Another repost from the alternate site. You may have already read this but then again, you may not.

 August 19, 2024

THE OPPRESSIVE SERIOUSNESS OF TRADITIONAL PHOTOGRAPHY DISCUSSIONS.

Ceiling in the Alexander Palace. Pushkin, Russia. 

It's a bit funny. When I talk to people who make photographs as the sole source of their income they tend to be open and accepting about diverse styles of photography, alternative processes, trail and error, experimentation just for the hell of it, and so much more. Their approach to making images for themselves, as opposed to making precise images for clients, is light-hearted and there is a general acknowledgment that all technique is open-ended and subject to change, evolution, transformation and metamorphosis. 

On the other hand, when I talk with some hobbyists or even with people who are somehow attached to photography but not earning their living directly from the process of making photographs as their main job, the discussions about rules, guidelines, and various boundaries of tradition seem to be much more front and center. More important. The traditional rules of image making seem almost obsessive. Unflinching formalism is firmly in charge.

While a pro might know from hard won experience that there are dozens of ways to make a particular image, and dozens of cameras that can do a good job in the undertaking, in the minds of less flexible enthusiasts following "the rules" becomes almost a compulsion. 

In books and interviews by "artistic" photographers, who also have full time jobs in other industries, I have read accounts of them hauling 8x10 cameras to the tops of far flung hilltops, spending a lot of time reading the reflections of every tone in the field of view with a spot meter, endlessly focusing and re-focusing, using specific tripods as though any other tripod would precipitate failure, carefully selecting from a host of color filters to apply to the front of the lens, mixing darkroom chemistry with special water from a special reservoir, making endless test strips under an enlarger with a specific kind of light source, having endless discussions about the best way to archival-ly wash a double-weight print, how to light a print,  and how to look at a print, all followed by metaphysical discussions parsing the meaning of everything in the print. And then there is the whole rigamarole of actually coming up with lofty titles for the pictures. An unchanging "bible" as it were for the "right way" to make a photograph...

Each step down from this "ultimate" way of making photographs is made to seem suspect. "Why a 4x5 camera when 8x10 cameras are available?" "Photographs from a digital camera? Heaven forbid."

I watched this all through the time I spent in the film age. It was almost as if each person who introduced a larger camera; say an 11x14 camera or even a 16x20 camera was appropriating the photographic moral high ground with their ever increasing dedication to camera labor. And garnering the ethical high ground with their ever more intricate and relentless attention to detail. Grasping for the mantel of top expert. And, as in politics, the elevated aesthetes of photographic practice were revered by a whole collection of acolytes who came to believe that this fixation with how to be perfect in photography was something to aim for. Something to pull forward as a litmus test of photographic purity. The ever present lure of the "golden age" to those who never really experienced it.

I guess this meant that the people who worked with the huge Polaroid cameras were the ultimate experts in the modern history of photography. All hail artist Chuck Close! One of the last folks to work with Polaroid's famous 20 by 24 inch instant camera...and with the host of assistants needed to wrangle lights, tiny depth of field and wild film handling requirements. 

All of this tends to baffle me now 20 or 25 years into the digital photography age. Styles have changed. Technical stuff is ever evolving and yet a cohort of photographers seem rooted into a belief that all the things related to producing a certain kind of image from the film photography days has a guaranteed place on the hierarchy --- many steps above those who've made seamless dives into the realm of digital and the gallery space we call the web. 

Certain traditions seem oppressive to me. Telling aspiring portraitists that they must always use a 1:2 lighting ratio or, at most, a 1:3 lighting ratio. Telling the same students that all portraits must have hair lights and back lights. That all prints much conform to some sort of Ansel Adams formula to be legit. That large format landscapes are the royalty of photographs. But mostly if they are done in a regimented array of gray tones with a solid black and a solid white nestled somewhere in the images. Even my own allegiance to Tri-X film seems silly now in retrospect. Like the thrill of running behind trucks into a cloud of DDT...

It's all too much. 

I'd rather not read about "how we used to do things in the good old days" when we should be figuring out "how we want to do things right now." Enough already. Too much misguided "how to" and not enough "wow! That was fun!!!"

When the obsession with rules sucks the fun out of photography it's time to change the rules...

The past was an interesting time. But not so interesting that I want to continue to live there.

A post about staying current. This ran on my other blog last Fall. I thought it belonged here as well....

 October 13, 2024

OLD DOGS GOTTA LEARN NEW TRICKS IF THEY WANT TO DO BUSINESS IN A FAST EVOLVING ECONOMY. CAN'T REST ON OLD LAURELS....

It's human nature to find a way to do a job, have some success, and then doggedly try to do things the same way; over and over again. Some of us seem to be highly resistant to change -- no matter what that intransigence costs us. I remember, during my 40 year career, the transition from shooting everything on 4x5 film to shooting almost everything on medium format film, and then transitioning again to 35mm film. When we learned to get everything just right on our film cameras we barely had time to take a deep breath before we had to do the whole process again for digital. And we went through many iterations of digital before real innovation slowed down.  

Lighting too has changed. At the outset of my career studio electronic flash systems (heads and packs) were frightfully expensive, heavy as boat anchors and fraught with danger. Over time lighting units got smaller, lighter, less dangerous and more controllable. Then, all of a sudden, we were offered lots of units that had features like 1/10th of a stop power control, reliable radio triggers built in, and....big change....the ability to do powerful flash exposures with battery powered units. No more extension cords. No plugging stuff into the wall sockets and praying the circuit breakers wouldn't trip. Then we started experimenting with LED light, etc, etc. 

Now I am convinced that the majority of basic photography projects can be done and done well with a late model iPhone. But for some reason duffers want to make everything as complicated as it was back in the days of film, and lights that had few, if any options beyond on and off, full, half and quarter power. Most of the duffer-ism stems from a profound resistance to learning new stuff. On so many levels. 

Portrait photographers no longer delivery paper proofs. Wanna see which portrait you like best? There's a private web gallery for that. Want to deliver thousands of high resolution (big) files to your clients? There are inexpensive and easy to use file transfer apps you can use. But you'll need to upgrade your internet access if you are still locked into a cheap, slow service. 

Commercial photographers are transitioning to take advantage of newer file enhancement features that are made possible by A.I. which are being incorporated into existing programs as new features. And we use them more and more. I've hit a tipping point at which it's easier, better and more advantageous for my clients if I photograph their portraits against a neutral background and then composite them into an appropriate pre-shot background using some of the new selection tools in PhotoShop. Bitch all you want about A.I. but at this particular level what you are really doing is taking chance out of the equation for your business. No more endless location scouting for environmental portraits only to show up some place on a shoot day and find: The weather sucks. The building you were going to use as a background just got demolished. The shoot day "features" record breaking heat/record breaking cold/high winds/a protest march or something else that lays waste to  your clever schedule. 

The business of photography is, at its core, all about business. Offering products and services that clients need, want and value, and for which they will pay well. The new barriers to entry are no longer access to gear or access to start-up capital. Rather, the new barriers: are failing to understand how to incorporate new tech, new image styles and new points of view into work you want to sell to clients. How to shoot it all efficiently and how to bill for it.

There is a prevailing myth that no one is making money any more by creating and selling photography directly to clients  --- or through an ad agency or P.R. agency to clients. While it's true that anything which can be competently done with the camera in a phone will be done by the clients in house there are still enormous opportunities out there for people who keep up with the progression of technology and business practices. Our fees for creation and our usage fees for licensing have never been higher or met with less resistance. 

It's no longer enough to show up with an 11x14 inch printed portfolio of black and white images you did 20 years ago to try and secure a job. Nobody really cares about that. They want to see absolutely current work and they want to see it right now, and on their phones. Nobody is looking for your printed invoice to come in the snail mail. They want a digital invoice now and a way to instantly pay for your services with a corporate credit card. 

I had lunch this last Wednesday with an art director  who I have worked with on hundreds of assignments over the last 30+ years. We were sitting in a new restaurant here and he asked me to excuse him if he got a text. He was art directing a food shoot with a photographer in Houston, Texas who specializes in photographing seafood dishes in his well equipped studio. We ate our appetizers and he got a text with an attached test image on it. We looked at the image and bounced a few small suggestions back and forth before my art director friend sent the photographer some quick feedback. This happened several times more during lunch and by the time we left the art director felt like the food shoot a couple hundred miles away was going well. No need for travel. No need to wait around for approvals. 

Everything moves faster now. Everything changes now. Faster and faster. 

We don't buy the latest cameras just because they are pretty, we buy them because they have features we value which make the work faster, more efficient, easier to work with in post. 

And we're not buying into the idea that no one wants to pay good money anymore for good photography. In fact, we raise our prices by 7-10% per year and I will say that I've had zero push back on prices this entire year. Everyone gets that there's inflation. The clients charge their clients more. They expect the same from us. 

Sure. If you want to take your Nikon FM out and shoot some office buildings with a 28mm lens and some color film, and then delivery machine prints from a warehouse store you are probably going to have big problems being taken seriously or being paid much of anything. And if you are inordinately slow because you've refused to adopt technology or advanced training in necessary processes you'll probably never be invited back to work with clients who endured your painfully slow processes again. 

I've said it a thousand times. Photography is like staying in shape for swimming. You can't go months or years without regular swim practices and expect to do much more than not drown. You can't go months or years without practicing the craft of photography and expect to do much more than waste everyone's time. The more you practice the better you get ---- if you practice the things that add value. For the client. 

My list would be: Use the right camera. If you need lots of dynamic range, the best image stabilization and class leading low noise at higher ISO settings you'll need to spend accordingly -- or suffer from painfully involved file salvation in post processing. You'll need the right lenses for your work. If you are an architectural photography, for example, you'll need lenses that are wide enough to give you some room for perspective control in post. You'll need lenses that are sharp all the way into the corners because clients want the corner details to be just as sharp as the center of frame details. If you need lights you need lights that are fast to set up, highly reliable and easy to control. A couple of Vivitar 283 flashes just won't cut it. And you need to have researched your field to understand what the clients who practice in it want from your engagement. They are not paying to subsidize your guess work. 

But you also have to stay culturally current. Constantly researching great work on the web. Embracing current movies, music, art and social structures. Being able to speak to people without showcasing anachronistic tells. Not playing too much Frank Sinatra at your contemporary fashion shoot...

My list of important stuff would include money spent on liability insurance. And a targeted web presence. And apps that make it easy to get paid. And a professional attitude. And lots and lots of ongoing training.

In the "old days" we'd redo botched shoots if we needed to and that might make the clients of that period happy again. Now with deadlines measured in hours instead of days it's more and more critical not to fail in the first place. Some clients have their backs against the wall and there's no margin for re-dos. No time.

I had coffee last Monday with a 62 year old event photographer. He's right up to speed. His latest client wanted images from on-stage speaker presentations as the speaker was still on stage speaking. He set up a connection between his camera and his phone that allowed for immediate transfers of the files he was shooting from camera to phone which he could them directly send to the client's marcom staff via the venue's high speed wi-fi. Result? Happy client who was posting to social media before the presenters even left the stage. No time spent diddling around with inconsequential edits or stumbling blocks. Happy clients pay quickly and then invite you back again for another round. 

Most of my clients are half my age. Most of them are up to speed on what can be done with A.I. tech and the latest tools in the Adobe Suite. Most of them grew up with constant phone access. Telling them how we used to do it in the old days is a ticket to irrelevance. And lost opportunity. 

If you aren't constantly learning you aren't running in place --- you are going backwards. 

Move fast. Don't break things. Don't look backwards. Staying current is staying profitable.

A "Guest Post" ported over from my other blog site. In response to art history nonsense.

 

June 08, 2024

HENRY WHITE'S GUEST POST ON FINE ART PHOTOGRAPHY.

 

Henry White agreed to take over for me on random Saturdays 

so I could go helicopter bungee jumping over the volcano near Grindavik

and get my mind into a mellow place. 

Having seen first hand that everything in the art world of photography has already been done, seen, critiqued, lionized, demonized, exploited or discarded I switched from making beautiful color photographs of flowers (all large dye transfers printed by Bob) to making austere and oppressive grayscale images of buildings, roadways, shop windows and rubbish along the sides of roads. Once I "unmastered" myself from the constraints of logic, good taste, humanism, and sincere, authentic interest in subjects imprisoned by my cameras I was freed to engage in abstractly chaotic street photography and New Documentarianism to my heart's content. 

Following in one of my mentor's footsteps I endeavored to find the best coffee in my home town and used the proximity to the various coffee shops as a formalist boundary structure to contain my work within a geographical box. Within a construct of minimalization of scope I would move my pursuit of pure, ordered photography to a pursuit of strict visual chaos larded with purposeful bad timing and a general ignoring of compositional structure. By eliminating the merchant class fixation with color from the work I was able to pull out one more parameter of interest in order to keep the viewers off kilter so they could approach my new work with the trepidation of one who walks blindfolded through a mine field. Hoping to find some "treasure" at the end of their short or long journey.

Recent physics papers have hinted that every structure in the universe is possessed of its own consciousness and I used that as a jumping off point to decry our prejudicial myopia about the relative value of subjects based on academic constructs of beauty and cultural relevance. To my eye every piece of gravel, every discarded condom and every tortured human standing next to an ironic sign has absolutely equal value and represents a mirror for my own möbius strip existence. I also drop the names, Kant, Neitzsche, Hume, and Cher as often as I can when writing about my work. It makes everything so much more Lucida for my newly found collectors...

I approached many galleries and all the doors were welded shut. Me on the outside and the likes of Leroi Neiman and George Bush firmly and comfortably seated inside. That is.....Until a famous museum curator chanced to see my Plate #324 and, after scraping it off his windshield, declared that the work showed me to have an incisive and "once in a generation" ability to decode the emptiness and mental depravity of early 21st century post corporate existence. I was giddy.

He encouraged me not to make large and luminous prints but to work on flattening my  black and white palettes into a porridge of unrelenting gray tones and presenting them in books not printed via a quad tone, tri-tone or even duotone processes but in strictly constrained, half tone grayscale. And he further encouraged me to make all the images in every one of my five hundred almost identical (but slightly different) books smaller and less "engorged with duplicitous decoration of size" but more universally accessible, by printing them smaller. 

With his manifesto and some prints in hand my newly befriended curator showed up drunk at a Steven Meisel Party in Kuai, played scrabble with spider monkeys and met an unattractive heiress who took pity on my work, examples of which the curator wore on his lounge kimono, and put me up for both a Guggenheim grant and also a MacArthur Genius award. I was able then to purchase a fine art Range Rover and finally buy health insurance. But the phone has never stopped ringing and Anna Devere Smith refuses to give up stopping by my house without an invitation. You'd think she and David Remnick would have better things to do with their time.

I am just about to enter my newest artistic phase by getting one of those 8x10 cameras with the accordion mid-sections,  which makes even the drollest, least well executed images an instant candidate for yet another tranche of great art that the unwashed masses will struggle, and struggle mightily to understand. At some point the most pretentious of them will give up and just pretend to understand the new work --- and some will even profess to like it.  In spite of all I do to make my work intellectually inaccessible...

anyone who questions the value of empty, banal chaos on cheap paper will be set upon by the art cognoscenti, and their thugs, and be drummed out of the gallery circuit only to find tentative solace in their new friendships with the huddled masses of failed and desperate artists who are still struggling to monetize their Instagram accounts. 

I won't care because I will have already sold out all the limited editions of "The Thick Opaque Visual Gravy of American Society -- a portfolio" and will have secured my place forever in the history of fine art photography. I will then turn to cinematic comedy and attempt to garner, from the French, a coveted, Jerry Lewis Medal of the Highest Arts from the curators at the Pompidou Centre. The tie-in being my use of my stand up comedy routine, translated into French, as captions for "The Thick Gravy....." 

Oh Dear. Must run. Crucial to have drinks with a whole new generation of online magazine editors. Gotta keep the gallery ball rolling.... 

I'd leave you with words of encouragement like: "If I can do this so can you!" But the truth is that the actual work is secondary to your personal relationship with the gatekeepers. You'll probably never be invited into the inner sanctum. Thank goodness my day job consists of working for a large U.S.  intelligence agency. I was able to use black mail and threats about national security to secure my place in the art pantheon. I might also suggest having access to a large and liquid trust fund. That seemed to work well for Stephen...

Plate #324. "The Ghost of Blueberry Pancakes and compound interest. 

Plate #1023 "Receding Industrial Wall."

We have sixty five hundred versions of "Wall receding toward Abilene" but

I'm still not sure which one to use on the magazine cover....

Industrial Strength Birkenstock Sandals. A SW USA artist standard for year round art creation.

As one reader recently commented about my friend, Kirk:  "I liked his earlier, funnier stuff better." 

C'est la vie.

"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." -Leonardo da Vinci

"Sunlight is poetry, and studio lighting is geometry." - Irving Penn

I didn't want to get out of bed this morning. I heard the heater working in the distance and right where I was the covers were warm and enveloping. I injured my shoulder last week. In my lazy, rational mind I tried to figure out how to make that into an excuse to not go. To not get up. To skip the morning swim. Maybe drag myself out of bed at 9 and make coffee. Scrounge through the refrigerator to see if anyone put something sybaritic in there for breakfast. Search the work table for a forgotten croissant...

This hesitation happens from time to time. The lure of embracing entropy can feel like settling into a warm bath. 

But as on most days I threw back the blankets, pulled on a pair of pants, look around for the green sweatshirt of the day and stuck my feet into a waiting pair of sandals. From that point on I was attached to my schedule. Pad down the long hallway to the kitchen, grind fresh coffee, boil water, grab a handful of almonds to chew on. Check to see if there is any half and half in the refrigerator. Make coffee. Luxuriate in the bright glow of caffeine and growing consciousness. Toss almonds into my mouth three at a time. Sip hot coffee. Pry the lid of the laptop open and check the news, the overnight markets, the latest camera propaganda. Rinse my now empty cup and put it beside the kitchen sink. 

Head to the bathroom. Brush my teeth. Pop the first L-Arginine supplement of the day. Grab my swimsuit and a fresh towel from the rack in my bathroom. And the pivotal action of the day, drop by the office on my way to swim practice in order to select the "camera of the day." 

Today's selection is the new (to me) Leica SL2 with the Voigtlander 50mm APO lens. The rig is set up to shoot high contrast black and white but I know it's always okay to change my mind and switch to color, or DNG or whatever. The initial selection is just a starting point. 

Today I swam with Matt. He's switched on from the minute he hits the water. If there is short interval designated on swim sets he makes it even shorter. He doesn't believe in resting between sets. A "recovery" swim between hard, anaerobic sets for him is a fast 300 yards with hand paddles. I follow him through the whole workout going ten seconds behind him on the intervals and working hard to catch him. I swam with him on Tuesday and we repeated five x one hundred yard swims on one minute, twenty seconds. I haven't repeated hundreds on such a short interval in years but it seemed like the thing to do. In all we nailed down 3300 yards. Today we approached the sets with the same unwavering diligence. And it was fun --- but now I'm sore. We matched the yardage from Tuesday but with more diversity of strokes. More butterfly weaved into the mix. More breast stroke sets bookended by freestyle. Having someone to chase as we circle swim makes it easier to go faster. Harder. Easier, mentally, to keep from falling behind. 

I've got the studio set up for a series of portraits. Neutral gray background. Two big LED panels blasting through a 4x6 foot diffusion panel. And, for a change, my camera is handheld. After the portrait session I'll grab the camera, download the files, reload the battery and SD card and head out for my afternoon walk. It seems so repetitive to write all this down but the reality is that every day's hike has its own flavors, its own mysteries and its own rewards. The walks may be on the same routes but every day there's something new to see or there's something different in my own engagement. 

How do I know when it's time for a walk? When I feel sleepy and as though I need a nap I know it's time to get outside and move. 

Even though all Leica SL2 camera bodies should feel identical they never do. Even though they are inanimate objects each one I've handled has its own feel. There's little I can put into words but each one has its own energy and its own little nuances that make them all feel different. Today I'm getting used to the new arrival. The familiar lens is like a neutralizing element. And it's all fun to be aware of the tiny differences in the camera bodies even if it's nothing more than my imagination...

I had lunch with my favorite advertising agency, creative director yesterday. We've worked on projects together for about 30 years. We meet for lunch once a month or once quarter to trade family stories and the share our separate experiences as they relate to the industries of marketing, public relations and ad work. We're both becoming aware that everything is become more and more granular. The idea of one advertising agency that rules every facet of a client's marketing, from influencer management through television production is being sliced into smaller and smaller channels. A.I. is nipping around the edges of many creative projects. Automating simple ad copy, replacing the role of traditional stock photography; even seeping into video production. 

Clients feel more and more inclined to shop around for specific resources and many find having legions of influencers is profoundly cost effective and.....just plain effective. But each granulation of the overall marketing of a client comes for the agency as a loss of control, a loss of a segment, and a loss of billing. Budgets are being cut everywhere in the processes. Purse strings are tightening for the same reason as in other industries. We are in a period of process evolution. No one is sure what works and what doesn't and this is all coupled with the ambiguity, uncertainty and wholesale change of our political and social landscape. It should be an interesting year to pay attention to how interwoven both processing and fear really are. I've got a ringside seat but the closer to the game you sit the less comfortable everything is. 

That's why the walks are important. They allow for a distancing from the anxiety provoking flurry of change. And they are a chance to play, unencumbered, with the more joyful process of making or taking photographs. 

Swim. Walk. Pay attention to the important stuff. That's all I've got on my mind today. 

Today's choice. But with a different strap.

I just noticed this morning that the progressive haze of the backlit on the blue table makes it look like the sky. What a nice background for a simple cup of coffee...

It all starts here. Every morning. An hour of detachment from worry and news.

An hour of revving up your internal engine and blowing out the carbon. 

Proof each day that you are still alive and vital. 

 

"Cameras, like rattlesnakes, should always travel in pairs..." Working on it.

 

Black SL2 in X-Ray mode.

The used Leica SL2 I ordered last week came today. It was a day early. I bought it from the guys at Leica Store Miami. I get absolutely no preferential treatment or pricing from mentioning them here but I think it is appropriate that I do because they sent a perfectly packed box with an inner-boxed camera inside that looked (seriously) brand new. No tripod plate scratches. No wear. No tear. Perfectly clean. It arrived in the same condition as the one I bought brand new, back in 2020. For the low price I paid I think the whole package (camera, packing, shipping, etc.) is worth calling out in a positive way.

I sat in a comfortable chair and went through all the menu items so I could configure this camera to the exact same settings as the first SL2. I'm using both cameras this week for a personal project. I'll have a 35mm lens on one body and an 85mm lens on the other body so it will be nice to have the colors, resolutions and handling all match as I switch back and forth between them. 

There doesn't seem to be a logical reason for the big price drop on SL2 cameras lately but I guess Leica has been able to deliver a plentiful supply of SL3 and SL3-S cameras into the ready hands of their brand enthusiasts and I guess most people are happy to buy and use their cameras one at a time. Serial relationships. One in and one out. I think people working professionally have a different mindset. One that fixates on always having a back up for any contingency on paid jobs. Or multiple back-ups...

I have been backing up my SL2 with an SL, and more recently the SL2 and SL2-S have been the tag team of choice. It will be nice to have a pair of SL2s for the work that requires their unique features and looks. And the SL2-S will be there for the times when high ISO/no noise work is on the table. 

I am re-emerging from the ridiculous idea I had of retiring from work-a-day photography. My significant other is out of town a couple days a week taking care of family and frankly I got bored. When clients came calling after the first of the year I was ready to hop back into the mix. Sure, I could travel around by myself and play tourist with camera but would hate to do so while leaving B. behind. And, what I found out when I was taking it (too) easy is that I really love the challenge of doing photographs well. At least the kind I like. 

We're being a bit pickier this year though. No jobs starting before 10 a.m.--- in order to preserve the sanctity of the morning swim practices. No dumb jobs that anyone could do. No jobs that have anemic budgets. Just looking for the whip cream and cherries at this point. 

Now heading out the door for a nice walk in the hot weather (80° Fahrenheit) we're having. A good time to break in the new camera. 

First thing I did was grab an SCL-6 battery for the new camera. Got a 50mm lens on the front and my walking shoes on. Let's go!

A few interior photographs done for a client after a couple days of successful environmental portrait sessions.

 

Back in 1981 I started working for Early American Life Magazine and spent three or four years packing my old pick-up truck with 2000 watt Norman Strobe boxes, heavy duty flash heads, yards and yards of heavy extension cords, A Calumet 4x5 inch view camera, three view camera lenses, 30 four by five inch film holders, a huge tripod, light stands and all the other support gear needed to make large format, architectural images on transparency film,  and make it work inside houses and buildings, as well as for exteriors. It was quite a load. 

On a typical job my art director would fly in from Harrisburg, PA. I'd pick her up at the Austin airport in my giant light blue Chevrolet truck and we'd head off to our various locations for the better part of a week at a time. On a typical job I might shoot eight to ten set-ups a day on the big camera along with some detail shots on medium format film. I'd bracket each exposure in half stops over a plus and minus two stop range. I'd come home with somewhere close to 200 sheets of 4x5 inch sheet film that I'd take to the lab in tranches...just in case something went wrong in the processing. When the film came back I would edit the results down to two good exposures per set up, divid those into two batches and send each batch separately, via Fedex, to my client back in Pennsylvania. You never really wanted to throw the dice and send the whole take at once because, even then, things went astray occasionally. 

I continued to do large format architecture photos, as a side gig to my mainstream portrait, work all through the 1980s and early 1990s. We used the big camera and big film to do brochures for medical centers (including lifestyle shots on large format), hotels, resorts, law offices, and new buildings for architects and construction companies. Eventually I got more and more event and portrait work and that, at the time, was a lot more fun so some of the original momentum of my architecture work wore off and I moved the business in a different direction. I also met a local photographer who had much more passion for photographing inanimate objects/buildings that I ever would and as a result he was also better at it than me. I more or less surrendered my little corner of that discipline to him.

Last Fall I was making portraits in various locations around a spanking new office in a swanky new high rise in downtown and having a lot of fun. Light came in from walls of floor to ceiling windows that wrapped around the client's entire floor. The portrait project went well and a week or so later I got a call from the same client asking me if I could do an interior architecture shoot of their new space. Since I knew them to be a nearly perfect client I was happy to accept. 

The entire job was done with a Leica SL2-S camera and I chose it because it has a ridiculously wide dynamic range and its high ISO performance means it can provide very, very clean shadow areas when used at lower ISOs. I made use of the built in perspective control feature for every frame. The finishing touch was getting the raw files into Lightroom to open the shadows and tame any highlights that needed taming. One or two images were made by taking a light and dark version of the same shot and blending them in post production. It worked very well. 

We did fifteen different set-ups over the course of a couple hours, all with one camera, two lenses and a decent tripod. So much different from the film days....

I'll gladly go back to making interior shots if clients want them. I'd forgotten how much fun it can be. I just hope all the potential clients have brand new spaces and have spent good money on interior design because that's the real secret (if there is one) of great architectural photography. 

The images chosen by the client have had the skies adjusted. But just a little bit...

Early morning encounter with pour over mechanism.

 

Just a quick review of the Sigma 45mm lens as a choice for square format imaging. The lens can be highly detailed or it can be slightly soft depending on how you use it. If you want high sharpness and satisfying bite from this exactly "normal" focal length it's all yours if you follow this formula: Set the lens for f5.6 or f8. Stand two meters (six feet-ish) or more from your main subject. Use a shutter speed of 1/250th or faster. Hold your camera still and push the shutter. Presto! High sharpness, nice contrast, lots and lots of detail. 

If you want a different effect use the lens at it's widest open aperture, focusing on things that are somewhere between the closest focusing point and about five feet, and choose a shutter speed that you think should be adequate. This might be a suggested starting point for portrait photography. I don't know anymore because I have the lens permanently fixed at f5.6. It's just so damned happy there. 

The lens in question is small, light, beautifully made and actually is so perfectly crafted that I sometimes  think it outshines my favorite Leica cameras for industrial design and realization. 

People don't really understand this lens as well as I think they should so you are in luck. There are plenty in the used market and mostly can be had for somewhere around $250, in great condition. 

I used to have two of them. The vagaries of buying bundled stuff. I gave one to a friend. He loves it as well. 

These lenses work best if you put them on a nice camera, head out the door and spend some time looking around and making photographs. Left in a camera bag which is itself left in the house? Not so much. What did you shoot today?

the most boring book I have ever read about Robert Frank. Whose work I like very much.

Shame on the Museum of Modern Art. Too much academi-speek.

My coffee cup from the LBJ library. A lonely double "A" battery. 

In my "reading corner." 

Make em big. Check out the bricks!

All the above are make with the Sigma 45mm f2.8 Contemporary lens. 

Camera used was the venerable Leica SL2.

All conceived as, and shot as, Jpegs. Square Jpegs.