Moor Advenchers of Kirk teh Kitteh, Part I

A few months back my housemate got a kitten. He’s a ragdoll and he’s called Kirk. Some of you enjoyed the photos I posted of him back then, when he was thirteen weeks old. He’s now about seven months old, and I figured it was high time to share some more photos.

Also, some people (I’m looking at you, @ShoesfromthHood) have been gently implying they would like to see more photos of Kirk teh Kitteh. So you can consider this my contribution to the #1millionkittens campaign.

I am expecting cupcakes.

And in all seriousness, he’s such a darn cute little thing to look at that I just couldn’t resist. So I went out and had a little play with Kirk in the garden yesterday afternoon. As a ragdoll he’s supposed to be an indoor cat, but he’s okay to play in the fenced back yard (as long as he doesn’t realise he can climb the gate).

Comments on the somewhat wild nature of our back garden are not required. I like to think of it as our very own Carbon Sink.

It was a long way from the easiest shoot I’ve ever done. I used my Canon EF 85mm f/1.8, one of my favourite lenses and which I adore shooting with, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere. It rocks my world when it comes to portraiture, and that crisp, shallow depth of field and huge aperture make it a joy to shoot with.

(A reminder to the non-photo-literate readers among you, ‘depth-of-field’ relates to the amount of the image, front to back (depth) either side of the point you are actually focusing on that is in focus. Shallow depth of field means that only a small amount of the photo either side of that point of focus is sharp, which is the technique which gives those pleasing-looking portraits where the subject’s face is nicely in focus but the background is all smooth and blurry).

The downside to shooting at such a shallow depth of field is that if you get your point of focus even slightly off, the bit of your photo that you want in focus, is no longer in focus. This is a challenge even at the best of times taking portraits. When you are dealing with a seven-month-old kitten which has an attention span of a fruit-fly on speed, this is a task not entirely different from trying to hit a sheet of paper with a dart, side-on, while riding a mechanical bull.

Using a variety of tricks, cajoling, and abuse (it’s a good thing Kirk’s too young to understand cuss-words) I did manage to get his attention enough times to get a handful of shots I was pretty pleased with, and which I feel capture both his beauty (he is one gorgeous-looking cat) and his cheeky, resilient and adventurous spirit.

I’ll post the second tranche of these photos on Thursday to keep the variety up. After all, I’d hate to overwhelm you with kitten cuteness.

Click some of the shots for a larger version…

The Great Game

In fact, ‘The Great Game’ tends to refer to the geopolitical manouevering that took place between the British Empire and the Russian Empire in Eurasia during the nineteenth century, as the British pushed north and west out of the Indian subcontinent, and the Russians moved south.  The implications of this colonial struggle can be seen in the arbitrary demarcation of the Pakistani-Afghan border and the resulting ethnically-driven conflict that is taking up so many of our news headlines recently.

For once, that’s not what I’m talking about.

I’m also (once again) going to show incredible restraint by not hauling out loads of fascinating factoids about the game of chess.  Suffice to say that it’s really, really old, and that it apparently started off as a way of strategising the movement of different units on the battlefield during war.  Other than that, it’s a fascinating and enjoyable strategy game which I really ought to play more than I do, and which I tend to take far more seriously than it has merit when I do actually get around to playing.  Also, that it’s highly enjoyable to drink a glass of port (or three) while playing.  Which may not necessarily aid the strategy much, but certainly adds to the overall experience.

In the little A-frame cabin we stayed in in the Porongorups, there was a chessboard.  It was a glass chessboard, which is something I’ve seen pictures of, and maybe seen in shop windows once or twice, but never really looked at before.  To be honest, it’s a little impractical.  One of the key features you need in a good chess set is a) pieces that are easily differentiated, and b) teams that are easily differentiated.  This is paramount in visualizing the lay of the game while strategising, and not being able to see clearly can undermine the ability to play well, believe it or not.  In this case, one side was clear glass and one side was frosted glass.  Not great for easy differentiation.

However, they look really cool.

More to the point, they do cool things in light.  And in the slanting early morning light that was coming through the window of the cabin, they looked awesome.

I’ve always liked natural light.  I want to learn flash photography better than I know it now, but I think I’ll always be into natural light over any other medium.  I’ve seen cool things done with strobes and glass chess-sets before, but I wanted to play with what was naturally available, so I moved the board around a little and then lined up some shots with my 85mm f/1.8 (mmm… depth of field…).  These shots are the result.

