Phlog

Mining and refining photographic history

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2010-01-19T00:34:37-04:00

Unidentified image of a King of the Bands masquerader. Caribbean Beat published six images in the January/February 2010 edition from a new collection of images I’ve been working on. The story of how it came to be is in the accompanying text, but here’s some technical background on the project. After my father died two years ago, my stepmother, Dani, brought an envelope of his hold negatives for me. I did not have anything resembling a close relationship with my father. He separated from my mother when I was seven and except for some brief and profoundly unfulfilling visits that lasted until I hit my teens, I saw nothing of him for years at a time. By the time I hit the age of 14, I had become that judgemental, all-knowing, absolutely assured in his anger person that we are certain will rule the world for the rest of our lives. My father, Kingsley Dexter Lyndersay, was not overly communicative about personal matters and we never found a way back to anything beyond polite conversation. The last time I saw him, it was in a hospital and I was accompanying my mother on a visit to him that I suppose I really didn’t understand. It is a surprising and probably appropriate consequence of the conveyance of this bag of history to me that in sifting through this bag of negatives that I would find an answer of sorts to that question among dozens of photos of the young couple. Preparing the images for consideration by Caribbean Beat meant identifying them and editor Judy Raymond's sharing of the gallery of photos with calypso archivist Ray Funk and steelband historian Kim Johnson led to the work being viewed and analysed by a surprising number of knowledgeable students and practitioners of that era and the successful identification of many of the first batch of images that were scanned. The negatives were in daunting condition. Mercifully free from the kind of dust that can infest old material of this kind, they were kept loose for decades and my father’s constant moves throughout his life had probably contributed to them rubbing against each other and developing grit scrapings. The majority of the roughly 60-year-old negatives are black and white and were professionally developed. There was little fungus damage, possibly because of the widely differing environments in which they were stored and the basic resistance of silver based film, but every image was damaged to some degree. Most of the fancy scanning technologies that are designed to improve the quality of images during the scanning process don’t work on black and white negatives. In fact, they fail catastrophically. That means that the capture process has to be as rich as possible because restoration will have to be done on the final scan for every image. Each of the images for this publication commanded roughly two hours of inch by inch restoration work. What follows is now my process for the migration all of my film based assets. I scan at the highest resolution and highest bitdepth possible. On the Nikon medium format scanner that I’m using, that’s 8,000 pixels on the longest side and 14 bits per channel. A full colour image captured at this resolution and bitdepth will clock in at roughly 450MB saved in TIFF format. The decision about the resolution should be obvious. One can always make an image smaller, but upscaling is messy business. The higher bitdepth gives me more overhead for drastic colour corrections to images without breaking up the data spread of the image, which can result in sudden shifts in colour tone and solarisation effects. After almost a decade of scanning and rescanning images, I’m hoping that I don’t have to go back there and will be keeping these and other images in full resolution after they have been colour corrected and retouched. Clearly this is way more data that most licensing uses will call for, but it’s the closest that a digital image will come to representing the potential of the now ancient medium of negative and transparency. Related: A slice of Carnival's history As of this posting, the January-February edition of Caribbean Beat is not available on the magazine's website. Still, you can view their archives after a free signup process.

Losing rights in photography competitions

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2010-01-16T22:30:10-04:00

Here's an interesting post on just how widespread the rights grab for competition photos is becoming. Related... TIDCO Divali Competition

Womanwise 18

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2010-01-04T20:48:50-04:00

Debbie Ali lived through one of the worst experiences that a woman can have in Trinidad and Tobago. On her 30th birthday three years ago she was abducted from her home in broad daylight in Roystonia, Couva, then tortured and abused. Three years later, I’m driving around her neighbourhood on New Year’s day looking for her house and calling her phone with no luck. I find the cross roads in the housing development where Debbie still lives with her family, but I can’t figure out which house it is (I’m not a big fan of shouting or blowing horns in the road). “Tell her I’ll be in the road and to look out for me,” my wife suggested. I’d asked Donna along partly because of the long drive to Couva but also because of a buzzing intuition that it might be a good idea to have a woman along, given that I’m a six and a half foot red Afro-Trini walking around a largely Indo-Trini neighbourhood with big dark bags. ...And there she was in the heavily barred window, waving at us. A petite, stocky and very attractive young woman, Debbie Ali was all flowing hair and quick moves, briskly ushering her into the house. Every door, it seemed, was protected by heavy burglar proofing and she was home alone, the only sign of her family the toys strewn around the television room and a bedroom door ajar at the end of a hallway. On first seeing the house, I’d eyed a small balcony that overlooked the setting sun. My original plan for the shoot and the reason I scheduled for dusk was to light her nicely against the colours of sunset, and the sky was an interesting mix of brooding blues and moody magentas. Donna, who has a gift for making small talk in the most challenging of circumstances, was chatting with Debbie about her experience, and her brows were knitted with unusual concern. I set to work setting for the balcony shoot, hoping that the original plan would play out. Debbie was accommodating, but not really into the shoot, her mood seemed mercurial. The usual banter about not looking good in photographs was traded back and forth as I tried to find some purchase in this exchange between photographer and subject. I asked after the garage, where the abduction took place, and Debbie graciously showed me the space but declined to be photographed there. By now I was pretty much casting about in desperation. The balcony photo was nice, but not decisive and I felt the threads of opportunity unravelling in a situation that must have been even more complicated for my subject in ways I can’t imagine. Then I took a second look at the front door burglar proofing, thick bars of steel with ornate patterns that kind of summed up the middle class prison that most of Trinidad and Tobago lives in. Aware that I was slip-sliding toward the end of this shoot with nothing to brag about on my memory card, I asked, “Can we do something with you opening the door?” Of course, what I was really asking is “can we build a visual metaphor for the way you’ve had to protect yourself from the world?” Phrasing is everything in delicate situations. Rushing now, I reached for an umbrella to reset the lights and promptly jabbed the quick of my thumbnail so deeply I let out an involuntary gasp. “Heh,” I said, grinning as I squeezed blood out of my thumb and smeared it inside my hand as unobtrusively as I could manage. “It isn’t a real photoshoot until I draw blood.” Quickly now, I set one bare strobe directly behind Debbie to light the room behind her and put some snap into her dark hair and the shoulders of her sweatsuit top. The other light and a white umbrella goes without me outside the door. In just a few minutes, the shoot resumes, first with the door shut, then ajar, then fully open. As we shoot, the sounds of raucous male laughter, probably a neighbour’s lime, rise and fall. Debbie’s eyes flit toward the sound and back at me as the strobes fire. It isn’t until I do the final edit that the pictures really begin to emerge. In Couva, it was a delicate glide around the elephant in the room, the terrible story that I’m trying to find a way to portray in pictures. Who is this woman three years later? Where does she find the courage to tell this story? Pictures, are after all, just slices of time and the expressions and depth we read into them are really an illusion we impose on expressions that may have come from somewhere else entirely. The remarkable photo of Winston Churchill glaring at the camera shot by Canadian photographer Yousuf Karsh was such an inspiring image during World War II that it’s believed to have played a key role in stiffening English resolve. Karsh got the expression by snatching away Churchill’s beloved cigar. In the edit, I find pictures of Debbie Ali that seem to serve as an interpretation of a story I won’t see until the next day. I’m trying as I make my selects, to reach into my subject’s cool reserve and a few dozen photos to find expressions that add their own nuances to the still very turbulent story that I visited on the very first day of the new decade. Feel free to comment on the results.

Womanwise 17

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2009-12-21T23:38:02-04:00

It is one of the great curiosities of my life as a photographer that I have never, until last week, photographed Giselle La Ronde, Trinidad and Tobago’s only winner of the Miss World pageant (1986). It is also one of the great pleasures of the photography assignment for Womanwise that I get to close these gaps. My very first Womanwise shoot was with HaHaHa Productions, the production company founded by Nikki Crosby, Penelope Spencer and the late Mairoon Ali. I’d never photographed Mairoon either, her career starting in the theatre just as I ended my work on projects in that space. I suppose Giselle’s career started just as my interest in photographing pretty girls for their own sake was pretty much on the wane as well. If that sounds lame, it's probably because it is. The session was in the service of Giselle’s new jewellery line, but I couldn’t imagine separating the precious metals from the gem. In our discussions before the shoot, I embraced the new jeweller’s idea of placing her work in the environment it was designed for, and the pieces were worn by the young girls who were part of its inspiration, her sister’s daughters Emma and Monique. The session was straightforward, despite some unavoidable hiccups with our scheduled makeup artist, in response to the challenge, sister Janine Andrew did the precise and even work on Giselle as well as lending her the top she’s wearing. The creator’s photo is the only one that I envisioned right from the start, I played the photos of the children by ear, and neck and wrist, as it were. Essentially, I wrapped the subjects with soft light to reflect the facets of the gems in a bright, high-key environment. On a shoot like this, the lighting sets the stage and the star, along with the necklace, was Giselle’s bright, sparkling eyes and winning smile. You shape the environment, place the subject and get out of the way when sparks like this fly.

Womanwise 16

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2009-12-14T21:25:59-04:00

This cover for Womanwise turned out to be a still life, with no woman in sight. Ah well. To the challenge at hand. Photography to be done on location of premium jewels from BR Jewellers. This was, after all, a photo of roughly TT$80,000 worth of diamond rings. I could have walked with the big kit, but this project is about making the best of portable speedlights and dammit; this was an opportunity to see what the wee flashes could really do. I’m no jewellery photographer. If you want to see some really good jewellery photography by a Trini photographer, have a look at the work of my good friends at Sanchez-Arias. Here’s what you need to know about jewellery. The work is generally defined by what it reflects. At the highest levels of the craft, reflectors and gobos (black cards that go between the light and the subject) are interleaved to create beautiful, liquid reflections and contrasting anti-highlights on the surfaces of the jewellery. I added some silver reflectors and a matte black card to my usual WW gear for the shoot. Some careful angling, testing and chimping of the results, not particularly deft tweezering of the product around and some shifts of the reflective cards, I got something useful for the cover. I shot the final image with a Canon 100mm macro lens. Next up, jewellery on a subject. A very special subject.

Womanwise 15

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2009-12-07T22:34:06-04:00

Usually I talk about the lighting setups on a Womanwise shoot, but that isn’t all I try to explore on these assignments. The project gives me an interesting set of elements to work with, because unlike most of my photography sessions, these take place for the most part on the home ground of the subjects. I try to move the encounters into spaces or familiar locations that offer an opportunity to reveal something about them, but all too often, I end up in a space which I have a few minutes to scout the possibilities and decide on the best angle and positions that reinforce the idea of the story, the character of the subject while maximising the potential to hold the casual reader’s attention. Lystra Cudjoe is someone I haven’t seen for decades. When I began as a photographer, I pursued pretty much everything and some of those things were, as you might expect, pretty. I ended up doing some photography for the model impresario Ken McPherson, then known as Jasareh H, who was running a model training studio and agency called Finale Fashions. Many of these model hopefuls were not what one might describe as classically beautiful. Some of them were definitely in the wrong business. Lystra was the right hand of Mr McPherson and an up-and-coming model easily in the class of the reigning empresses of the day, Alyson Brown and Sharon Imbert. Alyson and Sharon would, a decade and a half later, launch their own short lived model training agency that coached, among others, Raymond Ramcharitar. I have pictures. Don’t tempt me. The living room at Lystra’s Woodbrook guest house is a sunken nook designed to encourage intimacy and conversation, but offering few interesting angles at the level of a seated subject. So I abandoned the idea of using the seating for sitting and considered the unusual shape of the furniture in the centre of the room. The brown of the furniture and red of the carpet offered strong, powerful colours in potentially interesting shapes that reinforced the idea of robustness and health that were part of the conclusion of the story. Of course, I knew none of this then, but I picked up the outcomes when Lystra described herself and her daughter as “cancer survivors” and went with my instincts. I asked Lystra to sit on the floor and lean into the kidney shaped couch and invited Shevonne, her daughter to find a spot on top of it that brought her close to her mother. I’m not an aggressive poser. When I have two people who are naturally close, I like to see how they relate and “fit” into each other. Shevonne didn’t disappoint, falling into a pose that felt young and sexy while establishing the parity and camaraderie she shared with her mother. Related: The Womanwise Virtual Gallery

Womanwise 14

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2009-11-30T23:58:15-04:00

I meet some interesting people doing Womanwise for the Guardian. Along with the possibilities of the photography, it’s one of the real perks of the job. These are women with fascinating stories, real character and unique experiences, but even among them, there are special people and among those is Mystie Thongs, who can best be summed up as awesome. Mystie has a medical condition that pretty much charts the course of her life with a sobering clarity. She already has the answers to the questions that we sometimes ask ourselves in idle moments, the “what if I knew what would happen with the rest of my life question.” Ever since I first met her online as one of my first regular tweeps, folks I correspond with regularly using the 140 character service, it was clear that this was someone who lived carpe diem with a remarkable rigor. Meeting her in person was kind of humbling and unremittingly cool, but that didn’t stop me from trying to push past her point of comfort. At first, Mystie planned to keep me confined to her “public room,” the space where she holds her in-person meetings (much of her work is done online), but I kept pushing. I never got the opportunity to photograph her in her true workspace, the private world where she plots music promotion domination, but we managed to compromise with a look at her private thinking space, an inspiring patio that overlooks a lush mango tree. We did some photos in the meeting space, but the glow and greenery of her thinkspace proved to be the big win of the session, with both photos, cover and interior, coming from that location. Mystie and her mom were very kind in their appreciation of my efforts, but really, these photos rise or fall based on the involvement and participation of my subjects and with this session; things just soared. Related: The Womanwise Virtual Gallery

Womanwise 13

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2009-11-23T22:40:19-04:00

I decided to take Judette Coward-Puglisi up on her suggestion that I scout the location for the photo session with mature model and newbie fashion designer Patricia Tracey the day before the shoot. Once Womanwise editor Essiba Small asked for photos of not just Tracey but of event sponsor Sheena Thorpe, I dropped an idle notion of photographing the model in the studio and shifted my thinking to making the most of an opportunity to do the photos at the Claudia Pegus’ Woodbrook office. It turned out to be a really good idea. Pegus’ space is part showroom; part creative space and there isn’t a wasted square inch. Fitting the photographs into it was going to be a challenge of fitting stuff in as much as it was going to be a way to make decent photo. Two spaces jumped out, a couch that needed careful positioning to avoid reflections from the mirror behind it. The other space was pretty much a cupboard space; a narrow roomlet with a bank of mirrors that would be amazingly tight for two grown people but would make it possible to create some beauty lighting with just two lights. It’s a simple photo that leverages the environment to multiply the lighting, surrounding the practiced model with the flood of crisp light that’s characterised her entire career. Shot wide open using a 24-105mm lens. Scrapped the 100mm macro because of the cramped space and the need to frame dynamically. Related: The Womanwise Virtual Gallery

Womanwise 12

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2009-11-16T22:12:26-04:00

Destra Garcia was, apparently, worried. You might understand how this would seem strange to me. This is a woman who has braved the most wanton spaces of the Carnival season, triumphing in what was, until recently, very much a man’s world, doing so in the most saucily female way possible. With all the physical changes the soca singer’s body was going through in this full phase of her pregnancy, she’d made it clear that she had big concerns about how the photos would turn out. This was a situation that called for some craft, some technique and a lot of tact and reassurance. With no location that seemed right for the shoot, I decided to invite Destra to the studio where I could exercise the most control over the final image. I really prefer to do images for this series on location, but you have to use the right tools for the job at hand. Destra was, of course, different. Her baby bump had become a baby sphere, and her face was radiant with the changes her body was going through. Her first outfit wasn’t what I had in mind at all. A tight fitting, leopard spotted number, it was the soca star on the town, proud of her altered physique. We did the photos in alignment with her intent, something spirited, saucy but still vaguely maternal. My tacit endorsement of that shoot won me some slack for the photo I really wanted, a photo that cast her in a new light, adapting to a new phase of her career and her life. I really wanted to lay Destra out on a table and shoot across the length of her body, elongating her neck and bodyline but that didn’t seem possible given the way she was struggling with her new body. Instead, I asked her to sit on the floor on a cushion, climbed a ladder and shot at a sharp angle down on the singer. Destra absolutely hated the maternity dress she was wearing, but I though it was delightfully uncharacteristic, a uniform of change. I shot wide open with a 100mm macro lens to render Destra below the neck to a soft impressionistic blur. Related: The Womanwise Virtual Gallery

10 ways to improve your photography without buying gear

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2009-11-09T23:12:46-04:00

This post was inspired by a post on the subject by Scott Bourne of Photofocus.com, after the pair of e-books by David duChemin. Here's my take on the subject. Take a second look at your gear, it's probably more capable than you think. Lenses are pretty straightforward (though most photographers aren’t as aware of the optimal aperture for their lenses as they should be), and too few photographers know how to really take control of their speedlights, which are extraordinarily capable examples of technology and engineering buried in pages of manualspeak. Try something new with your flash unit after getting it off the camera with a cable or wireless trigger. See what dialing up and down the output does to your photos. Read the manual that came with your camera. Your camera is also more capable than you think. Shoot in manual mode if the only thing you’ve ever done is to use automatic exposure. I have to confess that I’m nowhere as confident with automation in exposure as I should be, having spent most of my 32-year career shooting with cameras that had no auto modes at all. So that’s a weak spot I have that demands some practice. Look at what you're shooting. Look at the work you admire. Think about how to close the gaps. In most cases, it's a matter of perspective, attitude and approach and in trying to do it, you’ll probably release some unexpected potential in your work. Dissecting great photography teaches you more about how a photographer thinks than it does about what he bought to equip his camera bag and studio. ...Don't worry, you won't succeed. But if you investigate a photographer's work thoroughly and try to apply their principles to your photography, you'll create something that isn't quite what you were doing before and is quite what they are doing. If you do succeed at completely cloning another creative person’s work, well, you aren’t putting enough of yourself into it, are you? Never make a final edit right after you transfer your images and review them for the first time. In the good old days of film, we had no choice. There were just too many steps between shooting, processing and printing for impulsive decisions. ... If you can't, walk away, get some sun, lick an ice cream cone. I always find something new when I take a second look after putting some distance between the first and second times I look at a group of images. Photography isn't as hard as it used to be, but it isn't easy. Don't underestimate the work you need to do to be an above-average photographer in 2009. I started out with a mad passion for the work of Annie Liebovitz, but no matter how hard I tried, I could never quite make a photo that looked like hers and that was back when she shot with minimal equipment. I did learn a lot about location portrait photography, environmental portraiture and the transformative power of the photographer-subject engagement that is still part of the way I work today. Take another look around before wrapping up the shoot. Even if you’ve fulfilled the client’s brief and your initial hopes for the photography, have you fully exploited the opportunities of the location and the talent? Is there something you could be shooting with the remainder of the time that hasn’t been asked for, wasn’t planned and might well prove to be delightful? Whatever you thought you would be doing when you began taking photographs probably isn’t where you’re going to end up. Be ready to change your ambitions when your aptitude and passion reveals itself. ...Don’t like it, don’t feel good about it, don’t be proud of it. ... That means you have to be prepared to “speak harshly” to it when it’s necessary and to be willing to accept it when it doesn’t turn out the way you expected. Then, of course, you’ll need to spend more time with it than you have in the past. Nobody wants you to become a photographer. Your parents probably still want you to be a doctor or lawyer, maybe even an accountant, so if you want to be a photographer, then you are already involved in a self-directed exercise and you’ll need to both understand and embrace that. The most illuminating comment I’ve ever heard on the subject is to be found in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen, when Rorschach, the poster boy for defiant commitment, says, “We do not do this thing because we are allowed. We do it because we are compelled.”

Womanwise 11

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2009-11-09T22:15:31-04:00

You’d think it could have waited for shoot number 13, but things went wrong a little earlier than that. The folks at Habitat for Humanity couldn’t have been more cooperative. Yes we can do a shoot on location at one of our buildings. Yes, we can do it the day before your deadline. Oh, and hey yes, we can drive you there if you come to our head office in El Socorro. In the face of such positive vibes, I arrived at the first stage of our journey to Couva around 20 minutes late, having underestimated even my best estimates of the constraints of traffic. That multiplied in the hundred or so yards getting to the traffic lights of the El Socorro Junction which took an astonishing 25 minutes. The net of all this? We’re at the site of the house construction at the worst possible time of day, the sun standing at its staggering midday zenith casting racoon’s eyes shadows everywhere. It is at this precise point that I long for a really powerful strobe pack with a super light battery pack instead of a pair of Canon speedlights that won’t fire in this blazing sunlight with an infrared trigger anyway. Instead, I used a hardwire extender cable (that I always try to remember to pack) that allows me to use the strobe at arm’s length. At the end of my arm, I bolt the flash to an umbrella connector and wave it around like what must have seemed like maniacal abandon. I decide to go for the cover shot first and pose Jennifer Massiah under a tarpaulin the workers have set up to cover their tools and makeshift worktable. Providence is with me, and the workmen actually show up on the building behind her for a couple of useful photos. I miss a great opportunity inside the building itself when the strobe slips off the extender cable connector very subtly and begins misfiring during the brief moment that I get some cloud cover. One of the shots is good enough to be used inside the magazine, but in one of those great injustices that comes knocking on our doors from time to time, from a selection of two horizontal images and one vertical destined for a cover that’s vertical, one of the horizontals gets placed on the cover. And the printing falls short. And I am appalled. These are the times that I rely on that old newsman’s solace, “today’s news, tomorrow’s fishwrap.” Things I learned. Explicitly try to setup the shoot early in the morning or late in the evening. If I’m going to be shooting at midday outdoors, then I need to walk with much more gear. Clamp the damned strobe in place on the cable. Really, clamp it. Label the picture for the front page. Do not assume that the design/sub-editing staff will choose a vertical picture for a vertical space. Related: The Womanwise Virtual Gallery

