Why fast lenses on small cameras are different from long lenses on big cameras.

No digital trickery in the depth of field in this shot.  Just the normal fall off that occurs when you use a 150-180mm f4 lens on a six centimeter by six centimeter square camera at its closest focusing distance. Look at the eyes and then look at the ears. Sharp versus smooth and effortless unsharpness.  And acres of imaging area for detail and high definition.  Is it any wonder that people still buy and use bigger cameras?  Some times "good enough" isn't good enough.

All the different formats have different looks and some of it is predicated on two major considerations:  1. Can you make the focus fall off in a beautiful way while keeping what you want sharp very sharp?  And, is there enough finesse to the high value curve (shoulder) to give you a rich tonality all the way up into the highlights while keeping the shadow detail?

I've shot with a bunch of digital MF cameras and the DR is very, very good.  Now we need to get the manufacturers to work on the curves.  I still think black and white film is a very viable alternative to the "everything digital" mindset.  Not for everything but especially for  portraits of beautiful young woman.  Every time I see this print I want to go to the pool.  That's where I first met Jennifer.

What's in my bag today? And which bag is it?

I'm getting ready to walk out the door and spend the day shooting some roadway projects. Doesn't sound exciting but it's good, clean fun and it's alway a fun challenge to make something we see all the time look interesting and cool.  I'll be shooting bridges, flyovers, pedestrian overpasses, some buildings and a lot of big interchanges. My goal (as always) is to come back with more good stuff than the client can use.  If I don't get everything at the right times today I can go back tomorrow, after swim practice and get the straggler photos.

When I was starting out in the business I always wondered what the other photographers were taking out in their bags with them on assignment. Sometimes I'd meet another photographer who had more time in the trenches and I'd ask them.  I thought I'd share what I'm heading out with and why.

I'm taking two camera bodies.  They are identical Sony a77's.  I always take two cameras.  I'd hate to be 50 miles from the studio and have a camera fail and have to drive back to the office for another one.  In tight scheduling situations, those with models and clients and location permits it would be a incredibly stupid to go out without a back up camera.  Today it would be just a major annoyance.  You don't need two identical bodies but when you are out in the sun all day it's one less thing to think about when both the bodies work in exactly the same way and with the same menus.

I like the a77s for this kind of work because the files are huge and detailed, the ISO 50 is gorgeous and I might even have a use for mild, in-camera HDR (yes Andy, HDR....).  The EVF is convenient for chimping or pre-chimping in full sun and I might find something out there that lends itself to video.

I'm taking three lenses (four if you count the 50mm 1.4 "lenscap" I keep on one of the cameras).  The one I anticipate getting the most use out of is the 16-50mm 2.8 Sony DT lens which is my current "most favorite lens in the world."  It's very sharp, auto corrects geometrical distortion in Lightroom and is the most useful set of focal lengths for stuff like this.

I'm taking along a Sigma 10-20mm 4-5.6 lens for those times when I want drama in the flyover spans and lots of puffy clouds.  It's not the lens with the best geometrical correction I've ever seen but it's great if you aren't shooting brick walls and charts.  Even wide open the center 2/3rds of the frame is sharp, sharp, sharp.  Finally, I'm packing the 70-200 2.8 G Sony lens.  Not because I think I'll use it alot but because if I don't pack it I'll keep stumbling across shots that would look incredible with a bit of compression and I'll kick myself for not having the right tool at hand.

Each camera is packing 16 gigabytes of SD memory with about 200 gigs in the little card pouch.
The bag also contains a Sony flash, off camera cable, extra set of double "A" batteries for the flash and two extra camera batteries.  We may go long....

The final addition to the camera bag is a handful of circular polarizing filters to make the sky get all dark and dramatic and make the clouds pop out.  We're shooting advertising here, folks.  We need as much pop as we can get.

Not shown are water bottles, sunscreen and a nice hat.  YBMV (your bag may vary).

The bag is a Domke F2 bag in distressed black.  Honestly distressed as it's seen at least a decade and a half of this kind of work.  Hope you're having a fun and productive day.

