Starting over. Starting for the first time. Starting at all.

When you work as a commercial photographer you acquire tools the way the tops of picture frames acquire dust. Photography is a moving and fluid target. It's rare now that your response to the business of photography can be one of maintaining the status quo. If you don't take photos for money I'll assume that you do it for fun and that you can shoot whatever the hell you want with whatever camera you want. We (paid professionals, collectively) stopped having that luxury as the whole world of imaging changed around the changing primary delivery systems for images. Clients want good images, they want good web video and they want it all right away.

At the present we live in a bifurcated imaging universe, split between the last remnants of print culture and accelerating onslaught of web display. Yes, there are still magazines but they are thinner and the images in many are just rehashed stock pictures you've seen a thousand times. Yes, there is still point of purchase advertising; big posters in stores and stuff wrapped around bus stops and in train terminals but it's quickly being replaced by screens. The benefits to advertisers are just too great to ignore. The super large poster is expensive to print and expensive to install. And the messaging remains the same, day in and day out until the physical art is exchanged for another poster. Large, flat, efficient electronic screens can contain messages that move, type that  changes and messaging that can be customized for the kinds of customers specific to each period of the day.

In fact, with the ubiquity of smart phones which signal to stores who you are, and the power of internet information about you, your buying habits and your income; even what you bought last time you were in the store, retailers can customize the messages on the screens toward which you are walking just for you. And they can do that in real time.  How much more powerful is that than a static, printed sign?

In the last decade professional photographers have largely been buying cameras to solve problems that their businesses really didn't have anymore. As more and more clients rushed to embrace the electronic marketing wave, both on the web and on freestanding screens we could see that they needed fewer and fewer images that required enormous, perfect files. But photographers chased huge pixel counts and expensive, infinite sharpness like dogs chase cars. And in the end we used these enormously capable and expensive cameras to deliver files that mostly ended up, at the most, two megapixels big on a screen. Once we photographers caught our "cars" we were as much at a loss about what to do with them as the dogs.

I was thinking about this as I swam this morning. I've been using a couple of full frame Sony DSLR-derived cameras, the a99 and the a850, in my business for quite a while. And before that I was using the 24 megapixel a77's and before that the Canon 5Dmk2. I've been following the righteous herd of professional photographers and carefully shooting images as enormous raw files with pristine custom white balances. And as I've done so the typical requests I get from the kind of ad agencies and clients I do work for is, "can you delivery smaller files?" What they're looking for are images they can drop into web files. The classic "style guide" for web images from one of the big agencies we do work for is this:  Profile=sRGB. Size=960 pixels wide. Save as jpeg or png. We're pulling children's wagons with Clydesdales...

The other request for more and more of the lifestyle and food shoots that we do is for instant sharing. Not on the web, per se, but on the set. The advertising crews, almost to a person, would love it if we were continuously flowing our test images and our actual shoot images not to a big monitor in a dark corner of the room but onto everyone's phone or iPad, individually. Clients would love to sit in their chairs on the sets or in the studio and watch the feed as a full screen display as we shoot. We older photographers tend to resist this because what we did in the olden days was really much less collaborative. We were used to getting our approvals on the Polaroids and then having a license to interpret. 

Now there is a trend to tight collaboration. The photographer is no longer the defacto captain of the ship he has become part of the crew on a rich man's yacht. He still has the responsibility for making the ship work but its direction and destination is at the whim of the owner and the adventure succeeds with the ready application of team work. Younger artists have grown up with the overwhelming press of the idea that teamwork is a positive thing while older artists remember a time when individual control and individual achievement was in vogue.

Collaboration only works if everyone is sharing and sharing the images as they spring to life is now part of the process whether I like it or not. But beyond whether one is comfortable with getting along in a group, or not, the real elephant in the room, where imaging is concerned, is video. It's not a thing anymore that you can leave to everyone else while you specialize in that still thing that you want to do. Clients want, need and will get both stills and video. Whether they get it all from you or they get it all from someone else---they will. And most would love to get it from the same source. It cuts down on all those meetings by 50%. And the vision of work, between stills and motion, matches.

