Why the best types of cameras are camera phones.

I have really missed having a camera phone. Although I am only into day two of playing with my new toy, having been without one for a year, I forgot how bloody handy it is to have a camera in your pocket at all times.

I imagine you could be thinking.. “Wait a minute, this guy works as a photographer.. Surely he has a camera at the ready at all times anyway.. and a good one at that?” Well, just as a bricky doesn’t take his trowel everywhere or the artist his brushes, I too neglect to carry around my very heavy pro kit, or even sometime my pocketable compact camera. I always seem to have my phone with me though.

This I think is a really important point and on that basis alone, I feel I could comfortable argue that the camera phone is the best type of camera you can own.

How could this be? Well the best camera is the one that gets the shot. We have seen phone pix from air crash victims, protesters using mobiles to keep the police accountable for their actions, Burmese sending at one point the only news from their oppressed country and let us not forget the most famous pix from the heart of the 7/7 bombings.

It’s all about being there.. with a camera. It doesn’t really matter what kind of camera as long as you can push a button and some kind of legible image is captured.

Initially the first time I thought you could actually take a decent picture was with the 2MP Sony k750i and now I have the K850i I am really beginning to think we are getting there. We still need the leica lens’s of this world and a decent sensitive CCD before the traditional camera can feel threatened regarding quality, but as it stands, we have some pretty decent tools at our disposal.

So there you are in the center of the action camera phone in hand. Do you trust yourself? Can you capture the moment under pressure?.. Or more likely.. after a few beers when tying shoe laces is hard enough?
Follow these few tips and you will stand a much better chance:

Get the most from your camera phone.

Keep things bright - Just as photography means painting with light, the better lit your subjects, the clearer and more defined your images are likely to be. Outdoors in the day will be much better than indoors at night, (obviously) even with a decent flash. Turning lights on indoors will help a little but you will get a bit of a colour cast depending on the kind of lights.

Use the best resolution available - Why anyone would want to take low resolution picture on an already limited format is beyond me. Memory is getting really cheep right now so stick the biggest card your camera will take and keep the quality setting on maximum to get the best resolution/image size. NB: Most cameras will automatically resize for texting so don’t worry about texting large files..

Don’t use affects - There is nothing you can do in the camera that you could not do later on the computer. If you want a picture to be in Black and white.. Wait and do it later so at least you have a backup copy of the original colour pic. Again, its easy to convert from colour to black and white but you try to do it the other way round.

Fill the frame - Don’t be afraid of getting in really close. If you haven’t got a lot of resolution to play with you don’t want a little spec of a person standing in the distance. Fill the view finder (unless you have a distorting fisheye lens), get in as close as your focus will allow and you will get much better detail in your photos.

Avoid using digital Zoom - If you have a zoom feature on your camera phone it will most likely be a digital zoom. all this does is cut into the amount of pixels you have to take the picture with , rapidly reducing the quality of your final image. Use your legs where possible and just move in close. Where not possible, later on the computer, crop in a little.

Keep it Steady - The steadier you hold the camera phone the sharper you final image will be. This is even more important indoors in low light as the camera uses lower shutter speeds increasing the chance of blur. Try to steady yourself and the phone against something solid like the edge of a door or suchlike.

Be snap happy - You don’t have to worry about the cost of film so let rip. Take as many pix as your memory card will allow and you will be more likely to capture that ‘perfect moment.’ Play around, experiment. Some camera phones have a ‘best shot’ setting, taking a number of pix when you press the button and allowing you a choice from similar moments.

Break the rules! - Once you find that the basic composition ‘rules’ (like the rule of thirds) gets you pretty pictures.. Break them! Some of my favorite shots happened when I was ’shooting from the hip’ or through an object or from a strange angle. Try to get different perspectives from the norm to create an interesting picture.

..and finally, Be prepared - Having your camera phone with you is one thing, remembering how it can be used is another. Practice using every aspect of it from the macro (close-up) feature to switching the flash off and on manually. Once is all because second nature you are ready to grab that one shot you may be able to retire on.
Or at the very least, you will have a nice photograph of something.

