Taking a break today from having opinions about photograpy.

A friend told me today that his Instagram account had been hacked. This started us down the path of trying to understand just why we continue to post things on social media. He's been a long time user of Twitter and he's decided to close that account in August this year, it will be the tenth anniversary of his interaction with the platform. Last year I made the determination that I was wasting too much time on Facebook and I deleted that account. What my friend said to me was, I think, prescient. He said, "I've never made a cent posting all that stuff. The only place where people pay attention and where that attention is sometimes connected with someone who has the ability and willingness to write me a check is on LinkedIn. If I post something relevant to my business there I sometimes get great responses. Every other avenue of social media, at best, just delivers a parsimonious dose of dopamine, and then only if someone leaves a comment about my "contribution." 

I thought of my own Twitter account which languishes with the same follower count from month to month= 253. Why do I bother to post stuff on Twitter? Certainly it's not a practical place for clients to find photographers or videographers. And it's filled with too much politics and negative content. I hope I remember tomorrow that I want to delete that account as well. I'd eliminate my Instagram account but for the fact that a famous curator dropped by and "liked" a handful of my work, as did one of my favorite creative directors....

I know why I started this blog back in 2009 but for the life of me I don't know why I keep pounding away at it today. The books I wrote were my original impetus for starting the Visual Science Lab; I wanted to help market them, but they have all entered the "long tail" death rattle of declining sales and I don't have the energy or desire to revise any of them. At one time I thought I might market workshops but I looked around realized that the people who were doing workshops were the ones not doing the actual, real world or fine art work and I made the choice to pursue commercial clients, fees and usage instead.

I worked on a great job yesterday. It went quickly. My lighting design was exactly what the client wanted. The art director and the traffic manager of the advertising agency both wrote e-mails to me today to tell me how happy everyone is with the (singular) photograph. I am basking in the glow of a job I did well and enjoyed putting together. For today, at least, the photographic world can take care of itself. I'll start dismantling the less productive piece of my social media memberships tomorrow...

For the foreseeable future I'll keep posting to this blog. You might not like the new content but then again you've never paid me for it either.

I do know that I really like the colors in the two photographs here. I'd put them on Instagram but it's starting to feel so gratuitous.

I appreciated Andrew Molitor's take on the Notre Dame fire. Go check his writing out on PhotoThunk.

We're doing an assignment in the studio tomorrow. The photography will take two hours. We'll bill more.

Putting the divisive discussions about what constitutes modern photography and whether or not Alec Soth is relevant aside I thought I'd talk about the anatomy of a small photo assignment for an advertising agency. In spite of my arguments that all photography is headed to the web this particular job will have us creating an image that will end up in printed magazines. We think we'll be able to style our model and do the relatively simple photographic work in a couple hours in the morning but we'll end up billing for far more time + usage. Here's why:

We bid the job back in October of 2018 but it kept getting delayed. It's a shot of a doctor against a black background illuminated by a hard spot light from high above which also creates a shaft of light against the black background. Seems simple, right? But a single spotlight would create a very hard light source with bright highlights etched against empty shadows. We've tested and tested and the way we'll actually light is to put a 2x3 foot soft box up on an boom arm and then drape the bottom edges of the soft box with black fabric. The black fabric hanging down on all sides by about a foot and a half keeps the light off the foreground and background. It acts as a soft-edged snoot. Our talent will be sitting and working with a piece of high tech medical gear. I have extra flashes and large panels standing by in case we need to decrease the lighting contrast even more.

When we got the go ahead to do the ad we started with a half hour call to the agency go over all the details again with the art director. Then I spent a couple of hours casting an age appropriate model. After that I headed to the photo store to fetch a long roll of black seamless background paper and a new Kupo boom arm. 

We've been doing artsy portraits in the studio over the last week so most of today was spent packing up the lights and modifiers I generally use for those kinds of shots and then pulling up the foam floor tiles so we could cover the floor with the black seamless paper. I had to sweep and wash the floor in the mid-afternoon so it would be clean and dry after dinner when I could prevail upon Ben to help me get the seamless aligned and spread just right, and taped down to the concrete studio floor. I also had Ben sit in while I played with the skirted soft box, working with the distance from the subject and power settings to get the exposure combination I wanted. Something that would give me enough depth of field but also a large enough f-stop to prevent sharpness loss from diffraction. I wanted to hit the right level to get f7.1. A good light meter helps... Also, the distance from the light to the subject will determine how hard or soft the light will finally be.

I spent time last week, as soon as the assignment was confirmed, getting together medical props. We needed face masks (I got three different styles so the A.D. can pick). We needed surgical aprons, clean room shoe covers, forest green scrubs, and both disposable and re-usable surgical hats. I got gloves but they were blue. I also wanted plain gloves so I hit up my physician and dropped by his office to get a small Baggie with a variety of gloves.

Some of the stuff came from Amazon.com and some of the stuff came from the oral surgery practice that I work with. They were great about handing me a stack of daily use materials. After I got the props, the photo materials, and the talent squared away I stocked in a can of Illy coffee (medium roast), a fresh carton of half and half and an assortment of muffins from my favorite bakery. The last step before I walk into the studio tomorrow will be to come home after early morning swim practice and clean the guest bathroom. 

After the actual photography we'll bid everyone farewell and I'll start breaking down the set-up and archiving the raw files. I'll edit down the take, which, for a change, will be more like a still life shoot, meaning far fewer frame shot,  My client is going to have some needed compositing done by a professional retoucher and they'd like the raw files so I'll send them along via FTP and then bill the job. 

I'm shooting with studio flash and the camera will be locked down on a tripod. I've gone through the camera menu twice to do some fine tuning and have remembered to turn off the image stabilization and to make the raw files uncompressed. I don't like to shoot tethered but I will have the camera connected via HDMI to an Atomos Ninja Flame 7" monitor for the convenience of the art director. The screen on that device is much bigger and brighter; easier to assess. The camera will be a Fuji X-H1 with the 16-55mm f2.8 lens. Trying to make it as easy and flexible as possible...

I've gone through and tested every step. When the A.D. hits the studio at 10am tomorrow we should be able to make our wardrobe and prop selections and get right to the shoot. After I deliver the images I'll spent the rest of the afternoon stowing the still life oriented gear and black background, and re-setting for a doctor's portrait I'll be shooting the next morning against white. 

So, yes, the actual shoot might only take two hours but the prep time and post production time are much more extensive and someone needs to pay for that as well. Photography may be going through many changes but some niches in commercial photography haven't changed much at all. 

Can't wait to try one of those raspberry and walnut, oat bran muffins tomorrow. Ah, craft service.

Gratuitous coffee syrup shot.

Once my favorite pair of frames, now destroyed by the ravages of time....

Searching for meaning in the current state of photography.

Reflection. Sixth Street. Austin, Texas 

Lotta hand-wringing going on about the state of photography today. Most of it pessimistic and some of it downright apocalyptic. We seem to have gotten to the point where people who have been doing photography for a long time have the perception that everything that gives "real" meaning to the craft is in the process of imploding. The sale of "serious" cameras is in decline, there are no new superstar photographers rising from the modern ranks to take up the mantle being discarded by our dying super heroes of the 20th century. There's even a ripping of cloth and a wringing of hands  over the lack of curators placed to guide us to whatever meaningful crumbs are still left. 

Most of us writers have in our heads our lists of all time great photographers and we carry it around with us like holy scripture; sadly, there is little impetus to make many changes in our structural hierarchy of master photographers even though ones most of us carry around did their best work forty or fifty years ago. In our collective haste to grasp onto seemingly connected life buoys; remnants of the curated past, we tend to reflexively make bad decisions. How else to explain the popularity of MFA-Style hacks like Alex Soth? No one who has really taken time to look long and hard at his work would really consider him as a replacement for any of the Thaddeus John Szarkowski Corps of New Documentarians or Window people, or even Mirror people.  

