I like the idea that imperfections help make an artwork more accessible. I translate this to mean that portraits which are over-styled will never be as satisfying as portraits that are a reflection of the moment.

Usually I crop a bit tighter to the top of the frame. My first thought is that I've left too much head room in this portrait of my friend, M. But when I try to crop it I lose the square and too much of the wonderful and energetic background. I see the wisp of hair that's come away from the well tended majority and created its own extra diagonal just over M's left eye. Common practice would be to have a stylist rush in an cement that errant wisp back into the fold. But the "imperfection" makes the portrait more real for me. And to stop the process of interaction we had embarked upon in order to maintain order seemed like a bad gamble as well as a nod toward too much compulsive neatness.

The common practice now seems to be a push to strike a "sexy" pose when young women are photographed. I like seeing M. look into the camera in a strong and confident way. Style dictates a slight turn of the body so one doesn't photograph squared shoulders but, again, I think the shoulders balance the image in a way that adds a graphic element often missing in portraits.

Finally, I understand that I've (unintentionally?) centered the image around M's eyes. I have no explanation or excuse other than the idea that this was a reflex on my part because I found her eyes to be so compelling.

It's a portrait replete with "errors." It is a portrait of a beautiful person. The errors make the whole of the work more accessible to me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adjustable arm. Ambidextrous. 

My selection for a monopod system.

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

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

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

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

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

Here's the book we were talking about:

It still works.....

You can get a copy here: