A few announcements. No major rants.

Swimmer makes perfect triangle with arm and lane line.  ©2010 kirk tuck

Open Invitation:  Book Signing Event: On Saturday, June 19th, my friends at Precision Camera have invited me to do a two hour book signing event, at the store, from noon til 2pm.  I'm presuming that we'll have all four books available.  It will be very informal and I'll be happy to talk about photography with anyone who drops by.  I'd love to see some familiar faces even if you have no interest in getting a book...

Precision Camera in Austin is located at 3810 North Lamar Boulevard Austin, TX 78756.  If you've got questions, call them at:  (512) 467-7676.  I won't be competing with UT football this time.....

I'm working on a book about portraits and I need some help from people in and around Austin:  The book is about alternatives to traditional portraits.  I'll be exploring a more modern portrait ethos, new, minimalist lighting for portraits and more of a lifestyle approach to posing and venue.  I'll mostly be using non-tranditional light sources and small battery units.  This is where you come in.  I need lots and lots of cooperative models.  I'm looking for all kinds of people with interesting faces who could join me for an hour at a time in coffee shops, on the street in down town and around town and for short stints in the studio.  Anyone who participates will get a 12 by 18 inch original C print (signed on the back) of one of the photos we make together.  I'll be shooting in Austin mostly but would also welcome the chance to shoot people in San Antonio.  If you are interested you can e-mail me at kirktuck@kirktuck.com.  If you know someone with a beautiful or intriguing face will you pass my offer along?  If you send me someone who is very, very photogenic I may offer to use them for step by step photos.  In that case I'll be able to pay them for the time we do that together.  Thanks for the help.

Surveying:  Is there anyone out there who would like me to be doing video blogs on lighting topics or techniques having to do with portraits?  A few of my friends think this would be cool.  For me it would scary as they want me on the other side of the camera doing the explaining and stuff.  Just thought I'd ask around and see if anyone is interested in this kind of stuff.  If you have an opinion one way or another would you toss it into the comments?  

That's it for the announcements and stuff.  Catch you on the next read.

Getting outside the studio and shooting mid-day in the heat and wind.....

This is Mike.  He's an executive at a tech company.  And that's some of Austin in the background.

Sometimes I think I get too philosophical about photography.  Today I'm just talking "nuts and bolts".  

I've spent decades shooting in the studio and inside the (air conditioned) corporate buildings of major clients.  Recently a new company asked me to shoot their corporate officers in a different way.  We talked a bit and decided that shooting outside, with the city of Austin in the background, would be a cool way to go.

Scheduling is always a concern.  Executives seem to have busier schedules than most and, with packed schedules, we sometimes have to shoot right in the middle of the day or in the heat of the afternoon.  So we learn to deal with the sun.

My shoot with Mike was scheduled for 4pm.  My morning shoot was a technology shoot in the studio.  Tiny cities on top of tiny slices of silicon.  I packed for Mike's shoot the night before and when the clock ticked 3:15 pm I started turning off hot lights, covering products so dust wouldn't cover everything, and I headed out the door.  We shot on the pedestrian bridge just to the south of downtown Austin.  I was able to park a couple hundred yards away and push my stuff over onto the bridge on a small cart.  The bridge is about forty feet wide and it's a wonderful place to shoot.   In the early mornings and early evenings it's covered with runners and walkers but at 4pm we pretty much had the whole span over Lady Bird Lake to ourselves.

I packed a Canon 5d mark 2 with a 24-105 zoom lens.  Hoodman loupe (really need this for sunny locations and just about any camera...).  Profoto 600b, battery powered electronic flash with one head and a speed ring.  Two light stands.  One collapsible, two stop, white 42 inch Westcott diffuser panel and an arm to hold it.  Most important pieces of equipment? Two 20 pound sandbags.

