Tim Gander's photography blog

Tim Gander’s photography blog.

November 1, 2011March 10, 2014 by Tim Gander

Pixelheads: Sarah Wolf

Sarah Wolf, aged 37, lives in Frome from where she operates as Diablo PR.

What camera do you use?

I have a Nikon D40X with kit wide angle lens.

What kind of pictures do you like to take?

Landscapes and buildings are my favourite. They tend not to move about too much!

What was your most recent picture?

This one, a 14th century square in Barcelona – sitting with a friend, after a hot day, drinking beer, laughing and looking up at the beautiful architecture. It reminds me of that night.

Sarah's Barcelona photo holds special memories.

What picture are you most proud of taking?

This one taken on a boat of the edge of the running rail and the sea. We were exercising the engines on a 50ft super-yacht in the Solent for a client. It was a bitterly cold winter’s day – we were all wrapped up in layers and oilskins. The sea was calm and I lent over the running rail, enjoying the wind and the salt when I saw the reflection of the sun on the water and just wanted to capture it.

Life on the Solent can make for beautiful pictures.

If you could improve one area of your photography, what would it be?

I’d like to learn to take better photos of people and capture that moment of happiness, sadness, joy etc just through one shot. Pictures of people being themselves is what I’d like to learn how to take – just smiles and frowns and expressions without the people posing.

Would you like to become a pro one day, or is this always going to be a hobby?

Always a hobby!

If you could have taken one great photo, what would it be?

I would love to have taken the planting of the Red Standard on Hitler’s headquarters – the Reichstag in Berlin – which marked the end of Nazi Germany. The man who snapped the historic shot was Soviet photographer Yevgeny Khaldei, someone who I admire greatly particularly as he was part of the propaganda machine. However, as a Jew, his career was cut short by the wave of anti-semitism in the Soviet Union and he was sacked in 1949.

What drives your interest in photography?

Sarah Wolf has a passion for books on historical Russian photography.

One of the reasons that I adore photography is my love of war photos – particularly those taken in the Soviet Union. As a Russian student, I spent many years studying the impact of Russia, and then the Soviet Union, on the course of history. I bought many books of photography from the last 100 years and love the gritty realism of the photos of peasants working in the fields juxtaposed with the glossy photos of well-fed Party members. You can understand a country through its photography – the photos that are published and those that aren’t (but have subsequently come to light). Even though I no longer need to study Russian history, I will still spend many a happy hour looking through the photography books.

A sadness of the digital age, and no longer shooting on film, is that so many photos are deleted and never see the light of day. I’m obsessive about cataloguing my life, and my family’s, through photography and have annotated photo albums going back to when I had my first camera aged eight. Now that I shoot digitally, I print less photos and those that aren’t quite perfect are deleted so quickly, whereas in the past, there was the thrill of having your films processed and seeing your shots for the first time. I even kept those photos that weren’t quite perfect which now provide an alternative picture of family holidays and events – you look in the background and see things that were accidently picked up and it gives a wider picture from that time than the story in the best shot that made it into the final album.

Thank you for your time Sarah.

If you would like to be featured as a Pixelhead, just drop me a line to [email protected] You will need to live in or near Bath, be an amateur photographer and willing to have your photo taken for the article 🙂

in Case Studies 3 comments

October 25, 2011September 5, 2014 by Tim Gander

What the flickr should I do?

The Law of Flickr dictates that for every opinion applied to the subject, there will be an opinion of equal and opposite force. Despite this, I’m going to ask the question, “Should I be on flickr?” and hope for some kind of definitive response.

In truth, I already have an account there, but like many internet things I’ve signed up to over the years, I’ve never got around to doing anything with it.

This is due to a number of reasons. Perhaps the primary reason is I can’t see the point. The secondary reason is it probably doesn’t suit the work I do. Flickr strikes me as the kind of site where you upload a picture of a flower, kitten, sunset and wait for the heaps of praise to come in from your fellow flickrati.

Probably fine for flickr, but will it help my Google ranking?

Occasionally I’ll shoot something just because it’s fun to take pictures. My weirdly-lit, low-angle fungi shots are just that. It gets me out into the woods, gets me in the fresh air, experimenting with light, but I don’t shoot them in the expectation some large corporate organisation will licence the pictures for fantastic sums of money (if you’re a large corporate organisation, do please get in touch). They would be perfect flickr fodder though.

Before you ask, no I’m not posing this question because I’d like to sell my snaps through the flickr/Getty deal. I’d rather sell my soul to someone likely to pay a fair fee than licence any images I take for 6p a download.

If I use flickr at all, it would be with a view to attracting the corporate commissions I rely on as the mainstay of my business. I want to know if flickr adds Googlejuice to my website, if people looking to commission new work (as opposed to buying stock images) use flickr to find someone who shoots the kind of work I shoot, or if it would just be another account to maintain and feed with no real benefit beyond the fun?

Is flickr only (or best suited) to the keen snapper or professional selling prints or stock?

This week, I’m asking you, my loyal and beautiful readers, for your opinions based on the parameters I’ve set out here.

I fear I’ll end up on flickr posting endless corporate headshots and wondering why no one is telling me I’ve got nice bokeh, it’s a “cool capture” or a great use of light. It might be a lonely time there, but if it gets me more enquires for paid commissions, you won’t find me complaining.

Opinions please!

October 18, 2011June 5, 2018 by Tim Gander

Latest Blockbuster: The Cow Dancerer

One of the things I enjoy about what I do is the variety. Most of my work involves business portraits or people doing things in business, but every now and then I get called upon to shoot something unexpected. Something, for example, like cows in a field. Straightforward enough, you’d think, but when you need the shot to be used as a very large, very wide, narrow banner, and you not only need the cows in the shot, but a building and some park land in the background, the tricky-factor mounts up.

In May 2009 I was asked by National Trust to engineer exactly such a shot at Kingston Lacy in Dorset to show off their Devon Red herd that they rear there.

Having spoken to the designer who was putting the banner together (I should add the finished, vinyl banner ended up around 3 metres wide), I knew what arrangement would work, but these animals can only be herded to a certain extent and the herdsman who brought the cattle into the field for me early on the morning of the shoot had other things to get on with that day.

So there I was, alone with a field of cows, trying to work out how to get this one shot that would work. No assistant with me, I put the camera on a tripod having decided what the background needed to be, and then worked on the foreground – the cows.

At first, there were far too many animals in the shot. They were blocking out the view beyond, but then my luck changed. Some got bored and started to wander off, which then made me panic as I thought they might all walk away and I’d be left trying to herd these animals back into my scene single-handed.

Thankfully, some were obviously more into having their picture taken than others, and just the right number stayed behind. The calves settled down into the lush grass, and the adults got themselves into a line, but put their heads down to munch.

This still wasn’t quite right. I needed their heads up and turned in my direction, but how do you get a cow to look up? So I got my house keys out, took a furtive look around me, and started to, um, dance. Yes, I danced like a loon, rattling my keys in the air, to get the bovine models to look up.

The result worked a treat. They must have thought I was mad. Luckily visitors hadn’t started arriving at the house, so my performance was only seen by cows and birds.

You might look at the final result and assume I did some Photoshop to get the cows in that line and looking the right way, but the frame you see is the frame I took, minus the top and bottom crop. Job done, one happy client, and the cows looked pretty chipper too.

If you visit Kingston Lacy, do visit the restaurant and maybe try a Devon Red steak…

This wasn’t looking good…

Years of dance training finally paid off as I got the cows to look up. Click to see big.

in Case Studies 13 comments

October 11, 2011September 5, 2014 by Tim Gander

Why wasn’t my Dad Vivian Maier!

Those of you who follow me on twitter (those of you who don’t, why don’t you?!) may have read my tweets over the past weekend that I am currently looking through a box full of old transparencies taken by my late father. Most appear to date from the very late 1950s and early 1960s, though not all are dated.

Of course I was hoping to stumble across a veritable Vivian Maier-style collection of emotive, historical images. Unfortunately for me, my Dad wasn’t the street-photographer type.

Many of the images were taken in Germany of the places my Mother and Father visited when making trips to see my maternal grandmother in Ludwigshafen am Rhein where she lived, but Dad always liked taking pictures of landscapes, old houses and castles. None of which change much even in 50 years.

I’m still working my way through the slides though. There are maybe a couple of hundred in all. Again, not exactly Maier proportions, but some have caught some interesting fashion styles and cars and I need to look at them all before deciding if there is anything worth scanning.

One of the main problems I’m finding is the deterioration of the slides. Some have fungi growing on them. With some the slide mounts have sprung open, and others have lost all colour except magenta. Bit of a mixed bag of problems really.

Just out of curiosity, I’m posting a small selection of them here. These aren’t proper scans and I’ve left them deliberately messy – let’s call them instagrams that took a little longer to develop.

With all these issues though, it makes you wonder what state our digital files will be in 50 years from now. One solar flair and perhaps all digital photography will be wiped! Hmm, if only I could control the Sun, then I could control the digital photography market! MWAHAHAHAHA!!!

*Tim has gone for a lie down and nurse will be along shortly with fresh medication.

View of Pultney Bridge and Empire Hotel, Winter 1961

Taken circa 1961, of the Empire Hotel and Pultney Bridge, Bath

Trees in a park. All the colour dyes apart from magenta have disappeared.

In those days you dressed smart for holiday.

in Archive / Personal Work 10 comments

October 4, 2011March 10, 2014 by Tim Gander

Case Study: PR photos for multiple titles.

Although I still take the occasional magazine assignment, I don’t deal directly with newspapers as often as I used to, their rates being low to non-existent. However, the many years I did spend working for newspapers means that when I’m commissioned to undertake public relations photography for a corporate client, I have a pretty shrewd idea of what’s required.

This case study centres on a recent assignment for EDF Energy, which is working with its charity partner ParalympicsGB to find ways to help reduce the environmental impact of multi-sports events and related training facilities. In this case, EDF Energy were working with ParalympicsGB athletes, coaches and managers and the University of Bath.

Over a period of two weeks in August, members of staff from EDF Energy sites around the country came to the ParalympicsGB preparation camp to assist as athletes trained at the rather excellent sports facilities of University of Bath.

What EDF Energy required of me was an individual photo of each of their volunteers that would go to the local paper in their respective home towns as a local interest story. Of course this would also give EDF Energy some PR too, as well as ParalympicsGB and the facilities at University of Bath Sports Training village.

For a couple of hours a day on three separate dates I attended the training camp and went around getting the required shots. We’d hoped to get pictures of the EDF Energy volunteers working closely with the teams, but for the most part this wasn’t going to be possible due to the tight schedules and the intensity of the training, so it seemed the best option was to work as inconspicuously as possible to get the job done.

What I ended up with was really a series of portraits with something of the training in the background, or a relevant backdrop to try to tie the portraits in with the context of the story.

The results, some of which I’ve featured here, got good showings in the regional press, so I’d say the whole exercise was pretty successful. I wish the ParalympicsGB teams all the best in 2012.

EDF staff member volunteering at ParalympicGB team training, Bath

Teams busy with training makes a good backdrop to the portrait.

EDF customer service advisor from Hove, Louise Foreman of Newhaven, gets to chat with ParalympicsGB powerlifter Adam Alderman during a break in training.

Sometimes a banner backdrop was all that was available, but a smile lifts the picture.

These groovy banners also made an interesting backdrop for a simple press portrait.

in Case Studies 4 comments

September 27, 2011March 10, 2014 by Tim Gander

Pixelheads: Nicola Jones

Pixelheads is a new and occasional feature for this blog. When the mood takes me and circumstances allow, I will interview a random person about their photography. The interviews will not be with professional photographers – those can be read in abundance elsewhere. I’m interested to find out what makes a non-professional photographer tick.

Here is the first Pixelheads interview:

Nicola Jones, aged 34, of Bradford on Avon in Wiltshire, is a keen photographer, budding graphic designer, and founder of the Bradford on Avon Photography Group.

I asked her about her life, photography, influences and tastes.

Nicola Jones likes to shoot grime and decay.

What do you do for a living?

I’m an office manager and designer and to progress my designing career I’m interning at a Bath design agency.

When did you get into photography?

When I moved to Bradford on Avon in 2009, the place inspired me to start taking pictures.

What cameras do you use?

I have a Nikon D3000 with 18-55mm and 55-200mm kit lenses, and a 50mm f1.8, which is my favourite lens, a Canon Powershot S90 and a Polaroid 500.

The S90 is my main carry-around camera, with the D3000 being for more complicated stuff. I love using the Polaroid camera, but the new film doesn’t work well through my camera because it’s a bit volatile in daylight, so I need to find packs of old stock.

What kind of pictures do you like to take?

I’m a bit of a mixed bag really. I went through a big macro phase when I had a macro-enabled bridge camera – shooting things like Lego minifigs (Minifigures), but I’ve got into shooting derelict buildings because I like grime and decay. Street photography too, though not so much of that now.

Nicola's minifig phase...

Tell me more about the minifigs shots.

I started with standard figures, then they brought out series of figures (Star Wars, Batman) and I’d buy a handful of those. I’d set up film themes like Psycho, Forrest Gump sitting on a bench, that sort of thing.

Titanic?

No, the arms don’t go out the right way for that, but I did The Shining. But I stopped doing those pics and sold most of the minifigs. I go through phases really.

Why not the street photography so much now?

I enjoyed it, I used to snap away and not care, but had some run-ins with people complaining and I sort of lost confidence. It doesn’t float my boat as much now.

