Balance, Counterbalance. Going overboard and then getting back into the boat.

 

It was such a wildly excessive portrait week last week. All portraits all the time. Exterior portraits in the wind. Fluorescent lit portraits. Flash lit portraits. HMI lit portraits. Even little flash portraits. So, after additional time in the post processing/retouching trenches I emerged this morning ready to shoot just about anything else.

One of the problems with doing lots of portraits for group medical practices or high tech companies is that even after you've carefully explained all the steps to your direct contact you still end up administering more than you should. For example, I make it really clear that when it comes to portrait selections for retouching I'd like to have everyone's selection on one list before we get started. If you've done a job with 10 or 20 different people for one company you know that they are looking for consistency. After all, these portraits are generally going to sit right next to each other on the website. And the best way to ensure consistency in a project is to sit down and edit all the images at once in one long, clean session.

When too much time elapses between edits you start to go "off the ranch" (at least I do) and toss in the results of experiments in processing that you might have done in between batches of erratically delivered file numbers. You might think to automate the process so all the retouching looks the same but you'd be barking up a strange tree as almost every face needs its own combination of fixes and enhancements. The major things to get right when you're looking for consistency are getting the color and density of the background right, hitting a pleasing and reproducible skin tone, and keeping the contrast and sharpening/noise reduction all in the same ballpark. Toss in cropping as well because you really should be matching head sizes. If you leave that up to some web designers you run the risk of getting a really rocky checkerboard of images in the final layouts.

Another issue we come across on a lot of shoots (and something I hear from other photographers) is that clients just can't make up their minds. I had one client recently who was supposed to select one image that would be used in an ad. His admin sent me a list that included selections from: His wife, his two daughters, his business partner and, of course, his admin.  In all there were nine different image files selected, and on one his admin wanted to know if I could change the color of the man's tie...

So, how do you pare it down and make it manageable? We lay a lot of stuff out in advance of the job. If we're doing a directly commissioned portrait; and by that I mean the person we're photographing is hiring me and paying my bill, I'll offer three to five variations which are included in the price of a session. If it's part of a larger set of people and images or it's part of an advertising project I'll cap the included file retouching at two images per person and then charge a set fee per additional file retouch. In the new year I'm moving to a stricter policy of doing one great selection retouch and then charging $25 per image for each additional file selection. When I say "basic retouching" I'm talking about doing basic color correction and tonal correction, making sure the skin is right color and hue, that we have taken out normal pimples and blemishes, dealt with normally bloodshot eyes and soften rough skin. If we need to do more stuff or more complicated stuff then I'll hand it to an outside retoucher and mark up their fees or do it in house on an hourly rate.

If you've been working with PhotoShop for a long time and you've been shooting portraits for a long time you should be able to do a "standard or basic" retouch on a file in five minutes, ten minutes tops. This does not include clipping paths, masking out backgrounds or any other graphics/production work.

With the rules firmly in place when a direct client comes back with a laundry list of files they "might" want it's easy to add the number of files all up and present a price before you begin the retouch process. If that list of ten means adding $250 to their final bill, and they are okay with that, then you win---kind of.  I think it's better to help your client narrow the list down a bit and keep the charges in a comfortable ballpark but at the same time you have to be wearing your business hat right under your artist hat so you don't give away your time. It's pretty much all we've got...

So last week I just went overboard on portraits. Like a customer in a Mississippi buffet line. Earlier in the fall we (assistant: Amy Smith) did a giant shoot with 100 portraits done over two days. This past week was a bit more difficult because of the daily change of landscape, usage, locations and style expectations. On several jobs we were trying to match previous work (which I hate because I dislike doing anything the same way twice) and sometimes I no longer have access to a distinct background or a quirky lens that I thought I hated and sold only to realize I liked and couldn't replace it.

