I hate to travel with gear but I love getting out of town.

Jana. Canon 5Dmk2. 100mm f2 lens.

I'm a worrier. If there is something to worry about I'm on it. Murphy's Law is my mantra and Worst Case Scenario is generally the tune my mind is humming as I go about my business. But few things get me into the butterfly stomach condition quicker than packing for a trip, and the first and last legs of a trip. Don't get me wrong, I'm not wound up like a rubber band for the whole adventure, just the parts over which I supposedly have control: Getting from the house to the airport. Getting from parking to the terminal with two large cases. Getting in line at the Sky Cap station and getting the little luggage tags I forgot to put on earlier into position on the cases while the Sky Cap gives me the steely once over while looking at my unorganized paper work. 

The anxiety notches down from 95% to 90% once the guys have accepted my bags, confirmed my boarding pass and sent me on my merry way. We operate at 90% anxiety for the portion of the trip that requires standing in the TSA line as it zigs and zags through the little rope barriers, putting all my pocket stuff and camera bag into the gray plastic boxes and stepping through the back splatter/scatter x-ray machine for my own personal, hands over head scan. 

Once I'm out of the ingestion process and I'm putting my shoes back on, getting my precious camera bag, and re-orienting myself toward the right gate my negative excitement levels ratchet down to about their typical 40-50% levels and I'm okay with that.

What's the deal with my decided lack of enthusiasm for the first lap? Well, part of it is engaging the timing of the whole process. I know with absolute certainty that the plane will leave without me if I don't get every part of the initial timing process correct. My brain works like this: "Hmmmm. The plane leaves at 4 p.m. and if there is a big line at the TSA check in it might cut things close if I don't pad the schedule with an hour. So that means I want to be in the big, squiggly line by 3 p.m. So backtracking from there I have to make sure I get to the Sky Caps with enough time to spare. Sometimes there are crazy lines for both the outside check-ins and the inside check-in areas. Like when SXSW is going on or ACL Fest or F1. I better give myself a half an hour to get through that part of check in so I plan on presenting myself to the Sky Caps no later than 2:30 p.m.

But then there is the complex calculus of how much time to give myself to get to the airport. The traffic lights in the main intersection of my neighborhood could be on the blink again. The last time I drove to the airport the main highway had a detour for road work and the line of cars going through the two lane, traffic light controlled, intersection stretched back about a half a mile. Then there is the very real possibility that all the ground parking and garage parking adjacent to the terminals will be full and I'll have to head to an off site lot and wait for their interminable little shuttles to get me back over to the airport. Better leave by 1:30 p.m. to get there with a generous buffer......just in case. 

And so it goes. Remember my trip to Berlin last year? My wife teased me for getting to the airport two hours early but I was able to find out that all of United's flights to NYC and on to Berlin were cancelled that day and I was just able to snag the last seats on a series of American flights by the skin of my teeth! Being early saved my trip and reinforced my neurosis. 

But the last five flights to Denver had me considering dropping my guard a bit. With light traffic everywhere and TSA pre-check status I got to the airport and through the process so quickly that I ended up cooling my heels in the gate area for two, long hours. 

If I'm flying with carry-on only the anxiety load is never too great. And if I am flying on an opened schedule I can be totally relaxed. But the worst component is always the luggage. I still remember last year trying to fit two, large Pelican cases into a tiny Fiat rental car... No matter how you pack lighting gear, stands, tripods and flashes you're going to have a big load to watch out for and transport. Even getting from baggage claim to the shuttles is a pain in ass. Not to mention the aspect of Murphy's Law which clearly states that the one thing the TSA will destroy or "lose" is the one thing that's not replaceable and it will be the thing upon which all other parts of your job depend.

I did try shipping stuff ahead which everyone here rushed to advise me as the best course of action. The shipping charges clocked in (round trip) at somewhere near $600. I might as well buy the gear a seat on the plane.

But I do have a solution for some of this. There's a Hilton Hotel at the airport. I'll just give up and get to my own, hometown airport a day earlier and I'll have at least cancelled out the roadway and parking travel concerns. (Not seriously considering this. This plan falls under:  hyperbole).

I wish for the slower pace of life that we enjoyed at the beginning of my career. I once did a cookbook for Texas Monthly Press that had me in all the major cities of Texas and I did it all in a little, un-air conditioned, Volkswagen bug. Leisurely driving. Seeing the scenes. Ice chest full of Gatorade by my side. Rest stops located strategically. La Quintas where you needed them. 

Sure, the car broke down once or twice but nothing was such a rush back then. We'd just use the phone at the gas station and tell the restauranteurs that we'd be a day late. Didn't seem to matter to them...

On the flip side of this whole mental health equation I absolutely love getting to new places and I love conferences like the one I'll be attending for the next three days. Lots of fun people, good food, straight forward event photography and all the usual trappings of staying in a nice hotel. Also, I love Denver. It's nothing at all like Austin and that may be what I love most about it. That and the altitude. Nothing beats the free buzz of being oxygen deprived for three whole days!

On another note, I thought I'd be calmer and more at ease when I finally got my amazing-blockbuster-rivetting-can't-put-it-down novel uploaded and published on Amazon.com but now I'm on pins and needles waiting for the first reviews...  I think I've chosen all the wrong careers for a person as nervous as me.

I wrote this novel to open up a new writing category: Photo Fiction. It's all about stories for people who love the practice of photography. Action/adventure/Photography. Seems natural. Hope you enjoy it.

Dear VSL Readers, Belinda and I clicked the final boxes and uploaded the long-awaited Novel, The Lisbon Portfolio, to Amazon.

The Lisbon Portfolio. A Novel by Kirk Tuck.

It takes about 24 hours for a book to upload and go through the Amazon process to become a Kindle book. We should see it show up on the Amazon.com site and on my Amazon Author's Page by tomorrow evening (Tues. the 17th of June). I'll post the link as soon as it becomes available.  The link is now live: The Lisbon Portfolio.  We are publishing it first as a Kindle Book and as soon as that goes smoothly we'll start formatting the printed version and get it up onto Amazon as quickly as we can. We'll branch out from there. 

Here's the elevator speech: Our hero, Henry White, has been earning his living for the past seven years as a professional photographer specializing in documenting corporate events and shows. In his previous career he was an intelligence field researcher, working for a government agency, until his anxiety got the better of him and he resigned. His cover as a researcher was: a corporate photographer. The difference now is that he needs the money and the assignments and--- there is no safety net.

While on assignment for a multi-national, technology company in Lisbon, Henry White gets pulled back into a web of danger and intrigue by his old boss from the agency. After stumbling into the middle of a bloody and dramatic confrontation between multiple bad guys he'll need all of his wits and training to make it out of Lisbon alive. And he'll risk life and limb to keep a terrible new technology off the underworld weapons market before it makes nuclear war a very local issue for everyone.

The story takes place in 1999, just at the moment when digital cameras started to replace film cameras in the weathered shoulder bags of the first few adventurous, professional photographers. Henry must balance his need for this paying job, and his need to keep a few demanding meeting planners happy, with his duty to help prevent an escalation in miniaturized weapons technology from hitting the marketplace. 

The story weaves a very authentic look at the everyday life of a working photographer, on an assignment in a foreign capitol, with an action-packed, fast moving, deep dive into a thrill ride of fictional action and adventure. 

The book will be available for only $9.99

I'm so thrilled that I'm finally able to share this story with all of my friends. Thanks to everyone who encouraged and prodded me to resist resistance and to finish it. And thanks to Steven Pressfield for writing The War of Art. His book made all the difference in the world to me. 

I hope you'll buy a copy of The Lisbon Portfolio, read it and comment about it. I'd love to hear what you think!

Best to all my readers, Kirk

edit 6-17-2014: We've been live on Amazon.com for less than a day and we've already cracked the top 10,000 books for Kindle. Thank you!

Packing for a shoot. Getting everything into two cases and a camera bag.

Noellia. Sony Nex-7. 50mm lens.

I have a fun job lined up this week. I'm heading up to Denver on Weds. and I'll be there until Saturday evening. It's a conference and I am one of the photographers who will document the people, the speakers and the events. Normally, I'd just head up with a small carry on case with some changes of clothes and a small tripod. That, and my camera bag. 

But this time we're replicating something we did last year when the same conference was held here in Austin. We're setting up an on-site studio with a nine foot wide canvas background, three lights and all the trimmings. We'll spend the first morning of the conference making portraits of organization officers, speakers and other event nobility.  Last year I was able to stuff as much as I wanted into the capacious back end of my Honda CRV, including my magic cart, and I could park directly under the hotel and drag up everything into the hotel meeting room. 

I brought four or five A/C powered, monolights, a posing stool, big light stands, a robust and intimidating tripod, and back up stuff for everything. When you can bring the kitchen sink why not also bring along the gas grill and the mini-fridge, just to be comfortable?  We had fun last year and we inadvertently trained the client to appreciate the fully implemented, studio portrait treatment.  

This year I'm flying up to Denver to participate and I'm bringing along a version of the temporary studio. But this year everything has to fit in two cases that weigh under 50 pounds and are the correct size for Southwest Airline's baggage restrictions. Oh boy! Condensation packing! How to do the same with less!

