A whopping 5 comments my alltime high-I RULE! Well, I thank you all for noticing, mainly thanks to Andrew. I wanted to post-forward a comment that Olivier Laude offered on an older post:

Back in 97 us 12 fools in SF tried to force the business to turn editorial into a viable business by negotiating better rates with the magazines. It was called Editorial Photographers and it was a miserable failure primarily because photographers in LA and NYC did not follow thru what we were trying to do.

Photographers are as guilty as the magazines who hire them for failing to turn editorial into a business because we bought into the BS philosophy that editorial is a way to brake thru to other more lucrative parts of photography. Essentially always give their clients the stick to beat them with. We are a sorry ass bunch of fools if you ask me but as they say,”divide and conquer” and we were more than willing to jump right in. Sure that model will work for some but the overwhelming majority will fail, regardless of their talent or the efforts they put in it. I, personally have been rather blessed, but like John Loomis says, it can be gone in a hurry. We have only ourselves to blame. Way back when a part of the site was called “cost of doing business”, it said it all. AS interesting as Robert’s musings are, they are old and sad news but don’t blame others for this state of affairs, blame yourself. In the meantime, the mags keep crying wolf but laugh all the way to the bank. Those execs in the publishing, they are the ones running real businesses, we are the ones running fragile egos.

http://www.editorialphoto.com/

Later as Olivier noted anyone who is currently working for BW or Forbes has the SF12 to thank, although they later did renege on the agreement of further increases, but the higher rate has stood. I myself have never worked for BW or Forbes, I think there was a stigma that if you worked for Fortune they did not hire you, but I don’t really know if that is true.

If you look at the history of unionization almost all of the significant action took place at the turn of the century, and it was a pretty bloody affair, but in all those cases you have a group of workers and you have a “workplace” to leave, and get locked out of. Solidarity is enforced bodily at the factory gates, and everyone knows everyone else who works there, you have to work alongside each other which makes scabbing very difficult. Photography knows no such workplace, despite my calling the still life studio the “coal mine.” Enforcing solidarity is practically impossible. Another part is you have two different kinds of workforces, on the one hand a group that was immigrant to this nation, largely poor, used to all kinds of hardship and with few alternatives, the other a privileged mobile group. You can’t herd cats. Read on… » Read the rest of this entry «

After stalking him in the LaGuardia airport last week I got a call from thejackanory himself Andrew Hetherington. We did our best to solve all photographer problems everywhere or at least relieve Puckfair of some of its beer.

I am reminded that photographers are a similar bunch, although maybe musicians or physicists are a similar lot too, I don’t know, but we all share the same struggles, money, inspiration, finding time, finding direction. Andrew has talked about it on his own blog, but he reminded me of PrintSpace, which was a clearinghouse in the mid 90′s for many of us. I didn’t really spend a lot of hours there, the color darkroom never really hit with me. But those times I was there it was good to see work on the walls and react to it, either feeling good or bad depending. But it was a kind of trench to be in, and I miss that association…

A ton of interesting posts this week from Andrew, Liz, John and Alec, all to do with what happens when magazines call and I just want to pile on!

I posted this scan of a contact sheet from a job long ago for Fortune, this is, or was, I don’t know now, the CEO of Whirlpool. The headquarters of Whirlpool is in Benton Harbour Michigan. More on that later. You can see by the rebate that it was shot 4×5. I had reached the apogee of what I like to call the Canada Dry Style. Perhaps I had reached it before this shoot, but definitely, in this shoot, having been forewarned that Mr. Whitwam was not the most dynamic of characters, I did not bring “Da Noise” or “Da Funk”…. » Read the rest of this entry «

By way of the Leica Camera User Forum I found the blog of David Alan Harvey and a really inspirational post about coping with change, which makes a nice antidote to my last curmudgeonly post. Good words.

Two months on with Brick and what do I have to report? In everyday usage over two months, streetshooting many days, a trip to Berlin, there have been no problems to report. Many in the user community had reservations, and my own camera died after 24 hours, but the replacement has been solid, with no hiccups. I have treated it no better or worse than any other camera, and I feel it is a durable as any other Leica M. It has been a lot of fun.

I am working on another installment to the Lightroom/Aperture comparison, which will probably appear later this week.

Boxing Day 2006 Stephen DiRado

On Jan 3, 2007, at 8:42 PM, sdirado wrote

Hi Rob:

(Oh, sorry for this long rambling letter, got carried away about process.)

I’m up here in Worcester, MA about 3 hours from you in Brooklyn. I do come down your way from time to time and will see Brian’s show at Julie’s at one point.

Yes, flashbulbs! The amazing thing is how portable they are and yet so powerful. I can setup very, very quickly wherever, I can clamp it in the room I’m working in. I carry with me a few quick grips, some tinfoil (to create barn doors) and a shit load of bulbs in a satchel along with my film holders. The 8×10 sits by while eating with friends almost every night. During dinner, anytime during the eve, if there is a photo to be made, I quickly set up the camera, run a focus through the table, and place the flashgun someplace that accents the scene– create a sense of drama, or an overall soft light effect. It all depends on what I feel is going on emotionally within a situation. I use (clear) number 22s for some major light, they will give me an f64 direct at 15 feet away. BUT rarely will shoot them direct. Most of the time I will bounce it, or use tinfoil to scatter the light, or even cover most of the bulb in the center, to create a soft ring light effect. I use number 11s for about an f32 at 15 feet away, number 25s for an f22 at 15 feet. Most of the time I overexpose by 2 stops to flood a room with light in order to get details into the shadows. I have to underdevelop my negs to reduce contrast. I’m writing to you about this stuff– and I’m hoping that you are laughing away, because it can’t get more archaic. To add to this silly way of working, I never read the f-stops on my lens, I look at the iris and judge the opening. In part, because the damn f-stop ring has worn away, and because I can’t see shit for details at 49. For my shutter speeds, mostly shoot at about a 1/5th of a second, or slower if I want candles to burn bright on my negs. I just lower room lights, pop the flash (it goes off at about a 1/50th or so) for this effect.

