Doc Diaries: On Reflection

There have been a great many photographers who loved being behind the camera, but who were hesitant to have their own pictures taken. For whatever reason, I have never been that way. And while talking to a friend recently, it occurred to me that looking back on my history of self-portraits, and the cameras that took them, might reveal something about how my style and perspective have changed over the years. None of these images is cropped; they are all complete frames.

I consider the real start of my photographic journey to be late 2002, when I was gifted a Sony DSC-P31 for Christmas. The settings were all auto, there was no usable zoom, and there were no real manual controls.

That was a generation before selfies, front-facing cameras, and articulating screens, and it took me a few months before I finally turned the lens on myself, and then a few more before I produced this shot. This was one of the first self-portraits that showed the seeds of how I would go on to capture myself in the 16 years since.

I think that during my earlier years, the self-portraits that I took were mainly incidental — I happened to be a convenient subject to experiment on — but I don't think I had any real documentary intent for them.

Doc Diaries: Aesthetics and Storytelling at the Stanford Invitational (part 2)

I mentioned in part 1 that it's important to take some time before the meet to make guiding decisions about the general shape of the coverage. As a documentary photographer, I always feel a sense of duality between my aesthetic decisions and my storytelling decisions — they're almost inseparably intertwined. And as much as I love to make beautiful images, my actual aspiration is to make images whose aesthetics support the meaning that they're trying to convey. For track and field, beauty is often, but not always, the tool of choice.

Portfolio Brainstormin'

As I've been working to update my portfolio for the first time since 2013 (when I took this picture), it's again occurring to me that the traditional sense of a portfolio as a collection of images-that-stand-alone doesn't really fit the kind of work I do. I feel like my dedication to storytelling and my focus on everyday moments are two distinguishing traits of my work. I try to get the aesthetics and style down as well, but I feel like they're less central to what I do.

But presenting those characteristics as part of an online portfolio still seems challenging. Among other things, phone screen aspect ratios make it challenging to lay out images and text together, such that the text is legible and the details of the image are still visible.

Long Day in the Studio

Yesterday, my Lovely assistant and I spent all day in the studio, working through the majority of the remaining images for my Photos of Prints project. We finally finished the last one (the snail, 24"x36") at 11:00 in the evening, and that's when things started getting a little silly.

I was really happy with how things turned out. I had only just finished the second version of the print hanging fixture that morning, and it worked fantastically. Which is nice, because those framed 24"x36" prints are heavy. We managed to get through 20 images — the 17 from my Music at Google exhibition, Mondrian Salt Flats, ENDIKA, and Keep Calm, Carry On (aka the snail :o).

Beyond that, I had an opportunity to use the amazing Coastal Optics UV-VIS-IR 60mm f/4 Apo Macro lens. As mentioned in the prior post, I had noticed some color fringing and optical distortion that I wanted to try to fix. Aligning things more carefully helped a lot with the keystoning, and the Coastal Optics did a number on the other problems. This is probably the only opportunity I'll have to shoot with one, so I'm glad everything came together. Thank you to the anonymous benefactor who let me borrow the lens.

An Ongoing Project: Photos of Prints

After having collected a startling amount of print inventory over the last couple years, I've started working on taking photographs of my prints in an effort to sell some of the inventory. Because I can't damage any walls of the studio, and because I wanted the images to "float" against a white background, I ended up designing and building a custom fixture to hold the prints to be photographed.

After finishing a prototype, I took the rig for a trial run, in what was my first time setting up and using studio strobes. I ended up using a ~7-foot octa as the key light, with some (not enough) reflected fill from the bottom. The other two lights are to (left) blow out the background, and (lower-right) blow out the sheet of paper hiding the exposed portion of the stand.

Nearly all of the pieces to be photographed are custom-framed, and thus are reasonably expensive and time-consuming to replace (and some are one-of-a-kind), so a combination of redundancy and over-provisioning was the name of the game. My spec for the system was to handle a 40-pound frame with near-zero chance of the frame ending up on the ground. The heaviest pieces I've done so far, two 24"x36" pieces with glass, should still fit within that envelope, and at this point I'm pretty confident that the system would be able to handle a minor earthquake without issue.

In the prototype, the two main pieces of wood are attached with two small bolts per plank, with a metal framing bracket actually connecting them. The final version will have a pair of brackets, tied together with three bolts, and holding the end of the horizontal plank flush against the back of the vertical plank.

The dowel is intended to locate the fixture both laterally and longitudinally in the head of the work stand. The stand's clamp closes on the dowel to prevent it from moving, and the dowel is again attached to the horizontal plank with bolts. The dowel is slightly wider than the planks themselves, which gives the setup plenty of strength to withstand any yaw forces.

