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The Lisbon Portfolio. The Novel.

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Kirk is a short telephoto user. What the hell was he doing with a fisheye lens? The Nikon 10.5mm.

In the days when DX was the only format you could buy a Nikon in we suffered from a deficit of short lenses. There were a few repurposed film era wide angles but they all seemed to have their share of problems. For a while the widest rectilinear lens was the 14mm Nikon lens which was something like $1600 and could get you to the equivalent of a 21mm on a full frame camera. Wide enough for most stuff but not for the things that really mattered.

I was hired to document the interior of the old Palmer Auditorium Building which was re-birthed, after $80 million of construction, as the Long Center. There were a lot of enormous spaces and stages as well as some tiny spaces like historic dressing rooms. I knew I wanted a lens that would communicate the scale of the interior spaces and would work well with the Nikon D2x, my camera of the moment. While very few people like the effect of a fish eye lens with its distorted lines the people at Nikon had designed into the Capture Raw software a component that "de-fished" that particular lens. You could enable the correction and, voila, you had a very wide image and all the lines were as straight as could be ( providing you were careful to level the camera while shooting ).

The lens worked fine for the assignment with the caveat that the expanded corners lacked the detail one would find in the center of the frame. They were "stretched out" to make the file geometrically rectilinear and that meant there were proportionally fewer pixels in the corners.

I subsequently used the lens on a number of jobs that required a wide view, including the job for Lithoprint (above). I am certain that we used a normal looking file for the final brochure but for some reason I came to really enjoy the look of curved fluorescent lights and so I kept a copy like this.

Wide is really no longer an issue in most camera company's lens catalogs. My current favorite is certainly the already rectilinear, and wonderfully sharp, Panasonic 7-14mm ultra wide angle zoom. There are also ultra wide angle zooms available for the APS-C systems that are very good.

If we've made any progress in the digital age it's been in the area of making lenses that are better matches for the size and technical nuances of digital imaging sensors. Good glass always seems to triumph over the nerdier technologies.

Just a blast from the recent past as I clean up an older computer and its attached hard drives.


Editor's note: Try out the comments. It's fun and easy to make a comment on the site and it makes the writer feel like there's an audience out there. Just saying.  VSL Senior Executive Staff.

A quiet portrait in an elegant office.

Shot on assignment for Primary Packaging in NYC. Simple, single source lighting. Tri-X film. Simple design. The post production was all done in the printing. Agfa Portriga paper, selenium toned. The 16x20 inch print is so pretty, as an object, that it brings tears to my eyes. 

Whatever did we do before drones? I think all exterior photography was impossible until their invention.

....Oh yes, I remember. We found tall buildings and shot from the roof tops.

This is a project we did for the Austin Chamber of Commerce a while back. The art director for the Chamber's ad agency wanted to show off the city scape and also show some representative people sprinkled amongst the downtown skyline. ( A skyline that is much, much more crowded today)>

We scouted a location that would give us a view of Congress Avenue, looking north toward the state Capitol building. We ended up shooting from the top of the Embassy Suites building, just south of the river. The Chamber of Commerce seems to open many doors in Austin so we had no trouble securing the location. We shot in the late afternoon with a Nikon D2x camera and one of the unheralded, great zoom lenses of the time, the 28-70mm f2.8 Nikon. A great lens. Incredibly sharp at f5.6 and f8.

Once we had the skyline shot "in the can" we move on to casting and then photographing our talents. We had a big ink jet print of the skyline that we referred to in the studio for positioning the people.  Everyone was shot against a white background, clipped out and composited into the piece.

The image was used as a double truck ad in magazines but another important use was on big, fabric show dividers in the convention center in Austin. The repeating dividers were ten feet tall and sixteen feet wide. At the time the D2x was the highest resolution camera made by Nikon and we worked hard to make sure that we were working with optimum technique. That meant: Always on a tripod. Always at the sharpest aperture. Always at the lowest ISO.

The images on the big, fabric dividers looked great. I'm not sure how much more actual quality a 24 megapixel camera would have bought us. After all that's only a linear increase of 20% in pixel resolution...

Fun with advertising. I remember those years as the transitional years between print and electronic media. Going forward I think we are resolutely in the electronic presentation decade. Yes, there are still corners of the business where people work with prints, and there will be printed magazines at least for the foreseeable future, but....

A campaign we did for LifeSize. Why I remember it so well.

Working life can be so interesting and dramatic. This is a series we did for one of our favorite ad agencies. Their client was "LifeSize," a provider of teleconferencing hardware and software. The agency came to me with a fun idea---put people in situations where they might use the products and then put the whole thing in a screen which is how their counterparts across the world might see them.

Each image is a two piece composite. We shot each person (or couple) actually holding a prop HD TV surround in front of them. We did the classic white background lighting in our larger studio space which is approximately 42 feet long by 18 feet wide and has very high ceilings. 

The ad agency cast the models and had the prop made and we did the photography. This campaign was done in the early part of this century, probably around 2003. 

I remember the day very clearly because we were shooting tethered to one of the original Mac Pro laptops with the G4 processor. The camera was the venerable Kodak DCS 760 and all the lights were Profoto something or other. We were using a 20 foot firewire cable with full sized connectors on both ends and every once in a while we'd lose our connection and have to re-boot everything. 

But that's not really why I remember this one so well. You see, we were on the very last shot of the day when my assistant came hurrying over to me carrying my cellphone. "You'll want to take this!" she said, in a panicky kind of voice. It was Ben's school on the phone. Ben had fallen off some playground apparatus and broken his arm. The school nurse had already left for the day. Ben's mom was out of town. 

I tossed the camera to the world's greatest assistant and turned and headed toward the car. My assistant informed the client and then she proceeded to finish the shoot with perfect technique and poise. The clients were most understanding. The campaign went out without a hitch after we got that pesky compound fracture taken care of. 

We are still working for the same agency. I did a fun job with them last month (with no casualties) and we're on schedule to do another project next Weds. It's never fun to have a child emergency but maybe it's even more stressful when you leave a studio with ten or twelve people behind. 

I've always liked this campaign because I think the concept is so good. And it was a joy to shoot. Right up until the very last hour...

One exits and one enters.

Just remarking on the balance in the universe. I wrote a blog about losing a job yesterday. The job was booked to have occurred on or around August 25th. I opened my e-mail this morning and another client was inquiring about booking the 25th. Same depth to the job. Same basic budget but with different usages. Also still life. It's already scheduled.  One in, one out. Balance.

On a totally different tangent: The image above is one of my favorites from my recent "Tommy" shoot at Zach Theatre (the play is still running and still a visual delight).  I caught it with a GH4 and the 35-100mm f2.8 lens at the long end, wide open.

I might have used a higher res camera but if you look very little in the image is tack sharp due to subject movement. But it's the subject movement---the kinetic feel---that allows me to enjoy the image. More or less resolution would have made no real difference. In fact, had I upped the ISO and made a completely sharp image I'm sure we would all find it a bit boring.... Just conjecture.

Sometimes I like to post stuff just because it's fun. Like really beautiful women and very narrow depth of field. Makes the committed m4:3 users "jaw clench."

Jana helped me by modeling in the studio for my book on LED lighting. You can still buy the book here. It's a fun read. But her "audition" took place on a hot Sunday in the middle of a blistering, record setting Summer afternoon. We met for coffee at Little City Coffee house on Congress Ave., just south of the capitol building. We proceeded to shoot outside, in the heat.

I shot pretty much everything that afternoon with the Canon 5D mk2 and a lens I actually miss, the 100mm f2. It's a lens I tried always to shoot at f2 or f2.8. I doubt the aperture gizmo in the camera ever introduced the lens to anything smaller than f8.

We stayed in the open shade or under covered shade for the hour or so that we worked at making photographs. Jana graduated from UT two years ago and is now working for some powerhouse marketing company on the east coast. She was ultimately professional in every aspect of every project we worked together on.

I liked the fact that she understood advertising and marketing so well. It made her work as a photographic model or talent that much more convincing.

Seeing this image again makes me want to rush out the door, hop in the car and go to Precision Camera to buy a Nikon D610 body and a 105mm f2.0 DC Nikon lens. Same look with an even better sensor. The problem with impulses like that always comes later when I find that the system back or front focuses and does it in a non-linear fashion. That's what effectively killed my enthusiastically sought after relationship with the 85mm 1.4 Zeiss lens for Canon. Wonderful combination if you are lucky enough to get a pair with no focus shift and no crazy back focusing. Nothing makes you look like a dumb ass photographer more than an  image of what could be a beautiful girl whose ears are sharply defined while her eyes and lips look like soft focus mush.

Oh, now I remember why I love shooting with the Panasonic GH4......

Marketing. Just a side note because it all happened in 24 hours.

The sharp eyed readers of VSL may have noticed that I put up a strange post on Ripe Camera yesterday. It consisted of a lot of images from food and beverage shoots and some copy about my experience and qualifications shooting food and drinks. You can read it/see it here:

http://ripecamera.blogspot.com/2014/08/drinks-and-food.html

So you may be wondering what the heck that was all about. Well, I thought we'd take a break from the holy camera wars and the intriguing dives into the icy waters of lens lore and optical sorcery to discuss the plain nuts and bolts of the photo business. (Ooops! We just lost half the readers.....).

Yesterday morning I got an e-mail from an account person at an advertising agency I've worked a lot with over the years.  The e-mailer asked me to bid on a job. The agency is working on a alcohol makers account and needed to commission some well done product shots of nice drinks made with Tequila for their client's new website. The request laid out all the details nicely.

They wanted me to come and shoot at their location. They would hire a drink stylist directly. They would be in charge of assembling props and product. I would come in, design the lighting and shoot 12 mixed drinks, in various glassware, individually and deliver beautifully post produced files against white for use on posters, some collateral and on the client's website.

I pulled together a list of questions and a preliminary, "ballpark" estimate that would qualify them as either 'serious', 'fishing', or competitive bidding. I thought the project would take a day to shoot and another day to post produce the files. I already knew the rights package they needed.

After I sent along a ballpark estimate that was essentially one number with a dollar sign in front of it.  I got a "hey we're definitely in the ball park and we need a detailed quote with terms and conditions." The one thing they requested that sent up a little warning signal was the request to break out my photo bid into an hourly cost. That always scares me because if I am good and do the job cleanly and quickly I should benefit from the application of my years of hard won experience. Because of this I always try to bid based on the value of the needed usage for the images but I am happy to break out hard costs that are external to my licensing fee.

While I came highly recommended by a senior creative director, and also a well known art director another firm, the person who requested the bid also wanted to see some F&B shots I had done. She wanted to be able to share them with her client. I handled that request by quickly assembling some fun, recent work and making the blogpost you see at the link above. They liked the work and we jumped over another hurdle in the process. We were getting closer to the purchase order. I could almost taste the tequila in my glass.

The one thing left to handle was the requested price breakdown. I handled it by walking the person through my thought process. It went something like this:

"We don't, as a rule, work by the hour in our advertising projects because it's the work itself that has value to you and the client, not how long it took or how difficult it was for me to complete. You've already agreed that the pricing we're offering is what you were looking for so we know you'll be happy with the budget. The downside for you, if I estimate this by the hour is that there's no real cap to the costs. No way to know exactly how long it might take if everything goes slow, if the beverage stylist is slow, if we go over on time. Say we agree on $300 per hour and our estimate is based on an eight hour day of shooting. What happens when the ice machine breaks down and we have to send someone out for ice and wait for them?  What if the chosen glassware adds complications and it takes longer for us to figure it all out? What if I'm just stupid that day and I have to do things over to get them right? What happens if the creative director and the client are on different pages and have to work toward some shared vision----and that process takes time? If we estimate by the hour that clock keeps ticking and you may end up spending more than the job is really worth. 

Another thing, say every photographer you ask quotes you "a day rate" based on eight hours of work.  If I'm in the groove and I work well with the stylist, and the food and beverage gods are with us. I might get the whole thing done in six hours, while it might have taken Joe or Steve ten to twelve hours. If we get your images done in six hours they still have the same value to everyone as if I had taken the full eight hours to get the work done. But since you heard, "by the day" or "by the hour" you may think that you are entitled to get a full eight hours of work from us. If you are like some clients we've worked with you might decide to add three more drink shots to the mix. But this isn't what you asked for in the beginning and you need to understand that there will be an additional usage charge of each of those three additional image licenses as well as an increase in the retouching and post production charges. A better idea would be to use those extra two hours that my skill and efficiency bought you as a gift to get something else done, bill someone else more money or take off early and spend more time with your children.

And there's the flip side. If you accept my offer and it's based on the value of the final, supplied images in the uses that you have specified then you know exactly how much you and your client will be paying. It's a fixed amount. If I'm having an off day then I eat the overage. If I need to send out for something then I eat the delay. If one of the images is a doozy to retouch and takes me a full five hours then I eat the miscalculation. If I didn't figure out that cherries and olives require different approaches to styling and lighting and have to spend more time on set getting stuff right then I eat that and you end up paying.....exactly what we said you would at the very beginning. You get the exact value that we calculated the images had for you. I can even tell you, right now, how much more a buy-out would be. And if I do go over my bid I pay for the assistant's extra time right out of my pocket. It's such a win for you to have this all locked down! There's so much incentive for me to do it efficiently and right.

So, how did it all work out? Well, the creative director called to tell me that he loved the bid, loved working with me and had approved his end of the paperwork/permission routine. As far as he was concerned we were a go. His one caution? The only uncertainty would be the client.

I sent along the long (4 page) agreement form which outlined usage, how we would work, delivery schedules, pricing, rights package, and (most importantly) when we would get paid. The account supervisor was happy with the paper work and got ready to send it along to the client for final approval. Then the phone rang on her desk. It was the client. "Good news!" he said. "One of my friends, who is a photographer, owes me a favor and is willing to shoot the whole thing for free!!!"

I got a sad e-mail back from the account supervisor. She filled me in on the terminal glitch.

End of the story? Nope. In my experience many of these "friend" deals don't work out and we get the job anyway. In the meantime I got to educate a critical, new person at an agency I've worked with for a long time. Next time the bidding process will be even easier. I was gracious with the news and didn't complain. That's just good marketing. Finally, it gave me something to write on the blog that didn't include a paean to yet another winsome and flirtatious camera. Gotta like that.

Now, someone tell all those non-commercial photographers that it's safe to come back into the blog....

The most powerful lighting tool in my inventory...

Do you see the instrument? Is it a Profoto? Is it Broncolor? Is it a fluorescent? How many watt seconds? What's the CRI? How about the color temperature? Do I have a beauty dish in the mix? Is it bare bulb? I can barely restrain myself. Is there a radio trigger? Is it a good one? Is it a Pocket Wizard? How high can it sync? Can I change the exposure from the camera position? Well, maybe.

But of course you know that I'm not talking about whatever metal and glass unit is hidden behind the 74 by 74 inch white diffusion screen, I am talking about the diffusion screen itself. It cost me about $100 ten or fifteen years ago. That included the soft, shimmery, nylon diffusion material as well as the frame. It's held in place by two ancient light stands.

And I have used this as a light modifier in hundreds and hundreds of shoots, including three or four of the shoots from which I've posted images here in the last week or so. I've used it to diffuse terrific Texas sun on outdoor shoots. I've used it as a big reflector. But mostly I've used it the way we would have used a big, wonderful soft box in years gone by. It's been an integral, defining part of many of my shoots.

It's been used along side of Kodak, Canon, Nikon, Leica, Hasselblad, Olympus, Panasonic and Samsung cameras. It's seen twenty or thirty or forty thousand dollars of cameras and lenses come and go. But it's still here. It's still the bedrock and aesthetic magician of many, many shoots and it still only cost me ..... $100.

In the example above I was shooting for Zach Theatre. The magic light unit of the moment? An old and crusty 1,000 watt, open faced tungsten light. As cheap and old tech as dirt. The final result?
A wonderful season brochure and accompanying ad campaign. The sale of hundreds of thousands of dollars of theater tickets. The paychecks of dozens of actors and staff. From a well used modifier and an old, non-automated light. And, an older, 12 megapixel camera.

The most powerful tool in the lighting inventory is little more than a bed sheet. Charge for what you know. Charge for how you see. Not for the dollar value and novelty of your tools.

Is it all about the magic camera? Naw....

The single most important parameter in the success of a photograph is, without a doubt, how interested you are in the subject.  The second is the way you look at or consider the subject. Then it's all down to how you incorporate that consideration or emotional point of view with your lighting.

From a technical point of view the success of an image is so much more dependent on the quality, direction and motivation of the lighting than the camera will ever be. Honest.

If you've been chasing cameras and lenses for a while and you feel constantly frustrated it may eventually dawn on you that you may have been chasing the wrong things. Learning to light well takes a lot of time and experience. Learning to use a new cameras well (not the initial learning curve of photography and camera use in general) takes an evening to read the manual and about a week of shooting to get used to the controls. Lighting? Much longer. Lighting well? A life time.

We talk about cameras here because they are like the lunch of the photography world. Should we go out for a burger? Are we celebrating with steaks? How about that romantic little French place. But lighting is like breathing and meditating. It's what the real masters had to master.

People have chided me for having no allegiance to cameras but really, I consider them now, in the digital age, like the Tic-Tacs of photography. A temporary Pez dispenser of imaging. It's the lights and the lighting and the subjects I'm really interested in. A new camera just gives you something fun and novel to play with while you are waiting for your real subject to show up or when you are waiting patiently for the light to get neat.

Making your own light well is hardly ever about the brand no matter  how hard we try to make it that way. Give me twenty different flashes of equal power and decent color consistency and once I put them through a modifier or a diffuser (or even a bed sheet) I defy you to tell me which one was a Nikon Speedlight, which one was a Yongnuo 560 and which one was a Broncolor Mobil. Just flat out don't believe you can tell a different.

So, magic cameras? Naw. Magic lenses? Maybe for certain stuff. There aren't any magic lighting units. But the ability to mold the lighting to your vision-----that's where your magic starts to happen.



For Henry White it's all about the light....

A quick look back at my favorite digital camera of all time and a magic lens.

This image was done for the Austin Lyric Opera. It was done in the early days of digital imaging. I shot it with a Kodak DCS 760 camera and a wonderfully eccentric lens, the Nikon 105mm f2.0 DC lens. The DC stands for "defocus coupling". All I know is that the lens had a sharp center core and the ability to shift the out of focus areas behind or in front of the main subject.

While the image looks like we just found amazingly nice available light it is actually lit. I used my favorite big scrim for the model with a 1,000 watt tungsten light as a source and a direct tungsten spot light on the back wall some 50 feet behind her.  I love the way we were able to frame her head in the little pool of background light. I like the lighting in here more every time I see the image and that amazes me since I liked it a lot when we shot it. Learning more stuff isn't always better....

Swimming pool re-visited.

Photographed for an article on water features for Tribeza Magazine 

I keep thinking about this image for some reason. I think it's because I am a sucker for diagonal lines, triangular shapes and the interplay of the opposite colors in the closest part of the pool. It's an image that's all about patience and planning. I needed to pre-visualize the effect I wanted, get there in time to figure out the composition and then sit back and wait for the pool light and the twilight to balance. 

Negative edge pools are neato. 

Just for the record, I am currently having much fun playing with fluorescent lights.

Late last year I explored what was available in the realm of fluorescent light fixtures for still and video production and I bought four fixtures from Fotodiox. The biggest one has six double tubes, the two next biggest ones have four double tubes and the smallest one has two double tubes. All but the smallest have switches that allow you to turn off one or even two banks of tubes for more control.

The bodies of the lights are made of heavy metal and they have metal barn doors that close over the tubes to protect them during travel. I have used them now on six different commercial video projects and dozens of still photography shoots and have had no issues with them at all. I like the quality of light and the color is easy to manage by either shooting raw files or by doing a custom white balance before shooting.

Here is an image of one of the "middle-way" banks:

Unlike portable flashes these lights are heavy and need to be on stout stands. It might also be a good idea to toss a sandbag or two on those stands as well. You'll also need electrical power. But not the amount you'd need to make a nice tungsten soft light....

I've seen people use them "bare", with no diffusers or modifiers but I prefer mine to be pushed through a nice diffusion silk. A "one stop" silk is just right. Used with diffusion these already large light sources become lush with softness. The Dulux bulbs are powered by electronic ballasts that are supposed to be flicker free. At the price point I'd take that with a grain of salt and test them before you do any high shutter speed work or high fps videotaping for eventually slow motion effects. All I can say is that I've never seen any flicker or banding in my use.

The one caveat I'll toss out is that no big assortment of tubes like this is going to travel well. I limit my travel with long tube fluorescent lights to cars only, no airlines, no shipping services. If you are looking for a little change in your still life, portrait or video work these might just move the creative needle a bit. They are cheap enough to try out.

Checking off the days on the calendar. Ben is off to college on the 30th. My team of mental health care practitioners should be here on the 31st.

Just to confuse all the camera pixel peeking activities, this is one of my favorite images of Ben. He's just out of the pool having raced in a swim meet.  The eccentric camera of choice I was using at the time was the Kodak DCS 760. All 6 megapixels of it. It had an APS-H (1.3x crop factor) CCD sensor from Kodak. It had a removable AA filter but I used it without. Since the lens mount was Nikon I was using a Nikon 50mm f1:1.2 lens stopped down just slightly. I can't remember the exposure settings but the ISO was either 80 or 100 as we didn't dare go much above that for fear of noisy files.

We have a very large print of this and it is sharp, noise free and fabulous, which again makes me question the need for more and more little, tiny, skinny pixels when big, plump, fat ones do so well.

We talk about the "why?" of photography from time to time but nothing brings home the value of preserved memories to an individual's life like someone you love moving away...

For Readers of "The Lisbon Portfolio." Henry White sent along one of the shots described in the novel...

© 1999 Henry White & Kirk Tuck

From a trade show many years ago in Lisbon, Portugal. Image taken with a Leica M4 and a 50mm Summicron lens. It was a week and a half of indecision. Sometimes I wanted color and some times I wanted black and white and I tried only to take one camera along with me on my walks so I was constantly trying to decide which way to go. I  thought I never really got it right but to be perfectly honest I've never been the best judge of what works in which medium. Somehow, ten or fifteen years later is seems that no matter which decision I made in the past it was the right one. 

The funny thing about photography is that it's all about forks in the road. Do I go left or right? Are those the only choices? Can I go foreword or backward? Can I stand right here and see what happens next? Our decisions are always less about what camera or film to use and more about which path to take on our walks. Which path determines everything. And ultimately it doesn't matter which path you take because there's something to see everywhere......

Sunday Morning. Local seeing.

My chair is the one in the background. 

We were out of town yesterday. Ben and I came back late last night and hit our beds. I woke up at sunrise this morning and Studio Dog and I went out for a walk before the sun had a chance to heat up the pavement and make its presence felt. While I was walking I was daydreaming about all the places that I'd like to go to and take photographs. I'd like to head back to Lisbon, I can never get enough of Rome and I haven't been to Istanbul in years. I thought about all the photo opportunities that might present themselves and when I got back to the house and started to make coffee I remembered an essay I'd read in Brooke Jensen's wonderful book, Let Go of the Camera.  In it he tells about his pilgrimage to Point Lobos to take large format landscape images like Edward Weston. In the end he realizes that there was really nothing special about Point Lobos, there was something special about Edward Weston and the way he saw things. 

Weston probably returned dozens and dozens of times to the famous park mostly because it was available to him. He was able to infuse the scenes with his vision and his point of view. He distilled his feelings about his vision over time and then overlaid them onto the subject matter at hand. 

With this in mind I started to look around my own dining room and kitchen, noticing the play of shadow and light. Noticing the juxtaposition of shapes and objects. I realized that "where ever you go, there you are." (Buckaroo Bonzai). I finished a particularly fine cup of coffee and went out to the car to rescue a camera I'd left there last night. I went into the studio and grabbed a small tripod and then I came back in and started looking for images that just "felt right" to me.

The first series of images are of my dining room chair. Belinda painted and finished these chairs about 20 years ago and they've been part of my family's dining experience for the entire 18 years that we've spent raising Ben. The dining room has a set of double French doors on the South side of the house. In the mornings they get soft, diffuse, indirect light. The light makes soft shadows.  I like my chair images because they extend back into their space, and they also anchor my feelings about family meals and being together and also of being apart.

I am always careful not to bump or scrape the wall behind me. Not everyone is as careful.

We'll need to repaint that wall sooner rather than later.

I turned my camera to our living room and tried to capture the feeling of the wide open space and the tall ceilings with light pouring through from both sides of the house. I spend a lot of high quality time sitting on that couch writing and laying on that couch, reading. Ben and his friends move the furniture around a lot so they can all crowd around the big screen and play video games. It disturbs my sense of order but we each bend to make life comfortable for one another. 

I took photographs of a long hall but they didn't feel like much to me. I was looking for something else. I photographed my white chair. It sits in our bedroom and in the afternoons the French doors let in beautiful light. It's indirect and then diffused through thin, white curtains. 

I bought this chair when we moved into our house years ago. For a long time my lovely black and white cat staked it out as her territory and defended it against all comers. She was gracious enough to share it with me if I would let her sit in my lap and if I remembered to scratch  gently under her chin. She lived to be 20 years old and her last days were spent lounging in this chair. 

A few years after her passing we got a puppy who prefers to be known on the blog as, Studio Dog. The chair has passed to her and she settles in for naps there in the afternoon, and after she gets Ben to bed at night and makes sure he's sleeping she hustles back down the long hall and curls up again in the chair, positioned just right so that she can keep a watchful eye on me. Occasionally Belinda gets to use the chair to read in. It's usually at a time when Ben and his horde of friends have taken over the living room and the sound levels rise at that end of the house. The chair has a matching ottoman and my favorite portrait of Ben as a very young child was taken while he was sitting on it. Funny how many stories my chairs seem to have...

I'm not sure about anyone else but I have "favorite" articles of clothing and prefer them to everything else. This Summer I got a new shirt and no one seems to like it but me. It's plaid and that may be the problem. Most of my artist friends still dress in black. The shirt is made out of a special, lightweight technical fabric that breathes, wicks away moisture and is ultimately comfortable. My new shirt even has its own SPF rating. It's 50 SPF. I guess that means my shirt won't get sunburned easily.

If you read the blog on a regular basis you know that I walk. A lot. With cameras. All that walking demands good walking shoes. I've done enough impromptu walks in flip flops to know that the right footware makes the whole photo exploring a whole lot more comfortable. I've been in a shoe upgrade mood this Summer and upon evaluating some my old standbys I was amazed at how worn down they'd before. 

Life is full of little doodads and trinkets.  My night stand seems to attract old phones, old watches and reading glasses of every variety. 

It was a calm and fun project to just walk around and make photographs that are tremendously local. It's probably good to get out of the mindset that we can only take wonderful images at far flung travel destinations. It's a bit desperate to start searching out the geographic locations that others have shot well and then try to put your tripod down in the same spot and make a variant of someone else's vision. My experiment didn't produce anything I want to put in a frame or in a portfolio but it's a start.

As it is August I've started inviting friends over for informal portrait sessions. A fun fantasy: What if all your art could be done in your own studio and in the borders of your own home? What a time saver that might be....