Why do I keep talking about shooting medium format black and white film????

I had lunch today with a very well known advertising shooter who does work with the big boys. That would include:  McDonald's, Quaker, Compu-Add and many other big names.  We were sitting around eating burgers and talking about our favorite subject: Photography.  I mentioned that I'd added yet another medium format camera to my collection and he scoffed.  I'd never seen a really good scoff before but he did it expertly.  The kind of scoff that makes you feel like you totally missed the boat.

"Just get a Canon 5Dmk2 and be done with it." he told me.  And I think it's probably good advice but I'm rather bull headed and I really like what I like.  

And what I like are classic black and white portraits that are shot on long medium format lenses with the aperture set to nearly wide open.  The opener the better.  As long as I'm not sacrificing core sharpness.  My favorite looks come from 150mm lenses on 645 or 6x6 bodies. And, without doubt, the film of choice is Kodak's amateur version of Tri-X.  Let's shoot that at ISO 200 and pull the development just a tad for some really wonderful skin tones with lots and lots of detail in the highlights.  You remember that kind of highlight detail, it's what you used to get before you started living in fear of your digital camera burning out all the good stuff.

Right about now is where a person who's never shot film comes in and says,  "All the stuff from the old days is bullshit.  I can replicate any of it in Photoshop".  Oh the hubris of youth. Would it change their opinion if they knew that I started shooting digital in 1997?  That I've owned Kodak 660's and 770's while they were dancing to the New Kids on the Block ?  That I owned copies of Photoshop, pre-layers?  What if I told them that Photoshop once existed without "undo"?

So, the reality is that there are things the medium format cameras can do when it comes to imaging that small sensor cameras cannot do.  The number one attribute is the ability to make focus fall off fast.  While keeping the areas that are in focus incredibly sharp.  Is that subtle?  Yes, but so are fine wines, good tailoring and proper grammar.  Does everyone desire it?  No.  Some people like everything to be in focus.

But here's the deal.  I'm not willing to settle for "good enough" or the hoary phrase, "good enough for government work"  or "this isn't rocket surgery".  You only get one life and you might as well do your art exactly as you envision it.  And for me that means controlling the focus fall off.

On to the film.  Guarantee you that if you scan a piece of well shot and custom developed Tri-X you can't mimic it convincingly in PhotoShop without hours of hard work.  And even then you probably won't be able to get the non linear nature of the edge acutance and the non geometric changes of tonality to work the same way.  It's too perfect perfection will give it away.

Here's the thing I think you need to know about art:  We are attracted to the imperfection that exists in nature.  The imperfection in a face is the frame for aesthetic perfection.  When everything is symmetrical we are bored by it.  When everything can be endlessly duplicated and every experience exactly replicated it looses its attraction.  Film works precisely because it doesn't work perfectly every time.  To attempt to be an artist means being afraid to fail miserably but to go forward anyway.

That, in a nutshell, is the appeal of film to me and a legion of other people who can have it both ways but choose to try and master the infinite nature of craft over the ease of digital production.

Before you write me off as a Luddite, please understand that I own all the same cameras that my possible detractors probably own.  A Nikon D700 and a D300, a drawer full of cool lenses.  A big Apple computer.  The works.  And I use them every day for client work.  But for my own stuff I can't bear the compromise, and, after hearing the workflow lecture of Vincent Laforet, I decided that  life is too short to become a slave to my digital archive.  Tending it and replanting it on every changing generation of storage devices until my whole life's energy is consumed with  "migrating" my library of ephemeral images every two years.  I'll keep the real art in a notebook.  In a filing cabinet, where, properly stored it should last a lifetime.  And the negatives should be printable long afterward.

Here's to beautiful black and white portraiture.  If I remember correctly, the photo of Michelle was done with a Pentax 645 using the 150mm 3.5 lens wide open with a large tungsten light source.  According to modern pundits I've done everything wrong.

To see more work like this please go to my website and look for the black and white portfolios.

Thanks, Kirk

for more lighting tips see my Studio Lighting book!

The Art of the Headshot.

I absolutely love to do portraits.  My dream, when I started taking photographs many years ago was to have a little ivy covered studio in the hills west of Austin.  Nothing fancy, just a little office, a dressing room and a shooting room of about 20 by 40 feet with a nice, tall ceiling.  I'd have a highly organized and vaguely beautiful assistant who would book sittings and take care of getting prints and various orders from the lab and make sure they got to the client.

