Solo Exhibits

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As you may have gathered, in the next few months I am putting on another two solo photography exhibits. One starts this weekend: an exhibit with a twist. A series of Fine Art Nudes, displayed in a naturist resort 40 minutes north of Toronto (just past Newmarket). See www.michaelsmuse.com for more details. The twist, of course, is that the audience will also have to be nude. (Try it: not weird, not threatening – and a whole new level of interaction with the subject matter – this is a unique experience – don’t miss it).

The second exhibit will be in the Kodiak Gallery in Toronto’s historic Distillery District, during all of August. Stand by for details soon.

So as for the first of these: why shoot Art Nudes?

I wrote posts about that on my Tumblr.com feed, here and here (warning: you may encounter nudes). But let me summarise, including a repeat of some of what I said on Tumblr.

I shoot many things. Weddings. Parties. Events. Business portraits. Product. Industrial. News. Whatever you have, I’ll shoot it. But like most photographers, I also consider that there is a large art element in photography. And nudes bring that out more than most other types of photography. They are far from simple to do well: you have to know technique, composition, light, and especially, what people think.

  • “You just get a naked girl in front of your camera and click”, some people say.
  • Or “You sleep with your models”
  • Or, “It’s Porn”.

Let’s start with the latter: nope. It is not porn. Porn is pictorial depiction of the sex act. Nothing against the sex act or its depiction, but it is very limited in its expression of mood, story, emotion. These are pretty clear. I do not object to porn, but it is not that interesting: it is limited not because of what it does show, but of what it does not show. No story. No mystery. No beauty. No guessing. No freedom. Just sex: porn shows one subject only.

Sleep with models? Nope. If that is all you want there are much easier ways, I am sure, than by lugging around expensive and heavy camera and lighting gear. I think in general, it’s good to separate the personal and professional worlds.

Finally, the first part. No, it is not easy. When you picture someone nude, you picture their essence. You picture an emotion, an expression, a feeling, not encumbered by clothing, which restricts, ties to a certain time, sets a mood for you. You can picture many things, not just one. And best of all, a good nude is evocative. It raises questions. It tells a story, and best of all, it makes the viewer wonder what that story is; put it all together. That, in my mind, is the essence of an art nude. That is why it is art. Art Nudes are difficult but very rewarding.

When you want to achieve, you should challenge yourself. If you want to learn photography – and that is why you are here, I presume – you should definitely try nudes. They do not have to be 20-year old supermodels – on the contrary.

Oh… to see an illustration of how most Canadians get it, and are therefore relaxed about these things, go here (warning, nudity). From yesterday’s shoot.

Want to learn more? Give me a call or drop me a line, or better still, come to Never Not Naked: Natural Nudes, 22 June-8 August just north of Newmarket, Ontario. I promise that if you have the courage to turn up, if it is the first weekend I shall be there and I shall take the time to give you sufficient tips to get you started.


Picture of the day

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Today, the picture of the day is a simple picture of a girl on a kitchen table:

That is Kim, my favourite model. I shoot her a lot: see my Fine Art Nudes site, mvwphoto.tumblr.com, as well as this blog. I shoot her all the time because she is a great model, very talented, and especially because we consistently create art together.

And that is a special gift for anyone in arts – someone to make art with (and no, get your minds out of the gutter, it’s nothing more than that). An artistic muse. She features heavily also in my upcoming Fine Art Nudes exhibit, www.michaelsmuse.com – I hope to see some of you there for the official opening on Saturday.

And today, I also wanted to show a picture like this to re-emphasize what makes a picture interesting. Worth seeing. And I think there are several.

  • Of course an image has to be technically good. Namely well exposed, in focus where it needs to be, and well lit.
  • Most importantly – it should involve some sort of storytelling, or perhaps rather, evoking questions. An image has to have some connection with something happening. It has to have the ability to make the viewer wonder what it is that is happening; perhaps to make sense of it, to make the viewer work in out in his or her mind.
  • This picture is black and white. That often adds to the storytelling. It also stops distractions – the subject and the story are important, not the colours of the kitchen implements.
  • The setting needs to be relevant to the story.
  • The close crop adds extra tension. This is sometimes allowed – ask Degas.
  • For extra mood, I even added some film grain.

So a picture like this can actually have a had fair amount of thought put into it.

Fuji Happiness

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Those of you who have a Fuji X100 APC-C sized small camera: the new 1.30 firmware is out. Maybe it has been for a while – reminder to self to check regularly!  Download it from here.

Then upgrade, ignoring the Fuji instructions – you do not need the extra file. Just the FPUPDATE.DAT file. Once you have that:

  1. Insert a fully charged NP-95 battery into your X100.
  2. Format your SD card in your camera. (Backup your data first!)
  3. Connect the card to your computer.
  4. Copy the FPUPDATE.DAT file to the root directory of the SD card.
  5. Insert the SD card into your camera.
  6. Turn the camera on while holding down the [BACK] button to start the firmware update process, and follow the on screen instructions.

You will need to reset date/time and all custom fuctions.

And you will now have a camera with a few major upgrades since last year. Among them:

  • Better Autofocus
  • The RAW button can now be used as a programmable Function button too – thank God!
  • Many bugfixes and other small functionality improvements

Fuji has a winner with the X100, as I have said before – more importantly, Fuji, unlike some other camera makers:

  1. Listens to its customers;
  2. Acts quickly to implement their requests;
  3. Sees  an expensive camera like the X100 as an ongoing project, not as a “I’ve sold it and now on tho the next project”

…all of which I find very refreshing!

 

Illegal! Illegal? Really…?

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Let me start a little discussion here today.

Brought on by a shoot cancelled because of “privacy reasons”, I had a discussion yesterday on an Internet pro photographer forum about photographing children. In short, this is frowned upon even when allowed (in a public place) – in my view, a worrying development for photographers and for anyone who likes freedom.

Apart from my cancelled shoot, this is in no way a personal argument – I do not go around photographing kids – but I am concerned that the general opinion in this discussion was that photographing children should be illegal, even in a public setting, and that this opinion seemed to be based not on fact, but on emotion.

Now don’t get me wrong: I know there are bad people in the world, and I am very sensitive to the need to protect children, and to parents’ wish to do just that. Goes without reason and should not even need saying.

But I had a problem with the majority opinion and the lack of nuance in translating the need to protect to the desired policy to achieve that. If I – hopefully correctly – paraphrase that majority opinion, it was:

  1. That photographing kids is dangerous to them.
  2. That whether it was legal or not, it was objectionable and should lead to police persecution, if not prosecution.
  3. That the law is irrelevant: kids matter, the law does not.
  4. That the wishes of the individual (e.g. a parent) overrule those of the photographer.

As happens regularly, in this case I was in the minority – a minority of one, in disagreeing with this.

Alas, the thread was deleted by the moderator (who was arguing against me – I have to think perhaps the deletion happened because he thought he was losing the argument? :-)). So I will try to recap my thoughts – this subject is important enough to be discussed extensively.

I disagree strongly with the position that photographing children should be de facto illegal. For the following reasons:

