Once on this Island. A studio shot.

Shot with a Hasselblad camera and a 150mm Zeiss Planar lens. Film: Agfapan 100 apx. Printed and then scanned from the print.

The thing I liked most about the images I made of this show, besides the beautiful and energy filled faces, is the way the curtains on the left and the background behind the actor on the right are rendered. I used a giant softbox with extra diffusion very close in to the actors and kept the power on that flash head as low as possible. I was shooting at f5.6 or around there. I lit the curtain with a small softbox and put the curtain far enough back so that it was lit separately from the actors. There's a third set of lights on the far background, modified by grid spots.

In my mind, at the time I was shooting this, the construction of the out of focus background elements was as important as the lighting on the main subjects.

Re-visiting the idea of the long tail. Buying valuable knowledge in an inexpensive book.

Minimalist Lighting. The small flash guidebook.

I wrote my first photography book back in 2007 and it was published in 2012. That seems to mean that the information in the book is five years old and, like cheese, it must be past its expiration date by now. But oddly, it continues to sell briskly on Amazon. I think it's because while the model numbers of the flashes and cameras and radio triggers change faster than a presidential candidates position the core stuff, the real information has hardly changed or been rendered obsolete. The basics are still the basics even though publishers are always trying to repackage the basic information with new visual candy. The book has been ranked as high as #19 on Amazon in its early days, and, for the last few days, it's been in the top 20 to 30 thousand books on Amazon.  Pretty amazing to me when I consider that there are over 8 million titles to choose from in their sales catalog.

Most interesting to me when looking last night at Amazon's tally of the four lighting books I've written is that all four of them, at that moment in time, were still in the top 100 books about photographic lighting. What this tells me is that people are looking for the concepts and details more than they are au currant illustrations. It also shows me the power of creating intellectual property with a long tail. Last year my publisher wanted to revise this book but I think it still has some legs. It's got forty five star reviews and I still get e-mails from people around the world who find the contents valuable.

I am a firm believer that books are the best value proposition for self education on the market today. They are infinitely re-readable. Unlike streaming workshops on the web one can stop and mull over a concept and then go on reading. A book will sit in the back pocket of your camera bag or on the back seat of your car and wait for you to come back to it. The batteries won't run down. You can look at illustration photographs side by side. You can pass it along. You can write notes in it. You can rip out the pages and tack them to your wall. You can share it.  And when you come back to it time and again it always seems a little different. The market and products may shift and change but the basics are more robust. All of that for the price of four or five vente mochas at Starbucks. Seems reasonable to me.

If you aren't familiar with the book above it's my stab at explaining why I thought we were destined to evolve our shooting styles from big, heavy lights to smaller, battery powered flashes and it also provides a guide of what kind of gear to buy and how to use it to your best advantage.

The Fuji X-E1 is an interesting camera.

Fuji X-E1. The way they'll find a market for the X series cameras.

My friend Paul and I had lunch on Tues. We are both camera-a-holics. We should both be in some sort of rehabilitation program for obsessive camera buyers. But there it is. Until someone does an intervention I count myself as incorrigibly curious and always ready to jump into the other pasture where the grass seems greener and more lush.

Niether of us own or have used the X-E1 yet but we are already putting together our basic, new systems in our heads. I have a good tolerance for zooms, especially ones with short lengths and with the word "ashperical" printed really big right inside the filter ring. Paul will naturally hold out for either the Zeiss glass that's said to be coming or, at the very least the cherry picked, single focal length lenses from Fuji.

Why are we so interested? Well, the chip and the lenses are the deal with Fuji. I've read a number of reviews of both this camera and it's older, more expensive and more problem laden big brother and while there are a bunch of nits to pick with some of the operational characteristics of the camera the universal consensus seems to be that the sensor is magnificent and that most of the lenses rise close to the top of the heap compared to what is available from everyone else. Leica excluded, of course.

The body is well styled and beautifully and simply designed. It seems like it would be a good take anywhere camera. The use of an EVF means that zooms lenses aren't an issue as regards the finder. The black finish and the black lenses harken back to the Leicas they seem bent on imitating and referencing. But mostly I think I am interested in the camera because the implied quality of performance seems to rival a Leica M9 at a price point about 1/6th or less of the price.

