A casual and even tempered rant.

I don't know what it is about some hobbyists that sends me into a frenzy.  I think the thing that really chaps my ass is when a person goes out and buys all the latest, greatest photo stuff and then comes to me and whines about "not having anything to shoot."  "You're lucky," they say,  "You're a professional and you get to photograph really cool stuff all the time."  I laugh to myself and think about the job I had shooting garbage trucks.  Or the fast deadline magazine job of shooting the 300 pound IT guy in the tiny beige office with the last century computer tower and trying to make him look.....positively interesting.

The befuddled whiner packs every piece of gear he can into his oversized bag and heads out on a quest to find something, anything, that might interest him.  Every once in a while I'll do my walk with someone like this.  I made the mistake of doing so recently.  It was an eye-opener about the power of indecision and uncertainty. They were so busy choosing which lens to put on the body or which body to put over their shoulder that they walked right past subject after subject that would delight me.

Like the image above.  It's a flower in a vase in a fast food Sushi restaurant.  It's behind a glass window. The person I was walking with glanced at the window and walked on.  He saw an empty restaurant.  I saw the flower.  I moved in closer, shot at a wide focal length and a fairly wide open aperture.  I love this flower just as it is.  No need to head to PhotoShop to "spruce it up."

I saw this sign in the window of a downtown club and loved the insouciant trashiness of the whole thing.  I snapped a quick photograph for fun.  My hobbyist friend took this as some sort of cue that this was high art and blessed by the professional photographer in tow.  So he grabbed another camera body out of his bag and covered this poster with two different L series zooms.  He also bracketed.  Some hobbyists think "hot girl" = real photo.  Even if it's just an illustration.

By now I was trying to ignore the constant chatter about technique and which lens is sharper and what body has the best dynamic range and all the usual stuff.  We walked by this building and I was intrigued by the light on the bricks and the reflections in the windows.  I snapped a few frames.  It's one of the last ancient, two story office buildings in all of downtown.  My friend was mystified by my choice and kept on walking,  a big camera over each shoulder.

Finally we walked past a green construction fence on the way to the cars.  He was busy putting his cameras away.  The sun was sliding down and downtown was behind us now.  He didn't see much else he wanted to point his cameras at. I snapped away at this series.

He shook his head and made some remark along the lines of, "You should really take more time to look at the stuff that's online.  You'll know what's popular.  You'll never be able to sell this!"  We were supposed to go get coffee after our walk but I decided that I just wasn't in the mood.  He shoved his Canon 1D4 with his 24-70mm L lens in one part of a bag so big it would give an inferiority complex to a Samsonite Steamer Trunk and plunked his Canon 1DS3 with a 70-200 series 2 L lens in the other side and fidgeted with his fanny pack of gadgets.  

Then he finally looked over at my camera.  "Oh," he said, "That's your problem.  That's not L glass!." 

I was carrying around a Canon 7D and the little, dirt cheap, refurbished, $119 18-55 IS zoom lens.  "I don't see how you can shoot anything with that piece of shit." Was the last thing he said before he got in his car and headed off to an evening of post processing and vigorous Photoshopping.

He's right, of course.  It's impossible to do any good photography without spending tens of thousands of dollars.

I have a new rule.  I'll only walk now with non-photographers.  Should suit both of us fine.......

All photos shot this afternoon.  Yes.  We survived the big freeze.

Kirk Tuck Photographs Food At Jeffrey's. Works For Me.

I've been eating great food at Jeffrey's Restaurant for over 30 years.  When Austin was a smaller town Jeffrey's was pretty much the only dining establishment within fifty miles that didn't had chicken fried steak or hamburgers on the menu.  Like every temple of food they've made a few tiny missteps (nouvelle cuisine compounded by raspberry vinaigrette salad dressing)  along the way but it's pretty easy to say that they've been the high end dining destination for two generations of food savvy Austinites.  With very good reason.

I still remember some of the dishes that Raymond Tatum prepared for Belinda and me on any of our many visits during the "two-income-no-child" years which were so good that they actually constitute the "happy place" in my mind that I go to in times of stress.....  I proposed to Belinda there 26 years ago and we've celebrated many anniversaries and birthdays there as well.

So when the arctic winds whipped across Austin this past week and I got a bit of "cabin fever" I called the manager, Kate, and asked if I could come by and shoot some of their food for a new book I'm working on about lighting.  She was very gracious and offered up Thurs. afternoon, without hesitation.

While I'd eaten his incredible food I had not yet met the new chef, Deegan McClung.  He is an alum of Commander's Palace in New Orleans and honed his chops at Wink, Herbsaint and Uchi before accepting the kitchen helm at Jeffrey's.  I told him what I was looking for and he headed to the kitchen while I wrestled with some bags full of lights and stands.

