Changing business practices to reflect a changing marketplace.

Markets change over time. Destructive market forces destroy existing paradigms and allow for the establishment of new ways of doing business while also opening up the potential for new businesses to fail. In the past markets would remain stable for decades or centuries which gave innovators a life time or at least a good amount of time to profit from their new ideas and their destructive re-imagining of their markets. Not so anymore. Innovation and change occurs in ever compressing cycles. Businesses, it seems, are more interested in volume and being the first mover than in margins and sustainable practice.

In the world of photography stock was one of the first shifts in an established market construct. The introduction of pervasive stock photography sales, with declining cost to consumers roiled the status quo of the maturing assignment markets. And drove down the cost of an image.

The closing of 4000+ portrait studios (mostly in Walmart and Sears stores) is an indicator of a shift, caused in part by the pervasive penetration of foolproof digital cameras into the hands of the lower middle class demographic of the buying public. And the near universal use of viewfinder screens on phones, tablets and televisions has eviscerated the market for printed images at nearly the same speed with which e-books and on-line reading are devastating the market for printed books in many categories.

If you created a business as a portrait photographer and your pricing model was based on the wide spread concept that the portrait session itself (your time, expertise, taste, and technical skills) was to be offered as a loss leader or a break even proposition while the profit from each consumer portrait job lay in the sale of prints you are about to either hit the wall of a new reality or you are already out of business.

Very few consumers surveyed have an interest in buying a print (as a value-added artifact) from a professional photographer. That doesn't mean that those consumers no longer want the intellectual property that come along with the artifact, they just aren't keenly interested in the artifact itself.

The old pricing model built in margin for the cost of doing business and heaped profit on top of that number. Clients in previous generations rarely had secondary viewing opportunities that were as compelling as a good print. To view an image on a television screen, pre-flat panel and pre-HD meant looking at an image with a net resolution of about 525 lines of interlaced information. The gamuts were extremely limited and color uniformity nearly non-existant. There was no peer-to-peer electronic sharing. Sharing meant having additional prints made and, as the original negative remained in the hands of the creators, that meant consumers HAD to pay for each individual use.

Now it's rare to find customers who constitute both a sophisticated visual market (taking images should still be creative and fulfilling) and who are constrained from wide spread sharing. Their hierarchy of needs has shifted in ways that Maslov could not have predicted.

If our local market is an example then technology-forward, affluent clients are much more interested in having unlimited personal use of images created of them and for them, on all manner of electronic devices, then they are in having single physical artifacts in their homes. They understand the fluidity and ease of the process of having acceptable prints made, understand that the actual costs of good prints continues to drop and that a good physical reproduction can be made from files that they possess. There are no barriers to keep consumers from ordering their own prints and paying wholesale. The mystery has been drained from that "scary swamp" (consumer's previous perspective about printing).

The new customer still wants (for now) the art of the image as it relates to lighting, posing and post processing creation but now, instead of being satisfied with a few images they want to possess and control the digital files. They want to be able to make the canvas print or wrap the face of their toddler around a coffee cup. They want to order the thirty-nine cent, five by seven inch print from Costco without paying an additional $50 or even $100 to have the same print mounted a piece of board and presented in an embossed envelope. And can you really blame them for not understanding the business model? They've been told for years that they should go to a professional portrait photographer for the artist's vision. But they end up paying the lion's share of their budget for the product, not the IP.

What's a business poised on the edge of uncertainty to do? Obviously, we need to re-examine every angle. According to studies of the current, ascendent generation they are much more interested in buying and sharing experiences than they are possessing treasures. So, now owning a house and scrimping and saving for a down payment becomes a more prolonged period of rental and the savings are spent hiking in Nepal or following Formula One racing around the world. Or just taking time off from work to pursue passions. Can we make the actual portrait sessions more fun and interesting? Can we turn a portrait session into a mini-workshop and dinner party as well as a venue to create great work? I know a lot of amateur photographers who've expressed an interest in being photographed or having loved ones photographed so they can experience what a "real" session is like. Why not package the experience?

We can also create very interesting and desirable styles of lighting and camera work in order to give consumers something they can't get anywhere else. That might mean shooting on medium format film or shooting with medium format digital camera for a more interesting interplay between tonalities and focus falloffs. It might mean lighting styles that would difficult to mimic with speed lights and tiny soft boxes. And it might just mean working at  high levels both technically and aesthetically.

