Phlog

On behalf of Andrea and Alva...

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2013-04-06T23:42:06-04:00

Alva Viarruel, Guardian Photo Editor, tied the knot on Easter Sunday morning with Reuters photographer Andrea De Silva, herself a former chief photographer of the paper. The wedding ceremony took place on the pier at Tobago's Pigeon Point Heritage Park. This photograph, a request by the bride, appeared on the front page of the Sunday Guardian for April 07, 2013. ...On March 31, at seven in the morning, photographers Andrea De Silva and Alva Viarruel married on the dock at the Pigeon Point Heritage Park in Tobago. I was there, invited by the two young image-makers to speak on their behalf at the reception to be held afterward and while we were milling around after the marriage ceremony and photographs were being taken by Elmo Griffith and Keeara Gopee, among others, Andrea pointed to the nearby sun dappled beach and said, “Hey Mark, let’s do some photos walking along the beach there.” So that would be the second task I was called on to perform for the young couple that weekend. This little talk, on behalf of both bride and groom to the assembled guests, was the first... This is a story about two people who found each other. ...But it's also a story about photography. I met Andrea first, more than 20 years ago. She was the young hot thing in the Guardian photo department a young freelancer, vivacious, absurdly attractive with a megawatt smile that floored anyone she trained it on. ...He had been a lab assistant at the Guardian who had begun taking photographs of increasing sophistication. I remember a remarkable photo of an urban cyclist with a really good caption and telling him to shoot more like that and to write longer captions. I ended up giving him copies of US magazine, which I’d been reading as a guideline for the kind of little stories he could work up from his photographs. He ran with that, becoming a full-fledged crime reporter who sometimes took photographs before returning to the Guardian almost two years ago to become the Photo Editor of the paper. These were two young people with ambition and talent. I was fortunate to touch their lives so many years ago. ...I've got many Andrea stories, but a wedding is the bride's day, so I'll save those for blackmail. But I will tell you an Alva story. Around 15 years ago, I met up with Alva on Carnival Monday after J’Ouvert on Duke Street, coming back from the festivities at Picadilly and Charlotte Streets. We both heard a sharp pop and then Alva flinched and held his hand. ... A truck might have rolled over a bottle and a shard probably cut his hand. It was clear that he needed medical attention, so I took his bag and putting pressure on the wound, we walked up the street to the Port of Spain hospital. There at the Casualty Ward, we were witness to all the madness that reigns on a Carnival morning. The DJ who was stabbed for playing music the crowd didn’t like, a raving, screaming man wheeled by at high speed on a gurney by interns. ... We walked down the street, the brilliant sunshine and thinning crowds almost a relief after the concentrated mania of that morning’s experience. We parted company at the top of Charlotte street, heading off in different directions; There isn't a big moral to this story. We looked out for each other as colleagues and I know that Alva and Andrea have done the same and more for each other. Now these two photographers, these two friends, have chosen to bind their lives together. ... That's a blessing, but it can also be a curse. ...It's at this point that I'm supposed to offer sage, experienced advice. After 13 challenging, wonderful years with my wife Donna, I can confidently offer the following hard won advice. ...Celebrate, acknowledge and yes, respect those occasions as they will - as all married men know quite clearly - come along very rarely. ...It takes practice, but the correct answer to every question your wife asks from this day forth is "Yes dear, that will be fine." ...It's how we've shared the joy of your lives together these past few years. You will, from time to time, correct each other. ... You are two adults who have chosen each other's company, remember that when you disagree and your worst arguments will be at least productive. I can't guarantee cordial, not with two headstrong people like you two. ...Keep faith with each other, love each other strong and always remember what brought you together today, because it will keep you together for the rest of your lives.

Copyright discussion on TV6

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2013-02-19T19:56:20-04:00

Related… BitDepth#875: CarnivalTV, 2013 BitDepth#874: Copyright and Cacada BitDepth#873: Dear Allison BitDepth#872: Tradition and Commerce Photoblog: Carnival's Axis of Copyright Photoblog: The Images of Carnival (Video)

Images of Carnival

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2013-02-06T20:22:08-04:00

Part one of the broadcast...

TV6 - Images of Carnival, Part one from Mark Lyndersay on Vimeo.

And here's part two...

TV6 - Images of Carnival, Part Two from Mark Lyndersay on Vimeo.

Carnival's Axis of copyright

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2013-02-04T20:40:34-04:00

I’ve been advised, by a source with no reason to lie about such things, that some quite draconian fees have been instituted for the coverage of Carnival in 2013. These fees break out as follows in T&T cash money as the unsuited thugs say… NCC Fees: Personal use - $600.00, Commercial use - $800.00 Additional National Carnival Bandleader’s Association (NCBA) fees for coverage of costumed bands and individuals: personal use - $5,900.00, commercial use - $10,000.00 (permits two years of local usage). For international commercial usage for U.K. and Europe add $3,500.00. for international commercial usage for the US, add $3,000.00. It’s unclear what rights “commercial usage” covers. That’s very specific terminology in photographic licensing and these terms would, if the NCBA understands what they are talking about here, allow a photographer to cover Carnival and sell it to, say, Prada for an advertising campaign in the US and Europe. If that’s the case, $16,500 is a steal of a deal. I suspect, however, that this isn’t what this Axis of Copyright has in mind. The NCC/NCBA/TUCO/Pan Trinbago coalition of shortsightedness has tended to see “commercial usage” as magazines offered for sale and prints sold in a photographic outlet, neither of which is particularly commercial or profitable and those fees applied to magazines could stand some testing in court. The absurdity of charging for the documentation of a national festival isn’t something that photographers have been railing out only recently. In this interview with Noel Norton, he laments the fees charged more than 20 years ago which he paid every year in order to continue his work recording the national festival. I witnessed begging expeditions by these same Carnival stakeholders to Norton’s studio to get access to images for one project or another, requests that the normally stern Mary Norton would always try to accommodate. Both of the Nortons photographed Carnival because they really loved this country and wanted to do their part to participate in its development. In 2005, when they really began to struggle with the yearly trek to the Savannah, I wrote this letter to the NCC. A good friend of mine was present when it was read to the leadership of the NCC and it earned a single response: “What did Noel Norton ever do for Carnival?” Not a single person spoke up for his years of service and the access they had offered to their archives. If anyone has ever wondered why I have been so biliously venal in my contempt for the NCC and everything it stands for, this is one outstanding reason why. Now Carnival's Axis of copyright seems to want to limit or at the very least, severely tax the recording of Trinidad and Tobago’s Carnival. This is such a stunningly myopic notion that I cannot speak to it at all, instead I’ll just let Andrea De Silva explain why. I’m very tempted to walk away from this mountain of crap. But here’s the truth. Carnival is bigger and more important than the stupidity of the people who are appointed to run it. There will come a day when we look back on these decisions and lament the chilling effect they had on serious coverage and documentation, but that won’t bring those lost events and personalities back. Hundreds of hours of Carnival coverage have been either lost or are steadily deteriorating in what remains of TTT’s video archives. This year’s Panorama Semi-Finals went unrecorded while negotiations over rights dithered on. The Norton Archive of Carnival, captured through love and preserved with dedication, remains our most complete record of the last fifty years of Carnival and it is now, justifiably, the inheritance of Mary and Noel’s family. Instead of acknowledging that there is a small but important tradition of documenting Carnival in this country and finding ways to seek mutual reward in the recording for posterity and future leverage of our country’s creative patrimony, the Axis of copyright has chosen taxation as its only tactic of negotiation and discussion. Pay us or go away, they say to us. They don’t see what commercialising Carnival coverage has done to this country’s understanding of the festival. How decades of jam and wine photos have redefined the event using its most common and vulgar visual language. Art doesn’t sell like hotcakes, but hotties do, so instead of a Carnival of creativity, documented and analysed, we get page after page of abs and boobs draped in feathers and spattered with glitter. If Carnival is a golden goose, being paraded for the pleasure of the punters, this Axis of copyright is four fat fingers that are pressing steadily into its throat. This year, they’re squeezing in for the big choke-off, I think. ...BitDepth#875: CarnivalTV, 2013 BitDepth#874: Copyright and Cacada BitDepth#873: Dear Allison BitDepth#872: Tradition and Commerce Photoblog: The Images of Carnival (Video) Photoblog: Morning Edition on Carnival copyright (Video)

Noel and Mary Norton on Trinidad's Carnival

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2013-02-04T20:32:12-04:00

N: As far back as I can remember I loved to play with the box camera that my mother had, not thinking for one moment that I would take it up as a career it grew on me rather gradually. I always admired cameras that I couldn't afford; would look in showcases in England for instance and see a Nikon and feel that one day maybe I will own that and be able to take great photographs but it didn't work exactly like that. ...I did lots of work for Nestle in the early years when there were few people in advertising in Trinidad, at least on the photographic end of it. I had another career that I was involved in as factory superintendent with a manufacturing company in Trinidad Myerson Tooth Company, and photography remained my hobby until eventually I realised that I was making more money from photography than from manu- acturing, but that didn't give me the push. The incentive to get into photography was the fact that I loved it and I found that I started to love it a little more than my career, so reluctantly I gave up my other job. ...I didn't realise when I took up photography full-time that I would be working seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day never getting a vacation and never making the kind of profit that I would have anticipated, in fact none at all. ...I think I eventually realised that I would have made much more money at whatever job I was doing before, but I gave it up nevertheless and I'm stuck with photography. ...I found out quite early in life that the one thing I should never do in life is play mas', I just am not that kind of person but I love seeing other people play mas' and when I love seeing people do things I want to photograph them, so I did it for fun, for a hobby, but of course everybody knows how expensive photography is. I just couldn't keep that up and then people started to ask me to sell them a print and I eventually started to do it and sell prints or whatever. ...I don't do photography of Carnival because I want to photograph our cultural heritage or any sophisticated, grandiose reason except that I love photographing people playing mas' and having fun. ...Q: Going through the pictures I noticed that on the Monday and Tuesday you mainly photograph the big bands like Wayne Berkeley, Edmond Hart, Minshall, Stephen Lee Heung Why is this? ...I would love to be down in Marine Square or at the Savannah at the same time but I eventually have to settle at one place where most of the bands pass. ...You either do that or walk all over the city for miles and keep missing all the big bands because you don't know where they're going to be: We do know that they are ending up in the Savannah. ...I just don't have that, there are two of us and invariably we are stuck with the Savannah, But I think in future years, if I have future years, I'm going to try to force myself out of it. ...Q: You have been photographing Carnival for thirty years or more and the whole concept of this book is Carnival through your eyes - what significant changes have you noticed? ...As I said I cannot he everywhere at Carnival time and there's so much more that I am unable to record but I have seen changes yes - gradual changes. ... We've improved tremendously and we got to a peak, as it were, in the eighties and we've had a couple little dips here and there depending on the financial constraints and what's happening in the country at the time and I think it's moving in the right direction, however, it's getting a little vulgar. ...Q: When I was going through the pictures I came across one called "Beauty in Perpetuity," a clown with shaved head How do you feel when someone goes all out like this? ...I believe that if I make a print of it now it would be just as brilliant as it was how many years ago - it must be about 25 years old. ...One of the reasons for no J'ouvert pictures is that you have to be up very early in the morning - a very difficult thing for me to do as I usually spend the early hours of j'ouvert morning printing or processing my work from the night before. ...It's not that I object to J'ouvert, I would like to see what I see on TV, but I'm not out there early enough. ...They've also realised that Carnival is going to play a vital role in our tourism drive and it's the only way we seem to bring some hard currency into this country. ...When they are playing in the streets on the Saturday, that's when you're free to move around as you like, so I like doing that. ...I like that too, it's nice just to look at the stage and see a judge or a well-known doctor walking, jumping across, having a ball, you know, I've seen that. ...It's great, the fact that they feel so at home and so at ease in Trinidad that they can go and jump and play mas' with us and be one of us. ...For example if any of the big bands have any special things that they want to do for instance, if there's going to be a special enactment on stage, they ring us up before and say 'watch out for so and so'. N: For instance, I often have great fun watching them as they come on stage - I can see some faces looking across - they look for me. ...One Merry Widow has just died and they have all for the last don't know how many years played in the same band and they are among the first ones that start - "let's see where Noel is" - from the time they hit the stage - "let's see where Noel is". ...For instance, they built a tremendous monstrosity across the stage for a few video cameras, usually about two TV cameras and one other video camera - a massive thing that must have cost them half a million dollars to build. It's really good for the average photographer to take one or two shots, but you'll just be taking people from a height and it's too far off. ...If they built something solid like that they can get ten photographers on each side, looking down, not getting in anybody's way but right over the stage and you could get great photo- graphs that way. ...M: This is one of the things that we quarrel about every year because we pay more money than anyone else photographers pay more than anyone else: newspapers and other media and we have the worst facilities. ...There are times when we say we are not going back but then one or two people ring you up, like Wayne Berkeley, and you get an inner excitement and you are compelled to go. photographs, so we are entitled to show them the best we've got and we're just not given a chance. ... There are pillars there right now supporting the roof so all they have to do now is put the pillars for the new stand in the same position, it doesn't change the outlook of the place. ...N: Yes, I had to take a ladder and chain it onto one of the poles, stand there on this ladder for hours on end and I didn't get into anyone's way - no one complains. ...I'll never forget on one occasion Noel came down to get a soft drink and its a good thing that I wasn't there because two or three men went up on the ladder and they would not come down, When he (Noel) came back I had to tell them I will unchain the ladder because it happens to be mine. ...The Press perhaps go for free and there are of course in Trinidad, dozens and dozens of press photographers and they haven't paid a thing. agree they do a good job - what we see in the papers is good but what about the commercial ones who are doing a job for the general public at large? ...M: When we sit down and we think and say to ourselves - look at what we put up with, why do we go back? ... For instance, last year I got sick, I had the 'flu very badly and I did not go to a number of the events and when I came back, the amount of photographers that said - "Where were you? ...I think it will be very difficult for us to say we are not going to do Carnival for as long as we are around.

Andros chat

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2013-01-14T22:47:56-04:00

What follows is a transcript of a discussion on Facebook that originated with a post on January 09 and sparked some discussion about modern professional photography. ...When I was forced to pick up the camera about 3.5 years ago (long story) not knowing anything about photography I knew just one thing....... Today I still haven't read the manual (no time), don't know what ISO, Shutter Speed or Aperture really does (I have an idea but who cares) but yet I have 25,000+ FANTASTIC FANS on Facebook. I was soooo busy with my baby www.ticketfederation.com that when I crossed this epic milestone of 25,000 fans I was unable to express my gratitude. Thank you all for the comments and look forward to some great pics in 2013. (also visit my Ticket website for all your Carnival tickets and join the Fanpage www.facebook.com/islandticket) ...I guess not knowing about much about ISO, shutter speed and aperture doesn't mean your work can't be flawless. ... Quite inspiring because I thought you were doing this for well over 3.5 years. ...Marissa Morris Self taught is great Keep up the good work. sure to hire you one day ...Leisel Margot Thorne What you just said there is an inspiration and I hope one day I can produce just as you. ...Latoya C When you are given a talent by Jehovah God, you don't need a manual or training of any sort, yet you become great at whatever that talent is, yours is photography and that talent came with built in training already established by the greatest photographer, Almighty God, stay blessed. ...Isabell Blenman-Quash Congrats Andros all the best in 2013 and keep doing that wonderful work ...Rsj Rsj You must be GOD if you shooting all this time on automatic. ...Andros 1978 Photography Rsj Rsj I have NEVER used Manual nor Automatic in my life for more that 5 shots on any shoot. ...I'm really not sure why you'd be proud that you don't exactly know what the functions on your camera are for. ...Andros 1978 Photography Mark Lyndersay It is understood that to any PROFESSIONAL photographer like yourself it would be. I am aware of the hard work you guys went through to build a name and reputation for yourselves. ...Andros 1978 Photography Denith McNicolls I'm proud because I've proven that NATURAL TALENT and AMBITION could give so-called "professionals" a run for their money on the Facebook platform because it's about what the masses choose to like or dislike. ...Mark Lyndersay I think you should know, Andros, that you really have no idea what this business was like before it became lubricated by digital technologies. ...My post was an opinion and you are free to disagree with it with appropriate enthusiasm. ...Nigel Tyrell Ntr Reid Congrats on one hand....but on the other, why shortchange your ability? ... And if you don't shoot with automatic or manual what do you shoot with? ...Andros 1978 Photography Mark Lyndersay You are totally correct, I have no idea what went on 6 years ago except for the tales told to me by some of the greats I've sat with and had discussions. Ironically it has been a tale of grief whereby they talk of a time when there were only a handful of photographers and they dominated the market. ... This force would enable any average person to "post" their images no matter what quality on a global platform that allowed the masses to judge their work. In essence it evened the playing field because this medium was on the world wide web and it was given the name FACEBOOK. ...Andros 1978 Photography Mark Lyndersay Come now Mark, you are one of the Successful greats...you literally wrote the book on photography in Trinidad. I'm referring to a few "others" whom I've sat with and the taste of scorn was in their mouths. As you know I'm an engineer by profession and we have governing bodies like APETT and BOE to which we belong. ... It's a pity the older heads in photography never got together to create such a body that would require a licence to practice photography. This said, I hope you know how absurd this sounds simply because YOU CANNOT STOP ART AND NATURAL TALENT. There is absolutely no reason for me to read the camera manual once I am confident I can deliver a successful wedding to my clients which I have done over the years. However if a client asks me to do a commercial shoot I pass that job along so quickly (as I have offered you once) simply because I know it may be beyond my scope. ...The reason for a license would have been to protect the old-school people in the business from being overshadowed by the technology-driven "johnny come lately" guys like you and I. ... Recently I was told by a MUA that a popular female photographer posted up a comment to the effect that we new hot-shots were "taking their bread and butter". To this I said "I'm glad she feels that way, because shame on me if I stood by and let her make all the money". ...Nigel Tyrell Ntr Reid Well I have heard that as well...and the upstarts who are untrained and feel dey good...but I could care less what anyone thinks or what they do. I am concerned with me and where I go and where I reach...if everyone tried to help each other succeed we would all reach further... ...Nigel Tyrell Ntr Reid Too many of us in the various artforms locally are too concerned with what others are doing and not how far they can reach... ...Andros 1978 Photography Nigel Tyrell Ntr Reid As you know I don't mingle with any photographer nor do I attend any seminars etc. ... I wonder if it's when they shot 10 weddings or someone tells them their work is "fantastic" or did they join some governing body that we don't know about?

