RobertBenson.com

I’m staying at a local hotel tonight, and when I walked in the lobby I saw some portraits I shot from a few months back, being used as a promotional employee recognition campaign. The pictures were in the lobby as displays and also in the rooms.

I’ve been on vacation, and things this time of year are usually slow for a lot of freelance photojournalists (myself included), but still things are clicking along. Shot the San Diego Chargers last night. They advance to the playoffs, so I’ll be shooting the same team again this coming Saturday in San Diego. Got a call this morning from a local newspaper asking if I can shoot the Holiday Bowl parade.

The Holiday Bowl football game is tomorrow. I’m shooting that, but right now off to shoot some high school basketball. It’s sunny here in San Diego, low to mid 70s.

Here’s a video of a do-it-yourselfer who shows how he attaches cameras to kites to make cool aerial videos:

Here’s a video about a 70s punk band photographer from the UK, who shows the old school film gear he used. He stuff is good:

Photographer Spencer Tunkik photographs people naked. Large groups of them. Here he shoots some 20,000 nude people in Mexico:

Here’s a former New York Post photographer talking about how she covered rappers and break dancers in the 70s:

Photographer Jensen Walker is shooting a project of Iraqi soldiers in American kitchens and living rooms with guns drawn. Watch to understand:

I’m in Florida visiting my parents, and at their home came across a book I hadn’t seen in 25 years, but remember reading as a 15 year old. It’s a photography book first published in 1952 called “The World of Henri Cartier-Bresson”. It’s full of stunning photos, the yellowed pages show images which I remember from constantly looking at when I was younger. I’m sure in some way the book helped get me hooked in photography and shaped the way I lived the rest of my life.

In addition to great photos (shown in the video below), it’s interesting to read how the photographer approached photography, and how completely different modern photojournalists shoot today. For example, he wrote “approach each subject on tiptoe, even if it is a still life….” C’mon, how many photographers do that today?

His approach to shooting portraits of people: “The mere presence of the photographer and his camera affects the behavior of the ‘victim’. Massive apparatus and flash bulbs prevent the subject from being himself.”

Bresson never used a flash on the camera. He wrote “there is no question, of course, of flash photos, even if only out of respect for the light, however evanescent; otherwise the photographer appears intolerably aggressive.”

Although there’s still photographers shooting the way he did, it’s rare I think. Bresson had a lot of insight and almost a science into how he made great photos, he had what he called a “clinical eye.” Here’s some of what he wrote. In the picture below I wrote the word “memorize”… I wrote it in 1980-something, when I was particularly moved by what the sentence said:

Did some more athletes in the studio. This is part of an ongoing personal project I’m doing. You can see other athletes I’ve shot already over on my website, at www.robertbenson.com

Finding a cricket player in San Diego was surprisingly difficult. I went to the San Diego Cricket Association, wrote the board of directors an emails, put a message on craigslist and asked around. Took three weeks before I found someone willing, this person, named Gaurav Khillon, who has been playing the game since he was a child in India.

Five lights were used for these images. Two lights on the background, two strip banks (one on each side of him) and a frontal fill from a large parabolic umbrella.

Here’s some of the studio pictures:

I did these shoots low budget, without an assistant, and don’t always use a light meter. Here I am checking the power of the background light using my hand as an aide. I also see my sensor is kind of filthy and needs cleaning.

I have two background lights, one on the left and right pointing at the white wall. They are both set at the same power setting, and both lights have only a seven inch reflector as a modifier. With my hand there (where the model will be), I chimp on my monitor and learn that the exposure on the background will be about f10. With the hand shot, I’m checking to make sure not a lot of bounce from the white backgound is exposing my hand (again where the subject will be). Also making sure that I’m not overexposing the background. If I was, there would be flare and weird things happening around my hand.

With the background lights set, I’m going to bring in the subject lights, and slowly “craft” the image and shape with with lights.

In the previous hand shot, my hand was centered between the two lights (but the two lights purposefully weren’t firing in the hand shot). In the portrait of the cricket player above, I used sandwich lighting. These strip banks were to the left and right of the subject, and slightly behind him. The white “runway” looking thing taped to the floor is White Thrifty Tileboard, which is sold at Home Depot for about $12 a sheet. It gives a little bit of reflection, almost mirror like, when it’s lit up. Doesn’t get all dirty like white seamless does.

Now I’m standing where my hand was, and handholding the camera with a 35mm lens on it. I take this picture to check the lighting from the strip banks, and quickly discover that the light on the right side of this photo is putting out more light than the left one. So I bump up power on the weaker light until both sides are equally matched. Again, with a light meter I wouldn’t have to do this chimp checking.

Now both of the side lights are at equal power. Next I bring in some fill from the front with another light, and I’m set to take pictures.

This beast, a seven foot parabolic umbrella reflector, is throwing light on the front of the subject. I keep it to the side, so there is still a bit of shadow on the subject’s face. In the portrait above, this light was NOT used – I only used it for the action images. With regard to the parabolic umbrella, I bought it recently from China, and I really like it. This thing is a knock off of a $12,000 Briese Parabolic reflector. It acts just like a normal seven inch reflector on most home studio lights, except it’s huge. So it’s a hard light, with hard shadows, but it’s soft at the same time. You can’t really see the effects of the light in the above photos though; when I have a good example, I’ll post it.

There’s a lot of talk about how microstock, the companies that sell stock images for one dollar or less, is ruining the traditional stock model at companies like Getty, Corbis, Jupiter, etc. But even at a dollar, images are too expensive for some! Saw this image on Jeff Singer’s blog who found it on Photoshop disasters. The person who designed the banner obviously did a screen capture of the beer mug, with logo still on the image. Ugh.

Photographer Damon Winter covered Obama on the election trail, and made some stunning images. PDN Magazine did a question and answer interview and a slide show gallery with Winter here.

According to the article, Winter shot more than 90,000 images. That’s a lot of editing.

Photo by Damon Winter/The New York Times

I stumbled across this commercial, and it has to be seen. When it comes to creativity, this is it, and it’s won awards. Guarantee you’ll watch it a couple times and smile at the end, on the first viewing. That’s when things “click.”

There’s an interview online with the company who made this spot – learn more about it here.

Video here of a photographer, Jordan Chan, doing senior portraits with a battery powered strobe and umbrella. Interesting for the strobists out there….

The photographer in my posting below this one, Sandy Huffaker, has been getting a lot of mileage with this photo he shot, which ran in the New York Times on A1 above the fold (love saying that…). Read what PDN had to say here.

And since were talking about Huffaker, read about his experiences on askaphotographer.com’s website here.

Sandy Huffaker photo