Photographers need understanding (and patient) friends and luckily I have several. On this occasion my friend Rachel was enjoying a well deserved break and spent part of it visiting me in the city. As we wandered around (she was searching for a gift) I noticed interesting shadow plays on the pavement as light reflected off the glass clad buildings and smeared and flickered itself along the city's canyons.
I asked her to stand where some of these light pools interested my eye. As a long time friend Rachel understood my ways and used the time to check her email and texts. Between her unscripted actions, the scattering light and random passers by I found some pictures.
I love the fun of finding pictures - it is a welcome break from creating images for set briefs and layouts. It doesn't matter what you use to find your own pictures as long as you look. For these shots I used a Canon 1Ds (3) and a 17mm Tilt/Shift lens set to give a very narrow field of focus.
While I love being a professional photographer sometimes the fun of photography can get lost in the business of making pictures. This is why I need to regularly get out and make pictures for myself. They can be part of an ongoing project or the result of a more spontaneous wandering around to see what I can find.
It was on one of these 'wandering around afternoons' that the idea of Finding Pictures came about. This new workshop is about the enjoyment and challenge of photography and learning how to use a DSLR to make considered, thoughtful pictures wherever you are.
Set in Sydney's beautiful and inspiring Botanic Gardens the half day workshop will set you on the path to your own style with skills and techniques to nurture creativity.
You will discover how to train your eye and imagination to see the light and the design that makes interesting, captivating images. The half day workshop will hone your composition skills as well as explain how to use light and shadow to add depth and drama to your photographs. You will learn how to control depth of field and add deliberate motion blur as well as the ins and outs of Polarizing and Neutral Density Filters.
Essentially it will help you gain the skills to 'find' the pictures by exploiting the techniques and photographic rules that apply to DSLR cameras. By knowing how to adjust aperture, shutter speed and ISO a photographer can manipulate texture, depth of field, movement and colour to 'create' photos rather than just 'take' them.
To get the most out of the workshop you should know how your camera works so it is essential to have a good read of the instructions and for you to bring the instructions to the workshop. Even after 25 years of using cameras of all types I still take the manuals of my current cameras on every shoot. No one can remember every thing and todays cameras are so capable it's handy to have some help to understand all those menus!
The other thing required for the workshop is a tripod. A tripod helps you set up shots and take more considered pictures as well as take advantage of slow shutter speeds. There is no need to invest in an expensive tripod - just a basic one will do. Also, if you have one, a remote camera release is a good to accessory. It is not essential for the workshop, though, as I will show you a handy workaround on the day.
While the tripod is essential for the workshop everything you learn will be applicable to your everyday photography when you don't want to carry the tripod around.
The morning will begin with a short classroom session then we will head into the beautiful Gardens and surrounds to make pictures. It will be fun, creative and certainly educational! The Workshop also includes one on one, online tuition in the month after the workshop as I assess up to 5 of your pictures as you practice the lessons learnt.
The two remaining workshops are set down for Saturday March 24 and Saturday April 28, 2012.
Class size is limited to just 15 and includes a yummy lunch under the shade of the Garden’s trees. Please feel free to email me directly if you have any specific questions about the workshop.
I hope you (or someone you know) can join me for this workshop - I've designed it to help keen photographers understand the process of picture taking and make photographs they
will be proud to hang on their walls.
The pics in this slide show are my holiday snaps. Not the usual vistas, sunsets or tourism icons just pictures I found around the corner one hot summers day.
Over the New Year break I spent some time in Melbourne, Australia with friends. Chris and Marie live in the historical suburb of Williamstown with its beautiful colonial architecture and pre Federation houses. Chris is a builder who specialises in restoring such homes and any walk around his neighbourhood is dotted with many fine examples of his skill and devotion to authentic quality. Marie is also an artisan but one I have more in common with. She's a skilled chocolatier. I eat chocolate.
Please click on the pictures to purchase as fine art prints or stock
Apart from spending time with my friends I had the intention of taking lots of personal photographs. Unfortunately Chris and Marie are too good at hosting and while I did drag my DSLR around, they filled my days with dining, wining and talk while we wandered around Melbourne and it's surrounds.
Soaking up the atmosphere of places like Yarraville, Fitzroy, St Kilda and the city's famous laneways was a real delight and I found myself enjoying it for real and not through a viewfinder. For a photographer such enjoyment is sacrilege!
This hiatus lasted a few days until a major professional cycling event passed by the Williamstown foreshore. I was still very ensconced in holiday mode and somewhat surprised to find myself meandering down there with a camera slung over each shoulder - as if they had invited themselves! As we neared the foreshore the noise of the crowd and race commentary quickly roused the photography in my veins and I was glad to feel the straps on my shoulders.
This part of Williamstown looks across the bay to the Melbourne skyline. There is a tree filled park beside the water with many yachts moored alongside wooden piers. Large merchant vessels glide past as they head into the port or off to the ocean.
The historical town centre with it's cafes, restaurants and yesteryear appeal is separated from the park by a wide esplanade. It was here that the main straight, finish line and two strategic corners of the 2012 Jayco Bay Cycling Classic were situated.
The closer we got to the foreshore I knew I needed a plan of attack to make the most of the many photo ops that would lay just around the corner. A practical benefit of shooting digital is that a photographer can make decisions about the look of the final picture after the shoot. However, the best pictures are made when a photographer's idea is realised. That 'idea' can be involved or simple - it may just be a starting point or it could be a plan with every variable accounted for. My holiday brain was quickly switching to picture mode with every step.
My 'plan' was formulated soon after I rounded the corner to see a group of riders (led by a photographer's motorbike) lean around the first turn of the course. The mass of individual athletes had become an organism of tension, sweat and competition. Though each strained to win, this corner required co-operation, skill and agility if the pack were to survive it. I wanted to photograph that.
This was a hot January day with hard overhead light, areas of deep shade, an abundance of orange, crowd control mesh and a vibrant discord of advertising signs. So, despite the colour overload that defines professional cycling, my imagination saw black and white.
A tonal but contrasty approach would suit the gritty strain and determination on the faces of the athletes. The tension and jostle as they rounded tight corners or rose to sprint towards the finish line would have had me reaching for Tri-X film in the days before digital.
Cycling is a great sport to photograph and this event featured the best of Australia's professional cyclists including the new Australian GreenEdge team. The sport is fast and strenuous with lots of movement, colour and tension. There are often many opportunities to get close to the action with a wide-angle or to stand back and create those compressed, montage-like views of the peloton and crowds with a telephoto.
Even a simple idea like shooting for black and white will improve the pictures you make. It helped me define my compositions and framing. Because I could imagine what different parts of the scenes would look like in black and white I chose my angles, backgrounds and exposures to suit. When the action passed by me I was ready.
Of course the same cacophony of colour that made me see in B&W could be the inspiration for another photographer wanting to show the full gamut of bright, wild energy. Whatever the decision it's best to have a plan - even an unplanned one!
The fantastic auto focus modes found on all brands of quality DSLRs these days are perfect for these tight, fast situations. Canon call theirs AI Servo while Nikon uses Continuous/AF-C. Both will follow focus a moving subject while ever you keep the shutter button half pressed. By using a single focus point to the side of the field of view I was able to select which riders were in focus as well as create strong, dynamic compositions.
Using the wide-angle lens was a different matter. As it was manual focus I had to preset the focus and wait for the riders to pass by. I sometimes held this camera over my head and pointed down to get a different angle. Some of these shots were made by panning with the subject using a slow shutter speed.
The event was actually a series of races held on a set course so it helped that riders would pass by the same spot several times. It gave me time to assess my shots while I waited for the next lap. It also meant I could move around the course to capture different views and actions.
For the technically minded I used a Canon 1Ds Mark3 with a 70-200mm f2.8 lens and a Canon 5D Mark2 with a 17mm f4 T/S lens. The files were made in the RAW format and processed in Lightroom 3.
Finding pictures is the theme of my next workshop being held in Sydney's Royal Botanic Gardens in February, March and April. You can find more information here.
Update! All registrants will receive a free Fine Art Print of one of their pictures! (Early birds will receive 2!)
My new Photography Workshop will show keen photographers how to make arresting, thoughtful pictures of wherever they are. Be it on the other side of the world or just outside your door there are unlimited, unique pictures just waiting to be made.
If you, or someone you know, loves making pictures then here's the chance to have a pro show how to get the most from a DSLR camera.* Discover how to train your eye and imagination to see the beauty and the design that makes interesting, captivating photographs.
Set in Sydney's beautiful and inspiring Botanic gardens the half day workshop will set you on the path to your own style with skills and techniques to nurture inspiration.
Paul will hone your composition skills as well as explain how to use light and shadow to add depth and drama to your photographs. Learn how to control depth of field and add deliberate motion blur as well as the ins and outs of Polarizing and Neutral Density Filters.
This course is designed for the keen enthusiast so you should know the basics of how your camera operates and own a tripod and shutter release.
Making pictures with your camera on a tripod slows down the creative process and gives you time to construct more 'considered' photographs capturing the beauty and details that many others don't even notice. Of course, these skills will also improve your hand held, spontaneous photography.
The morning will begin with a short classroom session then we will head into the beautiful Gardens and surrounds to make pictures. It will be fun, creative and certainly educational! The Workshop also includes one on one, online tuition in the month after the workshop as Paul will assess up to 5 of your pictures as you practice the lessons learnt.
Class size is limited to just 15 and includes a yummy lunch under the shade of the Garden’s trees. Please feel free to email me directly if you have any specific questions about the workshop.
There are 3 Saturday dates available for the workshop: 11 February, 24 March and 28 April 2012 so hopefully there's a date that suits. You can visit here to book your place and if you book before January 15, 2012 I will personally make a Fine Art Print of one your pictures for free! **
I hope you (or someone you know) can join me for this workshop - I've designed it to help keen photographers understand the process of picture taking and make photographs they will be proud to hang on their walls.
*Paul Foley has been a professional photographer for over 25 years. His landscapes have won international awards and been exhibited in Australia, China and Japan. Many hundreds of his limited edition prints are hung in homes around the world.
** To fit on 375 x 250mm paper - valued at $55.00.
In this digital, online world it is always great to see your work on paper, be it a fine art print or as a double page spread in a well printed magazine. The world of magazines and newspapers moves further from paper towards pixels each day and I was pleasantly surprised when a real magazine showing one of my pictures arrived in my post box recently.
In September I wrote about the 'See Change' panorama shoot I undertook for Newcastle City Council. The usage agreement allows for the client to get a lot of mileage from this picture so I was very happy to see it used across two pages in OUTthere magazine's 'Windowseat' section.
click on the photograph to purchase your own fine art print
OutThere is the national in-flight magazine for Australia's largest regional airlines, Regional Express (REX), as well as New South Wales' AeroPelican Air. 'Windowseat' highlights a different facet of Australia each month and on this occasion celebrated Newcastle's listing in Lonely Planet's 2011 Worlds Top Ten Cities.
Many thanks to Guy Pendlebury and Edge Custom Media for the high design and reproduction values they insist on for their work. The surfers at sunrise picture looked beautiful!
For those of us who like to hold real paper photographs and/or display them in our homes please visit the new Collectable Photography website. The prints are personally made by me and limited to editions of 25 or less. For stock photography please visit Lightmoods
Back in 2005 two friends joined me in a 3 day exhibition called 'View3'. We held it at Cooks Hill Surf Club, overlooking the beautiful Bar Beach, in Newcastle Australia. Mates since school who shared a passion for surfing, we reunited with our art to present our different views of the ocean and its many moods. We did it again in 2007 and now look forward to holding the latest exhibition 'View3 20 eleven' from 18-20 November.
My friends are University of Newcastle computer scientist and painter, Keith Nesbitt and professional firefighter, surfer and artist, Chris Buller. We've set up the View3 20 eleven Facebook page where you can find samples of the exhibition. It will feature 24 works encompassing the diverse fields of Keith's abstracts, Chris's seascape realism and my photography.
To quote Keith “This exhibition has been four years in the making and has provided us with a common goal among the challenges and changes in our own lives.”
“Our previous view3 exhibitions fostered reconnections of people and experiences from our collective past as well as a range of new relationships, and this exhibition will build on that,” he added.
We all hope you can join us at Fridays opening or over the weekend. There will be short Artist Talks at 1 pm on Saturday.
My contribution is called 'the light moods' and features two of my favourite places - Newcastle and Merewether Ocean Baths. Australia's oceanside pools were originally built to safely wet and cool the citizens on hot summer days. Today, along with the ebbing edges of the Pacific Ocean, they hold memories and remnants of past living and lives.
Coastal pools like these at Newcastle and Merewether Beaches are spread along the East Coast. For many they are often nostalgic places - especially in times of special light. Early mornings; warm, soft dusks; bright, hot afternoons and cold, weather-beaten nights.
The worn, whitewashed steps have seen the same feet skip and later shuffle, growing from tiny & soft to gnarled and wide. Parents, holding small, excited hands, have nurtured the tentative steps of offspring beginning their own memories. These places are community - gatherings of clans and friends.
For such a visual feast 'the baths' are just as sensory with closed eyes. Squeals of fun, the slap of bare feet on wet concrete, the crashing of waves and the squarks of seagulls picture the story of the Australian coast indelibly on the mind.
The Newcastle and Merewether Ocean Baths are very familiar to my camera. My early visits in the 70's and 80's taught me about light and composition. These places are where I became a photographer, honing my craft and patience with a 4"x5" camera, while a measly film budget meant I had to get it right before I pressed the shutter. I don't live nearby any more, however, when I visit it's often enough for me to sit with eyes closed and let the sounds and scents refresh those slideshows in my mind.
I've made images for long enough to know many of the rules of my craft. It's that knowledge that helps me break a few of them from time to time. With these pictures I used an unusual lens arrangement and techniques to selectively blur and emphasise. I hoped to find pictures that suited memories of special places. Perhaps a little embellished, with some 'facts' less defined but always a steady centre of truth - even as time separates then from now.
Whether it's the saturated sepia of the Newcastle Ocean Baths plates or the muted tones found in the Merewether Ocean Baths pictures they reflect the mood and the light of a few short moments when the shutter opened.
For the technically minded I mounted a Canon 17mm Tilt/Shift lens to a 2x Extender. The technicians will tell you not to use a extender and such a wide lens together (and they are right) but this combination gave me a soft but defined point of focus. If you are going to do something 'wrong' with your lenses make sure they are of the best quality to begin with. A Tilt/Shift lens allows the front to swing, tilt and slide up and down. They are highly crafted, very sharp and most often used in architecture and landscapes to keep the perspective square to the sensor and to get as much in focus as possible.
Not happy to just distort the clarity of the lens with an extender I also 'swung' its front the wrong way creating a very narrow field of focus. I shot with a Canon 5D Mark 2 connected to a SmallHD DP6 Monitor which helped me set the focus point exactly where I wanted it.
I was happy enough with the pictures to try out Blurb - a easy to use and very professional looking book printer. You can see the results here. 'the light moods' is available in both hard and soft cover as well as an ebook for your ipad or tablet.
Recently a client sought to purchase usage rights for one of my stock images to be used as a long narrow banner in an airport. While the picture looked great as part of their bold branding design the filesize itself was too small for the extra wide reproduction.
I suggested that we shoot a new picture in a format more suited to the output size required. To keep costs down I recommended my Commissioned Stock pricing model. While this doesn't suit all assignments it fitted perfectly here.
Essentially, a commissioned stock shoot is one where I make a picture to suit a client's brief but am also able to include it in my online stock library. The fee is negotiated according to the usage required and the production costs involved but is significantly lower than a traditionally commissioned assignment.
Please click on the pictures to see them larger or to purchase a print
I decided to shoot a multi frame panorama with the RAW files to be processed in Lightroom and then stitched in Photoshop CS5. This would give a very wide file with enough pixels for the extra large reproduction.
Once this was sorted we had to get the shoot organised and done quickly. Gemma, the client, sourced two willing surfers, Chris and Simon, to be the models. This may seem obvious but shooting lifestyle or sports requires believable models who know and understand the situation being photographed. Besides, who else but surfers and mad fisherfolk are going to turn up at a beach before sunrise!
Susan Gilmore Beach was selected as the location and we set aside the following Friday for a pre dawn meet up. Of course it was winter and would no doubt be very cold.
I checked the beach the afternoon before to sort out the best way to get around to the rock shelf in what would be darkness. The swell had come up and, although the tide would be low when the sun rose, we would still have to walk across a very rocky and wave swept shoreline to get to the location. In the dark. Surf reports were indicating high surf conditions for the morning with the weather expected to be clear and bright. The thing was, though, we needed to get around to the location before the 'bright and clear' part of the dawn.
On July 4th in 1884 an American clipper celebrated it's last Independence Day. The 'Susan Gilmore' was wrecked on the small beach that would remember it in name. On that day all 14 crew as well as the ships' two dogs, cat and bird survived. Although the Susan Gilmore's demise was met in much stormier conditions, tomorrow would be July 8th, 2011 and the surf was expected to be high and charging in. Lucky for us the timing turned out to be coincidence and not omen.
The next morning I arrived to find Chris sitting on the bonnet of his car peering into the darkness. The noise and barely visible lumping shapes told us that the surf was big. While Chris waited for the others I went down to see if we could get around to the shooting location without drowning the talent, client and equipment. We couldn't. Did I mention the dark? By the time I got back the others had arrived and were in Simon's van watching a surf movie. Oh, the rigours of modern surfing!
Eventually, in murky, predawn light we headed around to the little beach. Gemma and I zigged, zagged and hopped close to the cliff base. Chris and Simon, in wetsuits and carrying their boards, waded through waves sweeping across the rock shelf.
Aside from the more accessible time of day during which they occur I do prefer shooting sunsets to sunrises for one important technical reason. As the sun sets the best light arrives - you can see the colours strengthen and become more vibrant. At sunrise that beautiful light emerges from the dark and leaves very quickly. This sunrise image would require 9 separate frames to be stitched together. Each panorama would take several minutes in quickly leaving light that wouldn't be back for 24 hours and would never be the same.
Timing is everything in photography and even more so with this picture. I would have to time the first shot on the extreme right with the incoming waves as I panned to the left a few degrees at a time. From an elevated position on a large rock I shouted across the noise of the surf to arrange Chris and Simon how I wanted them to stand and to place them at the spot that would be captured in the 7th frame.
After what seemed like a long time for the guys to be standing in the cold water and freezing wind the light on the horizon achieved a pleasing glow. A series of waves began their journey from right to left. I shouted "Shooting", Chris and Simon returned to the planned pose and I panned with the waves, stopping at pre-determined degree markings on the panorama head to make each frame.
We made a few more panos then headed back to the carpark and then down to Merewether Beach for a cuppa at the kiosk. Protected from the wind by the surf club the guys could warm up as we watched the big waves being ridden by those surfers who had made it out the back.
The picture is now hanging at Newcastle Airport which is a very modern regional facility servicing the Hunter Region on Australia's East Coast. The banner features the 'See Change' Newcastle logo - strong vibrant branding being used to attract visitors, business and new residents to Australia's seventh largest city.
I'm quite biased about Newcastle because I grew up there. Although I moved 160 kilometres south to Sydney about 7 years ago some of my family and many friends are still there. It really is a great place to visit, live and do business with.
A successful photograph is the sum of the team that works on it and special thanks go to Gemma, Chris and Simon.
Credits
The Surfers: Christopher Tola, Simon Drinkwater
Client: Newcastle City Council
Client Rep/Producer: Gemma der Kinderen
Agency: PeachAds / Megan Duncan
Equipment: Canon 1Ds Mark 3, Canon 100mm f2.8 macro lens, Acratech GP Ballhead Software: Lightroom 3 / Photoshop CS5
