Where does style come from? How do I get some?

Shot in 1993 with a Canon EOS-1 and the first version of the 

85mm 1.1.2 L lens.  Paris, France.  Agfapan 400.

There's two ways to look at style. One is tied to the idea of fashion and what is fashionable.  This idea rewards constant changes of approach in order to incorporate the lighting of the day, the subject matter of the moment and the presentation of the minute.  Just last year many photographers rushed to make images that made liberal use of the "clarity" slider in PhotoShop, along with multiple backlights and a healthy dose of dynamic range manipulation via the shadow and highlight sliders that showed up, en masse, in most image processing programs.

The other way to look at style is to perceive it as the leitmotif of the long term arc of an artist.  How do they routinely like to approach and display subjects.  And what are the pervasive consistencies over time.  We like artists who can innovate while staying true to their basic nature.  That's what makes them powerful.

In time, given the number of monkeys typing and the vast spending power of the marketplace, people in the first camp will, within weeks of the birth of a new style, be able to buy a canned filter set that will allow them to make work that superficially looks like the work of the latest "wunderkind". (When did we go German?????).  Take a shot, dump it in PS, hit the art filter button and sit back while the little magic squirrels on the wheels take control and make your work look like everyone else's.  Indeed, we can see this all over the share sites right now.  And there's a huge number of self-promotion videos in which today's acknowledged instant photo celebrities show you have to look like them...

It's not so easy in the second camp.  It requires shooting and shooting and looking and shooting.  And watching the natural evolution of a style that is demonstrably both yours and long term at the same time.  And it may be nothing like what you expected when you started.  There is value to playing scales and learning method but it's all just filling time if all you ever do is sit around playing the opening measures of "Stairway to Heaven" for the rest of your life.

Nabokov became rich and well known by writing like Nabokov.  None of the rest of a generation of Nabokov imitators made it out of the gates.  The style that counts is the style that comes over years and decades, not the one you can get out of can.

I'm still working on mine.  But it's one of those miserable Zen things.  If you focus on style it eludes you.  It only works when you forget to work on style and just respond to the things you attract to the front of your camera......

A rare portrait of me by Ellis Vener, Monday.

A rare look at a crusty blogger.  ©2010 Ellis Vener.   In my front yard....

I've known photographer and writer, Ellis Vener, for......decades.  We were in school at the same time at UT and we intersected at the Ark Cooperative Darkroom pretty regularly.  Ellis moved to Atlanta from Houston a while ago and he's doing well with both his commercial photography business (http://www.ellisvener.com)  and as a writer and equipment reviewer for Professional Photographer Magazine.

He's in Austin this week and dropped by my studio to pick up a tripod.  He does these incredibly complex image assemblages (far beyond a typical stitched panorama....) and he needed some stout sticks.  I lent him the big, black Berlebach tripod.  Like a consummate pro, he brought his own tripod head.....

As is our habit, we sat around the studio and swapped stories about outrageous bids, even more outrageous clients and equipment nerd stuff.  When the conversation slowed down Ellis announced that he was sporting some new technology and wanted to try it out on me.  Here's the technospeek about the technique used to do the portrait, above:  http://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/topic/919822

The new TTL Pocket Wizards have the capability of giving your Canon camera's FP flash sync at much higher shutter speeds than before.  Interestingly enough, it's a technique that rewards flashes with fairly long burn times.  We hauled out the Profoto 600b with a head and a small Elinchrom shoot thru, umbrella modifier and headed toward the stone wall the runs along the street at the front of the property.  Goal:  Get portrait with cool, out of focus sky.

After some playing around Ellis added a backlight from a Canon 580 EX2, also equipped with one of the Pocket Wizard TTL transceivers.  We found that solid, Texas live oaks can block radio signals but we eventually get everything worked out.

Ellis was shooting with a Canon 1D mk4 (a camera I am very interested in) and the new 70-200mm f2.8 IS lens.  Fun to watch another photographer at work from the point of view of the subject.  However, as it was close to 100(f) in the shade we quickly headed back into the cool, dark cave that is the studio.

