It's not just my own new site that I've been busy with over the past few months. I've also shot the images for three other websites.
Pedal Progression is a new mountain bike skills company based in Bristol, offering tuition and guided riding for riders of all abilities:
Gary Lake, the man behind my new-look, soon-to-be-launched portfolio site, is also busy training to ride the Wales Coast to Coast in the summer. I know. He's clearly mad, but what can you do?
Finally, Gary also put together the site for endurance racing team NinerStansErgon:
It's been the norm for my pictures to end up on the web at some point, but it's more often than not a site that accompanies some kind of print product, whether that's a magazine or a catalogue. These shoots were different, because the web was always going to be the delivery medium of choice. It's a new way of working for me, and one that throws up its own challenges and opportunities.
It's quite liberating being freed from the design constraints of an A4-ish paper product. Looser crops are useful, so that web designers can run banner-style images where appropriate or crop into a tighter area of an image. I'm used to doing my own cropping in-camera and don't generally like seeing my images cropped in print, but with the web you can't always use standard 2:3 aspect ratios... and anyway, resolution isn't an issue. Provided you're working with a good designer, freedom to crop is generally a Good Thing.
Towards the end of last year I posted about my portfolio site's impending rebuild. Well, although it's taken a while, we're now on the finishing straight and it should be live very soon. Incidentally, the new site is one of the reasons things have been a bit quiet around here lately...
Here are some screen grabs to give you an idea of what's in store:
What you can't tell from these reduced size grabs is just how good the pics look scaled to full screen on a 24 inch monitor. I'm taking a punt putting such relatively high res pics online, but there's no denying the impact.
But that's not the only cool thing about the new site. It's also designed to play nice with both iPad and iPhone, including supporting the swipe function for navigation. Here's an iPhone screen grab:
Plus the blog will be integrated, all the pics will be captioned and there are direct links to my Twitter feed and Facebook page.
There's also all sorts of other cool stuff going on in the background, including some clever scaling and a bunch of other stuff that I don't understand. It all contributes to what should hopefully be a slick, easy to navigate site that puts the images where they deserve to be: up front. Big thanks to Gary Lake for 7 months of hard graft in what little spare time he has, putting it all together.
Watch this space - not long now!
I've been a bit slack keeping up with my published cover shots lately. Which is how I find myself with three consecutive What Mountain Bike covers to share:
Nikon D3, 80-200mm f/2.8, 1/250sec f/6.3 @ ISO200, two radio slaves
Nikon D3, 80-200mm f/2.8, 1/80sec f/6.3 @ ISO800, two radio slaves
Nikon D3, 24-70mm f/2.8, 1/200sec f/7.1 @ ISO640, two radio slaves
There's something these three covers have in common: none of them are shot wide. The shortest focal length in use was 70mm, and the longest 130mm. Why does this matter? Because, as students of any of my courses will know, long lenses take the viewer away from the action and slow things down. Looked at another way, shooting a mountain bike in close with a wide lens is a good way to involve the viewer in the action, adding a dose of drama and movement even in situations where there's not much of either happening. Step back, put a longer lens on, and the viewer involvement decreases.
In other words, the further you are from the action, the more you're relying on visual cues to impart the sense of movement. It's very easy to take a boring shot of mountain biking on a long lens, particularly from head on. There needs to be something going on to grab - and hold - the viewer's attention. Usually, in the absence of obvious movement, it's all about implied movement.
So in the first shot, we've got a climbing rider working the bike hard, out of the saddle and about to put in a power stroke. Timing is critical in an image like this - bike upright and pedals level just won't cut it. The fact that the rider's smiling doesn't imply hard effort (although it works in this context, because publishers like readers to feel that riding a bike is fun), but his body position does. You won't be able to see it here, but there's also enough movement in the front tyre's tread to show that the bike's moving.
The second shot also makes use of the rider's body position and facial expression, but it's helped along by a slow shutter speed and the added interest of plenty of backlit spray. The bike's hauling - and you know it. I actually tried some wide shots of this corner and they didn't work as well...
The final shot is all about the rider's position on the bike - elbows bent, body low and pushing the bike into the corner. The shutter speed's higher than I'd like on this one, but what you can't see is that as soon as i'd taken the shot the rider needed to straighten the bike and push it the other way into a berm. My attempts at slowing things down just resulted in too many shots with blurred handblebars or face. The first isn't ideal; the second is a definite no-on. Details matter, and it's my job to get them right.
2011 marked the end of my 15th year as a full time pro photographer. If you'd asked me back in 1996 (when I was just starting out with a few hundred pounds in the bank and an F801 with a couple of lenses) if I'd still be a photographer 15 years down the line you probably would've been met with a blank look. Still? I hadn't even turned a profit yet.
If you're a regular here you'll know from some of the posts I've written over the past few years that it's not always been an easy ride. From a pro's perspective costs are up, there's more competition, budgets are down and fees are static or falling. 2011 didn't change any of that. There's never been a more important time to be good at the 'pro' part of pro photographer. Luckily, it appears that I can still add and subtract reasonably well.
More importantly, there are enough clients out there who appreciate a job well done for me to continue to earn a living doing something that I love. The people that I work with - from magazine editors and art directors to the riders who turn up with enthusiasm, in all weathers, to ride that corner 'just one more time' - are fantastic. If you've worked with me over the past few years... thank you. I couldn't do what I do without you.
So 2011 turned out to be a pretty good year despite recession gloom. It turns out that more people like riding bikes than ever before - and who can blame them? Bikes rock. All I do is try to capture that essence of that simple truth. Over the year I scored 17 covers across 4 magazine titles, which equals my previous best. Then again, I didn't ride my bike as much as I'd like... but there's always the next 12 months to put that right.
Whatever your plans for 2012, thanks for reading over the past year. Here's to 2012!
Golden hour. Scott Nicol, Santa Cruz CA
Nikon D300, 50-150mm f/2.8, 1/500sec f/4 @ ISO200
Nikon D800: lots more, for the same. But how much is enough?
Unless you've been asleep under a bush for the past couple of days, you've probably noticed that Nikon's completed its pro dSLR one-two with the announcement of its D800. It's the 5DII-killer that Nikon shooters have been clamouring for for the past couple of years. In fact, given its specs and price, Nikon clearly expects it to be a 5DIII-killer too. Canon will have their work cut out to match expectations, now that Nikon has shown their hand.
In case you haven't seen the specs, the salient points are thusly:
- D700-ish body with some styling tweaks and a small drop in weight (yay!)
- 36mp at 4fps, with a 15mp DX crop mode that actually looks like being genuinely useful
- all the weather sealing and robustness you'd expect (though not quite as much as a D3/D4)
- nearly all the D4's video cleverness
- price back to D700 price at launch
In other words, it's one heck of a lot of camera for a price that, although not a trivial sum of money, actually gets you an awful lot of very solid performance. What particularly interests me is the DX crop mode, which offers more pixels than my D300 and is therefore genuinely, supremely useful. The AF sensors cover almost all the DX frame. See where i'm heading with this?
However. 36 is a very big number indeed when we're talking millions of pixels. You don't get something for nothing, so anyone expecting a D4 sensor in a small body is going to be disappointed. Specifically, the D800 loses out on high ISO (though it's likely to be at least as good as the D7000 in this respect - which is to say, very good indeed, though not quite up to D3 levels). It's also not particularly fast, although 4fps is perfectly useable. Anyone wanting more than that out of a high pixel count camera needs their head examining... 9fps @ 36mp is getting on for 1Gb per second.
There are also the tangentially related issues of lens performance and diffraction, as well as the weakest link of all in the image quality chain - technique. I'll make a prediction now: an awful lot of D800 buyers are going to be disappointed with their results unless a. they own absolutely stellar lenses and b. have the technique to get the best out of them. The intersection of those two groups is a fairly small number...
From my point of view, as intrigued as I am by the D800 it doesn't actually solve any of my needs. There's no way I - or the vast majority of my clients, the vast majority of the time - need anything like that many pixels. If I were habitually making A2 or bigger prints, on the other hand, i'd be lining up to buy one straight away. It's certainly a lot of camera for the money.
Posted at 02:37 PM in Comment, Gear | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
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