The Soviets, having overrun a Carl Zeiss factory in Jenna, claimed the existing designs and tooling to all the pre-war Zeiss optics as war reparations and began manufacturing copies of Zeiss lenses and rangefinders at their own factories, Krasnogorskiy Mechanicheskiy Zavod in Krasnogorsk just outside of Moscow and Zavod Arsenal in Kiev, Ukrane.  While the quality control and finish details of Soviet manufacturing were far below the German Zeiss standard, the Zenitar and Kiev photographic lines they turned out eventually found a secondary market in the west with quirky and adventurous photographers.  

Although these quirky Russian cameras and lenses are mostly celebrated for the medium format offerings of the Kiev line, the Zenitar Fish-eye lens has become an affordable curiosity in the 35mm world for those that can overlook its faults.  Despite all it’s frustrating qualities, it has slowly become a regular element in my photography thanks to a specific method of shooting I’ve developed to mitigate all its faults.

The MC Zenitar 16mm fish-eye lens is a full-frame fisheye, but unlike traditional fish-eye lenses that produce a circular 180° image within the frame, the Zenitar is a rectilinear fish-eye lens that fills the entire 35mm frame from edge to edge.  The aperture range extends from a maximum of f/2.8 all the way to a minimum of f/22, with neither extreme being photographically ideal.  The lens is fully manual, with hard aperture stops that operate in full stop-down mode throughout the range. 

The Zenitar is capable of producing some really interesting shots at a very affordable price, but rather then detail the pros of the Zeniter, I figured I should just get down to brass tacks and tell you all the things that are terrible with this lens.

As with all russian-made optics, there are many variations in Zenitar copies in both build quality and camera mount adapter.  Some Zenitars ship with an M42 mount and adapter to fit your particular camera.  While these lenses are becoming more rare, the internets are scattered with stories about Zenitars that extend so deep into the camera body that the mirror actually strikes the back of the lens when firing the shutter.  More recent copies of the Zenitar are fitted with the particular lens mount screwed directly to the lens body instead of using an M42/camera mount adapter which eliminates the mirror strike problem.

Regarding build quality, some Zenitars come perfectly clean and smooth in operation while others will feel gritty and may even show evidence of metal filings stuck in the optical path.  As they are sold mainly via eBay and random internet stores, it is unlikely that you will be able to test out several copies in order to pick the best of the litter, thus purchasing a Zenitar is somewhat of a leap of faith.  That being said, the sticker price hovers right around $200 in most cases so if you manage to get a copy that is quite subpar, you won’t be out a tremendous investment and you may even be able to reclaim a large portion of that purchase price by posting it back on eBay.

My EF mount Zenitar arrived with the focus scale out of wack and the front hood was oddly tilted to the side.  After reading this post, I discovered that by pulling back the rubber band around the focus barrell, you can access the screws that will allow you to realign the front hood and recalibrate the focusing scale.  Although I spent several hours attempting to properly calibrate the focus scale, I’ve never been able to nail down infinity correctly which leads me to believe that I have an issue with flange depth on my particular lens/mount combination.  When I have more time, I will use Aperture’s tethered shooting mode to try to calibrate this once and for all.

Being a fully manual mechanical lens, there are no motors for autofocus and no electronics to relay aperture data to a DSLR.  In order to use a Zenitar on a Canon EF body, you’re stuck using either fully Manual or Av mode while stopping down the lens manually.  Real world operation becomes even more tricky due to the extreme wide angle nature of this lens which when combined with the Digital Rebel XT’s tiny viewfinder, makes almost everything seem to be in focus no matter how far off it is. 

Furthermore, attaching the lens to a cropped sensor DSLR like the Rebel series basically changes the lens from a full-frame fisheye to a normal wide-angle lens with extreme barrel distortion.  The resulting images aren’t distorted enough to be immediately identified as a fish-eye shot, yet are also not optically flat enough to look like a normal wide-angle shot.  On a cropped sensor, the Zenitar falls between two odd extremes that greatly limit its potential uses.

Finally, to round out the negatives, the lens ships with a useless front lens cap and a crappy nylon storage bag.  Any slight bump of the cap will cause it to either fall off completely, or grind it into the front element of the lens, eventually resulting in numerous scratches of the front surface and lens-flare coating.  My copy, having seen a lot of time at the front of my camera body, now has numerous physical imperfections on the front element directly related to the incredibly poor design of the lens cap. 

So now that I’ve detailed what a hunk of crap this lens is, I will write my next post on the technique I developed to circumvent its numerous faults and why it has become one of my favorite tools.

In the meantime, enjoy these blogs further detailing the Zenitar:

• http://spaceship.ca/article/27/mc-zenitar-16mm-fisheye-review
• http://etischer.com/zenitar/zenitar16mm.html
• http://etischer.com/zenitar/zenitar16mm.html
• http://www.bobatkins.com/photography/reviews/fisheye.html
• http://mac.tidings.nu/PinkyPentax/Z16mmFE.shtml

The flowergirl was a ham.

The truth is that event photography is hard.  Wedding photography as a subset of event photography is an incredibly hard thing to learn on your own and is really best left to people who have solid experience doing it. 

You really need a second-nature understanding of flash photography (which I still don’t fully grasp) and a complete command of your equipment in order to perform well under the strenuous conditions of a wedding.  Realistically, I probably spent about as much time trying to figure out how to change the settings on the camera and flash equipment as I did actually shooting pictures.  In addition, you need to be able to pose groups of people on the fly, anticipate moments before they happen and keep a mental checklist of the photos you think the couple will want as you go.

I missed few great moments, many of my shots were less then stellar, and I spent about a solid month working in photoshop before I was able to hand over a CD of the best images.  The couple ended up mostly satisfied with the results, though they were slightly annoyed with the time it took me to complete the post-processing work. 

I never intended to accept responsability for being the sole photographer at someone’s wedding, and I regretted almost every moment of the experience, but I did learn a number of things as a result of completing the task.

1. Equipment does matter.  Anyone that tells you “The photographer makes the shot not the camera” is lying to you.  Unlike day-to-day shooting, event photography is not an arena where you can mitigate the faults of your equipment by shooting to your strengths. 

If your lens is slow at long distances, you’re not going to be able to work without raising your ISO significantly.  If your camera system isn’t intuitive and easy to operate, then you’re going to miss great moments while you fiddle with controls.  If your flash has a slow recycle time, then you’re going to have a lot of unusable shots where your flash didn’t fire and even more shots that you’re going to miss while you’re waiting for the flash to charge. 

Most of all, people aren’t going to put a genuine moment on hold and wait patiently while you fiddle with your equipment.  If you’re not able to grab a shot as it’s happening, you won’t ever get the opportunity to get it again.  Case in point, to the left is the shot I captured right after the bride smashed the grooms face with cake.  If you miss it because your flash wasn’t ready, then you missed it.

2. Shooting RAW is the only way to go.  Sure you need a ton of cards because you can rack up over a thousand frames pretty easily, but even the best JPG compression is unforgiving in low light and high-ISO situations.  RAW won’t save a hopeless shot, but it will give you the latitude to rescue a bunch of marginal ones.  I admit that I bought the arguments professed online by interweb blowhards that JPG was “good enough” and that the storage space required for RAW images didn’t justify the minimal increase in quality, but after switching over to RAW shooting with Aperture 2, I’ve been shocked at the differences in processing latitude afforded by RAW over JPG. 

Even images that were saved in the highest JPG compression quickly block-up in the toe of the curve, showing the ugly compromises of DCT compression.  By contrast, images saved in RAW format have huge amounts of latitude to pull up the toe and bring the shoulder of an images curve back into range.  If I’d shot this wedding project in RAW instead of JPG, I would have cut my processing time in half.

3. Regardless of your ability, your time comes at a cost.  This is a tricky concept for amateurs like me to understand, but it’s important to realize that even if you don’t think your photography worth charging someone for, your time is finite and thus has an inherent value to you.  There’s nothing wrong with offering your services  for little or no fee, but you should be realistic about what it is costing you and limit the level of your obligation according to the amount of time you’re willing to part with.

Although shooting this wedding did only take a single day of my life, I did not consider in advance the 20+ hours I spent after the event color correcting, applying curves adjustment layers, retouching, cropping, and sharpening all the images I captured.  Even when performed during your spare time, 30 hours of your labor is a tangible expense that takes away from other aspects of your personal life.  It’s important to be realistic about what you’re agreeing to provide someone and how much of your time it will take to finish the job.

4. Sometimes you have to see what you do wrong to see what you do right. The shots that didn’t work will be obvious and easy to criticize, but it’s important to look for patterns within the shots that did work.  Are all of your best shots taken at a similar distance?  Do they share similar lighting or framing?  Do they capture specific candid moments or are they staged and posed?  Recognizing these patterns can often lead you to find strengths in shooting you didn’t know you had.

Not frame worthy, but quirky enough to like

What was plainly obvious in the massive number of shots that I captured at this particular wedding is that my strengths are in mid to close range candids.  My posed formal shots of the bridal party were acceptable, if challenging to visualize and achieve, but the candid shots of the bridal party taken before the staged session was far more successful.

The long range shots of the bride and groom’s first dance did the job, but the close up shots of guests kicking it on the floor were far superior.  This contrast showed me something that I was coming to understand about my own photography and encouraged me to explore more photojournalistic close-range candids.  Eventually, this exploration developed into a specific technique that I’ve developed that has gradually become a “signature” part of my photographic style…something I’ll delve into for my next post.

So, although I regretted taking the job for the unwanted responsibilities it placed on me along with the amount of time it removed from my life, I was able to turn it into a learning process that would better prepare me for similar event photography situations in the future. 

These shots here are acceptable, but to truly understand what great wedding photography looks like, you’ve got to see the work of a great wedding photographer.  One of the best out there today is Ryan Brenizer from New York.  Take a look at his flickr.com page and drool.

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1. I’m in an unfamiliar area.
2. It’s early or late or some situation has arisen where I’m able to venture out into an unfamiliar area alone.
3. My wanderlust draws me to an area I did not expect to be in.

What is frustrating to me is that these three circumstances are very difficult to meet in every-day life, so my every-day pictures tend to be unsatisfying.  Furthermore, I tend to take my best pictures at some distance between me and the subject, as noted by the increased focal lengths in my favorite pictures.

All this adds up to a situation where I realize that I’m uncomfortable taking pictures up close, and I also fail to find inspiration in scenery that I’ve encountered before.  

What’s a boy to do? I guess I should start getting all up in people’s faces.

Knowing that the end goal is shooting some of the food we cook for my wife’s site The Fashionable Foodie, I decided that I would set a few parameters before shopping.  Since we’re both new at this, I wanted to minimize as many variables as possible.  We have very little experience plating, styling, photographing, lighting and setting scenery, so I thought it would be best to cut out table settings entirely.  I decided to begin by building a table-top cyclorama to shoot all the subjects on a plain white background for simplicity’s sake. 

I knew that I’d be able to obtain a workable sweep by purchasing some simple poster board at the craft store, but when I arrived in the posterboard aisle, I discovered that they also sold incredibly thin sheets of dry-erase plastic.  I was intrigued with the idea of shooting on a semi-reflective surface and it was only $1.99 a sheet, so I picked up a single sheet to play with.  I also grabbed a sheet of 20×30 white foamcore board for $1.50 and a sheet of white posterboard for 50¢.

In walking out of the store, the wind started to blow and the incredibly slick sheet of dry-erase plastic slipped out from my stack of items and I ended up stepping on the sheet.  Grrr.  I dented one side of it up pretty good, but pride prevented me from going in and buying another sheet.  Next stop was the Home Depot.

Note: the dry-erase sheeting comes with a gigantic 2″x4″ sticker on one side.  I ripped the sticker to shreds trying to get it to peel off before just cursing the whole thing.  Your experience might differ from mine, but that sticker ain’t going nowhere.  I just have to photoshop that part out if it makes it into a picture.

I already had some negative assumptions about Compact Fluorescent Lights (CFL) before I arrived.  What people don’t understand about them is that unlike a conventional fluorescent bulb, the ballast has to be built into the base of each bulb in order to make it compatible with existing Edison screw-socket lamps.  In a standard commercial fluorescent lighting fixture, the ballast alone is at least twenty bucks, in a film-quality fluorescent light, the ballast is at least half the total cost of the fixture.  The economies of scale dictate that the quality of ballast included in a disposable household fluorescent bulb can not be equal to the quality of ballast in a more robust fixture.

But what’s a ballast anyway?  Fluorescent lamps are really just a gas-filled tube that has an arc of electricity running through it, but there’s a negative differential resistance within the lamp.  This means that while lot of current is required to ignite the arc, after the current begins to flow, the resistance drops and allows even more current to flow.  This is where the ballast steps in to regulate the flow of current through the lamp so that it doesn’t run away.  Also, the larger the tube, the more voltage is required to ignite the lamp from a cold start and ballasts also have a system to ignite the lamp as well as regulate the voltage after ignition.

Even though I did not think highly of the CFL system for photographic use, I did not really want to get into the process of building a fluorescent fixture from scratch.  I decided that I would buy the best two CFL bulbs I could find and see what my results turned out to be.  

Entering the aisle of Home Depot where they keep the bulbs, I was a bit shocked to see that nearly the entire aisle was taken up by a single brand of CFL bulbs – “n:vision“, a brand I’d never even heard of before.  This certainly would work to streamline my choices, as I couldn’t really find any competing manufacturers products on display.  This kind of ubiquitous primo product placement made me wonder if n:vision might be the Home Depot store brand, but I could find no solid leads on my iPhone while standing in the aisle.

I did discover a promising series of traditional bulbs from Phillips under the “Natural Sunlight” product line.  These bulbs were marked with a corelated color temperature of 5000 K and a CRI of 92.  While the color is on the warm side of daylight, the CRI is incredibly high for a household grade fluorescent tube.  That being said, I’d already decided I was going to go with a CFL solution so I made a mental note and selected a CFL bulb instead.

I settled on the n:vision “daylight” bulbs.  I found a two pack of the bulbs for $8.97 and just decided that if they didn’t work out, they’d be fine to use in any other lamp in the house.  The package was listed as “100w equivilant” bulbs, 27 watt usage producing 1400 lumens.  In tiny print on the back, they listed “5500°K” with no CRI number.  I assumed this would not be a high CRI lamp, but decided to see what it looked like anyway.

The fixture I set out to mimic is the Lowel Ego light, but in examing the lamp’s design, I couldn’t understand why they were using a giant panel of diffusion in front of an already diffuse source.  Obviously, you greatly increase the surface area of your light by shooting it through diffusion, but I assumed you’d also be losing a significant amount of your already diffuse source when shooting it through more diffusion.  Because of this assumption, I decided to purchase two individual fixtures and use the lamps in an open-face situation.