See the shirt?  It's one of the Ex Officio technical shirts doing its job and keeping me from sweating.  Now if I could only figure out why Ellis PhotoShopped my hair gray........ (humor intended.  Signal provided for the painfully serious....).

This is a great way to try out product.  I don't have to invest anything till I see how it works, what the tradeoffs are and how I might be able to use it.  Another fun topic of conversation was the Paul Buff, Einstein monolights.  Ellis showed me some great footage he'd done using the 10 fps of his Canon 1dmk4 along with the fast recycle of the Einstein.  Cobbled together from hundreds of jpegs into a Quicktime movie-----it was an eye opener and presages yet another paradigm shift.

Say what you will about Paul Buff but he is single-handedly keeping an entire industry on its toes.......

On the calendar today,  Young Ben will be pressed into service as an assistant for another Dr. shoot out on a ranch.  I have high hopes for something as fun as the Dr. feeding the baby deer shot I showed a week or so ago.  We'll see how the boy does as a videographer and general assist.

Street shooting in San Antonio.

Renae on Commerce St. in San Antonio with a wedding dress and tanned shoulders.

I blame Robert Frank and Richard Avedon equally for my love of street photography.  While the Robert Frank reference is obvious to anyone who's looked through a copy of "The Americans" I'm sure people unfamiliar with the breadth and depth of Avedon's career are probably scratching their heads.  Rush out to a well stocked book store and browse through a copy of Richard Avedon, " An Autobiography" and you'll be surprised to find a bunch of wonderful street photos from New York, Paris and Rome.  Were they all staged?  Probably, but I don't find them any less powerful.  Part of the power in the work of both artists no doubt comes from their conversant ease with graphic black and white.  They were working directly in the process rather than trying to divine how to shoot in RGB and then make the right gyrations to unlock their vision, after the fact.  

Both Avedon and Frank were masters of seeing and capturing gesture.  And gesture is one of the unsung foundations of a great portrait.

So, after sitting around brainwashing myself with my book collection I called my friend and transcendent muse, Renae and suggested a street shooting foray in one of our favorite (financially) accessible cities, San Antonio.  She mentioned that she had a wedding dress we could use as a prop and we were off.  

As you've probably come to expect by now, we didn't do anything by the numbers.  Instead of a box full of gear I dragged out a Hasselblad 2003 FCW and an 80mm lens.  Instead of our typical Provia color transparency film or our old standby, Tri-X,  I threw ten rolls of Agfa Scala film in the bag.  Sink or swim.  All my stories seem to have the line....."It was a hot, Texas day...." and this one is no different.  By the time we banged thru the ten rolls we were shot and heading toward the bar at the Havanna Hotel.

For people who never had the privilege and pleasure of shooting film I guess I should explain Agfa Scala.  It was a black and white transparency film.  No chance at redemption if you weren't able to hit the exposure.  And it was a latitude cheapskate.  Half a stop over and you were in white territory.  One stop under and you lost your lower mid-tones in a sea of black.  Once you shot it you had to send it off in pre-paid mailers so you didn't know if you were a chump or a hero for about ten days.  I'm always optimistic on the front end and pessimistic on the back end.  Love it while I'm shooting and critical when I see the mess I've made.

But the whole exercise was more for fun than anything else.  I figure if photography is so fun that it's the world's biggest hobby I should consider my life one perpetual "Magic Kingdom" of fun.  So we shot and settled for what we got.  Even the stuff that was blurred by subject motion or photographer inattention.  Like the one below....

note:  After I started writing this I went into the house from the studio (fourteen steps....) and grabbed the Avedon book off the shelf to make sure I had the title right.  I plugged it in and checked out the Amazon.com link for the book.  OMG!!! The first (and only?) edition of this book is going for a lusty $500+ dollars.   Very good condition used copies are around $350.  Amazing.

But I guess I shouldn't be too surprised as the first edition of "The Americans",  inscribed by Robert Frank, is going in the neighborhood of $16,000.


 I better stock up on some more first edition, Minimalist Lighting (location) and Minimalist Lighting (studio) books before they run out.  I'd hate to be an author who couldn't afford his own first and second books..........

I have one Summer reading suggestion to all you readers who like historical fiction.  If you haven't read Stephen Pressfield's, "The Gates of Fire"  you should.  It's a brilliant version of the Greek battle at Thermopylae against the Persians.  I've re-read it three or four times and I'm always sucked into it.  You've probably read my recommendation of his smaller but no less brilliant non-fiction book,  "The War of Art"  which I believe should be on every artist's night stand or bookshelf.  It'll save your artistic life......

Hope you're having fun.  People will want to know what you did over the Summer......

A re-appraisal of the Olympus Pens as fine art cameras.

You may remember that on my little journey to west Texas I rashly took my EPL-1 and my EP-2 and a little bag of lenses and batteries.  While the older, film camera lenses saw some use I was most at home using the little 14-42mm kit lens that shipped with every Pen camera you could get your hands on.  It was a wild roller coaster back then.  The economy was still very uneven (yes, worse than today...),  I'd just basically told a publisher I couldn't work with them on a project (the West Texas Road Trip) that we'd been discussing for the better part of two months and I felt at loose ends.

When I got home I posted some images from the trip and did a little write up of the experience but I don't think I really burrowed down to discuss the nuts and bolts of the little cameras in much detail.  I think I was still processing my own intellectual fallibility and hubris.  You see, I thought any project I could think of I could make work.  But by actually going out on the trip, even without the restrictions of a publisher or commercial, outlined project,  I came to learn that I just don't have much of an affinity for the aesthetic of the wide open spaces.  I'm not in love with the ethos of the cowboy as is Robb Kendrick or Kurt Markus.  I don't think Marfa is mystical or Marathon magical.  I couldn't wrap my interests around the endless miles of driving and the vast desolation.  I felt like a character in Jack Kerouac's, "On The Road", destined to drive on mad, nonstop, junkets back and forth across the United States with only a bag of cheese sandwiches and whatever rest stops I could find.

But in retrospect I brought back quiet photographs whose code I hadn't cracked yet.  Like the one on top which speaks to me about the ebb and flow of "colonizing" territory and then letting it slip back toward its sustainable chaos.  Other empty landscapes made me think, pretty much for the first time with any diligence, about how thin the slice of our livable environment is when measured against the volume of the earth.  A few feet of soil and then rock below.  Two feet or fifty feet of vegetation, sparsely scattered around, and above that only the ether.

I guess that not every photo needs to be of craggy faced celebrities, pretty girls and buff men to have it's own subversive impact.

This tree is next to a dammed up spring.  The spring was corralled in the 1930's during our last, national economic catastrophe by people working for the FSA.   It's on a piece of public land miles from the tiny town of Marathon, Texas, at what seems to be the very edge of the earth.  If the stream hadn't been dammed would this tree exist?

And, so what does any of this have to do with dinky cameras?  A lot.  Nothing.  I know that I wouldn't have gone looking for pictures in quite the same way with a different camera.  I've harped on this but the ability to compose and see in a square format removed friction for me.  It lubricated the seeing process in a nice way.  And it's one of the reasons I come back and pick up the Pen cameras over and over again.

I love the fact that they are tiny and light.  I can carry them without regard for their weight, their bulk or the imperialism of their intention.  What do I mean by that?  I mean that a Canon 5Dmk2 or a Nikon D700 is a professional tool that commands a way of confronting subject matter.  They suffuse situations with an expectation of "serious" photography.  They are not airy and exploratory cameras the way the Pens are.  The Pens seem to defy an easy categorization and they seem to morph themselves to match your intention.  If you need them to be serious cameras you can pull off serious photography with them.  If you need them to be "Lomos" or "Holgas" you can do that too.

I find the electronic viewfinder indispensable.  I would never want to shoot one without it.  The only time I can make that work is when I'm shooting video on a tripod.  I use a Hoodman Loupe on the back LCD when I need to use the hot shoe for the microphone adapter.  If I can get away with using the built-in microphone I will.

Of the two cameras I have to say I prefer the EPL's imaging quality and quickness.  I prefer the elegance and retro design of the EP2 as an object.  Of all the lenses I've tried I always seem to come back to the kit lens.  I try to shoot at ISO 200 and I nearly always use the large/fine Jpeg setting.  I only shoot raw if the lighting has incredibly mixed color temperatures.  I try not to use either camera above ISO 800 because, no matter what the reviews say, you'll have a hard time reconciling the noise.

