Unconventional approaches can produce a different result.

Portrait of a person who quit smoking. For Prevention Magazine.

I recently came across a thread in a forum that disturbed me. I think I know why. The originator of the thread was asking the community of photographers at large about using continuous light to make photographs, in the studio. All the "experts" quickly chimed in to "educate" this poor bastard and let him know that flash is the best, only approved, only correct and standard way of taking any photograph that requires any lighting. The implication was that the use of any other type of light was symptomatic of arch stupidity. The main premise of the commenters was that any movement shown as blur in the photograph is bad and also that photographers might require dozens and dozens of hot lights in order to "match" the light "power" one can easily get from a single, plastic, electronic flash.

I was disturbed to find that people are so incurious and so resistant to the application of any technique that is not unanimously embraced by the collective. I was disturbed to think that there is now only one (approved) way to skin an image. And I was disturbed by the hubris of the responders. It reminded me how dangerous it is to have only enough information to have an opinion.

Over the course of my career I've always owned lots of flash equipment and I've used it on thousands and thousands of jobs. But there is a time and place for experimentation, curiosity and expressing a different vision. One of those places is in the arts. And photography sometimes falls into the category of "art" (with a little "a").

The image above was made for Prevention Magazine. They called. They liked the black and white style I'd been doing for a number of years and they wanted me to do that style for an article they were writing about people who'd changed their lives.

I started with this style of lighting after studying some really cool images from the 1940's, taken by a photographer in a small Texas town. All of his images were done with "hot lights" and all of them had wonderful areas of shadow and light, as well as a sharper look to the lighting than what was in vogue in the 1990's.

I packed for the shoot by taking a bunch of Lowell Pro Lights (a 250 watt focusable flood light with barn doors) and several low wattage optical spotlights that use fresnel lenses to collimate the light. Out of a reflexive fear I also packed the usual steamer trunk full of Norman studio electronic flash gear. The Normans stayed in the car.

I used one light from above, diffused by a very thin diffusion material to create a very directional downlight for my subject's face. I use a small, Lowell from above and behind the subject as a kicker and hair light. And I used a small 250 watt flood to illuminate the back wall (lighting in layers...).

The light looked so different to me from the softbox driven, soft transition lighting we all used back then. The fact that it was lower powered than conventional strobe was something that I really liked because it gave me both a very shallow depth of field but also an excuse to keep telling my subject to freeze.  It's a quality of light that also looks sharper, overall, than more diffused light.

The magazine was very pleased with the image and ran it in a full page, uncropped, next to the article. I was pleased because the image didn't look like any of the other images in the magazine. I stayed with this style for quite a while. It's a little harder to set up and you have to keep your subjects in the sweet spots of the light but it's nice to have extra and different tools in the box.

I am currently evolving that style now. It's fun and challenging to use harder, hotter lights. It takes more time and effort. But the difference is worth it when you pull it off.

Contrary to the opinions of the "Photo Borg" we needn't all be assimilated into the Borg. There are plenty of really good lighters who use nothing but continuous lights. They are called directors of photography, or DP's. They work in the movie industry and they create stunning visual products that create billions and billions of dollars of value. There are also plenty of still photographers who also understand that there are advantages to using hot lights, florescent lights, HMI's, and even LEDs to create effects and to give heightened control to lighting. As well as helping visual creators find their own brand, their own style.

It's okay to be different. It's okay to shoot differently. In fact, for people at the higher end of the craft, it's mandatory. Being able to mimic the majority of work out there is nothing of which to be proud.

What's For Dessert?

Maybe a chocolate mousse with a couple chocolate truffles.

This is a small part of a bigger shot. The bigger shot was just fine but I liked this section more than I liked the whole thing so I cropped. I made this photograph for Garrido's Restaurant about a month ago. It was lit with LED lights and a Sony a99 camera equipped with a 70-200mm f2.8 Sony lens. I wish I had the time that day to make a comparison shot with the Sony Nex 7 and the same lens, equalizing the angle of view to compensate for the difference in sensor size.

