Great lighting storm

Living in central Texas, we get some pretty amazing storms. As I was driving home tonight, there was a very strong storm with near continuous lighting. Of course as soon as I stopped the car and got the camera setup, it eased up, but I still got a few interesting shots before the storm (and rain) started to close in.

If you want to try to take these types of shots yourself, you need to set the camera on a tripod or another rock steady platform, use a low ISO setting (I used 200), set the aperture to about f11 or so, and the shutterspeed on bulb or a very long exposure - about 15 seconds worked for me, but you'll need to experiment with the first few shots. Since you never know when the lighting will strike, the trick is to have the shutter open and hope the lighting goes off while you are recording. This is why you want to use a low ISO setting and relatively small aperture to give you such a long exposure - it increases your odds of capturing the strike. Even so, I took about 30 images and got only 3 decent shots of strikes. If you can, you should set your focus to manual and use the hyperfocal distance for your aperture or set the focus to infinity. If you don't have manual focus control, then you'll want to focus on the most distance object you can (probably something like a streetlamp far away since everything else will be dark).

The advantage of using bulb, which keeps the shutter open as long as you press the shutter release, is that you can make some adjustments on the fly. I was next to a road where cars kept coming along every couple of minutes. By placing my hand completlely over the lens just before the cars came by, then removing it and adding that time onto the shutter speed, I was able to get a consistent exposure, but avoid any light from the cars.

What about the cool sky color? Try playing around with your white balance settings (ideally afterwards on a computer). Tungsten will generally give you a very nice blue effect, flourescent will make it magenta, daylight/cloudy or similar will be more orange.

Have fun!

Elliott Erwitt

I was privileged to sit in the front row on Thursday at Elliott Erwitt's presentation to the Austin Center of Photography, of which I am a founder's member.

Erwitt is a world famous photographer and is perhaps best known for his images of dogs (see below). However, his career over the last half century has encompased an amazing array of photographs, including the first images of Soviet nuclear missiles on parade, the Kennedy Whitehouse, and a plehtora of images from countries around the world taken at a time when it was very difficult to get into many of them.

He showed a number of pictures from Shanagarry and Ballycotton in Ireland and mentioned that Ireland was perhaps his favorite place to photograph. Afterwards I talked to him - knowing exactly where these very small Irish towns are, we got talking about Ballymaloe, a local iconic hotel and cooking school and Stephen Pierce pottery. Turns out Stephen Pierce is a friend of his, and I used to sell some of his wares when I worked at the Kilkenny Design Center one summer during college.

Erwitt has a great sense of humor, both verbally and in his photos. He is incredibly sharp, and certainly doesn't seem like someone who is in his eighties. Erwitt talked about being a professional photographer, that is, someone who does advertising and other paid work, and photography being his hobby, i.e. someone who loves to take pictures for their own sake. Most of his "fine art" photos, which is what he showed, fall into this latter category. Indeed he talked about how he would be sent on a professional assignment and after getting "the shot" he would take the opportunity to do his own photos while taking advantage of traveling on his client's nickel.

Many of Erwitt's photos have an ironic humor and compare or juxtapose two or more elements with each other. For instance consider the photo to the left of a french poodle at the UK dog show Cruft's.

But his work also has a serious side. One image in particular that jumped out at me was "Boy with Gun, Pittsburgh 1950", which brought up a question from the audience about whether or not the photo was intended to be humorous. Erwitt said no. To me, the image is reminiscent of Diane Arbus's "Boy with Toy Hand Grenade, Central Park 1962". Both contrast tools of war with the innocence of childhood. But in Erwitt's image, I could not help wonder was this playfulness or a self commentary by the boy about how he felt growing up at time of greater racial tension.



Erwitt is still taking photos, as evidenced by an image (his only color image of the night) of the Obama convention with most of the crowd taking their own photos of the event.

I wish him good health and many more years of creating intriguing and funny imagery.

More of his Elliot's work can be seen at :
http://www.elliotterwitt.com/lang/index.html

Digital Photography Classes

I've signed up to teach a series of photography classes at the Jewish Community Association of Austin. The first series is being offered at short notice and classes will start on April 28th and run through the end of May, but I am also planning on teaching a couple of series in the fall with separate classes for beginners and intermediate photographers.

I will blend demonstration, theory, practical exercises and critical review to help participants move their capabilities forward technically and creatively.

Past classes that I've taught have been very popular, so if you want to learn how to improve your photographic skills and have some fun at the same time, look out for these on the class schedule, which should become available on www.shalomaustin.org

Hope to see you at one of these sessions!

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.