When will the VSL video editor return?

B&B at Sweetish Hill Bakery. 

Ancient image from the archives.

My son has been away at college for the last three years. He comes home for the Summers, and for the end of year break, and I can generally convince him, during his stays at home, to lend a hand in the business as a video editor and on set director. This Spring semester was quite different. Ben applied to and was accepted at Yonsei University in Seoul, S. Korea for a semester abroad. 

He has taken several years of Korean language and has a deep interest in the culture, politics and history of Korea. He headed out in early February and has been dividing his time between (hopefully) diligent studies and much site seeing. He's eaten interesting foods and lived to write home about it. He's traveled almost weekly across Korea and made many good friends. 

I am happy we were able to provide this experience for him but I am even happier at the prospect that he'll be back near the end of next week. 

If you've been holding off on hiring me to do some glorious and ample-budgeted video project because you missed Ben's skill in the editing bay you'll want to reserve your company's place in line to make sure we can work your project in sometime this Summer. It's a limited engagement; he's back to school in Saratoga Springs, NY in the Fall. One more academic year and then ..... ?

I smell graduate school lurking in the wings... 

(camera note: What camera did he take? I opened up the equipment cabinets in the studio and invited him to take whatever he wanted. If he didn't see something there I would gladly have bought him whatever he required. He demurred and chose to go only with his iPhone 5s. He's sent back dozens of photos. They're all pretty good. PHONE, the camera choice of the millennials. 

A couple of casual shots from the Contax RTS 3 and the Zeiss 85mm f1.4.

I'm working on a new website but in my search of interesting photos to include I keep running across old favorites. I thought I would share one.

I started working with Renae nearly 21 years ago. I remember because during the first few months of working together we were still over in the old (enormous) studio just east of IH35; the "other" side of town. She helped with the move to my new location and we worked together for another three or four years before she moved to NYC, and then on to Los Angeles.

We worked a lot back then. That was the nature of commercial photography in the 1990's. The work was pretty predictable; whether it was an architectural shoot for a home builder, a corporate headshot "cattle call" on location or a product shoot in the studio, they all pretty much proceeded in the same way.

If the assignment was on location we probably sorted and packed everything the evening before. The new studio is right across the walkway from my house so many times Belinda would throw together a nice dinner and we'd break from assembling all the crap that goes along with a photographer to create images in the wild to sit around the dining room table to relax and eat with Belinda and toddler, Ben.

On the shoot day we'd get back into the studio and start hauling the gear cases out to the car around 7:00 am in the morning, hit the local Starbucks around 7:30, and then pull into the client's parking lot just before 8. It takes longer now. We're no longer a sleepy, little town so we double or triple the travel time.

We'd spend the first hour or so setting up lights and light stands, and taping down extension cords so no one would trip over them. Then we'd start working through either a list of shots or a list of people who needed to be photographed, and we'd get into the rhythm of the shoot. We'd break for a late lunch in the company cafeteria or someplace quick and close by and then get back to the process.

We'd wrap up around 4:30 pm and start packing up. If we were up in Round Rock, with the folks from Dell, we might have a forty-five minute or one hour commute back home to Westlake Hills. If we were south, at Motorola, we could do it in half the time. We'd get to the studio and unpack the car.
If we had another shoot the next day we'd take a little break, have a glass of wine, and then re-pack everything for the next day. We'd unload the film and get it ready for the lab and Renae would drop it by the lab, in the night drop, on her way home.

When jobs all bunched together we'd hire a second assistant whose main job was to ferry shot film to the lab for processing and then bring processed film back to the shoot so we could review it as we worked on the next job. If we had a full week of shooting booked then editing, packaging for delivery to clients, and then billing all got done on Saturdays and Sundays.

If we were lucky enough to have a down day; one without a client assignment, we'd organize the studio, file the negatives and transparencies, clean stuff and then take a little time to do our own photography. This (above) is from a series I did to test a look for a particular gray canvas as a backdrop.

Looking back I can't honestly say that if I were to do it all over again I'd prefer being an accountant or I.T. professional. I can say that I resent the fact that progress has made the need for a daily assistant unnecessary.

It's probably all for the best since I was never able to find someone as brilliant as Renae to take her place.

This is the image I wanted for the cover of my book about commercial photography. I might rip actual cover off a copy and paste this onto the front...

©kirk tuck.

Funny to think that, in 2009, we were still shooting black and white film 

in our big, square cameras, for everything that we thought 

was personal and important. Funny how some of the work

still bubbles up to the top. 

Sweetish Hill Bakery. Plain Croissant. Wonderful Hand.

When Patricia ruled her bakery domain everything was magical and delicious. It was inevitable that she would retire some day. I didn't know it then; before she sold the business, but it was a dark day for coffee and pastries lovers of a certain kind in central Austin. 

Under the new management the quality didn't change.....just the magic. 




Shot in the studio. Available light. Rollei 6008. 150mm. 

A Photograph of a Dancer in a second floor studio on Sixth St. Back when it was the cheap real estate in Austin, Texas. Circa: 1979.

We had so much time back in our youth. Time to sit on wooden floors and watch the light flow through big windows and still be amazed by the weightlessness of the dust floating through the shafts of sun.

I was hanging out with dancers and snapping away with an ancient Canon SLR and a 50mm f1.4. Everything was on Tri-X then and I never had to make decisions about which lens to shoot with since it was the only one I owned.

I still love the work from back then. It was propelled only by my curiosity and my attraction to beautiful people.

Funny how easy everything is when your biggest responsibility is to remember to lift the toilet seat lid.

I think we sometimes forget how important it is to celebrate our victories.

This was taken sometime in 1983. I had recently left the welcoming but soporific bosom of academia; shortsightedly leaving the stability of a steady job for the insanity of the advertising industry. But it was fun. Fun in a way that academia really could never be.

This was taken at the successful end of our very first photo shoot as Avanti Advertising and Design. We had a retail client who sold high end chocolate, Champagne, flowers and cards. The shoot required opening several (or more) bottles of Champagne so we could capture that magic moment when the cork pops and the bottle overflows. Honestly, it was vital to the creative concept....

But once open the bottles couldn't be returned and so it fell to the marketing team on the account to liquidate the luscious liquid. There may also have been some "prop" chocolates that couldn't be resold so we made short work of those as well.

The important thing we learned early on in the business was the importance of really celebrating our victories in the industry. We commemorated every successful television commercial and print campaign with a toast, a happy hour or a "all hands" friday lunch at our favorite, sloppy Tex-Mex restaurant (which, at the time, was Nuevo Leon, on East 7th St.).

This job was shot on a Pentax 6x7 camera and, as was typical for the times, ran in black and white in the local newspapers. I strongly suspect it was shot on Tri-X film and I remember making the 11x14 inch fiber based prints in my darkroom. Good times.

These days I've gotten a bit jaded about the process, and, truth be told, if I celebrated every successful job with a bottle of Champagne I would have died long ago of some liver disease.

Still, it's good to remind oneself, from time to time, that this is a tough business and sustaining success for decades at a time is a worthy thing to celebrate. I think I'll head into the house and see if there's any wine left in the fridge from the last dinner party.....

other notes: hard at work on a very insouciant and strange new website for Kirk Tuck Photography and Video. I'm using a program called, Sparkle. It's fun but so, so time consuming. Now where is that Sauvignon Blanc I remember re-corking....

Something I wrote in 2011 and re-discovered today on TOP. One of my favorites....

http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2011/12/kirks-take-kirk-tuck-2.html#more

I needed this reminder TODAY. I was diving too deep into the minutia of video. I think I just pulled myself back from the edge of the abyss.....

A Portrait done this week with my small Godox flashes. A return to a style that I used back when I was writing my first lighting book.

Sara B. ©Kirk Tuck

As most of my blog readers know I've been more or less immersed in the use of continuous lighting for portrait work over the last few years. It's a practice I started back when I was working on a book about LED lighting back in 2009-2010. Recently, I've had to travel more often to light and shoot both video and photographs and it's been a challenge to figure out how to pack to get the most bang per ounce across both media.

I recently bought bunch of Godox small flashes because they pack down so well and require fewer light stands on which to hang light modifiers, etc. I think the traditional flash equipment that I used for decades (mono lights, pack and head strobes) are now mostly obsolete for most working photographers (with exceptions) who need

A quick look at a recent portrait session with an attorney.

Luke. ©Kirk Tuck 2017

I first photographed Luke a number of years ago when he commissioned a local advertising agency to create a new website for his law practice. We both liked the images we generated in that first encounter and when the time came to update the website design Luke moved on to a different design firm but called on me directly to do new portraits. 

I knew that he was looking for images the that would project a calm competence and that's what I aimed for. Our session was scheduled for 10:30 one morning but I started the basic lighting design and set up during the afternoon the day before. I knew I wanted to use a cool, steely gray background because it creates a nice color contrast for flesh tone. I wanted to use continuous lighting because I wanted to work with wide apertures and also wanted to leverage some of the daylight coming into the studio for very subtle fill light. 

My main light was an LED panel pushed through a Westcott diffusion flag (2x3 feet) positioned about four feet from his face, 45 degrees off axis, and up high enough to create a flattering shadow under his chin. Just behind the main light and a bit more to the center I put up another LED panel and pushed it through a 4x4 foot Chimera diffusion panel with the power all the way down at 20%. The purpose was to add fill light overall. 

I used a smaller LED panel as a hair light. It came from the right rear of the set and created some interesting separation in Luke's hair. I used another LED panel pushed through another Chimera panel from the back left side of the set. Its effect is almost invisible but it shows up as more even lighting on the right hand side of his face and is more noticeable in bigger enlargements. 

The final light was a vertically arranged LED panel with one sheet of translucent material clipped on to soften the beam; aimed directly at the seamless paper background. This light was positioned directly behind Luke and carefully metered to get a halo effect around him without having to resort to post production vignetting or manipulation. 

I took a couple of test shots and then we spent time just chatting and catching up. The session lasted long enough to generate several hundred shots, which may sound excessive to retail portrait takers but is part of our advertising tradition. We're looking for small but important changes in pose, gesture and expression. Even small adjustments to expression can change the impression of the subject being photographed. 

I included three different expressions here so you can see what I'm talking about. Each is very similar but, to my eye, each has a very different demeanor. Luke selected 12 final shots and I spent an afternoon getting the flesh tones exactly the way I wanted them to look for web use. The files were delivered as large, layered Tiffs as well as "ready to use" Jpegs in two sizes. 

Luke and I were both quite happy with the results. It's a straightforward project but, as usually is the case, knowing the final use is important. Knowing the subject well enough to have a good rapport is priceless.

Camera: Sony A7ii

Lens: Sony FE 85mm f1.8

Lights: Aputure LightStorm LEDs