Flashes of Hope, Spring 2009

I'll keep saying it because it's true: I love photographing for the Madison WI chapter of Flashes of Hope. Trudy, the coordinator, is wonderful. The kids are an inspiration to me. They're strong, resilient, sometimes joyful, but also tentative, vulnerable, uncertain; sometimes tearful, other times full of laughter. They're tired of disease and the smell of hospitals and the machines of treatment. But they're riding with it.

I love being able to participate with other volunteers to provide portraits of these kids and their families during a very difficult time for them, a season of life when the last thing they'd be doing is scheduling portrait sessions. It's a beautiful gift to them, and who wouldn't love a chance to help make and give a beautiful gift to someone who's hurting? It's a privilege.

For an afternoon, we convert a conference room in the UW Children's Hospital into a "cozy" studio (smaller by a couple feet and it almost wouldn't work) and after any special makeup or selection of wigs or hats, we make a few photographs together to record this journey. Sometimes it's just the child, other times mom or dad or grandparents or siblings join in. The child might be a year old, or a teen.

The most difficult portrait I've made in the four times I've done this so far has been a trip to a 4 year old boy's hospital room a few weeks ago, he was immobile and unable to come to the studio, after surgery on his spine that week. We made some memorable portraits I think, but it was especially difficult for me -- trying to be sensitive to the mood in the room and to his pain; not wanting to intrude or disrupt his quiet; but also wanting to make some meaningful portraits of him and his sister and mom since they had accepted the offer from FOH. I haven't posted any of those portraits, they are somehow too personal and intense for me to feel comfortable yet, portraying them here.

Setup info for anyone who cares: these portraits are all shot with one light (a White Lightning X1600) through a 47" softbox, camera left; a white reflector camera right; and in this case, far enough away from the unlit canvas backdrop (somehow, in the tiny conference room) for falloff to render it very dark or black. Triggered with Pocketwizards. I like the soft light of the big softbox. I shoot with a 50mm 1.4 or a 105mm 2.8 or a 24-70 2.8 at 70mm; in all cases usually close to wide open aperture. I focus on the near eye and let the rest fall where it may. For groups, I stop down a little to gain some depth of field. I'm going to experiment next time with the background. I process everything in Adobe Lightroom, a wonderful tool.

We keep some stuffed toys at hand, and some bubbles. One of my tricks with kids is a stretchy bouncy squeezy goofy rubber thing (quick, trademark that name) from Walgreens which I sometimes rubberband to the lens hood. With very young kids, it gives me 1-2 minutes of curiosity, smiles, maybe even laughter, directed at my lens. Then they're bored with it. :-)

So that's the tech and gear side of things, which all needs to be reliably in place, well exposed and composed, in focus. A few dozen parameters to keep in mind. But all of this needs to become second-nature, because the most important part of portrait photography is helping the subject feel comfortable with me, with the room, with the process; and inviting them to participate in making the photographs. It's an invitation for them to let their personality show, and sometimes, if they're willing, to reveal some of their feelings about this difficult road they're traveling. All of that in a 10 or 15 minute window, with a total stranger, lights and lenses.

I don't mean to speak about this like I'm an expert who has arrived or figured it out, because I'm not. I always feel like I'm still learning and still have so much more to learn. Every person comes into the room with a unique personality and emotional, psychological, spiritual and physical presence. For a photographer, this is 9% physics and science, and 91% improvisation and adaptation. (For you math zealots: the other 28% is luck.)

I'm partly afraid of this (fear can be healthy!) and partly invigorated by the challenge because I enjoy collaborating with each person to make portraits which represent who they are (love overcomes fear!). When it all comes together just right, a portrait seems to reveal something genuine about who a person is inside.

Sometimes, after they leave the room, I think about what I should have done or said differently to make the mood, the process, the experience, and the outcome even better. That's learning, and I love it. Wouldn't photography be boring if there were no fear, no failure, nothing more to learn, no more room for improvement?

If you've read this far, thanks for reading, and please share your own thoughts or questions in the comments. And check out Flashes of Hope.

Exposure vs. Brightness

iPhone contemplates its own reflection

Worldwide Photowalk - Madison (slideshow)

I posted the rest of my selects from the Madison Photowalk on Flickr. Here's a slideshow:



And a brief side note, I finally installed a Lightroom plugin for exporting to my Flickr account, direct from Lightroom. There's another one I'll try soon for exporting to Facebook from Lightroom. This will save a LOT of time and file management! The Flickr one lets you choose sets (or make a new one), set keywords, etc.

