Digital Photo Pro Magazine

Everything Old
IS NEW AGAIN

Jody Dole strikes a creative balance between using any tool and technique-old and new-to help him get the shot.

By William A. Sawallich
Photography by Jody Dole

When most commercial photographers discuss their transition from film to digital, they usually explain how they resisted at first. Then, over the course of a few years, they begin experimenting with the equipment and finally realize all it had to offer.

The story usually ends with how they're now shooting almost everything digitally, but they occasionally use film when they're feeling nostalgic.

With Jody Dole, that story unfolds a bit differently. His exploration of digital technology occurred no around the turn of the 21st century, but more than a decade ago. He began to experiment with new equipment before the term "digital photography" had even been coined. He was, in fact, one of the first photographers in America to use a digital camera.

"The fact is that I got started in digital photography early, simply out of curiosity," Dole says. "I was just going along and doing my thing with the digital camera because I thought it was very interesting."

It intrigued him enough to invest thousands of dollars in equipment--from scanners to cameras to printers. His friends thought he was crazy; few others knew what to make of it.

"I got the first version of Photoshop on a Macintosh computer in 1990. I was showing it to my rep at the time, and he looked at this thing, and it was literally like I threw a carpet on the floor and it levitated him. When you see that for the first time...it was as fascinating for me as the first time I ever saw a print come up in the developer. It was like magic. My agent saw what I was doing in Photoshop, and he left my studio like a leprechaun clicking his heels, running down the street."

"A few days later, I got a phone call from a client at an ad agency in New York , and she said, 'Hey, Jody, I heard you're getting out of the business.' I said, 'Excuse me, I just got into the business.' She said, 'Your rep said you were opening a photo shop, and I was just curious where it was going to be.'

Slowly, the rest of the world began to catch up with Jody Dole, but it wasn't overnight. Back in the dark ages of digital, he faced the early-adopter problem of working with tools that weren't widely understood.

"We were sending my portfolios out on CD, and people were calling me up, saying that it wouldn't play in their stereo," he explains. "I had a Website up before there were HTML browsers, so nobody could see it. People had heard I was making Iris prints, and when they looked at my portfolio, they were wondering where the pictures of the irises were."

Although obviously enamored with the new, Dole didn't abandon the old. To this day, he uses film frequently, resisting the idea that incorporating new technology into a workflow means abandoning the tried and true. Film is still the best choice for some jobs based upon client needs or image size issues. He makes technical decisions in the same way today as he did 15 years ago--solely for the purpose of benefiting the photograph. It's a choice that the photographer eagerly makes, refusing to allow the technology to be imposed upon him.

"Digital technology isn't something that changed the way I do things," Dole explains. "I changed the way I do things. I don't let technology manipulate what I do; I manipulate the technology. You have to have the background and you have to have the history, and you have to be a visual communicator in order to use the technology or any other means--whether it's a pinhole in a shoebox or the latest piece of technology."

In 1990, it was about curiosity; now it's about control. Like most successful photographers, Dole places the utmost emphasis on the final image--everything else is just a means to an end. with digital tools, Dole has been able to bring into his studio processes that he once outsourced. But digital tools have allowed him something even more valuable that photographic control. They've freed him from his New York studio and prompted a significant change in his lifestyle. Digital technology helped make the move possible because Dole didn't have to be close to New York 's film labs.

"If there's one thing digital did for me, it's that it got me out of the studio after 15 years of still life and it got me outside," say Dole. "I lived and worked in New York City for 18 years. My family and I used to come up the Connecticut River Valley for vacations in the summer. After seven years, we were there a few days and then a week and then two weeks, an then pretty soon we bought a house and never went home. I love what I do 100 hours a day. And I love the fact that we were able to move out of Manhattan into a studio up in Connecticut . That's absolutely something I dreamt about."

Along with a new lifestyle, Dole is cultivating a new type of client. But just as digital "can't change the laws of physics," it also can't change some clients.

"What I've never dealt with well is when clients want to see exactly their shot in your portfolio before they'll ire you," he says. "I have this great shot of a pretzel, and I was up for a potato chip job. 'we know you can photograph a pretzel,' they said, ' but can you do a potato chip?' The client hired the guy with 15 mediocre potato chip pictures rather than making the leap of faith with the one guy who had the great pretzel shot."

Even worse, the prevalence of digital cameras today means that some clients simply think they're professionals. " We had given an estimate on a project," Dole says, "and the client came back to me with, 'Well, I think we're going to do this in our in-house studio because we have a digital photo studio now.'\

"I asked them, 'Why are you doing this in-house suddenly with digital technology? When the times were different, when you needed to expose film, when you needed to develop film, and you neededto look at Polaroids, when you needed to have some technical ability beyond instantaneous capture from a digital camera, why weren't you doing it back then?'

