I posted so many blogs today on my "image only" blog that Google demanded I prove I am not a robot. More difficult than I thought....

http://bettervisualstuff4ads.blogspot.com

I'm building a blog site that's different from this one. It's all portraits with captions as titles. No comments, no feedback, etc. I've put up the first 50 today and you can go see them at the link above.

I'm building that blog so I can send clients there to look at work I like but without the usual commentary from me or anyone else. It's a fun experiment since I also get to use the dynamic views offered by Blogger.

Drop by and see what you think. Comments here remain open.

The disconnection between what we see online and what we see in a big print.

©1995 Kirk Tuck

It's so hard to have conversations about what we show and see on the web. Sometime in the future, when everyone has a Retina screen and everyone's computing machine auto-calibrates that screen and we all adjust the rooms we sit in while viewing on screen artwork to the same basic parameters, we'll be able to have meaningful conversations about technical issues with imaging. And by extension more in-depth discussions about aesthetics, but right now? It's all a crap shoot. 

This is an image I shot in Rome with a Mamiya 6x6 camera and their amazing 150mm lens on Kodak 400 CN film back in 1995. When I got back home I headed into the darkroom and worked and worked on getting a perfect print of the image. I exposed so the highlight areas had plenty of detail and I dodged at least a dozen prints to open up the shadows and get detail into the dark area of the young woman's hair just to the right of her face. I also dodged and dodged to get more discernible detail from the trees that line the steps in the background, in the upper middle and right side of the frame. I'm looking at a final, vintage print of the image right next to my desk. It's 24 by 24 inches of double weight fiber paper and it has an apparent depth that I can't adequately describe with words. 

The web image is made up of infinitely fewer points of information. The whites are on the verge of blowing out and the trees and hair shadows go to black way too quickly. But, frustratingly for me, the web image is the only venue most people will have to look at an image that I really love. I love the actual print not only for the visceral sensuality of the young Russian woman's look but equally for the complexity of tones and the sense of depth I see everyday when I walk into the studio and look at the print. The web representation is like placeholder or an avatar for the image on the print. A thumbnail representation of the original intention. 

In art history classes I had been shown a large number of Caravaggio paintings via projected slide copies of the original paintings. I understood intellectually what my professors were saying about chiaroscuro and the dark to light translations but I didn't really have an affinity for the painter and his work. The slides were generally copies of copies and didn't deliver the power and detail of the actual work. A few years later I had the opportunity to see a good collection of Caravaggio paintings in Florence and I was spellbound by the work. I went back to the gallery again and again to soak in the work. The work itself was worlds different than the slides we looked at in representation. 

Last year I confronted for the nth time just how big a disconnection there is in our lives between the screen image and reality. I heard that there was going to be a show of Arnold Newman's work at the Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. It was a comprehensive show of his work; hundreds of prints perfectly presented. I spent some time re-acquainting myself with Newman's work in the books I own of his images and also on various web sites. In fact, even though Arnold Newman had presented a slide show of his work to my ASMP chapter here in Austin back in the 1990's I don't think I had ever seen an actual presentation print of his in person. Photons bouncing off the front surface of his paper prints and hitting the rods and cones of my own eyes unimpeded by layers of technology, current or primitive. 

When I went to the show I was stunned at how wonderful the actual prints were. Not just the content of the prints or the composition but the prints as objects themselves. They were remarkable. It had nothing to do with relative size because many of the images were shown as 8x10 inch prints. But the prints were engaging and captivating because they possessed what seemed to be an almost infinite range of tones and effortless transitions between those tones. The heart of the work was more than just good printing or prints as jewel like objects. It was the combination of a artist so far beyond the need to overthink technical details that he was able to concentrate almost solely on the engagement with the people in the prints coupled with a time in our culture when people could take time to make images in an unhurried and thoughtful amount of time. A luxury of temporal space in which to come to know the subject and thoughtfully interpret the subject. 

I still have the memory of just how wonderful the prints were and how different they are from our experiences of seeing things on the web. Yes, the web is flatter and more people can experience an artist than ever before but the experience is diluted and reduced. 

If you've grown up with photography being exclusively a web based construction it might really be an amazing and wonderful thing to go see real prints well displayed. In Austin the logical thing is to go see shows at the HRC or the Blanton. But everyone would be well served standing directly in front of actual art as many times in a year as they can. A trip to NYC will give one ample opportunities to see a wide range of photographic shows and collections. For about the price of a decent new camera body one might just have an eye opening and transformational experience that adds new levels of awareness in their own pursuit of this most curious art form.

What one sees on the web is not what one sees in real life. In art this is a critical thing to understand. 

Off the topic of photography. Working on that pesky freestyle stroke.

The heck with cameras and silly arguments about megapixels. Let's talk about something more important: good freestyle technique! Practicing a stroke incorrectly, day after day, makes that stroke harder to correct down the road. Today is a good day to start working on better technique.

I've been swimming for a long time and I'm here to tell you that your impression of your arm position and its actual position in three dimensions can be completely different. Case in point, I thought I was placing my arms directly in front of me on my freestyle recovery and had been practicing that way for years. A month or so ago one of the coaches stopped me mid-set and told me that I was "crossing over" way too much. That meant that if you drew a line from the top of my head down the center of my body my arms were crossing over that center point in front of my head as I placed each hand in the water. Crossing over reduces the efficiency of your stroke because a certain amount of your catch and pull is spent pulling your body left and then right instead of having all the power of the stroke pushing water back in the direction of your feet. That side to side wiggle is just lost energy and requires even more energy to keep pulling your body back to center.

If you want to see just how much you are crossing over a good drill is to have a fellow swimmer walk backwards in front of you in the pool holding a kick board at the center point of your head. (The board is held perpendicular to water instead of its usual flat on the water position). As you stroke, if you are crossing over, you'll repeatedly hit the board with one or both of your hands. That's a sure sign that you are crossing over.

The cure is to swim wide. You have to swim with the feeling that your arms are entering the water much wider. And even better is to tilt your head back and watch your initial entry to make sure you are getting wide enough. Over time what felt awkward will become normal. (don't keep tilting your head up, you don't want to affect your overall balance in the water...).

Another thing to consider is that the pull of the stroke, from the entry to the final push at the top of your thigh, needs to be more or less a straight line with the intent of anchoring your hand in the water and pulling your body past that point. Moving your arm in a wide "S" curve during the front end of your stroke takes time and uses unnecessary energy to move the body laterally. Every unintended lateral move has to be corrected by use of power expended in the opposite direction.

A quick catch, following by a pull with a high elbow position, and increasing speed and power at the end of the stroke is the optimal way to swim freestyle, provided you don't waste energy and mess up your body position by crossing over.

When you are working on correcting or fine tuning a stroke you may find it uncomfortable at first. The key is to drop down a lane and swim with slower swimmers so you can concentrate on technique instead of speed and endurance. Trying to do a stroke correction while maintaining training at a high level is a recipe for failure as you'll get tired and allow your stroke to fall apart. When the workout is tough most swimmers working on strokes revert to what's familiar and that's exactly where you don't want to go. If you normally workout in a lane that repeats 100's on 1:15 you might want to drop down to a lane that repeats on 1:25 so you have the energy to focus on your course correction. 

And now a photographic tie-in: It's helpful, when reconstructing your freestyle, to see what your stroke looks like both when you are doing it right and when you are doing it wrong. Get a friendly swimmer or coach to video tape you swimming toward the camera. Best to get your person to stand at the end of your lane and for you to swim toward them so you can see clearly your arm entry and catch. Watch the footage pool side and then hope in and fine tune it.

I spent the morning workout really concentrating on my stroke technique. I've been at it for a month. It's feeling easier and more efficient every day. It was wonderful to be in the pool early this morning and to watch the sunrise as we swam. Coach, Tommy Hannan, (Gold medals at the 2000 Olympics) was on deck and coaching with gusto. It's a great day to be a swimmer.

Another Project Just Now Published. A story about a collector and her home in Fredericksburg, Texas.

