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COMINGOFAGE A FRESH TAKE ON SENIOR PORTRAITS
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Dave Black This veteran sports shooter has covered 12 Olympics plus countless NFL and NASCAR events. A master of specialized lighting, he created iconic images of Arlington National Cemetery for National Geographic’s moving book Where Valor Rests. “I’ve conducted workshops for 25 years, and the Mentor Series is absolutely the best. That’s because people learn most effectively when they’re involved in an intense, enjoyable interactive experience. By the final portfolio review, participants are proudly sharing and applauding the incredible images they’ve created. I make a point of explaining sophisticated flash techniques like light painting in simple, direct language and engaging personally with each participant. I know I’ve succeeded when trekkers continue to teach themselves, help each other, stay in touch, and sign up for more.”
“By the final portfolio review, participants are proudly sharing and applauding the incredible images they’ve created.”
There is no better, faster way to enhance your visual creativity, enhance your photographic skills, tap into the knowledge base of seasoned professional photographers, and experience the camaraderie and passion of fellow photo enthusiasts than signing up for a Nikon-sponsored Mentor Series Photo Trek. Acclaimed by experts and participants as the most effective, enlightening and enjoyable events of their kind, they provide a unique hands-on learning experience devoid of daily distractions—a total-immersion course in visual expression wrapped in a seamlessly organized, carefree, once-in-a-lifetime photographic experience! Mentored by friendly Nikon professional photographers who share their shooting secrets and priceless practical tips, you’ll receive the kind of personal one-on-one attention that will have you shooting better pictures almost immediately. You’ll also have the chance to use the latest high-performance Nikon digital cameras with legendary NIKKOR lenses, have incredible photo opportunities, and bring back images you’ll treasure forever. What makes Nikon Mentors so special? Read their amazing profiles and heartfelt comments below.
“It’s totally photocentric—a rare opportunity to set aside a block of time to devote entirely to your creative passion.”
Reed Hoffmann A top pro for 30 years and winner of National Press Photographers Association awards for outstanding newspaper work, he’s an acknowledged expert on digital workflow and color management. “My mission is to expand people’s visual consciousness. As a mentor, I achieve this by challenging trekkers to explore new types of picture opportunities, to push themselves beyond their comfort zone into their creative zone. I also help them articulate their vision by providing a good grounding in lighting, timing and composition. The best part: All the logistics have been worked out so perfectly you always have the chance to take great shots at precisely the right time. It’s totally photo-centric—a rare opportunity to set aside a block of time to devote entirely to your creative passion.”
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Tony Corbell Internationally acclaimed for his signature portraits of world leaders and celebrities shot over three decades, he has received dozens of coveted professional awards. “How to tell a story with pictures is the essence of what I teach. It’s the best way for the participants to document any location and capture its sense of place and time. What’s great about the Mentor Series is that we’re in a bubble—trekkers and mentors have the priceless opportunity to focus totally on the creative process, so we learn fast and really have a ball. Telling the behind-the-clichés story of a place like Nashville requires passion, enthusiasm and working each picture until it embodies the truth of your perception. I teach these things the only way you can—by example.”
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David Tejada This esteemed pro has been serving the graphic design, corporate communications and marketing communities for 27 years, specializing in location photography for signature business publications. “The Mentor Series means a great deal to me because I love sharing my enthusiasm and knowledge about photography with fellow trekkers and helping them grow as creative photographers. I really enjoy the personal one-on-one teaching and it’s wonderful to be able to resolve their questions right there in the field. I particularly enjoy teaching, participants how to use Nikon Speedlights creatively, demystifying the use of off-camera flash and the Creative Lighting System. Flash is fun! With the right attitude, so is composition or lens selection. The synergy that develops among trekkers is amazing—it transforms learning into an excellent adventure.”
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A VOICE IN THE WILDERNESS Robert Glenn Ketchum is not a member of the glitterati. But his conservation photography and activism make him one of the most influential photographers of our time, which is why he’s the subject of American Photo’s Master Series No. 5. BY RUSSELL HART
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COMING OF AGE No longer satisfied with mug shots on a cheesy mottled background, high school seniors want portraits of themselves that project their identity. For forwardthinking, profit-minded photographers, senior-portrait work is becoming big business. BY THEANO NIKITAS
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SMITH ON SET Right after shooting the production of Charlie Chaplin’s film Limelight, W. Eugene Smith sat down and wrote a rare essay about his experience working on the great comedian’s set. It never appeared in print until now, here, almost 60 years later. BY W. EUGENE SMITH
DEPARTMENTS 9
FLASH News & Trends in Photography Miroslav Tichý’s first major North American exhibition + On the Wall + Sweet Spot: Puglia, Italy
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FOCUS The People Behind the Pictures One to Watch: Alejandro Chaskielberg + Side by Side: Marc Yankus and Henry Sene Yee + Personal Project: Robert Buelteman + The Pic: Michael Muller
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FLICKR CREATIVE SHOWCASE These members of Flickr’s American Photo Creative Showcase group use photography to explore — and share — their inner thoughts and outer environments.
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GEAR What Photographers Need Ricoh’s novel GXR camera system + Editor’s Choice: Video accessories for your DSLR
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SKILLS Know-How Now Digital Darkroom: Using Photoshop’s Smart Objects to make composites + The Picture Biz: What you should know about model releases
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PARTING SHOT A portrait of a young tiger by former U.N. chief photographer John Isaac helps highlight the problem of poaching in India.
AMERICANPHOTOMAG.COM | MAR/APR 2010
Part of a growing cadre of photographers finding new ways to shoot senior portraits, Mike and Heather Krakora here captured the teen’s personality. See page 48 for the rest of the story.
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C LO C K W I S E F R O M TO P L E F T: © R O B E R T G L E N N K E TC H U M : © 1 9 5 2 , 2 0 1 0 T H E H E I R S O F W. E U G E N E S M I T H ; © M O N A R C H P H OTO G R A P H Y; © R O B E R T B U E LT E M A N ; © A L E J A N D R O C H A S K I E L B E R G
FEATURES
Mamiya Award of Excellence
©Adam Hribar
The Mamiya Award of Excellence acknowledges dedicated efforts and achievements in the field of photography. It is judged by an independent group of advertising professionals. This year’s award has been given to Adam Hribar, of Langhorne, PA and graduate of Hallmark Institute of Photography. Prior to attending Hallmark, Adam graduated high school having spent three years studying photography. Through these classes, he developed an intense passion for photography. Adam chose to attend Hallmark because of its 10-month total immersion program and its location in an area where he could devote all of his attention to photography without any distraction. At Hallmark, Adam found his calling not only on the shooting side of photography, but in the area of imaging arts. His imaginative skills in postproduction breathe life and energy into his work. While working on his images in front of his computer, his focus is very intense and he finds the work easy, immersing himself in the details at hand.
Upon graduating from Hallmark, Adam will highlight this unique vision and illustrative style as he embarks on a career in commercial/advertising photography. For 34 years, Hallmark Institute of Photography, in Turners Falls, MA, has been one of the country’s premier schools for the training of tomorrow’s professional photographers. Mamiya extends congratulations to Adam Hribar for his award, and to Hallmark Institute of Photography for providing the guidance that made it all possible. To find out more about this outstanding school or Adam Hribar contact: Hallmark Institute of Photography At the Airport, PO Box 308, Turners Falls, MA 01376 413-863-2478, E-mail:
[email protected] Web site: http://hallmark.edu
MAMIYA • 914-347-3300 • www.mamiya.com
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SARAH KINBAR Russell Hart Donna Reiss Russ Moore Jenny Andrews Leigh Ann Ledford Chelsea Stickel Cindy Martin Rebecca Geiger, Judith Myers Stan Horaczek Patrick Parker Jonathan Barkey, Amy Bedik, Greg Ceo, Jack Crager, Miranda Crowell, Joe Gioia, Vicki Goldberg, Michel Leroy, Lindsay Sakraida
DEBBIE GROSSMAN A senior editor at Popular Photography, Grossman writes its monthly “Software Workshop” column and leads the magazine’s coverage of software and image archiving. Before joining Pop Photo six years ago, Debbie produced photo shoots at New York Magazine and was photo editor at nerve.com.
MARK JANNOT Larry Nighswander
GREGG R. HANO Steven B. Grune Anthony Ruotolo, Wendi S. Berger Christopher Graves Mike Gallic Tara Bisciello Matthew Bondy, Lauren Brewer, Scott Constantine, Sara Schiano Flynn, Taryn Guillermo John Marquardt 312-252-2838 Krissy Van Rossum Robert Hoeck 310-227-8963, Bob Meth Kate Gregory Edward A. Bartley 248-282-5545 Diane Pahl Jason A. Albaum
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JOE GIOIA Writer/editor and American Photo contributing editor Joe Gioia lives in Chicago. His photographs can be found in the collections of the Minnesota Historical Society and the late Sir John Paul Getty, as well as the collections of Polaroid and online at visiblerepublic.com — his picture-a-day project, now in its 10th year.
JOE MCNALLY Our “Light Matters” columnist is an internationally acclaimed photographer and longtime photojournalist. From 1994 until 1998, he was Life magazine’s staff photographer, the first one in 23 years. His most well-known series is the “Faces of Ground Zero — Portraits of the Heroes of September 11th.”
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SUBSCRIPTIONS: American Photo (ISSN 1046-8986) (USPS 526-930) is published bimonthly (Jan/Feb, Mar/Apr, May/June, July/Aug, Sept/Oct, Nov/Dec) by Bonnier Corporation, 2 Park Ave., New York, NY 10016. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY 10001 and at additional mailing offices. Authorized periodicals postage by the Post Office Department, Ottawa, Canada, and for payment in cash. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to American Photo, P.O. Box 420235, Palm Coast, FL 32164; 386-597-4375; www.americanphotomag.com/customerservice. If the postal services alert us that your magazine is undeliverable, we have no further obligation unless we receive a corrected address within one year. One-year subscription rate (six issues) for U.S. and possessions, $15; Canada (includes 5 percent GST) and foreign, $29; cash orders only, payable in U.S. currency. Two years: U.S., $30; Canada and foreign, $53. Three years: U.S., $45; Canada and foreign, $76. Publications Mail Agreement Number: 40052054. Canadian Registration Number: 126018209RT0001. Return undeliverable Canadian addresses to: P.O. Box 503, RPO West Beaver Creek, Richmond Hill, ON L4B 4R6 Canada.
JONATHAN BARKEY Jonathan Barkey has been reviewing DSLRs for American Photo for the past decade and contributes regularly to the Gear section. In his spare time, the Brooklyn photojournalist shoots for environmental and civic organizations. He leads a moonlight bicycle ride in Prospect Park on the second Saturday of every month.
Niko koon® andd D3S™ aare r reg registe isteered iste istered edd trad trademar ema ks of emar of N Nikon o Corp Corporat o a ion. ©20 orat 2010 10 Nikon Nikon Inc Inc..
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ONE D-SLR LETS YOU. INTRODUCING THE AMAZING NIKON D3S. GO TO WWW.NIKONUSA.COM/D3S TO SEE THE HD VIDEO “BARYSHNIKOV BY SELIGER,” CAPTURED WITH THE NEW NIKON D3S. See how celebrated photographer Mark Seliger uses the extraordinary image quality and low-light capabilities of the versatile new Nikon D3S at the Baryshnikov Arts Center. With an astonishing low-noise ISO range of 200-12,800 and performance at ISO 102,400 that must be seen to be believed. The D3S has a 12.1 megapixel, FX-format CMOS sensor. A ready-for-anything speed of up to 9 FPS, coupled with a 51-Point AF system for the ultimate in precision and razor sharpness. Add outstanding HD video capabilities and legendary NIKKOR ® lenses, and it gives Mark a whole new set of creative tools. Mikhail Baryshnikov was photographed at dusk at 1/50 s at f/4.0, ISO 12,800.
Enter online from January 15 – April 5, 2010
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Winners will be published in the July/August 2010 issues of American Photo and Destination Weddings & Honeymoons. Two grand-prize winners will receive trips for two to a luxury resort. Additional prizes to be provided by:
Winning photos will be selected by a panel of distinguished judges:
C^]h2^aQT[[u:TeX]:dQ^cPu3^dV6^aS^] 1P\QX2P]caT[[u9X\6Pa]Ta And editors of American Photo and Destination Weddings & Honeymoons.
contest categories All winners will appear in American Photo. Winners in categories indicated with an asterisk (*) will also appear in Destination Weddings & Honeymoons.
Getting Ready A candid moment caught of the bride, groom or other members of the wedding party just before the big event. Ceremony The emotion, significance and beauty of this momentous ritual, as the lives of two people and their families are joined. Couples Portrait Whether formal or informal, this shot should reveal the deep connection between the bride and groom on their wedding day. Reception The ceremony is over and it’s time to gather with friends and family, dancing, eating cake and toasting the newlyweds. Send-Off Bidding adieu to the happy couple as the bride tosses her bouquet and they climb into the “just married” car, or walk hand-in-hand past cheering wedding guests.
SPO N SO R E D BY
Details Little things often stand as perfect symbols of this momentous occasion. Whether it’s a still life of rings, bouquets or champagne glasses, or a close-up element such as beading on the wedding dress or the couple’s hands. *Best Use of Locale An image that combines the beauty of the ceremony with the essence of the destination — from an exotic tropical island to a medieval European castle. *Best Use of Local Flavor The creative use of regional elements as integral parts of the ceremony, whether it’s leis in Hawaii or a mariachi band in Mexico. *Day After Once the official ceremony and reception are over, everyone can relax and take a more playful approach to photos of attendees. *Trash the Dress Repurposing a wedding dress is just a myth, so why not have some fun? Stretch out on a lawn, wade into the ocean or ride a roller coaster.
NEWS & TRENDS IN PHOTOGRAPHY TICHÝ’S TURN 9 | EXHIBITIONS 12 | SWEET SPOT 15
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Right: Tichý was fascinated by women in repose and created a series of images of crossed legs and feet. This tightly cropped composition emphasizes the sensual sweep of bare legs and classically draped fabric.
LOOK
L E F T TO R I G H T: © R O M A N B U X B A U M ; © T I C H Ý O C E A N F O U N D AT I O N , Z U R I C H
International Center of Photography 1133 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY Through May 9 212-857-0000, icp.org More than 100 of the photographer’s images, along with examples of his homemade cameras, will be on display; a documentary about his life will run periodically.
THE OBJECTS OF HIS OBSESSION Miroslav Tichý finally takes his place in the spotlight with his first major North American exhibition | BY AMY BEDIK At first glance, Czech photographer Miroslav Tichý appears to be the quintessential outsider artist. His appearance is wild and woolly, his tools are primitive and homemade, and the images he creates are seemingly naive. But a deeper look at his work — primarily photos of women, taken surreptitiously — suggests a more sophisticated and complex aesthetic, one that finds beauty in mundane MAR/APR 2010 | AMERICANPHOTOMAG.COM
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pleasures like a well-turned ankle. That Tichý, now in his 80s, made his slyly subversive photographs while living in isolation in a small, Communist-ruled town is a remarkable achievement. Almost as remarkable is the fact that Tichý’s work has been a well-kept secret, known only to a small coterie interested in work created outside the mainstream — until now. Marking Tichý’s first major exhibition in North America, the International Center of Photography is displaying more than 100 of his evocative and intimate photographs, as well as examples of the cameras he crafted from recycled refuse. “The exhibition is interesting not only because his work was lost and then resurfaced,” says Brian Wallis, chief curator at the ICP. “It’s also an amazing story of this man’s life and struggle.” Born in 1926, Tichý studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. Then Tichý, who had always wrestled with mental instability, suffered a breakdown in 1957. After several institutionalizations, he returned to his hometown of Kyjov, where he began to document the local scene with cameras cobbled together from bits and pieces of junk. Over the next 20 years, he took 100 pictures a day, amassing a collection of more than 5,000 images of women, in all shapes and sizes, in bathing suits and sport clothes, cavorting by a pool and strolling
IN THE BAG Tichý didn’t work with off-the-shelf cameras, instead assembling his own from discarded toilet-paper rolls, string, tin cans and other bits of refuse. Because his quirky cameras did not have viewfinders, he lacked exact control over composition of the images.
