Time to talk a bit about marketing. Yikes

Is it possible to be in the market for too long?  I'm not talking about the stock market.  We all know the answer to that one.  I'm talking about the photography market.  If you are forty or fifty years old and you've been a photographer for the last ten or twenty years you know that we've been through some gut-wrenching changes.  We've all devised some self-serving and optimistic ways of looking at the decline of our traditional markets.  Some people walk around telling anyone who will listen, "Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger!"  But they never mention the scar tissue...  Others say, "This too shall pass!" Implying that the pain we feel now is but a temporary sting that will give way to a rosy and prosperous tomorrow.  "If you can make it through this economy you can  make it through anything."  As though it isn't possible for the economy to get any worse.

I've been thinking a lot about this lately and I've come to some conclusions about our position as photographers in this new world and how things might work out.  I'll say up front that if you are twenty five and surrounded by marvelous designer friends in some cool and unaffected part of the economy then just don't even bother to read the rest.  Everyone's kilometerage will vary.

Let's start by going around the room and admitting we've got a lot of baggage.  I know I do.  It's hard not to.  If you were working in the booming 1990's you no doubt remember when one of the hardest things to come by was a day off.  Day rates were climbing and corporate clients were throwing out stacks of money to advertise new web based companies and services. Traditional agencies with long pedigrees understood the rationale of usage fees and were willing to negotiate based on these historical payment agreements.

We used real cameras that spit out physical products.  We lit stuff and the lighting looked good. Clients didn't (and still don't ) understand lighting and they were willing to pay well for people who did.  Checks came from local offices and agency people understood mark-up.

We remember all this and some part of our brains feels like that's the marker for what should be a normal photo market.  But that's our baggage.  Can we still feel the buzz and get all enthusiastic after the whole model irrevocably changes?  Can we get pumped to do amazing stuff for less money?  For much less profit?

The market has flattened and once clients have tasted nearly free stock, used it and waited for an apocalypse (loss of market share, damage to the brand) that never came we are confronted with their version of a genie that's been released from the bottle, a ship that's sailed, a horse that's already out of the barn.

The selling mantra against dollar stock was fear.  "What if all the businesses in your sector used the same stock image in their campaigns?  Wouldn't you be devasted??  Wouldn't you perceive the tremendous value of a commissioned shoot? You'll never get fired using a proven supplier!!!"  That's pretty much a paraphrase of an essay up on the ASMP site.  But here's the disconnect:  Many of the art buyers, art directors, creative directors and marketing directors who learned their trade in decades past have been swept into other areas and out of negotiation with photographers by two big, catastrophic economic downturns in the first nine years of this century.

They've been replaced in legions by much younger and cheaper people.  These people were raised with dollar stock use or limited rights managed stock as the norm.  That's their baseline. There is no nostalgia driving these people back to the traditional assignment model.  There never will be. They add their own value to the stock stuff with tons of manipulation.  To be clear, clothing catalogs and product catalogs will continue being shot.  CEO's will continue being  photographed.  Stuff will still be assigned.  But it will be the exception rather than the rule.  Only a tiny percentage of images will be assigned and only for specific, proprietary products.

Here's another critical driver:  Advertising clients have scaled back in all print media and have poured more resources into online advertising.  By some counts webvertising is up 20% this year over last.  Consumer magazine ad pages are down nearly 35% over last year.  What happens when the recession finally ends and clients find that web and cable satisfied their needs almost completely?  I think they will channel more and more dollars into the web and TV and less and less into print.  

Let's face it.  The web isn't challenging medium.  My medium format cameras are definitely overkill for most web uses.  For that matter my Canon G10 is overkill for most web use.  The subordinated quality of web versus traditional media is just another barrier to entry knocked down.  The challenge on the web is pushing people to the site but that seems to be the provence of social marketing and viral marketing.  

I think that by the time this market recovers 80 to 90 % of the people we veteran photographers dealt with before the collapse will have moved on to other jobs and other industries.  More and more we'll be dealing with a brand new crowd.  None of them will know anything about your brand or your history in the market.  In fact, having a history in the market will mark you as a dinosaur.  Everything that we've learned over our careers, in terms of marketing, is going to be upside down.  New is the new good.  Fast is the new production value.  And coffee is the new martini.  The Canon G10 is the new Nikon D3x.  Just as Strobism is replacing studio flash equipment.

