Bronx-born, California-raised, Ian Sitren has been around gyms his whole life. Moving to Southern California at the age of two, Sitren’s father took him often. After doing some weight lifting of his own when twelve years old, Sitren became inmpressed with the photography he found in bodybuilding magazines. As an adult working as a full-time photographer, he married his interests and carved out a spot for himself as a top bodybuilding shooter.

As his career progressed, Sitren won the confidence of many photo editors and commercial clients. Whereas he previously gave them what he thought they wanted, he now delivers what he thinks best, shooting to both express himself and complete the assignment to his exacting standards.

Regarding locations, Sitren shoots where the assignments lead him. Although the majority of his work is done in gyms and bodybuilding shows held in auditoriums, he shoots in more interesting locations when he can. “I will typically try to think up something more interesting and adventuresome than just shooting in the gym, which can get very tiresome,” he explains. “For the average person, going in and shooting in a gym would seem pretty exciting, but when you do it over and over and over again, there’s only so much you can do with it.”

Other clients such as Bodybuilding.com have given Sitren even more freedom. For that publication, he writes, shoots, and puts together the Iron Man Magazine BodySpace Physique of the Month column. With a half-million readers and site members, he chooses whom to feature and how to shoot them. He also writes a brief article on each body builder and how they transformed themselves. “It’s a huge amount of freedom,” he says. “I send them, typically, 12 to 24 photos from a shoot. They’ll run three to six.”

Originally a film shooter, Sitren was slow to embrace digital technology. “I was quite happy shooting film. Still am,” he says. “I still shoot quite a bit of film. It depends on the project. I don’t limit myself. When I think about a project, or when I’m doing a project, if I get up and I say, ‘Boy, in my mind’s eye I see that in medium format Tri-X,’ then it’s going to be in medium format Tri-X.”

“If I see the shot as really sharp, high-resolution digital, then it’s going to be really sharp, high-resolution digital. If I see that as: ‘Whoops, that’s due tomorrow,’ then it’s digital,” he laughs. “It also depends on budgets. Budgets aren’t the same as what they were just three years ago. I don’t quite have the latitude on some projects in shooting film now because it’s too expensive.”

Sitren was witness to an industry-wide trend as the Great Recession continued to drag on and deepen. Magazines cut back as their advertising fell away. Paper-based publications literally got thinner. Ad budgets got smaller. Manufacturers re-ran ads and repurposed photos. Some publications went from monthlies to quarterlies. Some ceased to exist. This survival strategy gave them large backlogs of materials for future issues. Photo assignments disappeared.

Adapting to these changing budgetary landscapes, Sitren adjusted what he was spending on shoots, and got more out of single shoots than he previously did. When shooting film, he was more judicious to get the maximum out of the expense of film and processing. “I’ve been through recessions before, but nothing like this,” he says.

Conversely, this has slowly brought about a pendulum-swing in the opposite direction. “The upside is typically in a recession, the bodybuilding and fitness world does very well,” he explains. “People who would otherwise be running out and spending money at the bar every night, and spending money doing this, that, and the other, all of a sudden internalize things and do things more important and better for themselves than they used to. They start going to the gym. They start paying attention to health. They start paying attention to things that they weren’t doing before. So, they’ll run out to the magazine stands, and they’ll buy a $6 magazine, whereas before they wouldn’t have even bothered. $6 for a magazine is actually fairly inexpensive entertainment. Your $30 gym membership, well, gosh, it’s a pretty big social network you can have very inexpensively.”

The economy isn’t the only thing changing for Sitren. He’s been experimenting with various Mamiya medium format digital gear. “I was probably the first person ever to be published with the Mamiya ZD Back,” he says of an assignment he did for Bodybuilding and Fitness World magazines. He also used it for a Palm Springs feature in Private Clubs, a large country club magazine, and a feature in Iron Man magazine. “I got a cover and a big feature in a couple trade magazines using the ZD Back, and that’s pretty much when it first came out. For the pricepoint, it was a pretty good buy.”

Sitren is also using the Mamiya DM33. “I was really impressed with it,” he says. “What amazed me especially was the dumbfounding color that came right out of the camera. The tremendous sharpness, the color, everything was so damn perfect, and part of it’s got to be the vast improvement of the D‑series lenses, as compared to the primary lenses I used on the 645AFD II. I was just astounded of what came into, and what came out of the camera. I had to do nothing to them. I had to do nothing, just no retouching. It was perfect.”

Feeling the medium format quality gives him an edge when presenting to his clients. “When I opened up those DM33 files, I about fell out of my chair,” he recalls. I was amazed. They were heads-up better than the Aptus 65 files, heads up better than the Phase P45 files. No question. I’ve shot a lot of stuff and the DM33 just blew me away. I was dumbfounded. I was pretty impressed with the Mamiya anyway with the prior lenses and everything, but this just blew me away.”

Additionally, Sitren shoots a Canon 5D, a Canon 1D, as well as the Mamiya 645AFD II.

Defying conventional wisdom, Sitren is able to achieve film-like qualities with medium format digital shooting. Of his outdoor session with Raechelle Chase he explains, “I did the ever popular high‑definition look to photos. The files out of the DM33 were so sharp and had such definition. The gravel in the ground was plainly visible. It was dumbfounding. But, at the opposite end of the spectrum, when I wanted to slow the shutter down and make it have that film, not-quite-in-focus-movement-look to it, it worked really well for that too. I like doing that. With the DM33, it was so easy to emulate a lot of types of shooting I used to do on film. Still do on film, actually.”

With his own photography, Sitren continues to attempt to stand out, even if his subject matter remains the same. “I try to do things differently. I try to make sure that my stuff does not look like the next thing in a magazine. One of the big tests for me was taking the camera into the gym. Even if you’re lighting it, you’ve got a whole different set of parameters you’re working within. I also have a tendency to shoot kind of odd lightings. I’ll put the light behind somebody, or I’ll flood them with light and give it that hazy look. The DM33 was much more responsive to really odd lighting than I had expected. I was able to focus without resorting to go to manual most of the time, which is a big time saver. Especially, when I shoot people in the gym, I actually make them work out. They’re not posing, for the most part.”

Sitren feels it’s critical his bodybuilding subjects are fully engaged. “I’m pushing them through a workout because I want it to look like they’re actually working out. I want the muscles to be flexed and to be working as they would in a workout. The only way to do that is to use real weight and real people doing real things. The camera needs to be fairly responsive to that. It has to be able to shoot fast enough, and preferably autofocus fast enough.”

When asked about his lighting, Sitren quickly says, “I exclusively use Profoto. Ninety‑nine percent of the time it’s an Acute 2400R. I’ll use one or two heads. I’ll use a strip softbox and a head, or maybe just a head, or sometimes two silver umbrellas. A couple of PocketWizards and my Sekonic L‑358 meter and I’m good to go.”

With his chosen gear, Sitren is able to quickly set-up and get the shots he’s looking for. “It’s easy,” he declares. “I can store everything in the trunk of my car. I have one assistant. He gets everything out of the car, has it all set up within 15 to 20 minutes.”

This summer Sitren will be wrapping up a photo book entitled Muscle Beach Today, spanning his work with bodybuilders. His blog on Bodybuilding.com has pulled in hundreds of thousands of viewers, and shows no sign of running out of content. Other areas he’s been experimenting with include flattening colors, desaturating, and changing overall color themes. Client response has been positive. “I like doing it,” he says. “It’s fun. It’s something you would have done in film. In film you burn and dodge and cross process and different things, but you gotta start out with really good files.”

Ian Sitren has found his niche. He and his lifework are textbook examples of utlilizing a deep personal interest to create art and earn a living from it. Whether you spend time in a gym, or not, and whether you can appreciate the staggering array of muscles bodybuilders strive for, Sitren’s work and the career he’s built are testaments to a photographer beating odds to become and stay successful, despite economic downturns, fluctuating public interest, and advancing technology. That’s an impressive display of strength and art.

Ian Sitren Photography

Ian Sitren blog

Written by Ron Egatzhttp://blog.mamiya-usa.com/wp-content/uploads/

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Posted by Ron Egatz on June 28th, 2010 :: Filed under 645
Tags :: Ian Sitren

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From growing up in the Ann Arbor-area of Michigan to shooting exotic locations throughout the southwestern United States, Jim Shoemaker is no stranger to reinventing himself and his destiny. After obtaining a degree in Graphic Design from Siena Heights University, he worked as a designer, riding out several recessions. In 2000′s dot-com collapse and recession, he moved to California to reboot his career.