And the derelict building photography; what draws you to that?

I’ve been to a few places; hotels old factories, that sort of thing. Obviously you have to be very careful, but it’s so interesting to capture the essence of a place. Getting a sense of what was there before, the life that was there and what used to happen. One hotel I visited still has a website as if it still takes bookings, which is quite funny.

Vanished lives haunt Nicola's derelict building photos.

Which photographers do you admire?

Martin Parr; I understand his approach. I just think his photos are amazing. The New Brighton series especially.

Don McCullin also, his conflict work. The landscapes don’t do it for me, but I understand why he had to do them – to get his brain back together again. Then if we’re talking portraits, it’s got to be Jane Bown.

What’s next photography-wise for you?

At the moment I’m devoting more time to my design work, but looking forward to seeing Martin Parr’s exhibition at the Bristol M shed when I go with the Bradford on Avon Photography Group soon.

in Case Studies 1 comments

September 20, 2011March 10, 2014 by Tim Gander

Case Study: Business Portrait Consistency

Reasonable consistency across different sites is possible with the right set up and approach.

A recent commission, spread over a number of days, consisted of corporate portraits of around 50 partners and staff in accountancy firm Moore Stephens.

Simple enough, apart from three considerations: Firstly the portraits all needed the same look, secondly the staff are spread across five office sites (Salisbury, Chichester, Newport, Southampton and Guildford) and finally the style needed to match that which I’d established with the client on a shoot which happened over a year ago.

The first task then was to pull the previous headshots from my archive and double check the look and lighting of them. That’s easy enough, and I remembered what setup I’d used so simply had to replicate that for the new shots.

The simplicity of that setup also made it easier to replicate it across the sites. This was handy because different offices have different amounts of space for me to work in, so compact is good.

Different offices will also have different kinds of lighting in them, and different amounts of daylight. Really I needed to kill the daylight and ceiling lights, and set up using my portable studio lighting so that again the look would remain as consistent as possible.

I’d previously chosen quite a flat, “airy” kind of lighting because as nice as it is to use dramatic side-lighting, it can be a lot less flattering. And while everyone at Moore Stephens is attractive in person, I have to consider how they’ll look in a photo.

With corporate portraits I often emphasise to the client that these photos aren’t meant to flatter them or look good on the mantlepiece, their purpose is to make them look friendly and professional to their existing and potential clients. Even so, when shooting dozens of headshots while trying to keep people tied up for as little time as possible, the set-up I used ensured that the pictures are consistent, as flattering as they need to be and simple to execute.

Of course the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and so far I’ve had some very complimentary comments about how it all turned out.

If you have a lot of people in your business that need to be photographed, it’s worth thinking about how the look you want will translate into images which can be replicated for other staff at other sites, and how well that look will suit the people being photographed. And if it all gets too complicated, this will affect how easy it is to get everyone photographed in a sensible amount of time.

in Case Studies 0 comments

September 6, 2011September 5, 2014 by Tim Gander

Time to get real

Sorry to bang on about this, but I’m still hearing designers say “our client wants to use stock images for their site because it’s cheap,” and what the client wants, the client gets. And that’s usually where the designer/client conversation regarding photography ends.

The designers tell me they’re frustrated, that they put all this effort into designing a brilliant site only to have to drag the project down by slapping cheesy grins and ever-so-serious-but-utterly-anonymous business faces all over it just to fill the gaps between the boring text. Or how about some pictures of flowers? Or a tree? Or a business man looking at a tree? That’s soooo inspirational.

Hey! Business people! Here’s the news! STOCK SUX! It makes your site look generic. It makes your service/product look exactly as enticing (ie not at all) as all your competitors. Stock has become completely blasé and unconvincing. It may be cheap, but it WILL cost you in sales. So while you’re busy chasing the bottom line, someone else is creaming off what would have been your top line. The less you pay for your photography, the fewer sales your business will make. End of.

I hate all that management-speak about top and bottom lines, but if yours is the kind of business that uses stock imagery for your branding, then you’re the kind of business person that goes to a lot of management and motivational seminars in dull hotel conference suites in Swindon to hear a “guru” tell you lots of buzz words you’ll never quite understand, but which make you think you’re at the “bleeding edge” of your envelope, box, bag of mushrooms or whatever. Yes, go thread the needle of success and let’s make this kite fly, but you’re not convincing anyone, least of all the clients you’re working so hard to win.

So to designers, I suggest turning the conversation around and asking the client if their website is meant to please them or please their clients. If they just want a pretty site to show their mums to make them proud, fine, but if they want to seriously gain market share in an increasingly competitive world, they’re going to have to feature what’s great about THEIR business, not use the same old images that everyone else is using for a million other sites.

