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Articles Tagged with: Charleston

Get A Little Closer

1/2500 sec f/5.0 165mm ISO 200

I took this photo of the columns of a church on Hasell Street the other day in this fashion because the light was really hard. Instead of fighting the light, I decided to get in close to exploit the hard nature of it. By focusing closely in on the lines and contours of the columns, I am able to create a graphically rich and textured photo of one of the more defining elements of a grand old Charleston building.

Sometimes the details of the scene can tell more than a wide literal shot. What is it about the scene that attracts you to it? What naturally draws your eye in the real scene (not the one in the viewfinder)? Try isolating those compelling elements and making a photo about them.

0.8 sec f/2.8 40mm ISO 1600

In the scene above, the lights had just dimmed and the black lights came on as “Rock N’ Roll Bowling” started at the AMF West Ashley bowling alley. They must have recently replaced all of their rental shoes, because I immediately noticed everyone’s glowing white laces and trim on their bowling shoes. I put the camera down at foot level and focused on the middle foot. Without showing a ball or pin, most anybody who’s ever been bowling before will recognize exactly what this shot is about.

While you should always move around and find different angles, don’t forget to get in close and fill the frame. A lot of my favorite photos are very simple compositions with only a few major elements. The best way to achieve that is to get in so close that there’s no room for anything else!

Finding Your Composition Part 2

10 Seconds f/2.8 28mm ISO 200

I really enjoyed writing yesterday’s post. It’s truly a joy for me to talk about the decisions I make when making a photo and also why I choose my favorites from a shoot. I tend to flood my Flickr stream with a ton of different stuff, most of it out of context. Here on my blog I get to put things into a format that explains why I made the shots I did.

I was very pleased to see David duChemin’s blog post today talking about composition. He’s basically reiterating the importance of expression over conforming to the rules of composition. The point I think we both agree on wholeheartedly is that your vision needs to come from within you, not from a set of theories passed off as rules by the general population of some past era in design. Artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat made their statements through their individual and unique expression, not technical prowess.

As I continue to pursue the ideas I get in my head about what specific style I want to define myself with as a photographer, every once in a while I see something very extraordinary that brings out the child-like quality of why most of us ever pick up a camera. A scene screams to you – shoot me!! This was one of those scenes:

1/125th of a second F/8 92mm ISO 200

I have a favorite spot I revisit underneath the Cosgrove Bridge in Charleston, SC that a lot of fishermen like to hang out at. Later in the day on New Years Eve I was traveling over this bridge and got giddy when I saw a beam of light peering out from a break in the clouds. It was mystical to say the least. I would have beaten myself up if I didn’t pull the car over and start shooting. After grabbing a few shots I liked, it was gone. I was left with this completely different photo:

1/100th of a second f/12 120mm ISO 200

Now that my main element (the light beam) was no longer in the picture, I was able to look around and explore the effects of the clouds and the light over a scene that’s quite familiar to me. Slightly to the right of the two photos above was this scene:

1/125th of a second f/8 55mm ISO 200

Notice how the color at the horizon is completely different at this viewpoint and time? I also took advantage of how the clouds were breaking and making triangles at the edge of the scene. While the first two have a horizon that’s nearly in the middle of the shot (some would say that that is a no-no, I say phooey), this one demands a different approach. The mirrored reflection in the water combined with its original elements compliment in a visually balanced way with the grass in the foreground. This was all very intentionally placed in the viewfinder as I composed the image. The secret to successfully composing scenic shots like these for me is to treat each element as a graphical object and place them in a way that they fit for my vision of the scene. My thought process usually begins with a voice in my head telling me, “this looks ‘right'”. After I get a shot like that, I’ll start to expand on it and step out of my head, because that bastard doesn’t know everything and needs to be stood up to every once in a while!

There was something very graphical and cool going on behind me with the clouds, the bridge, and a small pool of water in the foreground. I kept trying to find the best composition and settled on these few elements I just had to include. I started here:

1/125th of a second f/8 85mm ISO 200

I wanted to show a bit more direction with the bridge and include more of the bush. I stayed in the same spot and moved my point of view and focal length slightly to get this:

1/125th of a second f/8 68mm ISO 200

I was pretty happy with that last shot. I moved on and started shooting other stuff in the area for a little while. Then, as I was getting back in my car I looked once again at the same scene. Now the color and position of the clouds had gotten so much more vivid that I had to shoot one more shot of this scene. This is how I composed it this time:

1/125th of a second f/13 92mm ISO 200

I like the last two for different reasons. This last one has a better definition in the clouds and the line of the bridge has a vanishing point that further conveys its direction through the image. I do like the inclusion of the dirt before the pool of water in the first two, but traded it off for that expanded bridge line in the third one. Photography can really be a game of give and take for more reasons than just light values! You see, there were fishermen there and their cars were parked right in my line of sight to the left of the frame. In order to eliminate them, I had to deal with what I had and make it work.

