The last couple of days I have been working my hands to the bone building out the office in my studio. After much consultation with my father, I designed and built two large worktables/desks in my office. One for me, and one for Xina when she chooses to work at home. Let me just say that I enjoyed the planning stages and the phone calls with my dad much more than the actual construction. Since I wasn’t able to build the tables with my dad in his well outfitted woodshop, I had to build them in my studio. Don’t get me wrong, I am certainly grateful that I have enough space to build an 8 foot table in my studio, but lacking power tools, it was a challenge.

I purchased the wood for the project at a local lumberyard rather than going to a big box store as I’d originally planned. The wood itself was slightly more expensive, but they didn’t charge me to make all of the numerous cuts that I was unable to do at home. The other advantage was that the location was much closer to my apartment than any of the big box stores. My little Subaru isn’t quite large enough to hold an 8 foot piece of plywood tabletop, so I had to stick it out from the back and drive veeeery slowly and carefully back home.

I’d figured out all the dimensions and the pieces needed with the much needed help from my dad. I wouldn’t have been able to do any of this on my own – my own plans were really terrible and dad was able to help me design something that actually worked. He even took the time to send me some notes. If you need DIY table plans, this set of instructions should be all you need (along with some math skills).

Once I had all of the individual pieces back home, I set up a camera, planning to do a time lapse movie of the project. After the first 20 minutes of frustration and anger I realized that the pressure of the camera watching me screw up was adding to the stress of the project so I turned it off. So sorry, no film. Construction essentially consisted of taking the pre-cut lumber, making some cross-cuts by hand and assembling all of the pieces. Here’s what I learned about myself during this process: no amount of careful measurement, combination squares and fancy Japanese pull saws are enough for me to make a straight cut. Seriously, as anal retentive I am, I was completely and utterly unable to make straight cuts with a saw. Each cut was consistently at a 2-3 degree angle from plum. Which made everything very difficult. One day I’ll buy a circular saw and be done with it.

Day one was the larger of the two tables, and day two was the smaller one. By day two I thought I’d figured out some of what I did wrong on day one, so set about the second table much more deliberately. While I was able to correct the mistakes from the first table, I realized that everything else that worked for the first table was apparently luck, and luck was not with me on the second table. Despite the 4×4s fighting me (one in particular had a grudge against me apparently because it was a complete pain in the ass) I was able to get the tables built – they are stable and feel very solid. Both tables are done and functional, and don’t look that bad mainly due to the nice birch plywood tabletops which cover up most of the mistakes. And let me tell you, going for and 8 foot table versus a four foot table is very liberating. Eight feet of lovely workspace!

I am exhausted, my entire body is sore and my hands are covered with blisters. But on the upside, I now have a usable desk/worktable in my office. I think I’ll wait on building a cyc wall until I can afford to hire a carpenter or maybe convince my dad to come visit. Here is what the larger of the two tables looks like all set up like a big boy office:

The office is starting to feel official finally. We even have a conference table! Which is our old dinner table, re-purposed as a work table. But I can, you know, have conferences! Have I mentioned lately how much better this it to my former cubicle existence?

Today is the start of my second full week in Saint Louis. I had this little app on my iPhone that I was using to countdown the days until the move when I was still in New York and I realized that after it hit zero, it changed over from “days until” to “days since”. I was going to trash it, but then I decided to just let it keep clocking away. In any case, it is Day 13 today, and I felt it was high time to make sure that all of my equipment is functional. I also wanted to make sure that everything was in the correct place, nothing was missing, and that I would be able to do what I need to do on a shoot. There is nothing worse than getting to a shoot and realizing that a piece of equipment is either broken or missing.

In my experience, the only way to truly make sure that you have everything in your bag and that everything is working is to stage an actual photo shoot, from start to finish. It is one thing to look at your bag and go through the inventory, and another to take everything out, build a set and make some pictures. This is especially the case when working with kits you haven’t used as much as others, or maybe kits you thought you knew but haven’t used in a while.

