Last week, I announced the launch of the Cairo Photo Tours, part of a new and active group of companies based here in Cairo Egypt, and it has been fascinating watching on Woopra where the interest, responses and traffic has come from. If you don’t know about Woopra, you must. It is totally addictive!

With the launch of the Group, The Photo School and the Photo Tours, as well as the Focus For Humanity Foundation, some of the detail about the Nile Photo workshop with Matt Brandon that was also announced, may have been a bit suppressed, so forgive me if I soap-box for a minute and share with you again why we think this is such an unusual workshop and why you should come on it. In fact in some difficult to justify self-promotion, you can watch Matt and me chat about it in the short video clip below too:

What marks this workshop out are 5 main differences and in no particular order these are:

1. There are currently no other photo workshops that are run in Egypt, which despite the challenging bureaucracy here, surprises me. The weather is always good here (sometime a little too hot if you had read some of my earlier posts from the planning trip!), and in October – when we are doing the workshop – the temperature is a very comfortable 34-36 degrees Celsius in the day and high 20C in the evening. But what marks Egypt out, as a really wonderful workshop location, is the extra-ordinary wealth of cultural photography opportunities and the warmth of the Egyptians’ hospitality.

2. Secondly this is not a workshop spent in basic hotels, in guest housed or on long train journeys – not that those are bad things as they often help you immerse yourself in your environment. But on this trip we are based on a luxurious private Dahabiya- a large twin masted Sailing boat – that has no motors and therefore is in harmony with the wonderful sites and culture we will see. If the wind fails us, then a small tugboat will help us keep on schedule. The Dahabiya is in effect a luxury floating hotel – the standard of the rooms and en-suite facilities, the cleanliness of the public spaces and the kitchens were the equal of many a small luxury hotel (and arguably I should know as that is part of my other day job!). There are all mod cons including wifi, Satellite TV, laundry, free soft drinks and as far as I can work out, hot and cold running staff to cater for every eventuality. The food promises to be great, and the only potential fly in the ointment is that the boat does not have a liquor license – but worry not. I already have a cunning plan that solves that!

3. Thirdly we are mixing the traditional “must see’ locations between Luxor and Aswan such as the Valley of the Kings, Karnak Temple, The Colossus of Memnon, Edfu and Philae temples with a host of unusual, seldom visited locations. Ancient mud-brick villages, livestock markets, ruined mines and a range of different villages including the Nubian village near Aswan that completely astounded Matt and me. In this last village we will get to spend a whole day with a Nubian family – sharing their lives, building a relationship and hopefully getting a compelling photo essay into the bargain. It is this mix of formal and informal and of ancient and modern that helps to make this trip so unique. In all these places – the only exception being the Valley of the Kings where cameras are banned – we have chosen them because of the richness of cultural, landscape, street or environmental photo opportunities that they will provide.

4. Fourthly – and unusually – we have some space for partners to come along. Not many, so you need to be quick, but we are hoping that this might encourage some of you who would otherwise find it difficult to come to such a remarkable place without your beloved other, to convince them that this is finally a photo workshop that they can come on without having to play second fiddle to a camera all week! The Partner program is really a relaxed Nile cruise. In the mornings they are with us when we visit the temples, tombs and historic places. In the afternoon they are able to relax on board or explore the local town and market. Relaxing on board is pretty civilized too – endless free soft drinks, a jacuzzzi, sun loungers, books, board games and Sat TV should occupy most people! In the evenings we are all then together for dinner.

And if that was not enough to persuade you, there is also the option of a Cairo pre-extension – perhaps that should be ”pretension”! A few days soaking up the atmosphere, getting into the groove, visiting some of Cairo’s extraordinarily rich cultural opportunities. We plan to have dawn at the pyramids including a photo opportunity with a camel train; visit the camel souk (check out Matt’s superb photo essay on this); whirl with dervishes, barter in the souks, bazaars and explore the narrow streets of the Old City full of artisans and daily life.

Anyway, enough from me. Please check out the itinerary for both the main “cruise” and the “pretension”. All the details, the costs, lots of images, the prices, what to bring and how to book are over on the dedicated tour website, Cairo Photo Tours.

