Photographing furniture. And getting it just....right.

This is an image from the early days of digital imaging. Back when four megapixels was pretty stout and brag worthy. My art director and I were doing a bunch of images for a high end furniture retailer called, Scott and Cooner. Art director, Lane, had the idea to use a beautiful musician named, Chrysta Bell for some of the shots. He thought she would enhance the appeal of the furniture.

Now, I've learned more recently that it's impossible to do any sort of work like this without at least 36 megapixels under the hood but we didn't know that back then. We were unhampered by our own ignorance.

I was transitioning from film to digital and my clients had already gotten a taste for the speed and the lower production costs of digital and they asked for it. We dragged our usual collection of Profoto electronic flash units and soft boxes along and had light stands strewn about all over the place.

But here's the weird deal: We were shooting all of the images with my favorite camera of the moment, the Olympus E-10. Look it up. It was pretty wild. A fast, permanently mounted zoom lens (ala the Sony RX10), an optical finder and a usable screen on the back. It shot 4 megapixel files on CF cards and it had an itty-bitty buffer. Why the e-10? It was actually the first true 4 megapixel camera on the market (leaving aside the nose bleed territory of the Kodak cameras of the time....).

The lens was a 35-140mm f2-2.4 equivalent with a 2/3 inch sensor. You had a choice of ISO 80, 160 or 320 but only a madman would have ventured past 160 and I'll conjecture that we never moved it past the 80 setting because we didn't want to see primitive digital noise.

The camera had the usual studio PC sync port as well as a standard hot shoe so we were good with all kinds of flash.

We shot about 48 set ups in a long day and I still have them archived and sitting around.

While I'm sure the photos would be much more interesting if taken with today's cameras (sarcasm alert) I am still somewhat surprised at how much we were able to get done with such primitive equipment.

We shot 130 jobs with that camera the first year we got it and the average project budget was somewhere around $2500. Not a bad return for a $1995 investment in the tools of the future. Here's the DPReview review: http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/olympuse10

Taking a day off from the mirror less future.

Leica R8. 90mm Summicron. Film.

In the process of getting my presentation together I happily run across a forgotten magazine cover. Proof that there is a profit motive for photographing beautiful people.

This is a magazine cover we shot back in the 1990's. The art director for this medical magazine called me and asked me to make a nice photograph of an attractive woman. I had someone in mind and made a call. We did a quick shoot with a very large soft box and a 35mm camera loaded with AgfaPan APX 100 black and white film. I selected a frame while I stood in the darkroom watching the film dry and I printed it a couple of hours later. I sent the art director an 11x14 inch fiber print. He loved it. ( the image above is a reduced sized scan of a printed cover ).

Interesting that we worked without a committee construct and approve a layout. We worked with minimal input from the art director. The input consisted of, "please give me a vertical."

We didn't need to send contact sheets back and forth. We didn't need to scan or e-mail or share on Dropbox. There was no retouching. No sharpening. No skin smoothing. And everything worked out fine. 

Streamlined. 

Trust. 

Is (camera) happiness a moving target?

It's funny, I'm trying to write a speech to give on Friday for hundreds of high school photographers and their teachers but I'm more or less lost. The gulf between the way I started in photography and the way they started in photography is so wide. We started in a culture where, for the most part, we had to search out good images. We had to subscribe to magazines. We had to buy books. Learning the visual/art part of photography was like belonging to a secret club where we passed along the names of the new stars of the medium like recipes or treasure maps. Certain books that were anthologies of photography were like sacred reference books to us, they opened up windows to new work.  And every technique we used was either gleaned from a magazine about photography or passed along by a more advanced practitioner who would take time to personally train an aspiring photographer. We dug for knowledge and we dug for images. We even had to dig around and listen to the grapevine to discern which cameras and lenses to buy. 

The generation I will be speaking to is part of the first inclusive Google generation. Need to know which camera has the best high ISO performance? There are 20,000 or 20,000,000 sites to choose from. And they all would love for you to drop by.  Want to know how to do Astro photos, time lapse, off camera flash, fashion, video interviews, make your own camera strap, clean your sensor, find a model or figure out which camera has the most haptical knobs???? There's a quick Google search for that. Or a Bing! search or whatever. 

Wanna know who's trending hot as a fashion/sports/news/war/hipster/wedding/baby/glamor/food photographer? Likely if you've read a camera review one time anywhere on the web you are already being inundated by sites filled with links and stolen images from the "next big thing." How does someone who started as a indigent field hand in the business explain anything to a spoon fed generation and find any sort of connection at all?  I guess we'll find out by Friday....

Today's real article: 

But today I want to talk about the cameras and art. I've given up. I've come to grips with the idea that I'll never be free from desire where cameras are involved. I'll never be happy to work with just one bundle of black plastic metal and fake leather. The desire for more and different is insatiable. But why? Why can we control how much we eat and how much we drink and bring to bear all the impulse control it takes to save money and work on long term projects but we can't seem to resist the call to arms when the shiny new camera is launched? How many of us took one look at the new Fuji and thought: "Pre-Order!!!!" ????

