A Few Images from the Recent Collaborative Portrait/Kimono Shoot with ATMTX. And some other stuff.

A.O. In the studio. 

I started the year out with a portrait session. It seems so appropriate given my announcement that I wanted to concentrate more and more on portraiture... I was asked to photograph a young woman in her kimono for her parents. We had a professional kimono fitter at the session, a second photographer, and the portrait subject's mom. It was a fun, and light-hearted session and I thought it would be good to (with permission from both mother and daughter) share some of the images from the session.

I photographed A. using one of the Lumix S1R cameras and I chose to use the 24-105mm because I knew we would need to cover a range of focal lengths in order to show the kimono fully and then also do some tighter shots. I generally work from a tripod and am less comfortable shooting more formal portraits handheld. My photographer friend, the blogger: ATMTX photographed a lot of behind the scenes images and stepped in from time to time to shoot available light images in breaks between my photography.

I kept my lighting simple because it seemed to make sense not to overthink weird accent lights and such. We were looking for portraits that were about the subject and about A., not about showing off the latest lighting techniques. 

Everyone seems happy with the results and I now have to go in and do my post production to the ten images that mother and daughter have selected. It should be fun because I'm also playing around with a new software program called, Luminar (4.1). Lots of tools for making skin nice and doing modest amounts of retouching. We'll finish the images off in PhotoShop.

Mother and Daughter in kimonos. 

In other news. I hate to go down the pathway of talking about nutrition and personal stuff too much. I love Michael Johnston but I disagree with a lot of what he believes is correct about diet but.... I stopped having my glass of red wine with dinner most evenings; in fact, I cut out alcohol altogether just after the new year in an experiment to see just how abstinence might affect my swimming and my ability to sleep through the night. 

The result?  Seven to eight hours of continuous, non-interrupted sleep followed by some of the better workouts in the pool that I've experienced in the last six months to a year. In the pool, at any rate, I feel as though I've turned the clock back about a year already. 

I'll keep the experiment going right up to the USMS Long Course National Swimming Championships this Summer and see if I can make some qualifying times for some of my favorite events. The worst case scenario is that my physical and mental health will stay the same but my spend on superfluous wine purchases will go to zero, potentially saving me thousands of dollars a year. Best case scenario? I'll fall asleep at the drop of a hat, be happily unconscious for eight solid hours a night, wake up totally rested and ready to dominate my swim lane. Oh, yeah, and I might have more energy for photography. 

Today's agenda. I made it to the 8:15 workout and we swam for an hour and fifteen minutes in an on-again, off-again rainstorm (no thunder, no lightning). The coach was worried that we might need to clear the pool because of lightning so he front loaded the workout with a lot of fast, long yardage. He wanted us to get our money's worth in a compressed time frame. He needn't have worried because the god of Thunder was compassionate and didn't disturb our workout. At the end of an hour and fifteen minutes we'd gotten in somewhere north of 3500 yards with many reps of negative split 200s and an occasional, fast 400. After it became clear that we were not going to surrender the pool for meteorological reasons we finished up with some all out, as fast as you can go sprints on decently generous intervals. 

A nice way to get your heart rate ramped up before heading off to work. 

Speaking of work...today will be the first event shoot of the year for me. I've got today and tomorrow booked for a corporate event in one of the downtown hotels. Lots of stuff to shoot and a client request that we deliver both raw and Jpeg files at the end of both days. Good thing I got those Lumix S1 cameras so I can put the raws on CFast cards (damn, those things are expensive....) and the medium sized Jpegs on the SDxx cards. 

I'm packing light today. We'll see how it goes with two cameras and four lenses. The lens choices are: the Sigma 20mm f1.4 Art, the Lumix 50mm 1.4, the Lumix 24-105mm and the Lumix 70-200mm. I'll toss a flash in the bag and a smaller MacBook Pro in the front pocket of my Think Tank rolling case. The case is for transport and extraneous gear storage. A big, black, tattered Domke bag is the main, mobile camera container. That's what I'll drag around the event. 

I can hardly wait to kick off the event and get shooting. My only big decision is whether or not to get my haircut before we start. I'm working on being more eccentric so the ever growing hair is part of the schtick. But then again....corporate. Ah well, what do I know?

Go out and have fun. Life's too short to sit around pouting...

I forgot why they call it "work." Now I'm starting to remember...

I took most of December off last year. It was great. But then I started to worry about whether or not I would ever work again. You know, "freelancer's syndrome."

I'm 64 and have been doing this for a long time. Ever since I turned 40 I've been hearing over and over again: photography is a young person's game.... I keep expecting work to dry up and vanish. I'd be sad but, in the big scheme of things it wouldn't be that bad. I love to work and I love to photograph but there is more to life than heeding the call of every client... That was my mindset at the beginning of January, at any rate.

This week I am back to the regular schedule. We shot a series of portraits Monday, went on location to make 13 portraits of 13 accountants for a firm yesterday, photographed a radiologist this morning and will start a two day event shoot at one of the new, downtown hotels which will take me through long days on Thursday and Friday for a national, medical devices client. On Saturday I have a in depth session photographing a rehearsal of a new Janis Joplin play at Zach. Maybe on Sunday I'll rest....but only after swim practice.

I guess being immature is the next best thing to being young. If so, then I'll take it.

Having a blast slinging cameras around. I hope your new year is off to a brisk start. Never too old to make great photographs. That's my take.

FEAR OF IMAGE LOSS! FEAR OF ARCHIVE FAILURE! FEAR OF LOSS OF ARCANE POTENTIAL! I CAN HELP YOU WITH MY NEW WORKSHOP! "How not to care."

You too can take my workshop about how not to care much at all about photo archiving. It's $17,000 for a weekend; class of 50, and if I can fill up the glasses for three or four weekends in a row then I'll pretty much banish most relevant worries I've ever had....

But this is all about you and your need to horde everything you've photographed since you picked up a camera as a youngster and started plowing through film, memory cards and long nights of massaging your files/negs/slides and then printing them. At a certain point you'll likely wind up with a mountains and mountains of material and you'll also likely never have time to go in and touch, much less print/mount/exhibity much more than 1% of this "bounty."

If you've been a busy commercial photographer since the 1980's you might have many filing cabinets filled with contact sheets and corresponding sheets of negatives, along with floor to ceiling shelves of carefully burned CDs and DVDs with the bulk of your digital work carefully cataloged and stored. If you've bought into the "cloud storage" pet rock fad of the last few years you likely have most of your recent work up on someone else's server; just praying that their business model doesn't crash and burn overnight... along with your best recent work...

But here's the deal: You will most likely have compartmentalized the pile of images that matter most to you and you will have backed it all up so well it might never disappear. These images will most likely include, the negs and prints you made when you were just starting out and were fascinated with the magic of photography. You'll have the images you took of your super hot college girlfriend/boyfriend from those times when you convinced that person how great they would look nude; and then you took all those incredible photographs of them naked. And the photos still look great... You'll have the best images of your children, along with your favorite images of your long procession of wonderful cats and dogs. If you are adventurous you'll have great vacation images and if you included your family on these trips you'll have an even more valuable stash of images/memories.

No one would ever suggest that you NOT back up and worry about the loss of these images because you might NEED the comfort they'll likely provide as you age up, lose people, lose some ready memory and spend more time alone and in need of comfort and some connection to the wonderful moments of your life. Got it. Guard these memories like Ft. Knox. Caption the backs of the prints. Caption the cardboard around the slides. Caption the digital files. And save them like crazy.

But, if you are like me, and you shoot a bunch of images recreationally; whether you call it street photography or photo walk or visual sociology or landscape photography, you'll admit that if you aren't killing it in galleries with your work, and you aren't actively being collected by museums and institutions by a certain point in your life then you are doing all this stuff for the experience and joy of being in the middle of life and you are probably not going to be the next Mozart of the medium. Not the Picasso of the shutter button. And, if you are honest with yourself you'll come to realize that most of the work, while fun to produce and to share in the moment, is really nothing special. It's the stuff that your kids and spouses will be hauling out to the dumpster a few months after you've moved on to a different spiritual realm.

Then there are all of us who make photographs for a living. Do we need to be archiving and making safe for all eternity all of the outtakes of, say, a portrait sitting for Bob in XXX Company's accounting department, that we did on color slide film in 1992? The company may be gone. Bob may be long since gone. The image has little to no real aesthetic value and its only responsibility seems to be keeping the slide of Agnes, from the same shoot, comfortable in the slide sleeve in the next folder. You're really going to scan all those outtakes at high res, load them on to two locally resident hard drives, burn multiple DVDs of the images, send an SSD to your photographer friend in Des Moines and upload them to two different cloud services? Really?

