I’m not talking about renaming a gallery or two, or moving a couple photos around.  I don’t mean I’m changing the background color.  We’re not painting the walls or buying new furniture here—we’re burning the mother to the ground, clearing the wreckage, and rebuilding.  A completely new, totally redesigned website will be coming online in the next week or so, and I can’t wait to share it with you.  So if you’d like to have a butcher’s at the current site one last time, you should go and get your fill.

So long, 2000s:

RIP: 2006-2009

(For those who aren’t familiar, Witkin is kind of a controversial figure.  You probably won’t want to click his name up there if you’re at all disturbed by photographs of cadavers, disembodied human parts—including heads—and physically deformed people.  Personally, I really don’t care for his work, but feel free to see how you feel about it.  Ya been warned.)

When I first started to amass photo equipment a few years ago, the Alien Bees were recommended to me by a friend and colleague.  I dutifully visited the website, and was immediately confused.  The price was right, but…why was the website decorated with cartoon aliens, stars, and planets?  Why did the lights have the same cartoon aliens on the sides?  Why did Paul Buff, owner of the company, refer to himself on the site as the alien King Luap?  What was this, Fisher Price’s My First Strobe Kit?  Was this a joke?  Was I being punk’d?

A quick Google search proved that the company was not a joke at all.  In fact, I honestly could not find a single case of anyone with anything unkind or derisive to say about the stuff (except perhaps the occasional snide remark about the cartoons).  On the contrary, the consensus was that the equipment was reliable, durable, versatile, and easy to use, and that customer service was excellent (factory direct, remember).  What more could one ask for?

Well, two things.  First, being monolights, one could ask for the ability to adjust the light’s power output remotely, from one spot.  Perhaps the biggest advantage pack systems have over monolights is that they provide a single bank from which the power for each light can be altered.  With monolights, the power is set on each head, so to adjust each light in a particular setup can be a bit of a chore, especially if a light is on a boom or otherwise out of reach.  Second, it would be nice to have no noticeable color shift in the light as you reduce its power output.

But now it looks as though Mr. Buff has struck upon elegant technological solutions for both of these problems.  Available today is the Cyber Commander, an on-camera transmitter much like a Pocket Wizard (but nuts to Pocket Wizards, right?) that allows the photographer to power up or down as many as sixteen lights in a single setup.  I won’t go into all the bells and whistles here.  If you want to learn more, you can check out the details on the website.  And Paul C. Buff, Inc. is also set to release a new line of lights that promises to solve the color temperature issue, delivering a constant 5600°K light by incorporating an insulated gate bipolar transistor shutoff of the flash tube in conjunction with a digital correction of the capacitor voltage.  Now, I’m not exactly sure what the latter half of that last sentence means, but if you’re in the market for some lighting, these might be some strobes to think about.

*There’s nothing in it for me to say any of this.  Oh, how I wish there was.

Canon EOS 5D
f/10 @ 1/100, ISO 100

It’s titled “Time Enough For Love” because I like the phrase and it seemed appropriately arbitrary, and because one doesn’t generally associate love with unreasonable amounts of toilet paper (unless you’re me, I guess).  The idea for the shot came, of course, from the painting by Rene Magritte called The Son Of Man.  If you are unfamiliar with Magritte’s work, you really owe it to yourself to correct that problem.  It’s absolutely brilliant.  I don’t own nearly as many books as I’d like (lack of space), but I do have two collections of his work and I look through them quite often.  There’s a font of inspiration there.

This year, two Pocket Wizards just up and quit on me.  The second one went about a week ago.  Now, I take perhaps unreasonably good care with my equipment, so I promise you these deaths were not by my hands.  Cheap products just stop working sometimes, and there they are now—two dead little plastic husks not even heavy enough to serve as paper weights.

Okay, fine, so maybe Pocket Wizards aren’t as reliable as they should be.  Maybe they’re even garbage, and to be honest, even that wouldn’t be the most extraordinary thing in the world.  How many things are actually built to last?  What really bothers me, though, is that they’re the industry standard and they’re such expensive garbage.  Pocket Wizards, in a fair and just world, would cost twenty-nine dollars and ninety-five cents.  Maybe even just ten bucks and a jaunty song and dance.  But a hundred and seventy?  Are you kidding us with this?  It’s plastic and a circuit board—we’re not even talking a dollar to make one of these things.  Does a more flagrant highway robbery exist in the entire realm of photographic equipment?  I really don’t think so.  And that, by the way, is quite a charge.

So no, I won’t be replacing my fallen receiver.  Instead, I’ll be selling off my remaining Pocket Wizards and buying into the Alien Bees wireless system by Paul Buff.  They do the same job, and if one of these new remotes decides not to show up for work one day, two would be available for the cost of one Pocket Wizard (you know, so the first one will have the other to play with).  When you think about it, it’s what I should have done in the first place.

Okay.  Whew.  It’s over.  Thanks for reading, and for letting me rant.

The reason my family goes to Chattanooga is not because that’s where the Waffle House is.  The Waffle House being there—that’s just icing (or syrup, as the case may be).  No, we actually go to Chattanooga because that’s where my grandmother lives.  The six of us are scattered across the country so the holidays are really the only time we can all get together, and when you’re my grandmother’s age, one of the perks is that everyone else will come to you.  My grandma was born in 1910.  She just had her birthday a couple weeks ago, and that means she’s 99 years old.  That’s amazing.  She’s amazing.

Here is a photo we made together yesterday, on Thanksgiving day.  I know it won’t be as meaningful to you as it is to me, but I hope you will appreciate it nonetheless.  And I hope your holiday was as lovely as mine.

Canon EOS 5D
f/5.6 @ 1/8, ISO 200

Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
I wish, I wish he’d go away…
-Hughes Mearns, 1899

Canon EOS 5D
f/11 @ 1/25, ISO 100

Post processing consisted of converting the file to black and white, removing the person from the image, and employing Photoshop’s diffuse glow filter.  There were a couple other minor tweaks, like slightly darkening the shadow, but nothing significant.  As ever, you’re free to click on it to view it larger.  I really hope you like it.

Last Saturday, in less than an hour’s time and a radius of less than a mile, I saw not one, not two, but three wedding parties and their photographers.  Apparently, in the middle of November in San Francisco, brides just come out of the woodwork and you just about can’t swing a dead cat without hitting one of them.  Two appeared at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor (quite a name for a place), and the third was just down the hill on a beach at South Bay.  Now, I have remarkably little interest in shooting weddings, but I do enjoy watching wedding photographers when I see them.  In this case, I noticed one was using a reflector to light her happy couple, another had a yellow Alien Bee (not the color I’d've chosen, but certainly festive) with a big ol’ umbrella on it (outside?!), and the third appeared to be going au naturel—no equipment besides the camera that I could see.  Nice—three different people, and as many ways of working.  Here are a couple quick snaps of them.