While I was over in Europe, went out at the edge of darkness to do some shooting, and I learned something. (This is just me catching up, really. I’m sure lots of folks already use this technique.)
When confronted with dicey shutter speeds without a tripod handy, my traditional approach is to hold steady, obviously, and also find something to brace on. (My tripod was where it usually is, back at the hotel room.) For the above I rested my elbows on a railing. Then I went to continuous high on the drive, settled in, and started bursting the camera. Hits and misses, as always, but sheer volume dictated I would have a reasonable number of sharp images.
My wife Annie, who’s got a terrific eye, was right next to me, shooting quite a bit slower. She counseled me that I should go to a feature called mirror lock up, available on lots of camera models. (In Nikons it’s up on the ring where you dial in your shooting mode, labeled Mup.) In this mode, the mirror swings up and out of the way, and the shutter opening is not immediate, as in normal operation. There is a lag between the mirror bouncing upwards (which can be the cause of vibration within the camera, and loss of sharpness as a result) and the actual picture being taken.
Now, this was news to me, as I’m sure it is not to most folks. But, seeing as we’re heading into 2012 and I’m still working on my first rough draft of the nineties, it comes as no surprise.
It’s one of those bells and whistles features I generally overlook, mostly because I still use the cameras, as fancy as they are, about the way a blacksmith uses a hammer and an anvil. But, it was cool. I started shooting in that mode, while Annie started humming the theme from Space Odyssey. (Joe make discovery!)
Looking at our respective takes later, her results were consistently sharper than mine. So it was a good outing, and I learned something. A walk with Annie, camera in hand, beautiful sunset, and I learned something? Christmas came early.
More tk…
Geez. Some interesting commentary yesterday, ranging from feminine physiques to Photoshop to posing to pixels. In the interests of advancing information here’s a production snap from the lagoon, taken by our buds Rob and Jen Lace. There’s another version of the shot below.
Hopefully these snaps confirm a few things. A) Sara does have a left arm. B) She is on an island of sorts. C) The c-stand used in this picture is still sort of rusted out and has a hint of a sulfur smell. D) We are on location and I didn’t shoot this on a green screen. E) It’s only the combination of the lens and the angle of the above production picture that makes me look like Shamu wearing a cap:-)
Here’s another pose of her on the rock, sans, jacket. I didn’t like the pic nearly as well. In fact, for all the debate about her positioning, I have to say, I loved it. When she curled up, somewhat impossibly, on that rock, she balanced the frame and became a counterpoint to the lighthouse, graphically. It’s one of my favorite pics in the new book. This one below, not so much. But folks might like this. Or not. It’s okay. That’s the eternal beauty and damnation of photography. There’s no real right or wrong.
But there is passion, that’s for sure. Lots of people had interesting takes, and some advice, some of it even sort of medical. (Talk of extended or flexible hip joints and the like.) The fact is, I have often asked people to curl up, contort, or curve for a picture, for all sorts of reasons. There was Mary Ellen Clark, the famous diver. I shot her nude for LIFE, and this pose, a simulated tuck, was a good way of making sure, as she put it, nothing was hanging out.
Then of course, there was Pilobolus. But, this sort of contortion is cheating really, ’cause this is what they do.
I asked Jada Pinkett Smith, somewhat improbably, to hug a wall.
And Michelle Yeoh to crawl across the desert floor.
And the basketball giant Greg Oden to bend way over to fit into a frame. And then I gave him a tiny basketball to make him seem even more outsized than he is.
Also, the whole idea of incongruity is one I’ve been in love with since momma dropped my on my head. I like taking disparate physical elements and placing them together, in unlikely context to each other, in hopes of creating something serenely surreal and beautiful. Or just plain odd. (Why is she on a rock in a lagoon? I don’t know.) The idea is to arrest the eye of the viewer. I took, for instance, this homespun clad, magnificently voiced trio from the New York City Opera into a Japanese pachinko parlor during the opera’s historic tour of Japan. They were styled for “Little Women,” a quintessentially American opera. So, I took them someplace quintessentially Japanese. The fun thing? These folks are in full throttle, singing beautifully in the parlor. Not a single person even looked up from their game.Wonderful.
This whole thing is about having a restless eye, one that is never patient, or self-satisfied. One that keeps pushing, and is happier thinking about what it will see next than it is dwelling on that which it has already seen. Win, lose or draw, the eye has to be an ever hungry hunter.
There was lots of talk, as there always is, about the pixels and the PSD and various digital whatnot. That’s okay, too. It’s important to discuss and assimilate the mechanics of all this. But it’s important to remember that the how exists only to serve the why. The how addresses the infernal machine, and the bells, whistles and dials. But the why is the real deal. Why pick up a camera at all? Why do we let ourselves in for all this frustration in the first place? Why go to the lagoon in the freezing cold? (That coffee house was much more comfortable.) There’s a ton of “how to” in Sketching Light,” but the larger, more important discussions dwell on the why of all of this.
It’s important to dive into the mechanics, to be sure. But not too far. When we pick up every pixel, and hold it up to a magnifying glass, looking at it every which way, like a precious bauble we just found during a walk on the beach, it is self defeating, not to mention boring as shit. There’s an old phrase that describes that type of discussion and examination. I can’t remember it exactly, but it has something to do with the forest and the trees.
More tk….
This just makes me proud. All of us, actually, in our studio last week, observed a moment of silence, an interlude of quiet pride if you will, when the news arrived that we were once again featured in Photoshop Disasters.com, that storied pantheon of post production goofs. Cali got a little choked up, truth be told.
Seems the gang over at PS disasters have well, issues with the more sensitive areas of the female anatomy. I’m still trying to figure out what they are. Sara, our absolutely lovely, graceful, athletic Icelandic model is perched on a rock in one of that northern island’s famed thermal lagoons. We helped her out there, and then, because I wanted to keep her out of the fading sunset light, and control the foreground area with flash, I asked her to see if she could comfortably, artfully crouch (We do ask ridiculous things, don’t we?) on this slippery, two foot square boulder poking out of the steaming, mineral laden waters of the lagoon. She popped down there as easily as a songbird arriving on a tree branch. If I had tried to assume this position, they would’ve had to medevac me out of there.
Okay, here’s the red circle image. Now, I’m still trying to figure this out. Do the guys over at disasters think her, as they put it, crotch, is missing? Or badly re-touched and manipulated somehow? Trust me, if the lovely, youthful Sara had arranged herself into a personal predicament, I would have pointed that out, and encouraged her to adjust. 
And, if she had been wearing, say, colorful, zebra striped underwears, and thus needed some re-touching, I do believe that’s a task the guys back here at the shop would have embraced in diligent fashion. But, we are shaking our heads a bit, because, well, see below.
Here’s a screen cap of our RAW D3x file in Adobe Camera Raw, and below is the untouched JPEG, right out of camera. Outside of a touch of color correction (very subtle) and a hint of saturation, we did….nothing to the picture.
Maybe that’s their issue. We did nothing, and we were supposed to? I’m unsure. One thing remains certain, though. I do suck at Photoshop. Me and the computer have never had a particularly comfortable relationship. So, I resolved this weekend, once again, to go to work on my post production skills, given the ignominy of once again being featured as a disaster, which of course is just a fulfillment of what virtually every nun who taught me said I would ultimately become. Some type of disaster. What do you think of the below? Do you think they’ll put a red circle someplace on this one?
This is the second time we’ve actually graced PS Disasters. The first summons they issued me was about a shot of Olympic gymnast Shawn Johnson astride a tipsy balance beam in an Iowa cornfield, shot for Sports Illustrated. Her dad’s hand is seen, positioned under the beam to catch her if she fell.
It was a great opportunity for me to riff on the helter skelter nature of weekly magazine journalism. It appeared then, and I’m sure still now, that there are folks out there who think that the business of closing a news magazine on deadline is a considered, deliberate process, rife with nuanced debate, and delicately handled decisions. A parallel experience could perhaps be a classical music concert, held out of doors on a summer’s evening, where lovely notes mix with balmy breezes and fading sunset.
It’s nothing like that at all. It’s more like a screaming death metal concert at a beer sloshed mosh pit. It’s a business populated with intelligent, talented people who are stretched so thin, and so over-worked into a state of near delirium by the budgetary demands currently reigning in the world of publications that they might be hard pressed to find their ass with both hands on a good day. It’s a bruising endeavor fraught with frailty, ego, error, miscalculation, nastiness and outright bungling co-mingled freely with intrepidity of effort, dedication to excellence and moments of sheer, informational, story-telling magnificence. Much like, I don’t know, organized religion, for instance. My commentary on the above shot and the process of seeing it grace the pages of Sports Illustrated can be viewed here. It’s a lively read that actually has some interesting info.
Thanks to the gang at PS Disasters for one of what I would regard as our high moments of the year. More tk….:-)
Laughter comes easy to Donald and I. We’ve know each other for ten years or so, and to me, it’s just one of the small but rich gifts of this nutty business that he ends up on the cover of this new book. He’s a decent soul who takes his honey out for several spins on the dance floor every Friday night, sips Cuervo like it’s medicine, and always has a bit of a twinkle in his eye. As he said to me once, “The day they put me down, all the music in the world’s gonna stop.” I think he’s right.
Home. Feels good after a tumultuous year. For the rest of the year on the blog, I’ll be focusing on some of the highs and lows of another year of survival as a shooter. I looked around my tiny apartment in NYC in 1979, and realized I was paying all of my meager bills with a camera, and knew right then that I was a professional photog. At that point in time, being called a pro was high praise indeed. It was a mark of distinction that acknowledged the fact that your pictures were not only being consumed by people and influencing them every day, but that your livelihood flowed through a lens. It was a stamp of approval that only a hardy few could merit and sustain. So, as we approach 2012, 33 years with a camera in my hands and counting. Sheesh. I get points for stubbornness, anyway.
But, lots of highs and lows, as always. The new book is one of the highs, and it’s a fun read. Lots of survival lessons in there, right next to the lighting diagrams and production shots. Having my friend Mr. Blake on the cover of Sketching Light is one those wonderfully odd pieces of serendipity that occasionally come a shooter’s way. Donald looks a bit stern and forbidding on the cover for the gentle soul that he is, but I know he likes the picture.
Shot this during a workshop demo, when the sky and the wind just gave me a feeling I could find my way to a picture.
On the other hand, one of the more notable lows occurred this year aboard Flashbus, when a hard turn ended me up in bed with David Hobby. He reported on this incident thoroughly in his blog of yesterday:
Also, if anyone woulda told me five years ago that one day I would be traveling in a tour bus with Joe McNally, I woulda told them that they were nuts.
And if anyone woulda told me five years ago that one day, I would suddenly and unexpectedly find myself in my underwear, sharing a bed with McNally, I woulda punched ‘em in the mouf.
Suffice to say you never know what turns life has in store for you. Especially an unexpected hard left-hand turn by a bus, resulting in the above. After that, I slept in full clothing.
Lots of laughs, twists and turns out there on the road.
The picture up top was shot by Kent Skibstad who attended a workshop and who wrote to me that the workshop “really kickstarted my photographic career, thank you!” It was a wonderful note to get as a teacher.
More tk…
Here’s the video. The cool thing is that you can grab the actual discs here at this Adorama link, or go straight here, for a download version.
David and I had Washington DC and Philly put on video. It’s a two disc, soup to nuts treatment, same as the Flashbus day. David handles the morning. I go in the afternoon. Every lesson from each session is on the disc. Which in David’s case is a good thing, ’cause the way he teaches is clear headed, and defines logic. My session veers around like a roller coaster, much like being on assignment.
Scenes and lessons from the most acclaimed and talked about tour of 2011! On this two disc set, you get the both sessions–Hobby and McNally–in their entirety.
Disc One- David “The Strobist” Hobby
If you are going to drive, you should know how to drive stick. So the morning is spent lighting in manual mode.
We start small with a 4-light headshot, learning to control the scene by adding one light at a time. Then we take those same principles and export them into other settings — an outdoor portrait at midday, a table-top, a big dark room, a shower stall (with water) and finally, into the woods at dusk.
For all of these situations, simple or complex, we use the same approach. Control the ambient, then add one light at a time.
Disc Two- Joe “Numnuts” McNally
After learning to drive stick, in the afternoon we go automatic, and get out on the high wire of TTL. Using members of the audience, we craft spontaneous lighting solutions, talking our way through each setup, mixing TTL and manual (oh my!) approaches, going from one light on the hot shoe to four and five lights on sticks, fitted with lots of different light modifiers.
It’s location photography–with all its wonderful possibilities and chaos, right there on stage.
And with this being Hobby and McNally, the entire day is completely serious, steeped in utter formality with no fun or irreverence whatsoever. Kidding.
Actually, really, really kidding, ’cause the video takes you on the bus for an inside tour from which there is quite possibly no recovery:-)
But, truth be told, it’s the DVD set is both fun and informative, with scenes and interactions from 14,500 miles, 29 cities, mixed in with non-stop flash lessons, wit and wisdom. Watching it almost makes me want to hop on another bus and do it all over again! Almost…:-)
More tk….
