The Online Photographer

The Plot Thickens

"There are a lot of people out there who are pissed...."

—Robert Mann

So you remember that I posted in passing about an Eggleston picture I liked that was being offered for sale for a big chunk of money. Then about the prices the sale actually fetched, which were in excess of pre-auction estimates.

Well, little did I know this would turn into an actual story.

It turns out that Eggleston had offered those same pictures before, many years ago—in limited editions. (When his dealer was Harry Lunn, who, quite by coincidence, we mentioned just a couple of days ago.) Uh-oh. According to gallerist Robert Mann, a lot of collectors are highly annoyed that new prints of their supposedly limited edition prints are coming onto the market.

Especially one Jonathan Sobel, described as "a major collector of William Eggleston's work," who, according to the developing story from PDN Pulse, "filed suit against the photographer yesterday in a U.S. District Court, accusing him of devaluing his vintage dye transfer prints by selling new, large-scale pigment prints of many of his iconic works."

You already know my opinion about limited editions. I think, to quote myself, "they're stupid"—from the photographer's point of view, that is. I don't think photographers should voluntarily limit their ability to profit from their own work just to benefit dealers and the secondary market. But I'll also opine that, once you set a limit, you should stick by your word. I gotta go with Sobel on this one—I think I'd be pissed, too.

PDN suggests checking back for more on the story later.

Mike
(Thanks to Ahmer Inam)

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Featured Comment by Jeff Grant: "I like the Brooks Jensen method: Editions. The first lot would have been Edition 1, and the new ones Edition 2. Problem solved."

Featured Comment by Kevin Purcell: "Artsbeat has a couple of extra details:

Last month, three dozen of the larger-format prints—40 by 66 inches instead of the original format of 16 by 20 inches....

"So they use a different printing technique and a (very) different size. I didn't realize how 'small' the original dye transfer prints were.

Mr. Eggleston’s lawyer told The Wall Street Journal that the lawsuit had no merit and that printing vintage works in new formats falls within his creative rights.

"Huffington Post has a very detailed overview on this topic too.

This was the first sale of these new pigment prints. "First time seen and sold," Read said, adding that his gallery plans to exhibit other to-be-created large-scale pigment prints from older negatives by Eggleston this fall at Frieze London.

"That might be another reason for Sobel trying to get on top of this.

"Plus there is a New York State law covering this but it excludes different sizes, production types and numbering systems (arabic versus Roman). Why did Sobel file in Federal court?"

Featured Comment by Chris Crawford: "I disagree with Mike and the collector here. Eggleston's new prints are a different medium. Dye transfers are rare and won't be devalued. If he did new dye transfers, then I'd understand collectors getting upset."

Featured Comment by Bobby Salmon: "It doesn't sound like Sobel has much of a case, for reasons already mentioned above. The concept of limited editioning is to me a false one and violates the whole nature and spirit of the photographic medium. Photography is the most democratic (with a small 'd') art form, the process best suited to mass printing and to providing art to larger numbers of people and for multiple end purposes. I'm not saying to give prints away for free, but artificially constraining photographic works into limited editions is an unnatural attempt to force photography into the mold of painting or screen printing. If any editioning is to be done at all, then, as mentioned in Jeff Grant's comment above, Brooks Jensen's method is the only one that makes any kind of organizational and honest sense."

Featured Comment by Ahmer Inam: "...And continuing this saga, PDN now has an interview with Mr. Sobel who does make some compelling arguments."

Random Excellence: Michael Poster

Photograph by Michael Poster

...Not so much this single image but the whole set, called circus school, which can be viewed on Michael's new website along with several other sets of work.

Not naming any names, but sometimes art museums actually make me a tiny bit angry with what passes for "photography" in some cases. Photography to me is about life, the world, and truth. "Photographs" with zero percent of any of those three things in them sometimes seem like a waste to me. I get...impatient.

Michael Poster is a documentary photographer of considerable seriousness. His work has a lot of those three things in it.

Mike

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Featured Comment by David Adam Edelstein: "Holy cow, yes. This one especially tells a lot of truth about circus: As an aerialist friend once told me, 'leotards are there to hide the bruises from practice.'"

