Nick Miners Photography

I know there are sev­eral people who like my pho­to­graphy; the Face­book ‘like’ but­ton shows me there are at least 112 of you. But I’m in this busi­ness to make money, as oth­er­wise I won’t be able to spend the time I do tak­ing pho­to­graphs, and there will be less stuff to like. I’m not going to beg — that is undig­nifed and unne­ces­sary. I’m not going to chas­tise you — that would be coun­ter­pro­duct­ive. But I am going to point a few things out that may not be imme­di­ately obvious.

If you want to use my pho­to­graphy on your site, that’s fine, but please get in touch and we can agree a price. The chances are the people who use your site are not there to buy pho­to­graphs, so even if my pho­tos are seen by thou­sands of pairs of eyes on your hugely suc­cess­ful site, there is no dir­ect mech­an­ism to con­vert those views to sales, nor any incent­ive, so a credit and/​or a link to my site will not be enough. In fact a credit is the min­imum I’d expect for even a paid photograph.

If you want to share my pho­to­graphs with oth­ers, that’s fine by me. I don’t have a prob­lem with people com­ing to my site to see what I do, as it increases the chances that someone will buy some­thing, or hire me for a pho­toshoot. How­ever, I reserve the right to decide by which mech­an­isms you share my pho­to­graphs. Sadly there is little I can do to pre­vent Tumblr being used to repro­duce my images en masse, how­ever you may notice that you can’t use Pin­terest to share an image from this site. Sim­il­arly, sev­eral of my images are avail­able on Flickr, where there is a link to licence the images from Getty, so I have an (albeit small) incent­ive to share my best work there as widely as possible.

But you prob­ably already know all this (how­ever if you didn’t, I hope it’s been use­ful to know). As it is, I do have one final request to make, and this goes out to those of you who are also pho­to­graph­ers. Please, please, please, DO NOT under­sell your­self as a pho­to­grapher. If someone wants to use one of your pho­to­graphs for a web­site, or a magazine, or some other com­mer­cial use, don’t assume that by get­ting your name in print they are doing you a favour. As I men­tioned above, this will not raise your pro­file as a paid, ser­i­ous pho­to­grapher — the people who see your pho­to­graph are not neces­sar­ily going to be the same people who would want to buy it; your cus­tomer is the per­son who uses the image. In fact, if someone DOES request the use of your pho­to­graph, you can quite reas­on­ably argue that merely by their hav­ing found you, your ‘expos­ure’ is good enough already, and does not need the myth­ical boost that such people prom­ise. The more pho­to­graph­ers demand to be paid for their efforts, whether ama­teur or professional, the harder it will be for us to be exploited, and the less ‘accept­able’ it will be to try to obtain pho­to­graphy for free.

I can sense it -
Some­thing import­ant
Is about to happen

If asked, I would find it impossible to name a favour­ite album, as the answer changes based on my mood, the weather, and the time of day. But there’s no doubt in my mind as to the most import­ant album, one which has argu­ably shaped the very per­son I am today.

In the sum­mer hol­i­day of 1993, dur­ing the hey­day of ITV’s music video show ‘The Chart Show’, my atten­tion was caught by an unusual sight. A young Icelandic singer was fret­ting about the odd things humans do, whilst walk­ing through a bizarre fake forest with assor­ted pup­pet anim­als. And what a voice! I was fas­cin­ated, and in those days, when MP3 down­loads were but a twinkle in the vir­tual eye of a nas­cent inter­net, I had to sat­isfy my curi­os­ity in the only way pos­sible, by pur­chas­ing a CD of Björk’s ‘Debut’ when it was released.

The album was a first for me in sev­eral ways. Trivi­ally, it was my first CD, but more import­antly, it planted in me the seed of my obses­sion with Ice­land and Icelandic music. Here was this girl from a strange land that to most people only exis­ted as a blob on school geo­graphy maps, and whose cap­ital city had an exotic name, com­ing out with some of the most com­pel­ling and ori­ginal music I had heard for years. Until that time my choices of listen­ing had (to my eternal shame) sailed with the winds of pop­u­lar taste; Sting, Annie Len­nox, Mike Old­field, to name but a few; and it took this album to make me real­ise there was so much more out there.

In 1999, 6 years after Björk screeched and wailed her way into our lives (well, those of us who were unfa­mil­iar with The Sug­ar­cubes), I trav­elled to Ice­land for the first time, with my part­ner and our 6-​​month-​​old son, and I was bewitched. I returned to Ice­land as often as time—and my wallet—would allow. Con­fron­ted by scenes such as this, how could I help but redis­cover my love of photography?

Gull­foss, the Golden Falls

Twit­ter, the microb­log­ging ser­vice, and object of the deri­sion of many of the less forward-​​thinking mem­bers of the tra­di­tional press, also had a major part to play in the immin­ent com­ple­tion of an 18 year long per­sonal cycle. A set of black and white images from Iceland’s west­ern fjords region, which I took in May 2009, was extremely well received, and shared by sev­eral people, both within and out­side Ice­land, mak­ing it my most pop­u­lar gal­lery of pho­to­graphs to date. By main­tain­ing links with the people who had pub­li­cised my images, I gained a small but grow­ing net­work of friends who shared a pas­sion for, or lived in, Iceland.