I hope to do a 3rd composition installment in the future involving portraiture, but I’ll need to shoot those shots with publishing the exploratory pics in mind! Thanks for reading. I hope you have a great start to your year. We had a bit of a scare in our house, but it all is seemingly working out now and we’re stronger for overcoming it. “Resistance” has its work cut out for it if it thinks it will hold my family back from its dreams!

Finding Your Composition

1/200th of a second, f/4.5 22mm ISO 200

When talking about any style of photography, a consistently important factor is composition. If the composition doesn’t connect with the viewer, the picture is overlooked and it fails. When you first become aware of that fact, the issue becomes “How do I change static elements to fit into a better composition?” The answer is usually a simple one – you don’t, you change yourself.

There are plenty of rules that you should know – the rule of thirds, the golden ratio (as featured in the photo above – 1.618), and compositional balance. There’s also the rule of odds, which tells us that three birds is better than two, and the rule of space which suggests that negative space should be used to suggest movement and/or tension. I try to break these rules on a daily basis, but I also try to use them as a reference point. I have not forgotten my own instincts on composition, and combined with the knowledge of the traditional concepts, I find that gives me the opportunity to step out of my own head to explore more possibilities. Lets look at four photos of the same exact scene composed in different ways.

Yesterday I was parked about a block away from a client and decided to do an impromptu photowalk. As I parked, I saw this scene below in my mind just as it’s composed and liked the combination of the shapes of the foreground, middle, and background as a flattened 2D image. I shot the exact scene as I envisioned it.

1/2500th of a second f/5 180mm ISO 250

After I got what I wanted, I decided to change the orientation to a landscape shot and used pretty much the same point of view. This brought in some more elements and creates a more recognizable image.

1/2500th of a second f/5 185mm ISO 200

I preferred the vertical composition and tried to re-arrange the elements. This time I moved to the left and zoomed out a bit. I was using my 55-300mm DX lens, which is an awesome and inexpensive piece of glass. I like the composition of the foreground elements (the lamp post, the light, the sign, the sidewalk, and the fence), but I don’t think the background is as powerful with the placement of the crane and the bridge.

1/2500th of a second f/4.8 116mm ISO 200

Finally, I took a break and shot some other things before I eventually came back to this scene. Sometimes it’s best to gather inspiration by shooting unrelated photos so that when you go back to the first scene, it’s like a whole new vision to behold! This time I got closer. I placed the foreground elements in an evenly spaced way at the top third of the photo and brought out the texture of the fence and train car for the bottom two thirds. The background crane gets blurred and adds a bit of dimension to the shot – this helps more clearly define and separate the foreground, middle and background elements. The gray texture of the train car replaces the sky as a source of a negative space-like element. By moving closer, I also managed to fill the fame. In my opinion, this is the most successful composition of this scene out of the four.

1/2500th of a second f/5 200mm ISO 200

It’s all the same stuff, I just moved my camera around to include, remove, and alter the view of it. The truth is that there is no correct composition of this scene – It’s all up to you and your tastes. People who view them will have their own reasons for liking different versions, just like some people buy red cars over yellow ones. The power we have as photographers is to define and show what we like in hopes that others will connect with you on it as well. Art is all about relationships. The relationship of the elements on a fundamental and tangible level as well as the relationship of style and intent on a philosophical and spiritual one.

Which one do you like? Why?

Festival of Lights 2010

It took two attempts to get in, but we made it to the Charleston Holiday Festival of Lights at James Island County Park this evening. As usual, we listened to classic holiday music while driving though the park checking out the grand light displays. Nothing has changed about it in the six Christmases I’ve spent here in Charleston, but it’s always a fun time with the kids and it really makes the season feel complete.

Here’s a piece of the giant sand sculpture for this year, which was an underwater theme.

The line to get in earlier this evening was so long that we left and went to my brother-in-law’s home and hung out for an hour or so to wait out the crowd. The second time was a charm and we got to enjoy hot chocolate and roasted marshmallows.

The picture up top was just hand-held with no flash. I have a similar shot here that utilized a wireless flash being held by my daughter, but I lost the whole background with it (and I had it dialed down to 1/100th power). Sometimes the blurry shot captures the feel much better anyway. The second and third shots were taken with the camera held out of the sunroof in our mini-van. The sand sculpture was shot using the railing around the sculpture to steady the camera. The last shot of my son chowing down on a marshmallow was made with a wireless flash held in my left hand pretty much right over the fire pit – I had to be quick on that one!