How many of you recent purchasers of the OMD EM-1 are already getting itchy for the EM-1A? And how many Nikon dF owners are already wallowing in post cognitive dissonance and getting ready to sell at a loss and move on to whatever Nikon tosses out there next?

I'm temporarily lucky when it comes to full frame cameras. I like my Sony a99 well enough and I like the lenses I have for the system but Sony fucked up the A7/r so handily that it deflated my reflexive need to rush out and upgrade. Now my choice of full frame camera is also being vindicated by its selection by Hasselblad for "improvement" and chic-ification. So I needn't even consider making any big moves. 

But seriously, I'm starting an exercise wherein I line up all the digi-cameras that grace the vault at the VSL world headquarters and each day I pick up the next one in line and shoot it all day long. Then I put it in the back of the line and the next day I pick up the next one in the front of the line and shoot with it. I calculate that I can go twenty days or so without repetition so we'll see if it's boredom that drives these purchases or what.

I suspect it is this: A new camera is presented and it has a new combination of feature sets. My brain starts to think about the feature sets and comparing them against what I shoot right now. On paper the new camera has attributes that trump the existing camera. I convince myself that I will be able to do better work if I have the new whatever. I buy the camera and find that I use every camera in nearly exactly the same way. This effectively neutralizes whatever I bought the camera for in the first place.

I bought the Sony RX10 because I read the specs and thought how wonderful it would be as a small, light but powerful video camera. I would be able to run and gun in exciting and fast moving situations and return with powerful, kinetic video. Then, in the course of a few weeks I settle into the way I like to shoot and find myself locking the camera down on a slider or a big tripod and plugging in microphones and doing some nice lighting. I have just gutted any advantage that the camera might have presented to me.  I can do the same thing with one of the GH3's with more control over the quality of the video files.

I bought a Sony a99 because I thought I'd be doing more low light work. I also bought some fast lenses. But I've found that I use it mostly in the studio and on locations where I have total control. Why? Because that's the vast majority of work I do. I would be just as happy shooting most of the work with the older sensor in the a850. If only it had an EVF........  But the idea that I might want to shoot in low light was enough to turn my craving into ownership.

There are situations where cameras can make a difference but not as many as we need to convince ourselves exist. But there is something about the eternal promise of new gear performance that drives us on to purchase. I'd like to pretend that it wasn't this way in the film days but I know we were only saved from ourselves because the product cycles were so much longer. Besides we could always look to cryptic improvements in film emulsions to give us a short term fix of "new and shiny."

On some level I know that the gear acquisition is just a form of resistance aimed at us by the evil forces in the universe to keep us from actually getting started or following through on the work we'd like to be doing. The work we see ourselves doing.....If we only had that one piece of gear that might knit everything together. ---

I re-found a new excuse to buy gear. It gives me more to write about. How sad is that?

So, are the changes being made in cameras really things which will make us happier photographers? Do wi-fi and touch menus and programmable buttons really make our lives so much better? Does the ever repeating menu learning curve outweigh the new features? Does the financial opportunity cost outweigh those extra two points on the magic DXO scale?

Don't look to me for answers I have the sickness as bad as the rest of you.  (and yes, before you comment I know that you are a rock of logic and still shoot with your camera from 2001 and the lens you picked up in high school. And I know that you are unmoved by any new camera bling. You must have clicked into the VSL space by mistake...good for you).

Re-learning how to be a beginner.

I love this image. I love it because it's photograph of Belinda from decades ago. We were sitting in our favorite restaurant, Sweetish Hill Restaurant, on a warm Spring morning on a Sunday. We spent many Sunday morning there eating wonderful egg dishes and savoring pastries and coffee. It was a slower,  quieter, less nervous time. 

I'd brought along one of my favorite little cameras, an Olympus Pen FT half framer, loaded with Tri-X film. The lens on the front was the svelte but hefty 40mm 1.4.  The camera spent the morning mostly hanging from its strap from the back of my chair but I loved the way the light came through a skylight and put Belinda's face into a mix of shadow and highlight. I picked up the camera and shot a number of frames and then I put it down and we drifted off onto another topic. 

We were both working in ad agencies back then and photography had reverted from an early, halting career back into a hobby for me. Belinda had given me a black Pen FT and a collection of lenses as an engagement present. I still have them all (and many more) today. The camera went with me everywhere. 

I knew that the lens was sharp a stop and a half down from full aperture so I am sure I had it set for f2 or f2.5 and I'm sure I set the shutter speed according to the in camera meter. I knew enough to be dangerous but there was certainly no over thinking going on. No ruminations about introducing fill flash or augmenting the angular light with some sort of white reflector. The beginner mind was content with the scene as offered. 

One of the reasons I now like this image is because of the jaggedy black line that runs horizontally behind Belinda's head. It echoes and and mimics the black lines that run across her shirt. I love everything about the almost frenetic background even though it is seemingly at odds with our notion that the only good bokeh is smooth bokeh. 

I find myself now trying sub-consciously to control every aspect of images I shoot and I think it's a natural response to years of controlling light and composition in the service of paying clients. But when I look through collections of earlier images. Images made when I was not a professional photographer I find that I consistently like them better. I am attracted to what attracted my eye in the first place. 

