Been on a portrait jag around here lately. Here's a colorized black and white portrait that was first created back in the golden age of medium format film. And a bit of information about my work with screw heads!!!
I have been meticulously checking the screw heads on every single piece of gear in the studio. It's hard to do with the Leica cameras. There are no exposed screw heads. I've had to get out the heat gun, warm up the exteriors enough to pull off the leatherette that is generally wrapped around the camera bodies and then strip it off to expose the screw heads underneath! To my chagrin, on several of the M series cameras that I have systematically disassembled it appears that not all the screw heads are aligned. In fact, it seems like blind luck that any of them are aligned. This, of course, is causing me much consternation and loss of sleep. I am now dismantling the Fuji camera and also a couple of Panasonic cameras and I must say that the picture isn't much better in those camps either.
I have always wondered if the screw heads in the lenses are correct or if they are also in disarray. To see better how shabby photographic equipment has become I've taken it upon myself to disassemble all of my M series lenses as well as all of my L mount lenses. The shabby disregard for making all the slotted screw heads absolutely identical in orientation from screw to screw has so infuriated me that I've undertaken a letter writing campaign aimed at all the perpetrators of this sad state of affairs. I hope this will cause them to change their standards before I am encouraged to initiate a class action law suit.
As a result I am unable to perform my usual blogging duties such as writing, uploading photographs or moderating the comments. I hope you will forgive me as I attempt to wholesale remedy the entire camera design and assembly universe to better align (see what I'm doing right there???) their operations to the standards to which I thought we photographers were already holding them. At least in spirit.
Now...can someone tell me a quick and easy way to get all these cameras and lenses back together again? I need to make sure I get the leatherette on just so. And I need to get it done before I go out later and check on all the internal screw heads in my new car. So much important stuff to worry about!!!!!
Portraits.
I've been having a blast visiting client locations and making on the spot portraits. Some environmental portraits and some portraits against plain backgrounds. The environmentals will stand on their own but the ones I take against plain backgrounds are destined to be composited with urban backgrounds and made to look as if they were taken around the city of Austin.
I have an odd process quirk in that I like to mix up lighting techniques, lighting styles and camera gear all the time. If we get something close to perfect on one shoot my impetus is not to continue replicating that over and over again but to switch gears and see what I can do with something else.
Yesterday morning I got up early, loaded the car and hit the road. I was at my client's front door at 8:15 in the morning. I found a large and empty office on their floor and set up some lights, a tripod and a camera and set about making portraits of twelve different people. It was fun and quick. Once the art director involved makes selections from each person's sitting I'll composite these images together with the urban backgrounds and they'll be updated on the corporate website.
The client did a good job of scheduling and I was done with the photography in a couple of hours and headed back to the office.
The lighting consisted of two Godox V1 flashes bounced off the ceiling on either side of the camera position and a third flash bounced into a 45 inch umbrella which was set 45° to the right of my camera, above the subject's chin position and angled a about 45° down toward the subject. The light was nice and soft and evenly lit the background behind the subjects.
Breaking with big camera tradition I pressed an APS-C camera into service instead. I used a Leica CL and just to be wickedly unpredictable I fitted a Carl Zeiss Milvus 50mm f1.4 lens on the camera. This gave me an equivalent angle of view on the smaller frame camera as a 75mm on a full frame camera. Just right for portraits that needed to be "loose" enough to see "air" on both sides of the subjects shoulders. Enough air to make believable composites with.
The 50mm Zeiss lens, a descendant a close performer to the Otis series lenses, is totally manual when used with a "dumb" adapter on the Leica CL. I've set the button in the camera's right most dial to be my "punch in" magnification button so getting sharp, accurate focusing is easy as pie.
Nowadays, when I get back to the studio I do the usual tossing out of blinks, grimaces and off expressions, and then I do a global color correction and exposure correction to each person's folder of images. It's easy enough since I don't change lighting or exposure from a subject's first frame to the last. Correct the first frame and all the rest follow along in a batch.
The one change I've made lately involves applying an Adobe Lightroom Classic preset to all of the images for each subject. The preset is under "adaptive portrait" and the setting is called "enhance portrait." It softens skin, brightens eyes and ...... wow! It's A.I. enabled. It's nice because it makes everyone look good without overdoing it. And the amount of correction is controllable with a slider.
All my lighting and camera gear fit into one Think Tank rolling case and I was able to balance my modest collection of light stands, umbrellas and my favorite tripod on top of the case. All of which fit nicely in the trunk of the car. Nice not to require a big, clunky cart.
The jobs done this way have been well received and rewarded with prompt payment. Nice indeed.
Health notes.
If you are descended from Northern Europeans, from Brits, and other pale skinned people, and you are constantly exposed to doses of sun light here in Texas, you will probably grow an interesting collection of skin issues on your most exposed surfaces. I've tried to be diligent about using sunscreen but there are all those years in our collective youths where sunscreen wasn't on the radar and not suggested by experts. We did the damage early on and now we get to upgrade our vigilance to catch dangerous new skin growths before they kill us.
I've been swimming outdoors in Texas for a long time. It's been great. But I collect actinic keratosis(es) and SK's the way some people collect coupons. So, when the urge to clean up the epidermis strikes I head into my dermatolotist's office for an in-depth skin check and the painful ritual of burning off AKs, etc. with liquid nitrogen. Stings for a while but I look at it all as penance. We did a mess of burning today. My back feels like a checkerboard of bee stings. But my doc says it's fine to return to the pool. Oh joy.
I'll look like the guy with localized chickenpox.
Swimming continues to be a most joyous activity. I'm trying to hit the earlier practices to stay out of the sun. Not much enhanced UV at seven in the morning...
Wanna appreciate swimming more? Do a YouTube search for Katie Ledecky's 1500 final at the Olympic Trials last week. Amazing!!!
