Katrin Eismann’s fascination with the visual world started early. “When I was very young, my parents had a faceted crystal stopper on a bottle of cognac, and I would run around the house looking through it, taking pictures … in my mind,” she recalls.
She got her first real camera at 12, a little Instamatic that she earned from collecting the S&H Green Stamps her mother gave her from food shopping. “It was called a Lady Carefree Camera, and it had a lace cover and little flash cubes, she says. “But my father photographed with a Rolleiflex, and he was very talented, but spartan. For him, one roll of 120 film lasted a whole year.”
Above photograph: While studying at RIT, Eismann was known for experimenting in both the wet darkroom and the digital darkroom. This self-portrait was created with an early flatbed scanner, which needed to make three successive passes for red, green and blue. Eismann kept her head quiet and moved her hands during each pass to create the tri-color effect.
German Bred Jersey Girl
Trained as a graphic designer in his native Germany, Eismann’s father had worked with Bertolt Brecht to help rebuild the German theater in Berlin after World War II, before becoming a theater critic for the German newspaper Die Welt, published in Hamburg. Yet, worried by the political upheaval of the post-war period, Eismann’s parents emigrated to America in 1951 with an infant son and $8 to their name. After settling in Ridgewood, New Jersey, they expanded their family and worked hard to achieve the American Dream.
All Photographs © Katrin Eismann, unless otherwise noted. For behind-the-scenes shots, Eismann would like to thank the many photographers, including Zabrina Deng, William King, Kent Meister, and Joshua Smith, who provided images of her teaching and speaking.
“They both went to college, and had good careers, but they also always maintained their identity and their interests,” Eismann says. Among the values they instilled in their daughter was the importance of making do. “They taught me to make do with what you have, and to do the best you can. They also taught me to be independent,” she adds.
For example, once Eismann was in second grade and could open the front door by herself, her mother, then in her late 40s, went off to Montclair State College to pursue a teaching degree. Eismann cites this as a big influence, explaining, “It showed me that you really keep working on yourself, and you keep being true to yourself.”
Not surprisingly, art and design played an essential role in family life. “Our dining room walls were lined with art books,” says Eismann. “That’s what my parents spent money on.” On weekends, the family would alternate between exploring nature in the area one week, and then visiting world-class New York City museums the next.
One of Eismann’s most formative photographic influences was to be found in the pages of LIFE magazine. “My brother and I would argue about who got to read it first,” she recalls. It was there she first discovered the photographer Ernst Haas.
“I would just stare at his slow shutter pictures, the bull fights, and the stories he shot out west. I had no idea how it was done, but I was really enthralled,” she explains. “Later, I became more aware of people like Duane Michals and Jerry Uelsmann, who were doing really interesting things combining images. Once again, they were so mysterious to me that I would just stare at them forever.”
From Philosophy to Photography
Although Eismann discovered photography as a teen, she did not pick up a camera in earnest until her freshman year at Ithaca College, where she was studying philosophy and politics. Frustrated by the sedentary, cerebral demands of these subjects, her roommate handed over a 35mm Minolta and told her to go out and take pictures.
“And so, I got out, and I came back 20 minutes later asking how to turn the camera on,” Eismann says with a chuckle. “But that was it. I like working with my hands, doing, experiencing. I’m still interested in philosophy and politics, but I prefer the hands-on exploration of taking and processing images.”
She quickly realized that photography was a window to different ways of seeing the world, noting, “You can look at it with your mind, your heart, and your senses. Photography offers me the great combination of moving around, being active, and responding to the world around me.”
After 25 years of living in the United States, Eismann’s parents decided to return to Germany to be closer to her maternal grandmother. Taking a leave of absence from college to join her parents, she enrolled in a one-year photo program, in Stuttgart, and began shooting in color, gravitating to overlooked details that she felt that other people didn’t see.
“I know it’s very idealistic, but I thought that if I could show how I saw the world, it would be a better place,” Eismann says. “All this means is I just like being curious.”
