Tag Archives: uk

Photography

My life as a wedding photographer

For those that got here via Google and those other people that don’t know me, I’ll start with a confession: I am not a wedding photographer. I am keen amateur photographer, mainly concentrating on travel and occasionally branching out into portraits. However having a reputation among friends as “the photographer” has resulted in a number of people asking me to take pictures at their wedding.

[photopress:CRW_2614.jpg,thumb,alignleft]It’s something I have generally resisted. It struck me as just too high risk. Wedding pictures will, hopefully, last a life-time and I didn’t want the pressure of needing to get everything right on the day. Even if you discount all the variables around the camera, computers and memory cards, there are so many other things that could go wrong. The weather; missing shots ((For the second I missed the bride signing the register.)); people blinking or looking on the wrong way; people inadvertently missing ((My mum hates having her picture taken and made efforts to appear in as few photographs from my wedding as possible!)); annoying things in the back-ground ((A lot of my wedding pictures have a homeless man and a litter bin as a backdrop.)). And then, since neither of these were commercial ventures, I would have to take all this into account as well as actually trying to enjoy the event as a guest, and, in one case, as a best man.

Perhaps that’s even more pressure than getting paid for it!

In the end I made sure that I wasn’t going to be the only person at each event with a camera, said I wasn’t promising anything but that I would try to get something good. While certainly not flawless I think I did okay.

[photopress:CRW_2501.jpg,thumb,alignleft]For the first wedding I borrowed a proper flash unit from one of the grooms. Initially I wasn’t terribly keen. As a matter of principle I was trying to steer clear of things that I didn’t know how to use properly or might fail at some inopertune moment. However I was assured that it was simple enough to use and I figured that, worse case, I could just take it off and revert to the built-in flash. Looking back this was a great decision and is the only real equipment change I’d make if I ever did a wedding again. My trusty Canon EOS 300D, EF-S 17-85mm IS lens and stack of 512Mb CF cards stood up nicely otherwise.

I had to use my camera’s built in flash for the second wedding. This turned out to be a mistake for two reasons. Firstly, it was no-where near as powerful as an external flash. This meant that virtually every picture came out too dark and required extensive work in Photoshop in order to bring out any detail. Shooting in RAW format, rather than JPEG as I normally do, helped here. The second was even more annoying as it couldn’t easily be corrected afterwards and, in hindsight, was trivially avoidable. The build-in flash unit didn’t raise up high enough to fire over the top of the lens hood, meaning that when I tried to go wide there was usually a large, dark circle at the bottom of the picture.

[photopress:CRW_2648.jpg,thumb,alignleft]Overall, none of the major issues were technical in nature. This make the biggest lesson: have a plan. Decide what pictures are needed, remember who you want to have in them all. The next biggest thing is: learn to improvise. With so many people around and only you focusing on the photography, you only really get the one chance at most shots. If you miss someone, say, signing the register you can’t rely on getting another chance. The fact is, at this point people are often too emotional to take suggestions on board and, besides, getting in the way is really a huge faux pas for a wedding photographer. A corollary of the need to improvise is that you need to be familiar with your camera. You don’t want technology problems just as a critical moment arrives.

Similarly it’s easy to forget to take pictures of someone who may not be at the centre of the event but who is, nevertheless, important. Just ask my wife, who I managed to take only a couple of pictures of for both events put together. And, of course, I was in none of the pictures either.

The other thing I learned is how long it takes to edit the pictures afterwards. I took over a hundred pictures for each event so getting down to the good few images is pretty time consuming. For the second wedding I also had to spend a lot of time in Photoshop playing with the RAW decoder, adjusting the levels and removing red-eye.

In the end I would have to say that it was a good experience. In both cases I was able to give a great, unique gift and had fun doing it.

Computing

The Promise, The Limits, And The Beauty Of Software

[photopress:DSC00005.jpg,thumb,alignleft]This evening I went along to this years Turing Lecture, an annual presentation hosted by the British Computer Society (of which I’m a professional member) and the Institution of Engineering and Technology. This years lecture was given by Grady Booch, someone that most people in IT will either have heard of or, at the very least, been influenced by. He started his early career working on object oriented design and is currently passionately working on a project to collect the architectures of a hundred computer systems.

