A quiet exercise in old camera appreciation.

I worked late on a video last night. Got home around 10:30pm and still had a couple hours of post production to wade through. The video shoot went like clockwork. It was tiring though because I had to pay attention to everything all the way through the run of the play. Monitoring two cameras and following the main actor with one of the cameras means never pausing to actually enjoy the performance. 

At any rate I survived and delivered files this morning after swim practice. I returned e-mails and calls and made myself a lunch and then prepared for my one p.m. call. I was on the line for an hour with a wealth advisor taking care of the boring part of being an adult and owning my own business. I had a weird feeling about the markets recently and decided to move sufficient money into CDs to allow me to sleep through the night. We also fine-tuned some diversification/asset allocation. After that I had to dutifully give full details to the CFO of my company and family. (Literal readers, by CFO I really mean my spouse who is, literally, much more adept at money and numbers than me...).

When we finally wrapped up I was shot, spent, tired, and felt like I'd just spent a week working overtime in a cubicle (apologies to any reader who works in a cubicle. It was a metaphor...).  What better antidote to maturity and responsibility is there than a nice, late afternoon walk through the downtown areas of my favorite city? It was 68 degrees and the skies were central Texas blue. 

I've felt a bit sheepish all week long about having wasted good money on the used Nikon D2XS so, of course, that's the camera I grabbed to take along with me. I'll tell you right off the bat that it's at least twice the weight of a GH5 with a similar optic on the front. My lens of choice this afternoon was the cheap 50mm f1.8 Nikon AF lens I picked up last week (adding financial insult to injury). It's a very decent lens from f2.8 to f8.0 or f11 but then what lens isn't?

As you can see from the image above I've been playing around with the black and white mode which was one of the features I think was added in the upgrade from the X to the XS. It's nice. The screen on the back doesn't do the files justice but they looks pretty in Lightroom, especially if you lean on the contrast slider a bit. Don't bother adding sharpness; they already have sufficient bite...

My goal was 10% about getting a decent little handful of photos and 90% about walking around without a schedule, a deadline, an assignment or a self-imposed goal. It's been a tough year for me as far as family goes and after losing my mom and getting my father situated in memory care it's been all I can do to get business done and then drop myself on the couch at the end of the day where I sometimes just fall asleep curled up with Studio Dog. This walk was the first one done in nice, sunny weather in weeks and the combination of bustling sidewalk traffic, clean, clear sunlight and 60 degree temperatures worked miracles on my recently re-acquired stress and anxiety. 

But what about that darn camera? Deja Vu. It's big and heavy. The rear screen sucks hard. But it focuses like a bat out of hell and the files are rich and satisfying. I remember why it was I had such fond memories of my first ownership of this camera model. In it's time the handling was state of the art. And, at ISO 100 and 200 its image quality might still give current cameras a run for their money. While its 12 megapixels might not give you the micro detail of the new generation of 40+ megapixel cameras I remember an article about "shot discipline" written by Ming Thein wherein he made the point that if you are using a camera handheld, in the street, you'll probably never exceed the image resolution that one gets at 12 megapixels and, that at higher megapixel densities shot discipline (technique) becomes ever more important. Perhaps 12 megapixels won't satisfy every situation but he made a good case for the many, many times that 12 megapixels is optimal. 

Here are a few shots I made shooting the camera at ISO 400, straight to Jpeg. I think it's a marvelous camera as far as images go and I'm trying right now to figure out how to integrate it into our shoot at a radiology clinic tomorrow, along with our GH5's. Maybe I'll bring it along as a "behind the scenes" black and white documentary camera. I've done crazier things.....

Hope your week was as productive as mine --- but a lot less stressful. Hope Mike Johnston can dig himself out of the snow banks! Hope Ben is staying warm in Saratoga Springs. 

I'll end by saying "I'm just an average intelligence, working photographer but I'm happy I've re-allocated some of my meager assets to cash (literally: CDs)". It will be interesting to see what the markets do in the next few weeks. I guess we've never touched on the topic of personal finance here on the blog before. I've always assumed that most of my readers are much more adept at finance than am I. But maybe this will open up some discussion. I'll admit that I vacillate between having a medium to low risk tolerance. Your mileage probably varies. Where do you think the market is going?

Will we be happily buying medium format digital cameras next month or boiling our leather camera straps to make soup? 

