[Leica] Tina said what?!

[reid at mejac.palo-alto.ca.us (Brian Reid)]

> I photograph all kinds of human subjects with an 85 1.2 on a 5D all  the 
> time.  This is just silly.

Me too. And yes, it is silly. But it is real.

The 85/1.2 is pretty much on my Canon DSLR all of the time. Mostly what I 
shoot is studio portraits, and these days mostly I do it with the Canon and 
that lens.

In a studio setup, they have come to my world and are sitting on my stools 
and blinking at my strobes and checking their hair in my mirrors and worried 
whether their shoes are going to injure my backdrop, the camera is 
invisible.  It's just part of the whole studio setup.

On location, where I am venturing into someone else's space, the camera is 
not invisible, and different people react in different ways. For the last 
few months I've taken more pictures of 5- and 6-year-old children than most 
other subjects, but never in my studio. It is with that group that I have 
noticed the reaction to the camera. They all know what it is, they can tell 
the difference between kinds of cameras. Every one of the children who 
talked knew that my camera was not a video camera, and 
that it was bigger than the kind they were used to seeing. Very few of them 
were afraid of it, but all of them were aware of it. I don't want the kids 
paying attention to the camera. I want them looking at me, or looking at the 
person that I usually ask to stand right behind me and look over my head 
while I crouch. Yes, I can get them to stop paying attention to the camera, 
but with kids that age you don't get a lot of their attention, and I don't 
want to waste it on them looking at the camera.

On those rare occasions when I charge for a sitting (usually I just charge 
for prints), people want to see big heavy cameras and big strobes and giant 
painted backdrops and all of the gear that I own that they don't, so they 
think they are getting their money's worth by paying for a sitting. I'm not 
famous enough to sell my name, and I don't do this full time, so I have to 
pay attention to what they think they're getting for their money.

If I charge for a sitting and then seat them on a kitchen stool, use a 
couple of reflectors to bounce window light onto them, and shoot with a 
Leica CL I can get a magnificent portrait, but they'll think "My uncle Fred 
can do this, and he won't charge me." If I seat them on some Lastolite 
Posing Tubs in front of a painted muslin backdrop and some strobes with 
diffusers, and heft a big DSLR with a long lens hood, they respond very 
differently.

I think my dentist does the same thing. He doesn't need or use half of the 
gear that he keeps in his office, but it's there to help me understand that 
my uncle Fred couldn't do this cheaper.

I believe that this phenomenon of "gear as environment" is primarily a 
phenomenon of studio portrait work, but vestiges of it do show up in 
location posed portrait work.

When I take pictures of my mother, I seat her near a window and use the M6 
and a couple of reflectors. And I don't charge.

Brian Reid