This is the kind of shoot that an assistant is very helpful on.  Watching the gear while you go and look for lost subjects (for the record, Mike was right on time and NOT lost), holding light stands in a brisk breeze and helping to drag the cart back to the car on remote locations.  Unfortunately, I did not have an assist with me on Mike's shoot.  That's just the way the scheduling goes.  But we go thru without incident.

First step is to put up the two stop diffuser above Mike's head so he didn't have to stand in the sun.  Once we had that up I grabbed the camera and started looking for the right angles.  I'd worked with his marketing director on three other similar shoots so we had a good idea of what the composition should be like. I also knew that we didn't want to be too tight.

I sandbagged the light stand that had the diffuser and its holding arm and then set up a second light stand with a 24 by 36 inch softbox on it.  That stand got a sand bag as well.  The diffuser is as close to the top of Mike's head as I can get it and still keep it out of the frame.  The more light I can block the better. The light blocker keeps Mike from being hit by the hard, direct rays of the sun and drops the exposure on his face around two stops.  I fill back in with my own, controlled, more flattering light.  I walked the softbox in as close as I could and set the power on the strobe box to 1/4 power.  Our exposures were in the 1/160th of a second f8.5 range.  I was trying to balance the image so that the background read about 1/2 a stop darker than Mike.  I also wanted to be sure to get shadow detail even on Mike's black shirt.

We shot about 60 images but the very first one was the keeper and the one unanimously chosen.  

I processed the image in CS5, taking advantage of the new, content aware, masking tools to do different treatments to Mike and to the background.  Gotta love layers...

Here's some advice on lighting like this outside:

1.  Gotta take sand bags.  Even light breezes can get a hold of a panel or a collapsible diffuser and make it into a sail.  And wind on the bridge is always amplified compared with wind on the ground.  

2.  If you can swing it bring an assistant.  Not to haul stuff but to hold onto the light stand with the softbox and the light head.  With Profoto heads heading toward $1,000 each the last thing you want is one heading toward the ground.  The added benefit of the assistant is this highly complex mathematical equation:  Big assistant+sandbag= bigger softbox.  Where y equals the velocity of wind and x equals the softness of light....  I love big softboxes but if I'm by myself I think the 24 by 26 is just about the limit.  And that's with the 12 pound strobe pack and the 20 pound sand bag hooked onto the stand.

3.  If it's over 90 and the sun is shining get your shade up for the client first thing.  You don't want them frying and sweating before you've shot the first frame.  Being able to make shade is almost as fun as being able to make light.  You might also want to bring the client a cold bottle of water.

4.  Get the whole thing,  from the firm, welcome handshake to the warm farewell,  done in ten minutes or less.  If you need to fiddle, get there early and do it on your own time.

5.  If you have the resources (additional sandbags and an assistant) consider bringing along a second panel.  Make this one black and put it up right behind the camera.  This will give the talent/subject something dark to look at so they aren't squinting from the bright ambient light.  This could be really important in a location with lots of bright building reflections and concrete.

6.  Don't depend on the rear screen of the camera for total imaging confirmation unless you've brought the loupe and disable the automatic brightness setting that now seems to be a standard feature on new cameras.

7.  Dress for the heat.  Nice to make that good impression and I'm all for the random suit and tie in the boardroom or the chic hotel ballroom but out on the pedestrian bridge you'll be fine in some nice shorts and a polo shirt.  Or even better, a UV resistant shirt from Ex Officio  (the offical provider of hot weather shirts for Kirk Tuck Photography :-)  ).

I've got no advice for post processing because everyone does that differently.  The most important part to remember is to make your own shade. It will separate you from the yahoos out banging around with direct flash and hot hightlights.  Nobody looks great with razor sharp shadows and too much detail.  

I hit the bridge at 3:45pm.  I had everything roughed in and set up when Mike hit the bridge at 4:00pm.  I had Mike walking away at 4:08pm.  He was happy to get out of the heat.  I needed to finish the tech job that was already taking a lot more time than I budgeted for.  

Just eight minutes?  Yes.  And that's a feature/benefit.  Because we don't charge by the hour we charge by the image that gets licensed.  Efficiency works for you and the client unless you are dumb enough to charge strictly by the hour.  

So, that's my afternoon a few weeks ago.  Hope all is well.  

Best, Kirk

Indulge me. I re-read this and wanted to reprint it for the people who are new here. More original programming to come.

Why you shouldn't shoot like everyone else.

Let's face it,  I don't think any of us woke up one morning and said, “The thing I love best is taking pictures of strident brides putting on yet another cookie cutter,  antique ivory white dress with the annoying little buttons down the back.....”.  We didn't.  We don't.  We do many of the annoying little jobs we do because they pay the bills.  The wedding profits pay for the mortgage and the car payments.  The bridal portraits help pay for new gear.  And the PR photos of “guys in ties”, done with the same old soft box and grid light on the background,  pays for dinners and electric bills.  But you are way off base if you think we buy for a moment that you shoot these things because you are driven by your “inner muse” to do your “Art”.  (That's capital “A” art.....).

We're not all wired the same way so if you really get a thrill running a business and making a profit and that's all you want out of your photography then I get it and we'll give you a pass on the art thing.  But the rest of you aren't getting off so easily.  Most of us got into this field because we loved taking photographs of people, or landscapes, or life on the streets.  I certainly didn't pick up a camera because I saw a cool product photograph in a catalog.

I picked up a camera because I loved taking photographs of my friends.  I wasn't drawn to images that were lit in a particular way, I really loved the stuff that was black and white, available light and relatively unposed.  When I had done this kind of work for years as a pleasurable hobby I found my self at loose ends after my partners and I sold our advertising  agency.  I had some money in my pocket and a bunch of people kept hiring me to photograph them or their loved ones in the style I'd done.

But.....as soon as the art moved from hobby to business there started a subtle erosion of the essential point of view that made my work different from everybody else's.  I learned that there was an established style to shooting business head shots and so I learned that style and began to offer it.  I had to buy lights and drag them into the mix.  I learned the “right way” to do an executive portrait and I started to incorporate what I learned into the mix.  

And if you think about it, the convergence of digital imaging and the photo sharing sites on the web has quickened a process of homogenization that now seems relentless.  How many of you think that a reportage style of wedding photography is wonderfully unique?  Really?  Even though every wedding book I've seen in the past three months has exactly the same stuff in it?  The close up of the fingers trying to button five hundred annoying buttons on the back of an antique ivory wedding dress?  The edgey images with the razor thin slice of sharp focus that just screams out, “Hey, look at me.  I got a Canon 5D and a fast 85mm lens...”  You know the drill.  We all know the drill because we presume that these are the images and styles that brides want and we want to deliver them so we can make the car payments and buy dinner.  And in the corporate world we know that the standard head shot is generally a boring piece of crap that doesn't move the game forward any more than music on your website.

I think we homogenize for a variety of valid anthropological reasons.  We have a subconscious  desire to please our tribe.  We fear striving for originality and excellence because we have a suspicion that these things aren't valued by our clients and showing different work might cause them to reject our services.  Which we then interpret to be a rejection of our selves.  We might fear the hostility that will inevitably come from those who are practicing the status quo.

But here's the nasty reality statement that I'm sure you've known was coming from the minute you started reading this:  The people who populate the top 1% of the art world don't really give a minute of thought to what might “play well in Peoria”.  They pursue their vision.  Their own vision.  And they do it in a way that basically welds them into the longer view of art history or photo history because it introduces aesthetic game changers that the rest of us will buy into decades down the road and work to homogenize into our collective offerings while some where a new generation comes knocking with the real goods.  But we won't understand the value of those goods until it's just too damn late.  Think Richard Avedon and Irving Penn.  Both of whom were incredible pioneers as opposed to the Chase Jarvis and Michael Grecco types who understand a trendy, contemporary use of the tools, and the power of good, pervasive marketing.

