Hmm. Photography.

So I decided I really wanted to take some pictures, studio or not. I rented a hotel suite for cheaper than I could have rented a studio space even for one day (thanks, hotwire.com!)

This is a model I'd worked with before a long time ago - her name is Angie. She was pretty young when I first worked with her, and it's really very interesting to see how her face has matured. She's going to be a very striking woman as she ages, I think. In addition to some images she wanted for her portfolio we of course had to shoot for my Girls in Towels project. Never pass up a good bathroom, that's my motto.

Is she adorable, or what?

The images don't have as much kick as they might due to the lighting and the fact that we saved this for last and it was REALLY late. But they're still fun and I feel good about 'em. More after the jump - click here!

Transitioning Yet Again/Still

So, we're theoretically moving in two weeks or so. (I'll believe it, as I tell everyone who asks, when I'm standing in front of the place with my keys in my hand.) So haven't done diddly other than work and deal with that for a while. But I thought I'd pass along two little things which may Amuse you.

First, iTunes has the pilot of "Double Exposure," the show about Markus Klinko and Indrani, as a freebie. It's certainly worth watching if you are interested in photography or fashion, mostly to show you that it's not exactly rocket surgery. (Editor from Women's Health: "We want the shot to be about beauty, and fashion, and strong women." Well, gosh, lady, good thing you were here to provide direction. He might have done a shot themed on bumblebees eating cheese or something.) Markus and Indrani are possibly the least sympathetic stars of a reality show I've ever seen, although Markus was totally in the right about being peeved when Eve brought her own photographer to the shoot. Not only is that incredibly rude, he had an on-camera strobe and he could have been stepping on Markus' light. I've had that happen and it is not happy-making.

Second, also available as a freebie is the pilot of "Work of Art: The Next Great Artist." It's like America's Next Top Model or The Shot, only the subject is artists generally. There are two photographers, as well as sculptors, painters, etc, etc. Several of the artists are abstract artists and I can't tell you how much I enjoyed the dressing-down they got when they submitted totally abstract works for the first challenge, which was to do a portrait of one of their fellow competitors. I am a petty person. But anyway, also interesting if you're into art and things like that.

M More after the jump - click here!

The World Is a Strange Place, Part 1,349

The otherwise unameliorated suckiness of today was slightly mitigated when the kid talked me into going to Barnes and Noble. Why, I don't know, because she didn't want to buy anything. I suspect it was a trick to get me to take her to Burger King. Well, I wasn't going to drive that far just for Burger King, so I told her we'd go to Half Price Books and get Burger King from the one in their parking lot.

Now here's the mitigating part...

What I really wanted was an out-of-print CD which is VERY hard to get, or even the original LP of the album (which was released in, IIRC, 1972. It's not much younger than I am, at any rate.) We have a USB record digitizer so I'd settle for that.

Well, they didn't have it, but my usual quick shufty through the photography section produced a book which for some reason sounded vaguely familiar.

"Wait," I thought, "Isn't this the book that one of my favorite models talked me into giving some publishing rights to her pictures? It was going to be published in England, I never saw it nor heard if it actually went to press."

Check the book - published in England. Publisher sounds right. Check the index. There's the model's name. Turn to her section...

... there are the photos. Credits, weblink, the whole shebang.

Well, how about that? I'm in a real book. In a real bookstore. Okay, yeah, it's a publisher's remainder. But still, that means it GOT published. There were two copies on the shelf and they both looked brand new, so it pretty much has to be a publisher's remainder and not a used book.

Sucker wasn't cheap - marked GBP18.99, USD37.95. It's an oversized art photography book, perfect binding, spot-glossy cover. The quality of the printing is really quite good. Pity it didn't do better. I bought 'em both - I'll give one to the model if I can find her again.

M

More after the jump - click here!

It Really Is A Shame

Here is a link to a post on the Copyright Action forum called, "The Real Cost of Being Sued By Getty [Images]."

http://copyrightaction.com/forum/the-real-cost-of-being-sued-by-getty

A small company used one unlicensed image "about the size of a postage stamp" on its website. Getty sent them a bill for unlicensed usage for £1,700 (the image could probably have been licensed for a tenth of that, or a similar image licensed royalty-free for a hundredth of it.)

They relied on advice from "experienced business people," Internet lawyerin', and all the old tired arguments we hear when such issues are discussed 'mongst the crowd.