AMERICANPHOTOMAG.COM | MAR/APR 2010
Above, left: While the Czech government controlled television programming, Tichý was able to pick up Austrian television signals and made a series of screen grabs like this one of two women dancing, which resembles a photogram in its two-dimensionality. Above, right: Picking up color in the subject’s bathing suit, this homemade frame incorporates an inner cardboard border with penciled designs, surrounded by a yellow plastic edging.
down the street. Printing each negative only once on a homemade enlarger, Tichý manipulated the prints through a multiplicity of means — scratching, drawing, tearing, folding — to create dreamlike images that seem like recordings from a distant past. Tichý’s archive might have disappeared if not for the prescient actions in the early 1980s of his neighbor, Roman Buxbaum. A psychiatrist who had worked in a prison hospital with a renowned collection of artworks made by patients, Buxbaum recognized the originality of Tichý’s work and started a foundation to preserve it. Thanks to Buxbaum’s efforts, Tichý’s work has been shown throughout Europe, Japan and China. In 2005, at the age of 79, Tichý won the Prix Découverte (Discovery Award) at Les Rencontres d’Arles Photographie, in France. The ICP show marks another major critical endorsement, but Tichý hasn’t been wholeheartedly embraced by the art world. Some critics claim that Tichý’s work is exploitative, but Wallis believes that’s a misread. “The pictures are about discovering joy and pleasure in an oppressive political situation,” he says. Wallis also points out that the exhibition is especially relevant today because Tichý’s aesthetic is shared by a growing cadre of photographers who are “not so concerned with formal issues of technique and composition, and are more willing to accept a more slapdash approach to image-making.” Those photographers will likely take inspiration from a revealing, if tongue-in-cheek, comment from Tichý himself: “Photography is painting with light! The blurs, the spots, those are errors! But the errors are part of it; they give it poetry and turn it into painting. And for that you need as bad a camera as possible! If you want to be famous, you have to do whatever you’re doing worse than anyone else in the whole world.” AP
C LO C K W I S E F R O M TO P L E F T: © T I C H Ý O C E A N F O U N D AT I O N , Z U R I C H ( 2 ) ; © R O M A N B U X B A U M
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ON THE WALL
ɥ ɥ ɥɥɥ | BY ANGELA FARIS BELT ƭɥɥ ANASTASIA PHOTO 166 Orchard St., New York, NY 7'( (3(.-ƨɥDavid Wright: Uganda, A River Blue Through March 31 Vibrant color portraits, landscapes and village scenes offer a broad look at this East African nation .412ƨɥTue-Sun 11-7 .-3 !3ƨɥ212-677-9725, anastasia-photo.com
HASTED HUNT KRAEUTLER 537 W. 24th St., New York, NY 7'( (3(.-ƨɥHotel & Dawn/Dusk: Erwin Olaf Through March 20 Meticulously constructed scenes based on historic imagery merge commercial perfection and fine-art conceptualism .412ƨɥTue-Sat 11-6 .-3 !3ƨ 212-627-0006, hastedhunt.com
PHOTOGRAPHIC RESOURCE CENTER AT BOSTON UNIVERSITY 832 Commonwealth Ave., Boston, MA 7'( (3(.-ƨɥ2010 PRC Student Exhibition Through April 4 Annual juried exhibition highlights the best future professionals from the Northeast region .412ƨɥTue-Fri 10-6, Thu 10-8, Sat-Sun 12-5 .-3 !3ƨɥ617-975-0600, prcboston.org ƭɥ Lj CONNER CONTEMPORARY ART 1358 Florida Ave., NE, Washington, DC 7'( (3(.-ƨ Maria Friberg: Transmission March 20-May 8 Provocative shots that challenge preconceived notions about gender, masculinity and social hierarchies .412ƨ Tue-Sat 10-5 .-3 !3ƨ 202-588-8750, connercontemporary.com
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CORCORAN GALLERY OF ART 500 Seventeenth St. NW, Washington, DC 7'( (3(.-ƨ Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change April 10-July 18 Collection of 1800’s vintage photographs and ephemera that documents the innovative photographer’s wideranging impact .412ƨɥWed, Fri-Sun 10-5, Thu 10-9 .-3 !3ƨɥ202-639-1700, corcoran.org
GALLERY 339 339 S 21st St., Philadelphia, PA 7'( (3(.-2ƨ Henry Horenstein: SHOW and Stuart Rome: Drawn from Nature Through March 27 Lovely black-and-white photography of humans, creatures and the land .412ƨɥTue-Sat 10-6 .-3 !3ƨɥ215-731-1530, gallery339.com
ƭɥ VIRGINIA MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS 200 N. Boulevard, Richmond, VA 7'( (3(.-ƨɥDarkroom: Photography and New Media in South Africa Since 1950 August 21-October 31 18 South African photographers and video artists who have gained international prominence since Apartheid’s end .412ƨɥCall or check website for updated hours .-3 !3ƨɥ804-340-1400, vmfa.museum
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JACKSON FINE ART 3115 E. Shadowlawn Ave., Atlanta, GA 7'( (3(.-ƨɥLynn Geesaman Through March 13 Meticulously manicured landscapes and gardens create a sense of awe and wonder through soft, saturated color prints 7'( (3(.-ƨ Jack Spencer Through March 13 Masterful portraits and landscapes, simultaneously sublime and surreal, in subdued tones .412ƨɥTue-Sat 10-5 .-3 !3ƨ 404-233-3739, jacksonfineart.com THE LIGHT FACTORY: CONTEMPORARY MUSEUM OF PHOTOGRAPHY AND FILM 345 N. College St., Suite 211, Chapel Hill, NC 7'( (3(.-ƨɥThe Romance of the Road: Photographs in Search of the Promised Land Through April 11 Must-see highway- and byway-inspired images and video summarizing American wanderlust; includes
/#-(-%ɥ#!#/3(.-ƨ March 6, 7-10 An inspiring juxtaposition of vintage Porter and contemporary Dykinga .412ƨ Tue-Sat 11-5, Thurs 11-7 .-3 !3ƨ 520-624-7370, ethertongallery.com
ƭɥɥ AMON CARTER MUSEUM 3501 Camp Bowie Blvd., Fort Worth, TX 7'( (3(.-ƨɥEdward S. Curtis: The North American Indian Through May 16 Compelling new acquisition contains cross-section of images from the American photographer’s concentrated repertoire 7'( (3(.-ƨɥMasterworks of American Photography: Popular Culture Through July 18 Images reflective of our shared cultural heritage and interconnectedness .412ƨɥTue-Sat 10-5, Thu 10-8, Sun 10-5 .-3 !3ƨɥ817-738-1933, cartermuseum.org
ETHERTON’S TEMPLE GALLERY 330 S. Scott Ave., Tucson, AZ 7'( (3(.-ƨ Tucson Saguaro Photography Invitational April 3-May 30 /#-(-%ɥ#!#/3(.-ƨɥApril 9, 5:30-7:30 Prickly and humorous representations of the Southwest’s quintessential National Monuments .412ƨ Mon-Fri 10-6; call on weekends .-3 !3ƨ 520-624-7370, ethertongallery.com
FOTOFEST 2010 BIENNIAL EXHIBITIONS Contemporary U.S. photography in 100 participating spaces in Houston, TX March 12-April 25 7'( (3(.-ƨɥRoad to Nowhere A variety of artists explore politics, surveillance, race, war and economic insecurity Winter Street Studios 2101 Winter St., Houston, TX 7'( (3(.-ƨɥMedianation Mixed-photographic processes, video and installation reflect the volatility of contemporary media practices Various locations; see website 7'( (3(.-ƨ Discoveries of the Meeting Place Highlights the work of photographer-artists discovered during the last biennial Allen Center 1200 Smith St., Houston, TX .412ƨɥVary by venue; see website for details .-3 !3ƨ 713-223-5522, fotofest.org ƭɥ CATHERINE EDELMAN GALLERY 300 W. Superior St., Chicago, IL 7'( (3(.-ƨɥKeith Carter: Seen & Unseen March 12-May 1 Fresh and powerful images of international icons using selective focus to highlight a gesture, person or place .412ƨ Tue-Sat 10-5:30 .-3 !3ƨ 312-266-2350, edelmangallery.com SCHNEIDER GALLERY 230 W. Superior St., Chicago, IL 7'( (3(.-ƨ Guillermo Srodek-Hart and Kevin Malella March 5-May 8 Opening Reception: March 5, 5-7:30 These recent MFA grads’ color images explore unique found and constructed spaces .412ƨɥTue-Fri 10:30-5, Sat 11-5 .-3 !3ƨ 312-988-4033, schneidergallerychicago.com TOLEDO MUSEUM OF ART 2445 Monroe St., Toledo, OH 7'( (3(.-ƨɥBare Witness: Photographs by Gordon Parks Through April 25 Dozens of photographs capture a cross-section of human experience through the eye of one of photography’s greats .412ƨ Tue-Thu 10-4, Fri 10-10, Sat 10-6, Sun 12-6 .-3 !3ƨɥ419-255-8000, toledomuseum.org ƭɥ ETHERTON GALLERY, MAIN GALLERY DOWNTOWN 135 S. 6th Ave., Tucson, AZ 7'( (3(.-ƨ A Radiant Land: Jack Dykinga, Eliot Porter and Lynn Taber March 2-May 29
VERVE GALLERY OF PHOTOGRAPHY 219 E. Marcy St., Santa Fe, NM 7'( (3(.-ƨɥMark Citret, Douglas Ethridge, Dominic Rouse March 19-May 8 /#-(-%ɥ#!#/3(.-ƨɥMarch 19, 5-7 Superb black-and-white images range from picturesque to purely grotesque; something for everyone .412ƨ Tue-Sat 11-5 .-3 !3ƨ 505-982-5009, vervegalleryofphotography.com ƭɥ ROBERT KOCH GALLERY 49 Geary St., 5th Floor, San Francisco, CA 7'( (3(.-ƨ Joshua Lutz Through March 27 Haunting images of hollow, suburban no-man’s lands in the eastern U.S. and Europe .412ƨ Tue-Sat 10:30-5:30 .-3 !3ƨ 415-421-0122, kochgallery.com MUSEUM OF PHOTOGRAPHIC ARTS 1649 El Prado, San Diego, CA 7'( (3(.-ƨɥState of Mind: A California Invitational Through June 6 Work by 21 California artists represents the state’s premier photography of the 21st century; the show also examines global concerns .412ƨ Tue-Sun 10-5 .-3 !3ƨɥ619-238-7559, mopa.org ƭɥ GILMAN CONTEMPORARY 661 Sun Valley Rd., Ketchum, ID 7'( (3(.-ƨ Roberto Dutesco Photography March 2-April 15 Tender and illuminating images of Sable Island’s wild horses .412ƨɥMon-Fri 10-6, Sun 12-5 .-3 !3ƨ 208-726-7585, gilmancontemporary.com NEWSPACE CENTER FOR PHOTOGRAPHY 1632 SE 10th Ave., Portland, OR 7'( (3(.-ƨɥSusan Burnstine: Selected Works March 5-28 /#-(-%ɥ#!#/3(.-ƨ March 5, 7-10 13(23ɥ #!341#ƨɥMarch 6, Noon Dreamlike black-and-white plastic-camera images linger in the imagination .412ƨɥMon-Thu 10-8, Fri-Sun 10-6, First Fri 7-10 .-3 !3ƨ 503-963-1935, newspacephoto.org THE PHOTOGRAPHIC CENTER NORTHWEST 900 12th Ave., Seattle, WA 7'( (3(.-ƨɥPhotolucida’s Critical Mass 2009 Top 50 Finalists March 5-May 18 /#-(-%ɥ#!#/3(.-ɥ -"ɥ 41.1ɥ #!341#ƨ March 5, 6-9 Examples of the finest photography from all genres .412ƨ Mon 12-9:30, Tue-Thu 9-9:30, Fri 12-9:30, Sat-Sun 11-5 .-3 !3ƨɥ206-720-7222, pcnw.org
work by photographers Maureen France, Amy Stein, Richard Gilles, Bryce Lankard, Pamela Springsteen and video artist Charles Woodman .412ƨ Mon-Sat 9-6, Sun 1-6 .-3 !3ƨ 704-333-9755, lightfactory.org
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A PHOTOGRAPHER’S PARADISO With its pristine seascapes and nearly tourist-free villages, Puglia, Italy, offers astonishing visual variety and inspiration | BY YOLANDA EDWARDS Thanks to the popularity of Tuscany among both tourists and movie directors, Italy usually brings to mind certain images that, while beautiful, have become visual clichés (hello, sun-dappled vineyards). But in Puglia, a region that’s less documented than other parts of the country, photographers will encounter surprises that go far beyond the expected. Reachable via a flight into Bari or Brindisi or a five-hour train ride from Rome, Puglia offers a compelling mixture of architectural wonders and watery vistas. Some of the area’s whitewashed villages seem straight out of Greece, other towns evoke Florence, and still others have Moorish influences. And while there are certainly equally charming towns in other parts of the country, Puglia is one of the few spots left where you can still photograph an authentic Italian town square without a tourist’s fanny pack invading your frame. Locally sourced fare is visually appealing — think shellfish, homemade pasta and lots of figs — and will inspire more than a few artful food shots. The people behind that food — fishermen, farmers and butchers — also make character-rich photography subjects. Locals are generally happy to let you take their picture, but visit a masseria (a working farm often with a restaurant and bed-and-breakfast) where you can meet the farmers and take their picture while engaging with them in a natural way. On top of that, Puglia also has its fair share of vineyards, particularly in the south, along with groves of olive trees so ancient that you half expect to see a Roman soldier sitting under one of them. Even if you’ve had enough visual stimulation for one trip, you should make the effort to wake up early to capture these landscapes in their most picturesque light — after all, who can leave Italy without one rolling vineyard on the memory card? AP
TO P TO B OT TO M : © S I M E /J O H A N N A H U B E R ; © M AT T H E W H R A N E K
Above: The stalactite-studded Grotta Zinzulusa. Left: Polignano a Mare, a $.13(Ɗ#"ɥ -!(#-3ɥ!. 23 +ɥ5(++ %#ɥ 4(+3ɥ(-3.ɥ3'#ɥ!+(Ɖ2ƥɥ
WHERE TO SHOOT IN PUGLIA
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ƭɥ To capture the region’s architectural diversity, hit these three villages: Alberobello, designated a UNESCO World Heritage site for its conical-roofed houses (called trulli); Polignano a Mare, an ancient coastal village built into the cliffs; and Lecce, a town that rivals Florence for its baroque buildings. ƭɥ 4++ɥ.$ɥ6# 3'#1#"ɥ.+"ɥƊ2'#1, -Ʀɥ3'#ɥ2# 2("#ɥ5(++ %#ɥ.$ɥCastro Marina offers great portrait opportunities. ƭɥ In the whitewashed town of Ostuni, the chic La Sommità hotel , *#2ɥ ɥ%.."ɥ'.,#ɥ 2#Ʀɥ6(3'ɥ"#+47#ɥ !!.,,." 3(.-2ɥ -"ɥ2#15(!#2ƥɥ(3'ɥ(32ɥ)473 /.2(3(.-ɥ.$ɥ,."#1-ɥ"#2(%-ɥ(-ɥ ɥƏƖ3'Lj!#-3418ɥ building, it also offers rich possibilities for both interior and fashion photography. ƭɥ Visit the tourist office in Castro to arrange for a tour of Grotta ZinzulusaƦɥ ɥ+(,#23.-#ɥ! 5#ɥƊ++#"ɥ6(3'ɥ23 + !3(3#2ɥ -"ɥ23 + %,(3#2Ʃɥ / !*ɥ -ɥ#73#1- +ɥƋ 2'ɥ3.ɥ .4-!#ɥ+(%'3ɥ(-3.ɥ! 5#ɥ!#(+(-%2ɥ -"ɥ' 1"Lj 3.Lj1# !'ɥ2/.32ɥǒ 4(+3Lj(-ɥƋ 2'ɥ4-(32ɥ' 5#ɥ+(,(3#"ɥ1 -%#Ǔƥɥ
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THE PEOPLE BEHIND THE PICS ONE TO WATCH 17 | SIDE BY SIDE 20 | PERSONAL PROJECT 23 | THE PIC 26
©ALEJANDRO CHASKIELBERG (2)
CLOSE-UP ALEJANDRO CHASKIELBERG Grew up in: Buenos Aires, Argentina Studied at: Argentina’s National Film Institute Awards: Burn Emerging Photographer Grant, National Geographic All Roads Photographer, Leopold Godowski Jr. Color Photography Award from the Photographic Resource Center at Boston University, SCAN Talent Latent award, PDN’s 30 selection, Ruth Benzacar Gallery Curriculum Cero for new artists
Above: In “Double” (2007) from Alejandro Chaskielberg’s The High Tide series, a laborer carries his fishing waders through the Paraná River Delta. What looks like the sun in the sky is actually the full moon. Chaskielberg follows and works with his subjects during the day, then re-creates scenes in nighttime shoots.
