Field notes and late night rambing

I was dreaming ...

about developing film the other evening. Really and no it wasn't because of eating too much spicy food. Ok I'll admit that in the dream I was developing it in a fish tank while the lights were on but hey - it's a dream so cut me some slack jack! Now from time to time I am shooting film and developing it but I haven't in a while. So this all got me thinking. What does it mean?

Well I've been reading some postings about how some non-news clients are finding film interesting again if only because it doesn't look like digital. I think that's cool but when you consider that most publications ditched their scanning person/department atleast 5 years ago when digital replaced film I'm wondering that if they are interested in me/you shooting film are they expecting me/you to have it scanned properly? I mean THEY don't have a scanner anymore, right? Do they expect us to have a $5,000 film scanner for the occational job where they let us shoot film or are they willing to wait while our only remaining pro lab in the area does it? Hmm ...

Anyhoo it made me just think about the simplicity/joy/anachronism of shooting film. Maybe just maybe our digital "gotta have it now!" mentality has a sliver of a chance of slowing down and allowing our photographic vision to not be based on turn around times. Still I'm glad that I never got rid of my film cameras and am still using them.

More from the Pola-pocket-cam-o-phone

This is more from my doodling with the CameraFX application for my G1 phone camera. I really wish that it didn't reduce the file size so much but eh' what do you want for nothing huh? I is nice to make delightfully trashy photos without so much as real gear or anything that resembles professional control. Ahhhh!

Words from masters of other arts

I ran across these two short bits of thought that totally made sense to me about our job as a photographer in capturing visual moments. Unless you are doing still lives in the studio there is always some variable element. If the subject is a person then even if they are the most trained actor/athlete there are a whole range of different ways that they can perform the same action. It's our job as photographer to direct, and in camera via our decision to make the exposure and then which one of our exposures to use, edit to deliver the moments that we want. Which brings me to this though on directing from Steven Spielberg:

Then on the other hand you have the freewheeling journalist/documentary approach where you have no real control over what is going to happen and you are improvising along with the elements around you. Most of my work is like this and the jazz great Sonny Rollins puts it perfectly here:

But there there is a world where you need to combine both and be able to turn the director and improviser on and off in a moments notice. I find that this is really hard and when I do it my brain gets tired from using the clutch all the time with all the gear changing. Stay too long or too shot in one mind frame and things go wrong. It's all about balancing the knowing of what you want and letting the rest flow. Ooooooooommmmmmmmmm!

2010 - I’m so excited

Huh? Am I crazy? Nope my eyes are open and my heart is eager for the upcoming year.

Yes everything is in flux and moving too fast. Yes the economy is still faltering and markets are precarious. And I’m certainly aware that clients are tightening their already taught purse strings. I don’t care.

 

Why? Because we photographers, especially the ones who work on location, are used to adversity. Things never go “as planned” in our work so why should any of this really bother us? We always have to think on our feet, adapt, adjust and bring back the goods.

How is this current state of transition any different? If anything because of the newfound glory of all the digitally inspired niches and their various info pipelines we have more opportunities for work.

 

Ok some venues are just not doing what they used to and as such some kinds of photography are becoming “rarer than an honest politician” but that’s not that big a deal. There was never really a big market for gritty news and documentary work ever. Even during the 50-60’s with Look and Life battling it out that was only a tiny fraction of all the photographic work out there. Frankly I wonder where all the death and dying photo stories that get the big photo awards ever get published anyhoo!

 

My prediction is this: With all the venues for reaching potential customers now the power of compelling imagery is even more important to cut through the din. This will require a different way of pricing/licensing since your photos won’t be used in a specific given publication/advert space. The photos will be used essentially everywhere but for a very short period of time because in a blink everyone will have seen the image and the next time they see it it will loose its impact. Ads will have to be generated more quickly to keep up with saturation and as a result the photography will have to be new.

 

That’s the ad/marketing dude stuff. For the news dudes we are going to loose the vertical image because 99% of the venues for our work will become screens which are horizontal. Forget the cover shot as there aren’t covers anymore. Cool! We never liked verticals and cover shots, although lucrative, were a ton of work and never really any fun. Also just as with the advertising mess people are getting tired of sorting through all the information clutter and are wanting a focused source of news that is relevant and vetted. Newspapers/news magazines will mostly stop being printed and will be online but not the same as they were. But their need for serious content will be just like the old days if not more. With things happening so fast we need to be plugged in to the news stream more than ever. I mean who are you going to trust to give you the skinny on that mess in City Council, some dudes blog? Who is going to sort out this whole deal with the scandal with the Governor? A “citizen journalist” who by day works at the car dealership? The guys who run news organizations are going to realize that the simple puff pieces that they ran for the last decade don’t cut it anymore and they have to go back to doing hard news, investigative news to survive. Now from a classic news photographer’s perspective, how can that be bad?