Now It's Spring

James Friedman, Inside of a Major League Baseball

Jim Friedman's tribute to Opening Day. (The Cards beat the Miami Marlins 4-1, in the Marlins' new house.)

And don't forget what starts today. (No noise from the Patrons, please.)

Mike

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Just Ask

By William Schneider

I began collecting photographs back in the mid 1980s. My first print purchase was from a Very Big Name art photographer known for pioneering darkroom work in the 1960s.

I saw a photo of his on the cover of Darkroom Photography magazine in early 1986, and wanted it. I didn't know about the gallery scene or the "proper" way to purchase a print, so I just telephoned him after finding his number in the local library's collection of phone books.

The call must have caught him by surprise, and he must have sensed a naïvety in my conversation. He offered a 16x20 print to me for $300, but he said "don't tell the gallery." Apparently, they charged double that price for a print.

In another instance, I saw a documentary photo gracing the cover of a Land's End clothing catalog during Christmas, 1986. The caption inside the cover said, "Lois Holland and niece Alison Ladd share a quiet moment in Mineral Point, Wisconsin." I wrote to the company asking for more information about the photographer (the late Archie Lieberman), and they provided it. I called Archie, and he sent a print at no cost to me because I said I was a customer of Land's End, his client for that job.

My collection is admittedly hodge-podge, but I have obtained many, many prints over the years through special sales like the Turnley offer, special editions, and just plain asking the photographer directly.

It never hurts to just ask.

Bill

Bill Schneider teaches in the School of Visual Communication at Ohio University.

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Featured Comment by Ruby: "I also called a photographer, after seeing a print I liked at our local museum. It turned out the exhibit ended the next week and I was able to buy the very print they displayed, already framed and signed."

Featured Comment by Jim Richardson: "Speaking of recent connections on TOP! You realize that Archie Lieberman did the wonderful documentary book Farm Boy, right? And that Howard Chapnick (lately mentioned here by Peter Turnley) was his agent on that book. Lieberman was one of my heroes, teaching me the value of documenting simple events over time. Seeing the boy in his book grow up, get married, and start his own family was a sweet, simple, and rewarding reading experience."

The 2012 iPad, Part II: Bigger Display, Better Camera

By Ctein

(Part I is here)

This is the second part of my review of new iPad. I strongly recommend the first part and my previous iPad reviews to understand where I'm coming from with this device. I'm reviewing only the features that I care about, as there are an unlimited number of other reviews out there.

Resuming right from where I left off, last column...

Ultra-high-resolution displays like the iPad's can't reasonably portray graphics at their "native" resolutions, if those graphics were designed to look good on normal displays. Ordinary displays have resolutions of 100–150 ppi; the Retina displays easily double that. Consequently, if I design a thumbnail for my website that's, oh, say, 170 by 135 pixels I'd expect it to take up 1 inch square or so or so on a normal display. On a new iPad it would come out something more like 1 cm square.

iPad's rendering software upsamples the graphic to display it a more plausible size in layouts suitable for normal human beings instead of Lilliputians. Unfortunately, the upsampling looks lousy. Even my 768x1024 pixel "fullscreen" images look mediocre. The thumbnails look like, well, total crap.

For those who want technical details on dealing with this, read this. I'll be taking the brute force approach; e.g., leave the image tag heighth and width attributes alone (e.g., 170x135 px) but upload double-resolution (340x270 px) JPEGs and just let the receiving device cope.

My test page now looks great on all screens. It's going to be a lot of work, since I don't have high resolution versions of most of the full-screen images; it's back to square one to re-create them. The thumbnails, at least, I can up-rez relatively efficiently (a few minutes work apiece) from existing resources.

The problem isn't pressing; currently this matters only for the new iPad. Still, the handwriting's on the wall; it's not going to be too many years before everybody is running high-resolution displays. Consider yourself warned.

Now, let's talk about the camera.

I need to bring up ergonomics, a very subjective matter. I ask you to imagine the very best-handling digital camera/phone/whatever you've used and rated as a 10 and the very worst as a 1. Ready? Where would the new iPad fall on that scale?

About –273.

