Revisiting a favorite portrait shot for Restaurant Business Magazine.

Vic's Dinner. At the "Y" in Oakhill, Texas.

Vic's is long gone. There's a bank building or something where the diner used to be. I was asked to photograph the owner by Restaurant Business Magazine to illustrate an article they were doing on how new smoking laws were effecting restaurants. Vic's was a last hold out for smokers. You could tell the minute you walked in the front door. It's odd to remember a time in the Austin area when there were ashtrays on every table and a gray-white cloud of smoke lingering almost invisibly around the upper corners of the room...

Shot note: Mamiya 6 camera with 75mm lens and color transparency film.

When cameras go all Frankenstein.

Setting up a Panasonic G6 as a "b-roll" camera for an interview.

I love the way those wacky guys in the video industry trick out their cameras. They put 'em on rails, have follow focus knobs hanging off the sides, put them in cages with all kinds of cables attached and make lens hoods into dramatic, architectural structures. Then they put the whole mess on top of fluid heads that look as serious as the cameras. How many knobs per square inch (kpsi) does it take to make sure a camera is ready to roll a few minutes of interview? I'd say plenty. 

Above is my basic starting point for a Frankenstein camera. I'm sure the product manager for this consumer item presumed that the main use of a $600 digital camera would be handheld recording of kids blowing out candles and first bike rides. And studies have shown that 94.067% of all owners of digital interchangeable cameras use only the kit lens that came with the unit. Kind of makes all those arguments about the safety and long term security of composite lens mounts meaningless. 

I figure that cameras with interchangeable lens mounts were intended to be used with multiple lenses. If the photo gods had wanted us to work with only one lens they would either have made all cameras like the Sony RX10 and put Zeiss zooms on them (and made them par focal as well....) or they would have made all camera with only 50mm equivalent lenses and been done with it. I'm happy it didn't turn out that way because few things make me as happy as putting wildly inappropriate lenses on crazy small bodies. 

In the illustration above I'm using a Rokinon (Samyang? Bower? etc.) 85mm 1.4 Cine lens on the G6. Our main camera for the project will be a Panasonic GH3 sporting a 50mm lens. I really like shooting video with the G6 because I can set up and fine focus with the focus peaking and I can punch in and magnify the frame to confirm really spot on focus. The 85mm is something like a 170mm equivalent on the m4:3 bodies and in this application, where I want a really tight shot of a person talking to use in editing as a cut away, it's just right. Since it's such a long focal length I can put the camera much further away from the subject and still get a nice, tight frame.  

Why not another GH3? Well, the color between the G6 and the GH3's matches up very well and I don't feel like I have to shoot at super high res for my quick b-roll shots. The other reason is that the focus peaking on the G6 makes set up and focus confirmation with this long lens quicker and easier. I can punch in with the GH3 but I can't monitor zebras as I go. 

A lot of people are writing about "hybrid" use of small, inexpensive digital cameras like the Panasonics and the Olympus OMD EM-1 and I think that everyone is on the right track. Done well these inexpensive cameras can rival much bigger and much more expensive DSLRs. That opens up the field to everyone. But where I think a lot of people are missing the boat is in not using multiple cameras for production. Many traditionalists, from the video and the still sides of the aisle, still have the idea of having one "perfect" camera to do everything with. In video that means setting up and shooting one angle and then setting up and shooting another angle over and over again. In many situations, such as conversational style interviews you need to be able to cut back and forth between two speakers and to make things more interesting and have more footage to use in edit it would be nice to have head and shoulders shots of each person in the conversation as well as a wide shot that covers both people. 

Now we can do that inexpensively by adding several six hundred dollar cameras to the mix. One on the wide shot and one each on the tighter shots. With all the cameras running simultaneously you have so much more material to choose from.

And the same holds true for dramatic work. You can have one camera on a scene that's handheld, a wide camera and as many different points of view in other cameras scattered around the scene. Total coverage for each scene in one set up. The low priced cameras are a boon to film makers.