The shallow depth of field let me take shots that focused on just one part of the board while throwing the rest of the scene out- an effect that at times was a little overdone.  It also allowed me to ramp up the shutter-speed so I could be assured of sharp photos even in the relatively low light (or at least, highly contrasted light) inside the cabin.  The light leant itself perfectly to the monochromatic theme of the chess-board, with slashes of intense bright sunlight contrasting with deep shadows that mirrored the black-and-white of the board itself.  As a result quite a few of these photos have been converted to black and white, to take out colour that would otherwise distract from the image.

Hope you’ve enjoyed something a little different today.

A[nother] Day at the Beach

The other week I went down with friends to Sorrento Ocean Beach.  It was mid-June, and in true Victoria fashion, the weather was changeable and shifty, so that when the sun was out it was warm enough to strip down to t-shirt, and when the clouds rolled across its face and the wind blew, you were hugging your jacket.  I took the camera for a walk to see if I could get some landscapes, and I got a handful, but the light was a long way from ideal, so I quickly called it a day.

However the same flat light which makes landscapes a bit dull is ideal for portraiture.  Strong sunlight gives faces angles and contrast, while softer light, especially diffused through a thin cloud layer, is just what you’re looking for; there’s a reason flashguns often have a diffuser on the front.  It gives enough light on the foreground to make subjects stand out, but little enough that features look smooth and natural.

I was with friends J. and A., and A.’s four-year-old daughter, M., who spent most of her time climbing up rocks and waiting to get helped down, exploring caves and holes in the rocky foreshore.  She also succeeded in misjudging one leap and landing two feet into a rockpool (I take considerable blame for this), and managed a pretty impressive tumble down a series of rock platforms (she and I are clearly kindred spirits on some level).  While the tumble did trigger tears for several minutes, the beauty of children and their frustratingly short attention-span is that before too long, the tears and their cause were forgotten, and life went on.  I think we big important grown-ups could learn a lot from our youthful little counterparts…

I had fun shooting with A. and M.  M. is completely comfortable with the camera and didn’t pay too much attention, and they were both really good sports about my photography addiction.  I like natural, spontaneous shots first and foremost, but on a couple of occasions mum and daughter lined themselves up nicely and I had to ask them to hold their positions for a few seconds while I reeled off a couple of shots.  I was shooting with my beloved 85mm f/1.8 , a standoff lens ideal for candid and natural-looking portraits, and when it’s wide open, the bokeh is delicious- crisp, sharp detail on the subject and a beautifully-blurred background.

It still takes me a bit of courage to delve into the world of portrait photography.  It helps having friends like these who let me practice on them, and I hope that over time it’ll become more natural and comfortable for me.  For any other aspiring photographers out there who want to get into portraiture, I can’t stress how important having the right equipment is.  Most compact cameras focus far too slowly and inaccurately to be able to fire off spontaneous spur-of-the-moment portraits at that beautiful moment when everything works right, while shooting with wide-angle lenses that distort features or low-quality zoom lenses that blur the moment the light drops off a smidgen will tend to frustrate and discourage.  I have found both with my 60mm f/2.8 and 85mm 1.8 that having a fast, responsive lens with narrow depth-of-field has made portraits a joy, and almost every portrait I feel proud of has come from these lenses.

Now stop reading, get out there, and start shooting!

Photos:

1. Mum and daughter pose atop a rocky rise beneath a windswept moody sky.

2. M. works on her ‘Supergirl’ pose.

3. A. & M. pause on the rocks in front of the southern ocean.  One of those shots which turns out almost exactly how you wanted it to.

4. M. gets a spin from J. on the foreshore.

5. Scrambling on the rocks.

Thanks J., A. and M. for being such good sports! 

One for the Kids

I’ve put up a few posts on portraiture, partly because this is an area I’m trying to improve in my photography, and partly because in the absence of exciting overseas travel, I’ve been trying to take more shots of people and keep my skills up.  It’s been fun, frequently challenging, and often rewarding.

Probably my favourite subjects to take photographs of are children.  Partly for the process, and partly for the end result.  Admittedly I don’t have to work with them in a studio or anything like that, and I realise that if your job is taking family portraits it’s probably a different game altogether.  The times I’ve been doing it has been on my own time, and usually under fun circumstances.

