Myerson Photo Blog

Many times as a photographer, it’s easy to fall into your own pattern of working. Lighting setups, posing, props, and subject matter can all become stale if they are repeated without variation. As photographers we need to find that balance of exploring and utilizing what we know and where our strengths lie and the opposing force of cannibalizing and rehashing what’s worked in the past.

For me, and for many other photographers, the answer to that comes from photography groups. Whether live and in-person, or virtual and online, photography groups give us the exposure to other shooters, and with it the exposure to other experiences, aesthetics, techniques, and concepts.

Some groups I’ve been involved in include:

• The Tucson Photography Meetup
  I helped found this group a year or so ago. It’s a great bunch of local photographers, mostly amateur and semi-pro, with an ever-changing roster, and a wonderful core group. Though I’ve stepped down as group leader, and have had to scale back my involvement, the group has continued strongly. Monthly meetings consist of photo challenges, short seminars, networking opportunities, news and kudos, and more. If you’re in Tucson and enjoy photography, this is a good option for you.
• Flickr Groups
  There are groups on Flickr for virtually any photographic interest. I’m currently involved with the Strobist Flickr group, a Lightsource Flickr group, and two food photography Flickr groups (though I’ve never actually done any formal food photography). The great thing about Flickr is the variety of groups available to join. If you’re into macro insect photography, fashion photography, automotive, sports, Lomo, or practically any other area of specialty, you’ll find a group or two to join.
• iStockphoto
  Though iStock doesn’t technically have groups to join, there are several opportunities within the realm of iStockery to experience the benefits of groups. There are monthly photo challenges, there are informal challenges among Creative Network members, and most importantly, there are iStockalypses and minilypses. These get-togethers usually happen over a weekend, and within a calendar year the odds are good of there being one within striking distance of your home. This year, for instance, I went to a minilypse in southern Utah, and there’ll be another one in Bullhead City, AZ later in the year. The minilypses are awesome for meeting other iStockers (as well as the odd inspector or admin), for sharing ideas, for working together with other photographers for problem solving, and more.
• Informal Group Shoots
  From time to time, I’ll set up a stock photography shoot, and invite some other photographer friends to join me. We can split the costs associated with the shoot, we can assist each other (it’s always nice to have a “voice-activated reflector stand”) and we can help each other think of ways to use lights, to pose subjects, and more.

Many photographers find working with a group to be uncomfortable, limiting, or distracting, but if you view groups as a way to cross-pollinate ideas and to learn and share, they can represent a great opportunity to grow as a photographer.

Like any community, the iStock forums have evolved their own peculiar vocabulary of acronyms and terms. Here are some of the more common ones for newcomers and oldtimers alike.

AOTW
Artist of the Week. A weekly honor bestowed upon a contributor who has stood apart from the crowd for some reason. See xOTW.

BM
Best Match. Best Match is one of the search results sort algorithms,  the one that seems to cause the most forum angst. It’s powered by a super secret recipe, the details of which are often the subject of speculation in the forums. Thanks, Karen, for reminding me to include this in the list!

BME (also BDE)
Best Month Ever (Best Day Ever). Commonly seen in the “How were your monthly stats?” threads that tend to pop up as soon as a month ends somewhere in the world. See WME. Edit: Holy cow, I just found out that pal Sean is responsible for coining this acronym! H*ckin’ cool!

CN
Creative Network. Your list of iStock friends, contacts, lovers, and idols.

Crickets
The crippling near-silence that follows a failed attempt at humor, trolling, sympathy, or other forum reaction.

CV
Controlled Vocabulary. This is the lexicon of official tags (keywords) in use on iStock images.

DOTW
Design of the Week. The weekly showcase position in the Designer’s Spotlight. See xOTW.

DL
Download

Ebb and Flow
Sometimes “Uncle Ebb and Aunt Flo” – Just as the tides change, sometimes high, sometimes low, people have found sales in iStock come and go in waves. Unlike the tides, however, there’s no real way of knowing when the current crest or trough will end. Enjoy the ride.

EL
Extended License

ETA
Edited To Add. Fixed a forum post? Add your little “ETA: ” message at the end to let others know what corrections you made.

F5
The F5 key on Windows machines is the page refresh key. iStockers tend to wear the F5 key down to a dull shiny nub when new announcements are on the horizon, when they’re on the verge of a milestone download, or just any old time, really.

FIOTW
Free Image of the Week. Each Sunday, a new image is offered to the community as a free download. To have an image added to the pool of images considered for the FIOTW honors, please send a sitemail to Sirimo. (Vector submissions should go to member Bortonia, and Video submissions to member VCR). Free downloads do not add to your download count for your next canister, but it does earn you some cool visibility. See xOTW.

H*ck
Once, long ago, there was a splash page on iStock that depicted a character uttering the just-past-censors word “F*ck”. Folks felt that, asterisk or not, this may have been too racy, so it was amended to read H*ck. The splash page eventually vanished (was it a 404 page? a contest? I don’t remember…), but the near-expletive lives on.

HHUR
Heart Heart Unicorn Rainbow. Peebert-only.

IOTW
Image of the Week. Each week, the site admins select one of the newly uploaded images as Best-In-Class. On Sunday, the champion image takes it showcase position on the front page. Along with this honor comes a cool little icon, and a week’s worth of front-page visibility.

Lypse
iStockers tend to congregate, descending on a location like a swarm of photographic locusts for the purposes of camaraderie, cameramanship, and consumption of comestibles and … uhhh… booze. Get togethers planned and executed through iStock HQ are known as iStockalypses. Those put on by the community members are known as mini’lypses.

OP
Original Poster, or Original Post (Thanks Mikael!)

Pimp
Generally frowned on in the forums, this is the act of putting one of your own images into a thread discussion (other than into a thread devoted to critiquing, that is). There is a weekly sanctioned thread devoted to themed pimping, however. See PTOTW.

PTOTW
Pimping Thread of the Week. A weekly forum thread (found in the iStockphoto Discussion area) devoted to letting members pimp their favorite images around a given theme.

Totally Touching Floor
As good as it gets.

UL
Upload

Wiki (v)
To wiki a file, in iStock parlance, is to click the “Report Inaccurate Keywords” link to notify the admins of a poorly keyworded image. Wikiing a file puts it into “Keywords Under Review” status, which prevents further wikiing, but does not impact search results.

WME
Worst Month Ever

xOTW
Something of the Week. See IOTW, DOTW, FIOTW, AOTW, PTOTW

Often times when I’m critiquing work or discussing lighting design with others, I bring up a concept of the “Three Tiers of Lighting”. That phrase may not be common, but the underlying concept is nothing new; Lighting design can be executed on one of three levels: Accidental, “Exposural”, or Intentional.  Let’s take a look at these in order.

The Three Tiers
Accidental Lighting is typically found in the work of newcomers. It essentially means the lighting in the image was not intentionally designed. This kind of lighting typifies the “snapshot” kind of photography. Images shot under Accidental Lighting are shot without regard to (or even awareness of) light source, light quality,  or color temperatures. They are likely to be over- or under-exposed.

A lot of folks might read that previous paragraph and conclude that Accidental Lighting means ambient lighting. Nothing could be further from the truth. Ambient lighting can certainly be designed and modified to suit the needs of the image. Accidental lighting is just those lighting setups that haven’t been intentionally designed. Accidental Lighting can just as easily happen with artificial lighting. In fact, most snapshots use those tiny on-camera flashes. That is both undesigned light (Accidental) and not ambient.

It’s important to note that these images shot under Accidental Lighting are not necessarily bad. There may be very good images that were shot under Accidental Lighting; they simply happened on to favorable conditions. The factor that makes it accidental is that the scene wasn’t intentionally set up to capture good lighting.

The next tier of lighting is what I call Exposural Lighting. This is “get-the-job-done” lighting that has been intentionally designed to give proper exposure, but little else. An image shot under Exposural Lighting will be properly exposed, but the lighting doesn’t contribute to the feel of the image. It’s lighting that would be suitable for reproducing a document.

Again, Exposural Lighting is equally likely to be found in either natural or artificial lighting setups. In fact, the most common blend of the two – outdoor daylight images with fill flash – is a great example of Exposural Lighting. In those images, the lighting was intentionally chosen only to ensure the subjects are properly exposed.

Finally we get to Intentional Lighting. This is lighting that has been designed by the photographer to suit the image’s compositional and emotive needs. Images shot under intentional lighting will likely be properly exposed. Beyond that, though, the lighting was chosen to help tell the story. The lighting design has become a tool for the photographer to tell the story. The photographer using Intentional Lighting is able to give his images a mood. He uses lighting the way he uses his set, subject, and props – to create a feeling of warmth, of starkness, of fear, of happiness, or whatever the point of the image is.

Images shot under Intentional Lighting are not automatically good images, of course. There are plenty of examples – in photographic lighting or composition, in graphic design, in product design, etc – where the design was intentional but still bad.  But at least in Intentional Lighting, the photographer created the image to get his intended result.

OK, but so what?!
I mention all of this as a way for you to think about your own work. I can’t look at your image and say whether it was an Accidental Lighting setup or an Intentional Lighting setup, because the main difference between the two is the photographer’s intent, not the end result of the image (”Of course it’s overexposed and lit with the on-camera flash! That’s my artistic vision!”). The only one who can assess the image and put it into these tiers is the photographer himself. If you’re honest with yourself about your work, you’ll put it into the tier where it belongs.

It may seem that I have a bias toward moving up the tiers, and that’s because I do. The most successful photographers (and I’m not speaking solely of the most financially successful ones) are those who can control their lighting to achieve the results they’re after. Does this mean one must use strobes, speedlights, or other artificial lighting to be successful? Absolutely not. In fact, I’d argue that those who can be intentional about their lighting and create Tier 3 images using only ambient lighting are stronger photographers than those who can only do it with artificial lighting, but that’s a discussion for another time.

My challenge to the photographers out there reading this is to push yourself up the tiers. If you’re currently shooting with no regard to lighting (and this includes using Auto-Everything on your camera), push yourself to figure out how to start managing the light for exposure. If you’re currently doing that, your task is to learn how to set up your lighting to achieve a specific mood in your image. If you are currently able to do that, your task is to make sure you can do it in both a natural light and an artificial light setting. And if you’re currently able to do that, you can leave a comment in the notes field below and tell me what the next tier is.

This is actually a really cool project. A couple of grad students from Ireland have created this site where you can buy a word (at a dollar a letter) to “redefine” it. The redefinition, of course, consists of a link to whatever site you like. Their example is to buy the word donkey (at $6), and have it link back to your site about donkeys. If that’s your thing.

I bought “affordable” (which ironically was not), “value”, and “superhero”, which link to various parts of the myersonphoto.com site.

It’s maybe a silly way to blow a few bucks, and I have no doubt that this will launch the careers of two young grad students from Ireland. If it nets a few more hits on the site for me, than great. If not, at least it’s fun to see what words have been redefined, and which are still going by their old tired definitions.

I just wanted to post a big thank you to everyone who nominated me for the Chase Jarvis ASMP contest. I didn’t win the big prize, but I was so pleased to read all of the fine comments you guys left for me in the nominations. I was truly humbled by your kindness, and I want you all to know that I’m always there to back you guys up as well, as you all did for me.

Much love and thanks.

At the risk of becoming a Strobist metablog, I’m going to post one more blog post here about Strobist. I had every intention of playing along with the Lighting 101 segments when David ran those. They seemed like (and were. And still are, I suppose) a great way to practice lighting techniques and force myself to shoot assignments not for clients or stock.

So this time around – Lighting 102 – I really am going to play along at home. I’ve already missed the first several assignments, but it’s not too late to jump onboard. The current assignment, due in early March, is a single light setup. The whole point of the assignment, however, is to press that one light into extra service. Through creative use of reflectors (traditional reflectors, as well as anything else that might bounce and modify the light), one light can serve as key light, fill light, rim light, and who knows what else.

To help us along the way, the lesson is set up to mimic a commercial assignment. That is, there’s a topic and a publication. Of course, we’re free to select the topic from a list of three general options (”Financial Planning”, “Going Green”, “Physical Fitness”), and we’re free as well to select the publication. Thinking of the shoot in terms of an end use can help clarify the context and point you in the right direction for previsualization. Shooting a treadmill for Wired might entail a different set up than shooting the same subject for Men’s Health or Vanity Fair or Guns and Ammo.

In the interest of “double duty”, I may try to develop a shot concept that would serve as my entry for the Tucson Photo Meetup monthly challenge for March as well. The theme there is “macro/closeup”. There are lots of ways the two assignments could be suitably combined.

I’ll post my results here on my blog, as well as in the Strobist Flickr group.

Not golf photography, but how I try to apply the only lesson I’ve ever learned in golf to photography.

Years ago, my wife and I took golf lessons. She was born a good golfer, and consequently got a lot out of the lessons. I’m a lousy golfer, and managed to learn one single tip in the whole six-week course. The instructor saw how every one of my drives would slice pretty sharply to the right. His advice? “Hook it.” That is, he wanted me to intentionally try to get the ball to hook left. I already knew what it felt like to go too far right. By learning what it felt like to go too far left, could eventually learn how to hit it right down the middle.

So I try to bring that to my photography. Whatever I’m doing wrong, I try to overcompensate the other direction. That lets me find out what I need to do to get it right and drive it right down the middle.

A good example is in my lighting. During a recent shoot, I knew I wanted a dramatic rim lighting on the subject. I set up the lights to do what I wanted, snapped off a few test shots, and was just not pleased with the result. It was close, but just not there. I tweaked the lights back and forth, in and out, started playing with a number of variables. It started to get frustrating, and I hate doing too much experimentation with a model on set.

So rather than tweak it incrementally, I went whole hog and moved the lights completely incorrectly. Rather than giving me harsh rim light, the setup created an overall flat light. There was no modeling, no dimensionality to it. It was awful. But it also showed me what I was missing before; the lights as I’d set them up before were too harsh. I wanted rim lighting, but it wasn’t until I washed everything out with boring flat lighting did I realize that I wasn’t really looking for overly dramatic rim lighting, but a nice accent rim light. Sometimes you have to go all the way to the right to see how far left you’d been going before.

These days I’m applying the same lesson to my Photoshop post-process work. For a long time, I held back on doing any post-processing at all. Now that I’m putting a little more thought into the final piece, I want to know that I’m hitting my target. So I’ll do some experimentation and take the intended filtering (sharpening, for instance, desaturation, or others) way too far. It lets me see where my own aesthetic limits are.

Here are the answers to the avatar game on the iStock forums.
1 point each:
(sylvanworks)
(bitter)
(JJRD)
(subman)
(benoitb)

3 points each:
(donald_gruener)
(mnieves)
(blaneyphoto)
(nojustice)
(kickers)

5 points each:
(konkrete)
(slobo)
(ivar)
(soopysue)
(stills)

And the matching game answers:
A:3 (phfft)
B:5 (hidesy)
C:2 (maodesign)
D:1 (richvintage)
E:4 (keywords)

Not long ago, I decided that I needed to finally get my speedlight off my camera. I’ve been using Alien Bees strobes for most of my studio lighting, which works fine when I can do a studio set up. For those times when I need to be a little more mobile, my only lighting option is my Canon 430 EX. Up until now, I’d been firing it from the camera’s hot shoe, using a Gary Fong lightsphere to soften and disperse it some.

That set up is fine sometimes, but other times you just have to get the flash off camera. Fortunately, I already have Pocket Wizards to trigger the light. The only problem was that I didn’t have any way to attach the PWs to the speedlight. Enter Flash Zebra.

Flash Zebra (located conveniently at flashzebra.com) is a little online store that has exactly what you need: Flash accessories at a great price. Lon provides quick and reliable service. And, as luck would have it, he had this little beauty in stock. The cool thing about it is the 1/4″ – 20 thread hole, which lets me attach the now remote flash to a lightstand.

So, next time you need some flash accessories, be sure to check out the zebra.