Third in a series of Art Historians. Pose.

I hate what happens to black and white prints when I upload them to Blogger. They get grayed down. The surrounds go from 95% to about 74% and it makes me crazy. Oh well. This is the last image I'll show in the series of Art Historians and it is my personal favorite.

I'm not sure why other than that I like the tilt of the subject's head, the accessorizing of the scarf and neck chain as well as the tuft of hair right in the middle of this accomplished woman's forehead. No features, I am afraid, that would pass the test of modern portrait imaging as approved by the web at large. But then the audience for these images was an entirely different demographic...

It was 80 degrees in Austin today with bright sunshine. I bought a tank of gas today for $1.70 a gallon. The world has turned upside down.

I hope everyone who regularly reads VSL is happy, well and warm.


Resume following me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/KirkTuck

Just a photograph of clouds and a tree.

I was having coffee with a friend yesterday afternoon. We were helping each other stay motivated with our respective projects. It's a great thing to have friends who will push you forward. Once you've discussed a project that you want to do it's almost as if you have more discipline simply because you don't want to let them down.

As artists we all need to know and socialize with other artists because they so rarely ask you things like: "Will that be cost effective?" "What's the R.O.I. on your creative venture?" "Won't that take time away from paying work?" And all the other helpful advice and suggestions that people who don't do their own art projects like to offer by way of constructive input.

We were sitting outside, enjoying the warm spell, and the sky began to change just before sunset. Neither of us said anything about the sky but we both glanced over as the light became more beautiful. I don't remember who stood up first but we walked over the edge of the sidewalk and shot a few images of the sky and the clouds and the trees. I can pretty much guarantee that we did it because we both felt that the sky in that moment was beautiful.

And I can pretty much guarantee that neither of us was thinking, "I wonder how much money I can get for that image as a stock photograph."

Find friends who are artists and hang out. Feed the fire. Turn the coals. Help them get their projects done. Let them help you to do the same.

When making a series of portraits continuity can be important. Art Historians, part 2.

Art Historian.

Few things bother me more when looking at a printed brochure or a website than being confronted with a page of photographic portraits that are not consistent in look and feel. I looked at a website for a law firm yesterday. Three years ago I had made portraits for them of all sixteen partners and all of them were on consistent backgrounds, with consistent color and head sizes. The feel of the lighting was carried through from photo to photo.

Over the last three years some of the partners retired or moved on while nine new people were added to the roster. Unfortunately, they must have decided not to spend the money on updating the website with new images of the newcomers because each new added photograph was strikingly different. Some were done with very hard light. Some where phone-cam snaps. Others were archaic styles from another time. It's not that any one image was horrible but that the mismatch of images stood out like a red wine stain on a white silk dress. The ensuing collage of mixed styles and varying level of production quality damaged the visual integrity of the page and degraded the marketing effect dramatically.

I try to make sure that we don't have that problem if I can help to avoid it. I keep a sketch or lighting diagram of the shoots I do so I can replicate them closely if there are additions after the initial shoot. If we are doing projects with teams here in Austin and counterparts in another state or country we set a style, shoot it and then create a detailed style guide for our counterpart photographers. The goal is to be able to seamlessly insert an image into a corporate website and have it look like it matches everything else on the site.

Continuity of style is part of a company's brand. You work with the marketing people not only to come up with the style but to preserve it over time. Yes, I did send a note to the marketing director at the law firm.  Yes we will probably reshoot everyone.

Continuity+Style=branding.

Portrait of an Art Historian.

I was commissioned to make a series of portraits of art history professors at the University of Texas at Austin. The client and I decided to go with black and white images as it seemed appropriate to the nature of their work.

To make the assignment most efficient it was decided that I would go to their location at the Fine Arts College and set up a temporary studio. I worked with medium format cameras and high powered electronic flash generators. The lighting was very simple. I used a 4x6 foot soft box as my main light, adding an extra layer of silk diffusion material to give me the look I wanted. I did not use any fill to the opposite side of the subjects' faces in order to add contrast and black intensity to the images.

I was able to select a room that had a good amount of distance from front to back and I set up my canvas background as far from the subjects as I could while keeping the subject framed correctly and without showing the edges of the background material. The background was lit by a small soft box powered by a second electronic flash generator. The background soft box was positioned directly behind the subject and just below the shoulder line.

For each subject I exposed two twelve exposure rolls of black and white film after testing the set up carefully with black and white Polaroid test materials.

After we wrapped up the shooting I returned to the studio where I processed the film and hung it up to dry. The next morning I went back into the darkroom to make contact sheets of all the rolls of film I'd shot. I made two sets. One for my use and to keep with the film in the filing cabinet, and a second to give to the client for selection purposes.

After the individual images were selected (days or weeks later) I went back into the darkroom and made 8x10 inch, double weight fiber prints of each person. Excluding test prints I made sets of prints "bracketing" exposures by small increments in order to get exactly the level of highlight detail I was looking for. The prints were marked with copyright and contact information on the backs with pencil and I asked that the prints be returned to me after the contracted use.

I came across the envelope this morning as I "thinned out" a drawer in one of the filing cabinets and pulled the prints out to take a look. These are quick copy shots of the printed material and certainly don't have the same impact,, as small images on the web, that they do when one is able to hold them in one's hands and really examine the subtly toned surfaces in good light. Maybe that is a reason why actual photographic prints seem overlooked these days; there is less exposure to the actual product and what is seen on the web is hurried and prone to bad electronic interpretation.

In my encounters with subjects I am rarely interested in in smiling images and much more interested in images that show the personality of the sitter as I have experienced them, even if our exposure to each other is limited. I like the compression I get with longer lenses and I like to fill the frame with the main subject so I can really go back and inspect the nuances of their faces.

The critical part of a portrait shoot is establishing a rapport with the sitter and providing an emotional space that makes it safe for the sitter to relax into the stasis that represents themselves at rest. Everything else is just showmanship...

This is post number 2200.

Well. At this point we've shared 2200 blog posts with each other. We've bantered back and forth with nearly 28,000 comments. The VSL blog has racked up nearly 18,000,000 page views. We've covered trends, cameras, lenses, business of photography and Ben's progress through high school and into college.

I've posted thousands of photographs. Some interesting (at least to me) and some not. Today I lost one follower. I think it may have been someone disgruntled by my recent purchase of a D810.

