Rejecting fear of change and living life on your own terms.

Life is a very interesting thing. It continually throws curve balls at us and it's how we deal with new stuff that comes out of nowhere that determines whether we are successful or whether we just give up and capitulate to the inevitable decline. I think about this in my profession. So many people my age and even younger are so wedded to the way they learned to do things in school and the way processes operated as they did their craft that they seem unable or unwilling to accept that some aspects of photography have irrevocably changed. Some types of photography have entered the same realm as making a Xerox copy in that there is no need for a gifted operator in order for the process to be successful. Richard Avedon's first real job in photography was taking I.D. card photos for the Merchant Marines. I doubt that they still need a trained and gifted artist to do that....

The discussion I put up yesterday about Adobe and their Creative Cloud marks a change of process and a change in the way we address the tools we bring to bear in the making of some of our images. I don't own Adobe or their stock. If I did I'd give myself free software for life. But I have no control over that, at all. And it's not as if Adobe is the only company that is doing this. I'm sure the move by Apple to stop having boxed sets of software in their physical stores is the first step in Apple's transition to a subscription model for their software content as well. Once the big suppliers initiate the tipping point I can imagine that software from smaller and smaller developers will follow. Eventually most discretionary software will come to us this way. We can fear this or understand that it's an evolution and learn to leverage whatever advantages there may be to this system.

We (as photographers) have done a lot of moving around before this. Our product has become more or less virtual and has been for nearly a decade. In the film days our control was our ownership and possession of the physical slide or print. But that's gone now. We deliver transient information. We changed tools. We changed deliver methods. We changed deliverables. And at each step people became fearful or frustrated and dropped out. We adapted to the changes in the markets in order to stay profitable and relevant to our clients. That's the nature of all industry.

I've been talking a lot lately about incorporating digital video into my product mix. I would never have considered this if my clients hadn't developed an obvious inertia in that direction. And, given the depth of my research, I was/am fearful that I might not become as proficient as I need to be as quick as I need to be. My fear/understanding is that while 2K video has a hard time yielding a good still from a video stream the eight megabyte files from 4K video will be good enough for lots and lots of uses, if they are shot correctly. And already on the heels of 4k video is the very real appearance of 8k video which is more than enough actual resolution (and dynamic range) to be repurposed into just about any demanding still use.

The hyper technical among us will jump up and declare that it will never happen because the shutter speeds at which video is shot are too slow to freeze action. The next argument will be that it is well nigh impossible to sift through the horrendous amount of data that the cameras will generate in order to find that perfect frame. (And what if the new cultural evolution means that we no longer have to have the "perfect" frame, just a perfectly good frame....). But with automated facial detection and smile detection and almost certainly open eye detection the sorting process will become automated to the point of efficiency.

Here's the scenario: Client undertakes a fabulous television commercial shoot, hires really good director and cinematographer who cut teeth doing fabulous lighting for great movies, and creates expensive and mindboggling cool sets. Client also wants stills for ads on web and in print that match the look and feel of the commercials. Get the pose and gesture just right and run a few minutes of moving images before each take. Sort and select. It would be hubris to think that we, as a group, are better at lighting and posing than great DPs and directors, yes?

All of this trickles down. The junior AD on the set may not get to do projects of that scope but is being trained in a new production paradigm. Not going to happen in our still businesses? Consider that I was hired for one shoot last week for my ability to "light once, shoot twice" on an industrial shoot. I designed light that would work for both motion and stills and we used the same camera to go back and forth between the two. If my fear of change had paralyzed me into inaction and I refused to start the learning cycle necessary to go in both directions I am convinced that my client of many years would have, sadly, hired someone else who was less inflexible rather than continue with the added expense and time of sticking with the traditional system of hiring both a still photographer and a separate video crew. Job lost, money gone. Opportunity squandered?

No one likes it when I talk about EVFs but that's just one of the building blocks of shooting in an efficient hybrid manner. So are headphone jacks and microphone jacks on "still" cameras. And, by the way, if you've been a long time reader you've probably noticed that I haven't changed systems in over a year. No one else offers a camera with the flexibility I've gotten used to. And it's a combination of these things. And it's a good thing I haven't wanted to switch because I've been spending all my extra cash on microphones and marketing.

Everyone makes their own choice about when or if to give up growing in their fields. The day you start saying "this is all I need to know, I'll just keep doing this until I retire" your market is already starting to shrink. We love to blame stuff on age discrimination but it's really initiative discrimination.

I've been watching and experiencing all this stuff myself. It scares me. But I'm not willing to give into fear and stop and neither should you. We are all capable of learning so much. And putting what we learn into action. The key is to stay flexible and bend with the prevailing wide. Get too stiff and a hard gust will snap a brittle tree while a flexible one bends and recovers.

When I wrote the piece about Adobe yesterday I wasn't applauding their move or even agreeing with them. I wasn't jumping up and down with excitement at having my software paradigm shifted all to hell. But I was trying to reflect the idea that it wasn't the end of the world for any photographer. Hardly a speed bump in our workflow. And nothing to be afraid of. Adapt and move on.

Sorry to ruffle a few feathers. But the sooner we learn to shift and bend the quicker we'll see new opportunities and act on them. That's what I've learned after 30 years of doing this to put food on the table.

And it's amazing---- I feel the same excitement in learning more and more about motion and sound that I did watching those first black and white prints coming up in the darkroom so many years ago. It became fun when I stopped fearing the transition.



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The Great Adobe Creative Cloud Furor. Or, "How I learned to love dis-attachment and get on with my creative life."

The anguish of learning that all our software is only licensed and not owned.

Many years ago I started accepting American Express cards in my business. My Mac based business. The move was driven by my biggest client at the time, the company then known as Motorola. They used corporate Amex cards to pay small suppliers. You know, invoices that were under a million dollars. The person I did most of my event work for strongly suggested that my accepting the card would make her life easier and, predictably, lead to more and more business. Mission accomplished. 

I got in touch with Amex and they set me up. They delivered a free software product to me called,  MacAuthorize. It worked only on my Mac. It was secure and used a modem connection. It ran on system 9. Or Carbon or whatever was out there before OS X. It was a very nice and succint little program and it wasn't supported in OS X. I got in touch with the software people once I upgraded over to the dark side and they very nicely told me that they had no plans to support or update it. Our relationship was over. I had to find another way to do the processing. I sighed, because really, who wants to change a successful way of doing business? 

Now there are many ways to process corporate cards from the comfort and safety of your Mac computer. I will also note that Wordstar, the program I first started writing advertising copy on with my IBM PC (equipped with two floppies and an 8086 processor) didn't make the transition to the next gen of PC system software in 1984 either. Just didn't. They stopped supporting the product.

But now there's much bigger news on the software front. After years of using PhotoShop as a perpetually licensed tool Adobe has decided to change the way they deliver the capabilities to their customers. From a certain point onward all new encounters with PhotoShop will be by subscription, delivered to you from the Adobe  Creative Cloud. You won't buy the disk, pay for upgrades and "own" the program. Once CS 6 is replaced you'll have the choice of staying with the CS 6 you "licensed" on disk or download, or upgrading to the subscription method.

If you are perfectly happy with CS 6 (or earlier variations) there is no need for you to do anything. Keep using it forever. Or until you upgrade your computer system to a future operating system that (most probably) will not be supporting older versions of software and apps. So, to drill right down: If you never plan to change operating systems, never need to upgrade raw conversion capabilities within PhotoShop and don't need any new features you are pretty much set. You can ride along for years doing just what you are doing right now, and with no consequences.

On the other hand, if you are in the business you'll probably find that you need to upgrade to the new cloud system as soon as you buy the next generation of raw file happy digital cameras. Or you may need to deliver newer .PSDs to clients. Or you may WANT the new stuff they keep inventing.... In that case you'll (under the current system) need to pay about $20 a month for a subscription. You'll still have the software resident on your desktop but the system will check in with the mother ship about once a month to make sure your recent check cleared and that you are authorized to use the latest version. $20 bucks a month for the latest, latest, latest PhotoShop. Going with my international currency scale that's about four Venti Lattes per month from Starbucks. Not a big deal. Less that an evening's parking in downtown.

Why did Adobe do this? Probably lots of reasons. One is that they are including new tech like motion correction to deal with the number one reason for unsharp photos. But a filter like that takes a lot of processing power. More than you're likely to want to pony up for, so the filter can run on dedicated servers in the cloud and then put the result back on your desktop. And one assumes it can do this seamlessly. You can also share with other CC users more easily as well as transfer files to clients quickly. The minute the latest raw profiles become available they are updated to your system. New capabilities? The same. In fact, the system will probably be a time saver for real, professional users who are Adobe's target market.

But there's a darker motive at Adobe. They're tired of being hosed by millions of people who wish all software (and alcohol and sex partners and cars and .......) was free and available and they think nothing of stealing it. And, of course, if they are stealing it then Adobe is not getting paid for it. Which is really counter-productive for a for profit business. We haven't reached the point yet when image processing software is considered a "safety net item guaranteed by the government for all people...." (maybe it is in Denmark, I don't know.) If someone can't afford to buy the premium product there are any number of less expensive alternatives to choose from. But I'd hate to see Adobe do what many book authors have done in the face of piracy, and that is to throw up their hands and stop publishing.....because it is no longer profitable. And now we don't get to read their books. And some of us were fans....

So they hosed the stealers right back. And the rest of us were kind of in the splash zone. We get to choose how we'll manage going forward. 

Many of the stuck-in-the-20th- century, knuckle dragging, portrait studio and pro-amateur neanderthals on the forums are in full rage mode right now. They would never let a bride or a mom walk away with "the photographer's raw files or negatives" because they own the copyright but they don't seem to be able to make the intellectual leap that Adobe has the same privilege: they own the copyright to PhotoShop and they are ready to implement a strategy that will work to the productive advantage of daily working professionals (at a very fair price point) while sticking it to the thieves who've spent over a decade helping themselves to someone else's property without the realization that they are as addicted to the stolen product as crack addicts or oxycontin broadcasters and they have  set themselves up for severe withdrawals once the owners crack down on the people who've been stealing their stuff.

It seems that photographers have two choices. They can look into the future and figure out how to leverage the new stuff that arrives on the ever changing landscape or they can lock themselves into the irrational "security" of the past. For those who don't need layers and clipping paths and frames, etc. there are more creative image processing programs (at a much lower cost) than ever before. Lightroom, Aperture, Picassa, Pixelmator, Corel, iPhoto and a hundred more that I don't even know about. I used Aperture every day. I open PhotoShop when I need to do something special. Perhaps Adobe will even introduce a day rate for the use of the software so that those of you who spend weeks at a time in the wild, and who mainly use cataloging programs like Lightroom can "rent" PS by the day when you need something special. It might even be tremendously cost effective.

When I hear a collective whine about a change that costs money I always compare the cost of the new service or subscription to the cost of America's most shameless addiction: Cable Television. It's an enormous time sink hole. It's a lure that pulls people away from shooting, writing, post processing, fine dining, relationships and higher brain use. And the average American household pays a MONTHLY subscription of $128  to turn their own brains into mush and effectively prevent their children from going to top tier universities with droll and useless programming aimed at selling product and addicting people to the watching cycle. Which is totally passive. And introduces unempowering information loops to their brains. So, passive acceptance of absolute crap for $128 per month versus $20 a month for a powerful productivity tool that stimulates creativity and brain activity. And they want to scream and bitch about the cost.

Here's a suggestion. Resign from cable TV prison, put most of the money you will save into your retirement or college funds and spend a small fraction of that on a cutting edge tool custom made of the expansion of your consciousness and potential. Easy choice in my mind.

The idea that you own someone else's intellectual property until the end of time is ludicrous. If you figured out how long it would take you to program your own image post processing software at this level you'd probably quickly come to the conclusion that you would have been dead for a decade or two before you were able to create an equally elegant copy.

So, if you posture as a pro then work as a pro and subscribe to the tools you need in order to be profitable. If you aren't making enough money to swing $20 a month then having a state of the art piece of software isn't going to help anyway because there is something much more seriously wrong with your business plan than a slight overall cost increase in your overhead budget.

If you are one of my typical non-pro-photographer readers then you do this as a glorious and fun hobby and, demographically speaking (according to conversations I've had with readers) you are at the top of your game in a technical or medical field and the price of the monthly subscription falls into "Rounding Error." 

Love or hate Adobe but don't cut off your nose to spite your face. Buy what you need to use and use it well. Make pretty pictures not statements of irrelevant discontent. The pricing and structure is what it is. Pay for it or move on.



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Brief gear side track....

I know, I know. I said I wouldn't talk about gear. And I'm not really going to. And I know that none of you like Sony cameras because.....I really don't know why. But I've been saying to anyone who will listen that the Sony Nex-7 is a tremendous picture taker to anyone who will listen to me. An additive camera. But now I don't have to say it anymore because I found someone that everyone will trust to make the case for me.

Here, with no particular introduction is Trey Ratliff and his tale on why his Sony Nex-7 is taking the place of his Nikon D800....

http://www.stuckincustoms.com/2013/05/09/the-china-experiment-dumping-nikon-for-sony/

I thought it was a fun read. Maybe because it helps confirm my seat-of-the-pants camera analysis.

If you don't ever want to read about gear ever again then just ignore this one and don't click that link.






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Adventures in shooting. Melding photography and video in one job. And a packing nightmare.

My assignment yesterday was to create content for web use and print collateral for a high tech manufacturer. The job was just about evenly split between providing good video and providing good still photographs. The video we needed included interviews with eight people, including senior staff and a also a client testimonial. We also needed to capture lots of moving images of people (wide, medium and close) to use as b-roll or cutaway shots for a series of videos. The still images needed to include headshots of the senior staff and then shots on the factory floor that would show the wide range of capabilities the company has, as well as showing a bright, happy workforce in action. That's a lot to shoot in one day!

I started packing the afternoon before. I decided to work with continuous light for every part of the project. That required packing the heavy duty, new fluorescent fixtures, the Fiilex P360 LED light and a case of Fotodiox 312AS battery powered LED lights. Since I'm using continuous lighting I've changed from using umbrellas and softboxes to using diffusion panels to modify my light sources. The positive take on that is that the panels can offer more creative options and more flexibility. The downside is that each modifier must have its own light stand so now I'm packing nearly double the number of light stands I used to when we just did photographs.

I packed two stand bags full of stands and a complete, three frame Chimera ENG diffusion system with various diffusers and nets. It takes a bit longer to set up lights this way but we saved time in the long run by not having to set up one station for stills and one station for video.

Of course, when we were shooting only stills we never had to think about sound. Both what to pack and how to engineer our environment at the client's location to minimize background noise. Now that I've had fifteen or sixteen recent experiences in sound recording, as well as reading everything I could get my hands on....I've pretty much zero'd in on using nice lavalier microphones to record people talking. The one I wanted to use is a professional Audio Technica microphone that terminates in an XLR plug. I wanted to maintain the ability to run longer, shielded cables which balanced terminations allow but I also needed, at some point to convert the interfaces so I could plug the microphone into the 3.5mm plug on my Sony a99. I also understood that there was an impedance mismatch between the camera and the microphone. My solution was to use a BeachTek adapter. The adapter fits under the camera and is passive, meaning it doesn't require batteries but it doesn't amplify signals. It does allow you to "trim" each channel separately. The box also uses very good transformers to take care of the impedance mismatch. The box outputs an unbalanced signal to the camera via a very short 3.5mm to 3.5mm cord. This mini-mixer can attach to the bottom of the camera and the top of the tripod which makes it a convenient package.

But I never really know what clients will ask for while we're out on location so I packed a variety of microphones that would handle just about anything that might come up. I packed extra cables, batteries, wind mufflers, headphones and adapters. Another full case just for audio...

Finally I packed cameras, lenses and memory cards. I came equipped to cover anything from 15mm to 300mm but I wound up most using the 85mm 1.5 Rokinon (for all portraits and interviews) and the 35mm 1.5 Rokinon Cine lens for nearly everything else. My primary shooting camera was the Sony a99 but I also packed the a58 as a back-up camera. One of the most important tools for the job was my fluid head tripod. What about verticals??? My client called me at 6:22 am to tell me that he couldn't remember if he mentioned that EVERYTHING would be shot in landscape, 16:9. I figured that if I needed a vertical shot I could do what millions before me have done and.....hand hold the camera, stabilizing it on the top of the tripod while I shot. Primitive but workable. And, as it turns out, unnecessary for the project at hand.

I was out of the house by seven and minutes later throwing away good cash on a cup of decaf at Starbucks (any hour before 8 am is too early to operate heavy machinery or to make your own coffee...). By 7:30 I was at the client location loading all the glorious inventory onto my cart and dragging it into the building. By the time the ad agency guy arrived I had the initial lighting set up and ready.

This was my routine from 9 am until 1 pm: Meet various executive. Have stylist look them over for wrinkles and shine. Make a still portrait (actually many----the agency likes choice. Think 40 or 50 per sitter). Switch to video on the camera. Put lavalier microphone on the subject. Have them speak while I set audio levels. (Trying to stay below -12 db on the meter.) Call out to my director/agency guy that we're ready and then operate the camera while agency guy conducts the interview. Make sure the subject doesn't go out of focus when leaning in and out. Monitor sound with closed headphones to make sure levels are good and audio is clean. Stop reset and prepare for the next person. Some people are comfortable in an interview situation and some are not.

One person nailed his interview in one long take. Another took us 45 minutes for what will edit down to about 30 seconds of content. Patience and extra batteries are a vital part of the kit.

Once we wrapped the studio style shooting I dragged the tripod out onto the factory floor to shoot the CNC machining shop, the assemblers, the fabricators and the shipping departments. I most used the a99 on the tripod but I supplemented with the a58 and a 16-50mm lens for quick, handheld stuff.  If we needed to juice up the existing light we used the little LED panels. They were just right for a bit of color matched fill light. I'm happy I had them along.

We finished shooting our last set up, a conference room shot, right five and then I broke down the set and packed all of the gear. I hate packing most and it took me nearly an hour to get everything packed up correctly and loaded back into the car. Of course Austin traffic was as dreadful as ever and it took me nearly an hour to go the 17 miles back to my studio.

Today I am writing this while ingesting video and still files into respective folders and then burning delivery and back up DVDs. As usual the original memory cards are tossed into an envelope and pinned on the wall. When the project is over and the images and movies are backed up in several places we'll put the cards back into service. The deliverables will take up 6 DVDs. Yikes. That's 24 gigabytes of material.

I'm not editing this project. The agency has an editor they like to work with. Thank goodness. There's so much to wade through.





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Keller Williams Book Shoot.

It was a cold and rainy day last month when Caitlin came to my studio with a box full of books. She'd designed a new book for Keller Williams Ink, a large publisher of real estate specialty books and she wanted a whole basket full of documentation. We did the regular stuff, the single book cover, the stack of books, the interesting angle on the book and everything else you can think of. Then we embarked on massively non-parallel book arranging. Seems the book is just crying out for an arrangement similar to the domino set ups where you spend days setting up millions of dominos, knock over one and watch the rest fall over at a rapidly accelerating clip.

Our biggest challenge was stacking them without accidentally starting a book avalanche. We did them a number of different ways and even incorporated a hand into the mix. I was using a Sony a99 with the Sigma 70mm macro lens. We lit our set with a combination of the new fluorescent lights because it's so much easier to arrange still life shots when you operate in the "what you see is what you get" mode.

The real bear was doing all the clipping paths. Beware of having too many image design ideas because your client may not want to choose and you may get stuck creating complex clipping paths for every single variation. I didn't mind because I really did find myself appreciating my client's design sensibilities. 

When we were thru shooting and Caitlin headed back to the office I sat down and actually read the book. Pretty darn good guide to doing business but an even better guide to figuring out how to be successful in life.

Above, grappling with the sad reality that books really do fall down from time to time and, if they are ill placed they take the whole stack down with them.

The End.

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We just finished shooting this TV commercial for Zach Theatre. It's "Harvey."

It's tuesday and editor, David Munns, already has our Harvey spot ready to go. We shot the footage on Sunday morning with Martin Burke. Click on the  YouTube logo on the bottom right corner of the video frame to go directly to YouTube if you want to watch the HD version.

Nearly a dozen loyal VSL members chimed in to me personally after I wrote about shooting this video last Sunday. They were interested in trying their hands at DSLR video and the common question was: "What do I need to get started?"

I'm just at the beginning of this whole video journey myself but I'll tell you what's come in handy so far.

1. While it's wonderful to have a camera that includes a headphone jack we've done a bunch of projects with the Sony a77 and some with a Canon 5D mk2 and neither of them were so equipped.  The most important feature (as far as sound goes) for me is the microphone input and a set of manually settable level controls. The headphones are critical to hearing problems with sound as you go but there are workarounds. You can record your audio to a digital audio recorder, listen to the sound via the headphone jack and output the same sound with a "line out" or "aux" to the microphone input of your camera with a 3.5mm to 3.5mm male, stereo plug. Kind of cool because you're making a back up as you go. Honestly, all the APS-C and FF DSLR cameras can record great HD video. Even a lowly Rebel. (The Sony's are the only ones with good, fast focusing during recording...if you don't mind losing manual exposure controls..).

2. I think you'll need two different external microphones. You probably won't use them at the same time but you'll end up needing each kind sooner or later. For interviews or direct to camera content where you have a subject or actor talking to the audience a lavalier microphone is great. There are all kinds. It's sexy to get wireless radio mics but it's not necessary. People have been using cabled microphones for decades and decades, and they work. Seems like every microphone sounds different so you'll probably want to go to a store and try them out with your camera. Bring someone else along to talk so you don't end up thinking you don't like a microphone when you really just don't like the sound of your own voice.

I bought a wired Audio Technica Lavalier microphone and it sounds great. I spent about $125 and I bought it used. I also have a Sennheiser wireless system and it sounds insanely good but it was a whopping $600. Start with the wired one and move up when you find a pressing need to. The audio is not that much different.

The second kind of microphone you'll want to get is a good shotgun microphone. We use these when it's impossible to hide a lavalier mic on someone and you need to hear them well.  Contrary to popular belief they're not made to function like a telephoto lens and bring far away sound close to you.  They just tend to be good at isolating the sound of a voice right in front of you and dumping away the sound that's off access. These work great if your subject is stationary and you can carefully aim the microphone and put it on a stand. They are also great if you have someone who can hold a pole and aim the microphone for you as the person is moving and talking. Also, if you only have one microphone and you need to record a back and forth conversation you can have a person swivel the microphone back and forth between them. Plus, when equipped with the fuzzy wind sock they look so cool and all Hollywood.

Play around with your microphones and cameras until you find a need you can't fill and then start looking at things like mixers and stuff that lets you hook up several microphones simultaneously and control their levels separately.

3. Depending on what sort of video you want to shoot you'll probably need a fluid head tripod. It's just a tripod with a dampened head that allows you to pan or tilt without too many jitters or false movements. Mine cost $500 but there are many priced down in the $150 range that might work. Alternately, if you are a big spender and your wallet comes well equipped there are numerous models up to the $5000 range and over. Go play with some and see how they work before you drop big dough. A lot of successful camera movement is from practice, not the gear. Sound familiar? But the fluid head are helpful. You probably find a decent head that will fit on a tripod you already own.

4. Unless you plan to be an available light videographer you'll need some continuous lights. And if you do this commercially you'll need some big, bright ones. You can go old school and buy a bunch of tungsten hot lights pretty cheaply. You can play around with LEDs which, for big commercial video are either expensive or need a few nudges of filtration for good color, or, you can go with some of the recent fluorescent panels from Alzo, Fotodiox, KinoFlo and other.
I'm not going to tell you how to light anymore than I would tell you how to dress but I find I usually need one big main light and two or three additional fixtures for lighting up backgrounds, creating fill light or making accents. I'll assume that, if you've been shooting photography professionally, you'll already have light stands, diffusers and the like.

5. You'll need a totally different mindset from that of a photographer. Stuff really needs to move and it needs to tell a story so rather than just shooting from the hip you have to slow down and create some sort of narrative framework to use as a guide to your shooting. I found it very revealing to sit down for the first time with a non-linear video editing program and try to cobble something together. It humbled me. Still does. That's my weak spot and the area I need the most help on.

Good luck with your efforts in video. It's a nice commercial adjunct to still photography.

Tomorrow I'm doing a total immersion kind of assignment. We're shooting portraits, interviews, and some stuff they call "b-roll" which means all kinds of footage of a manufacturing process, the smiling faces of the workers and staff and the sexy detail shots that will make nice cutaways for the main body of a comprehensive video. Crazy, but it means I get to try my hand at a bit of everything that I've either studied up on or practiced in the studio. Wish me luck.

Creating a portrait of an actor. The time on the back end was always a bitch.

Actor, Woody Scaggs, was in my studio for a photo shoot we were doing for Zachary Scott Theater. The play was The Illusionist. We did all sorts of shots with a transluminated crystal ball and also with second actor. What I really wanted was a dramatic image of Woody so when we had the rest of the images in the bag I asked him if we could do a solo shot directly into the camera. 

The fun thing about photographing actors is that they seem to get what I want in my images. I can give them a thin story line or even a feeling and they translate it so well. This expression was exactly what I was looking for. I think we spent all of five minutes making this one and probably half of that was spent timing Polaroids. The image endures as one of my favorites.

What I love about it, in addition to Woody's great energy, is the interplay between the light and dark areas. I also consider the border treatment to be part of the overall image's design. The light side of his hair is contrasted by the black line running down the right edge of the frame while the dark shadow on the other side of Woody's face is offset by the bright background, and all of it is contain between undulating borders. The flaring borders were caused, in printing, by my use of a Pictrol mechanism just below the enlarger lens which flared the highlights into the shadows while non-linearly distorting and diffusing them.

The image above is a quick shot of the 16x20 inch work print in one of our flat files. When I got a good first print I would write useful information on the front and the back. On the back of the print are the exposure times under the enlarger, the toning, washing and other information, all in pencil.

There was always an investment in process when we worked with film and prints. I was never able to hit everything perfectly on the first print and, many times, when trying to mix vision and technical clumsiness I would print ten or fifteen 16 x 20's in an attempt to get everything on the paper just right. I thought about the discipline forced by process this morning. When I shot this image I worked carefully to get just the right expression but always mindful that we had some sort of budget to hew to, whether external or self-imposed. Once I was mostly sure that I'd hit the right mark I developed three or four tanks of fim. That took an afternoon. Then the film dried overnight. The next day I made two sets of contact sheets, 24 sheets in all. One set for me and one set for the client. I selected a final image and set up the dark room with oversized trays.

I went through the process of making test prints and then a final test at full size. We'd take that final test and put it out to dry. We needed to see how the paper image would look once it dried down. Prints always looked darker dry than they did in the fixer tray... If we needed quicker feedback we'd stick a chunks of the final test print in the microwave to dry it quickly.

Once we had the windage I'd go back and print iterations. Different burning and dodging methods. Different implementations of the Pictrol. Experiments with different paper grades and all the rest. Once a print came out and was as perfect as I could make it I could have 20 or more hours invested in that one artifact, not counting the shooting and prep time. Is it any wonder that we had a different regard for the final product? 

And, of course, if I put the ten prints I have of this negative side by side none of them are strictly identical. There were changes in the way my hands moved across the paper when burning and dodging. The chemicals drifted in temperature and potency over time. Even the selenium toner changed subtly from print to print. In fact, just about any hand made print from the film age could/should be considered a one off.

The contrast to that work was my documentation of the work this morning. I put the print on the floor, stood over it and shot it in the available light of my studio with a handheld Sony a58 camera. Once I knew I'd worked cooperatively with the camera's built in image stabilization I stopped shooting, walked over to my desk and stuck the card in the side of the computer, grabbed a frame and then spiffed it up a bit in PhotoShop. Two minutes later it was in this document, ready to anchor my thoughts and my words.

There is still a resonance from the older work that guides me today. We may have ditched the physical craft but the idea of the work still informs the way I shoot today. We're near the balance point though. The point in time when my tenure with film based systems just slightly exceeds the amount of time I've worked with digital. Close to a 50/50 split as a working professional.

Everything you've done informs this one moment. The moment right now when you make today's art. 

Please use our Amazon links to buy your camera gear (and anything else you like at Amazon). We'll get a small commission which helps defray my time and cost while costing you zero extra.
Thank you very much.

Checking in with the remaining VSL readers.

Seems like barely a week ago I announced that I was changing the way I would be handling the blog. I dumped most of the gear specific posts and I've spent the last week adding back the articles that I feel are more or less timeless. Or at least not wedded to the obsolescence of the toys depicted therein. From a metric perspective the experiment has been an abject failure with the number of pageviews quickly dropping by half. And trending downward. 

I have added back in nearly 500 articles that fit my new parameters from the warehoused article inventory.

In some instances, like this afternoon, I republished older articles at the top of the blog because they were articles I really liked. I won't do that for much longer but sometimes I read something I wrote in 2010 (when I had less of a culture filter in place) and I find that I still like the message.

If you came here to read a review of a hot, cheap, little camera from two or three years ago then I'm sorry you wasted your time. I'm going to keep moving in the direction I decided upon because it's turning out to be much more fun.

In a few days I'm going to take a stab at writing stuff that I hope has a sense of humor, bundled with a photographic context.

If you really, really need to know which camera is currently the best in the world I can tell you that. Get in touch with me offline, send me $50 and I'll tell you exactly what you want to know.

I do want feedback. Just because we no longer argue about which cameras and lenses are the coolest doesn't mean I don't cherish the dialog. That's all for now.

marketing note: 
Oh.  I decided to have a bunch of Amazon links below the articles that have nothing to do with the articles, other than that they will reflect stuff I like and buy on a regular basis. If you're hot to spend money at Amazon please consider clicking through with one of those links to support the site. I find that I miss the income. It's the difference between a grande and a tall at Starbucks.


Please use our Amazon links to buy your camera gear (and anything else you like at Amazon). We'll get a small commission which helps defray my time and cost while costing you zero extra.
Thank you very much.