Portraits that measure the continuum of time together.

These are both portraits of Belinda.  The one on the top was taken today, in my studio.  The bottom one was taken over 30 years ago in a makeshift studio in the top part of a rambling old house I used to live in near the University.  Portraits shown one after the other catalog the changes life has made on peoples' faces.  But what do they say about, and to, the photographer who took them?

This morning I photographed a family in my little studio.  The studio is nestled next to our house, just a few steps from our front door.  The family are old friends.  I offered to photograph the kids and the parents and then the whole group in exchange for using some of the images in an upcoming book.  I also photographed them because I've been photographing them since their children were toddlers.  Now they are teens.  And, in a sense, I'm visually mapping the ever changing relationship between the kids and the world as manifested on their changing faces.  Much like I've done with my patient wife, Belinda.

When I finished photographing our friends and they pulled out of the driveway I walked into the house and was struck at how beautiful Belinda looked, just then.  I asked her to come out into the studio and pose for a few minutes.  I started the shoot with a couple lights on the white background and two lights in front.  One as a main light and the other as a fill.  One by one I extinguished each light until I ended up with just one thru a soft white scrim.  That was the distillation,  the look I wanted, and it's what I ended up with in the top photo.  But as I was processing the file I remembered the older photo, just below.  The image had the same resonance and the same style, connected, or disconnected over the thirty something years in between.

I rummaged thru the archive and pulled it up for comparison.  Two things struck me.  First is that in all my meanderings through all the technical adaptations of photography from the beginning of my career to now my basic style had remained the same and the way I like to light and look at people is consistent.  Amazingly consistent.  And secondly, to my way of thinking, Belinda has become more and more beautiful over the years.  She would complain about  her wrinkles and the unkindness of passing time but I only see her beautiful eyes.........

It's already a Happy New Year.  I wish the same for you.

note:


In a moment of unclear thought I abandoned my twitter account.  Now I wish I hadn't.  If you are so disposed could you click on the link in my link list and "follow me"?  http://twitter.com/#!/kirktuckphoto

A fun, Texas-style assignment. And portable lighting.

This is Dr. Russell Cunningham.  He's a rancher, a Texan, and a competition horse rider.  Oh yes, and he is also an accomplished oral surgeon.  I would probably have never met him if not for an ongoing project I've been doing for the practice in which he is a partner.

To make this image my trusty assistant, Ben, and I threw some gear in the trusty Honda Element and drove out past the town of Dripping Springs to the ranch.  Ben dragged the cases and sandbags out of the truck while Dr. Cunningham and I discussed the set up.  We shot in the open shade and went back in and filled with the Profoto 600b battery powered electronic flash firing into a Photek 60 inch Softlighter 2.  It's basically a 60 inch umbrella with a black backing.  It also comes with a diffusion cover to soften the light that bounces off the reflective surface of the umbrella.  I used the umbrella in fairly close and set the control box at half power.  I set a basic exposure for the sky and sunlit background and the used a light meter to set the flash level on Dr. Cunningham and his horse.  We brought two thirty pound sandbags along because we knew if the wind kicked up we'd need them.  We needed them!

Ben hung onto the stand and the umbrella while I fired away with a Canon 5Dmk2 and the 24-105mm L lens.  This lens has some cool features.  It's got a great range for most editorial situations.  It's got a really good image stabilization system.  It feels solid.  But the thing that keeps me reaching for it is that it's so darned sharp.  Even at f4 the detail I get in the center of the frame is really wonderful.  If I didn't suffer so badly from GADD (Gear Attention Deficit Disorder)  I could easily run my whole business with this lens and the 70-200 f4L lens.  They're a nice match.

The ad ran in color but I like the feel of the black and white treatment so that's how I processed it for my portfolio.

Every month has been different.  This one really feels like Central Texas in the old days.

Remembering that photography isn't really about the gear but about the cool things you can do with the gear.

 I make silly pronouncements from time to time.  My family and friends know me well enough to not take everything I say as the "final word."  They know I'll change my mind or my point of view when I wake up and see things in a new way.  Last week I ran a post that declared the Canon 7D my "Camera of the Year."  I hope the rational response is:  "So what?"  When I did my "Christmas List" one commenter posted a response that spanked me back into the reality I wish I spent more time in.  To wit, he said he didn't really care about the gear he just wanted the time and money to go someplace interesting and to be able to shoot there.  And that's the response I'd love to hear more often.

Don't get me wrong.  Gear is a important but only as a means to an end.  But all the tools in the world are meaningless if we don't get appropriate opportunities to use them.  But one of the tools we should have in our boxes, and one that is often overlooked, is basic camaraderie.

In my culture (pampered American living in an upscale neighborhood of intact families) we pay lip service and involuntary servitude to the overarching myth that family overrides everything else.  That nothing can be more important than family.  And I'm sure that's true in its most basic meaning.  But we've re-interpreted that, as a culture, to be an imperative that all time must be spent with family.  If you have a spare second it should be spent engaged in quality pursuits with our children.  If we have an opportunity to travel it's assumed that your spouse will share in the experience (and not via long distance).  In truth we've eroded two fundamentally healthy ways to exist.  In the first place we've surrendered our ability to enjoyed spending time by ourselves.  We feel guilty when we're not including everyone even though we'd really rather have some time to ourselves to read, create or just be a separate human being.  According to everything I've read we rebel in our teen-aged years to be able to differentiate ourselves and become individuals........why do we spend our adult years joined at the hip?

In the second place we've lost the ability to create and maintain friendships with groups of like minded people.  The photograph above was done in Rome a few years back.  These men meet nearly everyday at a little table next to someone's apartment building.  They drink, they play cards, they tease each other, they talk politics and they revel in other male company.  This easy camaraderie is vanishing in our culture.  We've replaced the more intimate surroundings and easy exchange with friends with things like loud and chaotic happy hours and quick texts.  Several mental health care professionals have bought copies of the above to display in their offices.  They say that it reminds them to remind their clients to work on building healthy networks.  Not to further businesses but to further their happiness.

I look at this photo to remember the value of everything I talked about above.  I took this image back in 1995 while in Rome on a shooting trip with my good friend, Paul.  We left our wives in Austin, grabbed a couple hundred rolls of medium format film and proceeded to have a good, long shooting trip in Rome and Orvieto.  We shared information about the best routes to walk and the best sites to see and we ended most days over dinners with wine and stories about time spent ferreting out interesting stuff.

Our interests were aligned in a way that was much different than the uneasy truce that takes place when travelling with a non-photographer partners.  We didn't need shared shooting experiences but we did appreciate the easy mix of technical and logistical information sharing mixed with observations about everything from the classic beauty of Italian women to the virtues of the antipasto buffet at Al Grappolo D'oro.

I think photography is a like living life.  Too much tunnel vision is boring.  The same view every day is boring.  The same conversations, boring.  Only by stepping outside a uniform construct, even if it's just for a few days at a time, informs us and makes us happier.  Just a point of view now that we're getting close to the end of another year.  Space.  It's the final frontier.

I showed these two images to make the point that being in the right place and being awake to life is much more important than what sort of camera and lens I used.  Or how I used it.  While it's good to make sure your shutter and aperture are correctly engaged making sure you're happiness and interests are engaged is even more important.


Note:  I screwed up and cancelled my twitter account.  I've gotten a new one.  Please see the links for the new address if you want to follow my 140 character ramblings.  And let me know your twitter address if you want followers.

Anatomy of a public relations job.

I love public relations.  I love events.  They separate the real photographers from the poseurs.  They help you channel your photo Ninja skills.  A bit before everyone started to close down for the holidays I got a call from one of my clients at Dell, Inc.  Would I be available to shoot an event at a local Boys and Girls Club?  You bet.

Here's the background:  Dell, Inc has been a major, major contributor to the Austin Area Boys and Girls Clubs for over twelve years.  In addition to very generous financial support they've also be proactive in getting computers into the hands of "at risk" kids.  And they've provided the product and funding to set up computer resources within the Boys and Girls Clubs.

The event that I was contacted about was typically Dell.  Instead of just dropping by for five minutes of face time in front of the media the Dell Executive Leadership Team showed up, in force, to lead the kids thru several hours of one-on-one instruction about doing projects......and yes, even homework.....on computers.

My responsibility was pretty open ended.  I got an agenda and a "wish list" of possible shots but no one was looking over my shoulder to approve or un-approve of a shot or an angle.  The expectation was that I'd get good shots of each team member working with real kids on real projects.  To that end I took about five hundred shots and edited them down to about 300 for the public relations team to choose from.  My goal in these situations is to work like a journalist and not effect the scene any more than necessary.  No coaching or setting up poses.  Just straightforward reportage.

There are always several challenges.  People step in front of the camera from time to time.  The lighting all came from old, overhead florescent fixtures.  Nothing was choreographed with me in mind.  I had to anticipate where I should stand and when I should stand there in order to best document an unfolding scene.  I needed to stay out of the way of the Dell in house videographer so I wouldn't spoil his takes.  I needed to use flash sparingly, if at all, to keep the natural look of the scenes.  I had to be attentive to the dynamics between the children and the adults.  But above all I had to move the camera away from the front of my face and actually look, listen and pay attention.  Otherwise I'd miss the good moments and I'd tunnel vision into cliches.

I shot with two cameras.  I got the most use out of a Canon 5Dmk2 with the remarkably versatile 24-105mm f4 L zoom lens.  Even though the light was low and mixed with light through windows covered with different covered appliques the white balance in the raw conversions was quick and easy.  I shot most things at f4 or 5.6 making good use of the Image Stabilization.  At ISO 3200 the shooting shutter speed hovered between 1/125th and 1/250th of a second.  I applied a little bit of noise reduction in the final processing.  The second camera, the 7D with a 35mm f2 on it was there just as a back up.

One wag asked me later, when I was explaining the project to him, why I didn't use the 35mm 1.4 and the 85mm 1.1.2 L lenses instead.  The misconception among people who don't regularly do this kind of work is that we could always use a faster aperture.  But it's just not true.  When you are shooting scenes like the one above you need a certain amount of depth of focus in the photograph to keep all the main players reasonably sharp at the same time.  With a 1.4 lens wide open I would have been able to render Michael Dell pin sharp but the kids would have been rendered as nice, cotton candy, bokeh-blurs.  And the kids were the real story.  If I had been braver I would have chosen to shoot at f5.6 and ISO 6400 but our turnaround was quick and I haven't played with that ISO setting enough to have the confidence I would have liked.

It was a great job to do before Christmas.  Michael Dell and the Exec. team were all warm and gracious and giving to the kids.  No one was rushed.  No one reticent.  The kids loved the computers that were donated and I was jealous that they were getting the latest touch screens monitors in their computer labs.  The Austin Boys and Girls Clubs do such a great job keeping kids safe and well directed.  And the Dell people do such a great job working with the kids.

I headed home after the last executive got into his car with the last rays of a late December sunset in the background.  I checked in with Belinda and headed into the studio to do my initial processing.  I edited down the files in the input screen of Lightroom and imported the 300+ I selected.  I imported them to two different external hard disks at the same time while re-naming them with a job code.  I also meta tagged them and wrote captions for various groups.  I checked my names in the little Moleskine notebook I carry on jobs.  Once I had all the global corrections done I exported the files as 1500 pixel (on the long side) jpeg files.  While that was running I ducked into the house to see how Ben was doing on his homework and to have dinner with the family.

Then I came back to the studio to upload the images to a password protected web gallery, send the links to my corporate contacts and head back into the house to watch an episode of "Madmen" on DVD and relax.  Before I turned in I checked e-mail, grabbed the files the team ultimately selected and postprocessed them in PhotoShop.  No big changes.  Just a stringent color correction and a bit of cropping.  In the Info palette I wrote AP approved captions and sent out the images to the wire service.

Got an e-mail in the morning that everyone was happy and proceeded to write a note to myself in my little journal.  It reads, "One job done.  I'm happy.  They're happy and I hope we work together again soon.  Note to self:  Send thank you cards."

I really do appreciate the great clients out there.  I'm happy and thankful that hey do more than just business.