Aquatic Saturday. Dateline Austin.

Ben and I left the house around 7:45am this morning after a breakfast of egg and bacon tacos on whole wheat tortillas.   Just another saturday morning swim meet with the mighty Rollingwood Waves.  We got to the Westwood Country Club right on time and headed in.  You have to prod 14 year olds to do stuff.  This morning Ben announced that he didn't "do" warm up.  No matter that his coach requires it.  And now, so does his dad.

In many ways I'm just like every other parent pacing around the deck;  I want my kid to go fast and get a few ribbons and make the "A" relay team.  I'm happy when he hits a good flip turn and peeved when he breathes six or eight times on a 50 meter sprint.  But I have an extra perk:  I'm the official Rollingwood Waves Team Photographer.

What does this get me?  We'll it's more what it gets me out of.  I don't have to volunteer to be one of the timers or stroke judges.  On the flip side, though, I have to be at every meet.  I try to get  at least a handful of pix for each kid on the team.  I get some of them hanging with their best friends,  a few starts and a few races.  At the end of the season I rent a big monster digital projector from my favorite A/V company and we have a slide show at the swim team award picnic.

When I started this adventure we shot slides.  A costly affair for the volunteer photographers.......

Back in 2003 we went digital and haven't looked back.  Here's the truth though, the slides look a hell of a lot better.  That's not a dig at digital cameras but cost effective projection technologies are still way behind the curve vis a vis film.  Really.  I have a couple of LCD projectors and I have a Leica Pradovit slide projector and it's Yugo versus the Aston Martin as far as I'm concerned.  But we decided not to care and everyone loves to watch and giggle at each other.  We also put the images up on a web gallery and they look much, much better there.

The meet started at 9 am and lasted till 2pm.  The other team had legions of young kids and that always takes more time.  A lot more time.  But that's part of the deal.  We always have to remind the teenagers that they were once "six and unders" and they didn't move any quicker than this set of six and unders.

Today was  a good photo day because we had a nice overcast.  Not a dark gray, English style overcast but a thinner, southern california overcast with a small layer of Texas clouds thrown in.  I shot 735 images over the course of the five hours and edited down to about 600 for the web gallery.  I took one camera and two lenses.  A Canon 7D, the 70-200 f4 and the Canon 15-85mm.  I took along two 4 gig cards and made a solemn promise to myself that, when I filled them,  I'd just stop and smell the roses......or the chlorine.  I was a lazy photographer today and shot large jpegs with the camera set to Aperture Prefered Priority.  It all came out just fine.  I watch the light and shove in plus or minus compensation pretty accurately when I need to.  I didn't have to dump any files for exposure or focus issues so I think 735 out of 735 is pretty darn good.

The camera worked fine.  The boy swam well.  The photographer stayed hydrated.

So that was this morning.  Then we went out for lunch and I came back to edit, color correct and upload the stuff to a Smugmug gallery.  Now it's almost six o'clock and I'm ready to take it easy and do some stuff just for myself.  I know, I'll grab a camera and a lens and go out for a long walk in downtown Austin.  You know,  just to stay in practice.......

The metrics of joy and the prison of assumption.

There are some things like joy and love and anticipation, affection and aesthetics that defy measurement which is a dicey proposition since we've devolved into a culture that falls back on "metrics" to explain everything.  Even whether or not we're having fun.  Here in the states we have a history (at least men do...) of buying things based on specifications.  How many horsepower in your car's engine?  How many megapixels in your digital camera?  We also analyze our recreation the same way.  How would you rate this on a scale of 1 to 10?  We're pretty sure now that cholesterol isn't a good way to predict heart attacks but it's one of the easiest things to measure so our doctors do the test and accept a vague and unproven causality.  Cardiologists could measure homocysteine levels but it's more costly and the usual remedy for high levels of homocysteine is more folic acid and B vitamins and nobody makes any real money from that.  But I have digressed.  My point is that we've become a measurement culture and we seem less and less disposed to understand the value of things that can't be measured.

For example:  art, serious music,  live theater, great books,  gentle talks over coffee,  time spent just thinking,  any experience that can't be labeled, "extreme", "intense", "wicked" or "hot".   We're edging that way in photography all the time.  I'm sure someone will soon come out with software that measures the "quality metrics" of your images and gives you a grade for the technical achievements.  83% for that headshot because you didn't have sharp focus on the tip of the nose and the backs of the ears.  97% with the extra credit for perfectly matching back lights.  

But, of course, by the time you create the metrics all you've really done is codify the progress of photographers at the top of the Bell Curve.  Institutionalized a new stasis.  A new middle of the road.  Created a new speed bump for a generation of artists.  If we are to grow as artists we need to accept stuff that looks different and stuff that's not even on the metric radar.  Next time you see art that you don't get, don't dismiss it out of hand.  It might be the next great thing.  Very few revolutions come with their own set of measurable markers.

And that drips over into another thing I've been thinking about today.  The life of the artist.  And the assumptions of our culture.  Which is tremendously aspirational.  We don't seem to aspire to art the way we aspire to make millions, live in a house the size of a factory, drive fast cars, live with supermodels or tip doormen outrageously.   Even though we are, as a culture, aspirational we can be rational and in our pervasive rationality we expect people to expect certain assumptions.  Here in Austin the assumptions go like this:  You WILL need to own a car.  The closer you live to downtown the cooler you are.  You will want to eat Sushi.  You do want to own a $6000 bicycle.  You will go out.  To fuel these priorities it's assumed that you will have a job, predicated by a college degree and you will work at this job for 50 to 60 hours per week.  You will do this with the vague aspiration that you'll strike it big on a start up or an IPO and you'll retire at 40 to go off mountain climbing for the rest of your life in Nepal or somewhere equally cold and cool.

But the rational underpinning assumption, by the time you reach your forties and have the responsibility to pay the mortgage and for kids and their braces and French horn lessons and soccer camps and all the other trappings, is that you better like what you're doing enough to keep at it until at least 65.  Because all that money you've been making seems to be covered with Teflon and slides through your wallet like designer bottled water through a mid-day jogger...... And you work and work and at some point you look over your shoulder and it's too late.

While the storybook artist hits "delete" on all those layers of responsibility and gets directly on with the process of doing the art at any cost.  The material trappings of successful life  don't have the same allure and value to the committed artist.  The reality is somewhere in the middle and everything is a compromise.  I'm unfair because I presume that everyone secretly wants to do their art and they don't want to do it in the two weeks a year they have off from their job or in the evenings when they are already exhausted or on the weekends when there's so much to do that was put off over the course of the work week.  But the reality is that we're all somewhere on the continuum.  You may think that doing art is total bullshit and that you're happy doing just what you're doing.  And I'm good with that.  You may think anyone with a "real job" is a robot moron and I'm not going to say "I'm okay with that".

Somewhere along the line I think nearly everyone buys into the assumption that it's impossible to have a life outside of the 9 to 5.  Not just after the 9 to 5.   I know too many entrepreneurs and artists and swim coaches and writers to totally buy into the "must have a real job" deal.  But you must be willing to confront the idea that you might be miserable doing your art.  Not enough money.  Not enough socializing.  No quick fame.  etc.   Sometimes you trade the job for freedom and the steak for macaroni and cheese.  And trying to juggle both worlds requires incredible discipline.   Everyone has their equation for sacrifice and comfort but it's good to pull out the calculator and check it every once and a while.  You never know when the numbers might have shifted.

It's friday. All I can think about is swimming.

There's this moment when you push off the wall in a perfect streamline and the water is rushing past all around you.  It's the closest that human beings come to flying.  Shut down your computer.  Leave the office and find a pool.  Jump in and push off the wall with your hand locked together and your arms stretched over your head.  Keep you head in line with your body and push off hard.  Point your toes after the push off.  Then feel the glide.  You'll never want to go back to work.

So. When's the last time you shot a wedding?

Been a while for me.  But I couldn't resist shooting one for my friend Heidi.  You might recognize her from the cover shot of the second book,  Minimalist Lighting:  Professional Techniques for Studio Photography.  She was a tremendous help to me in getting the second book done on time and I thought I would return the favor.  And you can't pass up a wedding where the reception is in as fun a place as The Mean Eyed Cat Bar.  There is an obvious Johnny Cash worship in every corner of this awesome Austin music spot.....

While I haven't shot a wedding in a while I do have a bunch of friends and acquaintances who are wedding photographers and I hear horror stories about brides and moms going nuts and melting down during the preliminary preparations and at the reception.  No such luck here.  No bad behavior, just happy people with nice families and good friends.  So, what do you wear......in your camera bag?

As many of you know I'm juggling two and a half systems but on this day I left the Olympus Pen cameras at home and concentrated on shooting with a Canon 5dmk 2 and an Olympus e30.  Canon lenses included the 20mm, 50 1.8,  100mm f2 and the ubiquitous 24-105 f4 zoom.  It's a poorly behaved zoom on it's own.  Oh it's nice and sharp but it vignettes like a mad bastard and the wide angle distortion is legendary.  All that is forgiven when you whip the files thru DPP (the Canon Raw converter) or the new Lightroom 3.  Press a button in LR3 and it turns into a lens you can be proud of.  The IS works well, too.  

On the other side of the camera bag I had the Olympus e30 paired up with the 35-100mm and the 14-35mm f2 zooms.  And I mixed them indiscriminately.  At normal sizes in good lighting there is very little difference in quality between the two cameras and the wedding would have been a breeze to do with just the Olympus system.  The Canon low light performance is pretty cool.  But I'm sure you've read enough of that elsewhere.

There are two kinds of weddings that I've been part of as a photographer.  One is the big celebrity wedding.  We did several in the past years, with me working as a second shooter to both Jenn Lindbergh and also to Todd Williams.  The wedding we did with Todd was ultra-chic and had a big guest list.  How big?  Well, it filled the Driskill Hotel mezzanine and that's a comfortable space for up to 400.  On that occasion we had three principle photographers (including me) and two full assistants who supplied us batteries, film and memory cards (yes, we shot film and digital interchangeably).  We shot several thousand frames.  We were well paid.  The wedding with Jenn was similar, just as amazingly produced but it required four shooters.......

Then there are weddings like Heidi's.  Short on limos but long on calm happiness.  I shoot stuff like this all by myself.  We had tons of time to shoot while the women were getting dressed and tons of time to shoot at the reception. The ceremony was beautiful and short.  The set up shots few and far between.  Nothing was a made rush and there was no overt wedding planner, flogging the wedding party on, keeping the wedding party on a painful, minute by minute schedule.  I like weddings like this.

I brought three flashes but I only used one.  I used it for fifteen or twenty minutes near the end of the reception when the light started to fall and I didn't feel like experimenting with the low light capabilities of a new camera.  

The fun thing about any event where there is an expectation that a camera will be present is that everyone just relaxes, stops playing to the camera and let's me get on with my privileged role of the "invited voyeur".   How often are you invited to go through a casual crowd and pick out interesting faces, photographing them at will, without even having to ask first?

One nice thing about the highlight and shadow recovery tools in the latest revs of all the software packages for image processing is the ability to make Texas clouds look like Texas clouds with the slip of a slider.  All while keeping detail in the shadow areas.

The shot just above is really about the future.  Not metaphorically about married couples or anything sappy like that but the future of lenses and photography.  I shot this with the legendary distortion monster, the Canon 24-105.  The original had very dark corners all the way around and the many pillars bowed like a cowboy's legs.   One click in the new software and everything is......boom.....rectilinear and even.  This means we can start getting lenses that maybe are a little faster or smaller and make up for the design deficiencies in software.  The flip side is that using any of these lenses on a film camera will make the film shooting experience worse and worse.  Ah, progress.

The lens I used most during the wedding was the Olympus 35-100.  I like the way it does stuff.  It's sharp wide open and the bokeh is stunning.  (Confession:  I still don't believe that's a real word but for all of the people who believe like me what I really mean is the out of focus areas had nice smooth structures to them instead of weird, harsh patterns).

Are you one of those stodgy old wedding photographers who can't imagine grabbing a beer or glass of wine at a wedding you are being paid to cover?  Well, trash me on the web because over the course of the evening I had both.  And a glass of Champagne for the toast.  I also had a great plate of BBQ from the Salt Lick and I pushed a few little old ladies out of the way to get to the cake.  I get the demure, non-intrusive thing but there's a limit to deprivation.  Now that I've said this I'm sure I'll never be invited to shoot a stuffy wedding again.  Hope it works........

But as any hobbyist or professional will tell you, the only real reason to do weddings is because you get to spend time playing with all of your stuff.  Testing and shooting and framing and all the stuff you need to practice any way.  My only rule of thumb is not to take pix of people stuffing things into their mouths.  Nobody likes those.

I read a lot on forums about how nervous wedding photographers are supposed to get before the big day.  Ostensibly there's so much to go wrong.  But really not.  As long as you have a lot of back up gear and Google maps to the various locations you'll do fine.  The people who screw up are the ones who over think everything.  They have flash brackets made in a joint venture between NASA and the Ukraine.  Giant Erector Sets of complexity that make mounting or unmounting flash or camera a nasty job.  And they've heard they're supposed to have assistants with flashes on sticks.  It all gets so complex.  When things get that precious it's really time for another glass of wine.  I'll take the Bordeaux, please.

Slipping into the moment.

Outside the Termini train station.  Roma.

This isn't a Holga image.  I added some blur in the darkroom using a small device called a Pictrol.  It was a device that was like an iris that you put on your enlarging lens. You could then dial in the amount of edge blur you might want.  When you dialed it in little, wavy, transparent plastic blades (like the aperture blades on a lens) would stick into the light path and distort the edges of the frame.  Close the blades all the way down and you'd have total soft focus over the entire print.  

I didn't mount the Pictrol on my englarging lens.  I preferred to hold it under the lens so I could move it around during the exposure for random mixes of hard and soft light in different parts of the frame.  That's part of the technique you see in many of the images I present here that were originally interpreted on prints.

But this wasn't meant to be a primer on the dying art of enlarger printing.  

The photo above reminded me of the magic times when you are totally in the moment and you walk through a city looking from side to side and everything you see is a photograph.  You don't stop to think about whether or not people will like what you see or if it will pass muster as art or whether your parents will understand.  You're walking and it's a brisk day and you are unencumbered and free.  You are in a state of total self-determination.

It never hits me the first day in a city.  In fact, given my track record I should just leave the camera in my hotel room for the first 24 hours after arriving.  But somewhere around the third or fourth day you start to ease into the rhythms of the city and you just float through street after street.  You've become an anonymous drifter.  You have little or no skin in the game and you just seem to be able to lift the camera to your eye and make art.

And even if, when you return home, you later discover that all the images seem like crap you remember the wonderful feeling of capturing them and it's okay.  The ultimate pleasure is to come back and examine your work and find that you really love it.  And then it transports you back to the moment you clicked the shutter and you somehow knew you'd gotten the best image a particular scene had to offer.

For me, getting into the moment requires that I have no schedule, no appointments and no itinerary.  I need to be able to follow my nose and my camera.  If my target is the fresh produce market but  nothing is happening there I need to be able to change direction without inertia and continue along another path.  When I go with the preconception of what I expect to get it never happens the way I would like.  If I think that I'm just going out for a walk, for exercise or fresh air, then images present themselves. And if I go out without a camera beautiful stuff is everywhere.   

When I go out now I take a notebook and a camera.  I write when there's nothing to see and I see when there's nothing to write about....

Does everything really need to be sharp?

Paris 1978.

I've taken lots of photographs since I did this one in 1978.  And I've used some of the best equipment in the world in the process.  But even though the resulting images are far sharper, much higher resolution and in many instances nearly grainless, this one image remains one of my very favorite.  I was in Paris for the first time as an adult.  I'd bought a Canon QL17 camera just a month or so before I arrived.  I knew next to nothing about photography.  I didn't know how to read and exposure meter and didn't own one.  My friend, Alan Pogue, lent me some Ansel Adams books and told me to shoot Tri-X film.  He suggested that I shoot it all at ASA 200 and that he would show me how to develop it when I returned to Austin.

It was early on a September weekday morning and my girlfriend and I were out walking, headed for Printemps to have breakfast in the rooftop cafe.  I had the little camera in my hand and a very tattered backpack over my shoulder.  I looked ahead and saw this woman coming toward us.  I lifted the camera tried to quickly line up the rangefinder in the viewfinder and I snapped one frame and she hustled past.

It was months later that I developed that roll of Tri-X and weeks after that when I made my first feeble prints.  The negative was underexposed, grainy and out of focus.  I must have tried reprinting it 50 times over the last 32 years.  I finally decided that I liked the image enough to ignore the negative's negatives.  And now I have a print of the image over my desk.

I've never bothered to ask anyone else if they like the image and I'll never be able to separate the amalgam of my feelings that come to the surface when I try to evaluate it's objective value.  But I've come to understand that the day I made a print of this image is the day I decided to become a photographer. 

We think of audiences and influences when we create our careers but mine started with a slice of time captured on a loud city street on a brisk autumn morning.  

And I've spent the last 32 years looking for more images like this.  Do I care if this image is sharp?  

A few announcements. No major rants.

Swimmer makes perfect triangle with arm and lane line.  ©2010 kirk tuck

Open Invitation:  Book Signing Event: On Saturday, June 19th, my friends at Precision Camera have invited me to do a two hour book signing event, at the store, from noon til 2pm.  I'm presuming that we'll have all four books available.  It will be very informal and I'll be happy to talk about photography with anyone who drops by.  I'd love to see some familiar faces even if you have no interest in getting a book...

Precision Camera in Austin is located at 3810 North Lamar Boulevard Austin, TX 78756.  If you've got questions, call them at:  (512) 467-7676.  I won't be competing with UT football this time.....

I'm working on a book about portraits and I need some help from people in and around Austin:  The book is about alternatives to traditional portraits.  I'll be exploring a more modern portrait ethos, new, minimalist lighting for portraits and more of a lifestyle approach to posing and venue.  I'll mostly be using non-tranditional light sources and small battery units.  This is where you come in.  I need lots and lots of cooperative models.  I'm looking for all kinds of people with interesting faces who could join me for an hour at a time in coffee shops, on the street in down town and around town and for short stints in the studio.  Anyone who participates will get a 12 by 18 inch original C print (signed on the back) of one of the photos we make together.  I'll be shooting in Austin mostly but would also welcome the chance to shoot people in San Antonio.  If you are interested you can e-mail me at kirktuck@kirktuck.com.  If you know someone with a beautiful or intriguing face will you pass my offer along?  If you send me someone who is very, very photogenic I may offer to use them for step by step photos.  In that case I'll be able to pay them for the time we do that together.  Thanks for the help.

Surveying:  Is there anyone out there who would like me to be doing video blogs on lighting topics or techniques having to do with portraits?  A few of my friends think this would be cool.  For me it would scary as they want me on the other side of the camera doing the explaining and stuff.  Just thought I'd ask around and see if anyone is interested in this kind of stuff.  If you have an opinion one way or another would you toss it into the comments?  

That's it for the announcements and stuff.  Catch you on the next read.

Getting outside the studio and shooting mid-day in the heat and wind.....

This is Mike.  He's an executive at a tech company.  And that's some of Austin in the background.

Sometimes I think I get too philosophical about photography.  Today I'm just talking "nuts and bolts".  

I've spent decades shooting in the studio and inside the (air conditioned) corporate buildings of major clients.  Recently a new company asked me to shoot their corporate officers in a different way.  We talked a bit and decided that shooting outside, with the city of Austin in the background, would be a cool way to go.

Scheduling is always a concern.  Executives seem to have busier schedules than most and, with packed schedules, we sometimes have to shoot right in the middle of the day or in the heat of the afternoon.  So we learn to deal with the sun.

My shoot with Mike was scheduled for 4pm.  My morning shoot was a technology shoot in the studio.  Tiny cities on top of tiny slices of silicon.  I packed for Mike's shoot the night before and when the clock ticked 3:15 pm I started turning off hot lights, covering products so dust wouldn't cover everything, and I headed out the door.  We shot on the pedestrian bridge just to the south of downtown Austin.  I was able to park a couple hundred yards away and push my stuff over onto the bridge on a small cart.  The bridge is about forty feet wide and it's a wonderful place to shoot.   In the early mornings and early evenings it's covered with runners and walkers but at 4pm we pretty much had the whole span over Lady Bird Lake to ourselves.

I packed a Canon 5d mark 2 with a 24-105 zoom lens.  Hoodman loupe (really need this for sunny locations and just about any camera...).  Profoto 600b, battery powered electronic flash with one head and a speed ring.  Two light stands.  One collapsible, two stop, white 42 inch Westcott diffuser panel and an arm to hold it.  Most important pieces of equipment? Two 20 pound sandbags.

This is the kind of shoot that an assistant is very helpful on.  Watching the gear while you go and look for lost subjects (for the record, Mike was right on time and NOT lost), holding light stands in a brisk breeze and helping to drag the cart back to the car on remote locations.  Unfortunately, I did not have an assist with me on Mike's shoot.  That's just the way the scheduling goes.  But we go thru without incident.

First step is to put up the two stop diffuser above Mike's head so he didn't have to stand in the sun.  Once we had that up I grabbed the camera and started looking for the right angles.  I'd worked with his marketing director on three other similar shoots so we had a good idea of what the composition should be like. I also knew that we didn't want to be too tight.

I sandbagged the light stand that had the diffuser and its holding arm and then set up a second light stand with a 24 by 36 inch softbox on it.  That stand got a sand bag as well.  The diffuser is as close to the top of Mike's head as I can get it and still keep it out of the frame.  The more light I can block the better. The light blocker keeps Mike from being hit by the hard, direct rays of the sun and drops the exposure on his face around two stops.  I fill back in with my own, controlled, more flattering light.  I walked the softbox in as close as I could and set the power on the strobe box to 1/4 power.  Our exposures were in the 1/160th of a second f8.5 range.  I was trying to balance the image so that the background read about 1/2 a stop darker than Mike.  I also wanted to be sure to get shadow detail even on Mike's black shirt.

We shot about 60 images but the very first one was the keeper and the one unanimously chosen.  

I processed the image in CS5, taking advantage of the new, content aware, masking tools to do different treatments to Mike and to the background.  Gotta love layers...

Here's some advice on lighting like this outside:

1.  Gotta take sand bags.  Even light breezes can get a hold of a panel or a collapsible diffuser and make it into a sail.  And wind on the bridge is always amplified compared with wind on the ground.  

2.  If you can swing it bring an assistant.  Not to haul stuff but to hold onto the light stand with the softbox and the light head.  With Profoto heads heading toward $1,000 each the last thing you want is one heading toward the ground.  The added benefit of the assistant is this highly complex mathematical equation:  Big assistant+sandbag= bigger softbox.  Where y equals the velocity of wind and x equals the softness of light....  I love big softboxes but if I'm by myself I think the 24 by 26 is just about the limit.  And that's with the 12 pound strobe pack and the 20 pound sand bag hooked onto the stand.

3.  If it's over 90 and the sun is shining get your shade up for the client first thing.  You don't want them frying and sweating before you've shot the first frame.  Being able to make shade is almost as fun as being able to make light.  You might also want to bring the client a cold bottle of water.

4.  Get the whole thing,  from the firm, welcome handshake to the warm farewell,  done in ten minutes or less.  If you need to fiddle, get there early and do it on your own time.

5.  If you have the resources (additional sandbags and an assistant) consider bringing along a second panel.  Make this one black and put it up right behind the camera.  This will give the talent/subject something dark to look at so they aren't squinting from the bright ambient light.  This could be really important in a location with lots of bright building reflections and concrete.

6.  Don't depend on the rear screen of the camera for total imaging confirmation unless you've brought the loupe and disable the automatic brightness setting that now seems to be a standard feature on new cameras.

7.  Dress for the heat.  Nice to make that good impression and I'm all for the random suit and tie in the boardroom or the chic hotel ballroom but out on the pedestrian bridge you'll be fine in some nice shorts and a polo shirt.  Or even better, a UV resistant shirt from Ex Officio  (the offical provider of hot weather shirts for Kirk Tuck Photography :-)  ).

I've got no advice for post processing because everyone does that differently.  The most important part to remember is to make your own shade. It will separate you from the yahoos out banging around with direct flash and hot hightlights.  Nobody looks great with razor sharp shadows and too much detail.  

I hit the bridge at 3:45pm.  I had everything roughed in and set up when Mike hit the bridge at 4:00pm.  I had Mike walking away at 4:08pm.  He was happy to get out of the heat.  I needed to finish the tech job that was already taking a lot more time than I budgeted for.  

Just eight minutes?  Yes.  And that's a feature/benefit.  Because we don't charge by the hour we charge by the image that gets licensed.  Efficiency works for you and the client unless you are dumb enough to charge strictly by the hour.  

So, that's my afternoon a few weeks ago.  Hope all is well.  

Best, Kirk

Indulge me. I re-read this and wanted to reprint it for the people who are new here. More original programming to come.

Why you shouldn't shoot like everyone else.

Let's face it,  I don't think any of us woke up one morning and said, “The thing I love best is taking pictures of strident brides putting on yet another cookie cutter,  antique ivory white dress with the annoying little buttons down the back.....”.  We didn't.  We don't.  We do many of the annoying little jobs we do because they pay the bills.  The wedding profits pay for the mortgage and the car payments.  The bridal portraits help pay for new gear.  And the PR photos of “guys in ties”, done with the same old soft box and grid light on the background,  pays for dinners and electric bills.  But you are way off base if you think we buy for a moment that you shoot these things because you are driven by your “inner muse” to do your “Art”.  (That's capital “A” art.....).

We're not all wired the same way so if you really get a thrill running a business and making a profit and that's all you want out of your photography then I get it and we'll give you a pass on the art thing.  But the rest of you aren't getting off so easily.  Most of us got into this field because we loved taking photographs of people, or landscapes, or life on the streets.  I certainly didn't pick up a camera because I saw a cool product photograph in a catalog.

I picked up a camera because I loved taking photographs of my friends.  I wasn't drawn to images that were lit in a particular way, I really loved the stuff that was black and white, available light and relatively unposed.  When I had done this kind of work for years as a pleasurable hobby I found my self at loose ends after my partners and I sold our advertising  agency.  I had some money in my pocket and a bunch of people kept hiring me to photograph them or their loved ones in the style I'd done.

But.....as soon as the art moved from hobby to business there started a subtle erosion of the essential point of view that made my work different from everybody else's.  I learned that there was an established style to shooting business head shots and so I learned that style and began to offer it.  I had to buy lights and drag them into the mix.  I learned the “right way” to do an executive portrait and I started to incorporate what I learned into the mix.  

And if you think about it, the convergence of digital imaging and the photo sharing sites on the web has quickened a process of homogenization that now seems relentless.  How many of you think that a reportage style of wedding photography is wonderfully unique?  Really?  Even though every wedding book I've seen in the past three months has exactly the same stuff in it?  The close up of the fingers trying to button five hundred annoying buttons on the back of an antique ivory wedding dress?  The edgey images with the razor thin slice of sharp focus that just screams out, “Hey, look at me.  I got a Canon 5D and a fast 85mm lens...”  You know the drill.  We all know the drill because we presume that these are the images and styles that brides want and we want to deliver them so we can make the car payments and buy dinner.  And in the corporate world we know that the standard head shot is generally a boring piece of crap that doesn't move the game forward any more than music on your website.

I think we homogenize for a variety of valid anthropological reasons.  We have a subconscious  desire to please our tribe.  We fear striving for originality and excellence because we have a suspicion that these things aren't valued by our clients and showing different work might cause them to reject our services.  Which we then interpret to be a rejection of our selves.  We might fear the hostility that will inevitably come from those who are practicing the status quo.

But here's the nasty reality statement that I'm sure you've known was coming from the minute you started reading this:  The people who populate the top 1% of the art world don't really give a minute of thought to what might “play well in Peoria”.  They pursue their vision.  Their own vision.  And they do it in a way that basically welds them into the longer view of art history or photo history because it introduces aesthetic game changers that the rest of us will buy into decades down the road and work to homogenize into our collective offerings while some where a new generation comes knocking with the real goods.  But we won't understand the value of those goods until it's just too damn late.  Think Richard Avedon and Irving Penn.  Both of whom were incredible pioneers as opposed to the Chase Jarvis and Michael Grecco types who understand a trendy, contemporary use of the tools, and the power of good, pervasive marketing.

It's like Avedon invented Haute Cuisine while Jarvis added an extra strip of bacon to the cheeseburger.....while Grecco introduced pink mayonnaise and convinced Ludacris to put it on his bacon cheeseburger.....really, it is apt.

Consider this for a moment...two companies sell 90% of the cameras used by professionals today.  Both have the identical format!  Your choice is really sensor A or sensor B.  Processing algorithm A or   Processing algorithm B.  Can you imagine the photographers we truly admire from the film age being constrained to choose between just two different films?  Where is the differentiation?  Where is the rugged individualism?  How did this all happen?

Some postulate that every move toward convenience decreases overall quality.  That every wave of mass acceptance creates an inertia to consider whatever the masses have embraced to be the “standard”.  By that measure, clothes from Walmart are the new standard, and if you are truthful you'll acknowledge that you'd never get your wardrobe from Walmart...

So, what do you do? If you are a business person, first analyze your business carefully, and if you find that selling your current product, no matter how commodified it is, is going well and your market share is growing, then continue on your path.  But if you feel like you got into this field to do something unique and different but you have the queasy feeling that you let the weight of life and money drag you into some compromised stasis then start pushing back and re-connect with why you wanted to be here in the first place.

When I taught at The University of Texas at Austin I had a student who came to me and complained that she couldn't possibly fulfill her promise as a great fashion photographer unless she had a Hasselblad and a stable of good, Zeiss lenses.  But she whined that she could never afford them, so she was doomed to failure.  A week earlier I had overheard her telling a classmate that her parents had just bought her brand new, turbo-charged  Volvo station wagon. ( in the early 1980's this would have been viewed as radically indulgent within the student class---now, who knows?).  

I suggested that she sell the car and buy the dream.  She thought I was insane.  The money trumped the art.  The comfort quotient kicked the crap out of art.  I caught up with her two decades of “life lessons” later.  She has become a gifted artist.  She pursues her vision with a Holga camera.  She lives on the edge.  She doesn't own a car.  But here's the news flash, she's happier than she ever was because she's very clear about what she wants.  And what she wants is to pursue the vision she had in the very first gestalt moment of loving photography.

So, how do you change?  How about throwing away all the trappings and offering what you really feel compelled to offer as art, and the hell with the rest of the market.  After all, would you rather be the next Avedon or a watered down/ tarted up version of Olan Mills.  You have the “Art” with a capital “A” in you or you would have never chosen this business.  Owning a McDonald's franchise is a much more secure way to earn lots more money.  So trade down on lifestyle, if necessary, and trade up on artistic integrity.  I can almost guarantee that you'll spend less on therapy and Xanax.  And people may grow up wanting to be just like you----instead of wanting to have your lifestyle.

I know you might think this sounds preachy and high handed but it's really a synopsis of the journey of self discovery I've been on lately.  I've opened the files in my office and dragged in a big ass trash can.  Anything that doesn't feel good, special and all about my work goes into the can.  All the event negatives from the 1990's.  All the executive portraits older than three years.  And I've started showing only the styles I want to shoot.  Not everything I could do in a pinch.  It makes me feel lighter.  Like I'm freeing up mindshare.  But that's something for another month.

In the meantime my prescription for change is to go back to using your very first camera for a month.  If you learned on a Canon AE-1 or a Minolta Maxxum 7000 or a Holga, go back and get one and load it up.  Shoot the way you once loved for a month.  Live with your style for a month and see if it doesn't feel better. 

I could give you more advice about shooting with little strobes but it would all be bullshit until you figure out why you shoot, and what you want to have coming out of your camera.  Customers?  If the work is satisfying to you then you'll find the market you want.  It may not be the market that supports your BMW payments but remember, you trade you life for money and you'll never get either back, so you might as well start doing it on your terms right now!

Thanks, Kirk

Author:  Minimalist Lighting: Professional Techniques for Location Photography

      Minimalist Lighting: Professional Techniques for Studio Photography

(really, two totally separate books with annoyingly similar titles.....)

See more work:   Kirk Tuck's Commercial Website/An adventure in iWeb

Taking a mental vacation to the islands.

Belinda under the Jamaican Skies.

Obsessing about your job is a quick way to make life suck.  Letting go of job-session is a quick route back to happiness.  Over the last couple of years our industry has been pummeled like an ugly pinata at a teenage birthday party.  We've heard that stock photography will eat our lunches.  We've seen that clients under duress have the loyalty of a Goldman Sachs executive.  And we've been beat over the head with the concept that legions of amateur photographers will steal our clients (the same feckless clients) and undercut us by working for free.  Well.  What a special and happy way to look at your chosen profession. (sarcasm intended).

I'm not buying any of it anymore.  We're in full mercenary mode at Casa de Kirk Tuck Photography.  No mercy, no prisoners.  But we're doing it by re-inventing reality to suit our disposition.  The rules going forward are simple:  Provide a great product and provide it at a fair price.  If someone wants it cheaper, say, "No."   If no one wants the product then take the day off and work on one of those long term, big payoff, personal projects.  Part of the new reality is that we've got existence and subsistence covered and we're only working for the gravy anyway.  My own European social welfare construct on an individual and self directed basis.

So today a job got postponed.  No worries.  I had lunch with a wonderful art director instead.  We even had beer at lunch!  I swam at the pool this morning.  I'm writing a blog now.  And I'm going on vacation in my mind, remembering all the fun places I get sent....just because  I am a photographer.  

The image above was done on a vacation in Montego Bay, Jamaica.  Again, on vacation with a Hasselblad and a 100mm 3.5 planar.  One pocketful of Tri-X.  We'd done a project here a few months earlier and part of our payment was an equal amount of vacation time at the same resort.  We sampled many islands over the course of two or three years,  nearly always with the same bargain.  One week of work in exchange for a fee and a one week of vacation.  And vacation can be a beautiful thing.

So I'm banishing all those negative presumptions and my new reality includes the fact that the phone keeps ringing, the e-mail pinging and the checks arriving like clockwork in the mailbox.  Job postponed?  Off to lunch.  Job cancelled?  Off on vacation.

GEAR NOTE:  I like to keep my friends up to date about what I'm shooting with.  As you may remember I got some feedback from a big agency client a few months back about the need for much higher resolution in my files.  I'd been shooting exclusively with Olympus cameras because I find their lenses to be wonderful and the color palette very attractive.  And to a certain extent I'm enough of a curmudgeon to not want to shoot what everyone else does.......

But I am running a business, I'm not paid by Olympus and I do listen to my clients with the intensity and focus of the Echelon System.  So, knowing that Olympus isn't making any higher resolution cameras right now I added a Canon 5D mark 2 and some lenses.  Decided I could work with the system and started filling in the blanks spots.

I just picked up two pieces last week that I actually like shooting with a lot.  The Canon 7D and the Canon 15-85mm EFS zoom lens.  I'm practicing with them now and I'll be wringing them out at the next few swim meets and then I'll be ready to let you know what I think about them.....

Love the idea of full disclosure.  Just wanted to let you know what's jangling around in my brain and my camera bag today.

Sometime the only rules that apply are propriety.

So, I've made all kinds of pronouncements about how one should do street photography but here's one situation that falls outside my strictures.  I saw the face and wanted to do a quick portrait but she was in the wrong light.  I walked up and asked, in very broken Italian, if I could take her portrait and if she would mind moving about twenty feet to the other side of the street so I could take advantage of the overhanging structure to shield her from the direct sun but close enough to a bright wall so I would have some direction light on her face.  It was near dusk and she was also illuminated by the light fixture in the overhanging structure.  The whole process took about three minutes.  She was amenable but guarded and that was exactly the look I wanted.

Rules are helpful in defining the boundaries that you must inevitably step over to do art.

Overheard this morning at a coffee shop....

Two advertising agency creatives were sitting at a downtown coffee shop having some sort of espresso drinks and I overheard them talking about business.  Now, it's no secret that the advertising business is going through as big or bigger a meltdown than even the photography business so I leaned over a bit and concentrated.  I wanted to hear how they deal with the slow down and the slow pay and the slow etc.  Quick into the conversation it became obvious that their agencies had lost some pitches and things were.....tense in the respective offices.  Finally one of the guys says,  "We should both ditch our jobs and start our own ad agency."  The other guy takes a long drink of coffee, gives the other guy the "are you insane" look and then says,  "There a ton of agencies.  We don't need to open another one.  Someone needs to open some new clients!"

The above vignette has very little and a lot to do with the blog below...

Kids playing on the Square in Sienna.

Wow!  If you're really freaked out about the economy and the state of the world and you feel a bit paralyzed and helpless I suggest that you stop drinking coffee for a while.  You may find that half the panic is self inflicted..... You are also less likely to spill hot beverages into your lap while driving, or, onto your laptop while contemplating the fall of civilization.

I just got it today.  The realization that we have no machine that will allow us to freeze our cultural evolution at a point where it works optimally for me.  I now understand that we're never going back to the "old days" even though the old days never really existed except as a fluid interpretation in our own minds.  Were we richer then or did we care less?

I read something in a book over the weekend.  It said (and you've heard it before) "the past is like the wake of a boat.  It trails out of view, never to return.  As to the future?  One step ahead and all is blackness.  We have only now."  In a way this flurry of images from Italy is a purge of the past.  I'm showing them and then archiving the prints.  Because if you are busy tending the work of the past you don't have the bandwidth to create here and now.  I'll show some of my favorites over then next few weeks and then get back to work on my own stuff.  In a new way.  With new understanding and new insights.

One of the insights is the need to be flexible.  To bend and try new stuff. To embrace fun and stop digging in my heels, trying to make people understand the value of what we did in the past.  Someone once said, "No one will ever win who bets against the web."  I would add that you rarely win by depending upon the way you used to do things...

It's hot and summer and everyone is moving slowly.  I'm heading out to walk and soak up the feeling of slowness and see if there's a visual component to it.  Wish me luck.

Ah. Verona. Romeo and Juliet. Tourism. Italy.

As I mentioned in the last blog, I love shooting on the streets in Italy.  As part of one of our trips to Italy in the early 1990’s Belinda and I decided to visit some of the smaller cities like Lucca,  Bologna, Parma and Verona.  It was the same trip that found me dragging along my big, chrome Hasselblad 500 CM and my 100mm Planar lens as my street shooting camera.  While all of the cities had their own charming attributes it was Verona that stole my heart because of their wonderfully cynical tourist board.  They took the story of Romeo and Juliet and ran with it.  Right down to designating a small house and courtyard as the house of Juliet.  Tourist would go there to see where the star crossed lovers lived.  And the tourist board indulged them by also installing a telephone like contraption that, for a few coins, would tell you the brief story of the feuding houses in one of four different languages.  I noticed that the photo which graced the machine was from the Zefferelli version of the Romeo and Juliet movie.  So appropriate!

Of course we made the pilgrimage to the house.  How could we come all this way and not see it?  We saw a few adventurous tourists from other countries but we also saw plenty of Italians.  I saw this man listening intently to the taped message and couldn’t resist photographing him.  I printed the images and put them in a show a few years later.  Most people took a cursory look and decided that the man was some sort of shady character doing some sort of shady and illegal deal over the phone.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  He was just a local tourist, eager to hear all the news.

I have many images in my files of people on phones.  How was I to know back then that all the phone booths would eventually disappear only to be replaced by the ubiquitous cellphone?  The phone booth now seems like a romantic and chancy part of a past life. The cellphone like an empty appliance.  C’est la vie.