dispatches

Planning the Shot

  Serendipity vs. pre-planning. For two days I had observed that a shaft of sunlight penetrated the Roadhouse dance floor at Folklife between about 7 and 7:30pm. Both nights I got some spectacular images. Tonight I anticipated again the light in the hall. I had brought more gear, like the long lens that I’d wished I had before (1st rule of location shooting—you always have the wrong lens on the camera. 2nd rule: it doesn’t matter. You’ll get whatever image is available to you). This night I saw the sun setting, and beginning to spread across the floor. Then it stopped. The marine cloud layer had moved in, and the sun vanished. (3rd rule: you can’t control very much. Respond to what you’re given).

So I dealt with what I was given. As the next dance formed, I walked between lines to see what things looked like, peering through the camera as I did so. The dance floor went bright with the reflected sky, and the figures of the dancers formed nice silhouettes. Another reason for walking up and down the hall was to get the dancers used to me being behind them (the contra lines were far enough apart that I wasn’t going to disrupt the dance, but I wanted them to unconsciously register my presence). As the dance started, I saw there was one spot with a bigger backlight area (where the garage-style door to the hall was open), that provided the best possibilities. Then I watched the dancers. I was seeing the movement of legs and feet making abstract compositions. There was a moment in the figure, just when the couples broke into a swing, that looked the best. I needed to choose a woman in a skirt. And I needed her to be in this specific spot. Dancers advance up and down a contra line, so it was going to happen sooner or later.

I had put together the shot, and then I needed to wait for the elements that complete it to be in position. But I can't control how it’s going to unfold. I have to trust my unconscious to know the right moment. The lovely thing about digital is that I can whack away at a situation until I know that I have it, without any per-exposure cost. In a fluid, complex situation like this, with lots of movement and blur, shooting digital is a dream.

First Day of Folklife

A thought struck me this evening on the dance floor. A lot of what I’ve learned about attunement in my photography I’ve learned from dancing. By attunement I mean the ability to sense the energy in a situation or a person, and match that in myself, and from that matching comes the ability to start to see a photograph. In a contra dance line, I am in the presence of all this intense female energy (it’s a dance form where a new person of the opposite sex is thrust into your arms every 30 seconds or so). I instantly know a great deal about this person just by the kind of contact we can have (or not have). I match my partner’s energy and connection so that we can have a great time in motion together.

When I arrived at Folklife with Robin I was anything but attuned. We were snappy with each other, I was a little hungry, and I was overwhelmed with the cacophony of sounds and sights of thousands of people. After we sat and ate, I left to get grounded. Now Folklife is often the four most bliss filled days of the year for me. But it takes a little getting used to at first.

   I gravitated to a free-form participatory drumming circle. If my senses were to be overwhelmed, I seemed to need to be in the ground zero of sensory overwhelm. I moved my body to the rhythm, and started seeing photographs.

I then went to the dance hall and contra danced for two hours straight. Then I saw the low sun coming through a window, and the dancers’ shadows against the floor. I peeled away and worked the image through a square dance where the same couple occupied the same patch of sun on a regular pattern.

Robin showed up for the waltz. "You’re back!" she said, looking in my eyes and seeing how I could now look deeply back. We waltzed together, she holding her salad in one hand, me in the other, as my free hand cradled the camera.

Hot Kitchen

The ideal: the poised proprietor and chef in her elegant dining room, holding an artfully styled plate of food, Gourmet Magazine style. The fine-dining side of Hyde Park.

The real: Dinner rush in the downstairs kitchen. "There to there, don’t cross! You can watch, don’t get in my way!" Orders piling up. Spanish to the kitchen crew. More orders to us. "Don’t stand in front of the door! You’ll get run over!" The main light source is a row of partially burned out fluorescent tubes.

Regroup time. Shot one is never going to happen. I acclimatize to the frenzied but precise energy, antipodal to the serenity upstairs. Mary is moving fast, with total attention to the momentary requirement. Pour oil in pan, dust five duck breasts with spice, pull out five chicken thighs, set two salmon fillets in smoking oil, pork loin in another hot pan, chicken thighs nestled in another, duck in a fourth, start filling enormous stock pot, taste reduced veal sauce with handle end of spoon, turn chicken, tongs into dirty dish shelf under my tripod legs, add salt to sauce, rotate pork loin, turn salmon. Halibut on pastry parchment, a splash of water on the tray. A small spill. She gets a mop, wipes floor, sets against wall. Salmon under broiler, pull chicken, pour off grease, set in oven. The choreography is a marvel to behold.

I sense that she senses that I’m attuned to the flow now. "Can I move to that corner?" I ask. She nods yes. I set up at the end of the range, I now need to be alert to the splattering pans and to the traffic flow that I’m now blocking. I am totally on, and I see a shot coming together. The saucepan anchors the bottom of the frame. The lights under the hood are a welcome source of focused illumination. Mary moves back and forth from the range to the prep table in a predictable pattern that I can now track, and I pan her movements at a slow shutter speed (as if there is an alternative). Her sautéing of the green beans and almond slivers in clarified butter offer great action close in. She pulls a finished plate to show me. I grab a few frames, but that shot is in the distant past now. This one’s so much better.

Upstairs, over the duck breast, she visits our table. She is the serene, poised proprietress now. I show her the photos I took thirty minutes ago, as well as the shots of the salad course (the card with the dinner is still in the camera). "I’ve been looking for these forever. What do you charge? Can I hire you?"

I tell Matt how amazing it was to watch her in her element downstairs, the intensity and focus on the all-consuming moment. "It’s like watching you," he replies.

Long Day's Night

I don’t think I’ve ever discharged two camera batteries in a day. Nor shot nearly 11gb in a single stretch. Then again, I can’t remember the last time my shooting day exceeded 14 hours.

I’m due out the door (7 hours after I went to bed), for another long day. So no cogent essay on the meaning of the work. I don’t have time to upload a photo, but I did get one (technically, a day late) posted over breakfast on the daily blog.

Chicago Hot

"I got fascinated over this music, and I just wanted to make a contribution. It ain't nothing but folk music, like Hungarian folk music. It is all the same thing. That's why I think Bartok is so good. He was playing and writing Hungarian folk music."

-Fred Anderson

The only light in the room is from the stage, and it takes some minutes for my eyes to adjust. The décor isn’t much, some wobbly tables, old red patterend wallpaper, a big water stain in the corner ceiling. The room is mostly full, the crowd quiet and attentive. The college students, whose "Evening in the City" we are documenting, have settled into the center table, bringing in their half-drunk bubble teas. We are in the Velvet Lounge in Chicago’s South Side.

The post-Coltrane riffs on the stage are hot. Virtuosic and passionate. The boy pounding on the Yamaha (he looks like me at 19) looks far too young to have the licks he has. He appears to be in a trance. Another white boy plays bass. Then a big black guy in a white shirt takes the stage with his tenor sax. He rivets the room with that sax. The music shatters any other thought I might have had, or have ever had, and captures all of me. I am stunned into open mouthed amazement.

The Velvet is a place for musicians to play. Ryan, whose evening we are sharing, has joined the house band. You can see his nervousness. Waiting for his turn, he fiddles with his reed, looks down, listening, pondering, hoping, I imagine, like anyone who steps up here, that he’s good enough. He starts slow, matching the rhythm, dancing around with it, then launches into his solo, a fast, intense attack. Deeper he digs, he’s looking for his soul down there, you can hear the approach to it, one way, then another. The veins on his forehead look like they could explode, his lips might pinch themselves shut forever. As he ends the crowd applauds appreciatively.

Yet Another Photoshop CS2 Rant

Warning: Geekspeak ahead.

A good example of bad software design is when a way of accomplishing the same task changes depending on the mode. Photoshop CS2 RAW interface has introduced a host of non-conforming modes.

Here is an example that is driving me nuts. In Bridge, you can choose to do one RAW conversion at a time, or select a bunch of files that then open in the RAW convertor. If you open up one (or more) images in the convertor, then go back to Bridge, you can choose "Previous Conversion", and that’s the settings that will be applied to whatever files you have highlighted.

You’d think the same protocol would apply within the RAW convertor dialog. Alas, no. As in Bridge, you have a strip of images to the side. You can choose to make an adjustment to one image, or to many images at a time. If you adjust one image, then choose "Previous Conversion", the settings that are applied are NOT those that you just made to the first image. They are those left over from the last time you opened up the RAW Convertor, for an entirely different set of images with different adjustment requirements. There is no easy way to make an adjustment to one, then apply it to the remainder. It’s all at once, or one at a time.

A truly big deficiency is the loss of "First Selected Image" as a conversion choice. In CS1 you can fix one image, keep it highlighted, choose a stack of subsequent images, and convert them all to look like the first one in the queue. No more.

Another thing that is driving me nuts is the on-and-off availability of arrow keys to navigate. In the RAW convertor, the arrow keys work great to navigate through a stack of images. Until you make an adjustment. Then the arrow keys don’t work. You have to mouse-click to the next image in the queue. This is NOT true in Bridge, another bad mode change.

OK, one nice thing to say about CS2. In CS1, the File Browser was something of a narcissistic prima donna. It processed the images at its slow, stately pace, while you waited. If you took your attention away to another window, like to check your email, the processing would halt. It would not work if you weren’t watching. CS2 at least will process in the background. It still cycles through a lot of thumbnail building and sidecar file loading, but it has matured to the point that it can play unattended.

Mt. St. Helens 25 Years Later

I suppose I’ve entered the land of "old-timer" when I recollect where I was when Mt St Helens blew up, 25 years ago today.

I was in my senior year at The Evergreen State College. The day before, on Saturday, was warm and clear, and an old friend, David Grombeck, collected me from Seattle for a day of observing the mountain. He had a spot picked out, up a snarl of logging roads and over some ridges to a spectacular viewpoint. We had gear with us to spend the night.

Although the mountain had been smoking and burping for two months, it was all quiet the day we were there. "Nothing’s happening, let’s head back," we decided.

Our perch was probably outside of the blast zone, I think. Had we stayed, we would have had to have walked out under the total blackness of heavy ashfall. But we would have felt the hot breath of the eruption.

The next morning I was in the printmaking lab at school, with the radio on, when the news came over. I hurried back to the appropriately named Ash Apartments at the the edge of campus, rousted my roommates and a friend with a car, and we were off to see the eruption.

I knew the main routes would be clogged, so we navigated back road through Lewis County. We could see the eruptive cloud over the farm fields. We got as far as a highway closure on, I think, Hwy 12, where ash was falling.

That night we sat in a crowded dorm lobby with a television on, watching the news reports. A TV cameraman had taped his escape, under the total darkness of the ash cloud, breathlessly narrating what he could only assume was his imminent demise. That could have been me, I thought.

More Fan Mail

What a great way to start the day. Just got this from my U of Chicago client:

Doug,

Matthew and Matt returned from Chicago with some great stories! We recently had a slide show of your shoot, my first viewing of this work.

I have to say, I was all giddy and had a smile on my face throughout!

I don't really know where to begin, but I must say that this work is a breath of fresh air. You've captured a treasure chest of angles and perspectives in each environment, your compositions allow a designer to REALLY use its negative space, the way you pull the soul from the eyes of your portraits...

I'm even on a rant for adding additional pages to this already 144 page piece, who could choose just a few??? ;)

Through these photos and those that are to come, Chicago and NCSDO will have an amazing display of visual communication and you will have a product to that will proudly display your work as well!

I'm so excited!Thank you for your hard work and effort, I look forward to the next one indeed!

Tracy

The Daily Photo

I have a new weblog. No words, no context, just photographs. One a day, uploaded on the day it was taken. The discipline to shoot for myself daily can only be healthy for my photographic muscles, and having a public space where these are posted is a useful prod.

The address: http://dougplummer.blogs.com/daily/

I was inspired by "Impermance," a weblog by Christian, who wrote to take me to task about trashing the Photoshop upgrade. At its best the sequence of these daily moments forms a lovely poetic narrative. His last post is from Sunday, titled "Goodbye." I hope this doesn’t mean it’s over.

More on Getty Buys Photonica

Jim Pickerell’s Selling Stock newsletter (a subscription site on the stock photo industry: http://www.pickphoto.com/) interviewed David Neilson of Photonica. I broadly quoted the previous piece about the sale without attribution, a sin for which I am now atoning. Jim has graciously given me permission to quote a portion of the interview.

From Neilson:
"I read your analysis on the sale of Photonica to Getty Images, most of which is untrue. I wouldn't recommend you publish too much more from the 'industry insiders' who provided you with this information. I would like the opportunity of setting the record straight and having the following corrections made:

"In acquiring Photonica, Getty Images have what is now, and always has been, unquestionably THE premier high-end stock brand. Indeed the most recent content is without doubt Photonica's best ever. Not my opinion but that of clients, photographers and industry peers all over the world. I have plenty of evidence to back this up.

"The western entities of amana have been very profitable. The past three years alone were our most profitable ever! Furthermore, we have demonstrated excellent revenue growth over the same period, with in particular 2004 up almost 17% on 2003. Very few of our same-level industry peers can boast organic growth anything similar.

'The reason Getty Images was chosen as the buyer had nothing to do with the patent litigation."

Keeping Photonica out of Corbis' hands was absolutely not the reason Getty Images acquired Photonica. They have long recognized Photonica's brand values and strong content. Leveraging this through their own large distribution channel makes very powerful commercial sense. That is the real reason.

Elsewhere in the interview Neilson says it is undecided how Getty will treat sales of US photographers who make sales in Japan. It could become a sub-agent relationship whereupon another hunk out of my commission will be sliced out. I am unusual among US Photonica photographers in that I make a significant amount of my sales in Japan (my style seems more in sync with that culture perhaps), so this will bite.

Another Photonica colleague, who has also done quite well with Getty, wrote that he is pleased about the sale, as Getty is brilliant in the sales arena, unlike Photonica. He concludes, "The Borg has won. I will be assimilated."