These aren’t photographs; they’re relationships. {Philadelphia Wedding Photography}

There’s nothing better at weddings than great families.

One thing that I always try to stress in my photography–both in talking about it, as well as in the images that I aim to make–is the importance of relationship. This can be taken in a couple different senses. There’s the relationship of elements in the frame, for example, and the relationship between the photographer and the subject, whether the shot in question is a portrait where the subject is aware of the photographic process, or a candid shot where the photographer’s knowledge of the subject and environment prepares him or her to anticipate the critical moments just before they happen.

And then there is the relationship between the people inside the viewfinder. I mean, as they exist out there in the world. Weddings are so enjoyable to shoot because the day is all about relationship, and the activities and ceremonies and celebrations put aside just about everything else and allow the true nature of the countless relationships amongst the various participants to be visible. And I get to shoot it all, from the father of the bride seeing his daughter in her bridal gown for the first time, to the couples who have been married for forty years, on the dance floor late in the evening.

The above image comes from such a moment…from Lora’s smile, to her father’s look of content pride, to Lora’s son loving being a part of it all. This isn’t an image of three people. It’s not even an image of family. It’s an image of a relationship.

Preceding this shot, I have a number of shots of Dylan looking like a groom who’s having his picture taken. We chatted a bit, we laughed some, the best man was there to crack some jokes and tell some stories. I wasn’t getting it. I stopped shooting for a bit, left and came back, shot some candles or something to clear my mind and eye, and went back. Everyone had relaxed a bit. Dylan started looking like himself, and this shot came soon after.

And the Maid of Honor. We could write out what she said, and I’m sure you’ve heard it before…growing up friends, quality of character, how good Dylan is for Lora and vice versa. We can always wonder at how these relationships all have their similarities, and their idiosyncrasies. It was a lovely, touching speech, and the deeper she got into it, the more you could sense that the moment was coming. I think I got something close to it here. Her words conveyed her message; this expression conveys the relationship.

I asked the guitar to dance later in the evening, but it said it had to step out to make a phone call. It wouldn’t make eye contact the rest of the evening. It was awkward.

And the best man, who sat down and played and sang an original song, unplugged. I’m probably partial to this image because I’m an eye-closer when I’m playing and singing, too. That’s probably because, when I’m playing and singing, too, it’s not a bad idea to avert your eyes, and I might as well lead by example. The song was bluesy and mellow, and well-done, and everyone in the room knew that, independent of the musicality of it, they were hearing the way that Lora and Dylan affect and better each other, and the best man, and, hopefully, each guest there. It’s the kind of thing that makes you want to close your eyes and have yourself a contented moment.

Lora and Dylan’s Center City Wedding {Philadelphia Wedding Photography}

When the bride’s brother makes his first appearance on a bicycle in the middle of a street closed down for a movie shoot, and he’s got his tux in a bag slung over his shoulder, and he’s wearing orange sunglasses, and the whole gang is on their way to a Rittenhouse Square restaurant brunch, you know it’s going to be a good day. Having the bride and groom be good and valuable friends of yours makes it all the better. Having a number of good and valuable friends among the guests…well, I might just have to put my camera down and dance a bit.

But, given the convenient convergence of my professional duties and my general aversion to musically induced physical destabilization, I just went on doing what I do better.

So my wife is friends with Amy, and Amy is friends with Lora, and I was introduced to Lora years ago at Ferry Fest, Amy’s band’s annual summer music…uh…thing, I guess you could call it, and when I first met her, she was described as John’s brother, and I used to work with John, who replaced Jackie (who is married to Bob), and Jackie lives across the street from the stop where my wife gets off the bus after work. So it’s a big happy circle. My memory might be a bit fuzzy here, but I believe that I met Dylan a few years after that, also at Ferry Fest, the Ferry Fest from which I have awesome video footage of Dylan crashing a man-tricycle in pretty gnarly fashion. I haven’t said yet that Ferry Fest used to happen in Harper’s Ferry (also the name of the band) WV at one campground, until they went dry, and then at a KOA until, because of a lack of dryness, some of the band’s peripherals used, at an hour that was very, very a.m., rougher than necessary language with the campground manager, who, after the fact, let the band know that the final Ferry Fest at that facility had been a good time for the most part up until about the last six minutes.

That was a digression, but I feel it needed to be said.

After brunch, it was back to the Courtyard Marriott in Center City. Let me say this about Courtyard Marriotts: I find that they have ridiculously photogenic rooms. That shot I was raving about a while back, the one that I said was the best photo I’ve ever taken? Courtyard Marriott in North Wales. In one of the rooms that you or I could rent if we were passing through and wanted to spend the night next to a Chili’s and across the street from a mall. The one in Center City is just as good, although I find myself wishing they didn’t have things like sofas and large screen tvs under all of their amazingly awesome windows.

Aside from the rooms that look like butter (that’s a colloquialism there…the rooms don’t actually look like yellow milk fat. That being said, this blogger is a guy who likes his butter), I got to witness my first bridesmaid-dress-lacing-up conga line:

Given knowledge of the entire day and evening, one wishes one had known at the time that some dresses were not secured as well as they ought to have been. But that’s a story I won’t tell.

That’s a good place to leave it for now. More to come.

Evolving Ideas and Honing Quality {Philadelphia Landscape Photography}

I was forced to part with a good friend today. It wasn’t that the relationship was long…it’s just that this friend taught me an awful lot in a very short time. Yes, I had to return my 4×5 view camera today.

Working with a view camera is different. It is slow. It is deliberate. It is expensive. It is painstaking in its technicalities and demands. But the results are superb. For better or for worse, the digital age of smaller, lighter, faster-to-post-to-the-web cameras, more so than the era of film point-and-shoot cameras, has changed what people think of as high-quality photography. The 35mm camera used to be the light, fast, traveling person’s camera. Now, a full-frame DSLR is not only at the high end of the price scale, it is also at the high end of the perceived quality scale as well. Medium format or larger photography, not to mention film in general, is increasingly seen as a choice of eccentricity, rather than as a choice of quality. I’d like to submit that the quality of a 4×5 negative can only be believed once it is seen. Digital has no answer.

At $85 for a 50-sheet box of film, one has to be careful how and what is shot. Each mistake, each careless exposure, each half-baked idea, comes with a tangible price. A full day’s shooting might only result in ten or twelve frames. And depending on how strictly you edit down your shots, that means that, every day, you might get one usable shot, even when you are thinking clearly and working well. Some days, there won’t be anything usable.

For the large format photography class that I’ve been taking, we had the assignment to develop and shoot a project over a six-week span. Not long by any account, but long enough to spend some serious time thinking about how, what, and why we each were indulging ourselves in this form of photography. Such a project has to start out with an idea, and I, in my fashion, had a few awful ideas that I tried to play around with at first, the kind of ideas that would have worked out well if I had had six years and an unlimited travel budget, and maybe a helicopter, to work with. I finally realized, after much crappy photography, that what I was shooting when no one was watching me were intimate, detail-driven landscapes. So that is what I decided to focus on.

The only thing is, that is kind of a wishy-washy idea, and wishy-washy ideas lead to wishy-washy photography. Cartier-Bresson said that he would rather see a fuzzy picture of a clear idea than a clear picture of a fuzzy idea, and I’m not one to disagree. My project started out with textural shots of erosion and roots, and they were…mneh. Boring pictures of interesting things, at best.

But I found that using the camera in its slow, methodical way was a sort of meditation. The surface actions of finding an interesting subject and making a technically sound capture became, in their familiarity, somewhat invisible, and I could then think and look and see at a deeper level. And being the kind of person that I am, thinking in images soon led to thinking in words, and I found myself ruminating not about intimate landscapes, but about the mutability of natural forms, and the timescales that change happens across. It’s a much more specific idea, and even if that idea is not explicitly investigated in the resulting images, it was a much clearer idea that was motivating me to shoot. I found more interesting things, framed them better, and printed them better. Over the course of the second half of my shooting, each image became a little more compelling than the previous. I started getting that sense that things were well in the universe. I kept the idea in mind, I talked to myself about it so that the idea of mutability of forms became, in its familiarity, somewhat invisible, and a clearer, calmer, more productive space opened up for me. These later shots ended up comprising 75% of my final portfolio.

There was even a moment when I started knowing that what I was intending to capture was what was going to come out in the final print. There, under the dark cloth, I could imagine, even, where I’d have to dodge or burn, how I’d have to play with contrast, what the final thing would look like. And at some point, I actually started to be right, too.

I don’t often have the time to spend twenty minutes searching for just the right thing to photograph. As a wedding photographer, things come and go so quickly that it is exhausting merely to keep up, in the moment. It’s a different type of shooting, a different mindset that demands that I be open to seeing (Mssr Cartier-Bresson also said that photography has to be like the last few words of Ulysses: yes, yes, yes) and consuming images and moment en masse. With large format photography, I have to be more careful, saying not yet, not yet, not yet, and making more choices in the moment, not in the dark room. That time to slow down, to look, to think, to decide on something else, to not have to settle for anything that is not exactly what I want, has made me a better photographer by broadening the experience of shooting, and by putting a literal price tag on the value of each shutter click. It has taught me when it is best to say yes.

The last frame I shot for the class. Also, the best. A result of process, not coincidence.

Light. {Philadelphia Wedding Photography}

You’ll please excuse me while I have a love affair with window light. Of all the things I have learned over the past six months, it is this: turn off the lights in the room and let the windows work their magic.

In photography, when we talk about light, there are at two major things to consider: quantity of light, i.e. how much of the stuff there is, and whether there is enough to get a good image, and quality of light, i.e. how hard or soft it is, and whether it is directional or not. Windows give a wonderfully soft, directional light that can be used to create a number of lighting effects. There might be a tendency to think that the more light the better, but this is not at all true; great lighting creates some type of effect by negotiating differences in light and shadow.

As a general rule, diffused sunlight is beautiful, and there’s lots of it. Artificial lighting, whether incandescent, fluorescent, or something else, looks odd-colored, especially when mixing with sunlight. Best just to leave it to the sunlight, even if the room looks a bit dark. Trust me. It’s probably perfect.

Sometimes a warm light with heavy shadows creates a rich, opulent feel. Shift the camera or the subject just a bit, and the same source can create an open, airy high-key look. This is possible when the room is not flooded with even, artificial lighting, and the photographer leaves the flash in the bag.

Same window, same light, different angle, different effect

Incremental Change, My Best Photograph, Internet Privacy, and Sharing

Last Saturday, I took the best photograph of my life. It was a bit of a surprise to me, and it took several hours for it to dawn on me exactly what I had done. It started to click that I had a special capture when, throughout the evening, I kept taking out that card and scrolling through the images to find that One.

The image is excellent in the way classical portraits are excellent. It is technically sound, of course, but it is by no means fancy or elaborate. It is a couples shot of a bride’s maternal grandparents. The grandmother is seated and dressed in green traditional Pakistani garb. The grandfather is standing behind her and wearing a suit with a red sweater vest. The pose is dictated by their tradition. It was shot in a room in a Courtyard Marriott in the suburbs, and the only light is available window light. No fancy lighting, a very traditional composition, no specific posing…just two exceptional faces, beautiful light, and something intangible.

It looks great printed on Hahnemuhle Bamboo Matte 290gsm paper.

I arrived at being able to shoot this image slowly. In general, I think I’m a pretty good portraitist, especially if I really have time to work with people. I enjoy the engagement of personalities, the conversation, the figuring out of what emotions and expressions best convey a sense of the person, and which emotions and expressions make for the most compelling images. I favor simple lighting even when using strobes, and my use of lighting hasn’t changed much over the years, because good light is good light, and good light is usually simple, warm light. A lot of posing looks unnatural to me, even if it can be compositionally dynamic, so I don’t use it too often. In short, I haven’t changed that much about how I shoot portraits. If you look at my portfolio over time, there is incremental improvement, and a strengthening of style, but it is nothing dramatic. Images flow from one to another in a nice continuum of betterment.

Then, all of sudden, something changed. I shouldn’t say all of a sudden. I took this winter, when I wasn’t shooting as much, to undertake some training (specifically, kelbytraining.com was my greatest single source of learning), so I came to my first wedding of the season certainly with some new knowledge jumping around in my mind, and it came in handy in the first hour of the shoot. I didn’t learn anything revolutionary. There was no head-slapping, heart-stopping, cloud-parting moment when the secrets were revealed (because in photography, there really aren’t any secrets, and I find the technical aspects of it to be relatively uninteresting), but there was a slow nudge toward better awareness of what I was doing and what the light was doing.

There’s a philosophical debate about change of type versus change of kind, i.e., how much a thing can change before it is no longer just a different type of the same thing, but a new kind of thing all together. My photography is always inching forward, and it is difficult, from inside, to notice significant amounts of change because they happen slowly. But this image was something special…a different kind, not just a better type.

I am saying all of this with the knowledge that I cannot share the image with you. In a way, that’s good, because wearing one’s heart on one’s sleeve like this on the internet is just asking for people to jump in and say this image that I find so compelling is nothing special at all. So perhaps it is best that you be left with me just waxing poetic about it, and you just having to imagine (or meeting me in person to see it). The bride and groom have their own privacy concerns and don’t want the images on the web, and that’s just as well…as I’ve gone through this year and my print-per-day project, I’ve reacquainted myself with the importance of the printed image, and the evanescent nature of the digital image. This is an image that demands to be in print, and, in fact, it was print #100 in my project. A small handful of my friends and family have seen it, and when they have seen it, they have seen it in person, and the image has become a catalyst for storytelling. And like a good story, there is something immediately easy and comfortable about it, and something unique and challenging.

I am glad that I have to show this image to people in person, on paper. They can hold it and put it right up to their noses. The image doesn’t need batteries or electricity (anymore). And I know that, as valuable to me as the image already has become, it will enjoy another life in print, somewhere far away, where friends and family of that old couple can look at it and enjoy how much like them that picture is.

Adam Web at Milkboy

A couple weeks ago I had the pleasure of shooting Adam Web and his band at Milkboy in Center City Philadelphia. Adam was releasing his latest CD Pendulum, or album, or digital files collection or whatever…all I know is that physical discs containing music were available for purchase. The show benefited Philabundance, which is a very important hunger charity organization in Philadelphia. Good music, good cause, good venue…what’s better than that?

Adam describes his music as optimistic acoustifunk, and even though I’ve had to explain that term to just about everyone I mention it to, I think it’s actually a pretty non-obfuscatory label, if you know what I mean. And explaining in words what unfamiliar music sounds like is a fools game. But I digress.

Upbeat, happy, songs about loving people and life…it’s good stuff, and the band sounded solid. Of course, they had an electric violin (played by Nyke Van Wyk), and technically that’s cheating in the same way that bacon is cheating in cooking, since once you have an electric violin, or bacon, I mean, where can you go from there?

If bacon had strings, it'd have one more than expected, too.

Ektachrome: The End Is Near

Seriously depressing news from Kodak today.

I’ve been on this kick about the importance of physical artifacts, and that has carried over into my photography. notably in that I am shooting much more personal work on film than on digital, and making more prints no matter how I shoot. Digital photography, as a medium, is so easy, so effortless…there’s no changing film every 12 or 36 shots, no taking the film to the lab, no time in the darkroom, no smell lingering on your hands after you work hard on making that perfect print. The files come and go, a card might need to be replaced every couple hours if you are really shooting a lot…. I think it is easy to forget the fragility of the digital files we create. Photography is still difficult no matter the recording medium. But the decline of film has me worried about the tangibility and permanence of our photographic body of work.

So it is very disappointing to hear that Kodak is discontinuing production of my favorite film, Ektachrome E100G, as well as the other Ektachrome films. It is hard to communicate to those who have never shot film how one can fall in love with a particular medium, and find that it amplifies and improves one’s photographic vision. This isn’t a Lightroom preset or a Photoshop action or an Instagram filter that one can click on and then click away from; learning a film, and being in artistic symbiosis with its peculiarities, is a commitment. When you shoot Ektachrome, you shots look like Ektachrome, and you start to see the world as Ektachrome sees it (because a camera, says Dorothea Lange, is a tool for learning how to see without a camera).

And those slides! My god, those slides!

Photography will continue; excellent photography will continue; excellent photography on color transparency film will continue. Perhaps the loss first of Kodachrome (which I never had the pleasure of shooting) and now Ektachrome is sort of like the decline of script handwriting (you’re reading a guy who prefers writing with a fountain pen). For those who do it, it is important, not just aesthetically, but as a part of what writing or photography is.

I think I’ll have to shoot a bunch more of this film before the end of the year, when current inventory is expected to run out. I’ll have to come up with a suitable project to frame it around, and go from there.

After that, I guess it’s on to Fujifilm.

Hana’s Weltaflex

In general, I think it’s a good idea NOT to post images here that don’t really sing about who I am as a photographer; the idea is that I should use this space to discuss my photography, and, in case you haven’t caught on to what an awful lot of blogging is about, do some self-promotion, which would imply that I post only work that I think really says something good.

I guess the above and below photos do say a lot about me as a photographer, but it’s more in the philosophical realm that these images speak. Aesthetically, they’re snapshots. Technically, they’re trainwrecks. But they have a good story:

I was out in West Lafayette, IN for Christmas this year, and my sister-in-law, who is Slovakian, offer to show me her father’s camera, which he had given her some time ago, and which had not been used since maybe the early or mid-80′s. It was a Weltaflex Twin Lens Reflex camera (made in East Germany) in a very nice leather carrying case. And the big surprise was that there was film in the camera. Fomapan film that had been loaded into the camera when the country was still Czechoslovakia and the war was still cold. I got kinda excited.

Disappointingly, it turns out that it was a “newly” loaded roll of film, and that no exposures had been taken on it. I had some Ilford Delta 3200 120 film with me, so I loaded that up and started chasing the kids around the house, finding very quickly that, if I had to sit down and write ad copy for the Weltaflex, I’d probably just leave the subject of viewfinder brightness out of the conversation altogether. I couldn’t see a thing, and by the time I had fiddled the focus knob into something within a good chuckle of sharp focus, the two-year-old I had been hunting would be far gone. Even when I had my brother’s family sitting immobile on the stairs, I still couldn’t really tell if that thing was in focus. I knew that I really liked the prism viewfinder on my Bronica and how it made sharp focus child’s play, but shooting with the Weltaflex drove that point home.

What I love about TLRs is the sounds their shutter makes. It’s sort of like one of my former students sucking his or her teeth. Subtle. Quiet. My Bronica sounds like two sheets of plywood falling off a truck on the highway when I press the shutter release…so much so that my daughter refers to taking a picture with it as “clomping the camera.” The TLR, on the other hand, is so unintrusive; it is so much easier to forget that pictures are being made, and that is good for both the photographer and the subject.

I don’t know how old the camera actually is. Forty years? Fifty? Maybe sixty? It still works perfectly well, and since film doesn’t functionally change that much over time, it is still a fully functioning camera. I’m sending prints–silver gelatin prints–to my brother’s family, and some of those will hopefully find their way back to Slovakia, where my sister-in-law’s family still lives (her father, unfortunately, has passed away). I like the thought of how far that camera has travelled and the different cultures and settings that have passed through its lens. I like the idea of sending pictures of the grandkids taken on the grandfather’s camera halfway around the world. I like what using this camera says about photography: it’s still about exposure and the moment, no matter what the technology used. And I guess that says something about me as a photographer.

I Have Soul Mates Out There. Or, don’t blow all your money on a camera body and neglect the lenses.

If you follow tech or camera news at all, then I’m sure you’re aware that Nikon has been updating their high-end cameras over the last couple months, first with the D4, and now with the D800. The D4 seems like a perfectly logical camera to purchase, and looks like a good, solid update to the flagship camera.

The D800, however, leaves me scratching my head a bit. At $3,000, it’s not as if it is a crazy-expensive piece of gear. It’s the 36 megapixels that I don’t understand. Half of that would have been just fine by all standards. Undoubtedly, some will get very excited about the megapixel count, and assume that this, therefore, is a great camera. I’m sure it will prove to be a formidable piece of gear, but for a very specialized type of photographer who has very specific needs.

Which brings me to my periodic reminder about the tenuous link between good cameras and good photos:

99% of what makes you love a photograph is unrelated to the technical specs of the camera used to take it. No one ever hung a picture on their wall because it had a lot of pixels. A great expression, a perfect moment, an important place, yes. Megapixels and ISO? No.

This blog post gets into how to handle equipment queries, and I second his opinion. You probably don’t need a DSLR. If you do feel you need one, you should get an entry-level model and spend the money on a good, fast prime lens. What I really recommend is either the Nikon P7100, or the Canon G12, which I think has just been replaced with the G1X. Compact, self-contained, more features than most will care to use, flexible and relatively fast glass. Did I mention compact? And affordable.

Even for me, I’m having a hard time seeing how the D800 will make sense. I guess I’ll wait to see what the D400 has to offer, and then decide how tech-happy I am.

Maggie and Sean: Southampton, PA Wedding Photography (Part II)

Some additional shots from Maggie and Sean’s early December wedding, featuring a shot of the goose convention that was being held just below the dam in Tyler State Park. I’ve been in plenty of weddings where the bride and groom get honked at by passing motorists. Somehow, it just doesn’t have the same celebratory flair when Canada geese are doing the honking.

One of my favorite short stories is Donald Barthelme’s “A Flight of Pigeons From the Palace,” and this flight of geese had nothing to do with it.

Part III will wrap it up.