RobertBenson.com

For the newspaper shooters reading this, it may seem a little elementary, this information. For all others, I thought it would be a good read to share how a newspaper assignment works, from a photographer’s perspective. As an example, I’ll use my most recent assignment, shot yesterday, for USA Today.

• The photo editor calls. USA Today has multiple photo editors for each section of the newspaper. I’ve done quite a bit of news photography for the Money section, and sometimes hard news for the A section. I’ve done an occasional sports assignment too. When they have a story in San Diego (or wherever) most editors will go to their photographer database and see which shooters are in the area. In this case the call came in on Wednesday, asking if I was available on Thursday for a story at a farm 45 minutes away. With newspaper assignments, the call often comes the day before the shoot, sometimes a few days in advance. She told me about the assignment, a story about California Proposition two. If it passes, it will create a new state statute that prohibits the confinement of farm animals in a manner that does not allow them to turn around freely, lie down, stand up, and fully extend their limbs. She asked me to go to a hen farm - where they have hens, 600,000 of them, many in small cages. She wanted portraits of the owner and other things happening at the farm.

• I say yes. I take the assignment. I never say no to an assignment, unless I’m already booked up with something, or the terms are horrific. Yes, yes, never no!

• I get assignment via email. Outlines in more detail what was discussed on the phone. The assignment shows location, address, points of contact, names and phone numbers, FTP and mailing instructions, editors name, my name, deadline date, etc. This is part of the actual photo assignment:

• I shoot it. The assignment was scheduled in the early morning to take advantage of the nice light. When I get there, I’m at first overwhelmed with the smell of chickens. Then I begin hearing them, hundreds of thousands of chickens. My mom grew up on a farm in North Dakota. She probably knows this smell. Most of the hens are house in individual “houses”, maybe several thousand chickens to each house. I meet the owner of the farm, and start shooting in one of the houses which had nice light streaming in. I tell him I also wanted a house that had workers actively doing their thing (collecting eggs) so we find that also. I change lenses several times during the assignment, even though I was using two cameras. I do so quickly, because inside the houses the air is thick with dust, microscopic and larger chicken feathers and other debris, which is kicked up by the hens flapping their wings (which they do madly every time a human walks by their cage). I was surprised to learn that each hen lays an average of one egg a day. There were eggs everywhere. I was blasted with pneumatic air after the shoot, and I still had chicken debris all over me and my cameras. I ignore the constant swarm of hens pecking at my feet nonstop.

• I edit and transmit. I shoot for an hour, maybe a little more. The shoot started at 8:30 a.m., and my editor wanted an edit of images by noon my time, so there wasn’t a lot of time to go nuts. I go to a nearby Starbucks to edit on my laptop. Laptop battery dies. I didn’t have plug in. I buy one at Radio Schack nearby for $119 (gawd…). Use it, return it. No way are they going to get away with charging that much for a cord! In my editing, I use photo mechanic, and blast through images looking at thumbnails. I wrote about why I like using this program to edit here. I mark the keepers with a color code, and transfer them to a special folder on my desktop. I then go through those and look at them more carefully, enlarged, and mark again the best ones with another color (red). Then I go through the red marked images and pick the best ones from that. Edit them in Photoshop, spending about one minute per image. My final edit is 30 images. That’s a lot for a small story, and it’s called a “loose edit.” I like sending in loose edits over tight edits, as it gives the editor and page designers more freedom to play. Some of those 30 images are below. This story will run in the Monday, November 3 newspaper most likely. It was bumped for whatever reason, from this weekend’s USA Today.

• I invoice. This is my least favorite part of the job. Paperwork. Ugh. Invoices are sent electronically via email with an attachment (the actual invoice). Some shooters use fancy invoicing programs, I write the invoice in the actual body of an email, or just put in on a word document. Easy and quick.

This is my flash power pack being overrun by hens. I was at a farm today shooting with 600,000 hens and a farm owner. I’ll explain it all tomorrow. I’m busy plucking feathers from my clothes and manure from my shoes.

Someone sent me this video, which had a headline that read “Obama’s loss traced to Robert Benson”.

It’s pretty interesting. Check it out here.

Just got this tearsheet via email this morning, which is running in the Orange County guest book (that book that they put in hotel rooms in the area…). It was shot on the 18th hole at Torrey Pines after he sank a long putt to tie for the lead and force a playoff hole at the U.S. Open.

Was digging around looking for photos earlier, and came across these old band photos I did about a year ago or more. There was a wide shot that showed the lighting used, so I thought some people might be interested in it (Scott asked for it via comment in the last post). I used strip lights on the sides (sandwich lighting which I call my “bling bling” lighting). Also used a light in front, and the ambient, coming in from a large window, which you can see on the right. The band plays 50s rock, and are called the Cathouse Thumpers.

This morning I photographed Craig Slike, aka “the mole”, the guy from the last ABC series “The Mole”.  Shot for a local magazine. Craig was a really nice guy, and reminded me of Drew Carey a little bit. I found out later Slike has his own website, Craig Slike.com.

Emotion came out (smiles, reaction, laughs) when I asked him about the show, so I talked about that during the shoot. He told me about one scene where he was tasked with running through an Argentinian city in his underwear with a skinny guy, also in underwear. He said during that stunt, which he did for the TV show, the locals called them “10″ in Spanish. “Ten! Ten! Ten!” The skinny guy looked like the number one, and Slike’s body shape resembled, well, a zero. 10.

Get it?

I shot both medium format film and digital. The medium format film still gives a look that is not necessary better quality wise than full frame digital, but it has a different look. There is more depth. There’s a 3d look to it, where digital sometimes to me looks a bit 2d. There’s not a clear way for me to explain it, but the larger the negative, the more lifelike images look. I used a small Westcott softbox for the outdoor portraits, and a large umbrella with just a hint of light from the side on the other portraits. I get the film processed and scanned at a local lab.

Looks like Getty just acquired another stock agency. Jupitermedia announced this morning that it has entered into a purchase agreement to sell its Jupiterimages division to Getty Images.James Alexander, Senior Vice President and General Manager wrote in part: “While the companies have signed a definitive agreement, the deal will not close until shareholder and government approvals have been obtained.  Approvals could take up to several months and there is the risk of not obtaining approvals, but that is not expected.  There will be no change in your relationship with Jupiterimages as a result of this announcement.  Jupiterimages will continue to operate as it always has delivering the highest quality imagery with world-class customer service.”

The headline is true: I’ve made a long range wireless camera triggering device that works at distances up to 20 miles, sometimes more, depending on radio used. This video shows it firing a remote camera some three miles from the transmitter:

The switch

Right off the bat, I have to say that there may be some regulations with the FCC that says you can’t use a two way radio for any purpose other than talking with it, so you might be violating FCC laws by using this thing. Will the FCC police come get you if you do this? Only you can decide that! You need a license also to operate a walkie talkie (although most people never get a license when they use walkie talkies) that uses FRS/GMRS (most of them do). To stay legal, use this camera triggering device with a MURS (multi-use radio service). MURS walkie talkies can be bought on the internet. Data communication is permitted with these radios and you don’t need a license. Read about MURS radios here and here.

Here’s how it started: In early 2008 I shot a Red Bull Air Race here in San Diego. Planes raced over San Diego Bay, flying through gate pylons in sideways positions. I wanted to make a cool shot, so I got on a boat, went out to one of the floating docks which had an air gate on it, mounted a camera at the base looking up, with the idea of shooting the planes just feet above as they raced through the gate at 200 miles per hour.

Bad thing was, it didn’t work. The gate where my camera was mounted was only about three football fields away, in the line of site, but they were out of range of my Pocket Wizards (I had a guy with the transmitter ashore). You can link pocket wizards in tandem - but that get’s expensive and wouldn’t have been possible to do as the camera remote was mounted on a floating dock surrounded by water.

So my quest to make a long range, reliable, radio camera trigger began. I started by going to a radio controlled airplane hobby shop and asking a lot of questions. I left with an airplane control transmitter and receiver, and Frankensteined together a trigger on the receiver side to fire my camera. Problem was, the range of the thing was still lousy, and there was a lot of interference, setting off my camera at random unwanted times.

So I found a better solution by using walkie-talkies. I made a special switch that works in conjunction with walkie-talkies, any walkie-talkie, the kind of walkie-talkies that sell at Walmart and Target and Radio Shack for $40-$80. Suddenly I had a camera remote trigger with 80 times the range of a Pocket Wizard - 20 miles or more, depending on the radio used and the conditions. When you buy a set of walkie talkies, they advertise their range. They are exaggerated ranges though in my opinion. In urban areas for example, the range is NOT that long. Read on!

