Spending the afternoon relaxing with a camera and a lens. B&W. And one color.

Packing up for the last shoot of the year and wistfully thinking about donuts. And vacation.

 I say that tomorrow's shoot will be the last one of the year but it never really happens that way. People get panicky when they realize that they haven't spent their budgets for the year and crazy things happen. I'd really like to get everything wrapped up this week and just take a month or so of solid downtime. I'd spend a good part of the time in the pool and on the trails but I'd also like to spend more time in some of Texas' great state parks. Or on some sort of photographic field trip to someplace interesting. Someplace I've never been to before.

But first there is tomorrow. It's going to be an unusual day. One of the advertising/P.R. agencies I enjoy working with is using the occasion of an "all hands meeting" and their holiday party to multi-task with their favorite photographer. A catch-all for the end of the year. 

I can't get Tim Horton's donuts tomorrow morning so I'll settle for some Pumpkin Spice waffles and some really good coffee at home. Then it'll be time to load up the car and get moving. There's not too much gear to pack and carry; just enough to get a bunch of mini-jobs done during the course of the day. It's kind of crazy to realize the sheer amount of packing and unpacking I've done over the last ten days to two weeks. And since every job is a bit different so is the daily load out.

When I arrive at my client's H.Q. the first thing I'll do is set up a white seamless background and some lights in their small video studio. It's upstairs and I'm kind of lazy so I'm bringing small lights. Less to carry up and down the stairway. I'll be setting up to photograph 10 to 15 headshots that will join about 25 previous headshots on the company website. We've been photographing the people against white and dropping in well considered backgrounds we've shot around downtown. The small range of backgrounds provides the overall continuity. 

I'm planning on bouncing two Godox AD200Pro electronic flashes off the ceiling and adding a small reflector near the camera to bounce light into people's faces. These lights are so much smaller and lighter than my traditional monolights and faster to set up and use as well. I'm scheduled to shoot the portraits from 11:30 till 12:30 or 12:45 and then we strike that set and haul the two lights outside to set up for a group shot of 40-45 people right at 1:00 p.m. 

Those are the two set-ups I'm sure about and the rest is up in the air. I know we have a bunch of speakers who will be addressing the group in an adjacent conference space and I'm sure we'll get photos of them. There's an awards ceremony and a dinner as well, and then a party afterwards. The portraits and the group shot are the key things I've got to get right and the rest is catch as catch can.  aka: optional.

I'm currently charging batteries for three different on camera-style flashes. One is the Godox V1 which is dedicated for Olympus and Panasonic interfaces (but not current Leicas!!!). One is the Godox TT685 which is also O/P dedicated and then there is a tiny Godox TT350 which is also set up for O and P. All three work well with the Panasonic S5 so that will be my primary camera for the day. These flashes are all intended to enable me to light all the non-setup social photography that happens after the group shot. But only used one at a time...

Interesting that when I look through my tool bag of on-camera flashes every single one of them is a Godox model. Even my 400 watt second monolights (not accompanying us tomorrow) come from the same company. I've accrued this stuff over the years and the sad truth of it is I keep coming back to this brand because the camera maker's branded flashes are less reliable. And are too feature laden. At least that's what I've found in practice. 

There are three lenses being packed for the S5 system. The 24-105mm S Panasonic lens is my all arounder. 

It's lightweight relative to the Leica 24-90mm and has more effective image stabilization; especially when used in tandem with the S5's in-body stabilization. It covers a great range of focal lengths as well. Next up I have the Sigma 35mm f2.0  Contemporary which has worked well for me when using flash in dimly lit rooms. The extra aperture capability makes it easier for the camera to focus and nowadays I am not above turning on the AF-Assist lights as well. The final lens is the Sigma 65mm f2.0 just because I'm currently infatuated with it and want to use it for everything --- even when I know I shouldn't. 

Since the Leicas don't work in TTL or Auto with my collection of flashes I chose an interesting sub-system as a back up for my long day on location instead. I'm bringing along my trusty Panasonic G9 paired with the Panasonic/Leica 12-60mm zoom and, just for kicks, the Olympus 150mm  75mm f1.8. 