I'll save you the $17,000 for the workshop. Any client work that you did, prior to five years ago that never even was considered as portfolio work for yourself, gets deleted or goes in the trash. Any work that does not have historical value and now looks old and dated in your "art" files gets left on whatever piece of storage it now inhabits and you stop nursing it on misguided migrations to ever newer storage. From this point forward you tell all clients that they have to keep their hands on the material they've licensed from you....for as long as their company exists.

If you get hired to do a job that's so good it ends up in your dream portfolio then treat it like those family pix. But realize that at some level a lot of what all working photographers do is like plumbing or changing the oil in cars. It's just work. Not art work, just work work. We do it to pay the bills and we do it because we like the process better than flipping burgers or presenting horrible, horrible PowerPoint decks. It's transient. We're not painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. It's more like we're painting someone's office walls and we're not even sure we liked the color they picked out.

Surely you can understand that not everything your camera encounters turns to gold. So why do we treat all of it like we are curating a filing cabinet full of Renoirs. Honestly, you have to fail a lot in order to finally succeed in anything but the really smart artists know how important it is to throw out all the failures and not sit around swimming in the detritus of work done mostly as a series of exercises.

Instead of fixating on saving every chewing gum wrapper from every stick you've chewed, and every negative from every shutter button you've pushed, not to mention hundreds of times more digital files, consider how great you'll feel when you've tossed the vast majority of stuff you'll never need to  confront again and now you have those memory banks and also those hard drives that you can fill up all over again.

I remember why photographers saved so much of their commercial work in the days before digital. They could (conceivably) sell it as stock photography. Many believed that their inventories of workaday Annual Report photos, and editorial work featuring garden homes and new recipes for spaghetti, would continue to sell and make them money. Now those endless boxes of slides are worth......?

Why? Because the digerati responded to their new found digital productivity by flooding the market with trillions and trillions of images. Most priced as close to free as one could possibly imagine.

Styles and looks change. Technology changes. Presentation changes. Not all the work we have should readily comes along for the change.

Worry smaller. Worry about the solid gold stuff. The universe will take care (destroy) the rest of it and you may be better off for it in the long run. I know your survivors, for the most part, will.

That wonderful moment before a rehearsal starts and everyone is standing around just so....

It was last Saturday morning. I was at one of Zach Theatre's smaller auditoriums getting ready for a dress rehearsal of "The Very Hungry Caterpillar." It's a play whose intended audience is very young children and their very happy parents.

The tech folks were doing last minute lighting and sound checks when the young woman in the center stepped into a beautiful bit of light and another cast member stopped to fix the young woman's braid. 

I was getting my cameras ready and I lifted up one of them and clicked off a few frames. I particularly liked this one because her expression is so sweet.

Shot with a Lumix S1 and the 50mm f1.4 Pro S lens. 

And yes, the show was absolutely great. 

What Kind of Craziness have I Embarked on Today?

I've been made aware over the years that many of you are very, very organized and that your back-up strategy for your digital files is well nigh flawless. I'm proud of you all and wish I could hand out gold stars personally. I am embarrassed to admit that my back-up strategy has more or less fallen apart and I depend more on endless duplication across an aging brigade of weathered, external hard drives that range from ancient, one terabyte (original) firewire and USB-1 drives, to little bus-powered "pocket" drives, all the way up to nearly modern, USB-3, four Terabyte drives. 

Nearly all of them have names and most of them have swatches of white tape on them to label them both by name and by the year they were first introduced to service on my jangly and jumble-wired desktop. Some of the dates on them are starting to become....embarrassing.

In photographic caveman days my back-up strategy for client photographic files was pretty straightforward; at the beginning of the year I'd head to Office Depot and get a big binder that held a couple hundred CDs or DVDs. When I finished a job I'd make two copies of the material (raw files and finished files X2) on DVD's and put them into that year's binder. The binder would sit on the Metro shelving in the studio, along with last year's binder, and the year previous to that. I would also have a copy of the files on two different hard drives. But, when budgets were tight I'd only splurge on one new hard drive at a time, and only when one of the older ones either crapped out got too full. 

At some point about six or seven years ago camera files got much bigger, I got more indiscriminate in my shooting style (more is better?), and I tossed fewer non-selects (because editing takes time....). Since a job shot with a camera generating 42 or 50 megapixel raw files takes a bunch more space than the old 12 megapixel, steam-powered camera files it became more and more impractical to try sitting around burning multiple multiples of DVDs for each project. And hard drives started filling up quicker as well. 

