OnTakingPictures

A couple shots of Turner

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 01:35:36 -0500

A couple shots of one of my favorite subjects

Gayle in Type 55

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 17:18:20 -0500

I love this film. Too bad I've only got about 10 sheets left.

Subject's Primer

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 00:46:12 -0500

Because of the way I take pictures, I've had one-on-one portrait experiences with literally hundreds and hundreds of people. It's my preferred way to work, and over this time my bed-side manner has slowly been refined for me to get the kind of pictures I want out of the subject. The one thing I can't control however is the subject themselves and how they come into the experience. So I thought I'd write a subject's primer so that they know what to expect. Hopefully this will be interesting and helpful to those who will eventually sit for me.

The first point I'd like to make is pretty obvious: Relax. Getting your picture taken should not be a stressful and is certainly not a painful experience. There is no 'doing it wrong'. I for one don't bite, and I have the additional quality of finding just about everyone interesting in some way. Whether it's what you do, or where you're from, or how you work, where you've been or any number of topics. So if I chat you up, it's mostly because I'm having fun. Most people are nervous that I'm not going to take a good picture of them, or that they'll look stupid or unattractive. The thing is, being nervous tends to make all of these things more likely, not less. You can see it on people's faces in pictures. Humans are designed to pick up on facial cues like those. It sometimes takes a good while to get someone from the state they're in when they walk in the door to the point where they open up and we can really get to work. This is the real problem with really short sessions I sometimes get for magazine shoots. It's not that I can't take the kind of pictures I want in 10 minutes, it's that I can't always get the subject to the point where they're invested in the pictures in that amount of time, but I digress.

The second point is that getting your picture taken is an active proposition. It's not so much you sitting quietly over there and me 'taking' a picture of you. It's rather an unfortunate word for what's going on. You are not a mannequin, and I will need your attention. It's a collaborative process, and when it's really going well I liken it to a dance. The point is that you need to allow me to take a good picture as much as I need to want to take it. Read that last sentence again, it's important. Sitting for me is a partnership of give and take. Now that doesn't mean that you have to pose like you're on Next Top Model, though every once in a while it does mean that, but rather that you have to let down your guard and trust me. It's interesting that the simple act of getting your picture taken is sometimes a very intense experience, especially when it's one-on-one, the way I prefer to shoot. When everything is clicking it can be terribly intimate, and I mean that in the best way possible. It's that experience that keeps me coming back for more.

Just remember that it's my job to take photographs of you, and I'm very good at it. Letting your guard down is not a bad thing. I'm not there to take advantage of you, or to trick you into anything. I'm honestly there to take the best photographs I can. My process doesn't always work. I'm also not the combative type of photographer who taunts the subject to get what they want by whatever means necessary. Karsh famously grabbed the cigar from Churchill's mouth to get the scowl he wanted. I can respect that approach, and it's arguable that it can be more consistent, but I think it often misses the magic moments that I thrive on, despite being somewhat less reliable.

As for things to prepare, a change of clothes or two can help if the feel isn't quite right, and for people with longer hair, ways to put it up or back are often helpful. Most of the time it's really about just bringing yourself and a good attitude.

If anyone has any questions or comments that could add to this, please let me know in the comments so I can improve it over time.

Stealing from the Masters

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 20:51:39 -0500

Most people are surprised when they hear that I have no education in photography. I went to college for music and then somehow ended up here. In the modern age of digital cameras, you learn by shooting. Take some pictures, look at them, repeat. There's also plenty of reading to do on the net and in books, but experimentation (just a fancy word for messing around) is the key.

Personally I get fascinated by other people's pictures. I don't actually spend too much time looking at other people's work, mostly because it makes me frustrated and cranky. But often I get this urge to figure out how they did it. For me, this is the best way to learn about light. Find photographers you admire and try to emulate their work. Not so that you can mimic them perfectly, but so you can take their tricks and add them to your arsenal and make them your own. As the famous quote from Picasso said, "Bad artists copy. Great artists steal."

This might be a good time to mention that while in this essay I'm talking about other photographers, it's also a time honored tradition to steal from painters as well. The only problem I've found with this is that painters often take liberties with the direction, quality, and quantity of light. They're using their eyes and imaginations to see, you've got to use a camera which isn't quite as good at it. Ok, back to the show already in progress.

There are two big giveaways for light. Eyes and shadows. If you can see the eyes of the subject, often you can tell exactly what kind of light setup the photographer was using. Pick up one of the magazines when you're in line at the grocery store and get real close and look at the covergirl's eyes. Most of the time you can see a light or two or three in the reflection. And moreover, you can see the relative size of them and often you get enough information to tell exactly what they used. Ribs on an umbrella, or tell-tale signature of a ringlight; which brings me to shadows. Always look at the shadows in an image because they can tell you the direction that the light came from and whether the source was hard or soft.

Put this all together with some experimenting and a good friend who is willing to sit and be shot while you kerfutz stuff and you'll be learning right and left in no time flat.

I do all of this all the time, ask anyone who ever spends any time with me, and you can see the results in my work. The object here isn't to do exactly what they do, but rather figure out HOW they do what they do so you know how to get that look when you want it. Here are a few examples to get you going...

Harder spot with ringlight fill like Dan Winters:

One big light and simple background à la Greenfield-Sanders:

Two light pin-up like Seliger did for the Vanity Fair series:

You get the point...

Knowing when NOT to take pictures

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 02:16:33 -0500

Just a quick little observation that I've had rattling around my mind for the past few days. With the proliferation of digital cameras, with their red eye reduction pre-flashes and blindingly bright rear LCD screens, it seems like everybody has a camera with them at all times. Now I'm not talking about people who carry a little camera just in case they see something that might make a nice picture on the way home from work. I'm talking about the people who are taking pictures CONSTANTLY. People really need to learn when NOT to take pictures.

Last weekend I was at a concert at swanky venue here in NYC called City Winery. It was nice enough and the food was very tasty. Try the short rib if you ever find yourself there. But the tables are packed together tight like at a jazz club where you end up sharing tables with people you've never met. The two middle age men next to us were friendly enough, but then the performer took the stage and within minutes and without end, they proceeded to pull out and set up a digital audio recorder with stereo external microphone (this doesn't bother me as it largely invisible), a flip HD video camera (which does bother me because it's propped up on the table in front of me with it's LCD blaring), and finally each had a small pocket digital camera. For the entire 90 minutes they were constantly holding the cameras up at head height and a foot or two away from their heads and snapping away. No only was it massively distracting to everyone around them, but camera flashes are annoying as shit when you're alone with a guitar up on stage trying to play.

Why are they taking pictures? Especially with a flash. So they've got 50 terrible, direct-flash shots of Bob Mould from the right-hand side. You and everyone around you is paying good money to hear someone play music, so sit back and LISTEN to the music instead of taking crappy pictures the entire time. At the very least turn off your flash and screen and do it a bit more discreetly. Now I'm not a confrontational person, so I just sat there fuming instead of getting in an argument with the guy, but I still feel like people should know better.

Also if you see someone famous at a restaurant or on the street, they probably just want to be left alone. So why don't you keep the camera in your purse and not take it out and gawk and make everyone around you uncomfortable.

The information revolution has given you the tools that let you carry around a camera everywhere you go, but only you can know when not to use it. It's just the same as your computer letting you use 23 different fonts in your book club newsletter, but you shouldn't do that either. Everyone grow a conscience, a sense of decency, and at least a modicum of respect for those around you. Not everything needs a picture taken of it. Some things are better left alone.

My Philosophy On Retouching

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 04:38:34 -0500

As you would imagine from looking at some of my Drabbles series of portraits, I have no problem with a lot of post-production. But that's mostly when I'm trying to create an image that is almost an illustration, as much as it's real portrait.

But for the most part I tend toward the middle of the road when it comes to retouching, but will admit that this has changed over time. I went from very little, to poorly executed, to fairly well executed but way too much, and then back down to where I am now, which is hopefully very well executed and largely subtle.

As an example, here's a shot that I took of my friend Caroline the other day. You may remember her from the Drabble of the girl running down the stairs in a blue dress (link)

One light in a softbox high and to the right and fairly close. While she is obviously a very pretty girl and certainly doesn't need a lot of help from me, I thought I'd show you a before and after so you can see where I came from and where I went. Hopefully, it's somewhat polished without looking too fake. The trick is to not make it too perfect, unless of course you're doing a make-up advertisement in which case you might as well just Gaussian blur her skin to within an inch of it's death.

By the way, before some of you accuse me of trickery, all of the blur in the photo (torso, hair) was done in camera. I was shooting at f/1.2

Before:

After:

Last Drabbles

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 23:22:06 -0500

I'm done with this set of Drabbles. There are 46 of them in total.
Now it's time to lay out the book.

Auto Levels Gone Wrong

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 17:41:30 -0500

There's a problem with bringing high-quality files to your local consumer photo joint or pharmacy photo hut. And that is that they're not expecting high-quality files. It's not that their machines can't print well (though often they're terribly calibrated, etc) rather it's that the computers in the printers are automatically pre-processing the files to make crappy pictures from your vacation look better.

I'm putting together a book of my Drabbles series I finished yesterday. My designer friend Kaytee is coming over tonight and we're going to piece the thing together as a maquette. Sit down on the floor and try them in different orders and that kind of thing.

So to this end I wanted to print all 46 images out as 4x6 prints to throw around. I burned a cd of medium res files, brought them down to my local mom&pop photo place and came back an hour later. 46 prints, $10, done. Some of the images looked great. Others looked terrible. They're fine for what I need tonight, but I was staring at them trying to figure out why some were perfect and others were so wrong. And I realized that it was the darker images which came out poorly. Because the computer on the printer doesn't expect a dark image, so it runs an auto-levels adjustment which pulls the lightest color to white and voila! your image looks like ass. So be careful.

Here are two examples. Original file on top, scan of print on the bottom. The photo of Lesley on the left came out great, that's because the lightbulbs around the mirror were already at white, so no processing was nessessary. By contrast the image of Henry on the right is very dark on purpose, as he is drinking is a dark bar. However the computer doesn't know about the dark bar, so it did what you see below.

I've thought about ways to counter this by putting black and white chips along the edges like the CMYK color marks, but that just seems silly, as I rarely get stuff printed there. Also interesting is that it works the same in film processing, where the negative is great, but the prints come back with highlights clipped because the computer goes a little too far in trying to maximize contrast. I know I could also tell them not to process them (if that's possible on their machine), but the proprietor is a very nice older Chinese couple and complex technical communication is not our best interaction.

A couple of portraits

Wed, 06 Jan 2010 13:38:33 -0500

I know you're getting bored with them, but more Drabbles

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 14:09:18 -0500

Even more Drabbles

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 22:34:27 -0500

A few since my last update. I'm starting the final group tomorrow. It'll be nice to have an end date on this thing.

Asset Management Essay 2 - One Year On

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 15:01:36 -0500

About a year ago, when I was planning to build my current desktop computer, I wrote a number of essays where I talk about the issues of image storage. None of the options where ideal, and so I went for the simplest, which was to upgrade my internal RAID 1 pair with higher capacity drives. I don't shoot every day or keep everything I shoot, so while my library grows, I'm not the kind of shooter like an event photog who is adding 50GB every time he comes home.

So for the last year, the pair of 1.5TB drives has done me well. But here I am, a year later as predicted, in much the same same position and trying to come up with an answer that's a little smarter this time.

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Just to review my requirements:
1) I need at least 2TB of redundant storage, most likely I'll just buy 3 or 4.

2) It's got to be fast, no USB or Firewire externals.

3) I like having my whole library available at all times. There have been a few big projects that I don't need immediate access to that I've moved to multiple external drives that I consider 'Cold Storage', but for the most part, I have everything online in one system.

4) I don't want to have to worry about complex RAID 5 or 6 systems that are a mess to fix if something REALLY goes wrong.
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To this end, there have been a couple of developments from Drobo. Now I know I scoffed at a Drobo a year ago, and for the low-end one and what I do, I still scoff. However they have released 2 models since then which 'could' answer my call.

First is the Drobo S, which is basically a 5 drive version of the original (which had 4 drives), along with a faster processor, an eSATA connection, and optional dual drive redundancy for $799 plus drives.

The second is the Drobo Pro, which is an 8 drive system, with optional dual redundancy, which connects over a gigabit ethernet cable via a system called iSCSI for $1500 plus drives.

Both expensive to be sure, but remember, this is your data we're talking about. Are your pictures worth $1000 to you? See, I thought so. Now the Drobo Pro has been out a while, gotten good reviews, but is big and expensive, and iSCSI is limited by the gigabit ethernet which in the real world means about 90MB/second. Which is fast, certainly faster than firewire or USB, but is it fast enough to work over?

The newer Drobo S is cheaper and does everything I need it to do (as far as I can tell) and has eSATA, which is theoretically faster than iSCSI, though it's only been out a couple of weeks and I have yet to find a review or anything to give me any objective numbers to compare. I'm worried that the processing overhead of dual-redundancy will slow the whole thing down to the point where it won't even live up to the eSATA potential. The Drobo Pro has 2 processors, so might be better in that regard.

Either way, I planned to fill them with 5 WD 1.5TB Green drives. They run cooler, are still pretty fast (which is less of a concern when they're all working together) and they're only $109/ea at NewEgg. I'd also like to make the purchase before the end of the year for tax purposes, so if anyone has any information that might help, please let me know.

Image Properties (Or how most people talk out of their ass)

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 18:49:49 -0500

There is something that's driven my nuts for a long time now. It's rampant at all levels of the photography, print, advertising, web world, and that's the lack of technical knowledge of the people in all of these business. Most of this has to do with image formats and settings and I'm fed up, so I'm writing a primer about it.

Film, since it is an analog medium, has always been something of a black art. A photographer will use film X with developer Y and paper Z to get his particular look. And that's if they did the work themselves. Think of all the photographers out there who just handed their film over to the high priest at the lab who did whatever it is he does to make your pictures look fabulous. This is the world before scanners and file formats and technical requirements.

Now it's different, photographers know what a Jpeg is, and they may have heard of a Tiff. However most people don't really know anything about the differences between the two. They have heard that JPEG is 'lossy' compression, and that TIF is 'loss-less'. Well who in their right mind would want to lose data? I guess I'll use TIFF's then. Well it's not that simple. First off, TIFF files are generally about an order of magnitude larger than JPEG which makes them take a lot longer to transfer over the internet for example. And yes lossy formats are theoretically inferior to lossless formats, but would anyone know the difference? I have a smaller magazine I do work for who require tiff files, but big magazines that want jpegs. I know from my own experience that high quality jpegs look pretty good compared to the original, but I've never taken the time to test it until now.

Just now I took a 100% crop of part of the Golden Gate Bridge in SF straight from a RAW file that came out of my 5D. I then exported it as a JPEG with a quality of 80 out of 100, in some software it's 1 to 10, so in that case it would be an 8. High-quality, but theoretically not 'best'. I then loaded this saved jpeg back in Photoshop, copy and pasted it on top of the original pre-export and switched the layer blend mode to 'difference'. This would show me exactly where any differences lie between the two files. You know what I get? A black image, or at least visibly black. I was prepared to show the difference image as an example, but I won't bother showing a black image. Now, just to test to make sure it was working, I added a levels adjustment layer and to pull the white end almost all the way down before I saw anything show up, and even then, it was faint dark pixels that were hard to make out.

The point is that hi-quality jpegs are perfectly fine to make prints from. Do I save my final master images as jpegs? No, I'm the kind of guy who rarely even merges layers in his 900MB 16 bit PSD files. However I do export a full-res quality 8 jpeg of my final work and have it uploaded to an off-site backup service. Those are my worst case scenario files in the event that my house gets burned down. And if you took that jpeg and edited it and saved as a jpeg, and then edited again, and saved as a jpeg, eventually you would see visible image degradation and nasty jpeg artifacts, but first generation? No way. Maybe graphic designers want TIFF's because they were the preferred image format for Quark back in the day, but that's not true anymore. Jpeg's have other limitations such as color bit depth, lack of an alpha channel, and a technically out of date compression scheme, but that's a whole other article, and those things rarely impact what people are using them for.

Another pet peeve is people's concept of resolution. I got an email the other day where the woman said, "We would need the photo in no less than 400dpi" and I just stared at the sentence. First off, they were going to use the portrait very small in a book, from what I understand, probably less than a couple inches. So 400 dots per inch? If so, how many inches? Maybe she meant 400 pixels.

People throw dpi around all the time and few people know how it relates to computer files. DPI or dots per inch is a print specification, it's related to the physical world, of which digital files and data most certainly are not. Digital image files are a certain amount of pixels wide and a certain amount of pixels tall, as far as dimensions go, that's the only absolute value. Print height and width and resolution are all relative. For our example, let's say that an image file is 1200px by 1200px. Our image could, for example be printed 4"x4" at 300dpi, or 6"x6" at 200dpi, or 12"x12" at 100dpi. Or even 1"x1" at 1200dpi.

Telling me that you need a 400dpi image is meaningless. It's like telling me that you need a place to visit to that's 6 hours away. Well, it all depends on how fast you're going. In 6 hours, I could walk from one end of Manhattan to the other, or I could drive to Portland, Maine, or I could fly to London, or I could go around the earth 4 times in the space shuttle. It's only if you say, I'm driving a car on the highway and want to go somewhere that's 6 hours away that I can help. Then I can say ok, you're going to be traveling around 60mph for 6 hours, so that means you want to go somewhere that's about 350 miles away.

Lightroom for some reason, defaults to exporting images to Photoshop at 240dpi, and sometimes when I reinstall I forget to reset it, or if I do reset it, I make a mistake. Last year I sent an image to an Art Director at one of the major book publishing companies. They had requested a file with a resolution of 300dpi as most people to for print work, but I had set the Lightroom export to 300 dots per centimeter by accident without noticing (changed the inches/cm drop down). I sent off the file to the guy and got an email back about 5 minutes later that said that the file I had sent them was too low-resolution and that they need a better one. Now the file I sent them was full-res from a 21MP 1Ds Mark III, it was 5616 pixels by 3744 pixels. It was huge, and definitely NOT low-res, in fact, if anything it was too high-res as 300dpc is about 850dpi. I opened the file, looked at the image size in photoshop, saw the error, fixed it, and sent it back to a happy AD. The thing is that he should have known better. Was the mistake mine? Yes. But his email shows that he doesn't understand the relationship between resolution and pixel dimensions. It was a 2 second fix, and he had everything he needed to change it himself, but he didn't. And he's an Art Director, he should have known better.

So, here are the things to take away from this rant.
1) For final images that you're done editing, high-quality (quality at 8 or better) JPG files are fine and would be indistinguishable from the lossless file in print.
2) Pixel dimensions of a digital file are the only things that really matters. Dimensions and resolution are relative and can be easily changed. So if someone asks for a 300dpi file without specifying dimensions, then they probably don't really know what they're talking about.

The rest of Drabbles - series 2

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 05:31:01 -0500

Below are the rest of the second set of my Drabbles project. I've completed 32 of them so far, and I think I'm going to do about 15 more.

So if you're in NYC and interested in submitting yourself as a subject...
Email me: drabbles at billwadman.com with a few photos of and a little about yourself.

Drabbles Series Two - The first few

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 22:57:22 -0500

I've been lazy about posting links to my Drabbles on my blog. So without further ado, here are the last few.