Shooting runway shows can be fun. Unless you're doing it too seriously.

Atsuro Tayama runway show. Carrousel du Louvre. Paris. Contax 35mm camera (ST?) with 135mm Zeiss lens. Agfapan 400. ©Kirk Tuck.

Portrait of a business man.

I was in New York to shoot on the floor of a specialty printing company when the art director for the project asked me to also include a portrait of the company's owner.  I went into his office which was filled with wonderful art. Paintings, lithographs, antique clocks and furniture. Photographs from the late 1800's and so much more.

He was at his desk when I walked in and you could tell that it was a spot in which he was very comfortable. The perfect spot for him.  The art director wanted to do the classic shot where the business man sits on the front edge of his desk, looking powerful so we did that first. It was awkward and unbalanced for all of us. When I asked him to sit back down and do some work while I reconfigured my one light it was as though a weight fell from his shoulders and mine.

I liked his direct and assured expression so that's what I set out to capture. It was one of those sessions when you get just what you need in twelve frames and then you pack and get the hell out.

This was shot on a Hasselblad camera with the classic 150mm f4 Planar lens using Tri-X 400 film.  Camera on a tripod and light provided my one Profoto 300 w/s second monolight bounced into an old, worn, yellowed umbrella. Printed on Seagull Portrait DW paper.

To my mind this could have been taken any time in the last 50 years.  And I like that.

Why arguing about how to perceive photographs is so much more fun than arguing about which gear is best.

This morning I wrote a post about whether or not photographs need context to be relevant. While I seem to have a combative writing style (I thinks it's just emphatic...)  I wasn't trying to be particularly defensive about my photographs, only the defense of my position that they don't need captions/context. In the course of the ensuing commentary I came to grudgingly see both sides of the argument. BUT in truth I really enjoyed the process because it made me think about something I generally have always taken for granted and that is the idea that photographs exist and are consumed as stand alone objects.  And that when working outside the structure of journalism that captions don't add critical weight. Now I am more carefully considering the benefits of captioning and contextual embellishment.

Some readers more or less jumped to my "defense" while others were quite objective and stood solidly in neutral ground. I enjoyed the whole exercise because we were engaged in actually talking about the art of photography instead of the gear or the business.

When you talk about gear you can go at it from two distinct viewpoints. You can talk about how the gear feels in your hands and how you react to the physicality of the design and the mentality of the user interface, or you can put the machine into the arms of other machines and derive some sort of vaguely objective measure aimed at giving you a series of numbers so that you can graph the relative attributes of the camera in question, via their number scores and come to some aggregated understanding of the camera's potential performance.

No matter which path you take you discover two things: 1. That any preference based on emotional acceptance or "feel" is so subjective that a large portion will hate the very parameters you love, and vice versa.  And, 2. That no matter what you measure when you aggregate all the numerical data points some outweigh others in relative merit based on the tasks in front of the camera while other seem altogether useless to one set of users and critical to others.

Fighting and teeth gnashing always seems to ensue, the owners of the numerically triumphant cameras trumpeting their victory over the cameras of the lesser kingdoms, while the legions of "defeated" camera owners talk about the obviously overlooked faults of the victor and the even more obviously overlooked, nearly magical attributes of the maligned cameras.

As an example: For me the Nikon D3200 is a highly usable, high resolution camera at a very affordable (paradigm shifting?) price point. To fans of HDR the camera is poisonously unusable because it lacks the most critical feature: auto bracketing.

When we talk about art though it seems that we're all on more even ground.  We may like or dislike a piece or a style but we can still talk about it in more interesting ways because of the art's wholesale subjective nature. There are no machines that measure the validity of a piece or the paucity of its contribution.  And if we make cogent arguments they can be used to expand understanding instead of contracting understanding and dividing it (demolishing it) between two warring camps.

Now, does anyone want to take a crack at explaining to me the value (beyond the tasteful enhancement of tonal range)  in obvious HDR photography?

I know a lot of photographers who meet for coffee and end up talking about gear.  Wouldn't it be cool if we each brought a work or book of a photographer we liked and made our discussion over coffee about the merit of the work?   More seemly, I think, to have a smackdown over Avedon versus Helmet Newton than Canon versus Nikon...

Does a photograph have to "be about something" to be valid?

This photograph is currently without context or validity. Or even a caption. But I like the way it looks because it speaks to me of quiet isolation and melancholy. In fact, it was a quiet moment in a light hearted shoot. Context is a capricious bitch.

I recently posted an image of an older man, surrounded by other people, at the Vatican in Rome. The photograph is part of a disconnected series of images I took in and around the front of the building on a rainy day. I don't know who the man is or why he was there. I just liked the look and feel of the moment and decided to take the photograph. In retrospect I could supply all kinds of pseudo-psychological rationales for taking and printing that particular shot. But I doubt that any of the reasons that I can think up now would have been in play at the time.

I posted the image in part to thank a reader for some kind comments he made earlier on his own blog.  I didn't think anything more about the photo or the blog entry until I reviewed a comment left by Kenneth Tanaka who called into question the value of posting a photograph cast adrift from any sort of context.  Here's exactly what he asked:

This is an excellent example of a competently-captured photograph that becomes lost without context. Who is this man? Who are the faceless people greeting him? Why is the reported location significant? It's Exhibit A in the thesis that photographs, in fact, do not really tell stories in the absence of language or richer context. Eh?

While I'm fairly sure that Kenneth's question was genuine I was a bit taken aback. I don't mind a serious critique of any image but it seemed as though he was saying that a photograph must have some sort of context in order to be valid or to have a reason for its existence.  In short, that all images must be contextual, informed and substantiated in order to have any relevance whatsoever to the engaged practice of photography.