It never worked out that way.  I've spent the last 20 years doing some head shots in my small office studio but most of the work is done on location at advertising agencies and corporate headquarters.  I'm pretty much a location portrait shooter.  And by location I don't mean that I spend time putting babies in patches of blue bonnets or photographing families at the beach.  I spend my time taking conference rooms that started life as broom closets and making them into temporary studios so I can photograph the movers and shakers of corporate culture.  And I love that.  Everyone has a story so everyone is interesting.  Anybody who doesn't have a story is interesting because they don't have a story.

I made the portrait above as part of a series for a very chic agency here in Austin, Texas.  I came in and moved the conference room furniture around to make room for three lights.  While I was setting up Patricia Garcia was doing make up on the seven people we needed to photograph.  I usually light with one big soft source to the left of camera and a large white reflector on the other side for fill.  I usually pick a gray background when I'm left to my own devices.

This time we all wanted something just a little bit different.  I used two umbrellas instead of just one main light.  I keyed the portrait from the left (creature of habit) using a 48 inch white umbrella with black backing.  I used a 60 inch white umbrella five feet further back and slightly to the right of camera as my fill.  The background was lit by a standard profoto zoom reflector with a sloppy, wide grid on it.  The background is a soft blue paper.

The sitter in the above example was made up so well, and had such great skin that I don't think we had to do any retouching to speak of.  Maybe a stray hair or two.  That's about it.

I love shooting portraits.  No nervous energy.  No hesitation.  Just a great afternoon yakking it up with people.

Camera:  D700.  Lights: Profoto

To learn more about my approach to studio lighting check out my new book. 

See more work:   Kirk Tuck's Commercial Website/An adventure in iWeb

Low Light Workout at the Photon Gym.....

One thing you have to say about the D700 is that it works very well in light so low you can't read the dials on the camera body.

I like shooting dress rehearsals for Zachary Scott Theater.  If a play is not exactly my taste (a rare occurrence at Zach...) I at least have the technical challenge of rendering it with good technique.  

When a play is  good I feel the challenge with more weight.  When a play is really good I want to share all the things that made it special to me.

I recently shot the advertising images for the "Grapes of Wrath" during the dress rehearsal.  I was just amazed at the use of light in this production.  You can see in the photographs that the lighting designer used a limited palette of warm tones for most of the scenes.  I don't know if you can tell from the images but it evokes the hot dusty feeling that must have pervaded the "dust bowl" in the middle of America in the 1930's.  The light was so well done it transported me into the scene and the milieu.  In many theaters lighting directors, because of their limited inventory of lights, make use of a few hard spots and a handful of gels.  This set was literally as intricately lit as a blockbuster movie set.

I shot most of the action with a Nikon D700 and a handful of prime lenses.  My primary optic was Nikon's inexpensive 85mm f/1.8.  A wonderful lens that's often overlooked in the mad rush to have the fastest glass.

Checking the IPTC data shows that I set the camera at ISO 3200 and used the lens at f/3.2 with a shutter speed of around 1/25oth of a second.  

I also shot with a Fuji S5 but none of 
those images made the cut for one reason or another.  I have one complaint about the D700.  I don't think it focuses as well as the D300. It may be the spacing of the sensors or my own ineptitude but I hunts every now and then when I least expect it.

Someone will ask about my workflow in these situations and I want to talk about that because I'm of two minds when it comes to shooting theater.  If we had a big budget for post production I would probably want to
shoot every frame as a 14 bit uncompressed raw file. But the budget is all but non-existent.  Then there is the advantage that, with the D700, the camera corrects for the weaknesses of any attached lens by tweaking out any chromatic fringing, but it's only automatic in the Jpeg setting.  This feature makes the 85mm f/1.8 lens sharper and better than it used to be.

I usually set the WB at 3000-3200 as all the lights in the theater start life as tungstens, though most of them are gelled.

The other reality is a time constraint.  The marketing director needs the images as quickly as we can produce them.  The goal is always to shoot on Weds. and get the images to our daily paper on Thurs. afternoon.  In a typical rehearsal shoot I'll take 1200 to 1500 images.  If we processed raw files individually it would take an enormous amount of time.  That's why it's important to me to get things right in the camera.  While I'm shooting.  All the files I've placed here are untouched jpegs shot at the highest quality settings.

While I may screw up ten or fifteen percent of the shots I generally end up with at least a thousand usable images for the the marketing team.

As tough as it is to capture the action under low light, with constantly moving actors, my client is very happy with my work. The digital cameras do make things easier but in writing this I'm thinking through the process and reminding myself that the "feel" for the flow of a show and being able to anticipate action is more important than the camera gear.  

