Angles and Color.

These aren't the kind of images I make to generate money or business. I like them because they are quiet and fun for me to look at. It's easier for me to imagine them as art on the wall than portraits, which in most cases are too personal or two direct to be good, long term art for display.
I think portraits work best in book and magazine form. The exception is family portraits displayed in the context of the family home. But even there a portrait that is as much about art as it is about paying homage to the family member doesn't wear well. We can look past mediocre technique to the naive display of a cute expression and of happy moments but when we attempt to elevate the portrait of a family member to fine art the weight of the exercise seems to embue the presentation with a level of pretention that cripples the enjoyment of the representation.

In this regard I believe that we want our portraits to fall into a set of boundaries that includes lighting formulas and variations on basic poses. This allow the portrait created for posterity to gain a timelessness that attempting to overlay fashion or current editorial styles of portraiture rarely achieves.

While none of the work above passes muster to go up on the walls each of the images engages me for reasons having to do more with design, color and forced angles than timeless contextual value.  These are all things which we find engaging in and of themselves. Many of the images we take are never intended as fine art or even survivable art. Like a pianist or guitarist who practices scales we are practicing our own visual scales and doing our exercises in spatial and tonal problem solving under relaxed conditions. If we practice well we can bring the understanding of design and color to our more serious work.

I included the final image because the building somehow makes me nostalgia for a time in the past when buildings were built on a very human scale in Austin, in particular, and Texas in general. This building, which now houses an ad agency, represents the accessible style of the late 1950's and 1960's. Even the scale of the windows and offices seems more welcoming than the sterile and efficient architecture I see in so many of the newer buildings. That alone makes the image interesting to me.

Abstract Reality.

Walking downtown always looks different but the same. I like the neutral look of a 50mm lens on 35mm frame. It's not passionate or showy. It just....is.

The start of a new year always paralyzes me. I never know what to expect. Are we supposed to just do the same thing we did last year but with different dates? Do we jump into the river of change or sit on the banks and watch the people frolic as they get swept downstream?

I don't know how to get started. Eventually the phone will ring and the e-mail will chime and I'll get pushed along. There's something disquieting about being grown up and not knowing what it is you really want to do when you grow up. When you are young you have all the answers. As you progress through your life you have fewer and fewer answers but even more vague is any idea of what it is you really want.

The cameras are a fun distraction. The photography is a pleasant disconnection. The family anchors one to the here and now. Friends keep you from flying off the edges. But at some point is there a juncture at which you are supposed to say, "This is it. This is the thing I know I should be doing." ???

How do you do it? How do you continue to put on your pants, shave your face, brush your teeth, and go out for more of the stuff of which you've already had heady doses? Is there a lure of some treasure hidden in the near future that keeps you moving or is it just your monumental faith that all of this (life, work, love, death) is part of some great master plan that will reward you with purpose in some distant or alternate reality?

What is it that keeps you engaged? Not a rhetorical question. I really want to know...

The Shots Between Shots.

Taking a portrait is a process of trying and rejecting many things until you arrive at the recipe you had in mind but didn't know when you started. The shot above is not a final shot. It's part of the process. But erasing the building blocks means erasing the description of your process. And many times you will wish you were able to go back to the abandoned frames and look for the attributes that might have become clearer to you on your return to the image through the passage of time.

One of the crimes of the digital age is the cavalier way we toss away all but the "keepers." But what constitutes a "keeper" changes with our experiences, our evolving point of view and our changing perceptions. I like the fact that the out takes from my film days are still there. Still available for me.  I go back and find new things to like and new sources of inspiration.

What seemed like mistakes to me ten years ago seem like intended silence between frames now. I like the insouciance of an "in between" frame when I rediscover it. You might too.

It helps me to be mindful not to overshoot. But the act of rediscovery also helps me to be mindful about not throwing to much away. Not to edit too permanently, in the moment.

Photo Above: Renee Zellweger in the old studio. Camera: Pentax 645n. Lens: 150mm 3.5. Film: Tri-X.

It's not "what you took with you" it's "where you've been."

A ceiling detail from the Alexander Palace in Pushkin, Russia. 1995

Dead of winter. Blizzard conditions outside. The one thing Russia had plenty of in 1995 was petroleum and the one thing they shared all over the country was heat. I've never been  hotter than in a Russian public building in the dead of winter. I was part of a survey team from the World's Monuments Fund. We were analyzing the very last palace of the Czars. This is shot with a Hasselblad SWC/M.  It was a specialized, wide angle medium format camera that had a permanently attached 38mm Zeiss Biogon lens on the front, a bright-line optical viewfinder in the accessory shoe and an A-12 film back on the read end. There was also a bubble level on the camera.  The system was sharp and distortion free.

