On The Run With The Reads

A lot can happen in a quarter of a century.  Take the smiling young chap on the left for instance.  This was my Zoology classmate Andrew Read on the night of his farewell party from Otago University before starting his doctorate at Oxford.  Andrew went on to marry distinguished behavioural scientist Victoria Braithwaite, father the very lively James and Matthew, be made Professor and Chair of Natural History at Edinburgh University at 35, and has since progressed to a Professorship at Penn State.  Me... well, I've learned how to get a little more control over my flash.


Andrew and his family were back in Otago for a little skiing and sightseeing last week, and I had the chance to catch up with them, recall old times, and practice a little hit-and run family photography.



Taking a day off from skiing meant we could bring Andrew's parents Ron and Sophie up for a look at the ski field (Andrew assures me that Treble Cone has the best view of the many fields he has tried) and a family photo with a nice scenic background.  Lake Wanaka was bathed in sunlight, but the ski field deck was pretty shady, so I threw my flash onto a remote cord and took a shot with it camera left, just to get a little light on those faces and some extra sparkle in those eyes.  Not bad for a quickie, although next time, I'd turn Andrew's face in a little more to avoid the bounce off his glasses.  Now when did he start wearing those?


The day was about relaxing together, not posing, so I didn't want to spend a lot of time arranging groups and trying to get the lighting exactly right.  I wanted quick setups where the smiles were easy and natural.  This one's by far my favourite.  Down at the base of the ski field road the sky was brighter, giving us nice directional light from the right, so my flash was providing a nice fill in the shadow areas of everyone's faces.  Actually with this bunch, it wasn't hard getting natural smiles.  One tip I just got from a friend (thanks Reatha) is that it might have been better to put Victoria in the lower group.  Higher angles are more flattering on a woman, while lower angles make men look taller and hide any thinning hair that 25 years of blazing intellect might inflict.

Andrew's an evolutionary biologist, who despite what he may say, realised after attending Oxford that my own field of parasitology was where the real answers were to be found.  There just wasn't room for our two egos in one field of science, so I politely moved on to writing children's science comedy TV while Andrew has gone on to heading a high powered research group investigating the mysteries of why malaria is so hard to beat.  If you think that's not extremely cool, check out this video he told me about.  Remember all those pentagon billions that went into Ronald Regan's "Star Wars" Strategic Defence Initiative?  Here's what we got out of it:









Cooler than a can of raid, just not as easy to deploy in the 3rd world, or anywhere outside an extremely well funded lab, I'd say.  Unfortunately, this isn't one of Andrew's projects, otherwise I'd be using some of my old university pictures to blackmail him into hiring me. 




 After the skifield, we headed up the Matukituki valley road, and I stopped to get a few more family snaps before we lost the winter sun down on the valley floor.  This is a pose from Andrew much more reminiscent of our student days.  The quick snap here was to affirm that yes, I could again use a little flash fill to lighten the facial shadows.



Sun coming from camera left this time (see the shadow behind Sophie), I got to practice my left hand camera hold while aiming the flash with my right (see Matthew's shadow on half of Victoria's face).  As expected, the valley floor was pretty dark at Raspberry flat, but on the way back to Wanaka, we stopped by the lake near Glendhu Bay  to get a few dusk shots.



Here I took an exposure reading on the background, underexposed by a couple of stops, and then adjusted my flash so the family were nicely exposed. It meant a few test shots, but after just a few seconds I had it.  Again, the flash was in the default left hand.  By the time I'd readjusted for a closer shot, Matthew was up the tree, making for another nice relaxed family look.



Whenever I've got my camera with me now, I usually have a couple of flashes with me.  Even with limited setup time, a little off camera flash lets you cope with the changing light conditions.

Some things don't change though.  Andrew's smile.  If you knew him in real life, you'd know he's just not this pretty, yet the camera loves him.  In fact, you really have to try hard to make him look bad in a photo.  I should know.  I've been trying for 25 years.