Changing Aesthetics and the Grace of RAW Files

I’ve mentioned before the advantages of RAW files and I firmly believe that anyone doing post production on their images should use them if only for the exposure latitude.  There are exceptions of course (sports shooters, parents who take 1000 photos of their kids, etc) but
to get the full potential of the image quality in your images you need to be able to get to the original data off the sensor.

One of the cool advantages of RAW is that RAW converters keep getting better, and you can always go back and reprocess old shots. it’s like upgrading your old 20D with a new image processing chip.  It’s also useful when you want to return to an old image for aesthetic reasons.  

As an example I pulled out a picture I took of my friend and author Grant Stoddard back in January of 2006. Almost exactly 3 years to the day. Back when I knew even less about photography than I do now.  It was shot on a Canon 20D with a 50mm prime and if I remember correctly, a big octabox on an Alien Bees 800.

Below are three different ‘editions’ of this image:

The first is a straight export of the raw image with default settings in Lightroom.  It’s a little over-exposed, but at the time I wasn’t quite that observant.

The second image is what I came up with 3 years ago when I post-processed the RAW file.  Really just exporting it with some extra contrast and then cleaning up a few do-dads. To my eye’s now, his skin is really blown-out and has no detail. It’s over saturated, and I was too heavy handed with the overall contrast.

This third image is what I did with it tonight. Obviously much more like my locally-contrasty sharpened look that people comment about. That said, it’s very different than the one from 3 years ago.  And just imagine what I’ll do in 3 more years.

Profoto AcuteB 600 – Opinions Needed

I’ve been thinking about upgrading my lighting system for a while. However the more I think about it, I’ve realized that what I really need is to augment it.

Currently, I’ve got a big White Lightning 3200 that I use as my key light at my place and a couple small Alien Bees (400, 800) that I use for secondary lights and on location. I’m a fairly simple lighting guy. Playing with 3-4 lights is fun, but quickly becomes more of an interesting enginering problems than taking pictures.  So most of the time I stick with one light, just like old paintings. The only reason I need that much power in the main light I’ve got now was to use a big octabox with my 4×5 and polaroid 55, which was rated at iso 25 for the negative.  However I’ve only got a handful of slices of that left and most of the time I use the thing at 1/4 power or less anyway (sometimes way less that 1/4).

They’re fine for my personal studio work and when I’m on a big job there’s always a budget to rent big Profoto Pro7A’s or some other similarly crazily priced gizmo.  What I need is something between my big strobes and the couple of speedlights I use for most quick and dirty gigs.  Preferably battery powered and still small enough that an assistant could carry it in a bag.

So I’ve been looking at and reading about the ProFoto Acute-B 600 for a couple months now.  $2000 for the pack, and about $800 for the head.. I figured with a decent bag to carry it all in, I’m looking at 3 grand. Certainly not cheap, but it’s for work and I need to buy things to write-off at the end of the year anyway.  However I was at a camera store this morning and the woman said that there was a deal currently running where you get the pack and head for $1999.  That’s more like it.

Before I pull the trigger though, I wanted to see if anyone had any experience with this setup, good or bad.  I’ve found a few little reviews online, most positive.

http://briansmithphotogear.blogspot.com/2007/02/profoto-acute-600b.html

http://www.flickr.com/groups/strobist/discuss/72157611180180194/

Thoughts anyone? 

Good to Great

Being good at something is not the same as being great.  Perhaps that’s the last great struggle in life.  Malcolm Gladwell has talked about how you can get good at almost anything with a few years of intense study.  Other will say that might be true, but it takes the rest of your life to become great at it.

The quote above is by Philip Seymore Hoffman from a long, and in my opinion, fascinating article in this week’s New York Times Magazine.  Most of his insights are spot on. If you haven’t read the whole thing yet, you should. Here’s a link, so go do that and come back. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/21/magazine/21hoffman-t.html?pagewanted=1

Even just striving for greatness, whether or not you ever get there, takes a lot of work. Sure there are the usual crop of phenoms and just plain lucky bastards, but in the end it involves hard work and a lot of hitting your head against a wall until you find where the doors are. And there will always be others that are better or more successful than you. I’m fine with that (most of the time), as long as I still enjoy the work I do and make progress.

As a photographer, I’m Good, but I’m not Great. There may be those among you who plainly disagree with me on this on both sides, but that’s ok. I’ve come to the realization that there will always be a chunk of people who don’t like my work no matter how good I do or don’t get. That’s part of being alive I guess. But I’ve spent a lot of time lately looking at where I am and in what direction I’m going. I know I don’t want to just work for the paycheck, and I know I don’t want to do the same thing over and over again.  I do want to make work that lasts, and I want to feel like I’ve used my life well in the end.

I got a larger wide-gamut monitor last week and have been digging back through my portfolio while getting used to it. And I’ve found my work to be crude and painfully lacking refinement.  That’s ok though, I’m not flagellating myself for the fun of it, I’m just being self constructively critical. I go through cycles as my pendulum swings between “Hey, that’s not half bad, I’m actually getting a hang of this” and “My God, I actually sent that image to a magazine!?”  Right now, I’m on the later, but as my friend Tom said last week, it’s those times when you usually have a burst of creativity. Let it come.

5D Mark II Initial Thoughts

Ok, so I’ve now used the 5D Mark II on an actual shoot of an actual subject and so far my opinion is very favorable.  As most of you know I was an original 5D shooter and more recently I used a 1Ds3 as my main camera.  My comments will generally be a comparison of these 3 bodies. I’m sure I’ll come to more and perhaps better conclusions as time wears on, but here’s what I’ve noticed so far.

SIZE AND HANDLING
Compared to the 5D1 it’s obviously very similar.  The viewfinder is slightly bigger and brighter, but not as good as the 1Ds3. I have started to get used to shooting with the extra weight of the 1D and it’s got a feeling of solidity that neither of the 5D’s can compare to.  That said, the finish on the 5D2 is that speckled matte paint similar to the 1D which gives the new camera a bit more polish.

I will miss the portrait grip shutter button, but I’m willing to give that up for the weight and bulk that I won’t have to lug around.  Also, the information inside of the 1D’s viewfinder is better laid out (I like the exposure meter vertically along the side), but again, I’ll make that concession for the weight difference. Same goes for the mode dial which I’ve gotten used to not having, instead changing modes with buttons, but you can’t have everything.

The shutter and mirror black-out, sound and seem a bit more solid on the new camera though that could be chalked up to the fact that my 5D1 has had about 150,000 shutter actuations on it.

I don’t like the trash button being in the lower left corner of the new camera, but the new high-res screen is great.  Huge improvement.  You can actually zoom in and see if you’re shots are sharp now.

IMAGE QUALITY
Some people have noticed a bit more moire in the 5D2’s shots versus the 1Ds3.  That’s most likely due to a weaker anti-aliasing filter in front of the sensor.  I’m not sure if it’s true or just my imagination, but the RAW files do look sharper right out of the camera.  I edited in Lightroom after converting the CR2 files to DNG with the adobe converter (A Lightroom update is rumored for this Tues which will make this step moot).

Other than that, the files look great.  The sensor looks to be as good or better than the 1Ds3 to my eyes.  I’ve got a location shoot tomorrow, so I’ll know more after that.  But for low-iso studio use the images are beautiful.

There’s been a lot of talk in photo forums about the ‘black dot problem’  Basically in some images where pixels are blown out (say a photo of a streetlight at night) there is a group of black pixels to the right of it in the image.  I’ve not seen this problem, and honestly I’m not sure it should happen much in my kind of work.  As one comment on the subject I read today said, “all of the images I’ve seen with this problem are terrible images.  The black dots were the least of the problems”  Your mileage may vary, and I’ll keep you up to date on this one.

I’ve played with the higher-iso modes, but not for anything serious.  For my purposes, and keep in mind that I’m an anal pixel-peeper, 6400 seems usable.  Which means that I should not need to shy away from 1600 and 3200. In the past I tried not to go above 800 unless I had to.  My post tends to exaggerate noise and I don’t like the compromise in detail and dynamic range that you’ve sometimes got to make, so I’m pretty conservative.  This means I’ve got at least another stop or two of usable range.  Speaking of which, the new auto-iso mode seems like it could be handy for those situations when you’re in and out of light and want to worry about one less setting.

MOVIE MODE
I’m not a cinematographer, but if I was, I’d be pretty psyched.  I’ve only played with the movie mode once, but the video looked great on both my mac and pc and edited fine in iMovie.  Very detailed and very big.  Could be much fun.

That’s it for now, but as I mentioned I’ve got a shoot tomorrow which should be a good test. If anyone has any specific questions, let me know and I’ll try to answer.

Annie’s book

There aren’t many living photographers you can refer to by first name. In fact, Annie Leibovitz might be the only one.  Certainly the only modern photographer any non-photographer has ever heard of.  I’m not a fan of all of her work, but most of it is beautifully done.  So when I heard she was coming out with a book about her ‘at work’ I went and pre-ordered on amazon that day.

Well it was released last week and while I can’t highly recommend it as a reference book, it was definitely worth the read.  She goes into little depth about technical matters, so if you’re looking for details on her lighting setups, look elsewhere, or rather look at her photographs and experiment until you figure it out.

The things I most took away from it were more basic realizations. For example she talks about shoots that went badly, or times that she screwed up technically or conversationally.  It’s nice to know that I’m not the only one who makes mistakes. Simple stuff, but sometimes easy to forget if all you ever see if the final polished retouched glossy shot in Vanity Fair.

Also it seems she was a fan of polaroid 665 pos/neg film.  She mentions it a few times specifically, well she mentions polaroid negatives repeatedly and then shows images that could have only been made on medium format.  I myself was a big fan of polaroid 55. In fact I’ve got about 12 slices left that I’ve got to use before they go bad.  Time to pull out my 4×5.  <grin>

Photoshop CS4 thoughts

Ok, CS4 is now released and available, so I thought I’d write a little about what I like and don’t like about it.  I’ve been using it over CS3 for about 4 months now in beta form, and it had (as most beta software does) a few rough edges until the last few builds.

Let’s start with things I like:

– GUI is now rendered by your video card, so zooming includes a zoom animation, and odd percentages look smooth.  For example, in the past if you were zoomed to 33% there was a roughness to the image which made it pretty useless to tell what you were editing. You were kind of forced to go to 25% or 50%. Now it’s all anti-aliased and smooth as glass.

– I haven’t gotten into using it yet, but there is a new rotate view function (related to the GUI stuff above) where you can rotate the image while your editing just like you can a piece of paper on your desk.  It’s not rotating pixels in the file, just your view of it on the screen. I can imagine this one being very big for illustrators who are used to drawing in the real world.

– Adjustment layer palette. I use adjustment layers constantly, sometimes 20 to an image. Want to burn parts of the image?  Create a curves adjustment layer, make it darker, set the blending mode to multiply, fill the mask with black and then paint with white.  That way you can always go back and edit the mask, or pull the opacity of the whole layer down to soften the effect, etc.
Well in CS4 instead of double clicking to open up the adjustment dialog, there is a palette (I keep it right above layers) which changes depending on which layer you’ve got active. Click on a curves AL and it shows that curve panel, click on a hue/saturation, and that’s what you see. Much less modal and always right there where you can see the curve and histogram of the masked area.

– Which brings me to one of my favorites.  Vibrance adjustment layer.  Anyone who’s used Lightroom has probably played with this effect.  Basically a smarter version of saturation that’s much more smooth and natural. Won’t let separate channels to get blown out.  Very good for controlling skin color that gets out of control when you’re adding a bunch of contrast.  Or maybe that’s just me adding a bunch of contrast.

– Oh and I like that it’s 64bit on Vista x64 which I use.  Not sure that I can tell a tangible difference (I haven’t tried 32bit since I moved to 21MP files) but I like the idea that Photoshop can use more than 4GB of my RAM.  Though the downside of this is that 32 bit plug-ins don’t work, so I’ve got to open my stuff in CS3 to use Exposure.  And if I’ve got any of those Vibrance layers, it makes a mess going backward.

Now the things I’m not happy with:

– Well, it’s bigger than CS3, but every new version of software is bigger. More features, more bloat, but that’s why we buy faster computers.  What’s the point in having the horsepower if you’re not going to use it?

– Honestly that’s about it for the negatives.  I’m sure there are other things I’ll think of while going to sleep, but it’s been stable and the additions are already so part of my workflow that I can’t go back very easily.  It’s crazy how fast that happens.

Quandary Decisions

Ok, so I’ve made some computer decisions that I’ve been complaining about for months (sorry about that).

First things first, I’m going to stick with Vista x64 instead of moving my desktop to OS X.  I’ve never had Vista crash on me, and it can actually use the 8GB of RAM I’ve got installed, as well as the fact that 64 bit Photoshop is Windows only for a while and I’ve come to really like CS4.

I’ve also decided to not replace my desktop, but rather upgrade it instead. Next week, Intel’s new i7 processors will be available, along with the new motherboards and DDR3 memory that goes with them.  I’ve been eyeing and waiting for them for a while, but you know what?  My Core 2 Quad 6600 is pretty darn fast, and as I’ve said, I’ve already got 8GB of RAM, so why replace all of that for not that big of a speed boost for what I do? In fact, I think the only thing I ever wait for the CPU in Photoshop is the lens blur filter on the rare occasion I use it.  Most of the time I wait to save my 500MB layered 16bit PSD files.  Which brings me to the changes.

Currently I’ve got 5 hard drives in my machine. 1 old 74GB Raptor as a boot drive,  1 500GB RAID 1 array for random documents and downloads, and another 1TB RAID 1 array for photography.  That’s a grand total of about 1.6TB of space on the built in Intel RAID controller on the motherboard, and I’m running very low, easily down to below 20% space remaining on all of them.  Hard drives slow down as the fill up, so this storage situation is my big problem.

Therefore here’s what I’ve done.  This morning I ordered a new case, 2 more 1TB drives, and a new bigger power supply.  When they arrive (part tomorrow, part Friday or Monday) I’m going to transplant my current system into the new, larger, fancier case (more on that in a moment), add the new drives as an additional photo array and my current collection across the two.  So I should end up with 2 photo arrays which are about 40% full.  I figure that at my current rate of consumption, this should easily last me a year. And since hard drive space keeps doubling, I can just upgrade to bigger faster drives next Christmas for the same price.  That said, the files from my 1Ds3 are twice the size of those from my 5D, so we’ll see how well my math holds.

Initially I was thinking of keeping the storage in a separate enclosure and connecting them to the machine via eSATA, but the high end enclosures cost about $500 empty, so I figured I’d be better off just getting a bigger case and doing 7 drives internally.  This giant Lian-Li case was the answer.  Looks about perfect for my usage.

When I finally get paid for the UBS job I did a few months ago, I think I’m going to get myself a little extra treat in the form of an Intel SSD to use as a boot drive.  $600 yes, only 80GB yes, but those who have taken the plunge have said that it’s done more to make their computers ‘feel’ fast, than any other upgrade they’ve ever done.  Yum.

What’s Next?

Not to get political on a photography blog, but I just wanted to say something.

On election day four years ago I was upset by the Bush re-election. At the time I was working as a freelance Art Director doing mostly online advertising, as I had done since graduating from music school. I knew I didn’t want to spend the next 4 years wringing my hands and watch pundits talk and talk and talk.  I called myself a musician, but how much music did I make?  I called myself an artist but how much art did I produce? I called myself a photographer, but how many photographs did I take?

I was so upset by the results of that election that I decided to ‘do something’ with my time.  That night I started the first of 3 consecutive annual projects.. my first 365 Project, which began as an attempt to do something, artistic each day for a year, posting them every night so that others could share in creativity and bear witness to keep me honest in my challenge to myself.  That year found me confronting the diagnosis and death of my father of cancer. It was the loss of the one person I always felt I had to prove myself to. From then on it was really only myself I had to convince.

Soon after I had completed that year’s project, I began the 52 Project, because I felt that I wanted to do larger things one each week.  So I wrote pieces for string quartet, and really cheesy pop songs, and I shot series of photographs, and I wrote a one act play.  Towards the end of that year I showed a book of my portraits to an art buyer who told me, “They’re good, come back when you’ve got more to show me”.

So I left and thought to myself, “How can I build my book and get better at this really fast”. My project 365 portraits from last year was the answer.  It led me to meet hundreds of people, even some heroes of mine, many of whom have become part of my life. It led me to from Elizabethan homes in England to the home of a porn star north of LA, and everywhere in between.  And when I finished I wondered how I was going to take the next step and really make this my life’s work.

Since the beginning of this year I’ve gone from almost nothing to having shot for TIME and BusinessWeek and UBS advertising campaigns and having my images seen by millions of people and on the cover of magazines.  It’s just been unbelievable.

This is all to say that tonight is a real milestone for me, as it is for our country. Four years ago tonight I decided to change my life. And today, here I am. And for the first time in my adult life, I really am hopeful for the future of this world. So while it’s bittersweet that I feel like a chapter of my life is complete, I’m hopeful and excited to see what the next one brings.  Thank you so much to everyone who takes the time to look at my work and read my words. This sense of community and family that I feel with all of you is what keeps me going day after day.

Time

Last Friday I had a studio portrait shoot for a magazine.  I’ll keep you in the loop and show you outtakes when they get back to me about their selections and what issue it’ll be in, but I bring it up to talk a little bit about time. That is, the amount of time you have to shoot your subject and how you deal with that.

I once read about when Platon shot Bill Clinton for Esquire back while he was still president and he was given 7 minutes in the President’s schedule.  I’m pretty sure Platon had a similarly short amount of time for Vladamir Putin when he shot him for TIME last year.

The flip-side of this might be when Bert Stern shot Marilyn Monroe back in the day. She showed up a couple hours late and he was very worried that he had lost his window, but when asked she said that she was prepared to stay all night if need be.

Now, if you know ahead of time that you’ll only get a sliver of time, as with the Platon shoots, you can generally do more work up front.  Know what shots you want to get, have lights setup, or at least experiment before the subject gets there, so that you can hit the ground running.

Temperament comes into play here though, as you don’t want to make your subject uncomfortable by coming on too strong because you feel rushed.  In fact I think this is a good point all the time.  In my opinion, the subject should always feel like you are in control and have all the time you need.  Making them confortable is job number one.

The there are the times when the plans change in real time, as they did on Friday.  My assistant Meg and I had gotten there about 30 minutes early and setup the lights and chosen a nice burnt umber paper that happened to be leaned against the wall.  I was told I’d have the subject from 1:30-2:30.  1 hour.  More than enough time for a photographer like me. Not too long, not too short.

But 1:30 comes and no author.  He was getting interviewed before the shoot and it seems the writer was running long.  1:40, nothing yet, 1:50, ixne.  So couple minutes before 2, they show up.  Which means my 1 hour is now down to 30 minutes and that my experimentation time has been cut way down.

I was looking at a book of Mario Testino photos the other day.  And I’ve always loved his use of light, but I started noticing that he had a definite set of ‘safe’ setups that employed more often than not.  It was like he had a book of recipies that he liked to cook.  Which is funny because I think we all of these safe zones.

When you’ve got 30 minutes to get a shot good enough for a full-page portrait in a national magazine, you’ve got to KNOW you’ve got it.  These are the times when I think it’s perfectly reasonable to shoot at least some of it in your safety zone.  Once you’ve got that in the can, then you can mess around.

So this is what I ended up doing.  I shot for about 15 with a simple single soft light setup that I could probably shoot with blindfolded. Only then did I pull out another light with a grid and get a bit more adventurous.  That said, I don’t think that anyone would ever accuse me of being a multi-light whore, so even these setups were pretty straightforward.  Plus a lot of my look is in post-production, so shooting for me is more about connecting with the subject and getting good source material for my final image.

In the end we finished a few minutes early (something photo editors seem to remember positively) and I’m happy with the images.  Would I have setup differently if I had known I’d have 30 minutes instead of 60?  Perhaps a bit.  I would have brought more lights and had setups and ratios ready so there wasn’t a minute here and there lost getting the lighting right. That’s also a minute that you’ve lost the attention of the subject, which can be the difference between something great and something exceptional.

Anyway, just some thoughts. 

Trouble Shooting redux

I’ll probably post some examples a little later today, but I wanted to give everyone an update on my shoot I had last night.  Well, like I thought, it was cold and very dark. 

For the group portrait, I shot two ways, high-iso medium-aperture in order to try to equalize the subjects in the foreground with the buildings in the background. It worked to a point.  It’s a little noisy, especially after my brand of retouching, and the guy in the back isn’t perfectly sharp.  But it’s passable.

The second option was to shoot them with a smaller aperture to get them all in focus and make up the difference with the flash, but which left me with too little light to hold the background.  Before they got there I took some long exposures of the background, which I then merged in post.  The result is passable, in fact, the average person would probably never question it, but then you see it next to one of the single shots, it looks a tiny bit off.  Again, passable but not super.

For those of you who don’t know me, I’m a bit anal about my photography. Scratch that. I’m just plain anal about it.  I need my pictures to be good, so I hate situations where there is no perfect answer and it’s just the lesser of two evils.  Last night was definitely one of those.  Though I don’t know what I could have done differently, it still bothers me. We’ll see what the client has to say.

On a brighter note, during the individual portraits, I got some really nice shots of one of the guys. we were standing on a corner down on Wall street and the sum of all of the lit buildings and street lights and headlights of running cop cars led to this storm of light that looked really cool at 1600 iso and short depth of field.

Anyway, more later.