Bart Reardon - Photographer

An important message.

2011-09-15T09:48:00.000+10:00

An important message via Bianca Dopson about being careful who you get to do photos of your bub.

Newborn Safety Warning {PLEASE TAKE THE TIME TO READ THIS}

Going black and white

2011-03-27T17:01:00.001+11:00

As an experiment and for something different to do I'm going to limit how I can take personal photographs for the next week. The simple rules I have set myself are:
1 - photos must be in monochrome.
2 - the lens used must be a prime lens

This does a couple of things intend to force a different way of thinking when taking images. Firstly, with monochrome you have to consider what colours are going to look like when converted to greyscale. This can change with the addition of filters so that, for example, a blue sky can be rendered black with the use of a red filter. Shooting on a digital camera has the advantage of inbuilt red, green and blue filters that exist as part of the bayer array on the cameras sensor. The camera can be told to ignore one or more colour channels and the result is the same as using a filter on the lens. In order to force this rule I am also shooting JPEG instead of raw. The reason is that when shooting in raw you are keeping all the information about the image, including colour information. The purpose of this exercise is to not be tempted to go back to the colour image. The camera will bake the image into a black and white JPEG and that's all I'll have. The added advantage is that a 4gb card now holds a gazillion photos.

Secondly, by using a prime lens (one that doesn't zoom) I have to think more about positioning myself in relation to the subject. I can't just zoom out to fit more in or zoom in to see detail. I need to "zoom with my feet" so to speak. Fortunately this rule is easy as I only have one prime lens and that is my trusty 50mm.

I haven't set any rules oth than this so I can still control iso, aperture, shutter speed as well as adjust the settings the camera will use to create the black and white image. There are all pre-shutter adjustments though so I still have to think about what I'm doing before I do it.

The aim of all this is to keep active those parts of my brain that influence how I take images. The end result is to better myself, become a better photographer and not be reliant on camera defaults or image editing software for great images.

Back to an older image.

2010-12-05T23:52:00.000+11:00

I really like going back on my older images. Re-processing after a couple of years or more of experience can give an alternate, sometimes better, view on what might or might not work.

This image is one of a series of 5 or so that I took of the same view while visiting Cape Conran in Victoria (on my way through to Melbourne and ultimately Tasmania). The original image I uploaded to flickr was in colour and when I look at it now it seems very contrasty. This time round I wanted to emphasise the softness created by the subtle movement in the water and thus went with a black and white treatment. Whether it's better or just different than the original is in the mind of the viewer.

It is of course available on RedBubble but as this was shot with a 8mp Canon 350D the print options are limited to small and medium only.

4 more landscapes

2010-11-28T23:24:00.000+11:00

I've added 4 more images to my Redbubble profile.

Once again, I hope you like them.

Also available I have made a calendar of some of my images for 2011.

Cheers for now.

2 more and then I'll move on.

2010-11-27T23:37:00.000+11:00

The problem with Norfolk Island is it's a damn beautiful place to take photos....even when the place is in drought.

These two will be the last Norfolk Is shots for a while as I concentrate on offering other images for sale.

Both these are available as prints, posters or cards on RedBubble

Another Norfolk Island image

2010-11-25T23:45:00.000+11:00

Here's another image from my Norfolk Island trip from earlier in the year. I'm picking out some of the better ones (in my opinion), re-processing them and uploading to RedBubble.

These will be available as everything from postcards to canvases to framed prints. Click here to see this on the RedBubble site.

Prints through RedBubble

2010-11-23T23:41:00.000+11:00

I'm uploading some more artwork to my profile on RedBubble.com.

Over the next week or so I'll be adding some more (and removing some ones that are there) so go check it out.

Running the numbers

2010-11-22T16:22:00.001+11:00

The cost of Photography

If you ever wondered why photographers cost as much as they do and why beginner photographers that charge $50 per session will never make it then read on.

There are some assumptions that one must make when determining what to charge a client. These act as guidelines for the photographer and are designed to present a baseline. A minimum of income and what needs to be done to achieve that. Things to take into consideration are:

- how much you want to earn
- how much it costs to run a business
- how busy you want to be

How much you want to earn is easy. Pick a figure you are happy with and start with that. Look at the average income for your area or look at what you are currently earning (if you have a full time job). In Canberra, the average income is $75,000 but for this example I'll aim a bit above that as I want to be comfortable but not struggling. I'll aim to earn $85,000.00 but then I have two kids and a mortgage to take care of as well.

How much is costs can vary. You need to take into consideration the cost of running a website, ordering process, computers and software, internet, advertising etc. Most of these should be tax deductable but they are real costs nonetheless. This doesn't include the cost of the shoot (that comes under client fees).

