Friday, August 15, 2014
Kirk is a short telephoto user. What the hell was he doing with a fisheye lens? The Nikon 10.5mm.
In the days when DX was the only format you could buy a Nikon in we suffered from a deficit of short lenses. There were a few repurposed film era wide angles but they all seemed to have their share of problems. For a while the widest rectilinear lens was the 14mm Nikon lens which was something like $1600 and could get you to the equivalent of a 21mm on a full frame camera. Wide enough for most stuff but not for the things that really mattered.
I was hired to document the interior of the old Palmer Auditorium Building which was re-birthed, after $80 million of construction, as the Long Center. There were a lot of enormous spaces and stages as well as some tiny spaces like historic dressing rooms. I knew I wanted a lens that would communicate the scale of the interior spaces and would work well with the Nikon D2x, my camera of the moment. While very few people like the effect of a fish eye lens with its distorted lines the people at Nikon had designed into the Capture Raw software a component that "de-fished" that particular lens. You could enable the correction and, voila, you had a very wide image and all the lines were as straight as could be ( providing you were careful to level the camera while shooting ).
The lens worked fine for the assignment with the caveat that the expanded corners lacked the detail one would find in the center of the frame. They were "stretched out" to make the file geometrically rectilinear and that meant there were proportionally fewer pixels in the corners.
I subsequently used the lens on a number of jobs that required a wide view, including the job for Lithoprint (above). I am certain that we used a normal looking file for the final brochure but for some reason I came to really enjoy the look of curved fluorescent lights and so I kept a copy like this.
Wide is really no longer an issue in most camera company's lens catalogs. My current favorite is certainly the already rectilinear, and wonderfully sharp, Panasonic 7-14mm ultra wide angle zoom. There are also ultra wide angle zooms available for the APS-C systems that are very good.
If we've made any progress in the digital age it's been in the area of making lenses that are better matches for the size and technical nuances of digital imaging sensors. Good glass always seems to triumph over the nerdier technologies.
Just a blast from the recent past as I clean up an older computer and its attached hard drives.
Editor's note: Try out the comments. It's fun and easy to make a comment on the site and it makes the writer feel like there's an audience out there. Just saying. VSL Senior Executive Staff.
A quiet portrait in an elegant office.
Shot on assignment for Primary Packaging in NYC. Simple, single source lighting. Tri-X film. Simple design. The post production was all done in the printing. Agfa Portriga paper, selenium toned. The 16x20 inch print is so pretty, as an object, that it brings tears to my eyes.
Whatever did we do before drones? I think all exterior photography was impossible until their invention.
....Oh yes, I remember. We found tall buildings and shot from the roof tops.
This is a project we did for the Austin Chamber of Commerce a while back. The art director for the Chamber's ad agency wanted to show off the city scape and also show some representative people sprinkled amongst the downtown skyline. ( A skyline that is much, much more crowded today)>
We scouted a location that would give us a view of Congress Avenue, looking north toward the state Capitol building. We ended up shooting from the top of the Embassy Suites building, just south of the river. The Chamber of Commerce seems to open many doors in Austin so we had no trouble securing the location. We shot in the late afternoon with a Nikon D2x camera and one of the unheralded, great zoom lenses of the time, the 28-70mm f2.8 Nikon. A great lens. Incredibly sharp at f5.6 and f8.
Once we had the skyline shot "in the can" we move on to casting and then photographing our talents. We had a big ink jet print of the skyline that we referred to in the studio for positioning the people. Everyone was shot against a white background, clipped out and composited into the piece.
The image was used as a double truck ad in magazines but another important use was on big, fabric show dividers in the convention center in Austin. The repeating dividers were ten feet tall and sixteen feet wide. At the time the D2x was the highest resolution camera made by Nikon and we worked hard to make sure that we were working with optimum technique. That meant: Always on a tripod. Always at the sharpest aperture. Always at the lowest ISO.
The images on the big, fabric dividers looked great. I'm not sure how much more actual quality a 24 megapixel camera would have bought us. After all that's only a linear increase of 20% in pixel resolution...
Fun with advertising. I remember those years as the transitional years between print and electronic media. Going forward I think we are resolutely in the electronic presentation decade. Yes, there are still corners of the business where people work with prints, and there will be printed magazines at least for the foreseeable future, but....
Thursday, August 14, 2014
A campaign we did for LifeSize. Why I remember it so well.