While I am currently infatuated and satisfied with my Nex-7 (especially after the firmware update) I can't help but wonder just how much better the overall performance of the sensor really is. And everyone with a Nex 7 is always in the waiting mode for more and better dedicated lenses from Sony.

Two things slow me down from actually putting in an order for this camera. The first is the feedback from owners who've shot both Sony Nex 7's and Olympus OMD's who have also auditioned this Fui camera. The EVF is not up to the level of quality and implementation of those cameras. I'm not sure I want to go backwards now that I have finders I really like.

The second thing that holds me back is the fact that the camera currently really has to be viewed as a Jpeg only proposition. That may change now that Adobe has raw files to work with but Fuji introduced a new RAW format with a new way of de-mosaicing the output from the sensor and it seems that the only way to consistently get good conversions is to use Fuji's slow and flawed software.  I've been down that road before with the S3 and S5 cameras and I won't load Fuji's software product onto my little computing machine again. But as I've stated, all that may change as the products mark time in the market and in the hands of third party software developers.

If you are transitioning from dinosaur DSLR cameras into a new century of photographic tools and you are ready to toss aside the heavy iron and start making images with mirrorless EVF cameras you should go into a store and check one of the X-E1's out. If they've fixed the focusing issues of the X-Pro-1 and maintained the quality of the sensor it might just be one hell of a photographic imaging device. And what they didn't get right out of the gate might be tweakable in firmware updates.

Fuji's has always made cameras and camera sensors that intrigue me and have enabled me to turn out beautiful files. And their lenses are also well regarded. I hope that these cameras are the spearhead of a whole new family of cameras from Fuji. I can hardly wait to put one through its paces.

Why I'm adding another Nex 7 to my tool box.

I've always liked the Nex-7 for silly reasons. I like the way it looks. I like the fact that it packs such a dense and information rich sensor in such a small package. I like that it actually accepts and uses my Pen FT lenses well. I like the fact that I can put just about any lens in the world on the front of it. I like the fact that I can put my collection of really good Sony Alpha lenses on the camera and keep auto aperture and even effect fast AF. But there were several downsides to the camera that kept me from joyously recommending it to friends and family. One was much web discussion about the camera's sensor having some incompatibility issues with the outer regions of wide angle lenses and another caveat was the really slow review function. The time from shooting and image until it wrote in the LCD or in the EVF seemed glacial. 

I've toyed with the idea of getting a second body because I've had really good image results from the camera and I really liked the way it handled after I got conversant with the menus and the controls. I was on the fence though since the cost of another body might make me re-think my budget for other goodies such as the a99 and the VG-900. But, on the other hand, I love to buy and use cameras in pairs. I'm sure it comes from my old film days when having a second loaded camera was like a safety net in fast moving events and having a redundant and intimately familiar back-up was a nice safety blanket. Most of use started carrying around two cameras because it was easier, during assignments, to assign one prime lens to each body rather than stopped to cap and un-cap lenses and replace other lenses back into their padded bags and pouches.

Nowadays having two identical cameras means not having to change lenses in dusty locations (that's everywhere) or not having to change lenses at all. And in an age of ultra-battery dependance a second camera that shares a battery and a charger is a bonus. I was hesitant. I liked the symmetry of two identical cameras and it's worked out well when I use my two a77 cameras together on a shooting day. But some of the issues above slowed down my purchase of a second Nex-7.

But that was before yesterday....

Yesterday I downloaded the firmware update for the Nex-7, followed the instructions, restarted my computer in the ancient 32 bit mode and did the upgrade dance. Now my Nex-7 camera slams that review into the finder almost instantaneously. The review is state of the art. And my test with the kit lens point to much improvement in the outer periphery of images taken with my kit lens at its widest focal length setting. For all the clumsy fingered the update also enables one to disable the movie button so there are no accidental triggerings to complicate one's life. For me now the camera has achieve an almost platinum level standing with me. The few gripes I have are easily rendered moot. I wished that the batteries lasted longer but then I realized I could just buy three more and not worry about it. I wished the kit lens were faster but I just started using faster primes.

Now I've shot several jobs with the Nex7 and find the image quality, especially at ISO 100 and 200 to be nothing short of superb and I think a second camera is the correct next purchase.

I'm sure someone will ask me about the upcoming Nex 6 but I'm one of the users who will gladly trade away a slight improvement in high ISO noise performance for the rich, dense information I get from the 24 megapixel sensor. And I don't relish moving away from the Tri-Navi dials now that I've learned to use them almost unconsciously. Better two slightly older cameras with the performance I really like than one new camera with its attendant new learning curve.

Yes. I know this all sounds "cult-y" but there you have it. Sometimes a camera works for you and sometimes you have to drag it kicking and screaming to do what you want. I'll take the easy path where I am seduced overtime by the totality of a camera's charms rather than dazzled by a single metric of promise.

Order one today.

Kinky Friedman. Texas writer, musician and perennial gubernatorial candidate

Hmmm. Digital or Film? And why?

Your unique selling proposition is your unique way of looking at the world.

M.

I will confess to being a horrible landscape photographer. I can point the camera at trees and lakes and mountains and beautiful skies and do all the technical stuff but I don't "get" landscape. It's a genre that doesn't get my heart racing. I don't pine to rush out at "first light" and make photographs while the mists delicately burn away in the first tentative moments of sunrise. Architecture? I do like a few older buildings and a handful of modern buildings but most dwellings and offices and public buildings leave me feeling like I've just walked through an appliance store and detoured down between the row of white refrigerators and matching washers and dryers. 

What I like to photograph is people. I like to make portraits for a couple of reasons. One is that it gives me an excuse to get to know people I've never met before and it gives me an opportunity to get to know the people that I do know so much better, and in a different way. The other reason is the interactive nature of having another person collaborating in the mix.  In a good portrait session there's always such an abundance of good energy and a wonderful feeling of sharing. Even a "bad" portrait session has its own "charms."

Yesterday I spoke to a group of photography students at Austin Community College about the business of photography. It's one of those moments when you are trying to distill and translate messages about the thing that you do so you can share the ideas. And the idea that kept coming to me as I tried to explain how to be "successful" in this crazy business was simple.  You need to understand that you will have a style and a vision that is unique to you. This is the thing that you nurture and once you understand what it is this style and vision is the magic stuff that differentiates you from everyone else in your market. Not everyone will like your style or understand your vision but your job, in the pursuit of a sustainable business model, is to find the people and the markets that not only "get" what you are doing with your photographs but also values them and are of the opinion that these unique expressions can either be used to move their own projects forward or, that they stand alone as visual objects that enrich the lives of people in these markets.

When I studied portraiture I devoured books by Kodak and every magazine article on portraiture that I could find. I waded through lighting ratios, charts that showed you which lens to use if you were shoot a full body, a three quarters, a half or a tight head shot portrait. There were rules galore for both lighting and the use of backgrounds and props. You could study the art of posing for weeks or months. In some corridors of photography and photo education there are more rules and restrictions than are offered by most major religions.  And awards are routinely given for strictly following the rules of the game.

It's only when I ignored the rules entirely and started to make portraits that I liked on some gut level that my portraits really became interesting to me. And once they became interesting to me they became interesting to more and more people who were not me.

The goal of a brand is to have your product become recognizable. To be different enough that one can pick your image out of a stack and know that it's one of yours. That's gotten a lot tougher as everyone copies everyone else's styles but it is do-able and it's something to shoot for, whether you do the work professionally or just for your own aesthetic pleasure. Because in many cases it means you've started listening to your own muse and your own ideas of good and bad and you can now proceed away from the learning and into the creating.

There are constant essays and blogs that profess to teach a person how to create their style but I find them mostly useless or downright dangerous to my progress as a portrait photographer. What I've come to know, for me, is that my work improves as I do more and more work. When I look for inspiration I look at paintings and movies. But mostly I use the images that my mind seems to create as I read descriptions in novels and images that come to mind when I read well written dialogue.  My work is at it's worst when I see a body of work on the web that's alluring, or flashy and new and I veer off my course and try to emulate it.  Then I'm not doing my own work, I am slavishly copying the vision of someone else and there's none of the power and insight we can bring to our own work embedded in my final product.

