My favorite portrait of photographer, Nick Kelsh.

©2013 Kirk Tuck. NYC.

I met Nick when we worked together at the Photo Expo in New York a few years back. Whenever I look at the photograph I am reminded that, even though I presume to know a lot about portrait lighting, one is never too old or too brilliant to learn something new from a master of the craft. 

I despaired when I arrived at the Samsung booth to find the one softbox Samsung had acquired for us to use in our demos was not the 54 x 72 inch one I had requested but a much smaller, 20 x 30 inch model. Not what I had in mind. Not what I had planned for. But then I watched Nick use that modifier closer, and at angles I'd never thought of. He played that little box like Van Cliburn played a Steinway (or a Bosendorfer). 

The portraits he made were wonderful. 

I played at it after I watched him work and I got it. I loved the fall off. I loved the proximity effects. I had my eyes opened. I got less attached to my preconception of what kind of raw materials I needed to make nice work. 

I'm just posting Nick's image to say, "Thank you for the impromptu and unintended workshop!"  I'm glad I decided to pay attention. 

On another note: The busier Austin gets the less busy it gets. When the city is filled to capacity with SXSW attendees, and in the middle of Spring Break, the city feels full but the actual level of work done by the natives drops to some sub-baseline level. Just like the week between Christmas and New Years. Large swaths of the creative community bag work to go see music, hear about new technology and listen to panels about making movies. People wha aren't interested in the Festival know it's a good time to rent out the house for two weeks and get the hell out of town. 

One more weekend of music and then everything goes back to normal. Just letting you know why there are a few more posts than usual here. 

Curious if ANY of my VSL blog readers are here at SXSW? Anybody? Let me know if the comments...

We'll arrange something social next week. 

ads....

A link to my Studio Portrait Lighting Class with $25 Off.

Food Photography. by Andrew Scriviani

Off Camera Flash Photography. by Neil van Niekirk

One of the original Craftsy Photo Classes and 

still one of the best! 

Night Photography. by Lance Keimig

I met Lance a couple of weeks ago in Denver

and found him to be really fun and knowledgeable 

this class reflects what he teaches in hands-on

workshops in Ireland and Iceland, as well as 

cool places around the U.S.

Narrative Photography: Storytelling with Photo

Essays. by Mike Hill.

How to make what we shoot into a cohesive

train of visual thought.

Perfecting Photoshop Portraits. by Lesa Snider

Walking through downtown. Stop and say, "hello." Welcome collaboration. Get nice photographs.

©2016 Kirk Tuck

I know this shot doesn't fit into the usual definition of street photography. It's too close. The man in picture is totally aware of both my presence and my intention. I stopped to say, "hello." I asked permission. Too much of what's done in the name of street photography these days is nothing more than "hit-and-run" photography. Lots of images that pass by on the web show people from the back. Lots more are done surreptitiously, with cameras held out to the side; shooting blind. 

While I'm sure those images have their place they don't bring a smile to my face the way street portraits do. It's a different way of working with people and a different way of shooting. We can't always work the way we want to and, I've done my share of anonymous shots, but when I have the time and can get over my innate shyness I find that the images I make, person to person, are the ones that make me happy. 

On a totally different note: I've walked through SXSW several times this week and thought I'd give an anecdotal camera inventory appraisal. This year the young, future film makers and working photographers using Sony A7x cameras were a plurality rather than an oddity. I saw dozens of them. Mostly used by still photographers but also a good number of them being pressed into video camera service. Interesting, as the last few years saw Canon with the lion's share of the hipsterama market...

Camera life changes....

Black and White in the West Austin Studio. Just for fun.

©2003 Kirk Tuck.

I had just finished a long day and evening photographing food for a restaurant in the downtown area. I wheeled my gear out the back door of the restaurant and packed my car. I went back in to say, "goodbye." The restaurant was in a U shaped building that was filled with restaurants and bars; the central courtyard area was a popular venue for local bands. I went down to see who was playing and saw "Anna" in the crowd in front of the stage. 

During a break in the music I approached "Anna" and her boyfriend and introduced myself. I gave them my card and told them I would like to photograph "Anna" some time. Why? Just because I thought she was beautiful.

A week or two later I heard from them and we arranged a session in my studio. I was shooting with a Rolleiflex SL 6008i at the time. That, and a 150mm Schneider lens. It was a quick shoot. Five or six 12 exposure rolls of black and white film and a few rolls of color negative. We all shook hands and, they left. A brief and singular intersection that led to some good prints for me. 

I was so fearless then. Has the world changed or is it me?

Below are a selection of online classes from Craftsy.com. Click the links to go and check them out.

Thanks!

A link to my Studio Portrait Lighting Class with $25 Off.

Food Photography. by Andrew Scriviani

Off Camera Flash Photography. by Neil van Niekirk

One of the original Craftsy Photo Classes and 

still one of the best! 

Night Photography. by Lance Keimig

I met Lance a couple of weeks ago in Denver

and found him to be really fun and knowledgeable 

this class reflects what he teaches in hands-on

workshops in Ireland and Iceland, as well as 

cool places around the U.S.

Narrative Photography: Storytelling with Photo

Essays. by Mike Hill.

How to make what we shoot into a cohesive

train of visual thought.

Perfecting Photoshop Portraits. by Lesa Snider

Breaking in a camera that is new to you. Each camera has a personality, you have to spend time understanding it to make good work with it.

This is a Nikon D810. Widely believed to be the best "all around" DSLR

in the marketplace today. Can I just pick one up and shoot it

and get perfect files right out of the box? Nope.

The web is packed with articles about how to choose a new camera, reviews of the latest camera products, and charts, graphs and infographics about how they perform. But in very few cases are there articles that tell you how to go about breaking in a new camera so that it consistently does what you want it to do. 

I'm sure we each have a different approach to getting familiar with the way our cameras operate but I'm equally sure that we're all looking for similar things: Good color. Good exposure. Good focus, Just the right sharpening. Pleasing or accurate tonality. 

If there was one universal camera menu, and if changes in that menu effected all cameras in the same ways, we'd only have to figure out one universal camera workflow and then overlay that to all the cameras we shoot with. But, clearly, this is not the way our camera universe works right now. Every maker has their own color palette, their own ideas about what constitutes the right exposure formula and so much more. We all want consistency but sometimes we really have to work at it to get what we want. 

I am using the D810 as an example because

A repost from the earlier days of the Visual Science Lab. Six years ago, January 2010. The anatomy of a wet shoot...

http://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2010/01/getting-wet-quick-look-at-fun-shoot.html

Fun for me to go back and re-read stuff from a while back...

Another five star review for "The Lisbon Portfolio." An action packed "spy" novel starring commercial photographer, Henry White.

Order your Kindle or Print Copy from Amazon.com today!!!

Another image that convinced me the time had arrived to re-appraise one inch sensor cameras. It's a "lab test."

A laboratory in New Jersey. ©2106 Kirk Tuck

I'm pretty sure I'm going overboard with all this "one inch" enthusiasm but please know that I'm not rushing to abandon all other formats or denigrate their use as great imaging tools for photography. I guess I'm sharing this succession of images and stories from my experiences shooting smaller format cameras on real jobs because I am personally so amazed at how well they work in lots of different situations. I believe that the smaller format cameras are important tools to have along on most projects and offer an ease of shooting that, in many cases, is unparalleled. 

We all have a prejudice, based on digital camera history, that tells us that all big sensor cameras make better images than all smaller sensor cameras. If you are just measuring noise response at higher ISOs you'd be more or less correct but there is so much more that goes into the success of an image and a lot of it has nothing to do with the noise formula. Even in that arena the one inch sensor cameras I am currently using outperform the noise characteristics of even full frame camera from only a few years ago. I have only to pull up images from the Sony a850, a900 or Canon 1DS mk3 to know that this is true. So, here we are five years down the road from the introduction of the full frame