Kids respond differently to the lens.  Some get shy or suspicious.  Some are indifferent.  Some get really excited- especially in third world countries.  And some play to it.  There’s fun to be had with all types- although if a camera is upsetting a child I put it away.  As with all of my portrait shots, what I really love is capturing an expression or a spontaneous moment, rather than a carefully posed image.

Recently I’ve had the opportunity to take photos of various friends’ children while out and about socially.  I enjoy how the different characters come through the lens.  The first one was at a good friend’s 25th.  This little one, who I’d never spoken to before that day, saw the camera and immediately started playing to the lens.  I was snapping with my 16-35mm, which isn’t a great portrait lens unless zoomed all the way to 35, as the wide-angle distorts the face, making it bulbous and unflatteringly misshapen.  However she was completely unfazed by the glass and generally tried to get her face as close to it as she could, without the slightest shred of self-conciousness.  Precocious might be the best word to describe.

I really like this second shot for her thoroughly natural and comfortable smile.  A natural born performer…

Overseas, and I spent some time with a good friend and his family.  They have three children, L., G. and C..  L. and G. didn’t pay a lot of attention to the camera and allowed me to get some nice candid shots.  Here was I shooting on my 400D with a 60mm f/2.8 Macro.  Although f/2.8 isn’t super sharp, the detail and clarity I’ve always gotten off this lens astound me (you can see more detail by clicking the pictures below), and it remains my favourite of the EF-S range.  Many of my favourite overseas portraits have been taken with it.  In this shot, L. is sitting on the side of a speedboat, about to do his first water-skiing lesson, contemplating the breeze on his face.

While L. was learning to ski, G. stayed in the boat and watched her brother with considerable attention.  G. is six but wishes she was actually nine, and generally tries to keep up or outdo her brother on any given chance. I got to spend a bit of time while I was overseas playing with both kids, and I had a lot of fun with them.  They were [exhaustingly] energetic, sweet and good-natured.  G. is looking particularly contemplative in this shot.

Here’s another shot of G., taken a couple of weeks later having her own go at learning how to water-ski while Dad fixes up the life-vest.  The discoloration on her forehead is a bruise she got a day or two earlier after running her face into something, in true six-year-old style.  Love that big unselfconcious front-tooth grin.

Meanwhile, C. is still learning about the world, and not at all sure she is always that happy with what she finds when it doesn’t suit her.  For a good little while she was pretty scared by my beard, and despite numerous attempts by myself and her parents, we couldn’t coax her into actually touching it.  It became the defining feature of our relationship, and I was known to her as “Baba Chin”.  She started her life in West Africa and was now in yet another country foreign to that of her parents, so she was still learning how to string sentences together, with an odd little mix of English, French, and a lot of happy babbling which took some work to decipher.  When she gets the hang of words she’s going to be unstoppable.  However she was none too sure she liked the camera pointed at her:

Another of my favourite little friends at the moment is M., the daughter of a friend of mine here in Australia.  The other week a few of us ended up on a beach on midwinter’s day, and while the light was a little patchy, it was actually pretty good for portraiture, with soft filtered sunlight that didn’t threaten to burn out features.  M. is entirely non-self-concious in front of the camera, and most other places too once she’s warmed up.  Full of energy and positive attitude, she’s a fun little thing to have around.  Like a lot of children her age, she basically has two buttons: Stop, and Go Really Fast, and spent most of the time on the beach clambering up rocks, then getting stuck and calling out for mum to come and get her down again.  I took this picture of her while atop one such rock during a brief pause, and liked the way it framed her against the sky (again, for best viewing click to see the shot a little larger).

(This photo of M. was taken with my 5D using the 85mm portrait lens.  On the full-frame sensor it is almost identical in reach to the 60mm on the 1.6x cropped sensor of the 400D, but the glasswork is exquisite, and that f/1.8 aperture makes for wonderful sharpness.)

Of course, kids being kids, I couldn’t finish off without at least one obligatory face-pull.  Which of course comes courtesy of Mum’s Little Princess.  I’m sure mum is really thrilled.  But I personally reckon that as gurneys go, this is a grand one.

Thanks guys.  Love you all.

A Bounce in Her Step

Spur of the moment fun with my Canon EF 85mm f/1.8 USM.  Click the image to see more crisp DOF-y detail.