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I found two low quality clamp lights that would fit the bill perfectly.  The two fixtures, both from Commercial Electric, were simply a plastic edison screw-socket fitted around an aluminum reflector, wire clamp and a 6′ cord.  I picked up one in an 8 1/2″ size and one in a 5 1/2″ size.  

Getting everything home, I decided to setup in the kitchen.  I taped one end of the plastic dry-erase sheeting to the tile wall about a foot up and let the sheet drop naturally into a sweep.  I screwed the CFLs into the fixtures and noticed the first problem: they stick out the front about an inch on each fixture.  Guess I won’t be able to lay these units face-down.  I started positioning them and immediately noticed my second problem: the clamps won’t grip to anything that isn’t shaped like a board.  The back of a chair worked perfectly, however the rounded top of our paper-towel holder caused the unit to droop and slip under the weight of the CFL.  Positioning these lamps was going to be a pain.

I fired up the lights and noticed the third problem.  When placed in these aluminum reflectors, the diffuse light of a CFL becomes much more directional then I expected.  (This is a “duh” moment for me.)  Where I expected the slightly unnatural diffuse omnilight of a Kino-Flo, I instead saw a very directional, if diffuse source…perhaps similar to an inkie shot through some frost.  Diffuse, but still very directional and casting some noticeable shadows on the subjects.

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Again, this is a point when I realize that shooting small objects is harder then I already assumed it to be.  I positioned a tomato on the acrylic sheeting and tried to start lighting it.  With such a small object, I found that I could light it pretty well, but I had trouble blowing out the white background and still keeping the subject properly exposed.  What I really needed was a way to position a light overhead, but given the constraints of the kitchen and the clamp lights, that wasn’t going to happen.

The CFLs are far more intense then I expected them to be and the clamp fixtures were really not suited to support the weight of a CFL bulb, perhaps those crazy Lowel cats were onto something when they designed that Ego light.

Pictured below is the tomato captured in the first lighting test.  I spritzed it with a bit of water to give it some much needed definition.  There’s just some white balancing in Aperture 2.0 and a little bit of exposure control.

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Decent for a first attempt.  A nice shadow at the foot of the tomato, a bit of a trailing shadow to the upper right side.  Some good specular highlights in the water and relatively good color reproduction.  The bad?  Well, the cyc isn’t lit evenly under the two source lights.  The sides of the tomato wash out, diminishing definition and separation from the background and the whole scene has a certain “tone” to it even after color correction.

In investigating further, I could not find reliable information about the CRI of the n:vision bulbs, but after shooting with them for a few days, I came to believe that they’d probably rank in the low 80′s.  There are some noticeable color casts in the green and somewhere in the blue spectrum that are very difficult to completely eliminate.  Pictured below is a completely uncorrected shot of some steamed clams.  To my eyes, there is a noticable yellow/green cast to the pale tones within picture.  The white point is not far off, but you can see some distortion in the yellow garlic and the coral tones of the shells.  The distortion seems to enhance the green within the yellows and mute the corals by diminishing the magenta tones – exactly what you’d see with a low CRI Cool White bulb, just to a lesser degree.

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For bright and vibrant colors, the color cast doesn’t seem to be very much of an issue, but for very light and near-white colors it is far more of a problem.  In the final picture that was used for this particular recipe, I struggled for a good period of time trying to remove the tarnished green hue from the garlic butter.  I don’t think I was fully successful in the end result.

Conclusions?

I’ve determined that it’s not really possible to build an acceptable lighting setup from your run of the mill big-box hardware store.  At least, not in the CFL realm.  

Manufacturers are generally not posting CRI numbers on their CFL offerings which generally indicates to me that they’re not going to be very good at color reproduction.  High CRI compact fluorescent lamps are sold online by many sites that offer “full spectrum” lighting, but you’re generally not going to find those same bulbs in your neighborhood hardware store.

Additionally, when placed in an aluminum reflector, the CFL lamps are far more directional then I’d expect.  If I were to redo this whole setup, I’d probably build something closer to the Ego setup with a large panel of diffusion to make a larger emission source.  The clamp lights are just too directional to be used as a single source, and too limited to be used in a multi-point lighting situation.  I plan to revisit this project and construct a ghetto version of the Ego lamp using some full-spectrum bulbs in the future and I’ll post my results when I get around to it.

Despite the obvious deficiencies, I was able to build a very affordable lighting solution that, although imperfect, allowed me to continue shooting food without relying on any natural lighting sources.  In the future, I’ll revisit this setup and see what I can do to improve functionality and color fidelity, but for the purposes at hand…it will do.

Totals:

• n:vision “daylight” 100w 2-pack: $8.97
• 5.5″ Clamp light: $6.47
• 8.5″ Clamp light: $7.47
• 1 Sheet acrylic dry erase sheet: $1.99
• 1 sheet white posterboard: $0.49
• 1 sheet 20×30 white foamboard: $1.50

• Total: $26.89

The wife and I had been discussing a project for quite some time to unify her two great loves of food and fashion.  In prepping for a Next Food Network Star Season 5 audition this past year, we finally happened upon a theme that melded her two passions: The Fashionable Foodie.  The title summed her up in a nutshell, encompassing her ridiculous lust for all things fashion related as well as her constant tinkering in the kitchen.  The Food Network audition went very well, but she did not receive a callback.

While my personal long term goal is to turn the concept into a weekly video podcast, it seemed like a shame to just let the idea languish until we bought a video camera.  I decided to just go ahead and jump in headfirst and create the concept for her as a website.  I thought that by creating content now and working to refine our style and content, we should have a backlog of good material to pull from when we’re finally able to jump into production.  Getting in a bit over my head as usual, I bought the domain name, started re-teaching myself wordpress and bought a year’s worth of webhosting at Bluehost.  The hosting plan came with a free domain registration, and thus ishotalot.com was born as a side project.

All things must dovetail in life and while prepping recipes for the site, I quickly discovered that photographing food is much more difficult then I’d thought.  Below is a shot of a delicious Vietnamese pork lettuce wrap.  Not terrible for a first attempt, but I could immediately see that I was going to have problems with backgrounds, proper camera support and lighting.

The camera support question is the easiest to answer.  I have a set of nice carbon fiber tripod legs attached to a clunky video-style head.  All I needed to do was find the missing tripod plate to begin using it again.  Eventually I’d need to upgrade to a geared or macro style head, but the tripod would be fine for the time being.

I started poking around on the web to see what most foodbloggers do to light their subjects and found that many of them are relying on natural lighting for their food photography.  I appreciate natural lighting, but in our case this is simply not going to be an option.  I don’t get home from work until around 5:00 PM each day and we usually don’t start cooking until six.  Generally, there won’t be enough natural lighting left when everything’s done cooking to get a suitable picture.  Furthermore, I’m somewhat experienced with lighting and I’ve used everything from open-faced redheads to big old PAR HMI’s.  I’m not the type of person to give up control and just shoot with whatever the skies give me.

In order to properly capture the food, I was going to need to use artificial lighting.  Since money is tight, I decided to keep costs as cheep as possible.  My research indicated that the preferred artificial light among many food bloggers is the Lowel Ego light, but I must admit I’ve never been a huge fan of Lowel’s lighting equipment.  The stands and supporting equipment are worthless junk and the lights themselves are rarely suitable for anything in production other then bounced fill. 

When I examined exactly what the Ego light is, I found myself wondering what Lowel’s exact markup is.  Two E27 sockets, a cord with in line switch and plug, a solid white back and diffuse front with two Compact Fluorescent Lamps for $137.50 retail?  Sure the quality of the light is very good and it seems to be quite easy for the average person to use, but I figured I could build something equivalent for half the cost at Home Depot. 

Rather then wrestle with questions of styling both our food and our backgrounds, I decided that I’d create my own miniature cyclorama and shoot everything on white until I get the hang of it.  In the long term, I’d prefer to shoot the food in more of an editorial style with some effort put into backgrounds and scenery, but for now everything will work just fine on a white shooting table.

Thus, my objective was set – to come up with a suitable lighting solution and create a cheap cyc using only items from Home Depot or the local craft store. 

In my next post, I’ll attempt to navigate the quagmire of CFL’s, CCT’s and CRI’s.

They began arriving early in the day, staking out positions on the lawn as if it were some festival concert.  Some in traditional Buddhist robes, some carrying handmade signs urging support for a free Tibet; they crowded along the capitol steps and watched a jumbotron feed of the Congressional Gold Medal ceremony taking place inside the Capitol Rotunda.

I did not watch the jumbotron because I was inside photographing the ceremony.  Of the hundred plus pictures I took that day, one stood out immediately:

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This was my second time attending a Congressional Gold Medal ceremony, so I was already experienced in the pageantry and pomp that surrounds these events.  The US Army Chorus sings and the rotunda comes alive with music, attendees file in slowly, taking snapshots while finding empty seats.  After all the ticket-holders find chairs, the congressional staffers are allowed to fill the remaining standing-only areas of the rotunda.

The photo corps set up shop on a press riser pointing an array of white-clad canon zooms with the odd Nikon photographer sticking out like a sore black thumb.  One step lower, the video guys have tripods set up supporting DVCPRO, XDCam and random prosumer HDV cameras.  They fiercely guard their positions as if they were waiting in line for a Black Friday sale.

Inevitably, there is always an argument between the late-arriving radio folk and the video guys over the multbox.  From my position next to the tangle of XLR cables, I watched as someone’s feed was “accidentally” unplugged in favor of one of the radio people’s portable recorder.  Quiet arguments usually ensue and the unspoken promise of ass kicking prevents further transgressions between the two parties.  As I was there in an “official” unofficial capacity, I did not have approval to take a place on the press riser, so I did my best to stand taller then the crowd in front of me and grab what shots I could.

