World turned upside down

Here's another photo of Dario and Heidi from "Segiuti."

And, I have to take some of it back. Some of what I said about the new TTL exposure flashes, specifically, my new Nikon SB-600. I shot the wedding this afternoon. I shot the pre-ceremony and post-ceremony group shots with one of my old Vivitar 283s using this setup which allows me to rotate the camera from horizontal to vertical while keeping the flash at the top. The flash is connected to the camera with an SC-17 hot shoe cable. The camera was set on manual and I could control the shutter speed to provide a proper exposure for the stained glass windows in the background while the flash gave perfect exposures to the bridal party in the foreground. Here's a sample. I didn't even need to adjust levels in photoshop for this...it's right out of the camera except for some minor cropping:

Then I went to the reception and switched to the SB-600 directly on the camera's hot shoe. I used a Sto-Fen diffuser on the flash for all the photos at the reception, sometimes direct and sometimes tilted up for bounce. The value of the TTL flash setup in that situation, which involved moving from a dark indoor hall to a sunlit outdoor deck to an enclosed tent, was immediately obvious. I could just leave the whole setup on Program TTL flash and the exposures were pretty accurate. I did have to use exposure compensation ranging from -.3 to -1 in order to keep the white wedding gown and men's white shirts from blowing out, but that was easy to do. This would have been a much bigger problem with the 283 and would have required a lot of adjustment as I moved from one situation to another...with some test shots to establish a correct exposure for each scene...it would have taken a lot of time and thought...not things that go well with doing a good job of taking photos of a wedding reception. So I'm pretty happy with the capabilities of that new SB-600 and TTL exposure.

All of these did require adjustment of levels in photoshop.

Here's one from inside:

Outside:

In the tent:

Please remember that I'm not a wedding photographer. I only do this for friends. My style of shooting is probably pretty much stuck in the 1980s which was about when I stopped shooting things like this for money.

Segiuti (To continue on)

I was in New York City a couple weeks ago to shoot a dance concert. This is the first of several photos I'll be posting from that concert. The choreographer is Dario Vaccaro, a very talented dancer and choreographer who I met at Lois Greenfield's studio in December. The name of the dance is the subject of this post, Segiuti. That's Dario in the photo along with Heidi L. Kershaw, another very talented dancer.

The performance was at the Dicapo Theater on the east side of Manhattan. I've delayed this post because I was waiting to hear from Dario. Turns out he had taken off for Puerto Rico right after the concert and did not have internet access there. He tells me his company, the Dario Vaccaro Dance Project, will probably be doing a lot of performing in Puerto Rico in the future.

Whatever he does and wherever he goes, I'm confident Dario will be very successful in the world of dance. His talent is amazing.

I'll post more photos from the concert soon. For now, here are a few words from the program about the meaning of this dance:

"Seguiti reveals the moments when change becomes a necessity. The dancers disengage themselves from reality to unveil the lonely truth of desire."

Life continues to be very busy. This week I had the great pleasure to work with Unbearable Lightness and RJ Berry when they both came here for two days of shooting. One of those days involved an "oh dark thirty" drive across the state to shoot at dawn at one of my favorite locations...one of the most beautiful locations in Ohio. I'll share something from that shoot soon.

This evening I'll be attending the rehearsal for the wedding I'm photographing tomorrow. Then I'll run in to Dayton for an opening of a show where some of my work is hanging. Wedding tomorrow, Sunday back to Athens to watch the lighting rehearsal for another dance concert, then Monday back there to shoot the concert. I might get to catch my breath then for a day or two.

And, one more technical comment. The Sto-Fen flash diffuser for a Nikon SB-25 flash will fit perfectly on a Vivitar 283. So I'm all set with strobes for the wedding. The 283 will be the primary flash with the new SB-600 as a backup. I may put the SB-600 on and use its TTL exposure mode for the reception photos...or not...

Ode to the 283

OK...this is the techie rant you were warned about. If you aren't a photographer this most likely won't mean much to you. Feel free to stop reading now. Nekkid wimmin will return to this space at some time in the near future. And some new dance photos soon, too, I hope.

Meanwhile, for those of you still reading...

I have a wedding to shoot this Saturday. Now, mind you, I don't shoot weddings. I used to. Once upon a time I had an "anything for a buck" strip mall photo studio. I shot lots of weddings. I shot seniors, families, commercial catalog photos, model portfolios...like I said, anything for a buck. When I closed that studio I swore I'd never do retail again. And I haven't.

But every once in a while someone I like or am related to...or both...asks me to do their wedding photos. I usually say yes. I don't charge anything to do it. I have to like them that well or I won't do it.

It's been a while since I did a wedding. In the old days I always took studio strobes to do the group photos. And I always worked with an assistant. These days there is no assistant and I've officially declared myself too old to drag all that stuff around at a wedding. So it's going to be on-camera flash...well, on bracket flash...I use a bracket that positions the strobe a little higher and allows me to rotate the camera from horizontal to vertical while keeping the flash in place above the camera.

These days I don't use flashes outside the studio much at all. When I'm out shooting in nature I'm not really interested in trying to force the light into some pre-conceived idea of what it should be. I'm much more interested in seeing what the light is really doing and seeing what sort of photos I can make that take advantage of that light. Sometimes this approach works very well, sometimes it fails totally. That's a fine approach for art photos, in my opinion, but not so much for a wedding. Failure is not an option.

So I started digging around in the equipment cabinet for my shoe-mount strobe stuff. Like most pros from my generation, I have used Vivitar 283 flashes a lot. I still have two of them. But, they are getting a little ragged. One only works with a hot shoe. The other only works with a sync cord. I was not feeling real comfortable about their reliability for this wedding. After all, they are 25-30 years old...might even go back to college...I don't really remember when I bought these two.

So, I naively thought I'd just go buy a new one...or if the 283 wasn't available, something similar. HA! How can it be that there are no simple, non-dedicated electronic flashes available today?

I ended up buying a Nikon SB-600. It's a nice little flash. It costs way too much money. Its manual is thicker than my camera's manual, and harder to understand. It does all kinds of neat lighting tricks that I'll never use and could care less about. The good old 283 always...yes, always...gave a perfect exposure. It didn't have to look at the film plane and communicate 47 different ways to do it. The sensor on the flash was dead on accurate. And I could just set the shutter speed I wanted to allow ambient light to register and improve the look of the photos.

I hate Nikon's dedicated strobes. I have an SB-25 that has never...yes, never...worked accurately. And it cost about 4 times what a 283 cost. And until today I'd never even been able to get it to fire on my D200. Finally figured that out as I was playing with all this stuff today.

Now I have this new dedicated flash and I think I've figured out how to turn off most of the fancy crap on it so I can control what's happening without being a computer programmer. Of course I had to pay an extra $100 just for a stinking cable to hook it up to my 30-year-old Quantum Battery 1. I think that's more than I paid for the battery. Another old piece of gear that has never missed a beat. But the adapter doesn't fit well into the SB-600 battery compartment and the velcro that came with it wasn't doing the job of holding the contacts in place...so now it has a couple heavy rubber bands wrapped around it to hold all that together. It doesn't look like there's any acceptable way to carve a notch in the battery compartment door to let the door close and the power cable come out, like I was able to do with the good old Vivitar 283s.

After all that, I think I'm still going to use a 283 for the wedding and just keep the fancy new flash as a backup in case it finally breaks. I've been looking around and it seems that some places are still selling the Vivitar 285, which was also a good strobe, though not legendary like the 283. But I've been reading that the new units that are still around seem to be poorly made and there is no support from Vivitar which has stopped making flashes. I see a few other odd little non-dedicated flashes are available, but even if I could get a Quantum cable for them, it seems silly to buy a $100 cable to power a $40 flash unit. So I guess eventually I'm going to have to try to read that SB-600 manual...or more likely hunt up a third-party manual, since Nikon can't seem to write anything about their cameras and flashes that isn't totally incomprehensible.

OK...done ranting for now. That photo is the entire kit and kaboodle (shot with the built-in flash on my D200)...I'll probably drag it all to the wedding so I have options when things break. (Yes, when, not if.)

