Warming up on South Congress in anticipation this week of my last commercial assignment for the year. Still having fun with that crazy Sigma fp camera. Who knew?

I went photographing and holiday shopping on the ever popular 

South Congress Ave. (AKA: SOCO) today to look for gifts

and get my hands and eyes warmed up for work this week.

I got lots of fun photos but I was only able to buy.....

a cappuccino. It was good. 

It's odd. I thought this December was going to be a slow, relaxed and non-work month. I kept trying to get out of the business but they kept pulling me back in... But the best laid plans...

I've actually gotten quite busy this year end which is probably more an indication that businesses took a deep breath before the November elections and decided to pause in order to see what might happen next. That generated a backlog of demand for overdue services and...boom... the rush into the end of the year was on. Mostly my work has been with law firms and medical practices this year. Especially here at the end. And no matter what you hear from the whining chorus on the internet clients seem happy to spend  right now and largely are indifferent to whatever budget figure you might toss their way. It's a good time to be a freelance photographer. Or, at least it is from my perspective. 

On Wednesday this week I'll pack up the car with lighting and camera goodies, make a detour over to the pool for the morning swim practice, and then head straight downtown to park on the 2nd floor of the parking garage connected to the 26 story building in which my favorite law firm (I'm a vendor and also a client!!!) occupies a couple of floors. I'll set up two very new Nanlite Compact 100 panels, toss some diffusion on one and call it "fill"; put a grid on the other and call it "main." The Compact 100 panels are self-contained, soft light, LED fixtures that offer very nice, soft light from a 16 by 24 inch front diffusion panel. You can use them bare as defacto soft boxes or you can put Nanlite's extra diffusion cover on the front (which adds about two inches more to the depth of the light. Alternately you can use their egg crate, grid attachment to make the light more directional, with less spill. A bit of control for those of you who need more control. I'm also bringing along several of the Nanlite LumiPad 25s which are smaller panels that give you soft light from a 12 by 14 inch panel that's only 1.2 inches in depth. 

While the bigger, Compac 100s need to be plugged into an A/C source the smaller LumiPad 25s can be wall powered or they can be powered by Sony video-style NPF batteries. These smaller panels make very nice hair lights, background lights and accent lights, and they take up so little space in a travel case that it seems dumb to not bring them along just in case. 

With this particular client; the one I'm working with on Wednesday morning, we've always used continuous light because we find our best locations for environmental portraits in the public spaces around their offices. Since most of their client conference rooms are nearby and have frosted glass walls the continuous lighting is much less intrusive/disturbing/distracting than what we'd get with pop after pop of electronic flash lighting. We've lit the portraits for this client with continuous light LEDs for going on ten years now and it just plain works. It's also easy to match our lights with existing interior lights and the light coming through floor-to-ceiling windows in most parts of their offices. 

The four LED lights pack into one rolling case with a second, soft bag for the light stands and tripod. Instead of having to put up soft boxes or separate diffusion frames for our lights these hard shell panels go straight onto light stands, get plugged into the wall and are ready to go on the spot. Time savings? At least ten minutes saved per set up. And the same again on the back end.

We do a photo style for this firm that incorporates their office environments as backgrounds. These are thrown mostly out of focus but it's a fine line because you want them to read as distinct, nicely designed interiors. We light our portraits of attorneys to get the same soft look one gets from using a medium sized soft box or umbrella from close in. For math geeks we try to put the light at a distance from the subject roughly equal to 1.5 times the diagonal measure of the light emitting surface. A bit more if we are using a low ratio fill. This gives me soft transitions in shadows and helps to subdue unwanted skin textures. 

We've used so many different cameras and lenses over the years; everything from micro 4:3 cameras to Fuji medium format models. The point of continuity is that we're generally staying within a 70-105mm, 35mm focal length equivalent for our portraits. Usually an 85mm on a full frame sensor camera and a 120mm on a MF camera. A 50mm lens on an M4:3. All of the images are shot in a horizontal orientation  because that was the style set for me by the original webpage designer. And it's worked well for the client (with updates along the way...) for the last decade. 

On Wednesday I'll be doing portraits of two different attorneys; new additions to the firm. I arrive at 10am and I'll be ready to do the first portrait by about 10:30. Then I'll reset in order to get a slightly different but stylistically similar background. I'll do the second portrait at 11:30 and then pack up and be home in time for lunch. And maybe a nap...

