Which portraits do I like best? The ones that have meaning for me. Connection. A reason to exist.

B.Y. ©2012 Kirk Tuck, All rights reserved.

Twenty years in in which to grow more beautiful. A side by side comparison of two black and white images taken twenty years apart.

2012.

1992.

The earlier one taken on a Hasselblad with a 150mm lens. 

The later one taken with a Nikon using a Hasselblad 150mm lens with an adapter. 

The early one scanned from a print the later one a digital file.

My continuing opinions about the use of stock photography for corporate advertising.

Here is something I wrote a while back to run on LinkedIn. It's my honest appraisal of the use of stock photography for branding by major ad agencies. I get that mom and pop operations may be budget restricted but given the cost of doing "real" branding ads and ad placement......

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/stock-photography-lost-imagination-kirk-tuck?trk=pulse_spock-articles

An image from an annual report project last year.

In a hospital lobby. Talking about energy.

I love photographing annual report projects. We used to do a lot of them but many companies opt not to print the big, four color brochures that used to be more or less standard. Now they print the financials on plain paper with black ink and depend on their web content to fill in the emotional blanks. 

One of the projects I handled last year was for an electric utility company. They serve residential consumers but they also serve enterprise and corporate customers. One of the images the marketing department wanted was a discussion between a hospital engineering person and a representative from the utility. They wanted the image to say, "Hospital." 

We located a customer facility and got permission. While the image does not look lit we did use a 60 inch umbrella near camera position to create enough fill light so the faces "read" well.  The light came from a small, battery powered electronic flash, used at a low power. I feathered it as well as I could so that it didn't spill light all over the floor. I was helped by intentionally cropping out (in camera) the part of the ceiling effected by my fill light. 

I used a Nikon D810 and the 85mm f1.8 G lens, set to f2.8, to make the shot, which wound up being used as a spread in the finished report.

I was going to remove the exit sign in the top, middle of the frame because I have photographed for many architects and interior designers and they hate exit signs in their photographs. Hospital people like to make sure they are always seen to be in compliance and so having the sign show was not an issue.

Just another day out of the office with cameras...

Procrastination. I always want to work on stuff that promises nearly immediate gratification, not the mirage of riches down the road...

Rush Hour at Swim Practice.

I pretend to be pretty disciplined where work is involved but I have to admit that I have a weak spot. I hate writing long proposals for projects that won't be taking place for weeks or month from now. I'd rather go swimming, drink coffee, and discuss photography or video production with friends in the industry, or just go for a walk. 

Today is one of those dangerous days. I've been invited to create a proposal and budget for a high production value video by a Texas based utility. The video needs to be five to seven minutes long and, given the subject matter, it should be a fun and challenging project. But before I get the contract and the go-ahead I have to go through the process of concepting, discussing methodology, and budgeting. Yes, I have to write a proposal.

Most of the content for the piece needs to be shot outside and that carries with it a host of possible issues that can be tough to budget for and tough to schedule. We'll need to do interviews outside on remote locations (meaning, with no electrical power).  We may need to fight the sun with big diffusers, a portable generator and HMI lights. That means we need some crew. But then again the days may be overcast and perfect. We may be able (as I will optimistically propose) to schedule four interviews per day over the course of two days but, then again, people's schedules seem to be in constant flux these days. 

We'll need to schedule a segment with the CEO. Those sessions are always subject to change; both in content and schedule, right up until the very final edit.

Then we'll need some stock footage and some music, along with a narrator. I can plug in prices very approximately but I always fear that some committee, lurking behind the curtains, will scuttle all our first choices for various highly subjective reasons and send me back to look for more. Again and again. 

So much easier to get up and go into the house for another cup of coffee. So much more fun to sit here and write this blog. Even more fun to head to the pool for some spirited swimming, but it's Monday and the pool is closed. 

The simplest cure for work procrastination? Run out of money. That's always an effective whip to motivate even a jaded procrastinator like myself....

The sooner we start the sooner we're done....

Daily Practice is a good thing for swimming, playing the piano and making art with a camera. Familiarity engenders comfortable knowledge.

Post Swim Self-Portrait.

When I look around at the contemporary landscape I am often surprised that no one carries their camera with them anymore, unless they are on some sort of photographic mission. I guess the rationalization is that everyone is carrying their phone and so are equipped for those times when an image presents itself. Then, of course, if the image doesn't turn out well they have a built-in excuse to trot out --- "it was just shot with my phone." 

