The Hottest Thing in Town

http://new.music.yahoo.com/videos/billy-joe-shaver/hottest-thing-in-town--2165199

So, now that Canon and Nikon have video capability everyone is running to become a DP. Been there, done that. A dozen years ago I was asked by Steve Mimms of the Austin Filmworks to be the DP on a music video for Billy Joe Shaver's "The Hottest Thing In Town" music video. We did some amazingly low budget stuff to make this all work but we didn't scrimp on the camera. We rented a 16mm Arriflex, a bitching 12-120mm Zeiss zoom lens and a video assist (AKA early video mode also known as "full motion Polaroid".

I designed and built the fixture over the pool table, inserting two 500 watt lowel tota lights that could be switched separately. The tracking shot of our female star outside the Continental Club was done using a cart with pnuematic wheels. I learned a lot about lighting a tracking nighttime shot but we did pull it off.

We shot the video in one long, long day with about a week of pre-production.

The video won the Country Music Television "best of" that year. Do I know how to shoot a video production? Yes, I think so. Do I think photographers will make good videographers? Only if they understand that they have to light so that everything moves and everything matches. I've done commercials and industrials but this is the funnest of the video projects I worked on with the exception of my Rene Zellweger, "Coffee: Is it a gift from God or a tool of Satan" video. But that's a story for another day..........

Combatting the Oppressive Sense of Isolation Many Freelance Photographers Feel

In talking to friends and peers who are photographers and have been photographers for many, many years, the undercurrent that permeates conversations these days is the overwhelming sense of isolation many of us feel. While this has always been a loner's sport the recent economic upheavals have played havoc with our sense of being connected to the world outside our studios. In recent years the stream of jobs and contact with assistants and suppliers provided an almost daily intersection with people.

The first erosion of this feeling of belonging came as an unintended accessory to our embrace of PhotoShop and post processing. In our haste to control our digital files (and to leverage the fictive cost savings of electronic image massage) we inadvertently killed off the labs.

Our logic driven (but totally misguided) demand for the lowest price on everything we bought for our businesses effectively killed off most of the good camera stores. With the labs and the retailers gone we lost two points of intersection that were part of the fabric of the freelance life.

Now the recession has taken away a large percentage of our human contact with clients. I don't know about you but we're booking fewer jobs and the ones that come in seem to be produced and negotiated and delivered all on the web. Once again diminishing human contact.

It's a recipe for depression and anxiety if I ever saw one. And unlike our Latin and European counterparts who have rich history of men socializing over coffee during the day or drinks in the late afternoons our Calvinistic society demands efficiency and frowns on time spent that can't be quantified and its productivity measured.

In order to preserve our sense of well being I think photographers must adopt new strategies to reincorporate ourselves into the every day fabric of communal life. We need to leave our dark caves and reconnect.

I have a ten point program and I'm following it as well as I can:

1. Coffee outside the house. Find a coffee shop or diner with a fun crowd and go there for your coffee in the morning. (yes, I understand the accountant driven "Latte Factor" of economics, but have you priced psychiatric care lately? Believe me, two bucks for a cup of coffee is a bargain.)

2. Have at least one lunch a week with a friend, peer or comrade. Complain, celebrate, talk nerd talk. Connect.

3. Have at least one lunch a week with a client or potential client. Having to shave and take off the sweat pants and put on a reasonable outfit will at least make you feel like you still get the drill.

4. Join a group of runners, swimmers, bowlers or whatever. The health advantages of regular exercise are enormous and the mental health advantages of doing your "whatever" with a group are even greater. Interesting thought, put together a "walking group" and do it as many mornings a week as you can muster.

5. Have a project to work on. My fall back is to plan and put up shows of my work. It puts me in the public and is a workable, sustainable goal.

6. Find a cause you feel very strongly about and donate your photographic talent. You'll get practice, exposure and move the game forward for your cause.

7. Help someone else get their project done. You get karma and you might learn something new.

8. If you've been thinking about getting into video but clients just don't get that you're the next Fellini or Spielberg you might want to find some actors and do your own project. You never know where it might go.

9. If you need more clients do what the lions and cheetahs do and find out where the clients hang out. You'll have more fun hunting if you look in the habitats appropriate to the species. You're sure not going to find busy art buyers on those flickr forae!!!!

Finally,

10. Stop making lists like this and get out into the world. Life is still swirling around and if we stop tying our self image so tightly with our business success we might make better art, meet nicer people, and be a lot less isolated.

