Photo Copyright Gary Gardiner - SmallTown Stock

Several discussions took place this week between myself and a few friends. Not all were professional photographers. Nor were they artists or designers. All called themselves photographers because they owned digital SLRs and had sold some of their photos which they thought placed them among those of us who make our livings from photography.

Scientific America, in a 2006 article, used a California State University, Fullerton professor’s anthropological study of chess to help explain how experts are created.

Chess has its own criteria for determining a player’s placement in the hierarchy of experts. A major factor in the rating system is assessing expertise on performance rather than reputation. The results are remarkably accurate according to the magazine with winners easily predetermined by comparing their rating scores. However, one player’s progress to a higher rating came from stronger structural knowledge of the game and less analysis of each possible move.

Owning a digital SLR instead of a film camera automatically removes barriers that prevented most people from acquiring more knowledge about photographic craft. Instant results viewable on a small LCD screen instead of waiting for processed slide film can accelerate the learning curve making it easier to gain the structural knowledge necessary for creative success. Failure becomes immediately measurable and correctable without additional monetary cost. On-screen analysis of technique and results quickly advances the body of skills necessary to advance to a better understanding of the craft. It doesn’t guarantee success, just more knowledge.

Photo Copyright Gary Gardiner - SmallTown Stock

Moore’s Law that computer power doubling every 18 months has proven quite accurate. Especially when each successive high-end computer-driven digital camera has faster processors, more memory, better ergonomics, and greater resolution. Just as stronger, faster, and cheaper computers has rapidly changed how society communicates, works, and learns, digital camera advancements will continue to make it easier for people to become photographers.

Precocity among this new group of “creatives” undercuts the value of photographic masters who’ve accumulated much greater structural knowledge of the skills and techniques required for creative and business success. Owning and using the greatest in technology doesn’t make one an expert or allow them to excel at the craft. My #2 pencil, among the lowest example of technological achievements, is nothing more than wood and charcoal in my hands. In the hands of David Meyer, an artist friend, it is a tool for artistic success.

Herbert A. Simon’s psychological law that it takes ten years of study to become expert in a field strengthens the argument. Studies of Mozart’s designation as a child prodigy indicate that his earliest works were heavily corrected by his father, himself a composer, and that even his earliest serious works were derivative, not original.

Determining success may be measured by a variety of factors from financial to artistic. For professional photographers, that measure has become financial as advanced amateurs and semi-pros gather extended knowledge and experience.

The challenge for pro photographers becomes how to separate themselves from this new group of talented, expressive, creative people who are quickly accumulating the skills to challenge our business.

“Without a demonstrably immense superiority in skill over the novice, there can be no true experts, only laypeople with imposing credentials. Such, alas, are all too common.” – Scientific America

Photo Copyright Gary Gardiner - SmallTown Stock

The request was simple. The execution slightly complex. The results certainly worth the effort.

The client, a furniture store, wanted several strong images to showcase how its furniture looked in a home instead of the cyclorama white wall in a studio.

The chosen home’s original furnishings were replaced with a selection of pieces that complemented each other and the home’s color scheme.

There were only a few restrictions, all centered on budget and time. The budget was fixed and too small for a full complement of focused strobes with grids, snoots, and shaping tools to light the room in one gigantic explosion of light. And, the furniture had to be removed by the end of the day so the family could return home to its normal routine.

The only choice was Strobist glory.

This photo combines nine separate images lit with one SB800 using a either a Honl snoot, an Ezy-Box, a straight strobe or a single bare tube. All but one of the frames were shot using strobe on a stick with Nikon D300 CLS lighting. The assistant, who earlier hauled in all the furniture, balanced atop a step ladder, leaned over the second floor balcony railing or stood an arm’s length away holding the strobe on a stick.

The doorway at left was covered with a Photoflex translucent panel to soften the light entering the room.

Although it isn’t perfect, it met the client’s need for budget and speed. And, I learned a little more about Nikon CLS, Photoshop layering, RAW conversions, and how lighting can effect the mood of a room.

A larger version

One Man’s Decision

I have a print of Jeff Widener’s iconic photo of an unknown Chinese man carrying shopping bags stopping the advance of a column of tanks as the military completed its crushing of pro-democracy rallies in Tiananmen Square. My grandchildren do not understand its importance or the signficance of one man’s decision to calmly place himself in harm’s way at the head of a rumbling column of steel. There was little the world could do as it watched Communist China’s bloody ending of student and dissident attempts at freedom and a lone man’s decision to defy his country’s military power being used against its own people. [ New York Times ]

Effective use of a Canon G9 in closeup mode. The EXIF info contains all the camera particulars.

Pulled the RAW file into Adobe Camera Raw for the first edit. Modified saturation, vignette, fill light, and graduated filter to darken the top edge. Second edit increased fill light for the stem.

From today’s commercial shoot of furniture for a catalog. This frame is the splash page image for beds and bedding.

Had access to multiple lighting sources, multiple studio flash with all sorts of light modifiers, soft boxes, umbrellas, light panels, and scrims. But, being the simple Strobist fan, I decided to finish the day with two SB800s using Nikon CLS, with a couple of Strobist-style modifiers.

The light at right has an SB800 with a round globe modifier. This is similar to the Gary Fong modifier but much simpler. It’s a translucent globe that fits over the end of the SB800 like a paper lantern. Perfect for simulating the light from the lamp.

The light at left is an SB800 on a stick with a set of barn doors to narrow the light to simulate a reading light on the head of the bed.

Part of my Labor Day was walking through Barnes and Noble with family, watching the grandkid’s excitement at every book they found. It was a relaxing time as I enjoyed a 6-year-old’s feverish search for the best books he could find for his reading level and hi solder sister’s rediscovery of books she’d found at six.

I never go to the bookstore without investigating two aspects of the publishing industry.

How many catch lights in the eyes of the models on the magazines published for women and what is the source and who is the photographer for the most recently published books? I can’t even enjoy a simple day at the bookstore with my family without exploring good photography and advanced techniques.

Later, when I went out for the daily photo shoot, the covers of books was on my mind as I watched two fishermen “drowning worms” in a familiar inlet on Hoover Reservoir.

I’s purposely carried only my Canon G9 to simplify my photo search with the limitations of a point and shoot camera. The restriction can be liberating although it takes a radical mindset to think that less is more.

I’ve often seen the tips of inverted rods with plastic lines passing through the final eyelet. This particular arrangement of color and background with light focused through the open space above a thin inlet at sunset seemed perfect for a book cover photo.

G9, 7.4mm, f3.5, macro focus, ISO200, -4/3 exposure, RAW, ACR, blacks increased, slight vignette.

I’ve waited several weeks to shoot this photo yet it is not what I intended when I began.

The original plan was an interior photo, looking out through the windows on the third floor of the Holmes Hotel in Uptown Westerville, with the restoration workers on ladders scraping old paint or applying new to the exterior of the landmark.

I had already taken numerous photos from street level and from the third floor across the street as the building was prepped and painted. What I wanted was a different angle showing Uptown in the background with the painters framed from inside in the windows.

Once inside, which took some leg work, the angles were all wrong. Even with the 14-24mm on the D300, the workers were too close to the windows for a foreground emphasis angle and the third floor level too high to get the cityscape without tilting the camera making the windows keystone. The best angle was leaning out an open window as the painter worked in shadows for a near silhouette.

The image had to be taken in the afternoon because the building owner didn’t open his shop until 2:00 pm which was the earliest I could get the key for the empty third floor offices.

So out the window I leaned, compensating for the shadows and fearing the bright highlights in the full sun by dialing down the exposure. It darkened the shadows a bit but they were recoverable in ACR.

There are only three cherry tomato plants in our small garden yet they produce as if they are ten times that number. I do nothing to hasten the plants grown or speed up their ripening. There’s no regular application of fertilizer. No consistent spraying of insecticide or herbicide. The only moisture the roots receive is natural from beneath the mulch layer applied at their plantings. I don’t sing to them, pray over them, threaten them with uprooting, or waste their produce. Yet they grow so prolific that I can’t eat them fast enough to keep up. It’s even difficult picking them fast enough to prevent splitting with too rapid growth. I’m tired of salads. You can eat just so many cherry tomatoes like grapes before it begins to affect the intestinal tract. I know.

The next best thing to eating all these tomatoes it to make them the photo subject for the day. I’ll eat them later, with olive oil, basil, pork roast from the slow cooker, fresh carrots, yeast rolls with butter, and sweet iced tea. Maybe some of the fresh corn although there’s less of it and it’s almost gone.

Technical stuff: Natural light near sunset. Open shade with shafts of light moving through the trees. Slight fill from wall of nearby house in sunlight. My front yard is a great place in the late afternoon.

Football Friday Night High School Football with a Canon G9 instead of a Nikon D300 - Photo by Gary Gardiner/SmallTown Stock

It was going to be a simple evening of high school football. Me and a couple of grandchildren at the season opener. I no longer shoot high school football, or most high school sports. There are plenty of photographers who love the low wages, the requirements for fast, expensive lenses, and dark stadiums.

I did take my Canon G9, the one with screws missing and, from what I’ve been told by too many camera technicians is impossible, a dust ball on the sensor.

I was taking it only for protection. My condom against disaster.

As luck would have it, disaster struck. It was a minor disaster. Still, it wasn’t  what was planned.

Before the game teams could take the field for pre-game ceremonies and final warmups, a very large and threatening storm front moved across the city prematurely darkening the skies and filling the early night air with lightning.

The crowd was wisely advised to go into the school until the storm passed. Like most news photographers I remained outside ready for lightning strikes or tornadic winds. My Palm Pre browser, viewing the mobile weather.com site,  showed me it would be some time before the game would start, if at all.

The problem was I was holding only the G9. It’s a fine camera but the camera’s higher ISO settings and poor shadow performance meant I’d not be too successful getting a lightning photo or emotional crowd shot. I alsodidn’t have a tripod, almost a necessity for a night lightning photo.

I had to prop the G9 on fence posts, light poles, brick corner posts, and the soccer goal. None were sturdy enough for long exposures, especially with my hands as the other steady anchor points.

I changed my work process to exclude lightning photos and concentrate on the roiling clouds as they moved over the stadium. Even then I was limited by the G9’s limited wide angle view the prevented deep verticals. The widest vertical I could get didn’t include a good compositional element with the stadium and the lights at the base.  I couldn’t back up any further. I was already shooting through a chain link fence at the edge of the parking lot.

I shot away, G9 at the ready, noisy, slow, too narrow a view, and missing screws.

Even then, the resulting photo wasn’t bad. I was just not happy that it could have been with a D300, 14-24, and a tripod.