Comfort Zone.

Have you ever had photographic sessions where everyone felt so good they could laugh and cry and howl and be totally in the moment?  No? Loosen up the controls a bit and have more fun.

I made a portrait of my friend, Jeremy, yesterday. He won an award for something and needed a portrait to send along for an article. While I normally reserve Sundays for long walks and sloth I thought it would be fun to photograph him.

It dawned on me that a good portrait session is really composed of three or four discrete and almost unrelated sections. It's good if you can turn your brain on, do the work required in each section and then turn your brain off again. Some sections of the process are all about technical stuff and then the making of the actual images is non-technical stuff. It's best to get your stuff all set up and then get your technical brain out of the way before you start shooting.

So, what are the discrete parts? The first part is planning. This is your aesthetic and technical pre-production. It's the part of the process where you ask yourself:  How do I want the lighting to look? How do I want the composition to look? Am I looking for more compression? Am I looking for more limited depth of field? How will I handle color?

I generally start with the background. I decided that I wanted a neutral gray background for Jeremy's business portrait. But I decided that I didn't want it to be boring and uniform so I figured out how I wanted a light to slash across it. Once I had the background figured out I started working through the other parameters. My choice of lens is somewhat limited by my available space in my small studio. I have 24 feet from my back to the seamless background paper when I'm shooting. I don't want to place people too close to the background because I want enough distance to drop detail on the background totally out of focus. I ended up using the 85mm lens on an a99 figuring that I could crop in if the lens was too short for my taste in the edit.

I decided I would have Jeremy sit. It works better for my lighting and posing. It was my intention to use a big fluorescent light bank as my main light because I wanted to be able to shoot almost wide open with my lens. I ended up shooting a little shy (on the fast side) of f2.8. I knew that the raw fluorescent bank would be too bright and too hard to either be comfortable for my sitter or hospitable to his skin tone so I knew I would want at least one, and possibly two, layers of diffusion on a frame, in front of the light. I chose to use a 4x4 foot Chimera Panel with two layers of 3/4 stop silk on it. A nice blend of hard and soft.

I know that my little studio has too much reflection from the white walls so I know I would need a black panel to the "fill" side of Jeremy's face to cut out some of the unintended fill light. But I also knew that I would have to add back a bit of controlled fill so I did that with small, pop up reflector.

My final bit of lighting design was to add a small, almost invisible, backlight on the opposite side of the main light and from (of course) behind. I decided on the little Fiilex LED P360 as it's easy to match color with my flo lights.

The whole thought process is the planning stage. It sets how the overall shot will look, technically. It's subject to modification as we go but it's good to start with a plan that's a reflection of your style. This is what I started thinking about as soon as Jeremy described the final use of his portrait. It would be used in public relations for a major university. It needed to be well crafted and have a feeling of solidity.

Once I had the plan planted in my brain I went into the auto-pilot mode of "set-up." I like to have time to set up my gear. Not just exactly as much time as it should take but time to re-think and test. I set up one thing and look and then add the next piece and see how it will effect what I already have set. If my main light causes too much spill onto the background I'll add light blockers. Sometimes I set up the camera and sit on the stool and click a self portrait to see how the light looks. I'm always starting with the main light too far to the side and I inevitably move it but I like the idea of the side lit drama of a certain angle. My rational brain usually vetoes that early on....

Once I have all the lighting set and the camera and lens placed on a tripod I go through a process with my camera. I go through a pre-flight check list of settings. I start by formatting the memory card. My next step is to choose between raw or jpeg. Then I go through color settings, ISO, focusing controls and anything else that might affect the process of making the image. I make sure that my camera has setting effect on for continuous light set ups and setting effect off for flash set ups. (If you use a camera with an OVF this is a step that doesn't enter consciousness...).

When everything is set with the camera I get out an incident light meter and measure the light at the subject position. Then I measure the light on the background. Finally, I pull out a Lastolite gray target and set a custom white balance. When I've done all the stuff on my check list my brain relaxes and I know it's time to switch from technical to social engagement. 

I get out our make-up kit and put it on a tabaret. I want to make sure it seems like a natural part of the process instead of something I have to fetch under aesthetic duress. I make sure there's a fresh bottle of cold water, with a napkin, for my client. I make sure the temperature in the studio is a bit on the chilly side and I go over, once again what I want to get, image-wise, from the session.

The next part of the process is to introduce my subject to the studio. I know Jeremy pretty well but being in the studio is out of our usual context. I want to give him time to look around and get comfortable. I want to look at the clothes he's brought along and help him make selections that will work well with the camera. We make small talk. We talk about the process. I look at his face and realize that he'll need some grease wipes to take some facial oils off his face and that some translucent powder will go a long way toward minimizing some unwanted specular highlights. We talk about his kids and the upcoming school year. We talk about work (his).  When I feel like his pulse had dropped and his trepidation about being in front of the camera is lowered we start.