I first started working for Early American Life Magazine in 1981. I got a call that year from a very nice editor from Harrisburg, PA. She'd been referred to me by one of the people working in the art department at Texas Monthly Magazine. The EAL editor gave me the assignment to make images for their magazine all over central Texas, but mostly around Fredericksburg and Roundtop. It was my first major magazine assignment which entailed shooting 4x5 inch sheet film on locations. It was also my first marathon length shoot using big studio electronic flashes outside the studio. I was nervous but when I picked up the editor in my old Chevy pick-up truck at the Austin airport she assured me that everything would go well. 

We had a blast, I got my first national magazine cover from that first assignment and came home with a fistful of beautiful 4x5 inch transparencies. I went on to do about a dozen more multiple day assignments for the magazine and scored three or four more cover shots. It was a good relationship and one that lasted for well over a decade and a half. Eventually the magazine was sold to a new owner, they moved to a new location and I resigned myself to the possibility that the new publisher and staff would have established relationships with photographers in Ohio, where they are now headquartered. 

I was pleasantly surprised, after a number of years, to get a call and an assignment from them near the end of 2013, shooting images at a restored historic home outside of Fredericksburg, Texas. The assignment went well and led to another assignment last year to photograph the home and collections of antiques expert, Edyth O'Neill. 

It was a warm day in late Spring when I packed up the Honda and headed an hour and a half west from Austin; back to Fredericksburg, Texas. I brought an assortment of lights which included a lot of small LED panels and I brought along two camera systems. The main system was the GH4 with assorted lenses and the second system was the Sony RX10 camera with its fixed zoom lens.

I started the morning with interior images, using the Sony RX10, and never shifted to the micro four thirds system. The combination of sharp focus at wider apertures and very clean files at ISO 100 were enough for me to get the images we needed. The combination of the variable color temperature LED panels and the wide depth of field and great optical performance of the Zeiss lens on the RX10 camera allowed me to move through the house and capture at least twenty five different angles/set-ups in the six hours I spent there. The EVF was very effective in giving me a clean view of what I was shooting in areas with high ambient light levels and the LCD was great for everything else. 

Contrary to my usual practice I used the camera in the Jpeg mode and not the raw mode so I could make use of the sophisticated, built-in HDR system to bridge the gulf between high and low tonalities in a way that would provide a usable files for the magazine. While it may seem counter-intuitive to use this small sensor camera for a national magazine assignment it's really just what the doctor ordered for this kind of editorial work. The lens is superb and when the camera is used on a hefty tripod and you use continuous lighting judiciously, you get files with tons of detail (20 megapixels worth) and a nice, long tonal range. Couple those benefits with the wider depth of field provided by the smaller format and you can get away with things you would never be able to achieve easily with much bigger cameras. 

The magazine used 16 of my images on five spreads and the reproduction throughout is very, very good. The client was very satisfied with the work and the files. When I got the magazine I went back to my archives and compared the images in the current publication with some done over twenty years ago on 4x5 inch sheet film. There are some differences but the lighting style is consistent and in print any quality differences are well nigh invisible. Fun to be able to compare how we did it then versus how I do it now...

If you are interested in early American life; the crafts, the furniture, the homes and so much more, you might want to look into Early American Life Magazine. The writing and research standards are very high and the geographic reach nicely diverse. It was fun to flex a different part of my photography brain. I found myself liking the challenges of architecture again. 

The End.

Here's a project that I shot just before the holidays. I did the images for the website producer.

ART MASTERS WEB SITE  I love to share work once the clients have gotten everything squared away and have publicly published the work. I shot the images for this site for my long time friend and continuing client, Lane Orsak, who owns Creative Marketing Consultants. (nearly every image on his site is also one of mine, which speaks volumes to customer loyalty. And makes me happy).

We spent one day shooting at the offices of Art Masters and my main job was to make people who don't spend any time in front of a camera feel safe and secure there as we pursued made images of them that would help illustrate their business.

I shot  with a Nikon D7100 camera and a little bag full of Nikon lenses. I lit almost every photograph but I tried to make every image look unlit; natural. All the additional lighting (in conjunction with fluorescent ceiling fixtures) was provided by Fotodiox battery powered LED panels. I used four of the smaller 312AS panels and one 508AS panel. The big panel had two layers of 1/8th plus green filtration on the front to effectively match the unfiltered color of the other four panels. All the panels lasted for every set up over the course of six hours without the need to change batteries, which makes them a very efficient lighting tool because it obviates the need to run cables or nurse them along too much. The 312AS lights are small enough to allow me to just balance them on the top of a bookshelf or on the floor, if need be.

Working with a professional like Lane makes shoots very straightforward and productive. He had a list of images in his head that he could share with me as we went along. Even though he knew what he needed he was very open to us just playing around with different angles, set ups and expressions to get the best material we could. He also has an eagle eye for details so he helped make shots better by un-wrinling stuff that shouldn't be wrinkled and removing background clutter that might confuse the viewer's eye.

We had a great time shooting the images and working with the clients. The post production on the images Lane selected was very straightforward. That's because we were careful to do custom white balances as we changed from scene to scene, and I metered carefully in manual mode as we shot.

We talk about doing the work here a lot. But this is typical of the day to day assignment that sustains the business and makes the job ultimately enjoyable. Gear is fun and good but a great client is priceless...

Everything about art is a process. In photography---even more so.

Cronut Inventor

Dominique Ansel

At work in  a kitchen in Austin, Texas

©2014 Kirk Tuck.

We spend time finding our subjects. We spend time figuring out what the composition should be, how to deal with the light, how and when to shoot. How to process. How to display or share. It's easy to let the process create its own roadmap for you. The nature of art is to fight against the comfort zone enough to make the images work. 

Sometimes we fail and sometimes we succeed and sometimes there is middle ground. That's the nature of doing a process that's always open to interpretation. 

Why I think the EM-5-2 might be an important tool for photographers who also want to be videographers.

After the announcement of the new Olympus EM-5.2 I wrote a piece about the two things I thought were important to photographers and videographers in the new camera. For people who are only concerned about still imaging it was that the new high resolution setting could provide fully accurate color. I didn't really see the enormous files as so much of a benefit as much as the nice work around of the bayer pattern of color interpolation. Pure colors means no aliasing and wonderful tonal separation. That's a distinct plus in the realistic rendering that so many want. But the thing that makes the camera a potential boon to videographers (now that the camera has a more detailed and robust selection of bit rates....) is the potential to do much more hand held work with the camera instead of always trying to tie the camera to a tripod or to some sort of (cumbersome, and largely ineffective) handheld stabilizing rig.

Of course the remarkable stabilization in the camera works beautifully for still images but the potential for moving video and smooth hand holding is huge. If the rolling shutter effects are engineered out this camera should be able to do some pretty amazing stuff. At least that's what I talked about at first blush.

But then I thought about it and realized that I had never really tried using the Olympus EM5s I already have for any kind of video. I just took everyone's word for it and assumed the internet was well informed and that the EM5 was a dud for video. I bought a GH4 to use instead of the EM5 for video and never really looked back. And that was a big mistake.

So yesterday I grabbed an EM-5 and went toe-to-toe with conventional wisdom. Conventional wisdom also states that if you want to minimize the appearance of camera movement in handheld video you are always better off with shorter lenses. I put my 60mm Sigma lens on the front of the camera, left all the conventional rig stuff, at home and headed over to the graffiti park to make some video. It's a test. Only a test. But it showed me that even the older EM-5 could actually shoot decent video at 1080p 30.

This test is meant to show one thing. It's meant to show that the image stabilization in the EM series of cameras can provide a very stable platform with which to shoot handheld video. I've been shooting black and white with these cameras lately and decided to keep doing so for this test. There's a long sequence of people going up and down the wall followed by a much closer shot of two women sitting at a picnic table, watching the crowd and smoking. Finally, I added some footage of a movie truck rushing by. What I hope I've shown is the stability of the system for handholding. It's a major benefit for still photo and video shooters.

With the addition of much more sophisticated video files I think it makes the new EM5.2 a very capable second camera in a narrative project. And for not a lot of cash out of pocket. Not every advancement has to be high ISO noise abatement or megapixel increases to work for at least some of us....

Untitled Project from Kirk Tuck on Vimeo.

Handheld in the late afternoon. 60mm Sigma lens. No tripods, monopods or shoulder mounts were harmed or even disturbed in the creation of this short piece. This is not an art piece nor is it for any client. It's just what we used to call a test.