It's a perfect camera for an artist.  It's not a perfect camera for a commercial photographer.  And maybe that's why it's a perfect camera for a commercial photographer.  Its quixotic approach to imaging pushes us outside the confines of our usual, self bounded boxes enough to make photography serious in the opposite way that commercial photography is serious.  It's serious in the,  "I want to look at things and see how they look as photographs"--way instead of being, "I want to impress the guys on DPreview with the sheer technical quality of the frame and make money from clients"--sort of way.

I keep them because they aren't like my other cameras.  And that's a good thing.

Just an image to celebrate passing my 300th blog post!!!!!!!

Renae sitting for yet another portrait.  My favorite kind of lighting, extant.

As I'm sure you've figured out, if you've read the blog for any amount of time, that I change my mind from time to time, switch gear with what seems to be reckless abandon,  have used the phrase, "reckless abandon" more than once in these writings, and generally get bored doing one thing over and over again.  So I was amazed when I looked at the blog stats yesterday and noticed that I had surpassed the 300 mark on entries.  Amazing to me.  We have an average of 1800 people a day (or original clicks) reading the stuff I've written and 396 people count themselves as "followers" of the VisualScienceLab.

I thought I'd take this opportunity to explain the "Visual Science Lab".  It started, as all great ideas seem to, at a Happy Hour in some forgotten watering hole.  If I remember correctly, my drink of choice at the time was the venerable "Cuba Libre" and I'm sure I had several at the end of some productive week back in the late nineties when clients had an excess of courage and an excess of cash.

I'd watched the virus-like intrusion of entirely unnecessary "consultants" into every fabric of the advertising and marketing industry.  From cost consultants on the agency side to content and metrics consultants on the client side.  The whole mysterious charade of "branding".   Even down to the clothing consultants who counseled CEO's and CEO wannabe's about what to wear and how to wear it.  We were at the ground zero of consultants here in Austin.  Even the city would blithely spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on such pressing consultation needs as, "what color to paint the trash cans?" (five different "solutions" were offered and then the city was passed on to a "color consultant".  "Where should the busses go?" (On the streets!  There's another 1/2 million dollar consulting fee.....)

During the course of an unusually spirited happy hour discussion I proposed that I open a consulting company called, the Visual Science Lab.  I created a framework:  (tongue in cheek) that would describe as "scientifically based" our proprietary process and  tell our clients (big corporations, all) exactly what the visual content of their advertising should be.  The colors, the sizes and shapes, the type styles.....anything visual.  And we'd get our two cents in before the ad agencies even got involved.  It was all a lark.  

My elevator speech went something like this:  "Bob.  Every corporate marcom director since the dawn of time has heard the hoary old joke that one half of all their advertising spend is wasted.  And you know the punchline.  It's "if only we knew which half."  Am I right?  Well, we looked at the problem seriously, scientifically and analytically and decided to do something about it.  We've hooked up with the data mining sector at MIT,  and some really smart folks at Stanford, and we entered millions of consumer assessments and visceral measured reactions to colors, shapes and various measurable attributes of advertising: measured scientifically:  and devised a matrix that allows us to predict with a plus or minus four percent accuracy, just what a particular demographic wants to see, and will react to, in advertising."

"And Bob.  We can offer these custom assessments to your corporation for only a meager retainer of 1% of your total media buy a year.  If we're "on the money" you'll save 49% of your media spend, annually.  Dear God, you'll be a hero!"

And the sad thing is that I threw out that elevator speech for fun in front of some friends who actually were on the client's side and they wanted to know how soon we could get started.  There were, of course, no programmers mining this information.  No matrix.  No metrics.  Oh sure, we could have signed a contract and faked it for a while but our corporate ethics officer (Belinda) would have shut the whole thing down the minute she got wind of it.  It was a total fraud.  A silly story.  Like one or two modern religions created by old ad hacks.  But it did have its own legs.  

I've always liked the name and when I decided to blog it seemed perfect.  We are talking about a visual science.  And an art.  And wherever there's an intersection.............