So I thought I'd take a moment and ask those of you who are left: How are we doing at VSL? What do you see too much of and what would you like to read more of? What do you like here? What annoys you? I rarely do much research but would sincerely like to know what our audience is thinking.

legal disclaimer: The request for information should not be construed as a contract, or bailment, or assurance that any suggestions, or comments, will influence content, cause specific content to be created or discarded, nor is the request a guarantee of a continued flow of written content and/or images. Nor is the request for comments an indication that any employment or offer of employment has been extended to anyone from VSL, their agents or assigns. We reserve the right to write whatever pops into our head at any time and in any font. Should we be subject to alien abduction the blog will be suspended until such a time as when we are returned to the planet and have recovered from our experiences at the hands (should they have them) of the extraterrestrial perpetrators. ©2015 Kirk Tuck

Thanks, Kirk

Don't you wish everything just stayed the same? Maybe someone could make one perfect camera and we could all buy that and be done with it. Wouldn't that be cool?

Remember the old days when you could buy one camera and use it forever? We'd get our hands on a crunchy good camera like an F2 and just bang on it for years and years and years. Nothing in the imaging chain really ever changed. As long as the "magic box" kept dragging film through the gate and the shutter kept clanking away the only upgrade you ever needed was a green or yellow box of the newest emulsions from the chemical boys. Good times. Really good times. Back then we hardly ever talked about cameras it was mostly about lenses and film. And developers. And condensers versus cold light heads. And enlarging paper. And enlarging lenses. But bodies? Naw, those things were just something to mount the lenses on.

Then those reckless bastards at Kodak set the world on a path which eventually destroyed Kodak entirely and plunged the photographic faithful into a long period of wild confusion. From 2000 (A.D.) onward we have had to deal with the insane combination of computer programming and silicon design progress when using cameras. We had to learn all kinds of stupid stuff that we really never wanted to learn because computers destroyed the world as we knew it. We became lab, color scientist, retoucher and IT department.

At first the magazines, pundits and smarty pants people in the industry told us to be patient and that one day we'd actually see cameras with native resolutions of SIX MILLION PIXELS!!!! And at that point we would have, for all intents and purposes, achieved parity with 35mm film. The road to six megapixels was littered with 1, 1.5, 2, 2.5, 3, 3.5 and 4 million pixel cameras that cost way too much.
Most of these cameras sucked and sucked hard. They were slow and gimpy. The files were shallow and brittle and the time between shots was the new reference standard for coffee breaks. Amazingly, we were all stupid enough to continue the march forward.

We were assured that everything would plateau right there around 6 megapixels. But it didn't turn out that way. First it was those nut jobs at Canon who drove up the pixel count to an astounding----eight. Nikon leapfrogged to ten and then Canon dropped the big bomb---12 megapixels in the 1DS FULL FRAME camera. The universe shook. Pigs flew and the dead rose from their graves and reached for their credit cards.

It was a revolution. Nothing would ever be the same again. Millions of hard core Nikon fans rushed to trade in their obsolete DX sized gear for pittances as waiting lists for Canon gear grew. Canon was invincible. They would be the Guardians for the Universe of Imaging for all eternity.

And just to toss some mud into the faces of Nikon, and any of the other upstarts, the all knowing Canon engineers (and marketers) came along and cemented their place in the heavens with both a 16 MEGA-NORMOUS-PIXEL full frame camera AND a super fast shooting 8FPS!!!!! Sports camera. All the Nikon believers could do was glare at their 12 megapixel, mini-sensor cameras, balefully, and plan their switching strategy. Exiles. Outcasts.

It was 2005 and the headlines were already being prepared by the photographic press: "NIKON WITHERS ON THE VINE AND DIES. OBSOLENCE THY NAME IS NIKKOR." Scores of Nikon shooters in countries around the world died of shame. It was also the year that Leica was pronounced, "The Walking Dead of the Camera World." Olympus's brave and virtuous attempt at birthing a new format standard and shiny new lenses was slowly dying as well under the onslaught of Canon's prowess and perfection.

We could have stopped the universe right then and there with the 16 megapixel Canon 1DS mk2 and that could have represented the ultimate, aspirational camera for generations to come. Had we stopped there future generations of photographers would have grown up assuming that all camera lenses were light gray. Everyone who could had switched brands. Everyone who couldn't just shuffled off into obscurity.

And no one blamed the people who switched. It had to be done. They felt that the writing was on the wall and that was that. But there was one little glitch. They hadn't counted on the scheming collaborative powers of Nikon and Sony. All at once Nikon delivered a Sony powered full frame camera that could see in the dark. It was the D3 and it was both bulletproof, insanely fast and able to shoot two or three steps higher on the ISO scale than anything Canon could put out into the market. Sports photographers went nuts and the Nikon faithful came out of their huts near the river Styx where they had gone, waiting to die, and re-embraced the magical machines from Nikon.

Another tidal shift happened overnight! The shock waves were everywhere. How dare these people switch systems when they had pledged their allegiance to Canon??? Was nothing sacred? Canon volleyed back with a higher pixel density camera, the 5D mk2 and trumpeted its 22 megapixels from the roof tops. Then they showed off how the same camera could also take pretty good movies and even make most stuff out of focus if you wanted it that way.

Movies and a bigger pixel count? The pendulum swung and the faithful followed Vicent Laforet back over to the Canon camp. Each time the trade-ins benefitted the retailers and the sheer volume of recent and now unwanted gear fed an almost insatiable used market. The Canon camp swelled back toward their original supremacy right up until Nikon tossed in not only a flagship 24 megapixel camera but also a never ending series of 24 megapixel consumer cameras. Cameras that uniformly could out perform the sensors in just about every Canon at any price. And just when you thought Canon would volley back with an incredible new product that would leapfrog over the Nikon offerings.... Nikon rushed to the net and slammed home their advantage with the 36 megapixel D800.

Now, most of this was only of interest to sports geeks and people working to produce commercial photography for the very high end of the market. And a few wedding photographers. The rest of us could pick and choose as we liked. If we didn't do print then the biggest buying filter was the 2560 x 1440 pixel count of the best monitors. Or the 2,000 by 1080 standard of real HD TV. That meant that we could select fun cameras with resolutions of 12 to 16 megapixels and have more than enough in resolution reserve; more than we needed. Most of us stopped printing with any serious intent in those years although we did talk about printing and showing prints for good long time....