It's like Avedon invented Haute Cuisine while Jarvis added an extra strip of bacon to the cheeseburger.....while Grecco introduced pink mayonnaise and convinced Ludacris to put it on his bacon cheeseburger.....really, it is apt.

Consider this for a moment...two companies sell 90% of the cameras used by professionals today.  Both have the identical format!  Your choice is really sensor A or sensor B.  Processing algorithm A or   Processing algorithm B.  Can you imagine the photographers we truly admire from the film age being constrained to choose between just two different films?  Where is the differentiation?  Where is the rugged individualism?  How did this all happen?

Some postulate that every move toward convenience decreases overall quality.  That every wave of mass acceptance creates an inertia to consider whatever the masses have embraced to be the “standard”.  By that measure, clothes from Walmart are the new standard, and if you are truthful you'll acknowledge that you'd never get your wardrobe from Walmart...

So, what do you do? If you are a business person, first analyze your business carefully, and if you find that selling your current product, no matter how commodified it is, is going well and your market share is growing, then continue on your path.  But if you feel like you got into this field to do something unique and different but you have the queasy feeling that you let the weight of life and money drag you into some compromised stasis then start pushing back and re-connect with why you wanted to be here in the first place.

When I taught at The University of Texas at Austin I had a student who came to me and complained that she couldn't possibly fulfill her promise as a great fashion photographer unless she had a Hasselblad and a stable of good, Zeiss lenses.  But she whined that she could never afford them, so she was doomed to failure.  A week earlier I had overheard her telling a classmate that her parents had just bought her brand new, turbo-charged  Volvo station wagon. ( in the early 1980's this would have been viewed as radically indulgent within the student class---now, who knows?).  

I suggested that she sell the car and buy the dream.  She thought I was insane.  The money trumped the art.  The comfort quotient kicked the crap out of art.  I caught up with her two decades of “life lessons” later.  She has become a gifted artist.  She pursues her vision with a Holga camera.  She lives on the edge.  She doesn't own a car.  But here's the news flash, she's happier than she ever was because she's very clear about what she wants.  And what she wants is to pursue the vision she had in the very first gestalt moment of loving photography.

So, how do you change?  How about throwing away all the trappings and offering what you really feel compelled to offer as art, and the hell with the rest of the market.  After all, would you rather be the next Avedon or a watered down/ tarted up version of Olan Mills.  You have the “Art” with a capital “A” in you or you would have never chosen this business.  Owning a McDonald's franchise is a much more secure way to earn lots more money.  So trade down on lifestyle, if necessary, and trade up on artistic integrity.  I can almost guarantee that you'll spend less on therapy and Xanax.  And people may grow up wanting to be just like you----instead of wanting to have your lifestyle.

I know you might think this sounds preachy and high handed but it's really a synopsis of the journey of self discovery I've been on lately.  I've opened the files in my office and dragged in a big ass trash can.  Anything that doesn't feel good, special and all about my work goes into the can.  All the event negatives from the 1990's.  All the executive portraits older than three years.  And I've started showing only the styles I want to shoot.  Not everything I could do in a pinch.  It makes me feel lighter.  Like I'm freeing up mindshare.  But that's something for another month.

In the meantime my prescription for change is to go back to using your very first camera for a month.  If you learned on a Canon AE-1 or a Minolta Maxxum 7000 or a Holga, go back and get one and load it up.  Shoot the way you once loved for a month.  Live with your style for a month and see if it doesn't feel better. 

I could give you more advice about shooting with little strobes but it would all be bullshit until you figure out why you shoot, and what you want to have coming out of your camera.  Customers?  If the work is satisfying to you then you'll find the market you want.  It may not be the market that supports your BMW payments but remember, you trade you life for money and you'll never get either back, so you might as well start doing it on your terms right now!

Thanks, Kirk

Author:  Minimalist Lighting: Professional Techniques for Location Photography

      Minimalist Lighting: Professional Techniques for Studio Photography

(really, two totally separate books with annoyingly similar titles.....)

See more work:   Kirk Tuck's Commercial Website/An adventure in iWeb

Taking a mental vacation to the islands.

Belinda under the Jamaican Skies.

Obsessing about your job is a quick way to make life suck.  Letting go of job-session is a quick route back to happiness.  Over the last couple of years our industry has been pummeled like an ugly pinata at a teenage birthday party.  We've heard that stock photography will eat our lunches.  We've seen that clients under duress have the loyalty of a Goldman Sachs executive.  And we've been beat over the head with the concept that legions of amateur photographers will steal our clients (the same feckless clients) and undercut us by working for free.  Well.  What a special and happy way to look at your chosen profession. (sarcasm intended).

I'm not buying any of it anymore.  We're in full mercenary mode at Casa de Kirk Tuck Photography.  No mercy, no prisoners.  But we're doing it by re-inventing reality to suit our disposition.  The rules going forward are simple:  Provide a great product and provide it at a fair price.  If someone wants it cheaper, say, "No."   If no one wants the product then take the day off and work on one of those long term, big payoff, personal projects.  Part of the new reality is that we've got existence and subsistence covered and we're only working for the gravy anyway.  My own European social welfare construct on an individual and self directed basis.

So today a job got postponed.  No worries.  I had lunch with a wonderful art director instead.  We even had beer at lunch!  I swam at the pool this morning.  I'm writing a blog now.  And I'm going on vacation in my mind, remembering all the fun places I get sent....just because  I am a photographer.  

The image above was done on a vacation in Montego Bay, Jamaica.  Again, on vacation with a Hasselblad and a 100mm 3.5 planar.  One pocketful of Tri-X.  We'd done a project here a few months earlier and part of our payment was an equal amount of vacation time at the same resort.  We sampled many islands over the course of two or three years,  nearly always with the same bargain.  One week of work in exchange for a fee and a one week of vacation.  And vacation can be a beautiful thing.

So I'm banishing all those negative presumptions and my new reality includes the fact that the phone keeps ringing, the e-mail pinging and the checks arriving like clockwork in the mailbox.  Job postponed?  Off to lunch.  Job cancelled?  Off on vacation.

GEAR NOTE:  I like to keep my friends up to date about what I'm shooting with.  As you may remember I got some feedback from a big agency client a few months back about the need for much higher resolution in my files.  I'd been shooting exclusively with Olympus cameras because I find their lenses to be wonderful and the color palette very attractive.  And to a certain extent I'm enough of a curmudgeon to not want to shoot what everyone else does.......

But I am running a business, I'm not paid by Olympus and I do listen to my clients with the intensity and focus of the Echelon System.  So, knowing that Olympus isn't making any higher resolution cameras right now I added a Canon 5D mark 2 and some lenses.  Decided I could work with the system and started filling in the blanks spots.

I just picked up two pieces last week that I actually like shooting with a lot.  The Canon 7D and the Canon 15-85mm EFS zoom lens.  I'm practicing with them now and I'll be wringing them out at the next few swim meets and then I'll be ready to let you know what I think about them.....

Love the idea of full disclosure.  Just wanted to let you know what's jangling around in my brain and my camera bag today.

Sometime the only rules that apply are propriety.

So, I've made all kinds of pronouncements about how one should do street photography but here's one situation that falls outside my strictures.  I saw the face and wanted to do a quick portrait but she was in the wrong light.  I walked up and asked, in very broken Italian, if I could take her portrait and if she would mind moving about twenty feet to the other side of the street so I could take advantage of the overhanging structure to shield her from the direct sun but close enough to a bright wall so I would have some direction light on her face.  It was near dusk and she was also illuminated by the light fixture in the overhanging structure.  The whole process took about three minutes.  She was amenable but guarded and that was exactly the look I wanted.

Rules are helpful in defining the boundaries that you must inevitably step over to do art.

Overheard this morning at a coffee shop....

Two advertising agency creatives were sitting at a downtown coffee shop having some sort of espresso drinks and I overheard them talking about business.  Now, it's no secret that the advertising business is going through as big or bigger a meltdown than even the photography business so I leaned over a bit and concentrated.  I wanted to hear how they deal with the slow down and the slow pay and the slow etc.  Quick into the conversation it became obvious that their agencies had lost some pitches and things were.....tense in the respective offices.  Finally one of the guys says,  "We should both ditch our jobs and start our own ad agency."  The other guy takes a long drink of coffee, gives the other guy the "are you insane" look and then says,  "There a ton of agencies.  We don't need to open another one.  Someone needs to open some new clients!"

The above vignette has very little and a lot to do with the blog below...

Kids playing on the Square in Sienna.

Wow!  If you're really freaked out about the economy and the state of the world and you feel a bit paralyzed and helpless I suggest that you stop drinking coffee for a while.  You may find that half the panic is self inflicted..... You are also less likely to spill hot beverages into your lap while driving, or, onto your laptop while contemplating the fall of civilization.

I just got it today.  The realization that we have no machine that will allow us to freeze our cultural evolution at a point where it works optimally for me.  I now understand that we're never going back to the "old days" even though the old days never really existed except as a fluid interpretation in our own minds.  Were we richer then or did we care less?

I read something in a book over the weekend.  It said (and you've heard it before) "the past is like the wake of a boat.  It trails out of view, never to return.  As to the future?  One step ahead and all is blackness.  We have only now."  In a way this flurry of images from Italy is a purge of the past.  I'm showing them and then archiving the prints.  Because if you are busy tending the work of the past you don't have the bandwidth to create here and now.  I'll show some of my favorites over then next few weeks and then get back to work on my own stuff.  In a new way.  With new understanding and new insights.

One of the insights is the need to be flexible.  To bend and try new stuff. To embrace fun and stop digging in my heels, trying to make people understand the value of what we did in the past.  Someone once said, "No one will ever win who bets against the web."  I would add that you rarely win by depending upon the way you used to do things...

It's hot and summer and everyone is moving slowly.  I'm heading out to walk and soak up the feeling of slowness and see if there's a visual component to it.  Wish me luck.

Ah. Verona. Romeo and Juliet. Tourism. Italy.

As I mentioned in the last blog, I love shooting on the streets in Italy.  As part of one of our trips to Italy in the early 1990’s Belinda and I decided to visit some of the smaller cities like Lucca,  Bologna, Parma and Verona.  It was the same trip that found me dragging along my big, chrome Hasselblad 500 CM and my 100mm Planar lens as my street shooting camera.  While all of the cities had their own charming attributes it was Verona that stole my heart because of their wonderfully cynical tourist board.  They took the story of Romeo and Juliet and ran with it.  Right down to designating a small house and courtyard as the house of Juliet.  Tourist would go there to see where the star crossed lovers lived.  And the tourist board indulged them by also installing a telephone like contraption that, for a few coins, would tell you the brief story of the feuding houses in one of four different languages.  I noticed that the photo which graced the machine was from the Zefferelli version of the Romeo and Juliet movie.  So appropriate!

Of course we made the pilgrimage to the house.  How could we come all this way and not see it?  We saw a few adventurous tourists from other countries but we also saw plenty of Italians.  I saw this man listening intently to the taped message and couldn’t resist photographing him.  I printed the images and put them in a show a few years later.  Most people took a cursory look and decided that the man was some sort of shady character doing some sort of shady and illegal deal over the phone.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  He was just a local tourist, eager to hear all the news.

I have many images in my files of people on phones.  How was I to know back then that all the phone booths would eventually disappear only to be replaced by the ubiquitous cellphone?  The phone booth now seems like a romantic and chancy part of a past life. The cellphone like an empty appliance.  C’est la vie.