This is just my perception.  Everyone else's mileage may vary.  But the real question is what to do about it.  I think this year is going to be a wash out.  It's a great time to get personal projects done, it's strategically smart to stay in touch with as many clients and potential clients as you can.  It's important to build some new portfolios and some new self-promo and get the website ready.  But here's my "from out of left field"  "brain-stormed" (or lightning struck) idea for 2010.......

Shut your existing business down at the end of this year.  Shut down everything.  Close the doors.  Toss out all your preconceptions about how a photography business should be run.  Toss out your nostalgia and your mythology.  Everything.  Total purge.  Career colonic.

Then, on the first of the new year (or when your gut tells you we're heading back to a prosperous overall economy) emerge and totally re-invent yourself from the ground up.  New look.  New marketing.  New point of view and new ways of doing the business.  Because no matter what you do you will be participating in capitalism's biggest "hard reset" ever and it's pretty much and even bet that, except for premium brands like Coca Cola and Apple and IBM and Starbucks, everyone else will be sitting in on the same reset.  

Tired of buying endless gear? Maybe your new business model calls for rental of all lighting and grip gear.  Tired of getting tooled around for payment?  Maybe your new business model calls for nothing but credit card payment.  Tired of your old clients?  This is a time to reset.  Tired of that filing cabinet of legacy headshot files your clients will never need again?  You've gone out of that business, remember?  Toss the stuff you don't need and make room for the stuff that will make you money in the new paradigm.

I've been in Austin a long, long time.  My old clients will use me for  a long time to come.  The people who've been here as long as I have and haven't used me aren't about to start because they've already pigeon-holed me for one reason or another.  When new people move into existing jobs they bring their own people or they go out looking for those people.  By killing off our old business persona we get to be the people they bring in to replace us.

Let me repeat that:  By killing off our old business persona we get to be the people they bring in to replace us.

Being a new business gives us an excuse to get pumped up again.  To throw a big opening party. To invite people into our new process.  

I'm still thinking about all this and working the kinks out of it.  But it seems right to me on a number of intuitive levels.  Everything changes and everything evolves.  I don't want to wait around and be a miniature GM when I can be the next new thing.  I know there are many holes and pitfalls to this new idea.  And I'm not saying that I am rushing to implement but I do think it is interesting and we should discuss it.

I know it's not as sexy as talking about gear but that's the next thing I'm looking at.  Really.

Looking forward to the re-launch.  What form will it take for photographers?

Lighting instruments from another world.

I've been working on a book about lighting equipment and, after talking to many photographers, I am convinced that many are unaware there is a rich selection of alternatives out there to the usual battery-powered camera flashes, the monoblock electronic flashes and the various "pack and head" electronic flash systems.  The photograph on the right is of a Mole Richardson 10K fixture.  This thing puts out 10,000 watts of tungsten balanced light!  It's really amazing. Even more amazing are the 20K HMI lights.  That's 20,000 watts of daylight balanced light from one fixture.  

I bring this up because I think some photographers would really like to pursue a vision that's not based on using the same lights everyone else uses.  I was inspired to seek out these alternative light sources in part because of the work of Gregory Crewdson.  He does interesting fine art photos and relies almost exclusively on big movie lights for his work.  It seems to impart an entirely different feel to the work.

The same photographers who've sent me hate mail about my articles praising "radical" things like film and medium format cameras will no doubt rush to tell us that they can duplicate any lighting look with their White Lightning electronic flash gear or their $10,000 Broncolor gear but they will, as usual, miss the point.  And that point is this:  The tools and their attributes have profound influence in the creative process.  The feel of the camera, the heat and throw of a light.  The size of the fresnel in front of a light source.  It all influences our creative choices.  It influences the way a shoot flows.  And it definitely affects the outcome.

So, I found myself at an Austin shop called, GEAR.  They serve the movie industry, the television industry and a number of still photographers by renting everything from the stands and scrims to the enormous lights and the  trucks to haul them around in.  They have HMI lights (continuous daylight balanced instruments) ranging from 400 watts to 20,000 watts. They have all the most popular sizes of fresnel and open faced tungsten lights and they have stacks and stack of KinoFlo professional florescent lights.  

They have electrical generators you can put in the trunk of a Prius and also generators that come on the back of a really big truck.  And they have rolls of just about every filter gel you can possibly imagine.

I asked them for some pointers to pass along to still photographers who haven't worked on movie or television sets.  Any pitfall that might be avoided with a little forewarning.  Here is their short list:

1.  Lights over 1,000 will need their own electrical circuits.  Run a 2K tungsten on the same household circuit as the computer and you are asking for problems.

2.  Lights over 2,000 will require the services of an electrician to do something magical called a "tie-in" at the breaker box.  Alternately, you can rent a generator rated to handle the power requirements of these lights.

