An Interesting and Compulsive Approach to a Photo Assignment.

NASA Exhibit at the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum.

Nikon D610+Sigma 50mm 1.4 Art Lens.

I think that when most people conjure up an image of a working professional photographer they imagine a guy in a khaki vest of many pockets, several large cameras hanging around his neck with a long zoom lens on one and short zoom lens with an intricate hood on the other. Over his shoulder they anticipate seeing a large, black camera bag the size of an ice chest, filled with flashes and a Whitman Sampler of different lenses and ancillary gadgets.  He would be trailed by at least one assistant who would also be toting a case or a bag; perhaps filled with lights.

They would not be far from the mark in most cases.

After spending the entire week hauling a Think Tank roller case filled with cameras and lenses around to various locations in central Texas, as well as cases of heavy lights and their attendant light stands, umbrellas, panels etc. I came into Sunday wanting nothing more than to return to my "amateur" roots of one camera and one body. 

To round out my already full dance card for the week I had a job booked at the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum from noon till 6:00 pm. I would be looking for interesting people and making their photographs, both candidly and with their knowledge, for use on the Museum's award winning website. The museum forbids the use of flash (policy now changed to allow flash as of this week) and definitely forbids the use of tripods when the facility is open to guests.

While the exhibits are well lit the surrounding areas (where my potential subjects stand) are, by contrast, very dark and hard to make photographs in. I knew from previous experiences that there would be many times that I'd want a fast lens and a low noise camera body and I decided to plunge in with only one of each; the Nikon D610 and the new Sigma 50mm f1.4 "Art" lens. I brought along a small shoulder bag but it was not filled with the usual photo paraphernalia. It held five pens and a clipboard with lots and lots of model release forms for the museum. The need to get model releases from adults and parents of kids was also a good reason to go light on gear. How much can you really juggle?

Having just one focal length to grapple with I quickly fell into the groove of composing in that frame. What might be perceived as a limitation was actually freeing because it eliminated one variable in the collage of choice we make each time we pick up the camera bag.

The combination of the D610 and the Sigma 50mm was pretty cool in that I felt confident I would get sharp images at all apertures and especially sharp images at f2.8 and smaller apertures. I could also  shoot without worry at ISO 3200 and still manage noise in a very satisfactory way in Lightroom CC.

There are some combinations of tools that really make you want to shoot with them and them only. The 50mm Sigma and the D610 are like that. While the D810 camera has more detailed files I think that by the time you factor in the lower noise of the D610 and the more manageable raw file sizes the 24 megapixel sensor makes much for sense for tricky available light shoots in darker interiors.

I have a long history of preferring the 50mm (or format equivalent) angle of view. I can move in and make a nice, tight portrait or I can step back and put a person or several people into context. The focal length is very much a chameleon.

When I got back to the studio I noticed two other things: First, the lens and camera combo is heavy and my left arm was a bit sore after hand holding the rig for the better part of a day. Second, the files, even at f2.0 and f2.5 were very sharp and detailed and the lens has a very good look to it. The sharpness is more consistent over more of the frame than I'm used to with many other 50mm lenses.

I was able to get about 400+ good images to add to the Museum's marketing content reservoir. I mostly shot at ISO 1600 but did go up to 3200 for about a third of the shots and 6400 for another ten percent. All were very usable with the ISO 6400 images requiring a bit more noise reduction in post.

One of the things I like about the new generation of Sony sensors in the Nikon full frame cameras is that ability to pull up detail in the shadows. At lower ISOs like 400 and 800 you can pull up nearly a stop and a half of shadow detail without really effecting the overall quality of the image. It's a nice buffer when shooting in contrasty light.

A note: I will be in Saratoga Springs, NY on Weds., Thurs. and Fri. of this week and don't plan to take a laptop. I won't attempt to write a column on my iPhone but hope to be back in the writing mix on Saturday. I'll try to make tomorrow's blog good enough to last you for a few days. In the meantime, if all the other photo blogs on the web bore you to tears you can always buy a copy of "The Lisbon Portfolio" at Amazon.com and get a nice dose of my long-winded writing.... And you'll be supporting my blog. You might also enjoy the story of a working photographer caught in a web of corporate and national security intrigue...

An Image I made today of Russell Harvard for Zach Theatre. Almost the end to a long week of shooting....

Russell Harvard will be starring in the Zach Theatre production of "Tribes." 

We've had an exciting and busy week here at the VSL H.Q. We spent three days working on an annual report shoot for a central Texas utility company which necessitated early mornings and the fun filled stress of managing a CEO, a group of marketing and advertising people, four large trucks, eight linemen and assorted additional crew, all on exterior locations. This all followed days of pre-planning meetings, conversations with drone experts assistant booking and lots of packing and re-packing. But we aren't done yet. 

One of the things that jumped out at me from my calendar (and the white board next to my desk) was that we had also booked a marketing shoot for Zach Theatre's season brochure for today. We needed a  bunch of shots to promote our version of Mary Poppins and also a play called, Tribes. After I put all the batteries back on chargers yesterday evening I started packing for today. I would be using completely different lighting gear than I had been using for the A.R.