When I was a student at UT Austin I was fortunate to make the acquaintance of a photographer named, Garry Winogrand. He was a visiting lecturer in the College of Fine Arts, and also a regular habitué of the hi-fi shop where I worked part time. One semester I took his class. It was a revelation to me; that photography could be nearly totally immersive.

It was back in the 1970s and everyone was into photography around campus. Olympus, Nikon and Leica cameras dangled casually over shoulders, and over the corners of chairs at coffee shops and bars. It was common practice to people watch on the patio at Les Amis Cafe with one's camera on the table; exposure set, ready to capture some wry and interesting moment that might unfold in front of us.

We wore our cameras to class and we took them along with us everywhere but into the pool. 

Garry Winogrand was a role model for some of us. He didn't take his camera with him most places. He took one or two or three Leica M cameras with him everywhere and he shot all the time. He could load those cameras and set exposure and focus without ever having to look at the camera. As he walked down the main drag across from campus he was continually adjusting focus and exposure, and constantly shooting whatever caught his eyes.

Garry made a lot of images but he never had to make the excuse that this picture or that picture turned out poorly because it was taken with his phone. 

Thinking about this now I believe that Garry carried his camera at the ready in order to train his mind to be always ready. To train his mind not to be self-conscious about the idea of, or the act of, taking photographs of strangers in the street, or strangers in the hallways. 

As photographers we seem to have become sensitized to society's anxiety about the use of images. We fear that our behavior will be interpreted as intrusive and sinister, or that it may cause discomfort to the people we observe and photograph. We self-restrict because we are part of our culture and feel the unspoken, but quite real, constraints and pressures that events of the last two decades have cumulatively hobbled us with.

And, like most habits, the surrender to the pressure of the group is ever self-reinforcing. The less we carry our cameras around the more uncomfortable we come to feel when we do carry them around. Some of us become more furtive in our efforts and some quit the field altogether to become "landscape" photographers. Only shooting images without people in them in order to remove one more source of friction from the process of making photographs as personal art. (Even though some artists would say that all good creativity involves some amount of friction in order to be manifested into existence...).

In essence this surrender seems to signal that we have become cognizant that we are doing something almost tabu. Something almost perilously outside the mainstream. But in reality our acquiescence to perceived social norms may be, at least partially, our response to merely the general disappearance of cameras in our everyday lives. We don't see as many cameras. We feel segmented from the group by nature of our extra "plumage." The camera over the shoulder comes to signify our implied differentiation from our social groups. We become outsiders. And the cycle of reinforced behavior continues, and continues to constrict. 

The level of highest comfort will be achieved when we achieve homogenous parity. But.... If we fancy ourselves to be artists then the discomfort of exclusion is part and parcel of the artist's experience. We need to be a bit outside to see past the objective self-image of the group in order to make subjective images as commentary on culture. Just as Robert Frank (a Swiss citizen) was able to step outside the collective emotional reticence of 1950's U.S. culture to shoot "forbidden" images of our tender psycho-social underbelly we, as artists, also need to stand outside the group's self-censorship if we are to express our real and authentic voice. Otherwise the cameras exist just as toys for tactile enjoyment. 

What photographers like Garry Winogrand showed me was that we don't wear our cameras through our daily lives to make a fashion statement or to show off our buying prowess but to become personally comfortable with the "idea" of being able to respond to visual and social stimuli wherever and whenever our muses favor us. By keeping the camera close by we are making clear (to ourselves and the public body) our intentions to photograph. And we do so by, if necessary, walking against the current of our contemporary culture instead of being swept downstream by our own emotional trepidation of seeming to exist on the periphery of "the group." We trade a certain amount of social safety net for a larger amount of autonomous thought and action. 

But the constant carrying and use of our cameras isn't really about thumbing our noses at cultural convention, it's about building a fluidity of both practice (eye, hand, brain and subconscious coordination) as well as re-building our own understanding that one of the rights and privileges of living in a free society includes both our free expression, and the covenant to protect our individual rights as a group. 

I carry a camera with me everywhere and, like the "worry beads" of my Turkish friends, I have the camera in my hands when I am in between meetings, on buses, in waiting rooms. My fingers come to know where the controls of the camera are and how to hold the camera to reduce its movement. The familiarity takes hesitation out of practice.

As a swimmer I know all too well that a week out of the pool means I am "out of practice" and "out of shape." In photography the "out of practice" translates to a weakening of intention to be photographically present now. "Out of shape" translates as a loss of muscle memory and habit. 

Like all rights, the more we ignore our privileges, and underestimate their importance and relevance, the quicker they go away. Our hoped for immersion into our art and our craft suffers when we allow the momentum of popular opinion to sway us into abandoning our public pursuit of our arts. 

But we need to make sure we aren't (in)actively complicit. Making good images in public has always been hard but people have always succeeded in making valuable artifacts of their cultures anyway. The first step is to make sure that our intention to create follows through to bolster our courage to publicly embrace the process. To make other people comfortable with the idea of people carrying their cameras we must first make ourselves comfortable with that idea. 

First step? Well, it's lunch time here and Belinda and I are heading out to our favorite burger joint for a couple of burgers and a shared bag of fries. You can count on me having a camera over my shoulder. Who knows what art may transpire if someone drops the ketchup in a particularly interesting way....

Ancient lenses on brand new cameras. How fun!

Found object off Sixth Street in Austin, Texas.

Close up of same.

One of the main reasons I bought a Sony a6300 was to see how well my fairly large collection of Olympus Pen F, film era, lenses would work with the new generation of Sony imaging sensors. I knew from having owned both a Nex 7 and a Nex 6 that the lenses would cover the APS-C format. But on the older Sony cameras some of the wider and faster lenses had issues with odd color casts in the corners and whatnot. Have modern sensors conquered old issues?

Yesterday I shot some images with the 38mm f1.8 and they looked good. No problems with chromatic aberration or weird color cast corners. Today I decided to spend a little time with another old favorite. It's the 40mm f1.4 lens from the old Olympus half frame system. It's attached to the a6300 with a $20 Fotodiox Pen F to Nex adapter. We all went out for a walk...

I found the above image adjacent to the historic Scarborough Building on Congress Ave. and Sixth St. Never saw this unusual and ancient vent system before and the sun was hitting it in a nice way. I stopped to snap a few frames. Now, it's important to keep in mind, when evaluating a lens that's more than 40 years old, against some of the modern "ultra-miracle" lenses made for digital cameras that it's not actually an even playing field, in some cases. Not equal at all.

The new generations of digital lenses don't have to be designed and manufactured with nearly as much care.... A lot of the heavy lifting is done in-camera with software. Lousy resolution in the corners? They can fix that with a bit of interpolation and geometric correction! Not as sharp as we might want? There's a lens profile for that! Ditto for outrageous vignetting. I think most buyers of kit lenses and inexpensive primes, made for manufacturers' own camera systems, would be a bit chagrined if the in-camera magic was turned off and they actually saw how much distortion their lenses produced. And how much vignetting there actually is in the compromised lens designs. And how much sharpening was being applied to yield an impression of high sharpness. But my old Olympus lens doesn't get the in-camera spa treatment.

Nope. The ancient Olympus lens doesn't have any electronic connections. No way to tell the cutting edge cameras of our time how to fix its optical issues. And there are no profiles in post to help them along either. It's pretty much a reality that what you see is what you get with older lenses. If the lens designers didn't do their job correctly in 1969, and the factory floor didn't do their job correctly in 1969, then you got a lens that made images that look like crap. Surprisingly, that's not what I see from many of these little, solid, metal barreled optical systems. 

The image above was shot handheld at 1/125th of a second. There is no internal image stabilization in the a6300 body, and certainly none in the lens. Just the trembling fingers of a middle aged man, wrapped carefully around the camera body while bending over precariously to line up a shot. Fingers trembling with the demon scourge of the hand held shooter = caffeine. And yet. And yet when I pulled the images into Lightroom I saw sharpness and depth in the files. Miraculous given that none of the usual crutches of contemporary photographers were involved in the image's creation. Just an old lens, a new sensor and a mildly faulty stabilization device (me). 

While I understand that eventually computational techniques, coupled with massive data sampling (huge resolution sensors), will one day reduce the compromises involved in software lens correction to a minimum I can not help but wonder just how much better the lenses of today might be if they were produced to the standards that many makers were very capable of meeting forty or fifty years ago.

Could it be that a lens designed to perform optimally, without the need for a mathematical helping hand up, might be turbo-charged into stellar performance if the number crunching and  profiling applications were put to the task of making exemplary designs stellar? I would guess that's the impetus behind the Zeiss Otus lenses and, of course, the real Leica lenses. But I can't help wondering if the same precision and tolerances, applied to average lenses, might make us a whole lot happier.

Just a thought. 

So, how do I find the performance of the ancient 40mm f1.4 Olympus Pen lens on the newest copper wire, BSI, Sony APS-C sensor? It's pretty darn good. Which makes me wonder if the Olympus OM lenses from the 1970's and 1980's might also have merits which I have not yet plumbed. Might be interesting to find out. Hope I haven't already missed the run up in that market...