Today I was part of a four person team. Two photographers and two videographers. We paired up to gain a lot of coverage for our client --- a big, new, rambling real estate development in the far east corner of South Austin. In addition to the camera jockeys we also had in tow someone from the client side and a producer from the advertising agency side along with seven different talents/models and a couple of small children.
It's August, it's hard, bright sun all day long, so of course all the shots were exterior shots. The crusty veteran content producers showed up with big, floppy hats, long sleeve shirts and glistened with layer upon layer of luscious sunscreen protection. The less experienced among us chose ball caps or came head naked, wearing shorts and t-shirts. By the end of the shoot the red faces of the less experienced looked like they'd been lit by color gels. Red color filter gels.
We photographed people walking to school, visiting a retention pond, coming out of their spiffy new houses, walking through a pedestrian underpass and so much more. Some swimming pool shots. Some pickle ball courts. Lots of new homes with bright color touches, etc. My videographer partner did some testimonial interviews. He also spent a lot of time flying his drone. I don't know what the other crew did because we separated after our brief logistical meeting; a meeting complete with client supplied donuts, kolaches and other odd pastries, and wee didn't catch up with the other team until the clock ran out on the models and we wrapped the shoots. People were starting to run down...
When I started out at the location this morning, around 8, it was already flirting with the 90s. Typical humidity in the morning caused clothes to stick to skin in an uncomfortable way. When we wrapped up the project around 2 pm the ambient temperature was already over 100° and climbing. The temperature on the black asphalt of the roadways clocked in over 130°. Just another August day in Texas...
When I started planning my part of the project my biggest two concerns were reducing the light contrast on people in sunlit settings and keeping myself safe in the heat and extreme UV environment. Two bouts of surgery for skin cancers on my face is more than enough for me right now....
I tested and then packed a set of Godox AD200 Pro II strobes and an accessory that allows for them to be joined together in one fixture to power two bare tube flashes in one Bowens reflector. At full power they can toss out 400 watts seconds of flash. Used in an umbrella it's a nice fill light. Used directly with the 8 inch reflector you can go toe-to-toe with the sun; as long as you are close enough to the subjects.
Along with the powerful light came a big light stand, a sandbag, some back-up batteries and a dedicated trigger for Leica. With the flash trigger and these lights I could do HSS flash (high speed sync) and shoot beyond the usual maximum sync speed of 1/250th. Nice. But you know what? The big flashes never came out of the car. So much for the hour I spent on Thursday testing them in the afternoon, out on the driveway... We were moving too quickly and nobody wanted to wait the five or ten extra minutes I might have taken to move a lighting rig around.
Instead I depended completely on the HSS output of the Leica SF64 flash unit. An oldie but a goodie. And it's a true EV flash. No magnesium is burned. No flash powder. No green house gases emitted. And after several months of daily, hourly, minute-by-minute research I found a battery charger that plugs into the wall of my own home and re-charges the batteries for the flash for free. And really, the research into flash battery chargers is the most fun part of photography. So much more fulfilling than the process of problem solving, building rapport with talent or using all the stuff to make photographs and to make some real money over the course of a day. The SF64 takes double A batteries. Don't even get me started on my near endless research to find the exact right batteries. And at a budget I could afford!!!
It feels good to have all the bases covered so I packed with purpose. A primary shooting camera. An identical back-up body. A Leica Q2 camera with a leaf shutter for those ample shots that might need a puff of light from a flash while zinging along at a high shutter speed. A big ass, very expensive zoom lens. A couple of back-up lenses for the very expensive zoom lens. Endless batteries for everything. Even a back-up Leica flash for the Leica flash.
Wanting to be prepared for the heat I bought a white photo backpack and that's one thing I did use all day long. I also clipped a small, white towel to the backpack to wipe the sweat off my hands and off the camera as well. SPF 50 sunscreen on every exposed piece of Kirk flesh. A variety of hats...
But here's the kicker: when you work in the heat with talent and ad folks who spend their lives in air conditioning you have to move fast, work close to shade areas in order to give the talent breaks, and proficiency and speed take precedence over fine-tuning the details. So I ended up using one camera, one lens, and one flash for the entire day.
The camera I used was the Leica SL2. I shot it in the raw .DNG format so the person doing the post processing would have the widest dynamic range files possible. If you are careful with exposure you can have really great dynamic range and possibility of recovering lots and lots of shadow detail. Even more so if you are shooting around ISO 100 --- because of the brilliant sunlight. Even with fill flash there are times when the overall contrast of a scene is overwhelming. Fill flash helps but being able to "lift" the shadows in post is like free money.
The lens I ended up using, exclusively, was the Leica 24-90mm zoom. The wide range of focal lengths is just right for a fast moving job and the comfort of knowing for certain that whatever f-stop I chose would be bitingly sharp, but with a pleasing rendering, was great.
The off-white photo backpack I wrote about last week performed quite well. The gear inside stayed relatively cool and the compromise between padding and intelligent use of space was well thought out. I'm very happy to add this one to the inventory of bags and anticipate getting a lot of use out of it. I had a water bottle in one of the side pockets and the flash in the other side pocket. The pack fit me perfectly. A bargain at forty something dollars. Now I will laugh at all the expensive Peak backpacks I see people tote around.