Discovering Digital
After spending nearly 10 years in Germany, Eismann was determined to complete her undergraduate degree. “I did the research, and I decided that Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) was the best school to attend,” she remarks. “I worked on my portfolio, and they accepted me as a transfer student, meaning I could have started in the second year. But I didn’t want to do that, I started as a freshman—a 30-year-old freshman.”
On her first day of orientation, Eismann introduced herself with a bold statement. “I literally said, ‘I do not want to be a photographer,’” she recalls. “And everybody looked at me like, ‘What?’ And I said, ‘I’m here for a visual education.’ I had the feeling that my fellow freshman didn’t understand that, but the professors did.”
In the big picture, the awkward gap in her college studies would prove to be hugely providential to her future career. During her sophomore year at RIT, she noticed one of the professors, Douglas Ford Rea, wheeling a cart through the halls with what looked more like a small TV than the typical Kodak carousel slide projectors that other teachers pushed around. Says Eismann, “I literally followed him down the hall wondering, ‘What is that?’”
She discovered that Rea’s class met in a little improvised lab, where students sat at desks working with this same device—a Mac SE/30. “They were doing the same things in the computer lab that I was doing in the darkroom, but they were sitting in comfortable chairs under bright lights, and they weren’t dealing with chemicals and darkroom clean-up,” Eismann reflects. “I was like, I have got to get into this class, so I literally talked my way into it.”
Making the transition from darkroom to digital was essentially seamless, since she had already been doing very creative work with compositing in the darkroom, working with multiple exposures and printing through objects. “I was doing acrylic lifts and printing through them, and I was shooting through creative materials, shooting reflections,” she explains. “Some of the stuff that I did on film, people thought I did in Photoshop. So, the big difference was that in Photoshop I had undo and I could actually see what I was doing!”
According to Eismann, early digital was full of possibility. “There were no books and, obviously, there was no Internet, so you just had to figure it out on your own. But, it wasn’t so bad,” she affirms, “because you were working with a group. God only knows how many times I irritated people by asking whether to press option or shift to add to a selection, because software just didn’t come naturally to me.”
Envisioning the Future
After graduating from RIT in 1991, Eismann had the good fortune to be hired for a position at the Kodak Center for Creative Imaging (CCI), in Camden, Maine. “I got connected through a friend at RIT who had an internship at Kodak,” she says. “They literally asked him, ‘Do you know anybody doing digital photography?’ and he was like, ‘Oh yeah, Katrin.’”
One of her first tasks on the job was sorting through the resumes of other applicants who had submitted for her position. “It was very humbling,” Eismann admits. “I looked at them, and was like, ‘There’s no way I would have gotten this job without help from a friend.’ But that’s the thing, you’re going to school with your future colleagues, and you’re meeting colleagues when you’re networking.”
It was at CCI where Eismann really discovered the potential of digital, while also forging her career—going from entry-level intern to Director of Education during her three-year tenure. “I’d say that’s really where I grew up,” she says. “A who’s who of photographers, publishers, and multimedia folks came through that facility—Lynda Weinman, Douglas Kirkland, Paul Davis, Russell Brown, Jay Maisel, Grant Peterson, Stephen Johnson, Jean-Pierre Laffont, and Barbara Bordnick, to name just a few. CCI really showed the possibility of what you could do with the tools to make new and exciting work.”
One particularly fateful encounter she had was with John McIntosh, an educator from Alexandria, Virginia, who was at CCI for a workshop, and had asked his teacher a question she couldn’t answer. Eismann walked into the room, and the teacher said, “Oh, Katrin will know.”
She recalls, “I’m thinking, ‘thanks a lot,’ but I knew the answer, so I explained the Unsharp Mask Filter without an interface—you know, amount, radius, threshold—and I walked out of the room because I didn’t want any more questions. And he turned to the man next to him and said, ‘I’m going to marry that woman.’ And that’s that,” she proclaims. “Then he started following me around CCI asking for my handouts. When he went back to Washington, DC, he sent me a pad of paper and a pen—this was before e-mail—so I would write him. We got together pretty quickly after that,” she adds, “and we got married in 1995 in the Little White Chapel drive-thru in Las Vegas.”
A New Way of Working
While CCI was an important incubator for digital training, Eismann is quick to admit that in the early years, “The equipment was slow, expensive, and the quality still wasn’t as good as film. To appreciate photographic digital technology, you had to really have a vision and be willing to explore,” she says.
Despite these challenges, she asserts, “Digital changed how you worked, and how you experimented, and how you saw. The people who were open to it understood that it was only going to get better. And I was in that camp, saying, ‘This is the future.’”
A key aspect of this new way of working was that people experienced the process together. Says Eismann, “It’s not like being in a darkroom, where you’re by yourself. In the computer lab, you’re together with other people. It’s a completely different feeling.”
An obvious advantage to this is the ability to see what others are working on. “I’m always learning by looking over people’s shoulders, or seeing how they’re doing things in Photoshop,” acknowledges Eismann. “It’s really inspiring.”
Another big advantage when working digitally is flexibility in trying things out. If you don’t like your progress, you can literally rinse and repeat. “You know, just undo and try it again,” she notes. “I always used to say, unless you pour Coke® on the computer, you can’t really hurt it. But I often notice older students are very hesitant, and they’re fearful that something’s going to go wrong. I have to tell them, ‘Unless you have a power failure, everything’s fine.’”
Emergence of the Photoshop Diva
After leaving CCI, Eismann worked with Kodak Germany to help roll out the Kodak DCS 460 at Photokina 1994. As the first full-frame DSLR that wasn’t tethered, the camera was based on the body of a Nikon N90, with a special digital back, complete with a 6.2 mg CCD sensor, and a list price of $35,000. “That was a big project, and it really showed where digital was going,” Eismann recalls.
Over the next six years, she toured the world for Kodak and other digital imaging clients, speaking or teaching on six continents, as well as establishing herself as a book author seeking to teach people what they could do with digital tools rather than just how to use them. By 1999 she had co-authored Real World Digital Photography, Web Design Studio Secrets and Photoshop Studio Secrets, with three more books—Photoshop Restoration & Retouching, Photoshop Masking & Compositing, and The Creative Digital Darkroom—to follow between 2001 and 2008.
One strategy Eismann incorporated early on to drive her instructional philosophy was to always show before and after examples. “This gives readers a goal rather than making them wonder what the author means or where they are going with an exercise,” she explains.
At one point, while presenting at a Seybold Conference, one of many venues where she was a featured speaker, color-management guru Andrew Rodney was watching from the side of the stage. As Eismann describes it, “He literally said, ‘You are the Photoshop Diva.’ He gave me that moniker, and I was like, ‘Oh that’s really cool.’ It’s sort of fun, and just a little tongue-in- cheek,” she adds. “It’s memorable.”
Adding Design to the Mix
By 2000, Eismann was ready for a new challenge and she decided, with great nudging by McIntosh, to pursue her Master’s degree. Believing that another photography degree would be redundant to her existing skills, she decided to tackle a different subject. “If you’re going to do it, dive into the deep end,” she explains. “That’s why I decided to pursue an MFA in design.”
One of the Design program co-chairs is legendary designer, author, and educator Steven Heller, which was a big draw. “I knew he was going to expose us to a lot of different people, and that was really exciting,” she enthuses.
Immersing herself in this subject also provided insights about the power designers have for what is put out in the world. She recalls Heller telling her class, “There is enough visual garbage in the world, and we’re not going to add to it.”
Eismann is quick to admit it was a tough two years, but the insights she gained have since become essential to her own teaching philosophy. “I learned that a photographer can literally ruin a picture in about 10 seconds with bad design and bad type,” she points out. “I also learned how design can influence the world and really change things. Obviously, we know it can change people’s opinions, but how we get information across to people and how they understand it is also hugely impacted by design. And that’s why good design is so critical.”
She makes an analogy between the essential importance of seamless design and flawless Photoshop skills. “It’s sort of like when you use Photoshop, you never want people to go, ‘Wow, that’s a really beautiful vignette.’ You don’t want the technique to be the subject. That’s not what we’re supposed to be talking about,” she insists. “In both mediums, we as professionals all geek out and like talking about that stuff, but it’s really not that important. It’s got to be well done to support the actual message, subject, and meaning.”
In addition to learning your own strengths, Eismann points to the importance of learning when you need to work with others who have better skills. “Nothing’s easy, nothing’s fast,” she admits. “There are so many decisions that go into both photography and design, and whenever someone says, ‘Can you do it quickly?’ you’re really setting yourself up for a bad outcome.”
Results Oriented Digital Education
A few years after receiving her MFA, Eismann learned that SVA was looking to expand its graduate programs. It was 2006, and she realized that many photographers and educators were still not up to speed with digital.
Picking up on this point, she proposed a program for SVA that would combine the technical skills of a world-class school like RIT with the infrastructure of an illustrious art school. “It’s still a fully accredited Master’s degree, but an MPS degree is very results oriented,” she explains. “You’re looking for practical, tangible skills and outcomes, and that really fit with the school’s existing MFA in photography.”
In fall 2007, Eismann was named chair of SVA’s new MPS program in Digital Photography, which has educated well over 200 candidates in the past 11 years. Offering a curriculum that combines instruction in technical matters such as photo compositing, digital workflow, and color management, with thesis development and a full semester of business class, she declares, “There’s no other program like it.”
As a small program capped at 16 to 18 students per year, SVA’s MPS degree offers a big advantage in terms of flexibility. “The way SVA is set up, department chairs can make decisions,” Eismann notes. “So, I’ve been able to adjust the schedule based on student feedback, because they know the program almost better than I do.”
When speaking with prospective students, Eismann stresses three decisive factors: “Find the right school, the right department, and make sure it’s the right time in your life. All these things have to really fit. It’s a big decision, because you’re investing a lot of money, energy and time,” she explains. “Attending a rigorous graduate program is as if you’re hiring yourself to reinvent yourself.”
In terms of educational and creative structure, she offers three building blocks for good digital imaging and artistic outcomes—strong technical skills, bold creativity, and solid concepts. Riffing on the Ansel Adams quote, “There’s nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept,” she asserts, “If you miss any one of those three foundations, you may just end up with a great print of a boring picture.”
Another basic piece of advice Eismann shares with all her students is this: “The more personal you make your work, the more universal it becomes. We’re all human beings,” she explains. “If you’re honest, and if it shows in the work, we can relate to it. Please don’t try to do the work you think other people want you to do, because you’ll never figure that out. Unless it’s a client brief,” she concedes. “Then you have the brief, and that’s why they hired you.”
All told, the MPS program is driven by the same collaborative, experiential work process that existed in the earliest days of digital. “I see the students really working together, because nobody can know all of it in digital,” Eismann says. “Everybody has their strengths, and everybody can use help.”
These combined factors contribute to impressive learning outcomes. “Our students realize there’s a lot more to the photography community, and the photography business, than being the photographer,” says Eismann. “So, many of our alumni work as retouchers, as technical editors, or they work in archives, because they understand metadata and keywording. They’re working as reps, they’re working in galleries. It’s all related to visual communication.”
In June 2019, after nearly 20 years at SVA, Eismann made the exciting decision to move on to a career with Adobe, as Product Manager of Engagement, leaving the MPS program in the capable hands of her fellow Rochester Institute of Technology grad and longtime SVA MPS Digital Photography colleague Tom Ashe.
What’s in Her Bag?
When it comes to her own photography, Eismann has worked with just about every brand of camera imaginable during her prolific career. “You name it, Nikon, Canon, Hasselblad, Sinar, Widelux, Deardorff,” she rolls off. “The first camera I bought with my own money was an Olympus, because I liked the way it fit into my hands.”