I'm extending the idea into stills. I have a portrait shoot with a series of professionals this week and I'm planning to use a big Sony camera for the "hero" portrait. That would be the classic, looking into camera shot. But I'm planning to have at least one additional camera set up to do a series of more casual shots from a slightly different angle. I'll be able to trigger that camera remotely with a radio trigger. That way I can get double duty from each sitting. 

Shot notes: The image of the G6 and 85mm Rokinon was shot in studio with a Sony RX10 using a combination of florescent light and a Fiilex P360 for backlight. It was shot at ISO 100 and processed normally in Lightroom. Blow it up and look at the quality. It's reduced to a bit less than half the original file size. I think it looks pretty good. 

Finally. FINALLY!!! Four of my five books about photography are back in stock at Amazon.

The LED Book. It's finally back in stock.

While the end of 2013 was fun and calm and happy for the most part for me there was one little burr under my saddle. One scorpion in my cowboy boot. One little rattlesnake hiding on the floorboard of the pickup. Three of my best selling actual, printed on paper (soon to be collector's items?) books were out of stock at Amazon.com for the entire month of January. I thought it would get resolved quickly as in: more books printed. more books delivered by the distributor. more proactive retail braininess on everyone's part. But I watched America's most potent buying season fade, watched the Christmas trees get recycled and watched the Valentine's Day adds crop up in the stores and coffee shops and the website still showed:  "Brilliant. In high demand. But unavailable at this time."

So much for my careful financial planning and my resolve to be able to buy new track shoes for the boy this quarter....

But now, like a Super Bowl Miracle, four of my five books are back in stock (although in limited supplies).  If you didn't get one from the holidays and it's been driving you crazy then now is the time to rush to your keyboard and place your order. Maybe next quarter will be the time Ben will have more shoes....

Seriously though. I like to think that there's a lot more information and examples in each of the books than you'll ever get in one day long workshop and the price of the books is about what you'd budget for coffee en route to a workshop and happy hour afterwards. Each of them is under $25.

Please go and buy a book today. Even if it's nothing more than a souvenir of our time together here at the blog.  Thank You!

If there's a special camera you need to buy on Amazon you can use one of the links above to get to Amazon, navigate to your much needed camera purchase and VSL will earn a small commission directly from Amazon at no cost to your, your loved ones or your heirs. Thanks!

Checking in to see how my first course at Craftsy.com is doing.

Victoria. My model for our Studio Portrait Lighting Workshop at Craftsy.com

It was the middle of July, last year, when I headed up to Denver to do my first photography class with Craftsy.com at I was nervous, filled with trepidation and a little overwhelmed. I had been asked to teach a class on portrait lighting which I've done many times but this time I'd be doing it in front of two cameras with a microphone attached to my shirt and a radio transmitter stuck in my back pocket. 

I guess I assumed that classes like these, educational programming that would be streamed to the web, would make use of teleprompters. And, as most people here know I can write fast and fill pages. I'd have no problem producing reams of information I could have read back on a teleprompter. But Craftsy.com doesn't work that way. They like spontaneous. Maybe the producers there like to see the "talent" sweat a bit.....(just kidding) but they don't use teleprompters or traditional scripts. I worked from an outline that we collaborated on and put together weeks in advance. 

Most of the first workshop explores portrait lighting and I made the decision to use mostly continuous light sources as we could see the effects of the different lighting instruments as we worked along. 

The finished class runs about two and a half hours. I feel like I look nervous for the first few minutes but I later get into the teaching and everything smooths out. I've come to like teaching this way since it allows me and the producer to go back and try stuff again. It allows students to back up the video and go over parts again for more reflection. And the course is available to the student for the life forever. 

An interesting addition to the platform is the ability to ask questions about the lessons or about lighting in general, on the website, and get a response from the instructor. The best part of the overall value proposition is that, if you don't like the course you have a money back guarantee. Buy it, watch it, evaluate the value and decide. 

My profits from the course come solely from royalties for each class sold. Craftsy takes some risk, I take a risk. They put in lots of production and editing time, pay their crews and producers. I put in a days or preparation and three solid days of on camera production, followed by an hour a week of online "office hours" answering questions. 

You can think of this class in two ways. One is that you'll learn basic portrait lighting and posing techniques so it's educational.  The second way is as entertainment. You've been reading my stuff here on the blog for who knows how long so now you can put a face and a voice and body language onto this mostly anonymous writer and enjoy the contrast between how you thought I would be and how I really am.

Anyway, here's a link to the class for 25% off. I hope you'll give it a shot and see what it's all about. 

Thanks for reading through this brief marketing message. 

What format is this?

 

I've been playing a lot with the Sony RX10 camera for the last two weeks and admit I am a bit obsessed about it but I've been reading too many ill informed opinions on the web and the whole subject of shallow and deep depth of field are starting to drive me nuts. Everyone seems to consider so much aesthetic stuff in photography in purely binary or black and white terms. Something is either good or bad. Sharp or not sharp. In total focus or totally out of focus. Even when the rest of us see things in shades of gray, subtle gradations of settings and effects. Zones of focus...

The difference that most amateurs are perplexed and binary over is the idea that the depth of focus on all bigger formats is tiny, almost razor thin, while any camera with a sensor smaller than whatever sensor they are currently championing is only able to render scenes with an infinite range of sharpness. You can show people stuff and you can explain ideas to them but you can't understand it for them....

So, above is a shot of a sausage maker that we did in Elgin, Texas. Tell me which camera and lens you think I shot this with and why. If you've seen it in an older blog before please don't give away the technical details until people have had the opportunity to weigh in.  Thanks.

(edit: added a second shot. Take a guess at the camera and lens on the one below, as well...)

Have fun!

The reveal: the top photo, sausage maker, was done on a 4x5 inch field camera equipped with a 135mm f5.6 lens. The bottom image was done with a Panasonic GH3 using an 85mm Rokinon lens.

One night at one theater then the next night at another. Bag of mini-cams in tow. ISO and mixed color insanity.

Sony RX10 at 3200 ISO.

When we last left off the chairman of the Visual Science Lab had just written about a lovely evening at the theater shooting an hilarious but traditionally produced play called, In the Room Next Door. The folks at Zach Theater were rehearsed to the nth degree and the production staff were as flawless and accurate as a computer.  And not just a generic computer....a really good computer. Go see that essay (which is a paean to the RX10) here: http://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2014/01/my-theatrical-test-of-sony-rx10-and.html

Well, yesterday I went to a different kind of theater production. No less fun but where the production the night before was perfectly regimented yesterday's fare was all about improvisation and on the fly, on the stage direction. The production was: The Bowie Project: A Rock and Roll Soundpainting. And you can read more about it in the Austin Chronicle, here: http://www.austinchronicle.com/arts/2014-01-31/the-bowie-project-a-rock-and-roll-soundpainting/

I was pre-recession busy yesterday with raw post processing in the morning, some accounting for Ben's college apps over lunch and a bunch of portrait retouching for a large medical practice for the first half of the afternoon. I remembered (almost at the last minute: thanks, iCal!!!) that I'd promised my friend, Colin, that I'd photograph the final dress rehearsal for his project (The David Bowie Soundpainting) and I needed to be right in the middle of downtown in less than half an hour.

Fortunately it's VSL policy to charge batteries and back up cards the minute we walk into the studio from assignment so the cameras were packed and ready to go. One Sony RX10, two Panasonic GH3s and a couple of fun lenses for the m4:3 camera. Should have just left it at home since the RX10 worked charmingly.

So, here's the deal. The Bowie play is completely improv. There's no script. There are snippets of choreography. There is a modern dance company involved. A Bowie singer. A rock band. A guy who let the fog machine run wild and two guys named Steve who loved playing with all of the cyberlights and catwalk mounted gelled spots---sometimes all at the same time. The direction? Shoot whatever you want from wherever you want. The play will last for between about 45 minutes to maybe 70 minutes. It might be longer. There's no intermission. Go!

