Do you remember when we used to print things?

I got just got copies of an annual report that I worked on last year.  We started in the Summer when it was hot and steamy and we finished on a freezing, overcast day in December.  The design of the annual report was very, very good but the thing I liked most about it (in addition to the photography) was the printing.  Whoever spec'ed the printing didn't mess around with skinny, toilet tissue newsprint.  They went with rich, glossy premium white stock.  The high priced spread.  And they used a six color offset printer with nice machines.  No cheesy powder dye printing.  And the result is makes this report look like the best handprinted Lightjet/Cibachrome prints you ever saw.  And you know what?  When everyone else settles for what they think is "good enough" and then something like this comes along and sits next to it, the makers of the lesser work should just hang their heads and walk away.

And maybe that's where we're coming to with photography.  Maybe so many people have settled for "just-good-enough" stock photography and "just-okay-but-really-cheap" production values and "she's- not-really-the-person-we-wanted-in-the-ad-but-she-works-in-HR-and-she-was-free" not quite there models, that they've diminished peoples' memories of what really great stuff looked like.  And when something really well done comes along it sticks out from the crowd like gold coins in a pile of...... leftover pizza.  And everyone recognizes the difference in quality.  And then clients will want something that's as good as "that piece that Bob did."  You know, the one that won all the awards and grabbed everyone's attention.

Could it be that after a decade of "good enough" the pendulum could actually swing back in the other direction toward........WOW!!!!! THAT'S FANTASTIC.  ?????

Well.  One of my clients just did it and I was blown away.  I wonder if we can make that reality the next big social trend.  We could call it.........I WANT STUFF TO BE THE VERY BEST IT CAN BE.  Because we only get to do this one time around.  And wouldn't it be great if the work of our lives was something we could be proud of?

While printing presses have been modernized, at the top it's still the same process of spreading ink across a sheet of paper.  At high rates of speed.  Yeah.  Let's do this thing right.

LED lighting. I'm finally getting a handle on this stuff. And I'm using it more and more. It's a "style" thing.

I did a project a little while back for the Austin Technology Incubator and most of it entailed taking photographs of the really smart people who seem to be inventing the next wave of entrepreneurial businesses.  The building we photographed in had a wild mix of business start-ups, mentors and educators, all seemingly bent on discovering or sharing why some businesses thrive while others never seem to get cranking no matter how much time and money get thrown in.  The building also had an amazing long central atrium that was filled with diaphanous clouds of softly diffused sunlight.

I used one of the "sky bridges" that linked the two sides of the buildings together as a portrait location for some of my shots.  What I wanted was the "idea" or feeling of a large, open space but without the instrusion of too much detail.  It was the perfect venue for using the technique of shooting a moderate telephoto lens at a shallow aperture.  I chose to use a rather pedestrian (but more than adequate) Canon 85mm 1.8 lens, stopped down to f2.8.  While the area behind my subject was nice and bright the ceiling over the bridge blocked all the top light and, since he was on the outside edge looking in he wasn't lit by much fill from the other side.

I knew I would have to add light to balance the difference between the illumination where he was standing with the illumination behind him.  I also wanted the light to have some direction so I would want it to come from one side, high enough to put a little shadow under his chin.  I added a second, harder but weaker kick light from the same side just to add some teeth to the light.

I could have used a small flash into any number of modifying accessories but I've become weary of the constant use of flash.  Subjects are used to continuous light.  They don't react as much to that.  Flash always seems to draw more attention.  And subjects also seem to "play to" flash more than to other kinds of light.  I was in an experimental mood so I shot all the work on that particular day with a combination of different LED light fixtures.  Some battery powered and some A/C powered.  And what I liked, once again, was the WYSIWYG nature of the lights.  With a 1/4 minus green (a magenta colored filter) over the main light source the balance for the diffuse daylight is pretty darn close.  I dropped the green saturation by about -10 in Lightroom 3.2 and that seem to make everything just right.