The famous electrical pole. With old fashion dust spots in the sky. (Left in for nostalgia. Yes literal readers I do know how to remove them with the cloning tool or the spot healing tool in PhotoShop.....and, no, this image is not intended as a marketing tool aimed a paying clients).

Last night's last minute video assignment. 200 Gigabytes later.....

The camera and lens are the same ones I used last night, as are the headphones but

I used different tripods and also the new DMW-XLR1 audio adapter. Added for literal readers. 

I got an e-mail late Wednesday asking if I could help ZACH Theatre out with a video project the next day. We had stuff booked through the midday but the request was to make a two camera, video documentation of the current production of, "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time" on the main stage. The theatre needed archival footage to satisfy their usage contract. 

I got the message as I was walking into the house at 9:30 pm after shooting all afternoon and evening at a radiology clinic. I responded that I could do the project but would not have the bandwidth to also edit or do post production. "No Problem." was the response. They just needed the raw footage of the show from two different cameras; one for a wide, static shot of the stage and a second one to follow action on the stage. I started a quick job folder so I could make a list of the things I'd need to take along and what sort of pre-prep my gear might need. 

Usually I shoot things like this during the last rehearsals and I like to use external Atomos monitors so I can really see the frames clearly which helps me achieve better focus and is even more helpful with nailing exposure. We would be shooting this project with a sold out house and I would be on the cross through row in the middle of the middle of the house. This meant that there would be paying clients behind and in front of me. We had the house manager take out three seats so I could position two cameras on two tripods. The row behind me starts the upper half of the seating configuration so their floor is at about my shoulder level when I'm seated behind the cameras. Still, I knew the bright Atomos screens would be unacceptable for most of the audience behind me. Sadly, I had to leave them at home...

Pre-prep for something like this mostly means putting all the gear on the list onto a table in the studio and making sure it's work-worthy. Since we need to shoot with two cameras we'll need an extra set of batteries. All the batteries need refresher or full charges. I generally use a third set of batteries in the camera while setting up the menus for specific shooting so I don't start with a partially drained battery in camera. I pull the caps off both cameras, grab a loupe and inspect the sensor for dust. If there's any foreign material on the sensor I use a bulb blower to dislodge it. While I don't recommend doing it I have, on occasion, used canned air to blast something off a sensor but I'm very careful to hold the can level...

If we pack monitors I make sure there are ample batteries and two back-up HDMI cables. 

If I'm using tripods I make sure the quick release plates are attached and the correct tripod screws are resident on the plates. Can't tell you how depressing it is to pull out a tripod only to find that the last user (probably me) left the plate with a 3/8th inch connector attached instead of a needed 1/4 inch connector....

I finished by earlier photographic jobs and packed for the video job with my inventory list in hand. 

I arrived at the Theater two hours before the start of the show, just in case. I set up both GH5 cameras putting the (adored) 12-100mm f4.0 Pro Olympus lens on one and the 40-150mm f2.8 Pro Olympus lens on the other. Both cameras were set to MP4 at 100 mbs, 1080p, 10 bit, 422 color space. The cameras and their attendant V90 memory cards are capable of writing 400 mbs All-I files at 10 bit and 422 but since I wouldn't be editing the material I defaulted to a file size I knew would not be problematic for the editor. 

The camera with the wide zoom was my stationary camera and it was the one on which I put the Panasonic audio adapter. The sound engineers had dropped an XLR cable from the sound booth to my location so it plugged right into the adapter. Important to note that the sound coming off the main mixer (usually) is a higher line level signal. If you run that signal into an input that's looking for a microphone signal you'll almost certainly overload the input and the audio you end up with will sound distorted and crappy. Set you're switch to "line in" instead of "mic." 

The second camera, the one with the longer zoom, got its own microphone in the hotshoe. This provided a sound track that would make it easy to sync footage between the two cameras in editing.

Once the cameras were set the sound engineers played the loudest pre-recorded cue that they would send to me during the evening. I set levels for that and noted the dial position. We then had a quick dialogue rehearsal which showed me where I should set the average level. This is important because in a two camera set up I can't follow action with the longer lens on one camera and set sound levels on a second camera simultaneously. As a back-up the entire audio of the show was recorded from the main mixer in the sound booth by the engineers. 

