The second day of shooting with the EP3.

People love to talk horse poop about stuff they haven't tried for themselves.  My favorite is the put down that you shouldn't buy micro four thirds cameras because you can't do narrow depth of field effects.  I shot this at Starbucks this morning while sitting around with a bunch of my swimmer buddies, swilling coffee.  Pen EP3 with Pen F 40mm 1.4 MF lens.

Let's get a few things out of the way first.  I walked into Precision Camera and paid for my Olympus EP3.  Olympus isn't sponsoring my review or giving me this stuff so I feel pretty okay saying just about anything I want about the EP3, good or bad.  I was immediately interested in the Pens on their launch because I am a collector of Pen F film cameras and their incredibly good Pen F lenses.  The stuff is downright amazing.  I rushed to the store two years ago to look at the EP1 and I passed on that camera. There was no way to do eye level viewfinding.  No EVF.  I'd have to wear reading glasses to see fine detail on the screen.  Just not going to happen.  But I didn't get too upset because I knew it was only a matter of time before they released a model with an EVF.  Well, we got the EVF in the form of the VF-2 and while many people don't like this solution I'm very, very happy with it.  In fact, I own two of them and now use one on the EP3 and one on the EP2 or the EPL1 depending on which camera I'm toting as a back up.  I got the EP3 a couple days ago but today was the first time I had free time to walk around and shoot with it.  I put the kit lens in the small bag but I also dragged along a bunch of the old glass, including the (All Pen F lenses from the 1970's)  25mm 2.8, the 40mm 1.4, the 60mm 1.5, and one of the two 50-90mm zooms.  It all fit, with my phone and an extra battery, in a bag about half the size of an 9 by 12 inch envelope.  The Pen lens are all metal construction with buttery smooth focus rings and the build quality (optically and mechanically) is nearly on par with older generation Leica M lenses.

Minimalism as mainstream? Small cameras the new pro cameras? Is the world out of control, or just catching up?

Actor as rancher from a theater shoot.  It was an interesting time of experimentation for me.  I used mostly small fresnel spotlights to create shots like this.  Our exposures were down in the 1/4 to 1/30th second range so people had to stay still.  But the tradeoff for a bit more care was a lot more control...Camera: Hasselblad 501 c/m.  Lens:  150 Sonnar.  Film:  Tri-X.  Lights:  Desisti hot lights.

So I was at Holland Photo Lab on South Lamar Blvd. this morning.  I'd come via a circuitous route since the city of Austin has closed off most of the streets I normally navigate to have some sort of "rock" concert in the park for the next three days....  I dropped off my three rolls of Velvia 100f (a whopping 36 exposures, total) from my roadway project and I was waiting for someone to log in my film when this magazine caught my eye.  "Be A Minimalist."  the cover demands.

There are several articles in the magazine that gush about the move to use more "minimalist" gear in your lighting and shooting.  There's a breathless article about a shooter in Joplin who uses only an entry level DSLR with a kit lens and a couple of clamp lights from Walmart.  That's one of his shots on the cover (above).  Sometimes he even uses.......available light!!!!  Further into the guts of the magazine is a long "technical" article that explains how shooting with cameras aimed at rank amateurs can "make sense" for professional photographers.  It shows a chart with all sorts of entry level cameras including two I felt were odd choices, both because of price and also the capabilities of these weather proof and well regarded bodies.  Those were the Canon 7D and the Nikon D300s.  Seems not every photographer covers sports and needs superfast response and (AMAZING) not every professional photographer shoots in harsh environmental conditions that would require weather sealed cameras.

New and Improved.

This is Ben from about ten years ago.  He grew up (grows up) in the studio.  Tonight he needed photos for his Spanish class.  What did he do over the summer?  We jumped up after dinner and put together a collection.  Is it cheating if your dad is a professional photographer?

Isn't photography fun?  Maybe we should step away from our keyboards and go do some more photography......bye.

From geeky to creaky. The progression of life.

From black Canon AE-1 with a normal lens to an Olympus EPL1 with a normal lens in 30 short years.  Progress?  Entropy?  Real life?

The important thing is to keep shooting and don't look back!  We are not spectators in our own lives.  It's how we take control that makes a difference.

EP3 tags along with a real camera. Shots for business and shots for fun.

I've been working on an annual report for a roadway authority for the better part of a month now.  A day here and a day there as it works out.  Fine with me.  It's nice to have a break between shoots to take care of other business and do good pre-production planning.  Today we were out at a location where several large construction companies are building a massive interchange.  Lots of steel and concrete and big machines.  We were shooting soaring construction images to use as backgrounds for executive photos.  Seemed like a good idea to me, especially when the execs were only really available on days when the temperatures soared....

Caveat Emptor. What you see is a distillation.

Have you ever looked through a blog or a website and seen great image after great image and, while you were happy; after a fashion, for the photographer, you went away a bit dispirited?  You compared the work you've been able to produce every day for however long you've been doing photography and you can count the winners on one hand or, if you're lucky, both hands and both feet.  And the implicit message you get when looking at an image forward blog is that the photographer can do no wrong.  Give him or her a box camera or a cellphone and everything they point it at will be breathtaking, awesome, riveting and otherwise perfect and beyond the ken of mortal photographers.  Every morning you go to the site and there's something so entrancing that it just frickin wears you down.

We're human and we can't help but make comparisons with the people around us. Culture drives us to measure our accomplishments against the mean and against the curve busters.  But I'm here to tell you that it's largely BS and marketing in large measures.  I'm very clear on the fact that very few of the images I post to accompany the written (important) part of the blog rise even to the level of art.  Much less high art.  Some are interesting while some just show something I want to talk about....

But when you look at my blog, or John Paul Caponigro's blog or Joe McNally's blog and you really like a photo or a series of photos you might want to remember that the photos you admire have been cherry-picked from 10, 20 or 30 years of daily practice.  For each photo you admire there are hundreds, thousands, or, in the case of my work, tens of thousands of "close but no cigar" and "what the heck was I thinking" contenders to wade through.

If blogging required me only to use the photographs I've taken that I actually think are exciting, wonderful, insightful or emotive I think I would have stopped illustrating the blog after the first twenty or thirty offerings.  Like most introspective photographers I have a feeling of failure as I look through my files.  I have thousands of 4x5 transparencies of micro processors and circuit boards.  Nothing I would inflict on a general audience but a workmanlike history of the my sliver of the semiconductor industry.  I have files filled with literally thousands of head shots done for companies like Motorola and Dell.  The bulk of the people in the files are probably retired, have moved on to new start up companies, etc. but I can't bear to throw much away.  And, for the most part, while their mothers and children and spouses find them attractive the crowd is a mixed bag.  It's journeyman photography at best and certainly nothing to share as the example of a life's work.

There are medium format chromes shot for magazines that are dated and in some ways funny in their historic perspective.  Hairstyles change, clothing styles change and lighting styles change.  Gone is the fascination with saturated, gelled backgrounds just as fill flash at sunset has become the cliche of this decade.  By the time it filters down to every studio the fad is past and the trend setters are on to something else.

And so, when I look through the files it's the images of friends and family, people I've met in coffee shops and clubs and on the street that I've been able to cajole into sitting for a portrait, that constitute the images that resonate with me.  And some are nostalgic reminders of a wonderful time spent sitting and talking.  The images may mean more to me than to any audience.  And yet, I feel that this sort of distillation is part and parcel of every camera artist's experience.  Amateur or professional.

But the message to everyone who steadfastly continues making images in spite of the angst and negative inertia that comes from comparing yourself to someone's stream of greatest hits is this:  We are all the same.  We all struggle to make work that is relevant.  We all struggle with the niggling feeling that others know special secrets that make them better.  We all lack total self confidence (except for the sociopaths...).  We're all on a learning curve.  We all have the tendency to put our best foot forward and to cram all the stuff that didn't work back into the closet or the filing cabinet.  The masters you see whose work you think you'll never be able to equal are just as conflicted and just as unsure.  And you're seeing only the tip of their "iceberg" as well.

At its core the kind of photography we all want to do doesn't have quantifiable, objective measures of relative value.  All that matters is that the images you create resonate with you.  But I'll go further and repeat an idea that a friend of mine and I were talking about at breakfast:  As important as the images might seem the more important thing is to enjoy the process.

I don't put images up on the blog with the expectation that you'll use them as a measure of my quality as an artist.  Few of my clients are interested in blogs about photography.  They are not our audience here. My audience, as far as I can tell, are like minded photographers for whom photography is a joy.  For whom camaraderie, whether on the web or in person, is important and valued.  The enjoyment of photography is not akin to a pissing match.  There are no ribbons to be won here.  No trophies other than the lucky shot well seen.  In some little incremental way we are all moving the art of photography forward just by participating in the process.  A ripple that becomes a wave.

Good marketers distill their greatest hits down into a public persona.  I could do that with the meager handful of images I've made that I truly love but in the end it would be dishonest to the purpose of this blog.  And that's to share the love of photography and the discipline of working at the process.

Last word:  I was re-reading a book by Steven Pressfield about the life of Alexander the Great.  Near the end of Alexander's invasion of India his entourage was walking along a road and his advance people were clearing the way for Alexander.  A group of holy men was sitting in the road and refused to move.  As Alexander approached he could hear the animated conversation between one of his officers and one of the "naked holy men".  The officer said (and I'm paraphrasing):  Do you know who this is?  He's the greatest commander/leader in history.  Alexander has conquered the entire known world.  What have you done?


The reply from the holy man:  "I have conquered my need to conquer the world."

A fun photo from a secret "super" camera.

Photographed for a dermatology practice.  Nikon D2h.  Lighting:  big and soft.

And also a version in black and white:

......Lousy old cameras.....


We were off-line for about an hour this evening to do some psychic maintenance. I'm not always gracious about taking ad hominem attacks.  If you like the blog send me some nice comments to take the bad taste out of my mouth.  I'm working on growing thicker skin....

Professional photographers always use..................yadda, yadda, yadda.

The people on photographic forums are really nice people but they don't always have the story straight.  A lot of people learned stuff about photography that might have been true in the days of steam powered cameras but has lost its relevance in modern times.  There's also a mental glitch that translates stories or anecdotal events into facts and rules of thumb.  To wit:  All pros use full frame cameras! (No.)  All pros use big lights. (No.)  All pros use f2.8 zooms. (No.)  All Pros use Nikon or Canon. (No.)  All pros shoot raw. (No.)  All advertising clients demand 1. High res tiffs,  2. 120megabyte files, 3. L-series lenses. 4.  The highest resolution cameras on the market.  5. Kickbacks.  6.  Profoto lighting gear.  7.  Alien Bees lighting gear.  8.  Unlimited usage rights.  9. Ultra high sharpness.  10.  A perfect image every time.  (no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, and no.)  All book publishers demand super high res files. (chuckle).  All cookbooks are done with Medium Format digital cameras.  All pros are abandoning  Olympus, Sony, Pentax, (fill in the blank) cameras.  My favorite of today, "All pros get their cameras free from the camera companies!!!"  I wish that was true.  My wife wishes that true even more.

Let's see,  the cover of the book above was shot with an Olympus camera and some really cool Olympus lenses but the real story is the inside stuff.  Mostly there are images of equipment and some lighting set ups.  Many, if not most, of the shots were done with a Canon G10 compact camera.  My publisher has done hundreds and hundreds of books and his staff are experts in color printing.  No one had a single complaint and, in fact, I doubt anyone could tell which shots were done with the small camera and which ones were done on a large camera.

We tend to take technique more seriously when using serious cameras but BUT if you take the time to put a G10, G11, G12, LX-3, LX-4 or some other well made compact camera on a tripod, light well and shoot at the minimum ISO you'll have great images.  Well worth putting in a book to illustrate concepts.  And you may find that the increased depth of field is a blessing, not a curse.  Especially when shooting products.

I love the perennial questions about which brand of electronic flash lights are "the" professional brand to buy.  Like DSLR cameras today, most are pretty darn good regardless of the price.  I recently wrote about dumping a fifteen year accumulation of Profoto gear and replacing it with cheap Elinchrom D-Lites.  The new lights are 1/2 the weight of my older monolights and less than 1/3rd the cost.  They're plastic.  Do I care?  About as much as I care whether the harddrive casing on my desk HD is plastic.  Hardly matters.  Will the Elinchroms be as sturdy?  I'm not sure.  We'll find out.  But I'm guessing that most photographers are flying a lot less frequently than they did before the recession hit so maybe their lights won't spend quite so much time in the hands of the baggage savages.  Maybe that will even out the MTBF........

By the way.  We did another shoot with the new lights today and the art director didn't notice any changes.  The lights flashed.  The image on the screen looked great.  That's all that mattered.  It's not like Profoto is a household name outside the arena of working professionals and gear geeks.  And if there is a hierarchy isn't Broncolor on the top?  I can't keep up....because we don't need to keep up.  1/10th of a stop control and 1/5000th of second t.05 flash durations are rarely issues in making headshots or shooting a group shot of the swim team.

I meet a lot of people who've decided to become professional photographers as I do workshops, speak at Expos and go to lecture at classes in three colleges and one university, locally.  And to a person they are all different.  No denying there are a lot of Canon and Nikon users but that goes with the market share.  The interesting people seem to be the ones who gravitate to outlier cameras.  A huge number of people are still shooting film and loving it.  Five or six friends recently followed me down the rabbit hole of shooting with Hasselblads.  My friend Paul is rocking a Hasselblad Digital body and a case full of Hasselblad lenses.  Agnes bought a pinhole camera and keeps selling prints to art collectors.  My favorite street shooters are using m4:3rd cameras and Nex cameras.  Alex Majoli used a compact Olympus to cover the early parts of the war in Iraq.   

I was on a forum where one old pro was roasting an Australian photographer.  Didn't think she had technique worth a crap.  Don't know what camera she was using but I do know she's a marketing gladiator and she's found a market for her stuff.  She's obviously resonated with her customers. We're all so different.  Our customers are all so different.  That's how we stay in business.

And for some of us the choice of cameras is tied up with a nostalgia for either a better time or at least a less hectic time.  Shooting film for me harkens back to the days when clients could wait a day or two to see the results.  When a long lunch was more important than ultra efficient post processing.  Incidentally, I shot part of a job on Thurs. with the film cameras and the client didn't get to see the images until Monday.  She held a few pages of transparencies up to the office window, chose three frames in less than 90 seconds and asked for scans. She loved the process.  She loved the look of the images. No time wasted importing and key wording and color correcting and converting from raw to jpeg and uploading and making a gallery on Smugmug and sending links and all that other "butt expanding" computer work.  We shot, we dropped, we picked up on the way into downtown and that was it.  Metatag?  It's written in Sharpie on the archival page sleeves......

Even though there are infinite styles and points of view in photography, "professional" is a word with just one meaning:  "I make money from my work."  Professional doesn't define the work it merely defines the business relationship.  Now go out and shoot with something fun.  If you can sell the work for money you just used a professional camera.  

Professional Color?  Why not.  If that's your vision.....

Bet that machine was made in 1955.  Still makes money for its owner.  Don't you wish you could buy something worthwhile and keep it for 60 years?  Maybe that's the real mark of good tools.  Longevity and the experience gained working with it..

Maybe today is a Holga day.  Naw, probably a Linhof day.  Either way something interesting might happen.

An ad campaign for a local company.

I spend a lot of time writing about artsy portraits and big concepts of sturm und drang in the field of photography but my time teaching a workshop on video showed me that most people don't care so much about hermeneutics and epistemology and would really just like me to shut up about philosophical crap and show them what we actually do most days to make a living.  So I thought I'd oblige with this fun project.  It's for a company called EcoBox that sells and recycles and resells packing boxes and all the materials you might need to move your household across town or your business across the country.

The owners of the business, like most smart business men, didn't want to spend money on stuff that didn't make a difference in the bottom line but enough demographic research showed that their biggest potential customer base was women.  Mostly women in the 30 to 45 year old age group.  We knew we wanted to use a person in all of the ads because again, research shows that an image of a person looking directly at an ad viewer gets the longest engagement and the highest recall.  

We called our local talent agencies and gave them the specifications and asked for a "go see."  On a certain day all of the women that we narrowed our search to (by looking at headshots supplied by their agents...) came by and we snapped photographs of them to see how they looked on our cameras and how much they'd changed since they had their last headshot done.

The woman we chose, Kara, was a unanimous choice.  She does well in front of the camera.  She has a very pleasant aspect and her athleticism and good features make her an aspirational model for our client's demographic.  We negotiated for the various usages that we'd need and booked her for a day long shoot.

My studio is adjacent to my house in west Austin so we sometimes spill over into the house on shoots and sometimes, when we need lots and lots of space we shoot in my living room and use the studio as a make-up, wardrobe and gear storage facility.  In this situation we had the studio set up to shoot in and used our living room as a station for our make-up person and the dining room as a break room for coffee and meetings and internet silliness.  My assistant reserved two "travelers" of coffee from Starbucks the night before and went by to pick them up on her way in to work.  I had ordered a tray of baked goods from my favorite bakery and I went early to pick them up as well.  We also had juices, power bars and protein-y snacks set out.  Ben cleaned his bathroom for my clients.  We had the following people in attendance:  Greg, the art director/CD.  Amy, my assistant.  Patricia, the make up artist.  Kara, the model.  Two clients.  One account executive (who's name escapes me...).  

The creative brief called for shooting everything against a white background.  Amy and I set that up first.  We used the classic technique of four lights in umbrellas with black backing cross lighting the expanse of the background.  We metered the background and moved lights and feathered them until the meter read within one half of a stop anywhere on the visible paper.  We used black panels to block any spill light and to increase the general contrast by reducing flare and spill.  

I used a large softbox to to one side of the set and a smaller box on the other side for adjustable fill.  We did everthing a step at a time.  We were careful to match the light on the product shots of boxes to the light we used one Kara.  We had a series of pencil sketches and a shot list to work from and we were methodical about checking off the boxes, one after the other.  While I was shooting Amy was setting up and tearing down the boxes we were using as props.  Patricia kept an eye on Kara and stepped in when Kara started to get shiny.  She also kept a sharp eye out for wrinkles and other wardrobe issues.

I'd shoot (I think this was all done on a Nikon D700) and then Greg and I would review a test shot on the back of the camera.  If there was a question about detail we'd tether the camera and shoot test shots which we reviewed on a 24 inch calibrated Apple Monitor.  I've learned thru experience that it's more important to be consistent in your light sources than it is to have prestigious but mixed light sources.  Now I'm shooting with Elinchrom gear but I'm pretty sure I had a bunch of Alien Bees monolights in the studio at the time (I was writing a book about studio lighting....) and we used six of them.  All set above 1/4 power to ameliorate any color temperature inconsistencies.  In work like this I prefer big, softer light sources to smaller, harder light sources.  We can also increase apparent contrast but it's much harder to increase it after the fact.

We shot everything in uncompressed RAW files so we could make sure of the color matches in post production.  I did a rough edit to throw out blinks and scowls and flat out errors and then converted to smaller jpegs and uploaded to a web gallery for Greg and the clients.  I also provided a DVD of the same Jpegs for Greg in case he wanted to use them in a PhotoShop view instead.

Once Greg narrowed down his choices he sent me over a list and some instructions to customize the images.  We work large since some of the files would end up on the sides of large trucks.  I went thru each file, matched it for color, corrected loose threads and subject faults and output the files as 16 bit PSD's.  There's a mythology that photographers deliver Tiffs and that ad agencies just drop them into place but I've found that the art directors I work with have lots of practice working with files and fine tuning them for various applications in PhotoShop.  Greg is one of those art directors.  He knew exactly what to do with 16 bit PSD files....

I know it's kind of silly but I still get a kick when I'm driving around town and I see one of the truck wraps with my images all over it.  I am amazed at how well planned out Greg's campaign was and, by dint of his tremendous pre-production planning, how much we were able to get done in one long day of shooting.   The clients loved the campaign and are in their second full year of use so they've long since forgotten about the relatively small cost of my production.  In the grand scheme of a long running campaign my fees will be a fraction, perhaps less than one percent of the total advertising budget.

Amy and I cleaned up the studio and the house,  we hugged everyone.  We helped the guy from EcoBox who came in the big truck to pick up all the prop boxes.  I sent thank you notes to everyone involved.  I backed up the files on another hard drive and two DVD's and then Amy and I started resetting the studio, at nine o'clock that night, for our 5:15 am head shot for an executive from Dell.  The next morning always comes faster than we think it will.  Better to be set up the night before.

I sent Greg a bill and it was exactly the same amount as the bid.  No surprises.  No angst.  The check came quickly and the job was another gold star for each of us.  That's the basic anatomy of a local advertising photo shoot.

Note:  Last weekend's workshop on Video seems to have been a big success.  The people at Precision Camera sat in and enjoyed the whole thing.  They've invited me back to do another one on the 19th of November.  Should be fun....