Photo Traveler

More Fun at Home….

Bob — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 03:50:30 +0000

Photo © Bob Krist

Well, I know this is supposed to be a travel photography blog, and I have been traveling lately (but again, can’t show the results just yet due to legal issues), but I am having a stone-cold blast working on my “New Hope: In Character” community portrait project.

New Hope, or Coryell’s Ferry as it was called at the time, was the place where Washington and his men crossed the Delaware to defeat the Hessians and the Brits in Trenton on Christmas Day all those years ago.

These guys re-enact that crossing every Christmas Day here in Bucks County. They get in those longboats, and unless the river is choked with ice, they row across Delaware come hell or high water. It’s an amazing sight to see and a Christmas morning tradition in these parts.

Now, I don’t want to say that they take their roles seriously, but some of the guys who re-enact the crossing had ancestors who were actually involved in the original crossing three hundred years ago. Can you say, “tradition?”

I was so appreciative that these gentlemen decided to come up and participate in this portrait project. In these parts, these guys are almost as famous as the men they are embodying.

For a look at the lighting setup, hit the jump.

Photo © Bob Krist

It’s the same basic lighting I’ve been using all along. One DynaLite 400 Uni Jr. into a 4×6 foot Photoflex softbox. A black cutter card right behind the box to keep some light off the 12 foot painted canvas background. And two 4×6 Litepanels with white coverings as fill cards. Behind the fill cards, I’ve got another grid spotted Uni 400JR hitting the background to create some separation.

And here’s the painting that started it all. As an historical aside, the flag in the painting did not exist when Washington actually crossed the river. More than likely, they had the flag that is depicted in my photograph, not the original painting! Who says photographs lie?

Tales of Customer Service Continued….

Bob — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 03:27:10 +0000

Time for more of the copyrighted feature, “Tales of Customer Service.” Actually, I’m ripping this concept off from another copyrighted feature, “Tales of Airport Security,” from Harry Shearer’s excellent weekly radio program “Le Show”on NPR. If you haven’t caught Harry when he’s not being Mr. Burns, Smithers, or the guy in Spinal Tap, you should catch Le Show.

First, the good news.

The guys at Camera Bits, creators of the best and fastest image browser in the universe, Photo Mechanic, continue to innovate, and to provide the best damn software support in the industry.

If you have a glitch or a hitch with a new version of PM, and you report it, you’ll get personal responses, and advice, from not one, but a bunch of different guys from Camera Bits, and your problem will be solved, post haste. No case numbers, no bizarre reporting rituals, no bullshit runarounds. Just solid answers and personal service.

If Photo Mechanic wasn’t already the best browser in the business, I would still follow these guys into the jaws of hell, just on the strength of their concern and followup with their customers.

Alas, for every great, there’s a grunt. And in the world of self-publishing, that grunt is Lulu.

I’ve been publishing my book, 101 Tips for Travel Photographers, with Lulu for some time now, and have not had a problem with quality control. Peggy, on the other hand, just wrote and published a book called On His Way Home, about our son, Jonathan, and her experience has not been a happy one.

On her first shipment of 100 books, 83 had smeared pages and blotched pictures. When we reported it, we got case numbers, order numbers, incident numbers and a couple weeks later, instructions to send pictures of the flaws. We snapped jpegs of several pages in a few books, and sent them off.

No response for another 10 days, then a report. We were supposed to line up all the books and photograph the flaws of all the books in one picture, one picture of each flaw in 80+ books!

Are you f’ing kidding me?

Now, I’m no still life photographer, but if you had to line up and open 83 6″x9″ books and photograph page spreads in one shot, you’d have to use a gigapan to get enough resolution to show the actual flaws.

This is a level of customer service bullshit the audacity and stupidity of which beggars belief.

Nobody messes with Peggy, so she packed up the 83 books and shipped them back to Lulu. Now they can get first hand views of the flaws. And we’re shopping for another publisher, needless to say.

Got a tale of customer service? Vent it here in the comments….it’s therapeutic!

UPDATE: After receiving the books themselves, the customer support folks at Lulu say they are going to issue a refund for all the damaged pieces. Never underestimate the power of the grand gesture! BK

Drop, and Give Me….How Many????