The Andros Factor

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2013-01-14T22:48:00-04:00

I contacted the photographer to request a photo of him to accompany this post, but he required vetting of the piece before considering the request. I do not offer my journalism for vetting by subjects before publication or posting, so that didn’t work out. ...There’s been a bit of fuss on Facebook about a statement by young photographer Andros Belfonte about his three-and-a-half year career in photography. (Here’s the original post and comments for those on Facebook and a transcript here, for those of you who aren’t) I know this because I posted the first dissenting comment among the flood of congratulations that followed his statement and by then, some other folks had chimed in. ...“Today I still haven’t read the manual (no time), don’t know what ISO, Shutter Speed or Aperture really does (I have an idea but who cares) but yet I have 25,000+ FANTASTIC FANS on Facebook.” ...It isn’t as if Andros is the first photographer to build a career off a thin understanding of photography’s intricacies, a heap of intuition and some crafty marketing. The trifecta of collapsing prices, dramatic improvements in camera technology and the explosion of social media have created an unprecedented spike in interest in photography, forever dropping the bar to entry for a craft that once operated on the basis of high cost and knowledge barriers and skill scarcity. I’ve got a Canon EOS 1Ds (2002) and a Samsung Galaxy III (2012) and the physical difference between the devices is as striking as the quality of the photographs they produce. ...I’ve spoken to Andros on the phone a couple of times, chatted with him on Facebook and even seen him once or twice but never had a chance to speak personally, but he’s exactly what he sounds like. ...While some folks on Facebook have been politely removing his name when referencing his posts, I’m pretty sure he not only doesn’t give a damn, he’s probably relishing the attention. What’s inflamed so many passions and got some folks thinking twice in the debate that’s followed is the possibility that he might be right. ...“I wonder if it’s when they shot 10 weddings or someone tells them their work is “fantastic” or did they join some governing body that we don’t know about? ...It’s worth noting that it was Andros who introduced the idea of photographer licensing and the concern about whether or not he’s a professional photographer to the conversation on his own. ...Those concerns are mirrored by other young photographers in their comments, which leads me to suspect that there is a prevailing worry that there’s a marker somewhere that needs to be crossed before one is regarded as a “professional photographer” and nobody seems to know where it is. Some folks describe a professional as someone who earns their living doing something, but that tends to be covered by the terms “contractor” or “supplier.” If I’ve had any benchmark for when I think of a photographer as a professional it’s when they behave professionally. ...I think I’m right in observing that many of Andros’ comments were calculated absurdities aimed at stoking a promotionally attractive flame war, rallying his supporters and generally driving traffic to his Facebook page. ...I’d responded to Andros’ original post because it seemed like this personable young photographer was taking a dump in the metaphorical pool of photographic practice and that water was going to be coming my way sooner or later. But sticking with that metaphor for a bit left me wondering whether I wasn’t worrying about a body of water that was draining away anyway. Perhaps he was prescient in following his instincts to take a joyously celebratory crap on the whole practice of photography as I’ve known it since it was all swirling down the drain anyway. ...You have to work hard to take a bad picture with even a low end system and the defaults cameras ship with are set to make the whole process foolproof. ...People who have a great experience with their equipment are more likely to buy more gear, making the Sonys, Canons and Nikons of this business more profitable. ...With zone focusing, facial recognition and truly intelligent exposure algorithms, today’s digital cameras make better and faster decisions than all but a few photographers and the pictures are all the better for it. I manual focused for decades, but now that I wear glasses that have three discrete zones of clarity, I’m happy to let the camera do the thinking for me on that front, confident that it’s got better eyesight than I do now. ...At the same time an average guy who knows nothing about painting decides to do a drawing and it turns out to be a masterpiece. ...It’s a maddeningly off-base analogy because drawing is an analog exercise that demands studied craft if you aren’t an autistic prodigy and his photography career, along with mine and everyone else who uses a digital camera today, doesn’t stand on the incremental gains won throughout the history of the craft. It leaps boldly into the future buoyed by millions of hours of programming by an army of code warriors who want to make picture taking easy and rewarding. For everyone who takes the time to learn how to use Photoshop’s clone tool and healing brush with creative restraint, there’s someone who drops a batch of photos into SnapHeal. ...Photoshop and digital cameras would be their [photography’s old guard] worst nightmare…(just imagine your father trying to use Photoshop).” Setting aside the rather ghoulish vision of my zombie dad trying to hold a mouse that keeps slipping out of the rotting flesh of his hands (mostly because he was cremated), I’ll settle for pointing out that I toned my first photograph in Photoshop (v1.07) when Andros Belfonte was 12 years old and leave it at that. ...There’s something quite giddy and compelling about his sense of what photography is all about and his cheerful dismissal of actual photographic knowledge feels like a modern update of Tom Sawyer’s rebellious dismissal of “larnin.” ...He’s the street corner artist discovered by MOMA, the intuitive auteur enabled by software and the social media superman able to gather thousands of likes in a single bound. ...It’s easy to demonise Andros as an ignorant lout so uneducated in his chosen craft and so drunk on Facebook likes that his ego has long cut loose from reality, but I’d never say that, not least because everybody is the hero in their own story and the Andros 1978 story is, to a young person, clear, inspiring and oh so attainable. I don’t think for a minute that Andros is as clueless as he wants folks to believe he is. “ART AND NATURAL TALENT,” the capital that he capitalizes, will only take you far and then there are files to transfer and images to work on. There’s work that you can’t avoid if you want the results he gets, whether he gets the image in camera or on a computer screen and to suggest otherwise is, well, to lie. ...The progressive migration of everything routine and calculable into the processors that run our cameras the coding that runs our imaging software will continue and there will be more Belfontes in our future. Young Andros may well find himself lionised as the most outspoken of a new breed of pure photographic artists and brilliant social media marketers who will define the vanguard of a new technology driven freedom to create. To such photographers of the future shooting and processing slide film will seem as crude and as alien as nailing shoes to a horse would seem to today’s fancy dan mounting up his new rims.

On local photography, a 2012 overview

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2012-12-31T20:56:43-04:00

An overview of the surge in photographic activity during 2012, originally published in the Sunday Guardian for December 30, 2012. ...In 2012, photography seemed to be moving from the sidelines to centre stage in the art world, or at the very least, onto walls normally reserved for the admiration of paintings and sketches. With no less than three major showings this year and three accompanying documents coming out of those projects, the craft of photography became a subject of conversation and reevaluation in the arts space. The three shows, Pictures in Paradise, a gallery talk and running slideshow in support of a hefty regional overview of contemporary photography, the Art Society's Record : Art : Memory, an Independence anniversary inspired overview of the craft as public archive and 10, Alex Smailes'retrospective of his work in Trinidad and Tobago, each brought different perspectives to the contemplation of what photography means in 2012. The work on the walls of Smailes'exhibition, large prints held to the spare white walls at Medulla by tiny magnets articulated the photographer's ethos of no fuss accessibility to the work. The photographer eschewed a formal book in favour of large sheets of images printed by the Guardian on high brite newspaper and bundled informally into a brown cardboard box with identifying information silkscreened into it. ...Emphasising low cost accessibility for the work, Smailes priced the work affordably both on the walls and collected in the casual "box set." Smailes'approach to photography is useful to note, because he's the only photographer whose work is represented in all three shows and documents. British trained and war-zone honed, Alex Smailes came to this country at the turn of the century to work on a book project that he hoped would explain this part of his bloodline, first for himself and then for his readers. Over the course of that decade he evolved his attentions from the issues of the region to those of hard knock families living within just a few blocks of his office at Fernandes Compound. At his artist's talk at the end of his show, Smailes traced the route he took since coming to this country and choosing to settle here, closing the talk with new digital images that sparkled with the hip, colourful gloss of modern visual branding and eye candy seduction. The work is at a striking remove from the grit and ruthless honesty of his journalism, those images reeking of a disturbing reality. The newer images, for which he is no doubt much better paid, offered an invented truth constructed out of Caribbean flavoured elements with which he had become intimately familiar. Has Trinidad and Tobago been good to Smailes and his work? ...These three shows all strove mightily to address the latter question, positing visual theses to support varying roles and value that might be assigned to this business of taking photographs. It's a useful question to be considering at this time in the craft's development in this country. Photographers in Trinidad and Tobago, in numbers never before seen in what was once a small market, are struggling with the constantly changing expectations of image making, the massive consumption of images through the firehose of often dubious Facebook postings and a vigorous newbie enthusiasm to become the next big thing. Two decades ago when I served on the Art Society's board, Carlisle Chang, never an artist to mince words, allowed my presence as a representative of the plastic arts. If he were witness to today's explosion of software driven artifice and gimmickry, he might be prone to dismiss the whole cycle of undisciplined exploration as a spastic art, I'm sure. Local photography finds itself in a curious place now, accorded the respect of exhibition and ennobled by the success of these three projects, it finds itself elbowed onto a table of more rarefied considerations. This is quite an accomplishment, having skipped the torturous debates and demanding reconsiderations and deconstructions that accompanied such artistic upgrades in the first world. The respect accorded to photography as a visual art in Trinidad and Tobago has received a welcome boost from that international acceptance of the craft as occasional but not necessarily automatic art, but the architecture that supports such an elevation is almost entirely missing. In that absence, Melanie Archer, a designer with strong curatorial credits and Marsha Pearce, a doctoral candidate with a modernist view of creative arts, have emerged as coordinators and explicators of this new shift, bolting together a superstructure beneath this rapid ascension of photography almost as quickly as it soars. Both Archer and Pearce have either been involved with, present for or consulted on the production of all three exhibitions and their role in making this new appreciation of photography as art sustainable is not to be underestimated. ...Photography is, for the most part, a straightforward craft, made even simpler by modern cameras and technologies which almost completely remove the need to think about fussy things like exposure and focusing in today's picture taking. Kodak may have had to advertise that it would do "the rest" for hopeful photographers a century ago, but today's camera owners simply accept that the magic box in their hands, whether it be an iPhone or a high-end digital SLR, knows more about the details of picture taking than they do. Such smart processors and programming have made it possible for almost anyone to take a good picture, but they have increased the gap between good and great quite dramatically. Into that canyon have been poured filters, Photoshop actions, enhanced dynamic range imaging and dramatic transformations that seek to lift image making beyond the cleverness of cameras, but so many of these effects, best summarised by the popular Instagram, substitute style for considered thought and effect for creative authority. Photography that aspires to lasting value, let alone art cannot simply be good anymore, it must inform, infer and engage on a quite different level. That was the message of the Art Society's Record : Art : Memory (henceforth AS:RAM) which turned out to be a culling of the best of what's left, a curatorial exercise undertaken by Abigail Hadeed, whose search for photographs taken over the last half century was as much a funeral for lost works as it was a joyful celebration of the important works celebrated at the society's Federation Park headquarters. Even among the works that were featured, some were offered anonymously, their authorship long ground up in the laissez faire bureaucracy of newspaper filing systems (more on that here: http://ow.ly/gbcCv), others the result of an accident of wealth, expertise and curiosity that led to privileged eyes using expensive cameras and film to record ordinary, attractively quaint lifestyles. These photographs draw their power and capacity to move by bringing the ruthlessly faithful record of film forward by a more than half a century to eyes that have never beheld such sights. That capacity to record and the malleability of today's photographic works bring two branches of photographic approach into inevitable conflict and nowhere was that clearer than in Pictures from Paradise, billed as "A survey of contemporary Caribbean photography," by its producer, Robert and Christopher Publishers. Between the covers of the 200 plus page book, co-edited by Mariel Brown and Melanie Archer is a wide ranging collection of work from Caribbean photographers that cleaves cleanly between artifice and documentation. ...Pictures from Paradise offers a collection of works that are striking in their often quite divergent motivations, offering the dramatically spare works of Abigail Hadeed, Radcilffe Roye and Gerard Gaskin, the faux documentary works of Renee Cox and the artist as photographer explorations of James Cooper, Holly Bynoe and Marvin Bartley. It's quite beyond the scope of this contemplation to delve deeper into the wealth of work offered up by Paradise, but the book quite clearly explicates the challenges that tomorrow's photographers will face in finding an effective way of expressing themselves. ...Much of what's called art is so described because it's paint on a canvas, but that doesn't stop it from also being uninspired hackwork, attractive, market focused daubings that match household decors but stir no souls. At its best, photography is photographic, whether it's built out of film grain or pixels. There's a direct line of visual connection between the delicate beauty and ornate details of the Indian betis in the Jocelyn Arnott collection at AS:RAM and the hyperreal Hasselblad digital composites of Marvin Bartley. Both works are as determinedly photographic as they are different in execution, but both champion photography itself as a goal worthy of pursuit, with the determinations of art left to other forces and agendas.

The Queen

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2012-12-18T00:47:17-04:00

Athaliah Samuel, photographed on December 15, 2012. I've had an opportunity to photograph a beauty queen or two, beginning my career with a photograph of Janelle "Penny" Commissiong and doing a photo or two of Giselle La Ronde-West and Wendy Fitzwilliam. The high-stakes fashion and beauty world isn't something I've spent too much time considering professionally generally and no time at all contemplating since returning to full-time photography seven years ago. There are far too many enthusiastic photographers running around and way too many keen young women posing for them for that whole scene to look like anything other than bees in a particularly sweet flowering field. I leave the pollination allusions up to you. A few months ago, though, I stepped into some particularly noxious discussions on Facebook about Athaliah Samuel, this country's 2012 Miss World candidate. Triggering this discussion were some particularly awful photographs of the young woman which I saw as an indictment of the photographer's skill and judgement, not the model's. Many people don't realize the power that a photographer has over a photography session and how pliable a young model can be when the person behind the camera exercises that authority. Add inexperience into the mix and truly awful things can result. Athaliah had trusted her photographer, her makeup artist and her stylist on that shoot and they had all failed her terribly. While I was railing about all this, Damian Luk Pat stepped up to the challenge and provided the young model with photographs that were more in keeping with her role and her beauty. Imagine my surprise then to realize that Athaliah had been in touch with me via Facebook private message politely and quite flatteringly asking for a photo session. As with all such requests, I'd deferred the opportunity, suggesting that other young photographers might be keen to photograph her. By now I was basically appalled that I'd had a hand in throwing the young woman to the photographic wolves and vowed to make good at the first opportunity. That chance came along this weekend when I needed someone to be photographed for a lighting talk and demonstration. Multiple birds were lined up to be brained with a single artful throw on this one. Athaliah proved to be everything I'd expected from her interviews and responses to the many cruel comments that had been made about her. This is a young woman who has had no silver spoon opportunities who intends to upgrade her life's cutlery and is doing so with energy, enthusiasm and a remarkably positive outlook. I was mightily impressed by her and I hope the photographs we did nudge her along on her life's journey.

