Old Tech. New Tech. No Tech.

The two images above are from a campaign I did a while back for the Austin Lyric Opera.  At the time my camera of choice was the Kodak DCS 760.  I guess this would have been back in 2002 or 2003.  I was using hot lights so I could have complete freedom of choice for apertures while using the Nikon 105 f2 Defocus Coupling lens.  It was a wonderful combination.  The six megapixel camera could be used without an anti aliasing filter and that was fine with me.  But while the camera was capable of giving me very sharp images the lens was equally capable of taking the edge off.  We shot tethered to an aluminum Apple Powerbook and the shoot was wonderful and very productive.  

Time marched on and I've been thru many cameras since in a silly search for the "holy grail" of cameras.  But two Summers ago, just to do something different I charged up the aging batteries and shot a kid's swim meet with the DCS 760 and a Nikon 180 2.8.  It brought me back to the idea the cameras are never really obsolete if they still do what  you want them to do.  The files were wonderful.  The pictures, even better.  

I came across the camera in a drawer in the studio last week and immediately re-bonded to it.  Five pounds of picture taking potential.  I went on line and ordered two new batteries (which came yesterday) and I've been shooting it ever since.  New rule:  Never get rid of old cameras.  

That's my version of old tech.

Below is new tech.

I was doing a book on the business of Commercial photography and asked three really great photographers to contribute some photographs.  I was writing profiles of them because each, in his own way, defined what I thought was great about commercial photographers.  The gentleman above is the best living portrait photographer I know ( and it pains my ego to admit it.....).  His name is Wyatt McSpadden, and his book on Texas BBQ is amazing.  But even more amazing is the body of work he's assembled over the last 25 years.  To my mind he defines "master photographer."  Go and check out his website:  Wyatt's Website and tell me I'm not right.  On second thought, don't bother telling me because you'd be wrong.

Anyway,  I was tested the latest Phase One camera,  at the time a 45+s and making files left and right.  I love the way it handle skin tones.  And this is my example of New Tech.  Super sharp, super accurate and more expensive than both of my cars.....

But I always come back to no tech. 

The above image is an actor I shot years and years ago on 120mm Kodak Tri-X film.  I souped it by hand because that's just what we did back then.  When the film was nice and dry I made contact sheets and then sat around with a cup of coffee marking my selections with a grease pencil.  I'd draw quick circles around the keepers and then go back and draw three lines under the "must print" frames, two lines under the "under consideration" files and one line under the,  "go back and re-look if the other frames don't enlarge well" files.  The I wandered into the darkroom and made a bunch of test strips and test frames and then work prints and then a few final prints.  When they dried down I looked at em and went in again and did one more round of printing.

It's sad to show you this image on a web browser.  It's like describing what it's like to drink coffee instead of giving you a hot cup full.  It's like telling you how exciting it is to drive a sports car at the limits instead of putting you in the driver's seat and letting you take a few laps.  Well, I think you get the analogy.  I look at a 16x20 inch print of this and I'm still amazed.

We can do things quicker and cheaper now.  Is any of it technically better?  I don't think so.  Does it really matter?  Not if the image is good.

Old Tech.  New Tech.  No Tech.  Doesn't matter if it serves your vision well.

the holidays are upon us.  I humbly submit that a good book about photography will be most welcome by the photographers on your list.  Here are a few suggestions:

   

   

   

   

What goes into a "simple" assignment?

I was going thru some older work; stuff from the early part of the century (doesn't it feel weird to type that phrase?) and I found this image from a job I did for a telecom company thru a large ad agency, here in Texas.  The telecom was doing a series of newspaper ads about a "mentoring" program they inaugurated and supported.  Our brief was to cast four models and shoot them against both a white background and a black background.  We cast these two people for our African American mentoring duo and we cast a caucasian women and girl for our other mentoring duo.  We would shoot them in five or six different configurations in front of each of the backdrops.

So, how do you budget something like this and what all is involved in shooting it?

No matter how simple the shoot, when an agency is putting together a campaign that will run nationally for a client they want everything to become "bulletproof".   And a bullet proof Honda Civic cost tons more than a "run of the mill" Civic.  We would need to cast a large number of people so the agency and client could pick exactly the right mix for each pairing.  We'd need to rent a bigger studio so we could bring in lots of wardrobe choices and so we could accomodate art directors, creative directors, their assistants and, of course, a product manager and program manager from the client as well as their assistants.  Of course we'd also need space for the hair and make up people and space for the food catering.  So, yes....a bigger studio space.  We took a creative meeting and went into great depth about EXACTLY what the clients all wanted and then we went back to the studio and bid.