In fact,  in days past we've shot the shows with Leica M cameras and color transparency film and consistently had images published in the national theater magazines.  Our favorite way to roll back then was to use Kodak 320T slide film, pushed one stop in the processing to ISO 640 and shot as though it was ISO 500.  Spot meter around the neck along with two rangefinder bodies.  One sported a 35mm Summicron and the other a 75 mm 1.4 Summilux.  

You had to be able to feel your camera in the dark and know what your settings were.  And you had to know when there were  subtle light changes so you could meter again and hope the settings stayed the same for a few minutes.

In some regards shooting theater remains the same.  The spot meter is king and we keep the camera in full manual exposure mode.  There are just too many dark spots on stage to depend on automatic settings.  And when the light is all but gone manual focusing becomes mandatory.  I'll say one thing,  shooting live theater certainly keeps your photo reflexes in shape.

By the way, double clicking on the images will show them at 1200 pixels. Thanks for reading.  

P.S.  Fashion note:  If you shoot live events you might think to wear as much black as possible so that you blend into the darkness and not distract the actors or speakers.  I even wear a black baseball cap now that I'm dying my hair a bright silver.....  :-)

See more work:   Kirk Tuck's Commercial Website/An adventure in iWeb

Why you shouldn't shoot like everybody else.

By Kirk Tuck

Let's face it,  I don't think any of us woke up one morning and said, “The thing I love best is taking pictures of strident brides putting on yet another cookie cutter,  antique ivory white dress with the annoying little buttons down the back.....”.  We didn't.  We don't.  We do many of the annoying little jobs we do because they pay the bills.  The wedding profits pay for the mortgage and the car payments.  The bridal portraits help pay for new gear.  And the PR photos of “guys in ties”, done with the same old soft box and grid light on the background,  pays for dinners and electric bills.  But you are way off base if you think we buy for a moment that you shoot these things because you are driven by your “inner muse” to do your “Art”.  (That's capital “A” art.....).

We're not all wired the same way so if you really get a thrill running a business and making a profit and that's all you want out of your photography then I get it and we'll give you a pass on the art thing.  But the rest of you aren't getting off so easily.  Most of us got into this field because we loved taking photographs of people, or landscapes, or life on the streets.  I certainly didn't pick up a camera because I saw a cool product photograph in a catalog.

I picked up a camera because I loved taking photographs of my friends.  I wasn't drawn to images that were lit in a particular way, I really loved the stuff that was black and white, available light and relatively unposed.  When I had done this kind of work for years as a pleasurable hobby I found my self at loose ends after my partners and I sold our advertising  agency.  I had some money in my pocket and a bunch of people kept hiring me to photograph them or their loved ones in the style I'd done.

But.....as soon as the art moved from hobby to business there started a subtle erosion of the essential point of view that made my work different from everybody else's.  I learned that there was an established style to shooting business head shots and so I learned that style and began to offer it.  I had to buy lights and drag them into the mix.  I learned the “right way” to do an executive portrait and I started to incorporate what I learned into the mix.  

And if you think about it, the convergence of digital imaging and the photo sharing sites on the web has quickened a process of homogenization that now seems relentless.  How many of you think that a reportage style of wedding photography is wonderfully unique?  Really?  Even though every wedding book I've seen in the past three months has exactly the same stuff in it?  The close up of the fingers trying to button five hundred annoying buttons on the back of an antique ivory wedding dress?  The edgey images with the razor thin slice of sharp focus that just screams out, “Hey, look at me.  I got a Canon 5D and a fast 85mm lens...”  You know the drill.  We all know the drill because we presume that these are the images and styles that brides want and we want to deliver them so we can make the car payments and buy dinner.  And in the corporate world we know that the standard head shot is generally a boring piece of crap that doesn't move the game forward any more than music on your website.

I think we homogenize for a variety of valid anthropological reasons.  We have a subconscious  desire to please our tribe.  We fear striving for originality and excellence because we have a suspicion that these things aren't valued by our clients and showing different work might cause them to reject our services.  Which we then interpret to be a rejection of our selves.  We might fear the hostility that will inevitably come from those who are practicing the status quo.