I then asked to see the lighting cue that was used the most during the show. The lighting designer got a cue up for me and I had a crew member from the theater hold up a white card dead center in the stage. The lights, LEDs with filters, gave a reading of 4600K with a negligible hue shift. I also checked the follow spot and it was balanced within 100K of our average lighting cue as well. 

White balance set. Camera set to show green focus peaking outlines. Exposure and focus set to "M." 

The final step before the start of the show was to balance the fluid head with the "following" lens. Having a well balanced video head makes for smoother moves but if I was too ham-fisted in any one spot we could always cut to one of the wide shots as b-roll. 

Now my job was to start the cameras and then follow the main action with tight framing on the camera with the longer zoom. The first act is about 1:15:00 and the action moves continuously. That means the camera and the focus also move continuously (and as smoothly as I can possibly manage).

I was using 128 GB V90 cards which, based on the shooting codec, would give me about 2:45:00 of shooting time. The two acts combined were about 2:15:00. No worries there. The batteries were both still showing 2/3 full at the intermission but I had the luxury of just putting in fresh batteries and that also meant one less thing to worry about in the final act. 

After the early swim practice (Yay!!!!!!) this morning I got to work transferring the files to a small, milspec hard drive. Each camera card clocked in at about 100 Gigabytes for a total of just under 200. I'm happy I won't be the one editing this project. I think the render time will be agonizing....

I delivered the work on the hard drive to the Theatre offices this morning and sent out an invoice an hour later. Now comes the gear post production during which we pull everything out of cases and charge all the batteries. I don't want to take chances with gear as we have a full day of still photography shooting schedule at a location tomorrow for another client. I can finally say that it's a busy start to the year.

Go video. 

On a related front, the Stephanie Busing Video has been well received and tallied a little over 10,000 views during the first five days of life on Facebook and YouTube. The client is very, very happy and ready to enter into discussions about the next project. Fun with stuff that moves. See the video in a previous, recent blog. 

I must not write very clearly. Someone yesterday interpreted our blog post about stand-ins to be a professional portfolio presentation of my work and not a behind the scenes look at process. I need to write better or a commenter needs to read better.

The "Jenga" Building in Downtown Austin.

People are so painfully literal. It seems that every time I post an article about how I did something photographic, or how I set up a shot in video, I get someone who writes in with the "tsk. tsk." patronizing tone to let me know that "this is not your best work...." "it's a really mediocre portrait" "I expected more...."  I should develop a thicker skin but people who read blogs should develop better reading skills. 

So, I just want to make sure that everyone understands that yesterday's article about stand-ins, and the assistants' role in helping make photo assignments work more smoothly, was NOT meant to be a portfolio of finished, polished work. The images were meant to illustrate the written points I was making in the piece. 

Had the commenter paid attention he would have read (pertaining to the first image) that Amy (my assistant) was standing in for a doctor who would be photographed after we got the lighting just right and after we cleaned up all the clutter in the scene. It seemed to make sense to me when I wrote it but  I obviously must be overlooking something. 

A quick show of hands. Is anyone else confused by the use of the photos in yesterday's post? 

(I didn't have an image to illustrate frustration, and a sense that I'm just writing this stuff to exercise my fingers, so I put in a cluttered shot of a building under construction. This image is not meant to be a classical or formal presentation of the architecture as an art piece. It is meant to convey the visual chaos that layers parts of an urban environment. And no, I won't be explaining the intent of every photograph I post in the future.).

The process of "standing in" so we can figure out lighting and what needs to be cleaned up.

Amy stands in for a Radiologist as we begin the prep of the scene.

I've been working for one large radiology practice here in the Austin, Texas area for nearly twenty years. They are fun to work with and have lots and lots of cool gear that looks great in photographs. Every few years, as the gear changes and the practice evolves, we get to do a series of daylong photo assignments in order to help them build an ever-changing image catalog that the practice's marketing team can use for advertising and public relations. 

Yesterday Amy (my assistant) and I met up at one of the practice's mid-town clinics to make environmental portraits of doctors and health navigators. Our client wanted to use selective focus in the images in order to focus attention on the people and pull attention away from unnecessary background detail. It was an opportunity to give one lens in particular a workout. I used the Rokinon 50mm f1.2 lens as frequently as I could and supplemented with the Sigma 30mm f1.4 when I needed a wider angle of view. The important thing for my was how well each lens worked at or near its widest aperture. In that regard both lenses passed my tests. 