The total project came in a bit under $30,000.  (I know I hear someone out there grumbling, "I woulda done it for $400.  Or a byline....."  Right.)  Here's how it all breaks out.

Our casting director (freelance and paid by the day) gets in touch with model and talent agencies in Dallas, Houston, Austin and San Antonio.  Everyone sends out books of models.  We narrow down selections until we have several dozen who all look as though they might be right for the part.  We rent the studio for three days for casting.  We schedule all of our "possible" choices to come in over the course of three days to be photographed and interviewed.  We also have a general casting call during those three days to pull from non-affiliated actors and other potential walk-ins.   After meeting and photographing dozens and dozens of people for each position we have prints made of each person, with their information on the back,  we put these into a book and send them to the art directors and producers at the agency.  After a week of winnowing down the selections and getting them approved by the clients we get their four main choices and four back up choices (in case we can't make the scheduling work for everyone.)  

Once scheduled we book the studio for another three days.

At this point we begin negotiating with the talent agencies.  Professional talent is paid for showing up and then paid residuals for each 12 week run of ads.  We were negotiating for more uses and trying to keep the budgets reasonable.  When we successfully negotiated with the talent agents we set up a schedule and started putting together a team.  After my assistants the most important two people were the make up person and the wardrobe person.  We had a budget and a wish list for wardrobe, as well as sizing for all of our talent.  The wardrobe person gets moving.  We book our favorite make up person and she books an assistant.

At this point we get a rough head count and call our favorite caterer.  The magic number is 24.  That's not a typo.  We'll have 24 heads for a one day shoot with two pairs of models against both white and black backgrounds.  We'll need pastries, some protein and lots of coffee first thing in the morning on the day of the shoot, snacks during the morning, a sit down lunch for everyone and snacks in the afternoon.

We lock up the caterer and pay a deposit.  Next up is to get parking at the downtown studio lined up.  We negotiate with a building near the studio for six of their spaces and pay a rental fee.  That will take care of the agency and client cars.  The crew will use spaces next to the building if they have lots to load in (caterer, wardrobe).  My first assistant and I will go into the studio space the day before to set up the first background and design and test the lighting.  We'll be using two Pentax 6x7 cameras with 200mm lenses and we'll bring two back up bodies and a back up lens.  We're using big soft lights.  My trademark?

In the week leading up to the shoot we check in with the wardrobe person and the caterer as well as the studio management, just to make sure.  We give daily progress reports via e-mail, to our client.

On the shooting day the first assistant shows up at 6am to open up the space, turn on the lights and meet the caterer who needs to be set up and ready for the onslaught of crew that will arrive at 8am.  The talent arrives at 9am along with the clients and agency folk.  While the first pair of talent sit in make up the wardrobe person and the client and agency figure out what they want each talent to wear on set.  These items are steamed, ironed, de-tagged and made ready.  We're doing the guys first but we choose the wardrobe for the female talent and have them change before getting into wardrobe.

For every set up we shoot tons of Polaroids and spend a fair amount of time making adjustments to the background/foreground lighting ratios and direction of light.  We also get to a consensus on what kinds of expressions we want (but we end up shooting a big range......).  Then we shoot in earnest and burn twenty or so rolls of 120 (ten frames on a roll) or 220 (20 frames on a roll), pausing every once in a while to shoot more test Polaroids, just in case.

As we go along one of the assistants will pin Polaroids to a wall in linear order by "time shot" so we can be cognizant of continuity and progression.  When we hit the half way mark (as near as we can tell....) we break for a delicious lunch.  Half an hour later everyone is back to work and the caterers are pouring coffees and cleaning up from lunch.  We've got bowls of fruit and nuts and chocolate on the food table for anyone who needs a quick burst of energy.

The shoot goes on the rest of the afternoon.  My second assist marks every roll of film and logs it into a book.  We'll process the film in batches so that in the worst case scenario of a lab catastrophe we'll have enough variations to cover the client's needs.  In the end we shoot about 150 rolls of film, a mix of 120 and 220, all color transparency.  All carefully metered and double checked with Polaroid tests.  The first batch of film goes to the lab.

We booked the studio for three days.  One day was for loading in and pre-production, one day for shooting and a final day for rounding up wardrobe, packing out gear and cleaning everything out.  I don't need to be there for most of that and that's great because it gives me time to hunch over a light table with my first few test rolls and a good loupe so I can make sure we've really nailed the exposure before we begin running all the film.  One batch at a time.  

