To Boston and Back. A Parenting Journey.

Our room at the Taj Hotel, just off the park. Boston is so nicely compact,

it seems you can get anywhere in just a few minutes.

I've been in Boston for the past week. Now I am back in Austin, Texas. My small crew was doing something traditional that, no doubt, many of you have been through, and some more than once. We were visiting colleges during our child's Spring Break. For now, at least, I know that Ben did not spend his week frolicking on the beach in Daytona with a beer bong and a group of young women whose judgement has been impaired by alcohol...

We visited the big name schools and the not so big name schools. Our parenting mission was to get the ball rolling so that the kid would start to narrow down his preferences. Big school? Intimate school? Urban or bucolic? Ivy league or desert quaint? We'd love to think that our little darling is so bright that every school will lavish money upon him but we're pessimistic enough to know we'll all be selling plasma at the blood bank before this is all over with. 

Ah well, many of you have already experienced the pain and far be if from me to push you into reliving it. I will say this: I love Boston. And I was thrilled with the tiny camera system I took along with me. I knew I wouldn't have a lot of time to go out shooting in the streets but then again, I am married to a benevolent goddess and she does make allowances for my street shooting addictions. I took a single, very small Tenba backpack. One that I wrote about this last summer.

I took two cameras because only a rank amateur travels without some sort of back up. I took three lenses because in my estimation that's all anyone really needs. 

I left all flashes, tripods, lights and light stands at home and traveled photo naked. If I couldn't shoot with the image stabilization and ISO 1600 I really didn't need the shot. 

Since I wanted to travel light I took the lightest system I have ever owned. Two Sony Nex 7 camera bodies, the 50mm 1.8 OSS Sony lens and the two new Sigmas; the 19mm and 30mm 2.8's. I shoved a 16 gig card into each camera, added one battery charger and four extra batteries and that's it. Did I pine for more? Naw, I have a weird brain. If the basics are covered I spend my time figuring out how to maximize what's in the bag rather than aimlessly wishing for something else.

The Nex 7 is an amazing camera. It's small and lightweight but it packs an imaging punch high above its weight class. For all but low light applications I'd put the Sony Nex 7 24 megapixel sensor up against full frame cameras where resolution and sharpness are the driving metrics. Sure, the bigger sensor cameras will out score it in high ISO noise but what do I care? I shoot in normal situations, mostly. 

The Nex 7 has three well known faults when it comes to intense, daylong use. And two of the faults are interrelated. Fault number one is the fact that the system launched with a bare handful of lenses and an even sparser collection of really good lenses.  The Zeiss 24mm, the new 35mm 1.8, the 50mm OSS 1.8 and one or two others are quite good but some of the early entries are mediocre at best. Most maligned, on the Nex 7, is the 16mm lens. Some of the others are just the run of the mill, slow kit lenses. And it's really sad because the sensor coupled with the right glass is capable of really good images. The saving grace in this regard is the increased introduction of third party lens makers like Sigma. Their cheap and plain 19mm and 30mm 2.8's are very sharp, even wide open. At f5.6 the 19mm is a stunner little performer and I can imagine that the m4:3's version brings a bunch of extra bite to the really good sensor in the OMD as well.

The second major fault of the Nex 7 is all about power management versus start up speed and awake from sleep times. If you want any battery life you need to implement the power management controls and set the sleep time to a few minutes, at most. The problem is that the camera takes five or six seconds from a dead stop to fully functional. And about three seconds from sleepy time to hello, I'm engaged, let's shoot. When I'm in a visual target rich area I give a minute massage of the shutter button on a regular interval so the camera doesn't go to sleep and it's ready when I am. Still, you have to expect that if you want a battery to last all day you must turn the camera off when you are not using it.

The only other real fault of the camera (number 3) is the short battery life. This is of course all tied up with power management and the implementation of two backlit screens as well as the smaller form factor of the camera. When I shoot diligently (as opposed to casually and sporadically) I tend to go into the menu and turn off the sleep time which means the camera is on all the time. This sucks power from the battery but ensures that the camera is ready to shoot the moment I am. My work around is to carry four or five batteries for a full day's shooting and change as needed. I've got three chargers so on a day of shooting out of town I generally put three on the charger before we head out for dinner and then put the other two on before bed. Works fine. I've been using Wasabi Power batteries as my second layer of batteries and so far they work as well as the originals.

I generally used two cameras on the trip, one with the 50mm and the other with the 19mm. It was a very efficient and straightforward way to work.

Over the next week I'll be blogging about my Boston experiences and about my wonderful, behind the scenes tour of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts photo department tour, where they do magic. We'll also talk about shooting while doing family trips.

Once I experienced how good the images could be and how little a great camera can weigh (not to mention how little space they take up) I can't imagine ever traveling with a bigger camera system again. The a99 will travel when it is contingent on me charging my regular fees to a brand picky client. Until then it's mirrorless Sony all the way.

Coming back from an early morning session of shooting and the acquisition of personal 

coffee. I took a break to shoot the mirror image.

We missed the snow by a day or two but we had our share of 

cold and rainy nights.

My collection of sweatshirts and set gloves certainly came in handy.

Is it my imagination or are there really a Starbucks and a Dunkin Donuts on every single street corner in Boston?

Ben's top choice at the moment (subject to quick change) is Brandeis...

I finally took Andy's advice and tried a file conversion in Aperture.

Shot with LED Light Panels for Zachary Scott Theatre.

Camera: Sony a99 with 70-200mm 2.8 G lens.

I don't want to start a war about which RAW converter is best. God knows, there are more than enough religions out there already, but I wanted to share that some files work better in RAW converters we might not have been using in our own workflows. Since I switched to Sony cameras I've felt that Lightroom 4.4 was just about as good as anything out there for conversions so I didn't look around much. I mean, Adobe Camera Raw is considered by most image workers as the standard of the industry.

But recently I picked up a Sony a850 camera (more about that whole deal on another day) and I shot a bunch of portraits with it. The images looked great on the LCD screen on the back of the camera and there wasn't anything really challenging about the lighting or the subjects, but once I pulled the raw files into Lightroom my stomach kind of tightened up. The images were contrasty and for some reason LR wanted to add 12 to 15 points of magenta to the faces in my portraits. Well actually the default seemed to be, "the more magenta everywhere, the better!"

I worked and worked on the files but I was not happy. So I opened Capture One and messed around with 7.0. Better but still not in the "happy camper" ballpark. A quick and disastrous detour through Sony's primitive program didn't help my mood at all. Frankly, I was ready to go back to film and throw the whole mess at a lab. Right....

Then I remembered that my friend, Andy, swears by Apple's Aperture. And his images always look great to me. Great contrast, believable sharpness and great color. And he swears he uses nothing but Aperture. For $79 bucks and a quick download I'll bite.

I re-learned (I'd tried the 1.0 demo a few years back) everything I needed to do the job at hand in about an hour. I tweaked the images and they fell into place without the slightest glitch, color cast or posterization in the shadows. The sharpening worked better and the color controls made the flesh tones....perfect. I batched them and they're spitting into a folder as I write this.

But then I started wondering about the image above. I posted a version earlier that started life in LR and I wasn't totally happy with the contrast and the overall look of the image. Since Aperture is a multi-thread application I tossed this image file into the program and started playing with it. To my eye it's a totally different image now. I could see a big difference in the way the program made the initial conversion and how well it works with Sony files.

I'm not saying that your Nikon or Canon or Olympus camera will necessarily see the same kinds of improvements that I saw in the files from two different full frame Sony cameras but if you are using an Apple machine it may be worth your while. Particularly if you feel less than thrilled with the stuff that's coming out of your current workflow.  Just a thought.

ed note: look what popped up this morning over at DP Review: review.com/articles/8219582047/raw-converter-showdown-capture-one-pro-7-dxo-optics-pro-8-and-lightroom-4

Mad Beat Hip & Gone.

Erin. Actor in Mad Beat Hip & Gone.

Live theater has been going through a technological evolution just like most other arts. At Zach Scott Theatre directors and stage designers are incorporating more and more video projection in their work and, as in other arenas, the projections are dependent on the quality of the content. 

I got a call from the video designer at Zach, Colin Lowry, a week ago and he asked if I'd be interesting in helping to create both still images and video that could be incorporated into the play Mad Beat Hip & Gone via a large, rear projection screen. And by large I mean something like 16 feet by 24 feet. I jumped at the chance to do the work and to collaborate with Colin. He's very talented and working with talented people always makes you look good.

Since we would be jumping back and forth from still photography to full motion capture we needed to use lights that worked in both directions. All of our shots would be close up or medium length shots and movement in stills wasn't really an issue so I chose to work with our basic selection of LED panels. The image above tells most of the story. I used two 1,000 bulb Fotodiox panels aimed through a one stop diffusion screen for the front light. I used a small (14x14 inch square of white material as a fill card to the shadow side of my actor's faces, one 500 bulb panel on the background and, for most set ups, on diffused 500 bulb panel as a back light. The background was a roll of standard, gray seamless paper.

I chose to use the LEDs because they emit little heat and are most comfortable to work with. I decided to dispense with the adding of magenta filters to the light sources to cope with the small, green spike and just rely on the custom white balance from my camera. A slight gamble since I was also shooting in Jpeg and would have more limited options for color correction in post processing. As you can see from the sample above the color balance worked out just fine. Very little nudging was required to make the color file I've included at the top of the blog.

When I first heard about the size which these images would be projected I had the kneejerk reaction of thinking that I should shoot at the highest resolution possible. But Colin reminded me that the best projectors out there for this kind of work were limited to a fraction of the capabilities of the cameras these days and, that the distance from screen to audience would be at least 100 feet. In the end I shot everything at the maximum res of the camera so we'd have big files in case we wanted to use any of the images on posters for the marquees or in the Duratrans blow ups that are feature on the street facing wall of the Theatre.

Someone recently asked me if LEDs were up to the task of providing complete light for a portrait. I hope this blog answers that.

Erin. Actor from Mad Beat Hip & Gone.