How busy you want to be is a personal preference. You might be able to handle 2 wedding per weekend for 8 months or you might want to do less than that but this number and the amount you want to earn per year determine (roughly speaking) how much you need to charge the client. In simplistic terms you could charge one client $85,000 or 85,000 clients $1 and you get the same amount.

So here's some very conservative assumptions we are going to make:
- I want to gross $85,000 per year
- I want to charge around $2000 per wedding
- I want to charge around $500 per portrait session
- Each wedding costs $500 to produce (transport, prints, other package items etc)
- Each portrait session costs $200 to produce
- I want to split those workloads 60:40 (weddings are more profitable but portraits are less stress)
- I have very lean ongoing costs of around $3000 per year (averaged over 3 years), half of which is for some minimal advertising
- I want to spend just a day editing each portrait session (typically delivering 10-15 photos)
- I want to spend a week editing wedding photos (typically delivering 10-15 special shots and up to 100 additional images)
- I want to assume I can make all my income from shooting. Selling prints and products after the fact aren't included in the cost estimate

Here's how some basic figures run, taking into consideration the ongoing costs, tax that needs to be paid to yourself and the running cost of each event:
To pull in my $85,000 I will need to produce 34 weddings and nearly 114 portrait sessions

That's a lot of shooting! 34 weddings per year might be doable but 114 portrait sessions might be out of my reach, so either the wedding price, or the portrait price will need to increase. A quick calculation shows that by increasing the wedding photos price to $2500 and adjusting the ratios to 80% weddings, 20% portraits I can still shoot 34 weddings but the number of portraits I need to do drops to a bit over 55. If I decide I need to advertise more to bring the numbers up then that extra cost is passed on to the client and so on and so forth.

There are a few ways in which these numbers can be adjusted, including re-thinking how much I want to earn and having greater separation between business costs and income, but whichever way you look at it, charging $100 or even $200 to clients for a simple portrait package is unsustainable if the photographer want's to make a living. A hobby done on the side for the love of it can easily turn into a career you resent. To make the same $85000 your $50 a pop photographer needs to get 1700 clients, or nearly 5 clients per day for 365 days straight.

Food for thought.

Yulan and Andrew

2010-09-05T21:22:00.000+10:00

I had the privilege of being the wedding photographer of fellow photographer Andrew and his bride Yulan on the weekend.

The location was Kangaroo Valley Bush Retreat which I can highly recommend. Wonderful vistas and plenty of opportunity for taking some great images.

Todays shoot

2010-08-14T21:56:00.000+10:00

Had a great shoot this afternoon. The clouds were out for a little which made for some nice light in the yard. Got some rather nice natural light shots as well as some indoor ones with flash.

Great buch of people though...and very photogenic. It's great when kids and adults alike play well with the camera. Will be delivering their images later in the week and with their permission I'll post one or two up on the blog.

New Gallery

2010-06-12T09:15:00.002+10:00

I'll be filling up a new gallery in the coming weeks. This one showcases family/child photography with examples from the past 3-4 years.

The gallery is here but I will also put a link on my blog sidebar and on my homepage at www.bartreardon.com

Visiting the past - pt 2

2010-06-09T23:29:00.002+10:00

No posts for a while then two in one day :) (the plan will be to post an image a week...hopefully the schedule will allow)

This past is a bit different from the previous post. In this past I re-visit some of the first images I took as a child portrait photographer. I do this on occasion as over time one refines ones processes and it's a good experiment to see what would have been done differently. I won't say much more about them at this stage other than to post them up.

Visiting the past

2010-06-09T23:24:00.004+10:00

Sometimes toy take a photo at a location and you want to return one day to see what else you could do.

This happened a month or two ago and I returned to a spot not far from where I live. The result is as you see below with a bit of editing (no, the sky was not that red ;)

For anyone interested, the first image take at that location almost 2 years ago is here

Lightroom 3 vs Aperture 3

2010-03-24T23:39:00.003+11:00

There will already be lots of discussion about this out there on the big bad internet...but for my 2c...

I purchased Apple Aperture 2 a while back but never really used it, much preferring Adobe Lightroom 2. When Aperture 3 was released it answered many of the questions I had that was stopping me from using it. Since then I have been using Aperture 3 and even started re-arranging my photo library to suit. But then Lightroom 3 beta came out and just recently beta 2 of Lightroom 3 and I have made the decision to sell off my Aperture licence for good.

I liked Aperture...I liked the integrated book printing and many other things....but for me Lightroom does them so much better (except the book printing).

There was once a time when a photographer could just have a system and be used to it but these days things change so fast it's sometimes hard to keep up.

Why colour matters (and the internet sucks for showcasing photos)

2010-02-14T22:16:00.002+11:00

Every photographer worth their salt will have a screen calibrator of some sort. Even the cheapest type is better than none at all because our eyes and brains are designed to deceive us, something that can be easily demonstrated. So we need to get our screens representing colour as accurately as possible if w are to have any hope of having the image not only look good but look the same as it did on the screen when it's printed.

Most people though don't have a colour calibrator and simply use their monitors with whatever setting it came with out of the box. This is perfectly fine for most tasks but it means that when you look at a photo either on Flickr or some photographer website you are not really seeing the same thing as the photographer has created. The only real way to do this (apart from breaking into the photographers house and stealing their computer) is to the the photo printed and displayed as it should.

Moral of the story...if the photos look good on the web, they will look even better printed and hung on the wall.

The cost of photography

2010-02-06T23:08:00.000+11:00

A recent post on Photo Business News & Forum (blog by John Harrington) on the costs of photography explained with one helpful commenter following the breadcrumbs back to the original article, linked here http://www.caughtonfilmphoto.com/costofphotography.html

While those blogs are written from a US point of view, the same holds true here in Australia. The point being that there is so much more than the press of a button when delivering a final image to the client.

A place to sell stuff

2010-02-01T19:47:00.000+11:00

Specifically, photos.

I've moved to a site that offers Australian dollars and payment with credit card or paypal. I have a couple of client galleries there at the moment as well as some panoramic landscapes here at my PhotoMerchant site.

At the moment it's a self fulfilment process which means all that happens is I get a list of images to be printed. That's vastly better than the lo-fi method of clients going though a list of images, writing down the name and emailing the list to me....not to mention getting payment. As far as shoppers are concerned it works like any other e-commerce site and that's a good thing. The site is fairly new and automatic fulfilment is in the pipeline.

Feel free do drop a line and let me know what you think.

2010-01-27T23:00:00.000+11:00

A while ago I had a message on my site that there would be some disruption while I moved galleries to another host. That particular host wasn't ideal but it had a really nice user interface for displaying galleries to clients. Two things have meant I will have to move the galleries again :(

1) Lack of ordering in AUD. I could have set up purchasing which would free me from needing to fulfil orders myself, a process that is both time consuming and prone to errors, but the site would only accept USD. Not ideal and a turn off for clients, thus I was using them for hosting only. Recent communication indicates that not only are they not working on non-US currency's but won't be for the foreseeable future.

2) An Australian focused image gallery with print ordering system and accounting tools has become operational to the point of exceeding the options provided by my current host. This means beautiful galleries for clients and ability to order prints directly with a credit card or paypal.

So....without further ado, I move the galleries once again (and hopefully for the last time for a while). Clients past, present and future will be notified of gallery location as they are loaded up.

Thanks for patience and understanding.

...and some images

2010-01-24T20:30:00.000+11:00

As promised, an image from Norfolk Island

For more images, check out the set in my flickr stream.

I'll be adding to it as I go through and process the files.

Norfolk Island

2010-01-21T23:08:00.000+11:00

Spent the afternoon shooting with Robin Nisbet on Norfolk Island. Wonderful guy and even if he thought I already knew my stuff I still learn't a thing or two...if nothing else it was a good change to take some great photos. Will publish a photo or two when I'm back on the mainland and have gone through all the images.

Such a photogenic island and so close and accessible to Australians.

iPhoneography

2010-01-13T12:12:00.000+11:00

There's a saying that the best camera is the one that's with you.

To that end I've been taking pics with my iPhone and uploading them using a little app called Best Camera to http://www.thebestcamera.com/

My own little slice of this ecosystem is here which I try to add to at least once a day.

Apps I use to edit iPhone images include Cool fx, CameraBag, TiltShiftGen and of course, Best Camera itself.

Try it out...better than not having a camera on you at all.

The starting point...

2010-01-13T02:00:00.000+11:00

Everything needs a starting point. Every piece of art, every painting, every drawing starts as a blank canvas. Every photo starts as an unexposed square of film (or used to...these days it’s an unexposed digital sensor). Nothing ever comes into this world whole and complete, instead being built piece by piece and growing over time. With this nothing is ever complete, as with growing over time, so does everything continue to grow if given the chance. At various points in time one can take a snapshot...a record of the current state...but then time moves on and things continue to grow.

I’ve been taking photos for a bit over 15 years now with various cameras and camera skills. Growing over time with experience and helped along the way with the insight and teachings of others. The digital age as brought with it an increased interest in photography which as a whole can only be a good thing.

From here I continue my photographic journey. This particular starting point has been preceded by many events photographically, from early astro-photography and sports to landscapes and through to portraits and wedding photography.

I guess the simple message of all this is....I’m not just another person with a camera.

Bart