New Portrait Style. Getting Outside More.

I've been shooting more and more stuff on the pedestrian bridge that connects north and south Austin for walkers, joggers and bikers.  Last Fall we started using it to make portraits.  Kind of a cool location since there are cityscapes in every direction and it all depends on what time of day you choose as to what backgrounds work the best.

We hit the bridge with a scrim to put over the top of Chad's head which blocked the direct sun.  It was a bright 3 pm in late Fall.  I brought in a Profoto 600b with one head.  The head sported a small (2x3 foot) Westcott softbox that originally came as part of a Spider TD-5 florescent light kit.  I the image with an Olympus e3 and a 14-54mm zoom lens.  We did a little post processing on the sky and played around a bit with the highlight and shadow controls in the PhotoShop adjustments menu.

I've gone back to the bridge again and again and every time we do it's a bit different.

This shot is a totally different style but we're standing in the same spot and shooting in pretty much the same direction.  I was using the 70-300mm IS Nikon Lens on a D700 and trying to shoot as close to wide open as possible.  This shot was done on an overcast day that was still kind of stingy bright.  I blocked the almost directional light by putting a 1/2 silk diffuser between the general position of the sun (over my shoulder) and my model.  Amazing how different one location can look.  But we've been back again.....

This was shot in January and it's about 90 degrees to the east compared to the last two shots.  Again, I'm using the Profoto 600b but this time I'm using an Elinchrom small shoot thru device that's about 36 inches in diameter.  The shot looks entirely different than the first two.  I need to take some subjects up there at twilight.

On another note:  I bitch a lot about the business but I thought I'd tell the story of a more or less routine but delightful shooting assignment.  My PR client, David, asked me to shoot a data center; one of those anonymous buildings that houses hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of blade servers in racks and basically houses most of the web content that flies around the fiber these days.  The buildings are very secure and a typical feature is a cluster of giant, diesel generators over to one side or another of the building.  Having a total electrical failure is considered a very negative feature set.......

David and I have worked together on projects like this before but it had been a while.  I suggested that we meet the day before and do a walk thru of the building's interior to get an idea of what we'd be dealing with.  David added that we should meet for lunch and then do the scouting.  It's this kind of thinking that makes David a good client.  We settled on Sushi.  His suggestion and my pleasure.

We went into the building carrying an Olympus EPL1.  Not the camera you've come to know but it's other permutation as a small color temperature meter.  I took a white card and the camera and then used the custom Kelvin settings to take images of the white card at each Kelvin setting until I struck gold.....or white.  The Phillips florescent bulbs that covered acres of the ceiling gave me every indication of being 4100 degrees Kelvin.  That's a great starting point.  I grabbed the Lee filter catalog and looked at the chart of conversions from daylight.  Bingo.  The Lee 442, otherwise known as half CT Straw (an orangey yellowish filter) was a good match.  After we scouted I headed for GEAR on far east Caesar Chavez Blvd to pick up some filter gels.  Unlike those Strobist moochers (who rip the samples out of the filter sample books and tape them together on their flashes)  I actually BUY the stuff a couple feet by one yard at a time.  I also stocked up on some 1/8th CTO and some garden variety 1/2 CTO just to be safe.

When I got home to the studio I cut each of the gels into  a little stack of filters that would cover a Metz or Olympus flash as well as some larger squares that would fit over a Profoto head or an Elinchrom head.  Then I packed and went off to have some semblance of a balanced personal life.  

This morning we started our shoot at a very civilized 10 am.  I used a Canon 5D mk2 and mostly a 20mm and a 100mm prime lens to shoot both portraits in the data center and the architecture and comportment of the center itself.  I lit the portraits using two lights.  One was a Metz MZ 54 in a small softbox with a Lee 442 straw and the other was a Vivitar 383 with a small grid over it to spot it down as a small separation light.  The Vivitar was about forty feet back from the portrait subject at 1/16th power with a Lee 442 filter on it as well.  Blended with the ambient florescents (which matched color almost exactly) the effect was soft, yet directional.  My intention was to gently boost the contrast in post.

The rest of the time was spent looking for great angles and visual alleys.  We used ourselves as blurred, moving models to jazz up the scenes.

At the end of the session I had three  great portraits fifteen or twenty nice interiors and an inventory of technical shots.  The post processing was snagless and the galleries of images are already up and awaiting David's arrival at the office tomorrow.

This is how I remember photography.  Livable budgets, fun lighting challenges, gear that just works,  clients who are gracious, welcoming and appreciative of all the touches that come from years of experience in the craft and a direct client who understands the value you bring to a job.

I came home, petted the world's best dog, took the boy to swim practice and ate some vegan soup Belinda made for dinner.  Now I'm sitting in the office drinking a nice glass of a California Cabernet Sauvignon and typing on my spiffy computer.  This is how a photographer's life is supposed to look.

I think the nasty spell of 2009 is broken.  Thank goodness.

Sunday. Nostalgia-rama

Teenage Benjamin, illuminated by the glow of his MacBook Pro.  Sitting in the dining room at sundown.  Taken with a Kodak SLR/n and an old Nikon 50mm 1.2.  ISO 320.

