Blog posts - AEL Designs

March 27, 2023March 27, 2023

Where photography meets Health & Safety!

Not quite Landscape or Nature photography

In my ‘alter ego’ as as Health & Safety Advisor, Fire Risk Assessor and Business Support Services including marketing, there is another more mundane use of my camera.

Apart from the obvious hazard spotting and reporting with photographic evidence, there is also newsletter production.

Newsletters

I produce a monthly newsletter for my clients on Health & Safety / Fire Safety subjects. My my goal is to illustrate it appropriately without the use of external stock images if at all possible.

People at work

I have hit on a solution which doesn’t involve the hassle of getting permission from real people to photograph them at work. Instead I use toy people (Playmobil™) or miniature artist mannikins. They are quite well behaved, don’t get camera shy, and it is actually fun to set up scenes! This can be done without a full studio although I would use studio lighting rigs if necessary. But I prefer to use diffused natural light as I can use slow shutter speeds with stationary objects. Therefore most of it is shot in my conservatory with the (plain white) blinds drawn so I get a good even light and soft shadows.

Here are a few examples of my little workers illustrating various health and safety matters.

Training

The other requirement I had for suitable photographic images was when I was asked to produce training PowerPoints to deliver in-house to groups of workers. For this I set up scenes to illustrate, for instance, safe manual handling. This was where the mannekins came into play, lifting and carrying various items.

I know that a lot of this can be created with animation software but I have found it an interesting creative project as actual still photos.

LinkedIn Posts

I’ll always try to use my own images for H&S-themed LinkedIn posts as well. It helps that I have some real life examples of things like overloaded electrical sockets, plus actual fire incidents. I’m always on the lookout for ordinary ‘stock’ shots of places, equipment and vehicles that can be used for newsletters and LinkedIn posts. Occasionally I will use generic images taken within client workplaces, but always with any identifying features edited out.

February 16, 2020March 27, 2023

Photography defined

What is Photography?

Literally – making pictures with light, or ‘drawing with light’. (From Greek: photo = light; graphy = drawing.) Today, in the 21^st Century, we couldn’t live without photography in all its myriad of forms.

Photography is the capture of a moment of time: a place, a scene, a person, a happening, a look, a pattern of light or colour.

Photography can be used:

to record history;
for marketing;
to aid committing crime;
for crime prevention;
as evidence in a Court of Justice;
as evidence for insurance claims;
to settle disputes;
to inform;
to shock;
to delight;
as fine art for display;
to share family occasions.

It can be a form of art, a career or a hobby, or maybe a responsibility as part of a job role.

Photography can be as simple as the click of a smartphone camera or webcam, or as complex as professional video filming, with external microphones and complex lighting and reflectors.

Today, photography can utilise film or digital media; its output can be in monochrome or full colour; on a screen or on paper. It is no longer bounded by what the photographer actually sees at the time – digital processing software enables photographs to be distorted, cloned, merged and colour managed to create something quite different from the original. The old adage that ‘the camera never lies’ is therefore no longer correct.

Digital photography is merely the capture of millions of ‘bits’ (megapixels) of light on sensors and filtered by Red, Green or Blue light to create faithful copies of every colour the eye can see – and all by electrical impulses using the binary system!

Photographic images can arouse many emotions depending on their content: excitement, shock, horror, fear, awe, humour, sadness, happiness, nostalgia, amazement…

Without photography most of us would never have known how awful the conditions were in the trenches in the First World War; what Queen Victoria looked like; what an atomic bomb explosion looks like; how an area looks after a hurricane; the appearance of the moon’s surface or what lurks at the bottom of the sea!

With photography it is possible to pick out family likenesses between children and their ancestors of an earlier generation. Photographic records enhance any family history.

Digital photography can be achieved very cheaply, or it can be very expensive – and everywhere in between!

It is possible to take reasonable pictures on a cheap camera, but better ones on a more expensive camera. It is also possible to take very poor pictures on an expensive camera! Photography is more than the equipment, it also requires training to utilise it fully as a tool or an art form.

Photography is open to persons of any reasonable age, any nationality, colour, race, creed or gender. However, photography in public is restricted in some cultures, and in any culture it is considered at best impolite, and at worst a crime, to photograph a person individually without their permission. But CCTV cameras are everywhere, quietly recording people going about their daily lives, doing things right and wrong, committing crimes, making silly mistakes, or just looking very silly. Dashcams are a fairly new form of photography and can record motoring offences being committed, road accidents happening, and near-misses.

So – whatever your reason for taking photographs or recording videos, whatever your preferred genre or location: be it the wilds of Antarctica, the urban scenes of London, the Australian outback, a Caribbean beach, your studio or simply your local park or backyard – enjoy the freedom that digital photography gives in the 21^st century.

October 17, 2019October 17, 2019

Composition and post-processing

Most photographers know the ‘golden rules’ of composition such as the ‘rule of thirds’, leading lines and grouping of threes, etc.

But these rules aren’t set in stone and can be broken.

Cropping

Sometimes you have to compose an image with a view to perhaps cropping it square later. You may decide that an image needs to be a little more symmetrical, and crop it accordingly. Another example is in shooting large buildings. Do you choose straight verticals or the different impression it creates with converging verticals? This is one that is best to get right in camera and maybe try both.

Post processing vs Bracketing

Personally I don’t like to spend a lot of time perfecting images in Photoshop, Lightroom (or my old favourite Nikon Capture NX-D programme). So I will try out various compositions and exposure bracketing in shooting. Then I can limit the editing to improving light and colour to better reflect how it appears to the eye. One thing I have recently learnt on an online course is that the fewer edits you do the better as over-processing can lead to artefacts in the finished image.

Composition in nature photography

This is all mainly with landscape photography in mind. In nature photography the composition is mainly related to content and depth of field. Birds, animals and insects tend to move quickly so you don’t always have time to get the positioning perfect. This kind of image often needs some judicial cropping afterwards.

The most important things to get right in nature photography are:

sharp focus on your main object
(mostly) shallow depth of field for a less distracting background
negative space

None of these can be improved much in post-processing if the composition and camera settings were wrong in the first place.

As I have said before, I’m still learning and trying out new things. I will be adding some more images to my galleries soon.

July 8, 2019October 17, 2019

Photography – lifelong learning

Largely self-taught, I’m a strong believer in lifelong learning. Brought up on film cameras, I had to learn composition in camera (no cropping or post-processing) and progressed from black and white film (which was cheaper!) to colour once I could get this right. I was only a youngster then and my parents had to pay for the films and processing, but it taught me a good lesson.

Fast-forward to the 21st century and 2013 which was when I converted to digital. It was a steep learning curve to find out the wider options of digital photography and all about editing and processing on a computer.

Since then I’ve avidly read blog posts, magazines and books, done several online courses and I’m still learning and trying out new ideas.