A Few Environmental Portraits I Did for a Client Last Fall.

Up on the side of a mountain in Virginia.

November and freezing cold. A sleet storm just firing up.

A slick, one lane road in the middle of no where, starting to ice up and 

me trying to get good portraits and still make a flight at an airport 

three hours away.....

I did a lot of domestic travel last Fall. All of it for work. Very few of the photographs were made in big cities, near airports, near nice restaurants; hell, most weren't anywhere near a wall plug or a decent hotel. But it was fun nonetheless. Problem solving on the fly. 

The photographs just above and just below were done at about 7500 feet of elevation in weather that was starting to turn nasty. I'd hit the airport in Charlotte, NC about three and a half hours before, grabbed a Camry rental car and hauled ass up the through the Smokey Mountains. I needed to met up with a large crew of people who were stringing high voltage transmission wires through the mountains. 

Thank goodness for cellphones and GPS. I just made our rendezvous and followed a crew up the side of a mountain at the end of a small caravan of white, crew cab, pick-up trucks. When we got to the near the top I started scouting for a good location. I knew the client, back in Knoxville, would want to see some "product" in the background so I found a spot that showed transmission lines and pylons going off into the distance. By the time we got organized it was sleeting. We found a window screen in frame in the bed of one of the trucks and used it to keep sleet from hitting the portrait subject's face. I put my Godox flashes in a plastic bag, on top of a light stand and the guys who were waiting to be photographed took turns holding the light stand so it wouldn't get blown off the side of a cliff. 

The wind picked up and the temperatures were dropping into the 20's. Somehow we got everyone just before the crew chief got a call that a potential blizzard might be cutting through the passes. He took one look at my rental car and advised me to make a quick retreat if I was going to have a chance at making my next connection back in Charlotte. I headed back another three and half hours watching the gray get darker and darker in my rear view mirror.

Sometimes luck is with you and you stumble into an idyllic setting just about the same time you also have twelve guys who need to be photographed. That was the case when I was photographing the construction leads in a remote location in North Carolina. We were on the site of a dam project which required a bit of travel on unmarked, unpaved roads. We drove through some pretty countryside and the into an open spot when we descended into a scene that was just gorgeous. A lake, with mountains in the background and a bridge out to the middle of the lake. 

I took advantage of the early morning light, a small flash and a Panasonic G9 with a Panasonic/Leica 12-60mm lens to create the two images just below. At first I cropped lighter since that's become, more or less, a style with me. I generally like tight portrait compositions better than loose ones. But as I played around with composition in this setting I just had more and more desire to go wide and to really see the space. 

The two shots just below were in the same location but I had a different reaction. I changed angles in case the images were used at some time in the same publication but I never liked the tall grass in the frame. I finally went with a tight crop and it seemed just right to me. Same G9 and Pana/Leica 12-60mm. 

The image just below was taken on a steaming hot Summer days just outside the Florida Everglades. Again, we wanted to show "product" along with our portrait so we found a suitable location which showed transmission lines going off into infinity. I moved my portrait subject into the shadow of some thick trees to block direct sunlight and then came back in a created a main light with a Godox AD200 flash in a white 20 by 30 inch softbox set over to toward the left of the frame. I tried lower shots, tighter shots and more dramatically lit shots but this one, for me, captured the space, the outdoors-ness of location and the serious look of my guy. If you judiciously fill portraits and balance them with sun drenched backgrounds you are, in fact, increasing your dynamic range. I love it.

Some locations aren't glamorous and all you can do is channel your inner "Annie Leibovitz" and use a bit soft flash to creat a nice key to separate your subject from a so-so background. Again, I used the Godox AD200 flash blasting into a bigger soft box and the exposures were set to match with a small priority (1/2 stop?) given to the subject on the left. And then I got back in the car and headed back to the airport for the next leg of the adventure.

On all these trips I had three parameters to work within. I would need strong enough flash to overcome direct sun. I would need to use a diffuser to kill the contrast that would have been created with direct sun in the photos. I would need to be able to handle all the associated gear; getting it through airports and on and off shuttle buses, and into rental cars working completely solo. I chose two Godox AD200 flashes. One to use and one for back-up (which I did end up having to use...). Three light stands (one for the main light, one for the diffuser, one in case I needed a bit of back light, and one to hold the round diffuser over the top of my subject's heads in order to block direct sun. The lights, stands and my clothes (with a winter coat) all packed into a long Manfrotto roller case. My two Panasonic G9s, an assortment of batteries, radio triggers for the lights, and three lenses (8-18mm, Panasonic/Leica 12-60mm and the Olympus 12-100mm) all fit into a small, Think Tank backpack. One checked bag and one carry on bag. It couldn't be simpler.

I love shooting outside. It's always a challenge and I always like the play between almost out of focus backgrounds and the main subject. I'd hate for the gear to slow me down.

Odd contraptions that make handholding heavy cameras easier. Made for Video. Usable on Photography Cameras?

A production photograph from a video shoot at Zach Theatre. Videographer, Jake Fordyce, (center) is shooting with a rigged out Sony FS-5 (extra heavy duty batteries, follow focus gear, and an Atomos monitor) which is...weighty. The thing strapped to his back makes a four or five hour shoot bearable...

Those video guys are pretty ingenious. The device being used by the camera operator (above) is called an, Easy-Rig. It's a backpack with support belt and extra strength connections which support the strong metal bar you see running up over his head and ending up above his head and about a foot in front of him. At the front termination of the bar is a cable (capable of adjusting closer or further from Jake's face) that reaches down and supports the weight of the camera and its accessories. This adds a lot of stability to the handheld camera and keeps the operator from having to support all the weight with his arms. I watched Jake work with the Easy-Rig and it seems like the right compromise for a lot of shooting. It's more controllable than most gimbals and seems to require less experience to use. I can also be used in conjunction with in lens or in body image stabilization. At the same time the Easy-Rig allows more fluid movement than any tripod or monopod.

I've been playing around with gimbals for video and find them fussy and hard to control. I'm a much bigger fan of "dumb" shoulder mounts, monopods (with or without feet) and, of course, tripods. But I wonder if some enterprising company might realize that sports photographers, and some other specialist photographers, spend a lot of time holding heavy gear up in front of their faces in a handheld fashion and might benefit from a device that suspends the camera right in front of them while supporting the weight of the camera and lens with a system that transfers that weight to the hips and body's core.

I'm sure it would look a bit "dorky" for photographers but if it worked to make camera handling more comfortable and at the same time more stable I'm sure a fair number would give it a try; especially those who frequently work on sets and in other controlled environments. Yeah. I think it would be embarrassing to see a street photographer in one of these rigs but it might be just what the doctor ordered for a guy shooting a football game with a 300mm f2.8 and a big-ass camera body...

Blog notes: 

I want to thank everyone who wrote to offer condolences and other good thoughts in connection with the recent passing of my father. I enjoyed reading them all. It made a difference to me that you all cared enough to write and share.

I've been busy since I wrote that post about my father; I've made funeral arrangements, closed out accounts, cleaned out his room at the memory care facility (with the help of my older brother...) and have had two phone conferences with my family law attorneys. I've pretty much done all I can do for right now since just about everything surrounding the disposition of his estate requires either/and/or a death certificate and letters testamentary.

For the first time in at least two years I feel unconstrained by the familial responsibility to be "on call" and also to not venture away from contact and proximity for more than a work week at a time. I can now check in with my close "nuclear" family and then head out for a road trip or a flight to someplace more exotic than Austin, and spend time both in transit and away from home. It's odd to feel the weight of "availability" lift off one's shoulders.

Many have written about their grief. I rarely hear anyone say (out loud) that a family member's passing is accompanied also by a sense of relief. Relief from the schedule restrictions and restraints, yes, but also a relief from the long term and incremental drip of grief and sadness that must accompany anyone sharing a loved one's accelerating mental and physical decline. And one understands, on some level, that the person "departing" is also enjoying a sense of relief. In a moment all responsibility is removed, all expectations evaporate and someone else picks up where they left off.

While we photographers are sometimes the record keepers and curators of our families, by dint of creating and housing a visual archive, I think it's important not become a museum curator for your parent's memory since that pushes you to constantly live in and re-live the past. While the photos are bittersweet reminders of people who have gone ahead of you it's important to remember that all of these things that happened to you and your family are now in the past and your life is best lived in the moment in this day with an eye to the future; and a plan to make your every day from now forward count. No parent would want their child moored to one spot in the continuum instead of constantly experiencing the joys of life right now.

It's been an interesting experience for me, to be there for my father. But while many have suggested I somehow sacrificed a bit I would say that just as children teach us patience and kindness the elders teach us the value of this life. This moment.

Walk out the door and live. It's our best gift to and from ourselves.

A Portrait of my Father.

My dad passed away today. He was 91. He lived a good, long life and then left it quickly and comfortably. I spent the last 70 or so Sundays visiting and having lunch with him. We spent many weekdays going to doctor's appointments and on errands of one sort or another. We had lots of time to say "Goodbye."

He had no interest in cameras or photography whatsoever. I remember showing him the very first magazine assignment I'd done for Texas Monthly Magazine, at the beginning of my career. The editorial photo spread was printed in black and white. He said (drily, tongue-in-cheek) "Doesn't your camera take color photographs? Do you need mom and me to buy you a better camera?" 

I take a camera with me everywhere. This is a photograph I took after a family dinner at Cappy's Restaurant in San Antonio. We were all getting in our cars to head to our homes. The light was nice and I asked him to stay still for a moment. It's one of my favorite portraits of him. I take a camera with me everywhere...

