Recalibrating my fear and paranoia with a good walk. Plus, a high temperature test run with a new camera and lens

If you spend too much time listening to the radio, watching the news on TV or scanning Google News on the internet you will eventually develop anxiety and a brace of related mental health disorders. The media is a cruel filter and saturates the more compulsive members of its audience with a never ending stream of doom and gloom. I respond by battening the hatches and hunkering down into the bunker of the studio, anxious for the storm to pass and for light and decency to prevail. But are things really so wretched?

I recently got rid of a huge mess of gear in the spirit of distilling down. Focusing on one system. One set of cameras and one small collection of lenses. I decided to abandon the system I've been working with all these years and go with a fresh canvas, a counterintuitive side step. (I have more space in the drawers of my cabinets since I started back into the business in 1987...). I decided to take a break from the internet and the TV and all the other voices of misery and take my new camera for a walk. A real, get down and play with your camera, sort of walk. And it was so cathartic.

I grabbed a tiny little Olympus e520, popped an 11-22mm lens onto the front, jammed a 4 gig card in the side and fired up the Honda Element. What I needed was a little bit of downtown adventure. When I parked the car near the city's hike and bike trail around 11 am the temperature was already in the mid-90's. I pulled out a hat, put up the windshield reflector thingy and headed off over the pedestrian bridge to downtown.

Here's what I found as I walked through the downtown area: Dozens of high rise, luxury condominiums. Some built and occupied, some under construction and some breaking ground. None of the projects was on hold. The streets were filled with people in suits or shirts and ties walking to meetings or early lunches. By noon the downtown eateries were full and in some there were lines for tables. Not too many "sale" signs in the boutique windows. Most people seemed pretty happy. Pretty content.

None of the "doom and gloom" wasteland scenario.

And then there was my new little camera. I've long since given up caring what the exposure meter says to me. On a sunny day like today i learned to set the right exposure at least 25 years ago. Put the camera on manual and set for ISO 100, set exposure at 1/500 @f8. Unless something changes, don't move the dials.

At the end of three hours the temperature was cresting 100(f) and I was sweating like a boxer. I'd re-acquainted myself with humanity and made at least an introduction to my new camera so I headed home. Less fearful about the economy. Less paranoid about the localized representation of the human condition and happy with my photographs.

The 4:3 format suits me well. The lens is great. The finder is good. I can be happy working with this camera.

I bought a couple of battery powered flashes today. They are both Vivitar EF-383's. They have built in slaves. They supposedly work in ttl on my new Olympus stuff. They are less than a third the price of the Olympus flash. I'll let you know how they work out. They are coming on the snail express from Amazon.

Three or four of the images above are from my little stroll around Austin today. The other one came from my first adventure with the new cameras. I was out last friday and I shot this with my friend, Emily. We were playing around with a 4x4 foot scrim over her head and a flash bounced out of an umbrella for the main light. It's all fun.

No presumption that any of the images are great art (or even minor art). I'm in that stage where I'm getting the new stuff all dialed in and that goes for the economy as well.

NEWS FLASH: I'm going to be a presenter at the CREATIVE PHOTOGRAPHIC RETREAT in Dallas, Texas on the 23rd, 24th and 25th of July. Should be fun.

IN AUSTIN: On Sunday, August 9th, I'll be giving a lecture and a lighting demo for the Austin Photography Group at Book People, third floor from 7pm on. I think it is free and open to the public. I know my friend Paul will be coming by to heckle. I'll be showing some work and then showing my favorite ways to light portraits. If you are in Austin please come by. I'm sure we'll head out for coffee or a glass of wine after we wrap.

EVENT: Thinking about a happy hour this coming Monday. 5:30pm at Threadgills at Riverside and Congress. If you are in Austin and want to go hang out, have a beer and talk about art drop a line or leave a comment. One dollar Lone Star Longnecks all day long.......Look for the guys with the camera.

A new strategy for buying cameras. Circa 2009.

Ceiling detail from the Alexander Palace in Pushkin, just outside of St. Petersburg, Russia. 1995.

If you were alive and shooting in the time of film you worked with the presumption that you would buy camera bodies and lenses and then use them until the little cogs and gears were worn down to nubins, then you would sell them all to your first assistant and retire. The image on the left was shot in the time of non obsolescence with the epitome of that breed of camera, the Hasselblad medium format film camera. This shot is most likely from an SWC/M wide angle camera but we didn't have exif in those days so I'll never know. Film was the thing that got outmoded but we could remedy that by buying newer and better film. Although sometimes the film was merely newer.

