Every portrait photographer has stuff they need to work on.

Gloria. NYC 2013. Samsung Camera.

I'm working in putting more "air" around my subjects. I guess we got into the habit of cropping tight back in the days of skimpy sensors with low pixel counts. We wanted to make every micron of space count. But these days I feel like some of my images from that time and some that were offshoots of a style that became habituated at the time feel claustrophobic to me now. A little more space might be a  good thing. Next I'll work on adding context and stuff in the background. That should be a seismic change....

One note on the series I've been playing with today: I was using the Samsung Galaxy NX camera at the time I took this image and since then I have more or less ended my active participation in their Imagelogger program but when I examine the images I can't help but admit that Samsung got their flesh tones and gradations on human skin down to a good science. The files are very pleasing to me. While the camera's EVF bothered me and the connected side of the camera slowed down the interfacing process the actual imaging----the thing we mostly used to use cameras for --- is pretty darn good. Just thought I'd toss some credit where it is due. 

OMG!!!!!!! All of my books are back in stock at Amazon....

....Just in time for----------next Christmas season? Thanks a lot, Amherst.

As you know if you tried to order one of my captivating and remarkable lighting books to give to your most loved loved one over the recent holidays, three of my five books were out of stock at Amazon for nearly the entire month of December...

How nice that we have them back in stock just in time for the spendy tax season. Hmmm.

My Amazon Author's Page

After working alongside Nick Kelsh I've added a few medium sized soft boxes to my lighting inventory.

Gloria. NYC. For Samsung.

When I presented in New York at Photo Expo I tag teamed with an incredible photographer named, Nick Kelsh. I had originally spec'd a very large soft box for my lighting demos but the size of the booth made that potentially unwieldy and when I arrived I was confronted by a mid-sized box. Probably two by three feet. I was a little unsettled about it because, well....I am used to getting my own way, but then I watched Nick work the smaller box in very close to his model and get pretty spectacular results. 

When it was my turn I worked the light in closer than I usually do and, frankly, I like the results very much. So when I came home I looked through the stack of umbrellas and soft boxes looking for my little collection of mid-size modifiers. Sadly, these things don't last forever. Rods break and fabric deteriorates and rips. I had one or two very small boxes that I used for backgrounds but the 3x4 footers I used to have had all been destroyed and discarded over the years. 

Last night I ordered a new box from Amazon.com. It's an inexpensive Fotodiox branded box that measures 32 inches by 48 inches. It should be here Weds. in the late afternoon just not in time for my Weds. portrait session with a communications company. But that's okay, I've been practicing with umbrellas too. 

Here's the one I bought. It even comes with a speed ring for my Elinchrom flashes. If you have a different flash they sell with different rings.

Food? Food Photography!

I love food. I owe everything I know about food to my friend, Patricia Bauer-Slate. Patricia owned the best bakery in all of Texas for 32 years, introduced the real croissant to Austin and created a number of restaurants that people still talk about a decade after she exited the restaurant business.

I'd been going to her bakery, Sweetish Hill Bakery, for years to get bear claws and petit pain au chocolate and killer coffee before I actually met her and became a Bauer-Slate fine food disciple.

The change from customer to friend came from one of my earliest magazine assignments. I was assigned by one of the city magazines to go to her new restaurant, La Provence, and make photographs of the beautiful dining room, the chef and the front of house manager. I was working exclusively with 4x5 inch transparency film at the time and did my lighting with several Novatron power packs and flash heads firing into big white umbrellas.

I made (through sheer dumb luck) some of the best interior images I've ever been able to make and some very passable portraits. Patricia was so pleased that she asked to buy some of the images and, to sweeten the deal, she also invited me and my girlfriend at the time (now my wife) to come by and have a dinner ( we could never have afforded at the time) as her guests. Belinda still remembers the angel hair pasta with truffles and caviar as one of the best dishes she's ever had while I remember the entrecôte mirabeau (a perfect steak criss-crossed with anchovies) as the best steak I've ever eaten (sorry Morton's and Sullivan's). We shared a bottle of wine that had a little booklet tied around the neck which explained the provenance of the wine. We still have that booklet now 34 years later.