Now I just keep a DVD drive around for the times when I need or want to access files stored and filed on DVDs. Or to impress children who have only ever known about streaming media. Nothing gets burned anymore because the first hour of shooting, in many projects, would fill up a couple of disks and time is money. Or, at least, billable time is money. 

My current methods are these: Before I shoot a project I let the client know what my workflow is. I tell them that they'll receive final files and that they are responsible for storing, archiving and protecting these files for future use. Not me. I'll let them know that I'll try to keep the files safe but since I don't personally own a hard drive company there's no way I can guarantee with any certainty that the files will always survive and be available a decade later. In the last year I started letting clients know, in advance, that we only agree to try to keep the files safely stored for one calendar year. After that the availability of the files is totally up to them. This isn't a film world anymore. Everything moves faster. Images have a shorter shelf life and I have fewer opportunities to re-sell or re-license images. 

Once I do the job for a client I ingest the images into my system via Lightroom and have Lightroom write the files (pared down keepers) to two different hard drives. I work on the files mostly in Lightroom and output them as highest resolution, full size Jpegs. If something needs work in PhotoShop I do that and then put the resulting files (as Jpegs) in to the Jpeg folder. Then, all of these Jpeg files get uploaded to Smugmug.com and put into individual galleries. The galleries are nested into logically named and sorted folders. 

The clients get access to the galleries, and, if I've contracted to allow them to use the images for a long time, across many media, then they also get a download password that allows them to endlessly pull big, nice, color corrected Jpegs right off their gallery. I could be out of the office for a year and as long as I keep paying Smugmug.com for their service the clients will be able to access their galleries. I currently have about half a million images in folders and galleries on the site and the oldest folder is from 2004. It still works. It's still active and accessible. 

The real reason I adopted this strategy was the dropping price and increasing speed of broadband web access. I can finish a job with 10 or 20 Gb of files, hit the upload screen, go for coffee, and chances are the entire gallery will be up and ready by the time I've finished bullshitting with friends and acquaintances at the coffee shop. It's nice to know that the files are stored off site and, in all probability, a local lightning storm or a random meteor strike that wipes out my desktop system won't wipe out my image inventory of client work. I also keep many galleries of family stuff there as well...

But....but...I still WANT to have those files saved as raws and Jpegs in a local storage device as well. Because....I think that's what we've been led to believe... So, I have a current collection of eight hard drives on the desk and a wide filing cabinet drawer with another dozen or so older drives sitting right next to the desk (don't know how I'm going to access a couple of the oldest SCSI drives....but three or four times a year I take a day to spin everything up). 

When I tallied the active desktop storage selection recently most of them were filling up fast and many of them were getting up there in HD years (which are even quicker than dog years). My oldest current desktop veteran is a 1 TB drive that was put into service one year short of a decade ago. Its demise is inevitable. At least that's what the digi-savants tell me. 

So, when I upgraded to the new iMac Pro I decided to also start the year out fresh by bringing in two, new hard drives; almost the same way in which would go out and buy a new binder each year. Since the files from the two Panasonic Lumix S1R cameras aren't going on a diet any time soon I decided I needed to get bigger drives this time. I bought two 10 terabyte drives which I have earmarked for all 2020 files on the desktop. Each folder of files is duplicated across both hard drives. Seems like a good plan, especially in concert with my ongoing uploads to Smugmug.com. 

I formatted both new drives today and then went in searching for all the quasi mission critical files that sat on the oldest drive. I thought I could copy them over to the new drives, just in case... you know....entropy. When I plowed through the content on the oldest disk I realized how much sheer crap I save on my disks. There were folders filled with raw files of obsolete products from companies that had long since gone bankrupt and exited the market. Those didn't need to be transferred, they needed to be dragged to the trash. When I finally edited down to the "must have" keepers on that drive I ended up transferring less than 50 GBs of work files. 

Now I'm plowing through each additional legacy drive to see just how much absolutely worthless crap I've been paying to keep around on my desktop for all these years. I'm learning that so much of what I've shot over the last decade is filler and exploratory stuff but not much that's valuable and dear. I should have learned this a year and a half ago when I had to clean out my parents' house of 40 years worth of stuff that needed to make the trip to the trash can long ago. 

