Pictures of exciting times

In the spirit of pushing the barriers of the photographic art form, and going places more conventional photographers fear to tread, this week’s instalment of Billo’s Photos will not contain any photos. Take that Annie Leibowitz.

No, instead of showing off some dazzling photos from the week just been, and coming up with some insightful observations, I have decided to shine a spot light into the inner workings of how the blog works. I also get to combine this with my other passion – statistics!

“Statistics can be used to prove anything Kent; fourteen percent of people know that”

SO, when I signed up with this rollercoaster ride back in March I also signed up to Google Analytics, it’s another great free product from Google which allows you to keep track of all sorts of things regarding your website or blog. Here are a few high level stats to get things started, don’t worry, I’ll be going into more detail later on:

* 752 visits so far resulting in 1,099 page views (when your whole site is basically one long page you wouldn’t expect page views to be much higher than visits)

* 349 unique visitors – I don’t know who all you people are but thanks for stopping by!

* Average time on site 1 minute 10 seconds. Can’t read too much into this as I suspect a good number of viewings were just confirming I still hadn’t updated it.

* Most hits in 1 day was on April 8 when I announced to the world via email and facebook that this baby was live and 31 of you stopped by to kick the tyres. A bit disconcerting that once everyone saw what it was all about this lofty total hasn’t been reached again, although I did get a total of 41 hits over 2 days after last week’s long overdue update which was encouraging.


I’ve got loads of other info on what browsers people use to access the site (65% Explorer, 27% Firefox and 4 visits with Seamonkey, whatever that is?) but that’s not all that interesting.

What is slightly more interesting is where people are accessing the site from. As expected the big 2 are UK and Australia with 289 and 254 hits respectively, we’ve got USA a clear third with 128 visits with the vast majority coming from New York (is that you Brian?) although 19 states are represented. Some of the more unusual and unexpected visits have come from Colombia, Israel, Turkey, Brazil, Slovenia, Latvia, Chile, India, Poland and the Czech Republic – especially unexpected as I don’t think I know anyone living in these countries! All up there are 27 countries who can proudly lay claim to its residents viewing the majesty of simonbills.com.

Now, onto the interesting stuff. Most of the visits come from direct hits, ie, typing simonbills.com into the address bar in your browser (or clicking the bookmark you’ve all no doubt made to speed up the process by 1.4 seconds), however my friends over at Google have sent a bit of business my way by people searching for the following things:

* “Live East Die Young” – this one brings more traffic than any other search, 14 visits to be precise. I’ve since done my own google search of this phrase and discovered I’m on the first page of the results which would explain things.



* “Pictures of punks in Camden” – 4 searchers have found their way into my world by searching for this phrase. I’ve also received some traffic from “Camden Punks”, “Punk’s pictures Camden 2008” (if I can figure out a way to block people with bad grammar I will), “punks in Camden photos”, “recent photos of punks in Camden” and even a typo “punks in cambden” which means that I must also have the same typo on my site. Ooops.


* Speaking of typo’s I’m google’s NUMBER ONE RESPONSE for the search “Mini pojects”. I think typos are the way forward actually, if you spell things correctly you get lost in the sea of other literate web nerds, but by misspelling certain important things you’re likely to come up much higher in google rankings for cretins.

* There are practical ones “backlighting for photos”, and “photos from sigma 10-20”

* Some precise ones “bride walking down the isle (sic) and groom comes out late”

* Some exciting ones “pictures of exciting times” and “exciting photos”

* Disturbing ones “picasa- webalbum young kids” and “picasa-webalbum young boys”

* A self indulgent one “beardvember Gerhard”

* And at least one particularly unusual one “picture of jigs white smoke”

My challenge to you, faithful readers, is to see how obscure you can make a search and have it lead to my blog. Go ahead, make my day.

