Monthly Archives: March 2019

Photography is an art of finding something interesting.  

Posted by enmanscamera on

Gosh, the first day of spring (has passed) and the temperature is climbing.

I stood out on my porch looking at the melting snow along the walkway to the driveway thinking that winter seems to have come and gone in a rush this year.

It was a lazy day for me and I really didn’t want to do anything except have another cup of coffee and maybe snooze on my chair listening to music. However, I do like pointing my camera at things and this would probably be my last chance to photograph things poking out of the snow. And if this year is like most I expect the cool spring rains will be pounding on my roof in short order.

So, as hard as it was I ignored the waiting coffee grinder and went off get my camera.

My latest acquisition is a 300mm lens. I like that focal length and have had several since the first Pentax I owned back in the 1970s. This latest lens came with a 1.4 telextender that gave me a 450mm of reach.

I have a longer 150-600mm lens, but the 300mm takes up less room in a bag or on my car’s seat, it focuses very fast and is just darned fun to use.

Although I sometimes photograph wide landscape vistas my preference is tight close shots. It’s the intimate, close cropped “parts” of a scenic that catch my eye. So after making sure I had an empty memory card and charged battery I mounted the 300mm lens on my camera and set off to see if I could make some interesting photographs of things resting on, or poking out of the snow.

By the time I drove down the road the sun was high in a bright blue cloudless sky. My choice was to head up into the hills or down to the river. But I wondered if the small pond was still frozen over so I went up.

The pond was frozen without a footprint or even a lonely bird in the tall lifeless reeds that circle the pond. I was disappointed, but as it has for the past 40 years, this rural place where I live, always offers something that catches my eye. The long lens was the perfect tool to isolate and exclude as I focused on the remains of a tree poking out of the snow. That broken and rotted stump in a desert of white snow was crossed with neat long thin shadows that made up for the boring pond.

I stopped to photograph what was left of an old log building that once might have been for storage or maybe living quarters for some ranch hand. When I first drove down what was then a bumpy dirt road many years ago it still had a glass window and roof, but now only the decaying log walls remained.

I drove around getting out of the car and trudging through the wet snow trying to photograph subjects I have photographed before in a new way.

I often wonder what the people in the cars think when they, once again as they have many times before, pass me pointing my camera at some subject. Most are not photographers, making the things I am photographing of little interest to them.

It always seems new to me. A bit familiar for sure, but this was the first time I photographed anything in my neighbourhood with this particular lens.

So yes, new.

I know I’ll be back photographing everything again when it rains or maybe when the grass begins to grow or when there are geese in the pond or anytime I am in the mood.

I know I have included this quote from American photographer Elliott Erwitt before but it just seems to fit.

“To me, photography is an art of observation. It’s about finding something interesting in an ordinary place… I’ve found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them.”

Photographing dogs and using flash outdoors.  

Posted by enmanscamera on

When my friend Jo McAvany told me she wanted to do something the combined her love of photography and love of large breed dogs I was intrigued. She said she was planning to make a photograph book of big dogs that live in the Kamloops area.

Jo intends to spend the next year photographing the dogs in all seasons and at different locations throughout the year.

For the past two years that I have known her I’ve been pushing her to use lighting when photographing people indoors and out. She began by attending my lighting workshops and eventually became my ever-helpful teaching partner.

I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised when she said. “Will you help me with the lighting on my project”. I readily said I would.

Flash technology made quite a leap from the manual settings we once used to when Nikon added TTL in the early 1980s. That was when I sold all my Pentax and Canon equipment and “jumped” to Nikon. (I am pretty sure all modern cameras have TTL flash capability)

Flash took another large step when digital cameras became the norm. TTL was already almost foolproof and digital technology offered added control. Then it again matured and “High-speed Sync” was introduced and mastery over light in any environment and condition became easy.

Manufacturers began offering portable wireless units that, unlike the dedicated speedlights a photographer usually purchases with their camera, are much like those powerful units used in serious studios.

