Pro goes amateur for the day. Just another dad with a camera...

I was worried about Ben this morning but it turns out I didn't need to be.  But isn't that what worry is all about?  You pay the price now for something you may never get...  Anyway, I was worried because he abandoned swimming this year to take up cross country running.  He started at the beginning of the Summer and as you may have heard this is the hottest Summer in history in Austin, Texas.  How hot is it?  Well tomorrow the meteorologists are predicting 110(f).  And it isn't like the dry, refreshing heat of the desert; the air today was laced with moisture creating an atmospheric soup that saps your energy and your will to live.  I was worried because Ben was competing in his first cross country meet.  Today's distance was three miles and by the time his heat started running at 11:00 am the thermometer had already crept over 90.  

The meet was an invitational with tons of high school kids from five or six local high schools.  It was held out at the Decker Lake Park in far east Austin. The park is famous for it's lack of trees, lack of water fountains and lack of amenities.  But they have a decent long loop course.  Two laps makes three miles.

I got Ben up at 6:15 this morning and fed him scrambled eggs and whole wheat toast.  Normally he has only a teaspoon of honey before an early morning run but we knew he wouldn't be running until after 10:30 and a bit of protein would keep him from bonking during the race....or before.

I dropped him off at the school at 6:45 because the team all goes together on the bus.  That's non-negotiable in his coach's eyes.

Then I clicked into the "dad mode" and started thinking about what camera to bring to photograph the boy with.  I decided on the Canon 7D and the 70-300 IS lens (the latest version).  A lot of reach, great image stabilization and half the weight of my 70-200L.  I figured I'd go light and blend in with the other dads and moms who would, no doubt, be clicking away.  I set the ISO to 320, the aperture to 5.6 and let the camera meter lead me by the hand.  I used the 1/2 size raw file setting and I used servo AF set to the center, large group.

Nothing else photographic in my pockets or over other shoulders.  And that worked out well because you need to go from the starting area to the middle of the race to the finish a couple of times to get all the photos you want and if your kid is fast that means you have to move fast to effect the rendezvous.  Can't imagine doing that while porting around extra bodies, lenses and bags.  

It's easier to photograph swim meets because everything is confined into the boundaries of a 25 yard or 50 meter pool.  Find the side with the good light and you can spend a few hours shooting without much distraction.  Distance running is different.  It's a lot more acreage.  And you have to move to come home with stuff to send to the grandparents.....

So Ben did really well and finished ahead of the middle of the pack.  Not bad for a first go.  I did okay with ten or fifteen decent shots.  It was odd for me in a few ways.  The last time I shot a distance running race I was freelancing for the people who hold the Capitol 10K.  There were 20,000 participants and they ran the race on closed, public streets.  Not only did I have endless press credentials I also rode in the truck that led the race and gave me a platform from which to shoot stuff from a primo perspective.  This morning the guys started with their backs to the sun and finished with their backs to the sun.  Back lit was the name of the game.  But being a dad and not a professional photographer you take what they deal you and stand where they tell you.  But next time.....I'll scout that course in advance, get them to 180 the start and the finish,  maybe bring some big lights for fill......Naw.  I think I'll stay with this plan and just enjoy the whole process.  Seems like the right thing to do.

I think over photographing your kid's sport stuff, festooned with tools of the trade (three camera bodies a bunch of lenses, some Profoto battery systems, compass and reflectors), might be just as embarrassing to your high school boy as showing up with a banner that says, "Go Fast Sweatheart!!!!  Mommy and Daddy Love You."  That's always something to keep in mind when they start growing up.

 
After a few hours at Decker Lake, in the heat, I think I chose wisely.  The pool is the place to be.  At least until the first frosty day.  But right now that seems a long way off.