What we have here is a failure to understand the tectonic shift that happened to photography as a result of going from collected physical object to program flow. Our engagement with photographs, like that of everyone else in our culture, has gone from a contract that revolved around holding a physical object in our hands and looking at it and its corresponding pieces in a one-at-a-time embrace. We also like sorting stuff, categorizing it and putting it in neat stacks. A physical print made our brain happy in a certain way. If we liked something that other, cooler people liked then we were on the threshold of being part of a cult of appreciation. If we wanted to step over the threshold we could buy and "own" the actual physical manifestation of the artist's intention. Which seemingly conferred a certain part of its power to us as the new stakeholder. 

While people use new tools to shoot much of the same stuff the two shifts that changed everything in the embrace of modern photography were that there is no implied cost to additionally own the camera that already comes in our phones, making, for the first time in history, the creation of the visual/intellectual content FREE. Also, for the first time in the history of history everyone could share, disseminate, spam, curate, disgorge and present their work to, potentially, the entire connected world, also at no discernible financial cost. It's the ultimate expression of the market economy. And, at the same time, pure art socialism.

In the old days, with much less handholding and information sharing, one would learn the intricacies of film photography and then the magic of the darkroom. Proficiency took much longer and was painfully expensive for most. Proficiency took longer because the feedback loop that is part of any education was also much longer. Days instead of seconds. If people can learn to take technically good images with phones, and we reduce the time of their learning curve massively, is it any wonder that the world is inundated with new photographs? Many of them very, very good.

The problem for people with both an ego investment and a financial investment in traditional photography is that the new progression of the craft seems unfair. The old guard still wants barriers to entry. Knowing that digital cameras have become almost universally available they've shifted the barriers from economic ones to more ephemeral requirements for entry into "real" photography. 

The biggest stumbler is the idea that no photograph has value unless it is printed. Once it enters the printing milieu the value of the image rests on many physical attributes. There are extra points awarded for larger prints. Even more extra points if the image is printed on costly paper stocks. Super points for images printed as black and white prints. And maximum points when one goes all Sebastiåo Salgado and has physical internegatives made from their digital images in order to print the digital images onto traditional double weight, black and white, archival paper, in a traditional darkroom. This fascination with ordination by printing is the first step in creating an orthodoxy for appreciating "real" photography. If your fingernails don't turn black and if your shirts are all stained with brown fixer splashes then you haven't graduated to "real photography" yet, or so goes the thinking.

Next is the idea that someone important and certified needs to vet the work, and the artist, before they can be let into the private club which confers authenticity to the artist and the work. In the recent past being included with a spread of images in an arts oriented photography magazine was one way of attaining bonafide celebrity. If you got your portfolio into Lens Work Magazine you were one step closer to one of the ultimate prizes; either inclusion into a museum show or acceptance by a name gallery. Hopefully a gallery where Penn or Avedon images once hung, or a museum attached to a real, world class collection of past photography masters. If you were lucky enough to get into the Modern  with anything at all you could conceivably be the next Stephen Shore. The third most banal, widely collected photographer in the western world. Brought to you by......Thaddeus John Szarkowski and his celebrity photographer making machine at the Modern. 

So, now photography is more or less universally enjoyed on screens, from artists located all over the world, and damn few of them have ever had their rings kissed by the photographic kingmakers from....anywhere. I see more beautiful portrait work in five minutes on my Instagram feed than I have seen in an adult lifetime of visiting galleries and museums. Amazing stuff. All ephemeral in a sense because it doesn't exist over time, in a physical state. 

And this drives the old guard absolutely crazy. "Who let these interlopers into our once gated communities? Where are the curators? Where is that artist's vitae of shows? Which gallery represents them? Left to our own devices how will we know whether they are good or not? Did they study with Minor White? Did they matriculate through the Yale program? Did they study with Callaghan? Have they ever been to gallery week in Sante Fe? Have their portfolios been reviewed in Palm Springs?" 

The answers are pretty much no. The new artists don't give a crap about being knighted by the queens of the old guard. They just want to make work and share it with their friends and the rest of the world. It's more like making television programming than building monuments. But you know what? I think they're having a blast. The kids are alright. A lot of the work is good. And to some extent the world is better off not needing "super heroes" in every category. 

Super heroes are like magnets. Their work attracts a following which attracts an army of imitators. If every generation has a pantheon of about 100 photographic super heroes then the concept gets locked in and becomes a specific generation's idea of what constitutes photography's meaning and relevancy. When I look at current photography there are very few players who stand out for any reason other than being selected by an old guard hellbent on making the new generation a resonation of their choices. What I love about the new generation of artists is that they don't really give a shit what the old guard thinks and they are playing by their own rules. 

The word "curation" gets bandied about a lot these days. It just means you get a list of things that someone else likes along with the presumption that this "someone else" is smarter and has better taste than you do. There are millions of self-appointed curators and each one comes with an agenda of some sort. Much the same way that a small group of curators made abstract expressionist painting the darling (for a while) of the 20th century art collectors. Get the Tom Wolfe book, The Painted Word, to really understand the cultural clusterfuck a concentration of curatorial power is to the health and diversity of art....

So, what I'm really saying is that the rest of the world is moving to a time and cultural ethos in which physicality is no longer a gate-keeper to making good, connectable art/photography. What museum curators liked and encouraged when access to art was location limited, the access to the work was scarce, and the work itself was expensive to create, no longer has much, if any, connection to the value of art in the current age. It might for collectors but not for most creators, appreciators and users of the work. 

In a nutshell we now do work as hobbyists because we love the process, we love the ability to share our work instantly and nearly universally and we love playing with the cameras. For full time professional artists nothing really has changed at all except the need to learn how to market in a whole new marketing environment. Silly collectors will still pay large sums for work that their clique vets (more if you'd do them the courtesy of being dead first) but most people will embrace art in a different and more fluid manner. If you know someone in their 20's who is interested in photography you'll know that they have a collection of their favorite artists' work on their phone and they share this work with their friends, phone-to-phone. It doesn't mean that they appreciate the work less but they have a new freedom to unleash the work from its physicality and to share it in a manner that has just never existed before. 

More work gets shared more often. We may never figure out how to monetize the new work as we did with the old work in the time of signed and numbered, limited edition physical items but most people will appreciate it and incorporate it into their lives in an entirely new fashion. More about flow that about ownership. 

And, maybe the whole concept from the age of print collection; partial ownership of an image by possessing a print, is also a dying concept. It's interesting to think about as we consider throwing away our own power to have opinions and favorites of our own and surrendering all that discretion to the same kinds of curators who gave us........Alec Soth. Thomas Struth....or Andreas Gursky. Do we really like any of their work? Do we? Really? No, be honest! Really? Can you explain it to me? I mean can you explain the work in the absence of a "curator approved" manifesto? I dare you. 

Pretty flowers on Congress Ave.

Making sharp photos with a cheap lens on a small camera. 

If I print this 8 feet by 10 feet can I say I "Gursky-ed" it?

Will it look more interesting? Doubtful.

In the one I was exploring the idea of the flatness of the canvas.....

A Critical Road Block to the effective practice of street photography which 

few people discuss with their favorite curators....

A video-oriented product that I think is really cool.

I love the democratization of gear. I love it when technology disrupts existing markets and supplies people who are just starting out with gear that's 95% of the quality and capabilities of gear priced five or ten times more. So I'm loving this newly announced product from Australian audio company, Rode. 

It's call a "Wireless Go" and it's a very, very compact and inexpensive wireless microphone set that features great 2.4 gHz performance for about $199. Six years ago I bought a wireless microphone set from Sennheiser (and it performs really, really well) that does pretty much the same stuff and back then I paid nearly $700 for a system that is much, bigger, bulkier and more complex to use. In fact, I bought two sets (total of $1,400) so I could have a microphone for each person in a two person interview. Now I can do the same thing (better) for about $400. 

What is the Rode Wireless Go? It's a system with a small transmitter and matching receiver that allows you to put a lavaliere microphone on a talent and wirelessly send the audio signal to your camera. Rode has reduced the size of both the transmitter and receiver unit to about a quarter the size of the Sennheisers I've been using. Part of the cost savings with the "Go" is that a separate microphone is not included. You can use just about any microphone that connects with a TRS 3.5mm plug but the transmitter unit (the one you plug your microphone into) does not supply plug in power. 

But do not despair, the "Go" has an omni-directional microphone built into its transmitter unit. Clip the small unit onto someone's lapel and you are ready to record AUDIO. Most of us who have existing systems, or inventories of various lavaliere microphones, won't be deterred for a moment by the lack of an included microphone because most of us already have a collection from which to choose. But in the event that a cable breaks or we accidentally leave the bag of microphones someplace else I'm pretty sure that the built in mic will do a good job of covering one's ass. 

The units use internal rechargeable batteries and are said to get up to 7 hours of run time. Recharging via USB-C takes about 2 hours. A big plus of this UHF unit is the incorporation of dynamic frequency selection. My videographer friends complain about using wireless in areas with massive interference (think: The CES show floor, or the Dell World show floor where thousands are using their cellphones, there's tons of competing wi-fi and interference generators at every turn) and, when using an older system like my Sennheiser wireless system they must go through the process of trying to find a channel without interference and then inputing that frequency to both units. The "Go" does this automatically, and on the fly. 

I can certainly see adding two of these systems to the mix for those times when you need to do on-the-spot interviews without dragging around XLR cables or fussing with exacting microphone placement. Just apply the transmitter to the talent's shirt or jacket, turn everything on, set the audio levels on your camera and start interviewing. 

Here's the caveat: No one I know personally or professionally has any experience with these yet and they don't become available at most retailers until sometime after April 17th. I'm on a list and when I get mine I'll save the packaging until I'm pretty darn certain that the hype matches the delivery. If the performance equals or exceeds my expectations then we just reduced the size and complexity of a one man, field operation for the construction of video content. Nice.

Friday Roundup. The week's new about flash, video, the studio and its birds, reckless new purchase, and more...

First off, I wanted to let everyone know that the birds are doing fine. I think we have two babies in the nest next to the window air conditioner unit for the studio. They weathered a huge rain and wind storm last week and I was impressed to see that the parent birds constructed their nest in the one spot that didn't get a drop of rain. Pretty damn good location scouting. 

We humans, helped by benevolent weather, have been able to resist turning on the air conditioner for now so the fledglings are getting a good, quiet environment in their formative weeks. No guarantees long term. It was 94 here the other day and since I only had clerical work to take care of I was able to decamp and head into the house proper. It's on an entirely different, huge central system and it made sitting at the dining room table messing with accounting on my laptop, durable. 

A fan in the service of bird habitat preservation. 

While prognosticators across the web are once again bemoaning the imminent decline of the industry I can only agree with them in a very haphazard and partial way; I think people will buy fewer interchangeable lens cameras but I think people will still take photographs (with their phones, etc.) and still enjoy looking at photos. Collecting them? Not so much. But enjoying photographs in the same way one consumes and enjoys a nice glass of wine? Absolutely. One piece of entertainment at a time. 

I think the change-elephant in the room is that people are quickly replacing the written word with images that tell the story. Photography is now a pure language instead of a field that specialized in collecting quasi-handmade iconic items. We see stuff and then move on. We no longer are each responsible for store housing everything that flashes past our eyes as a piece of paper in some ersatz vault or chintzy frame. 

It's been a quietly productive week. Taxes all taken care of and paid. Jobs from last week delivered and jobs this week already spirited off into the corporate sharing cloud. 