Photography as a vocation

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2012-11-26T23:19:48-04:00

Record : Art : Memory from Mark Lyndersay on Vimeo.

There’s a certain enthusiasm among young photographers to become “professional.” This isn’t always a money thing, though making money is not something one should have a reflexively negative response to. It seems to be a prestige thing, a way of separating oneself from the larger herd of camera wielding masses, which is essentially everyone these days. But is being a professional necessarily the best way to distinguish your approach to photography from those of casual shooters? More compellingly, is funnelling an interest in photography into the rather strict limitations of commercial work the only way to find satisfaction in making photographs? Most of today’s new photographers have only been shooting for six years or so, and that reality makes me think back to where I was after half a decade of working with a camera. At that point, I was still some distance from being a commercial photographer, spending much of my time with a camera photographing theatrical productions all around the country under appalling lighting conditions, many of those images done to accompany reviews I was doing for the newspaper at the time. That mix of projects, along with some advertising stills and some public relations photos to bring some money, provided me with an intriguing mix of challenges and allowed me to explore a range of photographic experiences, But even then, it was clear that some of the things I was photographing would have no lasting value (particularly the pots and pans) and some might, depending on how history judged the images I was recording largely for my own amusement and sense of adventure. I’ve kept a lot of that work, but I’ve also lost some of it as well. Some of it was lost to those few occasions on which I was a work for hire photographer and others to the type of carelessness and misplaced trust that would lead me to send someone a sheet of transparencies and then never see it again. It was during this time that I began to get something of a reputation as an ass about my photographs, what we’d call being conscious of my copyright these days. When the Guardian lost two sheets of my slides, I had the audacity, or so the management of the day saw it, to demand that either a greater effort be made to find the work or that I be paid a fair fee for its loss. That effrontery got me banned from the Guardian’s compound, both as a content provider and as a visitor, for two years by Mark Conyers, the CEO at the time as a response to my boldfaced letter requesting action. It was a ban that would only be lifted in 1989, somewhat reluctantly by Conyers when CEO Designate Alwin Chow decided that I would be coming in to coach the photographic department. That project would turn into another interesting phase of my life. I wasn’t clear about what I was doing back then, but intuitively, I understood that my creative work was the only thing of value that I owned as a photographer. The equipment was depreciating (though at a glacial pace compared to today’s camera churn) and even to my relatively numb appreciation of finances, it seemed that negatives preserved was the better bet. The catch is that you never know what’s going to be valuable and what’s just going to be another photo in a file that nobody cares about, even people who might be expected to. It’s like that photograph of Monica Lewinsky at a fundraiser shot by Dirck Halstead that was just another snap at an event until it became visual evidence in a national scandal. I’ve known many photographers over the last four decades in Trinidad and Tobago, men and women who created great work, some who created mediocre work and far too many whose work has simply disappeared. When the photographer Jerry Llewelyn died, I contacted his widow, intending to gather his work for an exhibit that I’d hoped might raise some money for his family after a long and costly illness. I knew that Jerry who had photographed alongside Derek Gay and myself during the amazing theatrical era of the late 1970’s and 1980’s had lost some of his negatives in a flooding at his home some years before. I knew that much of his work done at The Trinidad Express during his time as the chief photographer there was the property of the paper, but I didn’t expect to get an envelope with nine prints. The sum total of his work over a productive and creative lifetime. Other photographers like the amazing Harold Prieto, who basically owned the commercial photography sector throughout the 1980’s and 1990’s, had shot and delivered thousands of pictures to his clients but kept only a few. Other photographers had admirable archives that were either scattered and largely abandoned or left in a state of such incomplete organization that their heirs will have to evaluate the work now without their experience and understanding of the collections they have inherited. At the Art Society’s recent Independence exhibit of photographs, Record : Art : Memory, I had several photos on show, chosen by the curatorial team led by Abigail Hadeed. They were culled from a small fraction of the images that I’ve photographed, images on film transposed to digital files in a process that’s even more challenging that older print processes but at least must be done only once per photo. For the most part, they represent my work in photography as a vocation, image-making that made almost no sense at all financially, but were, very much, the reason I’d begun taking photographs in the first place. Some of my colleagues in those days made far more money than I did, they made good money and they served the market well. I was able to improve my relationship with the market over time, but I was always pulled in two directions, the work that I saw that needed to be done and the work that I’d be paid well to do. Despite our country's small size and lack of archival support systems and funding, it’s possible with a few sacrifices, to have a photographic career and a photographic vocation, but I’m not sure anything like that is part of the discussion about photography anymore. It’s all, let’s shoot the pretty girls and turn their skin into plastic, and the supersaturated landscapes at dusk with the stars gliding across the sky and anyone on stage, doing anything. It’s as if the language of photography has become monosyllabic as well as repetitive, like visual text messages copied and pasted over and over again and transmitted on Facebook to a chorus of LOLs and Likes. There’s so much more that needs to be said with this increasingly pervasive visual language and so many more speaking it that it’s almost shocking that the conversation has dwindled into colourful grunts and groans. This country deserves better, the craft deserves better and our history deserves more than the compromised record we are creating today.

Asked, answered

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2012-11-19T23:45:09-04:00

Both togs have agreed that I can make a public response to their questions as long as I leave out some identifying information. ...He successfully arranged with his employers to upgrade the office camera, and to buy some lights and a soft box to improve the in-house photography work they have been doing. ...Part of his business proposal to the company included getting a cut of the income from this photography work, but since the equipment came in, discussions about revenue sharing have evaporated and other photographers have been brought in to work with the equipment. AC is, unsurprisingly, unhappy with this situation, particularly since the other photographers haven’t been doing particularly good work with the gear. ...My career as a photographer essentially began at AMPLE in 1978 when I make the jump one evening from producer to photographer after filling in for an absentee shooter. ...The AMPLE experience put me in the position of delivering on my nascent skills, moving from the occasional good photo to being able to reliably deliver a selection of photos that met client needs. I would eventually leave AMPLE on bad terms, dissatisfied with several things and angry with the flush indignation of youth, but also departing with the most precious asset the company had invested in over that 24 months, my skill with a camera. If AC really loves photography, he may find that the situation he’s found himself in might prove to be an equally educational experience. ... If you aren’t an investor, you’re an employee and your best efforts will be rewarded with a salary, not shares or income participation. ...One of the things that angered me during my time at AMPLE was my feeling that I’d worked really hard for the company, and I expected more than a pay packet as a reward for that commitment. It took me a really long time to understand that companies aren’t built to make you happy; they are there to pay you a salary. ...A company won’t intentionally help you achieve your personal goals, their protestations about “human capital” notwithstanding, but it’s possible to use corporate environments to learn more than you’ll ever manage on your own. After letting AC know all this using far fewer words, I encouraged him to consider making use of the opportunity the equipment and work situation gives him to build his skills and capabilities. I don’t know what type of business he’s working for, but it sounds like he might be able to find out more about how the company deals with clients for photography and how the process of successful client relations might be pursued. ...One of the things that AC will also have to live with is the loss of his work done during that time. There are only two times in my life that I’ve worked somewhere as a photographer and in so doing, committed work for hire. At AMPLE I did a multimedia slideshow (state of the art tech back then) about Carnival that the company funded that’s long since been lost. ...Neither body of work was my property and while I often think of those photos, the work that went into them and their value, the photos weren't mine to care for. ...“…the problem is that for some jobs there’s just hundreds of images of each bottle, each box, each container, at various angles, and it’s quite impossible to get them all edited to perfection in a time frame the client would be happy with.” I’ve encountered this situation before with local advertising agencies who apparently want to fondle vast numbers of images before settling on exactly the perfect shot. ...I’m moved to hope that Shaun is concentrating more on effectively licensing the use of his work and crafting suitably prophylactic contract terms rather than worrying about image numbers or the final “look” that the agency imposes on his images. For many agency situations, the creative teams want to put a stamp on the images that you may not always appreciate or enjoy, but it’s commercial work, not art. The only useful response to this admittedly frustrating and creatively numb situation is to develop a personal style of imaging that’s attractive and appealing to direct customers and then proceed to market that style to them directly. ...After refusing and going back and forth, I caved and gave them RAW files for their archives but got a signed agreement from them stating that I owned the copyrights and that those RAW files are “for their archives” only and not publication.” This is a point that I feel very strongly about and my reasons for refusing clients access to RAW files are worth exploring. Most client’s aren’t aware of file metadata, but RAW files generally only carry camera produced EXIF data, not user generated IPTC information. ...Most savvy metadata authors will note that among most camera EXIF data is the serial number of the camera creating the file and if a user has intervened, the name of its owner. To you I say, if you know that much about RAW files, then you should know why you shouldn’t be releasing them. ...Someone with access to such a file has a disturbing level of access to the underlying file information you’ve captured and can remake your image in ways you would never have considered. Again, if you’re being paid well for disposable advertising work, you may not much care about such things, and several of my professional peers have adopted exactly this position. The only solace I can offer is that over time, it’s unlikely that anyone will have the skill to access and manipulate that RAW file no matter where it ends up. Advertising agencies and corporations simply have better and more productive things to do with their time than to fiddle with RAW images and more useful things to do with their money than to retain the people or the talent to do the same. ...If there’s any advice that I can offer that covers the concerns of both young photographers, it’s that they should stick to their knitting and keep working at becoming better photographers. I always remember Harold Prieto, who was the commanding commercial photographer of the 1980’s evaluating the decision by AMPLE to have an in-house photographer (and in doing so, ensure that he got less work that he might have otherwise). I’m paraphrasing here, but Harold’s position was basically that if an in-house photographer was any good, he would soon be off on his own and if he wasn’t, he really wasn’t any competition for him. Over time, that would prove to be true not just for AMPLE, who retained other photographers briefly after I resigned, but also for other advertising agencies who tried the strategy. ...A photographer will always be a photographer and that focus brings its own responsibilities, demands and incentives that simply aren’t fulfilled by a company with an entirely reasonable focus on their return on investment. I could share horror stories about what local print media companies do with the millions of photographs they have captured over the decades, but let's just say that their decisions make perfect sense from a corporate point of view and no sense at all to any serious photographer. You can make money as a photographer if you work hard enough at it, and you can make money in the advertising agency/creative hotshop/design business if you work hard enough at it, but you really won’t make money or find much satisfaction or fortune in the crazy hybrids that crop up occasionally. ...It’s a lot of fun and offers a lot of personal fulfilment, but that doesn’t lighten the load of the work and when that hits home, most folks just give up.

The Photographer's Responsibility

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2012-10-01T21:22:02-04:00

I was disappointed, though ultimately not surprised, to discover that a photographer, recently returned to the local market, was circulating a price list for services that offered access to RAW files and all rights to the work done. ...The answer was not as the clearly agonized photographer suggested, to call a meeting of senior photographers to discuss this matter. That would presume that the local professional photographic community, many of whom have been in the business for decades, had somehow managed to miss this rather obvious development or that such a group of experienced practitioners could do a damn thing about it. It’s not as if the professional community hasn’t experienced a group of photographers arriving half-baked and undercharging before, it just hasn’t happened on quite this scale before or with technology that lubricated exact copying like computers do. Adding kerosene to my doubts about the usefulness of such a move is the Abyssinian gulf between the pros who anchored the local photographic market over the last few decades and the new digitally enabled photographers who have swarmed the market in the last few years. ...Very few of the photographers I've known longest are actively presenting themselves on the web or even using something as accessible as Facebook. Some of that has to do with this other thing that I do, and some of it has to do with the fact that beyond the commonality of the equipment we use –itself fractured among younger photographers on the basis of silly brand preferences –most people using cameras are actually quite different personalities. There are, among such shooters I have known over the years, a number of artists, geniuses, gentlemen and ladies, plodders, hustlers, thieves and a sex exploiter or two. Very few photographers are numbered among my equally few friends, and the quality of their work and success has more to do with who they are as people than their choice of photography as a career or calling. I also have no shortage of trepidation about dealing with today’s young photographers who are often quite drunk on the fumes of their success and adamantly unwilling to hear anything about the “old way” that things were done in the business. ...I had one particularly unsatisfying experience recently with a young photographer who objected rather viciously to my reservations about his predilection for wearing a “Media” badge on his assignments (a not uncommon tactic, I’ve found) despite not representing any acknowledged media house. ...There is simply too much adequate photography flooding the market and buyers have discovered that they can successfully insist on lower prices and more rights than ever before. The response to these demands, it seems, is no longer informed by experience or the expectations of a long career and job negotiations shred like wet toilet paper, not least because a photographer dabbling with the craft for less than five years is unlikely to be thinking about things like archives and a body of work. ...I have no idea what "we" can do, or even who "we" are, but I'm going to lay out some facts worth considering, since I believe these are considerations that rise above the many individual permutations of business approaches. Clients and customers must do what they do, which is to buy as much for as little as possible and photographers must also fulfil their responsibility, which is to supply commercially viable photographs and ultimately to create a body of work, along with a bank account, capable of constituting a legacy for their families and heirs. Photographers make their living off the licensing of their intellectual property, not from shooting their way through memory cards full of images and burning them off to CDs. ...I'm not there yet, but anywhere between five and ten percent of my annual income comes from photographs I shot many years ago. ...That said, much of what's now called "corporate work" is only of marginal value to photographers and even to the companies that commission it. I discovered this when I tried to sell old negatives (filed in a binder I helpfully labelled PR Shit) to a leading bank that I'd worked for extensively over my first decade in the business. ...I’ve actually seen wedding negatives stored with the fine cutlery by a client who fought to get them from the photographer. ...Abandoning your work like that is an abrogation of the photographer's key responsibility to care for, and keep accessible for licensing, the work that they create. Most clients don't know what the hell to do with RAW files and those that think they do have no idea what your post-processing intent was. They will probably try to open them in Adobe Bridge (does anyone go to the Bridge anymore?), lose all your careful edits in Lightroom or Capture One and dismiss the work as crap, cheerfully ruining your reputation. ...There may be some situations in which it’s just easier to hand over a large collection of images to a client or agency, but I’ve never encountered a situation like that where 8-bit TIFF files, delivered with basic post processing to my satisfaction, failed to give the customer what they needed. ...If you’re advertising yourself as a professional photographer, you'd better know more about the photographic process than the client. It's not just about your magical "eye," it's about demonstrable mastery of a complicated process that makes you the go-to person to solve a client's problem. ...If you’re in a situation like this, these are your options as I see them. ...If you surrender the rights to your intellectual property as part of your contractual arrangements with a client, you’re already a work made for hIre employee except that your salary is irregular and devoid of perks to boot. Go sign up for group insurance and a dental plan and leave the unstable, challenging photography market to those with a long-term interest in developing it. ...There’s nothing inherently noble in being a professional photographer and I’m not sure why there’s such haste to become one. There’s a lot to be said for being a really good amateur photographer, free to explore the craft on your own terms and with no-one to answer to. And if it turns out that you have a real talent for it and you’re willing to make it a career, then come to the business in good faith or go bother the art world. ...It’s surprising to me that young people who are capable of vacuuming information from the many websites that explain how to take fashion photos with homemade equipment and use Photoshop to turn skin into plastic don’t take any notice of the equally accessible sites that discuss and consider the shifting landscape of rights negotiation and market positioning. ...In sharing early drafts of this post with some of those “senior photographers” I’d mentioned earlier, some noted that there were situations in which handing over RAW files made sense for them and that’s cool. These aren’t photographers who are folding to the demands of the market, they are negotiating their skills and the assets that result from their work to their benefit with a clear idea on the most profitable settlement for their particular situation. I have, on a few isolated instances, sold all rights to my work in situations in which there would be greater benefit to surrendering those rights for a fee than holding onto them to preserve images that would be ultimately unsaleable. ...Many photographs done for purely commercial purposes have now become valuable records of lost technologies and have proven crucial to remembering the histories of businesses and their business processes. In some ways, I’m doing something I’m usually loath to do here, getting involved in the way that people do business, but there are, and should continue to be, common principles in the way the photography business should be managed and I hope that some of those notions come through clearly here. Accept your responsibility to the trade you’re practicing in and try to understand what happened in the business before you came along. The hard work and sacrifices of the professionals who were in the photography business before you arrived triumphantly with your shiny new digital camera created a viable business that you might destroy through carelessness and ignorance.

