I'm thinking of writing a book called, The Anti-Flash Manifesto. It may be a weird idea but it reflects my feelings about what's happening now in the world of photography...

Zach Theatre. Dress Rehearsal.

We see the world in continuous light and we embrace the constant stream of connected information from that continuous light as our pervasive reality; one critical part of our sensory perception, so why do we default to episodic and intermittent flash to make visual documents of our world? It's really wild. As photographers our mantra seems to be that it's all about the light but the light that it seems to be all about seems to be mostly artificial constructs of our memory of what real light is, as expressed by short flash bursts. Yes, images capture of moment of time but that's hardly how we see those moments or how we sense them. We see our images as a continuous stream and we're most comfortable catching moments from the stream, like a bear grabbing the unlucky salmon from a mountain stream. Seeing your life as a series of lightning storms....

I've been thinking a lot about our flash addictions. The reason flash came into such wide use in our industry has more to do with the rigidity of our early capture materials than it does with any aesthetic concerns. It also has to do with efficiency versus lux inefficiency. In the days of ISO 25 film and the need for rock steady images with no glimmer of motion the choice was often the use of electronic flash or flash bulbs versus thousands of watts of withering, direct lights. Now we can carry the equivalent of big light in a side pocket of our camera bag with portable electronic flash. But what have we lost? 

I'd postulate that we've lost a delicate intertwining of all the different colors and qualities of existing and continuous light sources. We've homogenized color temperatures (which was critical in the days of film) but in doing so we've also homogenized our vision of what lighting could be and how it should be constructed. And in the process we've lost a certain range of voice that made so much art photography so interesting for so long. Over time we've come to understand that it's the little imperfections in art that are the source of interest or the source of engaging frisson and we long for them even as we evict the possibility of imperfection by the meticulous selection of tools that are reliable and consistent.

When I first started working with LED panels my linearly inclined photographer associates were immediately critical of perceived color spectrum failures and the horror of low light output. I embrace the visual differences and am excited by the need to work in the realm of slower shutter speeds and wider lens apertures. When I started working with fluorescent lights I loved the ability to "drag" the shutter and introduce slight movements and the sensation of breathing into portraits. How much more real it seems to me than the locked in sharpness of instantaneous flash.

And it's not even a factor to me that the cameras have gotten better and better at delivering pristine images at high ISO's. Once we learned how to make technically perfect files all that technique became boring and repetitive and bourgeois. The ability to make sharp images with no apparent subject movement became as desirable as making your own leisure suits. Uniformity of tools and purpose becomes an affirmation of a static status quo.

It's been a while since I happily reached for an electronic flash to use in making a portrait. I've surrendered to the wonderful mix of continuous light and live view. I love to watch the image of a person swirl in my electronic viewfinder, me alert, waiting for that perfect moment. Or that perfect movement which may, by its blurry motivation, make a more interesting image than one I could have captured by totally controlling the process.

I am doing a program this week that's all about portrait lighting. I've dutifully packed my studio flashes because I think that's what my producers really want the audience to see. But I've also packed and shipped several fluorescent panels, a Fiilex P360 LED light, a few LED panels and two hot lights just because I think they represent so much of what we've temporarily abandoned, out of necessity, and then out of routine, and I want to show how differently they impel and inform the process of taking a portrait. A rapport is a continuous and evolving process. It seems that the staccato intermittency of flash is at odds with the bedrock gestalt of that process. 

If you've grown up with flash it may be an interesting experiment to play with and leverage some continuous light sources. Digital imaging is allowing us to reinvent and rediscover processes that served our industry ancestors both well and differently. Viva la difference. 

The Fiilex P360 kicks out good light, gives me tungsten to daylight color control and is dimmable from 100 % to 10% and fits in my camera bag. Thankfully, it doesn't flash.

When I'm looking for total light control I generally put away the flashes and get out the lights that stay lit up for the whole shoot. 

