Some fun, Friday afternoon notes. From the desk of an unorganized photographer...

What the heck was I doing in Denver last month? I'd been invited by a company called, Craftsy.com, to make a video course on Studio Portrait Lighting. I worked with a producer from the company to put together an in-depth outline that covered everything from which lights I work with and why, through basic portrait lighting, and into a little behind the scenes of how I work. The program took days to commit to video (hey, I'm a photographer not a professional actor) and almost a month of post production and editing to get just right. What we ended up with is a 2.5 hour video that people can purchase and watch online (and once purchased can watch forever...). I hope that people find it interesting and useful. It's for people who've mastered basic photography concepts and now want to extend their expertise into the realm of studio work. In particular, portrait work.

My only fear, now that we're approaching the launch date, is that there's some sort of very embarrassing blooper reel I don't know about that the producers are going to release to pay me back for being a newbie on the set. Seriously though, I had a great time working with the company and I hope they invite me back for more. I'm not posting  any links yet because I don't want people to go prematurely and be disappointed that the programming isn't there yet. Look for more details in the next two weeks.

An added benefit for me was a deep immersion into studio video production. Spending ten hours a day in front of two and three cameras at a time was like taking a crash course in how to do more adventurous and polished video. And yes, I still think sound is the most important consideration!! Well, sound and having someone incredibly beautiful in the program with you.....

Quick Equipment Review: I don't know if it's the sharpest 50mm 1.4 lens in the whole world, in fact I suspect that just about any current 50mm lens from Leica will handily beat it, but I really like shooting with the beefy and imposing Sigma 50mm 1.4 lens that I recently bought. I've used it pretty extensively over the last month and it's a great match for both the full frame Sony's that I own. For the last week I've had it spot welded onto the front of my Sony a850 and am attempting to shoot (as much as possible) at f1.4, f2.0 and f2.8 just for kicks. I mean, why else own a fast lens? The reason I'm using it on the a850 is that I'm a contrarian. The a850 reminds me of Kodachrome 64. You can't really push it up to very high ISOs so I'm making a conscious effort to shoot everything where that particular camera shines. Most of the time I leave it at ISO 100 and when push comes to shove I crank it on up to ISO 200 and live dangerously. At those speeds I don't think the camera has any competitors that are head and shoulders better. You could argue for a Nikon D800, but only one that focuses on both sides of the frame....

Once you've dialed in an a850 you're working with a really great image maker with a smaller IQ sweet spot than some of the newer 24 megapixel cameras. Interesting point for the DXO true believers: the Sony a850's overall score of 79 is only two points lower than that of the Canon 5d mk3 which is four years newer... The a850 still spanks that camera in the dynamic range realm which means more to a studio type photographer than just about any of the other measurements the inscrutable ones do....

Anyway, back to the Sigma 50mm 1.4. When it first hit the market a lot of people had trouble with front and back focusing but so far (knock on wood) mine is right on the money with both varieties of the full frame cameras. In terms of sharpness most people will take points off for the fact that the lens is very sharp in the middle but that the far corners need to get close to f5.6 to be really, critically sharp. Since I only use the lens for human-style, three dimensional subjects and not ever for flat copy work I understand that this metric is meaningless for the intended use of the lens and joyously use it at all apertures, counting on it to be less sharp in the corners and far edges when I'm shooting images of people. But it's really no different in that regard than the older Sony 50mm f1.4 or those that I've owned from Canon and Nikon. If you need sharp edge to edge, near wide open then you are in the market for a macro lens, not a high speed lens.

When I shot with the Canon 1DS mk2 and the 5d mk2 cameras I bought and (tried ) to use the vaunted Zeiss 50mm 1.4 lens. When I had luck riding with me and all the variables (like focus) lined up for me the image could be very good with rich colors and pleasing tonalities. But the rub in that set up (and I suspect most situations where one is attempting to connect a legacy style manual focus lens with a modern, autofocus camera (which through ancient design choices does not feature focus peaking) ) is the fact that the 50mm ZE, when used in the most popular part of the focus range (closer than ten feet) had a tendency for pronounced focus shift. Even if your green dot of focus confirmation lied to you and told you the lens was in focus it was not. The only way I was uniformly successful in using that lens was to take advantage of Canon's live view function. As you can imagine it was a major pain in the derriere when trying to shoot in bright light. The ambient light just washed out the screen  image and you wound up basically guessing when you had achieved sharp focus.

Of course if you use a camera with an EVF and integrated focus peaking it's much easier to determine the point of sharp focus on the fly. And with image magnification and in finder live imaging paranoid levels of confirmation are much easier.

I've wanted to buy the fast Sigma 50 for the Sony for some time but already owned Sony's version and it's not at all a bad lens in its own right. I finally grabbed a Sigma 50mm 1,4 when the priced dropped from daunting $499 to a less anxiety inducing $399. I've used it for many shoots and love the images at nearly every aperture. I've sold off all the other Alpha capable 50mm variants I had lying around and I'm breathing a sign of relief at my inventory downsizing. While the lens is big and feels ungainly on my a58 (which is a crop frame camera) it's just the right balance in my hands when coupled to the a850 which is in itself a monster sized cameras.

I love shooting with the combo only because of the nostalgia I have for a time gone past. In days of camera yore every "professional" camera came with a choice of 50mm 1.8 or 50mm 1.4 lenses. And that's how we bought them back then. I remember the succession: Nikon F2 with 50mm ai 1.4, Canon F1 with 50mm 1.4 SSC, Contax RTS III with Zeiss Planar 50mm 1.4, and even a brontosaurus like Nikon F5 with the 50mm 1.4 AF.... Those cameras trained my hands and my mind to favor the fast over the flexible and mass over pocket ability. The Sony a850 is their digital analogue. And I love it when I pick it up.

The Sigma 50mm 1.4 is available for all of the "big three" camera makers and, if the price stays where it is, To summarize: in the center of the lens it's very, very sharp---on par with just about anything not made exclusively for NASA or the military. Far edges? On par with just about all the competitors---better than some, even with others. Size? Enormous and imposing. Cool factor? 8.5.  I think you should check it out if you are in the market for normal/fast. It's a good value.

Travel Plans:  I'll be traveling to Berlin on the third of September to do some serious shooting, to meet with execs from a camera company, and to attend a small part of the annual IFA show (fun, high tech stuff----huge showcase with lots of tech product launches and introductions). I'll be there for about a week and I'd love to meet for coffee with any VSL readers who will be in Berlin during that time frame. Let me know what works and when my itinerary is set we can start making plans.

I'll be traveling to Tokyo in early November and I'd love to hear from Tokyo VSL readers. My schedule is wide open on that trip. The Tokyo adventure is purely for shooting and socializing. I'll be there by myself and it's always nice to meet photographers when traveling.

Books: If you don't already own a "Kirk Tuck" book now is the time to get one. They're still in stock at Amazon and they are still full of the same great information they've always had.  Please check out the links to the books at Amazon.com below.

Yesterday I started making a short movie about what Austinites do when the temperature starts to climb like crazy. I'm trying to edit it quickly and get it up by tomorrow. It's mostly just for fun but it shows off what you can do with a little mirrorless camera like the Samsung NX300. I was amazed at how well it handled the wide range of tones in direct sun. Maybe you will be too. Not much difference between the footage from the small camera and the footage from the a99 or 5Dmk2. Stay tuned.

Amazon links below!!! If need diapers or sardines or car parts or even camera gear and books I'd be much obliged if you'd click through any one of the links below to start your shopping adventures...

Soft side of photography...

I normally don't photograph babies. I like babies just fine but the whole business side of dealing with moms and the mercurial rhythms of babies crying and fedding schedules seems too uncontrollable to me. But I'm an avid amateur photographer of cute babies who are attached to my friends.

Renae and her second daughter came to visit on Sunday this week and I thought they were both adorable. I'd worked with Renae back in the 1990's and we've tried our best to keep in touch. She was a brilliant business partner and a fun person to be around. She hasn't changed, she just has a new, super (baby) model in tow.

We were all sitting around the dining room, catching up, when Maisy stood up on her mom's lap and smiled and stared at me. I flailed around for a convenient camera and found a Sony a850 with a 50mm lens on the table, right next to the plate of deviled eggs and the bowl of hummus. I picked up the camera and started shooting.  I'm looking at the image now, as I type, and I understand the power in a photograph. The potential to catch so much happiness and store it for the future.

Good thing I always keep a few extra cameras on the dining room table...

The absolute worst branding: photographs that "look" professional.