I love most of David Bowie's music and it's always fun to see entertainers engaged in pure play so I just went for it. Here's a selection.....

 Panasonic GH3. 25mm.

 Panasonic GH3. 25mm.

 Panasonic GH3. 25mm.

RX10 wide open at 3200.

My Theatrical Test of the Sony RX10. And what a fun romp it was.

My mistake. I used the clear digital zoom (interpolated pixels) feature on this one 

to get a 400mm equivalent that I could handhold.... 

One shoot. One camera. One Lens. (Not shown here, but still yummy: 24mm equiv. shots 

of the whole stage. And yes, the lines are straight).

By Austin Photographer, Kirk Tuck ©2014

If you've read the blog for a while you know that I shoot a lot of marketing images for the best live Theater in central Texas, Zach Theatre here in Austin. I've been doing it for twenty years now and I'm finally getting proficient at the whole thing. A lot of our shoots are studio productions done weeks or months before a play is ready for an audience. We used to do that kind of assignment with big strobes and Hasselblad film cameras and now we press whatever really good digital camera we happen to have into service. Any of the major brands, with more than 8 megapixels can do a great jobs when you have the camera anchored on a stout tripod, when you are using the best lenses and when you hot glue the ISO dial solidly to 100.

But the other portion of our photo assignments from Zach Theatre are what we call, "running shoots." These are the images that we take at the final dress rehearsals, and since the opening of the new Topfer Theatre (Zach's premier theater and stage) we do those dress rehearsals with an audience of "family and friends" in the house.

In the past I've tended to shoot these with full frame cameras and fast, long lenses but from time to time I've tossed in lots of Four-Thirds, micro 4:3s, and a never ending mix of strange birds like the original Sony R1 (still have some great shots from the Janis Joplin show from that camera...).
When I do a running shoot I try to cover everything so the marketing people have a wide range of images they can use across diverse marketing opportunities. That means I shoot a lot frames. So I get to know the camera I'm shooting with inside and out.

If you've shot live theater before you know that the light levels on the stage change constantly. You know that the light levels can get pretty low.  You know that the color of the light changes all the time (you can thank programmable LEDs for that...). And you know that actors constantly move and that their hands move even faster (1/250th and above can help stop hand blur. Sometimes).  You either want a camera that can read all that complexity or you need a camera that you can make adjustments and changes to almost automatically. A poorly set up camera can be a nightmare. A slow focuser will drive you nuts. And, you'll shoot at ISOs starting at 800 and, if you are lucky, cap at 3200.

In earlier digital days I found the Nikon D700 to be a wonderful theater camera when it came to focus and ease of exposure adjustments. It was great when we worked in tight. The big revolution for me came with the introduction of great EVFs.  Especially the one in the Sony a99. For the first time I could make "real time" adjustments and have a high degree of certainty that the images out of camera would match what I was previewing through the eyepiece. No more shoot-and-chimp.

I've been happy with the a99 and the 70-200mm 2.8 G lens but the entire universe is our lab and our newest infatuation here at VSL is the new baby Sony, the RX10. So, with a bit of trepidation I decided to go totally "bridge-cam" for the dress rehearsal of, "The Room Next Store."  Also known, in the theater circles as, "The Vibrator Play."  According to the camera critics I would be facing insurmountable odds. I'd be gnashing my teeth at the contrast detect auto focus. Especially on moving subjects going in and out of the shadows. The zoom of the lens would be too slow to catch any decisive moments, and the depressing capper to the whole gloomy undertaking would be the sheer nasty-ness of the microscopically small sensor. Even smaller than in the Olympus "world champion" camera. According to some critics I'd be better off using my cellphone....

Well. I'll cut to the happy ending. None of the crazy negative stuff came to pass. And the play is really fun, and funny and filled with clever examinations of sexual politics and hilarious plots twists. Well, just imagine a victorian society circa the invention of electricity and the idea of "curing" female and male "hysteria" with a vibrator.... I messed up a few frames from laughing too hard. I enjoyed it so much I was even able to ignore the woman in front of me who pulled out her cellphone and texted a bit...

Let's talk about camera set up. I have to face some limitations. The RX10 is not going to match the a99 or any full frame camera at ISO' above 800 so I decided to try to stick to ISO 800 and use 1600 as my high limit. Then I go backward and try to figure out what combination of shutter speed and apertures will match up we with that. I aimed for 1/200th of a second as a target shutter speed but I was willing to go all the way down to 1/80th since the image stabilization in this camera is very good. I knew I'd spend most of the evening at the long end of the lens so the extra stability was nice to have.

I was sitting in the middle of a (non-paying) audience (and I'm not a "dirty baby diaper hold" shooter) so I turned off the rear LCD and depended exclusively on the very good EVF. And that's actually a battery saving move as well. You see, there's a proximity sensor at the eyepiece and if you have only the eyepiece implemented whenever you move your eye from the finder it shuts off the monitor. Instant "eco" mode.

I usually shoot in large/finest Jpegs but I though I might need some extra finesse in noise reduction so this time I shot RAW which also freed me up to shoot in automatic white balance, thinking I would do my color corrections in post. I used the movable AF focusing protocol and selected "smallest" for the AF box.

S-AF for the mode. No weird modes like HDR or DRO engaged. But I did enable the Clear Image Zoom. High ISO noise reduction was not set as that menu item is grayed out in raw.

Here's what I found: The camera never failed to lock in quickly and accurately to the subject on the stage that I selected. The focus, unless the subjects were in deep shadow, was as quick as nearly every phase detection autofocus DSLR I've ever used and quicker than several camera from a few generations ago that were four to six times the price of the RX10. Sorry phase detection fans.

Here's the big news....The color the camera kept deciding on in AWB mode was, when I pulled the raw files into Lightroom 5.0, exactly like the color I was seeing on stage. Now remember, I've been fine tuning previous cameras with exact custom settings or exact kelvin settings in order to manage color but no other camera I have ever used for this kind of work ever got me so inside the ballpark before. After a while I just presumed that the files would be close enough to not need tweaking.

At 100% (the land of the pixelphilia) and at 1600 ISO the images have the mushy, painterly kind of appearance we've gotten used to seeing from high resolution, small pixel well cameras, including the Nikon d800 and the Sony a77 and Nex 7. The files at both 800 and 1600 are a little flatter (in contrast) and have softer detail than files at lower apertures. But this is only apparent at 100%. As soon as you pull back to 66% or 50% the entire image on the screen looks good.

There's that pesky digital zoom again. But you know....sometimes you want to get close.

That's as close as I could get with the (handheld) 200mm equivalent. But I sure like the skin 

tones and the detail.

I wanted the image to be a little contrastier so I used a slider setting of 10 in clarity. I went down to sharpening and pushed the amount slider to 70 and at 1.0.  Then I went one menu down and invoked a bit of noise reduction mostly in luminance but ramped up the detail slider a bit. Once done I applied these settings to all 972 files I'd shot. Then I went back through and did little exposure tweaks to groups of images.

While the files are not as good as my a99 they hand 1600 ISO better than the Sony Nex7 or the Sony a77 and I think that's also a big deal out of a camera at this price. But what really impressed me was the lens performance. This will sound heretical but I decided, given the pixel sizes and the sensor size, that the lens was probably diffraction limited wide open. All that means is that the lens is probably computed to be as good as it's going to get wide open. The next two stops might be better but probably not by much. I thought, "what the hell. Let's go wide open." Since I rarely needed more depth of field and I was generally trying to nail focus on the main actor or speaker I didn't have problems with areas going out of focus. On a couple of occasions I dived down to f4 but mostly out of curiosity. Hello sharpness.

The files out of Lightroom were done at their full pixel dimensions of 5472 by 3648. Most of the images will be used on the web or offered to magazines and other printed publications at a "press room" size of around 3000x2000 pixels so they'll be downsampled in half. If you print the images in a tabloid you'll still greatly exceed the print specs for any rational size use.

But wait, there's more. After pounding through 972 images over the course of two and a half hours of shooting via the EVF the first (and only) battery was still showing 23%. WTF???? I thought this camera was supposed to be a monster battery sucker and I thought the battery was supposed to be lame. Not in my experience. In fact, I should have mentioned that I got well over an hour and thirty minutes of "camera on" time when I helped my friend Chris shoot video on Saturday. I know what the specs say but they are based on focusing, shooting and refocusing while using a flash 50% of the time. Your mileage will definitely vary.

So what am I to think of all this? The perfect little video camera combined with a great still camera for theatrical work. Huh? Who would have guessed it? And who would have been crazy enough to test one under these conditions? Well, for that you can pretty much always count on the crazies here at VSL. We love that kind of thing.

My advice to you would be to avoid this camera at all costs. If no one buys it the prices will drop near Summer and our staff will be able to buy bucket loads of them for much lower prices. We'll use them for everything. Hell, what am I saying? I'm already using them for everything. I'll reconsider when I hit something that doesn't work. Don't hold your breath.

in other news: Belinda and I finished working on, The Lisbon Portfolio. The photo/action novel I started back in 2002. I humbly think it is the perfect Summer vacation read. And the perfect, "oh crap, I have to fly across the country" read. It's in a Kindle version right now at Amazon. The Lisbon Portfolio. Action. Adventure. Photography.  See how our hero, Henry White, blows up a Range Rover with a Leica rangefinder.....

Remember, you can download the free Kindle Reader app for just about any table or OS out there....

Yo! Nikon. Go to the Fuji Site and Check Out How To Do Retro Right.

Fuji just bitch slapped Nikon. Hard.


By Austin Photographer, Kirk Tuck ©2014

Hey look! Fuji made the camera that should have been a slam dunk for Nikon. It's the right size. Just like a traditional Nikon FM from the "golden" years. It's got retro knobs that actually work like they're supposed to. It's got a real, live aperture ring just like grandpa's camera. It's not huge!!! It's got real convenience features like....video. It's got a state of the art electronic viewfinder so you can use all the power of information the camera can provide. Did I mention that it's just the right size?

What is the Fuji XT1 missing that the Nikon dF "grandpa-cam" features? Just one thing.  There's no full frame sensor.   ( You know, the large block V8 motor your creepy uncle with the mullet always waxes on about...).  Can anyone take a camera seriously if it doesn't have a full frame sensor? Well, I'd point you to just about every photo-gear site on the web and they all pretty much unanimously declared that the "quarter frame" sensor Olympus OMD EM-1 was "The Camera of the Year" for 2013. That certainly says something about our changing attitude about cubic inches and performance...

So, smaller camera, nicer control interfaces, incredibly well thought of APS-C sensor, (should have great color, great jpegs), includes added features like a modern, electronic viewfinder and, gosh golly!!! jeepers--new fangled video. A nice line up of well done lenses is also available, all with real aperture dials.

What's the Nikon grandpa-cam have that the Fuji doesn't? How about a price tag that's twice as big??? Yep. The much nicer looking Fuji (mercifully available only in black) is about $1300 for the body while the Nikon dF weighs in at a whopping $2900. 

To be honest, the sensor in the dF is the same as that in the D4 and it's supposed to be a low light monster. If only the focusing could keep up with it...  The sensor in the Fuji isn't exactly in the same glass but it might also be in a class of its own where it really counts: Image Quality and Color. Or maybe it's just par for the course these days. And that would be really good anyway.

Sometimes I like the backgrounds to go just a little bit out of focus.

By Austin Photographer, Kirk Tuck ©2014

I always laugh when I hear the arguments between various camera factions over such things as the relative differences in auto-focus speeds and the huge differences in the (mis-understood) "bokeh" between various digital camera formats. Cameras are so good and the functions are so capable that getting "good" pictures now is like shooting fish in a barrel. We did this image, above, old school: Hand-held Pentax 6x7 cm camera with a 150mm 2.8 lens and color negative film. Scanned the neg., printed it on water color paper and then scanned it again to share.