I might use the latter lens if I'm called on to make photos of a speaker at a far off podium...

Except for the fact that the two cameras don't share lenses the G9 is a good choice because the menus are so familiar to me. The flashes work exactly the same across the two systems. And, finally, because both cameras can use exactly that same batteries, which are plentiful around here. That alone is a source of great joy for me!

Also, I've logged 20 to 30 thousand shots with G9 cameras and trust them 100%. 

All the cameras, lenses and batteries go in an Airport Essentials backpack. All of the flash gear goes in a Gitzo photo backpack and the light stands and background gear get stuffed into a stand bag. The goal is to be able to carry all three containers up and down stairs and between the two locations which are located about 200 yards apart, by myself. That should be enough exercise for tomorrow, right? 

There's not much stress surrounding this particular shoot. The agency, from the owner down to the production people, is filled with old friends, collaborators and congenial clients. There's not much here to stress about. Group shots tend to fall together on their own and we've logged hundreds and hundreds of portrait shoots for this firm. We know and they know what to expect and they also know there's not much here we couldn't reshoot if we had to....

But I don't want to get cocky so I'm bringing back-ups for everything and going through the checklists as I pack. Doing the job by the numbers. Checkmarks required. I'm even tossing two SD cards in each camera and setting them up for redundant backup. I might even shoot in the raw format!

So, by the end of the shoot I will have photographed over the course of the last week: multiple attorneys at various locations in their downtown offices, about 20 accountants in environmental portraits around their offices, one oral surgeon whose name I had to "embroider" onto his white doctor's coat via PhotoShop, several intricate piece of cutting edge medical gear, four models doing medical lifestyle stuff, and a couple of portraits in the studio for friends.

And I will have spent far too much time sitting in front of the computer trying to wring the best looking images I could make out of the best shots from thousands of files. And not nearly enough time walking aimlessly downtown with some odd camera. 

And, with that in mind I'll end this post, grab a Sigma fp, put a 50mm lens on the front and go out to shoot some random black and white images of downtown Austin as it gets ready, in its own way, to celebrate the holidays.

Wish me luck. 

Quasi-Landscapes. From a corporate photographic adventure at The Breakers Hotel in West Palm Beach. --- the coffee was decent too!

 

I sometimes laugh at how seriously most of my photographer friends and I take the gear. We're always so quick to move on from old stuff to new stuff. Almost like we're running marathons and switching from running in hiking boots to running in progressively better and light shoes. Too bad it doesn't really work out that way. Maybe it's even more like moving up from a Porsche to a Lamborghini in an attempt to get through commuter traffic fast... when, perhaps, a nice economy car makes the difference when everyone is going forward at 12 miles per hour....

When I recently came across a small collection of images I took in my free time at a project location I reflexively searched for the file info to see what camera and lens I used. Not a Leica. Not a Hasselblad. Not even a full frame camera. Nope. It was a Nikon D7100 and the early 24-200mm VR zoom lens. Yeah. I was a bit surprised too. 

But there it is. I guess this just adds to the idea that being in the right place at the right time is much more important than having the latest and most spectacular gear in your hands. These images are pretty much right out of the camera. Minor exposure tweaking not withstanding. 

Can't imagine they'd be any better if taken with a camera that's twelve years newer. Sometimes we might want to stop and look at what our gear (and we) were capable of doing back in the "dark ages" of digital photography. It might slow down the frantic research to find the next great thing. 

And I'm so glad you asked about swim practice this morning...

A nice, gray day. A smattering of splattering rain on and off during the swim. No lightning or thunder but fun gusts of chilly wind. Reminds a swimmer to stay low and streamlined in the water. 

Warm water and cold air mean the insides of one's goggles tend to fog up quickly. The cure? Lick the insides of the lenses before putting them on. It's a temporary fix but it beats not being able to see where you are going.....

Spit. who knew?

Landscape attempt. Vancouver. Stanley Park.

 

40mm f1.4 Voigtlander lens. Panasonic S5 camera. 

