Its supposed to go in an iPhone- its called “Square” and it allows you to accept credit card payments over your iPhone which are then deposited nightly to your account. They take 2.5%, which I think is low compared to standard merchant services accounts in the major banks.

I’ve often thought and written about how the whole financial model of professional photography is busted, if you think about your daily life, you rarely if ever get to walk out of any store, professional office, toll booth, school, even church without laying down you hard earned CASH in one way or another for something you received. The kid at the local neighbourhood lemonade stand ain’t gonna take credit either. And there are so many ways now to pay, banks have made it incredibly easy to move money around online and with direct deposit. All for a fee yes but time is money too.

I’ll let you know how it works out, right now I just got it (and its free to sign up and the reader is free too) because I have had now a few occasions where I have been asked or when it might have been more expedient just to accept a credit card.

Maybe the next 5DmkIII will have it built in. Just remember you saw it here first.

First is a website update. I streamlined the logo and have separated out galleries. There will be some new galleries added in the coming week. Piece of advice; don’t bother creating your own custom website. Just get some service to do do it like aphotofolio or livebooks. It is not worth the effort. I had to migrate to a new server and have lost days to that. And I sort of know what I am doing, just enough to be dangerous. Massive PITA. If you are interested, I have used slideshowpro.com to provide the functionality, also their Director software to manage the backend. It is well integrated with Lightroom so I can export images and they appear instantly, formatted.

New also is iPhone and iPad compatibility via HTML5- ok so you don’t care- but the website works and formats for whatever iOS or Android device you are on. Check it out.

You might notice some new faces in there- tomorrow I will post about recent work.

When you are in it and someone says something great, you think to yourself, yes, remember that advice, then when you get home and try to remember all that sage wisdom, somehow it has faded…

The experience itself has not faded- Look3 is a tremendous festival, very well organized, just to mention a few things:

The location could not be better on a pedestrian boulevard with great food all around, tables in the center to meet and eat, even AC outlets on the lampposts! There were signs and banners everywhere, you could find your way around, and all the volunteers and staff were super motivated and excited.

Charlottesville is well integrated in the festival, all the merchants love the business, even cab drivers have opinions on film vs. digital. They must be reading photoblogs…

The curation and direction of the festival is firm: they are not about workshops altho they have them- what they are about is education, and the “image”. It is the festival of “the photograph”, and they are dedicated to enriching the experience of making and sharing work. They want to get young photographers next to the experienced veterans, and they want to put experienced artists next to each other on stage to see what happens- the pairing of Sally Mann to interview Nan Goldin was a masterstroke- it completely changed my idea of Nan’s work. As she says, she has no relation to “NanGoldin”, whoever she was.  That person is gone. And Nan even turned the tables on Mann, interviewing the interviewer, in a conversation on a couch on stage where it felt like we were listening in on a private conversation, you wanted it to continue to see just where it was going to end up.

The pairing of Massimo Vitali with NPR’s Alex Chadwick was another great idea- a professional interviewer who does his homework, and that voice- if you closed your eyes you could imagine it was Sunday afternoon and you were listening to a great radio interview, and Massimo spoke very intelligently about his work and the realities of the contemporary art world- about how Marianne Boesky challenged him early on in his development to consider presentation as central to what it was he was doing- he realized he was making objects- large scale plexi mounted images, not images- and to concentrate on showing a small body of work over an extended period of time to cement in the viewer or buyers mind who he was and exactly what he did. And it ran counter to the advice he was getting and his own ideas that he had formed over a 30 year commercial career, he was told the beach was not interesting, the pictures were not interesting, and he should drop it and move on. That has since been proven wrong, altho Massimo himself acknowledges he does not exactly understand the contemporary art world and its values, but at last he is getting to make the work he wants to make. A very illuminating interview.

Scott Thode curated what seemed like two-thirds of the work in the evening slideshows- and did a superb job. He must be nearly blind by now. There were several standouts for me- Gillian Laub’s Four Generations, Tim Davis’s Dollar General Drive By, Jeff Jacobsens completely amazing From the Catskills,  on night two, and on the final night, Donald Weber’s Interrogations, Erin Trieb’s The Homecoming, and Robert van deer Hilst’s Chinese Interiors stood out for me. Crowd favorites were Yuri Kozyrev’s The Arab Spring got a huge applause, and the festival ending video from Jacob Krupnick- Girl Walk//All Day Shot which you can see heregot everyone to their feet when the featured improv dancers from the video magically turned up live and performed. A great way to end the evening.

I could probably write more, all the interactions and conversations, how everyone is faced with similar challenges and as David Alan Harvey says, we are one big tribe and this is a gathering of the tribe. The festival is also about community, and is one of the few places I know where photographers and editors feel like they are standing on the same side of the line, all trying daily to get to the image.

If you can go next year, go. I’ll be there.

full story here.

Joe and Mamina.

Five very pressure filled minutes. But I loved them. Full story here.

I got a call recently from the VV to request images of Pablo, no mention of why, but they really liked what I sent and said that it was a possible cover.

It’s not the cover that is remarkable, it is Pablo’s story. We didn’t discuss much that day except the story, do some cool pics of Pablo on the streets of New York in different cycling garb, a style piece, and I suggested we just cycle and find locations that worked, which he was all for. Pablo was riding a fixie, and I loved watching him descend the Brooklyn Bridge locking up the rear wheel every once and a while. I lumbered along after him on my mountain bike. (I’m old enough to remember when it was necessary variously to have: a Banana Seat Bike, a 10 Speed, a Mountain Bike….I skipped the BMX phase…)

Anyway you should read the VV story, it is very current, it is an individual story about an immigrant, which we should recognize as very common.

I am sensitive to the whole notion of “immigration” – Neither of my parents are in the country that they were born in, and now, neither am I. By “law” I have rights to three passports but carry two- on from jus soli and the other by jus sanguinis to get fancy- born in Canada to an American mother. I have a third option available to claim British Citizenship through my father and his father, although my father was born in New York to British parents…what a bounty of passports simply being thrown at me! I have to wonder- what are we all so sensitive about when it comes to people born south of the border? East-West doesn’t seem to get everyone so worked up.

I am oversimplifying-Pablo was convicted of a felony- had I been convicted of a felony while in Canada I do not know how the immigration authorities would have handled my case-as far as they were concerned, I was an American from birth, so I suppose you cannot deny something from someone that they already possess.

Everyone accepts that this is the country you come to to get a new start-certainly things were good enough for me in Canada that I didn’t need to come here, I wanted to. I have never been to Uruguay. I am told it has a high standard of living relatively in South America, and is progressive and democratic.

What the story boils down to, as so many stories do, is that if you have money and can hire better than a public defender, your troubles will likely go away. No one will talk about rewarding bad behaviour, consequences, etc. “Used to be” that this country was a place for people with no money to come and work and create a new life. Now that we are the “haves,” we are insensitive to the have-nots. And unless we all get down to making babies real soon, we need immigration simply to prop up social security and medicare for all those boomers who used to be on the side of immigration but now seem to be against it.

Update: so I wrote all that last night and was going to post it and checked the VV story again for the link and evidently he is out!-

So this is the basic setup for a seamless portrait with back glow. I set this up in the reception area, with a 5 foot white seamless. I just gives enough to get a head and shoulders edge to edge. Nothing fancy, it works. The backlight is a speedlight with a diffusion dome, on a stand, probably set to 1/8th power, aimed sort of at the paper and up a little, about a foot away from the paper. The subject, Ian, is about 3 feet away from the paper, and I am under the front light on a c-stand extension arm, with a speedlight in a x-small chimera over camera. It is maybe 2.5 feet away and above. Power is probably 1/4, 400 ISO. I can get f8-1/3 out of this with an instant recycle using the canon battery pack.

So that is what you see top left, moi, ugh…doing the self posing self timer thing. I keep meaning to get the canon remote. And a makeover!

That is the “A” setup, there is another setup in his office with a big softlighter. The issue is when I packed, since I was doing this solo, and I had a backdrop, I only packed four stands. So I had to take the stand from the backdrop light to use in the office setup. Once I got this done, I realized I had compromised myself, that there was not going to be any time to move the stand back, so I improvised using my tripod as you can see. Well, I couldn’t now test that because the tripod was holding the camera…

Interview ends and we do the “B” setup first, in the office, and it goes well and I tell my charming tale of my only experience in Studio 54–NO I am not THAT OLD- it was a magazine party for NY Magazine 40 years in 1999. Not even ‘back in the day but now it qualifies as a kind of ‘back in the day… We then move to the “A” setup and first frame- that is top right. Bingo. Or not Bingo. The rear light is not firing. Ok, Strobist does not tell you this, but I will-honestly- again-speedlights are no substitute for real lights, the kind that go off every time. Why-? In that moment, I had no idea why. But you can’t do anything about it. You have to punt. So I continued. And finished. But the writer has a few more questions, and Ian is wonderful, takes time, and they go back to the interview.

So now I am determined-what is going on? I fire directly at the slave- nothing. I move the head around, jiggle, watusi- nada. Then I pull the batterypack cord out-the result frame bottom left-what had happened is that the rechargeables in the battery pack had flatted in the interim- unlike regular batteries when they go they go-instantly. There is no delayed recharge. It is just done. So now the light is firing and I summon up some crow eating reserves and politely ask if I could have a few more, I’d like something a little different. And Ian again is wonderful, and he stands in for a few more, frame bottom right.

At this point, I really don’t know what I am getting. I cannot really look, really take time. I have no modeling light on the speedlight to see what it looks like. The light should have been a tad higher to give a full shadow under the chin. But I can’t really see that, and every moment I chimp is a moment lost. I have to go on experience and hope there is something useful. Also, the camera is not on a tripod, so I cannot stand off from it, I must look through the viewfinder, and this reduces me to taking pictures, not making pictures.

Ok- so the problem is not the speedlight but the batteries. True. But they are a fact of using speedlights unless you want to be tossing batteries into the trash once a week. And recharging 24 double-A’s at a time is a PITA. Then they flat unexpectedly. It has happened before. If one goes, or if you bought the cheap Adorama batts, one out of four will be flakey. And that one will take down the entire unit. You could get a turbo, but for another 400 dollars on top of the 400 dollars you have already spent- do the math people, 2 speedlights plus 2 turbo battery packs is 1600+. Even the canon pack is 150 each. Plus rechargeables. You are well on your way to two monolights or an elinchrome quadra.

Yes they are small and they are light and they go anywhere but when you really need them-they suck. I really cringe when I read the supposed wisdom that is being shared on the ‘internets and what the next generation of photographers are taking away-good work is not, repeat, not being done with voice-activated light stands-salad bowl beauty dishes or tinfoil hats! Light is our most important ingredient-forget the cameras, with great light you can use your iphone (don’t get me started on that…) to make a picture.

Second problem is I got lazy, humping all the gear, and thought, a fifth stand- won’t need it. But I did, and in moving a tested setup, as you can see, the glow is not as good in the final as in the setup. So another piece of advice, if it is working leave it alone! It is the kind of thing that inexperienced people do, and interestingly enough, the kind of thing experienced people do too…because they know they will be able to figure it out. And I did, but it cost me, it cost me frames I did not get.

In the end, photoshop saves the day. Awful to say, but I pulled a page out of Nadav Kandar’s book and sandwiched two layers of the same image processed differently, you can control background and foreground colour and exposure this way, and came up with a third look, which is on my portfolio site. And depending on the way you brush the two together, a third colour appears which is the blend of the two layers. You can see it in the hair, it looks like bleed from the background. Also, the shadow is not really there like that. He looks somewhat flat yet three dimensional. Another way to do a classic portrait on white.

I had tested all this out, with lights in front., but we got to the condo and there was nuthin- no space at all, no way to put the seamless illumination in front of the seamless, so we punted, and put it behind the seamless. The big box is actually the hallway we setup in, all white, about 12 feet deep. I figured if I could blast all 1600ws through the paper I could get something in front- which turned out to be 5.6 at 200 ISO. This accomplished a couple things, one was to soften the edges of the subject next to all that massive overexposure. In the past I have seen digital do nasty things to fine edges like hair when silo’d in front of 255,255,255. 5.6 keeps things softer.

Next we setup a small softlighter on a c stand arm in front-this was going to be the “second” setup, in other words, shoot backlight for some of the session and then add the front light for a different look. We went with f11 on the front light, which gave me almost pure white on the background with the backlight on. Something like 245, 245, 245. If you wanted a third look you could then kill the backlight and end up with middle grey on the backdrop. Ann was about 2 feet in front of the paper.

OK, WHAT STROBIST DOESN’T TELL YOU (well he’s been saying it more lately…)

So if I had brought three speedlights I would have been really stuck. NO way to blow two speedlights through the paper. Even 1600ws was barely enough. And we were boxed in with the location, literally. So the whole backlight ethereal idea goes out the door. As it was, I had two broncolor heads and a third Q-Flash in the front light. So what isn’t ideal about that? No modeling light. You can’t see your subject, and you can’t see what the light is doing. Sure, you can test it and set it, but when you are actually shooting, you don’t know. And critically, the front light has to be just right, not too high not too low. In a tight head portrait there is nothing but small moves, and every move looks different. It was great on my assistant, but not so good on her.  So I 86′d that setup as we were shooting, and just went with the backlight.

So I can’t stress this enough-you can’t shoot what you can’t see. Another thing I like to do is put the camera on a tripod and use the live view to focus and compose, standing next to the camera, so I can see in 3D and in “2D” simultaneously. Like using a 4×5- there is something liberating about not looking through that 35mm viewfinder tunnel. But I didn’t do that, the hallway was only 4 feet wide, and the tripod was going to be a timewaster to move around. But in retrospect, perhaps useful. See I didn’t expect a long shoot, but actually there was no time pressure once we got started, and having some process to stumble through with the tripod might have been useful, useful to break the constant practiced media smile I was getting. Whatever works.

So what does this tell you? Well, really great work requires preparation and support. There is a lot of cost cutting going on, downsizing of gear, all this information out there about how to get good results without employing a truckload of lighting. I am here to tell you it is mostly bunk. You may think you can hang out at ISO 800 and f2.8 with a few speedlights and get what you want, and sometimes you have to, but the difference, what you see in really good work is different by an order of magnitude. You do need gobs of light, small apertures, fast recycles, bright modeling lights, some space, some preparation, and good crew. I had only a few of those things going for me. And some luck.

In a couple weeks I’ll have another back of the envelope to share where I made a crucial rookie mistake but learned something I didn’t know in the end. For now, lets just say for want of a stand…

Jumped around the Plaza Hotel with Betsey Johnson,

Found out “What Girls Want”

and spent some time up in the clouds with Nadia and Myriah (right).

more to follow.

WhiteHouse Custom color is doing the printing, short runs of 25, 50, 100, etc. Makes it real easy to send out quick hits. About the only paper I like from them is their Art Recycled.

Got an email back from him saying he was really happy with the picture and felt it reflected who he is, which is interesting- you spend a couple hours with someone and try to put that into a picture. From experience I know that the way I see someone in their picture is often very different from how they see themselves. Nice when the two dovetail.

Another view;

In case you are not on the list.

What’s that Crazy Font you say! – Well Sir, Madam, it’s “Eloquent Regular” by Jason Walcott after the long lost Pistilli Roman. Just the perfect Tonic to Pick You Up I say! Peppy? And How! Well, where can I get some? Veer!

There is some confusion on the intertubes about who created it first-either John Pistilli or some other blogs say Herb Lubalin and Lou Dorfsman-I am sure some typophile can correct me. Depending on how it is deployed it can either look playful or ‘eloquent’ or classic like Bodoni/Didot.

It gets a little funky small so I am not sure about the blog header, but I wanted consistency.

And yes, designed by me. The function parts come as before from Slideshowpro and Director, it is based on their layered thumbgrid demo for those that care, with some custom ActionScript thrown in. I posted before about it here.

The site coding is from Freeway Pro. I don’t know of any other web design software that allows a total idiot like me to make a decent website.

Every site is a trade off, for me my goals are to get people to see a lot of work quickly and big if they want to. So the update saw me redo every image for the site at 900 px wide-This is about as large as I want to go.

Also performed an upgrade on the portfolio-

Went for a couple portfolio meetings yesterday and one editor was surprised by the physical porfolio-she was seeing a lot of laptops. Really? Talk about No Plastic Sleeves! Speaking of, yes those are acetate sleeves, the International House of Portfolios kind (iHOP). I’ve read a lot kvetching over there about the practice-but Really? You want to change the order of your book or one image and you can end up reprinting most of the book? And what if you don’t want to print on any of the double side offerings- or on matt paper? I love Harman Gloss. It is what I print on Period. And it ain’t two-sided. You think I’m gonna glue that sh– together? Really? You think acetate is going to lose you work? Really?…I think bringing a laptop in is gonna lose you work. You have no idea what it really looks like.

Another editor said they were seeing a lot of Blurb books. For the price it might be cheaper even. But then you give away control of colour I would expect, and what you can print in CMYK is nothing like what you can print on inkjet or c-print. Which brings me to my final point; minilab develop and scan. I had a roll done recently just to see what was up, what was out there. Picked the wrong lab. L&I on 22nd. Can you say rip-off? 18$ for dev+scan-get this a whopping 15mb scan. Do you know what that really is? 2 Megapixels. Yes, your iPhone has 2mp resolution. But they call it 15mb-which is a to confuse the point, 1700px x 1100 px is ~5mb per channel RGB- there’s you double digit file size-15mb! Thanks a lot! And colour-don’t get me started! But it did make me think about what I am seeing from the gang rediscovering film-

wonky purple shadows, no detail, stained highlights. Excuse me while I book an ad shoot. Off to look for another lab.

Following on the heels of a story in NYT here, I made a few changes, added the Flyover States video, and a random function to load a few images at launch. Yes I had to do a lot from scratch because blah blah blah Flash CS3 is not Flash CS4. Its 2:35am…Just pay for a site is my advice…