ACL Fest Bricks My Printer. Bastards.

I don't really know if it was the rock music profiteers who tear up our public parks every year but the timing was suspicious. I was writing invoices this morning and I turned on my Canon Pixma Pro 9000 printer to get ready to (archaically) print out invoices for clients. Don't know why I still send them paper invoices in the mail when I'm already sending them .pdfs but it seems like a nicely redundant reminder that they should pay me for my work and image licenses.

At any rate I went into the house to get a cup of coffee and as I'm trying to decide whether or not to put cream in my coffee all the lights, AC, etc. goes off. Ten seconds later it clicks back on and thirty seconds after that I hear the warm up music at the Austin City Limits Festival for the first time this week. The two weekend festival starts today. It's a mile from my house.

I can only conjecture that the Austin Power people needed to shut down the power for a few moments in order to incorporate the gigantic power sucking festival into our portion of the grid. I later found out that the schools in the neighborhood also went black for a few minutes, etc.

Well, when I came back out into the studio the computers were re-booting and the music and lights were back on but the Canon inkjet printer sat there being dark. Totally dark. I hit the power button. Nothing. I unplugged and replugged. Nothing. I changed outlets to a known, working source. Nothing. The tech part of my brain diagnosed a failed internal power supply, even though the device was plugged into a protection device. The MBA side of my brain (very atrophied) weighed the repair versus replacement costs and the advantages of a nearly decade newer printing device. It also ran a sub-routine about depreciation and cost of ownership. All indications pointed to the spiritual side::::: the universe was telling me that it was past time to get a new printer.

The acquisitive gear-y side of me already had a

The Answer to my EVITA quiz.

The answer to the camera and lens question: The Olympus EM5.2 camera and the

Olympus 50-200mm f2.8-3.5 4:3 lens. Big and heavy but nice and sharp...

Well. It's a wrap. Another fun, yearly conference has come, been photographed, and gone. How did it go?

September was "life in the fast lane" for me. I was booked on a project, or chained to post production, every single day of the month, except for a couple of Sundays. I worked for international bio-chem companies from Switzerland, local tech companies, industrial concerns, commercial construction companies, the Theatre, a collection of health care practices and two law firms. Oh yeah, and one conference. I could stop working on the first of October and coast through the quarter but....I would begin accruing a Karmic Debt for the first quarter of 2016. 

But what I want to write about today is a re-cap of the last week. The nuts and bolts of a high end event. How high end was the high end? Well, at the last session of the day, on Monday, they served everyone Moet Champagne. We drank our way through a discussion of securitizing something. I'm not really sure what we were securitizing but it doesn't matter. The actual attendees learned stuff and had fun. 

This is a conference about finance and real estate. But it's not a "workshop" about how to buy and flip houses on a "one off" scale. It's for bankers, federal regulators, investors and others who buy thousands of properties, provide access to financing and also securitize the assets for the investment community at large. Attendance at this conference is by invitation only and all attendees are required to agree not to disclose any quotes or proprietary information they discover at the conference. From high executives in the federal government to executive V.P.s at Goldman Sachs, it really is an audience of heavy hitters. At one point I looked up at a panel on the stage and counted 6 CEOs of billion dollar+ companies. Not bad. 

The conference started on Sunday evening and went through Weds. This is the sixth year that I've covered the conference and I don't think it violates my N.D.A. to tell you that I did wear a coat and tie for every session. Along with nice shoes. (Yes, I wore pants...). 

But my intention here is not to describe the conference in more detail than I need to in order to tell you the story of the photographic coverage. 

When I shoot conferences like this one I need to take into consideration that I'll be covering keynote speakers, moderators, participants in panels and emcees. I want to shoot multiple angles of the stage and include wide shots of the stage, and tight close ups of every speaker and panelist.  I also need to shoot break out sessions, and coffee and refreshment breaks. Signage shots and venue shots are also appreciated. It's like a long, three and a half day wedding with multiple brides. But unlike wedding photographers my brief is to be discrete, never use flash during a stage session, and never call attention to myself, or try to direct the action. There is no posing and no "do overs."  All this means that I shoot lots and lots of frames, not only to cover my ass but also to give my clients lots of choices. Different angles and different expressions.

I really thought a lot about

Evita Part Two: Which lens was this?

Evita Still Photo. ©2015 Kirk Tuck, for Zach Theatre.

An image from the dress rehearsal of "Evita" at Zach Theatre, on Tuesday night. Which camera? Which lens?

Evita Still Image. ©2015 Kirk Tuck, for Zach Theatre. 

I loved this frame when I saw it in the Lightroom gallery. It's one of the 1500+ images I shot this past Tuesday for Zach Theatre. I'd be curious to see if you know which camera and lens combination I shot this with and why you think your choice is the accurate one. Don't look for exif info. That's cheating...

Go.

Still at the banking and global finance conference but I thought I'd put up one of my favorite portraits, just for fun.

Thanks for coming by. I'm shooting at a conference until Wednesday evening and I'm just in the studio to charge some new batteries that arrived today for the Olympus cameras. They are Wasabi Power batteries that I bought from Blue Nook. I've been buying their Olympus (and Panasonic) batteries for a year or so and have yet to have any problems with them. No problems at all.

I first took a chance on them when Olympus has a supply problem with their batteries. I couldn't get any and I needed them for a trip I was taking. The Olympus batteries, at the time, were about $54 each. The Wasabi Power batteries are priced like this: Two Batteries, One Really Nifty Charger = $28.

I deleted a comment yesterday from someone who (with very little actual knowledge of the profession) scolded me for shooting with Olympus and Nikon cameras if my goal is to do great portraiture and make "big money". He was wrong but I didn't have the time, inclination or energy to tell him why he was full of B.S. I've been doing this commercial photography thing for a long time, have made (and continue to make) good money doing it, have as much technical expertise as anyone in the market, and know advertising and marketing forward and backward. Not looking for career advice right now.

Next week is a bit zany. We're having a new roof put on the house and the studio. We're having attic fans installed. We're having a retrofit to our back porch. We're having new gutters put up. We're having our fence re-painted. Just a little Fall maintenance to keep this Austin property humming along.

This weekend is the first weekend of the great two week traffic jam we also call, ACL Fest. Look for most of the major roads that serve our part of the city to be closed, detoured, rendered unusable. Look for about a quarter of a million people paying big money to mostly sit in the dirt and listen to music in a park that will then be closed to the public for months as the city tries to grow back new grass.

Look for a general slowdown of all central Austin productivity for the next two weeks, minimum.

Thank goodness both this economic conference and the dress rehearsal for Zach Theatre's play, Evita, will be done before the music mayhem starts. Yes, we can hear the bass line (only) for most of the bands at ACL Fest even though we are a mile from the park.

On another note...


The Olympus cameras are working very, very well for the conference. I have finally mastered flash with the mirrorless miracles. Thanks for asking.

Need some cheaper batteries? Try the Wasabis. Here's a link:

Portrait. Fade to black. Career, hard turn.

I had a little epiphany this week. I'm tired of accepting diffuse and unchallenging work. Especially as regards portraits. I'm pretty sure I can make a living, in the future, by doing portraits in the way I want to see them, not in some commodified style that just fills space and "describes" the person in the frame. I want people who view my portraits to feel as though they have come to understand something about the subject, even if it's only the nature of their patience. Even if it is a visual and emotional illusion.

Something happened to a lot of the artists I knew when the economy collapsed in 2008. They became fearful of their commercial futures and let that fear dictate the terms of their engagement with their art and craft. I don't expect the 90% of American people who never lost their jobs to understand the emotional impact on people who lived a more precarious existence as freelancers. It's as though we scrambled, en masse, to do the lesser biding of agencies, companies and commercial audiences to compete for the few remaining projects of the time. We became afraid to push back and lobby for the quality each piece deserved because our collective fear of jinxing a deal by pushing for parameters that would continue to move the aesthetic we had created forward. Clients cut budgets and they also, by extension, cut the potential for excellence.

I talk to so many people in related communication crafts and most frequently what I hear is that they are nervous about raising rates back up because they feel that clients have become used to holding the upper hand and dictating the construct of the engagements. But what I hear from the actual clients---a step beyond the ad agencies and intermediaries---is a dismay that all creative work has become boring and diminished, and that they resent their agents and proxies for disregarding the need for great work in order to pursue a budget number that they think their clients will----tolerate. 

"We never asked them to limit the budgets. We never demanded that things be done on the cheap. We want the best creative resources we can buy and we're willing to pay for them." That's what the good clients are saying. The cost cutting happened because the intermediaries felt the fear they were partially creating and embraced it in their own dealings.

Seems it's time for a cathartic throwing off of the budget harness. Time to step up and tell people that we are no longer interested in doing homogenous crap just to keep the doors open. It's time to pull out the stops and get back to the real work of our work----making people look at what we've done with a sense that they are seeing something new or expertly seen and translated. And making sure that what we have done is exciting enough to merit getting our client's marketing work a second look. Even while it means asking for more money and rejecting demands to commodify.

Use of stock photography is a form of creative cowardice. Presuming a client is part of the legion of cheap, petit bourgeois culture, hellbent on the bottom line (at any cost) is passé. The brave new world of commercial art is all about standing out, again. Leading the charge. Innovating and not being afraid to demand workable budgets for hardworking art. The clients feel it. The rest of us need to get on board. Or get off the train.