Having my camera with me keeps me out of trouble far more than it get me into it. Usually it's just because rather than being bored and getting fussy like the short attention span dude that I am I can just make photos. While at my nephews birthday party my wife was playing with some balloons, yeah she's a big kid too!, and I made this photo through one of the balloons. It's kind of how I see her anyway.
So my friend LuLu tells me that she and her long time sweetie Chris were finally getting married. Since their little mountain town throws a huge party on 4th of July they thought "why not join in?" She is a chef and he is the drummer in the popular Phish tribute band Phix so you know that it was going to be a good time. How's the day going to start?, I ask. "Well", she says, "we are riding the fire truck in the parade and there's a kazoo marching band ..." AaaahG! I'm in! How can you pass THAT up? So I assigned myself to be their officially unofficial photographer.
Well the area has been getting monsoon weather lately and it didn't let us down - as in downpour. It rained and rained but luckily it stopped for the hour of the ceremony and some family pictures then it rained during the reception but then it cleared for the big fireworks display that this tiny town somehow finds the money every year to put on. Which is odd considering how many cities canceled their fireworks due to budgetary issues. Anyhoo it was a total hoot. This little town is nuts in the best mountain hippy way possible. Here's some of my faves:
During the parade, which is about 6 blocks long, there was this kid who made this hat from a cardboard box. Love it!
Except during the ceremony I pretty much shot everything with my Nikon D700 and Nikon AF-D 28mm f/1.4 wide open. I so love this lens.
Like I said: it rained but that didn't stop them from dancing like the happy bunch that they are. I found the hard way that the weather seals on the D700 work really well. I was totally drenched shooting the dancers but the camera acted as if nothing happened. Whoo-Hoo!
There were dogs everywhere and not a clean one in sight.
This is the kind of shot that frankly you just couldn't get a few years ago. It's shot with my AF-D 28mm f/1.4 wide open at ISO 3200 at one and a third seconds; yes with a tripod. The files these days are so clean at what used to be insane levels of sensitivity that it's stunning. Combine that with long exposures that don't give hot pixels and an available darkness shooter like me is in heaven. This was done at EV-2 which is a stop below the lowest light level that Nikon says that the camera will autofocus at. By using the autofocus on the guys Nike shirt I was able to get a focus point in conditions where our eyes could never ever register as sharp. Man do I love this technology.
The red glow is the fire fighters setting off fire works while the moon shines through the evening fog. Kinda spooky huh?
Ok there was no Rabbi but it does make for a good beginning, yes? A bit ago I was at a studio opening with my good friend who is a pretty hot-shot shooter. While we were mingling about he said something to me as I kept jumping in and out of the conversation. He noticed that some photographers are married to their cameras, always have them with them and are making photos whether they are "working" or not. At the time I was rudely looking for and making pictures with my new Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX3. It’s a neat-o little camera that is just about the coolest available light grab-n-snap out there. Yeah I'm one of the guys who always has the camera out. He's not and that's cool.
But I digress. At that moment something the host said earlier in the evening came back to me: he likes to have total control when he makes photos. My friend is the same way. That got me thinking. We've had loads of conversation about our creative process and we are very different. I’ll call him an “Architect”.
Architects are building something grand. To them the photograph
is the end result of lots of planning, organizing and coordination. They have a wonderfully crafted concept that they are making reality. They work with design and engineering to make a whole that
is functional and beautiful at the same time. Their work has a
purpose and they know what it is going to be before they start. They don’t easily get distracted
from that vision. Their way of working usually isn't to go out there and see what happens; although sometimes they do. Their art is superb and they don't mind the details. If anything visualizing and negotiating the details is what makes their work what it is.
These kinda guys compose symphonies, write novels and direct amazing movies.
Then there is me. I’m the ferret. I’m always poing!-ing
around and being sucked in to some shiny new thing. I see photography as an end
to itself. The experiences that come along the way are the perks but not the
goal. The reason that I’m a photographer, and the kind of photographer that I
am, is that I love to visually wander about this amazing world of ours. I want
to be inspired by the moment. I want to be surprised. I really don’t want the
photo to look like the one in my head – I want it to be cooler and more
interesting than I would have thought up. I want to wonder "what if?" I want to look at the shot and say "How the heck did THAT happen? Sweet!". I want to be caught up in the moment and the moments that I capture. Minute details bore me and as a result my work is much more raw and loose than that of the finely polished Architects. I wish that I had their patience, focus and vision but I'm just not wired that way.
I'm an improv comic and visual vagabond.
The LX3 is going to be my best little go-everywhere-together friend for a while. It’s tiny, has the equivalent of a 24mm f/2.0 lens, is fast to shoot, easy to work with, has a usable ISO 400 and it shoots RAW. Oh and it does HD movies too. It’s the perfect camera for a ferret who isn’t “on the job” because I can do a lot with it at any time. Here’s some ferret pix from the LX3:
PoinG!
I got a call the other day from the PR rep of a company that just won an award related to their sales growth. They do something very well and as a result have grown a very impressive amount over the last few years. The guy wanted to be able to use the photo that I made of their CEO recently to go along with their PR blitz about said award. I asked what their intended usage is because that's how you figure price. It's about value. The more valuable the image is to the buyer, the more you charge for it. This isn't a huge company but they are not a "Mom and Pop" either. Oh and they had an over 500% increase in business in the last two years so I knew that they couldn't honestly give me the "but money is tight right now" argument. The guy wanted 6 months web and limited print use. No problem. I had told him that I needed info to formulate a fair price and explained that I would send along a contract that spelled out the terms and rights involved. He was cool with all that but when I quoted him a very fair price, not "chump change" but very reasonable, he acted shocked.
"Oh," he said, "can you just give it to us and we will only use it for a few weeks?" Now let's be serious. This is a PR dude for a fast growing and profitable company and he balked at a very insignificant amount of money to better help him promote their achievement. How is this?
I explained as politely as I could that I do not give my work away. I am a professional and I earn my money because what I do has value. They did not get to be as successful as they have by giving their goods and services away so why should I? If my work has value to him then it certainly has value to me and I could be compensated for it. Makes sense right? Well not to a lot of people who are in powerful positions in successful companies who understand that the image of their business is important. "I want it but don't want to pay for it" is short sighted and selfish. That is the impetus for millions of people who have been hurting the music and movie industry for years with piracy. Heck I had that one guy call me up to ask me to give him one of the images that, he admitted, he was trying to steal from my web page. Yeah, he was having a hard time ripping me off so would I be so kind as to just send it to him! Gah!
Well anyway the PR guy gave me the "I'll call ya back" and I'm pretty sure he will never call back even if he realized the logic and correctness of my position. Frankly I think that I embarrassed him and that's cool to a degree. I hope that he never tries to low ball someone who will make him and his people look good/better. It makes him look like he is the one who doesn't understand business and marketing. I know that I will have this conversation on the value of my work over and over and over again for years to come. Educating clients about how the business of being a creative person works is a never ending process. As soon as you get that one new client up to speed, here comes another one who is baffled that I'm charging real money to "just snap a few photos".
When people ask me how to make their photographs better I often tell them to simplify their images. I tell them to clearly show their subjects and get distracting elements out of the frame. This is mostly because beginners compositions tend to be too loose and have lots of stuff in the frame that has nothing to do with the subject. This is what I call the "brown dot" photo. You know what I mean. You friend/family member comes back from vacation and excitedly shows you this awesome photo of a wild critter that they got. But what is in the picture is a bunch of trees, rocks, sky and a little brown speck that you are told is a bear, moose, wildebeest, bigfoot, whatever.
Get close. Get tight. Show me the subject and get the junk out of the way! This advice usually improves their photography greatly if they take it to heart. But frankly a complex composition is a very advanced technique. When you have lots of layers in your shot you have a much greater amount of images that simply don't work. However sometimes sticking things in your frame supports the subject or in other ways helps the shot. In other ways they save the shot.
Case study #1: Kate
Kate is a consultant and works out of an office only slightly larger than your coat closet. Really. I was assigned to do a portrait but her office wasn't going to cut it. The entry way of the building had this wall of frosted glass and some comfy chairs so I had her back lit by the windows. I put my small Chimera soft box slightly to camera right and a 10degree spot grid behind her at camera right. There was a flower arrangement nearby so I took it and with my 28-70 set to 70mm and wide open at f/2.8 I moved the flowers around right on the lens hood until I got an interesting color pattern to frame her with. The dark stuff at the top of the frame and the tan-ish blob is the flowers.
Case study #2: Lee
Much like the situation with Kate i.e. nothing to work with for context, Lee is an administrator of an outreach program for immigrants. He's not a teacher but a desk dude. I met him at a school where they do english instruction. After some shots of him in a classroom situation I noticed that at the front doors the school had a display of soda bottles for a project on plastic recycling. They were mostly clear but I knew that if I had Lee stand under one of the ceiling lights as a "spot light" and color corrected for the tungsten bulb the bottles would go blue. So I positioned him and went outside. Again that's my 28-70 at 70mm and f/2.8.
Case study #3 messy eats:
There is a gyros cart that shows up only late on weekends in downtown Boulder to cater to the party/drinking crowd. I was doing a story on places like this one and while hanging with some gyros fans I got this shot. The looming and out of focus dude on the right makes for a very layered frame and makes you feel like you are right in the thick of things. I tend to find that frames like this work better of the big blob is on the right as we tend to read images from left to right. This was my 28mm f/1.4 @ f/2.8.
Case study #4 Pari:
Was doing a profile piece on Pari, who is a chef from India, and it talked about how family centered the cusine is. I was spending some time with her family and while she was playing with her daughter at the kitchen sink I made this. I saw the cut lemons and glass on the counter so I put my lens up against them for color and texture. You can't tell what the objects are but they create a more 3 dimentional composition than if I didn't have something in there to frame the moment with.
These shots are almost always much harder to make successful than a clean frame. If there isn't something immediately noticable to layer in the frame I tend to get cleaner "straight" shots first. But after that is done I try to find a way to get something with more depth. Usually the answer is to let things get wierd. They don't often work but when they do it's pretty neat-o.
Some may have heard about a certain news photographer from Denmark whos photos from Haiti were disqualified from the final round of a major photo competition because he worked the be-jebus out of his entries in Photoshop. He didn't add/remove stuff like some other guys lately who have come under the watchful eye of journalistic ethics. Nope. Here he took rather boring images and cranked the color, contrast and burn/dodge tools into the relm of "that's nothing like what the scene looked like at all".
This got me thinking about how for ever I have been, on non-news "its the truth yer Honor" photos, actually been doing essentially straight prints. By that I mean if I was to be shooting film and after processing it, if it's a negitive, I would pop it into the enlarger and make a color correct print with adequate contrast and minimal cropping. No burning, dodging or selective anything. Basically taking the image out of the camera and adjusting it to print well without doing anything to be creative to it after the fact. Now when I was making gallery prints I'd do all kinds of stuff to bring out my vision. As Ansel Adams said "The negitive is the score but the print is the performance" and I wanted great performances. I was/am am pretty darned good print maker but in the news world that's a bad thing so I have left that stuff at the door, so to type.
However for some things where it's not reality to begin with, like portraits, the act of making one is from the get-go a manipulated situation. So if you are going to have your subject sit here, wear this outfit, turn your head this way, hold the chicken like this and put a few lights around to set the mood, why can't you make a few adjustments to the image to bring out what you want to show? With in reason of course.
I have a few actions set up in Photoshop so that they take the RAW image that I shoot, always RAW muh-friend!, and create adjustment layers for all the things that I may need. These are: a sharpening layer, a color boost, levels adjustment, curve adjustment preset, a selective color layer, a burn/dodge layer and a layer with a whole lot of mid boost that I call a "fill light". Once I open up the RAW file it takes Photoshop about 3 seconds to make all these layers. With the preset color and curves I have in my main action I usually just flatten the image and start shipping it to the client. But with other things I'll get a bit funky with the tools at hand. Take this shot which is the straight RAW file: BTW, everyone say "HI!" to Leah.
It's really flat but that's the way that a RAW file looks. I wanted to bring out her eyes and add some depth to the image but not make it look "worked". So here is the image with the layers and masks I created:
It's pretty simple really. I masked out the color saturation to her skin but not her lips and eyes. I applied the sharpening only to her eyes, eyebrows and lips. I did a slight edge burn and boosted the white point on her face for more contrast. Using the "fill light" mid tone boost I increased mid tone separation in her eyes and hair. Total time to produce: maybe 4 minutes.
Final result:
I'm pretty sure that I'm not going to be kicked out of any competitions for my toning - ever. With Leah I didn't use the clone or healing tools. I didn't add or remove any "content" but instead just tried to bring more focus on her. The "straight print" didn't work that well. The saturation on her skin was wrong and the contrast was weak. With some minor adjustments I think that she looks "right" to me. At least that is how I felt about her when I was making the photos. Having the emotional content as well as the informational content be true is, to me, rather important.
Technicals: Nikon D700 daylight WB, 1/60th sec ISO320. Nikon AF-S 28-70mm f/2.8 @ f/2.8 SB-800 into 43" shoot through umbrella at camera left and and SB-800 at camera right set to -1.7 controlled via CLS.
I don't get it. Photography, and being an artist in general, is about trying to see beyond the obvious. We are to try and explore the external and internal world in an attempt to reveal some kind of truth and encourage the audience to engage in a dialog about our subject and point of view upon it. Right? Yet every few years there is a resurgence of portraits that seems to me to be taken by photographers who are using basically none of the tools of photography to make a compelling/story telling image about their subject.
What I'm talking about is almost always a person usually standing directly in the middle of the frame with very little environment around them and almost nothing in the foreground. The person has their hands at their side or in a position where there is no kind of gesture. The subject has no expression - call it the "thousand yard stare" if you will so there is no emotive state other than possible boredom as they look into the lens. The scene is either lit with direct on camera flash or unflattering ambient light.
I call this the "Diane Arbus effect". I'm not blaming her but she is one of the originators of this kind of work. Since she's dead she won't be directly confronting me about it. But this kind of look which I've been seeing a lot of, again!, lately makes no sense to me. There is no: 1) use of color/graphics, 2) dynamic composition, 3) dynamic lighting or 4) moment that makes the photo interesting. The image, which is printed in an established and visually respected publication, is just plain boring. Now Arbus did a whole body of work this way and I have never understood why she's famous - that's me just ranting btw. But all these people, professional photographers mind you, appear to be telling their subjects to "go stand over there and look like you wish you were somewhere else". The most boggling thing to me is that these images get published and the creators get more assignments to produce the same kind of work. Wha?
I think that there is a huge difference from producing a photographic likeness of a person and creating an evocative portrait. The kind of images that I'm picking on I find to be neither inspired nor inspiring. They just puzzle me. Meh!
So here of mine that I'm happy with: This is Sven Hadenas, part of my "Chef's that I dig" series.
I was given an assignment to photograph Betsy who publishes a magazine called Famazon for and about gamers, fantasy, sci-fi, horror and tv/literature from the female perspective. So after a phone call to her it was obvious that she's the kind of sweet and goofy person who makes photography easy. "Do you want me and my daughters to put on our fairy wings and run around the house?" I mean how can you say no to that? Oh no mam, we wouldn't want the photos to be fun ... can you instead just stand there with a blank expression while wearing a grey sweatsuit? (duh!)
So I fell in love with Betsy and her fun family. They live in a lovely home in the mountains that is filled to the brim with just about every classic/important/cool sci-fi, horror and fantasy novel ever. So long as you are not uptight their energy is infective and their sence of fun delightfull. The deal is that they really didn't just play dress up for me. They do this alot so it's actually kinda normal for them. I wasn't sure what I was going to need so I brought my case of lights and such but they never left the car. I shot for two hours with just my D700 and AF-S 28-70 f/2.8. Light and simple.
Here's Betsy trying on one of their costume hats. It ended up spending most of the time with her 7 year old Sylvie.
The youngest, Bella, was constantly getting into my frame and making faces, sticking her head/hand
way into the lens, and in general doing silly things. Here Betsy is
adjusting Sylvies wings and Bella is doing whatever Bella does. It was
hard not get a kick out of the whole deal. Yes Betsy has a leather
winged helmet on.
Except for the snow boots the girls have on this almost looks like a
scene from some funky fantasy movie but no, they are just playing
around in the snow outside their house. The swingset and grill are just
off to the right. Man, who needs "reality" when really odd is so much
cooler but just as true?
Bella became my friend and kept wanting to hold my hand, give me
things, scream that happy little kid scream at me or sit in my lap. So
I had to take a frame of her on my lap with her funky eyewear.
I gotta tell ya, meeting such honestly neat and different people is one of the true joys of this job.
Photographer Dave Black has been a huge inspiration to me from the moment that I met him. I was at a photo conference and had some time to kill and saw that this guy who works for Sports Illustrated and Newsweek was going to talk about freelancing. About 35 of us showed up to the hour long talk and in walks this tall thin dude who walks up the the podium and promptly does a hand stand. "Now that I have your attention - let's talk about photography!" That was my introduction to Dave. His energy is amazing and he has always pushed his artistic boundaries. He's visually fearless. I picked up a lot of things from him and one was "Don't assume that you have to photograph anything in a particular way. If you are used to using a 400mm lens to shoot baseball, try using an 85mm instead. You will be forced to find different images than the ones that you expect to see. It will be hard at first but they are there."
So even though we all have a comfortable zone of approaching subject visually sometimes it's good to force yourself into something that is going to throw a variable into the mix. If you tend to use your 70-200 lens most of the time, shoot some with a fixed 35mm. If you typically bring out 4 lights to do a portrait, do some with just ambient and a reflector. Sometimes the "wrong" tool for the job is better.
For my news/documentary work I tend to stay in the 28-85mm range for a number of reasons. Mostly because it allows me to be physically close to my subjects and show an intimacy both personally and visually. Also at the 3-5 foot "conversation" range any lens longer than an 85 is very tight and won't focus close enough. Anything wider than a 24mm gets quite distorted when hands or feet get so close to the lens. So for those kind of shoots I tend to either have two bodies (one with a 24/28mm fixed and another body with my 85mm f/1.4) or one body with my 28-70mm f/2.8.
I was assigned to make images for a story about an aerial dance studio and decided to bring with me the wrong lens for the job: my 14mm. I initially got that lens when I was shooting my Nikon D200's with their 1.5x crop so that I would have a very wide 21mm equivalent for things like architectural shots. Since I've been using the full frame D700's though the 14mm has become the "insanely wide lens" that hasn't really been used because it's soooo wide. But I thought "What the heck!"
After getting what I knew would satisfy the client I put on the 14mm and started doing what you are not supposed to do: stick it very close to people. Why? The foreshortening becomes extreme and very distorted/odd looking. So what?! It could be cool. Also rather than framing things through the viewfinder I blind shot nearly everything. I did use Live View for some initial rough lining up of shots but since they were moving about I couldn't really "compose" in a normal sense. End result? I loved the 14mm shots more than the other ones done with less lens induced weirdness.
Now this approach doesn't work very often, or it becomes boring, but here it was a load of fun. Sometimes talking the wrong approach is just the thing to do.
Did a little spring fashion-y shoot the other day and thought that ya might want to take a gander. I did it a little backwards as is my usual method. First I didn't want, if possible, to to use typical 19 year old gal who is a size 2 or 4 as the piece was aimed at women in their 30's. We got lucky and found two ladies who are gorgeous but exotic looking in their own right so I wanted to use both of them for the contrasting looks. The studio that we used is rather small so I made the best of it.
First off I wanted to use softboxes as edge/separation lights but because of the size of the studio I ended up using two small Chimera softboxes instead of the mediums that I initially wanted to use. Frankly I couldn't fit two mediums in and not be crowing the area that I had to work with. The softboxes give a bigger and glow-ier light on women than a hard light like a grid spot and I wanted the ladies to not look etched by the light. I also wanted a big soft light on them but wanted the light mainly high for the jawline shaping that a high light produces. Since I was going to have them move about I used my 60 inch shoot though umbrella because it throws light in a curve rather than a flat plane as softbox does. It also gives a round catchlight which is more natural looking than that of a rectangular softbox. I used another head with a 20 degree grid to be placed just above my head to act as an on axis fill to keep the eyes and shadows open. The camera, a Nikon D700 and AF-S 28-70mm f/2.8 was tethered to my laptop.
The diagram looks like this:
For your amusement I put my old Nikon D200 with my AF-S 17-35mm f/2.8 on a tripod set as an interval timer, cranking a shot every 15 seconds so that we could see how things transpired. And it looks like this:
