The final name on my list of the top five photographers of the 20th century is......

Of course, it's Arnold Newman. While there were a large number of great portrait photographers working over the course of the century Arnold Newman was prolific and strong willed. He kept recreating styles over and over again. I like the work of Phillipe Halsman and, of course, Yousuf Karsh, Newman's work is more modern and even post modern while maintaining the sense of a privileged point of view.

His image of Igor Stravinski is both compelling and beautifully designed. His work encompassed so many famous and unfamous people for a span of over 50 years. He would be my choice for the 5th person on my list because of both his rigorous seeing and his ability to present his sitters.

Sadly, I've had to leave out several of my favorite fashion and advertising photographers, like Bert Stern (caution: music on website!!!), Chris Van Wagennheim, Arthur Elgort, and Albert Watson.

My tiny list also left out Susan Meiseles (brilliant multi-media documentarian) and Mary Ellen Mark.  And so many more.  I guess over the next month or so I need to compile a list of the top 100 influences, from my point of view. A list of driven, amazing people. And that's probably the one commonality that intersects within all of these people. They are or were driven to photograph and they did it relentlessly, not just for a lark on a sunny saturday afternoon....

Here's a link to a group of great books about Arnold Newman

Here's a link to an archive of his photographs:

http://www.arnoldnewmanarchive.com/

And here is a link to my all time favorite Arnold Newman portrait:

My Favorite Arnold Newman Portrait.

Go see my own portraits on my 500 px gallery: 

http://kirktuck.500px.com/people_in_the_studio_b_w/#/0

What is the single best camera of all time? That's easy...

It's the Leica M3. And I was going to write a long and passionate review of that amazing rangefinder camera but in the process of doing a little research I came across a really wonderful review of the camera by none other than Mr. Ken Rockwell.  Yes, yes, I know Ken can be zany and self contradictory and bombastic but this is a damn good overview of a camera that had an important part in the maturation process of photography. If nothing else his opening photograph of the M3 is gorgeous.  You have to give him credit for that...

http://www.kenrockwell.com/leica/m3.htm

Have a different idea of what might be the best camera of all time? Feel free to post your opinion in the comments. We can argue long into the night.....

Number four in the top photographers of the twentieth century.

Downtown Clouds. 

This is so hard. There are so many great artists that came of age in the previous century. There are the obvious ones like Alfred Steiglitz whose "Equivalents" really made photography of abstracts and enhanced landscapes into a respected subject matter. He was a ferocious champion of photography as art and introduced Americans to a host of great, European painters as well as a generation of American photographers to the the gallery scene. As much as I admire his work and his drive to legitimize art photography there are few images of his that really intrigue and move me. Maybe his wonderful image of O'Keefe's hands or the Flat Iron Building in a Snow Storm in NYC.  If you are curious about Alfred Steiglitz (who was married to famous painter, Georgia O'Keefe) you can get a great sampling of his critical and photographic work in this book:  Alfred Steiglitz: Photographs and Writings.

A whole generation of photographers seems to be obsessed with the work of Walker Evans but to my mind he seemed to be the first photographer to embrace the idea of having an art historic manifesto to accompany his black and white images. While he worked for early iteration of Fortune Magazine, and his black and white images of walls and old houses and depression era (largely unpopulated) street scenes have much art historical merit on some levels it reminds me of the atonal  and experimental music produced by 20th century music composer,  Karlheinz Stockhausen.  Heady stuff, intellectually, but practically speaking: unlistenable. Would I call is 'aloof'?  There is no single work by Walker Evans that comes into my head and my imagination even though I've seen his work over and over again. His most important work, in my estimation, is the work he did for the FSA during the depression. His portraits of tenant farmers and the unemployed from that era are iconic and powerful; it's his more cerebral, personal work that leaves me cold. He's an important fixture in the pantheon of 20th century photographers but you'll have to decide for yourself. This book is widely considered to be one of the best looks at Evans. :  Walker Evans: American Photographs: 75th Anniversary.

People who read the Visual Science Lab have been guessing all week that one of my five top photographers of the 20th century would be Elliott Erwitt. Not so. While I've enjoyed his work and collected his books over the years I really like the work the way I like the old Seinfeld show on TV. Every week you'd get some sort of wry insight into modern, urban culture. It's the same with Elliott Erwitt. There's tons and tons of wonderful, gracious, poignant and comedic work. Clever and well seen juxtapositions. But my sense is that it's all very good but not earth shattering. Elliott Erwitt is an ultimate practitioner with a depth of intelligence that, because of its relative paucity in general culture, is elevated in our estimation into a pantheon in which he just doesn't fit.  He is, without a doubt, a photographer's photographer but my sense is that his real genius is being able to spend the greater part of life having fun with his Leica, walking the streets and sharing his visual sense of humor. A wonderful contribution to our collective enjoyment of well done photography but not epochally breathtaking. Here are some of my favorite Erwitt books: Elliott Erwitt Snaps, Elliott Erwitt Paris, Elliott Erwitt Personal Exposures,  and Elliott Erwitt: On the Beach. You should at least own his thick but inexpensive book of Dog photos....Dog Dogs. It's a whopping ten bucks...and there's more good work in there than most photographers will get to in a lifetime.

One of my readers presumed that we had similar tastes and suggested that William Eggleston would be on my list. Nothing could be further from the truth. While a favorite of museum curators and gallery owners I can think of no 20th century work (other than Stephen Shore's) that leaves me with the feeling that I just saw ten episodes, back to back, of Masterpiece Theater's rendition of George Elliott's novel, Middlemarch. But not even the good episodes...  Our modern equivalent is probably Andreas Gursky....  OMG, COLOR !!!!!! And suburbia writ large....  Yawwwwwwn.
If you find you usually disagree with me vis-a-vis aesthetics you might want to embrace Eggleston.  William Eggleston's Guide might is as good a place as any...

So, who do I think is another one of the five important photographers that strode like a colossus over the world of 20th century photography?  Well, I think it would have to Josef Koudelka.  Don't know Koudelka? You should. His work has echoes of the images of HCB but with a hell of a lot more edge. His black and white book of Gypsies is the most powerful single book I have ever experienced. He shot close, intimate and powerful. While not as prolific (by a factor of thousands...) as People like Elliott Erwitt he is like the ultimate reduction.  The work is distilled down and made concentrated. And his backstory is an important one for a generation of soft and hazily committed photographers. Why? Because he lived this.  If you own five books of photographs by masters this should be one of them:  Gypsies (the collector's edition) This one is pricey.  Here's a version for the rest of us: Gypsies.  Here's a good sampler of his work from all over the world: Joseph Koudelka.  And here's one I'm just about to order for myself: Chaos.  It's a departure from his earlier work. Landscapes with a panoramic camera but with a very different approach to landscapes.... challenging but brilliant.

Joseph Koudelka is one of my favorite photographers of all time. But putting together a list of the top five, while a fun exercise, is also a silly undertaking. There's so much good work out there to discover. I have a "B+" list with nearly 100 photographers on it. Every one of them has shaped my generation's visions as photography makers. Everyone of them is an important part of the mix.  You don't see the foundations of a house but all the material you don't see is as important as the material you do...

One of the five greatest photographers of the 20th Century.

Henri Cartier Bresson. 

Go here to see some of his iconic images: http://www.magnumphotos.com/C.aspx?VP3=CMS3&VF=MAGO31_10_VForm&ERID=24KL53ZMYN

The book that shoved photography from second class citizenship into consideration as true art was a revolutionary book that rumbled into the world and shook up editors, magazines and every photographer with a pulse. It was Henri Cartier Bresson's, The Decisive Moment. It's impossible to say, without sounding saturated with hyperbole, just how dramatic the impact of that book was when it hit the bookstores in 1952.

In the U.S. at the time, most journalists were using larger cameras like twin lens Rolleiflexes and bigger single plate cameras like the Graphlex. Most portraits were lit and meticulously controlled. Amateur photographers were at war with grain and most images were tinged with a vague romanticism. HCB walked into the party and turned it upside down.

He was one of the pioneers of the genre we now call street photography but he practiced it all over the world, from Alabama to China. He carried a small, screw mount Leica camera with which he was ultimately fluid. He favored the 50mm focal length but kept a 35mm in one pocket and a 90mm in another pocket. His camera was, of course, a completely manual rangefinder and no one ever saw him use, touch, or hold a light meter. He learned exposure through experience.

He never used flash. He once was quoted as saying that "Using flash is like bringing a handgun to the Opera."

But what about the images? This collection contains over 150 very well printed images. The book weighs in at 6 pounds and is 338 pages in all. The images chosen are both his best work and his greatest hits.

The core of what HCB did was this:  He was inconspicuous, his camera was used quickly and discreetly, his exposures were pre-estimated, he watched for the decisive moment when all the elements in a frame came together perfectly, when the energy of the frame hit a peak, and he would bring the camera to his eye and snap.  He captured a world in transition. From the second world war, to peacetime and rebuilding and he documented transitions in societies into modernism and into the post industrial age.

But he was much more than a documentarian. He was an artist. He was trained as a painter. He came from enormous wealth and he left a legacy that changed our visual world.

I remember back to 1977 when I  was working hard at being an electrical engineering student at UT. I went to the Fine Arts Library with a girlfriend and I browsed while she worked on a paper. I stumbled across a copy (now nearly priceless) of the first English edition of The Decisive Moment and sat down in one of the study carrels to glance through it. Over the course of several hours I looked through the book again and again. Trying to tattoo the images onto my retinas. In one moment of library Satori I'd discovered a master who was responsible for me buying my first real camera (a 35mm rangefinder) and embarking into a passionate study of photography

Looking through my collection of HCB books I am still inspired and can still see the influence of this Frenchman's vision poking and tickling my images. He taught us that photography was about motion, about design and about being aware enough to know exactly when to hit the button and save a concisely framed moment in black and white amber.

He, along with Avedon and Penn, is one of the five greatest photographers of the 20th Century. In my mind he is the precursor to the current, modern age of image making. A loner, an artist, a sensualist. Buy the book at your own peril. I've met many photographers who were lured into this passion during an unguarded moment with a book of Henri Cartier Bresson photographs.

Can we talk about microphones for a second?

Rode Videomic.

I know every time I write anything about video or microphones almost everyone tunes out and it kills the blog for a couple of days. But I can't help it. I bought my Sony cameras partly because they are good, efficient video tools and microphones are generally one of the cogs in production that make a difference. Miles of copy have been written by video professionals about really good microphones and, without a doubt, you can get a really good microphone for $600 and up. But how many of us really need to sport the absolute best if video generally plays second fiddle to our still photography? While I'd love to be booking the kinds of video projects that require perfect sound recorded at the time of shooting the reality is that the market I find most welcoming for video productions are the same smaller ad agencies and small businesses that buy my photography.

Most of the work I've done in video for the past few years has ended up being targeted directly for the web. Sound quality is important but there really is such a thing as "good enough for the web." For a lot of what I do I need more microphone flexibility than raw excellence. By that I mean the primary goal I have is to use a microphone that I can position off the camera and as close to the subject as possible without having the microphone in the shot. My secondary (but still important) goal is that the microphone not obviously color the sound with glaringly inaccurate reproduction.

I have a set of Sennheiser wireless microphones that are complex, expensive and give very, very good sound. But they are a pain to set up and calibrate. Just like people who have both a big DSLR and a small mirrorless camera I find myself, more and more, using more traditional, straightforward microphones that are hooked to my camera with a cable. And I find that my mid-to-low priced units can sound almost as good as my more expensive microphones if I use them well. I hate to say it but to some extent it's not so much about the gear but how you use it that counts.

In this blog I'm going to talk about the three microphones in my sound box that I use all the time but I want to  issue this caveat: I am not a sound expert and when the budgets are ripe and succulent I always hire a sound person who brings along his owner mixer, microphones and sometimes a separate digital recorder. My microphones make their appearance when I'm shooting for a web video or an "in-house" presentation for a company. Where big stake are involved I tend to dial-a-pro.  You should consider that too.

The microphone above is a nice, plastic microphone from the Australian company, Rode. It's called a VideoMic. It's monoaural, shock mounted and runs off a 9V battery. It's fairly directional but not nearly as directional as a true "shotgun" microphone. That's okay by me because a wider pattern means I can be a bit sloppier in placement.  Too might a pattern and being off axis makes for poorer, not better sound. This microphone is pretty inexpensive at around $150.  I use it to record sound on sets where I can't show a microphone in the scene.  If I use it within two feet of a speaker or actor and aim it correctly the sound is very good.  Ben and I both have one of these and we count on it for most stuff. When you put a wind screen over it (dead cat) you can make good use of it outdoors. This is my first line tool for projects where I have someone who can hold this microphone on a pole and position it and reposition it while we shoot. 

Rode SVM StereoMic.

The microphone just above is Rode's inexpensive stereo microphone. I use it a lot in the studio when I can use it close to my subjects because it's a pretty nice voice microphone. It has a stereo plug that goes straight into my camera's 3.5mm plug.  It records a left and a right channel and it's best use is as an all around documentary mic in a small, quiet room where you are trying to mic two or more people in conversation but have only one mic and one set of eyes and ears with which to monitor said mic. There's a lot of usage cross over between this mic and the one at the top of the article. From time to time, if the venue is quiet enough, I will mount this mic on a fishpole and use it the same way I would use a short shotgun microphone to record dialogue.

If there are no operational caveats; if you can use this mic as close as you want and at the angle you want, you can get amazingly good sound from it. It's not a high decible level performance mic. I don't think you'd want to use it with a rocker who screams. But for general work it's a champ. Not as directional as the VideoMic but that can be a blessing. Around $249. If you are working alone and fast, off tripod, it's great to be able to stick the StereoMic in the accessory shoe of your camera and put the audio recorder on ALC and just go. At least you'll have good "natural sound" to use in your edit...

Olympus Stereo Mic.

Finally I want to tell you how I use my "kit lens" of a microphone, the Olympus ME 51S.  This is the microphone that Olympus sold in the SEMA-1 kit that contained an adapter to plug into the port on the back of Olympus Pen cameras.  You could plug the microphone directly into the adapter and use it as a better "on camera" microphone or you could attach it to a stereo, 3.5mm to 3.5mm cord and use it off camera. The whole bundle is well under $100 and the SEMA-1 adapter is the only way to get off camera microphone audio into your camera when recording.

The microphone consists of two omni-directional microphones so in a live room it tends to pick up every sound with very little discretion. But most lavalier microphones also happen to be omni's and they work very well in isolating the voices of speakers and actors when the lav microphones are position on a lapel or shirt plaque, close to the speaker's mouth.  And, not surprisingly, the little Olympus works well in those kinds of applications too.

I helped a friend with a video for an association over the weekend. We had a lot of microphones to choose from but we chose to go with one of these. We clipped it to our interview subjects' shirts and cabled it back to a Sony a77. Even though we did not use one of the mixers that emits a non-audible tone to over ride the ALC of the camera the microphone was surprisingly un-noisy. And the camera managed to intelligently work it's auto level controls so that there were no big, fast spikes in spurious noise. We reviewed the sound this morning on small monitor speakers and it was actually quite good.

I've started to think of microphones the way I think about lenses. The cost is not always a good determiner of their usability. While an L series 50mm 1.1.2 costs somewhere in the $1500 range an enormous number of people swear by the 50mm 1.8 EF lens (the nifty fifty) and do very good work with it. Under certain circumstances the L lens might shine but for everyday work and everyday budgets the nifty fifty is a perfectly workable compromise.

We've also found that slower aperture zoom lenses can routinely outperform faster, more expensive zoom lenses in the same focal length ranges. In the Sony line the Sony 55-200DT is an excellent performer and, if you never need fast, you'd probably have a hard time distinguishing files from it (at $199) and the 70-200mm 2.8 Sony G lens (at $1995). Same thing with microphones. Use a high end production digital audio recorder, perfect microphone placement and an acoustically optimized setting and you'll get amazing sound. Videotape in a mall with a lot of background noise and non-optimum acoustics and you may find the microphones are equally challenged.

I mentioned that I have a wonderful set of Sennheiser's wireless microphones and they do sound great. But I've compared them to the big ME 51S and they are both better than my current talents or ability to make one appreciably better than the other.

Our video project worked well.

Side note:  All three images were shot with one small, Fotodiox 312 AS LED panel positioned about a foot and a half above the microphones, shining straight down. The rest of the light was just fill from windows around the studio. A quick and easy set up. No filters required.

Saw these things on my way to work last night.

So, I was working the evening shift for the Visual Science Lab last night. I checked into the lab, took an iodine tablet just in case I'd been exposed to any random radiation during the course of the day (the Homeland Security people are flying planes filled with radiation detectors over the city to  try to measure pinpoint hot spots that may be linked to terrorism aimed at the big event) and then grabbed my job sheet from the dispatcher's desk. I drew hazardous duty. My assignment was to brave downtown with the projected 300,000 Formula One guests and then do photography for a private investment bank. I left the studio an hour earlier than I usually would because I was concerned about traffic and parking. I needn't have bothered because there was no traffic, plenty of parking and a number of half empty restaurants and bars right in the middle of downtown. The hordes? Many fewer than a typical day at South by Southwest. The one thing that was different was all the cool little cars being displayed at some of the local venues. This one (above) is kind of round-y and reminded me of a Volkswagen Bug. I might look into getting one as a run around or delivery car for the Visual Science Lab. I haven't seen a dealer yet in Austin so I'm a little hesitant about committing----but if they're a bit cheaper than a VW I might just get one. And maybe one for Ben as well. They are really cute.

I didn't think I'd be able to get in the door at Caffe Medici since all I'd been hearing for weeks was that 300K people would be arriving into the downtown area with bags of money ready to spend on everything from coffee to mink lined, diamond studded cowboy boots. According to the owner of Austin's premier coffee shop it had not been a particularly busy day. Most of the seats and tables were open even though the day's festivities at the big track had been over for hours. The few out of towners were huddled outside huffing and puffing on their cigarettes.

I photographed these artfully arranged flowers in front of the W Hotel. Yes, the Formula One Grand Prix is tomorrow but there are still vacancies today. Just give them a ring. Whatever. The flowers were nicely arranged over an array of LED panels. They looked cool. And stayed cool.  I made the photos (Above and Below) with a Sony Nex 7 camera and an older, Olympus Pen FT 40mm 1.4 lens. I think it's a lovely lens. I've stopped believing in the magic of focus peaking for wide open high speed lenses and prefer to confirm focus by hitting the magnify buttons a few time....

I finished my assignment before 10pm and headed back across downtown to the area where I'd parked the VSL staff car. Many of the streets were blocked off. I expected (based on the press speculation that the elite of EU car racing would be in attendance) that I would see dazzling glamorous beauties in the latest fashions accompanied by men who dressed more like James Bond than Homer Simpson but it was not that way. The whole milieu resembled mostly the 1990's street carnivals in San Antonio that spring up around that city's Fiesta. Lots of Kettle Corn and vendors selling cotton candy. An impromptu outdoor beer garten with the usual assortment of wide characters wearing ubiquitous car oriented Members Only style jackets over their XXL logo'd white t-shirts.

I headed back to my car, less than a quarter mile walk from downtown, and was pleased to find both that it was still there and intact and, that it was on a street with dozens and dozens of open parking spaces. I'm sure the race on Sunday will be a lot of fun for those attending. But downtown was comparatively a ghost town. If you want to see what crowded looks like you need to come to a home grown event like any Halloween evening on Sixth St.

Added to on Sunday evening: Here's the first news story about the economic impact of the race on local, downtown businesses:

http://www.statesman.com/news/sports/f1-boon-and-bust-for-businesses/nS9SF/

It was my intention to spend part of all three days downtown documenting the crowds but after my direct observations on Friday evening it was pretty clear to me that the only excitement was at the track and that the expected boon to the local economy was anything but. I chose to stay home and read a good book.  So this is the European version of NASCAR? Right....