Readers Q&A Segment

Simone Jackson, MNZIPP I (Dist.) , Associate of PSNZ and winner of Nature Photographer 2019 NZIPP Accredited Professional Photographer

What is your favourite time of day to shoot a wedding and why? I guess my choice would be to work in the beautiful light that we get as we move towards golden hour, so around 5pm in summer or 3pm in winter. But thinking about it, it’s not about what the wedding photographer wants, I might stand the best chance of getting the most stunning images then, but the day is actually all about the couple, so the best time for the couple is the best time for the wedding photographer. The reality is that many weddings will happen in bright sunlight and we will often find ourselves trying to deal with a bright white dress and darkish suits in bright light. If we’re really lucky, the ceremony might take place in an area with dappled light.. NOT! I am super happy if the day is overcast but realise the wedding party may not feel the same..

What is your favourite thing about shooting weddings? Well, I’m very much a people person so for me, I really enjoy learning the energy of every wedding. If I can get into the vibe of the day, I believe I can then get the very best out of the couple. To try to illustrate what I mean about the energy of the day, I would like to share with you a useful lesson I learnt many years ago. I found myself in the situation where I had two weddings booked for the same day. I couldn’t pass either of the weddings on to another photographer as I was new to Dunedin (back in 2003). Anyway, the first wedding was a relatively early wedding. This lovely young couple had booked me to do their photographs well in advance of the day. They wanted full coverage, finishing with an afternoon teatype reception. I think it was a dry wedding too.. It was all scheduled to finish by 6pm. The second wedding was for a couple who came from somewhere around New Plymouth, they were completely disorganised and contacted me 3 days before the wedding. I told them that I already had a booking for a wedding on the same day and warned them that the needs and timing of that wedding came first, but would try to be with them somewhere between 6pm and 7pm. They were totally fine with that and said they just wanted me to cover whatever I could and so I accepted their booking. So when I left the first wedding for that day, I had the energy of that wedding - I was in their zone, if you like. Everything had been so ordered and structured. I arrived at the second wedding party and it was like entering a parallel universe! They were a bunch of volunteer fire-fighters and they had so much energy. I’d just walked into a totally different world and I simply had to change my vibe level fast - darn fast! I found myself becoming as over the top and loud as the rest of the wedding party - all fourteen of them. It was amazing! SO ... MUCH ... FUN!! I feel just taking that bit of time to feel the mood or the atmosphere, is so important. Every single wedding is different. Within a few short hours those two families and groups of friends are all going to go into one melting pot - which could well include quite marked cultural and social differences. I simply have to have picked up on all those nuances. If I fail to do that, I’ll simply be ‘covering’ the day, which, to my mind anyway, just isn’t OK and would fail to get the best out of the day. If I had to choose a favourite aspect of wedding photography (apart from picking up on the vibe of the day), it would be the pre-bridal prep. It is such a special time to take unhurried images of the bride. For me, being part of that is a privilege. I always try to do my absolute best with the light and the mood during this time.

If anyone was starting out shooting weddings or events, what would you recommend as the basic kit? I’m certainly no gear freak or techo expert, but in terms of basic kit I would suggest two camera bodies, ideally with the main camera body having two memory card slots, minimise the risk of losing everything from the day if one card malfunctions or corrupts. In terms of lenses, I would recommend a 24-70mm, together with a larger zoom lens such as a 70-200mm on the other camera body. Try to make sure that at least one of them has the widest aperture you can get, with F2.8 being ideal or otherwise F4 should be OK. If you still have a kit lens like a prime ‘nifty fifty’, throw that in as a backup lens. A flash unit that you can use to bounce light off the ceiling if needed, and that should preferably also have a diffuser. If you can’t afford a basic diffuser, remember you can always use a cut-off plastic milk bottle or the like and attach that instead. It might look like rubbish, but hey, it works! Always make sure you have spare batteries, memory cards, a plastic bag and a towel. At events or in crowds, I would suggest a pair of sharp elbows together with an ever bigger smile to placate the ones you have ‘bumped’ to stop them dropping drinks on your kit! Also super comfy footwear that looks good.

