We were talking this morning about how to do portraits.....

Not really the kind of portraits that portrait studios make.  Not so posed.  Maybe not so formulaic.  And certainly not aimed at a huge audience.  One person on my favorite private forum asked how people approached portraits.  What did they think about lighting and how did they pose people?  What did they think about when they stood behind the camera and tried to pull together the session?

Project "Post Partum" Depression. Ouch.

Shot in Willie Nelson's private saloon, somewhere west of Austin.  Canon 1dmk2N and Zeiss 50mm 1.4 ZE lens.  Daylight thru a dirty window.

I'm pretty sure most photographers and writers, and just about anyone else embarking on a lengthy project, confront an sense of ennui and lassitude when they finish up their work and send it off to wherever it's supposed to go.  There's a sense of freedom and elation as you become aware that you've been freed from your obligation in the best possible way:  You saw it thru and completed it.

But if you've been working on a book as both the writer, photographer and creative director you've had to shift your life around to compensate for the inevitable deadlines.  You delay some things.  Put off commitments and reposition yourself to be most efficient and focused until the project ends.  When you are the one who pitched the book there's always an extra onus on you to do it well and do it on time.  You're submerged in the process of proving the value of your undertaking at every turn.

So when you finally emerge you probably do the same silly thing I do and send out an e-mail announcing your triumph.  You're done.

But most people (all of them?) didn't put their lives on pause just waiting with ever ripening anticipation for you to prevail and shower them with wisdom.  On the contrary, if they were friends in your social sphere they probably (barely) tolerated months of conversation that was always just a few degrees removed from "the book" and they were happy someone finally stuck a stake in it's heart so you could get back to holding up your part of the social bargain.

So even though you've announced your triumph in the loudest possible way you should consign yourself to getting back a few well intentioned "attaboys" and not hold your breath for a flurry of congratulatory bottles of good champagne, and month long string of celebratory dinners at the best restaurants in town.

When Steve Pressfield finished his first novel he rushed to tell his mentor.  His mentor said something along the lines of,  "That's great.  Now you'll want to get started on the next one tomorrow..."  And that was it.  And that's the way it works.  But today is the monday after I put my most recent project to bed.

I shot for Zachary Scott Theatre on Saturday and Austin Oral Surgery on Sunday but I still feel a little lost and anxious.

Michelle on medium format Tri-X.  One tungsten beauty dish as fill.  One diffused tungsten spot as a main light.  Hasselblad.  180mm Carl Zeiss lens.

That's when I know it's time to re-group, have a cup of coffee and work on my marketing.  But I always think it's time to work on the marketing.  And that's how we start the cycle all over again.

Don't worry about me, though.  My publisher already sent a contract for the next project.  I've assured myself that I'll take some down time though.....How about I start on April 1st?  That should work.

Reminder.  I'm not a paid reviewer.  My readers don't pay me and the manufacturers don't pay me.  I write stuff because I'm genuinely interested in what I write about.  I turn down the "opportunity" to play with/review ten times more stuff than the stuff I write about.  And in most cases what I write about is stuff that I own or will own.  And I'm very upfront about the fact that I don't give a crap about charts, graphs and test numbers.  I only care about why I might like something, not whether you will like it too.  And I can't think of another way to do it because I don't have a clue what each of you hold to be critical priorities and what you think is fluff.

Someone named Steve took me to task yesterday for not sounding the alarm about the damn "red dots" in my EPL-2 review.  Implied that I was some sort of elitist who had so many cameras at my disposal, and bought so many new ones, that I wouldn't care if a camera were tragically flawed.  I didn't like his implication,  I didn't like the way he stepped over my line.  But here's the deal:  The visual science lab is me thinking out loud.  Really loud.  And if you don't like the angle or the way I think (out loud) you can demand a refund of my "lifestyle consulting fee" and leave.  I'd write this stuff even if I only had an audience of 25.  And I have......

But I won't homogenize what I write to fit a "one size fits all" faux "objective" audience.  I'm not going to invest in test gear and if something doesn't pop up in my tests, and fun shooting periods, I'm not going to spend my time tracking down and brutalizing my gear so you can have a "worst case" scenario appraisal of a $500 camera.  That's just bullshit.