Here's what the set up looks like:

160 LED fixture on the far left.  500 LED fixture in my typical "portrait" position being diffused by a one stop scrim on a Westcott FastFlag frame.  Canon 5d2 with an 85mm 1.8 on a Berlebach wooden tripod.


When I first started working with the LED lights I felt a bit "off" and that perceived lack of mastery is probably what pushed me to continue to work with them.  I hate unsolved mysteries.   And, in truth, I haven't really changed a bunch of parameters since I started as much as I've just allowed myself to sink in a become comfortable with the lights.  It's the same thing we did with studio flash but for many of us it happened so long ago that we've forgotten the learning pains of the process.

Now it's becoming my preference (where practical) to light portraits with LED's.  I'm into some mental groove that makes me happy to perennially problem solve and so, I guess the constant need to blend light sources instead of overpowering them is giving me some kind of nice feedback loop.

Let's revisit the ground rules for the blog again:  You don't have to light like me.  You don't have to use the same gear.  I'm just writing "out loud" trying to help you and me understand why I sometimes approach a task the way I do and what the attractions are.

And I'll be frank,  part of the attraction right now is that so few other people are lighting things the way I do.  And that's cool too.

Nostalgia for the good old days....of early digital.

This is not so much a walk through remembrance gardens as it is a quick salute to one old war horse of a camera.  My Kodak DCS 760's last battery bit the dust.  It holds enough charge to get off maybe ten or fifteen images before shutting down altogether.  I've made no secret through the years that this is my favorite digital camera for all the same reason I've always talked about here.  I doesn't have an extensive menu of choices.  It was built to be a RAW only camera and Jpeg capability was added later via a firmware upgrade.  There are very few user settings to work with.  There's no "dynamic range enhancement" feature because the camera already kicked butt when it came to dynamic range.

There's only two focus modes and while you can set single and continuous for frame rates you'll only get 1.5 fps as your fastest throughput.  There are no "sports modes".   There's no "vivid"  or "landscape" setting.  The body is based on Nikon's venerable F5 and the whole thing is a nearly five pound block of metal.  The screen on the back is miserable.  It pushes you to double check what you're doing with a good light meter.  And, even in their prime of life, the batteries sucked and the camera sucked down batteries.

So why do I love this camera?  Well,  it's the same reason any photographer should love any camera:  The files look so nice.   So very, very nice.  Even today I love the look I get from this camera.  It's enough to make me plug in the A/C adapter and get busy.  When I look back over the last ten years at all the digital cameras I've owned this one consistently gave me images and campaigns that looked different and better.  Almost magical.   In fact, one of the things that attracted me to the first generation of  Olympus professional cameras (as exemplified by the E1's that I still own.....) was the look of the files from the Kodak sensors.  So different from the other solutions on the market.

Yes,  I've been using PhotoShop for decades.  I can probably emulate the look with enough post processing but the point is that the art just squirted out of this camera with reckless abandon.

The shot above was part of a series for the Austin Lyric Opera.  We shot it with a Nikon 105 DC lens nearly wide open.  It was lit with a six by six foot screen to the left of frame, very close in and slightly over the top of Meredith.  The main light source was a 1,000 watt Profoto ProTungsten, continuous halogen light.  The background (nearly 60 feet away) was lit with a single 300 watt DeSisti spotlight.  I used an 80B filter on the camera to bring up the blue spectrum and avoid blue channel noise in the file.

The image was processed in Kodak's Photo Desk software and then tweaked in PhotoShop.

I had other cameras available to me at the time but I chose this one because it matched my vision of the palette I wanted for this job.  Too often we buy one camera or one system then shoehorn everything into that one set of tools.  And it's not always an optimum choice.  The painfully high res camera may not always be the ultimate choice.  One system may have lens strengths in one area by not another.  Your mood may change.  Even now,  with all the feedback I've gotten over buying some Canon gear it's good to remember that I shoot with more than that one system.

