual focus. This meant that all the shots were completely repeatable, and I wouldn’t have to make any adjustments throughout the day.

In fact, if it hadn’t been for people being different heights, there wouldn’t have been any reason to touch the set-up at all: even the batteries in the flashes, the flash transmitter, and the camera, lasted all day long. Impressive stuff – but then, battery consumption was the chief reason why I only set the flashes to 1/16 output – in my experience, in modern cameras, you may as well let the ISO do the work, and give your flashguns a break.

Finally, I wanted to ensure that the iPod Touch was clearly visible, so people would be able to see the black ‘needle’ move on the app – so they knew how loud they had to shout to trigger the camera. To achieve that, I used a Tripodclamps clamp. It’s simple: It bolts to the tripod, then squeezes the smartphone firmly to hold it in place. It looks good, and it makes it easy to demo the device, too, which is a bonus.

Someone check for the Four Horsemen of Apocalyspe - I shot in JPEG!

I should also mention at this point that the camera was shooting JPEGs rather than in RAW. The Canon 6D shoots enormous RAW files, and since I had a fully controllable lighting situation, I didn’t expect I’d need to do a lot of adjusting the images. More importantly, the JPEGs are much much faster to download via the tethered connection, faster to process in Lighroom, and it meant that my poor little MacBook Air didn’t slump to its knees. Having said all that, I do generally recommend shooting in Raw. Here is why, and I also wrote an article about why this particular situation (controllable light, need for speed) is an exception where JPEG is acceptable. Because, yes, I’m an insufferable nerd about this sort of stuff.

Turning it into a show

To show off the images, I decided I had to shoot ‘tethered’. I was in luck; my Canon camera comes with a piece of software called EOS Utility, which enables tethered shooting. In this case, I hooked up a27″ monitor to my MacBook Air. I made sure that all photos that were taken were shown on the audience-facing big screen as soon they were shot. Great for instant gratification – even the most reluctant screamers giggled their heads off when they saw their mugs on the big screen.

Instant publishing

I anticipated (correctly) that people would want a copy of their photos – but how do you go about doing that? Quite a few people used Instagram and took a photo of their photo on the big monitor, but obviously we wanted something a little bit better than that. So, I devised a workflow.

I was running Lightroom 4, using the ‘auto import’ feature. In this way, the photos would be downloaded by the Canon EOS Utility to a folder, and Lightroom 4 would automatically import them from that folder into a library. The import script applied a preset to the image (white-balance, some vignetting, some extra contrast and some colour effects to make the photos pop out more). It also applied a description and title to the images, so it would be as quick as possible to publish them online.

From there, I only did one edit to each photo: A quick crop. This was necessary because we didn’t have a lot of time to frame people properly, and besides, a lot of people either jumped or hunched over as they were howling at the camera, so the framing was almost always off anyway.

After cropping, we just dragged the photo to the Flickr publishing tool within Lightroom, and hit the ‘publish’ button. With one person manning the computer, that meant that from squeal to Flickr, it could take as little as a minute or so, including the processing, resizing, and uploading.

We also had an IFTTT set-up, so that we could auto-tweet our ScreamGrabs. Except that Twitter sent us to Twitter Jail for too many tweets!

Other ideas?

It would really have been awesome if we could have had a printer there, and printed out people’s ScreamGrabs as they were taken – but we didn’t really know how many people to expect, and we only had two people at our little stand at any time, so I suppose we wouldn’t really have had time to deal with the logistics of printing anyway — but it would have been amazingly good fun, so perhaps that’s something we’ll do next time.

The other idea that came up, was that perhaps we should have been recording people’s screams! Playing the screams, along with a slide-show of all the photos, would have been a fantastic project, I think – but it didn’t come up as an idea until someone mentioned it to us about half-way through the day. Again, I have no idea how you’d deal with the logistics of matching up the sounds to the pictures… But it would have been great.

In the Triggertrap ScreamGrab booth, everyone can see you scream!

