A quick post. Staying flexible.

I was pretty flip (cynical, sarcastic, dismissive, etc)  about the effects I was getting with Snapseed when I last wrote about my adventures in post processing.  But today I had a mini-lecture from a great swim coach about the need for enhanced flexibility if we intend to keep swimming butterfly into our middle ages... (wry smiley face implied...).  Then I looked up at my analog bulletin board and saw the quote from creativity consultant, Ian Summers, which reads, "Grow or Die."  And I thought I should sober up and take a hint from the converging messages I'm getting from the universe.

When I was printing traditional black and white prints (in the darkroom) I had dozens of little tricks to make a print pop or sing or look sexy.  I had a Pictrol which is a little contraption you stick under the enlarging lens to soften the corners in an artistic way.  The blurred spilled light also enhanced the black tones around the edges.  Of course we would burn and dodge but we also stole a technique from 1940's Richard Avedon in which you place very thin tracing paper in contact with the print during printing.  You could also do it selectively.  Just in areas.  The parts that touched the paper were sharper than the parts that didn't.  Primitive darkroom "tilt-shift" technique?

We selected paper for effect.  And we did full contact, radical toning.  With selenium, sepia, gold and even coffee (which never worked as well).   And for a while we did lots of art on the print with transparent Mashall's oil paints.

So why the burr under my saddle about modern post processing?  Can't imagine it would be anything but jealousy in not having discovered it first, followed by curmudgeon tendencies.  So I'm coming clean.  I actually like playing around with this stuff and I've been re-working some recent images to re-interpret how I used to print.  After all, the Snapseed generation had to find their inspiration somewhere.  Right?

If you are bored with your photo work right now you might want to change processing.  The water's fine.  Jump on in.

edit/addition feb. 2:  An interesting article from www.luminous-landscape.com about the "RULES OF PHOTOGRAPHY."  http://www.luminous-landscape.com/essays/rules_of_the_game.shtml  A fun read, in light of our continuing discussions here.

Are you working too much? Are you going crazy? This is an oft requested post from about a year ago. I'm not saying you're "bad."

2.20.2011

Working 24/7 and slowly going insane? Join the club? No Thanks!

I was rather shocked when I listened to a person from a company that makes all kinds of electronic products the other day.  She made the pitch to me that her company helped stressed out, over-worked moms by making products (like phones and tablets) that would allow a frenetic mom to "disconnect from her office" and be able to "take her work along with her" so that she could be present for her children's activities.  From what I could understand this person believed in the 1990's mantra of "multi-tasking" which has been so thoroughly discredited by psychologists and process experts over the last decade.

The idea was that, between tweets, urgent e-mails, progress reports and modifications to mission critical spreadsheets, the newly unfettered mom would be able to look up from the screen and instantly enter into her child's world just at the moment when Sally hit the game winning home run or when Poindexter cinched the national Spelling Bee with the correct spelling of "Delusional". 

The more grievous idea I came away with is that now it's no longer good enough to give a company a stress and anxiety filled 50 or 60 hours of your week.  No.  The new norm is total ownership.  The excuse is that now so many people in finance, tech and commodities work in a world market and they must be accessible to their counterparts in Malaysia, must not miss the opening bell in Berlin or Kerplakistan, must be electronically present for those important clients in Kathmandu....

I have a sneaky feeling that chronic unemployment is not caused by a lack of jobs but that many jobs are being handled by one person.  The manically compulsive super workers are stealing more than their fair share of jobs.  And they are training their companies to expect "work till you drop" dedication that trades health, family life, hobbies, community involvement and the basic richness of existence for quarter by quarter profitability.  And here's the kicker:  Those super employees aren't being compensated for doing the work of three, they're giving their employers undeserved charity.  

In the self employed world we read books on negotiation.  We learn that you never give up something without getting something in return.  That's the foundation of good negotiation.  And as self employed people we never work for free (unless we are donating our time, services, goods to a needy and beneficial cause.)  But that's exactly what the super workers of today are doing.  They are giving it away for free.  And, of course, their companies are encouraging them.