Granted, it's easier to shoot with the cleanest, highest res LCD's as guides.  It's nice to have great high ISO performance.  But I still keep two different Kodak cameras around for their unique color and file contrast.  I keep a Sony R1 around because it love that lens for outdoor stuff.  I love the Pen series from Olympus for its feel and its gorgeous jpegs (and good movie mode) and I still keep a drawer full of Rollei SLR MF film cameras when I want real black and white and not just the canned SilverFX  looks. (I'm sure I'll hear from SilverFX fans so I'll just say that they're really good.  They're not Tri-X on Seagull warmtone or Ilfobrom Gallerie).

I'm not writing this to suggest that you rush out and buy old cameras.  Or even new cameras.  I wouldn't have brought it up at all if I hadn't just put together a portfolio full of portraits and lifestyle shots and spent the better part of a month selecting and printing images.  I assumed that the old Kodak images would fall apart compared to some of the newer stuff I'd been shooting on the Canon 5D2 but it just wasn't the case.  When it comes to portraits it's a whole different ballgame than technical subjects with lots of detail and sharp edges.  At 13 by 19 it all looked technically good.  And that included images from the 6 megapixel Kodak, a ten megapixel Olympus, some Nikon D2x files, some Canon files and even an entry from the Leaf AFi7 system (39 megapixels).  They all coexisted just fine in one book.

I showed the book yesterday at a design firm called Pentagram.  The designer I showed the book to stopped and savored the four images from the Austin Lyric Opera series.  I included a variation of the one above.  To her, the look outweighed any sort of technical differences.  It might have been a different ballgame if I'd been showing landscapes or big production ad shots.  But for portraits.  I think I was right a year ago.  The Kodak's were a milestone.

Note:  I wrote this last Summer.  And I'm reposting it today because I was able to get brand new batteries for the DCS 760 and so I've been shooting with it again.  It's wonderful.  It's also written as an argument for people who want to hold my feet to the fire for not sticking with one brand, one style, one way of being a photographer.  Photography is a celebration of diversity and evolving ideas and techniques.  Not a hobby embedded in the amber of "best practices."  That's great for doctors and engineers but nonsense for artists and visual communicators....

A brief, one sided conversation about lens testing and reality....

Testing lenses by shooting targets and graphing the resolution line pairs is interesting, compelling and.....silly.  Most high speed lenses don't do "great corners".  And in either image above the ability to have great performance in the corners is beyond meaningless.

To read the DXO reviews of Canon's fast primes you would think they were all designed by morons who couldn't make sharp glass if they broke it into little shards.  But very few lenses are really computed with intention of being flat field, macro lenses.

Gear is fun but it's what we do with it that counts.

 Kirk and the clients.  I'm praying hard that the carefully feathered umbrellas deliver photons to the back of the room.  Love the ladder.

I just wrote a review about the Olympus EPL2 and I'll admit it was fun to get back all the comments.  It was even more fun to get nearly 20,000 viewers in three days!  But concentrating on gear reviews sends a skewed message to readers who are beginning their journey in photography or for people who are contemplating leaving the warm safety and security of "real" jobs to try their hand at freelance photography.  I think everyone would love to believe that, by investing in the right camera and a magic lens, they would be able to enjoy success in the wild and woolly field of "professional" photography.  I wish it were true.  I've already spent tens of thousands of dollars on gear....I should be a millionaire by now.....I'll have to check with my CFO, maybe I already am.....but I doubt it.

As the antidote to the "big" review I thought I'd dissect the shoot done Monday after I posted the blog (yesterday) and came down from the fun of mass communications to the reality of the business on the ground.  Is that okay with you?

I had an assignment to photograph for one of the best clients I've worked with in a while.  They are a large medical practice here in Austin.  Their practice has nearly ten locations and almost 100 employees. Monday was the day of their annual meeting and they held it at a giant, local restaurant.  My job was to shoot candid shots of the meeting, set up, direct and shoot a group shot of 100 people and then reset on the fly and shoot seven different groups from the different offices with anywhere from 10 to 20 people in the groups.  Sounds easy, right?

Let's do the dissection.