Just some thoughts on a bright, Tuesday morning.

I borrowed a medium format digital camera but it was really just an excuse to photograph my friends.....

Last year I reviewed three different medium format digital cameras. They all had their strengths and they all had their weaknesses. But I enjoyed the process of reviewing them not because I knew I'd get better images but because it gave me a new excuse to photograph my old friends.

One of the portraits I took was of my friend Paul Bardagjy, who may be the best architectural photographers in North America. Had I proposed pointing a Nikon or Olympus camera at him I'm not sure there would have been enough of a lure to drag him into my studio. But we're all curious about new stuff and I think that did the trick.

Photographers are interesting friends. Most people have boring jobs that are repetitive and linear. Everyone knows what to expect. Everyone knows that they have to be at their desks at a certain time. They know the rules are proscribed and rigid. Unwilling to disrupt their income, most people are loathe to make drama at work so they save it for their personal lives. If you are the friend, spouse or relation of a person with a "real" job you know that they can sometimes go out of their way to introduce the drama missing from their job into their personal lives. Something personal is always flying out of control. Relationships, finances, health or weird hobbies.

Photographers, as a rule, don't do this because our work lives are filled with constant uncertainty and drama. Work that doesn't come. Checks that don't come when the work finally does. Psycho clients and crazed assistants. Weird demands and even weirder plans.

I think that's why I like hanging out with photographers like Paul. They've seen it all before. They've lived through client drama and they've been out on the edge of the business cycle but survived to shoot another day.

Paul is like that. Very few things stump him. He's an artist and a business genius. That's why architects like to have him on their projects. He gets to the root of the project and spins it visually in a manner poetic. And he does it without any drama. That's for people in lesser occupations.

About the photo: Can't remember which big, fat medium format digital camera from 2008. Almost certain that the light was a big flash in a big umbrella aimed through a big diffuser from one side. One light. One subject. One smile. All done.

Friends like that you keep around.

Have you ever experienced a job that left you feeling elated?

I did. It was several years ago. Freescale Semiconductor had just been spun off from Motorola and the people who tend to their garden of marketing content wanted to make the statement that everything good about the corporation was driven by the people who worked there. I was asked to create a light look and a compositional feel to show off their most valuable assets.

One big light from the left of the frame. A small amount of fill from the right. And a soft wash across the background. Once the lights are set I could spend the rest of the two days meeting my subjects. Talking to them about their jobs, their kids, their amazing work and even their favorite cars. Whatever it took to develop some mutual touch points so we could connect and serve this common purpose for just a few minutes.

The next time I walked into the building the posters were everywhere. 24 by 36 inches. Beautiful colors. And warm smiles.

When I looked at the posters I could remember the exact moment of each exposure. I knew it was time to click the shutter because, in that one moment, there was a real connection that I could feel. And I hope my subjects could feel it too because it was genuine.

True feelings that drive a collaboration can't be faked, or contrived. In work like this you really have to live the emotion to create the energy that needs to be part of the process.

I've been thinking about what parameters must exist in order for jobs like this to be so successful and what I've come to understand (after subduing my incredible ego) is that it is the unsung heros of the business that really provide the agar that grows the right culture.

In this case I was lucky to work with two creative heads who understood that it would work best to apply the reins gently. Heather Grant laid out the assignment to me and then stepped back to let me do the work. But I could feel her guidance at every step I took. And I think I felt it because she trusted me and I needed to show her that the trust was not misplaced.

Whatever the reason it is work I'm proud to have been part of. And when I walked away on the final day of the shoot I realized that it's never the talent of the photographer alone but the willing complicity and collaboration of people who are willing to be part of a process instead of needing to ride roughshod over the whole thing.

I'm thankful that those people are out there. And I know that a healthy dose of humility breaks down a lot of barriers........

If you are reading this, thank you!

Fun with outdoor light. Control freak central.

I did some fun outdoor images with Emily a week ago at the lake. Most of the images featured the lake in the background but I wanted to play around with a little spike of sunlight as a hairlight so we turned around 180 degrees and played to the other side. I took a break from my usual Minimalist self and dragged out a Profoto 600b (and a back up unit) to make the shot. When I shoot outside I generally light to put a diffuser up over my model to control the quality of the light. If I want harsh and angular I can add that while keeping my model from squinting.

