Pangkor monkeys - 3rd & 4th of September

Before I write a post on the island itself and where we stayed I thought I’d pop up a bit about the monkeys.  Chaotic little bastards that they are.   Our first encounter with them was when we  first got to our room at Pangkor Island Resort (the ‘splurge’ part of the journey).  First afternoon I walked outside to see a monkey sitting on the fence to our villa only meters away, I quickly ran in and got the camera and Celine decided to feed him a banana, as soon as he saw the food he charged Celine (which I think I found a whole heap funnier than she did).  After that she’d scream and hide away indoors whenever the monkeys came, but it’s all good - I got a couple good shots of that first monkey eating a banana (kinda stereotypical though I know).

Second day on walking back to the villa I spied a couple monkeys break into one of the resort buildings through the window, seconds later I hear a high pitched scream, some thuds and out fly both monkeys, one with a bag full of something in hand.  Next thing come resort staff running out the front door but the monkeys were long gone. 

Not much more to say about them aside that they are highly amusing, very cute & all over the place climbing on everything, strolling along the paths and just wreaking general havoc.  I imagine for the staff there that they are a right pain in the arse…anyways on to the pics:

Journey to Pangkor (Malaysia) - September 1st & 2nd 2007

It was a pre dawn wake up this morning as I had a sunrise shoot planned with a local model by the name of Geraldine (more on this perhaps in a later post).  After that is was back to the backpackers to frantically pack and push the 11am check out time.  

A huge lunch (thanks to Celine ordering half the food court) later and we were struggling on with bursting bellies down to the Golden Mile complex to try to negotiate our way into Malaysia.  Unfortunately as we found out when we got there it was some sort of national holiday and most busses were booked.  Only ticket we could get was on a ‘luxury’ snoozer coach for S$42 a ticket - about twice what I wanted to pay…but on finding out it had wireless internet, private movies, tv screens & headphones for each person we figured it wasn’t too bad a deal.  And it might not have been if the headphones had of worked or the wireless internet actually existed…

Anways early evening saw us in Kuala Lumpur and I’ve got to say it was a pretty nice time to be rolling in - with the twin towers lit up against the fading light of the post sunset sky it was a bit of a postcard moment.  The postcard got a little crumpled though on stepping out of the bus into a blast of heat, refuse & hawkers cries.  We decided to check in to one of the backpackers straight across the road from the bus terminal as it was already night time and we wanted to leave as early as possible the next morning.  

I don’t think I need to say much on this aside from posting a shot I took the next morning of the view from the window of our room:

There is one part of KL though that is quite clean: the public waste bins, quite simply nobody uses them….

Ironically (just like Singapore) it wasn’t until we got to Chinatown that I actually started seeing other foreigners. The night market there was something of an experience, a cacophony of sight smell and sound.  I’ve now a whole new definition of ‘sales’.  Celine wanted to eat at a place that was full of obvious tourists but I vetoed that plan on looking at the menu prices and instead opted to find some street vendors serving the locals.  Food was pretty good and at a quarter of the price of the touristy place but we did get very swiftly chased from our seats the instant we finished eating…

Next morning we awoke at around 8, booked our bus tickets to Ipoh (a much more reasonable RM13 a piece) and went in search of breakfast & sandals (hiking boots & sock combo starting to get right smelly).  11am found us at the bus terminal and about 12:15 or so our bus finally decided to turn up.  Trip was pleasant with some amazing scenery.  The entire country seems to be lush jungle & pine plantations.  It was a wet day and all around were mountains shrouded in low lying mist, there were some spectacular cliffs (a couple with temples built into/carved out of them) and one HUGE waterfall.  Unfortunately I couldn’t get any decent shots from the bus - will have to perhaps rent a car for a few days when I come back through and take my time with the area.  A couple hrs later and we were in Ipoh wondering how in the hell we were to get to Lamut.  Celine earned her keep here by finding a Chinese family to ask directions of who then went on to give us a lift across the other side of town to the correct bus terminal - not sure how I would have found my way without her as this deep in Malaysia nobody seems to speak any English at all.  I was quite literally the ONLY Caucasian either of us saw in the entire town.  Anyways at the second terminal Celine befriended another Chinese dude who filled us in on some local info and later on (on the bus) gave us a packet of tasty nuts.  As we were waiting for our bus another one fired up and started to move from the parking area to the passenger pickup area, as it did folks started sprinting from all around and in a surge of bodies jumped into the moving vehicle.  I could only guess that they were fighting for seats and when Celine asked her Chinese fried (who I think had the hots for her) my suspicions were confirmed when he replied “Yes yes, bus always very full, very dangerous, you stand you die!”

Comforting words considering we were about to hop on one of these things…

It wasn’t as bad as foretold actually and the bus was remarkably roomy, especially seeing as Celine’s Chinese boy went sprinting in with the crowd on our bus and managed not only to snag himself a seat but somehow keep a couple reserved for us as well.

Once at Lamut we were greeted by a happy fellow who helped us organise our ferry tickets, offered all the info we needed on how to get where we needed to go on the island (Pangkor) and then offered us a 35 RM discount on a room…I was a little suspicious of this but on checking prices in my trusty lonely planet guide it seemed the price he got for us was actually about on par with the best we could manage to get just by rocking up ourselves and he was completely up front about the 20RM commission he would get if we booked with him.  Gave him a go and all went smoothly, am now typing this in a decent air conditioned room on a beautiful island for about US$20.

After a fun though wet (storm came through) ferry ride to the island we had a good feed and a swing on a big rope & driftwood swing set up on the large trees that grow up and out over the beach….tide was in and the swing goes almost over the top of the breaking waves…I’ve had worse evenings…

 

Singapore, Day 1 - August 29 2007

Arrived bright and early in Singapore this morning.  In fact due to a beefy tailwind most of the way, we rocked up an hour earlier than we were due to (and we were due at the unholy time of 5:45am).  Too bad Celine (slacker!) wasn’t as early as the plane…

Also my cunning plan to get up the previous morning at 6am, stay awake all day and then pop a sleeping pill to ensure an unconscious plane trip was a total failure.  There’s just no way I could find to fold this lanky frame of mine into those little ecconomy class spaces and actually be comfortable enough to fall asleep.  If only they showed big brother on the flight, that might have done it…On the plus side the food was pretty bloody good.  Breakfast of chicken & noodles, fruit, yoghurt, breadroll & jam and a pastry was about 12x as good as the vita britz I normally put myself through.

Keeping on the food theme for a moment, those of you who know me probably won’t be too surprised over the first thing I’ve learned to say in chinese here.  Ordering an iced coffee - my caffeine addiction needs satisfying dammit and it’s way too hot here to drink a regular brew.

Anyways after finding the backpackers it was off to wander the city.   First up we found some sort of Indian temple with colourful statues all over/in it, including a rather disturbing Indian god of some description:

I’m not sure who this guy is but he was kinda hidden around the back of the temple - one can only assume the other gods get a tad upset over his apparent delight at enviacerating what appears to be a young child.  I guess this is the bloke you pray to when someone has keyed your car and you want a little Karma action…

Next temple was even more ornate, I was waiting and waiting for the couple of people milling around outside of it to leave and get a clear shot of it when a damn tourist bus pulled up (bloody tourists!).  Best shot of it was when Celine grabbed my camera off me and took a snap of part of the roof, so that’s the one I’ll post here:

After wandering around a while We headed back to Celine’s house where I met her maid.  Never thought I’d be rubbing shoulder’s with the kind of people that actually have a full time maid!  I tried to help her clean up after lunch but with Philipino being her native language and my accent it took a minute or two to convey that I was offering help and not asking (as she thought) for her to wash my clothes. After lunch Celine had a job interview so I went for a wander over to the Chinese/Japanese gardens.  Bad timing as only the Japanese section was open, the Chinese one being closed in preperation for some big water festival.  Sucked as the Japanese ones were quite zen, the minimalist kind of zen that is, ie nothing much about.  So I had to be content with some shots of the Chinese pagoda from across the river:

So You wanna earn money from your photos? (part III)

Tips to succeed

 

Here we come to the tips and techniques part of the article. Now bear in mind I’ve only been submitting to stock agencies for about 6 months and even that time could be best described as ‘part time’. So I’m no expert, in fact I could well be talking through my ass. Nevertheless I have put some time into it and discovered a few things that just may make your life a little easier if you are planning on going down this path:

#1 Keyword, title and describe your shots in PS

Please don’t tell me you are thinking of going exclusive with Istock - I almost did and I dodged the biggest bullet of my life next to my bride-to-be leaving me for another guy at 19!  Non-exclusive is where it is at.  If you need convincing then just head back to part one (can’t be arsed linking it) and look at the breakdown table.  Even if you worked your way to the highest exclusive rate at Istock you’d still earn more money JUST submitting to Shutterstock - and it’s a damn sight easier. Anyways, assuming you are submitting to multiple agencies, you don’t want to type all those descriptions and keywords out for every site do you? (I hear a big ” HELL NO”) so do it in PS. You can do it via file-file info.

#2 Shhhh, keep it down in there!

Microstock sites seem obsessed with silence. To reduce noise in your images you should shoot at the lowest ISO you can manage (although I’ve gotten away with 800 at times, that’s on a 5D and only on selective images, with good exposure and little editing). The more you push or pull (over or under expose) an image in photoshop the more noise you introduce into the image. The general rule is that you should expose so that the bulk of the bulge in the histogram is as close as possible to the right hand side of the graph without clipping highlights in the ‘area of concern’. That means clipping highlights that are in the background of an image isolated on a white background is fine but not if that clipping occurs within the subject. Even if the image looks a bit bright in the lcd preview that’s ok, so long as all the detail is there you can pull it back in your raw conversion and make a good image. It all comes down to digital sensors and how they work, to go into detail would be an article in and of itself but suffice it to say that exponentially more detail & color information is recorded in the areas of highest exposure (aside from clipping). If light is at all an issue (such as when you don’t have studio flash) then use a tripod and keep it to iso 100/200 and exposed correctly.

Also Photoshop’s reduce noise filter can be surprisingly good, especially when combined with some judicious masking.  A quick description of what I mean by masking is to duplicate your layer, apply the filter to the top layer, then apply a layer mask to it and mask out (paint in with black) the parts you don’t want filtered, eg eyes, hair, lips, detils etc.  Make sure you go over your images at atleast 100% and pay particular attention to any large areas of semi-solid colour (eg skies) and the darker parts of the image.  Smaller areas of noise can either be taken care of with funky masking or the blur brush.

# 3 He who shoots in the raw gets more exposure

For some of the reasons I went into in the last point and some I didn’t, raw is the king of image formats. Firstly it has a higher native dynamic range than JPG. Meaning it can capture more highlight/shadow detail than an equivalent JPG capture. This means that you can potentially save a (somewhat) over/under exposed image more readily if it was shot in RAW than in jpg. It also means that if you want to mess with your shot in PS (eg. contrast enhancement or pushing, pulling etc) that you have a much wider ‘buffer’ to work with. It also has an advantage colour wise. Personally I have my white balance set to ‘overcast’ 99% of the time and it usually returns good results. If on occasion it is a little out then I can compromise easily with ACR (adobe camera raw). White balance is one of those things that is somewhat destructive and if you save an 8bit jpg (and every jpg must be 8 bit) with a certain white balance then there is only a certain amount of colour shift you can perform with the image without degrading quality. With a raw image however you can shift the white balance from one end of the spectrum to the other without any degradation in quality. The reason is that RAW format saves the image data directly as perceived by the sensor, before any involvement with the camera or it’s settings has taken place (ergo the name RAW) where as JPG mode applies certain preset calculations to that raw data that are then unable to be undone. JPG is a format in which certain losses in image data occur, this enables it to be much smaller than a raw file but also less flexible. Raw to jpg conversion though is very quick on today’s computers with today’s software, and with storage prices being as cheap as they are there’s no real reason as far as I see for anyone to shoot in JPG aside from sheer laziness. Sure 9 out of 10 times you might not need that flexibility but on that 10th time it can be a life saver (or more to the point - picture saver).

#4 If you work alone you do everything yourself.