So, here's an interesting question that I just was asked at Sunday morning swim practice: "I thought you were going to retire from commercial work! Why did you take this job? Why spend a day in the heat?"
Frankly...I was getting a bit bored and in a moment of weakness I accepted the job. In retrospect, having lived through it, I probably would and will turn down future projects like this. While the budget was fine I'm no longer working in the realm of having to make ends meet with work. I'll likely fritter the money away on better coffee and prettier lenses. I guess I was trying to prove to myself that I could still handle the constant movement, the harsh heat and the day long mental focus as I could in the past. Chalk part of my acquiescence to nothing more lofty than ego.
And, I guess I felt a certain allegiance to the client since they've been a loyal partner in the ad game, in one form or another for nearly 30 years. Through thick and thin. The reliable source of ample billing...
Plus the chance to see whether work looks different now that I'm nearly seventy and the agency people were all less than half my age. But in that aspect things were as neutral as ever. No one seemed concerned about the age differences. No one treated me differently. And in return I took care never to reminisce about "how we used to do this kind of stuff in the golden years...." Or to offer unsolicited advice of any kind.
During the course of the day I downed two liters of water. I wasn't hungry until I got home. B. got a text that we'd wrapped and when I got home she was returning from a restaurant called, Cava, where she'd gotten me a big bowl filled with veggies and strips of spicy chicken. Pita bread on the side. After lunch I was ready for a big coffee from Trianon.
Revived by food and coffee I spent the next few hours unpacking, battery charging and looking through the files I'd shot. I backed up every shot to both SD cards in the SL2 and since the agency offered to do the post production I gave the art director one of the cards at the end of the shoot. I'm keeping the other one safe until I hear from the agency that they were able to pull the images off the card and back them up properly.
This particular agency is very, very tech savvy and I trust them to do even better post production on the images I shot than I could do. Plus they know the specific way in which they want to use them. They also have ready access to influencers in their market niches and are becoming very fluent with A.I. so it will be interesting to see how they use the work.
It's nice to keep up the connection so I don't lose touch with what's going on in the industry.
And that, in a nutshell, is how I spent my day on Saturday. In the evening we spent a couple hours at an opening at one of our favorite art galleries. One we've been frequenting since the 1980s. Ran in to several artists whose work we've collected and marveled at the huge crowd size. No photography in this show. All paintings and sculpture. By 50 artists. Celebrating the gallery's 45th anniversary. A fun capper for the day.
This morning? Just swim practice and quick lashing at the keyboard to type out this post.
Hope you have a great week planned ahead. I'm going to a play at Zach Theater on Tuesday and on a different day I'm doing yet another photo project I should have turned down. At least it will be inside, in Air Conditioning. And yes, Air Conditioning should always be capitalized....
4 comments:
If I lived in Austin, I would have been willing to tote your white backpack if I could have gone along to watch the shoot. Just sounds very, very interesting to a photo amateur. I'm taking the summer off, my first long off-time since I was a teenager sixty-plus years ago, and I gotta say, it has become a bit boring. Is it possible that we're actually addicted to work? And if so, is that bad? I've been playing golf, and a lot of golf courses now sell "sleeves," which are like leggings for your arms that you wear under a short-sleeved shirt; they supposedly keep you cooler than a long-sleeved shirt. And everybody wears wide-brimmed hats. Skin cancer is what we refer to as "Not Good."
That's some high end assistance!!! But I think you would have been bored to tears. On the subject of "fashion" wardrobe selections to prevent sun damage, they also make fingerless gloves to cover the backs of one's hands. The material is also supposed to be magical for wicking away moisture and delivering evaporative cooling. I wore a pair a couple of years ago when I was spending a lot of time outdoors working on the Texas Wine project. They helped. But that might interfere with your precision grasp of the golf clubs.... Hats are my obsession now. I'll buy anything that looks even marginally better than what I have right now.
A suggestion for your next hat purchase: https://www.coolibar.com/products/mens-holden-packable-travel-fedora-fog
I like mine. My dermatologist approved wearing it.
Kirk: This particular agency is very, very tech savvy and I trust them to do even better post production on the images I shot than I could do. Plus they know the specific way in which they want to use them. They also have ready access to influencers in their market niches and are becoming very fluent with A.I.
The generative AI tools already are becoming tolerably adept at editing photographs. Not just modifying a source photograph to produce an artificially-generated destination image—that's old school—but selectively altering attributes of a “real,” camera-captured, photograph (tones, colors, identifiable areas such as skies, skin tones, etc.) in response to a user’s prompt. Someone experienced at post-processing can still do a better job with conventional tools like Lightroom and Photoshop. But for how long?
Your AI-fluent agency friends may soon be competing for jobs with neural networks. If they are sufficiently fluent, they may be able to get a gig making their “influencer” friends obsolete by producing generative replacements that are deviously destined to go viral.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t have any fear of AI for myself; I actually use generative tools all the time. But I’m glad to be financially-secure and retired. The Brave New World of smart software is taking shape right before our eyes, and those of us based on biology are bystanders. (I hope my grandchildren are preparing to adapt, but as a matter of policy I’m determined to remain optimistic about that.)
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