Carleton Watkins (1829-1916) travelled from New York State to California as a young man alongside his slightly older family friend Collis Huntington. After some time in the West, Watkins took up a temporary position in a daguerreotypy studio and from that moment had found his calling… he would be a photographer.

Watkins had a mammoth camera made by a cabinetmaker to take 18 inch by 22 inch glass negatives and headed on the long and arduous trek to Yosemite where he produced mammoth plate photographs that were received with some acclaim. Although, the best of these Yosemite photographs were produced in the 1860s, while in his 30s as a more accomplished expert in the field. He went on to record much of the development of the West Coast including the gold rush and the ever-expanding railroads.

Watkins also produced a large number of stereoscopic photographic views through his career using a stereo camera, popular in the mid-to-late 1800s, and employed techniques like panorama and ‘putting a framed photograph on a wall’ that were quite novel.

So why have you probably not heard of Carleton Watkins? After all, he was the photographic rival to Edweard Muybridge. His friend Collis Huntington was to be one of the big four Robber Barons of the 19th Century railroads alongside Leland Stanford, Mark Hopkins and Charles Crocker.

The answer is probably that Carleton Watkins left little evidence of his thinking behind in written words to share for posterity.

But he was also, in the end, a victim of fate. On the morning of 18 April, 1906 Carleton Watkins woke to the San Francisco earthquake and a studio where a lifetime work lay in broken glass plates and burning business records. He was approaching 70 and had just arranged for his life’s work to be bought by Stanford University. The post-earthquake fire deleted that work like a blunt force trauma. A half century of work. Gone.

It wasn’t until the 1960s and 1970s that interest in Watkins resurfaced. Remember, he took those Yosemite photographs some 80 years before Ansel Adams trod the timbers into that same park to create his iconic images.

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art produced Carleton Watkins: The Art of Perception by Douglas R. Nickel as an exhibition book. It not only covers Watkins mammoth plate photographs but includes a large number of other stereoscope, panorama and card photographs.

I think if you take the time to look at the work of Carleton Watkins you’ll be amazed at the quality and detail of those photographs. In the mid-to-late 1800s photography was barely out of its cage and Watkins produced what could be described as perfect landscapes. They were technical masterpieces. Created under extreme difficulty and carried home precariously on the backs of mules.

It makes clear that photography is a medium that started out with perfection and seems to have been met by compromises in every direction. They already had it back in the day, right there.

The 2011 CAST Gallery 18th Birthday Party and Members Exhibition is on next week. The party runs from 6-9pm on Saturday 10 December, 2011 with the members exhibition continuing through until 22 December. This year’s members exhibition won’t be a gallery full of artwork… members were invited to submit birthday cards to celebrate the event.

As a member, I received the balloon in the mail today. I blew it up. I even took a few photographs of it.

I’m guessing that the CAST Gallery forgot there were nobody plods like me out there in the membership. The reason I’m a member is that once a year I get to put a framed photograph on a wall in an exhibition space. Nothing more. Nothing less. I’m not a real artist so I’m never going to get studio space or any other artist membership support. Just to put a picture on the wall for a week.

I guess we’ll just have to see what eventuates next year for the member’s exhibition. I’ve got a two year membership at the moment but if there’s nothing in it for me as a member then I’ll spend that few dollars on something relevant to my existence. A few rolls of film. In the meantime, I got a balloon. Yup.

Photoforce has been processing film in Hobart for 29 years and at one time there were over 20 places you could send film for processing. The only two film processors remaining are Stallards Camera House and Perfect Prints.

As far as I’m aware, neither service targets the professional photographic print. I’m not sure if either provide true black and white processing or high quality larger one-off prints.

Photoforce are recommending their clients onto Atkins Technicolour for E6 processing at 20% discount until the end of 2011. Atkins Technicolour are located at 89 Fullarton Road, Kent Town, South Australia, 5067 (email: info@atkins.com.au).

In a brief conversation we learned the major reason for Photoforce’s closure was a landlord unwilling to let them utilise the spare space they were renting. It needed renovation and the rent was already high. One room leaked. So they had no choice, if they couldn’t use that space to diversify and offer new services then there was no profit left in the industry for them.

So that’s a truely bastard landlord after 29 years paying a high property rent.

