I’ve been asking for Nikon to make fast, wide primes forever, and we finally got one! Meet the 24mm f/1.4!
Also out is the 16-35mm f/4 VR, another new type of lens from Nikon. Both of these have potential to let me see in some new ways this season, so I will be testing them ASAP. Read my quick take at End User Blog!
(I’m not counting the discontinued 28mm f/1.4)
I couldn’t have had a better time at Saturday’s workshop, and was absoutely thrilled with how everything went — my staff, Isla and Thomas, did a killer job throughout, Phillip Stark could not have been more gracious a studio host, and our models and couples were top-notch! But, as they used to say in Reading Rainbow, “You don’t have to take my word for it …” When you have an audience filled with 35 people, almost all of whom have a blog, you know there are going to be a lot of independent reviews. The first comprehensive one I’ve seen is this article by Dmitri Gudkov, but let me know if you have any others and I’ll add them to this entry!
You can also see 117-and-counting attendee photos here, including proof that it is nearly impossible to take a good shot of me while I am talking.
(Photo by attendee Jeniel Corpuz)
UPDATE:I randomly stumbled across this review in a Nikon forum by one of the attendees. Since he didn’t think I would see it, that means he’s not sucking up to me. ;-)
I am inspired by his shooting philosophy. He lives for the “worst” shooting conditions and actually gets bored when things go right the first try. I take that as always learning and being prepared for the worst. I also appreciate his take on ‘getting it right in camera’. I hate using photoshop and really appreciate the fact that he can get such great results with spending 5-10 secs per image and sometimes not even touching them.
I highly recommend his workshops and I will be attending one of his in the future again.
UPDATE: Here’s a nice video by Brett Maxwell showing the process of the shot shown here. I didn’t know I was being recorded and wasn’t speaking with that in mind, so hopefully you can pick up some of the audio. And although it sounds like I was overshooting, taking thousands of shots, those are the sounds of all the attendees’ DSLRs behind Brett. When I’m thinking about shooting, and not about talking, I say “you know” a lot. But before and after this I explained to the attendees more about the process, and showed the results.
I’ll have a full write-up of my workshop later today, but here’s a teaser image from it. One of my mantras that I shared with the group is to keep pushing yourself until there is a decent possibility you might fail — if all of your shots are pretty good, you’re not expanding yourself. (Of course, this has to be at times where you are safe to fail on a few frames. The first kiss is probably not the best place for it).
So I let the group watch as I decided to give myself a challenge: I would find the most boring, ugly place around and take photos right there. So I found a featureless office hallway with the ugliest green fluorescent lighting you’ve ever seen. The only thing it had going for it was the natural perspective of a hallway. So I took my awesome couple and sat them down, so that we could see that perspective better, and I lit them with a very warm, tungsten video light. With white balance correction, that turned the ambient from a horrible puke-green to a kind of funky and cool deep turquoise, a nice contrast to her red shirt, and of course this is kind of a funky couple.
I just finished three days of hosting meet-ups and mixers and workshops, oh my. I had the most amazing experience, which will get a full write-up tomorrow. But to start off with, let me publicly reveal my big, secret assignment: I challenged the workshop attendees to take portraits of a stranger … and, if possible, to take those portraits in their homes. This is an intensely challenging assignment for most people, and it’s one that I encourage photographers who are very interested in the documenting of people’s lives to try on their own. The lessons everyone draws are unique, but you learn a lot about making others comfortable, about being comfortable in your own skin as a photographer, about subject trust, and all of these skills that are very, very hard to teach in a one-day workshop.
I didn’t want to assign the attendees anything I wasn’t willing to do myself, so I went out and found a stranger of my own. Meet Tom. Unfortunately, Tom lives way, WAY out in Queens, and with the workshop planning I simply didn’t have time to go out there, so I photographed him at my office. But as soon as we started talking about the project, I knew I had to shoot him.
Tom saw this shoot as an opportunity to learn a bit more about himself. We got quite personal in our discussions and I won’t share them here, but he is 21 and sees himself in the middle of some major life transitions that have him searching for questions like “What’s next?” “What do I even want?” and “Who am I, anyway?” Trust me, these are questions that we keep asking ourselves, or should. But he also has a strong sense of whimsy — his role model, in ways, is Calvin from “Calvin and Hobbes.” So I wanted to get at that a bit with these portraits. We started indoors, using a mix of warm video light and cool window light to visualize these transitions and melancholy, but as we got more comfortable I had him change into one of his favorite shirts, a colorful Simpsons shirt he happened to have with him, and we headed out for some portraits with a lighter feel.
The biggest lesson of this assignment? We all want our stories told. Make people comfortable, and they will share theirs. Thank you, Tom, for sharing yours with me.
(The skyline is reflected in his glasses on purpose)
When life hands you sunsets like this, you use them.
The first full-day Ryan Brenizer photography workshop starts tomorrow! All full up, but dispatches and more dates to come!
This will hopefully be the coldest engagement shoot I ever do. Not Nick and Rebecca, who are warm and fun and awesome, but the unbelievably freezing weather. Since Nick and Rebecca are long-time friends of mine, I felt free to poke at them a bit about the weather in this Nikon D3s video.
A little bit of photo-booth stuffing at Kristy and Mike’s wedding.
Flower girls’ lives aren’t as easy as they used to be…
I did an engagement shoot on Saturday with Adam and Chastity, and had a great time despite the FREEZING cold. We decided to pause whenever my fingers couldn’t feel the shutter button anymore.
Kindiya and Thomas later told me that they had no idea why I was standing 10 feet away and shooting at a moped while they kissed. Surprise!
2009 was without a doubt the craziest year of my life, and I was so glad that I could end the wedding season with a couple as nice and fun and Dora and Josh.
The mixture of Eastern and Western heritage started early, with the traditional Chinese game of forcing the groom to either pay money or pass challenges to be let into the brides’ parents’ house. As weddings go later and later into the winter, you can see the groomsmen being increasingly desperate in just their tuxedos. The mix continued with a beautiful ketubah signing and Jewish ceremony under the chuppah. For this ceremony, the rabbi turned Josh around so that he was the very last person in the congregation who would see the bride, and his reaction was priceless.
Also, for my fellow geeks, this was one of the rare weddings where I shot with both Canon and Nikon cameras. Watch the slideshow and see if you think you know which is which.
I couldn’t have ended the year with a better couple. Congratulations!
A nice moment of a wonderful Australian couple who came to New York to elope. Hey — the Australian flag is Red, White, and Blue, too!
The fill light is from a Lowel ID video light.
A couple weeks ago, I got hooked up in the “Ask me a question” Formspring meme that was going around, and you can see all my answers (and ask me more) here. While I didn’t get as obsessed with it as some photographers … *cough* Jonas Peterson *cough* … it was a lot of fun and a great way to answer some of the burning questions people had. But the list is long and filled with questions that are either technical or sometimes silly, so I thought I would put some of my answers that readers might be interested in right on the blog. These aren’t exactly frequently asked questions, since most were just asked once, but close enough.
Is there a point at which you will think “I’ve arrived” in the photography world, a goal to reach “before you can rest”?
Photography isn’t a destination. It’s a journey. I don’t want to rest, I want to take pictures.
What do you remember about yourself when you were a child?
I was definitely shorter. And precocious.
Been a fan of yours since your early days on flickr. How do you stay healthy? And what do you do if you’re sick on a clients wedding day?
It’s important to me to stay healthy. In more than 100 weddings, I’ve never had to miss one for any reason (there are very good emergency plans, but it is very important to me not to have to use them). I try to get a decent amount of sleep. For me that means at least six hours. In college I was always sick because I slept about three hours a night.
Also, I get a good deal of exercise.
Are you a “stuff junkie” or an “experience junkie”?
Experience junkie. If I were a stuff junkie, I wouldn’t keep breaking it.
How do you get people to so such cool stuff on the dance floor?
They’ll do it. All you have to do is be unobtrusive enough to be in front of them without them noticing or caring.
What happens at your client meetings? Spill some tricks!
It’s mostly just pleasant conversation and watching slideshows, and when they ask a question I answer the seven they haven’t thought of yet.
Do you dance at all your weddings?
Only if my friends are getting married … then it’s ON.
I read that you said you deliver 100 images per hour, do you feel that delivering hundreds of photos detracts from the end users satisfaction when going through so many photos?
No. I deliver a front page of my 75-100 favorites, so people don’t have to view the full set unless they have a reason to. I like to photograph as many guests as possible, because they were important enough for the bride and groom to invite and pay for.
Could you describe the post-processing you usually do on your images in a sentence or two?
I do way less than most shooters, because I don’t want my post-processing to be trendy. Quite often it just looks OK right from the start. But sometimes I really love a picture and just like to finesse it a little. I also have a default tone curve that I shoot in or apply afterward.
Thoughts on diffusers? I’ve noticed some great photogs use them and others just bounce.
I don’t use them much, but really it’s all just about understanding light, and using the tools that make it looks how you want. Lots of diffusers turn flashes into bare bulbs, which can be useful but I’d rather not have it on-camera.
by Ryan Brenizer
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