Who the HELL is Ogalthorpe?

Would You Like Some Special Sauce with That?

2011-06-14T07:00:00.000-07:00

One of the characteristics of human behavior I find most interesting is the way people think and reason in certain situations. I'm very curious about other's decision-making processes and fascinated by how and why they choose to act in various situations. This is probably the primary reason why I find talking about gear and technique so fundamentally unstimulating. However there are times when I'm working that I feel I have a sudden insight or epiphany that is worth talking about. This is one of those times.

I occupy a live/work loft space in the Old Rainier Brewery building in Seattle's SODO neighborhood. Every three months we have an art walk where we open the building and our spaces to the public. Along with opening my doors and displaying my work, I usually have a set up and and I take portraits of willing guests during the evening. As the date for the last Art Walk approached I was considering what kind of portraits I would take. I decided that I would forgo the dark and moody feeling that I had been shooting at the time for something lively and energetic. I chose to shoot something similar to some portraits I made at one of the Seattle Flickr groups Garage Shoot Meetups a few years ago. I really wanted the Art Walk portrait experience to be entertaining and fun for my guests.

The Art Walk was scheduled to start at six p.m. It was five thirty and I still had to set up the lights. I figured I would use the same setup as before: a beauty dish up high in front, a ringflash from the camera position, two rim lights (bare strobes) from behind and a background light. I decided to go with strip lights for the rims (for a smoother, softer, silkier rim). I started placing stands in position. One for the back left rim, then the back right rim, then the background. The beauty dish would be on a boom overhead in front so I put the boom on a stand and set it in position in front of the posing stool. I put the ringflash on the camera and set it up on the tripod. After all the stands were in their rough positions I mounted the strobes and connected the power cords and pocket wizards. I was in the in the middle of a mental juggling act. I was paying mind to where things were set up, what I was doing, and what still had to be done -- was everything connected to the right place and set on the same channel, were the cords out of the way, was it going to look alright, I had waited too long, the snack table still needs to be set up and food put out. I was desperately hoping that it would all work out. It had been two or more years since I last shot this kind of setup. All of this was swirling around in my head when suddenly for no reason known to me I looked over at the wall behind the camera and thought "I should put my 7ft. parabolic there." I didn't really have time to question my reasoning. I just followed my instinct and added another strobe with the 7ft parabolic and finished the setup.

I asked my neighbor to sit for me so I could fine tune the lights. Once I got everything ironed out -- triggers turned on and tuned to the same channel the strobes in the O.N. position, basically all the bugs ironed out -- this is what turned out:

I couldn't believe it. I had thrown a hail Mary pass and it turned into a touchdown.

To this day I'm not exactly sure why it worked. I just count my lucky stars that whatever circuitry that fired in my brain while I was stressed out and running around like a wild man made the right decision and that I trusted this instinct. If pressed I would say that I the reason the images have such a sculpted 3D look is that all the light is relatively harsh (but not too harsh) and somewhat specular. Add to this, using three front lights I was able to build the light in layers in such a way that avoided a flat look. The other cool thing is that these images looked just about perfect as they rolled off the camera. There is very little retouching to them.

Here are a couple more images from the shoot:

Here is the lighting setup:

I Might Be a Portrait Photographer

2011-06-08T00:01:00.000-07:00

Over the past year or so my focus has shifted toward portraits. For quite some time I viewed portraits as the weak link in my repertoire. Perhaps one reason for this perception is that I like to have a fairly controlled and ideally conceptual scenario to photograph. Shooting models in an environmental setting allowed me to do that. In this kind of scenario a model is akin to an actor -- a skilled individual who uses their talent to work toward the common goal of the creative situation. Often that entails working toward the director's vision. As the photographer doing self-directed work I was essentially the director.

For a very long time I held the notion that a portrait sitting removed all artifice and artistic constructions and left the photographer alone with the subject. It was sort of "Photography Unplugged" -- stripped down to the basics. Add to this the fact that the common thread in the world of portrait photography involves the building of rapport with one's subject. I don't think you can swing a dead cat around the photography blogosphere without knocking down scores of posts on that very subject. I found this all very intimidating because I felt as a person my greatest weakness was my ability to relate to others, especially strangers. The whole thing scared the hell out of me.

I can't say that I necessarily pursued portraits as a way to strengthen a weakness. I think it just sort of happened. My general interest changed, I grew and matured as a person, and I just gravitated slowly toward portraits. I have always had a difficult time describing my photography. I think Avedon said it best (and I paraphrase) that if I could describe it, I would have been a writer. But nowadays I feel a certain amount of comfort in stating that I'm a portrait photographer.

The really cool part of this is that as I have grown I've been able to relax my view of what exactly a portrait is. A portrait sitting doesn't have to be a magic act where I try in a very short amount of time to discover and display some fundamental truth about the person I'm photographing. I'm a photographer not a shaman. I can build as much artifice and artistic license as I like. I can build a set or find one that suits my needs. Everything I do is my choice and an extension of my vision. I just hope that my subject is willing to dance to my music.

Speaking of which I'd like to thank my friend and neighbor Topher who is shown above for sitting for me. I've made it a personal goal to try to shoot a formal portrait once every week or two. I'll be posting more of these as time goes by (I've been doing it for a bit so there's some catching up to do). But until then, here's another shot of Topher. Click the pics to see them large.

The portal to the divine is temporarily closed.

2011-04-26T13:15:00.000-07:00

The portal to the divine is temporarily closed. We’re sorry for any inconvenience as this outage is unexpected and took us completely by surprise. You have to understand that in the creative world this happens. The circle of creativity is much like the circle of life. An idea, like a child, if lucky is born and born into a nurturing environment where exploration and development are encouraged and supported. Creativity to me is a bit of a mystery.

I really don’t know much about the making of art. I have few peers that are artists and anything I’ve learned about the endeavor has been either by my own exploration or from devouring biographies and documentaries of personalities apparently important to the cultural identity. I would like to think that if I understand anything at all it’s my relationship with my imagination but I think in actuality I’m just blowing sunshine up my skirt. I grew up with a fundamental dire need to understand the physical world in terms of causality. I desperately wanted to understand how things worked. I would take apart toys and examine the gears and motors and plastic bits that linked them all together. I would question why, why are the guts of this machine packed together this way? I would play doctor and perform little experiments by picking and prodding at various pieces and seeing what happens. I would pull out parts and study the resulting behavior. I would try to put it all back together again. It was like trying to unexplode something. Sometimes it would work. Sometimes not. Mostly not and aside from being left with a pile of meaningless spare parts, I would be left still asking the same questions I started with: why this way? What was this person thinking when they set about to construct this thing and in the process orchestrated this alien mess of conjoined plastic and metal spinning with some purpose I would not comprehend.

I carried that desire to know and comprehend the hidden bridge between intent and how it was manifested as I grew from a child through adolescence into adulthood. Except now that I am where I am on the spectrum of human experience and age, I have extended that curiosity. I have extended it both inward to try to understand how I work but also to others to figure out how they work and finally the relationship between everything else. It’s kind of a heavy trip to lay upon oneself and it probably explains the vacillation of my general emotional climate between the states of stone cold serious and I don’t give a shit. It’s the singular forceful desire to understand the why to everything I observe and experience, that gravity of a deep inner sun so massive that no matter how I try to sway from it’s pull I am cannot escape this continual wondering. I am revolving around myself and at the same time struggling fiercely to disengage from the orbit.

There are times when my mouth salivates and my lips drool as I suck on the idea of jabbing a jagged hunting knife straight into the heart of Plato’s unexamined life. Perhaps in times like these maybe the idiots have it right that the meek deserve to inherit the world. Thinking about it otherwise just leads to frustration and it’s associated neurotic manifestations – drinking, drugs, cutting, protests, general mayhem and insanity. The real problem is when the inner self decides to take up arms against it’s own government. It’s times like these I am left asking the perennial question of why? I thought I understood it – my relationship to my imagination -- the causal link between “I think therefore I am” and “I am therefore I do”. It would be wonderfully divine to be able to understand the underlying topology and functioning of any relationship because (ideally) if one can understand the equation at the heart of whatever is examined that understanding can lead to influence and manipulation. This, of course, is the basis of power. What I covet is the power to create at will.

It has been my experience, however, that creativity is the result of unexplained response to external stimuli. I see something and if the wind is blowing from the right direction and the heavens are smiling and I’ve had my daily coffee then I have an idea as a result. And it’s an idea of something to create – a picture or a story. It’s as close as I’ve ever come to getting religion – this voodoo in my head that makes pictures appear out of nowhere. It’s the wizard behind the smokescreen of my imagination. But sometimes the wizard takes a nap and then all worry hell breaks loose. Questions start bubbling up from the brook of despair. The self starts wondering if it’s all over forever and ever. Did the wizard just step out for a smoke or did he skip bail and run for the hills? It’s a holy-shit kind of worry.

After a few days I get the identity DT’s – internal shakes and visions of vultures snacking on the carcass of my creative soul. It makes me wonder if the magic will happen again. It makes me want to give up. I’ve been through it so many times. And I’m sure I’m not alone in this. I’ve heard there are books written that are devoted entirely to telling readers how to get their mojo back; how to get the wizard back behind the screen; how to be creative. I haven’t read any of them but I know they’re out there because I’ve had people tell me there are. And there are times when I consider reading a few of them, I get that desperate. It’s like the idea of reading one of those books that advertise an all-you-can-eat magic formula on how to pick up chicks and how to get laid . But I just can’t stomach the idea inching through some collection of confectionary platitudes and wives tales. My data has to come from empirical evidence and experimentation. I have to do it the hard way. I’m not a desperate measures for desperate times kind of guy.

Right now the hard way is figuring out how to start it up again. Finding something small and working on it little by little. Making something that will hopefully build upon itself and entice the wizard back to his post. Finding something worth doing that will slowly rebuild the decay that apathy has wrought. Sand bags to shore up the levy and make it sturdy enough to stand upon and wave the flag that is the pride of creation. For me that lurch forward was writing this essay. I don’t know if anyone will find it meaningful. But really it’s value is personal in that it has been yet another first step. Another exercise in the exorcising of a demon.

The portal to the divine is temporarily closed, but we’re working to reopen it as soon as humanly possible.

Website Alpha Beta

2011-02-28T10:51:00.000-08:00

Just a brief word here that I'm putting some finishing touches on the website. Click the pic for a preview.

How I Simulated Shade in the Studio

2011-02-15T16:26:00.000-08:00

I’ve recently undertaken a new project that I’m tentatively calling On White. It’s a series of portraits taken against a simple, plain white background. The purpose of the project is for me to learn how to communicate with and talk to people more fluidly than I do now. To this end I decided that all technical aspects of both the photographs and the process of making them should be as simple as possible.

I have historically shot on gray because, for one thing, it simply just appeals to me. The second reason is that I mostly just don’t like black or white backgrounds. Perhaps it’s because most photographs I’ve seen shot on either background are poorly executed and usually just leave me cold. However there’s a certain aesthetic to white done well and I decided that I would use it. White is also a wonderfully neutral stage that hast he potential to get out of the way and let personalities dominate the image.

So that was that as far as deciding on the aesthetics of the photographs. As for the process of making the portraits, I needed to create a situation with as few obstructions between me and the subject as possible. Probably the key factor in the simplicity plan was getting the camera away from the front of my face. To do this I put the camera on a tripod and I sit on a stool behind it. Doing this keeps a clear line of sight between me and the person I’m talking to and photographing.

So for this project, ideally it would be just be the subject, my camera, and me. But considering I would be shooting in my studio, which is at best ISO 800 during standard graylight conditions (your average Seattle day, that is), I would need to use lights. At first I started with a 60” umbrella just above the camera. There were two problems: 1) it created some shadows I was unhappy with, and 2) there was a huge ugly thing between the subject and me. I went through many iterations of ideas: large diffusion panels placed on one side, then both sides of the camera. I thought about lighting the background separately and tried to do it using one strobe, but I nixed that in favor of trying to keep everything simple. I was kind of stumped. I know a little bit about lighting so this was almost a masculinity challenging moment.

After thinking about the situation a bit, I said out loud to myself “I need light to come from everywhere, like on an overcast day or in the shade.” And that was the moment it hit me: I would see if I could turn my whole studio into a light box. The walls are white, the ceiling is tall and white. I had everything I needed. All I had to do was to make light come from everywhere. So I turned the strobes around and pointed them at the far wall, took a few test shots, and that was that. I realized that I had simulated shade.

If you think about it for a moment and realize that shade is non-direct light that comes from everywhere then you’ll understand my madness. And that’s really what I want you to take away from this. I don’t want to give you a technique (i.e. turning strobes around and using the wall as bounce light). I want to give you insight into the thought process of realizing exactly what I needed (light from everywhere) and one way to go about achieving that.

Everyone talks about simulating sunlight. But no one talks about simulating shade. I guess it’s all in how you think about things.

Below is the setup seen from above:

BTW, I'm looking to expand this series and am actively looking for more people to photograph. If you or someone you know is interested, please drop me a line. You'll get a nice image to use for whatever purpose you'd like in exchange for your time.

Voices of the People

2011-01-05T15:20:00.000-08:00

My friend Tim and his buddy Mike have been working on a project lately where they find random people and video their story, they call it Voices of the People.

Here's the latest video in the series.

You can see the rest of the videos here.

All the Kings men could put it together again.

2010-10-19T11:04:00.000-07:00

In the last post I explained how I arrived at the final image of my Ibanez Artcore guitar. In the description I said I wasn't going to discuss the individual pieces but someone asked to see it, so here it is.

Once More with Feeling

2010-10-13T07:00:00.000-07:00

In the last post, I showed an image of my Ibanez Artcore electric guitar. The post was all tongue-in-cheeky. But after discovering a serious error in the image and some aesthetic consideration I decided a more serious do-over was in order.

I made the original image on a lark. The guitar had been sitting forever on its stand gathering dust. On occasion I would look at it and think to myself that I'd like to make a photograph of it some day. I get this thought often (not just about the guitar) but last week decided to act on my impulse and make a picture. I had an idea of what I wanted it to look like -- something dark with a hint of ethereal. The model in my head was the monolith from 2001 A Space Odyssey -- basically something spacey and backlit. So the lighting was solved and I moved on to the business of making of the picture. I'll leave the details out, but here's the setup and the original:

The main reason for the redo is because I missed something very important. I missed it when I set up the image. I missed it when I shot the image. I missed it when I processed the image. I missed it when I posted the image. What I missed was a piece of foam insulation underneath the bridge that had been there since I bought the guitar five years ago. I had put this image online not only on my Flickr stream but on my professional portfolio site. D'oh!

The secondary reason for the redo is that after some time spent reconsidering the image, I decided I wanted the chrome pieces and the white parts to pop. Basically I wanted them to stand out with a certain amount of crispness and forward presence. In order to do this I would have to make a separate exposure for each of the major components. I won't post the component pieces of the composite whole, but I'll describe them below.

1st exposure -- this exposure is the same as the original. I wanted the same side lighting with no specular reflections on the body itself. I wanted that warm, rich color to come through and be the central draw of the image.

2nd exposure -- this was for the bottom chrome piece. I put a medium softbox on the floor in order to get a specular reflection on the chrome.

