My name is Robert Benson, I'm a freelance photographer in San Diego and shoot mainly editorial and commercial stuff. You can write me at robert atmark robertbenson.com. Read more.My portfolio.
These photos are a few months old. A friend, Carey Schumacher, wanted some soccer pictures of her son and her friend’s son, and also wanted to learn a bit about lighting herself. So I did the shoot, used some of the photos as stock (they all signed model releases) with Aurora Photos (you can see image here) and gave them to her as well. Carey wrote about the shoot on her blog here.
She ordered a few Alien Bee strobes and wanted to see how they would work. For this shoot though, I used some of my own beater lights, some White Lighting x3200 self contained units, one with a big beauty dish on it.
When I see cool photos from photographers I dig, I have to bring them to your attention. This one was made by Damon Winter, one of my favorite portrait photographers (who I bookmark on the left side of this page).
According to the Times, he made this photo on a film 8×10 camera, exposing half the frame in daylight, then using dark slide at night to expose the other half of the sheet of film.
When I see photos like this I think - why didn’t I think of that? I dig Damon Winter’s work, in part, because he uses unusual cameras like this (unusual in today’s age) and his portraits are ridiculous. I always get him confused with Damon Dan Winters though.
Read more about this photo here. And you can see the man’s website here.
I’m in Minnesota now, here for a short week visiting family. I’m staying at my sister’s farm, about 100 miles south of Minneapolis. Reception is terrible with my Verizon wireless card, which I use to get online. But found if I stand out in the field here 100 yards from their farm house, I can get one bar of reception. Used it to do an update yesterday.
I swear I don’t work for this company or have stock with them, but my most used and favorite software is a program called Photo Mechanic, from a company called Camera Bits. I use it everyday, and don’t know how I survived without it in the past.
Photo Mechanic is software that let’s me edit and caption photos. Photo Mechanic calls it “a standalone image browser that lets you view your digital photos with convenience and speed. Photo Mechanic displays your “thumbnails” in a familiar “contact sheet” display window.”
Seems there’s nothing you can’t do in Photo Mechanic. For example, did you know you can FTP images right from the program? Or that you can send a picture via email from the program (and don’t have to resize it in an image editing program)? If you read past this jump, you’ll see eight of my favorite functions of the program. (more…)
On the first day of a photojournalism class at Syracuse University in 1998, our teacher, Professor David Sutherland, told us all to stand up with our cameras. He gave the order like a military drill sergeant.
We stood up.
“When I point at you,” he said, “take my picture. If you do it right, you can sit down.” Only one person was allowed to sit. Everyone else, all 10 or so of us, failed. We kept taking his picture though, when he pointed at us again and again. Some tucked in their left elbow more, others flexed their knees a bit, some leaned against a wall for stability….
The reason we failed, we later realized, was because he saw our finger move when we took a picture. He demonstrated the correct way to push a shutter button. And when he did it, none of us could see his finger move. He walked around the classroom with the film Nikon N90 camera taking a picture two inches in front of each person’s face.
We all got a close up view. No one saw his finger move.
With a couple minutes of practice, it’s easy to take a photo without seeing your finger move. The thought process behind the drill is to prevent jerky motion when depressing the shutter. Just like in golf, everything seems to begin with the grip.
In the video above, you can see my mad skills at taking a picture without moving my finger. David Blaine - STEP!
Don’t even get me started with the chicken wing left arm/elbow-out camera grip.
Just got this tearsheet emailed to me from Kimberly Kasitz, the PR lady at General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Inc. in San Diego. Thanks Kimberly!
I usually don’t see my work in print. I shoot a job, deliver the images, then three months later in ends up in a magazine or other publication somewhere. By that time I’ll have often moved on and forgotten to check the publication. That’s why it’s nice when the client, in this case the PR lady at General Atomics Aeronautical, sent me the tearsheet. The guy in the photo is the CEO of the company. They make unmanned vehicles.
When I go the assignment, I was envisioning three foot model airplanes, but it turns out the unmanned vehicles they make are quite a big bigger. Bigger than a Cessna airplane. That’s one behind the guy.
I lit him with one light, a strip box coming down from his left. The CEO is a former Navy pilot, and back in the day was stationed at Top Gun when they were filming the movie there, and served as an adviser to the film crew.
I got a call 20 minutes ago from a client at a local casino, where I do a lot of work. She needs pictures I shot and she needs them right away!
The pictures she was referring to were portraits, shot over a two day period at the casino last week. I shot in RAW with a full frame DSLR, so the files were pretty big (considering the type of job), with the shoot exceeding 20 gig. Didn’t want to burn countless DVDs. Making CDs would have been a nightmare. I could have FTPed the images, but the client wanted all the images, not only my edit of the best. Again, a pain on both ends.
Normally I’ll send off discs to the client, but this time I burned everything onto a portable USB hard drive. It’s easier on their end to get the files (plug and play) and eats up less of my time making and mailing discs! I just get the hard drive back a bit later. Easy!
The price on portable hard drives has really come down too, and they hold a lot of info. The job for the casino was something I do their each quarter: photographing their star employees. It’s an internal incentive program, and images end up poster size on walls in employee areas of the casino. They are also used for marketing purposes at the casino.
These were some of the images I shot last week which the client wants. These pictures, and a thousand or so others! Photos by Robert Benson
The portraits I shoot end up as posters and are displayed in the walls of the casino and also used by marketing in other ways. This guy is a chef there. Photo by Robert Benson
Here it is, quite a beauty eh? One frame per three minutes, manual focus only, not weather proof, heavy, made of breakable parts like glass…
Actually it’s not a Nikon (no kidding?), it’s a 1940s-era Speed Graphic camera which I am modifying to fit my needs. The regular 4×5 film camera gives results which I find too pedestrian - they look like images taken with any other large format camera.
I want a camera that will give me results similar to what I get when I do tintype photos - images with distortion, nice bokeh, swirl and unexpected defects. Film cameras don’t generally do that, so I bought an old lens from the 1900s called a petzval lens. These types of lenses have a sharp center area, then rapidly blur to swirls around the edges. Any photo made in the 1800s has this look. When opticians learned how to make better lenses, they were able to get edge to edge sharpness on an image. (more…)
More of my work floating out there, all current. The man with the eyeglasses was shot for Popular Photography Magazine. He’s one of the contributing writers to the magazine, lives in San Diego, and has an eye problem which he wrote about in the story that accompanied my images. This is the online image, and is in the August issue of the magazine. You can read the story online here.
Shot for Popular Photography Magazine
This other screen capture below is the cover of Biz San Diego (go figure…), a local…ah… er…. biz magazine. Locally available now in San Diego, it’s a photo of motivational speaker Tony Robbins (left) and his son. Tony is a huge guy, but really nice. Many remember him from the movie Shallow Hal. Had eight minutes to shoot him with his son. We set up, my assistant Dave Good and I, in a posh Beverly Hills boutique hotel, where Tony does a lot of his business.
Remember that scene in Pretty Women, where the snooty clothing store ladies ask Julia Roberts to leave the store (“please leave!”)? Same kind of vibe at this place. Although it was coordinated well in advance, some at the hotel weren’t expecting a roll of nine foot seamless and five lights to go up in their empty ballroom.
Shoot went okay. The chair though, shown below, was ripped from the roof of my car where I had it strapped down, after I entered my parking garage. Didn’t have quite enough clearance for the chair to squeeze under the lift up gate at the entrance. Those racks on the roofs of Honda CR-Vs pop off quite easily. I’m sitting in that same chair now, and it’s fine.
This shows some of the set up - one light up above (diffused), a strip light on each side and pointing at the subject, and a gridded light hitting the background directly behind subject. Ambient light from windows filled in shadows too.
Tony Robbins and son, on news stands in San Diego now.
Shot this portrait for Inc. Magazine a month back. Received it via email today from the person pictured, Aaron Hall, CEO of Borrego Solar Systems Inc., in San Diego. Should be on news stands soon… didn’t see when I went to bookstore the other day.
The editor dictated how they wanted the image to look, which was fine. They had me use a green background - in the same story they featured three other CEOs in three other parts of the world, who were being shot against a red, blue and yellow background, respectively. My color was green!
Used a H3D Hasseblad digital camera for the shoot. Way beyond point and shoots, this huge sensored, $20,000 behemoth of a camera with a 39 meg back on it. Shooting is simple, and no problems were encountered with the camera. Anything over 200 ISO get’s a little iffy with noise, and it’s not as quick and fast a camera as my other DSLRs, but the file quality is ridiculous.
I shot this in the company’s huge garage, with a lot of natural light spilling in. Supplemented that with a seven foot Elinchrom Octabank to the guy’s right. (more…)
