Another Cover!

I recently finished a story on the art scene in Austin for Austin Home Magazine and am pleased to see my portrait of artist Roi James on the cover! For other portraits in this series see my website, in the main portfolio: http://www.smcintyre.com/

Shooting with the Panasonic GX1 at Enchanted Rock

On a recent getaway to the hill country we went to Enchanted Rock and I got to shoot with my husband's recently purchased Panasonic Lumix DMC-GX1. He got this camera for shooting at the job site, as well as for shooting pleasure (he is an architect). This tiny camera will also take his Contax G1 rangefinder lens's with an adapter, and with it's manuel settings, has lots of control. It has a pretty large sensor for being such a small camera, is 16mp and able to shoot in RAW mode. Add all of this up, and it's a great camera. I mostly shoot with the zoom it came with.

When we visited it had been raining a lot and the everything was alive. We hiked the giant pink granite rock right before a huge rain cloud rolled through. I was having so much fun shooting the intense dark sky and the incoming rain that my husband had to run over and tell me that I should probably put the gear under my rain jacket because we had about a minute before being dumped on. 

These are my snap shots from the day. I found the iPad guy very amusing. I was trying to be very casual about taking pictures of him, but I think I scared him off in the end.

The End of Summer in Austin

One of my favorite things about Austin is the Greenbelt, a huge swath of wild land (809 acres) that snakes through the middle of the city, surrounding a seasonal creek. For much of the year the creek is dry, not a drop of water there. It's still a great escape to wilderness when it's dry, but when there is water in the creek, especially in the hot summer months, it makes an amazing secret oasis.

This September has been very mild, days often in the low nineties, some have even been in the 80's and we've had rain, which means, you guessed it, water in the creek. I went for a walk there the other day with my sister. We were wondering if we would see water as we started out on our hike. A few minutes later, through the trees, a stranger (who we never even saw), says "Water at sculpture falls, about a 20 minute walk up the trail." Ok, that was our goal. A few minutes later we were on the path that is next to the creek bed, but no water there. After at least a half an hour (the 20 minute report was very optimistic), we finally came out of the trees at sculpture falls. And there was our oasis. A small gathering of various types of people had found the place and were making the best of a Tuesday afternoon, so we joined in.

See more photos at http://www.smcintyre.com/

Rallyhood Campaign!

Back in the late 90's I used to shoot a lot for an advertising agency called the Olson Group. We did lots of fun stuff together and I became friends with Patti Olson. Recently Patti has started a new company called Rallyhood (https://rallyhood.com/) and I got to work with her again, as well as Lewis Carnegie (http://lewiscarnegie.com/)

for this campaign.

For more work see the Kids portfolio at http://www.smcintyre.com/

How To Get Good Pictures of Your Kids

This is my daughter Josephine. These photos were taken one day after I picked her up from preschool. Our tomato plants had been going nuts and I had noticed that our first red ones were ready for picking, so out came the camera.

Josephine, for the most part, likes having her picture taken, but I don't think that this happened by accident. I've been photographing kids professionally since well before she was born and I've watched how kids develop this awful grimace when told to smile. They don't really know how to smile on command, but they try, and it's often not the look you want for a photograph. Also, if they are trained well, that's the only look they do when you point the camera at them. Mostly what I've learned from photographing kids is that they don't take direction, so you need to be intuitive, patient and fast when taking their picture.

DON'T SAY SMILE

So, with Josephine, instead of saying, 'smile' when I'm taking her picture, I think of something to say that will make her smile, or pull my head away from the camera and make a silly face at her. Often I tell her there are turtles inside the lens (although she's getting too old to fall for that one). This is a good trick for younger kids though, they often stop and look in the lens just long enough for you to snap off a few images. If you are close enough, you can reach out and give them a little tickle. I think that doing things like this has made it fun for Josephine to get her picture taken, and so when she sees the camera, she already knows we're going to have some fun.

WAIT

What you want to capture is beyond just a smile, but a little bit of their personality. Wait to see what they will do for you. Even if you think a photo won't be a good one, in the age of digital, why not keep taking them, just to see? What you are waiting for is the break in that action, for that moment when they are the most natural and unposed.

GEAR

If you are lucky enough to have a DSLR, you should have a fast lens. When I say fast I'm referring to the biggest lens opening that your lens has. So look on your lens, does it say 2.8, 4 or 5.6? What is best is 2.8 or better yet, 1.8 (the smaller numbers actually refer to bigger lens openings, that is because there is supposed to be a one over these numbers). If you have a wide aperture on your lens (a 2.8 or 1.8) it makes it much easier for your camera to focus. A lot of zooms don't have very wide apertures, so they are slow with focusing, and it makes it harder to capture the quick movements of children. There are fixed lens that are very fast and also pretty cheap. Try a 50mm 1.8, they usually run about $80 and you can shoot with them in low light with out a flash.

If you don't have a DSL, look in your instruction manual and see if you have a high speed shooting mode that will take multiple exposures quickly. Shoot a lot, and delete the bad ones.

Happy picture taking!

See the Kids Portfolio at http://www.smcintyre.com/

Hill Country Getaway!

I finally got out of Austin! A nice little jaunt to the country side. My friends arranged a girls trip to the Hill Country over Mother's Day weekend. We stayed at a house in Center Point, a small town on the Guadalupe River.

The weekend was all about relaxation, laughing, and also FOOD. Mary Louise Butters (of Butters Brownies) was along with us for the weekend and her family has a ranch nearby. We were invited to the Ranch for dinner, and what a treat! This family loves it's food-smoked a pig for the occasion! We also had skillet cornbread, roasted turkey, two kinds of cole slaw, rosemary roasted potatoes, pound cake with berries and cream for dessert. We ate out on their patio which has amazing views, overlooking the valley.

The next day I meandered home, stopping here and there to take photos. I've always wanted to stop and photograph those hay bales! It was Mothers Day, and a perfect way to spend it was wandering around in a field in the middle of the country. Why don't I do this more?

See more photos at http://www.smcintyre.com/

Austin Monthly Style Shoot

I pitched a story to Austin Monthly in April for a style shoot. The concept I pitched was for how the photos should look and a rough idea of what the models might be wearing. I had wanted the shots to be all outside, showing the beauty of early spring. The crew at Austin Monthly does not want to travel far, so I scouted all over the city for wild places of beauty-places that would you would think were out in the country (which there are many).

The weather was not looking good though, it was dark, dark, dark, and rain seemed imminent. So I began to look at indoor spaces to shoot in for a back up.  I found this cabin near lake Travis that looked like it could be a good back drop, went out there and shot a lot of potential backgrounds and matched them up with a rough shot list I had put together. On the day of the shoot it gets very hectic; getting in six shots between the hours of 9-5 with out an assistant can be challenging, (especially when you have to factor in time for hair and make up and choosing clothing) so I was really glad I had done a lot of prep work. The magazine came out two weeks ago and the spread looks great.

See the layouts in the InPrint Portfolio http://www.smcintyre.com/

New website up!!

I've been working on a new website, and it's finally done. Now I'm stumbling through social media after listening to a teleconference Monday on social media marketing. Twitter, Facebook, Blog, Website. Could take a full time employee just to keep up with all of this stuff. Now, on to an e-mail blast!

Check out the new website and don't forget to share it, or you can just 'like' me on FB! Or follow me on Twitter.
http://www.smcintyre.com

shooting for a cause

Pro-bono work is work done for free or at a very low cost for a client that is doing some good in the world, usually a non-profit helping the poor. At it's best pro-bono work is a way to get involved in the community, network with other creatives and often do award winning work. Giving your time as a professional is worth so much more than volunteering to do a job that anyone can do. This makes a lot of sense when you think about it in terms of hourly wages, i.e., how much would I make per hour as a photographer, versus how much would I make per hour as someone serving food? Donating time as a professional allows you to give more. In the past I have shot an award winning campaign for Caritas of Austin, and in San Francisco worked with the Taproot Foundation. 


So when Avance-Austin approached me for photography for a new website it seemed like a good chance to do some great photography and give to a worthy cause. Avance is a non-profit that provides early education programs for low-income Latino families. On average, children living in poverty enter kindergarten far behind their middle-class peers, which affects them through out school. In the Avance program parents are taught to be a partner in their child's education, allowing for school readiness and a much greater chance at high school graduation. 


I want to point out that in my experience doing this sort of work, I've found it to be more rewarding to work with an advertising agency. Mainly because the work has follow through; the ad agency will make sure the work gets seen by an audience and that it will look good. (I've also worked on projects that did not have back end support and the photos were never seen by anyone, a waist of effort). On this project I worked with a company called i2i Group. We worked as partners, meaning, they did not give any art direction, but are putting together the website (it's still in production). After evaluating Avance's needs, I came up with art direction and did the photo shoots.


See more work at http://www.smcintyre.com/

Bad weather makes good photos...

On our Bay Area Christmas trip this year we decided to go the beach one day. At that time of year the weather at the beach is a very hit or miss-that is if you're looking for sunny weather. On this day we had very heavy fog, it wasn't quite what you would call rain, but it might as well have been, everything, including my camera was getting soaked. I put it under my jacket in between photos (until I got smart and went to get an umbrella out of the car). Despite, or maybe because of the weather, I loved this day. It wasn't just that it was beautiful. I looked around and saw all of these people completely enjoying themselves; kids playing in the sand, families playing soccer, groups huddled around fires, who cares if it's wet and cold? An authentic Northern California day. 

see more work: http://www.smcintyre.com/

 

Hipstamatic love it or hate it?

It's crazy how easy it is now to create interesting imagery now. I used to carry a Diana camera around, complete with a changing bag, a light tight bag that I would use to load and unload film with. I couldn't do it in the day light because the paper backed rolls of film wouldn't wind up tight enough, so the film would get exposed when taking it out of the camera. I would process my film, none of it straight, usually cross processed or pushed 3 stops. After getting the rolls and contact sheets back I would go to the dark room and print the ones I liked the best. Because this whole process took a certain amount of knowledge, time and money, it was somewhat unique. And I loved it.

When I got an iPhone and started seeing Hipstamatic imagery about, it was not just annoying, it kind of made me angry. Making plastic camera images was now available to just about anyone, you didn't even have to care about photography to do it. For the first year of having my iPhone, I wouldn't even buy the app. I was happy with my Shakeit Polaroid and a few others, intentionally avoiding the Hipstamatic, like it was developed just to be my menace.

In an effort to make peace with new technology, I've started using the Hipstamatic recently. It's far from perfect, I always want to tweak things and I don't like most of the lens and films. But the ones I use, I really love. I must admit that I don't have time now for dark room, and for the most part, even shooting film. So it makes me extremely happy to take these quirky little keepsakes.

Most of the time I use these:

Color: the John S & Blanko film 

Black & white: Lucifer VI and Black Keys

See more work: http://www.smcintyre.com/

These were taken with a Diana for a book I did on New Orleans.

I always took my Diana on my travels. The photos above and below were taken in Spain.