Obviously, the two new 10 terabyte drives are NOT SSDs. Not even Warren Buffet can justify the cost of multiple 10 terabyte SSD drives used just for storage and occasional access. But they are USB 3 drives and those are much faster and less doggy than the USB-2 drives and the 2's and the 3's run circles around the very old, original USB-1 drive. 

I do have a couple of external 256 GB SSDs and I use them a lot now to load full of folders and work on files in concert with the SSD drive in the new computer. It's like working at hyperspeed compared to my old ways. I guess keeping up with some technology is prudent. It sure is nice to finish projects in one quarter the time we spent just last year. Go 2020!!!

(just above) a mission critical part of our workflow philosophy revolves around the access to and utilization of coffee 3.0. Made fresh with steamed milk and delivered in an enclosure that retards thermal decay. It doesn't make the machines run faster, it only enhances my typing speed and accuracy...

Ben and Studio Dog visiting relatives at Christmas. The uploading of family images to our online storage sure makes it easier to find photos I want to share with family and friends. Can't imagine now having to dig into a cardboard box to find a folder full of black and white negatives and then heading into the darkroom to print up a couple 5x7's for someone. Not for free, at any rate. And, I'd have to build a new darkroom. Never going to happen. Not while these disks keep working. 

Next up, on my agenda, is to revisit printing my own stuff here. Stay tuned? Or largely ignore?

A. Molitor: How's the LED Light search going? 

a caution to readers: Please don't tell me how I can save thousands and thousands of dollars by building my own hard drives or by building my own computers from scratch. I tried that with a Ferrari kit once and it was a f---ing disaster and blew up in the driveway...... YMMV.

Everybody trumpets their favorite camera of the year but I didn't read much about everybody's favorite cheap lights last year. Here's my favorite 2019 purchases and my favorite 2020 purchase. Go Lights!!!

Don't you just love it when the box shows up from some photographic retailer and everything inside has arrived without damage? I sure do. I think I buy as many lights in a given year as I do cameras. I rarely get emotionally attached to lights but I'm of the belief that good lighting is as important to many photographs as having the right camera or the hippest lens. I got one box this year and it had my "2020 Electronic Flash of the Year" in it. I know I'm a little early but patience was never my strong suit....

But before I unveil my current champ of low cost lighting for 2020 I'd like to call out my favorite two purchases of 2019.

First up is the Godox SK 400 mark ii. A fancy name for a dirt cheap monolight from a fairly well trusted brand. I bought this in the middle of the year when a set-up shoot on a dark stage with 60 foot ceilings convinced me that modeling lights that would stay on constantly were not a luxury but a mission critical feature when it comes to focusing in dark spaces. No matter how powerful your battery powered flash unit might be pretty much all of those lumens are wasted if your AF won't lock or you can can't see where that point of sharp focus is when manually focusing your image. 

I have three battery powered monolights, each with its own LED modeling light, but the issue with them is that the modeling lights are dim and only stay lit for 30 seconds. I guess it's a battery saving "feature" but it makes using them in dark environments really, really tough. After a bout of guess focusing, and having my assistant stand by one of the lights poking the modeling light button every half minute, I drove to Precision camera to check out the options. The least expensive, but still capable, electronic flash I found was the Godox SK 400 ii. It's got a metal body, allows for a wide range of Godox triggering options, has a 150 watt modeling light, recycles quickly, even at full power, takes Bowens accessories and, best of all, is only $139. I immediately bought one.  I thought it might not stand up to wear and tear but we're going on to about 60 projects on which the SK 400 has been the main light so I think I've already gotten my money's worth out of it, and it still seems pristine and very reliable. It was my best flash purchase of 2019.

The other "Best Cheap Light of 2019" was, without a doubt, the Godox SL 60 W. It's an LED lighting instrument that kicks out 60 watts of clean LED lighting from a COB LED that is about one inch by one inch across, which means it does a much better job giving me hard edges than an LED panel light. This guy also takes Bowens accessories, has a very quiet built-in cooling fan and a very nice LCD read out on the back. You can go from 10% to full power with the nice, big dial on the back of the unit, in very fine little increments, which makes it very easy to control. 

At around $139 for this unit, with a 7 inch reflector and a set of four way barn doors, I was very, very skeptical. I had a hard time believing it would be any good at all. But I thought I'd give it a try and ordered one to try out around the studio. After I had the light for about a week I dragged out the credit card and bought two more of them. They've been wonderful for video projects and when not in commercial use I bounce one off the office ceiling for a nice, soft and color correct office light source. 