Thoughts On Today’s Help-Portrait Event

Before I start, I just want to credit the photographers who took the pictures in the diptych above. John Lindroth took the photo on the left of Krista Leapold, myself, and Kathy Hare, and Kathy Hare took the photo of me on the right. John, Kathy, & Krista all joined me to photograph children and their families at the MUSC Children’s Hospital this morning.

I have to go ahead and say that we had an absolute blast doing this today. In fact, it was a major highlight of my journey behind the lens so far. The families were genuinely grateful and excited to get their pictures taken. The looks of joy on the kid’s faces was worth more than anything tangible in this world. I wish I could share some of the pictures that Kathy & John took of the kids checking out their photos on the back of my camera’s LCD screen. Their joy was matched only by the joy in my own face as I looked at their reactions. I felt like a parent on Christmas morning watching his children open up their gifts. But the pictures we made today are for the people we photographed and are not mine to show, so I can only share my words with you.

To be able to share our passion for photography and creativity with people like those that we served today is why most of us ever decide to make photographs. We want people to share in a moment of time that we stopped forever because it meant something to us at that point. Little gifts like this will hopefully make the experiences these children are enduring filled with enough highlights that their passion for life will burn stronger than the illness that put them there.

Unlike the other local Help-Portrait group that is serving the Charleston Convoy of Hope on December 11th, we did not serve hundreds of people today (they did an amazing job last year and are estimating over 1,000 subjects at this years event). This gave us the opportunity to not only create professional portraits, but also take candid editorial style photos of the kids during the event. We were lucky to photograph every kid that was not confined to their rooms, which was amazing. They each got a CD filled with the pictures we made, and the hospital also got a DVD of all of the pictures we took so they can use them any way they want to.

I shared a bunch of pictures in yesterday’s post that are similar to what I was doing today, so because Krista was helping out today I present a picture I took of her being her bright and cheery self. Thanks for reading!

Time To Give Back

**UPDATE – 12/1/2010** – I have posted the notes from our first planning meeting here. We have our volunteers set for the December 6th event, but still need people for the 16th and back-up volunteers for both dates. We also could use a portable photo printer if you have one to loan us.

**UPDATE – 11/29/2010** – Our first planning meeting will take place on Wednesday, December 1st at EVO Pizza in North Charleston. The details can be found here.

**UPDATE -11/22/2010** – We have set two dates: December 6th & 26th 2010 – please click here for the details.

Original Post – 11/16/2010:

Last year, I saw a video about the annual Help-Portrait event in Charleston. I thought it was brilliant and put a reminder in my calendar so I could remember to get involved with it this year. Help-Portrait is the brainchild of celebrity photographer Jeremy Cowart. The idea is for local photographers to organize a way to use their skill to give back to their community by volunteering time and prints for those in need.

My wife and I have been talking back in forth for a long time about how we could help kids with cancer. She regularly follows the blogs on CaringBridge.org, and get very emotionally attached to the families and their stories. Recently, one of our daughter’s classmates, Jesse, got diagnosed with Leukemia after he couldn’t walk into the state fair with his grandparents. Just the thought of a 10 year old boy not being able to make it into the fair is heartbreaking enough, and to suffer through the horror of finding out that your child has been diagnosed with cancer is something I could never even fully imagine – but it happens to the most unlikely and innocent children.

So, when I signed up for Help-Portrait in anticipation of volunteering for an event that was being run by another local photographer, I was kind of bummed that nobody had anything planned yet for this year. Then it clicked in my head. I could do it. Why not? But what to do – who could I serve for this? The answer hit me like a ton of bricks – We could do it at the MUSC Children’s Hospital and we could take holiday portraits of the families who are in similar situations as Jesse’s!

Today, my wife Amy finally got to talk to the Child Life Manager at MUSC and explained our plan. Unfortunately, the day that Help-Portrait is planned for (December 4th) is not a possibility with their schedule. However, she did say that she was really excited about the idea and that there are plenty of other days that we can do it on! So I talked it over with my wife, and we both easily agreed that the date is really unimportant – we don’t have to do it on a specific day to be part of this. The idea is to give back, not to give back on only one specific day! I’ve created a group for this MUSC Kids project on Help-Portrait.com for anybody who wants to participate with me. It’s the same idea as Help-Portrait, just on our own schedule. Anybody can help – photographers, make-up artists, hair stylists, people who can hold a light stand – anybody who wants to be a part of this is welcome! I also signed up with the existing Charleston, SC Help-Portrait Group because I plan on helping out with whatever event pops up for the 4th of December.

This is what we are going to be focusing our efforts on in the coming weeks, so please, sign up at the Help-Portrait community site and get involved! Lets make this happen together, it will be fun and you will make someone’s day a bit brighter.