I bought a couple of Sunpak J110 flashes (one works as a slave) but mostly use them in the nursing home. The flashbulbs freak out the patients in the Alzheimer’s ward. You can feel the heat from a bulb 20 feet away. The dif is that the strobe fires off at about 1/2,000 of a sec. Everything looks plastic. BUT a flashbulb burns bright and slow for about a 1/50th of a second. The result is a softer light on faces, and glow room wide that for some reason no strobe can replicate.

I just attached one I made on Boxing Day. (I shoot 2 to 5 dinners weekly, most images suck. BUT the law of batting averages gives me one or 2 a month that work, something about them that go beyond predictions.) Here is the breakdown on how this photo came to be: The setup is the dining room of the lady on the far right, she is the ex-wife of the man, Mike in the back reading the wine label. Mike to this day (divorced now for 12 years) leaves his good wines in his ex-wife’s cellar. Once every few years he invites friends to come and drink a few bottles. The ex made a nice dinner before tasting the wines but that was not a photo. The photo came to me after the dinner while we were drinking these great wines! I wanted the camera to be an observer, equal with the group but set back to observe quietly. I ran a focus (tilts front and back) through the table to concentrate on expressions. I pushed this tilt thing far, in order to create a canopy overhead to contain the chandelier. I placed the flash (used a #25 bulb) on the mantle of the fireplace, and covered the end near the camera with tinfoil to prevent light flare. I’m holding just outside the camera’s view, a cable release. Over a period of about 6 minutes, I popped off 3 shots. I partially directed my subjects to stay put, not move around while I photographed. BUT I do not contain them from talking, or drinking, or chatting. That is the magic needed to makes these things work… When it works.. My friends are so used to me setting up, that it goes unnoticed.

Stephen

My reply;

I am reminded of Abelardo Morell in all of this, for how he uses the simplicity of what the camera is, just a box with a hole in the end of it. You could light with a bonfire if you wanted, (its just not always convenient to burn the house down during a meal…:)

Photography is a silly little thing. I think a lot of that is lost on the current incarnation of photography, anything post 2001, the digital realm etc, there has been a tremendous rush to these new technologies. A friend of mine from Maine just released a book on Holga. Such a simple tool. But even the holga has been changed, there is a flash now, a polaroid back, etc.

A good friend of mine just bought one of the Leica-clone point and shoots, the Panasonic one, 10mp, 16×9 format, it’s really nice. We were out on New Years and he said he really liked it but hated the red eye preflash. So we tried to figure out how to turn it off, two professional photographers, no luck, and then we tried to figure out how to fool it to turn it off. Can’t be done! So you miss the moment. I had my M6 and flash on it, f11, hyperfocal distance, 28mm lens. I didn’t even need to look through it or focus it, and it goes off instantly, exactly when you want it to. It really is a little bit like “shooting.”

I was watching some girls pose for a picture taken by a friend in the subway today, and there is that frozen expression, the waiting. This is new, used to be we all got fooled by the preflash, the red flash, etc, now we all know to wait for several seconds while it all goes on. Immediately after the pic (this is the pic that got away for me…) one of the girls instantly turned to bored, the effort of holding that smile. It was so artificial.

I like that you can feel the heat from the bulb, it means something, makes me think of Weegee bar-b-queing a corpse with his flashgun just as the police arrive. “Hey he’s a little warm this one…nah that’s just the flash, he’s been dead for hours mack…”

I think on 8×10 you almost need that much power to shoot at f64, not many other portables (none?) can achieve that. There would be no other way.

About the photo; not many of your pics have the out of focus so out of focus, (that I have seen) and usually I really don’t like extreme tilts, but here, it does exactly what you say, it contains the moment in the room, a toast, that moment when the world is supposed to wait, listen and appreciate. I like that it is so circular, like another idea of a toast, the circle of friends, a sharing. You might go as far as Emmet Gowin and use a lens with less coverage and make a truly circular image, which is what the lens projects anyway, on 8×10, I could see and accept that easily, not for every image, but for some. Or like the Escher drawings of the silver globes.

A photographer that I assist, Sheila Metzner, introduced me to their family rule that you are not supposed to cross over someone to clink a glass, and you have to make eye contact. I like that. The toast is a moment of eye contact, and the camera is another eye.

If you are ever in the brooklyn nabe, give me a call.

rob

Had the good fortune of being featured on Brian Ulrich’s blog Notifbutwhen. He also mentioned another photographer Stephen DiRado and we had a brief exchange in the comments section. Looking at his pictures I get a clearer idea of what I was after, but often could not articulate. The project was not so much about Malls but more about human nature, and also about the emotional weight of the environment. That is something I can really put my finger on now, fifteen years later, but at the time, I really did not know what I was looking for.

Later I will attempt a wrap-up of 2006. Happy holidays.

Update: the newyawkers get to see Brian Ulrich up close at Julie Saul, opening this Thursday, Jan 4 from 6 to 8pm. That was for my five friends who read this…:)