During the great recession I'd given up the megapixel race and was exploring other interesting things like cool aspect ratios, nice color, smaller sizes, higher portability and lower costs. With client budgets down and the pixel wars raging at the esoteric end of the spectrum I figured we'd just cruise along with inexpensive gear and try to make some truth out of the web-ism of "Indian not arrow."

All the while wishing that film had never vanished (yes, I know some of you still shoot it. I am very impressed.) and that the cameras that cost us a fortune in our youth were still in service today.

While we all paid lip service to the idea that 12 megapixels was enough no one was ever pilloried for moving up to 16 megapixels when the change came to m4:3 cameras. As long as you only moved within your established systems.

We're well into switching fatigue now. The feeling I get from everyone is that they just want to snug in with what they've got; be it Fuji or Olympus, and chill for a while. A camera nesting phenomenon.
And I don't blame anyone. Every time the big switcheroo happens it always seems like a good excuse for a nap in the aftermath.

But for commercial photographers it doesn't always work that way. We can't always schedule a nap and sit on the sidelines. The field of photography is now a living and (ever) quickly evolving organism that reaches into everything. The recession ended in Austin early and the people in the lucky part of the cycle realize two things. First, that the money was coming back, and secondly that BIG and SHARP was going to be a photography industry differentiator for workers in this field. Especially in the most competitive and affluent markets.

I also realized that I'd love to have the same big, sharp gear shoot good video too.

For the last year or so I've waited to see how everything might play out. I bet on 4K video and the GH4 as my strategy for increasing profits last year. I should have realized that rich ad agencies would be the first to want "big" and also to replace their existing 2K monitors with 4K (retina) monitors. I should have realized that the payoff would extend far beyond just viewing video and would change the way art directors and fashion forward marketing people started to look at images. Still images.

The younger people, with fewer fatiguing gear replacement cycles in their recent history, jumped on the Nikon D800 bandwagon hard. They marketed the crap out of their gear's features and benefits. But at the same time no one in my camps (clients) even mentioned the need for 4K video. So I belatedly, and once again, became a switcher. I bought a bunch of Nikon stuff. And I'm not at all sorry I did.

You don't have to be an eagle-eyed forensic photo viewer/scientists to realize that 36 megapixels with really good technical parameters is a game changer for commercial (for profit) shooters. Now there's nothing scary about clients who like posters. Nothing scary about clients who do trade show graphics. But this only applies to people who have to justify their tools to the market!!!

But guess what? None of this is binary. Just because I bought a D810 doesn't mean I can't also have a drawer FULL of micro four thirds cameras and lenses. Lots and lots of them. I get to decide when I leave the big camera at work and bring the little cameras along for a nice walk, or a daylong assignment whose only missing parameter is the need to be printed at very large sizes. It's not binary. Owning one camera doesn't cancel out owning other cameras. It doesn't cancel the reality that you liked other cameras in the past. In their context. Especially when the camera budget for all these cameras is less than the amount I used to spend on film and processing in one year! That's right, in some ways I consider the cameras bodies to be more like film that our original thought construct of "cameras" back in the film age. The bodies are less precious now precisely because they do become obsolete.

In two years Canon might leapfrog over the D810 or Nikon might consolidate their new lead with an even better camera. If they do I might switch or upgrade (respectively) because it will be the equivalent of sticking a couple of new cases of film in the deep freeze (a common practice in the day...).

So why am I writing all of this? Why not just enjoy the new camera and get on with it? What's the point? Well, someone wrote to ask this morning if I hadn't betrayed my readers by writing in a nice way about some gear last year (or last month) and then personally switching to another system. I wanted to get across the point that nothing really stands still any more. That cameras are the interchangeable film of the process now. That professionals photographers might need to change just to reach new markets and new customers. That styles, client tastes and viewing systems change.

Look, I love to play with new gear. I'm as nerdy as the next guy. Maybe even more so. Put titanium on it or carbon fiber and I'll probably buy it.  I've owned every major system that's hit the market since I started working (with the exception of 35mm and digital Pentax ---- but in my defense I did own both the Pentax 6x7 and 645 cameras....) including Contax, Leica, Sony, Nikon, Canon, Olympus, Hasselblad, Mamiya and some I've forgotten. They are fun to play with. Current tax law allows full time imaging companies to expense a lot of the gear. It all has good resale value. It's almost like leasing.  So I get to play. It's one of the few fringe benefits of being a full time, self-employed photographer. A brief respite from paying self-employment taxes, your own health insurance, business insurance, disability insurance, liability insurance, retirement, blah, blah, blah.

So, here's the current and future disclaimer: 1. The only time I've been given free gear by a manufacturer or their agents was Samsung. I used their mirror less cameras for a year and a half before resigning from their program. I now own exactly one Samsung kit lens. All the rest of the equipment is gone. Traded, sold or gifted. Every single time I wrote about any Samsung gear or experience my relationship and perks were completely disclosed here. 2. Neither Nikon nor their agents have ever given me any equipment or any discounts that were not available to the general public in exchange for purchasing, using or writing about their gear. This includes the many articles I wrote as far back as 2009 at the inception of the Visual Science Lab blog. I am not a member of Nikon Professional Services. I don't get swag from them. 3. When I review cameras I am either using cameras I've borrowed from the manufacturers or purchased myself. If I borrow a camera there is no stated or implied quid pro quo. I am not ever given the cameras to keep. They are all returned. Mostly sooner than I'd like but some are here too long even if they've only been here a day or so and they are rarely reviewed.

4. When I review a camera or write about the performance of a camera (or lens) I am writing contemporaneously about how I feel concerning that camera in that particular time frame and under the circumstances of the moment. 5. If I write positively about a feature such as EVFs this doesn't create an obligation on my behalf to limit myself only to using EVFs for the rest of my life. There may be compelling reasons other than viewing and composing that make a camera useful for a particular service. Equally, my use of a camera with a particular feature or lack of feature doesn't obviate my preferences or my previous purchases. To state it simply, I wish the D810 had a state of the art EVF. It doesn't. But the performance of the sensor impels me to overlook Nikon's engineering shortcoming in that regard.