All we had back then was film and film cameras. All the camera info is in a little notebook that I kept while I was in the St. Petersburg area in February of 1995. I brought home so many better memories than of what was at the end of my camera strap. It was the people I met and the sights I saw that stick with me. Curators and guards, translators and professors. 

In the end it may be what you take with you on assignment, but I certainly am not referring to cameras and lenses and power packs. I am referring to all the experience and vision you have already packed in your head. Just a thought.  And actually, that's the most valuable commodity today-----just a thought.

Spa Shoot. Fun Shoot. More Like These, Please

Cured Greek Olives on Flaky Pastry Crust with Carmellized Onions and Herbs.

50mm 1.4 Sony. Handheld.

I tend to write about the big, exciting event shoots because I perceive that it's what you want to read about, but my favorite shoots are the kind where I drop into a business or a project and try to capture the essence of the people, the space and the products in a less frantic and more measured pace. So today I thought I'd write about one of my favorite shoots from the last quarter, my website project for the Spa at The Lake, here in Austin, Texas.

I did this job before I acquired the a99 and, in looking back I am almost surprised a what a proficient and transparent tool the a77 cameras have turned out to be. For this job I packed simply. A bag of cameras and a bag of small, LED panels that run off batteries. I packed two Sony a77's, the Sigma 10-20mm lens, the 16-50mm Sony lens, the 50mm 1.4 Sony lens and the 85mm 2.8 Sony lens. Three small Manfrotto micro light stands and my wooden, Berlebach tripod.

We worked on a cold Sunday. We choose that day as one on which the Spa was least busy.  I worked without an assistant but with a very bright art director. We did the whole shoot as a stream of conscious exercise. We knew we'd need a frame work of shots, the "must haves" but we kept our eyes constantly moving; looking for nuance and new angles.  Because in projects about beauty and brands every detail tells part of the story.

Cucumber Infused Mineral Water. 85mm 

A great example is something as simple as the jug of water above. I saw it and immediately cleared clutter out from behind it. The jug is lit solely by direct sun. No reflectors or diffusers. And it's one of my favorite shots. I like it even more since I tasted the water. The infusion of cucumber is subtle but so refreshing. I can taste it now whenever I see this image.

Dressing Rooms. 16-50mm

Part of the assignment was to document all of the facilities. Interior architecture with and without people. The dressing room shot is simple. I like the inclusion of the blue towels on the orange stool. We used all three of the LED panels to make the shot. The setup took just a few minutes because we could gauge light placement so quickly with the continuous light sources. The lights were the Fotodiox 312AS panels that I've written about so often.

Olive Pastry from the Artisanal Bistro. 50mm 1.4

The Spa at the Lake is located in a shopping center just off the entrance to the Lakeway community that sits next to Lake Travis. In the same shopping center is one of my favorite recent restaurant finds, The Artisanal Bistro (and bakery). The restaurant is run by and cooked for by a chef was professionally trained in France. The Spa's owner had our snacks and lunch catered by The Artisanal Bistro and it's probably the best food I've ever had in a shoot that wasn't directly engaged by a restaurant! I drove back out a few weeks later to have dinner there with Belinda and we are now officially addicted. Funny how the message of comfort and luxury ends up being reflected by all the little touches, like wonderful food or fresh flowers in all the treatment rooms.

Sony a77, 16-50mm 

When I work with locations that have good natural light coming through the windows or really good interior lighting design and implementation I try to use the LED panels just to fill and reinforce the intention of the existing light. My goal in most advertising shots is to show off the product or the person and to make the lighting look as though it's all natural; even when I have two or three fixtures on at once. Having lights with changeable color temperatures and infinitely adjustable output levels makes it easy to use your eyes to carefully supplement what is already there.

Bread, Dates, Preserves and Cheeses. Craft Service Snack.

Yes, they did serve a very nice red wine with our afternoon snack. As the day went on we photographed women getting manicures, couples getting massages, people having their hair done and a number of spa treatments. In all I delivered about 24 set ups with people in the spaces and about 10 nice details that we just grabbed as we went along during the day.

A Bit of Hair Craft Before the Final Photographs.

Massage.

The image above was done in one of the massage rooms and we were able to mix LED panels with the existing incandescent lights almost seamlessly. The image was shot at ISO 160 with the 16-50mm lens at f4. The shutter speed was down around and 1/8th of a second but it didn't matter, this was hardly and "action" shot.

A Post-Massage Glass of White Wine overlooking the Hill Country.

The Spa has a beautiful deck with a sweeping view of one of Austin's nicest golf courses so we wanted to include exterior shots as well. I built a small softbox from the three LED panels and balanced the color temperature in order to add a bit of fill even outdoors in open sun.  If we needed to control contrast even more I was ready to put up a large one stop diffuser between our model and the sunlight.

An Alternate Use for Cukes.

The Sony a77 gets a bad rap for having too much noise in high ISO situations. But it's not entirely true. The image just above, with the model and her cucumber eyes was shot at ISO 1600 but the LED panels, set at a color temperature of around 4400K seems to help keep noise out of the blue channel and decrease the overall appearance of chromatic noise. I wrote a blog many years ago talking about how little of the blue spectrum exists in incandescent light and how it causes cameras to over amplify the blue color channels to compensate for the deficiency. It's the amplification of the blue channel signals that causes the appearance of noise in digital files. That's why shooting a digital camera at high ISO's in bright daylight doesn't illicit the same noise effects as shooting in low light situations that are lit mostly by orangey-red light bulbs. In the old days we used to add corrective blue filters to our higher ISO shots. We'd lose a stop but gain back maybe two stops in noise control. When you did the math we were generally one stop better off than with an unfiltered light (82C).

Professional Photographers and Art Directors do break for lunch.

My most used tools in this project were the 16-50mm lens, the LED panels and the tripod. Everything else could have largely been interchanged with Canon or Nikon product and done just as well. But it wouldn't have been nearly as much fun. I just can't go back to the optical finders. Not enough feedback. Not enough information.

On another note my friend, Frank, met me for coffee yesterday and surprised me by pulling two really cool lenses out of his camera bag.  He shoots with Olympus OMD EM-5 cameras and has all the cool prime lenses. Well, now he also has the two, new Panasonic zoom lenses that I consider the first truly professional zooms for mirrorless cameras, the 12-35 2.8 and the 35-100mm 2.8. He was indulgent and let me play with them for a while. I can only say that I wish it were possible to use these on the Sony Nex cameras. They cover the 24-70 and the 70-200 focal lengths that are the standard gear for most working photographers. But they do it in a fraction of the size and far less than half the weight of their full size competitors.

These lenses, coupled with the soft thump of the OMD shutter have me sitting on the fence. We'll see how my will power holds out. And we'll see if Sony ramps up production on some useful, professional lenses for the system. I'll give it a little while.

Have fun out there and don't forget to stop for a nice lunch.

Business Portrait from December.

I had a photographic assignment late last year to make images of a spa out near Lake Travis. We spent a day photographing different services, with models,  as well as interiors and exteriors. It was fun and crazy and I got to work with a bright, young art director named Mary Beth Taylor from one of my favorite insanely creative ad agencies, Clutch Creative. When we wrapped up the main day of shooting we still had one image that we needed to do; the owner, Melissa.

She runs a very high energy business and I wanted to remove her from the day-to-day interruptions and make her portrait here at the studio. We scheduled her portrait for a different day. I set up my usual lighting design for portraits with a large, softlight on the left and a fill diffuser on the right. I used a light gray background. When we finished shooting my regularly planned shots I noticed that the exterior light, coming from my wall of northwest facing windows and gliding through the white diffuser I had been using for fill, was nicer and softer than the lights I'd been using. 

I turned off the big flash but I left on the modeling light for fill. I tried some poses that were out of my normal routine and, when she turned around in the shot above, I loved the feeling of motion and connection. I had Melissa do variations of this pose for a few more shots and then we moved on a tried a few more poses and experimented with looser crops. But this was the image I really wanted that I didn't know I wanted until I saw it. I have yet another resolution for this year: Be open to the available light instead of always lighting everything to death.

I shot this image on my Sony a99 camera attached to the 70-200mm 2.8 G lens. The camera was anchored on my wooden tripod. I shot in raw and processed the image in Lightroom 4.3. The image required me to color correct the side of her face away from the light. The tungsten modeling light made that side too warm. I used an adjustment brush to make my corrections.

I often pine for the 85mm 1.4 Zeiss/Sony lens but images like this serve to remind me that I'll need to end up shooting at more reasonable f-stops like f4 and f5.6 if I want to keep both of my subject's eyes in focus. I really like using the 70-200 on a tripod because it has a mount that takes the weight off the camera and balances out the system. Which the twist of a lock button I can go from horizontal to vertical very easily. The 70-200mm is good at f2.8, better at f4 and wildly excellent at 5.6. It's the right tool for the job, if your job is making portraits in the studio.

Nice to start the year with a portrait I really love. Kind of sets the bar for the year.

blog note: Thanks to all the people who signed up for Wyatt's workshop/road trip/BBQ fest. I predict you will have much fun. I further predict that I'll sneak up and meet everyone for lunch. I'm a sucker for great BBQ and anything photographic...

Also, keep the comments coming. The feedback loop is priceless.