But here's the nasty reality statement that I'm sure you've known was coming from the minute you started reading this:  The people who populate the top 1% of the art world don't really give a minute of thought to what might “play well in Peoria”.  They pursue their vision.  Their own vision.  And they do it in a way that basically welds them into the longer view of art history or photo history because it introduces aesthetic game changers that the rest of us will buy into decades down the road and work to homogenize into our collective offerings while some where a new generation comes knocking with the real goods.  But we won't understand the value of those goods until it's just too damn late.  Think Richard Avedon and Irving Penn.  Both of whom were incredible pioneers as opposed to the Chase Jarvis and Michael Grecco types who understand a trendy, contemporary use of the tools, and the power of good, pervasive marketing.

It's like Avedon invented Haute Cuisine while Jarvis added an extra strip of bacon to the cheeseburger.....while Grecco introduced pink mayonnaise and convinced Ludacris to put it on his bacon cheeseburger.....really, it is apt.

Consider this for a moment...two companies sell 90% of the cameras used by professionals today.  Both have the identical format!  Your choice is really sensor A or sensor B.  Processing algorithm A or   Processing algorithm B.  Can you imagine the photographers we truly admire from the film age being constrained to choose between just two different films?  Where is the differentiation?  Where is the rugged individualism?  How did this all happen?

Some postulate that every move toward convenience decreases overall quality.  That every wave of mass acceptance creates an inertia to consider whatever the masses have embraced to be the “standard”.  By that measure, clothes from Walmart are the new standard, and if you are truthful you'll acknowledge that you'd never get your wardrobe from Walmart...

So, what do you do? If you are a business person, first analyze your business carefully, and if you find that selling your current product, no matter how commodified it is, is going well and your market share is growing, then continue on your path.  But if you feel like you got into this field to do something unique and different but you have the queasy feeling that you let the weight of life and money drag you into some compromised stasis then start pushing back and re-connect with why you wanted to be here in the first place.

When I taught at The University of Texas at Austin I had a student who came to me and complained that she couldn't possibly fulfill her promise as a great fashion photographer unless she had a Hasselblad and a stable of good, Zeiss lenses.  But she whined that she could never afford them, so she was doomed to failure.  A week earlier I had overheard her telling a classmate that her parents had just bought her brand new, turbo-charged  Volvo station wagon. ( in the early 1980's this would have been viewed as radically indulgent within the student class---now, who knows?).  

I suggested that she sell the car and buy the dream.  She thought I was insane.  The money trumped the art.  The comfort quotient kicked the crap out of art.  I caught up with her two decades of “life lessons” later.  She has become a gifted artist.  She pursues her vision with a Holga camera.  She lives on the edge.  She doesn't own a car.  But here's the news flash, she's happier than she ever was because she's very clear about what she wants.  And what she wants is to pursue the vision she had in the very first gestalt moment of loving photography.

So, how do you change?  How about throwing away all the trappings and offering what you really feel compelled to offer as art, and the hell with the rest of the market.  After all, would you rather be the next Avedon or a watered down/ tarted up version of Olan Mills.  You have the “Art” with a capital “A” in you or you would have never chosen this business.  Owning a McDonald's franchise is a much more secure way to earn lots more money.  So trade down on lifestyle, if necessary, and trade up on artistic integrity.  I can almost guarantee that you'll spend less on therapy and Xanax.  And people may grow up wanting to be just like you----instead of wanting to have your lifestyle.

I know you might think this sounds preachy and high handed but it's really a synopsis of the journey of self discovery I've been on lately.  I've opened the files in my office and dragged in a big ass trash can.  Anything that doesn't feel good, special and all about my work goes into the can.  All the event negatives from the 1990's.  All the executive portraits older than three years.  And I've started showing only the styles I want to shoot.  Not everything I could do in a pinch.  It makes me feel lighter.  Like I'm freeing up mindshare.  But that's something for another month.

In the meantime my prescription for change is to go back to using your very first camera for a month.  If you learned on a Canon AE-1 or a Minolta Maxxum 7000 or a Holga, go back and get one and load it up.  Shoot the way you once loved for a month.  Live with your style for a month and see if it doesn't feel better. 

I could give you more advice about shooting with little strobes but it would all be bullshit until you figure out why you shoot, and what you want to have coming out of your camera.  Customers?  If the work is satisfying to you then you'll find the market you want.  It may not be the market that supports your BMW payments but remember, you trade you life for money and you'll never get either back, so you might as well start doing it on your terms right now!

Thanks, Kirk

Author:  Minimalist Lighting: Professional Techniques for Location Photography

      Minimalist Lighting: Professional Techniques for Studio Photography

(really, two totally separate books with annoyingly similar titles.....)

See more work:   Kirk Tuck's Commercial Website/An adventure in iWeb