The res­ult­ant increased pro­file of my work brought me to the atten­tion of Coun­ter­feit magazine, a music web­site based in Shef­field, who were look­ing for some pho­to­graphs of a London-​​based, Sheffield-​​born rap­per called The Ruby Kid for an inter­view they were pub­lish­ing. After com­plet­ing the shoot I star­ted ask­ing around to see if there were any other web­sites like Coun­ter­feit, but more local to me, for whom I could do sim­ilar work. The amaz­ing net­work­ing power of the Inter­net brought me to The 405, where I was given the oppor­tun­ity to gain free entry (via photo passes) to end­less gigs in Lon­don to shoot for reviews or photo-​​only ‘In Pic­tures’ features.

It wasn’t long before I real­ised that we could do some­thing par­tic­u­larly spe­cial at The 405 (that’s not to belittle the great work it was already doing), so I sug­ges­ted try­ing for passes to the annual Ice­land Air­waves fest­ival in Octo­ber, with a view to pub­lish­ing a fea­ture focus­ing on the fest­ival as a whole. The edit­or­ial team were all in favour of the idea and, once again through Twitter’s net­work, I was put in touch with the press officer for the fest­ival, who agreed to issue three passes to us. Only a week or so later, it was announced that there would be two spe­cial per­form­ances dur­ing the fest­ival at Reykjavík’s recently com­pleted opera house, Harpa, by none other than the one per­son who is still Iceland’s most fam­ous export: Björk Guðmundsdóttir.

And so I find myself on the brink of an adven­ture that will bring together the holy trin­ity of music, pho­to­graphy and the magical island of Ice­land, and I can trace it all back to one single, cir­cu­lar piece of foil and plastic, imprin­ted with the DNA of my life as it is today.

Pho­to­graphy Stack Exchange

An excel­lent resource I’ve come across recently is the pho­to­graphy Stack Exchange. This is a user-​​driven web­site with a strict question-​​and-​​answer format, with none of the off-​​topic tan­gents and trolling that you find on tra­di­tional inter­net for­ums. By answer­ing ques­tions well, or post­ing good ques­tions, you earn repu­ta­tion and badges, all of which act­ively encour­ages good use of the site. Have a look and see if there’s any way it can help you out. I’m on there as Nick.

Adobe finally released Light­room 3 today, after an extens­ive beta test­ing period dur­ing which we were shown tan­tal­ising glimpses of the new fea­tures. How­ever, by far the most impress­ive of the added good­ies is the improved noise reduc­tion. I’ve included some examples below.

Bor­ough Mar­ket, EOS 5D Mark II, ISO 3200

This photo was taken at ISO 3200 on my Canon EOS 5D Mark II, shortly after I bought it, as part of a series of pho­tos of Bor­ough Mar­ket in Lon­don. All the pho­tos in the set were taken at the same ISO, which allowed me to cap­ture much of the activ­ity and goods on sale without hav­ing to use flash.

Bor­ough Mar­ket, EOS 5D Mark II, ISO 3200 (no noise reduc­tion — 100% crop)

Here is a 100% crop of the same shot with no noise reduc­tion applied (all sliders set to zero); for ISO 3200 it’s pretty good, show­ing off the low-​​light cap­ab­il­it­ies the 5DII is fam­ous for.

Bor­ough Mar­ket, EOS 5D Mark II, ISO 3200 (after noise reduc­tion — 100% crop)

After apply­ing noise reduc­tion, the chroma noise has all but van­ished, and only a hint of lumin­ance noise remains, with (in my opin­ion) sug­ges­tions of film grain.

Bor­ough Mar­ket, EOS 5D Mark II, ISO 3200 (after noise reduction)

The full photo, after noise reduc­tion has been applied. It’s hard to tell the dif­fer­ence at this size, so here’s an example of an ISO 6400 shot that has been adjus­ted with Light­room 3:

Starry night, ISO 6400, no NR

The chroma noise, even at this smal­ler size, is obvi­ous, espe­cially in the cloud and on the right-​​hand illu­min­ated tree at the bot­tom of the picture.

Starry night, ISO 6400, after NR

The dif­fer­ence here is plain. A huge improve­ment over the original.

I now feel I can more con­fid­ently use ISO 6400 more on my cam­era now; tech­nic­ally it does go up to ISO 25,600 but I would have to try that out in Light­room before decid­ing whether it’s a real­istic option.

A Bel­gian couple pose for the cam­era out­side the Con­cert Hall in Bruges.

One of the most strik­ing aspects of my recent trip to Bruges with my friend Mark was the markedly dif­fer­ent atti­tude to pho­to­graph­ers that we exper­i­enced com­pared to that in the UK. You can’t open the paper these days without read­ing about yet another pho­to­grapher being har­assed by police for tak­ing (legit­im­ate) pho­to­graphs in a (pub­lic) loc­a­tion. How­ever in Bruges, des­pite the fact that the major­ity of people walk­ing about were tour­ists tak­ing pho­to­graphs, the loc­als appeared to act­ively wel­come the chance to appear in a pho­to­graph (see above). We both felt that we were free to go wherever we pleased, whenever we pleased, even as far as the indus­trial docks to the north of the city where pho­to­graph­ers with large lenses in the UK would prob­ably be accos­ted by offi­cious staff or police almost as soon as they stepped on the premises. Wan­der­ing round the streets and canals at mid­night has never been so much fun.

Whilst I don’t want to use my blog to make polit­ical points, the Con­ser­vat­ive party did prom­ise prior to the elec­tion to stop the abuse of stop-​​and-​​search powers gran­ted to police under sec­tion 44 of the Ter­ror­ism Act, and the newly pub­lished coali­tion agree­ment also makes the same prom­ise. I will be watch­ing closely and hope­fully we will see an end to the non­sense that inno­cent pho­to­graph­ers have been sub­jec­ted to for far too long.