Everywhere I read about photography there is one message that seems to come through; from Daido Moriyama all the way to the traditionalist large format lovers at Lens Work Magazine. It's the same everywhere...
Ann-Marie in the old studio.
The message is: The more you shoot the luckier you get.
I'm once again embarked on cleaning up the studio and re-hanging favorite images on the walls. I'm doing so in anticipation of two or three portrait subjects who have recently accepted my wide open invitations for them to come into the studio to participate/collaborate in a series of portraits I am doing just for fun.
There are a number of things I want to try out and I'll be damned if I'm going to buy a dummy plastic head to experiment with. I'd rather have real people to look at, to interact with and to elevate into the pantheon of breathtaking beauty. (If only I had that power...).
I bought an old Pentax 150mm lens to cobble onto my medium format camera and I'd like to see how that works on real portrait sitters. I'd also like to spend more time with the 90mm f1.25 lens I've had sitting around the studio for months and months. Also on the MF.
I'm interested in putting the 90mm Voigtlander APO lens on a Leica M240, tossing one of the EVF-2 finders on the camera and lighting up some portraits with big LED lights shining through even bigger white scrims. Then I'll try the same thing with the 75mm Aspherical lens. Just to see what they look like when they are used in a studio setting. A setting with total light control.
The one thing you really can't do with a Leica M240 and the EVF-2 is use them together with flash. The finder takes up the hot shoe and, well, that's pretty much a hard block against triggering flashes. There are no other flash sync ports on those camera bodies. And really, it just seems wrong to use the M cameras with anything but continuous lights. At least that's the way I see it.
The only bad thing about shooting more and more frames, in an attempt to get lucky and catch more "winners", is the inevitable filling up of hard drive after hard drive. Knowing this I'm trying to slow down on my over the top way of shooting which is mostly to shoot a lot of frames, always looking for those small but important differences, frame by frame, in pose, expression and gesture. I'm trying to be more alert for the best moments and less reactive to the middle of the road stuff.
OT: Does anybody pay attention to the stock markets anymore or have we just stopped paying attention to good financial news altogether? I ask because it looks like the S&P 500 is heading for a new record high. I'm sure that whatever goes up will come back down in a bit but I'm equally sure that it will follow a trend line of "two steps forward, one scary step back." I guess I'm thinking that looking at long term trends is less anxiety provoking than watching stuff day-by-day and week-by-week.
I'm guessing everyone has their own financial end goal in mind. I always wonder not about their "number" but about the emotional friction of watching those graphs go up and down.
Long ago I knew people who wanted to be day traders and who tried to anticipate ups and downs of stocks and thereby make magical money. But I also met a smart guy who told me that no one can really anticipate the markets and that market timing was a foolish approach to investing. His one unbendable rule was to stay invested in the markets at all times. On the whole it was good advice. Better advice than a photographer like me could have come up with left to my own devices.
Interesting thoughts as people get closer to retirement.
Kirk:“I'd rather have real people to look at, to interact with and to elevate into the pantheon of breathtaking beauty. (If only I had that power...).”
ReplyDeleteJust wait: No doubt AI researchers are even now training neural networks to offer an anatomical-improvement capability that can be used during post-processing to discreetly modify a portrait subject’s features according to a menu-selectable attractiveness parameter.
Chris, it's already here. I use it on myself...
ReplyDeleteHow did you shoot in MF film days? Your work from those days is wonderful, but I doubt you took hundreds of shots for each pose.
ReplyDeleteChris Kern -- in other words, they're going to do what painters have always done.
ReplyDeleteKirk: Market timing works quite well if only you know how to do it. 8-)
A conversation many years ago with Dallas newspaper photographers talking about a colleague who was not present:
ReplyDelete"He's the luckiest photographer in town."
"He's also the hardest working photographer in town."
Regarding retirement planning, I remember begging a number of my friends to leave their investments where they were during the financial crisis of 2008-09. But, to a one, they panicked and sold stocks after the market declined, thereby locking in their losses. They had no answer afterward when I asked them what was going through their minds. I guess there’s just no helping those who have a tick in their fight-or-flight instinct. Everyone should remember: You can’t time the markets.
ReplyDeleteGreetings Kirk -
ReplyDeleteI am considering retirement in the next year or so - Looking forward to projects & travel. Going to Prague, Poland and Germany this Fall. Good way to test my recently acquired Nikon Z8 & 24-120 F/4 zoom.
Investment Management vs Financial Planning, with FP being more comprehensive & often missed. Goal development, Retirement Planning, Social Security & Medicare, Medigap options, Withdraw & distribution plan, Trusts, POA's, Long-term Care discussion, Tax Efficiency, best ways to pass on assets to next generation (Wealth Transfer), & of course Generosity & Legacy planning.
What really matters? Many of us have more than enough for our own lives, so what causes and needs could use some of our help? Volunteer options too. Those are interesting & rewarding discussions.
Chris
I'm glued to the US markets for the first hour of trading most days, I've been doing some basic options trading with plenty of rookie mistakes but no huge wipeouts as of yet, supposedly the first half of july is the best week but my stocks have been fairly flat or gone down a bit which has been making my covered calls depreciate nicely, using margin and trading spreads is apparently more capital efficient but riskier, I may switch over to some of that at some point.
ReplyDelete“The more you shoot, the luckier you get” may work for a trail camera…but, in itself, it will do little to improve one’s photo skills. It just fills hard drives today. Without conscious study you’ll spend decades just shooting the same centric, planar, dull way that you did when you were a child. Capturing rich, layered, engaging frames with any camera requires some talent and study / expert criticism, and, yes, lots of shooting.
ReplyDeleteA bit of hyperbole is always fun first thing in the morning...
ReplyDeleteit starts mid-afternoon here, so far the stock I wanted to go up has gone up and the one I wanted to go down has gone down, I'm pretty much used to the up's and down's now, was pretty stressful to start with
ReplyDeleteThe investing advice I give to the kids, in my extended family, starting their investing experience are:
ReplyDeleteWhen starting out, the averages are your friends.
When you start investing don’t watch the market everyday.
When the market is going down, it is on sale. So buy more.
Be prepared to ride the roller coaster.
Don’t keep your eyes on what the world holds. Keep your eyes on who holds the world.
PaulB
Kirk wrote: "The message is: The more you shoot the luckier you get. "
ReplyDeleteAlso, "A bit of hyperbole is always fun first thing in the morning..."
Well shucks. I was beginning to hope that Robert Frank was just lucky.
Kirk, you cannot please all of them all of the time. You pleased me several times. I thank you. Chris
ReplyDelete