Computer Quandary

I’ve got a bit of a decision to make soon and I’ll admit that it’s keeping me up at night.  No it’s not the presidential election, that one’s obvious for me. It’s also not Canon v. Nikon, as the 5DII has helped me on that count. Rather it’s a platform issue.

As I may have mentioned before, I’m not a Mac guy. That’s right, I’m a Windows user about 95% of the time. I like building my own machines a little too much. My current desktop is a 2.4GHz Core 2 Quad with 8 gigs of RAM and 5 hard drives. One 74GB Raptor boot drive, a
pair of 500GB drives in RAID 1 for general storage, and a pair of 1TB drives in RAID 1 for my photography. This whole thing runs 64bit Vista and it screams. Very fast, very stable, and very silent (just two 120mm fans on low voltage).

Interestingly enough, I was emailing with John Nack from the PhotoShop team a couple of months ago and I asked him the win/mac ratio of Photoshop sales and he said 70% Windows to 30% Mac.  And I’ve got to tell you, I was a little suprised. Sure, people use Photoshop for all kinds of things besides photography, but that’s a big number, which means there are a lot of photographers who use Windows.

Back when I went to music school it was all Macs in that industry too, and I stuck with Windows. There’s just something about Apple that pisses me off. Maybe it’s the smugness of too many of their ads. Maybe it’s the form over function much of the time. Maybe it’s the fact that even after you close all the windows of an application, the application is still running. And it drives me nuts that they’re a company that gets blowjobs from the mainstream press but rarely gets called on it’s failures (Proprietarty ADC display ports?, The fact that they never document what they’ve changed in software updates “Misc bug and performance improvements”, Hyper-inflated battery-life quotes, No MMS on the iPhone? Come on!)

It’s definitely Mac users who think that you’ve got to use a Mac if you’re doing photography, but who have no idea how their machine works and think that the guts inside are different than any other computer (‘My mac has a sad face today, I’ve got to bring it in to get it fixed’). Hey lady, it’s not a pet, it’s a computer. I had a hard drive problem a month ago and a Steve Jobs ass kissing friend of mine said snidely, “You know, that wouldn’t have happened if you had a Mac!”  Well, first off, it was the hard drive in my Macbook Pro that died, so up your nose with a rubber hose and secondly, the drive was made my Hitachi, which also makes drives used in computers of every brand. It’s the same stuff inside, especially with Apple’s move to Intel a couple years ago. Ya, that’s another good one, for years they portrayed x86 processors as slow and stupid compared to their PowerPC’s, then they to and switch without ever having to eat their words, but I digress.

Now, as I just mentioned, I do own a Macbook Pro from about 2 years ago that I use when I travel, but I only bought that because I don’t know of any comparable machines that are as compact with as good a screen on the Windows side. Even with 4GB of RAM and a 7200RPM drive in it, it’s no match for the 400MB PSD files my work ends up creating.

So here I am, a desktop Vista user with a Mac laptop for travel.  So what’s the problem?  Well, a couple of things. I’ve got an approaching storage problem that needs a long term solution. Unfortunately most of the external drive enclosures with RAID support just bridge the SATA connections together to get it to your PC where you create the RAID sets in software. So if I go that route, which is currently heavily favored, I need to decide on a platform because the drives will end up being platform specific. Second, I’ve had these machines for about two years and while there’s nothing WRONG with them, Intel is releasing it’s next generation of chips in the next month or so, and Apple looks to be replacing it’s laptops on Tues. And with big big files, every cycle counts so I’ll be upgrading sooner rather than later.

In the past few months I’m getting to the point where I use my computer basically for 4 things. Firefox (email), LightRoom, Photoshop, and watching movies. Obviously I can do all of this on either platform. Photoshop CS4 ads an application frame to the mac, which fixes my pet peave that the desktop is visible underneath the files you have open and clicking on it by accident takes you back to Finder. Though CS4 is also 64bit on Windows and not on the Mac, which means more available RAM. One thing I would miss is Qimage which I love and use to print my images. I’ve never been able to get decent color out of Lightroom or Photoshop even when I turn off all of their color management and let my HP printer driver handle everything, settings which give me perfect prints in Qimage.  I guess that I could use boot camp or parallels to print, but that sounds like a pain. And while I’ve got my laptop talking to my desktop through SMB file sharing, it never seems quite as seemless as two machines on the same platform

My pie-in-the-sky dream is a really fast Macbook Pro with an ExpressCard eSATA adapter hooked up to a 4TB external RAID set and a 30″ NEC monitor.  That way, I’ve got the best of both worlds, big screen and fast hard drives along with a lower pwer consumption and the ablity to disconnect and take my main machine anywhere. But I don’t think this next generation will be quite fast enough for that.  I’ve grown fond of 4 cores when converting RAW images to DNG.

So I’ll probably end up with a new Mac laptop and a new desktop.  The question is if I should wait for the new Mac Pro and get one of those? Or just do what I’ve always done and build a sweet new quad core machine in the next couple months, for about one half what I would pay for an inferiorly speced Mac.  Decisions, decisions.

Comments welcomed, but I’ve got one esoteric Mac RAID question for anyone out there who could answer.  If I create an eSATA software RAID set on one Mac, say a desktop, and then plug it into another Mac, say a macbook with an eSATA port; Will it mount and work seamlessly?  Would I for example be able to have my laptop on a shoot, take 50GB of photos, come home, plug in the RAID to the laptop, copy the files, unmount it and mount it back to the desktop to do my post work?

Misc Tues Stuff

– Timothy Armes wrote an export plug-in for Lightroom called ‘LR Mogrify’ based on ImageMagick that is certainly interesting, and may even give better results (certainly more options) than the Adobe one that’s built in.  Free to use for 10 images at an export, unlimited if you donate (I did).  You can read about/download here.  Thanks to Erik for sending me a heads-up via email.

– Looked at my hard drives today, and my main 1TB photo array is getting up there.. about 150GB free.  Time to start planing a real answer to that storage issue I discussed a while back.  I’m seriously thinking about a 4 drive external SATA array. Maybe RAID 0+1.

– Also looking to replace my fantastic Eizo CE240W monitor with a 30″ and I’m looking at the NEC 3090.  Working with these 21MP images needs a lot of real estate, and the portrait mode might actually be fantastic for this particular use.  If anyone has any thoughts on the NEC or is interested in buying my Eizo when I switch.  Let me know.

– I currently use a small Wacom tablet (4×6″) and need to upgrade because I’ve tried it with a 30″ display and it’s too small to control well. I was thinking about the 6×11″ if anyone has any thoughts on the ‘widescreen’ tablets pros and cons.

– Doing commercial work is great except that you’ve got to wait MONTHS to get paid, which is infuriating and stressing me out.  Everyone needs their photos TODAY but god forbid they pay you in a timely manner.  It’s just a respect thing, or lack thereof.

Canon 5D Mark II – My thoughts

Yesterday Canon finally announced their replacement for the now 3 year old (that’s 108 digital camera years) 5D SLR. In a few ways, I miss using my 5D.  It’s small, light, and has excellent image quality. So as someone who shot over 120,000 frames with a 5D and used it as my main body until very recently, I’ve been eagerly awaiting this news and have some thoughts I thought I’d share with you.

First off, the good stuff.  21MP is super, though at less than 3 grand I’m a little pissed I just bought a 1DsIII. Higher ISO speeds and better high-ISO performance, looks pretty good so far, though I’m a detail guy and find the noise reduction necessary at these levels tends to mush detail a little too much for my liking. High-res screen, super and I wish I had it on my flagship 1D.  1080P video mode, honestly couldn’t care less as I don’t shoot video, though I guess this would be useful to photo-journalists.

Now for the bad.  Same or very similar AF system to the old 5D, hmm.. well I rarely use anything but the center focus point and almost all of my subjects are still, that said, I kind of wanted a pro AF system in a smaller package or at least a really substantial upgrade.  The new viewfinder is slightly larger at 98%, thought we’ll see if the 5DII’s is actually an improvement on what was a very good but not incredible finder on the original. I’ve become a little addicted to the 100% finder on the 1D.

But the main thing that’s stopping me from pre-ordering one right now is the shutter.  Supposedly it’s the same as the old camera.  While 3 or 4 frames per second is fine for me as I never shoot in anything other than single frames, the blackout time on the 5D can simply be described as glacial.  Seriously, it’s like 150ms or something.  I think my 40 year old Hasselblad is faster.  We’ll see I guess, maybe it’s better than I think or maybe I can get over it.

Oh, and I’m not sure why everyone is always complaining about the lack of environmental sealing in these non-pro bodies.  I’ve used my Canon cameras in mild rain tons of times and had no problem.  You’d think that everyone on DP Review was shooting on a sandy beach during a huricane the way they talk.

Style

I’ll be honest, I’m not much of a fashion hound, I’m not even a fashion golden retreiver. I generally wear pretty boring clothes, hate shopping, and get a bit angry when people say things like, “Oh, blue is in this season”. Oh really?  And who exactly decided that blue is in this season?

Over the past year, I’ve fallen into a groove with my portraits.  They’ve started to feel a cohesive set to me, and also, I think, somewhat recognizable as having been taken by me.  Some of it has to do with my framing, and the focal length lenses I like to use, and of course my post-processing. And some have said that I’m able to cultivate a certain kind of portrait from my subjects, though that sounds a little new-age for my liking.

As a general rule I think all of this is a positive thing, because it makes my work more recognizable and perhaps memorable, which will hopefully lead to the all important, more work. But I’m not sure if the groove is not just as much of a trap. I mean, I ‘think’ that this look was organic and just came about, which would be a good thing, but did I subconsciencely choose for it to happen because I felt the look of my portraits was too scattered. And then the question remain, is having “a look” in the first place really a good thing?

There are many portrait photographers who’s works is quickly recognizable. Annie Lebovitz has a look, Platon definately has a look, Seliger to a certain extent, Greenfield-Sanders most certainly.  I once told a big-dog I know that I was scared of getting pidgeon-holed to which they replied something like, “It’s better to be pidgeon-holed and working than not”. Which is a good point; None of the above photographers seems to be for want of work.

Then of course there is the issue of what’s cool, as what’s cool is what sells. And I’m pretty sure my pictures are not cool.  Last year I entered in a competition at the National Portrait Gallery in London, and while a couple of my images made it to the last round of 150 out of about 6000, none of them were selected for the show.  Of the images that were, some were absolutely gorgeous, and others, in my opinion, absolutely god-awful. Most of the stuff I didn’t like was of the flat light, dirty, seemingly poor person with a blank look on their face kind of stuff which I think was in vogue last year. Most of the stuff I did like was dramatically lit and looked like a painting. Which is good because my images tend toward more dramatic lighting and painterly look.

The thing is, that I don’t like to be comfortable.  In fact, I’m uncomfortable being comfortable if that makes any sense. So while with one foot I feel like I’m hitting my stride, with the other I question greatly the path the stride is taking.  Maybe it’s just fear of regret, or of screwing up, or of becoming static.  I’ll admit that I’m at my best when I’m changing, when I’m dynamic.

I talked all this over with my friends Craig, Lisa, and Mary Beth. A typographer, a photographer, and a writer.  Basically the conclusion we came to is that you may need to make certain concessions of stability to the commercial gods, so they know what they’re going to get when they hire you, which is fine as long as you continue to grow on the side. And not in a every once in a while I mess around way, but rather all the time.  The trick on this balancing act is to not teeter too far toward either side.  

So basically I need to come with some ways to expand my creative horizons a bit, so if anyone is in the NYC area, wants to take some pictures, and will allow me the time to experiment: Let me know.

Portfolios

It’s the distilled culmination of a photographers work; a collection of their best images, their ‘book’. But how do you choose what photographs you include? And in what format? I’ve spent some time thinking about all this and thought I’d share my thoughts.

First off, the physical decisions. How big do you want/need your images to be. This depends on the style of your work to some extent, as a landscape photographers stuff probably won’t look best at 8.5×11″. Some people have these books which have hard
cases which latch and strap and fold like some kind of matryoshka doll. To my mind, unless your book is really getting messengered around every day, that sort of external vault feels like you’re compensating for the work inside. I chose a soft
leather covered Pina Zengaro book which I picked up at Sam Flax. It’s pages are held by posts, so it’s expandable to however
many pages you need. And I went with 11×14″ for paper size. Because I shoot environmental portraits, I feel like a larger print
gives a better representation of the images, regardless of the fact that most editorial use of them would be smaller than that.

As for paper and borders, I’ve been printing on Red River Arctic Polar Satin with the image centered inside 9×11″. Therefore,
they don’t take up the whole page and feel more like fine art prints. There are those who say that full bleed works better or
is more in style, but I say that trends change and while my look may not be “cool” now, my book will look classic and hopefully
never passe. Plus as much of my work is in the 3×2 ratio of 35mm, there really isn’t a paper I could use to go full bleed
without cropping the image way too much for my liking. Maybe 11×17″ but that’s a wierd size for someone to be looking at, and
if there is a landscape image, then the viewer would have to rotate the whole book. Yuck.

However all of this is circumstantial to the real question of which images to include. Not all of my images have the same feel. In fact, a few of my favorite images don’t look like my work at all (maybe that’s something I should discuss with a therapist). It seems that everyone has different opinions on this topic. I’ve spoken to other photographers, to art buyers, to magazine editors, to gallery owners, and to muggles. Some say to include your best work, some say to include your favorite work. While I think these people meant the same thing, I think there is a subtle but important difference between your ‘best’ and you ‘favorite’ images. Then others will tell me that it’s too eclectic a collection and that I should choose one ‘look’ and have a book just of that. For example, choose one section of my billwadman.com site and create the book around it. They say that editors and buyers want consistancy. They want to know that when you hire Bill you get X. I once asked a big photographer friend of mine about my fear of getting pidgeon holed into a look, to which he said that getting pideon-holed and working is better than better than not.

Because so many people have differing opinions, I’ve come to the conclusion that they’re all just opions and that there is no right answer. Or rather the right answer is that your book should contain the images you want it to contain and to hell with the way the viewer interprets that. You have no control over them anyway. Maybe the person you hand it to will pass you over because they think your consistancy shows lack of range. Or maybe they’re looking for something specific and think you’re too unpredictable. I’ve met both on both ends of the spectrum.

I’m currently reworking my book and am ending up somewhere between the two extremes. I have no real problem with an image looking a bit out of place. Yet as time goes by my images are settling more and more into a consistant look all by themselves, and maybe that’s a good thing, Maybe it’s saying something about my maturity as an artist or something. Funny thing is that I was happy with my book last time I updated it a few months ago, but now I look through and can’t believe I let people see half the images in there. Yuck!

Ok, back to obssessing.

Update Number Two

So, day two of this four day shoot was completed on Thursday, this time on-site in Saratoga Springs where the Philadelphia Orchestra spends their summers.  And just like the first shoot on tues, all of the people I met were delightful.  My side of the crew was the same with the addition of James and Kevin who worked as PA’s and drivers and such. It was nice having a couple extra pairs of hands when things needed to get done, as there was more driving and larger instruments this time.

When we met up with the boys as I’ll call them, I did a quick double check of the equipment they picked up from the rental house, and sure enough we had packs but no heads, so we had to make a pit stop at fotocare before getting on the road.  As is turns out, ultimately the fault was mine, I didn’t have them on the list. One of those “staring straight through” the obvious stuff.  No harm, no foul. That’s what double checks and teamwork is for.

In the last shoot we worked in a big New York studio, but this time we setup on the stage of a theatre.  It was just big enough for our setup width wise and everything came together quickly.  However after a few test shots I noticed a little problem.  You see, in the studio there was a white floor and walls, and so I had a de facto reflector on the far side of the subjects filling in the shadows.  However here on the stage, there was nothing to bounce some of the light back onto the other side, just a whole lot of cubic feet of really dark air.  So Meg and I fashioned a quick solution by clamping a white tablecloth to a clothing rack we borrowed from the wardrobe person (thanks Patty).  It worked fine, but obviously I would have rather seen it coming.

Lightroom 2 was released last week and runs pretty well.  The adjustment brush is a great idea and could prove very useful trying to tame RAW data even before it gets rasterized into a PhotoShop file. However I’ve found that it’s a little sluggish when painting in the adjustments, and I’ve got some pretty beefy machines.  We’ll see if it improves. More about my thoughts on Lightroom 2 when I get back from Lenox later this week.

The reason I brought Lightroom up is that I used the automasking features to desaturate the green screen paper to grey for the selects before I send them to the client.  And it took no time at all.  Just choose Saturation in the HSL panel > click the little handle icon to activate the tool and then click and drag down anywhere on the green and presto, you shot on grey paper.  I’m very impressed, and it makes the images much easier to visualize in the final composite.

On my next big shoot, I’d also like to try double diffusing my light. I’m using a 60″ softlighter for my key, but I see a lot of people in shoot videos sticking a scrim or diffuser between a softbox and the subject..  I need to play with that.

At the end of the day, a few of us where invited to to see the orchestra play.  It was a pops night and it was a program of movie scores. So I walked over mid-concert with a couple of my co-workers and we caught 15 minutes of it before we had to hop in the car to head home. A full orchestra playing live outdoors in a lovely setting on perfect summer night as a special magic.

So, in the end I learned to always check the equipment before getting on the road, tableclothes are my friend, Lightroom’s automask is very handy, and that the Philadelphia Orchestra can play.  Ok, I already knew the last one.

Off to Lenox, MA tomorrow, more updates in a day or so.  Someday, hopefully, I’ll get to show you the fruits of all this labor. 

A Quick Update – my back hurts

Sorry for the lack of updates lately. I was away with the family last weekend and now I’m in the middle of a multi-day job. I figured that I’d give you an update and let you in on how it’s going.

So, yesterday I had the first shooting day of a four day shoot for an advertising campaign I’m working on. I’m shooting musicians on a green screen, which is fun, and I must say that if they’re all like the 6 I shot yesterday this whole process is going to be a really nice experience. Everyone, especially the players who flew into NYC for this, were great. That said, I’m exhausted, or rather I was when I got home yesterday about 12 hours after I left in the morning. Standing and talking and shooting for hours on end while trying to keep your attention at 100% is really draining, and I don’t like coffee so I don’t have that little crutch. Plus my back is screaming at me.  Time to load up on ibuprofen. Better still, later this afternoon I’ve got to get in a car to drive for 3.5 hours to get to the next location for tomorrow.

I’m shooting tethered with a 1DsIII to a macbook pro, Canon remote software with Lightroom picking up the RAW files automatically as they’re dropped onto the hard drive. It takes about 10 seconds for each 22MB RAW image to transfer and show up which is a little annoying, but it’s certainly a more instant feedback than film would be and at least you get to see the image on the screen. I’ve heard that the camera to computer transfer time is much faster on a windows box (which I usually use), something to do with inefficient USB drivers in OSX. I went to go use bootcamp to install vista and try to get that boost, but the DVD drive on the macbook pro won’t read half the disks I insert, so I guess I’m stuck on this gig.

I’ve shot about 100+ images or so of each person. Trying to come up with and capture interesting ‘poses’ or expresions which will be useful in the post production phase of the process. My big thing is trying to make it a comfortable experience for the subjects because that’s how I get a portrait of that person and now just a picture of some guy playing violin. To that end, I like to keep it largely one-on-one, with the clients and other gaggle of agency people and the like not right there watching while I shoot. I’m happy to show them work at intervals, but this is a case of where too many cooks really does spoil things. Makes the subject feel like they’re on trial.

After everyone (the client team, art director, me, and anyone else who happens to want to weigh in) is happy with the images from each subject, my assistant copies the RAW onto a couple external drives just in case all hell breaks loose. BTW, I needed a couple drives for the shoot and so went to techserve the other day and picked up a couple 250GB Lacie Little Disk drives for $139 a piece. Not the cheapest for bus powered little drives, but they’re bost USB2 and Firewire which we’ve found is substantially faster for this kind of thing.

Most of them are wearing black, so I’m exposing to the right when I can to try to minimize the amount of noise in the material and shadows, and then pulling back the exposure a half a stop or so in Lightroom. It seems to be working. Unfortunately most of the men are also wearing white shirts which means I’ve got to be careful not to blow out the highlights on the other end of the spectrum.

That’s about it for now, but I’ll come back with more tales of the shoot tomorrow.
We’ll be back to regular posts and programming soon enough.

From 5D to 1DsMkIII: The double-edged sword and mini-review

I’ve now spend a couple of weeks shooting with my new 1Ds and thought it was about time that I gave some insight into the transition from my 5D to the 1Ds3. I’ve mostly shot with primes (28, 50, and 100mm) though the 24-70 zoom has also done very well. At least with the primes I don’t feel like the lenses are limiting the sensor at all, especially when they’re stopped down a bit.

Let’s get some of the obvious stuff out of the way first. The 1Ds is bigger and heavier
than the 5D, and by a decent margin. It’s not heavy like a Mamiya RZ67, but it’s not
the camera I’d want to carry around all day with a heavy L zoom while sightseeing in
Paris. The files it produces are obviously much bigger as well, so hard disk space gets eaten up twice as fast. I’ve started being a little more stingy with my RAW files,
keeping only the ones I know I’ll actually use, versus another 50% more that I used to
think I’d get around to processing but rarely if ever did.

As for the RAW files, they’re great. Resolution, with a good lens and technique, is
stunning as I’ve noted a couple weeks ago with the boring and ugly leaf example. There is an
improvement in the malleability of the RAW data, but honestly, not as much as I thought
there would be, at least on the highlight end of the spectrum. There is however room to
pull up shadows without much noise, especially at low ISO. As with most digital
systems, under-exposing is generally a better idea as the clipped highlights kill ya.
That said, the highlight to white transitions are much less jarring, with plenty of
data to pull back with the highlight slider in Lightroom. I’m caulking this up to the 14bit files.

While there is more detail overall, I think the greatest use of the glut of information
is to give the image noticably more texture, at least to to my eyes. They feel less
‘digital’ (that being the negative plastic look that people complain about) that the
files from my 5D and I’ve also noticed the images need less post production overall, seeming to have more character right out of the camera.

Noise levels are very good, I’d say about the same as my 5D, which was pretty good as well. I’m not a sports shooter so I don’t need 1/500th of a second at iso 12000, but I
regularly shoot at 800 and 1600 and have no problems to speak of. Plus remember that
with that many pixels, you can theoretically use extra noise reduction then down sample
and sharpen and end up with a 12MP image that’s really low noise. I have had no need to
do this though, so it’s just conjecture. ISO 100 shots do seem to have a little more randomness to patches of color (a blue sky for example). You could call this noise I guess, but I think it’s a good thing because it’s very subtle and makes the images feel much more like really good film scans. It’s much like dither in a digital audio recording if you have any experience with that.

The shutter is fast and tight, mirror blackout minimal. None of that gets in your way.
And the viewfinder is butter and probably my favorite part of the new camera and the
hardest thing to go backward on. It’s big enough to actually manually focus with. Even the 5D finder feels small in comparison, I can’t imagine what the step back to a rebel would be like.
After using the 1Ds for a couple weeks I wanted to test some tethered shooting
scenarios using Capture One and so picked up the 5D body for the first time when I hit a snag. And wow,
in comparison, the 5D feels really tiny and something akin to a toy. Not that it is or
doesn’t take great photographs, that’s just the visceral first reaction. I also like the idea that there are no dummie modes or anything on the camera. That you’re average person would have no idea what any of the buttons do (I’ll admit to being a bit of an elitist in that way)

If they could fit the 1Ds sensor and viewfinder in a 5D size body, that would probably
be my ideal camera. But that’s not really an option, so I’ll take the trade-off. As of right now, I’m much less likely to pick up my Hasselblad if I want to take high-end images, the files I get out of the new camera are more than a match for medium format scans to my eye. Much more so than the 5D.

If anyone has any specific questions, I’d be more than happy to answer.

Taking the Plunge

I did it. I took the next step. I pulled the trigger. I threw myself into the deep end. And I may have even jumped the shark.

As some of you have read, I’ve been doing some camera shopping lately to find a replacement for my good ol’ 5D, which has become like a very old friend. It hasn’t let me down in the slightest, but I’ve got a studio gig coming up where I need higher-res files and figured that I might as well put the budgeted camera money towards a purchase instead of a rental.

So I went and ordered a Canon 1Ds Mark III today. As any camera dork worth his or her salt can tell you, that’s the top-of-the-line 21 (yes twenty-one) megapixel professional body for fancypants people who are probably much more talented than me.

The extra resolution will be nice, though a greater strain on the glass I own as well as my own skills as a photographer. However the other reasons why I think I’ll love it are the reportedly huge and bright 100% viewfinder, superior auto-focus, short mirror blackout, and I have to admit, portrait grip (though I tend to be anti battery grip as a rule).

I know that the replacement or replacements to the 5D will be announced within weeks, and that I’m spending $8000 on a body when I might be able to get the latest and greatest camera at 16MP and half the price, I doubt that it’ll be of the same professional quality. Then again, if it is, the 1Ds will retain most of its value and I’ll just sell it, get the new prosumer model and spend the difference on some L primes.

All of this is academic though, since I need the camera in the next few weeks so I have little choice. When it arrives in the morning, I’ll be sure to share my initial impressions with you all. And I’ll remember to bring a box of Kleenex for all the drooling that will probably be going on.

On a completely unrelated note, I’m severely disappointed with our Congress today, the Senate voting to approve immunity for the completely fascist and illegal wiretapping which has occurred in the past few years. I was supporting Obama, but as of right now he’s lost my vote.

It’s going to be like Christmas Eve in my apt tonight.

<insert excited
energy here>

The Key to a Successful Shoot

Preparation, preparation, preparation.  Well that, and knowing how to use your camera, and how to control light, and of course, having a camera in the first place.   But after you’ve got all those, preparation is the key.  As I do more and more editorial portrait shoots I’m really starting to do more preparation and more research.

The photographer Platon took portraits of Vladimir Putin for Time magazine last year and there is a great video online where he talks about the shoot and the days leading up to it, and how he broke through the walls a guy like Putin has got to have up by bringing up Paul McCartney.  Apparently he found a photo of Putin meeting McCartney and it was the only photo he could find of Putin smiling.  You should watch the whole story if you’re into portrait photography because it’s a good one (inside 2008 > top row toward the right).

So I’ve started to prepare more for shoots.  Figure out the person before I get there so that I’m not just some guy with a camera, but rather a person who’s really interested in what they have to say.

When I shot Charley Maxwell (see yesterday’s post and the above photo) a couple weeks ago, I went and read interviews he gave, articles about him and ones he’s written, watched him on Charlie Rose, and then went to Wikipedia and read up on oil reserves around the world, new oil field discoveries, as well as ‘peak oil’ predications and theories.  I’ll admit that I found it fascinating even if I hadn’t had to talk about it the next day, but I’m generally an curious person into random useless knowledge so it’s all good to me. So when I walked in the room and sat down with him, I feel that I immediately had his attention and his comfort level high. We chatted as we shot; it was a lot of fun.

Now, I’ll contrast that to yesterday when I had another shoot with another smart, powerful man.  However the night before I had to go to the emergency room with a family member, so I didn’t get to do as much research as I had liked, and while it didn’t bite me in the butt too badly, I felt a bit off balance.  I can see that in the future, this research portion of the preparation is going to be a ritual to help calm my nerves.  The more unknowns and gray areas in a shoot, the more scared I get, and while I’m definitely one of those people that thrives when I’m nervous, there is always too much of a good thing.

Preparation is also important when things don’t go as planned.  The subject is a very busy guy, so he had only one hour to do both an interview and pose for my portraits.  I was told going into it that I would get about 20 minutes with him, which is not really enough to get someone into their comfort zone, but I work fast so I wasn’t too scared.

So the reporter went and started the interview, but as we came up on the 40 minute mark, he was still in there.  And then came the 45 minute mark, he’s still in there…  In the end, I had 9 minutes to do the shoot which was rushed and frustrating, I felt a little jipped but you do what you have to do.  When I saw the office we were going to shoot in, I noted the nice indirect light coming in the windows, so planned to use that as much as possible. I like using available light.  However once we got in there, I learned that the overhead fluorescent were on a motion sensor and couldn’t be turned off. <arghh>  So then it’s 9 minutes AND bad light.  I’m usually a fairly deliberate shooter, rarely if ever shooting more than a shot a second.  I’m definitely not one of those sports guys who’s doing burst of 10 frames a second (come on people, that’s almost video). But then I started to notice that he was a blinker, which meant that I couldn’t trust that his eyes would be open in my deliberate shots, and I wasn’t about to be checking each image on the screen with only minutes to work, so I starting shooting more frames than I usually would, much more of a burst shooter than I ever normally shoot.  In the end I got stuff that I’m proud of, but I was not in my comfort zone for most of it; too many unknowns and little curveballs.

While I think my photographic style is starting to gel, and I’ve become competent with the techniques I use, I think the improvements I make in the short-term will be more about pre-shoot flow and preparation. More research and more shot setups in my head. Not as canned shots that I do all the time, rather a more deliberate plan of what I’m trying to capture conceptually.  I need to think about what that means exactly and how to implement it, but I’ll certainly let you know if I figure anything out.