High Key bridal portraits

Canon 1ds II. 70-200mm IS lens, window lighting.

On Saturday I got to try a couple of High Key bridal portraits. While shooting the pre- wedding portraits at our brides home, I saw the opportunity to grab this shot. Lit only by the light from a large window and shooting high iso, this capture was made in the "Hail Mary Zone" but thankfully image stabilization on Canon L series lens helps reduce the possibility of camera shake even at very slow shutter speeds. I remember pondering whether or not to spend the extra $1000.00 for the IS feature but I can now tell you that it is worth every cent. And any future lens purchases will be images stabilizer enabled if I have a choice.

Working in available light as we so often do, the added versatility of IS lenses is just amazing. Being able to work with available light adds to the comfort of our brides, due to the less intrusive nature of available light photography as compared to the more traditional strobe on camera techniques often used by wedding photographers. Secondly capturing the true ambience of the wedding environment certainly helps record the emotion and feel of the wedding day. Getting a real feel of how the church looked inside as the bride and groom exchange vows has got to be preferable to the stark and often unflattering light from an on camera strobe unite.

Mistletoe

Nikon D2x with 60mm f2.8 micro nikor lens

After shooting a great wedding yesterday and some much needed rain on Friday night I decided this morning to venture out to a nearby location and photograph the flowers on a colony of Mistletoe plants. These particular parasitic plants have made home in the branches of low growing Acacia trees near the small township of Merbein, in far Northern Victoria.
The Mistletoe, much maligned for the damage it does to native trees, provides countless numbers of birds with a great supply of food at this time of year. In fact while I concentrated on finding a picture to add to our stock photography collection, there were about a dozen very noisy honey eaters fighting over who got to feed from the best flowers on my plant. None of them seemed to mind me being there, such was the attraction of the flowers.
Apparently of all the tree nesting birds in Australia, around 75% of them are very happy to call a Mistletoe plant home when it comes time to nest.

Quite January... NO WAY!!!!

Canon 1Ds II, 24-70mm f2.8 lens

January for us is traditionally a quite month, a time to catch up on all those jobs that should have been completed in December but somehow just didn't get done. A time when we sit back and look at what we need to do to get ready for the coming year and a time for some personel photography projects. Not this year however, it's been go go go right from day one...Actually day two because we did manage to get new Years day off.

This morning I decided to take a bit of R & R and get up early and take the boat down to the river. Unfortunately when it came to getting out of bed early my enthusiasm for the project started to wain a little. Finally manage to convince myself that it really was what I wanted to do, rather than lay in bed wishing I was out there. The image above suffers from the old I didn't get up early enough syndrome. Fifteen minutes earlier and the light on the river bank would have been so much better, but this is what you get if you sleep in instead of getting out and about. Guess I'll try again soon, which of course means another early morning laying in bed trying to convince oneself that I have to get up now or I'll miss the light. Oh how I love shooting at the other end of the day.

Finding stuff....

Nikon D2x 17-35mm f2.8 lens, post processed using Nik Color Efex Pro 3.00

Much of our time is spent making sure we can find stuff. Using a totally digital work flow should make this task a lot easier and it does. Every image has key words added during the importation stage and those key words then stay with the image for the rest of its life on our system. Even when shooting film it was rare indeed for an image to go missing, and then it was usually because someone had put the negative into the wrong file bag. That believe me was not a good thing, as the only solution was to then manually search all file bags until you found the one shot you were looking for. Most of of team at some stage filed a negative into the wrong bag, few made the same mistake again as the rule was you loose it you find it.

Searching for stock images is a problem as we need to have enough key words applied to an image to allow it to be found with relative ease but not so many as to have the image keep on appearing in search results inappropriately. The image above for example can be found by typing Murray River into the simple search panel on our Excitations website but the reality is that anyone who was searching for an image of the Murray River, would be unlikely to be looking for an image like the one above. However the shot was created on the Murray and the keywords Murray River should be applied to the image. Other images to appear in the search for Murray River include news portraits of speakers at a water crisis meeting held last year. While not relevant to a search looking for images of the river, those images needed a reference to the River Murray as that was the main focus of the discussions on that evening.

Other issues the outback photographer has with meta data and that is essentially what keywords are, along with image titles and image descriptions, is the way various image library search engines deal with the data. For example one of the libraries that we submit work to virtually ignores titles and descriptions, relying instead almost entirely on keywords. Yet another places heavy reliance on descriptions but vary little on keywords. One library provides much better results if you have a very detailed description attached, but another with the same image provides more search reliability if the description is only a few words long. For me the problem is having to re write descriptions and keywords many times over for the one image, or risk that image being lost forever in the libraries system. Any image that fails to get onto the first two or three pages of a search frankly is dead in the water.

The final issue I have with image searches is the current habit of photographers to throw a dictionary at ever image. Their rational seems to be that the more people who see an image the more likely someone is to license that image. That is simple miss guided, if I'm searching for an image of a glass of Shiraz, then I certainly don't want pictures of citrus trees, bowls of fresh fruit and motorcars in a carpark heading up the search result. When this happens I get grumpy as I would expect most genuine buyers would.