Wanna buy the Brooklyn Bridge? How about a theater seat?

In my "welcome back" article yesterday I mentioned that I recently had an assignment to photograph one of Austin's greatest actors in order to "sell" theater seats as a way of funding a much needed, new theater building.  The marketing people knew that showing a seat by itself would be boring but a seat with Martin would sell.  I showed up to the shoot with several things that might interest you as a photographer.  First of all I've all but given up using white, seamless background paper on location. It's a pain in the butt to transport and, with the new selection tools in PhotoShop CS5 and CS6 as long as you get enough light on your background to get it near white making a drop out is a piece of cake. White cake. I bought a white, muslin background years ago for an annual report project.  It came from Calumet.  When it gets dirty I toss it in the washing machine with some detergent and a bit of bleach and it comes out clean and white, white, white.  I probably spent $60 on the cloth background in 2002 and I've used it hundreds of times since then.  When Ben was young he used it often to build tents in the living room....

I brought four Elinchrom D-Lite 4IT monolights but I only used three of them.  I used one on either side of Martin because the marketing folks at Zachary Scott Theatre like bright, high key light for stuff like this.  The light on the left is coming through a small, Elinchrom Varistar which is a like a shoot through umbrella but the back is enclosed so there's no backward light scatter.  A white interior re-directs light to the front for more efficiency.  It's soft but directional.  And the Varistars set up as quickly as a regular umbrella.  That seemed easy enough so I used another, larger (41 inch diameter) Varistar on the other side.  Usually I use two lights on a white background, bounced out of black-backed umbrellas.  Today I had enough room to try something different so I put one D-Lite 4IT with a standard reflector behind the background and shot it through the fabric.  I tried to balance the exposure so that the area directly behind Martin would go white without too much spill coming forward onto Martin.  I think it worked out just fine.

I brought along one of the Sony A77 cameras with a 16-50mm f2.8 zoom lens and shot all of the images here with that lens and camera combination.  I like the Sony A77 camera even more than I thought I would for studio work.  You get to pre-chimp every shot and then see a post shot  review immediately.  I had the camera set up so that I'd see a review for two seconds after every shot.  But a touch of the shutter button would cancel the review and return you to the live image.  At one point in the shoot one of the front monolights stopped firing.  I saw it on the very first review.  I was  able to quickly fix the issue (dead or dying battery in a radio trigger....).  Shooting in the "old school" OVF method I would probably have shot a long volley of shots before stopping to review and we would have lost many good shots to a technical problem. 

The shots here are presented as 1800 pixel (long axis) images but I can assure you that at 4000 by 6000 pixels the images are exhilaratingly sharp.  In fact, now that I've untangled the "jpeg rubric" of the Sony hive mind I love what I'm getting from the camera and rarely, if ever, need to sharpen images in post. What you see in the EVF or on the rear screen is such a close approximation of what I eventually see on the studio computer screen that I've stopped worrying about technical details that fall outside of the binary "fail/succeed" paradigm.

But the real magic of a shoot with Martin is Martin.  He's a pro and that really makes getting wonderful images easy as pie.  My big complaint from the marketing department?  Too much great stuff to choose from.  I wish all my photography problems were like that...

Information to Sony Alpha shooters... I'm kinda shocked at how good some of Sony's cheaper (more cost effective?) lenses are.  I was going to buy the Zeiss 85mm 1.4 for the Alpha cameras but I tested the 85mm 2.8 SAL lens and found it to be terrific. Even wide open. The Zeiss is around $1500 while the Sony SAL lens is just $249.  When I first dallied with the system I also bought a cheap, 55-200mm SAL lens for around $250 just to have something longer and light weight. I eventually bought their big Kahuna, the 70-200 f2.8, with its glorious white finish (and dense, wrist straining, beefy construction) but after I saw how sharp the cheap zoom is I've left the other lens in the drawer for every assignment except the low light theater work.  Amazing how good the consumer stuff is... All the Canon and Nikon shooters can ignore this.

http://www.kirktuck.com/site/home.html

There's a setting on my new camera that I like to play with...

It's called: Rich Tone Monochrome.

It only works in the Jpeg file setting. It's basically noise reduction and HDR combined for black and white.  It can produce dramatic files with high sharpness and very little high ISO noise.  And since the frame rate of the camera, in normal daylight, is so fast, and the processor in the camera is so powerful, the mode can be used hand-held and the camera will "micro-align" multiple frames and stack them into one finished file.

I normally dislike the religion of HDR.  But I'm finding more and more uses for some of the in-camera options, as long as they are used intelligently. This is not intended to be a promotion for Sony or any particular model but an admission, based on long meditation during my break, that some stylized processing can be useful and fun.  Especially when it is controllable and customizable.

I was sitting at Medici Caffe, drinking a cappuccino, watching the beautiful people downtown, and reading the owner's manual for my Sony flash when I decided to explore the rich tone monochrome setting on my camera. I was reading the owner's manual for the flash in vain.  There is no control on the flash for setting exposure compensation.  That has to be done in the function menu, on the camera.

But I was amazed at the results of my test.  The coffee cup has an extremely wide range of tones and none of the highlights are even close to burning out.  Even with a .75 stop push to get the exposure I was looking for.  What a wonderful tool this might be for portrait work in the studio on a sturdy tripod, with a patient subject.  I say "patient" because the downside of most of the in-camera modes is that the file is processed right after you take the picture and can take up to ten seconds to render.....

While I still find "over the top" HDR offensive,  I am giving up my one person crusade to persuade people to have good taste.  If you want to try an effect then who am I to say you are wrong?  If you want to wear mutton chop sideburns then I think you should  go for it.  If you think pink is a good color for your car then more power to you. Go Pink. In fact, with the adoption of the Sonys I'm joining the parade and using the little settings with so little discretion it amazes me.  Digital is different.  The technique is everything.  I'm trying to bend the device to my will.  Then it will be photography.

I call this one, "Street lamp bending in the hurricane winds."  And any pixelazation you see is intended.  Rock on a77.

At some point it's really all about having fun with photography.

Renae (on the right) was my assistant back around the turn of the century.  She was amazing and brilliant.  And when we finished long shooting days on location she'd invite a friend or two over to the studio sometimes and we'd all share a bottle of good wine and set up lighting gear and make portraits.  Kinda weird when you consider that most days we'd just spent eight or nine hours setting up and taking down equipment somewhere in or around Austin in order to make portraits for work.

But shooting portraits of people like Amy and Renae was the perfect way to wind down a day and leave the studio on an art note.

We had just finished shooting an annual report for a dot com company whose stock had gone from a dollar a share to fifty four dollars a share, overnight.  (A few months later it made the round trip back to a dollar when the market popped...).  We invited Amy over, uncorked a St. Emillion Grande Cru Classé and started playing with cameras and lights.

I used a 35m Leica R8 film camera with a 90mm Summicron lens for this shot.  At the time I was happy using Ilford's Pan F, 50 ISO film.  The light of the day was a four foot by six foot softbox used in close and just to the left of camera. Powered by a Profoto box.  A small softbox slapped a little light on the gray, canvas background and we fired away.  We probably shot ten or twelve 36 exp. rolls of film that night and shipped it off to the lab the next day without a thought.

When the film and contact sheets came back I took a cursory look through and ordered a few favorite prints from some individual portraits we'd done.  Today I was looking through this work box of film and contact sheets and this time around it was the shots of Renae and Amy together that caught my attention.  I grabbed a strip of negatives that looked promising and put them on the scanner.  This is what we ended up with.

It's instructive to me that somewhere in the last five years we started doing just what we needed to do to survive.  And the art got lost.  But the magic is that with a little elbow grease, some heart and some imagination, we can get the art back.  It's a process of reaching out to people and fighting the entropy that whispers in your ear, "you've already done this.  Why do you need to do it again?"

But the reality is that even though I've made portraits before, each new person in front of the camera is different and interesting in their own way.  I'd forgotten for a while just how satisfying the process of making a portrait is.  Doesn't matter if you're playing for happiness or playing for the money.  The important thing is to play well.  And play often.

I saw that bumper sticker again yesterday.  It said, "Bark less. Wag more."  I like it.

We're back. Both of us. Now. Howdy.

Thanks for your patience.  I needed some time away from the VSL blog and from all the noise on the web in order to really assess where I am and where I want to be....as an artist.  When I look back over the last ten years I regret that I focused only on the nuts and bolts of getting the jobs done.  At times I was too conscientious about a client's time. I presumed they only had time to get done what we had in the contract.  But I come into contact with so many interesting people that by doing "just what the job required" I missed the opportunity to supplement each project with my own "take" and my own point of view.  I became really good at following the "instruction manual" of image making without giving enough thought to stepping outside the boundaries of our proscribed relationships and asking, "Can I take a really cool photo just for us?"