Pricing in the consumer world needs to take into consideration the customer's desire to "hold" the potential images in their hands and on their machines. So, instead of anticipating selling physical product down the road pricing needs to be changed to reflect the fact that it's the IP that has the value, not the artifact. This means that to be profitable one must charge much higher session rates.  If you charge a sitting fee of $200 and your average print sales were $650 per customer, you might want to consider making the sitting fee something like $650,  then working with the consumer in a proofing process to select the final images and then charge a standard (profitable) fee to "complete" each image via post processing. That might include sophisticated retouching and file preparation for a number of different output scenarios. So, in effect the post production becomes the printing.

One could still offer large prints since some people will still order large family portraits for display but you'd probably be better off offering photo books since the market seems to lean more toward personal coffee table books of multiple images rather than larger, single display prints. The big sellers will be disks full of images to playback on consumers ever growing and ever improving TVs and monitors. Parenthetically, we used to sell a batch of five by seven inch prints along with every corporate head shot. It was a good profit center. We haven't sold or had a print ordered for a commercial client in probably seven years. That went away. We raised our session prices to compensate for income that's never coming back.

The benefit of making your money upfront while, for all practical purposes, jettisoning the extra labor and costs of selling, printing, shipping from labs, mounting, etc. is the certainty of good profit at the time of shooting, or shortly after. That's when consumers have the highest motivation and desire to transact.

Look, if you are a professional portrait photographer you know that the portrait you just made is going to end up on the sitter's iPad or Surface tablet and that's where it will have it's dominant "residence." You might as well get paid for that use. Because, remember....it's the vision that has value, not necessarily the paper it's printed on...

When markets shift you have choices. Sooner or later your customers will decide for you.

Mousumi.

Rarely, but sometimes, I just don't feel like writing anything and I'd rather show a photo.

The Search. It always boils down to one thing...

Rancher. Hasselblad. 150. Tri-X.

I'm not particularly suited for the field in which I find myself. At least not in the usual sense. You see, while I understand the importance, financially, of customer service and production and diligence, and creating sell-able products; I really just want to be left alone to search.  You see, I'm on the search for the perfect subject. On some level I'm totally convinced that I need to find just the right subject in order for my "genius" as a photographer to be totally understood. Widely acknowledged.  And, of course, I'm therefore on a search for just the right background or setting that will allow my subject to enable me to show off that genius. That's also a search that seems to border on infinite.

But before I can really express the unique inner vision I'll have to make sure the lighting is just right so, of course, I am on a constant and unrelenting search for just the right light. Which means I'm searching for just the right type of light. And I know I'm not there yet because that genius  hasn't leapt out and made itself known just yet. But after two decades of focused searching I have narrowed down the field a bit. The ultimate lighting, as gleaned from my reading, research and experience is either: natural light, electronic flash, tungsten, fluorescent or LED light. Or, perhaps some sort of light that hasn't been invented yet. But never fear, the search continues unabated.

The unsettling thing about the search for exactly, irrefutably, unquestionably, the right light is the fact that the moment I find just the right light I'll need to ramp up the search for just the right modifier. Because the modifier completes the light.  But that's a whole other series of blogs just waiting to be written, because, of course, I am sure there is one right modifier for the perfect light. It's all like pieces of some cosmic puzzle. But the search for the perfect modifier has to take a back seat to other, more pressing, searches in the job of expressing my genius... Like which camera to use in the high calling of creating "genius level" images to share with the world.

That's a search that seems to take most people a life time and that's a pity because the importance of the search is critical to finally being able to realize one's true visual genius. My readers will understand that the search is well underway here. I guess my strictly scientific methodology is to buy and use every camera in every category because the definition of the ultimate camera is a very subjective thing and, once we've sorted through and created a hierarchy of objective metrics I'll need to go back and work with each camera to truly parse it's immeasurable qualities.  Things like the camera's "soulfulness" or the pitch and aesthetic merit of the sound of its shutter. And, of course, whether it feels sexy enough in one's hands...

But my search for my ultimate camera---vital for the ultimate realization of my genius vision---is somewhat stymied by my search for the ultimate lens. (I know only that it cannot be a wide angle). What if my ultimate lens is only made for an un-ultimate camera? Will the promise of my potentially life altering vision be extinguished like a soaring bird shot down from the sky? Are there enough gifted optical technicians out there to convert say, an early dual range 50mm Leitz Summicron (with Lanthanum glass) with seven elements to work on the front of a Leica SL2 body, equipped with a Phase One 180 back? If they can't pull it off will my vision be in jeopardy? And will the technicians be able to retrofit an EVF into that older body?

Ah. The agony of getting everything just right and then realizing that a newer camera tests .001% better on DXO's sensor evaluation system....

But maybe I'm looking at the wrong "genius" spread sheet. Maybe the real search is one for meaning. How disappointing if my real search should be about looking for beauty in life instead of ultimate sharpness. How will I measure beauty when I find it? And how will I improve on transcendant beauty if I don't even know which lens is the right one? Or which body resonates with the beauty paradigm I finally discover?

I guess I'm destined to keep looking until I find that absolute, multi-threaded intersection of technical perfection. The search for beauty and meaning? It'll have to wait. I've got so much equipment evaluation to get through first...

Shadows and Bread.

The week has started and it's started well. I've cleaned up my studio in anticipation of an assignment that starts at noon tomorrow. Portraits. New people. One of my favorite subjects to photograph. Making my daily "bread." I've got the lighting set up already and I've tested it. I wanted to shoot the portraits with the new fluorescent lights but I've only received one and the background light doesn't arrive until Weds. (I'm so cheap, I went with the free shipping). I'm shooting with flash instead.

I've set up a Elinchrom monolight with a 60 inch Softlighter 2 as my main light. I'm using a second Elinchrom through a small 20 by 30 inch softbox on the grey paper background and another monolight into a 20 inch beauty dish, covered with diffusion, for a hair and back light. The fill is just a big, white flex reflector. I'm thinking broad and modern.

Don't know what it is about the bread shot above that I like. Maybe it's the very defined shadow against the bread and maybe it's just the look of the bread itself. Either way it's like trying to dissect a joke. When broken into its pieces it all falls apart.

Sony a850 with the nasty, old 24-105 Sony lens. I like those two pieces of gear precisely because they are NOT perfect.

Remember how cool it felt the first time you made a website?

http://kirktuck.500px.com/food_and_restaurant/

http://kirktuck.500px.com/food_and_restaurant/

We made our first website in 1998 and, of course, everything had to be hand coded. Bandwidth sucked back then so we had to make sure that every image was a tiny little jpeg that would open quickly. Once you had everything the way you wanted it on your machine you lived through various levels of agony every time you saw your site on someone else's hardware. If they weren't using the same browser that you optimized for the elements of your crafty site ended up all over the place and the type got replaced by some goo type that made your design look like crap.

Now you can just hop on the web with a bucket of images and make a quick web portfolio to share in minutes. When I finish shooting something fun I hop over to 500px and add to a gallery or build a new one. I can send the links out to potential clients pretty darn quickly.

With blogs and portfolio sites everywhere I think the traditional sturm und drang of creating a masterful website has been tamped down. Most clients just want to see the images or get the contact info. If you've done your thousand little marketing jobs right they've already seen your images in more than one place.

I'm looking into Animoto right now. Seems like a fun way to make tasty little motion bites. Do you have experience with Animoto? Would love to hear how you use it and how you market with it in the comments.

Thanks, Kirk

The photographer as a farmer. Just do the work.

Crocs for the dirty work.

It's easy to fall into the trap of comparing yourself with others. It's easy to fall into the no win situation of comparing your work with the work of everyone else's you see. Some work is exciting to look at when you first see it. Some work grows on you over time. Things you thought were exciting at first blush have a parabola of excitement. The faster you fall in love with a look, a statement or a style the faster you fall out of love. Who would want a constant diet of whipped creme or a constant display of fireworks?

Your own style is more like a marriage than a one night stand. You build trust and love over time until you get to a point where you can't conceive of any other relationship. In art, then you know you have a style. You trust the process of just doing the work. This is why, statistically, married people have a much better sex life than single people. Practice, practice, practice.

The problem with the web is that we post things and hope others will like them. When you do this you give strangers power over your work and over you. The true masters of the craft ignore everything else. They do their work and then they walk away. They do their work and then get up the next morning and do it again. They don't read the reviews. They just Practice, practice, practice.

Share your work but leave your ego at the door. Present the work and then step away. The need for approval obscures the true value of what you do. 

These statements seem like declarations but they are just reminders I write for myself. Good work, like good wine, takes time to mature. It's not a process I can hurry along just because I want to. Copying someone else's vision is the quickest way to kill mine.

The Sony a850 is a camera living in two different generations.

I recently picked up a Sony a850 camera because I'd always been intrigued by the idea that the $2000 Sony used the same basic sensor as the $8000 Nikon D3X and I wanted to see just how good it could be. I also wanted a point of reference for just how far Sony had come in camera and sensor chip design since 2009. I've been using the Sony a99 and I do love the EVF but I was wondering if I could have a good back-up camera at an absurdly low price (used = 800) which would give me the same angle of view with the same lenses.

First, the good: The body is almost perfect for my hands and for my need for a camera with personality and gravitas. It feels heavy duty and stout. Everything fits my average hand very well. The next thing I noticed was how stripped down (mercifully) and easy the menu and the interface is. So far I've looked one thing up in the owner's manual and everything else has been apparent even to a slow user like me. If you take off video, live view and all the bells and whistles from a camera and its menu you end up with a camera that's extra easy to understand and to use in the real world. And yes, the optical finder is nicely done.

This is a camera that screams at me to pick it up and make some art. Any art. Anywhere and at any time. Oh, and the battery goes on forever compared to its SLT cousins. So when you are out making art you can forego the extra battery in the pocket.

The exposure metering seems unflappable. The focus, with appropriate lenses, is fast and accurate. So, what's not to like? Well, let's circle back to that sensor for a second. Once you claw your way past ISO 800 you enter a world of noise that high end users haven't seen since......2009.
At ISO 200 everything is smooth sailing. Sharp and pretty much noise free (unless you're peeking at the shadows at 100%...). Once you head north of 800 you need to use some sort of noise reduction plug in to even get near today's sensor ball park.

The second flaw in the ointment is that the raw files from the a850 don't work well with Lightroom. I'm much happier now that I've found Aperture to be a good Sony RAW converter but in this day and age it seems a bit quaint to find a raw file that doesn't at least play in a satisfactory way with one of the flagship Adobe products. Not so great in PhotoShop either.

The flaw that renders this camera my art camera (and quells my thirst for the a900 I just saw at an enticing price) is the thing that most "old schoolers" love about it. It has an OVF. An optical viewfinder. I kept looking through that OVF and assuming that whatever I saw would be rendered pretty much the same way on the files, but it was not so. The finder only shows you the here and now of your own optical reality, through glass, not the future. The EVF on the a99 shows you the future. It shows you how your image will look with the current exposure settings and creative settings. How it will look when you get it on your big machine. That may not sound like much but it's hard to wrap your head, simultaneously, around two different philosophical implementations of time. The present and the near future. The objective and the already nuanced.

I like the a850's personality. I'll keep it around for the same reason I keep the Kodak SLR/n and the Kodak DCS 760 around. They are quirky and eccentric but on their best days they each do files that look and feel different than the cameras of the current day. And they all feel interesting in one's hands. The a850 is modern enough to operate without glitches and to give me wonderful and highly competitive files at the lower ISO's. The SLR/n does a sharpness thing that's incredible when it's shot correctly. And the DCS 760 has a wonderful color palette that no other camera seems to have.

But for all my professional work it looks like the right back up for the a99 is.....another a99. Ah well. Nice experiment.

Today the VSL Analysis Team is playing around with an interesting florescent light.

When I photographed and video'd Erin for Zach Scott a little while ago the video designer asked if I wanted them to budget the rental of some Kino Flo florescent lights in order to do our motion shots. (Kino Flo's were the first company to commercialize nicely color balanced florescent lighting fixtures for the movie industry on a big scale and they are now the "Kleenex" of florescent lights for the film industry.) I told him that I'd be comfortable in that project to use the existing LED lights we had around the studio. 

Coincidentally a reader sent me a link to some cool looking florescents lights on the web and the photographers at the Boston Museum of Fine Art showed off their set of Alzo florescent lights a few weeks ago when I was there touring the facilities. I guess I got a case come cumulative florescence on the brain because I decided to order one and check it out. Above and below is an three bank, six bulb florescent fixture from Fotodiox. I'm pretty sure it will match the performance of the ones from Alzo since they use the same bulbs....

My light arrived on Thurs. evening, just before I needed to leave for Sylvia Plachy's presentation. I just had time to stick in the tubes and turn the shebang on to make sure it worked. The light is very bright and much softer than my un-modified LEDs. One sheet of one stop RoscoLux will make the feel and look of the light just about perfect. In essence it becomes a fairly small softbox.