In the few days since we soft launched the tour, we have already sold a number of places, and several firm expressions of interest. So don’t tarry. You know you want to come. Print out the itinerary, sit down with your loved one, talk it through and then book the trip of a lifetime in October 2011 down the Nile.

The tickets for these are free as both the location is owned by and the Troup employed by the Egyptian Ministry of Culture, but such are the popularity of the shows with both Egyptians and tourists that within minutes of the doors opening at 6.30pm the tickets are gone.

Wekalt El-Ghuori is a beautiful old merchants house that has been sympathetically restored and now host music and cultural events. The once open courtyard has now been covered by a permanent tent like roof, and the beautiful fret-work windows that in former years would have preserved the modesty of the women of the household form the prying eyes of men, now just look out onto the courtyard, where at one end a permanent stage sits as testimony to the popularity of the show.

I went there with my Egyptian photographer friend and colleague, Ramy Salem, as part of a reconnaissance for a new photography tour business we are setting up in Cairo. Ramy specializes in commercial and event photography and so we wanted to see whether we could run a course for those interested in this type of photography, using this show as one of the teaching vehicles.

The show itself is spectacular. The mix of live traditional music together with the artistry of the musicians – each performing a solo piece that left the audience spell bound and all of us wondering how they managed to drum with such precision or blow such long sustained notes. But the real highlight of the show are the whirling dervishes – the dancers that enter a trance like state and whirl for up to 45 minutes round and round, altering their body position little by little to create amazing shapes and patterns with their extravagantly colored shirts.

We were fortunate that once inside, we et with a couple of the officials that Ramy knew, who allowed us to wander freely around the edge of the stage during the show, as well as to go up briefly on to the musician balcony to get some unusual perspectives.

This was my first time seeing the show – I didn’t know what to expect and I hadn’t really researched the show thoroughly enough to know what would happen when.

I’ve posted a few of the images that I captured on the night – all shot without flash but showing the wonderful low noise-high ISO capabilities of the Canon 5d Mk11 – that go some way to capture the wonderful sense of colour, motion and dramatic lighting.

I will be returning to re-shoot some of these images for my portfolio, now that I understand the format that the show takes, and how to overcome some of the very challenging lighting conditions.

You can see more of the images in my gallery.

When we moved to Egypt – which was not I hasten to add my sad attempt to “tick-off’ the exotic location component – this myth was quickly dispelled the first time I went out and found that my Steve McCurry impression was pretty wasted on the average Egyptian and my images were just expensive snaps.

Compelling reads such as “Within the Frame”, by David duChemin and following the blogs of great photographers like Gavin Gough, Chris Orwig, Ami Vitale and Matt Brandon and others have helped me to realize that the answer is a mix of craft (knowing how to use the tools of the trade properly so that you are free to concentrate on the aesthetic); the vision (breaking the rules, trying to follow your heart and allowing your creativity to flourish); the preparation (knowing what the light will be doing, what the cultural sensitivities are etc); the graft (going out there time and time again until you get the shot you want) and of course, sometimes, luck

Ami Vitale in a recent review session, encouraged me to slow down and to try and understand the story better, and this advice came to mind yesterday when I was walking past a non-descript blacksmith forge, camera in hand.

Rather than just acknowledge the nod of the two men sat at the back of the shop, we stopped and I gestured with my camera and muttered in my halting Arabic as to whether I could take their picture.

Ramy, my Egyptian colleague then started to chat with them as I began to take some shots. Within minutes they began to suggest that they start up the forge again and show me what they do.

I thought that I would share with you some of the successes and failures that I went through over the course of that hour or so as I tried to work the opportunity by trying different angles, lenses, compositions and style to capture this wonderful story of what turned out to be a father and his two sons running a small family business.

The first image at the top of the blog was one of the portraits I made of the old man towards the end of the session, but the thumbnail snapshot from Lightroom below show you some of the different images I made and later discarded of his son working at the furnace before finally choosing one to process below right.