Oh, and the other reason I elected to fly in the face of convention and post a photoless update is because the only photo I took this week was of the TV we’re looking to sell, and there really wasn’t any artistic merit to this (let me know if you’re in the market for a tele by the way, a lovely 32 inch Sony number, not a plasma or LCD but a very nice picture and excellent sound - £100).

Quick update on last week's post- we gave the couple a slideshow last night and it went down very well, they mentioned that in the end there were 760 guests that turned up. Insanity.

My big fat Asian wedding

When my business parter Danny and I put out a few ads out 6 months ago offering our services as wedding photographers one of the first responses was from Shabnam asking if we'd be interested in covering her Muslim Bengali wedding. As a couple of cocksure young snappers there was no job we wouldn't take, no job too small, and in this instance no job too big.

As the big day approached it began to dawn on us that this would be a pretty big operation. For a start there were going to be 650 guests, more than double the total number of guests in the 3 weddings we'd covered to date, furthermore Asian weddings run very differently to those we'd shot before and attended as guests. The groom has a seperate ceremony to the bride, and neither are at the other's ceremony. The groom's ceremony was covered by Danny and had several hundred guests, I was lucky enough to cover the bride's ceremony which as simply held in a small suite at the hotel and had less than a dozen people in attendance.

One of the people in the suite with me was the videographer (there were 2 of these, along with Danny and myself taking the photos, plus a friend of the couple who was wanting some practice shooting weddings and shadowed us all day). I was a little aprehensive about being too intrusive at such an intimate ceremony, but the videographer had no such reservations and seemed to have no problem holding his camera less than 30cm away from people's faces and shining his light striaght into their eyes. This worked very nicely for me for a couple of reasons, firstly I felt a lot better about shooting with my loud shutter, and secondly his video light provided some lovely mood lighting for my shots.





After the formalities were over I finally had a 20 minute window to get some bridal portraits (I'd been at the venue for a couple of hours already but didn't have to chance to take shots of her getting ready as I had expected). I've got a theory that as long as you know what you're doing, have the right equipment and know how to use it, taking great photos is all about putting yourself in the right place at the right time. That place and time was now. There was some lovely soft light coming in through the window of the suite onto the bed, there was a stunning bride dressed in the most ornate dress I'd ever seen with amazingly intricate henna all over her hands and arms. The photos basically took themselves.







After these shots there was a bit of down time while we waited for the groom to finish his ceremony and the 650 guests to enjoy their starters. A kind soul brought some of these starters into the suite for us to eat and it was without question the most delicious Indian food I've ever had. Eventually the bride and her siblings got themselves together and made the entrance into the main hall. Picture the scene, there's 3 official photographers, 2 official videographers, countless other punters sporting SLRs, point and shoots and mobile phones all jostling for the best position, it was the closest thing to a paparazzi scrum I've ever been involved in.



The cutting of the cake was no different.



The rest of the day was a bit of a blur, a chaotic assortment of unpredictable events and situations that we had to be ready to capture. Kids are always great subject for photos and there must have been 200 of the things running around screaming all day, it was tough keeping any of them still for long enough to get a shot, but I did like this one.



6 days till we give the couple a slideshow and I've still got some final editing to do, I've managed to put it of for the last half hour or so thanks to this blog but I need to get into it shortly. All in all I was very pleased with how our photos have turned out, it was a manic, exhausting and often challenging day, but when you're sitting on the train on the way home with the knowledge that you've got some amazing images in the memory cards in your pocket it makes it all worthwhile. And now we've got some Asian wedding photos in our portfolio this could open up a whole new market, a market with over 1.1 billion people in India alone!

Here Comes The Photographer

A few weeks ago I took my second tentative step into the big bad world of professional photography. With a solitary maternity shoot as my only paid work to date (not including a free trip around Ireland for some promotion snaps this time last year) I took on the challenge of recording photographically the most important day in the young lives of a very trusting couple as their “official wedding photographer”.

It’s fair to say I had a few restless nights in the lead up.