On this week's adventure I thought it would be fun to mix up gear between two kinds of systems. I'll use the Leica SL2-S as the primary camera and then use either the 75mm f1.9 Voigtlander Ultron or the VM 90mm APO-Skopar f2.8 lens, depending on how much room I have to maneuver in. Both are great lenses and both are designed for use with the M series cameras. But all it takes to adapt them to the SL camera is a simple, Leica M-L adapter. I guess, out of habit, I'll toss the Sigma fp into the camera bag as a back-up. One never knows.... Best to be prepared. Merit badges for the folks with a solid "plan B." 

I'm of the belief that one needs to commit to frequent practice in anything that requires eye and hand coordination, and also requires dealing congenially with other humans. Take too much time between practices and you lose that special touch you had between your seeing and your reactions. And, without warming up to other humans on a regular basis you might become touchy, grouchy, or otherwise antisocially bombastic. So, I was out with a camera today and will probably be out again tomorrow for a number of reasons...but warming up for my two sessions on Wednesday is the current catalyst to keeping up momentum. It's also nice to look out toward infinity for a large sections of the day. Good for your eyes and your brain. I'm also breaking in some winter boots for upcoming travel. You have to walk in them to do that.  And, I had a wonderful time just walking around in a t-shirt and short pants in the middle of December. It was 76° here today. Nice...but weird. 

Hope you guys are doing well. Stay in touch. The family rush of the holidays is a meager excuse for not leaving comments!!! 

Somebody else is still out shooting fun stuff for a living. Count on it.

Who knew that curtains could be so visually delightful?

I was at Maufrais today. It's mostly a high end hat shop in SOCO.

JC recently sent me a thoughtful note about why I should never, ever wear a

Stetson Open Road hat. Like the one LBJ always wore. His argument was

sound. I thought I'd go by and look at them one last time...

Well, that's $425 saved.

The mannequins on SOCO are snottier than the ones downtown. 

But you can see the family resemblance. Yeah?

I walked by this woman sitting in front of a coffee shop working on her laptop.

I observed that she was, in a certain way, very beautiful. I don't know why I walked by.

But I got twenty or thirty feet down the sidewalk and decided I really wanted to to photograph

her just as she was. I turned around, walked back and asked her permission 

to make a photo. She said 'yes' and started to close her laptop, turn and smile.

But I wanted an image of what she looked like at work so I smiled and 

asked her if that would be okay. It was.

When I got the frame I wanted I thanked her very much.

She replied, "Thank you for asking first. I appreciate that." 

And there it is.

 

Today I was delighted to reacquaint myself with a miraculous 32 megapixel, square format camera. One that shoots really nice "monochromes" I spent an hour making square photographs before lunch.

 

A small portfolio of square, black and white images for a cold and wet Friday the 13th.

Three photos done with a Leica SL2 set to 1:1 format.

Color profile set to Monochrome HC (high contrast).

Lens: the cheap and wonderful Panasonic 50mm f1.8 S. 

Don't like squares? Go home!

 

I used to be a "seat-of-the-pants" photographer until I read about pre-visualization on a famous blogger's site. Now I spend hours, even days, meticulously planning for the end result.

 

Before reading (yet again) about pre-visualization I might have walked by this point in space and casually turned, clicked the camera shutter and then walked on by. But now armed with the knowledge that all the really, really good, super smart photographers rigorously pre-visualize every square millimeter of every image they take I have changed my slothful ways and adopted a wholly new practice. 

I woke up one morning, soon after diving into an exhaustive article about the process of pre-visualization and in my mind I had a vision of what this scene should look like if I applied the needed rigor to my once cavalier approach to enjoying the taking of photographs. I had missed the part in my photo education which clearly states that obsession with minutia and a desperate need to control the nearly uncontrollable flow of the universe is almost mandatory if your work is to be taken seriously. 

To that end I started by establishing the GPS coordinates for the scene I had seen in my dreams. Once that was entered into my notebook I drove over to look at the location and the assemblage of safety railings, roadways and retaining walls. This scouting was broken up over the course of three different days, each taking several hours, during which I took many scouting shots and took notes about the angles that I thought most closely replicated the dream state image. Once I'd made a thorough mapping of the space via numerous overlapping images I went back to the studio to begin laying out the material on a large board and brought out a graphing calculator so I could compute the perfect location in the X/Y coordinates. Back to the scene I went with a measuring tape, a laser rangefinder and a can of yellow spray paint. 

After careful measurements to ensure that my camera position would, indeed, give me the exact distance from the railings and at the exact exo-center of my overall composition I over-sprayed paint around my shoes and the tripod legs to make an exacting marker for future forays into this magic of pre-ordained imaging. 

The next thing I needed to do was to determine the exact required height for the nodal position of the taking lens on the camera. I could calculate that from the oil paintings I executed by memoried reference from my dreams of the scene. One of the great powers granted by pre-visualization. Persistence of potential reality...

But in doing the calculations for distance to the railing, accurate left to right positioning for the tripod and camera, and exacting calculations for the camera's nodal height and the angle of attack for the lens I realized that I hadn't carefully experimented with the best focal length to re-enact my original vision. 

I came back to the location again with a full rasher of lenses; from 16mm to 500mm and tried each one of them to see which would give me the exact appearance and perspective which I deemed would be vital for the success of the image. It was a close call with lenses from focal lengths of 45mms to about 60mms. I wasn't sure because there were no exact fits so I went back to home base and ordered a number of lenses in the limited range. I thought about zoom lenses but I wasn't sure I could get a zoom lens with the right final aperture. How sad it would have been to carefully and thoroughly pre-visiualize the image only to be laid low by the wrong aperture setting. 

Another round of trial and error with a small (ten) sampling of wide normal, near normal, normal, slightly longer normal and, an outlier, a 58mm focal length showed me that I was narrowing down the field of appropriate candidates. And don't get me started on the weeks and weeks of shooting test charts to determine just how much character and of what kind the final lens choice would need to deliver...

I finally had all the pieces together and went to the site to make initial photographs, fully understanding that an accurately, well and accurately pre-visualized end result might require many more return trips as I compensated for time of day and time of season. And meteorological conditions. I returned to the  site over and over again. In the steaming heat of the Summer, during days of driving rain, days of sleet, and even one day of an ice storm which paralyzed the rest of the city, but on no single occasion did all of the parts come together for me. I quit my job to be more available to the changing conditions that would lead to the perfect result. Then I realized that I might never be able time the shot so that a random car was in the right spot on the right day, at the right time. So I hired a car and a driver and had them on call for weeks at a time. 

Today was the day. The weather was gray and damp. There was a perfect mist in the air. I called the driver and had him rush to a rally point a block away from the location on the roadway that was mandated by the pre-visualization. I set up the tripod, the camera, the lens and the point of focus that was the result of weeks of mathematical calculations based on Bamburger's Construct of Alternate Conscious Displacement which predicates that exacting locations have a singularity that calls to the artist. I waited for traffic to dissipate after the lunch rush and counted on several friends at the top of the route in question to radio me with minute-by-minute traffic analyses. At the critical moment I called the driver and he set out onto the course in a carefully rehearsed automotive choreography. 

As I watched the car approach I readied myself for the exact moment of clarity and resolution. 

I clicked one perfect frame on two vetted memory cards and held my breath for a moment as I reviewed the file. Then it was off to the studio to go through the pre-visualized processing steps that would bring the vision I had so clearly in my mind, now months earlier, into reality. So, one perfect photo can equal months and months of incredible work, trial and error, the loss of any contact with social reality and so on. But it's all worth it because I'll finally be able to write, with a straight face, that this is the result that I wanted all along. That I had, in fact, pre-visualized it.

And here I thought some photographers were just good at making up this crap, after having mindlessly grabbed a shot, in order to make it seem as though their image was imbued with some greater value or that they had a more cogent idea of how to "make" photographs than everyone else. 

Yes, of course, it's all bullshit. As is most of the stuff one reads about pre-visualization outside the studio. I guess some people need to continually justify their indecision about when and why to click a shutter. But previsualization is akin to trying to plan to fall in love with a complete stranger who is mostly out of your league.

Don't fall for it. And if you believe in the power of previsualization there's probably no help for you. You are in a cult...