I am Honored Beyond Words.

To understand how way cool it is to have been immortalized in one of UK shooter Mike Stimpson's Lego photos, you have to appreciate some of his other work. Mike is the guy who did all of those classic photos in Legos.

Bonus points for the setup shots he includes with most of his iconic reproductions, too. Make sure you click through the photo above to see the notes, too. There's some serious deets in there.

Eat your heart out, Mt. Rushmore. And thanks again, Mike!

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2009 Save-the-Dates: Dubai, Paso Robles and Santa Fe Workshops

In late March / early April, I'll be teaching three classes at a new, expanded Gulf Photo Plus 2K9 in Dubai. More on that full line-up (and an amazing video) after the jump.

Also coming soon is a week-long intensive lighting workshop in California in late April, details of which will be posted shortly. And looking further out, I also will be teaching for the Santa Fe Workshops in San Miguel d'Allende (Mexico) in mid-October. More on those last two when the respective sites go live.

But Dubai is fast approaching, so hit the jump for more on that...
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GPP 2009

What can you say about Dubai that has not already been said? It's insane. But a picture is worth a thousand words, so check out what The Big Picture had to say on the matter.

I was there last year for Gulf Photo Plus '08, and I am looking forward to getting back for GPP 2009 at the end of the month.



Scheduled to teach this year: Zack Arias, Carol Dragon, Drew Gardner, Chris Hurtt, Chase Jarvis, Vincent Laforet, Bobbi Lane, Cliff Mautner, Joe McNally, Robin Nichols, David Nightingale, Asim Rafiqui and yours truly.

I'll be teaching three classes -- a two-day lighting seminar for beginners, an introduction to headshots class, and a two-day class on self-generated personal shoots with a purpose.

Which pisses me off, really, because I would much rather be off the clock and attending things like Laforet's three-day assignment class, or any of Zack's classes, or learning high-end HDR with David, or draping models on water buffalos with Drew, or anything with Joe. You get the idea.

Chase is even reprising his five-day soup-to-nuts commercial shoot course, too. Last year it was a huge hit -- one of those things that erases a few years of "school of hard knocks" from your career track. It is the full deal: A 360-degree look at a full commercial assignment, from creative brief to preplan to model selection to shoot to post. Everything.

Note that 5am - 8pm sked on the shoot day, too. Heh.


You'll Run Out of Adjectives

I know Dubai is a stretch for most. Would be for me, too, if they were not bringing me in. But if you are one of those lucky souls with some disposable income left, and live in that quadrant of the world, it might be worth a search on economy-depressed airfares into DXB. Emirates Airlines flies there -- in style -- from just about any major international airport. And the onsite hotel (next door, actually) for GPP is significantly cheaper this year because of those empty rooms, too.


If you are rationalizing the trip as a getaway with your significant other, Dubai is a shopper's paradise. (Or hell, depending on who gets the credit card bill.)

The Mall of the Emirates with the indoor ski slope now only barely cracks the top three offerings. My personal favorite is Ibn Battuta Mall, just one of the pavilions of which is pictured at left.

Of course, it has been almost a year since I have been to Dubai which means there is an all-new "biggest mall ever" -- the creatively named Dubai Mall. (Lotta thought went into that, I am sure...) I'll have to check that one out, along with Ibn Battuta again. Not that I am a shop-a-holic. I am mostly in it for the over-the-top cultural/capitalist/visual stimulation. And the air conditioning.

But Dubai's most Freudian attraction is, of course, the Burj Dubai. It will be the tallest building in the world (by a long shot) upon completion this year. If you ever do visit The Burj, skip the stairs and head straight for the elevators for the ride up. I'm just saying.

But for the ride down, you may wish to consider an alternate route:



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Links:

:: Gulf Photo Plus 2009 Main Page ::
:: Blog: Dubai Strobists ::

Lighting 101 PDF Released in Three More Languages

I am happy to announce that, thanks to the generous efforts of a dedicated group of multilingual readers, the Lighting 101 course has now been released into French, Hebrew and Spanish.

