I bought another lens. It's an "old news" lens but I like it.

Sigma Seventy.

Over the last four years I've played with a lot of lenses. Some good.  Some really good. And a handful that were mediocre. But whenever I talked to my photographer friends about good medium telephoto lenses for APS-C cameras someone would always toss in the "really, really good Sigma 70mm f2.8 Macro."  But something always kept me from buying the lens. When I shot with Canon's APS-C cameras I used the 60mm 2.8 macro and it was pretty good. With full frame cameras I always seemed to fall back on the Zeiss 85mm or one of the Canon or Nikon 85's.

My optical sweet spot  for portraits (based on my years with "full frame" 35mm film) has always been a 90, 100 or 105mm focal length.  When I switched to the Sony a77 cameras I started looking around again. I have the 85mm Sony lens but that works out to about a 128mm equivalent focal length. I love the lens and I'm sure I'll get plenty of use out of it when I buy a VG-900 or an a99 but I wanted something shorter.  

I could use the wide end of my very nice Sony 70-200mm 2.8 G lens but I really wanted something smaller, lighter and more single-focally.  And having used the 85mm wide open to good effect I wanted something extra crisp at 2.8.  The 70-200mm is great from about f4 on down but it can be just a tad softer wide open.

I started looking again.  Then, in the middle of the week several unconnected people mentioned the Sigma 70mm.  When a client called last week to book me for a shoot today, which was all about portraits that would run big on large posters, I decided to get the Sigma 70, test it and use it if it passed the test. It did.

The lens is sharp wide open and insanely sharp by f4.0. It uses the old screwdriver AF so it's noisy when it's looking for sharp and it's a real macro lens so it tends to be geared for lots of range in the close area which means it hunts more than a lens with a different slip differential.

I don't really care. In the bright light of a white background, studio set up the camera and lens combo focused promptly and with ample authority. I just got back to the studio after spending the better part of the day shooting. I've been reviewing the files I shot at 1:1. They are very, very good.

So, the lens is four years into its product cycle and noisy when auto focusing (manual focus is silent and easy with focus peaking). I don't care. It's sharp wide open in a way most lenses never achieve. It has a crispy character and it cost less than five hundred anemic American dollars.  I love it. It reminds me of my old Nikon 105mm f2.5 lens, once considered the ultimate portrait lens. Only sharper.  Images to follow.

A strange assignment that, in retrospect, is analogous to modern over processing...

An art director who had seen some of my hand colored portraits called me and got a bid for making a number of still life constructions, photographing them using 4x5 Polaroid Positive Negative film (Type 55), printing large prints from the resulting negatives and then lightly coloring them with Marshall's Transparent Oil Paints.

Each of the construction was used as a facing page or illustration in a four color brochure for a financial services company. We shot 12 set ups over the course of three days, in the studio.

At the time I was using a Linhof TechniKarden 4x5 inch view camera with an older set of Zeiss lenses. Most of the images were done with shorter lenses, in the range of 150mm to 210mm. To get different lighting effects we were spraying light through glass bricks, clear marbles and odd screens. It was the early 1990's and torn paper was chic.

The process was fun. We'd work on the constructions and keep photographing them with the Polaroid film. If the art director liked a construction we'd take the resulting negative and soak it in a sulfite bath to fix it. My darkroom was adjacent to the studio and at the end of the third day we had clotheslines full of curly, thin negatives hanging in neat rows.

My assistant and I contact printed all the "keeper" negatives and shared them with the art director. She made final selections and I headed back into the darkroom to make black and white prints on matte surface photographic paper. Once the images were printed (I made multiple copies as hand coloring is anything but an exact science) I sat down at a big table in the middle of my big studio and started coloring with little brushes, balls of cotton and cotton wrapped around little wooden sticks.

Once the prints were finished and presented we grappled with the fact that the color separator wasn't too thrilled about wrapping still malleable oil painted surfaces around their very expensive drum scanner. We ended up using an Apo lens on the Linhof and shooting copy shots of the large prints. The color separator did their work from the resulting 4x5 inch transparencies.

The process, from bid to final copy transparencies took, cumulatively, about ten days. We shot at least 150 sheets of Polaroid black and white, positive/negative film. The images worked well in the brochure and the brochure won some awards. everyone was happy.

When I look back at jobs like this I wonder where planning and patience has fled to in the world of advertising and the graphic arts.

The image above is a snap shot of a copy transparency of a work print from that time. The final image, presented above was taken with a Sony a77 and a 30mm macro lens with the transparency precariously balanced on the frosted plexiglass top of an old light box.

Just mellowing out to a bit of nostalgia this morning.

Yes Virginia, there can be such a thing as too little depth of field.

Untitled Photo #2

Contax RTS3. 85mm 1.4 Carl Zeiss lens.

Maybe.

Little City Coffee Shop on Congress Avenue.

 Untitled photograph.

Obscure and marvelous objects of keen desire. Meter me. Please.

A light meter for the 21st century.

While the photo world pants at the rumor of more and more very similar cameras being readied for the market a lot of really cool stuff is languishing because it's not bling enough for prime time. The Sekonic Pro L-478D light meter is one of these cool stuff devices.  

While light meters seem to have fallen out of favor with most grab and shoot photographers I still carry around two different ones and use them on every shoot that requires me to use lighting.  I wouldn't want to do lighting set ups without one. The one that travels with me everywhere is the tough and hardy Minolta autometer V f.  Like most good meters from last century it reads both flash and ambient light. It's never broken and it takes a double a battery, which makes me happy.

In the studio I depend on my Sekonic L-508 zoom meter. It's a great incident light meter and it also has a built-in in spot meter function that I use, infrequently.  I use both the Minolta and Sekonic meters to measure mostly flash output on white backgrounds but after a bad experience with the rendering of test portraits on the rear LCD of a Nikon D700 I've gone back to making incident readings for every portrait session I do. I've found LCDs on most camera give varying results in varying ambient light environments and it's easy to under expose portraits since the live view or review screens always seem too hot to me.

With two meters in residence at VSL why in the world would I want the L- 478D? Well, mostly because it's so cool. It has features that I think are fun and useful.  I love the big screen and the fact that it's a touch screen. I like the front and center cinematography features and while I probably won't have a use for shutter angle settings as the world of film movie cameras darkens I find being able to set frames per second on the meter a big help when I'm trying to noodle in a good exposure that still hews to proper video technique.

The meter builds on the camera calibration we first say in the L-758 meter and the compulsively detail oriented photographer will have the option of fine tuning the meter and its read out based on actual camera performance.

But why use a separate meter at all? Precisely because we are so subjective when it comes to visual analysis. Most camera LCDs and EVFs show a preview or a review based on the jpeg converted file generated by our cameras, even when we are shooting raw. The exposure latitude of jpegs is much narrower and I've found that camera makers consistently engineer their cameras to err on the side of underexposure in nearly all situations. Even when the image on the screen is big and bright. You can see it plainly if you examine your camera's histogram and compare it with what you are seeing when you look at the same image on the camera's screen. The screen shot looks bold and bright while the (too tiny) histograms almost always have a notch-lette of flat line over to the right hand side.

When I use an incident flash meter, at the subject location, aiming directly back to the camera I generally get readings that are one half to one full stop more aggressive than what my cameras suggest. When I trust the meter I generally get perfectly exposed skin tones and detain in all highlights but I don't get crunched shadows and ruddy transitions from mid tone to dark in portraits.  That alone is enough to keep me using meters for a long time to come.

Where incident light meters really come into their own is aiding in the quick and precise set up of white background studio shots. I meter the background to make sure it's even and I take the incident reading (plus 1/3 stop) as my base for the set up. Then I use the incident light meter with the subject and raise or lower the illumination on the subject until it reads what the background does (before adding the 1/3 stop correction for detail-less white...) and I know I'm where I need to be to have the cleanest, noise free files with the right tonal ranges. Magic.

You're probably able to do much the same process with the reflected light meter in the camera but there's more math involved and the reflectivity of the background materials makes a difference in the accuracy of the metering. 

The reason I want the new is mostly that the new display is much more readable for me than the older, lower contrast, monochrome displays of the older meters. I also like that I can make changes to frequently used parameters on the touch screen rather than having to find the right button and scroll.

The meter uses two triple "A" batteries, which is better than some obscure older camera type battery (I'd prefer one double "A"....).   With included accessories you can use the meter as a reflected one instead of an incident light meter, and, by adding an accessory you can convert the meter into a five degree reflected spot meter.  The meter is highly configurable and offers thirteen different custom settings. It is firmware upgradeable via an USB socket.

Both of my current meters are over ten years old. Buying a new meter happens rarely but they are pieces of gear that I use nearly every day. When I'm shooting with a non-metered Hasselblad they are a constant companion. Now, if I can just get approval from the CFO.....

What book would I start with if I wanted to learn how to light?

The one book I always recommend for people who want to really learn about lighting.

I know you might have thought I'd be pushing one of my lighting books in today's column but I'm writing this because I've been hearing from a lot of people lately who want to move beyond the noble savage stage (available light only) of photography and really learn how the nuts and bolts of lighting work. I'm old fashion, I think you should learn the theory first and then build the practice framework on top of that.

I've written five books on photography and I know how hard it is to do it right. Fil Hunter, Steven Biver and Paul Fuqua have done it right with their book, Light, Science, Magic..., so much so that it is now in its fourth edition and it never leaves the top ten tier of lighting books on Amazon.com
It is one of the best books about the nature and control of light I have ever read and I keep replacing copies that are (permanently) "borrowed" from the studio bookshelves because I find myself returning to the book time and again as a primary reference for both my writing about lighting and my practice of photography.

Disclaimer: I have no financial interest in this book. Mr. Hunter and I exchanged e-mails several years ago about the possibility of doing a joint project but we were both too busy to follow up and nothing came of the communication. I just really like this book and think VSL readers will be happy to have it at hand as a resource.

Buying a copy from the link below will help to support the blog with no additional cost to the purchaser: 

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0240812255/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0240812255&linkCode=as2&tag=thev0c1-20

Michael Reichmann has written a first review of the Sony a99.

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/reviews/cameras/sony_a99_field_report.shtml

It's a good read for anyone interested in Sony's new, FF, DSLT flagship still camera. He likes nearly everything about the camera except------------the inclusion of the electronic viewfinder instead of an optical viewfinder. I'm holding back my opinion until I handle a Sony a99 in the flesh. We'll see....

Smaller, Lighter, Faster? How about bigger and better. What's ahead for the professional photographer.

Steering is almost as important as taking the right road.

I had a plan for the recession and it worked out okay. It was pretty simple. Get rid of anything with a recurring payment (stuff like cable TV, a fax line, subscriptions of any kind, standing lunch appointments, car payments and coffee) and then relentlessly downsize. Minimize. Maintain a low overhead and continue to market as much as possible.

Professional photographers were the first "luxury" item to be cut by our corporate clients and right after us they put all the good graphic designers and traditional ad people on hold. Clients maximized anything they could on the web because of the perception (real or imagined) that they were getting placement for free. Also, web oriented design shops turned out (according to studies done by Ad Age) to charge about half the fee traditional print shops did (and still do) for creative content.  The lunge to the web and the hop out of more traditional media made "good" photography less mission critical than in the days of print and P-O-P and that made it A-okay for everyone to lean heavily on "almost free" stock photography for their websites and e-mail blasts.

Given the Scrooge-ian nature of the last four years in our industry I think my instinct to downsize and hold the line were prescient. It didn't hurt that we produced five books over the course of the recession but that was sheer, dumb luck and not part of any conscious plan for survival.

More to the point I counseled any who asked to do as much as they could with the least they could manage. My first book, Minimalist Lighting was marbled with this convenient belief.  And so, for the last few years, we've excused our assistants from the room, learned how to pack lighter and continued to try and make a living in photography.  And when I say, "We" I mean professional photographers around the world.

Like a sinusoidal waveform on an oscilloscope every trend and cycle has a natural progression. A market hits the apex of its successful curve and then crashes down to the bottom of its trough and then repeats the cycle. The main differences are the length of time over which the cycle plays out and how steeply inclined are the angles of destruction and recovery. Those pesky x/y axes.

Now we're starting to see a healthy revival amongst our diverse client bases. People are coming back to the table. Like all you can eat Sushi that's three days old they've had pretty much all the stock imagery they can take and they're ready for more diverse and substantial fare. But while everyone was hibernating in their bunkers the content providers shifted and changed. Now all the cameras are more or less the same. Everyone seems to be using little battery powered lights that limit the potential to provide a wider palette of lighting design.  At our clients' cues, in the past four years, we all started to gear down for "good enough." And now that they've emerged (the clients) from the economic bomb shelters and the  life support stasis pods they're hungry to go back to a universe they used to know. One in which photographers could trot out the big guns and do marvelous things.

But circumstances flattened the playing field so hard that few are left who even remember how to light well and big.  Or even anything at all beyond one light.

Much of the style that dominated over the last four or five years was generated and mutated by a grim necessity = no budgets. No budgets for models meant more retouching and a lot of compromise on the messaging. No budgets for gear meant lots of available light with fill flash and a rash of itchy, uncomfortable PhotoShop manipulations just to get images up to what would have previously been considered basement level quality.

So here's what I think clients want right now.  (Real clients. Players with checkbooks and P.O.'s.) They're starting to think they want to see how good it can really be again. They want photographers to play big again and break out the atomic arsenal of creative kick-ass and they're almost willing to pay for it again. But they're looking around and not finding many steady hands left. Or new ones to take their places. And no one wants to play "re-invent" the wheel again.

Here's the plan for commercial photographers for the next few years (and hopefully these are years that are on a newly ascendent part of the economic waveform):  Play big. If you still have your big power packs and heads and a case filled with Monolights then get them out and play big. Light shit up old school good. Show potential clients the difference between a skinny, anemic Nikon flash in a cheap umbrella and several thousand watt seconds through a seven foot Octabank and several layers of real silk. Show them with the work. Demand good models (not their office admins and interns) and demand real make up artists, not the Goth chick you met on Model Mayhem.

We need to get back into the mindset of knocking down imaging compromises and re-focus on making images that are as good as we are capable of producing. We need to deliver the highest production values we can imagine.

We ducked and covered when there was no other way. That's over.  If you can handle big lights well and big files even better you're almost there. If you can also direct and produce a shoot and make it sing then you have become re-competitive. As of now it seems like price is no longer the only consideration in the bid process.

The mantra changes as the economy changes. We spent doing the last four years doing whatever it took to stay afloat and profitable.  That meant smaller teams; it meant cutting muscle and it meant a diminished way of working. It's hard to change gears now but it's a new quarter and a new game and it's ramping up quickly. If you play to your strengths and amplify your advantages you have the potential to grab and hold more market share as advertising and commercial markets move from positions of procurement weakness and uncertainty to a new drive with a new goal. Cumulatively the clients know the dreck they've been using for the last four years is now an anchor on profits and forward momentum and they know they need to upgrade their game. They'll do it with much better content and much more differentiated content.  When economies recover it's almost always reflected in the advertising, expressed as much increased production value.  Grander visions and greater emphasis on quality.

For many companies it's time to reposition as "subtle yet elegant" instead of "workmanlike." And the first contact every company has with it's clients and customers are the image presented by their advertising.  Strong, powerful, stable and innovative companies show off best with high production values, beautiful faces, professional styling and appropriate propping and great locations. It's the good, old "put  your best foot forward" theory.

If you can light and shoot well you may win. If you try to sell  only on low prices now you'll only play in the discount sandbox with the other children.  The rest of us are getting back to business.  And it makes sense to go back to playing with the big gear now.

Program note: This advice is relevant only to the north American market. I think we've de-leveraged a lot of debt both on the consumer and corporate sides of the ledgers and we've become more financially efficient. Europe is lagging in the de-leveraging arena and it's retarding their small business and medium business recovery, in some cases severely.

I don't know about the wedding and portrait markets. My statement is only about the commercial, advertising, public relations and corporate markets. That's where the money current sits. That's the segment with both pent up demand and actual need as opposed to "want." 

A black and white walk. Why I think the Sony Nex 7 is a great black and white camera.

When I first started taking photographs all I could afford was black and white film and black and white prints. They were much cheaper than color at the time. We grew up in photography convinced that nicely done black and white prints represented the apotheosis of artful photography and that color was something people did for work. It's hard to bust up long time habits of thought.

I'd come off a long week of working photography and post processing so the last thing I wanted to do today was walk around and shoot color images. I really did want to walk around and shoot black and white images and channel my first romps with Tri-X and its brothers.  My first thought was to shove the Hasselblad in the car and go to it but I've decided to reserve that puppy for making portraits. Methodical and well thought out portraits. Instead I grabbed the Sony Nex 7 and the 50mm 1.8 OSS lens, a Hoodman 16gb SD card and some cash and I headed out the door for a brisk walk in the first afternoon of Austin's first brisk weather of the Fall.

I've worked with the Nex 7 long enough so that it falls to hand transparently and operates on an almost subconscious level. The focal length is perfect for most of the things I see and now I find that its black and white rendition suits my tastes as well. I usually end up brightening the image (but not much) and adding a little gob of contrast. No more monkeying around with the laborious black and white controls in PhotoShop "Adjustments."

When I shoot with black and white in mind I don't worry or even think about noise at higher ISO settings. I just shoot. I had my camera set up as aperture control (generally at f3.2) and the ISO set to auto. I used my EVF and I could see instantly, via pre-chimping, if the image was going to need a slightly increased exposure or not.  After the settings were locked in I just enjoyed the looking and the shooting.

Working in close with the sparkly 50mm 1.8 Nex lens means having fun with limited depth of field and high sharpness. I was handholding these shots at the bar in Caffe Medici at around 1/20th of a second so I'm going to suggest that the OSS (optical super steady) works pretty well.

I spent a good amount of time just walking out the kinks from the recent structural failure of my back. (concerned parties may be interested to know that I was able to swim about an hour or around 3,000 yards this morning, without incident.  Thanks to all who recommended ice packs and Advil....).  I was also breaking in a new pair of shoes.

As a result of tests done with the Sony Nex 7, the 50mm 1.8 and lots of pixel peaking I'm ready to announce that the Nex 7 is one of the finest IQ and handling digital cameras I've ever had the pleasure to use. The files are far better, overall, than the files from my recently discarded Canon 1dsmk2 and even a bit better (dynamic range and low ISO tonality and sharpness) than my even more recently discarded Canon 5D mk2. Not at all bad for a camera that's roughly 1/7th of the 1DS mk2's original selling price and about 1/3rd the original selling price of the Canon 5D mk2.

We can argue lens choice all you want but with an ever increasing range of Zeiss and now Schneider lenses becoming available for the Sony Nex system I think the Canons are currently fighting a losing battle.

There is a caveat. The Nex 7 is not for action photographers. The contrast detection AF is really good but it is not up to the level of focus tracking and quick lock on that many amateur will expect. Not much of a bother for those that used to focus under dark cloths with 4x5 and 8x10 view cameras.  I'm willing to give up a few milliseconds for the kind of imaging performance I am able to get from such a small, inexpensive yet powerful package.  And I suspect that if you shoot the way I do you may too.

Ye olde dayes of corporate photography...

Mid-1990's. I've set up a flash and I'm going to make portraits of each person who gets on this boat for a cruise around the lake. I'm stacking up the city skyline in the background. I'm using the self-timer on my camera to test the flash. Since we didn't have little TVs on the back of our cameras I am using a flash meter. We shoot a lot of 35mm film and our lab makes prints for everyone. The event is for Motorola. They serve a dinner on the boat. It is chicken or beef fajitas and assorted complementary Mexican food. Wine and beer. I eat a fajita, it is pretty darn good.

Walking back a commitment to digital imaging.

The latest Photokina and the showing of new product from the makers of medium format digital gear started some discussions around the web on just how different current medium format digital cameras are from 35mm sized digital cameras. And that led, on most of the forums that deal with the arcane world of cameras costing over $10,000 to a rather logical discussion of just what might be the differentiators between the current state of MF digital and all the more "plebeian" format such as m4:3, APS-C and 24x36.

Here's how I parse it all: Until the launch of the Nikon D800 the medium format market dominated the highest image quality tier because of the enormous resolution advantages and the true 14 or 16 bit depth per channel. Holding the line at 6um pixel sizes also yielded advantages in overall dynamic range. There was also the presumption (or prejudice) that CCD sensors looked better than CMOS sensors and all of the MF digital backs and cameras used CCD sensors.

When Nikon (Sony) showed up with the 36 megapixel chip and it turned out to be really, really good it naturally eroded a lot of the imaging quality advantages.  Now the MF crowd are starting to source CMOS sensors to answer two of the vexing issues facing MF camera users: 1. Being able to accurately focus the systems, via live view and getting meaningful previews. So now the perceived advantages of the CCD sensors will be eliminated as well (holy homogenization!).

Where that leaves most medium format digital users who are in the financial "nose bleed" section is with camera backs of about 40 megapixels with a total sensor geometry that's about 50% bigger than a competing 24 by 36mm sensor.

None of that really matters to me. The thing I want when I look to medium format is that wonderful size different that we had between 56 by 56mm film and 24 by 36mm film.  Being fractionally bigger doesn't convey the optical difference in depth of field or rate of focus fall off the way X times bigger does.  What's the difference in surface area? How about 864 versus 3136? Roughly a 4:1 difference.  The difference between a Leica S sensor and a Nikon/Canon/Sony sensor? Roughly 1:1.5.  Hmmmm.

In the old days of film we came to MF for the resolving power but we stayed for the smoother tonal transitions and the smoother, more elegant and faster transitions between in and out of focus.  

And to a large extent that's one of the critical looks that's been missing from the tool box/ammunition dump of expressive photography since the early part of the century. We throw aesthetics out when we chose mindless convenience.

( Sarcasm alert: Yes, I'm sure you can put a fast lens on the front of your small digital camera and emulate the look of an older, square format camera with a long lens exactly..... )

Some of my photographer friends have been mystified by my acquisition of two nearly brand new Hasselblad 500 series cameras this year and I am sure they will be equally mystified by my acquisition of a lightly used 180mm f4 Zeiss Sonnar but I'm here to tell you that the look is different. At least it is to me and it's my pervasive sense of reality that I have to deal with, not anyone else's.

I actually did a private portrait session recently for a client who also thinks they can see the difference. While I'm sure it's a tiny niche market I'm equally sure that portraits done on full frame, medium format film can be a profitable niche in higher end markets. The more things are automated the more it seems that people are drawn to original works with mature and archival materials.  I guess we'll see we'll see what the market will bear.

The image above was done years ago with a Hasselblad ELX and a 180mm Sonnar f4. It was a very sharp and flare free lens that used to cost an arm and a leg. It can now be had for less than the price of a small sensor camera body. I go both ways. I have a Sony Nex system and I've used so many different professional and quasi professional digital systems that I could have saved the money and shot everything on film for the last 12 years. 

Digital has it's place. It's good for most stuff. But there are areas in which the bigger film size of 6x6 has clear aesthetic advantages to me. And if we're trying to market images without compromise why wouldn't I want to be able to work with the tools that match one vision? After all, someone has to work in that last 5%. (Remember all that stuff about "raising one's game?).

Staying focused on the work.

I think one of the interesting aspects of modern life is the push to turn everything we do into experiential entertainment and "group participation" exercises. You see it everywhere. In the 1970's we ran for exercise, now we run to participate in 5k's, 10k's, mini-triathalons and charity events of all stripe. It's not enough to own a cool car anymore, now you have to belong to a car club and write about your car on a forum.  As a working photographer it's the path of least resistance to do a workshop, a photo walk, a forum chat or work on your brand (whatever that means...). All of those things are generally focused on becoming more popular or more integrated with other photographers than they are focused on getting more work or doing more art.

The real work of all photographers is to do their work but being surrounded by other photographers slows down the process and dilutes most photographers' focus on their own individual point of view. Coffee and conversations about cool gear seem more fun than trudging around alone, looking for your kind of subjects or building a collection of images. Teaching workshops is a two fold reward equation. As a photographer you are getting paid for your efforts which is more and more necessary for people who are unable to move their shooting careers forward with real clients. But there is also the emotional reward of feeling wanted or needed by eager students. It can seem like a validation of your worth as a photographer.  

Likewise, frequent photo gatherings, be they workshops, coffees, photo walks, lectures and gallery visits also help people feel connected and as though they are learning more about their art, and moving their game forward.  In a sense the fully engaged workshopographer and his student counterpart have made a separate social activity of the idea of photography.  And it's a universe in which everyone seems to win and everyone gets a trophy for playing.

But it has little to do with the actual process of creating great photography or getting paid for it. 

Good photography comes from pursuing good pictures, not pursuing good reviews from non-professionals. But it's so easy to get sidetracked by the comfort and inclusion of the social process. Of the entertainment side of photography. And it's newest entertainment outlet, the stage show.

I feel it every time I'm asked to give a talk about some aspect of photography. Speaking about LED lights is not something that moves my creative vision for photography forward. Nor is talking about small flashes or electronic viewfinders. I'm repeating what I already know over and over again and many times to the same audiences. While fewer people would know who I am it would be more productive for my art to spend that time working on the work.

As a working professional and aspiring artist there are two groups of people I do need to surround myself with in order to be successful and neither group includes other photographers. One group is clients. Not workshop clients (unless I plan on changing careers, like so many of my peers, and start "teaching" full time. Oh crap, let's be honest. Entertaining full time ) A working photographer needs real clients. These are the owners of businesses, the marketing directors of corporations, the creative departments of advertising and public relations agencies and other people who need, as part of their jobs or the promotions of their businesses, to contract for the creation of images.  These are the people who license our work for money.

The last four years has been hard sledding for many commercial and editorial photographers but there is work out there. Magazines still publish. Products still launch. Press releases still go out and websites still get built-----a lot. But it's been harder than before to compete. The low hanging fruit got picked a while ago.  To many teaching a workshop or giving a speech or guiding a tour of wannabe wild life photographers seemed like a bright spot for previously working photographers in the midst of a cloudy business forecast. But, if you want to do advertising photography you have to find clients who will pay your invoices.  And if you want to lecture about current practices in commercial photography you pretty much have to be doing it contemporaneously.

Your business of licensing images depends on non-photographers being a large part of your universe. And it's their language you need to master. Not the language of the teacher.

Likewise, writing books for other photographers might be a great full time job for a writer who is keenly interested in photography but I think it's a sidetrack for someone whose life is about making great images. While sharing your knowledge, in books, about lighting, composition and even inspiration can return income it's nowhere near the income stream that one derives from successfully participating in advertising and commercial photography if you are able to compete. My books don't speak to my core audience (see: ad agencies and business, above) they speak to other working photographers and people with a keen interest in photography.  As such they do nothing to leverage my interface with my primary audience but they do create momentum that pushes me to do social marketing and blogging to effectively transform them into a profit stream which validates the time I spent on the books. It just doesn't move forward the actual work at the core of my vocation and avocation. 

I don't regret the writing because on several levels it sustained my interests and aided me financially during an altogether bleak period for the commercial arts. But I am ever cognizant that the book publishing process retarded my personal momentum in photographing for myself and it took time away that would have been well spent pursuing the kind of clients who represent my core business.

The other other group I need to access in order to continue to have real success as a photographer are gallery owners and curators. If you make the presumption (and who doesn't?) that your personal work has value you need a conduit to buyers who would want to acquire prints for collections and the decoration of their homes and offices. The gatekeepers to the real money in this field are the gallery owners and curators. Every jovial afternoon spent with the local camera club traipsing around "mentoring" amateurs and feeling wanted and needed by receptive and welcoming photographers is one less slot of time to spend researching and meeting with people who can move your career forward in a different way.

When you become ancient and you are wearing your trousers up under your armpits and combing what little is left of your hair over the bald spot on your shiny head you will still be able to work your camera and pursue your vision. But you will no longer be on the highly transitory "A" list for the next generation of camera buffs looking for a charismatic teacher who will lead them out of darkness and into strobism, one light-ism, zone-ism, and all the other offshoots of  the photo entertainment industry.

Better to make art and make the connections to sell art, and the connections to sell to commercial clients, right now so that you can afford to enjoy your photography on your own terms as you head to your dotage.

Staying focused on the core requirements of your commercial work means identifying the best markets for your work and connecting with as many members of those markets as you possibly can. Money is the reward for properly connecting with this market, not the adoration of your peer group.

Staying focused as an artist is harder. It's harder because it's not collaborative. It's not about consensus and it's not done in a group, jockeying to get a shot of the same subject from a slightly different angle. It means spending time alone coming to grips with what visual nutrition sustains you. It means spending time honing your craft. It means time spent actually doing the work. If you are a portrait artist it means time spent finding just the right subjects and convincing them to willingly bend to your ideas of what a portrait means. If you are a landscape photographer it means getting up early to get where you need to be when the light is right, and being willing to return to a spot again and again until the light is right.

If you work in the street it means working up the courage to engage people and jump on chance. Which means you have to be open and ready for chances, not engaged in a heartfelt discussion of the edge sharpness of the latest boutique optique.

But if you really want to do the art or anything it means you have to be committed to spend the time to work all the way through the process. If a print is your final  espressive product then you work from idea all the way through to the print and beyond. And at each step you have the choice of doing it your own way or getting all collaborative and share-y.  No great art is ever done by committee. No great art is a result of sharing with your team. And no great art can be learned, wholesale, from your mentor of the week or that class on creative imaging you take on the cruise ship.

The inspiration comes from many avenues but the realization comes solely from the artist. Staying focused makes the art focused. Too much discussion with peers and playmates during the gestation process just dilutes the original inspiration and makes it more group accessible. It's the latest creative battle: How to make art that you love while resisting the lure of being about art for entertainment's sake.

I'm not saying the equation needs to be all or nothing but I think we've become like aspiring film makers who've been to way too many movies. Spent too long on the learning curve.  We've seen every great film ever made and make time to watch movies almost continuously and, as a result, we never have time to make our movies....

That's okay if you are a movie critic but it's tough sledding if you really want to produce your own film.

I guess the real key is moderation.  Moderation in everything except the creation of your art....

edited:  an added thought from last year: http://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2011/07/worklife-balance-and-obverse-and.html

Coming back to the blog after a long and dusty trail of jobs.

I started working on projects last week and haven't slowed down since. I've learned that post production takes about 50% more than the amount of time it takes to actually shoot something. I've re-learned that camera bags get heavy by the end of the day. I've learned that no matter how long you've been doing this and how lofty the client there's always someone at an event who thinks you're the same thing as the party photographer at the frat house; who demands, in that imperious sort of voice saved for communicating with fast food cashiers and professionals from the plumbing and pest control industries, that you immediately follow them and photograph said order giver and her friend, Missy. Missy being too important to walk across the room...

If you've read the blog before you probably know that I was out this week photographing a conference at a conference center west of Austin. We started packing on Saturday night. The first wave of packing is to make a list of everything you want to bring.  My list included a Sony a77 camera, a Sony a57 camera, a 16-50mm 2.8 lens, a 70-200mm lens, a 24-85mm cheapo lens, six sixteen gigabyte SD cards, two extra batteries for each camera. One Sony HVL- a58ef flash unit with two extra sets of batteries. One Leitz monopod. One Leitz Tiltall tripod. Some Stride peppermint gum and an iPad. As an afterthought I added a small 160 LED panel and an extra battery for that.

Before I pack everything into a Domke shoulder bag I put everything on a table, pull all the batteries and put them all on chargers. I like to make sure all the batteries have a fresh charge. I must be doing something right with my Sony camera batteries because I'm routinely getting well over 1,000 shots in each camera, per battery.

Sunday was an easy slide into the job. My house is about four miles from the venue and the first part of the conference was a reception and dinner on Sunday night. I arrived at 6pm for a 7pm start. The dinner and reception were held in a large pavilion but the show crew was busy in the main auditorium, setting up lights, sound and staging. I stopped by there first as the event company is one I've worked with in five countries and for over twenty years. They are also based in Austin. I chatted with the show director and dumped the monopod and tripod in safe place behind the curtain wall since I wouldn't really need them until the next morning.

The staging was relatively simple. The had two ten by fifteen foot screens, one on either side of the main stage. The screens would be part of a two camera I-mag set up and the show would cut between live stage shots and charts, graphs and other infographics during panel discussions and lectures.

I took a few minutes to talk with the lighting designer who let me know that the front lights (the lights that wash the people on stage) would be  unfiltered tungsten. I said that would be great and I was happy I'd be able to set the camera WB at tungsten and be done with it.  He burst my bubble and told me they'd be dimming them to 75%. I concentrated for a minute, trying to channel the information I once read in my Kodak Photo Data Guide from 1978. It came to me. The 25% reduction would drop the color temperature to around 2900k and it's possible that the light would add .05cc's of green.  Simple enough setting with the Sony cameras.

I headed down to the dinner/reception location and got myself set. One camera dialed in with a 16-50mm fast zoom for use with flash and the other set up to do available light and also some work with a small LED panel.

I've shot corporate events for years and I'm always reminding myself that event planners want to have a record of all their hard work. That means shooting all the different flower arrangements, table decor and any extra touches they've put into a party or dinner. It's good to do this before the guests start to show up or, invariably, you'll be trying to shoot as people walk in and out of your backgrounds.

If there's an ice sculpture it's a good idea to get it shot early.  That dolphin is going to look like a jelly fish later on....

Everyone gets cranked up at a different speed when doing event work. No two photographers I've watched do it the same way. I like to stand around and just observe until at least the first fifty or sixty people show up. I like to the first arrivals get their choice of alcohol and start drinking before I start walking around the crowd shooting. It's like warming up a car engine on a chilly morning.

I like to shoot real candid photographs. I don't mind shooting pairs and trios and foursomes but I'd rather slink through the crowds, stalk the beautiful people and try to be as anonymous as possible. Works for some crowds and not for others.  While the sun set outside I was trying to work fast and get nice blends of on camera flash and exterior ambient light.

The Pavilion sits up on a hill and is surrounded on three sides by one of the nicest golf courses in central Texas.  The pavilion has a wide porch  on those three sides and people took advantage of the unusually temperate day to loll about outside. I took the opportunity to substitute the small LED panel in place of the typical flash. The panel has a control dial that allows the unit to be turned up to full power or all the way down in a smooth and continuous arc. I set the Sony a57 to 3200 ISO, opened up the 16-50mm lens to f3.5 and set the WB to AWB. My goal was to use the dial on the light to create an amount of front light that just barely overpowered the ambient light. I was in manual exposure and I worked the shutter speed dial as the daylight dropped.  Since the depth of field was limited by the f-stop I shot more to make sure I had "keepers."

It worked pretty well but eventually I got tired of working nearly wide open on the lens and switched back to the flash for small groups.  When the host got up on the small stage to welcome everyone I used the LEDs as my main light there as well.  It's a different way of working. Some things are better than with flash and some are worse. If I had been shooting advertising and had been able to set up the shots and work on a tripod it would have been a wonderful style to shoot because it's so easy to see the effect as you are shooting.

The evening's festivities wound down around 9:30 and I headed back home to recharge two batteries and get ready for the long Monday. When I hit the studio on my way into the house I checked e-mail and noticed two different client messages. Both needed some files generated and retouched ASAP and I figured I'd better just sit down right then and knock them out instead of letting it go into the week.

While I worked on the files on one computer I downloaded the evening's memory cards on a second computer, using Lightroom 4.1. I renamed the files and wrote them to two different hard drives. Once the files were downloaded I put the memory cards into a small, manilla envelope and wrote the job name and creation date on it and put the envelope into the job file for safe keeping. This way, even if both hard drives were fried by lightning or capitulated to some more arcane disaster I'd still have the originals to go back to.  It's standard procedure around here now that the cost of SD memory has dropped to almost zero.

I'll put the cards back into service as soon as the job is completed, the clients have multiple DVD copies and I've burned a set or two for myself.  When I finish making conversions from the raw files (after the job is backed up) I'll dump the raw files and keep only the final high res jpegs. On a job like this nearly all the uses will be in electronic media and 3200 original raw files from cameras that shoot 16-24 megapixels is just too much to store for posterity.

I hung a navy blue poplin suit, white shirt and thin black tie on my closet door, took a shower and hit the rack.

Ben and I were up Monday morning at 6am. Pretty standard this year for weekdays. I delivered Ben to cross country practice and headed back to the studio to pack up and eat a quick breakfast. I've gotten into the habit of eating plain Greek yogurt with a fistful of walnuts and a little drizzle of local honey on top.

I got the last close in parking space at the conference center and was on the show floor with the director and client at 7:15 am.  We spent a half hour shooting various "stage looks" and lighting designs for everyone's portfolios.  The main doors for the 350-400 attendees opened at 8 am and the conference was scheduled to start at 8:30 am. I staked out a place at the table that faced center stage, put down my camera back and then headed to the atrium area just outside the ballroom to grab coffee and an apple.

The conference started at 8:30 on dot and we spent the entire day, from 8:30 am to 6:30 pm, divided between individual speakers and panel sessions. I keep two cameras and two lenses with me and the monopod. I shove a couple extra batteries in my pockets along with two extra memory cards. Part of the job is to shoot various angles and magnifications of each speaker and of each panel member as they speak on stage.  This requires me to move around a bit and I always try to time my moves with slide changes on the big screens or audience laughter or responses.

I'll kneel down next to the the side of the stage to stack up panelists with a bit of compression using the longer lens and I shoot corner angle shots of the full stage at the widest angle for a little forced optical drama. You have to have a certain balance. You don't want to shoot so many images of each person that your wading through and endless sea of big, fat raw files but, at the same time you are covering live performances and you're trying to catch moments where people looked engaged and focused and they are not making funny expressions with their eyes or their mouths.  Some people look natural pretty much all the time and some people have faces that are constantly in motion-----and not always in a good way.  You get a rhythm over time.

There's a break every two hours. At the morning break there's always coffee and pastries and fresh fruit and bagels. The next big break is a seated lunch in the conference center's elegant restaurant.
And then the afternoon is broken up with several more breaks. The favorite is generally the one with all the ice cream treats and fun cookies.

I try to pay attention to the content of the show but I am just a small business person and most of the jargon, acronyms and subject matter is way over my head. The distinguished speaker from the Deutsche Bank spoke better english than most people I know but he might as well have been speaking German for all the good it would do me. Anybody else not know what a "Non-Agency RMBI" is?  Oh well.

After the last session (Champagne served during the panel debate...) everyone headed back into the atrium for yet another "heavy hors d'oeuvres and cocktails" reception before crawling into the town cars and limousines that whisked the attendees off to various restaurants across town.

I tossed the hardware back into the bag, hoisted it onto my shoulder and headed back to my car. Back at the studio I answered e-mail while backing up  Monday's covey of memory cards and writing out yet another envelope for temporary storage in the job folder.

Tuesday was a repeat of Monday. And I guess I should mention that in the between times between sessions, during lunches and breaks, I am trying to get photographs that show people networking and building business relationships. I get my best stuff on the last day of most conferences because people have had enough time to get acclimated to my presence and become well bored by the whole idea of that novelty of the 20th century, documentary photography.

But I'm also constantly on the prowl for little visual tidbits that I take just for myself. The way a man pours himself coffee, the over the top shoes worn by the remarkably good looking woman who just happens to be the youngest of the attendees, the way the swivel chair bases all line up. It's fun and it's generally what I remember most from the many conferences I've shot. The way the key lime pie looked on it's white china plate was more alluring than the keynote speaker at a show in San Francisco.  The flowers and the sky, smashed together with a 15mm lens was more fun than the famous band at another outdoor venue and, of course, the woman with the stunning eyes trumped presidents and CEO's for pure magnetic attraction.

We wrap up around 6:30 pm on Tues. night and I head home to shove the last of the memory cards into the system. The suits are still fresh so I hang them up. The shirts get in the bag that goes to the dry cleaners. I check my black tie for food spots and count myself lucky once again. I kick off the Cole Haans and relax with the family as the cards drone on and spit their files onto the spinning platters of our reality.  Before I head to bed I go out and transfer the SD cards into yet another envelope for safe keeping.

The show is over but the work isn't done.

Weds. morning was set aside for two bid meetings, back-to-back. I know I'm just the "invited guest" to round out a three way for one of them but I think I have a good shot at the other job because it's largely portraits in my style and it's an art buyer I've worked with.

Played with the dog for an hour and then headed to Esther's Follies for an absolutely fun assignment. Esther's Follies is a live cabaret/theater that does political comedy, topical comedy (think: Honey Boo Boo meets Snooki) and magic. Every year I get a call to come in for an afternoon and shoot a non-stop, hyper photo shoot to generate advertising images for the next year.  We were originally booked for last Weds. but you'll remember that was the day I damaged my poor back and, as a consequence, I had to re-schedule.

We did the shoot the same way we do our running shoots for Zachary Scott Theater. They run through the acts and I shoot like crazy.  I did bring along four Elinchrom monolights and a bunch of Varistar umbrellas and we did use them for some stuff but most of the images were done with the stage lighting and a follow spot.  I leaned heavily on a pair of Sony a57's because the file size is just right in raw, they have really clean 800 ISO and very satisfactory 1600 ISO and they're nice and light.  I used a 16-50mm on one and an 85mm 2.8 on the other.

The lighting was high enough to be able to shoot 1/250th of a second at f5.0 and the camera locked focus at least as well as my Canon 5D mk2 ever did. We did that all afternoon and then I headed back to the studio to go through the same routine I've already written about above: Ingest through lightroom to two HD's, pull the SD cards and put em in a job jacket until I've finished post processing and burned disks for myself and the client.

Quick shower, change of clothes and back out the front door to a public relations company party. Their speaker/guest of honor was a woman astronaut who was part of the crew of the first successful, commercial spaceflight and space station docking.  She grew up in Iran and emigrated to the U.S. with her family when she was 16. A great argument for digging in and doing your math and engineering courses. The party lasted all the way through the debates, sparring me all that.  Home, see family, pay bills, sleep.

So now it's Thurs. and I can't put off the post processing of the two jobs any longer.  I drop Ben off at cross country at 6:30 am, grab  coffee and some Greek Yogurt with walnuts and then head to the studio for a marathon of post. I started with the Esther's Follies images first because it's a smaller job and it's visual candy. The routine is to open up the folder in Library mode and start tossing out stuff that doesn't work. Blinks, blurs and bazingas. I grind it down from 1300 images to about 700 images. Then I switch to the develop  module and start color correcting and contrast correcting the raw files. I batch as many as I can.

Every hour on the hour I get up to stretch my back, throw the tennis ball in the side yard for the dog or make a cup of tea. In three hours I'm finished with that job and I push "process" and convert the files to highest res Jpegs, color space= sRGB.  That's the way my client likes em. We deliver what our clients like.  So now those files are processed but not yet burned to the disks. The SD cards stay in their envelopes and I move on to the big conference job.

Whoa!!! That's Huge!!! I forgot that I ended up shooting about 3800 raw files. Damn. That's too many. But there's no way to get through them if you don't start on em. Into library mode to start winnowing down. If I find an expression I like I just keep one out of every three similar files. I edit until lunch and I'm less than a third of the way through. The dog is helping me. She's sleeping on her studio dog bed and occasionally she gets up, comes over and licks my hand and then growls at the screen. I instantly delete anything at which she growls.

I take a break around 4pm to pick Ben up from school and then I get right back to it. I've lost me assistant editor. The dog has decided that hanging with Ben and begging for treats beats the hell out of grinding out work with the pack leader. It's lonely at the top.

As Belinda pulls into the driveway from work around 6:30 pm I've just finished my final edits and color corrections. Luckily, with the pre-chimping capabilities of the Sony EVF's I'm already right in the ball park on 90 % of the files. That certainly saved me a couple hours, at least.

I winnowed down 3800 files to something like 2600 files and they've been converting since around 6:30. Judging by the progress bar I've got about an hour or so to go.  That's as much time and energy as I want to spend on everything today. Ben needs some help with calculus and physics and Belinda reminded me that it's my turn to do the dishes. The dog reminded me that she really likes walking the neighborhood after dark----she loves to smell the deer and armadillos.

Tomorrow I'm scouting a spa for a shoot next week but as soon as I get home I'll be burning DVD's in three different computers. Then I have to do the billing (still have some stragglers from last week to bill) and then I get to deliver the jobs to my clients. My goal is to have everything out of my hair by the end of the day Friday. Barring any glitches we're right on target.

My big observations from these last few days: 16 megapixel raw files trump the crap out of 24 megapixels for overall processing efficiency.  Even with i7 processors this stuff takes time. The ISO performance of the a57 is great. What noise there is tastes like dark, monochrome film noise and not the color splotchy kaleidoscope that drives people nuts.  I even went to 6400 on a few of the reception images and I'm happy to deliver them. Used at less that full screen they are quite good.

In better light the a77 files are great. But for $600 the a57 is a very good deal and a very good work tool.  With both cameras the electronic first shutter curtain and the stationary mirror both make the cameras much quieter in use than their flippy mirror poorer cousins.  Much better for any conference use than the Canon 1DS mk2 I used for some of the same conference last year....

The 16-50mm 2.8 Sony zoom lens is flawless. I wish it was 16-60mm but it is what it is. I would buy it again in a heart beat.

The 70-200mm 2.8 is just as good as the Nikon and Canon counterparts (yes, I have used all three) and it's just as heavy and burdensome as it's lofty associates as well. But the images are wonder.

The batteries in both cameras lasted twice as long as I thought they would and that made me very happy.  The image stabilization also worked very well with both lenses.  I still feel more comfy with the 70/200 on a monopod but that may just be a prejudice I picked up from the days before I.S.

I felt oddly disconnected from the blog and yet I just didn't have the energy to write anything cogent or interesting while I was so immersed. We've already booked up three days next week so I hope to get some writing done this weekend.

Lots to discuss. Hope you've had a good week and that this sheds some light on the glamorous life of a freelance content creator.