I'm going to be presenting at TEDxGreenville on March 18, 2011. If you're not familiar with TED you should really take the time to check it out. There are some amazing things going on around the world and I'm proud to be a very small part of it. If you didn't get tickets in time (they sold out fast) you can live stream it here. The topic? Hmmm. I think you'll have to tune in to find that out; it will have something to do with photography I'm sure.

A new website is coming. A new blog is coming. A new workshop is coming. A new 365 project is coming. An awesome opportunity to speak at a TEDx event is coming. Off the grid for the past month yes, lazy, not a chance. Stay tuned for more details. I'm hoping everything is up and running by the end of the month. In the meantime, if you or someone you know is interested in hosting a workshop please contact me at info(at)iancurcio(dot)com.

It’s not that I’m opposed to doing work in post, in fact I once heard someone say, “pixels were made to be punished” and to some extent I agree with that statement. If I need to do something in post to make an image better, I’m all for doing it. I just don’t enjoy spending a ton of my time behind the computer fixing something I could have done in camera to begin with. That goes for everything from proper exposures to pulling a shirt straight or fixing hair. In this case it was easy to make a grey day look like a beautiful evening sunset by simply turning the white balance on my camera all the way up to Kelvin 10000. That’s it; no cutouts and dropping skies in or anything like that. Just turning a little dial on the camera and poof, a homemade sunset. A little saturation bump in post but no heavy lifting.

You can do this with portraiture as well. This is another almost grey sky. Dial the white balance down to Kelvin 2600 or so and you’ll get that deep blue sky. Gel your flash with a CTO warming gel and there you have it. Something a little more creative and a lot less work than layer after layer of trying to make something cool in Photoshop.

[tuh-ney-shuh s]
–adjective
1. pertinacious, persistent, stubborn, or obstinate.

Last Sunday I drove up to Charlotte to work on a two-day assignment. I was up by 5:30 am on Monday morning and put in 20 hours that day. Tuesday started out the same; I was wrapped by 3:30pm though, drove back to the Upstate in time to vote, pick up good friend and fellow photographer Carroll Foster of HotEye Photography and then drive to Atlanta to see Joe McNally speak at Zack Arias’ studio by 7:30 pm. All of this knowing I had to be up by 6 am on Wednesday to walk my son to school and start editing.

The truth is that although I was very excited to hear Joe McNally speak and to get an opportunity to shake his hand, both of which I made it in time to do, I was there for a different reason.

We took my son to Disney World for the first time last week and I was happily surprised with how well they pay attention to the details. Disney is a well-oiled machine.

The morning we were leaving my son asked if we could walk on this little (well, not so little really) manmade beach. So I grabbed a cup of coffee and we went out for him to play. I shot the above picture with my iPhone, walked around him, turned around and then shot the below picture with my iPhone. Same camera, same time of day, same location, we’re just looking at it from different perspectives.

Here are a few more favorites from Disney World & an iPhone. They've each been edited with PhotoGene and BestCamera.

There will be more BIGPORTRAITlittlegear lighting diagrams showing up in the near future but for today I'm working through another white seamless session in the studio.

In every one of these lighting scenarios the model is anywhere from 6 to 8 feet away from the back of the backdrop and I’m anywhere from 15 to 30 feet away from the model. Once again I used an old manual focus lens. This time I shot with a Nikkor 85mm 2.0 manual focus lens, circa 1980. It’s clean and sharp and not too difficult to focus under the modeling lights with a fairly still subject.

Meet Victor, he was kind enough to come into the studio last week and let me work on some different lighting techniques.

The image above was less about lighting and more about using the circa 1977 Nikon 105mm 2.5 manual focus Ai lens. A very inexpensive lens that is as sharp as they come. You can get some great results with it but you'll need patience, at least for me, 8 out of 10 images that I shoot with it are out of focus. I feel confident that's more my fault than it is the lens' fault. I’m hoping to get to 7 out of 10 with practice.

This is a series I did over the weekend for a family member. Senior portraits I guess, I mean, she's a senior and these are her portraits. We only shot for about an hour. We ended up, by accident, at two different abandon grocery stores. It could have been anywhere really, a parking lot or parking garage, an alley, a park, main street anywhere, a bridge, a field, a backyard, creek, river, lake, ocean, it didn't matter.

I have to admit that although I love shooting in the new studio and I think the possibilities associated with having the space are endless and enormously valuable to the growth of my business, there is still a great deal of excitement linked to just grabbing some gear, jumping in the car and driving around looking for opportunity. It's all around.

I went one light for these. It was an AlienBee 1600 and the Vagabond. I mainly used a 24x24 softbox and 40-degree grid. With the exception of the last one, I added a Nikon SB-80 to bring out the cinderblock wall in the foreground.

Lots of people keep journals, mine just happens to be visual. To help keep me creative, interested and inspired, to help keep what is familiar, unique, I've been shooting pictures with my iPhone and Holga cameras for the past few years. Which has lead me to start experimenting with a lot of different cameras, iPhones, Holgas, point-n-shoots, disposables and now a Polaroid.

It’s not always about the tools, sometimes it’s just about the vision.

The above images are some recent work I’ve been enjoying with an old-school Polaroid Sun600 and PX 600 Silver Shade Instant Film. It has to develop in the dark. I kinda miss those days.

Check out The Impossible Project if you're into the Polaroid thing.

Nothing to see here, just showing some personal work shot and edited with the new iPhone4.

Last fall I posted a blog on five must-have photo apps for the iPhone, at the time I was using an iPhone 3G. I’m still currently using those five apps as my go-to photo apps, so naturally when I received my iPhone4 last month I wasted no time taking pictures with it and running all the photos through some or all of those apps.

I can’t speak for anyone else using an iPhone4 but I’ve been happy with mine.

It's been a long and winding road trying to decide where we wanted to set up our home base on this crazy adventure of being a self-employed editorial and commercial photographer. Without the safety net of a staff position we wanted to be sure we were making the best choice for us as a whole. In the end, we decided to set up our camp in the Upstate of South Carolina. Centered in the middle of Asheville NC, Charleston SC, Charlotte NC and Atlanta GA. After all, this is where our friends and families are.

So…

We've been breaking in the new studio space for the past few days. Located at 12 Rutherford Road in Greenville SC, close to downtown it's 1800 square feet, has 14-foot ceilings, and comes with two bathrooms and a dressing room. Having the space will allow us to start building sets, work when it's raining and have a place to educate and be educated. It gets us out of the coffee shops for meetings and gives us an opportunity to create our work under a controlled environment.

The above shots are from a white-seamless set up we did over the weekend with a few Upstate film and theater actors. With the exception of that last droid, that's yours truly.

Interested in a Studio Tour? email info(at)iancurcio(dot)com

Getting big portraits with little gear isn't as hard as you might think it is. You need a little imagination, that's all. The above image took all of 5 minutes to set up and execute. It was about 5pm, a 100 degrees and we were in the backyard. The below image shows the simple set up, a "28" Westcott softbox", "AlienBee 1600", a "Vagabond" and a box of instant mashed potatoes. It was also shot with a circa 1977 manual focus "105mm 2.5" lens that cost me about $100.

It's tough times out there. No one will argue that statement, especially not a working photographer. Jobs are far and few in-between and competition is in full swing. I shoot more assignments nowadays were I'm standing next to a soccer mom or Nascar dad with a Nikon D3 and an SB-900 hanging around his or her neck then ever before. As an old newspaper photographer I used to gaffer the name on my cameras so I wouldn’t draw attention to the professional equipment I was using. I'm still doing that today but not for the same reasons.

I poke fun but the situation is a serious one. The old "don’t take $200 assignments" truism is a painful one. As professionals and even the professionals-in-the-making we have to educate or clients and future clients on the value of great photography.

Photography is not much different that anything else out there. You have your Mazda and then you have your Mazarati. There are buyers for both. If you give your client a Mazarati for the price of a Mazda, you're not only hurting yourself but you are hurting your industry. Know how to turn down a job. We simply can’t shoot a $2000 job for $200. It doesn't matter how badly we need to pay rent.

Anyone who reads this blog knows that I'm a big fan of using lights. I think understanding how and when to setup strobes gives you an advantage over the photographers who do not. It gives you more options and when you need to be visually creative, having and understanding your options is a valuable tool. It also gives you control; there is something to be said for being able to walk into a situation and owning it because you understand how to light it.

But not all assignments are going to require you to light them; some are going to require a different set of skills. Skills like remaining calm while being at the mercy of variables you cannot control and being able to wait patiently for the perfect shot.

While on an editorial assignment last month, it took me two days to get these two shots while it really only took me a few seconds to shoot each one. It was the prep work and waiting that took so long. Waiting for the rain to stop, waiting of the sun to be in the right location, hoping the wind would stop blowing, these were all variable that I could not control. That car you see in the bottom picture, I had to wait for that, there was no big production. Just me and a camera. The skyline shot, I asked forgivness later and not permission first as I scouted out and climbed random rooftops in Charlotte's South End to get that picture. It took patience.

We had a great group of people come out for the lighting workshop in Charlotte this past weekend. We kicked it on the streets of Uptown for about 9 hours before calling it a day. A big shout out to Anthony and Sarah for hanging out and modeling for us while we explored different lighting techniques and to the security guard who simply looked the other way and didn’t bother hassling us.