Hit the jump for links to the uploaded files, instructions on how to get L101 in other languages -- or maybe even translate it into a new one...
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Leading Off -- French

Thanks to the team effort on the French translation project, the L101 French version will thankfully not be a jumble of misconjugated verbs and insulting idioms. My French, she is not so good, non?

These guys did it by committee and were meticulous to a fault. I am told they deliberated over it until the last drop red wine was gone. Such dedication.

Thanks to Jacques, Mélina, Benoit, Charles, Christophe, Laurent and Jon, many hands made light work (owch - that pun physically hurt).

The PDF is available for download here. Not that it has to stay there, either. These PDFs are released for hosting/sharing anywhere, as long as they are unaltered and attribution is maintained.


Batting Left -- Hebrew

Thanks to the one-man translation machine, Tomer Jacobson, Lighting 101 is now available in Hebrew.

I had to hold my laptop up to a mirror to try to make sense of the right-to-left script.

Didn't help! But it looks beautiful and was a lot of effort for one person. You rock, Tomer.

That translation is here. As with the French version, feel free to pass it along anywhere you wish.


And at Clean-Up, Spanish

What else can I say about Rafa Barbera? He has been translating Strobist into Spanish at Strobist en Español since way back. So, naturally he felt he should take on all of the extra L101 translation and PDF formatting all by himself, too.

Having finished this task, he will next be solving the world's economic problems before moving on to single-handedly finding a solution for global warming.

The Lighting 101 PDF in Spanish is here. (Thanks Rafa!)
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Remember, a Japanese version is already available (over 4,000 D/L's from the MediaFire site alone) and of course there is an English PDF version, too.

If you want to learn more about the translation projects, start here.

And again -- many, many thanks to all of the people involved.

peace out

pink umbrellas, originally uploaded by sandcastles01.

the future perfect

All week I've been trying to stave off the grippe. Not happening, my drippy nosed head is telling me.

In my benedryl fogged haze I'm forcing myself to sit, quietly and do a little lap-top window shopping at, the aptly named: 'The future perfect' ~which carries, great tongue in cheek chic design.

'dusty table'~$1,950.00

this one's already making my nose itch. could they also make fur tumbleweeds for the corners of the room? that would be great. thanks.

'freck specs'~$600.00

face 'jury' {btw, I was told this is the real way to pronounce 'jewelry'} for all of us freckle-less faces who always wished for nature's sprinklin's.

'three sixty table' ~ $1795.00

good ollie, this is awesome.

'graffiti pillow'~$175.00

graffiti needle pointed pillow. wow. I do so love this. It's granny tagger street chic, mon dieu.

'new york delft'~ $100.00

is new york the new amsterdam? hmmm.

'london toile' wallpapers~$242.00 a roll

my sister can't live with toile~ as our dentist's office, growing up was plastered in it. I, on the other hand, will never tire of the detail patterny-pattern busy-ness of it. I also, love most timorous beasties wallpaper.

'frutti di mare etched crystal'~ $298.00/pair

I love a good frutti de mare themed table top piece {beats that tired old coral motif}

'franky tattoo cutlery'~$960.00 six person set

sleeve your flatware, kid.

it's like kirk repose´ for the inked crowd. beautiful and modern

happy friday, I need to go take another benedryl and dream of my future perfect.

::larry sultan::

Thanks for the correction, reader 'K' made re: today's post on Tina Barney. Naively, I attributed a shot by Larry Sultan to Tina Barney {above}

The photograph, of his parents, is part of a decade long series, Sultan worked on during the 70s and 80s. His father, Irvin, had recently been forced into retirement from his position as VP of Schick razor company. As initially conceived, the project was to be about “what happens when – as I interpreted my father’s fate – corporations discard their no-longer-young employees, and how the resulting frustrations and feelings of powerlessness find their way into family relations,” explains Sultan.

The similarities between Barney and Sultan's work are obvious. However Sultan's work invites you into a little grittier, suburban -less patrician- world {one series includes shots taken on porn sets}

While I love the patrician elegance of Barney's work, Sultan's work is equally as beautiful and 'textured'.

