Image capture and storage

All of my  images captured with the cameras I am using at the moment a Canon 7D and a Canon 5D are recorded onto digital memory cards known as CF cards or "Compact Flash".


The advantages of this type of card are, the cards hold vast amounts of storage data and are the Ideal media for storing vast quantity's of photographs.They range in size from a couple of GB to approx 64 GB for top end storage. They come in a variety of different types,speeds  and makes and price ranges to suit. The faster the read write speed of the card the quicker response time you will get from your camera and computer

Photographer's use these cards to store their photos because they are very small and potable and can be easily carried in a shirt pocket. They are very compact and can be sent through the postal service very cheaply because they are very light in weight. They are relatively cheap to buy and top end cards are very efficient at reading and writing data, which allow fast downloads/upload speeds from a camera and uploading to a computer.

There are mainly 3 main manufactures in this field who produce these types of cards and they are:

Sandisk

Lexar

Kingston

More information on compact flash cards see the link below

This link below is a technical link from the encyclopedia Wikipedia and gives loads of information about compact flash cards and their technical data

Although information on Wikepedia is not verified by any organisation it is a free encyclopidia that anyone can add to or edit. I have always found information on this site to relevant and true

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompactFlash

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Comparison's

I have used all of the cards mentioned above and have found there are some distinct advantages of some cards compared to others.These I have outlined below

Sandisk

Shown below are some examples of Sandisk's CF and SD cards  

The biggest manufacturer of these type of cards. They have a vast range of cards to suit the amature to the professional. They are very well made rugged cards aimed at all levels and branches of photography

At first I used to use a lot of Sandisk cards. There is a large variety of cards on offer from this company. There are cards to suit all types of digital photography. There are really fast cards which have very fast read write speeds, ideal  for press photographers who need speed at hand instantaneously. 

There are HD(high definition) CF cards designed for  photogrphers who use there camera's for video. You can buy top end very fast cards that cater for HD recording nowadays something that all camera manufactures are using now. Read write speeds have to be very high to record and playback HD movies

There are also slower cards made by this company with slower read/ write speeds tailored for the amateur photographer who's not bothered about speed. These cards are a lot cheaper to buy but downloading large raw files from your camera to your pc can take a lot longer and images take a long time to open

However I have found that a lot of these cards from Sandisk have been counterfeited and have actually bought some of these fake goods. They were supplied by Amazon and they are not sure how these counterfitted goods have infiltrated their stocks. I have 2 faulty cards bought from Amazon and both have crashed my camera. I cannot say if these cards are faulty because they are fakes,it's hard to tell. On two occasions I have lost a vast amount of images and I'm very reluctant to use this make of card again

Follow this link below to Sandisk's website. It shows a variety of video's on the correct card to use for your photography and their specifications

http://www.sandisk.com/consumer-products/camera?utm_source=Camera_link&utm_medium=ProductUsage&utm_campaign=HomePageTracking

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Lexar

Another large card manufacture of CF and SD cards. In comparison to all the other cards I prefer Lexar cards. I haven't come across any fakes yet.  I now tend to use a lot of  high end Lexar cards. These cards are very fast and efficient cards and have never let me down. They are competitively priced compared with Sandisk's products and work out a little cheaper for a high quality card. I have moved over to this brand because of all the fakes infiltrating Sandisk's cards

I tend to use the 300x or 400x speed cards which are more than adequote to cater for all my photogrphy needs. In comparison, Sandisk's top of their line pro series cards are the best you can buy way out of my price range

Shown here is one of Lexar's top of the range Cf cards which delivers 90 meg a second download speeds and the technical data taken from their website

Link to Lexar's site

http://www.lexar.com/products/compactflash

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Kingston

The Kingston cards tend to be a lot cheaper cards and haven't got the speeds of the top end cards of Sandisk and Lexar. I have used these cards in the past but now would only use these for geneal use photography as the performance of this type of cards are very slow. They really lack the performance especially for high end HD video shooting or handling very large raw files that most cameras manufactures are producing nowadays

Follow this link to Kingston's page for CF cards

http://www.kingston.com/ukroot/flash/photo.asp

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Over all you get what you pay for and I tend to pay the extra for a more efficient faster card. In comparison with all the other makes of CF card, I now choose the high end Lexar cards for my photography. They are very fast, efficient and reliable and also prove very cost effective

SD Cards

Another common  format of memory cards that I use in my compact camera are "SD" or Secure Digiatal cards (shown below),which again are similar to CF cards but are smaller and cheaper but do not hold as much data as CF's. I also use this type of card in my mobile phone and on my

computer

Cloud storage and External hard drives

Once stored onto these cards I upload the recorded images onto my computer for further secure storage and image manipulation. I use a USB lead and a very fast Lexar CF card reader which transfers my images from my camera to my Pc in super fast times. Using Lexar cards and  my card reader shown below  a lexor professional it transfers a 25 mb file/pohto in less than a second and takes about 30 sec's to trasfer 1GB of phto's to my PC. You get what you pay for and this was one of my best buys

I then trasfer my images as a backup solution to other external hard drives and cloud storage online another very good form of storage and security as an extra security measure to insure against loss of my images

Using cloud storage is relatively inexpensive and costs me appox £105.00 for 3 years unlinited storage. I think that this kind of storage is the way forward and for ease of use and convenience would rate it 8/10. It does have it's down side all of  your data or photo's have to be uploaded online and all this  depends on your ISP's speeds and policies etc. Some ISP's have a cap on the upload/download you can use  so it pay's to check out your package

People also worry about their data being kept secure, well in my opinion,it is more secure than your home pc being hacked online and data stolen from under your nose,ask yourself how many times has this happened to you? Cloud storage is very efficient and very secure and a lot of the country's top companies now use this type of storage

Apple has recently joined the cloud "Band Wagon" storage and now offer a free 5 GB cloud storage to mac,I pad and I phone users and additional storage can be added for various fees

The main companies include:

Mozy

Livedrive

Carbonite

Exploring techniques old and new

I am in the process of examining different photographer's work's and styles. I particularly like the fantasy art style of portrait images shown below which show a combination of art and photography

Shown here are some images of various photographers taken of the website "Master Photographers Association" This is a particular style that I like and will be experimenting with over the next couple of months Portraits are bended together with different textures using various layers using the sosftware Photoshop

These images mainly consist of portraits that are blended together with various textures which are then darkened using a various vignetting layers

I will be shooting some new portraits shortly and will be blending them with various textures I have photographed over the last couple of months. Shown below are some of my textures that I may be using , I photogrphed lot of these textures on recent phtogrphy trips to Lacock Abbey near Bath and Tutbury castle some local historic ruins situated about 6 miles from Burton

I have always been an avid lover of Photoshop and have played around with textures and blending modes for years. Shown below are some of my  manipulated images which show show various blends and textures using different layers that I have created in Photoshop   

This image has 3 elements applied to it, a base image which I have de-saturated, various softening layers applied and a soft Grunge texture added to give an old dirty type of effect 

This image shows a simple blend of a recent seascape I took on holiday combined with a stone wall "grunge"texture taken from an image from a wall at Tutbury Castle a local historical ruin that I visited in the summer

I blended the image above of a friend of mine together with a texture of ice photographed on my car windscreen using various layers,blends and masks

Shown here is a base image with just one texture added, I blended the images together using layers, masks and blending in Photoshop. I find the possibilities are endless of what can be achieved it's all down creativity and being inspired by other photographers work's

This image has mutiple layers blended together to produce a soft focus type of feel

I hope to take blending with textures to a higher level over the next few months a technique that I find very fascinating and which I am passionate about. This technique requires creativity along with a good knowledge of using Photoshop which I feel I posses but would now like to take these elements to the next level