Before and After

I'd been growing my hair and beard long for the past year. This was the longest they had been since I left college back in the 70s (seems like there was more on top back then, though...don't know what that's about). I was going for an "eccentric artist" look, but it was tending more toward "unabomber," I'm afraid. I was getting a little tired of seeing fear in stranger's eyes when I passed them on the street. Then I did an outdoor shoot early this week. Between the heat and the wind blowing my hair around, I knew it was time for a change. I don't think that career as a mall santa was really going to work out anyway.

So I went to the barber and told him to just leave an inch of hair. Now it's shorter than it has been since the army cut all my hippy hair off in 1971. I like the result. My wife, not so much. But it grows. I think this is pretty much the look I'll be keeping for a while, though. I like the lack of required maintenance.

I'll get back to posting nudes and dance photos soon. Sorry for the less attractive detour. But you may have to read a photo-technical rant first. Just fair warning.

Long week

It's been not quite a week since I got back home from my trip to NYC to photograph a dance production. In that time I've been editing those dance photos, just about full time. Today I finally finished. After the editing there were just about 1,000 photos to be photoshopped and prepared for uploading. As of about an hour ago they are all on line, ready for the choreographer to review. Once he gives his approval I'll post the link just in case some of you want to go wade through that many dance photos. I'll probably post a few of my favorites here too, to save you that trouble.

Meanwhile I seem to be unable to stop doing figure work. At least there seems to be a demand from models that I keep working at those, and who am I to say no to beautiful naked women? So I worked in one figure shoot this week and I have more scheduled over the coming two weeks. I'll share the results of those as I get time to work on the editing.

But for now, here's one from last summer in West Virginia. I hope to get back down to that wet, wild and wonderful state again this summer. For now I think I'll go lie down for a while.

Back Home

I'm back from NYC and getting caught up here at home. I have a lot of work ahead for the next couple weeks. First is editing the dance photos from the concert. I have it edited down to about 1000 shots, taken over three rehearsal performances of the dance. Those all have to be individually photoshopped for exposure and cropping. I'm going to try running Noise Ninja on them first and see how I like the results. Based on past experience it will take Noise Ninja about 24 hours to run a batch process on that many files. I'll try a few samples first to see what I think.

The concert was great. I'm very pleased with the resulting photos. And Dario says he likes the few samples I've sent to him. I'll be waiting for his approval before I post any of the photos here or in other places on the web. Hopefully that will come soon.

Meanwhile, as I mentioned in the last post, I did a shoot with Theda while I was in the city. Theda is a great model, but she tends to always be in "model mode" whenever she is in front of the camera. I told her I thought she had slipped up when I took this photo and let a little bit of the real person underneath that model exterior slip into this photo. She agreed with me. So that's a glimpse of the real woman who calls herself Theda. I'll have some Model Theda photos to share soon too.

Thanks Theda.

Another Diner

I love New York City diners. Good ones are all over the place, in every neighborhood. I'm sad that the Cheyenne Diner, which was probably the last "train car" diner in Manhattan, has closed. But I hear from Dave Rudin that it is going to be moved to Brooklyn, so it may live on in a new location.

I did a shoot with Theda, as I always try to do whenever I get to New York. After we finished we walked to a nearby diner, the Grand Canyon Diner, in Brooklyn. Here are Matt and Theda after we ate.

The dance concert shoot is going well. This afternoon is the final dress rehearsal. I shot last night and will get another go at it tonight. The dance is wonderful and the lighting is beautiful. Should have some good photos to post, but it's going to be a while before I'll be able to edit them.

Yesterday in the morning before rehearsals started I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I spent some time in the new Photo Gallery and also saw the Jasper Johns and the Poussin exhibits. Saturday I plan to go back and see the Coubert exhibit before going to the dance concert in the evening.

I've seen two shows in the Met's photo area now and I've been pretty disappointed in both of them. The both seemed to miss the mark. I wonder about the motivation of whoever is curating these shows. The main message I seem to see in them is that photography is dead and has no future as art. I, of course, disagree very strongly with that viewpoint. At this point I can't recommend the Met as a place to view photography. Try MOMA instead.

Big Apple

I'm in New York City shooting a dance concert. And having a great time. A couple model friends were in town with just a one-day overlap with my visit, so we got together for breakfast before they flew out. That's E-string and Brooke Lynne, from Minnesota, at Mike's Diner in Queens looking great on an hour and a half of sleep after playing pool with James Graham until 4 a.m. the night before.

Tomorrow night will be the first dance rehearsal with lighting. I'll take meter readings and shoot some backstage things, then shoot the dress rehearsals on Thursday and Friday. At the concert on Saturday night I won't shoot during the performance, but will go backstage after the show and shoot some photos of the celebrities who are expected to be there.

I've seen enough of the dance now to know that it is fantastic. I'm sure the reviews will be outstanding.

Working

I'm staying pretty busy trying to get everything done that needs to be done before I leave for New York next week. Today a good bit of my time was spent editing my last shoot with Theda. I'll be working with her again while I'm in the city...I always try to arrange a shoot with Theda when I go to NYC...and I wanted to give her a disk with my selections from the last shoot when I see her again.

I'm about a year and half behind on editing things I've shot. I like to let the photos sit for a while after I shoot them so I can be more objective when I edit, but I've been so busy and shooting so much that I never seem to get the time to do all the editing. Often I'll do a quick look and pick one or two favorites, but then it may be months or even years before I go back and do a thorough edit. Maybe I just need to manage my time better.

Tomorrow I'll get back to editing my recent dance photos and putting together a portfolio of those to take with me to NYC. I've contacted Lois Greenfield and hope to stop by one day while I'm there and visit with her again. I'd like to be able to show her what I've been doing with dance at Ohio University since I saw her in December.

The photo, of course, is Theda in her apartment. Last time we shot at night. I also made it an exercise in using my 50mm f/1.4, limiting myself to just that one lens for the entire shoot. I worked with available light...using the photojournalist definition "any light that is available." This trip I plan to shoot there again with daylight from the windows to get a very different look and use some different lenses for more flexibility in the space.

Time is short

And, no, I'm not talking about getting my taxes done. That was done a long time ago and the huge check I had to write this year has already cleared.

But there is a lot going on and not much time to get things done. I'll be spending next week in New York City photographing a dance company there in rehearsal. I also plan to fit in a shoot with Theda and visits with some other friends. I'm trying to get a small portfolio of my dance photos printed up to take along on this trip. And I need to do some editing on my last shoot with Theda and take her a CD of my selections. There are a couple shoots to do this week too. I'll probably get most of it done and whatever I don't finish can wait.

In May I'll be going back to Ohio University to shoot more dance there. This photo is from the first concert I shot there after I started doing dance photos again. This is Gretchen Ziolek dancing a piece she choreographed called "Kore."

The trip over to Bloomington for the Kinsey Institute juried show opening was a great time. I finally got to meet Stephen Haynes and Dave Swanson as well as the lovely model Abigail. After the opening Stephen, Dave, Abigail and I had a nice dinner at an Irish pub and then after dinner I walked over to another fine Bloomington establishment for the after party for the opening. I spent the rest of the evening talking with Catherine Johnson-Roehr, the curator of the art collection at the Kinsey Institute, and with other artists who had work in the show.

The show was a bit smaller than I had expected, but as large a show as they could manage in their small gallery space. It was a good collection of high-quality work. A much higher level of quality than the Dirty Show. Lots of very fine art with a range from very erotic to sensual. As usual with this kind of show, my piece seemed to be the most tame piece in the show. I'm ok with that.

I'm already looking forward to next year's Kinsey show and to a continuing relationship with that fine ground-breaking institution.

Kinsey Show and Travel

The opening of the Kinsey Institute Juried Show is tomorrow evening. I plan to be there. It should be interesting. Not least because I'll get to finally meet Dave Swanson and, I hope, Stephen Haynes. Stephen is in doubt, as you can read on his blog, because of the airline problems that are going on. His flight has been cancelled. He may still decide to drive down to the opening...I hope so.

I'm worried about the airline situation as well. In a week I have to go to New York City to photograph a dance company in rehearsal. I've decided to fly. I can only hope that the airline I'll be flying on will not be doing wholesale flight cancellations when my time to fly comes along.

I used to enjoy flying. Now I try to avoid it if there is any alternative. The airlines seem to have completely lost sight of their mission: to serve their passengers. I'm so old I can remember when passengers were treated well, when the seats were large enough and had enough leg room that you could actually be comfortable during a flight. I remember courteous ground and flight personnel. I can even remember good food on airplanes.

Now, flying is torture. And it's a crap shoot as far as where you will end up and whether your luggage will be there with you. The seating on airplanes should be considered a violation of the Geneva Convention. And, of course, you could starve to death on an airplane these days.

The air travel system is broken. I don't think anything short of some completely new, revolutionary system of air travel, perhaps small "air taxis" or some other different approach to moving passengers around will solve the problem. Meanwhile I'll continue to drive whenever it is an alternative.

That's the poster for the Kinsey show...not one of my photos. Come see the show tomorrow night if you are in the neighborhood.

A walk at the lake

Most days when I'm not being lazy I go to a lake at the edge of town, not far from my house, and walk. I try to do at least 3 miles. When I'm getting in shape for a photo trip that involves hiking I'll take that up to 4 and then 6 miles. There's a set of steps that go right up the face of the dam...so I also go up and down those as fast as I can several times to help keep me able to handle climbing up mountain trails.

This morning it was foggy when I got to the lake. I shot this scene with the point and shoot Casio digicam that I always carry in my pocket. Not great art, but I thought it was a nice scene.

No Joke

It's April Fools day and I got fooled. Over on Model Mayhem there was a fake message to everyone on the site telling them their account was suspended because of a complaint from Theda that they had sent her inappropriate messages. Of course, I knew that wasn't true for me, so I immediately shot off an e-mail to Theda asking her what was up. About 10 seconds later I realized what was going on and sent a follow-up "nevermind" message.

A lot of people over at Model Mayhem seem to be unable to take a joke and are taking it out on Theda. To them I'll just say, "Lighten up, people...it's a joke!"

But I was already thinking about Theda today because I just realized that Chris is back in action over at http://universdartistes.blogspot.com/ and had actually featured this photo of Theda on his great blog. I'm so glad to see that Chris is feeling better and is well enough to be back to blogging.

I really can't say enough good about Theda as a model. She has a wicked dry sense of humor too, so I'm quite certain she is enjoying this little April Fools prank. If nothing else it brought a lot of traffic to her Model Mayhem portfolio.

I shoot with Theda whenever I get a chance. Every time I've worked with her I've ended up with a photo that is in my permanent portfolio...the work that I consider my "body of work"...my life's work. Theda is a sure thing, as a model. And she is a lot of fun to be around, once you figure out how her sense of humor works.

Hats off to Theda today...and that's no joke.

edit: Theda just told me that she didn't know about this little joke and came home to a mailbox full of angry messages from people who didn't get the joke. That's a pretty nasty joke to play on Theda. I hope it generates a few photo shoots at least. She is really a wonderful model...the best figure model out there, as far as I'm concerned.

Daughter

Now your children are your children,
even when they're grown.
When they speak to you,
you got to listen to what they have to say.
But they all live alone now,
they have TVs of their own
but they keep on coming over anyway.
And much as I love them,
I'm always kind of glad when they go away.
--Randy Newman
"My Country"

I don't post much personal stuff here because that's not what I've intended this blog to be for. But I'm making an exception today. I also don't post song lyrics, but that Randy Newman song was playing while I was getting this ready and it just seemed too appropriate to not share.

My older daughter will be getting married in a couple months. She's been out on her own for a while now, but she had never cleaned out her room. Since we want to have a guest room when people come for the wedding we've had a Hazmat team in there for a while trying to find the floor and walls. Well, actually it's been my wife and her cousin who are doing all the work. When they get it cleaned out I'll be doing the sanding and painting to try to make it suitable for human habitation again.

But today we noticed this little bit of paste-on graffiti and thought it was worthy of preservation. And I thought it was enough fun to go ahead and share it with all of you. Enjoy.