In 2013, she was shooting with a Canon EOS-1D X Mark II. Recalls Eismann, “Either it was getting heavier or I was getting weaker (wink-wink). I noticed I was leaving it at home a lot, and my husband noticed this, too.” After lamenting that she did not want to lug a big heavy camera during an exploratory trip to Cuba that she and her husband were planning in 2014, he surprised her with a Sony A7 mirrorless camera and a Sony 35mm ƒ/1.4 lens.
“That first Sony just fit me, and since it was smaller, lighter, and silent, I was very comfortable with it,” she says. “I was so glad not to have that big wall of metal in my face making a loud kerklunk every time I pressed the shutter.” In Cuba, Eismann approached people and asked to photograph their hands, which allowed her to connect to a wide variety of people. That trip turned her into a convert and, before long, she had replaced all her old cameras with Sony gear. In 2016, she was named a Sony Artisan of Imagery, and she is thrilled to be a part of such a supportive, engaged, and creative community.
Depending on the subject matter, she employs a variety of Sony cameras to best suit her purpose. For street photography, she calls the Sony DSC-RX1R2 a street shooter’s dream. “It’s small, it’s light, it’s silent, and it has a 42 Mb high-resolution sensor, and a fixed 35mm lens that is one of the sharpest lenses I’ve ever worked with,” she notes. “Each lens is hand calibrated specifically to the body. For street shooting, it is just great.”
An essential distinction of mirrorless cameras over DSLRs is silent shooting. With this advantage, Eismann can ask a stranger to pose on the street, and then walk away with a dozen frames rather than just one. “Sony’s technological advances in camera design really got me excited about photography again,” she says.
For travel, or when she has limited time to shoot, Eismann recommends the Sony DSC-RX10 IV with an integrated 24 to 600mm Zeiss lens, saying, “It’s a great carry-around and travel camera if I don’t want to carry or manage a lot of lenses.”
While traveling light is important, the one accessory Eismann always packs is an X-Rite ColorChecker Passport. “I just stick it in the frame during the shoot to capture the color temperature of the light via the known reference of the Color Passport,” she explains. “When I bring my images into Adobe Lightroom, I click on the second lightest white patch and I’m guaranteed a known neutral white balance. I teach that you should start with neutral, or accurate, white balance, and I also practice this rule. Then, if you want to add a color interpretation or mood, that’s fine, but I recommend starting with neutral and then adding creative effects.”
Color fidelity and file integrity are essential to Eismann’s fine art work, and she trusts the Sony a7R III for these discerning tasks, noting, “I want the megapixels, and the dynamic range.” She only uses Sony lenses, saying, “For me personally, the simpler and more straightforward the equipment, the more I can concentrate on photography.” Her current go-to lens is the Sony FE 24-105mm. “It’s such a handy focal length for New York,” she says, with a wide-angle throw that lets you get far enough back to capture an overview—even with buildings behind you—yet the 105 zoom still lets you get detail shots.
One of her favorite features of the A7 series is the electronic viewfinder (EVF). “Because I’m a little older, I need to put on my glasses to look at an LCD screen, but I can’t photograph with them on,” she points out. “Managing this stuff was always a real distraction, but with the EVF I can control the menus and see what I’m getting through the viewfinder. I shoot with both eyes open,” she adds, “so one eye is on the viewfinder and one eye is always looking. The EVF completely changed how I shoot.”
For general purpose documentation, she keeps the Sony RX 100 VI on her shoulder all the time, most recently adding the Sony RX100 VII to the mix, as well. “I use that camera like most people use their cell phone,” she says. “That’s my notebook camera. It shoots fast, and it shoots RAW.
Finally, Eismann uses each camera’s built-in wireless network, “to transfer photos to my phone, so I can process and share instantly,” she says. While cellphone camera quality has markedly improved over time, she prefers the flexibility of shooting with a real camera and a variety of focal lengths, which allows her to share on the fly, as well as to make big prints.
Making the Most of Shooting Modes and Image Processing
For most purposes, Eismann shoots in auto ISO and aperture priority mode, except in her motion-blur pictures, which require extremely slow shutter speeds. The one setting she avoids at all costs is Program mode. “Personally, I like to control either the aperture or the shutter speed,” she explains, “so Program is just like a blunt knife for me.”
