February, 2011

Portraits are by no means my specialty. But when given the chance to photograph Author C.D. Payne on the heels of the release of the film adaptation of his book, Youth in Revolt, I couldn’t really say no.

C.D. was gracious enough to let us into his home and let us capture him in his natural habitat, and shared with us his crafts and passions outside of writing. And of course, he did it all in front of the camera without batting an eye.

He recently released a new book, Invisibly Yours.

I’ll lead off with the important part. You can buy Photo Mechanic right now for $60. I wouldn’t blame  you if you didn’t read the rest of this post. But if you do by chance remember to come back here, it would be much appreciated.

Remember when you first got a digital camera, and importing that first group of 2 Megapixel photos to your computer’s 40Gb hard drive was magical because you didn’t have to deal with film?

Well, if you’re like most photographers nowadays, you have to deal with a day’s take of 500-1000 12 or 18 Megapixel RAW files. In addition, you have to review them, rate them, keyword them, and caption them. Then you have to upload them to an FTP server for a clients review, or place them into a web gallery, or export proofsheets and email them.

Well, I had gotten to a point where I had dreaded that potentially hours-long process. Then Zack Arias introduced me to Photo Mechanic. What used to take me anywhere from 3-4 hours in Lightroom (no offense Lightroom, I love you and you will forever be part of my workflow) took less than an hour when going through Photo Mechanic. I was initially skeptical about adding another piece of software to my workflow. Lightroom was revolutionary when it was released, but the time it took to render previews made the selection process slow to a crawl with the huge RAW files today’s cameras produce. Enter Photo Mechanic. I won’t go into specifics too much–you can always watch Zack’s video if you follow the link above if you want the nitty gritty, but essentially Photo Mechanic only deals with the RAW file’s embedded JPG preview, and consequently, it is fast. Crazy fast, even on the damn near ancient workstation where I do my selections.

Photo Mechanic is not for pixel pushing, or even making global adjustments. No curves, saturation, levels, healing brushes, dodging or burning. It’s for editing and sorting only, and when you see it in action, you’ll see why it’s the go-to tool for a majority of press photographers and newspapers in the country.

If you deal with hundreds or even thousands of pictures per assignment, and you want a lot of your time back, get it today for $60 instead of the regular price of $150.

Dinner with Friends is Donald Margulies’ Pulitzer Prize-winning work about a couple that re-evaluates their relationship after the the dissolution of their closest friends’ marriage. This production was put on by the Dreamweavers Troupe in Napa, a non-profit, volunteer run theatre company dedicated to producing quality shows in the Napa Valley.

The lighting at Dreamweavers has made it one of my favorite theaters in which to shoot; powerful and plentiful. And after remedying some storage shortages mentioned in a previous post, I was free to be as trigger happy as I wanted with the shutter. Which brings me to one of the main things that I try to practice: capturing the emotional height of a moment. Photographing a theatrical production requires a great deal of anticipation–trying to be where the puck is going to be as Wayne Gretzky puts it.

Even though I do make liberal use of the 7D’s eight frames per second, I only really use it as a safety mechanism so that I can choose from the single best shot of a series–not so I can show off all 30 frames from a burst. It helps me to make sure that I capture the moment–the moment that illustrates a special connection between actors, the moment where the action is at it’s peak. And in a play where movement is constant, and an inch of movement can mean losing multiple stops of light, that moment can literally be a fraction of a second. Eight frames per second helps, but it won’t move you to where the puck is going to be.

See the whole set here.

Buried Child is  a Pulitzer Prize-winning drama by Sam Shepard, and the first production I shot for a young production company, Bay Area Stage. The first thing that struck me before action was called was the amazing attention paid to set design, art direction, and construction. It was easily the best set I’ve seen on a production of this size (as of yet–Bay Area Stage has a tendency to top themselves time after time).

Because of the general mood and tone of the play, it was a fairly dark show. Especially a challenge when you depend on (and hope for) as much light as possible to make sharp, clear photographs. More than a few times, I had to bring my shutter speed way below my normal level of comfort and employ Joe McNally’s “Da Grip“. I wouldn’t have had nearly as many keepers had it not been for this technique.

The other issue I had was storage. I had 20Gb with me in CF cards and I damn near ran out of space. the 7D makes huge raw files, anywhere from 23Mb to 32Mb in size, and in any given show I will snap the shutter 900-1000 times. I didn’t have a choice but to switch to JPG in the last few scenes. Luckily I did a custom white balance before the show and really concentrated on metering as accurately as possible, so all was well. But I’ll admit I was sweating shooting in JPG and not having the cushion of RAW. Still, I captured everything I wanted to, and I could see a marked improvement in exposure accuracy, composition, and my ability to click at “the moment” over the last couple of shows.

Either way, one of the bigger lessons here is that storage is cheap, and you should definitely invest in as much of it as you can.

See the whole set here.