Behind the scenes shots of our marketing shoot for "The King and I."

Mel Maghuyop as "The King."

I was happy to see "The King and I" on the 2014-2015 season listing at Zach Theatre. It's one of the most enjoyable and visually enchanting musicals from Rodgers and Hammerstein. On a show like this one we'll end up doing two or three different kinds of photographic shoots to help visually charge the marketing. Last week I covered an event that brought in a group of VIPs and donors to see a typical evening rehearsal. No costumes and no full band, but lots of energy and hard work. I was able to capture images of the interplay between the director and the cast. I was also able to get reaction images showing this small audience's appreciation of the details that go into bringing a rich and complex show like this to life. 

On Friday last week we had a fun, little shoot. Just the kind I like. We were able to photograph the two adult leads and one of the lead children, together and separately, for marketing images that Zach Theatre will use on the web and in direct mail (which still seems to be very effective). 

"The King and I" A marketing shot for an upcoming production at Zach Theatre.

We shot against a white background but I spent some time adding color and texture to the background just for fun.

Morning Notes. It's Friday and we're off to a good start.

"It's all about the light."

A scene from 'A Christmas Story' at Zach Theatre

November 2013.

I started my day out walking with the remaining Austin contingent of my family, Belinda and Studio dog. I'd cleaned the studio yesterday and set up a lighting design for a portrait I was hired to shoot, scheduled for this morning. The assignment was to make a portrait, for marketing, of a new radiologist who has joined a large, central Texas practice. I've been making marketing images for the group for over a decade and one of the things we provide often are head shots. 

I was anxious to use the K5600 HMI's that I got last week. I've used HMIs on video projects before and worked with them as a still photographer on other peoples' video projects but I'd never had the chance to use a lower output set to create portraits in my own studio. 

I put the open face Joker 200 light, with a front glass filter that gave me a nice light spread, where I usually put my main light. Up about 45 degrees and about 45 degrees off camera axis. I was pushing the photons through a 48 by 48 inch Chimera ENG panel with two layers of diffusion on it. One layer was a very thin, half stop silk and the next layer (with a quarter inch gap between the two) was a one stop silk. The light was gorgeous and I used the diffusion about four feet from my subject. While the HMI was the dominant front light there was indirect fill coming from the day light outside through my ten foot by ten foot, northwest facing bank of windows. The color temperatures matched perfectly.  I also put up a 3x3 foot chunk of white foamcore to the other side as additional fill.

Books, Depth of Field and Days Spent in the Studio.

Many years ago I was running a regional advertising agency and our biggest client was a company called, BookStop Bookstores. They were the first, serious category killer in the book business. A forerunner in the merciless slaughter of small, independent book stores. As they grew from a local, Austin retailer to a national chain with over 100 locations, our little ad agency grew along with them.

Bookstop's main value propositions were the facts that each store had large inventories (over 100,000 books in stock!!!) and lower prices (20 to 80% off, everyday). 

When we were busy running an agency I didn't have time to photograph the books that needed to be photographed for cooperative advertising and marketing in general so we subbed that out to various photographers. Eventually the chain became large enough to become a juicy (and very willing) takeover target for a bigger fish; Barnes and Noble. In the matter of a few months we said goodbye to our client and, after careful introspection (prodded by a downturn in the Austin economy) we decided to shutter the agency and move on. 

I moved into commercial photography and started my business in the deep economic trough created by the mid-1980's real estate free fall engendered by the savings and loan bust. Fortunately the design work for Bookstop ended up at a design firm run by a good friend. As the book business (and the inflow of new capital) improved the designers seemed to be churning out three or four newspaper co-op ads per week and some sort of four color catalog or flyer at least once a month. And since the account originally got steered to them by our referral I got the lion's share of the photography work. 

It was a two edged sword. On one hand my business was in the black from the very start but on the other hand I spent the better part of two years shooting hundreds, maybe thousands of books. In those days a fair amount of the book advertising, running full page or double truck in newspapers, was done in black and white. This meant that I'd shoot the books, soup the film and print a final reproduction print under a nice, tight deadline. Sometimes we'd get the books in the late afternoon and the final prints would be due the next morning....

I laughed when I read that people will always want to shoot with traditional digital cameras.

Camera: Pentax 6X7 cm.

Big, Loud and a pain in the ass to 

load with film. Ten shots and time 

to re-load. 

I'll never switch to digital???

(Now, "I'll never switch to an EVF?)

The recent discussion on EVFs versus OVFs spilled over to the Nikon and Canon forae at DP Review and I was amazed at how civil 98% of the people who commented were. A lot of good points were made. The current crop of full frame cameras is the gold standard for ultimate, affordable quality in cameras and there are still reasons (flash?) for some people to prefer optical view finders. No one threatened murder or muttered the "fanboy" put down. Either we photographers are evolving or the whole field has become so stagnant and  picked over that most people are just too bored to fight about stuff.

The remarks that I thought were interesting were the ones from people insisting that optical viewfinders were a "forever" thing and that most folks would be "pushing up daisies" before EVFs became relevant to the rank and file camera user. I thought about that sentiment in light of my own (overly) long career as a professional photographer. The idea that there's a singular answer to making art.

I know this will be boring to some but it shows me that a lot of us who have done this as a business were not preoccupied by oh so rationally pinching every dime and only buying new gear when we'd used our existing gear so hard and for so long that it ground into dust in our hands. Far from it. I think we were downright experimental all through the film age and we certainly weren't completely beholden to the 'miracle' of the pentaprism finder. 

All of my first few years of well paying commercial assignments were done almost exclusively with two camera systems. One was the 4x5 inch Calumet view camera and a trio of medium grade lenses. That camera, along with 24 film holders and a Polaroid back, helped me accomplish hundreds of assignments in a time when the large format transparency was king and real photographers still headed into their own darkrooms to tray develop their sheet film and print their own prints. The other camera was a Mamiya c220 twin lens camera with a 135mm lens (that was really a bit too short for my taste) and this was my portable, quick, candid camera system. Oh sure, I had a Canon TX camera and a 50mm lens but no self-respecting client was interested in using such a small frame for "real" work. Nothing was web res. Everything might need to go large. No way such a dinky frame would go poster sized (24x36 inches) at 600 ppi and no one really wanted to try...

Eventually more and more stuff went to medium format and we bought Hasselblad cameras to work with. They beat the pants off the Mamiya camera and having multiple backs pre-loaded was like a dose of paradise. We ended up using the waist level finder with a flip up magnifier for everything and the 4x5 inch view camera was still the "go to" camera for important assignments. We even shot portraits with it, along with a 250mm Zeiss Planar view camera lens.

In the early 1990's we settled nicely into medium format and when the waist level finders of the Hasselblads proved unwieldy for street photography or fast reportage we did NOT rush to find a pentaprism finder, instead we started buying up Mamiya 6 and Mamiya 7 rangefinder cameras that shot medium format film. By now we had some auto focusing Nikons or Canons but they still only saw use for event work and slide shows. No real work (except sports and journalism) got shot by commercial advertising guys with such a tiny format. (Sure, throw Jay Maisel, and Pete Turner back in my face...).

We used the medium format gear right up until the conversion to digital. And I still remember wave after wave after wave of older professionals, or professionals who wanted a clearer roadmap into the future swearing all the way up to 2005 that digital was never, ever going to be as good as film, ever. And that they'd be pushing up daisies before they felt the need to change over. A good number went belly up but by 2005 even the hard core stupid and recalcitrant ones were dragged, kicking and screaming, into digital because, for the most part, clients just started refusing to pay for film and processing and scanning. And few clients wanted to wait to use "their" files.

We bit the bullet back in 1998. And we bit the bullet over and over again until the taste of lead seemed normal. We reveled at the one frame per second, twenty four frame buffer of the Kodak DCS 660. Ooohed and ahhhed over the 4 megapixels of the Canon 1D and almost fainted when we mastered raw files and color profiles. But we never felt that finders would make or break our careers as photographers. 

I'll agree that current EVFs, while plenty good for most stuff, aren't perfect and there might be reasons to use OVFs for some stuff. And maybe it will stay that way for another year. Maybe 18 months. But beyond that the idea that we need to make a pledge to a life long allegiance to any camera technology paradigm is silly beyond silly. 

Maybe it's only my crusty, old generation of problem solving photographers who can make nice pictures with just about any machine. Maybe the new generation, raised on digital sensors crammed into last century camera bodies are incapable of shifting gears, dealing with change or otherwise retaining the flexibility that allows the sapling to bend in the wind while mightier trees are felled.

I can't think that is true. I think people just get comfortable and burrow into whatever they first learned on. But it really doesn't matter; if they use their cameras to make good images and nobody needs to change if there's no compelling reason to change. There's a big, old hump in the middle of the Bell Curve. The early adopters can't imagine why people don't want to embrace the newest thing and reap the benefits of being first. The middle section (the vast majority) only follow when every kink is worked out and the theories are well proven. The final, tail end embraces the product in its last  gasp of relevance, assured that they are getting the bargain of a life time. And each group believes with vigor that they are absolutely correct. But in the end it's only the images that matter. 

Thanks to all the new visitors from DPR who added to the process for me. I enjoyed (and learned a few things) reading their comments on the forums. I hope some will stick around here. The nice ones. Of course. 

other notes: We've rounded up a couple of wonderful models for the HMI experimentation and will begin our series of shoots on Friday. 

Those wonderful people at Nikon in Europe have had the newest firmware for lens corrections with the D7100 (and a raft of other popular Nikon bodies) up for about a week now. Those dolts at Nikon USA haven't gotten around to uploading the upgrade to the U.S. site. If you go to Nikonusa.com you see version 1.009. If you go "continental" you can get your hands on version 2.005. The upgrade fixes the distortion issues I talked about with my "convenience" lens, the 18-140mm.

I spent the middle of my day doing a photographer task that we do when we are not shooting. I drove to Johnson City, Texas to meet with a client about an upcoming annual report shoot and to scout several shooting locations for assignments in October. Gotta see the locations before you can really figure out the logistics. Studio Dog did not want to travel. I went by myself and had a nice, quiet drive out into the Hill Country and away from the "big" city. 

that's all the news from me. hope your week is fun. 

Forget the viewfinder debates, we've got new HMI lights in the studio.

K5600 Lighting. Alpha 200.

This is a beautiful and compact HMI light 

that is also a focusable spot. It's a wonderful 

tool for finely crafted lighting. 

If you read the blog on a regular basis you've got to know that I have a soft spot for continuous lighting. I like using tungsten lights, LEDs, fluorescent fixtures and now, HMIs. But that doesn't mean for a second that I think you should abandon the ubiquitous photographer love affair with flash of all varieties. It's just that continuous lights provide such immediate results. It's so much easier to see the effect your lighting is having on a subject if the light hangs around long enough for your eyes to register what you are actually seeing. I'll go out on a sturdy limb here and say that continuous lights are the best learning tools for people who want to really, really learn how to light. Not just how to bounce some photons off a white ceiling but to be able to see definitive changes in outcome from seemingly small adjustments. Feathering an parabolic reflector is a good example. Finding the penumbra of light is harder when you use a modeling light or depend on trial and error...

If you are an event photographer then by all means, grab that SB-900 or that Canon Speedlight and go to town. You need to be untethered and mobile. And you probably want to freeze the action as your subjects freeze their smiles onto their faces. But, if you want to try your hand at still life or even portrait photography you might be pleasantly surprised at how flexible and satisfying it can be to work with light that sticks around. 

I love tungsten lighting because it comes in all shapes and sizes and some fixtures can project razor sharp beams of light while others, when used through big diffusion, can give the soft effect of northern light coming through high, thin clouds. The downsides of tungsten are that it consumes a lot of electrical energy which it converts mainly into heat and infra-red radiation. Tungsten also has a color temperature that is very different from daylight which makes balancing this light source with ambient daylight a bit more difficult than with most other light sources. You can easily filter it accurately but you'll need to worry about heat. A powerful tungsten fixture can melt a filter used too closely in minutes....

That's why a lot of people who work with continuous lighting have embraced LEDs and fluorescents. They are much more efficient with electrical energy and can be filtered or engineered to work in tandem with daylight. The weak spot for both of theses sources is both the lower light output you get with them and the discontinuous spectrum you'll get with all but the most expensive fixtures. (If you are using either source as your dominate light in a space with no daylight infiltration the color balance is not important as custom white balancing takes care of most spectral mismatches...).

The optimum continuous light would be nicely and accurately daylight balanced, strong enough to use in any ambient lighting situation and agile enough to provide many looks. While LEDs are encroaching into the film making space at a rapid clip the long time gold standard for most cinematographers has been the HMI light. 

So, what are they, really?  Here's what the Wikipedia says:

Hydrargyrum medium-arc iodide, or HMI, is the brand name of Osram brand for a metal-halide gas discharge medium arc-length lamp manufactured for film and entertainment applications. Hydrargyrum is Latin for mercury (Hg).

An HMI lamp uses mercury vapour mixed with metal halides in a quartz-glass envelope, with two tungsten electrodes of medium arc separation. Unlike traditional lighting units using incandescent light bulbs, HMIs need electrical ballasts, which are separated from the head via a header cable, to limit current and supply the proper voltage. The lamp operates by creating an electrical arc between two electrodes within the bulb that excites the pressurized mercury vapour and metal halides, and provides very high light output with greater efficacy than incandescent lighting units. The efficiency advantage is near fourfold, with approximately 85–108 lumens per watt of electricity. Unlike tungsten-halogen lamps where the halide gas is used to regenerate the filament and keep the evaporated tungsten from darkening the glass, the mercury vapour and the metal halides in HMI lamps are what emit the light. The high CRI and color temperature are due to the specific lamp chemistries.