Womanwise 10

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2009-11-02T22:23:43-04:00

Carolyn Pasea was in a confessional mood. “I’ve haven’t done this before,” she said as I put my gear down. “Actually, I’ve never done anything like this before,” she continued. “I’m usually behind the camera.” Remembering the slight quaver in her voice as she tried to laugh her way through my plan for the shoot when we spoke the day before, I smiled and said, “I thought so.” I’d hoped to photograph the shy music producer and manager framed with the stage rigging she spends so much of her professional life working around, but there were no shows happening. I tried to coax her into getting us access to a storage facility, hoping that I would be able craft something out of the raw materials. That proved to be impossible, though I suspect that the novice subject was trying to keep things uninvolved. So here I was, in the bandroom that you walk into when you enter the offices of Question Mark Entertainment. It’s a green room, with splotches of dark, jagged sound dampening material on the walls. There’s a wild scattering of musical equipment and amplification gear crammed up against the walls on three sides, my gear was on a deep dark couch at the other end. Along one long wall were floor to ceiling mirrors that provided an artificially deep, reflected view of the chaos of wires, speakers, keyboards and odd knobbed boxes arrayed around the drum kit in the centre of the room. I took the tour of the rest of the offices, but this room was going to be it for the photos, the best opportunity to pull together the subject with her work. The photo that really demanded some planning was the first one. I didn’t much care for the way it got used in the paper to accompany the story, so that’s the one I’m going to break down here. I got approval to yank a heavy speaker box around the room. It would be the box that I’d be using for to make some height for the shot that got used on the cover of the magazine, but it began its life as a prop as the platform Carolyn would be sitting on. Having set the angle of the shot and the scope of the reflection of the rest of the room, I set my two strobes in umbrellas to first, light the subject, and then to light the section of the room that would be reflected in the mirror. Related: The Womanwise Virtual Gallery

Among the children

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2009-10-19T21:30:11-04:00

I’ll freely admit to a significant nervousness when photographing Hindu and Muslim ceremonies and festivals. My interest is real and runs deeper than might be assumed by a casual look at my physical presence. I’m often one of the few persons of African descent present during the preparations that so intrigue me and I feel a real responsibility not to get things wrong through ignorance. There’s a sidebar to this as well. My grandfather, Ainsworth McClaren O’Reilly was a powerful presence in after my father left our household permanently in 1965. Ainsworth was a teacher of some repute from Arouca and a man of intimidating will and correctness, but he was also undeniably Indian; marrying an African teacher named Moze and fathering three children. A Presbyterian, his experience with his race was profoundly Anglicised, but he was a free thinker with no racial concerns that I can recall, pursuing his work with an eye on those who were most in need of the transformative powers of education. I mention this because the truth of the matter is that I have no hidden genetic yearning to explore the Indian side of my heritage, but I do have a powerful sense of embarrassment at living in such a richly multicultural society with so little real understanding of the skeins that make it such a remarkable quilt of culture and creativity. I do have a real sense of belonging to these many influences, growing up in frank admiration of a mature, intelligent Indian man, living in St James, surrounded by the crashing cymbals and rhythmic taals of Hosay, I remember that at school, when my friends would drum out clumsy rumblings on their wooden school desks, I would rap out equally clumsy tassa hands with my fingers on the edges of the desk. Some curiosities about the Ramleela story... I was, for most of my time as a guest of the Hindu Prachar Kendra, the only non-Indian Trinidadian around. This was not a source of discomfort for me, but I would, occasionally, look around and realise it. You’ll find a number of photos of Dhanraj Ramdhanie in the expanded gallery of images. I actually did not realise this until the time came to caption the images and it was a real surprise. Dhanraj has a mercurial face that is transformed by makeup. When I do the first edit from the finished shoot, I look for range of subject matter, inclusion of as many different subjects as possible and a loose story thread that narrates, in the broadest possible terms, the story that I experienced. I have never picked four photos of the same person, even when they are an important part of the story for the first edit of images. The story commands the final edit and sometimes the visual narrative is cruel. When I did the Tribe story, the first thing that bandleader Dean Ackin told me was: “You left out Gail!” Gail Cabral was a critical person in producing that story, speaking on my behalf to the band’s leadership, she opened doors on that story early on, before I could win the kind of trust I needed to go deeper behind the scenes. There were some good photographs of Gail, and one great one, but they simply didn’t fit the abruptly truncated narrative of the published version. That happened again on this story, as Geeta Ramsingh, my primary contact on the story and a great help to me. There are a number of good photographs of Geeta, some of which are in the first edit that usually becomes the basis of the online gallery, but, again, they didn’t fit the merciless 12 photo selection process for the published story. It’s a story about the children. Adults play a serious role in the preparation, training and even the final performance, but the power of this particular Ramleela is the enthusiasm and seriousness that the young performers put into the project. My first edit was based on this narrative and sought to thread together a timeline with the real engagement of the young performers with the show and its religious underpinnings. I had to fast to be allowed onto the performance field. I discovered this on the first night of performance. Everyone had forgotten to specifically ask me about the requirement. Not a major fast, just no meat and no alcohol, which I can’t drink anyway. I was nursing a terrible cold, so I took two days off, ate appropriately and returned for the Wednesday night performance. Rather embarrassingly, this small fact was noted repeatedly over the PA system. Technical notes... Here’s how it came together. Shot with a Canon 5D, mostly with a 20mm f2.8 lens and a 70-200mm f4 lens for the performance photos. I did do a few images with flash on the final night of performance, mostly on the procession from the Kendra to the Ramleela grounds, but all of the images in the gallery are existing light at a range of sensitivities from 400 to 1600 ISO. The images were first edited on transfer to my MacBook Pro with PhotoMechanic then imported into Lightroom where keywords, copyright information, file renaming and converted to DNG format. The edits were filtered in Lightroom and exported as low-resolution JPEG files to be used in a dummy layout in Apple’s Pages. The selected images were edited in Photoshop CS3 and resized as TIFF files for the Guardian. Related: Local Lives 10

The TDC and me

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2009-10-15T11:54:02-04:00

I hold no illusions about the Tourism Development Company and its relationship with the local photographic community. In a previous incarnation as TIDCO, this arm of local tourism promotion entered into lengthy discussions and negotiations with me for a photographic project and two assignments into what was supposed to be a number of photography sessions, they abruptly cancelled the contract. When I called to discuss the matter, I was informed that payment would be arbitrarily reduced and if I remember the quote accurately, they had “more lawyers that I did.” A few years later, a member of the TDC leadership asked for a meeting with Lennox Grant and myself when we were at the Trinidad Express. The gist of that meeting was that the tourism company seemed to think that the Express should give them Carnival related content for free throughout the season, “in the national interest.” We left that meeting with a deep confusion that has never since been resolved. The content was not provided. Last year, I got an e-mail from someone claiming to be from the German arm of TDC. Their leadership apparently liked the work I had done on the Making Mas series I produced for the Trinidad Guardian. We exchanged e-mails for some weeks and finally, I got a phone call about the matter. The call went something like this, to the best of my recollection... “We’d really like to use your photos; they really explain how Carnival gets made.” “Sure, what’s your budget?” Long silence. “We thought that you might like to have the opportunity to show your work to a new audience.” “Um, it’s already on the Internet. That’s how you found it.” Eventually, I sent the young woman an e-mail suggesting that money need not change hands for both of us to pursue our interests. I offered to give some talks about the project, supported by multimedia and possibly an exhibition. The silence following that communication has lasted to this day. Based on conversations with colleagues, I believe that I am neither exotic (read foreign) enough to hold the interest of local tourism professionals nor am I submissive and needy enough to offer my work for free “for the good of the country.” So the TDC can continue to do their thing and I will continue to do mine.

Responses to the TDC Post

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2009-10-15T11:49:48-04:00

The range of rights that can be granted over different durations that will be useful to the people who hold these competitions is so expansive that they can usually get what they want without being so rapacious. ...I might sell all rights to an image for TT$10,000, but I'd like to negotiate that, not throw it at TDC/Ministry of Tourism in the vague hope that I might win, losing all my rights in the process. ...In some cases, particularly in photography, the copyright to the image can be held by the photographer, while ancillary rights, such as property rights, rights to privacy in subjects and the rights of creators in objects being photographs can complicate licensing. ...Nobody should be in the position of crying foul if they find their image in a collage on a TDC billboard when they won nothing at all. ...I was reading an article recently about camera clubs but this is definitely one of the reasons why there should be one (or a few) now. ...I'm sure as all of you professional photographers know, they want to take your professional work by copyright chokehold too - no matter what. ...I will go a step further to urge ALL creatives involved to read the fine print with ANYTHING involving ANY company/gov't agency and to have copyright/IP/entertainment lawyers (I think there's 1/v few in the country?), on speed dial. ...In addition, the disrespect is just accepted because we have no damn respect for ourselves as creators and are not committed to standing up for our rights. ...I know that photog the world over have a serious problem with copyright ingfringments, especially now seeing their pics all over the internet with no reference to them. However, in Trinidad, we also have the problem that copyright law is so poorly developed, so, we can hardly begin to have a mature discussion on the topic. If it were me, who takes pics with a canon powershot IS3, for fun, I may not be so concerned about losing copyright to one of my pictures. ...It is like where google and/or twitter and/or facebook try to stake claim to posts etc. the outcry forced them to stop that. copyright law in T & T needs to develop so that a real debate can begin. ...Copyright law is properly in place in Trinidad and Tobago for the last 20 years, ever since the country became a signatory to the Berne Convention. ...International copyright law is local T&T law, by and large, that's what happens when you sign on to the Berne Convention, which is the mechanism that allows for cross-border prosecution of copyright claims. ... I spent a lot of time arguing in meetings two decades ago with a phalanx of photographic professionals to ensure that our rights were properly represented in a law that was being seen as only relevant to music, at the time. ...Where I can't by a legal copy of Machel HD's album before the end of Lent, but my sister has it on her computer, and they selling it on the street. ...Also, although we are a party to the Berne Convention, it only forms part of our domestic law insofar as Parliament has incorporated it into local legislation. ...I wasn't suggesting that the competition itself was governed by the Berne Convention, only that there are points of law that need to be in place before a nation can become a signatory. ...Now I have not seen the ad (don't read the "paper" paper, but it ma be that you have to sign a form to enter the competition agreeing to the terms and conditions, which would then raise the question whether that is sufficient to pass the copyright. ...come on...write or wrong go back decades and you will see this same line in every competition for a wide range of companies and government agencies..not saying it write but you acting like it new ...I've been involved with many photographic competitions that do not insist on any rights transfer at all, indeed, it is a condition of my participation. ...The Tourism Development Company (TDC) has noted the concerns raised in various fora over the inaugural amateur Divali Photography Competition now being advertised in the press. In particular, we recognise that clause F of the press advertisement, which states that “all images submitted are the property of the TDC”, has raised a major area of concern. The TDC would like to advise that in response to the concerns raised, regarding ownership of the photographs to be submitted to the competition, we have modified the wording of the press advertisement. Clause F of the rules for entry in the advertisement will now state that “only the winning images will become the property of the TDC”. This competition was envisioned by the TDC as a vehicle for our citizens to show the world how families in Trinidad and Tobago celebrate Divali in their homes. It was not aimed at professional photographers, but as a way of recognising those amateur photographers among us who take the time and effort to decorate their homes to celebrate the Hindu Festival of Lights. However, we would like to emphasise that in claiming ownership of the winning images the TDC is in no way negating rights of the photographer to be credited and recognised for his/her work. The TDC has always been mindful, and is well aware, of the moral rights that ensue to photographers and other creative persons to receive due credit and recognition for their work in accordance with Section 18 (1) of the Copyright Act of Trinidad and Tobago. ...It should be noted that the TDC does not intend to collect these images for further commercial or promotional use beyond this competition. ...Its not only a photography issue, even for student art competitions, I have asked to have work returned as the students' work hard on pieces, to then have them disappear. ...In making your adjustments and clarifications, it still remains unclear why you need to have all rights to the work when a licensing contract for a range of anticipated uses over a reasonable time would offer the winning photographers recompense and recognition and allow the TDC to use the work to their advantage. ...Mark, more than willing to discuss this further with you offline. again the intent was to celebrate those who take the time and effort to decorate their homes to celebrate the Hindu Festival of Lights. ...I have no doubt that if I had called the TDC or written a letter saying the very same things that began this conversation online, I would have been roundly ignored. ...I did not, as Wyatt put it, bring these concerns to the TDC, I put these concerns to a number of online communities in which I am active and they responded. It was admirable of the TDC to respond to the concerns raised in these "fora" as you put it, but it would be rude of me to suddenly shut the door on a conversation that has only benefited from its articulation in the public domain. ...2) I may be mistaken, but most of the competitions in T&T are like that, your entry becomes their property, win or loose. ...Also this may sound like sour grapes, but from what I have seen of winners in these competitions, the work is JUNK. ...My immediate thoughts are, how do we get this info in every newspaper before its too late, secondly does anyone have or know anyone who is connected to those mass emails i get from various bodies,( unfortunately they do not stay in my inbox more than a few seconds!) ...You can be sure the person who created the rules of engagement gave NO thought whatsoever to copyright and intellectual property at all... old time ting, old time ting.

