Edit, Caption, and Transmit Photos with the iPad

Would you like to edit your photos on your iPad? While there are several good editing apps, what's different about this one is that it's the only one I know of that lets you ITPC caption and ftp photos, as well. Check out a first look at an updated iPad app that lets you do all that at www.ipadapalooza.com. It's written by a favorite blogger (me...grin).

Slow Motion Photography

Here's an eye-popping video showcasing some amazing technology -- images shot at 1000 frames per second. Compare that to a digital SLR's roughly 8 frames per second, or standard video's 24 or 30 frames per second, and you'll see why this looks familiar, but different.

The movie was created by David Coiffier, mostly at a rugby match, and Coiffier identifies the camera as a SprintCam v3


I-Movix SprintCam v3 NAB 2009 showreel from David Coiffier on Vimeo.

100-year-old artist and portrait phobia

Update May 2009: The image at the bottom won in a photo contest and is hangs in a gallery in Fairfield, CT.

The 100-year-old artist I photographed recently was perhaps the most reluctant photo subjects I've come across. Her aide warned me as I walked in the door.

Glenora Richards is famed for her beautiful miniature portraits, complete paintings just a bit larger than a book of matches. She still creates them, without the use of a magnifying glass. Dozens of them -- each one exquisite, some perhaps created 70 or more years ago -- lined her living room walls.

"I look like a rhinoceros!" she yelled after looking at a head-and-shoulders image of herself on my LCD.

Her aide said, "so why don't you smile? You'll look better!"

"You try smiling when you have no teeth!" She had a point.

Another challenge was that I was reluctant to ask her to move from her chair, since she looked pretty comfortable there, and hey, she is 100 years old. Gotta respect that.

Richards is a great conversationalist, and her winning personality, plus my professional pride, had me trying to figure out how to get three different images, given the constraints. I knew the newspaper had planned a lovely feature on her, and figured they'd need three: One for the lede, one for the jump, and one for insurance, in case they were lucky enough to have a bit more space in that day's paper.

After Richards rejected yet another head-and-shoulders image -- a go-to composition -- I started looking around the room and spied a poster on the wall. It was an enlargement of a magazine cover, featuring a seated young woman with her head resting in one hand. Miniature paintings decorated a table in front of her.

"Is that you?" I asked.

"Yes," she looked up.

"Do you like that picture?" I asked. The picture was likely taken nearly 70 years ago.

"Yes, I do," she beamed.

"So let's recreate it, OK?"

She loved that idea, and I asked her aide to help me set it up. The aide directed me to a TV tray in the kitchen, and I set that up in front of the artist's chair. I asked if I could bring over some of her paintings to place on the table, like in the old poster. She agreed, and I used some tissue boxes and salt and pepper shakers to prop them up. I asked her to put her head in one hand, like in the poster, and she did. We got this frame:





The second picture was easy. I asked her to hold one of the miniatures -- a painting of her late husband, when he was in his 40's -- and I snapped a detail shot:




I got the idea for the third and final image while I was taking the detail shot. I noticed I had to position myself carefully so as not to get a reflection on the glass of the miniature. I figured I'd use that type of reflection in the next shot, which took only a moment -- with careful attention to positioning -- to compose:




Happy 100th birthday, Mrs. Richards. I hope I get to photograph you for your 101st.

Soccer star Marcus Tracy

One of the things I like best about this job is that I get to meet some interesting people, from all professions. Recently I caught up with Marcus Tracy, a soccer phenom who won the Hermann trophy, awarded to the best college soccer player of the year.

He lives in the area, having graduated from Wake Forest, and stays in shape with the help of trainer E.J. Zebro.

Driving over to the gym, I'm expecting grey cinderblock walls, high ceilings, ugly flourescent lighting, ya know, standard gym decor. When I saw the red walls, I knew this was gonna be fun.

Bonuses: the ceilings were low and painted an orangey-yellow, perfect for bouncing a flash and warming up the light. The windows added a cool blue contrast. There were lots of mirrors that, once I positioned myself to stay out of 'em, added some nice depth.

Tracy and Zebro just went about their business, and I had a great time experimenting with angles, light bounces, and composition in this super room.

Rock Concert

When I walked into the club concert venue, I figured it might be tricky getting images for the newspaper. The band was playing, but the lights were off, as in no light at all.