Above is my basic lighting set up.  I'm using a Canon 7D on my favorite wooden tripod.  The 7D sports a 60mm EFS macro lens (which is wonderul, by the way).  The lighting is vintage me.   A big diffuser positioned as close to the subject as possible without being in the shot.  Two big, 500 bulb LED fixtures blowing light thru that diffuser.  A handy white "pop-up" reflector to the opposite side. And a wee little battery powered 160 bulb LED light used with its diffuser way in the back.  I love using a diffuser panel because I can skim light on it in so many ways and subtly change the feel of the light.  I can also angle it around its vertical axis to provide more or less tip light.  Very flexible lighting tool.

The little building Jeffrey's occupies is probably 50 years old but I had no fear of tripping any breakers because, together, the two A/C powered fixtures draw only 80 watts of power from the wall outlets.  Quite different from the days of thousand watt movie lights or 2400 watt second strobe packs and 4x5 view cameras.

Here's what the scene looks like from almost directly behind the camera:

This image is a little tighter and gives you a good idea of how soft and distinct the light is:

I always start with a "stand in plate" so I can get a sense for the real estate I'll be dealing with when the "hero" dish hits the table.  I wanted to be really tight on all of the dishes because I really like to see the ingredients in a way that's different from real life.  Here's my stand in plate:

The passive reflector on the opposite side of the camera from the diffuser and the light source is what controls the quality of the shadows.  Need more fill?  Bring the diffuser closer.  Need more drama?  Move the diffuser away.  There is no "correct" ratio or distance.  We make this up to taste as we go along.  Just like good chefs.  After half and hour of fussing with lights and comp I'm ready for the first dish and Deegan brings it out right on time.

It's a fabulous, spicy, rich quail appetizer!  And it looks so good on the plate.  The chef tells me which side of the dish is the "presentation focal point" and then leaves me in the darkened dining room to explore the dish however I want to.  So I do.  I move it and the camera again and again.  I'm looking for interesting angles and combinations of colors......

When I've thoroughly explored the dish (20 variations? Maybe 23) I put it on an adjacent table and start playing with the next plate size.  Did I nibble on that quail?  Would you nibble on a great, freshly prepared quail appetizer from a world class chef as you're setting up your next shot?  If you said, "No." you've missed out on one of the prime perks of photography.

As an aside I would say that the 60mm macro on the smaller sensored Canon is wonderful.  When you are this close to the food you need more, not less depth of field at your fingertips.  And this lens is very well behaved.  When I apply the lens profile to a file in Lightroom there's very little discernable change in the on screen image....it's that well corrected.

Next up is an incredible salad sourced mainly from locally grown produce.

I start wide and then I move in.  I have this salad from so many angles but I keep coming back to the photograph below because in a small encapsulation it describes the entire salad so well.  The lush, sharp goat cheese, nuts and vegetables.  There's always a temptation to crank up the saturation on shots like this but it never really conveys into CMYK print so I tend to aim for a more faithful rendition.....

We follow the salad shot with a shot of a Pate de Foie Gras.  I found the presentation wonderful, in person, but challenging to photograph.  Finding just the right angle and just the right elevation took a lot of trial and error.  I'll confess that I'm a bit out of practice and the chef is used to cooking and plating food that satisfies in the eating.  But I did the best I could and then I ate the evidence.

The final shot, though untraditional, is my favorite.  It shows the ingredients well and it's monolithically intriguing.  I racked the tripod all the way up and stood on a chair to get the image.  On every shot I set the camera's two second self timer.  I tried to squeeze the shutter release with a minimum of movement.  Most of our shutter speeds were in the "danger zone" between 1/8th and 1/25th of a second at ISO 200.

The final dish was a duck confit that was absolutely wonderful.

Two almost identical angles but a slight difference in elevation.  I wish the photos could transmit the aroma of this wonderful, crispy duck.  It was superb.

As soon as I finished shooting the duck I started breaking down the lights and the cameras and packing up.  It was five o'clock and the dining room needed to be set and ready for service by six.  My friend, Keith dropped by and helped pack up the duck.......

Shooting food for a top flight restaurant is pretty exciting if you are really into food.  I was able to step into the kitchen and watch the chef's technique and his fluid handling of his chef's knife.  I'll share the images with the restaurant, giving them a full set of totally retouched images.  I get to use the images in my upcoming book.  And you get a front row seat of the way I shoot food.  I learned a lot over the years from a NY food photographer named Lou Manna.  You might want to look at his books.