3.  Hot lights are hot.  You'll either need padded gloves to handle the fixtures or lots and lots of time to let them cool down before trying to move them.

4.  As above, the bigger lights put out an enormous amount of heat so don't plan on using your regular softboxes or umbrellas with them.  You'll need specially constructed softboxes or umbrellas that handle high temperatures.  Melting softboxes don't inspire confidence.....

5.  When you use a 12 foot by 12 foot silk scrim outside you need to understand that's about the same square footage as the sails that move boats across water at 20 knots or so.  You'll need more than a couple of 20 pound sandbags to anchor them!  Ask for guidance when you rent.

6.  HMI's have safety filters so that your don't tan or burn when using them.  Don't defeat the safety features!  You don't want a model suing you for the impromptu tanning booth episode.

7.  HMI's are expensive.  The bulbs start around $400.  Make sure your assistants know the score and make sure every light is secure.

Those are the big points that the rental guys deal with on an almost daily basis.  Even so you can get some really unique looks with some of these lights and the rentals on traditional tungsten lights are  reasonable.  Well worth trying out the next time you want to do something different.

I really enjoyed what I saw from the KinoFlo's.  There's something cool (literally and figuratively) about florescent lighting.  I'm pretty interested in how those differences might manifest themselves when shooting a portrait so when I saw an interesting fixture at Precision Camera I just had to get one.

Interfit makes cheap flashes and decent flashes and a bunch of other lighting stuff.  Just recently they came out with a light called the Cool Lite 9.  It's a fixture that takes nine compact florescent bulbs, comes with a large metal reflector and a heat resistant softbox attachment. All for $279. So far it's a lot of fun.  I need to be reminded from time to time how much fun it is to shoot with WYSIWYG continous lighting.

As you know if you've read much of my stuff I'm a real sucker for wide open apertures and short telephoto lenses.  They seem to converge to make magical portraits.  The Cool Lite 9 gives me enough light to keep the camera steady (1/125th or 1/250th of a second) at reasonable ISO's (200-400).  I'm working on a new series of portraits with this light.

I'm also shooting lots of examples for the book.  Should be interesting.  I keep learning about neat new stuff and relearning techniques that are mostly lost these days.  Hope the week ahead is profitable and fun.  Try some movie lighting if you get a chance.  But be sure to get the gloves........

Kirk

Kirk's Website.

Kirk's Studio Lighting Book at Amazon.

Kirk's First Book (Location) at Amazon.

Getting what you want with digital.

I've made no bones about my appreciation of film and film cameras but there is a certain reality that has to be interjected when we talk about the world of photography in 2009. For better or worse clients expect things to be done faster than a haircut and for little or no money.

There was even a goofy idea on the web that somehow we'd all get rich if we just gave everything away for free. But the guy who came up with that stupid idea starved to death a few 

weeks ago and his intellectual supporters have moved on to the thorny problem of how to "monetize" Twitter. (that means "make money" for all the gentle readers who haven't kept up with the frighteningly fast destruction of common language...).

The rest of us are left with the task of bringing some sort of sanity back to the financial models of our industries. Here's a novel idea:  Let's charge money for what we do.  A cheerful amendment:  Let's charge additional money for using the images more than once!  A third idea:  Let's charge more than it actually costs us to make the image.  (That would include materials, cameras and our time!!!)

That was all non-sequitar.  What I really want to talk about is how to arm wrestle with the digital media to get the images you really like.

All three of the attached images were done for an advertising campaign for the Austin Lyric Opera.  In each shot I wanted to get the kind of soft, non detailed background we used to get when we shot portraits with a long lens on a view camera. In this case our non-profit client had a very "non-profity" budget so our choice was digital or.....digital.  And here's where it gets interesting.  As soulless as I make digital photography out to be I am sometimes (wife and friends snicker...) given to hyperbole.  I must grudgingly admit that a number of the digital cameras produced in the recent past are possessed with an intangible but very visible character that makes them wonderfully different from the run of the mill.

Top of my list is the Kodak family.  My regard for the DCS 760, six megapixel camera from 2002 is unabated.  I battle for dominance with my DCS SLR/n and on the times when I win and the camera grudgingly accepts my direction I am truly delighted with the files.   I sometimes sit on the back porch with a warm cup of coffee and a lone tear comes to my eye when I ponder the irony of Kodak inventing all the good stuff but no longer able to compete in the market......