So what does all this mean when it comes to what we use these days? Do we need Leica S2's for our still work and Arriflex Alexa cameras for our video productions? Do we need a Nikon D800 as our foundational camera? Can we do our businesses with Olympus OMD's?  Well, yes. I guess it's yes to everything. But I'm having the queasy feeling that it's not such a great idea to rush out and buy anything expensive right now. That doesn't seem to be where the market is headed....

If I were starting out today as a young and sassy photographer how would I approach the idea of buying gear? Honestly, I'd put together a small, practical system that consists of (imagine your own brand's similar offerings....) say a Canon 5dmk3 body with a 24-105mm lens and a 70-200 mm lens and call it quits. Anything else I really needed I'd rent. But that's old school thinking on one point; the Canon 5Dmk3 and most other cameras on the market today are not paragons of instant sharing or file sending flexibility.

There are interesting things on the horizon for pros, if they are open to change... Especially those who value quick sharing and flexibility over muscle and traditionally enabled cameras. Samsung has already announced their NX Galaxy camera. The sensor is the same as the one I've used in the NX 300 and it's really good. But the real power in that camera comes from it's ability to quickly and easily share pretty much anywhere and all the time. With built-in wi-fi and built in cellular capabilities you can continually upload images to your cloud or a local network as you shoot. Basically that means everyone in the room with a smartphone or an iPad can follow along on collaborative shoots. It might be uncomfortable for some photographers (especially those who depend on backend processing to make their images marketable) but it might be more comfortable and soon, more expected, by all our younger clients. And our older clients who are control freaks.

I can imagine a scenario where I go on location with a communications enabled camera and get fast approvals from an art director who is back at her office. That's cool enough. Imagine the next step. Suppose you run Snapseed on your communications enabled "smart" camera and you have a five inch screen and a full operating system on the camera as well. You've just shot 36 images of Bob, head of marketing at the WizBang corporation and, instead of driving back to the studio or setting up your laptop and downloading stuff to make a gallery, you whip the camera screen up and you and Bob sort through the images on the big screen on the back of your camera. You find one you both like so you fix it up in Snapseed. Maybe it needs some retouching so you open a program that offers cloning and fix the offending reality.  Then you resize and save the image and send it along directly, to DropBox and notify your client. She's using the image on a website design before you even get back to your car. You are on to the next thing.

That camera will exist in the next month. It will be cheaper than a big Canon or Nikon. It will take great images. But it will do more. And it will once again lower some more barriers to entry in our field. But as soon as it launches the smart competitors will be in line with their versions. The smart ones will extend the features instead of just copying them.

We can be aloof and snobby and reject the new tech as gadgets or distractions. Or we can leverage it as part of our proactive response to a continually changing market. We can be the first adapters. We can show off the tech and make clients happy first. We've seen how the aloof thing works in the markets. I think I'm ready to try early adapter.

In the future I'll be looking for cameras that are more about flexibility than raw specs. I don't need sports cameras. I don't need massive amounts of resolution. I want good video (wow! the video in the GH3 is amazing!!!). I want good sharing capability (amazed about what I've heard concerning the Samsung camera). If the camera is going to become more and more the epicenter of our work I also want a lot of screen real estate on it.  Make sure it has a standard hot shoe and an input for external microphones and I'm there. All the specialty stuff becomes rental.

It's about to become a brave new world. Again.

Random Pairing.

Experimenting with paint and color and everything else.

There was a time in the 1990's when everything was an experiment. It was a response to the conformity expected at work. When we did jobs for advertising agencies and corporate clients on medium and large format film everyone had financial skin in the game and we made sure no highlights were blown, the focus was were we (and the clients) intended it to be and everything conformed to the prevailing ideas of "high quality." 

What that meant, though, was that on our own time we spent a lot of our own resources experimenting and trying new stuff. I went through a meticulous hand coloring phase using Marshall's transparent oil paints and acres of cotton swabs. We cross processed film to see how it would look. We distressed Polaroid in mid-development. We built our own lighting rigs. And we spent a fortune out of our own pockets on just trying stuff out. And messing up was part of the process of learning a new process, and by extension, translating a new look.

Funny, now that we all have digital cameras I see much less real experimentation and more just goofing around with lighting and post processing. I'm guilty of the same thing. It's almost like it's become an article of religious faith to grab something into the camera in a neutral way with the intention of having a good, solid file as a jumping off point for frilly and risk-less post processing.

Like always shooting in color even when you KNOW you want the image in black and white. Why? "Because (whiny intonation implied) it gives you more flexibility and options."  That's so logical and so chicken shit. Sometimes you just have to fold up the safety net and get on the trapeze naked and with greasy hands. Why? Because we learn more from failure, and even more from near failure, than we ever learn from applying metaphoric goo over the top of a perfect file. If the safety net is too broad and too close to the trapeze the audience understands, in some informed way, that there's no real excitement to be had. We watch the high wire and the trapeze acts holding our breath because of the possibility that someone may fall to their death. If we don't have that in our work then it becomes lifeless and mundane. Without risk there is no joy. Only stale popcorn and tacky souvenirs.

I'm taking my old Kodak out tomorrow to see what I can really fuck up. I mean make art with.....

The Summer Doldrums.

Life slows down when it gets hot and sticky in Austin. I still go out for walks in the afternoon but I do them more slowly. When I get slower I start looking for subjects that are slower than me. I was cutting across the lawn that stretches between the manmade hill in Zilker Park and the Palmer Event Center to poke my head into the Psychic Showcase (only in Austin?) and I saw this elegant and bountiful tree right ahead of me. It's presence seemed so powerful that I stopped in my tracks and just looked at it.

The horizontal expanse of branches and leaves was impressive and the leaves were so thick that the shade under the tree was an almost unbroken blanket of shadow. It was much cooler and even quieter under the canopy. I stood under the tree for a number of minutes and tried to soak in what it must be like to be a tree. To be immovable and stately. I walked back to the point at which I first became really aware of the tree and made this portrait of it. I tried to make it look as serious and stately as it seemed but I also tried to make it give me an expression of welcome. It remained neutral and a bit aloof.

There will come a time, I am sure, when the land in central Austin will be deemed too valuable for trees and developers will cover every square inch of the inner city with concrete and buildings and black top.
When that happens I'll pull out this portrait of this tree and remember a time when trees were valuable. I'll be reminded of a time when people and trees coexisted in the city.

I carry my camera on my walks, in part, to record a way of life. I'm preserving my understanding of the soul of my city. That's my project.

One additional note about my Studio Portrait Lighting Class at Craftsy.com...

Since I am an instructor I am able to offer my Visual Science Lab followers the class at a 25% discount.
If you click through this link you'll get the discounted price: Kirk's Studio Portrait Lighting Class.

Thanks, Kirk

My Studio Portrait Lighting class launched on Craftsy.com This Morning.

Here's my big announcement: My two and a half hour course on Studio Portrait Lighting launched on Craftsy.com this morning. Here's the information page about my course on their website: Kirk's Studio Lighting Course.  If you go there you can scroll down the page and find a two minute video trailer that gives you detailed info and gives you an idea of the production values Craftsy.com brought to the project.

But let me back up and explain this all a little better...

Craftsy.com is a relatively new company located in Denver, Colorado. They create online education programs on a number of different subjects. They started out making classes about crafts (things like knitting, embroidery, even oil painting) and they are expanding to include food and cooking, more fine arts and now photography.  Their aim is to be the biggest and the best arts, crafts and all around education site on the web.

Craftsy.com is bringing in accomplished people in their fields who have written books and practiced their specialties for years and, with an accomplished crew of video producers, editors, and veteran camera operators, work with tight content outlines to produce well edited programs.  The programs are constructed as a series of 15 to 30 minutes segments that move logically through the information. 

The editors at Craftsy called me after researching my books and my blogs and asked me if I'd be interested in spending the better part of a week in Denver, working ten hour days, to create a program that shows people how I approach studio portrait lighting. From gear selection to posing to various lighting designs. I loved the idea.