Bob — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 15:21:30 +0000

I’m heading off to San Francisco, blizzard gods willing (update: they’re not, I’m holed up in an airport hotel watching it snow after a two hour battle up here because my flight showed “ON TIME” until I pulled into the airport!), to teach a seminar for National Geographic Traveler with my buddy Ralph Lee Hopkins. I’m going to hang a few extra days and shoot some stock.

Okay, stop laughing. Travel stock of San Francisco? Good luck selling it. Yeah, yeah, I know. But I’ve never really shot there, so I’m doing it for the therapy value. Peggy and I lived in the Bay Area when we were first married and I was in acting school (at the American Conservatory Theater), and I hardly ever get back and I always wanted to shoot it. So who cares if it never sells? At least that’s what my therapist says….

So the blog will be a little quiet and I thought I’d share a couple more shots from the New Hope portrait project. Like the one above of Dan and Katie, proprietors of New Hope Fitness. Now that’s what I call strength training. This shot was a lot easier for me to pull off than it was for Dan. All I did was use the regular big softlight I wrote about in the previous post.

A more difficult challenge came lighting Adele, the Ghost Lady of New Hope. Adele gives ghost tours of town, and you really need a scorecard in this town because it’s full of them, from as far back as the Revolutionary War and beyond.

To get the basic “ghoul” lighting, we took the big lightbox off the stand and aimed it up from the floor. That was a cool effect, but the lantern candle wasn’t quite cutting it, and we had a shadow of her arm across her face.

We bypassed the candles (truth is, I knew they’d never be bright enough) and instead put in a little Morris mini flash slave in the lantern to simulate the lantern light. Then all we had to do was balance the light from the box hitting all the black of her outfit with the light from the slave hitting her face—-piece of cake.

Only took twenty minutes until we had enough ND material in the lantern to provide a good balance. Then we had to work out a position where the highlights in Adele’s glasses weren’t too distracting (couldn’t get rid of them altogether—-the studio space we’re shooting in is said to be haunted too, and the ghost just wouldn’t let me have an easy time of it!).

But, thanks to Adele’s patience and good relationship with the spirit side, we got off a fun shot.

In My Little Town…

Bob — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 03:39:09 +0000

Photo © Bob Krist

Every time I spend some time around New Hope, PA, where I live, I’m always blown away by the great array of talented and interesting folks we have living in town. It’s a little art community on the banks of the Delaware River, and it’s home to great music clubs, art galleries, restaurants, funky shops, artists, sculptors, actors, musicians, cabaret artists, female impersonators, brewers, screenwriters….well, you get the picture.

I’ve always wanted to document my neighbors, and I have some studio space this month (courtesy of the New Hope Arts Center) to work on a project I’m calling “New Hope: In Character.” I just started shooting this week and thought I’d share a couple with you. Right up top is Andre who runs a great restaurant called Zoubi. Andre is from France and is the quintessential restauranteur—friendly, charming, and sophisticated.

Below are Sam and Stasia, the girls from Love Saves The Day, a funky shop (the original was in Greenwich Village) where you can find vintage clothing, toys from the 50’s and 60’s, and, um, all kinds of other stuff. There’s always a wacky mannequin outside the shop, and so we just had to include her.

And finally, Brendan the master brewer (so young, and so accomplished) and his associate, Dan, from the Triumph Brewery, where I often rush the growler to bring home some fresh, delicious suds that really make it hard for me to even pretend I’m leading a low-carb lifestyle!

Photo © Bob Krist

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As part of this project, I also spent last weekend offering pro bono portraits for area families with a member serving in the military. We photographed 45 families in two days!

It was an incredibly busy and rewarding weekend. We met some amazing folks who have put a lot on the line for us all, and it was a real pleasure to give a little something back.

My friend, Rich Kennedy, photo editor of the Doylestown Intelligencer, volunteered two days of his time and did all the computer work (plus some excellent art direction when I started to melt down on occasion…like when 13 people from one family showed up)!

We also had help from photographer Arun Paul and Rose Gutekunst, not to mention Peggy (aka SWMBO).

For a look at the studio space and a quick discussion of my basic light setup, hit the jump.

Photo © Bob Krist

It’s times like these that I’m glad I never sold my big strobe gear and light modifiers from my annual report shooting days. We’re only using one light so far, a DynaLite Uni 400JR in a big 4×6 foot Photoflex softbox on the left. We’ve got a black cutter card to feather the light off the background a bit, and a couple of 4×6 panels with white material as fill.

