The Birth of a Photography Studio

After 3 weeks of blood, sweat and a few tears, the new Luke Photography studio is nearing a point where it will be ready for occupation.  And unlike the Occupy “Insert City Here” movement that has fizzled out in various cities across the country, this one is here for the long haul.

The changing room has been built and is awaiting the finishing touches.  The wall along the north-facing windows has been extended, so that standard-width backgrounds can be hung from it, to take advantage of the natural light from the windows.  The floor has been installed in the shooting areas.  And most of the painting has been done.  The waiting area was finished off with a new couch and coffee table, and will be receiving new prints for the walls and some comfortable décor touches.

Next week, the changing room will be finished in a vintage Hollywood theme.  The work island in my office will be completed and stocked.  And finally, the sales room will be readied for the final touches.  Next weekend, furniture from the current studio and office will be moved in, and all the photography equipment will be following shortly after.

A new friend that I met in New Orleans sent me a congratulatory greeting card that contained a Home Depot gift card and several band aids.  The band aids have been used up, as has the gift card, which was used to help pay for the wood for the cabinets in the work isalnd.  There will a storage cubbie in my work island that will be forever known as the “Slye Spot” as a thank you to Kiera for her thoughtful gift.

As I told one of my new building neighbors: the good thing is that I can do all this renovation work.  The bad thing is….I can do all this renovation work.  Most of the heavy work has been done.  Now onto the finish carpentry, which will require fewer band aids, and a lot less sweat.  Then I can sit back and start the work that I was meant to do: create great photographs.

  

Watching Paint Dry...Nauseously

On and off for two weeks I‘ve been spending time painting several of the walls in my new studio.  Because I still have jobs to shoot and orders to fulfill, I can’t spend all my time there getting things ready.  So I pick and choose the days I can get there and try to make the most of the time that I do spend there.  Which makes me all that much crazier when I feel like I’ve wasted time.

I was planning on the walls in my waiting area reflect the nice warm, inviting, chocolately brown that is prominent in my logo and web site and is consistent with my branding.  As such, I proceeded down to the local Home Depot paint aisle and picked out a fantastic shade of paint called “Shaved Chocolate”.  Now….seeing that there was the name “chocolate” in the title of this latex-infused pigmented wonder, you’d assume that the resulting painted wall would be a reasonable facsimilie of a chocolate-like color.  I don’t know what corner of the world you are reading this from, but I have to assume if we all picked out a color that resembled chocolate, we’d all be pretty close.

As I watched the paint dry, I prayed to the God of Sherwin Williams that the color of the wall would indeed look better as it dried. Boy was I mistaken.  For what to my wondering eyes should appear, but a color that was not Shaved Chocolate.  If I had to describe it to my friends….and I did…it was Infant Diarrhea Brown.  Now, for those of you without kids…Infant Diarrhea Brown would never be mistaken for Shaved Chocolate.  No matter how late in the night the Infant Diarrhea Brown presented itself and no matter how badly you pleaded with your wife that it was ‘her turn’.

After assessing the situation, I knew that not only would my customers not like it, but it may cause many of the younger parents to rush out screaming with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.  One of the great things about paint aisles in big box stores is that they will often take back custom mixed paint that didn’t quite set the buyer’s world on fire.  Over a year ago I purchased a gallon of one such paint.  It was dark brown paint that I plucked from the Shelf of Mis-Fit Paints for $5, knowing that I could use it to paint backgrounds for my studio, or somewhere else.  I precisely mixed in 14 Dixie cups full of this dark brown paint into what was left of my Infant Diarrhea Brown paint, magically transforming it into….Shaved Chocolate.

As I happily covered all evidence of the…let’s say it together…Infant Diarrhea Brown, I was pleasantly surprised at how perfect the color was.   So I watched it dry.  Just to be sure that it stayed perfect.  And it did.  And now I can move on to another area of the studio, with the knowledge that I need to stay away from colors that resemble anything you might find in a diaper or regurgitated on a bib.  That being said, I may have to rethink the choice of Split Pea Soup in the sales room.

The End of a Kodak Era

This week Kodak announced that it was getting out of the camera business in order to save money.  No, that’s not a typo.  The company that brought photography to the masses in 1884 is exiting the business.

Kodak did not invent the camera.  Cameras were around for decades before.  In fact, the first known photograph dates back to 1825.  For the next 60 years, large box cameras were used to expose light onto glass or metal plates that were coated with light-sensitive materials, making it a very time intensive and laborious process.  Taking photographs often involved a strong-willed photographer, a couple of Sherpas, and a mule train to carry all the equipment.

What George Eastman did when he patented roll film in 1885 was to make it easier for everyday people to take photographs, without Sherpas or mule teams.  He coined the phrase “YouPush the Button, We Do the Rest”, which described the process by which a camera owner would send the whole camera back to Kodak when the roll was completely shot, and Kodak would process the film, make prints, and load film back in the camera, which it would then return to the owner.

Kodak started making cameras in 1891, introduced the No.2 Brownie in 1903 (which basically invented the photography enthusiast), and invented the first digital camera by Steve Sasson in 1975.

Fast-forward all the way to 1999, when I worked in Kodak Professional, testing the DCS professional digital cameras.  Kodak would buy camera bodies from Canon and Nikon and strip out all the film parts and replace them with all the digital components.  Half the Canon cameras would have a Kodak logo on them and were sold by Kodak, and half got the Canon logo and were sold by Canon.  Likewise with the Nikon cameras.

These cameras were the best digital cameras in the world.  I remember watching events like the Super Bowl, and noticed that at least 90% of the photographers on the sidelines were using Kodak cameras.  Only a photography geek would notice that, although I apologize to no one for that.  The cameras were also used by photojournalists all over the world, who happily used the amazing 2-megapixel cameras and could send photos all over the world…within hours…not days as with film.  We laugh at that now...but at the time, they were the cat's pajamas.

I also worked on the DCS Pro Back system, which was a 16-megapixel back that would fit on a medium format camera.  The camera back was amazing, but at $10,000, you weren’t expecting to sell a lot of them.  I felt very fortunate to be able to use that system, knowing that it was going to go into the hands of the best commercial photographers in the world.

In 2001 or 2002, Nikon introduced their own digital SLR camera.  Although it didn’t have all the bells and whistles, it was priced at about half of what the Kodak cameras were selling for.  I remember it being really quiet around the Kodak offices for almost a week.  As other camera manufacturers came up to speed on digital technology, other cameras came to market.  None of them had the quality of the Kodak digital SLRs, but they were good enough for the common man.  Sales of the Kodak cameras dropped, and Kodak Professional stopped making professional digital SLRs in 2005.  And this week, the announcement came that consumer cameras would no longer be made.

It is the end of an era.  I have a collection of old Kodak cameras, some dating back to the 1920s.  As a Rochester resident, the home of Kodak, we lived and breathed Kodak cameras our whole lives….for the better part of 120 years.  Until this week.  Now we get to witness Kodak moving off in another direction.

Creating a Photography Studio

It's finally here.  Twenty-five years in the making...and I finally have my first commercial studio.  Well, not yet.  What I have now is an open office area painted a horrible dark olive green that was formerly occupied by  Country Wide Home Loans.  You know Country Wide...one of those mortgage lending companies that robo-stamped mortgages and helped ease us in the the Great Recession.  A very dubious honor for the future World Headquarters of Luke Photography.  Maybe my first call should have been to have an exorcism performed.

What the studio "does" have is potential.  There are two offices in opposite corners of the room.  The one with the windows overlooking Donnelly's Pub will be my office, natch.  In the opposite corner is an office with no windows that will work nicely as a sales room for reviewing my customer's images with them.

There will be a large area (Shooting Bay #1 in photos) that will be my main shooting area.  There will be another area (Shooting Bay #2) that will be a natural light studio, and at least two other walls that will be used as backgrounds to shoot against.

These photos are from Day 0, when I got the keys from the landlord.  Within an hour, I actually started priming the walls to get rid of that excruciatingly ugly dark olive green paint.  Within a week, the painting should be done.  Within two weeks, the furniture should be delivered.  Within three weeks, the hardwood flooring and any construction that is needed should be done.  And within four weeks, I should be shooting in the new studio.  A Grand Opening-Open House is scheduled for Saturday, April 14th.  That is, unless an exorcism is really needed.  Then I'm calling 1-800-EXORCIST, and postponing the Open House.

Western half of studio. 

Eastern half of studio.  The landlord won't be staying.

Stay tuned as more progress is made.

Photo Chosen in Top 10 of Project 9.11

On September 11, 2011, I was one of more than 40 photographers that took part in Project 9.11, sponsored by the Professional Photographers of NY State (PPSNYS).  The project was merely to capture a day in the life of people on the 10th anniversary of the 9-11 attacks.

One of the photos I took and submitted was chosen in the Top 10 of the more than 400 photographs that were submitted.  The photo shows the detail of mourning bands on the badges of several officers lined up in formation.  It was taken at a memorial service held by the City of Rochester to honor all the first responders....police officers, fire fighters and emergency medical technicians....that lost their lives rushing towards the disaster as everyone else was running away.

The Top 10 photographs are shown on the PPSNYS website, and are all truly works of art.

A winner will be selected among the Top 10 and will be announced at the Photo Northeast Convention in Woodcliff Lake, NY in March 2012.

The other photos I submitted for the project are shown below.