My initial guess was that with a declining market for film processing and a changing industry all-consumed toward digital that our explosion in water fees and other overheads just took their toll. In a way, I guess they did.

However, R and K strategies offer a little advice for us on this one, too. Early in an industry an R strategy says the advantage would be taken by those who rent and lease assets. In contrast, in later stages of an industry (and not much is more mature than film processing) the advantage is in following a K strategy.

The K strategist invests in the assets. They would buy the building… or a building.

Had Photoforce moved to the K strategy they might still be in business. It’s worth keeping in mind if you’re struggling with your own business out there. Photoforce was ultimately at the mercy of a third party – the landlord.

The trick of R and K strategies is to realise that at the beginning of a new industry the advantage goes to the fast and the nimble with low overheads. But as that industry matures the advantage moves to the K strategy.

I would really have loved to have sat down with these guys a few months or even several years ago. That was 29 years of brand building they’ve pulled the plug on and it’s sad to see them go. Sadly, as these thriving small businesses wither in our community that makes us a poorer society with less services to access. One of the things I would have recommended at that earlier stage would have been a dialogue with local and State government.

I wish them the best of luck. Being self-employed to unemployed must have been a difficult business decision. We’ll all miss their quality service.

The plastic camera offers up the perfect bang-for-your-buck path into film photography. The Holga 120N, for example, weighs 7 ounces and sells for under US$30. There are 200,000 Holgas sold worldwide every year and over 1 million Holgas are out there in the hands of photographers. The Holga is a simple plastic camera that shoots 120 roll medium format film through a plastic lens with the opportunity to embrace photography for it’s true quirks and foibles. From that price point you can move into collectable Dianas or the newer Diana+ or through the numerous other plastic cameras (including plastic pinholes) on offer. There is probably no better or more affordable entry point into shooting film photography than turning to plastic.

Plastic camera photographer, Michelle Bates, has released a 2011 second edition of Plastic Cameras: Toying with Creativity. This book is going to be your best friend if you’ve purchased a plastic camera. Michelle exposes the reader to a wide variety of artistic and professional photographers who shoot with plastic. In the second part of the book the objective is entirely a practical guide to shooting with a plastic camera, loading and unloading film, using flashes, strobes, processing film and opening the reader’s mind to the possibilities of the tool.

Because that’s what a camera is… just a tool. You don’t need the $5,000 professional DSLR body to take world class professional photography. What you need is the creative mind, the photographers eye and the experience to make effective images. The camera is just another thing that a photographer uses to produce a final image. The plastic cameras also offer an ability to experiment because each have individual and unique traits even between the same model. The down side, of course, to modern high cost cameras are the replicable and familiar looks that come out of them. Plastic cameras free you up from that limitation.

The only trouble now is the book has inspired me to the possibilities of plastic. I’m even thinking of ways I can corrupt the images that are shot through my Zenza Bronica ETRS medium format film camera so they might produce less conventional images. A world of possibilities I had seriously not considered to this point.

Thoroughly enjoyed the read and highly recommend it to anybody thinking about shooting film. At the same time, you might want to pick up a copy of Pinhole Photography by Eric Renner.

The most effective photography books are those that engage the reader in a conversation about their own photography. A lot of authors miss the opportunity to connect with people when writing books about photography (gear, skills or history) and spend far too much time aggrandising and pouring themselves imaginary James Bond martinis to consider the power of the communication tool at their fingertips. In this regard… particularly in this regard… Chasing the Light: Improving your Photography with Available Light by Ibarionex Parello grabs that opportunity by the lapels and pulls the reader through the book jacket into the photographic world of light. After all, photography has never been about taking pictures of things… photography is about the study of light reflected off objects and captured onto film or a sensor.

As Ibarionex explains the nature of light in relation to capturing better photographs the world in my head pushes ever so slightly outward. Because what he is sharing with the reader isn’t just a series of images accompanied by ISO, fstop and shutter speed… he is sharing the context and the relationship with the world just before that photograph had been taken. This reader-inclusive conversation works particularly well with photography.

I don’t really like to pour out the contents of any book into the book review because, as someone famous who I’ve long forgotten once stated, the answers you are looking for are readily available inside the book. If you’re interested in photography then read the book. But be forewarned this is one of those books that make you feel edgy about sitting there reading a book instead of shooting images.

Mostly this is a book about a certain manner of thinking about light. Light and photography are joined at the hip. You can’t study photography without understanding light. The better you understand light then the greater your opportunity to create amazing photography.

I would also highly recommend listening to Ibarionex Parello’s photography podcast – The Candid Frame.

The math is simple. Consider the concerned market vendor takes $240 per Saturday in sales (and I believe that may be optimisic) for selling something we will call their Product. The individual Product is worth $40 and the vendor sells 6 of them on the day.

Let’s work backwards. With all things being equal and given no advantage of stall position to foot traffic at the market on a given weekend, the assumption has to be the same number of Product will be sold – $240 in value. This would mean $120 sales to Vendor A and $120 to Vendor B. In other words, the sales pie for Product doesn’t increase simply because there are two vendors and therefore the current sales figure is split equally between the two.

So Vendor B, who stole the idea with a photograph some weeks earlier, would rake into their pocket $120 in sales. That math should make sense.

However, there are a number of costs Vendor B would have to deduct from that $120 before working out the profit (idea theft and product replication being a profit motivated business). These costs include (but are probably not limited to):

1. effort to reverse engineer the Product
2. production cost to create the Product
3. transport & storage of the Product
4. market stall rental to display the Product
5. tax to government from sale of the Product
6. value of man-hours invested in the Product

Add onto those deductions something called Vendor B’s opportunity cost – the best foregone alternative that Vendor B could have been doing to earn money instead of photographing, reverse engineering, replicating, displaying and otherwise investing in the Product.

There is also the question of a Break-Even-Point… at what point would the photographer’s original investment in this theft return a profit? Because profit doesn’t come along until the money coming in from the business model outweighs the money that has gone out to bring that Product to sale. In plain terms – if Vendor B only has three sales of $40 each Saturday (also noting that market stall rental is in excess of $30 each Saturday) then how many Saturdays would they have to invest at Salamanca Market to recoup their investment and turn $1 in profit.

This is a very simple example but it should make one business fact obvious to every market vendor. Those other Vendor B costs far outweigh $120 in potential sales from stealing an idea and opening a direct competition market stall. Neither does it provide Vendor B with any long-term competitive advantage over Vendor A to warrant the effort and investment.

To the contrary, photographers and other market patrons with mobile phones (duh) pollinate knowledge of Vendor A’s Product throughout society long after the market day has ended. Through review, recommendation and description (in words and photographs). Photographers bring their families to the market, they purchase food and local products… they support the community market business model. What’s so hard to understand about the math?

Part 1 – A Xenophobic Fear of all Market Customers

The market vendors fear that their ideas will be stolen. Their fear is that technology enables easy duplication of their work. The enabling technology is the camera… a tool found in every person’s pocket traversing the market. The bigger the camera, the higher the assumption that the photographer is an idea thief with a link to cheap Chinese manufacturing and a desire to open a market stall in direct competition. Don’t laugh, this is exactly why (as I heard from a family friend this weekend) Eumundi Markets in Queensland have signs that inform no photography permitted of the vendors artwork.

Let’s backstep a little… they struggle to sell an art/craft product at a community market and I, the photographer, am supposed to (a) want to replicate their product, (b) have the ability and advantage to replicate it below their production cost, (c) envision enough profits to warrant that effort, and (d) ultimately come out of the deal with a fast profit. Seriously, that’s a business version of Alice in Wonderland where the Break-Even-Point on my investment is measured by how full the sugar bowl gets compared to the length of my coat-tail.

The fact is that with declining profits at Salamanca Market year on year and with a Hobart Council looking at ways of saving it’s sorry arse from disappearing… yes, it’s that bad partly because of the high ratio of Chinese made hats and tshirts… there is NO MONEY to be made by copying a vendor’s product. The best one could hope for is to recreate the same product and each person make half as much money. Does that make any sense?

And let’s go right back to the beginning – identify the people who the community markets want to attract? Tourists. Repeat local traffic. If you can’t see how photography fits in then I can’t wait until you suggest cutting the tongues out of market patrons to stop them talking about your work. Has it occurred to anybody that a real thief who saw that business model would just BUY YOUR PRODUCT and replicate it?

So this xenophobic idea that all photographers are thieves out to fuck market vendors over… while accepting a reality that all customers at all markets carry a camera… is even more absurd. How do you market your products beyond a ten-by-ten physical space if the very people sharing your art/craft are being shut down and insulted? Photographers only shoot what they love or hate… or the photographer’s reason for making the photograph could be to share it with a friend who may be interested in the purchasing a similar item. That’s marketing 101 stuff.