Working in Black and White and Loving it All Over Again.

When I first started working as a photographer in what was then a very secondary marketing (Austin, 1978) ads or editorial work shot in color were a rarity. Nearly every photographer I knew spent most of their days then shooting in black and white and delivering 8x10 prints to their clients. Almost all of us had our own black and white darkrooms, or shared darkrooms with other photographers who were also just starting out. 

Assignments rarely ended when the cameras were put in the bags and the lights were packed away. The actual taking of photographs was the quickest part. It was followed by time in the darkroom rolling film onto reels and then into tanks for development. When the film dried we cut it into strips and put it into plastic pages so we could make contact sheets. The contact sheets went to clients for image selection and were usually returned with china marker indications of which frames to print and, in some cases, how to crop. We'd hustle back into our darkrooms, mix up print chemistry and try to pull really great black and white prints for our clients. Not too contrasty and not too dark. We aimed for a beautiful range of gray tones because those prints ended up getting through the half-tone screening process best and then printing best in newsprint, magazines or on offset presses. 

By the time the digital age rolled around color was ubiquitous and, frankly, in digital, much easier for most people to handle and get printed. Black and white was (at least for me) harder to do in digital than by traditional methodology. I could never get those mid-range skin tones exactly the right gray and exactly in balance between the shadows and the highlights. I know some people swore by their own PhotoShop methods but try as I might I could never get close. 

Now I feel like I'm living a little larger when it comes to black and white. I've been using Fuji's Acros Profile with their green filter finesse added in. The profile does a great job nailing the skin tones and gets me right in the ball park, overall. I still apply a bit more contrast to the mid-tones but the files are so much better balanced, overall, that it's easier now. I could apply the profile to raw files in post but much prefer to pretend I'm shooting totally old school and trying to get as close as I can in camera. 

I photographed a long rehearsal at Zach's rehearsal space on Sunday. Nothing fancy but we wanted to capture the process of rehearsing a play whose actual content is still partly in flux. I spent all day shooting what I think are very beautiful black and white images with a Fuji X-H1 along with the 90mm f2.0 (used almost exclusively at f2.0) and the saucy and able 16-55mm f2.8 for everything else (used mostly at f3.5). I'm not sure how the files will do with Blogger's resizing algorhythms (yes, I know I spelled it differently; I'm shooting a musical...) but the photo just below is from the shoot. At full res and viewed at 100% it is absolutely beautiful with massive amounts of detail and great tonal transitions. 

I may never shoot color again.... (just kidding. I'm afraid my clients will insist). 

I love that Fuji provides such nicely thought out profiles; not just for black and white but also in the color space as well. It makes shooting Jpegs so much fun for me. 

A blog note: I may be publishing sporadically during this week and the next. My father is in hospice and we are nearing the end. Family is, of course, my first priority but I'll write when I can because it's nice to stay in touch. Comment at will. I'll read them all. Even the ones I choose to delete...

Seat Hat. 

Just Spending Some Time Reminding Myself What It Was I Really Liked About Medium Format....

 ©Kirk Tuck.

A Few Thoughts About Fuji's GFX100 and Why I Think This Product Will Change the Commercial Photography Industry (while blunting the sale of high end 35mm sensor cameras).

If the GFX100 performs close to its specifications and features list this camera has the potential to change the higher end of mass photography. It's less expensive, in inflation adjusted dollars, than previous flagship cameras from both Nikon and Canon and it also promises a return to greater control over depth of field, focus ramping and other optical signatures that professionals enjoyed when photographing with medium format cameras in the days of film. While it's true that Leica (S series) and Phase One have continued to offer cameras with the same sensor size they've been priced high enough to be out of reach for a vast number of photographers who still struggle to recover from the downturn ten years ago and the more recent collapse of parts of the overall market for images. Getting a camera down into this price point, along with an accessible selection of good lenses, means that photographers who are able to stretch a bit, financially, will have a system that helps to differentiate them from the majority of practitioners.

There are a number of features that make the GFX100 more desirable to more users than the more expensive offerings from Phase One and Leica. These include in body image stabilization that promises up to 5.5 stops of anti-shake improvement. It's the first of the medium format cameras to offer truly useful focus tracking and it also provides a feature that I think has been the "missing link" for current medium format digital cameras; a great EVF. The camera features Fuji's really good color profiles and, while some people might disparage the use of a 100MP camera to shoot Jpegs (in order to use the DR expansion and color profiles) I would say that they are blinded by the megapixel count and overlooking the fact that the real strength of the larger sensor, for most people, is the different look the longer focal lengths give for the same angle of view.