Wedding Reception Venues

I am in the process of gathering some information on the various wedding reception locations in and around the area where I live. I am researching this information to try and find a suitable venue to enable us to shoot our wedding photograph marketing shots for inclusion on our website

Shown above is a screen grab from google maps which shows some of the venues in and around this area that may be suitable for this purpose. We really need a venue that stands out from the rest and also has a little quality about it

Shown below are some venues that I have found  which could possibly meet our requirements. These are highly used commercial venues an no doubt they would charge us to use their premises even if they would even allow photographer's let loose on their property's

Hoar Cross hall would be the idle location set in it's own grounds about 8 miles from Burton. it has great facilities and has a little class about it

Other paces  include Sudbury hall about 10 miles from Burton, Keddleston hall at Derby and Calke Abbey at Ticknall nr Burton

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I will be contacting some of these places shortly to find out if they allow or cater for the kind of thing we have in mind. Even if these places were to allow photographers to use their premises I should imagine they would be charging a large fee

Business planning (planning our business)

The Business idea 


                               under construction

My Colleague James Woodings and I are in the early stages of setting up a part-time bespoke wedding photography business


The business will provide a different bespoke type of wedding photography tailored more to the customer's individual needs but set in our style of our photography 

Our  aim is to target a niche market away from the run of the mill traditional wedding photography where the client wants something different which is unique and the photography  stands out from the rest. Some of our photography ideas we hope to include in our styles include,retro,available light,textured, pastel colour popping, montages and dream fantasy 


A lot of our work will be post processed using the software "Photoshop" a photography tool that Jim and myself are both conversant with where we hope to add most of the effects to our photography

The competition,local and national photographers

We are under no illusions this will be tough, it’s been done a thousand times before and there are far better photographers out there that can produce much better photography than we can.


So how do we compete? We have to provide a better product, a different product, a more unique product that nobody else in this area is doing or will try to emulate. It has to be different, something that will sell our product and hopefully attract potential clients to our style of wedding photography

Our skills 


Good photographers

Both of us are very pro-active to find work,customers,models etc 


Reasonably good business and marketing skills

We have a yearning to take our photography to the next level

Excellent Photoshop and software skills


Confident with a will to suceed

Business planning

We both know that this will be an extremely challenging operation as the market is already saturated with a variety of wedding phtogrphers in our area


The first step in our planning is researching the market to see if we have a viable product that people want to buy. We are checking other photographers websites,wedding websites,studying bride and wedding magazines and visiting bridal fairs as I speak

Marketing:

We are in the process of buying some web space and hosting services to build a website to promote our products. It is absolutely paramount to get your marketing right from the outset. The marketing needs to be slick, precise and up to date.


We will need to stand out from our competiters so a good website with excellent photographic content will be our main marketing tool. It’s absolutely imperative that we have an excellent product upfront, which will be our photography, this has to be of very of very high quality so we need to up our game and produce better images than what we are producing at the moment  

We intend to produce  portfolios of our images to a high very standard of photography

which we will show to potential customers or clients,these are a great marketing tool an an excellent way of showing off our work or products. We hope to build these up over the next couple of months

We are sourcing models  for our initial photo shoot which will supply the main images for our website. As I speak Jim and I are both pro-active in our search for such models

Jim is sourcing models from online model agencies,some of which are free,they provide a ”time for prints” service where the models provide the acting and we provide the photography
Some of these agencies/websites include, Model Mayem, Pure Storm and Star now

I work for the local college here in Burton and we have a large amount of courses delivered that could provide potential models to assist us in our photography. These departments include,dance,drama,hair dressing,beauty classes,makeup,textile etc. All of these classes could help us to provide valuable contacts which could help us to shoot our photography.


