aCoolDryPlace Photography

A couple of weeks ago (it takes me some time to get around to blogging) I did a photoshoot for my sister’s NCT group in Bradford-on-Avon, and some of there connections. There were a mix of ages there, from 9 weeks up to a couple of years old. There’s not too much to say about the shoot really, other than it was great fun, and a nice opportunity to play with my neice. But here are a few observations about baby and toddler photography, which although not coming directly from this shoot, were evident during it:

Babies who are six to nine months old are generally the easiest to photograph: they can sit up unaided, but hopefully are too young to crawl/run off; and there attention can usually be held by a few simple toys keeping them happy. If they aren’t hungry or tired, they will usually be reasonably happy and smile/giggle a lot. A really wonderful age. If your child is this age, contact me now to book a shoot!

Really tiny babies can be a challenge becuase they are so very dependent, and usually find it hard to connect to anyone else other than their mother, particularly when the stranger has a black box attached to their face. That is why you’ll see a lot of baby photos focused on cute little features such as the hands and feet.

Joanna decides that the shoot is over and it's time Daddy puts the lens cap back on

Toddlers become challenging again as they know their own mind, and choose not to co-operate if they don’t want to be photographed. By two most kids have also learnt how to acheive a very fake looking camera smile. But that only makes successful photoshoots with toddlers all the more rewarding. My top tips for toddler photography are:

1. Get them involved. Ask them to press the shutter button a few times. It make it more exciting when they feel they can take turns being the photographer. (Or bring a toy camera for them to use)
2. Allow them just to play in the studio (getting mum & dad involved to0), and just take photos of the kids doing what they do best. Don’t expect them to pose.
3. Have ridiculous hair like me, they’ll assume you are a clown and smile! Well, it gets children looking at me in a slightly puzzled way anyway.

The photos in this post are of my children, as I didn’t ask permission of any of the parents there to post their photos publicly. The gallery of the photoshoot in the client-area is password protected for the same reason.

St Hilda’s College ball was on Saturday 8th May. Photos from the ball can be seen in our client area. This Oxford college was the last single sex college, and started accepting men for the first time this year. Although that makes little difference to the ball night, since men attend as guests anyway.

This ball must have been the first that we have attended where we were not pushed for space in one way or another. The room had high ceilings and decent amount of floor space. Unfortunately for the us, we were at the far end of the college from the majority of the ball venues, and less people ventured that far away from the beer tent. I know of at least one person that was unable to find us during the ball. We weren’t completely out of it, as we were right next to outdoor cinema which was screening “Romeo and Juliet” repeatedly.  I guess it gets the couples feeling romantic before their photos are taken.

As a benefit of our location within the college, while setting up for the ball we were treated to a lovely sunset behind Magdelen College tower.

For this ball shoot aCoolDryPlace Photography was assisted by Kate of Paperleaf Studio, maker of handmade stationery

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I finally got around to getting off my first film from my medium format camera developed. The film was a black and white one which came “free” with the camera. I’d realised (even before I tried this film) that I’m not very good at visualising the world in black and white. When converting digital files  I need to give it a go to really appreciate what an image will look like in B&W. Unfortunately, there’s no such luxury with film so I tended to go for high contrast scenes this time around to be on the safe side.

I’ve learnt from playing this way, and now I’m looking forward to trying out the colour portrait film I have sat in the fridge.

Because this was an experiment really, I couldn’t bring myself to spend the £20 to get them properly scanned from the negatives, so I’ve scanned in the photos using my cheapy flatbed scanner at home. That has degraded the quality a bit compared to the prints.

I hope you’ll forgive me, but I’m spying on you! Well, sort of, in a very anonymous kind of way. It’s helpful for me to know what visitors are looking for when they come to my website, and how many visitors I’m getting. That kind of thing. So to help with that, I use Google Analytics. That tells me most of the things I’d want to know about visitors to this website.

The number of visitor is always  quite interesting. Peaks in the visitor rate, as shown above, can normally be correlated to events or Oxford college balls that I have photographed, and are people who have coming looking for their ball photos. These peaks often start building during the ball - people expect me to work fast to get the photos online!

The more amusing details that Google Analytics tells me are search terms used to find my website. As expected there are are lot of “acooldryplace” and variations on that them. My favourite of those was “the pretty cool place photography” - obviously I don’t come across as very cool. My site is also popular for those searching for “trash the dress” photography, “ball photography oxford” and even engagement and wedding photography in Oxford, but the rarer hits are the more interesting  - “screen printing wedding stationary”, “bean time lapse” & “tutors at Oxilp” have all been used and followed to my website. I know why I have come up for all of them, but I can’t imagine I rank that highly in any search engine for those terms.

If you’re looking for screen printing wedding stationery or bean time lapse I can help. I have no idea of the tutors at Oxilp, but I hope to see you at one of their balls.

I briefly thought about adding “storing your memories” as a tag line to the header until I realise quite how cheesy it was.  And it might, or might not, give you a clue to my on going competition to win a free portrait shoot by guessing “why aCoolDryPlace?” This article isn’t going to help in the slightest on that front.

If you book me as your wedding photographer, you will want to know that when you get home from honeymoon I will still have all your wedding photos. Keeping your photos safe is important. In this post I thought I would share what I do to keep both my professional and my personal photos safe, and offer you some advice of fairly inexpensive back up solutions for use at home. I am going to assume digital photos are the order of the day, since most photography, both amateur and professional/wedding has gone that way. Film is an altogether different monster.

Warning: This article is very geeky. Please don’t take apart your computer unless you know what you are doing! Contact me if you are desperate for a little help. Contact a professional support service if you are in need of a LOT of help!

Harddrives fail!

I know from personal experience that harddrives fail. Assuming anything else is to take a risk. Copying to CD/DVD is often thought of as a straightforward approach, but you’ll quickly end up with a lot of Cd/DVDs and be unable to find anything. CD/DVDs also fail given time, not that I’ve experienced that yet. The simplest back up solution is to get a second harddrive, whether internal to the computer, or an external USB harddrive.The problem with this approach is remembering to copy everything onto the second harddrive, and keeping it consistent with the main harddrive. Backup software can help with that, but a hardware solution should be more reliable. RAID (Redundant array of inexpensive disks), more specifically RAID 1, enables you to set up two physical drives as if they are a single harddrive in the computer. The hardware (hardware raid is a better bet than software raid) automatically copies everything to both disks. If one disk fails, it can be replaced and all the data on the surviving on copied across to restore the redundacy. Some computers’ motherboard’s have that feature built in, or you can get a PCI RAID card to do the job. I used an internal RAID solution for quite some time until I needed to upgrade harddrives and ran out of space in my machine. I’m now using a network RAID box so that multiple computers can access the photos in my home network.

Houses burn down!

Having a backup readily available at home is great, but what if my house burns down or some not so friendly individual steals my computer when I’m away? It is important to also have a backup offsite. For some people paying a service like Flickr to store their important photos should be sufficient. Personally I don’t have the broadband bandwidth to upload so much data, and I have opted to have a removeable harddrive rack in my computer. From time to time I can bring the harddrive from its secret storage location, backup everything, and return it to that location (your parents house is always a good place to store stuff!). Backups aren’t as frequent, but most of my data will be safe in the event of a disaster at home. There are network solutions available which enable you to host a box offsite to upload data too, but you’d need a very good internet link.

Having the original and two backups is a fairly standard approach to managing this risk. More backups would be safer, but less manageable, and it is very unlikely that both my home and offsite backups will fail at the same time.

On the job backup

For added peace of mind, I also have a photo drive to allow me to back up my memory cards while out on the job. This means that I have at least one backup of any really important photos (like wedding photos) prior to getting home.

Recommendations for the non-professional

For the non-professional photographer I would still recommend the double backup solution for keeping your memories safe. And the backups should be stored at different locations. The links above are to example products and not ones I have tried or necessarily recommend. I’m not going to make a precise recommendation because the best solution for you will very much depend on your technical skill, number of photos, and financial situation. As an initial solution you probably can’t go too far wrong with keeping a backup on Flickr. They don’t guarantee your data’s safety (other online services will), but I don’t think they’ll loose it in a hurry, and you can share your photos with the world (if you want to they can also be kept private). And when you sign up you might get 3 months free which you can give as a gift, to a friend, or to me perhaps!