Every once in a while I try my hand at a landscape photo.

I think this one actually works...

Notes from an extremely happy assignment. They actually do exist. Still. Even now.

 

This image has nothing to do with the written content of this post. I can't upload images of my clients from yesterday until the client publishes the images on their website but I didn't want you to get here and stare at a non-photographic page.... And everyone likes red/blue contrasts...

About a month ago I wrote of my experiences going on location to the Austin offices of a national accounting firm to make portraits of their employees. The company has been a client now for over a decade and in the past they've always asked for portraits photographed against a gray seamless background. A while back a new internal marketing team took the reins and engineered a completely new branding strategy and a new look for their materials. Gone were the headshots against gray, incoming are environmental portraits taken in the offices, complete with nicely out of focus backgrounds. I couldn't be happier about a style change. 

On the first round we spent a day on site, shot in six or seven different locations and ended up making portraits of 19 people. Yesterday I was back for another full day in their Austin facility doing the same thing for 17 more people.

The first time out I photographed everyone with a tripod-mounted Sigma fp camera and the Leica 24-90mm f4.0 lens. I lit almost every portrait that day with a big LED light aimed into a 60 inch, white umbrella. It worked out really well so --- I couldn't do it the same way again. I wanted a little friction of change just to shake up the day a bit.

So, this time I decided to use the Panasonic S5 (one of the most under-appreciated, full frame cameras on the market today!) and I brought along only prime lenses instead of the usual zooms. The lighting was pretty much the same. A 48 inch circular light blocker to put between the portrait subject and the icky fluorescent lights in the ceiling and then a small octa-box with a powerful LED light aimed inside.

In a huge split with past practices I'm lighting and white balancing for the subject and the subject is shielded from the bulk of the ambient light in each location by the light blocker. My in-camera color correction is just for the LED lit subject. I let the background fall wherever it's going to fall. But there is good logic behind this. If I use the ambient light exposure and balance for relative intensity with the subject's light I don't have to do any additional lighting beyond the LED main light. But wait! Won't the background color be icky?

On this particular location the subject was well lit and accurately color balanced but as a result the background was all lit with very yellow/green, icky (VSL technical word), fluorescent lights. It was the kind of color no client really needs to see. So.....why do this?

Well, in the latest rev. of Lightroom Classic you have an extremely powerful set of selection and masking tools. If I include, say, 50 shots of a person in basically the same pose but with a wide range of expressions and tweaks of expressions I can now go in and make an instant selection of the subject and fine tune color, etc. on them. Then I can create a second mask  -- automatically -- that includes only the background and quickly color correct and tweak the background any way I want --- including getting a tight match to the foreground/subject color. If that's what I want.  Each mask containing its own exposure, color, contrast and sharpness or de-focusing tweaks. Once I have one file looking really nice I can sync that file's settings and masks across all 50 of the similar images in less than a minute. Amazing.

When you think about the sheer control you have over both sections of the image; from subject alone to far background, and you are able to correct for each of the person's files quickly, you can imagine how much improved are the proofs (online galleries) you can share with the client. You no longer have to talk them through how you are going to "fix" files post by "saving" the background. The tools are an amazing addition to LRC and the fact that you can more or less automate giant tranches of the work is game-changing. 

Why was this shoot so fun? Well, the client's office has a killer coffee machine, the client trusts me to figure out the locations I want to shoot in and how I'd like to photograph. No one is standing next to me impatiently waiting to "approve" stuff, all the people in the office are half my age but we find each other fun to talk to, and fun to hang out with. The corporate culture is..... mellow.  One person stopped in the middle of her session to launch into a long discussion about Birkenstock shoes when she saw my now hard to acquire Birkenstock Bostons. Seems I share a specific shoe appreciation with a 27 year old accountant. She was wearing Arizonas with socks. And she was one of the cool kids. For an accoutant. 