I had a fun run to my bricks and mortar camera store on Wednesday. I needed to replace a boom arm that was lost to a bad lend. I felt that the Kupo Baby Boom was just right. It was $99. I bought it and tested it on top of my extra tall C-Stand and it's just what the photo doctor ordered. While I was there I also picked up a long roll of black seamless paper. 

Here's the boom arm. It works in conjunction with a clamp head. 

Neither the boom arm nor the black seamless paper were impulse purchases; I need them both for a photography assignment I'm doing on Tuesday. I'd explain it but it would take too long. Suffice it to say that I need to shoot a tight scene on a seamless background that goes up about 12 feet in the air and that I need to hang a mono-light with a soft box up about 14 feet in the air. The fee plus expenses amply covers the newest expenditures. And that's lucky because I've needed a new boom arm for a while....

Saying a prayer of gratitude that we still have a full service camera store in Austin. 

Replacement rolls of seamless are a quick (depending on traffic) jaunt up the Mopac Expressway. 

And there's always cool stuff to ogle on the used shelf....

Tripod Dolly. 

Another recent purchase was this tripod dolly. Why a tripod dolly? Well, you may or may not believe this but sometimes moving shots are popular in video. Everyone has rushed out to buy cheap gimbals which promise wonderful smoothness, etc. But I find that electronically controlled gimbals require lots and lots and lots of real practice and that few people become proficient using them until they've logged about six months of good use. You also really need to use lightweight cameras and lenses and you can't be tethered to stuff like monitors. 

But if you have a smooth floor (or you buy a couple of 4x8 foot furniture finish pieces of plywood) you can get a very controlled and repeatable set of camera moves with one of these under $100 devices. Just attach your tripod, rehearse your moves and try it. The advantages of doing your moves in this old school fashion are: 1. the initial cost savings. 2. the very, very stable base with translates into less up and down wobble. 3. the ability to use any camera and lens combo you want without penalty. 4. Your arm doesn't get tired after doing the camera moves for two minutes. 5. You can use your external monitor and your microphone junction box without penalty. 6. the dolly never needs batteries. 7. it works with any tripod. 

and, 8. When you are not using it for camera moves you can just use it to hold up your camera.....

Yeah. $60? Maybe...

the reason Profoto and Broncolor will probably exit all but the highest end of the 

electronic flash markets. Field tested (one destroyed in 2018 from a ten foot fall onto hard ground; still useable to the end of the assignment!!!). 

I've been buying Godox flash units for a while now and I think about 95% of the people in the market for all kinds of flashes have been doing the same. I've found them to be at least as reliable as the name brands (especially where shoe mount units are concerned) and much less expensive. I love the shoe mount models that come with big, lithium ion batteries in them. They flash forever; at least through a full day of heavy shooting. The remotes work without confusing the hell out of me, and my friends who use their big, plug in the wall, monolights are mostly extremely happy with the price-to-performance ratio and overall availability. 

We are now at the point where purchasers of expensive flashes such as Profoto are in the same league as Leica buyers. They want the best and are willing to pay for the privilege of the badge. If I owned a big catalog studio I might outfit it with their pack and head systems because of the reputed reliability and consistency but I think it's a bit like comparing which 50mm lens at f5.6 is the best. They are all good. 

They get the job done. And you'll have to forgive me if I'm not anxious to rush out and drop $10K on a Leica 50mm to get that extra .02% of image quality over my Fuji or Nikon or Canon lens. 

At any rate, I was an early buyer of the Godox AD200, about two years ago, and I used it frequently for location portraiture; especially on those jaunts off road that meant long hikes to a location, or those times when I was packing for multiple plane flights on regional commuter jets. These things pack down small in a way that an A/C powered unit just can't. 

The AD 200 is small, recycles fast, provides enough power (in  HSS) to fence with sunlight and is usable with the Godox X-Pro triggers. I have one of the remotes for the Fuji cameras and it gives me control over flash levels at the camera location as well as providing high speed sync. So, how much do I like these tiny 200 watt units? Well, when I destroyed my first one I didn't wait until I got back home to replace it, I dialed up the Amazon account from the road to make sure the replacement would be at home waiting for me, by the front door, right next to Studio Dog. 

When I read recently that they were making a new head for the unit I was enticed. They have interchangeable heads/flashtubes. The units come with a conventional looking head like the ones on a shoe mount flash, and also a bare bulb head because that's what the really cool photographers want (works very well in a soft box). The newest head, which just clicks right on, is a round head with a built in front diffuser. 

Around the edges of the front diffuser is a metal ring, the purpose of which is the attachment of accessories for the flash. It looked good to me so I splashed out the $79 for the new head and added in another $50 for the additional accessory kit. 

First thing I did on delivery was put the dome attachment on the front of the round flash head. It snapped on perfectly and is held in place with magnets. I put the assemblage in a soft box and tested it. Nice, nice, nice and even. Then I looked through the other accessories. 

There is a lovely set of nested front of the flash accessories including, a four way barn doors, a fresnel diffuser, a filter holder and a grid spot. All seem well made and useful. There is a collapsible silicon rubber snoot the fits on the front. And there is a small collection of hard filters that are well chosen (more fine-tuning than theatrical). 

They are the most fun accessories I've gotten for a flash that I can remember. Now I'm thinking that I need one more AD200 and that two of these would make a wonderful, flexible and brilliant location lighting kit. 

Yeah. I'm not sure I'd trade this stuff for one of Profoto's new $1100 shoe mount flashes. In fact, I know I wouldn't and that is Profoto's marketing problem to solve. Good luck to them.

AD 200 with round front face. 

A small Pelican case with a bunch of lighting accessories and a cool light. 

Business is happily steady and as I get older I'm getting faster and faster on assignments. Why? Because I've done most similar assignments so many times that the guess work is mostly gone. We are letting our subconscious do the set ups and then my brain steps in for the interface with subjects and clients. It's so efficient it leaves me more time to swim and to wonder why people think all this work stuff has to be so hard. 

One thing I read this week that struck me as really funny, until I realized that the same sentiments might be true for commercial photographers.... It was a quote about the evolution of the advertising industry. It was in a great book entitled, "Squeeze this Mr. Whipple." 

Here's the quote: "In the future advertising will become like sex. Only losers will pay for it." 

Seems that this sentiment is the real, underlying promise of the web......

Sometimes the secret to getting an image you want is for everyone to just slow down a bit. Take a breath. Get still.

Lou. Studio. 

Seems the harder we try to be good at something the more elusive success is. I think the old masters of every craft knew that rushing things ruined them. That patience is a way of letting 

what you are learning soak in. That calmness is a path to beauty.

Yesterday's simple and fun event photography for Texas Appleseed.

the poster show begins to ramp up.

I'm trying to throw off the mental shackles from a time when a clean ISO 400 file was a miracle to behold and when flash absolutely ruled all aspects of night time event photography. There's a penalty for having decades of experience; sometimes you are held back by old information and truisms that are no longer even remotely true.

Using the Jpeg setting on my Fuji X-H1 I am fearlessly (hmmm....) racking the ISO dial all over the place while shooting at events. And yesterday I substituted the little, tiny Fuji EF-X8 flash in the hot shoe of my camera instead of a bigger, more traditional flash unit. Kinda nuts but it worked.

Texas Appleseed is a non-profit you can learn about here: Link to Appleseed.

In order to fund their initiatives they do the usual fundraising but they also do a bunch of event stuff that I think is fun and cool. Yesterday was their annual poster show. Working with sponsorship from the largest ad agency in town they select a group of artists/graphic designers and get them to design posters that incorporate current messaging about justice and legal issues people face in Texas. The top print houses in town donate the printing, and the posters, signed and numbered by the artists, are sold for $75 each; both at the show and on the Appleseed website. It's exciting because it brings in a segment of Austin's very hip advertising community and not only raises money but also creates community awareness in a new demographic.

And, of course, nearly everyone in Austin loves an excuse for a good party... There was ample catering by Austin restaurant, El Dorado, (EldoradoCafeATX.com) and several open bars. No charge for admission to the show and no charge for drinks or food. Felt like the old boom days in Austin...

The pop-up gallery was at 800 Congress Ave., just a few blocks from the capitol, in the middle of downtown, and people started trickling in when the doors opened at 6pm. By 7 pm the place was packed and posters were flying out the door.

In the days of yore I would have been concentrating on making big flash work. I would have a large guide number, articulated head flash in the hot shoe and it would be topped with a Rogue reflector or a large, DIY foamcore reflector, held up by tape and rubber bands. I'd be working at f5.6 to f8.0 if shooting full frame, and I would be working around ISO 400 to ensure noiseless files. As darkness closed in I would come to rely on the AF-illumination light to get focus in the dimmer areas of a big ballroom.

I did none of that yesterday. I put on the 16-55mm f2.8 and used the lens mostly between 2.8 and f4.0. Near the big windows on the east side of the large room I used ISO 1250 and, instead of pounding flash and watching the background go to black, I was shooting down around 1/60th of a second and being very, very mindful to catch people in pauses where subject movement wouldn't ruin my photos. I got some blurry hands but I decided it doesn't matter and I didn't care.

In the back half of the room I worked around ISO 3200 and, in really dim areas I took a deep breath and set the ISO dial to 6400. And, amazingly, it worked. It all worked.

Most of the time I wasn't just depending on the ambient light, I was using the small, included-with-the-camera flash to fill in and get me a little closer to clean color. I had the flash set to minus 2/3rds of a stop, in TTL, and I worked a bit to get a reasonable level with the ambient light; sometimes (usually) opting to keep it about a half a stop dark. Seemed just right for the combination of tiny flash and room light. They worked together to get me very close to a perfect exposure out of camera.

Here are a couple samples showing the ambient + flash in action:

The small, EF-X8 flash seems to come with every Fuji X camera that I buy and I had ignored them for a while. Now I'm keeping one on the top of my camera almost all the time, just in case it comes in handy. 

The EF-X8 doesn't take batteries; it uses power from the camera's battery(s). I used to worry about battery drain but I was using a battery grip last night and after shooting from 5pm (set up and posters) till about 8pm (party winding down...) I was still on the first battery in my grip. Not bad considering all the stuff it was running....

All my photo stuff fit in my small, Think Tank backpack. I brought along the Fuji X-E3 with an 18-55mm f2.8-4.0 kit lens as well as a 35mm f2.0 Fuji-cron, neither of which I needed to use; but you know my feelings about always having a back up.... I also brought along a big, Godox flash, dedicated to the Fuji system as well as a radio trigger. This did come in handy for shooting the posters as I could have someone stand ten feet to one side of, and at a 45 degree angle to, the art work in order to get clean shots without a lot of fall off and with no glare. 

I could get used to a minimal kit like this! In fact, someone should write a book about it...

The last thing I wanted to mention was transportation. I could have taken the super high performance Subaru Forester downtown and parked it in a garage. I could have spent $26 and taken an Uber from the house to the venue. But in the same spirit of carrying everything I needed in one small pack I thought I would also reduce my travel footprint. To that end I chose to take a city bus to work. 

The bus comes to an intersection about a half mile from my house. An easy and leisurely 15 minute walk. The bus costs $1.25 and gets me to downtown, within a block or two of the venue, in about 25 minutes. Easy-Peasy. I cheated on the way home. Belinda is working downtown and has garage parking at her agency. She met me at the show and when it was time to head out we walked two blocks to her garage and then sped off into the night. In a Subaru Impreza. All fun. 

That's my take on yesterday's photo festivities. Hope you aren't pining too much for the days of complex flash, slow film and the need to deliver stacks of color prints to your clients. It wasn't really that much fun. This is better. 

I remember the line that Ian Fleming wrote at the end of "Diamonds are Forever." He was talking about James Bond's life as a spy. He wrote, "It reads better than it lives." Brilliant. Just brilliant.