Her one indulgence with the RX 100 point-and-shoot is Auto Intelligent mode. “That camera is so smart, it does such a great job of evaluating the scene, when I’m shooting Raw, I’m like, ‘Why bother using anything else?’”
When it comes to high ISO, Eismann says she’d rather have a picture with a little noise than no picture at all. “It’s not like in the old days, when camera noise looked like Christmas tree lights,” she points out. “The sensors and onboard image processing on these cameras are so good now, and the raw files so clean that the noise feels more like really tight film grain.” This allows her to easily boost the ISO to 3200 or 6400 and often higher.
As a digital imaging pioneer, post-production techniques are integral to Eismann’s photographic vision. “When I look through the viewfinder, I’m already seeing image processing, so I’m shooting for Lightroom or Photoshop. But that’s how I see things,” she says. “We know the raw files are flat. They’re sort of like the ingredients to create a dinner, you have to cook ’em. So, I’m already visualizing the processing, and knowing what I can pull out of a file.”
Given the many software iterations and workflow transformations she has witnessed over the years, these days Eismann does most of her post work in Adobe Lightroom Classic on an Apple MacBook Pro, or on the Apple iPad with Adobe Lightroom CC. “Photoshop started my career,” she admits, “but now I try to get 80 to 85 percent of my work done in Lightroom. As I tell my students, you want to use Lightroom to make a lot of images look very good, and Photoshop to make a few images perfect. They are two different mindsets, and they are also two different time commitments.”
Interpreting the World with Her Cameras
Despite Eismann’s hectic work schedule and professional responsibilities, she is more prolific than ever as a photographer. She describes her work as being characterized by a sense of abstraction, reflection, and ambiguity. “There’s always some interpretation, and the images are usually playful,” she says. Essentially, she is still that curious child wandering the world with her parent’s crystal stopper.
Much of her recent work plays with the concept of time through long exposures. “I’ve always been intrigued by people doing long exposure photography,” she explains. “It actually goes back to Ernst Haas, and how he used slow shutter so beautifully.”
Eismann equates long exposures with the serendipity she appreciated from the analog world. “With film and the darkroom, you didn’t really know what you were going to get,” she explains. “But with digital technology, we got so good at controlling things and making everything pixel-perfect, that sometimes the heart and soul got retouched right out of the picture.”
Earlier this year, she began a series called “Futility of Memory,” using a Formatt Hitech Firecrest Ultra 3 ND filter to slow her shutter speed and reduce the contrast of early morning sunlight reflecting off the surface of Michigan’s Lake Huron, where she and McIntosh have a beautiful home and artistic retreat. Essentially self-portraits, showing the artist immersed in water and interacting with second-hand clothing and props, the images take on symbolic meaning through the fluidity of motion blur.
“Long exposures add that surprise back in, that serendipity, because obviously, we don’t see like that,” Eismann notes. “I mean, I can sort of figure out what’s going to happen, but to actually see what happens is just so much fun. Because it’s surprising, and I get excited about it, so I get up early the next day to do it again.”
In the final analysis, Eismann would much rather be out in the world taking pictures than sitting in front of a computer. “This is going to sound odd, but I’m not the biggest tech person on the planet, that’s for sure,” she concludes. “It’s so easy to get distracted by widgets, numbers, and dials, but it’s not that interesting. It’s about getting out, seeing the world, taking pictures, and learning from it.”
For behind-the-scenes shots, Eismann would like to thank the many photographers who have provided images of her teaching and speaking over the years, including Joshua Smith, whose images are featured above.
Last spring, Eismann was a featured artist in B&H’s Documentary Video Series Women of Influence.
To watch that interview, follow this link. To learn more about Katrin Eismann, click on the links below:
https://www.katrin-eismann.com/
https://www.instagram.com/katrin_eismann/
https://twitter.com/KatrinEismann
https://www.sva.edu/graduate/mps-digital-photography
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