I’m not only taking pictures of lobsters and traps! Portraits of the lobstermen are also important for the book so when there is a lull in the action I try to take photos of the people and things on the boat. Here are some of my favorites of late.

A couple of weekends ago I was in Gloucester, Mass. looking for pictures for The Lobstering Life book I am working on. The one picture I really want is one showing a lobster being pulled out of the trap when it first comes out of the water. There are two ways this can be done- with a very wide angle lens hovering right over the trap on the boat or with a longer telephoto lens from off the boat on another boat. The ideal to either shot is capturing the exact moment when the person, lobster and trap are in the perfect position. The trick is that the perfect moment seldom occurs and when it does seldom seems to happen in nice light.

I had two days to go out on the water.  The first day I went out on a lobster boat for the day and photographed as they pulled 300 traps. The crew was very nice and extremely cooperative even allowing me to step in front of them as they were working. In this part of the lobstering world lobstermen drop traps in trawls or sets. On the boat I was on each trawl was 150 to 200 yards long (it seemed) and had 10 traps. So by the time one trap came up and was cleaned, rebaited and stowed on the stern of the boat the net trap on the string was coming up. There is no time to relax when working a trawl so for the crew to  let me intrude and interfere with what they were doing was quite generous of them. None the less I had just seconds to step in, compose and fire bursts of 10 or 20 shots before I had to step back. This does not lend itself to contemplative photography!

It also does not lend itself to good photography. I have 800 images to prove that! Of those 800 images I kept about 20 of lobsters being pulled out of the traps. Of those 20 there are one or two I like. Of those one or two there are none I really like- they are useable, probably good enough for the book but not good enough for me.

The problem was that the light, the lobster or the position of the arms and hands never perfectly aligned or at least I never caught them when they were perfectly aligned. Most of the time the terribly contrasty light was the culprit- it added just enough visual  chaos to make the picture confusing. The rest of the time…well, the rest of the time nothing worked.

I even tried lying down on the roof of the boat above where the pots were being pulled and shooting directly down on the action. I got some pretty good shots but the angle and perspective was pretty bizarre. I still don’t know if I like them or not.

The second day I arranged to go out at dawn for a few hours in a chase boat to try to photograph alongside a lobster boat. The boat was a small Boston Whaler (a 12 footer) which is pretty small for the open ocean but luckily the day was clam and the ocean flat. The obvious difference between photographing on or alongside a lobster boat is that of viewing perspective. The less obvious difference is one of permission and cooperation. I had both when I was on the boat but when chasing a boat you have neither, at least initially. This becomes disappointingly obvious when the captain keeps positioning his boat with its ‘wrong’ side to me.

But then we found Gussie, captain of the boat Gussie’s Girls. Suddenly everything worked! The light was good, the boat was colorful and with one shot out of the 400 I took I got a lobster in a trap in good light being hauled up the side of the boat. Yeah for me!!

So there you have it, 1200 pictures over two days of lobsters being pulled out of the water. One I really like and half a dozen that are good enough, I think, for the book. There are dozen other pictures I like of other things related to lobstering (see the coming blog entries) that I took on those two days so don’t feel sorry for me…I got some very nice images. I just didn’t get the exact ones I was looking for. I guess I will have to go out again, and again, and again!

This brings up  an interesting point of conversation. Whenever we see a photographic presentation be it a show or a gallery or a book or a magazine piece we are seeing the best images that photographer had. We are not seeing the ones that are pretty good nor are we seeing the ones the were just okay and we are certainly not seeing the hundreds of terrible shots the the photographer first took as her or she learned how to take the best one. No, the only ones we see are the ultimate ones, the very best. Yet when we go out and try something new and get less than what we hoped for we get all disappointed and bummed out because the pictures didn’t turn out as well as we would’ve liked. Wake up! Smell the delete key! Photography is a process. We all get better by practicing. One or two tries means nothing, talk to me after ten or twenty. Then you are getting good stuff. After thirty you are getting great stuff. So enjoy the process and keep shooting. If this was easy everybody would be doing it!

For those of you who don’t know I am a huge Photoshop Lightroom fan. It is incredibly powerful and very efficient so that I do all my down loading, editing, organizing, processing and printing through Lightroom. And it is incredibly fast. Lightroom is so powerful and effective now that I haven’t used Photoshop in months! (By the way, I am not a paid advocate of Lightroom. I am not a paid advocate of anything. This way I can stay objective)

Here is a shot I took the other day at the farm of a barn swallow. I noticed this barn swallow perched on a nice loop of hose in the barn while I was doing chores. I came back with my big lens (Nikon 200-400) little later to get the shot but when I set up I noticed that the better shot was on this old pipe gatepost that was behind me. The only catch was  it meant that I was shooting it into the sun. So I did the best I could at the time to minimize any bright spots int he background, shot away and down loaded it into Lightroom

In lightroom the first thing I did was crop it to a vertical. This cut out a lot of the bad background. If I had had time I would’ve shot it as a vertical but my mind said horizontal at first and at second the bird flew away!

The first 3 things I do when I process an image in the Develop module in Lightroom involves correcting the exposure. This image seemed a bit light to me so I darkened the image using the exposure slider. I also put the ‘Tint’ slider to 0. (this is something I always do. Not for any good reason, I just don’t like the computer making this value judgement without including me). I also added a bit of black to the image by sliding the black slider from 5 up to 9. Using just a touch of black will often take some of the haziness/dullness out of an image. (Using both the exposure slider and the black slider in Lightroom is the same as finding the white and black points in Photoshop when in Levels)

The second thing I do to an image in Lightroom is to use the Clarity and Vibrance sliders. (With all the sliders I strongly recommend that you slide them up to the point that you like the result and then back off some. This prevents the image from looking over processed and detracting with the beauty of the shot.) For me, Clarity seems to end up between 30 - 50 and Vibrance between 15-30. Again, I am very judicious about using too much of either so I move the slider just enough and no more.

For most of my images these two sets of adjustments are the only things I do. I do sometimes use one more tool for small, fine tweaks of the image. This is the adjustment brush. With this tool I can go in and selectively adjust just one part of the image. This is the same as making a mask in Photoshop but a heck of a lot easier and quicker. And with the Auto Mask box enabled any changes I make to the background stay where I want them and don’t spill over on to the bird.  (Auto mask works by looking for strong edges and confining the changes to those edges.)

Using the brush I selectively darkened the bright areas of the background to try to make them less obvious. Ideally, I prefer not to have to do this by choosing my shooting angle carefully and avoiding distracting highlights.

The last thing I did was slightly bump up the exposure to give the image more life. And that was it. In all it took me less than 2 minutes to do all this processing in Lightroom. Here is my the final image-

Am I finished now? Nope! Now I am going to go back and try it again and do a better job. This image is nice but I know I can do better!

I was in Gloucester last weekend riding lobster boats and looking for shots. I’ll include some of the pictures in the upcoming blogs. For now let me show you this very unusual blue lobster. I found this guy when I walked into a lobster processing plant and started asking questions and generally annoying people. Probably as a way to get me to go away, they showed me this blue lobster.  They said it was the first blue lobster they had seen in over 10 million pounds of lobsters!  Now that is rare! It looked like it was made out of porcelain. I suspect it is still there but I’m not telling where. They were bothered enough by me!

When I first started out as a Pro (or trying to earn money to be a Pro) I decided to concentrate my photography on three areas- wildflowers, forests and harbors. There wasn’t much fore thought into this decision, there was no market analysis or saleability review on my part nor did I look into the future and try to predict where these three areas of concentration might lead me. I just know I loved wildflowers, forests and harbors, it was that simple.

It was a good decision. In all of my photography and in all of my books I have included lots of photos of wildflowers and forests and I am still drawn to them and enjoy photographing them. Harbors though, while I still love to wander around in them, have never been a big seller for me. I use photos of harbors in my introductory shows but I don’t think I have ever sold one (probably because I have never sent them out to be considered for sale!). So why is it that I keep taking pictures of harbors? I think it is the colors.

No matter the time of year or business of the harbor there are always bright colors to be found. You can go on the drabbest of winter days or the rainiest of summer days and there are colors every where in a harbor. This is in contrast to most other outdoor subjects that have definite times of the year when they are prime and other times of the year when they are nonexistent. Try photographing wildflowers in November or forests in the heat of summer and you will soon be craving the bright, eternal colors of harbors.

Finally, after 25 years as a professional photographer, I have a project, The Lobstering Life, that will actually pay me to photograph the colors of the harbor. This book will not only be full of colorful lobstering gear but also full of colorful lobstermen but that is for a different post. Today I am happy to wallow in the bright and sometimes bizarre colors found in the harbors of the Gulf of Maine. Hope you enjoy them too!

My new book is out!

It has been a long time coming- about 5 years- but the wait has been worth it. I am very happy how it turned out and hope you will be as well.

The book can be ordered at any bookstore or ordered from me if you would like it signed. Please email me - dmidfoto@sover.net -if this option interests you and I will let you know how soon I can get one to you.

We Shoot Horses, Don’t We?

So how do you go about photographing a running stallion? Before I tell you the hows lets review the wheres, whats and whys. Last week (early June) I was employed by a thoroughbred horse farm, Pin Oak Stud, in Kentucky bluegrass country to provide all the photographic images they would need for all their advertising in the near future. This is the fourth time I have done this for Pin Oak and while it is an incredibly beautiful place to take pictures I am ‘under the gun’ the entire time I am there. The pressure to create at my highest level can make dull light or uncooperative animals very stressful, very frustrating and not much fun.

Why is it stressful? Because it is not my usual kind of photography, that’s why. No, not the subjects- big animals and beautiful landscapes are what lots of people photograph. This is stressful because I usually photograph to please me but at Pin Oak I am photographing to please others. This means that doesn’t make any difference if I think the picture is magnificent, if they don’t like it is no good.

The other reason it is so stressful is because for a picture to be considered useable the horse has to be in the perfect body position with an imposing posture and formidable attitude. This means many, many of my pictures were rejected because a leg was too high, the knee was too bent, the ears weren’t turned properly, an eye wasn’t bright, the mane was flying, the tail was too high, the back legs were too spread, a leg was too straight, too curved, too under the body, to low, too wide, the neck was too curved, the belly too long, the nose too long, the stride too long and on and on and on. Getting a good picture was like looking for a needle in a haystack without knowing what a needle looked like.

Luckily, I didn’t have to pick the pictures I just had to take the pictures. My job was to get pictures that were properly exposed, appropriately composed (all horse, nothing else) in beautiful light and most importantly, in focus. Their job was to pick the ones they liked. So I took a lot of them and they picked a few of them. I took about 5500 pictures in 5 days, 5000 of which were just of the three stallions (or studs). Of the 5000 they considered about 50 images and really liked (translation: were going to use eventually) no more than 5 of each stallion. That’s one tenth of one percent of the pictures I took of the studs. Now you know why I took so many pictures.

The important part of this process for me was learning not to care which pictures they fell in love with. I just cared that they fell in love with some. I had no attachment to any of the pictures so whatever they said, no matter how picky and inconsequential it seemed to me (translation: ridiculous) it didn’t matter. I was bullet proof from criticism as long as they liked some pictures of each stallion. This is not as easy as it sounds but it is necessary when you are taking pictures for someone else and you don’t know what they are really going to like.

Okay, now for the hows. Here is the situation. I am inside a paddock with a stallion, two grooms and the farm manager. This is not something I recommend you try. Stallions are fully operational horses if you get my drift. Plus, it is still breeding season so all the stallions are flooded with testosterone. This makes them, like any male in a similar condition, unpredictable and just a wee bit wild. This is why fences were invented. Never go inside the fence with a stallion unless you are prepared to either run for your life or listen to someone who knows the horse better than you do.

The paddock (a big, fenced pen) is about half an acre in size but because of the late afternoon light I can only photograph about one third of it. Anywhere else the light is either crummy or terrible. The grooms are positioned at either end of the paddock to keep the horse moving. Clifford, the Pin Oak manager stands with me to make sure I don’t do anything really stupid, like walking away from him and to tell me when the horse is not looking right (ears up, tail too high, etc). When I am ready the grooms clap their hands and the horse starts a fast gallop around the edge of the paddock.

I have about 5 minutes to get all the shots I can get. After 5 minutes the horse is too sweaty and the veins on his neck become too pronounced. My Nikon D300s is set on auto white balance, high-speed shutter release, Aperture Priority, Matrix metering, -.3 auto-compensation and continuous autofocus. I have it on Ap. Priority to make sure I get the maximum possible shutter speed. It seems counter intuitive but Ap. Priority will always give me the maximum shutter speed based on the minimum acceptable depth of field. With a running horse I know f5.6 will give me enough depth of field for the horse to be in focus. So I keep it on f5.6 and let the camera pick the appropriate shutter speed. If I were to use Shutter Priority I may be getting too much depth of field (and a slower shutter speed) or too little (what’s the point?).

I am using my trusty Nikon 70-200mm f2.8 ED zoom lens with vibration reduction because I am handholding the lens (Clifford didn’t think a tripod inside the paddock was a good idea). This is a very fast focusing lens and very bright so I have the greatest chance of getting good pictures. I am also using the center autofocus point and composing bigger than I normally would because I am not trying to compose the shot, I am just trying to get the entire horse in the picture, in focus and properly exposed. Everything else I am letting the camera take care of.

As the horse runs circles around me I wait for him to come into the nice light. I am only going to photograph him when he is in the nice light. I don’t care what he is doing the rest of the time; he is not in good light so I won’t take pictures. When he gets in the good light I concentrate on aiming the autofocus sensor on the middle of the horse. This gives me a big target and also gives me the best chance of not cutting of his tail or his front legs. I also watch his ears and his tail as I pan with the horse and listen to Clifford critique what he is seeing. If he is happy and the ears are forward and the tail is not higher than horizontal I hold down the shutter and blast away. If his tail is too high or ears are back I don’t shoot. I don’t need to get volumes of pictures I know I am going to delete.

While I am shooting I don’t have the foggiest idea of what I am getting. At 6 frames a second the action is too fast for me to be able to tell if one frame is better than any other. When the horse leaves the shooting zone of nice light I stop, reposition myself and wait to do it all over again. This pause also allows the buffer, which fills up after each burst, to empty and my head to clear and stay in the game. Six or seven laps around the paddock and the horse is done and I have shot 250 to 350 images.

It takes about 45 minutes and 1000 images to do all three stallions. As the horses are given baths and put in their stalls I am in the office downloading the cards into Lightroom to do the initial edit. At this point I am just looking for obvious flaws –misfocus, cut off feet or tail, bad leg position, etc. I am a quick and ruthless editor. Any flaw goes into the trashcan because I know they only want perfect shots. By the time Clifford walks in to the office I have 100 or so images of each horse for him to look at. He reduces the number down to about 20 per horse, which I then do a quick crop and basic processing (a touch of black, clarity, up-exposure) for him to have a closer look and narrow the pictures down to about 12 per horse.

I did this everyday I was at Pin Oak so I ended up with 50 to 60 strong images of each stallion. When the person in charge of Pin Oak’s advertising came over to review the pictures she eliminated all but 5 or 6 shots for each horse. There were many pictures that I thought were beautiful that were never seriously considered because of a flaw I never saw. Oh, well, such is life photographing on assignment.

I just heard from Pin Oak Stud. The powers that be love one shot of their best stud and two of each of the other studs. That’s five shots and five shots is plenty. Oh, there were lots of other, non stud images they liked but I will leave that for my next post.

Hello Everyone!

Sorry for the delay in my postings. I did a long workshop in the Pacific Rim National Park on the west coast of Vancouver Island two weeks ago followed by an odd week long virus that knocked me out of action for a bit. But now I am back and firing away and the picture of health once again.

This last week I have been down in the Lexington, Kentucky area photographing at Pin Oak Stud, the thoroughbred horse farm that I photograph for their advertisement needs every few years. This is the first posting of several I will share telling what it is like to photograph on assignment, under pressure to produce. As a teaser I will include some of my favorite images. I will put more up this weekend.

I shot about 5500 images in 5 days. They are keeping 350 of them. there are many, many beautiful images that they don’t want because the position or posture of the horse is not perfect. A horse calendar publisher would be thrilled with these pictures but they are not horse people and horse people have very specific ideas on what a horse should look like. More on that later.

Hope you enjoy these pictures, stayed tuned for more!

What struck me most strongly about Bhutan was the generosity and friendliness for the people. We spent most of our time in country exploring the backroads away from the main tourist areas. This is because it has been my experience that in popular tourist spots the locals become jaded and adversely affected by the throngs of strangers. but if you  get away from the touristy areas you get to see the ‘real’ people and more importantly experience the ‘real’ people.

So every day, while the other tourist busses were heading off to yet another monastery or temple our bus would head to the countryside and look for villages, markets, farms, anything off the beaten track. Then we would stop, spread out and spend a couple of hours just hanging with the locals watching what they were doing, interacting with them as best we could and enjoying the experience.

Photographically, the secret to getting these intimate portraits is to spend time with the person before you start taking pictures. I would always sit and watch, try to compliment them, just hang out before I started taking pictures. And I never took any pictures unless I had permission to do so. The more time you spend with your subject the less aware and self conscious the person is going to be and thus your images will be more personal and thus more powerful and intimate.

So here are some more faces of Bhutan. I’ll post some environmental portraits from Bhutan shortly.  Enjoy!

Here is just a quickie teaser from my trip last week to Maine for the lobster book project. I’ll post some Bhutan pics tomorrow.

I call this picture ‘Wrinkled Butts.’ Look closely, you’ll get it.