Of course, whenever I order dessert I'm generally pretty happy with what I get but I always wonder if the other desserts that I passed up in making my choice might have been even better. 

I wonder what the analogy to chocolate is in still photography...

Old School Instagram. We used to call them Polaroids.

This grizzled, old relic (the print, not the subject...) is the precursor to the current trend of presenting distressed photographs. The only difference is that we didn't need to do anything to distress a typical Polaroid SX-70 print; they came mostly pre-distressed. Nevertheless we did spend some amount of time walking around with the bulky SX-70 cameras and snapping away at a couple bucks a frame.

When I got back from Boston last week I finally came to grips with the reality that my studio/office was an unorganized mess. I've been cleaning, sorting and throwing stuff out. My intentions were good and my energy adequate until I found a small box filled with old Polaroid images. I was organized enough to get a bunch of instant film prints into a box many years ago, just not organized enough to put a label on the box or to put it someplace logical.

The man in the image is my friend, Wyatt McSpadden. Originally from Amarillo, Texas, I rank him, along with our mutual friend,  designer/writer  Mike Hicks, as two of the funniest people I've ever encountered.

I have no idea why I was photographing Wyatt on the loading dock outside our studios in east Austin nearly twenty years ago. But I'm glad I did. It preserved the time for me and this small print brought back the whole feel of the time.

Can I suggest that you print out and save some of the digital images you currently take of family and friends? You may not always keep track of the digital work that we make these days but the sheer physical-ness of a printed object makes it a more valuable artifact. One that's easier to access and harder to throw away.

Amazing to me what power there is locked in a single image.

Bricks and Mortar Camera Stores Dying? I Don't Think So... Not in Austin.

http://blog.atmtxphoto.com/2013/03/09/precision-camera-transforms/

People want to shop local. But they want merchants to keep up with the times. ATMTX Blog shows what a camera store can be. Go read about it.

Almost everything here came from Precision Camera. The only exceptions are the two Pen lenses and the Fotodiox lens adapter...


disclosure: I do not work for Precision Camera and have received no product, money or promise of either in exchange for this blog post. 

I hurt my brain writing yesterday's blog so I thought I'd give my brain a day off.

...And share some of my favorite, old, previously published blog links. These are blogs about gear or about the idea of gear that are among my favorites. If you've been here for the long haul you've probably already read them. Some are dated. Some are prophetic and some less so. Just wanted to share while letting my cerebral cortex spin in neutral....

Some of my favorite "GEAR" posts…

http://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2012/01/thinking-about-gear-made-me-think-about.html

http://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2012/01/how-to-shoot-far-more-interesting.html

http://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2011/12/my-old-camera-can-beat-your-new-camera.html

http://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2011/12/small-sensor-systems-practical.html

http://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2011/12/does-application-of-technique-de-facto.html

http://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2011/12/dual-edge-sword-of-control.html

http://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2011/11/late-afternoon-and-into-evening-with.html

http://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2011/11/im-always-amazed-at-how-entrenched.html

http://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2011/11/speaking-of-disruptive-technologies-and.html

http://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2011/10/branding-photography-based-on-logo-love.html

http://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2011/09/old-cameras-new-cameras-old-pictures.html

http://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2011/09/professional-photographers-always.html

The practice of photography can be like fashion. Or it can be a life long linear process.

A display in the window of the Nespresso Shop on Newberry.

As I sat trapped in a coach seat on an aged and tattered American Airlines airplane I had time to think about the whole spectrum of art photography. I wanted to have a clearer window into the different ways in which people who aren't using their cameras to make a living in a traditional, commercial application of photography approach their subjects and their understanding of style. How much is generated internally and how much is a reflexive reaction to a world inundated in images?

I spoke with a person in the film industry on Friday. We were talking about HMI lighting (yikes! more lighting from Kirk?) and he made a remark concerning still photographers. I give him credence since his background originally included a successful career in photography. His remark, in regards to the real lack of lighting acumen among most shooters was this: "There's no such thing as a good photographer under 40."

Rather than trying to be snarky what he was really trying to say is that it takes both 10,000 hours of working on a craft to even begin to get a sense of mastery, and that the first twenty years of working in the arts is a process of working through all the different styles and influences you are plagued with until you finally get to the point where your true visual and conceptual nature shine through and you are able to comfortably separate your work from the transient seduction of the photographic fashion of the moment. It's the point at which you decide that you don't need to learn HDR or layering or a specific method of fill lighting just because everyone else is doing it, in the moment. 

Said in a nicer and simpler way:  It takes time to find your voice.

Back in the 1960's John Szarkowski curated a show at the Museum of Modern Art in N.Y. called, Windows and Mirrors. Here's what the Museum's press release had to say about the show:

".......In John Szarkowski's view, the dominant motif of American photography during the past 20 years has been a movement "from public to private concerns." Unlike the generation of the 1930s and 40s, Szarkowski suggests, the generation that came to artistic maturity and public recognition after 1960 is 

characterized by a pursuit of highly personal visions of the world rather than by any attempt to offer a comprehensive program for social or aesthetic progress.

MIRRORS AND WINDOWS has been organized around Szarkowski's thesis that such personal visions take one of two forms. In metaphorical terms, the photograph is seen either as a mirror--a romantic expression of the photographer's sensibility as it projects itself on the things and sights of this world; or as a window--through which the exterior world is explored in all its presence and reality. 

The 1950s marked the historical watershed in photography's turning away from public to private concerns for a whole complex of economic, social and technological factors including the decline of the great picture magazines (Life, Look) and the diminished commercial and, by extension, social opportunities available to the photographic professional. Two major influences 

in the realignment of photography's relation to the world were Minor White's magazine Aperture, which first appeared in 1952, and Robert Frank's 1959 book The Americans, a personal vision of the Eisenhower era. 

Between White, the prototypical "mirror," and Frank, the prototypical "window," there was defined, in Szarkowski's works, "a model for the fundamentally divergent concepts of photography's function," a model still "useful in the critical 

analysis of the continued evolution of American photography during the past two decades." 

Among the leading practioners of the "mirror" approach are Paul Caponigro; Jerry N. Uelsmann, whose surreal, technically stunning montages have been widely influential; Robert Heinecken; and painter Robert Rauschenberg,......" 

I was amazed that my memory of this show and of Szarkowski's thoughtful demarcation of the two houses of fine art photography was one of the first things that came into my mind as I grappled with my current opinion of where the momentum in photography resides and why I am so disquieted by the present trends in the art of our collective visual passion.

I've recently come to the conclusion that there are two spheres in our world of photography. There are images (the vast majority) that are "found." And then there are a tiny percentage of images that are "created." While most uses of cameras seem to be for documentation, or documentation with embellishment (cellphone images of today's breakfast taco with a bit of post production nostalgia thrown in....) and don't require more of a photographer than to wander about on a kind of scavenger hunt, looking for images that resonate because they are re-imagined icons of popular culture. Our re-capturing becomes just another echo... Even in this world there's a hierarchy. The most mundane on the bottom. The "street scenes" that mostly show a stranger's back. The gratuitous snap shot of your friend slurping coffee or smoking a cigarette. The top end of the hierarchy is arguably the landscape photo since it shows a higher form of active subject discrimination. A more nuanced search. But it's still an adventure in "found" work. Chances are that, because of the ubiquity of "found" photography and that implied saturation of that genre most of us would choose the same angles, the same basic icons, and make the same artifacts of our culture because we've already previously ingested the roadmap to the image, subconsciously.

Amazing to me is the idea that while we are all scavenging with our little cameras the people whose work we are fascinated with are busy "creating" their images. Whether it is Annie Leibovitz directing and demanding that people share in her vision of what their portrait should be (and making it up as surely as a movie) or Gregory Crewdson who imagines complex tableaus and then painstakingly creates them with crews of lighting professionals, actors and stylists. His images can take crews of forty or more to create and each is thoroughly imagined (created) before a single grip truck rolls.

David LaChapelle is another prime example of a photographer who created his own lush color fantasy world completely from his own fertile mind. It's the creation of a differentiated vision that compels us to be much more interested in this kind of work than in the vast majorities of mostly straightforward documentations. Look at the work of Chuck Close or even the lighting of Martin Schoeller.

Between the two spheres there is obviously a mix, or center ground, that gives us a bit from both pursuits. A fashion image by Peter Lindbergh is a combination of a found beauty subsequently written into a shooting concept which removes the found beauty from everyday and, by the application of lighting, posing, propping and rapport turns the object into a blend of conceptual and documented art.

In a more workaday sense, there are two kinds of portrait photographers. One is more or less documentary in nature, applying a set of accepting poses and lighting norms in order to make a documentation or enhanced found photo of the person in front of the camera. The more uniform the application of technical norms the less we are drawn toward the image. It becomes not a concept but cliched artifact of a portrait.

Then there are the portraits that reveal by collaboration and non-uniform technical structure. Marc Hauser rose to his highest stature on the strength of a series of black and white portraits done with very simple lighting but with wonderfully nuanced interpretations of non-artificial beauty in front of his camera. In some of his best work Arnold Newman's portraits are good examples of this successful intersection.

The work I've seen of someone like Zach Arias that rises above "normal" function are in his collection of studio portraits. Portraits that depend on his point of view and his direction of the subjects for their weight and value. His pursuit of exterior portraits always seem much more about working to get the technique correct more than interpreting a vision. Like a relatively new sailor trying to work a sail in a strong wind... But when he clicks in the studio it's transformative.

Like most fashionable pursuits I think we (in the collective sense) have embraced the "found" side of photography to excess over the last ten to twelve years. We've spent the time grappling with the effect of dealing with new technology instead of grappling with the exposure of our own inner visions and conceptual natures. We're constantly testing our cameras instead of testing ourselves. And it shows in a collective body of work that looks more forensic than narrative. More "cold, hard fact" than delicious and mysterious fiction.

The bottom line, I think, for the vast majority of practitioners who do this for the joy of discovering their vision, would be best served by doing just that. Now that we have a firm handle on how digital cameras work it's time to exit the cocoon of technical transition and get back to the real work of personalizing our work and exploring our own inner visions. We're not all sports photographers or war journalists. 

Stock photography has given us (as a culture) an endless supply of descriptive, documentary images of everything from the Eiffel Tower to cream cheese to every variation of the female nipple. We don't need to exactly replicate any of that. We didn't embrace this passion to become Zerox machines.  What might be interesting is setting up images that tell the stories in your mind. It takes more time and commitment but the pay off might be much more rewarding. Interpretation is usually more interesting than documentation...

We can shift the fashion of photography away from endless documentation. We can create images that don't exist in the world around us. We can choose our models and our intentional messaging and have fun with it. 

And once you find a subject matter (not style!) that works for you then you can dive in and do the hours it might take to translate your vision into a recognizable and diverse personal vision. And when you do the time you may end up with a genuine and unforced style you can call your own.

It's just a thought. Windows? Mirrors? As a portrait photographer I constantly vacillate between documentation and creation. Sometimes I win and sometimes I lose. But I mostly lose when I go on "auto pilot" and make a product. I'm more successful when I follow a plan in my brain instead of the ones in the books....

Edit: An interesting post over at NPR: http://www.npr.org/blogs/pictureshow/2013/03/12/174043868/japanese-photography-a-tale-of-two-artists