5. My use of, or appreciation of, any piece of gear, enjoyment of a television show, taste in wine or my shoe size is no guarantee that you will appreciate the same subjective characteristics of an object, product person or piece of art. It is always wise to establish the historic perspectives (and changes in perspective) of any reviewer whose work you might read. For example, I think Lloyd Chambers writes about gear by looking for objective measures of perfection. While he can tell me objectively which lens might be sharpest he can't convey to me whether I will like all the other characteristics of a lens because subjective analysis is an area in which he is tone deaf. Ming Thein's review are fun for me to read (and a subtextual insight into his struggle to find meaning in the craft) but the way he shoots and the way I shoot are nearly opposite. I suggest that you read my writings about gear only to whet you appetite to experience the gear and see how it might work for your uses. For example, if you travel extensively I don't really need to tell you that the sheer mass of a full frame D810 and attendant professional caliber lenses will suck the joy out of traveling quicker that a 500 HP pump draining a bathtub.

6. This is a two way street. I use my brain to write this stuff but you are required to use your brain when reading it. There's no "second coming" or holy insider knowledge being doled out here. Just the opinions and topical ramblings of someone who tries to work full time in an incredibly challenging and ultimately fluid business.

7. I will let you know every time I write about something that is on loan. If Nikon gifts me with a shipping carton full of D810 bodies you'll be the first to hear about it here and the bidding will begin shortly afterwards.

8. The Olympus EM-5 camera is still the most fun, most portable and most cost effective personal shooting camera you can buy on the market to day. Everyone should own four of them. Especially if they own bigger cameras. Contrast between products is good.

9. The market will change again. I will shoot some video with the d810 and if it is good I will write and say it is good. And the minute I do they will come out with a 4K capable D820 and I will buy that, and if the video is even better I will write that the video is even better. The D810 video will not cease to exist but it will be newly overshadowed by its predecessor. And I will have no guilt in buying the new camera if I can make a profit using its new capabilities.

Finally, if you had your own company wouldn't you sit down every year and ask yourself what worked in the past year and how you could improve your products and services to your clients in the next year? Would you wait for your competitors to define your market on their terms? Would you allow them to define you?  Could you consider product extensions? Could you use different tools for different jobs? Would you change tools if you felt that you could secure a more profitable market niche? Or, are you emotionally tied to your tools?

I write this as a business owner first, a photographer second. Although why I write it is usually a mystery to me since this is the least (financially) profitable thing I do.

It's a new year. My boss told me I could buy new gear. Who am I to leave allocated budget untouched?  :-)

The Saga of the proliferating Nikons. Some thoughts about cameras and camera systems.

Nikon D610

It all started with a comfortable combination. When I picked up an ultra-cheap Nikon D610 I rediscovered my much loved 105mm f2.5 ais lens. Having rediscovered the 105mm I immediately rekindled my love affair with the 50mm f1.2 lens and felt the rush of familiarity in using that lens at its intended angle of view. The experience was nostalgic, sentimental and, well, it reminded me that there's a lot to like about the 3rd best (35mm sized) sensor in the world. Especially when packaged in a good camera body for not a lot of money. 

I probably should have stopped there but I started pressing the D610 into commercial service and that's when I fell down a different rabbit hole. You see, all during my career I've tended to buy and use camera bodies in tandem. One as a main shooting platform and the second as an identical back-up when doing advertising projects. For public relations and event work (math conferences, banking conferences, tech conferences) I usually put a wide to normal zoom on one body and a long zoom on a second body and carry them over each shoulder rather than toting a camera bag around. 

When selecting a second body I want something that is the same format. That way, in a pinch I can use either lens on either body to good effect. No extra thinking required. I would also want to have two bodies from the same maker and the same era; that way I would have a reasonable expectation that the menus would be very, very similar, the nomenclature identical and the operation most rational. And it's always better if each body has an additional strength you can count on. 

I looked at a second, identical D610 body but I decided that I wanted to choose a second body with some additional benefits. While the D610 has one of the best high ISO ratings on DXO and the same high dynamic range as both the D750 and the Nikon D810 what it doesn't have is a complete set of video features. The D610 requires you to exit video to change apertures on non-manual lenses, it also lacks 60 fps in 1080p. Finally, video people in the know tell me that the codecs on the D750 and D810 are vastly improved. All three cameras can output uncompressed files in 4:2:2 so adding a Ninja Star digital recorder gets you into the realm of really, really great video quality at a very low additional cost.

When I weighed the pluses and minuses between the 750 and 810 the 810's higher resolution was a selling point, but so were the higher top shutter speed (1/8000th) and the higher flash sync speed (1/250th). The D810 also added 1.5 and 1.2 crop modes and because of the very high pixel density it is still able to deliver 16 megapixels into 1.5 (DX) and 20-something pixels into the 1.2 crop. 

Any combination of the three cameras would do a great job getting me good, high resolution files for still work but the D810 would add the ability to do really good video with a wide assortment of fast lenses. It also provides an "ultimate" marketing tool when I come across techie clients who are interested in getting the highest resolution files for their work.

I am also interested to see what kind of look the combination of the "flat profile" and high resolution sensor of the D810 will create when making portraits. I am hoping for the endless and subtle cascade of tones I used to be able to get from medium format film files. 

Once I made up my mind in favor of the the D810 I headed up to Precision Camera where I got the camera (as can anyone else) for the exact same price as I would have paid at Amazon.com or B&H Photo and Video.  I love to keep my money as local as I can and I certainly owed the sale to Ian (my regular sales guy) since he spent much time with me going over the assortment of cameras over the last few months. It's always wonderful to have a bricks and mortar resource where I can go in and actually handle the cameras and put them through their paces. Had I not handled the D810 and heard the vast improvement in the sound and feel of its shutter I might have just defaulted to the D750 just to save some money. But I would have missed out on owning the 35mm style camera that currently boasts the best sensor specs and overall image quality in that market. 

It was sunny and warm in Austin today. I grabbed the new camera and a 24-85mm G f 3.5 to 4.5 lens and walked around shooting. It was a blast to shoot in the sunlight with a (native) ISO of 64. Even though the camera's main failing is its lack of an EVF the view through the optical finder was pretty nice. But the real joy was the well behaved shutter mechanism. When I got back to the studio I tossed the uncompressed, 14 bit raw files into Lightroom and took a good, long look. The color in the files is wonderful and no matter how hard I tried it was impossible to find even a trace of noise.

Next week I'll be shooting a dress rehearsal for Zach Theatre. I am looking forward to having one body with a fast 80-200mm ED f2.8 on it and a second body with the 24-85 on it. Each body with a killer sensor. It should be fun. 