It's not that I like the images because I am willing to overlook whatever perceived flaws are resident in the early images but precisely because there are flaws in the early images. It's the flaws that  reinforce the authenticity of the photographs for me. The rawness is part of the original way I saw whatever is in the frame. I like that I wasn't compulsively correcting myself back then. 

I aspire to that now. 

Revisiting a favorite portrait shot for Restaurant Business Magazine.

Vic's Dinner. At the "Y" in Oakhill, Texas.

Vic's is long gone. There's a bank building or something where the diner used to be. I was asked to photograph the owner by Restaurant Business Magazine to illustrate an article they were doing on how new smoking laws were effecting restaurants. Vic's was a last hold out for smokers. You could tell the minute you walked in the front door. It's odd to remember a time in the Austin area when there were ashtrays on every table and a gray-white cloud of smoke lingering almost invisibly around the upper corners of the room...

Shot note: Mamiya 6 camera with 75mm lens and color transparency film.

When cameras go all Frankenstein.

Setting up a Panasonic G6 as a "b-roll" camera for an interview.

I love the way those wacky guys in the video industry trick out their cameras. They put 'em on rails, have follow focus knobs hanging off the sides, put them in cages with all kinds of cables attached and make lens hoods into dramatic, architectural structures. Then they put the whole mess on top of fluid heads that look as serious as the cameras. How many knobs per square inch (kpsi) does it take to make sure a camera is ready to roll a few minutes of interview? I'd say plenty. 

Above is my basic starting point for a Frankenstein camera. I'm sure the product manager for this consumer item presumed that the main use of a $600 digital camera would be handheld recording of kids blowing out candles and first bike rides. And studies have shown that 94.067% of all owners of digital interchangeable cameras use only the kit lens that came with the unit. Kind of makes all those arguments about the safety and long term security of composite lens mounts meaningless. 

I figure that cameras with interchangeable lens mounts were intended to be used with multiple lenses. If the photo gods had wanted us to work with only one lens they would either have made all cameras like the Sony RX10 and put Zeiss zooms on them (and made them par focal as well....) or they would have made all camera with only 50mm equivalent lenses and been done with it. I'm happy it didn't turn out that way because few things make me as happy as putting wildly inappropriate lenses on crazy small bodies. 

In the illustration above I'm using a Rokinon (Samyang? Bower? etc.) 85mm 1.4 Cine lens on the G6. Our main camera for the project will be a Panasonic GH3 sporting a 50mm lens. I really like shooting video with the G6 because I can set up and fine focus with the focus peaking and I can punch in and magnify the frame to confirm really spot on focus. The 85mm is something like a 170mm equivalent on the m4:3 bodies and in this application, where I want a really tight shot of a person talking to use in editing as a cut away, it's just right. Since it's such a long focal length I can put the camera much further away from the subject and still get a nice, tight frame.  

Why not another GH3? Well, the color between the G6 and the GH3's matches up very well and I don't feel like I have to shoot at super high res for my quick b-roll shots. The other reason is that the focus peaking on the G6 makes set up and focus confirmation with this long lens quicker and easier. I can punch in with the GH3 but I can't monitor zebras as I go. 

A lot of people are writing about "hybrid" use of small, inexpensive digital cameras like the Panasonics and the Olympus OMD EM-1 and I think that everyone is on the right track. Done well these inexpensive cameras can rival much bigger and much more expensive DSLRs. That opens up the field to everyone. But where I think a lot of people are missing the boat is in not using multiple cameras for production. Many traditionalists, from the video and the still sides of the aisle, still have the idea of having one "perfect" camera to do everything with. In video that means setting up and shooting one angle and then setting up and shooting another angle over and over again. In many situations, such as conversational style interviews you need to be able to cut back and forth between two speakers and to make things more interesting and have more footage to use in edit it would be nice to have head and shoulders shots of each person in the conversation as well as a wide shot that covers both people. 

Now we can do that inexpensively by adding several six hundred dollar cameras to the mix. One on the wide shot and one each on the tighter shots. With all the cameras running simultaneously you have so much more material to choose from.

And the same holds true for dramatic work. You can have one camera on a scene that's handheld, a wide camera and as many different points of view in other cameras scattered around the scene. Total coverage for each scene in one set up. The low priced cameras are a boon to film makers.

I'm extending the idea into stills. I have a portrait shoot with a series of professionals this week and I'm planning to use a big Sony camera for the "hero" portrait. That would be the classic, looking into camera shot. But I'm planning to have at least one additional camera set up to do a series of more casual shots from a slightly different angle. I'll be able to trigger that camera remotely with a radio trigger. That way I can get double duty from each sitting. 

Shot notes: The image of the G6 and 85mm Rokinon was shot in studio with a Sony RX10 using a combination of florescent light and a Fiilex P360 for backlight. It was shot at ISO 100 and processed normally in Lightroom. Blow it up and look at the quality. It's reduced to a bit less than half the original file size. I think it looks pretty good.