On a more serious note....

Yellow Holga.

I think it can be healthy to take a break from the idea that we somehow have complete control over the images we create. I put a Holga on my Christmas list because I thought it might be somehow fun to roam the city on a sunny day with the camera loaded up with ISO 100 black and white film and take the technical processes out of the mix and go out with the intention of a pure seeing adventure.  Freed up from thinking about focus and exposure (and to a certain extent, even composition) my mind might concentrate solely on finding subjects that it wants me to photograph. It may be that "no control" has attributes that are as valid as "total control", which itself is an illusion...

Besides, a medium format camera for $29? 

A New Camera For The Post Digital Art Age.

I thought I had it all figured out. I discovered that I really liked EVF cameras and I spent last year selling off the "dinosaur" technology cameras and buying up really nifty and break-through-y cameras like the full frame Sony a99, the half frame Sony a77s and 57s, and even a smattering of teensy-tiny cameras like the Nex 6 and Nex 7. I toyed with the littlest Sony RX100 and even played around with the RX1. I thought I had it wired. I'd spend 2013 happy as a pig in poop, playing with the metal-ly knobs and pushing the oh so sleek and demure direct buttons.  I was like a happy child, sitting on the floor grabbing handfuls of beautiful lenses and drawing them into my arms like teddy bears for toddlers. Then my whole gear oriented world fell apart under the two pronged attack of information chaos and gift giving.

You see, I watched David Hobby guest star on the DigitalRevTV with ultra kool Kai. The premise of the show was to hand David Hobby a crappy, toy Buzz LightYear (trademarked by Disney!!!! Please don't sue me for just writing down the words!!!) digital camera. Two megapixels of whopping image creation automation just waiting for a master's touch. David (with Kai along for the ride) used the camera on five different location shoots to prove once and for all that "it's not the course of the arrows it's the horses for Indians.." thing that everyone says. Which I guess I translate as meaning that some photographers are so good that they can point anything at a subject and come away with exciting art. Did David make the grade? That part is totally subjective. You'll have to see for yourself "if the glass is half full of everything looks like a nail..."  But the video sure got me thinking about my bourgeois fixation with using the best tools around with which to do my work. That's for sure.

I looked at the video and then I looked around the studio with the deflation that comes from watching the ease with which a master seems to work. And with the most basic of gear. I spent all Christmas Eve meditating on my photographic existence. My failings and the gear that had become my aesthetic crutches. I spent the rest of the night burning sage, chanting and beseeching the photo gods to show me the way. The path to exceptionalism.  How could I rise up and embrace the bad tool/great artist paradigm. How could I make the transformation from hay to needle so that I could be the veritable "needle in the haystack"? Defeated and exhausted I stumbled back into the house just as the rest of the family was getting up on Christmas Day. Feeling hollow and worthless I went through the polite motions of opening my gifts and nodding a thank you to the family. Leica S? Check. Vintage, restored Piper Cub? Check. Yet another Italian sports car? Check. The hoary and clichéd case of vintage Bollinger? Check. Another smattering of Leica M glass to put on the front of my Sony Nex? Check (but why even bother.....).

And then I came to the haphazardly wrapped gift that would change my career, my attitude----dare I say it? It would change my life. Inside the reindeer encrusted wrapping paper, under the tissue, beyond the sticky embrace of the linear feet of Scotch magic tape was a simple box that contained the instructions from the photo gods for the happy continuation of my career---the bright yellow Holga.  It seemed to say, "If you are truly an artist the tool will never matter. If you can use me well you will have arrived.."

The life changing tool, perched on a five series Gitzo.

For those of you unfamiliar with this powerful learning tool let me provide a brief description. It's a camera made totally out of plastic (not composite resin...) that has a simple, plastic one element lens. It is somewhat zone focus-able and it accepts 120 film. The breed is famous for their random and art enhancing light leaks, and it is a favorite tool of people who've learned too much and subsequently journeyed to a different mental space than the millions of photographers who are glued to the technical side of photography like bugs on flypaper. It is the ultimate "un-think" camera.

