Fashion ain’t easy, especially if you’re wearing gossamer clothing or trying to keep an octabank from blowing off the side of a rooftop and taking you with it. But it came together, and the team did a spectacular job showing off the stylish work of designer Kristen Ernst.

We used all sorts of light, from the sun to video lights to an SB-910 to a big studio light. We used all sorts of tricks — it’s not easy to do a panorama of someone whipping their coat around, but that happened. Mostly, though, we tried to stay warm. Each look was shot in under five minutes so poor Yulia could keep her fingers and toes.

Shoot director: Aparna Dasgupta
Wardrobe: Kristen Ernst
Model: Yulia Panina
Makeup: Jiaying Wang
Hair: Chi Shay
Lighting assistants: Emily and Bobby from Emily Porter Photography

You can trust me, but this time you don’t have to — I have proof. Chandeliers tell no lies, and Amanda and Glenn’s wedding rocked the Merion so hard the darned thing looked ready to come down.

Passionate, fun, and ready to tear the foundations off a building with merriment — these are my kind of people. Thanks to Dustin Finn for assisting the mayhem (and spotting the chandelier).

Just a reminder that, with all this talk of authenticity on the blog this week, I do still like a nice trick or two. And when you arrive in the chosen spot for wedding portraits and it’s pitch black, it’s nice to have a big back of tricks, literally and metaphorically. It took a flash composite AND a panorama to pull this one off.
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Lens: 35mm f/1.4
Camera: Nikon D3s
Light: Lowel id-light

I took a photo I liked yesterday.

As I mentioned earlier, I went back to school this week, re-taking a version of a documentary photography course that I took more than five years ago. I did it even though it pushed this week’s workload from “busier than it should be for an off-season” to “absolutely insane” because I wanted to try to deepen and broaden my work, and connecting with a fantastic teacher and the sort of psychopathically devoted photographers who attend classes at the International Center of Photography is a great way to do that.

When you spend all of your time as a craftsman, honing and shaping exactly how you see the world, it can be excruciatingly hard to break your habits. On the job, if it’s possible to turn out 1,000 amazing images in a single day, then that’s what I want to do. To that end, I have sort of a Schroedinger’s Cat attitude — frantic and placid at the exact same time. I want to calm my subjects so much that they completely get over the fact that they’re being photographed, but I never, ever stop moving, stop looking, stop rocking and swaying and stepping back and forth. If someone stops me to talk, I’m likely looking through them or over their shoulder to make sure I never missed anything.

Whereas yesterday, with a documentary photographer hat on, probably the most important thing I did was to put my camera down and just talk to people for hours. I had to make some slight changes in how I composed a photo, but I had to make gigantic changes in myself. I wasn’t sure if I’d break through the crusty walls of a craftsman in just five days, but I did.

Starting a good documentary project is hard. Trying to do the whole thing in two days is virtually impossible, and almost doesn’t make sense. Is two days of shooting a documentary, or is it just a short magazine assignment? Amazing projects like The Ninth Floor are generally measured in months or years — so by that scale do you think Jessica Dimmock got a photo she liked for publication every day? Nope. While my normal pace has me thinking about “How good is the 500th-best photo I took today?” in documentary photography the story matters, and the subjects matter, and that’s it. Excessively beautiful photos can actually hurt the story sometimes. The deeper you’re into it, the longer these periods of just sinking in get — you can go weeks without a photo that would fit the final storyline.

It’s context. If I came back from a wedding and liked one photo from that day, I might jump out a window. When I came back from a day’s shoot yesterday and had taken a photo I liked, I was ecstatic. I’d been proud enough that I had woken up that morning with no idea what I was going to do, and by the end of the day had cut through red tape and gotten to a place few photographers would have access to. I set out to tell an uplifting story about overcoming obstacles and how we help each other along the way — and I did. But I kept myself open to surprise, and when the story deepened and the narrative became more complex I saw that, and I shot it, in what I believe to be a magazine-publishable image.

But I’ve also learned in this class that sometimes you have to keep the best images under your hat, or only allow them to be shown within the full and proper context. Because what really matters are the subjects.

Yesterday Andre mentioned a student who was really excited about getting clearance to go to Haiti after the hurricane devastated the island.

“That’s great,” he said, “why are you going?”

“Because I need these photos for my portfolio!”

If you’re gritting your teeth now, you’ll understand why I’m not showing the photo.

As a longtime Nikonian, it still seems a bit odd that Nikon is known as the “great high ISO camera company.” Back in my day, we had noisy ISO 800, and walked uphill both ways to the photo shoot! But that was OK, because we were flashers. Our Nikons had fantastic flash control, TTL metering that worked extremely well, and we made due.

And then everything changed. Along came the Nikon D3, and our SB-800s changed into SB-900s. Not everyone was a fan of this — the SB-900 was significantly larger but didn’t have more power — but I liked them enough to buy three. Fully rotational flash heads is a big deal to my bounce-loving self, and I never quite got used to the fact that you had to physically break the SB-800 to make it work properly.

So I had the SB-900, and everything was good. The output was great, the TTL worked well in those rare cases I wasn’t being a manual-using control freak, and I especially adored the ability to zoom the flash head to a narrow beam of 200mm. Because it’s a narrow beam, I can bounce strong pulses into the ceiling and not use much power, giving me more charge and better recycling time.

There were only a few quirks, some of which bothered me and some of which didn’t. The one that everyone talked about is that out of the box, the SB-900 has an overzealous Thermal Cut-Off protection program that, after a few strong flash pulses, essentially says “No! It’s too hot in here! No flashes for you!” This, I agree, is terrible — so I turned it off and never thought about it again. As someone who’s fired hundreds of thousands of pulses through SB-900s, my experience is that unless you’re using some super-jacked batteries or third-party battery packs, you’re not going to melt anything down. If you find yourself firing your flash at 1/1 all the time, you might want to take a hard look at your gear or compositional choices.

Other things that no one talked about much bothered me a bit more. The new gel system, which used coding to automatically change white balance, was pretty cool but a bit tricky to find and slide on in the field. There was that darned menu access, which was better than the SB-800s but still took time and some slight-of-hand to get to the settings. And the one that really got me is that the infrared AF-assist beam seemed to be mis-aligned in some ways, so that if you were shooting a shallow-depth-of-field lens like the 85mm f/1.4 on a dark dance floor, and using the AF assist on any focus point other than the center point, you were almost guaranteed to have your shot be out-of-focus.

So here’s all you really need to know: The SB-910 fixes all of these quirks. They use the same sort of snap-on gels as the SB-700, which are harder to pack but work great. The Thermal Cut-off gradually slows the flash down as it gets hot instead of getting all Soup Nazi with you. (You can see an oh-so-exciting video of me firing the SB-910 at full power here.) They even fixed the AF assist, which is attention to detail surprising even for Nikon. Awesome.

It also adds some things like illuminated buttons (which will nicely match the Nikon D4 buttons) and a revamped menu system to be more like the SB-700. Illuminated buttons don’t matter much to me — after two days shooting with a piece of kit the buttons are mapped in my brain, no looking required. The dedicated menu button is fantastic for working quickly, but it has a downside: If you have a bunch of SB-900s, you will probably want to sell them if you’re tempted by the 910. These two flashes are so similar in basic form that you will never remember by simple touch which is which — and they have buttons in the same places that do entirely different things. Give your brain a break and try not to limit your time mixing these two in your system.

In the photos above, I wanted to use the tungsten gel given that it’s now easy enough to put on that I won’t say “Oh, forget it.” In both, I fired through a Lumiquest LTP softbox. At left, I got the double-diffusion softness and made use of a tight spot by skipping the light off a white door to the left. At right, the light from the right, combined with a tweak of the automatically cool white balance the camera knew to give me thanks to the coded gel, gives a more complicated and moody mix of warm flash and cool ambient. Is there any real difference in the light between this and the SB-900, or even the SB-700? No. But I probably would have never fished the delicate SB-900 gels out of my bag on a freezing cold day — so the real answer is whatever works for you. And the SB-910 works really well.

I’ve gone back to school. Many years ago I took a documentary course at the International Center of Photography. It was intense. In the land of the Internet, the average critique you get is about as deep as “Nice photo!” or “This has colors!” I was still getting my photographic feet under me in a lot of ways, but my head had already swollen with the weird world of Internet photography culture. People were favoriting my photos on Flickr! Someone recognized me on the street! Clearly I was big time. So it was a shock when someone said that my photos made them physically ill, when critique got so intense and personal that I dug my fingernails into my skin. It was exactly the shock I needed, and helped make me a much better photographer than I was then.

There are a lot of things that are amazing about the Internet culture of photography, and it has helped raise the bar on the industry of wedding photography astonishingly quickly, but there are a lot of photographers out there, and especially the very good ones, who would be helped by the occasional “This is a terrible photo and I hate you for showing it to me.”

I love weddings. I love them so much. I love the craft of them and the art of them. There are so many special skills that it takes to turn out good results every time that even many great documentary photographers and photojournalists don’t have at a high level. But to do that, sometimes you need a big bag of tricks, and those generally conceal far more than they reveal. Where’s the soul, man?

So I’m back, even though my schedule is way more crazy than I thought it would be by mid-January. I should be planning my own workshops right now, not taking one that crams 10 weeks of work into five days. But I refuse to ever stop learning. I happily still take classes and workshops, and will never stop. I love it when extremely experienced wedding photographers take my workshops, because they know that it doesn’t mean that I’m better than them, whatever that means, but that we’re all different from each other and we have some things we can learn along the way.

But I particularly recommend this course, “Passion and Personal Vision” by Andre Lambertson. I don’t use flower-child language like “beautiful soul” easily, but Lambertson has one, and you can see it in his work. I like to think I make people so comfortable I become invisible — and I’ve had brides and grooms say “Where’s Ryan?” when I was three feet in front of them — but we’re talking about a guy so invisible and who inspires such trust that he has photos of kids helping their mothers shoot heroin. His images have soul and patience, and he pushes past discomfort. And I know I have learning left to do on that front.

So yeah, I’m back in school. It’s nuts, and so are the other students. Picture being given two assignments — document a local business and get a stranger to let them into their house and photograph them — at 10 p.m. They’re due by 6 p.m. the next day. I gave the last assignment to one of my workshops and gave them weeks to do it, and maybe a quarter of them did. In those few hours, 85 percent of my class did it. That’s the sort of dedication you only get in art school.

First, my business assignment. I went to Trapeze School New York because it has an interesting story and I was seeking discomfort. TSNY is a second home for a lot of its students, and in a some way a first home for more than a few. They say the way to understand the character of Batman is that Batman is the real person and Bruce Wayne is the costume. And for a lot of flyers and aerialists, that’s exactly how it works. They are circus freaks, they just happen to wear the clothes of a lawyer most of the time. This is a place where a man can practice a strip tease act (the tricks, not the stripping), while 11-year-olds have a birthday party. Where a woman will climb up and wrap herself in silk 15 feet in the air — and just sit there and think for 15 minutes. A lot of the real story of TSNY is in the pauses in-between. It was something I could only begin to tell in my short time there, coming in cold with no prior permission, introducing myself and shooting.

I started with just my Fuji X100 on totally silent mode, trying not to interrupt the scene, to get people used to me, but I soon wanted more ways to tell the story. I felt myself get closer and closer to where I wanted to go, and I wonder what I could do if I had weeks to tell these stories, instead of minutes.

I don’t. Not yet. But I can already feel that yearning to shoot, to tell stories that are deeper and more comprehensive than the ones I’ve told before, even on wedding days. To answer the question “What’s behind that door? What’s behind those eyes? Who are these people?”

Exactly what I need.

I simply cannot believe how hard Yulia rocked this in 35-degree weather and 40 MPH winds.

Shoot director: Aparna Dasgupta
Wardrobe: Kristen Ernst
Model: Yulia Panina
Makeup: Jiaying Wang
Hair: Chi Shay
Lighting assistants: Emily and Bobby from Emily Porter Photography
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Lens: Noct-Nikkor 58mm f/1.2 AIS
Camera: Nikon D3s

Here’s a teaser. Much, much more to come.

Shoot director: Aparna Dasgupta
Wardrobe: Kristen Ernst
Model: Yulia Panina
Makeup: Jiaying Wang
Hair: Chi Shay
Lighting assistants: Emily and Bobby from Emily Porter Photography

Elizabeth had elements of this day planned in her fancy three-ring binder for quite some time — some of them, I’m willing to bet, before she met Anthony. I don’t know if it said “Be fabulous” in there, but some things are just a given.

It’s been quite a journey for them, from playing Guess Who over cups of tea in the cafeteria to a fabulous fall day in Central Park. Weddings, of course, are not without challenges, which is something that keeps them interesting. The gods of the New Jersey Bridges and Tunnels were not kind, leaving the choice of either having the ceremony without 90 percent of the guests or having it in the pitch dark in the only place in Manhattan without lights. But it doesn’t say “problem solver” on the left-hand side for nothing. Under a canopy at night is too much for even my D3s or my eyeballs to see, but luckily I always travel with video lights. I used the help of the videographers (Peter Ferriero and team) to set up light in the corners of the gazebo, about 90 seconds before the processional had to start. Not only was there no disaster — they got to enjoy a stunning twilight ceremony with the lights of Southern Manhattan twinkling in the distance.

There’s nothing I can say about the emotion of the day, about their connection, about the fun that was had — both theirs and mine — that the images don’t say better. But it was a pleasure and honor to be there and to have my friend and phenomenal photographer John Edgar there to capture the day with me. John basically owns Canada. I hope there will be some more international team-ups in the coming year, because this was an amazing experience.

The compact world is in a bit of a stir right now. Heck, all you need to do is read the news today, with Canon’s release of a compact camera with a DSLR-sized sensor. After years and years of advanced amateurs and professionals saying “Wake, up guys! The compact cameras are uninspired and terrible — you need to shake it up!” the companies are finally listening. Why?

Phones.

Simply put, there is no reason for anyone to buy a bad digital compact again. They’re already carrying something around in their pocket that does the job of a bad digital camera — and some of them, like the iPhone 4s or Samsung Galaxy SII, can play the part of a pretty decent compact. The entire lower end of that market is in deep, deep trouble, and they know it. So what they’re finally starting to focus on are compacts that can do things your phones can’t. Use flash well. Shoot in lower light. Shoot RAW. And in Nikon’s case, use interchangeable lenses.

Nikon and Fuji are showing two different approaches to this market, with Nikon heavily touting their new J1 and V1 lines, with a bigger-than-compact-but-still-small sensor that allows for a smaller system overall. Fuji had a hit with the X100, and they’re hoping to replicate it on a smaller scale with the compact, zooming X10.

Now, as a professional Nikon user, my initial gut reaction to the J1 was disappointment. I know from the X100 that mirrorless options can be helpful in even the most professional systems, and I was hoping for something that would change my working environment. The J1 isn’t designed for work — it’s for fun. It’s about being a compact camera with somewhat better photos and having the versatility of interchangeable lenses. And then something got my attention — people who used it, other people who had been disappointed, started singing its praises. That little-but-not-too-little sensor seemed to be quite a workhorse. So I got my hands on one to pair with the X10 I was testing and headed out to Hong Kong.

I put up some preview images yesterday, and everyone assumed I was testing the Canon 1DX versus Nikon D4. It wasn’t my intention to trick anyone — I want to really put the D4 through its paces before I write a review, but I suppose that speaks well for these cameras.

The X10 is the simpler camera to describe: it’s just a compact, but a nice one. It has a nice zoom range from medium wide-angle to short telephoto (“portrait length”), and you zoom manually by turning the ring, not from moving some wonky switch like most compacts. It zooms smoothly as you turn, more smoothly than cameras like the Canon S100 that try the same trick. Its zoom range also starts at a nice and fast f/2 and only closes down to f/2.8 at the long end. It has an optical viewfinder, but it’s of the only-for-emergencies compact camera style, not anything like its big brother the X100.

Essentially, the X10 changes nothing radical about the idea of what a compact camera is, but they bring impeccable style and functionality to the design — and that makes all the difference. It’s a pleasure to use in a way that was almost unthinkable for a compact from about 2002-2009. In true Fuji style is produces nice, colorful images with good skin tones, and a noticeable love for magenta:

One thing to note about the X10: Like a good number of compacts these days, it cheats even with its RAW files, writing in instructions to clean up extreme barrel distortion and vignetting. Companies like Panasonic have done this a lot, and it’s dramatic to see what happens when you open the same files in a program that listens to those instructions (such as Adobe Lightroom) versus one that doesn’t (like Apple’s Aperture.) Here is the same photo from Lightroom on the left and Aperture on the right — no adjustments:

You can see Lightroom left in a little bit of the distortion to not change the frame too radically, but especially with this sort of composition the one on the right (which reflects how the lens actually captures the scene) looks almost like it was taken with a fisheye.

But it’s a good camera overall, and great at low-light for a compact. Here’s an ISO 1600 image — a bit painterly noise reduction in places, but still sharp and with good detail:

The J1 confirmed a good number of my worst feelings when I first picked it up — this is made for consumers, not a tool for professionals to use on the side. All you need to know is that Nikon, the Kings of Strobism, didn’t put a hot shoe on it. They clearly put thought into making this just something to capture snapshots and home video better than a phone can. And so the video side is well-thought-out, with a separate button for video capture and a slow-motion mode that really works, although it has low resolution and a long aspect ratio.

On the face, it seems to not quite realize the advantages of the small sensor. The camera is small but not THAT small — the APS-C-sensored NEX-5n is smaller. The optics are still just as slow as they’d be on a bigger DSLR — the kit lens I used was f/3.5-5.6. When you compare that to the f/2 to f/2.8 lens the Fuji had, suddenly you seem to be giving up the gains that the bigger sensor gives you.

But then I started seeing the images. And they looked good. Crisp and clear and with vibrant but realistic color — better than what I’d gotten from a compact before, even a well-designed one like the X10. High ISO is surprisingly good. Good enough that although I wanted to use these cameras for their intended market of vacation snapshots, I even used it for clients — the image at top is ISO 800, which was enough to capture a night-time scene with very little noise and sharpness and detail preserved. In that case, the design came in handy, since I wanted the “infinite depth-of-field” look that I would have had to stop WAY down on my D3s to get.

Here’s a few more images showing that it’s crisp and sharp and handles contrast well:

Perhaps Nikon is reaping the advantage of low expectations, since the camera is more enjoyable to use than it appears on paper. I think the full promise of this system will come with the adapters, where the 2.7x crop will turn telephoto lenses into “photograph a songbird’s eyeball” lenses. But something like a 20mm f/2 would be a nice addition to the lens line-up, as even amateurs expect nice results in terrible light these days.

Since these are similar price (with the J1′s kit lens), this is going to come down to personal preference, especially given all of the other compeition for this marketplace. But it’s heartening to see how many more great choices we have now than the dark ages of compact camera design.

Coming soon: A review of the camera that took the photo on the left versus the one that took the photo on the right.

And more so with a kind, hilarious couple. I came in a few days early to make sure there were no flight problems, and because it was Aruba in November. I had my run of the island, but spent most of the time hanging out with Gary, Gina and their wedding party just because of how much fun we were having. It’s one thing to get on a wedding party’s good side … it’s another to hang out with them at the hotel pool until 3 a.m.

All you need to know is that Gina’s wedding gift to Gary was a pristine copy of The Incredible Hulk #181, the first appearance of a furry little fellow named Wolverine. They wanted to mix the traditions of a Filipino wedding with the laid-back nature of a beach wedding, so the ceremony was at a local church and then we boated out to a private island just in time to catch the last bits of sunset.

The reception was on the beach in the sand, with a court for dancing and speeches, and Gina and Gary thoughtfully provided sandals for every guest. I couldn’t resist the opportunity to photograph a reception barefoot, though — and so I did.

We spent part of the next day going around the island for a day-after shoot. I recommend post-wedding photos for everyone, because hey, why not get more photos? But especially for destination weddings. There’s nothing left to worry about — you can just relax and have fun together. I’ll be having fun in any case.

This wedding knocked my socks off … literally. I shot most of it barefoot.
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Lens: Sigma 12-24mm f/4.5-5.6
Camera: Nikon D3s