• Is it legal? NO and YES! The device I make is only a switch, similar to a light switch. It does not emit, receive or transmit radio signals on its own. So yes, on its own, just sitting there on the desk, it is legal. But there are FCC rules which prevent two way radios from being used for anything other than talking. If you use common FRS/GMRS walkie talkes to trigger this switch, like this set up, it violates FCC rules. You can use them with MURS frequency radios, which do not require a license to use, and allow data communication. Still though, I am only making them for people as a novelty item, who want to plug the thing into a radio, tape player or Ipod, okay? You can use that kind of a device (ipod, radio, tape recorder) to trigger the camera too. But you’d have to be standing right there, next to the ipod or radio and camera, turning it off and on, to trigger the camera.

• How it works. There are three cables coming out of my switch. One connects to a nine volt battery, the other (a mini phono plug) plugs into your walkie-talkie’s headphone jack, the other plugs into your camera’s shutter input. Place remote camera, walkie-talkie and switch together somewhere, and keep the second walkie-talkie with you. To take a picture, just push the walkie talkie’s Push To Talk (PTT) button. Hold it down for as long as you want the camera to take pictures. The circuit board I make has a on and off switch. The whole thing is encased in a cell phone type case.

• Range: I have tested the setup with a camera deep inside a building in downtown San Diego, drove two miles away - with multiple buildings in between us - and the camera still fired when I triggered it from that distance. It’s a stupid-simple, long range camera trigger solution, and it works! The video above shows it in action at a distance of about three miles. The camera trigger switch is not dependent on audio quality. It can be crystal clear audio, or faint static and gibberish coming from the radio: the switch will still work. As long as there is some sort of interaction happening between the two radios, even if faint, the switch will fire your camera. The range is determined by the radio used with the switch. Most radios sold at places like Target or Walmart claim 12 miles to 28 mile maximum distances. Price for these radios varies from $29-$80 or more. Average price is about $45 for a pair of walkie-talkies (also called two-way radios).

• Size: I enclosed the switch and nine volt battery in a case used for carrying cell phones. The swith attaches to a walkie-talkie’s headphone jack on one end, and the camera on the other end. The switch has an on/off switch.

• Interference: None! None to date at least. Today’s walkie-talkies (two way radios, MURS included) aren’t the same AM type things you used as a kid, or even a couple years ago. The technology has greatly improved, preventing bleedover and other interference, by incorporating things like Interference Eliminator Codes (121 per channel on my Motorola radios) which offer superior interference protection. Radios also have QT noise filtering, which filters out unwanted transmissions from other channels or maker’s radios. I live downtown San Diego, next to a train station and shopping mall, and when I put the radio on a certain channel, and select one of the 121 additional interference eliminator code, that channel is all mine, and there’s no interference from taxis, shopping mall employees, shoppers, police, train station employees, security guards, etc. The technology seems to work pretty good. I let it sit on that channel all day, and it stays quiet.

• Compatible cameras: Can be made for any camera with shutter release plugin.

• Delay? There is a very slight delay from the time you push the walkie-talkie’s transmit button until the camera takes a picture. It is about 1/4 to 1/2 second. As a result, you may have to anticipate moments more so than you normally would.

• More about it: If you use a switch like this, you need to have walkie talkies and a nine volt battery. The triggering device plugs into a walkie-talkie’s headphone input, usually a mini phone plug, so make sure your walkie-talkies have a jack for headphones or VOX. You need a nine volt battery to power the switch. The switch has an on and off switch. In the on position, the drain on the battery only takes place while the switch is in use, so as a result, it will have a very long life.

• Guarantee? If you don’t like it, return within seven days after receiving and I will refund your money.

If you would like one of these switches I can custom make it. Please allow 2-3 weeks, since it is made from scratch. Also, if used with a walkie talkie you are possibly violating FCC rules which say that walkie talkies can be used only for talking, and not triggering devices like this. So use as a novelty item instead, with a Ipod or tape recorder. Or, use it with a MURS type radio.

$90 camera triggering switch (specify camera).

Publishing your best photos on your website portfolio takes involves more than just scaling them to 72dpi and making the dimensions smaller (although I’m a bit guilty of that). An article by photographer Lonna Tucker here shows how she makes her low res images look high res on her website.

Photographer Lonna Tucker has an interesting process she uses for preparing images for her website. See her secrets on the link above.

First let me say that local San Diego photographer Jay Reilly is the master at making photobooths and using them at parties, and he even has an upcoming workshop on it next month. I was at a party yesterday and set up a photo booth in preparation for a photobooth project of sorts I’m starting next month (a public photo booth.. more to follow!). This booth had a sound activated switch, a clapper switch, to trigger the camera. The simple novelty of clapping switches adds an additional layer of fun to the self portraits I think, and brings out a little more emotion. I had a monitor attached to my camera, so the image shot would immediately be displayed for the posers. That just added fuel to the fire.