It’s difficult to pick out highlights, partially as there were quite a few but mainly because I wasn’t taking notes and can’t remember half of the parts that I pledged to write about. I do remember that he gave a one line summary of every decade from the 1920’s, culminating in the 2030’s being described as “The Rise of the Machines.” Hopefully not in the same way as in the Terminator movies. And on a smaller scale he talked about his front door bell crashing and why, as an IBM Fellow, he was using a PowerBook and mocking some less reliable operating systems.

The lecture was broadcast live on the Internet and, they tell me, will be available to watch probably by the time you’re reading this on the IET website. It’s well worth a watch.

Blog

Catholic threat on slave rights law

The Catholic Church today caused widespread controversy when it issued a statement urging the Government to overturn a law made two hundred years ago.

Clive Adams, standing outside Saint Johns Cathedral in Norwich, read the statement: “The Catholic Church is unable to comply with the Slave Trade Act, the 1807 Act of Parliament abolishing slavery throughout the British Empire. This law is incompatible with the teachings of the Bible and we cannot in clear conscience operate under such restrictions. We ask the government to consider an opt-out clause in revised legislation.” ((In case it’s not absolutely obvious, this is a parody on the recent story that the Catholic Church is, with some support in the Cabinet, seeking an opt-out of equality legislation on religious grounds.)) Adams, an unpaid volunteer reporting to Cardinal Michael Osborn, denied that he himself was a slave.

The church suggests that past ill treatment of slaves was merely due to an incorrect interpretation of the Bible. “Sentiments of kindness and understanding vastly outnumber passages advocating beating servants and selling your daughter.”

The release also notes that the Blair administration has already repealed the Slavery Abolition Act in 1998 ((This is actually true — Statute Law (Repeals) Act 1998 — although staunch Catholics should note that this does not mean that Slavery is legal.)) and suggested that it wasn’t such a stretch to go “as far as common sense leads us.”

The government has not officially commented, although some senior members of the Cabinet are rumoured to have suggested that passing new legislation might be easier if MPs “be obedient to them that are [their] masters.”

Opinion

Hiring

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Talking about Google’s old and new hiring practices seems to be all the rage at the moment, so I thought that I would get in on the act.

I got through two phone interviews for a technical consultant role here in the UK before being rejected. My second interviewer told me that he’d had fourteen interviews before being hired. That’s just an absurd number. How much holiday and sick leave can you take at short notice without arousing suspicion?! (They were both long enough or required Internet access that I couldn’t do them at work.)

By the end of the second I was in two minds whether to take things any further anyway. I wanted to work for Google, but could I go through fourteen interviews? I was concerned about the money, as no number was on the job spec and big names often offer low and offer options to compensate. I can’t pay my mortgage with stock options! And the work in the consulting side didn’t sound quite as appealing as the kind of thing you hear on the development side.

Most significantly, was the style of interview. They asked brain-teasers, which I tend to think is a lousy way to scope out a candidate. Either you know the trick and can do it instantly, you get lucky or you need a hint. None of these really shows how smart you are, how well you can program a computer, interact with clients or, indeed, any other aspect of the job. The interviewer was also clearly typing away in the background while I was trying to answer the questions, only half listening, which was just plain rude.

Most communications were friendly and personal, right up to the last. The rejection email was signed, impersonally, “Google Staffing.”

So overall I’m not terribly impressed with Google recruitment. Okay, maybe I’m biased against them as they turned me down but as an interviewer I’ve always considered part of my job as leaving a positive impression of the company even with candidates that are not going to be hired. Google failed in this.

Blog

Thanksgiving

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[photopress:DSCN0161.jpg,thumb,alignleft]On Saturday we hosted the first Thanksgiving dinner at Chez Darlington. Due to the size of our kitchen this became a bit of a logistical nightmare but we persevered.

Well, I say “we” but pretty much all the cooking was down to B with me in more of a motivational role, insisting that the spinach and cheese casserole smelled really good and that the turkey looked great. I got the easy job as it was true!

Our guests helped with the rest of the food, with MC bringing the snacks, AP concocting a butternut squash and tomato side, PG and IY providing the drinks and EL baked banana and pumpkin bread.

I think it’s fair to say that we all left thankful to have such great friends and completely pogged from all the food.