I packed my standard white background kit because we would be doing a series of set-ups that the art director at Zach Theatre would use in the campaign. She will be dropping images into different colored backgrounds and, in some cases, into composite scenes. What we'd be looking for is nice, clean lines to cut against. We are no longer in the search for perfect white backgrounds right out of camera. And that was good in this situation because our shoot was relegated to a small space that didn't give me the front to back depth to do our traditional white background set up. 

In this case all the lights are in front of our actors and I'm counting on the inverse square law and smart placement of lights to carry the day. I packed our four Elinchrom mono-lights with umbrella reflectors, five light stands, our background set up with a white seamless paper background. All four lights had 42 inch umbrellas mounted on them and I used various ratios between the lights to get the look to the overall light that I wanted. 

I triggered the lights with Cactus V6 transceiver triggers. 

My camera and lens of choice for today was the Nikon D810 with one lens; the 24-85mm f3.5-4.5 G Nikon zoom. It's a step up from a kit lens and I often see them for ridiculously low prices in my favorite camera store. It must have been part of a Nikon bundle at one point. All I know is that while the lens has some linear distortion it's very sharp and very well behaved. It's perfect for work like this where we need to be able to go from full body to close head shots from one frame to the next. 

I packed everything but the cameras into the car last night. Our call at the theater was set for 11:00 a.m. and as today is Saturday (my most holy day of swimming) I was determined to be ready to go on time but without missing the wonderful (and difficult) Kristen Turner masters workout and the post swim coffee klatch at Starbucks. I figure if you are a freelancer you need to get your socializing where you can, right? 

We logged some serious wet miles and we drank coffee. I stayed right up until 10:50 am and then said my goodbyes and headed to the theater to set up. I used the Marshall Electronics monitor we made such good use of earlier in the week because I wanted to be able to share the images we were taking with a room full of make-up artists, costumers, an artistic director, art director and marketing director. God, I was outnumbered.....

The Mary Poppins portion of the shoot went well and we moved on to making images of Russell Harvard for the play, Tribes. Here's copy from the Zach website that explains the play:

As the only deaf member of his sharp-tongued British family, sweet-natured Billy has spent  much of his life feeling out of place. But when he meets a young woman on the brink of  deafness, he finds out what it means to belong for the first time. This provocative and  touching play is as much about the tyranny of language, as it is about the challenge of  not being able to hear it. ZACH's production will be staged on our Kleberg Stage  starring deaf, Austin actor Russell Harvard, who won a 2012 Theatre World  Award for Outstanding Debut Performance, and garnered Drama League,  Outer Critics Circle, and Lucille Lortell Award nominations for Outstanding Lead Actor.

Same image cropped in to nearly 100%.

Russell was great to work with and we ended up with a couple hundred really good shots with which to promote the play. I was struck with how well the 24/85mm lens worked with the D810. It's a powerful combination and I feel like many people who immediately default to the clichéd 24-70mm f2.8 are missing a really good image maker at a very advantageous price. 

The images from Mary Poppins and Tribes are already color corrected and transferred to a small hard drive for delivery on Monday and you'd think that might be a good place to break for the weekend but my iCalendar had other plans. I am also booked to shoot all day tomorrow for the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum.  

This job will be more of a "reportage" style escapade. I'll be "wearing" two cameras; one with the new Sigma 50mm 1.4 Art lens and the other with the Nikon 24-85mm f3.5-4.5. I'll also have a small flash with a modifier and a messenger bag full of model releases. The batteries are recharged and the small camera bags are packed. All that stands between me and the project tomorrow will be our Sunday masters swim workout. That and a full day of shooting and I should have the weekend all wrapped up and I'll be ready to dive into new work on Monday morning.  Yippee. Never a dull moment around here. 

Counting down the moments till my trip to Saratoga Springs, NY gets underway. I leave Austin at 5:30am on Weds. and should be in S.S. by 1:30 or 2:00 pm. It'll be great to see friends and hang with Ben. I'm looking forward to it. After a long week of lugging around Nikons I think this trip definitely calls for the more discreet and almost silent Olympus EM5.2. 

Thanks for reading. I'll catch up with you tomorrow.

Go to Amazon and check out the two new reviews of the Novel, The Lisbon Portfolio. The economy is recovering. Now you can afford to buy a copy!

One more program note: We've spent the last year making hundreds of images for the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum and many of them are used on the new website. That website, the design of which was overseen by David Munns, won the Gold Award for Online Presence at the American Alliance for Museums convention in Atlanta this last week. The site beat out competitors like the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum and many others.

Nice to see good work acknowledged.

Another lens review: The Nikon manual focus 25-50mm f4 ais. A classic from the film age that works well on modern cameras.

big electric insulators. Nikon 25-50mm f4.0 lens.

We often operate under the mistaken idea that anything invented or manufacturer more than a year or two ago is crap and that every newer iteration is much better than anything which came before. Where the only metric is efficiency or the only real value is the cost savings to manufacturers I tend to agree. When it comes to finely crafted tools, great lenses and well made grip equipment I'd strongly disagree.

In the past few months since I re-embraced Nikon cameras (and particularly the Nikon D810) as the primary shooting cameras for my commercial image making business I've auditioned a number of different lenses for the system. I've found that many assumptions about lenses are erroneous and little more than conjecture and the general re-spewing of advertising bullet points from the makers.

I don't use wide angle lenses very often. When I do use them it's usually on a tripod and with complete control of focus, exposure and depth of field. I use them when clients want to show expansive works of architecture or when they are looking for dramatic near/far exaggerations. What I want are lenses with simple rather than complex distortion patterns. I'd like the lenses to be sharp across the frame and I'd like them to perform very well at f8. I don't use wide angle lenses in combination with shallow depth of field very often, if at all.

Finally, since I don't rely on wide and ultra wide angle lenses for my day to day work, as an architectural photograph would, I don't want to invest a small fortune in them.  I'll distribute the bulk of my gear investments where I know they'll do the most good for me and that's in normal, slightly wide and slightly long focal length lenses that I can use to make good portraits. The idea of buying a Nikon 14-24mm lens for nearly $2,000 seems wasteful to me and the two samples I tried have lots of trouble flaring with side light and any light source in the frame. But I can make good use of an 18-35 or a 20-35 or even a 25-50 for the vast majority of all my work; including architecture and annual reports. After testing and returning a Nikon 18-35mm f3.5-4.5 G lens (way too much weird distortion and an inconsistent sharpness across the frame) I've settled into using my old 25-50mm f4 for most of the things I shoot that need to be both full frame and relatively wide angle-y.

When I need to go wider I put the 14mm Rokinon f2.8 Cine lens on the D810 and use a very nicely done custom profile in Lightroom to correct frame geometry. The lens is very, very sharp wide open in the middle and the sides and corners come into high sharpness by f5.6. By f8.0 it's perfect. If I need a longer focal length but one that fall under the 25-50mm or the 24-85mm G f3.5-4.5 I'll just shoot carefully with the 14mm Rokinon and depend on cropping to get me exactly what I want in the frame. With the huge amount of resolution provided by the D810 it just makes sense.

But for my All Around best buddy wide angle shooting lens I'm beginning to think that nothing beats the old, manual focus 25-50mm f4 ais.

Why?

Many of the newer lenses I've tested make a bad trade-off. The makers juggle distortion, sharpness and cost in interesting ways. While I understand the mania for ultra-fast lenses in medium telephotos and especially in long telephotos I am mystified about the usefulness of f2.8 lenses for ultra wide zooms. According to Leica engineers making a lens one stop faster requires about 8 times better manufacturing tolerances to make the lens equally as good (meaning sharp and consistent). In almost every focal length being able to go one or two stops slower in the design of a lens increases the manufacturing consistency when grinding lens elements. Since most people are using their ultra wides to shoot architecture and landscape the f2.8 becomes irrelevant and most knowledgeable shooters would gladly go to a lens that only opened to f4 or (God forbid!!!) f5.6 is they could be assured that the slower lenses would have much better resolution AND micro contrast.

To my mind the previous generations of optical engineers made the compromises I like for the 25/50. It's an f4.0 lens so no false heroics in design were attempted for the sake of marketing. It's a very short but very useful range of focal lengths that takes one from wide angle to normal and maintains a consistent aperture setting across the range. The lens design reflects an old school aesthetic wherein the first two stops are "good enough" but two stops down and three stops down are the sweet spot for the lens where the sides match the center for sharpness and they do so without introducing a mustache distortion signature that seems to be the hallmark of more modern zooms.

The 25/50 does have distortion at its widest focal length of 25mm. The distortion continues to about 30mm but the important thing to me is that the distortion is a simple "barrel" pattern in which the side bow outward on a consistent and simple curve rather than having several waving curves across the long axis of the frame. This kind of simple barrel distortion requires only the sliding of the distortion slider in the lens correction panel in Lightroom. The opposite design approach is that which is found in the Rokinon 14mm lens which requires a more complex, custom profile to correct the wave-y distortion and the plunging distortion at the corners.

I like the rendering of the 25/50mm lens. The colors seem rich and not brittle. The sweep across the frame (when photographing blue skies for instance) is consistent in color and value when the lens is stopped down to f5.6 or f8.0. The lens has very good resolution but a lower amount of apparent contrast. The lens is by no means "flat" but when compared to more modern optics it's a bit lackluster. Of course the remedy is simple and is, again, just the matter of moving the contrast slider or clarity slider in Lightroom to taste. It's much easier to add contrast to a file (if it's already rich in resolution) than it is to remove the effects of too much contrast in an image.