Why did I buy the new bodies and attendant lenses? For fun. For the tax deductions. As a differentiator in the market. For the resolution. Just to see if the grass is greener on the other side of the fence. Finally, perhaps just to be able to use that old Nikon 105 f2.5 as I remember it from the days when it sat on the front of F2s, F3s, F4s and F5s. Nostalgia pure and simple...

I'll write a review of each camera as I accrue more experience with them both. We've got some low light projects just on the horizon.

Final note: The boy has arrived at his dorm, safe and sound. I can hardly wait for Spring Break...

Quiet Sunday around here.

Ben and Studio Dog.

It's a quiet Sunday morning around here. Ben and his entourage of video game playing, snack food chomping, tea swilling, chinese food and pizza eating friends have all headed back to their respective colleges, scattered all over the United States. I got him up this morning around six and handed him a cup of coffee and some more money. He likes both.

We got him to the airport early, which he likes. He is a lot like me when traveling; he wants to get through check-in and security with lots and lots of time to spare. Once inside the secure area he can have a leisurely breakfast and catch up on the news and the blogs.

He's flying from Austin to Albany and going from day time temperatures in the low 70's to day time temperatures in the high teens. I bought him more ski mittens. He probably didn't need them but the idea of them keeps me warm. He's heading to Saratoga Springs and Skidmore College to finish out his first year. 

For the first time in a month we're largely socially unscheduled. I guess that means it's time to get back to work on some projects. 

First up, in the next blog, we'll be discussing new gear for the year. Did I just buy some? You bet!

Hope everyone with kids away at college is handling it at least as well as me. And to all those people whose kids are on that track but aren't there yet-----save up money!!! 

Another chance to take my Craftsy.com Studio Photography Course at half price.

There's lots of great stuff on Craftsy. com

Photo Courses from a bunch of good people and a heck of a lot more.

I'm actually planning on take an unrelated course. It's called 

Mexican Street Food: Tacos and Salsas

and it's by: Deborah Schneider.

But the class I'd really like to see my readers and friends take is

my course on Studio Portrait Lighting.

But whatever you end up taking it's fun to head over to the site and see what's available.

Use this link for any class and you'll help me support this site

Kirk's Link to Craftsy.com

Thanks!

edited Sunday morning: we're back on Twitter. Follow at your own risk: www.twitter.com/kirktuck

Putting together personal projects for a number of different reasons.

I don't care if you are one of my keen competitors, a retired CEO who likes to take pictures or a tortured artist whose camera is the nexus of his identity. I think you need to have a personal project through which to better enjoy your personal art of photography. Let me tell you why from a couple different perspectives.

From a personal perspective, as a commercial photographer, one needs some sort of device or construction as an antidote to the cycle of collaborating with (compromising for) your clients in the creation of marketing images that are aimed at wide audiences and which have, as their sole intention, the focus on selling a product, a service or a concept. I have a number of personal projects that I pursue when I am not working or marketing to get more work. One personal project is the creation and constant gardening of this blog. To date I've published about 2200 posts. Some are good and some are mediocre and some (I am truly sorry) are just bad. But as a personal project the blog does two important things for me: 1. It keeps me practicing and fine tuning my writing (along with a writing feedback chain of my readers...). And, 2. It keeps me out shooting photographs all the time. Which is a good thing since I think fluency comes with quantity of effort. 

The ongoing, personal project of making the blog gives me a reason to try new techniques and to try new subject matter. It cures the pervasive laziness of existence by pushing me to go out and make images that either bolster some positive point I am making about gear or to even push out a bit or social or aesthetic commentary. In about 6,800 more blog posts I should just about have enough practice so I'll be able to turn out one perfect post. A post with a breathtaking and life changing photograph coupled with writing the would make Nabokov and Hemmingway both cry with jealously, if they were still around to experience this 10,000th blog...

I have other personal projects that get my attention as well. One is making black and white portraits of friends and then making beautiful prints. Another is my seemingly endless documentation of two seemingly constant changing city downtowns. One in Austin and the other in my home town of San Antonio. These projects all provide a balance and a happy extension of the work that pays the bills. 

Recently I've been pondering a project in the area of motion pictures. I'm toying with making a series of scripted interviews of fictitious characters who can say outrageous things and tell outrageous stories. It's nice way to lower myself slowly into the water of video. (I am normally the sort who jumps in quickly to get the immersion part of the entry over as quickly as possible and to save myself the discomfort of the slow torture of sliding in, inch by inch). In a longer time frame I would actually like to make a movie out of the Novel: The Lisbon Portolio.  Any of these projects provides practice writing scripts and figure out how to solve all of the technical and aesthetic problems of video so I can provide better services to my clients and in return learn even more stuff to apply to my projects.

To an ardent hobbyist the personal project, executed with discipline, is the best way to move both the skills sets and the rigor of good seeing forward. Not only that but a personal project with deadlines and a goal at the end (A show? A book?) keeps providing a sense of direction and even meaning to their practice. Projects that require one to ask for collaborations and shared work build networks of people who can help each other succeed with their good work. You might need someone to help by holding a light in a kinetic and complex shooting situation. That person might need someone to sit for a narrative portrait. Everyone might need a volunteer crew for their video project and everyone learns more by being part of the crew for someone else's video project. 

Having a show of work at a gallery or your favorite coffee shop or restaurant is a great way to get focused on what needs to get done and always informs me of just what the current state of my imaging inventory is. I have a rule that also keeps me shooting personal work: If I show at a gallery or the bakery or even in a social slide show I always want to show work that I've never shown before. It's exciting to see what other people think. If you have time to prepare you usually find that you need to fill in a bit around the edges and it's a great way of narrowing down your field of view and getting you out shooting to fill in the missing blanks. 

Finally, a personal project helps you develop a style because, if you do it right, you've set some formal boundaries for the kinds of images that will all fit comfortably into the same presentation. That's a quick way to encourage a shooting style to emerge.

If you have a subject you are interested in, say beer, you can create something really interesting and beautiful by walking us through the whole process. And you'll learn more about that subject, not just photography. 

All the images above are part of my "Austin Downtown Project." Over time I'll have a twenty year record of what's been added and what's been demolished and begun to fade from out collective memory. If I do a good enough job I'll donate a set of prints to the Austin History Center. If I do a bad job I'll be disappointed-----but I will still have a body of work to share.