There's just about no way it's good. The iPad is too heavy and awkwardly shaped to comfortably hold in camera-using position. You can select what point to focus on and set the exposure for by touching the screen, but then you're gripping one-handed, and that hand'll cramp up really quickly. In landscape mode, the lens is at the lower right corner, where it is very easily accidentally touched while holding the iPad in a way that places your hand near the shutter button. Voila, a smear of finger grease on the camera cover glass! Rotating the iPad 180° places the shutter button right next to the "exit this application" button. Guess which one you'll be hitting by accident? Portrait mode is better but still difficult.

How does the camera perform? As the photograph of the Macbeth chart (above) shows, color rendition is really excellent. It is slightly too saturated, but the hues are spot on. A good digital camera will do better, but this is more accurate color than any film can provide (says the guy who's tested most of them). Under non-daylight conditions, such as fluorescent or incandescent light, there is a slight color cast, orangish for incandescent lamps and yellowish for compact fluorescents. It is usually ignorable. It could easily be corrected; even Mac OS's Preview is sufficient for this task.

I measure the resolution at about 1200 lines by 1600 lines. That's roughly a 2-megapixel equivalent, a bit low for a 5-megapixel camera. In film terms, that's roughly like getting 25 lp/mm from a 35mm point-and-shoot camera. Not quite at the level of "acceptable sharpness" in an 8x10 print, but close. Indeed, such prints made from the iPad's photos are passably sharp; just don't scrutinize them too closely. Remarkably, sharpness is entirely uniform from center to corner; that new five-element lens really is remarkable. It does show a bit of pincushion distortion.

The camera will focus close enough to cover smaller than a 3x4" area; on the iPad's screen, it's more than a 2X enlargement from life-size. Even with relatively low resolution, you can photograph detail as fine as the naked eye can see.

Figure 2

The iPad's exposure range measures only seven stops. This is definitely an expose-for-the-highlights camera. Let the shadows go. Automatically-determined exposure usually works well, as figure 2 indicates, but there will be times when you'll need to dial it down by tapping the screen in a brighter area. Figure 2 show off both the accurate color and short exposure range. Elmo's almond eyes and the slight pinkish tinge to the skin around his eye are faithfully reproduced while the feathers are pleasantly close to the proper shade of gray.

Figure 3

Zooming in on figure 2 to 100% (figure 3) shows the ointment's big fly. Extremely aggressive noise reduction produces that undesirable "watercolor" look. The fine detail in the feathers on Elmo's throat pops in and out of existence depending on whether it has enough contrast to survive the noise-reduction algorithm's not-so-tender ministrations. At low light levels the noise really becomes unacceptable, viz. figure 4 (100% scale). It's tolerable on the iPad screen and might be acceptable in a "drugstore" sized print. It's ugly in anything larger.

Figure 4

Even in direct sunlight, the photographs aren't noise-free, as you can see in figure 5 (full frame) and figure 6 (100% scale). The noise is fine-grained; in a print, it looks about what you'd expect from a fine-grain 35mm film. Entirely acceptable to most viewers, even me, but well below what digital cameras can deliver today. Subject matter with bold edges and tones won't suffer much from the noise issues, as figure 7 (full frame) nicely demonstrates. Although it lacks tack-sharpness, it makes an attractive 8x 10print.

Figure 5

Figure 6

Figure 7

All in all, I'd say the iPad camera's quality is vaguely comparable to a middlin' 35mm point-and-shoot (better in some ways, worse in others). That puts it well below today's good digicams and the iPhone 4S. But the camera's usable, if you don't get your expectations too high; that certainly couldn't be said of the one in the iPad2.

Ctein

Note: None of the illustrations here were massaged or enhanced, save for a slight exposure adjustment to figure 1 so that it would properly match the Macbeth chart.

Ctein's regular weekly column on TOP appears on Wednesdays.

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Update #2—And a Fish Tale

 9 p.m. Tuesday: I am happy to report I am no longer overwhelmed. In fact I'm completely caught up with the orders, and with all the bookkeeping. Despite not being good at that sort of detail work, I'm being very careful and checking everything twice. If you place an order, you will get a response from me within 12 hours at the most, and probably much sooner than that.

It's been a successful sale so far, with 79 TOP readers from 19 different countries each ordering between one and seven prints. Twenty-one people so far have taken us up on our offer of a free one. Ctein ordered four, and I intend to buy "News." (I already have several Turnleys. Incidentally, speaking of that, it occurred to me this morning that Peter is the only one of Voja's clients whose prints I can actually afford! And I can only afford his because of the sales we've done together here on TOP.)