Sure, there was a faint glow from the streetlights outside coming through a window, but that was only good enough to keep me from tripping over people. Even at a high ISO, no light is no light. I had a flash in my bag, but I hate to use that at a concert. Wrecks the mood and the resulting image only captures that wrecked mood.

So I waited. Surely there must be SOME lights, sometime, right?

Fortunately, there were two strobes set up on the side and slightly behind the band that would go on for a second or two every few minutes. I positioned myself to take best advantage of those lights, adjusted my settings, then waited some more.

Sure enough, the lights blinked again. When you're shooting at 1/100th of a second, a full second of light is really plenty of time to get an image. Two seconds is plenty long enough to wait for some decent emotion, especially when your subject is an energetic rock band.

The images below are of one of the bands, Ice Nine Kills. The image up top is Mercury Sky.

High School Basketball Portrait

I took a photo of the Norwalk High School girls varsity basketball team to run full-page on the cover of a local paper's winter ports preview section. The team had posted an impressive record last season, and the sports editor figured they'd be a good team to highlight. Turns out the captains are also good sports, too.

We did the photoshoot moments before their first scrimmage of the season. It worked out great, since the players were all suited up already. I had scouted the location earlier, and had come up with this courtyard in the school. It had three things going for it: I liked the warm lights in the background, it was close to the gym so we'd maximize the short time we had together, and since it was freezing outside, no one else was around. I used a couple battery-powered strobes in umbrellas to light 'em.

We did a couple of traditional poses first. The toughest part was getting them all to be serious, since we all had a hard time not laughing. The photo above gives you an idea. It works OK. We had a couple of minutes before the game started, so we figured we'd try something different. Sometimes the best -- and most fun -- shots come when I know I have a "safe" shot in the camera already.

The players climbed up on a rock in the courtyard, figuring we'd get a "we're tall and tough" pose, with the added benefit of getting that nice blue sky in the background. While they were getting ready, I snapped this unposed frame for kicks:



But we weren't quite done. We were having such a good time together, that I asked them if they might be willing to jump off the rock. I was a bit nervous, because I sure didn't want anyone hurting themselves. But they insisted they could do it. We talked through how everyone should position themselves. We only had time for two shots.

The first shot we got a hand out of the frame. Below is the second shot -- my favorite and the girls' favorite from the whole session. It's the one that ran full page.

Ice Rink in the Palace Theater in Stamford

I've been to ice rinks, I've been to theaters. But it's not often I go to an ice rink in a theater, especially a rink that's only there for a day.

This past Sunday, the Palace Theater in Stamford hosted "Sleeping Beauty on Ice," a holiday show. The Sleeping Beauty part is standard, I suppose; it's the "on ice" part that gets tricky in a traditional theater setting. So on Saturday the Stamford Advocate sent me there to photograph how an ice rink gets built inside a grand old theater.

Turns out it's not too tricky, if you know what you're doing. Not many people do, but Lynn Novakofski does. That's him in the photo above, spraying water on crushed ice cubes. The photo below shows his colleague, Ed Armstrong, taking a turn a half hour later.


Technique note: I shot the frame above with a very long shutter speed -- longer than a second, I think -- on a tripod. I wanted the lights from the theater to burn in nicely.

Speaking of lights, while Lynn, Ed, and crew were setting up the rink, Michael Pegler, house electrician for the Stamford Center for the Arts, fine-tuned the lights for the performance. That's Michael at work, below:

Martha Stewart at Stew Leonard's

Yesterday I was asked by one of my client newspapers to photograph a book signing at Stew Leonard's, a local grocery store. Going to Stew's is as much an event as it is a weekly shopping expedition. For those who don't live near one of their stores, it may be hard to fathom that Stew's is indeed a *venue.*

So it wasn't a shock that Stew's guest would be Martha Stewart. Her new book is called "Martha Stewart's Cooking School."


The press was offered a 10-minute window at the start of the book signing to take photographs. I didn't recognize any of the handful of photographers there, which was a bit of a surprise, since the photojournalist community is pretty small around here. We run into each other from time to time on assignment, and it's a cordial group. Perhaps the event drew media from a bit further away.

In that ten minutes, there was plenty of time to capture a portrait of Martha with her book, as well as images of the first few customers who asked to have their book signed. As an assignment, it was easy. The atmosphere was friendly.