The key is to define the project, define the parameters and the end goal and then get to work on it starting now. The pre-planning should not be the project. The image making and sharing is the project. 

I have a friend who is just about to start a video on the Graffiti Wall here in Austin. He's a gifted film maker. I hope he starts on it this weekend, the weather is supposed to be beautiful.....

Swimming pool at 14mm on the Nikon D7100.

Everywhere I went on Weds. the people I talked to were already bored and tired with the low temperatures and the seemingly endless overcast skies. Cold, wet and gray. The novelty of making fires in the fireplaces had quickly worn thin. And the windy 34 degree early morning swim on Tues. had certainly notched down my tolerance for this sort of weather nonsense. 

Yesterday and today have been nearly as perfect as the weather gets in Austin, in January. I hit the noon workouts for maximum real vitamin D absorption. When I crossed the deck this morning with my goggles in hand it was about 55 degrees farenheit. The water was a less cool 80 degrees and the pool was filled to the brim with sun worshippers. 

I decided that I needed a few images of the pool to post on my bulletin board to bolster my swimming enthusiasm in case the weather takes another nose dive. I got to the pool half an hour early and walked around the periphery with the Nikon D7100 I keep in the car along with the 14mm Cine Rokinon lens. Nice combination. Lots of pixels and still decently wide at a 21mm equivalent.

I've given up trying to visually focus ultra wide lenses on optical viewfinder cameras. I'm spoiled by being able to quickly punch in magnification on EVF cameras and being able to see the images, protected from sun contamination, in the EVF. What I've been doing with this particular lens is to stop it down to f8 and then setting the focusing ring to ten or so feet and blazing away. Sure seems to work well and it turns the whole rig into a quick snapshot camera.

This is the pool I spend so much time in. During all but the late Spring and Summer months it is vacant for the greater part of every day. Our masters team uses it from about 6:30 in the morning till 9:30 a.m and then again from noon to 1:00 p.m. The local high school practices there from 3:30 till 5:00 p.m. And then we have a youth swim programs that uses it from 5:30 till 7:00 a.m. The pool is open until 9:00 p.m. to accommodate any evening lap swimmers who choose to swim after dark. 

While we call it "The Rollingwood Pool" it's really part of the Western Hills Athletic Club which is a private club about two miles west of Downtown Austin. The club sits on a handful of acres in the middle of a beautiful neighborhood and (excepting the Summer months) is quiet, secure and peaceful. When the weather is in the 60's and higher I often go there with a laptop and write stuff. Just beyond the pool in the image above is an open air basketball court and beyond that, through tree studded lawn, is a sand volley ball court. There are also two sets of tennis courts. I think that if I ever retire I'll just plan on getting my mail delivered there and arrange somehow to have hot coffee delivered by Starbucks. It's that refreshing of a spot in an otherwise frenetic and jangly city.

We've done much renovation this year to the club. We now have brand new locker rooms, each with four showers fed by a duo of tankless water heaters, and each locker room is complete with central air conditioning and heating. We even invested in a swim suit spinner! Put your suit in after workout and it spins at a million miles an hour dragging all of the water out of the fabric. No more stinky, mildewed suits in the trunk of the car....and no more trying to get into a wet suit that's been freezing overnight.

We get an interesting mix of swimmers in the pool. We have at least a half dozen recent Olympians who are here because it's so nice to be able to swim outside year round. We seem to have a surplus of driven electrical and computing engineers who are swimming to improve their triathlon performances and we have a huge component of people like me who swam in high school and college and just want to stay in shape. We also have a large contingent of attorneys who mostly seem to be diligent distance swimmers.  Our holiday parties are legend and our workouts are tough and fun. 

As a working photographer it's nice to have a place to go where no one really talks about work, everyone likes everyone else and the only competition is in the pool. It's a nice respite from the inanity that sometimes surrounds pods of photographers when they gather together. Amazingly, there is not a single other photographer who swims in our program. I'm happy to have a place to go to sample something beyond the feedback loop of photography and imaging.

I'd be curious to know what the VSL readers in various other cities do for exercise and camaraderie when they need to shut off photography for a while and just have mainstream fun. Especially the folks who live in the great white north. Anybody care to share?

Stationary Mindset. Moving Target.

Let's see... This week I've been taken to task for not still using the 12 megapixel Olympus EP-2 in my regular, commercial workflow, for buying cameras with optical viewfinders, for buying a full frame camera and for writing too much about video. I don't know what to say except that times change, progress slithers onward and people in changing situations can make different choices.

I suspect everyone in my age cohort would have been much happier overall if everyone was still shooting medium format black and white film and making delicious prints, in happy solitude, in the darkroom. But I suspect a lot of that longing is misplaced and the delirious pleasures mis-remembered.

Culture and society, and culture and society's tastes are moving targets and so is technical advancement. I'm more and more interested in video from a commercial sense out of an instinct for commercial survival. Last year video sharing increased on Facebook by nearly 80% over the year before. Of the four bigger websites I shot images for last year three have video components in them while two have huge video across their splash pages. Here's an example: http://www.aurea.com/index.html

And here's the page where they used our portrait images: http://www.aurea.com/about-aurea/leadership  If you mouse over any of the portraits they transform to color (I think it's neato and someone had to program that as well).

And here's a typical use where a client has embedded a video I produced for them into a website that we have also provided extensive still images for: http://www.salientsys.com/products/pos-transaction-tracker/

I guess the point I'm trying to make is that we content creators who used to call ourselves photographers are no longer in a binary world where a wall exists between still imaging and motion products. Our clients more and more want both and the learning curves are about equal on either side of the process divide. I can learn to do and sell video well and then I get to keep both sides of the content product creation. It's easier for a client to deal with one supplier, one lighting style and one creative vision than a mix. Having both halves of a project is a greater overall incentive for the artist than having just one or the other. And it is inarguably better for the bottom line.

I've said it many times, there are no longer any barriers. I can go after web video and video production companies can and are going after the total package, including photography, as well. It's a contest of making the best overall selling proposition to the final client rather than futilely sticking to your guns and remaining (still photographically) pure. 

I'm guessing that the pushback I am getting from some readers is due to the heterogenous nature of my audience. Many here are long term photo enthusiasts who have no interest in video while a good number here are working professional photographers; some who have embraced the idea that motion will become part of their mix and some who are still locked in an emotional battle with themselves over whether or not to accept it and whether or not the transition is really even inevitable.

I can't really answer that for anyone except myself. I have the luxury and the burden of having a number of technology clients. They are good clients but the nature of their businesses drives them to demand a different mix of media and engagement with their clients. And to be technologically au courant.  It seems that 2015 is the year that all of them embrace richly mixed multi-media content in all of their various outreaches and communications with clients, customers and prospective markets. I am learning quickly to understand and satisfy the needs of the clients as they relate to video and I think failing to do so will change the landscape of my business.

For better or worse you are along for the ride here because I can only write about what I know.

And I know that the next ten years of imaging will be driven by a mix of still images and video and that for most clients the bulk of both will come from single points of supply. It's part of our job (and our responsibility to our imaginary stockholders) to make sure that we get a decent slice of that pie.

I re-evaluate the tools I use all the time. If they work I use them, regardless of whether they have EVFs (which I much prefer) or OVFs (which I have good experience using well for over 27 years...). What I'm looking for are the production tools that get the jobs I anticipate doing in the next few month done well, and the ones that make me happy to use them. Sometimes the two curves don't always line up.

Side note. The image above was shot with a Rokinon 14mm Cine lens on a Nikon D7100 making it, effectively, a 21mm lens on the DX sensor. It required a +11 setting for the lens's inherent distortion. I like the intersecting diagonals and the color palette in the image.

I'm always curious to see things with my own eyes instead of taking everything I hear or read as objective truth. There's a lot open to taste and interpretation. Like the noise in a GH4...

A Twilight, Handheld Test Run of The GH4. Shot in 4K, edited in 2k. from Kirk Tuck on Vimeo.

If you want to see this in HD you'll have to click through the link to Vimeo (above). And if you hate gratuitous sound effects you should turn off your speakers....

I bought a GH4 last January and I really like the camera, especially when I am using it as a video camera. I did a hand full of major (for me) video projects last year where we used the GH4 as the primary shooting camera and then used one or two GH3s as b-roll or secondary angle cameras. I mixed lenses between the Panasonic X series and my older, manual focus, high speed Pen FT lenses and in every situation I was very happy with the performance. But I'll be the second one (after my wife) to tell you that I am more of a big picture guy and not so focused on the details.

Most of my use of the cameras was in conjunction with decent lighting. If there's one thing I can do pretty well in video or in regular photography it's to light stuff. So I rarely used the cameras at ISOs higher than 640 (except for some of the restaurant footage for Asti Trattoria which was done at ISO 1600...). All of our paid projects last year were also done in 1080p.

So recently when a good and experienced video shooting friend of mine sat down with me over coffee and exclaimed, "I'm over small sensor video!" I paid attention. I'd lent him the GH4 for several commercial projects and while his clients were always happy with the final footage he frequently alluded to the noise in the mid-tones and shadows. And I'm pretty darn sure that my friend knows his stuff, his resumé includes many projects for large, picky corporations and ad agencies. He was also one of the first people in town to throw down for a Red camera...

But here's the deal; some people really care about shadow and mid tone noise and some don't. It's like a sensitivity to wool sweaters or cheap sunglasses. I'm sure you know two groups of photographers: one group that thinks grain adds a lot to images and another group that sees grain as a major failure. It's the same thing. Given my perspective that a certain intolerance or over-tolerance for noise might be highly subjective I felt duty bound to shoot the camera in a dark set of situations and just see for myself.

I grabbed the GH4 with a Leica 25mm f1.4, a fat memory card and an extra battery and went downtown to shoot some minute's worth and check out the noise for myself. And I set up the camera just the way I thought it should be set up by a typical user. I shot at cinematic 4K which is 24 fps. I set the exposure to manual and set the shutter speed to 1/50th while leaving the aperture wide open (it's not a lens performance test, after all).  I used AWB and I varied the ISO sensitivity from somewhere around 640 all the way up to 3200 over the course of my little experiment. I used the "cine-like D" color profile and just to make it real  I hand held that little sucker (also an experiment to see the effects of coffee on small camera holding technique).

I shot with camera movement and with subject movement. Every scene is a veritable symphony of mixed light. I brought everything back into Final Cut Pro X and did not do any grading or noise reduction or color correction at all. As I cut it together I put in some annoying sound effects so you'll probably want to turn your sound off...

So, what did I find? Hmmm. I can see the noise in the deep blue sky areas and in some of the mid tones but it doesn't bother me at all. The highlights seem clean and clear. I'd use the footage as long as the content was good. If the content isn't there the cleanest file in the universe is pretty much a non-started. My overall thoughts?

If you do good lighting and you get enough level to work at ISO 200-800 you can pretty much use the footage for just about anything. Yes, you might hit the noise reduction a bit and you will want to sharpen but at the lower end of the ISO scale you shouldn't have any issues whatsoever. It may be the downsampling from 4K to 2k that helps but the times I've shot these situations originally in 2K yield pretty much the same results. The camera is quite good and the focus peaking, zebras, potential to use a 200 mbs codec are all nice extras. I won't disagree with my pro video friend, I'll chalk it up to different sensibilities.

I know this is not about still photography but the test was, in fact, part of my overall decision making matrix about gear for the year. The Panasonic wins again---at least in the video category. I'm keeping it!

Photographic Tools and Toys that have my rapt attention in 2015. For better or worse.

I want one more of these at the same price I paid in December. $1249.

Every once in a while I get into the mood to go shopping. It usually happens during the slow periods for the business. Like right after major holidays when the business world is trying to get some traction and rev back up into action. I start looking at what I've been shooting with and I look over the fence to see if the grass is greener in the other yards. Sometimes I think it is and sometimes I wonder why we don't just all xeriscape and get it over with. But shopping doesn't mean looking. It means touching, fondling and usually rejecting the final purchase of new stuff because: a. We don't need it. b. We can't afford it. or c. The merchandise is not as pretty and magical in person as we thought it was when we read the breathy reviews on the web. So, here is a list of stuff that I'm ogling in 2015. It doesn't mean some or all of it will end up in some corporate board room, pressed into the service of commerce and it doesn't even mean it will end up in my bag. But it's stuff that's whetted my appetite for sure.

