Lighting tools and camera synergies.

Chartier.

I was looking across the littered studio this morning and noticing that I'm not really a camera junkie as much as I'm a lighting junkie. As I looked through the little piles of lighting fixtures I starting into the reductive mindset that tries to eliminate clutter by pushing me to make choices and get rid of everything I don't need.

The two piles most in conflict, at the moment, are the new fluorescents over the older LED panels. They both cover the same shooting situations. They both provide continuous lighting for video and good lighting for just about everything on my bucket list. But here's what you have to know about bigger continuous lights (the ones that plug into the walls).....they require more overall stuff in your lighting package when you leave home.

If you use flash you can put each flash on one stand, then apply a softbox or an umbrella as a light modifier directly to the light fixture without having to use a second stand. When I set up my big fluorescent light or LED light there's no easy way to attach a softbox or umbrella and, honestly, I wouldn't want to if I could because it would take away too much light and drive my exposures towards lower shutter speeds or noisier ISOs.

So when you want to modify your big LED panel, or your even bigger fluorescent panel, you generally use a separate diffuser on a frame which requires a second light stand and an attachment mechanism. You gain some lighting control since you can carry a range of diffusers and nets, etc. but you definitely add to your packing craziness.  Four flashes generally means four light stands while four fluorescents generally means seven or eight light stands (you might not need two stands for the background light...) to do the same basic lighting set up. More if you want to bring along black flags and modifiers for the modifiers.

My recent excursion into the world of location video/photography required eight light stands, a background stand system and two tripods (one for the video set-up and a second for the still work). It also required collapsible frames for the 4x4 foot diffusion scrims along with clamps to hold them.

While it would be nice to light exclusively with one type of light the real world makes this difficult. If I worked only in the studio or other interior locations where sunlight was something we looked forward to seeing on our way to lunch I'd be happy enough with my new fluorescents.

But there are still a lot of assignments that require me to go on locations and balance man made light with bright sun and, for still photography, that's still the territory big, portable flashes like the 1100 watt second Elinchrom Ranger RX flashes work best in. 

Then there are those more complex interior exterior locations like the CEO standing in front of a vast wall of floor to ceiling windows. She'll need to be balance with the sun drenched scene behind her and might require a few supplementary lights behind her, which is efficiently handled by three or four electronic flash mono lights.

So, even though we are now providing hybrid video/still content solutions we still need some variety in our lighting equipment to handle all the situations we seem to get into.

I'm sure some of you have leapt forward to the logical question: "Weren't you all jazzed about LEDs last year? Why now the fluorescents? Have LEDs failed?"

Hardly. But there's an analogy that's something like cellphones. The big LEDs I currently have---the ones big enough to kick out effective levels of light----are very much G1. (First Generation Technology). They require me to jump through a few hoops to make them work well. Mostly they need to be intelligently filtered. And the newest fluorescents with the latest tubes are better, color-wise, and a couple stops brighter than my three to five year old LEDs.

I looked hard and long when I started really moving into motion at replacing my current inventory with the latest panels from people like Lowell. Their Prime Light LED panels boast a 91 CRI and they are markedly brighter than my existing panels, so better light and more of it. But here's the rub, they are about $1800 each and every lighting set up I do seems to require at least three lights. That meant spending $5400 to replace my original investment of about $1200. Would they be demonstrably better? Yes. Could I make a better investment to get the same results? Yes. 

When I visited the Museum of Art in Boston, Greg Heins showed me the Alzo fluorescent lights that his photography and video department use for video programming and interview. Very good light, requiring very little correction and about a third the cost of premium LEDs for the same three light set up. Most of the advantage for the Alzo lights come from a new generation of fluorescent tubes so I started to research all the options and came up with the Fotodiox version. I give up dimming controls but gain a price advantage.

I've used the flo's on six or seven mixed video and photography assignments in the last month and they are working out well. My one concern (and this is where LEDs absolutely rule) is hauling all of those oh-so-very-breakable glass light tubes around. I think breakage is inevitable with the tubes and hardly possible with the LEDs.

There's a second area in which LEDs have all other light sources beaten, hands down. And that's using them with batteries. My smaller LEDs, the color changing Fotodiox 312AS panels use two standard, camcorder batteries for power and can light at full power for around two continuous hours. No other light source is anywhere near as efficient. Which means I have to keep my case full of these lights for those kinds of run and gun shoots where plugging in and accessory light stands are just not in the cards.

And that brings me to the stack of "hot lights" I have sitting over in the other corner. Why the heck am I keeping these primordial light fixtures around?  Well.......first of all they keep me warm in the winter when I use them (just kidding, not a good reason...). But really, I have several Lowell Totalights, a Lowell DP light and three of the Lowell VIP lights that fold up for cartage. I use them for the times when  wall of LEDs or Fluorescents isn't enough for a special application.

Sometimes you just want raw power and, though they are hardly efficient, for their size and relatively minor investmentm, they can really push a lot of photons through big diffusers. They're my go to lights when I need to shoot continuous and I need both low, noise free ISOs combined with medium to high apertures.

So far I'm counting a number of systems here. Two kinds of LEDs. Fluorescents, High Powered-battery powered Electronic Flash, Electronic Flash mono lights and a pile of hot lights (tungsten).

But we really don't stop there. We have to consider the portable speedlights. We have a couple of the big Sony flashes because they work well on and off camera and can be used wirelessly. Then there's also a motley collection of manual-mostly speed lights along with radio triggers, that are left over from the Strobist/Minimalist lighting days.

I use the speed lights for candid shots at events and though it seems like this market is in an off cycle right now I'm sure it will swing around again when I least expected. For their size the on and off camera flashes are a potent lighting tool. Without (real) modeling lights and fast recycling they won't take the place of studio flashes and with their 100-200 watt second flash power they won't replace the large Elinchrom Rangers in sunlight but they sure are handy to have when following an executive around a trade show or whipping up good light for an impromptu portrait.

So, of all these things how can I best consolidate in order to pacify that part of my brain that's rebelling against the clutter and demanding some rationalizing of the vast VSL lighting inventory? I've decided that the first generation LED panels must go.

I'm going to sell them locally for some price that makes no sense. Live in or around Austin and want to play with 500 bulb panels or 1000 bulb panels? I'm asking $100 per smaller panel and $150 each for the two bigger panels. I won't ship them because they are too bulky and heavy to make it sensible. I also hate to pack stuff. If you want them you can e-mail me and we'll meet up.

Take them all and we'll price the lot accordingly.   Edit: the LEDs have been sold. Thanks.

Another day at the photo office. Working with two cameras. Including the new Sony a58.

A quick summation of last week's hybrid job.

We set up a temporary portrait and interview studio in a big conference/mixed use room. I brought along one of my favorite color management tools, a Lastolite gray/white target. In this room I used the big Sony a99. One click white balance worked for both the stills and the video. I like setting the color correction once in shooting instead of pasting it in post. I lit with two fluorescents and one LED light. And I brought my own stool for the subject's to sit on. The more stuff I can control the fewer problems I seem to have. I went for five hours with one lens. It was the 85mm 1.5 Cine lens from Rokinon.

Using the big Rokinon at wide apertures, in close is what the Sony a99 was built for. The lens is totally manual so I rely on focus peaking to ensure sharp results where I want them. 

I brought the Lastolite target out onto the assembly floor and balanced both the cameras for the existing light. Made it easier to shoot because I only had to focus on composition and focus, not on color balance. I tend to use manual exposure and all of these shots were taken in a landscape format with the camera locked down on a Manfrotto video tripod with a fluid head.

By moving quickly with one camera on a tripod and one camera over my shoulder we were able to move through the space quickly. After every still shot I ran about ten seconds of video and then moved on. We got fifty or sixty set ups during the course of a long day.

I had the client carry a small Fotodiox LED panel around with us but it didn't get much use. I liked the bright way the area was lit and, with the preset color balance the images were easy to work with in post.

My one and only gripe about the 85mm 1.5 lens is the close focusing distance. It's 39 inches. I'm spoiled, the Sony 85mm 2.8 focuses much closer. But then again it doesn't do quite as well at f2...

I unabashedly like the new a58 camera. It may be because I always use it with the 16-50mm f2.8 DT lens. I like the range of focal lengths and I love the high sharpness of the lens. The image above was made with that combo. With all the present generation of digital cameras there is a freedom in being able to comp and shoot a scene as a still photograph and then spin a dial and start shooting the same thing on video. Double threat. Most the work I did on this job with the a58 is available light, handheld and at ISOs of 800 and 1600. The OLED viewfinder is great and the built in IS works well for me. No matter how I handled the camera the metering was spot on.

I decided to live on the edge for this shoot. I realized that there's no way to shoot raw video files on the a58 so I needed to get any video I shot just right in the camera. Just like shooting jpegs. Since they were equally important to the client I decided to go ahead and shoot jpeg as well. I might as well take advantage of the extra care I was using to get things right for video...

The a58, like the a57 before it is small and light and highly usable. The new sensor is sharp and detailed and has as little noise as the a57 did but delivers a much better user experience both in the EVF and the actual sound of the shutter. I can report no focus problems in over 600 shots under regular working conditions.

While this shouldn't be construed as a review I would like to say that the tools are so suggestive to the way I take images. While the a99 was on a tripod, using a longer MF lens the a58 was always handheld and used with a fast wide to short tele zoom. With the smaller camera I found myself moving around the edges of subjects and quickly trying new angles while the locked in camera was used in a more straightforward way.  

All cameras are good these days. I don't care about brands but I know that for my paying work I'll never willingly go back to a camera that doesn't have an EVF as an integral part of the design. Now, after selling off other systems, every camera I have except the Sony a850 is equipped with an EVF. And when I pick up the 850 I have to slow down and think more about operation. That means I think less about the image. I like the real time feedback of the newer finders. They make the feedback loop much more effective.

That's it. Get yout mom an a58. Ask her if you can borrow it. Happy Mother's Day.

The End.

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The inter-relationship of different art. Want to be better in one segment? Broaden your wisdom net. See more stuff.

It's kind of funny but most of the photographic images that I like of people are lit like the pronounced chiaroscuro of Caravaggio paintings. And most of the poses I like I've seen in paintings and sculptures. It would seem to me that a lot of our photographic imagery are really references to work done in other media and in other ages. In most cases I would conjecture that the current photographic practitioners are just copying what they've seen other contemporary photographers doing (and so on) without having a real idea of what the original sources were. Without a wide catalog of cultural references work quickly becomes one dimensional and formulaic. In every field.

I'm going to make a statement here that may sound elitist but is not meant to be. Whether you are a commercial photographer or a hobbyist I think your work (and mine) can be improved in direct proportion to the amount of varied art work to which you expose yourself. If you are lucky enough to live in a cultural center like Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago or even Los Angeles you have ample opportunity to see an enormous range of old masters and new, original art in many media. When you add galleries to the pot your range of selections becomes almost infinitely rich.

If you are working or living in one of the major European cities you have the same opportunities. I couldn't imagine being a photographer in Paris and not having been to the Picasso Museum, the Louvre or the Jeu de Paume. Or to live within one hundred miles of Rome and not having been to The Vatican or the Borghese Garden museums.

When our points of reference are too far removed from the original sources they are diluted and become spuriously referential at best. To copy the work and working methodology of a young, technically aimed photographer on Creative Live is a woefully thin substitute for experiencing the real power of art first hand. Standing in front of a great painting is worlds different than flipping through some 640 by 480 pixel thumbnails of a painting. Watching light move around a sculpture is a world different then seeing a two dimensional photo of the same sculpture on Wikipedia.

Often times, because we live in a technical culture, and in thrall to the ideas of best practices, and the tyranny of metrics, we look toward technical fixes when our photography gets stale or when our enthusiasm stalls. We try a different lens or a new filter. We try some "new" lighting technique that's popular on the web. But in the end these are quick fixes for our boredom and not deep fixes that could transform our love of our art. A mindless copy rarely makes for valuable growth.

Not seeing original art but being influenced by its faint and diminished echo is like playing the old game where one person comes up with a phrase and whispers it to the person next to them. That person whispers the phrase they heard to the person next to them and so on. In a small room with thirty players the message becomes garbled and meaningless in a matter of minutes. Imagine the art message in a brilliant piece watered down by centuries of the same game. The end result is a thought artifact that's been distorted, changed and relieved of all context. It becomes a cheap filter or schtick.

Our jobs as artists don't exist in a cultural vacuum. We are all subject to cultural reference points. It's our choice if we want to drink the collective spit in the bucket or participate in the actual wine tasting of art.

I know that I am renewed and recharged when I eschew pondering more and more contemporary photographs and instead sample actual masterpieces and the works that laid the foundations for our work across different disciplines. Today might be a great day to step into a museum and drink from a rich cup of work that stands the tests of time. Work that forms the foundations of our visual culturals. What a gift to be able to experience foundational work first hand. How much greater the impact.

When someone directs me toward the latest over-processed pop photography I like to direct them right back to the masters they unwittingly borrowed from. Almost inevitably they are astonished at how much they learn and how much more organically the power of the original work gets integrated into their own projects going forward.

If you are a portrait photographer you've heard a lot about Rembrandt but you need to look at Leonardo da Vinci's work and Caravaggio and maybe Edward Hopper; even Georges Braque. I love heading down to San Antonio to look at work by Renoir and Picasso, at the McNay Museum. No matter which museum you head to you'll see something new and perhaps be able to add to your own repertoire. At the very least you'll finally learn who to ultimately credit for that neato lighting technique that you saw on some contemporary's website. The magic is all out there for us to sample and subsume and use. Don't you want the undiluted version? I know I do...


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The Three Graces.

I confess that I love to photograph sculpture. From the Bernini pieces in the Borghese Sculpture museum to the Rodin Museum to the ancient Asian examples at the San Antonio Museum of art I am fascinated by all kinds of sculpture.

Often, when I read that the death of photography is approaching I remember that all the arts have been through ebbs and flows and all of them have, at one time or another, been declared dead except for sculpture. And I wonder what it is about sculpture that  grants a collective immunity to it.

I think it may be the difficulty of working in marble or granite, or even with castings. The capability of working to the level at which Bernini did is all but lost in the modern age and it's our fascination with what we can't do that elevates this art to a more impregnable perch. I can no more imagine taking a chisel and hammer and making a home made version of the Pietå than I can making my own deep space passenger rocket in my garage.

I have to wonder though whether the evolution of 3D printing will eventually make sculpture for everyman as accessible as taking still photographs. I imagine a time in the near future when a typical person will walk around his naked girlfriend clicking off frames that will later be sequenced and integrated into a 3D CAD program and them set up to be rendered by a printing machine.

Not a two dimensional printer but one that works in all physical dimensions. One that can, unaided, build statues and sculptures as well as guns and pottery. The technology is here, now, and is becoming more financially accessible every year.

I imagine a time in the not too distant future when new apps and CAD plug-ins will appear that will allow you to INSTAGRAM your sculptures and have them rendered with pre-programmed actions and filters. Click this filter for late Renaissance, click that one for Etruscan, click this setting for modern abstract. Perhaps there will be a button that just wraps pre-made sculptures in cloth. The Cristo filter for conceptual artists....

But I imagine that once done the methods will lose their intrigue because, like current photography, most people's art-in-a-box will look like everyone else's. And the work that is significantly different will retain value.

In the meantime I intend to look at as much sculpture by old and new masters as I can. Then I'll be ready to write series of articles about the GOLDEN DAYS OF PRE-DIGITAL SCULPTURE.
I shudder to think that sometime in the near future I'll drive through neighborhoods and people will all have their digi-sculptures in their front yards, much like we have every photographic permutation resident on the web in the sharing galleries. From soup to nuts.

Most yards will have sculptures of pets and varying degrees of chubby and homely children. Or spouses in odd drapings. Perhaps the masses will revive the Roman and Greek tradition of painting the statues. Perhaps the style will be more and more heightened realism and eventually we won't know if the sculpture in the front yard is live or just a three D replica. If the sculpture is of someone checking their cellphone will there be a difference?

Ah, the march of progress. What would the three Graces have to say about all of this? They would probably tell me to stop the negative daydreaming and just concentrate on what I want to do. And they'd be right...



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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Brief gear side track....

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

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

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

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

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






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