We got asked to do so much more in the past. Now everyone seems to have short schedules, tiny budgets and diminished expectations of what is possible...

I shot this image back in the 1980's for a theater group. The photo shoot was not some afterthought engineered to fit into a couple of minutes after a dress rehearsal or during a rehearsal break. It was scheduled and the "look" of the shoot was well discussed before anything started. The play was set in a Texas town in the 1940s. We all decided that the look that most appealed to us as collaborative group was both a hand colored look and the look of portraits that were lit by tungsten spotlights. A look that was an amalgam of current, contrasty shadows and the kind of wonderful tonality inherent in images of the time.

We selected a film that would emulate the look of film from that time. It was called Ektapan and was ISO 100 or 125 panchromatic black and white. We carefully posed and photographed all six major actors in their costumes, paying attention to the fall of the light under hat brims and chins. Each subject lit from scratch to match the feel of their character.

Once the shoot was over I took the six rolls of 12 exposure film back to my studio. I'd shot an additional roll of film in a separate A12 Hasselblad film back; one or two frames of each person we photographed. This roll of film was my test roll. I would hand develop it in a single roll tank and evaluate it after the film dried. In this way I'd be able to see if certain frames were too thin (needed more development) or too thick (needed less development) and I could adjust. I ended up custom developing each roll to get exactly the density I thought would print best on one of the two grades of paper I had chosen for the project. The development took the better part of a day!

Once developed and dried I made contact sheets for each roll. One contact sheet for me and one for the marketing people at the theater. I didn't take chances with the people at the theater misreading the edge numbering so I wrote out the numbers with a red China marker. If we talked on the phone I wanted to make sure we were all discussing the same frame....

Once the frames were selected I went back into the dark room with two boxes of 11x14 inch black and white print paper. Not just any print paper but Kodak Ektalure G surface paper. It was the perfect choice for both a long range of tones and also a perfect surface on which to hand color. Why two boxes? One was grade two and the other grade three. The numbers related to their fixed contrasts. Two was softer, three contrastier.

I made three or four identical prints of each selected negative, selenium toned the prints for just the right look and then washed them archivally. I air dried the prints on screens, face down. The prints had to dry overnight before we could start working on them.

My next step was to carefully hand color each print with Marshall's Transparent Oil Paints. I won't bore you here with all the techniques and steps but it took about three hours per print. The extra prints were made so that I could start over on the painting if I messed up. Which I did. A lot. Figure at least 18 hours for print coloring...

Once painted the oils had to dry completely before I could spray the surface of the prints with a fixative to prevent abrasions.  After all these steps the images were delivered in a print box with neutral paper sheets in between each photograph.

The theater had to send them to a color separator to get the scans done for advertising and the programs but I also made a set of black and white prints for newspaper and magazine to use.

Once the color separators did their work each print was matted and framed and hung in the lobby of the theater for the run of the show. It added to the feel of the period piece for people to be able to see the prints in the lobby during intermissions.

Today no one seems to ask for anything harder than putting this better head of our CEO, Chipper, onto this better image of his body in Photoshop. I find it sad that the schedules dictate the creativity and that there is a self-reinforcing expectation among clients that no one is up to do something extraordinary so why even bother to ask? Is it any wonder we like to show prints from a different time?

www.kirktuck.com

Rome's Termini Station. Arrivals.

Camera: Mamiya 6 medium format, interchangeable lens rangefinder.

Lens: 75mm

Film: Kodak 400 CN (chromogenic black and white) ISO 400

Scanned from original print.

Hanging out at the Vatican, taking images of the non-tourists. The normal lens means you're close.

It was always interesting to shoot black and white film with a medium format rangefinder camera, out in the streets. Interesting because there was no way (other than the experience module in your brain and the depth of field scale on the lenses) to know how the image would look. The rangefinder window on the Mamiya 6 cameras showed an images that was as much in focus as your eyes could see. The center weighted meter got one onto the the target but you had to use your experience and observation skills to get exposure closer to the bullseye.

And if you got everything just right you still ended with a negative that had to be matched to graded papers and interpreted in just the right way to get the look that you had in your mind's eye in the first place. We digital users forget (or never experienced) the fact that the time elapsed from taking the photograph to actually seeing the first indications of what you actually got could be separated by days, weeks or even months. There was, for the most part, no immediate feedback loop to guide you in iterative steps to a better image --- in the moment.

It was a wet and rainy October day in Rome when I walked over from my hotel near the Via Veneto to the Vatican complex. It was the middle of the week and the kids were at school; their parents at work. When I got there the area in front of St. Peter's Cathedral was packed with senior citizens, gathered around their church banners, talking and debating. In my old pants and a vintage sport coat I mixed with the crowd and looked for images I wanted to take.

I pulled an old, incident light meter from my pocket and made a general reading for the area. The overcast light never changed. I ignored the camera meter and set my exposure controls based on the meter's indication. I kept the lens focused to around 10 feet which put me into a useful zone which could be quickly fine tuned when I put the camera up to my eye. I was working with a 75mm lens at f5.6 and there is surprisingly little depth of field there. The ISO of the film was the limit and really couldn't be changed half way through the roll without sacrificing what was already on the roll. You adapted by using a slower shutter speed and bracing yourself; paying attention to your handholding techniques. On sunny days, out in the streets, you could shoot at f8 or f11 and this allows you to pre-focus even a medium format camera and get good images. The benefit of pre-focusing is that when you see a scene you want to capture you need only lift the camera to compose and then shoot immediately. Most of use learned just about where twelve feet in front of the camera was, more or less. This yielded a photographer a certain invisibility that seems to have faded over the years.

I spent the better part of an afternoon wandering through an ever changing crowd just looking and absorbing the feeling and mood of the participants. Time well spent as I became, over time, a fixture to be overlooked. Perfect.

Too much color...

An artist at work on part of a wall that no one ever sees. 

Conceptual realism?

Selfies at the wall. Bringing portrait organization to visual chaos.

Photography of selfies in progress (and the above counts because of the included selfie stick) made with Nikon D810+24-120mm f4G lens. ISO 64. 

After nearly two months of constant rain and cloudy skies I am overdoing it with post processing in an ill advised attempt to make up for lost time with dramatic renditions of SKY!!!

I know I am overdoing it. I know I should lay off the "dramatic" filter and the "structure" filter in Snapseed but I've lived through so many gray skies that I just want to make up for lost time and create my own version of giant, Texas skies. I'll get over it. I swear! 

I am so confused. I must be doing something wrong. All the lenses I buy, which have reputations for softness, are far too sharp and detailed for my liking. Example: Nikon 24-120mm f4 G.

It was a holiday here in my country so I decided to do something different today and go for a walk in our ever growing downtown. Astute readers will remember that I bought a Nikon 24-120mm f4G lens about a week and a half ago. I almost didn't buy it because even though the long range of focal lengths and the relatively fast, constant aperture made it look great, on paper, I read many reviews which would have left a saner man running in the opposite direction from this product.

The two biggest knocks against this lens are that it is a crazy basket of distortions and that it's just not very sharp in the corners or at the longer focal lengths. Of course I have two replies. The first one is a quick acknowledgement of the fact that the lens has geometric distortions across the frame at different focal lengths. It's most pronounced at the widest setting. Most of the lenses people shoot with these days have the same kinds of distortions to some degree but the relevant thing is that the distortions can be automatically corrected by the camera, if you are shooting Jpegs. If you are shooting raw files the correction is one mouse click away in Lightroom or PhotoShop. Problem solved. Moving on.

The sharpness thing has me baffled and it may be that I'm just not keen enough to see it or smart enough to know what I should be looking for. I used the lens this afternoon to shoot lots of pretty pictures and I came back to the studio to fix them up and play with them on my computer. No matter what focal length I used to shoot the images they all looked sharp to me. And by "sharp" I mean they resolved lots of detail and that the transition between tones has high enough edge acutance to show off the detail in a convincing (and satisfying) way. I was using the Nikon D810 at ISO 64 and I don't think that's cheating. The camera can only pull as much detail out as the lens puts in. Right?

Stop reading lens reviews and test the lenses you are interested in for yourself. You might be surprised to find that most modern lenses are pretty good and that there's more to a lens than extreme corner sharpness. I hate corner sharpness. I put clear filters on my lenses and rub vaseline into the edges so it softens my corners up nicely. That way a file with too much sharp detail won't harm my eye with over sharpness.  (kidding. Just kidding).

But seriously, if you are a Nikon user, try whatever lens might suit you for yourself and ignore the internet experts. They are aiming for something different than you and I and it probably isn't the happiness of making nice photographs.

Happy Fourth. Independence can even extend to lens evaluations. Fun/Fireworks.

Too much fun playing with filters in SnapSeed......

Robin Wong (wonderful photo blogger!!!) reminded me of this piece I wrote five years ago. It may be the second best thing I've written about photos.

http://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2010/11/passion-is-in-risk.html

Would you please read it and tell me what you think?

Loading the multi-DVD player for a long weekend of director's cut movies down at the office. Getting away from the routine at home....

Now. Who's got the darned remote?

(shot for Motorola to illustrate one of their fabs. It was a long day of "bunny suit" hell with a couple of Hasselblad cameras that had been repeatedly swabbed with alcohol....Ektar 25 film. Stay still!)

A Dial That Measures Your Ennui.

This is the second in my limited edition, "Industrial Art Meditation" series of photographs. For some mystical reason I can only print this image very large. I call the process "Struth-ification" and it means that prints are wildly, ruinously expensive. If you are interested in owning one of the 10 x 15 foot images for your country home or ski residence please send along your banking details and we'll arrange an understanding....

Ah. The magic of machined metal. 

Magic Lamps. Piss colored backgrounds.

Sometimes, during a long shooting day on location, I find myself looking for images just to please myself. Things the client usually won't want. Things that have a form and color combination that makes them a bit surreal. Or hyper-real. I was at a company that machines all sorts of things. I was shooting mostly scenes from their production floor. There is a transparent, yellow, plastic curtain that separates two areas to contain dust. This light sits on our side of the curtain and is lit by a mix of daylight and fluorescent lights. I was intrigued by it and returned again and again to try to make better images.

It was shot with a Nikon D610 equipped with the old, push-pull 80-200mm f2.8 lens. I used the lens at 80mm and the combination of camera and lens were stabilized on a wooden tripod.

It is available (of course) as a 24x36 inch archival print for $12,000. The edition of these prints is limited to 100,001. We will honor your check.

You'll enjoy owning this piece. It has its own insouciant effervescence. 

The Three Graces. An afternoon at the Louvre Museum.

The sculpture of "The Three Graces" was done in Roman imperial times and by most accounts was inspired by an earlier Hellenic work. While many people are attracted to the Louvre Museum for it's immense collection of paintings I am almost always happiest looking at the sculpture. My favorite piece is one I found on the second floor back in 1978. It's called, "Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss", by Antonio Canova.

But every time I go back I find something new to like. This image of the "Graces" was shot on a cold, wet, rainy afternoon in the early 1990's. Agfapan 400 film. Camera brand lost to memory but most likely a Leica rangefinder with a 50mm or 75mm lens.

When I first started visiting the Louvre you entered by a small door off to the side of the main plaza. There was no pyramid, no escalators or elevators. But more to the point there were far fewer people going through each day, which meant you could almost always find quiet and uncrowded corners, filled with new (to me) treasures. And before digital cameras and phones there was no giant horde of "guests" thronging around the painting of the Mona Lisa, making selfies and ignoring the "no flash" signs. The museum has given up policing the "no flash" policy and put a much, much thicker piece of protective glass in front of the painting.

That's okay, I'd much rather get closer to the sculptures.... That's good stuff.

Required reading for real photographers and wannabe photographers who want to be real photographers. Thank you NYT. It's about Robert Frank.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/05/magazine/robert-franks-america.html?smid=nytimesphoto&_r=0

This is a wonderful article about Robert Frank who is one of the greatest living photographers today. If you don't like Frank's work then you...... 

Back to the crack. I mean gear. I've been testing a prototype zoom lens that's under wraps. I think it must be a Zeiss Otus Zoom lens because it's very heavy and very good...

Amazing. Micro-contrast within micro-contrast. At 20mm it's at least 87.5% sharper across the frame than the Zeiss 21mm f2.8 prime. The color purity redefines delta. The coatings must be the tiny particles that together make up nano-crystals only mixed with gold and platinum to resist both flare and the dreaded banality coefficient. 

It was a dark and stormy night and even though it was humid, and the mercury had come to rest near the ninety degree mark, the man in sunglasses who approached me was wrapped in a black trench coat and had his wide brimmed hat pulled down to drop the rest of his face into shadows. "Are you Tuck?" He asked with a trace of a growl and more than a dash of some Germanic accent. I nodded my head and waited. He thrust a small package into my hands. It was wrapped in brown paper and secured with twine. It felt heavy. Dense. Expensive.

The mysterious man nodded curtly and said, "The boys at the lab would love for you to shoot this and write about your results. But be careful. What's in this box is capable of such high sharpness there is the chance that the wrong sort of use might actually slice your eye." With that he turned and stepped into a black sedan and peeled out of the parking lot of the Seven-Eleven convenience store where I had gone for my working photographer's microwaved, burrito dinner. I went without the luxury of a meal (such is the fate of the freelancer in this era....) and headed home to open the package in the privacy and security of my tiny, cramped office.

I locked the deadbolt and turned on the old, flickering desk lamp which threw a tiny beam of troubled light onto a desk piled high with bills and cancellation notices. I pushed the rejection letters for my books off to one side, to create space, and set the package down. It was no bigger than the boxes that camera lenses come in. I hesitated and then pulled the John Ek, EK4 KA-BAR commando knife from its sheath on my right ankle and sliced through the twine. I carefully peeled through the brown paper with the tip of the blade and then opened the plain, black box inside. There, nestled in Andalusian, model grade, foam peanuts was

Fashion Show. Transparent Jacket.

It's funny to think how much photography has changed since I was a younger person walking around with a camera. Now we can display images on the web with a few deft clicks and thousands or millions of people will see them. We've made enormous transitions from film to digital and supposedly lenses have gotten better and better. But when I go back into a box of 11 x 14 inch, black and white prints and really look I am struck by how much the same the actual images look from then to now. As if we've changed all the external parameters and left only the core event untouched.

I took this with a Contax SLR and I used a Zeiss 135mm f2.8 lens. There was no image stabilization and the noise was what the noise would be using Tri-X or Agfa 400 speed black and white film. The printing was limited by my own skills at the time. The black edge is actual light from the gap between the "live" film and the edge of the negative carrier. The negative carrier was filed out one evening so it would always show the full frame.

But seeing the image when I was taking the image; the when of pressing the shutter button and the framing overall, those things haven't changed with the new technologies. Those things are innate to the artist, not the cameras.

Convection ovens are invented, juicers are modified, knives are re-invented but at the end of the day it is all about the flavor of the food served in a fine restaurant. Pretty much the same with photography. Images are to be eaten by the eyes and enjoyed. Doesn't matter which "oven" they were baked in.

recipe for model on runway at fashion show, old school:  carefully meter white runway. Set exposure 1.5 stops slower than meter indication. Pray you nailed exposure for skin tone. Stay in the 2 by 2 foot box/boundary that you taped onto the floor of the shooting platform so you don't jostle the other 50 shooters who have also marked their territories on the crowded shooting platform. Remember that you only have 36 frames on the roll and you don't want to be re-loading during a fun imaging moment. Be sparing with your shutter finger. Pre-focus into the zone in which you think you'll be shooting and then make small corrections in real time (no AF on that camera...). Don't get too excited early on and use up all your film. Save a couple of rolls for the grand finalé. 

A man responds to Art.

©kirk tuck.

The look. The runway.

©kirk tuck.

Siena.

©kirk tuck

A moment between moments of endless creativity.

©kirk tuck.

A good position at the shows is valuable. A camera with a trustworthy lens, even more so.

©kirk tuck.

Backstage at the Karl Lagerfeld show, October 1994.

©1994 Kirk Tuck

Rene Z. In the old studio on San Marcos Street.

Rene Z. ©Kirk Tuck

Belinda drinking cappuccino on a chilly October day.

Walking through Paris with a Contax camera. 1994.

©1994 Kirk Tuck.