In the Nikon family, the D700 is a great camera but it lacks personality.  The D2h is a so-s0 image producer but has the personality of a border collie.  The D300 and the D100 both exude soul like a box of Motown 45's.  The Sony R1 is an axe bumbling idiot with flashes of savant genius.  And so on.  But I digress.

When I started planning this campaign for the ALO I know I wanted shallow depth and a color palette that was different than the latest eagerly precise and clinically sterile cameras.  I choose the DCS 760  and decided to shoot at ISO 80.  To get the tiny depth of field I craved I looked through the lens drawer and, after long consideration, I pulled out my unreliable sleeper, the Nikon 105 f2 DC (defocus coupling) lens.  I say unreliable because no matter how often I use it I'm never able to really predict the outcome.  Perfect for a job like this.

And, of course you know that I had to choose a continuous light source to make the wide open aperture work the way I wanted it to.  I used a light that is no longer made.  A Profoto Protungsten.  A fan cooled fixture that mimics the ergonomics of the Profoto flash heads and takes all the same light modifiers.  I used a Magnum reflector with a wide spread and coaxed the light through two layers of white scrim material clinging to a six foot by six foot frame. This was suspended above and to the right of the subject just as close as I could place it without making it a co-star in the frame.

Here's the secret of making tungsten work with an old Kodak that was famous for it's noisy blue channel:  Gel the light with a 1/2 CTB.  That's a filter that gets you half way from tungsten color balance to daylight balance.  Essentially you are trying to keep the camera from compensating from the lack of blue in 3200K light by ramping up the amplification on the blue channel and flooding the image with noise.

I used a small Desisti 300 watt spotlight in its wide flood position for the background.  The only other trick is to try to position the bright spots and the shadows that appear in the background in the proper relationship to the subject.

I love shooting this way.  One part of me always longs for stuff like Leaf medium format digital cameras and Nikon D3x's but as soon as I've got them in hand I feel like a slave.  I'm always trying to show off their capabilities instead of mine.  Mine are all about design and rapport and posing and thinking.  They want me to show off sharpness and accuracy and other things that computers do so well.  It's a hell of a fight when you have to go mano a mano with the very tools that should be serving your vision instead of trying to create it.

Random Note:  Please check out my second book.  I think it's quite good and though you may be too advanced for it at this stage in your career I'm sure that your wives and mothers would love a copy for mother's day.......Minimalist Lighting:  etc. Studio

Right Place. Right Time. Right Intention.

So.  I've written about my proclivity for shooting with medium format film and I've made a case (I think) for using the tools that inspire you most, but there's an image up next to my desk that kicks me in the shins every time I get the gear lust and start to covet yet another camera that's destined to make me the "hot" photographer of 200x.  It's the one on the right.  The image is of Rene Zellweger, circa 1992 and it's a constant reminder to me just how secondary all the equipment really is. I was trying to replicate a shot I'd done of my wife Belinda, years earlier. That shot was done on an old Canon TX film camera.  A real beater of an SLR, with shutter that capped out at 1/500th of a second and a little "stick and lollypop" metering system.  I was living in an old house at the time and I'd set up a quickie studio in the living room with a rickety old tripod and a 500 watt photoflood in a utility reflector.  The light was aimed into a 40 inch white umbrella in the "shoot thru" position and placed fairly close to Belinda.  It had to be pretty close because for some silly reason I was using ISO 50 Ilford Pan F black and white film.  The lens was wide open.  The result was wonderful.

Flash forward ten years and I'm in the studio with (at the time) unknown future movie star, Rene Zellweger, and we're trying to get that same look.  I'm using the same old Canon TX and I was using the Canon 135mm Soft Focus lens.  Same old, tattered umbrella and some variant of a 500 watt continuous flood light.  It's one of my favorite photographs.  Partly because it reminds me of the silly projects that Rene and I did together (like an art video entitled, "Coffee. Is it a gift from God or a tool or Satan....."  lots of long shots and coffee cups, and girls with leopard print scarves and little black dresses......) but mostly I like the image because it reminds me that all the gear is so secondary to the power of my intention.  If I intend to do an image I generally carry through and do what's needed to realize my ideas.  The momentum of my intention is what makes a project successful or just another piece of crap.  The equipment is so much less important.

A second, and most important point.

After my last blog post I got a wonderful personal e-mail from a photographer in Alabama who basically said,  "The lights don't matter.  The camera doesn't matter.  The lens doesn't matter. The only thing that matters (to a portrait photographer) is, how do you get that look in their eyes?  That rapport?"  She went on to say that she'd searched the web for a while and felt that some of the images I shot had the emotional quality that she was interested in.  She wanted to know how to get to that.

