Good energy... Melisssa continues to inspire

I think I mentioned a few entries ago that my friend Melissa was in from California and we got a chance to get together and have a brief shoot. I not only love to photograph her, because the images always turn out so well, but also because she always recharges my soul a little bit and that's quite a nice bonus.

Here's are two images from that shoot. Thanks Melissa!

"The problem's plain to see... too much technology."

Remember paper... sorry I've been gone so long. Updated my computer and lost the ability to blog for a while. But after lots of troubleshooting, I'm back. Could have been back sooner if I wanted to start over... but I didn't want to, so I just waited until I could figure out how to get everything back.

So this really won't be an entry about photography except that I already have two shoots lined up for this month, which doesn't seem like a lot, but considering how busy I've been lately trying to play catch up, that's really not bad.

A break for the Cubs... and then a flourish of work this weekend...

It seems that I am no different from the rest of the city of Chicago in that since the Cubs have reached the playoffs this October, I have been very distracted. Whether you're a Cubs fan or not, you can't ignore the historical significance, at least from a sports point of view, of what the Cubs have done thus far, and with any luck will continue to do as the playoffs continue into the World Series. And so I've been watching a lot of baseball. It's been a bit exciting.

So back to this weekend. I had a great shoot on Friday with a tremendous friend and muse Melissa Muñiz who was in town for a few days from California. I'm always inspired when I work with her and this evening was no different.

One of the frustrations I've had with shooting digital, which I've been doing a lot lately, is that I'm stuck with the color image. Since I really like B&W, it's not just as easy as turning the color off on the digital file and expect it to look like fine art black and white. It's the same reason I wouldn't shoot color film if my intention was to make a B&W image. The chemicals on the color film react in a way that to me, muddies the crispness of the image when I try to print it in B&W.

So I've been doing a lot of experimenting and reading and research, but up until this weekend, I would say that I've been fairly unsuccessful. As I said before, just clicking the grayscale button in photoshop does not create a pleasing B&W photograph from a color digital file. Without getting into the technical details, a color digital file is actually made up of three channels, red, blue and green. They are actually recorded in the file as three B&W files. So by looking at each of these files individually, it's surprising to see what each color channel "sees." It's also interesting to see what increasing and decreasing the levels of each color does in relationship to each other in the B&W color space. Here's an example of a digital file I took in August up in Canada that is my first successful conversion of a color digital file to B&W.



This to me looks like a real B&W photograph, not a color digital photograph with the color turned off. I'm happy with it. Maybe today or tomorrow I'll post more of the work I did over the weekend with Melissa. It was really fun and we both sat down afterwards and since the digital files were instantly available, we went though them all and played with color and made some B&W using some of the new settings I had been experimenting with. It was really a great experience, and I'm not sure what time she ended up heading back to her hotel, but it was quite late and I was exhausted, but very happy.

This week, I'll process the B&W film that we also shot at the same time. And it will be interesting to see what those images will be like. In the past, I felt that digital might be a bit of a compromise. This is the first time though, that I feel my skill in working with digital has improved to the point that I can make a better comparison of shooting with film or digital. Working with digital in many respects is EXACTLY like working with film in that, only half of the process of making an image is the moment you click the shutter. The other half is making the print in the darkroom and all of the decisions that can be made there involving contrast and tone and dodging and burning. Except now, the darkroom is Photoshop on my computer. And the second half of the image making process is no less important here than it is in the print world. An obvious lesson, perhaps. But I think it's easy to be swayed by idea that digital is faster and instant and easy. If you're goal is to make an average image, it is. But if you want to make fine art, it's a skill like any of the other disciplines.

I'm very excited to have made that connection this weekend.

jim visits and we compare RAW files

The fact that the Cubs have made it to the playoffs has been a little distracting lately. I'm usually much more focused on getting work done well into the wee hours. But I've found myself in front of the TV a lot and even though I have a computer and scanners and piles of negatives to input.... the game calls.

But tonight, I had my friend Jim over who, like me, has recently entered the digital world of photography after being a pure film guy for years. I went Nikon and he went Canon, so tonight we compared RAW files from our cameras and discussed lenses and sharpness and shutter speeds and I must say it's all so much easier to analyze what went right and wrong with the photographs with all the camera information tagged into each RAW file. We can see, for instance, that one of the reasons an image is a little soft is that the shutter speed was probably a little too slow for the long focal length of the lens. We all know that, but it's great to have the camera keep track of that for you rather than scratching your head trying to remember what you were doing in the heat of the moment.

Other than that, not as much progress as I'd like to be making with my photography the last few days. But how often are the Cubs, and the Red Sox for that matter, in the playoffs.



An image Jim and I were playing with tonight. I originally shot it at a very low resolution on a Nikon CoolPix digital camera I borrowed from my friend Mark. It was my first outing with a digital camera and Jim and I were experimenting tonight with Genuine Fractals to see if it could be blown up enough to have a decent print made out of it. I think we can. This photograph was made last January from my sleeping car on the California Zephyr, on the way into the Colorado Rockies.