  1. I believe that there is no evidence to suggest that photography, or identifying children, does any significant harm. Child abuse is done in the vast majority of cases (over 98% I believe?) by people who know the child, not by weird stalking strangers. If there is any evidence to suggest that photography has caused any child abduction or abuse cases, I do not know of it. I have kids and want them to be safe – but let’s be evidence-based, not emotion-based. Evidence may well show that we should outlaw uncles, soccer coaches, and relatives, but not photography.
  2. The argument that people who photograph a child “obviously” do this for sexual reasons (“let them go away to masturbate”, was the phrase used”) is entirely unsupported by factual evidence.
  3. The argument, also made, that one must not be allowed to offend anyone or hurt their feelings is also a very weak one. Whatever we do, we will hurt someone’s feelings. Imagine if we allowed religious feelings to dictate policy – the sum total of all religions is against, and hence is offended, I am sure, by everything. Everything we do offends someone.
  4. A phrase similar to “photography of children should not be protected by the law” was used. (Forgive me if I do not recall the exact phrase: the thread, as said, was deleted). This shows a worrying lack of understanding of law. Unlike people who live in dictatorships (and I have worked in them), we do not live in a society where everything is forbidden except what is specifically allowed. Rather, the reverse, and I think we should keep it that way.
  5. With few exceptions, our law allows photographers on public property to photograph anyone on public property.
  6. The phrase “I do not care what the law says, it must not be allowed” (again, paraphrased) is also a worrying one. The whole point of having laws is that it does matter. If something is bad, prove it and make a law against it, and then it is no longer allowed. We do not regulate ourselves by random sentiments or opinions: the law ensures that all this clear, evidence-based, discussed openly, and agreed upon by a majority. History has shown amply that freedom restrictions by popular emotion are always a bad idea.
  7. Imagine if we outlawed photographing children. There are many issues with this seemingly simple law. Like “what about crowds?”. “What if they are your own”. “What if you are their uncle?”. “What about public events?”. “What if it is news?”. “What if the thing you are shooting is newsworthy but the criminal brings a child to avoid photography”. And so on. A simple idea, when thought through, would end up as many complex pages of law. Lawyers would be happy I imagine, but would we?
  8. There are already plenty of good laws against criminals. Stalking is already illegal – no need to make the act of photography itself illegal.

Meanwhile, often aided by our authorities, the general population increasingly thinks that photography is already illegal. And when photographers support this, rather than pushing back and insisting on evidence and law, we live in sad times. Again and again, it is easy to manipulate the vox populi.

So before you take a quick position, I recommend you think things through and try to be fact-based.

Sure we should be sensitive, but if photographers everywhere stopped shooting whenever anyone objects, or worse, did not start because someone might, we would end up doing little photography. Lawmakers and governments always want to increase their power by restricting our rights; since the magna charta, we have pushed back against this.

Remember: Photons are just photons and have no magic evil-powers when captured by a sensor instead of a retina.

But there is one good thing here: I am glad that people apparently feel that a photo can be powerful.

(You can comment by clicking below. Feel free! The first comment by any reader has to be approved, which I will do quickly – then you’re good from then on).

Metering: The Light Meter Lives

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Using a light meter, you say, is oldfashioned.

Not so!

  1. A light meter is fundamentally different from a camera-based meter. The former is an incident light meter and does not depend on the subject’s brightness. The camera based meter, on the other hand, is a reflected-light meter, and hence depends on the subject’s brightness. In fact the camera’s meter can only indicate the right number when you aim it at a grey card (and when using the spot meter, at that).
  2. For manual flash you can only use a light meter, a so-called “flash meter”.

A modern meter like my Sekonic is both ambient and flash meter.

To use it for ambient light, as I did for the student photo above, do the following:

  1. Move the white dome all the way out.
  2. Turn the meter on.
  3. Using the MODE button, set the meter to ambient metering (the sun symbol). Select the mode where you set the aperture and the meter will indicate the shutter speed. (The F-number has a square around it on the Sekonic). You could also choose to set the shutter speed, and have the meter calculate the aperture instead. But let’s assume here that you choose the aperture and want the camera to calculate the shutter speed.
  4. Set the ISO to the ISO you choose to use on your camera (200 in the shot above).
  5. Set the meter’s aperture number to the aperture you have chosen on your camera.
  6. Hold the meter exactly where the subject will be, facing the camera. Ensure you are not blocking the light that falls onto the meter.
  7. Click the reset/measure button on the side.

And now you read the shutter speed you need with that ISO and that aperture. (You can change ISO and/or aperture and a new correct shutter speed will be displayed that match those ISO/aperture settings.)

Set that shutter speed on your camera – and you exposure is correct. Spot on.

You see, the benefit of using the meter is that you ace the exposure. Not like the camera meter, where you have to allow for darker-than-a-grey-card subjects (expose less than “0”), or lighter-than-a-grey-card subjects (expose more than “0”). With a light meter, no such adjusting.

Yes, you can use a grey card, and you can use the zone system. Sometimes you have to – mountains do not lend themselves to you running over to them with a light meter. But generally, if you have the time and the light is steady, consider using a meter and be a pro in terms of exposure.