The group shot was going to take place in a large room with a stage.  The lights would have to be at least twelve feet in the air, as far back from the front row as possible with 60 inch umbrellas to soften the light, and they'd have to be feathered just right to keep to much of light off the front row and put just enough light on the back row.  That also meant we'd need a lot more power than I'd be able to get out of conventional shoe mount flashes (sorry Strobist disciples...).  But the lights would have to be set up in a public area with traffic.

The smaller group shots could be done in the same area but with a canvas background and they'd have to be done right after the main group shot so we'd have to be quick because we had dozens and dozens of people waiting and we were between them and their unofficial happy hour.

I also needed a camera that would reliably handle the candid shots I also needed to take in the main meeting room.  And it was a bit of a nightmare in there, with light coming in from floor to ceiling, west facing window on one side of the room and a darkened area with a projector on the other.

So I just showed up and we shot, right?  Nope.

The main photo would commemorate the 40th anniversary of the practice so we were determined to do this job absolutely correctly.  That started with a scouting trip to the location a week out from the event.  Yes, we charge for that.  The client and I went thru every step of the upcoming meeting and we mapped out how we would handle the group, how they would be arranged, who would be sitting and who would be standing.  We worked with the venue to ascertain when we could have access to the room and what we needed in terms of seating, graphics on a large screen in the back of the room, and where to load in gear.

I decided I'd do the shot with two big umbrella lights so the night before the shoot I put two Profoto Acute 600b battery packs on the chargers after running a "set up and fire" test on both systems.  I wanted both system batteries charged and ready to go.  I also charged several extra batteries for the Canon 5Dmk2's I selected for the project.    Before I hit the rack I made a thorough list of everything I would need for the next day.  The next morning I went to early swim practice (7 am) so I'd have ample time to pack and organize.

I packed a collapsible ladder, two complete Profoto 600b systems  (six hundred watt seconds each, one head each) two sixty inch softlighter umbrellas.  Three twelve foot Manfrotto stands.  I brought along a Manfrotto Magic Arm and camera plate which I attached, in lieu of a tripod, to the top of the ladder with a Super Clamp.  That gave me a solid and stable shooting platform.  I packed two Canon 5Dmk2's and both a 24-105mm L zoom and the same complement of wide angle and telephoto prime lenses as back up.  I also brought a Sekonic 758 flash meter and a set of background stands.  I brought a laptop with the graphic for the background screen loaded on it and also the logo on a disk.  The final cargo that went into the Element was four twenty pound sand bags.

I was scheduled to arrive at the location at noon but, of course, I got there at 11:30.  You never know about traffic.  My assistant, Amy, arrived at 11:45 for a noon call.  She shares my view about traffic.  We had a brief discussion with my client and we decided that we really would like to have a white background behind the groups to make it easier to drop out the individual office shots.  I sent Amy on the one hour round trip to retrieve said background from the studio.  No sweat.  The giant group shot would happen at three and the smaller groups, the ones we needed the background for, would be after that.

Before Amy left we loaded the cases, ladder and other materiel onto our cart and dragged it in the and unloaded it.  I did as much as I could in terms of setting up but the room wouldn't really be fully available to us until two o'clock.  I grabbed a camera, set the ISO to 2500 and headed into the main meeting room for candid shots.  I love shooting events.  You have a temporary license to get close in and shoot people without feeling self conscious.

When Amy returned we set up our main lights for the big group.  We put forty pounds of sandbags on each of the two stands and also used the strobe boxes as ballasts.  Using the Profoto's at their full 600 watts per unit, bouncing into the 60 inch umbrellas, I was able to set an exposure of f11.5 throughout the room at full power, based on an ISO of 320.  And that's an ISO I know to be optimum with the 5D cameras.  Once we were set and we measured every row with an incident flash meter I double checked that the radio slaves were banging and that every component had fresh batteries.  I attached  our other camera to the top of the ladder with the Magic Arm and locked in a  good composition.  Then I went back to shooting candids as Amy stood guard over the set up.