My style springs from my desire to be directly engaged with my subjects. There isn't a technical consideration that dominates. I think that's how art works best.

The photo above was done with a Hasselblad medium format, square aspect ratio camera. I like the square and it feels like I've come home to a warm house and the smell of baking chocolate chip cookies with walnuts in them when I come back to using one of these cameras after using most cameras with other aspect ratios. I used a medium length telephoto lens because it seems right when I look through the viewfinder. I light the way I do because big soft lights, used from the side are flattering but they still have the power to model the contours of the face. I want to reveal but in a gentle way.  But above all my primary goal is to make you become interested in the person pictured. To make you want to meet them and talk to them as well. 

In the end I see beauty or energy in the faces I like to photograph and I want to show everyone the wonderful engagement I experienced.  I always find it interesting to go through the process of distilling down what I do so I can explain it to someone else. If you want to be a good portrait photography it's much more important that you be curious about the person you've selected to shoot, and excited about showing the aspects you find captivating,  than it is to know everything there is to know about light or cameras or technique. It's actually the only important creative thing you bring to a shoot which no one else can.

Look. I'm smiling. It must have been a fun job.

T.D.A. Lofton and me at the event.

I did a fun job yesterday evening (Sunday) and I wanted to write about it because I come off as being so dour sometimes. I thought I would talk about having fun on jobs instead of always making it sound like challenges and technical drudgery.

My friend, Debbie Kern, with whom I've done events in at least four countries, invited me/assigned me to take photographs for a party at the Austin Lexus dealership. The party started at 5 and went till 8 pm. The catering was done by Austin veteran caterers, Currant Event and it was wonderful, a slap in the face to the subsistence entertaining people ended up doing during the great recession. Everything from fresh crab legs to bacon wrapped quail. The bars were plentiful and well stocked and the new space, with a barrel vault ceiling, was spacious and open.

I walked thru the crowds with an assistant provided by the client. Her job was to get the names of the couples and members of groups I photographed. I did an equal number of staged and unstaged photographs and another third of the images were of the food, decor and the cars. I saw my first Lexus LFA, a $400,000 carbon fiber ultra performance car, of which 500 exist worldwide.

I used three different cameras, mostly just for fun. I used a Nex-7 with the kit lens (18-55) for wide shots and really tight detail stuff---all with natural light. I used a Sony a57 with a 16-50mm lens and a Sony flash with a bounce panel for all the flash images (groups, couples, etc.) and a Sony a77 with a 35mm 1.8 as a grab shot available light camera.  Nothing long.

The pace was party cruise. No tight schedule, no big set ups. I'd almost forgotten how much fun it can be to work as a photographer at a well executed and happy party.

The image above is the first iPhone image to grace the VSL blog. It is what it is. At least it hasn't been run through the filter-mania... I'll grudgingly admit that it's a pretty good shot.

Photographing Alanis Morissette at Liberty Lunch in Austin.

It was a hot, sticky evening in Austin when I went to Liberty Lunch to photograph Alanis Morissette in concert. Liberty Lunch was "old Austin." It started as a down town, out door, music venue back in the 1970's and it thoroughly pre-dated Austin's progressive downtown gentrification.  There was a small pool called, "Esther's Pool," no bigger than a bathtub up near the stage but off to one side back in the older days and one of the first times I went there to hear music the famous poet, Alan Ginsberg was soaking in the tub mostly naked.

For a couple of years Belinda and I had a standing date to go on Thurs. nights to hear a local band called "Beto and the Fairlanes" play very hip sambas, tangos, cumbias and other latin music and we would drink one dollar Shiner Bock beers and dance until early morning. One time we won the cumbia dance contest and took home the grand prize: two cases of Shiner Bock. We threw a party at my house the very next night.

Over time Liberty Lunch got tamed. Now there's a restaurant on the corner called Lamberts and some kind of chocolate and coffee shop where the heart of the club used to be.

On the evening of Alanis' concert the gentrification was already in motion. The owners of the club built a roof over the venue so they wouldn't be at the mercy of the weather. The club that used to cater to college kids and Austin fauna gave way to hundreds of screaming, adolescent girls. The club built a plywood wall that separated the crowd from the stage by about five feet. It was the first time I'd ever seen a physical barrier between the performers and their fans at Liberty Lunch but I guess that was the price of going corporate.

The distinguished members of the photo-press operated in the space between the barrier and the stage.  As memory serves there were exactly three photographers at the concert. It was a time of film and getting fun shots actually required some.....knowledge.

All I needed was one good shot. I was shooting in black and white and I took two cameras to the event with me. One was a Leica M4 with a 50mm Summicron, loaded with Tri-X film. The other was a Leica M6 ttl .85 with a 90mm Summicron, also loaded with Tri-X. I didn't plan on shooting much with the 90 but it sure made a nice semi-spot meter with which to gauge exposure.

Alanis wailed while an ocean of young woman screamed along with their favorite songs just behind me. I took one or two meter readings, set my shooting camera and then fired away. I shot two rolls of film, 72 shots in all, and then I decided I had what I needed and evacuated myself from the hot center of the action. While I like some of AL's music I'm really not a big live music fan and I was ready to give my eardrums a rest.  I headed over to the darkroom to soup my film and then headed home. I remember it as the last evening I went to Liberty Lunch. Shortly after, in the middle of the 1990's, development on steroids came to the downtown area and swept away the feeling and trappings of the counter-cultural Austin we'd known and loved. Liberty Lunch held on longer than the Armadillo World Headquarters but in the end it seems that bare naked commerce always wins over art. Too bad.

I have many casual snapshots from my evenings at Liberty Lunch but for some reason this is one of my favorites.

Simple light works well.

I get lots of e-mail asking me to talk about tricky lighting with multiple, radio slaved flashes but the reality is that I prefer simple, one light set ups for most stuff.  And most of my personal portraits are lit by only two lights and a reflector. I think there is something valuable about mastering one or two lights before even considering all the tricky and blingy lighting set ups one sees on the web or in books the raison d' étre of which is to sell glorified lighting diagrams.

One umbrella. One light. One small reflector. Old, black and white film shot.

Untitled beautiful woman.

This young woman came to my studio with her older sister. An advertising friend of mine thought the older sister was a wonderful beauty and needed to be photographed. I disagreed. I understood at that moment how subjective human understanding of beauty could be. 

Fall in Austin. Back when it used to get cold.

I re-read the interview with Dennis Darling this morning. I agree with the most important part. The only interesting photographers are the curious ones. Not curious about how the gear works but curious about how memory, people and  sensibilities work. That interview is a self contained workshop on how to be creative.

Zach Scott Theatre opens big. Big.

I've spent two evenings at the theater this week. Both times I was watching RAGTIME in the new, Topfer Theatre building. It's a brand new 400 seat theater that's pretty much state of the art. Beautifully design, great bars, and a large percentage of the stage lighting is done with state of the art LED lighting fixtures. For those of you who've never seen RAGTIME it's a play set at the beginning of the 20th century in the United States and it deals with issues of racism, how Americans at the time dealt with immigration from nearly everywhere and, issues of personal morality and our responsibility to our fellow humans. The play is held together with eerily beautiful Ragtime music. Enough about content of the play, I want to write about shooting in the new space.  It's going to be challenging and I'm still coping with all the changes but that's what makes this career so much fun. Just when I get everything figured out for shooting on a small and intimate space we get to change gears and shoot BIG.

Since RAGTIME is an enormous production we were tight on schedule. The costumes and scenery weren't quite finished for our usual dress rehearsal and marketing wanted to ramp up attendance quickly. Both nights I attended there was an audience in the house which meant that I didn't the usual leisure of moving around to get the best angles and elevations. It also meant that I couldn't work in close to the stage as I have for years at the other two theaters.

I went the first night without a camera in order to concentrate on the run of the play. It was like scouting. I wanted to see where the lighting cues came in. What the action and choreography looked like. How the stage was blocked out. I did discover two interesting things that would affect my photography.  One is that most of the stage lighting was set as approximately a 3700k color temperature but the follow spots were set up as daylight fixtures. This meant that there would be a  color split depending on which light sources had dominance. I would have to set two different color balances and then be able to "see" the changes and to toggle between the two color settings.

I also learned that being stationary during the show is a whole new way of doing the work. I had to rely on the long end of my long zoom in order to get the shots I needed for most of the show. My observations on the first night let me know where the "ta-da" moments were in the play and allowed me to be ready for them on the next night.

When I came back to do the actual photography I was positioned in the center of the house about 26 rows up from the stage. There's a break between seat rows there.  Unusual for me since I've been shooting at stage level or actor eye level for most of my previous work.

What I figured out in my scouting was that the majority of stuff I wanted to capture, shots of one two and three people together in a scene, or small groups, would require long lens and enough ISO to lift up the shutter speeds to something higher that I was used to using. I did most of the tight shots with a 70-200mm 2.8G lens on the front of a Sony a57 (supposedly better high ISO performance than the a77...) All the wide, stage and scenery shots as well as shots of the entire cast on stage at one time were done with the 16-50mm 2.8 Sony lens on an a77 body.

I set both bodies up with two different color temperature/wb settings. As soon as I noticed the faces turning blue or cyan in the electronic viewfinder (yes, that's one of the fringe benefits of the EVF, real time color analysis!) I could hit the function button on the taking camera and then toggle to the needed setting.

Since I was trying to capture action, expression and movement I decided I needed to shoot a lot. How much is a lot? I ended up with around 1800 shots over the course of the three hour show. This meant I needed to be shooting Jpegs or there would be no way to edit, process and convert the files in time for the marketing department's deadlines. It also meant that I really had to nail the changes in color since I'd have a limited opportunity to make color shifts in post. The majority of images were shot in the a57 camera which did 1200 shots on one battery while still showing 41% power remaining at the end of the evening. So much for the hit against Sony on battery life...

There was a non-revenue audience in this particular run through but the electronic first curtain shutter of the Sony cameras, and the lack of a moving mirror, makes the Sony camera quiet enough to use unless you are seated directly next to or directly in front or behind someone. On the mezzanine row I was far enough in front and behind the other rows that the camera was mostly inaudible.

What have I learned or re-learned? First, the obvious. If you are shooting from further away with a longer lens you flatten out the scene and you lose a lot of intimacy in the images. There's a reason why  world class photo journalist and street artists use shorter lenses and work close in. It makes for a more emotionally exciting image. Really.

Secondly, even though the Sony 70-200mm 2.8 is a really nice optic and the cameras have built in image stabilization I was at the outside limit of my ability to hold the lens steady enough at anything longer than around 1/500th of a second. 200mm on a cropped frame camera is the eq. of a 300mm camera on a full frame camera and, at the longest focal length, every subject and camera movement is amplified.  And not in a good way.  Next time I shoot at this venue I'll try to shoot much closer. In fact, if we can do a closed house dress rehearsal I'd want to stand on stage and shoot with a collection of much faster single focal length lenses. The longest I would need in that scenario would be the 85mm and that's a whole different ballgame when it comes to lens speed/subject movement/ISO compromises.

In the final processing I could see some issues from camera movement in dark scenes. But I have mixed feelings about changing the mix in the camera bag. I could go with the new Sony a99 but then I'd lose about 100mm of effective reach which would necessitate buying longer lenses. If I use a longer single length lens I'll be switching back and forth to other cameras as the scenes change in order to get the framing I need for each shot. It's a bizarre compromise and one that I'll ponder for the rest of the week.

The theater is beautiful and the range of new stagecraft that's been made possible is breathtaking. I just need a few years of practice to lock in a new way of working with the dimensions and layout of the new space and everything will be groovy.  Photos below.

Must read essay of the day about photography.

I read this interview with my friend, Dennis Darling, and I decided to take the rest of the day off. Dennis is a tenured photography professor at UT Austin. He is also brilliant, pithy, and eccentric. All the good trappings of an artist. Read the interview and gnash your teeth or praise him. I'm going out for some BBQ and then taking a nap on the couch. Dennis already said everything I wanted to say today....

http://www.ilovetexasphoto.com/dennis-darling/