I think there’s a view around most of the population that wedding photography is a licence to print money, you rock up for half a day, take a few photos then send the bill for a couple of thou (for the record my fee was no where this amount!). I knew that this wasn’t the case, but I didn’t really know just how much work is involved, especially when it’s your first and you need to learn things for the first time.

Something I learned is that the more work you do before the day the less trouble you have on the day, the problem was that most of the work I was doing before the day was making sure I had enough memory cards, enough spare batteries, another body in case the main body malfunctioned, the right lenses and also that I had the technical know-how to complete the job to a professional standard. This involved reading books on wedding photography, doing research on nightclub photography (while the reception wasn’t at a nightclub I knew there would be dancing shots in low light and I wanted to know the techniques available to create different images), learning how my flash works inside out (learning how to use a flash properly is far more technical than learning how to use a camera properly) and generally looking through hundreds of wedding images online to get inspiration and ideas for poses and angles.

What I should have been doing before the day was building rapport with the couple to make sure they were comfortable around me and the camera, going to the venue to scout out locations, getting a running schedule for the day, working out where photography was fitting in, and communicating with the couple about expectations. The way it turned out we basically did things on the fly on the day, but within the scope of what I had broadly planned, and realistically this is probably how the vast majority of weddings will run, if the bride turns up half an hour late this could throw a strictly regimented day into chaos so the photographer’s role is to roll with the punches, remain calm and get on with the job.

The couple didn’t want any photos of them getting ready so I met the groom at the church. I arrived an hour before the ceremony to meet the priest, have a chat about where I could stand, whether I could use flash, those sorts of things, and generally scope out the place for any good ops. As luck would have it the church was beautiful and ideal for photos. Soon enough the groom arrived, as did the groomsmen, guests, bridesmaids and finally the bride. I took this photo of the bride walking down the aisle, I think it shows off the beauty of the church and has a really nice symmetry about it, I also love how the white of the dress is in stark contrast to the darkness around it.



My favourite part of the day was shooting during the ceremony. It was slower, more predicable, people didn’t move much and there was plenty of time to compose the shots exactly as I wanted them. I moved around a little bit through the ceremony as the next 3 shots show, the place I took the final shot from was excellent, as I was obscured from most of the congregation so as to remain unobtrusive, but I was in the perfect place to get shots of the couple’s faces and provide a view that none of the guests had. The lack of flash during the ceremony made my decision last year to get the f/2.8 stabilised version of my 70-200 lens totally justified, likewise my decision to invest in a monopod a few days before the big event.








I was quite keen to take a nice group shot at some stage during the day, later on at the reception I managed to get up high and shoot down on everyone which was quite effective, but right after the ceremony, while everyone was out the front of the church, I switched to my Sigma 10-20 ultra wide angle and got a shot of the whole scene which I think worked quite nicely. Just looking at it now I’ve noticed something in the shot that annoys me – your challenge, dear reader, is to find this annoyance and leave a comment telling me what it is! First one to find it gets a high from me when we next meet.



While I’m here this is the group shot I took later on, I’ve since cropped it tighter to make the people bigger, it’s really a shot that needs to be printed as big as possible.



Ok, I think I might actually leave this wedding here, half way through, and return for the 2nd half next week (or will it be later this week? You’ll have to keep checking to find out). I will say that I gave the couple a viewing on Friday night and they were thrilled with the photos, and at the risk of getting big headed the words “I’m so glad we chose you and not the other photographer we were looking at” did come out of the groom’s mouth, although perhaps that was the rum they procured on their Cuban honeymoon talking (which was muchos tasty gracias). Until next time…

The Greatest Of All Time

First up apologies for not updating this thing for a month, I had the folks over for a week and didn't update it then, after that there was some other reason I didn't do it, next thing I knew a full month had passed. It's it's not through lack of photos either, I've been pretty busy snapping away this last month.

I decided some shots I took this time last week were probably an excellent place to start. I managed to procure myself a ticket to the men's final at Wimbledon, which turned out to be in the 2nd row and close enough that both players could hear me shouting "COME ON ROG". To say it was a good day is perhaps the understatement of the year, from start to finish - including breaks - it went for about 7 hours, and I wasn't getting sick of it at all. If it wasn't almost pitch black at the end I could happily have sat through several more hours. The quality of the tennis was absolutely breathtaking, at least once every game through all five sets I made a comment along the lines of "What? That's not possible" after one of the warriors blasted an impossible winner off a shot that would have been a winner against anyone else on tour. 5 hours of play hadn't desensitised me at all to this genius, I've seen a fair bit of top level tennis in my time and these guys were so far ahead of anything I'd seen it was ridiculous.

So, on to the photography. I managed to get my 40D and 70-200L f/2.8 into the ground which was pleasing, the conditions on the ticket say photography is allowed but you can't use the images for commercial gain but you never know the reaction of an overzealous security guard when you try and bring in a huge white lens. Fortunately they were more concerned about the 4 x 250ml cans of Pimms I attempted to bring in, you were only allowed 2 cans and my argument that these cans are half the size of regular cans fell on deaf ears. Rules is rules. If you want to know where I was sitting it was the corner that Nadal ran to after the match to get into his coaches box, I could have patted him on the shoulder but I was too busy trying to take his photo, you know you're close to the action when the athlete is too close for the camera to focus on. These shots give you an idea of our position (I went with my flatmate Dave who wore a bright pink shirt which was a master stoke of being identified on tv), and how close we were to the pro photographers (well, one group of them anyway).







(just as a side note that guy on the far left looking at me taking his photo is the chief sports photographer for the times and wrote this article about the final)

So, now you're sufficiently jealous of my positioning it's time to hit you with some action shots. I took over 1100 photos on the day, which is a lot, but sports photography is a game of hit and miss to an extent, the more you take the more chance you have of getting that killer shot with the ball right on the strings, or that split second facial expression, a prime example of one of these shots is this one. It was a combination of new balls, back lighting on the fluff and a bit luck, but they all come together for a cool shot.



Of the 1100 photos I'd say close to 70% were of Nadal. There are several reasons for this.
a) He's more photogenic, ie better facial expressions when he hits the ball, ridiculous arms that translate well to photos, etc
b) At my end I could only get shots of Feds face when he hit forehands, and Rafa was really pumping it to Feds backhand so I didn't bother taking too many photos of his back
c) When Rafa hit his backhands he was facing me, and a backhand is a more photogenic shot than a forehand which often tend to look a bit awkward when frozen in time
d) Rafa won and I reeled off close to 300 after the match of his celebrations, crowd invasions, trophy acceptance and what not.

Here are some of my favourite action shots from the day.








I was looking in the paper and internet before the final this year and realised that most shots that got published were not action shots but shots of players fist pumping or somehow showing emotion. It's so tempting to put the camera down once the point is finished but the trick to capturing great shots is the know the feel of the game, understand the massive points and the likely reactions of the players and make sure your lens is pointed in their direction if they win those massive points. For this reason I pretty much missed the epic 4th set tie break as I was glued to Nadal to get his reaction when he won (which everyone thought he'd do when he was up 5-2). Still though, small price to pay as I managed to watch LOADS of tennis with the camera safely stowed in my backpack.















So there you have it, memories and photos that will last a lifetime.

Oh, other exciting news, I photographed my first wedding last weekend as well, it went really well and I'll put some shots up here in my next posting. Take it easy.

Photoshopping

The devil makes work for idle hands. At least he did last Friday night when I was home alone with a camera and a tripod. Yes, it was time for Simon to do some experimenting. With Photoshop.

Now, I'm not much of a Photoshopper, I use Lightroom for my image editing which basically consists of some levels adjustments, perhaps some dust removal and occasionally some cropping (although I like to get it right in camera where possible). After returning from Italy I had a couple of photos that were really nice, but had an unsightly pole or something ruining an otherwise great image so I decided to have a go at cloning some of these distractions out.

Original


Edit


But this wasn't how I spent my Firday night. Oh no. All this did was whet my appetite for the power at my fingertips with this revolutionary bit of software (I briefly considered selling my camera and going pro as a Photoshop artiste but decided I was getting a bit carried away, despite my absolutely excellent cloning work). So, Friday. I decided to experiment with layers, which I've never done before, so I came up with an idea that involved taking several photos and cutting and pasting them together to make a new creation. By this stage my flatmate Dave had returned home so I summoned him to the hallway and took a few head shots, then got him to do the same for me, I then got him to make the peace sign with his hand and took a few shots of that. All the shots were taken with a hand-held external flashgun to provide a bit of side light. From here I went to work, this is the result.



Now, after completing my creation I unleashed it to the world on Facebook, but to my horror the following comments were flung in my direction:

- It's a bit creepy
- Vanessa agrees it's creepy
- Dude, that is seriously weird. You should use your Photoshop skills for good instead of evil.
- Dave, do you feel violated

It was clear I had to make another creation. And to be fair, I did think it was a bit gay once I'd finished it but I was so pleased with my layering skills I was temporarily blinded to this fact. Another thing I wasn't really happy with on mark 1 was the inconsistent light between the heads (mine is darker) and the lacklustre background. Here's what I came up with next.



I was much more pleased with this effort. I used the sky from a cactus shot in Cinque Terra as the background and made the heads smaller and less like they were about to make out. I think you'll all agree this new one is far less creepy. So, there you have it, this is what happens when no one invites me out for a drink on a Friday night, I get weird and nerd-like. Be it on your head if I descend any further into the pits of computer nerd hell.

Punks and Mini-Pojects

Now, if you're one of my regular readers (dad, ?, .......) you'll have been waiting with feverish excitement these last 6 days, on the edge of your seat dreaming up what this mini-project mystery I promised last week could possibly be. Well, wait no more. I bought a head torch a few months back with the grand plan of using it in a long exposure rear curtain flash experiment, and Monday of last week I found myself with a few hours to kill and the house to myself. Like any normal person would in a similar position I took out the tripod, attached the camera (complete with flashgun), strapped the torch to my noggin and began experimenting. I learned pretty early on that this would be a good way of writing letters, and what better word to paint with light that "Simon", the name above all names. As if this wasn't exciting enough I decided to give it an exclamation mark to seal the deal. I used photoshop to stitch the 6 photos together, this is about the extent of my photoshop skills but as I once read on a bus ticket a journey of 1000 miles begins with a single step. All shots were taken at f/8.0, 4 seconds, ISO 100, rear curtain flashgun, tripod.



On the weekend I went on a walk from Camden to Maida Vale along the canal with my friend Emma and some of her friends. I was running at a bit late but fortunately the others were running even later so I had the chance to take a few shots at Camden before they arrived. I spotted a row of punks sitting on a wall with a Camden sign in the background so decided to sneakily take their shots from behind with the word "Camden" clearly in the frame to give the shot some reference. I was so chuffed with myself after nailing this shot I excitedly ran under a bridge to inspect my handiwork in a dark area. Disappointed. The shot didn't really jump like I was expecting, there was a big distracting pole right in the middle, basically I wasn't happy.



Emma and her cohorts still hadn't arrived so I returned to the punks in pursuit of something with more impact. My idea was the get a shot without them posing, just a natural reportage style image, but this was going to be tricky with the hundreds of tourists and whatnot in the vicinity. I noticed someone was having their photo taken with them, and I figured it would be rude to just take someone's photo without asking permission (although it doesn't seem to bother this guy)...