Outsourcing is not a dirty word. Personally I have two people who are both happy to submit my stock shots for a fraction of what I can earn per hour shooting/submitting new work. Sure for this to work you have to be disciplined and make sure you do new work instead of the work you’d otherwise be doing submitting to the time consuming sites. But if you do then your $/per hr spent working on stock will definitely go up. Of the two people I have doing my stock submissions both were models (ergo I didn’t’ need to advertise anywhere to find them). One is/was travelling the world and was happy for the extra dollars (I pay US12$ per hour) the other lives in Asia and earns twice as much from me as she does doing her normal office job (she works in advertising). However you have to be reasonably content that your employees are trustworthy, after all they will have access to your stock account user names and passwords. A good idea might be to set up unique passwords for each person and watch your stock sales on the sites they manage for you closely. If you do then the most they can ‘rob’ you of is one minimal payment to one stock site. A small risk really for the potential productivity results. The sites I have my girls manage for me are the ones that piss me off, ie Istock & Fotolia, I also have them do bigstock not so much because it annoys me as because it’s a damn low priority.

#5 A picture is worth a thousand (key)words.

Be smart with your keywords. This means trying to find the balance between a/ not spamming and b/ using every APPLICABLE keyword. Sure you can keyword spam and end up in more searches, but you will only piss folks off…and I don’t know about others but I tend to remember companies that have pissed me off and aren’t too likely to buy from them in the future. I also have no interest whatsoever in a picture of a girl that happens to be underexposed in a studio wearing white shoes when I get it as a result for searching for “white studio fashion silhouettes”. Keep the keywords relevant but DO have a good think about concepts. First off with your keywords you should describe the main elements of the photo, but then you should think about messages it conveys & feelings inspired by it (or if you are a REALLY dedicated stock shooter these are actually the first things you’ll think about, before even picking up your camera!). Make sure if your image is of a model outdoors on a surfboard with a big smile on her face you don’t just use the keywords: model, girl, woman, surf, surfboard, ocean, water etc. You also should use: fun, summer, holiday, recreation etc. Also keep an eye on Shutterstock, in their members area they have a very useful function to tell you the top 100 searched for keywords, this will give you not only a good idea on which keywords to use but also a very good idea on what to shoot in general.

#6 Thou shalt not copy (but only if you want to have a hard time getting anywhere)

This is going to be a little bit controversial but hell, I say copy to your heart’s content. Copying may not be art, it may not be creative, but we are talking about stock photography here, a product, not an art. If nobody ever copied McDonalds then we’d have no Hungry Jacks (or as you in the states call it, Burger King)…and that would be a damn shame. Imagine having to have a Big Mcshit every time you felt like an Aussie Burger? *shudders* (ok you probably don’t have Aussie burgers either over there but you get my point). Creativity is all well and good (and it honestly is very good). But it’s a VERY rare photo or concept that hasn’t been tried before, so rare in fact that were it a beef patty it might still be moo-ing. Copying might not be original but it is a VERY good learning experience. One of my favourite ways to learn is to find a shot that I like. I work out what it is about it that I like and then I try to replicate that in another setting. If it doesn’t work (and often it doesn’t) then I compare the differences and try to ascertain where it is that mine fails, what exactly I need to do differently. Also as I just implied copying doesn’t have to mean trying to make a shot as similar to another as physically possible. It might be as simple as copying a lighting setup, a concept, a photoshop technique or an overall aesthetical look that you like. There are always ways to bring your own individual ideas and personality into every image and to my mind it is actually the highest and most ironic form of conformity to be different just for the sake of being different. Shoot what is in your heart and soul, shoot whatever takes your interest and learn what you can from it - regardless of whether it has been shot before a million times or never. That is the only true path to individuality I believe…

This part of this article is very much a work in progress and if you have any suggestions, comments or questions please feel free to pose them and not only will I try my best to answer them but I may also add sections to this post where appropriate. In the next section (which I will have posted before a week is up as then I leave for Asia) I’ll be tackling FAQs and some of the debate about whether microstock is a positive or negative force for the photographic industry.

<— Part II 

Australian Landscapes - 18th August 2007

Just a quick entry to let you guys know that I added a new section to the gallery here containing a few random landscapes from around Australia (mostly from S.E. Qld & northern N.S.W.)

                                      Travel & Landscape - Australia