Edit:  Follow Up.  The shoot was fun and kind of like a scavenger hunt. The most used lens was the 16-50mm, followed by the longer zoom. It was hot and humid and several shots required hiking in 95(f) with long pants and "no-snake" boots to get to railroad tracks, etc.  But I'm not complaining, it may partially be the discomfort and physicality that keeps the cube dwellers and soccer parents from switching careers.  Or maybe it's the tenuous twists and turns of the business....At any rate, the Sony a77 was just what the creative director ordered. Big and sharp.

A celebration of silliness. Jill Blackwood stars in Zach Scott's Presentation of Xanadu.

http://www.zachtheatre.org/show/xanadu

Zachary Scott Theatre never does anything halfway. When they do a campy musical they pull out all the stops and rev up the camp. This week the Theatre opens their version of Xanadu.  This isn't your 1980's movie version either. This is a magnificent spoof-musical that made me laugh so much the image stabilization in my cameras was working overtime. 

Last night my trusty video producer, Ben Tuck, and I headed over to Zachary Scott Theatre to do some work.  Ben was there scouting locations for a video project. He was also shooting some general "B" roll during the dress rehearsal.  I was there to shoot images for the local newspaper and for Zach Scott's marketing department. I ended up with about 1855 images but many of those are similar shots with different gestures and expressions. That's why shooting people, portraits and events is so frame intensive...you might like one sort of expression and the art director might prefer another.  You shoot both.  And while you're shooting you get the expression in front of you because it might be the best one, until the next one happens and you get that one because it's even better (and on and on).

While I covered all the actors in the show I decided I'd show only Jill Blackwood in this set of blog selections.  Jill is wonderful on stage and her singing and incredible action made the show for me.  In this role she is the team leader of the original Greek muses who ends up falling in love with a mortal artist.  A big, Mount Olympus No-No.  I love the way Zach's Xanadu is propped, lit and costumed.  

Ben shot his video with a Sony a57 with the kit 18-55mm lens and his Gitzo tripod with Manfrotto fluid head.  I shot with two Sony a77s.  I used one with the 16-50mm lens (which, along with the cheap 85mm, is my current favorite optic).  On the other camera I shot with both the 85mm 2.8 and the 70-200mm G 2.8 lens.  The lighting on this production was fairly bright, with lots of follow spots on Jill, so I was able to keep the ISO in the range of 400 to 800.

Everything I shot was handheld. Everything you see here is straight out of camera with no PhotoShop chicanery or lily-gilding.  

I love the musical and all the 1980's music has gone from nostalgic to kitsch and now is just flat out funny.  Yes, I'll line up for tickets.

One more thing.  Shooting theatre with a big, bright, detailed EVF is the only way to go.  Believe me, I've done it both ways....

Fine Tuning medical images, pre-post.

I don't know what you do for a living but my job is different every time I leave the studio. A few months ago we did a job for a medical imaging practice here in Austin. Like most of my jobs it was fun, it moved fast and I learned lots of new things about other people's jobs.  Our project was to go to several clinics and photograph the staff and "patients" (model released employees of the practice) doing their jobs, making scans, making patients feel comfortable and mixing science with a human touch.

At the time my cameras were relatively new to me and this was a good job in which to push the limits of mixing available light with gentle boosts from small, battery powered LED panels.  I shot the job above with a Sony a77 camera and the 16-50mm lens.  The lens is the finest 24-75mm equivalent lens I've ever used.  In the center area it is very sharp even at its maximum aperture.  The Sony a77 gets a few knocks from every reviewer for what we perceive to be too much noise at ISO's from 800 and up.  And I'll admit that when I first started using the cameras, especially for low light theater work, the files did seem plagued with noise.  Nothing like the noise in previous generations of digital cameras but again, nothing like the clean files in cameras like the Nikon D3 and the Canon 5D either.

Before the job started I took a day to shoot some tests at 800, 1600 and 3200.  I took the files into Lightroom 4.x and started playing around with exposure, noise reduction and sharpening and I was able to make a start on fine tuning my approach to shooting at higher ISO's with these cameras.