I am not proclaiming these to be great images – I like them and the old man loved them so I guess that is all that really matters. But what I did learn and wanted to share with you is that it is not the exotic location and it is not luck that made this work. It was taking the time to slow down, build a relationship and to keep trying different angles and composition – even when I knew I had a couple of “keepers” in the bag – that allowed me to walk away with 3 new friends and a couple of fun images.

It would have been so simple to have just nodded that acknowledgement and to walk on.

I cut and pasted the code as suggested, and it didn’t work. When I read the small print it talked about “Support for WordPress hosted blogs will follow shortly”. So I made a work around that allows you to embed it in WordPress blogs, pages and sidebars.

Here are the steps:

1. You’ll need a blurb account and a book that has been published and is public (with previews turned on). Sign into your blurb account.

2. You’ll also need the Kimili Flash Embed Plugin for WordPress.

3. Go to the Blurb BookShow widget page: http://www.blurb.com/my/book/preview_widget

4. Select the book you want to profile.and then go into the “Copy and Past this code” dialog box . Find the section just after and embed opening tag that begins with (see yellow highlighted area in the image above):

5. Now select only the following from that bit of code: http://www.blurb.com/assets/embed.swf?book_id=XXXXX. Note this is the bit after the src tag up to and not including the type tag. Also note that I did not copy the quotation marks.

6. Now go to your WordPress post. Switch to HTML mode, and put your cursor where you want this to appear. Click on the Kimili Flash embed button. In the dialog box that appears, you then past the URL that you copied into the Flash.swf tag, that is probably currently saying untitled.swf.

7. Tweak the settings (the size for example) to what will fit well on your page, and you are done.

8. You could also pace this in a sidebar widget, and you can style the whle thing with

You can see the sort of look and feel of the widget below for a book that I did last year on Cairo.

[kml_flashembed publishmethod="static" fversion="8.0.0" movie="http://www.blurb.com/assets/embed.swf?book_id=985751" width="450" height="300" targetclass="flashmovie"]

[/kml_flashembed]

]]> http://www.marcoryanphotography.com/index.php/2010/03/how-to-mak-blurb-bookshow-widget-work-in-wordpress/feed/ 1 http://www.marcoryanphotography.com/index.php/2010/02/off-camera-flash-and-reflectors-a-day-of-learning/ http://www.marcoryanphotography.com/index.php/2010/02/off-camera-flash-and-reflectors-a-day-of-learning/#comments Sun, 21 Feb 2010 17:55:35 +0000 Marco Ryan http://www.marcoryanphotography.com/?p=598 I don’t know if you are anything like me, but if I am really uncomfortable with something I always find an excuse to put it off or give something else a higher priority. I justify to myself that this is really me being efficient –  giving focus to the “must do” tasks and deprioritizing the “should do” or “could do” tasks to another day. After all they are going to take time to master, right? And time is the biggest challenge for me wth a full time job, a young family and endless travel. Of course the truth is that I am just making excuses. I like to master things, and so of course if there is something that I can’t do, then I find excuses as to why I haven’t done it yet!

Off-camera flash and using reflectors has been just such a topic. For many of you,  your eyebrows will now be twitching in surprise! “But they’re easy”, I hear you saying! But for many of us – and by “us” I mean the keen hobbyist with aspirations but also self-recognition that they are at the beginning of their photographic journey – some of these topics seem more complex or tricky. I had convinced myself that off- camera flash required expensive triggers, probably a couple of other photographers and that this was an area of photography better tackled by full time photographers. I have always liked the purity of natural light and the freedom it gives me to just have my camera, a couple of spare batteries or CF cards and go wandering off down any alley that took my fancy to explore what was there.

Well I finally confronted this ridiculous state of affairs yesterday. A friend of ours, the beautiful Maha Youssef wanted some pictures for her new business as a professional make-up artist and also a couple of portraits of herself. I decided that this would be the right time to try and experiment with off-camera flash and the use of reflectors. I found an old merchants palace in the heart of old Islamic Cairo, and together with Karim Soliman and Mohammed AbdelWaheb – two wonderful friends and very talented Cairo based photographers – we went and did a mini-workshop.

I was right about one thing – we did need another pair of hands, reflectors and some radio triggers, but Karim and Mohammed kindly donated these for the day. In fact I discovered that not being able to afford pocket wizards was ot a barrier to this whole approach. They had a great set of Chinese made radio triggers that worked brilliantly and were as cheap as chips and of course, relfectors are not expensive or can even be home-made! I had made sure that I had already previously visited the location at the same time of day to see what the sun would be doing, what internal light would be available and what the best external locations might be for some natural light portraits too. So now there was no excuse but to dive in and experiment.

We started with the outside shots, partly to get Maha relaxed in front of the camera and partly because I knew I could do these type of portraits without any real assistance. In the first two images included here, I just used an on-camera flash for a little bit of fill to create a slightly enhanced catch-light. Maha was incredibly patient, and as the first part of the day progressed she became more relaxed and used to being in-front of the lens, rather than just doing the make-up for models, or brides who would be the ones having their photograph taken. I also took a couple of fun shots from across the other side of the building of Maha peeking out of one of the small ornate windows too (see the third image below)!

After an hour or so we moved inside, and started to use the radio triggers and the second speedlight. We kept it very simple. A key light and a fill light each at about 45 degrees to Maha. Karim showed me how to set up the key light and a fill-light/back-light. We were shooting with the strong midday sun streaming in through the ornate fret-work of the old palace windows,  but after a couple of test shots we found the right settings, and then I was left to my own devices to direct Maha and to make the composition as I saw fit.

The final part of the morning, we moved to a wonderful window seat, where Maha could look down on the closed courtyard below. The ligth reflecting off the walls was sufficient that we did not need flash, but as the perfect excuse to use a reflector to help balance the light. It was fun to play with the gold, silver and white sides of the reflector and to understand the difference it made in tonal quality, the strength of the light and the subsequent exposure values. You can see some of the images from the indoor seesion at the bottom of the post.

All in all a fun day – I learnt that actually the use of off-camera flash and reflectors, really could not be easier. Why was I getting so worried in the first place? Sure you need to understand the setting of your Speedlight, and to experiment a little with the manual settings and TTL settings, but I am kicking myself now for waiting so long. It has incouraged me to experiment more and to think about using off-camera flash with gels to complement the main key light, especially in some of the samll rural workshops that I love to shoot, where the lighting variances can be so tricky.

My thanks to Maha Youssef for her patience and for letting us turn what she thought would be a couple of quick portraits into a mini-workshop and photo-shoot. If you are in Egypt and need a make-up artist then you can contact her through her Facebook group, Glamour Eyes. My thank also to Karim Soliman and Mohammed AbdelWahab – two wonderful young professional talents whose new company, the Photographer Agency, is already making companies in Cairo beat a path to their door. You can find out more on their facebook group Photographer Agency or their website, www.ph-agency.com

You can see the rest of the images from the shoot in the gallery, by clicking on this link, here

]]> http://www.marcoryanphotography.com/index.php/2010/02/off-camera-flash-and-reflectors-a-day-of-learning/feed/ 4 http://www.marcoryanphotography.com/index.php/2010/02/proof-that-panning-shots-are-art-not-science/ http://www.marcoryanphotography.com/index.php/2010/02/proof-that-panning-shots-are-art-not-science/#comments Tue, 16 Feb 2010 17:34:05 +0000 Marco Ryan http://www.marcoryanphotography.com/?p=577 Following my post yesterday on 10 tops tips for panning I thought I had better go and swallow some of my own medicine and practice some panning.

I had a free couple of hours this morning, so I went out into the chaos that is mid-morning Cairo, and stood on a street corner for a couple of hours – always an interesting experience! Other than getting a couple of locals insisting that I moved location once or twice, the morning went reasonably well.

The fruits of my labour are below. Not perfect by a long measure, but an improvement on before and certainly I feel that I am getting more comfortable with the positioning of the subject in the panning frame, selecting the right shutter speed and finally, today, some progress on the focusing. In the six images below you can see how I start out very shaky – literally – with off centre framing. As the morning progresses I get in closer and manage to get the subject more central and the focus more accurate. By the end of the morning – the 6th shot below of the red vespa – I had bought together the combination of background, subject, shutter speed and framing and was even getting a little cocky and tilting the camera to try and vary the composition.

It was great fun and time well spent, although surprisingly tiring and it made me realize that this is a technique that I have only just scratched the surface of! Lots more practice required!

]]> http://www.marcoryanphotography.com/index.php/2010/02/proof-that-panning-shots-are-art-not-science/feed/ 2 http://www.marcoryanphotography.com/index.php/2010/01/what-price-a-camel-in-birquash-camel-market/ http://www.marcoryanphotography.com/index.php/2010/01/what-price-a-camel-in-birquash-camel-market/#comments Fri, 29 Jan 2010 20:40:55 +0000 Marco Ryan http://www.marcoryanphotography.com/?p=384 Practice , practice, practice… Not always easy when a camel is spitting in your face and all over your lens.

I spent the morning at Birquash Camel Market – the “new” home of Cairo’s famous camel Souk and about 15 kms north west of the city. Now you should take the word “new” here with a pinch of salt. It just means new location – not new as in “spanky brand new” or “never been used” or even “modern, clean and safe”!

I wanted to try and shoot a photo-story – Which I didn’t quite pull off, because despite getting up before dawn. It took us over 2 hours to drive the 15kms, as we drove from place to place searching for the market. Nothing is ever signed properly in Egypt and the locals’ directions were straight out of  Monty Python film. Draw up to a junction, ask the two men waiting by the side of the road which way, and you guessed it, one would point left and one would point right! So we missed the beginning and some of the more interesting action.

I did try some panning shots and some backlit shots, but none of these really worked out quite how I had planned! I clearly need a workshop with “Mr Panning” himself – Gavin Gough – to get that technique licked!

Biquash Camel Market  – or Souk el Gamaal in the native tongue – is an extraordinary place, and arguably not for the feint hearted or for animal lovers. Let’s just say that animal husbandry is an area that Egypt needs to focus on a little more. Every week thousands of camels trek up from the Sudan, Southern Egypt or nearby to be sold at auction. There is no one single auction place within the Souk, rather a long street with a series of Camel pens, with auctions happening simultaneously in the street in front of the pens.

They all have one leg tied up to stop them running around, and everyone – and I mean everyone from the 3 years old to the old man using it as crutch – has a wooden stick with which they beat the camel to make it turn, move or do as requested.

The conditions are biblical – but fascinating. Lots of dust to play havoc with your lenses, but also lots of amazing sights, sounds and opportunities.

Not all the camels make it through the day and so some inevitably have to be disposed off, which of course is done there and then in the full glare of anyone watching.

Like most events in Egypt, there are a lot of people sitting around, drinking tea or coffee and seemingly doing nothing. However they were all incredibly friendly and keen to have their photo taken – surprisingly I thought given the number of tourist and other photographers that must come to this weekly market. However this little community of traders, herders, drovers and farmers that assemble each week provide a fantastic blend of Egyptian street life and rural market, which makes it a place full of potentially compelling images.

I don’t know why, but I didn’t find the groove today. I love being out somewhere new and observing everything that is going on, so perhaps I was distracted by the fact that for me it was all so new, or maybe I expected too much and didn’t take my own medicine in my last post – “dashed expectations are seasonal” and just go with the flow. I tried to shoot an opening, some details, unusual angles, close-ups and a closing shot to try and frame the photo essay and, whilst they are a good record of the day, they don’t tell the full story. The full story – such that it is –  is over in the gallery.

But that is what practicing is about. Trying, learning from your mistakes and then trying again. I will certainly be back to the Birquash Camel Market another Friday morning, now that I know how to find it and what to expect.

You can see more of the images, including some fun portraits, over in the gallery.

Oh, and the short answer to “What price a camel”, is about 5000 Egyptian pounds or about US $1000!

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