I liked MIchelle's portrait in color but I wanted to see how it would look in Black and White.

Most of my earlier images of Michelle were done in black and white so I decided I wanted to play with the photograph of her I put up on the blog earlier today and see what it would look like if I'd been shooting it on my old favorite, Tri-X film.

I've resisted buying Silver FX Pro for years thinking that I could do just as good a job in channel mixer or the black and white adjustments in Photoshop. I downloaded the SilverFX a few minutes ago and gave it a trial run. Darn. It's good. Now I'll need to buy it. Yes.....it's better than I am at hitting the old Tri-X film feel.

I like the portrait so much more in black and white. No extraneous information, just Michelle and those beautiful eyes.

SilverFX is a plug in for PhotoShop, Aperture and Lightroom which helps make easy and (apparently) wonderful conversions of color files into black and white. It's built by Nik software and you can go to their site and download it for a 15 day trial. At some point you will become addicted and they will send you serial numbers to plug in and free the program for long term use.....after you send them the credit card info. You can go the more expensive route and keep shooting film...

A portrait from this morning. A model from twenty years ago dropped by...

I've shared a number of black and white photographs of Michelle with you over the past year or so. Most of them were taken between 1992 and 1994. She was astonishingly beautiful. Twenty something years later I think that she is even more beautiful. More subtle. More interesting.

We spent some time this morning catching up. Then we made some portraits.

I did a few things differently this morning, technically. To start with I used a set of Lowell VIP hot lights for my illumination. They are very small and inexpensive tungsten lights that my friend, Paul, no longer wanted. He dropped them by the studio last week. The lights are lamped with 250 watt bulbs.

I set up two four foot by four foot Chimera diffusion panels, side by side, with the panel closest to the camera angled to carry light across Michelle's face. I used a black panel to the opposite side to reduce room spill light and to make the shadows on the other side of her face deeper.

When I started shooting I was working with the Sony a99 and the new 85mm Rokinon lens but the focal length was too short for what I had in mind. I rummaged through a drawer and found my Hasselblad 150mm f4 lens and an adapter. The longer focal length seemed just right to me. Even wide open the older lens (made for medium format) still has enough bite for a lovely portrait.

I shot with the lens wide open, on a tripod.

Simple lighting. Simple tools. Gracious model. 

Yeah. That's what I'm talking about. My second book, on sale for $1999.98 at Amazon...

Living is a small town in Texas, away from the hustle and bustle of the sophisticated capitols of the world, I had no idea that my prowess and renown as an author was so recognized and valued. Currently, on Amazon.com, you can buy a Chinese language copy of my second book, Minimalist Lighting: Professional Techniques for Studio Lighting for about the price of a new, Nikon d600. Since my books don't have a history of dust issues I'd say it's a great bargain.

Of course, if you don't read Chinese you can always come down market and enjoy an English version for around $23.

Fun with retail. No doubt.

Talking about a lens is one thing but shooting with a lens is quite another. Here's some stuff from the 35mm 1.5 Cine Rokinon.

 

Oh my gosh. I'm having a blast with this lens. A couple years ago I reviewed the Leica 35mm f1.4 Aspherical on an M9 body. I shot most of my images on a 105 degree day and it was miserable but the one thing I discovered is the one thing that is counterintuitive about an ultra fast 35mm lens: the real power is getting the subject in context and still being able to drop the background convincingly out of focus. But in order to do that you must have a lens that has the same properties as the $5,000 manual focusing Leica lens; it must be sharp at and near wide open. Not all of the fast lenses from the big boys do that....But I'm going to throw in this spoiler and say, that in my opinion the Rokinon (Samyang) 35mm Cine 1.5 lens does. With ease.

The image above is a quick portrait of a stranger on 6th street from this afternoon. We were in open shade and I walked up and said, "I like your hat and the way it goes with your jacket. Would you mind if I made a portrait of you?" He was flattered and more than happy to stand there, in front of the famous Driskill Hotel, for an extra thirty seconds or so. I used the focus peaking built into the Sony a99, got a quick focus at f2.0 and shot. If I'd been on a tripod and used the image magnification to focus at 10X the image might have been marginally sharper on his face. It's sharp enough for me just the way it is.  Is the Rokinon 35mm Cine 1.5 lens sharp enough wide open? Can't say. But I can tell you I think it's nicely sharp at f2.0...which is one stop down. And I think the out of focus characteristics are very nice in the background.  The contrast in the center, the part that's in focus is snappy damn good.

When I have time I have a new focusing routine for the 35mm on the Sony a99 in aperture priority mode. I open up to f2.0 or somewhere around there, get the focus peaking outlines where I want them and then stop down till I like the shutter speed and ISO combination. I'm generally looking for exterior exposures in the f5.6 and 1/500th category with ISO's around 100 or 200.

When I left the highly secure compound of the Visual Science Lab in my up-armoured and very discreet, Honda CRV I made the decision to try and shoot everything on my walk/test shoot at apertures from 1.5 to f5.6. I wanted to see how the lens performed in the meaty part of the curve. Any middling focal length lens is fine and dandy at f8 and f11. I shot the wall above at 2.8 and I think it's pretty juicy (technical term we testers bandy about).  I've been by this wall many times a year for many years and have never seen this pattern before.

In easy circumstances (f4.0 and f5.6) the lens is unimaginably good. Every bit the equal of the Leica lens at these apertures. If you shoot on a tripod you should look no further for your 35mm optic. This one is all work and no play in the middle.  

I walked over to the Hilton and photographed their ceiling (see below) and even near wide open the lens cuts the line between tones like a razor blade.

 

I shot everything as a Jpeg today and most of the images here are straight out of camera with perhaps a little exposure correction here and there. Some slight sharpening with the wide open   images. But I was amazed at the concentrated, saturated colors the lens consistently provided. The green temporary food trailer below is a great example. The green just oozes radioactive...

