My Philosophy On Retouching

As you would imagine from looking at some of my Drabbles series of portraits, I have no problem with a lot of post-production. But that’s mostly when I’m trying to create an image that is almost an illustration, as much as it’s real portrait.

But for the most part I tend toward the middle of the road when it comes to retouching, but will admit that this has changed over time. I went from very little, to poorly executed, to fairly well executed but way too much, and then back down to where I am now, which is hopefully very well executed and largely subtle.

As an example, here’s a shot that I took of my friend Caroline the other day. You may remember her from the Drabble of the girl running down the
stairs in a blue dress (link)

One light in a softbox high and to the right and fairly close. While she is obviously a very pretty girl and certainly doesn’t need a lot of help from me, I thought I’d show you a before and after so you can see where I came from and where I went. Hopefully, it’s somewhat polished without looking too fake. The trick is to not make it too perfect, unless of course you’re doing a make-up advertisement in which case you might as well just Gaussian blur her skin to within an inch of it’s death.

By the way, before some of you accuse me of trickery, all of the blur in the photo (torso, hair) was done in camera.  I was shooting at f/1.2

Before:

After:

Auto Levels Gone Wrong

There’s a problem with bringing high-quality files to your local consumer photo joint or pharmacy photo hut.  And that is that they’re not expecting high-quality files.  It’s not that their machines can’t print well (though often they’re terribly calibrated, etc) rather it’s that the computers in the printers are automatically pre-processing the files to make crappy pictures from your vacation look better.

I’m putting together a book of my Drabbles series I finished yesterday.  My designer friend Kaytee is coming over tonight and we’re going to piece the thing together as a maquette.  Sit down on the floor and try them in different orders and that kind of thing.

So to this end I wanted to print all 46 images out as 4×6 prints to throw around.  I burned a cd of medium res files, brought them down to my local mom&pop photo place and came back an hour later.  46 prints, $10, done.  Some of the images looked great.  Others looked terrible.  They’re fine for what I need tonight, but I was staring at them trying to figure out why some were perfect and others were so wrong.  And I realized that it was the darker images which came out poorly. Because the computer on the printer doesn’t expect a dark image, so it runs an auto-levels adjustment which pulls the lightest color to white and voila! your image looks like ass.  So be careful.  

Here are two examples. Original file on top, scan of print on the bottom.  The photo of Lesley on the left came out great, that’s because the lightbulbs around the mirror were already at white, so no processing was nessessary. By contrast the image of Henry on the right is very dark on purpose, as he is drinking is a dark bar. However the computer doesn’t know about the dark bar, so it did what you see below.

I’ve thought about ways to counter this by putting black and white chips along the edges like the CMYK color marks, but that just seems silly, as I rarely get stuff printed there.  Also interesting is that it works the same in film processing, where the negative is great, but the prints come back with highlights clipped because the computer goes a little too far in trying to maximize contrast.  I know I could also tell them not to process them (if that’s possible on their machine), but the proprietor is a very nice older Chinese couple and complex technical communication is not our best interaction.

Asset Management Essay 2 – One Year On

About a year ago, when I was planning to build my current desktop computer, I wrote a number of essays where I talk about the issues of image storage. None of the options where ideal, and so I went for the simplest, which was to upgrade my internal RAID 1 pair with higher capacity drives. I don’t shoot every day or keep everything I shoot, so while my library grows, I’m not the kind of shooter like an event photog who is adding 50GB every time he comes home.

So for the last year, the pair of 1.5TB drives has done me well.  But here I am, a year later as predicted, in much the same same position and trying to come up with an answer that’s a little smarter this time.

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Just to review my requirements:
1) I need at least 2TB of redundant storage, most likely I’ll just buy 3 or 4.

2) It’s got to be fast, no USB or Firewire externals.

3) I like having my whole library available at all times.  There have been a few big projects that I don’t need immediate access to that I’ve moved to multiple external drives that I consider ‘Cold Storage’, but for the most part, I have everything online in one system.

4) I don’t want to have to worry about complex RAID 5 or 6 systems that are a mess to fix if something REALLY goes wrong.
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To this end, there have been a couple of developments from Drobo.  Now I know I scoffed at a Drobo a year ago, and for the low-end one and what I do, I still scoff.  However they have released 2 models since then which ‘could’ answer my call.

First is the Drobo S, which is basically a 5 drive version of the original (which had 4 drives), along with a faster processor, an eSATA connection, and optional dual drive redundancy for $799 plus drives.

The second is the Drobo Pro, which is an 8 drive system, with optional dual redundancy, which connects over a gigabit ethernet cable via a system called iSCSI for $1500 plus drives.

Both expensive to be sure, but remember, this is your data we’re talking about. Are your pictures worth $1000 to you? See, I thought so.  Now the Drobo Pro has been out a while, gotten good reviews, but is big and expensive, and iSCSI is limited by the gigabit ethernet which in the real world means about 90MB/second. Which is fast, certainly faster than firewire or USB, but is it fast enough to work over?

The newer Drobo S is cheaper and does everything I need it to do (as far as I can tell) and has eSATA, which is theoretically faster than iSCSI, though it’s only been out a couple of weeks and I have yet to find a review or anything to give me any objective numbers to compare. I’m worried that the processing overhead of dual-redundancy will slow the whole thing down to the point where it won’t even live up to the eSATA potential.  The Drobo Pro has 2 processors, so might be better in that regard.

Either way, I planned to fill them with 5 WD 1.5TB Green drives.  They run cooler, are still pretty fast (which is less of a concern when they’re all working together) and they’re only $109/ea at NewEgg.   I’d also like to make the purchase before the end of the year for tax purposes, so if anyone has any information that might help, please let me know. 

Image Properties (Or how most people talk out of their ass)

There is something that’s driven my nuts for a long time now. It’s rampant at all levels of the photography, print, advertising, web world, and that’s the lack of technical knowledge of the people in all of these business.  Most of this has to do with image formats and settings and I’m fed up, so I’m writing a primer about it.

Film, since it is an analog medium, has always been something of a black art. A photographer will use film X with developer Y and paper Z to get his particular look. And that’s if they did the work themselves.  Think of all the photographers out there who just handed their film over to the high priest at the lab who did whatever it is he does to make your pictures look fabulous.  This is the world before scanners and file formats and technical requirements.  

Now it’s different, photographers know what a Jpeg is, and they may have heard of a Tiff.  However most people don’t really know anything about the differences between the two.  They have heard that JPEG is ‘lossy’ compression, and that TIF is ‘loss-less’.  Well who in their right mind would want to lose data? I guess I’ll use TIFF’s then.  Well it’s not that simple.  First off, TIFF files are generally about an order of magnitude larger than JPEG which makes them take a lot longer to transfer over the internet for example.  And yes lossy formats are theoretically inferior to lossless formats, but would anyone know the difference?  I have a smaller magazine I do work for who require tiff files, but big magazines that want jpegs.  I know from my own experience that high quality jpegs look pretty good compared to the original, but I’ve never taken the time to test it until now.

Just now I took a 100% crop of part of the Golden Gate Bridge in SF straight from a RAW file that came out of my 5D. I then exported it as a JPEG with a quality of 80 out of 100, in some software it’s 1 to 10, so in that case it would be an 8.  High-quality, but theoretically not ‘best’.  I then loaded this saved jpeg back in Photoshop, copy and pasted it on top of the original pre-export and switched the layer blend mode to ‘difference’.  This would show me exactly where any differences lie between the two files. You know what I get?  A black image, or at least visibly black. I was prepared to show the difference image as an example, but I won’t bother showing a black image.  Now, just to test to make sure it was working, I added a levels adjustment layer and to pull the white end almost all the way down before I saw anything show up, and even then, it was faint dark pixels that were hard to make out.  

The point is that hi-quality jpegs are perfectly fine to make prints from. Do I save my final master images as jpegs?  No, I’m the kind of guy who rarely even merges layers in his 900MB 16 bit PSD files. However I do export a full-res quality 8 jpeg of my final work and have it uploaded to an off-site backup service.  Those are my worst case scenario files in the event that my house gets burned down.  And if you took that jpeg and edited it and saved as a jpeg, and then edited again, and saved as a jpeg, eventually you would see visible image degradation and nasty jpeg artifacts, but first generation?  No way.  Maybe graphic designers want TIFF’s because they were the preferred image format for Quark back in the day, but that’s not true anymore.  Jpeg’s have other limitations such as color bit depth, lack of an alpha channel, and a technically out of date compression scheme, but that’s a whole other article, and those things rarely impact what people are using them for.

Another pet peeve is people’s concept of resolution. I got an email the other day where the woman said, “We would need the photo in no less than 400dpi” and I just stared at the sentence.  First off, they were going to use the portrait very small in a book, from what I understand, probably less than a couple inches.  So 400 dots per inch?  If so, how many inches? Maybe she meant 400 pixels.

People throw dpi around all the time and few people know how it relates to computer files. DPI or dots per inch is a print specification, it’s related to the physical world, of which digital files and data most certainly are not.  Digital image files are a certain amount of pixels wide and a certain amount of pixels tall, as far as dimensions go, that’s the only absolute value.  Print height and width and resolution are all relative.  For our example, let’s say that an image file is 1200px by 1200px.   Our image could, for example be printed 4″x4″ at 300dpi, or 6″x6″ at 200dpi, or 12″x12″ at 100dpi. Or even 1″x1″ at 1200dpi.   

Telling me that you need a 400dpi image is meaningless.  It’s like telling me that you need a place to visit to that’s 6 hours away.  Well, it all depends on how fast you’re going.  In 6 hours, I could walk from one end of Manhattan to the other, or I could drive to Portland, Maine, or I could fly to London, or I could go around the earth 4 times in the space shuttle.  It’s only if you say, I’m driving a car on the highway and want to go somewhere that’s 6 hours away that I can help.  Then I can say ok, you’re going to be traveling around 60mph for 6 hours, so that means you want to go somewhere that’s about 350 miles away.

Lightroom for some reason, defaults to exporting images to Photoshop at 240dpi, and sometimes when I reinstall I forget to reset it, or if I do reset it, I make a mistake.  Last year I sent an image to an Art Director at one of the major book publishing companies.  They had requested a file with a resolution of 300dpi as most people to for print work,  but I had set the Lightroom export to 300 dots per centimeter by accident without noticing (changed the inches/cm drop down).  I sent off the file to the guy and got an email back about 5 minutes later that said that the file I had sent them was too low-resolution and that they need a better one.  Now the file I sent them was full-res from a 21MP 1Ds Mark III, it was 5616 pixels by 3744 pixels.  It was huge, and definitely NOT low-res, in fact, if anything it was too high-res as 300dpc is about 850dpi.  I opened the file, looked at the image size in photoshop, saw the error, fixed it, and sent it back to a happy AD.   The thing is that he should have known better.  Was the mistake mine? Yes.  But his email shows that he doesn’t understand the relationship between resolution and pixel dimensions.  It was a 2 second fix, and he had everything he needed to change it himself, but he didn’t.  And he’s an Art Director, he should have known better.

So, here are the things to take away from this rant.  
1) For final images that you’re done editing, high-quality (quality at 8 or better) JPG files are fine and would be indistinguishable from the lossless file in print.
2) Pixel dimensions of a digital file are the only things that really matters.  Dimensions and resolution are relative and can be easily changed. So if someone asks for a 300dpi file without specifying dimensions, then they probably don’t really know what they’re talking about.

Robert Frank “The Americans” – a short review

The Met is showing Robert Frank’s seminal work The Americans now through, I think, December 27th. If you’re interested in photography and live in or near New York you owe it to yourself to make it down there to see it. All 83 images, in order, in all their black and white darkroom printed  glory.  All of the prints are from the 50’s and 60’s and many were borrowed from other collections to put together the set. And despite what I’m going to say about them below, I think it’s an opportunity to see a very famous work in it’s entirety, and I’ve made the mistake of missing similar shows in the past and greatly regretted after the fact.

Ok, with that out of the way, and I know I’m going to kicked for this one, let me say right off the bat, I don’t get it. There are certainly a number of fantastic photographs in the series, and something for everyone.  I went with my delightful friend Lindsay, and we both had our favorites that the other disagreed with, but overall we came away unmoved.  As Lindsay said while we were eating pie afterwords, “There were a few that thought were really great while looking at them, but I couldn’t tell you what they were now”.  And I felt similarly. Frank had a great quote I read the other day too:

 ”When people look at my pictures I want them to
feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice.”

I’ll admit that I have something of a bias against the quasi-street, quasi-reportage, quasi-documentary, quasi-art photography like this. I feel like it can’t quite decide what it wants to be.  Is it trying to record something leaving the interpretation up to the viewer, or push an interpretation from the get-go? If you read some of the quotes on the labels from Kerouac and the like, you’d think that the images were parting the Red Sea.

The thing is, part of the exhibit is a bunch of work prints and contact sheets and the like (This post has some examples). One of the labels said that he got it down to 1000+ images which he then culled down to the 83 in the book.  That’s 1000 selects, which had probably gone through quite a distillation process to even get there. Let’s figure that he chose maybe one image per roll on average, so that’s like 20,000 images over the course of two years driving around the country. Anybody is going to take some great pictures (though I’d like to say that as a rule, the images were not very good from a technical point of view. Often soft in focus, obviously heavily cropped from a larger frame, look like they had to be saved in the darkroom with lots of dodging and burning, etc. but I digress) So give a camera to your average joe and have him shoot 20,000 pictures over the course of 2 years, at a time when people didn’t have the same phobia of getting their pictures taken as they do now, then distill out the best 83.  I’m pretty sure you’re going to get a decent sampling just by chance.

Again, it’s not to say that the images are bad, quite far from it.  Many are just fantastic, but I don’t see how the series is as supposedly important as has been said.  Before people start yelling at me about how it was of it’s time and he was the first to do xyz and that’s what makes it important, I’d like to say that there are other similar sets of photographs that people think are important and of their time that I think are great.  Atget’s pictures of Paris from the late 19th century, or Eggleston’s work from the 60’s and 70’s, Avedon’s portraits in the American West just to name a few.  Even Larry Clark’s Tulsa, which I don’t personally enjoy because I have a squeamish thing about watching people shoot up drugs, I can almost understand how it was shocking or at least different from what was being shot at the time.

I’m sure many of you will disagree with me, but that’s perfectly fine and what art is all about. Maybe you love Frank and can’t stand Karsh.  That’s cool too.  Either way, you should go by and see them while you can.  Many are really great pictures and you probably won’t see them together this way for a long long time.

Travel Camera Lessons

A few photographic conclusions I came to on my trip.

1) A good little camera can be really handy.
I borrowed my friend Meg’s Canon G10 for the trip and it was great to just sling over your shoulder on a hike when you didn’t feel like trucking an SLR up the the hill. It’s nice being able to get a 10MP+ image from a little camera.  Much of the time I even used the camera in black and white mode.  To be that much more Ansel Adams with every shot.  Though it’s capable of shooting RAW and I’m normally an adamant RAW shooter, I just left it shooting jpegs.  The idea was that I was going to use it to take what were effectively snapshots as keepsakes.

In fact, I didn’t even have it shooting full resolution, though still at about 9MP.  A few years ago on a trip to Oregon with my original Digital Rebel I had read an article arguing that by setting your camera to save a medium resolution JPEG, not only would you save space which was an issue when CF cards cost $1000/GB, but that the camera would down-sample all the data and you’d end up with a smoother, smaller file which would still up-sample and print quite well if you needed it too.  Now, with a 6MP camera, I was effectively getting a 4MP image out of it. But I have one of the photos from that trip printed at about 6×9 in my bathroom and I have to admit that it looks pretty darn good.  

2) A little camera, as handy as it is, is no match for a full-frame SLR.
I’ll admit, I’m a pixel peeper.  And it wasn’t a fair fight because I was comparing jpegs from a compact with RAW files from a 5D Mark II.  But there was NO contest.  The big problem is that the little camera’s sensor just doesn’t have the dynamic range of the larger one.  Highlights and the sky were almost always blown out and shadows went straight to black. This would not be that much of an issue if you were shooting people at a party or snapping your kids in the shade in the backyard.  But when you’re trying to capture the sandstone cliffs at Zion National Park, you’re in trouble.  Basically you need to work with the limitation and make the shadows and highlights as blocks of color as far as composition goes.  So that’s what I did.

3) The Canon 24-105/4L lens isn’t terribly sharp.  Even stopped down.
I make this conclusion based on two separate samples of this lens.  I owned one a few years ago which I bought for a trip to Italy.  The color on those images are fine, but anything but the center of the frame  (full frame body) was pretty soft.   Fast forward to now, and I’ve got nothing but big heavy primes for my work, so I also borrowed from Meg her 24-105. (In exchange for her lens and camera she got to use my 24-70/2.8 and 85/1.2, lest you start feeling bad for her.)  The images from her lens were also soft on the edges, even when stopped down to f/8 or so.  This is especially noticeable in complex scenes like the wide shots of Bryce Canyon. Maybe I’ve just gotten really used to having to wear gloves for fear of slicing my hands open when editing the images from my primes. Yes they’re that sharp when used correctly.  It’s not to say the 24-105 is bad, it’s certainly 1000 more versatile than a prime, but ultra-sharp it is not. Maybe the fabled new version of it will help.

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When I got back a friend asked how many pictures I took, and I replied, “not many, maybe 500”.  I only really took pictures when I thought of it.  It definitely wasn’t one of the prime goals of the trip.  You photographers out there will know that 500 over a week is very few indeed, especially for digital shooters.  Normal people look at me like I’m crazy.

I think when it comes down to it, my ideal travel camera would be something small, with a big sensor and great glass.  So basically I want a Leica M9.  If anyone wants to buy me one, just let me know.

The Good, The Bad, and Blurb.com – UPDATE

It’s time to update you on my latest Blurb experience. Long story short: They did good.
As you recall from our last adventure, while I had good experiences with the Blurb book service while working on both my 365 Portraits and Japan books, I got terrible output from my portfolio which I designed in InDesign and sent to them via PDF.  All the shadow detail was lost into blackness in a way that was unacceptable.  

Their customer support replied to my email and told me, in what I took to be a very condescending tone, that my images were too dark.  Basically, it was my fault, ‘Go brighten up those images and send us a new file, here’s some store credit to try again’, was what I took away from it.  I wrote back saying that they shouldn’t blame their customers so quickly. Explaining my calibrated setup, workflow in creating the pdf according to their specs, and pointing out that my images were never a problem in my other books (a few were even the same images).

I guess my rant bumped me up to the next support level because I got another guy who apologized for the tone of the first email, said he looked into it and that my images were too dark.  So I wrote back again to give him the CMYK numbers of gray areas in the images that showed up black in the book. I figured actually data was a more objective case.  

Finally the gut wrote back and said they were having the book reprinted to see if was just a dark printing that was within their specs of variability. Sounded like an excuse to me, but whatever.  I got the new book yesterday and it’s MUCH improved.  In fact, the images are right where they’re supposed to be.  The images on the cover interestingly enough are still shadow detail dead, which gave me pause upon opening the box, but the ones on the pages are great.  AND, I think I still have that store credit to play with.

Here’s a side by side comparison for you.  Left is the old one, Right is the new.  See how the whole left hand corner of the image is black? In fact it’s more black than the black background of the page. The one on the right has a correctly black background.  And a tonal range of grays the way they should be.

So, in conclusion.  Blurb did good.  I had to fight a bit to get them to do it, but it all worked out in the end.  Next time, I think I’m going to stick to the BookSmart software though.  The PDF based books were printed in SF, while the ones from BookSmart came from upstate NY and I had no problems with them.

The Good, The Bad, and Blurb.com

Let me start off by saying that this is one person’s experiences, I can’t speak for anyone else.
When I made my book for 365 Portraits I did some research on a few companies and ended up printing the book with Blurb.  If you happened to buy a copy, I think you can agree that the pictures look pretty good, and I can atest to the fact that they’re a reasonable facimile of the files on my screen.  

They were so good, in fact, that I went and published a book of my photographs from Japan which I shot on film with a Hasselblad and then painstakingly scanned and processed.  That second book was printed on their ‘premium’ paper, which is thicker and heavier and looks to be able to hold the ink a bit better. The images in this book, if anything, looked better than the ones in the 365 book. Dead on when compared to my images on screen.

Now a quick aside on my setup.  I currently edit on an NEC 3090 30″ LCD which has been calibrated and profiled using the NEC Spectravision II software and an Eye-One Display 2 colorimeter.  Tests show that I end up with a delta-E, that is ‘how far away the colors are on the screen from what they should be’, of less than 1.  Which means that it’s about as accurate as you can get.  I’d also like to point out that prints from these files done one my HP 9180 printer with stock paper type profiles look great.  I’d also like to point out that for 10 years before I was a photographer I was an art director and graphic designer, I’m no newbie.

Ok, now that that’s out of the way…  I was so happy with my Blurb experiences up until now, that I decided to have them print my portfolio.  The problem is that the Blurb BookSmart software which they give you and which I used for the first 2 books has a lot of limitations as far as typography, cover layout, and such.  The good news is that they offer templates for all the major layout software, so you can roll-your-own and upload it as a PDF.

So I spend a whole day a couple weeks ago, resizing images, and laying out my book in InDesign CS4 using the Blurb supplied templates. I then exported the PDF files (using the Blurb supplied PDF export settings template) and uploaded it to them where everything passed the pre-flight checks. Oh and the PDF when opened locally looks just like it should.
Fast forward to last Saturday when I received my book in the mail and opened it up.  All of the shadow detail in the images was pushed to black. This was not a problem I had on either of the first two books.  In fact, some of the images in my new portfolio are 365 pictures, so I can stick the two right next to each other.  This was unacceptable, and certainly not anything I could show an art buyer at a big ad firm.  So I sent an email to Blurb explaining most of the stuff I just said here, along with the picture below and asked ‘what happened’?

This is a photograph of the image on my screen (upper left), a print from my local HP printer (upper right) and then below is the picture in the latest Blurb book. I’ve highlighted in red circles a good example area.  Getting the brightness of the screen at the same exposure as the flash on the prints is a little tricky, but know that the top two are very close. On my file and print, you can see the suit leg, on theirs it’s just black.   

After a couple days, this is part of the email I got back:

“It looks like some of your images may not print well with our print process. Many print houses automatically adjust your images. However, BookSmart does not automatically brighten images and it is up to the author to lighten them when necessary.

Please note that dark areas in your images will print even darker on our printed page. The printed photos won’t have light shining through them unlike the photos when seen on your monitor. You will need to adjust your photos accordingly. Fine shadow details are especially likely to be lost, and you may need to adjust the brightness/contrast of your images; if you have the option you can lighten/brighten your shadows and/or midtones as well.”

Basically, I take this as, “Well Timmy, computers are REALLY complicated and you’ve got a lot to learn about making pictures”.  I hate it when incompetent people accuse me of being incompetent. Many of the same image files have been printed millions of times in national magazines without complaint.

In their defense, they gave me a $75 credit towards another book, but without answering why it came out so bad, I’m not sure what to print.  I guess I’ll go back to using their limiting software and see if THAT works. I guess the moral of the story is that you should be careful about making Blurb books from PDF files.  As I said in the first sentence, your milage may vary.

Portfolio Selections, or How I Learned to Sort My Work

I was asked by email how I go about selecting images for my portfolio. As the sender noticed, I’ve got a section called unparsed recent work where I throw new stuff until I decide where, if anywhere, it belongs. I do this for a couple reasons, first it’s a quick place to throw stuff I’ve just been playing with, and it let’s people come and say, “Ok, all of these are great, but what kind of stuff have you shot lately?” It’s a holding tank; or maybe purgatory if images have feelings.  Often times that’s the end of the road, they die there and get removed all together.

Images that do make it out get moved into their relevant section. Studio stuff to studio, most other stuff into environmental, etc. The section distribution is of course completely arbitrary, what I’m currently using works for me. Other people like to break it down by subject instead of look.  Men, Women, Cars, that kind of thing. I decided to base mine on the story I’m trying to present, which is to say, the look of my work and how I shot it.  I like to keep each section less than 20 or 25 images for easy of use and usability reasons. Which means that I may have to decide which image is the weakest link, goodbye. Maybe it’s an orphan image, it might be good, but doesn’t fit with your other stuff. Sadly there are times when you’ve got to remove an image that you really love, or perhaps loved at one time.

A case in point is my portrait of Charlie Maxwell that I shot for BusinessWeek last year. At the time I was very satisfied with how it came out. Considering the lighting setup Meg and I used (one speedlight on a cable with a lightsphere) I think it looks much more high end in the final product. I might have a soft spot for the image because Charlie was such a nice guy and trusting subject, but I think it captures my goal that I was forming at the time of making my images feel as permanent as paintings. I even have it on my current business card. But looking at it today, in my eye it’s lost some of the bloom it once had, getting a little long in the tooth, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it moved down the list in the next few months as new stuff enters to replace it.

My currently online portfolio is exclusively portraits, but that’s not all I shoot. While I shoot portrait professionally, I do shoot thing stuff for fun.  Experiments, landscapes, and travel for instance. Lately I’ve been thinking about putting some of this other stuff up to show that I’m more well rounded as an artist.  I haven’t decided if it’ll dilute my ‘brand’ or strengthen is, but it has been bouncing around in my brain.  

In some ways, the online portfolio is easier.  It’s easier to update and change, you can have more images separated into sections, and you can show it to a million people all at once.  But some people just need to see it in print. Some are old school and like to see them on paper, and no one can knock the improved resolution on paper compared to screen. Others need to show them to clients and gathering 5 people around a computer screen isn’t nearly as good experience as a nice 11×14″ book.

And that brings us to the issue of size and shape. My current portfolio is 11×14″, but printing new pages, or a whole other set for a second book, is expensive and time consuming.  Damn HP pigment cartridges are $30 a piece time 8 colors, ugh.  I recently decided to try a blurb book for my portfolio since I had too results with my 365 Portraits and Japan book.  However I got the first copy on Saturday and the shadow detail is non-existent, as in black.  So I may be back to square one. Speaking of square, I printed it as an 8×10 portrait book with landscape images as double page spreads. That said, I’m not sure if it’s quite big enough to have the impact I want, but the next size up that would be useful for me is 12×12 which would be a waste as most of my 35mm images will take up about half of the page with the rest blank. Most thought required.

Ok, back to book image selection. You’re problem here is that you should really try to keep your book to 30-40 images, which is less then you’ve probably got in your online set.  So you’ve got to make some hard choices and also decide what kind of work you’re trying to present and to whom. I’ve currently got just one book, but my agent has recently asked for at least two. One tailored to editorial and another to advertising.  I’m not sure if I’m going to be good at making that distinction, but I guess that’s what she’s for.

So, in conclusion, choosing images for your portfolio can be a bitch. I use my ‘unsorted’ section as a cop out so that I don’t have to make the big decisions immediately. Though it may have a extra benefit of keeping my book fresh.  I’ve got a lot of hard decisions to make about all of this soon. I promise to keep you all apprised of my actions.

Four Years On

4 years ago today, a few minutes after 4AM on Sept 16th, 2005, I watched my father die from pancreatic and liver cancer at my parent’s house in Connecticut.  There were a handful of people in the room. Immediate family, his brothers and sisters, and one hospice nurse. I remember vividly that I was sitting at the end of the bed, touching his legs near his ankles. It was in all ways that can be described, a horrible experience.  

In the days and weeks and years after his death I spent a lot of time trying to come to terms with the meaning of his life, and by association, the meaning of my own. After all, we had the same name. Wasn’t he just me with a 30 year head start? What his goals were, what he accomplished, and perhaps most importantly, what he left behind. I came to the conclusion that along with our memories of him, he left behind a lot of ‘stuff’ that used to be his, but with him gone, just became a lot of ‘stuff’. Up until that point in my life I spent a lot of time worrying about similar thoughts, worrying about money and ‘things’, but have come to the conclusion that it never really make me happy.

All of this led to a realization that, as I’ve put it since, “I didn’t want my legacy to be that I sold 2% more toothpaste this month” You see, since my graduation from music school in 1998, I had been working as an Art Director in advertising. Designing and building the messages that made you buy more ‘stuff’.  So I made the decision to change my life, to start to value experiences over things, all of which led me to start my transition to photography.

I bought my first camera back in 2001. My friend Jeremy Kaiman took me to Adorama to help me pick out a Pentax K1000.  He explained shutter speed and aperture over lunch, and away I went.  For the first few years it was just a casual hobby when I felt inspired. But after my father died it became a way to create something that would last, something that hopefully meant something. Maybe if my photographs where good enough then I would be good enough and my whole life would mean something.

I knew I couldn’t get myself to take pictures of events or babies, and so my mother told me to concentrate on my portraits which she thought were my strength.  Then in January of 2007 I started 365 Portraits as the third consecutive year-long project I had worked on, basically a year long boot camp of practicing the craft for hours and hours each day. The rest from there is public record.

All of this is to say that I’ve been pretty cranky the past week, without really knowing why. Part of it is the weather changing, a little bit might have been Patrick Swayze death from pancreatic cancer, maybe a little 9/11 thrown in for good measure, but I think most of it was an unconscious observation of the anniversary of the most painful moment of my life.  Four years is a long time.  It can fit a college education.  Hell, if you’re really moving fast, a courtship, marriage, baby, and divorce.  It’s a length of time that is just asking you to look back and take stock in where you are and how far you have or have not come.

When he was alive, my father was difficult to impress.  His criticisms difficult to overcome.  There were many times when I was younger that I wished that he would just stop or go away.  The funny thing is that even in his death, even after 4 years have passed, even though he’s not alive to judge me anymore, I’m still trying to impress him. Even if it’s only the memory of him.  And my great fear is that I’m never sure that I have, or even could.

Considering that I’m trying to compete in one the most difficult of photographic disciplines, haven’t been doing it very long in real terms, am self taught, and that we’re all slogging through the worst economy since the great depression, I think I’m doing ok.  Some of the things I’ve accomplished in the past couple of years are things many photographers never get the chance to try in their entire career.  Magazine covers, national ad campaigns, full page portraits in TIME. If I were being objective and could step outside myself for a moment, I should be impressed. And while I am satisfied with most of my work, somehow I don’t feel like I’ve reached my potential, and I think that is the real reason I’ve been depressed for a couple weeks.

Perhaps what I think is the ghost of my father, has actually become my own self that I may never be able to impress.  This of course, is a double-edged sword. It means I may never feel satisfied with my accomplishments, but it also means I’m always going to strive to be better and then better again. The people who change the world are the ones who believe that they can. It’s quite late now and I’m feeling a little punchy, and I hope that by the time I wake up in the morning my depression will have started to break up with the passing of time, and I can get on with making things which will make me proud. Four years on, that’s the greatest thing I can hope for.

(btw, if you would like, you can read my thoughts on that morning four years ago)

ALSO:  Who would have thought that 3 years later I’d take a 365 Portrait on a spot about 100 yards behind us in the above picture.  http://www.365portraits.com/index.php?date=1005