Since we were aiming to work with the taking lenses used as wide open as possible I decided to skip electronic flash and do all of our lighting with LED panels. Working this way made it easier to get an exact balance between the room illumination and the brightness of the reading screens that were somewhere in nearly every frame. 

My method in setting up lighting was: First get the right illumination intensity on the dominant computer screens. Second, set up lights that would mimic the direction and type of light illuminating the face of someone sitting in front of a monitor. In the case above we had a tight space to work in behind the computers (less than a foot). I taped white paper on the wall in front of Amy, behind and above the monitors and bounced a small LED panel off the paper. It made a convincing computer monitor light source that was controllable. 

The next step is to balance the primary illuminate on the subject with the illumination on the screens. This is straightforward as most good LED lights can be adjusted from 10% power to 100% power in tiny increments. After the balance is achieved we bounced several lights from the ceiling to bring up the overall light levels so we could seen into the shadow areas in a believable way. 

Once we got everything lit we started cleaning up the clutter that would be in the shot. We removed the lighting fixture just behind Amy's head, cleared off papers, eliminated the bar scanner in the bottom left hand corner of the frame, etc. Only then were we ready to bring in our physician and start the process of posing and fine tuning. If we are photographing someone in a white coat we keep the portable steamer close at hand to get rid of wrinkles. 

Since I was shooting at or near wide open it was important to go beyond focus peaking and punch in as far as possible in preview mode in order to get a highly magnified section of the frame for fine focusing. I compose the shot and then move the target for focus to the eyes of the subject without moving the camera. Focus and recompose is NOT an option with narrow depth of field....

I've also learned (the hard way) to check focus frequently. When manually focused any sway on the part of the subject might be just enough to kills the sharpness where it's needed. We worked on a tripod for all but two of the shots in our assignment yesterday. It helps. 

Amy stands in for a classic "hallway" portrait. 

Clients sometimes like backgrounds that dissolve away. But with m4:3 cameras making backgrounds dissolve works best if the subject is fairly close to the camera and the background is fairly far away. We found the hallway above and decided it would be a great place to make portraits of busy doctors. 

My first impulse was to block the existing light with a scrim and then re-light the subject but when I put Amy into the location the art director and I decided on I noticed that the ceiling lights were indirect, firing into a white barrel vault ceiling that made the lighting very soft and flattering. All that was really needed was a white reflect just under the bottom of the frame to bounce light back under our subjects' chins. Before Amy set the white reflector in position we used it as a target for a quick custom white balance. When the art director saw the results on the monitor she decided that we could do two other people in the same location. As with the first image I am using a tripod, shooting wide open and re-focusing frequently. 

(Note: if you are using an AF lens in a situation like this, and it's one of the Olympus Pro series, make sure to switch the AF off on the camera body. Using the manual clutch on the lens is great but once you take your hands off the lens barrel  and then touch the shutter button the camera will re-focus your lens UNLESS you have set the camera into MF).

Our biggest challenge in the shot above was to keep people out of the background. While we were shooting after hours we had a bunch of talent waiting for various shots and they wandered in and out of the hallways. A lot. Had the budget been even more generous I would have hired a second assist and tasked them with keeping people corralled and keeping an eye on clients who wander away from the set just when I'm looking for shot approval.... :-)

Having a stand in is great because getting busy doctors to stand still while we change this and that is a money losing venture of the practice and they are not nearly as cooperative in the pre-shooting part of the exercise as a good assistant.

Amy stands in on our "consultation" location. 

A lot of location photography is about moving furniture so it works for our compositions. Consultation rooms and exam rooms are small because....they don't need to be big and square footage in Austin is expensive. But the tighter the space the harder it is in which to light and compose. Our quick stand in shot showed me that we needed to cant the small couch and the matching chair about 20 degrees counterclockwise in order to best show both faces of the talents who would be in our consultation shots. Since the room was tiny and my back was against the wall we needed to have the art director and the talent wait outside the door as we brought in three lights, some modifiers and a bounce card or two. It's easier to put a plan into place if you aren't dodging closely packed people.

The shot above is our starting point. There is a process which involves putting up the lights you think will work and then fine-tuning and the looking, again and again. Better not to bore your subjects or your art directors with too much picky rearrangement; especially when you have a good and patient assistant in tow. 

Our final location. Another spot for consultations. 

We were on our way to another consultation "closet" when we walked past a big, welcoming waiting area and it dawned on me that this would work much better, photographically. I liked the nice, warm light in the fixture at the back-left of the frame and the colors were great. We switched around some chairs and then started lighting by using the illumination of the "practical" light as our starting point. Some top light and a bit of back light from the right side of the frame were just right. I backed up as far as I could and shot with the 50mm Rokinon (which is the equivalent to a 100mm in full frame). 

About two hours into the shoot Amy walked up to me and handed me a bottle of water. "Drink." She commanded. She is aware that sometimes I get into the rhythm and schedule and forget to stay hydrated. It's good to have assistants that are watching out for me.

The entire shoot yesterday was lit with two Aputure Amaran 672S daylight LED panels and one smaller Amaran 96 panel. The bigger panels both use Sony NP970 batteries which are enormous and heavy. The benefit is that we were able to shoot for about five hours and still come back to the studio with at least 50% in reserve for each light. Since both of the big lights take two batteries I also packed two more sets. Just in case. You never know when you'll need to run at full power for long set up.....

I think of yesterday's shoot as a warm-up for our shoot coming up on Saturday. We'll be on location for a full, long day at a different location. We'll have about 12 models and 3 marketing staff with us as well as a hair and make-up person. The client is arranging craft service and, so far, they've done an exemplary job. 

The Panasonic GH5 continues to exceed my expectations ---- as long as I use premium optics and use them correctly. The LEDs are priceless for work like this. But the best productivity on jobs like this is a good assistant who keeps an eye on schedule, clothing details, stuff intruding into the frame and more. Amy is a great assistant! On a busy location it's best not to cling too strongly to the "one man band" concept of production photography.

Hope your week is good. We're packing up for tonight's video project. More on that tomorrow...

Trailing lens reviews. The Sigma 60mm f2.8 DC DN Art. Nice.....

If you own a small sensor camera, be it a micro four thirds or an APS-C Sony mirrorless, you might seriously consider picking up one of the absolutely cute and very high performance 60mm f2.8 DC DN lenses that Sigma has been making for a number of years now. This is the third time I've owned this lens. I first bought the early version that fit on the m4:3 cameras but it left in a purge on my way toward the Sony system. One of the first lenses I bought for the Sony a6300 (a high performance imaging camera with a huge deficit of handling comfort) was the Sony version of the same lens. And once I migrated back to the m4:3 system late last year it was a lens I quickly searched out.

Here's why: It's small, light, cheap, fun to look at and.....it delivers wonderful and pristine optical performance even when used at its widest aperture. It has a wonderful combination of bite and realism. It's capable of high resolution with high contrast and, one of my favorite lens test sites, Lenstip.com, raves about the overall imaging performance of the lens -- across all the systems for which it is available.

For people who need wide angle lenses because they just can't make up their minds about what needs to be included in their photos and what needs to be excluded from their photos it might be a little long (focal length, not physical dimension...). But, if you like to isolate subjects and have definitive ideas about cropping the focal length is very good on the m4:3 cameras (equivalent to a 120mm on a 35mm, full frame camera) and perfect on an APS-C camera (90mm equivalent).

It also has the added benefit of being able to focus quite closely as you can see below. While it won't take the place of a good macro lens it will let you cut out a lot of extraneous clutter while maintaining high sharpness. My impression about the quality of its out of focus areas is that they are some and smooth and very desirable. (See image just below).

The lens comes with a hood and a small case and is around $240. While the f2.8 aperture may seem inadequate for some low light uses the two advantages bestowed by the limited f-stop are: It's fully sharp and usable wide open and it's comfortably small and portable. 

I consider it one of the great bargains available for all of the cropped sensor systems. You should rush out and buy one right away. If it doesn't fit on your full frame Canon or Nikon DSLR camera (it doesn't) then this gives you the perfect excuse to finally get rid of that old clunker and step into the wonderful world of smaller and more capable mirror-free camera systems from Sony (APS-C), Olympus and Panasonic.

I figure that any lens worth owning three times over is a lens you'll probably want to try.