Big conference starts Sunday. What am I packing? What am I taking?

Every Fall, about this time, I get hired to provide photographic coverage of a very cool conference. People come from all over the world to spend three days discussing the state of the real estate economy on a global scale and how all the myriad details of growing and falling economies will punish and reward the markets. The conference is fairly small, as conferences go. A total of less than 400 guests but the most of the guests and all of the panelists and speakers are what we in the USA would call, heavy hitters. Billionaire investors, hedge fund managers, government officials and representatives from some of the big banks in in North America and Europe. I attend every minute and document everything that looks interesting.

This will be my fourth or fifth year to photograph the conference and each year I've used a different camera system. Last year was Canon's year. The year before was Olympus and the two years before that were Nikon.  This time it's Sony's turn.

A lot of the coverage is in a darkened auditorium and most of the rest is available light work in cocktail receptions, lunches and break out rooms. Since we're always working with low light situations at this show I was hoping that Sony would have an a99 in my hands by now but it was a vain hope. So I've tested everything I currently own and I'm going in light.  And cheap.

I want to use long glass and fast glass and that means I need to be choosing from the SLTs and not the Nex 7 category. The low light capability of the camera is critical so after my low light tests I've decided to go with the a57.  I have one and Ben has one but he won't need his right now because he's at the Pre Nationals Cross Country Invitation in Portland, Ore. till sunday night and then he's swamped for the next few school days----catching up.  He gave me the thumbs up to use his a57 body and a couple extra batteries.

While the a57 shoots a 16 megapixel RAW file it's more than big enough for my client's needs and the smaller (than the a77 ) file will help keep me from loading up lots and lots of SD cards.

I am perfectly satisfied with the camera's noise performance right up to and including ISO 3200 and very comfortable going to 6400 in a pinch.  The camera (according to the testing druids at DP Review and DXOmark) also has class leading dynamic range chops which will help with the contrasty stage light.

I'm going mostly with zoom lenses on this job since I don't want to move around in front of the stage very much.  I'll mostly have the very stellar 16-50mm f2.8 Sony lens on one body and the very good 70-200mm 2.8 G lens on the other body.  I'll bring along my 50mm 1.4 if I want to use something faster or smaller.  Three batteries per camera and a pouch full of 16 gigabyte SD cards for overkill.

I'm going way outside the zone on this show and I'm going to do most of my supplemental lighting with a Fotodiox 312 AS LED panel.  I'll bring along the big Sony flash just in case I get cold feet...  Finally, I'll bring along my old Tiltall tripod just for those overall room shots and long shots from the back of the auditorium.  Not a lot of gear but that's a fun way to work.  I'll spend the real budget on the suits and ties that are mandatory wardrobe. When you hang with the bankers and policy makers it's expected that you'll dress like they do.  I hope my ties haven't gone totally out of fashion.

With a little bit of luck I'll be totally over my combination illness/structural dramatics and ready to make some really fun images of people being smart and saying smart things. Do you think anyone will notice that I'm not using professional cameras? 

Freelancing and calling in sick....

Nothing sucks worse than coming down with whatever sore throat, grungy thing your kid had last week and then throwing your back out while struggling to find the clementine that rolled over by the refrigerator at six o'clock in the morning. Addled with lack of sleep you bend over at the waist to pick up the errant fruit and all of a sudden your lower back goes KAPOW! and you feel like you're never going to walk again.  And that's the easy part. The hard part is rescheduling the shoot you had booked for 2:30 pm at Esther's Follies because you know they've been looking forward to it and I've been looking forward to it and they've had lighting people and actors and magicians booked and ready to go since last week.

If you're a cube pilot or and engineer or a banker you get to pick up the phone and-----call in sick. Someone covers the slack for you and if anyone feels like giving you crap about staying home you can unleash the HR goons on em.  And generally calling in sick means that you still get paid and  still get all the goodies that go with your job, wherever it may be on the totem pole.