I love these lights and love the price even more. Sure, you might need more power for bigger projects, but within their design parameters they do a great job. Especially for the price. Want to stop down more? Lower your shutter speed or turn up your ISO. Godox makes more powerful units but they get big, heavy and expensive pretty quickly and you only gain a stop for every doubling of power and price. I might get one bigger unit but so far I haven't felt the need to progress beyond these bargain bad boys. Easily may favorite continuous light of 2019.

Here's what the back panel of the SL60 W LED light looks like. 

Nice and uncluttered and, yes, you can use it with a supplied remote; though all you 

can do it turn the power up and down. The light is one color temperature= 5600K.

But, that was last year. What have I done for me lately? 

After last year's black floor, black stage, black ceiling set-up shoot fiasco (not to worry, we pulled it off --- by the skin of my teeth...) I decided I needed more cheap studio flashes with built-in, continuous (and relatively powerful) modeling lights so I went to Precision Camera looking for a couple more SK 400 mk2's. End of the year....Inventory in flux....no available stock and no chance of getting the SK's in before the middle to the end of the month. 

So I went home and dialed up the online retailers, knowing I'd be able to source the Godox flash from one of them them. But when I hit the product pages I noticed a new light from Godox that was smaller, lighter and even less expensive than the SK 400ii. In fact, there were two models; the MS300 and MS200, both from Godox. A bit of reading let me know that the model numbers refer to the watt second rating of each light. 

Since the only specification that was different between the two lights was the power rating, and the price difference between the two was a measly $10 I opted to order two of the MS300s. It was ordered from Amazon.com so I figured that if I didn't like something about the lights I could always send them back for a refund. They arrived in nice, well designed (from an aesthetic/advertising perspective) boxes and come only with the body of the flash (with flash tube), the modeling lamp (which you must install), a power cord, and a rugged cover to protect the flash tube and modeling light when traveling. They do not come with a reflector. 

Not to worry, the vendor had a special offer; you only needed to click on the optional reflector and it would included free of charge. 

The construction of the MS300 lights is almost all plastic, including the stand mount and tensioning control for tilting the flash. The receptor ring for Bowens accessories attachment is metal and, honestly, the plastic parts seem like they are well made and will stand up to normal, conscientious use. You won't be able to throw them, unprotected, onto the bed of an old truck but if you generally take care of stuff you'll be fine. 

The lights can be triggered by most of the recent and current Godox radio triggers and some of the triggers (XT-1, for sure) can also be used to control the power settings. If you don't use radio triggers the lights come with built in optical slaves which can be triggered by a separate flash. The modeling light controls allow for manual control, proportional ratio, and off. There's a recycle beep that lets you know when the unit has recycled, but you can turn this off, if it bugs you. At full power it takes about 1.8 seconds to recycle. Not quite as speedy as the SK400 ii but perfectly adequate for most uses.

The one thing the experienced user and beginner of modern flashes alike needs to know, about this model, is that there is no "auto power dump" mechanism. What that means is that when you have the flash set for high power, say, 1/2 power, and you turn it down to a lower power like 1/16th, you'll need to fire a frame or hit the test button to get rid of the excess power in the capacitors. Old timers will remember this from the days of big "pack and head" systems but users of many other modern studio flashes will not be familiar with the idea of "dumping the power" to get to that lower power setting. Many more expensive flashes do this for you automatically as you turn down the power.

So, I ended up with two 300 watt second flash units, complete with internal cooling fans and all the stuff a studio photographer might want, along with two umbrella reflectors for the princely sum of $218. Or $109 each. At this price you could almost consider them disposable. 

MS300 back panel.

big modeling light? check!

Since they don't come in an array of bright, tacky colors and they don't have giant illustrations of insects on the side of the product housings, there's little chance clients will think one way or another about your choice of lights. So long as they keep flashing on command. Three of these would make a great starter kit for a financially struggling photographer while the well-heeled practitioner might even consider them to be "disposable."  Consider this, if this light put your checked luggage over your limit you might be forced to choose between a $109 light or a $140 luggage charge. Leaving the light behind would be $31 less painful. 

My take?

Need some flashes with good modeling lights? Don't want to invest a lot of money?

Start here.

And that's why, unless something more fantastic comes along these pups are already my "Cheap Ass Lights of 2020." 

A collaboration with ATMTX to start out the new year. He wrote about our photo session over three different blog posts....

https://blog.atmtxphoto.com/2020/01/07/collaborating-with-kirk-on-a-portrait-shoot/

https://blog.atmtxphoto.com/2020/01/08/behind-the-scenes-the-kimono-fitting/

https://blog.atmtxphoto.com/2020/01/09/behind-the-scenes-the-kimono-photoshoot/

I have a friend who works at a non-photographic job and then spends a lot of his free time making photographs. Really good photographs. His progress over the ten years I've known him has been meteoric. And, guess what?, he owns far more cameras than I do. Tons and tons of them. Mostly bought used and "obsolete." But he uses them well and they really deliver. He's also got more modern stuff; even a few models that make me envious...

At any rate ATMTX sent me an e-mail late last year asking if I wanted to collaborate on a portrait shoot in the studio. He's more of an outdoor/available light/small flash expert and a friend of his wanted some studio portraits of her daughter. I'd never say "no" to a fun collaboration so I started the work year out by getting the studio into shape for a portrait shoot that included close up shots as well as full length poses.

ATMTX shot in between my shooting with his handheld camera and he also shot "behind-the-scenes" throughout the afternoon.

Hit the links above to read (and see) his version of events. I'm not through doing final edits on my high res shots but I'll share them after I'm done.

I love ATMTX's blog and think his complimentary description of my working methods is too glowing. But I was trying to be on my best behavior....

It was a blast working with a friend. I'll definitely do it again.

Gear notes: I was working with a Lumix S1R and the 24-105mm f4.0 zoom lens. Shot in raw+jpeg. Studio flashes into a huge umbrella and a smaller umbrella. Go see ATMTX's photos for more detail.

Hope you are having a fun start to your new year.

Photo by Stan Tyoshin. Denver, 2013

 Kirk loaded up with GH4's.....

I thought corporate events and event photography services would die off and people would embrace virtual meetings and webcast events. I was wrong.

I'm getting myself organized for the first bout of event photography in the new year. Next Thursday and Friday I'll spend most of my time at a large hotel, near the convention center, photographing an event for a corporate client. I'll make photographs of everything from signage to decor, key note speakers on the big stage, and the dynamics of small "breakout" sessions. I'll be there for the opening reception. I'll be there before dawn for rehearsals and some set up shots on the second morning. I'll be there when the CEO wraps up the show at the end of the week. And I'll spend the majority of the time with a camera in one hand and a second camera in the other.

In the early days of this century one of my clients was a pioneer in virtual/video conferencing. They did installations all over the country, outfitting conference rooms with multiple cameras and large monitors. The idea was that instead of gaggles of execs and technical folk hopping on planes and spending enormous amounts of money on airfare, travel time, hotels, taxis, restaurants and entertainment, they would just dial up clients and vendors and have virtual face-to-face meetings in these constructed meeting environments. It might have worked out. To some extent I'm sure it did (although now I think the video+audio systems, and audio only systems, are mostly used by clients to relentless torture their advertising agencies, and vice versa...).

One of my clients is a very successful event production company and my conversations with them in the transitional days of all things digital circled around how to deal with the "reality" that broadband and ever improving tele-conferencing would profoundly change the way they did business. Rather than load up multiple 18 wheelers and heading into giant hotel and convention ballrooms to set up stages and execute rapid decor installations they would have to figure out how to create meetings that could be broadcast to clients and their satellite offices around the world. They would say a sorrowful "goodbye" to warehouses full of lighting, truss, drapes, mixers, audio equipment and so on. 

But even after cataclysmic terrorist events and the biggest economic downturn of our generation the predictions of teleconferencing and webcasting taking over from live, on site events never fully materialized. At least not in a way that slowed down the desire and demand for live, face-to-face engagement. Seems there's something valuable about actually meeting people in person and gathering together in large, dark rooms to share information first hand. As a culture that no longer reads text the primacy of "monkey see/monkey do" has become, de facto, the only way that many people are now capable of learning new stuff. 

I guess this is why photography workshops took off as well; a market based on an inability to transfer information from the written page to the brain. The workshop provides a situation in which people can watch an "expert" do something, in a particular way, and then be led through the process until it is consumed and newly integrated.