The reason I loved the idea is that I've taught a lot of live workshops and I always felt that there had to be a better way to teach for both the students and the photographer teaching the class. A video workshop is a much better value for everyone involved. The students get to see the information with all the gaps and stop-and-starts edited out. It's much easier to keep the program focused and on task. Once the students buy a Craftsy.com workshop they can go back to it again and again to review concepts and to see details. Craftsy adds more value by having the instructors participate in a private online forum that's open to all the students of the class to answer questions about the material presented and to share information.

One of my last live workshops was a daylong event at the One World Theater in Austin. We had about 50 participants. Since it was a new space for us we had a few delays getting up and running. Even though we were in a big theater space it was hard for everyone to see and hear, in detail, what we were demo-ing. It's just not possible for 50 people to walk up and look into the finder of the camera or at the screen on the back...  And once I finished a marathon day we were spent. We had no workable way to answer individual questions. No way to continue adding value.

With a Craftsy workshop the students pay $59 and they can watch the program they've purchased again and again. Forever. There is also a very active community around the workshops. When I explored their website I found forums, specific to each class, for questions and answers as well as places to for students and instructors to share projects with everyone.

When the team at Craftsy filmed my class they did it the way a professional crew would film a television show. They used two or three cameras for most scenes and provided both wide and detailed shots that made it easy to see exactly what I was talking about. And while it felt strange to wear a lavalier microphone for 10 hours a day the resulting sound is great. Much better than seat 5, row D at the live workshop.

You can go to the site and see how the program is constructed. I'm covering basics like hard and soft light, types of modifiers, color control, some posing and a lot of my favorite style of portrait lighting. I worked with a model named, Victoria, so you can see demos of how the lighting turns out.  If you want to take the course you can do so without trepidation because Craftsy.com has a Full Satisfaction, Money Back Guarantee. If you don't like the course, if it's not your cup of tea, just ask for a refund.

I think the value proposition is great. The cost of the course, in my Universal Latte scale, equals just 13 large lattes from Starbucks (10, if you are in an airport...). And if you ever wanted to see what I really sound like then this is your chance to find out. I watched the entire program last night---for the very first time---and I really liked it. If you want to learn my style of lighting and shooting you probably will like the course as well.

Finally, the best thing about doing a workshop online is that instead of traveling around the country for weeks at a time doing live workshops I'm all done. Which means I'll be here blogging for you nearly every day instead of trying to get all my lighting gear in the overhead compartment of some tired jet heading for Des Moines... If you are interested in giving the Studio Portrait Lighting Workshop a try please click through the advertisement  below (or, this link) and I'll get credit for sending you there. Big brownie points for me! I think you'll like the course. If you don't you haven't risked a thing.  Thanks for your support. 

What am I thinking about reading in Chinese this Summer? All about Studio Lighting...

In 2009 Amherst Media published my book on Studio Lighting. Frankly it was a fun book to write and a nice follow on to the Location Lighting book I'd done the year before. Last year I discovered that the book was available in Chinese. I found it on Amazon.com but the price was astronomical. A few days ago I checked in to see how the books were selling and I found the Chinese version again but this time the price was much more in line with the original English version. I did what any self possessed writer would do and ordered a copy. 

I think I will leave it purposefully laying about the studio when clients come over. Maybe it will spark interesting conversations. I sat down last night to leaf through and see how the translation worked until I remembered that I don't know how to read Chinese at all. I flipped through the book and enjoyed the memory of making the various images.  The one thing I really about the book was my face on the front cover, partially covered with Chinese characters which I presume spell out my name.

This will sound like a plug but....I really like this book. Not the Chinese version which I am certain is very good and very well done, but the original book. I read it again this Summer and although the gear continues to change the basics are right on the money. I fear that the book is in the "long tail" curve of its life and I would advise you to snap up as many copies as you possibly can before it goes out of print and becomes unavailable. The actual title is:  Minimalist Lighting: Professional Techniques for Studio Photography.  Drop by the studio and I'll be happy to sign your copy.....