Finally, the black thing near the left of the fixture is a self-tightening strap to lock the pitch of the fixture relative to the head of the workstand. The final version will need adjustable pitch (even if just using some shims and the same strap) to make it easier to square the face of the print to the orientation of the camera sensor.

Oh! I should note that I picked the Spin Doctor Pro G3 bike stand for its combination of portability, stability, robustness, and low cost. The large-diameter tubes are plenty rigid, and all of load-bearing components (including clamps) are constructed from metal.

This is the face of the carrier fixture. The wire hangers are rated for 30lbs each, and given their shape, are extremely unlikely to fail in the first place. For the final, I'll need to remember how to drive a nail ;o) I also did a poor job of laterally centering the fixture on the bike stand, but it seemed to make little difference. Even with the current two-bolt arrangement, the setup has plenty of roll stiffness and stability, thanks in large part to the ability to clamp the dowel.

This also shows the simple paper setup used to hide the central tube of the work stand. That sheet of paper is the "magic" of the floating effect, yet is probably the simplest part of the entire contraption.

This was the first image that I tried. On the plus side, the color tones of the print itself are great; this is the best it's ever looked, and demonstrates how it would look in a properly-lit environment. Beyond that, the lighting setup does a good job of conveying the rounded shape of the frame, especially in the top half.

In what would become a repeating theme for that session, the bottom half of the frame is under-lit, and consequently looks flat and lacks detail. Moreover, the frame looks decidedly non-rectangular. I wouldn't be surprised if this particular frame were out-of-square, but that appearance is definitely exaggerated by some keystoning (that is, the print and the camera aren't properly aligned).

Finally, the background light level wasn't set properly, and so the background isn't fully overexposed in this shot — with a good monitor, you can differentiate the sheet of paper from the backdrop.

This was the second image, and the lighting here definitely needs some work. The defining feature of this frame moulding is the combination of a matte-black exterior with a shiny piano-black interior. I managed to get a little light on the bottom of the frame with a reflector, but it's still got no real depth. I also need to add another light somewhere to illuminate the shiny surface of the piano-black band.

From a slightly more technical perspective, there's some combination of keystoning and pincushion distortion, as well as some chromatic aberration at the edges of the frame. Shooting with a macro/micro prime lens rather than a general-purpose zoom should clean a lot of this up, especially stopped all the way down to f/5.6 or f/8.

I again had some trouble with the lighting on this shot. The top-right corner is too hot, which is most apparent in the overexposure of the cream-colored mat. The colors of the print are generally pretty good, but as the light falls off from the top-right corner to the bottom-left, so does the color saturation. The frame is a tiny bit too hot in the top-right corner, but is under-lit almost everywhere else. Oh, well…

Welp, that's my journey so far. It's been pretty educational for me, and I hope y'all learned a little as well. Until next time

Overwhelmed

I don't think of myself as a landscape photographer, but every once in awhile I'll see a stunning vista, and I somehow manage to capture not just the view, but the feeling of having been there. This is one of those images.

After departing Half Moon Bay, I was driving up through dense fog on CA92, when suddenly the fog cleared. At the ridgeline, I turned south along Skyline Boulevard and was immediately stunned by the scene to the west. It was just dim fog from below, but what I saw from above was an undulating mass of clouds, stretching as far as the eye could see.

But even more, as I stood there watching, the fog was slowly rising toward me, sloshing around like the water in an occupied bathtub. It was such a unique, unforgettable feeling, to simultaneously experience the tranquility of a beautiful sunset alongside the the excitement of a gigantic wave of moisture rising to wash over you and engulf you completely. It's like nothing I've ever experienced before.

Yet somehow, I managed to capture that mix of emotions. Perched precariously atop a guard-rail, I was able to peek over the looming, advancing clouds in the foreground to also capture a glimpse of the still-turbulent mass in the midground, all beneath a beautiful, tranquil sunset in the distance. A shadowy hint of the California shrubs and wildflowers that populate the mountain keep the image firmly anchored in reality.

If it seems like I'm excited about this image, that's because I am :o) If you're also excited about this image — perhaps you've tried to explain to someone just what fog can look like rolling over a mountaintop, or maybe you just want that feeling in your own home — I urge you to consider a print. An image like this is best enjoyed when it's larger than your head. After all, part of why nature is so awesome is that it's Just… So… Huge… A fantastic print can recreate that feeling in ways that go far beyond seeing a small image on a computer. Contact me at prints@doppler-photo.net

As for me, I know exactly where my own copies of "Overwhelmed" and "Fluid Dynamics" are going :o)

All good things come to an end

After 4.5 months up on the wall, my Music at Google exhibition has come down. It was a good run, and people seemed to enjoy it; time to move on.