3rd exposure -- this one was the most difficult due to the fact that the pickups were parallel to the lens/image plane. The ideal place for a light was right in front of the lens which kind of defeats the purpose of photographing the guitar. To overcome this, I put a 39"x72" translucent panel in front of the camera, but pulled the fabric from the frame just enough to slip the lens between them thus making a "hole" in my panel. I placed a strobe behind the camera/tripod and basically shot through the panel. This did the job.

Here's the final composite image:

I'm sure there's some kind of moral to be taken away from this story. It probably has something to do with paying attention to detail and taking the time to make the best image the first time. Sometimes that's not possible for whatever reason. However, this was on my dime so I had the time to shoot it again. I had the technology. Now I have a photo that I'm extremely proud of having made. In fact this lark of a photo (in spite of the ensuing do-over) is probably one of the most favorite of my images. I rarely create "beautiful" images, but this one is definitely beautiful (IMHO).

This is my guitar

2010-10-05T07:00:00.000-07:00

This is my guitar. There are many like it, but this one is mine. My guitar is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life. My guitar, without me, is useless. Without my guitar, I am useless. I must fire my guitar true. I must shoot straighter than my enemy who is trying to kill me. I must shoot him before he shoots me. I will...

My guitar and myself know that what counts in this war is not the rounds we fire, the noise of our burst, nor the smoke we make. We know that it is the hits that count. We will hit...

My guitar is human, even as I, because it is my life. Thus, I will learn it as a brother. I will learn its weaknesses, its strength, its parts, its accessories, its sights and its barrel. I will ever guard it against the ravages of weather and damage as I will ever guard my legs, my arms, my eyes and my heart against damage. I will keep my guitar clean and ready. We will become part of each other. We will...

Before God, I swear this creed. My guitar and myself are the defenders of my country. We are the masters of our enemy. We are the saviors of my life. So be it, until victory is America's and there is no enemy, but peace!

The irony of all this is that I can't really play. It is my guitar for real but it mostly just collects dust. I just wanted to make a pretty picture of it.

Thanks to Ken Brown for the inspiration.

Anatomy of a Composite

2010-09-21T07:00:00.000-07:00

One of the creative obstacles I constantly encounter is that my mind is much better skilled at making images than I am. It's kind of like how I'm a much better piano player in my head than in real life. Never having taken any lessons doesn't help much either. But when it comes to photography, I kinda have some chops. When it comes to digital artistry, I'm kind of a hack.

What is fortunate though, and I understand this, is that my mind makes pictures in the first place. The one shown up left is an example of something my brain thought up all on its own. Now I'll leave the whole philosophical debate over making vs taking pictures to the lint-pickers and naval-gazers. I'll just say that I consider my job is to make the pictures that my brain makes into a reality. I can't recall what it was that inspired this one. My brain works in mysterious ways. But what I can tell you is how I went about making it.

First I needed to figure out where to get the pieces. I had in my capacity to create almost all of the elements myself. There are four pieces to the image: sky, foreground, football player and rhino. The ground and sky were found locally at the dog walk area at Marymoor Park in Redmond, WA. The football player I shot in my studio. And the rhino was obtained from a stock image site.
So now the individual pieces:

Sky:

Foreground:

Football Player:

Rhino:

When I built the image in Photoshop, I wanted to keep all the components as independent of each other as possible. To make this happen, I put the elements into three groups: Background, Football Player, and Rhino. Doing this lets me work on each of the parts independently and maximizes flexibility as I can make changes down the line without interfering with the other components.

I started by masking the foreground so I could easily drop the sky in. I altered sky using the transform tools to match the foreground perspective. Then I used adjustment layers to get the tonality that I wanted. This was important to do first since the tonality of the "environment" would dictate the tonality of the other components.

The next step was to mask the football player and rhino. I shot the football player against the green screen to help with this process. I still don't have my green screen lighting down yet. But the lighting I used was sufficient enough so that I was able to use the selective color tool to do most of the heavy lifting in the mask making. The mask for the rhino was a bit more difficult. I used a color channel as the basis for the mask and then a combination of the magnetic lasso and pen tools to fine tune the edges.

Once all the pieces were ready, I placed them against the background. Since I knew the image I was making, I chose all the perspectives to match as closely as possible before hand. Luckily I was working with a single-point perspective and this really made things fairly easy as far as perspective matching goes. The only placement task left was to size down the football player and transform the rhino. I had to slightly transform the rhino to give a convincing feel that the two were actually head to head on the field. At this point I also matched the color and tonality of each piece to the background. I'm still working with individual groups and unflattened layers here, too.

The next part, and most difficult and probably the weakest element, was to create realistic looking ground contact so the two pieces didn't look like they were floating over the background. I'm not so good at the ground shadows but I got as close as I could. One of the reasons I chose non-directional lighting was to avoid complicated ground shadows and contact points. Hopefully with more practice (and either a drawing class) I'll get better. Or at least get to the point where I can afford a good retoucher.

The last part was overall tonality matching, component sharpening and unsharpening, and final touches on the ground contact points. At this point I'm working with a flattened layer since I use a universal approach to final touches. But before flattening (to a new layer -- I never destroy the underlying parts), I sharpened the rhino a bit and unsharpened the football player a bit to help match the resolutions at which each image was shot. After I thought I was done, I walked away and watched some TV for awhile before returning to the image to make any final adjustments I may have missed.

I think the image as present, although not perfect, is pretty good. At some point one needs to move along. But the key thing here (for me at least) was to get this image out of my head and onto electronic paper. That's where the true value of the work lies. That and now I have something pretty cool that I made.

A bit of non-photographic inspiration

2010-09-03T15:07:00.000-07:00

Many years ago I had the honor of taking a college physics class from a professor named Mario Savio. At the time he was quite a sight. The man couldn't have looked the part any better. He was probably in his 60's, tall and slight. His hair was a mix of white and gray and fell like a waterfall to his shoulders. When he walked his mane looked like it was following him like a puppy. But it turns out that this odd looking fellow had a rather interesting history. He had been the lead figure of the 1964 Free Speech Movement at the UC Berkeley.

I have a slight hero attraction toward certain types of characters. I would put Mario Savio right up there on the top shelf along with Richard Feynman. Both men were as well known for their non-physics activities as they were the physics (of course Feynman was a Nobel laureate). In Mr. Savio's case he was a master orator. I was awed by what I saw played out in the historic videos of the demonstrations. There as a particular piece that has stuck with me for the last twenty years. In this piece he talks about the University as a factory and how the students have the right to dissent and rise against the managers and board of directors. Here's the passage:

There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all! (video)

I've carried this around with me since I first heard it. Although it occasionally gets shuffled and lost or filed in the vaults and forgotten. Then, out of nowhere and apropos of nothing really, I stumble across it again. I think it's a great mantra for any movement where a limit has been reached and the status quo can no longer be tolerated. I think we've all experienced this to some degree.

I had the luck to have had several personal discussions with Mr. Savio over the course of the semester I had his physics class. We often talked about the ideal of the well-rounded scholar. Until recently, I've always had one foot in the technical/science world and one foot (more like a toe, actually) in the art world, with both feet separated by fear. This condition has been the source of much internal strife, struggle, and self-examination. But I remember one conversation where he turned me on to this poem by Langston Hughes -- A Dream Deferred. Here's the poem:

What happens to a dream deferred?Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.Or does it explode?

It's a great little bit of inspiration, a reminder of lost, shuffled, exiled, or mis-filed goals and dreams. It's something I think about when I wonder if I'm doing the right thing (or what's right for me at least). It was pinned to my cubical wall at several jobs. I think it just might be pinned to my soul.

Unconventional

2010-08-24T07:00:00.000-07:00

I was once reading a brief bio of a photographer whose name I can't recall off hand. In the text, the photographer was described as someone who photographs women of unconventional beauty. I found that phrasing kind of strange considering I found most of the subjects quite attractive. Regardless of how attractive I thought the subjects were, that phrasing seemed to me to be a work of art so I made sure to remember it.

Speaking of unconventional beauty, that's Dave up there on the left. I had the opportunity to make a few portraits of him this weekend. He may look like a meanie but he's a real nice guy and he just lights up when he laughs. I was invited out to spend a few days at my friend Ray's place in Sequim out on the Olympic peninsula. The idea was to just get away from the city for a few days do some sightseeing. Oh, and to take some portraits of Dave here.

With Dave's weathered face it would have been easy to go all Fast Company style and give him a hyper real look topped with a flood of rim light. But instead I decided to do something a little different. I've always liked the look of the seamless background plopped down in the middle of some location that's shot wide so you can see the surrounding environment. I bought a 4ft gray seamless with the intention of doing just that. We set up at EcycleNW, the local ecycling facility owned by Ray's friend Dan.

Here are a couple of the resulting photos:

You can see the rest of the images here.

Elements of Style

2010-07-20T07:00:00.000-07:00

A photographer’s style is a kind of visual signature that is imprinted upon the photographer’s work. Developing a style is one of the most often discussed topics of photography. It seems like you can’t swing a dead cat without whacking some photographer who’s concerned about their style.

People are concerned whether or not they have a style. If they have one, what is it? If not, will one ever develop? How do I copy the Dan Winters look or the Dave Hill look? Is my style cool or does it suck? The list of concerns goes far beyond these. Personally I think I'm probably known as a soft light guy. I mean, I love my Photek softlighters (and I've been using them ever since I tried to copy the Annie Leibovitz style). But recently I've faced a couple of situations where using big soft lights just wasn't going to work. Instead of forcing my style onto the situations, I adapted my style to fit them.

In the first situation, my friend Heather had just bought a Porsche Boxter S and wanted to create some sassy photos that would feature the car. The location was my hometown, which is located in the middle of the Central Valley of California. The weather was in the high 90's and due to logistics, we had to shoot in the mid-afternoon (the hottest part of the day). I was packing big lights as I knew I'd have to contend with the super bright sun. From experience I decided to use the 60" softlighter without the front diffuser -- I wanted a big, bright, specular light to contend with and balance (or slightly overpower) the sun. Problem is one little gust and my 60" umbrella blew right off my light. For some reason, the umbrella holder wouldn't lock down the umbrella shaft. At this point I immediately decided that basic hard light was the way to go. I put on a 7" reflector and called it good -- no wasting time messing around with gear.

On the camera camera I had a ringflash to help balance all the hard shadows that were bound to show up with two hard lights (the sun camera left and the bare strobe camera right). The following shots are also from the same shoot.

In the second situation I was doing a test shoot with my friends Ray Ketcham and Tim Engle. We were shooting on location in the industrial part of the city. We had two models and a somewhat interesting background of an RV and some discarded tires and other detritus along with some trees and bushes.

When I first set up I didn't have a clear vision of what I wanted to execute so I went with my fallback -- 42" softlighter on boom overhead. I shot a few frames and decided it just wasn't working -- so off with the softlighter and on with the reflector. The ambient was overcast clouds making way for the sun. I decided I would use the bare strobe to highlight my subjects and make them pop a little from the ambient. The following are two of the model shots from the test:

A funny story from the shoot: it turns out the RV was inhabited. The guy who lived there was Jack and he had a deal with the state. He'd keep an eye on the nearby facility which had been subject to quite a bit of vandalism and break-ins in exchange for setting up home on part of the land. We were a bit concerned about Jack at first since on-lookers can be a nuisance especially if they can throw you out of wherever you're shooting. Tim had a great idea to put him in some of the shots with the models and we were all best friends right after. Jack was a super nice guy and a gracious host. I decided to make his portrait in a little area that I had been eyeing for awhile as a potential background (for some reason the area just spoke to me).

I shot Jack with with a 42" softlighter (for fill) and a bare strobe with 7" reflector (and 20° grid) as key. The fill was camera left centered at head level. It was there to lift the shadows and also light the background. The key was camera right a little below eye level to to get under Jack's hat. This combination of soft and hard light really brings out the texture and creates a 3D look without super hard shadows.

Here's Jack:

And here's Ray in the same setup:

I don't think any of the above images would be considered my normal style. But in reality they were informed by my aesthetic and I'm sure my fingerprint is in there somewhere even though they look different than images I've created in the past.

The bottom line is that it's crucial to be adaptable to whatever situation you find yourself photographing. I'm fortunate that I was able to figure out how to make these situations work by abandoning preconceptions and rethinking my approach. And now my style has been slightly expanded because of it.

And Now for Something a Little Different

2010-05-26T14:29:00.000-07:00

It's been awhile since I've done any creative work. I've been concentrating on the non-photographic bits and pieces of photography while I let my creative side take a break. Ok, so it's great excuse for being in a bit of a creative slump, but it's the story I'm sticking to for now.

The photograph at left is inspired mostly by the great weather we had here in Seattle in the past two weeks. Until today it's been extremely bright in these parts and that ultra-brightness has contributed to my current perception of reality. Usually I have to ability to see things not just as they are but to see potential, photographically and creatively speaking, for what could be. Sometimes a city street is more than a city street if you think about it in the right way.

But lately when I drive around it seems to me that the landscape is exactly what is seems to be. In fact it often has a sense of ultra-reality, like I'm driving on a movie set and all the buildings are fake and nothing exists beyond their facades. The only thing that's real is me, my car, and the street I'm driving on. It's like I'm driving around in a Dave Hill photo with the high pass sharpening turned up to 11. I attribute this to both a state of mind and to the abundance sunshine in the city of rain. So now you know the state of mind I've been in for a bit. Hang on because it comes into play again later in the story.

Yesterday I lent my studio out to my friend and fellow photographer John Galfano. He had a shoot scheduled with Lauren and needed a place so I offered my studio (and whatever else we could find in the area). Last week when we made arrangements he asked if I wanted to shoot her also. I politely declined since I didn't really have any ideas to shoot. I said just use the studio and I'll hang out and help if I can. I actually like playing technical consultant when I can so I was fine with that. But in between last week and this that changed a bit.

Like I said I had been experiencing the landscape as a sense of hyper-reality but I didn't know what to make of it. I figured it was circumstance and that was it. But as I was sitting around the day before the shoot I had an idea that this sense of hyper-reality lent itself to being on the verge of a dream-like state. Then I had an idea. What popped into my noggin was something along the lines of the shot above -- a very high key, faded out shot of a woman. I was thinking that high brightness could somehow suggest other-worldliness about the scene. The trouble was I would have to do it all in post and I wasn't sure how to go about it.

So toward the end of the day we went up on the roof of my building. We had to descend three flights of stairs then turn around and climb up five stories to the roof. This meant there was no way we were going to carry C-stands and studio lights up there. We went back to the basics and took a couple speedlights and a mini-boom. I decided it was there that I would make the frames for the shot.

So here are the technical details:

This shot a composite of two frames -- I locked the camera down on a tripod and shot one frame with the model and lightstand (it had to be in the frame due to the short length of the mini-boom) and one frame with nothing in the scene exposed a stop above ambient. I needed as much information as I could get in the frames without underexposing or blowing out. The lighting is a single light source composed of two speedlights ganged and shot into a reflective umbrella high and overhead in front of the subject.

In post I did all I could to make the image as high key as possible without completely blowing everything out. This meant lots of curves layers set to screen blending mode and lots of selective masking. I got the image to what I thought was a final state and then decided to play with it a bit. I pulled the "final" image back into photoshop along with the background-only image. Something wasn't quite right and I was messing around to see if I could get it settled. In doing so I had a nice accident: in changing the opacity of the top level (with the model) she became semi-transparent. It was an unintended effect but I liked it so I stuck with it. To give the overall image a dreamy feel I applied a radial blur to the background along with some general tonality changes.