The counterbalance to spending full days with people right in front of your face is to go out for a long walk with a different camera and no people anywhere near your face. I did that this morning. I was dragging around a Nikon APS-C camera with a 50mm lens and just banging away whenever I saw anything I liked. Nothing moved, blinked, squinted, flinched or frowned. Everything just sat there begging me to photograph it. I spent a couple hours in the brisk morning air having a great time with a mundane and unimpressive camera. But it did a nice job.

The final part of the walk took me past the original Chuy's Restaurant. The chain is pure Austin Tex-Mex food but the owners have a flare for crazy decor. There's an assortment of drive in intercoms and reflective balls out front. All of these images are from a space of about ten square feet in front of the restaurant. Sometimes shooting stuff in Austin is like shooting fish in a barrel.

I've polished the reflectors and light stands in the studio and wrapped cords with an unusually graceful touch. I've sent invoices and thank you notes. I've been on the non-portrait cleansing walk and now I'm ready to jump back into making portraits. Good think I've recharged, we've got one coming up tonight and three more before the end of the week. It's nice to be back in balance. Now I'm waiting for chance, luck and destiny to send me a really great annual report....  That should keep the fates (and the studio) busy for a while.

The Rumors have begun. What can we expect from an Olympus EM-6 ( or EM-52, or EM-5pro)?

The rumors are starting to swirl like a light dusting of snow. The people who divine such things are pointing to a February announcement of a new camera from Olympus to replace the three year old EM-5. It's important to note that the EM-5 is, in many people's opinions, the prime driver of acceptance for high end micro four thirds cameras. It upped the ante in image quality, image stabilization and physical downsizing in smaller cameras aimed at professionals and advanced enthusiasts. This make the introduction of its successor seem more important to me than just another upgrade.

I know that a lot of people will point to the EM-1 as the logical successor but they are really two separate products; the EM-1 being bigger and fully equipped with chubby handgrips while the EM-5 is svelte and can be configured to taste. My hope is that they'll keep whatever the call the successor to the EM-5 equally svelte and allow users to add just the right combination of grips and extensions to personalize the camera for the customer's individual hands.

I'm expecting to see the following fixes and upgrades to the new model:

1. The eyecup. While the EP-11 (the bigger optional eyecup) fixes the "random falling off" problem of the stock eyecup it's not that great. The original eyepiece works well for me when it's on the camera. I hope Olympus has figured out how to reliably keep it in place.

2. I fully expect to see a new EVF that's as good as the one in the EM-1 and also adds more processor speed to the mix to cut down even more on any perceptible, visual delay. While they are at it they could slightly widen the entire faux pentaprism hump to make the EVF bigger and get a greater eye point stand off for people who wear glasses while shooting.

3. Since the EM-5 was introduced Sony has made much headway with the one inch sensors that we current find in the Sony RX10 and the Panasonic fz1000. I would like to see more pixel density in the EM-5. A step up to 20 megapixels while keeping the same high ISO noise performance would help ensure that users aren't as tempted to migrate to higher res options outside the brand. And we'd all welcome an increase in resolution as long as it doesn't come with any performance hits. 

4.  I don't necessarily want 4K video in the body but it would be nice to change the current codec to something like the XAVC-S codec in some of the new and firmware upgraded models, like the RX10. The new codec would go a long way to solving the less than stellar look of video from the camera and the newer processors should be able to handle the increased throughput with no problems. While some might feel like we need the addition of microphone and headphone ports I'm thinking that a new SEMA-type attachment that fits into the current accessory port (and could spill up into the hot shoe) would be the logical place for those attachments.

5.  I'm certain that whatever new sensor ends up in the EM-5x will have phase detection AF points. At least it should...

6. Finally, I'd like them to change the exterior wrapping of the camera to something thicker and rubberier. The camera is small, which is good, but I still want to keep a good grip on it. 

Push this camera out at $999 and maybe we can see Olympus profit and loss numbers at least start trending back into positive territory for their camera division.

