Film or Digital? Quick Update

Per my discussion of film/digital a couple weeks ago, here’s a quote from the British Journal of Photography in 1890:

“This newfangled idea of ready-made plates takes all the fun out of photography. The next stage might be a shop to produce prints and lantern slides to order — but that is too distressing to anticipate.”

See?  Stuck in their way curmudgeons have been around forever.

Quick thoughts on the 7D

A couple people have asked what I think of the new Canon 7D which was just announced, so here you go:

– Personally, I like full-frame cameras.  So right off the bat I’m not really interested. That said, it seems like it’s pretty tricked out from first glance.

– Unless there’s been some amazing breakthrough, I think 18MP in a cropped sensor is a waste. First off, most of the people who are buying cropped sensors are not using glass that’s up to task of feeding nice sharp images to a sensor that packed.  And the 50D at 15MP already had only middling high-ISO noise performance.  All of this remains to be seen of course.

– 8 Frames a second would be useful for sports or wildlife shooters and is pretty darn fast for $1699 or whatever the body costs.  People who need this capability are pretty psyched.  That’s a lot of data at 18MP, which is probably the reason behind the dual Digic chips. I’d say that this totally makes the 1D a paperweight unless you’re the kind of person who needs a bulletproof body for war zone use. And even then, you could buy three of these for the price of one of those.

-Along with the speed comes an updated auto-focus system with 19 cross points.  This was a badly needed updated which brings Canon back in line with the mid-level AF from Nikon.  Not that I use anything other than the center point on my 5D2, but I’m a little jealous on this one.  Seriously, this should have been done a year ago and on my camera.

-100% viewfinder.  Here’s another one that should have been on the 5D2 in my opinion. Though it’s a little easier with the cropped sensor. Should be a big step up from the 20/30/40/50D.  No interchangeable focus screen though, which is sad, but understandable.

– Movie modes.  Great for those who want them.  The cropped sensor will give you a bit more depth of field at the equivalent focal length and aperture, but you lose sensitivity of course. I hope they port the 720P mode to the 5D2.  I could have used that last week while helping my good friend Carole film her puppets.

– There’s been some suggestion that in the past, Canon tries out new technology on the smaller APS-C sensors which have higher yields than full frame.  The area of a cropped sensor is about 337 square mm while a full-frame sensor is 864 square mm.  The practical upshot of this is that if you do the math, it suggests that the next full-frame sensor from Canon is going to be spitting out huge amounts of data.  Personally, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the 1Ds4 at 32 or even 36MP. Food for thought.

—————–

All in all, a fine upgrade and in some ways a new class of camera for Canon. Squares up better than well with the D300.  at $1699, I think they should get rid of the xxD line and stick with something like this as the mid-grade body.

For those with a 40/50D, I’d say only upgrade if you need something specific like the video.
For those with a 20/30D or an old Rebel and are ready to make the leap to a modern body, I’d say that it’s a great time to leap.

Your Way With the Subject

A lot of people ask me how I deal with my subjects.  Some people claim that I get something special from them, something different than what other people get.  I don’t know about that.  I’m proud of my work and I think it’s of a high quality, but I don’t buy into having any special powers or anything.

As I’ve said many times before, I tend to like serious portraits.  I was looking at the portfolio of another editorial portrait guy and a lot of his subjects are smiling.  I usually get a few of those during the course of a session, but mine almost always end up feeling forced or silly, even when they weren’t.  What’s someone ironic is that I tend to think of myself as a people person kind of photographer. I have a knack for discussing pretty much any subject with anyone. Any readers who have sat for me could hopefully back this up. Usually, I’ll spend an hour or so the night before and do some research on the person and watch interviews if they’re available, maybe look at other pictures people have taken of them. And I think this leads to honest portraits of people, but you think that it would lead to more smiling pictures if I really had them comfortable.  Maybe other photographers ask the subjects to smile or tell jokes to get them to laugh and then snap away. Maybe I make them think too much so they’re all serious.  I once read a list of rules that Timothy Greenfield-Sanders uses when taking portraits (a list I came upon while doing research before shooting him) and one of them was something like “never ask someone to smile”. Perhaps I’ve internalized that one a little too much.

I’ve also seen the setups of a bunch of other photographers and they’ve got a ton of gear. Two, three or even four battery powered strobes on stands with modifiers and sandbags and such. Makes me feel a bit inadequate. I’ve got a lot of that gear, but I find it tedious to lug and setup even in a studio setting, let alone in some park or office or outside. Not to mention that my back would be screaming at me for days. My hat is off to them for the patience and time required to use that kind of setup. They certainly get some great looks out of it, but for me I feel like I’d get consumed by the gear.  Lately, I prefer an incredibly minimal kit. I’ve been working with a reflector and a speedlight or two.  One stand plus an assistant to control the other light.  Does it work for every situation?  Of course not, but it covers about 95% of what I could imagine having to cover, and for the other 5% I can improvise some shade or a diffuser or other. This is probably from reading McNally’s book and reading Strobist.  When I’ve got 30 minutes with a person, I like to have a malleable setup that can bend to the subject, not the other way around. Gotta keep the subject engaged when you’re not shooting. The biggest problem with fancy setups in my experience is that they’re complicated and require the subject to stay in one place, turn a certain way, etc. It makes people self-conscience and feel awkward.  Or at least, that’s how I’d feel if you stuck me in that situation.  I tend to instead start taking some pictures with a vague sense of the lighting I want and see where the subject takes me. This ‘fly by the seat of my pants’ approach can be internally terrifying at times, but it hasn’t failed me yet, and on the rare occasion where I get stuck, I’ve got enough lighting and shot staples in my toolbox to get good work. When it does work, it’s a great rush. Like improvising something good in real time. Like playing jazz.

I also want to be remembered by my subjects.  I have the feeling that some other photographers would like to get the shot and disappear. To be invisible.  Me, I’d rather have all of their attention and really be engaged with me.  And not in a superficial, “Look here Tom” kind of way.  But rather as a partner in an experience that we’re sharing.  I think that’s where the really special images come from. My goal is to meet up with some person I shot 4 years ago and have them say “Hey, Bill, of course I remember you. You know, I was thinking the other day about that story you told me…”   I guess we’ll come back in 4 years and see if it happens.

Film or Digital? Is this really still a question?

I could have sworn that I’d written a blog post about this topic, but I did a scan through my archives and came up empty, so here I go.  A few weeks ago while I was shooting futurist Ray Kurzweil, he asked me the question that most non-photographers end up asking me.  “Is that film or digital”.  And it surprises me that this is still in active rotation.  Maybe they ask it because it’s topical and they don’t know what else to say, or maybe they figure that even though amateur photography is about 98% digital at this point, maybe pros still shoot film.  

The answer is that yes, some of them do.  But it’s a minority by now and the population is shrinking. Whenever I meet a young photographer who’s dead-set on shooting only film, I just shake my head.  Maybe if you’re independently wealthy or are doing amazingly original art photography you could pull it off. Honestly though, unless you’re shooting only b/w tri-x, I wouldn’t trust that I’d be able to even buy my favorite film in 5 years.  In the short time that I’ve been shooting, I’ve said goodbye to a number of films that I loved to shoot. I still weep for Scala. The film counter at B&H is a third the size is was only couple years ago. And chemistry and darkroom gear which used to take up 4 rows of shelves is now relegated to the back wall next to the bathrooms.

Let me take a moment to say that I’m no hater of film.  I’ve got a Leica M4, and a Hasselblad and a big Cambo 4×5 that I occasionally take out for a spin.  In fact on my recent trip to Japan, I took only the Hasselblad and twenty-something rolls of film.  I love the way that great pictures from film look. It can be special, but that doesn’t mean it always is.  It also doesn’t mean that digital images can’t be special too.  They’re just different. It used to be that digital images lacked depth, resolution, and refinement. Here’s the thing though, digital keeps getting better while film stays the same.  And better it’s gotten by leaps and bounds.  My first digital camera, less than 10 years ago, was a 2MP little digicam whose images don’t even fill half of my current screen.  Now I’ve got a 21MP body whose images easily rival my medium format setup in overall quality. Does b/w film have a lot more dynamic range that digital?  Yes and by a few stops. But honestly, that’s the only truly objective measure where film is still killing digital.  And also the next place that digital will probably try to improve. 

In my humble opinion as a working photographer, the two are at least at parity. They each have strengths and weaknesses, but images of approximately the same quality. Much like analog and digital audio recording. Digital has gotten to the point where it’s advantages trump analog with all but the most ardent die-hards. And don’t forget the photoshop plug-ins that add grain or otherwise try to mimic the look of different film formulations.  I use fake grain occasionally, and it looks pretty good.  Another thing that gets me mad is film snobbery. Competitions which take only film-based entries for example, have no place. What does it matter how the image was made. Isn’t it the final image that matters?

Some digital haters like to point to the supposed over-use of digital manipulation, as something akin to a ‘purity of the game’ argument.  Well you don’t have to look hard to see the weaknesses of that.  Manipulation of images has been around since the medium was invented. Different development recipes, basic dodging and burning during printing, and don’t forget the heavy retouching of old negatives with what is essentially redrawing with a pencil.  Why do you think master print makers exist? At the recent Avedon exhibit at ICP there is a whole room full of working prints with his comments and direction. As well as a number of collages that I had looked at large prints of only 10 minutes earlier and had no idea they weren’t a single shot. Hell, even Dorthea Lange’s famous migrant mother photo is manipulated. 

As someone who shoots mostly digital and does a fair amount of manipulation to my images, I find the new technology to be liberating.  I could not make my portraits on film and have them look the way they do. To me it’s the final image that matters, not necessarily the steps you went through to get it.  Film is a pain in many ways.  You’re stuck with film speed and type for a whole roll, you’ve got to get it processed, most of the time you’ve got to scan it.  Plus it’s expensive.  My Japan pictures cost me about $400 in film and processing, plus 2 days of my time in scanning, color correcting, and retouching.

Maybe for some people that’s a good thing.  Some sort of perverse puritanical statement about pulling yourself up from your bootstraps.  ‘It’s supposed to be hard! Otherwise everybody would be doing it’.  You know what?  Everybody is.  Everybody has got a camera nowadays and they’re posting their images to flickr.  The thing is that you can still tell the good images from the bad.  Yes digital makes it easier for everybody, but it doesn’t make everyone good.  Tools are tools, nothing more.  Are things that are time-consuming automatically better?  Anyone who believes that can go clean their bathroom with a toothbrush.  Seriously though, if that were the case, then why are all these film people using plastic roll film instead of pouring their own Collodion plates and developing them over vapor before making albumen prints (which I would love to try at some point btw)?  Technology moves on, things change.

While it may sound like I’m mostly knocking film, it’s not for political reasons, purely practical ones. I and I think most other photographers, would have a hard time making a living shooting film.  People expect their photographs in a few hours, not a few days. But mostly what I’m trying to say here is that there is room for both under the photographic tent. So if you like film or digital or both, it really doesn’t matter.  They’re just tools for making pretty things to look at, not religions in and of themselves regardless of what anybody says. So worry about the images, and certainly don’t judge them based on what was used to make them. 

Another interview with me

Apparently, some people think that I’d be interesting to read about.  You can fool some of the people some of the time apparently.  😉

If you’re interested: 
http://www.petapixel.com/2009/07/30/interview-with-bill-wadman-of-365-portraits/

My i7 workstation and a SSD up in a tree…

Earlier today I received a package from newegg.com with a brand spankin’ new 80GB Intel SSD. Apparently this second generation just got recalled for a rare problem involving bios passwords (which I don’t use, so I’m going to ignore it). Because of that recall, everyone stopped shipping them on Friday, but somehow mine got out on Thursday night. Lucky me!

I have also taken this opportunity to install the final RTM build of Windows 7 64bit as well. It is standard procedure to only change one thing at a time if you’re trying to test it’s impact on system performance, but I’m not a product reviewer, so I’ll leave all of the hard core benchmarking to anandtech.com

The SSD itself is tiny, the size of a notebook hard drive, has no moving parts and gives of little to no heat. All of this means that it’s a little disconcerting to be booting your computer and hearing absolutely nothing, especially after we’ve all gotten so used to the sound of a thrashing hard drive over the past 25 years. Last night in preparation, I had copied the windows install files (per a web tutorial, there’s a little more to it than that) onto a usb keychain for faster install, so I plugged that in as well, told it to boot from USB and away I went. Installation was fast, though I’ve heard that the W7 install is fast anyway, so I have little to compare it to. Once I got to the desktop, it was just a matter of the rare driver it hadn’t found, and then applications.

Since the SSD I got is only 80GB I’ve decided to use my old 150GB Velociraptor as a Lightroom catalog, preview cache, and Photoshop scratch disk. That said, with 12GB of ram, Photoshop rarely if ever goes to it’s scratch. I had wanted to try the LR catalog on the SSD, but while the catalog itself is only a couple gigabytes, the preview cache on my old drive was almost 20GB. Not enough room on the SSD to be giving 20GB to preview images. I have tried to do some research but haven’t found a way to put the catalog on one drive and the previews on the other. It seems that Lightroom just keeps them in the same folder. If anyone has a way around this, please let me know.

Ok, so here’s my opinion. It’s quick. Very quick. All those people who talk about launching 3 apps at once and them all loading as if you had launched only one at a time are not lying. It’s just very very snappy. That said, I can’t be sure if that agility is the SSD or the brand new install of an operating system. This is a seriously fast system, so it’s not like Vista x64 was running slowly before, but so far this is much much smoother.

There is talk around the net about how these drives slow down over time, which people I trust have shown to be true, but in real world usage you’ll never hit the worst case scenario, which is still better than a traditional hard drive. It’s the incredibly low latency which makes it feel fast. All of those little 4k file reads and writes that happen almost instantaneously. On top of that, Windows 7 includes support for a new ATA command called TRIM which helps out this problem immensely. Intel is supposed to be releasing an updated drive firmware to turn on support for TRIM in the next couple months. In the meantime, I think I’ll be fine.
I wish is was bigger, but I don’t want to spend almost $500 for the 160GB drive, the $229 I paid for 80 was hard enough to swallow. Other than that, I’m very happy so far. Now if only I could afford one for my laptop…

365 Portraits – The Book.

As many of you probably know, in 2007 I completed a daily portrait project called 365 Portraits. 

Well I’ve finally gotten around to putting them in a book and am taking pre-orders.

I’d imagine that it would be useful as inspiration for ideas or settings for other portrait photographers, and certainly interesting to see the changes in my style and technique as the year went on.

So without further ado:

————————-

365 Portraits – The Book 
/  Order Now!

You’ve waited for it, and it’s finally here.
The book of my 365 Portraits project is now ready for pre-order.

http://www.365portraits.com/book/

This initial limited edition series of only 500 books will
be hand-numbered and signed.

The pre-order deadline is Monday, July 20th, so don’t miss
your chance to order before they’re all sold out.

In Search of the Goldilocks of Lights

I’ve got all kinds of light making devices.  I’ve got a couple Alien Bees, a B400 and a B800.  As well as the big White Lightning X3200 which I bought to use with Polaroid 55 on my 4×5 before it was discontinued since it’s negative is rated around ISO 25.  On top of all of these plug in strobes I’ve got a couple of Canon Speedlites, a 550EX and 580EXII which I’ve been using lately on indoor editorial shoots.  THEN, I’ve also got a ProFoto AcuteB which is a 600ws battery powered strobe for use when you don’t have a wall outlet.  

So basically I’ve got every option from a little tap of light to a huge ‘you just shorted out the neighborhood’ POW!  However I often find myself questioning which I should bring or use in any particular situation. Lately I’ve been using the speedlites with the wireless controller more in a quasi TTL mode where I’m playing with flash exposure compensation on the flashes themselves.  I know that the infrared controller can do ratios between flashes, but I’ve found that it rarely actually does what I want it to.  I could also use them in manual mode with pocket wizards like they suggest on Strobist, but for some reason, I can’t get myself to use them that way.  If I’m using little flashes, I want it to be more automatic, if I want a pain in the ass manual setup, then I feel like I’ll use big guys. Maybe that’s short sighted.

Also with the speedlites, I never get the same quality of light as I do with the big guys.  The way they’re shaped and how they sit and point into the umbrella from their bracket doesn’t seem to give the same spread as a centered studio strobe would.  I haven’t done any definitive experiments, and maybe there are better brackets out there, but the one I’ve got just doesn’t do it for me.  The light source ends up skewed way to one side if you’re using any reasonably sized umbrella, and I can’t imagine you get a nice even light that way.

Anyway, on tues I went and shot my delightful friend Tia at her restaurant.  It’s a big space with high ceilings and I was going to use a big 60″ softlighter, so I thought I needed a big strobe.  The power plug on my B800 is cracked (keep meaning to get it fixed) and I didn’t think the B400 would be enough, so I borrowed one of Meg’s B1600.  Well, long story short, it was way too much light and I ended up with it almost all the way down the whole time.  The moral of the story is that the B400 would have been fine, if not even less.  It’s one of those things where if you’re there and you don’t have enough power for what you want to do, you’re screwed, so you pack big and then you end up with too much.

As for the ProFoto, I haven’t used it nearly as much as I would have liked or would have though. In fact I need to make a point of using it more. To that goal, I brought it up on the roof with me when I was shooting Brie last week (see post below) along with the small 30 something inch softlighter.  It’s not the most powerful thing out there and if you’re fighting the sun, you’ve got to know your limits. Last year at one point I tried it into the 60″ softlighter in afternoon sun and at full power it didn’t have quite enough oomph to get the job done.  You see, if you’re using a big strobe outside in the daytime with a digital SLR you’re limited when it comes to your shutter speed.  Most of these cameras will only sync with an external strobe up to about 1/200th of a second (The reason why is a long explanation that I’ll just link out to instead of reinventing the wheel  http://dptnt.com/2007/10/flash-sync-speed/) The practical upshot of this relatively slow shutter speed is that even at iso 100 your aperture is going to have to be stopped way down to get the exposure right, let’s say something like f/13 or so.  So now your strobe has to put out enough light to handle f/13 with the modifiers and distances you’re working with. And that’s only to have the strobe equal the sun.  If you want to pull down the ambient, you’re looking at f/16 or f/22 into a big softbox, and that requires a lot of power. This is why people use giant generators and 2400w/s packs in those big outdoor shoots people like Annie do.

As a quick aside, Pocket Wizards just released their latest triggers that do some timing magic to get some cameras to sync at higher speeds, up to something like 1/500th of a second max. This would allow you to use a wider aperture and theoretically need less power on your strobe.  The thing is that really it only buys you about a stop of light, and from what I’ve read it can cost a little power on the light because of the way it fires the strobe slightly early in order for it to line up.  So as far as power goes it might be a wash, but I need to do some more research on it.

The other option outside is to use a speedlight on high-speed- sync.  Basically the light emits an even low-power buzz of light that is on while the shutter is open, thus making it work at any shutter speed.  I personally haven’t tried it through any softening modifiers in afternoon sunlight, so I don’t know if this is the answer, but you could for example throw the shutter speed up to 1/4000th and open up the lens to f/3.2 or so.  You’d end up with a blurred background while still using an additional light.

One other idea that some people forget is just using the modeling light from your strobes at open apertures.  Sometimes I do this when I want a really thin plane of focus that gives the effect of something like a large-format close-up.  Just get a fast prime and shoot at f/1.4 in Av with the modeling lights.  The only real problem I have with this is that I need to get or make some strip boxes to get the effect I’m really after.

As you can see, lots of options and lots of lights, but they all fill some kind of niche.  It’s like different wrenches, they all look similar, but they’ve all got different jobs to do.  Please comment and add your own tip and experiences.

Artistic Compass

Today, I got some constructive criticism about my work, which unless I’m in a really cranky mood, I’m all for hearing. I want to get better, and you need to know what can be improved upon before you can change. Also, what I’m talking about now isn’t about this person’s particular thoughts, but it’s got me thinking about the overall question of art and identity.

First off, begin successful at almost anything is hard. This may be doubly true in art, especially when you’re trying to make a living at it. Not to mention the quite nasty economic situation most of the world is in at the moment. And speaking specifically of photography, there are a lot of photographers out there. I’d venture to say that there are many more than there were in the past.  Everybody seems to have a camera now and many of them are incredibly good. Digital photography, in my opinion, both allows things unimaginable in the past as well as makes getting better faster easier. I myself have really only been taking pictures for about 4 years, only about 2 years with any real seriousness.

In that time I’ve shot tons of stuff. Landscapes, and travel, and still life, a couple weddings, and of course portraits. It was my mother (she always takes credit for it anyway, so I might as well give it to her here <grin>) who told me to specialize in portraiture. I like shooting people, individuals mostly, because I like making that connection with them.  As I’ve said before, it’s a partnership and a dance, and when it works it can be incredibly satisfying. So as time has gone by I’ve honed and shaped and sanded the look of my photographs and perhaps more importantly, my philosophy on what makes a good portrait to me.  Again, I like to take deliberate portraits, not snapshots, while at the same time, not getting so caught up with lighting and equipment that you forget the person. The subject is king. I like to liken myself to the guy you would have called 200 years ago to get your portrait painted, except I’m doing it with a camera. So in general, my images are not of the subject smiling for example. They’re also usually minimally lit, with available light or one soft strobe to mimic window light, only on rare occasion to I bother venturing into two or more. That’s just not my style.

That said, who cares what I think? I read a great quote from Richard Avedon tonight, he said, “It isn’t important what I consider myself to be, but I consider myself to be a portrait photographer”. I can relate.  And to get back to my original point, how do I make myself happy with what I create.  I could make the pictures I want and to hell with critics and detractors and even admirers. But I’m not independently wealthy and unless I come into some money or meet an old lady who wants to support me, I’ve got to think about it in broader terms. I’m also not an art photographer, so I’m not making my pictures completely in a vacuum.  I’m working for magazines and advertising agencies so in some ways I’ve got to listen to what they say, or at least take it into account.

So for example, people have made comments lately about the choice of images in my portfolio, or that they’d like to see more deliberate lighting, or that the people in my pictures are too serious, etc.  And certainly I’m open to opinions and perhaps my portfolio’s selection could be different or the order tweaked to greater effect or what have you.  The question is, how far do you go to please? If people want happier looking people, do I start shooting lifestyle stuff on the beach to get that ad job even though it’s not what I do? You have to think that there are photographers out there who specialize in such stuff, who have naturally come to that style over time, in fact I know there are.  So, not to put too fine a point on it, but why not hire them?  They obviously like shooting that stuff.  The photographers shooting that kind of stuff probably aren’t shooting the kind of portraits I am, and isn’t that the point? Call me when you want what I do. However that may work for Annie, and Timothy Greenfield-Sanders and others who are established and famous, but does it work for people like me who are, for lack of a better term, up and coming? It’s a dog eat dog world out there, give the people what they want!  Ugh.  I’m a photographer because I enjoy it, and I’m terrified of changing to please others and diluting myself to the point where I don’t enjoy it anymore.

There’s also the question of specialization versus generalization.  I’ve gotten people who have said that the images in my portfolio are too similar to each other and that they don’t show enough range and buyers want to see range. Conversely and perhaps perversely, I’ve also gotten the comment that they’re too disparate that I lack focus, and buyers want to see focus, they want to know that for X kind of pictures, we call Bill.  Well they both can’t be right?  Can they? And who do you listen to?

Some would say, listen to everyone and then make decisions based on all the information. The thing is, if you don’t do what each of them says, that’ll make none of them happy. You also can’t do everything people say, because then you’re not you, you’re them.  In some ways I’ve come to the conclusion that you might as well not listen to anyone and just go with your gut. Everybody’s got an opinion, I might as well listen to mine. It’s a tough question with no clear answer, so I figure I’d open it up to discussion.

Highlights, Skintones, and Newly Minted Doctors

An old friend came over this afternoon for some portraits. She just yesterday successfully defended her dissertation, so now I have to call her Dr Pillsbury.  It’s all very intimidating, but huge congratulations go her way and I’ve very proud of my friend.

Anyway, while kerfutzing with the results, I thought it was about time to talk about some of my problems. Or rather, bring up some of the walls I find myself pushing against in my work and to start a discussion of how to overcome or at the very least difuse them.

My main problem lately is that I don’t like how digital renders highlights, and this is especially true when I’m shooting simple single light portraits like the one below. The image on the left is the mostly untouched RAW file, and on the right, my finished image. So now, let’s walk through this step by step as I did.

First I say, the original shot is overexposed, or at least it looks like it on her forehead. However using the eyedropper you can check and see that it’s no blown-out.  In fact none of the channels are above 80% or so (I’ll use lightroom percentages instead of exact photoshop numbers just for simplicity).  One could argue that the problem is my light, or more specifially that I need a fill on the other side so that the range isn’t as wide for the sensor. But that’s not really the problem.  I’ve got plenty of detail in the shadows for my liking and again, the highlights aren’t blown. But somehow they look like crap.

The one thing that I constantly miss about film is the fact that it fights back. The same thing was true of analog tape in my recording days, try to push too much level onto it and it pushed back, effectively compressing the signal.  Film does the same thing in highlights, regular negative film is pretty hard to get to blow-out. What you get is a compression of the highlights that leads to a much more pleasing, much more smooth transition. In digital, even when not blown, I find myself adding in a curves layer with a mask to try to give skin some contrast instead of it not being just a big block of almost solid color as it is on her forehead in the first image.

What I want is something like the image on the right. The kind of light you see people like Annie Leibovitz getting in her Vanity Fair portraits.  It’s smooth and contrasty, but not harsh.  I think that this would be much easier to obtain in the film days, but I know Annie shoots digital now, so it must be possible.  So far what I’ve come up with and need to experiment more with, is the idea of underexposing and bring it up. Now I know that it’s counter to every rule about exposing to the right and then pulling back that you’ve ever read, but somehow my skintones don’t look as much like shit when I under and pull up.  Essentially this is what that Highlight Tone Priority stuff does on these new Canon cameras.  Lately I’ve been shooting with that on for just that reason, but shut it off today because the shadow noise was bothering me and to me the images look more crunchy and ‘digital’ with it on. Loosing a lot of that Canon CMOS smoothness.  I’ve got to do more experimenting to really bear this out.

Today however, I had the raw files I had and you’ve got to work with what you got.  So I started by using an adjustment brush in Lightroom with an exposure -1 stop or so.  I used this to paint in the blown-out looking (but not really blown out) sections on her face, in an attempt to bring them back in line with the rest.  I then added another adjustment brush with a +.25 exposure to add a little light to her eyes.  Even still, the whole thing had that flat look, so I pulled up the ‘fill light’ slider a bit and the main exposure down a half stop or so and moved the contrast up a tad.  What I ended up with it is basically what’s on the right.  There was some hair and minor curves work in Photoshop, but the heavy lifting was in Lightroom, which I’ve been doing more with lately in an attempt to tie my hands a little bit and not do as much post.  I find that the adjustment brushes are sometimes hard to control and not nearly as responsive as brushes in photoshop, and I’m on a really fast machine.

Any thoughts or experience that should come to bear would be appreciated.
And here’s the final image bigger.