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DREAMSCAPES Alejandro Chaskielberg shoots documentary subjects as fine-art photography | BY PAUL LOVE Argentinean photographer Alejandro Chaskielberg doesn’t care much for limitations, and his blindness to boundaries can now be classified as award winning. Chaskielberg’s project The High Tide, for which he received the 2009 Burn Emerging Photographer Grant, documents the life and work of natives and émigrés in the Paraná River Delta. For The High Tide, Chaskielberg joined workers in their fishing and logging labors in the delta, a wetland in eastern Argentina, about 20 miles north of Buenos Aires, to gain an understanding of the people (some of whom had never been photographed) and their connection to their surroundings. The isolated (but not primitive) culture of “islanders” who work the land inhabit the archipelago carved out by the Paraná and its MAR/APR 2010 | AMERICANPHOTOMAG.COM
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FOCUS | ONE TO WATCH
Below: A woman watches her child at the shore of the Rio de La Plata in “Her Own Water” (2007) from the Nocturama series. Exposures that were several minutes long made the midnight sky appear as morning or dusk and gave the water a smoothness due to its blurred motion. Opposite: “The Lifeguard” (2006) from the Borders series, watches over people as they swim in the Gualeguaychú River in northeastern Argentina. Peoples’ connection to water is a central theme in Chaskielberg’s photography.
AMERICANPHOTOMAG.COM | MAR/APR 2010
FOCUS | ONE TO WATCH
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© ALEJANDRO CHASKIELBERG (2)
many arms. “The Paraná River supplies water for more than 100 million people, including the cities of San Pablo, Buenos Aires and Asunción. My photographs set out to document the life and work of the islanders.” But what might seem like a straightforward photojournalism concept, Chaskielberg has captured in dreamlike imagery, reminiscent of the magical realism movement in literature and film. “I am interested in the poetic and visual power of the water, and I try to give a magical view of people in their environment,” he says. In many shots, which have a voyeuristic feel, the full moon seems to light the world as brightly as the sun. Chaskielberg’s interest in photography began when, at 10 years old, his friends gave him his first camera — a plastic 126mm Kodak. His initial fascination was with the technology itself. “From the beginning I tried to understand what was happening inside the camera,” he says. He currently shoots with a 4x5 Sinar Norma, using its tilts and swings to achieve a surreal, soft-and-sharp look. At the age of 18, Chaskielberg began working as a photojournalist for local newspapers and magazines in his native Buenos Aires, shooting images of social conflict, but after six years he grew tired of the creative restrictions inherent in press work. “Photojournalism and fine art are commercial definitions of photography,” Chaskielberg says, and he doesn’t let such terms define his work. Rejecting convention, he has found a fusion of the two styles. AP
TRADE SECRETS Chaskielberg’s nighttime shots for The High Tide required exposures that could be anywhere from five to 10 minutes long. He couldn’t catch the workers in action, so he observed them during the day while conceiving specific shots. Around midnight on nights with a full moon, he re-created the scenarios he observed during the day and lit the surroundings with only the moonlight, some LED flashlights and a handheld strobe.
MAR/APR 2010 | AMERICANPHOTOMAG.COM
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COVER STORY A photographer and art director capture the essence of a book in a single image BY JAN ROSENBAUM
MARK YANKUS: A working photographer for more than 30 years, Yankus has specialized in book covers since the late 1990s. His interest in collage began at the School of Visual Arts in New York. His awards include the Photo Folio award at Arles and a nomination for the New York Photo Awards. He has had several solo shows and been included in more than two dozen group exhibitions.
HENRY SENE YEE: A book designer for 20 years, Sene Yee is the creative director of Picador, a Macmillan paperback imprint, where he is responsible for more than 100 books a year. He has a BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York City. His awards include AIGA’s 50 Books/50 Covers, the Art Directors Club GOLD Cube and a Type Directors Club award.
Turns out, we do judge books by their covers — how else to make sense of a bookstore’s thousands of possibilities, all vying for our attention? For photographer Marc Yankus and creative director at Picador books Henry Sene Yee, the trick is to stand out from the crowd. A veteran of more than 400 covers, Yankus is accustomed to working in tandem with art directors, and he and Sene Yee have collaborated on half a dozen projects over the past 10 years. The
cover of Burnt Shadows, a novel by Kamila Shamsie (2009), is a prime example. The process typically begins when Sene Yee reads a manuscript and develops ideas — for the cover and for who the perfect collaborator might be. In this case, Sene Yee turned to Yankus to bring his ideas to life. The goal of Yankus and Sene Yee was to capture a key concept along with the tone of the book. Burnt Shadows is the lifeadventure, from World War II through
9/11, of a woman who has been marked by sadness, both figuratively and literally — the image of three cranes has been burned onto her back by the heat of the atomic bomb explosion in Nagasaki. Says Yankus: “Sometimes I’ll read a manuscript and come up with an idea, with very tight photographic sketches, but Henry already had a vision. He wanted the back of a woman in a kimono.” Not showing her face is a subtle reference to the shame the main character suffers. For the main shot, Yankus used a good friend who has a loft with soft, descriptive light. Though not a professional model, she had worked with Yankus before. After seeing the contacts and picking an image, there was Photoshop work still to be done. “Henry wanted a crane to be tastefully placed on her back, and he wanted me to add waves,” explains Yankus. “That started my search. I wanted an old-style Japanese print, a line drawing, but I couldn’t find the right crane. Henry contacted illustrator Philip Pascuzzo, whom both of us know. I sent Phil a reference from the Internet, and he did the drawings. Henry and I artdirected him to get it where we wanted it to be. Then I put his art on a separate layer and placed it into my composition.” In Photoshop, Yankus made some changes to the kimono, repeated and fine-tuned the drawings, and added a color gradient. The result is a classic Marc Yankus tableau: a timeless mood combined with soft, mysterious light. AP
SENE YEE: “It all starts with the manuscript. My publisher and I read it, and I have my ideas. We interpret the story. We are very conscientious of the text. I’m trying to find an image that evokes the tone and the emotion of the book without having to be so literal and describing a specific scene.” YANKUS: “Henry brings a certain integrity to the project. He’s very committed and sincere and insightful.” SENE YEE: “Marc and I are always trying to find a good project to work on together. His images have a not overly romantic, but a dreamlike and
AMERICANPHOTOMAG.COM | MAR/APR 2010
soft and sensitive quality. He’s able to take images and combine them in a way that looks very painterly.” YANKUS: “Although I’ve done covers for more than 30 years, it’s been a focus for the past 10. It’s been an evolution of where I was and where books were at the time. I started to notice these beautiful books, and certain designers were doing work that was getting my attention. I had studied painting and illustration, and was very good at collage. As the years went by, I started to use my own photography in the collages — and then all of a sudden, I was a photographer.”
© M A R K YA N K U S
WORKING TOGETHER
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A long, fruitless search, from libraries to kimono stores for the perfect crane ended with a commissioned drawing, along with a Japanese-inspired ocean wave, by Philip Pascuzzo. Yankus’ Photoshop collage layers the woman in a kimono, the cranes and iconic Japanese waves, all unified by a subtle color wash. The art encapsulates the story of a woman marked for life by the image of three cranes scarred onto her back by the atomic bomb in Nagasaki. The novel moves through six decades, from Japan to India and Pakistan to New York, and eventually to Afghanistan after 9/11.
IN THE BAG Yankus’ first choice for a portrait is his Canon EOS 5D Mark II DSLR with an ultrafast EF 85mm f/1.2L USM lens and the soft, natural light of a New York loft. His years as a master of Photoshop allow him to collage his photographs with other picture elements into exactly the dreamlike image a cover needs.
MAR/APR 2010 | AMERICANPHOTOMAG.COM
FOCUS | PERSONAL PROJECT
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BODY ELECTRIC
TO P TO B OT TO M : © R O B E R T B U E LT E M A N ; © 2 0 0 9 K A I N A Z A M A R I A
For Robert Buelteman, voltage brings power to art | BY JENNY ANDREWS
Alone in the Arizona desert in 1999, Robert Buelteman had a flash of clarity — the rest of his life looked utterly predictable, and he was no longer in love with his art. At that, he stopped working professionally on the black-and-white photography that had been his raison d’être for 25 years and “surrendered to serendipity.” Under the starry sky, appropriately enough, he could not shake images of the Metaflora series, Walter Chappell’s luminous work in Kirlian photography — a process that involves sending electrical currents through objects that rest directly on a photographic plate. When he emerged from the desert, Buelteman was obsessed with getting back to basics: cameraless, lensless, computerless photos. Most Kirlian equipment is about the size of a Polaroid camera, but Buelteman wanted to work big, with prints up to 40-by-96 inches (his photos have sometimes been referred to as Georgia O’Keeffe meets Frankenstein). He found an engineer to build a generator that could drive an image over 80 square inches, and Buelteman constructed his own supersize easel made of aluminum sheet metal floated in a solution of liquid silicone, sandwiched between pieces of 1/8-inch-thick Plexiglas. Then he tracked down 8-by-10-inch, tungsten-balanced color transparency film. After one year he had completed only two pieces — “My wife thought I might be crazy.” But at the opening of an exhibition organized by Sarah Adams, granddaughter of iconic landscape photographer Ansel Adams, one of those images mesmerized a crowd
Above: To showcase diversity of color within a single species, Robert Buelteman chose rainbow chard, grown in his garden specifically for this purpose. Five specimens were scanned separately, then combined to produce a single work (“Rainbow Chard,” 2009). Buelteman’s amped-up version of Kirlian photography here incorporated a 100-micrometer-thick fiber-optic strand, a tungsten bulb and several filters — plus 1,000 volts of electricity.
CLOSE-UP: ROBERT BUELTEMAN Entry Into Photography: “A friend owed me $100 and offered me his camera instead. Looking through the viewfinder was my first authentic spiritual experience.” Published: Thirteen portfolios of blackand-white landscapes; monographs: A Vision of Life (1988), The Unseen Peninsula (1994), Eighteen Days in June (2000). Cameraless imaging portfolios: Through the Green Fuse (1999), Sangre de Cristo (2006), Rancho Corral de Tierra (2006); catalog: Signs of Life (2009) Honors: Artist in Residence at Santa Fe Institute, 2003-2006 Favorite Quote: “When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else.” — Georgia O’Keeffe Website: buelteman.com MAR/APR 2010 | AMERICANPHOTOMAG.COM
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brush-stroke painting, once a stroke is made, there’s no going back, which has a simplicity that appeals to Buelteman. As he says, “It’s a myth that having more options equals greater freedom.” Yet the prep work and setup are anything but simple: “In blackand-white film work there are 15 or 16 variables; in this process there are more than 50, some of them intangible, like the opacity of a leaf.” In contrast to the structure of his black-and-white work, Buelteman compares his Kirlian image-making to improvisational jazz. The faint of heart should know that this pursuit is not dangerfree. Buelteman has electrocuted himself many times; on one occasion he was lifted off the ground by a 40,000-volt jolt. “I’m working completely in the dark with electricity — fear is part of the process.”
Top left: For “Cyclamen persicum” (2000) Buelteman used minimal electricity so that the image would have warmth and mystery. Top right: Since the flowers of calla lily bloom for only a short time, it took Buelteman three years (and 120 sheets of 8x10-inch, 64 Tungsten film) to achieve the effect he wanted for “Zantedeschia aethiopica” (2001). Above: A study in life and decay, “Russian River Oak” (2007) pairs a living leaf with a dead one, plucked from an oak on the banks of the Russian River in Northern California. For the “texture,” Buelteman overlaid the leaves with a worn, 1-inch-thick, front-silvered piece of glass from Stanford Research Institute’s laser lab, pulled from his glass collection. AMERICANPHOTOMAG.COM | MAR/APR 2010
© R O B E R T B U E LT E M A N ( 6 )
of 150 people. Since then, his work has been shown in more than 35 countries and he’s been published in 18 languages. Part of the draw is Buelteman’s new twist on this old craft, named for Russian inventor Semyon Kirlian for his work with photograms in the 1930s, though it dates back much further. The “Buelteman technique” adds light sources such as xenon strobe, tungsten and fiber optics. Buelteman literally “paints” his subjects by illuminating them with a fiber-optic probe the size of a human hair. But using no computer enhancement (Buelteman says some of the colors he achieves don’t exist in Photoshop), the outcome is somewhat at the mercy of physics. As with Chinese
FOCUS | PERSONAL PROJECT
Recently Buelteman has been battling his way back to reality, having been sidelined for some three years with Lyme disease, an experience he calls “humbling,” though he adds that “it has made my work all the more precious to me.” Now he’s once again in the dark with his metal plates and high voltage. One of his most recent works is of rainbow chard, something he spent a year finalizing. One reason for the lengthy timeline: Buelteman, an avid gardener, is actually growing many of the plants he shoots in the courtyard of his northern California house: “It’s lettuce heaven.” Though cameraless photography can be used with inanimate objects, plants make ideal subjects. And the tight relationship between film, light, plants and Buelteman’s own hand has brought him a “connectedness that has eluded me in other parts of my life.” AP Above: After convincing a police officer that he wasn’t stealing, Buelteman took this branch of eucalyptus from a country club. The image (“Eucalyptus polyanthemos,” 2000) was created using small, selective pulses of light via a fiber-optic probe. The discharges show up as blue where the stems are close to the film and plate, and where the plant is farther away, the image blurs. Left above: For “Mitch’s Roses” (2004), Buelteman climbed a ladder and let rose petals fall onto the film randomly. Left below: For “White Clematis” (2005), blooms were suspended over the film with copper grounding wires.