An assortment of bipartisan congressmen and senators gradually filled out the dais and John Boehner obsessively wiped his nose with a hankerchief.  Finally, the President and the honoree were announced and the room stood to receive them.

Regardless of how you feel about any particular President, their presence in a room is a commanding spectacle.  When you see them on television and in print, they become a caricature of themselves, open to a form of vilification and demonization that is far greater then any physical form could possibly live up to.  Such it was with Bush, subject to near universal disdain and mockery for his policies, mannerisms and abundant gaffs, the expectation is to be met with a man that can personify that caricature.  However, you quickly see that the person that walks into the room is much less then that image you’ve been shown, and as a result, seems far more complicated as a human being.

The Dalai Lama and the President sat side by side, talking quietly, laughing in moments that were charming and warm.  They seemed as if they were old friends, sharing an ease in each others company that was both genuine and surprising.  To watch a man so vilified enjoying the company of a man believed to be a living god contrasted how the public opinions of a man can be so out of touch with the physical representation of that man.

The Dalai Lama’s eyes wandered about the room, studying the audience, the statues, the intricate frescos on the ceiling and something caught his eye.  The President and the Dalai Lama spent a few moments examining the ceiling before the President lost interest and retreated to his own thoughts.  I was trying to capture the moment of them both looking up at the ceiling, but I snapped the frame half a second late and would up with the image above.  In many ways, it is superior to the shot I was attempting to get.

Aesthetically, this shot is very pleasing to me.  The subjects are centered at the bottom of the frame and the leading headroom complements the Dalai Lama’s gaze.  As far as the contents and composition, the end result is very successful.

Technically, this shot is a complete disaster.  My employer provides me with a Nikon D200 DSLR for my photographic needs.  My personal camera is a Canon, but I grew up shooting on a Nikon FE 35mm so I came to this camera with a positive opinion based on brand-identity alone.  After spending a significant amount of time with it, I find the D200′s controls to be sub-par and its imaging performance is atrocious both in the quality of its JPEG compression and inherent sensor noise.

Paired with this camera is the only lens they’ve invested in, the Nikkor 18-200 f/3.5-5.6 VR zoom.  Without reservation, I’d say that this lens is the worst piece of glass I’ve ever shot through.  It’s incredibly slow, corner sharpness is stunningly poor, and the resolution is abysmal anywhere below f/8.  Since we own two copies of this lens (don’t ask why), I did a side-by-side comparison to see if we simply had a bad example.  In my informal testing, I found that both lenses suffered near identical distortion in the image corners from wide angle to mid-zoom.

For events in the capitol rotunda, they set up two ARRI HMI Pars quite some distance back from the dais.  I’ve never bothered to check the exact lamp, but they appeared to be 1200w heads from what I recall.  Even with the extra lighting, I was barely able to get anything usable on full zoom wide open unless I opened up past 1200 ISO.  The shot above is at f/5.6, shutter speed of 200 and ISO of 1250.   The high ISO, poor optics and requirement that I shoot only in JPG results in a shot that has gigantic toothy noise and would only be printable on a similar textured matte paper.

Excepting the poor technical quality of the image, it is easily one of my favorites due to the authenticity of the moment it captured as well as my own personal memories of being at the ceremony.  The positioning of the two subjects caused many on flickr to comment with conclusions drawn from their specific political and philosophical appraisals of both men.  While those types of conclusions are occasionally funny and intellectually interesting, the overall analysis of the moment was almost entirely vapid and caustic with no real appreciation of the reason for the event.

The first shot in this three-part analysis was an example of a picture that was discovered in photoshop and twisted into its final form through brute force pixel manipulation.  The second shot is an example of shooting one specific subjects until the winning image presented itself.  For me, this shot is an example of shooting the right frame at the right time, and is one of the more pleasing shots I’ve taken.  All together, these three shots tell me that I don’t have a particular strength developed as of yet.  Beyond my preclusion to snap endless party candids with my Zenitar Fisheye, I have not developed a photographic style that translates to a specific mode of photography.  I can only assume that will come with age and experience if I continue to push myself to shoot as often as possible.

As far as this specific photo, I suppose it has taught me that the audience and the creator can both enjoy the same image with vastly different inferences about the contents of the image.  Without shooting a ton of frames, a moment like this would have been missed, so in the future I hope that I might have the confidence to keep shooting even when I don’t see the picture in front of me.

Letting go of that 36-frame mentality is difficult.

Looking back on it now, I’m surprised to see that I actually took 71 frames before I finally arrived at the winning shot below.

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I suppose I understand why this picture works on a basic level, but I don’t fully understand why it became my most popular image on flickr.  The tonality is pleasing, there is a strong sense of composition within the frame and there is a nice color palate between the blue sky, the white clouds, the muted human figure and the pink/magenta stick.  In the middle, and entirely by accident, lies the pregnant bubble with it’s glistening highlights.
 

If I could point at any one thing that makes this shot successful, I would assume it might be the tension of a growing bubble right in the middle of the frame.  The highlights and slight dodging around the bubble set is apart from the background to focus attention to the center of the frame.  I also personally like how the subject is essentially lit in a reverse-key, which seems to add additional depth on her hand.

As far as post-processing, this is a strong contrast to the previous shot in that only a basic set of enhancing techniques was used.  There was a bit of dodging and burning in order to enhance definition, sharpening to enhance clarity, and I also added my standard vignetteing technique that I’ve had so much trouble getting away from.

What I find personally confusing from a perspective of artistic technique and vision is that I had no intention of composing this shot while shooting, but in reviewing the frames, this quickly became the strongest choice of the series.  My only creative thought during shooting was to capture a series of shots focused on the bubbles drifting while Gretch was in the background blurred out of focus.  Each of those shots proved to be terribly boring and they were all dismissed out of hand.  The lighting on the remaining frames was far too flat, and this final shot was instantly the most distinctive of the bunch due to both the size of the bubble and the reverse key lighting.  

While the first image in this analytical three part series was created essentially in post production, this image is unique in that it was created purely from persistance.  While those 70 other snaps did not strike me as anything special, this one combination of lighting and composition made this frame stand out completely from the rest.

I wonder if other photographers approach a subject with such a general sense of exploration, or if most good artists have a deliberate idea of the composition they’d like to achieve before opening the shutter.  Or are they much more inclined to work as I do, in a war of creative attrition, snapping shutter after shutter until the right combination appears in the frame?

Up next, I will explore “Up, Down”, an example of the right shutter at the right time.

This is the first picture in my three part analysis of my minor photographic successes.  Unique in the three, this photo is an example of a shot that was completely created during the post production process and has essentially no artistic value in its original form.

This is where I come into conflict with the concept of factual integrity as it relates to post-production in photography.  I understand that in photojournalism there is a direct need for honesty within the frame.  When a photojournalist documents a situation, a person or an event, any manipulation of the pixels must be limited to the basic requirements for correct display.  Anything more can be misconstrued as an attempt to mislead the audience.  I can even understand the reluctance to sharpen a picture, as that could theoretically introduce visual data that was not actually present at the time of capture.  But all that being considererd, the factual integrity inherrent to photojournalism has somehow been misappropriated to apply to all documentary photography as if it is a standard of practice.  

There is a notion that any photoshop work done on a photograph instantly recatagorizes a “photo” as instead an “illustration” due to the electronic artistic intervention employed by the photographer.  These latent luddites would even suggest a simple black or white border to be heresy.

For those people, this image of the vegas’d version of the Statue of Liberty would be the ultimate quagmire.  All that you see in the final work is actually contained within the original capture, yet without the techniques I used in stumbling towards the final creation, none of those indivudal details could have coexisted within the same final frame.  

To the side, we see the original frame, and how it was exposed for the sky instead of the subject.  It was only through a series of processes and layers that I was able to split out the foreground elements and background elements in order to create the optimal range of tones for both.  By using an adjustment I almost never use, “Equalize”, I was able to draw out an increase of detail and color saturation from the foreground statue.  This process left the background completely over exposed and flat, so I was forced to separate the foreground and background elements into two different images and then recombine them with some layer masking in order to achieve the optimal contrast for each color tone.

The end result is something akin to an HDR photograph, albeit one created in the post production process.  The background was optimized for the full range of cloud and sky tones while the foreground could spread the entire range of tones within the same frame.  The fact that this range of tonality was all included within the original JPG compressed capture is truly a testament to the processing power of the 350D camera.

It is a shot that was an instant hit when finished, however there were always people who questioned the methods used to achieve the final result.  The luddite crowd, perhaps woefully unschooled on classical darkroom techniques, believe that any form of photo editing is a copout.  They don’t understand that “burning and dodging” are not inventions by Adobe, and so they dismiss a photo like this as a distortion of reality.

For me, it is a perplexing example of photography because it is an image that was not created in the camera, but was essentially created in the electronic darkroom.  Having little confidence of my own artistic vision when out in the field, it becomes particularly vexing to prove that a throw-away image can become one of my most popular shots with just a few simple photoshop steps.  It becomes difficult to claim any authorship of the final product when so much of it is created after the shutter has snapped shut.

I suppose the truth is never as important as how you present it.  

This morning after a particularly rough struggle to wake up, I cast aside my self-imposed thrift and bought myself a large, three-shot mocha at Starbucks. As I waited for the barista to steam the milk for my drink, I watched people come in and join the line to order as the Isley Brothers’ “Shout” blasted out of the speakers. Regardless of race, age or social class, every single person in the room could be seen tapping their feet or nodding their head along with the music at one point or another. It’s a damn catchy song and some magical distillation of the tempo, rhythm, and call-and-response vocals creates a near-universal hit. It’s the same with Jonny Cash’s version of “Ring of Fire”, with Andrew Wyeth’s painting “Christina’s World”, with Steve McCurry’s “Afgan Girl” National Geographic cover, or any number of artistic works. There are examples of creativity that are almost universally loved by such a wide demographic that the appeal must be something almost inherently human.

But does a person ever know if what they’re creating will be so readily consumed by such a wide audience? Is that certainty limited to more conceptual arts and absent in the documentary arts?

I got started thinking down this twisty road when reviewing my much neglected Flickr account and noticed that my three most viewed photos were each very different and in a certain way – unexpected. The shots that I loved most were never very highly viewed, commented or favorited, yet some shots that did not strike me as particularly interesting were almost instant hits. (All things are relative to the observer, so you should understand that my flickr stream has only been visited about 20,000 times in history…my version of a hit might be much more paltry compared to anyone else.) The point being that I have no firm understanding of what it is that makes people like a particular photo I’ve taken while ignoring any other particular photo. When hunting for something to capture, I very rarely understand how it will translate to another viewer until it sits in front of them.

Perhaps this is a feeling specific to journalistic photography as opposed to painting or studio photography as composition, color and subject are essentially dictated by what lies in front of your lens, but I wonder if others encounter similar uncertainty.

For my next three posts, I’ve decided to try and explore these three different images to see what exactly it is that draws people to them, and how their popularity surprised me. Since I neglected to renew the rediculous “pro” membership fee, Flickr has locked away the majority of my images, leaving only the most recent 200 shots for public viewing – thus I will have to dive into my archives to find the originals that I posted to flickr first.

What is personally more interesting to me is that each of these shots were the result of three different photographic methods. One shot is a throwaway rescued by photoshop, another shot is the best single image from about 40 frames of one subject, and the third is the result of just snapping the shutter at the right time. Each is personally satisfying for a different reason, and I would assume, each also consumed for a different reason.

First up in the next post: Liberty of Vegas.

I started shooting originally with a Fisher-Price 110 camera.  It was blue with rubber ends and a break-away neck strap and you could stick one of those vertical flashbulbs in the top for indoor shooting.  From there I graduated to my father’s Nikon FE with a Nikkor 50mm f/1.4 prime lens.  

Click for Larger

That was a fantastic camera and in my opinion, no other camera design has ever reached that level of perfect simplicity.  One mechanical indicator showed your f-stop setting in the viewfinder while a needle indicated the electronic light reading at the center spot of the viewfinder.  If the needle fell in the middle of the mechanical f-stop indicator, you were dead on for exposure.  A simple split prism in the viewfinder allowed you to achieve perfect focus quickly and easily and there was no need for autofocus magic to snap a sharp frame. 

Eventually I branched out into videography, making backyard films with a sony 8mm camcorder.  I began printing black and white RC prints and developing my own 35mm film.  I went to film school and shot Beta, Super16 and 35mm.  I graduated to fiber-based printing and learned the true frustration of fine art printing.

After school, I worked in a number of different jobs.  I shot HD for the first time.  I spent a year performing broadcast video evaluations for four of the Discovery International networks.  I could spot a two line analog tape dropout in a 60Hz broadcast feed.  I started carrying a Yaschica T4 35mm point and shoot camera.  I worked on an independent film and learned a ton about electricity.  I moved to New York City and learned a ton about life.  After spending 8 hours in a makeshift darkroom in a 4′ x 8′ bathroom to make a single fiber print, I gave up on chemical printing and packed my darkroom supplies in a box.  

I started shooting medium format film using a vintage Rolleiflex TLR and a Voigtlander Perkeo II 120mm rangefinder.  After paying an arm and a leg to have medium format film developed and printed, I put my Perkeo in a box.

I found myself working at an acting school.  I learned how actors think, how they talk, how they need to be talked to.  I started shooting MiniDV.  I wrote a few short films and produced none of them.  I was asked to direct a few shorts written by an actor and I learned some lessons about artistic control and the complicated nature of authorship.

I bought an open-box Sony DSC-U10 at Circuit City, a 1.3 megapixel camera the size of a pill bottle.  I started shooting everywhere, I flexed photoshop muscles.  I moved back to DC, got married, got a real job.  I bought a Canon Digital Rebel XT and a Tamron 28-70mm f/2.8 autofocus lens.  The immediacy of digital thrilled me.  The lack of a split focus screen and a dim viewfinder aggravated me.  I bought a lensbaby and again cursed the 350D’s tiny viewfinder.  I bought a Zenitar 16mm rectalinear fish-eye lens and cursed the 350D’s tiny viewfinder.  I bought an epson 2200 printer and began to experience the true joy of repeatable printing.  Gone are the days of spending four hours to create a finished fiber-based chemical print that will never quite look exactly like all the other copies you’ve already made.

The Epson 2200 broke and I cursed technology again.  I’ve since bought an Epson R2400, but I still fail to find time to use it.

So this is kind of where I stand now.  I’m still fascinated with the capture of moments, either through still frames, motion, or words.  I find myself thrilled to explore different viewpoints, different angles and unusual scenes.  I lack the discipline to create daily and I often lack the vision to discover a picture in front of me.

In spite of all that, I hope to continue shooting, continue writing, and maybe I’ll find a moment here and there worth seeing…worth reading.