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.

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/

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.