It's Sunday evening and it's been another week spent in the trenches of art.  As many of your know I usually try to put aside some time on Sundays to go out for a long walk in Austin's ever changing, ever growing downtown.  During this time I take photos for an audience of one:  Me.  And I don't really care if anyone else likes them because that's not the point of the excursion or the point of the photography.  The stroll is like walking meditation punctuated by anti-photos and photos that I would normally resist taking because I couldn't think of a rational market for them. And that, in itself, is even more reason to take them.  The images wouldn't resonate if something subconscious wasn't ticking away and tickling the alternate vision gland.

Everything about my photography seems to be a multi-track, multi dimensional process.  By that I mean that I'm drawn in a lot of different directions and tend to go backward and forward in assessments of gear and technique, subject matter and motivation.  2009 was the year of abandoning the traditional Nikon/Canon path and downsizing into Olympus gear, and more importantly, the micro four thirds gear. I've loved roaming the ranges with palm sized photo machines and snapping away with immediate feedback.  This afternoon I started to reach for a mini camera and I froze.  I knew I was pining for a taste of the old times.  Something big and brutal and manual.  A camera I would have to work at and beat into submission.  I opened some drawers and found just the right thing=the Kodak SLR/n and a Nikon 50mm 1.2.  When I purged the Nikon stuff last year ( I still remember how soulless the D700 was.....) I couldn't bear to send off the Kodak.  At some level I didn't want to let go of Kodak as a company and as a concept so interwoven in the lives of American photographers.  And no one who's ever used the 50mm 1.2 would willingly send it away.

Here's the deal with the Kodak SLR/n and the Nikon 50mm 1.2:  You get the right format, frame and focal length with the combo.  You get a very high res camera.  In fact, I'm planning to test it next to a Canon 5D Mk2 to see which one is really sharper.....Canon fans, get out your handerchiefs.  There may be tears......  But you get a combo that has to be manually focused, exposure set manually and there will be a total reliance on the histogram because the tiny screen is beyond useless for checking quality and exposure.

A downtown landscape punctuated by a vine that's captured a telephone pole.  Exposure calculated by conjecture.  Focus by zone and composition by chaos.  SLR/n+50mm

Sounded perfect to me, so I grabbed the combo, a couple batteries and an extra memory card and headed out the door.  I remembered that manually focused cameras can be "set once/shoot often" cameras and started to forget about the center autofocus sensor reality and started filling frame any damn way I wanted to.  I also remembered that, in full sun you can, "meter once/shoot often" so I metered once and stopped worrying about it. So, to recap:  No worries about focus, no worries about exposure.  All that leaves is:  see picture, compose picture, shoot picture.  Wow!  So simple and so straightforward.  Makes photos fun again.

The vampire power plant.  Shut down years ago, it just won't go away.  The camera was already set for the exposure and focus, all I had to do was lift it to my eye and compose.  How easy is that?

The walking was the part that showed some intentionality.

 I headed downtown in the high performance (satire intended here) Honda Element.  At first the total manual experience was frustrating and mind occupying but then, at a certain juncture, I stopped caring about whether or not the images turned out as turned my attention to the walking and the seeing.

This is the modernist awning above David Garrido's restaurant, downtown. 

It was cool not to care.  It's not that I didn't care, I just didn't have a dog in the hunt as it related to the final output.  I was playing scales, practicing stroke drills, working on the technique, screwing off, snapping at random.  The more playful I was the more fun I had.  The less I cared about the outcome the more I cared about the experience. And what I see is that the camera has less and less significance in the photography and my state of mind has more and more significance in the photography.

Let's face it, the lens is forty year old technology and the camera, in digital chronology, is an ancient relic.  And yet, in every instance, they were more than adequate for the tasks at hand.  The colors are no better or worse than my last year's Nikon or my this year's Olympus.  The difference is the quantity of my engagement.

Just love that Norwood Tower in the middle distance.  Can you believe that one exposure setting and one focus point could last you on an entire two hour walk through downtown?  Well I did cheat by changing it once or twice when walking through some open shade.  But those weren't the photos my brain wanted.

If you've just sunk thousands of dollars or Euro's into some topflight gear and now you have the post cognitive dissonance because you shot with it in the front yard and it did not transform your every glance and gesture into a higher level of fine art, may I make a suggestion?  Put the damn miracle machine in manual everything, stop worrying about the ultimate image quality and then hit the streets and walk around until your eyes engage your mind in some sort of fun game.  Then shoot only what interest you and you alone.  No thought for your spouse's approval or how you think the image will play on some website.  And you'l be amazed that half the fun is just being by yourself, setting your own direction and pleasing yourself.  It's the value of less automatic equipment.  The more manual gear actually engages you in a much more immersive way that is much less about showing off and much more about being happy.  Or I could just be totally full of shit and maybe just needed a nice walk.....Whichever, it was a fun tromp through downtown.  Loving the character of the old Kodak.  Maybe I'll get some sort of ectoskeletal amplifier suit and drag out the Kodak DCS 760 after this............

Whatever you do for a living during the week be sure to spend the time appreciating the present rather than being fixated on a future that might not exist.  If the sun is shining and hitting a building or landscape in just the right way, shoot it now----don't come back later and hope is will all be the same.  It's never the same.  Just live now.  It's the most fun.

I had three epiphanies today:  I love coffee.  Anxiety is contagious.  Art is really totally about trying to bring order out of chaos.