The ongoing search for the best 50mm lens for my Sony cameras.

The Sigma 50mm 1.4 lens on my Sony Alpha 850.

I seem to be running about four years behind the times when it comes to buying lenses. Today I went to Precision Camera to buy the lens you see in the photograph, above. It's the Sigma 50mm 1.4 lens and it's received both rave reviews and mixed reviews since its launch in 2008. While I love 50mm lenses on full frame cameras the only 50mm I had for the Sony FF cameras was the Sony 50mm 1.4. Its big advantage is its size. It's probably half the size of the Sigma lens. It's also pretty darn sharp in the middle two thirds of the frame. But I kept hearing good things about the Sigma except from people who think that a high speed normal lens's biggest aspiration is to be sharp from corner to corner, wide open. That's just not going to happen for a reasonable amount of money.  And while edge to edge sharpness is a good thing for people who like to photograph flat objects I've found that perfection sometimes gets in the way of art. We spend lots of time making images with ultra sharp lenses only to spend more time making the corners and edges soft so that by comparison our central areas seem even sharper.

By adding blur to the periphery of a frame with a person near the middle we also use focus to direct a viewer's attention to that which we want to emphasize. At one point, long ago, the people at Leica wrote something defending the idea of curvature of field and center sharpness in their fast 50mm lens. It made sense when I read it but I'm not going to drop into the rabbit hole of lens design versus shooting philosophy so you'll have to beat up someone else over that.

All mysticism aside there were two reasons I decided to buy this lens: 1. I've come to respect many of the offerings from Sigma over the last few years. To wit, the 70mm Macro, which may be the sharpest single focal length I've ever owned. And the 19 and 30mm lenses for the Nex are very good optics at very good price points. Even the 10-20mm wide angle zoom I bought last year performs beyond my initial expectations. It jumped nicely over the bar I'd set.  2. The other motivator was the drop in price engendered by a $100 rebate which has dropped the current price of this lens to $399. At that price it's hard to lose and it becomes almost a bargain.....if it delivers.

The 50mm 1.4 Sigma is a new optical design in a field of lenses that were mostly based on a Planar design from 60 or 70 years ago. It uses a molded aspheric element that supposedly goes a long way toward reducing chromatic aberrations and the rest of the design is supposed to have advantages in terms of reducing vignetting and increasing central sharpness.

I've only had the lens for short while but I've done some preliminary shots, both wide open and at f5.6 and I've been impressed so far. I'll spend some time with the lens tomorrow and hope to have some images to post on the blog.

Why the 50mm? Interesting question. I'll explain it with a story about an interview/conversation conducted by Ibarionex Perello with me and photographer, Seth Joel. Seth does corporate photography and his modus operandi is to use wide lenses like the 35mm 1.4 for Canon or Nikon, close in and nearly wide open. His photographs of people have lots and lots of background context. We were talking about different styles and when we turned to my work it was almost the reverse; very little background context and a much more isolated main subject. As we explored the subject further I admitted that I like the 50mm focal length but I love the 85mm focal length and, except for cliché uses, I just don't understand anything wider than the 50mm in any meaningful way. In fact, I'm heading to Denver on Weds. for a project about portrait lighting and the shortest lens I'm packing is the 85mm 1.5. I just don't feel really comfortable shooting wider unless I've already got cropping in mind.

If you love wide angles you do yourself a disservice following my example.....

Somehow a beautiful portrait makes my day better every time.

I'm sure you've seen a variation of this portrait before. I tend to re-work and re-work the portraits I  like and I'm sure next week I'll come back and decide that this is too processed and I'll look at it again. But for today, after a tedious ten hours of selecting and post-processing images for my presentation and waiting for the delivery thing to be sorted out I'm happy to just look at my computer screen and look at Amy's beautiful face.

When I feel down or tired or like I'm loosing ground I look back at work I like and realize that it's proof that I can do good work. Just like looking back at remarkable jobs is proof that we can do profitable work. Sometimes it's good to just sit still and appreciate what you've gotten done so far.