Has the Creative Cloud storm encouraged Adobe to rethink its prices?

Well this is intriguing. Photo Rumors is reporting that Adobe recently surveyed some of its customers about a restructure to the not-very-well-received new Creative Cloud subscription model. Instead of the proposed $49.99 a month for the complete Cloud, or $19.99 a month for a single product subscription it asked how customers felt about paying $9.99 a month for Photoshop or $29.99 for all of Creative Cloud on a three year contract. At the end of the period, you'd be entitled to a permanent copy of CS6 and a promise to keep it updated for file types and camera. Now I didn't receive one of these fabled questionnaires and I've not heard of anyone who did. Whether it did or didn't survey a selection of its users, Adobe is under no obligation whatsoever to respond to the findings. And if it thinks that it can get away with the new pricing structure then why should it change. If there is a change to the subscription model in the offing, the rumoured structure is quite a departure from the original plan. I'd suspect it would be somewhere between the two. Let's wait to see.

(Headsup to Photo Rumors)

How exciting is the iOS 7 camera app?

Whilst everyone else is arguing about whether the new flat design and Crayola coloured icons that comprise iOS 7 are genius or travesty, shall we take a look at what's been updated, reshuffled, and introduced camera-wise?

Taking on an iPhotos feel, photos are now automatically organised into 'moments'. It's a twee name for a fairly neat concept: images are sorted and labelled geographically and temporally using their metadata. This will let you search photos you've taken in one particular location by date. It's a more sophisticated digital version of having holiday albums sorted by year and place, with each photo captioned; you can see all the photos from one place organised by date, too.

Airdrop will allow you to drop an image into someone else's iPhone over the same wi-fi network. If we can Airdrop to other devices, for example a MacBook Air, that'd be neat.

Photo Stream already allowed you to share with your friends and for you to comment on their streams; now you can insert your photos into their shared streams, creating a collective album.

Moving between camera, video, panorama mode, and the square crop feature is managed by a swipe. Yes, you read that right, there's a square shooting mode built into the camera app, along with a range of filters. It feels like a dreadful disease that afflicts smartphones. With any luck, it's a childhood illness and everyone will grow out of it soon.

The conclusion? There's nothing revolutionary or even exceptionally exciting here. It feels more like a consolidation of features and in some respects even a game of catch up. That's not to say that sharing images via Airdrop isn't a welcome addition, it's just that it isn't setting alblaze the world of mobile photography.

Facebook and Instagram sitting in a tree

Honestly, when I woke up this morning and saw that Facebook had forked out a mind-blowing $1 billion for Instagram, I had to do the BBC-thing and verify it from three independent sources. That one of my sources was the BBC didn't matter. Still, there it was in MacBook screen technicolour.

Last week, when I asked what was next for Instagram, I mentioned that it was taking slow and carefully placed steps towards social media domination. Over 30 million people were sharing their lives photographically through the app, and it was set to grow, and grow, and grow. Facebook was hardly going to be ignorant of this, and there was no better means of keeping their photo-sharing enemy closer than by gobbling it up. Even if Facebook wasn't concerned for Instagram's independent rise, which I doubt, the prospect of another company laying its grubby mitts on the 30 million subscriber prize would have been enough to motivate it to make Instagram an offer it couldn't refuse.

Zuckerberg has been quick to point out that Instagram will continue to be developed independently of Facebook and that users won't be forced to share their images on Facebook or prevented from sharing them via any other means of social media: 'We plan on keeping features like the ability to post to other social networks, the ability to not share your Instagrams on Facebook if you want, and the ability to have followers and follow people separately from your friends on Facebook.'

Kevin Systrom echoed similar sentiments on his blog over at Instagram: 'You’ll still have all the same people you follow and that follow you.You’ll still be able to share to other social networks. And you’ll still have all the other features that make the app so fun and unique.'

I'm terribly cynical when it comes to Facebook - that's not something I've ever kept secret - so whilst it may remain the case that Instagram users need have no obvious and overt relationship with Facebook, it's still Facebook at the top of the foodchain with its talons firmly embedded in its photo-snapping prey. Also, I wouldn't be surprised if a little further down the line sharing photos to Facebook becomes a default and sharing to other networks just that tiny bit harder. But I am a cynic.

I'm not the only one, though; there has been a clutch of people jacking in their Instagram accounts in protest. It's highly doubtful that out of Instagram's 30 million users there will be more than a handful of dissenters, so their impact won't be more than a drop in an ocean. However, for a lot of people Instagram's appeal was its simplicity - just a photo and a filter. That's the one thing that Instagram and Facebook need most definitely to hang on to.

"What The Jiminy Christmas Are You Taking a Photo Of?!?!?!"

You are approached by a complete stranger with a look of pure incredulity etched across their stupid face – “Um, excuse me, what are you taking a photo of?!!???!”

“Uh, well, I’m taking a photo of this wall”

“Why?!?!?! Why would you want to take a photo of that wall?!!”

“I dunno – I like the textures and the brick work”

“…..are you a terrorist?”

Pointless Conversation With Stranger, Take Two

“Um, excuse me, what are you taking a photo of?!!???!”

“How many times have you been to the toilet today? Are you feeling regular? Need more bran?”

“I beg your pardon?!”

“Oh, well I just figured that seeing as you’re fine with approaching complete strangers and brazenly poking your nose into their day to day life, you wouldn’t mind me throwing a couple of questions back your way”

Pointless Conversation With Man Who Owns High-Vis Jacket

“I’m sorry sir but I’m going to have to ask you to put that camera away”

“Why? I’m allowed to take photographs in a public place”

“Now don’t make me talk into my little radio thing”

“What about those people with compacts? They’re taking photos”

“…..erm….please put the camera away sir”

“I don’t see how that’s diff…”

*man begins to talk into little radio thing*

“sigh”

What is this even a photo of? It's stupid - it's not even, like, a mountain or anything.

Pointless Conversation With Man Who Owns High-Vis Jacket, Take Two

“I’m sorry sir but I’m going to have to ask you to put that camera away”

“What seems to be the problem, pseudo-officer?”

“Well that camera looks like a professional one or something, so you probably have some kind of terrorist or illegal money making agenda. You know something? I don’t even know myself! Ain’t that somethin’?! Now put that camera away”

(you remove the large hotshoe flashgun from your camera)

“Huh? Where did he go? Excuse me sir, have you seen a man with one of those professional, up-to-no-good type cameras around here?”

Email Conversation With Potential Business Customer

Dear Gareth,

We here at Corporation Corporations love your photos. We feel they really capture the ethos and corporate direction behind our new advertising campaign – “We Are Stuffy Robot People Who Enjoy Using Made Up Words”. Could we possibly liaiseise and actionate a request to utilise your images for our advertiseination strategemator? We would like unlimited rights to 200 of your images forever and ever and ever and ever.

By way of payment, we clubbed together and have come up with the tantalising offer of half a packet of Chewits only briefly sat on by Kevin (our Chief Exec) and a pirated copy of Dirty Dancing.

Please let us know if you agree to this as soon as possible. Otherwise, we’ll probably just bully some poor new photographer with lots of talent but no idea of what he should be charging into giving us his work for free, throwing out the classic “it’ll be good exposure for you” line, the “exposure” being “hey everyone, this guy gives you his stuff for free!”.

Kind Regards,

Business McMickeytake.

Sound Familiar?

Everywhere I look, it seems that photography, despite its ubiquitous, omnipresent nature, is held in a shockingly low regard in many respects. I’m aware that it’s not as simple as that but there are many instances where the inherent ignorance of photography and its worth really stand out. News items often crop up, detailing incidents where images have been used without the photographer’s consent, sometimes with full knowledge of the copyright breach, sometimes without. Either way, it shows a disregard for the value of photography and the photographer. I’m not saying it never happens, but how often do you hear of copyright theft of works of art using other media?  Nowhere near as often. There are, of course, other factors in place here, such as the ease of distribution of photography compared to (some) other art forms: maybe the digital age of photography and the Internet has increased the immediate availability, accessibility and sheer volume of photographs so dramatically that people feel that nicking off with this one image from thousands upon thousands won’t really matter.

The ease of sharing, creating, editing and distributing images that digital has brought is, then, something of a double-edged sword. However, at the heart of it all, I feel that general ignorance and a low opinion of photography is at the heart of the problem.

WOW - I bet this guy's camera was well brilliant!

Widely Held View #1: Expensive Camera = Great Photographs

People think photography is easy: you can see it in the stock responses and reactions to a variety of situations. Again, I appreciate there are shades of grey to this, and not everyone is interested in photography – that’s fine, of course – but let’s look at weddings. I’ve experienced the situation where people think that they don’t need to get a wedding photographer in, because they have a friend with a DSLR. They are of the opinion that it is the camera itself that is allowing for such fantastic images to be captured, not the skill of the photographer. Now, I don’t do weddings, but I am sometimes asked as a favour to take photographs at a wedding. I’m perfectly happy to do this, I may even enjoy it, but I always tell them to hire an actual, proper wedding photographer. I don’t do wedding photography, so it would be a silly idea to book someone who didn’t have the experience (which brings me to my second point).

Widely Held View #2: If You Are A Photographer, You Are An Expert At Photographing Everything

There is this fallacy that if you’re proficient and able in one area of photography, then you can do ‘em all. This is again indicative of the general view held of photography – the idea that it’s not very diverse, that it’s easy to master. Although this seems like a more innocent presumption than some of the others, it fuels the ignorance and reinforces the idea that anyone can do this. Yes, anyone can take a photograph, but not everyone can take a good photograph.

Widely Held View #3: If You’re Photographing in a Public Place and Not Using a Compact, You’re a Terrorist or Weirdy Man / Woman

This also goes for choice of subject. You’ll get enough rolling eyes and presumptions that you’re a tourist just from photographing a landmark (plus possible infuriating hassle from Captain High-Vis), but start photographing a park bench or a grid or the texture on a wall and you’re regarded as a mental man or someone documenting possible ways to burrow into Buckingham Palace to explode the Queen’s Corgis. Oh and god have mercy on your soul should you decide to crouch to take a photograph. What sort of rabid, dribbling nutbox crouches to take a photo?

Widely Held View #4: A Photographer’s Time, Effort, Ability and Product are Not Worth Paying For

Despite the mild irritation of the other widely held views and the poor public attitude they highlight, this is the one that is a real problem. Regardless of the area of photography you work in (I mean, they’re all the same anyway, right?), I imagine you will have encountered this problem on a number of occasions, and probably still do encounter it. Personally, I have one or two stand out moments. I remember someone phoning to enquire about getting some actor headshots done. When given a price, they were astonished, hostile even, and stated that they had been quoted £50 elsewhere. So that’s about 2% of the cost of the equipment used, before my actual time and ability are taken into account. I just replied with “ok” and waited for the phone call to end.

I constantly hear about my peers, contacts and friends involved in photography being offered next to nothing (if anything at all) for use of their images in some advertising campaign or for use in promoting an event of some kind. When refused, the potential customer tends to get genuinely annoyed by this, like they’re turning down a stonking deal. They then proceed to use some poor sucker’s work for free, because they bought the “it’ll give you good exposure” line.

Too Long Didn’t Read

If you take anything away from this slightly manic rant (maybe I shouldn’t drink so much coffee in the mornings) please take away this. I’m pretty sure I’ve said it on Small Aperture before but, to be honest, I don’t think it can be said enough. I’m thinking of tattooing it onto my forehead, or having it pumped out of giant speakers across the entire planet, or beamed into people’s brains via satellite (NASA still haven’t got back to me on that one, I must chase them up).

The message is simple – do not sell your work for peanuts. Do not let it go for free. The less you value your work, the less photography is valued. If you work cheap, it affects all of us.

If we all stood up and requested a decent price for our images and refused to work for free, the value of what we do would increase. Furthermore, people might actually start paying attention to the quality of the images on offer if they had to part with a noticeable amount of cash.

If they don’t want to pay you for your time, you don’t do it. There are areas of photography and assignments that I love doing that I’ve had to turn down, because I won’t do it for free. Sadly, this leads to someone else stepping in and doing a lacklustre job for free. In that instance, I don’t blame the customer, I blame the photographer: you are driving the market down.

What Do You Think?

Admittedly I went off on one a bit there. My ultimate purpose for this article was to get some opinions together – what do you think is the major cause of this dim view of photography many seem to hold in today’s climate? Is it the saturation of the market? Is it the availability of professional equipment? Is the Internet to blame? Am I being overly sensitive? Am I flat out wrong and should hang my head in shame like a silly monkey man? Let’s get the chatter going – we want to hear what you think.

Looking at composition

People have been obsessing over composition – and the theory and maths behind it – for thousands of years. Pythagoras discussed it, Ancient Greek architects used it, and Fibonacci sequenced it. But what does it actually mean for you and me when we take a photograph?

Essentially, the resulting rules of composition help us to create pictures that please the eye and are easy to understand. Composition can make or break a picture, but is so often overlooked. Let’s look at some of the main ideas people are using.

Rule of Thirds

One of the oldest rules in of composition is known as the rule of thirds. It’s easiest to understand if you imagine a grid across your picture, splitting it into nine equal rectangles.

Basically, the rule says that placing your subject(s) on any of these lines will make for a better composition. Let’s look at some examples of the rule of thirds to help explain it:

The rule of thirds applies to landscapes...

...and to portraits

Roughly speaking, the horizon is placed on the bottom of the two horizontal lines (although it also works on the top) and lined up the subject with one of the verticals. You can also place extra emphasis on focal points of the picture by positioning them where the lines cross, such as the girl’s face in the second photo.

Maybe try imagining these lines next time you look through the viewfinder, and adjust your shot to see if it works better. It doesn’t have to be exact!

Symmetry

Almost the polar opposite of the rule of thirds, symmetry can change a photo from ordinary to extraordinary, especially when used in unexpected ways. Using symmetry in portraiture can be very unsettling, but also very effective! To get perfect symmetry in your photos, it’s probably easiest to use a tripod to frame the picture exactly as you want it to appear (and remember, a little ‘cheating’ in image editing software can also help you along the way).

Sharp Symmetry, by Scintt

Place of Contemplation, by Martin Gommel

Leading Lines

Leading lines are exactly what they sound like – they cut through the image, drawing your eye down them and into the picture. These are often used in landscape and architectural photography, and a favourite technique for photos of roads and railings. Often used to great effect when leading to a vanishing point, and frequently combined with symmetry, this can also have very dramatic results. Again, a tripod will help give you set up your shot for the composition you want.

Airport Symmetry, by Doris Hausen

Vanishing Point, by Luigi Caterino

Other techniques

I’ve only scraped the surface of the different techniques used by photographers to give their pictures the composition they want. Try using elements in the composition to frame the subject (such as the trees in the picture with the runner), and maybe try different techniques on the same picture – it might be the easiest way to find the one that works.

Ignoring the Rules

The theory behind what makes a ‘good picture’ can certainly be off-putting for many. After all, isn’t a good photo about how it makes you feel rather than how perfect it is? Possibly. But understanding conventions helps us decide when to follow them, but also when to break them for dramatic effect. So go experiment with unusual crops, dead-centre subjects and skewed horizons – you might just discover something amazing!

