Messages

1

Say HELLO / Re: Hi every body!

« on: December 09, 2012, 10:04:23 PM »

Welcome-

 Traditional avenue- one I would whole heartedly recommend, find active studio/s that would be willing to take an apprentice and start there. Little to no pay for the first few years or so, but as some one who teaches photography, learning OJT over a few years will exceed what you will learn in a class room in a semester or two.  Doing the work day-in-day-out is a powerful motivator for ingraining the skills that will last a lifetime. Plus you get a taste of the business side of the photo world. Everything from digital asset management, proven workflow methodologies that work in real world expectations and deadlines, to the best ways to interact with a myriad of clients and talent in front of the camera.

Attempting to throw your hat in the ring right off the bat can cause a lot of frustrations and the feeling that all the passion you want to bring to making your work are all for naught because your personal business isn't thriving as you expected. 

That being said- there are a lot of professional shooters who did just that and have scraped, survived and thrived over the years through pure grit and luck.  This isnt the only way to go about getting your feet wet in the photo-world, but one that is proven to prepare you best for a career in the field.

Its not an easy career by any means- it requires a whole LOT of business sense (if you dont have a business background invest in some small business management classes, they go a long way. Just doing taxes for the first time is easier with knowledge on the subj).

Hope you find some good knowledge and make some awesome work.


tip of the iceberg...


Best of luck-

2

Pro Photo Show & Beyond / Re: Pro Photo Podcast #88 - Image Presentation, Licensing & Epic Sounds

« on: December 05, 2012, 06:42:26 PM »

An all film show in the works? Give me a heads up when that gets going.  I'd be interested to know what direction you would take a show themed around film photography.

All the best-

3

Pro Photo Show & Beyond / Re: Discussion: Pro Photo Podcast #87 – Flare To The MAX or The Disaster Effect

« on: October 16, 2012, 04:15:09 AM »

Leitz optical company + making camera = Leica = Lei(tz)Ca(mera) Invented by Oskar Barnack, an optical engineer for the Leitz optical company. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oskar_Barnack
<-- This seems pretty on par with what I know of the history of the Leitz company.  Also- the Minigraph camera was designed to use 35mm movie film stock before accurate light meters were available.  Send out a PA to go photograph the scene  you would like to shoot your next movie scene.  Bracket and record exposure values, develop, compare and make a choice for shooting the movie scene based on that information.  I dont believe the Leitz company was involved in the production of the Minigraph, but the Leica 1 is a refined and improved version of the Minigraph that is repurposed to make photographs of things for the sake of the thing, not because you need to make an exposure judgement for a movie your filming.
 
Film is chemical and breaks down with time, hence an expiration date.  Adding heat to a chemical reaction, see: high school chem class memories, quickens any chemical reactions or, in the case of color film, the degradation of your color couplers and dyes in your color film.  The silver in your color film is less effected.  Similarly, black and white film, 100% silver based, not black and white and C41 process (still uses dye couplers and subject to the same pitfalls of color film), is pretty bomb proof and less susceptible to temperature shifts compared to chrome/neg films.  Polaroid/Fujiroid is extremely sensitive to temperature shifts, even more so than chrome/neg color film.  I believe the mordants in the paper can deteriorate, but for the most part, instead of having only one area of liability for color shift (the film itself), instant film has both the film and chemistry that can degrade (or dry up entirely) plus the mordant print paper the image is transferred onto.

4

Pro Photo Show & Beyond / Re: Discussion - Pro Photo Podcast #86 - Of Light and Toilet Seats

« on: August 29, 2012, 12:20:28 PM »

Gav,

     I think that you would like the darkroom a lot.  Its a lot slower process, its meticulous, meditative, and frustrating as heck most of the time, but it's so worth it.  If your printing silver you get to see the magic before your eyes appear in a tray; there is this sense of of 'making' that can be absent fromt he process when everything is digital from start to finish.  That aspect of work is incredibly important to my process as an artist. Perhaps you'll get a chance to make some work in a darkroom sometime soon.

All the best-   

5

Pro Photo Show & Beyond / Re: Discussion - Pro Photo Podcast #86 - Of Light and Toilet Seats

« on: August 28, 2012, 08:55:53 PM »

in reply to above- I saw the 2+hr long run time on the podcast and hit pause after a while...i didnt get to a point in the podcast where sh-t photos were discussed.  Perhaps a closer and continued listen will be required.

6

Pro Photo Show & Beyond / Re: Discussion - Pro Photo Podcast #86 - Of Light and Toilet Seats

« on: August 26, 2012, 01:56:52 PM »

Film/getting back to basics:

Challenge accepted....:-p Ok, not much of a challenge since 90% of my work is film based, but I'm glad that you are still making the benefits of a silver based medium known to your listenership.   Next you will lauding the benefits of zone 6 enlarger heads and how you've converted your garage into a color/b&w darkroom. 

Good shooting-

7

Show Your Images / Re: Tybee's Tower

« on: August 26, 2012, 01:38:37 PM »

Tybee is a great place!  Savannah in general is a great place to shoot.  Great looking shot of the light house. 

8

Inspired by Art (NEW) / Re: Saw the original painting - Puget Sound on the Pacific Coast.

« on: May 11, 2012, 08:56:47 PM »

The HRS exhibit made its way to SC when I was back there this past spring.  I wish that I could have spent the whole day at the exhibit, but sadly only a few hours. 
Another great resource for the HRS was the writing of Henry David Thoreau.  Look at a collection of essays titled The Maine Woods.  A link to the Amazon listing http://www.amazon.com/Maine-Woods-Penguin-Nature-Library/dp/0140170138.  Especially what Thoreau writes about climbing an experiencing Mt. Katahdin, the highest point in Maine & the Appalachian Trail, also I think that it still holds the world record for sustained wind speeds, no sure though.  Church did a painting of Katahdin and its worth looking at.  Its easy enough to find on the interwebs.

I've doen a fair amount of research on the HRS and the ideology as an American art movement- its been influential in a lot of the work that I'm making now that deals with the national parks/federal/state-lands and how they are designed.

All the best- 

9

Going Analog (NEW) / Re: Scanning on the V700

« on: May 07, 2012, 01:56:48 PM »

Idiot students + Aztek Wet scan kit = Dead V750

I'm not the authority by any means on wet scanning, but I've been frustrated enough with residue left on my negs and scanner bed to not want to do it. Plus not done right, without a scanner platform to mount your neg to, and you mount directly to the bed, if that liquid, no matter how quickly it evaporates, gets on your scanner eye/bar bye bye scanner.  That was what happened here, get a new wet scan kit, not careful people use it, the scanner can no longer calibrate colors and we've got big blue bars running across every frame. Hence, dead V750.

Just my $0.02 worth, but if you get things up and running it would be great to see some 100% crop selections for comparison.

All the best-

10

Going Analog (NEW) / Re: 4x5 In Dark Areas.

« on: May 07, 2012, 01:41:33 PM »

Whats makes these low light situations easier is a depth of field calculator.

Here is a Rodenstock one:http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/155145-REG/Rodenstock_260700_Depth_of_Field_Calculator.html

And a Linhof one: http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/115415-REG/Linhof_025009_Depth_of_Field_Chart.html

And there are far more expensive versions out there, too.

But like everything these days- theres an app for that.  Several free DOF calculators exist, most are pretty good, but finding one that includes 4x5 or especially 8x10 gets hard.  So do your research on the app, especially if you're forking out money for it.

Also, if you are going to be using only a few lenses with your field camera you can take some white gaff tape and write focal length of the lens you will be using and note either where on the lens bed the standard is for focusing your hyperfocal distance-infinity or the mm distance from the lens' nodal point.shutter to the film plane to get max DOF.

Also, when trying to get EVERYTHING in focus and eek out as much as you can even after movements, for 4x5 diffraction, according to some, starts to appear after f/22, but even making my big enlargement I dont see much difference in minute detail rendering until f/32ish (and thats mostly tiny tiny things, like edge contrast around individual leaves in a landscape).  Just something to be aware of.

All the best-

11

Going Analog (NEW) / Re: SOLD my first 4x5 Portrait.

« on: May 07, 2012, 01:23:19 PM »

Glad it sold- So much great information in a neg that big, makes for great traditional enlargements and brutally sharp scans.

12

Light Zones and Beyond / Re: Light Ratios

« on: May 07, 2012, 01:20:37 PM »

I've done a few lighting workshops and taken on assistants who only wanted to learn about lighting, as soon as you mention things like lighting ratios, logarithmic functions of light, inverse square law... et all things math and light related I always enjoy seeing the blank look on faces as their minds puddle into goo. :-p

I think the hardest part in relating the nature of light using mathematical terms is getting some one to correlate the sets of numbers (in the case of ratios) with what things actually look like.  It is ESSENTIAL, if some ones intention is to best understand the medium, to know how these abstract concepts relate back to the actual photograph.  One of the best ways of doing that is shoot and experiment, review your results thoughtfully and adjust your approach for next time. Second to that, look at another persons work, ex: like in this video by the late Dean Collins http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyzkWxtKWm8 recording of a lecture from Brooks Institute. 

These things should be scary or unapproachable because they are the stock and trade, the literal tools with which photographs are made.

Hope the video link helps- Collins has a great stage presence for lectures and was a great resource of knowledge.  You can find more video clips from his lectures on youtube or out on the net.

All the best-

13

Share Your Social / Re: Share Your Other Social Places

« on: May 07, 2012, 12:43:03 PM »

Twitter: @tsspro
APUG & DPUG: TSSPro
Google Plus: https://plus.google.com/u/0/117289200916323687976/posts (need to buy a domain just to redirect that long an unnecessary URL :-P)

14

Pro Photo Show & Beyond / Re: Pro Photo Podcast #83 - History & Essentials.

« on: March 05, 2012, 06:11:20 PM »

G,

Niepes' first photograph- exposure was all afternoon.  Bitumen of Judea is essentially asphalt.  It will harden in places that receive sunlight and those places will remain when it is submerged in a salt water bath. That stuff is disgusting, messy and it smells; nuff said. :-p

You didn't seem to be following a very linear pattern with the history- Talbot and Daguerre/Niepes were all working around the same time they were just separated by geography.  (some historians speculate that Talbot was making paper negatives as far back as 1824) Also Daguerre was always in it for the money.  He backed Niepes' research so that he could come up with a way to produce scrim-backgrounds for the popular theater that he owned.  Niepes' idea would negate the hours upon hours of meticulous painting the Daguerre had to pay for and wait to be completed.  Even though he sold the patent to the French gov't, for a healthy sum, he retained all rights for the manufacturing of equipment and chemistry.  So even though the process was owned by the French gov't and you could get it for free, you still had to hand over money to Daguerre to have access to chemicals and cameras.

Interesting factoid- Kodak's first digital camera was not created from any part that Kodak manufactured themselves.  It was assembled from pre-made parts from another company. :-)

Something that people hate to hear- "USE A TRIPOD!!!!" I don't know how many times I have to tell my students about shooting with a tripod when they bring images back from a shoot and they're trying to hand hold at 1/4 of a second.  Its something I say at least once a week.  Thanks for fightin the good fight with the tripod reinforcement. 

When you don't have time to meter, previz, etc- Again, practice makes perfect.  If you, as the photographer, hasn't gone to the effort to learn some of the extraneous facts that you pick up when you take the concerted effort to understand light relationships you wont be able to more consistently make that snap judgement.   Your penchant for AA makes me think of the story behind "Moonrise over Hernandez" that he writes about in his autobiography. That knowledge is essential if caught in one of those situations.

Favorite elements from history- The fuzzy-graph- Glass dry plate, 1889 in a book, or rather pamphlet that he published called "Naturalistic Photography for Students of Art"  He advocated that the camera is too perfect a mimetic device and that distant, far off things are seen by the human eye blurrier than the camera sees things there by creating an unnatural photograph.  I like to think he just needed glasses.
Anyway- This idea of the fuzzy-graph caught fire and became the next big thing until he published another book/pamphlet titled...drum roll please...."The Death of Naturalistic Photography"
In Edward Weston's day  books he recounts when he made a concerted change in the way he created photographs that he took all of the glass plates that he had used to make fuzzy-graphs, scrape them all clean and use them to pane the windows in his cabin!

15

Pro Photo Show & Beyond / Re: Why You NEED the Zone System for Digital…

« on: December 08, 2011, 03:49:42 AM »

Well put

Previsualization and the concepts of zones are the foundation stones on which the core elements involved in the taking of the image and carry over to the developing and printing of the image.  They are fundamentally essential and the basis for all the complexities that make up the ZS in its entirety.  There is no denying that.

To support the title of your original post "Why you NEED the ZS...": these fundamentals are crucial in essentially reteaching how the photograph is approached.  Primarily slowing down the image making process.  Facts are that doing math, taking spot readings and envisioning an image before you take it forces the photographer to slow down and take less photographs.

Take less photographs, yes, less. Quality not quantity.

As for the complexity of the ZS and to me the even more complicated BTZS, it is all an effort to gain the precision and consistency that are inherent in digital technology that now requires relatively little fiddling with.

In some ways it has gotten easier, but the tenants of the process familiarity with materials and having the mental flexibility to equate abstract variables of exposure to tonal qualities are still the same and no less essential.