Well. It's a wrap. Another fun, yearly conference has come, been photographed, and gone. How did it go?

September was "life in the fast lane" for me. I was booked on a project, or chained to post production, every single day of the month, except for a couple of Sundays. I worked for international bio-chem companies from Switzerland, local tech companies, industrial concerns, commercial construction companies, the Theatre, a collection of health care practices and two law firms. Oh yeah, and one conference. I could stop working on the first of October and coast through the quarter but....I would begin accruing a Karmic Debt for the first quarter of 2016. 

But what I want to write about today is a re-cap of the last week. The nuts and bolts of a high end event. How high end was the high end? Well, at the last session of the day, on Monday, they served everyone Moet Champagne. We drank our way through a discussion of securitizing something. I'm not really sure what we were securitizing but it doesn't matter. The actual attendees learned stuff and had fun. 

This is a conference about finance and real estate. But it's not a "workshop" about how to buy and flip houses on a "one off" scale. It's for bankers, federal regulators, investors and others who buy thousands of properties, provide access to financing and also securitize the assets for the investment community at large. Attendance at this conference is by invitation only and all attendees are required to agree not to disclose any quotes or proprietary information they discover at the conference. From high executives in the federal government to executive V.P.s at Goldman Sachs, it really is an audience of heavy hitters. At one point I looked up at a panel on the stage and counted 6 CEOs of billion dollar+ companies. Not bad. 

The conference started on Sunday evening and went through Weds. This is the sixth year that I've covered the conference and I don't think it violates my N.D.A. to tell you that I did wear a coat and tie for every session. Along with nice shoes. (Yes, I wore pants...). 

But my intention here is not to describe the conference in more detail than I need to in order to tell you the story of the photographic coverage. 

When I shoot conferences like this one I need to take into consideration that I'll be covering keynote speakers, moderators, participants in panels and emcees. I want to shoot multiple angles of the stage and include wide shots of the stage, and tight close ups of every speaker and panelist.  I also need to shoot break out sessions, and coffee and refreshment breaks. Signage shots and venue shots are also appreciated. It's like a long, three and a half day wedding with multiple brides. But unlike wedding photographers my brief is to be discrete, never use flash during a stage session, and never call attention to myself, or try to direct the action. There is no posing and no "do overs."  All this means that I shoot lots and lots of frames, not only to cover my ass but also to give my clients lots of choices. Different angles and different expressions.

I really thought a lot about

Evita Part Two: Which lens was this?

Evita Still Photo. ©2015 Kirk Tuck, for Zach Theatre.

An image from the dress rehearsal of "Evita" at Zach Theatre, on Tuesday night. Which camera? Which lens?

Evita Still Image. ©2015 Kirk Tuck, for Zach Theatre. 

I loved this frame when I saw it in the Lightroom gallery. It's one of the 1500+ images I shot this past Tuesday for Zach Theatre. I'd be curious to see if you know which camera and lens combination I shot this with and why you think your choice is the accurate one. Don't look for exif info. That's cheating...

Go.

Still at the banking and global finance conference but I thought I'd put up one of my favorite portraits, just for fun.

Thanks for coming by. I'm shooting at a conference until Wednesday evening and I'm just in the studio to charge some new batteries that arrived today for the Olympus cameras. They are Wasabi Power batteries that I bought from Blue Nook. I've been buying their Olympus (and Panasonic) batteries for a year or so and have yet to have any problems with them. No problems at all.

I first took a chance on them when Olympus has a supply problem with their batteries. I couldn't get any and I needed them for a trip I was taking. The Olympus batteries, at the time, were about $54 each. The Wasabi Power batteries are priced like this: Two Batteries, One Really Nifty Charger = $28.

I deleted a comment yesterday from someone who (with very little actual knowledge of the profession) scolded me for shooting with Olympus and Nikon cameras if my goal is to do great portraiture and make "big money". He was wrong but I didn't have the time, inclination or energy to tell him why he was full of B.S. I've been doing this commercial photography thing for a long time, have made (and continue to make) good money doing it, have as much technical expertise as anyone in the market, and know advertising and marketing forward and backward. Not looking for career advice right now.

Next week is a bit zany. We're having a new roof put on the house and the studio. We're having attic fans installed. We're having a retrofit to our back porch. We're having new gutters put up. We're having our fence re-painted. Just a little Fall maintenance to keep this Austin property humming along.

This weekend is the first weekend of the great two week traffic jam we also call, ACL Fest. Look for most of the major roads that serve our part of the city to be closed, detoured, rendered unusable. Look for about a quarter of a million people paying big money to mostly sit in the dirt and listen to music in a park that will then be closed to the public for months as the city tries to grow back new grass.

Look for a general slowdown of all central Austin productivity for the next two weeks, minimum.

Thank goodness both this economic conference and the dress rehearsal for Zach Theatre's play, Evita, will be done before the music mayhem starts. Yes, we can hear the bass line (only) for most of the bands at ACL Fest even though we are a mile from the park.

On another note...


The Olympus cameras are working very, very well for the conference. I have finally mastered flash with the mirrorless miracles. Thanks for asking.

Need some cheaper batteries? Try the Wasabis. Here's a link:

Portrait. Fade to black. Career, hard turn.

I had a little epiphany this week. I'm tired of accepting diffuse and unchallenging work. Especially as regards portraits. I'm pretty sure I can make a living, in the future, by doing portraits in the way I want to see them, not in some commodified style that just fills space and "describes" the person in the frame. I want people who view my portraits to feel as though they have come to understand something about the subject, even if it's only the nature of their patience. Even if it is a visual and emotional illusion.

Something happened to a lot of the artists I knew when the economy collapsed in 2008. They became fearful of their commercial futures and let that fear dictate the terms of their engagement with their art and craft. I don't expect the 90% of American people who never lost their jobs to understand the emotional impact on people who lived a more precarious existence as freelancers. It's as though we scrambled, en masse, to do the lesser biding of agencies, companies and commercial audiences to compete for the few remaining projects of the time. We became afraid to push back and lobby for the quality each piece deserved because our collective fear of jinxing a deal by pushing for parameters that would continue to move the aesthetic we had created forward. Clients cut budgets and they also, by extension, cut the potential for excellence.

I talk to so many people in related communication crafts and most frequently what I hear is that they are nervous about raising rates back up because they feel that clients have become used to holding the upper hand and dictating the construct of the engagements. But what I hear from the actual clients---a step beyond the ad agencies and intermediaries---is a dismay that all creative work has become boring and diminished, and that they resent their agents and proxies for disregarding the need for great work in order to pursue a budget number that they think their clients will----tolerate. 

"We never asked them to limit the budgets. We never demanded that things be done on the cheap. We want the best creative resources we can buy and we're willing to pay for them." That's what the good clients are saying. The cost cutting happened because the intermediaries felt the fear they were partially creating and embraced it in their own dealings.

Seems it's time for a cathartic throwing off of the budget harness. Time to step up and tell people that we are no longer interested in doing homogenous crap just to keep the doors open. It's time to pull out the stops and get back to the real work of our work----making people look at what we've done with a sense that they are seeing something new or expertly seen and translated. And making sure that what we have done is exciting enough to merit getting our client's marketing work a second look. Even while it means asking for more money and rejecting demands to commodify.

Use of stock photography is a form of creative cowardice. Presuming a client is part of the legion of cheap, petit bourgeois culture, hellbent on the bottom line (at any cost) is passé. The brave new world of commercial art is all about standing out, again. Leading the charge. Innovating and not being afraid to demand workable budgets for hardworking art. The clients feel it. The rest of us need to get on board. Or get off the train.

Hey Dude! What cameras are you gonna use for that corporate show coming up? Will it be the D810?

I've photographed the upcoming conference a number of times in the past. Two years ago my schedule didn't match up and they had to use someone else but the client came right back last year. Over the five or six years I've been involved with this very private conference of bankers, federal regulators, finance experts, commercial and residential real estate investors and economists I've mostly documented the event with some form of four thirds or micro four thirds cameras and lenses. Last year I mostly used the Olympus EM-5s, with a smattering of Panasonic. When I first started working the event I was using the Olympus E-3 and E-30 cameras along with their fast f2.0 zoom lenses. (Still miss that 35-100mm f2.0, but what a weight monster...).

This year I thought to change the whole paradigm and use the full frame cameras but I just can't bring myself to hoist the bag of what feels like lead weights yet again. I'm remaining loyal to the small cameras for this one. I also dreaded massaging those enormous full frame raw files. Totally unnecessary for this kind of work.

And I'm packing as light as I can. How's this? Two EM5-2 bodies with grips attached. One Panasonic 12-35mm f2.8 zoom and one Olympus 50-200mm f2.8-3.5 FT zoom (used with an adapter but originally made for the Olympus Four Thirds, mirrored cameras).  Add to this two of the tiny flashes that shipped with the Olympus cameras and one, bigger Panasonic flash. The final addition to the inventory? A nice monopod for that monster, long lens. Someone has to carry the weight, right?

We'll do social photography on Sunday night at a nice, downtown conference hotel and then begin the show in earnest on Monday morning. Early. Too early. We shot from sun up till sun down on Mon., Tues. and Weds. and we'll have another year's show in the can.

I'm selecting the diminutive system once again because it's small, light and delivers great results. Nearly 100% of the client's use of the images will be on the web and in electronic presentations. It's another area or niche where the absolute "best" can be a hinderance to productivity and workflow.

Also, I may want to switch into video and capture some movement. I'd love to be able to do that handheld. That's playing right into Olympus's strengths...

The end of the week and some thoughts about lighting

Sarah. Post swim, in the studio.

I love the control that knowing how to light gives to photographers. The character of light is a big part of the success or failure of an image. But in the same way that cameras have evolved, and styles of shooting have evolved, the way we light is changing and moving forward from project to project. 

For the assignment I wrapped shooting on today I talked an ad agency out of the "easy" way of doing portraits and set myself up for a lot more intense work instead. They had come to me with the idea of making portraits of 30 attorneys in front of a gray background; or something similar to that. The idea was that we'd set up a standard background, maybe three flash units (main light in a big box, an accent light and a background light) and we'd dutifully stand in a naked and boring conference room waiting for a cattle call line of subjects to arrive, smile at the camera, and then leave.  And we would do this over and over again on the first day and then repeat the whole exercise on the second day. 

I'm sorry but I have to say that I think the factory approach to shooting innocuous and unchallenging portraits has seen its day. We can do better than that. We can light better than that. And even though we may work harder getting there, the ride will be much more fun. 

I asked a few weeks back, just after we sat down to estimate the project, if we could do a quick scout. The folks at the law firm were happy to have me look around their space and the firm's contact person (also an ardent photographer) was more than open to the idea of shooting an available light style and doing the set-ups in different locations around the offices. They have brand new