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IN THE BAG Buelteman’s “bag” these days is more likely to contain pruners than a camera, to collect plants to take into the studio ƭɥ4#+3#, -ƹ2ɥ6.1*ɥ(2ɥ231(!3+8ɥ234"(.Ʀɥ2.ɥ'#ɥ-.ɥ+.-%#1ɥ3.3#2ɥ ɥ! ,#1 ɥ bag to locations. In his workshop, which is converted from a five-car garage, he relies on surgical scalpels to get the form and opacity he wants in petals and foliage prior to manipulating them on the imaging easel. ƭɥ-.3'#1ɥ-#!#22 18ɥ/(#!#ɥ.$ɥ#04(/,#-3ɥ(2ɥ ɥ6.."#-ɥ2 $#38ɥ$#-!#ɥ around the easel — with its big electricity-conducting metal plate — to forestall future electrocution accidents. Hanging on the wall: a neck brace as a reminder of Buelteman’s previous face-off with 40,000 volts.
FOR MORE ON BUELTEMAN’S PROCESS, GO TO AMERICANPHOTOMAG.COM
MAR/APR 2010 | AMERICANPHOTOMAG.COM
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FOCUS | THE PIC
ALTER EGO
CLOSE-UP: MICHAEL MULLER Training: Self-taught, beginning with shooting snowboarders. At age 15 one of his photos of the sport was published. Eventually attended Parsons for a semester but left to continue discovering the craft on his own. Other Work: Largely sports photography, including basketball, baseball, surfing, snowboarding and boxing. Developed his own lighting for underwater shooting. Best Advice: “Shoot every day, listen to your gut and have fun.”
AMERICANPHOTOMAG.COM | MAR/APR 2010
Creating an effective image for the purpose of promoting a movie is always a complicated endeavor. Add to that the audience expectations inherent in bringing a beloved fictional character to the big screen, and you’ve got a truly big challenge. Photographer Michael Muller kept all this in mind when he shot the movie poster for 2009’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Having already photographed posters for several other comicbook movies — including Hancock, Iron Man and Spider-Man — Muller was familiar with the pressures that critical fans bring to the table. He knew it was best to come to the set fully prepared. “I always read the script beforehand, because I want to really know the characters I’m shooting,” Muller explains of this unique challenge. “And Wolverine’s got this dark side to him, this troubled beginning, so I tried to tap into that and convey it in a subconscious way.” Muller largely achieved this with stark settings and dramatic lighting; he even used a cage at one point to cast symbolic shadows onto the animalistic Wolverine. In addition to numerous solo portraits of Hugh Jackman, Muller also photographed the entire cast. And although 20th Century Fox — the studio that produced Wolverine — believed that all the images shown below effectively convey the tone of the movie, the group shot was one of the first to be ruled out. According to a Fox representative, ultimately it just wasn’t right for the franchise. “We had already released three X-Men movies, so we decided that introducing new prequel characters before the film was out would be confusing,” he explains. It was thus narrowed down to single shots of the titular character. Among these, two stood out. “The bone-claw image [below, far right] was a serious contender for a long time, because it indicated the early evolution of Wolverine,” the rep says. “Being a prequel, that made sense. But ultimately, the straight-on single [top left] was chosen because it’s iconic of that character. Plus, print generally comes down to gut instinct, and that piercing stare was hard to beat.” AP
© M I C H A E L M U L L E R /C O U R T E S Y 2 0 T H C E N T U R Y F O X ; P O R T R A I T: © W I L L I A M B R A D F O R D
Michael Muller takes shooting superheroes seriously | BY LINDSAY SAKRAIDA
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C L O C K W I S E F R O M T O P L E F T: © L I S A K I M B E R LY; © VA L E R Y R I Z Z O ; © B R I A N K R U M M E L
Images from Flickr’s American Photo Creative Showcase, clockwise from left: A rare stop-action pinhole photograph by Brian Krummel, with the low-angle point of view often seen in the technique; a self-portrait from Lisa Kimberly’s photo-a-day visual diary, with Photoshopped commentary; a boardwalk band at Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach by Valery Rizzo, shot with a plastic camera as part of a hometown portrait.
ART FOR LIFE’S SAKE These three members of Flickr’s American Photo Creative Showcase use photography to explore — and share — their inner thoughts and outer environments | BY JOE GIOIA If Flickr proves one thing, it’s that a fine-art sensibility in photography doesn’t require formal education in the arts — or even technical training in our favorite medium. Those sharing their images on the Flickr site are as likely to be self-taught as they are to have had at least a modicum of photo instruction. How to decide whether their work is art? It’s in the eye of the beholder, of course, but the focus and dedication of the photographer are other
important measures of artistic merit. Besides showing their work on their Flickr photostreams and in Flickr’s American Photo Creative Showcase group, the three very different photographers featured on the following pages have one thing in common: a determination to make arresting images, driven by their curiosity about the world within and without. We think that shared impulse makes their work art. MAR/APR 2010 | AMERICANPHOTOMAG.COM
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FLICKR CREATIVE SHOWCASE
DAY AT A TIME An intimate look at Lisa Kimberly’s yearlong photo diary
In September 2008, hardly a year after she started experimenting on her own with photography, Lisa Kimberly began a yearlong, photo-a-day documentary. Lots of photographers have undertaken this strenuous self-assignment, of course, but Kimberly’s highly graphic, surreal-yet-warm images make her project one of the best examples we’ve seen. The self-taught photographer posted her daily images on Flickr. AMERICANPHOTOMAG.COM | MAR/APR 2010
“If it hadn’t been for Flickr, I probably would never have started the project,” says Kimberly, a radiology technician and U.S. military wife. “It inspired me to try new techniques and photograph different types of subjects.” Kimberly’s pictures are “50 percent made in my head,” she says, and are often tweaked or highly manipulated in post-processing. “But even when I’m doing something major, like cloning images, I strive to get the image right in the camera first.” Digital technology aside, Kimberly enjoys the process of inquiry that is part of making pictures. “I still consider myself a photographer in the traditional sense,” she explains. “I get inspired by simple things like song lyrics, a piece of clothing or the way the sun comes through my bedroom window. I started the 365-days project to keep my creative juices flowing and just sort of document my year. Pretty soon I found that I was more interested in creating images with personal meaning.” Nowhere is this more evident than in the project’s self-portraits, a dreamy chronicle of the inner and outer life of a young woman. “I didn’t photograph myself too often at first,” says Kimberly. “But eventually I learned a way to show a version of myself that exists only in my imagination.”
CLOSE UP: LISA KIMBERLY Hometown: Rota, Spain Camera: Canon EOS 400D (Digital Rebel XTi in U.S.) Flickr member since: 2007 Flickr page: flickr.com/photos/lisak24a
© L I S A K I M B E R LY ( 3 ) ; O P P O S I T E : © B R I A N K R U M M E L ( 3 )
Left and below: Scenes from Lisa Kimberly’s yearlong personal photo diary. Her series is an absorbing day-by-day narrative of a developing photographer’s experiments with the medium. If you check it out on Flickr’s American Photo Creative Showcase, though, you’ll count only 350 images — the remaining 15 are private.
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HOLE WORLD For Brian Krummel, almost anything can be a pinhole camera A trained photographer and professional Web designer, Pittsburgh area-based Brian Krummel takes full advantage of his Flickr account. He has posted more than 70 sets of photographs in the past three years, their subjects ranging from the architectural remains of Pittsburgh’s industrial glory days to the homemade cameras with which he shoots many of his pictures. Though some of Krummel’s unconventional cameras have cobbled-on optics (everything from crisp, large-format glass to “simple” plastic lenses), the work featured here was shot with his many pinhole cameras — built with everything from pumpkins to Starbucks coffee cups. The long-exposure images the photographer makes with his pinhole cameras appear to be less about the real world than glimpses into dreams. “Wonderful things happen when you relinquish exact control over your pictures,” he says. “Pinhole images remind us that creativity doesn’t depend on bigger or faster equipment.” His pinhole pictures are made either on film or by directly exposing sheets of printing paper inside the camera. Darkroom processing turns the latter into paper negatives. If chemical improvisation contributes to the low-tech quality of his images, says Krummel, digital post-processing gets the photos ready for prime time, when he scans and Photoshops his paper and film negatives to create final inkjet prints — or Flickr-ready files. Krummel has made and discarded more pinhole cameras than he can count. (He details his working methods in The Pinhole Camera, a how-to book available through thepinholecamera.com.) If his approach has a guiding philosophy, it is that technology is not the point. “It doesn’t make you an artist,” he says. “Pinhole photography removes the obstacles of camera and lens, making more room for enthusiasm about your art.”
Left and below: Brian Krummel’s dreamlike pinhole photographs are shot with cameras crafted from such unlikely objects as cereal boxes, tomato juice cans, tea kettles and Altoids tins. Visit his Flickr photostream to see some of these eye-popping cameras, which are part and parcel of his art.
CLOSE UP: BRIAN KRUMMEL Hometown: Bethel Park, PA Cameras: homemade pinhole Flickr member since: 2007 Flickr page: flickr.com/photos/forgottenpittsburgh
MAR/APR 2010 | AMERICANPHOTOMAG.COM
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FLICKR CREATIVE SHOWCASE
CITY LIGHT For Valery Rizzo, home is where the Holga is Brooklyn-born Valery Rizzo has been shooting professionally for 11 years, selling much of her work through stock agencies. A lot of the work she shares on Flickr, though, is devoted to an evolving book project close to her heart: a photographic portrait of the New York City borough she still calls home, shot with plastic cameras. Rizzo finds her lightweight, medium-format Holga and Woca cameras perfect for the project’s combination of street photography and portraiture. “I probably have 10 cameras, but I rely on four or five that I’ve customized,” she says. “Three of these I use all the time, one of them I use in low-light situations on a bulb setting, and another I customized for macro shots.” The cheap cameras’ simple lenses produce relatively soft images with shallow focus and vignetted corners — pictures that mirror the unique, abiding spirit of Brooklyn, says Rizzo. “People are not intimidated by the cameras, and I can take them anywhere — in bad weather, to bad neighborhoods, you name it. I also love the Holga because it’s a rule breaker.” The rule Rizzo does not break is that of classic street photography: the direct capture of a decisive moment on film. “I don’t alter my images digitally in any way,” she says. “My final prints are made from the color negatives in a darkroom and retouched by hand.” She scans the negatives of photos she wants to upload to Flickr. While she acknowledges the many advantages of digital capture, Rizzo believes it can’t replicate some of the essential qualities of film. “A digital image is always trying to look as if it were printed traditionally,” she says. “I think most people can feel the difference between an unaltered real moment caught on film in-camera and a digitally created photograph.”
Above and left: Brooklyn is a borough of many colors — perhaps all colors, as seen in Valery Rizzo’s lively, ongoing portrait of her home town. Rizzo shoots with plastic cameras to give her photographs a soft, vignetted quality that perfectly suits Brooklyn’s sometimes surreal sights and sounds.
Hometown: Brooklyn, NY Cameras: Holga, Woca Flickr member since: 2007 Flickr page: flickr.com/photos/valeryrizzo
AMERICANPHOTOMAG.COM | MAR/APR 2010
© VA L E R Y R I Z Z O ( 3 )
CLOSE UP: VALERY RIZZO
“Peak, Above a Cloud,” an early, minimalist black-and-white view of the Rockies from Ketchum’s Winters: 1970-1980 portfolio. Opposite: “Endless Meanders, 1998,” from Rivers of Life: Southwest Alaska, The Last Great Salmon Fishery.
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{voice}
You might not know much about Robert Glenn Ketchum, but his conservation photography and environmental activism have made him one of the most influential photographers of our time By Russell Hart
© R O B E R T G L E N N K E TC H U M ( 2 )
in the
WILDERNESS
MASTER SERIES NO. 5: ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM
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H
is is not a household name, even in genteel households familiar with photography’s luminaries. He wouldn’t be counted in the firmament of Avedon, Leibovitz, Cartier-Bresson or Helmut Newton, the subjects of American Photo’s prior Master Series issues. Robert Glenn Ketchum, a champion of the modern environmental movement for more than 30 years, may well be the most influential photographer you’ve never heard of. You probably know the photographers who blazed the trail for Ketchum’s unprecedented use of photography for environmental advocacy — William Henry Jackson, Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter. Just as Jackson’s 1871 photographs of
Yellowstone were the argument that convinced legislators to preserve it as America’s first national park, Ketchum’s 1980s photographs of Alaska’s threatened Tongass rainforest were instrumental in leading Congress to set aside a million of its oldgrowth acres as America’s largest national forest — all off limits to logging. The difference is that unlike Jackson, Ketchum did massive research on his subject and actually lobbied for its cause. Among many other tactics, he visited members of Congress to present them with his Above: “Rootwads and Slash/Ode to Woodie, 1986,” from The Tongass: Alaska’s Vanishing Rain Forest. Opposite: “Cosmic Trees,” an image from Ketchum’s Sundance Institute artist’s residency that appears on the cover of the Amon Carter Museum’s retrospective Regarding the Land: Robert Glenn Ketchum and the Legacy of Eliot Porter.
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Returns to California after four years of shooting in the Rockies, during which he has earned a living with commercial work and gallery shows. Studies briefly at Brooks Institute, transfers to Cal Arts for MFA in photography. Makes 30-by-40-inch dye transfers, one of the first color photographers to print at such a large scale. Curates shows of vintage work by James Van Der Zee and Paul Outerbridge at Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies.
1979
Starts college at UCLA, studying with influential photographer-teacher Robert Heinecken; fellow students include Jo Ann Callis and Patrick Nagatani. Pays bills by shooting rock bands, including the Doors and Jimi Hendrix. Shoots first landscapes at Big Sur’s Limekiln Creek on the way home from 1967’s Monterey Pop Festival.
1974
1966
ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM: A LIFE IN PHOTOGRAPHY Moves to Washington, D.C., to become curator of photography for the National Park Foundation. Organizes exhibit and bestselling book, American Photographers and the National Parks, about the relationship between photographers, the parks and the growth of public environmental awareness. Contributes to first photo exhibit ever held at the White House. Begins to shoot in the forests of the American East.
Aperture publishes The Hudson River and the Highlands. Ketchum begins to photograph in Southeast Alaska’s Tongass rainforest, work that shows both the area’s untouched beauty and its increasing despoliation by logging companies. In 1986 is commissioned to photograph Ohio’s Cuyahoga River Valley, a pollutionplagued area being proposed as a national park.
1987
Moves to New York’s Hudson River Valley to shoot the area on a commission that includes photographers Stephen Shore and William Clift. Starts printing in Cibachrome directly from medium- and large-format transparencies at 30-by-40 inches. Shoots his first “confrontational” images of environmental degradation along the Hudson and elsewhere.
1985
1983
MASTER SERIES NO. 5: ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM
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Aperture publishes The Tongass: Alaska’s Vanishing Rain Forest. The book is distributed to members of Congress and prints exhibited in the Senate Rotunda. Robert Redford offers Ketchum a three-year artist’s residency at his Sundance Institute in the mountains of Utah. Audubon names him one of 100 people who “shaped the environmental movement of the 20th century.”
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newly published Aperture monograph on the Tongass — just as Ansel Adams had worked those hallowed halls in 1936, his own prints in hand, to bring about the establishment of King’s Canyon National Park. And then there is Eliot Porter, whose color photographs celebrated a more intimate kind of natural beauty than Adams’ grand black-and-whites, and who was a
mentor to Ketchum until Porter’s death. It is sadly ironic that Porter’s most conservation-oriented work, his photographs of the Colorado River’s Glen Canyon, were published by the Sierra Club only after a massive hydroelectric dam had already flooded the area to create Arizona’s Lake Powell. “I want my work to be political, like
© R O B E R T G L E N N K E TC H U M ( 3 )
MASTER SERIES NO. 5: ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM
Clockwise from above left: “Meltwater Flowing Over Golden Sand and Silt Bars, Baffin Island, 1994,” from Northwest Passage; “CVNRA #125 (Toxic Waterfall in a National Recreation Area), 1986,” from Overlooked in America; “October 24, 1983/2:10 p.m.,” from The Hudson River and the Highlands.
Porter’s,” says Ketchum, whose recent focus has been on photographing and lobbying to protect unsullied Southwest Alaska, in particular the rich fishing grounds of
5.6-million-acre Bristol Bay. “But I never want to be in the position Porter was in, where it was a lament over something already lost.” Indeed, Ketchum means to intervene — in Southwest Alaska and elsewhere — before irreversible damage is done. “I always want to be out in front of an issue,” he says, “so that the work, instead of being about sorrowful regret, can be
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Aperture publishes 20-year retrospective of Ketchum’s work, The Legacy of Wildness: The Photographs of Robert Glenn Ketchum. Work is included in CLEARCUT: The Tragedy of Industrial Forestry, which ignites a firestorm of criticism of U.S. forest management. With ALC, funds the creation of Big Sur’s Limekiln State Park.
1994
Congress passes the sweeping Tongass Timber Reform Act, greatly reducing logging in the rainforest. Aperture publishes Ketchum’s Cuyahoga Valley work in Overlooked in America: The Success and Failure of Federal Land Management. Receives Sierra Club’s Ansel Adams Award for Conservation Photography and, next year, U.N.’s Outstanding Environmental Achievement Award.
1993
1990
ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM: A LIFE IN PHOTOGRAPHY Organizes multiphotographer exhibit on the Tongass at Smithsonian; prior to its Earth Day opening, Alaska senators Stevens and Murkowski try to censor pictures and text. Ketchum alerts The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, all of which publish exposés the next day; the show is unchanged. In 1996 Aperture publishes Ketchum’s Northwest Passage, which brings early attention to global warming.
MASTER SERIES NO. 5: ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM
art, which had picked up where art-forart’s-sake “happenings” left off. “I’ve always viewed my art as a total package,” Ketchum says. “For all the work that the pictures have done, their use was mostly traditional and following in the footsteps of previous historical action.” For Ketchum, though, any performance aspect is for the sake of environmental advocacy, and any advocacy project is multimedia and pragmatic in nature. “Every lecture I give, every press conference I hold, every guerrilla exhibit I throw up in Patagonia store windows is timed to make a difference,” he says. That total package is also designed to reach larger numbers of people than could be reached with traditional means of photographic dissemination. Yet at the very core of Ketchum’s work is the photographic book, a medium that often limits distribution to no more than a few
The Amon Carter Museum mounts Regarding the Land: Robert Glenn Ketchum and the Legacy of Eliot Porter, a retrospective pairing Ketchum with his mentor. Attends a 2007 Washington, D.C., conference on global warming with former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who supports his Bristol Bay initiative. Hand-delivers Rivers of Life to key U.S. legislators to advance protection for Bristol Bay; John Kerry co-sponsors Senate bill.
2008
Aperture publishes Rivers of Life, with which the photographer raises funds for land purchases to protect Southwest Alaska’s rivers and fisheries. In 2002, Alaska says it will permit the open-pit Pebble Mine in the region’s Bristol Bay, creating a 20-square-mile toxic pool that could destroy the bay’s fishing industry. Aperture gives Ketchum its Lifetime Achievement Award.
cutting-edge advocacy.” While Eliot Porter certainly viewed his photographs as polemical, for him the argument seemed to end once the pictures were seen by the public. For Ketchum, by contrast, photography is just the starting point for an agenda of short-term exhibitions, mass mailings, public events, PowerPoint lectures and other tactics — sometimes subversive but always media savvy — that bring attention to his environmental causes. He traces that key difference with his precursor back to his own MFA work at the California Institute of the Arts. When he was at the school in the mid-1970s, it was a hotbed of politically driven, multimedia performance
2006
2001
© R O B E R T G L E N N K E TC H U M ( 2 )
Above: “Louisiana Pacific-Ketchikan, 1986,” from The Tongass: Alaska’s Vanishing Rain Forest. Opposite: “The Chainsaws of Summer, 1992,” an image from the book’s second edition that shows a clearcut in an area of the Tongass outside the newly declared National Forest.
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During Congress’ Christmas recess, Senator Stevens sneaks Bristol Bay off the bipartisan no-drill list. In January the government offers oil and gas leases in Bristol Bay. In 2009 the Obama administration cancels the leases, but the threat of Pebble Mine remains. Ketchum continues exhibits and shows relating to the bay.
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Above: “Spruce and Tundra at the Edge of a Lake, 2000,” from Ketchum’s 2005 Aperture book, Wood-Tikchik: Alaska’s Largest State Park. Opposite: “YK Delta from 1500, 2003,” a loom-woven Chinese screen from 2006’s Regarding the Land.
thousand copies. “Where I feel I changed things and did something different was in working with a nonprofit publisher to turn picture books into advocacy tools,” he says. That nonprofit is Aperture, perhaps the most committed publisher of serious photographic books, which has published seven of Ketchum’s monographs. These include 1985’s The Hudson River and the
Highlands, 1987’s The Tongass: Alaska’s Vanishing Rain Forest, 1991’s Overlooked in America: The Success and Failure of Federal Land Management and 2001’s Rivers of Life: Southwest Alaska, The Last Great Salmon Fishery, among others. (See timeline.) Ketchum has taken these handsomely produced books and run with them, getting them into all the right hands — not just those of photography lovers. And with that kind of delivery the photographic book can be a persuasive political tool, condensing visual and verbal arguments into an armchair package.
MASTER SERIES NO. 5: ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM of his experience at both UCLA and Cal Arts, which included work in other media. One key influence was Color Field painting, the mid-20th-century practice of creating oversize canvasses containing large areas of flat color, content that made no pretense of breaking out of the picture plane to simulate some other reality. In the 1960s, the movement spread from New York to the far corners of the Western art world, including California. Many of Ketchum’s photographs owe their flatness to this aesthetic — horizonless mountainsides that tip up toward
the picture plane, tree trunks that line up with the edges of the frame, aerial views that turn geological features into washes of color. And Ketchum makes that connection clear by printing them at very large sizes. The images that veer toward abstraction, however, are almost always the ones that depict virginal nature. In what Ketchum calls his “confrontational” photographs — images that show the corruption of nature for our excessive needs — the more-overt message requires a higher degree of realism. These images necessarily sacrifice the
© R O B E R T G L E N N K E TC H U M ( 3 )
SAVING STITCHES
Ketchum’s artistic thinking is in some ways quite unlike that of traditional nature photographers. He doesn’t force visual drama on his subjects. He tends to avoid familiar devices — such as near-far composition, shallow depth of field, off-kilter framing or toying artificially with the horizon line — that could call more attention to composition and technique than to the simple beauty of his scenes, at least the unspoiled ones. Yet the seeming lack of a true center of interest in many of Ketchum’s best pictures can be seen as the logical extension
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“My photographs utilize texture compositionally,” Robert Glenn Ketchum writes in the Fowler Museum’s book Threads of Light: Chinese Embroidery from Suzhou and the Photography of Robert Glenn Ketchum. “Although photographic paper renders them with great fidelity, it does so on a glossy surface, completely devoid of relief. So I found myself increasingly drawn to the idea of translating my complex and highly organic images into textile form.” Ketchum acted on that idea in 1986, when he first visited China’s famous Suzhou Embroidery Research Institute, just inland from Shanghai. He was met with courtesy and skepticism: The imagery he proposed translating into multicolored stitches was far removed from the traditional subject matter of Chinese embroidery, and the artisans were concerned that it would be too complex and time-consuming to execute. Not one to take no for an answer in his conservation work, Ketchum pressed his case. After some initial tests with simpler images, SERI and Ketchum began an artistic relationship that has lasted more than 20 years. In accepting Ketchum’s challenge, the institute’s artisans had to expand their language of stitches to simulate photographic effects (see detail, above). Their vocabulary now includes dozens of different kinds of loops, knots and bundles. And Ketchum has asked for ever-larger and more-complex work, including multipanel images that have required several years to complete. The latter are Ketchum’s own nod to their creators’ heritage of elaborately produced standing screens—and the photographer has had them mounted in frames that feature traditional Chinese woodworking. Several are still in process, and more are planned. While not directly related to the environmental agenda that Ketchum has used his images to promote, these unique creations are a reminder that art is at the heart of his work. — Marvin Good
46 Below: “CVNRA #705, 1988,” from Overlooked in America: The Success and Failure of Federal Land Management. Right: “Johns Hopkins Inlet, Glacier Bay, 1988,” from The Tongass: Alaska’s Vanishing Rain Forest.
area that had defenders already lobbying to protect it, ultimately helping to turn it into a national recreation area. And in 1993, working as one of the first board members of the American Land Conservancy, he used his photographs to persuade a donor to fund the purchase of private property in and around Big Sur’s Limekiln Creek — then transferred the land to the state to create Limekiln State Park. Ketchum speaks without irony about the circle of life, and the creation of Limekiln State Park formed one. It was there, 25 years earlier, that he had stopped on the way home to Los Angeles from the legendary Monterey Pop Festival and taken his first landscape photographs. But that perfect circle also reinforced a more practical lesson for Ketchum: Important change isn’t accomplished overnight, and political activism takes at least as much patience as nature photography. AP
© R O B E R T G L E N N K E TC H U M ( 2 )
painterly for the political. Unlike most photographers, Ketchum can measure the effectiveness of his work in acres saved — and, if such calculus were possible, species pulled back from extinction. Though salvaging the Tongass and saving Southwest Alaska have been two of his most conspicuous initiatives, other bodies of his work have supported similarly successful conservation campaigns, from New York’s Hudson River Highlands to whale nurseries in the Gulf of California. Early on, he collaborated with Tucson’s Rincon Institute in a direct-mail and magazine campaign to protect nearby Saguaro National Monument from encroaching development; Congress upped that cactus kingdom to national-park status, and 30,000 acres were added to it in the process. On commission from Ohio’s Akron Art Museum he photographed the state’s Cuyahoga River Valley, a pollution-plagued
MASTER SERIES NO. 5: ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM
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© S C O T T H AY N E / T H E S E N I O R E X P E R I E N C E
Scott Hayne turned a windy day into an opportunity rather than an obstacle, allowing Chelsea’s hair to partially obscure her face. He chose a location just outside his studio to make use of the golden sunlight and dune grass. An overlaid texture adds to the warm tones and lends a vintage look. Says Hayne, “A combination of light, lens and editing gave me the emotion and depth I desire in all my shots.”
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coming of
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Senior portraits take on an edgy, editorial, very personal look By Theano Nikitas High school seniors no longer want to graduate with only a cookie-cutter yearbook picture as their legacy. Instead, they’re flocking to photographers for portraits that represent who they are — or who they’d like to be. Case in point: For the photo shown here, Scott Hayne let Chelsea’s windblown hair partially obscure her face, observing, “It’s not your classic senior shot, but kids are looking for images that show their depth.” During a time when people are cautious about money, senior-portrait work now comprises between 20 percent and 45 percent of some wedding and portrait photographers’ business, a dramatic increase from just a year or two ago — and it’s still growing. Hayne, Senior Portrait Artists Artist of the Year in 2009, started his photography business in 2007. In the second year, his senior work went up tenfold, and in the third year nearly doubled that.
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Below: Hayne captured this sweet candid shot as his subject was walking down the beach. A “cross-processing” effect applied in postproduction gives the image a pop-art feel. Right: A fan of America’s Next Top Model, Brianna wanted a “modeling session.” Chris and Tammie Billey of Largo Photography chose to juxtapose her against an old, gnarled mesquite tree in the desert. The shot was lit with two Canon 580EX Speedlites, umbrellas and a reflector.
Senior-portrait photographers tend to be already established as general portraitists and, in many cases, wedding photographers. And a significant percentage of them have begun translating the skills and styles popular with those clients to their senior work, including lighting effects, postproduction work and unusual angles. A student might cover half of his face with a guitar or the focus might be on a school ring with the teen blurred in the background. Monarch Photography has become known for such effects as gradient masks, and a trademark look of Scott and Adina Hayne (The Senior Experience) is post-processing textures. As Huy Nguyen of f8studio says, “I think [senior portrait] photographers are becoming aware that they have the power to be creative.” When working with teenagers, getting to know them is perhaps even more important than with other types of clients. Photographers who go out of their way to discover their subjects’ interests are the most successful at putting them at ease — and getting the most evocative images. Create a fun experience, incorporate elements that make the images very personal, make the students look good — and different from everyone else — and seniors will be happy. Though most studios are equipped with props that range from old trunks to colorful umbrellas, teens these days are invited to bring props and clothing to the shoot that
represent something important to them — a violin, football uniform, camera, ballet shoes, soccer ball or even a car. Listening to teens’ ideas is also vital. As photographer Tammy Swales points out: “Kids are more vocal and involved than they have been in the past. This generation of kids is media savvy. They are oversaturated with visual ideas, and I think that impacts what they want out of their images.” Trends in music videos, movies, TV, fashion, advertising and magazine editorials all contribute to what seniors want from their portraits these days. Guys want to look like rock stars or pro athletes. Not surprisingly, girls tend to be fashion oriented, want to look beautiful (of course) and often cite America’s Next Top Model as one of their favorite TV shows. Jonathan Brown and Rosemary Cundiff-Brown of Monarch Photography even say ANTM has been helpful “because it’s easy to draw from that and explain things like an S-curve in posing,
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or ‘Smile with your eyes.’” The Browns note that seniors want edgy, editorial shots, like the ones they see in magazines and advertisements for popular brands like Abercrombie and Fitch and American Eagle. When Swales noticed that Teen Vogue used a lot of group poses in their editorials, she incorporated groups (seniors and their friends) into her work to the delight of her clients. She also pushed the envelope, with great success, by using motifs and styling from The Twilight Saga movie series as the basis for a recent shoot with her senior models. As Mike and Heather Krakora of Krakora Studios say, “The trends in popular culture are going to drive the trends for senior portraits,” but knowing how quickly those change, it’s critical for photographers to stay current with what’s going on. Naturally, it’s important to please parents and grandparents too, so most seniorportrait photographers do take at least
BEYOND STILL PHOTOS Video and multimedia slideshows — still images set to music complete with transitions created with programs like Animoto, Showit and Photodex ProShow Gold — are also potential trends in the seniorportraiture market. Though still in its infancy, video’s popularity seems to be increasing. The Krakoras, for example, initially partnered with a local videographer to create live footage of seniors but hope to shoot their own videos in the near future. Right now they’re still researching equipment and technique as well as marketing possibilities, but from their experience, video or Senior Fusion Film seems to be a highly viable — and exciting — opportunity for expanding their senior business. Swales and Kramer both produce multimedia slideshows but are using them for promotional purposes rather than as a source of income. “I consider them marketing tools,” says Swales. “Once it’s online and their friends see it, the excitement dies. Once parents see it, they don’t need to see it again. I put them out as viral marketing. In the short term, I lose X amount of dollars, but it’s far more valuable [as a marketing tool] in the long term.”
coming of
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IN THE BAG Full-frame DSLRs are the norm for most senior-portrait photographers, usually paired with 70-200mm f/2.8 and 24-70mm f/2.8 lenses. Wide-angle shots are especially hot, and Scott Hayne will sometimes go to the extreme with a 15mm fisheye lens. At the other end of the spectrum, Hayne also shoots with a 100mm macro lens for close-up images. Hayne and Mike Krakora also love the look and bokeh (out-of-focus detail) of 85mm f/1.4 lenses.