TDC Divali Competition is intellectual property rape

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2009-10-14T13:41:00-04:00

In today's newspapers, the Tourism Development Company and the Ministry of Tourism formally announced the terms and conditions of their competition for "amateurs" to win TT$10,000 for a Divali photograph. Buried in the fine print (white on a red background) as the final term of engagement for the competition is rule F: "All images submitted are the property of TDC." This means that the company, a Government organisation, is seizing ownership of EVERY image submitted to the competition, not just the winners. This is reprehensible at the best of times, but doubly so in an arm of a Government which is a signatory to the Berne Convention on copyright. The emphasis on amateur creators suggests that the organisers of this competition are specifically targeting potential entrants who are likely to be less savvy about their rights as image creators. Under the terms of copyright law, the copyright in any image is invested in its creator at the time of creation as a default. That can only be changed by a specific signing away of rights. It is unclear whether simply announcing an intention to seize copyright is enough to overturn the legal rights of intellectual property creators. It's possible that this approach to intellectual property theft might be overturned in a court of law, but it shouldn't have to be tested legally, most notably because the defendant would have been using taxpayer's money to perpetrate this nightmare situation. This cavalier approach to copyright is a travesty in 2009 and I urge photographers to not only boycott this competition, but to circulate this e-mail to anyone they know who takes photos so that they will be aware of what is being asked of them as a criteria of entry into this competiton.

Womanwise 09

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2009-10-12T22:04:54-04:00

Allison Demas has a gorgeous house, which makes an environmental portrait all the more challenging. We've met before, so she felt comfortable giving me a tour of the public areas of her home. So many set pieces, which the homeowner was so keen to offer for my consideration. The challenge that I’ve set for myself on the Womanwise stories is not just to take some nice pictures, but to capture something of the character of my subjects within the limits of our short interaction and using all the context I can find to add information to the image that will help to tell a visual story. Part of that challenge is anticipating what the story is likely to be about since the news schedule, the writer’s schedule, the subject’s schedule and my own schedule often reduce the window of opportunity to a sliver. Walking through the house, I saw my opportunity and my long-shot. Eyeing an attractive wading pool, I suggested a photo with Allison and her daughter Aisha wading on the sunny afternoon. “I am not getting into that pool.” Allison responded firmly. The cool thing with getting shot down early is that most subjects will actually be more accommodating the second (or third time) around. The first shot would be easy, an image of mother and daughter doing something they usually do, reading together in a plush couch. The image wasn’t used particularly well in the paper, but I think it’s pretty cool. Shot with the 100mm f2 Macro at a sliver thin (for the subject matter) f3.2, the busy background drops into an informative but not too distracting bokeh blur. The cover image required the most trust and participation from the subjects, so I saved it for last. It required the subjects to slide down into a very comfortable chair just a bit beyond the point of true relaxation and get really close together. I shot that one from almost directly overhead with the 24-105mm zoom lens, tweaking and twisting my angle to make the best use of the vivid, very directional pattern of the fabric of the couch. Related: The Womanwise Virtual Gallery

Womanwise 08

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2009-09-28T22:09:45-04:00

I wish I could write it off to nerves, but Wendy Fitzwilliam is one of the very few genuinely beautiful women who is capable of putting a red blooded male at ease. And I know that. When she wrote for the Guardian, I was a contact point for her when it came to sending the column in and ensuring that e-mail issues and the occasional virus problem were quickly sorted out. Regardless of where I have met her ever since, she has never failed to generously acknowledge me, even while surrounded by fans and admirers far more personally emphatic than I. So when I dipped into my camera bag to find the Canon flash trigger and realised that I’d left it back at the home office, I ground my teeth and realised I’d just been careless. While I futzed around with the tools I had at hand, young Ailan was making his presence felt, first with a hula hoop and then more directly. There’s one thing I’ve realised about photographing children, it’s that you can’t bullshit them. Cooing, ingratiating behaviour invariably leaves them bored or irritable. I’ve always had the best luck being straight up with wee ones, so I offered advice on his hip spin for his hula moves and on putting the right spin on the hoop to get it to roll along the floor. By the time Wendy was calling for him, we were counting to six, hands upraised, one finger flipping up after another. I like to think that helped with his expressions during the photo session. During that time, I planned a strategy to make the best use of the gear that I had at hand. The STE2 trigger allows me to use both strobes on lightstands, but one of them was going to have to be on the camera for this shoot. I put the 580 EXII on the camera, dialing the output down by one and a third stops; bouncing it off the mercifully white ceiling with a call card attached for forward fill with a rubber band (the built in fill card only works for horizontal shots). The other strobe was on full power (it doesn’t dial down or up) as the main light. This was the first of the photos that I did with the Canon 100mm macro, which gives glorious bokeh (the out-of-focus blur behind the subject). I was fortunate enough to be the first photographer from a newspaper to be allowed to photograph Wendy at her home. “I don’t really think of you as media,” Wendy said during our setup call. “Well, actually,” I responded, “I’m more of a large.” Related: The Womanwise Virtual Gallery

Womanwise 07

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2009-09-14T22:49:34-04:00

This was the shoot in which everything pretty much went wrong. I arranged to meet Professor Patricia Mohammed at her home in Maracas Valley in the evening. My plan was to work with the golden light of evening, capturing the filmmaker and gender affairs intellectual in the warmth of her home. I didn’t think I was underestimating the traffic leaving home at four in the afternoon, two hours and fifteen minutes later I was shrugging off regret and trying to find the opportunity in a bad situation. The light wasn’t just poor it was on the verge of nonexistent. When I set the shot on the porch, we turned on the screen of the laptop and immediately had to turn it off. That normally invisible glow was blasting her face into total overexposure. I just managed to get some of the afterglow of in the sky before wrapping that setup. From there, it was a matter of completely reversing everything I hoped to get originally and reworking my mindset around what was actually available. The next two setups took advantage of some obvious reading nooks on Pat’s porch and in her living room before I closed up shop on this one. Related: The Womanwise Virtual Gallery

Womanwise 06

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2009-09-05T23:21:42-04:00

Crystal Felix was a pleasant surprise. Somewhere along the line, nobody bothered to tell me that the shy actress of Yao Ramesar’s sequel to his short film Sistagod was um, melanin challenged. Not that there’s gear available to manage extremes of skintone, but as she walked out of the house in Malabar, every tiny notion I had for the photos got summarily dumped. Nothing I was thinking of while talking to her on the phone would be right for such a unique presence. Crystal wasn’t interested in photos reflecting her work on the film. She had a new single in release and wanted that to be reflected in the image. While the conscious reggae number hammered in the background and Crystal pointedly swung around in the sound engineer’s chair, I peeked into the audio booth, a small room covered with a rich burgundy carpeting. Here was contrast that might give me a chance to pump the singer’s milk white skin and dazzling blond dreadlocks. Would it be possible to bring some of Crystal’s energy to the shot by asking her to sing along to the track? Crystal rose to the occasion and I trailed along in her wake, illuminating the scene with two strobes with umbrellas, one gelled with a full CTO to put a splash of warmth to the subject’s hair and shoulders. On the way home from the session another notion struck me for a photo and if Crystal’s game to try it, I might shoot it for her CD single. We’ll see. Related: The Womanwise Virtual Gallery

Womanwise 05

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2009-09-05T23:16:34-04:00

I've known Mariel Brown for several years; a familiarity that doesn't help as much as you might think. What you gain in trust you often lose in perspective and freshness of seeing. Mariel's space would prove to be more of a challenge than her giddy shyness. The big picture was something I'd been preplanning (always a mistake), a plan to make use of her video setup to put another “dimension” to the photo. Damn, writing that sounds so fake arty I could puke. Ramrodding the notion into the reality proved to be daunting. Mariel works with two 20 inch monitors in a space that most ladies would be shy about calling a closet. Determined, I continue on my quixotic path, jamming the video camera into a corner (losing the plan to show the camera in the shot), wedging a strobe up above it (and forgetting to turn it on), and aiming a small overhead task light so that it would provide the primary light that would allow Mariel to register on the screen via the camera. The compromises on the shot were iced nicely by the Womanwise page designer, who treated the photo to uneven scaling to make it fit the window of the front page, turning Mariel’s head, normally a pleasing, roughly spheroid shape into a deeply disturbing oblong. The shot that I didn’t plan worked out just fine. Mariel sat in front of a bank of portable computers being used by her staff to plan the private screening of her new film, stretched her legs out on an empty chair and beamed. Related: The Womanwise Virtual Gallery

Womanwise 04

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2009-09-05T23:08:10-04:00

Patricia Dardaine-Ragguet runs a school for children that emphasises music as a critical part of the curriculum. She's very loyal to and supportive of her staff so a photo incorporating them was going to be part of the shotlist. Implicit in these kinds of requests is a trading of trust and understanding. I like to service these unforeseen requests early in the session, because the put something in the relationship bank that I can draw on as the shoot progresses. I would cash this in on the very next setup, a magic opportunity to immerse the subject in her story and in her space. The room is a simple classroom, but I'm drawn to the big number and letter tiles in a nearby play box. Seeing my interest, one of the teachers offers to lay them out on the floor as I arrange my strobe kit to take advantage of the light streaming through a panel window. Patricia gets the feel of the pose I'm after, the children drift in and out of the shot, dividing their curiosity between the large man looming over them, the flashing lights and Patricia's beaming smile and gentle words. Related: The Womanwise Virtual Gallery

Womanwise 03

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2009-09-05T23:00:59-04:00

Not a Womanwise story, to be absolutely accurate, the photo of Marjorie Boothman was commissioned to accompany a news feature item for the Sunday Guardian. The sister of Boscoe and Geoffrey, mother of Michael, David and Roger, to name a few of her more famous children, I envisioned an image of Caribbean art nobility. The reality of the Boothman's circumstances in Cascade wasn’t going to be supporting any of that. The main house was being re-roofed and Marjorie and her husband were living in a cramped annex bundled in with much of their furniture and art. There wasn't anything flattering in the space to work with, but the alternative, a lush garden drenched in pouring rain, was a non-starter. So we return to the room. Time to stop looking at as a room overflowing with stuff and to start slicing it visually into narrower opportunities. Here's a wicker chair. There an interesting painting. Can we carve a little space to put a lightstand in around those possibilities? Some negotiation, navigation, and profuse apologies later, I manage to wean two tight portraits out of the situation. The Guardian runs just one of them, severely cropped. Related: The Womanwise Virtual Gallery

Womanwise 02

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2009-09-05T22:53:49-04:00

The first Womanwise location session ended up looking like one of those airy, super stylish studio shots that get done in posh loft spaces with big windows in metropolitan countries. That's probably because the lobby of the Carlton-Savannah hotel in Cascade is, in terms of the light that streams through its large windows, virtually identical to those spaces. The big white (leather? pleather?) chair and flat gray wall behind it were a happy bonus. We are working here because that's where the subject, film producer Sonya Wells is staying and it's the Sunday before she begins work on the project. With no production visible, this turns out to be as good a place as any for the photos. The light was great for overall illumination, but a bit dim for freezing motion without boosting sensor sensitivity. To boost the quite attractive light, I added a single strobe bounced off a white umbrella to add a bit of snap and crispness to the portrait. So Guardian page designer, what's up with using goddamned Brush Script as a font on this Sunday morning hardwuk? Related: The Womanwise Virtual Gallery

Womanwise 01

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2009-09-05T22:45:33-04:00

The challenges of creating the kind of environmental portrait that I like to do for newspapers sprang into sharp relief from the first session we booked for this series. Environmental portraits can, when they aren’t too heavy-handed, offer a particularly potent shorthand for character and background story. The three actresses who make up HaHaHa Productions were keen to do the shoot, but the sets for their most recent production were already packed away. Dammit. Time was running short on the deadline and options for a location were running slim. Double dammit. In the end, I settled for the lowest common denominator of my ambitions for the project, a studio shoot. These were actresses, though, so it would be possible to indulge in a bit more drama in my lighting than normal. I also decided to ditch the white background that has been pretty much the hallmark of this phase of my career, in which I create portraits that are, more often than not, lifted off their backgrounds and stripped into graphic layouts. When Nikki, Mairoon and Penny arrived, it was clear that the lighting would have to be even harder, with tighter posing to compensate for the challenging range of clothing they were wearing that morning. Ultimately, it was a troubled but dignified start to the project. Related: The Womanwise Virtual Gallery

Womanwise Gear

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2009-09-05T22:37:41-04:00

I normally do location portraits with just shy of 100 pounds of White Lightning, Manfrotto and Westcott lighting gear. The Womanwise opportunity was a chance to strip back to the essentials of a portrait session, putting as little between myself and the subject as possible while working with people on their turf and on their terms. I hope, with the series, to capture something of the dignity of a wide variety of women working in Trinidad and Tobago and visiting here on some interesting mission or another. The subjects are selected by an editorial process that is quite remote from me. I get a call and a phone number, sometimes just a text message with basic contact info. Briefs, where they exist, are often brusquely to the point. The one mercy I have been able to extract is a little lead time to set up the photos, which gives me a chance to have a preliminary conversation with the subject and set up a meeting for the photos at a place that allows them to be comfortable and gives me a chance to do a little storytelling. My gear is minimalist, particularly in comparison to the stuff I use on a commercial shoot, but it’s no less potent and sometimes can be more effective. I shoot with a Canon 5D Mark II to Sandisk cards, and use 580 EX and 430 EX flashes from Canon triggered with a Canon STE2 wireless transmitter. All this stuff fits neatly into a small Kata shoulder bag. In another small tripod bag I carry two Calumet umbrella shoe mount adapters (the best of these that I’ve seen, several don’t fit modern shoe mount flash units), a pair of Westcott 43 inch collapsible umbrellas (soft white and soft silver) that fold up like a lady’s umbrella and two Manfrotto nano stands, tiny but sturdy lightweight stands that rise to six feet. The gear doesn’t look like much when I arrive for a photo session, but it opens up impressively and delivers studio quality light on location without worrying about electrical outlets. The STE2 transmitter calculates exposure at the instant of exposure, so I don’t even walk with a light meter anymore. Credit where it’s due. Most of this lightweight equipment and remote triggering systems came to be as if from a blinding light in articles by David Hobby at Strobist. If you’re keen to take control of the quality of the light you work with in your digital photography, it’s an excellent resource.

La Fleur Morte - Gayelle the Channel Interview

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2009-03-14T20:50:17-04:00

Film vs Digital - Gayelle The Channel Interview

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2009-03-14T20:33:41-04:00

Photographing Traditional Characters

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2009-02-15T15:23:05-04:00

The challenge at Viey La Cou in the late 1980's was that people had begun to realise that the old practitioners of the craft were on their last legs and the crush to take photographs became absurd. It was wonderful to see these characters getting their just due and admiration, forgotten as they were by then on the road on Monday and Tuesday, but I wanted to get some decent photos. I was able to make an arrangement to set up an impromptu studio space in the unused bar area off to the side of the old Queen's Hall, long before the massive renovations that would turn the space into an office. In that space, I set up a backdrop that was painted for me by Illya Furlonge-Walker for a shoot with the Baggasse Company (I believe that it was Extremities, though the cloth since been reworked extensively) and two White Lightning 5000 strobes with umbrellas. I shot on 6cm x 6cm Tri-X using an old Mamiya C330 twin-lens reflex camera I owned back then. The characters were corralled by Christine Johnston, who I was involved with at the time. Christine took extensive notes on the characters, notes that I have since long lost and because I only spoke to the subjects when they appeared in front of my lens, I have no knowledge at all of who they were. The captions in the Virtual Gallery show are based on subsequent knowledge, which is both vulnerable to error and is also missing some identification. The whole shoot didn't take terribly long, because they were photographed before they made their stage appearance and disappeared off to points and events unknown.

Canon ETTL test in Hosay

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2009-02-13T23:50:11-04:00

Hosay is one of the great cultural festivals of Trinidad and Tobago, but much of it happens at night under truly awful street lights. It’s possible to get decent photos with high ISO sensitivity, and some flash fill, but I wanted to try to shape the light I put on the huge tadjah structures and put a little more snap into the night photos. I also wanted to achieve better results without carrying around a ton of equipment so this seemed like a good opportunity to test the limits of Canon’s wireless TTL (Through The Lens) synchronisation system. For those who haven’t tried this capability of modern digital cameras, Canon (and Nikon) have created a closed loop system that allows off camera flashes to be fired with an infrared pulse with the resulting flash burst metered on the film plane for unparalleled exposure accuracy. Put to work, you have the remarkable ability to trigger multiple strobes from the camera with the exposure controlled automatically by the camera’s settings. In practice, you either designate one strobe as the master, or commander strobe or use a special module that doesn’t have a flash, just the infrared pulse and controller. Nikon lovers, I’ll be the first to admit it. Nikon’s system is much more capable and sophisticated than Canon’s system with useful niceties like being able to change exposure settings from the commander module, which makes Canon’s commander module look much less commanding by comparison. That aside, I’d been using the wireless system where it was meant to be used, in fairly close quarters, usually in a single room where it works extremely well. To push its capabilities, I enlisted the help of Mark Gellineau to put a second light in the picture, as it were. The gear was as follows; Canon 580 EX strobe connected by extension cable to the hotshoe of my 5D set as the master strobe and held at arm’s length bounced into a small LumiQuest reflector triggering a Canon 420 mounted on a lightweight lightstand. The findings? You pretty have to make sure that the two strobes face each other, or at least that their infrared windows, which trigger and measure out the flash pulses. This turns out to be a whole lot trickier than it sounds, particularly when you’re trying to do it in a large crowd while finding the right spot for the shot. When it does work, which was around 70 percent of the time, the results are worth the effort, with much better light shaping and a deeper view into the event.

Duke: In Memoriam

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2009-01-15T22:33:12-04:00

I wasn’t old enough to know Kelvin Pope when he was in his prime as a calypsonian, winning four consecutive Calypso King crowns, but I had the opportunity to photograph him for the Guardian when he was in the renaissance of his career, the successful soca reinvention that delivered hits like “Thunder.” He was a presence at Spektakula Forum the year that I took his picture, all stunning, well-tailored outfits and engaging raunch. He was also a finalist at that year’s Dimanche Gras, holding his own against rivals who were his juniors in every way. The photo that ran in the paper in a lineup that included Bally, Denyse Plummer and Sugar Aloes among others was a more traditional portrait, but I always loved this one. The brim of Duke’s cap hid his eyes, but the photo was then reduced to his essentials; that unforgettable smile, stylish clothes and gleaming jewellery. Tech stuff: I shot these photos when I was the “colour” man for the Guardian in the early 80’s, a time when reproduction was so finicky that reproduction really demanded medium format transparencies to have any chance of creating film separations that registered properly on the press. I would ride around (yeah, I was a biker) with a small lightstand, a Metz 45CTthat was strapped to lighting rig from Larson and connected to a Quantum Turbo battery. With this kit, I could shoot at full power into a white umbrella without worrying about recycling and exposure inconsistencies, though bracketed exposures were still a good idea. I shot these with a Mamiya C330 on Fujichrome 50, hand processed in E6 chemistry. So yes, this was a time when you had to get the shot in six frames, each of which would cost around TT$25 in materials. Then I’d spend a few hours processing the take, three rolls at a time in Jobo tanks. Great times in a dark smelly room with stinky, poisonous chemistry. How I don’t miss it.

PhotoPlus 2008, Day Two

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2008-11-24T23:54:06-04:00

Mac Talks Joe McNally speaks at the Nikon exhibit area at PhotoPlus 2008. Photograph by Mark Lyndersay The show floor at PhotoPlus is a busy place. Most of the bigger vendors host mini-lectures, signings, demonstrations and tutorials that are all worth a look, and it isn’t unusual for the corridors between booths to be blocked when a popular photographer shows up. That was how I ended up spending most of Friday afternoon with Joe McNally, not that he noticed. I was stumbling around the show floor when the huge crowd in front of one of the Nikon spaces drew my attention and McNally was just getting started. This was a show for the punters, with lots of big bright photos and a demonstration of basic lighting techniques using diffusion screens and Nikon’s new strobe system. I’m a Canon user, myself, so it stung a bit when McNally took some cheap shots at Canon’s admittedly less sophisticated wireless system. That got salved pretty quick when the Nikon wireless links went wonky during the photographer’s demonstration. Still, the gregarious photographer blustered through, swapping strobes and keeping the banter going as he glossed over the issues in favour of the technique. It was an intriguing glimpse into his technique for keeping a shoot going when the technology collapses all around you. McNally would offer more glimpses into his approach in his formal seminar “The Moment it Clicks: Tips for the working photographer” an hour later. This was a markedly different Joe McNally, possibly a wearier presenter. Gone was the salesman’s shill and in its place was an appealing honesty as he pulled up a chair and asked an audience of photographers he seemed keen to treat as peers. This presentation was more focused on McNally’s personal projects, including his work with firefighters after 9/11 and other projects with the room-sized Polaroid camera. “You have to shoot something that makes your soul sing, you have to shoot something that makes you happy.” “The basic message that was left on cave walls is the same one that we leave, we were here.” These are some of the reasons why McNally continues with editorial work when advertising opportunities await. Then the photographer discussed the path he took to where he is today, sharing a remarkably open and direct story about his time with Geographic, which was “difficult.” On his commercial assignments, he can end up shooting 120-140 gigabytes per day. For the National Geographic story on early humanity, the society created Wilma the reconstructed neanderthal at a cost of US$85,00, but then realised that the super realistic mannequin would not be suitable for public display and would only be used in the magazine. McNally then had the assignment to place “Wilma” in settings that would make her seem to be alive in the past. On business: “I don’t dupe people, I believe in disclosure. When it comes to billing, make everything clear from the get go, put everything that’s agreed on in writing. Insist on non-exclusive contracts, but I’ll give my (my what? I can’t read my own handwriting here) away if somebody pays me enough.

PhotoPlus 2008, Day One

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2008-11-04T08:42:04-04:00

Papa's got (another) brand new bag The first mission at PhotoPlus was always going to be finding a hook for the lead report for the Guardian, but after that, there was some of my business to take care of, the kind of business you can only get done when pretty much every major photography vendor is in one huge hall, desperately keen to talk to you about their products. I spent some of that time bitching chatting with supplier representatives about some niggling issues I'd been having with their products. At Westcott, it was a gripe about the plastic cap that they ship on the tip of their large folding Apollo softbox (a cute but poor design that cracks far too easily), and the design of their right angle clamp for these boxes, which is either a hex shape or a milled screw type, neither of which is particularly easy to tighten by hand. You really have to be an Apollo user to understand these issues, but if you are, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about. At Tenba it was all about some curious design decisions they made with their Gen 3 Photo/Laptop Messenger bag that I bought at last year's expo. After some fairly tame travel, the front pocket seams began to separate from the main bag body. I don't mind some wear and tear in my gear bags, but this seemed to me to just be shoddy stitching on a bag that was pitched to professionals. Pros should expect their gear to stand up to more than a few shoves into an overhead compartment. Took the opportunity to chat with a bag designer about these issues and some others that I've noted over a year of using the bag and got a hearing, though it seemed kind of pointless since Tenba didn't even bother to bring this bag line to the expo this year. That took their Gen 3 sling bag out of the running for me, since part of the Thursday mission was to get a smaller sling bag to use for covering the remaining two days of the Expo. The Gen 3 bag is a gift when you're moving from country to country or from the studio to a big assignment setup, but it's a bulky hunk of nylon and padding hoofing it around a show floor. Tenba was busy hawking their new line of sling bags, the Shootout series . This line is, shall we say, inspired by LowePro's popular sling bags. I bought one of those last year and sold it off quickly after finding it both a poor fit for my body type (massive) and right-handed orientation. Here's a tip list for anyone trying to make a killing in the sling bag market. • Many of us aren't the size of the slim young men of medium height that you advertise using your products. We are bigger, rounder and much more fussy about the gear and how it fits. • One man's right-handed draw is entirely inappropriate to another shooter's and this sometimes has more to do with habit than which hand he favours. I eventually sold off the LowePro because I didn't like the way it hung on my shoulder. ...I realise that it's difficult to pad the entire length of the sling strap, but at least try to cover the most commonly used area. I dismissed several slings because at six and a half feet tall, the padding on the strap didn't even reach my shoulder properly when the bag was hanging the way it was supposed to. Kata's D-3NI-30 sling bag. Photo courtesy Kata. So what did win out? I needed something light, wearable as a sling that could carry the basic equipment that I was using to cover the Expo and give me quick access to it. After a number of try-ons, the Kata D-3NI-30 sling finally wooed me successfully. It isn’t quite as small as I would have liked, but the two smaller models just didn’t fit my frame. Positives in the D-3NI-30’s favour included a generous sling length, partly the result of a design decision to have a second strap available that makes the sling wearable as not just a backpack, but as a backpack with crossed straps. Padding on the sling is reasonable, but not really generous and there’s a sliding pad that you can move around to increase your comfort with the bag. It’s no secret that most sling bags have abandoned alternative designs in favour of the success and obvious utility of the basic LowePro sling design. That gives you a bag that tends to be long and narrow that slides around your hip to your front, giving easy access to camera equipment through a side load port that becomes a top load port when you bring the bag to your stomach. The dual sling design of the D-3NI-30 follows through to the access ports. There’s one on either side of the bag, essentially putting one on the bottom when you’re in sling mode. The Kata representative on the floor at PhotoPlus promoted this as a feature that allows you to make use of dead space in the bag for equipment that isn’t being used as often. Getting to it isn’t easy though, and you really have to take the bag off to get to gear on the secondary port. I’d like to see Kata think about beefing up the padding on the active sling, perhaps with an adjustable and removable padding wrap that you can zip or velcro to the strap. Kata’s design style includes an electric yellow cloth for their interior padding and while I’ve warmed a bit to brighter colours on the interior of bags, opening a Kata gear bag still feels like opening a glowing Pandora’s box. The D-3NI-30 is a worthwhile design break from the LowePro lozenges and given the size and capacity of the bag, adding a small slot for carrying a 13 inch laptop doesn’t seem as if it would have taken much room at all. That would make it an almost perfect runaround bag for photographers on quick shoots who need to download and transmit files in the field.

PhotoPlus 2008: Microstock Superstars

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2008-11-04T08:20:33-04:00

Further notes from the Microstock Superstars session Kelly Cline takes questions after the panel discussion. Photography by Mark Lyndersay. The strata of stock photography today are microstock, midstock and traditional or macrostock. Different agencies have different maximum sizes available as the largest files they sell, these “extra large” sizes command the largest fees in the microstock business. Prices also go up based on the sales figures of the stock photographer, the more photos sold, the higher the selling price for their images in the library. Yuri Arcurs makes 30 percent of his sales income from extra large and expanded licenses. Kelly Cline is the only one of the four panelists who is exclusive with an agency (iStock Photo), and experienced a 100 percent rise in income, faster inspections turnover an exclusive queue and improved exposure as a result. Yuri produces 1200 or more images per month for his stock submissions, well above the 60 per month limit for iStock Photo. Yuri Arcurs: “Many agencies are running on the edge, so prices are likely to rise.” Some stock photographers have had success with software that handles uploading to multiple agencies at the same time, Torrens suggests ProStock Master and Cushy Stock. Two hundred thousand images are being inspected every month and arbitrary rejections for unsatisfactorily specificied issues are far too common among stock image inspectors who focus on technical quality. Successful photographs are clean, simple designs, focusing on lifestyle imagery, no composites, no sharpening, no postproduction work on images. Keep the focus on end-use. Kelly Cline: “when you shoot, think like a designer, leave space in the composition for copy, use white backgrounds on objects to make them easier to drop out. Kelly Cline has successfully carved out a niche in people and food photography, with many successful images showing people interacting with tasty looking dishes. Yuri sees naturalism to be a growing trend in the future and he finds that a lot of microstock images look posed and stilted. In lifestyle photography, styles are changing faster than ever and images can become stale quickly. ”Big sellers will generate income, but all your other images will sell as well. I’m developing my photoshoots around the idea of a storyboard. We develop a situation, but we also think about what happens before and after that situation and plan the shoot around that as well.“ Key to success is ensuring that stock photographers find the right balance between spending on producing images and the expected return per image (RPI). Kelly Cline averages a return of 125 percent on her image collection. Andreas Rodriguez: “as long as you keep uploading, your revenue stream will keep going up.”

What a difference a lens makes

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2008-09-20T20:11:34-04:00

My theory boils down to this: Put one of these babies on your Rebel XS and see a world of difference in the quality of your images. Photograph courtesy Canon. Before you read on, here's the summary in a sentence. Buy the cheapest digital camera that will do what you need and the lens you can't afford. I haven't always been as careful as I should have been about choosing lenses for my photography. I shot most of ten year's worth of theatre photography with an essentially broken Tokina zoom lens because it was stuck wide open and I never needed anything else but maximum aperture for that work. The other Pentax lenses that I used were a mixed bag, though I never regretted buying their 100mm fixed portrait lens, a magnificent and miniscule tube of glass that got a lot of use for portraiture. My studio work was shot on Hasselblads and a Mamiya RB67 equipment and there were never any options for lenses for those cameras beyond the camera maker's products. When I finally switched to Canon four years ago, I was in for a world of instruction about kit lenses, bargain lenses, third party lenses and professional grade lenses and their impact on the digital files I was working with . Perhaps it's because today's digital cameras capture images that you can easily enlarge to 100 percent, but sharpness has become something of an obsession in the digital age and photographs that seemed quite astonishing just a few years ago now seem a bit mushy and soft. Perhaps the big difference between today's image evaluation process and pre-digital systems is that capacity to inspect fine detail and how readily it is available. To inspect a negatives or slide with the same level of detail that anyone with a 17 inch monitor has at their disposal today, I would have had to mount the piece of film into a projector and blow it up to at least three or four feet wide. Needless to say that wasn't part of my day to day workflow, though zooming in with a single click on a toolbar is standard operating procedure. One of the first jobs I did with my Canon Rebel XT was a job that required massive enlargements, on the scale of six feet tall and while the client was happy with the work, I could see the kit lens failing at the edges, even at two stops down. Later on, as work picked up, I upgraded to the Canon 5D and picked up Canon's 24-105 lens to go along with it. Just three months before the warranty expired, I fell victim to the 5D's Achilles heel, the notorious weak internal mirror mounting. Canon graciously agreed to repair the camera, but it wouldn't be back until weeks after Carnival, so I was going to have to shoot through Carnival with my backup camera and this fancy new lens. What happened after that forever changed my thinking about the relationship between cameras and lenses in the digital age. Simply put, with Canon's premium red circle glass on pretty much any of their digital SLR cameras will give a digital photographer high quality results. Like most scientific findings, it makes perfect sense when you think about it. Sensors are basically a commodity technology that get mounted into cameras in exactly the same way. Some are better than others, but those differences tend to show up at the extremes, when you boost the sensitivity of the sensors. In broad daylight, one is pretty much as good as another. Lenses are another kind of technology altogether. These unassuming tubes of glass are an amalgam of precisely machined glass, critically aligned optics and threading all brought designed with close tolerances to gather light rays into focus on your sensor. The best lenses do this extremely well and are constructed to keep doing so for a long time to come. Cheaper lenses make tradeoffs to reduce cost. Lens elements may not be made from premium materials, critical parts of the lens barrel and machining may be made of plastic instead of metal, maximum apertures may be variable and quite small compared to the constant, "faster" glass of premium optics. You may have no need for the best of everything when you buy your lens, but if you grow as a photographer, one day you will and chances are that you will have changed cameras a few times by then and stuck with the same lenses. Better cameras sometimes take superior pictures to their budget brethren, but better lenses always will. So to return to the mantra that I offered at the outset of this post; buy the camera you need and the lens that's beyond your needs. You'll save money in the long term if you do.

Channelling Penn for Pierrot

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2008-09-08T19:52:50-04:00

If these photographs look a little familiar, it's because they should. The photographic style is a shameless ripoff homage of Irving Penn's early portrait lighting, later made into a career by William Coupon and Norman Seeff. It isn't particularly complex technically, being window light stripped to its basics. That simplicity makes special demands on the photographer-subject relationship and photographs can be successful or utterly uninteresting as a result of the quality of that interaction. Gayelle offered me a small space just off the main studio where the presentations were being done. I was able to liaise with the production staff to set up a flow directly off the camera stage to my little studio setup and back to their seats. Adding a wrinkle to the plan was the fact that the official awards were not ready for showtime, so two previous awards were used for the presentation and part of my job was to "invite" the freshly awarded recipients to lend their awards back to the production staff for on-camera recycling. That's why the awards have that alarming red tape strip which you can't help seeing once I've mentioned it. The setup was pretty simple. A folding painted backdrop provided the background and another reversible (black/white) unit was placed white side out to the left of the shooting space. Only one light was used to the right, a White Lightning 1600, throttled down to quarter power and pumped into a large 52 inch square softbox provided the main light. On average, I had two minutes with each subject, inclusive of explanation, posing and shooting. This dovetailed nicely with the reduced power, which allowed for brisk recycling times and fast shooting. The relatively low light output (f7.1) made the background nice and soft. These photos are now the inaugural exhibit in my first "Virtual Gallery" collections of images in extra large format that I'm offering as an alternative to meatworld showings.

Theron theory

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2008-08-22T23:11:47-04:00

Theron Shaw, photography by Mark Lyndersay. Ace jazz guitarist Theron Shaw visited the studio to consult on his new CD. Like every artist with a product on the shelf, he wanted an album cover that would make people stop, look and purchase. Given the nature of the jazz market, which focuses on appreciation of an individual's talents, we agreed that putting him on the cover was our best bet. I wanted to capture some of the introspection and passion he brings to his playing, the delicate symbiosis between performer and instrument that inspires non-players to the adventures of air guitar. Theron is the real thing, and he's too busy working his frets to engage in antics onstage. We shot a few variations on the theme of musician making music, but the image on the cover was always the one I envisioned for the cover. Today's CD covers have to embrace the reality that the physical media will be short-lived. Even legal owners of a CD will normally rip the file to MP3 format and the serious digital music aficionado will embed the CD cover image into the digital file. I'm hoping that Theron goes to electronic distribution with this album, which makes a simple, easy to read image particularly crucial, since album images have now effectively shrunk from 12 inches to five inches and now down to just about an inch square in software that previews album art on a computer or MP3 player. Since the pose was going to be relatively passive, the image had to pop though light. I opted for a dramatic, controlled staging of the scene. The lighting plan is keyed with a large softbox just a few angles wider than 90 degrees to the camera position at right. This offered broad illumination to the subject but threw much of his left side into deep shadow. To pop his left side off the black background, I added a second light with no modifiers to his left. This hard light source gives the left of his body a defining line of light to separate it from the background. To bring the focus subtly in on the business at hand, I used a single light with a 20 degree grid almost directly over the camera position to brighten his left hand as he plays. In the final image, which will have to be readable at the size of this thumbnail, artist Richie Joseph, an old school friend and fine designer, has replaced the black background with a nice blue glow that lifts the final art nicely.

Why I hate shooting tethered

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2008-08-12T20:29:08-04:00

Just so we're on the same page, shooting tethered is the practice of connecting a digital camera to your computer system and establishing utility links between the computer and camera. This is pretty easy to do, since today's digital cameras are as much computing devices as they are light tight optical boxes. You camera is very much a peripheral of your computer system, so being able to control it from the desktop shouldn't be surprising. My own experience with tethered shooting comes out of two projects, one a copy job that tethering the computer made a bit easier and the other was a commercial project that proved to be an appalling distraction. It's one thing, I've found, to confirm that an inanimate object has been recorded correctly and quite another to work in a situation that creates a maddening dynamic that invites input from everyone in the room. This group think distracts attention from what I like to think of as the magic zone, the space that I work to create in an environment of light and human focus to draw the best from a subject. I don't have too many pretensions of art when it comes to my photography. I work hard at it and try to make every photo a bit better than the ones that I've done before. If I happen to make something that's considered artistic, or at the very least attractive along the way, then great. But what I do believe, is that once I have a brief and a subject, I'm in control and the idea of somebody looking at a screen and hollering "wait, wait" for some nitpicking reason isn't particularly alluring to me. I do review my work with clients in studio and sometimes on location. I'll occasionally zoom in using the preview LCD on a particularly good expression or pose and show the subject what they look like on the back of the camera. That's sometimes a pivotal part of building trust and confidence in a session. On most studio shoots, I try to review a full take with clients before they leave to get a sense of what they like. I really like PhotoMechanic for this. The software generates previews of 2GB folder of RAW files fast, which is what you need when a client is looking over your shoulder. I know that some clients really prefer to work this way with photographers, viewing the shoot as it progresses, but at some level, it just feels like a lack of trust and I'm used to working with film and the occasional Polaroid as the sum total of pre-development confirmation. After three decades of working in this business, it just feels like a step backward in the process of photography and while there are environments in which shooting tethered represents a great advance on the axis of Polaroids and prayer, my working methods aren't usually enhanced by bit for bit border inspection.

RBC Signing

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2008-07-15T12:46:35-04:00

RBC’s Suresh Sookoo, Peter July, James Westlake and Ross McDonald I generally don’t do Public Relations photography any more, but some sessions are more historic than others. I photographed Peter July (second from left) for the first time almost 30 years ago at the very beginning of my career as a photographer and this return engagement was an important opportunity to show my stuff three decades later. At the best of times, this kind of photography is rushed and the pressure is steady. Arrayed to my left and right were corporate communications folks from Canada and Trinidad looking on in a way that completely unnerve you if you take your eye off the ball. The ball in this case is getting four grown men to focus on a staged signing ceremony with the right attitude of professional attentiveness and corporate responsibility writ large on their faces. This isn’t as simple as it sounds. The silliness of having a huge sweating photographer lurching about in front of them with various white objects and the importance of what they need to be doing next inevitably keeps attention spans short and focus drifting. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about this sort of thing, (as recently as the RBC-RBTT announcement photo which preceded this assignment and faltered a bit in its focus) it’s the importance of clear direction, fast shooting and continuous feedback (which can’t be “give me more baby, yeah”). I shot with a Canon 5D with a 17-40mm lens to RAW using the Canon STE2 transmitter to trigger a handheld 580EX in my left hand with a small Chimera softbox for fill and a 420 EX to my right bounced into a Westcott 45” folding umbrella as the main light. I slammed out around 50 variations on this in the time we had (roughly 6 minutes) and generated an edit for the client 30 minutes later on location for the first pass selection.

Pixels are NOT free

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2008-06-24T12:04:40-04:00

Memory cards. Photography by Mark Lyndersay. Now that I'm looking for the damned quote, I can't find it at all. But it's in there, I know it, it's just crammed in with some of the best location shooting advice ever gathered between two covers of a book and I keep getting distracted. The book is Joe McNally's excellent and highly recommended "The Moment it Clicks," a collection of photographs and behind the scenes stories and technical advice from a shooter whose style is essentially "bring back the best shot." Somewhere in those pages McNally wrote the words, "pixels are free" and it jumped out at me. Not so much that I'd drop a Post It on the page so that I could find it again, and I'm sure that it was in the context of shooting in the same situation with film and trying to set everything up again. McNally, who has an imposing collection of gear, knows damned well that pixels aren't really free, but some new photographers and practically every client on Earth is convinced that they are, so here are some thoughts about that popular fallacy. A new 4GB memory card sells now for less than US$60, just about what it cost to buy and process a few rolls of 36 exposure film, but you can wipe that card and use it until it fails, which for a well-made card is quite a few writes and rewrites. So after you've shot the equivalent number of film frames, the card is free, right? Well, no. Every image has a cost before and after it's made. The card has to be put into something to make an exposure, and unlike the good old days of the Nikon F3, the digital camera you buy today has a radically shorter shelf life. Even if the physical equipment holds up, the reality is that advances in sensor chips practically ensure that a camera has a useful life for a professional photographer of around three years. Any pro worth his salt has built his business around the reality that the cost of a digital camera should be absorbed by billings within a year, eighteen months tops. If you don't have the billings to cover the cost of the camera you want in that time frame, then it's time to either set your sights lower or start hitting the streets for some more work. After you capture the image, it's time to start preparing the files. High resolution image files demand a fair bit of processor horsepower if you want to finish your work in something approaching real time, so that's either a state of the art laptop, if you're hooked on mobility, or a serious desktop, both kitted out with giant gobs of RAM. Your digital darkroom has a useful life that closely tracks your camera equipment and needs to be amortized on pretty much the same schedule, so that's some more fixed costs to add to your annual bottom line over the next year or two. Add in your costs for editing and organising digital images while you're working with them and your costs for these "free" pixels just keeps rising. I estimate that for every hour I spend shooting, I need to match it with at least another hour in Lightroom making sense of the shoot and prepping it for client review and approval. Then there's finalising work in Photoshop, which can escalate into insane amounts of fussing time when I'm feeling particularly anal retentive. Then there's the dark abyss of digital photography, storage. Having shot, edit, post processed and delivered your best work, you need to keep it. This is one area that film has digital completely beat. I have shelves full of binders with negatives of my work over the last 30 years that are still accessible, but there are images I've shot just six or seven years ago in digital format that are gone forever. An archival and retrieval system for photographers is pretty easy to put together, but it's an enormous pain in the butt and easy to forget to put in practice. The reality is that both hard drives and optical media fail, so you can't trust either. Old media must be regularly migrated to new media, unless you plan to keep an old system around that can read SCSI drives, and even the best optical media should be rotated out in favour of newer discs. There's a method to the madness that I work with, and I'll probably do a post about that later on, but more germane to the matter at hand is that it costs money just to keep pixels active and available. If you aren't bothered by any of this, then you should cost your photography according to the ease of use afforded by modern digital photography methods, but any remedial efforts you make to salvage the work afterward will be coming out of your pocket. I like to at least work at the pretence that I'm running a business, and that means factoring in the real as well as the anticipated costs of capturing, editing and maintaining a professional photographic archive of work. And my pixels end up being pretty damned expensive.

Light and the egg

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2008-06-15T22:02:00-04:00

The Egg Syndrome One of the most basic photos a photographer can try is the egg shot. Set as an assignment in some photo courses, it's meant to be an introduction to the way that light strikes surfaces. It's surprisingly effective at demonstrating texture and shape. Shoot an egg the lazy way, straight on with a flash mounted on the camera and you'll get a featureless oval, the outline of an egg with none of the curious interest that the genesis of chickens can offer when you hold it up to the light. Most eggs have some colour, ranging from a creamy off-white to a rich milky brown, an intriguing pebbled texture and a very distinctive shape. I set this assignment for some young photographers that I coach occasionally and the results were, shall we say, interesting. After some griping about the apparently annoying simplicity of the assignment, I saw images that reflected some wrestling with the subject (it's difficult to get an egg to stand up) and lighting for the sake of putting the light source in odd places. I always try to eat the dog food I set out for others, so the images accompanying this entry are my own take, in a demonstration session, on working an egg with a single light source. In the first photo, we start with the egg lit by a single source of light (Canon 580EX) from a 90 degree angle (counting clockwise from the camera position). This is a bit of cutting to the chase, to get right down to the business of delineating shape and texture, though what we actually get is half the shape and a whole lot of texture. Fielding a request from the floor, I move the strobe to roughly 135 degrees, which gives a cool rim light to the egg. The cool "new moon" or "Alien" effect, depending on your tastes, reduces the light to a bright highlight, the result of the extreme incident angle between the light and the camera and particularly rich texture where the highlight falls off. It's worth noting at this point that the egg is surrounded by darkness because there is no other light source on it. It's time to fix that. In photo 3, the angle of the light is reduced to around 110 degrees, to strike a midpoint between the extreme fringe light of photo 2 and the above average, but improveable 90 degree angle of photo 1. There is also a white reflector (a sheet of white foamcore) introduced to the image at roughly 270 degrees, angled slightly in toward the egg and just outside the range of the lens field of view. This puts a soft light glow on the right side of the egg, rounding out the shape and giving us just a hint of balance to the image. In the final image, a light modifying device is added to the flash, a Lumiquest Big Bounce diffuser which changes the source of light from a single point source into a broader source of light that tosses illumination all around the room. As the light becomes less intense on the illuminated side of egg, the returned light on the right hand side of egg from the reflector board becomes just a bit brighter in relation to it. You can usually figure out the size of a lightsource from the reflection it leaves on a reflective surface. The scattered light source is now broad enough to scatter light onto the background, raising it from perceived black to a shade of gray. The wall is actually white, but doesn't receive enough light to register above the tone you see. Note: The clamp that's holding the egg in place is different in the final frame, after the original egg fell and broke between photos 3 and 4.

Making 'Making Mas'

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2008-06-14T20:33:43-04:00

Making Mas wasn't my idea. It was suggested to me by Anthony Wilson, currently the Acting Editor in Chief of the Guardian, but he saw the possibilities of a series on the creation of Carnival costumes modelled along the lines that I've been exploring in Trinidad and Tobago with Local Lives. Local Lives has been on hiatus for a year while I worked on other projects that were, to be frank, less about art than commerce. Since my return to full-time professional photography in 2006, I've been very clear about my own need to balance what people need with what I want to do and the best way to achieve that has been pursuing my own projects in the spaces between formal assignments. With Local Lives on pause, I took up my La Fleur Morte project as a way of feeding my personal work Jones. Making Mas is, basically, Local Lives but with a more circumscribed subject, a single page allotted to each instalment and a pretty brutal deadline. The project launched with its first instalment on January 11, 2008 in a Carnival season that would last just four weeks into the new year and costume construction proceeding apace. I was given a page on Monday and another on Friday for a total of seven instalments before Carnival Monday and Tuesday. There were some aspects of the project that weren't completed. I badly miscalculated the construction schedule for Children's Carnival costumes and when I started calling, everyone was finished their work. There were other aspects that were a challenge. This was, ultimately, a series about a single thing; people with their heads bent over working on costumes. Making Mas isn't the first time that Carnival costumes have been photographed as they were being created, but over the years a lazy shorthand has evolved to describe the process. There's the headpiece being fitted to the pretty masquerader shot, the acting like I'm doing something with a glue bottle/pliers/bit of wire shot and the bandleader pointing to the costume designs shot. Some bandleaders or section managers told me right up front that they didn't have time to pose. They seemed pretty surprised when I told them that posing was the last thing I wanted. Getting around the predilection of people to perform for a camera is always a challenge, particularly in circumstances where a camera rarely gets poked. My usual method is to work quietly and continuously until everyone gets bored and gets back to what ever they need to be doing. The cruel deadlines of Carnival 2008 were a big help with that. Clowning around for the photographer wasn't something that anyone in charge of production had a lot of patience with. ...People bent over working, again and again tends to get boring, so I employed lighting (Canon hotshoe flashes at arm's length or on lightweight stands in some circumstances) whenever existing light failed me to lift workers out of the realm of the humdrum and sought situations that brought character to the work. I like my lighting to be invisible, so in many cases the strobe light is meant to either fill unreadable shadows or put light where you would expect to find it, now where it makes me look terribly clever. ...The photograph of Douglas John and his mother was true to the situation, but John offered to bring some backpacks and headpieces back upstairs to hang on the line (he had put them away a few hours before). ...The photo of the Tribe packaging line required two wireless hotshoe flashes to light in circumstances so dim that even high ISO photos were murky and undistinguished. I then had to keep shooting until everyone got back into the rhythm of packing and set my presence perched on a ladder aside in their minds. Some situations were rich with opportunities; others were a mystery to be decoded. The Kalicharans work in a small space, no more than thirty feet square, leaving me in a box with few angles to explore. As with Local Lives, I produced each instalment from beginning to end, from selecting the people to be featured, to conducting the interviews, writing the story and roughing out the layout. If a Local Lives story is a short story, each Making Mas was a haiku. Without a second page to extend the visual aspects of the story, I needed to ensure that the words didn't repeat the photos and vice versa. ...Some lovely photos that didn't offer enough information were set aside in favour of less dramatic images that knitted the story together more tightly. There's a tableau photo of Ancil McClean that I particularly like but it didn't read as well small as the one I finally chose. After the photography was done, I'd spend a day with a rough draft of the story and a rough layout of the page, juggling impact with information to tell the best story that was most likely to grab some attention on the printed page. I delivered colour corrected and toned RGB files with NewsEdit copy and a PDF and print of the rough layout to the Guardian and let the designers do their work. It was a tough project, with far too little time and too little space, but it was a remarkable opportunity to meet a wide range of mas producers working in Trinidad today. What has been particularly striking about the experience is the hospitality and enthusiasm of my subjects. In the afterglow of the project, I've found even more surprises in the reception that it has received on the web. In January 2008, my web visitors jumped by more than 1,000 for the month with key references coming from Trini bloggers focused on the Carnival space. So in concluding, here's a hearty big-up to the folks who took kind note of the work. ...If you're interested in some of the off-camera strobe techniques I use, visit this website.

Making "A Tomb for the Imam"

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2008-06-14T18:45:34-04:00

Creating a Local Lives essay means engaging people, not one of my natural strengths. I'm a disaster at first impressions. I actually only really get going somewhere around on the third or fourth meeting, so creating an essay either means working at it fast and hard, which was typical of the first three instalments or being patient. But as I mature with the project, I realise that slowing down and taking my time can be even more rewarding (yes, I know how it sounds). "Imam" was shot over four weeks, beginning in early January 2007. I chose the Panchaiti yard for the laziest of reasons. They are just two blocks from my home. That proved to be as much a curse as it was a blessing. The photography, much of it in the enclosed space of the Imambara generated more than 1,500 images, which I edited down to just over 500 as my first edit. The picture above was from my first encounter with the people of the Panchaiti yard, and it is a kind of warm-up, a declaration of what is to follow. Nothing from that first shoot even made it to the first edit. You can see the second edit here. Moving from the final take to the published piece is one of the most difficult experiences I face working on a Local Lives project. The next step for me is proving how the images work together. I normally batch process small grayscale JPEGs of the final selects and place them in facing pages in a word processor. I use Apple's Pages for this, because that's what I use for word processing, but the software has a useful "masking" feature that allows me to crop images to fit. This is where the essay really comes together for me, and I can see if a narrative is really taking shape. I will sometimes find that something isn't working out at all and return to the original pool of images to find a better image. This is the point at which I must "kill my darlings", the good photos that don't advance the narrative. For "Imam" the process of whittling down the first selects to placed images on the page was particularly difficult. In the sketch above, you see the changes I made at the bottom right of page one, changes which continued through to the final layout. Below my crude rough is the final piece, paginated by the Guardian's Dexter Solomon. I usually sit with a mamber of the Guardian's design team to finesse the final crop of images and to reslve problems when my rough layout is rebuilt in Quark Xpress. A slideshow in Flash of the final selects, which I turned into grayscale images using Photoshop's Channel Mixer is available here. (Update: I now use Lightroom’s Virtual copies for this transform) 990033 A downloadable version of the final layout in PDF format is available here.