Field notes and late night rambing

Picture a window

I'm not sure where there idea hit me but I've been glad that I went with it. Since I love to photograph things in a layered manner it often bothers me that I have to deal with things that are very 2 dimensional looking. I often think that it would be cool to be able to peer through something to get to the subject. But in studio-esque situations which are actually on location that often is either in abundance or non existent. Even if you have things to shoot through it may not give any context to the photo. Rather it may be cool but what else? Well how about maybe giving some context or a particular feel to the image?

About 4 years ago the idea hit me to go to the hardware store an buy a sheet of plexiglass for this shoot I was going to do about a guy who runs a company that does new ideas in marketing. After talking to him on the phone it was apparent that his office is a boring set of cubes and that turning it into something interesting would be a challenge. The surrounding area, like taking him to the park et al, didn't make much sense and certainly wouldn't explain anything about him or the story which was about the idea of narrow casting your marketing message. I show to his office and it was, well, a plain office space with a lot of bicycles in it. So I whip out my sheet of plexi and have him diagram out a most basic idea of what the whole thing is about while I start setting up my stuff. I mount the plexi on two stands with clamps and have him get behind it with his pen to go "John Madden" as if he's drawing out the thing in real time. It finally looked like this:

 

One soft box to camera left and one at right dialed back as fill with a third bearing a blue gel to turn the boring white wall something more interesting. The trick was that plexi is very reflective and it showed everything behind me. I had to do a lot of gyrations of angling the plexi, the camera and blocking highlights to make it look clean. But for my first time doing this it worked out pretty well and I learned how to do it better for the next time. The diagram was like this.

I've kept that sheet of plexi and have only pulled it out a few times because there just isn't that great a need for it. But when I can I do. I was commissioned to shoot a portrait of a woman, ok it was actually my wife no joke, who wrote an article about a particularly difficult time in her life and how she got through it. I wanted something moody but wasn't depressing looking. I wanted her to be strong while obviously in a difficult situation. Or something like that. I know that her wearing a silly hat was out of the question.

Since I don't have a studio I put this together in my office.

I made a 1/2 mix of water and glycerin in a spray bottle to make rain drops that would stay put. It a rainy evening ya know! I used a black muslin for the background and draped that over two saw horses with a half sheet of plywood to make a table where I put the lit candles on. There is an extra small softbox acting as a hair light that is gelled full CTO to make it match with the light from the candles behind her. I used one of my 11" sports reflectors with a 1/4CTO gel just out of frame because I wanted it to be very close to her and have no spill onto the shiny plexi. At camera right is a medium softbox with a 1/2 CTB to act as cool  evening light. That but to control reflections I had a black card keeping most of the blue off of her as well as keeping a few reflections under control. The other trick was to keep the camera out of the shot as the plexi easily made a distinct reflection of it so I draped it in black muslin and triggered the camera remotely. Diagram is like this:

Then shortly after doing that I had to shoot a local famed chocolatier. The making of chocolates is messy but most of the work is done in stainless steel machines. The hand work is well hand work and isn't very interesting looking plus you have the issue of scale where a person and a one inch truffle doesn't show well. So out came the plexi. The fun/hard/insane part was adhering her sweets to the front of the plexi to have them suspended in air so to speak. They didn't hold for very long but we got the shot.

For this I side lit the chocolates to get the most texture and shine from them. I knew that soft lighting them would make them look flat and uninteresting. But side lighting her would be unflattering so I put grid spots on the side lights to keep them from spilling. Then I put a small softbox on a boom to be right over the plexi to give her soft light. Then a touch of hair/separation light over the black portable backdrop. Again the camera was draped in black and I used the Live View on my Nikon D700 triggered via my laptop to direct her and make the final exposure. Diagram below:

Well after that my $20 sheet of plexi is pretty beaten up but it's served me well.

Previsualizing filter

 There was a day when some hardcore B&W landscape photographers would carry a filter in a frame that sucked all the color out to render the view through it to be essentially black and white. This was to help you visually edit out the color content of what you are looking at to get a better idea of how the colors would be rendered as B&W tones. It wasn’t perfect but it helped. You still had to learn how the film that you were using actually rendered things but it was close.

 

When shooting color film you had to learn that and had no help previsualizing your shot. Photogs would often find a film that they liked and basically only use that one. Otherwise you might not realize how this scene or skin tone would be either made lifeless or garish by the way that your film saw things.

 

Digital has changed that as you can to a large degree when shooting RAW render the scene anyway you want it. For quite a while I wanted to see my flat and boring looking RAW files to look like themselves when I was doing an image review on my cameras LCD screen. But then I realized that once I found a look in Photoshop that made me happy 95% of the time I could simulate that by changing the color curve and saturation of the jpg processing my cameras do. The deal is that even if you are shooting RAW the camera makes an imbedded jpg into the RAW file for the preview. Thus the file isn’t processed but the preview is so I can get the feel of how the image will most likely look like when it comes out of Photoshop.

 

But when I started the Avery Brewing project I had in my head the idea of doing it in B&W for three reasons. 1) it makes things more timeless looking, 2) most of the brewing process takes place in white-ish rooms with big stainless steel containers and tubes so there isn’t much color content to begin with and 3) it puts the emphasis on form and lighting which I really dig.

 

So I decided to use a warm tone B&W mode for the shoots so that when I’m checking on my shots the tones “feel” right. I still will do the toning in P-Shop but after taking a few shots with my normal straight color preview preset and the warm tone, the B&W made me more inspired by a mile. And isn’t that what we want – to be inspired to make photos?

 

Here’s another from the Avery barrel room. They use a stainless steel nail as a simple plug for taking samples without introducing air into the barrel. For some reason the silhouetted pliers reminds me of that famously manipulated image by Gene Smith of Albert Schweitzer where he used like 5 negatives with the handles of tools in the foreground. Hmmm?

 

Technicals: Nikon D700 and Nikon AF-D 35mm f/2.0. ISO 400, f/2.0 @ 1/30th.

Multimedia and lighting classes

I've been doing teaching/lecturing on photography for a while now but primarily in the Denver area where I'm based. It's exceptionally cool that I've been added to the faculty of The Compelling Image. TCI is a comprehensive online school that does a variety of classes on various topics from developing your compositional sense, macro photography to video editing. The classes take 2-6 weeks with new lessons each week followed by assignments and critique from the instructor.

I will be teaching classes on shooting and producing multimedia slide shows and lighting portraits on location. For those of you who are looking into adding sound to your photos to make your stories even more powerful or want to be able to turn your speedlights into creative and expressive tools for portraiture take a look at the TCI classes starting Sep14th. Since you can do them from home it's a lot easier than taking 2 days to go to a workshop. Heck you can do all the assignments in your pajamas if ya like!

C-ya there.

In the dark

This is from a shoot I did that was made possible by few things.

1) A great subject. Vivian is a great gal with a stunning look. She was superb to work with and was perfect for the modern urban look we were going for.

2) PocketWizards. This was done with two strobes but one was very much behind me and there was no easy way to trigger them with my beloved Nikon CLS system. The Wizards make the "you gotta be kidding me!" totally possible.

3) Willingness to risk. While I was setting this up, in an alley just steps away from a very busy street where lots of evening revelers going to and from clubs I heard one person with a camera say something like "that won't work. It's too dark" Ha! I used the darkness as a low fill light and let my two strobes do all the work.

The setup is pretty simple: I had an SB-800 up about 10 feet on a stand to my left and behind me about ten feet using a Zoot Snoot to create the spot of light on her. I had another SB-800 low and parallel to the wall giving separation to her legs. That was handled by my Voice Activate Light stand named Kim. I used my workhorse Nikon AF-S 28-70mm f/2.8 @ f/5.6 on my Nikon D700 set to ISO 200 for 1/8th of a sec. Like this:

I triggered the strobes with my PocketWizards. Once we wound Vivian up good and tight the rest was a total snap. I really think that it's so much easier to light things when you don't have to crazily overpower the ambient. These strobe in the dark situations are to me far more interesting than just finding a way to overpower the sun. Besides, without a day lit scene to work with you can do more with lights and make the photo look "natural" because in dark situations we are use to seeing dim light being reflected by all kinds of surfaces and light sources. In this case I made the light on the stand similar to a street light and the low light the reflection of something else.

Junk it up

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.

You can tone a piano but can you tone a ...

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.

When in doubt - use the wrong lens

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.

Five minutes, two lights and a mood

I was walking back from doing a shoot with my friend Aimee when we walked past this alley. It was a cool and lightly overcast day but I saw something other than the boring scene before me. I saw something rather film noir-ish. I didn't have any lightstands with be but hey - that doesn't stop us now does it? There was a light near the doorway that I spotted that was hanging flopily by a wire and found that I could wedge the strobe under it and positioned it so as to essentially emulate the light from the light it was attached to. I then found a plastic chair behind the dumpster down the way and took one of the large rubber bands that I keep on each of my SB-800's to keep gels attached and rubber banded the strobe to the chair. I positioned it low and to camera right to act as a fill light and cast the tall shadows that so often appear in noir films. I wanted the high light on Aimee to be a bit hot and since she was wearing black and her hair is very dark that wouldn't blow her totally out as the dark coat and hair would keep her face framed and bring out her eyes. I saw the scene in B&W so I wasn't worried about the colors, just the tones. I had her set into the doorway and clutch her coat and look over her shoulder as if in fear of who was coming down the alley. I dialed the low strobe back 2 stops, under exposed the ambient by 3 stops and did the whole thing in about 7 frames.

Technicals: Nikon D700 ISO 200 daylight WB. Nikon AF-D 50mm f/1.4 @ f/5.6, 1/250th. Two Nikon SB-800's controled by D700's built in flash as a commander.

My right knee

If I'm out working you can tell that I'm a photographer even if I don't have a camera in my hand. Just look at my pants. You will usually see that the knees are abnormally worn; especially the right one. Even if my jeans are only a week old you will see a noticeable wear pattern on the knees from all my kneeling while making photos. A pair of jeans really only last me a few weeks before they are too beat up to wear anymore - just because the knees are gone. This is one reason why I don't wear Armani everyday. But why all the kneeling?

Well I think that many of us photograph makers, even a lot of professional ones, tend to make images from whatever their standing height is. For many images that works perfectly. But for others - not so much. So I get high angles when it works and low angles a whole lot. That means that I spend a fair amount of time on location crawling around and my right knee gets the most amount of abuse in the process.

Low angles have a lot of benefits: they clean up backgrounds, change perspective to that of a child/dog, make things like hands more dominant than faces which is great when your subject has expressive hands, it tends to make things heroic and then there are others which don't come to mind. Anyhoo they are not "straight" pictures which bore me. Sports photographers do a lot of low angles just because they are often photographing people who are wearing hats/helmets which obscure their eyes and sporting environments usually make very very cluttered backgrounds so the low angle shows you more face and less background.

So here is an example. I was photographing Air Force cadets performing a ceremony to honor the loss of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. In my usual way I got there early, great photos happen when people are preparing or in this case just standing around, and noticed how the cadets were taking turns holding the flag in a fashion that looked like a hug. The area was next to a busy street, there were loads of buildings around and the trees still don't have any leaves so the scene at eye level was not only not interesting but obscured the elements that I wanted to show clearly: the cadets and the flag. By getting in low and tight with a wide lens I got what I was seeing in my head.

Technicals: Nikon D700, AF-S 17-35mm f/2.8 @ f/8, 1/500th, ISO200

Things we can do now

I fully admit that I an a gearhead, technology junky or in other words: a nerd. I love the tools and arcana of my work. However I don't get emotionally wrapped up in them as it's just a waste of time. I don't care who made this neat-o tool/toy so long as it works and gives me options that other things don't. Anyone who knows me is aware that I have more gear than I may need but not as much as I want and yet I end up using all of it at one time or the other. It's not just for show folks!

However I am not one to rush out and get the latest anything. I wait for the fix because they rarely work right the first time especially anything involving software. I wait and see if this new thing is really great or just hype. So given that: here's a little story.

I've been using the Nikon D700 for a while now and I simply love-love-love it. The D3 came out and rocked the world. When it's baby brother the D700 hit with essentially all the same systems but in a smaller body I just walked out and plunked my money down. I knew that there were going to be some aspects of the thing that weren't going to be quite "all that and a bag of chips" but what the heck?

Well frankly I think that the cameras we have these day are a pretty big bag of chips and the D3/D700 are the cats pajamas. They enable us to do things that we really couldn't have done just a few years ago. We used to be able to only make photos where there was more than a certain quantity and quality of light. There were some places that frankly if you could make photographs they resulting quality was very poor.

It wasn't that long ago when Fuji came out with their Fujicolor Press 800 film that gave us, at the time, the unheard of professionally usable ISO of 1600 when push processed. It may sound funny but that was a big deal and opened up a lot of opportunities. Did it really look good? Well it was ok but everything else looked horrible. However that film and it's glory wasn't an option for magazine or commercial photographers - that was a newspaper shooter thing. Magazine/commercial guys have quality requirements that just weren't met by that film when pushed. So they didn't shoot in situations where you could/had to use the 800 pushed or not. Their work was usually capped at ISO 200 because for color they shot slide film and ISO 400 slide film never got to be worth a darn.

That's the way that the world was and for those of us who lived and worked back then to a degree we still have that in our heads ... "Can I get a way with ISO 400 here?" Well that's all changed in a major way. My D700 gives me resolution that rivals medium format and ISO's that are beyond anything that film ever produced and beyond the digital cameras of the last generation. I now have to get used to walking in to a situation and saying "Oh cool! I'll just use ISO 3200 and it will look great!" It still freaks me out and it will for a while. I'm making photos in places that you just coudn't shoot in before. Wha!

Ooh! Then there's little thingys like Live View which I was certain that was going to be worthless - viewing through the LCD playback screen had to be a joke. Nope it's ver-ah kuhl and I've ended up using it alot. So much that I have a function button setup in my main shooting preset. So no more "Hail Mary" shots where you are shooting high or low angles without knowing what the lens is actually seeing.

Case in point:

Technicals: Nikon D700, Nikon AF-D 28mm f/1.4. 1/20th @ f/1.4 ISO 2000 Tungsten WB. Sandisk 4GB Extreme III card.

I shot a story about how with the economy being what it is people are flocking to restraunts and bars happy hours for the discount drink and eats. This place was rocking but dark-dark-dark. A year ago I'd walk in and start trying to think of how to light it so that it looked natural since the ambient lighting was so low. Granted I cheated with my 28mm f/1.4 "The Secret Weapon" but bear with me. @ ISO 2000 the file looks like it was shot at maybe ISO 400 from cameras that were state of the art two years ago. I could have gone to a higher ISO but this combo gave me what I wanted.

Now I didn't "see" this shot. I was behind the bar and put my camera between some pint glasses pointing up at the ladies. There was no possible way for me to get my eye to the viewfinder so I used Live View for composition and focusing; switching it off for the final frame. The depth of field on that lens at f/1.4 is very very small as I've shown before - one major reason I used it here. I could not have gotten a sharp point of focus by guessing or by hoping that I had an AF point that I could get on the face of the gal at the right but not focus on the glass just below her head. This is fargin cool stuff.

There are new worlds that are opening up to us just because we have cameras, and some lenses, that give us the ability to produce quality images in now new places. We will be seeing the world in new ways just because this technology is being used by insightfull and creative photographers. Thinking about that gives both the nerd and artist in me goosebumps