All photos used in this article are used according to Creative Commons licences. If you have strong reservations against your photos appearing on Small Aperture, please contact us, and we’ll get them taken down. Please support the artists creating these photos by clicking on the photos to take a closer look at their work!

Facebook and the post-operative cancer photos

Does a scar and a piece of skin where a breast used to be constitute nudity? If you ask me, no. If you ask the FaceBook nudity-detecting software, it might spew out a different answer. You see, the omniscient powers-that-be at FaceBook demanded that pictures Anna Antell posted of her post-operative scar be taken down because they were ‘offensive’. Thankfully, after a bit of a to-do, FaceBook has backed down. But really? Nudity?

Ms Antell (who’s 43 and lives in Oxfordhsire, if that sort of information floats your boat) wanted to document her treatment and recovery from breast cancer, and posted some photos showing her scar. In one, you get to see her bare shoulder. Her other breast is covered. The photo is neither a nude nor offensive. In fact, I happen to think that it’s a rather lovely photograph.

Offensive?

The good news is that FaceBook has rescinded its ridiculous stance on the shots, muttering something about needing to protect their young users from offensive postings but realising that Ms Antell wanted to share her experiences with her family and friends. You’d have thought that FaceBook might have learned its lesson when something similar happened with Sharon Adams in May last year. For a few different reasons, I hope that something similar doesn’t recur.

It puts a bit of a slant on the definition of ‘offensive’, doesn’t it?

In photography, rules aren't laws.

The internet is absolutely full of guides about things you should and shouldn’t do to take ‘good photos’. Don’t over-expose. Remember the rule of thirds. Don’t cut people’s heads off. Watch your background. Use a shallow DOF in portraits to throw the backgrounds out of focus. 3-point lighting for portraiture, etc.

A lot of us just take all these rules for given, as if they are hard-and-fast rules that you have to stick to, because if you don’t, you’ll fail as a photographer. Break these rules, and you won’t take a good photo in your life. Your cat will die, your children will hate you, and your significant other will divorce you.  

Truth, as you might expect, is slightly different. Don’t get me wrong, most of the time the ‘rules’ (which in any case should be seen as mere guidelines) make a lot of sense. Of course it looks silly if you cut people’s heads off. Of course your photos won’t look conventional if they are harshly over- or under-exposed.

Rules aren’t laws. You can break them unpunished

Grossly over-exposing a photo doesn't have to mean it won't look good. (click for bigger on Flickr)

Read the sentence above. That’s all I really wanted to say with this article. So if you’re in a rush, or you think I use too many words to say something simple, then read that sentence a few times, and go check out XKCD for a while.

What I’m trying to say is that while the guidelines are there to help you, there’s no point in following any rules or guidelines unless you fully understand (or grok, if you’re geeky and/or well-read enough to be familiar with that concept) why.

The best reason to understand why a rule is there, is to break it. Some times, you might find that your photos actually come out more interesting – better, even, perhaps – when you break the rules. Other times, you’ll try to take the same photo twice; once whilst following the rule, and once whilst breaking it, and you’ll realise why it’s a good idea.

Just remember: Never follow a rule just because you’ve read somewhere that it’s the ‘right’ thing to do. Follow it because you understand it, and because you know what happens when you don’t.

Break these rules

Contrary to popular belief, your foreground doesn't have to be in focus (clicky for bigger)

• DPS’s 11 tips for beginner photographers.
• DP Tutorial’s Photography tips for beginners.
• The tips in my own How to win a photography competition
• Buzzle’s basic digital photography tips.
• Photography Tips and Tricks’ Tips for Beginners
• Digital Photography Tips’ guides on The rule of thirds, Making a good crop, Change shooting angles for better photos and Focus on the details for better photos.
• Every single one of Rick Sammon’s (@RickSammon) Top Ten Digital Photography Tips (YouTube Video)
• These 100 tips from Cameras.co.uk (ignore the first 30 or so, they’re about 600 years old, and are related to taking photos by carving them into mountains)

A couple of examples

DO cut their heads off at the top if it makes for more interesting and intimate photos (click for bigger on Flickr)

The Carlsberg Express: Of course your horizon doesn't have to be straight, if a non-straight horizon gives you better results! (click for bigger on Flickr)

Sometimes, getting in closer makes a photo more intimate. Don't be afraid to crop into people's faces.

The horizontals aren't horizontal. The verticals aren't vertical. The background is a mess. How could this photo ever be any good? But it is... (click for bigger on Flickr)

White balance? Hah? I spit on your white balance. (click for bigger)

Some times, the background adds to a photo - don't throw it out of focus on principle just because you have a nice, fast lens.

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© Kamps Consulting Ltd. This article is licenced for use on Pixiq only. Please do not reproduce wholly or in part without a license. More info.

Oi! You! No pictures!

A few months ago, I ran a story on how the UK government was trying to restrict public photography. It seems as if they’re now playing the back-pedalling game in a big kind of way. Once the petition hit 60,000 signatures, the Prime Minister’s office issued a statement which can be summarised into ‘uh, no, we never intended these kinds of changes to be made’.

What I really want to know: Do you have any stories of instances where people tried to stop you from taking photos? Leave a comment!

Have you ever been stopped from taking a photo?

• No
• Yes, and I decided to stop taking photos
• They tried, but I did it anyway. Cause I'm a rebel.

View Results

It’s hard to tell if the guy who set up the petition was, in fact, petitioning the wrong people (the government wasn’t imposing restrictions, but private security firms might have been), or if the government have gone ‘whoopsie, a lot of people feel strongly about this, let’s try and save our skins’. Either way, the text of the statement is as follows:

Thank you for signing the petition on the Downing Street website calling for the Prime Minister to stop proposed restrictions on photography in public places.

This petition has already attracted over 60,000 signatures from people who obviously share your concern. Not surprisingly, the idea that the Government might be poised to restrict your ability to take photos has caused some puzzlement and even alarm.

We have therefore decided to respond to this petition before its closing date of August, in order to reassure people.

The Government appreciates that millions of people in this country enjoy photography. So we have checked carefully to see if any Government department was considering any proposal that might possibly lead to the sort of restrictions suggested by this petition. We have been assured this is not the case.

There may be cases where individual schools or other bodies believe it is necessary to have some restrictions on photography, for instance to protect children, but that would be a matter for local decisions.

So… Do you have any stories of when you were prevented from taking a photo by slightly over-zealous security personnel? What happened? What did they say? What did you say? Did you have to stop taking photos?

(Photo © iStockPhoto)

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Do you enjoy a smattering of random photography links? Well, squire, I welcome thee to join me on Twitter - Follow @Photocritic

© Kamps Consulting Ltd. This article is licenced for use on Pixiq only. Please do not reproduce wholly or in part without a license. More info.

Respectless photographers?

I seem to be months behind on this item of “news”. I actually spotted it a couple of weeks ago, but didn’t think it was that interesting. It seems as if people didn’t agree, as the topic is getting some serious discussion. Basically – a picture of a photographer in the middle of a marathon race is pissing off a lot of people.

On one hand, I can kind of see what is going on here. As Robert Capa said: “If the picture isn’t good enough, you’re not close enough”, and getting in the middle of a race is one way to get closer, I suppose… 

On the other hand, you are guest on somebody else’s path, and getting in the way of runners who are at the limit of their tiredness, and only want to make it to the finish line, is at best rude.

Now, I don’t know the circumstances around this photo, but would like to talk about it a little bit anyway. My reaction is different, based on if she is a commissioned photographer or an amateur. If the latter, she’s in the wrong place, and someone should have told her to shove off. I’m not sure about the outraged calls of “getting ticketed… or worse” in the Flickr discussion, though – a bit harsh, I feel. If there were so many people who were outraged about this behaviour, why didn’t they just tell her to move out of the way?

One commenter mentions:

To all of you taht seem to think that she has the right to do somehting like this…… WAKE UP!!

I mean really now, I don’t recall having ever seen a race of ANY sort that is INTENDED for photographers. If there were, I’m sure that it would be around the block and not 24k (or whatever). If you had the right as a photographer to do this, the nice telephotos would be cheaper, the sporting events would be shorter, and a good photo would be a dime a dozen. It’s just not a good shot if you ruin the event that would in fact MAKE it a good shot.

I agree to a large degree, but if she was, in fact, a press photographer, things could have been slightly different: This was in New York City, and if this was a photographer for the New York Times, I believe she had a bigger ‘right’ to be in the way, than Joanna Q Random, amateur photographer. Why? Well, photographers should never be part of the story, so those two photos in the Flickr stream shows she’s in the wrong, but perhaps she was photographing the event all day long, and that was the only time she was in the way?

Or maybe not: This is what the original poster said:

The whole thing took around 3 – 4 minutes and around 30 runners were inconvenienced (or that is how I saw it).

Having said that, though, Magnum agency sent a photographer along as well, and their photos look as if their photographer was on the road as well…

Obviously, the Flickr comment stream turned into a random slagging-off match, as one of the commenters notes:

All of these message boards and websites for photographers…and it seems like there’s a direct correlation between the level of professionalism exhibited in the comments and the actual professional status of the “photographer” posting. The cattier the comments, the less likely the poster is really a professional photographer.

Ultimately, I believe it all boils down to why you are there. If you are shooting for an important newspaper or magazine, your job is to represent the publication honourably (because you are their face to the world. If she was wearing a huge National Geographic jacket, people would have been more careful with their comments, but that doesn’t mean what she is doing is any better, from the runner’s viewpoint), but also to get the best photos possible.

If a wartime photographer has to risk his life for the best photo, that’s what he has to do. If a sports photographer has to inconvenience a runner or two in the course of her job, well then so be it.

Personally, I hate pissing people off, but there have been situations where the only way I could get the best shot was to elbow another photographer, push a policeman out of the way (!), and block off a road with my car. Granted, that was a one-off, and I seriously angered about 30 people that day, but I was the one who came home with the best photo, and nobody else’s pictures got used. Some times, being rude is a business decision…

What do you guys think? Good behaviour or bad behaviour, on her part? Vote in the poll, and leave a comment here or in the Flickr stream.

n

The NYC marathon photographer... Is she in the wrong or not?

• Yes, she should never have been there.
• Yes, but only if she is an amateur
• No, but only if she is a professional
• No, she's not doing anything wrong
• Uhmm, I don't know, actually...

View Results

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Do you enjoy a smattering of random photography links? Well, squire, I welcome thee to join me on Twitter - Follow @Photocritic

© Kamps Consulting Ltd. This article is licenced for use on Pixiq only. Please do not reproduce wholly or in part without a license. More info.

Try before you buy: Rent glass!

A good way to get to grips with camera equipment is to go out and rent some. Here in the UK, I’ve found Calumet Photo to be an invaluable source of expensive glass on a temporary basis (they also have a presence in Germany, Holland, and the US), but I just stumbled across a brand new concept: On-line lens rental! 

It is such an obvious thing to do, but I guess it’s like Columbus’ egg – you have to think about it first. Of course, you can’t keep a good idea to yourself for very long, so when I started to look for it, I actually found two companies that do on-line camera equipment rental – One of them is Ziplens, and the other is the unimaginatively named RentGlass.

As far as I can tell, they both only cater for the US market, but hey – it’s a brilliant idea, and I bet it’s only a matter of time before the concept goes around the planet.

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Do you enjoy a smattering of random photography links? Well, squire, I welcome thee to join me on Twitter - Follow @Photocritic

© Kamps Consulting Ltd. This article is licenced for use on Pixiq only. Please do not reproduce wholly or in part without a license. More info.