Hi I'm Doug McKinlay and you're watching
Adorama TV. For this segment we're going to look at three of my previously published
pictures.
What I want to do is point out the technical aspects of each image,
the problems I encountered getting those images and how I overcame them.
Adorama TV presents stay focused with Doug McKinlay.
So just before we get started I just want to point out
that I am a professional reportage, documentary and travel photographer
and I work alone. No assistants. In that regard, I hope the following images
will highlight some of the problems and pitfalls that you run into,
as a working Pro. Recently I was commissioned by the Sunday Times Travel
Magazine
to write and shoot a story about the coastal grizzly bears in the Knight Inlet in
British Columbia in Canada.
So the first thing I'm thinking about, is weather
and lens choice: now this is the largest trof costal
temperate rain forest in the world, and as such it rains a lot. So I've got to keep that in mind when I'm
looking to keep my camera safe and dry. It's also very very remote
so the only way in is by plane or boat. My personal transportation while out
there on-the-job
was a one man river kayak, so you can already imagine the problems.
A bombing kayak, choppy seas, pouring rain,
leaden skies, and of course grizzly bears.
I'm going to need a pretty high ISO in order to try and get the right shutter speed
to mitigate the problem of the animals moving and also on the problem of camera
shake last time in the kayak.
But I can't determine this until I get into position so it's anywhere between 1000
and 1600 depending how the cloud patterns happening.
Am in this case it's giving me around 1/500 second which is just enough to stop the action
of the bears on this shoreline and to stop the
the problem of camera shake in the kayak.
Now keeping the cameras dry was another problem. Nor dry bags are a really great
solution for this, they are nice and deep
and they are light and easy to carry and there deep enough to carry
300mm f2.8 with a 1.4 converter attached and the camera body.
So even with all these environmental factors, they can cause you no end of
grief if you're not careful.
I still managed enough images to produce an eight-page spread in the magazine.
So this next picture little old now,
It was shot in a refugee camp on the outskirts of
Herat city in Western Afghanistan. It was a tense time and people were starving.
But unlike a magazine where you have a number of pages to tell a story, for
newspapers
you have to get in one maybe two shots. So doing this can work means traveling
light. You don't want a big rucksack on your back, bogging you down when you really
need to run!
So my kit here was, two bodies
1D's at time...Canon 1D's
35mm 1.4, a 50mm 1.4
a 70-200 2.8 and a speedlite. Now I spent a few days
touring the camp with an interpreter. It was a big camp
A hundred thousand people. It was very cold because it was December.
And this horrible wind kept blowing off this flat plain for miles around.
But it wasn't until the last day that I was there that I managed to get his picture.
On the outskirts of the camp there is this graveyard,
I came across this man who was burying his three-year-old daughter who had died the day
before
due to exposure. Now these are difficult pictures to take.
No matter how seasoned or harden you are it's always
troubling to take these kinds of pictures. But as a working professional,
you have to have an unflinching eye and tell the story anyway.
Now with this man, I talked with him through my interpreter to make sure it was
okay for me to take this picture.
A very intimate moment of him burying his child. But what I chose to do here,
was I chose to step back a little bit with the 70-200 mm
zoom lens, because I wanted to suck the background in a little bit as you can see.
The big lenses tend to diminish the dept of field a little bit,
making things look a little closer, what I wanted to convey with his picture
was that a it wasn't a one-off, it wasn't one guy burying his daughter, it was a common thing
in
that camp at that time. The people were starving and dying of exposure.
So the image tells that story, the hard shadows to me showed
that was a hard situation that these people were living in.
I've got to try out a lot of places in the world and one of the most
memorable trips I've done in recent years was to
Utah in America. Now Utah is a fantastic place, it's a
landscape photographer's dream. But my job was to
focus on on the old movie sets and movie locations
of the old western's starring John Wayne and directed by John Ford.
John Ford was phenomenal at picking the right locations, so
I was trying to tell the old-west in modern terms
That only meant hanging out with some cowboys.. yes they still do exist
I'm no horseman, in fact they scare the life out of me,
but I like to think after a few days in the saddle
aching backdside and all, that I at least gained a city slickers level of competence.
But for this image here I was on foot,
and now I had to forward this River camera bag held high
to try and get these guys coming across, to get the picture.
Now the problem I had here, was the lead cowboy
and his hat. Now again it was that time of day thing, the Sun was fairly high in
the sky,
It was August, we're looking hard, hard light here. Now I didn't want this guy to be lost in
shadow
his face to be gone in some big black hole so
I needed to use a flash, a little fill-in flash in order to get the shot
and I was using a 24mm lens which presents it's own problems.
It's a great lens to get all that background in but if you're not careful
with it you start to elongate your
subject's, so it's a little bit of a
trying to get it right.. pick in a sweet spot. Now if I had waited
another couple feet the horse's neck with a look a lot longer than it is.
If you look closely looks a bit stretched as it is, so the 24 mm lens gets me that
great background, but you've got to be careful about stretching out your
subjects.
A little bit a fill flash, the flash powered down to about
1/8th of output. It's enough to get my light
under his hat, light his face up without making him look like he's got
too much light on him.
So by the end of the job I managed to get enough pictures,
to visually tell the story, which the picture editor and the editor of the
magazine liked!
Managed to get me an eight-page spread. So that's it for me
and I'm Doug McKinlay for Adorama TV you can join Adorama TV for
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