It's time we took a good long look at the American work ethic and got rational.  The unions got it right back in the coal mine strikes and the meat packers collective bargaining days:  Forty hours a week is the most you can work in a reliable and sustainable way.  And by that I mean being able to preserve your personal dignity, your physical health and the health of your family and relationships.  

If you are routinely working 60 or 70 hours a week and you don't OWN the company you work for (and, in my mind, even if you do) you might consider that you are your own "scab" and you are in some ways responsible for the downward spiral of the American dream.  That spreadsheet WILL wait until monday.  Your real life can't always be on hold.  If it needs to be done over the weekend your company needs to hire a weekend shift.

So, this is a photo oriented blog, why the hell am I talking about workplace issues?  Because from time to time I write columns that talk about some of the outrageous schedules I work.  But the difference is that my projects stop and start and there's lots of in between time for rest and rejuvenation.  Joy and pleasure.  Family dinners together and weekends puttering around helping Ben with homework and Belinda with some gardening.  Couch time with a novel.   If a freelancer in a struggling industry can do this and keep his head above water then so can the valuable employees of all sorts of companies.

The electronics that we seem addicted to are also a secret weapon that helps bosses (and clients)  suck more and more from their people by blurring the lines between what is and what isn't work.  The cellphone is not referred to as "An Electronic Leash" without good reason.  

It's all about setting limits.  Isn't that what we tell our children? 

The shot above is of Belinda in Montego Bay, Jamaica.  The way I negotiated a series of projects in the Islands was to work for a week, for my usual rate, and then go back later with Belinda for a second week of vacation and downtime.  No phones, no internet, no emergencies in Patagonia.  The vacation opportunity defrayed the travel time and longer working days of the actual project.

Shot with a Rollei medium format camera on Tri-X film at a place called "The Pork Pit."  Really good pulled pork.  A quiet week by the sea.

Added half an hour later:  I read this on Kim Critchfield's FB page and loved it.  I sent a copy to Ben and to a friend who needed to read it.  I'll post this on my wall, just to the side of my computer.

One evening a Cherokee elder told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people.

He said, "My son, the battle is between the two 'wolves' that live inside us all.

...

One is Unhappiness or Evil - It is anger, jealousy, fear, regret, greed, arrogance, sorrow, self-pity, resentment, inferiority, false pride, superiority, weakness and ego.

The other is Happiness or Good - It is joy, love, hope, serenity, benevolence, peace, empathy, kindness, generosity, truth, humility, faith, strength and compassion."

The grandson thought about it for a while and then asked his grandfather, "Which wolf wins?"

The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed." - Cherokee Elder

Yesterday was about marketing. And fine tuning.

Untitled from Kirk Tuck & Will van Overbeek on Vimeo.

This is just a test of the Nikon V1 video at 720, 60fps. I looked at the top of my desk (as opposed to my "desktop") and figured it would make a cooperative subject.   I put together a DIY slider using a rail assembly from a company called, Igus.  There was a Manfrotto ballhead on top of the slider carriage. I lit the desktop, and the old Kodak camera, with two 1,000 LED panels.  I was looking for noise and artifacts.  The stuff looked pretty good in FCPX.

I keep getting more intrigued with video.  I had a sales meeting with a client yesterday and it's one of the few meetings I've done so far with the iPad2 as my presentation tool.  The ability to go from still portfolios to video with the touch of a finger was eye-opening for me.  With a print portfolio I was always careful not show to much.  Conventional wisdom said 20 to 40 nice prints.

I bought a program called Portfolio for iPad and arranged my work into six different categories.  Each category has its own icon and incorporates its own images.  Each category had anywhere from 25 to 40 images.  With the iPad in the client's hands he controls the pace of the show and the amount of images he wants to see.  It was fun to watch how addictive the screen is.  The client went through every image.  And all the videos (six).

I had also loaded a smaller portfolio, just for him, of images that I'd done various levels of post processing to.  I wanted to make sure he understood that we could overlay these effects to just about any image we create for him.  I labeled this gallery:  (His Name)'s Portfolio.   It took only minutes the night before to create the custom gallery of test images.  It would have required sending out for prints in my older style of showing.

His take away at the end:  "I have to be honest with you.  I much prefer seeing work on a screen than in a print book."

It was a successful marketing foray.  It got me back into his sphere of attention and hopefully, onto his "A" list of suppliers.  I left him with a copy of my new LED book as a leave behind.   I figure that, with over 300 of my photos in one place it's got to be a better leave behind piece than my competitors...

I will say this for progress: Carrying around an iPad beats the hell out of carrying around my 16x20 inch portfolio book (yes, I know, yours is 11x14 and it's just right and I should consider........).

Best of all, we used the calendar function on the iPad2 to book a lunch this Friday.  I still remember what a crusty, old marketing guy told me decades ago about a clients:  "Lunch em or lose em."


If anyone wants details on the "slider" let me know and I'll throw together a quick blog post.  

An interesting article about lighting. With an interesting conclusion.

This article is from Michael Reichman's amazing, Luminous Landscape site.  A treasure trove for people interested in medium format digital.  The article is a short history of lighting culminating with a very interesting conclusion that involves LED lighting.

It's from 2010.

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/techniques/the_next_chapter_in_photographic_lighting.shtml

Hard work is hard. Everything changes.

The sky behind this construction person was there.  It's been enhanced but it wasn't dropped in.


I'm usually as resistant to change as anyone else I know.  You find stuff that works and you try to stay in that groove until something pushes you out.  I'm coming to grips with the idea that post production isn't just a way to fix stuff we didn't get right in the shooting, it's also a way to finish out your illustrative  vision.  Maybe a path to completing what you had in your head when you were out shooting but what can't be done by camera alone.

There was a time when, by necessity, most everything was done in camera.  At some point in the 1980's or the 1990's the art of photography starting to diverge along two pathways.  One path was litered with the saints of documentary photography and its religion called on followers not to crop, not to heavily burn and dodge and never to change the contents of a photograph with retouching, air brushing or other methods.  And it was good.  And these people were called, "photojournalists."

The second pathway was engendered by the relentless needs of the marketplace.  Here anything you could imagine could, with time and budget, be done.  This was the land of top technicians and people with visions that couldn't be easily realized with regular, in-camera techniques.  This has become the land of post-processing.  In the past it was the land of air-brushing.  Nothing in the photograph could be taken as "truth" but it sure did look cool.  These people were imaginative.  And what they do we called, "Photo-illustration."

I was always in the first camp.  Henri-Cartier Bresson implied, to an entire generation of photographers, that only pussies needed to crop.  Real men saw the composition in the decisive moment and leapt upon it like panthers.  Generations of magazine picture editors forbade radical color changes because they would not be objective.  Never mind filter effects or added grain.  Anything that broke down the presumed objectivity of an image was forbidden.  And this was not just the provence of journalists.  The most powerful advertising icons, from the Herb Ritts/Calvin Klein underwear ads to the "Marlboro Man" ads to Bert Sterns Smirnoff ads were all done in this manner.  As are many ad images even to this day.  Sure, we retouched the frazzled edges but we didn't light em up.

PhotoShop changed everything for professionals and the ardent.  And now programs like Snapseed* are changing it all for everyone else.  It's everywhere.  The unspoken mantra is that a photograph is not ready for viewing until it's been dipped in the magic pool of post production.  Every image.  Every time.

I used to fight stuff like this.  I used to make impassioned arguments that photography should remain "pure" but I've given up.  This  change feels permanent.  When we came to a cultural conclusion that, if all the stuff coming off a camera sensor is already filtered, manipulated and color tweaked by firmware and software then wasn't it already "retouched" for all intents and purposes?  If you shot jpeg and you liked your files with a little extra sharpening and more saturation and you set your camera that way weren't you already toeing over the line of strict objectivity?