On shooting for free

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2012-07-09T22:15:38-04:00

A young child living with Down's Syndrome, photographed at her home in late 1988 for the National Down's Syndrome Association's calendar for 1989. Photograph by Mark Lyndersay and yes, that's James McNeil Whistler I'm channelling there. The project was shot on 6x6 black and white film, but I did a couple of rolls of medium format transparencies to offer to the Guardian, which was publishing my color work regularly in their Sunday magazine back then. Free isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and I have to tell you, it’s way better than cheap. For many years, when I began my career in 1978, I photographed the theatre. I shot stage productions, backstage, portraits both formal and informal and built quite a reputation as a photographer capable of handling black and white photography. I did all this either at my own cost, for most of the first five years or with the production companies underwriting the costs of film, chemistry and photographic paper (usually given as a donation to the producers) for the work to get done. Free shouldn’t mean that you spend to do a job, and that stuff was expensive. I learned a lot doing this work. I learned to soup black and white film in rare chemistries like Diafine to push the emulsions to their absolute limit. I learned to handle small flashes in location and studio style lighting under odd and often pressured situations. One of my very first location portrait shoots was done in the half an hour before a production began at the Little Carib Theatre. People were filing in to take their seats while I was putting away the 611 hammer style flashes I worked with back then. The beginnings of my craft as a portrait photographer began with the lobby portraits I began doing for productions by Helen Camps’ All Theatre Productions and the Tent Theatre project that followed it. It was a lot of fun until it stopped being fun, and then I stopped doing it. That work left me with a decade’s worth of photographs of a theatre and it's practitioners in transition from one era to another. Stanley Marshall and Errol Jones in their prime, a young Raymond Choo Kong and Cecelia Salazar. It took a long time, but eventually I began to understand that my photography had value and the work I was putting into it should have a price, even if it wasn’t actually getting paid in cash on some projects. While I was giving it away, I wasn’t selling it cheaply and the difference between the two would, over time, be a world of difference. I hear of theatre companies today demanding copyright for photography they can't afford and all I can manage, as the young people put it, is a rueful smh. ...The National Association for Down's Syndrome contacted me about photographing a calendar for them featuring some of the children they worked with. I thought it was a great idea, but I thought they way they wanted to go about it was wrong for the subject. The NADS folks wanted to bring the children to the studio. I though that wouldn't read well as photographs and would fix attention on the physical characteristics common to such children. These were young people who had lives and families and much of their story was about just how special those relationships were. Those were the photographs I wanted to make. We disagreed on this point, and it was on this project that I formulated the methodology that I’ve used ever since to govern my decisions about such projects. I’d do whatever they wanted, but they would pay my price, because that makes it a job. Or…I would do it for free and they would do it the way I wanted. ...The 1989 NADS calendar remains one of those projects I’m remained proud of over the decades. I shot at 14 locations, capturing children at their homes, with their families, in environments in which they were comfortable and I was a guest. Designer Russel Halfhide, famous for his defining work on Caribbean Beat, pitched in to design the piece and asked some of the children to write numbers, which he used for the calendar dates. Most recently I had an excellent opportunity to work with ALTA, the local adult literacy organization, who had asked about getting some work done. It’s certainly started well with the first project, a poster. I'm a reader as well as a writer, so a project that opens up the world of words to people runs close to my heart. It arrived at a difficult time for me, so I was willing to just follow orders on this one and asked for a brief from the agency who was supposed to be doing the artwork. That didn’t happen, but the back stories on the three models were so fascinating that the images suggested themselves, as did the caption copy that goes along with them, which I wrote and offered to the organization. On an ongoing basis, I continue to contribute work to the Trinidad Guardian, working there for an absurdly low rate, which also happens to be the very top of their pay scale. The leveraging difference for me on those projects, which include Local Lives, is the value of publication in a widely read newspaper and the satisfaction that I personally get from keeping my hand in photojournalism (I've been in charge of photographic departments at three different local daily newspapers), albeit at more of a distance. Free then, as you’ll also read here is a challenging way to market your work and find satisfaction, but it can be fulfilling it as well if you think through your involvement (and investment) carefully and plan your participation sensibly.

The TNT Mirror's resource reallocations

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2012-04-16T20:45:29-04:00

Mr Hagley [this is incorrect, I conflated two photographers named Jason] did not simply post the image you used, he embedded a highly visible watermark on the image, indicating clearly that he reserved his rights of reproduction. ...Media Watch was mildly amused by the chatter on Facebook among some photographers who were scandalised by the TnT Mirror’s publication on its front page of a photo, taken from MP Chandresh Sharma’s Facebook page, which showed him standing next to Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar at a La Divina ... ...Clarence Rambharat Three points Mark- first note the line "suitably amended to take into consideration local mores and customs", an authority the writer of Media Watch took upon him/herself; second the British reference (in so far as it is relevant and it is not) deals with the privacy interests of the subject of photos and not the intellectual property in the photograph; and at a minimum use and attribution go together. ...Anthony Sladden I have tried to get copies of the copyright laws as it relates to photography, I have been to an office on Jernimham Av, and onother one down on South Quay and nobody has a clue what copyright is when it comes to photography. ...Anthony Sladden Is there any small claims court in Trinidad, I have had problems with some organizations, and publishers in Toronto who thank they can ride roughshod over you, I have never actually reached the stage of going before a judge. ...Salim October dont know if this was covered but he also at this time, not sure if before, has this notice PLEASE DO NOT USE PHOTOS WITHOUT MY PERMISSION. ...I'm glad you have made the necessary apologies and compensation has been agreed upon but at the same time, you definitely broke copyright laws by not acknowledging the photographer in any way in your paper. ... From the News watch article: “Notwithstanding the provisions of section 8(1)(a), (i) and (j), the following acts shall be permitted in respect of a work without the authorisation of the owner of copyright, subject to the obligation to indicate the source and the name of the author as far as practicable.” ...I remember how embarrassed I was when I used one of Mark Lyndersay's photos of Machel that was marked as supplied by his mother, and did not credit him for it. ...Jason Nicholas S I settled for $300.00TT because I thought about the same thing you said Mark, "Even a few lawyer's consultations on how to proceed will often exceed any money you might reasonably expect to get in court." ...Bridget van Dongen I don't see why it was up to Jason to contact you when his watermark was clearly on the photo. ...Not even a credit far more an attempt to seek my permission prior to publishing - I personally believe that the person who "found" the photograph was not truthful about being able to contact me. ... Upon finding the photograph, clicking on it would lead right back to my album and Facebook Profile where I could have been contacted by a simple comment on the photo. ...Now, the saga continues with an article stating they they were "mildly amused" about my disgusts mentioned above and what they did was in fact ethical and in keeping with the highest journalistic and legal practice.>>> http://www.tntmirror.com/2012/03/30/facebook-debate-over-photos. ...If $300 is a generous amount for a photo used in a newspaper, I am sure most photographers not "hungry" for a measly $100 ... but we just want the respect to be asked our permission to use our work and in some cases a simple credit. So 'media' ... just ASK and save the small change that you working so hard to avoid paying ... or else one day someone might really take you to the cleaners and all the $100s you save will pay for one person's rights. ...In an infringement case, it's no longer a situation in which the infringer is making a payment based on their rates, but one in which the photographer is being paid, at his expected rate, for its use. ...I didn't post here to specifically dump on the Mirror, and that referenced matter seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of the role photographers play in Government employ and the way that the Gov't makes use of photos. ...So every use is not stealing, at least not from the photographer directly, but every use should be authorized or cleared for publication, if the images aren't clearly designated as being for press release or press consumption. ...You may have intended no disrespect, but taking people's work, not intended for publication, without reference to their rights as authors under Trinidad and Tobago's copyright laws, is, by its very nature, disrespectful. ...This is a surprising development for old-school media practitioners used to the front page being a prize for photographers and it's a phenomenon that I sought to explore in a post on my photoblog here: http://lyndersaydigital.com/brain/pix_files/photodesk.html Surprisingly, even to me, and I've been looking at this situation for some time now, none of the best photographers to come along over the last seven years, the era of photographic plenty that you characterize as that of "paparazzi" is really an era of accelerated online sharing, discussion and engagement which has bypassed traditional media completely. The 'potshots' as you describe them are a quite normal aspect of these engagements, discussions that go back and forth, sometimes become heated and demand, of journalists who choose to participate in this space, a willingness to shelve decades of authoritative pronouncement in favor of using their communications skills in an environment which gives equal power and force to all voices. ...If you choose to dip into the pool where all these photos are to be found, it might be useful to understand that nobody's grateful for your presence or attention, you earn your space and place and respect of its denizens by accepting the rules of this particular road, regardless of protests of the multitude of traditional press pronouncements on the matter on which you have chosen to rely. ...As someone who has done considerable research on new and old media I thank you for your exposition but don't feel offended by the fact that I disagree with much of what you assert. ...To suggest that before using a photograph "every use should be authorized or cleared for publication" is not only contrary to the law but a clear restriction on the freedom of the press. ...The point is being missed in this debate that the Mirror did not take Jason's photograph from his Facebook page but from the Facebook page of a Minister of Government, MP Chandresh Sharma. ...The photo did carry a watermark which was removed and it is for this reason that we apologised and paid compensation although we were under no legal obligation to do so. ...Very few photos on Facebook can accurately be described that way and I'd like to suggest that the intrusion here was on the Mirror's part, not the photographer's. ...BTW, the photo of Chandresh Sharma wasn't in one of the Minister's galleries, it was an image in Jason Nicholas S' galleries which had been tagged as including the Minister. ...Ian Reid Ummm. . . still doesn't make it right. . . there is right and there is wrong, the excuse of "time contraints" is utter bull, I work in advertising, and our deadlines are JUST as tight, we ALWAYS try to find out who's photo, how much we have to pay. ...Most laws do allow for fairly unfettered use of such images outside of advertising use, but very few photographers will be able to last in the business if they don't play fair with public expectations for fair use. ...Most laws do allow for fairly unfettered use of such images outside of advertising use, but very few photographers will be able to last in the business if they don't play fair with public expectations for fair use." ...I am happy to hear that, because I remember an agency taking a shot of me in public and the picture was abused on another forum and I was mad and asked them to take it down from their webpage to which they refused, saying they had every right according to law. ...This is a simplification but I believe that the media's use of photographs or any other material should only be circumscribed by the Constitution and the laws of Tinidad and Tobago. ...Marcia Braveboy Both you and Mark are right Maxi, now the both of you please go to bed like some well behaved children and remember to take a pictures of yourselves while you sleep and post it here for public consumption and enjoyment....hahahahaha who vex..vex lol. ...If you make money through the use of my photographs and I don't, you are grazing on grass that wasn't offered to you as part of the commons agreement. ...My enjoyment in posting my work and, presumably, that of Jason Nicholas S was his publication online, were everyone who was interested could find and, as you put it, enjoy it freely and without limitation. ...I believe that it has been common practice to use images in this manner in the past because the policing and access to various forms of media that is a public good was not as easy to access now. ...I respect the work of photographers and your role in elevating it, which is why I never quibbled in giving Jason Nicholas S his apology or his compensation, but I cannot do anything which undermines the media's role in being able to gather and report information.

Laura Ferreira on Copyright

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2012-02-13T20:35:10-04:00

An e-mail interview with Laura Ferreira on February 06, 2012 about copyright infringement as background material for BitDepth#821. ...Looking back, did you ever find that you might have followed the style or work of a particularly powerful photographer quite closely? ...I think that I tried to light my work like his, but honestly, back then I don’t think I ever achieved it. In terms of styling, he is a fantastic fetish photographer but my work doesn’t really venture into that realm. ... It’s just something that has stuck with me, but our work looks nothing alike. ...Have you ever regretted the free sharing of your work and your techniques on the web? ...I have no worries about showing people some of my techniques with the photo-manipulation side – anyone can figure it out if they just put time into it. ... I get a lot of emails asking for advice on lighting and colour-correction/adjustments, and it’s not a problem to help out. Of course, I don’t tell every single thing as some things are my own little techniques that I have developed over time. As for sharing my work, I do not regret it one bit. I have worked on some amazing projects that came about solely by the right people stumbling upon my work. ...Have there been any particular instances of stylistic cloning or outright theft of your images that stood out to you as being particularly unfair or simply low? ...There was a photographer who cropped my name out of my image, put his name on it, and slapped it on his website. ...When he came around to emailing me he said, “I did it because I wanted to impress people and I never thought I could take an image like that," those may not be the exact words but that was the gist of it. I thought, well...that’s the saddest excuse for outright theft I have ever heard. You're very calm about the vulnerability of your posts on the web. ... Do you think it's a result of the way you learned? ...I can easily take out a large watermark from a photo using any editing program; therefore, I choose to have my photo look its best instead of having a giant, ugly, removable splotch on top of it. Like I said before, my work has grown and developed online – I am a photographer of the digital age, and the Internet is my work’s showroom. A physical photograph and a scanner are an easier way of grabbing a photo – no names to remove, and you can bump up the dpi. If you look at it that way you can say that all photos are susceptible to online copyright infringement. The truth is, you either accept that this happens and learn how to deal with it, or you never share your work on the Internet, and you miss out on opportunities ...What steps have you taken to respond to people who simply use your work without permission? Have you found the legal options to be of any use? ...It’s very easy to get in touch with people who have used my work through the Internet. I also have a great group of fellow artists and supporters who go out of their way to get me information when I post about an image theft that I have found, or that someone else has found and alerted me with. I have spoken with lawyers in the past (as recent as last week), but because I like to deal with things straight away, I have always ended up going ahead and sorting out the problem on my own. ...Do you have a sense that some of these infringements are malicious or the result of ignorance? Do you find the responses of younger, more enthusiastic web denizens to be different from the way that old school print publishers and advertisers approach the misuse of your work? ...I think that some of it is ignorance, especially from young graphic designers who are pulling images off Google to make flyers and posters for products and think that we will never see them. If it’s on the Internet, we will find it. ...However, it’s hard to believe that all of them are like that. Some just think that they can get away with it. ...When I release a photo online, it may be one out of two from a set. ... Call me crazy, but I think they can easily contact the photographer if they do a search for the name on the photo, and then ask for permission. I am currently dealing with a business that pulled an image of mine from a web search to use on a flyer for a commercial event. ... Facebook copyright claims were made, and Facebook decided that instead of taking the photos on their pages down, they were going to completely disable the account of any person who had that flyer as their profile picture, or who was sharing the photo. ...Needless to say, I was on the phone with the company the very next day and we are currently settling the cost of using the image. I actually emailed Facebook and told them that I was handling the situation (and to stop banning people), and they replied that they were happy to hear so. That’s one example of using the Internet to market your images, then having them stolen from the Internet, and then the Internet helping you sort things out.

Noel and me

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2012-01-13T23:36:10-04:00

The photograph below did not accompany the original publication of this piece, but it's how I like to remember Norts in the prime of his career, a lion with a medium format camera. ...Before I met him, I knew his work, which always loomed like an unreachable benchmark of excellence in a field I was struggling to understand, far less to master. I have been a photographer of one sort or another for twenty years now, and it seems surprising to realise that Noel has been a photographer for only forty-five years. The breadth and scope of his work has always made his presence in the photographic landscape seem to arch back much further than that. Perhaps it is because so much of what we knew as Trinidad and Tobago has disappeared in that time. The rapid industrialisation of this country, the urbanisation of our people and the ravages of an American culture delivered to us via television and radio have changed fundamentally the things we revere and consider important. ...He came to photography as an adult, already married– and involved in a job that offered reasonable renumeration. He did not have to become a photographer, but to look at his work over the years, it is clear that he really had no choice. Given what he knows about photography, the work of Noel Norton is remarkably free from artifice and critical presence. It is not his way to seek answers to the world’s problems in his images but rather to record those aspects of his personal world which he finds valuable and satisfying. ...When we work well, photographers manipulate the relationship between elements we can see and capture a moment that realises something special about them in time, often freezing something into reality that we cannot see until after the fact. ...In our dedication to capturing reality, we are often presented with an opportunity to find an angle or a juxtaposition that brings our subject, the light and the environment together in a way which pleases us. In the world of Noel Norton, Trinidad and Tobago is a far better place than the one which greets us on most days. ... If this vision makes his work seem unrealistic and a little passé, then it is our vision of the world and the cynical harshness of modern photography which makes it seem that way. Noel still photographs his world the way he has always seen it, with hope and a grand belief in the better nature of his fellow man. It is a vision which has informed his work since his earliest days, and coupled with a wry, sly sense of humour so generous and careful it is almost imperceptible; he has created a body of photography which is unequalled in modern Trinidad and Tobago for its unity of theme and spirit. Even if we do not all know it yet, he is photography's Naipaul and Chang, its Walcott and Clarke, a local artist who has transcended the limitations of his medium to create works which define it in the context of the national landscape. ...I took my film to his studio for three years in the early eighties, hardly catching a glimpse of him in that time. There were always pleasant young ladies to handle my business and his wife, Mary would come out to explain away the most awful of problems with a stern but concerned expression. ...He offered me a job at a new lab he was involved in setting up and I remember being stunned. He had been looking at the film I had been sending in to be processed and studying it all that time, marking my development as a photographer. I think it was at that moment that I decided to make photography a lifelong commitment and I will always owe Noel for the vote of confidence he gave me when I was still very unsure of myself in the business. A few years later, I got fired from a job in Public Relations and decided that I would finally become a photographer. I drove over to Marli Street, knocked on the door (was well past closing time), and let Noel know that I had decided to take the plunge. He smiled a really broad smile, the one he rarely shows to acquaintances and simply said, “Welcome to the business,” extending his hand to offer a firm handshake. I was to remember that moment several times over the next few years when I would end up ketching my arse in amazingly complicated ways. Once things got so bad that I spent a couple of evenings talking to him about my situation and hearing his take on it all. After all his decades in the business, Noel had seen many people come and go and he was sage and clear in his understanding of the cycles of the business and the fashions of the times. Norton is our premier archivist of Carnival, the resource to which we turn when we hope to retrieve a long junked costume or prove that a thing existed which all but a few have forgotten. He was a fixture in the Savannah photographing the annual festival before there was a North Stand and a Grandstand as we know them today. He photographed robbers and jab jabs when the parade was just a straggling few costumed characters marching past rickety bleachers. I sat next to him for several hours on Carnival Tuesday, quietly marvelling at what a great gift he is, to have come from so far and still find the energy and the time to capture the energies and spectacle of the mas. Still quiet and unassuming, he was the longest serving Carnival worker at stageside that day, manning his post with serene reserve and quiet dignity. Mary, as always, was at his side, quietly taking roll after roll of film and logging their contents. I have come a long way since the first time I met Noel Norton and I have learned many valuable lessons about both photography and comportment from him. I will probably never be the gentleman he so indubitably is nor will I ever be able to live with the humility he so effortlessly conveys. When Norts agreed to be photographed for this story, I thought with the brashness of youth 8that it would be a good idea to have him do a photograph of me in turn. In his presence though, I became a fumbling bundle of nerves, apologising for my lights, asking after his preference for equipment, all while he gently shrugged and said, “Whatever you want to do is fine.” We took some photographs, and somehow I managed to gather the cojones to ask him to do the photograph of me, explaining at uncalled for length about how it would be a “matched set”. ...As he got ready to leave, we chatted about computers and photography, the subject that he is busy researching these days and I thanked him for taking the time to come over to the studio.

On copyright in a digital world

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2012-01-09T23:41:41-04:00

Magic, tar and copyleft from Mark Lyndersay on Vimeo.

A discussion of copyright issues in an age of digital sharing.

This is a talk that I gave to the Trinidad and Tobago chapter of ISACA on December 02, 2011. The online version tends to lag a bit behind the slide changes. You can also download an MP4 of the vidcast here.

PhotoPlus 2011 - Jack Hollingsworth

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2011-11-03T11:19:53-04:00

Jack Hollingsworth discusses new media techniques at PhotoPlus Expo 2011. Photography by Mark Lyndersay. Notes from a seminar session at PhotoPlus Expo 2011. New media marketing for next generation photographers - Jack Hollingsworth October 29 After 30 years in the business Jack Hollingsworth now sees the future of his marketing efforts as divided between local, social and mobile. “Personality and process are as important as product and portfolio.” Content trumps craft. Study the true masters, Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, Ansel Adams Photographers with average technical skills but high social skills will do better than those with great skills and low social media aptitude. “There’s e-commerce and me-commerce.” Keep the pitch focused on the customer’s experience. Talk to customers, not photographers. Evolve suspects into prospects into customers into clients into advocates. Develop your USP. If you have radically different voices, consider different websites, which will in turn affect the kind of conversations you will want to have with customers; commercial images, iPhone photos, portraiture. New media marketing is not selling your work, it’s celebrating it. Jack Hollingsworth's blog. Related posts from PhotoPlus 2011... BitDepth#807, Douglas Kirkland BitDepth#806, DSLR video Art Strieber seminar notes Creative longevity seminar notes Blake Discher seminar notes

PhotoPlus 2011 - Art Streiber

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2011-11-03T11:19:36-04:00

Editorial photographer Art Streiber discusses his work and process at PhotoPlus Expo 2011. Photography by Mark Lyndersay. Notes from a seminar session at PhotoPlus Expo 2011. The Big Picture: Editorial photography behind the scenes - Art Streiber October 28 Streiber manages his studio information in a customized and quite sophisticated database that automates his production process and data. “We are professionals, we take this seriously. Everybody’s got a camera and you have to separate yourself as a professional.” Streiber wrestles with the professional finishing processes that have come to be collectively known as post production. In Streiber’s workflow it’s described as custom printing. Should it be custom preparation of files? Digital files look like chromes, but they need to be treated like negatives. His retouching is done so that the image doesn’t look retouched and he shoots complex composites with the retoucher’s needs in mind. “The web is king, but Just because you can doesn’t mean that you should. This is a showcase, not a journal.” Art Strieber's current work. Related posts from PhotoPlus 2011... BitDepth#807, Douglas Kirkland BitDepth#806, DSLR video Jack Hollingsworth seminar notes Creative longevity seminar notes Blake Discher seminar notes

PhotoPlus 2011 - Creative longevity

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2011-11-03T11:15:20-04:00

From left: Douglas Kirkland, Jay Maisel, Mary Ellen Mark and Duane Michals discuss their careers at PhotoPlus Expo 2011. Photography by Mark Lyndersay. Notes from a seminar session at PhotoPlus Expo 2011. Creative longevity - Douglas Kirkland, Jay Maisel, Mary Ellen Mark, Duane Michals, hosted by Doug Menuez October 27 Duane Michals: Well known for his fine-art black and white sequences and annotated narratives, Michals broke the flow of fine art presentations with a collection of his commercial work. “Everybody wants to be an artist,” Michals said. “How can you do your [personal] work and do your jobs? They come from the same place?” “I don’t know anything, always be a beginner.” Mary Ellen Mark: “I’m always challenged to be challenged. That said, I’m getting more work that are the kind of work that I do.” Doug Kirkland: “We can’t give our rights away, that’s our future!” “The first thing I want out of an assignment is a good image. Don’t get screwed on the negotiations, but do good work first.” “If you’re a pro, you can’t say you get it half the time, you have to get it all the time, you have a responsibility.” Douglas Menuez: (responding to a compliment on his work from Kirkland) “I feel like I’ve made every mistake possible and I was hoping that you guys would help me!” “I thrive on now knowing what I’m doing, I go with my intuition, when I don’t, I screw up.” Jay Maisel: “All assignments aren’t great, because I found myself photographing someone else’s motivation.” “There’s a difference between not knowing what you’re doing and not knowing what you’re going to do.” Related posts from PhotoPlus 2011... BitDepth#807, Douglas Kirkland BitDepth#806, DSLR video Jack Hollingsworth seminar notes Art Strieber seminar notes Blake Discher seminar notes

PhotoPlus 2011 - Blake Discher

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2011-11-01T11:55:50-04:00

Blake Discher speaking at PhotoPlus Expo 2011. Photo by Mark Lyndersay. Notes from a seminar session at PhotoPlus Expo 2011. Sales and negotiating for the new photo business reality - Blake Discher October 27 Have your elevator speech ready: your name, what you do, why you’re great. Have a “wow” business card. Go where your clients are. Ninety percent of success is showing up prepared. Ask existing clients for referrals, prewrite the testimonials for them. Look for leads with satisfied customers, “Is there someone else you know who might be able to use my services?” Have a memorable but not overbearing message on your voicemail - ordinary is dead. Are you talking to the decision maker? If there’s an answer to the question “Is there anyone else I can show my work to,” then that’s the person you need to be talking to. If you can’t get through to that person, then be ready to give talking points to your contract. If you get asked for a buyout, tell them: “We do them all the time, tell me what you need and I’ll give you a price.” Don’t educate. Clients don’t understand and you’ll waste time explaining your work processes. Position key items as value propositions. Ask smart questions about the assignment when offering a quote that will lead to solutions you can offer in producing the job. Be the expert. Aspire to be second. “I don’t want to replace your guy, but call me if he’s busy. ... Because I only need ONE chance.” “You need to hear more nos.” It takes 20 presentations to get five calls to get one job, so you need to hear 20 nos. Don’t give information on the first call. Gather information, prepare the estimate, but call before you send it, then send it while the client’s on the phone and talk through the estimates with the client. Make an appointment with yourself to do marketing. Do the business, do the paperwork, get it signed before you begin the work. Have your paperwork ready, always be ready to present a model release for signing. Work on a customer focused point of differentiation, your USP. Changing your status with a client is difficult, moving to a different level and raising your price is almost impossible. Find more on Discher’s blog. Related posts from PhotoPlus 2011... BitDepth#807, Douglas Kirkland BitDepth#806, DSLR video Jack Hollingsworth seminar notes Art Strieber seminar notes Creative longevity seminar notes

Suddenly, ten years later...

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2011-09-12T22:15:05-04:00

Carib Girls in Wire branded baby tees hand out copies of the first issue of The Wire at the publication's launch on the Brian Lara Promenade on September 10, 2001. ...It was a Sunday, the very first day of the working week for a new newspaper that would hit the streets the following Monday morning and ran for the next 18 months, five days a week. I was, according to the paper’s masthead, its Operations Manager, a role I’d managed to win after writing a four page plan for the paper and spending the next eight weeks doing everything from planning new toilets and designing the desks to specifying the type on the publication with designer Kevan Gibbs. It would be the culmination of everything I’d ever hoped for in media, shaping the destiny of a publication in the market from the ground up. ... I was responsible for the editorial side of things, with publishing being handled by the Guardian’s print system and the paper, which was absolutely not the Guardian, never found someone to champion its virtues to advertisers with the same enthusiasm I had for its content. Advertising wasn’t my job on the project, and to this day, I regret not knowing enough, not being mature enough, and not being aggressive enough to make that aspect of the paper’s economy more functional and ultimately sustainable. I was an editorial man, and my passions and focus remained with the editors who made the paper happen over those sweet and painful months. But if I cared about the editorial, I have to confess; my heart was buried deep in the paper’s photographic department. The most mature thing I ever did at The Wire was to give up my leadership of the department to Andrea De Silva, and it probably ranks as one of the smartest too. Andrea’s passion for photography ensured that only the best work moved forward to the subeditors and cemented the paper’s reputation as a picture paper. ...From the start, the four photographers working at the paper, Andrea, Keith Matthews, Karla Ramoo and Curtis Chase were able, using the slingshot of the digital workflow I designed for the paper, to consistently slay the better equipped, better manned photo departments of every other paper in town. For months after we began, nobody in the business even believed that we were all digital. I’d chosen the Olympus E10, a bizarre little camera that married the style of a prosumer point and shoot camera with the features of an SLR. It also had the best price in a 4 megapixel camera in 2001 (roughly US$2,000, back then). I’ll always remember the night I unpacked the gear in my office at The Wire and my hopes that Olympus had put a decent sensor in the impressive metal shell of this new camera. By today’s standards, the camera was glacially slow, prone to sensor noise, heavy and with its built in lens, clumsy to adapt to telephoto or wide-angle use (you attached adapter lenses to the body). Those cameras outlasted the paper and hammered home, at least in my mind, the advantages of this new medium. ... There was no way to justify it in the budget and it would be months before I could get something better than my Nikon E990 to shoot with, but my hands were full during that time with startup pressures and internal politics. I look back now on the crude workflow we put in place there and marvel at its robustness. The two iMacs and eventually, the iBook, on the Wire’s photodesk ran a copy of GraphicConverter for reviewing folders of images and making selects. The only other software in its class was PhotoMechanic, which cost almost five times as much. The selects were printed from GraphicConverter and moved to a folder for placement on the pages and colour correction by the imaging tech. My good friend Keifel Agostini held down that role the longest (though Kristian De Silva, Andrea’s son, made it a career and is still at it) and trained all the techs who came after him, lucky devils. Every few weeks, I’d begin harassing Keith, Curtis, Andrea and Karla to begin organising their folders for archiving. This was the one thing I kept my hands on, burning two CDs of each month’s work to increasingly rare Kodak Gold CD ROMs and creating a catalog of the CDs using a free version of Extensis’ Portfolio software, called My Portfolio. This catalog, available to all the subs to search for photos as well as the photo desk, made it possible to find pictures taken months before under crisis deadlines and along with a stunning archive of entertainment related photos made it possible to publish a picture paper five days a week with less than half the photographers available to our competitors. And we published lots of photos, using many of them large, so they had to be good. I’ll always remember after shuttering The Wire and merging its assets with the Guardian, the sinking feeling that I had when I realised that the photographic department wouldn’t fit. A good friend of mine there actually cussed me out when I handed over the collection of CDs. ...Despite ever increasing hard disk space and optical disk capacities, amazing improvements in software as browsers, parametric image editors and much improved catalog creation software have come to market, photodesks in Trinidad and Tobago have conspicuously failed to keep pace. If there was one lesson that came out of The Wire, it was that an elegantly organised workflow and a deep, accessible digital archive could be the engine of great photography regularly delivered. ...Andrea eventually became the chief photographer of the Guardian some years before, but left in 2006. Curtis never made the jump to the Guardian, moving from The Wire to Newsday and now The Express, where he’s worked for years now. ...Alva Viarruel who did some crime reporting for us at The Wire, is now the chief photographer at the Guardian. I’m still plugging away at photography, and sometimes I do some photojournalism at the Guardian. I miss the energy of it, but I don’t miss the frustrations of having to depend on other corporate hierarchies for critical supplies and technologies. I see what’s happening on local photodesks, and it makes me sad to see how little of the technologies available today are being used to streamline the work of photojournalism. ...Even in a bluntly declared information age, newspapers are still operating as if the product they produce is the newspaper and not its content. Until that changes, photojournalism in Trinidad and Tobago will continue to be as starved of leveraging resources as it is of talent. ...From left, Steve Regis, Joanne Barsatie, Sean Simon, Donna Pierre, Azad Ali, this author, Keith Matthews, Nigel Simon, Sasha Mohammed, Richard Howard, Carla Bridgewater, Trevor Burnett and Andrea De Silva.

Open wide

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2011-08-15T23:10:57-04:00

Great Fete, July 31, 2011 6:24am. Photography by Mark Lyndersay I stumbled into doing panoramics, not as a cool thing to do or as a specific frame for a body of work. The first image simply presented itself to me as the solution to a problem my client didn’t know they had. It was around fifteen years ago, and I was standing on a metal platform overlooking the Caroni-Arena Dam. I had a Mamiya 6x7 in my hands, a tripod and a landscape that absolutely defied the format of the film I was shooting. I took a couple of photos from some decent vantage points and then decided to go for it, trying my first panoramic. That first image needed more overlap, in retrospect, but there was enough there to make the image and the experience made it clearer to me what was necessary to pull a good panoramic together (lots of photos with lots of overlap). I had the prints made at 8” x 10”, asking Noel Norton to maintain the consistency of the colour across all the frames. I scanned them at 300dpi and began the business of merging them. There was no PhotoMerge command in Photoshop in those days, but mercifully there were layers and, as it turned out, a surprising upper limit on the number of pixels that could be in a Photoshop document (no large document format either). That first panoramic image took six hours to pull together and I needed to call in my retouch buddy, Peter Shim, to straighten out some issues with eddying water close to the bottom left of the image that absolutely defied my skills at the time. I did two more panoramics for that WASA project, but to the best of my knowledge the client never made any use of them. I finally printed that first Caroni-Arena image at half size and mounted above the doorway to my studio. A true panoramic, an image in superwide format not a traditional photo cropped at the top and bottom, is a tricky beast. It’s usually large, all my panoramics are more than 300MB and tend not to make sense until they’re printed really large. My intent with that original Caroni-Arena image was to convey the staggering scale of the dam from that viewpoint, the impossibility of taking it all in until you pivoted from left to right to see the entire scene. Panoramics make no sense on the web and only marginally less so in the average publication, where they just seem skinny and insubstantial, the exact opposite of the impact that any photographer hopes for in making them. With that fate awaiting them, it should come as no surprise that I wouldn’t do another panoramic image until 2009, when I stood on the stage at Great Fete in Tobago that year and looked out on a massive, surging crowd at sunrise that put the “no” in going home. Again, there was nothing there that a single photo could capture, even with the widest lens in my bag. So I scanned the surging crowd, the wavelets of swaying hands and undertow of wining hips and mentally crossed my fingers before slamming out a quick series of handheld images, pivoting as smoothly as I could to capture the vista before me. This time I depended on Photoshop’s PhotoMerge automation command to pull together a rough “cut” of the three takes, surprising myself with two reasonable successes. When I sent off the best of the two to be printed (one’s on my wall, the other is owned by Great Fete promoter Kevan Gibbs) the printer called to tell me that there was some funny stuff going on with the crowd in a couple of areas. That’s one of the issues with a stitched image. In a landscape, the wind may shift leaves around a bit, but at a party, dancing people sometimes move quite some distance even in the minute or so it takes to slam out a good series for a panoramic. In 2010, I made a vague effort at doing another panoramic at Great Fete, but the crowd wasn’t as impressive and really, I was utterly exhausted. The images didn’t justify the work involved in finishing them, and I was willing to write off 2009 as the best I’d do on the project. That was before this year’s Great Fete, and the remarkable performance of Vybz Kartel who entertained the crowd for almost two hours, ending the set with his Empire at dawn on the Pigeon Point beach. Inspired by the enthusiasm his energetic performance had infused the crowd with, I decided to try another panoramic of the stunning and apparently fatigue-proofed crowd. A lively crowd makes for complications. Three early efforts at the image pan failed as people kept running onto the stage and into the image area. At least one effort collapsed at the last minute when a photographer drifted in front of me, and I, not to put too fine a point on it, lost my mind. The three groupings of images also made something clear after the event. All the images gently tilted to the right. I’d stumbled the night before going up some steps, and the cant of the images left me suspecting that I’d thrown my inner ear balance with the loud music. I’d also slightly overshot the panoramic elements, and each of the photos I ended up with a scattering of half people, disembodied hands and heads and at least one person appearing twice, side by side with themselves. I imagine that third party software designed this sort of image stitching would handle it better than Photoshop does (the gap between Photoshop’s HDR and third party software designed to do that is quite vast), but this is a rarely used tool for me. It’s easier to just layer in some corrective image parts to put things right in the final images. All that remains now is to figure out what, exactly, to do with an eight foot panorama that, like all its brethren, just looks weird on the web.

Digital storage, 1994

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2011-08-08T23:12:02-04:00

Remember these? There was a time that this card was capable of storing many photographs from the new fangled digital cameras. Now all those photos are essentially useless, hopelessly crushed JPEGS from marginal sensors mangled by overly aggressive algorithms in the early cameras we trusted with our work. Back then, this was a top of the line model, offering whopping 8X speeds, so much faster than the CDs of the day. Now it's just a reminder that technology marches on, briskly and inexorably and today's hot new technology is tomorrow's head-scratching curiosity. An artifact of a digital history that seems far more archaic than mere years would seem to indicate.

What makes a photographer?

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2011-07-25T21:12:02-04:00

From my theatre work in the 1980's. Carol La Chapelle performing with the La Chapelle-Douglas Dance Company performing at the Little Carib Theatre under hardware store spotlights. ...Too many of today’s young photographers rashly begin defining their careers far too narrowly just a few years after picking up a camera for the first time. We have portrait photographers, landscape photographers, fashion photographers, glamour photographers, retouch artists and wedding specialists in what seems to be a mad rush to replicate popular styles and “looks” – a term that simply screams fashionable and commensurately ephemeral. The end result is a landscape of photographs, particularly online, which offers an abundance of images but a dreary lack of diversity. As soon as someone hits on a new combination of capture, toning and filtering that seems attractive, dozens, then hundreds of otherwise sensible people jump all over it, first dissecting it, then posting how-to’s on it, and then, finally, replicating it until it becomes unbearable. I’m certainly not immune to the phenomenon. When I first began taking photographs, I was shooting a lot of black and white film. I was using it because it was cheaper than shooting colour and I could more readily access the kind of processing equipment necessary to make images at my own pace. There was a much bigger market for black and white photography then. Newspapers, to which I contributed directly and on behalf of PR clients didn’t reproduce colour very often so grayscale wasn’t a style, it was the norm. I had a real fascination with local theatre, and looked to the work of practitioners like Derek Gay, who produced dense rich blacks in his prints that often eluded me and Jerry Llewelyn, who went at his work with admirable vigour and enthusiasm. My style, if such a thing might be said of the work, was defined by the weak garden floodlamps in black painted KLIM tins at the Little Carib. I’d shoot Tri-X souped in Diafine, a violently aggressive push developer and hope something interesting would happen in a bright part of the stage. Along the way, I began taking portraits for some of these theatre companies, particularly for the productions of Helen Camps and working with a very crude lighting kit based on Sunpak 611 potato masher flashes, I began my work in portraiture. I managed to get some basic portraits done using general principles but soon became bored with just getting some decent, if straightforward headshots done (one of those is the cover of a recent book by Joanne Kilgour). So I began following the work of Annie Liebovitz, then doing remarkable work at Rolling Stone. By following, I mean heavily influenced by. By heavily influenced, I mean outright cloning within the limitations of my equipment. Then I found Arnold Newman. ...There was so much work being done in so many different styles that my own approach ended up being hewn out of the many ways of approaching portraiture that pulled me in so many different directions. Even so, my work falls into three broad categories, the first ten spent mostly with black and white and shooting theatre, the second fifteen spent mostly in active journalism, when I also messed around with editorial management and commercial work and got my introduction to the potential of digital imaging. Then there's the third ten, which I’m deeply into now, which is all digital, baby. That experience is why I don’t understand shooting digital colour and knocking it down to black and white for a look. ... You’ll never truly replicate FP4 processed in HC110, so why not embrace the specific look that digital sensors bring to the table? There is, I think, a very real and palpable difference between being influenced by a way of seeing or a point of view which is liberating and becoming consumed by the strictures of a technique or a process, which is ultimately quite limiting. Each of these phases of my career was a mix of circumstances, opportunity, tools available and the possibilities that ensued from that mix. Along the way, I’ve tried on a lot of suits. Some of them, like Ansel Adams’ were too big for me, some, like Penn’s, were too awesome (I’m finally reading his book Passage now, fifteen years after I bought it, because I wasn’t ready before) and some, like Liebovitz’s were ultimately too specific and mannered for my taste. I am the photographer I am today because of an eclectic mid of influences that were neither stylish nor fashionable at the time I discovered them. It’s kind of tragic, I think, to see young photographers locking themselves into stylistic tics like HDR and bokeh-chasing before they’ve even begun to figure out why they are taking photographs in the first place. Hundreds of thousands of photographs and 35 years later, I’m able to look back on all those old contacts and sheets of slides and begin to see the tiny steps I took along the way to finding myself as a photographer. Along the way, I shot stuff for money, I shot stuff because I thought it was clever, and I shot stuff because it seemed like a good idea at the time. Some of the photographs exploded. Some of them took a long, slow road to recognition and some of them are perfectly awful and you’ll never see them, thank yew very much. Sometimes photographers will ask me what they should be doing. ... It’s kind of like a pannist asking me what to play or a painter asking what to paint. The only correct answer, of course, is to create what’s in your heart, and you can only do that if you fill it with inspiration. That kind of means filling your head with images of all kinds, regardless of what you think you’re going to be doing with a camera. That’s probably a good way to get started, I think... by learning the common language of images and all the nuances and ways they bring visual understanding.

Newspaper photodesks will feel the web's sting first

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2011-07-18T22:15:26-04:00

At the Wire's photodesk in 2002 with Keith Matthews, who's busy showing contestants in the Miss PSA beauty competition the photographs he's taken of them. I’ve been spending a lot of time looking at the changes that are taking place in newsrooms and considering the future of reporting, but I think that I’ve missed something. I don’t think it will be the overall capacity and quality of the reporting resource that’s going to get hit first, the big dent will come first in newspaper photo departments. ...Why would a young photographer have shown up in a newsroom looking for work two decades ago? It would be one of two reasons and usually a subtle mix of the two. You either wanted to learn the craft or get published. In 2011, neither of these reasons is enough to bring a curious young photographer to a newsroom anymore. I did my first photographs at the Express 35 years ago for a different reason. I wanted photos to go along with my stories, but I soon began ducking into the darkroom to catch a look at the process whenever I could. What began as a purely functional exercise - and I really didn’t care how the photos got done at first - became an obsession that drove me to find out more about photography and the mechanics of the process. I was already being published, but the introduction into the arcana behind the scenes soon became almost as intriguing and I soon put together my own nighttime only darkroom. A computer with a pirated copy of Lightroom and Photoshop packs more image adjustment horsepower than any photographer in even the finest lab had available to them as recently as a decade ago. ...Well I shouldn’t have to mention the power of the web, Facebook and Flickr, should I? Getting published in a local publication still carries some potent cachet. In a single day, your work can be seen by thousands of people, but there’s little feedback, the drug that drives online participation in photography and more specifically photosharing. It dawned on me recently that not one of the better young photographers that I’m aware of would ever consider a career as a newspaper photographer. They’re happy to pursue that day’s worth of buzz and will put their work into a print publication, but showing up for work and plugging away at photojournalism day in and day out simply isn’t on the agenda for most of today’s young photographers. I can’t think of a single photographer of significant quality and promise who has joined a newspaper in Trinidad and Tobago in the last decade as anything other than an occasional contributor. ...I’ve had the opportunity to work on three newspaper photographic departments over the course of my career. In 1990, I was appointed the first Picture Editor of the Guardian after conducting months of training exercises and evaluation of their systems. During that volatile time, the attempts at revolution on the streets were matched by a real revolution in technology at the paper as old technologies were replaced by Macintosh systems, digital scanners and imagesetters. This was a turbulent, emotional time for workers at the paper used to a decades-old way of doing things. Some people’s positions within the company would change and not always for the better by the rapid changes in technology. ...and when I had the opportunity to create a hybrid workflow of film photography and digital scanning from film and prints that would become the paper’s way of doing things for ten more years. Five years later, I’d do the same thing for the Express, eliminating the intermediary step of printing images for proofs using a Fotovix, a now defunct video capture device that allowed a user to quickly review an entire roll of film, viewing the results on a television screen. In 1998, I returned to the Guardian and added that system to their workflow, but the next big revolution would come in 2001 when I created the all-digital capture/review/archiving procedures for The Wire, Trinidad Publishing’s brief experiment with a youth focused tabloid format and style. A picture-driven publication, it published more than three times as many photos as any other paper daily, most of them larger than a third of the tabloid page. The demands of publication five days a week drove the small department of four, Andrea De Silva, Curtis Chase, Karla Ramoo and Keith Matthews, the smallest staff complement of any daily paper, to deliver dramatic photos regularly. The sheer excitement of that newsroom and the vibrancy of the work it produced made the paper very desirable to young contributors and when the paper was shut down in 2003, I had a file almost two inches thick of hopeful resumes, most of them from people younger than 30. It’s hard to imagine a commitment to daily photographic storytelling like that happening today. Newspapers are increasingly using cheap stock photography for features, gutting the best opportunities for creative work on the photodesk, discouraging photographer engagement with the publication process and direction (there was precious little to begin with) and relegating them to creating snaps to accompany stories and pushing the photographic resource off to the side as a support system instead of as the source of visual reporting it deserves to be. The question posed by a photographer about today’s market might well be: Why should I contribute to this? What’s in it for me? The response from today’s newspapers might well be: What makes you think we need you? (The same might well be said to editors looking for work.) There’s all these other folks with DSLRs who aren’t so fussy. And we can always give the reporters a good point and shoot camera. (A look at the way local newspapers display photographs on the web is all the reinforcement of this point that need be offered.) I have the clear sense of a frog in a slowly heating pot here, and things are rapidly coming to a boil. I’m afraid that by the time it’s agreed on that photography in local newspapers no longer aspires to excellence or even pleasant surprise, the metaphorical frog will be floating belly up and there will be nothing more to be done about it.

Controlling your RAW

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2011-06-13T21:47:50-04:00

There’s a small but growing murmur of folks who have been asking photographers for their RAW files locally. There are even more young photographers who seem, in an amazing turn, to be willing to hand over their in-camera originals without a thought. Here’s why that’s a bad idea. RAW files, as you might have gathered from previous entries on this blog and other resources on the Internet, are a very useful dump of the direct digital data captured by a professional or prosumer camera’s sensor. This data is far more flexible than the baked in JPEG files that the cameras produce, but unlike JPEGs, they need work before they can be declared finished images. There are artists and designers who have enough of an understanding of modern digital photography that they can make use of these files and maybe even use them effectively. In my experience though, photographers have traditionally been best at handling photographic materials, despite the protestations that tend to come up at times like this. In the good old days, negatives and transparencies would get lost or damaged and frustrated clients couldn’t seem to understand that they had managed to destroy their originals. With infinite copies possible in a digital age that isn’t likely to be an issue, it’s not hard to imagine a client opening a folder of RAW files and not having any idea what to do with it. In my own workflow, I spend a lot of time working on final image files to put my own stamp on them and on realising the vision I had for the image when I did the original photography. There’s still no reliable way to add those alterations back into the RAW image, so it’s most likely that such transforms, even embedded in Adobe’s DNG format, will be lost when they are opened. There is, however, an alternative for clients who want a file with data headroom to work with. A digital RAW file is essentially a special flavour of TIFF file with some custom additions designed by the camera manufacturer. Most of the advantages of the format, plus the alterations you choose to make to the file in Photoshop after the fact, are supported by the TIFF format in 16-bit mode, the format I usually work with when working on the derivative files I usually label as “finals.” For most clients who want unretouched TIFFs, I export 8-bit versions after making broad adjustments in Lightroom, but with a 16-bit TIFF, it’s possible to bake in important tags like metadata and some key adjustments and give a discerning designer enough data for even the most vigorous of digital transforms.

Film: Cuatro Hero

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2011-05-30T20:06:16-04:00

Robert Munro’s right hand. Photography by Mark Lyndersay. During this shoot in 1999 for the Guardian’s U magazine, I found myself fascinated not just with Robert Munro’s startlingly fast playing but with the fact that he didn’t use a pick. It was pointless asking Munro to pose with his instrument, once he had it in his hands, he began to play. We did two shoots for the story, one at a delightful old house he sometimes visits on Duke Street and the other at my studio. While Munro played, I asked him at one point to just stop and show me his hands. It was just one photo among many, but I can’t look at that contact sheet without stopping at that image. Not a perfect detail photo, but a riveting one, particularly the bright sharp fingernails that are his personal instrument in making music. The other thing that caught my eye was his guitar case when he popped it open. It’s a weathered, old and quite personal protection for his cuatro, as thoroughly used and worn in as his instrument. Even more compelling than the character beaten into the case were the many personal bits of inspiration attached to its lid, reminders of his many muses for a musician dedicated to entertaining with every performance. Sometimes a photographer will find that as fascinating as their subject is, there are compelling details about their life and work that add to the story and sometimes can convey to a reader as much as a traditional portrait can. Robert Munro carried his cuatro around in this case when I photographed him and probably still does. Photography by Mark Lyndersay.

Film: Walcott

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2011-05-23T23:10:55-04:00

Derek Walcott, photographed for the press kit for The Last Carnival. I shot this with a Pentax 645 on Tri-X film lit with a single Sunpak 611 strobe bounced into a Reflectasol umbrella. The picture would be reproduced constantly in the Guardian throughout the 1980’s. Photograph by Mark Lyndersay. In the early 1980’s I was quite active in the theatre and working at Colonial Life as their public relations officer. The Trinidad Tent Theatre, conceptualised by Helen Camps, was where I was hanging my hat in those days, doing photography, promotional work and even some print design, back in the pre-computer days of cowgum paste ups. I was, I suppose, the go-to guy for theatre promotion, largely because nobody else could be bothered with the unpaid, unheralded work. Derek Walcott was on an extended visit to Trinidad to restage his 1970 play In a Fine Castle as The Last Carnival and he’d decided to put the play on at the old Government Training Building, a structure that had been abandoned for occupation and would later be classified as uninhabitable and demolished. Walcott is acknowledged as a brilliant poet and the recognition he’s received in that sphere has tended to overshadow the significant work he’s done as a playwright. I am a fan of his plays Pantomime and Remembrance, which I reviewed back in the days when I served as a theatre critic for the Guardian. I was still bobbing back and forth between both roles when the opportunity to work with Walcott on The Last Carnival came along. The playwright and director brought two promising young actors back from the US with him for the production, Cotter Smith and Fran McDormand, who would go on to become quite well known in Hollywood in just a few years, winning an Academy Award for Fargo. As part of the promotion, photography was scheduled at the Cascade home of Clara Rosa de Lima who was a supporter of the production. At the shoot, I asked Walcott if he was interested in sitting for a photograph. He declined quite bluntly. I progressed with the photography, with Walcott looking in from time to time. Finally, I was done and I looked around at the playwright. “You have three,” he said, brusquely. He sat in the chair and I asked him to place his hand on his head, quickly deciding to put the mind and the instrument of his work together in the frame. I shot, one, two, three photographs and then Walcott got up and walked away without a word. I learned a lot from the experience working with Walcott on the project. One morning, I came by to visit him at the Hotel Normandie and had to wait fifteen minutes until he was available for the discussion. I have to confess that I was a bit miffed at the delay, particularly since I’d taken time off work for the meeting, but when I entered the room, I found out why. Walcott set aside a certain number of hours each morning to work at his craft, and during that time, nobody was allowed to disturb him. When I entered the room, I found him surrounded by sketchbooks, notebooks and reference materials strewn all over the bed he was working on. It was a lesson about respecting the need to work at one’s craft that I never forgot. As a postscript, I should note that The Last Carnival represented the pinnacle of my brief encounter with the famous poet. The play failed to draw an audience, who were, apparently, concerned about safety issues at the venue. I charged Walcott only the costs incurred on the project, but this apparently upset him. A review of the Branch of the Blue Nile on Gayelle almost a year later when it was produced in Trinidad was also not met well by the playwright who matched my disapproval of the play by putting my name, cited as part of a disparaging line, in the play. I frankly found it impossible to be annoyed at having my name mentioned, if only briefly and negatively in a Walcott play, and I confess to sneaking around backstage at the Tent Theatre to hear the line spoken. It would be the last review of a theatrical production that I’d ever do, but things would get worse one more time. I saw Walcott at an event at Judy Stone’s Woodbrook Theatre after he won the MacArthur grant and walked over, hand outstretched to congratulate him. Walcott slapped my hand away and Charles Applewhaite came by a few moments later to whisper in my ear, “Welcome to the club.”

Photoshop: Metamorphosis

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2011-05-16T22:20:03-04:00

The poster for Celebrations, the 1997 Metamorphosis presentation. Photography by Mark Lyndersay. In 1996, my good friend Peter Shim came to me with an excellent opportunity. His wife was working on the launch of a dance company, meant to be the graduating class company for the Caribbean School of Dancing to be called Metamorphosis. The company would be having their first show in a few weeks and needed an image to launch the company. That was a heady time for computing. Macs were finally getting fast enough to keep up with serious graphics and image files, and hard disks were getting cheap enough to buy drives with hundreds of megabytes, hundreds, I say, worth of space. I was working at the time with a Mac IIci sporting a PowerPC accelerator card and a whopping 64MB of RAM, 16 MB of which were 1MB chips sitting on a special riser card that allowed you to reuse older RAM, four chips at a time. Peter had a PowerPC 7100, which was one of the first models with that chip on the market. We also had a terrifyingly expensive Micronet 2X CD Burner, which was originally a 1X model, but since that never worked, the company caved in and sent us their brand-new model after some testy phone calls in which we explained the kind of duty we were paying on these devices when they were shipped in. Using that hardy, souped up Mac, with my first shrinkwrapped copy of Photoshop 3, it was possible to start doing some of the fancy stuff that was so popular in all the colour magazines of the day. Peter and I would collaborate on six of these posters for Metamorphosis in all and they were fun to do. We’d talk through the image, figure out how to shoot it and then I’d block out the image in Photoshop before handing it off to Peter to finesse (or repair, depending on your perspective) the retouching and add the typography. This experience taught me a lot about using Photoshop, and more compellingly, it taught me just how deep the software was. My background was decades spent in a darkroom and Peter’s was with pencils and paint and our approaches to the same image and software was shockingly different. It was normal in those days for one to look over the shoulder of the other and ask politely, “What are you doing?” I used selections and feathering a lot; the digital analogue of the burning and dodging I’d been doing for years, while Peter favoured the brushes and pen tools. Kind of vividly logical when you think about it in hindsight, but we’d both been working with the software for a couple of years before realising the way we did things was so completely different. The key image leading off this post was the second image we did for Metamorphosis. In the first few images of the series, I was wrestling with portraying the dynamism and movement of dance in a still photo and cloth seemed to be an interesting way to portray the feel of speed and movement that these young dancers traded in so effortlessly. For the second photo, we got some light grey cloth into the studio and shot it repeatedly on 6x6 colour transparency film. I scanned several promising images and layered them together to build the effect. We’d used cloth on the first image as well, asking dancer Zara Bartels to jump repeatedly on a trampoline with a red cloth. And just for the record, the cloth was plain red and her leotard was black before we got to work on the project. Eventually, the project would run its course. Colour posters are expensive to produce and the ideas began to run dry. And personally, I finally jumped the shark on the project with the fifth poster, which resulted in this image. Mercifully, it got axed as a possible image and I reduced the photo down to the core photo of Abby Charles, sister of Ettiene, who had appeared in most of the images in the series. That turned out to be quite popular, actually. The series was a wonderful opportunity for me, to fully explore what was possible with images in Photoshop and to push the limits on what I wanted to do with the software and more important for the world, I think, what I shouldn’t be doing with it. As it turns out, all that work with selections and the excellent experience of working with Peter Shim refined in my mind exactly what Photoshop work would become part of my workflow and what I wouldn’t be doing. I actually do quite a bit of work on some of the images I do these days, but if I do my work well, nobody should ever see it. That’s become my style, after all the enthusiasm I put into filters and layering and general messing about with Adobe's software, but I had to go through my own Metamorphosis to get there.

Film: Minshall - Donkey Derby

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2011-05-09T21:02:03-04:00

Peter Minshall, photographed at the Callaloo Company mas camp, Cocorite, 1993 In 1993, Peter Minshall and his Callaloo Company were gathering the debris of the failed wedding concept and repurposing the materials and partly finished costumes into the Donkey Derby at a warehouse space in Cocorite. I was producing a Carnival Souvenir for the Express and a story on what Minshall was planning that year would be part of the story package. It was around eight in the evening when I got there, and the place was buzzing with activity. There didn’t seem to be many places where I could photograph the masman, who was showing signs of getting frazzled by all the demands on his time, one of which was to be this nuisance of a photographer who needed to get a picture. Tucked away under a stairwell was a little nook where the wireframe headpieces for the band were being shaped and skinned with papier-mâché. On the platform were a number of the headpieces in varying stages of completion, from wireframe to fully painted. I had a choice of two possible angles, ugly discoloured galvanize siding or dancers rehearsing in the background roughly 20 feet away. I set the two strobes up to highlight the dramatic potential of the situation and jacked the shutter speed right up to the limits of flash sync and the power output on the unit to maximum, shooting with Fujichrome 50 on a Pentax MX camera. The slow film, burst of strobe light and relatively dark rehearsal room behind the scenario dropped the background out to complete black, though one of the support pillars for the stairway is still just visible to the right of the frame. It’s worth noting that this was shot using White Lightning’s early model strobes, the WL 10,000 units or the soup pots, as most pros call them. I’d discovered this Texas based company through ads in PhotoDistrictNews some years before and through my cousin, William Aguiton brought in first two and then another pair of the units. As far as I can tell, I was Paul C Buff’s first customer in Trinidad and Tobago and William eventually switched from Norman units to more modern White Lightning units a few years later. I also introduced Garth Murrell to them, suggesting that when he moved on from the Novatron pack he was using that these units would make a good alternative. Peter Minshall finally made himself available for the shoot, looking at the scruffy circumstances in which I was about to place him with some suspicion. “If you could just sit here, and hold this,” I told the band leader, handing him the wireframe headpiece. Minshall looked at me quizzically for a moment and then I looked over the top of the camera and told him, “Alas, poor Yorick.” His eyes twinkled as he got the idea, he gave a wry smile and turned contemplatively to the headpiece, immediately settling into the vibe. I banged away a full roll of transparency film on the situation, bracketing a full four stops either way on the setup. I saw Minshall a few weeks later at the end of a play at the Central Bank Auditorium. “The photographer did well,” Minshall said, pausing in the aisle. “The subject was excellent,” I replied, and we exchanged smiles. The photograph of Peter Minshall was used this month as the key image in the second issue of ARC Magazine, published as a full-bleed two-page spread (better than it got in its original publication) to lead off a story by Dalton Narine on the iconic mas maker. It's not the only photo I've ever taken of Mr Minshall, but it's one of the better ones.

Womanwise - Gabrielle Hosein

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2011-04-25T22:13:22-04:00

Gabrielle Hosein and her family at their Santa Cruz Home. "But I only have one light." Don't know how many times I've heard that lament from a new photographer and sometimes even a few togs who have been in the game for far too long. The thing is, if you aren't shooting in a completely dark room against a black background, there's a good chance you have more light than you realise available to you. For one thing, there's usually the sun, the most powerful source of ambient light, which I make a lot of use of when I'm shooting with low powered speedlights on location. The sun is often a challenge and one of the reasons why I keep a Canon G11 in my bag on location shoots is for those times when I can't overpower the sun with speedlights and I can make use of that camera's ability to synchronise with flash at any shutter speed. With my DSLR, though, the top speed for flash sync is one two-hundredth of a second, and sometimes I need to boost the strobe a bit more. Of late, I've been making use of Lastolite's TriFlash, a coldshoe multiple flash solution that's now part of a family that includes a new locking coldshoe version and a quite expensive hotshoe version that looks like it might be quite useful to a hardcore speedlight user. The Triflash is a surprisingly well made gadget that stacks up to three flashes into an array that you can bang into or through an umbrella. The photo of Gabrielle Hosein and her family was done under photographer hostile circumstances. Brilliant midday sun with few attractive options for shade, but I decided to make the most of those. With the Lastolite, I can either boost the effective flash output by roughly one additional stop for every flash I attach or I can take advantage of faster cycling times by cutting the power output of each of the individual units. My "lightweight" location lighting kit is already starting to feel a bit hefty, with two lightstands and one extension pole, three strobe connectors, two collapsible umbrellas, one silver, one white in one bag and three speedlights in the camera bag. I've found the Lastolite useful for duplicating the capacity of a single lightstand by allowing me to point strobes in two different directions from the same position. The other challenge of shooting outdoors with an umbrella, of course, is that the units are basically a sail for every passing wind. It's not always as effective as I'd like, but hanging my bags off the lightstand usually makes it stable enough for a quick shoot. If there's anything to be learned from this exercise, it's that the first step to controlling any shoot is being able to place the light source where you need it to be, and that usually means getting it off the camera, which has been the underlying theme of pretty much all of these conversations about photographic technique and then controlling it accurately wherever you decide to put it. It's not possible to do everything with a single speedlight and many projects demand multiple lights and sometimes they demand far more power than any speedlight system or even a combination of speedlights can put out, but then there are photos you can do with far less light than you might suspect and even just one controllable source of light.

Womanwise - Sarah Jane

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2011-04-04T23:58:20-04:00

The lighting setup for the in-car photo of Sarah-Jane Gopaul was simple enough, but carried some special complications. One small softbox with a 580 ex strobe connected by hard cable to my camera with a 20mm lens. The shoot with Sarah-Jane Gopaul, was a perfect storm of things gone wrong. Let's start with the storm, or at least the cloudy wet day and the actual rain falling when I got to the garage in Couva where her beast machine was being prepped for racing. "So," Sarah-Jane says when we meet for the first time, "where are we going to take the pictures?" I get the hint implicit in the comment. I'd hoped to photograph her car on the open road at sunset. With no sun visible and water spattering the ground hard, that idea must have seemed quite dead to the hard driving lass. I eye the Mazda, which isn't so much small as it is stripped and purpose-built. In between the piping for the rollbar cage, fire extinguisher system and bulky instrumentation, the chairs seem like a half-hearted afterthought, a passenger, a laughable notion. I explain my plan to photograph her driving from inside the vehicle. Sarah-Jane shrugs good naturedly, with the kind of wry smile that in retrospect suggests that I have no idea what I'm getting into. Twenty minutes later, we're at Brechin Castle, the rain has let up, but the overcast sky is losing light rapidly. After formally requesting permission to drive up and down the bumpy road, I shove and twist my six and a half foot frame past the roll bar cage, over the extinguisher and into the seat next to my subject. Along with me comes my Canon and a 16 x 22 Chimera softbox that suddenly feels huge in the constrained space. I quiely curse my forgetfulness in leaving behind an even smaller Lastolite light modifier and we're off. Well, the car is off, I'm bouncing up and down like beans in a chac chac, vainly trying to read settings on the camera to match the light outside with the light the softbox is providing and waving the camera around in positions that seem like they will capture the driver at work. We drive about half a mile before turning to come back before I start smelling something really sharp and electrical which quickly turns into a choking cloud of white smoke with the distinctive tang of burning wiring. Of course, with my gear in this space, I can barely move and twist my head desperately, hacking and gasping for air toward the window. Sarah-Jane pulls the car over and we fling the doors open, and for a long moment, it seems to make no difference at all. Then the wind pulls the smoke away and I can breathe air, even if it tastes funny. For a shot moment that lasted far too long, I have a good sense of what drivers must deal with when their cars go wrong at high speed and I have to tell you, it's pretty damned scary. The rest of the shoot is uneventful, is brisk. The light is disappearing fast on this rainy evening, but the darkening wet road looks even better, I think, than the golden sunset I originally had in mind and Sarah-Jane, bless her roadcrushing self, is an absolute sweetheart about waiting on the gear to get set in the soft drizzle for the final photos of the evening.

Photographing Carnival

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2011-03-14T22:26:33-04:00

So much of today's Carnival coverage comes down to this. Photograph by Mark Lyndersay. In my BitDepth column this week, I spent some time thinking through the way that Carnival has been influenced by photography. What I never got around to discussing is the way that Carnival coverage itself has changed. Twenty-five years ago, coverage of Carnival was demarcated by clear zones. Photographers and videographers were here, and the costumes were there. Over time, here became much closer to there as the presentation of Carnival became less about costuming and theatre and more about the body and self and the articulation of individual sensuality to the camera. The communal experience became a fundamentally selfish one, and the cameras rewarded sexually charged enthusiasm with expanded coverage. It was, in short, the evolution of look ah mas to look at me. Match that adjustment in the relationship between a significant diminishing in the overall skill level applied to the coverage of Carnival and you have a recipe for the commonplace writ large. Today's Carnival, despite the expanded dynamic range offered by today's digital cameras over the colour transparency film that was used for much of the festival's coverage over the last century, is curiously compressed. The technical approach to Carnival is now a camera with a medium range zoom lens and a flash on camera to fill the shadows blasting away at the subject. The result is flat, without any character that the natural lighting of the day might offer, with a background that falls away in exposure quickly. It isn't a bad way to light a subject during the day, but multiplied by dozens, even hundreds, it becomes less a style than a shortcut, a visual contraction of a once rich visual language. It isn't that the photography isn't good. It just ent.

Scanning film

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2011-01-31T23:09:36-04:00

Technology has pushed photography along so far, so fast that it’s hard to imagine that just eight years ago, digital images, unless you were willing to spend several thousands of dollars, sucked. I didn’t make the jump to only shooting digital images until an affordable eight megapixel camera capable of shooting in RAW mode became available. For me, that was Canon’s Rebel XT and I’ve never regretted that move. But it was one that I waited more than a decade to make. The differences between a negative printed using a system of lenses and a diffusion box was readily apparent to an even moderately experienced darkroom technician. Even the best film scanners can only bring the one technology to very different film source material and as a result tend to deliver only an average job of capturing the nuances of their source material. Most scanners are optimised to produce the best results from colour negatives. That’s not surprising, since huge numbers of images were captured using that medium. Digital ICE, Kodak’s useful technology for repairing scratches on colour film doesn’t work at all black and white film and contrasty colour transparencies can only be captured accurately with the very best desktop film scanners and really only spring to life when they are digitized with a drum scanner. Compounding the challenge is the rather grim reality that film scanners are slowly on the way out. Nikon, who make the best film scanners that most people can afford have basically exited the business. Their software hasn’t been updated for most of the 21st century and while Silverfast makes modern scanner drivers for pretty much every major film scanner out there, it’s pricey. VueScan is a useful and significant cheaper alternative, but I’ve never been able to make it work well. It's a bit of an acquired taste that I've never quite embraced. Silverfast is feature rich, but complicated as well as expensive. This post was inspired by my cousin Bill who shoots exacting portraits and has become very comfortable with a sophisticated RAW workflow. His older images, shot on portrait-optimised colour negative film, often using diffusion filters are proving to be a challenge to migrate to digital and I’m feeling it for him. My own road to bringing my work into the digital realm so far has been a mix of disappointments and the occasional pleasant surprise. Medium format film generally scans well, though black and white images require detailed, quadrant by quadrant retouching. It’s a simple fact that any negative that’s been printed in a working darkroom is going to have picked up some dings and digital shows them all up in appalling detail. The hard truth is this. Analog workflows worked well. Digital workflows work well. Bridging the two is challenging and requires work, patience and skill, more than most folks are willing to invest. Unless they happen to have two decades worth of negatives to bring into the digital realm and basically have no other choice. My scanning workflow My process is straightforward. I scan on a Nikon scanner that's on loan using Digital Ice in normal mode to deal with cruft on colour negatives and transparencies. Two 35mm models that I've owned have failed on me and I probably won't buy another one. I do minimal colour corrections at capture, correcting major colour shifts in the Nikon software (the stand alone software still works on the Mac, the plug-in died in Photoshop CS3 and higher). I scan in high-bit mode, which makes for honking big files – expect file sizes upward of 400MB for a 6x6cm colour original. That's led me to make significant upgrades in storage, because I save in TIFF format. I've been scanning and saving images, confirming focus and general colour quality and setting aside any major toning work and retouching for later in the dance. With the enormity of the project before me, capturing and archiving takes first priority over finishing work. I plan to do finishing on the images when sales or projects bring them forward for serious consideration. This roughly parallels what I've been doing with digital originals, which I archive in DNG format and, of course, my original negatives, stashed in yellowing Paterson glassine pages all these years. These raw scans are backed up to two different drives from different manufacturers with one off-site backup in Houston. I'd like to do an optical media backup, but Blu-Ray needs to drop in price a bit more before I can consider it.

Womanwise - Lorna Henry

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2011-01-24T21:46:38-04:00

Lorna Henry’s story is a fascinating one. You can read the details of it here in this Express story, unfortunately, I can’t find the story I shot for on the Guardian’s website. At the time of the session, Lorna’s home was being built in Morvant in an assisted self-help arrangement with Habitat for Humanity and that was the project that was filling her days when the story was scheduled to run in Womanwise. The building is set into a moderate incline with a front door facing west. The light was great, soft and overcast, which was terribly useful, since the incline of the land made it impossible to bring any lighting to bear on a subject posed in the doorway. That light; however, wasn’t getting into the building at all in any significant way, so here was an opportunity to give the image some depth by popping some light into the busy interior. This photo was the one used on the cover, though there are a few alternates shot through a window space that show the volunteers from Habitat for Humanity working in the background. Both images show the subject proudly in her space and the lighting, a pair of speedlights triggered by radio slaves, ensured that she wasn’t photographed in the doorway to a dark cave. Sometimes lighting isn’t about lighting the subject, but about lighting the environment, subtly but effectively.

FlipBac takes note of our post

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2010-09-18T22:35:09-04:00

Our What a difference a lens makes post got referenced on the website of FlipBac, an angle viewfinder for DSLRs.

An amateur's perspective

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2010-09-13T16:27:26-04:00

In response to a few questions that I sent to gather perspectives for this BitDepth column, R, the proprietor, chief photographer, programmer and darkroom technician of Trinidad Dreamscape, offered these responses. They were way too juicy to just discard, so I'm posting them here in the public interest. For more perspectives on photography from this talented artist, visit Trinidad Dreamscape. You might want to start here and here if his thoughts as expressed in this brief interview interest you. What, in your mind, is the point at which an amateur becomes a professional? ...As my earnings from photography remain anchored at zero all I am sure about is that I'm definitely an amateur! How long have you been a photographer and how long since you chose to pursue landscape photography? I have been taking pictures for 28 years. I started to get more serious about landscape photography about 14 years ago. ...I had some rough times many years ago where I lost faith in my friends and colleagues, so I gravitated to the beauty of the landscape to offset the fact that I didn't find much of anything uplifting in human interconnectedness, at least at the time. ...What equipment are you working with these days and how have your choices in gear changed since you began photographing? My main cameras consist of two large format film cameras (old-time cameras where the photographer has to hide under a cloth to focus), one medium format film camera and a Canon digital camera. The digital camera I find unrewarding to use so it remains on the shelf more often than not. With the exception of the digital camera, I have been using the same cameras for the past 10 years or so. I am familiar with their workings and they take good pictures. In the past I took a little while to find a camera I was comfortable with for the work I do. I also couldn't afford anything too wonderful either so I made do with used cameras mostly. What do you think of the new "breed" of young photographers who have come to the craft in the digital age? ...I have heard all too often that the difference between film and digital photography is restricted to the capture medium alone, everything else is the same. ...Digital photography favours the iPod generation, it is their medium for capturing life around us. Digital photographers are obsessed about capturing the perfect image: a bit-perfect artifice of the landscape derived through a digital sensor enhanced with software. Just like the iPod listeners who have never heard a real orchestra perform, the digital landscape photographers of post-film vintage I have met seek merely to emulate and recreate pictures they have seen on the internet without any appreciation for the grand landscape sitting in front of them. Digital images are the new photographers' mp3 files: bit-perfect, innumerable facsimiles of something infinitely more grand. Film, on the other hand, is an imperfect medium and it takes many years of trudging through mediocrity to get the best out of it. Along the way one gains an appreciation of the landscape as each picture is consciously considered. I usually take only one shot per outing, the rest of the time I admire the view! Film also has flaws, there is no perfection here. ... The viewer sees not just a landscape but a landscape as seen through the very human eyes of the photographer with all his flaws in tow. The Native American Indian belief system revolves around the view that man and nature are one. A landscape photographer, by extension, incorporates his or her humanity into every image. Digital photographers have a harder time learning this as the rapid-fire automaton camera is a barrier to this reality. What advice would you offer to photographers interested in pursuing photography seriously, whether as a professional or as an amateur? Well, giving advice where it is not really wanted nor sought is always fraught with peril. Everyone has his or her own motives for taking pictures and any advice should be given within the context of, or with the assumption of, knowing what those motives are. I have found that the photography knowledge I possess, in this age, is not really relevant to those starting out. They are interested in megapixels, lenses, filters and software: stuff I don't know very much about. I can and have offered advice about the philosophy of photography: why we photograph a landscape, how a photographer should seek to confer an appreciation for the landscape in a viewer, how a scene that really means something to a photographer can transcend any deficiencies in technique when viewed. But no one wants to hear about those things. ... Love your subject so that others can sense that in your pictures. Make your pictures your own way: they are, after all, your pictures.

Womanwise 19

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2010-04-19T20:40:51-04:00

This was my second opportunity to photograph Kenisha Thom. The first came when I was in Tobago recording last year’s Great Fete Weekend and The Bridge publisher Chenier Belgrave asked me to schedule a session with Kenisha and her family. I should note that I’d packed strategically for Great Fete, working with gear and backup gear built around using an extended strobe that I’d be waving around on what might technically be described as a “stick” actually the top two extensions of an old PIC lightstand to model light in an event that might technically be described as “wildness.” So that’s what I had for the shoot, along with a small light modifier I’d packed as a nervous afterthought. Those photos turned out pretty well, in spite of the fact that after posing Kenisha and her family artfully on a neighbour’s hammock, attractively slung between two trees with really radiant light spilling all around it, the whole thing collapsed, mercifully harming nothing but my reputation. For this return engagement, Kenisha politely but unequivocally declined any notion of showing the scars from the brutal attack she suffered in Tobago, which was to be the subject of the story. The photo opportunity would take place at her Santa Margarita home, so I packed gear to take advantage of what I hoped might be attractive exteriors. The housing project wasn’t finished and punishing heat and dry weather conditions had turned the struggling lawns a quite distinctive shade of brown. The sunset, which I planned to shoot into, also joined in, offering an image shattering background in shades of dull gray. I pressed into service the new Cactus radio triggers that I’d bought to fill in a small but notable gap in my location shooting capabilities. I use radio slaves in the studio and on commercial shoots, but neither of these solutions work with the kit I use for my personal work, a pair of Canon strobes. Much of the work I do with this gear is handily accomplished using Canon’s STE2 infrared trigger, which supports ETTL control of the two strobes, but a light based triggering solution is utterly stymied by even moderately bright outdoors light and distances beyond 16 feet or so and any position that loses line of sight with the trigger. Not a problem indoors, where the infrared signal can bounce around a bit, but outdoors, getting that synchronisation can be a bit like threading a needle with wicketkeeper’s gloves on. I don’t do enough small strobe work outdoors to justify the pricier and, it’s said, more reliable units, and the Cactus triggers, which I sourced from Cowboy Studio, seem to offer terrific value for the price. The strobes trigger in manual mode, and do so reliably in my experience so far. The full length shoot of Kenisha Thom was done on a neighbour’s lawn with two strobes staggered in height from the left. The upper strobe is at just over quarter power, the lower one, meant to light but also to taper off the former model’s tall frame was set at just under quarter power. Both strobes had CTO warming gels and Lumiquest light modifiers in place and I shot from roughly thirty feet away from the subject on the long end of a 70-200mm zoom. The closeup photo used on the cover reduced the lower light a bit more and angled it upward to balance the overhead light for a classic beauty light effect. On reviewing the images, I really should have gone in the opposite direction with the warming gels and shifted the colour balance of the strobes down into a cooler blue to match the dull glow of a disappointing sunset, then an overall colour correction would have warmed up both subject and background. Still, with a sparkling, sculpted beauty like Kenisha before the lens, there’s a limit to the damage my spot misjudgements could do to a photo of a two time beauty contestant.

Young photographers lament younger photographers

mark@lyndersaydigital.com — 2010-04-12T19:25:46-04:00

This is the text from the original Facebook posting that led to this BitDepth column. ..."Amateur photographers, happy to accept small checks for snapshots, are underpricing professionals". That is what is killing photographers in T&T today. ...What's killing some photographers in T&T is the closed-minded mentality of keeping to themselves, for fear of the next guy learning something from them and taking "their" clients. ... This has made it quite easy for amateurs to shoot a few frames, start up " [insert your name here] Photography" and subsequently undercut the professionals. ...Mark Gellineau: Anthony has hit the nail square on the head with that comment. What that article describes hasn't really made an impact on our photography market due to its size and monopoly style setup. ...In my time, I've known dozens of photographers working in Trinidad and Tobago and one thing has remained the same. The photographers who don't share their knowledge pretty much have two tricks and can't afford to share one, the people I've learned from knew so much that they could talk for weeks and never truly get started on their well spring of knowledge. There's been underpricing, cockiness, arrogance and informed ignorance throughout my relations with photographers in T&T over the last thirty years, but I've always respected the time that people like Gary Chan, Noel Norton and Harold Prieto gave me when I thought I knew it all and they showed me by example just how much I didn't know at all. I don't think it's necessary to run around in packs to share and no great photographer has ever truly been my competition, unskilled, obnoxious photographers have done more to make my life complicated than any pro it's ever been my pleasure to bid against on a job. With the ease of access to information about how professional photography is done in this Internet enabled world, I'm not even sure that anything, beyond laziness or a lack of craft can stifle improvement. This is a glorious, almost unprecedented time for photography. Access is easy, information is abundant and the cost of experimentation is as low as it's ever going to get. I find it rejuvenating, exciting and something of a blessing to be able to work in an era that brings so much possibility out of so many people who might not otherwise have had a chance to express themselves. Ultimately, photography is work, creative, often amusing and sometimes startlingly exciting work, but work nonetheless and just like it did in the late 70's and early 80's, the people who stick with the effort required will be those who really want to be photographers. ...Mark Gellineau: Well I feel schooled as usual in your wake Big Mark and I concur however I feel there is some relevancy to what was said prior. The times have changed and there are certainly less worthy veterans who take the time to impart their wisdom to the next crop of whippersnappers. There is also a new found explosive saturation of guys with cameras that the internet arms but doesn't guide. ...Kibwe Brathwaite: Great comments from everyone and although I fully agree and appreciate Lyndersay’s contribution, I also agree with Gellineau; times have changed and there is a different breed of individuals today. Some are quite established, some think they are established, many of them with unnecessarily inflated egos. But back to the issue in the article. ... Honestly, I don’t mind if a wedding planner or a performing artist blanks me and chooses a $200 photographer, once they understand that in many cases, you will get $200 worth in quality. ... Customers are, in most cases, not very informed to differentiate between work that has considerable technical and creative merit, from one that is.... well... not (insert any snap-an-ah-pong-ah-one-click-photoshop-filter-photographer’s name here). ...I'm sure this must all be very confusing to you, but no, there isn't a different breed of individuals today. I've seen exactly this sort of thing happen twice before. The first time was in the late 70's and early 80's, not coincidentally, when I began taking photographs, there was a massive upsurge in photography related magazines (information access) and a huge reduction in prices on darkroom equipment and cameras (technology) that made is much easier for a complete amateur to shoot and process photographs just like folks with labs and cameras that cost thousands of 1970's dollars. I bought quite a bit of the equipment I still use from the local photographers who bought into this idea. In the early 1990's, computers became absurdly cheap compared to the cost just a few years before and software became a commodity. The first product to achieve mainstream status as a widely pirated product was Pagemaker. It was fairly easy to use, much more powerful than Wordperfect and encouraged casual users to do anything they wished with a blank page. In both cases, something happened over the ensuing years. Ready access to new technology and enthusiastic use brought home to people just how much work photography and later design really was. Their stumbling efforts to make good work taught them a little about a craft they had previously taken for granted, increasing the general understanding and appreciation of both photography and print design. There were more professionals in the market after both surges in interest and both markets benefited from the increased awareness. Contemporary photography was increasingly recognised as an artform and design became much more adventurous than it ever had been. Typography, for instance, has never been the same since Fontographer appeared. ...Yes, the clever filtery stuff is much easier to do than it ever was, but that really just makes it the equivalent of the old "ransom note" graphics created by users who didn't really understand what fonts were for and how they should be used. I've met everybody you've described and many, many more, not just once, but twice and I have to fall back on the wisdom of my elder, Noel Norton, who showed me by example that the answer to the madness of fads is to pick a path, preferably one that the crowds aren't all following, and work steadily at it. I've always been grateful to Norts for that advice and I'm happy to pass it along.

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. 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 downloadable version of the final layout in PDF format is available here.