I immediately went into research mode and consulted the acknowledged expert in the field of Minimalist Lighting. In fact, I was able to pull down one of this books on the subject from my bookshelf and start wading into the information. 

Seems that with a little ingenuity you can put together a portable, battery powered system that will give you the same look as a monolight system with a few compromises. My portable system won't have modeling lights so I'll leave the room lights on while I shoot so the camera and I can focus. And I won't really be able to shoot through big modifiers and get f16 on a subject ten feet from the front of a soft box---but I never do that anyway. 

So here's how it's coming together on late Monday afternoon. I have a 48 inch long, 10 inch by 10 inch Tenba light stand case with wheels on the end and on the bottom. In that case I have two background stands and cross poles. Three Manfrotto Nano stands with cold shoe/umbrella adapters on the tops. A bigger stand for the main light and a back-up stand, must in case. I also have packed four 43 inch umbrellas. Two silver and black, two shoot throughs. 

Also wedged into this miracle case is a little Pelican sub-case with wireless triggers and receivers along with a "carefully folded" muslin background. The same one we used last year. Love the idea of continuity, right?

Well, what about the lights? I looked around to see what might be cheap and new and fun and I decided on the Yongnuo YN-560 II Speedlights. On the day I bought these flashes they were $46 a piece. I couldn't help it. I bought three. What are they? Basically they are fully manual flashes with built in optical slaves that have two modes. One mode is a straight ahead slave while the second mode delays the flash assuming that your on camera flash will do pre-flashes for stuff. I don't care anything at all about the second mode but I bought the units for the first mode.

The 560's bounce and they can be turned all the way down to 1/128th power. Did I mention that I bought them because they were cheap and had built in optical slaves. I immediately stuck batteries in and hit the power button but nothing happened. So I did what 313 reviewers on Amazon.com did not do---I sat down and read the manual that came with the units. Hey, guess what? You have to hold the button down for about four seconds as the flash goes through a start-up cycle. I can imagine this is a great feature which will prevent accidental ignition in the camera bag and the resulting battery drain. 

I tested the flashes in the studio and was happy with color and performance. I added a Sunpak flash which also has a built-in slave as well as my giant, ungainly and ready-to-shut-down-at-the-slightest-hint-of-heat, Sony HVL-60 flash (which I keep, stupidly, in case I need to use it with the Sony RX10).  Just to add a cherry to the top of the pile I added the little Panasonic DMW-FL360L flash. I figured this one would come in handy on the GH4 when I'm walking around taking spontaneous social images...

That's it for the lighting. And the camera packing is straightforward: GH4, GH3, 12-35mm, 7-14mm, 35-100mm, 45mm 1.8 (Olympus) and done. Five batteries and a charger. Two super fast 64 GB SDXC U3 cards (which give me 7,000 shots per camera --- more of less) and an iPad. 

The two equipment cases roll up to curbside check-in and are well under the weight and size limits. The camera bag is lighter than with any previous system. Now I just need to remember the deodorant and to trim the nose hairs and we're ready to party. 

Hope your father's day was great. I got to "snake out" the air conditioner condensation hose before we ended up with an inch of water on the floor. Much fun.

in other news: Belinda and I finished working on, The Lisbon Portfolio. The photo/action novel I started back in 2002. I humbly think it is the perfect Summer vacation read. And the perfect, "oh crap, I have to fly across the country" read. It's in a Kindle version right now at Amazon. The Lisbon Portfolio. Action. Adventure. Photography.  See how our hero, Henry White, blows up a Range Rover with a Leica rangefinder.....

Remember, you can download the free Kindle Reader app for just about any table or OS out there....

A very well done blog post (also available as a podcast) from Mats Andrén called "Five Thoughts on Being a Photographer.

http://the-walk.se/five-thoughts-on-being-a-photographer/

I liked reading this and enjoyed it even more when I went back and listened to Mr. Andrén present it via his podcast.

Andrén is a photographer and a walker and right now he's walking across the U.S. He should be in Austin by the end of the month and I am looking forward to having lunch, dinner, coffee or whatever he would like in order to spend some time with him and listen to his stories.

Andrén got in touch with me because of the blog and it's one of the wonderful benefits, to me, of throwing the doors of my mind open to the world. Sometimes (usually) you get some great stuff back.
I hope Mats has some images of the American South he wants to share with me...

Please enjoy his blog post while Belinda and I spend the day uploading the novel to Amazon.com and getting all the kinks worked out so you can really enjoy it.

Imagine shooting concerts at ISO 400 with a manual focus 50mm lens and no meter in your camera. Imagine it was more fun.