We spent years eating Patricia's cooking, devouring her bakery's chocolate cakes and whole wheat bread. She taught me how to perfectly poach an egg and to make a Hollandaise sauce that wouldn't separate. I've photographed hundreds of products and dishes in return.

I love photographing food almost as much as I love eating it. But the important thing in my education as a food photographer has been a thirty five year education in what makes good food good---taught to me by a master. The photography part is easy if you know why you are making a photograph.

Graffiti Wall Video. Austin, Texas. By Kirk Tuck

Untitled Project from Kirk Tuck on Vimeo.

Go to Vimeo via the link to see and HD version. This one is only 500 pixels wide.
Shot with the Sony RX10.

Happy Valentine's Weekend.

Getting more focused on good camera and studio technique.

Caught mid-sentence in the Craftsy.com Studios.

I was having a discussion with friend, Frank, over coffee yesterday in the late afternoon. We'd both put in long, hard days and it was refreshing to share a little time with someone as interested in the holy triad: photography, video and marketing. When it comes to marketing I defer to him. He's an actual pro. But I can hold my own in discussions of photography and to a certain extent in video. 

We've both been buying m4:3 cameras and we both are excited about the introduction of the Panasonic GH4. But over the course of our conversation the talk turned to the use of small cameras for professional work. When it comes to format my brain ebbs and flows. Sometimes I like the look a full frame file can give me and sometimes I like the ethos of the smaller cameras. After all, what were the original Leicas if not the answer to an earlier generations fixation with larger and more ponderous cameras?

And all that started me thinking about how much good image quality we leave on the table by not practicing each piece of our craft with diligence and purpose. One reason people seem to shoot raw files is to be able to fine tune color and exposure better, after the fact. After having shot an image casually. Many think it's a badge of honor not to use some of the functionality of the cameras when making images. For example, to eschew the use of face detection auto focus when doing portraits or to not take advantage of a camera's software filter to improve an image. 

I'm still amazed at how opposed most people are to the idea of using a tripod where it's possible. I'm often guilty of believing what an LCD shows me when evaluating exposure instead of taking time to meter a scene. 

I was still thinking of this last night. I'd made basil linguini tossed with a smoked salmon and parmagiano cheese cream sauce for dinner and then, while my family relaxed, I went out to the studio to pack for a shoot we did this morning. I went out on location to a rehab hospital to set up a temporary studio and shoot twelve staff portraits against a seamless background. 

While I was packing I was thinking about our conversation and about getting all the details right up front. Would this make shrink the quality differences between full frame and smaller formats? I had already made up my mind to shoot these portraits with a Panasonic GH3 camera and a moderately long zoom lens. At the last minute this morning, before heading out the door, I tossed my RX10 and a couple extra batteries into my jacket pocket. 

After I set up the lighting in the small room at the client's location I pondered the cameras. I would be shooting under controlled florescent lights and I would have the camera on a tripod. My brain reached for the GH3 but my inquisitive and mischievous side came up holding the RX 10. "What the hell?" I thought, "Let's give it the old college try."

I set the camera for medium sized, super-fine Jpegs and started doing the due diligence check list. I metered the position in which I would place my subjects with a Minolta incident light meter. I ended up with 1/60th at f4 at ISO 250. Perfect, considering I was photographing adults and I would have the camera on a tripod. Next I pulled out a Lastolite gray target and made a custom white balance. And then I did it again a couple more times just to make sure. 

I enabled the camera's face detection auto focus and figured out a standard for head sizes that I'd apply to each sitter---for consistency on the website. Finally, I enabled a filter called, "Soften Skin," took a few test shots of my client and evaluated them at the largest magnification the camera is capable of. The effect was perfect. Nice and sharp on features, eyelashes, eyebrows and hairs but a slight softening of intrusive skin texture. Not plastic, but, on the other hand, not cruelly clinical.

I shot these same settings for twelve people which equalled about 500 frames. Since the camera was doing the focusing and aesthetic work for me I was absolutely free to focus on composition and building a nice rapport with the sitters.

When I got back to the office an hour ago I dumped all the files into the latest rev of Lightroom and started peeking at the images. There's strong detail in all of the images but the areas of skin are smoother and less contrasty than a typical shot. The color is perfect and at 1:1 there's very little real noise. 

