The Canon 5D Mark II – Pros and Cons

I’ve been using the 5d2 as my primary body for the past 6 month or so, and I thought it was about time to give you an update.  Some of this will be obvious or a rehash of things people have said in early reviews, but I think it’s still relevant as an actual photographer actually using the thing instead of a lot of photos of charts and graphs.  Please keep in mind that my conclusions are based on my shooting style, which is mostly environmental portraits. I also use mostly high-end primes too, so lenses are not the limiting factor in most of my work. Ok, first the stuff I like.  

The resolution is great. Very similar to the 1Ds3 which I had last year. Which makes sense as they’re the same resolution and it’s probably just a newer revision of the sensor. Sometimes I look at the 100% images and think that they don’t look ‘quite’ as good as the 1Ds, but I think that might just be in my head.  I haven’t yet tried getting a really big print, like 30×45″ to see how it holds up.  My guess is, pretty well.  

Colors are fantastic most of the time, as long as you get the WB right.  Auto WB still sucks much of the time as it has for Canon cameras for years.  It’s weird, some of the time it’s right on and other times it leaves you shaking your head.

Noise is reduced from the old 5D, though that camera was no slouch in noise either. I find myself comfortably using 1600 and 3200 iso with the new camera, where I’d usually try to top out at 800 on the old one. The thing is that which 6400 and up are usable, that’s really only true when you’ve got enough light. And when you don’t have enough light is when you usually move to a higher iso.  I love all the noise tests and advertising images (like that motorcycle shot Nikon used to sell the D3) which show these high-iso images looking great.  Well sure they’re going to look great when you shot them outside in the middle of the day.  Go shoot at 12k in a dark bar with a wide open prime and then come back to me.  Perhaps it’s really useful for sports guys who need crazy shutter speeds in middling light.

Ok, then there are the negatives, beginning with the screen. The resolution is great and colors are good and the new menu system is a big step up, but the brightness levels are killing me.  The new camera’s got a light sensor, so you can set brightness to auto and it’s supposed to turn it up when it’s bright and down with it’s dark, so that you can get a good approximation of the photo you just took.  No matter what auto settings I use, or the manual ones for that matter, I can never get it right.  Most of the time it’s too bright and my images look somewhat blown out on the screen when they’re perfectly fine. I’d say it’s usually a stop too bright, but if I manually set it lower, then half the time it’s way too dark.  I’ve been checking my histogram as my safety blanket, but I’d rather just be able to trust the damn screen.   I never had that problem with the old 5D.  Maybe there’s a trick I’m unaware of.

The brightness problem is only compounded by the fact that I find the auto-exposure very inconsistent, especially when you’re using E-TTL flashes.  I haven’t found the reason for this either but there are times when it’s so annoying I just go 100% manual to at least give me some stability.

Tests have shown that the dynamic range of the sensor is a bit better than the original 5D, but I don’t feel that it is.  There have been a few times where I felt that my old camera would have done a better job, but I can’t measure that, or at least not easily. In the past week I’ve been playing with the “Highlight Tone Priority” setting and been quite impressed.  It very much helps the dynamic range and highlight problem, you can pull back highlights in RAW that were “No way in Hell” before, but does result in more noise in the shadows and even in the mid-tones.  Especially for a photographer like me who does a lot of post processing.  There is definitely more noise. Whether or not that’s a problem is a picture by picture question.  Certainly a good tool though, I’m going to leave it on most of the time now.

Then the silly things.  A camera at this level should have a 100% viewfinder.  Sony’s camera has one,  and it’s the one big thing I miss from the 1Ds3. That’s not true, I also liked not having a mode wheel that gets easily knocked into the wrong position when you let the camera dangle around your neck while you fix a light.  Also, there should be more control over bracketing.  The 1D and Nikon’s high-end bodies can do 3, 5, or 7 images over a +-4 stop range. This is an easy thing to fix in software and would make the body fantastic for HDR work, especially landscape use which is one of this cameras fortes anyway.  Oh and sometimes the camera locks up on me.  Not all the time, but I’ll be shooting shooting shooting and then all of a sudden the lens stops autofocusing.  Cycling the power quick has always worked, but it’s still disconcerting.

Though it’s got obvious strengths over the old 5D, for some reason it’s not nearly as satisfying a picture making tool to me.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going back as the resolution alone will keep me here, but the old camera had a rock solid feel to it.  I trusted it more than I do the new camera. The 5D felt like an old friend that never let me down.  Now, I always feel like I’m second guessing things with the Mark II and often I find that it was for good reason.  I’m not sure if I’ve got a bad copy, or if the stuff that bothers me will get fixed in a software update or even if anyone else is seeing the same things I have.  The one thing I’m certain of though, is that there are readers who will disagree with me on some or most of this.

Skin Tones, Color, and Custom Camera Profiles

Being a portrait photographer and a mostly environmental one at that, skin tones are very important to me.  Most of the time I don’t have complete control over the direction, intensity, and color of the light I use. It might be a tungsten bulb from the lamp next the guy in a room with florescents, and then I bring in a daylight balanced strobe to try to make something nice out of it.  It’s a nightmare in post to get all of those lights to merge.  Usually involving multiple exports of the RAW file at different white balances, and then masking them together in Photoshop.

The thing is, being ‘right’ isn’t always enough.  Sure, I could use a gray card and eye-dropper to color correct, but it doesn’t always work as well in reality as in theory.  Sometimes neutral is a little TOO neutral. Or, just because you’re outside in the afternoon doesn’t mean that the daylight WB setting is right on, there is a fair amount of variation. For example, I think the cloudy setting on Canon camera’s is way too warm, and auto WB sucks at tungsten lights which change temp over time.

And since different lights have different spectrums as well as different colors, you can’t guarantee that you can get correct colors out of some lights, no matter how hard you try playing with white balance and tint.  I tend to find this the most annoying when working with photos of people with pale skin, as the color is usually very subtle and difficult to capture.

There are people on both sides of the big camera debate that’ll say that Nikon or Canon has better skin tones, or that to make it work you’ve got to use the manufacturers RAW converter because Adobe and Apple can only reverse engineer the curves and they only get it right some of the time, and not at all in others.  I’m a Lightroom user, so the ACR engine is my tool of choice. With the release of Lightroom 2, Adobe installed custom camera profiles for Canon and Nikon models which simulate the look of the built in ‘picture styles’ and theoretically level the playing field between ACR and the manufacturer’s software.  I can’t verify if that’s the case since I don’t even have the Canon stuff installed, but it seems people think it’s about right.

I however, have not had the greatest luck with any of them.  They’re better than the adobe defaults from Lightroom 1 to be sure, but they’re just averages of a few different examples of each camera that Adobe tested, not necessarily yours.  So last night I was looking about on the net and found the DNG Profile editor that Adobe has released, which lets you create custom profiles for your camera.  All you need is a Gretag-Macbeth Colorchecker (too expensive for what they are, but very handy to own) and a couple minutes of your time.  Take a photo of the color checker in nice even light (I used a daylight-balanced profoto strobe), feed it into the editor and it’ll create a custom profile based on YOUR camera.  You then export it and it’ll show up in Lightroom’s Camera Calibration profiles list. It’s early on, but so far I’ve been pleased with the colors it’s giving me.  Closer to what I want than the canned profiles, especially in the skin tones where it counts.

Here’s a link to the editor: DNG Profile Editor
So give it a try yourself.  Worth the few minutes if it’ll make your color work that much better in the future.

Also, more questions from anyone that’s got them.  Would love to answer some more.

Storage – eSATA

If you use external storage and you have the option, choose eSATA.  Basically the same thing as an internal SATA drive as far as speed goes, so it’s fast. Get it, the E is for External. Substantially faster than your USB or Firewire drives.  For desktop machines you can buy inexpensive expansion cards to add the ports if you don’t have them (Shame on you Apple, for not adding them to the new Mac Pro), or use an ExpressCard adapter for the MacBook Pro or similar laptop.  Imac and Macbook users are out of luck. Many 3.5″ external drives and enclosures are available and tend do cost just a bit more than the USB only ones, but totally worth the upgrade if you’re doing any heavy lifting or saving big files.

There are also so-called port multiplier enclosures which allow you to plus 2 or 4 or even 8 hard drives to your computer using one cable (most 8 drive cases use two connections).  You can even setup RAID arrays with these drives to act as one giant speedy volume.  That’s what serious video guys do. This crossing of streams ‘could’ of course saturate even an SATA connection, as you’re trying to throw 4 drives worth of data down the cable designed for 1, though you shouldn’t notice that limitation most of the time unless you’re editing multiple streets of uncompressed video.  Hey, some people do.

The only thing I don’t like about eSATA is the damn connectors and cables. In a word, they suck. The cables are not very flexible and worst of all, they fall out all the time because the connectors don’t grab each other.  It’s really surprising to me that this went all the way through the development and engineering stage without someone, or many a whole bunch of people, saying “Hey, maybe we should work on this connector a bit more. It kinda sucks”.  Is there a trick I’m not getting?  As it is, my cables come loose if I touch the drives and they won’t mount.  Annoying.

Online Portfolios

Like most ‘artists’, I obsess over how people see my work. Designing and redesigning my website, and doing constant iterations of what images are on it and as prints in my book. It’s a stressful process that is often helped by an objective pair of eyes.  I for one have redesigned my website at least 4 times in the past couple of years. To be fair, before I was a photographer I was an art director and flash programmer, so there is an element of fun in it for me as well, but that’s not to say that I’m ever satisfied.

Years ago, in an attempt to make it easy for me to post random images, I sat down one night and started coding what became PhotoFolio. It worked well and I kept adding features and started letting people download and use it.  For a while I used it on my own site, but eventually I wanted something I bit more customized for my own use.

My current site, at billwadman.com, is based on a horizontal scroll mode.  Grab the red bar and drag is to the right to see more images. I saw another photographer’s site about a year ago and kind of fell for the way it felt. Her images were more airy and fashion than mine so it felt a little less cluttered. I’m also kind of over the ‘sections’ at the bottom. I’m thinking less images, higher overall quality. More of a paper portfolio on the web.  One image on the screen at a time.  Also, for those with higher-res screens, I want to be able to have larger images because I think my work looks better when you see into the images a bit more. 500 pixels tall doesn’t quite cut it. Of course, it also doesn’t help that most of my images are of a portrait orientation.

A few days ago I was looking at my monster talented friend Craig Ward’s new site at wordsarepictures.co.uk and liked the simplicity of the column of text and the image, and thought I’d give a similar look a shot. Initially I was thinking of doing the site in HTML, or to be more specific, HTML5 or at least a lot of js/css.  But after fiddling with a php template read from an xml file for a while I got thoroughly frustrated.  Seriously, doesn’t everything you want to do in dHTML have to be some kludgy workaround? Hey, W3C, how about an alignment attribute to ‘center’ things with?  Thanks in advance.

That led me back to Flash, and I remembered that one of the things I didn’t like with flash in the past is that my images color shifted a bit. I export them as sRGB and everything else I can do to minimize it, but I end up with some weird saturation issues, especially reds in skintones.  Remembering that the latest flash player and Actionscript 3 have some kind of support for color management, I threw myself into the task of building my idea in AS3.  Now, I’ve done a lot of Actionscripting in my day, but all AS2.  Any time I’ve dabbled in AS3 I’ve felt like I forgot how to do basic things like walk. Today was no different.  I’m sure for people with computer science degrees, a lot of the things I found frustrating and annoying and confusing and downright incomprehensible, would to them be a breath of fresh air, or at least comforting.  For me however, it was an exercise in humility.  It was all I could do to get an xml file loaded and parsed, and pull in smoothed and resized jpegs on the fly. Huge snaps to my good friend Hardin Gray for the assist.

Anyway, what I’ve come up with is a greatly simplified site, and still in a pre-beta stage.  But if you’ve got flash player 10 and want to take a look:  http://www.billwadman.com/proto

I like the big images, I like the openness. It still needs some work. For example, I’ve got to have the big image size up or down on the fly if you resize the browser. But the obvious functionality is there.

So how do you guys feel about this issue? HTML or Flash? Are thumbnails a necessity? How many images are enough? How many are too many?  Are templates like the ones in iWeb or Simpleviewer good enough?  Light or dark background?  Tough questions and I’m sure, open to many opinions. I’m not even sure where I stand on most of them.

—–

Oh and I almost forgot… About that Flash 10 color management stuff, I found it very hit or miss. Testing the site in flash player on my windows box produces correct colors.  Loading into a browser plug-in does not.  In either FF3 (with color management enabled) or IE7.  Flash says they’re not capable of using color profiles.  Interestingly enough, the flash plug-in says the same thing in FF and Safari on the Mac, however it ‘seemed’ as though it was rendering the colors correctly.  I’m not sure what all this means, but it somewhat defeats the purpose of me using AS3 in the first place.  Argghhhghgh.

Disappointing

So a couple months ago, Meg and I got a zipcar and drove out to a construction site in NJ to shoot a real estate developer for a weekly national magazine. We walked around with the guy and the writer and the guy from the PR company for two hours while they showed us around the place and gave us the hard sell.  To me, none of that mattered very much, you don’t need to sell me, I’m just here to take pictures.  It was interesting enough, but mostly I felt bad for Meggers having to carry a backpack with an AcuteB in it up and down many floors of stairs with a hardhat on.

Once the tour was over and it was photo time, it became clear that the subject wasn’t too keen on getting his picture taken.  I snapped a couple of test shots to see if everything was working and my exposure was good and already he was saying, “Ok, are you done yet?”.  I tend to think that I work pretty fast, all things considered, but I’m not really a one shot plus safety newspaper shooter either.  I need time to coax my subjects a little to get what I want.  Especially when they’ve got walls up.

In the end, I had enough time and got enough material to work with in a couple different settings. I thought the portraits came out well, but it took weeks for the photo editors to make decisions and then I went to Florida for the Shuttle and the to Japan. So I emailed my contact yesterday and it turns out that the story isn’t going to run in the magazine afterall. Not sure what happened. Maybe the story didn’t gel, or the subject didn’t like the angle, or there was no space because of articles about the bailouts.

It’s still a little frustrating. I mean, I did a good job, and I have no control over the the images, and I’m still getting paid, but no one will ever see the portraits which is sad and kinda lame.  Just needed to vent a little.

Photography in Japan

So I’m back from Japan, now have a few hours of sleep toward the ultimate goal of not waking up in the middle of the night anymore, and would like to share a few thoughts on taking pictures while on a trip to Japan.

As you know I went with only a film camera, an old Hasselblad 500cm.  Today’s job is to start culling through all the pictures and scanning and whatnnot, but I can already make some conclusions:  
– The Hasselblad takes really pretty pictures.
– Film and processing are getting more and more expensive.
– Slide film sucks on contrasty scenes.
– and finally, if I had it to do over again, I would shoot digital. Probably the 5DII with the 24-105IS zoom and an additional wide fast prime for night stuff.

It was really fun shooting film and certainly changes the experience of taking pictures. And even though with digital there isn’t that “this piece of film was there at the location where the picture was taken” kind of like an ‘moment time capsule’.  In the end the cost of film, I probably spent almost $400 on film and processing,  as well as the inability for me to change films quickly, led to some frustration.   And yes I know I could have had multiple film backs with different films, etc, I didn’t want to deal with that kind of complexity.  Plus at over $1 a shot with medium format film, I was more hesitant to take more fun and silly pictures that might not work.  Digital would have let me be a bit more experimental.

All of that said, for those photographers planning a trip to Japan, here are a few pointers.  You really can find film over there.  120 is no problem, I even saw 11×14″ sheet film.  I should have brought some home for Timothy Greenfield-Sanders.  The big camera stores like Bic Camera and Yodobashi have large film selections which are just out against the wall for you to peruse, and even little camera places in tourist sections of town carried a more impressive range than most pro shops here in New York.  I’ll agree with the person who suggested Provia 400.  It’s beautiful, though a little too expensive for me at $8 a roll.  Yikes.

As far as processing goes, I didn’t do any until I was back in Tokyo the second week. I brought most of it to a place called Kimura Camera  on suggestion of an old post on photo.net.  I was in Shinjuku, so it was the closest place that wasn’t some huge mega store.  However they sent it out and it took a few days, though it was done faster than they promised.  Quality seemed good and the people there was super nice.  Like if they were that nice in America, they would be being sarcastic. This place also had cases of old cool stuff to oogle, some of it at reasonable prices. 

However when I picked up my last batch from them, I had a half dozen or so more rolls and not enough time to do it their way so I asked if he had any faster suggestions and he pointed me to Horiuchi Color, which is the kind of place I was looking for all along.  Pro lab, overnight turn around, better prices than people who have to send it out. Their work was great, and they only took cash (which I found interesting) but the one guy in there didn’t like me at all.  I was trying to be polite to the girl who was helping me, and maybe he was dating her and felt threatened or something, because he was cold.  A drastic 180 degree difference from everyone else we me there.

Oh and as far as film suggestions.  I think sticking with negative film over slides is a good idea. The dynamic range of chromes is a little too narrow for many settings.  If I were starting over on the trip, I’d grab a couple boxes of Portra 400VC and then a few rolls of 160 and 800 for certain settings.  

Ok, time to get to scanning and such. If anyone has any specific questions, let me know.

I’m Back!

I got back from Japan about noon on Saturday.  My sister picked me up and kept me awake for a few hours but I crashed at 6:30 and just woke up now in the middle of the night.  Damn jetlag.
So I went and got an egg sandwich and some drinks, but before I take an ambien and try to sleep til morning I thought I’d write up some observations on Japan.  I’m sure there are more to add when my faculties are at 100%, or at least above the 30% they are now, but:

– There are drink machines EVERYWHERE.  Selling hot AND cold drinks.  Like 3 machines on a block in the residential areas. Right out in front of people’s houses.  It’s strange but handy.

– Movies are expensive.  We went to see Watchmen while there and it was about $20 per person.

– People with tattoos can’t swim in pools. Apparently old people think they’re Yakuza (mob)

– You can actually find 120 film.  Like at the corner store.  Crazy.

– We were some of the tallest people around.

– Toilets have heated seats, electronic bidets, and buttons that make flushing sounds to cover embarrassing noises.

– The train system is amazing. Shinkansen bullet trains that go 180mph.  Just awesome. And they leave every 20 minutes or so.

– I wish that the short skirt or shorts with knee high or thigh high fad would make it to this side of the pacific.  That said, many of the younger women walked with a strange gait.  Not sure if it’s learned or anatomical.  Kinda like their knees were rotated inward somehow.

– Cash is king.  Almost everything is done with cash, very little credit card use and you’ve got to seek out international ATMs.  Look for 7-11 Stores.  I hear taxes are high too, but with such a cash society, I wonder how much of the economy is off the books.

– It’s a strange mix of very old and very new.  On your left is a 1300 year old temple and on your right is the latest pop star cardboard cut-out that little girls are in line 100 deep to pay to get their picture taken with.

– Overall I did not find the whole place as overwhelming as I had feared.  It’s like New York but with vertical signs up every building.

– When you’re at a store, you don’t hand money to the cashier, you place it in a tray

I’ve got 20-something rolls of film to go through and scan tomorrow, so that’s a full day.  Can’t wait to show you all some pictures.

More observations tomorrow I’m sure.

Japan gear

So, I’m heading for Japan on Saturday, and I figured I’d talk a bit about what I’m packing.  Photo-wise of course, I’m sure you aren’t interested in how many pairs of socks I’m bringing.

Well, this is it. One camera and it’s film.  I decided on my old Hasselblad 500cm just to make things interesting and slow me down a bit. When it’s all folded up, it’s surprising how compact they are for a medium format camera.  It’s from about 1973, and I bought it from KEH a few years ago with an 80mm lens for around $800, bargain grade and it works great.  I did replace the focusing screen with a acu-matte that I found online used.  It had a couple small scratches on it, but it cost $30 instead of the usual $120 for ones without a scratch. I think I can handle the damage.  I’ve also added an op/tech strap like I use on my Canon as well.  They’re comfortable and I like the way they just click disconnect when they get in your way.

Next is a meter, since the 500cm doesn’t have one. So I’m carrying my Sekonic 308. It’s not fancy like some of my friends have, but it does the job for what I need it for, which is mostly purposes like this and when I’m shooting film with a strobe. Actually in this case I wish I had a smaller one like the 208.  Some little old school analog one that took up a little less space, but at the moment I’d rather not spend another $100 for a marginal size decrease.  One thing I like about the lens I’ve got is that the aperture and shutter speed are linked and related based on EV which is a measure of the amount of light there is available.  So your meter reads 12EV, you left the lever and set your lens to 12 and then all of the correct combinations of aperture and shutter are available at a twist.  So maybe f/2.8 at 250th, f/4 at 125th, and f/5.6 at 60th are all options for 12EV.  Well the lens is locked to 12, so just select the combination you want. Makes it really easy, especially when your traveling and your head gets fuzzy.

And since it’s a film camera, I’ll be bringing film.  It’s all in a plastic bag so that I can ask TSA security to hand check it and not have it go through the machine.  Apparently they have to if you ask nicely and make it easy for them.  I always bring a roll or two of Ilford 3200, both because it’s handy when there’s no light, and also because it’s really fast, so you can say, “Well, there’s high-speed film in there, so it absolutely can’t go through the machine.  I plan on getting the film processed there when I can, just so I don’t have to deal with security on the way back, and I’ve heard that I can buy film there, but I’m more of a Kodak guy than Fuji, so I thought I’d bring some just in case.  So in the bag I’ve got:

Kodak E100G Chrome
I love this stuff, something about the subdued colors it’s got.  Shot some in Paris a few years ago and they were my favorite pictures. Plus looking at travel positives on a light table is so satisfying as well as making scanning easier. Some of the more observant of you might notice that there are a couple rolls of Provia in there as well, but I’ve replaced them with more E100G since I took this photo an hour ago.  I figure I prefer the Kodak, and I’m sure I can get Fuji over there.

Kodak Portra 400VC
I usually get NC, but they didn’t have any in stock so I figured I’d try the more saturated stuff.  My girlfriend Holly at Calumet assured me that it wasn’t too garish, I’ll find out for myself. Went with 400 for times when 100 chromes are just too slow.  I also threw in a roll of Portra 800 just in case.

Ilford 3200 B/W
This stuff is really fast, really contrasty, and pretty grainy, but fun for dusk and nighttime in the city.  I imagine it could be magical in Tokyo.  We’ll see.

My goal is to shoot about 1 roll a day, which would leave me with about 200 photos over the two weeks.  That’s a lot of scanning, and processing fees, but when’s the next time I’m going to be in Nara?  Exactly.

Shuttle Launch: the day after

As of 7:43:22 last night, I can officially cross off  “See Space Shuttle Launch” from my list of things to do before I die.  It was a beautiful day with the actual launch almost perfectly coinciding with the sunset, so it was in shadow on the pad, but came into the sun about 15 seconds into flight.  The practical result was that the exhaust contrail was just amazing. Here’s a shot of it I found on Flickr, but it was even better in person. The launch director said it was the prettiest launch he’s seen, so I guess I picked a good one. About 6 minutes before launch, the gantry walkway and the external tank vent arm retract and that’s when you know things are really getting serious. I remember watching this happen on the first Shuttle launch back when I was 6 and I have to admit I got a little teary.

A few things to say about the launch.  Was it worth it?  Yes, to me it was.  It was an expensive week to be down there, but I’m not going to remember the $700 car rental fee when I’m 80, so the hell with it. We ran to our car and were one of the first out of the parking lot, and yet it still took us over 4 hours to drive back to Orlando, a trip which takes about 45 minutes normally. One giant parking lot the whole damn way.  That part was a nightmare, I hate traffic.  And, I guess our gamble of staying an extra couple of days to wait for the rescheduled launch after the scrub last wed was a good one.

We watched from the Visitors Center which is about 8 miles away from the pads, but where you can’t see the pad itself because of the tree line.  If I were to do it again I would suggest either watching from the coast on Route 1 which is about 12 miles away or giving your Congressperson free sex to get VIP tickets to the special area about 4 miles away with unobstructed views.  Normally it’s just friends of the astronauts and visiting dignitaries and such over there.  They do sell a very limited number of tickets over the phone, but they sell out in minutes if you can even get through to them.

I don’t regret not taking a camera with me except for a couple of good photo opportunities right after the launch.  First was the contrail which I linked to above, though even that photo doesn’t really do it justice. The second was on the way out where all of the employees of the visitor’s center were staggered around the main courtyard away from the crowd all looking up and watching the launch. One of the shouted, “oh no.” when the SRB separated about 2 minutes in, but her coworker cooled her out by saying, “no, no, those are just the boosters, that’s normal”.

There were a lot of people their with cameras, but honestly I didn’t get it. A few had 600mm lenses which would do some good from 8 miles away, but most just had Rebels with kit lenses, which really ain’t gonna cut it.  Maybe it’s because I shoot mostly portraits, and my longest lens is 85mm.  My thinking is that I’m never going to take a photo that’s better than the ones pros have been taking of launches since day one, so I might as well just enjoy the experience.  Which I did, very much.

Lack of Control

The thing about being a commercial photographer, that is editorial and advertising versus fine art, is that often you don’t have control over how your images get used or what form they take or how they’re cropped, etc.

Would I like more control? Sure, but I realize that there are plenty of people further down the line that have input.  I don’t usually agree with their decisions, but that’s part of the game and I figure until I’m asking for a $100,000 day rate, I need to roll with the punches.

That said, sometimes it’s funny or shrug-worthy.  Examples:

Here’s a author’s portrait I did of the delightful and talented Mary Elizabeth Williams. Elle was apparently testing exactly how small they could print an image and still have it be visible.  This is what I have a 21MP camera for?  <grin>:

Today, NPR used a severely cropped image I took of John Wesley Harding:

… and here’s the whole image it came from:

The there are the times when they use your image as intended as in this ad for Practical Law Company that I shot a couple months ago. Pretty much it’s my picture with copy added.  Ah if they could all be like this. Excuse the crappy scan, I just pulled it from a magazine: