We support you. And your camera gear.
Dan Carr recently posted a video showing off the GoPro HD Hero helmet camera in action. The helmet cam captures some mountaintop photography taking place on Induro tripods. Looks like a great time!
Shooting skiing in Alaska, GoPro helmet camera video. from Dan Carr on Vimeo.
Leander Hutton recently published “Five Tips for Photographing a Meteor Shower” on his blog. We really enjoy what he does and how he writes. Here is his post for our Five Photography Tips.
This week is peak time for annual Perseid meteor shower. Astrophotography was actually my first photographic interest, being a Astronomy student in college spurred my interest in photography. I’ve compiled five tips for making good looking astrophotos and some specific ones for meteor shower events.
©Leander Hutton
Leander also sent me this line in an email: “I just purchased an Induro BHD1 and an AT213 tripod and I’m throughly enjoying it. I’ll probably have a review of it in a few weeks. Really good stuff!” We’ll keep an eye out for this review. Thanks so much, Leander! Great tips!
D.C. Chavez posted a great story chronicling his commercial work with Formula Drift drivers for an energy drink sponsor. He mounted a Canon EOS 5D Mark II and a 16-35mm f/2.8L lens on an Induro BHD3 ballhead inside champion Chris Forsberg’s car. Despite a tremendous amount of torque in drift driving, Chavez writes, “the BHD3 is the only ballhead I have used so far that has not loosened up after a lap or two with the 5D MK II.”
Known for his blog, where he documents putting off-the-shelf commercial photographic gear through real world production experience, Chavez also provides detailed accounts of how to use equipment which can baffle some mere mortal photographers.
The footage Chavez shot so impressed the director, he asked to incorporate is into the commercial. See the Canon and Induro rig’s results at :10, :13, and :24 in the below video.
Chavez also details work for another drift team sponsored by Hyundai. He documents how he eliminated vibration his in-car camera suffered by applying a Magic Arm. As always, a deeply informative piece. He even closes with a shout-out for the Induro CT313 tripod, which he hiked with over four days at elevations of 10,000 to 14,110 feet. Hooray for Induro Carbon Fiber!
Although Ken Lee has professionally shot commercials, weddings, concerts, and other types of photography, his favorite work is travel photography. His Top Five Photography Tips are geared accordingly.
Lee is a Los Angeles-based photographer, with assignments which have sent him around the world, from the Himalayas to the Andes, from Burma to Kashmir. His tips include respect of local language and the importance of multiple digital backups, among others.
©Ken Lee
Ken Lee’s Top Five Photography Tips
©Ken Lee
You can learn more about Ken and his work at the following links.
Brian Rueb sent us the following story chronicling his long exposure shots done on tripods. Thanks for sharing with our readers, Brian. Beautiful job!
Professionally, one of my most important pieces of equipment is my tripod. It took me several years before I started using a tripod for all my photography and it was one of the biggest ‘ah-ha’ moments I’ve had since becoming a photographer nearly twenty years ago. In those twenty years I’ve had more than my share of tripods. Early on, I never fully appreciated the importance of quality when it came to tripods, and subsequently went through more than my share of tripods. I tell a story of a tripod I broke before I ever got it out of the car to use. Over time, my trials have taught me the importance of a quality tripod. It is literally the foundation for all good landscape photography.
©Brian Rueb
I recently conducted a workshop and shoot in the Columbia River Gorge of Oregon. This type of environment throws everything at you, and there is no better way to test the durability of a tripod. Water, mud, rugged terrain—this area has it all. I’m using an Induro Carbon Fiber 213 and BHD Ballhead. The first thing I appreciate when photographing in an environment like this is the weight. My whole tripod weights less than 5 pounds. When you’re walking mile upon mile up steep trails, and down slippery mossy rock slopes, the last thing you want is extra weight. Most new cameras weigh enough as it is.
©Brian Rueb
The Induro tripods also come with durable foot pegs that work perfectly in extreme environments such as this. Whether in the mud, on slick rock surfaces, or in rare instances on flat ground, the tripod worked like a charm, and held firm. Most tripod pegs aren’t removable, and it’s a constant struggle to make sure you’re screwing out the pegs properly, and the pegs just don’t have a rugged feel to them. The Induro pegs are hearty, to be sure. One photographer in my group commented, “Looks like you could kill a bear with those things.” They’re tough and they work, although I haven’t had to use them on any bears yet.
©Brian Rueb
My style of photography involves immersing myself and my gear in rivers, streams, and the ocean. The 213 worked great! Even when the current of the creek was racing, I had great stability for my camera. One instance that comes to mind was a long hike I made into a remote section of the Gorge where the best way to capture the image I had in mind was from in the middle of the creek. I spent roughly 45 minutes with the tripod in the water
©Brian Rueb
I was very pleased with how well the legs continued to open and close even after being submerged. This doesn’t mean tripods still don’t need to be properly wiped and dried when the day is done, but it worked brilliantly through that morning, as well as the duration of the trip. For this trip I hiked over 20 miles and saw eleven different waterfalls, which required me getting in the water to photograph most of them.
©Brian Rueb
I put my gear through a lot, and I really expect a lot out of it. The 213 performed at a high level throughout. A shoot like this puts a tripod through a tremendous amount of work. The last thing any photographer wants is to worry more about gear than creating images. My Induro never left me feeling let down, or worried when making my shots. I just hope I don’t run into any bears.
Brian Rueb is a professional landscape and wildlife photographer living in Northern California. When he is not in the field or spending time with his family, he teaches infield workshops with the Aperture Academy, and this summer will spend 65-days photographing the beauty of Iceland, where he will confidently put his Induro Tripod through extreme conditions of every kind, and, most likely, not have to kill a bear. You can follow his journey on Facebook throughout the summer.
After spending the first ten years of his life in Cincinnati, Ohio, Tim Meyer has been a longtime transplant in the Los Angeles area. He’s lived in L.A., Orange County, San Diego County, and Santa Barbara. Studying photography at Orange Coast College in Coasta Mesa, California, he then went on to get a bachelor’s degree at Cal State Fullerton. While at Fullerton, he began his career in commercial portrait photography.
“I noticed the people who were doing the best work and who were the most creative had a little bit of an art background, which I had no experience in at all,” he recalls. The value of education is strong for Meyer, and at the start of his career—and with a young family just beginning—he went back and got a Master’s Degree in Fine Art Photography. That was 30 years ago. All his education and life experience haven’t slowed his desire to learn. Last year he started an MFA program at Brooks Institute, where he also teaches. Meyer credits education with “completely changing my style of work, my interest in work, and my understanding of others’ work.” For instance, his study of the work of masters such as Rembrandt and John Singer Sargent has influenced his composition and grouping.
©Tim Meyer
Conversely, Meyer understands the business world’s application of formal education. “The letters after your name don’t always do much for you, professionally,” he explains. “They did when I came back to teach, but when you’re working for somebody commercially, they don’t care whether you have a letter or two after your name. They just wonder what you can do for them now.”
Meyer credits education with helping keep his style fluid. “One of the reasons I went back to get the degree is that most of the people I knew—even the best photographers I knew—tended to be one‑dimensional. They had a particular thing they were very good at. They did it really well and built a whole career off of it, but they never diversified much. And, once you got them out of that area of expertise, they were not only average, but sometimes less than that. I didn’t want to be that person.”
©Tim Meyer
During Meyer’s thirty year career, styles have changed a lot. Probably best known for his dramatic black and white images, Meyer has seen photographic trends come and go. When one of his early images was given a negative review at a competition, he began to research how the criteria from which it was judged had evolved. “I started researching and finding out where a lot of those rules came from,” he recalls. “Most of the stuff I found didn’t have a basis at all. It was just somebody’s idea of something that kind of turned into a tradition.”
His research led him to photographers like George Hurrell, Yousuf Karsh, and Victor Avila. Meyer carefully studied the work of these masters, but realized he wanted to go beyond their techniques. “I’m not against the traditional things,” he says. “I think the traditional things are very important, but, again, it falls back to that one-dimension sense. We do what we do. We do it very well, but there are just so many other things out there that people don’t even consider and that’s been my quest for quite a while.”
©Tim Meyer
Whether Meyer shoots in color or black and white is largely a stylistic choice. “In the old days, even when digital first came out, or before with film, I used to always use one camera for black and white and one camera for color. When digital came out, even though you could switch it immediately, I still had one camera set for black and white and one for color. I don’t as much now because I don’t shoot them commercially as much as I used to. I actually think differently when I photograph in black and white than I do in color. When I think about color, I think how color dominates and that it’s almost always about the color. Black and white is almost always about the shape and form. So I light them differently, I compose them differently, I think quite differently about them. I do shoot them both in the same camera, but I just think differently about it. I think about dramatic lighting and contrast.”
The last few years have brought much traveling for Meyer and his wife. While most of his work professionally is digital, all of his landscape work and travel work is shot on film. Landscapes are often shot with an eight‑by‑ten inch camera on medium format film transparency. When he travels, Meyer shoots 35mm transparency. He uses a Leica M7 for his travel photography. “My main body is the Nikon D700,” he says. “I had the Fuji S5. I just moved that on, and now I’m using mostly Nikon products. So, D300 or D700.”
©Tim Meyer
Meyer relies on his Induro tripod for his travel work. “One of my favorite times is the evening,” he declares. “I really enjoy just incredibly long exposures on night scenes within cities. The tripod we use traveling is the Induro CX113. I also have an Induro monopod I just purchased that I happen to love.”
When asked about using tripods for his wedding work, Meyer is a believer. “I do absolutely,” he says. “I use it mostly for groups and for some of the still work. I use it extensively for the family portraits. I still do a lot of large wall portraits in my work, and you just can’t handhold a camera for that. I don’t care what shutter speed, whatever combination, you just can’t produce the spotlight 20″ x 24″ or 24″ x 30″ or larger off of that unless it is on a tripod.”
Meyer finds people mistaking tripod images for something created in Photoshop post-shoot. “With the advent of higher ISOs in noise reduction, et cetera, we meet a lot more people using tripods less and less. There is an image on my Web site, that opens up on Weddings. It’s a photograph of a bride and groom in front of a waterfall. My students look at that particular image and ask, ‘What effect did you use in the Photoshop to get the water to look like that?’ I tell them it takes basically two seconds to do and they can’t understand how you can do something in Photoshop for two seconds. Then I explain that it’s done on a tripod and dragging the shutter for two seconds and asking the bride and groom hold still. But it can’t be done, unless you’re using a tripod.”
©Tim Meyer
There are other examples of these types of shots on Meyer’s site. The couple kissing in the water at sunset, waves breaking around them, is also a tripod shot. “That was done with a Profoto AcuteB with a Magnum standing in the water. It’s about a two- or three-second exposure. So the Magnum is illuminating the couple and the rest of the scene is way past when the sun set, and that’s why you have to drag your shutter and wait two seconds. It looks like that, but then you see the movement of water. Of course the camera is on a tripod. That’s the only way to get that shot.”
©Tim Meyer
For lighting, Meyer owns the Profoto AcuteB 600R. For full details of Meyer’s lighting gear and how he applies it, please see Profoto’s blog post about Tim, which reprints part of this story.
Meyer sees the irony in the purchase patterns for professional photographic gear. “With digital cameras and computers, we end up replacing them every two years, eighteen months, whatever it may be,” he says. “They become either backup equipment or you’re replacing them. But when it comes to tripods, meters, strobe equipment like the Profoto equipment, or lighting equipment, you hold on to those guys for years, and years, and years, and years. In my case, I have come to believe even though the Profoto is a little bit bigger investment than most, I would wait the extra couple of months or whatever it is if required to come up with a little extra cash, because I would rather have good equipment for ten, fifteen, twenty years, than always wanting to get up to the best later on.”
©Tim Meyer
In November a book entitled The Portrait was published which Meyer co-wrote with Glenn Rand.
Next on his plate will be a series of black and white portraits shot with an eight by ten camera. Still in the planning stages, the subjects of the portraits may be the townspeople of where Meyer is living, Santa Paula, California. He will continue to take photographs and educate. Currently teaching at Brooks Institute, the future promises more quality photos and lessons from Tim Meyer.
Written by Ron Egatz
Although his photography has taken him around the globe to shoot assignments and build images for each of his books, Andy Katz has not only found his niche, but has risen to the top of that vertical market. Accomplished in many types of photography, Katz is most often known for his worldwide documentation of all things wine. Living in Sonoma Valley for the past ten years, for decades he’s been shooting and publishing some of the most arresting scenes of vineyards and wine production. We recently had the opportunity to discuss photography, tripods, and, of course, wine.
©Andy Katz
In high school he worked in a White Plains, New York camera store. After graduation, he attended the Art Center College of Design to study photography. Leaving to turn pro, he relocated to Boulder, Colorado, and opened a studio focusing on the ski industry. Shooting an album cover for Dan Fogelberg led to a spate of work for the music industry, including album covers for other artists.
©Andy Katz
Katz moved to Los Angeles in 1977 to specialize in music industry photography. Eventually faced with having to sign another one-year contract with a record company, Katz realized he no longer wanted to be in L.A., so he returned to Boulder, where he lived a total of 32 years. A friend owned a restaurant showcasing American wine, and gave Katz an assignment: fly to Napa and Sonoma to photograph the wine industry for eight days. “I fell in love with the place,” he recalls. “I really liked the photos I got. They were framed large format in a studio-style for this restaurant, and they looked great. I went back to Napa and showed some images to the wineries, and I got several jobs.”
©Andy Katz
One job turned into another, and Katz built up his library of photos from both valleys until he created his first book, A Portrait of Napa and Sonoma. The book was well-received. “It got me my start in the book biz,” he says. Since then, he’s gone on to publish Vineyard, The Heart of Burgundy, Burgundy and Its Wines, Robert Mondavi Winery, Tuscany and Its Wines, and Concannon: : The First One Hundred and Twenty-Five Years, among others. His latest title, New Zealand: Sea, Earth, Sky, is available on his site. A book on India is forthcoming, and a new book on Sonoma with an introduction by James Laube is heading to the printer this month.
©Andy Katz
Katz shoots all-digital these days, and his main camera body is a Sony Alpha 900. “There are certain things I miss about film,” he says. “I’m convinced in years to come these software geniuses will be able to figure out ways to recreate everything I like that film does better than digital. Digital brings it up a notch. I’m shooting a 35mm digital camera now that has equal quality to 6 x 7 film.”
©Andy Katz
“I use a tripod often,” Katz says. “There’s so much you can do with a tripod that you absolutely cannot do without one. When people are starting out in photography, it’s essential. It slows them down and lets them observe what’s in the viewfinder, as opposed to shoot first, focus second, and compose third,” he says, laughing. As far as tripods go, he’s well-covered. “I now have three Induro tripods I use,” he reports. “For travel, I’ve got the C114. When I’m not shlepping, I’ve got the C413, and I’ve got one in my car that’s in between. I’ve been a big advocate for tripods for a long time.”
©Andy Katz
When asked what younger photographers are missing by not using a tripod, Katz is quick to list his thoughts. “First, it slows down what you’re doing and it makes you think. Anything that makes you think is good. With digital technology, things are so simple. Pixels are free, so no one’s worried about shooting too much. There’s a machine gun mentality of overshooting and not thinking enough. What a tripod does is it makes you stop, think, and look more carefully at what you want in the frame and what you don’t. That, to me, is the key of composition.”
©Andy Katz
“Using a tripod allows you to take photos where you couldn’t do it without a tripod,” Katz reiterates. “If you’re shooting in gorgeous light which is very low—and that’s my favorite light to shoot in—and you want some depth of field, you’re going to be shooting at two or three seconds, and there’s no way you can do that without a tripod. I often tell people the tripod and the ball head you choose are going to be two of the most important decisions you’re going to make photographically.”
©Andy Katz
Keep an eye out for his forthcoming books, which Katz shot with the help of his Induro tripods. “Using one is a piece of cake,” he says. “They’re very well designed. They’re light because of the carbon fiber. You just do a quarter of a turn and everything pops in or out. I’ve had mine in rain, sleet, salt, dirt, dust, grime… I put these things through hell. I just wipe them down with a little water and they’re fine.”
©Andy Katz
After all the years of photographing vineyards and spending time with winemakers, the bug has bitten Katz, too. This year will see the release of a new venture for him: his own wine. Called AJE, it’s 100% Alexander Valley cabernet. “It’s wonderful,” Katz glows, just like his photos of the region.
©Andy Katz
Indiana native Scott Bourne has called the Pacific Northwest his home for fifteen years, but his passion for photography boasts an impressive 37 year history. In the early seventies as a high school student in the Midwest, his half-sister’s husband was the editor of the Bloomington Herald Tribune in Bloomington, Indiana. Young Scott was given press credentials to photograph the Indianapolis 500, and was assigned as a stringer for the Associated Press. Racer Tom Sneva crashed and Bourne was fortunate enough to capture a photo—complete with airborne engine hurtling at him—that ran on front pages around the country the following day. He was paid $2000. Scott Bourne was a photographer.
After high school, Bourne became a political science major, but took photos his entire college career. For six years after that, he professionally shot motor sports, largely based on his Sneva-crash photo. He also spent years in Europe photographing Formula One races. Returning to the U.S., he worked in New York and San Francisco. “I did some portrait work. I tried my hand at fashion photography and failed miserably,” says Bourne. “I didn’t like fashion. I got back into portrait and wedding work—really enjoyed it, and found a niche. I did that for about fourteen years, owning a studio in Minneapolis, and later, Seattle.”
©Scott Bourne
Bourne sold his wedding practice fifteen years ago and dedicated himself to his new photographic passion: nature and wildlife. “In order to avoid being burned out, sometimes it’s good to try different genres,” he explains. “When I describe myself now, I say I’m a portraitist. I just take portraits of animals. Catch light is catch light, whether it’s on a bride or a wolf. My goal is to have people understand these creatures. When the public sees an animal, it’s typically for a few fleeting seconds. I try to show these animals up close and personal. When you see a bird, they’re fast and flighty. You don’t really think much of it because you don’t get the opportunity to study it. When you see the detail in a portrait like this, it’s hard to discount these animals as something you might run over with your car, or ignore.”
©Scott Bourne
The passion Bourne feels for photography is equal to the passion he feels as an educator of the public on behalf of the animals he’s captured with his cameras. “A wolf may live seven or eight years in the wild,” he says. “They’re not going to be around forever, so taking their picture sort of preserves that wolf’s story. I try to take the approach every animal I photograph might be the last picture of that particular animal anyone ever sees.”
©Scott Bourne
Subject knowledge is what informs Bourne, aiding him to make the best possible photograph he can. “Ninety percent of being a good portraitist is knowing a lot about your subject, whether your photographing a rock band, a CEO, or a bear.” Accordingly, Bourne has an encyclopedic knowledge of a range of wildlife he’s interested in photographing, including habitat locations, migratory timetables, and feeding patterns. “Sometimes it’s just a matter of knowing where your subject’s going to be,” he continues. “In the wildlife photography world, a lot of it is just patience. Taking your time is critical.”
©Scott Bourne
The gravity of the combined mindset of historical importance and patience applies to Bourne’s feelings toward photography in general. “I take photography very seriously. It’s a sacred job,” he cautions. “When people’s homes are burning, they don’t take the video game console. They take the wedding album or the box of family photos. We’re documenting family history, wildlife history, national history. We look at old photos from the first days of photography—native American Indians and some of the work done during the Civil War, for instance. There will be times in the future when people will look at our photos with the same interest.”
There is no end of equipment Bourne regularly uses in the field. “I have a lot of gear,” he says. “I shoot both Nikon and Canon. I shoot Canon primarily for video, Nikon primarily for stills, although I have started to shoot Canon for some stills because of the beautiful new 800mm f/5.6 lens. In bird photography, there’s never too much lens. My main bodies are a Nikon D3s and a Canon EOS-1D Mark IV. I use an Induro tripod for landscape work.”
©Scott Bourne
Tripods are critical to his wildlife photography. “I use a tripod almost 100% of the time, unless it’s flight shots,” he says. “If you want to try the most difficult shooting in the world, it’s getting flight shots,” he laughs. “But a tripod is essential. Sometimes I’m standing in a lagoon, sometimes I’m standing in the ocean. I beat that little Induro to death and it hasn’t burped once. I’m hard on my gear. It’s a tool for me, not a museum piece. I’ll run a little water on it, and that’s it. I’ll get it wet every day for six weeks at a time and it’s never caused me any trouble.”
©Scott Bourne
When shooting’s done, Bourne uses both Apple Aperture and Adobe Lightroom. Photoshop is also used, when necessary. Promise hard drives with 16 terabyte RAID arrays store his images. A remote server in Minnesota backs up his data.
Many photography enthusiasts don’t know Bourne by his impressive wildlife photography, but by the site he runs, photofocus.com. Founded in 1998, photofocus.com is a magazine devoted to photo advocacy and the education of photographers. It achieves this by reviewing photo-related products with a high degree of independence, journalistic integrity, and clearly-defined editorial ethics. Photographers can regularly visit this site and gain knowledge from product reviews, inspirational how-to articles, info on upcoming events and musings on new technology. The site gets 1.5 million page views per month and at the present growth rate, will top 2 million per month this year. Defying conventional wisdom, after choosing to concentrate on content rather than police comments and spam submitted to every article, site traffic has tripled. His Twitter feed has over 66,000 followers.
“It’s rewarding to get mail every day from people saying how much this post or that post meant to them; that it changed their photography, or helped them,” says Bourne. “Sometimes it’s a little thing I’ve written, and I didn’t think it would mean much to anyone, and I’m surprised by the response.”
©Scott Bourne
Bourne continues to teach, and is often on the road. As he sees his career winding down, he’ll also keep writing for photofocus.com while managing his stock photography collection. His latest big news announced at this month’s WPPI is the book he’s co-authoring with industry giant Skip Cohen entitled Going Pro, to be published by Random House. It will be more than a book and include a podcast, a conference, and a blog. An exciting project, for sure, but it seems to be just one more outlet for Scott Bourne’s deep passion for all things photographic. We’ll keep reading and learning, Scott. Thank you.
As a high school band director in 1978, Seattle-area native Bruce Hudson and his late wife Sue began photographing weddings on weekends to supplement their income. By 1982 they gave up their day jobs and opened Hudson’s Designer Portraits in Renton, Washington. Building their business on the wedding trade, it now accounts for only three percent of their annual revenue.
©Bruce Hudson
With the help of his son Josh and daughter McKenna, Hudson has created a small empire based on his passion for photography. “We built our business based on our relationships with our clients,” he says. Senior portraits have grown to be a huge piece of the Hudson Photography pie. By providing excellent service with his photos, high school seniors return “five to ten years later they get married and we do their weddings, then we do their babies, and now I’m doing their high school seniors. Part of the reason we’re still kicking is because we maintain a real good realtionship.” The art of customer relationships is as important as the art he practices with a camera so much so that Hudson penned a book about it entitled The Relationographer, now entering in an expanded second printing.
©Bruce Hudson
An example of how Hudson maintains excellent service with his clients is both savvy and heartening. Fifteen years ago he shot a couple’s wedding. He hadn’t heard from them since the wedding. They called again after having twins and wished to take advantage of Hudson Portraits’ First Year Baby Plan. The plan includes photos of the pregnant mom followed by monthly photos of the baby’s first year. After working with the couple and their twins for a year, they called back for another session when the twins turned two. The husband ordered a large 30 x 40 inch portrait for the wife’s birthday gift. “The type of clients we attract are the ones who put family above everything else,” says Hudson.
©Bruce Hudson
Early on Hudson identified the value of high-quality images for his clients. He began using the Mamiya RB67, and later the RZ67. “The 6 x 7 negative gave me a better quality image than the Hasselblad,” he remembers. Offering his clients enlargements up to 40 x 60 inches, “having that larger size negative really made a difference in the quality of the final product.”
©Bruce Hudson
Because he wanted to deliver higher resolution photos, Hudson went with the Mamiyas and stabilized them. “That’s one of the reasons I started using a tripod early on, even for weddings.” Using a Mamiya 645 at the time as a secondary camera, Hudson relied on a tripod for “the more arty things,” he says. “Back then I was using a Bogen. It was a pretty hefty piece of equipment to be carrying around. Having a tripod like that really took a toll on my body for twenty-some years to the point I started having back problems, which eventually turned into hip problems.” Eventually, Hudson needed two hip replacement surgeries.
©Bruce Hudson
“When the Induro came out with a carbon fiber tripod, it was perfect for me because it was so light weight,” recalls Hudson. “It’s helped keep my body from getting beaten up anymore. The thing is bulletproof. It’s very sturdy and it can hold any camera I put on there. It’s indestructable. We do what we call portrait safaris. One of our most popular ones is in Cannon Beach, Oregon. Once I was tucked up on this rock and was quite literally using the tripod to support myself, too. I often have it in the saltwater and sand. When you’re using the carbon fiber, you don’t have to worry about it rusting. You just rinse it out a little. It’s light, it’s easy to use, and it’s quick to set-up. It’s very sturdy and I’m very impressed with it.” Hudson is currently shooting atop an Induro C314 tripod with a DM23 head.
©Bruce Hudson
Again, the quality of the final photos trumps all for Hudson. “I still like using a tripod, especially with my large family groups,” he says. “Sometimes you have a slower shutter speed and when you’re enlarging the images to the size we do and sell them, you can’t have any camera shake or movement.”
©Bruce Hudson
The Profoto AcuteB 600 is also in Hudson’s gear kit for location work. “It enables me to shoot in full-sun, ISO 100, have control of the background and be able to illuminate the subjects from a 45-degree angle off-camera with one light,” he says. “Everything in my studio is all Profoto, too. They’re great products.”
©Bruce Hudson
“We’re still primarily doing family portraits and kid’s portraits. We’ve worked very hard to do viral marketing via Facebook, in particular, and it’s been great. We take maybe four or five images for a senior portrait session and put them on our Facebook page and tag them. It’s been working really well,” Hudson explains. A photographic area he hadn’t actively pursued has recently been growing significantly. “I don’t really see myself as a commercial photographer, but I sure am doing a lot of it lately,” he says. “A lot of my portrait clients own businesses,” and this has helped pick up the slack in the wedding segment of his business.
©Bruce Hudson
Hudson has also started My Studio Mentor as a photographic educational site. Some of the DVD titles he offers there include The Art of Family, focusing on how to create family portraits and New Directions/Reality Check, a two-DVD set on improving the business of your photo studio. Yet another venture is BruceTunz.com, which offers copyright-free music for presentations, calling on his days as a bandleader and musician. As the recession continues, the Hudson clan continues to diversify and channel their photographic experience into new areas, all the while offering photography services known and loved in the Pacific Northwest since 1978.
Educational Links
“Twenty years of walking while carrying a tripod,” laughs Tim Wolcott. “I felt like Lawrence of Arabia. I studied paintings, which are really about line, color, space and form. After getting all that knowledge, I thought I could break every rule photography ever created. I’ve drawn a lot of photographs before I find them in nature. Then I can photograph them.”
Wolcott’s photographic family lineage is outlined in Part One of this interview. Part Two explores his green gallery experience and his book production breakthrough for photographers, among other accomplishments.
©Tim Wolcott. "Butterfly Dreams was shot in the foothills of Southern California. This image was taken when a storm was approaching. I left my mountain home at 7,000 feet in a blizzard to be able to get here with the clouds forming and being pulled apart in the storm so I could get the shadows on the flower meadows. The hard part was to time the right shadows with no winds. The storm presented a big problem, with wind at 30 miles an hour. We had to wait until just the sequence with no wind and just the right shadows appeared at the same time. Happy to say after five hours I managed to get three very nice images. Patience pays off. 1/50th sec at f/22."
“I’ve figured out how to make a traditional, high-end coffee table book for photographers without having to throw $120,000 at the printing,” he explains. “It can now be done for a really extraordinary price with a printer in Hong Kong. That’s a significant breakthrough, and it’s really going to help the photo industry.” The Los Angeles Digital Imaging Group has tapped Wolcott to teach a class on this subject in a two- or three-step class where printmaking will be integral.
“This whole idea of 3000 books costing $110,000 or more is absolutely absurd,” he says. Wolcott’s formula for fine bookmaking overseas includes a dust jacket, shipped to a U.S. port, with Hexachrome printing and costs approximately $24,000. The price for 500 of those to have slipcases with linen and gold lettering is an additional $3000. A lower run of just 1000 books costs $15 per unit. The price gets even lower if you’re willing to settle for CMYK printing instead of Hexachrome.
Wolcott has a long history of firsts in the photographic industry, particularly when it comes to hardcopy of images. For several decades he’s been exhibiting his work that is entirely printed and framed with green technologies. In 1996 he built a gallery in Big Bear, California. It’s goal was to be the first continuously exhibiting green photography gallery in the world. “We only show pigment prints, which use no chemicals or heavy metals,” he says. “Our frames are from managed-forest woods. We try to do everything the right way.”
©Tim Wolcott. "This image is called Ephemeral Light, this image was create in Sequoia National Park. I visited the park about 5 weeks before this images was taken. I walked the valley looking and studying the trees. I wanted to see how elegant the tree were looking and to see what kind of backdrop the Dogwood trees had. I made a mental note, excited about what I saw, I quickly made a drawing and could not wait to get back. After five weeks I drove back, all the way I was hoping and envisioning fog in the valley. The second day, the fog arrived and I went to work. I ran from place to place trying make sure I got to every spot I had seen five weeks earlier. Shot at 1/5th sec at f/14."
Being environmentally conscious was not a trendy maneuver for Wolcott and his gallery. “It was a little hypocritical to show a beautiful shoreline of a lake in a photo mounted on the wall printed with Cibachrome technology, and then you’re dumping three gallons of toxic crap into the water system. We invented the first green process of printing color and called it Evercolor. The original idea was to make the prints last forever—nonfading and nontoxic. We were able to change out one of the yellows to get away from the heavy metal yellow, and make it 100% green. OSHA couldn’t regulate us. The prints last 250-plus years on display. That’s about 245 years long than a Cibachrome,” he laughs.
Light over long periods of time is what fades photographs and prints. This can be solved by using something like Tru Vue glass, which blocks virtually 100% of the UVA and UVB rays. “We wanted to show color photographs could be an investment, and last literally indefinitely, like a good, well-developed black and white photograph,” says Wolcott.
Eventually, Wolcott began consulting for ink jet printer companies. He helped develop pigment ink jet technology. “By late-1995 we made the first fine art ink jet pigment photographs, though we couldn’t show them until Photokina in 1996,” he says. “Ink jet printing has come a long way. I still think it has a little further to go, but it’s in a very good place now.”
In the near future, Wolcott will be bringing very small groups of people to the hidden places he loves to shoot in. Instead of a normal workshop, he wants to provide the locales where participants “will walk away with some of the best images they’ve ever shot,” he says.
©Tim Wolcott. "Ansel Inspiration named for obvious reasons. I was teaching a workshop in northern California. We were shooting Rhododendron blooms, and that night it snowed on the pass. I asked the student if they would like to shoot the snow vistas. We drove up and I found this scene and said to them, "remember the fog is rising from the valley floor. That fog will rise through the forest." Sure enough, within 15 minutes it rose and we were all ready, with the cameras on our Induro tripods, the mirror locked up and captured about 15 seconds of splendor. Shot at 1/15th sec at f/22."
Wolcott’s first camera was a Calumet Orbit 4×5. He moved to Mamiya medium format cameras. “When we were experimenting with what ink jet printers could do, we bought an 8×10 just to have a huge piece of film to see where we could take it,” he says. “To have a camera that large, you need an incredibly strong and sturdy tripod. I use the Induro tripod, the C414. When you’re climbing into a lake with $45,000 worth of camera gear on top of your tripod, it’s nice to know it’s big and strong. The rocks on the shores in Maine, New Hampshire and Pennsylvania are quite slippery. They’re ruthless to people. The best thing you can do is stretch out those tripod legs as wide as they can go and use that to help balance you. One wrong slip and almost anything digital hitting the water gets its electronics fried. That’s what I love about the Induro tripod. The ability to either close up the legs and help push me out of the mud, or to spread them out to help me balance is really important. Sometimes I’ll move rocks on the bottom of the pond so I can stand higher. With the extra-long tripod legs, I can position the camera even higher than I can hold it. It makes a big difference. I also use a smaller Induro.”
Tripods are integral to Wolcott’s images not only because of the long exposures he needs, as outlined in our first story on him, but because of perspective. “Picking the right height so the ground falls off at a certain rate is a unique way of looking at the landscape,” he explains. “If you don’t look at the ground and the way it falls away, the horizon doesn’t fall away at the right angle. This changes your perspective. When it’s correct, it allows the lilly pads to fall away at the right level, for instance. You want the image to feel three-dimensional, the way eyes see it. Sometimes the only way to mimic this is by getting the camera higher than the human head. When you walk in and see one of my 60 x 40-inch photographs, it feels like you’re standing at the actual scene. That’s what I’m going for.”
Induro has also helped him with stitching images. “I’ve been using Induro tripods for the past three years to do panoramic stitching since I went digital,” Wolcott says. “Having that super-sturdy tripod to do a 170-degree shot with some very heavy gear on it is really nice. It allows you to make the image feel like your eyes are there, but you also have this super-wide perspective. It’s like using an old banquet panorama camera, but now you’re shooting digitally, and you have every choice of lens Mamiya makes. It’s better quality tools than the old days. We used to have to walk around with these 22-pound tripods. They were the biggest and strongest ones you could get, but they were all metal. It was like carrying a baby around. Now we have these really lightweight, super strong tripods which lock very easily. You just shake off the water when you’re done and away you go. We used to have to really clean the old ones. ‘Adequate’ is a good description of what they were like.”
©Tim Wolcott. "This image is called An Autumn Brook. Shot in Pennsylvania, one of my favorite places. After shooting waterfalls for five days I wanted to focus my time now on the river. The river which I have walked past for many of hours. Looking and looking at it, I decided the river is always overlooked. I focused on walking up and down, just watching the water. What I noticed is when the light was higher you could see the muck below the water. I decided to wait and let the sun get lower in the sky and allow the water to reflect the color of the sky. This is a nice way add elegant color to your image and allow more color into the shot. This is a twelve second exposure at f/22."
Wolcott has a philosophy for the gear he carries which never fails him. “I have the same gear no matter where I go,” he says. “I never partition my gear down. Most photographers travel with one or two backpacks. They think about what they might need and then they’ll shrink their gear down. Over the years I’ve seen some people make very crucial mistakes, wishing they had this lens or that lens. I have one of the largest backpacks ever made, and carry thirteen lenses. I use a framing card to compose the shot I want, then set up the tripod in the right position to mimic that shot exactly.”
A Phase One P 45 camera is always with Wolcott. It shoots 39.4 16-bit linear capture using Capture One software. He also has a Mamiya 500mm lens. “That one,” he laughs, “you don’t try to carry with you. It works great for shooting lilly pads.” Wolcott can stitch landscapes together to create files up to 1.8 gigabytes, allowing for incredible detail when he prints his oversized images.
Tim Wolcott’s many years spent in pursuit of photographic excellence has done his family name proud. Part One of our interview with him chronicled his family’s long history with photography. Alexander S. Wolcott, an innovator in camera technology, would marvel at the technology his descendant uses daily. He would also be proud of the accomplishments Tim has achieved. From ink jet technologist to green gallery entrepreneur, book producer to educator, Tim Wolcott has worn many hats in the photo industry. Although he has worked hard at these ancillary areas to photography, great picture taking is still paramount to him. “You still need light, vision, and patience,” he stresses. “Image is everything.” We agree.