*(the snaps in this post were all taken in a couple of hours between a dog walk and a trip to the shops.)

The First Farleigh Video

In my guise as a music photographer I occasionally get called apon take photos of bands for promotional purposes. I may snap them reportage style in the recording studio, on a location shoot, or occasionally, if needed, live.

I caught up with the band Farleigh At one gig of their local gigs in Leamington. There was hardly any light and all I had with me was my cheapy mpeg video camera (A Sanyo Xacti H2). Never-the-less in what turned out to be an awesome gig I felt inspired to grab a few minutes of low resolution footage for posterity.

The band have some really good tunes and not wanting the footage to go to waste, I dropped it in, along with a few photos I had from before, to Glen of CV21.co.uk

All I said was.. “Make it look better that a bunch of raw low res clips and he said.. “I’ll see what I can do.”

We stole the track ‘Open Road’ for a bit of backing (Sorry Guys.. ) off their myspace page and before you know it.. A video was born.

Please click below to enjoy..

Opting out of the iPhone

Why won’t I be rushing out for the new Apple iPhone?

Well, as a Mac lover with a heap of Apple products to my name you would think i was waiting in eager anticipation for the new Apple iPhone.. Especially as my Vodafone contract ran out last week.

After looking at and having a play with the iPhone and it’s data tariffs I have decided to not only stick with my current service provider but to also renew a 12 month contract and order a new phone.

One of the main reasons why the iPhone is not that appealing to me anymore probably has something to do with being an ipod touch owner. I won’t go on about how liberating the iCal and Address Book syncing are, coupled with the always ready and super effective WiFi. The only thing it misses for me is the ability to use Apples ‘Mail’ app. At present though I survive with webmail through the wifi.

So, whilst standing at the cross roads, I looked at all the things I really needed in a phone, what my current provider would bribe me with for staying and the over all cost of switching.

Once you phone up a company like Vodafone and say you want to leave, you get a whole new level of customer service. I sometimes imagine a room full of well paid, well trained staff. You know, the ones that used to exist in other departments in the company.. Like customer service.

If your contract is up this or next month, now is the time for you to do some serious bartering. I imagine a whole heap of phone companies are pulling out all the stops to stop their clients migrating.

I uttered the magic words, PAK number and iPhone and in no time at all I was pretty much customizing my next 12 months of phone contract. Yes, you heard me right.. 12 months. If you insist you can still get a 12 month contract. This along with loads of free minutes anytime, 500 texts and free calls to landlines at weekends and I was a happy customer. Then couple that with a free Sony Ericsson K850i (£350 off contract) and I was sold. I am paying half the price of an O2 iPhone contract so if i really wanted to, I could get myself a ‘3′ mobile modem at £15 a month to free my laptop and still have change.

I think If the iPhone had a 5 megapixel camera I would maybe have been tempted. Same if there were decent data packages around that didn’t take the piss.

I refuse to get suckered into the hype. Yes it is a beautiful piece of technology but it comes at a massive price to the early adopter and if my ipod does half of it then I can live with that till there comes a time when an unlocked iPhone is on the street at a more reasonable less sell-your-soul kind of price. A jail-braked ipod would probably do it though but we are really very close to third part apps becoming mainstream anyway.

So for the time being I will still carry the two devices around. My ipod and my phone. Although as I may well also be leaving my pocketable camera at home. I may be lighter in the pockets. We will have to see how the 5 mega pixel camera pans out.

Regarding syncing it to my mac, one google search later and i found Feisar who supplied two plug-ins for a couple of quid and it saved me a trawl of the net. I bought their handy address book app as well but I still don’t know what it does.

It’s great having a compact phone once again. My last phone was a Nokia E61 and yes it did a lot of stuff but you knew when you had it on you and you couldn’t sit down with it in the back pocket for fear of getting an ass full of glass. Also the mail and data tariffs are extortionate and with more and more WiFi around I was finding it becoming redundant as i prefer my ipod for browsing the net.