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Off-camera flash is often used on location shoots, whether with dedicated units such as the Canon 580EX Speedlite or powerful alternatives like the Quantum T5DR. More-complex setups might involve a set of AlienBees monolights. In the studio, photographers use both monolights and softboxes. Jonathan Brown has a four-light Elinchrom studio setup and uses a main light, fill light and, sometimes, a hair light and background kicker light.
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Huy Nguyen of f8studio shot this image in a parking garage using mostly natural light, then used a custom Photoshop action to convert it to black-and-white. Says Nguyen: “If I had included all of her face, the viewer’s eyes would stray too far to the right and the photo would just be another common headshot.” Opposite top: Connor’s hair is a huge part of his personality, so Mike and Heather Krakora lit the background with a flash narrowed by a 30-degree grid spot and aimed to create a glowing effect. They applied a Photoshop action to simulate a “tilt-shift” effect when they converted the image to black-andwhite. Opposite below: Tammy Swales found the perfect grungy setting to create this intense, edgy portrait; a 24mm wide-angle added to the effect.
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SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING Facebook, as Tammy Swales says, “is the single most successful marketing for me, hands down,” and others agree. Whether it’s a fan page for the studio or a personal page (Swales has both), Facebook — and MySpace — is a direct line to seniors. Watermarked images are posted on the photographer’s Facebook page and tagged with the seniors’ names. Then it goes viral, with tagged images appearing on friends’ pages as well. Word-of-mouth recommendations add another dimension to marketing. A number of photographers invite a group of about 10 select seniors to participate in a “senior models” or “senior rep” program each year. Session fees may be waived and other perks are used as incentives for the teens to spread the word among their peers about their photo session. It’s a win/win situation — the kids love being part of a select group, and it costs the photographers little or no expense for effective marketing.
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Opposite top: At a popular location for seniors called “The Legal Wall” in Rochester, New York, Swales positioned her subject to capture backlight flare then lit her from the front with a remotely triggered Canon 580EX Speedlite to highlight Jill’s bright green boots. Above: With pro-athlete attitude, Alex here holds his wakeboarding equipment. The Billeys lit this with two reflectors and shot low to bring in the blue sky and create sun flare across Alex’s shoulders, giving it a “California” feel. Below: This montage was shot in natural light by the Billeys: “Yuya is a phenomenal person full of personality and comic relief. Our poser gave him time to share the many facets of his character.”
some traditional studio shots. While photographers expect kids to bring their favorite trendy outfits, they also ask them to bring one set of clothing that won’t look dated in 20 years so they can shoot a classic portrait for the family. More often the seniors prefer to be photographed on location. Tammie and Chris Billey of Largo Photography say, to satisfy everyone, “We’ll create a natural look for the parents and high fashion for our seniors.” For location shots, gritty urban settings are popular, report the Krakoras, who add that “a really big trend is to contrast what they’re wearing and the location — girls dressed up, as if for a fashion editorial shoot, but in a location like railroad tracks or a field.” Photographers like the Haynes, with their beachfront studio, find that many seniors want to mix it up and shoot some of their portraits on the beach and others in a nearby urban setting. Interestingly, though, a few photographers note that studio work will become more prevalent in the near future. They’ll go “back to the basics of studio pro work,” says photographer and educator Ron Kramer of House of Photography and Portranet, “but with fresh, contemporary [editorial] styles.” The Browns also expect to do more studio work, explaining, “Once they [seniors] see the studio work, they really love it because of the manipulation of light.” AP
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SMITH ON SET
In a previously unknown and unpublished essay, W. Eugene Smith writes about shooting Charlie Chaplin’s Limelight for Life magazine — offering rare insights into the legendary photojournalist’s working methods and artistic torment. An American Photo Exclusive
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PHOTO HISTORY
Below left: A rare image of photographer W. Eugene Smith, Leica in hand, together with comedian and filmmaker Charlie Chaplin, on the occasion of Smith’s 1952 Life magazine shoot on the set of Chaplin’s film Limelight. Opposite, top: Smith’s shot of Chaplin the director rolling on the floor “in exaggerated glee,” as Life phrased it, to show actors what he wants from them. Opposite, bottom: Chaplin the actor playing Calvero, the down-and-out comedian who is the central character in Limelight, in a Smith image Life chose not to publish.
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FEW PHOTOGRAPHERS ARE HELD IN such high esteem as W. Eugene Smith. Smith’s admirers are hardly a cult of personality, though. The man was famously fractious, fighting his editors at Life and other magazines for every inch of ground — in both his photographs (do not crop) and the magazine layouts in which they appeared from the late 1930s through the early 1970s (today’s photographers would die for that kind of space). But if Smith’s petulance was fueled in part by substance abuse, it was mostly due to his unwillingness to compromise his art — the art of photojournalism — in the interest of brevity or propriety. Smith rarely committed his thoughts about photography to paper, at least formally. In 1952, though, Life assigned him to shoot the production of Charlie Chaplin’s most famous talkie, Limelight, and shortly after completing the task, Smith sat down and wrote an essay about the experience of working on the great comedian’s set. The essay never appeared in print, and here, through a special arrangement with Smith’s estate, American Photo
publishes it for the first time, along with several images Life chose not to publish. For many years, Chaplin had refused Life’s reporters access to his movie sets. But he was well aware of Smith’s work for the magazine, which by that time included his “Country Doctor,” “Spanish Village” and “Nurse Midwife” stories — work that essentially defined the modern photo essay. Not only did Chaplin grant Smith weeks of total access, but he reportedly was so anxious to please the photographer that he wouldn’t strike a set until he was sure Smith had his pictures. “He just keeps doing the scene over and over again, waiting for [Smith] to smile,” complained Chaplin’s associate director, as quoted in Jim Hughes’ definitive biography of Smith, W. Eugene Smith: Shadow & Substance. Smith could be dour, his face hard to read due to shrapnel wounds sustained during his unrelenting coverage of World War II. As you’ll see in his essay, he viewed his coverage of Limelight as a flop. Yet isn’t a willingness to admit failure the mark of a true artist? — Russell Hart
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March 17, 1952, by W. Eugene Smith:
n artist whose work intrudes into the creative life of another artist is faced with a perplexing choice. To intrude enough to properly interpret, to translate, necessitates (at least when time is limited) a forcing of the situation in a way that might be damaging to the thin, intangible creative thread of the other artist. Yet not to do this is certainly frustrating and damaging to the depth and success of the interpretation by the intruding artist. Especially if the two artists are of the involvement, and the emotional and mental makeup, of Charlie Chaplin and W. Eugene Smith. It was his movie, and I was the intruder who had arrived so late into the situation that I was unable to establish the right understanding between us to make it more possible for me to properly function. I simply could not bring myself to properly (or improperly) invade the privacy of this artist when he was at his most revealing involvement with his creation. It was at this time — a moment, a direction, so intimate and fragile — I was most in struggle with the fear I would work a degree of destruction to his creation. This I had too much respect for Chaplin to chance, and not enough arrogance to ignore. His respect for my work helped me to approach as closely as I did, but that, to me, was only a starting point. If I had been able to translate the story on my terms, with my knowledge of the situation and what could have been said, it might not have been a failure. As it is, I think it to be one of my poorest, and because of this, I am even more repulsed by the “success” of it. However, my grief to the contrary, the experience of working with Chaplin, of watching him at work, was wonderful and valuable. The number of rolls used on any of my stories is nobody’s business, for unless the thinking and the way
PHOTO HISTORY
Smith had weeks of unprecedented access to Chaplin’s set, as he says in his essay (below) — but the comedian was out sick for one of them. As Life wrote: “Resting between takes, Chaplin, dressed in animal-trainer clothes, slumps amid a litter of props and light stands. This uncharacteristic show of fatigue was the beginning of a virus infection, which suspended shooting for a week.”
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Opposite: Smith’s photographs of Chaplin doing his own makeup for the semi-autobiographical role of Limelight’s main character, Calvero, whose personae in the film include a clown (top) and an animal trainer (bottom). Below: A Smith shot of Chaplin inspecting clips of 35mm movie film — essentially the same format in which Smith was shooting, only half-frame rather than fullframe. This image wasn’t used in the final Life magazine story.
of developing a journalistic story is understood thoroughly by outsiders, they will misinterpret. If a writer says that he wrote 26 versions of his last chapter, it is interpreted as showing what a diligent, careful, hardworking perfectionist he is. With a photographer, it merely is interpreted as showing that if you take enough pictures, some are bound to be good! When I am charged with doing a story, I must produce certain situations I know are necessary for the story. In the beginning I might photograph these, even though I am not happy (even before taking) with the situation as it might stand; but I do this to get them under my belt. Then I keep on searching for a better way to make the same point. Perhaps I will make another variation, will keep on searching, photographing the same point many times, discarding the thought of having to use the poorer interpretation each time I am able to lock up a better version. It might work otherwise, that I might be reasonably satisfied with the first version at the time of taking and not follow it with other variations of the same, although I might continue to think and be observant along the same line. I even chart the day’s shooting, marking after each subject: impossible, poor, fair or passable, with no higher marking than passable. I will then work to eliminate those with a rating lower than passable and, if possible, improve the passable. At the same time I make another breakdown, very similar perhaps to an author’s outline for a play, so I can start fitting the photographs into the form the story will eventually take, with the depth and roundness that is a fair balance of interpretation. This outline also undergoes constant revision as I gain more and more understanding of my theme, my subject. I try first, in any story, to study and learn of my subject, regardless of what I might feel I already know of the situation, stalling as long
SMITH ON HIS CAMERAS I used six Leicas as my basic equipment, with different focal-length lenses so that when held to one spot, I could reach out various distances for my photograph or secure different perspectives. One with 28mm extremewide-angle, two with 35mm wide-angle (the camera I used most frequently and almost exclusively in “Spanish Village” — the second camera being used so that I would not be caught without film at a crucial moment — later I loaded this second camera with an extremely high-speed film to use when the light was impossible for anything else); one with 50mm f/1.5, the so-called normal lens; an 85mm f/2; and a 135mm f/3.5. Besides these I used a Foton rapid sequence camera for two days, for such performance numbers as the somersault and split. A 4x5 view camera for two overall production shots of the set. I made a couple of unimportant pictures with a Rolleiflex. However, 90 percent of my usual coverage is done with the Leica with the 35mm f/2.8 wide-angle lens.
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SMITH ON PRINTING I, of course, also make my own prints, to be sure my original intention is carried out as far as is controllable. Many people, including photographers, think it is folly of me to make my own prints on my stories. To me it is no more a folly than the writer who makes a rough preliminary draft of a book, then turns it over to a technically efficient but untalented and uncreative secretary for putting into its final form. Or, in a less-clear way (unless one knows music), of the symphonic composer who sketches out the ideas and turns it over to someone else for orchestrating, which is an integral part of the completing of the creative work and is as personal as the basic work. My prints are very personal and cannot be done by anyone else, even someone who works closely with me and might, to a degree, understand what I am after. Even then it can usually be no more than a synthetic likeness of what I would do. I have found it impossible, in most cases, to give even my own finished print as a guide and expect a satisfactory result.
as is possible in the making of my first photographs, or at least making the least-important ones first, hoping that I gain a greater and greater understanding before the key interpretational pictures are made. In fact, sometimes I say my photographs are made in the month or two months of noncamera work, with the final improvements only when I finally am working with the camera. It is necessary to constantly think in terms of [the magazine] layout, and this might mean variations of the same point in way of vertical or horizontal, and that pictures that might counterpoint each other or be played off each other, will have richness of variety gained in many ways. I intrude as little as possible, rearrange as little as possible and seldom use flashes, trying to do it all as much as possible without physical or mechanical distraction. Thus the small cameras, fast film and lenses, and the light already available or [made usable] by merely lifting the light level of the rooms with floods. As for Chaplin, what can I say that has not already been exaggerated by Life? He welcomed me where apparently he would not welcome most other photographers. I became very fond of him as a person as well. [I] was on the set from early morning to late at night. Many of the people on the set were very aware of my work and my reputation, and were most kind in their praise and in trying to be helpful. Only I was unhappy with the situation, for they were for the most part unaware of the struggle within myself and were sure everything would work out well. AP
PHOTO HISTORY
Opposite: An elegantly composed Smith shot that Life didn’t use in its story, perhaps because it was confusing: It shows a scene in the “backstage” of a theatre in the Limelight story itself, not on Chaplin’s set. Left: Smith’s photo essay on Limelight ran in the March 17, 1952 issue of Life, which also featured a story about the “prettiest showgirl on Broadway” and a diatribe on the demise of baseball by retired slugger Ty Cobb, who says of Red Sox sensation Ted Williams that “you cannot call him a great hitter.” The Limelight story also included Smith’s photographs of Chaplin’s home life, as shown in a spread from the issue.
WHAT PHOTOGRAPHERS NEED EDITOR’S CHOICE 65
GEAR
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RICOH GXR INTERCHANGEABLE LENSES, COOL. INTERCHANGEABLE CHIPS, RADICAL!