I spoke with a very nice person at UPS customer service. She actually helped me. I loved it. It almost made up for how crappy their online forms are....

The image above is how grumpy I looked this morning when trying to ship three large containers of gear to Denver, CO. I'm heading up to Denver next week to do a teaching/online project and I needed to have my familiar and tested gear with me to do the best job possible. I'm taking my cameras and laptop with me on the plane... (I wish I was driving...I could take more stuff).

So, I need to show how I do portraits and I needed to pack stuff like my six by six foot frame, my big flashes, my frames and my clamps and umbrellas and all the little fun lights I like to play with. My partner/client asked me to send all the heavy stuff via UPS. Normally I avoid them like the plague because they can be horrible to deal with, especially for a freelancer who hates just hanging around the studio waiting for that "We'll be by sometime between noon and 7pm..." thing.

My partner sent along a sign in and password and presumed I'd be able to hop on line, navigate some of the absolute worst automated programming in the world today and then magically my packages would be whisked away safely. Oh that it was so easy. With my key board in front of me I entered the first circle of Hell. The non-responsive interface. Before I was in too far I asked my contact if I could just drop the packages by one of the ubiquitous UPS stores and have them wayfind their own path through their own cruddy software. I was assured it would be no problem
Into the vehicle go the three large 50+ pound cases and I drive off to the local UPS shop. I haul all three cases in a wait for too long and finally it's my turn and I explain what I need to do and the person behind the counter just shakes his head and tells me, "I can't access nobody's accounts. They don't let us do that. You need to have them air bills printed out and attached to the boxes and then I can take em."

I put everything back in the car and race back to the studio to try again. This time I get an error message about the client's address. I call the client and am assured that the address is hunky dory. I push onward. Finally we get to the summary page: Three packages, three day shipping, $685. Right, I could just buy the cases a seat on Southwest Airlines for that. We try again for ground delivery and the price drops by half. Now the problem is that the magnificent software (done, no doubt by the lowest bidder in the universe) won't allow me to print out the airbills I can see on my screen ostensibly because I am not the account holder.

I call customer service and a very patient and knowledgeable operator actually assists me and walks through the whole process until I've got airbills printed. Then I ask, "Can I now drop these by the local UPS store and have them receive the cases?" She replies, "Oh sure, unless you've declared a value of the cases." No, I always ship thousands of dollars of lighting equipment uninsured because of my deep faith and belief in prayer...... "I insured them."  She replied, "Well, in that case you'll need to take them to the main terminal (in the middle of rural Texas on the other side of the nuclear waste dumps, just south of the active volcano and slightly north of the massive septic tank truck spill....still in the process of being cleaned up..).  My heart sinks at the thought of wasting my day driving around and waiting to wait for some more waiting. And then she throws me the bone...

"We can arrange for a pick-up." Yes, Please.  "What time would work for you?" How about between now (noon-ish) and two p.m? "Okay, just let me enter that into the system. Yes, you are all set. Is there anything else I can help you with?"  No, thanks for all your help. Be sure to kick your I.T. people in the balls on your way out of the office tonight....

I pull the equipment from the car, slap on the labels and get back to work on something more interesting. I'm happy the cases will go out on time and make it to Denver in plenty of time for my presentations. Then Dave calls....

When I come back from getting coffee there's a message on my phone: "Hello, this is Dave from UPS and it looks like we have a req for a pick up from you. Is that a residence or a business? Anyway, I'm calling to let you know that we can't be there by that time and maybe you could call me back.."

Rising anger and frustration as I hit the number Dave just called from and, after twenty rings, I get a recorded message from UPS and am offered an "800" number. I go back through Dave's message and at the end he's made the mistake (from his point of view) of leaving me a direct line. We go through the typical back and forth of what constitutes a business address and I tell him that one of his people set up the pick up times and I don't want to wait here all day for someone to drop by. Not only that but it's lunch time and I can probably go to the Jason's Deli that's half a mile from here and find six or seven UPS trucks all herding together.... Dave's current placating offer is that he's pretty sure he can have someone here by 7pm.  Yes, somewhere in the next 7 hours. Oh joy. I tell him that's not going to work.

Dave promises to call me back in fifteen minutes with a pick up time. It's be a lot longer now and I'm starting to think that the second circle of hell is opening up and reaching for my ankles. I miss the days of skycaps and $25 per bag airline charges, etc. Why is it so hard to get stuff done now? Did all the embracing of technology usher in (to somehow compensate) a new and receding level of competency on everyone's behalf?

I can only imagine what the next shoe to drop will be..

I hate shipping stuff. I always have. In the future I'll just tell people I have to drive. That way I may arrive tired and road sore but I'll be able to bring all the stuff I want and control it on every step of the way. 

And so begins Canon's journey into mirrorless cameras with EVF finders.....Count on it.

I just read the white paper about Canon's new on chip, phase detect, auto focus technology for the Canon 70D. It basically uses over 40 million pixel elements working under 20 million micro lenses to capture images and to do phase detection AF. Since the camera is dividing all the 20 million pixels in two we can expect two outcomes: 1. The accuracy of the phase detection AF on chip will be really good and the amount of light, cumulatively hitting the AF sensors, will be higher than that in more limited  area systems (current Sony and m4:3rds).  2. The complexity of the processing and control of the sensor will be increased requiring more horsepower from the processors. I also suspect that having two photo diodes at each pixel site will have other, unexpected processing consequences. I'm sure Canon will work it out but it seems obvious that this is Canon's initial step (we, and the world at large, are, for the most part, ignoring their first failed effort...)  in creating an answer to the mirrorless incursion. A new philosophy hoping to deal with the Mongol hordes of mirrorless offerings thundering across the plains of the consumer camera market.

I see this camera as a "proof of performance" sample. The next generation will move to a mirrorless configuration with an EVF because, if the on-chip AF is successful, there's no logical or economic reason to retain the more costly OVF. (To all those who say that cameras with EVFs are MORE costly I would say that you misunderstand. The new cameras may be more costly to YOU but they are much less expensive for the manufacturers and hence shore up receding profits. Not everything gets passed along to the consumer, especially not in a stale market...).

Presuming that Canon's 70D really performs (and the on chip AF is touted as being fully usable with every current Canon lens...) this means that both Canon and Nikon (in their J and V1 cameras) have proven to themselves that they need not have a secondary phase detect sensor integrated with finder optics and can offer a less expensive product at a steady price point to consumers who are acculturated and acclimated to doing most of their viewing and reviewing on big, rear screens. It also means, when Canon pull the curtain open on their mirrorless EVF iterations, that video gets better for most consumers because focus gets better for the video portion of the camera's feature set. And that's been a big source of unhappiness with Canon and Nikon amateur (and pro) video users who've come from faster focusing still systems.

The next step for all the makers is to finish coming to grips with fully electronic shutters. Once that's done we'll have taken out all the moving parts except for the control interfaces and that means faster cycling shot-to-shot and no wear and tear.  Just in time to try and catch up with the mirrorless market that's already crowded in under the big tent.

Count on it.

Before you sell that old camera go back and look at some of the work you created with it...

There's always new photo stuff coming out and I'm as fickle (or more so..) as the average photographer. It took all the lip biting and jaw tightening self restraint I could muster not to buy into the initial hysteria surrounding the Nikon D800 cameras and plunge into another system shift. The thing that saved me was my embracement of the EVF world view and the hold that superior technology has on me. In retrospect it was good to stick with my Sony cameras and leverage their special advantages for video. While the D800 files might be a tad more detailed that would be the only real advantage of the camera for me, and for my way of working it's not much of a perk.

But I never seem to learn and the other day I was handling yet another camera at the camera store and my undisciplined brain started leading me down a pathway that promised a newer, better and snappier set of tools than those I had in my own camera bag. Well, I'm pretty taken with the Sony SLR stuff (this is how the thoughts progress...) but I haven't used the Sony Nex stuff in a while (damn Samsung NX300...) and I could probably trade in all of my Nex stuff and get the new stuff. An ill-conceived plan began to form and before I knew it I was heading home to fetch gear and all the while my gear driven dark side of the brain was tossing out little cupcakes of imagined happiness....if only I had that new gear to play with. Ah, almost seduced once more by nothing more than the beautiful sound of a wonderful, mechanical shutter mechanism and some nice exterior design. But if I had gone through with my thinly considered plan I'd have ended up with two overlapping SLR systems and no fun, little toys.

I'd like to write that my good sense and reasoning bubbled up and overwhelmed my more random and emotionally driven acquisition glands but the reality is that my plans were thwarted by the drudgery of maintenance. 

I'd been on a trip to Boston in the Spring with the family and took only the two Sony Nex 7 cameras (Michael Johnston is wrong; I do not have seventeen of the cameras. But I suppose I would if money were no object). I also took only three small but potent lenses. Two from Sigma and one Sony. The focal lengths were: 19mm, 30mm, and 50mm. I shot a bit and when I came back I stumbled into project after project and never really paid much attention to the images I'd shot. Well, as I was cleaning up folders, making space and generally getting ready to incorporate the new Mac Pro machine into my workflow the minute it is released I came across my  Boston Images folder. When I looked at the images I found them compelling and different than images from my past and present cameras. I found that I really responded to the tonalities and colors in a direct way. I resolved that, whether or not I flirted with newer or different cameras, I would have to practice camera polygamy because the Nex flagships were too cool to give up. I guess they will eventually go into the stack with the Kodak cameras from the early years of this century and I'll trot them out to prove, in 2019, just how good today's technology was. Is.

Once upon a time we considered a 6 megapixel file to be the Holy Grail for digital cameras. Can you imagine going back?

Production Image from Aida.

I'm going back through a lot of older portrait work, looking for fun images so I can put together a presentation next week in Denver. I'll be presenting in front of video cameras for three days and I wanted to have samples of the kinds of images we'll be talking about and creating. Since I was in an exploratory mood I didn't put any date restrictions on my search but I did want to stick to good digital files and not get into a marathon of film scanning and post production.

Today's foraging brought up some images I hadn't played with in a long time and I was surprised when I found these promotional shots for a production of Aida at how much I liked both the lighting (which is simple and straightforward) as well as the tonality I got from the files. The color in the shadow to highlight transition areas is very clean and the transitions themselves are smooth and detail without much evidence of banding.

I was in Bridge so I checked the info on the file and was surprised to see that it came from one of my earliest professional digital cameras, the Kodak DCS 760. The image was taken at ISO 80 and lit with Profoto strobes. The lens was the Nikon 28-70mm 2.8 zoomed, used at f11 and around 55mm. The original file is 2000 by 3000 pixels but when I examined the file at 100% I found it to be tightly structured and fairly noise free. I tried a quick blow up just using the interpolation in PhotoShop CS6 and found that the file could be res'd up to much larger dimensions with very little loss in quality. I was impressed to see how well the old technology holds together in a modern workflow.

I have made a mental note to myself to go back soon and convert all the Kodak raw files to .dng files as I'm almost certain that fewer and fewer raw conversion programs will continue to support cameras from a functionally defunct camera maker.

Given that most work now goes up on the web I think this could still be a viable studio camera. This isn't the first time that the DCS 706 surprised me in a good way.  I guess that, and nostalgia, are the reasons I keep the camera, lenses and bit and pieces around still. That, and the fact that five pounds of hard alloy are good for driving nails when I forget to bring the studio hammer along on projects.

I sometimes feel that we've all been chasing the wrong rabbit. The cameras are fine, it's the education on why and when to use them that we should have been (should be) working on.

Metering is a wonderful thing.

I have two lazy habits that sometimes sabotage my best intentions when making photographs. I've gotten used to using cameras in automatic settings when shooting quickly, outside. I let the cameras set the white balance and the basic exposure. It make sense in a lot of situations but when you get into the studio and you are inventing the light it pays to do two things on every shoot. The first is to use a light meter. In my opinion an incident light meter is the only metering tool that works every time. The second thing I always do, if I am being mindful of quality in the studio, is to make a custom white balance. Here's the tricky thing: White balance affects exposure. Exposure affects white balance. I always meter first and then I do my custom white balance.

When I do a custom white balance I use the exposure I've gotten from metering instead of relying on the camera to compensate.

You may be able to make adjustments in raw to your exposures and your overall color balance but they will be compromises and you'll see it in non-linear color casts in shadow areas and you'll regret not metering when you find that the histogram in your camera convinces you to underexpose in nearly every situation. That under exposure robs you of detail in your shadows (if you want it) and adds color noise to the overall file as you "lift" exposure to get where you should have been all along.

We (collectively; not royally) tend to use RAW as a 24/7 crutch and a convenient excuse not to practice our craft with the diligence and mindfulness that we could. We've come to believe in an industry wide mantra which states that RAW is always better than a Jpeg file. I've done some technical digging and I'm here to tell you that a Jpeg file that is accurately metered and color balanced at the time of capture spanks the heck out of an underexposed RAW files that's brought back under control in post. And part of the problem is color shifts due to exposure differences.

I don't care what the web says on this. Every studio photographer and videographer needs to own and know how to use an incident light meter to work at a high quality level. And every photographer and videographer looking for consistency and quality should know how all their cameras make custom white balances. Over time it will save one much time and energy. Once you practice mindfully using your meter you'll walk off your shooting sets knowing that you've nailed the technical stuff. Getting the emotion right is a different beast. Don't let the technical get in the way of the wonderful....

And, yes, I get the irony of using a black and white image as the illustration for the top of the article. For all the literal folks, here's a color version:

A quick review of my time with the Leaf Aptus AFi7 medium format camera.

I wish I still had the Leaf Aptus 39 megapixel, medium format camera in my studio; especially if I had gotten to keep the 180mm Schneider short telephoto lens as well. At the time the files were much more detailed than anything we could have gotten out of a 35mm style DSLR. Nowadays? The only advantage might be the real 16 bit files but you'd have to be looking at great prints or a $2,000 monitor to really see the difference between those files and the ones that start out as 14 bit files in our current cameras.

When I found this file in my archives I looked for a similar file done with the Sony a99 and compared them both at 100%. The colors were close and could be matched without too much brain sweat. The shadows are more nuanced with the bigger file camera. But I can get very close to the Leaf in post with the Sony.

What I loved about the Leaf was the combination of lens and sensor size but lately I've found that a good 85mm at f2.8 gets me so close to the same look. And pragmatically, my audience has changed as well. Most clients are working more and more on the web and at 8 bits the discriminating factors between the files vanish. At that point any good business person has to consider the price of ownership differential and the cost/benefit analysis.

The medium format package as I was using it was close to $40,000. The Sony a99 with a Rokinon 85mm 1.5 lens tips the total to $3200. The Sony files are easier to do the day to day plumbing work of photography with and the camera is much more agile in use. I'm glad to have kept the extra $36,800 in my pocket. It went a long way toward shepherding my business through some tough times. Sometimes the only way to make a real assessment of the value in your hands in to put the gear in your hands and try it. Anecdotal stories are too imaginary to use as decision making metrics. Now, the real question is whether or not the Sony/Zeiss 85mm 1.4 is worth the difference. I'm getting one to test. Should be an interesting and potentially embarrassing run through. More later.

Monday Morning Portrait. It's 50% lighting. It's 50 % engagement. And it's 100% collaboration.

Heidi.

I loved photographing Heidi. She came to my studio at the suggestion of my assistant, Amy. We were doing a book project and we needed a beautiful person to photograph so we could illustrate what I was writing about lighting. I lit her in what I've come to know as "my style" of lighting. It's a really big umbrella (could be a softbox if you prefer) used over to one side and fairly close. The other side gets a black blocking card to control the depth of the shadows. The little glimmer of backlit hits the top of Heidi's check and adds and inference of shaping to that side of her face. The grid spot on the background creates a vignette effect on the background.

We were using an Leaf/Rollei Aptus 7 back in the studio at the time but I found that I preferred a regular Nikon DSLR and a medium telephoto zoom lens instead. The files on the bigger camera might have been easier to work with but the smaller camera was 95% there on the quality and much more fluid with which to work. A variation of the image above appeared in the second book; the one about studio lighting.

I came across this image because I'm preparing to give three day, concentrated workshop on portrait lighting and portrait creation for a private company. I've looked through over 900 digital portraits I've made in the last decade with nearly 40 different digital cameras. My take away? All the files look nearly the same as artifacts because lighting and aesthetic attention trump the somewhat benign differences in cameras. Shop all you want but whatever you shoot with you shoot with your own brain first. Hard to overcome that hurdle, if you consider it to be a hurdle. On the other hand it certainly speaks to a triumph of purpose. Go with your flow and you'll drag whatever camera along with you....

Happy monday. Hope the week treats us all well.

The Return of the "Hot" Walk. Burning up with a camera in your hands.

 Ben reading "Old Path, White Clouds" in the reading room.

After a fairly mild Spring and a calm Summer yesterday felt like a reprise from the Summer of 2011 when we suffered through 105 straight days of over 100 degrees. Many of the days pegged out over 110. Although we don't hit the desert temperatures we're more like the Houston ship canal in the Summer where the high temperatures are leavened with ample humidity. Yesterday we heard the weather forecast telling us that the high temperature for the day would be around 109 (f) while in the heat sink of downtown we could expect a few degrees more. What a perfect afternoon to take a compact camera out for a walk and see how it would handle outside of its stated operating parameters...

I baselined the test with a shot of Ben sitting, motionless, in a comfortable chair with the ambient interior temperature hoving around 78 degrees. Even at 640 ISO there's little discernible noise. In a nod to the heat I found a light colored and thin ball cap and drank a glass of water before I walked out the door and steered the sprightly studio vehicle toward downtown. I had my trusty NX300, a Hoodman Loupe (I don't care how great your eyes are none of those rear screens is in its element at EV 21...). Ever the Boy Scout I tossed an extra battery in the pocket and tossed on a pair of non-polarized sunglasses. 

A moment to discuss sunglasses: Anyone who works outside and anyone who wants to keep their vision intact to their old age should wear good, optically rigorous sunglasses which block both UV and IR energy. Keep those retinas and corneas happy. But....don't go out for your photo walk with a pair of polarized sunglasses because the random interference patterns will obscure parts of the screen, which is also polarized. Also, polarized glasses greatly increased the dark tones in the skies making the clouds stand out dramatically. Unfortunately you won't see the same effect in your camera files unless you put a polarizer on the front of the camera too. I like polarized sunglasses when I drive but not when I shoot. Too much disparity between my human perception and the camera perception.

The Barton Springs Spillway.

I presumed that the general population of Austin would wither and hide from the heat in cool, little caves, in malls and theaters. Naw. The soccer fields were jammed with people kicking the balls around in the direct sun. Barton Springs and Lady Bird Lake were both filled with splashers and paddle boarders and kayakers and swimmers. No different than a mild day.

Mercedes. Buy a raffle ticket. At Zach Scott.

I recently received a 30mm f2, pancake lens for my Samsung NX 300. Their public relations agency sent it out to me and I decided that it would be my only lens for the heat walk. It is nice not to have to make decisions in the heat or to change lenses with sweaty hands.  I put the lens at f7.1  and left it there for the rest of the day. It worked well with one exception: I got a tiny bit of magenta discoloration on one side of the frame. I've had the same problem with wider and legacy lenses on the Sony NEX 7. I saw it mostly on side lit images and it may be the very beginning of flare just jumping in there.

When I walked from Barton Springs to Zachary Scott Theatre and I found this Mercedes sedan parked out on the "quad" in front of the new Topfer theater. Kinda bizarre, like a commercial that doesn't move. Or have sound. I put my knee down on the concrete in anticipation of kneeling to make a low angle shot and I quickly stood up because the surface was burning me. Instead I flipped the screen out, popped the loupe on and shot low that way. No weird magenta cast on this one. When I look at this shot bigger the detail is wonderful, deep and compelling. Even better than the detail I see in files from my 20 megapixel Sony a58.

I was amazed at the number of Austin cyclists tooling around in 

the downtown heat wave. The heat didn't seem to faze them...

I'm very happy with the focal length of the pancake lens. It's like a 45 or 47mm lens on a full frame camera and that's what I cut my teeth on back when I bought my first cameras. My Canon Canonet sported a 40mm 1.7, my Canon TX came with a 50mm 1.8 lens and my Rolleiflex TLR was in the same ballpark. 

This giant pit in front of the old power plant will be the home of Austin's new downtown library. We're collectively going to spend several hundred million dollars to build it and I wonder if someone missed the memo about books becoming digital and almost instantly available... 

As I walked from the pedestrian bridge, through the construction alley of new buildings, and over the railroad tracks I turned east toward downtown and wandered past Garrido's and the W Hotel before coming to temporary rest at Caffe Medici. Once refreshed I headed up the street and photographed several buildings, including the Littlefield Building, which, because of the heat, I envisioned in black and white. Or, as my trendy art friends say, "monochrome."

The corner of 6th and Congress Ave.

I've become very agile in using the eyelevel-finderless camera with a big Hoodman Loupe. It makes my process of photography more controlled and more easily reviewed. But I did have an epiphany yesterday ( or heat stroke ). I thought that young people and hipsters used the screens on the backs of their cameras and phones because they didn't understand the advantages of an eye level finder and a diopter optical system for framing and reviewing.  I kinda thought they were... stupid. But I've finally realized that the generation in question are early adopters of what I've been preaching all along: They are choosing live view. They want to see how the image will look as they implement changes, etc. and, since most cut their teeth on cellphone cameras, the back screen was the only option and they became habituated to it.

Not a reason to get rid of the EVF but a defense of that group's disregard for the better method. They were foiled and truncated early on by the dumb optical finders. Funny how heat changes your mind.

Sub Bridge Concert.

After walking through downtown and dousing my hat from time to time with cool water from one resource or another I set my internal GPS to Whole Foods and spent a few minutes wandering through the meat, seafood and dairy sections of the store where the temperature felt almost arctic. Re-refreshed I took the last lap and headed back over the bridge to regain my car. I intentionally took the hike and bike trail to photograph the reflections of the lake's water on the underside of the old Lamar bridge. It was here that I bumped into the violinist, above. He was playing for a small group of people who'd gathered under the bridge to temporarily escape the heat. It was wonderful and seemed somehow organic in the sense that this is how people lived before the age of air conditioning made us soft and prone to collapsing under even the slightest duress....

It was a fine walk. It was a long and happy walk. And at the end I felt cool and satisfied and somehow more integrated into the energy of Austin. Home for a lentil, apple and spinach salad and two glasses of a very nice, Argentinian Cabernet Savignon. And a couple glasses of water...

As you can see, the camera performed perfectly. No extra noise from heat. Not like my Kodak DCS 760 which starts to make happy colored sparkles the relative size of marbles whenever the temperature exceeds 104f. Works for me.