It was a fun challenge but I'll leave it to the reader viewer to judge whether I succeeded.

Wedding Portrait in a Japanese Shrine

2010-04-20T07:00:00.000-07:00

A few months ago I was contacted by Will who inquired about hiring me to photograph his marriage to Asumi.

To be honest I kinda freaked a little. Weddings, you see, scare me. It's the high pressure, once-in-a-lifetime nature of them that does it. Not only that, weddings are just not my forte. I'm a portrait/fashion/lighting guy. I've shot one for a friend, as a favor sort of thing. But the idea of doing it for complete strangers is not for me.

So back to Will and Asumi.

Will is photographer himself and it turns out that we actually attended the same Strobist seminar a few years ago when David Hobby was in town. The thing is, Will knew why he was contacting me -- even though I tried to tell him a couple times I probably wasn't the right guy. He was actually looking for a portrait photographer (ok, that's me, I'm cool) to commemorate the occasion of his marriage to Asumi. The ceremony was to take place at the Tsubaki Grand Shrine of America, a Shinto Shrine.

They only wanted three images: two group portraits (one with family and one with all the guests) and one of the two of them in the rural setting of the shrine.

Three images? That's it?

Yep.

Really?

Yep.

Ok, I can handle that.

We discussed the details over coffee and basically they were handing all creative control to me. They were hiring me mainly for the portrait of the two of them and to give them the Ogalthorpe look. This really didn't help my tension much as I was hoping for a little direction.

The ceremony took place last Monday. To be honest I was nervous up until I showed them the final images. I'm confident in my ability to produce my own work but when it comes to something so meaningful to two people, I'm actually very concerned about delivering images in line with expectations -- theirs and mine.

The shot below, they said, is exactly what they were envisioning when they hired me. I was so very pleased to have met their expectations so well. I want to thank Will and Asumi for inviting me to be part of this particularly special day.

I also want to thank Jill Evans, for assisting me and doing a wonderful job. If you need a capable assistant with a sharp eye drop Jill a line.

Turning Vaporware into Reality, or Stop Blowing Smoke My Skirt, Ogalthorpe!

2010-04-15T04:00:00.000-07:00

A few days ago my friend Chris emailed me the text of a post from the Box of Crayons Great Work Blog entitled Excuses, Vaporwork, and What You Can Do Now. Basically the post compares great work to vaporware -- that stuff that's greatest thing since sliced bread, promises you the world but doesn't really exist except maybe in somebody's head -- and how some people keep talking about their dreams or goals but let excuses get in the way of any real progress.

It got me thinking about my own progress and where I think I'm going.

Back in mid-February before my grandmother passed away I was on a roll. I had a posse, I was talking to business people, and I was talking about writing a business plan. Then I kinda gave up for awhile to basically completely tear apart my loft and put it back together again (although it does fit better now). After that it was time to figure out where the hell I left off.

I was feeling kinda lost and blown off course. So instead of trying to figure out where I was, I decided I had to do something -- anything -- that moved me in a forward direction. After all even the smallest step is still a step.

As photographers, we love our art first and learn how to participate in the business world as a necessity -- almost as an afterthought. We pour endless hours into learning technique, practicing, learning software, buying gear, thinking we're going to be the next Dan Winters. And all that's done just at the enthusiast level. I mean you might be a very damn serious enthusiast, but you're not in the game to compete with ole Dan just because you can copy his style. I know. I tried (see the picture above, yo.). There's a difference between and amateur and a professional.

"An amateur plays for fun. The professional plays for keeps." -- The War of Art.

I think I'm starting to feel the desire to play for keeps.

How?

Well, there's so much to do on both sides of the fence: the art and the business. I still don't have a portfolio. I have a website that I hate. Three guys on Flickr know who I am. None of them want to hire me. There's the business plan to write. Ah, the business plan.

Surely writing that will save me, right?

Maybe, maybe not.

Instead of trying to pull my idea of a photography business out of thin air and put it into a business plan, I chose a few levels of abstraction closer to the asphalt. You see, I've been spending some quality time with lynda.com getting to know my new best friend, Quickbooks.

Why the hell am I doing that you might ask?

Well, if you think about the reason for a business plan -- to figure out what kind of business you want to do and where you'd like to be in, say, five years -- there's some heavy abstract thinking that goes into it. In my mind some navel gazing that I seemed to be getting me nowhere. I really needed more basic answers to the questions involved in writing the plan (it's the engineer in me -- I have to know some things on a very fundamental level). And believe it or not, Quickbooks is forcing me to find those answers. Basically by trying to wrap my head around Quickbooks, it's asking me to figure out the following in very concrete terms:

Where is the money coming from?

that is, who are my clients and who do I want as my future clients.

What kind of services am I going to provide?

I have to have something to put on the invoice right?

If someone asks me to do work, am I prepared to do it?

I have to have something to put on the estimate, right?

Can I afford to pay my rent?

that is, am i making any money at this thing?

So basically if I put in a line item for "group portrait" I have to ask myself a few things: do I want to do group portraits? What other kinds of portraits do I want to do? Is this ever going to get me into the advertising world? What kind of material should I be shooting that will?

Sounds crazy -- kinda like framing a house at the same time you're drawing up the plans -- but it seems to be working.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go figure out my accounts payable from a hole in the ground.

New Work for The Cynch

2010-04-13T04:00:00.000-07:00

Cynthia Kelly is the first "model" I ever shot. There's a funny story behind our meeting. I had placed my profile on ModelMayhem sometime in 2008 kind of as a lark. I don't know how many months passed before I heard from Cynthia. The irony is I was on vacation in Barcelona, Spain. I had stepped into an internet cafe to check my email and send some travel updates when I got the message from her that she'd like to shoot.

She thought I was BSing her about being in Barcelona.

I wasn't.

It's fun to talk about now because it seems so long ago.
At the time Cynthia was a marketing major at the University of Washington. We had shot a few times and remained in contact over the years. In fact she helped out with some composite work I did late in 2009.

Well, Cynthia has graduated and has decided to focus her energy on a geek girl blog called the Cynch. Last week Cynthia contracted me to make some new images for the blog. We decided to use the geek girl sexiness in a tech context. I think the images turned out rather well. They are shown below and also I encourage you to visit the photos page on the Cynch.

Thanks to Cynthia for a fun shoot.

Ogalthorpe, Ogalthorpe wherefore art thou Ogalthorpe?

2010-04-06T08:00:00.000-07:00

I've been in a bit a creative lull for several weeks. About a month ago I had to divert my energy to family matters and after the matter was put aside (but not settled) I found myself standing around trying to figure out where the heck I had left off on the path I was on previously. It seems I had lost my bearings.
I further distracted myself by engaging in a severe restructuring of my living space. One can easily extrapolate that the tearing apart and re-ordering of my physical surroundings was clearing a manifestation of some inner turmoil. It's easily understandable. My grandmother was like a second mother to me. I spent a good deal of time in helping with her care in her last year. When she died the whole dynamic of the family changed in an unknown degree. It seems fitting that as a person governed equally by emotion and logic that some kind of psychic storm would blow into town. It did but fortunately it didn't come in the form of a breakdown but of a humungous restructuring -- first external but indirectly internal.

So today I finished the last of the major rework on the loft. All is clean and order has been somewhat imposed. So now I find myself feeling the pull to get back to my work. Both the work of becoming a professional photographer and also the work of being a photographer. The first is a matter of business acumen. The latter is a matter of the soul. It's about doing the work that I'm meant to do. The trouble is trying to remember what that is or at least figure out what it's going to be. In my life changing, the nature of me and what comes out of me has changed. I'm beginning to feel the slowing of aging and an increase in maturity. This has lead me to wonder if I want to shooting hot nekkid models in a provocative manner. I like LaChappelle, but I'm not sure how much I want to channel him into my work. Well some days it's that and other days I think WTF? I should shoot what I feel like I want to shoot. And that's probably what I might end up doing (hopefully), But right now the idea bank is a little thin. Which leads me to the idea of influence (again).

Tonight I did a flickr search for "Avedon". My thinking was that I'd go straight to the top of the heap and see if I could reap any new insight or inspiration from the results. And it struck me as interesting how much mimicry came up in the results. Based on what I saw I would hope Avedon would be flattered. Of course the images were all over the place in regards to quality and execution. But I still found the phenomenon rather interesting. I mean, I've been there -- trying recreate the lighting style of Leibovitz, Dan Winters, whoever strikes my interest at the time. But I'm at a peculiar crossroads -- I'm digging inside looking for some original content hoping to strike gold, not strike out. The way I see it I'm part amateur -- but I've outgrown the training wheels of Flickr, strobist.com, meetups and such -- and good enough to go pro. But I'm also below the radar of the professional world. I've got the talent but what's left is to do the work. So as much as I appreciate the work of Avedon, Leibovitz, LaChapelle, etc. etc, it's time to put their books away and open my own.

To that end I've lined up a couple of shoots with absolutely no clue as to what I will be photographing. I could sit here and pontificate all night long about the fuzz in my navel or I can get off my ass and do something. The first step is the most awkward. And it's especially frustrating when you've taken that step several times in the past. But what I'm thinking is that if I just do something -- anything -- it puts me on my way to somewhere.

Ogalthorpe Interrupted

2010-03-21T23:27:00.000-07:00

I've been on a bit of a hiatus from photography and having a tough time getting back on track. At the end of February I was doing rather well. I was on the verge of writing a business plan and getting my portfolio and workshops up and running. I had to make an unplanned visit back to California to my hometown. Some of you probably know that my grandmother has been ill for quite some time. She passed at the end of February. She was the strongest woman I've ever known and even though I will miss her tremendously I find great solace in knowing that she is no longer suffering. The week following her funeral I went to Lake Tahoe to be with my closest friends to celebrate two of us turning 40.

I think it's all finally catching up with me. This weekend I tore apart my loft to make some much needed improvements to its basic livability and usability. The living area is getting some carpet and a slight makeover. The studio is getting some organizational improvements that will make storage functional and I will finally be getting some things of the floor that have been taking up space.

I guess this renovation is a physical manifestation of the existential state that I'm currently experiencing.

I want to thank everyone who've been supportive. It's been a very trying three months but I'm confident that I've come out of the struggle a stronger more confident person. Now the thing to so is get back to whatever it was I was doing before I was interrupted.

So please pardon my dust. I have some more work to do.

The Epistemology of Me

2010-02-26T04:00:00.000-08:00

Identity is an idea I've been struggling with since I decided to take photography seriously. The first thing I really wrestled with is what name to use professionally -- Ogalthorpe or Jeremy Center. Every bit of sensible advice I received when I asked the question publicly said to use my real name. I decided to do something different. I used the name I was more known for hoping it catches on in the real world.

The second biggest concept I've been trying to wrap my head around is the answer to the question "what do you shoot?" And that's where the idea of the elevator speech came into play. From my perspective the most useful result of refining the elevator speech isn't that I'll be able to make the quick pitch -- it's that I will be able to know myself and know what I do in such a way that I can explain it to other people. Left on the chalkboard of Richard Feynman, one of my personal cultural heroes, after he died is the following phrase "what I cannot create, I do not understand." And I think that's a powerful notion.

Understanding can come on many levels. Right now I've come to understand that I have a rather unique outlook regarding the creation of photographs. It's more than having an eye. It's like having a theme and that theme is common to the images I create even if the subject matter is not. Whether it's a location shot of a fashion model, a portrait of a family member, a photo of some food on a plate, or a goldfish in a martini glass, there's a certain energy that's a part of all the images. Is it the lighting? Is it the composition? Is it the execution? I don't know exactly. But there's something there I can't quite put my finger on and that makes it difficult to put into words.

So here I am still working on the elevator speech -- but that's ok. What it means is that part of my processor is constantly churning over what it is I do. It's crunching all the various aspects of I do looking for an essence to distill. And all the while I'm getting closer to knowing who I am and what I do. I'm getting closer to understanding. And when I understand what it is I do, I can create the few sentences that really capture the essence of what I do and it will allow me to communicate that to other people. For now I guess I just have to let the images speak for themselves.

I've got style

2010-02-25T18:00:00.000-08:00

This afternoon I was reading a post on Mashable.com about building trust with social media. In the text of the post were 4 words that stuck out and they didn't have anything do with trust or social media. The words were:

intonation can convey passion

This short passage got me to thinking about a couple of images I created recently. The one above and this one:

Intonation in speech is used along with rhythm and stress to convey the speaker's emotional state and to add emphasis or focus to what is being said. If we think of tonal range in a similar manner we can craft a certain lighting style to emphasize what it is we are trying to say in a particular image. I've always said that composition, lighting, and emotion are as inseparable as mind, body and spirit. They're all intertwined and each affects the other. Often in an intangible fashion. In photography it's possible that poor execution of just one of those elements can seriously handicap the ability to convey full impact of the image.

I think what also struck me is that there is always a certain richly emotional component to my images. And that is especially emphasized when photographing scenes like these two because the lighting was crafted specifically to complement the body language of the subjects. Additionally the composition was chosen to draw attention specifically to the subject but was unlit so as not to distract from the main focus.

At this point I think these images are significant in that they demonstrate an evolution and example of my style. What these images do is they tell a story in a single frame. I can't say what story -- that's left to the observer. I'm fortunate that creativity for me is often an execution of ideas that just happen to pop into my head. The only reason there is an image of me is that I shot myself as a proof of concept in order to show it to prospective persons I'd like to use as subjects since I'd like to make a series of this. It just so happens the test shot is good enough to keep.

Creating these images has helped me further define what it is I do. In making them I know that I make images that are self-contained and tell some kind of story in a single frame by presenting to the viewer a single frame of deeply emotional content. I often create images with no particular back story to tell. I'm following what happens to pop into my head. But instead of handing someone a particular storyline, it's like I'm giving them a feeling in an image.

This process has helped me to understand that I do indeed have a vision even if I can't express it in a few sentences.

Lighting Photostroll Talking Points

2010-02-18T14:48:00.000-08:00

For those who will be attending or are contemplating attending the Lighting Photowalk this Saturday, here are the talking points I'll be addressing before we head out on the walk.

Looks like we're going to have some nice weather so the sun will present us with a very interesting challenge and a greater opportunity to practice our lighting skills.

PHOTOWALK NOTES

A. WHY WE LIGHT

a. To be able to fully control the luminance content of the image.

b. Create a particular mood, feeling, or emotion

i. Drama, mystery, comedy, romance, horror

c. Underscore the composition

i. Add emphasis to a particular part of the image

d. Reveal Form and Texture

B. CAMERA CONTROL

a. Without Consideration of Using Flash:

i. Aperture – Controls Depth of Field

ii. Shutter Speed – Controls the Capture of motion (blur or fast moving objects)

iii. ISO – Controls overall Light Sensitivity

b. With Flash

i. Aperture – Controls Dept of Field and Flash power

ii. Shutter Speed – Controls motion capture and ambient exposure

iii. ISO – Controls overall light sensitivity

C. QUALITIES OF LIGHT

a. Hard Light

i. abrupt transfer edge from highlight to shadow areas.

ii. Often higher contrast

iii. Good for revealing texture

b. Soft Light –

i. Wide transfer edge between highlight and shadow areas.

ii. Generally medium to low contrast

iii. Minimizes flaws and imperfections by providing self-fill

D. LIGHT CONTROL

a. Effective Size of the Light

i. Physical dimensions of the light source

1. Bare light/attached modifiers affect actual size of the light source

ii. Distance to subject

1. The closer the light source is to the subject, the larger it becomes relative to the subject (within reason)

b. Camera vs. Light angle

i. Shadows are created when the camera position and flash position are not on the same axis.

E. BALANCING AMBIENT AND FLASH

a. “Balance” is a bit of misnomer. Balance does not have to imply equal luminance of flash and ambient.

b. Unbalancing may be a better term since we may want either ambient or flash to dominate.

F. CREATING DRAMA

a. Tension is created by the placement of shadows (camera/flash angle)

b. High Contrast adds to the sense of tension (hard light)

c. Mystery is created by what is not revealed (camera/flash angle)

The Elevator Speech

2010-02-18T04:00:00.000-08:00

Shroud
Originally uploaded by Felix Meyer

UrbanDictionary.com defines Elevator Speech as the following:

An extremely pithy description of something, prepared in advance to be used in situations where time is of the essence. The term comes from the hyopthetical situation of somebody seeing a pin or something similar on your person that arouses their curiosity while in an elevator (such as a Unitarian Universalist chalice pin), and then asking you what exactly the pin stands for. Because Unitarian Universalism would be rather difficult to explain in the remaining duration of the elevator ride, the prepared elevator speech serves to provide as best of an answer as possible in the available time.

I've often struggled come up with an elevator speech of my own and never have come up with anything I like. I think it's important to have such speech not so much because you're gonna want to sell somebody on yourself. But mostly because developing the speech lets you narrow down what exactly it is you do and it forces you to distill it down to its essence. It would be like having to tell me what what you do over Twitter. Being limited to a few sentences really makes you think hard about yourself, your work, your goals, and how you communicate. It cuts out the fat, so to speak.

Personally it's been a challenge because I think I have a very well defined photographic style and it's hard to communicate that style without actually showing anyone some photos. I can't think how many I've started and but tossed it into the round file. Anyway, here's the one I'm working on now:

I create images, primarily environmental portraits, which possess an inherently strong emotional content. I use and craft lighting to reinforce the emotion and composition for superior dramatic impact. I strive to create images have the highest production value and would be well suited for display in a magazine, brochure, or a billboard.

What do you think?

Do you have an elevator speech? I'd love to read it in the comments.

Nothing Up My Sleeve and it's a Problem

2010-02-16T04:00:00.000-08:00

It's been a long week. So long I skipped a party Sunday night so I could rest. This last week was spent taking meetings, talking to people, doing some research, and of course getting out a little.

As I've said before, when you're looking at who you want in your posse it's a really good idea to find people who are outside of your normal circle. Someone asked me if I've been talking to a lot of photographers as part me figuring out what direction I want to migrate. To be honest, I haven't talked to many.

One might think it's a good idea, kinda like a meta-apprenticeship or something. One of the problems with talking to other photographers is that there's a good chance the conversation will end up just talking photography. That probably doesn't sound like such a bad idea since, hey, we become photographers not because we want to make a fortune and become barons of art, but because we love it and are passionate. At some level it's who we are and some of us have a fundamental drive to make it what we do

So like I said the problem is there's a good chance you're going to talk about the art. Certainly there's a place for that conversation. But just getting out there are some questions that really need to be asked. And sometimes it's either difficult to figure out what questions to ask of yourself or perhaps answer them when someone else asks them of you.

So who have I been talking to? Well I've talked to a photographer who has a nationally known blog, a local project management consultant, and an entrepreneur who has an extremely successful Ebay business but is transitioning toward venturing into the blogosphere. And here's what each asked me:

Photographer -- What do you want to shoot?

Consultant -- Do you have business plan?

Entrepreneur -- What are you doing every day to drive people to you?

Me (in order) -- Uhhhhh, Uhhhhh, Uhhhhh.

Yeah, I got nothin'. And that's a problem. Because if I can't answer these questions I'm not going to get anywhere.

So I got to thinking, and I have some tentative answers (and that's quite ok). The reason I think it's ok at this stage to not have some concrete answers is that answering them actually involves a process in order to arrive a definitive answer. So here are my answers and the implications of each for this particular juncture:

Photographer -- I want to shoot advertising. I've always wanted to be an advertising photographer. Although I like to shoot portraits the work I admire the most and would strive work toward producing often depicts content that is usually a juxtaposition of objects presented in a unique, creative, and completely unexpected way. The composite work I've done is the closest to this type of work I've produced.

Caveat -- sure I'd like to be the next Chase Jarvis from a business perspective, but nobody in their right mind is going to hire someone that hasn't proven themselves. So my job is to find the small jobs. Find the agencies who are willing to take a chance with some small work. Or even shoot some some campaigns that can't afford an A, B, or C list photographer and maybe even shoot them for free as a way of getting a foot in the door. Or more appropriately showing what I can do.

Consultant -- No. I don't have a business plan. But I've bought a book specifically about writing business plans and there are plenty of resources on the web. Even though I don't have a business plan or even any business, I understand that the process of writing one will really help me focus on what I want to shoot and who I want to be my clients.

Caveat -- I have to actually read the book. I've started but some other things have popped up and I've directed my attention to them. It might be a good idea if I can prioritize and make a schedule so that I am able to dedicate time to work on the more important tasks leaving the shiny object tasks for the time in between the important ones.

Entrepreneur -- I have a blog and I use Twitter extensively. Facebook kind of alludes me and right now it just echoes my tweets. I've gotten a lot of good information from Twitter and am looking for more interesting people to follow.

Caveat -- I feel I'm a genuine, up front guy. My blog is honest. It's not made up. It doesn't exist to create income or for the sole purpose of marketing. It's a reflection of who I am. The other thing is that like many people I get wrapped up in my own stuff and don't have as much of a chance as I'd like to be much a part of the community as I'd like. It's one of the areas I'm focusing on as a way to spend priority time.

So that's where I am right now. I've had some people ask me some questions that I need to find answers for. But again, it's a process. It requires discovery. It requires research. It requires me.

Do you have a plan? If so I'd like to hear about it in the comments.

Taking Money Out of the Picture

2010-02-09T04:00:00.000-08:00

Wi$e-Guy Money Roll
Originally uploaded by Gnerk

A few days ago I was out running some errands when I saw the billboard for the lottery. It's one of those boards that tells you what the current jackpot value is in ten foot tall numbers. It read 32 million. That's a tidy sum. you figure you take home maybe 50% after taxes. Except for Paris Hilton, who couldn't live a lifetime on $16M? I know I could.

What would you do with that kind of dough? Travel the world, pay off your student loans? Give to charity? Throw a party guaranteed to put you in the history books? The possibilities are almost endless.

But what if you still wanted to be a photographer?

So after I saw that sign I asked myself the following question: What if money wasn't part of the equation, what would I do then? What kind of photographer would I be and how would I go about becoming it?

The basis of the question stems from a conversation I was having last week with a much more experienced and established photographer. In the conversation he was saying that the thing to do is figure what kind of good one can do with the camera and move in that direction. My counter argument was that he and I were in different positions being that I pretty much needed to pay rent and buy food and I had to do it with paying photography gigs. I'm a starving artist nowadays, no longer a fat wallet engineer. I was talking about getting the book, pounding the pavement, trying to get meetings, etc. ad nauseum.

When I saw the sign and recalled the conversation it occurred to me that I was thinking and speaking out of fear. I was afraid that I wasn't going to make it. That doing the same thing everyone else is doing to get noticed is going to make me homeless and destitute. But really there is no way to know that. This kind of thinking is a fundamental cognitive distortion. There's no truth in it and it's just plain bad thinking. All it yields is stress and anxiety. After all I need to focus my energy on actually working; not worrying about working.

So what would I do if money wasn't part of the equation? I'm not sure how to answer that right now. It's something I'm letting my subconscious stew on for awhile. But I have a feeling it will mean something along the lines of getting involved with something that's a little bigger than me. I think it means finding a place somewhere in Seattle where my skill with a camera can benefit whatever community I end up joining. Where making excellent photographs can give something to further the richness of the experience of the people around me.

At this point you might be inclined to ask "how are you going to keep a roof over your head if you take this path". To this I also have no answer right now. Money will have to be part of the equation at some time. Otherwise you might see me on the street trying to wash your windshield with a dirty newspaper or explain why aperture controls flash power for a buck. And really, nobody wants that -- that would just be too embarrassing for everyone involved.

So I'll put it to you:

What path would you choose to take if money were out of the picture?

(Replies in the comments are quite welcomed)

Think Different. Act Different. BE Different.

2010-02-05T15:45:00.000-08:00

JennyGG, a very talented and well sought after Seattle-based wedding photographer made this tweet a few days ago. I had read something similar to that a long time ago and it has always stuck with me. The phrasing I know is this:

To get what you've always gotten, do what you've always done.

Pretty simple yet somewhat profound for an aphorism. I've always read this in the contra positive - that is that what I've always gotten is something I don't really want to be getting or at least I'd like to be getting something different. Realizing this is a kind of harbinger of change or at least a recognition that something needs to change. And really that something can be anything about your life: the nature of your relationships with other people, your general outlook on life, or even the kind of work you do and how you go about doing it.

In trying to change my life both personally and professionally (especially professionally) I've been talking to people about the nature of business and how they do whatever it is they do. It's part of expanding my posse. It's one thing to talk to others who are in the same position as you are but I think it's much better if you can talk to people who are where you want to be.

Then today I came up with my own little aphorism:

Think Different. Act Different. BE Different.

At the root of any action - positive or negative - are your thoughts. They really affect how you see yourself, how you see the world, and how you act. Think negatively, act negatively -- voila you're a negative person. Think in a rut, act in a rut, be in a rut. Or vice versa think positively... etc.

One of the problems I see about becoming a professional photographer isn't necessarily that it's a competitive field. It's that in this case competitive to me means there is an ocean of fish trying to swim the same direction and if you want to swim you better follow everybody else. In the case of photography that's get a book, pound the pavement, send out fliers and mailers, write a blog, blah, blah, blah. How am I supposed to get noticed doing this? I have no idea.

The hardest part is to come up with the idea of something different. This idea doesn't have to be revolutionary or earth shattering. It just has to be the "a-ha" to get you moving along a different path. It's something I'm trying to figure out this very instant. I certainly don't have a concrete answer to what I might do differently. The most important part here is that I'm asking myself to think differently than I have in the past and hopefully different than most others are thinking now. It might seem silly, but I'm thinking about thinking differently. I can only hope for the momentum and the luck to actually have the process come to fruition. Because when one starts thinking differently, it starts one down the path to actually being different.

And maybe if you start thinking differently and acting differently you can finally stop getting what you've always gotten and get something you actually want.

Photowalk Intensive Workshop

2010-02-01T22:57:00.001-08:00

If you'd like to participate in a flash-based photowalk like the one in my previous post, please feel free to drop me an email. This will be a paid event at $60 per person. I'll start the photowalk by explaining the interaction of flash and ambient and camera control. I'll also talk about use of modifiers such as snoots, grids, and umbrellas. After the introduction we'll head out on the walk and make some pictures. I expect the entire workshop to last 3-4 hours but my goal is to make sure everyone walks away with a better understanding of how to use their flash for dramatic effect and how to balance ambient with flash so it may run over.

So take a walk in my shoes, have some fun, and learn to add drama to your images with flash.

The first workshop is slated for the weekend of February 20. It will be on Saturday, Sunday, or both depending on interest and participant availability.

Take a Walk in My Shoes

2010-02-01T13:32:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago I went on a solo photowalk. It's something I hadn't done for quite sometime and I figured it would be good practice since I hadn't shot anything for quite awhile. I got my start doing street photography so I thought it would be fun to go back and challenge myself to see differently and see if I could come up with something decent out of the event. Even if I failed I figured it was better to try and not succeed than to not do anything at all.

I had been struggling with some personal things as well as some professional stuff. I was trying to figure out how to give a lighting workshop that wouldn't just be strobist jr. or strobist lite. Then it hit me.

Could a photowalk be turned into a hands-on lighting workshop?

I think people can get a little hung up on shooting other people. I mean there's nothing wrong with that. Heck, it's what I do. But when it comes to learning the principles of lighting it doesn't matter what you shoot, the physics and and the rules are the same. So as I walked along shooting only ambient I wondered to myself: could I use a flash to add drama to a rather plain image of a found object to create interest and drama and could I teach that to other people.

Several weeks passed from that day as I did other things and thought about this "off-line", letting it stew. But yesterday I finally put the hammer down and tried it out. I met up with my friend Chris for some coffee and a stroll through Georgetown. I brought with me a single bare flash on a stand, a Canon 20D with a wide angle lens, and two pocket wizards. There was only one way to find out if my idea would work and that was to attempt a proof of concept. I had no idea what would happen. Luckily I discovered it would work.

The following are images from that stroll. All of the subject matter was found in various locations in Georgetown. No shot was planned in advance. I just happened upon something that struck me as interesting and I tried to figure out how to use flash to make it more interesting.

Broken-Down Mercedes Convertible.

Airstream Trailer with Chair

Broken Down Mercedes Dash Board

Doorway with Wine Bottle

Diesel Truck Hitch and Transmission

Do YOU Have a Posse?

2010-01-27T15:50:00.000-08:00

This afternoon I was having lunch with a fellow photographer. It was a beautiful spring-like day here in Seattle and we were dining at a restaurant overlooking the north end of Lake Union. We were talking about various aspects of our struggle to figure out and make it in the photographic business.

I think I was lost in a bit of thought somewhere on the crests of the wind-stirred wave as I stared out the bay windows.

Then it hit me.

This was great! I was talking to someone about what he's doing to figure out how to grow his business. He's asking me what kind of photographer I want to be. I shared with him some influences of mine and some social networking information I had received from Photoshelter. He was giving me feedback on my Lighting 101 demonstration and my plans for lighting workshops.

There are a couple other photographers I've been talking to in this manner. I think getting together with your peers can really lead to some positive moves. You never know what you're going to learn.

What l learned was that I have a posse.

Do you?

Ogalthorpe's 4-point Lighting Process

2010-01-22T17:07:00.000-08:00

For quite some time when talking to my friends (especially photographer friends) about transitioning into a career as a professional photographer I've often said that I want to be a photographer, not an educator. But now I'm not so sure.

It's been pointed out to me, and I've subsequently discovered that I'm actually a fairly good educator. And that I have some knowledge worth sharing and a way of looking at that knowledge in a fairly unique way.

So I figured the most logical place for me to start would be photographic lighting instruction. However, I first needed to figure out where I would be coming from so to speak. In working out my particular perspective, I struck upon the following: The 4 point lighting process.

I started out asking myself the question "Why do we light?" over and over and after quite some time spent scratching my head trying to answer it, was able to write down some notes. Here's what came to mind:

To impart a "look" or "feel" to a particular image; to create "emotion"
To reveal form and texture
To augment the existing conditions
To underscore the composition of the image (again, more "emotion")

Those were the rough notes.

One of the difficulties in doing these things is that first we must become technicians of sorts. We need to learn the fundamentals of lighting (Lighting 101, anyone?). Not only do we need to learn them, we need to understand them and know how to put them into practice. That's the easy part. I think anyone can learn the fundamentals. After all, David Hobby built an empire on lighting instruction based around small strobes. But I think there's a slightly more abstract position to take when it comes to lighting: The Problem Solving Process, that is, how go about thinking about lighting.

And here's what I've developed that I call the 4-point lighting process:

1) INTENT - What is the purpose of the photograph to be made? What's our photographic goal?

2) IDENTIFICATION - What are the qualities and characteristics of the photograph you're trying to make. What problems have to be overcome in order to achieve the intent?

3) APPLICATION - What tools are at our disposal that will help us solve the problems we've identified in order to achieve our goal? This is where our lighting knowledge comes into play. It's our toolbox; our bag of tricks.

4) ASSESSMENT - In examining the results of the photograph, did we achieve the intended goal? If the answer is yes, then great everyone can home home and it's a wrap. But if the answer is no, then we have to start back at the identification and application stages. What did we do wrong that didn't solve the identified problems? Sometimes we have to resort to trial and error. Sometimes we have to ask if we thought about the problem in an appropriate manner. This process is iterative. You'll have to go back do some stuff over a little differently until you get it right.

So this is basically the process I try to think through when it comes to making an image. Did you happen to notice that actual lighting knowledge didn't come into play until the third step? Knowing your stuff is important, but knowing how it fits into the big picture is even more important.

How the Hell is Ogalthorpe?

2010-01-22T16:34:00.000-08:00

So In my last post, I spilled the beans about what was going on in my life. First I want to thank everyone for their heartfelt and caring responses. I was unsure how revealing that I was suffering from depression would be received. Whether it would bring stigma or understanding. And I believe the verdict is in that it has brought understanding. Again, thanks to all you have reached out to me with encouragement and empathy. It is very much appreciated.

So WORK has been coming along. I'm not exactly up to your 40-hour work week yet, but some fairly significant tasks have been completed. The first thing I did was clean and prepare my work area. I started there because I realized that's where I would start if I had begun a new office job. Seemed logical enough.

Secondly I have finally put Jeremy Center Photography to bed. The final nail in the coffin was changing the name on the bank account. Studio Ogalthorpe is name of my business and now all the legal documents (licenses, bank accounts, etc.) now reflect that.

Third, I have begun filtering images that will go into my portfolio. It's not an easy task, but is slowly getting done.

And last, I have been tossing around the idea of doing lighting workshops of various nature. I have been troubled as to what the material would be and how I would go about teaching it. Well, I've had some breakthroughs in that area and now I have a loose framework on which to build. I'm particularly proud of that.

Personally, I am feeling pretty good. I have gained some skills that have helped me deal with some negative thought patterns. This has helped me establish a newfound confidence. I now engage in activities that I haven't in some time, and also looking out for new things to do.

All in all I think the state of me is good and getting better.

Where the Hell is Ogalthorpe??

2010-01-15T19:37:00.000-08:00

This evening I was on the elliptical trainer at the gym and I had a little bit of an epiphany in between watching my heart rate and my speed. I realized that I've never really thought of photography as WORK. I don't mean that I love it so much it doesn't seem like work or it's a labor of love. What I mean is that I've never thought of it as the kind of WORK that you and I probably normally think of as WORK: that place where most people go for 8 to 10 or 12 hours a day. In an office or in a store or someplace like that.

I've been fortunate, very fortunate indeed, to have discovered in myself this talent of making photographs. Well it's been more of an obsession than a hobby for a good portion of my life. But this past year when my job as an aerospace engineer came to an end I thought it would be a great opportunity to transition into a photography career. After all, many people had told me that I was good enough that I should go pro. Sure, I thought, that sounds great. But the problem so many times with great ideas is that they never gestate and turn into reality. They live and die as ideas never seeing the light of day.

So I decided to try it out a little bit and I got some business licenses and a bank account. I even shot a wedding. But after that I just kind of pissed around fooling myself into thinking that I was WORKING. When really I was just kidding myself and jerking my own chain.

In the process something else happened. And it's very difficult to admit. I'm having some difficulty right now deciding if I should admit it for fear of being labeled or maligned because of it. Well, what happened is that I developed a major depression. The chemicals in my brain decided they were going to have a party of their own and to hell with me and what I wanted to do. And they did. And slowly I withdrew from the things I would normally do. Being on "funemployment" (as my friend Heather likes to call it) certainly didn't help. The problem is that for quite some time I didn't realize this was happening to me. Then one day I decided I didn't really want to get out of bed until after noon. And then after that one o'clock. I think you see where this is headed. But don't worry, the story gets better. Good better, not more interesting better.

After realizing what the hell was going on in my head, I was able to find some people who cared and helped to get me back on course. Now it's only been a few weeks and I'm still standing on a small hill of my life's wreckage -- my unemployment ran out, my girlfriend moved out, and I still don't have a photography business -- but at least now I have the strength to get out of bed and figure out where to go.

And this is what I've realized: It's Friday night right now.

But come Monday I gotta drag my ass to WORK just like everybody else who has a job.

I'll keep you posted.

My Name is Ogalthorpe Montoya. You Killed My Father. Prepare to Die!

2009-11-25T15:47:00.000-08:00

As I tell people about my transition from engineer to photographer I always try to make it clear that I am going to be a small business person who makes a living from photography. And that I'm not approaching the transition as someone who likes to take photos so I figured I'd try to make a living at it.

Identity has been a nagging subject for me to figure out. Part of the problem is that I feel a duplicity between the equal division between me and the Ogalthorpe persona. I've never really liked the idea of a "Jeremy Center Photography". It just doesn't ring true in my ears. It's something I've never felt comfortable with for reasons not completely clear. On the other hand, assuming a completely fictitious identity has also been uncomfortable. To some degree it feels phony or insincere and outside of my nature.

But I've decided to be brave.

Or foolish.

Depending on how you look at it.

Today I completed the necessary state and local forms and am now a full-fledged legal entity.

I am Jeremy Center, LLC.

dba Studio Ogalthorpe

dba Ogalthorpe

And I'm licensed through the state of Washington and the city of Seattle

Jeremy Center Photography no longer exists as a legal entity.

The gist of this "situation" is not that I feel more comfortable with Ogalthorpe, but that I feel a certain thrill and fear and exhilaration from taking the risk. Of stepping outside of my comfort zone and going with my gut.

It might be a completely stupid maneuver. After all everyone says that to be taken seriously you have to go by your real name. They say you have to do what everybody else does. I guess I can take that under advisement. But this is the way I'm going to go for now.

It might be the best thing I ever did.

Only time will tell.

Don't Ignore the Obvious

2009-11-10T12:24:00.000-08:00

It's going to break. It's about to come through. I can feel it. Down deep next to all the secrets I never share with even the most loved in my life. It's there. Waiting for me to discover it. I think I'll know it when I see it. But right now I'm not quite sure what it looks like.

What is it you ask?

It's me.

Well... it's sorta me.

You see I've been working hard to get my website up and functioning to the point that I can walk away from it for awhile and concentrate on more important things. The images were the easy part. The structure was a pain in the ass due to the fact that I was using a template and pretty much had to figure it out on the fly. But the hardest part -- the part that caused me to stop and think... And think... And think some more -- well that was the About Me Section.

ABout Me...

Hmmm... what the hell was I supposed to put here?

I asked a lot of people. I looked at a lot of photographer's websites. I read some books. I thought long and hard. And I still couldn't figure it out. At least to my own satisfaction. Should I write about my picture style? Tell my life's story? Make up something whimsical?

You see it's all a little bit confusing.

Then I came across a video talk in this post on Permission to Suck. The video is talk given by Mark Bierut, a designer who claims to have no creativity, no ideas of his own. He claims to be a problem solver. Like a doctor he needs patients to practice. And the more fucked up the better for him.

The key concept for me came at 5:11 where he says "Don't Ignore the Obvious".

As a creative I was searching for some well constructed analogical statement about my work. Something intellectual that in it's smooth delivery would convince the reader of my sublime intelligence and apt skill with words and photographs. But after watching the video I figured out that I should just simply state who I am and what I do and why I do it. That's about me, isn't it?

I think so.

I think it's important for a very subtle yet very poignant reason: in order to be able to tell people about me, I need to know a little about who I am. And the ability to put that into words has escaped me. I think I've found it. The method, at least, if not the exact words.

So who am I?? I'm Jeremy. I'm Ogalthorpe. And I make photographs simply because my nature compels me to do it.

So check out the video. It's worth the 19 minutes.

And We're Live

2009-11-01T16:26:00.000-08:00

Well after some considerable work, the new identity is finally here. The website for Studio Ogalthorpe is up and running.

For those interested the website is a flash template I bought from bludomain.com. I know some people are averse to flash and that there are SEO issue with flash sites. But for people like me who are not capable of coding sites from scratch or can't afford a designer just yet it's a good way to go.

The next step is to get some kind of HTML version up and operational. Ideally the HTML version would have two optimizations: one for people surfing over on the web who don't have or like flash, and the second for iPhone users.

Well if you happen to stop over, hit the contact page and drop me an email or leave a comment here.

Studio Ogalthorpe is Almost (A)Live

2009-10-29T16:19:00.000-07:00

I've struggled almost endlessly over what to use as a professional identity in the photography world. Am I Ogalthorpe? Am I Jeremy Center. Sometimes I can't decided. Sometimes I think I'm neither (take that one to you shrinks!). Sometimes I think I'm both. And this is what I've decided upon for the time being.

I've decided to brand my professional identity as Studio Ogalthorpe. I may choose to drop the Studio at some point down the line. But for the time being it lets be both of my selves: me and Ogalthorpe.

Click the pic to check out the (beta) website. Fair warning: it's flash. So don't bitch cause I told ya it was flash. I plan to have an HTML version up sometime in the near future. But for now this is what I have and this what I'm going with.

Wait for the Flush

2009-10-17T17:58:00.000-07:00

Last Saturday I delivered an introductory lecture on the topic of off-camera flash -- appropriately titled Lighting 101 (well I stole the title from David Hobby over at Strobist.com.

The event was a bit unusual for me in that I've been somewhat reluctant to do this kind of thing for a few reasons. First, David Hobby did it first and I didn't want to be hashing up retreaded material. Second, Terence has had the corner on this subject at Seattle Flickr for as long as I can recall. But I decided to do it for two main reasons: I felt I had a unique perspective on the subject and I needed people to see what I can do and how I worked since I will be offering hands-on lighting workshops starting sometime in November.

The other unique thing I did on this presentation is that I livecasted it over at ustream.com. I did it on a bit of a whim since the even "sold out" in less than 20 minutes and waiting list grew to just under 70. Also I was curious as to how many people who just knew me or of me from my online presence would be interested in watching online.

I'd like to say that it went off without a hitch (except for the flush, that is). And the response was overwhelmingly positive. Not only that I spent some time reviewing the videos and I'm rather pleased that I could actually stand to watch and listen to myself and it sounded to me that I knew what the hell I was talking about.

I'd like to thank my team who helped bring the online part of it together at the last minute (I couldn't have done it without them.)

Jill Evans for lugging equipment, setting up and breaking down and manning the chat room

Terence Tam for saving my bacon by bringing a working projector and filming a separate video

Rachel Blackman -- for manning the camera and the chat stream and technical support

John Kang for loaning me a wireless lapel mic.

If you're inclined to watch the videos, they're available for streaming in three parts:

PART 1 PART 2 PART 3

BTW, if you just wanna jump to the flush, hit the link for PART 3.

Brand My BMW - The Front End

2009-10-17T17:32:00.001-07:00

Just a quick update to the last post about the BrandMyBMW post with another photo from the shoot.

If you're interested in Allen's project, check out his website BrandMyBMW.com or follow him on Twitter at @brandmybmw.

If you have a Social Media Project you'd like me to photograph, please feel free to email me to discuss the details.

Brand My BMW - A Social Media Experiment

2009-10-14T16:22:00.000-07:00

Ok, you've got yourself a pristine BMW 745i -- a pretty sweet ride -- and it's your baby and pride and joy. You're young and you work for a progressive digital media company. You want to show off your ride so what do you do?

You cover the damn thing in bumper stickers.

WTF?? You say?

Yes, you read that right -- bumper stickers - 200 of them in fact. Crazy I know. Why the hell would anyone deface such a sweet piece of machinery? It's all in the name of proving a point.

Allen Hartwig is the Business Development Director at Pondry.com a web development and online strategy company located just north of Seattle in Mount Vernon, WA. He's engaging in a little social media experiment -- he wants to prove that brands can effectively be seen by thousands of people with a very little outlay in cash.

So for just a few dollars (the 1st company in line pays $5, the 200th company pays $1000) your company get get placement not only on a beautiful silver BMW 745i, but in the social media world where word of mouth is king.

I shot Allen and his BMW at Alki Beach last week. This is the first image of several that Allen will be incorporating into the BrandMyBMW campaign. We decided to go for something a little dark and edgy, shooting with emphasis on the stickers as if it were an ad for the car itself.

The shot uses three lights -- a White Lightning X3200 into a Paul C Buff medium softbox placed camera left to provide the main light to the back end of the car. The light was placed high and angled down to avoid as much specular reflection as possible. The second light is an Alien Bees ABR800 Ring Flash placed camera right to illuminate the side panel of the car. And finally a White Lightnin X1600 into a Paul C. Buff 47" octabox on axis used to illuminate Allen and the top rear quarter panel of the car. Photoshop was used for tonality and some additional fill light.

If you're interested in Allen's project, check out his website BrandMyBMW.com or follow him on Twitter at @brandmybmw.

If you have a Social Media Project you'd like me to photograph, please feel free to email me to discuss the details.

John Keatley @ Publicis October 1

2009-09-30T23:06:00.000-07:00

For those of you located here in Seattle, you're in for a bit of a treat. Local photographer John Keatley has a one day showing at Publicis on 2nd Ave in lower Queen Anne.

You'll want to stick around since there's a free drawing for one of John's prints at 7pm.

Click the pic for a link to John's blog with the details of the event.

Hope to see you there.

A note to myself.

2009-09-20T21:24:00.000-07:00

My goal is this: I want to be the premier source for photography, photographic information, and photographic training in the Pacific Northwest.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have some work to do.

I was a teenage (internet) radio star

2009-09-11T01:03:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, I was interviewed by Scott Sheppard of Inside Analog Photo Radio regarding my work with the Fujifilm Instax 200. Well, the interview has finally been released. If you're Itunes enabled, you can listen to it here.

Just to jog your memory, I originally wrote about how I hacked the Instax to use off camera flash back in March of this year. And then a follow-up post about my first use of it using a speedlight at a Seattle Flickr meetup.

For the non-iTunes folks, you can listen to the mp3 version here.

I only shoot available light.

2009-09-02T20:15:00.000-07:00

Available light is any damn light that's available (W. Eugene Smith). It's probably my most favorite quote regarding photographic lighting. And it's what this little story is about.

Last Monday I had the pleasure of attending the Chase Jarvis Twitter Meetup at Inner Space Indoor Skate Park. I don't like shooting in groups (never have) but I took the opportunity to do something I think nobody else there did -- and it involved stealing everyone else's lights.