At any rate, since the 2008-2009 economic downturn there has been a steady upturn and recovery in most corporate markets and along with it an ever increasing demand for live events of every kind. I understand live events from a sales point of view; nothing beats meeting a vendor and having them develop a level of trust and familiarity when it comes to closing a deal. But I would also guess that shows of all kinds: Sales meetings, CES, IFA, conventions, symposia and the rest are also nice breaks from mundane work weeks, a nice reward for high achieving employees, and a way to keep tabs on the rest of one's industry. At the higher end, corporate executive retreats, there is also a chance to sample "the lifestyles of the rich and famous" as companies make tax deductible forays to expensive hotels (where no rational individual would ever willingly spend the full rate...) to the finest restaurants in the service of their top people. And all of it is tax deductible. 

The benefit to me and to a legion of other photographers is that this may be one of the few actual, successful cases of "trickle down" economics extant. We get paid to go along for the ride... 

Most shows are now fairly pedestrian. Budgets are more carefully observed, venues less expensive, etc. It doesn't really affect me as my rates remain in the same basic band. But it's almost as though savvy event planners have found the spots in which they can "invest" less money in and still get the same bang for their overall marketing bucks. I'll call it the economy class version of last century's grand adventures in conventioneering. 

I'm not sure what to expect from next week's show but I'll be as ready for it as I can. I know the venue and the specific ballroom in the venue. It's a medium size room seating 400 or so at the max. I've seen stage plans and they look nicely proficient. A raised, center stage with a big screen at the rear that will display rear projection video and slides. Two large screens on either side of the stage so everyone in the room can see the information/entertainment without craning their necks too much. A foyer that will be lined with booth for vendors and their sales people. Tables running down the center of the foyer space that will provide space for coffee services, snacks, and maybe a breakfast buffet on the second morning. 

I know that the lighting for the important shots, the ones of presenters and speakers on the main stage, will be provided by multiple spot lights, hung from truss, in front of the stage. No real surprises.

I'll bring a roller case filled with back-up gear, extra batteries, a laptop and extra SSDs for back up and transfer. But the main gear will be the two Lumix S1 cameras, the 70-200mm and 24-105mm Lumix zoom lenses and the 35mm, 50mm and 85mm f1.4 prime lenses for those times when I want to get fancy with depth of field. I'll pack the 20mm f1.4 into the rolling case for some wide stage shots and anything that catches my eye but needs to be wide, wide, wide. 

I'll bring an on-camera flash (and a back up) for reception shots and for use in demos and in places where even the fastest lenses aren't going to freeze action. But I'll never use them for any of the "main tent" sessions. As HCB was purported to have said, "using flash is like bringing a handgun to the opera."  (He obviously didn't spend a lot of time in Texas).   

I like photographing shows. It's fun. I'm a bit of of extrovert so I like to meet new people and hear about new stuff. I like the pure photography of it because it's very rare at these shows to have anyone stand over your shoulder and micro-manage your day of shooting. You get to incorporate the skills of reportage (faux, interior street photography) stage show photography along with your skill in getting people to smile naturally for your camera in social situations. You have ample time to test out new lenses and new ways of using the lenses. 

I like this kind of work because it more or less requires you to minimize gear and to pack down. While some shows might have a component that requires you to set up a few lights and take a few headshots most shows are fast moving enough to trim off those extras and concentrate on the flow of each day's events. With a stocked roller case in the marketing team office and a comfortable camera bag over my shoulder I feel comfortable spending the day making photographs that I believe combine two things:  fun and accessible images along with a well executed visual message that helps drive my client's marketing and brand. 

During my tenure as an event photographer I've had the benefit of seeing some of the finest hotel venues in some unexpected places. It offsets the many times I have to stay at tiny, weird motels while on the road in my role as traveling environmental portrait photographer for industry. The images below are from The Breakers Hotel in West Palm Beach and also from the now infamous, Mar a Lago, also in West Palm Beach. I stayed at the Breakers for the better part of the week while working for a technology client. It's an amazing property but not one on my list of destinations I'd like to pay for out of my own pocket.

Mar a Lago was just weird.

But before I get on to next week's jobs I've got an important one to cover this Saturday afternoon. I'll be photographing a play for children at Zach Theatre. It's called, "The Very Hungry Caterpillar," and it should be a blast. Ben and I read that book....a lot. Nostalgia? For sure.  

Love shows. Love events. Not so fond of office work...

Above and just below: Mar a Lago dining room.