Net result?

They paid the license fee, they paid lawyers, and they paid Getty's legal bills. They won't disclose the final amount but it is surely north of £25,000, or roughly Forty Thousand US dollars.

It was a small company, the error was inadvertent (and made by a third party web developer) and... it cost them a significant portion of their operating revenue. It could very well end up bankrupting them. Not to mention the enormous stress it placed on multiple employees of the firm as well as diverting time and resources from operation of the business.

Bottom line?

If it isn't yours, don't take it.

If you do, and somebody calls you on it, 'fess up, pay up, and move on. If you admit fault (when you're clearly caught) and offer to negotiate, they'll probably work with you. Start relying on Internet Lawyerin', and, well, you end up where these poor folks did. And that doesn't really help anybody.

M More after the jump - click here!

Lightroom Update

I am still a little nervous about Lightroom 2: Adobe seems to have caught Microsoft Disease. ("Ship it: people will buy it even if it's buggy and we'll gradually get it to where it's livable sooner or later.") However, they have finally posted a script that fixes the keyword bug, which was totally unacceptable. And as I said earlier, some of the features are nifty. But wait..

A photographer/programmer has created a LR plugin that allows direct export to the PSC or the PSA from Lightroom. O frabjous day! This takes a very annoying step right out of my workflow. It seems to work fine both with LR 1.4.1 and LR 2.0. Here it is

http://pka.xs4all.nl/index.php/lang-en/lightroomexportpluginphotoshelter

M More after the jump - click here!

Darn, this DAM is a lot of work.

So my file drawer of model releases was getting kind of full.

You see, up until now I've had the following record-keeping technique for my releases. I've put in an envelope:

1) The original model release.
2) A disc (CD or DVD) with the orignal RAW files.
3) A copy of the model's ID, if I had one.

And put it in a file drawer. Well, it was pretty full, and I really didn't have room for more, and I had a bunch of releases that needed filing.

So I went to the store and bought a binder and a box of sheet protectors, and spent the last three hours opening the envelopes, stacking the discs, and putting the releases into the archival sheet protectors. Now instead of a file drawer, I have a stack of discs in my big disc rack, and a binder (that's not even full.)

What motivated me to do this was that I've spent the last few weeks organizing my digital assets (image files) so I could go through them and mine for stock images. When I submit the images, I also need to be able to submit the release to the agency. All this rooting through envelopes, taking out releases, and then putting them back after scanning was getting very old. Now I can just flip through the book (it's in chronological order,) take the release out, and put it back in the book without having to push and pull envelopes out of a drawer.

This binder will henceforth be known as the BRB, or Big Red Binder, because it's big and red. "R" could also stand for "release," but I think "Red" is funnier.

M More after the jump - click here!

This is Eerie.

You do not know how many times I have had this dream:



(Thanks to Rachel Hulin over at Shoot! The Blog for the tip.)

No, seriously. You don't. The pictures (click on the sample to see more) were taken, without any kind of trick photographry or post-processing, by French photographer Denis Darzacq.

When I have this dream, the situation usually that I have to go somewhere or do something that you can't get to by walking, and my dream-self concentrates, like he's remembering something he hasn't had to do for a long time, and starts taking steps into the air. Eventually this progresses to "flying" in much the same posture that Superman flies, although it's very, very hard to do: he can't do it for long, and if anything distracts him, he starts to fall. I usually wake up before he gets where he's going.

Incidentally, dreams like this are the only dreams I have had since I was a child in which I do not know that I am dreaming. When I wake up, remembrances of these dreams are indistinguishable from ordinary memories. More than once the day after one of them I've tried to walk on the air for a split-second before realizing that what I was trying to do was impossible. Maybe someday I'll pull an Arthur Dent and forget to remember that it won't work.

M More after the jump - click here!

Lightroom 2: Hmm.

For starters, I still don't think most people should upgrade to Lightroom 2. Just too many bugs popping up and/or waiting to be discovered. Give 'em another month or two to go to a .1 version, or at least to fix that GODAWFUL keyword bug. But if you're technically minded (I can tell you how to fix the keyword bug if you are technical) and adventurous, it does have some mindblowingly nifty new features...

For starters, there's the Graduated Filter tool, which is very awesome for landscape shots with hot skies - it's just like applying a gradient-masked adjustment in Photoshop, only WAY easier and faster. And the new camera-specific color profiles are a treat. Several tests have shown that the camera-specific profile for my camera starts out WAY closer to my preferred colors than the old ACR color profiles. You still will often have to do some twiddling - Nature, after all, often doesn't properly saturate the blues or whatever - but as far as getting good color balance, it's a huge improvement. I like the new catalog organization (everything's sorted by volume by default.) And it does seem to handle my very large image catalog (68K images) quite a bit more smoothly. I think it's going to be a great program.

M More after the jump - click here!

Ain't No Fighting It

I grew up in a small town in Iowa called "Wapello." (Named after Chief Wapello of the Sac and Fox tribes.) It is on the Iowa River, which you may have seen in news reports last month (June 2008) as it destroyed large areas of several cities, including Iowa City, home of the University of Iowa, and Oakville, a small town ten miles from Wapello which was totally wiped out. More than a month later, the town of Oakville is still under de-facto martial law. How do I know this?

I went home this weekend to visit my grandparents (one of them had been in a fall.) While I was there, I drove along the road from Wapello to Oakville to see the aftermath of the floods. It was horrific. The Iowa is normally a small, sleepy tributary of the Mississippi. (There's a reason you've never heard of it.) Most years, if my father takes us for a ride in his motorboat, he has to be very careful not to run aground in the shallower parts of the river channel. But this year it broke all flood records and laid waste to hundreds of square miles. Some are calling it "Iowa's Katrina." Have a look:



The water got under the road, washed it out, and tossed the concrete road sections like a child's railroad track. They are broken with almost geometric precision along the expansion joints which are typically placed in thin-bed concrete roads in the country.

Fortunately, Wapello is on higher ground, and because the levee broke in Oakville, the pressure was relieved before Wapello (which is much larger than Oakville) could be flooded. While it's cold comfort to the good citizens of Oakville, I'm sure, that failure probably saved hundreds of homes by destroying dozens elsewhere. I did drive to Oakville, but there was a woman sitting at the only road into town with a large sign that said, "ALL VISITORS MUST CHECK IN." I didn't feel like checking in, so I turned around and went back. My mother told me later that you had to have a permit to enter the town because there were problems with scavengers stealing things.

I have family who live outside Oakville, but they are not in the riverbottom and had no trouble. My parents, who live outside Wapello, couldn't drive into town for weeks as the road crosses the Iowa River bottom, and at its lowest point the water was over five feet deep. While the absolute number of people affected is small, the scale of this is hard to imagine. I guess the occasional severe thunderstorm isn't so bad when you think about living in flood plains or Hurricane Alley.

My grandfather told me about a fellow that my grandparents have coffee with most mornings (they still do that in Iowa.) The day before the levee broke, he came to breakfast and derisively snorted, "I went and looked at the water. The Corps of Engineers is way off - it won't get to within four feet of where they say it will."

The next day his house was gone. Not flooded, gone. The levee broke, the water picked up his house and floated it away. I'm guessing he didn't bother to get anything out since he was so sure the water wouldn't reach him. Let that be a lesson to you: there ain't no fighting a flood, there ain't no second-guessing it. If it looks like the water is coming, you have one choice: get out of the way or suffer the consequences. You can always come back and laugh at yourself if it doesn't happen.

Oakville - where I attended first and second grade, in an old schoolhouse Wapello used for a few years when their districts were consolidated - may never recover. Every building in the town limits was heavily damaged or destroyed. The entire infrastructure (roads, power, sewer, water, gas) will have to be completely rebuilt - and now that it's known the whole town is on a flood plain, there'll be no insurance available and very little government money for anything but buyouts. Only perhaps a dozen people in the town had flood insurance - not only is it very expensive (and Oakville is not a rich place) but except for those living right on the river, nobody ever thought that the whole place could literally be submerged for days. A little water in the basement, sure, but six feet of water on Main Street? Unimaginable - until now.

On a photography note, this is one of the reasons why backups, and by that I mean either portable or off-site backups, are required. Every time I leave the house for more than a day, I take a portable hard drive which has all my backlog on it. I also have a hard drive which lives at my office more than fifty miles away with a recent backup on it as well. That's not just my "art" pictures, it's all the family pictures (including our wedding photos which have been digitized,) our financial records, my wife's genealogy research, you name it. It would be awful to lose our house, but at least we wouldn't have to worry about reconstructing our records from nothing.

M More after the jump - click here!

Light Is Not Your Friend, Neither Your Enemy: It Is What It Is

As every book on photography points out, "photography" means "writing with light." Light has qualities, many qualities, and for the beginning photographer some of those qualities are less obvious than others. There's intensity, of course. That one's easy. It's too dark. It's too bright. Adjust exposure, or adjust light source. There's direction. That one's mostly easy - which way are the shadows pointed? Which side of the thing is lit up and which side isn't? Again, pretty easy to fix. But then there are the subtler ones - which produce anything but subtle results sometimes.

For instance, there's hardness. Hardness refers to a quality of light which is controlled by its relative size in the "arc" of the picture. The smaller the arc, the harder the light. Direct sunlight at noon on a clear day is very hard, because the sun is very small in the sky. Light from a softbox (and that's why they're called that) close to the subject is very soft, because it's huge relative to the arc of the picture.

Hardness controls the texture of the image in some ways. It isn't always apparent that this is significant in the ways that it is. For instance, consider this image:



The model's skin is very textured (and not necessarily in a good way.) That's because the sole source of light is a direct sunbeam - because she's in deep shadow, there's not even any ambient light from reflection off nearby objects or the ground, as there often is even in most "direct" sunlight pictures. It took a while to get her skin even this good: every little blemish and fold was sharply outlined by shadows. Even if you fix the blemish, you still have to fix the shadows, and it's tricky to find a good source for replacing the area.

Then consider this image:



Same model, same approximate location (less than a hundred yards away,) same time of day (less than ten minutes later.) Totally different. Why? Soft light. She's in open shade, in a courtyard with light-reflecting walls in all directions. The light "source" is huge: light is coming from everywhere. I hardly had to do any work on her skin, and that was just to remove actual visible blemishes.

It's not just a matter of how much light you have: what kind of light, its hardness, directionality, and color, are almost as important. I say "almost" only because if you don't have enough light, you don't get a picture. After that hill is climbed, the other qualities of the light are just as important as the quantity.

M More after the jump - click here!

One of My Occasional Advice Postings for Beginning Photographers

I post these from time to time so you don't do the things I done. Specifically, don't do this...

When I started taking pictures I was pretty haphazard about organizing them. Before long, I started at least being consistent, and saving model shoots in folders named like this:

Model_Name_Date

Well, I decided to start mining my back sessions for stock, and step one was putting them ALL in LightRoom so I could easily access and sort them. That took hours and hours. (Generating the previews on 60K images is a long slow grind.)

Then, once it was too late, it occurred to me that it's not a very useful thing to sort on Model_Name_Date, especially when your dates are in American format (MMDDYY.) The only thing you can sort on is the model's first name, and even then the shoots won't be in temporal order!

Yes, I am so smart that when I'm dumb, it's a lulu. I gotta fix this...

So now I am going through my LR catalog and changing each folder to:

YYYY-MM-DD_Name_Model

Folders which are specific projects and not just model shoots are getting this naming convention:

CC-YYYY-MM-DD_Project_Name

Where "CC" is one of five "types" of projects (Family, Other Personal, Spec, Paid Clients, Miscellaneous) each of which has a two-digit code. That allows me to add 95 more codes if I want.

I'm not saying it's perfect but it will be *consistent* and allow chronological and type sorting. If you don't like it, use your own system. But use one!

Addition:

The preceding is the naming convention for my folders (or directories, if you prefer.) So a shoot might be something like 2005-07-08-Lady_Atropos.

The naming convention for retouched images *in* a given shoot is:

FILENUM_Title_MODS.ext

For instance, a picture called "In Shadows" which corresponds to the RAW file _MG_3456.CR2 would be:

3456_in_shadows.psd

I usually save my mods (crops, b&w conversions) all in one PSD file, but in separate JPEG's, which go in subdirectories called "Retouched" and "JPEGs" respectively. So if the above image had one crop and one b&w conversion, it would look like this on disk:

2005-07-08-Lady_Atropos/

_MG_3456.CR2

2005-07-08-Lady_Atropos/Retouched/

3456_in_shadows.psd

2005-07-08-Lady_Atropos/Retouched/JPEGs/

3456_in_shadows.jpg (This is the original image.)

3456_in_shadows_1.jpg (This is the crop.)

3456_in_shadows_1_bw.jpg (This is the cropped b&w conversion.)

3456_in_shadows_bw.jpg (This is the b&w conversion.)

Then when I do my galleries for models or whatever, I just point the generator at /Retouched/JPEGs/ for that session, and it automatically generates a gallery with one of each variant of every retouched picture. I can then have models send me filenames copied from the galleries, and if I ever want to review the original image from any variant, the file number takes me right back to the RAW file.


M More after the jump - click here!

It's Their Natural Defense

We live in the suburbs, but pretty near the edge of any kind of dense population. To the north of our subdivision is miles of Forest Preserve. To the south, until they built the Auto Mall, it was cornfields for miles once you crossed the edge of our subdivision two hundred yards away. Now it's an Auto Mall and cornfields. So we get critters. Possums. Raccoons. Deer and coyotes in the Forest Preserve. Most of them don't get too close to the house, except the possums and the raccoons. Possums I despise. Raccoons I also despise but I do admit that they are cute. And I have no objection to putting them to work.

Namely, trying to get some cute pictures of the ones who live in a nearby garage to sell for stock. A sample from tonight:



The mother had just left the babies to go and look for food and water when I took this picture. I used a 300mm zoom lens and a flash enhancer called a "Better Beamer," which was invented by the husband of a friend of mine. It's a collimator - it refocuses the light from the flash to help illuminate objects which are too far away to be illuminated by its normal dispersion pattern. Works pretty good, huh? That picture was exposed at ISO200, 1/200s (that's my camera's maximum sync speed) at f16 - essentially, a daylight exposure. It was almost full dark - I could not see the babies through the viewfinder at all. But if anything, I had a little too much oomph.

It was the first time I'd used it... I will have to play with it some more.

M More after the jump - click here!

Let's Go Racin'

Well, I retouched a few of the pictures of the Sprint Car races with the idea of making some prints for my father-in-law. Rather than make you go and click on my PhotoShelter page (which you can still do, it's cool!) I thought I'd test the "jump" feature of Blogger. You have to actually twiddle the code in your layout as well as making changes in the text of your posts, but once it's set up it's not hard. John Harrington does this all the time and he rules, so it must be a good idea.


You can click on the pictures to see larger versions, by the way. Here's a nifty speed-blur shot.


Here's a picture of my father-in-law pulling away from the pack:


And here's a nifty racing-magazine style shot of a track official under the lights:

I don't think I'll be shooting for Sports Illustrated any time soon, but given what I had to work with (my lenses aren't very fast) I'm actually pretty happy with the shots.

M

More after the jump - click here!

This May Amuse You

Or it may not. From "PostSecret," a site where people send in anonymous postcards with secrets they want to tell, but can't trust anyone with:




Yeah, that's pretty much that.

M More after the jump - click here!

Desperately Seeking Style, Part I

I've been "seriously" taking pictures for about four years now, and I've got the basics more or less down. However, I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up what kind of pictures are really my "style."

Mostly I take pictures of female models, because hey, female models. (I am nothing if not forthright.) If you're at all interested in the Internet photography thing, you'll understand me when I say to date the vast majority of my shoots have been TFP. (If you don't, click here.) However, I've just gotten very tired of the flighty Internet model cliché, and now I almost always either shoot models who I already know, or models I have arranged to pay a fee. While I'm fortunate enough to make a good living, I don't have huge amounts of disposable income so this means I shoot a lot less than once I did.

I think if I had my druthers, I'd shoot a lot of Gothic models, because I really like that look, and I find it very challenging as well. It's not easy to capture images with extremes of tone, and Goth models are all about extremes of tone - pale, pale skin, black hair and clothing, lots of saturated colors. For instance:


This was a catalog shot for a friend of mine. (He makes industrial jewelry like the necklace the model is wearing.) I like everything about this shot:

1) The setting. I love shooting in strange places: this is the elevator of an old industrial building.

2) The lighting. Lots of light on the model, shows her and the product off, but fades quickly to give a little atmosphere.

3) The model. I just love exotic looks like this.

This shot went surprisingly well and the model was great, but unfortunately, most models who are "really Goths" live the sort of drama-filled lifestyle you would expect from someone who runs around looking like this all day. Not that most of them aren't absolute sweethearts, but they're not reliable, in several different ways, and I get very invested - again, in several different ways - in my shoots. If they don't show up or there's some other problem, it's hard on me. So there's the problem with shooting this kind of work.

That's "Style 1." Next up... "Style 2."

M More after the jump - click here!