Worldwide Photowalk - Madison

Here are a few of my photographs from Scott Kelby's Worldwide Photowalk on Saturday in Madison Wisconsin. I'll post a bigger selection on Flickr soon. More observations below.

Madison Museum of Contemporary Art

My precioussss

Great music! (handheld, 1/2 second,
Martin sneaking up on the bass player)

"Talk to the hand."
This is in the running for my favorite.

So this was my first-ever photowalk. I've heard about photowalks and I've been partly intrigued and partly disinterested. The idea of walking en masse down a street with 50 photographers is not something I'm naturally drawn to.

Much of my photography is a solo venture, a lot of internal thought and instinct during my creative process, not very much of a community venture. So this was a stretch out of my comfort zone, and that's probably the main reason I participated. I was also curious about the experience, and don't like looking back at missed opportunities wishing I'd tried something.

I'm glad I did it - it was an engaging creative challenge to shoot around 450 images in two hours and end up with 50-60 that (to me) are interesting little moments and glimpses into downtown Madison and State Street. And I met some photographers, made some friends, and gained a couple new ideas for subject matter.

We had the whole gamut of photographers, from some working professionals to some point-and-shoot hobbyists. It was wonderful to see in virtually every direction someone framing and composing a little part of downtown Madison in their camera. If I could clone myself I'd spend the whole time just documenting the photographers and their encounters with people.

Moral of the story? Try anything at least once, and if it's as enjoyable and interesting as this was, plan on doing it again. I have some ideas for next year's photowalk if it works out for me to participate.

Not All Readers Are Created Equal

After delaying for no good reason, I recently bought a Lexar Firewire 800 reader, and it's fast. A little or a lot faster than the USB 2.0 transfer devices and workflow I've been used to for 8-9 years now.

My first digital images copied from a CF card, probably around 9 years ago, used a PCMCIA adaptor which took donkey's years to move files. For a short while I used a USB 1.1 reader, until I realized I could just shove bamboo splinters under my fingernails.

Things have come a long way. I did 3 quick tests today with a full 8GB Lexar Professional 300x UDMA CF Card. It had 7.44GB of images, 1,074 files (half each: JPG, Nikon NEF).

The target drive was a Seagate 1TB External Firewire 800, 7200RPM.

Here are the results, with 3 different CF readers:
Lexar Firewire 800 CF Reader = 4:34 (274 seconds)
Sandisk USB 2.0 CF Reader = 5:05 (305 seconds)
Dell LCD / USB 2.0 built-in CF Reader = 12:50 (770 seconds)

The Lexar Firewire 800 reader was 1.1 times faster than the Sandisk USB 2.0 reader (which really surprised me, I expected it to be closer to 2x) and 2.8 times faster than the DELL Monitor's built-in USB 2.0 reader. I'll not be using the built-in CF reader in the DELL any more, even though it can be very convenient.

And for reference: copying these same files directly between 2 Firewire 800 hard drives took 3:28 (208 seconds) -- 75% of the time to copy from the Lexar CF Reader to a hard drive over Firewire 800. So today's high end CF cards aren't doing to bad in terms of comparable transfer rate.

Sandisk also makes a Firewire 800 CF Reader and I have not tested it, I would expect it to be comparable to the speed of Lexar's reader. I think Rob Galbraith has done some comparisons on these (is there anything he's not compared?) but I've not studied them.

Now I'll be honest, 4.5 minutes still seems like a long time to wait, copying files off an 8GB card. If you have four full 8GB cards from a shoot, even with Firewire 800 that would be about 20 minutes of transfer time... waiting.

I realize this sounds impatient. I'm simply making the point that anything which has us waiting for the computer is by definition a workflow bottleneck, in this case partly caused by the growing data size of today's digital images, and partly caused by the current limitations of bandwidth constraints.

For now, I'll happily take a speed increase factor of 1.1 or 2.8.

And, contrary to my expectations Sandisk's USB 2.0 reader is only 10% slower than the Firewire 800 reader, making it still a very good option. I like to have an extra CF reader handy in my camera bag and light kit.

Madison Aerial Sunset

Yesterday I did some aerial photography of the downtown Madison skyline at sunset. I could do this every day, no complaints.

For anyone unfamiliar with Madison: Monona Bay on the left, Lake Monona on the right, Lake Mendota on the horizon, and the Capitol building on the right, on the Isthmus. And the other tall building near the middle is Van Hise (UW Madison) where I studied Arabic and Hindi. :-)