dispatches

The Nightmare Scenario

These last few months I have been engaged in a deeply contemplative mode of photography. For example, I travel to a foreign city for the sole purpose of deep engagement with place, to understand my stance within it, and seek the photographs that emerge from that process. It takes days to start feeling like I am fully present and aware, to where the real work can begin.

Then there’s assignment photography, where the same process has to be compressed to within 30 minutes. The shock can be extreme.

I’m in the middle of an annual report shoot for a local philanthropic organization. Important People are my subjects. The format, delightfully, is black and white panoramic. They chose me because of that contemplative look I bring to a place. My first portrait location—Seattle’s Pike Place Market. On a busy holiday afternoon. There is not an environment in the world (well, maybe Times Square) more different than the deserted Venetian piazzas I had just been contemplatively photographing.

I have an assistant, who is my human light stand. I have various agency personnel for an audience. My site, that I scouted a few days earlier (at the same time of day, so I could see how the sunlight was falling), is five times more crowded now. I can’t see my shot anymore, and I am doubting that I have chosen the best vantage point. Then the technical failures begin. The bright sun, glinting from passing cars, is sending the slaved flash into convulsive, continuous strobing. My PC connection to my infrared trigger has failed. My backup, a direct PC cord, has failed. My next backup, a small strobe on the hotshoe to replace the failed external flash, is not firing. (Now, I tested every one of these connections the day before. Everything was fine.) My subject has arrived. I am losing it, but bottling it in. The crowds press. I focus my concentration, as best I can. I am not very successful. My last fallback to lighting him is a slow shutter speed, ¼ second, where I can open fire the flash manually. The brand new batteries appear to be failing.

My portrait work depends on having an unimpeded, emotional connection with my subject. Unfortunately, it's working. I am nervous (to put it mildly), so therefore my subject is nervous. I can see it in his expressions in the viewfinder.

I agonize until I see the film. The digital captures I took at the same time are uniformly awful. I am certain I have blown it. I fear an upset client, a ruined reputation, professional disbarrment. I try and prepare them for the necessity of a reshoot. The lab is a day late on the processing—I suffer two sleepless nights. There are three proof sheets. Yes, there are a lot of terrible photos. But there is one frame, the first one on the first roll, that is spot on, exactly as I had envisioned it.

Another workflow view

  Visiting Jonathan Ross of Andersen/Ross is to visit the state of the art in royalty-free stock production and digital management. He sits at a desk surrounded by four separate screens, in a darkened room, while two employees are busy at workstations in another. He shoots stock in high volume, producing scenarios with multitudes of models from a self-assigned shoot list running multiple pages.

Jonathan has a different take on exposure with digital than I’ve heard before. "I shoot with an exposure compensation about 2/3 of a stop over." What about blinking highlights on the LCD? "So long as it’s not in the skin tones, you’re fine. But you have to capture the shadows."

He talked about his first digital shoot—a set up of a wedding, the couple in the back of a Bentley, with that luscious wrap-around light from the windows to cast a glow on the couple. On film—no problem. It would have felt warm and fuzzy with all that overexposure. On digital, he saw huge sectors of the image blinking at him, and he kept compensating the exposure downward to rein it in. Which made the interior so black he ended up having to pump additional light into the car. "I wanted to throw that camera into the water at the end of that shoot."

So now he overexposes. Like negative film. Digital capture, in this way of thinking, works like this: the lighter the image, the more data there is. You can bring the tonality back down in processing, but you have to ensure there is a super-abundance of data, since you’re throwing out gobs of it in correction.

But what about those highlights in the sky that get clipped? He showed me a cool Photoshop trick. Set the brush mode to Multiply, pick a nearby color, and broadly paint in the highlight. It’s not going to fix large swathes of blown-away areas, but it can corral the details that are getting clipped and bring an errant histogram back into line. The same trick can work for shadows, using Screen mode. It’s not precise, and it doesn’t have to be. But it’s fast.

He has some workflow quirks that I will avoid, but make sense for his operation. He shoots both RAW and jpg simultaneously, so that he has a pack of images he can upload for his agencies to review right away. He keeps the file numbers that the camera assigns, so no batch renaming (this way he doesn’t need to rename two files of the same image, which is what he has in this mode). But (and this makes me nervous), he resets the file sequence counter in the camera after each shoot. It means his staff has to be assiduous about renaming his previous files at some point in the process, or he’s going to get overwriting of data.

Backups are made in triplicate on external hard drives, as well as on DVD’s. He is making a transition to digital wallets ("You can’t take a laptop to the beach"), and he’s found a brand out there with a fast hard drive and long battery life (I have a Nixvue, which has neither).

Like other digital shooters I talk to, the RAW files are a source to be mined for images that suggest further work. No one converts the complete set of images that emerge from the camera. Most images remain unworked and untended, and stored archivally as they came out of the camera. The analogy to negatives, most of which remain ignored, is obvious.

Jonathan is a profoundly generous shooter and technician, and I have great admiration for the operation he has built.

Testing, testing

I‘ve been spending the last couple of days in testing mode. Specifically, seeing how my lens collection functions with the Canon 20D. Here are my initial results.

I did a quick and dirty sharpness test on a dozen lenses, using lines of varying width on a sheet of paper and cut up magazine pages, one in the center and one in the corner. I examined them at 100% in Photoshop, using minimal sharpening, with a subjective condition code similar to what I used when I collected coins as a kid—P for poor, G for Good, VG for VG, E for excellent. I was particularly interested to see how lenses made for analog staked up against the lenses designed specifically for digital.

In general, I learned what I expected to learn. No lens is very sharp stopped all the way down, and most don’t perform well wide open. Any lens looks great at f/8. The digital lenses, the 10-22mm and the 17mm-85mm, are better lenses racked wide angle and wide open than anything else I own. Zoom lenses generally perform better at the high end of the zoom, especially the digital lenses, which look good wide open at the center and the edge. The sharpest lens I own is my 85mm f/1.8, which is good to excellent across the entire range.

All lenses exhibit chromatic abberation. The worst offender is, surprisingly, the 17-85mm digital lens at the 17mm setting. It needs a correction of –38 on the R/C adjustment to bring it into line.

All my wide angle zoom lenses exhibit pincushioning at their widest setting. The 17-85mm again was the worst of the lot.

My next testing bout is going to tell me how much exposure latitude I have, really. Stay tuned. 

The Opening

It is standing room only in the warren of rooms at Lasley & Russ Violins in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood. A significant portion of the old time music community seems to have showed up for the party. It is the book release party for Roses in Winter, for which I photographed 12 old-time fiddlers whose bios and tune transcriptions are the content for this project. Robin sidles up to one of the old guys in the room. "I lived with you for two weeks," she says, to his great befuddlement. "In my kitchen. Your photos were on the wall. I’m married to the photographer." At that moment Brìd Nowlan, the author of the book, walks by with a camera and flash around her neck. "You mean her?" the old man responds.

The music was, of course, wonderful. These are people, guys mostly, who have been fiddling for some 60 or 70 years or more. Their playing is a window into kitchen sessions and old time square dances from the middle of the last century, and their individual styles are what is documented in the project. I visited with each of these musicians at their homes last spring to produce the photographs that hang on these walls now. They are 20x24 prints that, as a group, I’m quite proud of.

A little girl prances to her own beat as Carthy Sisco and Stuart Williams play. The tune switches to a waltz, and I embrace the child in ballroom position and exaggerate a waltz step for her to follow. She obeys for about a minute and a half, then has to resume her own dance to the music, by herself.

The show continues at Lasley & Russ (2406 NW Market, Seattle) through March 10. I will have another show at their shop for the subsequent month, of the music and dance of Ireland.

Venice Photos Up

 

The Venezia Portfolio is now online:
www.dougplummer.com/
venice/venice01.html .
Enjoy.

Latin

Bob Haft, from Evergreen State College, and 17 of his students were crowded into my basement office, on their tour of Seattle photography studios. I like having them come to visit. It makes me feel authoritative and experienced, but this crowd was more subdued than others that have been through. When I asked for some basic information, like how many of them were planning to pursue photography professionally, it was like pulling teeth to get a response. Only after we officially broke up as a group, and I got buttonholed by individuals, did their passion come through.

I talked about my own trajectory as a photographer, which includes my epiphany in Tucson in 1983, when I got a job as an assistant to a commecial photographer. It was my first glimmer of awareness that you could be a photographer without waiting tables. And that you could have fun taking pictures for a living. There was more to it than "selling out."

I never plan what I’m going to say at these presentations. Whatever is uppermost in my mind at that instant seems the most relevant to the occasion. Which is how I photograph, actually. I talked while I showed my Venice prints, first about how it is a great excuse to stand in one spot for a long period of time and examine all the cool details around you. Then I got into more woo-woo territory about how I construct a portfolio by showing it a lot, to varied audiences. It’s not necessary to get a direct response from a viewer to learn which photographs have a life outside of my own attachment to them. There’s something in the air, that I feel at that moment, that alerts me to whether a given photograph has legs or not. I just know.

Bob made a flippant comment that is too true at this moment in history to consider very deeply without becoming depressed. He is teaching traditional black and white technique, which he called, "The Latin of photography. It’s a good thing to teach. It’s fundamental to everything else." The obvious suggestion is that we are pursuing a dead craft out of nostalgic attachment. As we hurtle headlong into this digital nirvana, old geezers like myself are going to be shouting, Cassandra-like (we only wish), to the masses, "Remember where all this came from. Forget it at your peril."

Digital Studio Tour

I am beginning my tour of colleague’s studios to get a sense of how other photographers are managing the digital workflow. I spent a couple of hours with Mel Curtis yesterday, who is in the middle of a big stock shoot for Getty, all on his new Canon Mark II. Looking at the RAW screen shots from that camera, he said, "It’s better than 100 speed film from a Hasselblad." It’s too sharp, in fact. There is no grain to soften the texture of the skin—every pore and hair is visible.

Mel claims he’s only a step or two ahead of me in the digital conversion. "Metadata? We haven’t gotten there yet." He’s also shooting under controlled studio light much of the time, so there is no exposure variation. I’m challenging the medium more aggressively in my location and travel work. And, I am using a much less sophisticated camera.

Mel has what I think of as a nearly essential ingredient in shifting to digital—a full time digital workstation employee. His assistant described the workflow thusly—a card goes from the camera directly to the computer, and is batch renamed right away. Right now he’s using the name of the model, his initials, and a date as the file name. The RAW files are immediately backed up on a CD or a DVD. A spiffy element is that he prints the file info, and a photo of the model, directly onto the CD with a cheap Epson R200 printer. It’s so slick looking. I want to do it too. So as soon as I got home I ordered a printer ($85) and a stack of printable DVD’s and CD’s.

Then he batch converts the bundle to jpgs and, if he’s on location or with an art director, that’s what they usually walk away from the job with. Here, now, is the paradigm shift I was seeking: don’t aim for perfection. "The jpg’s are like a contact sheet. The exposures are never all perfect on a contact sheet, and art directors understand that." The RAW file is the equivalent of a negative, to which you only need to invest the effort to make perfect when the occasion demands. Otherwise, it’s always in storage and available.

We talked about the computer storage issue. A single capture on the MarkII makes a 50mb tif file. He already has binders and binders filled with disks. There are two terabyte external hard drives on order.

Here’s another personal quirk: 512mb cards. This on a camera that makes 16mb RAW files. He says it’s like a roll of film, and he likes that break in the action in a rhythm that is familiar to him. If he’s out and about, and runs out of cards, then that means he’s done.

Dancing Fool

Well it’s getting busy around here. I’ve booked three major shoots this week, to fulfill over the next couple of months. Two of these are going to be all digital capture. I need to get up to speed pronto. Interestingly, the third assignment, for a foundation, is going to be black and white panoramic.

So I’ve bought more equipment: a 10-22mm zoom and a 580ex Speedlight. Today I tried them out at a contra dance weekend (Dancing Fool) here in Seattle. I have a minor bit of fame as the photographic chronicler of the contra dance scene. Anywhere I dance in the country, people know of my contra dance photos. That section of the website (www.dougplummer.com/contra.html) gets hundreds of hits a day and has a Google ranking.of 5.

It is, however, a high risk, low reward kind of shooting. I depend on accident and juxtaposition to make for interesting photographs, and it can take a lot of film to achieve what I want. It is a kind of shooting that is perfect for digital. Out of two hundred exposures, I have about 5 that I want to work on.

The Backlash

I’m at Ivey, our local professional lab, sorting film at a light table. Another photographer is doing the same next to me. "You shooting digital yet?" he asks me. "Yea but this client specifically asked for film" "Same here. Something about wanting to run it big."

I think we’re due for a backlash. Yesterday I got a call at 9 in the morning, asking if I was available for a shoot later that day. I quoted a price, they responded with one for half as much, we settled in the middle. "We don’t want digital. We want this on transparency," they said, more than once. I imagine that they have been burned in the past.

Two hours later I’m on a construction site by the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, photographing a steamroller. A Sakai GW 750, to be specific. I’m using my old camera and lenses. There’s no blink in the corner of my eye from the LCD. I hear a real film advance. It’s a bright, sunny day and I’m worried that the contrast is too great for the slow Ektachrome that I’m using. But I am grateful that, in less than 24 hours, I’m going to have the film sleeved and in a FedEx envelope, and I’ll be done. No post processing of RAW files. No two days in front of a monitor cleaning up images. The job is shot, and it’s out of here.