But it was all just an academic construct in the first place.  After all, even in the early days of color you could choose between the palettes of Kodachrome and Ektachrome and even Scotchcolor.  You choice of film speeds could buy you some extra grain and so one.

It's always tiring to tilt against windmills.  I'm tired of trying to bail out the Titanic with a small plastic bucket.  And I'm equally tired of trying to catch a two edged sword with no handle.  From now on anything goes.  Everything goes.  If it sells better with a coat of psychedelic paint spilled on it then who am I to question the marketplace?

I've written my last column disparaging HDR.  If you like it, more power to you.  I'm taking a psuedo-intellectual sabbatical from taste.  I'm working my maximum Zen and trying to live in the land of "no judgement."

We'll see how that works out.  I'm off to figure out how to automate Snapseed so I can churn my whole catalog of images through the "grunge" filter.  With enough grunge and tilt n shift I may even be able to pass myself off as one of the crowd.

*Snapseed is an app that was developed for use on the the iPhone or iPad which would allow you to tweak you images with contrast, color, sat and sharpness corrections but it also enables you to apply filters to create trendy looking images.  You can control the effects and combine them.  It's $20.  Now they make a version for the desktop.  I've taken the plunge, stopped lighting or even trying very hard during the shooting process, confident that I can just "auto-grunge" any of my images to save it.  You can too.

Snapseed for the Mac Desktop. Is it art? No. Is it fun. Sometimes.

When used as a quick contrast, brightness, contrast, etc. and sharpening tool, Snapseed works about as well as iPhoto or any of a large number of simple image tools you'll find on the web.  The magic is supposed to happen with the filters.  They have names like "Grunge" and "Drama" and "Vintage" and "Tilt and Shift."  They do most of the trendy stuff you'll see on the web.  I gave it a spin this evening.  While it's fun and makes stuff look different it's canned so eventually the effects will get old.  That shouldn't keep you from having fun.  Afterall, it's only $20.

I'll run the effects by the art directors who deserve them.

But once you've found a cute model.  Found a cute dress.  Gotten her on the floor with her legs in the air, you've really done all the hard work.  Why give a boxed software effect all the credit?

I'll keep it.  But like cheap alcohol I'll use it sparingly.

Roman Food. Roman Chef.

     The morning market at the Campo di Fiori, Rome, Italy.  


The man in the image above was/is one of the partners who owned a wonderful, little restaurant in Rome called, al Grappolo d' Oro.  If rumor is to be believed, it was at a table there that the famous song, "Volare" was written.  I was led to the restaurant on the recommendation of a native Roman back in 1985 or 1986 and I've returned for a meal on every trip since.  When my friend, Paul, and I shot in Rome in 1995 we ate there twice in one week. And that's says volumes in a "food city" like Rome.   I haven't been in a few years so I can't vouch for much now but I will always remember how fun it was to watch Carlo arrive at the Campo di Fiori market one day and carefully hand select the produce his restaurant would serve later that day.

He was, of course, a regular of the market and knew everyone there by name.

I was walking around the small piazzo with a Mamiya Six in hand.  I recognized him from one of my recent visits to his restaurant.  I took two frames and then walked off to see new things.  I ate at his restaurant again that night.

Walking through the markets in old towns is really nice.  There's a comfortable rhythm that feels organic and right.  The good ones dispay food with style but without too much flash.  I'm hungry.  I think I'll wander into the house and see what's for dinner.

These are medium format color negatives that were scanned at low res with an Epson V500 Photo.  With a little practice it does a good job with color negatives and even black and white negatives.  The images were taken with a Mamiya Six medium format camera and its normal, 75mm lens.  The images are nothing special to anyone but me.  I remember now the cool breeze of a cloudy day, the smell of the fresh fish and the vivid red of the strawberries like the day I took the images.

An Afternoon at the Theater with the Nikon V1.

I was supposed to shoot a dress rehearsal for an incredible musical, last Tues. night.  I had to call in sick.  We missed the chance to do a dress rehearsal shoot during a rehearsal.  Tues. was the last night without an audience in the house.  So, today I attended the afternoon matinee and sat in a seat that sits a little bit away from surrounding seats, on the side of the center section.  I wasn't able to move around the stage the way I usually do but we really needed the marketing images so this was our option.

Not wanting to distract my fellow show-goers I opted to use the Nikon V1.  I turned off the backscreen, put a little smack of black tape over the green status light and set the shutter to its electronic setting.  Once I turned off the sound, that camera was ultra-stealthy.  Silent.  Small (compared to my 5d2 or 1DSx) and unobtrusive.  I brought all three of the civilian lenses but I shot exclusively with the 30-110.

These are mostly shot at ISO 3200, out of necessity, and are SOOC Jpegs.  Shot in Jpeg.

Just put here as a real world thing.  Take em or leave em.

Sometimes we just take a photograph because it feels right.

The intersection of my dining room 

wall and the floor.  

We love to talk about gear so much it's easy to forget how important it is, every once in a while, to just put down the test chart mindset and look around at the world.  I was under the weather last week so when I got bored I puttered around the house and looked at what the insides looked like in the middle of the day.   I like the way the reflections from the sun on the tiles cast cool swirls into the middle tone shadows on the wall.  But I also liked the strong shadows on either side.  

Deep, Rich Color.

    Chair at Marti's in the Mercado, San Antonio. Cloudy day.  Panasonic GH2.  

"THE SQUARE IS EVERYTHING !!!" Wait, that's not what I said......

Even in moments of quiet reading I am still haunted by the square.

I thought, and Michael Johnston thought, that I'd written a pretty clear and straightforward article for his "The Online Photographer" web magazine, yesterday.  If you haven't read it, here's a synopsis:

In the film days photographers had many different aspect ratios to choose from.  When digital destroyed film camera making we had most of our choices removed.  We were mostly relegated to shooting with a 3:2 ratio in professional, 35mm style cameras, and a 4:3 ratio in "amateur" or "point and shoot" cameras.  I made the argument that it's hard for some people to compose in formats they don't enjoy and, I expressed happiness and relief that electronic viewfinders have allowed camera makers to bring back the choice of seeing, framing and shooting in multiple image ratios.  I also professed my personal attraction to the square, or 1:1 ratio while calling on people to experiment and find the ratio that was right for them.

Most people got the basic ideas just fine and either agreed or disagreed.  But there were two camps that mystified me.  And one of the camps highlighted to me how differently people's brains are wired from mine.

One group must have read too quickly or, perhaps had been multi-tasking at the time, but they came away with the idea that the whole of the article was a fierce defense of the square and a damnation of every other combination of geometric borders.  Even though calm and patient editor, Mr. Johnston, posted several comments reminding them that the whole point of the article was, "Freedom of Aspect Ratio Choice."

But the group that disturbed me, and perhaps only because their thoughts seemed industrial, analytic, mathematical and process oriented while mine are not, was the camp that insisted that the whole idea that a camera need have a set aspect ratio was "absurd".   I, we, everyone, should be able to look at a scene, figure out exactly what the future use of the image will be, capture it with sufficient space around it and then unerringly crop it just so in post production.  Done, neat, finished.  No muss, no fuss.

I imagine their universe is one of tight order and high cleanliness. Every decision perfunctory and binary.

I can't imagine that people don't understand the friction and momentum that tools create in a creative process.  No matter what format camera you select there are two forces at work.  One is the way you like to compose (your inertia) and the other is the implicit idea, perhaps very sub-conscious for some but not for others, that perhaps you should take the boundaries of the supplied finder into consideration as you try to decide what to include and what to leave out. (There must be a reason they made the finder this way.  Right?).  Even if you are a square guy and you know you want to crop square in the end, having to include more areas than you want, wrapped in  configurations you're not comfortable with, means having to constantly choose and evaluate more parameters than you need.  It's all wrapped up in the tyranny of choice.

I think artists (and we'll entertain the conceit that photographers count too...) establish formalist restrictions for themselves in order to cut down on an infinite number of choices, to remove paralysis, to help them get started.  An amorphous or "hostile" frame is one that pushes on a photographer an infinite number of choices by dint of having to "float" some intended, future composition, unanchored in a framework that doesn't conform to character of the artist's intention.  It's a fight from the start.  The choice of a camera with a friendly aspect ratio helps one concentrate on timing and what to include.  The form has already been chosen.  It's like making a mathematical equation less complex.  Less time consuming.  Removing variables helps us narrow down with greater speed and certainty.  Then again, it could just be the way my brain works and everyone is wired differently.  

I don't care if you like or don't like squares but I don't understand why people think their choice of tools is meaningless to the empowerment of their best vision.  

I had a funny thought, just now.  People talked about cropping to the subject matter.  But in all the years and years that people experimented and made art with Polaroid SX-70 images I never saw examples of cropped ones.  Never.  Nor have I seen Holga or Diana images cropped.  What to make of that?  

Just a few thoughts after reading the paper and drinking coffe on a bright, Sunday morning.

A nod to the square.

Kitchen Cabinets in the afternoon sun.

Panasonic GH2+Olympus PEN FT 40mm 1.4 lens, ISO 160 or 320,  Daylight white balance.  Manual Exposure. Manual Focus. Handheld.

The Week in Review. Chaos.

Wow.  What a week.  I started getting really sick on Sunday and by Weds. had descended into a bleak underworld of doom and gloom so depressing (as expressed in my column) that world renowned photographers (I had no idea they were even reading my blog) sent me private e-mails asking if I was okay.  I was touched.  And, while the meds my doctor gave me Tues. afternoon have been progressively effective it wasn't quick enough to prevent the staff at VSL from gleefully pushing me out of the way (under the pretense of encouraging me to rest) to make room for that annoyingly gleeful, Charlie Martini to come in and do his mischief, yesterday. 

You know you're really ill if even your collection of original Nick Fury and the Agents of SHIELD comic books doesn't bring you back into balanced contentment.

I know some of you were worried so I though I'd give you an overall update.  I'm back to 92.5% of my usual self and recovering on a geometric trajectory.  I might even make it back to swim practice in the morning, tomorrow.

The world of photography is not imploding.  Everything will be fine.  They just stopped serving the buffets during the shoot.  You know, like in the good old days.  With the iced filled bowls the size of larger beauty dishes, packed high with freshly boiled and peeled jumbo shrimp and the elegant plates with the careful stacks of black caviar grains.  Back when they served Champagne to the cast and crews instead of this cheap Prosecco we're getting now...  But it will all be okay and we'll all adjust.  Just cast that net a little wider and toss it a little harder.

I'm taking tomorrow off from blogging here but sent a scintillating article to Michael Johnston for his blog: the online photographer, that should run tomorrow.  That's providing, of course, that it passes his rigorous editing and high standards.

I know today that it's not the fever so I know I'm really trembling with anticipation as the first copies of our new book:  LED Lighting are being rushed to Amazon.com and other vendors across the United States.  The book has a cover price of $34.95.  The Amazon price is currently so low I don't even want to show it here but it's certainly less than the price of many lunches I've had.  And not really incredible lunches either. 

I can't really think of any big launches or products that hit this week and there's nothing much that I think we all need to run out and buy.  Next week I'm planning to write a bunch of short articles about specific uses of the LED panels and I think that should be fun.  I've used them for all of my assignments so far this year and I'm kinda thinking that I'll persevere through the year just for the hell of it.   I just found out that I paid my lab bill twice last month so now I have enough credit to run through another 20 rolls of MF tri-x.  If you see me out with the Hasselblad and a smile, that's why. 

I'm turning the comments on.  I'm around.  Say hello.  Check in.  Be heard.