So let’s cut back to the lady who accused me of being a sneaky art thief. Because I find this story a little funny. I returned ten minutes later and gave her my business cards. One tells that I am a fine art photographer (it alleviates the fear I’m a nefarious element). The second has my academic credentials… a Bachelor of Computing and a Master of Business Administration (Journalism & Media Studies). They have my contact details and my three websites. In return, and only on direct request, the lady told me her name (instantly forgotten), provided no brochure, no business card, no URL or contact details. In fact, I marketed to her and she failed to even acknowledge the opportunity in front of her to sell her *original art*.

Part 2 – The Cloudy Originality of Fat Ladies in Yoga Positions

Which brings me to the sore point. On the left were a group of small bronze sculptures of fat ladies in one piece swimmers in yoga positions. In the Salamanca Stall Guide the plot was labeled ‘Bronze Statues’. To be fair the vendor did not state that these bronze statues were her original artwork… or not her original artwork. However, by omission, it was inferred within the conversation that the bronze statues were her original artwork. On the right were a small group of brightly coloured porcelein sculptures of the same fat yoga ladies with anglicised faces. They definitely were identified as her original art… and that the theft of the idea was my sneaky intent. That the reason no photographs were allowed of her artwork was because I, or another photographer at the market, would steal and reproduce her original ideas and artwork.

Sometimes I do smell a rat when the world is throwing me possums. Googling the most obvious searches reavealed the bronze statues would appear to be Thai Fair Trade products distributed by a Hong Kong based online retailer called Novo Collections. An image of one of these statues appeared on Laurie Toby Edison’s weblog in August, 2008. This means that both Novo Collections and Laurie Toby Ellison’s blog-post clearly pre-date the market vendors fat lady sculptures at Salamanca Market in Tasmania. You could also go to Alibaba.com to prove they weren’t the Tasmanian vendor’s original art idea.

Perhaps I’m just plain wrong and the Tasmanian vendor was selling another coincidentally bronze statue of fat women in one piece swimmers in yoga positions. I’ve been wrong before. As for taking on board the ideas of others then I think the boomerang not only hits that woman fair in the arse but it also pre-dates any photograph from Salamanca Market this weekend by a substantial period of time.

The lesson of that is surely one about the origin of ideas. I tweeted a confession last night: “Oh I’m such a fake, all my ideas are taken from books, tv, movies, radio & talking to other people over the last 50 yrs.” And that’s the truth of it for us all. Very little is out of the ether, nearly nothing. Zero. It’s all a cultural accumulation of influences. And I would probably dispute over numerous hotel served beers any claim that I witnessed *original artwork* at the market. But, as I wrote, I may be wrong. The similarity may be entirely coincidental.

So I’ll leave it up to the reader to figure out how closely these porcelein statues are to the Thai Free Trade statues (besides anglicised faces and bright coloured swimmers). But please don’t tell me they’re remarkably dissimilar. And please don’t tell me it was a photographer at Salamanca Market who stole the idea and gave it to a cheap Thai manufacturer in the Fair Trade network. Unfortunately, I can’t attribute the Salamanca Market vendor because I don’t recall her name.

I’d like Salamanca Market vendors to consider this. Had she not jumped out into the crowd to accost me for sneaky photography theft of her original artwork I would never have hit Google… seen the fat lady yoga sculptures from Thailand… nor written this article. So, again, coming down on photographers is a stupid marketing strategy. No journalists? No reviews? No common sense. And significantly reduced profits for everybody because I also buy food, drink and honey at the market regularly. As do other local and tourist photographers.

If I were a vendor of hats, jewellery, cheese or wine my concern would be that this accosting of patrons to the market is counter-productive and will eventually dig at their own bottom line profits. The biggest way to kill a community market is to get too precious about everyday human activity.

Many of the best photographs emerge from a process of spontaneous consideration – holding a number of articulated ideas in my head (a vocabulary) and at the same time almost visually hunting the savannah like a hungry lion. Beforehand, you’re scared you might miss it and go hungry. In the moment before taking the picture, you know. Afterwards, you’re scared you did miss it. In some sense, I think DSLRs make it a little too easy for somebody like me (because I don’t call myself a photographer) to achieve good images. There needs to be more to it if I’m to pursue any meaninful intrinsic value.

Four 35mm Cameras Come Out of the Cupboard

The photograph below includes an almost pristine and beautiful Fujica ST705w, a Praktica nova B, a Kodak retina automatic III and a Hanimex D35.

Unfortunately the Fujica isn’t mine to use but it takes really nice photos in the hands of somebody more experienced than myself with shooting 35mm black and white. So I have some serious envy on that camera. I took the Praktica nova B into the optics shop for a considered opinion… the shutter is jammed, the spare parts wouldn’t be available and although it’s a decent second camera it would really only be worth about $5 after being fixed. Why is it that such a beautifully designed piece of analogue hardware has lost it’s value; I smell one of life’s injustices.

An hour later I walked into the same shop with the Kodak Retina automatic III but although the shutter was jammed (film cameras seize over time if not used) the value was somewhat more optimistically viewed by the staff. Unfortunately again it came down to money… around $360 to insert new innards. I like this little camera though and it would be nice and unobtrusive for street photography.

The Hanimex D35 is a rebadged Royal 35P. Again the shutter has siezed from not being used for several decades but again there is an unobtrusive form factor that would suit street photography.

So there I am with my prospects of shooting 35mm temporarily put in it’s place.

The Next Level is Medium Format

So, with a specific project in mind, I’ve moved to the next level by purchasing a Zenza Bronica ETRS f2.8 with a 70mm lens. I know, this is a major leap from shooting digital to shooting medium format film but the quality and detail are critical to my objective – to put large detailed black and white images on a gallery wall. The next step will be to start pulling together some dark room equipment and seeking out some kind of an art industry grant to pursue the project with Bronica in hand.

It also means I now have to scrape up the pennies somehow and score a decent quality light meter.

Influences to this Migration towards Film

I live in an artistic household so painting, lithography, etching, pottery, drawing and photography are constantly around me. We associate with artists and hang work in exhibitions and occasionally somebody gets recognised as an award finalist in something or other. That is a genuinely important facet of influence upon anybody – cultural exposure.

The second group of influences have to be the people producing fantastic online resources around the subject of getting back to the basics of film photography. Here I’m specifically thinking about Ted Forbes, Chris Marquardt and, in an inspirational and vocabulary sense, Jeff Curto. If you’re thinking a bit broader than simply shooting digital then it would be a good move if you downloaded and scoured (and rescoured) all of their incredible content.

Finally, the third influence pushing me toward film is the perfection and mass availability of digital imagery. A photographer can shoot a fantastic image today and another photographer can go to that location, reproduce the lighting and technical conditions and reshoot a very close original. In a sense that digital power can create a soul depleting experience. When in doubt with my DSLR I tend to stop thinking and feeling… the technology allows me to get close enough and spray and pray. In that sense it is not unthinkable to come away every single day with a huge number of technically proficient photographs. Film, for me, is about forcing constraints on myself to make me think and create and find the truth in the world that manifests through my lens.

While a part of me feels that statement sounds manifestly inflated… it’s the whole point of picking up a camera. If I only wanted a pretty picture I could leave that job up to the gazillion other photographers.

The Art of Photography

Top billed on my photography greens list are the video podcasts coming from Ted Forbes in The Art of Photography. To date there are 65 episodes and I couldn’t recommend them highly enough.

Ted is particularly animated and engaged about the processes of photography as a science – the camera, film development and the art of making incredible images. He also does a very good job of pushing his vision of photography through the work of those people who walked before us like Fox Talbot, Steichen, Brassai, Winters, Avedon, Blossfeldt and Sugimoto. Forbes has produced a long and invaluable series that achieves a strong balance between practical photography knowledge and skills along with the inspirational greens to make you want to grab your camera and go do some shooting.

The History of Photography

Professor Jeff Curto from the College of DuPage has a podcast series with slideshows called The History of Photography. As with the case of ‘The Art of Photography’, I subscribed to the RSS feed and downloaded the relevant file to view the videos as large sized content from my hard drive.

Curto focuses on the history of photography and the context around those moments in photographic history. The picture of how the world was changing, how the roles of people and their aspirations changed along with the technologies around them. He offers a fascinating perspective and comes back at this from numerous vantage points so rather than roting back the linear history you can better join an educated conversation on photography. A fascinating series.

Fstoppers

If you’re going to subscribe to any photography based multimedia website out there you can’t go past Lee Morris and Patrick Hall at Fstoppers. Every day these guys offer up embedded video on their website showing how the best of the best in the industry get things done; a broad swathe of absolutely brilliant photography and behind the scenes videos. Easily the 20 most impressive photography videos that I’ve seen this year have come out of Fstoppers. And don’t miss their community forum – they run in-house competitions and peer review (although there seems to be more of an industry focus on wedding and product photography rather than art photography).

The Photography Show

Ted Forbes and his brother-in-law Wade Griffith offer up an audio podcast called The Photography Show that you may find interesting. The show offers up a wealth of industry information and discussion about the practical aspects of being a photographer and draws on their respective industry experience.

Tips from the Top Floor

One fascinating and passionate guy out there I find inspiring is Chris Marquardt in his audio (and occasional video) podcast Tips from the Top Floor. Chris is another photographer who has inspired my recent move from digital over to purchasing my first medium format camera this week – a Zenza Bronica ETRS 2.8 70mm that I’m really itching to learn to use. It’s well worth going back through all of the older episodes of this podcast for invaluable information and insight into photography as an art and an industry.

The Candid Frame

Another great interview based audio podcast coming out from Ibarionex Perello is The Candid Frame. This guy has a great attitude that’s inspiring and contagious and nine times out of ten I can’t help picking up my camera during the show. He covers a broad range of photography genres with this series so it’s well worth your while becoming a regular listener.

Camera Dojo

Kerry Garrison produces the Camera Dojo podcast. This is another industry focused interview and tutorial focused production that offers high value to a wide range of photographers. This podcast comes with a companion website that offers up a really strong repertoire of knowledge that you will find invaluable.

Duckrabbit Blog

For the photojournalists out there and anybody interested in creating or watching professional quality photo-documentaries you can’t go past the UK based Duckrabbit Blog from David White and Benjamin Chesterton. These guys offer up a mix of humour and photojournalism that stands out from the crowd. Even though DuckRabbit Blog isn’t a podcast, as such, I highly recommend you keep tabs on them with a special mention for their quality of embedded content.

This Week in Photography

Finally, in this diet of photography greens, I put forward an audio podcast called This Week in Photography from Alex Lindsay and Frederick van Johnson. With over 200 episodes produced in this series there is more than enough photography meat to keep you busy. However, the important thing in any diet is the balance between greens and meat so don’t forget to shoot the real thing every day you can. I hope you enjoy that sunshine.

My professional reading list has moved from design to photography over the last year and one of the most influential books that I’ve had the pleasure of reading is Light, Science & Magic: An Introduction to Photographic Lighting (third edition) by Fil Hunter, Steven Biver and Paul Fuqua. This book is a step-by-step guide through the fundamentals of photographic lighting and the science of light with a focus on achievable small step exercises that will make you a better photographer.

I’ll step back there a few metres and say that again – it will make you a better photographer.

The reason I make that bold claim on a book of fundamental principles is that you do need to understand the science (and magic) that underpins what you do. The most valuable lesson I’ve learned in photography all year is this: photography is simply the study of light. It’s that simple. Photography is the study of how light responds when it interacts with a flat lens (as opposed to a rounded eye) and how refraction, reflection (family of angles), absorbtion and transmission (direct and diffuse; size of the light) affect the production of images in the form of photographs.

As somebody who generally likes to shoot natural light, this book has shifted the way my mind works out on the street and roaming through the Tasmanian countryside. At some point in making the photographs I’ll be thinking about the best place to get a certain shot and then it will occur to me there are other options because I’ve gained a small bridge of knowledge that leads away from the obvious. It has certainly narrowed the factor of chance in my work and improved my ability to walk along a crowded street and see an opportunity.

This is a short review because several chapters toward the end of Light, Science and Magic were a lot harder to work through than I’d appreciated at the beginning. This book is still very much a work in progress for me as I am still not finished. So keep in mind this isn’t a one-time reading book but rather an instructive text that you’ll want to visit occasionally to understand light more intuitively. It doesn’t really matter where you take that knowledge about light – the street or the studio – it’s then about making great photography.

I highly recommend picking up a copy for your studio bookshelf.