Something unexpected happened while we were making the quick portrait. We were all pointing our cameras at Stewart. Instinctively, I lowered my camera and waited until the other photographers were finished -- a matter of a mere few seconds, really. It's my habit to take turns, rather than blitz a person with shutter clicks.

I figure it's confusing to a person to try to decide which camera to look at. The momentary confusion can show on their face, which mars the image. Besides, if I clicked with all the others, most of my images, like theirs, would show a person looking at someone else's camera. Why take a bunch of images I'll never use and add to the confusion? So I waited my turn.

The unexpected thing was that while I was waiting, I realized that it didn't really matter that I waited. Stewart handled the situation with grace and ease, and gave every photographer a direct gaze, one at a time. In my experience, that's never happened before. It was a small thing, a fleeting thing, but I was impressed. Sure, it helped ensure the photographers got a good image, which helps with publicity. But it was also a courtesy, since the photographers could be on to their next job more quickly and the hundreds of waiting people would wait just a little bit less.

Two clicks from me -- one more than I ended up needing, in case she had blinked (she hadn't) -- and the portrait, seen above, was done.

This isn't the picture that ran in the paper today. The other ones -- the images that included customers -- captured the event better. But I like to give the editors choices.

I then left the book-signing area to look for crowd images. I ran into Terry, the grocery manager, who was restocking a display of the book to accommodate the growing crowd. He said they had ordered a thousand books for the two-hour book signing. "We might not have enough," he said. Here's Terry:


I made a few more crowd images, then headed on to my next assignment.

Cloved Oranges and Holiday Spices

The aroma of holiday baking is in the air...as it was one September when I was photographing a feature that would appear during the holidays. A wonderful editor named Val created the cloved oranges, seen in my photo below, in her home kitchen. We thought it might look nice to photograph them in front of her fireplace.


Alas, the fireplace was a gas fireplace, and the flames were too low to show up well in the photo. But that's not a problem -- just an opportunity for creativity. I put an orange gel over a speedlight, and directed it toward the fireplace -- instant roaring fire. Selective focus added to the effect.

Val had been doing some baking that day, and the ingredients were on the counter. We arranged them on her cutting board, with the help of a talented stylist named Tim.



The cinnamon sticks inspired Val to create an ornament. I photographed it on a white cutting board, so it would be easier for Tim to remove it from the background when he placed it on a page.



When I left Val's house that day, it sure felt like a late November day. But the warm September air reminded me we had a few months to go.

Senior Wii - update

Last week, I got a call asking me to photograph seniors playing the video game Wii. Seniors, as in seniors in high school? Nope. Seniors as in senior citizens.

Turns out it's a super way to stay active for the older set.

It's a sweet story how the Wii came to the senior residence hall. The woman on the right, the home's activities director, had gone to a family party with lots of relatives in various parts of the house. She said she was surprised to go into the den to discover her grandmother playing Wii. This is a grandmother who is not particularly mobile.

The grandmother had joined in the game when one of the teen cousins saw her watching him play the game. He simply asked if she'd like to try and she had said yes.

The teens and grandmother enjoyed a wonderful afternoon together, and the activities director decided to bring the Wii to the home where she worked.

The photo technique here is a favorite for showing motion. I wanted the woman's face -- with her intent gaze -- to be perfectly in focus, while her swinging arm to be blurred to depict her quick movements.

I worked in manual mode, for the most control. I set the shutter slow enough to capture the blur. It was likely around 1/30 or 1/15. I then set the aperture to underexpose the background just a bit. Easiest way to do that? Take a guess at the right aperture, shoot a frame, then look at the histogram. Adjust the aperture until you like what you see. I usually do this a bit away from the subject, so they don't get too concerned that I'm taking a lot of frames.

Then, with my shutter and aperture set, I handheld a flash off-camera with my left hand, and shot in TTL mode, so the flash would sort out the right exposure on the woman for me. Gotta love that technology.

So why isn't everything blurry with such a slow aperture?

The natural light in the room is mostly behind the woman, so the light on her face is even less bright than the light in the rest of the room. Since I underexposed the background, she would have been really quite underexposed had I not used flash. This is the same reason sometimes pictures at the beach turn out with a bright sky and people whose faces are too underexposed to see. (So no, it's not crazy to use flash on a sunny day at the beach)

Then the flash helped freeze the action. Since the flash helped to illuminate the woman, and the flash is very fast -- much faster than 1/15 of a second -- it effectively froze her in time and kept most of her from being blurry.