"Tru" A One Man Play About Truman Capote.

a99 with 70-200mm

I photographed a dress rehearsal of Tru at Zachary Scott Theatre last night. Jaston Williams, of Greater Tuna fame, played Truman Capote. It's a role that Jaston did here in Austin eleven years ago. I took three cameras and three lenses to make photographs for marketing and public relations: the Sony Nex-6, Nex-7 and a99 cameras. The Nex-6 had the 50mm 1.8 OSS lens, the Nex-7 had the 18-55mm kit lens, and the a99 had the 70-200mm lens. The majority of the images were done with the a99 and the 70-200mm but I noticed when post processing the files this morning that I preferred the look of the Nex-6 files the best. 

Nex-6 with 50mm

All three cameras were set to ISO 1600 and in post the 6 just looked a bit better. A bit higher contrast, richer coloration and an overall bite that the other two systems didn't quite match. I have a few theories about this. The first is the difference in lenses. The 50mm 1.8 Sony lens for the Nex is a great performer, especially stopped down just a bit to f2.8. Since it's a prime lens with fewer elements and a simpler design it can be optimized to do its one thing very well. And it does.

The 70-200mm encourages me to use it at longer focal lengths and, even with good in body image stabilization there's almost certainly more shake. And what shake is there is magnified both by the longer focal lengths and the bigger sensor frame.  The Nex-7 relied on the kit lens and while it's good stopped down I was already wide open at the long end at f5.6, which meant about two shutter speeds slower than the 50mm lens and one and a third shutter speeds slower than the a99.

In truth the real differentiator for me is the way each of the cameras handled noise at 1600. At 100% you can see the effects of the noise reduction on both the a99 and the Nex-7 files. A furry-ness and a lack of snappy edge detail. You wouldn't see it in prints or in normal work but it's there.  And the newest generation of cameras (regardless of their DXO ratings) seem to have the same signature as you look to 100%. Even the D800 files I've pixel peeped look great at normal magnifications and then show the same furry-ness with diminished edge accutance.

The sensor in the Nex-6 holds on tighter to the "edge effect" that makes our brains think, "Sharp."

There's a case to be made for both engineering decisions but I seem to like the Nex-6 solution in these circumstances.

Nex-6 with 50mm.

Nex 6 with 50mm

 a99 with 70-200mm

All three of the cameras worked well, focused quickly and accurately and delivered images which the client will like and use. But my observations are still there. To my eye the ISO 1600 performance of the a99 and the Nex-6, when equalized for size differences, are for the most part equivalent. Does that mean the a99 is a "major fail"?  Or, does that mean the Nex-6 is a "major win"?

As I use all three cameras together and separately, on all kinds of jobs, I'm getting more and more set in my opinions about them.  To wit; the a99 is a very neutral camera. It does what it's supposed to do without idiosyncrasies and without any showboating. But what it gains in competency it loses in personality. While the finder is bright and detailed and the files easily malleable and very high quality. It's not an "exciting" camera. Where it shines is locking in focus quickly, showing accurate images in the evf for quicker work and in, well----overall competence.

Like the a77 before it, the a99 is a remarkably good low ISO camera. It loves ISO 100. Just loves the hell out of it. And it loves ISO 50. Shoot in controlled light, in the studio or wherever the natural light is thick and beautiful and you'll get stunningly detailed files with amazing color. But the camera more of less disappears from your consciousness. In theory that's a great thing. Less between you and your subject. But in reality I like to have a companion along with me in the form of a camera that's like-able and fun to be around.

That's the Nex-6. 

Both have their place in my inventory but each serves a much different function. The a99 is my insurance policy that let's me know I'll always be able to pull out a great image in just about any circumstances and that the files will pass the professional taste test. It's never the camera I choose first for my own personal work or for just walking around.

That honor is split between the 6 and the 7.  The 7 is the first choice for those days when I'm channelling my hard edges/lots of detail/rich color/low ISO personality while the Nex-6 is the one I go for when I get into my black and white/Tri-X/available light/scruffy artist/Okay, give me some color too kind of moods.

Next time I shoot a theater production like this one I'm planning to bring two Nex 6's, one with the 50mm and the other with the 70-200mm on an LAEA-1 adapter. I'll focus the big lens manually and rely on focus peaking. Should be a fun way to do a head to head comparison of just the lenses.

How was the play? It's great. I'm a Truman Capote fan and Jaston does a great job capturing the character and making the drama both funny and poignant. I wrote somewhere else that this is the perfect show to take your friends who are whimsically cynical. The Zach Scott presentation is done "in the round" which makes it challenging for me. I'm always seeing great expressions but always in the wrong spot to get the shot....

Since the Truman character was a heavy drinker the actor nearly always has a drink in his hand during the play. On the way home I had the biggest urge to make a mixed drink. Subliminal advertising at work...

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