I have just been the reading on ‘Editor and Publisher’ a challenging tale of the times we are all living at the moment.

Winner of ‘World Press Photo’ Anthony Suau recounts his unsuccessful battle to get his excellent photo essay on the economic crisis in Cleveland ,Ohio, published in ‘Time’ magazine.

Any regular readers of ‘The Dark Art’ will know that I have considerable sympathy with this situation.

What I find truly disturbing though are the comments attributed to Suau in the ‘Editor and publisher’ story

The last two months have been especially bad, Suau says. He hasn’t had a single assignment except for covering the presidential inauguration for a Japanese book publisher.

“If the situation continues like it has in the last two months, down the road I would be in danger,” Suau says. “Do I have to get another job to do something? I don’t know. I may have to do something else besides photography.”

Anthony, who has won a total of two World Press awards and the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for feature photography,is a seasoned pro with 20 years experience,covering conflicts and human crises around the world.

Judging from the experience of many of my peers, Anthony is not alone in these particularly trying times.

It brought to mind an experience I had in 1993 when I won the ‘Nikon Feature Photographer of the year award’

I really thought I had arrived, lots of Picture Editors came up to me at the awards and complimented me on my work.

So I waited for the phone to ring……waiting for that call for some big gig or another.

Waiting for the magic wand to be waved by someone, anyone, but myself

I was to wait for some time, as ‘The’ phone call which I waited for never actually came.

I never did quite work it out

But I do have a theory………………

I reckon that when one wins a prize or an award, be it big or small, it may be best to consider it as a tool with which to promote oneself with, nothing more, nothing less

I wonder what would have happened if I had been more proactive after my small piece of success?

What I do know when I have had success subsequently I have used it as a license to be a right royal persistent pain in the backside to any art director or commissioning editor who will open the door to me.

I wish Anthony all the best with his career and hope he gets the work he so richly deserves.

The photographic world would be a poorer place without him.

Hats off to DPreview for getting someone to talk on the record about this lens.
Robert Cristina, Manager of professional products, Europe and Ludovic Drean, Product Manager for lenses, Europe talked to DPreview:
…The concept was to give a 50mm equivalent lens on the DX format. A lot of people have bought the 50 1.8 because [...]

I received a call last week from Bank of the West in San Francisco, CA. The director of communication needed a portrait of one of his bankers with a client for their annual report. The photograph was to be taken at the clients location in Westminster, Colorado.

I was provide a sample photo that was taken by another photographer in another city to match the lighting on the subjects. The background in the sample photo was not a true white, rather a dull gray… poor execution in my mind.

We arrived at our location and found the conference room filled with a large table and about 20 chairs. We spent about 5 minutes pulling chair out and placing them in the hall way and pushing the large table to one side.

We put up a 9 foot white seamless for the background which fit right up to the conference table. I used the surface of the conference table to position one of my background lights. We used a total of 3 SB-800′s fired via CLS from the commander unit built in on my Nikon D700. I used two SB’s for the background illumination. Both strobes where mounted on Justin Clamps, one strobe placed on the conference table and the other on the window ledge.

Both of the background strobes where set to 1/4 power group B. You can see my foam gobo’s placed on the head of both strobes, these are used to prevent light spilling on my subjects. The key light was also an SB-800 on a Justin Clamp and place on the back of a large Octa box. This strobe was set to 1/2 power and was placed in Group A.

I was able to use two groups on the CLS system for this lighting set up. The two strobes lighting the background are a “matched” set. Both strobes required the same amount of power out of each strobe and therefore could be place in the same group. With the CLS system, all strobes placed within the same group, in this case group B, each of those strobes receive the same power that the command unit is set for in that group.

On both my D300 and D700 cameras, the built in command unit will only control two groups, A & B. If I needed a third group C to light the shot, I would have to use an SU-800 command unit or another SB-800 as the commander.

In order to get a clean white for easy knock outs, your background needs to be about a stop and a half brighter than the key light on the subject.

You can see here with the background lights turned off we had sunlight driving through the blinds and projecting the window on the seamless. I was able to even out the light with the power settings on the background lights. Here is what the final image looks like.

This is the layout I had to work with for the above photo. The subjects above will be removed from the background and inserted into the circled location on the layout design below.