Chase's team had set up stations of Broncolor strobes around Inner Space. We were to divide ourselves into groups and spread out and get some time on each of the stations. Like I said I don't really like shooting in groups. I'm not a misanthrope or anything. It's just that I have this thing about doing my own thing. Anyway as for my plan, it really wasn't a plan. I kinda left my group by accident and wandered around and checked out the scene. The talent were doing all kinda of cool jumps and spins off the boards and I was curious about what everyone else was doing.

I decided I'd shoot ambient and not worry about getting time on the strobes. I've shot skaters before and have some pretty decent lights of my own (not exactly Broncolor, but hey, you gotta start somewhere) so I didn't feel compelled get in line. On a couple of frames I had shot, I noticed that my timing was good enough to catch a strobe firing. Of course when it did, it blew the hell out my exposure since my camera was tuned to the ambient. The problem was that this was hit and miss. One shot would be good, the next way underexposed and too blurry. Then it hit me: I'd just set a trap to catch all the strobe light I could in one shot. The solution: looooonng shutter speed.

The reasoning to that kinda went like this: well, the strobes are Broncolors which means they have a very short duration and capable of freezing motion (i.e. flying skateboarders). So I just set the ISO and aperture to a suitable exposure for a strobe shot. I really didn't care much what the ambient did as long as it didn't blow out. (rememmber - every strobe shot has two simultaneous exposures and they have to work together to get a good result.) Then I dialed down the shutter speed to somewhere around a half second. I figured that was long enough to catch a strobe going off. I had to watch the action and the photographer at the same time and try to figure out what the photographer with the pocket wizard on his camera was going to do and then time it all to catch it as it went down. Sometimes the results were good; sometimes not but the good was pretty good if you ask me.

Below is another shot from the night. In this one, I added a little bit of spice to the recipe and spun the camera about the lens axis (not very smoothly I might add). The result is that orange and yellow lines and trails are actually the ambient lights (fluorescent tubes I think) and the trail is a record of how I spun the camera.

In full disclosure, there was some photoshop-fu on the tonality but hey, it's how I wanted it to look so it's ok by me.

Pardon Our Deconstruction

2009-09-02T18:58:00.000-07:00

So as an artist, I'm prone to rash decisions at times. One of those times happened a few weeks ago when I abruptly left Flickr. The departure is something I had been contemplating for quite some time. I had been close a number of times. But after a bad day I found myself surfing back to the same old stomping grounds on Flickr. I had the realization that if I wanted to get anywhere I was going to have to leave it all behind and move on. So I did -- I took the red pill and got the hell out. Well, it probably wasn't the brightest of moments in my life but it was what it was - there was no going back (sort of) to Flickr. The Good Reverend Ogalthorpe no longer had a stream to swim in. I realized that I had made some good friends and connections and I didn't want to lose those. And doing what I did, was pretty selfish. It's like I just flipped everyone the bird and walked off, which is not what I intended. I basically just wanted to kick myself in the ass and use that as a catalyst to try to move onto the next level (whatever the hell that is). So over time, I'll do my best to fix the the broken links and images on this here blog. In the meantime if you'd like to find me on Flickr, I have a second account that's been pretty much private for a number of years. It's now my one and only account. You can find it here. Thanks to everyone and sorry if I pissed you off in the process.

Another behind the scenes video of Amber

2009-08-05T17:31:00.001-07:00

This is the second half of the video from my shoot with Amber.

Anatomy of a Composite

2009-07-27T01:39:00.000-07:00

Today my Uncle came down to visit from Santa Rosa. He had just finished building this guitar for his son, Nolan, a very talented and skilled (15-year-old) guitar player and he wanted me to take some photos of it. I imagine he was thinking of some standard studio shots but I had something different planned.

It was a lazy Sunday for us all as we vegged around the glow of the TV. All my equipment was in the car and I was wrestling with gathering the energy to drag my ass out of the chair and out into the 100° weather in order to set up a makeshift studio in the garage. As I was soaking up the second episode in a row of Law and Order, the shot popped into my head. So I decided to set about making it.

The location is an abandoned barn where I had recently shot Amber. My goal was to make the shot that popped into my head into reality - the guitar suspended in air with a spotlighting effect from above -- but with a little bit of a twist. When I edited this shot of Amber, I put a slight lens blur on the image in post, but I left her sharp. It created what I thought was a nice 3D effect. Problem was that the lens blur had also left her with a halo around her body that I didn't like. I figured I could either clone stamp out the halo or I could have shot the background separately so I could completely control it independent of the foreground. And that's what I did with this shot of the guitar.

The first shot I made was just the overhead light to get the spotlighting I wanted. The light is a White Lightning X3200 strobe on an Avenger mini-boom and C-stand. The light is modified by a 20° grid. Here's the shot:

Next I added a second strobe in order to light the fence and dead tree behind the guitar. The light is a White Lightning X3200 strobe on an Avenger C-stand. The light is modified by a 47" octabox. I knew I wanted soft lighting on the background and I was too lazy to pull out the 60" Photek softlighter so I went with the octa. It would actually work better in this situation because it is easier to aim than the softlighter. Here's the shot:

The next thing I did was shoot the same shot as above but without the guitar. This would allow me to put the shadow I wanted under the guitar in post. Here's the shot:

And finally the ambient shot with no equipment in the frame. I wouldn't be using the whole shot - only enough to fill in where the gear is. Here's the shot:

The first step after pulling the images into Lightroom was to select the candidates for the composite. After that I pulled all the images into Photoshop and aligned them. The layers were stacked as following: ambient on bottom, then everything without the guitar and lastly the shot with the guitar on top. I masked out the equipment stands and battery and then matched the exposure with a couple of curves layers and an exposure layer. The next step was to apply the Ogalthorpe™ secret recipe to enrich the colors and boost up the contrast. The end result was a nice useable background with no equipment in the scene.

The next step was pull in the guitar and mask out everything but the guitar. I used the pen tool to outline the neck and body and a brush on the headstock. One I had that I again applied the Ogalthorpe™ secret recipe to enrich the colors and boost up the contrast and sharpen the detail work around the sound hole.

Now I had two completely independent layers- foreground and background - to work with. Basically from there it was some fine tuning of the tonality of each of the layers so they worked together the way I wanted them to. Next I applied a lens blur to the background and fiddled with the opacity until it all meshed the way I wanted. And Voila - that's it - the anatomy of a composite.

Behind the Scenes Shoot with Amber

2009-07-24T11:47:00.001-07:00

A few weeks ago, I shot Amber, a model located in the Central Valley of California. Here's a little behind the scenes video of part of that shoot.

Ogalthorpe meets Avedon (posthumously) at SFMOMA

2009-07-22T22:57:00.000-07:00

Just a reminder to those of you on the west coast and especially to those in California: There is a Richard Avedon exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It a career retrospective and SFMOMA is the only Amercian venue for the showing. The exhibition lasts until November 29 of this year. It's definitely worth the view. Even if you've seen every Avedon book on the shelves at Borders, there's something special about seeing them hanging on the walls. The shots (it's actually three frames placed side by side) of Warhol and the Factory crew stood over six feet tall and took up about 40 feet of wall space. Definitely not to be missed if you have the means and opportunity.

And if you go, get your tickets in advance (you can get them online). The exhibition has timed entry and sells out during popular hours.

Me and you and a speedlight named Boo

2009-07-22T21:55:00.001-07:00

For the last six weeks I've been holed up at my grandmother's place in my hometown of Oakdale, CA. They call it The West at its Best. I call it the town I left 15 years ago for (literally) greener pastures. It's hot here (105 last weekend) but luckily grandma has a pool. I think I've been swimming more in the last 6 weeks than the last 10 years.

In order to keep me from going insane (and, well, to keep her from going insane too), Jill flew in from Seattle for a 10 day whirlwind California vacation. Being from upstate New York the only part of California she's ever seen was the inside of SFO for a 4 hour layover. I figured I would show her the town and we'd take a roadtrip down the coast a bit since we're only two hours away from San Francisco. The plan was a few days in Garnerville, NV then down to Monterey, Santa Cruz, then finally the City. She wanted some photos of herself taken at the Golden Gate Bridge. I wanted them to be memorable so unbeknownst to Jill, I packed a speedlight and a 43" brolley (standard Strobist operating equipment) for the shots we really wanted to hold onto. Personally I'm not much of a sentimentalist and rarely take vacation pictures. but I was more than happy to make some for her.

I brought along my 5Dii but for most f the shots I took of Jill I just grabbed her 40d and used the pop-up flash for fill. As a tangent, it reminded me that you can do a lot even with the little flash on the top of your camera -- especially if you understand how to balance ambient with flash. The technique is the same as when you're using an off-camera flash. Anyway, here's a shot of Jill at the Monterey Bay Aquarium that I took using the 40d with the pop-up that I think looks pretty natural:

Anyway, the real coup de gras took place at the Golden Gate Bridge: we parked and Jill scrambled out of the car to the observation deck and unknown to her I went to the trunk and pulled out a speedlight and brolly. Of course I totally got some looks from the (other) tourists. I can't imagine what they were thinking. What I was thinking was they were lucky I didn't bring the 60" Photek Softlighter on a C-stand and boom (which is my light of choice).

Anyway, after I set up my gear I went right into strobist mode: figured out the composition of the shot, checked the ambient exposure then set the flash power to about 1/8th power and started checking the balance of flash and ambient and adjusted the shutter speed and flash power until I got something I liked. To kind of show you the difference an umbrella makes, let's compare before and after shots:

Before: (ambient only):

After (with a brolly off camera right):

Even though the crop is different you can see that a little strobist goes a long way.

And just for fun, let's look at the setup. Here's the view from Jill's perspective:

So the next time you take a trip, pack a speedlight. It's small and portable and easy to pack. Who knows, you might turn that boring snapshot into a cherished memento and impress the hell of the other tourists while you're at it.

Shooting Chase Jarvis (and his shoes)

2009-07-20T23:19:00.000-07:00

Several months ago, I embarked on a weekend project that I called Ogalthorpe's Portrait Parade. Among the many many folks I invited was Chase Jarvis. Even though I've worked with Chase in the past on the Seattle Flickr Roundups I felt it was pretty much a longshot that he'd make it over to Chez Ogalthorpe. The guy's pretty damn busy when you're a busy photographic celebrity who's got time for a little fish like moi? Boy was I ever surprised when he emailed me saying he'd like to participate.

There was quite the volley to figure out how to fit this into his schedule. He would only be in town for a few weeks and he was doing some huge commercial shoot at the same time to boot. Add to that I wouldn't even be in town myself. I wish I could report that I was on assignment somewhere in South America shooting Chilean swimsuit models, but alas, I was in my hometown in Central California helping to care for my grandmother. I kinda had to squish myself into his schedule, but we found a spot that worked for both of us and I bought a plane ticket back to Seattle.

When we talked about what to shoot he just asked that it be quick. I figured that would be great practice for the day when I'm shooting celebrities on a weekly basis. The one thing that is constantly repeated, chanted, and ground into the heads of aspiring photographers is that celebrities have absolutely no time for you. And that's what I did. Well, we did. I brought along my buddy Mark Lea (maginashun on flickr) to back me up. I like shooting with Mark and he's a solid guy to have your back.

Anyway when we arrived at the Jarvis studios the CJ team was in a huddle planning some huge European campaign. I took the time to check out the situation and figure out what I was going to do. My original plan was to shoot against the concrete studio wall, the way I had shot Ted Leung. But the problem was that there was a huge white seamless already set up in the studio. The thing was like 2 stories tall and about 20 feet wide. It would've been a pain to have to take that down so I ~~erred on the side of lazy~~ decided to roll with the situation and shoot against the white. And have I ever told you how much I hate white. Just hate hate hate white seamless. But that's what we had and that's what I shot.

As far as the equipment goes, I shot a White Lightning X1600 into a 46" Photek Softlighter and the main and only light. I forgot the backup softbox that I planned on using to light the seamless so I tried shooting it with a bare strobe but it pretty much sucked so I killed it and just kept the one light. I figured that I could always bump the white in post if I had to (and that's what I ended up doing).

The plan was to shoot something formal(ish) and then something fun involving his shoes. I won't bore you with the details of the formal, but we did something fun for the shoes shot. I looked around the studio and saw these two barstools just sitting around not being used so I asked Chase to stand on then (one foot on each) and shot wide angle from below. The WA distortion kinda squished his head a bit, but I popped it out in post and he looks just like normal.

Here are the final shots and a couple of setup shots courtesy of Mark:
(click the pic for a larger image)

So a huge thanks to Chase for being open to this and making himself available. This kind of access doesn't happen every day. And props to Mark for being there.

PS. Mark says we need to try to shoot Annie next. I'll get right to work on that one.

Ogalthorpe Shoots a Wedding

2009-07-14T01:19:00.001-07:00

One of the things I've said I would never do is shoot a wedding. It's not my thing. It's too stressful. It's too much work. And the list goes on. But I did it anyway. Well mostly as a favor and partly for the experience. A coworker of mine was getting married and asked if I would be interested in shooting it. I politely declined and referred him to a few of my photo friends who do weddings and (who I thought) would do a much better job than me.

A few weeks went by, the wedding was moved up, and still a photographer was needed. So I agreed to do it. I was more stressed than Peter was about the thing. He's seen my work and wasn't a bit scared of my naked self (though I'd be fully clothed for the wedding). I have to thank him for that. Because I was certainly nervous. I remember combing through Gigabytes of wedding imagery on the web and in magazines. I didn't want to screw up his big day (Peter, you see, was doing all the planning).

I brought Jill along to help out and I'm glad I did. I got a bit lost a couple times and she helped keep me on track. She even thought about things that never crossed my mind -- like getting close-ups of the rings on the bride and groom's fingers -- mushy stuff like that. She even was there to comfort me after I ripped the crotch out of my brand new pants. It was a good thing I was wearing black underwear.

The wedding was held on at Country Club on a golf course. That explains the golf-cart in the shot above. I mean, what else are you gonna do on a golf course except play peanut gallery to the people playing through the hole that was 5 yards from where the officiator would be standing? Actually making that shot was a lot of fun. And from what I can tell a bit unusual for a wedding photo. The originality of the photo pleases me. It means that I can think creatively outside of my own genre and come out ok in the end.

In the end I'm glad that I could help make someone's special day memorable and fun.

Here are some behind the scenes shots courtesy of Jill:

Shooting the formals:

Shooting the golf cart photo:

Explaining to the wedding party how to gesture (enthusiastically):

Thanks again to Peter for the opportunity and to Jill for the help.

If you'd like me to shoot your wedding or special event, feel free to drop me a line.

Ogalthorpe's Portrait Parade

2009-07-14T00:40:00.000-07:00

It was a weekend in April and I was high on my own fumes. After figuring that I was Annie Leibovitz I decided to undertake what I thought was a novel project -- I would shoot as many portraits as I could in a single weekend. Well, almost a single weekend -- there were some before and after stragglers. I called it Ogalthorpe's Portrait Parade. I was a bit of a circus.

It all started after I shot Jill in a Leibovitz style. I was quite pleased with the results so then I invited my friends Steve Korn and Darien Chin over to my crib to shoot their portraits. After that I invited my friend Susan over. Steve and Darien are used to both sides of the camera, but Susan would be a challenge since she's not used to being in front of the camera and it would put my communication skills to the test.

After feeling successful with Susan, I invited everyone I know to come over for a portrait.

Crazy, eh?

I know. But what the hell, I figured. It couldn't be that bad, right? Right.

So I put out an email to just about everyone I know in Seattle asking if they'd be interested in participating. The first thing I discovered was that I didn't know very many people. The second was that some people wouldn't respond. But throw in some of Jill's friends and the ones who got back to me, and you've got a weekend pull of portraits.

The setup was simple: a 10 ft. x 24 ft. backdrop in my 14 ft. x 20 ft. living room (yeah, it was cramped to say the least). A White Lightning X1600 into a 46" Photek Softligher on an Avenger C-Stand and mini-arm as the main light and a gridded X1600 on the background. Throw in a couple of flags and a couch sitting up on end (in order to make space) and you've got my studio/living room. I was shooting digital tethered to my mac pro and also shooting the Fuji Instax.

I had everyone scheduled in 1-hour blocks. I figured that was enough to shoot people both digital and Instax, print out a 5x7 complimentary print (as a thank-you) and take a rest in between. I got everything but the rest. On Saturday I started about 10am and went well into the evening, finishing around 8pm. The last thing I remember that night was laying down on my bed and telling Jill that we should go out to a movie. That was it for the night for me. I was wiped. And I had to do it again on Sunday. And Sunday proved to be a bit lighter but still no less demanding.

All in all I learned that I need to work on my rapport building skills. And my getting my lighting down quicker. But all in all I think everyone had a good time and it was a great experience.

I might even do it again sometime.

You can see the images on my flickr stream. Or click here for the slide show.

It's all subjective if you think about it.

2009-05-01T00:03:00.001-07:00

In the process of making or planning a photograph many people put lighting first. Sometimes they’ve read about some A-lister hotshot who’s doing some wicked stuff with 65 lights and they want to try it out. Sometimes they find a setup they like and then proceed to hammer every shot with their two rims from behind and fill from the front setup. Sometimes the light just doesn’t fit.

Aside from basic illumination the best use of light in photography or cinema is to create mood. That’s emotion if you think about it. The scene, whether still or moving, by virtue of it’s nature makes you feel a certain way. It does that because of the way it’s constructed (composition) and the tone (lighting) that’s inscribed in the composition. In cinema you can throw in the third dimension of music as icing on the whole cake.

So as a photographer what are you supposed to do about this? You want to take a nice picture of your grandma who’s getting up there. Something classic and classy. Something mature and sensible. Something you’d be proud to show, well, your grandma. Do you think you’re gonna hit her with a beauty dish at f/22 and ask her to pose in the reverse C like Cindy Crawford did back in the ’89 Swimsuit Editions? Probably not.

But why not, you ask. I mean I know how much you love that beauty dish at f/22 with a coupla bare strobes on back each at 45 degrees for kickers.

Well, because that kind of light is not appropriate for your subject. Unless you’re Jill Greenberg. And we all know you're no Jill Greenberg.

Think about all the words you’d describe your subject with. Then think about the composition that goes with those words. Now think about the lighting you’d use to match those words and the composition. Did you happen to notice that? Lighting was, gasp, LAST!

Take these photos of Jill for example. I wanted to create something that was classic and daring at the same time. I wanted to show the vulnerability of baring oneself to the world when what you have to show might be outside of conventional sensibilities. And the confidence and maturity it takes to be so confident and brave. And I wanted to do it to show that beauty comes in more than a size 4. And I had to do it for no other reason than it had to be done.

In making this I relied on the classic paintings of the Renaissance as a foundation. The pose, the soft window-quality of the light, the form of the subject – all of it is juxtaposed against the porn-infused plasticism of the modern notion of sexual beauty. And the result is unique, lovely, daring, and brave.

So the next time you start to make a photograph, keep your lights in your pants and ask yourself what your subject needs and deserves. Then rise to those needs. Who knows... you just might do something unusual and good.

This is subject driven lighting.

Confessions of a Closet Photographer

2009-04-20T01:22:00.000-07:00

Dear World: You need what I have. Now just how the fuck I'm going to convince you of that, I haven't the slightest notion. I'm working on it though. Love, Ogalthorpe

Today I'm Annie Leibovitz

2009-03-30T01:30:00.000-07:00

I usually have a hard time telling people what kind of photographer I am. Am I a fashion guy, a portrait guy, somewhere in between? I'm not sure. Stylistically I'm kind of all over the place. I can't decide if I want to be Terry Richardson or Annie Leibovitz.

Today I was definitely Annie Leibovitz. This shot left is of Jill, a woman I've been seeing for a few weeks now. We were out for dinner with some friends and I asked her back to my place for a quick portrait (hey, getch yer minds outta the gutter now!) afterward.

Personally I think this is the best photograph I have taken to date.

Certainly the best portrait to be sure.

This shot was made with two lights: a bare gridded White Lightning X1600 on the background, and another X1600 into a 40" Photek Softlighter. The Softlighter is on a short boom to camera right so light comes a bit from overhead. Also the Softlighter is pretty much bumping against the ceiling to it's doing double duty with a little ceiling bounce acting as a hair light. The real texture comes from a new element to the photo: flags for subtraction. There is a 16" x 24" flag (opaque black) on either side of Jill. This really adds quite a bit of richness to the photo in terms of helping to shape the light and give it some texture.

I've always had the notion that you simply can't put up a bunch of lights and get the best image. I've been thinking about flags for awhile so while on a trip to Glazer's Camera to buy some Instax film I picked up a couple flags. I was preparing to shoot another portrait of Mama Ogalthorpe who was coming into town for a brief dinner stop. I knew that I wanted something different than what I've shot before -- I wanted something with style and class and distinction -- something with a bit of maturity about it. So I set out to make something along the lines of a Leibovitz portrait. I kinda missed the mark with Mama Ogalthorpe (sorry Mama) but I nailed it right on the head with Jill. And really it had everything to do with the addition of the flags.

I think with being able to produce a photograph of this caliber I can finally call myself a good photographer.

Smile -- You're on Instax!

2009-03-29T00:08:00.000-07:00

In the last post I told you how to modify the Fuji Instax for off-camera use. Today I'm going to share with you some of the results and what I've learned so far.

(BTW, that's Mama Ogalthorpe off to the left.)

First of all, F/14 is all lies lies lies. The Fuji datasheet for the Instax says the lens is fixed at f/14. Well, according my light meter readings, it's closer to f/8 to f/6.3 exposure-wise. Granted there is no control over the shutter speed so I don't really know how much ambient is leaking into the exposure. But I've been shooting this thing in darkness with only flash for illumination, and anything over f/8 is completely over-exposed.

That's pretty much the only complaint, or more appropriate, learning curve. Though I still haven't used it in daylight so I don't know what the camera is doing exposure wise. Otherwise it's been a complete joy to whip out the instax and a flash and make something you're not gonna find in the toy-camera world -- well lit, well-composed instant camera images. here are some of the images I've made so far:

Kevin:

Sean:

Jill:

Ben:

These are just a few. If you want to see the what's possible when using the Instax with a full studio setup, drop by and check out my flickr set of images.
I'm also in the midst of a portrait project using the Instax. So if you're in or around Seattle and would like to get instaxed, drop me a line and say hi or leave a comment.

Instaxed - How to add off camera flash to your Fuji Instax 200

2009-03-19T23:13:00.000-07:00

The Fuji Instax 200 camera is a wonderfully bulky plastic instant camera that produces quality wide-format instant photos. Think Fisher Price meets Polaroid. Speaking of which it's a fun camera whose popularity comes on the heals of the now obsolete polaroid instant films. The only problem I have is that there is no hot shoe. So I decided to ~~bolt~~ gaffer's tape one on.

So here's how it's done:

Step 1: Get yourself a nice Instax camera.

Step 2: Get yourself an optical slave

Step 3: Hack off the clear plastic lens (be careful not to damage underlying electronics).

Step 4: Attach Velcro to the front of the slave (be careful to not fully cover the sensor.

Step 5: Cover the flash on the Instax with mating velcro. Leave a small square of flash exposed.

Step 6: Attach the optical slave to the Instax.

Step 7: Reinforce the attachment. So far I'm using gaffer's tape but need something a little more robust.

Step 8: Cover the sensor holes on the Instax with gaffer's tape. There's one below the eyepiece and another below the lens opening.

Step 9: Connect your favorite off-camera trigger.

At this point you'll need to do some experimenting to determine the correct exposure.
If you want to see the what's possible when using the Instax with a full studio setup, drop by and check out my flickr set of images.I'm also in the midst of a portrait project using the Instax. So if you're in or around Seattle and would like to get instaxed, drop me a line and say hi or leave a comment.

Upgrade Your Inspiration

2009-02-23T13:27:00.000-08:00

When people talk about how to improve their photography, they often speak of equipment, tools, and upgrading them. Sometimes I'm asked about what lens I use or what camera I use or even what kind of light modifier I use. However, the most important thing to do before you upgrade any equipment is to ugrade your inspiration.

(This self-portrait was heavily inspired by the lighting style of Annie Leibovitz.)

I'm lucky in that I have a pretty healthy imagination. Ideas for photographs sort of spontaneously pop onto the little TV inside my head. Plus I'm a tad bit weird. But I have a secret weapon that anyone can use. It's something I do every week: I consume massive amounts of images.
First of all, I spend several hours a week at the local bookstores (that's plural) looking at magazines. I spend most of my time in the women's interst section, the mens' interest section, and the art and photography section (I actually only peruse a few photography titles). I go for the import magazines first, especially the fashion magazines. Then I go for the upscale domestic titles. For instance, I'll take a Vogue Italia or a Vogue Paris over an American Vogue any day of the week. Vanity Fair is also a favorite. It's where Annie Leibovitz takes up her print residence. However, if there's a fresh copy of Archive or Communication Arts, I'll always grab those first. As a note, I probably go through about 50-60 magazines a month if not more. I'm always looking for the best and most interesting and inspiring photographs. If I happen to see something particularly noteworthy, I'll snap a picture on my iPhone for later reference.
Another source I really like is the Russian photoblog 2photo.ru. You'll have to check your notion of copyright infringement at the door, but it's a great clearing house some of the best work out there.

The bottom line is to set the bar high and eat as much of this stuff as possible. I have no doubt that along with general practice, that having the right reference material (and again, lots of it) will help you develop into a more competent and creative photographer.

The Evolution of a Composite Shot

2009-02-18T23:24:00.000-08:00

As photographic philosophy goes, I am far from a purist. Most of the images I create are "photographic" in nature. When working with those images I use Photoshop mostly for tonal changes, which affect color saturation, and general contrast and sharpening enhancement. times I will reshape body parts or clone out objects I find distracting. The process is still pretty similar to traditional methods of image creation, albeit in a digital realm. I compose the image often by first by choosing a location and then determining how the subject will interact with the chosen locale. Next I set up lights (I rarely shoot ambient-only) and then finally make the exposure with the camera. Then I take the image home to the digital darkroom (a Mac Pro and Photoshop). I first use Lightroom to weed out the clear rejects. Then I choose the images I find most appealing to my eye. It’s mostly an emotion choice: I choose images for processing that strike me the most and just basically resonate with my sensibilities. Then it’s editing in Photoshop to again, enhance what’s already there in the image and to add the emphasis I want through tonal enhancement and contrast and sharpening improvements. However, I think the most powerful aspect of Photoshop is that it really has the ability to connect one’s imagination straight to reality. When conceiving of images, there are of course some basic logistical obstacles to overcome which would be part of every shoot: how to find the physical elements which form the foundation of the image to be created. But what Photoshop offers that reality doesn’t necessarily is the arrangement of the elements as you conceive them. And that’s where the magic comes into play. It’s this aspect of using Photoshop that I have the strongest interest in pursuing. I have created some composites, that while being relatively believable, are still flawed But I still keep moving in that direction and hopefully with patience, time, and practice I will get better. So now I’m going to walk you through the latest creation, which is a self-portrait. It was primarily inspired by two things: 1) I’ve been wanting to figure out how to photoshop an object into the human body so that it looks realistic that the object is naturally part of the body. What came to mind was a toilet paper roll holder (I don’t think we want to go into why, just for the sake of both our sanities) into the chest in place of the heart. The second was renowned advertising photographer Tim Tadder made an offering in a strobist thread looking for a photoshop junkie. I like to be kind of a smart-ass so I figured it would a perfect chance to get the image made and hopefully bring smiles to a few people. Not sure if Tim's seen it, but really it was made in fun with no serious attempt at vying for the job. After all, I'm a lighting guy, not really a photoshop guy. So here's the finished photo I'll be talking about: This photo is a composite of the following three images: The first step was to blend all of the layers together so that It looked like there was a continuous loop of toilet paper emanating from the role in the holder. The tricky part was making the roll holder look like it was embedded in my chest. This took quite some time. Basically I did some darkening around perimeter of the holder to add the contact shadow. I think did some other adjustments that made the skin look like it was pushed out of the way a little bit from the pressure of the holder. This was all accomplished with dodge and burn layers. Then I used the liquify tool to push around the flesh and make it really look like it was pushing up against the holder. After the basic shop job was done then it was time to make tonal changes. I was going for a raw Dave Hill-like over-sharpened look. I won't discuss that part as it was a lot of monkeying around and after all there are plenty of tutorials out there which will provide you with plenty of information on how to get the look. The final part was adding all that hair. I'm not really that hairy, but to be honest my not getting to the gym for the last 2 years really has taken it's toll and I wanted to cover my beached whale of a body somewhat but still reveal the composite work. I figured making me look super hairy (with massive unibrow included) would really add a strong bit of humor to the over all tone of the image. I used a somewhat custom brush to add the hair. I used the built-in grass brush and just played around the the shape dynamics and scattering until I got the spray pattern I wanted that made the hair look realistic. I also had made a custom brush but used it sparingly to add emphasis where needed. So, Mr. Tadder if you're out there and you see this and you happen to be amused, feel free to drop me a line and say hi.

You do what? Why?

2008-09-14T22:33:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I had the great opportunity to work with my friend Jamie, the owner of Cowbelly Pet Photography here in Seattle. As part of her 3-day intensive workshop on pet photography, I was asked to come in an give a mini lighting seminar to her 14 workshop attendees. I had spent the night before working on the outline for the talk. I only had a few hours to give a crash course and I was trying to figure out my game plan. The first talking point on my outline looked this: WHY WE LIGHT • Control • Reveal Form, Texture, Depth • Represent 3D objects in 2D • Mood It's the typical Dean Collins/strobist answer. To someone who's studied lighting and knows the work of Collins and Hobby, it seems like a canned answer. At least it does to me. It's their reason. Not mine. Since yesterday I've thought long and hard about the question why do we light? and I think I have my answer: We light because lighting provides us the greatest amount of control to execute our artistic vision. I think that sums it up pretty simply. As a side note if you're looking for an intense, hands-on workshop that teaches the kibbles and bits of pet photography, contact Jamie. Maybe we'll run into each other during the lighting portion of the workshop.

I'm Looking at the Man in the Mirror

2008-09-10T14:00:00.000-07:00

Despite any anecdotal evidence to the contrary, I'm not a narcissist. I just play one on Flickr. Self portraits, for me, are kind of a necessity. You see, despite what I'd like to think, I don't have a hoard of models running around my apartment snacking on celery and spritzer water waiting for my next idea to strike. I do it becuase I'm all I've got handy most of the time. When there's some new lighting technique I'd like to try, or maybe I need to practice using my meter, I have to shoot myself. There are two methods I find most useful when doing selfies. 1. Hook your camera up to your computer and shoot tethered. Not only do you get instant feedback about your composition, you also get to chimp your lighting on a big LCD. We know the little one on the back of your camera lies straight to your face. No matter how much you crank down all the settings to turn your jpg image into a boring, lifeless representation of that awesome shot you just made. Anyway, shooting tethered into Lightroom or Aperture gives you the exposure as it really is, pulling no punches. UPDATE:You'll need a piece of software to go between your camera and Lightroom/Aperture. For Canon it's the EOS Utility. I'm sure Nikon has theirs but I'm a Canon shooter and don't know what the Nikon software is off-hand. 2. This is the really fun part if you have one of those fancy big screen TVs. You know, the kind where you feel like your living room is an IMAX theater. Anyway you can get a long video cable and plug it right into the camera. So when you're doing your selfie, you just put yourself facing the TV and shazam! You're ready for your closeup. Now the really cool thing about this is, if your camera has liveview, then you can chimp the composition on the fly right on the big screen before you even hit the shutter. Actually the best way to do it, if you have the means, is to combine both. Use the big screen to compose the image and then use the captured image from the tether as your exposure guide. It's the best of both worlds. Oh, and don't let the big LCD thing scare you off. Any TV, monitor, projector with a standard Video input will do just fine. You just need a cable that has a 1/8" mono plug at one end and an RCA plug at the other. I went to Radio Shack and got a long video cable and an RCA to mini phone converter. The converter has a female RCA jack and a 1/8" mini phone plug all in one molded plastic package. It looks like a funny looking headphone adapter.

Your Lights go to Eleven?

2008-09-06T22:14:00.000-07:00

So, over on the Flickr Strobist Group, there's another post asking if people have meters. Let me say this: If you're serious about light and you really want to get it right, then you should own a ~~light~~ flash meter. A photographic exposure has four main components: the diffused value, the shadow areas, the highlight areas, and the specular. (Please forgive me, Mr. Collins for adding a fourth to your list.) The diffused value is the value of exposure that properly exposes the true tone of the subject. The diffused value is determined by using an incident flash meter. You can chimp it but unless you're shooting tethered to a big monitor and performing some kind of metric on the image, you just don't know. The other thing the meter will tell you is ratios. Your camera's meter just ain't built for that action. It can only give you exposure values for reflected ambient light. So let's say you're using one of those fancy Martin Prihoda setups with two hard lights at 45° behind your subject and a big fat softbox on camera axis. In that case you're wanting the hard lights to be rims and the softbox to be the main light. Where do you start? Well, if you're chimping, you pick aperture - probably f/8 because you like f/8. Then you point your camera at the air and see what the ambient is. If it's at least two stops above your max sync speed then you crank the shutter speed down two stops otherwise you crank the aperture up until you're within two stops of max sync. Then you pick a some starting point for flash power and fire a shot, look at the screen, look at the histogram, look for blinkies and then fidgit with the lights until it looks right on your LCD. But beware -- your LCD will lie straight to your face. We all know that, right? BUT, if you have a meter, you first set the max sync speed on the meter and take an ambient reading. You want to underexpose ambient by two stops so you dial the shutter speed down two stops and then the meter will tell you your shooting aperture. You then switch the dial over to meter flash. Great. Aim the meter at the main light, take a reading and adjust the main light until its power measures at your shooting aperture. Next you meter the rims. You want them one stop over the base? No problem. Aim the meter, take a reading, adjust and repeat until you're one stop over your shooting aperture. Do this for both lights and you're done. Right? Maybe. You probably did the metering all at the subject's head (I'm assuming a portait of some kind here). But with a meter you can actually "see" the spread of light before you even fire your camera. I'm not talking about the need to gobo the rims. I'm talking about metering down the subject's body, on the ground, in the air, toward the background. The cool thing is that doing this will let you know if your lights are aimed right. Then you press the shutter. When you do it this way, the camera becomes a composition tool first and an exposure tool second. Now let's say you want to shoot a portrait with a very shallow depth of field. You've got that sweet 85/1.8 and you know that 1.8 is it. Or maybe 2.0. You want your subject to have tack sharp eyes and blurry ears. So what do you do? Same as above except now you adjust the lights until the meter reads the aperture you've chosen. Simple. I know David Hobby doesn't do it this way. And Chase Jarvis doesn't do it this way. But you aren't them, are you?

The Trouble With Specular Reflections

2008-04-28T21:11:00.000-07:00

Last Saturday night Seattle Flickr had another garage meetup. Everyone was off shooting practicing the skills they had learned a few weeks ago in one of our Lighting101 classes. I was milling around mostly being social and trying to figure out what I was going to shoot if anything. I decided as a challenge to shoot Jackson's scooter. As you can see from the finished shots, it's silver with lots of chrome. Which means lots of specular reflections. But there's something not right with this picture. First let's talk a little about exposure and specular reflections. All exposure terms are referenced to what is called the diffused value of the subject. The diffused value is simply the "true" tonality of the subject. That is, it's what the subject should look like. A shadow is just an underexposed tonal value relative to the diffused value. That is the shadow area receives less light than the diffused value. A highlight is an overexposed value relative to the diffused value. It receives more (or brighter) light than the diffused value. Some people confuse the term specular reflection with highlight. While the highlight is, again, overexposed relative to the true tone of the subject, a specular reflection is a mirror-like, or direct, reflection of the light source on the subject. The specular reflection will appear in the shape of the light source modulated by the shape of the object that's reflecting the source. In the case of this shot, the source is either an octabox or a striplight. So the specular reflections seen on the scooter are either shaped slightly octagonal or rectangular depending on which light was reflected. See the original image with the specular reflections circled in red below. Now back to why we don't see those in the final image. Simple. I cheated. I knew what I wanted the reflections to look like in the final image so I used my retouching skills to kill the ugly and transform them into what they should have been. But the problem with this situation was before I even started out I knew I had the wrong tools for the job. How did I know this? Simple. By studying the reflections on the scooter.

I could see the reflections not only of the ambient light sources (regular fluorescent lights) but also whatever happened to be in the general vicinity of the scooter. We're talking me, the ground, the strobes, everything. I could tell that the sharp curvatures of the scooter's contours meant that they could reflect a large angle or field of view. It's like many parts of the scooter were looking back at it's environment through a fisheye lens. This meant that the light source I needed would need to be as large as that angle of reflection for all the specular highlights to be totally filled in with white. In other words, big. Very big.

So what would have done the job? If you've got the budget, you'd probably go down to Seattle Light and Grip and get some softboxes with about 60-100 square feet of coverage. Not exactly something that will fit into your strobist kit. The way I wanted to do it (but was too lazy to make it Home Depot Saturday morning) was to get some PVC piping and make some frames over which I could stretch some ripstop nylon. My plan was (and still is) to make some 6.5 ft x 3.5 ft panels. I could have strung 4 or 5 of those together and placed my White Lightning X1600 strobes behind them creating a very large apparent light source relative to the scooter.

Here's another before and after comparison of the same lighting setup but this time from a slightly different angle and with Jackson, the proud owner, standing in for the shot. And finally, the lighting setup. Mark is standing where the scooter was placed.

Scoping out the Competition

2008-04-08T10:53:00.000-07:00

Last week I was amazed to find out that people were astonished to find out that I'm not a pro. I think it's an awesome compliment. And for numerous reasons that I won't go into, I don't think I'm up to the task just yet. However, one of the fallouts is that in another discussion Don Giannatti (Wizwow) talked about knowing your who your competition is and who the potential clients are. As someone who currently works in a completely different field than photography I have often remarked about the difficulty in figuring out what's going on in the world that you want to be a part of. It's like first figuring out where the fence is then peering over it. Well, I had a little bit of a revelation the other day as I was surfing the ASMP website. They have this wonderful link at the top of the page called Find a Photographer that presumably a photoeditor or art buyer or whomever can use to find local photographers. The beautiful thing is that the search results will return the name of the photographer, the photographer's specialty, and a link to the photographer's website. I find this a great tool for snooping on what the working pro's in your area are doing. You can check out their work and brag to yourself about how much better you think you are than them. You can figure out who the buyers are from the commercial work. And maybe, if you're brazen enough, you can contact them and explain your "just about going pro" situation and ask to chat with them about their current or historical situation. It's just a thought.

Seattle Flickr Goes to Adobe

2008-03-09T23:45:00.000-07:00

Last Friday, about 70 Seattle Flickrites packed into a conference room at the Adobe Campus in Fremont to attend a demo on the Lightroom product. The demo was arranged by Seattle Flickrite John Cornicello (photo credit). The totally cool thing was that this event was especially for Seattle Flickr and not some sales pitch we tagged along for.

Over the course of two hours, we were treated to a dynamic informative run-through of most of the functionality that Lightroom has to offer. Colin Fleming and Rick Miller, both of Adobe, gave us the full corporate treatment and packed more information than any one photographer could handle into those two hours. They covered the user interface, controls, switches, and some secret goodies. They walked us through the import process, how to use catalogues, and more importantly hints on when use different categories. They also walked use through the export process, printing, setting up web galleries. Rick was kind enough to stay after and walk a few of us who really wanted to know how to do tethered shooting in Lightroom through the process.

Not only did they do their best to show us the ins, outs, bells, and whistles, they graciously stopped along the way to answer any question that came up.

I tell you, this kind of interaction between the professional community and a group of amateurs is incredible. You take a passionate group of amateurs with an insatiable appetite for learning and a professional who wants to give back a little and now you're doing something unique. This is open source knowledge sharing at it's best.

We're incredibly fortunate here in Seattle to be forging these kinds of connections in the professional community. I think one the advantages we have is our momentum. We're organized, we're growing, we're diversified, and as mentioned before, we do this stuff because we love it. But I strongly believe you can do these kinds of things in your community too.

Photo Credit Paul Gibson

Revealing Form

2008-03-07T11:05:00.001-08:00

Last night I shot my guitar which was leaning against the wall in my entry way. I was initially going for that lonely rockstar kind of look. I wanted the backlight to edge down the (camera) right side of the guitar and have the reflection from the white wall light up the face of the guitar. I had to play with the placement of the backlight a lot since I was in a very tight space. The final shot is a bit of a compromise but there were some added benefits that I discovered after looking at the final shot. This is what I learned: - The backlight is doing double-duty as the backlight and adding big speculars to the side of the guitar thanks to the side wall. The wall is to camera left just out of frame. You can kind of judge how wide the entry way is by the size of the door. It's not a very wide space. - The form of the guitar is revealed by the backlight and the strong contrast between the (camera) left edge of the guitar and blown out floor. -The gridded front light brings out the face of the guitar but doesn't overly-expose it and ruin the mood. This location wasn't optimal, but it's the only space I had for this in my small apartment. I would have preferred a much longer hallway so I could place the the backlight further from the guitar. Also there is some ugly reflection from the (camera) right wall on the face of the guitar. There really wan't any way around that given the location. If I were more diligent, I could have perhaps photoshopped it out. But a more sensible solution would have been to use a non-textured wall. Again, not something I had immediate control over. lighting info: 540ez snooted behind guitar 540ez snooted grid camera axis, about1.5 ft above the camera level triggered by PWs

2008-03-06T17:43:00.000-08:00

Thought for the day: Good lighting reveals form and texture. -Dean Collins

A Photo Editor Scares Me

2008-03-05T10:27:00.000-08:00

So I've decided if I start writing about wanting to go pro, it might actually motivate or force me to figure out how to make it happen. As someone who makes his bread in a field nowhere even related to photography, I find it a real challenge to stick my toe into a completely different pool. Mostly because the first problem is finding the pool itself. The strobist blog is a big help as Strobist does a very good job scouring the web for very interesting bits of information. Some of it is about pro photographers and other photography blogs. So this is how I start -- fishing around in blogs, looking for some insight. I've found that I really like A Photo Editor. But the guy scares the hell out of me. In a good way, though. I consider myself a decently talented photographer. But I know that success requires much more than talent. What I get from A Photo Editor is the raw about what he's thinking, what he's looking for, and how it goes down in the commercial editorial pool. There are sharks, but if you know they're there then you can swim around them. Or at least know why they bit you if you weren't looking. So he scares me, but all that does is make me more aware of the landscape. And it makes me sharpen my game. Or at least try to sharpen my game.

On Building a Better Strobist Community in Your Back Yard

2007-12-14T15:11:00.000-08:00

A little history How the Seattle Flickr Meetup Group Rolls, Yo. The Seattle Flickr Group has two kinds of meetups: the "official" meetups (the monthly photostroll and Briews and Views) and what we call Member Sponsored Events ("MSE"). The official meetups are planned and organized by a team of 7 peeps. We call them, appropriately, the organizers. The MSEs are sponsored by anyone with an idea for getting together. The official meetups make up the core group activities and provide a certain kind of long-term stability and structure to the group. Planning is hard work and these folks put a great deal of effort into picking unique locations for each of the monthly meetups. They also foot the bill for some of the administrative niceties (the meetup.com website for example) out of their own generous pockets. For a good portion of the group's history the official meetups were the only meetups and they weren't called official at all -- just meetups. When the popularity of the group took off, individual members started suggesting events. The term MSE came into being to differentiate the two. Now the beautiful thing about the MSEs is they are completely spontaneous and organic in nature. They just happen. The key organizing tool is our page on the website meetup.com. That's where we announce each upcoming meetup and also manage the RSVP list. It's a very useful tool and is great for communicating with a large group of folks in one shot, whether it's announcements, or itinerary changes, or whatever. That's the administrative tool. The second forum is the Seattle Flickrites Flickr Group. This is where the action happens. The pool is for posting of pics taken on outings, both MSE and official. The discussions are the heart of the activity. It's how we discuss our ideas and plans, ask for help or advice, or just say hey to everyone else. It's also the tool we use to mobilize. Often our meetups are thought up, discussed, and organized in relatively short time period. We're talking days or a week or so. Not months off. As an example, here's how we put the Chase Jarvis Adoption Program together: Sunday: conference call with Chase Monday Morning: announce to everyone via Flickr Discussions what's going down. Monday Night: Open Meetup.com RSVP list Tuesday: more discussion about what we want from the meetup Wednesday: a few people play musical chairs on the RSVP list Thursday: Me and 50 of my closest friends meet Chase at his studio. Ruckus ensues. The point is, we can mobilize and we can mobilize fast. Sometimes it's a shoot at the UW garage, sometimes it's a photo scavenger hunt, sometimes it's just cupcakes. But the key thing in either case is that there is a key organizer. For the official meetups it's one or more of the organizers. For the MSEs it's whoever suggested the thing in the beginning. Someone has to take charge or it ain't gonna work. Democracies are fine indeed, but they can get in the way of progress. We wanna shoot not spend six months trying to figure out which Saturday works best for most people. More on this later...

We're Live!

2007-12-13T15:35:00.001-08:00

In the immortal words of Frosty the Snowman, "Happy Birthday!"