The office reminds me very much of the software start-up offices, pre-2001 market crash. There's a fully stocked pantry of snacks that range from vegan and nutritious to crazy delicious but addictive and with borderline dangerous amounts of sugar. They cater-in every lunch. We had delicious ciabatta style pizzas yesterday along with an ample selection of salads. I like working for clients who order, among other things, prosciutto topped pizzas, garnished with arugula and drizzled with a fig sauce. Can't beat it. Not your standard Pizza Hut or Dominos stuff. 

I work at a pace I get to set and sometimes I change gears in the middle of a sitting and just try something else. Maybe a different lens or a different light placement. At the end of the day I get really nice feedback from senior staff and they thank me profusely and genuinely for having been there. One partner who was on site came to my last location of the day to chat while I was packing and he said, "It's fun to watch someone work who so obviously loves what they do. Especially when they are so good at it."  That's probably going to be the best holiday present I'll get this year. From a client. And I really cherish little moments like that. 

Since I wasn't using my typical zooms I guess I should mention what lenses I took along and what I ended up using to do the portraits. I brought along the Sigma 90mm f2.8 lens, the Sigma 85mm f1.4 lens and the Sigma 65mm f2.0 lens. I used the 85mm for the first half of the day and then switched over to the 65mm. 

I was composing in landscape format and putting the subjects off center to either the left or the right hand side of the frame. The brief from   the new marketing team asked to be able to see both shoulders and to leave some space for the background to read so it was okay to use wider lenses than usual. 

My favorite for the day was the 65mm f2.0. It's sharp, neutral, able to be used without fear of failure at f2.8 and I'm pretty sure it's equally sharp at f2.0 (wide open) but I needed some depth of field for the images to work the way they needed to. 

I have one more job to complete before I break and start turning everything else down between now and the end of the year. It's on Monday and it's a long day with the agency I did the wine stuff for a year and a half ago. I have a bunch of friends there and I'm going to shoot some portraits in the early part of the afternoon and then stick around and snap some pix at their annual holiday party. Should be fun and mellow and then the remainder of the year is just for me. 

If I were to buy another camera right now (which I'm pretty sure I'm not....) it would be another Lumix S5. the camera is close to perfect --- for the money. Loved using it all day yesterday. 100% unfailure rate.

What a glorious Fall day in Austin, Texas. What better way to celebrate than with a noon swim?

 

Today is my second official day off since returning from Vancouver. I've been working on pre and post production on a number of projects and yesterday and today were the first in a while with no work obligations whatsoever. And both days have been beautiful.

The temperature peaked at around 82° this afternoon and that was just right after what seemed like weeks of cold, wet, gray weather. 

I got up this morning and walked with the transplendent art director. We did our usual hike through the nearby hills. Home an hour later for coffee and food. And then I poked around the house looking for stuff to fix or stuff the fixing of which needs to be delegated to trained professionals. I'm having a new main water shutoff valve installed next week and I have some masonry work I need to get done. The periphery walls are not going to repair themselves. 

But top of my list was making it to the noon swim practice. The water was a cool 80°. The air temp. was a delicious 82°. Karen was our coach and she wrote a great workout for us. I substituted backstroke for freestyle on as many of the sets as I could so I could watch the puffy clouds float leisurely across the sky. 

It was one of those late November days when you could still wear your Birkenstock sandals without soaks and not freeze your toes. T-shirts were de rigueur and a pair of short pants would not be a bad choice. 

Attendance was light but there was one masters swimmer in each lane and sometimes that's nice too.

We've got the good weather until 10 or so tonight and then the next front moves through. Highs tomorrow in the 50s but fully loaded with sunshine. That perfect moment between our extended Summer and the onset of Winter. A nice day for a swim outside.

(the flags across the pool are backstroke flags. They exist at a precise distance from each end of the pool so backstrokers know when the wall is coming. Experienced backstrokers can count the number of strokes from the flags to the walls with high accuracy. Bashing one's head against the wall is a quick way to learn).

Kirk photographed in Vancouver by exquisite art director. She used a Sony RX100...

 

Squinting into the fading sun on top of the central Library building.

Trying out my winter clothes and a PD strap which walking near the sea wall.

It was fun.