If i didn’t have great loyalty bonuses for sticking with my present service provider and wasn’t currently the owner of an ipod touch, would i be getting the iPhone?

I still think not.

With technology moving so fast a eighteen month contract is just ridiculous. I will at some point have an iphone but i have a strong feeling it will be off-contract and be a very different model to the one out in a couple of weeks.

Although if they put an 8 mega pixel Leica-lensed camera in one tomorrow.. I may well be camping out with the Uber-geeks on a cold dark November night.

Do one thing at a time, do it well, and move on.

Did you take the time to focus on and make your way through the epic article in Time magazine entitled ‘Help! I have lost my focus..’ ?

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,1147199,00.html

I would have to admit to being a multitasking gadget user but although I manage to have numerous projects running side by side, i occasionally feel like shouting STOP! Then turn everything off and make a basic list of what really needs to be done now and what can wait a day or two.

I use my mac for my work and a thousand apps guide me through the day of information overload like a speedboat through info-burg littered seas.

I have stopped watching TV news or buying the paper as I figure a feed reader can give me all the feeds I need and more. And why not? Surely this saves me the walk to the shop and the money to boot.

The down side is that I feel I am being force fed as for some OCD-like reason I think I actually have to skim read every new article indicated by a little red number icon in my dock.

I must admit though, i probably read more headlines and less content as i skim read through far too many subscribed feeds.

I am a hoarder by nature so things like feed readers soon get overloaded and a day without looking at them means next time a good hour or so is needed as i religiously scan through every new feed.

I have been a little remorseless in my info trimming recently with about 10 twitter contacts chopped from my follow list and 30 or so feeds deleted. Do i really need five different Apple gossip feeds? I could probbly trim a few more off come to think of it.

Pruning links, contacts and feeds can feel quite liberating, providing you can get over the initial uncertainty of “Will i miss something if I don’t read the next blog post?”

Meeting with a couple of Freegans recently has really made me harder on all my time wasting distractions. They helped me remember a few finer philosophical points and enabled me to ask myself.. “Does it really matter?.. In the grand scheme of things?” Most of the time not..

Then there is a good friend who’s philosophy is very un-freegan but also helpful as he always prioritises his actions in the order of those that will earn him money. Needless to say, he doesn’t eat much.

Right now I should be editing a podcast and I had decided to do that over finish up on filing some photos from Glastonbuy that have cluttered my desktop since 2004!

Yup.. I really think i put the PRO in procrastination. But I am getting better… I think.

What is a Freegan (A short video introduction to Freeganism)

Here as promised is the first Freegan installment in the shape of a very short video introduction to Freeganism and what Alf as a Freegan believes in.

Different people follow freeganistic principles for different reasons but I am sure you will agree that Alf’s ideals make more than a little sense.

Hopefully soon I shall edit the audio podcast that goes into much more detail and post it to Documentally.com

Should you want more information on freeganism please check out www.freegan.org.uk

Please leave a comment if you wish and don’t forget that there will be an audio interview (with much better sound) coming soon…

(note: I know there is an annoying high pitched sound in the background.. I think my camera is up it… I will sort it for next time.)

Your dinners in the bin.

“Please come in, would you like a cup of tea?”

“Yes please” I said, climbing into the campervan, surprisingly spacious, basic but more importantly, warm and homely.

“Sit down please. Help yourself to a biscuit, we found them in a bin behind Sainsburys.”

Sat in a bowl on the table at the ‘office’ end of the camper was a bowl full of the biggest chunkiest most appealing looking cookies I had seen in a long time. It looked like a lot of love had been put into those cookies and yet they had been thrown away, no doubt along with the many many tons of other food that is discarded everyday. Discarded yet perfectly edible.

And delicious they were too.

I had come to this secluded road in a wood in North London to meet with two Freegans, Alf and Bob.

(Bob and Alf by their campervan in North London)

I have been batting emails and phone calls back and forth with Alf for a good few months now. He is a hard man to pin down and when you come to learn about his lifestyle, you will see why.

I spent a couple of hours chatting with, learning from and being inspired by Alf and Bob. So watch this space and all being well, in the next few days you will have a decent audio and video introduction to Freeganism and methods in how to live a simpler life.

Be Prepared. Why you should go into a job with an open mind.

A couple of months back I was hired to teach someone how to take photographs in a studio environment. Although studio is not normally what i do, I have done a few shoots and was happy to impart the basics to an already competent photographer I had taught before. (That’s why he is competent )

As my client had access to the very accommodating Jayne Elliott Hair Company and some of Jayne’s friends and customers, we decided to make a day of it.

Although I was there as an instructor, once I had shown Justin the basics he was quite happy to play and experiment as Jayne prepped the girls and sent them over to stand them in the limelight.

With a little time on my hands I took out my always handy Sanyo Xacti H2, a cheap little 720p camera that records to SD card. Although I don’t claim to be a videographer, with new media tools being so accessible and the ability to network easily with like minded folk, a little spare time was turned into a whole new product. All I had to do with the clips was call a friend (Glen of CV21) and ask for a favour.

So although it wasn’t intended or planned, with the right tools to hand, I feel that being open minded and flexible has given one client much more value that they had originally expected.

Here is the video…

Woyzeck, a review and photos.

Director Stephen Simms has really delved deep into someone’s nightmares to produce a really creative adaptation of Georg Buchner’s 1837 tragedy Woyzeck. And if you head over to the Ron Barber Studio at the Crescent Theatre Birmingham between the 24th and the 27th of this month, you can see it for yourself.

So last night I was sent to photograph the Birmingham School of Acting’s depiction of the troubled life of 30-year-old Franz Woyzeck, a servant, ex-soldier and obsessively jealous lover who is enraged by his common-law wife’s infidelity.

The set design was minimalist on first glance but soon became filled with props and half human-half animal machines i really hope i won’t be dreaming of in the next.. well ever really.

I was ready for the darkest set i have ever had to photograph, but in reality, although on the edge of what my camera and reflexes could handle there was a great use of light. It seemed to always appear just in the places needed but not as invasive as your standard spot or flood. This meant you were drawn around the play from mood to mood, corner to corner as the actors played to every space of the room in more dimensions than i have experienced before.

Coupled with the occasionally introduced smell… (yes there are scents used to set the scene too) and I was really transported into the emotional turmoil set in a twisted expressionistic landscape and an insight of how human obsessions can lead us away from our rational side. Such was the performance a picture of madness that I actually had to go back stage after and see if the actors were infact sane, normal individuals… You can tell I don’t go to this kind of theatre much.

Music, dance, song and breathtaking acting almost stopped me from doing my job as occasionally i would lower my camera, transfixed, sucked into the emotional eddies being played out before me. No wonder people are getting bored with the insipid triteness of the TV. This is where the real acting is. Sorry if this is not a revaluation to others but I have always been a once a year pantomime kind of guy. Not any more. I would go to watch these guys play anything. It was heart and soul performances from all of them.

So if you haven’t already guessed it.. I highly recommend Woyzeck. A twisted depiction of class versus morality, madness opposed to enlightenment and a tale of a downtrodden individual manipulated by the upper-class only to eventually lose his mind and commit murder.

I can get my hands on few free tickets if any of you guys out there would like to go and experience this evening of wonderful yet disturbing theater.. Just email or call at my normal contact details.

Warning- Contains nudity and scenes of a violent and sexual nature. Not suitable for children.

Funeral Photography

Photographing a funeral may sound unusual but deaths, like births, are key moments in any family’s history. If done properly, photos of a funeral and wake can serve as a fitting memorial, bringing together happy and sad memories.

Back in 2001 I bought FuneralPhotography.com. In a way it is an unfinished project, still sat there in stasis.

I won’t say it has lay there dormant and totally unused but I’m still waiting for the world to become a little more open minded to the whole idea.

Four years ago I went to my Grandad’s funeral and left my camera at home. I wish I had taken it. I had organised the funeral and understandably had other things on my mind.