GOTTA HAVE IT HOODMAN CINEMA KIT When you’re shooting DSLR video and your subject moves in or out — or you and the camera do likewise — autofocus just can’t keep things sharp. You have to follow-focus manually to keep the subject from going out of focus, and that’s not easy, even in bright light. The HoodLoupe 3.0 helps out by turning your DSLR’s LCD screen into a decent electronic viewfinder. Its three-element eyepiece tops off a rigid-rubber light shield that covers a 3-inch screen and delivers 100 percent magnification. Since the HoodLoupe was originally designed for handheld review of images in bright light, you’ll need to secure it to your DSLR with the Cinema Strap, creating a rig that adds a point of contact with the camera for improved stability. Buy the Hoodman Cinema Kit and you get the strap and the HoodEYE 3.0 (a bigger, softer eyecup). BUY IT: $115; hoodmanusa.com
NOTEWORTHY SPECS ƭɥ -3#1!' -%# +#Ʀɥ2+("#Lj(-ɥ+#-2nj2#-2.1ɥ,."4+#2ɥ match chip size to optical design ƭɥ#2.+43(.-ɥ5 1(#2ɥ6(3'ɥ,."4+#ƨɥƏƐƥƑɥ,#% /(7#+2ɥ for 33mm f/2.5 (50mm equivalent) macro prime ǒLjƦɥ ǓƩɥƏƎƥƎɥ,#% /(7#+2ɥ$.1ɥƐƓLjƗƐ,,ɥ (equivalent) fnjƐƥƕLjƓƥƓɥ, !1.ɥ9..,ɥǒƏnjƏƥƗƵƦɥǓ ƭɥ %-#2(4,Lj ++.8ɥ ."8ɥ6(3'ɥ2/#!( +ɥ14 #1(9#"ɥ
grip contains controls and pop-up flash ƭɥ."8ɥ(-!.1/.1 3#2ɥƑLj(-!'Ʀɥ'(%'Lj1#2.+43(.-ɥ (920,000-dot) LCD screen ƭɥ/3(.- +ɥ2'.#Lj,.4-3ɥ#+#!31.-(!ɥ5(#6Ɗ-"#1ɥƴ9..,2Ƶɥ3.ɥ/1.5("#ɥ !!41 3#ɥ$1 ,(-%ɥ$.1ɥ eye-level shooting ƭɥBUY IT: $837 ǒ6(3'ɥƐƓLjƗƐ,,ɥfnjƐƥƕLjƓƥƓɥ+#-2ɥ module); adorama.com
WHAT’S NEW: Leave it to Ricoh to come up with an altogether different way around an age.+"ɥ./3(! +ɥ/1. +#,ƨɥ'#ɥ'(%'#1ɥ ɥ+#-2ƹɥ, %-($8(-%ɥ/.6#1ɥNJɥ6'#3'#1ɥ(-ɥ ɥ3#+#/'.3.ɥ/1(,#ɥ.1ɥ ɥ wide-ranging zoom — the more speed it must sacrifice to stay comfortably small. With a given2(9#ɥ(, %#ɥ 1# Ʀɥ ɥ6("#1ɥ, 7(,4,ɥ /#1341#ɥ +6 82ɥ,# -2ɥ ɥ (%%#1ɥ+#-2ƥɥ(!.'ƹ2ɥ2.+43(.-ƨɥ2#ɥ ɥ 2, ++#1ɥ(, %#ɥ2#-2.1ɥ3.ɥ*##/ɥ ɥ+#-2ɥ!.,/ !3ɥ6'#-ɥ8.4ɥ-##"ɥ+.32ɥ.$ɥ, %-($(! 3(.-ɥ -"nj.1ɥ#731 ɥ 2/##"ƥɥ2#ɥ ɥ (%%#1ɥ2#-2.1ɥ6'#-ɥ'(%'ɥ, %-($(! 3(.-ɥ -"ɥ2/##"ɥ6.-ƹ3ɥ ""ɥ4-6 -3#"ɥ 4+*ƥ HOW IT WORKS: The mirrorless GXR body is essentially a holder and control center for interchangeable, self-contained modules that combine the lens and its dedicated sensor — a sensor sized to suit the lens’ particular optical needs, whether to keep high-magnification lenses small or to make lower-magnification lenses fast. The module houses the shutter and aperture diaphragm; the body incorporates the needed buttons and dials, a flash and a big LCD screen. IS IT BETTER?: The GXR’s unique design is ingenious, and could be brilliant once there are more than the two current lens modules available for it. It also depends on whether the price of additional modules is reasonable, given that you’re buying the better part of a new camera each time you buy another lens. But the GXR opens the door to special purposes that can elude DSLRs NJɥ,."4+#2ɥ314+8ɥ./3(,(9#"ɥ$.1ɥ5("#.ɥ.1ɥ'(%'Lj, %-($(! 3(.-ɥ, !1.ɥ6.1*Ʀɥ$.1ɥ#7 ,/+#ɥNJɥ -"ɥ3' 3ɥ would otherwise be impossible to accomplish in such a small camera. — Russell Hart VISIT AMERICANPHOTOMAG.COM SOON FOR A REVIEW OF THE RICOH GXR MAR/APR 2010 | AMERICANPHOTOMAG.COM
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GEAR | EDITOR’S CHOICE
STILLS TO MOVIES
HERE’S WHAT YOU NEED TO MAKE YOUR DSLR A BETTER VIDEO CAMERA | BY JONATHAN BARKEY
Because the image sensors in digital SLRs are much larger than those used in camcorders, DSLRs that shoot HD video offer wonderful advantages for moving pictures. These include the ability 3.ɥ !'(#5#ɥ ɥƴ!(-#, 3(!Ƶɥ2' ++.6ɥ$.!42Ʀɥ3.ɥ !!#/3ɥ4+31 6("#Lj -%+#ɥ +#-2#2ɥ -"ɥ.3'#1ɥ2/#!( +(9#"ɥ+#-2#2Ʀɥ -"ɥ3.ɥ/1."4!#ɥ#7!#++#-3ɥ(, %#ɥ 04 +(38ɥ(-ɥ#731#,#+8ɥ+.6ɥ+(%'3ƥɥ43ɥ ɥ5("#.ɥ +2.ɥ' 2ɥ, ).1ɥ2'.13comings, starting with audio. The built-in microphone in a DSLR has inferior specs compared 6(3'ɥ,.23ɥ#73#1- +ɥ,(!1./'.-#2ƥɥ 3ɥ(2ɥ2#-2(3(5#ɥ.-+8ɥ 3ɥ2'.13ɥ1 -%#Ʀɥ and picks up handling and operating sounds from the camera. Last
but not least, it records only monaural sound. Many DSLRs do have 23#1#.ɥ(-/432ɥ$.1ɥ!.--#!3(-%ɥ#73#1- +ɥ 4"(.ɥǒ ɥ%.."ɥ3'(-%ǓƦɥ 43ɥ,.23ɥ still employ automatic gain, which yields inconsistent quality. In the focusing department, true DSLRs (unlike camcorders and some Micro Four Thirds cameras with electronic viewfinders) are simply incapable of continuous AF in video mode. Manual focusing is usually required, but it’s not easy on a small LCD screen. DSLRs are also harder to hold steady than camcorders, and the tripod you own probably won’t work for filmmaking. To help, here’s some gear that should greatly improve the quality of your DSLR video.
REDROCK THE EVENT DSLR 2.0 HYBRID RIG COOLEST FEATURE: STEADIER HANDHELD SHOOTING Keeping video steady with a handheld DSLR is much easier when you use this modular rig, designed for photojournalists and event videographers. Highly maneuverable, the 2.6-pound ensemble does this by providing four points of contact with your body. Its quick-release aluminum baseplate mates with your camera’s tripod socket, and the clamp attaches to twin center rails that connect (via other components) to left- and right-side rubberized handgrips and a chestpod. The unit’s knobs and levers adjust for comfort and allow fast assembly/disassembly. An optional follow-focus gear drive has a focusing knob that works like the one on an old twin-lens 1#Ƌ#7Ʀɥ ++.6(-%ɥ2,..3'Ʀɥ/1#!(2#ɥ -"ɥ1#/# 3 +#ɥ, -4 +ɥ$.!42ƥ BUY IT: $600; sennheiser.com
ZOOM H4N HANDY RECORDER COOLEST FEATURE: FOUR-CHANNEL PORTABLE AUDIO If your DSLR lacks an audio input or your subject is too far away, this sturdy, portable recorder can provide full-stereo sound via its dual builtin microphones. It records (on SD/SDHC cards) uncompressed WAV or !.,/1#22#"ɥ ƑɥƊ+#2Ʀɥ6'(!'ɥ8.4ɥ".6-+. "ɥ5( ɥɥƐƥƎɥ3.ɥ8.41ɥ!.,/43#1ɥ and sync (via software) to your DSLR’s video. With two XLR/phono inputs -"ɥ ɥƑƥƕLj,(++(,#3#1ɥ23#1#.ɥ(-/43Ʀɥ3'#ɥƓ-ɥ! -ɥ1#!.1"ɥ$.41Lj!' --#+ɥ23#1#.ɥ and even dub multiple music tracks. A 3.5-millimeter stereo output lets 8.4ɥ42#ɥ3'#ɥ"#5(!#ɥ 2ɥ -ɥ.-Lj! ,#1 ɥ,(!ɥ.1ɥ,(7#1ƥɥ.6#1ɥ!.,#2ɥ$1.,ɥ36.ɥ ɥ 33#1(#2Ʀɥ -ɥnjɥ " /3#1ɥ.1ɥ8.41ɥ!.,/43#1ƹ2ɥɥ! +#ƥɥ BUY IT: $300; samsontech.com
MARSHALL V-LCD70P-HDMI FIELD MONITOR COOLEST FEATURE: BIG, WIDESCREEN VIEWING -ɥ,.5(#ɥ -"ɥɥ2'..32Ʀɥ -ɥ#73#1- +ɥ2!1##-ɥ'..*#"ɥ4/ɥ3.ɥ3'#ɥƊ+,ɥ.1ɥ5("#.ɥ camera gives the director the same view as the camera operator. This por3 +#Ʀɥ/1.$#22(.- +ɥƊ#+"ɥ,.-(3.1ɥ".#2ɥ+(*#6(2#ɥ$.1ɥ ɥ5("#.ƥɥ 32ɥƗLj(-!'ɥ widescreen is way bigger than your camera’s LCD, making composition and focusing much easier. (It’s also anti-reflective, scratch-resistant and 5(#6 +#ɥ 3ɥ ɥ6("#ɥƏƓƎLj"#%1##ɥ -%+#ƥǓɥ(3'ɥ Ʀɥ!.,/.2(3#ɥ -"ɥ!.,/.-#-3ɥ(-/432Ʀɥ(3ɥ.Ɖ#12ɥ4/ɥ3.ɥƘƎƎLj 8LjƓƘƎLj/(7#+ɥ1#2.+43(.-ƥɥ/#!( +ɥ2#33(-%2ɥ (-"(! 3#ɥ/1./#1ɥ#7/.241#ɥ -"ɥ$.!42Ʀɥ -"ɥ8.4ɥ! -ɥ9..,ɥ3.ɥƏƎƎɥ/#1!#-3ɥ to check details. The 1.3-pound monitor uses camcorder batteries or AC power and is light enough to mount on your camera’s hot shoe with an optional adapter. BUY IT: $950; adorama.com AMERICANPHOTOMAG.COM | MAR/APR 2010
GEAR | EDITOR’S CHOICE
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JUICEDLINK CX231 ULTRA PORTABLE MIXER COOLEST FEATURE: LOW-NOISE STEREO AMPLIFICATION This low-noise pre-amp lets you get hi-fi sound through your DSLR’s stereo input using pro microphones or other audio equipment. Its compact, rugged aluminum housing mounts to your camera’s tripod socket or the top of a tripod for off-camera use. Two locking connectors accept XLR cables; there’s a 3.5-millimeter stereo output on its bottom plate. Powered by a 9-volt battery, its high-quality amps produce a very clean, strong signal that overrides 8.41ɥ! ,#1 ƹ2ɥ-.(2(#1ɥ 4(+3Lj(-ɥ!(1!4(318ƥɥ/!.,(-%ɥ)4(!#" (-*ɥ/1."4!32ɥ6(++ɥ increase control, letting you disable the noise-elevating auto-gain feature in most DSLRs, and adding audio metering and headphone monitoring. BUY IT: $300; juicedlink.com
SENNHEISER ENG WIRELESS MICROPHONE COOLEST FEATURE: NO MORE AUDIO CABLES Professional wireless audio doesn’t come cheap, but it’s superconvenient when a microphone cable would get in the way. Sennheiser’s premium ew100 G3 system offers superb sound quality and interference-free reception, accessing 1,680 discrete frequencies and auto-switching between two receiving antennae. Its AA-powered transmitter and receiver (which also run on an optional rechargeable pack) are belt mounted and cellphone size; the former has a 3.5-millimeter input for its clip-on lavalier mic (or other sources), the latter a 3.5-millimeter mono output that connects to your audio-in (and can be attached with a hot-shoe mount). For us, the system worked flawlessly, sounding indistinguishable from a wired setup. BUY IT: $600; sennheiser.com
RØDE VIDEOMIC COOLEST FEATURE: HIGH-QUALITY ON-CAMERA SOUND This affordable mono microphone plugs into any DSLR that has a 3.5-millimeter microphone jack, mounting directly onto your camera’s hot shoe. It offers better dynamic range and lower noise than you get with a DSLR’s built-in microphone, while its directional, shotgun-type design minimizes peripheral sounds. A shock-absorbing suspension isolates the microphone from handling and operating noises. Made of fiber-reinforced ABS, the Vid#. (!ɥ,# 241#2ɥƐƥƖLj 8LjƙƥƘLj 8LjƓɥ(-!'#2ɥ -"ɥ(2ɥ/.6#1#"ɥ 8ɥ ɥ2(-%+#ɥƙLj5.+3ɥ 33#18ɥ3' 3ɥ+ 232ɥƏƎƎɥ'.412ƥɥ2#"ɥ.-Lj! ,#1 Ʀɥ3'#ɥ-#6ɥ,."#+ɥ(2ɥ/#1$#!3ɥ$.1ɥ ƴ14-Lj -"Lj%4-Ƶɥ1#/.13 %#Ʀɥ+.! 3(.-ɥ(-3#15(#62ɥ -"ɥ!+.2#Lj4/ɥ#5#-3ɥ!.5#1 %#ƥ BUY IT: $150; rodemic.com
MANFROTTO 503HDV PRO VIDEO HEAD COOLEST FEATURE: SMOOTH PANNING AND TILTING -+(*#ɥ23 -" 1"ɥ23(++Lj/'.3.%1 /'8ɥ31(/."ɥ'# "2Ʀɥ3'(2ɥ/1.$#22(.- +ɥƋ4("ɥ video head allows supersmooth moves using camera/lens combos up to ƏƗƥƖɥ/.4-"2ƥɥ 3ɥ' 2ɥ+ 1%#Ʀɥ#1%.-.,(!ɥ/ -nj3(+3ɥ+.!*2Ʀɥ ɥ3#+#2!./(-%ɥ' -"+#ɥ and a quick-release plate. Separate knobs control fluid drag (motion damping) and its tilt counterbalance spring, whose resistance can be matched to the weight of your rig. The 503HDV comes with an integral, battery-illuminated bubble level and is compatible with Manfrotto still-camera tripods. BUY IT: $355; bogenimaging.us MAR/APR 2010 | AMERICANPHOTOMAG.COM
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KNOW-HOW NOW DIGITAL DARKROOM 69 | LIGHT MATTERS 72
SKILLS
69
GET SMART How to combine the power of RAW files with the savvy of
©ROBERT ORTHEN
Photoshop’s Smart Objects to make a great composite | BY DEBBIE GROSSMAN One reason serious photographers shoot in RAW format is that its unprocessed files are forever flexible. No edit you make on a RAW file is written in stone and, better yet, global changes are more evenly applied. But we love Photoshop too. It’s unmatched in the ability it gives you to composite multiple images to get a single amazing one. The downside is that if you convert those images straight to Photoshop before combining them, you lose all that useful RAW data. So don’t do it. Instead, open those RAW files as Smart Objects. Smart Objects allow you to do basic transformations to your layers, like rescale or rotate, without ever altering the original pixels.