PPD. The cause. The cure.

Photo of Jana. Self assigned. Just for fun.

 Post Project Depression. Well, maybe "depression" is too strong a word. 

commercial photography projects can be intense. Not in a sudden and surprising way but more in a fashion that has one chasing after a lot of details both before and after the actual operation of the camera with a dose of intensity right in the middle (the shoot days). 

every time we step up to the back of the camera there is something riding on the success or failure of the project. Especially so when tens of thousands of dollars are on the line. You don't just want to get it right, you need to get it right. "It" being successfully matching the final results to the client's expectations. 

when you head out to shoot personal work you might drop money on travel and accommodations but it's generally nothing like the money you might drop on expenses for a national ad campaign for an industry-specific client. 

My company just finished three complex photo projects in a row. Tightly scheduled. The pre-production for several of them took place, sporadically, over several weeks. The budget for the biggest one included nearly $16,000 for talent (models), additional fees for a make-up artist and fees for my assistant. There were costs for craft service, props and even some extra gear. If anything happened to the files, either during the shoot or during the archiving stage I would be on the hook for a re-shoot, using the original talent, and every cent of the re-shoot would come out of my pocket. The price of failure? It would not be just the $18,000 in hard costs but also the damage to my reputation as someone able to deliver reliably.

If you live and work in a fairly small community you know that bad news travels quickly and the image bad news creates far outlives any attempt made to rectify the issues. You could come out of pocket for all the money and still have the stigma of the failure track you tenaciously. 

This means each big shoot comes with a large measure of responsibility. And that's what generates the feelings of intensity that surround most big projects. The biggest cost is usually the talent and that's non-refundable. You've already used up their time. You've already paid for the usage rates you've negotiated. 

So there is a certain amount of adrenaline flowing through the photographer. The attention to detail on the sets is amplified. Every detail triple checked. The actions of your support staff carefully supervised. And all while working in tight collaboration with the client. 

But a sad fact is that after you've photographed, archived the work, unpacked the gear, handed out checks and all the other post shoot details there is an emotional let down. An unfounded waiting for the other shoe to drop that goes with any large project. I've seen this all the way through my career. It's something I experience every time I shoot something that can't be easily re-shot. Or every time the stakes get high. 

For two or three days after the delivery of a project I find myself in a pensive mood. I wonder if the work will be good enough this time. Will a flaw be revealed in the middle of the hundreds of files that were delivered. Was there some technical flaw we didn't notice in the frenetic excitement of the day? How will the final approval of the client play out? Will we be asked to re-do any part of the project? Will the cash transfer come on time? Will we be able to work with this client again in the future?

Once the phone rings and the client calls to give good and positive feedback about the images the feeling abates. But the next time around, in the nascent start-up of another big project that inkling of fear re-emerges and starts seeping in. Generating that fear of failure that lurks just under the skin. 

Funny. I asked an art director who is around my age if he still gets nervous when starting a big, new project. He told me he's nervous every single time. Without exception. And when he finishes a project there might be a little celebration which is more like "theater" for the client and the production team but in his own world there is a let down of emotions and he wonders if he'll be able to be successful on the next one. 

With thousands of projects under my belt you'd think I would have figured out how to dodge this post project depression but to hear my peers tell it you will jinx yourself on both ends if you aren't nervous going in and not a bit deflated at the end. If you develop real hubris you will be punished by the gods of advertising and marketing. 

We're at the point in our important project at which the files have been delivered and we're awaiting final feedback/approval from our client. It's a time filled with pensive self-doubt. As I said above: waiting for the other shoe to drop.... which should really be stated as preparing oneself for the possibility of the worst case scenario. Which would be that the profitable job suddenly becomes a costly train wreck.

Why did I ever embark on this career when I could have been a safely employed actuarial scientist carefully laying all responsibility for failure at the feet of my employer? Would it have been equally fun?

So, what's the cure? Grabbing a camera and a friend/model and heading out to do some personal shooting. Working with the model and the gear in order to create something you really like. Photographs that make you love photography all over again. Again.