 

I’m not a soothsayer by any means. I have no crystal ball but peering into my beer glass of wonder I’m still pretty certain that although things are making many of us feel rather sea sick, it’s going to be a fun although bumpy ride.

 

As for me I have 4 personal projects in the works, one quite long term, new energy and fresh ideas and a decidedly confident attitude about 2010. New work, new clients, new horizons.

 

Happy photo to go with the prior delusional rant: A quick snap from my phone. BTW this is an ice cream shop made to look like a milk jug. The thing is about 35 feet tall.

 

BTW, it cracks me up to think that my phone has more resolution, although not as good, as the Nikon D1 which changed everything for photographers a decade ago. The D1 made millions of film photographers cower in fear that the digital photography revolution was at their door while others embraced what it brought. My phone, my lovely Google G1, seems to represent the current digital fear - compact and instant information access and “The death of print”. With its 3G/WiFi connectivity with full web browsing and e-mail along with a digital camera and camcorder that allows me to shoot a photo/video, write a story to go with it and upload it all from a device that costs less than $200 and fits into my pocket. Our tools are pretty Sci-Fi so shouldn’t our mentality be too?

Embracing a lack of quality control

Most of us photographer are control freaks. I've mentioned that before and yes it's still true. I tend to want to have lots of control over the things that I can and let the rest go where it may. I shot on chromes for so long that I could shoot just about everything as a jpg and not really worry that the image won't work. When you shoot a chrome what you get in the camera is what you get in the image. If you are used to that then you don't even think about adjusting the image after you've shot it so you get it right the first time. Given that I don't need the control that shooting RAW gives me but sometimes it's a blessing especially when I want to be able to take advantage of all the tools that post processing gives us. So as a result I shoot everything in RAW - it's part of my workflow and to a degree part of my shooting style. I pay more attention to the moment, the graphics and to a lesser extent exposure. The rest I'll worry/play with later.

But isn't that holding on to control too? Doesn't that keep me a "control freak" by letting me have all that control in post? In the old days the film that was in the camera when I hit the shutter button determined the bulk of how the image would look. Using Kodachrome  or Velvia  would give your image a totally different look and once your image was on that film you are stuck. With RAW you can give the image whatever level of contrast or saturation or tonality that you want at any time.  So I thought the other day "Maybe I should let some images go where they will like in the film days just to mix things up". Hmmm .....

I have an app for the camera in my G1 phone that processes the images into a Polaroid-ish one. Complete with funky colors and border for the authentic look. Now THAT is a lack of control. So I'm playing around with it for kicks. Crap lens, no exposure control, no color control, no decisive moment capacity,  blah-blah-blah. Perfect!

 

I mean, I would never do this on assignment (well if you want to pay me to shoot your campaign on my phone I guess I could be enticed ...) but as an ongoing exercise in creatively letting go it should be interesting.

Made me think of Weston

I'm a huge fan of winter light. It makes a good portion of the day that fleeting "magic hour" which is normally about 20 minutes long. However unless you are shooting outdoor sports winter here in Colorado tends to mean a lot of indoor shoots so that glorious light goes to waste. Ugh! Worse still are the days when the light is superb and I'm stuck in the office.

Like today. I did a quick early morning shoot of the new head of the Colorado Medical Society and then it was in the office setting up appointments and photo sessions for the next few days as well as tracking down a model for a shoot that I will be doing in about a week. Boring! But I went to get a fresh cuppa joe and noticed the long shadows on my kitchen counter. Egads but it's only 3PM and we get this light! So I get the Ferret Cam, my Panasonic LX-3, and make an image that reminds me of that one that Ed Weston did of his toilet. Only my image is more sanitary. I love the idea of Ed lying on the floor of his bathroom with his giant 8x10 camera aimed at his commode. But then you sacrifice for your art, right? Eh, back to the grind. Have to pack my bags to shoot a basketball game tonight. That is winter light that is never inspiring ...

Wise man say: "If it looks good shoot it"

It's easy to get overly focused, to get tunnel vision if you will, when on assignment. When time is tight and there is pressure on you to get the images that you need feels overwhelming I'm pretty certain that at some point of stress your creativity shuts down or at least suffers. I try to have as little a feeling of pressure as possible and try to do whatever I can to make the time that I have camera in hand to not get in the way of my inner vision.

To wit the saying : you will find what you are looking for but not what you aren't looking for, certainly applies. Sometimes there are very interesting things going on around us but we miss those moments and visual opportunities because they are not the ones on our shot list. In some cases we really need to find a way to take our blinders off and maybe stand on our heads if that's what it takes to not be so constricted. Many of my favorite images that I've made are out takes, asides, sketches ... things that just happened to seem interesting at the time when I was, say waiting for the subject to arrive or my assistant to move that light around.

One of the great things about shooting digitally is that you can easily pull out those out takes from the pile of images that you eventually hand over to the client. In the film days you would have to shoot them on a separate camera or roll of film and process them separately. You didn't want the client looking at all this time you spend crawling around in the grass shooting out of focus flower from worm level with a fisheye when you were supposed to be doing portraits of the singer at her pool. Well the fact is that she took a longer time in hair/makeup than you expected so you got inspired and kept your creative engine running.

So here are a few recent ones that I dig:

 

 

Archiving: feeding the beast / lightening the load

As I mentioned in the prior post about how our storage tech has gotten smaller/faster I realized that I had to do something that I've been dreading for the last two years: putting all my image DVD's into my mirrored hard drive archive system. Not that long ago large hard drives, i.e. bigger than 100gig were seriously expensive. When we first started seriously shooting digital around year 2000/1 drives were in the order of a $5 per gig and a 40 gig drive was considered to be pretty big at the time. To run a mirrored backup/archive you need two of the buggers. So that got rather expensive rather quick thus a lot of us were burning our files to CD and then to DVD because it was just a lot cheaper. Well time and technology marches on at a blistering pace and now I'm buying 500gig drives for about $70 a pop but I've been eyeballing this shelf full of DVD's knowing that one day I'm going to have to put them onto disc.

Well that day happened and I've been feeding the machine disc after disc after disc and have noticed a few things in the process.

1) I'm really glad that I was smart and burned things to mirrored discs. The writable CD's and DVD's have a limited shelf life. I found that some files on 3 discs were somehow unreadable but since I had the smarts to put them on two discs I could read the other one.

2) Good doG but reading files off of DVD's is so slow. They used to be wicked fast but in comparison to our current hard drives and flash cards the transfer has taken a painfully long time.

3) I'm going to have to go through essentially this process again in a few years but with everything in my archive. The simple fact is that I've already done this before when I went from CD's to DVD's to archive. About every 5 years the storage technology changes so much that things start to become non-backwards compatible. CD to DVD wasn't that big a deal as the interface was the same: IDE. Hard drives were initially IDE then EIDE which was the same cable but different guts luckily they talked to each other. Now we have been using SATA drives which are going to be replaced soon by solid state drives. When that happens I'll have to move all my SATA drives that that format. Gad!

4) In the early days I was really worried about how much storage I was using. I made brutal edits for archiving. It's funny but as I was scanning through some of my old shoots I could remember lots of vivid details about the shoot and I could remember some shots that I didn't save. Ugh!

5) My old "system" of archiving was horrible. I didn't even give folders good and easy to understand names. Never mind that I wasn't key wording my images or even the shoots. What a maroon!

6) In the early days I shot stuff JPEG! Wow was I ignorant. Granted we didn't have the ability to shoot RAW+jpg like we do these days and a 256mb card cost about $500 so that made RAW tough but still it gives me the shudders.

So now all those shiny discs in their little plastic cases are gone. Replaced by a single, well dual actually, hard drive. It was an exercise that I will go through again in a few years and for all that rot it was an interesting stroll down memory lane for my early digital years.

 

AC/DC as a lesson in photography

I was having lunch with my buddy Peter … everyone say “Hi Peter!”.

 

He is the guitarist and singer in two cool bands Shimmersound and Quitters Anonymous. We got talking about the creative process, as we often do, and he said something that really made me think. He said “Look at AC/DC, they have great songs and all that but when you really listen to them there is a total lack of ego there. At no time is anyone getting in the other players way. Nobody is trying to show off and that is so rare.”

Photographers, like any working artist, wants to be allowed to do their thing. We want to be the author of our work and don’t want to sacrifice our grand and noble “artistic integrity” whatever that is. Lots of us tend to do work that is in some way self serving. We are married to a technique we are fond of, a process/look that we think is special, subject matter that we think has more merit than others, whatever. You know the type. Maybe he can't possibly shoot without his ring light or has to do lots and lots of post processing. Nothing else will do.

Now I have said before that our work should make ourselves artistically happy in the long run and I will always stand by that. However it’s amazing how many photographers are tough to work with. We can be demanding divas and petulant children and I don’t understand why these folks get work.

I was just talking to an editor yesterday who let me know that the image that I shot for the cover was being replaced by another image of mine from the shoot. Seems that some editors didn’t “get it”. My reaction: why should I care; I’m still on the cover so why freak out? I know that some photographers would. Yeah the initial image was way cooler and the one they are going to use is much more straight forward and to me rather boring in comparison but I’m not offended by the switch and why should I be?

As I see it, when I’m hired I’m part of a team and my job is to bring back to the client what they need with as little trouble as possible. Keep it simple stupid, right? But I hear about other photogs who simply have to bring a big entourage to the set or have specific demands on trifles such as the snacks to be delivered during the lunch break and I just shake my head. How does that kind of attitude effect the subject? Do they enjoy that kind of energy coming from their photographer and does that help them relax and make better photos? Eh!

Personally I try to make the process of making photos as simple and fun as possible. I see myself as a problem solver and never want to be adding to the stress. Hotel booked up? I’ll sleep in a tent. It’s raining? I’ll do the shoot indoors. Subject having a rough day? I’ll work fast and make it fun somehow. That’s my job.

It’s not about me. Ever. Yeah I have concepts and a style and all that but it all has to work for the end result: a photo that makes the client want to hire me again and to make an image that is fair to the subject. I want the process to be invisible and for me to be just a dude that the subject is hanging out with and not some pompous and demanding jerk. As such I love to work with stylists and editors who are all about the artistry and not the artist.

I did a quick and easy shoot this morning with a guy who has been photographed quite a bit. I was walking the subject out of the studio he said something to the effect that of all the photographers that he’s worked with I was the easiest and most fun. That’s exactly what I want them to experience: a fun time making some photos with nothing, especially me, getting in the way.

Something old something new

My wife and I don’t quite belong in this era. She loves vintage fashion and often gets lost in the costumes of period movies. While we are watching a film like Gosford Park, that takes place in 1932, I can hear her thinking “Oooo! I want that dress and that one and wow I love that hat!”. As for me I love to tell people that “I’m totally 80’s … like 1480’s!” meaning that I love to explore and if I were living in those times I’d be on a ship or land expedition trying to find out what’s “over there”.

 

Meanwhile back at the ranch … the editor wanted to do a piece on the resurgence of vintage clothing. Lots of places are selling expensive remakes of classic looks but her idea was that we would do actual pieces from a great local vintage shop. Their store is broken up by decade: 30’s over here, 50’s over there … of course my wife fell in love with the joint. I decided that it would be cool to shoot the outfits in a manner that was similar to how they did fashion in each era that the clothes were from. This is tough as there were dozens of great photographers from each era along with some whose work, like say Penn or Avedon, spanned many decades. Still there were common visual themes to each. I spent quite a bit of time sitting on the couch with the wife researching this and of course she kept saying “Ooo … now THAT’S a skirt!” Consequently I now know more about historic fashion photography than I ever thought that I would. It was interesting to see how the technology of the day changed both what the photographers could do and how they worked with their new toys. Complicated lighting of outdoor subjects just wasn’t possible before modern powerful strobes so the location fashion shoots before the 50’s was natural light. Even into the 60’s they didn’t light the heck out of things - that came in the 70’s and especially the 80’s. The color palette was also different as film stocks changed.

 

So my idea was to make each shot a kind of homage to how things were photographed then and that meant a bit of post processing as well. We were doing 40s-80s and all of that was done of film and the early years were done on large format. So I ended up putting each image into a film frame and processing the image to match the era.  This was pretty fun project. 

40's. Totally ambient light not even a reflector. We got lucky with the lighting here even though I had lots of strobes and reflectors and such just in case.

 
50's Two lights here. I put my 60" shoot through umbrella way up at the ceiling of the studio to act as a base light for our model and the gray seamless while a small softbox is high and pointed down at camera right. I'm on a ladder above her while my assistant is holding a subtractive card just out of the frame at camera left.

 

60's. We went with "mod" not hippy 60's as per my request. I wanted that bright look that they used then. Again two lights. A strobe with a 40 degree grid very high at the background to produce the gradation and a medium softbox at camera right.

70's. I wanted the whole over warm with sun streak "Foster Grant" thing here. Getting the sun to splash over her was tough since I didn't want to make it too pronounced. Ambient with a reflector. There were guys playing frisbee just out of the view of the camera here and they certainly gave us the "Wha-tha?"

 

80's I wanted to allude to the self absorbed aspect of that decade as well as the self destructiveness. When I was getting the mirrors for the shoot the lady at the craft store asked me if I wanted them in bubble wrap to keep them safe. "Oh no," I said "I'm going to smash them in a few minutes anyway". Ha! One light here a medium softbox at camera left and a reflector at camera right.