And now, in Adobe Photoshop CS4, you can further modify your Smart Objects by applying most filters as nondestructive Smart Filters to them. But Smart Objects really shine when used with RAW files, because a RAW file opened as a Smart Object remains editable using Adobe Camera Raw, Photoshop’s built-in RAW converter. These RAW Smart Objects come in handy when you want to combine two different exposures of a RAW file. Using Smart Objects, you can quickly and accurately balance the two images for a seamless look. On the following pages you’ll see what we did with Smart Objects using a bracketed photo supplied by Finland-based Robert Orthen, to produce the final image above.
IN OUR NEXT ISSUE: INTRODUCING OUR NEW DIGITAL DARKROOM COLUMNIST, PHOTOSHOP AUTHORITY TIM GREY MAR/APR 2010 | AMERICANPHOTOMAG.COM
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SKILLS | DIGITAL DARKROOM
Step 1: After opening the image in Adobe Camera Raw, we added Saturation and Vibrance to make the sky look more dramatic. Doing this made the ice on the rocks at the bottom of the image way too dark, but we planned to fix that in the next conversion.
Step 2: Once we got the sky to our liking, we brought the image into Photoshop. When you hold down the Shift key on your keyboard, the button at the bottom right that normally reads Open Image changes to Open Object. If you click the button while holding down the Shift key, Photoshop will open your RAW file as a Smart Object.
Step 3: Next we created a new layer for the photo’s icy foreground. Because our image was a Smart Object, we didn’t have to go back to Bridge to find it, then open it again in ACR. We just repurposed the layer we already had by going to Layer > Smart Objects > New Smart Object Via Copy.
Step 4:
©ROBERT ORTHEN
We added a mask to the new layer (created in the previous step), hiding the sky by painting over it with a big, soft brush. Adding the mask at this point in the process meant that when we made adjustments to this layer in the next step, we got an immediate sense of what our finished composite would look like.
AMERICANPHOTOMAG.COM | MAR/APR 2010
Step 5: Next we double-clicked on the top layer to head back into ACR and made a RAW conversion that made the foreground look the way we wanted it. Specifically, we cranked up the Clarity slider to bring out detail in the ice and increased exposure to reduce detail in the water so it would appear smoother. We decreased Vibrance to make the ice look even cooler. Then we clicked OK to return to Photoshop.
Step 6: Because we added a mask in Step 4, we could immediately see what a quick composite of our two conversions looked like. The real power of RAW files as Smart Objects really came into play as we fine-tuned our image — allowing us to begin re-editing when, for example, we realized that the sky had too much vignetting. We double-clicked the bottom layer to return to ACR.
Step 7: Once back in ACR, we clicked the Lens Corrections tab. Grabbing the Lens Vignetting Amount slider, we pulled it to the right until we got the amount of lightening we wanted in the dark corners of the sky. Then we clicked OK to return to Photoshop to see how the change looked. Remember, you can always go back to ACR if you over- or undercorrect.
Step 8: Likewise, we decided the ice in the foreground needed more sharpening. We double-clicked on the top layer, then clicked on the Detail tab. Always zoom in to 100 percent so you can see what your sharpening does (ACR won’t give you a preview at lower zoom levels). We cranked up the Detail and Amount sliders until the ice really took on a three-dimensional quality.
FINISHING TOUCHES Not everything can be done using Smart Objects. When we got the balance we wanted between the water and the sky, we created a merged copy layer to add the finishing touches to our photo. There was a bit of lens distortion in this shot, so we used the Lens Correction filter to minimize it. Then we used the Motion Blur filter to add a little blur to the water. Finally, a Curves Adjustment Layer added a bit more contrast to the foreground.
MAR/APR 2010 | AMERICANPHOTOMAG.COM
72
SKILLS | LIGHT MATTERS
BRIGHT IDEA It’s not easy making flash look natural, but one good strategy is to emulate the light that’s already there | BY JOE MCNALLY
AMERICANPHOTOMAG.COM | MAR/APR 2010
Above: It might look like high noon, but the light streaming through the saloon window next to these four singing cowpokes is from a 1,200 watt-second strobe softened with a large diffusion panel. See text for how McNally filled shadows.
in this instance, I was able to stick to my game plan of blowing flash into this old bar and creating a pattern of highlight and shadow that would make it feel as if there were strong, high daylight outside. The main source of natural light in the scene was a window offcamera to the right. But it was nowhere near bright enough to shoot by — to let me set a shutter speed high enough to keep the subjects unblurred and an aperture small enough to keep background detail sharp. So I chose to pump flash straight through the window. The problem was that the window was in the position of a sidelight. In a traditional lighting grid, its position might have made it an accent or kicker light. But here I was trying to take my cues from the existing light, so it ended up being the main light. When shooting groups, strong sidelight can be problematic. Light at a 90-degree angle to your subjects causes shadows to fall into each other like dominoes. In this scenario, everybody in the picture is standing in everybody else’s shadow. Not good. I improved the chance that this extreme sidelight would work
© J O E M C N A L LY
Flash is photography’s ultimate convenience light, giving you lots of power in a small, portable package. But one risk of using flash is that it can call undue attention to itself. It’s hard to make flash invisible — to use it to create light that whispers rather than shouts. And it can be downright complicated to make “artificial” light look “natural.” That’s typical of the conundrums we face as photographers. We work awfully hard sometimes to make it seem as if we were barely there when we took a picture, or at least that we didn’t labor mightily in making it. Photographers never like it when the first reaction of viewers is to be curious about how they got the shot. (That should come later, if at all.) Whatever the quality of a picture’s light, they like it to look as if it belonged there, and one way to do that is to take flash-lighting cues from the existing light. I’ve watched a lot of westerns, so I have a mental storehouse of images and imagination regarding, well, saloons. So when I walked into the one at Santa Fe’s historic Eaves Movie Ranch to shoot some cow-town actors for a Kelby Training online video, I had a pretty good idea of how things should go down. It’s important to stay flexible on location, to be able to chuck all your planning and improvise if things start to play out differently than you were expecting. But
SKILLS | LIGHT MATTERS
by diffusing it well. I put a 3-by-6-foot Lastolite panel over the window and blasted light through it with a 1,200 watt-second, battery-powered Elinchrom Ranger RX flash set up outside on the boardwalk. When that hard light hit the diffuser, it went soft and glowy, spreading across the scene in a congenial fashion as opposed to screaming through a naked window and causing deep, cold shadows. So I had a big, soft, but dramatically oriented main light that covered my subjects. I couldn’t stop there. The camera-left side of all my subjects, being 180 degrees away from the light, was still too dark. It had to be opened up. Using a fill light in this kind of situation is tricky though. Too much fill, and it just looks like you solved the problem with extra flash from the camera angle. Too little, and you’ll have shadows that get you yelled at by your art director, who’ll have to spend extra dough getting the prepress guys to scrape printable detail from their coal-mine depths. I hardly ever fill a subject from the side directly opposite the main light. That could cause distracting, unrealistic multiple shadows. There was another window in the saloon, also to the right of the camera, so I went outside and set up a second Lastolite panel and Ranger pack, just like at the other window. I set this Ranger to a lower power than the other one. Why? Because it was a fill light, and I didn’t want it to overpower the main light. The second light helped, but it didn’t go far enough. My shadows were still too dark. Yet another light was required. (All this work just to simulate daylight!) To position this third light, I had to think about the behavior of strong overhead sunlight, specifically the way it comes through a window at a fairly steep angle. What’s the first thing it’s likely to hit? The floor. So the floor became my bounce card, and that soft light from the floor finally brought my shadows up to where they needed to be. And rather than putting my own reflector over the floor, I simply let the light hit the old wood, which gave it a warmth it would have had naturally. This carefully modulated flood of flash gave me control of the scene. It allowed me to keep my subjects sharp, without the risk of blur that comes with shooting in low available light. It feels like daylight, but it’s all flash. Gotta work hard sometimes to do what nature does in a heartbeat. After all that, a dirty window made my next shot easy. A dirty window is the nominal light source for the picture of the lovely little girl at the saloon’s piano (above right). Frosted with age and dust, partially covered with a frayed lace curtain, it became a natural softbox for me. One light was used for this photo — a single Ranger placed about 10 feet outside the window — in combination
Above: Unlike McNally’s complex bar scene (pg. 72), this little girl was lit by a single strobe outside a nearby window. (See below for details on the bar shot.)
with a 200mm f/2 lens set wide open. I was careful to keep the girl’s eyes in just about the same plane of focus, so they’d both be sharp. The window shapes the light just the way it would soft daylight, with a painterly, directional quality that richens and warms the scene, then falls off quickly. And there they are: Two ways of using flash to create light that doesn’t look like flash. One is complex, the other dead simple. What do they have in common? Both are answers to one of the first questions I ask myself when I arrive at a location: Where’s the light coming from? The existing illumination might not be enough to shoot by, but setting up your lights in its path gives you a much better chance of making your flash invisible. AP
THE SCHEME: FOUR COWPOKES flash head
1,200 w/s power pack 3-by-6-foot diffuser panel Nikon D3 DSLR
AMERICANPHOTOMAG.COM | MAR/APR 2010
McNally lit his saloon with a main light aimed through a diffuser-covered window directly to the right of his subjects. Because this created strong contrast, he filled shadows with a second strobe aimed through the next window over. Then he filled some more, bouncing a third strobe off the saloon’s wooden floor, which added warmth to the scene.
© J O E M C N A L LY; L I G H T I N G D I A G R A M : © N I K S C H U L Z
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BY GREG CEO Early this January, if you were strolling through Times Square and looked up, you might have found yourself staring at a billboard of President Barack Obama wearing what appeared to be a coat made by the Weatherproof Garment Company. No sleight-ofPhotoshop was involved: The picture was taken by an AP news photographer. The billboard’s tag line was “Leader in Style.” That wasn’t kosher, according to Nichelle Levy, an attorney in the Sports and Entertainment group of the Robinson, Bradshaw & Hinson law firm. “This was clearly a commercial use,” she says. “More important, it implies endorsement by the President of a particular product. You can’t do this without a proper model release.” Of course President Obama didn’t sign a release, nor did he consent in any way to the commercial use of his likeness. Weatherproof probably knew the rules and chose to break them as a publicity stunt: The company agreed to take the billboard down several days later. The rules haven’t changed. Any photograph displaying an image of a recognizable person that is used to promote a product or service requires a model release. Yet countless images of President Obama appeared in newspapers and magazines the very same week the billboard was up. “Editorial” uses are entirely legal. As long as published photographs are taken in a public place and are not used to promote a product or other commercial enterprise, they do not require a model release. There are gray areas, however. Not everything
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is a legitimate subject of journalism — some things really are private. And these days, fine art can seem a whole lot like commerce.
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JOURNALISM VS. PRIVACY Even if you’re a photojournalist, your subjects have a right to privacy. You can’t caption or doctor an image of someone to make him or her “appear in a false light.” You shouldn’t aim a telephoto lens at someone’s window, even if you’re standing on a public street. You can’t photograph someone in a place where they have a “reasonable expectation of privacy” — their home, their hotel room or a public bathroom, for example. The legal language can be vague, but let’s simplify matters: Most of the time, in order to do any of these things — or at least to do them safely — you need a model release. The news isn’t all bad. Attorney Elissa D. Hecker, editor of Entertainment, Arts and Sports Law Journal of the New York State Bar Association, describes a case in which a photographer took and published in a news context, a picture of a couple walking through Times Square holding hands. The couple didn’t want their relationship known to family and friends, so they sued. But the court decided that there is no “expectation of privacy” when you’re walking through Times Square. “However, I always tell my clients to err on the side of caution and get a model release,” says Hecker. “It’s just good business sense.” ART VS. COMMERCE New York’s most famous locale was the setting for another case that illustrates how privacy issues tend to play out in the fine-art world. Between 1991 and 2001, Philip-Lorca diCorcia took street photographs of pedestrians in Times Square without their knowledge or consent. He later exhibited the images at the Pace/MacGill Gallery, selling limited-edition prints at up to $30,000 each. One of the subjects sued him (the case was Nussenzweig v. diCorcia), arguing that the use was commercial because diCorcia had profited from it. The photographer countered that the particular use of the work was protected by the First Amendment. New York State’s top court dismissed the case on procedural grounds. But diCorcia’s attorney, Lawrence Barth (of the Munger, Tolles & Olson LLP law firm), was heartened by the decision of
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-*()5*/( PLAYING IT SAFE Sometimes the real issue, when considering whether to get a model release, is not that you could win a case if one were brought against you. It’s whether you can avoid an expensive lawsuit by getting permission, even if it is not legally required. Anyone can sue you, whether they have a good case or not. Mickey Osterreicher, general counsel for the National Press Photographers Association, reminds members that once an image is online, “Anyone might right-click on it and use it for anything.” Even though the photographer has not approved of that use or given away rights to the image, he or she can still be sued. Osterreicher strongly advocates getting the broadest model release possible, covering every right you can imagine, because you never know where your image will end up. AP
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84 PARTING SHOT
YEAR OF THE TIGER
John Isaac’s photography once helped save the world, but now he wants it to save the world’s big cats The wet whorl spun by this Bengal tiger’s tail is a reminder that contrary to popular belief, cats big and small love water — at least the ones inhabiting warmer climes, in this case India’s Bandhavgarh National Park. The frozen spray also proves that a high shutter speed, here 1/640 of a second, can expose hidden beauty. Captured this past summer by former U.N. chief photographer John Isaac, the tiger (at 20 months old, still a cub) has just stepped out of a cooling lake. She is one of many that Isaac has followed in recent years on semiannual visits to his native country. Her grandfather is the park’s most famous feline resident, Sundar (or B2), a tiger who lost his brother to poachers. Poaching has reduced the number of wild tigers in India to less than 1,500, according to Isaac. “It’s been said that one tiger is killed every day for use in Chinese medicine,” he says. “The carcass is smuggled into China by land through Tibet — all to make some bastard feel virile.” (Visit tigersincrisis.com/trade_tigers.htm for more information.) AMERICANPHOTOMAG.COM | MAR/APR 2010
The Chinese zodiac’s Year of the Tiger started on Feb. 14, and Isaac hopes it will be an auspicious one for the endangered cats. It should be for Isaac himself, since later this year he hopes to publish his first book of tiger photographs. Its contents will have been shot mainly with two Olympus E-3 bodies and two lenses, the Zuiko 300mm f/2.8 ED and the 50-200mm f/2.8-3.5 ED, plus a 1.4X teleconverter. “Lately I’ve been shooting almost everything handheld, sometimes resting the camera on a friend’s shoulder,” says the photographer, who seems as steady on the back of an elephant as he is on the ground. “It lets me react more quickly, and the in-camera stabilization keeps everything really sharp.” Some photographers don’t believe that Isaac, whose work is on display at the Hotchkiss School’s Tremaine Gallery through March 6, gets such sharp results without a tripod. Of course, some people don’t think endangered animals are really in trouble. Both assumptions are wrong. AP
©JOHN ISAAC
BY RUSSELL HART
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