 Near the end of my walk I started thinking that my evaluation of the lens would not be complete without a few little snaps at one of the "easy" apertures. Here (below) is an image of a building shot at f11. Seems sharp to me. Diffraction ignored.

My early assessment of the 35mm 1.5 Cine Lens from Rokinon (Samyang) is glowing. The images speak for themselves. On monday I have one of my favorite models coming by for a little session. I'll sneak the 35mm in just to see what it does wide open at low light levels. But most of the session will be done with the 85 Rokinon. Both of the lenses are totally manual. I think that's cool. A bit of control and user responsibility are refreshing. Being in control (or the appearance thereof) is calming and affirming. I like it. More like this lens. Hello camera makers! Are you listening?

Someone asked for a close crop of the top image......

Just a photograph for the sake of a photograph.

Long week. Taking a visual break from corporate...

It's been a wild work week. There was a photographer visiting from D.C. We had coffee at Caffe Medici on Sunday and lunch at El Azteca on Thursday. Still getting used to the cultural differences between the hard charging, brusk, brisk east coast and the laid back center of the universe called Austin...

I did my first job for Blackberry this week, did post production on a job for an architectural firm, gave a lecture to photography students at a local college, started in on my taxes, started and stopped on a project for a semiconductor company, did some pre-production on a food project and a project for a cardiology practice, swam, ate sushi, BBQ, Tex-Mex, New World Latino, and a Texas Tuna sandwich at Thundercloud's. (A Texas Tuna has guacamole and chopped jalapeños along with the tuna...). Started the week out with a nice steak at the Four Seasons. Finished the week warming up vegetarian chili we had in the freezer.

Now I just want to play with images that I like. And I'm not answering the phone for anyone who doesn't already have a ring tone programmed into my phone. And believe me, that's a very small circle...

I have a new lens I want to play with and after swim practice tomorrow and Sunday that's all that's on my agenda.

If you work as a professional image maker I think it's important to step away from work and do stuff that you really like on a regular basis. I've been going back and forth between post processing the image above and re-reading my favorite book, The Gates of Fire, by Stephen Pressfield.

The image above is Selena. Shot with a Canon 1dsmk2 and a Carl Zeiss 85mm 1.4 at Willie Nelson's ranch. Post processed in SnapSeed.

How much post processing is too much? When it starts to bug me I know I've gone a bit too far. But it's like soup; you get to salt to taste.

Anatomy of a friendly portrait session.

 This is a portrait of Selena.

I have a friend named Selena. She's a musician and she has a promising band here in central Texas, with lots of fans. We've photographed together from time to time and I used images of her to illustrate some concepts in my LED book. We worked on this portrait at Willie Nelson's ranch, just west of town. I wrote about the session a year ago. But I didn't really touch on the actual give and take of a portrait session; only the nuts and bolts.

When you do a session with a friend an exchange of money isn't necessarily the goal. In fact it rarely is. Each participant comes to the project with their own hopes for the outcome. Selena wanted to be able to use the images we would create for the promotion of her career. I wanted to go through the process/experience to, on one level, practice my craft but on another level to prove that a 56 year old photographer could bring a relevant vision to bear in the service of someone half his age. In effect I was trying to prove my own relevance to myself.

At the time I rationalized that I was getting value from the session by being able to use the images of Selena in my books and here on the blog but when I dig down deep I really wanted to know if I could still talk across the void of generational differences. And that was a much bigger unknown than anything having to do with the mechanical construction of the images.

We all fight the inertia of our own history and our own tenure. We learn to do things a certain way early in our careers and we tend to cling to them because the known ways are comforting in their familiarity. When you get to be a certain age there's a two way assumption that you've got a fixed way of doing things and it's never going to change. You feel this because you think you are right and your audience of younger people feel this because they've already experienced the intransigence of experience. "That's the proper technique."

I hear it all the time from people all over the web and all over life. Some people argue themselves hoarse over the noble provenance of three-to-one lighting ratios. Others offer that they'll give up an optical viewfinder system when you pry their cold, dead hands off the carcass of their Nikon/Canon/Fill in the blank camera.  And the young-ish aren't immune from the super glue of conformity either.

No, I took a day's worth of images with a conscious effort not to control things the way I had done images before. I didn't drag along strobes and softboxes and other lighting "just in case" and then press it into use for everything. I didn't presume to control the posing or the props. I tried to flow along with what Selena was interested in while trying to put my own spin on the process.

But when I look at the images even now I see the iron hand of precedence in the mechanics of the images. The one above is shot with an 85mm 1.4 Zeiss lens. It's a prejudice I find hard to break. My default is that medium telephotos with fast apertures are THE way to shoot nice portraits. I find some of the "rules" I picked up over time hard to break because they've worked and by working they reinforce their own efficacy.

But when I really drill down I did the shoot because I wondered at the time if I still cared enough about the outcome of my photography to make good work. Could I move past blasé to get back to committed? Could I find the fun and curiosity that made all of this so much fun back when I was 25 too?

That was then. Now I know that I can answer "yes." But it's important to me to understand why I take on some of the things I do. In some sense I want to see what the magic is all about now that they really have changed the formula. 

People think I change gear because I'm in love with the gear. I really change it because the only way to stay fresh and relevant to yourself and the process is to keep growing and keep questioning. I have the advantage of being able to look back and see how we used to do it long enough ago to see the stark contrast between the days of hypercontrolled and stiff photography that comprised the art when I started out in the commercial field. It's totally different today and the same old tools don't necessarily apply.

The brain stays flexible as long as you challenge it. I can think of nothing less challenging than to use the same tools to do the same craft over and over again in the same way.  It's something to think about.