I caught myself being stupid over the last four years. I was using a film business model in the acquisition and retention of camera bodies. I was buying digital SLR's as though they would last a lifetime. In one sense, they might. The Kodak DCS 760's that I adore are well made and seem to go on forever. But what i really mean is that every two years there is either a doubling of resolution or the introduction of a "can't live without" feature that compels us to rush out and buy another body.

So I looked in the drawer and there were generations of cameras. Fuji S2's S3's and S5's (and I couldn't bear to get rid of them because i'd gotten "magic" files with each of them.....) Nikon d300's, d2x's, and D700's. Old lenses that were purported to be magical, like the Nikkor 50mm 1.1.2 and the 105mm 2.5 and so many more that hadn't be used in years. Like the 28mm f2 that I bought because all the reviews raved about it. It never focused well on a D2x so it sat in the drawer.

We are quoted a price to trade in our older bodies that seems laughably low so we keep them and justify this by calling the body a "back up".......as though we'll go back and use the antiquated thing in the uncomfortable case that our main (and brutally expensive) main body dies prematurely. We won't.

When budgets were rising and work was plentiful the strategy was relatively harmless because we could assuage our longings for more and our nostalgia for the recently retired cameras by shrewd applications of massive cash flow. And are we really doing anyone a favor with all the equipment overkill anyway?

I don't think so and here's why: Since the beginning of the recession over two years ago clients have moved relentlessly to the web. I hardly need to tell anyone here that you don't need four or five thousand pixels on a side to make a good web image. Some magazines have lost 70% of their ad pages. When they fold they'll never be back. We might fantasize (while in front of the camera case) that we'll be shooting double trucks again before long but it might be a couple of years and by then the $8,000 wondertool that we crave today will be old news and ready for the scrapheap. Do you have more downtime than you really want? If so, do you want to spend it with an extra $8000 to $12000 worth of camera inventory?

I took a hard look at the kind of work we're doing lately. The one thing that seems to not go out of style is the need to light things well. If we light them well then we don't need peerless high ISO performance. Oh I'm sure someone will chime in and say that we do but I notice an interesting phenomenon: The ultra pro shooters who demanded super high ISO performance in their 35mm based DLSLR's moved into medium format DSLR's for a spell and never whispered a peep about the high ISO output of those $30,000 cameras. Which are not anywhere near as good as a $1,000 Canon or Nikon....

If you shoot weddings or sports I don't begrudge you the best high ISO tool you can find but if you are shooting advertising, corporate work or studio portraits you don't need (or probably use) anything over ISO 400, maybe 800 in a pinch.

So why go crazy on the bodies. It's the lenses that retain their value.

With that in mind, here's my new buying strategy: I'm buying up the pro level Olympus glass for the E system but I'm swearing to only buy camera bodies that are less than $800. I'll keep em for a year and then trade em for whatever comes out next. That way I'll always have the current sensor technology without the investment in the "talisman of power" that the high end cameras represent.

Don't believe me? That's okay because I'm not always right. But I ran into John Isaac the other day (big time Olympus shooter) and he was sporting the e620. Swore it's his favorite camera. Cost? $599. His take? Superb.

Just a thought. Lenses for the long haul, bodies year by year. No matter which system you favor. Because even when the megapixel hysterics wear out we'll still have dynamic range to drive the market.

I've sent off most of the Nikon and Kodak inventory. For jobs that require (and pay for) the high end gear I'll gladly rent. For all the rest I'll be happy with the 12 megapixel bodies that are now $599 and blow away anything that was available for less than $5,000 just five years ago.

Works for me. Might not work for you.

Hope everyone is staying cool.

Portraits made easy.

Mr. Bob Davis. Former CEO, USAA Insurance Company

I was thrilled when USAA's PR firm in Boston, MA called me and asked me to make a collection of portraits of their client's CEO. I've been a USAA member for years and always had warm and fuzzy feelings about their company. We did our pre production meetings on the web. We decided on formats, locations and styles as well as the overall schedule.

Like many CEO's his schedule was tight. We could get into his office suite around 9am and needed to be ready to shoot at 10 am. We needed to get four different shots around the offices in that amount of time. It was definitely a time to travel light but to come prepared.

I arrived with one assistant and a make up person at 8:30am, met with our contact and proceeded thru security. At exactly 9 am we went into the office suite, selected four areas that would make good backgrounds, and proceeded to light and test. We were told that Mr. Davis would need us to be out of the offices by 10:15 am so he could conduct a meeting. That would give us 15 minutes for make-up and forty five minutes to do four different set ups.

When Mr. Davis arrived I introduced myself and we found that we were the same age. We both went to high school in San Antonio and, in fact, remembered swimming against each other on our respective high school swim teams. (He was the better swimmer....). From that point on the shoot became more relaxed. All of a sudden the 10:15 deadline vanished. We were able to move with more care and try a few more gestures and poses.

I was shooting with a Rollei 6008i medium format film camera and a 150mm lens. If we were to do the same shoot today I wouldn't hesitate to use a Nikon D700 or even an Olympus E-30. Most of the images were subsequently used as quarter pagers in various USAA magazines and brochures.

The lighting was straightforward: Small and medium sized softboxes with monolights. Ocassionally I'd use a light with a grid spot to throw a little light on a back wall. We shipped off film to our client in Boston and they made their selections. We shot both negative and positive film. Once selections were made we got the film back and made the necessary scans and prints.

The key to success with these kinds of portraits is not so much the lighting or the technical skills but the rapport. Going forward that will be our most marketable differentiator in the corporate portrait market. The number one rule with CEO's is comfort and common ground. If you've got it you use it.

I love doing these kinds of portraits. And when I speak at photo expos. conventions and college classes these are the kinds of images I get the most questions about.

It's the portfolio that gets you the first job but it's the rapport that keeps you in the door for more. If I give advice to people starting out it's always to broaden your interests. Your brain is your best "equipment" investment!

The Studio Book is getting great reviews! Check it out on Amazon.com

Trading Camera Systems. Why do we cheat on whatever system we own?

I know why we kept our Hasselblads for decades, they always worked and no matter what year you` purchased yours it was capable of generating the same quality images as the latest or oldest one. It was the lenses that we stayed around for. But in this day and age the digital bodies are more akin to buying a few bricks of film and they go out of style and are superseded almost yearly. When I first came to photography we had to be "jacks of all trades" which meant keeping an arsenal of glass on hand. If you shot with Nikon you probably had everything from an 18mm wide angle to a 400mm telephoto and everything in between. And then even lenses started to change. Zooms superseded primes (but maybe not....) and then new revs of the zooms overtook the ones we bought just a few years earlier. Now we're slinging around glass and bodies like we're in a flea market. And I find that as my style stabilizes I use fewer and few extra long or short optics.

The logic is to buy the latest digital body and use it up quick. Sell it before the new models are announced so that you get the maximum value in the next trade. This year you'll be able to shoot everything at 3200 ISO but next year it will be 6400 ISO. I can't wait. Or can I?

In the old days the only even marginally available information about lenses was the anecdotal test stuff we'd read in the mainstream photo magazines. And they only came out once a month. Now every website has a precision testing rig based on DXO or IBF and we can see, right there in the four dimensional graphics, just how poorly last year's lens performance in the outer 12th % of the frame is versus this year's glass. If you are a Nikon shooter you are suspect if you aren't sporting a D3x and at least a 14 to 24mm and a 24 to 70mm. How can you possibly produce professional results without it all?

Not to generalize but the women photographers I know only seem to replace their cameras and lenses after someone drops them several times and an assistant accidentally spills Coca Cola on the main body while changing lenses. Could it be that many new camera purchases are nothing but sublimated male sexual desire? Have we transferred our biological imperative to go out and seek mates endlessly into a less (socially) destructive desire to chase camera systems instead?

I just finished writing a book and shooting a big ad campaign for an agency. I have the strongest desire to change systems today. No, my current system did not screw up on the big shoot. No, there was no lack of optical integrity among the lenses. In fact, I think they gave me their best effort. But there is much truth to the saying that familiarity breeds contempt.

I was talking about this to a friend in New York who just happens to be a psycho therapist. He laughed at my Freudian interpretation. He suggested that the desire is much the same in any area of art wherein the practitioner is finished with one cycle and ready to embark on a new cycle. He refers to this "sweeping the clutter off the desk" as a way of starting with a fresh canvas. A blank page. A new perspective.

The idea being that the hand/mind relationship (haptics and all that) predisposes one to work in the same fashion over and over again and only by making a conscious attempt to change the tools will you change the construct and the paradigm that keeps you slavishly locked into the same subconscious fabrications. The psycho therapist had to get off the phone at that point. You see, we'd been talking about the really cool f2 zoom lenses for the Olympus E system and he wanted to go play with them right away.

I'm between books and projects. I'm pondering cheating on my Nikons and getting some more Olympus gear. I like the color and the size but I know those are just facile justifications. I think I'll start with the 50 Macro. That's supposed to be a good one.

How do I reconcile all this? Well, a good shrink will cost me $250 a visit and it may take years to come to grips with my compulsive need to try new cameras. How many new cameras would that buy? How much painful introspection will I be able to avoid?

(For those who take everything literally please understand that approximately 15 to 20 % of this blog was meant to be "tongue in cheek" I'll still buy the gear but I'll laugh at myself while I'm doing it..........).

Note: I'll be teaching workshops on small flashes for two days at the Creative Photographic Retreats in Dallas, Texas on July 24th and 25th. Come on up (or down) for the happy hour intro on the 23rd.

Did you ever stop to think that maybe you became a photographer for a reason that you never really thought of before?

For as long as I can remember I've been in love with the process of writing. One of my early heros was Vladimir Nabokov. He wrote beautiful sentences. He wrote wonderfully visual descriptions. And he wrote with an incredible ear for narrative. Many years ago I got a degree in English Literature from the University of Texas at Austin and started a career as a copywriter in the advertising industry. Sometime in the whole mess of becoming a real, dues paying, adult I got seduced by the promise of photography= that one could make art with less fuss and commitment.

Even though I consider myself to be a "middle of the road" photographer I've been able to make a living at it for a variety of reasons. Early on there were enough barriers to entry in the field so that you actually had to know what you were doing and how you were going to do it to make photographs. I picked up enough marketing smarts early on to be able to sell the sizzle instead of the dektol. I made enough friends in the business who needed fairly straightforward work from a reliable source and I rode the reliability horse for years without ever falling off.

But as I put my fourth book for Amherst Media in the Fedex last Thurs and the went out to celebrate over margharitas with Belinda it finally dawned on me what the allure is for me. It's note taking at its most immediate. Looking back over fascinating trips to Russia or Maui it's not the photographs I want to share when I get back home, it's the stories. I spent a week in Monte Carlo several years ago and I don't think any of my friends saw any of my photos. I sent what I needed to over to the client and got well paid but for me the thrill was in sharing the stories. I was the first American to set foot in the Alexander Palace in Pushkin, Russia a while back but I would rather regale my friends with stories about sneaking off to use the Czar's toilet than wave prints of the Catherine Palace Golden Ballroom in my friend's faces.

I suspect many of us were lured into photography for reasons that have never been clear to us. It was interesting to have this epiphany. Now I see the interconnection between the two crafts; writing and photographing. It's clearer to me than every before. It's all about the storytelling.

The image above is from one of the last Metro stations in Paris to still have wooden slat escalators. It was taken back in the mid 1990's with an old M3 and a 50mm. Great gear for preserving the feel of history and the flow of life.

I think it's important to shoot for yourself.

Photographers shoot lots of stuff for other people and I think we get confused about the difference between what we create for an intended audience and what we should create for our more immediate audience: ourselves. If I were a psychology major I'm sure I could explain why the emotional need to satisfy others sometimes dominates, even in contradiction to our own best interests, our need to truly express our personal vision. Even if the result doesn't make people stand up and cheer it should cheer our own sense of discovery and playfulness.

I'm sure I attach far too much value to the criticism of others. It might be nice to work in seclusion for a spell. Anyway, I shot the above portrait of my dear friend, Renae, a few years back and I printed this because it seemed to me to be a part of Renae that spoke to her insouciance. It symbolized the part of our relationship that made her raise an eyebrow occasionally when I spoke about things I really didn't know much about. It took a commitment to shoot for yourself in the days of film. There was a financial cost to every frame. And though I wish I could go back in time and have all the money back that I spent on coffee and alcohol and pastries I don't regret any of the money I spent on film, processing and printing.

I just finished a few big projects and now I think I'll spend a week shooting just for myself.

Too Hot to Shoot Anywhere but at the pool.

It's Summer in Austin with a vengence. My car thermometer reads 114(f) on the pavement and it's 103(f) in the shade. My favorite art director is fleeing to Scotland and leaving me to roast. So I headed to the pool and caught up with my son, Ben. I've been finishing up a book about lighting instruments and couldn't find the image I did of him last year at the pool. We needed to redo it today.

He was as cooperative as I have any right to expect from a teenager.

I was using my favorite outdoor flash camera, the Canon G10. It was connected with a good old fashioned sync cord to the Profoto 600b battery powered unit and the head was spitting photons into a 40 inch white umbrella. All good clean fun. While I only needed to sync at 1/500th you can go all the way to 1/2000th of a second if you use a non-dedicated flash. That's pretty cool.

Stay cool wherever you are.

Best, Kirk