Working life can be so interesting and dramatic. This is a series we did for one of our favorite ad agencies. Their client was "LifeSize," a provider of teleconferencing hardware and software. The agency came to me with a fun idea---put people in situations where they might use the products and then put the whole thing in a screen which is how their counterparts across the world might see them.
Each image is a two piece composite. We shot each person (or couple) actually holding a prop HD TV surround in front of them. We did the classic white background lighting in our larger studio space which is approximately 42 feet long by 18 feet wide and has very high ceilings.
The ad agency cast the models and had the prop made and we did the photography. This campaign was done in the early part of this century, probably around 2003.
I remember the day very clearly because we were shooting tethered to one of the original Mac Pro laptops with the G4 processor. The camera was the venerable Kodak DCS 760 and all the lights were Profoto something or other. We were using a 20 foot firewire cable with full sized connectors on both ends and every once in a while we'd lose our connection and have to re-boot everything.
But that's not really why I remember this one so well. You see, we were on the very last shot of the day when my assistant came hurrying over to me carrying my cellphone. "You'll want to take this!" she said, in a panicky kind of voice. It was Ben's school on the phone. Ben had fallen off some playground apparatus and broken his arm. The school nurse had already left for the day. Ben's mom was out of town.
I tossed the camera to the world's greatest assistant and turned and headed toward the car. My assistant informed the client and then she proceeded to finish the shoot with perfect technique and poise. The clients were most understanding. The campaign went out without a hitch after we got that pesky compound fracture taken care of.
We are still working for the same agency. I did a fun job with them last month (with no casualties) and we're on schedule to do another project next Weds. It's never fun to have a child emergency but maybe it's even more stressful when you leave a studio with ten or twelve people behind.
I've always liked this campaign because I think the concept is so good. And it was a joy to shoot. Right up until the very last hour...
One exits and one enters.
Just remarking on the balance in the universe. I wrote a blog about losing a job yesterday. The job was booked to have occurred on or around August 25th. I opened my e-mail this morning and another client was inquiring about booking the 25th. Same depth to the job. Same basic budget but with different usages. Also still life. It's already scheduled. One in, one out. Balance.
On a totally different tangent: The image above is one of my favorites from my recent "Tommy" shoot at Zach Theatre (the play is still running and still a visual delight). I caught it with a GH4 and the 35-100mm f2.8 lens at the long end, wide open.
I might have used a higher res camera but if you look very little in the image is tack sharp due to subject movement. But it's the subject movement---the kinetic feel---that allows me to enjoy the image. More or less resolution would have made no real difference. In fact, had I upped the ISO and made a completely sharp image I'm sure we would all find it a bit boring.... Just conjecture.
Wednesday, August 13, 2014
Sometimes I like to post stuff just because it's fun. Like really beautiful women and very narrow depth of field. Makes the committed m4:3 users "jaw clench."
Jana helped me by modeling in the studio for my book on LED lighting. You can still buy the book here. It's a fun read. But her "audition" took place on a hot Sunday in the middle of a blistering, record setting Summer afternoon. We met for coffee at Little City Coffee house on Congress Ave., just south of the capitol building. We proceeded to shoot outside, in the heat.
I shot pretty much everything that afternoon with the Canon 5D mk2 and a lens I actually miss, the 100mm f2. It's a lens I tried always to shoot at f2 or f2.8. I doubt the aperture gizmo in the camera ever introduced the lens to anything smaller than f8.
We stayed in the open shade or under covered shade for the hour or so that we worked at making photographs. Jana graduated from UT two years ago and is now working for some powerhouse marketing company on the east coast. She was ultimately professional in every aspect of every project we worked together on.
I liked the fact that she understood advertising and marketing so well. It made her work as a photographic model or talent that much more convincing.
Seeing this image again makes me want to rush out the door, hop in the car and go to Precision Camera to buy a Nikon D610 body and a 105mm f2.0 DC Nikon lens. Same look with an even better sensor. The problem with impulses like that always comes later when I find that the system back or front focuses and does it in a non-linear fashion. That's what effectively killed my enthusiastically sought after relationship with the 85mm 1.4 Zeiss lens for Canon. Wonderful combination if you are lucky enough to get a pair with no focus shift and no crazy back focusing. Nothing makes you look like a dumb ass photographer more than an image of what could be a beautiful girl whose ears are sharply defined while her eyes and lips look like soft focus mush.
Oh, now I remember why I love shooting with the Panasonic GH4......
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