Around here everything wants to grind to a halt but once you cancel you can't replace the lost income from today. It's gone like mayonaise left out on that picnic table in the August sun. So I'm getting a friend to help reconfigure my computer so I can work standing up. At least I can try to get those 36 portraits on my to do list that need post production/retouching scheduled and pumped out today.

So, here's the drill:  Blow nose, cringe at back pain, blow nose again, cringe at back pain. Look desperately to see if anyone has any left over pain relievers beyond Tylenol.  Work on file. Repeat.

I can wade through the scratchy throat and the sniffles but feel free to send me your magic cures for lower back pain----the nemesis of working (and aging photographers). I need to work through this one with a certain amount of expediency, I have a three day conference that starts on Sunday and will keep me moving for 12 hours a day and today's shoot, rescheduled for next Weds.

Please don't bother to tell me I need three weeks of bed rest in the Bahamas. My private jet is out for repairs and I can't bear the thought of flying coach...

Seriously, miracle cures?

An older style of food photography where the food is actually in focus...

Sesame Salmon with asparagus and golden bell peppers.

One of those weekly phone calls that makes you question your career choice...

I was driving home from Maria's Taco Express, where I had a great lunch, when my phone rang. I thought it might be my errant lunch companion who failed to show up so I answered it. The call started out pleasantly enough, it was a woman from a publishing company in another city. She immediately went into the sell mode to tell me "what a wonderful series of books they produce about major cities in the U.S. and, isn't it wonderful?" They're going to do one on Austin.

Well, that's okay with me, I guess, but why was she calling me? "Well, in order to make it a great book about your city it would have to have photographs of stuff, including some food shots from some of our more famous local restaurants. So the publisher asked the restaurants to send in photographs. But here's the problem, the photographs from one restaurant are too small and mushy and they need big, meaty, high res images for their super deluxe, super high quality printed book." And they just kinda think I may have taken the photographs of this wonderful food that they want to put in a wonderful book that might just put Austin on the map as a city. Imagine that. Austin as a famous city. I can see people walking with more spring in their step right now....

I described the image I thought the person on the phone might be interested in and she more or less agreed that it probably was that image. Great, I say. What is your budget for the use of photography (one time) in your beautifully printed book that will put Austin on the map and save us from obscurity?  "Zero.  Ziltch. Nada."

But there are a couple of stumbling blocks to her wishful "free" thinking... The first is that the images were done for a magazine on a one time usage rights agreement. Oh darn, you mean the restaurant didn't get all the rights to my magazine assignment? That damn, pesky copyright law. Then came the "leverage."  "But well, if we don't get the high resolution files to use then we'll just have to pull that restaurant out of our book!!!!"  Oh no!!! This particular restaurant with a two hour wait for a table on week nights, the restaurant that's been here for twenty five years-----all that may crumble if I don't send off my intellectual property, ASAP.

Then why are you calling me? I ask.  "Well, you see, we need a high res version of the image and since you might be the person what took the image we were thinking we might be able to get the high res version from you. Because we need the high res image. See? For this impressive book."

Why didn't you ask the restaurant for a high res image? Isn't that their responsibility? "Well, they like this image but they weren't sure where it came from.... "  So why are you calling me? "Because we need a high resolution version for our book." But you don't have any budget to pay for it?

Now I'm getting a bit feisty. So you're producing a book to make money? "Yes." Your company is in the business of making books for profit? "Yes!"  And the restaurant will get free advertising because it will be in the book? Is that right? Yes!  And so why is the artist of the work the only one who doesn't benefit from the use of the work?  Why is the photographer the only one who isn't getting paid?

"Well, stutter,  I just trying to find out if you have some deal with the restaurant, like they pay you a yearly fee or something so we can use the image...."

But I don't have any business relationship with the restaurant. I own the photograph and I need to be paid if you intend to use it.

And then she asked, "Why are you getting so upset? Is someone you know dying or something?" (actual question...).

And I asked, Do you have any intention of paying to use my photograph?  "NO!" she said ".... .and you've been so unhelpful and mean I'll never call again and if I ever see your name come across my desk I will never use you!!!"

Thank you, I said, because you'd only be calling to see if you could get more stuff for free.

I don't remember who slammed their phone down first. But it never helps my blood pressure to be on either end of a call that's all about getting shit for free.

LED Lighting. My first choice for studio still life projects.

The inexpensive and enjoyable paperback book about LED lighting.

As you may or may not know I wrote a book about LED Lighting for photographers that was published this past Spring. Naively, I expected the book to be the hot seller of the season.  After all, who won't want to read an "edge of your seat" thriller about the promises and perils of the coolest hot, new lighting trend of the decade? Well, as it turns out photographers are more like stamp collectors and model railroad train hobbyists than they are adventurous revolutionaries. While the vast majority of reviews are five stars, and people who've actually read the book love it, most people keep looking for yet another iteration of a book on... How to Make Happy Light with a Battery Powered Flash... (can we all say, "been there, done that. and the t-shirt was lame?).

I've given seven or eight speeches and demonstrations about LED lighting and I guess I'll have to admit that I'm not a fiery on stage evangelist. I think my big marketing mistake was showing off the lights by using live models. People. The average photographer has worked hard to become comfortable shooting family and friends with his reliable electronic flashes and is loathe to learn new tricks if he or she can help it. But, I'd like to try a different tack in both selling my book and the general use of LED lighting------it's the best thing yet for anyone who does still life photography.  No long explanation, rather it's really just a matter or what you see is what you get. Or, what you light is what you get.  Good quality LED panels have never been cheaper, easier to use or more visually reliable. I still believe they are the game changers in the lighting space, going forward.  And with the special secrets revealed only in my book or my two week long, $15,000 workshop you too can learn the.......

I'd like to formally request that, if you have been a long term reader of the blog, you consider ordering a printed copy of the book. Even if you never decide to pull the trigger on purchasing a single lighting panel you'll have the knowledge to at least convincingly attack the whole folly of everyone else's adaptation of LEDs... And you'll make me happier into the bargain. But, if you shoot food, still life or studio work, and especially if you are dipping your toes into the world of DSLR video I think you'll be amazed at how fluid and easy LED lighting can make your jobs.  And, of course, your book club will thank you for introducing the drama and power of LED Lighting: Photographic Techniques for Digital Photographers, to them....

Below is a quick tutorial about using LED lights to photograph an old, folding Kodak camera. It goes like this:  "set up camera. set  up two lights, one on either side. turn on lights. play with positioning until the effect looks good in the viewfinder of your taking camera. Push shutter button.

 An in-depth look at the very complex lighting set up.

By using an EVF endowed camera I was able to pre-chimp the entire shot, from comp to exposure, to color balance, without looking away from the finder.

If you are interested in dipping your big toe into the LED waters and trying out the promise of the future I recommend one inexpensive lighting unit about all others. It's is the Fotodiox (or similar OEM) 312 AS.  The output is great. The color balance is infinitely adjustable between 3200 and 5500 and the whole fixtures output can be controlled with a simple rotary control on the back of the unit. It comes with two rechargeable lith-ion batteries and a keen carrying case. It's about $160 bucks.  But if you have to choose get the book first.  It doesn't have three easy steps to losing weight or making new friends but it is the first book on the subject on the face of the planet......

The good stuff is in the wiring. The dirt just holds the wires in the ground.

I've been grappling with the mental mechanics of re-invention. What can I offer clients that they can't easily get somewhere else for less money? How can I re-configure what I do for a living that will match the income I used to make as a photographer before the barriers to entry in our field came crashing down and the destination for our photographs changed? How indeed.

I've come to the conclusion that all the good stuff is in the wiring. The wiring in my head. And the biggest threat to future performance and happiness is the tendency we all have to cling to what we used to do in the past. The paradigms of our industry that once worked. The idea of a professional camera and the idea of a professional career as a photographer. There's so much more. I'm no longer a "picture taker" I am now a creative content artist. The medium matters much less than the idea and the process of creation.

I wrote about considering a video-centric VG 900 camera as my new still camera instead of the obvious form factor choice of the Sony a99 as my next full frame camera. Part of my mind kept screaming, "This isn't a real still camera. The form factor is all wrong. It's set up to shoot only horizontal. It doesn't fit in my hands the same way." Very much a pattern of thinking tied to the way I've always done things without a real consideration that my market continues to change and that I have the inner flexibility to adapt to, and try out new ways of doing things.

In this tense inner monologue some calm voice answered:  "It's not a zero sum game. If I need a camera that I can more easily turn sideways (to shoot portraits) I still have traditional cameras. The last portrait shoot you did you shot in a horizontal orientation because you were hell bent on cropping all the portraits square. If the camera doesn't work out it's not the end of the world, it's not even the end of your business.  And what if the camera helps you do better and better motion work? What if you like shooting stills with it?  What if you find it's even more flexible and fun than your existing stuff? What if you are more creative because the potential to go in lots of directions is sitting in your own hands? What will  you lose if you don't try?"

And the last sentence, in a nutshell, sums up why I think experimentation and the joy of new discovery is so much fun.  What will you lose if you don't try? What is the cost of opportunities lost?

All the magic is in the wiring. How you wire your brain is mutable. You can embrace change or you can run screaming from the market. You can step into a new milieu or you can sandbag the doors and windows to the studio and hunker down until change goes away----which it never will.

My business changed when we went from shooting most jobs on 4x5 sheet film in the studio to a new phase where I shot mostly lit medium format on locations. Then it changed again when I started buying digital cameras. But the reality is that it wasn't a change of the business so much as it was a change of the gear with which to do the business.

The real changes felt different. When I offered my lighting services to the first film/TV commercial director I knew and I started down a path to learning how to better light and shoot motion film and video I felt like I'd left the Yellow Brick road and found a different and equally fun path.  When I started writing scripts for corporate productions I felt like I was branching out. When I directed my first two industrial videos back in the 1990's I felt like I crammed a year's worth of learning into a couple of weeks.

Around that time I bought a Canon XL-1 hi-8 camera and started doing video art with my friend, Renee. I learned more. And it didn't seem like a big deal to drop $3000 on a video camera back then. But working on new kinds of projects that required pre-conceived ideas and collaborations pushed me out of the comfort zone of what I thought I knew into what was fun to learn. And it re-wired the part of my brain that kept telling me I was just a photographer.

Every time I change a camera system I hope it's because I'm trying something new and different, not because I think the new system does the same old stuff just a little bit better. I think it's vital to keep adding new challenges and to look at things in new ways because otherwise you'll get stuck just glorifying the past. Dredging up the way we used to do this back in the golden years. And that sounds too much like the play,  Death of a Salesman, to me.

I didn't come pre-wired to embrace change. I came from a comfortable middle class background that preached getting a good job and doing it for the rest of your career. Get that degree in electrical engineering, show up at the office every day at eight a.m. and stay till 5 p.m. everyday. Get two weeks a year to do whatever you have on your personal agenda...

Re-wiring your brain is hard but I have a few tips for anyone who wants to try.

1.  When you get really good at something don't then just do it over and over again. Abandon it entirely and start over learning something new. (All the stuff you learned really well stays with you and becomes part of the foundation for the next step).

2.  Once you've mastered your new tools throw them away and master newer tools. The tools can constrain how you attack a problem or a project. The more tools you've used the more arrows you have in your quiver for creating new stuff.  By knowing a  wide range of resources you are then free to pick the best tool for the task. Or more importantly the most creative tool for the task.

3.  If you know the perfect way to do something that means you probably haven't paid attention to the hundreds of other perfect ways to do the same thing. To know something perfectly means you have settled into a rut and you've gotten comfortable there. Challenging art is not comfortable.

4. Start with small steps and make big jumps. Shoot a video project with your small, still camera and learn how. Then jump to bigger projects. Start narrow, grow wide.

5.  When everyone embraces the same camera, technology, subject matter, be sure you run in the other direction.  As long as that direction is one which your heart leads you.