Last week I needed to make a quick head shot of Xina for her lab website, and when I pulled out my speedlight kit and built the set, I realized I was missing a few crucial items. I went online and ordered what I needed, and when everything gets here I’ll run through another test shoot, just to be sure. Today I unpacked and tested my big light kit, which includes a couple of Alienbees. In the past I’ve always used the Alienbee radio system, but my transmitter battery died, and I’m using PocketWizards these days anyway. After I’d set up the AB800 with a softbox and had it in place, I realized that the Alienbees take the small PC cords, while my other monolights take the large connector. Turns out I don’t have the correct cord to use with my PWs. Not a big deal, I have a standard sync cord and made it work, but if I’d been on a shoot I’d have been in trouble since that particular sync cord isn’t always in my lighting kit. It illustrates the importance of real world testing versus just checking things off an equipment list (which is important too). As a side note: you should always have a couple of sync cords handy when you go on location. You never know when you’re going to get interference from some outside source messin’ with your pocket wizards. Nothing beats a direct cable in a pinch.

So I hauled everything out into my fantastic new space and got to work. If you’ve never worked in your own studio space, there is nothing better than having space to move around when building a set, and the fact that it’s my apartment makes it even better. I turned on some tunes, and spent the morning and afternoon testing equipment and playing with various lighting setups. Unfortunately I only had one really funny lookin’ model to work with today, so your mileage may vary. You know what I love about photography? You can even make a big tub of goo like me look like he’s got muscles just by using light (and conveniently hide his belly in shadow while you’re doing it). Lemme tell you something, photos can, and do, lie.

Nothing like spending the day taking pictures of yourself to make you feel like a narcissist.

It has been a busy week here in St. Louis, and it’s only Wednesday. I had to actually pull up my calendar to check that, since to be honest I wasn’t exactly sure what day of the week it is. We have been busy unpacking and car buying, and while we are getting to the end of the unpacking process, we still have a lot to do. Not surprisingly I’m settling into the new loft very well. I have a kitchen I can use, you know, ordinary sized stove not a little toy stove, counter space … all in all it’s amazing.

It’s so amazing in fact, that I have to make sure to remember that my job is not to hang out in my office apartment every day. I am a photographer, and a photographer that spends his days organizing hanging files in his filing cabinet and other household items is not going to improve as a photographer no matter how diligently he stacks and straightens his Post-Its, pens and copy paper. Having a neat and organized office and having all of your equipment in order is important, no doubt. But it all means nothing if you’re not shooting. Hence the acronym that most photographers who blog have mentioned: ABS, or Always Be Shooting. It’s sometimes difficult to find the time when you have the other important things in your life happening, but if you’re a professional photographer, this is something you need to be doing. Not only so that you can have work to throw up on your blog, but so that you keep your creativity primed, your skills sharp. And lets be honest here, if you love it, you’ll find the time.

Citygarden, Saint Louis

Given that I’ve been in Saint Louis for exactly one week as of today, I have a ton of stuff to do. But today I took some time for myself and went out with my camera to explore a bit. I didn’t make a massive trip of it, and I stayed in the neighborhood where I live. However, my little photo walk this afternoon got the juices flowing, and as a side benefit, opened my eyes to a bit more of the city then I’d seen before. I can’t wait to go further afield (although when I go I’ll be armed with water, a hat, and sunblock – the St. Louis humidity is a force to be reckoned with. It was kind of overcast in patches today when I was out, and I felt that black and white conveyed the mood. Here is some work from today.

City Center, Saint Louis

Detail, Orpheum Theater, Saint Louis

Alley, Downtown Saint Louis

As a side note, Saint Louis has alleys. There is nothing more interesting to me than these little half streets behind buildings, in the middle of blocks. They aren’t on every block, but for some reason they always make me smile when I stumble across them. I had alleys growing up in PA, but New York doesn’t really do alleys – too much wasted real estate I guess. Perhaps I should do a project of just alleys. I’m also thinking of doing a project about parking garages … lots of those in Saint Louis too!

There is always the caveat of course: bad photoshop is still bad photoshop. Just the way that bad physical retouching is still bad physical retouching. To be good at intensive digital retouching you need to have control, subtly, creativity and knowledge of how things are supposed to look. This is why there are professional retouchers to offset every other schmo with a copy of Photoshop Elements.

I am do not use photoshop a lot these days. In fact, the more I shoot the more I want to do everything in-camera. Why? a few reasons. First, I’m impatient. I want the image to be as close to final when the shoot is over. Second, I find it much more fun to figure out how to make that perfect (or near perfect image) while working on the set, rather than sitting at my computer. I’ll nudge around pieces of black foam core for hours on set rather than try to photo shop out an unsightly reflection. And third? I’m not that great at retouching, so I try to avoid it.

Now, this doesn’t mean that I don’t do retouching at all. Like anyone else, I spend time removing blemishes and softening age lines and wrinkles. Note that I said softening, not removing. I do everything I can to not “remove” wrinkles. Wrinkles are character and there is a certain amount of photographic honesty involved here. In fact, I like wrinkles. I’ve never been a fan of the space alien completely flawless look. I’m usually not shooting beauty and fashion shots after all (at least no yet).

90% of my post production is done in Lightroom these days, which is a tool that has become invaluable to my workflow. Here is a quick run down of my post production process for most shoots:

Rough Selects: I do a first pass through the entire shoot, flagging picks. This is what I call rough selects and I flag everything that seems like it is worth saving. I generally don’t use the Reject flag at this point because I never like to throw anything away.

Selects: Next, I take a second pass and narrow down my rough selects further to a minimum number of shots that I feel are the best. This usually means that the cut goes down to three to four images per setup (this could be more or less depending of course on the project).

Develop: I shoot in raw, so that I can to develop those images similar to the way that film would be developed in a lab. I need to adjust the saturation, contrast, exposure and color balance. Lightroom makes it easy for me to make these adjustments to one of my selects and then sync the settings with all of the rest.

Minor retouching: Light room has some simple retouching tools for things like blemishes and spot removal. I use these tools minimally to take care of easy to remove problems.

Share with the client: Once I’m happy with the selects, I share these to the client. These days I’m using Photoshelter for this process and I love it. More on that in another post.

Final retouching: When the client gets back to me with their choice(s), then I do a final pass of more detailed retouching. It is at this point that I do the more intensive retouching that is necessary like removing copyrighted logos from a subject’s t-shirt or taking out an unsightly lamp that got into your shot somehow. Again, I’d like to mention that I do everything I can to make sure that all out removal is kept to a minimum in my shots. Depending on the final use I also make test prints to make sure that everything looks the way that I want it.

Image Delivery: Once the images are complete and ready to go, I make the high res images available for download (again via Photoshelter).

That’s it. I think my process is really no different than it would be if I was shooting film. The only real difference is that I can all of the steps at my desk instead of a lab, and I can do the whole process in one day if need be.

As I mentioned last week, I’ve been utilizing my iPhone a bit more lately for scouting, idea capture and in general, just another way to boost my creativity a bit. One of the challenges that I’ve faced with the iPhone, however, is how to get my photos off the phone and onto my computer in a reasonable fashion. The problem lies in the fact that I sync my iPhone to my home computer (a Mac) and spend most of my day working on a PC at work. I don’t want to connect my phone to my work computer, so this means that if I snap a photo on my iPhone during the day, I can’t really access it to post on my blog or on Flickr unless I email it to myself, wait for my email sever to hiccup a few times, and finally get it through.

So I’ve been looking for an app that will easily and reliably allow me to upload photos from my iPhone to Flickr. Surprisingly, Yahoo doesn’t have a native app for this. You would think that they would at this point, but they don’t. So after some research through forums and the iTunes store, I narrowed my decision to two apps: AirMe and Mobile Fotos. Both allow you to take photos on your iPhone and post them to Flickr directly from the app.