Yet as the funereal morning came to its climax and my brother and I lowered the casket into the ground, I instinctively reached for my camera. It wasn’t there.

The scene was beautiful, the green burial site was a field deep in the British countryside. At the foot of the grave next to my Italian Grandmother, a violinist played graceful tunes as the family took it in turns to throw single red roses onto the coffin. I looked across at my brother as he looked up at me and we both smiled.

My Grandad would of loved it. He always thought of himself as ‘the Don’. I want to remember that moment forever. A picture would have helped. Then there were those members of the family spread out over the world that could not be there. A photo could have given them closure.

Anyway, I was inspired and saw all the good reasons for capturing images at funerals.

Other than weddings there is no other time you get so many of one family in one place. Probably more so. This is a great coming together and unlike a wedding - where everyone dresses up and tells you how great their life is and how much money they are earning - people seem real at funerals. Sincere, attentive, keener to listen to those around them. Suddenly humbled by loss and brought back to earth with the realisation that our time here is limited. Perhaps we need to be reminded of these things.

And funerals are not just sad; when families and friends get together to remember loved ones, fond memories are usually order of the day, and laughter not uncommon. Funerals, in a strange way, are more often celebrations of life than maudlin recollections of death.
I am guessing that funeral photography hasn’t taken off because there isn’t really any money in it. Good. It may surprise you to hear I am not interested in it to make money. The last thing I want to see in amongst the hundreds of bolt on services that undertakers have leaflets for is some flier for a local photographer advertising ‘weddings and funeral packages to cater for all your pictoral needs’.

I think we are ripped off blind as it is. Prayed apon in a time of grief where we are told the more you spend the more you obviously love the departed. All funerals should be free. You would think that after a life of work in order to keep the cogs of society turning the least the state could do is pay for you to be put in a hole.

“Thanks for the last 45 years of taxes. Sorry we were too busy funding much needed wars to put any of it aside, you couldn’t just pay for your own death could you?”

Anyway I digress.

So, let’s say you have decided that the normal taboos around death and dying won’t get in the way of a moment of history being documented. Or maybe you have been asked to take photos at a funeral. How should you go about photographing a funeral?

I have had a few emails from people wanting to know how to take pictures without upsetting the more sensitive of attendees.

Obviously being a member of the family helps. If your not, then make sure people at the funeral know what you’re doing, why you are there before you pull out a camera. Then just be discreet.

Not so long ago I was asked to document the funeral of a friend of mine. Although close to the departed I hardly knew any of the people that were going to be there. Because of the time of the year the Dafodils were a theme throughout the service and the family had said that if it wasn’t for the flowers they would love the pictures to be in black and white. I don’t normally do selective colouring but as the order of service, the church, the digital projector and the grave side all featured the daffodil I figured it might work.

Regarding equipment I think a full blown 35mm digital slr is out of the question unless you are going to be loitering in the trees like the paparazzi. I have a Leica M6, a super quiet camera perfect for candid reportage, but on this occasion I chose to use a Ricoh GRD compact digital. I thought that with it’s 28mm lens and a big memory card, i could shoot from the hip so as not to draw attention to myself and keep on shooting till the memory card was full. This meant that i could get intimate with what was going on and not ruin the service or get in the way of people’s emotions. That said, the camera got in the way of my emotions and acted as a filter of sorts. It was not until I was editing the pictures at home later that night that I broke down and shed a tear for my friend. Having the camera made me an observer and not a participator.

The photos i took of that day are here.. www.christianpayne.com/josh

So, the funeral photography website: it’s in a partially made state and if it creates a presence and introduces the idea that documenting the passing of a life is a ‘good’ thing, all the better. If someone finds it and asks, i will take pictures. If they are happy with the images on a CD, then I won’t charge, just the costs to get there and if it is down the road then not even that.

I bought the domain shortly after covering the funeral of a minor celebrity for a local newspaper in Northamptonshire. I thought that as people’s perceptions of death and dying changed so too does our approach to documenting this often overlooked and ultimate moment in our life. Why are the only funeral photographs we see taken by the press covering the passing of royalty and the rich? What about documenting the average everyday member of the general public? Are we all not the same in death?

Towcester Jumper - The Story Behind This Photo

It was my first day shooting horse racing for the Northamptonshire Chronicle and Echo. If the truth be known it was my first time ever at a horse race.

The only reason why I had been sent to cover the race day at Towcester racecourse was that all the more experienced ’snappers’ were shooting rugby and football matches.

New to the newspaper and still relatively fresh to photography I really wanted to make good of this job. Being the new boy at the paper I had the oldest Canon digital camera with the most battered of lens’s and as everyone was doing the big pitch sports, I was left to fend for myself without a long lens.

Those amateur photographers out there that think the papers have all the latest and greatest kit, think again. The budget to purchase anything photographic for a regional daily more preoccupied with it’s advertising department.. Well the words blood and stone come to mind.

I would see fathers of kids at the local Sunday football match with better kit that we had. And they new it. Smug gits. Still i was getting paid to take photos and mostly enjoying it too.

So there I was, spying the other photographers photographing for their perspective publications and clients, trying to see where best I should be to grab that one shot my paper needed.

It was and probably still is about getting the one shot. A tight, clean well composed image that says all they have to say to illustrate the day. Any more pictures and you eat into valuable advertisement space.

Looking around everyone was ‘long-lensing’ it. The only other guy that had a camera with a wide on had set it up on a remote control in the ‘danger zone’ just after the jump. While he could fire off some frames from a safe distance, looking down at the jump through 300mm sports zoom, he could also trigger the camera close to the jump.

I looked through my poxy lens and realised iIhad to be in the hedge to fill the frame. Back then we only had about three mega pixels so if you wanted to shoot for a page you needed to fill the frame.

So between races I crossed the course and plonked myself down under the jump, a few inches course-side of the rail and waited.

I wasn’t sure how i was going to get my photo as I couldn’t see the horses approach. Also, as there was such along time between laps and races and such a short time between the list of other jobs i had scheduled for the day, it soon dawned on me that I had one shot only.

Looking back I am amazed we ever managed to do our job any justice. We would have a long list assignments spaced half an hour apart with at least 25 minutes of driving time between. As soon as we arrived and pressed the shutter, we would be saying our thank you’s and goodbye to a stunned subject on this, perhaps their biggest day.

They may well have single handedly rowed the Atlantic in a tin bath, but all we could give them was five minutes as you knew the next job was already waiting.. This would either be a photo of an innocuous looking car for an advertisement feature, or other hard news like an over flowing recycling bin.

So there I was crouching and looking across to the other photographers waiting for my cue.. I had decided I would watch to see them all simultaneously lift they long lensed cameras to their eyes hope for the best.

Suddenly, as the cameras came up to the eyes, so did mine. I felt a rumble in the ground beneath my crossed legs. Louder and louder.. And then it stopped. At that split second I pressed the shutter and took one shot. The seconds that followed saw me covered in raining dirt and turf.

Looking at the back of the camera I saw my one picture and smiled. But only for a moment. I loved the moment of power I felt I’d captured, and the composition, but as far as a typical sports.press shot, it didn’t tick any of the boxes. It was almost a silhouette, but not quite. The riders face was obscured and the colours were so muted it was pretty much black and white.

I thought, Sod it. I had captured the moment exactly as I would want to remember it and at the end of my day I filed it with my other pix and thought If they like it they will use it. If not then there would be plenty of other sport to cover.

The next day there was a special pull out sports section and on the front was my photo. The sports editor even took me aside and said thank you for ‘thinking outside the box’.

I think it was the first time a black and white silhouette had been used on the front.

The lesson I learnt that day was lost to me until recently. Sometimes as photographers on deadlines, with clear briefs and formats to follow, we get stuck in our ways offering clients exactly what we think they want. It’s almost too easy to play it safe.

Why not shoot what the client wants and then do what you want. Then hand the lot over and see what happens. You never know, that image you think is a little bit out there.. that breaks a few rules.. may also be exactly what’s needed.

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