School Trip

My latest read is a book entitled Art & Fear. I really enjoy the book because the writers are not journalists, social scientists, or psychologists trying to make an intellectual statement. They're artists who understand the subject from the inside out. One of the salient points they make, which really struck home with me, is that a general observer looking at a work of art can enjoy the product of the artist's efforts, but that in itself does nothing to enlighten anyone about the processes that culminated in the actual image. Understanding that process is of much greater importance than the pleasure of viewing the final product. 

When I studied and learned from each of the three mentors I've had in my life - Bill Monroe, Professor Raphael Bronstein, Mario Cabrera - I certainly appreciated the quality of what they created. But, not being them, I could never produce exactly that, so why bother. What was of importance to me, and what each in his own way showed me, was how they went about producing the end result. Talking about what in an image makes it work or not work may be interesting, but it does nothing to help me grow my own processes and subsequently create my own voice and output. 

Out for a walk in Manhattan yesterday, I wandered around Lincoln Center. For me street photography is nothing if there's no actors in the scene. I need people - so I have to go where there's traffic. A group of students on a school trip to the theater were milling around outside the Vivian Beaumont theater before the show, just doing their teenage thing. They were so rapt in their own very important worlds and stories that none of them took any notice of me snapping away.The buzz of energy was contagious. And then, in an instant one couple mugged this shot for me, I clicked, and a second later I no longer existed for them. I went on to shoot about fifty more images that afternoon and didn't give this one a moment's thought. But it turned out to be the best shot of the day. I had to be there and be ready for the moment when it happened. If I hadn't taken twenty shots before that moment, I don't think I would have been able to grab this one.

Back At It

After several weeks delay due to tropical storm Sandy, New Jersey Transit is finally running trains directly into New York City. I was definitely getting stir crazy and suffering Big Apple withdrawal. Hitting the streets again felt really good. But in all honesty, after just two weeks off I felt a little rusty - my reflexes not as quick, my attention drift. Oh well, I guess I'll just have to do it more often to get my mojo back.

I was particularly interested today to put the new images through a workflow with my iPad. It's a bit trial and error, and will take some experimenting but I was quite impressed with the ease of integration with Lightroom on my iMac. The new iPad processor is blazing fast and the Photosmith app on the iPad was designed to interface cleanly with Lightroom. I exported my keyword hierarchy from Lightroom to Photosmith on the iPad, set up an IPTC info preset and tagged all my photos, selected the picks, color labelled them and synced them to my Lightroom library with all the pertinent metadata in about 15 minutes. And this was my first time using the software.

I have yet to decide on how I will back up my images while I'm traveling - probably with a small hard drive and some kind of 'cloud' upload, but for now I'm really pleased with how this whole process is shaping up.

As I said before, I have some 'ring' rust from the two week layoff, but had fun on the street anyway. More shooting later this week and over the weekend. This shot was taken with my Fuji X-Pro1 and 35mm lens. Not that it makes a hell of a difference, but it was shot at 1/250th second, f8, ISO 1250.

More importantly, the guy had a really interesting face and posture, and he gave me a great expression just as I snapped the shutter.

Two Books

Firstly, I just bought myself a birthday present of a new iPad. I was intending to get the iPad Mini, I'd waited this long before purchasing just to get the smaller beast. When I compared the two - the mini and the full size - it was a no brainer. The retina display is quite startling. My only reservation about getting the big boy was that I thought it was in mid-cycle, and I didn't want to get just six months out of something that would be replaced so quickly. But Apple quietly slipped a new processor into the iPad 3  to make it into the iPad 4 so I jumped on it.

My primary motivation for the purchase was to have a way to view my photos and do basic catalog work on them while I did any traveling. At the Photo Expo show a few weeks ago I found a book entitled The iPad for Photographers which covers in detail all the various apps available for photo processing and a lot more. I needed to find apps that would integrate with my Lightroom workflow seamlessly. More on this stuff in later posts, as I work with the new software.

The second of the two books referred to in the title is Art & Fear. I had read a brief quote from the book and looked it up on Amazon. The intro to the book is available for preview, and as I read through, I was intrigued by the presentation. I'm often drawn to books about the creative process, only to be disappointed, so I rarely spend my hard earned money on them. I just get them from the library, read a few pages or chapters, and disappointedly return the book. This one wasn't available from the library. I had an epiphany. Interesting book/new iPad - download from iTunes and read on my new toy whenever I have a few free moments. What a concept!

More on this later. No photos for now, Sandy has made ingress to New York a chore, and it's not worth the 2-3 hours of travel each way. It's taken me 70 years to learn patience. Oh yeah, and I have a new toy to play with.

Not my usual

A few months ago some friends asked me to take photos of their family in their home before their second child was born. Studio setups are not my usual way of working, so I usually eschew that type of work. I've never taken photos of a pregnant woman, so I wasn't sure how comfortable I'd be, or how comfortable I'd be able to make the expectant mother. As it turned out, my misgivings were unnecessary. The session gave me an opportunity to reacquaint myself with my power pack and strobes, and a chance to play with some new toys. It was this same family that generously opened their home to me during the terrible storm that blew through here this past week. 

Sebastio Salgado once said 'If you take a picture of a human that does not make him (her) noble, there's no reason to take this picture.' I can't think of anything more noble for a woman than to be pregnant. This is my homage to Ella and her wonderful family. 

No photos today

I'm recovering from hurricane Sandy. I took photos of my local town, but they could be pictures of any one of hundreds of other towns in the storm's path. What strikes me profoundly about this storm is that five years ago predictions were made  for what the consequences would be if a category 3 hurricane hit the New York area directly. Sandy was a category 1 storm, and the results met the expectations for a category 3 storm. Th storm and tide surge boundaries for the most part defined the land's end boundaries of lower Manhattan before all the land fill and new development. I think Mother Nature is trying to tell us something here.

I was without electrical power for nearly six days. My home has electric heat and an electric stove. So, no showers and no cooking. And there is still a limited supply of gasoline. The upside to the whole experience is that I became part of a small community of warm generous people who included me in their family group. It was a joy to experience and to contribute.

(Just a quick note apropos of nothing: To my anonymous reader who feels the imperative to post comments to me about my grammar and spelling: if it's good enough for Google's spell checker, it's good enough for me.)

Fuji X-Pro1: Three different kinds of shots

As I mentioned in my previous post, after the Photo Expo on Saturday I spent some time sitting at a spot in the Meatpacking district of Manhattan. That gave me a chance to play with my new flash and flash bender, and because of a few mistakes, some new settings. 

I took a bus down Ninth Avenue and as I was getting ready to leave this gentleman asked me about my photographer's vest. While I chatted with him I grabbed a few shots, from the hip, raw, no flash, camera set at auto ISO (5000), 1/250th second, f4, 18mm lens. To be honest, I cropped the image to about 1/3 of it's original size. I did a fair amount of post processing on it - I mention this because even at it's reduced size the image held up really well with quite a bit of pixel bending. I'm attracted to shooting men with beards because I love the way the XP1 renders them so crisply.

This shot was with a flash. When I set up the flash on the XP1 I have to make adjustments in my camera settings. The shutter speed must be 1/160th or less, silent mode turned off (the flash won't fire if silent mode is on), and auto ISO reset to 200. I forgot to reset the auto ISO, so this shot turned out interesting for me. The ISO was 320, shutter at 1/125th, f2.8, with the flash and flash bender. A word about the aperture setting - the EF20 has a guide number of 20, it's not really powerful, but I don't need a killer flash, so keeping the aperture open wide is necessary to give the flash as much help as possible. I really haven't put the flash through its paces at night shooting yet - waiting for the Halloween parade to do that, hoping it's not rained out. As I said for the previous photo, I'm attracted to men (in this case a beast) with a beard. Oh, OK - it wasn't the dog that attracted me to this shot. But the look on that guy's face told the whole story: 'Oh the price I pay for being a hot hunk!'

 I took this shot with the flash and flash bender. I had reset the ISO to 200, the shutter speed was 1/160th, and aperture f2.8. But, my thumb inadvertently hit the 'Q' button and I mistakenly reset the image quality to 'jpeg fine'. I've read in a number of places about the great image quality the XP1 produces in its jpeg conversion. That's all well and good, but I avoid shooting jpegs because I don't see the point in throwing away one third of the pixel information and then doing the post processing on a compressed image. So I thought processing this image would be a challenge. To be sure, there were some issues of image degradation (the skin on his neck) but for the most part I think the image held up quite well. Yes, that is a flashlight in his earlobe!

A New Spot

When I walk around New York doing my flậneur thing, sometimes I come across an interesting spot or intersection back to which I'm drawn. I love these spots because they give me a chance to sit and work the street environment with some depth while I enjoy a good cigar. I experiment with different prime lenses by waiting for a subject to reach a particular spot where I know the composition that a particular focal length will give me. 

This past Saturday, after visiting the Photo Expo show at the Javitz center (for the second time) I went back to the Meatpacking district at the intersection of Chelsea and the West Village. I discovered a spot last week that I thought was bursting with possibilities, so I wanted to do a reality check. It was better than I had remembered.

I've been planning to get to the Halloween Parade in Greenwich Village this coming Wednesday evening. In preparation for it, I purchased a flash for my X-Pro1 camera, and at the photo show found a diffuser to fit over the flash. I took the whole rig with me to experiment with, and the results were very pleasant. Using a flash for street photography, unless you are Bruce Gilden, is contradictory. It's like shouting at people, 'Hey, I just took your picture!' That's not my usual style, so at first I was a bit uncomfortable. Surprisingly I found that quite a few people responded nicely to me, and I became engaged in several conversations with people who had questions about the XP1. Jon, the person on the left, talked at some length about his experience as a press photographer. Turns out that he knew my photography mentor, Mario Cabrera. But just like everyone else, hasn't a clue as to where he his or what he's doing. 

Mario, please call home!

Jon and Tim