A Perfect Fit

Lest anyone think the most important equipment debate is between a shirt-pocket compact cam and a sling-over-the-shoulder entry level DSLR, here's Carl Weese's new Honda Fit packed up for a two-day photography jaunt through Massachusetts and New York State. Carl tells me that the small brown bag on the far right, besides a laptop and two hard drives, contained a change of clothes and some toiletries. All the rest is photo equipment. Also, there's another case under the tripod that you can't see; it held extra 8x10 film holders and two big lenses for the 7x17" view camera.

Incidentally, Carl noted with some amazement that over the course of one 366-mile leg of the 874-mile trip, the Fit's mileage was 10% better than the EPA Highway MPG estimate, even though he ran the A/C part of the way! It outperformed its EPA estimate for the trip as a whole, too. Not too shabby for hauling all this gear.

It has to hold Carl, too. Although he's not wide, lucky sod, he's quite a bit taller than the average Joe.

Carl Weese, Ballfield, Keeseville, New York

And here's an example, if you can call it that, of why Carl goes out. The web image was scanned from a 7x17" contact platinum/palladium print made on Masa paper, a Japanese tissue with a rough surface that Carl says works surprisingly well for contact prints. The original is of course exquisitely detailed, and vivid and luminous despite its gentle contrast. The web image is only the merest approximation of the print.

Here's the 7x17 set up at the Transit Drive-in Theater, Lockport, New York, 5/22/07.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Taxes

Michael Reichman once used the phrase "the Photoshop tax" in a conversation with me about imaging software. That is, every so often Adobe upgrades PS, and you're suddenly behind, so you have to pay a hundred and a half to upgrade and get yourself back to zero. It's a regular if intermittent expense. You know it's going to come around again, like rainy season. The "Photoshop tax."

It got me to thinking. What else is a "tax"?

The "film tax" might be one. You can protest all you want about how great film is and how great your prints look, but like it or not, when you use film, every time you release the shutter you incur costs. Every time you click, it's like throwing a nickel in a can. Or a fist-wad of dollar bills, if you're shooting 4x5 color neg. The "film tax."

There's the "upgrade tax." I know of a few photographers who have been using the same view cameras since Cher had two names, and I talked to one blissed-out guy online once who'd been using one single screw-mount Leica since 1948. He'd never bought himself a second camera. He was still happy with it—this was in the '90s, as I recall—and felt no need to think about a replacement. For the rest of us, well, it's more than a little ironic that we spend so much time arguing about how long our cameras will last. Who wears out their cameras? Before digicams came along, not very darn many of us. No; we get wandering-eye and buy something new, just because, well, we want something new, darn it. My little bro' has a budget line for things he calls "non-recurring recurrables." You know. Like "the upgrade tax."

There's gotta be a "camera-bag tax." Who has just one camera bag, and who lets the fact that he already has ten stop him from buying one more? It's like we can't help ourselves. Like every untried camera bag we run across is the green grass on the far side of the fence. If I just had that camera bag....

So what else is a "tax"? What else do you just keep spending money on in this silly hobby, with no end in sight? Anybody got another one?

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Featured Comment by Chris: "There's the LBA tax, at least for me.

"Over on the Pentax forum at DPReview, LBA is the acronym for 'Lens Buying Addiction.' I seem to have acquired a fairly bad case of it.

"No matter how many lenses I have (in multiple formats) there's still another one on the horizon that I just gotta get. Places like eBay and KEH are not healthy for me...."

And Relax.

Saturday was back at Cargo; again, French Horn Rebellion who I'd seen a couple of days previous, joined by The Chap, who were impressive, and another band who didn't make much of an impression. I hadn't heard The Chap before, and was pleasantly surprised by the energy they put into their show.







It was a fun night. The rest of the week was dominated by two cancelled jobs, so I found myself less busy than I have been. Whereas a few weeks back I would have found something else to do, this week I needed to kick back a bit and take it a little easy. Wednesday I shot a portrait of Matthew Killick for lecool, to help publicise his exhibition.



Thursday was Skill Wizard, a night put on by Invasion guitarist Marek. The headline act was Insect Warfare. It was a lot more fun for having had a few relaxing days before.







It was the sort of night where I saw the other photographers hiding by the side of the stage and gave thanks for my height and bulk, although at one point a crowdsurfer grabbed my lens and I had to put him down. I would like it if I could make some sort of living from these sorts of photographs, but in the meantime, I have other exciting projects on the go, and perhaps doing it for a job would make it less fun.

Darkov's Answer

Earlier today I got a comment from a reader called darkov who asked:

There was a music/cd review blog that you had referred to in some previous posts. Any chance of putting a link to it on your "Online Photographer" blog?

Right. Thanks for asking. It's called C60CD, a name with a long and storied history, and it's written mainly by my friends Bob and Kim, who continue to put up some really nice stuff there. They can both be pretty challenging, but I've learned immensely from both of them and my musical life is always made better when I read the site.

I've put up a leetle tiny permanent link so you can always find it—there in blue, over to the left, under the Amazon link. See it?

I need to go write a couple of new reviews myself. It's been a while.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Portable Lightning

The significance of equipment is impossible to overstate. It is of course possible to take as good a photograph with a bad 35mm film camera as it is with a top-of-the-range DSLR, but ultimately what good equipment does it raise your strike-rate dramatically, even if often quality drops with new equipment as the photographer is required to learn how to best use them. I began this week with a single Canon 580EX ii flash unit, with a 5m off-camera sync lead. Nowhere were the limitations of this system more apparent than on Saturday night, trying to wind my way between trees to take pictures of horses, avoiding branches and hoping the unit powered up quickly enough from its batteries while the horse stayed still long enough to get the photo I wanted.





The shots came out well enough, but for a while, maybe years, I've been formulating a technique for shooting that requires faster directional lighting with more control. The background to my photography training runs like this: about five years ago, I was offered the chance to assist a photographer called Takashi Kamei, as a means to learning about how to take pictures, having never studied. We worked well together, and I am proud of the work we have done and continue to do, and that I have been able to help him somewhat in the progression of his career - I operate more as a lighting and shoot director now, with a team of other assistants also helping me out. Takashi is both a very patient man and a masterful photographer, who knows exactly what he wants from a shoot before he starts, and I have learnt many things, especially about shooting with a combination of strobe and continuous lighting. For a year, on his recommendation, I also assisted another Japanese photographer, Mari Sarai. As well as fashion, Mari shoots a lot of celebrity and music portraits for fashion magazines, and has a very different approach to shooting, full of energy, shooting very quickly. Working with her was hard, but I learnt a lot about how to handle models and subjects, and it was also the first time I came across Quantum flash batteries.

As I thought more recently about how to shoot set-up shots, I decided that the best possible way I could honour the pedigree of my training and develop my own individual style would be to try to combine their two styles into one of my own. To this end - shooting on location with rapid flash units and utilising as much natural light in the shots as possible. The first step to this is to get more equipment, so I ordered a second flash unit (as they can operate and be controlled from the back of the camera completely wirelessly) and a Quantum Turbo 2X2, which is capable of powering two flashes at once.

Perhaps it was just that I was particularly relaxed after a night in the woods, but I hit Sunday's assignment, taking pictures at alternative performance night Kinky Salon, like a dervish.







Tuesday and I was still waiting for them, but deadlines are deadline, and so I shot this portrait of Paul A. Young for lecool:



Talk about dream jobs; he makes chocolate for a living, and has a chain of shops across London. He also has an interesting-looking book out.

In the evening, I had been invited to the opening of The Queens' Elm, once a pub and now a four-floor art gallery. A friend from The Lady Greys was dancing there, and I got some shots of the performances, art and bits of bobs I saw there.