For readers that aren’t familiar with flash, High-speed sync means a photographer is no longer limited to the normal 1/200th or 1/250th second flash sync most speedlights use. HSS allows a sync speed up to 1/8000 of a second.

When I teach workshops on Flash I tell participants that the Shutter controls the ambient light and the Aperture controls the flash power. And remind them that increasing the shutterspeed allows us to widen the aperture.

When Jo walked out in the white, painfully reflective snow on a bright cloudless day to photograph those dogs this past week the contrast between the shadows and highlights were enough to ruin the pictures. However, I added flash and moved around to change the direction of the light fell on her subject. All she had to do was reduce the ambient light by increasing her shutterspeed and change the flash brightness by stopping down or opening up her aperture. Our goal was to balance the light on the dogs as evenly as possible without Jo’s final image showing that a flash was even employed.

Jo worked with the owners to pose the dogs. She’s very precise when it comes to how she wants them to be for the photograph. My job was to pay attention to the flash-to-subject distance and keep checking to make sure the light wasn’t to bright or to dark.

Confining oneself to only natural light means there will be elements beyond control. Natural light limits when and where one can shoot during the day. With the sun high in the sky at noon, there will either be a backlit silhouette, or the bright light will blind the subject and create black shadows. And if it starts snowing or raining, there usually won’t be enough light to shoot indoors.

Flash gives a photographer 100% control over the lighting. Whether completely doing away with the ambient light in the studio or adding flash with natural light outdoors, the photographer is in charge and can get the light to look exactly the way he or she wants it at any time of day.

Enman’s Camera     

Posted by enmanscamera on

Gosh, sometimes I have a hard time with the realization that I opened my little shop to sell used cameras over 21 years ago. The time has sure zoomed by.

I had just left the University College of the Cariboo (Now called Thompson Rivers University) and was looking for something interesting to do during the week when I wasn’t making photographs for clients.

In those days wedding and family photographers worked pretty much only on weekends.

After photographing a wedding or family my time was mostly taken up packaging and mailing the rolls of film I had exposed to a custom lab. Then I’d wait about a week for the finished prints, and after putting them in an album I would again wait, this time for the wedding couple to return from their Honeymoon.

I had spent almost 20 years at UCC employed as a public relations photographer and as a part-time photography instructor. After leaving I plunged head first into the business of wedding photography.

I enjoyed photographing people, and I liked the money, but the frantic business of weddings almost every weekend during the year was tiring and could certainly be frustrating at times.

I regularly attended the Vancouver Camera Sale and had made friends with many of the sellers. So when a fellow named Brian Wilson approached me with a proposition to become one of several used camera shops he was setting up around the province I was easily persuaded.

Each of the shops would be part of the “Mr. Camera” group that would exchange and sell used photography equipment. Wilson wanted to start with three shops, one in Penticton another on Vancouver Island and “Enman’s Mr. Camera” in Kamloops.

To make a long complicated story short. After a few years Brian Wilson decided he could do better as a custom print maker. Andrew, the owner of the shop on Vancouver Island, quit to sell Real Estate and Enman’s Mr. Camera became Enman’s Camera. (Although I never bothered changing the sign)

The building I rented a storefront in changed owners over the years, but I stayed.

My shop is unique. There are always photographers hanging out and the layout changes depending what I have for sale and I sell anything photographic.

I have never been much of a salesman. I try to keep the prices low with the thought, “What would I be willing to pay” and price everything with that in mind.

I’ll never get rich with that philosophy, but I do have fun. And at this point in my short life that’s my most important goal.

I live and breathe photography. I sell photography equipment, teach classes in photography, how to use flash, studio lighting and when not doing all that I wander with my camera and write my articles on photography.

I decided to retire from being a paid photographer some years ago. Photographing weddings, families and accepting commercial work and working 6 days a week at my shop came to a happy end. I changed Enman’s Camera hours to only Thursday, Friday and Saturday afternoons.

Now I get to just enjoy pointing my camera.

That shop is packed with twenty years of photography stuff and it’s always fun to go on a hunt to see if I have what someone is looking for. The years seem to have zoomed by, but I am still having a great time making pictures and selling anything for photography.