"The daily practice of a photographer is to be distanced, to have a little bit of room between what you're doing and how you see, what you look at. For me the biggest surprise was that the distance I thought I needed as a photographer slipped. It wasn't about 'these' people it was about 'us'."

sorry Tina, sorry Larry......Thank you, K, for the clue in.

John Keatley: Lighting Strikes Twice

On Monday I pointed to the blog at Redux Pictures as a great stream of visual stimulation that you can have delivered to your RSS reader almost daily.

Today, we chat with Seattle-based Redux photographer John Keatley, who photographed for two different magazines a hacker named Dan Kaminsky. You may remember the name -- Kaminsky was the guy who recently discovered a security hole in the entire internet.

This, and links to John's other recent work, after the jump.
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Same Subject, Different Day

John originally shot Kaminsky for Technology Review magazine, and then shot him about a month later for WIRED. You'd think, with those kind of publications backing you, that you'd have the subject at your beck and call for several hours.

You'd be wrong. John's first obstacle was convincing Kaminsky to stick around long enough for him to set up a light or two.

Okay, well, how 'bout a glamorous setting then? Can we at least get a really tech-looking environment?

Nope. How 'bout a sparse, mostly empty apartment with rented furniture. Say, a folding table and a couch.

But you're still shooting for a pair of very visual publications, so you have to step up and do something cool with it. Which is exactly what John did.


Dan Kaminsky, Take One

So Technology Review calls the day of the shoot to guide John toward shooting a simple head shot. Which is cool, because John has a thing for head shots.

John arrived at Kaminsky's apartment to hear that his subject had a meeting at Microsoft in, like, 45 minutes. Which is news to John, of course. But a little negotiation bumped his available time up to about an hour.

That still meant that he would have to tone down his normal approach, in which he uses about six lights to sculpt his subjects. But it was something, at least.

So he instead broke out four lights and in the end wound up using only three. He sat Kaminsky on a stool with a couple of blue kickers and a frontal key coming in from above the camera.

The fill light in the photo -- reflecting both the key and the blue separation lights -- was a pillow with a piece of paper on it being held by the subject. Hey, any port in a storm. And time was short.



(Click for bigger in a new window.)

"It was kind of a funny picture," John says. "He was sitting on a little stool, with about four couch pillows on his lap and a piece of paper underneath it. And I am controlling him to the millimeter."

Not exactly the picture of a glamourous set you might expect when shooting for the national mags, but it gets the job done.

John says that Kaminsky was really generous with his time -- what little he had. He tried to make good use of the limited time by coaching Kaminsky through a series of expressions. And in the end it was the wry, sideways glance that carried the photo.

"I shot a lot of stuff," Keatley says, "but this is the one that jumped out at me."


Dan Kaminsky, Take Two

A month later, when WIRED did a story on the security breach, John again got the call. Same bare apartment -- save a couch, card table, some guitars, etc. -- and the same subject.

John was doing a little straightening up for the WIRED photo and saw the dumbbell in the corner and decided to leave it in. Every little detail left in the photo is part of the narrative. The router, for instance, is being held together by tape. Perfect.

Kaminsky, again, said he had a meeting with Microsoft in an hour. Which was a little disconcerting, as WIRED was looking for several options as opposed to just a nice head shot.

To make things more interesting, this was his first shoot with a new MF digital back. You know, just to make things a little more complicated.

So he began working through different looks for the room, moving things around. (Good portraits are said to be 10% photography and 90% moving furniture.) John said he moved his environmental elements around until he ended up with a photo he could sit back and look at with contentment.

That's a great way of articulating it, really, as your photos are either going to make you content or pissed off later. And it all depends on how well you take care of the details before you make the picture.



Okay, so the top picture is a little more flashy and has that great expression going for it. But I have to say that I really love the WIRED shot above. The sparse environment, the lost-in-thought expression, the nuanced light. (Click to see it bigger in a new window.) These are the kinds of pictures I spend serious time on when I see them in a magazine.

"Typically what I do is I start with my key," John says. "I decide the shaping that I want. For this one I was using a spot grid to create shadow."