Honest difference of opinion with respectful writing?  Your comment gets posted.  Call me stupid?  Your comment gets flushed and I take you off the sweepstakes list to potentially win big.  Sounds fair to me.  

Can't get enough of those crazy LEDs.

Regular readers will know that I am the "official" photographer for Zachary Scott Theatre, here in Austin, Texas.  I was reminded today of why I like doing photography there so much.  They have great actors and the actors can make great faces.  And I get to capture those great faces and show them to the world.  It's a wonderful collaboration that makes me painfully aware that "out there" in the "real world" our sitters are generally nervous, self conscious and reticent to do anything that might make them look....."creative."  In the theatre we work toward "creative."  

The other reason I like working with the folks over at Zach is that the whole environment is one that's open to experimentation and "edge." To art as process and process as art.

Next month they start a new run of August: Osage County.  I don't know much more about the play than anyone else.  I know it's being billed as "one bitch of a family reunion" and that most of the characters have their share of social and mental dysfunctions.  That's about it.

The marketing people for the theater are going to collage all thirteen characters together for the advertisings materials and our job for this morning was to shoot each person in character against a light background so that they would be easy to select in Photoshop CS5.  Two years ago I would have meticulously lit the background a solid white to make the drop out easier by the new selection tool (with refine edge) in CS5 is soooo good I don't need to worry about a little tone in the background areas.  And if I use the images without dropping out the background I find I like the image better.

As it is Saturday I went to swim practice first and then headed over to the theater's giant rehearsal studio a little after 10am.  Even though I stuck the LED book manuscript in Fed Ex yesterday I was still excited to use the LED panels for the shoot today.  Something about tossing them on stands and covering them with a gauzy layer of diffusion then plowing right into the shooting really appeals to me.  The big panel (1000 LEDs) works so well as a main light.  Almost as soft as a beauty dish and harder than a small softbox, it has a certain authority I've come to enjoy and it's a look I don't get easily with flash.

Here's the basic lighting set up:   One 1000 LED panel with a thin layer of diffusion positioned so that the bottom edge is at the subject's chin level.  Just to the left of camera and about five feet from the subject.  I placed a 500 LED panel back near the plane of the seamless background facing back toward the subject.  I would use one of the other but usually not both depending on which side of the collage the person would appear.  I wanted that "rear lit" highlight for a change.  The ambient light levels were fairly high in the space so I didn't need to add any fill to get what I wanted.

The final addition was a little 160 LED battery driven panel on one side of the seamless paper, just behind the subject's plane, kicking some extra "clean up" light on the background.   The direct and I ran the actors thru their different emotional affects and we shot a ton of frames.  Our final tally was close to 1200 and the whole shoot lasted about and hour and a half. 

No filtration over  the lights and they were still a really nice match for the cool daylight that came fluttering down from the ceiling skylights, two stories up.  What did I learn?  Nothing.  I re-visited the idea that I love continuous light because the actors don't "play" to the flash.  There's nothing to cue them besides direction from the creative staff.  And, in my usual contrarian manner,  I used the Canon 1dmk2n instead of one of the newer, higher pixel count cameras  like the 7D, or the 5Dmk2.  

The shot just above is my favorite.  It shows off the effect of the light falling off as it cascades down from head to toe.  His face is well lit and by the time our eyes get half way down the frame the exposure on his coat pockets is a stop and a half, or two stops down.  And I love it.  I also love the idea of cocktails.....

While I have a bunch of cool lenses sitting in various toolkits in the studio, for some reason I'm having a brief infatuation with the Canon 50mm macro lens.  Yes, the cheap f2.5 version with the "noisy" focusing motor.  It's sharp, impressively well behaved and very sharp at f3.5 or f4.  My exposures on this shoot were approximately this:  ISO 800,  1/200th of a second,  f3.5/4.  

After "meeting" the characters I can hardly wait for the running shoot (dress rehearsal) in a week and a half.

Buy some tickets.  Come out and see some live theater.  I can pretty much guarantee that it's better than just about anything you'll see on TV.....  And it's real 3-D!!!!!!  The 3-D effects are incredible.  It's just like you are sitting in the audience......

Why the older camera?  Why not? It focuses at least as fast as the 5Dmk2 or the 7D, the files are just the right size for most of our marketing uses and it just feels so sexy in my hands.  

Nerdiest LED configuration of the day. Kirk Tuck's nutty contraption with a nod to Syl Arena.

I know now that I have become truly a lighting nerd.  I was reading Syl Arena's good book on Canon flash when I came across a small section in which Arena needs more power and manufactures a "light bar" out of wood and nuts and bolts and proceeds to festoon it with six or ten Canon 580 EX2 flashes.

Not being a carpenter and not owning power tools I meandered over to Precision Camera, looked thru their bewildering collection of lighting stuff and found an already assembled and ready to go model that was under $50.  With shoe mounts.

I came home, put four of the DLC-60 LED units on it, threw a sheet of diffusion over the top and lit a portrait.  Those four little guys can really belt out some light.  Don't know what I'll do with the assemblage now but I'm sure it's enough to earn me membership into the GEEKS OF LIGHT private club.  If I can just  scrounge up a couple dozen of these units I could probably go toe-to-toe with Joe McNally himself......

Done. Finished. Happy. Satisfied. Complete. A-Okay.

If you haven't written and photographed a book I'm here to tell you it's a sneaky undertaking.  By that I mean that it sneaks up on you, sucks away your time and energy and makes you a bit......compulsive.  So what's involved?  Well,  over 42,000 words,  a distillation of 12,000 images,  lots and lots of experimental shoots,  four very patient professional models (whom you've seen from time to time represented here in the blog.....),  approximately 260 captions and lots of time spent learning everything there is to know about buying and using LED lights for photography.

Of all the books I've written this is far and away my favorite.  It's a subject I  really wanted to write about because I think it will overwhelm and engulf the whole practice of photography over the next two or three years.  I think it will also make good video accessible to so many good photographers.  It's cool technology, literally and figuratively.  It's also available at relatively low cost for people who want to experiment with it.

For the past two weeks I've been declining social invitations, missing some swims and spending way too much time with a laptop burning my thighs.  I'm sitting here burning DVD's full of images for the people at Amherst.  In an hour or so I'm heading to the Fed Ex office to send out the whole bundle.  And that includes my hand drawn lighting diagrams.

All of a sudden the post partum depression is settling in.  What will I do tomorrow?

:

Getting really clear on what you WANT to do.

Life is really strange.  There's a lot of stuff that sounds like good ideas.  But then you try it on for size and realize that while it might be a good idea for someone else it's not necessarily a good idea for you.  Take social networking for example.  One of my friends insisted, a couple of years ago, that I would be left behind unless I embraced Facebook. According to him all social information would essentially migrate there and  if I didn't have presence and lots of "friends" I'd probably never get another invitation to........anything.

You may be having a different experience but I think most of the stuff that makes it to Facebook is pretty lame.  And since I never check the mail there I'm probably missing out on incredible parties I'll never know about.  But interestingly enough we still get lots and lots of invitations from Evite and we actually have friends who still know how to use e-mail and even the U.S. Postal Service to get in touch with us and tell us about upcoming actual (face to face in the same room) social networking activities.  We just don't call them "social networking activities" we generally call them "dinner parties."  Some of the functions we call, "Cocktail parties."  Those functions  have more alcohol than most of the dinner parties but much less food.  We talk to each other instead of sitting around "tweeting" about sitting around.....

I tried Tweeting but it makes me feel like......a twit.  I don't have a lot to say to people on Twitter except, "Go and read my blog!!!!"  Or the always popular (with me), "Go buy my books!"  And people get tired of reading that over and over again, even if I do it in only 140 characters.

Most of Twitter is different now.  A year ago it was all, "I'm Mike and I'm watching a train wreck here in North L.A."  but now it's mostly retweets of links that refer to something like:  "Ten ways to be a better photographer."  Or "Don't make the mistake of charging for your work when you can easily give it away for free."  Or,  "Tune in tonight for my Podcast of how to edit Podcasts."  And, of course, my favorites,  "Come to my workshop."  "Here's a link about my workshop."  "Here are ten things I learned at Bob's workshop." "365 ways to use social netwhoring to build new business."

It's basically become a clearing house for corporations that used to write press releases but  can no longer afford stamps, or lone photographers, writers, and IT people who want or need attention.  And who doesn't need a little attention?  But really, at some point "Give me Attention" Fatigue (GMAF) settles in and we realize it's mostly marketing messages disguised as "useful???" information.  Shouldn't there be "social" pressure to limit "Tweets" to ten a day?  Or fewer?  And please,  stop texting while you drive.

So what does this have to do with photography?  Well, we have a  tendency to believe we should be doing what everyone else is doing when it comes to marketing and even the kinds of photographs we should be taking.  We assume that the people who got there before us are more steeped in the magic and lure of the latest "social marketing" thang and that, if we only work at it hard enough and diligently enough, it will make us successful too, and clients will beat a path to our doors.

But does it work?  Does it ever work?  One could bring up the examples of Chase Jarvis or David Hobby.  They've made social networking pay.  But chase is talented, and driven, and connected enough to have made it anyway so we'll never know how critical tweeting was for him.  David needed a new gig and he did a great job of inventing it.  But he did it early, and often, and established himself before the big crush.  And, to his credit, he brought together a depth of understanding about lighting and a different set of tools about blogging, the combination of which propelled his Strobist.com to stardom.  Could he do it today?  Maybe.  Maybe not.  We'll never know.

But here's the real question:  If you wanted to be a photographer,  were passionate about actually taking photographs,  felt the greatest satisfaction when in the process of making photographic art,  would it make sense to re-launch a new career doing something totally different because the tides of marketing made it sound like a great business idea?  To wit, giving up shooting to stand on a stage, or tinkle a keyboard "teaching" other people to light or shoot, and growing older by the day?

All the time you spend tweeting and holding workshops in the icky ballrooms of "second tier" hotels in secondary markets is time you'll never get back.  All the time you spend "loading" more stuff into Facebook and the countless other supposed social marketing media are days and weeks that you'll never get to spend working on the stuff you love.

When money managers talk about one thing displacing the other they talk about "opportunity loss."  If you spend $50,000 on a new BMW you end up with a depreciating product but you lose the opportunity to make money with that $50,000.  When you decide to monetize your social network the very act skews you to aim toward whatever market you think you have prayer of hitting and dilutes both your spirit and your creative "true nature."

And it's easier to justify that the money you bring in will pay for shooting trips and opportunities of time but there's only so much time to go around.  If you sell your art you sell your art.  But I'm beginning to think that when you try to leverage social media into a money making machine you sell a little bit of your soul.  (Apple doesn't make money by giving stuff away.  Or wasting time on Twitter.  They charge for everything they do.  They are old economy kicking new economy's ass.)

And, I'm not pointing the finger at anyone else.  I'm as guilty as all the rest.  I write this blog because I hope it will help me sell books I've written in the past and books that I'll write in the future.  I hope that people click thru to Amazon from time to time and buy diapers, or mail order wine, or a car and that I get a small percentage of that.  And it's true that I'll never get the half hour a day that I devote to writing a blog back.  When you multiple that lost half hour by all the other half hours that you dribble away because it's "expected" of you, or because you think you are participating in the "new economy" they start to add up.

How does it help me do my art?  How does it help me connect with clients?  How does it free up my time to print or find new subjects?  The answer......it doesn't.  It helps sell books. But even though we all do it let's try to be honest with ourselves,  and by extension, to our potential clients.  We all wish we had the courage to say, "Screw it." to everything else and spend our time doing the projects we love.  We don't live and breathe just because we're sooo excited about the next workshop or, even for that matter, the next unexciting headshot.  Some of what we accept is because of our fear that no more money will come in if we don't  but mostly it is because we believe the current of information that ricochets around the web and tells us how important it is to be.......there.  Enmeshed.  Engaged.  Connected.

What if being un-engaged and productive with real (non-virtual) projects is even more important?

In case you haven't guessed......I've finished writing the LED book and I'm sending it off on Monday.  I'm going to read it one more time to see if I can catch any errors.  Then,  I'm getting in the car and going off for a long weekend to shoot some stuff that I like.  Even if no one in the entire webspace likes it or even cares.  Because I want to be really clear about what I like.  For me.  You might think of doing the same.

To wrap up, the photo of Jana, above, was done for the new book.