I used the 25-50mm lens a great deal last week while we were shooting photos for an annual report. Almost all of the uses were outside in available sunlight (where the lower contrast had the effect of enhancing apparent dynamic range) and in available light augmented by flash from umbrellas and soft boxes. I am certain that people who have had less stellar results than me with this lens stumbled in achieving good focus. A wide angle, manual focus lens with a slow maximum aperture is very difficult to accurately focus on the focusing screens of modern DSLRs. Their screens are optimized for brightness but at the expense of accutance which kills focusing accuracy. I find it impossible to accurately eyeball at the wide end. But when I use the lens on the D810 (in controlled situations) I am using a loupe and putting the camera into live view mode to focus a magnified image and then, once focused I revert to shooting with the viewfinder.

If I'm shooting in bright sunlight I generally use the lens at either f11 or f8.0 and then zone focus using the very legible and detailed focusing scale on the lens. This method has also been foolproof so far. While this lens was made over 20 years ago there are six or seven different images that are ready contenders for wrap around cover shots on the annual report. And they bow to none of the other images we took during the week regardless of the price or pedigree of the lenses used.

Not a bad investment for a couple of hundred dollars. 

I had the opportunity to use the Sigma 50mm f1.4 Art Lens in the Nikon Mount this morning and this afternoon and I am buying it. It's really good.

Sigma 50mm f1.4 ART

One of my friends is an avowed Canon shooter. Dyed in the wool. Full contingent of Canon T/S lenses at the ready. Fifty-four megapixel cameras pre-ordered, etc. He also frequently uses a Leica medium format digital camera in his day to day work as one of the country's best architectural photographers. For some strange reason he became enamored with the supposed mythology surrounding Sigma's very well reviewed 50mm f1.4 Art lens and when he saw one used, in a Nikon mount but at a very incredibly good price, he bought it immediately. Then, realizing that all of his camera bodies were of the Canon variety, he also bought a Nikon D610 to go with it

Since then he's come to realize that going too far across cameras systems is probably counter-productive and costly and that the learning of new menus takes time and can ultimately cause confusion under the pressure of shoots for money. (Yes, I know there is at least one of you out there that can compartmentalize information with ease and float across all menus without stumbling or hesitation but the rest of we mortals think you might be full of B.S.).  He decided to get rid of the Nikon and pick up the Canon version instead. But he's as mercurial as I am when it comes to gear and it won't surprise me at all when he chooses the Zeiss 50mm f1.4 Otus lens instead. But that's another story altogether.

He handed me the lens earlier in the week and I put it in my Think Tank rolling case and intended to use it liberally.  I used it on one of the exterior, environmental portraits we did yesterday but really, what can you tell about a prime at f5.6 that isn't just about the same story with every decent prime? They're all really good at f5.6, or they should be...

Yesterday's portrait images were well behaved, convincingly sharp with no intervention from Lightroom and the color was neutral and impressively complex. But again, it was all shot at f5.6 so I expected most of what I was observing in post production.

Today was another matter. We are on day three of an annual report project and I got to shoot the lens nearly wide open and in a few situations I tried it wide open just to see. I was shooting the Sigma 50mm on two different bodies just to see how different they might look. I used a D610 and a D810; both at their lowest rated ISOs. I used double the shutter speed I would normally use with this focal length and faster. Once I got back to the studio I opened the files up and went right to full on pixel peeping. 100%. Blow Up.

The files were not exciting in the sense that they were unreal in color or that the resolution or sense of sharpness called attention to themselves. It was more like looking at an actual scene instead of looking at the representation on the monitor. The lens is really, really good. I've just started playing with it but I am already very impressed with its quality and look. I need to spend at least a month to get used to it and I intend to do just that. Once I've amassed a collection of representative images I'll circle back and share more complete thoughts about it.

There are two downsides to this lens. 1. It's very big and heavy. And, 2. It's expensive for a 50mm lens. But I guess that's really relative when the Otus lens from Zeiss is over 4 times the price and the Leica M 50mm Summilux 1.4 Aspheric is three and  one half times the price. Based on the performance I saw today, and the advantageous price I got for buying used I think I'll count this one to be an absolute bargain.

Thanks for reading.

On an exciting adventure with Super Assistant, Amy S. Tales of Nikons and flashes and electricity.

It was still dark when Amy pulled up in front of my house, grabbed her grip gear and headed over to the studio car. She had a look in her eye that said, clearly, "You want me up at this ungodly hour you damn sure better be stopping by Starbucks!" I had loaded the car up with all the things I thought I would need last night and just had to put the case of cameras and lenses in (we don't leave cameras in the car overnight...).

After swinging by the coffee shop we headed up Mopac Expressway and on to our destination in a small town on the other side of Lake Travis. We were off to shoot day two of an annual report project for a utility client.

Our first shot was the CEO standing in a field in front of a row of several of the company's trucks. We positioned the trucks in the early dawn using a compass to make sure we'd get light on the sides of the trucks in the time window in which we were shooting. We started ultra wide, using a Rokinon 14mm f3.2 Cine lens on a D810. Amy put up a two stop diffusion scrim to the right of where we would be our main subject, the CEO,  to block direct, angled sunlight from hitting him and then we lit  a sweet spot of our exec to stand in with a large softbox (30 x 40 inches) from the right side of the camera. The box light was powered with an Elinchrom flash head and an Elinchrom Ranger RX AS system (1100 watt seconds at full, we used it at 3/4th power).

All through this shoot we had the new Marshall Electronics monitor plugged in to the camera; not so much for my use because I had the monitor on the back of the camera to reference, but so the art director, the marketing director and the CEO could look at the images and buy into the project as we were producing it. I was taking advantage of some of the D810's special features to make the shots I wanted. The first cool thing was to use the ISO 64 option. ISO 64 is not some pushed or pulled "extra" setting on the ISO dial, rather it's the native ISO for the camera. It's at this setting that the dynamic range is widest and the light transfer is at its highest efficiency. It also allowed me to use a shutter speed of 1/250th of a second with f8.0 so I could sync flash and control the ambient light in the background in an optimum manner.

The second two features would of course be the wide dynamic range of the camera and its high resolution and sharpness.

I had the monitor attached to one leg of the tripod via a Manfrotto Magic Arm. In this way I could angle the monitor away from the sun and over to the side away from the camera so I could continue working while the clients reviewed the images on the monitor and we wouldn't step on each other in the process.

I had forgotten how wonderful it can be to work with a diligent, professional and highly trained assistant. Amy was totally focused on making the shoot work smoothly for me (first) and then the client. Light stands got sandbagged as a matter of course, apple boxes magically appeared when I was ready for a higher elevation on the tripod. Bottled water appeared in my hands at just the right moment and disappeared when I was ready to re-embrace the camera. One thing I particularly loved was having Amy provide a "courtesy" flag for me when I was working in direct sun. We'd set up the camera and if I was standing in full sun Amy would appear with a black flag and hold it over me to minimize reflections on the camera screen and to keep me from getting sunburnt.

When I stopped to talk with the client Amy would immediately head to the equipment cases to bring order to gear chaos, to wrap cables, find errant lens caps and stuff soft boxes, hastily tossed to one side, back into their correct cases.

Another advantage of a good assistant is their patience in "standing in" for the final subject so the photographer can make sure the diffusion scrim will cover the subject with good shade and to make sure the composition really works once other humans are inserted.

I worked with an interesting assortment of lenses today. We started and ended with the 14mm Rokinon Cine lens and I will readily admit it's getting a lot more use since I uploaded a custom lens profile for it into Lightroom CC. I shot raw all day long and I immediately selected the profile when I got back into the studio and batched it to all the 14mm shots in the folder. It was fun to watch the previews pop into corrected-ness as the program churned through the giant files.

The lens that ended up in second place (as far as number of frames goes) was the older Nikon 25-50mm f4.0 ais Nikon lens. It requires a bit more contrast and bit of a sharpness boost in post production compared to some of the other lenses but once treated correctly it blossoms and is beautiful and highly detailed, but in a nice, calm way. I used it for abstract/technical shots in an electrical substation and I also used the longer end for some environmental portraits; both inside a substation control center and out in the field.

I used the Sigma 50mm f1.4 Art lens for one series of the CEO standing with a series of transformers behind him. It's my first encounter with this lens and I was duly impressed with the high resolution and drawing of that lens. I need to experiment more with it but it's a very fine optic, especially used the way we did, at f5.6 and focused manually to about 10 feet.

I got good use out of the old 80-200mm lens when we we're photographing electricians working in bucket trucks and being lifted up into the nose bleed heights and also for tight headshots of the CEO and other key employees. A nod also to the 24-85mm Nikon G lens for helping me get a bunch of quick moving, hand held images of truck crews.

Once we switched locations and concentrated on getting a good selection of environmental portraits of the CEO we also switched from using the heavy and powerful Elinchrom Ranger flash system to using a low cost, low weight combination of two Yongnuo electronic flashes triggered by Cactus V6 transceivers and ultimately triggered by a Cactus flash with built-in transceiver in the hot shoe of the camera. The flashes were firing into a 48 inch Softlighter umbrella that was postponed about six feet from out subject. With both flashes set to half power and a double net cutting sunlight on the CEO the lighting output was just right and the recycle time was good.

Interesting tip: We usually use a light, silk diffusion cloth on a Chimera ENG panel to block sunlight from hitting our exterior portrait subjects directly but we had a consistent wind today that threatened to either flip the panels around in their clamps or act as sails and knock the stands down altogether. In situations like this you can use black "double nets" to knock down the effect of sunlight coming from one side or above. The net allows air through the mesh and so is less prone to becoming sail-like and creating mischief. The net, when compared to the silk, also gives you a different and more intriguing look in portraits. A certain harder quality to the skin tones that can work well.

The flash and camera batteries worked all day long without slowing down but when we hit frame 700 at about 3 pm the batteries in the field monitor finally gave it up. I was about to have Amy replace them. We had plenty of spares as it uses the same batteries as the big Nikons. But I held off because I could tell that the darkening and surrender of the monitor gave the client the suggestion that we'd done what we'd set out to for the day.

All the batteries are back on the chargers. I've downloaded and color corrected today's files in groups. I am currently in the process of uploading them into a private gallery on the service I've used for online proofing since 2005. It's Smugmug.com and so far it's rare for them to ever miss a beat. I have over 150,000 files uploaded into the site for my clients and even folks who worked with us ten years ago can go back and reference their galleries at any time.

I am halfway through the uploading of photographs to my online gallery and thinking about the rest of the project. We have two or three more days of shooting and I need to supervise a drone shoot before all is said and done. I am happy to say that we're providing the client with a fast moving team, quick and effective lighting designs and good, general problem solving and we're collaborating on the look and feel of the images for the annual report. In the end my goal is to work hard at making all of this easy. I want the client to end up with a cohesive selection of images. I want their biggest problem to be that they are unable to choose because they have so many good options.

I've been working since 6 am and it's now almost 9:45pm. When the last of the files is uploaded I'll take my sore, tired body and crawl into the house, grab some water, brush my teeth and get ready to do it all over again tomorrow.

Amy's contribution of services probably saved us two full hours of time today and made the project much easier and more pleasant for me. By extension the client is getting better quality work because I can concentrate solely on my part of the job. Holding the silver sun umbrella over my head in the hot afternoon sun was a definite plus...

After tomorrow we take a break. Utility companies don't push their employees ( or suppliers) to work all weekend. We'll take up again on Monday. But that doesn't mean that freelance photographers can kick back and just enjoy the weekend. We have a shoot for Zach Theatre on Saturday; we're making new images for their season brochure. And as you probably know I always think working with actors and their creative teams is fun. On Sunday I'm spending the day shooting advertising images for the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum. Also a fun client and this year their newly redesigned website took gold at the annual convention of museums in the U.S. I was thrilled that my photography was so well represented.

The countdown is one week and a day until the boy is back in Austin and Studio Dog is once again euphoric.

Hope you are also having a fun and productive week!

Upcoming field trip to the great north. Traveling for fun.

Studio Dog puts her foot down and demands we organize a party to "fetch" our 

young college student back home. She is tired of having her own room and having 

to scratch her own belly. "Bring me the boy!" she growled. 

So next Wednesday I'm heading up to Saratoga Springs, NY, by way of Albany to help Ben pack up his winter gear, have dinner and coffees with my friend, Fred, and generally take a three day break from the constant stress and responsibility of being a Texas artist. I am sure Ben can hardly wait to leave his enchanted enclave at Skidmore College, trade the bracing freshness of 60 degree days for the 95+ with bountiful humidity of his home town, and rush to the chaffing, unfathomable boundaries of once again living at home with his parents after almost a year of freedom. 

I have only been to Saratoga Springs once before and that was last Fall. The leaves were turning colors and there was already a briskness to the air. It seemed like a foreign country to me. But I quickly came to love the small town, it's great restaurant scene, the community feeling of the Uncommon Grounds coffee house and the ten minute walk through a majestic neighborhood that connects the college with the town proper. 

There is one perplexing decision to make for this trip....Which camera and which (one) lens should I bring? The front runner at the moment is the Olympus EM5.2 with the Panasonic 12-35mm lens but I do have a line on a Sigma 50mm f1.4 Art lens and I may just be a big enough sucker for new gear to snag that and slap it on the front of my Nikon D610. I'll decide the night before. 

While I am excited about the trip and also the prospect of having boy around for the Summer I once thought of buying a place up in Saratoga Spring to use as a Summer home. Then I woke up from my Disney-like dream sequence and remembered that I am still a freelance photographer and am lucky to own one home. But I will make the most of my three days unencumbered by the hard work of making photographs so I can have fun making photographs. It's all very confusing but I think I know what I mean. 

That's Weds. through Friday of next week. If you read the blog and you happen to see me at Uncommon Grounds don't hesitate to drop by and say hello. If you seem nice I might even buy you a cup of coffee.

Kirk buys a seven inch Marshall Electronics video monitor and uses it all day on a still photography shoot. What the hell?

There I was with my big Nikon D810 on top of the Manfrotto cinema ballhead ready to shoot some incredibly cool video content of super-superstar vocalist, Jennifer Holliday, for my friends at Zach Theatre. The four big florescent light fixtures were slamming around electro-luminescent craziness and I had a Sennheiser lavaliere microphone clamped to Ms. Holliday's collar ready to record every ounce of perfect conversation that got uttered.

I had carefully focused my 85mm lens, marked a spot on the floor for Ms. Holliday and then stopped down to f5.6 to give me enough depth of field (or so I thought) to cover small amounts of talent movement. It all started out in the just right category. The voice through my headphones was wonderful and the image playing across the 3.2 inch screen on my camera looked just like the footage I saw earlier this year on the Academy Awards.

And then Ms. Holliday became a bit more animated and my day started falling apart. She took a step forward and I knew she would be out of the sharp range of focus. I went to manually focus only to be thwarted by a combination of eyes that have long since lost their perfect performance coupled with a camera screen that's great for composition but sucks for trying to achieve sharp focus. At some point I switched out of video mode and refocused. Thanks goodness for the off camera interviewer's interjection... But for a few minutes I was praying for focus peaking.

While Nikon may, at some distant time in the future, add focus peaking to the D810 I'm sure not counting on it. But then I remembered that a lot of video field monitors have focus peaking as a feature. I started looking around. I wanted to be prepared for the next session. I wanted to re-master sharp focus.

I made pilgrimage to Precision Camera and looked at their monitor selection. The one that made sense was the Marshall Electronics M-CT710. The screen looked pretty good, the controls are pretty straightforward and it has focus peaking. It also came with two batteries, a charger, an A/C adapter, a sunshade and two different HDMI cables. The batteries are copies of the Nikon EN-EL 15 batteries I use in my two Nikon cameras and one of the HDMI cables, the HDMI standard to HDMI mini fit my two cameras. At that point I made a note of the price, $345, and decided I'd wait and buy the unit the very next time I got booked to shoot video for a client. The very next time....

Miraculously, I exited Precision Camera without making a single purchase. Not even a lens cleaning cloth or a battery!!!

I got into my car and, in accordance with Austin's new hands free cellphone ordinance, decided to check my e-mails and texts on my phone before firing up the automobile. There was a message from the client that I will be working with all week long. We're working on an annual report project and she wanted to know if I had a monitor or laptop we could bring along to really look at the shots as we went along.

Now I hate shooting tethered to a laptop outside of the studio. Just hate it. It's ponderous and plodding and the big screens are hard to shield from bright, ambient light, and if your battery runs out in the middle of a field there's really nothing you can do----Apple Macbook Pros now "feature" non-changeable batteries (really, it's a good thing?). But I don't mind being hooked up to an HDMI monitor.

After I read the message I returned to the store and pulled out my wallet. That part where I talk about being a good steward of the family's money? That's over. Again. But I do have a snazzy, new 7 inch field monitor.

I charged the two batteries last night and spent time going through every control until I knew how the new monitor worked with the D810. I packed extra batteries and an extra HDMI cable and tossed a little Pelican case full of video capability into the car.

This morning we were shooting in a huge water chiller facility in a medical center. The "heros" of the shot were a rep from the company I am shooting for and his customer/counterpart at the medical center. I set up the camera and comped in the shot. A nice, wide one that showed off big, industrial gear and featured the two guys right in the middle, talking shop and looking at an iPad.

I set up a couple of background lights to keep the back wall and area from going too dark. It's a nice way to add depth and make sure the image fits into a usable tonal range. I used a large light as a main key and a fourth light as a back lit to subtly rim my human subjects. All of the lights were battery powered electronic flashes being triggered by a brand new set of Cactus V6 transceiver/receiver units. I was also using a new Cactus flash as a master unit to trigger everything else.

When I got the lighting set up and dialed in I added a  super clamp to the leg of the tripod and a Magic Arm to the clamp. At the other end of the Magic Arm I attached the new monitor and fired it up. Then I put the sun shade on it to make it look even cooler. All at once my client and I could see the live view image up big and personal. The color was fine (we were shooting raw but still making custom white balances as we went) but the cool thing was being able to see the image so big.  The client was able to see the composition clearly and quickly let me know how to fine tune it. I could "punch in" on the image and see the level of detail.

When I switched from a wide angle zoom to a manual focusing 85mm f1.4 I was able to call up the focus peaking feature on the monitor and see, very clearly, exactly what was (and wasn't) in sharp focus.

I left the monitor attached for the entire shoot and it gave my client additional piece of mind while allowing me to dodge the burden of a bigger, heavier (and more flare prone) laptop and all the inefficiencies of actually shooting tethered. We're charging the batteries now for tomorrow's shoot and we'll be bringing it along.

While I bought the monitor ostensibly for video it seems to serve a useful purpose for still imaging as well.

One more addition to the gear list for those shoots where clients are adamant about assessing the images before, during and after we shoot. I've decided to like it.

Thanks for reading.

The Luminance Conundrum. Why some video might look off.

Engineers know that you can't optimize for everything. Something in the triangle or dodecahedron of choices has to give in order for something more important to spread its wings. The people who design cameras must be plagued with issues like this all the time. Questions like: Do I make the chassis big enough to conduct heat away from the circuitry or do I limit clock speed of processors in order to keep the components cool enough? How many screws do I need to put into the lens mount in order to make sure big lenses don't cause problems? How simple do I have to make the image processing in order to have the camera shoot fast enough for the marketing people? Do I vent for heat or give in to the mania for "weather proofing"? Should the lens be fast or sharp or small? --- I can't have all three.

I've written before about my misgivings concerning the Olympus EM5.2 video but I'm starting to mellow as I dig into the files and come up with some workarounds to the standard shooting set ups. I was frustrated that a camera with some of the prettiest files I've ever seen (as still images) seemed to have issues with detail and sharpness when shooting video. I used the neutral color profile and turned various settings like contrast and saturation down to keep the files from seeming too thick. What I was getting was files with bigger sharpening interfaces that I wanted. It was as if the camera was set to use bigger radius settings in sharpening for video rather than using small radius settings and a higher percentage of sharpening. I wanted the files to be more subtle and more detailed---or at least as detailed as 1080p video files could look. My reference standard is the GH4 but I would be satisfied if the EM5.2 came close. In its standard set-up the files looked as though they were not as well sharpened as they could be and then had a layer of noise reduction over-layed on to them.

I had a little epiphanal insight about the whole mess this week. I was playing around with the camera and switched the profile to monotone (green filter setting) to make some black and white images. The camera went from sharp (in color) to ultrasharp (in monotone). I sat down along a babbling brook to meditate on what might be the deal when it dawned on me that Olympus's engineers must be doing most of their image sharpening in the luminance channel so they could prevent excess noise in the chrominance (color) channels. This would give them good sharpness with low chroma noise when people make images in color and in Jpeg (although I am sure somewhat the same choices are being made in raw).

While they have mastered this technique for still images where there is ample processor time to make everything match up video works in a different way. In the long GOP files noise in color is probably being handled as a median, homogenous setting that requires less speed from the processing engines. And, in fact, when I shoot black and white video, which throws away the chrominance channels I find the video to be sharply detailed and nearly immune from aliasing. Something is happening when the color is applied.

I went back into the menus and made a few changes that helped me produce video files that I am happier with. To wit, I have started using the muted color profile, leaving the saturation and contrast sub controls zero'ed and then bringing down the sharpening to its minimum level. Of course I am using the image stabilization without digital manipulation (mode 2) and I have tried to be very careful not to under or over expose. The final step is to go to the custom curves setting and flatten out the profile just a little bit more; raising the dark part of the curve and lowering the higher tones.

When used this way the camera delivers a flat file that can be messed with in post processing to bring back the contrast and saturation I am looking for. Minimizing the sharpness in the shooting portion of our program is helpful but there is still some sharpening going on. I can live with it.

With the help of these settings the Olympus EM5.2 is quickly becoming my "go-to" camera for any situation that requires me to go "off tripod" and follow something or someone around. It's a great little ENG (electronic news gathering) camera and the constant movement largely masks some of the shortcomings I was seeing earlier in my ownership.

When using the camera in this way I have also found that the best files come from my slower FPS settings. I am happiest with the files (color and sharpening) that I am getting at 24 fps. I would also say that lens selection is helpful. While someone from Olympus suggested that I would get the best quality from their branded lenses it's not really the case. I'm getting my best files (not over sharpened...) with older, legacy Nikon lenses as well as manual focus lenses made for the ancient Olympus half frame series of cameras. These lenses don't seem to have the clinical sharpness of the newest glass but their "rounded" quality and lower contrast seems to help when the camera translates stuff into video. Yes, the newest Olympus glass, like the 75mm f1.8 and the 45mm f1.8 are nifty sharp in still imaging but they are a bit too sharp for video rendering that I prefer.

Every time I get better results I get closer to thinking that the EM5.2 could be the best all around camera on the market today. It's clearly the most fun to shoot with, if it fits in your hands.....

Perhaps the engineers at Olympus decided not to have a separate sharpening protocol for video and depend on the sharpening for full, 16 megapixel files, the result being the over bearing sharpening characteristic when the frames are down sampled to a bit less than 2K for video. I don't know. I've never been a software/firmware guy. But I do know that they understand the issue. Whether or not it's cost effective to fix it is another matter. At this point I am very comfortable shooting good video with these work arounds. I'm glad I spent the time to "zero in" the cameras for the way I want them to look because I think the image stabilization is a big evolutionary step in shooting video.

My favorite rigging is to use the uber-sharp Panasonic 12-35mm f2.8 on the camera, a set of Apple earbuds plugged into the headphone jack on the HLD-8G grip and a small, Azden shotgun mic secured to a tripod socket mounted accessory bar. The camera focuses quickly, the lens renders things in a nice way and the Azden mic is a surprisingly good little shotgun microphone for under $100.

Yes, I have better headphones. Yes, I have better microphones. Yes, I have a fluid head tripod. But the whole idea is to come up with something that is small, light, agile and capable. I think of my rig as the video counterpart to Henri Cartier-Bresson's little screw mount Leicas with collapsable lenses---ready and infinitely available. It's a new age for videographers and these smaller cameras are a bridge between accessibility and ultimate quality. For me it's an engineering compromise I am now ready to say "works for me."  Thanks for reading.