What is your most favourite nature photo and why? The nature images I hold closest to my heart are those images that show a feeling. Some people feel it is wrong to assign human emotions to animals or landscapes. We could spend a lot of time debating the rights or wrongs of that and whether or not any creature may be feeling any particular sentient type of feeling. My favourite nature image is not actually a ‘nice’ image - in fact it’s actually quite horrible. It brings a lump to my throat simply writing about. It is of an underweight Yellow Eyed Penguin (YEP). The place where the image was captured has been absolutely decimated thanks in a large part to the greed of the human race, as have so many of the areas that the YEPs need to survive. The image shows the plight these creatures experience. It is emphasised even more by the brightness of the day which in turn is accentuated by the darkness of the shadows. To be honest, the image absolutely sucks. Imagine being that hungry, getting your feet chewed by predators when you venture into the water too early to find sustenance or exiting too late into the dusk to avoid land predators, being forced to give up where you have hatched or where you come from and now you have nowhere to go. I hate that image, but if it serves as a wake-up call for some, it is still the best image I have ever taken.

© Simone Jackson - Mataura

Which piece of work are you most proud of and is there a story behind it? I thought about this question and how to answer it and feel I have to be honest in my response. I often simply adore an image for the simple reason that I feel there is a real and tangible connection between the subject and the environment. However, I recognise that this is a subjective perspective and realise that it may not align with some people’s views. In all honesty, the images I loved a year ago and which were my favourites at that time, are not as exciting now. Am not meaning to sound blasé, but a good example would be astrophotography. I was super excited by imagery of that genre five or six years ago. Moving on through those intervening years and now it truly has to be pretty different for me to want to shoot it as the world is saturated with imagery now. A similar thing happened a few years ago when I became totally enthralled by cool film-style lenses that shoot bokeh, flowers etc. And now? Well, those images are still lovely but same-sameness. Being meh is my biggest enemy as far as favourites are concerned. It really has to have a super-powerful, lasting classic connection to remain one of my favourites. So that was a long and rather involved way of saying that honestly, I simply can’t think of any favourite image or one that I’m particularly proud of - sorry! Although, the image at Mataura has a lasting far out type thing going on. Beauty within the Beast I call it. Can you tell us a bit about your processing for your beautiful award-winning swan image? It was so ethereal. Thank you! There were two or three other images which were similar to the swan image I chose to feature. The light was changing so incredibly rapidly during the time I was taking the images and to be honest, I have never shot so many images as I did that day, simply trying to make sure I covered every base. It was all about the light which went from clear crisp images to the type of ethereal look that was so evident in the image I featured. But the image I had in my head of what I wanted to try to achieve simply had to have that soft, ethereal look. So as I shot, I just hoped that the mist and cold/hot steaminess of the volcanic waters would work their magic and produce the look I was after. And thankfully it did but for such a short time! The sun had just set and the light was fading very fast (mid Winter in Northern Japan). I had maybe two or three minutes, if that. I returned at the first morning light to make sure in both the late and early morning light I hadn’t missed something. There’s another story there but will leave that for another time. I captured the image at 1/200 sec at f/9, ISO 2000 at 100mm on my 100-400mm lens, (yes, lugged that beast everywhere around Japan on a snowboarding trip much to my hubbys dislike). I wanted the image to have that soft, muted, pastel toning but I also knew every part of

the image had to have detail too. In my mind’s eye of bucket list type imagery, it had to have absolutely all of those elements. The RAW image is not too dissimilar to the processed image apart from the fact that it is more blue in toning. Minus 23C tends to do that when the sun leaves. I edited the image in Lightroom. In post processing I experimented to see whether I could drop the contrast globally without seeing any loss in sharpness of the image. I dropped the contrast by -40, and took the whites and blacks down too. Also I dropped the saturation of the blues but boosted the blue luminance. I didn’t touch the levels at all. Sharpness is not needed in an image like this IMO but detail is. So I left the sharpness at 40, and finally, probably the riskiest thing I did to the image was to crop it into a tight panorama. I was SO in love with that landscape and that made it incredibly hard to lose those surrounds.