The images are right on the money. Exactly as I'd planned them and the camera was all but transparent. Granted, the front shoulder is not going to ooze away into Bokeh Heaven but the background only six feet behind the subject is smooth and texture free. 

Based on the intended and contracted use for the images they are for the most part interchangeable with the full frame files I did for the same client just last year. The camera didn't miss a beat. Didn't miss focus or deliver unwanted artifacts. It proved to me that many of the situations that we think to be the provence of bigger cameras are only thought of that way because of history and tradition. 

I'm sure that if I had not taken the time to meter and white balance I would have had to struggle more with the files and I would have found more "forgiveness" in the full frame images. But that's where photographic best practices and diligence come in. Those things enabled me to press a smaller, cheaper camera into service without penalties. And yes, I'd do it again. 

This business is changing. If things need to be faster and cheaper than the projects should be easier to do. And that's the arena in which small, mirror less cameras with fast, sexy lenses thrive. 

Did I just buy my last spindle of DVDs?

I've been on DVD-Autopilot for the last ten years. Shoot a job? Back it up on two DVDs. Deliver a job? Send it on a DVD. Seems like a workflow that became a routine that became a habit. Now, don't jump in and tell me I should be backing up everything onto successive hard drives because I've been doing that too. In fact, I have a large filing cabinet drawer filled with carefully labeled external hard drive filled with stuff I probably don't need and never want to see again. But every quarter I hire an assistant to come in, plug each drive into an older computer station and spin em up. Just to check em. We run disk repair on them for good measure, let them spin down and put them back into the drawer. Costs me a couple hundred bucks but it keeps the freelance anxiety at bay. Or at least on a leash. 

Lately, when client insist on "owning all rights" we make them sign a waiver informing them that once they receive the materials we have no obligation to archive the images or make any sort of replacement of the images for any reason after the first 30 days. We STRONGLY encourage them to participate in a good back-up strategy. With implied ownership comes a new layer of responsibility for them. 

So----I've been in the DVD habit for a decade and in the last year all jobs were actually delivered using alternate methods. We sent a lot of single, retouched head shots and hero advertising shots to various clients with on line services such as DropBox (Thank you Samsung for giving me two years of 50 gigabytes of free space!!!). That's worked out well and clients like the delivery system. They tend to want to keep stuff up on Dropbox so they can use it as a defacto storage platform but we send them a notice, give them a time window and then relentlessly sweep out the folders. 

For bigger jobs, especially those under 16 gigabytes of finished files we use thumb drives/memory sticks/usb flash memory (call it whatever you like). We load up the images on the stick and hand it off or send it to the client via USPS Express Mail or similar service. Takes longer but that's really a lot of material to get through some company firewalls done over the web....

For really big jobs that exceed 32 gigabytes we bite the bullet, grab a portable, USB powered hard drive and write out the job to that. The drive is handed to or shipped to the client and we generally don't ask for the drives back. Although some make their way back to us when a client does another job. They usually bring the HD along with them and ask us to add the files to it. 

So why am I still burning these damned disk? I'm guessing this is my last spindle. I need to research the state of HD reliability and move to a series of ever bigger RAID arrays. Not happy about it because I have the prejudice that optical media is more robust than magnetic media but I'm ready to be proven wrong. 

The biggest driver for change? HD Video and the looming memory black hole that is 4K video. We need to back it up. We need to move it and we need to share it. And very few projects I've done, even the 30 second spots in an editable state will fit on the meager pastures of the DVD ranch. 

Funny how changes in technology relentlessly push changes in storage. I guess I've been lucky to have lasted in the "old school" paradigm of DVDs for this long. 

Quick data point for those who are interested. I've been randomly pulling out and checking CDs and DVDs from as far back (CDs) as 1996 and I have yet to come across an unreadable or corrupted disk. Many of our CDs and DVDs were burned onto various maker's "Gold Disks" (Kodak, etc.) and while I don't image that they will last forever some of them are coming close to 20 years of service. We keep them sleeved, in the dark and in temperature controlled environments. Fingers crossed we'll last until someone comes out with indestructible storage and I'll hire that assistant to come back in and spend a month transferring.....oh boy! That will be fun.

Don't care how but you really should be backing the good stuff up. All the crap you shoot? Just stick it in the cloud....everyone else does.