As you guys probably know, I consider good clinical photography one of the cornerstones to proper physician-patient communication.  I was looking at this print ad recently by a local plastic surgeon and he had his before photos shot looking like Nick Nolte after a drinking binge and his after photos looking like some kind of glamour photography.  ARE YOU ABSOLUTELY KIDDING ME?  What is going on with scientific communication?  After attending my cousin’s high school graduation recently, I decided to buy a new Nikon D300 (of course, days before the D700 full frame version came out) because I saw my cousin Gordon shooting some incredible shots with this camera.  I figured my D100 was totally outdated since it is 6 years old and not even manufactured by Nikon anymore.  I was tempted when I saw the D200 but waited for the D300.  However, when I shot multiple shots with both the D100 and the D300 in my rigorous clinical setting, I saw that the D300 with its incredible advanced metering softens an image tremendously.  I tried every setting both Manual and Aperture Priority and bracketing all the shots.  The images simply looked too soft.  If the images looked good with the D300 I would have used the D100 for all patients after surgery who had their before image shot with the D100 for sake of consistency.  If you want to see a video and learn about how literally psychotic I am about photographic integrity and consistency, read this link page. Accordingly, I bought a backup D100 on eBay.

 Because of this little experimentation effort, I was quite depressed at having purchased such an expensive new camera.  Fortunately, I found a use for it. With the friendly and exhaustively extensive responses by my professional photography buddy, Ed Zabel, in LA, he guided me to purchase a couple beautiful Profoto lights. I have really enjoyed metering and shooting like a real photographer (which obviously I am not). If you look at the photo I took of Donna for the staff section I tried to partially match the quality of Ed’s work (obviously not great but at least marginally close). I used a lot of flash fill lights (i.e. the Profoto strobes) and a lot of Photoshop “post” work to get the image to soften and match the color tones of Ed’s fantastic work. In short, all my little tricks are well suited for beautiful portrait photography but absolutely wrong and unethical for good clinical photography. Accordingly, I want to help my patients understand what I do when I shoot honest clinical photography and when I “cheat” with fun photos that are intended for non-clinical purposes. These are not the same thing!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 15th, 2008 at 9:41 pm and is filed under Lam Facial Plastics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.