How I Scan

Shooting film is great.  It really is.
That’s not to say that there are not annoyances (cost of film and processing, sticking with a single film speed for a whole roll, etc)

But in my opinion, the biggest pain in the ass is getting the film into my computer. That’s means scanning. I use an Epson 4990 scanner, so most of the rest of what I’ve got to say is going to relate to that. That said, I’ve tried my fair share of other systems.  Friend’s Epson flatbeds, a canon flatbed (which was terrible, really really out of focus), a Nikon slide scanner about 10 years ago, a Minolta film scanner about 3 years ago, and in the fall I went and rented time on an Imacon 949. So basically, a little of everything from $200-$20,000.  I’ve read books and articles and talked to experts, but after all that I’ve come up with a process that works for me.

I’m sure there will be readers that’ll want to fight me about a lot of the details, but I think my final prints stand on their own.

Film Holders
These are plastic(usually) jigs that are supposed to hold the film in the right place for the scanner to do it’s thing. There are different sizes for different film types (one for 35mm, slides, medium format strips, and 4×5).   In my humble opinion, they suck. I don’t use them. At least the ones that come with my scanner suck, and I’ll tell you why.

When I shoot film I like to show the borders of the shot.  In fact I’ve got my own private rule with myself that I’ve got to show the whole frame of anything I shoot on the Leica. (Cartier-Bresson always showed the borders of his images in prints to show that he composed the shot that way in camera {except for one cropping example I saw at ICP last year, but that’s another essay}).  Well the 35mm film holders that came with the scanner hold the film in such a way that they automatically crop a tiny bit of the sides of the frame off.   And the 4×5 frames don’t fit Polaroid 55 negatives either. Worst of all, none of the films were held flat.  All in all a bad time, tragic for my purposes.

Apparently there are after-market film holders like the ones that betterscanning.com sells that are supposed to be good, but I don’t feel like paying for them, and most of their stuff seems tailored to medium and large format. Plus I’m lazy.

So I decided a while back to come up with alternate solutions. I read somewhere about a guy who sandwiched his film between two pieces of plexiglass and then laid that on the scanner.  I tried this with couple pieces of glass and the problems were two fold.  First, there are a minimum of 3 surfaces of glass between the sensor and the film, and that’s a lot of glass to keep clean.  Secondly Newton’s Rings (see wikipedia). Maybe plexi and not regular glass is the answer, or maybe my polaroid negs weren’t dry enough or I didn’t have enough pressure sandwiching the glass together.  Whatever the cause, I gave up on that.

Who Needs Holders?
In the end I started laying the film right on the glass in the scanner.  If the film is curled I use quarters to hold down the corners to keep the film flat (I needed small weights and they were the thing that was most handy. I used CF cards for a while but they don’t have the heft to flatten film).  For 35mm film, if I lay the film down in a convex fashion (bulging up in the middle) and then use the quarters on the frames to either side of the one I’m going to scan, that seems to work well to remove the curvature without pushing the film down onto the glass so much that it leads to Newton’s Rings problems.

I know it sounds crazy, but it works.  Oh, and I clean off the scanner glass before I start and then use an air blower (one of those little hand bulb rocket blower things) to get as much dust off the film and the glass before laying the film down.  Also, it’s best to trying to keep the film straight on the glass so that you don’t have to scan extra around and straighten it in Photoshop.  I use the bottom edge of the glass as a guide.

The Twain Resolution of 2008
OK, it’s time to open up Photoshop (or whatever you edit in) and start up the scanner software (usually File>Import>Epson Twain or something like that.

I always work in “Expert mode” if there is one, that way I have enough control and know what I’m getting. 

The 4990 scanner can scan up to 4800dpi without interpolating (making up) data, which is pretty sweet and more than I would generally need.  Most of the time I’m scanning 35mm I scan at 2400dpi because I don’t need THAT big of a file and 6MP is enough for the size prints I usually make at home. Usually it’s 1200dpi for large format, and medium format is one or the other depending on the photo.

Bit By Bit, or Not
Ok, that’s resolution, the other big thing you’ve got to deal with is color depth.  Now, most modern scanners are 48bit, which means they grab 16bit of data for each of the three RGB (red, green, blue) channels (16 x 3 = 48  get it?).  That is, they record one of 65536 discrete levels of red, green and blue.  This is significantly more than in 8 bit mode where they only record 265 levels per channel, so ALWAYS scan at 16 bit (sometimes called 48bit if you’re scanning color)  You can always take it down to 8 bit once you get the file into Photoshop, but it’s better to start with more data than you need.

A Quick Aside About Your Bits
(Imagine James Burke is saying the next sentence) The thing is, the 16 bits are more than a little bit of a misnomer, as I’ll try to explain. The 16 bits that they’re talking about cover the whole range from the blackest black to the whitest white that the scanner can measure.  However if you preview scan your film, crop tightly around it (like above), and then look at the levels palette, you’ll usually see something like this.

You can see that all the data in your photo is in the black mountain in the middle.  Not covering the whole area from left to right. So your data you’re going to capture isn’t REALLY going to be 16 bits of data, but rather less than that.. better than 8 bits certainly, but not 16. Ok, now back to the show!

Now the next step is to set those little level sliders in the right place (see levels image above). Nine times out of ten, I move the black slider on the left to the left edge of the data and the white one on the right to the right edge of the data as I did above. I find that if you let the Epson software ‘auto’ level, it clips
highlights which is a no-no. If the image is well exposed I click the black eye dropper and then click on part of the film base in the image. That is, I click on some of the border around the image. The thinking is that this is a good measure of black in the image since the image on the film can’t get any thinner than this (if it’s a negative, then the black parts of the image show up as empty space on the film, thus ‘thin’). You may notice that the left black slider moves so that it’s inside the left edge of the data, that’s ok because the infomation it’s clipping was probably just the empty holes in the edge of the film, not really any image information. This eye dropper stuff can also help reduce color cast in the scan (especially using the gray dropper on a neutral area of the image). But that’s a big enough subject for a whole other essay, for now let’s assume that we’re talking b/w.

Then I move the gray slider in the middle until I get the overall brightness of the image to be in the ballpark of how I want the final image to look.  I consider scanning the process of getting me raw data that I’m going to work on in Photoshop, it’s not the end of the process to me. So I’m not too finicky at this stage.  Mostly I want to make sure I get as much information out of the film as possible.

When all this levels stuff is set, I click OK and start the actual scan.

Clean-up and Curves
Ok, so now I’m done with the twain software and I’ve got my scan open in Photoshop. Next I create a new layer on top of the background and use a combination of the healing brush and clone tools to take care of any dust that I missed with the blower.  Leaving me, hopefully, with a nice clean scan.

You can use more levels, or curves, to adjust the contrast and black/white levels to make the image pop a little more, but that’s pretty much my process.

One more thing
By the way, last year when I went and rented time on the Imacon, the quality of the scans I got wasn’t leaps and bounds better than what I got at home.  The color of the images was much better, no color cast, but I appreciate that to the custom profiles the driver had for different color negative film stock.  As far as resolving power and pulling information out of the shadows and such, my little Epson did pretty well.  I’d give the Imacon maybe a 20% lead, which when you consider the fact that it’s 40 times the price, my little scanner did pretty good indeed.

Let me know if you have any questions.

oh and, 
p.s. Shawna, thanks for the idea .

Being Sick Sucks

I woke up in the middle of the night last night and had to run to the bathroom.  I’ve been sick all day.   Not that any of you want to know that, but I just thought it led to a fine moment to talk a little bit about motivation.

I suffer from depression a lot, have for most of my adult life.  And while it may look like I’m the kind of person who accomplishes a lot, I’ve got to tell you that I am a really bad procrastinator, ask my mom and pretty much all of my teachers I’ve ever had. 

That’s why I started 365 portraits and why I did my 52 project and the first 365 before that. I was and constantly am trying to overcome this friction that constantly feels like it’s slowing me down.  Giving myself daily goals was just one way to force myself to actually do something productive with my time.  Lately I’ve been feeling rather unproductive, but that’s another matter for another more thought out essay.

At this moment I get cyclical 10 minute respites from stomach cramps and nausea in which I’m writing this entry, but I’d much rather be shooting right now, even though it’s 2:46 in the morning.

It’s the irony of my life. I’m motivated to do stuff at exactly the same time that I physically can’t.  Of course if I were lying here feeling healthy, I’d probably just go to sleep instead of picking up my camera.  I’m not sure which is worse.

Either way, this is all to say ‘sorry’ for the lack of updates, and that being sick sucks, any way you slice it.

Choosy Photographers Choose JIF

Ok, so a lot of people ask me how I decide on a single photo, or two photos out of the two or three hundred that I sometimes take.  So I thought I’d write a bit about my process.  Most of the time I’m thinking about portraits, but I guess this applies to any set of shots.

I’m always changing the way I work, which wreaks havoc on my system for keeping things straight, but then again, I’m a cluttermonster.  I just can’t seem to spend time tidying something that’s going to get untidy again anyway; I’ve got better things to do.. though I’m sure my accountant hates me.  This is how I’ve been working for the past year or so.
Oh, and I apologize in advance for jumping between first and third person voices.

I do it in iterations using ratings (I use Lightroom for this purpose and raw conversion, but the same thing could be done in Aperture or  iPhoto or Picasa or whatever software you use).

STEP 1,
is to do the first glance cut.  This is to separate the ones that have no chance from the ones that do.  So things like blank frames when the strobe didn’t fire, or pictures of the setup while trying to get the exposure right, or subjects eyes closed, goofy face, wardrobe malfunction, or whatnot.  Anything that gets by this round gets one star.  I then go and delete everything with zero stars, because while I’ve got a few terabytes of storage it fills up faster that you can ever imagine.  This probably cuts it down to about 50% of the original shoot.

STEP 2:
is where I get a little zen about it.  It’s all about the blink moment, and first impressions.  Either a photo says something to me or it’s just a snapshot. It has Quality or it does not.  Photos that say something get 2 stars, those that don’t stay at 1. 

This is also where if there are multiple shots that are very similar, I choose the best and leave the others at 1 star.

I wish I could explain my process more, but it’s not the kind of thing that easily put into words. The one thing I have noticed is that my blink answer is almost always right.  This is not the step to stress over (that comes later).  Trust yourself  and mark the ones that ‘feel’ right.  You should be down to about 40 out of 200 now.

STEP 3,
is similar to step 2, but with more stringent standards.  This is where I’ll start comparing photos.  That one’s pretty good, but is it on the same level as that other one? Do they both deserve to make it to the next round?  If so, give them 3 stars.  To make it to 3 stars they have to show some real promise.

If we started with 200, I usually get down to 15-20 by now. This is
the level at which I would feel comfortable showing any one of the
shots to most people.

STEP 4,
and now we’re getting somewhere.  The ones you have left are probably a pretty good set.  You know when they show screengrabs of iPhoto on the apple site and you say, “ok, no one has photos that all look that good”?  Well they must have had the filter on two stars because these should all be pretty decent.

The selection process here is a longer version of step 2.  Where there I looked at them each for a second or two, now I bring each one up and take my hand off the mouse (or trackball as I use (or tablet which I sometimes use)) and really look at the photo.  I may play around with contrast and exposure and see how it ‘pushes’.  That is, see how it reacts to manipulation.  Does making it a bit warmer or brighter change how I feel about it?  Does it spark creativity?  and perhaps most importantly, does it make me go “Oooooo” when I stare at it? If so it’s 4 star material.

Photos on the edge sometimes flip between 3 and 4 stars, but usually that means they don’t belong there.  The picture has to be sure of itself.  Usually 5 or 6 out of 200 make it to this level, so about 3%

STEP 5,
now that I have the final selection, it’s time to actually work on them.  So I look at what I’ve got and pick one to open up in photoshop and do some retouching on it.  Not final final stuff mind you, just to see how they polish..  if the chrome under the rust is as pretty as it looks.

I usually start with my favorite and then work down.  Not all of the 4 star images get this treatment, but  the 3 or so that do are the ones that I choose the final from.

The psd files get 5 stars, and if they don’t clean up well, the psd gets deleted.  So the files with 5 stars are the A students; they’re the ones that make me loose my mind trying to decide between.

STEP 6,
Is where all of this culminates in the hard decision.  Sometimes it’s easy and one of them calls out to you.  Usually if this happens, it’s been your favorite from the start of this process, and sometimes it’s even your favorite since you pressed the shutter.  Sometimes it’s that easy.

Other times it’s a nightmare.
OK, here’s an example as well as 2 photographs of James Burke.  Now… meeting James Burke was one of the top 5 moments of my life, he’s been one of my heroes for as long as I can remember so choosing his portrait was especially tough. Plus, when it came to 365, whichever I chose, that’s it, it’s done and permanently part of the series.

I shot these in Barnes, outside London last August and Andrea will remember what a nutty I staged trying to decide.  She like the one on the left, because she said that it was what she remembered he was like.  Laughing and painfully friendly.  I agreed with her, and I loved the giant smile on his face, but for some reason I kept coming back to the one on the right.

For one, you can see his eyes, which for me is a big thing.  I’m all about people’s eyes. Secondly, he’s an author and historian, so there is a serious nature about him.

I anguished over these two photos for about two hours.  Looking at
them, putting them aside, arguing with Andrea, looking at them again.

And in the end I chose the one on the right, and that’s because I thought to myself “If this were going to be the only photograph of him in 100 years, which should it be?”  I decided that the one on the left, while delightfully adorable, was to me, an excellent snapshot.  The one on the right was a portrait.

Also, between the two, it was my ‘blink’ choice.  It had higher Quality.

It certainly could have gone either way, and you may have chosen differently, but I’m still happen with the decision. Which to me says that I made the right one.

———————————

This process isn’t perfect and just because it works for me doesn’t mean it works for you.  And there are plenty of times where I get it down to 3-4 pictures in 2 rounds instead of 4.  Depends on the subject and the goal. 

In many ways, I think the process of selection is as important as the taking of the pictures in the first place, because ultimately you’ll probably walk away with 2 or 3 finished pictures from a shoot. Which 1% are you going to choose to represent your work?

Being Special

I’m more than a little cranky today, so excuse this potentially adolescent rant.  I’ve just got to get something off my chest and onto this damn screen

I shot a bunch of portraits for a client recently and when they came back to me with their selections for which images they wanted me to process, all of them were boring. I mean, they were fine pictures; reasonably sharp, correctly exposed, no goofy faces, etc.  But they weren’t interesting in the slightest, and I’ll admit that it really made me fume.

In amongst the others that they didn’t choose were a number of really cool shots which in my opinion were really special photographs. The kind of shots that I knew were special when I pressed the shutter.

Now I know that they’re the client and they’re paying and all that. But I couldn’t stop thinking, “Why did you hire me when what you wanted were pictures that ANYONE with a camera could have taken?  You’ve seen hundreds of examples of my work, why bother asking me when what you want are glorified mediocre headshots?”

I know that I’ve got to make a living at this and all that jazz, but I don’t want to bother going down this road if I will end up as some run of the mill photographer who’s work is nearly indistinguishable from anyone else’s.  I felt that way with my old career in art direction, completely replaceable at every step.  A cog in the great wheel of commerce.

Look, there are plenty of very talented, technically excellent photographers who make a good living and are very happy giving the client what they want. And if that’s you out there, I’m very happy for you and I mean you no disrespect.  In fact, it would be so much easier if I could be more like you. This is all about the crap that goes on in my head. It’s about my completely irrational and mortal fear of failure, of mediocrity, of becoming average.

My goals in photography are multi-faceted.  I want to satisfy clients, sure, but much more importantly, I want to satisfy myself.  I want people to want me because they want what I can uniquely give them, not because they just need a photographer.  It’s like that line from The Fountainhead where the Dean says to Howard Roark, “Who’s going to let you build like that?” and Roark replies, “Who’s going to stop me?”.  I want to make art.

A friend quoted the “They don’t call it show art, it’s show business” line a few days ago.  And while he’s right, I don’t have to like it or take it lying down. 

I’m going to fight to be noticed.
I’m going to work to be exceptional at what I do.
And I will not compromise my beliefs.

The only people that really change the world are those people who think they can.

Consider the world ‘on notice’.

Are Nerves Good for Art?

Last year while I was doing the daily portraits I had the opportunity to shoot a few famous people as well as a few heroes of mine who might not be known to all of you, and I noticed that unlike most of the other shoots, I got really nervous in the hours leading up to the appointment.  I got cranky, my stomach turned, and I felt lightheaded.

We’ve all heard the stories of the famous actors and singers who, even
after years of playing to sold-out crowds, continue to get so nervous
before the show that they actually vomit. To think that I’m hoping to get over that reaction.

A long time ago, I used to play the piano.  I would feel similar to this right before recitals and remember thinking that the adrenaline helped my performance.  However when I look back at recordings, I find that I rushed and I glanced over subtleties that I normally would have graced.

So I guess that’s my question, is being nervous good for art? 
Do I take better pictures when I’m stressed? 
Or when I’ve got to deal with a limitation like a time constraint?

I’m not sure that I do.  My favorite photos from last year are mostly from shoots that were more relaxed and where I felt comfortable.  When I shot Buzz Aldrin I had about 30 seconds to get the shot, I took about 20 pictures.  But I had bad light to work with, and a guy like Buzz always has his ‘show’ face on when posing for pictures.  So while it was a great experience and I think I pulled it off, it wasn’t what I wanted to get out of the experience, either photographically or experientially.

Maybe there are those times when stress forces you to be more creative in finding the solution to a problem, and I’m sure some people get off that buzz.   I get off on shooting too, but it’s usually when everything starts to flow and you know you’re onto something special.  As many of my subjects can attest, I get all giddy and smiles.  I start to move around a lot too, and say  “Oo, Oo, Oo” too many times in succession.

So, if that’s the case, and I like not being nervous.  What’s the trick in overcoming it?  Without resorting to Xanax of course.  Is it a matter of experience? Then again, if that were the case wouldn’t it get easier for those anecdotal performers?

I guess time will bear this one out.  I’ll keep you in the loop.

Cameras and public places.

Greetings from the jury waiting room in the King’s Country Courthouse in downtown Brooklyn.

Yes, I’m on jury duty.  Hopefully for my bank account, it’ll only last one day, because if I’m here deciding the fate of people by holding onto the scales of justice, well then I don’t have a camera in my hand.

And interestingly enough I don’t think I could have a camera in my hand.  I just got back from lunch and the security guard put my backpack through the xray and had me open it on the other site to make sure my power adapter for my laptop wasn’t a camera.  It wasn’t but it does beg the question, why couldn’t I have a camera on my in the courthouse?  Certainly there are enough cameras in here on everyones cell phones.  And better yet, why can’t I have a camera in most public buildings now?

You could argue terrorism, that maybe someone was walking around taking pictures to plan an attack, but that seems kinda weak to me.  You could just as easily send in someone with a really good memory who could leave and sketch the whole thing out.  Or I’m sure the floor plan is available somewhere.  Hell, even the aforementioned cell phone cameras would do for most of those purposes..

You could also argue a privacy angle, that the people in the cases and jurys deserve to be somewhat anonymous. But I’m not going to pull out a Leica while I’m in the jury box.

That said, there are plenty of cameras all over this building, which I’m sure feed into some security room somewhere.

I’m not one of those people that thinks that all cops are corrupt or that the system is so unfair as to be comparable to a dictatorship or anything.  But if they can watch me all the time, I think it’s only fair that I can watch them. 

I once read an article where some guy said that the surveillance society is more fear mongering and that you only have to point to situations like the beating of Rodney King to show how that sword cuts both ways.  I thought he made a good point, but that is only true if everybody is free to capture and record freely. Yet there seem to be more and more and more places where the authorities are making it a one way broadcast that you can’t watch.

And just to fight the powers a little bit.  Here’s a shot of me sitting here writing this, courtesy  of my webcam.  ;-P

Polaroid 55 and the Slow Death of Film

I’m going to wax a little techie and a little nostalgic today.  So forgive me in advance.

I started taking pictures just a handful of years ago, and only about 2 years ago with any seriousness so you could say that I’m a child of the digital age.  That said, I’ve got 35mm, medium format, and large format film cameras as well. Switching between formats and cameras really does help improve your eye, as I wrote about the other day.

So last weekend my sister’s friend Pino was in town and wanted me to take his portrait. Which I did on my 4×5 camera with Polaroid 55 film.  Now, the cool thing about this film is that it is instant black and white film (or nearly instant, 30 seconds to be exact) which gives you an incredibly detailed negative right out of the camera (I heard that Ansel Adams himself helped design and test it back in the day).  You’ve got fix it with a sodium sulfite bath and wash and dry them, but at least you don’t have to go to the lab.  Not that 55 is perfect, it needs a ton of light (the negative is rated at iso 25, think 4 times the amount of light you need for 100 speed film and on a camera who’s maximum aperture is 5.6) and it’s not cheap.  Works out to about $4 a frame.

Anyway, I was running out of the film and so shot my remaining 3 frames of Pino.  Come monday I ordered a new box from this place on long island called ecamerafilms.com, and they were delivered today.

 I opened up the package and right there on the brand new box of Polaroid Type 55 is the dreaded yellow/orange sticker.

Look, I’m a pragmatist, and I understand that being in business is about making money, and I also understand that there can’t be too many people shooting type 55 large format images anymore.  It’s probably a group of landscape photographers and me.  However I really have to admit that it makes me sad.  A few months ago I bought a box of a similar film for medium format called type 665 and that had the same sticker on it, and now it’s long gone.

I went online and found a few people who had called polaroid and asked and they said they were going to keep making the film, but either they’re misinformed or the sticker is incorrect.  I’m going to be optimistic, but I think it’s more likely that they’re out of the loop.  The worst part about it is that polaroid film doesn’t keep for years like normal film, so it’s not like I can stock up on a few cases and I’m set for the next decade.

I discovered another cool film called Scala by Agfa a couple years ago, right after it was discontinued and Agfa went out of business.  It’s gorgeous b/w slide film, and I’ve got a few rolls left, but here is only one place in CA that still develops it. Which means it’s expensive and a pain in the ass.

While I don’t think that film is going away entirely any time soon, I do believe that we’re watching a long drawn out death.  Piece by piece, type by type they’re going to go away, until there are a couple of boutique shops that custom make rolls of 35mm b/w for prices that only rich and crazy people can afford.

If you go visit one of the big photo stores in NYC where I live you’ll see that the film dept has shrunk and that the darkroom equipment and chemicals area has gone from 3 isles just a couple of years ago down to 1.

I’m having a pretty down, crappy week and type 55 is the only reason I really like using my big camera.  Which makes this news all the more frustrating.  I’ve got some serious photoshop skills and modern digital images look great by almost anyone’s standards.  But there is something about film, especially more niche formats, that makes being a photographer as much being a scientist as an artist.  Or perhaps something in between, like a visual alchemist. I fear that it’s this part of photography that’s being lost.  What do I know, I’m cranky tonight.

For those interested, there is a small gallery of type 55 images on my main portfolio at billwadman.com and I’m sure you could find a ton by other people with a flickr search as well.

Tools for Framing

Even though I finished the 365 Portraits project a few weeks ago, I’ve still been shooting a fair amount. Let’s figure half and half between the 5D SLR and the Leica I got on the 31st (I really can’t put it down.  Ask anyone who’s seen me in the last month, I’ve made them all try it).

The thing that I’ve noticed is that my photos from the two are different, and I mean this beyond the differences between film and digital, or canon versus leica, coated versus uncoated lenses. I do have a small hunch that it may have to do with the fact that each
photo on film costs $, so I take more time with them, but I think there
is more to it than that. I just frame things differently with each of them.  And I’d go so far as to argue that I prefer the composition of my recent shots with the Leica.

It being a rangefinder, you can see AROUND the picture that you’re taking.  You can see how you’re putting a frame around reality, and perhaps more importantly, you can see what you’re leaving out.

For those who have never looked through one, here’s what the viewfinder on a rangefinder looks like..  I’ve stolen this from the Leica site:

The white lines are called frame lines and show the edges of the picture that the attached lens is going to take. So if you attach a wide angle lens then the box takes up more of the view, longer lens then the box gets smaller.

Now, see how you can see around the image you’re going to take?  It makes you think about the composition that much more.  If I was taking this shot I might say, “Ooo, I should pan up, have the buildings coming into the frame from nothing and get more of that super cool cloud in the shot” or maybe, “Ooo, that would look much better in vertically, I should turn the camera and get more of the sky”, or maybe even “Screw the city, that cloud is f*cking cool!”  Ok, so I’ve got a cloud thing.. we’ve all got our weaknesses.  There are also composition options which involve that barge in the foreground, or maybe the trees on the left side.  You get the point.

You could certainly just pan around on your SLR and see all these things too, but for some reason which I can’t quite put my finger on, I don’t. Or rather, I don’t see them as easily.

That said, this also goes for all kinds of other cameras.  I frame things differently on my Hasselblad too, and on my big 4×5 camera.  It just amazes me how much the tool effects how you see the world.   However I have started to notice a bit of cross pollonization happening, where my overall skill at seeing the picture has improved by moving from camera to camera, and format to format.   Maybe it’s like working out on different machines at the gym.  Strength training for your photographic eye.  Just a thought.

What is a Portrait? (Take 1)

I entered a competition in London a few months ago and the definition of a portrait they used was terribly broad.  It covered pretty much any photograph with a human in it.  However, to me, many such pictures are often better described as snapshots. That’s not to say they’re not good or even great photographs; Indeed, you could certainly call a lot of Cartier-Bresson’s pictures snapshots and certainly no on would agrue that they’re not incredibly great photographs.

In the past, wealthy people trying to prove their wealth (it often seems that this is the job of wealthy people) would hire painters to come in an immortalize them in armor (as if they ever actually went into battle), or on horseback, or perhaps much more attractive than they actually were. I’m not sure if I would call these portraits either.  Or rather they are, but perhaps they should be titled ‘fantasy portraits’.  This covers a good percentage of celebrity portraiture today.  Especially the editorial stuff in the glossy magazines.  And again, it’s not to say they’re not beautiful photographs, I love and have shot a lot of stuff that looks like that, but I’m not sure they really tell you anything about the subject; The pomp and circumstance gets in the way.

One of the most important things I learned while shooting all those people last year, is that you can’t take a true portrait of someone unless they want to let you take it.  It’s a partnership, and if the subject is not willing to join in, you’re screwed.  Sometimes it’s just a matter of time.  Keep shooting, and let them get comfortable and you can get something really nice.  I guess that’s where the people skills come in.  It’s all about making people feel like they are safe to show themselves to the camera.

Then again, I watched a documentary recently, where a guy said that it’s a bunch of bullshit. That any photograph is a translation of reality, and that you can never really capture a person’s true soul.  He might be right, but I do think there are special times that you can capture THAT person in THAT moment, and perhaps that’s the best that we can ever do. Or at least, that’s what I try to do.  Whether or not I do is certainly open for debate.

Here’s an example.

Pretty standard picture of a man staring at a camera.

This is a portrait of my father that I took in April of 2005, about 5 months before he died of pancreatic cancer.  We had decided to take some pictures while he looked thin but relatively healthy.  I honestly can’t remember if it was my idea or his, but there we were in the living room with a blue sheet hanging as a backdrop.

While was setting up the strobe  and was just taking pictures trying to get the exposure right, I got this shot.

Once we started for real I took a lot of photographs where my father is smiling and seemingly happy, because that’s the photo he really wanted to take. However when I got home and looked at them all, this is the one that stood out to me. It had to be saved from under-exposure and is not terribly in focus, but there is something about it that gets to me.  My sister hates it and has physically taken it off the wall when she’s come over.

I guess my question is; Did I actually capture something in my father in this split second? Or is it just a blank stare while he waited?  Would it be the same photograph if he was just some guy getting his ID photo taken at work?  And perhaps more important to the point, does the fact that you know
he’s got a terminal disease change the way you read his expression?

It’s these kinds of questions that I keep trying to answer in an effort to get better at what I do. My own personal definition of a portrait is a moving target. Even more so in the past few weeks. I hope I can eventually come to some conclusion, even if it is only temporary.

The Leica M

Ever since I really got interested in photography a couple years ago, there has always been the  Excalibur of cameras, the Leica.  Or more specifically, the Leica M series which was introduced in 1954. 

The Leica was the camera of Cartier-Bresson and Capa and Winogrand and a billion other famous photographers.  It’s a small, metal, nearly bulletproof 35mm camera which after over 50 years of revision, has undergone little change.

I’ll admit, I’ve always wanted one. I heard one story, that Cartier-Bresson knew he was going to be taken prisoner in  WWII so he buried his Leica (a pre-M model) in a field in France and then dug it up when he was released a couple years later and it still worked. In yet another anecdote, I heard that to impress potential buyers who wondered why they should pay 3 times more than the equivalent Nikon, Leica salesmen, used to remove the lens and throw the body against the nearest brick wall, pick it up, reattach the lens and take a photo. With stories like that, who wouldn’t lust after one.

Now, I’m not the kind of photographer who thinks that gear makes the picture.  Most of the photos from 365 Portraits were taken with a Canon 5D and a couple of $400 prime lenses.. certainly not the esoteric stuff some people get into.  That said, there is a mythology surrounding Leica glass that I just had to find out about.

Loaded up with a roll of Kodak 400CN film I walked around and shot and processed, and what did I find?  I found that a rangefinder takes a little getting used to.  I liked the lack of blackout when you take a picture. I LOVE the feel of the shutter and the film advance in a way that’s inappropriate with an inanimate object, but I’m willing to take that risk.  And as for the ‘look’ of the images, I’m surprised to report that yes, there is something special about Leica glass, at least in my first roll.  The smooth transition between in focus and out as well as the elusive impressionistic bokeh are delightful.

I’m sure there will be more to say on this subject, but I just wanted to give everybody my first thoughts on my new toy.