The gradients are all from the light -- not Photoshop. The gridded key is coming in from hard left. For fill, he used a soft box coming in from over his left shoulder, and the finished out the fill with a couple of umbrellas for a total of four lights.

He started with the key for shape, then kept bringing up the soft box and umbrella fill until he got the contrast that he wanted. The idea was for the light to be soft, and still have some contrast.

John has a mix of Elinchrom Rangers, which he loves for their power and portability. These are augmented with a growing arsenal of Profoto Acutes. It may sound excessive, but shooting with a medium format Hasselblad H3D2 at lower ISOs requires lots of light to carry depth of field.

He says has been leaning towards the Profotos lately, because he prefers the reflector mounts and their faster recycle times when compared to the Rangers. Also, the Profotos are well-represented in the rental houses, which is important when he travels.


Saving the Best for Last

John has recently begun blogging about his shoots. The blog is evolving quickly, and is definitely RSS-worthy. IMO, the more shooters doing this at John's level, the better.

If you're smart, you'll only believe half of what you read in his blog posts. If you're really smart you'll know which half to believe, as John weaves a pretty constant stream of BS. Any person who shoots serious photos without taking himself too seriously is aces in my book.

You can also see John's full portfolio on his main website, here.
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Photos © 2008 John Keatley

:: tina barney ::

the young lady

jill and polly in the bathroom, 1987

the red sheath, 2001

the two friends

Allison Sarofim

the orange room, 2001

the daughters, 2002

the ancestor, 2001

Tina Barney began photographing what she knew; friends and family going about their daily lives in affluent areas of New England.

Working with a large-format, 8-by-10-view camera Barney is able to capture details and nuances of her sitters banal day-to-day goings on while never losing the richness and complexities of their surroundings.

The final product is produced on enormous, 4 by 5 foot prints.

Her work is almost like a 20th century, John Singer Sargent. When you see one of her pieces, it's as if you could climb up into the photograph and be in the room with the subjects. The colors are so rich and the details so precise.

There's a great, Tina Barney documentary on Sundance called, 'Social Studies'.

I highly recommend.

right now...

i'm jonzing for a warm summer's night and one of those impromptu dinner parties,

the kind where your guests show up on bikes, wearing flip flops, sandy legs and expectations off.

"liberty london" for daisy hill
sue fisher king

you know, a casual, 'we were out riding bikes on this glorious warm evening, and thought we'd pop by. See what's shakin'


scenic dinnerware

$16.00 a pop

anthropologie

you take a quick spin to the market, grab a few things for the grill, bread, a couple bottles of wine...

rattan charger, sur la table

4 for $40

pull together a table and grab a few extra chairs...

william yeoward ,'fern' goblet
a bit more than $40 *here*

alain st joanis flatware

sue fisher king

sit late into the evening with easy conversation....

yes, I'm jonzing for sure.

The most perfect pre-dinner, summer cocktail:

I'm not much of a mixed cocktail gal, but this drink was introduced to me by my friend holly, and it's delish. St germain, is a liqueur made from elderflower blossoms {how can anything that tastes like a flower be bad?}

altered states

"california"

"colorado"

"The States is an ongoing personal project meant to be an exploration of form. The rules are simple: take the silhouette of a US state, and fit something inside of it."

~illustrator Frank Chimero.

"wyoming"

while the images used don't always reflect the culture of each state, Chimero likes to throw in a little visual reference here and there.

"kansas"

"idaho"

he also makes really cool gig and inspirational posters among other great prints, like this one:

to see if your state made the cut or to buy a print *go here*

My Daily Ritual: A Nice Steaming Cup of Redux

A lot of people start the day with a cup of hot coffee. I prefer to get my caffeine from Diet Mountain Dew, but you can't really hit that before lunch or you look like an addict. (I can quit any time -- I quit seven times last year alone.)

So, my morning pick-me-up is to cruise over to the Redux blog. It's run by Myles Ashby, and in it he offers a steady stream of published work by the very talented shooters at Redux Pictures.

There is no faster way to grow as a photographer than to consume a steady diet of good photography -- and take the time to try to understand which qualities in those photos appeals to you. I am into location portraiture, so Redux is a great fit for me.

Myles' approach is simple. He scans the tear sheets, runs the pictures all the way across the editorial hole, then tells you who shot them and where they ran.

Redux is a wonderful boutique agency which is part of a network of similarly minded agencies around the world. Bonus: If you do a little clicking through on the main site, you'll probably end up looking at cool photography until 3:00 a.m., like I did the first time I explored those links.

The Redux Blog is 100% photography -- like opening the fridge in the summer and scooping out the center of the watermelon and leaving the part with all the seeds for everyone else. In fact, the only way it could be better (for me) is if Myles spent a few paragraphs on each post breaking down the lighting.

But I'm a niche market. And besides, I have been talking with a couple of Redux shooters about just that. More TK.


Link: Redux Blog

(Photos by Robyn Twomey [top] and Tom Wagner.)

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Idea: SB-III Barn Door Mod

I have played around with the LumiQuest Soft Box III enough now that it is one of the few light mods I always pack if I am gonna be shooting people. You don't use it like a normal soft box -- you want it in real close, so it gets softer and is powerful enough to overpower the sun.

But I also noticed that one of the things I love about it is that fast fall-off you get when working in very close, like in this photo, shot for the ad. I love that soft light with fast fall-off so much that I have often found myself enhancing the fall-off with a nearby gobo.


This shot, if you'll remember, used the slightly smaller SB-II right overhead and a gobo in really tight to keep the light off of the top of his head. (A little fill was added in, too -- more here.)

And when I use two SB-III's as rim lights I tend to put them in close enough so that I have to worry about lens flare. So I usually have to gobo them there, too.

That got me thinking: If I am usually gobo'ing the light anyway, why not just build a single barn door into the unit itself? Saves a stand and a clamp, right?


Equal Parts Cardboard and Gaffer's Tape

I wanted the flap to be adjustable, retractable and to fold flat along with the SB-III when packed. So I just covered some cardboard with some black gaffer's tape and attached another strip lined with Velcro to secure it at the chosen angle.


Nothing fancy. The "hinge" is made out of gaffer's tape, too.

In addition to two ways listed above (blocking rim flare and shielding the top of someone's head from a nearby top light) I'm betting will most often use it to make a shaft of soft light for close-in, TTL flash portraits.

Holding the camera in the right hand and the light source in the left hand makes a nice cross light to back/right sunlight. And if you can gobo off the light as it works around the (camera left) side of your subject's head, you can definitely do some very cool stuff with nary a light stand in sight.

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*

gone to the snow for a few days.

be right back.

barefoot sneaker

I want somebody to make these. Right about now, doesn't every one have really ugly, winter feet? What a genie of an idea. Paint your own, ideal 'summer feet'. nothing looks better than summer feet sticking out of a pair of jeans, after all.

And if you have kids? OH. the ideas I have for you. Dinosaur feet? Furry paws? Bejeweled toes with crazy painted nails? This idea is ripe for interpretation.

barefoot feet. the works of okat

Nifty Three-way Flash Bracket at WPPI

Cool little triple flash bracket from Lastolite, the "Triflash," is being shown on the floor of WPPI this week. Being a Bogen Imaging product, I can only think McNally had something to do with this. Not available yet, so we'll have to wait a bit.

Looks very useful (and small) for spreading a decent amount of speedlight juice into an umbrella. You can mount one, two or three strobes easily.

I am liking the clamp. But my favorite thing about this photo is that someone is actually making fake speedlights for displays now. Just like the fake TVs in the Ikea showrooms. We've arrived.

[UPDATE: No, we haven't. Those are apparently Metz strobes, as per the comments. Sigh.]

More info: Lastolite Triflash

(Thanks to Curtis Joe Walker for the heads-up.)

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impress me

designed by Jungyun Yoon {can we all stop, and collectively, say this name out loud?} was inspired by a Korean love song about a guy who discovers a sunburn mark where the ring of his ex girlfriend's once sat. They come with two sayings, 'will you marry me' and 'always'.

I love any thing secrety like this.