LookatLao Photography Featured in the Latest Issue of GQ

I recently shot a quick photo of Ethan’s Escolar Crudo with Hot Coppa and Sharlyn Melon over at Anchovies & Olives that just made it to a half-page spread in the January issue of GQ. (Five Best Dishes of the Year). Sadly, Rhianna didn’t make it to the shoot, but she was there in spirit.

Look for a bunch of new work from me for Ethan and Co. in the next few months. Lots of cool stuff in the pipeline.

One More Book: At Work

I think I started this book in 2008 and finished it in 2009, so it will probably kick off next year’s list of favorites, as At Work is a great read. It’s sort of hard not to pay attention to Annie Leibovitz’s career—it’s everywhere you look. Some of the most popular magazine covers and spreads of all time were shot by Leibovitz and she’s an obvious icon of modern photography. But honestly, I never really paid much attention to her story. As to be expected, it’s a pretty great story. The book is not really a photography showcase, nor is it a how-to book with regards to equipment and lighting setups. It’s more about how she thinks and the internal dialogs going on in her head as she leads you through a handful of famous and not so famous photo shoots.

A couple of my favorite chapters include a recounting of a year spent on the road with the Rolling Stones, and then a more recent shoot of the Queen of England. The latter was a shoot that felt like it was hanging on by a thread, and yet she produced some really amazing photographs of Queen Elizabeth. I did some more research on the shoot itself and found this great video on YouTube called Monarchy. If you like the behind the scenes stuff to get a feel for how she does it check out these too: Sean Connery for Louis Vuitton, Keith Richards for Louis Vuitton, Marie Antoinette.

Wow, That Must Be A Really Good Camera

This has been happening a lot lately: someone will look at a photo I’ve taken, or check out the back of my camera during a shoot and say something along the lines of: “Gee, that must be a really great camera!” or, “Is that a special kind of camera? How do you get it to take photos like that?” These are usually friends or colleagues, and it doesn’t bother me at all—I actually find it somewhat amusing—but it’s been happening enough to inspire a blog post, so I thought I’d clarify a few things:

First off, yes, a good camera (and lens) is essential for taking a good photograph. I do have a good camera—a really good camera. But, the camera itself doesn’t take good photos. That’s my responsibility. It helps me out for sure, but the camera can’t take a good photograph on its own. In fact, my camera doesn’t have a little dial with a picture of a guy running for action shots, or a flower for closeup shots, or a snowman for, well, snowmen I guess. Instead, my camera sort of assumes I’ve been taking photos long enough (25 years) to understand how to meter and adjust aperture to achieve a decent photo on my own. The camera leaves all the dial twiddling and adjusting up to me, there is no “auto” mode. Bottom line: something like selective focus is not a camera setting, it’s an understanding of aperture.

Second, if you were to hire a guy to fix your car and when he was all finished you said: “Wow, you must have some really good tools in that box, the car runs great now!” I bet he would look at you sort of funny. It’s not the tool, it’s the person who took the time to understand how to use it.

Finally, I am not a professional photographer. I’m merely an enthusiastic amateur. And most importantly I don’t want to sound like a dick. But I do love photography. I spend hours and hours each week studying technique, brushing up on theory, reading books written by masters, investing in new equipment, and of course shooting photos. Just tonight, I spent a few hours at a friend’s restaurant, and when all was said and done I had almost 800 photos to sort through. Putting in the time, that’s what makes anyone able to shoot a good photograph in the end. It’s not, sadly enough, as easy as buying a fancy camera. But, I will admit this: a fancy camera can help. But only to a point. I have a Pentax ME Super 35mm film camera that I bought in 1985 that can essentially take any photo I’ve ever taken on my fancy 2007 Nikon D300. It would cost me more to operate the Pentax and it would take longer to see the final results, but the results would be the same if I knew what I were doing.

So, the next time somebody shows you a sweet shot on the back of their camera or sends you a stunning photograph via Flickr, remember that it’s probably not the camera that made the shot so good, it’s the fact that the person who took it cared enough about photography to put in the time to understand what the hell they were doing.

Photos From Thailand

Sa and I returned from Thailand just in time to vote in an historic election (Sa’s first!) I took over 1200 photographs over yonder and here’s a few that I thought might be interesting. This time around I tried not to do too much as I mostly wanted to relax for once. I’ve never really taken a relaxing vacation and it was actually harder to pull off than I imagined. But there was one day where we never left our pool villa in Chiang Mai and I managed to read a whole book in one sitting and drink a large portion of rum to boot. Life was good that day. Have a look.

Why Digital Photography Matters

2008 marks the year that I have decided to seriously rekindle my lost love affair with photography. When I first applied to design school and I had to declare a major, my pen wavered between checking the graphic design box or the photography box. In the end I chose graphic design, and that was probably a wise choice as my natural talent still probably lies there. But even after high school I never really left the darkroom. My Beseler 23C enlarger made appearances in various apartment bathrooms throughout the late 80s and early 90s as I continued to produce mediocre black & white photographs. When I eventually moved to Thailand in 1996 I sold most of my stuff—including the darkroom—and I never developed another print again. I still shot a lot of film with my Pentax ME Super while living in Thailand, but the corner photomat was as close to any hands-on work as I got.

Fast forward to the year 2000 and my first digital camera, a Nikon 4500. While the camera itself did nothing to improve my natural ability to take decent photographs, it did allow me to take a lot of them. Film cost no longer mattered. Mixing chemicals no longer mattered. This allowed me to take huge quantities of photographs, and in that sense it did improve my ability in one important way: I no longer waited for the perfect shot, I just shot.

At the same time some of my old-school artist friends were dismissing digital photography as a lower art form. It lacked the hands-on of real photography: the smell of chemicals, the labored processes, the selection of papers, the dirtying of the hands. I found this rather ironic as I’m sure that’s exactly what the painters were telling the photographers back at the turn of the century: This soulless new artform with its gadgets and chemicals called “photography” can never achieve the museum-quality status of the works of the great painters and sculptors.

Today, digital photography is under a similar scrutiny that its older sibling likely experienced back in the day. This distrust of digital art is odd to me for several reasons. First, old school black and white photography (which gets the most “artistic” respect) is a process in which silver halide crystals are exposed to light and are then rendered black or white. As these chemicals are grouped together they create tonality depending on their proximity to one or another. So really, light affects the crystals and turns them on or off. Black or white. 1 or 2. It’s a binary process. Black and white photography is a digital artform by definition.

Second, when you shoot film the film itself is designed to react a certain way depending on manufacturer and style. From there the processing of the film is typically done by a lab and that process adds to the number of “hands” touching the “art”. Next paper manufacturers design their paper to have specific looks and feels, etc. You see where this is going. Conversely, when I shoot a photograph in RAW format and bring it into my software application, in this case Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop, I am editing the raw data the camera captured and I have full control over every pixel in the frame. The chain of command is reduced to me and the camera—no lab, no film, no outside forces filtering my work. So really, my “artistic” control is enhanced with digital photography, both by my ability to shoot a higher volume of photographs and my ability to edit each pixel directly. Now, it’s important to mention that no amount of equipment or software is going to make anyone a good photographer, but that’s true of any discipline. If you can’t paint, the best sable brush will do nothing for you. But the converse is also true, one’s medium doesn’t determine the level of artistic authenticity in one’s work, that can only me determined by the skill and vision of one’s endeavor.

But yeah, now that I have the right equipment, I want to spend the next year really focusing on technique—I want to elevate the craft of making photos—both behind the lens and behind the Macintosh. I’ve never called myself a photographer, but I hope by the end of the year I will feel comfortable doing just that. And I really want to start learning more from some of the modern masters. My latest favorite is Jill Greenberg. (See photo above.) Her attitude about photography is right on to me, and this quote from a recent video interview says it all:

I don’t really romanticize straight photography. I think it’s nice to just get in there..If you want to change the picture, change the picture. It doesn’t need to be evidence of some actual event that happened.

I remember when I first started printing my own photos in high school and I would always make sure to get the edges of the negative in the print as proof that I didn’t enlarge the shot in the darkroom. As if by succumbing to the whims of the camera manufacturer’s frame ratio I was being truer to the artform. Seems silly to me now.

More photos and a completely redesigned LookatLao Photography section coming this spring. In the meantime there’s always new snapshots over on Flickr.