I've thought about it all week and I have an answer that will, no doubt, infuriate people who love to be surrounded by an entourage.  The answer is:  you must make a portrait sitting a very intimate relationship.  You must eliminate any distraction for you or the sitter.  No people in the room.  No tight ended schedule.  No fluttering make up artist.  No eager and relentless assistant.  If you want to truly connect with a sitter you must throw out all the crew and friends and the people who get you coffee and look at crap on the monitor.  It is like making love and very few people are comfortable doing that with a crowd looking on.

People will open up in front of the camera if they trust you and they don't have to entertain or make allowances for other people.  This whole mania of carting around assistants for every project, no matter how small, is one of the things that's killing good portrait work.  Send them outside to clean your car or to paint the fence.  A good portrait is a one on one sharing.  A collaboration and very little else matters.  Shooting a portrait, whether for fashion or your own art, with other people in the room means that you've abdicated your intention to do an intimate portrait and you are tacitly content just to do self serving theater about photography. At that point you've become a hack.  A workshopper.  The kind of photographer who cares more about how he looks on the video his assistants are shooting of him than how the image in his camera looks.  At this point one has abandoned the true practice of portraiture and become a hollow caricature of a photographer.  

One sitter.  One shooter.  An empty silence filled with potential.

Everything old is new again.....Photography 180.

Originally written for www.prophotoresource.com

in 2007.  

I’ve been talking to a bunch of my friends in the creative world and it seems like we’re on the verge of a tectonic shift back in time.  And the realization of this impending shift is striking people in diverse fields almost simultaneously.  Writers are going back to yellow legal pads or little leather journals to outline their next movie, novel, ad copy or grand opus.  Fountain pens are once again accounted sexier than the latest laptops.  My graphic designer amigos are sitting around with Bienfang sketch pads and fat #1 lead pencils as they sketch out logo roughs and doodle small icons---on real paper!

I just had an art director from a prestigious agency explain to me why they’re going backwards and doing marker comps for their multi-national advertising clients.  Seems it’s easy to sell the less literal marker comps than the meticulously comped digital collages we’ve grown used to over the past ten years.  And the agency doesn’t get locked into using the exact photo they might have presented in the comps.………..

I asked my favorite graphic designer for some insight and I was startled by what I heard.  She said, “It’s faster and easier to get my ideas down on paper.  It’s also less sterile.  When I try to concept on the computer it seems to me that the machine gets in the way.  The presets push you to conform.  The screen makes you filter in assumptions about how things will ultimately look on paper.  Designing on paper just feels right”.

All this “regression” in the arts mirrors what I hear from more and more photographers.  We were so enthusiastic about the promise of “no cost” digital that we swallowed the program “hook, line and sinker.”  In retrospect we’ve done one of the stupidest business moves imaginable.  We moved from a mature, repeatable and robust system of making images that yielded exquisite quality (and which most practitioners had already paid for the infrastructure and amortized ) into a system that gives us only one advantage:  We can do all this stuff quicker than ever before!

I’m as guilty of buying into the system as the next guy.  I’ve dropped tens of thousands of dollars on digital cameras that became “obsolete” inside of eighteen months.  I spent years feeding ink into an ever escalating collection of Epson “professional” printers and now, in 2007, I’ve come to two conclusions about printing with inkjet printers:  1.  Traditional photographic paper prints from a custom printer blow away anything I’ve gotten from any of the printers.  2.  The bulk of my money has been spent clearing ink clogs and not making prints.  I would add to those two points that my butt has spent too much quality time in the task chair in front of my computer and not nearly enough time out having fun.  

I’m even guiltier than most because I just finished writing a book extolling people to give up their “heavy and antiquated” lighting equipment and pursue the Holy Grail of using small, portable lights for all of their work.  No matter that my clients still look at my portfolio, select the stuff I shot on medium format film and lit with big Profoto strobes, and ask me to do “that style”.  At a certain point it dawns on a person that we’ve really been doing this exercise for ourselves and not for our clients.

Case in point:  Once a month a I get together with three friends for lunch.  Usually Mexican food. I’m the sole photographer in the group.  Mike is a creative director with thirty years of experience, Greg is an art director with 20 odd years of experience and Roy is a designer who’s been winning awards since the days of Kodak Double X film (1970’s for those raised post analog). 