If you work for a large company I'm sure you have plenty of tales you could tell of consultants.  My next cushy gig?  I think I'd like to be an expert witness.

In celebration of hitting (and surpassing) the 300 blog mark would it be too much to ask you to bring in a friend or two so we can keep growing?  It would certain keep me moving in the right direction......

The joy of a great partnership.

I thought I'd introduce you to our CFO, Chief Creative Officer and the ethical and moral compass of the the Visual Science Lab,  my partner,  Belinda.  She's the one I blame when I'm talking to clients who don't want to pay the invoice in the agreed upon time frame.  She's the one who keeps my from buying a Leica S2 and instead reminds me that I should pay the phone bill first.  She's the one who keeps telling me I'm using my logo too big, in the wrong way and in the wrong colors.  And she threatens that she's going to have to produce a style guide for me to follow.

Belinda and I have worked well together over the years.  Our first foray into working as a team came when we were both starting out our careers, were dirt poor and both cooked in the kitchen of a popular Austin "home cooking" restaurant on weekends and during late nights to make ends meet.  We both worked as cooks and have the dubious honor of working together on a record breaking "Mother's Day" weekend.  It was so busy we ran totally out of food.  Imagine, two sweaty cooks flipping 8 omelets at a time, grilling fajitas AND making salads, all at once.

Our first, professional tag team debut came when I joined a small ad agency as the creative director and promoted Belinda from production design to art director.  In her first year she proceeded to win a handful of gold Addy's and the respect of everyone in the firm.  We did that together for nearly eight years.  Then I started the photo business and she moved to a bigger agency...... and she became one of my biggest clients.  She's been a freelance graphic designer for the last   14 years and we still work together on random projects.

Many photographers write and talk about their exploits as though they were lone nomads ranging through the wild and doing feats of daring and amazing creativity unaided by any save the hand of God and provenance but the reality is that most photographers I've met would not have survived a year without a good and steady partner.   The partner just doesn't get the same press.

I'd have hung it up and gotten a government job years ago if not for Belinda.  She's smarter than me,  save-ier than me, totally optimistic and so organized.  Can't imagine working without her.  Wouldn't be fun.  Wouldn't be effective.  Wouldn't have the joy.  No muse is bad muse......

Looking back is looking forward.

When I'm in the moment I think the stuff I'm working on is really great and destined to go into the portfolio but time is an interesting filter.  And the stuff I shot years ago because I needed the money or I volunteered or I shot because I was stumbling around, bored, with a camera?  The same time filter eventually causes the old work with value to bubble up.  If you take the time to go back and look at it.

People are always in such a hurry to do new stuff.  Always new stuff.  It's relentless and once you jump in and get in the habit of habitually shooting you can almost not help trying to make each day and everything you come across a series or a project.

And what happens to most of us is that we're so busy administering the endless flow of raw files that need archived, and images that need processed and so on that we never take the luxurious step of just sitting back and really looking at what we've already done.  In an unhurried way.  In a thoughtful way.

There's an extra layer that mitigates against reappraisal of past work in digital and that is our subconscious belief that the cameras we are using today are so far improved over what we shot with just five years ago that.....what's the point of going backward?

But that's the very core of what knowledgable people have been saying for years:  It's really not the camera.  It's really all about the vision and the seeing.  And the lighting and, in the end, getting off the office chair and doing.  (Not taking a stab at non photo professional office workers but photographers of any stripe who research photography more than they shoot it).

There are always advances.  Some good and some bad.  But artists having always gone forward with the tools of the day and made art that stands.  They use the shortcomings of the tools as formalist boundaries which they use to define their niche in the genre.  There are artists selling work from the five and six megapixel generation of cameras in museums and galleries.  Images from 35mm film are still collected and appreciated.  At some point looking back reinforces to you what you got right and what you'd do differently.  And for that alone it's an incredibly valuable undertaking.

I shot these a few years back for a mentoring program called, Project Breakthrough.  In the intervening years we shot trendier versions of kids for the program.  But these seem to be the ones I come back to again and again.  And I look at them to figure out why.

Might want to crack open a few disks from the earlier part of the century and sit quietly with some of the images on them.  Might just give you an older/newer way of looking at things going forward.