My first exercise was to think rationally about what the files would actually be used for and then see how they looked in that application instead of just opening the files up at 100% on a big monitor and obsessing about the "grain."  The file above is about 900 pixels wide.  If you click on the image a couple times you'll see it at 2,000 pixels. In either of these sizes the noise issue is immaterial to me.  If you blow the file up you'll see more noise but you'll be looking at an enormous image. Not something most of my clients need for websites, small "rack" brochures and as 8.5 by 11 inch magazine ad issues.

When I dug into the files I discovered something else.  If the files are exposed to the right of the histogram (the files look bright but not blown...) the noise drops way down. The brighter the exposure in the camera the lower the noise levels in post processing. Given that the a77 has one of the widest dynamic ranges (in the top ten at DXO) and a longer characteristic curve in the highlights than many competitors I am able to pull good, solid highlight color detail out of files that appear to be blown out in the EVF or the camera histogram.  I fear over-exposure less with this camera than I did with previous generations of cameras I have owned.  And that makes this a bit more like what we used to do in the film/darkroom paradigm.  With Tri-X we'd routinely rate the film (expose the film) at ISO 200 or 250 and then compensate in the development in order to match the tones we wanted to see in a print.

With good technique I can use ISO 800 with the Sony a77 and have a nice file that response well to nuanced noise reduction without throwing away too much sharpness.

But there's more. I've learned to handle shooting my files the same way we did when we used to shoot with transparency film. I've learned that I can't just let the shadows fall wherever they want to fall and then depend on the shadow recovery slider in Lightroom or PhotoShop to save my ass. When a shadow is too dark and I know it needs to be open, even by only half a stop or three quarters of a stop I grab a light or a reflector and I fill it.  Limiting the range of light values ensures that I'll be able to get a usable file with much less noise in the shadows.  No matter what camera you're shooting boosting the shadows, either in post or in camera with something like a DRO setting, adds noise and decreases the appearance of delineated detail in lifted shadow areas.  Even the new miracle cameras (see: Nikon D800, Canon 5Dmk3 and Olympus OMD EM5) will give you cleaner and more open shadows with less noise if you take the time to toss in a fill reflector or a light to bring up the levels of the shadows.  Just because you can fix most of it in post doesn't mean you should.

When I can depend on a light source to help me boost exposures in the shadow areas I can dependably get clean a77 files at 1600 ISO as well. The handiest light I own, the one that's far easier to use than flash, is the Fotodiox 312AS LED panel.  These are small and light, put out ample light for low light available light situations and they have the added benefit of continuously changeable color temperature between 3200 and 5600K.  They also have a continuously variable power control.  With two camcorder batteries attached I can use the panel for nearly two hours of continuous run time.  If I'm careful to turn off the lights as soon as we get the shot I can use them for a full day when making images like the one above.  At 1/3 the cost of a single SB-XXX flash from Nikon or similar flash from Canon I think these lights are "no-brainers."  And since they are battery powered there's no scramble to run cables or find working outlets.

In the image above I was crouched into a corner to shoot. The camera was set at ISO 800 and the room was mostly lit by two overhead florescent fixtures.  The part of the measuring machine closest to me, the big, white ring, was in shadow and I knew it would either go too dark or I'd be forced to bring up the exposure on the part in post by nearly a stop and a half, which would add a lot of noise to the newly opened shadow area.  And the correction would also shift the higher tones. There's no free lunch.

I added one of the LED panels to my left.  There wasn't room for a lightstand so I balance the panel on the edge of a shelf. Using the permanent live view on the camera and looking through the EVF I fine-tuned the color temperature control until any sort of color cast difference between the room lighting and the LED light vanished.  Then I used the "volume" control to get the exact amount of fill that would be needed to lift the shadows without adding a second shadow anywhere obvious.

I also wanted to lift the value of the light on the face of the technician in the green suit so I put a second LED light just to the far side of the "patient" and just out of frame.  I "gobo'ed" that light with some black wrap (thick, black aluminum foil) so I didn't get too much spill on the rest of the scene.  That gave me light on the tech's face without messing up the nice series of contrasts through the rest of the image.

It took far less time to set this up than to write about it.  But essentially what I'm trying to say in all this is that good technique can be critical, even in the times of endless post processing, to make an image sing in just the way it needs to.  Taking time to add light instead of depending on lifting the shadows in software is an example.  We've done shoots light this for decades and have always depended on the ability to light in order to control the nuances of shadow and highlights.

Just because we've popularized microwave cooking doesn't mean that there's no place left for the sauté pans or the oven. Lighting to taste.  Season to taste.

I used the cameras at the opposite end of their ISO range this morning. Beautiful portraits in a conference room with a perfectly exposed exterior of trees and greenery.  ISO 50 is gorgeous.

Accelerating in the Web-O-Sphere.

©2012 Lane Orsak.  "Kirk at Work."

A little over a month ago, June 9th to be exact, we reached what I thought was a fun milestone: The VisualScienceLab blog had just clocked its 6 millionth pageview. It took a while to get there. Almost four years.  Well, pageviews fly when you're having fun; VSL will celebrate the 7 millionth pageview today!

I thought I'd take a second to reaffirm what VSL is all about. I've been involved in photo education and in the business of commercial and advertising photography for a long time.  I've seen trends come and go.  I've seen "truths" about the market and about gear be embraced and discarded over and over again.  But for most of us the love of a good image endures.

VSL is my medium for discussing the trends and gear that affect us right now. Today. Most of the time the essays and ensuing discussions can be good, clean fun. Sometimes we'll have honest differences and perceptions (and that's what the "Comments" are for...) but most of the time we'll discuss the relevant (to me) issues of the day, speak the truth about doing this nutty artform for a living, and occasionally wade into the raucous swamp of the hobby's craziness.

I have made a lot of good virtual and real friends along the way and I hope to keep up the conversation with you (or, in Texas, "y'all") for some time to come.

If you haven't signed up as a "follower" you might consider it. It doesn't affect anything other than my ego. No junk mail from me will follow.  But it lets me know that you appreciate the time and energy it takes to write and share.

I'd love to read more comments (even if I disagree with them) so sharpen your virtual pencils and let it fly.  Thank you very much for reading. Thank you for clicking on the Amazon links when you feel the lure of good gear calling your name.  It doesn't cost you more and it earns me a small commission which I generally use to buy more gear to play with and review.

Whether you shoot film or digital or both or even with (gulp) your phone I am happy you are here.  Unless you're a jerk.  And then all bets are off.

a

What are you willing to give up for more performance?

Performance has many metrics.  Sharper. Faster. Brighter. More resolution. More snap. More speed and more endurance.  And it seems inevitable that for every push forward in one of the performance metrics something somewhere has to be sacrificed.  For instance, if you want a faster lens you'll need to accept the trade-off that you will have a bigger, heavier lens.  If you want a full 35mm framed digital camera you'll pay a higher price and have less depth of field.  If you want bigger image files you'll need more storage and perhaps a computing system with a faster processor.

The trick is to narrow down your choices and figure out what you really want (need?) and what you're willing to give up to get it.  If I wanted the ultimate in photographic resolution would I be willing to give up part of my retirement fund or to go massively into debt to buy a Phase One 180 eighty megapixel digital system with incredibly expensive glass to go with it?  It would mean doing without lots of other things and the trade off might only have temporary benefits that might get lost in several quick generations of new camera/sensor designs.  What would I be willing to trade?

Recently I confronted two "wants" in two different fields that are strangely linked by one strong addiction.  I wanted to swim faster and I wanted to be able to handhold my cameras at longer exposures at least as well as I did in my "fresh and happy" twenties.  I also wanted to reduce my hereditary propensity for anxiety and all its nasty symptoms.  What was I willing to give up that would accrue me advantages in all three areas? What beloved ritual/habit/addiction would I be willing to abandon in order to become faster, steadier and calmer?

About four months ago I realized that I had some anxiety when I tried to go faster in the pool.  Increased anxiety manifested itself as tighter muscles (which cause a certain amount of physical resistance) and more difficulty effortlessly breathing as well as an elevated heart rate which slows down recovery between sets.  Even as a college swimmer I was plagued with a certain amount of performance anxiety that could degrade my overall speed and endurance.  Around this time I also realized that I was slowing down.

In my other world, photography, I noticed that I had developed more shake in my hands and body and that I wasn't able to hold a camera as still as I had before.  While image stabilization worked fine not every camera and lens I want to shoot with has image stabilization built in. (Hello.  Hasselblad...).  Often I like to shoot on the edge of what might be possible.  I like to get lucky shooting candid, available light portraits with medium telephotos like the 85mm 1.4 lenses; handheld.  Wide open.  The longer lenses magnify any sort of operational shortcomings and not being able to hold a camera still is a big operational shortcoming.

I made the (for me) momentous decision to stop drinking caffeinated coffee.  Yes.  You read that correctly.  Kirk Tuck no longer drinks super strong, deep black, potent caffeinated coffee.  The physical transition was quick enough, a few days of crabbiness (but I'd been so crabby on caffeine that no one really noticed a change...) some mild headaches and of course the standard bleeding from the eyes and ears and the grand mal seizures (just kidding about the last two symptoms..) but the psychological addiction was harder to shake (ha. ha.)  I've read about addiction and overcoming addiction and I realized that I couldn't do this halfway.  I couldn't vacillate.  I mean, look at what I had at risk: Faster swimming, better photographs, more patience.

After the first two weeks I noticed that my swimming improved.  Slowly at first and then more radically.  People I had never been able to hang with in workout suddenly came into my sights.  I no longer feared sets of 200's and 400's.  My butterfly stroke endurance increased by leaps and bounds.  But most important to me, my performance anxiety faded and then snuffed itself out altogether. I became both faster and much more relaxed in the water.  During this time I was also able to concentrate more on the mechanics of my freestyle stroke.  I watched an amazing swimmer named Kristen and began to copy her longer and more aggressive arm extension at the front end of her freestyle stroke, her perfectly delineated forearm catch and the decisive and powerful hip roll that kept it all rhythmic and flowing.  Just this weekend my times for 50 and 100 yard repeats dropped again.  I was muscle sore at the end of yesterday's workout but that was because the increase in my speed and endurance added another 1,000 yards to my usual workout.  My fellow swimmers and coach noted and commented and that was nice.

But I know most of you don't really care about swimming and that's okay.  In the realm of photography I started to notice that, in the first few weeks after my caffeine abstinence, my calmness (bordering on drowsiness) was yielding a diverse menu of positive results.  My grip and hold on cameras gets steadier and steadier.  At this point I feel as though I've regressed to my early thirties.  A 50mm 1.4 is generally sharp for me down to a 1/30th of a second when I am mindful of the process.  The bigger reward is more patience.  More proclivity to wait for the right moment instead of hurrying through a shoot or a scene or a moment.

A surprising side benefit of eliminating the liquid speed and slowing down my brain is a calmness in other work situations. The best example is my recent portfolio show where I was able to be less guarded and more affable.  I wasn't overly worried about the outcome and it translated into a better engagement with all the people I met and showed to. In all honesty, it was my first non-anxious portfolio show of my entire career. (that's sad just to read).

So, what did I really give up?  The psycho-chemical effects were easy to give up.  After two weeks all of the cravings were gone, physically, but I realize that I'd been drinking juiced up coffee religiously and with reckless abandon for the better part of thirty five years with very, very few breaks.  The culture of coffee was interwoven in everything I did.  I made extra time to get to shoots so I could drop by the coffee house and get a big cup of hot speed.  On the way to track meets and swimming meets and other events with my son, Ben, the coffee cup was a constant companion.  And I can't remember business meetings that didn't somehow revolve around the intoxicating elixir.  Locations were sometimes determined by their proximity to the best coffee in town.  And a bad shot (of espresso) could ruin my morning.

But I quickly learned that if I could get over my visceral repulsion to decaf that the meetings would still go on.  I've saved over $7,000 in the last three months on coffee purchases (just kidding, my habit was maybe $5 a day) and that's enough to buy a new camera and a couple cool lenses.

The biggest benefit is that fact that I now sleep like a baby, don't yell at bad drivers, and I can handhold a camera steadier than I've been able to in at least twenty years.  If that's not worth giving up an anxiolytic substance I always have my ace in the hole:  The best set of 100 freestyles I've swum in nearly a decade.  All for free.

What would you give up for better performance?

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Auto Focus Micro Adjustment and the Sony a77

I couldn't really adjust for this lens but that's okay, 

I know from recent experience that it's "wicked sharp."

As I work more and more with the Sony a77 I find lots of things to like about the camera and very few disappointments. One of the reasons I chose to go with the a77's as my primary shooting cameras ( in addition to the brilliant EVF and really nicely implemented video) was the Auto Focus Micro Adjustment control.  I've been pre-occupied with other camera controls in my quest to really master the camera and I left lens adjustments to last.

But recently I've been working nearly wide open with the 50mm 1.4 lens and I noticed that it would routinely back focus. This led me to jump into the menu and get busy.  I also noticed that my 70-200mm G lens (a whopping $2000) wasn't as sharp as my previous Canon and Nikon zooms so I thought I'd take a crack at that one as well.  In the end I tried every Sony lens I owned on both bodies and now, after hours of being really compulsive and fastidious, I am even happier with my little Sony system than before.

When I first accessed the control the ability to adjust was greyed out on the menu. I finally decided to push the "clear" button and a message came up telling me that 30 lenses had already been registered and that I would lose all those settings if I continued.  Since I'd been using the camera with this control deactivated anyway I decided that it would be "no skin off my nose" to go forward.  I pushed clear.  Now I could make adjustments to any of the Sony branded lenses I put on the camera and it would save up to thirty lenses of my choice.  Do I think the camera was used before me? Decidedly not. I think the camera comes that way by default.

I actually kept notes as I worked.  The 50mm needed a "minus 8" correction.  The 70-200 needed a "minus 6" correction and the 50mm 1.8 DT lens needed a -3 correction.  Most of the lenses were right on.  The little 85mm 2.8 shocked me.  I've always used it to shoot portraits and nothing with sharp lines or edges. When I blew up my test file with the LensAlign it was so sharp wide open that I was temporarily giddy.

I tested all my lenses at 2.8.  I figured most gaussian lens designs will have a bit of focus shift from wide open to 2.8 and that trying to get them just right at 1.4 was perhaps a futile endeavor.  Happily, once I adjusted the 50mm 1.4 at 2.8 I went back and checked it wide open and was happy to find the same correction needed.  At least the lens is consistent.

I tested eight lenses and I did this on two bodies and there were mild differences between bodies.  I almost messed up the test entirely as I had inadvertantly set the focus mode to local which allows the camera to choose between a little cross of squares.  When I aimed at the target I would get different readings each time and when I tested at different distances I needed different numerical values as well.  Once I realized my mistake and set the  camera to center spot AF everything fell right into place.

The 70-200mm is now very sharp wide open and wickedly sharp one stop down.  I took the time to re-test at every marked focal length and found that, once you've set the right value, it tends to be the same for all.

In addition to the stellar performance of the 85mm 2.8 I was also amazed at just how sharp the 16-50mm 2.8 lens is.  It's the sharpest wide to short tele high speed zoom I've ever played with. I can go out shooting now with a sense of assurance that I'm getting the ultimate performance for myself and my clients.  And it was a bonding experience for me and my camera.

A large part of inspiration is patience.

A few years back we were doing an annual report for a California company that built and managed water and wastewater treatment plants across the southern United States.  It was a wacky trip that started in Houston and rolled over to Gulfport and Biloxi, Miss. and then off to California It was our first annual report done entirely with digital cameras.  I used two of the Fuji S2 cameras but I snuck along a little Leica M6 with a sampling of lenses.  Just enough to get the job done....Just in case.

Right before I headed to the airport my favorite camera pusher, Ian, called me.  The Nikon 12-24mm lens for DX cameras had just come in, he had one on hold for me.  Did I want it?  You bet.  Those were the days when there were very few wide choices for cropped frame cameras and most wide angles designed for film looked like crap on the full frame cameras.  Good thing I stopped by because 80% of the images in that year's annual report probably came from that one optic.

But this particular blog post doesn't have much to do with lenses at all.  It's more about patience.  We got into Biloxi around noon and headed to our location.  The sun was direct, the plant looked boring and the sun showed off every inch of rust or wear. I shot the stuff on the list but none of it was more than technically good snapshots.  We were going to call it a day and head back to the hotel, have a few drinks and a good dinner but something kept us there. 

I finally said, to the art director and the direct client, "You guys go on ahead and I'll catch up with you after the sun sets."  But they were troopers and stuck with me.  As the sun started to go down the clouds and the sky got more and more interesting.  We kept going back to stuff we'd shot before and re-shooting and re-shooting.  The plant was quiet and there were few people around.  I used my clients as models to show scale and add a human component.

We knew we were getting better stuff as the light lunged for the horizon.  The intensity of the light dropped and the color temperature dropped as well, giving the landscape a golden glow for a short time.  We went back and started shooting the same stuff again.  We knew by now what angles would look good.

When the sun dropped down over the horizon the light became omni-directional, soft as premium toilet paper and the color of the light started it's gentle shift through the register.  Now things were fun. The year before we'd looked at black and white Polaroids as they came sliding out of their wrappings.  This year we hovered around the little screen on the back "oohing and awing" over the colors and the increasingly gentle tones. 

Fifteen or twenty minutes later the light changed again. We were enjoying the wonderful reflections in the waste water tanks.  And we shot another round.  We didn't think it could get much better but for some reason I still can't fathom we all silently agreed to stay a little longer and see what happened. It was so un-corporate and so cool creative.  I couldn't imagine how it would have looked on a spreadsheet schedule.  Something like this probably: "Shoot WW treatment plant, wait 15 minutes, repeat.  Wait fifteen minutes, repeat." And somewhere a bean counting lawyer would intone heartlessly, "Are we paying for all these repeats?"

But then the sun and the afterglow disappeared altogether and we discovered....long exposures.  We spent another hour or so shooting all the images we'd shot before glowing in blue against the warm yellows of the plants lights.  It was a rare act on all sides of patience.  We could have tossed on a polarizing filter and pounded out shots of the plant, right on schedule and have been back to our hotel by 5:15 pm to watch CNN, have a few glasses of wine and tell tall tales over an expense account dinner.  But it seemed like the goddess of patience came down and dusted us with a magic wand until we achieved what it was we really wanted.  

I shot maybe fifteen different scenes after the sun went down.  And I can't really say that it was "my" creative prowess that served us that evening.  We worked together as a creative team.  Each of us spotting some great angle or some coincidence of color and tone that worked just right. I just translated the collaborative energy into digital files.

What's the reward for patience? How about being inspired again and again by what could, by most counts, be considered a boring subject?  How about savoring the calmness of the moment? How about seeing what your camera will do with changing light colors and intensities. 

When the job wrapped up I got a phone call.  The client wanted to know how well the images would print large.  I said I'd do a test.  Now I know that no professional photographer seems confident enough to do any sort of enlargement these days with anything but a 24 or 36 megapixel shot but we were working with Fuji's insane (but remarkable) interpolated 12 megapixel files that in reality were coming off a six megapixel sensor.  I sent the images off to the professional lab and they printed them at 24 by 36 inches on a LightJet printer.  The enlargments were amazing.  Just amazing.  No appreciable noise at our usual ISO 100 or 200 settings and endless color and tone.

They say that patience is a virtue.  But I think it is its own reward.  And I would say that the first step on the road to patience is a beautiful tripod and a low ISO.  Taking time to let the camera soak in all the photons it wants in a leisurely and civilized way.  

I think we need to be on guard against impatience.  You can't hurry the creative process of children and photographers any more than you can hurry nature.

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