Lazy Man’s Digital Workflow – Learning from Film

Just because we can now take a million digital shots of every subject and do lots of post processing doesn’t mean we should.

To each their own, but I get no pleasure from digital post processing. I use it as little as possible, and generally only to fix mistakes.

I started working commercially in the days of film. My job was to deliver usable transparencies to the magazine editor to go with articles.

In those days my post-shoot workflow was as follows:

1. Pick the film up from processing.
2. Put the trannies on a lightbox.
3. Throw the bad ones away.
4. From the usable ones, select the best two or three.
5. Give them to the editor.

If digital is to make our lives easier, the post process should be easier too.

I confess to shooting raw for commercial work; my work cameras are Nikon, and I find the free NikonView software really good and simple. It allows easy adjustment of colour balance and exposure if I didn’t get those quite right in camera, and also easy quick crop and export as jpegs after.

So – keep it simple.  I paid for my own film on jobs  so I always tried to be economical with it. I’d try to limit a job to about a dozen frames so I could get two or three jobs on a roll. These days it’s possible to shoot even less than that, as bracketing tricky light is not so often needed.

My workflow is now this:

1. Load files into computer.
   I don’t miss the romance of film; making two trips to the processors for every job was a pain. There is no pleasure in wondering if you’ve stuffed the shots or finding out the best one is soft when you put it on the lightbox.
2. Look at the pics on NIkonView.
   Believe it or not, looking at images on a 27″ Apple monitor is better than peering at a slide on a lightbox with a loupe.
3. Delete the bad ones.
   Be brutal here – DELETE DELETE DELETE. There are enough crap photos in the world without any of us adding to the sum.
4. From the usable ones, select the best two or three.
   I often see commercial photographers giving their clients a load of crap in a folder with a few good shots hidden in there somewhere. To me this is inexcusable. Only give the client shots that are of publishable standard. Three good shots are better than 150 pieces of crap they have to wade through later.
5. Make any adjustments to colour balance, exposure that are needed, and export as jpeg.
   Never give a client raw files; they will stuff up the colour balance or do some dumbass thing to them and then blame you for giving them bad shots.
6. Upload the files to Dropbox and email the editor a link.

Easy.

Exhibition – The World We Live In

This post is about my most recent exhibition – a series of six works inspired by the LIFE Magazine book The World We Live In.

In 1954 the US Magazine LIFE brought out an ambitious series of twelve articles under this title in consecutive editions of the magazine.

The articles used majestic illustrations painted by the best natural science artists of the day – coupled with grandiose prose by Lincoln Barnett – to describe the natural world. The articles had titles such as “The Earth is Born”, “The Miracle of the Sea” and “The Starry Universe”.

Upon publication they were recognised as a marvellous achievement, and the following year these articles were combined into a book with the same title. As a child I was fascinated by this book. Too young to read the articles, I spent hours poring over these illustrations. Their detail was astonishing; huge scenes of deserts or mountains, examinations of the birth of planets and the creation of oceans were printed in fold-out folio pages. The detail that these tableaux contained drew the viewer in closer and closer in to the scene in an invitation to seek out the finest elements of the picture, all of which were rendered with meticulous care.

On peering closer and closer at the pages eventually the illustration was lost, becoming nothing more than coloured dots that were the result of the half-screen printing process used to produce them.

The skill used to produce these articles was matched by the ambition of their vision; this goal –  to represent the scope of the natural world in one volume – and the belief that it might be realised, bordered on hubris.

Looking back at the volume nearly sixty years after its production it is still majestic, but it is certainly dated.

It seems to come from a more optimistic time, when science was leading a path forward to a golden future. Of course, the nineteen fifties were not without their problems – the threat of nuclear weapons was very real – but it seemed then that the world was more under the control of man than it appears to be today. At that time it seemed that all problems could be solved by scientific advances and judicious government, whereas today we see a planet slipping into decay that we are powerless to stop.

In this work I seek to convey a nostalgia for that optimism – exemplified in the purity of the volcano, in the majesty of the nebula and the immutability of the fossil.

