The most powerful lighting tool in my inventory...

Do you see the instrument? Is it a Profoto? Is it Broncolor? Is it a fluorescent? How many watt seconds? What's the CRI? How about the color temperature? Do I have a beauty dish in the mix? Is it bare bulb? I can barely restrain myself. Is there a radio trigger? Is it a good one? Is it a Pocket Wizard? How high can it sync? Can I change the exposure from the camera position? Well, maybe.

But of course you know that I'm not talking about whatever metal and glass unit is hidden behind the 74 by 74 inch white diffusion screen, I am talking about the diffusion screen itself. It cost me about $100 ten or fifteen years ago. That included the soft, shimmery, nylon diffusion material as well as the frame. It's held in place by two ancient light stands.

And I have used this as a light modifier in hundreds and hundreds of shoots, including three or four of the shoots from which I've posted images here in the last week or so. I've used it to diffuse terrific Texas sun on outdoor shoots. I've used it as a big reflector. But mostly I've used it the way we would have used a big, wonderful soft box in years gone by. It's been an integral, defining part of many of my shoots.

It's been used along side of Kodak, Canon, Nikon, Leica, Hasselblad, Olympus, Panasonic and Samsung cameras. It's seen twenty or thirty or forty thousand dollars of cameras and lenses come and go. But it's still here. It's still the bedrock and aesthetic magician of many, many shoots and it still only cost me ..... $100.

In the example above I was shooting for Zach Theatre. The magic light unit of the moment? An old and crusty 1,000 watt, open faced tungsten light. As cheap and old tech as dirt. The final result?
A wonderful season brochure and accompanying ad campaign. The sale of hundreds of thousands of dollars of theater tickets. The paychecks of dozens of actors and staff. From a well used modifier and an old, non-automated light. And, an older, 12 megapixel camera.

The most powerful tool in the lighting inventory is little more than a bed sheet. Charge for what you know. Charge for how you see. Not for the dollar value and novelty of your tools.

Is it all about the magic camera? Naw....

The single most important parameter in the success of a photograph is, without a doubt, how interested you are in the subject.  The second is the way you look at or consider the subject. Then it's all down to how you incorporate that consideration or emotional point of view with your lighting.

From a technical point of view the success of an image is so much more dependent on the quality, direction and motivation of the lighting than the camera will ever be. Honest.

If you've been chasing cameras and lenses for a while and you feel constantly frustrated it may eventually dawn on you that you may have been chasing the wrong things. Learning to light well takes a lot of time and experience. Learning to use a new cameras well (not the initial learning curve of photography and camera use in general) takes an evening to read the manual and about a week of shooting to get used to the controls. Lighting? Much longer. Lighting well? A life time.

We talk about cameras here because they are like the lunch of the photography world. Should we go out for a burger? Are we celebrating with steaks? How about that romantic little French place. But lighting is like breathing and meditating. It's what the real masters had to master.

People have chided me for having no allegiance to cameras but really, I consider them now, in the digital age, like the Tic-Tacs of photography. A temporary Pez dispenser of imaging. It's the lights and the lighting and the subjects I'm really interested in. A new camera just gives you something fun and novel to play with while you are waiting for your real subject to show up or when you are waiting patiently for the light to get neat.

Making your own light well is hardly ever about the brand no matter  how hard we try to make it that way. Give me twenty different flashes of equal power and decent color consistency and once I put them through a modifier or a diffuser (or even a bed sheet) I defy you to tell me which one was a Nikon Speedlight, which one was a Yongnuo 560 and which one was a Broncolor Mobil. Just flat out don't believe you can tell a different.

So, magic cameras? Naw. Magic lenses? Maybe for certain stuff. There aren't any magic lighting units. But the ability to mold the lighting to your vision-----that's where your magic starts to happen.



For Henry White it's all about the light....

A quick look back at my favorite digital camera of all time and a magic lens.

This image was done for the Austin Lyric Opera. It was done in the early days of digital imaging. I shot it with a Kodak DCS 760 camera and a wonderfully eccentric lens, the Nikon 105mm f2.0 DC lens. The DC stands for "defocus coupling". All I know is that the lens had a sharp center core and the ability to shift the out of focus areas behind or in front of the main subject.

While the image looks like we just found amazingly nice available light it is actually lit. I used my favorite big scrim for the model with a 1,000 watt tungsten light as a source and a direct tungsten spot light on the back wall some 50 feet behind her.  I love the way we were able to frame her head in the little pool of background light. I like the lighting in here more every time I see the image and that amazes me since I liked it a lot when we shot it. Learning more stuff isn't always better....

Swimming pool re-visited.

Photographed for an article on water features for Tribeza Magazine 

I keep thinking about this image for some reason. I think it's because I am a sucker for diagonal lines, triangular shapes and the interplay of the opposite colors in the closest part of the pool. It's an image that's all about patience and planning. I needed to pre-visualize the effect I wanted, get there in time to figure out the composition and then sit back and wait for the pool light and the twilight to balance. 

Negative edge pools are neato. 

Just for the record, I am currently having much fun playing with fluorescent lights.

Late last year I explored what was available in the realm of fluorescent light fixtures for still and video production and I bought four fixtures from Fotodiox. The biggest one has six double tubes, the two next biggest ones have four double tubes and the smallest one has two double tubes. All but the smallest have switches that allow you to turn off one or even two banks of tubes for more control.

The bodies of the lights are made of heavy metal and they have metal barn doors that close over the tubes to protect them during travel. I have used them now on six different commercial video projects and dozens of still photography shoots and have had no issues with them at all. I like the quality of light and the color is easy to manage by either shooting raw files or by doing a custom white balance before shooting.

Here is an image of one of the "middle-way" banks:

Unlike portable flashes these lights are heavy and need to be on stout stands. It might also be a good idea to toss a sandbag or two on those stands as well. You'll also need electrical power. But not the amount you'd need to make a nice tungsten soft light....

I've seen people use them "bare", with no diffusers or modifiers but I prefer mine to be pushed through a nice diffusion silk. A "one stop" silk is just right. Used with diffusion these already large light sources become lush with softness. The Dulux bulbs are powered by electronic ballasts that are supposed to be flicker free. At the price point I'd take that with a grain of salt and test them before you do any high shutter speed work or high fps videotaping for eventually slow motion effects. All I can say is that I've never seen any flicker or banding in my use.

The one caveat I'll toss out is that no big assortment of tubes like this is going to travel well. I limit my travel with long tube fluorescent lights to cars only, no airlines, no shipping services. If you are looking for a little change in your still life, portrait or video work these might just move the creative needle a bit. They are cheap enough to try out.

Checking off the days on the calendar. Ben is off to college on the 30th. My team of mental health care practitioners should be here on the 31st.

Just to confuse all the camera pixel peeking activities, this is one of my favorite images of Ben. He's just out of the pool having raced in a swim meet.  The eccentric camera of choice I was using at the time was the Kodak DCS 760. All 6 megapixels of it. It had an APS-H (1.3x crop factor) CCD sensor from Kodak. It had a removable AA filter but I used it without. Since the lens mount was Nikon I was using a Nikon 50mm f1:1.2 lens stopped down just slightly. I can't remember the exposure settings but the ISO was either 80 or 100 as we didn't dare go much above that for fear of noisy files.

We have a very large print of this and it is sharp, noise free and fabulous, which again makes me question the need for more and more little, tiny, skinny pixels when big, plump, fat ones do so well.

We talk about the "why?" of photography from time to time but nothing brings home the value of preserved memories to an individual's life like someone you love moving away...

For Readers of "The Lisbon Portfolio." Henry White sent along one of the shots described in the novel...

© 1999 Henry White & Kirk Tuck

From a trade show many years ago in Lisbon, Portugal. Image taken with a Leica M4 and a 50mm Summicron lens. It was a week and a half of indecision. Sometimes I wanted color and some times I wanted black and white and I tried only to take one camera along with me on my walks so I was constantly trying to decide which way to go. I  thought I never really got it right but to be perfectly honest I've never been the best judge of what works in which medium. Somehow, ten or fifteen years later is seems that no matter which decision I made in the past it was the right one. 

The funny thing about photography is that it's all about forks in the road. Do I go left or right? Are those the only choices? Can I go foreword or backward? Can I stand right here and see what happens next? Our decisions are always less about what camera or film to use and more about which path to take on our walks. Which path determines everything. And ultimately it doesn't matter which path you take because there's something to see everywhere......