Link roundup – Old Stuff

Mar 312009

How often do you go through a photo blog’s archives?  Not all that often I’ll bet… which means that there are a lot of articles that go unread by a lot of folks simply because they miss them when posted.   Thinking about this, here are some great articles that I’ve bookmarked from a while ago.   Some of these may be old news to some of y’all but who knows – there may be a missed gem in there!

That’s it for today, some more golden oldies coming soon.

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And the winner is…

Mar 272009

…Bryantsphotography for his “Sunset Bride” image.

Sunset Bride

I really like this image on a few levels – one, the lighting.  This was the “Exciting Lighting” contest so obviously use of lighting was a big part of the criteria.  Bryant has done it very well – creating dramatic, yet not “over the top” light, well balanced with the ambient.  The backlighting makes the veil “pop” and prevents the dark shadows that would have otherwise crept in the back of the dress/train.  The shadows are subtle and non-invasive, in fact they even work with the scene overall – creating the “pool” of light that surrounds the bride.

Secondly the composition.   Bryant has made good use of the classic rule of thirds, – I also really like the strong diagonals in the composition:

capture1

(sorry for the hack job!)

The colors are saturated and dramatic, but not the “hyperreal-neon-glowing” colors we see far too often (besides, it’s a wedding shot, it’s allowed to be a bit “poppy” in the color).  still, skin tone looks good (at least on my monitor) and the splash of red from the bouquet is a nice touch.

The pose is great, and the whole scene just exudes a sense of exuberance and joy.   I’m sure this was posed, but it looks like a great moment anyway.

Anyway, congrats to Bryant – well done, and enjoy the free registration to the Digital WakeUp Call tour!

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On photographers and architects

Mar 262009

apple1

I started writing this article the other day, and saved it as a draft… sketching out the ideas I wanted to touch on etc… Then today I see THIS ARTICLE by Chase Jarvis, and I am glad I waited to publish my own, as his touches on some similar/complimentary themes that I would talk about as well!

I’ve been reading a book called Selling the Invisible: A Field Guide to Modern Marketing by harry Beckwith (great book btw), and the main point it makes is how marketing/selling a *service* is very different than marketing/selling a *product*.

And that’s what we are doing.  As photographers, we are selling a service, not a product. The “photograph” itself is not what we offer – anyone can make a photograph.  We are selling our *creativity*, our *skill* and our *vision* in creating that photograph.  I think it’s an important distinction to make, as it seems that the market becomes more and more “commoditized”

Look at it this way – when you hire an architect to design your office or house, you are not “buying a house” – you are paying for the creative vision of the architect.  You are paying for the service that his experience, creativity and expertise brings to the table, and how it facilitates your own end product (the house).  And that *service* is what makes all the difference in the final product (Think “generic housing subdevelopment” vs Falling Water or The NYC Apple store – they are distinct because of the vision and services of the Creatives involved.)

So what does this have to do with Chase’s article?

chase makes the point:

For the first three quarters of my somewhat short career in the business of professional pictures, I was the worst offender. Client said “that looks great!” I called it a wrap, tossed my camera to my assistant with a point of flair just like you’d find on a button on the suspenders of a waiter at TGI Fridays. Ugh. For years, I thought my job was done when the client was happy. But now…
…now it’s when the client says she’s happy that I really start to work hard. That’s the starting point.

Bingo! I agree 100%

In essence that shot (the one the client is happy with) is the “product”.   Don’t be satisfied with that – you aren’t selling a product.  You are selling a service, you are selling your vision, your expertise, your creativity.  As Chase says, go beyond – give them what they didn’t even *know* they wanted.   The more our industry becomes about selling a product (photograph), the more mundane it becomes and the less we are worth as photographers.

Don’t sell your products.  Sell your services.

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The Hot Shoe Diaries – a brief review

Mar 252009

411m0fyciol_sl160_It’s times like this that almost make me wish I were a Nikon shooter.

Almost.

But seriously – I’m going to go out on a limb, and say that if you shoot or are planning on shooting CLS – this book is your bible. No joke. I doubt there are many photographers on the planet using CLS to better effet than Joe McNally – and this book gives you a front row seat inside his head, breaking down each shot, each though process and each lighting decision so by the end you are left going “oh yeah, that makes total sense”.

remember the old Bo Jackson slogan from the late ’80s “Bo knows Football”?
well this is “Joe knows CLS”. For realz.

The book starts out with a brief discussion on “The Gear”, what Joe uses and why. Good stuff. Joe also talks about why he uses CLS – next time you hear a PhotoSnob opining on why TTL flash is for losers, or how it limits creativity – smile and hand them a copy of this book. Pretty hard to call Joe McNally Un-creative…

But the real meat of the book is, well, the rest of it – starting with one light setups, then moving on to two and more, Joe gives a blow-by-blow, play-by-play account of the creation of some of his most striking images. From concept to setup to trial and error lighting schemes, Joe walks you through his head as he creates the light for all kinds of awesome shots. Talking about both How and Why, he takes you inside the setup of some absolutely fantastic shots and how they are lit.   Each short chapter deals with a particular assignment, a particular shot.  From positions to modifiers, Joe breaks it all down.

In case it isn’t obvious, I am loving this book.  Even as a Canon shooter, it’s still worth a read just to get inside the head out of a creative person like Joe (and most of the CLS stuff is translate-able to ETTL)   I almost consider it a reference book – think about it as a “lighting setup library”  – a cornucopia of ideas & light to build on for all of us n00bs.

In short, get it.  Srsly.

:-)

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Develop film using coffee(!)

Mar 242009

Wow… 2 of my favorite things, photography and coffee.  extra2

Photojojo has a great article here on using coffee and vitamin C to develop film instead of normal developer. Not sure how practical it is, but good to know just in case of the zombie apocolypse when we can’t get diafine anymore :-) Looks fun to play around with though!

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Holga in the NYT

Mar 212009

interesting photoessay by a french photographer who documented broadway in a series of continuous, overlapping exposures on a holga. Some of the shots are quite beautiful. I found myself stopping the slideshow at points to just study the images.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/03/01/nyregion/thecity/20090301-cityweekly-broadway/index.html

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The Renaissance continues

Mar 202009

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Who woulda thunk it?  in a sea of digicams, Voigtlander goes ahead and releases a rangefinder. An analogue rangefinder.  A *medium format*, fixed lens, analogue rangefinder.  (and a folder to boot!).

Guess film isn’t dead after all :-)   The Bessa III (as it is called) apparently will be available in may for about 2k. not too shabby!

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1 week left for the exciting lighting contest!

Mar 202009


Just a quick reminder – Just one week left to get your entries in for the “Exciting Lighting” contest

Doesn’t cost anything to enter, and the winner will get to go to to David Ziser’s “Digital WakeUp Call tour” for free!

Just head on over to the f/1.0 flickr group, add you photos with “Exciting Lighting” to the pool, and tag ‘em with “F10DWC” – that’s it!

There’s only a few days left, so get those shots in!

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Toy cameras and fixed-gears

Mar 192009

577px-fixed_gear_cogWith my recent holga fascination and the seeming Renaissance of film that is going on in the photo-blogo-sphere (TM), it got me wondering – Why?

Look, by any technical measure, the Holga is a crappy camera.  It is flimsy, plastic, full of light leaks, blurry,  Basically the *exact opposite* of everything we look for in  a camera.  We will spend thousands of dollars for a little extra bump in that MTF curve,  or a fraction of a stop in increased lens speed – So why is my fancy-shmancy-SLR and High-end glass sitting on the shelf while I gleefully run around with a $25 toy camera with plastic lens?

Allow me to make an analogy (which I have used before, but applicable in this case as well!)  Consider the bicycle – Nowadays your average bike has 27-some odd gears, carbon fiber doohickeys, hydraulic disk brakes, and suspensions which will absorb a city curb or tree root with nary a complaint.  Pretty cool, huh? Gotta love technology (road bike tech is equally, if not more impressive).

Of course with all that, I can still walk into a bike shop and buy a “fixie” or “fixed-gear” bicycle.  Some shops even specialize in ‘em!  To explain:  a fixed gear bicycle is a bike with 1 speed/1 gear.  No shifters, no suspension, no brakes (!) – just 2 pedals and 2 wheels.  Not only that, the bike cannot even “coast” as ther gear is “fixed” (hence “fixie”) – the pedals turn the wheel directly, with no freewheeling so you *must* pedal as fast as the bike is going.  To slow down/stop you simply slow your pedaling, or lock your legs and “skid” the bike to a stop.

Now at this point one may ask, why on earth someone would want to ride a bike like that (ahem -Holga) when they could get a 27 speed, freewheeling, brake-having, trigger-shifting racing bike instead? (DSLR)  And ultimately, everyone who rides a fixie has their own reason – but for many, it is *discipline*.

The Fixie keeps you honest.  It *forces* you to work on your riding technique.  It *forces* you to pedal properly, “spinning” as the pros call it.  It doesn’t allow you to slack off – if you don’t pedal, you don’t go – simple as that.

It eliminates everything non-essential, strips the act of riding down to it’s most basic fundamentals and beats you over the head with them until they are mastered.

Similarly, the holga doesn’t have any of the fancy bells and whistles of high end cameras.  It strips the camera down to it’s bare essentials – a box with film and a shutter (ok, so maybe a pinhole is more “bare essentials, but you can get holgas in “pinhole” version too!)  It forces you to work within it’s constraints, and thus compensate by using your other skills – composition, previsualization, etc…  Digital shooting makes you lazy – the Holga makes you *work* for your shot!

Furthermore, most fixed-gear cyclists will tell you that there is a certain “Zen” to riding a fixie.  No clicking freewheel, no worrying about shifting, just you and the bike -directly connected.  Just like the holga, its very primitiveness strips away distractions and complications, leaving us to concentrate on the act in it’s purest form – either riding or shooting.

So if you are feeling in a rut with your shooting, or are dreading over sorting through those 4,000 almost-identical shots you took on your last shoot, try it – grab a holga and a couple of rolls of ASA400 b/w film.   it’s only a few bucks, and can give you a whole new outlook on your photography!

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CNN Piece on Mario Testino

Mar 162009

Very nice interview/piece on Mario Testino by CNN.  Even if you aren’t a fashion photographer, it’s worth a look.

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An old flame…

Mar 132009

It’s funny, there seems to be a kind of “collective unconscious” in the photo community… All the buzz about film lately, from discussions on strobist to Brian Auer’s fantastic “build a film developing kit for <$50“  Of course it just so happens that’s I’ve been rekindling my lost love affair with film as well…I started out developing film (from my 1967 Pentax spotmatic) and printing it in a wet darkroom.  Once I moved to digital, my 35mm film kind of fell by the wayside…

I picked up a Holga a while back with the intention of just messing around, running some 120 film etc…  At the time, I still had access to a pro darkroom, and intended to do my own processing and printing… Of course, that never happened.  With 99% of my work being digital, my poor rolls of 120 sat un-developed for <ahem> quite some time.

Of course that was before I discovered Diafine.  (for those who don’t know, Diafine is what is known as a “Compensating developer”  It comes in 2 parts, solution A, and solution B.   You pour in A, the film absorbs as much as it’s emulsion can hold, you then pour it out, and pour in B.  B reacts with A, doing the developing until A is all used up – then it stops (as there is no more A left to react.) essentially it is a “self terminating” development process.   What this means in practice is that it is just about the fastest, easiest way to develop black and white film that I have ever seen.  No carefully controlling temperatures of solutions (it works just fine anywhere from 68-80F), no exact timing down to the second (because it is self terminating, it doesn’t matter how long your film in).   You can load your film, pour in A, walk away and eat a sandwich, come back pour in B, go grab a beer, come back a half hour later, and your film will be done.  Just like that.

There are a couple of other cool features as well (eg it gives an effective “speed boost” of a stop or more to many films – my preferred HP5+ becomes effectively 800ISO when souped in diafine) and a few downsides.  It’s definitely not the developer to choose if you demand exacting precision & control over each step of the development process.  But for a low-fi neg like the holga produces it’s a match made in heaven.

Say what you will about film v. digital.  I love them both, I think they both have their place, and I think that every photographer should use both to at least some extent.   Even if you are die-hard 100% “digital is superiour to film in every way”, the “creative experience” of film is very different than digital.  It makes you shoot in a different way, think in a different way, see in a different way.  Not better, not worse, just different.  And that in my opinion is one of the great “creativity juicers” that we get.   So if you are in a creative rut, try it out.  Grab a holga and a few rolls of black and white 120 film ($30-40 bucks) and some diafine, and shoot some blurry, light-leaky, distorted, streaky, vignetted, *beautiful* frames.   Guaranteed to cure what ails ya!

All shot with the holga,  Ilford HP5+ film, processed in Diafine:

Philadelphia, Old and New

Independence Hall

At the Beach

Adrift on a sea of clouds

Liftoff

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Is the megapixel war over?

Mar 092009

For a long time, pretty much any advanced amateur/pro photographer carrying a dslr would eventually and inevitably be confronted with the question “Wow, how many megapixels is that?”  You can’t fault them for asking though – we had all gotten used to the marketers pushing the megapixel count as a measure of a camera’s quality.  You can’t really fault the marketers either – pixel count was an easy way of answering “why should I buy camera X over Y” to the consumer (certainly a lot easier than trying to explain the nuances of dynamic range, chromatic abberation & flare control, lens aperture etc…)  Of course, most folks “in the know” realized that there was *far* more to image quality than pixel count.   Nevertheless to the chagrin of most pros and enthusiasts the pixel count (and density) kept getting higher and higher…   Until now?

In the rapidly shifting world of camera technology, maybe consumer sentiment is coming around – when a blog as big as gizmondo explains why “more megapixels aren’t better” you gotta figure that people are noticing.  This combined with a number of recent compact camera launches trimming back their pixel count in favor of better low light performance… and then Olympus declares their complete withdrawl from the megapixel race altogether, setting the max for their SLRs at 12mp!

Could this be a renniasance in camera design?  With innovative camera designs like the G1, and sensors like the new Fuji EXR sensor (eschewing pixel count for improved dynamic range using pixel binning) it may just be that a whole new world is opening up in the digital camera arena.  Personally I’m looking forward to every bit of it!

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