Final observation:  Before I left the house for the meet today I read in the paper about America's obesity epidemic.  Seems that we're on a curve to have 50% of the population really, really fat in the next few years.  If that worries you come out and see the kids at a cross country meet.  They're putting in 6 to 8 miles a morning on the week days and doing much longer runs on the weekends.  No fat kids here.  They all look pretty much like Ben.  Lean and moving.  Come to think of it we don't have any overweight people in the master swim team either.  Oh my gosh.  I think I've found the cure to obesity!!!!  Move.  And then move more.

What does this have to do with photography?  Come scamper up an embankment with me sometime in the middle of the Austin Summer, with a full camera bag and a couple of sandbags and we'll talk about the photographic benefits of staying in good shape.  Can't take the photo if you can't get in position.....

Why the Sony a77 changes everything going forward. And "I told you so."

First, here are the two columns I wrote predicting/asking for high quality EVF's to replace optical finders going forward:

http://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2010/02/how-would-i-design-perfect-camera-for.html

http://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2010/02/what-would-i-really-like-to-see-in-next.html

So why do I think Sony gets it when everyone else is stuck at 2004?  When I first picked up an Olympus EP-2 with the VF2 finder on it I knew I was looking at the future of professional digital cameras.  Not because the EP-2 was so incredible (and for many reasons it was) but because the EVF was such a revelation.  You could see what you'd really get.  When you look through an optical finder you're seeing an image that's always at a wide open aperture setting, and it's beguiling with a narrow depth of field and a bright image.  But a great EVF shows you what you're really going to end up with once you push the button.  It's reading all the stuff you shoved in ROM and it's finessing the image exactly the way you requested.  If you set a color balance manually it's showing you THAT color balance in the finder.  No surprises.  If you set f11 or f1.4 the EVF is showing you the exact DOF you'll end up with.  The only two glitches were the shooting delay caused by moving mirrors and the fact that early EVF's sucked in low light.  As the camera's files got darker and noisier so did the finder image.  That was/is the Achille's heel of my beloved Sony R1......

LIghting like Leonardo da Vinci. Kinda.

Many years ago, when I  was still in the huge downtown studio,  I read a scholarly article about how Leonardo da Vinci executed his drawings and portrait studies in anticipation of painting.  It was fascinating to me to understand that he went to great lengths to understand the lighting and then went beyond what he saw in nature and invented his own inimitable lighting style.  The article centered around the way light flowed onto Leonardo's subjects and his construction of light modifiers to create a light which he used when concepting the modeling of faces.

His technique was to stretch a large, white cloth over top of the entirety of a central courtyard.  The cloth, two stories above his model, softened the light and gave it an unusual character.

After reading this I went into the studio and tried to make the biggest light diffuser I could.  I put two six foot by six foot frames together and put diffusion across both of them.  Then I put a series of large, soft light sources behind the whole construction.  I used a Norman 2000 watt second pack with four heads.  Each head was fitted with a beauty dish and each beauty dish was covered with a diffuser of its own.  The lights were as close to the 18 foot ceiling of the studio as I could get them while the diffuser is just out of the frame above the model's head.  My one mistake with this shot was that I filled the light from beneath too much.  I would have preferred deeper shadows under the model's chin and at the edges of her beautiful cheeks.  And, in retrospect,  I would also have preferred her to be looking directly into the lens.

Alas, my studio is too small now to re-do my experiments.  In order to add a bit more snap overall I probably would use a one stop diffuser instead of a two stop diffuser.  A bit more collimated light would add just the right touch.

It's wonderful to know that artists experimented endlessly with light, even before the invention of photography.  Being able to understand and appreciate graceful light is a talent in and of itself.  I posted this as a counterpoint to all the overdone lighting I saw today on the web.  Sometimes it's better to make simpler images.

Lighting matters to most commercial projects.

This was a fun image to make.  We were doing an annual report project last Summer and part of the brief was to go around central Texas and make portraits of people who were part of "shovel ready projects."  While many national projects didn't materialize, here in Austin people did get back to work and they've been building much needed road infrastructure right through the economic downturn.