Known primarily as a landscape photographer, Shoemaker explains his preferred subject matter by what interested him as a child. “I’ve been an outdoor person since I was a kid growing up in Michigan,” he recalls. “It’s not like there was a lot to do. We were in a rural area, and I spent a lot of time roaming around the woods. I always enjoyed being outdoors.” Inspired by Ansel Adams and other iconic landscape shooters, he was drawn to that type of photography. “Even before I was really into photography,” he says, “I would look at Adams’ work and there was just something so powerful about it, something that moved me, and I responded to, even though at the time I wasn’t making any connections I should be doing this myself.”

Primarily self-taught, Shoemaker developed his technique by doing, observing and learning. “Trial and error” is how he describes he obtained his technical ability. “I read a lot. I have quite a library of photography books. I read everything I can get my hands on and spend a lot of time researching online. I shoot both thirty-five millimeter and medium format. The best thing to do is just pack up the gear and head out into the field, shoot, come back, look at the results, go back and just keep repeating the process until I find what I’m looking for.”

What he had been looking for subject-wise turned out to be the desert. “When I was growing up in Michigan, I would see photographs of places throughout the southwest,” he remembers. “It was always fascinating to me but at the time I never even imagined I would see them let alone live out in these areas. There’s something about the desert I connect with. Maybe it’s that I’m living forty miles outside of Los Angeles and I deal with the traffic and crowds all the time. When I can escape to Death Valley, or I get out into the Sonoran Desert or something, it’s just the solitude. Maybe that’s what I was always looking for when I was in Michigan. Maybe it’s why I would head out into the woods and spend my days out there. I enjoyed being away. I guess it’s cathartic for me.”

In Shoemaker’s viewfinder, solitude is reflected as being a peaceful antidote to the crowds of Los Angeles. Rhyolite, Nevada and other ghost towns have proven to be fertile settings for this photographer’s accomplished and moving portraits. “I’ve always been fascinated with remote places, which is probably where I get my love of being in the deserts and mountains,” he says. “I like abandoned places—places that used to be such centers of activity, and now there’s just nothing there. There’s nobody living there. They’re just empty and forgotten. I don’t know exactly how I got an attraction to that, but there is definitely an interest in watching the process of things breaking down, I suppose. Among the things I’ve discovered over the years of shooting ghost towns are things breaking down gain more character to me than the things that are new and intact.”

Remote locations of former mining towns and camps are Shoemaker’s main focus in recent years. He points to Swansea, California off Interstate 395 in the Lone Pine area, with it’s one stagecoach stop building as a perfect example of a structure with heightened character. Shooting the remains since 2008, he’s documented a dramatic degradation of its condition. The small town of Garlock, California in the Red Rock Canyon area has also fallen before Shoemaker’s lens. With just a handful of buildings left, he’s charted the decay of Garlock, and is not aware of anyone restoring or even maintaining this small ghost town. Cerro Gordo had an owner/caretaker who passed away about a year ago, and the future of its remaining structures is in doubt. Bodie, California is faring better. Protected as a California State Park,  Bodie remains frozen in time by two caregivers who keep it in a state of “arrested decay.” They maintain and repair what is currently there, but do no improvements. Rhyolite, Nevada, mentioned earlier, is perhaps the most photographed of these ghost towns, with its iconic crumbling John S. Cook and Company Bank used in major Hollywood films since at least 1964, most recently in 2005′s The Island.

Rhyolite, although probably the most visited ghostown in the southwest, still holds a significant amount of allure for Shoemaker. “There’s something to the fact that at one point there was 8,000 people living there and within two or three years that population has decreased by a third, and then within ten years the place is empty. I can go back through archival photos online and see what this place looked like in its heyday and it’s really hard to make a connection to what I see now. There’s so little left, and it’s just amazing something that was so prominent and built to last…” he trails off. “It really draws me in that most of the towns following gold mines and gold fields were made out of wood. People built a simple wooden structure or simple stone structure or canvas structure, and when the gold ran out, they pulled up the stakes and were gone and the town went with it. But Rhyolite they built basically out of stone. They intended it to last but it didn’t.”

If Rhyolite holds the crown of ghost towns, the Cook Bank sits as its centerpiece jewel. “I’m fearful of the day when I drive into town and it’s not there,” Shoemaker says. “There’s a corner of that building that just has such great character, it gives character to the building, and I know it’s been slowly collapsing over the years. One day I am going to drive in and that corner is going to be gone. It’s going to have lost all of that great character that it had. I think, maybe, that’s why I photograph it every chance I get.” Shoemaker shoots Rhyolite at all times of the day and night. Daylight shots are challenging because of tourists milling about, which he doesn’t want to photograph.

When pressed for more about what draws him to photograph ghost towns of the southwest, Shoemaker is candid about the pull he feels. “It was this underlying feeling of needing to see this place for myself. I think that’s probably the thing I want to transmit through my own work: that I want people to look at it and say, ‘This is a place that I never really thought about before—maybe I didn’t even know about before—but I think I want to see this for myself.’”

In 2004 Shoemaker bought a Canon 10D and began shooting. Two years later he bought his first Mamiya, a 645AFD. He now shoots two of the same model. For backup, he uses a Leaf Aptus 17 digital back. A user of Photoshop since version 2.0, Shoemaker is no stranger to digital technology, and shoots no film.

Conversely, Shoemaker is careful about how much digital manipulation he executes in post-production. “When it comes to Photoshop, I try to limit it to the things that I would be doing in a wet darkroom if I was shooting film. Any education I have in photography came from reading books,” he says. Most of the books he’s read are by Ansel Adams. “If you’ve ever read any of his work, he is maniacal when it comes to getting it right in the camera. In his time, it was on film, but with a negative he wanted all the information he needed. That would give him the print he wanted, based on the vision he had when he looked at the scene. You get it in camera as close as you can to matching your vision.”

Shoemaker uses a Sekonic L-558 Dual Master spot meter to pick and choose the points in the subject he wants to read and meter for important tonal values. “That’s what I meter off of, and that’s how I judge the exposure,” he explains. “It’s both an incidental light meter and a spot meter, so it does a lot of work for me. And, of course, we’ve got the LCDs we can look at to check the histograms and see whether it’s in line with what I have in mind, exposure-wise. It’s like shooting with a Polaroid basically if I was doing film. I don’t want to spend so much time having to go back and readjust everything. I will shoot raw images in both formats. But, it’s just not that much fun to sit there and go through dozens and dozens of images and have to lower the values or raise the values or just make all kinds of global adjustments all over the thing when I could have done it in the camera in the first place.”

Heading out on photography excursions for three weeks at a time, Shoemaker knows what to bring and what not to bring. “I generally have my Canon 5D Mark II with me, and I’ll take my Mamiya 645, a spare Mamiya body, and sometimes I take a 20D backup body for my Canon. As far as lenses, I take a pretty limited selection for both formats. For my Mamiya I have a 35mm lens that I would probably consider my primary landscape lens, especially when I shoot with the least back because it has a crop factor. When I shoot film through it, it gives me a little more flexibility but I’ve got my 35mm. I’ve got a 55 to 110mm which is probably my next most used lens for the medium format. I’ve got a 105 to a 210mm which I don’t use a whole lot, but every now and then it comes in handy.”

Like his use of digital technology, Shoemaker is not stuck in ghost towns for his photographic subjects. The Bradbury Building and Chrysler Building are among the still-functional structures he’s photographed, not to mention meadows, natural rock arches and other settings which have fallen under the gaze of his cameras. “I have an interest in architecture,” he says. “That’s my problem: I have an interest in too many things. If I had to label myself, it would definitely be a landscape photographer, but there’s so many things that are interesting visually. There’s a lot of interesting things, and whatever catches my eye because of form, because of the texture, because of lighting, I think I’ll photograph it.”

The critical element for Shoemaker is feeling and instinct. “I don’t know that there’s a big difference in my mindset when I’m looking at a canyon, a landscape, a skyline, or architectural features, or rock formations,” he says. “I know what I have in mind. When I look at a subject, I kind of get a vision of what I’m looking for. And sometimes, whether it’s a landscape or a building, I can’t realize it on a camera. I just don’t find it on that particular day. It’s really frustrating, but that’s the way things go. Other times I know what I’m looking for. I find it, I frame it, I shoot it. It seems to be instinctual for me. It’s just a reaction to what I’m seeing.”

Jim Shoemaker Photography

Jim Shoemaker on Smugmug

Written by Ron Egatz

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Posted by Ron Egatz on June 16th, 2010 :: Filed under 645,Mamiya
Tags :: ghost town, Jim Shoemaker, landscape photography

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