As a reminder, the signed, dated, and framed original prints are for sale for $350 apiece (or $500 for the title image). Each image portrays a uniquely intimate moment with a great musician, and each captures a different way that the Google concert environment helps you get to know the performer. These aren't just celebrities you see on stage at a distance, they're people who have personalities, who shoot hoops, who laugh at your jokes, and who strive to connect and identify with you.

I have tried to capture a hidden glimpse of those personalities in each photo. As my idol Yousuf Karsh once said, "Within every man and woman a secret is hidden, and as a photographer it is my task to reveal it if I can. The revelation, if it comes at all, will come in a small fraction of a second with an unconscious gesture, a gleam of the eye, a brief lifting of the mask that all humans wear to conceal their innermost selves from the world. In that fleeting interval of opportunity the photographer must act or lose his prize."

I hope you will agree that every image from this exhibition is a prize. Click here to see the online version of the exhibition, and send me an email at prints@doppler-photo.net to inquire about a piece. Each image was professionally printed, matted, and framed in the Bay Area. The title image is 2 feet tall and 3 feet wide (24"x36", not including mat and frame), and the story images are each 1⅓ feet tall and 2 feet wide (16"x24").

On Printing (Print On)

Very nearly a year ago, I mentioned in a post on this very blog that I was hunting for ways to make my photography foot its own bill. I mentioned at the time that I was looking into stock photo sites like Photo Shelter, as well as online print houses such as MPix. Quite fittingly, this printing press photo was one of the images that appeared in that post.

In the time between then and now, I've done a lot of reading, a lot of research, and even some soul-searching. This past Sunday, I came up with a plan. Now, the plan is in action.

So here's how this goes. The images are now links. If you like a photo, or if you want to see a bigger version, just click it. You end up at a place where you can see larger versions, get prints, or possibly just browse through the photos without having to jump from post to post. My other gallery will remain as a place to see photos in high volume. This new site will be a place to see them in high quality.

To get a print, click the photo here, then look for the "Add to Cart" button in the top-right corner of the screen or in the pop-up menu of the image on that page. You'll then be able to pick paper size, quantity, finishing options (like mounting and framing), and all that jazz. Checkout is quick and easy; you don't have to get an account to buy things, and can pay with a credit card or PayPal. And to give you an idea, a few prices are $2/$4 for a 4x6, $6 for a 5x7, and $8 for an 8x10. I might end up changing things around a bit, though; feel free to complain.

If you're interested in a photo I don't have up, just send me an email or leave a comment, and I'll do my best to have it up in the Requests gallery within 24 hours. I keep almost every photo I've ever taken, so feel free to ask about photos I may have shot for The Tech, or even before that. Also note that I've only gotten through the July and August blog photos so far. I'll be working to get through the rest of them in reverse chronological order throughout the next week or so.

*Phew* It's been a long time coming. If you're interested, there are more details below. Either way, I really like this quote from Magnum photographer Elliott Erwitt, "I guess if you take a picture and you want to have a certain meaning, and people get that meaning, that's nice. Otherwise people can like my photos on any level and I'm happy."

This is a photo of Graham Ramsay, an artist and a mentor to many, and one of my photographic mentors for a few years, now. Here, he's looking through some medium-format negatives that a friend, Biyeun, had shot during her time in Uganda.

Now, the gory details: As part of my research, I ordered around 40 prints from the MPix lab, including a couple 12"x18"s, on Thursday evening, 18 December. That's only a week before Christmas. MPix whipped through the prints on Friday and shipped them out that same day. I had the prints in hand Monday morning, with hours and hours to spare before I left the country that evening.

So MPix is incredibly timely. Beyond that, the prints were stunning, and the packaging was fantastic. It was more than sufficient to give me confidence that anything I order will arrive in perfect shape, but also not so bulky as to be wasteful.

Around the same time, I saw an email that MPix was teaming up with Zenfolio to provide a gallery solution for photographers. I failed to put two and two together and look into Zenfolio until a few weeks ago, which was a major oversight.

When I finally looked, I was set to dismiss it when I saw this amazing waterdrop photo on their homepage. I looked to see if the photographer had other nice photos (he does), and the interface sort of grew on me. The site is super-slick, incredibly well-thought-out, and fast. It does what you need and gets out of your way.

So this past Sunday, I started thinking that Zenfolio might be for me. I searched around a bit and all I could find were rave reviews, including one back from 2006. In addition to seeing that they were well-liked, it was also reassuring to learn that they've been in business for at least a couple years, now. That same night, I got an account, messed around a bit, and have been frantically processing and uploading large versions of the blog photos since then. There are a lot more nights of frenzied photo-editing ahead, but at least for this first milestone, the end is in sight.

"Just don't give up trying to do what you really want to do. Where there is love and inspiration, I don't think you can go wrong."
—Ella Fitzgerald