All the "behind the scenes" images were shot, handheld, with a Canon 5dmk2 and a 24-105mm lens.  ISO 3200.  Wide open.

The quiet moments between hectic life.

I write a lot about jobs.  And those are vital to any photographer's career.  But I don't spend enough time writing about the importance of quiet time and meditation for creative people.  And when I say creative people I really mean all of us.  Everyone.

I just read a study about the value of meditation.  Not "swami-cult-chant-incense" meditation (unless you are into that....) but simple, mindful meditation.  We tend to go like the wind in our daily lives and we're confronted with new facts, new ideas and change all the time.  But we rarely make enough time to actually let our brains process the things we learn and confront.  The study, here , points to meditation as a tool to increase attention, create more grey matter and become better at learning.  Other studies document meditation as a blood pressure and cortisol lowering mechanism that could prevent disease (dis-ease) and anxiety.

We tend to reward photographers for writing stuff about daring feats of lighting, meeting heroic deadlines and jousting with evil bean counters and this focus creates a self reinforcing spiral of dis-information that makes many freelancers feel that they should be working until they drop every day.  I am guilty of presenting my version of life in this manner and I felt that I should be more inclusive in descriptions of how my life is really structured.

In this post I want to talk about the important of the quiet moments between hectic life.

Walking with a camera.  When I go out walking with my camera it's not with the mindset of an explorer on an expedition, with the goal of coming back with treasures (although I couch it that way when I shouldn't).  When I go out walking with a camera I am mindful that I'm just doing a walking meditation.  When I see something I like I snap a photograph. And then I let go of thinking about the thing that attracted my attention.  The rest of the time I'm trying to keep my mind clear of all the warring thoughts that impel us to worry and thrash around.  I follow a route and keep my mind on just experiencing everything as it opens up in front of me.  I think all solitary walking is a form of meditation because the cadence of your walk keeps your mind focusing subconsciously on being here now.

Catching some floor.  A few years ago, during the big downturn (circa 2006 and 2007 for photographers) I struggled with profound anxiety.  The way I had done things for years shifted in a heart beat.  All structure exited the emergency exits and most of us were mired in a "wait and see" mode as we watched our working capital shrink and fizzle.  I went to therapy.  I tried Xanax.  Nothing seemed to relieve the tension and apprehension.  Then I decided that every time the anxiety became overwhelming I'd grab a yoga mat, lie down on the nicely padded floor of my studio, close my eyes and meditate for half an hour.  I set my computer to ring an alarm, or I used a meditation CD with a timed thirty minutes of soft music.  This was the one thing that worked.  I could calm down enough to trace back to the quick thought that triggered my anxiety and de-fuse that mental bomb before it could do any more damage.

Eventually the anxiety went into total remission.  But I stay with the practice of meditating once or twice during the day and when I get off the floor I feel rested and calm and ready for the next task.  When I'm writing a book and I get stuck.  I hit the floor and meditate.  When I get back up the writing is easy.

Beyond meditation.  After the economic downturn started to recover here in Austin it felt good to book up work again.  There's a strong, pent up demand for new advertising and new images.  But even though my previous writing would lead you to believe that I work a lot I spend more time doing fun, human oriented things.  I book my morning swims in my business calendar.  If I miss a day because of a job I go into flex time mode and look for a place to make up the swim.  Even if it's just getting in the pool at sunset and swimming an easy mile.  When I'm not booked I make time to have lunch with friends.  Today I'm having lunch with a friend from an advertising agency.  Yesterday I had lunch at a ground breaking ceremony for the theater I shoot for.  We celebrated my 18 years of shooting for them.  I didn't even bring a camera. I just savored the moment.

Tomorrow I'll do some work in the morning and afternoon but I'll make time to have lunch with a photographer friend of mine.  We're working our way thru the "big shift" and our mutual support is priceless.  We know better than any of our friends what this struggle does to us and we're working on how to deflect the ambiguous nature of it all.

Time away is the secret to getting more energy.  You've probably heard that two photographers are getting on a bus and doing lighting workshops in 50 cities across the U.S.  While it may make sense for them economically it seems dangerous to the spirit of their work.  After big jobs I need time to read novels,  go to movies, have dinner parties and live the life I want to shoot.  If all I do is shoot and think about photography there's no reality left to reference outside of photography.  And a constant focus on tools and techniques without subject and concept is deadly to my way of seeing and being.

If the downturn taught me nothing else it is that downtime is a gift to be savored.  Experiences outside photography are the creative fuels we use to  come back and create art.  And art hits the audience it is made for.  If the art is ABOUT photography it appeals only to other photography obsessed people.  If art is ABOUT living life then the audience is infinite.

Relax.