It's still all about the expression and the right time to hit the shutter button. That, and looking for those cool diagonal lines....

What I learned from a really smart photographer back in the early 1980's.

This is a Polaroid 665 negative.

Janet Gelphman. Circa 1982

By Austin Photographer, Kirk Tuck ©2014

Everyone has mentors and influences in their photography careers and one of the first ones I was blessed with was a woman named, Janet Gelphman. I met Janet because we both were members of the Ark Darkroom Co-operative, located at the Ark Co-op college dormitory near the University of Texas at Austin. The darkroom had a big Omega enlarger that could print negatives up to 4x5 inches. It also had a couple different light heads which you could interchange depending on the look you wanted to get in your final images. The cold light diffusion head was a softer light source and reduced the contrast (and some of the need for fine spotting) on the final prints. The condenser head belted out direct, collimated rays of light that gave a darkroom printer excellent clarity and contrast. There were rumors of point source light heads that would give a scalpel like sharpness to prints but we were not brave enough to own that one. 

 I met many photographers there who have become quite well known including Will Van Overbeek and Ellis Vener. The darkroom was very utilitarian and only set up for one person to print at a time. It was laid out in an "L" shape with the hardware on one part of the L and the sinks on the other part of the L.  We had clotheslines strung across the room festooned with clothespins for hanging prints for air drying. There was a ferrotype dryer but I never used it after the first time I tried to operate it while standing on a damp floor barefoot. I discovered electrical grounding, unlicensed flying and unskilled landing all in one shocking moment..

There was also a print drying box with flat screens as well as a film drying box in which you would clip the long lengths of your wet Tri-x film to dry dust free....kinda. In the late 1970's, when I discovered the place, it was booked nearly around the clock. We had a sign up sheet on the door and we allowed three hours if there was someone else signing up. If no one else was signed up you could go as long as you wanted. We all chipped in for chemicals but everyone brought their own papers.

Legend had it that the Ark Co-op had originally been the Tri-Delta sorority house at UT and the room which later became the darkroom was the room of Farah Fawcett. I have no iron clad collaboration but it seems likely. 

Anyway. Janet hired me early on to help her with a daunting project, from which I learned lessons I still hold dear today. The project was this: She had been commissioned by one of the colleges (the physics or math school, if I remember correctly) to create large black and white photographs of physics concepts. To take the ideas of science and make visual representations of them. Most of the visualizations required lots and lots of propping and some special (in-camera) effects. All of them would be printed to the same final size which would be four by five feet. On double weight, fiber, Ilford Gallery printing paper which would eventually be mounted on board for installation. 

Janet was a wizard of the 4x5 view camera and spent lots of time under the dark cloth getting things just right. She taught me to focus and manipulate the movements of a view camera. She also taught me how to load and unload sheet film correctly and even how to develop it. I know she had other cameras and I think they were Olympus OM-1's but to this day I can't visualize her with anything other than the 4x5.  Her understanding of the science of photography was immense but it was all pressed into the service of her art. No gear grandstanding. Beside, back then if you called yourself a professional photographer you pretty much had to using a 4x5 inch camera as well. Even if only for some of your clients. 

I assisted her in making the shots (which is a story in itself) but the real focus of today's blog is to describe the darkroom processes we went through to print the images. The development of the negatives was straightforward. It was the printing that was the tough part. We needed to remove the enlarger from one part of its table and re-orient it so that it would cast its image from ceiling height all the way to the floor. That was the only way to create an image large enough to cover the paper size and give us the ability to do minor cropping. This meant that we had to design and build a floor sized easel to hold and mask the paper. We built this out of plywood and two inch by 1/4 inch steel plates that were five feet and six feet long.  

In order to get maximum sharpness from an enlarging lens optimized for 4x to 12x enlargement we needed to be sure to stop down to f11.  That meant, with thicker negative, that our enlargement times (with tested reciprocity factors) could be as long as three or four minutes. Some took even longer. And the ones that required burning and dodging were torturously long.

Our next big problem was print development. The conventional wisdom was to use long tubes, like PVC, with the prints rolled up inside. Of course we had to have some material sandwiched in between the roll of the paper to ensure that it didn't all stick together and that the developer and other chemicals could flow across the surface. We used thick plastic netting, tried diamond patterned plastic and several other methods but we always came away with problems in the final prints. 

We bit the bullet and actually designed and built three large, wooden trays out of plywood and resin and stacked them, via edge pillars to fit in the allotted flood space in the darkroom. The developer was in the top layer, two feet under that was the stop bath and two feet under than was the fixer. We saved the PVC for the washing. Next up was solving the issue of getting good agitation in all the baths. After much experimentation we came up with the "I'll roll it toward me and then you roll it toward you" method. We'd stand on either side of the tanks and roll or unroll, as required. 

One of the problems we didn't take into consideration was how much of each chemical would be released into our tiny atmosphere from so many square inches of exposed and commingled chemistry. Our coffee breaks became, out of necessity, more and more frequent. 

Here is our workflow: 

1. climb the ladder to focus the enlarger and hit the composition.

2. tack small  (one foot by four foot strips) of printing paper to the easel for test prints. 

3. expose a test strip (which required about ten minutes each for multiple exposure samples.

4. develop test print. 

5. dry test print in the microwave oven and evaluate dry print.

6. roll out the right size paper from the factory roll and cut to size with razor blade.

7. place paper under steel plates for flatness.

8. Expose (which could include many minutes of exacting burning and dodging).

9. Carefully transport paper to first tray and immerse, roll back and forth for three minutes in tested dilution. 

10. Roll up wet print and carefully drain then transfer to stop bath and repeat.

11. roll up wet print and carefully drain then transpire to fixer.

12. roll up fixed print with porous plastic substrate and carefully coax into PVC tube. 

13. carefully wash and use fixer neutralizer for archival permanence.

14. Take out of tube and unroll then use a two person team to clothespin the large, heavy prints to the clotheslines. Use six clothespins for safety. 

15. When all prints were created and dried we took them to a repro house and had them flattened in a print mounting machine. 

Sounds easy, right? Well, we printed an edition of six prints per image and there was a total of twelve different images. That's 72 four foot by five foot prints! We did that many editions to compensate for crinkles and dimples in the paper from handling and any other accidents that might sneak up on the precious prints. In the end it was all worth it and the installation was beautiful. The detail enormous and the concepts apt but also wryly humorous.

So, after weeks and weeks what did I learn? Well, I learned that it's not enough just to have a cool vision you have to follow it all the way through. That the best artists refuse to compromise. (Janet could have spec'd a smaller paper size and knocked the project out herself but she saw it in her mind as 4x5 feet and she was determined to find a way to do it). That every problem in photography has some sort of solution that is only circumscribed by the artist's imagination. That some infrastructure doesn't exist so you must design and build it yourself. That once you get rolling you might as well keep rolling until you are too exhausted (or overcome by fixer fumes) to go on without sleep. That the art is more valuable than the pay. That the learning to learn is the valuable lesson. And that we really played hard back then. 

I certainly don't think Janet made a fortune on this project. Not a project for a university college back in the 1970's. And not with all the experimentation and innovating we ended up doing.  But I do think she was happy that she was able to make conceptual stuff into visual stuff using a balanced mix of vision and technical virtuosity. 

But the biggest lesson I learned is that photography can be hard, hard work and being a prima donna doesn't get the work done, on working hard on stuff makes it all come together. And finally, I learned that if there's one little glitch we start all over again until we get it right. Not because the client will notice but because we will notice. So, thank you Janet for lots of valuable lessons.  We still practice them today. 

Shoot big, print big, show big. Or something like that....