How has nature and photography played a part in shaping the person you are today? Interestingly, photographing nature has really made me think about design. Let’s face it, you can’t do it better than what we see all around us in nature. Just thinking about things as diverse as, say, reproduction, seasons, cycles, colour harmony, tone, pattern, repetition, and hopefully you’ll understand where I’m coming from with this. Really thinking about nature can be quite profound and builds in me a huge appreciation of this planet, but I recognise that some people may be uncomfortable doing that. So ultimately, all we can do is put our own very individual play on it photographically. It is crazy humbling though. What is the furthest you have gone for a photo? Funnily enough, that was for the swan image I’ve just been talking about :-) I travelled to the very top of Northern Japan on the island of Hokkaido. It was the middle of winter there but it was so worth it. I dumped my hubby at (unfortunately for me) the best ski field, and trained up to the city of Kushiro, then managed to get a car rental and drove in 2 metres of snow and an average of -22c for a couple days before heading back to meet up with a very bragging hubby at how amazing the snow was at that particular field..

How has Covid19 affected your work in general? Last year, like everyone else, all my work fell like a stack of dominoes in a matter of two days. It was so surreal. Since then, some wedding couples have cancelled altogether, but fortunately for me, most simply postponed. Virtually without exception, they all re-worked their big day to be totally different weddings - and I don’t blame them for that one bit. Currently I have only three weddings left to cover as a result of Covid postponements. But how fortunate are we to have had those government grants to help us through that time. Since then, however, work has changed to have more of a focus on natural light family portraiture, whilst businesses are working harder to lift their on-line imagery, so it has been a steady, if rather unexpected, flow of work since the arrival of Covid. Seriously I am surprised. Wedding couples now seem to book either totally high or low end packages. I honestly can’t fathom the reasoning behind different couples choices. Wedding bookings certainly seem to have slowed up though, but that might simply be the result of the time of year.

If you could take your art in any direction without fear of failure or rejection, where would it lead? What new thing would you try? I left this question until last. Over the years that I have been using photography to earn a crust, it has been hard. It has seemed like I have always been on the back foot. I often find I am not earning as much as other photographers I know. And then we get told how to market, how to price, how to blah de blah. I’ve tried suggestions along with others in our industry and maybe it has worked for them, but not for me. Even my hubby was trying to persuade me to stop, saying things like, “Why work so hard on a business that you only earn 20% of your actual income from?”

Well perversely, the more discouragement I got, the harder I would try to make things work. And I have actually chosen to fly in the face of the advice to beware being “A Jack-of-all-trades and master of none”. I found myself thinking that as long as I was able to show good work in every genre, I was going to show it off. This has worked. Most of the people who book me to do photography now tell me they have chosen me because I do not have just weddings on my website. But it has taken me years to get to this point.

To be honest, I can’t imagine going anywhere in this business without some degree of rejection or failure. I guess it is the reality that I have experienced over a number of years. I have only just got to the point now of earning around 35-40% of my actual income from photography (told you I would be honest!). But there are actually positives from this because I have come to the realization that I do not want to have photography providing my sole income. I don’t believe it would be healthy for me to sit at my computer for hours on end editing images, my life being absolutely dependent on the jobs coming in. I also have a photographer friend I respect very much. We banter with each other about most things photography related. She is a true artist and literally lives on a yacht with her husband and makes wonderful imagery that many in N.Z are envious of. She doesn’t seek to make any kind of living from her photography. She does photography because she loves it - which might explain why her artistry shines. Something to be said about lifestyle. Having said that, selling a few more prints would be great! The only way to do that is spending the time promoting my work, exhibiting, getting my name out there. So yea, I would ideally be an amazing marketer and exhibit successfully and have loads of prints flying out the door .. (insert the Tui ad here).. This takes a huge amount of resources though and if I’m completely honest, the other business I operate and other commitments takes that time away. BUT, have only very recently had the courage to drop a big portion of my other business, (after 18 years of building it up), so am incredibly excited about that as have always been a big believer in having eggs in different baskets, especially in these uncertain times we live in. Early days though, will give it a year and see how it goes.

Simone Jackson www.simonejacksonphotography.co.nz

© Simone Jackson - Bird

© Simone Jackson

© Simone Jackson © Simone Jackson

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