Scribblings of the Metropolitician

Apparently, I'm a "Fauxtographer"

This dumbass article just came across my Facebook feed. So like someone is a little bit too invested in making the dividing line between the so-called “real” and fake photographer, a telltale sign of being An amateur oneself. I find that amateur photographers are generally concerned with what kind of camera body or lens one has or how expensive your equipment is, which is a way of compensating for the fact that one is not confident about the actual photography. a telltale sign that this article was written by an extremely knowledgeable hobbyist who doesn't do anything with photography professionally is the 1st rule in the article, which is that if you're not using RAW mode, you're not a professional.

Apparently, shooting runway JPEG and submitting CNN the JPEGs means
I am not a professional. I'm a "fauxtographer."

Apparently, that makes pretty much every central runway photographer or anybody producing large amounts of images doing a wedding very much not a professional. best because almost no one shooting large amounts of images is shooting RAW. one of the main reasons is that if you're shooting for example runway, there is essentially no room for error as clothing comes out, so you adjust the shutter speed in manual mode based on the brightness of the clothing, which if you are shooting in JPEG mode, you're going to get a spot on every time, and the problem with RAW is the prohibitive file size and the fact that the average runway show produces anywhere from 1200 to 1500 pictures. and in order to get the proper stance and position in the step, you got to be shooting on a still camera that lets you do continuous shutter operation at about 5-10 fps, the faster the better. since you are aiming to hit each article of clothing at each point in the runway completely accurately in terms of exposure because overexposure of the highlights means that detail is lost no matter what mode you're shooting in.

Shoot it right the first time and you don't need post-processing.
And if you blow the highlights with poor flash technique,
RAW won't save you.

And this idgit doesn't even know that you have abouyt the same exposure latitude in JPEG as you did with film negatives. Anyone coming from film to digital knows that you can fix even JPEGs quite a bit as long as it's somewhat properly exposed, as long as you were pretty close. I shot on film, where if you bonked it, you just bonked it. So to me, JPEG ain't too different. I shoot right the firdt time, not worrying about saving it in RAW unless you've got the time and card space and low output of numbers of images. A studio shoot would be a good choice for RAW. A professional photographer knows that there are no hard and set rules that makes one a "pro" versus "faux" shooter. Anyone shooting RAW on the runway is a crack smoker, just because that's like taking a bazooka to a knife fight.And if you fucked up a set of clothes or an entire show because your color temperature was off, you don't have time to edit 1500 pics, do you? Cause shooting it all in RAW and saying "I'll fix it in post -- white balance and exposure can be fixed after the fact" is about as ghetto-ass amateur hour as you can get. -- No, you, author of this article, are the FAUXtograpgher. What the hell is youarenotaphotographer.com? Overcompensating much?

Try this: You're house photographer for a designer and the rehearsal is all done in tungsten light. You're set and prepped, but then the show starts with a spotlight. WTF?! What do you do? Know your shit and switch from 3400K to 5600K and know that yes, that's a "bright" dress in my internal scale, and despite the fact that black was 1/400 of a second, which would normally make this bright two shutter stops higher at 1/800, you guesstimate that this is +2 stops higher than even that since she's closer and at the end of the runway, and since she's in a spot, she gets brighter the closer she gets, which would make black 1/800 and bright at end of runway in spotlight 1/1250. You either get it right or go home. RAW ain't gonna do shit but eat up card and buffer memory. You blow that dress out, and it's gone, JPEG or not. So real shooters aren't wasting their time with "Am I a Pro or Faux?" silliness.  Real shooters ain't got time for that.

My Cheeky Guide to Doing the Best Possible Ethnographic/Journalistic Work in Korea

1.Speak Korean.
 I don't want to belabor an obvious point. But too many people get by talking about Korea and talking about Koreans, or certain people in Korean society, without begin the language. I'm not going to get on a high horse here about how one can or cannot “understand the culture” without speaking the language in question, but I'll simply move on to a concrete point and reason that speaking the target language is in fact important. It's funny—if someone were writing the book about French culture or aspects of French society but didn't in fact the French, we would dismiss him or her out of hand. But for some reason, we let people get away with saying almost anything they want to about Korea, if these people can't speak their way out of a wet paper bag in the target language. Why is this important, you may ask? It's about to become very clear. 

2.  Do your own interviews in Korean.
 Speaking Korean allows you to do interviews in Korean, as opposed to finding oneself limited to speaking with only the people that their language ability allows you to speak with. This automatically limits the number of informants you can use, down from the ideal group of the best possible informants to, usually, merely those informants who can speak English. 

3. Interview the proper and most relevant people.
 Let's start with a concrete example. If you want to talk to the ladies who work in the street food stands on the streets of Seoul, you should talk to the people who run street food stands on the streets of Seoul, right? You're not going to get very much that's useful just talking to Seoul National University professor who talks about the point of view of the old ladies who sell food at the street  food stands on the streets of Seoul, simply because you're getting another entire filter in between you and the target subjects. it's funny that one even has to make this argument explicit in the Korean case, but unfortunately it is necessary. Let's take the recent case of the story that was published about the fire on Hooker Hill in Itaewon. this was published as some kind of in-depth piece of journalism on the 3 wise monkeys website. However, everything that was written specifically not from newspaper accounts and public records, as the  seemingly authoritative interviews made with people who worked near the scene, was hearsay, and potentially very biased hearsay. Let me remind you what the definition of “hearsay” is: when you don't speak to or hear from the subject in question directly, but from some other source. This is the very definition of hearsay.  Unfortunately, the writers of that article spoke to everyone except the most important person who needed to be interviewed for that article: the bar girl/prostitute who was the central figure and focus of a large part of the article itself.  basically, the writers spoke to the people who were able to speak English, namely the bar owner whose establishment is across from the bar in question, as well as a rival bar owner and infamous "mamasan" a few establishments up the road. Both their accounts were used to establish that the bar girl in question had apparently and allegedly swindled the young soldier out of his money, which in some way lead to tempers flaring up into an actual fire. Glaringly absent from the article was any interview with the woman in question, about whom many theories were being spun and aspersions cast. I found this to be pretty irresponsible,  and even unethical, since this was a story being reported about a person's allegedly immoral or even illegal actions, with her name attached, in a forum in which hundreds or even thousands of people could read about it. Their site seems to take itself seriously enough, so why don't they take basic journalistic ethics at all seriously?  this is not even mentioning the fact that all of this writing takes place in a language in which the subject isn't able to defend herself in, had she even been asked for her side of the story in the first place.

Note: since I made a pretty decent reputation for myself on the hill amongst the girls working there with my pretty honest story on the aftereffects of the 2004 special anti-prostitution law, and the girls apparently  all know who I am, if only by dint of the fact that I didn't told the standard  pity-party line that most of the Korean media uses when talking about prostitution, I simply went and found the girl in question within 5 min. of inquiry, and asked her for her side of the story, which completely contradicts everything said about her in the 3 wise monkeys story.

5.  You need to gain rapport and trust from your subjects. Then they will tell you the straight story and allow you access.  Do the due diligence. Just be honest and tell the story that there, instead of bringing the story that you want to tell and simply using your subjects as fodder for it.

 6. Just don't be a dick.
 It's not actually hard to get your subjects to do what most people would even consider it be impossible, which is for a hooker hill Korean prostitute to pose for a sitting portrait that she knows very well is going to be published somewhere. There are creative ways to get around showing the face directly, without bumping into the problem of looking like you're purposely not trying to show the face to the extent that interferes with the naturalness of the picture.  the environmental portrait that I did above was the result of a lot of photographic experience, but also the result of several years of having built good rapport with the people on the Hill, to the extent that they would even trust me with taking a picture that could potentially be misused to harm them. In the picture above, I had her shift her position such that identifying marks and tattoos would be thrown into the shadow side, since this was a concern that she had, almost as much as her face.

 Had you asked me even a few years ago, well after I had become an active street and documentary photographer, if I would ever be able to take such a picture, my answer would have been an absolute “no.” But it's amazing the kind of reportage that one can get when one is ethical and direct and what's more, journalistically responsible. The latter concept is a lot more than simply checking back sources and link's or footnoting properly; it's about being an honest reporter of reality and acknowledging in the report one's own limitations and bias in telling the story.

"Advanced Mixed Lighting and Flash" Class

A quick reminder about our "Advanced Mixed Lighting and Flash" class going on this Saturday evening.  This will be a nice way to practice in dark settings with the flash. 

Actual shot from class by former student Dustin Rippe.

The Present State of the Metropolitician

I've been working on a lot of stuff these days, and really getting settled into a nice, calm rhythm. Still, someone remarked, in a recent conversation with me, that I seemed to be getting angrier and angrier, at least on the blog. I guess that's true, but the funny thing is that it actually reflects the fact that I've been feeling more focused on other projects and chilling out.

As little sense as that makes, it been working like this: I've said a lot of what I feel needs to be said on certain topics I'm more concerned with, namely racism, sexism, the education system, and things in Korea. So, my long, serious, more academic posts on these subjects have been waning. Yet, things still pop up in the news, so I do respond to the more egregious things I hear about, which tend to be the things that make me angry enough to actually sit down and write something about. So, all you hear these days is the more reactionary side of me, with less of the more pro-active thinking and writing that marked the earlier days of the blog.

Which isn't a bad thing, I think. It just seems that I need to highlight some of the other directions I've been moving into more, especially in the realms of photography and fashion. As with any person, life brings changes to one's activities and interests. I've been doing a lot more traditional fashion shooting, which brings changes to my frequency (less) and type (more fancy lights) of shooting on Feetmanseoul.com.

I was involved in the aborted launch of a Korean fashion magazine (Faddict), but gained a lot of connections and experience through it. Since I have a column in a fashion industry newspaper called TINNews (Textile Industry News), I leveraged the support I can get from them in terms of picking up the phone and getting models, interviews, and other kinds of face time to start my own "social networked magazine," which happens to also be about Korean fashion and lifestyle called Yahae!

"Suki, 1949."

The idea here is that, if you look at the majority of traditional magazines, they're in a state of flux because media itself is in a state of flux, and that a lot of money still gets wasted on delivering content. The cost of printing, layout designers, shipping and distribution, and a myriad of other things related to the physicality of paper and the medium makes paper magazines expensive. Even with the "online magazine" that exist on professional levels, a lot of effort is required to construct and keep a web site, maintain the server, collate the content, etc. Long gone are the days of the HTML equivalent of the Wild West, back in the late 1990's, when anyone (including myself) could be a "web designer" and put up simple sites. But even then, the barrier to entry was somewhat high, which is why I was able to make extra money in grad school making sites for mom-and-pop shops, even though I was little more than an avid amateur. Because nearly everyone was, back then.

But, as Biggie Smalls, "things done changed" and "this ain't back in the day." Nowadays, slick content delivery vehicles spread ideas around specific communities faster than you can say the word "meme." What is "publishing," anyway? Facebook, Twitter, Wordpress, and Tumblr all allow you to get the word out, to connect with communities, to have arguments, plan events. I realize that a lot of my energy to speak out and connect with others has been subsumed by Facebook. In fact, many of my most recent posts are digested and adapted forms of a Facebook-based debate or even an annotated photo set I put up there.

So, the idea is that I have reached a professional-level ability to produce fashion content about Korea, from the street to the studio to the runway, shoot pro models and Korea's top fashion designers, and have the connections to start my own major photo projects (such as the one I started with Darcy Paquet in which we do an edgy, interesting portrait of a Korean movie star (my part), accompanied by an in-depth interview, with both types of content working on a level a bit different from that seen in the mainstream Korean media.

Look for that and many more samples of this work in a new column about to start late this week or early next week in Oh My News!, which might seem a strange place to publish a picture column, but makes a lot of sense because of its high readership through both itself directly and through the Naver news feed. I plan to gain a lot of  expsoure this way -- most importantly not just to the expat community, but to the greater Korean community at large -- so expect to hear a lot more about my pictures from that end of things in the coming weeks.

This doesn't mean I'm going to be doing less here. In fact, I want to focus more on light social critique through photography, as opposed to long, textual scribbles, going into the future. This blog originally started as a photography blog, to those who remember. It served its purpose to me in the way it evolved into the purpose it served. Now, I'm just naturally going in a slightly different direction, back to more expression through the camera.

What that should mean is more interesting content, as I continue FeetManSeoul.com and do street photo (and feed some of it into Yahae!), continue to blog and show pictures here, on my own personal blog, and gather a team to bring more fashion content into the Yahae! project. That project is in development -- live, not offline -- and producing magazine content already. Right now, a lot of it is experimental, but it's gelling together fast and is most definitely interesting. And that's what real "content development" is all about.

Expect a lot in the next several weeks and the immediate months to come. And keep track of me and these projects. Gonna do some shameless social networking promotion, but hey, it's my blog. If you can't do it here, where can you?

Follow me on Twitter @metropolitician.
Follow Yahae! on Twitter @yahaemag.
Read the world's first social networked Korean fashion magazine!
Yahae! at http://yahae.tumblr.com.

And of course, sign up for Seoul's only photo classes taught by a native speaker of English!

See you here, as well as 'round the Net!

Photo Classes for May

Spring's here, and it's time to get your photo skills together!

We've got Beginner, Intermediate, and a special Studio Master Class forming up for the May cycle. Check out the roster of classes in detail and remember the new page for the best English-language photo classes in Seoul. Six years and running, mostly by referral and word-of-mouth, I've been spreading the word farther and wider through Facebook Ads and better promotional ideas. Here's our Facebook page address:

http://www.facebook.com/photoseoul

Ain't that cool?

Check out what we got, sign up, and get to lairning that camera of yours once and fer all!

Ya hear?

Beginner Photo Classes for April Are Forming!

We've already got one class slated to start on Sunday, April 3rd and if there is demand for more, we can form another one.

This is the link to the Sunday class as a Facebook event, which you should RSVP to if you are going to register. 

And here's the link to the detailed course description and syllabus for those of you who would like a lot more detail about the class, its methodology, and its content.

Please note that you can contact me directly through the email address linked at the top right of this page, and that all payment information and directions are on the Studio 11 Photography Facebook page.

 

 

 

Come to My Exhibition: "The Fashion of the Korean Street"

When: Sunday, March 27th at 12:00 noon, showing until April 29th
Where: Cafe Bene at Chungmuro Station, right outside of Exit #5

Oh, yes. It's been a long time coming, and I'm happy to be showing off some of my work, after several years. And as many of you have seen, my work has progressed from street and documentary into street fashion, and now into the studio. But my heart is still in the streets of Seoul, which is where this exhibition will be coming from.

See ya'll there? Here's the formal announcement -- and if you're coming, please hit the Facebook link here and RSVP, maybe even to add me as a friend! And definitely keep up with changes to the event and announcements there!

THE EXHIBITION
Seoul has become an international city where fashion trends from all over the world come together, mix, and find increasingly broader expression. The Korean street has always been a place where old and new, traditional and modern, fast and slow have come colliding together. From old street markets to glass and steel skyscrapers, the hustle and bustle of the Korean street makes Seoul appealing as one of the best pla...ces in the world for street photography.

More recently, in just the past several years, as the prevailing winds of fashion trends have come into contact with Korea's super-connected Internet culture, Korean fashion has gone from the safety of blacks, whites, and grays to a melange of every fashion trend from around the world that combine into one another and find themselves remixed into a particularly Korean flavor.

A new "Korean wave" in fashion is brewing on the Korean street, and all kinds of personalities are finding expression through clothing, a new feeling of openness, and a respect for diversity in a new culture that is a celebration of the new.

This exhibition celebrates the fast, frenetic, and fabulous feel of the Korean street.

THE PHOTOGRAPHER
Having begun focused photo work in Korea in 2002, Michael Hurt is Korea's first foreign street photographer and street fashion photographer. By mixing the anthropological approach of taking things “as they are” with an unapologetically voyeuristic and fetishizing gaze, Michael is fascinated by the defining aspects of the Korean urban landscape, whether it be ajussis roasting meet in the street, or a prostitute showing her wares to passersby. Michael's photographs reflect a stark realism that matches the dynamic, frenetic, and extreme aspects of life in the world's most quickly, forcefully, and compressedly developed society.

Even in his street fashion photography, Michael works as a photographer - not a fashionista with a camera - to capture unique aspects of Korea's “clothing culture as colorful display,” whether fleeting, international trend or homegrown, flowery kitsch. In Michael's photography, mostly shot in wide-angle and often from the hip, one can feel "the hungry eye" of a Walker Evans, the obsessive desire to "see the world through the camera" that defined Garry Winogrand, the feeling of isolation and outsiderness that shaped Robert Frank's “The Americans,” and the familiarity and love for the Korean street in particular that motivated Korea's greatest street shooter, Kim Ki Chan, to keep shooting street until the day he died. Presently, Michael is working on a portrait series of Korean movie actors and is a working fashion photographer. But the streets continue to be Michael’s main stage and runway for the feel and fashion that defines life in Korea.

Some Notes on Modeling and the Studio

I've been starting to get more serious about getting better and more subtle with my lighting and fashion photography. After hunting around the Internet and looking at a lot of places, I've duplicated the lighting setup of a picture I liked a lot, which used a large umbrella softbox against neutral gray paper, set up high and off to the side of the model. I am also pushing myself to stop being so anal about making sure the model's face is "properly" and fully lit, using shadow to be more creative.

But as much as my new lighting configuration and pushing myself into other directions has made for better pics, I'm also getting some really expressive and awesome models. I found Shingoon through Facebook, as a suggestion of one of my ex-students, who is Shingoon's "junior." I had a feeling about her after looking at her Facebook pics, in which she was really self-confident and expressive. After some email and phone tag, we finally shot today, and although this was her first real professional shoot, she fell right into love with the lens and got comfortable fast. In short, the girl's amazing and has lots of potential.

You'll be seeing a lot more of her both here and possibly in some of my professional projects.

This is a technical exercise, still, so I am experimenting with the more subtle aspects of this kind of portraiture. One thing is getting the lighting effect you want, but another is catching just the right expression. Throw into that the more luck-based element of throwing the hair and getting just the right instant, and you are paying attention to a lot of specific things, but in a clear and useful way. So once I've got the angle of her body and face down (and have shown this to the model so the feedback can help her also figure out what's going on in the actual camera), what's left is expression and catching the hair at the right instant.

Again, this speaks also to the model's skill. Little things like remembering to keep one's eyes fixed on the lens while flipping the hair, in addition to keeping one's face relaxed while also giving the specific expression you want while doing the flip, is quite a hard thing to do. Seriously. A lot of models have major trouble keeping this together, but Shingoon picked it up and did it like a pro. Very impressive.

Also, one more thing. I hope she doesn't mind the unusual expression, but I doubt she will. After meeting her, I thought it kind of fit her personality, which is why I even thought to put this one in -- it's actually a crop of a full body shot, but I liked the way her face seems to condescend to you when you look at it.

Another aspect of this pose in these pictures is her stance -- I wanted her at an angle at which one might imagine you can see into her dress, which makes the feel of the image a bit more provocative or perhaps even intimate, but the important thing is that the shadow covers everything "naturally." The whole point of these pictures is that she's not showing much, but you feel like she is. Or perhaps she's actually showing a lot, but you don't feel it's too much. Either way, that's why Vogue can show you a picture of a nearly-naked lady riding a white horse with a headpiece made of thorns while wearing Prada heels or something, but it looks neither risque not ridiculous.

Or, in my case, I can put a picture of a topless girl wearing fishnet stockings and stiletto heels and no one freaks out, because when you desaturate into nearly black and white, do another layer in Overlay mode, and crop it just right, it looks "arty." Or, as is my goal, like a picture you might see in a fashion magazine.

I love the side shot, don't like how the dress covers everything so that it looks like potato sack, but then again, she's half taken it off. But I do like the expression and pose.

An alternate shot and testament to just how well Shingoon can keep her face natural and give a specific expression even as her head is flipping up from down by her knees. Try it sometime -- it's hard. She's GOOD.

Again, I love the look. I've found one of her strengths in this test shoot and it's in her intense looks, her eyes. Also, she has great hair and a great haircut, and after each head throw, her hair lands just right. It's awesome. It's the little things.

A crop of a shot just like the picture before this one. I wanted to eliminate the dress and concentrate on her body. Also, the shadow falls just right and slims her upper arm, which every girl can appreciate. It's the #1 thing I am asked to Photoshop, above pimples, scars, and birthmarks. The back of the upper arm. Shingoon's arms look fine, but I bet you a dollar she likes this picture, mostly because her arms look great, as much as her face.

A more naturalistic Photoshop job, one I like to do that naturally makes the skin look smoother in a sheeny kinda way, and also simulates the feel of black-and-white, but still has the slightest touch of color. I could go even further with the desaturation than most pictures because it IS essentially black-and-white already, as it alternates between black and white from her hair, face and arms, dress, skin from her thigh, then stockings, which themselves alternate between black-and-white because they are fishnets with lace tops.

Her "dress" is a skirt, by the way. Pulled up over her chest. Stockings were pulled out from a bag of them from a sale at H&M. We're keeping it real.

I like her 'tude here, and she sure knows how to work a skirt-we-used-as-a-dress to make it look good. It kind of reminds me of a hanbok (Korean traditional dress) in the way it basically hides the form as it balloons out from the chest down. I think I inherited that skirt from perhaps my ex-roommate Tasha?    

Shoot a Korean Supermodel!

Learn studio and general photography with a Korean supermodel!

Kang Minyoung.

When else on God's green earth are you going to have a chance to a) learn studio photography, b) shoot an actual supermodel, and c) display your work after the class finishes?

I'm a working fashion photographer, have many industry contacts, and was lucky enough to find the right people with whom to do this class. It's about the coolest thing I've ever organized.

If you want to up your photo game, this is the time and way to do it!

Movie Star Kkobbi Flowerain Kim Is a Faddict!