The rest of the week was mostly filled with meetings and the like; on Friday though, Dead Kids had asked me if I could come down to their show to take some pictures for them. It was at St. Moritz, a small venue in Soho that I don't particularly enjoy, but there were some fun japes beforehand.





Yup, inside-out eyelids and screaming girls. On to the show..








The band are all friendly to me and are one of the most energetic bands I've seen play recently, and I always leave their shows feeling a little bruised and tired.

Tonight: Resistance Gallery punkstep? Or maybe a less hectic night - I'm under the weather. Tomorrow: my gran's 90th birthday party. Then a week of busy - two portraits, including with one of my musical heroes, fashion shoot casting, surrealness with a freaky performer, and a voodoo go go dancer. Then the Bizarre Ball on Saturday. And I get to play with my new lights some more.. oh yes.

Taxes: Codae

There are a couple of codas to my "Taxes" post below (in which I tried to affect a sort of rueful tongue-in-cheek humor and evidently, for most readers, failed. Oh, well, I tried). Anyway, consider:

• Photography isn't that expensive. No matter how much you spend on it, there are any number of other hobbies / passions / obsessions / pasttimes which constitute much more efficient ways to pee away specie. You could own a boat, for instance, or collect cars like Jay Leno, or have a passion for racehorses, or be into really high-end audio. Photography can be expensive, sure, but there are lots worse things. Even if you collect photography, and do things like pay .1 million for the odd Cindy Sherman, you could always be buying paintings instead and tossing away ten times that. Comparatively, photography always comes out looking pretty good.

• Photography is reasonably wholesome, all things considered. I always qualify this by noting that there are indeed a few ways one can break the law with photography, and there must be a few ways that one could turn it toward immoral ends. But for the most part, it doesn't hurt anybody. Including you. Whenever one of my friends mentions that a spouse or S.O. is complaining about his or her counterpart's immersion into the hobby, I point out that it's better than crank 'n' liquor, poker 'n' prostitutes, yatta yatta, things of that nature—real vices. You could be pouring your wealth one quarter at a time down the throat of a one-armed bandit. That's a far sight worse than overspending on ink, methinks. Wouldn't you say that, on balance, photography keeps more of us good folks out of trouble more often than it gets us into trouble? That would be my guess.

I've always paid the various taxes and been happy. I spend a certain amount of my money on photography, sure. Have for years. But it's my thing. And that's a good thing.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Generations

Saturday and it was down to Worthing for my grandmother's 90th birthday party. It was a good chance to get a bunch of the Medwell clan together; it's fairly rare, as we all live in different parts of the country. It was the first time I'd seen my grandmother for a while; she seemed in good spirits, and I think she enjoyed the occasion, although after a few hours she went off to watch tv in her living room.







Monday, I shot a portrait of David Carter, who has a small boutique hotel called 40 Winks. In one of those curious twists of fate, it turned out that my stepfather, James Mortimer (an interior photographer) was a good friend of his. The world grows larger and smaller by the day.




Tuesday was one of those days that makes my head spin; while I've taken a few celebrity portraits with no fuss, taking pictures of the musical heroes of my youth leaves my dizzy. For about three years when I was in my late teens, I collected every release DJ Vadim touched. I went to his house to do a portrait, for lecool. Naturally, he'd had three hours sleep, having landed from NY only a few hours before I arrived, and was dazed and perhaps a little grouchy when he found me waiting in his living room...



Wednesday I did a promotional shoot for Missy Macabre. I originally met her through her act with Lucha Britannia.





After that I did some promotional shots for Rock And Roll Expressionists, a group exhibition coming up at Resistance Gallery featuring Tom Spencer and Vince Ray, among others..



Friday I had a meeting with Marga, the dancer and curator of the Queen's Elms show I covered recently. She is eager to do a shoot with me so we went to Queen's Woods near Crouch End to try some things out..



Coming up: Saturday, Bizarre Ball; Sunday, more Badger drumming; next week - Imogen Heap, No Age, Dead Kids, Fashion Shoot, Fangtasia.. busy much yeah?