As a small tease, if you are one of the many readers I've heard from without enough free cash at the moment to participate in this sale, you'll be in luck soon. Ctein is in the process of creating an "example print" to show off the very, very best print quality that a 12-MP Micro 4/3 file is capable of—the largest, most detailed, most perfect possible print. Because it's intended as a technical example and he wants to get them into your hands for informational purposes, he is planning to pare the cost down to as little as humanly possible. That print will be extremely affordable. And you might well like the picture, too—it's more than just a test shot.

Speaking of being able to afford Voja's prints, a little story. (I've told this before, so feel free to roll your eyes and shake your head and go get a beer.) When I lived in Washington, D.C., I would make a day trip to Manhattan three or four times a year to make a whirlwind tour of all the photo galleries (and I believe there were a lot more of them in the '80s than there are now). One of my regular trips was always to see the AIPAD show, which was originated by my friend Kathleen Ewing of the Kathleen Ewing Gallery, AIPAD's first director. (This year's show just concluded, a few days ago.) And at one of the AIPAD shows, there was a high, thin buzz going around the room high in the air—Josef Koudelka was actually selling prints for the first time. The rumor was that he'd gotten married and was actually living in a domicile, after years of being a true nomad, sleeping on friends' couches and in the hallways of Magnum between photographic journeys.

Robert Koch Gallery of San Francisco was showing the prints, and they were utterly gorgeous, among the very most beautiful photographic prints I had ever seen. The murmur was everywhere—the prints were being made by the mysterious, very private master printer in Paris who also did most of most of Henri Cartier-Bresson's prints. Very exclusive, too—he worked only for the best photographers in the world, a small, select group. I was not to know his actual name for years, but that was the first time I'd ever heard of Voja Mitrovic.

And the Koudelkas only cost twelve hundred dollars. And I had twelve hundred dollars. True, it was most of my net worth, but I lived very simply at that time and didn't have much need for money. I decided to do it. The choice was between two wonderful prints; this one:

And this one:

I looked and looked, but I couldn't decide. I walked around the hall and came back. Yea verily, I had my checkbook out, my pen poised. But I got cold feet in the end and decided to be "sensible," and not buy a print at all.

Very foolish. It would not be worth 100 times that today, but it would easily be worth more than ten times what it cost then. And I will never own one now.

Tyrannosaurus vs. stegosaurus
Forgive me for rambling, but I thought of something else to tell you. Remember a few days ago when we were looking for a missing issue of 35mm Photography for Jim Hughes? Doug Chadwick found a copy on eBay, and I purchased it, in a lot of six issues.

Well, the issues arrived yesterday. There was the one with Edouard Boubat and "Dave and Pete Turnley," "two teenagers" from Fort Wayne. But the article that fascinated me was in the Spring 1976 issue, included in the lot. Entitled "The Print Prospectors," and written by Jacob Deschin, and among other things chronicling the tyrannosaurus-stegosuarus struggle between Lee Witkin and Harry Lunn, two powerful competing dealers of the era (I got ignored by Harry a few times, I'll have you know), it warranted the following cover blurb: "WHY ARE PRINT PRICES SKYROCKETING? WE INVESTIGATE THE COLLECTING BOOM." In the article, on page after page, one photograph after another was held up as an example of those then-sky-high-priced prints—next to each picture, a dollar amount in huge, bold type.

An André Kertesz—

$375

 

It was a whopping $600 for a Brassai or a Eugene Atget. In the stratosphere was a rare Daguerreotype of Edgar Allan Poe for $35,000, the value of which may not have changed much since then. But at the top of the real-world prices was Stieglitz's "The Steerage" and Diane Arbus's "Identical Twins" for $4,000 each. A lot of money in those days—about the price of a nice high-end Buick. For a lousy pic-cha? I can see why that would impress.

"The Steerage" would most probably crack the million mark if one were to come on the market today—but I'm just guessing. I wrote an article about that Arbus a while back, though, and looked into what a print would be worth, and an unsigned "Identical Twins" would go for somewhere within shouting distance of $400,000 now, I think. There's that factor of 100. A wee bit out of reach for most of us. Somebody, somewhere, is probably regretting that Buick and wishing they'd kept taking the bus.