First off, every store in the USA is selling the Nikon D610 for about $1499. When you consider that the sensor inside this camera is one of the top three or four sensors for the 35mm and smaller format cameras at DXO and that the body is pretty utilitarian and straight forward it really is a good deal. Well, it's a good deal if you have a drawer full of Nikon lenses and a few older DX (APS-C) cameras and you want to be shooting with full frame cameras. If you don't mind the size and weight of the body and lenses it's a pretty convincing argument. I bought one on December 27th and, as I believe that cameras are always happiest (and jobs safest) when they travel in pairs I would like to add a second one before the rebates expire at the end of January.

But to be honest, if I weren't cheap, hadn't just bought a really nice couch and paid for another semester of college at a nice school, and put money into my "pay the IRS" account the camera that I am really interested in is the Nikon D810. What can I say? Even though I know that in most of my hand-held shooting there will be no discernible imaging advantage between the 36 megapixels of the D810 and the 24 megapixels of the D610 my irrational mind is trying to convince me that I will spend more time with my cameras on the big, stout Gitzo tripod this year, carefully fine focusing miraculous lenses in live view and using some sort of esoteric remote to trigger it all with. I know this is a fantasy and that I'll continue to hand hold, use cheap lenses and generally have more fun then technical virtuosity will allow. But, it is an aspirational camera for someone who has grown up with every generation of digital, professional camera. I keep dropping by the dealership and test driving. We'll see, we'll see.

But every time I buy a new camera body from one of the big makers there's always the lens penalty. I may have a treasure trove of interesting lenses for a system but when I make bigger moves there's always one that's missing. One that really works well for my type of photography business. While I have enough wide, semi-wide and somewhat wide lenses for Nikon bodies the one lens I don't have anymore is the fast telephoto zoom. I've owned several variations of Nikon 80-200mm zooms and I've shot a lot with the 70-200mm f2.8 zoom but every time I play with those lenses I have three complaints. The first is that they are never as sharp as I'd like wide open, at the long end. Getting f 2.8 and 200mm and sharp at the same time always seems like too much to ask. Then, the lenses are heavy. Really heavy to carry around all day in concert with a big camera body. I'm in good shape but I'm not into photo-masochism. Finally, the long, fast glass is too expensive. When did every good, fast zoom spring up into the $2500 price point? Who do these manufacturers think they are? Leica?

No, the lens I'd pair with the newer generation of full frame Nikons would be the 70-200mm f4.0 G lens. Sharp wide open, half the weight and almost half the price. Given the sharper performance (f4 v f2.8) and the amazingly good high ISO performance of the newest, biggest cameras I think the f4.0 is the perfect compromise. I made the same choices when shooting full frame with Canon cameras and I  always felt it was the right combination of features, performance and price for me.

It's interesting when one system gets under your skin again (I have good nostalgia for Nikon's flash system and general performance from the old days...) but it's more complicated when several types of cameras capture your attention. For me, and for a lot of other long time shooters, Pentax creating a tipping point medium format camera in the 645Z. All of a sudden the sensor performance leapfrogged everything in the MF arena (soon fixed by Phase One but not at a similar price point) and did so at what passes for a bargain price in the medium format realm. Now, for around $12,000 we can have a monster good sensor in a very well designed and constructed body, with lots of modern bells and whistles. along with two good lenses. Pretty amazing. 

Lots will argue that the D810 is so close as to be interchangeable in performance but they miss the point. The overriding reason to own a camera with a bigger sensor is to get the benefit of the way longer lenses draw at the same angle of view as their smaller brethren. The 150mm f2.8 on a bigger sensor achieves a focus fall off that gives portraits a different signature. Is that different signature worth $5,000 more? For some, yes. For others, definitely not. But for an eternal optimist? I'm thinking probably so. Will I buy one? Well..... that's hitting a price point at which my business partner definitely gets a strong say and a veto vote. I'd have to convince here (with a signed contract in hand) that a client job would effectively cover the cost. Do I want one? What red-blooded photographer doesn't?  But I'll be frank, I don't have any clients clamoring for more than current 35mm sensor sized cameras can deliver. Just no demand in my niche.....yet.

It always makes me nervous to even think about dropping close to $10K on a camera and then more on lenses so let's look in the other direction at some of the more sensible cameras that have caught my attention and require more pondering and testing this year. First off, the mirror less stuff. If I dropped down onto the planet with no cameras to my name and I wanted to buy just one and a small handful of lenses, and I wanted that camera to make very good images while not physically impacting my travels much I'd immediately look at the Fuji XT-1. Great finder, great body and great controls, and even the sensor is fun and makes nice files. With a fast 35mm equivalent and a faster 85mm equivalent I'd be happy and ready to go. The one caveat would be the need for a pocket full of batteries but I really don't fear the generics so I think I'd be set. I used to think the price was pretty good until I realized what I could get in full frame sensors from Nikon but as a system the benefits of handling and light weight still make it a contender for the guy who dropped in from outer space with no system at all and intergalactic credit cards burning a hole in his pocket...

But if I were sniffing around the Fuji I'd probably be sniffing around the OMD EM-1 as well and it would be a hard choice to decide between the sexier looking XT-1 body and the feature set of the EM-1. Each has available lenses that are great so it really all comes down to things like 5 axis I.S. and handling. Hmm. I'm still resisting and they are both still a toss up in my mind...

I thought I'd be more interested in smaller, one inch sensor cameras by now but nothing seems to be getting my attention at the moment. I think the Sony RX10 pretty much is the final word in that arena and it's so bulletproof in its operation and image quality that it's almost boring. The perfect choice for someone who wants an all-in-one tool for great video and really good stills is one package for under $1000.  Again, get yourself a stack of batteries if you are the kind of shooter who goes out for all day romps through the urban landscape, shooting with reckless abandon...

There's one last thing that has me mulling over the checkbook balance. It's not a camera. It's not a lens. It's a more pedestrian piece of gear that will be as functional in two years as it would be right now and my interest is more piqued by my recent use than anything else. I want another Fiilex P360 variable color temperature LED light. While they don't put out a huge amount of lumens the ones they do deliver are pretty much flawless and the lights work just as I want them to. Wow. A product on my mental shopping list that's actually useful and functional as well as affordable. Zany. 

Of course, the cheapest and most entertaining photo accessory would be a great book. If you're spending a lot of time indoors because of the harsh weather I have a suggestion that will keep you amused and reading, for a few days at least: