Drabbles Exhibition – Opening Tues, Sept 7th 6-8PM

Impact of Focal Length on Portraits

A lot has been written about the ‘right’ focal length lenses to use when taking portraits. Mainly, most such writers claim that a longer lens is a so-called portrait lens.  I have written a number of times that I generally disagree.  Any lens can be a portrait lens. In fact, I almost always use a wide-angle lens in my work. The longest I own is the Canon 85mm/1.2L which I find myself moving against (though lately I’ve been forcing myself to use it more)

Planning an Exhibition part 2

Michelangelo Eat Your Heart Out

Stealing from the Masters

Most people are surprised when they hear that I have no education in photography.  I went to college for music and then somehow ended up here.  In the modern age of digital cameras, you learn by shooting.  Take some pictures, look at them, repeat.  There’s also plenty of reading to do on the net and in books, but experimentation (just a fancy word for messing around) is the key.

Personally I get fascinated by other people’s pictures.  I don’t actually spend too much time looking at other people’s work, mostly because it makes me frustrated and cranky.  But often I get this urge to figure out how they did it.  For me, this is the best way to learn about light. Find photographers you admire and try to emulate their work.  Not so that you can mimic them perfectly, but so you can take their tricks and add them to your arsenal and make them your own. As the famous quote from Picasso said, “Bad artists copy. Great artists steal.”

This might be a good time to mention that while in this essay I’m talking about other photographers, it’s also a time honored tradition to steal from painters as well.  The only problem I’ve found with this is that painters often take liberties with the direction, quality, and quantity of light.  They’re using their eyes and imaginations to see, you’ve got to use a camera which isn’t quite as good at it.  Ok, back to the show already in progress.

There are two big giveaways for light.  Eyes and shadows.  If you can see the eyes of the subject, often you can tell exactly what kind of light setup the photographer was using.  Pick up one of the magazines when you’re in line at the grocery store and get real close and look at the covergirl’s eyes.  Most of the time you can see a light or two or three in the reflection. And moreover, you can see the relative size of them and often you get enough information to tell exactly what they used.  Ribs on an umbrella, or tell-tale signature of a ringlight; which brings me to shadows.  Always look at the shadows in an image because they can tell you the direction that the light came from and whether the source was hard or soft.

Put this all together with some experimenting and a good friend who is willing to sit and be shot while you kerfutz stuff and you’ll be learning right and left in no time flat.

I do all of this all the time, ask anyone who ever spends any time with me, and you can see the results in my work. The object here isn’t to do exactly what they do, but rather figure out HOW they do what they do so you know how to get that look when you want it. Here are a few examples to get you going… 

Harder spot with ringlight fill like Dan Winters:

One big light and simple background à la Greenfield-Sanders:

Two light pin-up like Seliger did for the Vanity Fair series:

You get the point…

My Philosophy On Retouching

As you would imagine from looking at some of my Drabbles series of portraits, I have no problem with a lot of post-production. But that’s mostly when I’m trying to create an image that is almost an illustration, as much as it’s real portrait.

But for the most part I tend toward the middle of the road when it comes to retouching, but will admit that this has changed over time. I went from very little, to poorly executed, to fairly well executed but way too much, and then back down to where I am now, which is hopefully very well executed and largely subtle.

As an example, here’s a shot that I took of my friend Caroline the other day. You may remember her from the Drabble of the girl running down the
stairs in a blue dress (link)

One light in a softbox high and to the right and fairly close. While she is obviously a very pretty girl and certainly doesn’t need a lot of help from me, I thought I’d show you a before and after so you can see where I came from and where I went. Hopefully, it’s somewhat polished without looking too fake. The trick is to not make it too perfect, unless of course you’re doing a make-up advertisement in which case you might as well just Gaussian blur her skin to within an inch of it’s death.

By the way, before some of you accuse me of trickery, all of the blur in the photo (torso, hair) was done in camera.  I was shooting at f/1.2

Before:

After:

Auto Levels Gone Wrong

There’s a problem with bringing high-quality files to your local consumer photo joint or pharmacy photo hut.  And that is that they’re not expecting high-quality files.  It’s not that their machines can’t print well (though often they’re terribly calibrated, etc) rather it’s that the computers in the printers are automatically pre-processing the files to make crappy pictures from your vacation look better.

I’m putting together a book of my Drabbles series I finished yesterday.  My designer friend Kaytee is coming over tonight and we’re going to piece the thing together as a maquette.  Sit down on the floor and try them in different orders and that kind of thing.

So to this end I wanted to print all 46 images out as 4×6 prints to throw around.  I burned a cd of medium res files, brought them down to my local mom&pop photo place and came back an hour later.  46 prints, $10, done.  Some of the images looked great.  Others looked terrible.  They’re fine for what I need tonight, but I was staring at them trying to figure out why some were perfect and others were so wrong.  And I realized that it was the darker images which came out poorly. Because the computer on the printer doesn’t expect a dark image, so it runs an auto-levels adjustment which pulls the lightest color to white and voila! your image looks like ass.  So be careful.  

Here are two examples. Original file on top, scan of print on the bottom.  The photo of Lesley on the left came out great, that’s because the lightbulbs around the mirror were already at white, so no processing was nessessary. By contrast the image of Henry on the right is very dark on purpose, as he is drinking is a dark bar. However the computer doesn’t know about the dark bar, so it did what you see below.

I’ve thought about ways to counter this by putting black and white chips along the edges like the CMYK color marks, but that just seems silly, as I rarely get stuff printed there.  Also interesting is that it works the same in film processing, where the negative is great, but the prints come back with highlights clipped because the computer goes a little too far in trying to maximize contrast.  I know I could also tell them not to process them (if that’s possible on their machine), but the proprietor is a very nice older Chinese couple and complex technical communication is not our best interaction.

Asset Management Essay 2 – One Year On

About a year ago, when I was planning to build my current desktop computer, I wrote a number of essays where I talk about the issues of image storage. None of the options where ideal, and so I went for the simplest, which was to upgrade my internal RAID 1 pair with higher capacity drives. I don’t shoot every day or keep everything I shoot, so while my library grows, I’m not the kind of shooter like an event photog who is adding 50GB every time he comes home.

So for the last year, the pair of 1.5TB drives has done me well.  But here I am, a year later as predicted, in much the same same position and trying to come up with an answer that’s a little smarter this time.

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Just to review my requirements:
1) I need at least 2TB of redundant storage, most likely I’ll just buy 3 or 4.

2) It’s got to be fast, no USB or Firewire externals.

3) I like having my whole library available at all times.  There have been a few big projects that I don’t need immediate access to that I’ve moved to multiple external drives that I consider ‘Cold Storage’, but for the most part, I have everything online in one system.

4) I don’t want to have to worry about complex RAID 5 or 6 systems that are a mess to fix if something REALLY goes wrong.
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To this end, there have been a couple of developments from Drobo.  Now I know I scoffed at a Drobo a year ago, and for the low-end one and what I do, I still scoff.  However they have released 2 models since then which ‘could’ answer my call.

First is the Drobo S, which is basically a 5 drive version of the original (which had 4 drives), along with a faster processor, an eSATA connection, and optional dual drive redundancy for $799 plus drives.

The second is the Drobo Pro, which is an 8 drive system, with optional dual redundancy, which connects over a gigabit ethernet cable via a system called iSCSI for $1500 plus drives.

Both expensive to be sure, but remember, this is your data we’re talking about. Are your pictures worth $1000 to you? See, I thought so.  Now the Drobo Pro has been out a while, gotten good reviews, but is big and expensive, and iSCSI is limited by the gigabit ethernet which in the real world means about 90MB/second. Which is fast, certainly faster than firewire or USB, but is it fast enough to work over?

The newer Drobo S is cheaper and does everything I need it to do (as far as I can tell) and has eSATA, which is theoretically faster than iSCSI, though it’s only been out a couple of weeks and I have yet to find a review or anything to give me any objective numbers to compare. I’m worried that the processing overhead of dual-redundancy will slow the whole thing down to the point where it won’t even live up to the eSATA potential.  The Drobo Pro has 2 processors, so might be better in that regard.

Either way, I planned to fill them with 5 WD 1.5TB Green drives.  They run cooler, are still pretty fast (which is less of a concern when they’re all working together) and they’re only $109/ea at NewEgg.   I’d also like to make the purchase before the end of the year for tax purposes, so if anyone has any information that might help, please let me know. 

Portfolio Selections, or How I Learned to Sort My Work

I was asked by email how I go about selecting images for my portfolio. As the sender noticed, I’ve got a section called unparsed recent work where I throw new stuff until I decide where, if anywhere, it belongs. I do this for a couple reasons, first it’s a quick place to throw stuff I’ve just been playing with, and it let’s people come and say, “Ok, all of these are great, but what kind of stuff have you shot lately?” It’s a holding tank; or maybe purgatory if images have feelings.  Often times that’s the end of the road, they die there and get removed all together.

Images that do make it out get moved into their relevant section. Studio stuff to studio, most other stuff into environmental, etc. The section distribution is of course completely arbitrary, what I’m currently using works for me. Other people like to break it down by subject instead of look.  Men, Women, Cars, that kind of thing. I decided to base mine on the story I’m trying to present, which is to say, the look of my work and how I shot it.  I like to keep each section less than 20 or 25 images for easy of use and usability reasons. Which means that I may have to decide which image is the weakest link, goodbye. Maybe it’s an orphan image, it might be good, but doesn’t fit with your other stuff. Sadly there are times when you’ve got to remove an image that you really love, or perhaps loved at one time.

A case in point is my portrait of Charlie Maxwell that I shot for BusinessWeek last year. At the time I was very satisfied with how it came out. Considering the lighting setup Meg and I used (one speedlight on a cable with a lightsphere) I think it looks much more high end in the final product. I might have a soft spot for the image because Charlie was such a nice guy and trusting subject, but I think it captures my goal that I was forming at the time of making my images feel as permanent as paintings. I even have it on my current business card. But looking at it today, in my eye it’s lost some of the bloom it once had, getting a little long in the tooth, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it moved down the list in the next few months as new stuff enters to replace it.

My currently online portfolio is exclusively portraits, but that’s not all I shoot. While I shoot portrait professionally, I do shoot thing stuff for fun.  Experiments, landscapes, and travel for instance. Lately I’ve been thinking about putting some of this other stuff up to show that I’m more well rounded as an artist.  I haven’t decided if it’ll dilute my ‘brand’ or strengthen is, but it has been bouncing around in my brain.  

In some ways, the online portfolio is easier.  It’s easier to update and change, you can have more images separated into sections, and you can show it to a million people all at once.  But some people just need to see it in print. Some are old school and like to see them on paper, and no one can knock the improved resolution on paper compared to screen. Others need to show them to clients and gathering 5 people around a computer screen isn’t nearly as good experience as a nice 11×14″ book.

And that brings us to the issue of size and shape. My current portfolio is 11×14″, but printing new pages, or a whole other set for a second book, is expensive and time consuming.  Damn HP pigment cartridges are $30 a piece time 8 colors, ugh.  I recently decided to try a blurb book for my portfolio since I had too results with my 365 Portraits and Japan book.  However I got the first copy on Saturday and the shadow detail is non-existent, as in black.  So I may be back to square one. Speaking of square, I printed it as an 8×10 portrait book with landscape images as double page spreads. That said, I’m not sure if it’s quite big enough to have the impact I want, but the next size up that would be useful for me is 12×12 which would be a waste as most of my 35mm images will take up about half of the page with the rest blank. Most thought required.

Ok, back to book image selection. You’re problem here is that you should really try to keep your book to 30-40 images, which is less then you’ve probably got in your online set.  So you’ve got to make some hard choices and also decide what kind of work you’re trying to present and to whom. I’ve currently got just one book, but my agent has recently asked for at least two. One tailored to editorial and another to advertising.  I’m not sure if I’m going to be good at making that distinction, but I guess that’s what she’s for.

So, in conclusion, choosing images for your portfolio can be a bitch. I use my ‘unsorted’ section as a cop out so that I don’t have to make the big decisions immediately. Though it may have a extra benefit of keeping my book fresh.  I’ve got a lot of hard decisions to make about all of this soon. I promise to keep you all apprised of my actions.

Your Way With the Subject

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

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

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

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