Once we get back film we snip out the blinks and dark frames caused by shooting too fast for the flash recycle.  We put it all in a notebook and deliver it.  I use the 50% advance we asked for (and got) to pay all of the crew and suppliers.  And another job goes out the door.  Did they want it produced in a cheaper way?  No.  They wanted what they wanted.  A job that almost could not fail.  If one camera dies we had three more.  If the lens died we had a bag full.  If  a light died we had several replacements standing by.   Don't like the green shirt?  We have red and yellow and blue.  Need a vegetarian entree'?  We've got that too.  It's dangerous in this business to presume that everyone wants the lowest price you can possibly offer.  Many, many times they want to assurance that everything will be just as they want it to be.  And many times photographers get hired not because they are masters of imaging (that's assumed) but because they are also masters of production.  Just a few shots against white and black?  No, not really.  It's really the intellectual property and creative content that ended up powering ads used in hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of ad placements.  Maybe millions. 

And if you are going to spend real money on buying space doesn't it make sense to have the right photograph to provide the visual message?  If you start bidding big jobs my advice to you is to have a checklist and never assume the client isn't interested in doing something right.  If they don't have the budget they'll tell you.  But if they do.........

Taking a walk and thinking about old tech versus entropy.

Here's an interesting exercise:  Grab any old camera and go walk around somewhere eminently accessible for two hours and shoot whatever you find interesting in a style that you find....interesting.  I've recently become interested in the idea that some of the technology that we've casually tossed aside over the last ten years may have had some hidden talents.  I've tossed aside the new Canon stuff and taken, over the last week,  my old Olympus e520,  my newish Olympus EP-2 and an old, old Contax T vs film camera out with me when I leave the house or studio.  I'm always pleasantly surprised that for every weakness I find in a "vintage" camera I also find some hidden treasures.

Yesterday I went to swim practice (crowded and rowdy) had coffee afterwards where I spilled a cup. (I was trying to be "green" and brought a cup with a lid that's damn hard to get off......).  Belinda, Kirsten (our "Yard Coach") and I spent most of the afternoon clearing brush and doing Landscapy things.  At four I'd had enough strenuous physical exercise and decided to grab a camera and take a two hour walk around downtown Austin with my old, Sony R1 camera.  In my opinion the R1 was the ultimate "bridge" camera:  APS sized chip (reportedly the same basic chip that the Nikon D2x sported....) a really cool swivel screen in addition to a usable EVF and, the capper,  a fabulous Carl Zeiss 24-120mm equivalent zoom lens.  A lens that DPReview proclaimed to be worth the entire price of the camera alone.

None of the photos is earth shattering or particularly tricky but I'm happy with them all.  Even the last one, hand held at some obscenely slow shutter speed with an almost unusable ISO 3200.  The camera just flat out works.  I'd done a bunch of jobs with this camera and a twin back in 2006 and 2007 and I remembered it as a great performer when you could use it at ISO 160 or 200 but it was a recent reviewing of a review that reminded me of it's really good long exposure capabilities.  I didn't have a tripod with me but I stabilized the camera on the railing of the pedestrian bridge over Lady Bird Lake and made a series of 15 and 30 second exposures of the afterglow from the sunset, behind the Lamar Blvd. bridge.  I think they turned out well.  Not something I usually shoot but I guess there's no law that says I have to spend all my time shooting beautiful people.......

While the R1 has a raw mode it takes five or six seconds to write a raw file to the buffer and during that time the camera locks up and won't shoot.  With that in mind I always shoot Jpegs.  My last technical observation about the camera is that its ultra-quiet shutter will synch with flash all the way up to 1/2000th of a second, its highest shutter speed.  I put this camera into the "under rated, under praised tools of the decade" category.  You'll never shoot sports with this camera but portraits and still life are natural subjects.  In many ways it reminds me of medium format cameras.

Along the same lines, the previous blog essay showed off images taken with two Kodak cameras that came on the market back in 2001 and 2004 respectively, the DCS 760 and the DCS SLR/n.  I was so happy to look at those images that I went online and ordered two new batteries for each camera.  I fully intend to shoot the heck out of them before something goes south.  Why?  Because they look different and in some ways better to me than my cameras that embody current tech.  And because I already own them.  And when I pull them out of the drawer after a hiatus of months and months it also satisfies my urge to buy something new......

We are nothing if not creatures of trained habit.  I've traded in too many cameras that I later wish I'd kept.  The lure and allure of the new is powerful.  The Sony R1 is a reminder that previous technology is also fun.  A formalist exercise?

What did I learn from my exercise?  I tend to shoot tight so I made it a practice to shoot near 24mm when I could.  I tend to believe AF, sometimes to my detriment, so I concentrated on placing focus manually, exactly where I wanted it.  I took hyperfocal distance into consideration instead of just arbitrarily assigning a focus.  I played with the edges of the frame more.  I'm trying to loosen up my composition.  Got a lot done in two hours.....

the holidays are upon us.  I humbly submit that a good book about photography will be most welcome by the photographers on your list.  Here are a few suggestions:

   

   

   

   

Lunch was happy, happy.

I'm shooting an event for a company this evening, downtown.  I probably won't have time for dinner.  So Belinda and I headed over to El Arroyo to have lunch.  I had the Sante Fe enchiladas and she had the "lite" plate.   The photo above has nothing at all to do with today's lunch other than it was lunch once.

I've done a fair amount of food photography over the years.  I've got two cookbook credits and I've done several dozen magazine spreads and probably a similar number of projects for the hospitality industry.  The photograph above was done at Uchi, here in Austin, for a lifestyle magazine.  I loved all the food that the owner/chef prepared for me.  What I like most of all was the clean and simple presentation.  I try to make the food look like it was lit by beautiful, clean daylight but in truth I lit it with a big white diffuser very close in to the left side (as you look at the food) and a white reflector four or five feet over to the right.  I used the reflector a bit further away than I might typically because wanted the little heart shaped shadow of the herb leaf to show well on the bottom right side of the frame.  I used a Kodak SLR/n and a 100mm macro lens.  I still use the camera from time to time and every time I do I wonder why I ever bought anything else.  And then I remember that it's not the most ergonomic or fast solution for anything other than slow studio work or studio-type work on location.  But what a magnificent file you can get out of it.  Just amazing.  The colors, tones and contrast is just wonderful.

It's a pity photographers didn't appreciate the Kodak products more for what they really do well instead of  insisting that every camera be the uber-camera.   You know, the super box that can shoot in inky blackness AND lock focus on five soccer players running in five different directions, simultaneously.  The camera of today:  The Swiss Army Camera.  "We can do it all."  Just not nearly as well as a precision crafted tool created just for a particular job.  I pity Kodak.  They made an incredibly good product (for portraits and food)  and then tried to sell it to the wrong market (weddings).  And, in some ways, we do that as photographers.  Hard to be good at everything.  That's why there's a lot of stuff I don't shoot.

But I like to shoot food.  And I like to eat it.  And if I can have lunch with a different fun and interesting person every day of the week I count myself happy.  As in "lunch was happy, happy."

(side note:  Many of you may be too young to remember this but Kodak basically invented digital photography in the 1980's and 1990's.  The earliest Canon and Nikon professional cameras were hybrids with mechanics by C&N and electronics and sensors by Kodak.  They owned the market until 2001 when Nikon came out with their own D1x and Canon came out with their D30.  Even then Kodak's "beast" the DCS 760 was (in my opinion) the camera to have.  It out muscled the other two in resolution and had a bigger sensor (1.3 crop factor).  It's real strength, and one rarely mentioned by reviewers or dilletantes was.......drum roll, please........Dynamic Range.  Used in raw, the files could do absolutely amazing stuff and the market is just now, nine years later, beginning to catch up.  I had reason to go thru older files today and look.  I'm still amazed at the quality of the files and the depth of the range from shadow to tweaked highlight.  The camera also had an stout buffer.  Twenty or so full raw files at one frame pers second was about three times the throughput of the other cameras of the day.  At one time I liked the look so much I had three of the cameras.  Now I keep one around for nostalgia.  At 6 MP they aren't resolution competitive with current cameras.  But for jobs that aren't going to leave the web?  Magic.)

Here are two samples from the DCS 760:

 This was shot on a sunny day for a sports medicine practice.  They have a 24 by 36 inch poster on one of their walls that is breathtaking.  All it took was a good interpolation tool at the right lab to bring out the quality inherent in the file.

This was shot for the 2006 Annual Report for the Kipp School.  It was blown up to a similar size for a fundraising event by the same lab.  People assumed it was from a Hasselblad negative........

And finally,  another example from the Kodak SLR/n.  I think the skin tones and shadows are amazingly good.

Amazingly good cameras.  Can't say I like the files from my Canon 5d2 any better.......

the holidays are upon us.  I humbly submit that a good book about photography will be most welcome by the photographers on your list.  Here are a few suggestions: