After all these years some people are still hazy about the blog...

Get the hazy reference? The person behind the camera is..... hazy. Cool huh?

We write what we want. We post when we want to. We use the "royal we" as many times as is pleasurable to me. You are free at any time to skip a post, read a post later, read all of a week's posts on one day, or to just look at the photographs displayed here and then go away.

Sometimes I will be working on a project and not be able to post for a few days. Other times, at the end of a project, I'll have more time and will make myself happy by posting more blog entries. Blogging is not my job. My job is taking photographs and making video content for clients.

Blogging is a fun outlet for me. You are not my client. You are not my boss. You are not my mother.  This is not Target or Nordstroms, I am the only "complaint department" and the complaint window has been closed for years.

I hate getting a comment telling me what to do with the blog. Especially one that says,

"Anonymous said...

One post a day, please. No one likes a serial poster."

So, if you happen to be the entitled reader who donated that thought yesterday, please stop reading my blog; it is obviously overwhelming you. If you are one of my regular readers or a commenter who includes his name along with a comment, Thank you!

Other than an occasional nudge to buy a book I've written, and a once in a while link in the copy to an Amazon product page, this blog asks nothing of its readers other than a modicum of reciprocal politeness and the willingness to share your experiences and knowledge.

I don't hawk weekly, monthly, quarterly workshops, no appeal to buy my (high nano-acuity) hyperprints, no sidebar filled with display ads, no crowdsourcing appeals, hell, I don't even have a t-shirt to sell you. (but I am working on a coffee cup (joke)).

Read at your own peril. But don't tell me how to enjoy my own blogging. Got it?

We are now ramping up the comment moderation. I've put Charlie Martini in charge. You can still disagree with me but you just can't be a dick.

We light differently for black and white and for color. In black and white contrast and tone is the thing. In color it's the contrast or confluence of colors in the frame....

Portrait of Austin actor, Woody Scaggs, show for a promotional ad. 

Style in photography is really just the process of becoming more and more comfortable with the way you like to do things.

Photograph done for a marketing project with a Theater in Austin. We were promoting a play for Live Oak Theater. The play was set in Texas in the 1930's or 1940's. I was trying to both do my style of lighting and portraiture but also to give a nod to the tools of the day. I used a number of small, fresnel lensed, tungsten spotlights to do the lighting. The edge effects and softness of the image on the sides and in the corners was done with a device used under the enlarger lens, in the darkroom.

When I did the project for the theater I ended up hand coloring the final image and we hung a show of the had colored work of the entire staff in the theater's lobby. They are still some of my favorite images.

There is something special about using low output, continuous light. I won't try to define it but I see a difference between the longer exposures and the kind of look I get from using electronic flash. 

Portraits of two Texas based photographers. Both quite accomplished in their fields.

Michael O'Brien. 

James Evans.

Both O'Brien and Evans are famous in gallery and photographic circles. Both have had several books of their work published and both are working in Texas. O'Brien, here in Austin and Evans, in the small west Texas Town of Marathon.  This is what they look like to me.

I love to make portraits of people. All kinds of people...

Over the past few years I've posted hundreds and hundreds of portrait images to this blog. When we discuss my portrait work some people feel duty bound to write, critically, in the comments that I only photograph beautiful, young women. I don't think that's true and it's certainly not a reflection of the day-to-day work that I pursue. I've put up more images of women than men but I think that's only to be expected of a heterosexual male from my generation as the female form (and the female face) has always been referenced in our culture as a nexus of beauty.

But I am equally happy photographing men. This is a image we did years ago that was used in an annual report for an international financial services company. I don't know if the company still exists but the photographic style and the depth of rapport seem more or less current to me even some 18 years later.

This image was not done in studio; it was done on location at the Dallas offices of the company. My assistant and I carved out a bit of space in a giant inner lobby, set up one of my favorite weathered canvas backgrounds and, in the course of a couple hours, executed four or five portraits that we were all very pleased with.

The project was always intended to run in quadratone black and white and, in those days if an image was intended to be used in black and white that's how we shot it. We didn't hedge and shoot color hoping to make an appropriate conversion. It helps to have clear intentions at the outset because there are decisions about tonalities that are specific only to black and white.  We also had much more latitude for dynamic range and exposure with medium format black and white film that we might have had shooting color transparencies.

While I have recently filled in shadow areas on my portraits a bit more than I did back when this was produced the basic lighting concepts have remained the same; as has my approach to working with people who stand in front of the camera. Male or female.

Kim. Not literal.

Not too sharp.

Nothing technically perfect.

My idea of a wonderful portrait.

A nice break from the pursuit of checking all the craftsmanship boxes...

Half frame of film.