It was hot and we were working close to busy streets.  I was dressed a lot like the guy in the photo.  Hard hat, reflective Gatorade colored safety vest and work boots.  This was a classic, Kirk-style, exterior location portrait.  I like the puffy clouds in the background and the rich blue sky and the only way I know to get that combination is to shoot with the sun behind you.  But the problem with doing that is your subject will end up looking into the harsh sunlight or near enough to it to make them blink or squint.  Here's how I like to do it.  Once I figure out the composition I bring in a 4x4 foot diffuser or a light blocker.  In this case it was a Chimera panel with two layers of white, fabric diffusion cloth on it.  The diffusion took the direct light off his face which made my worker a LOT more comfortable and dropped the exposure on his face by almost four stops.  For all intents and purposes he was standing in "open shade."  But he was still squinting a bit so I put up another 4x4 foot panel with black fabric centered on his eye line right behind the camera position.  This way he'd be looking into a dark area and could rest his eyes a bit.  Over to the right of my camera I put up an Elinchrom Ranger RX AS electronic flash pack and put an "A" head into a small softbox for my main light.  The bottom of the box is on the same level as the subject's chin.  The box is about 45 or 50 degrees to the right of camera.

I was working with a Canon 5D mk 2 but I didn't like the top shutter sync speed of 1/160th of a second so I think I switched to my Canon 7D for its 1/250th of a second top sync speed.  Part of what made this a tough shoot is that we had breezes and thunderstorms on and off all day.  That meant (as far as the wind was concerned) we needed to sandbag everything that lived on a light stand.  It wasn't just for the safety of the lights or the subject; we couldn't take a chance that a light would blow into traffic speeding by and cause an accident.  Many of our locations required us to park 50 or 100 yards away and bring the gear over in several trips.  I can still remember the misery of walking through the heat of a soupy day with a 20 pound sandbag in each hand and a light case slung over one shoulder...... nasty.

At the end of the day none of that matters.  All that matters is that we get images that match what the client has in her mind.  And this one passed the test.  The best piece of gear for stuff like situations above?  A Hoodman Loupe for the LCD screen on the back of the camera.  It's great to be able to accurately judge the effects we're working so hard to get in the field.  What's that you said?  Why didn't we tether it to a big Mac on a ergo cart?  Sorry, that's just too insane.

Now that I've got my Hasselblad mojo cranking up again I'm looking for more beautiful people to sit in front of my camera.  But as Gordon will tell you, I'm horrible about delivering final images.  I'm working on the backlog.  Maybe we'll have something for recent (last two years :-) ) sitters by Christmas.  Not saying this year.  But if you are strikingly beautiful and want to come by and sit for a portrait, send me an e-mail and we'll see what we can work out.  The image of Michelle, above, was done the third time ago that beauty dishes were in style.  Still works for me....

Finally, a recent headshot for candidate for Texas Railroad Commission, Christi Craddick.  We were asked to do a nice portrait of Ms. Craddick for use on her election website and other collateral.  I went on location to the small studio at Arts and Labor, here in Austin to do the job.  We hung a grey seamless in the background and used a 28 inch Fotodiox beauty dish with a diffusion cover over to camera right as our soft but directional main light and used a Photek Softlighter II just over the left of the camera as a fill light.  I washed the background with two very even direct lights and added a gridded hair light coming over Ms. Craddick's right shoulder.  We had a make up person, with an assistant, and a very nice intern who kept bringing us good food as we worked with different wardrobe and expressions.  Altogether is was a quiet and calm session that yielded a number of very good portraits.

Canon 5Dmk2 with a 70 to 200mm f4 L lens.  All lights used were Elinchrom D-lite 4 IT's.  All the units performed as expected.  

I love shooting portraits like this.  The backgrounds and lighting are pretty much stylized by the campaigns which is fine.  It means we can concentrate on expression.