Neil Alexander

Last week I watched an episode of the Grid with Scott Kelby, Matt Kloskowski and guest Zack Arias in which Matt proceeded to predict the demise of the printed photograph and state that it’s only an elder generation of photographers who still like to print. With the ever increasing rate of digital consumption, the slowing pace of traditionally printed newspapers and magazines, he may have a point. But from a fine art perspective, I felt he must be wrong. So I did some investigating, and found results that did not make me happy….

Industry insiders calculated that the global fine art market revenues totalled $10 billion in 2010, up from $2.7 billion in 2006. Whilst a significant proportion of this is undoubtedly made up of traditional art sales; water colours, oil on canvas etc, sales of fine art photographic prints in the big auction houses are on the decline.
In 2010 photography accounted for only 1.4% of fine art auction sales from results polled from auction houses such as Sothebys and Christies which totals $140 million, and this is proportionately significantly down from 2.2% in 2006 and 2.1% in 2003.

However, it’s not all bad news. Outside of the fine art auction houses, the digital fine market was reputed to be worth just short of $1 billion in 2010, up from $500 million in 2005. Sales of Photobooks are growing at an exponential rate. In 2010, Blurb reported a 3 year growth rate of 4,829.6%. In 2009 alone, Blurb created and shipped more than 1.2 million book, generating sales of $45 million from people who wanted to look at printed rather than ditigal copies of their images. Online sales of fine art prints and canvases are also at an all time high.

So where the hell am I going with all this, and why do you care?

I had originally intended on a post denouncing the Kelby media team and their predictions. However there was one particularly valid point that Monsieur Kelby made which was that whilst prints may decline, photobook sales will continue to increase. And with this point specifically I have to say that I agree, and so do the numbers. But the bulk of these sales will not be mass market photography books. They’ll be books of the kids for the grandparents, wedding albums and the like. I would envision that the majority of Blurb’s sales only actually go to a handful of people, but with the new book building features in Lightroom 4, the advances in Aperture and the plethora of self-publishing avenues now available I envision that this will be a growth area for some years to come.

Data sourced from artprice.com and artmarket.com

Over the last couple of years I’ve made several photographs of this Scirocco, but this time I wanted to try something different and really push my little flashes. I wanted to shoot into the setting sun and light as much of the car as I could with 2 SB900s (on SU4 mode), an SB28 and a borrowed Metz. In order to get a useable exposure I needed to use my Singh-Ray variable ND filter and had to dial it down about 3/4 of the way. Tripod mounted, this dropped my exposure 5 stops to 1/60 sec at f8 ISO 200. But even at full power, my lil’ flashes wouldn’t come anything close to lighting the whole car. Initially I experimented with 4 strobes dotted around the car, but with the ND dialed in, all I got were patches of light on the car as you can see below. This was even with the strobes on full power.
There were probably a few ways to do this, but in the interests of time mainly (the sun was about to drop behind the hedge and I desperately wanted it in the frame) I opted to make a series of exposures, moving the lights around the car for each frame with a view to blending them in photoshop later. Actually making the photographs was the easy bit. Merging 13 different layers in post proved to be altogether more time consuming, and to be quite honest having spent the best part of an entire afternoon layering, dodging and burning and tweaking I’m still not completely happy with the result. I think that when I next get a few free hours I will take the opportunity to re-visit the layers and merge them again from scratch. That said, I’m still pleased enough with the result to share. Below are a selection of the layers straight from camera.

Would you have done it differently? I’d love to know. Feel free to share in the comments at the bottom.

These are some additional images that I made of the car a couple of weeks earlier so I thought I’d include them here to.

I’ve also included a February Desktop wallpaper for your personal use of my Struggle image made in the Lake District. Download the size that nearest suits your screen – 2560×1440   1920×1200   1440×900 Note: The simplest way to download is to right click on the appropriate size and select “open in new tab” or “open in new window”

This weekend just gone, my wife and I took the opportunity for a well overdue weekend away and headed down to the Cotswolds for a couple of nights. As usual, it was beyond my abilities to travel without a camera, so in the interests of marital harmony I travelled light – just my Billingham 550 packed with two D300s, a 17-55mm f2.8 and a 70-200mm f2.8. Unfortunately from a photographic standpoint, the conditions weren’t ideal. Early Sunday morning was the only time the sky wasn’t completely overcast, so I made the most of it, and that’s when I made the majority of these images.

Cotswolds
Considered to be, by many, to be one of the most beautiful areas in England, the Cotswolds, with its unique stone-built heritage, gently rolling hills and broad valleys is dotted with historic market towns and small sleepy charming limestone villages. The region covers 790 sq miles in the upper part of South West England and is the country’s largest officially designated “Area of Outstanding Beauty”. Being “typically English”, and where time has stood still for over 300 years, the area makes an ideal destination for any discerning visitor.

Broadway
A delightful little village, often referred to as the “Jewel of the Cotswolds” lies beneath Fish Hill on the western edges of the Cotswold hills. Its wide High Street lined with tall horse chestnut trees contains a mixture of period houses and picturesque honey coloured Cotswold stone cottages which have lured visitors for centuries.

Buckland Manor
Going as far back as 600AD records show that a house stood on this lovely Gloucestershire hillside spot. Reckoned to be worth £9 in the Doomsday book, the estate passed into the hands of the Gresham family in 1536 and was eventually converted into a luxury country house hotel in 1981. One of the finest manor houses in the Cotswolds, this privately owned quintessentially English country estate provides a tranquil setting, comfortable drawing rooms, fine dining and a very warm welcome.

As I said earlier, all these images were shot over the course of one weekend when the conditions weren’t great, but I’ve managed to pull quite a bit back in post processing using a mixture of HDR processing with Photomatix Pro and black and white conversions using Silver Efex Pro 2. You can see more on the full gallery here.

Today I thought I’d write a little post around what I put into planning a day of landscape shooting.

The first thing I’ll do before a trip like my recent trip to the Lake District is to check the weather, re-check it, and then check it again. The weather in the UK is so varied and fickle, and can easily lead to a completely wasted day if not careful. I’ve always taken quite a keen interest in weather and meteorology and I find that this helps hugely. I have several apps on my phone, and make frequent visits to the Met Office website. I check the radar patterns and projected precipitation and cloud cover levels and often try and make my own interpretations of the expected outcome.

For most people these days, including myself, time is at a premium so it is important not to get these initial stages of preparation wrong. As far as weather is concerned for landscape photography, pretty much any conditions are acceptable except blanket grey skies (which will not make for good images) or torrential rain (which just makes life hard work).

Once I’ve managed to assure myself that the forecast is acceptable, I’ll then start to look at sunrise and sunset times, and their associated azimuths. This then gives me a basic outline of the general directions in which I want to be shooting at those key times.

The next step is to decide the overall area to where I want head to, and then use my saved locations as an initial guide. This has been an area of some issue for me for a while – I’ved used a bunch of different apps and GPS listings software, but not really with any great degree of success. I’ve now started using a combination of Google Maps and Evernote. Google now allow you to save a map, give it a name and then drop pins on it and save it all. You can even add some text description or notes to each dropped pin. For example, I have Lake District and Peak District maps with pins for locations I have previously scouted with some basic notes – these are locations that I know I can go back to and there is a photograph of some description there to be made. I’ll then look at the particular locations in more detail using the sun times and anticipated weather information, to decide whether this is the right time of year to make a photograph at the location and give myself a more detailed location by location plan. If I can’t find anything that suits because it’s the wrong time of year, or I’m not going to have the time required to hike for an hour befoore sunrise up a hillside for example then I’ll revert to a whole series of resources that I’ve built up over time to find alternate locations; endlesss list of websites, books, and magazine articles containing detailled walks, points of interest, landmarks, and vantage points. I also know several keen fell walkers and I’ll ask them for input too as well as having a large selection of 1:25000 scale Ordnance Survey maps on my iPad. The Outdoors GB iPad app is an absolute godsend.