This George Tice print, Two Amish Boys, Lancaster, Pa., is worth $1,200 now. In the "collecting boom" of '76 you could have picked it up for $75, according to Jacob Deschin's 35mm Photography article.

I'll never be a photography collector. I have a few nice things, and a few more interesting things, and a lot of things that have personal meaning to me, but not much that will go to even a modest museum when I shuffle off to Buffalo. But I should have bought a Koudelka when I had the chance. That fish slithered and slashed through the shallows and clean got away, dang it.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Juan Buhler: "Interesting that you mention those Koudelka photos in this context. When I took Peter's workshop in Paris in 2003 (the very first one he did!), and Voja came over to talk to us, the print of Koudelka's 'Romania, 1968,' the one with the horse, was one of the few he brought. He had two prints: one straight, 'as is' from the negative, and his final exhibition print. The difference was amazing: the tonality of the horse is incredible, the texture of the background wall makes you want to touch it. If I had any shreds of an idea that a good printer is not an artist, they went away when I saw that. It was one of the highlights of that week."

Featured Comment by John Camp: "I got relatively affluent in the early '90s, and had always been interested in buying some decent photographs. I talked to a museum curator who suggested that I go after the images I wanted, but that I buy the 'printed later' copies which were quite a bit cheaper than the vintage shots. The idea, he said, is to get photos you love, and not worry about the investment value. It turned out that the museum had another curator who would have told me the opposite—get the vintage stuff. But, I didn't talk to him.

"So, I bought a lot of prints that haven't increased much in value, although they're famous, or at least, famous among photographers. If I'd met the other guy first, I would have spent more money for the same images, but the values would have increased a lot.

"As a great philosopher once said, 'Oh well.'

"There are a couple of footnotes to this experience: one is that 'printed later' prints are often better than vintage prints, so maybe I got more out of them aesthetically than I would have if they'd been purchased as financial instruments. (Sob.) The other is, I did buy a beautiful Mapplethorpe flower, a big silver print. I have no idea of what it's worth now, but every once in a while I look at it and fantasize that it's worth a lot."

Featured Comment by Peter Turnley: "Your post today is wonderful. When I do my Paris workshops, Voja comes and shows my workshop participants what both of the Koudelka photographs you have posted look like with a simple exposure of a piece of fiber paper exposed one time in order to achieve the proper blacks with no burning and dodging. He then shows a final print of both of the photographs after his often half hour to one hour of burning and dodging required to achieve the look of the two photographs you've published in this post. Without fail, when the moment comes when he puts the two next to each other—the breath is literally taken away from all of the viewers in the room when they realize the contribution his printing makes to the final print. This is never meant to take any thing away from Koudelka's genius in making the photographs because Voja acknowledges of course that he couldn't make the prints without all of the necessary information on the negatives—and he always asks that if anyone photographs the scene that they not publish it. But, seeing this demonstration is a moment my workshop students will never forget!

"Viva Voja, and viva Koudelka—I am eternally inspired by Voja and his printing, and by Koudelka's photographs and his approach to life and photography."

Fuji X-Pro1 Ships!

Cannot resist mentioning: Amazon opened the Fuji X-Pro1 floodgates this morning. And B&H Photo has announced availability tomorrow (you can pre-order now). Expect a quick sellout.

Mike
(Thanks to Kent Phelan and Andrei Pandele)

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LED Lighting for Photography: Kirk Tuck

Why LEDs? And what was I thinking?

The "classic."  A one-foot-by-one-foot panel from Litepanels. One of the few U.S. companies making LED panel products. Also, one of the very first.

By Kirk Tuck

So. I finished writing four books and I was ready to take a break. Then I ghost-wrote a marketing book for a friend and I was really ready to take a break. But my publisher was insistent. Didn't I have something I wanted to write for them? Well, I did have one thing I was keenly interested in, but I wasn't sure anyone else would really care. I pitched the people at Amherst Media on a book about LED lights, and they went for it.

Once I signed the contract the reality of what I'd done kicked in. With my previous books I could fall back on a rich library of past assignments done with flashes and various cameras. I could fall back on twenty-odd years of experience divining just how best to use the lights of the day. I could steal from the best, like Jon Falk, who really was so instrumental in turning us all on to portable lights, homemade battery packs, and off-camera lights.

But when it came to LED lights I was as naked and uninitiated as the next guy. In fact, when I pitched the book, I'd only done a handful of commercial assignments with the lights and just a couple of small, industrial videos. But I had a nagging sense that LED lighting equipment, mostly small panels, was poised to change photography. And video production. With that in mind, I spent a year experimenting and playing and learning everything I could about the lights. Then I sat down and pounded out my book.

Since every studio has an equipment cabinet full of electronic flashes in the form of monolights, pack-and-head systems, and battery-powered flashes, why would anyone care about a relatively low-output light source that needed some color correction intervention? Why indeed.

But as I looked over the photographic landscape I noticed a few things that gave me pause. Since everyone was using essentially the same kind of lighting and the same kinds of modifiers (flash, with umbrellas and softboxes and grids) everyone's work was starting to look like everyone else's work. Sure, some few photon workers had some post processing they'd throw into the mix for a bit of differentiation but the foundations of the images all cloyed together like visual and cultural mud.

And when I looked at the professionals a couple of generations younger than me I saw a group of people who could swim back and forth between video and stills with a fluid effortlessness that made me envious. These were people who could shoot both sides of the divide without missing a beat. But they were trained by people like me who were already mired in the sticky status quo of photographic tradition. We made sure they knew how to flash. What they needed now weredual-purpose lights. Lights that could do still life, portraits, product shots, and movies and videos without changing a thing. They were pushing for them. And I realized that was exactly what LED lighting was all about. It could go either way.

Here is the "behind the scenes shot" of the lighting set up of a product shot. Always on means always visual.

The shot from the setup above.

After two years with the LEDs I am more comfortable shooting a portrait with a continuous light source than a flash. We've started to light stuff more like DPs on movie sets and less like 1970s portrait studios.

I've done some research and I've found that my subjects are more comfortable too. Seems that repeated flash causes the pupil to contract and expand over and over again. That causes optical fatigue and headaches. It affects both the shooter and the models. Flashes also encourage blinking because people subconsciously gird themselves against the popping onslaught of photons. (Are they waves or particles? Or waves of particles?) The continuous light allows use to become habituated. Comfortable in a way that flash never does.

Soft, directional light is important to my portrait style. So are quiet poses. Nothing the output of a few inexpensive LED panels can't handle. 

I've assembled enough LED power to put a prodigious amount of lumens through a big diffusion panel and still get exposures like ƒ/5.6 at 1/250th at ISO 400. With a good camera I can push the ISO higher and get even more action stopping exposure settings. And it seems natural.

In the course of writing the book I've come across dozens of experts who tried an LED panel or two back in the early part of the century. They came away with the permanent prejudice that the lights were all over the map color-wise, and not nearly powerful enough to use with the still cameras of the day. (I remember how bad the high ISOs were on cameras like the Kodak DCS 760.) That's all changed. And the days of being dependent on using ISO 80 to get good quality are long gone.

There are compromises. They will change. Right now only the most expensive LED panels have real CRI's (color rendering indexes) of 90 or more; 90+ is thought to be the gold standard for getting really accurate color spectra. Most of the less expensive imports advertise CRI's of 80. But most of us don't shoot under "gold standard" studio conditions anyway. We've learned to shoot well in mixed light, florescent light, and combinations of daylight and artificial light.

This outside shot, done in open shade, shows that small panels can be pushed into service as fill lights. It also shows a decent color match between the fill light and the ambient daylight.

LED panels, especially the inexpensive ones, have some rough edges. They could be brighter. And almost all of them suffer from a treatable green spike (or magenta dip) in their overall spectrum. But now they are easily correctable with appropriate magenta filtration. And when using a camera like the Nikon D3s or the Canon 5D Mark III, you'll have more than enough clean ISO to do just about any kind of photo short of filling in shadows in direct sunlight.

I think they have their place in providing a new way to shoot. I'm particularly happy with the portrait work I like to do in black and white. The tonality is different from other light sources, and the subdued magenta makes for better skin tones. I like the calmness of working with them when shooting people who are unused to a traditional "flash" studio experience.

Black and white image of Amy made with one 1000 bulb LED panel "pushed" through a six-by-six-foot diffusion scrim.

So, I wrote the book and discussed what I'd found. I tossed in 250+ samples and examples and I talked about using the lights for video as well. If you've been curious about what's out there beyond flash, this book might be for you. The video guys have pushed the "new tech" market hard. There's innovation and value pricing everywhere. It's all to our advantage. The push of efficient lights with better and better rendering characteristic means we photographers pay much less for good LED lights than ever before. It may be time to stick a toe in the water and see what it's all about.

Kirk

Kirk's new book, LED Lighting: Professional Techniques for Digital Photographers (U.K. link)

Kirk's Recommended LED Products
Fancier 500 LED Light Panel ($179.99). This is the basic 500 LED light. It's got four switches on the back to ratio power. It's bare bones. No color control or battery adapter. But it's cheap and rugged.

Fancier 160 Dimmable LED Camcorder Light ($59.99). These are my favorite cheap, battery-powered LED Panels. We use them for everything. Even put them in jack-o-lanterns for Halloween. They use AA batteries or cheap, generic Lithium batteries that are a copy of the Sony camcorder batteries. They have a stepless control for power. No color control, but a slot for supplied filters.

Litepanels 1x1' 3200K/5600K Bi-Color LED Flood (pictured at the top of the post) ($2,329.95). This is definitely the high-priced spread. This is what they use in the White House News Room. And in network TV. And in the photo studios of the still photography demigods. It's the Litepanels 1x1 LED with two set of colored bulbs, daylight and tungsten. By cross fading between the two sets you can shift color balance from 3200–5600K. These are the "gold standard" of the industry. (Kirk says, "I want four. Hello, Santa?")

Fotodiox 1000ASV Still/Video LED Light Kit ($429.95). Kirk's big favorite. Here's a light that is dimmable with a rotary knob and, with a separate knob, will cross-fade between tungsten and daylight bulbs to hit any color temperature between 2300k and 5600k. It comes with an AC power adapter and is wired and plugged to accept Sony V-type 12V batteries for location use. For the price it's pretty astounding. You'll still need to add in a bit of filtration for the green spike.

Fotodiox 312AS Still/Video LED Light Kit ($158.95). And here's a smaller, lighter unit that does the two-color cross-fade along with the stepless dimming control. Comes with two generic Sony-type camcorder batteries, a charger and a set of color filters. I'm buying one right now, today, before this post goes up, so I can be sure to get one for myself [me too. —Ed.]. A perfect size in a nice kit.

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Featured Comment by Gerry Morgan: "I've just finished reading Kirk's LED Lighting book and it's superb. The little I knew about LEDs before reading it I had gleaned from Kirk's blog. The book was a fun read and a great primer. Armed with Kirk's technical information (and safety warnings—don't stare at those LEDs), I now feel ready to get started."

Featured Comment by Rick: "...Me too! Thanks, gentlemen—I never really looked into this, as a quick search made it look like $X,XXX to get into this. But I'm now on my way.... :-) "

Featured Comment by Mike Plews: "Great piece. I'm a TV news shooter and we keep Fancier 500A fixtures in our cars for live hits. In the last year we started going from traditional live trucks to IP-based live reporting. TVU backpacks if anyone is interested. The problem with this is the loss of a full truck with its generator to run a couple of Lowel lights.

"The Fancier runs just fine off a cigarette lighter inverter or a 12v battery. The 500A also has a dimmer in addition to the individual switches. That means on night hits you can set up the camera to get the background where you want it then stand the talent in place and use the dimmer to balance it all out. You can do the same thing by feathering the lights or walking them back but when you are up against it just being able to spin a knob is very cool.

"We also put Litepanels micro instruments on top of all our cameras for run-and-gun shooting. If you want to get cute you can pull the light off and hold it at arms length to get nice off-axis light when working in the dark.

"The progress in LED lighting in the last couple of years has been amazing. You can really get a lot of light for not much dough these days. That's a good thing."

Sale Update

The print sale is going swimmingly, but I'm drowning. We're being inundated in torrents of orders. Enough watery metaphors? Okay.

