My next fine art exhibition will take place in the Geneva Area, at “Le Grand Donzel”, Plessy.
I will write in the next days an article on the blog with the final exhibition dates and especially the date of the private viewing of the exhibition. So, remember to subscribe to the blog!
Iceland Colors
When you are shooting sailing photography, you should not have 25 parameters to set before taking the photo, otherwise you will miss the photo!
So, you have to find settings that you will use during the whole race.
When I take pictures of sailing events, I always use two cameras (at the time I’m writing this article):
Championnat Grand Surprise - Thonon - Friday: Photo 22
Critérium Surprise de Thonon - Sunday: Photo 37
Having two cameras helps you to not miss a photo. You don’t have to change lenses to take a short or long distance photo: you just have to switch between two cameras. When you are taking photos during a sailing event, you are always switching between short and long distance photos.
Most of the time, you do not want to change these settings during the event. So, you have to find settings that will match your needs for most of the situations.
For long distance photos, I’m using these settings on the D2X:
For short distance photos, I’m using these settings on the D700:
ISO 800 Photo example
These settings are a starting point for you own settings. You will have to adapt them to your own cameras. Of course, during an event, you can change them to take a unique photo that you will have time to setup.
If you have one camera with one zoom, select the setting regarding how you will use the zoom: at short or long distance. If you will use both, select a shutter priority mode.
Recently, I have been to the Nikon Pro forum, the 22th of March in Paris. The goal for Nikon was to present the video function in their pro cameras. The invitation card was clear enough:
Nikon Pro Forum, March 22
As I was exploring the usage of video for my job, I wanted to have experiences of other photographers on their use of video and especially their business opportunities.
Conferences were mainly organized by the web site photographie.com. Its editor, Didier de Faÿs was the moderator of conferences and unfortunately it was pretty bad in this role. He was often at a loss for words and he was not giving a good rhythm to the conferences. Moreover, he seemed to know personally some of the photographers and it introduces a lot of collusion: a moderator should be neutral, but he often spent his time to congratulate the guests.
Morning conferences were bad. The first conference “Being a pro today” was an annoying discussion. The only person who was interested was a buyer of art that should participate… and who was not present! Otherwise, the discussion revolved around sales trends for consumer cameras (totally useless for a pro) and photos management workflow (I think that any professional has already tackled this issue today).
The next conference was really “parisienne” (living in a microcosm and only looking at himself). The photographer Elisabeth Schneider showed a video she made. You can watch it on this page (in French).
I have nothing to say about the video of Mme Schneider that has a good tempo and an interesting subject. But it was her first try with video and she was very arrogant and presumptuous. She says in the interview that this is a video she has done during her studies and her teachers have helped her enormously. However, she was always refocusing the discussion on herself and forget to be modest.
Luckily, the afternoon speakers were more interesting.
First in the conference “Try the video”, two people were part of the discussion.
Olivier Lambert, the owner of the web site brêves de trottoirs (brief sidewalks), presented his work. These are short videos about the neighborhoods of Paris. This work is unpretentious and pleasant to watch.
The interesting point was the business side of this site. The two creators of the site have received afund from the CNC to help them make this site. But no diffuser (online newspaper, television) was willing to pay to broadcast their videos, although they were interested in them. Their reaction was always the same: why should they pay to broadcast them when they were freely available on the Internet? This highlights a major problem with this kind of video works: how to be payed for your work?
Then Thierry Rajic talked about his career: a former commercial photographer who had the opportunity to become a director, first for clips then for advertisements. The most interesting part of the talk was that he highlighted that a photographer and director are two separate jobs and that a good photographer will not necessarily be a good director (it was quite comical as the moderator tried to absolutely make him say the otherwise).
Finally, William Herbaut was presenting web documentaries. It is a new way to present stories that newspapers and TV channels start to experiment en their web sites. France 5 has some of them on its web site (in French).
Retour à Tchernobyl - Guillaume Herbaut
Guillaume Herbaut is working on a web documentary on Tchernobyl. He was talking about it in the conference “Why doing a web documentary?”. You can already read his blog (in French). The business approach for this work was interesting. It will sell it through different mediums:
Moreover, it has found additional funding:
It is interesting to see the various business opportunities available for this kind of personal work. We must remember to work hard on pre-production to validated all these opportunities.
Manufacturers highlight video in their cameras but photographers have not yet found a definitive business model for the exploitation of these videos.
Photographers who are journalist can also create web documentaries. But journalist are a minority among photographers.
As a photographer, you can also provide a new service for event photography (especially for business events). So you can take photos during the event and also provide a video (composed of still photos and videos) of the event. The main advantage for your customer is to reduce his cost. But your customer will think that as you are already working on the event, the additional cost for the video will be small (he is just forgetting the post-production work related to the video). So, if you want to sell this kind of service, you should not have an high expectation regarding the price of this service, otherwise your customer will directly hire a company specialized in videos.
We have just updated our web site and have added a blog.
The “news” section has been replaced by this blog and old news have been added to the blog.
You will find in this blog all news related to this web site and our activities:
But will be also find general articles about photography:
We plan to publish one article per week about photography.
We encourage you to subscribe to this blog. You can do it with your favorite Internet browser or by using eg the following tools: Google Reader or Netvibes.
Good reading!
We have finally launched our English web site!
For all our visitors from foreign countries, you can now visit us in an international language. French was certainly a little bit difficult to read for a lot of people from other countries than France!