 

Filters and Flare

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You know it is handy to have a few clear filters available in your bag. But to use them always? I don’t think so.

Why not? Because they can degrade your image a little. In particular, they can cause extra flare. Like in these images taken today by a student:

With the clear protection filter on the 50mm lens:

And a second later, without the filter:

Look at my face, under my chin, etc: the strong back light causes flare in both locations; but it is noticeably worse with the filter, since the light bounces back and forth between the extra layers of glass, thus causing degradation.

My advice is: have a filter, but only use it when your camera is in danger from sand, water (especially sea water), snow, and other such dangers.

___

Learn From The Pro: You can benefit from private training and portfolio reviews too: the June special ($75 per hour instead of 95 per hour) is still on and there are some slots available during days, evenings and weekends.

 

Direct light!

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Her’s another post on the same subject.. flash. And why to use it.

The big reason, as you know if you have been reading here, is to be able to balance foreground and background. As in this combination of “no flash” – “flash” pictures of new model Khoral, whose personality will see her go far.

No flash gives you this:

While flash allows you to darken the background (ISO-Aperture-Shutter – The Triangle) while lighting up the subject with flash, which then gives you this:

But look closer. The other reason, the other difference you see: with directed light – your own light – you can shape. Legs look round, not flat. Faces look three-dimensional. Character comes out. I can light up certain parts (the person) and not other parts (the fence).  Flash gives you power to create, rather than just power to reflect what is there.

 

 

Sometimes…

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….you have to do what you can and work around issues.

Like my Canon 1D Mark 4 camera, which focuses inconsistently.

When I shoot with, say, my 35mm lens at f/1.4, and I operate the camera properly, nevertheless focus is different every time – and rarely right. I am using one focus spot; I focus away, then aim my spot at a contrasty subject; and so on – but it’s a gamble every time.

Look at these five shots – a very typical sequence – where in each case I carefully focused the 35mm lens at f/1.4 (using the centre focus point) on the round red logo on the bottleneck:

Incredible, no? Only one or perhaps two of those images are sharp enough. The reset are focused all over the place, except at the distance I was focusing.

Especially in low light, that is what I usually see. Of course what can I expect, from a $6,000 camera with $2,000 (each) lenses?

Now seriously – as a Canon shooter, I love their equipment, and rather than blog about how unreliable autofocus is, I would be discrete and handle it quietly, but

  • (a) Canon wants me to pay hundreds of dollars a year to get the good service I should get anyway when I spend tens of thousands on their gear (“CPS”, Canon Professional Services, which should be free); and
  • (b) Even when I had CPS, all I ever used to hear from them is “everything is OK” – when clearly it is not. They will never acknowledge problems.
  • A repair would take weeks, even longer.. what do I do in the mean time? Operate without a backup camera?

So why should I waste my time? Instead, I work around the issue. By avoiding close-up shots. By not shooting with large apertures. By avoiding shooting in low light. By choosing subjects that are good whether in focus in one area, or not.

The point is: even with expensive equipment, you will have issues that you cannot solve, but that you must work around.

Oh – my final workaround for Canon’s focus: shoot in bright light, and take every image several times.

 

Catch If You Can

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…and I mean catch lights. And you should always have them in portraits. Like in this one of model Kim that I took a few hours ago:

The catch lights are the little sparkles of light in the subject’s eyes. They make the subject look alive.

To get them, make sure there is a light source in front of the subject, above. This can be…

  • A reflector.
  • A natural light source, like a window with non-direct light.
  • A flash in an umbrella, like here.
  • Or a flash in a softbox – this gives you a square catch light.
  • A flash on your camera, bounced at the ceiling behind you.
  • A flash on your camera, direct or with a little bounce card.

The last option is not ideal since it will give you a small, centered catch light. Ideally, the catch light is high in the eye. Not in the middle of the pupil, and that is what direct flash gives you.

If your light source does not show in the eye, move it lower.

Like most things in photography, it is simple once you know it – nd especially, once you start paying attention to it! So from now on, look for catch lights in your subject’s eyes, and do what you need to get them if you are not getting them!