Right at 3pm the meeting broke and the people flowed into my shooting space light the rushing tide.  If you are shy and retiring this is not the kind of job you'll want to tackle.  I needed to get 100 people into position quickly so I could make this shot work before the crowd lost it's positive energy.  I can get very loud.  And I did.  We moved all the people into position and then dealt with the stragglers.  I got onto the ladder and fine tuned the crowd from the shooting position.  Amy's job was to make sure both boxes were firing and nothing technically failed.  My job was to get people to focus their energy to the front of the room and not blink, scratch, nervously joke with the person next to them, etc. until we had a couple fo perfect shots in the can.

I chose the battery powered Profotos because I've shot big groups before and the last thing I wanted to do was to string long extension cords across the crowded floor and take the chance that someone would trip over one and bring the whole shoot to a quick and liability laden halt.  But the tradeoff is that at full power they take four or five seconds to recycle.  That's where the photographer's playful banter comes in handy.

Before I announced the successful end of the big shot I made sure to remind the people in the smaller groups that they would need to stay close by while Amy and I added a background and reset our lights.  We moved a white background onto the shooting stage and then manhandled the sandbagged lights into  new positions.  The background was up, the lights positioned and powered down a bit in less than three minutes.  Amy stood in for the meter reading and then I called the first group in.  Two minutes and ten exposures later we were on to the next.  We kept up the pace and within twenty minutes all the groups had been shot and kidded around with.

At this juncture I'll mention what you can obviously see in the photographs of me on the ladder.  I am wearing a suit and a tie and a pressed dress shirt.  (I did take my jacket off to unload the car......)
Why?  Because we, as photographers, always moan about money and budgets and the fact that people don't take what we do seriously.  Well, it's hardly a surprise when so many of our "profession"  dress like roadies or starving artists or musicians that people think our reward is our "artistic" satisfaction and our alternative lifestyles.  The suit (or coat and tie)  reassures my marketing directors that we mean business and, for most people we photograph, it means we operate in the same strata as the people who run the companies they work for .

I work as an equal with my clients.  Not as an employee.  And most of the people who actually sign the checks dress professionally and, whether it's a conscious decision or not, the way you dress is a clue about where you are in the pecking order.  Asking for top fees?  Dress like it!

I shook hands with the partners and officers and then Amy and I packed up our gear and wheeled it back out to the noble Honda Element.  We got back to the studio and broke everything out of the travel cases, made sure we didn't leave any crucial elements behind, and then stuck the battery powered strobe packs and camera batteries on the chargers.

After Amy left I sat at the computer and ingested all of the files by category, backed them up to a second drive and started editing.  By dinner I'd done a quick but good edit and I started the file conversion to web gallery small jpeg files.  After dinner I started uploads to two different galleries and the went about checking and packing all the gear I would need for the next day's shoot.  A totally different shoot.  This one on location at one of the practice's offices.  I did NOT wear a suit for that one.  I wore a dark grey sport coat, white button down and a slim, burgundy tie.  And the client was better dressed than I.

Once the client chooses images for the website and ads I'll spend some time working with my retoucher so she knows what the client and I want, and then, upon delivery,  I'll make one more set of back up files  and get my billing out the door.  And that's the anatomy of yesterday's shoot.

Did stuff go wrong?  You bet.  I left the studio without my wallet.  Amy got it for me when she went back for the background.  I wish the room had been bigger so I could have shot from further back, etc, etc.  But it all went pretty much according to plan and that's what good clients pay for.  Dress up.  Tomorrow should be your "A" game.

Kirk on a ladder trying to levitate the crowd.

After Monday's shoot, and all the wrap up and post production, I clicked off the lights and headed for home.  All of fifteen steps away.  I said goodnight to Ben and, as Belinda worked on designing a website for one of her clients I cracked open the laptop that's dedicated to writing books and got back to work on the fifth book.  The due date is fast approaching.  By 2 am the house was quiet, I'd hit my 2000 word goal and I crept off to bed.  In five hours I'd be back in the pool, and then doing some variation of this day all over again.