If you hide your business behind a wall of fake images of models doing fake stuff, you send out the message that you don’t trust your real business to live up to the expectations of your clients. It also suggests you don’t trust your clients, so your clients won’t trust you. And if that happens, you lose sales.

Or as a business guru might say (if they had a clue about these things), “get real photography to get real business.”

Feature yourself and your colleagues in “getty-esque” style pictures, but with far more honesty and integrity than a “stock” image.

in Case Studies 5 comments

August 30, 2011September 5, 2014 by Tim Gander

Ziss Zeiss ist no gut!

They do say you should never meet your idols as you risk bitter disappointment, and so it was for me this morning.

Before I proceed I should state that I don’t do equipment reviews, and in the purest sense of reviews, this isn’t one. What it is is a rushed, cursory look at a lens I’ve fancied for a while.

There are no colour or distortion charts for you to geek over, no tests at all f-stops and all focusing distances, just a couple of random snaps as I only had about 10 minutes with the lens in rather dull light this morning.

So maybe this is unfair, but some issues cropped up that I wouldn’t normally expect, and now I’m gutted that my “idol” lens, the Zeiss Distagon T* 35mm f2, isn’t the T-star I’d expected.

I’ve posted up some fairly high-res images for you to look at to illustrate my points, but suffice to say I think in this case the price reflects the name, not the quality.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a lovely lens to handle once you get used to the quite heavily-damped focus ring (no autofocus of course), and it looks the dog’s vegetables with it’s sexy black alloy barrel and all, but at around £880-£920 I’d expect far better optical performance.

I was using this one on a 5D MKII, and maybe the lens performs much better on a cropped sensor camera, but then at f2 you could get a cheaper 35mm lens from Canon and just do away with the pose value and probably get better image quality, which is what really matters.

Maybe I’ve misunderstood the Zeiss concept, and as I’ve already hinted this is a deeply flawed “review”, but having tried this lens even briefly, I think I’ll just be saving a bit longer to get the Canon 35mm f1.4 lens instead. Not that I’ve tried it yet. At just over £1,000, I bet it’s dreadful.

A photo of nothing in particular, but I was looking at close focus and wide-ish aperture (f4.5). Read on…

in Reviews 9 comments

August 23, 2011September 5, 2014 by Tim Gander

Let’s play look-a-likey!

For some time now photographers have been waiting in hope for the application that would help them track use of their images. Something that, without prohibitive amounts of effort and financial investment would allow them to find illicit uses so they could chase infringers for payment and to have the work removed from websites where it’s not licensed to be used.

Of course photographers are keen to ensure they get paid for infringements, and this is the side of the copyright argument that is so often flagged up by those who would like to be allowed to infringe more freely (sometimes known as freetards). Having photographers portrayed as money-grabbing monopolists is a handy way of demonizing those who merely want to protect the work they create.

What gets mentioned less is the harm it does to a photographer when work they have shot and charged to a commissioning client gets hijacked by someone who is just not in the mood for paying for the stuff they use. If an image is licensed to a paying client, and they see someone else using it for free, it can harm the photographer/client relationship and also cause problems with exclusivity, model releases and further legal issues where a stolen image is being used in a libelous context.

All these are issues faced by the photographer today, and it can take a lot of valuable time just to ensure images are not being appropriated by inappropriate people and used in inappropriate ways (that’s easy for me to say).

So while the tineye service has been around a while, and it can be very good at “reverse image searches” it’s also clear it can’t possibly keep up with indexing every image that gets uploaded to a website every minute of the day. Better perhaps if a service like Google, which seems to have web crawling and indexing off to a fine art, could come up with something more powerful.

Cue Google image search, where you chuck an image from your hard drive into the search box on Google which then returns matches of that image, plus any similar images it finds.

However, if photographers thought Google had the answer, they may be disappointed to discover that Google’s image search function was starting out with a different question.

I’ve been playing with Google’s image search function, and to me it’s more suited to finding images which represent the feel or look of an image you already have, but which might not quite match what you’re after, rather than a tool for photographers to use to find infringing copies of their images.

Having run a few of my images through the system, I found some bizarre and vaguely humourous results, which I’ve set out below. Try it with some of your own images, and see what happens. I’m sure there’s a great game waiting to be invented.

Starting with Yours Truly: None of these women looks like me, but one appears to be holding a camera.

Seriously?!: Tony Benn is, among other things, matched with Einstein, a tapir and an X-ray of a pelvis. Squint and some of them do look similar.

in Industry Comment 16 comments

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