I am in the process of emailing these departments today for portential models/contacts etc   which may help to contribute to our photography

We also have an excellent photographic studio here in college which we have access to, this is where we hope to photograph some of our marketing material for the website. On Saturday mornings we have a range of hair and beauty classes taking place in the college. I hope to liaise with these departments to provide make up and hair stylists who want to gain some experience of making up a photographic model


Your reputation is another major marking tool, this is of paramount importance to us, as it is this that sells your business. One bad job with poor photography and your reputation is in tatters. We will have to prove ourselves and gradually build up a credible reputation as time goes by, it won't come over night and could take years before you become reputable. Hopefully a lot of our work will come from our reputation and  word of mouth so it’s critical that we provide a high quality service from the outset

Branding:

We need to think up a name for the photography business as soon as possible
We are at present checking out the competion locally,their prices, techniques and styles
We have local wedding fairs penciled into our diaries whch we will be visiting shortly to get a look at the competition and get a general feel of the industry
We will be designing business cards shortly to promote our website when it is complete
Our website will be our main advertising tool with our name and business outline shown here

Advertising     under construction  We will be promoting our buiness

Marketting tools

Website

Buiness cards

Publicity


Brochures


Stationary


Word of mouth

Setup costs

We will initially have to provide funds up front from our own pockets to get the business up and running. We have a lot of the equipment already in our possession but will be adding to the business as we go along and make profits.purchasedSome of these costs will includ:


Website,
Webspace,
Domain name 
Marketing and publicity
Model hire,
Wedding dresses and suits for our initial models
Business cards
Printing,brochures,stationary
Equipment
Photography shoot venue


Venues for marketing shoot

We are at present sourcing a nice location for the initial website marketing photographic shoot. We want this to be a unique venue, one which shows a little class and style but not over the top

These include:........................

I am in the process of talking  to these venue’s to try and a rrange a phtogrphy shoot at there premises...................

(Yervant) wedding and fashion photographer

Under construction

Yervant (wedding and fashion photographer)

I have heard of this famous wedding and fashion photographer before and also seen some of his photography on the net but never really payed much attention to his work

Wow! what have I been missing? it doesn't get much better than this

He was one of the first photographers to shoot his photography using digital cameras

with not a film camera in site

This is the gear that Yervant uses:

Cameras: Canon EOS 5D; Canon EOS-1Ds Mark II; Sony HDV Video Camera

Canon Lenses: 15mm fisheye; 24mm f/1.4L; 16-35mm f/2.8L; 24-70mm f/2.8L; 70-200mm f/2.8L IS; 85mm f/1.2L
Flash Gear: Canon Speedlite 580EX; Quantum Qflash; Lowel i-light video light; Bescor video light; Metz 45 flash

Yervant was born in Ethiopia, he is the son of royal photographer Hagop Zanazanian.  Yervant followed his father's footsteps in photography, mastered dark room techniques at a young age of 9, won his first award of excellence with a landscape image at the age of 11 

I know that photography is all about light and composition......................................................................................................................................................................................................................

Being one of the world's top phtographers I will find it difficult to emulate this kind if phtography,the majority of his shots I would assume have been set up with proper models and lighting......................................................................

Yervant studied at Mourat Raffael College in Venice Italy from the age of 13 to 17 where he was inspired by fine art and photography.

The Zanazanian family emigrated to Australia in 1975 and Yervant joined soon after and enrolled at The Photography College in Melbourne.  Yervant proclaimed he wanted to be a WEDDING photographer during his college years and he was told by his tutors to quit there and then as Wedding photography never required a college education. 

Nonetheless, Yervant graduated and set himself up as a 'Professional Wedding Photographer' Today Yervant's name is synonymous with the most influential photographers of our time.

y.

Health and Safety Considerations

Health and Safety Considerations in photography

The 1974 Health and Safety at Work etc. Act needs to be referred too when using phtographic eqipment internally and externally. Employees and public must take reasonable care. Risk assessments should be made for all activities, including fire precautions, using display equipment, manual handling and control of substances/chemicals COSHH etc, either in the studio or out on location

Internal, in the studio etc 


There are a certain amount of health and safety considerations to take in to account when using a photographic studio or using photographic equipment. Most of the work will take place in a darkened room so there are a number of dangers lurking for the unsuspecting photographer

1-Trip Hazards

here are various trip hazards in and around the studio,these include:

2-Tripods and lighting stands:

These are very easy to trip over and which cannot be seen easily in a darkened room. Some have long booms with large counter weights on their ends. Be careful not to bang you heads and be weary of low positioned lighting heads

3-Trailing power cables, leads and extension blocks: Again easy to trip over and carrying very high voltages.Tape cables to the floor where possible with warning or hazard tape

4-High voltage Flash and lighting heads: These units which produce the lighting in the studio can become extremely hot due to there high power outputs. The side casings of these units can become very hot, handle them with care. Do not hang or drape coats, shirts etc over lighting/flash heads. This could overheat the lighting and produce a fire risk

5-Strobe lighting and flash: Be sure to warn people accompanying you into the studio that there may be a risk that the flashing lighting in the studio may trigger of epileptic fits

6-Water and liquids: Be extremely careful if using liquids and water within a photographic studio. Liquids and high voltage electricity don't mix. Always use dry hands when using any electrical equipment within the studio

7-Fire extinguishers: Make sure you know the location of the fire extinguishers within the room. Make sue you know the right kind of extinguisher to use on a fire. There are different extinguishers for different kinds of fires

Shown below are the different types of fire extinguisher, we would use the dry powder extinguisher in our studio here at college as this is the correct extinguisher to put out an electrical fire. Using the wrong extinguisher on an electrical fire could result in an electric shock

C

O2 fire extinguishers (carbon dioxide) are the only fire extinguisher recommended for fires involving electrical equipment. CO2 is safe to use on and around electrical equipment, as the gas itself is non-conductive, and once used, there is no sticky foam or messy powder left behind. They are also effective on Class B fires (flammable liquids).

Carbon dioxide fire extinguishers are painted bright red with a black panel above the operating instructions. They have a distinctive horn-shaped nozzle at the side on the smaller models with 5kgs and above having a hose and horn.

8-Telephones: Make sure you have acess to a telephone or mobile phone while using the studio. Sometimes the studio door may be locked or restricted for people entering the studio while a shoot is taking place. If an accident was to accur the use of a telephone is essential. Always notify people that you are using the studio

The links below show some basic health and safety procedures for studio photography:

http://www.ehow.com/video_2371507_photography-studio-equipment-studio-safety.html

(Externally) out and about on location etc

A lot of my location photography is taken outdoors and I normally consider all of the health and safety implications which are highlighted below

1-  Maintaining all equipment in good working order ready for use

2-  Dependent on what you are shooting and what location,use adequate safety clothing such as high visibility vests, hard hats, and safety boots to suit your location

Beware of slippery surfaces and wet floors on location. Wear the correct footware for the job in hand

3-  Being aware of the surroundings on location, careful consideration must be given to positioning of any lighting stands,lighting heads,trailing leads or other equipment that may be a danger to the public

4-  Tape down leads to avoid trip hazards

5-  Use stickers on lighting units and other dangerous equipment warning the general public of the dangers. Some examples would be.....

"Warning!! Do not touch!  Extremely hot surfaces".   

"Warning!! Do not touch! Danger off electric shock"

6-  Warn the general public there are flashing lights in the vacinity whch could pre warn people who suffer from epelepsy etc

In the darkroom

Control of Substances Hazardous to Health

Photographers have to be aware of the environmental and health issues in Photography. Not so much now but many of the chemicals that are/were used in Photography can be and are damaging to your health. Chemicals have to be respected and the appropriate safety items or clothing etc should be worn when using these items

Ensure darkroom areas are adequately ventilated: there is no hard and fast rule as the required ventilation depends on the duration and type of work, but an extraction fan mounted on an external wall to provide 10 - 15 changes of air per hour will normally produce a safe working environment.

Chemicals need to be disposed of in the correct way set out by government health and safety guidlines


Below is a link to the governments heath and safty website guidlines on COSHH

http://www.hse.gov.uk/coshh/industry.htm