Beth assisted me and kept a hand on the panel so we didn't have any wind+gravity accidents. I was shooting with my Olympus e30 and the 35-100mm (weight lifting) lens. With the spike of sunlight carefully aligned at the edge of the diffusion panel I added the main light of the image using a 60 inch softlighter2 umbrella with the diffusion cover in place. The light is approximately five and half feet from Emily. She is being a trooper and holding her triathlete bike over her shoulder for way too many exposures. The basic exposure is 1/250th @ f 11, ISO 200.

I like having the option of throwing around a bunch of light outdoors. It's fun. More to come from this light hearted weekend exercise.

Best, Kirk

Cheap Camera in the service of commercial art.

Every year I work on an annual report project for the Kipp Schools in Austin. These schools do a great job providing a solid path to college for underserved kids. The schools are tough. Discipline is pervasive. Achievement is rewarded. It's rewarding to be a small part of the process.

This year I worked with art director, Gretchen Hicks, from Sherry Matthews Advocacy to create a brochure that evokes the feel of an old Farmer's Almanac. The emphasis on nurturing and growth echoed the philosophy of the schools.

Enough about schools. The reason to be here is the photography. And that was my responsibility. I set up the shoot in an empty classroom. The main light was an 84 inch Lastolite Umbrella with a built in front diffuser panel. The passive fill came from a 48 inch white Chimera panel, opposite the big umbrella. As you can probably tell, I used the panel fill panel pretty far away from the subject because I like my shadows to have some weight and depth to them.

There is a tiny kick of light on the gray background. It comes from an old Metz 54 battery powered flash, used in manual on a low power setting, in a small 12x16 inch soft box. I just used it for a bit of separation.

My intention was always to deliver black and white images and I decided to shoot the whole project with a shiny, new Nikon D700. When I intend to deliver B&W I like to set the camera to monochrome so I can "previsualize" what the images will look like in their final form. I started shooting with the D700 and a 105 f2 DC lens but I just couldn't get comfortable with the images. The picture on the rear LCD just didn't have the right feel and the right tones. In short, I didn't like the way the Nikon created black and whites for display to the LCD's. The images were......mushy.

I remembered that I like the way an old Sony point and shoot camera, the R1, handled monochromes so I pulled my surviving R1 out of the bag and started shooting. Now I would have to make a choice: The camera shoots one raw every eight to ten seconds and that was just too slow. If I switched to Jpeg I could shoot fast enough but I would have to trust the camera's interpretation of black and white because I wouldn't have the post processing control of a raw file.

I went with the monochrome Jpegs. I figured that if I really screwed up I could always come back and spend another day doing the job over again. The deadline was not too pressing.

We shot all day long. It was kind of a miracle, but we got 1200 exposures out of one camera battery and one set of background flash batteries. (The mainlight was an A/C monolight).

I love the images I got from the shoot. There is a very tiny gallery here.

I sure like the images but even more I really like what Gretchen did with the whole print project. In these days of ubiquitous web projects it's really nice to see some ink on paper done well. I went to a reception at the home of a wealthy donor and the brochures were passed out. It was gratifying to see the response they got.

It reminded me that print is not totally dead. That good projects can survive. That photography is very important. That art directors don't give a crap about which camera you use or how large a file you deliver. As long as you capture something worth using.

Technical skill is always way down the ladder on jobs like this. Any professional should be able to do a decent job lighting a shot like these. The real test is being able to establish a nice rapport, a nice give and take with each kid. And sustain that over twenty or thirty kids in a day.

We ended up shooting 10 meg jpegs. In monochrome. All of which were originally conceived as horizontals. What you see in the final 8.5 by 11 inch brochure are verticals. Maybe three megapixels worth of data. If that.

Technically about as non optimal as it gets. So why does everyone who see the project love it so much? Because the content always trumps the technique. No one really cares about technical perfection if the emotion isn't there.

I write a lot about doing projects with less than optimal gear and I worry that I'm sending the wrong message. I'm not trying to say that people shouldn't shoot with incredibly fun and expensive cameras. And I'm not saying that having nearly infinite megapixels at your disposal is a bad thing. Not at all. But I think there is a pervasive sentiment throughout the field of photography that, in order to do good, sellable work, you must have the latest, most powerful, most able equipment in order to succeed.

There is another myth that seems to say that you, as a photographer, are constantly being judged by your client with one metric: Do you have the coolest gear? And what I've found, consistently, over the years is that the only people who care about gear are photographers and other photographers.

We men tend to be pretty simple and linear in our understanding of technology. We always tend to think that more is more and less is less. We judge cars by how fast they go. How quickly they accelerate. How many G's they can pull in a turn. We rank cars from best to worst based largely on performance metrics. And yet most cars can do the job.

For commuting and family vacations and running to the mall and the camera store and the grocery store just about any car will do fine. Where will you see the difference between a regular car (honda civic, hyundai, toyota) and the Porsches, Aston Martins and Ferraris? On a race track at speeds over 100 mph. How often do you drive on the track? How often do you find yourself commuting at 150 mph? Taken a cloverleaf at 90 lately?

I mentioned that the market seems to be going to the web and that all the very best video systems can handle right now is the equivalent of a 2 to 3 megapixel camera's output. Several readers rebutted by saying that computer screens and video will get better and better with technology. Sorry friends, but we've only changed our video broadcast standards once in 50 years and we probably won't change your television requirements again for a good while. It's true that computer screens will get better and better but at the same time the growth market is in netbooks with 10 inch screens and in mobile applications that will never exceed the size of a pocket.

With decent LCD projectors still in the $5000 range for anything remotely hi res I think it will be a good long while before we come close to needing the kind of resolution that even 35mm slide film gave us in projection.

The real metric should be how comfortable you are using the gear and how comfortable you are interfacing with the subjects on the other side of the camera. I don't do much landscape. I find people more interesting. I always remember what a producer on a reality TV show once told me. "People don't care is the picture is dark, or fuzzy or grainy as long as the action is exciting and the sound is perfect."

And I always remind myself that Robert Frank's images in "The Americans" wouldn't be any more powerful if they were grainless and tack sharp. In fact, I think it would destroy them.

Texas Road Art.

I love big open skies and sweeping overpasses. I like monumental architecture. I like concrete that soars up into the sky. And I like skies filled with every kind of cloud, from the little "puffies" to the stringy "sliders" that come racing through when the weather changes.

You'd think a self proclaimed portrait shooter would run screaming from an assignment that was all about spending quality time with no one but myself. Even more so when you realize that I've heard all my own tall tales any number of times. But there is something quite liberating about being handed a list of potential locations and a wide open schedule.

The client and I agreed about a fixed price for the project. I would get to choose the days, the times, the angles and the feel of the shots. As long as I understood the budget I was pretty much on my own. I could be early. I could be late. As long as I turned in the stuff they wanted everything was fine.

I shot for six days. I'd trek out in the morning and when I got to the location I'd look up at the clouds and try to divine whether they were about to break and let the blue sky through or whether they were fixin to well up and cry down on me. If the portents were good I'd start the search for the angles and the lay of the light I wanted.

My only nemesis was the heat. I did this project in August, just north of Austin, Texas. The sun beat down on me like a bad drummer from a 1980's metal band. But after a while you learn to wear floppy shirts and a big hat. You learn really quick to bring your sunglasses along. And I learned, after my first Photoshop review of the take, that you should always take a light tight loupe to evaluate your take on the rear LCD. No matter what the maker says, no screen is accurate when the sun is bouncing and banking all around you.

I liked the parts of the highway project that were new because commuters hadn't yet incorporated the route into their routines. That meant that three or four minutes would go by without any cars. In early afternoon the roads would be silent for even longer spells. But my favorite part of the project was crawling around and under the sweeping and majestic overpasses, trying to contain the mighty dynamic range of real life and slap it down to sensor manageable blends of photons. My biggest allies were my Polarizing filters. My most important technique: absolutely accurate exposure metering.

Nearly all of these images were done on either an Olympus e520 or an Olympus e1 and nearly all three thousand shots were done with two lenses: The 14-54 and the 11-22mm. Other indispensable equipment included my water bottle and my cheap Nevados brand cross trainer shoes from Costco.

It was a quiet and contemplative job that was full of straight ahead work and satisfaction. The kind of job everyone needs to wedge in the middle of a hectic schedule. And working in opposition to my typical ways made it all the more refreshing. I did another job like this for another client about a year ago and shot the whole thing on small cameras. G10's, SX10's and the like. The results were equally nice.

Not having the client there made me realize how far down the line of decisions the choice of the camera is. And how mightily we've tried to elevate it. The number one goal of this job was to create good images without succumbing to heat exhaustion........