A re-introduction to the Visual Science Lab. The manual.

"A man with a live grenade in his hand always gets more attention."

What is it? This is a blog that's written by me to talk about stuff I'm interested in.  By extension, I think you might be interested in some of the same stuff.  This is not an "inspirational" site where I toss on my rose colored (but still polarized) sunglasses and write column after column of positive affirmations meant to make us all feel good about wanting to be photographers.  You can find several hundred million of those sites scattered across the web.  This is not a blog where I implore you to learn how to light like everyone else.  This is not a blog for people who think that their cellphones are a perfectly good replacement for cameras.  If we all agree with each other and pat each other on the back all we've basically done is the adult version of giving every kid who participates a big trophy and a sense that nothing is left to be done.  

I think this blog should be about the hard work of doing good work with your camera.  There are a few things I might take too much for granted about you as part of the audience.  To wit:  I think you've read your camera's owner's manual and you know how to operate the machine.  I think you're a good reader and you have a wide knowledge of subjects that deal both directly with photography but also with culture, art and literature.  I think you care more about the "why" of photographing something than the "nuts-and-bolts-how-to" photograph something.  I think you've been through enough schooling to make cogent arguments that center on the topic rather than presenting ad hominem attacks in your comments.  Further, I presume you are experienced in taking and making images and that you are not here because you think I have magic photo beans that I might be induced to share. I might be taking too much for granted but I'm optimistic...

How to use this blog.  Read the newest blog, think about it, figure out what's true for you and then go about your business.  If I do my job right you'll think about what you're shooting, perhaps concentrate on what you love a bit more and really be mindful about your photography practice.  If you do your job right you'll come to see me as a peer and just another voice on the web.  Someone with different opinions and maybe a different approach than other ports on the web.  Even if you violently disagree with everything I write it may be constructive for you to at least be exposed to a different way of thinking as a vehicle to strengthening your own position.  Share what you like and pass over the stuff you don't like.  I like my photographs.  You don't have to.  I'm not posting them for your critique. 

I don't want to read or write any comments on politics here.  There are hundreds of thousands of sites where you can go and scream at each other about which rich white men should lead us into the future.  Just remember the old Japanese saying, One step forward and all is darkness. Or you could ponder Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle.  Especially if you are very sure of all facts.....  Let's just not do it here.  Because, from my point of view, half of you are wrong.  :-)

No one really wants to talk about religion here either.  Unless it's about the worship of film or the damnation of cellphone-o-graphy.  But maybe those religions are too volatile as well.  I guess we better skip them. (for the record, I'm not against taking images with phones but I do resent the showmen and fervent proselytizers who are pushing the new agenda as a new way to monetize the process.)

There are three things we'll mostly discuss here. By that I mean there are three things I'm interested in discussing here, for the most part. The first is art.  What we're trying to say, and whose shoulders we're standing on as we try to say it. We'll talk about influence and art history because those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it....  The second is about the equipment we use to make our images and how our tools mold us and the other way around.  If you think you are the master of your tools and there's no reciprocity we'll have some interesting discussions.  Finally, we'll talk about the process.  How to go about realizing a vision.  And we won't just discuss it in "step one, step two, step three's" but in allegory and metaphor and allusion and idiomatic reference.  

Right now I'm grappling with the idea of re-inventing my take on the portrait.  But sooner than you know it I'll be on to something else.

Want to enjoy good photographic art?  Want to make good photographic art?  Then we all have to reach for it and spend the time in the water (a metaphor for practicing our craft over time) that it takes.  It won't happen a nanosecond quicker just because you won an argument on a web forum.  Get your goggles, your Speedo and your latex swim cap.  We start again tomorrow. Hope the water's not too cold...

One final word.  The use of a camera, and the personal experimentation with camera or a lens, will always take precedence over charts, graphs and numbers.  Always.  Measure as much as you want but leave your slide rule and charts in the car when you come to lunch.

Staying wet and staying happy.

Fewer blogs means more time for swimming.  And more time to shoot. Above: Hblad, film, Big lens. Big light. Beautiful woman. Balanced equation.




Here's one from 2010 that summarizes my "new" blogging direction: http://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2010/11/getting-back-to-basics.html

More on Tues.


In light of the mirrorless revolution and the Sony SLT technology I think this post I wrote a few years back is interesting.  http://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2010/02/how-would-i-design-perfect-camera-for.html

We're out swimming but we'll be back next week. See you on the 10th.

Don't let life run dry.