How do I know when my work is in trouble? When it starts to look "very professional." When I look at headshots and all kinds of commercial and retail portraits out in the marketplace I see an endless reworking of older styles, not just from the ages of film but from the times when film was a tough medium to work in and it took real lighting and shooting skills to overcome limited dynamic ranges and a masterful touch to finesse tones and colors into an unforgiving print medium. Some of the lighting ratios that we use in the portraits weren't a reflection of us wanting a "flat" print as much as needing to compensate for the tendency of printing papers to block up shadow tones. And we've carried over these fixes and compromises as part of a codified visual style into recent and even current work. Well, not everyone has. If you work for yourself you are free to create whatever you want. And if you set the style then the details are yours to control and present. There are a number of conventions, the reasons for which I understand, that still drive me a little nuts because they are not honest reactions to the subjects in front of the camera but fulfillments of group think and cultural expectations set back in a different time and a different technical milleau.

A lot of the "rules" are protected by organizations that have outlived their aesthetic reasons to exist. While the PPofA might be a good place to discuss how much to charge for a wedding or how to maximize prints sales from a family portrait shoot, their influence on professional portrait photograph as regards aesthetics is corrosive and manipulates scores of people into preserving a status quo that may, at the same time, be killing the very businesses of the people who follow the intonations and teachings of that particular priesthood. I could cherry pick images off  the web to show you what I mean but that would be cruel. I'm referring to the same kinds of portraits that I've taken a thousand times. Parameters like the four light set up with a main light, a fill light, a hair light and a background light.  The overly perfect pose. The obsessive attention to grooming. The meticulous matching of colors. The perfect gradations--from safe highlights to detail larded shadows. The banal, textured canvas background or the solidly tired solid colored background. Just the right focal length. Just the right distances from the camera to the subject to the background. The ultra smooth skin retouching and sharp lips and eyes.  And always the cloying social correctness of the whole presentation with last century mat boards and thick backings. 

But in my own work, my personal work, I love to see inky shadows that drown detail, and highlights ready to bust out of their relegated area of the histogram. The light I love usually comes from one big source that seems to have a brain of its own and spills around the edges and sneakily pushes just enough juice onto the background to say "hello" in an entirely natural way. And when I say "natural" I mean:  That's a kind of light I see all the time in the real world. It's soft like that when I open my garage door and look back over my shoulder at the face of someone who is following me out into daylight...only they aren't out of the open shade yet. Soft yet directional. Defined but not surgical.

Tastes change and over the last ten years there's been a changing of the guard in the world of portraits. The old school stuff is just about dead and those of us who practiced it; either cynically, knowing it was no longer moving people's marketing or branding or self image forward---or in ignorance of a tidal change away from obvious visual constructions to much more natural and less codified styles-- will go down with the ship unless they take a good, hard look at what's in our portfolios and in our promotional materials and change quickly and sincerely. 

And therein lies the rub. If we knew better all along do we have the balls to be honest now and show stuff to sell now in that personal style which we really liked all along. Do we even get the new way of doing portraits? Are we doomed by our ages and the shackles of long experience to keep doing styles that no one really wants for a market of fellow traditionalist clients which is shrinking every day? I would go further and ask if our acceptance, as consumers, of photo dreck in our own lives means that we're giving a tacit approval to something that looks like it came from the Brady Bunch era. By that I mean to ask, do you buy the package of school prints your kid brings home even though you hate the style and your kid's one stab at expression is.....not up to snuff? You figure it's not that much money and you'll probably send the prints along to grandparents and great uncles who may, in fact, be the last truly appreciative market for those styles. Do you settle for good enough when you know that what you've bought is as dated as the Twinkies you found in that drawer in the tool box in your workshop?

I think the time is long overdue for anyone who wants to create portraits for money to make a hard examination of the kind of work they love to look at and make sure it matches the work they do for money. In fact, I think I'm calling for a wholesale re-imagining of the portrait as a sellable product and re-align it to be a sellable work of art. But to do that we'll have to stop aping the styles of the neighborhood studios from days gone past and start producing work that we really adore. Work that makes us excited. Work that you can hardly wait to post on your social networks.....just to show off what you've done. My personal work is quirky. At least I think it is.... But it's more honest than the main light / hair light / back light / rim light / fill light structure with added amounts of barbie-esque retouching that I sometimes default to out of fear or indecision or in the face of ambiguous direction from clients.

How can I break the bad habits I've amassed because I made the serial mistake of making my work safe over the last decade by making it indistinguishable from the hive mind? And why did I make it safe (homogenous) in the first place? Oh, I remember. The economy collapsed a few times and I wanted to embrace the safety of the herd. So I adapted the kind of looks that I saw in other people's work when I should have been an out-of-touch but stubborn artist instead.

I figured clients had been trained to accept flash photography as the lingua franca of our business so I started lighting with speedy lights even though I knew I liked the languorous effects of soft, continuous lights. I took the coward's way out and conformed to best practices which is code for "don't blame me, that's how everyone else does it..." I'm trying to get back to the garden, my garden, which means getting back to the way I lit people when I didn't care about jobs or purchase orders or what clients might think. 

To that end I've been dragging along an assortment of continuous lights with me on all of my assignments. I did ten portraits at a hospital this morning and all of them were done with large fluorescent banks as my lighting tools. Big banks covered with custom layers of diffusion cloth. I did a personal portrait yesterday (in black and white) and it was lit with a mix of daylight and the cool, soft light of my little open faced LED fixture. These are the ones I like and the ones that my family and friends say they like.

I think when we hit the digital age a lot of us got confused. There were teething problems with the early cameras, especially when it came to color rendering and profiling. We were also trying to get calibrated and it seemed like our job was to master all the technical shit. Stuff like making sure that what we saw on the back screens of cameras would match our monitors.  And then, since we were one foot in and one foot out of prints being deliverables we were locked into the battle of trying to figure out how to get good prints out of our labs or out of donkey like ink jet printers. We forgot that we needed to be in as much charge of a changing visual style as we were in charge of making sure our Epson printers didn't clog up the night before a big deadline. We technocratically mastered the process by overlaying the new instruction set over an older idea of what constituted "deliverables" while a new generation took all the tech stuff in stride, ignored it, flubbed it or (MOST IMPORTANTLY) made it into the bedrock of a new (deconstructed) style.

We ignore giant shifts of style at our own peril and sometimes in our paid work we are supporting something that (if we look at our personal work as our compass) we don't even believe in.

When I find myself grousing about the younger generation not "getting quality" when it comes to imaging I immediately stop myself and think of someone whose work I personally can't stand but who represents, in a way, everything I'm talking about. I think of Terry Richardson, the bicycle seat sniffing misogynist who made over $40 million in three years doing his snapshot style aesthetic for magazines, fashion designers and publishers. Small cameras, grainy, noisy files, a lot of direct flash, etc. But it's his style and he's become the mirror for a big swath of his generation because his work is NOT about perfection. It's about intimacy and risk and perilous connection.

Let's face it. When we all know how to achieve perfection in a craft the craft becomes boring and there's a period of time in which we sit, like a car in idle, and do this boring perfection craft until someone comes along and blows the whole thing up. Because if we all practice the same parameters of perfection the one person who zigs in the opposite direction and shows the market something new is nearly always the person who's chosen to do his own style in a vacuum made by our own resistance to change. Or our abdication of our personal style for something we imagined might be easier to sell....

I'm not recommending any course of action and this isn't a manifesto for anyone to follow. But I've been coming to grips with the fact that visually everything I did before I learned to be "perfect" is much better (emotionally, visually, connected-wise) than anything I've done since I made enough money to buy my way into the best practices of equipment and since I've had access to the internet to learn all the details I didn't even know I needed to know but which everyone now knows equally. My first year of shooting was my favorite year. And the next ten were great. But when I started to analyze and manipulate the work for an audience which I assumed wanted something with a common inflection and finish I unintentionally killed the very things I liked about the work and I've regretted it ever since.

So what am I doing? I'm making the act of shooting portraits less of a big deal technically and more of an exploration of what I like in a person. What I find interesting. Or what I hate in that person. But I'm not dishonoring them with template lighting. I'm not doing the equivalent of putting marks on the floor to follow for the lighting. I don't care how good the camera is, or how Annie Leibovitz lit something, or which light Chase Jarvis used on his Ninja Bankers Skiing shots.  I want to go back and connect with people like I used to. I want to worship the beauty of the fascinating women in front of my camera and I want to look at the men in front of my camera with the same interest and curiosity with which I approach my closest friends. I want to find things that are peculiar and interesting about the people in front of my camera and not hobble their representation by cloaking them in an unguent blanket of syrupy visual goo that makes everyone more of a metaphor for their image than an interesting and unique artifact of our mutual collaboration.

Way too verbose. I guess I just wanted to say I'm tired of photos that look like all the other photos. I liked the way mine looked thirty years ago. I want to go back to a naiveté that subverted mechanical details in the service of falling in love with the people in the frames. I want to celebrate the look and the energy, not my ability to solve problems.

In the old days when someone said, "Your work looks so professional." what they meant was that you had done a good job mastering all the hard technical stuff so that your subject could shine through. What people mean now when they say, "Your work looks so professional." is that your work is done in a style that matches the vast center of the Bell Curve of working imagers and meets all the basic technical criteria in the space. But the subtext is that your work is contrived, stilted, robbed of authenticity and uniform to a fault. Interesting when you find yourself on the wrong side of the divide and you always imagined yourself as a risk taker and a forward thinker. 

The day that you wake up hating the work you do for a living is the day you need to quit or start over in a more genuine way. There really is no middle ground for artists.

Having fun with little cameras. Making an image of my swimmer friend, Amy.

So.... a little while ago the folks at Samsung sent me a cool little camera and asked me to shoot with it over the Summer and I said, "yes, I'd love to." And at first I was apprehensive because it didn't have a viewfinder and I fear change. But pretty soon I discovered a few things. One is that I really like the NX300 and I really like its menus and the way it handles. Another thing is that adding a Hoodman Loupe to the back screen when I'm shooting in bright light is no big deal. And it works well for composition and color evaluation.

Well, there are a group of us evaluating the camera and sharing images on our blogs and in social networks and the 28 or us got invited to participate in a tiny, little contest. It was a perfect excuse to go out and self assign. The general idea was to photograph something you see everyday in a new and unique way. I mulled it over and thought I'd pass on the contest thing until I went to swim practice this morning and ran into my fierce and amazingly competitive friend, Amy. I decided, on the spur of the moment that I wanted my entry to be a photograph of Amy.

I see her at the pool almost every day, and most days we share a lane along with a rotating roster of other early morning swimmers. We get to the pool at 7:00 am and we're usually out by 8:30 am and the sun in central Texas is generally hidden behind clouds that get burned off later. So I see her in the flat light of early morning, mostly in the water with our heads down, our hearts pounding and our lungs burning. If she's feeling fast all I see of Amy most mornings is the splash of her kick as she pulls away and prepares to lap me. If I'm feeling fast I see Amy on my toes when I'm flip turning and we see each other briefly at the wall as she tells me (forcefully) to stop playing around and go NOW.

I thought it would be different and cool to make an image of Amy that was totally different for me so I asked her to meet me at the pool in the late afternoon when the lanes are nearly empty, the light is lush and luminous and the heat has ramped up and burned away the diffusing cloud cover.

I asked her to jump in the water and look as mean as she seems during workout. I laid on two kick boards on the deck and pointed my NX 300 at her  with the 18-55mm kit lens on the front. I added a polarizing filter to deepen the rich blue of the water and to remove whatever reflections I might not like.  I set the camera to manual exposure and then, laying on my belly, I directed my subject into place and started shooting. The screen on the back, when used with the Hoodman Loupe was perfect. I could see exactly what I was getting and access all the menu items I needed as well.

I shot a bunch of different images. I didn't use any fill cards or flashes. I set the Picture Wizard to "vivid" and the file setting to super fine Jpeg and knew what I'd add in post processing. I opened the files in Aperture and did general corrections and then I opened the keepers in Snapseed and added fun amounts of post processing, leaning on the structure filters and the "dramatic" filters. I wanted the image to look different from the whole film aesthetic. I had a hard time choosing which image I really wanted to use but in the end this one seemed very three dimensional to me.

We celebrated the shoot with pistachio cannoli and sparkling wine at Whole Food Market at Sixth and Lamar. I hope I win because the prize is a new lens. And all my friends know just how much I need a new lens........ but really, it's the competition and the self-assignment that's so much fun.

I'm also happy to know that I have good friends who are willing to jump in and help me out on short notice. It makes the art better.

And the combination of the Samsung NX300 and the big Loupe make shooting in full sun easy.