The icing on the cake for me would be one more lens. I'd like to see a 38mm f1.4. Close to the 75mm Summilux that I enjoyed shooting with back in the Leica film days. Olympus made a manual focus 38mm f1.8 back in the days of the film Pen cameras and it was a great focal length there as well. It would nicely fill a certain hole that I keep stumbling across when I take the system out for shoot.

The rumor was mentioned on DP Review so I do give it a bit more credence than usual. I'm not sure about the February introduction but it certainly would spice up a boring time of winter and might make just the right Valentine's Day present.....

A Saturday walk with a firmware updated camera and an interesting lens. It was my day to shoot what I like.

After a tough workout at the pool this morning Belinda and I headed over to our favorite burger joint, P. Terry's. We were being sybaritic so we split an order of French fries. But P. Terry's fries are no ordinary fat sponges pulled out a deep freeze. They cut them by hand from fresh potatoes and dunk them in hot canola oil. Healthy? Maybe not but nowhere near as toxic as the run of the mill, fast food fries... I brought along a camera. I'd chosen it for the day.

I'd played with all my other cameras last week so as we left the house in a misty, forty degree midday I grabbed the Samsung NX30 out of its drawer and put an interesting lens in the front of it. This is a lens that Samsung sent me along with an NX3000. I passed that camera along to a retired from work swim buddy who needed a good, all around camera for art projects and I swapped out the lens that came with the NX3000 with an 18-55mm kit lens I'd been playing with since the Galaxy NX days. I'd heard good things about the new lens, the 16-50mm f3.5 to 5.6 collapsible power zoom so I kept it around. I would have loved a black version but I am growing fond of the zany whiteness of the copy I have. It gives the ensemble a zebra look.  So I put the 16-50mm on my pick of camera and decided to use the combo as my shooting tool for the rest of the afternoon. 

Freshly fueled by a double burger on whole wheat with the works and a more than equitable share of the above fries I dropped Belinda back by the house, conferred in a serious manner with Studio Dog, and then headed out to see the world through the fifth or sixth model of camera I've used this week. I was not disappointed. While the weather could have been cheerier I was happy for the coolness and the clouds, and the camera and I decided to ignore the whisper light micro rain that was a constant companion for the afternoon. 

I've been in a black and white mood for the latter part of the week and it was my intention to shoot all day in black and white. The NX30 has a mode that they call, "classic" and it makes the frame black and white. It does a few other things like popping the contrast but I haven't really stopped to figure it all out. I just like the effect and it's so much of a "one stop" thing when shooting Jpeg compared with bringing color raw files back to the office, converting them to Jpegs and then using another program to make them artistically monochrome.

But of course the first place I dropped by was the giant graffiti walls with its riot of colors so my initial intention to be a black and white artist was shot all to hell. I switched back to the standard color profile, set the white balance to "cloudy" (because it was) and went back to shooting in non-monochrome. The best of intentions sabotaged by a cinder block wall smeared and sprayed with pigments.

I snooped around for a while and looked at the new art and played with the camera. I was a bit harsh on this camera when I first got it but that wasn't completely my fault. It wasn't the fastest performer in my collection and I had issues with getting the EVF to match the LCD and other problems getting the EVF to switch quickly and with assurance from the LCD when I put my eye to the finder in bright light. A recent firmware upgrade has turned the NX30 into a very, very usable camera for me. The addition of the 16-50mm lens gives me a little bit more on the wide side than I'd had before and, while there is some geometric distortion at the wide settings the lens is sharp enough wide open and very sharp one and two stops down. I hope it is marginally water resistant because I did have to wipe water off the camera and lens from time to time. 

Also, for the first time since I got the camera I played with the tilt-able EVF. I didn't see the value to it when I first got the camera but I was enmeshed in another system at the time and probably not paying attention. At any rate, the ability to use the EVF in a 90 degree fashion was really pretty great today. Everything at the graffiti park was wet and muddy but at the same time all of the art that I wanted details of was painted down near the ground. It was great not to have to "put a knee down" to get the head on angles that I wanted. Later, when shooting quickly on the street I came to realize that I could shoot with the EVF at a 45 degree angle, kind of like a prism finder on a film-era Hasselblad and that was a very quick and interesting way to shoot as well.  I'll keep that in mind the next time I'm shooting portraits with the 85mm and I want a lower camera position.

The NX30 body is smaller than I remembered. I have it here on my desk next to one of my Olympus EM-5 bodies wearing the top half of its battery grip. They are almost the same size when the EM-5 is used in that configuration. The 16-50 power zoom is small and light as well. Especially small when collapsed and closed. The one thing I've always liked about the Samsung cameras is their sensor tech. Different than their competitors. Not better or worse, just different. And as you know, I like different.

One thing I tried to do today was to check in and pay attention to what I think about when I'm walking around taking images. I know I am a sucker for contrasting colors, especially deep reds next to lighter blues. I also love pure greens. But today I was trying to figure out why. I can only say that color is like music for the eyes. My brain and eyes seem to love to find patterns based on shapes  and colors although I am not consciously looking for either. It's all running on some sort of brain sub-routine. I just end up responding by pointing the camera at the stuff I like and wrapping a composition around it. Someone wrote in last week to suggest that I should shoot in a more symmetrical and balanced way. I think the ceiling shot of the Alexander Palace bothered them. 

I could not disagree more. I can't stand to look at very balanced images because they seem static to me. I'm always a fan of a little tension in an image. Whether that tension is supplied by the emotional quality of the content or a little twist to the frame is inconsequential to my enjoyment. I just like stuff that's a little off. 

As I walked down the streets today I thought of the jobs I'd just done and what I might have done differently in each instance. Was I too concerned with the wind on Monday and not concerned enough with the finer points of subjects' expressions? Should I have used different modifiers on Tues.? I could have metered the studio portrait more accurately on Thurs. and I could have fine tuned my location and composition a bit more on Friday. I should have already made a custom preset if I'm going to use Nikon raw files in Lightroom. I have to remember to build in more test shots at the beginning of shoots and not rush to get started. Once I go through all the post op review I forget it, resolve to do everything differently the next time and then start fantasizing about the ultimate way to actually do the business.

Practically speaking though, there is no "right way" to do the business because that would mean shooting the same stuff in the same way over and over again. Trying desperately to have the most efficient and repeatable methodology I could construct. Figuring out the intersection of cost/client acceptance and profit by commodifying everything. Then I would be nothing more than a template of a photographer. An accountant's dream. And I'd quit in a week. I love the challenge of shooting differently nearly every time I go out the door. I've come to believe that if you aren't a bit nervous, not just going out to shoot paid jobs, but every time you go out to do your art then you aren't doing it right. The whole circus is nothing without the stimulation of uncertainty and the thrill of discovery. The challenge is the challenge. The fun part is hitting the wall of fear and anticipation and going over the top to the other side. And I'm sure that's what the folks were also thinking when they painted this dumpster:

And this re-bar.

Next week I start all over again. It's almost like starting from scratch. I have some clients who are knee deep in an ongoing campaign. I've changed cameras systems during the project twice but no one seems to notice. I guess as long as we keep the images in the same aesthetic ballpark no one should care. 

So the NX30 was a delightful surprise today. With the unobtrusive 16-50mm f3.5 to 5.6 it was almost weightless and near invisible. I hope it dries out well. 

Commodification / differentiation. It's a choice. 

Color, Texture and Glow. Things you can find in Marathon, Texas.

Eve's Organic Bed and Breakfast.

©2010 Kirk Tuck

Into every life a little bit of architectural photography is bound to fall....

It was a freezing, arctic day in Puskin, Russia. It was in February of 1995. I was hauling around a view camera case filled with tungsten lights, cables and plug adapters. I had a big bag of Hasselblad cameras and lenses over my shoulder. I was about to enter the Alexander Palace for the first time. But first we had to convince the head of security that everything would be okay. We were some of the first Americans to enter the historic building in a long, long time as it had been repurposed from "palace of the czars" to "headquarters of naval intelligence" sometime after the revolution.

The first thing I saw was this ceiling. I thought it looked wonderful. I loved the details and the colors. So I grabbed the battered and scarred Gitzo tripod and assembled a Hasselblad Superwide camera on top of it. The Superwide was legendary among architectural shooters. The 38mm Zeiss Biogon lens permanently grafted to the front was supposed to be absolutely rectilinear and used at f5.6 and slower the sharpness could be breathtaking.

Once I had the camera set up and position and roughly sighted in via the wonky optical finder that came with the camera I grabbed a Polaroid back and made a test frame on the black and white instant film we used at the time. My brain did some subconscious adjustments based on the Polaroid and then I loaded a back with 12 frames of Fuji Provia 100 in it onto the camera. As was the custom at the time I shot three frames. One at the exact setting which I presumed was the optimum exposure and then one frame about 2/3rds of a stop under that exposure and one that was about 2/3rds of a stop over that exposure. I took one last look at the ceiling and then pulled the camera off the tripod and caught up with my translator, our restoration architect and our armed, military escort.

I am pretty sure the last czar didn't have a strip of electrical conduit running along the wall next to the ceiling in his day but I am happy that I was able to see some of the glory and design of the time.

A trip to Pushkin rewards one with a chance to tour the (very fabulous) Catherine Palace and to also see the exterior of the Alexander Palace. If I could though I would give the traveler a couple pieces of advice: First, don't plan to go in February. It's cold, snow-covered and cold. Unimaginably cold for a Texan. Second, don't take 500 pounds of lights unless you are going on assignment (we were...) they'll just slow you down. And third, be sure to listen to your military escorts when they tell you that a certain view is forbidden. They really mean it.

I know what the tests say but what is my high ISO limit with APS-C? Oh golly, another "real world" look.

When I photographed by friend, Fadya, last month I was captivated with the idea of using HMI lights to do the lighting. In retrospect it was well founded excitement. I am very happy with the way the lights work, their color balance is pleasing and the continuous light source leverages portrait shooting with EVF cameras in a very satisfying way. But the shot above wasn't done with an EVF camera, it was done with a traditional DSLR, the Nikon D7100. I wanted to use the camera to see how it compared with the Olympus and Panasonic cameras I had been using. According to the folks at DXO (DXOmark.com) who test camera sensors the APS-C sensor in the 7100 is the highest rated sensor in it's class and, according to their scale, is a good ten points ahead of the OMD EM-1 or Panasonic GH4 sensors in the various parameters that DXO uses for their evaluations.

This image was shot at ISO 3200 with the camera set at 1/640th of a second and the 85mm 1.8 G lens set at f2.8. I zoomed into 100% and did some pixel peeping and I was pretty impressed by the low noise and the high amount of detail present. It's a bit ahead of both the GH4 and the Samsung NX30 cameras (which I also own and use) but the difference in noise only shows up at 3200 and above so it's hardly a deal killer unless you only shoot in low light.

Here is a "100%" crop from the image with noise reduction in Lightroom set to zero. You can see some noise in the shadow areas but it's also important to know that the original file is 24 megapixels...

I'm always curious how this stuff all works but I'm pretty sure that if you expose well you can get away with a lot of craziness at high ISOs. I am also interested in how this sensor does so I have a baseline of comparison when evaluating the Samsung NX-1. It should be an interesting comparison of sensor with two very different design technologies...

More to come.

Photographic ADHD. Why I light everything I shoot in a different way than the last time.

Noellia with Ring Light.

On monday I shot eight portraits outside. It was fun because it was challenging. There was a brisk wind and some gusts. The client really wanted the images to be outside and we already had rescheduled due to weather so we went for it. I discussed the packing in a post over the weekend but to review I used a medium (3x4ft.) soft box with an Elinchrom Ranger RX AS powered flash head. I set up the gear and positioned the camera so I could include out of focus trees in the background, behind the subjects. The main light came from the right. On the other side I needed to block the direct sun but when I put up a solid, opaque 4x4 foot flag the wind kept pushing the frame over. The stands didn't go anywhere. I was using high rise C-stands that each weigh about 25 pounds and I draped sixty pounds of sandbags over the "turtle base" of each C-stand (C-stand is short for Century Stand, a standard of movie sets the world over...and much more durable and stable than most photographic oriented light stands). 

I solved the issue of the windblown frame by replacing the opaque and sail like flag with net material instead. I use a two stop net and a one stop net to drop the sunlight down into irrelevance but the secret is that the nets let wind come through so they don't act as "sail-like" and they stay in position. 

At any rate, that was the lighting configuration for the day. Big ass electronic flash through a traditional soft box with some light cutters and the aid of a neutral density filter. 

Yesterday I found myself on another location. I was in a medical practice making portraits for the practice's website. We set up to do 12 people but this time I used four fluorescent light banks instead of flash. I wanted to create a look and feel similar to a ring light which pushes down unflattering skin details and lines. I used one of the fixtures on the background, one over the subject's head, just above camera and one each on the sides. Totally different than I usually light stuff but it gave me just the right look for images that will be attached to a dermatology practice! The fixtures are the Fotodiox Day-Flo-Pro models. I find them to be easy to color balance, provide good output and to be reliable. (and cheap). Since they are heavier than electronic flash heads I did bring along bigger light stands and a sand bag for each. I used diffusion right on the lights which made for smaller sources that I usually shoot but the three different fixtures used together gave me a nice, soft images which will stand up to some contrast boost after quick retouch.

Two days, two shoots and two totally different lighting set ups along with very different lighting tools. What next?  Well, I had a portrait of an attorney on the schedule for this morning so after I unpacked the gear yesterday evening and ingested all the files from the medical practice shoot I started mulling over how I would shoot the next day. What lights and what modifiers?

I decided to go with one of my favorite looks and use a 6x6 foot diffuser over to one side. But what to light it with? I went for two K5600 Lighting 200 watt HMIs. One was the open face and the other a fresnel unit that they call an Alpha. The light was perfect and the multiple fixtures let me move the lights a bit further back from the rear surface of the diffusion to elongate the fall off a bit more. 

I used a white bounce modifier to the opposite side and finished the whole thing off with a Fiilex P360 LED light fixture as a background light. Both the LED and the HMIs color matched perfectly and since they were all daylight balanced I didn't have to worry about ambient light leaking in the windows of my studio and causing a color cast. 

Funny that the Elinchrom electronic flash mono lights that seem to be a type of standard working tool of photographers everywhere were not even on my radar. 

Why all the different lights? Why all the different looks? 

I guess I should confess that I get bored easily and using different lights makes every shoot more interesting to me. It's just my prejudice but I think shooting things the same way, with the same tools, over and over again is just mind numbing. The theories of lighting are the same no matter which tools you end up reaching for. You aren't really creating new paradigms of lighting but you are taking advantage of the various strengths each tool conveys.

I had to use flash on Monday in order to compete with the ambient sunlight. I wanted to use the fluorescents on Tues. because they could be used in close, in multiples and not drive the room temperature up. They were the perfect tools to create a ring light effect with tight control. And I used the HMIs today because they make me feel as though I am on a movie set and I can see every little change I make to the lighting as I'm shooting. Couple HMIs with EVFs and you may have the single best combination for shooting portraits in the studio. So it's not just boredom, there is some method in my madness. 

I'll go so far as to say using the same tools every day, over and over again is akin to making a uniform product. That puts the whole photographic endeavor into the realm of being strictly for the money. The desire to play with all the tools means to me that I'm still engaged in the actual creation of photographs, separate from the commerce side, and that keeps me interested, engaged and constantly learning. You can do it either way. But to my mind it doesn't make sense to be a photographer if you aren't a little scared and excited every time you walk in the door to start a project. 

Stay tuned as I finally circle back for a revised review of the new LED panel.

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