Also very important in this image, the woman's hand was moving much faster than the rest of her body. The flash couldn't stop this blur because there was just enough ambient light on her to create the "ghosting" I was after.

Sounds harder than it is, really. It's an easy one to practice if you have a willing pet, friend, child, or significant other.

License images of senior citizens playing the wii video game for editorial use here.

Our Town: Theater Images

Last week one of my assignments took me to a rehearsal of Thornton Wilder's classic play, Our Town. The young lady, pictured above, played the Stage Manager.

As it was a rehearsal, all kinds of things were going on apart from the action onstage: The lighting personnel were discussing technique, costumers and prop people were running around carrying things, and the actual stage manager (not the character) was barking directions to all. But amidst all the hubbub, this actress stayed in character and delivered her lines.

It made think about how, when I've covered professional tennis players, they demand complete silence and no movement. I suppose it's true that certainly, this actress doesn't have a ball coming at her at 100 miles an hour. But still, I was impressed how she was able to block out everything and deliver.

Often, I'll be in a theater and, when cameras are allowed, I see people in the audience using flash. I guess the automatic features on their camera suggest it. But even from across the room I know they won't be happy with the resulting image on their LCD. If they're too far away, their flash won't reach the stage, but will just light up the backs of the heads in front of them. If they're closer, the flash washes out everything onstage, and you get "soap opera" flat lighting, making the image a far cry from what the play actually looked like.

The trick is to not use flash at all. Think about it: The lighting designer is an expert who has spent time figuring out the most dramatic way to light a performance. Why should I override that?

So I set my camera on manual, with the widest aperture and the slowest shutter speed I can handhold. That lets me get the most light into my camera. I play with the ISO so I don't burn out any areas. Then I wait.

Wait for what? I wait for the actress to move into an area with decent light and a clean background. That works.

Eco-Friendly and Beautiful, Too

I shot this image back in September. I figured it'd run between Halloween and Thanksgiving, so I played up the fall color palette. Pleasant surprise to see the image on the cover. See the whole magazine here.

The items pictured are all eco-friendly, in a store chock-full of other beautiful items that are made from recycled materials. When I was assigned to do a photoshoot at Practically Green, in Ridgefield, CT, I figured it'd be a burlap-and-brown-bag fest. Not at all. The friendly staff there proves that what's good for the earth can be good on the eyes, too.

Technique note: Shooting with windows in the background can be tricky on a bright sunny day. The only way to tame the light -- and avoid blown-out windowpanes -- is to use flash to control the light on the subject. That lets you control the light coming through the window with your shutter speed. I used the technique here because I wanted to make sure the green color outside would read well in the image.

Happy Halloween - Bag O Tricks

If you've ever wondered what it's like to traverse through fields of thousands -- truly, thousands -- of jack-o-lanterns, I can tell you it's pretty creepy. The one above was one of the more benign designs I photographed earlier this week at Van Cortland Manor, in Croton-on-Hudson, New York.

The eerie effect in this photo was all done in-camera: a long shutter (a second and a half, I think) combined with a flash pop and a camera twist. It's a technique I like to have in my back pocket.

Reflections on Magazine Work

I always enjoy the challenge of photographing shiny objects. You've got all the usual challenges of setting up the lighting so it looks interesting, and with shiny objects there are always the reflections to think about. It's especially tricky when shooting on location, as I do often.

The bottles above are just a bit taller than my thumb, so they're tiny. Look carefully at the reflections (ignore the watermark) and see if you can figure out how I lit them.

Night for Day Photo

Walking up to the soccer field, I figured this was gonna be a tricky portrait. I was supposed to make a frame of the team captains, who were busy onfield running drills. So I knew this would be a quick one. The sun was shining bright overhead, so I looked around for some shade nearby where I could bring these guys, but no dice. I knew there was no way they'd have time to walk the five minutes to the nearest shady area.

Lucky for me, though, some storm clouds hovered in one edge of the sky. I asked the guys to stand on the edge of the field, with some trees and the storm clouds behind them. I closed down the aperture and raised the shutter to its highest sync speed to darken the frame. Popped a few frames and adjusted the settings until those clouds looked nice and ominous. Of course, that made the guys silhouetted against the sky, so I held a single flash in my left hand to pop some light onto them.

The image ended up running full page as a sports section cover.