Alanis Morrisette at Liberty Lunch in Austin, Texas. Shot with a Leica M3 rangefinder camera, 50mm Summicron, on Tri-X. Nothing fancy. Just roll after roll of well exposed, in focus images. And, bonus: it's in black and white.  © 2014 Kirk Tuck, All Rights Reserved.

Random Image from a trip to Rome.

Everyone stood around waiting for the Ferraris to roar through town. It was the annual day when the Ferrari owners from all over the country converged on Rome to show off their cars and socialize with each other. I was walking near the Spanish Steps with a Nikon F100 and an 85mm 1.4. I clicked a quick shot onto Kodak T-Max 400 CN and moved on. The day was rainy and warm. The cars were beautiful. The people more so.

Fun with a Physicist. Michio Kaku at a Freescale Technology Forum.

One of the amazing fringe benefits of being an event photographer for smart technology companies has been an ongoing "ticket" to a front row seat at events featuring some of the smartest and most interesting speakers of our time. This is Dr. Michio Kaku and he spoke to our audience of technologists and engineers back in 2008. His lecture was loosely based on his book, Physics of the Impossible, and I remember how quickly and completely he was able to draw me into his vision of the future.

I shoot corporate shows mostly with available light but I do make a valiant effort to understand the nature of the light and to talk to the lighting designers to find out about the light sources and the filtration they'll be using during presentations. I remember being able to go to a lighting rehearsal the morning of this talk and take meter readings on the stage and to use a color meter to devolve the mix of lighting on Dr. Kaku. I was able to set the camera I was using (a Fuji S5) to a pretty exact color balance and it was very helpful in post processing. The lens was the old standby, the 70-200mm f2.8 used somewhere around f5.0 with a shutter speed of 1/60th of a second.

I understand that Dr. Kaku has written a new book called, The Future of the Mind, (#1 bestseller in the physics category) and I can hardly wait to get my hands on it. This kind of book straddles the divide between fiction and non-fiction. That should keep both halves of my brain happy...

For more information on Dr. Kaku see his Wikipedia Page.

Edit: Funny how memory works to put everything in such a vague folder. I was cleaning the studio after writing this only to discover my (non-virtual) planning calendar from 2007.  It tells me that I used a Nikon 55-200mm lens and not the bigger, 70-200mm lens. That's probably why I used f5.x. I also noticed (quite obviously) that I shot this Freescale Event in Orlanda in 2007, not 2008. It took place in late June and the day after I arrived home my first book for Amherst Media would hit its deadline and need to be sent out. I now remember spending late nights at the show double checking the manuscript. Always good to write stuff down...

Tip of the day: Defusing the indecision of art directors and clients.

Kinky Friedman. Writer, Musician, Perennial candidate for Texas Gov.

You are thrilled. You are a professional photographer and you've booked a good assignment to make some images for an advertising agency and their client. They asked you to bid on one final image with three models on a location. You figured out the time required, how they'll end up using the image and all the details and, miraculously, they approved your bid without much haggling. 

So now you are on the location, your lights are set up and the camera is on the tripod just waiting to take some incredible shots. The talent is professional, fresh and ready to work. You're already patting yourself on the back for the incredible job you and your team are going to accomplish today. The make-up person is ahead of schedule (fantasy) and the stylist has a rack of good clothing choices so the client and art director have the best combination of wardrobe to choose from. You're waiting for the client and art director to come to a consensus with the stylist over what the models will wear and you are having a cup of that wonderful Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee your assistant picked up as part of the craft service. Life can be so good...

And then it happens. The client says, "I can't make up my mind about Jeremy's shirt." Jeremy is one of the three models.  The client continues, "I like the blue shirt with the strips but I also like that yellow, retro shirt. And I think we need to shoot a conservative version with one of those button downs. Maybe a white one and a blue one. Can we just try all four?"

And that's how it starts. You know it won't stop there because there are two other models to dress and there are choices to be made (or not made) for each of them as well. My math skills are no longer amazing but if you shot all the permutations you'd have something like 64 basic combinations and something like thousands distinctly different variations. And that doesn't take into consideration selecting shoes and pants. Or accessories. 

All of a sudden the half day you thought would be a generous amount of time to shoot in is looking like a small part of a two or three day shoot. Or at least a one day shoot that goes really long.

Even shooting three or four variations total puts a serious dent in the post processing budget, not to mention the extra time on set and the possible overtime for models and crew. What's a photographer to do?

Here are my three basic tips for getting the job done and still making a profit:

1. My favorite argument goes like this:  Pull the art director aside and say, "Really good models are like top athletes. They have one or two really good performances in them. Those are the performances where you can really tell they are connecting with the camera and with the audience. We really need to take advantage of that great energy and make sure not to shoot them when they've already peaked. Changing costumes is going to sap the energy out of them and you don't want to end up with the right wardrobe but a shot of them run down and looking bored after they've peaked. The best option is that blue shirt with the stripes! It'll go perfectly with the other models' outfits."

If they don't buy this (real) argument we can move on to my second tip, bringing up the money.

2. Pull the agency person aside and explain to them that this shoot was bid, discussed and approved as a "prix fix" meal. One set up, one wardrobe selection and the post processing required to fulfill just those shots. Let them know you'd be happy to shoot variations but each additional variation will cost 1/3X the original budget. Pull out your "job modification agreement form" and make it seem all very business like. You need to let them know they ordered the steak but they don't also get a free pork chop, a free salmon fillet and all you can eat caviar with every project. Especially on one with a conservative budget. If they can't decide at least you'll be charging them for each change...

If these don't work you can go for the nuclear option. 

3. Pull the agency person aside and say, as nicely as you can, "Look. This is not what we talked about and I can't keep shooting stuff over and over again. You hired me because I know how to make decisions. We hired the stylist because she's an expert in making these kinds of choices. If you don't trust our decisions then we're not the right team for you and we should stop right now, send everyone home and let you and the client have the opportunity to hire a crew that's more inline with your way of handling these things. The blue shirt works. And the other shirts work. There is no "ultimate" shirt.  

Now, we can go back into the shoot and make a decision or we can shut it down and you can start over with someone else. I'll leave it up to you..."

If you go with number 3 you probably will never work for that art director again for the rest of your career. But would you really want to? Sometimes saying "no" is the best business decision you'll be able to make in a situation. This all presumes that you covered these issues during the bidding process. An ounce of prevention sometimes gets sucked dry by the best of intentions, or hammered into the ground by the amazing sense of entitlement some clients bring to the set. Managing unrealistic expectations is part of the job. The steps above are workable escalations.  But you always have to be prepared to walk away.

Barton Springs Pool. The real "heart" of Austin.

A few Summers Back. 

Sony R1.

Nothing like it. An eighth of a mile long. Cool clean water bubbling up right out of the springs. The perfect antidote for the blazing sun  of Summer. Get a 40 punch swim ticket and go everyday.

Bikers Rally in Austin. Photographer goes to town with a 50-200mm zoom lens.

Yes. I did ask permission. 

Austin no longer has a functioning downtown. We now have a mile square area with very tall buildings that is more like an "on call"  amusement park for major corporations that want to throw cynical "consumer" events. Last week it was the X Games with a downtown exhibition (largely constructed just for the TV cameras) that took out blocks and blocks of Congress Ave. and assorted side streets so some painfully cool folks could ride skateboards up and  down some ramps. Before that it was some craft festival. And then, of course, there are the two full weeks of snarled traffic for SXSW. And before that the Europeans, and misguided Americans, who like Formula One car racing (we actually moved F1 to a God forsaken cow pasture thirty miles from town but the "visitors" like to teeter around drunk downtown. Seems like a "sporting" tradition) clogged up our downtown, smoking Marlboros and looking for the cheap beer prices.  But this weekend is all about good, clean fun with......the ROT Rally. One of the largest motorcycle rallies in the U.S. So, again, on Friday we block the streets and motorcycles sans mufflers race up and down Congress Ave. while their riders look tough and mean. Who wouldn't want to get out and photograph that?

I headed downtown with a simple camera set up; the Samsung NX30 and the 50-200mm f4-5.6 zoom lens. The camera does a great job on anything that's standing still or moving gently but it certainly wouldn't be my choice for a BIF (or "Birds In Flight") shooting tool. I tried tracking motorcycles and their riders and got about a 50% success rate. While the camera has a first rate sensor and also seems to nail exposure with aplomb I'm still grappling with some little issues like the lag time between switching between the rear screen and the EVF. It's too long. I shot mostly with the lens wide open which, while not generally recommended with consumer zooms, worked well for me and delivered files that, when in sharp focus, have rich detail and good snap. Samsung has proven to me time and again that they can make great glass.

I spent a couple of hours walking around shooting the stuff I saw but I got bored before the 7pm parade to the capitol building got started and decided to call it a day. Below are some of the marvelous scenes I came across on my walk down Sixth Street...

Don't get me wrong. I like motorcycles. 

Please read this one again because I've decided it's really important. And read the comments....

http://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2011/05/its-twenty-first-century-and-im-working.html

It's about reading fiction and my point of view about reading fiction.

in other news: Belinda and I finished working on, The Lisbon Portfolio. The photo/action novel I started back in 2002. I humbly think it is the perfect Summer vacation read. And the perfect, "oh crap, I have to fly across the country" read. It's in a Kindle version right now at Amazon. The Lisbon Portfolio. Action. Adventure. Photography.  See how our hero, Henry White, blows up a Range Rover with a Leica rangefinder.....

Remember, you can download the free Kindle Reader app for just about any table or OS out there....

Two accessories I could not do my photography business without. What are yours?

Kirk Tuck's Multi-Cart. Indispensable. 

We photographers tend to be a myopic bunch when it comes to gear. We are focused like little laser beams on the miracle of cameras. After that we are riveted by whatever the latest lens lore is. When we exhaust that topic we move on to sexy lights and then we're pretty much done. Oh, there are the printer/paper people but I think of them like the mole men from the Incredibles movie. Kind of trapped in the darkness and always trying to take over the world...one pigment print at a time.

But after some video shoots and some back-to-back photography shoots I've pretty much come to the conclusion that if one understands the physics and ballet of making portraits and doing interviews that pretty much you can make do with any modern camera on the market (always excluding those hard core sports jobs people love to toss in to screw up rational discussions) to do most work and no one will ever know the difference. Especially if you are showing off on the web. But after loading and unloading the car a number of times in short order, and after pulling hundreds of pounds of equipment across hot, dark, heat radiating, asphalt parking lots in a desperate attempt to reach the front door various client offices and so partake of the life affirming air conditioning, I would say, without equivocation, that the most useful and welcome piece of gear I own is also the most pedestrian: my Multi-Cart. Give me a Multi-Cart and enough bungee cords and I'll bring the most complete lighting-photo-prop inventory on to your location that you can imagine. If it fits in a Honda CR-V we can (and will) bring it, toss it onto the cart and drag it into your headquarters or your remote location. 

I can't remember how long ago I bought this cart. It was purchased at least 14 years ago to replace an identical cart that died when we worked at a Dell facility and someone decided to move a 1,000 pound, fully configured server enclosure (heavy metal, six foot tall cabinet) all the way from one side of a large building to the other----on our cart. The front wheels gave up the ghost just as we wheeled it into the carpeted shooting area. They just collapsed. Not the fault of the cart or the maker as the specs say the carts are good for loads of up to 500 pounds. The first cart was a noble machine that gave me good service for a very long time. Probably since the dawn of my current photo business, or nearly so...

We haven't attempted moving automobiles or server configurations or bags of cement with this one. We move gear in and out of client spaces and practical locations all over Texas. It's too cumbersome to fly with, sadly.  But I know that the cart has real, important value in my photography.

I was reminded of how important it is to arrive with enough energy left to actually be human and to be able to shoot without a pounding chest and a dizzy brain when one of my previous assistants regaled me, over a glass of wine, with a story about her time assisting a very famous (very famous!) London and New York based portrait photographer-celebrity who was, at the time, doing a tremendous amount of work for the New York Times Magazine. My friend had been hired as second or third assistant for a series of location shoots. On the first day she hopped into the van that would take the photographer, his gear and two other assistants to meet with the client and a famous subject on some urban location. 

When they arrived and had scouted the location in a big office building the photographer instructed his "people" to go and get the gear. My friend went with the other assistants to the van which was parked in a garage across the square from the first location. Having worked with me extensively she immediately searched the van for a cart. There wasn't one. She asked the other assistants and they shrugged, grunted and started to pick up cases with heavy power packs and head. They gestured at some 50 pound stand bags and started shuffling the 100 yards to the building and up to the 18th floor. They made about five round trips to get everything to the location. 

While the photographer was fresh as a daisy his "staff" was sweating bullets and gulping down water. Of course my friend realized that there would be a second part to all of this. They would have to retrace their steps back to the parking garage once the job was completed. And this would go on at location after location for the better part of a week. 

My friend finally plucked up her courage to ask the photographer why he didn't have a cart. His reply?  "That's what I have assistants for..."  She finished out the week and went off to find a photographer with at least the barest grasp of primitive physics and workplace efficiency.

The cart is a daily fixture in my world and has been for the last twenty years. If it were to die or disappear tomorrow I'd have another one here as quickly as I could source it. We have back up cameras and lenses but if the cart goes "Kaplooie" then all bets are off.  We'll be "on vacation" until it is replaced.

The other vital component of my photographic life...

I bought a set of background stands way, way back in 1981. They've been used in just about every studio portrait shoot I've ever done, and they've travelled to locations all over the world with me. I take them for granted. They just work every time. I put a canvas or paper background on them, we raise them up and they work away for me without even the slightest protest. I can't imagine doing 80% of my work without them. I have no idea where they were made. They were marketed by a company called RPS. The go up to about 10 feet. They have a cross pole that breaks apart into two pieces and also telescopes. This makes it easy to break down and pack for travel. 

In addition to backgrounds I've also used Super Clamps to hang cameras from the cross bar and stands over the top of sets. It comes in handy when I need to shoot from directly over head. In the old days we'd rig up the camera with a long cable release. Then we switched to a longer, electronic cable release. Now we just stick Panasonic GH4's up there and trigger them with our iPhones. We even get to preview the shots on the phones and change settings. But what doesn't change is the background stands. 

Lately I've noticed that they are slipping a bit and it's harder to tighten them down even when I use a wrench and a screwdriver to tighten all the joints. I've also discovered (in a few embarrassing failure events) that one of the stands in the set no longer stops at the maximum extension when going "up" with the stands. It will come right out of the bottom tube and leave me standing there with a wiggly pole in my hands, balancing a half a nine foot roll of seamless paper, and with a shocked and silly look on my face. I guess it's time to retire the first set and replace them but for some reason I keep mending them and keeping them in service. 

These are the devices that supply the real continuity in the business of making photographs. The cameras come and go and the lenses and even the lights are more or less transitory but the background stands are like family. Family with a long history.  I can't imagine an other investment in gear that has returned so much, so often for so little.

The background stands and the cart are the two accessories that I use every day and can't imagine surviving without in this game. They feel even more vital to me than tripods! I am curious. I know not everyone shares the same viewpoints as me. What are the accessories that you can't work without in your photography? Please share. 

Kirk Tuck's Background Stands are Twice as Old as His College Age Kid...Wow.

Gear Happiness. Two shoots two camera systems.

Unrelated image from the Bowie Project. Serving only as a visual anchor for the blog....

I've fallen a bit behind on the blog this week. We've gotten busy with the usual rush that happens once school lets out. Everyone takes a little family vacation and then the kids are inserted into Summer programs. The phones and e-mail are dead for a week. Traffic abates. Once this ritual plays out the clients climb back into the driver's seat, rev up the engines and off we go again.

Part of the crack VSL crew is working around the clock to format and beautifully design the novel we've been talking about so it looks as gorgeous as it can on any e-reader. But the main crew have been doing more or less traditional photography work. This week we had two days of corporate shooting which felt mostly like the "good old days."

Our first project was photographing executives in a  make shift studio we set up in the client's executive conference room. We were shooting against white with the understanding that the client's in house creative team would be dropping in a uniform, color background based on images we'd shot back before the great recession.

My client was a bit surprised by my retro gear when I showed up. Not my camera equipment but the lighting gear. The last few times I worked with the same marketing person we were using some variation of LED lighting. This week I showed up with some very traditional electronic flash moonlights. I added to the nostalgia with a soft box as the main light modifier and umbrellas for the background lights.

I guess I remembered the big wash of daylight in the last location we'd shot there and how much I struggled to overcome that and light with neutral color and LED lights. They are at their best for portrait lighting when you can control the ambient light in your shooting area. I chose the flash because it was a quick, easy way to get neutral color and to freeze action. But now I have to be careful because I find myself considering flash lit portraits to be a bit too sharp. In fact, I turned down the sharpness in my camera parameters to minus two. And I could have toned it all down to minus three. The cameras are much sharper than they have even been before, especially with the better lenses, but I'm almost certain that particular "feature" isn't usually a benefit for portraiture and I find it makes files that look a bit fake. Too much detail?

You'd think I was grappling with a Nikon D800e but I was sporting a Panasonic GH4 that day. That camera makes very sharp and detailed files, almost as if Panasonic was trying to prove something to the industry...

Things I like about shooting portraits with a Panasonic GH4 and the 35-100mm X lens? Well, wickedly sharp at my typical corporate shooting aperture of f5.6. Very straightforward custom white balance setting. Face detection AF. Touch screen for those times when I want to move the AF point around with my finger. 16 megapixel files that are sharp and detailed without being so big that they bring my computer and my storage system to a crawl.

Things I dislike about shooting with this stuff? It's not my big, square Hasselblad and it's too easy to get good images. Takes all the challenge out of the process. Okay, I'm just kidding. The real challenge is never really the camera or the lighting as much as it is getting a good expression and a nice, happy collaboration with the portrait subject.

I dragged all my stuff in on a cart, navigated the security desk, got badged and escorted and set up. My biggest secret for easy post production these days is to always do a custom white balance right before I start shooting in earnest. Back in the studio not a single file needed an exposure correction (go light meters!!!) or even a look at any color correction. I just edited for expression and composition and sent them along straight.

It was fun and relaxing to catch up with a long term client and shoot in a fashion that we used to do so often. By the time I got back to the studio that client had already given me a recommendation to one of his peers from the Northeast U.S. who contacted me the next day to bid on a project. Ahhhh.

Can the Panasonic GH4 handle executive portrait shooting for a world wide, high technology firm? Duh.

The next day I headed out to work on location with another really nice corporate client and we did the whole load-up-the-cart-and-drag-stuff-through-the-parking-lot again. This time I set up a temporary studio in their conference room and shot glamor shots of four of their server products. Hardware. Just old school product work against white. Making the product shine.

As you probably know I hate doing stuff the same way twice but since I already had the flashes loaded into the car I went ahead and used them again. This created a mental pressure which pretty much made my subconscious demand that I use some alternative camera in an attempt to add some challenge and fun into the mix. I went all counter productive and pressed the least likely camera into the mix: The Sony RX10.

Here's the rationale I came up with: When shooting computer cabinets you need to keep the front very sharp and even the back reasonably sharp. In this day and age this is more about getting the depth of field you require to hold focus that it is about getting enough information on your sensor. I looked at some depth of field tables that showed me that I'd be getting pretty darn good depth of field at f8. More that I would if I used a full frame camera at f16 or even f22. At the same time the RX10 is pretty resistant to problems with diffraction at f8 (although diffraction is also dependent on focal length....). To go one step further Sony has programmed in some software fixes in the RX10 to combat or compensate for diffraction.

The other factor is the quality of the sensor. If we needed to shoot the product (for some insane reason) at ISO 1600 I would have been over to Precision Camera to rent a Sony A7 or Nikon D800 from the get go. But with 400 watt second moonlights, used in close quarters I had all the ISO 100 I could ever have asked for. In fact, I could have bumped the flash power up even a little higher and shot at ISO 80 if I'd wanted to.  But the deal is that comparing the image quality of a still life, well lit and shot at a very comfortable sensitivity setting I would imagine that there's very little real difference between most modern cameras.

I took the leap of faith and shot all the various product shots and detail shots with the RX10 and when I got back to the studio and started working through the raw files and getting them ready for post production I saw what I thought I would, on screen performance that was at least as good (at ISO 100) as the first generation of full frame cameras I used to use and better looking image files (because of the extended depth of field) than I had gotten with any of the DX cameras and lenses I'd pressed into service over the years. The pixels held together well. There were no artifacts caused by noise reduction that I could see, even with pixel peeping, at 100%. Overall, the RX10 delivered files that were perfectly suited for this project. Sharp, noise free and in focus everywhere that I needed them to be.

At the end of the day we had one more shot to take. It was of the company's marketing director. She needed a new set of portrait images for a series of magazine interviews she was doing. Much as I love the Sony RX 10 it just wasn't the right camera for this particular part of the job. I looked around the conference room and realized that I couldn't light it any better than the wash of totally indirect light coming through the room wide wall of windows. I positioned the marketing director so I could put some warm shapes in the background and started designing a shot that called for dropping the background well out of focus while maintaining crispy sharpness in her eyes.

Out came the Panasonic GH4 and the dependable 35-100mm. Before we got started in earnest I slowed down long enough to make an incident light meter reading at the subject's position and I did a custom white balance for the light we had bouncing gloriously around us.  I shot a whole series of expressions and compositions with slight changes between them.  I used the wide open, f2.8 aperture of the lens at the longer end of the focal length range and the results were beautiful. Every once in a while I got some blur from subject movement but the shots without movement were stunning and in terms of focus we had sharp eyes, an acceptably sharp tip of the nose and by the time we got to the dangly earrings we were already going as soft as Kleenex. By the time your eye gets to the back wall all you see are soft, indistinct shapes with calm transition. What some would call quiet bokeh.

As of now all the jobs have been processed, masked where needed, retouched, delivered, and billed. Each job was done for a person who is at least a twenty year veteran of corporate advertising and public relations work. My first client also spent years on the agency side. There was no discussion of "this camera versus that camera." There was no hesitation in the process based on things photographers like to talk about and worry about. Just straight forward work which filled the bill for the job at hand. And that's the way it's supposed to be. That's the way it nearly always is....

Next week we're booked to shoot more portraits and I'm thinking I'll do them mostly with the Samsung NX30 and the 85mm 1.4. On Weds. I leave for a math conference in Denver. It's the same basic conference I shot for here last year but this time I get to transport myself from the early Summer heat and humidity into the Rockies. So much fun. I'm shooting it totally differently that I did last year and I'll write about it as I go along...

Hope the Summer is treating you well, that your clients pay in a timely fashion and that you find great coffee on a daily basis... thanks.