6.  Take more naps. Lie on the floor and think. Walk around and look more. Walk around and talk less.

7.  Re-wire your creative house. Make sure your fuse box is upgraded to handle a bigger load. Turn on the lights in your brain. Just because you feel comfortable doing a creative process in a certain way doesn't mean you should.  Sometimes you absolutely need to streeeeeetch.

8. Hang out with people who are younger than you and don't try to teach them, instead watch them and let them teach you. It's a cliché but kids do seem to come pre-wired for highly creative thinking and doing. The wiring gets brittle over time. If you spend time watching them you'll understand that no toy satisfies for very long but kids can play for days with an idea, a fantasy or a story.  Learn to tell your stories instead of what you think will get you applause from your same old audience.

9.  Don't try to make art, try to make statements with your art about things that mystify you or capture your imagination. Don't try too hard. The tighter you try to grasp water the quicker it flows through your hands.  The knife that gets sharpened too often quickly gets dull.

10. Even if (especially if) you do creation for a living don't get caught up in things like workflow, efficiency, standard practice and time savings. These are all things which re-focus your mind away from the process of creation and into the process of making everything measurable, comparable and routine. Efficiency and best practices are the enemies of wonder and change.

Re-wiring your brain is a life long activity. When you cease to want to learn new pathways you start to die. Do something fun everyday. Go back and finger paint. Play with glitter. Watch clouds.  I can almost guarantee that all these things will filter back into the things you offer your clients and keep them happy to work with you and intrigued at what might come next.

The good stuff is in the wiring in your head. When you share it life blossoms. People seek out those whose perspective is finding out what it possible. People want to be with those who aren't just thinking outside the box but have gone beyond  even thinking about the box.  Why? Because it might be fun....

Anatomy of a recent job. Broken down and discussed.

A killer combination: The a77 with amazing low ISO DR Performance and high resolution coupled with a Zeiss 80mm Planar 2.8. Stopped down to f5.6 for nice portrait imaging.

I got a call from a client I'd worked with extensively in the past but who had fallen off the radar for the last ten years. She'd left the ad world to run a small design shop and had gone from a situation (large agency) where she had been commissioning photography frequently to a situation that called for no photography. I missed working with her because she was a great art director and very organized.  So I was very happily surprised to hear from her again. She'd modified her career trajectory a bit and was now the in-house marketing person for a statewide business.

She asked for a bid to go on a location, set up two different portrait shooting areas and then photograph 13 different executives.  I would be making a formal portrait in an interior conference room of each person and then we'd move to the exterior location and make individual portraits there. The executives would be on site for a meeting and one of the marketing people would be responsible for pulling them out of the meeting and delivering them to each location.

I estimated for the following:

One day of photography (I was pretty sure we'd only need to be on location from 7am to 1pm but a full day fee also covered pre-packing, testing and travel. And I was correct).

One day of assistance.

Two hours scouting to go and look at the location and make sure there was a good, safe place to shoot our exterior work and that the conference room we'd be assigned was both big enough, and could be cleared of tables and chairs so we'd have unobstructed working space.

Then I estimated a full day of post production. (this would actually be broken up between two half days. First I would ingest the raw files into Lightroom to label and catalog, adjust and the output as lower res jpeg files to create a web gallery for my Smugmug Pro account. Once the client chose images the second half day would be spent retouching and enhancing 26 images in a combination of PhotoShop and Portrait Professional). The finals would be delivered electronically.

The last step of the estimate was to factor in usage. The client was adamant that they wanted "unlimited" usage rights so we added that to our budget.

My regular assistant was committed on a long term project but she recommended a new assistant to me who worked out well.  We met in the parking lot of the location at 7:15 am (I was 15 minutes early and, happily, so was she...) and started loading up our heavy duty cart. It's amazing how much gear you need to bring to do a portrait correctly in two locations.

We set up the interior location first. The background was a nine foot roll of Savage Smoke Grey seamless paper. It was lit by a small Chimera softbox used close in with an Elinchrom D-Lite 4 IT monolight set minimum power.