I also want to juxtapose the hand drawn illustrations against the mechanics of the reprographic techniques of the time.

In zooming in, and magnifying small sections of an image 25 times, the halftone screen of the printed book becomes a visual element of these works. I then have reproduced the images digitally onto polyurethane sheeting of the type that is used for signs and advertisements. By increasing saturation and contrast I hope to have highlighted the gulf between the delicacy of the originals and the mechanisation of their reproductions. It is an affectionate examination I hope, because of course the work would not have become available to a wide audience had it not been reproduced. The digital reproduction and disposable polyurethane I have used is again at odds with the permanence of the original illustrations and the world they portrayed.

Visit exhibition on David Hume website

Natural Light Food Photography – Then and Now

I’ve started having a look through my archived boxes of transparencies and putting some  on to a lightbox  to rephotograph with my DSLR.

When I started doing food shots in the mid nineties I used a natural light, shallow depth of field, close-up style, The shots above and below  are from 1997. Shot on 35mm Fujichrome Sensia 100ASA,  with a Nikkor 35mm f2.8 wide open.

In those days this natural style was much less common than it is today. Some magazines were starting to use it, but a lot of them still had very formally composed and well lit studio shots.

My style was born of necessity and expediency.  I owned practically no gear, and certainly no lights. Because I was shooting transparency film, either 100 or 50 ASA, I was always short of light, so I generally shot wide open at the slowest speeds I could hand hold, as  tripods were too slow to use.

I would ring and make an appointment with the restaurant, and go and see them in the quiet time between lunch and dinner service. That way they were unstressed and more friendly, and there was usually pretty decent light.

Being commercial photography, it was done on a budget. I was paid per restaurant so I’d try and get two or three places done in one day and shoot them all on one roll of film.

I did have an RB67 medium format camera, but it was three times as  expensive to fill with film so I generally saved it for covers and other important jobs that paid more.

These days it’s all digital of course:

While I don’t want to go back to old days days, I have retained a fondness for the style.

There is something nice about finding natural light and making it work for you.

I still don’t have much gear – my main camera these days is a Nikon D700 – pretty old by DSLR standards, and I’ve bought one brand new lens in my life, a 60mm 2.8 micro, which is what these are shot with. This camera is perfectly clean up to 800 ISO, so I have heaps of light to play with. The shot above is f4 and 1/180s. Pure luxury to be able to choose the depth of field I want rather than have it dictated by low light. Adjusting white balance is another luxury. I remember that Fuji Sensia was good at warming up closed shade so interiors did not have a blue tinge, while of course today we can set Auto White Balance and it can be so easily adjusted in post.

In these shots there is a bit of distracting light from the overhead lighting in the restaurant, but overall I like the look.

Instagram is Saving Photography

My daughter Issie and her friend Kate took the above image with an iPhone and posted it on Instagram while they were out on a run yesterday.

My daughter Ruby posted the one below on holiday in India:

While we were all on holidays they shot a quick portrait of their gran:

If you asked them, none of these girls would say they were interested in photography.

And yet in the past six months their photography has advanced from what was mostly a series of banal self portraits to this.

I think we can thank Instagram –  for the following reasons:

1. Seeing. They are now looking with a critical eye for opportunities to make exciting images.
2. Editing. They critically assess the images they make before posting. Only one image of a place or situation is selected, perhaps none if none are warranted.
3. Technique. Unconsciously, they are looking for light, colour, and composition. They make cropping and framing decisions. The filters that many people deride actually alert them to the possibilities of working with tonal range, colour balance and contrast.

If I try to talk to them about photography their eyes glaze over, but I would be happy to claim any of these images as my own.

A lot of serious hobbyist photographers bash Instagram for the faddishness of its filter effects, and I must say that when I saw some wedding photos that had Instie-like filters applied to them I did cringe a little.

But I do believe that Instie has the potential to improve the photography of those who use it as it leads to more careful, considered and critical image making.

Certainly it has worked that way for my daughters and their friends.

But they haven’t entirely forsaken the selfie…