I'm sure the same company in China that makes the LED lights for Fotodiox (and about a dozen other resellers...) makes these fixtures. The florescent bulbs themselves are Osram tubes and are made in Italy.

I played with lots of photo lights that used compact florescent bulbs when I was writing my book on Lighting equipment but I never tested the bigger panel style lights like these and the Kinos. But the Kino Diva has always been touted as a beautiful portrait and fashion light source and that sounds right up my alley.

I'm booked on conventional assignments on Tues. and Weds. and I'm waiting for another light fixture from the same company (using the same bulbs) to arrive on Weds. pm and then I plan to do a series of color and black and white portraits with them. The second fixture uses only two bulbs and I intend to use it as a background light. One bigger main light pushed through some tasty diffusion and one smaller source to separate my portrait subject from a dark background.

Why am I curious about these when I already have LED lights? Curiosity. I've explored LEDs pretty thoroughly. This will give me a chance to compare and contrast. It should be interesting. Even more in the next round of videos.

Incorporating video into the mix. Doing art instead of commercials. Sony a99 "footage."

Erin Moves in Mad Hip Beat and Gone. from Kirk Tuck & Will van Overbeek on Vimeo.

Go directly to Vimeo via the link and see it in HD for the full flavor.

I wrote earlier this week about shooting video of an actress for projection on a giant screen. The video content was used as part of the set design and arc of the story for the Steven Dietz play, Mad Beat Hip and Gone. I just wanted to flesh out what we did and how.

As many of your know I do a lot of project work for Zach Theatre here in Austin. The production they are doing now is a play that investigates that period between World War Two and the 1960's, best exemplified by novelist, Jack Kerouac's book, On The Road. The play is about two young men who are in the car following Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassidy. It's really a wonderfully imagined play about the need for meaning and connection.

The set designer imagined a set that is framed by weathered and distress, corrugated steel. The heart of the set is really a giant projection screen some 34 feet wide and 40-some feet tall which pulses with still images providing scenery cues to video providing emotional resonances. Video designer, Colin Lowry, asked me to collaborate with him in making both still images and video that would be content for the play. We did images of the male leads that included driver's license photos and mug shots. We did silhouettes of one character's father, complete with a baseball glove. And we did slow, bittersweet video of the actress who plays the love interest of all the proto-stream-of-consciousness road poets.

To produce video that's interesting is always a challenge but much of the pressure is relieved, in this instance, by good acting on the part of the stage actors and the charismatic allure of the actress on video.

We set up a light gray seamless backdrop in the rehearsal space and it anchored the still and video work and gave it a visual consistency that held the projections together. I lit the background just enough so that it would accurately retain its tone. One broad, 5oo bulb LED panel, used directly.
We lit the actor with two 1,000 LED panels projecting through a one stop silk diffuser. We used a fourth light, a 500 bulb LED panel, as a kicker light.

I wanted to use the Sony a99 camera for the video because I was comfortable working with it, having done a number of interview and other creative projects with it, previously. I also wanted to use it because, in conjunction with a Sony 70-200mm f2.8 lens, used at f4, I could control depth of field and push out any detail in the background that might have been distracting. Amazing what you notice with forty feet of information on the long side.

Colin requested that I shoot at 24fps so I set the camera at 1/50th of second shutter speed, f4 and used the ISO to adjust for the correct exposure. When you implement fully manual exposure in the Sony a99's video mode you disable autofocus. Fine by me. I used the camera's focus peaking feature to ensure good focus under dicey conditions. It worked great.

Colin and I took turns directing and ended up with plenty of footage to pare down. Erin was a consummate pro and, since Colin wouldn't be using the camera audio, we were able to direct her verbally during the takes.

The video footage and the photographs ended up being projected digitally. And they looked incredible. The production has become a critical success already.

So today I decided that I wanted to share a bit of the video footage to show which choices I made in the creating it. I wanted inky black, dramatic shadows on opposite side of Erin's face from the main light so I used no fill. You can see the effect as she turns into the shadow.

I took the footage and did an edit in Final Cut Pro X. I  used a program called  Compressor to output the images as 1080p HD video in order to upload it to Vimeo. The music I selected is royalty free music that comes with iMovie 11 and is available across the system in the Apple OS. I'm not a sound designer and I'm sure there's better stuff to put in a music bed but you can always just turn off the sound and evaluated the visual stuff...

I am captivated by the movement and the tones as they shift across Erin's face. The video adds a really wonderful layer of context for the play. I hope you enjoy what you see here...