Just how much lighting does an image need to make it work?

This is a portrait of Mark Agro. Mark is the president of Ottobock Canada, a health care device company. Several years ago he was in Austin, Texas for a week long meeting and we were called on to make a portrait of him for use in advertising and on the web. We had at our disposal the new U.S. headquarters of the same international company. It's a beautiful office on the sixth floor of a new building at the Domain Center in north Austin.

One of the features of the building that every portrait photographer would enjoy is the floor to ceiling windows along one entire side of the building, facing north. The light coming through the windows is soft and gorgeous. The interior of the building provides a lot of architectural stuff that looks good thrown out of focus.

I set up one, big soft light directly above and behind my camera position to provide an almost invisible fill light. I used a 60 inch, white umbrella and a small, Yongnuo strobe to provide the illumination.

For this image I used a Sony A7Rii and the Sony 70-200mm f4.0 G zoom lens at f4.0 to f5.6.

The flash was set at  something like 1/16th power and was about 15 feet from Mark. While the web is filled with forced examples of people using very expensive strobe kits to do the same kind of lighting an expense of $58 for the strobe is really all that was needed. If I remember correctly the umbrella cost a few dollars more than the light source.

It's easy to read too much stuff from people who are directly or tangentially linked to strobe or camera manufacturers and come away with the idea that certain pieces of expensive gear or complex techniques are mandatory for professional work but the truth is that knowing where to put a light is much more mission critical than which particular light you might select. The same applies to cameras and lenses.

The portrait was successful. It is one of my modern favorites and it led to dozens more executives being photographed in pretty much the same spot with similar variations of the same lighting. It was additionally successful in that I got to meet Mark and share a pleasant conversation which ultimately led to a very nice friendship.

In an earlier segment of my career I would have shown up with a bunch of Profoto lighting gear, run cords all over the place, and probably butchered the wonderful natural light that was freely available. I would have been so fixed on technically based solutions that my honest rapport and easy conversation with Mark might never have happened. So, how much lighting should you use to make portraits? The absolute minimum you need is just about right....

Just how out of focus does every background need to be?

We photographed this image of Selena at Willy Nelson's small Texas town (he's moved a bunch of cool, old, Texas buildings to a ranch somewhere outside of Austin (NDA signed....). It's a popular location for period movies about Texas. Selena had a band called, "Rosie and the Ramblers" and she needed some publicity shots. And there we were.

At the time I was playing around with some Canon 1D mk3 cameras and a complement of Canon glass and I could have easily used a wide open aperture to make all the details in the background nothing more than a blurry wash of colors. It would have been in keeping with the prevailing compulsion among photographers to make everything into a bokeh experiment. But, practical person that I am I assumed that we get permission and travel out to a cool, private ranch just to blur the background into anonymity so I stopped the lens down a bit until I got a balance between emphasis on Selena's face and some descriptive texture in the background.

There's also a bit of flash being used to make the photo but I tried to make that as invisible as possible.

Could I have done the same shot with a m4:3 sensor camera? You bet. Could I have done it with a full frame camera? Yes, of course. The idea though is that neither format would have been demonstrably "better." Each would have resolved the detail we needed for every application we intended for the files. Each could be color corrected into the right box. We just had to decide what was important in the overall look and select the controls that would make the image happen the way we wanted it to.

It was a windy day and that was something we could not control. Saved us from having to rent a wind machine to blow Selena's hair around...

Thinking a lot about backgrounds. And diagonals. And catch lights. And texture.

Woody came into my studio to do a shoot for a live theater production of a play called, "The Illusionist." (Or something along those lines). The marketing director was also looking for some dramatic portrait shots to put into the marketing mix. As strange as it may sound to photographers who came of age in the time of digital we did a lot of our work at the time in black and white; with black and white film, and black and white prints, because some of the newspapers, weeklies, and magazines had large sections that were only black and white. It was a cost saving measure. Their printers needed 8x10 inch black and white prints which were then half-toned with process cameras for printed reproduction on web presses. Images needed their own graphic contrast if they were to survive the process with any semblance of quality.

We learned how to print individual prints for nearly every paper, neighborhood rag and magazine that used our publicity photographs.

I loved tossing light into half the background and plunging the other half into darkness. I loved filtering the lens with a light yellow-green filter so Try-X would add tone and texture to skin. And I loved tweaking each print for its intended destination.

Today, once you hand off a digital file to an online magazine or website you may come back to see what they've done with your work a few days later to find that they've added teddy and inappropriate filters, cropped the hell out of it or cut out the head and dropped it into a totally different background. Butchering your art has just become so easy that it seems touching it and messing with it has become irresistible.

At some point in time printers and art directors appreciated certain aesthetic points enough to keep their damn hands off the buttons and let a well seen print exist as it was meant to be.

At least if one writes and produces one's own blog one can be reasonably assured that one will not come back the next day to find one's work colorized and mezzotinted; much less tortured by Instagram filters.

For me the two things that make this portrait work are the background and the catch light in Woody's right eye. Not the right eye of the print but Woody's right eye. Right?

Here is a quick selection of my photography and food books (English titles....). In case you missed one or two. All still available on Amazon.com. All still readable.

Benro All-Terrain Monopod. And by "All-Terrain" I mean it's equally at home supporting photography and video...

Adjustable arm. Ambidextrous. 

My selection for a monopod system.

This is a Benro A48FD monopod. It's a heavy duty monopod that features the three little support legs at the bottom of the structure to help stabilize the whole unit. It also features a full size Benro S4 video head at the other end. I used to think monopods like this were kinda dumb but now I'm finding them to be very cool. 

Many years ago I got a Leica monopod as a gift. It's a lightweight affair made by Tiltall and it came unadorned; without a head and without the little feet at the bottom. It provided more stability than just handholding a camera, but not by much. The most useful technique with it was to brace one's body against a wall (a corner, if it worked compositionally...) and so get an extra measure of movement curtailment. But until cameras and lenses came with image stabilization a naked monopod was mostly only useful to me to support the weight of heavy lenses that came with their own tripod sockets. Not a common occurrence around here. 

More recently I got a Berlebach wooden monopod and it's nice enough but subject to the sam limitations as the ancient Leica version. When it comes to handling cameras and lenses not equipped with image stabilization nothing beats a good tripod. My big issue with

Talking about the business of photography reminded me of an interview Michael Johnston did with me on the publication of my third book. Back in 2009. I just re-read it. I like the comments best!!!

http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2009/08/an-interview-with-kirk-tuck.html

Here's the book we were talking about:

It still works.....

You can get a copy here:

Ming Thein and a few others are talking about the decline and retirement of photography as a profession. My information is entirely anecdotal but I'm just going to have to say they are wrong.

It is always someone's Golden Age of Photography. It's always someone else's Fall of Photography. Depends on context.

From time to time I get frustrated because the photography industry won't stand still and let me fully benefit from my past experience and time equity. There are moments when clients seem as though they will never call, text or e-mail the offer of even one more project. I, like many professionals who've been at this for a while, am not immune to the fear, ambiguity and uncertainty of the market place. But the idea that the markets for photography have vanished is, according to my anecdotal information, not true. And, in the last 50 years, with the exception of extreme or localized economic disasters, this pessimism has never been true.

It's 9:45 in the morning. I'm in my smallish studio/office space. It's got about 450 square feet of usable space. The center part of the large room has a ceiling that about 14 feet high and unobstructed by cross beams. The space is painted white and has concrete floors, covered with foam tiles from Costco.

I've been in the office now for a while, getting ready for a 10 am portrait shoot and also catching up on new e-mail from, mostly, clients. Ongoing, paying, relatively happy clients. I've cleaned up the clutter from my space. The bathroom is cleaned and polished. The batteries charged. I'm not jumping into any task that requires too much focus because clients sometimes come early and I don't want to waste their time.

It's January which is traditionally a slow period for our imaging industry. I'm 62 years old which pundits and photo bloggers will tell you is far too old to be relevant in the photo industry. I'm old school so social media tells me my skill sets are no longer relevant, in fact, have never been relevant to millenials or Get-X-ers. I'm choosing to work with micro four thirds cameras instead of "full frame" cameras; which camera reviewers suggest should be the kiss of death for my professional career. In fact, to judge by conventional wisdom I am doing (and have been doing for a while) everything exactly wrong. I should be destitute at this point. Ready to shuffle off to that island where there is no one besides other ancient photographers with ancient cameras clamped onto the rails of their walkers, carefully gliding around complaining about how digital ruined everything.

While it's true that few of my assignments have anything to do with the kinds of jobs we always see from "working" photographers who post every moment of their lives on YouTube. I'm not able to show you behind the scenes videos in which a horde of scruffy assistants mill around giant monitors tethered to tomorrow's cameras, watching various "fashion" models gyre and gambol on vast sheets of seamless paper, Profoto flashes blinking in time to retro-disco music. (Wait! Wasn't Donna Summers an artist from our generation?).  It's not that I wouldn't like to do stuff like that it's just that those shoots don't seem to actually exist as PAYING jobs but are fabricated in order to make content for websites that try to sell workshops and push affiliate links and other new age advertising.

You may suggest that I'm just out of the loop and that those warehouse shoots filled with C+ grade models and lighting from the 1990's really do exist but that I'm just not invited to know about them. Ah. I get it. Classic denial. But the flaw here is that most of us actual working photographers have long relationships with advertising agencies in many cities. Some of us even have family, spouses who work in the art departments at big ad agencies. They laugh when I show them some of what passes for a "shoot" on the web environment. Big laughs. Hysterical laughs.

That's not to say that there are not "premium" jobs being done every day in nearly every market place. It's just that they are being done by sober, experienced hands in the business who are not surrounded by endless entourages because.....it's not profitable. There's no financial benefit to having extra people in your studio, drinking your coffee, eating your craft service and chatting up your models and clients. That's why real photographers are only surrounded by clients, stylists, and one or two good, and hardworking, assistants. If at all. And while there is a bunch of great new talent coming into photography I've come to understand that most corporations, agencies and larger businesses value proven results over new potential bling for the kinds of jobs that have substantive budgets attached. There are lots of small, micro-web-Instagramic-mini-campaigns on which new teeth get cut. The big money doesn't usually get wasted on trial balloons.

So, why do I say that the sky is not falling? Well, when we advertise our services business increases. I've worked several big projects in January, mostly for clients represented by marcom staff half my age, who are returning clients. We're in the planning stages for a multi-day image catalog project for a large radiology practice, we're finishing up a portrait project for a large oral surgery practice, we've just finished a multi-day assignment for a national accounting company. We successfully navigated a three day shoot for a high tech medical device company and the folks at ZACH Theatre just reached out yesterday to see if we could do a stunning and thoroughly of the moment television commercial for a new production.

Seems like we continue to provide a value proposition (which includes: experience, proven results, nice work ethic, teamwork oriented, the right gear for the right stuff, nice-ness, etc.) that corporate clients, smaller businesses and ad agencies still value. I think the thing that makes our business profitable is that we continue to market, go to lunch with clients, volunteer for high profile charity projects and deliver finished photos people like --- on time and within the parameters requested. Is there any other way to do this?

Some conjecture that because everyone in the world has flooded the photo viewing universe with every conceivable image that civilization will ever require that people no longer care about looking at photographs. This may be true if we're discussing day-to-day "look at me" photographs but those quick snaps of coffee cups or duck-faced selfies with crooked monuments in the background aren't what clients (mostly) are looking for. They need good images of their products, their plants, their environments, their people and their processes. None of which (typically) can be sourced from stock sources on the web.

The one true thing is that video is now part of the mix. It's not a separate thing anymore. It's part of the commercial experience of photography for business. Photography is now a bigger tent. Just as we never did our own retouching in the film days  and we are now routinely called on to "fix" images, move heads around, add absent executives to group shots, and so much more, we never had the making of marketing movies on our radar back when video was tough to do, technically. Now it's growing to be just another facet of the big jewel of photography. It's another income source. It's something new to learn and offer to imaging clients. For others it's a continuation.

The bottom line is that this is the Golden Age of Photography for a whole new generation. They'll grow into it as they learn how to market and how to meet the expectations of the people with checkbooks and account balances. 

The web has made a sitcom of the photographic process but people with persistence will learn to see beyond the "90210" or "Beverly Hillbillies" or "The Big Bang Theory" popular culture fictions of the photo marketplace and see the truth on the other side. Then they will learn to make the market pay them what they are worth. It's not magic. It's just not the end of the world as we know it either.

I'm happy to have a roster of mid-tier projects from good, solid clients. There's less sparkle and fewer people are impressed by our day to day work but at the same time we've worked with many of our clients for longer than a decade and there is a comfort and profit in the stability of their patronage. The bigger jobs come with bigger drama. Bigger risks. Fun for game shows, less fun for sustainable business. Go figure.