The game was now afoot. Me against my brain. Me against my training. And me against my heroin/nicotine/cellphone-like addiction to state of the art cameras. I had been challenged. The gauntlet thrown down with a spiky smack against the floor of my static reality. 

I grabbed the camera and put a Black Rapid Strap on it. But that seem liked cheating. All affectation and no innovation. I took it off and went through the box to find the plastic shoulder strap (not neoprene or some other weighty composite, just real, mortal, thin, tearable, flexible plastic). I loaded up some Tri-X 120 film, taped all the seams on the camera with black electrical tape and headed out into the new wilderness of subject matter that used to be my own boring existence made fresh by the intriguing mystery and unknowableness of this new machine.  I've yet to pull the roll out and develop it because I find that "ART" slows one down and makes one introspective and tentative. But I'm sure every frame will be a new masterpiece. I'm anxious to see if I am an "Not the arrow, it's the Indian" (and I'm not that fond of curry...) or a "Horses for courses" kind of photographer.

But I am committed. So much so that I dumped all the other cameras into the dumpster at the pool just before the backhoe operator dumped in the fragments of rebar and cinder blocks from the new bathhouse renovations on top. Crunch. Crackle. There's no turning back now. If I am really the kind of photographer that I've tried to pass myself off as here on the blog we should be seeing art ooze and jump and gush out of the camera with reckless abandon. 

Watch out, David and Kai. I'm nipping at your heels.

(to the humor impaired, a notice: This was meant to be a tongue-in-cheek, or humorous essay. It is not meant to demean or ridicule any individual person. I did not really throw out my existing cameras, or get a Piper Cub airplane or Leica S camera for Christmas. I did get a Holga camera but more as a joke or humorous reference to my almost lifelong career. While the gist of the article was inspired by the video with David Hobby and Kai from DigitalRev it is not meant to be disparaging or critical of those parties. I found the original video to be humorous and fun. The Visual Science Lab cannot be held responsible for fluctuations in interest rates, increases in UV radiation emitted in conjunction with or in spite of any action we have taken in the past or might take in the future. Our use of the super powerful laser to punch holes in the moon has no link to past or present religious affiliations. The payment of all invoices is still due in ten days, net. While we may or may not serve undercooked shell fish at our next Luau you are hereby warned that you consume all VSL provided shellfish at your own risk. While our writing is in English we cannot be held liable for dramatic readings by John Malcovich which are recorded and subsequently played backward and any satanic or even antiseptic meanings one may derive or interpret from the listening of such have no connection with hamsters living or dead. This string of caveats may not be applicable in certain areas of the Maldives or in coastal areas surrounding or adjacent to Oklahoma City. These interviews, though written by Kirk, may not reflect the opinions of Kirk or his assigns or heirs or even of himself. No donations to the VSL foundation are tax deductible and no worthwhile research will be done with such funds if you are impaired enough to send along said, unsolicited. Any mixed drinks you order and consume of the VSL in-house bar may be made partially with turkey gravy and may contain alcohol from various first aid kits liberated in the pursuit of photography by the studio, or not.

Not an actual frame from the yet unloaded Holga but a simulation of what we hope a representative frame may look like.

A Quick Project Done on Green Screen with LED lights.

I got an e-mail from Will Crockett today. Will and I met several years ago here in Austin and I've written a few articles for his Smartshooter.com website. Will was a Canon shooter when I met him and he lit all of his work with Elinchrom electronic flash units. He's a good teacher. But lately this long time pro has gone through a huge change in his gear preferences. He's abandoning all of the traditional DSLRs and flashes and embracing (whole-heartedly) two recent camera and lighting trends that we've been talking about here at the Visual Science Lab for the better part of three years.  He's discovered the transformative power of electronic viewfinder/mirrorless cameras and he's wedding the new camera technology with.......wait for it.......LED lighting systems. Really.  Ground breaking.  Mirrorless cameras (in his case, the new Panasonic GH3) and continuous, LED lighting fixtures. 

I had to smile though as his new site about these trends had an article today about his first foray into lighting portraits with LED's. I chuckled because I've been using LED lighting for portrait work and advertising work for over two years and I have been doing the same work with EVF cameras from Sony (and until recently, Panasonic and Olympus) for at least a year. In fact, the first definitive book about lighting with LEDs for photographers is mine: LED Lighting for Digital Photographers, (Amherst Media) published this past April.

The raw image before dropping out the background.

The timing was also funny. I got his e-mail talking about his first portrait tests with LED lights just as I was settling in to do some post production on this job for a local theater. I shot the images in this blog with my oldest set of LEDs. I used two 500 bulb fixtures on the background and two 1,000 bulb fixtures on the subject. Both of the fixtures used to directly light the subject were color corrected with 1/8th magenta filters and diffused with Rosco Tuff Frost diffusion material. I used a Lastolite Grey/White target disk and set a quick white balance on my camera of choice, a Sony a99 equipped with a Tamron 28-75mm 2.8 SP lens. 

Because of all the misinformation on the web I hasten to add that the background didn't turn green because of the LED lights but because it was dyed green for use as a green screen background, mostly for use in video. The correction set by the camera for WB was not that large.

The color temperature measured in at 5700K and the camera added 7 points of magenta to the mix. The whites are clean, the flesh tones are a good match and the exposures are good. I used the LEDs because we were photographing a shiny book cover as a prop and it's so easy to see when there are reflections on the cover when I use a continuous light source.

My basic exposure was ISO 800 (pretty easy stretch for the sensor in the a99....) 1/125th of a second f4 to f5.6. I shot mostly on a tripod but I did hand hold the close ups.

The session was quick and easy. I was able to pre-chimp every step of the way and the actor was happy not to be flashed in the face over and over again by electronic flash. I think the key to using LEDs for this kind of work (where flesh tones are important) is to be sure and pre-filter the lights to make up for the known dip in the color spectrum (a drop in magenta) and to make a good, initial custom white balance to work with. Especially in cases where you have large areas of rich color in the backgrounds which would surely throw off most auto white balance systems. 

The entire session was watched over by the Visual Science Lab Canine Security and Affection Officer who did a great job warding off weasels and badgers while providing positive encouragement and tail wagging for the studio guests.

I'm still amazed at how short sighted and fearful photographers are when it comes to adapting to new technologies, many of which make our jobs more efficient. I'm happy to see Will recommending the EVFs and LEDs to a mass audience and I'm encouraging any pros who also need to start providing basic video services to their clients to consider and play with LED lights.

It's really one area where the future is NOW. 

You might have to play around a bit to get perfect white balance with the cheapest units like the ones I've used here but I've had a chance to play with a set of Lowell Prime Lights and they have a very high CRI and a very neutral rendering. If you are willing to pay $1800 a panel you'll get a light that lasts a long time and can be used, without filtration, right out of the box.

If you are just getting your feet wet there are some good options on the market for under $200. I really like the Fotodiox 312AS lights which give me a control for intensity and a separate control for color temperature ( from 3200 to 5600K) for around $160. I've bought five of them over the last year and I haven't regretted those purchases for even a second.

On Weds. I'll be doing an assignment for a client that was one of the very first clients I ever did a job for with LED lights. It was almost two years ago and I had just put together my first LED system which consisted of three 500 bulb units and several smaller battery powered units. We shot a series of portraits on their location and several of them ended up as illustrations in my LED book. We did additional portraits for them a year ago and I've been invited back again to do ten or twelve more. I have more lights than I did on the first go around, and a camera that handles lower light output really well. I'm heading to GEAR in the morning to pick up some more correction gel but I'll be using that same, first generation LED technology because it still works well.

I'm happy to use the LEDs. It always leads to discussions like this with clients:  (Me): "...yes, we started to research and test LEDs a couple of years ago when we started getting more and more requests to do short videos for the web. Now we can do one basic set up for both stills and video."

