RAW Collection

I have just noticed an interesting post over at www.paulburwell.com listing 10 ways to destroy a career as a photographer. It list top tips such as:

• Don’t show your work to anyone other than family or friends.
  • Family and friends are great for moral support and can really help pick you up when you’re down but do they really know what makes a great picture and what sort of stuff is going to sell?

• Design your web site so that it’s impossible for a photo buyer to do business with you.
  • Through fear of protecting their images from being “stolen” from their web site, many folks make it so you can’t right-click to save a picture or use flash web sites that make it almost impossible to easily save images to a local hard drive.
  • While none of these methods truly protect the images from “theft” they are a really great deterrent to the editor or photo buyer looking for images.  They can’t easily save them to run past other people and they’ll just move onto the next web site.

• Don’t treat your photography like a business.
  • If you want to remain an amateur, that’s great.  But if you want to be professional photographer, you have to start thinking like a professional.  Covering a subject as a pro is a big difference from covering it casually.  You need to prepare in advance.  Have your gear and attitude ready to go.  And when you start shooting, you work it until you get what you need.
  • If you’re under the mistaken impression that you need to be a great, or “one of the best” photographers in your area of interest to be a professional, get over it.  At least as important as the photography skills are your business and self-marketing skills.  Make sure you work on those at least as much as your photography.

Any budding photographer determined on running their business into the ground can see the full list of top tips on Paul Burwell’s site

At this point you may be asking what it a snoot? Well, a snoot is a device you attach to your flash to produce a narrow beam of light rather than flooding the entire frame with light. It can be used to illuminate a single object while the rest of the frame is exposed using natural light. It can be made in various ways, a tube of fabric or a block of corrugated plastic both work well. Anyway I read an article on www.diyphotography.net some time ago about making a snoot. At the time I did not have an off-camera flash but the idea stuck with me.

Several months after reading the article (late Janury 2010) I set about making my own snoot and did so without re-reading the post. I pickup a A4 piece of felt from HobbyCraft along with a length of velcro for around £2.

I stitched two pieces of velcro to the fabric on opposites sides so I could make a tube of material around my flash. It was quite simple to make and it is adjustable so it fits onto other flash guns just as well. The difference compared to the design on www.diyphotography.net is that it doesn’t always produce a circular tube for light, although this may not be a negative point. Quite often the tube is ecliptic and can be moulded to some degree.

As you can see only a fraction of light escapes through the material and most of the light is directed to the subject. A few improvements could be made. I though about lining the inside with white fabric (although this may make the lower power setting more powerful) and adding a length of wire to the open end of the fabric. This would allow me to shape the end of the snoot into more suitable shapes.

I used the snoot to take the first picture of my project 365 (photo a day) which can be seen on flickr.

I was out in town yesterday flicking through one of the many photography magazines in WH Smiths and I noticed a quote from a top pro photographer. Unfortunately I cannot remember his name but the quote was along the lines

When lighting a subject remember that light travels in straight lines.

I thought nothing more of the text, flicked through a few more pages, placed the magazine back on the shelf and left the shop.

Late last night I was browsing the web and came a cross an article (Nicolesy Photography: Blog » Using a Reflector) which brought home the importance of the quote I had almost disregarded earlier. Its a short article but worth reading and felt poignant yesterday