"Because there was a level of uncertainty back then--they would have needed to know how to expose film, push-process film, the technical stuff that could potentially screw them up. Now you can see whether you got it right away."

Adds Dole, "One of the things that frustrates me is that people are willing to accept correcting after the fact versus going into a project with a stronger point of view. It happens every day: 'Well, we'll fix it in Photoshop.' therefore, you have, in effect, a less talented visual communicator who's going to use a technology to fix what they couldn't see to begin with. My whole career has been based on seeing it to begin with."

Dole is using his digital equipment to allow him not only more professional freedom in where and how he shoots, but what he shoots. Now he spends time working on the images that are interesting to hi, and without the added costs of film and processing he's able to experiment more. Those experiments ultimately bring in more work.

"I've found over the years that the more work I show in my portfolio that's personal to me, the more work I get," says Dole. "When I adapted my portfolio to showcase a lot more of the commercial work that i had done over the years, it just became lumped into that competitive crowd. The more commercial work I showed from other clients, it seems the less commercial assignment I got."

Just Another Pinhole

"There's no rhyme or reason for me to use digital photography unless we're doing something specific that requires it," Dole says. "when I'm doing splash shots, it's fabulous for obvious reasons. You end up with a great splash on a Polaroid and then you've got to go shoot eight or nine rolls of film and then wonder if you got it. I've worked on [digital] projects where we set up a splash shot at 10 o'clock in the morning and by 10:45 we were finished. With digital capture in the studio you know when you got it. The point is, though, you have to know what looks good.

"I'm doing portraiture that I've never done before," he continues. "By tethering either the Phase One or the Nikon camera right to the computer, when you shot and you can see it right away, you can fine-tune right away. I've found it to be fabulous. And the quality of Nikon's NEF format is extraordinary."

Digital has never failed Dole's quality test. On a recent job, he shot digitally and with film, and delivered both to the client in a "blind taste test." The client chose the digital. "The quality that I can get out of the Nikon D1x is, in most cases, better than film," he says. "So there's very little reason for me to use 35mm film. If I'm going to film, I'm going to medium-format film."

Although he's obviously tech-savvy, Dole resists the idea that technology has made him better. He prefers new ideas to new tools. He sees technology as just a different hammer or chisel. After all, he contends, would anyone imply that Picasso was successful because of his tools? "We all know it ain't the paint," he says. "I could shoot the same picture with a pinhole in a shoebox that I could shoot with any camera that you could put in my hand."

Dole does acknowledge how the computer can make the process more efficient. While photographing the Gelston House, an 18th-century inn near his home in the Connecticut River Valley , for example, Dole achieved the same final result that he could have with film, but the computer allowed him to streamline the process.

"Digital photography helped tremendously because I only had to backlight two or three of the windows," he says. "The windows are warm and glowing and look really cool. But we didn't want to light every window because we would have had to go out and buy 30 quartz lights. So I just lit two or three windows and cloned them in Photoshop, it was perfect."

His image of a dozen insects stemmed from his ability to do things in the computer that he simply couldn't do in the camera. The client wanted an insect for the ad, "but they couldn't find a bug that was friendly," he explains. "The bug in the top-right corner is a combination of a bunch of them. That bug has got a green beetle body with different "antlers," different head, different legs. We built a bug that didn't exist."

That amount of digital assembly is the anomaly in Dole's portfolio, although it's a book in which amazing arrangements and assemblages abound. Most stem from a combination of old and new tools together. They rely principally on the photographer's creativity, as well as a few decidedly un-technological devices.

"There's a million dollars' worth of jewelry in that picture," Dole explains of a striking stack of rings that illustrates his fondness for balance. "And I put it together with a hot glue gun. And let me tell you, that editor wasn't happy about that. But you know what? They came to me saying, 'You only have two hours with this stuff because it's from five different jewelers and they all have to have it back in the vault by 4 o'clock .' And they were suppose to get there at 10:00 , and they didn't show up until 2:30 . Once again, I get the hot glue gun out."

With the newest and best technology at his fingertips, Jody Dole strikes his own balance between any and all techniques; between small studio subjects and vast outdoor vistas; between commercial success and personal happiness. For someone so technologically ahead of the curve, he now seems content to make his own photos in his own way.

"I'd imagine that the next generation of technology is going to be much more superior to where we are today," he says. "But frankly, where we are today is very, very suitable for me." DPP