Three Useful Doohickeys

Some communications professionals shoot their own pictures instead of hiring a professional photographer.

Whatever the reason for doing it themselves here are a few things they need to watch for and correct: 1 - Is the color correct? 2 – Are there dust spots in the pictures? 3 – Are the photos truly sharp?

Let’s look at these potential problems and see how to avoid them.

Number One:

Color calibrate the computer used when working with the photographs.

Here is a list of just a packages that will do the job:

* Pantone huey – $89

* Spyder3Express Color Calibration System – $89

* X-Rite Eye-One Display LT Color Management Solution – $139

Calibrating a monitor is adjusting it to a known color
space. There are a few different color spaces that are standards. The figure to the left gives a few. All devices have tolerances. Calibrating is basically adjusting the monitor to the closest known factor. The software places a color target on the monitor and uses the hardware sensor to read the color and make the adjustments automatically.

A CRT monitor (similar to older TVs) must be calibrated more often than a LCD flat screen. For a good illustration as to why monitors should be calibrated step into a store showing the same signal on several TVs and look at the variety of colors.

Now that the monitor is calibrated adjustments made to the pictures themselves will be more accurate in color, contrast and brightness. Calibration also cuts the number of surprises emerging from a printer.

Number Two:


Cameras with interchangeable lenses (SLRs) need to have the sensor cleaned of dust. Many local camera stores offer this service for about $50.

I use the Delkins Sensor Scope Kit to service my cameras
myself. It comes with a magnifier that lets you see the dust on the
sensor once the mirror is locked up for cleaning. (See the illustration
on right) Here is a link to their website http://delkin.com/c-130866-clean.html

There is a video on how to clean your sensor.

Clean sensors saves a lot of time spent in PhotoShop just repairing the
damage caused by dust. Often, with dirty sensors, a dust spot will be
almost impossible to remove with the software.

Number Three:

The last step - calibrate your lenses. No matter what camera/lens you buy, it's almost certainly been mass-produced.

Even with the close tolerances adhered to by the better manufacturers; it is rare that perfection is achieved. If the camera body is "off" by a fraction and so is the lens the combination produces an image that is
soft. To be sure this is not the case the lens must be calibrated.

One tool for this is the LensAlign that sells for $179. http://www.lensalign.com

Here is a video for you to see how this works:

If all this takes more time and effort than is practical perhaps the communications professional should just hire me and let me worry about (and take care of) all this for them.

Shooting a Sphere Panoramic

This is a photo of me taken by my Uncle Knolan Benfield while I was shooting a Sphere Panoramic.

This shows the tripod head with the camera, special head and camera with 16mm lens. Here is the shot from this:

Clayton State University Center

Here are a few more for you to see:

Winshape Retreat - Courtyard

Winshape Retreat - Lower Patios

Georgia Tech College of Management Courtyard

LeCraw Auditorium at Georgia Tech

Collaboration

My friend Tony Messano talks about what he looks for when he hires a photographer in this video clip. Here is his website http://www.tonymessano.com/ad/

The difference between two parties who compromise or collaborate is huge.

Compromising leads to disappointment with all parties. When the parties come together they have a creative idea or solution for a problem. Each party wants their idea out there more than the other one. In this scenario a watered down version of both ideas emerge. In the end no one is satisfied with the solution.

Collaboration isn’t about negotiating solutions. It starts where the parties come together and listening to each other. They are open to new ideas. This is where everyone realizes that alone no one gets their ideas implemented, but by partnering with others they can accomplish their goals.

Rowing is a good illustration on how to collaborate. It is the oldest intercollegiate sport in the United States.

The Harvard-Yale Boat Race or Harvard-Yale Regatta is an annual rowing race between Yale and Harvard universities. It is America's oldest collegiate athletic competition. It takes place each year on Thames River, New London, Connecticut.

In this sport the team must work together. Each person has to stay in sync with his teammates. For me it is the perfect picture of collaboration.

If just one person is out of sync the team suffers.

When a client hires me they expect collaboration and not compromise. Trust is the foundation of this process. You must first trust to your clients, lower your barriers and be exposed.

Listen. Take notes while listening to the client. Note taking prevents you from responding to quickly with your ideas. Active listening means you ask questions to clarify and be sure you have their perspective. You may want to paraphrase their idea and ask if you have it right.

The key is understanding what they want to accomplish. You need to also listen and learn where they have very little room for flexibility. When the client feels like you know what they want and the parameters they are under you have the necessary information to be able to collaborate.

Meeting and exceeding the client’s expectations is easy, if you listen and check with the client to be sure you understand their project.

Many clients will have done an excellent job articulating their project from the very beginning. You still need to explore with them to understand how much flexibility they have. You still need to articulate their project in your own words. Skip this step and you will experience friction with the client.

All things being equal, people want to do business with their friends. True friends collaborate rather than compromise.

The Ten-Thousand Rule

Malcolm Gladwell tells us The Ten-Thousand Rule is a key component to how successful we are.

In his book Outliers Gladwell points to a 1990s study of violinists done by psychologist K. Anders Ericsson.

Ericsson and his colleagues divided the violinists at Berlin’s elite Academy of Music into three groups: great players, good players and those unlikely to play professionally and intended to be school teachers. The different groupings of musicians were asked. “How many hours have you practiced since you first started playing?”

Most of the fiddlers began when they were about five. By the age of twenty the great players had put in ten thousand practice hours; the good students about eight thousand and the future music teachers had fiddled around for four thousand hours.

In his book Gladwell relates how the Beatles, Bill Gates, Bill Joy and other extraordinarily successful people have not only put in the ten thousand hours perfecting their craft, but they have done so in a astonishingly short time.

Gladwell makes it clear that there is a threshold one must meet to complete in almost any field. He uses basketball players and IQ scores as examples.

Nearly all basketball players are over six feet tall. But the taller players are not necessarily the better players. However, to compete it will be difficult if you are not at least six feet tall.

There is a correlation between the six-foot threshold and an IQ of one hundred twenty. A one hundred twenty IQ is about the threshold for graduate school or other advanced learning. Just as being tall doesn’t bring success to basketball players having an IQ of two hundred or higher does not automatically insure success. However, there is a definite cut-off point for success in any business.

This holds true in the field of photography as well. David Lyman, the founder of The Maine Workshop, began each class with a discussion on creativity. Lyman says it is essential to “marry the intellect and the heart with the hands.”

He talks about how important persistence is to success and states that it takes about ten years to refine the craft of photography.

How do you get to be invited to play at Carnegie Hall? — by practice, practice, practice.

Bobby Fisher became a chess grandmaster in less than ten years, but it was close. It took him nine years.

Great artists are indeed talented, but talent can be wasted. The masters of their crafts combined their talent with the thousands of hours of work at the canvas, the instrument, the camera or the free-throw line. The Masters put in the ten thousand hours or more essential to master their chosen playing field.

This is good news for any aspiring professional photographer, rock star or whatever. Want to be one of the greatest in your field? - then put in the time. Ten thousand hours is a lot of time, but over the ten years it takes to perfect a task it breaks-down to fewer than three hours a day even if you’re Bobby Fisher.


Five Characteristic of Success

1. Persistence It takes about 10 years or 10,000 hours to refine a craft. Woody Allen says just showing up is 90%. The successful show up prepared. Watch out for the Draculas out there. They drain your time and you. Get rid of them.

2. Be Nice

3. Your Resources
Four people you need to get to know.
1. Teacher
2. Coach
3. Facilitators
4. Mentors
4. Be Skilled in Your Craft
5. Talent — Aptitude for the Profession

Earl Nightingale says that we can become an expert in our field in as little as five years. Malcolm Gladwell tells us the Great Players put in ten years. The trip of ten thousand hours can begin now.

Don’t just talk to your audience—Engage them

I’m sure you are familiar with the concept of the “elevator speech.” The idea is that — if you are asked what you do for a living or what your company does — you should be able to give a complete, compelling answer in the time it takes to ride an elevator to your destination.

But what about when you have the opportunity to speak to a group for more than the length of an elevator ride — say, 30 minutes or an hour? Does that mean you can just relax and let yourself ramble?

Quite the contrary.

Don’t Talk — TeachYou should still be able to boil down your presentation in a simple statement; you should have an elevator speech that explains what you’re going to teach your audience and why it’s worth listening to. And then you must move beyond simply talking if you want to continue to engage your audience.

For example, if I were speaking to photographers about social networking, I would start with a simple premise — that the key to successful social networking is to listen. I would then organize my talk around the different ways to listen, would provide demonstrations to help make my points, and would engage the audience in discussion.

Why would I take this approach, rather than simply lecturing the audience?

Take a look at the illustration above from the National Training Lab in Bethel, Maine. It shows how information taught through different methods is retained by students or other audiences.

As you can see, just talking to an audience doesn’t do much to educate them. Even if the audience member takes notes during a lecture or presentation and reads them back later, he or she still only retains 10 percent of what was taught. If you demonstrate what you’re talking about and then engage your audience in discussion, however, retention jumps to 50 percent.

When your audience has an opportunity to “practice by doing” — e.g., homework — retention increases to 75 percent. And since “teaching others” is the most effective learning method, you can see why educators like to put students in small groups and ask them to present a project to the class.

It’s also why teaching photography (or anything else) is a great way to learn a subject you know even better.

Simple or Complex?

Another factor to consider when you are teaching — particularly if it’s in a classroom, over a period of time — is how simple or complex your material is. We all understand how easy it is to walk on a flat surface, but to climb a mountain takes more work.

Good teachers understand that there are stages of learning. Here are the six basic stages, listed from the most rudimentary to the highest levels of comprehension:
1. Knowledge (memorizing, recalling)
2. Comprehension (expressing ideas in new forms)
3. Application (transfer of learning to a new situation)
4. Analysis (breaking a communication down into its parts)
5. Synthesis (creating something new by putting parts together)
6. Evaluation (judging value based on standards)

When you think about these stages of learning, it’s easy to see why you might have struggled with some of your teachers growing up, as I did. Too many teachers are stuck at stage 1 or 2 in their teaching methods, but expect you to somehow get to stage 5 or 6 when it’s exam time.

Engage, Engage, EngageWhether you are making a 30-minute presentation to colleagues in your profession, or teaching a semester-long course to college students, success begins and ends with your ability to engage your audience.

One of my favorite examples of effective teaching is from “The Sound of Music.” In the movie, Maria tells the children, “When you know the notes to sing, you can sing most anything.” Then she finds creative ways to engage them in the joy of music, again and again.

So don’t teach by talking. Teach by engaging.

Church Planting at the Houston Medical Center

Celebrating 10 years of "The Week In Pictures"

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Informative or Just Eye Candy?

Before our children could even read, they could identify restaurants by their logo. Our oldest son was in the back seat singing “… the Simpsons,” when he saw a sky with a lot of cumulus clouds. Most everyone involved in communications understands how the audience is enticed by images.

Sometimes logos conjure up other thoughts. For many folks ATT’s logo is called the “death star.” This is another topic for another time though.

For many people working as communicator for corporations, nonprofits, or in the media they see the visual as the “hook” to their written story. The concept of using visuals as “eye candy” is a way to make you stop and at least start to read the article.

Love her or hate her, Catherine Zeta-Jones helped shape the image of T-Mobile during her first run with the company. To celebrate the launch of their Mobile Makeover advertising campaign, she's back again. The ads use her as the “eye candy.”

No question this works in advertising, but how does it go over with corporate communications or journalism?

My opinion is that those that use imagery as “eye candy” are like the tabloids or car magazines with women on the hood of the car. This approach must work or these types of media wouldn’t be doing so well financially. However, they are not taken seriously for their content.

You can use the imagery as the message itself and not just a hook. In journalistic example are the photos of the Twin Towers being hit by the airplanes or on fire? Michael Phelps touching the wall first with others still behind him is another example.

In journalistic media we also see visual “hooks.” We see mug shots which accompany an article, but tell us nothing about what the story is about. How is this a hook? On sports pages peak action moments showing the looser looking like they won is a hook.

I’ve learned the best images leave the viewer asking a question. “Why are the Twin Towers on fire?” is the question people asked when they turned on their televisions. It kept us glued to the coverage to understand and help us heal. Is this the photo of Michael Phelps winning the 8th gold medal or what race is it?

We can learn from the “eye candy” photography. If the image is interesting and has visual impact it will hook the reader. You need to surprise your audience. I have talked about this in past e.newsletters. Getting a unique perspective like a worm’s eye view or the bird’s eye view is a great “hook.” Making photos from the standing position straight on all the time is what amateurs do. You can make an informative intriguing image of most content to help tell the story with your images.

I shoot for different audiences. I often shoot for Associated Press, magazines, corporate publications, websites, college recruiting and alumni publications, and many other mediums.

When I shoot for AP, I must tell the story in one photo. I must shoot tight, which means close-up and filling the frame. The users of AP images may run the picture really small and will not want to use the photo if it isn’t close-up. It needs to have impact. They may run it on a front page of a paper to help tell the story, and sell the newspaper.

At an event where an AP photographer is there and I am there shooting for a magazine, I have to take a different approach. By the time a magazine comes out the readers will have seen the AP images of the event. My coverage must be more than one impactful image. I have a variety of angles, from close-up, to medium and overall shots of the story. I will use lighting to help influence the image even more.


I am shooting a lot of multimedia packages lately which require 30 – 60 images for a 2-minute piece to run on a website. I need photos like I would do for a magazine, and I need transition photos. I need photos of noises you may hear in the audio to help the audience understand those noises are seagulls in the background near the subject. You still need strong images, but they can help tell the story and compliment the audio.

Most communicators today are using the same content in multiple places. They send out a printed newsletter, post it on a blog, put it on a website, or send out an e.Newsletter . All of the pieces point to the website where more content and images can be placed, than before this existed.

If you do a good job of telling the story using visuals you will now have just started telling your story. That’s right—just started. People like to be in dialogue and comment on your stories on-line. This outlet wasn’t available in print.

In the most recent Scientific American Magazine there was an article on Celiac Disease. When you went to their website the article was there as well, but now will comments like this, “The illustrations in this article delivered to my mailbox today, allow the complexities of the science of gluten intolerance to be easily understood by everyone.” Here is a link for you http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=celiac-disease-insights&page=6.

Is your material getting as many comments as this article? Are your visuals helping your audience to understand the topic? Using visuals effectively and not just as a visual “hook” will improve how your message is communicated.

Stanley is available as a consultant to help you improve your visual communication for your organization. Give him a call or email him to set up a time for him to work with your team.

Shooting Slide Shows: Behind the Scene With Stanley

Nikon D3, Sigma 120-300mm ƒ/2.8 w/ 1.4 converter, ISO 200, ƒ/5, 1/1600

This is a really simple way to do Slide Shows with audio. I prefer interview people as I did here. Watch the first one which shows what I did for a client and the second one is some photos of me shooting the package by my friend Ken Touchton.

Watch this one first

Then watch how I did it.

Do Your Photos Provide Context For Your Subject?

Professional communicators work hard at getting a message across. But first they must get the audience’s attention. There needs to be a “lead” or “hook” to stimulate their interest in the story.

Ted Koppel said that during his 25 years as anchor for Nightline, they spent the majority of their pre-broadcast time on the first 10 seconds of the show.

The hook is all-important. If it doesn’t work no one will hear the message.

A tactic used by writers to grab the attention of readers is to lead with a quote. This is a powerful literary tool for hooking an audience. It is often misused. Quoting out of context is done quite often. There are two known common practices of misusing a quote - the straw man argument and the appeal to authority. Both of these can undermine the message.

Photographers are also guilty of taking photos out of context to create impact for a visual hook.

If a writer or photographer uses the hook appropriately they will deliver context or story within the hook.

Wire service photographers have used impact as a visual hook (to the detriment of the story-telling photo) for so long that we rarely see good examples of photos with any real context. The context has been handed over entirely to the writer.

Extreme close-up photos have extreme impact but, out of context, may lack any story-telling ability. Relating the subject to its surroundings can help tell the story of the subject, but impact is still needed.

A good example of the type of photo that can contain both impact and context is the environmental portrait. The subject is shown in their environment and the surroundings portray the person and help tell their story. A simple headshot shows what someone looks like, but the environment portrait can speak volumes about the person.

I grew up watching missionaries give slide shows in churches. Invariably most of the pictures they showed were tight headshots of some person looking into the camera. A friend of mine characterized these lacking-context-pictures as “People Who Need the Lord” photos. The pictures show what they look like, but tell me nothing about who they are.

Today I am often asked to speak to these missionary groups about how to improve their photography of their mission trips. My chief complaint about mission teams going somewhere and then showing their photos is the lack of environment in their photos. They have many “People Who Need the Lord” photos, which could have been made almost anywhere. Their photos don’t tell a story, they have little context. What does the county look like? How do they live? What do they eat?

I suggest to these groups that they make pictures that tell something about these folks. Show the mother in her kitchen making a meal. Show the man at his job – what does he do to earn a living. Show the children and what they do for play.

Think of the photos as an introduction. How do we in America do introductions? After we exchange our names we usually ask what they do for a living or we ask about their family.

A real advantage of photography is how much story can be told without having to speak a word. True masters of the craft use light and composition to make sense of all the clutter and show how things in the frame relate to one another. When the photo includes people expression and body language add even more context to the image.

Here are six simple steps to help bring context to a photograph.

1. Determine the purpose of the photograph.
2. What is the mood for the photograph to be?
3. Determine the subject.
4. What should be included or excluded around the subject?
   a. Do I include some of the environment in front of the subject?
   b. Am I making an image that is just graphically strong or does the space around the subject give context?
   c. What is in the background?
   d. What is beside or on the same plane as the subject, giving it equal importance?
5. When do I press the shutter?
   a. Are they interacting with another person?
   b. Do I show a serious or light moment?
6. What about the light?
   a. Do I use the natural light?
   b. Do I bounce the flash?
   c. Do I use professional lights?

Put your subjects in context when you photograph them and your pictures will truly be worth 10,000 words.