...so I asked one of the punks if he minded if I took his photo. "One pound" was the reply. Bloody sell outs, a real punk would have told me to F off, punks these days.... Anyway, I figured that was a pretty cheap price to pay for what had the potential to be a great image so I coughed up. Apparently £1 gets you more than punks just sitting, they pose for you, give you the finger and snarl at the camera. Nice. I took 2 shots, the first one didn't quite capture the Camden sign properly but the second one seemed to fit it all in nicely. I didn't dare take a third unless the punk on the right flew into a strongbow fuelled rage.



After these shots I was happy to put the camera away and leave it there. I didn't take it out at all on the walk, it was actually remarkably pleasant not stopping to shoot everything, might have to look into that again some time! At the end of the trip we decided to wet our respective whistles, the others were getting out their point and shoots so I felt like I had to get mine out. I took this one of Emma, she always complains about me putting unflattering photos of her on the internet so hopefully this one will send the balance back the other way!



Who knows what this week has in store for Billo, but you can rest easy in the knowledge it will be documented and reported here some time soon.

Italy - the other days

As I was poking round Stanstead airport waiting for my flight to Genoa (or Genova if you're Italian - why do countries feel the need to change the names of cities in other countries?) I noticed one of the airport bookstores featuring signs proudly boasting "Exclusive airport edition" for many of their books. Has anyone in the history of humanity ever purchased a book at an airport simply because it's an airport exclusive edition? A particularly ardent Katie Price fan who already has the hardcover and regular paperback version of "Being Jordan" and needs the airport edition to complete the trilogy perhaps? Or maybe there are those who buy 1p Ryanair flights simply to get on the other side of airport security and gain access to the treasure trove of airport exclusive delights that exist in the land of plenty. While I'm on Ryanair, how can you take an airline seriously that offers 2 for 1 drink specials on spirits (who are they in competition with for drinks up there?) and has hostesses selling scratchy tickets on every flight?

Right, enough of the introduction, let's get down to some photos. The following are some of my favourites from the trip. It's tough to pick a handful of shots for something like this, especially as there are so many diverse shots, but here's what I've gone with.

First up we've got a super simple shot that is perhaps my favourite from the trip. I notices these glorious colourful umbrellas and thought they'd go nicely with the washing hanging up behind them. I wanted to go for a really clean composition, something from the "less is more" school of photography, initially I took some shots in landscape which I liked but thought were not quite right, when I decided to switch it to portrait that's when I became properly happy with it.



This next guy was hidden away. There was this mini bridge type thing which people seemed to think made a good photo, then if you snuck under the mini bridge you found this cave type thing which those who ventured that far also thought made a good photo. I took it a step further and went as far as a could down the cave and was rewarded with this fisherman casting off. I was shooting into the light so I really had no option but to play the silhouette card, I converted to B & W in Lightroom later on the PC as the original colours didn't really work.



I'm convinced that photo opportunities are placed in your lap by Aperturian (the god of photography) if you're prepared to seize these moments when they come. After a big day of hiking I was enjoying a tasty lager overlooking Vernazza when this cat comes out of nowhere and jumps up on to the wall right in front of me. I'd been taking photos earlier and happened to have the flashgun already attached to the camera, all of which was sitting on the table, all I had to do was raise the camera, frame the shot and make meow noises until the cat gave me some eye contact. Too easy.



I'll finish up with a couple of classic postcard shots. Well, they're not actually as good as the ones on the post cards (my excuse is that these postcard photographers have more than 4 days to get the perfect lighting and the perfect ocean conditions - that's my line and I'm sticking to it) but they'll give you more of an idea of what the place was actually like. The region consists of 5 colourful towns built onto steep hills/cliffs in little bays, each town between 1 and 5km from the next. A very picturesque part of the world indeed. This first shots was taken from a boat, I think the second was taken from the walking trail.



Right, my Picasa seems to have crapped itself so you'll have to make do with just the 1 postcard shot for now.

I did a little mini project the other day, stay tuned as I will be unveiling it exclusively here at some stage in the next 7 days.......

Till then.