My first question, when looking at the camera specs was, "Is there a reduced raw file size?" I'd love to shoot raw files at half the camera's maximum resolution while maintaining the potential to blow a client's mind with the full 100 MP resolution for highly detailed shots (not portraits) that would be used at very large sizes.

I'm seriously considering scraping together the cash to get this camera to use as a dedicated portrait camera. I would acquire the camera body and one lens; the 110 mm f2.0. With this sensor size that lens is the equivalent (angle of view) of an 85 to 90mm lens on a smaller format camera, like a Sony A7xx.
With a system like this I'd be able to get back to the look I shot for well over a decade when using Hasselblad and Rollei cameras with lenses from 110mm f2.0 (Zeiss Planar) to the 180mm f4.0 (Zeiss Planar) as well as the more esoteric lenses created for the focal plane series of the Hasselblads, like the 150mm f2.8. I'd spend something like $13,000 for the combination but it would put me right into the sweet spot of the style I made a living with for many years.

I'd continue to use the Fuji X series APS-C cameras for all the things that require fast, light cameras with a wide and high quality selection of lenses.

I applaud Fuji for design touches like the virtual control wheels in the top LCD and the permanent base with room for two higher capacity batteries. There are a few things that I'd change; especially if I were to buy the camera in order to do video. The biggest of these would be to make the HDMI socket a full sized one instead of a micro-HDMI. But all in all, from what I've seen and read, Fuji seems to have gotten a lot of stuff right.

We can argue forever about the price but if the camera allows one to market their imaging business as a top line supplier instead of an interchangeable commodity then the camera investment should pay back the photographer in a handful of bigger production projects.

My company had one project last year that would have paid for the camera, a selection of lenses and still yielded enough profit to also pay the mortgage and all the bills.

Will I rush out to buy one the minute the GFX100 becomes available? Naw. I have too much other stuff on my plate right now. I'm spending a lot of time with my father (hospice is great) and dealing with the extended family's business and financial stuff. But once the camera has been out for a while, in the real world, I'm sure I'll stumble into the spiderweb of desire that Fuji is effectively weaving and end up with one on the top of my favorite tripod. In the meantime I'm still trying to become perfectly comfortable with my 90mm f2.0 on the X-H1.

This is a turning point for working photographers. While the GFX has all the gingerbread people want (phase detect AF, Face AF, AF points across the frame, Super High resolution, and IBIS) the reality is that if your real rationale for owning a camera with this sensor size (geometry, not MP) you can dip down in the Fuji line up of three cameras (all using the same lens mount and batteries) and grab a 50R and a great lens for a little over $5,000 and get the same look for portrait work. All of a sudden medium format digital is accessible to a lot more people than it was two years ago. And it may shine a guiding light forward for camera makers like Nikon who desperately need to regain their old position (branding) as tools made for professionals.

The bittersweet part of all this is that the profit in the business has almost been completely sucked out by changes in media, the economy, crowdsourcing, and ever changing advertising and marketing. I guess the real question is, "Will there continue to be a place in paid work of ever higher quality or would we be better off learning how to make decent work with our phones."

Since I'm past the mid-point in my career I'll vote for optimism. Perhaps recklessly exuberant image quality will be the next big trend. It would certainly be novel across most of today's media.

To the last point in my headline: How will this affect Sony, Nikon, Canon and Panasonic with their lines of high resolution, full frame cameras? If the mantra we always hear when full frame users slag smaller formats ("Clients deserve the very best image quality you can deliver!") holds true and the internet is suddenly full of great work from the larger format cameras, more and more aspiring professionals will want to acquire the bigger format cameras to assuage their own self-doubts. Why invest in a format that anyone can own if you can differentiate yourself with a larger format which would prove the point you've been trying to make to APS-C and Micro4:3 users all the time on the forums? (Not that I think this rationale holds water...).

All kidding aside I think people will see a difference in quality and style. Not necessarily driven by more megapixels but by the different optical effects of larger lenses for the same angles of view. That, and with the 50 megapixel MF cameras, a larger pixel size per overall resolution. Being about to buy a 50 megapixel MF camera for the same or a bit more than a Sony A7Riii or a Nikon D850 AND having a clear upgrade path to the higher resolution/ higher performance body should encourage a lot of photographers to make some hard decisions about what might help them drive their businesses forward. I can tell you right this minute that if my choice was between a high res 35mm style camera or a camera with the same res and a bigger sensor for nearly the same outlay I would not hesitate to go with the bigger sensor.

Am I suggesting that VSL readers rush out and acquire one of these new GFX cameras? Only if you want one. I still firmly believe that most stuff can be well photographed with a one inch super zoom camera from Sony. Can be done even better with a good APS-C system and can be done almost as well with a full frame camera (compared to an MF). Technique, vision and creativity continue to be the defining metrics of success. A new camera might give you new ways to express yourself but it's not going to suddenly make everything you currently point a camera at look magically better. That's down to you and your skills.