I used a 42 inch Elinchrom Varistar to the left of camera as a main light and a 60 inch softlighter umbrella to the right as a fill light.  I added a gridded light from the background as an accent light.  I brought my own posing stool because I can't stand trying to use conference room chairs for portraits.  I also brought a half apple crate so the subjects could put a foot up on the box to help with posing.

Once we had the first location set up and tested we moved to a third floor bridge which gave us top cover all day long and allowed for views to the northeast and southwest throughout the day.  Since this was an exterior location I had no desire to run a 25 or 50 foot extension cord into a door and tape it down (high traffic area---potentially) so I used a Profoto 600B Acute battery powered flash into another 42 inch Varistar as my sole light here.  I depended on natural light for fill.  We anchored the light with two twenty pound sandbags and tested the crap out of the location before heading back downstairs to greet our first subject.

I brought along two sets of radio triggers and two tripods, as well as two cameras and two sets of lenses, just so I would not have to move any gear between sets as we worked. The idea was to do all the shots in one location first and then move to the second location for the rest of the shots but nothing ever works so smoothly in the real world. There's always someone who needs to leave early and needs to have both shots done one right after the other. But hey, part of good customer service means that we're ultimately flexible.  And with both systems up and running it was only a matter of heading up and down the stairs a few more times.

I've been testing portrait lenses lately and have really come to like the Hasselblad standard 80mm lens for several reasons. Mostly because it's just the right focal length for most portraits but also because it has a very nice out of focus look that it imparts to background.  At f5.6 the lens is critically sharp but not clinically sharp.  What I mean by that is that the lens shows the detail you want without beating the subject to death with the detail.  It feels like resolution rather than hard, crunchy, show-off-y sharpness.  Unless you want to crank up the clarity slider in PS and make everyone a dermatological nighmare....

The lens is easy to use on the front of a Sony a77 with a simple adapter.  You have to remember to use the stop down lever to lock in the shooting aperture. I focused at the taking aperture (usually 5.6) with the very, very convenient and well implemented focus peaking feature of the camera.  (This feature alone makes Sony cameras must haves for people who like to shoot with older, manual focus lenses).

Since I had only one adapter for Hasselblad lenses I used the Sony 85mm 2.8 lens for the exterior location photographs.

We carried along our make-up kit with various translucent powders, at least 13 brushes (sterilized with alcohol) and a fresh supply of hair combs, still in their packaging. We needed to "powder" most of the subjects to eliminate as much shine from their faces as possible. Our make-up kit includes a barber's drape to cover the subject's clothes and we used it on everyone since they were in dark suits for the most part.

I shoot between 25 and 50 shots of each person in each location and ended up with nearly 1200 frames for the day. During my initial post processing I eliminated about 60% of the frames in editing.

I dawned on me as I write this that the packing, moving, unpacking, repacking, moving, unpacking part of the process takes almost as long as our actual time shooting.  Someone once said that good location photography is 90% about re-arranging the furniture and I think they were right.

The process doesn't stop when we come back through the door of the studio. The lead/acid batteries for the Profoto Acute light should be recharged within a day from their use. The camera batteries go on the charger. There are DVD's to be burned. All the gear gets inspected, cleaned and replaced in the proper storage area. Invoices need to be written and a check sent to the assistant.  In the end, a seemingly simple shoot like this takes up the better part of two full days.  More if you are lazy and do things in spurts (guilty). And this is where photographers routinely lose money. They fail to bill for travel, post, packing and admin. time.  If we billed for every hour we spend on a shoot we make money.  If we let stuff slide or give time away we lower our rate per hour, mess up our margins and train clients to think that everything is included in one rate.

Kind of like going to an all inclusive resort with full open bar.  Tough to make money that way unless you're just making cheap drinks from watered down bottles....

I've delivered the galleries and I'm waiting for the selections to come back. The accounting is underway and I'm on to the next project.

I just thought I'd write about an assignment we just completed.  There's so much B.S. out there about what photographers actually do I thought you'd like to know pretty much exactly what we did on Weds. and part of Thurs.... It's a real world photo assignment from a smaller market.  I know we'd probably do this differently in NYC or LA but....