 I mentioned  that I was getting ready to buy the new Nikon D3 and they all turned on me like rabid dogs.  No, more like concerned parents.  No, more like exasperated friends.….  “The files are already way bigger than I need!”  Said Mike.  I mentioned the cleaner, better color.  “Once the files hit paper in CMYK you’ll never see the difference!”  Chimed in Roy.  “Oh hell!” remarked Greg before taking a big bite of his enchiladas verdes.  “You’re just wasting money on all that stuff.  Nobody’s ever hired you because they know what’s in your camera bag.  They hired you based on what they see in your portfolio.  You’re just buying this stuff because you’re afraid of just going out and showing your work!”

I trotted out all the arguments we see on the websites.  The low noise at high ISO’s, the incredible color accuracy, the high frame rate and more.  They laughed. “You light stuff.  You compose stuff.  You have a rapport with people.  That’s your real job.  The camera doesn’t really matter.”  While I was mulling that over Mike (who was honored as an AIGA fellow this year) added, “Besides,  I haven’t seen anything in the past seven years that I liked as much as the simple black and white portraits you used to do with your Hassleblad.  I love the square.  I love the way the focus slides away and puts all the emphasis on the sitter’s eyes.  And I’ve never seen a good digital conversion to black and white.”

Now my whole carefully constructed rationale for plugging away with digital was on the ropes.  I was shaken and confused.  So I called the photographer who’s work I’ve admired for years.  You probably have a guy like this in your market.  The photographer who is so good and who’s work is so nuanced and informed that you’d hire him in a heartbeat if you were an art director or an art buyer.  For me it’s Austin photographer, Wyatt McSpadden.  I wanted to know how Wyatt handled the transition to digital.

“Digital?  You’re talking to a man who shot 180 rolls of medium format film in the last two weeks!”  He shouted.  (He didn’t really shout but it seemed like it).  He’s got a digital SLR but only uses it for clients who (and I’m paraphrasing here) “Don’t give a ________ about your style, they just want a usable file, quick.  I want clients to hire me for my style. And I spent twenty years working on this stuff and I’m not going to go and reinvent the wheel just because someone needs to sell cameras!”   He went on to say, in his west Texas way, “I shoot film so I can use the lights and the lenses I love.  That’s what makes the photograph work.  It’s not the sensor it’s the way the lenses write to the sensor.  If the sensor doesn’t matter then I’ll choose film.  That way I’ll skip who storage issue and get better looking work into the bargain.”

I wasn’t totally convinced but I had just read Selina Maitreya’s book entitled, How to Succeed in Commerical Photography,and I was putting together a new portfolio to show around.  As I scrounged around for images I was shocked to find that the stuff I loved and wanted to show was all generated pre-Y2K.  Every last shred of it was shot on a Hassleblad or a Rollei.  The contact sheets were easy to read and the negatives were easy to scan.  And the prints that I ordered from my local Costco  (using their profiles and specifying “no mods”)  were worlds better than my best tries with Epson’s 4000 series printers at 1/3 the actual materials cost.

I’ve always felt uneasy composing in the awkward rectangle that comes standard in most digital SLR’s and I’ve never felt that I could justify the $20,000 or so that would be required to get into the medium format digital club.  That’s when my “oh so wise” wife, Belinda suggested that I get rid of the “binary thought process” that seems built into most working photographers.  We try to shoe horn what ever the latest and greatest camera solution that comes along into all of our jobs. It’s all or nothing.  The D3 or the 1DSmk111 and nothing else.

The reality, as my wife pointed out, is I can shoot on whatever I want to.  I can match the solution to the job.  I can match the camera to my vision.  I don’t have to have one “ubercamera” that does everything.  She gently nudged me out the door with orders to buy some medium format Tri-x and give the old ways a little try.  Ohmigod!  I’d forgotten just how good these cameras were.  Just how bright and detailed the finders could be.  The magic of a Zeiss telephoto at f4 or f5.6.

So where does that leave me?  Well when I shot a lake property development from a helicopter I sure as heck thought the Nikon D2xs was the right tool for the job.  I knew that the Fuji S5 camera and the Nikon 18-200 VR was a great solution for shooting 800 iso in the corporate offices of a client who wanted “available light/slice of life” images of people working in their offices.  But I knew with equal certainty that my Rollei 6008 with a 150 mm lens and a pro pack of Tri-x was just what the doctor ordered for the experimental studio portrait I wanted to shoot.  And nothing beats my little “beater” Mamiya 645e for walking around the streets of the city shooting stuff with Fuji Provia 100f.

What have we gained by going digital?