(Client): "Oh, I didn't know you also do video. We've got a video project coming up that I'd like for you to bid on..."

The business is constantly changing. I've found that embracing change is a lot cheaper than fighting it. Remember all those photographers in the early part of this century who claimed that, "Digital Imaging is not ready for prime time yet."? Hmmmmmm. Learning curve.

Happy Hour Shoot at Manuel's Restaurant.

About a year ago we did the photography (and a little video) for restaurant website. My advertising agency client did a nice job filling the restaurant with representative talent and I was left to do my favorite kind of advertising shoot. I asked the restaurant to serve everyone whatever they wanted, I waited for the first round of margaritas to be vanquished and then, by dint of just hanging out with my camera, I became invisible to everyone under 30 and began to shoot from whatever vantage point I wanted. We had a nicely populated restaurant and I shot whatever looked good. Sometimes I would prompt our "actors" or ask them to repeat a movement or expression that looked especially nice but most of the time I just stood back, or down, and snapped away.

All of the images we produced for the website were done in color and delivered in color. But sometimes I like to strip away the color and see what the frames really look like.

This was one of the last jobs I shot with the Canon 5D mk2 and the Canon 1DSmk2 cameras. I worked mostly with the Zeiss 85mm and 50mm lenses. The images above were shot with what was arguably the best of the Zeiss lenses for the Canons, the 35mm f2. I added a bit of grain in post processing because the files looked too "clean."

Where are we going with this photography thing?

introspection.

Looking back over the last four years I seem to have made so many definitive pronouncements about the right way to do photography and the wrong way to do photography. As though there is one shining path that everyone must take to be a real photographer. But all the rules I've learned and all the stuff I wrote is based on a time when photography was a different undertaking. I came of age at a time when the craft was maturing. We were turning away from straight documentation (how photography renewed painting by making it obsolete...) and embracing an exploration of not just the world around us but our interpretation, our slant, on what the world looked like through our own individual lens. And our own local and regional biases.

And, until recently, it was a period in the parabola of the life of photography which required both learned and practiced skills (in everything from camera hold to chemical mixing) and financial sacrifice. The financial sacrifice was as daily as our shooting. This made us selective and it made the generation of images less quick and less available. The time lag between shooting and being able to share was also much, much longer---think days and weeks instead of minutes and seconds.

But images are now the endlessly reproducible, intrinsically value-less, MP3's of art. The cost of creation and replication is measured in fractions of pennies. The distribution is painless and immediate and the choice is endless. The old analogy was "trying to get a drink of water from fire hose." The new analogy is: "trying to fill a dixie cup from a tsunami." How we interact with images has changed completely but have we/I made the evolutionary transition? Can anyone whose experience was birthed in a previous age make the wholesale jump into a new age without the momentum of his old baggage pushing him off the path of unrelenting progress? And would we even recognize the markets if we saw them?

I had to photograph this upside down.

I visit Michael Reichmann's Luminous Landscape website frequently. On that site the feeling I get is of a group of well to do men of a certain age (over 40?, over 50?) who've decided to embrace the new tools but ignore the newer art. The site is a rich resource for learning best practices in landscape photography but the work they show is of a certain period. An aesthetic frozen in the amber of a different time. As is mine and as is the "works" and discussion on every other "respected" site on the web. We are the codification of how things have been done. From my railing about the stinky baby diaper hold to my reverence for the look for old, medium format, black and white images. Even to my selection of human subjects. My prejudices are so worn and predictable. I don't want to make portraits of fat people. I don't think everyone is beautiful on the outside and unfortunately that's all my camera can show. I'm like an engineer doing best practices for the manufacture of vacuum tubes in a microchip era.

As amateurs we make the mistake of looking to established professionals for inspiration, guidance and as sources to emulate but they are the ones who are marking the milestones of history past. To endlessly recycle a variation on an "Avedon" or to "cover" yet another Ansel Adams masterpiece with our own less invested version just adds to the giant, planet wide haystack, which makes finding the little needles of diamond and gold harder and harder.

I guess what I'm really thinking and trying to say is that there is no right  way. No one way. We all have choices. We can continue to go out and explore our own worlds with the idea that we are only creating for ourselves and, in that case, it matter not a bit if we are derivative, if the images are blurry, if we're copying Terry Richardson or Chase Jarvis.  It doesn't matter if we use a big Nikon or a little Olympus. It doesn't matter if we shoot raw or jpeg as long as we find our own joy in the process. Alternately, we can go through a painful transition that is comprised of abandoning the past and going on an endless quest to find what our most personal vision is. In some cases only to find that it's about comfort and routine and safety and that we were never cut out to walk the lonely paths of our most revered artists, like Josef Koudelka or Joel Peter Witkin. And in the end the failure of our mission to break from the nest and move away from the strong, magnetic pull of the assimilated/collective vision is too overwhelming and yields up no rewards and no real treasures.

I grew up in America at a time when everyone got a trophy and every middle class child of even moderate privilege was consistently told that everyone could grow up to be whatever they wanted, even president or olympian, if they put their minds to it. But the truth of the matter is that it's not true. The olympians are almost entirely physical and psychological outliers. Becoming president is in the hands of mischievous and malicious gods in cahoots with the tendrils of fate. And not everyone is an artist. No matter how hard I try I cannot will myself to be "more creative" more insightful and more talented. 

Each of us can take time to attain clarity about why we photograph. And maybe, when we do, it will clear the air for us and make us happier to do that which we can. With more sense of accomplishment.

Whatever art there is in our photographs it is far beyond equipment and opportunity. To do work that we can like, and that others can find something in, we need to add value to what we see. We do it through style and point of view. The secret is to show people a thing or a person or a subject in a way that's never really been seen before. But here's the sad truth: The world is shrinking by leaps and bounds and so many of us are using the same tools, hunting the same visual prey and consulting the same references that the images are becoming homogenous. Pasteurized like whole milk and robbed of their distinctive taste and pleasure.

We have become almost circular in our reference. And it's destroying the surprise and the wonder of the images that we share. That's another reason to abandon our "heros" and to remain insulated from the world of photography at large.

And that's why we end up talking about the gear. It's fun, it's objective, it's hierarchical and it's usually easily attainable. Everything that art is not. 

Just a thought, you're always asked if the cup is half empty or if it's half full. In reality, when you sip the last fragrant ounce of delicious coffee the cup is still full. It's full of air. Oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen and trace gases. And it is now full to the brim with.....potential.

I hate having to add this note of explanation below but......

This particular blog is not about depression, bitterness and anger. Just a series of questions that all aspiring artists should ask themselves from time to time.  Coupled with one big question: why do we do this?  Which leads to the biggest existential question: Why are we here? And while I'm here, which camera should I buy.....?

blog note: Hey! Reader. Consider leaving a comment. I like the feedback. Thanks, Kirk

The most valuable resource of a portrait photographer? Hint: It's not the camera or the lights...

It's time. Time and patience. The images that I've taken which I like the most are the ones that came in second or third sessions with the same subject. The best portraits come after we try all the goofy stuff, all the serious stuff and all the trendy stuff. Once we get that out of the system we can work on just building a collaboration and playing around with the images. That's the way it works best for me.

This image is not traditionally lit. The light is coming from a point that's on the same plane as Lou's face, not from above or below. The main light is a smaller reflector softened by a beauty dish on the same axis. A big light right next to a small light. Don't know why-----it just seemed like fun.

Slowing down and enjoying the conversations and time together may be more important than Zeiss glass or ultra-megapixel sensors. I know it's more important than which light you choose.

Hasselblad Camera. 180mm lens. Kodak Verichrome Black and White Film (type 6041). Epson Scan.

A portrait on a cold and dreary day. A beautiful respite.

Lou.

In this frame, serious and intent. In the following frame, laughing at our mock seriousness.