Behind the 9 foot painted paper backdrop, we’ve got a huge 12 foot wide painted canvas backdrop for when we get into the larger groups. For that, I’ll probably use the big umbrella you see on the left and bounce into it and then through the big 6×6 foot white panel you see on the left as well, for that beautiful double diffused look, using one head and a DynaLite 1000 pack.

Attsa one big huge soft light source, and I know I’m showing my age, but with apologies to St.David of Baltimore, I personally love the look of a giant, soft northlight. Got the idea from my old drinking buddy, Vermeer. Talk about rushing the growler, boy could that guy put away the Heinekens….

Doctors, My Eyes Have Seen the Light….

Bob — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 03:55:47 +0000

I had the very great privilege of being interviewed by Jason Odell and Rick Walker, the well-known Image Doctors over on the Nikonians site last Sunday. After we three agreed that it was a fitting reward for old married guys to be able to spend Valentines Day discussing the latest camera gear and talking tech, rather than composing love poems and taking our better halves to a Nancy Meyers movie (hey, I already went to see It’s Complicated….and I loved it!), we got onto the meat of the interview.

We talked a lot about shooting travel and the two new lenses I got to shoot for Nikon recently. The Docs are great interviewers and have been doing this popular podcast for a number of years now.

Of course, choosing to start my Valentines Day hanging out with my new friends probably did nothing to further my cause in persuading “she who must be obeyed” into actually letting me buy the new glass I tested (and an FX body or two).

So I don’t know how smart a move that was….every time I start talking FX (which really only started since I shot that recent gig in Miami—-damn 24mm f/1.4, I wish I knew how to quit you), she brings out the chiropractor bills and the receipts for my Aleve usage to date….not to mention the dismal state of the business.

And speaking of seeing the light, my good friend Brenda Tharp is running a tour to one of my favorite places, Iceland, this summer. I’ve spent a lot of time up there over the years for National Geographic and other pubs, and it is a spectacular location. And you couldn’t find a better leader to show you around than Brenda. It’d be a great place to shoot that new wide FX glass I’m craving….Check it out…

Tango Audio Slide show

Bob — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 13:10:46 +0000

Don't click this, it's just a screen grab!!!

I posted an audio slide show about Tango in Buenos Aires….I think NG Traveler will have it up on their site too, but not sure where. This was originally going to have an interview narration with a Tango anthropologist and was going to be more educational, but then my editor said just do it a lot of dance pictures and snappy music, and I thought, why not?

Ordinarily, I HATE going out and shooting nightlife. First of all, it all starts too late (don’t you people have something to do during the daylight hours????). Secondly, everybody’s having fun, and you’re the nerd with the camera and the lightpole and no life and everybody would just prefer that you go away….

But…I loved documenting tango. I actually looked forward to getting up in the middle of the night to go out. It’s such a beautiful, passionate dance, and the Portenos were so warm and welcoming to my presence. I was blown away by the artistry of the dancers, whether the pros on stage during a show, or folks at a neighborhood milonga. It’s the real deal, it’s a lifestyle.

And I was privileged to have been a close witness to it. That’s why, despite all the bullsh… about our business lately, it’s just so cool that this camera gives you entree into so many different worlds.

L.E.D. Candlelight

Bob — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 01:13:41 +0000

Photo © Bob Krist

If you’ve ever tried to shoot people by candlelight, you know that you really need a lot of candles to cast light more than a few inches and your subject has to be really close to those candles to pick up that light.

When I was working on the shoot for Nikon Japan with the 24mm f/1.4 lens, we had a nice setup with the lovely Rose, a family friend, in period clothes at the piano of the Parry Mansion lit with several candelabras.

But the candles weren’t casting a clean, usable light.

So, how to keep the feel of candlelight, but boost the volume? Hit the jump to find out how some video technology came into play.

When putting together a little kit for my small video camera, I came across the Litepanel LP Micro LED On Camera light. It’s tiny, rides in the hotshoe of your videocam or video-enabled DSLR, has dimmable light from a bank of LEDs. It also comes with a diffusing panel and a warming filter.

I dug the light out of my bag o’ SB’s, put the warming and diffusing filters on, and had Peggy hold it just off camera left, from the same direction as the candelabra. Then it was just a matter of using the dimmer to just add a kiss of light on Rose’s face.

The light was the same color, direction, and intensity as the candles, and it blended in nicely.

The LitePanel Micro now comes with me (and my speedlites) everywhere. Ironically, the one place I haven’t used it yet is on the video camera, which was the original reason I bought it.

I’m sure that will change one day, but in the meantime, this has become my favorite little accent light for stills too.

Fast, Wide, and Handsome II

Bob — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 00:37:45 +0000

The other half of the one-two wide angle punch Nikon delivered to FXers, the 16-35mm f/4 VR, is another winner. I wandered all over a freezing cold, soaking wet South Beach in Miami (yes, let’s get out of the cold Northeast, and shoot in the nearly as cold, even wetter Southeast….Murphy, when will you and your law ever leave me alone?????) shooting with it primarily at night, as per my instructions from the agency.

I got sharp crisp results handholding at 1/4th, 1/8th, and even a couple of 1/2 second exposures (and that was before happy hour!). My brief said to avoid using a tripod, but did not prohibit the use of Margaritas to calm jittery weather nerves.

Of course, in South Beach, you have to pace yourself, because they all serve Margaritas in giant glasses as big as bird baths. Ummmm, VR II, there’s a challenge for you! The Jose Cuervo smackdown.

Stuff looked great wide open at f/4 too. Man, if I were an FX shooter (and depending on how negotiations go with my wife, my chiropractor, and my spinal surgeon, I might be one day), these would be my two wides. I’m not that much of a gearhead, and even I’m dreaming of them (oh, please come back, little 24, and bring your bokeh with you!)

The 16-35mm is bigger than the 17-35mm, but doesn’t feel any heavier and balanced well on both the big D3s and a D700. I’ll leave it to Nikon and the more techy blogs to give you all the details. I’ll just leave you with a couple of other sample pix and my user impression that this too is a killer piece of glass.

Oh, and just a request to the blogs who are grabbing and using these pics….how about running them with the copyright notice? Is that too much to ask? Geez, when a photography blog doesn’t know enough to run the damn copyright notice with a picture (and you know who you are), what hope is there?

And just to illustrate how changing the framing from horizontal to vertical can really change the message of your picture, hit the jump.

Fast, Wide, and Handsome

Bob — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 04:33:01 +0000

Well, I can finally talk about those two lenses, the 24mm f/1.4 and 16-35mm f/4 VR, I was shooting for Nikon’s Japanese ad agency back in Miami a while ago. First, I’d like to apologize to the DPReviewers and Nikonians whom I upset with my passing mention of new gear I couldn’t identify until it was announced.

Guys, I’m sorry. Didn’t mean to rile you up that much…. although it’s pretty much a truism that at any given time, camera manufacturers are testing new stuff, so I’m still not really sure why everybody got so, um, exercised.

Actually I do know why. Speculating about new gear is almost as much fun as eating pizza and drinking beer (you know you’ve reached a certain age when pizza and beer go from being a dietary staple to a forbidden fruit), and far less damaging to your arteries (although it seems to play havoc with some people’s blood pressure!).

There was no marketing conspiracy, though, with me making the passing mention. I just really needed a blog post (sometimes, it’s very hard to come up with bi-weekly tidbits….it’s the freakin’ digital Sword of Damocles hanging over your head!) and really it was to talk about the helicopter company and give them a plug.

But folks posited all kinds of conspiratorial sub-rosa marketing campaigns. Thankfully, nobody accused either Nikon or me of engineering the great financial meltdown or fixing the Super Bowl game. (So, my all-powerful Nikon cronies, and fellow members of the New World Order, we got away with those; heh, heh, heh….yeah, Cheney; gimme a high five!).

This shot was done with the new 24mm f/1.4, a nano-coated gem. It’s a 77mm filter mount, not too big or heavy for what it is and sharp as a tack. Nice bokeh too. I made this shot with the D3s I had to borrow to do the shoot (I’m a DX guy, still, but am sorely tempted by these lenses—I miss the narrow DOF with fast, wide glass. And this baby is just a world class optic.).

It’s Tungsten white balance and the musician, Miami personality, and all around great guy Leo Casino is being lit with an orange gelled SB900 shot through my little portable umbrella setup held by an assistant.

Hit the jump for a couple of other samples. My brief from the agency was to highlight the nice bokeh and shoot wide open, or close to it, whenever possible. More on the other lens coming up in another post.

Everything you need to know about shooting the news….

Bob — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 13:40:40 +0000

Forget journalism school, here’s the secret formula…..

Click here to view the embedded video.