1.  We can do stuff more quickly. 

2.  We can see what we got, right away.

3.  Clients don’t have to pay for film and processing so (supposedly) more money goes to our fees.

4.  We can shoot things without lighting them due to the good high ISO performance of the camera.

5.  It (seems) easier to take great photographs than ever before.

What have we lost by depending entirely on digital?

1.  We can do stuff more quickly.  At least it seems that way.  The shooting goes faster but the burden on the back end grows exponentially and the clients rarely see the hours that go into color correction, retouching and archiving of these images.  If they don’t see it they don’t value it.  That makes our fees harder to swallow.  What might have taken a day to light and shoot now might take a half a day to shoot and half a day to process.  That still adds up to a full day except now all the plumbing part of the job is invisible to the bill payer.  Personally, I liked handing stuff to my lab and letting them do the back end but we’ve trained our clients to think of us as “one man bands” and have let us push ourselves into becoming lab operators and color separators.  We’ve lost our free time.  We’ve lost our ability to depend on highly qualified experts to take our work to its highest level.  But we’ve delivered a delivery schedule that’s burdensome.

2.  Oh boy!  I can look at the little screen on the back of my camera and I’ll know when I got the great shot.  Or, shooting tethered, the art director and I can see when we got “something that will work” and we can stop right there and go on to the next shot on the list.  That really sucks.  In the film days, before immediate gratification, we would shoot and shoot.  Not to waste film but to explore the possibilities.  Often the “portfolio keepers” would arrive after the perceived high point of a shoot.  The fun shots seemed to manifest themselves when everyone was sure we were covered and they started to relax.  Makes me think we should turn the little digital camera screens on to “Polaroid” our lighting and composition and then turn the little devils off so that their “magnetic” pull doesn’t lure our avaricious eyes.…  There’s a lot to be said for not knowing exactly what’s there until you see it.

3.  Clients think digital photography is free.  That’s not, per se, a problem with digital but it changed the economic model of professional photography and we’ve been battling the unintended consequences for the last seven to ten years.  If clients think that all materials are free then how do we pay for the yearly advances in digital cameras?  

4.  We’ve lost the good stuff about shooting film.  When we used to shoot with  medium format cameras and  medium telephoto lenses we got a wonderful falling away of focus and sharpness that created a fabulous contrast of sharp versus soft.  The smaller format digital cameras just don’t do it.  We’ve invented all sorts of work-arounds like selecting, feathering and adding guassian blur to the background of a digital image but it never looks quite the same.  We’ve lost those big, juicy viewfinders with acres of visual real estate.  We’ve lost that fabulous black and white tonality with scads and scads of tonal differentiation (and you know you’re either lying or blind if you insist you can get great black and white conversions from digital) that we routinely got from Tri-X and Plus-X films.  And even simple things that translated into a higher quality workflow through to four color printing, like you, your client and your color separator all looking together at a medium or large format chrome (transparency film for the post analogers) on a color balanced light box.  That paradigm created a universal color standard rather than the turf wars of “who’s monitor is calibrated better than who’s”  that we’ve lived through for the past decade.

And finally, who among us hasn’t felt their rear end grow larger and their lumbar region ache as we’ve spent far more time hunched in front of our computers than we every imagined.

I know we can’t really put Pandora back in the box but we can at least admit that digital isn’t the end all and be all of imaging. I suggest that you finish reading this article and seek out a store that still has a few dusty rolls of medium format film left.  Brush the cobwebs off your Hasselblad, Bronica or Mamiya camera and try shooting the way you shot ten years ago.  Then scan your favorite frame and compare it with your best digital work.

Chances are you’ll look for opportunities to re-introduce film to some part of your business.  I suggest you position your ability to shoot on film as the “high price spread” of your enterprise.  You’ll likely find several unintended consequences of this decidedly Quixotic experiment:  You may find that clients  treat you more like and artist and less like a technician.  You’ll find that you will have created a differentiating niche that effectively separates you from every “Tom, Dick and Sally” sporting a digital Rebel.  You’ll find that labs have evolved in a way that make shooting film more streamlined and efficient.  As well as more cost effective.  And you may find that the specific tool does affect your  seeing.

Here’s our workflow:  We shoot on our favorite film stock (for me it’s ISO 400 black and white negative film) in a Rollei 6008 in the studio.  To check exposure I can either use Polaroid or my trusty Nikon D2x as a sub for Polaroid.  We drop the film by our favorite, full service lab (yes, they still exist!)  and ask that the film be developed and scanned.  Holland Photo in Austin will give you darn good proof scans for five or six bucks a roll (Yes, a roll, not just a frame) and they’ll give em to you on a CD.  We upload the scans to Smugmug.com to share with our clients.  They pick one frame and we call the lab and have a real, burned and dodged, fiber based print made to order.  The film itself is our archival back up!  Try it.  It’s amazing and it requires just the amount of time it takes to upload to your gallery.  You can be back out shooting within 1/2 an hour.  No more butt time.  Someone else has already color corrected your files during the scans.

So what does this have to do with battery operated strobes?  Well, you actually can use strobes with your film camera.  In fact they work better than they do with digital SLR’s.  But that’s a subject for another blog.  

Sorry for the rant but it was amazing when I finally tallied up what we walked away from when we abandoned film.   And it’s nice to realize that we don’t have to get locked into one way of doing things to the exclusion of everything else.  Sometimes film rules and sometimes digital rules.  But it’s absolutely great to have both.

Next month (if this rant doesn’t end my career) I’ll be talking about the advantages of using guide number flash instead of TTL flash.  Honestly.  And I’ll have images to prove my point.  I hope you’ll be back for a read.

Kirk

The Books:

Minimalist Lighting: Professional Techniques for Studio Photography

Minimalist Lighting: Professional Technique for Location Photography

The website:  Kirk Tuck dot com

Eeyore's Birthday Party, Austin, Texas 2009

Years and years ago a wise and playful English professor and some of his friends decided to put together a little bacchanale to celebrate the dour character in Winnie the Poo. Austinites will take any excuse to party and push it to the logical extreme.  I tagged along with a little Canon SX 10 and took some photos.  

Why the little camera?  The big ones all seemed so voyeuristic and gauche. And all the people with big cameras reminded me so much of the losers who go to the nude beaches with huge telephoto lenses.  

The most popular event at Eeyore's is the drum circle where everyone brings a drum and joins in the rhythmic cacophony while many  high and happy people dance in the middle.

Another popular past time is body and face painting.  But the most popular pastime is invoking the spirit of Austin in the 60's and 70's in various ways.  The smell of pot was everywhere and everyone else had a cup of beer in hand.


The cops took it all in with good natured indulgence while some of the suburban newcomers to Austin didn't quite realize what they were getting into as they unloaded their strollers from their minivans.

I guess my favorite find of the day was the drummer in the wrestling mask. Such a mixed message......

Really, a pleasant way to spend an afternoon and a nice reminder of why it's better to live in Austin than in some other places.  We know how to channel our "inner hippie".

A life divided by the two warring sides of my brain....

If you've followed my writing here for a while you've no doubt figured out that I really like shooting portraits and I really like doing it with medium format cameras.  Some people have (rightly) conjectured that I like doing it that way because of habit.  And to a point I agree.

But I'm not the least bit torn by the direction or the production of my portraits.  I am torn by my desire to write and to photograph and I constantly worry that I won't be able to do either as well as I could if I cast one of the two passions away and concentrated on doing one thing well.

But that's really tough.  Which way to go?  I think the question is particularly poignant for me today because I've been slamming away at my laptop finishing the writing on my fourth book.  I called it "quits" at 44,000 words because I couldn't think of anything else genuine to say about my subject. I still have to harvest one hundred photos (give or take a dozen) and caption them, but the hard part of the writing is over.

And here's my issue/problem/conundrum:  How to balance the visual side with the word side? Do I need to abandon the book writing to concentrate on the photographs or vice versa?  It's an interesting predicament.  

I think it took writing a book about lighting equipment to make me realize that much of what Steven Pressfield says in his book,  The War of Art, is correct.  That we accept assignments that seem like opportunities but are really our subconscious minds throwing obstacles in our true paths.  I really want to write a book about the "why" of photography but I keep writing about the "how".  That's supposedly the stuff the market wants.  But have people tried another way? Are there books out there that I've just missed that talk about a person's journey as a photographer?  

I would love to read a book that documents the life of a great fashion or advertising photographer from the photographer's point of view, not a biographer's.  A book filled with the trepidation, the hesitation and the fear of moving one's art forward.  I'd love to know if all artists are filled with the same lack of self confidence and jittering anxiety about their own work.  Instead we get what the artists want to project: confidence, the illusion of mastery and a public persona that's all about being comfortably, confidently at the top.  

I'd love to hear about the tight spots, the model meltdowns, the financial set backs, the family friction and the un-winnable battle to balance the domestic pull with the frantic tug of art.  A de-glamorizing look at the business and the craft of photography.  An assignment shooting waste water treatment plants in Biloxi instead of Madonna in Paris.

That's a book I'd buy.