The actual taking of the image is a totally different process than everything we've done above. I ignore any thought of technical issues. If it's not right by now we'll just have to fix it in post. I may fine tune a light or make a small adjustment to camera distance or height but from this point on it's all about getting an expression that's positive, relaxed and really representative of Jeremy. No clenched smiles, no over the top expressions.  Just the real guy. This requires light hearted feedback from me. I keep the energy going. I maintain a feedback loop so my subject knows what's working.  There's no stopping and starting to deal with technical issues. There's never stopping and starting to answer a phone call, we just work through and keep the pace going so that I'm focused on how my subject looks and my subject is focused on enjoying the process. When I finally know I've got a handful of really good images, all of which will work well, we wind down.

I tell Jeremy what will happen next (I'll edit down the sheer number of images to 20 and also mark my three favorites. I'll do a global color, exposure and contrast correction and put up the 20 images onto a gallery on Smugmug and send him a link. He'll make a selection and then I'll retouch it using a variety of software tools. Since he has a pressing deadline I'm make folder with various file sizes of his selected image and upload it to an FTP server like Drop Box so he can send it along to the editor or PR person who started this whole process.

He's already pulling his tie off and putting his suit coat on a hanger. We talk about more about kids and swimming and he tells me, "This was fun."

There are two parameters that I want to satisfy at every session. One is a good image of my subject. The second is for both of us to have fun. It's nice when it works.

Adhering to this whole process with full attention, even though I've done it a thousand times, is what makes the comfort zone real. When you are comfortable you see better, you share better and you shoot better. Three real sections but your technical brain needs only to attend the first two. Having your technical brain on line and in attendance during the actual shooting and sharing is a good way to second guess yourself into a "safe" box with boring results. Let your tech brain go outside for a break when you get down to the human to human work.

Starting over. Starting for the first time. Starting at all.

When you work as a commercial photographer you acquire tools the way the tops of picture frames acquire dust. Photography is a moving and fluid target. It's rare now that your response to the business of photography can be one of maintaining the status quo. If you don't take photos for money I'll assume that you do it for fun and that you can shoot whatever the hell you want with whatever camera you want. We (paid professionals, collectively) stopped having that luxury as the whole world of imaging changed around the changing primary delivery systems for images. Clients want good images, they want good web video and they want it all right away.

At the present we live in a bifurcated imaging universe, split between the last remnants of print culture and accelerating onslaught of web display. Yes, there are still magazines but they are thinner and the images in many are just rehashed stock pictures you've seen a thousand times. Yes, there is still point of purchase advertising; big posters in stores and stuff wrapped around bus stops and in train terminals but it's quickly being replaced by screens. The benefits to advertisers are just too great to ignore. The super large poster is expensive to print and expensive to install. And the messaging remains the same, day in and day out until the physical art is exchanged for another poster. Large, flat, efficient electronic screens can contain messages that move, type that  changes and messaging that can be customized for the kinds of customers specific to each period of the day.

In fact, with the ubiquity of smart phones which signal to stores who you are, and the power of internet information about you, your buying habits and your income; even what you bought last time you were in the store, retailers can customize the messages on the screens toward which you are walking just for you. And they can do that in real time.  How much more powerful is that than a static, printed sign?

In the last decade professional photographers have largely been buying cameras to solve problems that their businesses really didn't have anymore. As more and more clients rushed to embrace the electronic marketing wave, both on the web and on freestanding screens we could see that they needed fewer and fewer images that required enormous, perfect files. But photographers chased huge pixel counts and expensive, infinite sharpness like dogs chase cars. And in the end we used these enormously capable and expensive cameras to deliver files that mostly ended up, at the most, two megapixels big on a screen. Once we photographers caught our "cars" we were as much at a loss about what to do with them as the dogs.

I was thinking about this as I swam this morning. I've been using a couple of full frame Sony DSLR-derived cameras, the a99 and the a850, in my business for quite a while. And before that I was using the 24 megapixel a77's and before that the Canon 5Dmk2. I've been following the righteous herd of professional photographers and carefully shooting images as enormous raw files with pristine custom white balances. And as I've done so the typical requests I get from the kind of ad agencies and clients I do work for is, "can you delivery smaller files?" What they're looking for are images they can drop into web files. The classic "style guide" for web images from one of the big agencies we do work for is this:  Profile=sRGB. Size=960 pixels wide. Save as jpeg or png. We're pulling children's wagons with Clydesdales...

The other request for more and more of the lifestyle and food shoots that we do is for instant sharing. Not on the web, per se, but on the set. The advertising crews, almost to a person, would love it if we were continuously flowing our test images and our actual shoot images not to a big monitor in a dark corner of the room but onto everyone's phone or iPad, individually. Clients would love to sit in their chairs on the sets or in the studio and watch the feed as a full screen display as we shoot. We older photographers tend to resist this because what we did in the olden days was really much less collaborative. We were used to getting our approvals on the Polaroids and then having a license to interpret. 

Now there is a trend to tight collaboration. The photographer is no longer the defacto captain of the ship he has become part of the crew on a rich man's yacht. He still has the responsibility for making the ship work but its direction and destination is at the whim of the owner and the adventure succeeds with the ready application of team work. Younger artists have grown up with the overwhelming press of the idea that teamwork is a positive thing while older artists remember a time when individual control and individual achievement was in vogue.

Collaboration only works if everyone is sharing and sharing the images as they spring to life is now part of the process whether I like it or not. But beyond whether one is comfortable with getting along in a group, or not, the real elephant in the room, where imaging is concerned, is video. It's not a thing anymore that you can leave to everyone else while you specialize in that still thing that you want to do. Clients want, need and will get both stills and video. Whether they get it all from you or they get it all from someone else---they will. And most would love to get it from the same source. It cuts down on all those meetings by 50%. And the vision of work, between stills and motion, matches.

So what does all this mean when it comes to what we use these days? Do we need Leica S2's for our still work and Arriflex Alexa cameras for our video productions? Do we need a Nikon D800 as our foundational camera? Can we do our businesses with Olympus OMD's?  Well, yes. I guess it's yes to everything. But I'm having the queasy feeling that it's not such a great idea to rush out and buy anything expensive right now. That doesn't seem to be where the market is headed....

If I were starting out today as a young and sassy photographer how would I approach the idea of buying gear? Honestly, I'd put together a small, practical system that consists of (imagine your own brand's similar offerings....) say a Canon 5dmk3 body with a 24-105mm lens and a 70-200 mm lens and call it quits. Anything else I really needed I'd rent. But that's old school thinking on one point; the Canon 5Dmk3 and most other cameras on the market today are not paragons of instant sharing or file sending flexibility.

There are interesting things on the horizon for pros, if they are open to change... Especially those who value quick sharing and flexibility over muscle and traditionally enabled cameras. Samsung has already announced their NX Galaxy camera. The sensor is the same as the one I've used in the NX 300 and it's really good. But the real power in that camera comes from it's ability to quickly and easily share pretty much anywhere and all the time. With built-in wi-fi and built in cellular capabilities you can continually upload images to your cloud or a local network as you shoot. Basically that means everyone in the room with a smartphone or an iPad can follow along on collaborative shoots. It might be uncomfortable for some photographers (especially those who depend on backend processing to make their images marketable) but it might be more comfortable and soon, more expected, by all our younger clients. And our older clients who are control freaks.

I can imagine a scenario where I go on location with a communications enabled camera and get fast approvals from an art director who is back at her office. That's cool enough. Imagine the next step. Suppose you run Snapseed on your communications enabled "smart" camera and you have a five inch screen and a full operating system on the camera as well. You've just shot 36 images of Bob, head of marketing at the WizBang corporation and, instead of driving back to the studio or setting up your laptop and downloading stuff to make a gallery, you whip the camera screen up and you and Bob sort through the images on the big screen on the back of your camera. You find one you both like so you fix it up in Snapseed. Maybe it needs some retouching so you open a program that offers cloning and fix the offending reality.  Then you resize and save the image and send it along directly, to DropBox and notify your client. She's using the image on a website design before you even get back to your car. You are on to the next thing.

That camera will exist in the next month. It will be cheaper than a big Canon or Nikon. It will take great images. But it will do more. And it will once again lower some more barriers to entry in our field. But as soon as it launches the smart competitors will be in line with their versions. The smart ones will extend the features instead of just copying them.

We can be aloof and snobby and reject the new tech as gadgets or distractions. Or we can leverage it as part of our proactive response to a continually changing market. We can be the first adapters. We can show off the tech and make clients happy first. We've seen how the aloof thing works in the markets. I think I'm ready to try early adapter.

In the future I'll be looking for cameras that are more about flexibility than raw specs. I don't need sports cameras. I don't need massive amounts of resolution. I want good video (wow! the video in the GH3 is amazing!!!). I want good sharing capability (amazed about what I've heard concerning the Samsung camera). If the camera is going to become more and more the epicenter of our work I also want a lot of screen real estate on it.  Make sure it has a standard hot shoe and an input for external microphones and I'm there. All the specialty stuff becomes rental.

It's about to become a brave new world. Again.