When I’m planning a sunrise / sunset shoot, there are two things that I’m hoping for. One is colour in the clouds. Generally this is of a red / pinky / orange nature and occurs shortly before sunrise or shortly after sunset…. generally…. And then there is first or last light when the sun’s rays are just breaking the horizon and kissing the landscape with it’s softest and most golden light of the day. It’s nice to be able to make photographs at the same location with both the coloured sky and sun’s early rays, but often the colour will appear in the opposite side of the sky to where the sun is rising or setting and without pre-planning or some seriously quick thinking you’ve little or no chance of getting both, and if you’re not careful, you’ll get neither.

For this particular trip these are the steps I followed. I knew where exactly I wanted to be for sunrise itself. Once the sun had been up for an hour, I planned to head up to a nearby waterfall. Then in the less attractive midday light I was to drive up to a pebble beach I had discovered on the Solway Firth for some macro work and then back down to Wast Water for sunset. All points GPS tacked and saved to my Sat Nav and everything looked tickety boo.

12 hours before I was set to depart the forecast was still looking good. Dry with minimal cloud at dawn, with the cloud set to build slowly all day up to nearly 100% by sunset, but dry all day. So I surfaced at half 4, checked the weather again, filled my flask, grabbed my sandwiches and a bag full of gear and started out on the 2 1/2 hour drive up to Buttermere.

Alas as I left the motorway and nautical twilight arrived, I could tell that the forecast was off. And it got progressively worse. By midday the sky was flat grey, and it was raining. Hard. And it didn’t get any better. By sunset at Wast Water, the mist had arrived too. It wasn’t a total right off as I did manage to add some fresh locations to my scouting list but it most definitely wasn’t a day for making award winning photographs. And more frustratingly, with my current schedule, it’s going to be at least another couple of weeks before I can get back up there again….

The moral of the story: there’s no point getting disheartened when the weather fails to perform. You’ve just got to think on your feet and adapt or sack it off and go home.

I’ve set photographic goals of one form or another for myself each January for several years now, though more often than not I’ve just kept these to myself and haven’t really broadcast them. This time though I thought that if I shared them, not only would it give me a reference point to look back on, but the fact that I’d shared them with the whole world, would encourage me to try harder to actually try and hit as many of them as possible. Having thought about this for a few weeks now, I’ve completed my list and decided to bare my soul to the world. Here goes, in no particular order:

• Attain further accreditations – On the back of my Qualification with Merit of the Guild of Professional Photographers, I aim to submit a body of work to the Royal Photographic Society for their Licentiateship accreditation, as well as achieve the Guild’s Craftsman status. The RPS only hold a few Licentiateship assessment dates each year, and from the looks of their calendar, the earliest available date that I’m going to be able to fit into my calendar is June or July, which buys me a little time to think about what I’m going to submit. For the Guild’s Craftsman status, submissions can be made any time. The Guild’s website states that “The aim is to show complete proficiency in your craft, along with versatility, control of light, and variety of composition etc. The submitted assignments should show a good variety of style and skill sets in different environments.”. Along with written briefs, letters of recommendation from past customers, PI & PL certificates, the qualification requires a number of images from at least 3 different assignments over the last 18 months which obviously have to stand out from the crowd. Co-ordinating all of this will be no small task, but one that I feel will be well worth the effort. To be honest, I’ve never really placed a great deal of merit in accreditations in the past, but having spent some time thinking about my “brand” over the last few months, I have changed my opinion and I now feel that in the grand scheme of things, that they can actually be rather beneficial.
• Put on an exhibition – This isn’t a new one, and I’ve been put off in the past by the cost. From what I can gleam, these days gallery shows tend not to make too much money, but are actually more about raising awareness. I do have a show of some of my Maltese photographs pencilled in with a new gallery in Gozo, but so far the logistics have been too protracted for my poor little brain to handle. The thought of making and shipping framed prints to Malta, co-ordinating hanging and then freeing up enough time to spend over there to do it justice is a little frightening, but I do have something up my sleeve a little closer to home that I want to commit to in the next few months.
• Get a magazine cover – This would be a very nice goal to hit, but it’s going to take quite a chunk of effort on my part to market myself more and establish more rewarding relationships, which brings me to my next point…
• More networking – I’m not a networker. In fact I really struggle with it. But I know that I really need to push myself more, get out of my comfort zone and work harder at building more relationships offline and online and put more effort into building on the relationships that I already have. The long and the short of it is that I need to knock on more doors and make more telephone calls. It’ll be tough. I have no illusions about that, and I know with every new lead there comes a very high chance that it’ll be accompanied by a knock-back. But as the old adage goes, “If you don’t ask, you won’t get”
• Plan more – I need to devote more time to managing my business and marketing it, which is inevitably going to leave less time for shooting. This is I will find frustrating as that’s what I love doing and I feel that even though my photography has improved significantly over the last 12 months, one of the beauties of photography is that you never stop learning. It’s my hunger to learn that keeps me going and wanting to try new techniques and explore new places. So in order to maximise the opportunities in the limited time available, I am going to have to put more effort into planning when and where I’m going to work and to create a shooting schedule for several months in advance, or even further if I can. As well as working on my landscape and travel catalogue, I also want to schedule in more portraiture. I love working with professional models and struggle with people less used to being in front of the camera. That’s down to my inexperience of directing people and knowing which poses work and which don’t. I really get a buzz out of shooting people and would really like to do more not only with models, but also with those less comfortable in front of the lens.
• Publish a book – I’ve used several of the online self-publishing book services for assorted personal projects and family momentos in the past, but never really taken the time and effort to do it properly. I’ve found book layout is an art in it’s own right, can swallow huge swathes of time and have a great deal of respect for publishers that do it well. It’s not easy, but I’d really like to get a body of work in print. It’d be beneficial for me as an artist, and would also be a useful marketing tool.
• Work on my travel writing – From the perspective of marketing my work, I’m fully aware that pictures work better when accompanied with text. Not just for SEO purposes, but also magazines and publishers are much more likely to accept comprehensive articles these days rather than images alone. Sure, if the images are strong enough to stand on their own, then they’re likely to be accepted, but there’s an even greater chance if I can accompany them with a travel or photography article or similar. I’ve looked around for online writing courses that fit my needs, but to be honest I’ve never found anything that suits. So I’ll keep trying, working on it myself using the various sounding boards I have at my disposal and putting more out onto this blog.
• Charity Work – I’m very disappoined that we had to cancel the Manchester Help-Portrait event last month, so I am determined to make up for this year by commencing the planning and organisation in plenty of time (it’s already in my calendar), and I also plan to do some other fundraising using my photographic skills but more on that another time.
• Finally, I need to get my sorry ass to the gym, eat better, drink less, spend more time with my family, and attend more football games. The long and the short of it is that in 2012 I shan’t be sleeping…..

So that’s me. All out in the open for 2012. Clearly I don’t like to set the bar too high…. With a little application it’s all within my reach and now that it’s up here in black and white, I’m committed!

What are your targets and resolutions for this coming year?
Feel free to share in the comments below.

Well I hope you all had a fun filled an over indulged Christmas and New Year. I know I certainly did. The older the kids get, the more fun it seems to be. Can’t imagine that upward trend will continue forever so I make sure I enjoy whilst I can…..

So to the photographs. These two images were made on a trip out around the Lymm area of Cheshire late November. The cottage above had caught my eye previously but the light that day had been somewhat dull. But on this particular late winter afternoon with the sun due to set in under an hour’s time, I knew that the light would be great and would really pick up the features of this little place. I don’t believe that it was inhabited at the time, but within seconds of dropping my tripod’s feet I was accosted by the local farmer demanding to know what I was doing. Fortunately a few placating words later, he left me in peace. Just as I’d made three bracketed frames for this image, out of the corner of my eye, I caught site of the cyclist below rounding the bend towards me. I quickly grabbed my other body which had the 70-200mm f2.8 on it  and fired off a few frames of him heading off into the distant sun. I knew the sky was going to be horrifically overexposed, but somehow it didn’t matter. There was so much soft diffused golden light around to pick him out nicely that I don’t think the lack of definition in the sky really matters one bit. There both up on my Cheshire gallery here if you want to see them larger, or get copies.

Anyway, I’ve spent a not inconsiderable amount of time working on my business and marketing plans for 2012 over the festive break, some of which I’ll share in a post in the not too distant future. But one of the immediate up-shots is that for the first few months of 2012, I’m going to be scaling back my posting a little. For the most part of 2011 I posted every Tuesday and Friday, and I also ran the “Image of the Week” Newsletter for the latter 3 months. I’m going to keep up with the newsletter which I’m going to enhance a little by including a little more news along with a concise tip or two each Friday, but I’m going to drop the Friday blog post. Fridays just seemed to be getting too hectic towards the end of last year, and often ended up eating into valuable shooting time. You could always sign up to my weekly email newsletter to make up for the lost post….

One final comment, and it’s a little late as the offer has finished (DPS had a coupon to get 20% off) but I signed up for Kelby Training over Christmas and I’m blown away by the volume and quality of content they have available for Photographers and Photoshop users. I’m absorbed by Matt Kloskowski’s Compositing book at the moment, and felt I ought to give the Kelby Training package a whirl whilst I was at it – and I’m very glad I did. There is such a wealth of knowledge available. Definitely worth a look.

It’s that time again…. In keeping with the last couple of year’s reflections on the year that was (2010 here, and 2009 here) below are my 12 14 favourite images from 2011. Slightly different from these previous entries though, I haven’t picked one image from each month, I’ve simply tried to pick my 12 (which ended up being14) personal favourite images from this year. It’s always an interesting exercise and I find it really quite rewarding to see how my skills have developed from the year before.

So here they are, although not in any order in particular, other than chronological.

First up is an image I made in Spinningfields, Manchester that I submitted in the Urban View category of the Landscape Photographer of the Year 2011 competition, which was subsequently shortlisted.

Also in January I made the image below with Charlie in Castlefield with one of my favourite modifiers, the Lastolite Ezybox. Details here

Patrick with his guitar on the roof of the Arndale car park before the security guards came along. Blog post here

Maltese street scene – First trip to Malta this year. Blog post here.

Kayleigh, Trafford Park with the moon. Blog post  here

Second trip to Malta this year. Blog posts here and here

Anna – “Waiting for a bus?” with some very carefully placed SB900s – blog post here

Lighthouse, Vilamoura, Portgual. Blog post here and on variable neutral density filters here

Manchester Central Library – post here

Jenson Button in his McLaren Mercedes tears up Deansgate, Manchester. Post here

The Lake District. Post here

Derwent Valley. Post here

And finally a shoot I did with Sophie and Pat in mid December that I haven’t yet blogged about. Post to follow in the New Year.

So in retrospect I’m more than happy with the quality of what I’ve produced this year, though I do feel that I need to up the quantity next year. And in upping the quantity I’m pretty certain that this will also see an improvement in the quality too. I ought to write a post on my plans for 2012 too. For one, it’ll give me something to be held to, and it’ll also help me to thrash out my thoughts and plans for the next year of my business and where I want to take it. So you can look forward to this in the coming weeks.

Finally, for 2012 I’ll be releasing desktop wallpapers for your personal use. You can download January’s here in 3 separate sizes. There’s 2560 x 1440, 1920 x 1200 & 1440 x 900. Simply click the appropriate link and right click to save to your desktop.

As this’ll be my final post for 2011, I’ll sign off by saying that it’s been a fantastic year for me photographically speaking and I hope that 2012 is even better.
Enjoy the celebrations, and I’ll see you on the other side.

Wishing you a prosperous 2012.
Neil

Earlier last week, I took a trip into Manchester to shoot the Christmas markets, of which there are now so many it wasn’t easy deciding where to start! In the end, I plumped for the main European one in Albert Square presided over the an extremely large illuminated Santa perched over the entrance to the Town Hall. The top most image is probably my favourite of the lot, just because it is a half second hand held exposure! I’ve got a technique for shooting relatively long exposures which seems to get me pretty reliable results, although this is the longest exposure I’ve made with it. Leant backwards against  a lampost, I first relaxed and slowed down my breathing allowing the crowds to breeze on by. I then put my camera onto burst mode and life it to my eye. Compose and burst about 5 or 6 frames. Normally the first few frames are soft but by frame 3 or 4 I get tack sharp images. Works pretty much every time. The secret is in the breathing.

The last time I shot the Christmas markets was a couple of years ago, and I wasn’t too impressed with the results primarily because of the noise levels in the images. Shooting in such a dark environment requires my ISO to be racked up all the way to 3200, and even then it’s often not fast enough if I need to stop down. 2 years ago the noise reduction algorithms in  Lightroom weren’t anything like as advanced as they are in the latest version (3.6 I think) and it’s now really quite easy to get a usable image out even shooting at this high level. Admittedly the Luminence slider does give some rather bizarre results on faces if over used but nonetheless it’s amazing how the technology has advanced.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got to say today. There’s more on this story over at Demotix here.

Hope y’all have a sharp Christmas and a focused New Year….

Neil

For this fifth and final post (for the time being in my Snappy Tips series), I’m going to focus on composition and some simple do’s and dont’s.

Learn the rules and then learn why and how to break them.

1. Rule of Thirds
   Imagine splitting your frame into 3 equal horizontal strips, and then 3 equal vertical stripes. This will give you the basic layout for the  ”rule of thirds” which basically states that in order to make your frame more appealing to the eye, you should place the focal point, or primary element of your photograph on any of the 4 inner connecting joins.

   Salford Quays at sunset

   For one reason or another (too complicated to go into here), this generally makes your image more aesthetically pleasing. However, this is not always true but you need to learn why it works, and when to break the rule. For the image below of the bridge in Salford Quays at sunset, I have purposefully placed the bridge in the lower third of the frame which also gives me more room to show the magical colours in the sky.

2. Balance- this is simply the arrangement of shapes, colours, or areas of light and dark that complement one another and make sure that the photograph does not have an uneven feel to it. For this image below of “Dawn in the Peak District”, I have used the rising sun in the top left to balance the munching sheep in the bottom right. Without the sun in the frame, the image appears lopsided, and bottom heavy.

   Dawn in the Peak District

3. Simplicity- Make sure that your frame is free from clutter, and always make sure to check the edges for intruding elements. If you could lose that telephone pole by taking two steps forward, then do it. Telephone poles, random tree branches, power lines are all examples of elements that if included in an image, often provide distraction inevitably detracting from the final quality of the image. These are also all things that can often easily be removed by moving your feet a few paces forwards or backwards. In this image of Sarah below I have gone in close to remove some distracting grafitti on the wall just to the camera left. This image also incorporates elements of point 4 below using the lines of the brickwork to lead the viewer’s eye up to the subject.

   Sarah

   Kayleigh by Neil Alexander (Click for larger)An example of a very clean and simple frame, also incorporating an element of balance using the moon to provide equilibrium with the model

4. Using lines – Lines can often be used to draw the viewer’s eye into and around the image. These don’t just have to be clear lines like roads or paths, but they can be more abstract such as the line of a subject’s gaze, or the pattern created in a cloudy sky. The more of a path you can create for the eye to follow in an image, the longer you will keep the viewer engaged, and the stronger the image will be. In the image below I have used the windy line of the road to lead the viewer’s eye from bottom right round and up to the tree.

   View up The Struggle in the Lake District on an Autumn morning (Click to view larger)