Painting With Light

As I stated in Friday’s post, I love shooting after the sun goes down. One of the coolest techniques you can use to spruce up your long exposures is called painting with light. Basically, you use a flashlight to paint in the object you are trying to photograph in order to make it stand out in the frame. In the image above, there was a lot of ambient light on the right side of the College of Charleston Observatory dome, so I used my Fenix E01 pocket flashlight to fill in the left side.

An alternative to the E01 if you have a camera phone with an LED flash such as the iPhone 4, which is just as bright when using one of the countless flashlight apps available. A step up would be something like the Fenix LD15, which is capable of 117 lumens versus the E01’s 10 lumens (Hint to anybody who’s reading).

What about a much larger object? A puny pocket flashlight can surprisingly make a huge difference, but sometimes you want to really light up a structure, such as this lighthouse. In this situation, a car was parked on the side of the lighthouse and the owner was kind enough to turn on its headlights to illuminate the whole side of the Sullivan’s Island Lighthouse. Even still, I used my pocket flashlight to fill in some of the lighthouse’s left side.

Day 166 - Sullivan's Island Lighthouse at Night

Photography is all about capturing light, so anything that you can use to manipulate or create it is another item in your mental bag of gear. Whenever I shoot something like the photos above, after I compose the shot and take a test frame, I always think of way to improve it while I’m there. You should rarely ever shoot and think about how you can fix it later. In most situations, post processing should be about maximizing the information that you caught, not about changing it completely. Having a flashlight in you pocket that is just a little bit bigger than a AAA battery is a helpful tool to have for more than finding your keys in the dark!

New Charleston Themed Prints

Just in time for the holidays, I wanted to offer two recent photographs I made at Mount Pleasant’s Riverfront Park just after the sun went down. There’s a short magical window of light where everything gets a very deep saturation and it’s one of my favorite times of day to shoot in. This photo below was taken a few minutes before the one up above, and you can see the difference in the intensity of the color in just a short span of time.

Just a reminder, if you are planning to purchase framing through my store and want to do a mat or use glass, those options are not available when you choose Metallic Printing as the printer states a problem with it sticking to the glass. Personally, I don’t think you would have a problem if you use a mat because it would separate the print from the glass, and I’ve been pleading with them to change it. Until then, the color paper option still looks fantastic.

Industrial Roads

In contrast to yesterday’s post, today I snapped a shot of the docks off of East Bay Street in Charleston, SC. I have driven past these docks plenty of times before, and I always wanted to stop and take a shot of them. Today, I decided to practice what I preach and pulled the car over. I walked up and down the street looking for a good shot. I was intentionally trying to frame it to show only a man-made landscape. When the worker walked through the frame, It morphed the whole idea into something new for me.

Look at the grandeur of what we as humans can do. Items such as the shipping containers which see much more of this world geographically than most of the people who create them. Their bold colors, stark texture, and patternless arrangement like giant building blocks line the coast with giant cranes replacing Palmetto trees and a magnificent suspension bridge carving out the skyline like a pair of mountain peaks. In the foreground, instead of grass, lay the train tracks that will eventually cart those boxes to the mainland. Walking through it all is a man. Man, who created this landscape, is strolling through his domain. It’s as if the creator of the world was caught walking through a valley and someone snapped a photo of it.

Every element in your work matters. To me, what started out as a shot to simply show an artificial landscape turned into a nearly spiritual representation of creativity with the addition of one small but meaningful element. It’s the little details that can define a bigger picture.

CupcakeCamp Charleston

Friday night I saw a blurb on Twitter about CupcakeCamp Charleston, and it immediately caught my eye. I didn’t know what it was about, what the point of it was, or who was even doing it – I just knew that my family had to be there. That is how powerful a name like CupcakeCamp is. For all I knew, this could have been the second coming of the Jonestown Massacre, but I was hypnotized by sugary goodness and had to check it out.

We arrived to the Aloft Hotel in North Charleston to a lobby full of the happiest people on earth. Just look at that photo above, there ain’t a single unhappy person in the place. I didn’t know what was going on, but people were sitting around high on cupcakes, and there was a huge line snaked throughout the hotel of people waiting to try more. It was decadent to say the least. Just imagine a G-rated version of Studio 54, with sugar instead of cocaine.

Did I mention that the cupcakes were all 100% free? I’m surprised that the place wasn’t rioting! Do you understand what I’m saying? Dozens upon dozens of exotic cupcake flavors – all you can eat – FREE!! I think we might have died and went to heaven, but instead of fluffy clouds, there was fluffy icing.

I think there was some sort of contest going on, but I couldn’t tell you who won. Who cares? I won – I got to eat carrot cake cupcakes followed by banana pudding ones. Contest??? Who the hell could choose? After 3 cupcakes, you’re stoned on sweetness. It was absolutely crazy. These people below looked like they were officiating something though:

I don’t even know what to make of this. I just hope it happens again… Soon. Like tomorrow. Please, God.

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