food photographer Susan Seubert shoots for the New York Times

Today, a story I photographed for The New York Times is published in the Dining section of the paper.  The story covers barrel aged cocktails, the latest in high end libations.  Jeffrey Morgenthaller, the bar manager at Clyde Common in Portland, Oregon, was first inspired when he visited a bar in London.  He came back home and started experimenting with the mixture and came up with a nice selection of beverages.  If you find yourself at Clyde Common, you might want to order one of the favorites and most available, the Negroni.  Cheers!

Click here to read the story in The New York Times

I shot this assignment with Canon 5D Mark II cameras, using the 24-105 IS USM lens and the Canon 50mm compact macro for the details.  The images were all processed using Adobe’s Lightroom software.

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editorial photographer Susan Seubert and the Canon L Series 50mm 1.2 USM lens

This year, I broke down and purchased a Canon 50mm 1.2 L series USM lens.  It is spectacular for portrait work because of its amazing bokeh.  There is a lot of chatter out there about the spectacular price difference between the 1.2 and the Canon 1.4.  I also own a Canon 50mm 2.5 macro which is instrumental for me for shooting details of things from food to flowers but for portraits, the 1.2 can’t be beat.  Here are two examples.  One is a portrait of my husband, which I dropped into a film frame for effect – I’ve long been lugging around an analogue Hasselblad with a beautiful 80mm lens, which I’ve used for years as my primary portrait lens. It’s also fantastic combined with a few extension tubes. However, now that I’m moving into an almost exclusively digital workflow, I had to find a lens that I was happy enough with to leave my Hasselblad behind when going on assignment.  Don’t get me wrong, I still love working with film, but the practical side of my business has forced my hand on this one.  I’ve been taking the d65 wokrshop every other year to keep current on the latest digital workflow which has led me to adopt working almost exclusively in Adobe’s Lightroom.  That software combined with the Canon 5D Mark II’s and lenses I work with give me a great way to process thousands of images in a relatively short period of time, without sacrificing any amount of quality. (This year’s processed tally is almost to 13,000 client delivered images).  My digital library is now more organized than ever – I can find any image with just a few clicks of the mouse.  I hope you find this information useful!

Portrait shot with the Canon L series 1.2 50mm USM lens, dropped into a Hasselblad film frame using Photoshop CS5

my cat, photographed on the couch using the Canon L series 1.2 USM lens, processed using Adobe's Camera Raw and Photoshop CS5

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travel photographer Susan Seubert about the importance of an assistant

Greetings!  As National Geographic Traveler is publishing the story I photographed about Barbados in the January/February 2011 issue of the magazine, I thought this would be a good time to write about the importance of having an extra set of hands around on a shoot.  These days, editorial budgets are very tight, so sometimes the job won’t allow for one but in certain instances, having a partner on a shoot is indispensable.  The other caveat is that often times I’m asked to also shoot video and collect audio, making my work at least three times as complicated as it was pre-multimedia.  That said, I always like to rise to a challenge, so I tried being a one man band for the first day of this assignment and realized, quickly, that it would be impossible for me to do a good job in Barbados flying solo.  Enter: fixer.  I am blessed with a partner in life that not only has an MFA in photography, but also can get himself halfway around the globe in 24 hours or less.  He was with me the morning of the shoot with the horses and took a couple of stills of me in the water.  I was just perusing some of the images and realized that he illustrated precisely why – under certain circumstances – it is necessary to have someone watching your back.  Barbados is as safe of a place as one can get in the Caribbean, but add thousands of dollars worth of camera equipment left unattended on a beach and voila, it’s like finding cash sitting around on the ground.  Anyone would be tempted to walk off with my carbon fiber Gitzo fitted with a heavy-duty Manfrotto head and, set atop it like a crown jewel, a Canon 5D Mark II with a pristine 24-105mm lens with lens hood, a 77mm polarizing filter and a nice Crumpler strap.  Not to mention my favorite accessory – a three-way hot shoe level.  It was enough of a bummer to not have a water housing to work with, but that didn’t stop me from walking into the water up to just above waist deep, to get as close as I could to the horses.  Lost in my enthusiasm, I simply left the other camera with aforementioned accessories, sitting behind me on the beach.  As I look at the photo of me in the water, I can tell that I was drawn in by the dawn swiftly changing to daylight, as is evidenced by the light on my white shirt.  These men and their horses were just then becoming well lit and I only had a few minutes before the magic of that morning dawn would turn into the white-hot Caribbean day.  In hindsight it was a bad decision and without my fixer there, would have most likely been a great loss.  But he stood on the beach, watching the gear so I could get the shot.  For that moment, I will be forever grateful to him.

walking into the water, leaving camera equipment on the beach...

water housing? I don't need no stinking water housing...

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National Geographic Traveler photographer Susan Seubert shoots Barbados

It is with great pleasure to announce that a story I shot about Barbados for National Geographic Traveler Magazine last summer is being published in the January/February 2011 issue of the magazine.  This morning I woke up to the photo gallery which is now online and am anxiously awaiting for the printed issue to arrive in the mail.  Photographing in Barbados was a marvelous experience as the Bajan people are wonderful.  Throughout the country people were welcoming and eager to help which makes my job as a travel photographer an absolute pleasure.  The biggest challenge was finding my way around the island.  All roads do conspire to eventually get you where you need to be, but often in a more circuitous route than one might initially plan. It was a thrill to drive on the left, which I haven’t done for quite a while, along with the fact that once you leave the main area surrounding Bridgetown, the roads turn into one lane passages filled with anything from herds of sheep to giant trucks barreling along at break-neck speeds.  The most memorable experience was photographing the thoroughbred horses having a bath in the ocean at dawn.  After a tip from a local, I decided that it was worth getting up at 3:30 to drive to the water’s edge where, twice a week, the groomers bring the race-horses into the ocean for a bath and a swim.  It was completely dark when we arrived at the parking lot, and all I could here was the “ker-plock, ker-plock” of horses’ hooves on the pavement.  Then, out of the darkness a man and a horse appeared under the streetlamp by the beach, and off they would go into the water.  It took a while for it to get light, but the water was so warm and the air so still, that for two hours, I went chest deep into the water with my camera and stood as close as I could photograph to the groomers as they washed and talked.  It was so beautiful to see these horses enjoying the water, the men talking to each other in the heavy Bajan dialect, and then watch them as they would hang onto the hind haunches as the horses swam out to sea for a bit and then back to shore.  Some of the animals didn’t want to get out and would protest by pulling at their reins or lying down.  I had to be very careful as one swift kick from these lovely creatures would have sent me directly to the hospital!  The sky turned pink, then blue, then gradually the flow of horses slowed and stopped.  It was 7:30am and I had already been shooting for three hours.  Marvelous.

This was also the first shoot I’ve done for traveler that was fully digital.  I took my Rolliflex and a Holga, but time didn’t permit the use of either of these cameras, so I shot everything on two Canon 5D Mark II cameras, and a host of lenses including my new favorite, a 50mm 1.2 for portraits and low light.  I also shot a bit of video and took some audio.  I’ll post one of my pieces in January, so stay tuned!

Click here to see Barbados: Photos From the Big Hearted Caribbean Island

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fine art photographer Susan Seubert working in wet-plate collodion

Greetings!  The holiday season is upon us already… my how time flies.  Last week was a flurry of assignments but with the annual slowing down of work around this time of year, I usually take some time to work on personal projects.  This year is no exception.  My good friend and mentor, Jody Ake moved to Portland recently and agreed to give me a refresher course on wet-plate collodion.  For a one-person show in 2009 during Portland’s biennial photo festival, Photolucida, I showed a group of 25 full plate ambrotypes – a study of birds nests that I created during a workshop in 2008 at the Oregon College of Arts and Crafts that Jody taught. This piece was also included in the Tacoma Art Museum’s 2009 Northwest Biennial.

grid of 8x10" ambrotypes entitled, "Nest"

Since that show, I’ve been busily filling print orders and taking assignments and have not had a large enough block of time to get back into the wet darkroom… until now!  Often I use my holiday card as a conceptually simplistic way to get my creative ball rolling again.  I’m looking forward to continuing to work in the wet-plate process making not only ambrotypes, but also ferrotypes.  Happy Holidays!

wet-plate ambrotype of mercury glass ornaments

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