Most of the images we took of four different actors will be used in black and white and will be projected during active parts of the performances. We had discussions about the conversion from digital color to black and white and in the end Colin and I agreed that the black and white setting of the camera I was using was a pleasing rendition and it rivaled what we thought we could get out of a program like Silver FX pro so we decided to tweak the parameters of the camera's monochrome present and shoot all the black and white images and video that way. It would save production time later on.

Erin. Actor from Mad Beat Hip & Gone.

We used exactly the same preset parameters when shooting video. It's nice to be able to do that because now the tonality of the video and the stills will match without a lot of time spent grading the video to match the stills.  And that's important since we'll be using some of the content from both media in simultaneous projections.  We also used the same lighting design in video and still production for much the same reason.  I am enthralled with the way the video turned out. We were going for a specific effect. We wanted our actor to slow down her action so that the audience would have to look twice to get that it was full motion video and not a still moving across the screen.

During the shoot we both kept a careful eye on the rear LCD monitor of the camera but it was great to toss the footage and the images onto a new Apple MacBook Pro with a 15 inch Retina screen and really dig into the images to access our success. I downloaded my memory card directly onto Colin's production machine's hard drive minutes after we wrapped the shoot.

More than any other play this year Mad Beat Hip & Gone is the one I've wanted to see. I love the time period, loved the ethos of books like Jack Kerouac's On The Road and Dharma Bums, and I love the jazz of that era as well. I expect it will be one of the coolest plays around this year and I hope the work that Colin and I did in the service of the world premier will be valuable. I think Steven Dietz has another winner on his hands. And I think Zach Scott is just the play to debut it.

I used a Sony a99 camera and the Sony 70-200mm f2.8 zoom lens to shoot everything. The camera is a chameleon and able to go between media effortlessly. Couple that with fun lights and it makes generating creative content that much easier.

This is a good book. I'd be happy if you bought one. Or two. Or more.

See the details here:  Lighting Equipment in print.

Buy the book here:  Kirk's In Depth Book on Lighting Equipment

Why you might want a copy:  This is the fourth book that I wrote and I decided to write it because so many people kept asking me about what's available (lighting equipment and grip equipment) out in the photography market and what should they buy. Well, everyone's approach to photography is different and there wasn't a single answer that worked for everyone. In this book I created an overview of lighting tools from big studio flashes to little LED lights. From Florescent lights to tungsten. We also cover how to modify lights, what to put them on and some basic safety information.

I like to think that it's a fun read but you'll have to be the judge of that. If you've been thinking about a lighting gear and wondering what's out in the market besides battery operated cheap strobes from China then this book might be for you.

I'd say it's also great literature and that it will leave you exhausted from crying during the sad parts and laughing hysterically in the many funny parts, but it would not be true. It's just a book about lighting.

Take a few minutes to read the reviews: Amazon Reviews

Complete your collection of Kirk Tuck Writing.

End of random commercial for one of my books.  Back to our regularly scheduled program.

Whether or not a portrait is good is a matter of your intention going in...

It's the weekend and it's quickly racing to a close. I'm trying to make lists of things I need to do in the upcoming week but I keep getting stuck on the line on the list where I've written:

"Make an interesting portrait this week."

It's a little unsettling that I feel the need to write that down but at the same time we humans tend to get wrapped up in the minute by minute drama we sometimes construct for our lives and forget the bigger things that make it all worthwhile. One of the requirements, in order to make each week a good week, is to at least try and make a good portrait. Not technically good; I've long since been disinterested in that, but whimsically good. Or dramatically good. Or connection-rich good.

When I make a portrait I like there are several responses that I usually feel. One response is to find the image funny and that, in itself, is endearing in a photograph. If it's just the right kind of portrait I find myself feeling infatuated with the subject. Like having a crush.

Some images create a nostalgia for a time or place that was never really mine. And some portraits lie to me and make me think that I have some insight or awareness about the person I've made the portrait of when really, it's just me creating that response from the visual stimulation I've created.

I know a portrait works when I don't mind having it on the wall in front of me for years and years at a time. But, of course, I can never know that now. I can only know that in a future now.

A portrait is an emotional trophy when the subject says, "You capture exactly how I feel."

And you know it's a great portrait when you make extra prints because you could never bear to lose the image and you want to be certain that you have replacements, just in case.

I don't think "making an interesting portrait" ever starts with the thought: "I would like to explore this kind of lighting or that kind of lighting technique this week and I'll need a subject."

And I don't think "making an interesting portrait" ever starts with the desire to see how sharp my new lens is, or how superior my new camera might be in relation to all the many cameras that came before.

If you set out to solve a technical problem there's a small chance that the part of your brain that makes emotionally connected images will grab your bossy technical brain from behind and tie it up and make you do art before that smug and analytical tech brain busts free and gets everything back "on the right track."

I use the tools of my craft to show how beautiful the person in front of my camera is. I try not to use the beauty of the person in front of my camera to show how cool my expensive toys are...

"Make an interesting portrait this week." Is on my to-do list every week. I don't always get to it. I don't always have what it takes. But I leave it on my list to remind me that it's worth trying.

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.