Death and Photography

The great New York photographer Helen Levitt died yesterday at age 95 - NPR did a nice piece on her, which got me thinking a little about the nature of photography and death.

Like other artists, photographers' work outlives them. Sometimes the work only becomes famous after a photographer's death, sometimes it may not be famous at all, but is important none the less. In helping my sons do a roots project for school some years ago we gathered together memorabilia of past generations of our family, including numerous photos of relatives I had not seen before, taken by unknown photographers. These images are the only tangible connection I have with those relatives. A tantalizing hint at who they were and perhaps what they were like.

As inevitably happens when you photograph a lot of people, some of your subjects pass away, often unexpectedly. I have been in the situation several times now when I was the last person to take photographs of a client's family member, usually at some family celebration. These images become priceless mementos and, I hope, offer some small comfort to those who are bereaving. At the time we took these pictures the subjects were all in good health and no one expected these would be their last images. Being told that I captured the true essence of a person is a humbling compliment and one that inspires me to realize that whenever taking pictures of a person you never know if these will be something the client may consider just another picture, or may become the lasting memory of their loved one.

Long after anyone may have forgotten who took the picture, I hope at least a few of my images show up in the hands of some future descendant of my clients and helps give them a glimpse into who their long deceased relative really was and what they may have been like.

Greener Photography

A little while back, I became a member of Greener Photography, an organization of photographers dedicated to trying to improve the environment by using best practices.

Photographers probably aren't the worst polluters in the world, but since photography is what I do and I want to leave this world in better shape for the next generation, it is important for me to do what I can.

There are a number of things that I currently do to try to be more environmentally friendly, such as working out of a home office which recycles, uses low energy compact fluorescent lighting, is decorated with sustainable bamboo flooring, etc. I may blog more on this in the future, but what I'd like to discuss here is transportation.

As a photographer, particularly an event photographer, I often need to haul a lot of equipment around and thus my vehicle is a mid sized SUV. When I bought my car (an Acura MDX) I got it because it met the functional needs of my business and my family, was very flexible, and was likely the greenest vehicle of its kind, since it got better fuel mileage than the competition and was, I believe the first ULEV (ultra low emissions vehicle) SUV on the market.

My car has been great, but I've held onto it much longer than I have had any other car. Last year I started considering replacing the vehicle and was staggered to find that in the 7 or 8 years that I've had it there has essentially been zero improvements in terms of fuel mileage. Sure the new models have fancier electronics, new styling, and some other gizmos, but in terms of MPG, my car is equal, or better than any other vehicle of its size.

I looked at some slightly smaller cars, such as the Toyota Highlander hybrid, but its mileage rating is maybe 20% better than what I currently get and the car is smaller (which is a real problem as when I fill my car up, I REALLY fill it up with equipment). Unfortunately, most hybrid cars seem to work best at slow and go traffic when the battery can kick in. Given the kind of driving I do this is more the exception, than the rule (thankfully!) When comparing highway mileage ratings, the fuel consumption figures of the hybrids are even closer to my current rate.

This both amazes me - that there has been no significant improvement in the last 7-8 years - and leaves me in a quandary. In thinking about what the best thing to do is - for my business, for the environment, I'm left with a few options:
a. Buy another vehicle of similar size that I know will meet my functional needs, plus give me some new safety and comfort features, but more or less continue the same fuel consumption and pollution of my current vehicle.
b. Buy a smaller vehicle which may get somewhat better mileage. But what to do about when I need to move lots of stuff? A roof rack is impractical, but a trailer might work. Of course, I would have to find room to store it and have the cost of the trailer to contend with.
c. Hope for some new, better options to come on the market soon. Unfortunately, this doesn't seem very likely. Plug in hybrids, which may be the best option, are still a few years away, even for passenger cars, let alone SUVs or light trucks.
d. Keep my current vehicle and try to extend its life as much as possible.

At the moment, d. is my strategy by default. Of course this could change any time if the vehicle becomes unreliable or has other problems.

If you have other thoughts or suggestions, I'd love to hear them!

A Day of Mary Ellen Mark

Yesterday yielded some opportunities to look, listen, and learn from Mark Ellen Mark a phenomenal photojournalist and portraitist.

Around lunchtime I attended a taping of local PBS station KLRU's program Texas Monthly Talks with host Evan Smith. Evan is a great interviewer and the experience was more like eavesdropping on a conversation between two very intelligent people than the taping of a TV show. Their conversation ranged over many topics including a project Mary Ellen did for Texas Monthly on small town rodeos in the early 1990s. Mary Ellen shoots only film and does not retouch her work - in her words "it is authentic". While she appreciates images taken with digital cameras, she considers them a different medium and bemoaned how many images are altered. These she described as illustrations and not photographs. She also talked about how the marketplace and business of photography has changed so much. Some of her seminal earlier work such as the Falklands Road project about prostitutes in India was funded as photo stories by major publications and sponsors. She spent 3 months in India working on this (only one of many projects she has done in that country), but such work is unavailable today as magazines don't have the budget and perhaps even the appetite for such work. These days she takes commercial jobs that help her self-fund her own projects such as photos of High School Proms (not yet published), which will include images from Austin's very own Westlake High School.

In the evening, I attended the inaugural Austin Center for Photography event where Mary Ellen spoke and showed a panoply of images from her vast repertoire. Her photographs from "Seen Behind the Scene" taken on the sets of numerous feature films over the last 40 years were amazing - a favorite of mine is the image of Felini on the set of Satyricon in Rome in 1969. Getting this was sheer luck as she described it - she shot one frame, but everything just came together. This is probably her most purchased image. The evening ended with a short, funny movie "Twins" made by her husband Martin Bell and featuring identical twins with all their idiosyncrasies, a subject of one of Mary Ellen's books.

With a career more than 4 decades long and 17 published books, Mark Ellen shows no sign of slowing down. Her imagery, passion, and intelligence are an inspiration.

ACP

Kudos to The Austin Center for Photography whose inaugural event is this evening at the Blanton Art Museum - "An Evening with Mary Ellen Mark ."

I am a founders member of ACP and am looking forward to great things with this organization.

New services

We've been offering a variety of photo entertainment services for a while, but far and away our most popular service has been greenscreen/chromakey whereby we take an image of guests in front of a green screen and then replace the green in the image with a background of the client's choosing. Our "classic" green screen is approx. 10' wide and 8' high which requires a decent amount of room to operate, but which allows us to take pictures of small groups.

This service remains very popular, but some clients have asked if we could do anything smaller in scale and/or less expensive. Enter our Greenscreen Lite service. This is identical to our regular green screen service, except:
a. The screen is smaller - approx. 5'x7', which allows 1 or 2 subjects per image.
b. The space requirements are much smaller.
c. We include 200 prints in the service, additional prints are at additional cost. The classic green screen has unlimited prints per event.
d. Only one operator is needed to run the system.

This enables us to offer this service for about 25% less than our classic service.

In addition to green screens, we also offer:
- Photos with borders
- Photo booths
- "Boothless" photo booths
- Event photography with onsite printing
- Onsite minilab rental

So we have services for parties with 25 - 1,000 or more guests at a variety of price points.

Welcome!

Welcome to Finkel's Foto Fusion, my blog. I'll be using my blog to tell you about some of the things we're doing, new products and services, as well as sharing some ideas and information that you can use to improve your own photography. I hope you enjoy!