I tried out AirMe first because it is a free application and I’d read good things about it. Almost immediately I came across some obvious problems. First, with AirMe you can only post photos that you take using the AirMe camera interface, which is poorly designed and covers way more of the screen (in this case, your viewfinder) which makes composing more difficult. You can’t post photos from your camera roll, only from the AirMe camera interface.

The first time I tried to upload the photos, it worked great, and I was prepared to deal with the other problems, because the price was right. After my third upload, however, the app started to crash. I’d take the photo, would choose “Use Photo” and then watch as the app cranked for a minute, then crashed. This resulted in losing the photo. On one particular occasion I was really excited about a shot I’d pulled off, only to lose it seconds later when AirMe crashed. It ended up being a waste of time and effort.

So I ponied up the $1.99 for Mobile Fotos and so far everything has been golden. I can upload directly to Flickr, I can add title, description, tags, create or add to existing sets, and set privacy levels for my images, and best of all I can use the regular iPhone camera and pull images from my Camera Roll. So far I’ve uploaded images without trouble using the Edge network as well as when connected to WiFi. Mobile Fotos also has a great interface for browsing your photostream on Flickr which caches thumbnails to make subsequent viewings go faster.

I’ve only been using Mobile Fotos for a day or so, but so far it’s been a great compliment to my iPhone.

I tend to shoot a lot, probably too much really. I tend to get caught up in the moment and bang away a few too many identical frames, because honestly, I just love doing it. I love the act of making photos just as much as seeing the results. But when I go to unload my cards, there are usually many many images. This means a big library, which is difficult to maintain. When I started shooting professionally and the amount of images in my library started to increase, it because imperative that find a better solution to organize everything.

Then I found Adobe Lightroom. As I think I’ve mentioned before, this is my photography software product of the year two years running. When I started looking for a software to organize my photography, I compared Lightroom with Apple’s product, Aperture. In the end, my decision to go with Lightroom came down to three things: price (lightroom was cheaper), speed (lightroom performed better, even on my Mac) and platform (I could run Lightroom at home on my mac and at work on my shitty PC, therefore enhancing workflow). I’m not going to get into a long discussion about Lightroom at the moment but suffice it to say that I love it and couldn’t work as smoothly without it.

So here’s my workflow tip of the day: keyword every photo as you import it. Don’t wait and do it manually after the fact, do it immediately. Lightroom has an option to batch add keywords in the import screen: take advantage of this. Here’s why I do it:

In the past, I’d merrily skip past the import options and then painstakingly add the keywords afterwards. This works pretty well and doesn’t take a whole lot of effort. But as I started shooting more and more, my schedules got tighter, and I’d get distracted and wouldn’t actually go back and do it. The result? 18k photos in my library without keywords. This is a big problem.

Here’s what I do now: for every shoot, I choose at least one or two keywords that apply to everything that I’m importing. Most of the time it’s the person’s name, if it’s a portrait session, or an event name, or a project name. Obviously if you’re shooting more than one person you don’t want to apply everyone’s name in bulk. So I add a general set of keywords that work for all the images, and the do specific keywords later. This way, even if I procrastinate and never make it back to add those specific keywords, I have the ability to at least narrow down my search with some general terms.

Believe me, adding keywords every time I import has been a huge help. This also applies for metadata. Set up some basic information about you that applies to all your photographs – your name, your URL, your location, your contact information etc. Apply this to every photo you take, that way you won’t have to go back in and do it later. There is no better way to make sure that your name stays with a photo than metadata.

Was any of this helpful? I know it seems pretty basic, but it was a bit of an eye opener to me when I figured it out.

To meter or not to meter.

I’ve been reading photo blogs religously for the last couple of years, and the one over-arching theme amongst the digital professionals has been: when shooting digital, use the LCD as your meter rather than using an actual light meter. Nearly all of the pro-photo bloggers that I read don’t use meters, so naturally I stopped using my meter at all. When I started my lighting class at the beginning of the summer, I wasn’t in the habit of metering and caught shit from Clay about forgetting to meter. After a few weeks, I came to the realization: metering makes my life a whole lot easier and my work has improved greatly.

The photographers who advocate not using a meter generally have been shooting for years. As such, they have much more experience guessing where the exposure needs to be for a given situation. Even after my piddly two years shooting professionally I’m much better at guessing exposure – imagine where I’ll be in eight or ten years. However, in order to learn how to guess those exposures, you need to understand the exposure. If you’re constantly just clicking up or down a stop with your aperture, you aren’t going to understand the relationships between the light and your camera settings. You aren’t going to think, ok, if my key is f8 then I want my kicker to be f1. You’re just taking a few dozen setup shots to get it right. And lets not get started about drop off. Depending on your light source, drop off can be pretty dramatic. If you have your model step back a couple feet, do you really want to go through another series of test shots to check your aperture?  Bottom line, until you have a lot of experience with a lot of different lighting setups, being scientific is going to get you more accurate images, quicker.

For the most part, I work without and assistant. This makes it hard when you have to set up lights on your own in a strange place without someone to stand in. When I was going through my non-metered phase, I’d guess at the lights then put the camera on a tripod, hit the shutter then run over to the setup and get into the shot to test the light. I’d have to do this a half dozen times to get it right, and even then, I’m relying on my LCD for accuracy. This sucks. When I meter, I have a pretty decent idea of how the lights are going to hit. When my subject arrives I’m all set up and generally only need minor tweaks to the angles etc.

Long story short, metering allows me to get set up faster, make changes faster, get lighting experience through a scientific approach as opposed to a haphazard one, and in general makes me more confident when I’m shooting. I heart metering.

I use a Sekonic L-358 (with the Pocket Wizard chip for wireless triggering) and it works great.

Last year I was shooting almost exclusively on white seamless for my firm – the type of advertising we were shooting for was all actual employees for a people first campaign. This year the style has changed dramatically, and while I’m glad to be doing a wider variety of work, I still kind of miss the seamless stuff.

If you want to get into some seamless stuff, here is an excellent tutorial that I came across today which is excellent. Zach tells you how to go through the a bargain-basement set too. As always, I’m jealous of the studio. Why can’t I have a nice big studio?

/whine

For even more abuse, check out his podcast in the iTunes store for the 30 extended video where he shows off his full gear collection which makes my set of Hensels look pretty sad.

From a marketing standpoint, Chase is a genius with all these videos. What better way to show your clients that you are technically savy, prepared for anything, not to mention that you have the travel experience to travel with all your gear to exotic lands for a shoot.

This is part of the reason I’m enjoying the photography work so much – it’s new, it’s exciting, and it’s a way for me to build on my creativity a bit. I’ve been complaining about the boring work I’ve had to do for years, and photography gives me an excuse to stay cloistered in my cushy corporate job a little longer. The question arises: Once I get my fill of corporate photography for my one big client, my employer, will I stay here being bored like I have been with the design side, or will I try to branch out on my own? Or will my other projects pay off so that I don’t have to worry about it?

Dipping my toe in to the wild world of photography outside my bubble is a bit scary. I read a number of blogs that are uplifting and encouraging. But I read an equal number of blogs that scare the pants off me. Some of these make me question my creativity, my ability to drum up business for myself, and whether or not I’m real or if I’m just a poser, an artist or a hack. I had an email conversation with Jayme Thornton, one of the first photographers I hired in New York (who does really great work, btw), and he said “you’re in a brave new world of photography bizness. It’s mean and changing.”

The “mean” part is what I’m worried about I suppose. There are so many amateurs crossing over to the pro side, that I often question whether or not I’m one of them. Technology has made the competition fierce, although to be honest, I wouldn’t be here without the technology advancements either. From the sound of it, I just need to dive in, no matter how cold the water is and see what happens. For now I’ve got the cushy job to protect me while I learn.

I am also extremely lucky to be part of my other project which I have no doubt will make me rich someday, and then I’ll be able to make photos to my hearts content with a couple of 1Ds Mark IIIs and a full array of Profotos without having to worry about making money with my art. Right? Right??