Anyway. If you've emailed an order (thank you), you will eventually get an email back from me. If you don't, there's a problem, so let me know, but give it a couple of days—I'm currently pretty far behind, and probably will be for a while.

If you need anything from me that has nothing to do with the print sale, now is not a good time. In fact it's possible things might be pretty quiet around here for the next few days, as I do fun things like track and print orders, relearn (yet again) how to use a spreadsheet program, and cram every hour's worth of data entry tasks into about two and a half hours (my mind wanders. I have to go back and check. And then once more. I am just not good at this sort of thing). If so, I apologize. TOP World Headquarters is, among other deficiencies, egregiously understaffed. I end up doing just about everything under the sun but writing. (Sound familiar, pro photographers?)

We always get everything right in the end, though, never fear. Thanks to all for your interest.

Mike

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All-Time Best April Fool's

This takes the palm as my favorite all-time April Fool's Day post ever. Kudos to the talented Matt Laur and his PhotoPaint wizardry.

I'd ask for it back, but somehow I don't think that would work....

Mike

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Peter Turnley Print Offer II

"Glance"

This week, TOP is pleased to be able to offer, once again, a selection of fine prints of our friend Peter Turnley's pictures of Paris.

[UPDATE, Friday 4/6/12, 6:00: Sale has ended.]

These prints are available year-round, to all, for a standard price of $1,200 for a print on 16x20" paper, which is a reasonable price for fine prints from a well-established living photographer. TOP is able to offer somewhat smaller prints for much lower prices because we take orders in advance and then produce the work specifically to fulfill the orders we get.

Because of this, as regular readers no doubt know, we only take orders for five days. When the orders close, that's it—the printing and shipping materials are purchased in bulk and the work starts. We really don't take more orders once the sale closes.

"Wheelbarrow"

I've assigned one-word titles to the pictures for ease in ordering. These aren't Peter's formal titles for the pictures, just tags to help me identify them.

These are traditional fine prints on fiber-base silver-gelatin paper made from film negatives, taken with Leicas or Nikons. The prints will be made, once again, by Voja Mitrovic, who was Henri Cartier-Bresson's favored printer for more than 30 years and has been the printer for a select list of the world's best photojournalistic-style photographers, including Josef Koudelka and Sebastiao Salgado as well as the Turnley brothers.

"Kids"

This sale differs from our last one in that anyone ordering three prints or more can choose an additional one for free. And because of this, we're including one print that was offered in the last sale—Peter's signature image of the rooftop view of the bridges on the Seine with the Eiffel Tower in the distance. Last time, many purchasers bought two of these, persumably to give one away as a gift. We hope to make that even easier for you this time.

"Rooftops"

This picture is surely one of the most recognizable pictures of Paris in the world—in poster form, it has been a huge all-time bestseller. But relatively few people own an original, signed print of it.

The prints are exceptionally lovely. I own several (including my favorite, the one we're calling "wheelbarrow") and am looking forward to adding a couple more to my collection this time.

The price for these prints is $395 for one, $375 for the second one, and $225 for the third (and fourth). The prints are the standard European print size of 30x40 centimeters (~12x16 inches) (image area slightly smaller). The prints are signed on the front by Peter and on the back by Peter and Voja. The editions are unlimited.

One print $395
Two prints $770
Four prints (three plus one additional fourth print for free) $995
(Each additional print is $225 more.)

"News"

To order....

[Ordering information removed; print offer ended 6 p.m. Central Time 4/6/12]

The prints are made in Paris but order fulfillment is done from New York, so U.S. shipping is $15 and for all other countries it's $25. I'm very sorry, but prints cannot be shipped from Europe.

The sale will close on the afternoon of Friday, April 6th.

"Lovers"

Thank you very much for considering our sale and for reading TOP!

Mike

ADDENDUM: Some people in the Comments seem to be worried about European delivery, customs, duties, etc. We did not have any problems with that last time. Packages originated as USPS international mail and most were delivered within ten days. They were declared as documents and value was accurately stated as the replacement cost for us, which was the price of materials. We can't guarantee anything absolutely, but based on our actual experience last time, European buyers don't need to be concerned about delivery issues. —MJ

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