John’s blog

Don't you just love it when you find out that something you've been doing for ages had a name and you didn't even know it?

For a long time I've been working on taking not just single photographs but collections of them. I've always had the idea that you can show people more of a place by showing them less. By showing them details that are characteristically or quintissentially a part of that place or subject. The unique bits if you will. The elements that make something what it is. And a lot of my effort in photography goes into trying to see what those things are. I guess this all grew out of my efforts to learn to see.

Maybe one day I'll move on and do something else but for now I'm just happy to learn that this is a perfectly legitimate photographic technique that already had a name - Pars Pro Toto. That's latin and it means "part for the whole". Thanks for letting me know about that fotofinn!

So anyway, my latest collection was shot this way - taken at the Sandbach Transport Festival 2007. This is a small town but it's the home of a great british engineering firm, Fodens. Every year the town holds a small vintage transport festival and it's always very well attended. Well worth a look if you love old trucks, cars, bikes or steam engines. This year I took along a 100mm macro lens and shot with it exclusively. I only had about an hour and a half and I was aiming to capture recognisable details of the various vehicles on display without showing the whole thing. And it struck me that transport engineering is an important part of the heritage of not just my home town but towns and cities the world over. Detroit understands that.

This subject inpsired my choice of topic in the latest episode of Focus Ring.

Lately I feel like I've been drowning in unprocessed photos. I guess this is something every enthusiastic photographer faces at some point. But with so many family events this year and being pretty busy otherwise I've been letting things get out of hand.

On the bright side it's mostly family shoots and I've finding that I love those. In particular I'm loving a totally different style of photography from the one that I've been pursuing for the last couple of years. And I'm learning a lot in the process.

First of all, I simply don't attempt to post process these shots as much as I do my arty landscapes. I've mentioned that before but roughly what I do is run them in similar looking batches through the RAW converter and focus on white balance, then brightness tweaks and then finally I boost contrast a little (because I like that style) and usually I then need to pull back the colour saturation a tad. I might then crop the image at this point. I should probably do that earlier, though. And that's it. I might just occasionally add a vignette too if I'm not cropping too drastically.

Something else I've learned is not to be TOO selective about what I show. In the past I've picked out what I thought were the best shots in the collection and shown only those but the parents and family often have a different idea of what's a good photo than I do. Sometimes a photo that I might have discarded because, perhaps, a child is pulling an odd expression can really reflect something recognisable about them. And families love nothing more than photos of their loved ones that look natural and remind them of the person. So now I often ask Ruth to sit beside me as I select and discard photos from a shoot. She has a much less photographer, perfectionist eye. One that is much more focused on the human element. And I'm trying hard to learn from her what she's looking for. This has been really enlightening. (Thanks darling!)

And the main thing that I've learned is the primo numero uno rule. Process the photos as soon after the event as you possibly can. The simple fact is that things are much fresher in my mind if I do that. And I get through the processing more quickly. Plus is avoids the backlog.

So last weekend I worked on a shoot that I took way back in May when Lee was staying with us. They were all taken with her 50mm f/1.8 prime I think. And I really enjoyed getting the whole session processed in just a few hours. All the time I'm learning. And once I feel I've really got a handle on how to do these things I'll be turning that into a tutorial for PhotoWalkthrough. This seems much more like the kind of everyday photography that most normal people would be interested in.

Until then, though, I have the small matter of the photos from Rebecca's Christening, James and Ginny's Wedding, Jennifer and Chris' Wedding, the photos from our Vegas trip and god knows what else. And those Vegas photos are important too because I recorded a bunch of audio while I was taking some of them in order to produce a sound-seeing-with-pictures episode of PhotoWalkthrough.

All good fun!

Meet Sam. He's 1 and last weekend Ruth and I had the honour of being made his godparents. Or Guideparents if you prefer, since neither of us believes in a god. He's a cutie isn't he? Here's our other god/guide-child, Rebecca.

She's the image of her mum. :)

I love taking photos of the kids. It makes me want to do more people photography. But at the same time I find that I take so many and there's so much interest from the parents and family that I don't have the time to do the same kind of heavy post processing as I do on my more artistic shots. It's a kinda freaky tension for me because that's what I'm known for and I don't really know whether I should be including both types of picture on my flickr stream. I worry that people have come to expect a particular kind of photograph from me. And it's nice to have a recognised style but at the same time one doesn't want to get boxed and labeled.

I guess the answer is that I should be who I am, post what I've taken and leave the question of whether it's "my style" or whether it's any good to the rest of you.

John