how long does it take to do a dozen portraits?

According to my recent experience with yipieyaya studio, a whole day from 10am to 7pm, apparently. In what must be the most poorly organized shoot I've ever seen, the participants - winners of a scholarship - were called in at 10am to be made up. Fair enough. Except then they were made to stand around and wait for several hours until they started shooting. And of course whichever assistant was supposed to organize the shoot failed to notify people that the time slots were switched around.

How on earth can it possibly take a supposedly professional studio NINE hours to produce a few useable shots per person for twelve people? Perhaps the group shots yield a clue: despite shooting a tethered MF rig, and having TWO people reviewing images as they popped up live, almost every single shot - of perhaps a hundred - was misframed; limbs were cut off, proportions out, compositions imbalanced. At least they could have cropped a little, considering they were using a Phase One P45.

It gets better. The makeup was poor and unevenly caked; you'd definitely have to retouch that for advertising use. Personally, I've always tried to skip non-critical makeup (only mascara and hair; skin tone, texture and eyeshadow etc can be sorted out in post.)

I'm surprised the client stood for that. (A big international advertising agency with two nearly consecutive alphabets representing the initials of their name.)

In every commercial shoot I've done, the client has never allowed more time than strictly necessary - because they know we charge proportional to the time required - and even if billed per job, every photographer tries to cut down the time required to fit in more jobs. In one particularly memorable fashion shoot I had to manage fifteen costume changes in one day - with a change of hair and makeup for each, leaving me with about five minutes per set to change lighting and shoot. And I didn't even have an art director telling me what to do, nor did the client have any clue what he wanted.

So, if you're reading this and shooting sequential portraits, think about how you're going to organize it beforehand. Nobody wants to sit around waiting for seven hours while you get your house in order in a leisurely way, nor do they want to do dozens of retakes because you can't get it right the first time. Group portraits should be done first, then release individuals as you're done, and let those at the end leave and come back. Simple.

No wonder this country is nowhere on the photography map - the best here doesn't even make the rank amateur cut overseas.

To make this post remotely photography related and at the risk of offending Fuzzbucket by straying outside the boundaries of photojournalism, I'll include some images from my aforementioned fashion shoot. Everything was shot with a Nikon D3, AFS 24-70/2.8 and lit with multiple speedlights.

the 50 summilux update, part two

After an entire morning and afternoon of telephone calls, I have determined that:

1. The best the distributor/ dealer here is willing to do is refund the cost of the lens, less credit card fees. They can't get another lens.

2. Leica Germany said to send it back; that'll take a few months.

3. I can buy the last remaining lens in the country, but then I'd be about $150 out of pocket because of said credit card fees and because it's at a different dealer with worse pricing. And that might turn out to be a dud too, in which case I'm seriously SOL. Maybe I'll just buy Zeiss glass instead.

However, the most disappointing thing is the amount of cajoling and weight-throwing required to get to even square one with the local distributor. It seems to me that despite having a customer who has both media influence and is willing to buy another identical one even after all the crap that he's gone through so far, they would still rather wash their hands off the problem as soon as possible. Excuse me? I guess that's why they don't sell very many of them, then. Leica have said it's the only time they've ever heard of this problem. Well, one should damn well hope they'd be doing something to investigate it, right? I would if it were my company.

Maybe I am an idiot. Maybe it's unreasonable to buy two very expensive lenses and expect that they perform the same way. Maybe it's normal for people not to take responsibility for their jobs. Oh wait, I guess that's why we landed up in this recession in the first place.

Frankly right now I'm so disillusioned with the whole thing (and deeply concerned that if something should go wrong with any of the other Leica equipment, I'm seriously screwed) that I'm wondering if I shouldn't just quit and live off a diet of point and shoots and cameraphones or something. Sigh. I look at the M8 and don't even want to pick it up to shoot because it makes me a) angry b) scared that I'll break it if I so much as look at it funny, or heaven forbid, use it to take photos.

the economy class nightmare

The Economy Class Nightmare, somewhere over the Andaman Sea, Malaysian Airlines

Leica M8, 50/1.4 Summilux-M ASPH

I hate traveling. Not because I'm a xenophobe but because it's routine to be crammed into a pressurized metal tube for twelve hours with so little personal space that crossing your legs might be constituted as an act of war. And the amount of moisture in the air might as well be zero, because my skin is like sandpaper by the time I arrive. I'm sure the cabin designers hold surveys to find out just how little space a human being is willing to pay to be crammed into before they start feeling claustrophobic and irritable, or worse still, demanding their money back. I flew 108 times in 2006. I woke up in not my own bed at least three times more often than I woke up in my own. Suffice to say, while you do get some decent (though rare) opportunities from a window seat, most of the time the window is so scratched and horrible that you might as well have been shooting with a pinhole.

To make this post remotely photography related, airplanes these days are so tight and poorly lit that a) I shot this from three seats and an aisle away with a 50mm, and b) it needed 1/30th at ISO 2500 f1.4.