Author Portrait: Fred Brooks

Fred Brooks

I had the great honor to photograph Fred Brooks recently. Fred Brooks is the author of The Mythical Man-Month, one of the most famous project management books of all time. The book inspired what later became the agile movement in software development.

In addition to writing several very influential books, Fred Brooks is one of the great computing pioneers. He worked at IBM, on developing the IBM 360 series, and it was his idea to switch from using 6 bit to 8 bit bytes. This change made it possible to support lowercase characters, something computers had not done before.

Brooks founded the computer science department at  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he is still active.

I read The Mythical Man-Month many years ago. I was interested in agile software development, and Fred Brooks was a favorite author of my favorite authors of books about agile. Meeting Fred Brooks was great, even though the meeting was very brief.

The photo shoot was a panicky thing. As sometimes happens, I had set everything up for the shoot in one location, and then had to shoot very quickly, in a completely different location, that was unsuitable for photography, to say the least.

This happens from time to time. When it does, you simply do your best.

Walkabout (a.k.a. How to apply The Art of War to Photography)

Cheng/Chì (Ortodox/Unortodox) is an idea from Sun Tzu's book The Art of War, that says that to win a battle, you need two things: Ordinary military forces, doing the tried and true things, and unorthodox forces, creating an element of surprise. The principle can be applied to any other art, as well as the art of war.

I used to do a lot of street photography. It is an easy way to get started in photography, but it is also one of the most difficult photographic genres for the simple reason that most of the time, there is nothing noteworthy to shoot.

I followed the rules when shooting street photos, but I also started doing other kinds of photos. Still with a city environment as background, but with a dinosaur, or a spaceship, slipped in to make the picture more interesting.

I haven't done that in awhile, so maybe I should start doing it again.
Technically, this picture is mostly an exercise in tone mapping and saturation mapping. I started using the techniques recently, and I am not entirely happy with them yet. Next time, I intend to work in 32 bit mode all the way through the process, to see if that makes a difference.

Practice

Knowledge is of no value unless you put it into practice.

― Anton Chekhov

You may wonder, "why so many nudes lately?" Good question. I wish I had a really good answer, but I don't. Here is the closest I can come at the moment:

When I started with photography, I shot a lot of flowers to learn the basics of composition, and how to handle my camera in various lighting situations. I mean a lot of flowers! I shot more than 8,000 the first year, and more than 13,000 the second year. I was out shooting three times a day, every day.

After that, I was kind of done with flowers, but I had learned a bit about photography. After that, I did street photography, model photography, macro photography, levitation photography, flesh manipulation photography, portrait photography, some art photography, even tried my hand at pin-up photography.

Now, with nudes, I have found something as interesting to me as horror, Science-Fiction, and Fantasy photography. I want to learn more, and I want to integrate the nudes with the kinds of photography I've done earlier.

I have always been that way. I used to be a programmer, so I learned programming languages, then techniques of Object-Oriented programming, then design patterns, then project methodology, then systems thinking, queueing theory, Theory Of Constraints, statistics, military strategy, Chinese and Japanese military strategy...

And, I integrate it. I synthesize.

While I do not intend to do 21,000 nude pictures, there will probably be quite a few more, before I have integrated them fully in my repertoire.

Cheng/Chì

“Engage people with what they expect; it is what they are able to discern and confirms their projections. It settles them into predictable patterns of response, occupying their minds while you wait for the extraordinary moment — that which they cannot anticipate.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

If you read the picture caption, you already know that Cheng/Chì (Ortodox/Unortodox) is an idea from Sun Tzu's book The Art of War, that says that to win a battle, you need two things: Ordinary military forces, doing the tried and true things, and unorthodox forces, creating an element of surprise.

The principle can be applied to any other art, as well as the art of war. So, in the picture above, the street with all the ordinary people is the cheng, and the nude woman is the element of chì.

So, now you know how to apply the Cheng/Chí principle from Sun Tzu'z The Art of War.

Get out there and practice!

PS. The GDPR Thing!

You might wonder whether a picture like the one in this article breaks the new General Data Protection (GDPR) law. It does not. Journalistic images and art are exempt from the rules. That means it is okay to do street photography, it is okay to create digital paintings from street photographs, and it is okay to manipulate a photo taken in a street, if the purpose is to create a piece of art. You can read up on GDPR here.

Backlight your headshots by shooting a flash through the backdrop

Along with the umbrellas, lightstands, and other whatnots, I am always carrying a bed sheet in my portable studio bag. I have written two articles on how to use the bed sheet to create a backlit silhouette, and how to use it in combination with a front light to create a film noir type high contrast image.

The bed sheet setup is the same as in the other two articles. As before, I ensure that the light hitting the bed sheet is spread very evenly by first shooting it through an umbrella.

The key light is also a shoot through umbrella. If you imagine the subject standing in the middle of a clock face and the camera being at 6 o'clock, the umbrella will be at 7:30. It is a bit higher than my head, and angled down.

I used an 85 mm lens, and had the camera mounted quite high. I shot at 1/80s, f/8.

A good headshot is about more than placing the lights and setting the camera. Shooting someone with glasses can be tricky. You want the subject to angle his head so that wrinkles on the neck are minimized.

Peter Hurley recommends doing that by "putting the forehead forwards", which is what I did in the shot above. When you do that, you have to take care so that the frames of the glasses don't cover the eyes. As you can see, I'm cutting it close in the shot above.

If you put the subject very close to the bed sheet, or large softbox if you prefer to use more expensive gear, you will get a wrap-around effect from the light. Photons move in straight lines of course, but some of them will move from the edge of the bed sheet at an angle such that they hit the side of the head and the upper part of the front side of the shoulders.

To help light the face evenly, I use two reflectors. The first reflector is a triangular silver reflector held at chest level, just out of frame. The second reflector is the white door on the subject's left side.

You work with what you have got. If there hadn't been a door there, I could have used a large piece of white paper, or a third flash on a low power setting.

The same subject, bed sheet and doorway as in the headshot. Everything else is different though.

I am continuously amazed by how you can deliberately create entirely diferent photos, and tell different stories, by changing the light, shooting angle, lens, posture and clothing.

As a photographer, I want to do it all. While you can certainly become very good at something if you specialize, you need to do a lot of different things if you want to be truly creative.

Now, it's time to shoot again.

Capoeira

Capoeira is a Brazilian martial art that combines fighting moves with dance, music, and acrobatics. The moves are very smooth. The most common attacks are various circular kicks.

Because most kicks are circular, there is a lot of body rotation around the center of gravity. This makes Capoeira practitioners appear a bit slow, for martial artists. They are not. If you look at how fast the feet move, well, let's just say these pictures are all shot at 1/1600s. If there had been more light, I would have shot at an even shorter shutter time.

The high jumps are impressive. To capture them, I set the camera to shoot high speed bursts.

I also switched from RAW to JPEG format. The drawback is that I loose a bit of information, so I can't bring out details in shadows, nor reduce highlights as well as I could with a RAW picture.

The advantage is that the pictures are much smaller, so I can shoot long bursts without the camera's memory buffer filling up.

Another advantage is that the pictures require less storage space. I shot about 600 pictures in 20 minutes.

It helps if you start young, of course.

If you want to look at more Capoeira pictures, have a look at my Capoeira Picasa album.

Hadouken photo at the Retro Games Convention

The Hadouken photo craze has reached Gothenburg. I had talked to the organizers of The Retro Game Convention in Gothenburg about having a Hadouken photo event, and they were game.

Hadoken is fun, and just about the easiest trick photo shot you can do. The idea is to simulate fights from Japanese manga comics, like Streetfighter, where characters fight using, among other things, ki based energy attacks.

What you need is:

• People in front of the camera with a great sense of humor, the courage to be in front of the camera, and the ability to jump.
• A camera. Any camera will do. You can do Hadouken with a camera phone.
• A photographer.

Want to make it extra fun? Ask some cosplayers to be in front of the camera. The costumes add a lot, but most important, cosplayers will have as much fun in front of the camera as the photographer has behind it. Cosplayers are creative, and will come up with ideas on the spot.

• Shoot at low speed. The pictures here were taken at 1/80 s. The people who jump will be a bit blurred, which adds a sense of motion to the photos.
• Shoot from a low angle. Jumps will look higher.
• If you have a DSLR, set it too shooting high speed burst. That way, you can press the button a little bit before everyone jumps, and shoot a burst covering the whole jump. This increases your chances of getting a good picture.
• To get everyone to jump at the same time, it is best if the photographer calls out when to do it. I counted backwards from 3 to 1 and NOW!
• If there are many of you, see to it that everyone is participating as much of the time as possible. Most of the shots you see here are group shots, and that is because everyone can have fun at the same time.
• The goal is to have fun, not to get great shots. If you are working with models, or a group of photography crazed friends, by all means, go for great shots. However, if you are shooting a group of people you have just met and talked into doing crazy things in front of a camera, the most important thing is that they have fun.

Enough with the tutorial. Let's just look at some fun photos:

I have an album with more Hadouken pictures at Picasa.

Robert Johannesson joined in with a camera. His pictures are at this Picasa web album. 

Intense

Braided!

Yes, it's her braid hanging down between us. Though her hair certainly was an attention getter, it was her eyes that caught my interest.

Dangerous!

From the Swedish hair styling championships 2013.

Going Green

From the Swedish hair styling championships 2013.

Håkan

Håkan Forss is Lean/Agile coach, and one of my co-authors of the LESS! management book. Håkan wrote the chapter on standard work in software development. Working with him was a pleasure.

Insight!

Torbjörn Gyllebring. The photo was shot at the Stop Starting, Start Finishing conference in Stockholm.

Though we rarely meet, I have known Torbjörn for years through social media. He is one of the most clearheaded thinkers I have ever met. If I had to describe Torbjörn in two words, they would be "insight" and "compassion".

Big Smile!

One of the things I really like about street photography is that you get to meet people. Brief meetings most of the time, just talking a minute or two.

Steampunk Couple

Emma's Eyes

Emma

Tattoo

Red Cross Woman

Photographers are never bored

Julia

Julia Backlund, from restaurant Parken after The Great Photo Walk.

At Parken

Shot at restaurant Parken in gothenburg after the Great Photo Walk.