In my mind one of the traditions of photography, and especially street or documentary photography is about capturing life in the moment and sharing it. We make images of things that ping our subconscious and try to share the jolt or micro jolt of curiosity that caused us to point our lens at a stranger and make the photograph in the first place.

Ken implies, by way of his question and a later follow up comment, that without a overarching context, and perhaps the support of other faces turned toward camera that images like the one in question "do not really tell stories in the absence of language or richer context." His statement seems to imply that images without context have no value or ability to connect with viewers.

I'm still trying to process exactly what Kenneth's rhetorical intentions are and in the process I went to a site he's produced of his own photographs and read his own manifesto/statement of support for his own work.  It goes like this:

"I am most interested in the challenge of discovering and capturing the ephemeral beauty, incongruities, discontinuities, ambiguities, and humor in the everyday world. This, to me, is what the determined, observant and patient camera is uniquely able to do. "

(I added the bold type face for emphasis--Kirk)

And here is a random sample of his work from his site:

©Kenneth Tanaka

I guess what I am trying to come to grips with is just what is different, contextually, between the image I put in the original post and many of the images that Kenneth has shared.  And, in a larger sense, whether all images without written stories or journalistic captions, and without instantly recognizable celebrities are less valuable and less accessible without some context.

In many ways the history of photography as art is the history of discarded or non-existent context. The shot of your child may have relevance to you but in the ocean of images on the web it's hardly more than a disconnected document of another human.

To focus solely on the back story of the human face within the map of my entire frame dismisses the other elements of the frame which may have equal relevance to the viewer. In fact, much modern art outside of photography is concerned with tone, shape, color and even the surface topology of the art (minimalist painting?).  Why is it that photography must hew to a higher test that the other arts by making every image dependent on and wedded to its context?

What if, subconsciously, I was drawn to  make the image because I liked the out of focus rendering of the man's hat in the left hand side of the frame, or the repeating pattern of the columns.....?

This is the original image from yesterday's post.

Good, Clean Work.

Lost to the vagaries of the web and a lower res scan from the original neg are the amazing amounts of detail and sharpness in the originals...

I love looking back in the archives and thinking about how we used to work in the days before digital imaging. This is a job for Motorola that dates back to 1996. They had just opened their MOS 13 facility with a large percentage dedicated to clean rooms that were instrumental in fabricating .25 micron geometry microprocessors and microcontrollers. Every industry magazine and our chamber of commerce wanted to be able to take tours into the fab but the company soon realized that having so many people coming through would be a productivity black hole.  Not to mention that keeping out contaminants would be more difficult with clean room newbies.

The marketing team and the engineers in charge of production hired my company to create a photographic tour  of the facility that would show the 12 major steps they take to create chips on a wafer.  We had some challenges.  The first one being that all the images needed to be of high enough quality to be enlarged up to five feet by six and one half feet. The images would be encased in acrylic and hung up in a giant entry hall so people would be able to stick their noses right up to the image. The images needed to be sharp, saturated, grainless and of very high quality. Our next challenge was that we would not be able to bring in any sort of lighting equipment. None. I called a friend at Kodak and we discussed all the parameters and came up with a solution. Because the lighting was very mixed we would shoot on color negative film.  That would allow me and the lab to do lots of fine tuning for color, after the fact.

Since we needed high sharpness and low grain we settled on using Ektar 25 (ISO 25) color negative film. I wanted to shoot 4x5 sheet film but the contamination officer (rightly) wouldn't hear of it because the bellows folds would be incredible dust magnets and the felt traps across the tops of the sheet film holders were also rated as high dust perils.  Seems one small bit of airborne dust could really mess up the process.

We ended up using several Hasselblad bodies with 6x4.5 film backs. The film backs were 220 (we were well equipped in those days...) and held enough film for 32 images in each. The cropped backs helped me visualize the final aspect ratio of the prints while shooting.  We used two bodies because we didn't want to change lenses in the clean room.  Each body had one of my favorite production lenses on it.  One was a 100mm Planar 3.5 (slight telephoto with no geometric distortion) and the other was a new 50mm Distagon f4 FLE (floating lens element) which gave me a nice, but not intrusive, wide angle view.

We loaded a back for each camera and then took out the dark slides and sealed the dark slide slot with approved tape before swabbing down the cameras with an alcohol solution in a semi-clean room. Then we ran everything through the high air pressure entries areas and brought them, along with a metal tripod (also scrubbed) into the clean room.

The Ektar 25 had a very good long exposure characteristic that didn't really show reciprocity until you went over a 1 second exposure. We used the camera on the tripod throughout and always used the mirror lock-up control on the camera to eliminate camera shake.  I shot sparingly because reloading the backs required me to exit the clean room and start the process all over again.

I spent a long day in a bunny suit with rubber gloves and safety goggles on. In the end we produced 12 enormous prints which still hang in the facility (at least they were there last time I visited).  If I were doing the same project today I'd probably use a medium format digital camera with a high quality zoom lens.

I worked with a lab in Dallas called BWC. The did the printing and the acrylic process and they did a great job. Fun to do a job whose results are still in use over a decade later. And fun to remember the role of slow, sharp film and precision mechanical cameras.

For Mr. Lonien, in Germany.

A gathering at the Vatican.

I like making my quick black and white conversions in SnapSeed.

It's quick and efficient and I can add in some grain as well as some "structure" to my files. I don't have a workflow. I just jump in and look at what I can get using the color filter presets and the three sliders. I love a crisp black and a higher value skin tone. Generally, it takes about a minute to get everything the way I want it. Quicker than opening up Photo Shop and doing it in there. The trade off is that PS has more controls and more fine-tune-ability.

SnapSeed is my favorite "cheap" app. It's playful.