Random Notes Bouncing Around My Brain. Saturday Evening.

Swimming Pool. Lisbon.

A lot of cameras have come into the market lately; most are iterations of existing models with various added features or specialized feature sets. It's nice that almost everyone is busy iterating new models but there is little, newly launched, that propels me from my chair at the dining room table to my office computer to engage in pre-ordering much of anything. 

Sony announced the new A7iii and it looks great. Key features are improved video chops and the new battery. Both are nice, and welcome, but hardly a big enough jolt to move existing A7ii buyers to  rush to the camera store. The "nerd" feature of the new model is a sensor that is purported to have wider dynamic range and I'm sure there are a few people out there who feel that this would be welcome for their work. For me? Heck, I'm not using up all the dynamic range I've got right now. As a first time buyer into the Sony system the new A7iii would be a smart acquisition. You get ample resolution from a full frame sensor as well as a myriad of little improvements that should make photography more fun. But in the end it's the same resolution as the A7ii, the same color family, the same EVF resolution, the same rear screen resolution, and pretty much the same stabilization parameters too. If all you want a camera for is to generate a nice, big file you might be a thousand bucks ahead to just source the previous generation (A7ii) and learn to put a couple of extra batteries in your pocket...

My thoughts about the A7Riii are about the same. A bit more dynamic range, a bit faster throughput but mostly the same imaging performance one can already achieve with the A7Rii. Already have the A7Rii? Save your money and wait for the next generation after the iii and you'll probably feel smarter. As always, if there's something unique for you in the new model (can't think of what it really might be....) and you have the cash then go for it. 

My question for the moment is: Where is Sony going with the A6x00 series cameras. While the A6500 and A6300 are very capable image generators and both are very good at AF and video do we really need to keep iterating all that imaging goodness in a body design that is so tortured? It was novel to make a camera with such great output as tiny as possible five or six years ago but I think we've learned our lessons. If you want to have a camera body that's comfortable to hold and use you need to make it big enough to fill the average user's hands, to provide enough square centimeterage 

of surface area for good controls and enough mass to help make the camera stable. Not to mention that a bigger body gets you a bigger, better battery and much better thermal management. I'd love to see an APS-C version Sony mirrorless in the A7 body style; or even bigger. The APS-C sensor is a logical choice for great video capture and a bigger body (a la the Panasonic GH5) would allow for twin UHS-ii card slots and the ability to run the camera in the sun without shutting down or compromising imaging performance. 

I'll sign the petition for a "pro" style body that uses the newest Sony A7xx battery and the faster cards. That, and a much bigger EVF window/magnification. Let's make sure when they get around to producing it (inevitable) they remember to put that headphone jack on the side....

I won't go into the A9 because it's just a stupid camera for the kind of work I do. To pay more for less capability than an A7Riii in every regard but speed is just amazingly stupid for anyone not requiring some zany speed metric for some highly specialized task. It's not sports. No one needs 20 fps to track most any sport. I conjecture that they make this camera just to torment Nikon. 

Nikon. In my mind, for my potential use, Nikon only makes two cameras. But both of them are still very useful and bright arguments for sticking with the lens system or for staying with DSLRs. Conservative but capable. I'm thinking mostly of the D850 and the D750. I've owned the D750 (the most recalled camera in recent history) as well as the predecessor to the D850; the D810. After playing and working with a D850 for the last few days I can honestly say that when it comes to sheer image quality it's probably the best all around camera you can buy in 2018. And considering the competition that is saying a lot. If I shot high end products or fashion all day long this is probably the camera I would own. The files are amazing when wrung out to their maximum potential. 

I was even impressed by its the overall look of the video files. But even as I was playing around and shooting test shots with the camera I could not help wondering how much better the camera could have been with a super high resolution EVF installed in the place of the traditional eye level prism finder. Wanna go into the photography business with one camera and one lens? Buy a D850 and the Nikon 24-120mm f4.0. Then put your credit card away and go shoot. 

If you haven't had the religious conversion to the power of the EVFs yet and you don't need endless resolution then the D750 is the perfect all around compromise of: traditional DSLR, sweet spot resolution, great handling and very nice, mature color. The one I owned went back for service once too often for me but I have many friends who love theirs and have made kilo-bucks in the past four years shooting them. I've seen them new for around $1700 but if you are on a budget and must go Nikon be advised that D610s use the same basic sensor, have the same color response and are dropping in price toward the $1200 mark, new. 

If you enjoy studying the history of photography you might want to buy a Nikon for your historical collection. If they don't come out with a convincing APS-C or full frame mirrorless camera in the next 12 months ----- they are toast. Not right away but ----- toast all the same. 

Canon. Canon is such an enigma to me right now. Some great lenses. Some good lenses. Some mediocre lenses. A lot of good, nice handling and mature bodies (the 5D series, the pro bodies), some great AF technology and an interesting approach to sensor tech. Less low end DR. Shadows that recover into pointillist noise patterns. But when I walk out of my door and embrace the wide open world of photography it's the female segment of the market that is remarkably almost all Canon.  Every woman photographer I meet seems to be driving a 5D2, 5D3 or 5D4, nearly without exception. I get it. The color is pleasing and easy to work with in post production. The 24-105 + the 70-200mm combo is universally embraced and there's nothing else to buy (except for the A.I. powered new Canon flash). 

Seems the gear nuts are unable to embrace the Canon multi-verse because of the dynamic range controversy but the non-gear nuts are happy with tried and true technology that just works. I've shot with Canon cameras and they are, for the most part, great. Just think how much greater they'd be if Canon delivered a model with a really nice EVF. Since they've been introducing rank consumer models with APS-C sensors and EVFs I conjecture that it's only a matter of time before they begin to join the worship services already in progress over in the sanctuary of EVF-ness for full frame. They need only look to Sony for guidance....

If Nikon and Canon were the only two choices in solid cameras today it would be interesting to think about choosing one over the other. The Canons are fun to shoot and pleasant while the Nikon's are the precocious lab rats of the two. It all comes down to mindset ----- and the (perceived) need for super wide dynamic range. Confession: surging nostalgia for the Canon 5Dmk2+100mm f2.0, but equally balanced by the same kind of Nostalgia for the D610+85mm f1.8. 

Wouldn't it be a more interesting photo environment if both Nikon and Canon started introducing a choice in new camera lines? A D850 for traditionalist and a D850EVF for cognoscenti?

Olympus. It's time for Olympus to make some interesting "special edition" EM-1mk2s. Let's talk. 

I have a feeling we're going to be living at 20 megapixels in m4:3rd-land for some time to come so "new and improved" is going to have to come from features and style. I would love to see an EM-1 mkV that had a permanently attached battery grip, beautifully integrated into the overall design, that added all the capabilities that videographers who also moonlight as photographers would want. That would include space for a full size HDMI port, headphone jack, mic jacks, and a battery outside the core body of the camera in order to isolate the good stuff (sensor) from heat. I would also love to see a menu that you could choose in order to optimize for video. That would be separate from the Klingon language menus now being used for their mostly still photography control. 

Where Olympus is totally rocking it right now is in the lens department. I have experienced it first hand in the 12-100mm Pro and the 40-150mm Pro and I continue to be impressed and awed. I've been playing around with the Rokinon 50mm f1.2 for cropped cameras but it's just not quite there when used wide open. If anything the Rokinon has become my emotional brain's prime ally in the quest to buy the Olympus 45mm f1.2 Pro lens, which would be quickly followed by the 25mm Pro and the 17mm Pro. 

I teeter on the abyss of plunging back into the Olympus camp via an EM-1 mk2 just for the dual I.S. I'd get with the 12-100mm. I can't imagine it could be even better than it is right now.....

Which leads me to thoughts about Panasonic. The GH5 (classic) impressed me last weekend when I shot for a radiology practice. Batteries that last all morning long and then half of the afternoon. A perfect EVF finder. A great, flippy screen. And, at the end of the project, a great set of big raw files that are jam-packed with detail and perfect color. These guys get color science in a big way. 

My only regret was that there was not more video to be done. It's that camera's ultimate wheelhouse. 

I know they just introduced the G9 and it's fast and perky but what would I really like to see in the next generation of GH cameras? Um. The only thing I can think of would be the high res mode. Everything else about the GH5 is perfect for its format. 

But what about the GH5S? This camera is ultimately interesting to me but only as a curiosity. It's so obvious where the designer's inspiration came from. This is the micro-four-thirds version of a Sony A7S or A7Sii. Lower pixel count in exchange for higher ISO performance. But I think the performance improvement mostly pans out only in the video area and so it becomes only a specialty camera and not an everyday user. My friend James has one but every time he heads out to shoot something he seems to default to the GH5. It may be a compromise but life is made up of compromises and he seems to feel most comfortable with the classic... 

I'll wait for the G90. A rangefinder styled version of the G9. 

And that leads us to the eccentric system. Fuji. Like Olympus I think Fuji does lenses really, really well. They seem to have their fingers on the pulse of what higher end consumers would like in lenses and they tend to deliver it. I want to like Fuji but I'm a little afraid of them. You see, I was one of their early, unintentional beta testers. I worked with a couple of Fuji S2 cameras for while. When they worked they worked well and the color and tonality of the files was really great for the time. The S3 was good as well. But the S2 had two faults; it had two different sets of batteries and their individual exhaustion rate was never synchronized. Those cameras corrupted more CF cards than any camera in the history of my camera use experience. To this day I don't trust the bodies. 

And, in fact, I'm not sure I trust the camera body designers. I saved up all my money from returnable bottle deposits and from begging on street corners just to buy the original Fuji X-Pro-1 when it came out. I rushed to the store with my bags of nickles and quarters and dimes, I asked to see the demo model and pulled it up to my aging eyes. Blurry finder. I asked the salesperson to help me find the diopter adjustment knob only to be told that this particular camera did NOT have an adjustable eyepiece diopter. After that I've never been able to take Fuji cameras seriously as "user" cameras. Just not contenders....

I understand that they've improved by leaps and bounds. And, of course, the lenses... So I tried once again and bought a X-100T. That was a nightmare of a camera and one I could not understand, tolerate or appreciate. It's tainted my perspective ever since and that's sad because I've heard such great things about the XT-2 and even the X-H1. You go ahead and buy one. I'll go with the theory of "thrice burned means I am an idiot."

Great color. Great lenses. Nice styling, but I keep checking under the bed for monsters...

I think the overlooked Fuji camera right now is the EX-3. A nice body style with a reasonable price and the same sensor as the top of the line cameras. At around $1299 with the good 18-55mm what is there not to like? If I was to test the Fuji waters yet again it would be this camera that I'd pick up and put through its paces. Ah, here in the EX-3 is the Fuji gateway drug.

Who have I left out? Well, there's Leica but I won't go there. I believe they make insanely good lenses and that they used to make insanely good film bodies. I tested several Leica M series digital bodies and I'll have to say that the translation from film to digital didn't do Leica any favors. For the price of an M digital body and a standard lens you could pretty much equip an entire studio using other brands. When I make my next million I might reward myself with an M10 (or by then, M22) but maybe I'll just keep the money in the bank... 

Finally, there's Pentax. They lost me, existentially, when they came out with a camera that had a grip that lit up. Really! A light show on the handgrip. Amazingly tacky. Trump level tacky. In fact, had they come out with gilded version I think we could be hawking a bunch right now on Pennsylvania Ave. While the newest K1 mk2 might be an exemplary full frame body with the heft and density of a classic I falter when I look through their inventory of full frame compatible, designed for digital, lenses. 

Wouldn't it be great if the K1 Mk2 was similar to the Sony A7 series in that one could use just about anyone's lenses on the front of it? If I was an artist instead of a commercial user I'd love to try the K1-2 with a single, hand selected lens. Perhaps the perfect 50mm. It's a camera whose ethos cries out for a tiny handful of prime focal length lenses. As such it's a "pass" for most working stiffs.

So, where do I see the whole industry moving? 2018 has started out with a cough and a wheeze when it comes to sales. Maybe it's because we finally like and are satisfied with all the stuff we just bought. Maybe it's because official unemployment numbers dropped to something like 4.1% and everyone is too busy working to give a shit about cameras anymore. Maybe photography has become boring. Everyone is heading over to YouTube to glaze out on videos. Maybe, just as it's too much trouble to read it's also too much trouble to look at still images. Maybe it's like the Matrix where everyone is hooking in and endless video feeds them their reality. I think the malaise is because we've collectively decided to stop shooting literal and start shooting figuratively, shoot surreally, shoot impressionistically. Shoot ideas instead of proofs of technical process. All of which means that hyper detail, hyper sharpness and perfect focus are becoming much less important than having an interpretive style. And maybe we don't need new cameras if we're going to actively mess stuff up and post process the crap out of it. Maybe that's the short term future.

editor personal notes: Sorry to be out of touch this week. Taking care of a parent's entire existence seems to be a full time job. I've diversified investment accounts that no one has paid attention to in perhaps a decade this week. I've arranged for physical therapy and then, with feedback from my father, cancelled it as well. I've made claims on half a dozen insurance policies for my late mom's estate. I'm trying to clear out a house that's packed with 38 years of memories and memorabilia. I'm working with my parent's CPA on this year's taxes (while working with my CPA on my taxes!). And all the while I'm trying to visit and have meals with my dad at the memory care facility an hour and half from my home, at least twice a week. Throw in a few swim practices and something has to give. Last week the blog got short shrift. The week before it was just lack of sleep. Who knows what next week will bring?

Thanks for waiting and thanks for coming back. We'll keep writing. It's good practice for thinking. 

If you know where photograph is headed drop a line and let me know. I'm pretty sure cameras will follow along if we are smart enough to identify the trends...

Musing about last Saturday's photo assignment where the critical parameter (as usual) was the lighting.

This shot is here to illustrate what I write about in the blog below. 

It is not a "finished" "polished" portfolio piece. You didn't pay for that.

We'll fine tune and enhance the final image that the client chooses from 

this set up. We don't routinely polish everything that gushes out of the camera.

There's not enough time for that. But I think this illustrates a point 

I'm trying to make below.

GH5+Olympus 12-100mm f4.0 Pro.

Amy and I were on location by 9:00 a.m. on Saturday morning. We were shooting another radiology clinic in Austin, Texas. Our shot list was ample but that's par for most image catalog shoots these days. These kinds of assignments can be done with just about any good interchangeable lens camera made in the past few years, anything from 16 megapixels to 50 megapixels will work fine. And based on the metadata associated with the files the quality of the lenses you use is a lot more important that the advertising impressive fast apertures. Most of our shooting through the day was done with a wide ranging zoom and it was used almost exclusively at f4.0. That's not f1.4, that's f4.0.

But the unforgiving piece in every scene is the lighting. Nearly every room we worked in had a combination of fluorescent lights, each with their own unique color characteristics and light properties. The long, ceiling mounted tubes gave off a softer, greener light, with a mix of blue. The compact fluorescent bulbs in the recessed ceiling cans had a deep yellow cast to them. Mix them together and you've got a real Rubik's cube of a color puzzle to solve.

The worst set of problems come when you need to photograph a scene like the one above in which you are showcasing an MRI machine. An MRI creates a very, very powerful magnetic field which requires the room in which it sits to be shielded. It also means that any ferrous metal isn't allowed anywhere in the room. The magnetic field is strong enough to wipe out your camera's memory cards and can also damage both the imaging sensor circuits in your camera, as well as the electro-magnets that drive the shutters and aperture blades in modern cameras.

We could not put lights in the room and we had to shoot from just outside the door which isn't the best recipe for composing a great image!

Our strategy was to figure out the dominant light temperature within the room and then supplement, through the doorway and via the heavily screened observation window about eight feet to the right of the camera position. The overwhelming majority of the existing light in the room was about 3,000K with a small dose of green. In most situations (those without MRI machines to deal with...) we'd just turn off the room lights and re-light the room with flash, or our choice of continuous light. But turning off the room lights in this situation meant that the back half of the room would go dark, which would look unnatural.

I filtered a strobe with a 3200K correction gel and put the strobe into a 24x36 inch softbox, positioning it near the top of the doorway, about three feet above the camera. Then we took one of our battery powered LEDs, covered it with the same gel material and aimed it through the observation window. The combination did a decent job lighting our two techs and their "patient" but there is more we can do in post to enhance the photo. We'll select the people and get their flesh tones into a pleasing color range and then inverse our selections and balance the light in the room a bit more. But the filters and the additional light went a long way toward cleaning up a visual catastrophe.

During the day it became (once again) very clear to me that the lighting in situations like this is nearly always more important and harder to achieve than getting the camera gear right. In retrospect I could have shot all day long with one GH5 and one 12-100mm f4.0 zoom lens but over the course of the same day we used five different flashes and three different LED panels in order to get a natural and pleasing look to the light in each scene.

Had we brought a $100,000 Phase One medium format camera and no lighting we would have been much less successful. Color balance works the same across all formats. Mixed light nearly always needs to be corrected. With no lights and a super high res camera we'd have many highly detailed unusable files to play with. Conversely, I could have brought along that old Nikon D2XS and some ancient, manual focus Nikon lenses and, together with a box of strobes, could have done photographic work that would fit into the use envelope of my client, regardless of the media selected for final output.

Everyone seems to couch their shooting needs in terms of camera capabilities but in the commercial field it's generally lighting that rules the day. You can spend a fortune on a great camera and I'll concede that with the same lighting you'll make images that are fractionally better than images made with a lesser spec'd camera. The differences might not make any visual difference at all in most uses; for instance if the images are to be used on websites or inserted into video programming, etc. But for most of the work I do, which is profitable and fun, there is no need for fast frame rates, no need for super high ISO performance, and no need for spectacular resolution. There is always a need for good lighting even if it's just to clean up the lighting inconsistencies of a tough room.

We used a collection of cheap speed lights to do our work on Saturday. Nothing over $150 per light. All of the flashes could be sync'd to radio triggers or slaved from each other. Having five (an investment of about $700) meant I could put them in small places and add light to areas that needed more light without running cables. We use the lights in the same modifiers we've bought for our bigger mono-lights. Softboxes, umbrellas, diffusion disks; you name it.

One thing we lean on a lot is the intertwined use of LEDs with the small flashes. Most mono-light have tungsten modeling lights and when we need to drag the shutter in a combination flash and ambient light exposures used to make the screens on computers or the panel lights on machines glow correctly we get tungsten contamination in our daylight leaning shots. But it's nice to have a modeling light as a work light for focusing. It's common practice for us now to just grab a daylight balanced LED and bounce it off a ceiling, or even off the front end of the modifier we're using for flash. We get the focusing benefits of a modeling light and no color contamination of our mostly daylight flash exposure. Nice when it all works together...

During most of the day I worked the camera around ISO 200 and ISO 400. Using a smaller format meant I could use wider apertures and still get the depth of field I needed to get both techs, patients and machines in acceptable focus. All of our lighting units and modifiers fit into one, big rolling case and, since the battery powered strobes are small and light, we were able to use smaller, lighter light stands which helped us keep our overall footprint smaller and the overall weight load lighter.

Generally, on locations, the use of the camera is never a puzzle or mystery. Use the lens that gets you the composition you want and you are good. Lighting is a totally different story. Some rooms are filled with reflective surfaces that have to be tamed. Lights have to be placed just right for best effect, and all of it has to be balanced so nothing sticks out and beats our viewing audience over the head.

Think you need a kick ass camera? Think again; what you really might need are some kick ass lighting skills. Nine time out of ten it's the lighting that makes you the money.

At the end of the day we'd done 36 different shots (nine locations with variations in each) and amassed 1585 raw files. I can't think of a single shot on which I did not use at least two lights. Usually three or more. We edited the take down to about 600 and delivered the online gallery on Monday. This was our third day of shooting for this client in the last 30 days. We are scheduling additional shoots for this client in April. We must be doing something right.... maybe it's the lighting...

Closing in on that magical time of the year here in Austin. It's time for SXSW; the music, film, education and tech conference. Two weeks of .....

"South by," as it is referred to by locals, started out as a straightforward music festival during which bands from across Texas, and then across the U.S. and now around the world, made their way to Austin, Texas to play for free (or next to nothing) in hundreds of clubs and temporary venues in the hope of being discovered. When the festival started to expand the owners looked to other industries to expand the audiences (and the sale of pricey wristbands). 

Consensus is that the event has peaked. The cool kids find it about as attractive as a sunny Saturday afternoon at a local shopping mall and even the corporations are starting to glom to the fact that the overall festival has gone from trendy to Sears and Roebuck. 

But that doesn't deter the event's owners and promoters who seem to understand that even boring, plodding, participants from the downward side of  the coolness Belle Curve can spend money prodigiously and, since most of the content is more or less free to the producers, why would they stop now? No such thing as leaving on a high note in what used to be the music biz.....

But for anthropologists/photographers there is still a lot to like about the next two weeks (my take is that the official start is March 9th. Yes, there is an education segment to the conference that starts this week but it's a newer add-on and I don't think it really counts...). 

Over the next two weeks the clubs in downtown, along Sixth St. and in the Rainey St. district will be packed with bands playing everything from vintage punk to new age polka. Rabid or vapid fans will be swirling through the street oblivious to traffic as they stay up to speed on schedules via their cellphones which will never veer more than two feet from their faces.

Photographers will head downtown to photograph this year's variations off youth culture, music culture and some will brave the lines to see the good and bad movies that are part of the festival. Like participants in the stock market a tiny sliver of the attendees will actually make connections that will help their careers, everyone else will end up subsidizing national hotel chains, scrounging for free beer and finger food and generally waiting in long lines for crappy entertainment they would never have wanted to pay for at home. All at about $1200 per person for the generic wristband. 

Me? Yeah, I've watched SXSW grow from an extension of the native music scene to a city clogging world event so I'll head down as I have the time to see if there is anything interesting I can shoot for posterity. Maybe I'll catch some K-pop. Meet the next Spielberg. Rub shoulders with the next Fedex-shipping-dog food-delivery-online-start-up. Oh shades of 1999.

The camera of choice for me is usually something smaller and lighter but still capable of good stills and very good video. This year it's probably going to be the Panasonic G85 with the kit lens and a nice little microphone sitting in the hot shoe. I'll remember to pack a couple of ND filters. And to get into the center of downtown along with Austin's temporary 70,000 new hipsters I'll definitely be riding down there on the city bus. Parking a car is so last decade....

Maybe I'll see you down there on Saturday after the noon workout and the coffee klatch. Could be groovy. Want to fit in? Gain a lot of weight and wear a lot of black along with a really crappy pair of sunglasses. 

And don't forget to bring along your corporate mascots....

An Apt Reprint from 2012 about "professional" gear. Fun looking backward......

You can't use that. It's not professional.

This is a homemade florescent bank.  We cobbled it together to use it as a fill light in a giant data center that was all lit with similar florescent tubes.  It worked great.  The images were exactly what the client wanted.  It worked better than thousands of dollars of filtered flash would have.  It cost less than fifty bucks.  It's held together with tape and bungie cords.  There are chunks of cardboard that separate the tubes.  It's not pretty it just works.

Marketing works harder at sucking the individuality out of art and life better than just about anything else except poverty.  When you are poor you have to use what you have at hand.  But when you have enough pocket change rattling around you can get sucked into the whirlpool of "how the professionals do it."  And pretty soon you'll be shooting just like everyone else.

I wrote a column for Michael Johnston's blog, TheOnlinePhotographer, that ran on Sunday.  In it I talked about the Panasonic/Leica 25mm Summilux lens for the micro four thirds systems.  One commenter asked, in so many words, how I could convince clients that "Kirk+G3 = Professional?"

(The G3: referencing a < $550 small sensor camera).

This comes up in every facet of being a working photographer.  It's all based on looking in the rear view mirror of working life. How we did things a decade ago.  That's how it seeps into the current idiom.  The truth is that there's no longer any even imaginary line between what tools are professional and which ones are just screaming fun.  Now that the overwhelming target space for our "visual genius" is the iPhone screen or the website viewed in a coffee shop on a 15 inch laptop the metaphorical sky is the limit.  Not the number or provenance of our pixels.

Here's how I think of the whole subject...

Old school "pro" computer = The big tower with multiple processors and the giant monitor. The rationale: Big files demand fast processors.  The speed saves me time and money...

The reality = Most photographers would find the latest i7 equipped laptops screamin' fast.  And cheaper.  I ditched big computers in 2007 and I've never looked back.  My office set up right now?  A 13 inch Apple MacBook Pro with an i5 processor hooked to a 24 inch monitor.  Runs fast and works well.  

Old school "pro" camera = Canon 1 series, Nikon D3 series.  According the the experts who don't make money taking photographs any camera used by a "pro" must be weatherproofed, watersealed, shoot at 10 frames per second, have a shutter that will last far longer than their interest in said camera, and the camera must be made out of many pounds of metal strong enough to endure re-entry from outer space and impact with the Sonoran Desert at terminal velocity.  In the current space the camera must also have tons and tons of pixels.

The reality = Given that 80 percent of the images go to the web, that very few people make prints anymore and that ever advancing digital technology makes camera bodies more or less disposable there are tons and tons of people getting paid for making images with Canon Rebels, Sony nex5's and other small and delicious cameras.  The size of the body is meaningless as an evaluation of final quality in use.  My current small cameras spank the big, expensive cameras of yesteryear and our clients aren't really pestering us for anything better or more "spec'd."  Twelve megapixels is still the sweet spot for most work from a size/quality paradigm and sixteen megapixels is huge. 

Bulletproof?  The only two cameras I've had that required major service (or any service at all) have been a Canon 1 series camera with a defective circuit board and a Nikon D300 that backfocused everything in the universe.  The smaller, cheaper cameras?  In my small, anecdotal survey?  Much more reliable.

I'll trade face detection autofocus with eye preference over extra seals every day.  Makes my job easier.  Makes the focus better.  If I spent my days in San Diego, dedicated to photographing the Navy Seals in action I'd probably want an "everything proofed" camera but most photographers I know shoot in offices and in cushy suburban neighborhoods. 

I prefer using the micro four thirds cameras when it's appropriate.  They're more fun.  And, for most of the stuff I do the images are just great.  If you shoot sports you need something different.  But that's one of those YMMV things.  For ad guys the whole live view thing is a wonderful.  Do I need an optical view finder? Only to impress my hobbyist friends.

Old School "pro" lenses = The pervasive idea is big, fat, white zoom lenses with f-stops of 2.8 and lots and lots of knobs. Or big, fat primes with gold or red rings around the barrels. Heavy, weatherproofed and beknighted with a string of letters like ASPH, ED, UD, IF, and of course, LLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL.

Reality? =  While I've got some bigger lenses in a drawer somewhere the stuff I use looks more like fun stuff.  I like little zooms like the 14-45mm zoom I have on my G3.  Or the 14-42mm zoom I have on my EP3.  If I'm lighting stuff the apertures are fast enough.  If I'm outside the lenses are always fast enough.  If I need better I switch to cute little prime lenses (at a third the cost of their bigger cousins)  with apertures that are just as fast as the "pro" lenses but give me a little more focus coverage because of their shorter focal lengths.  But more importantly not having to carry all the prestige around with me leaves me more energy to explore and be nice.

Old School "Pro" lights = Profoto.  Big boxes. Big monolights.  Lots of big accessories.  Many stands.  Lots of sandbags.  Lots of assistants to hold everything together.  In fairness though I should mention that the great middle of the professional market has transitioned to plastic flashes from Paul Buff without too much grumbling.  

Reality? = Most of the images I see could be made with a couple of $100 speedlights and a couple of slave cells.  My five figure project in December was done entirely with three LED panels (maybe $1,000 total).  You light with what you need.  Most pros have a small set of electronic flashes, some portable flashes and a few fun lights like LEDs or florescents.  If you need more you rent more.  The real art is knowing when to turn most of it off...

This pro versus amateur thing is so silly.  When I talk to guys who've been doing it for years I hear the same story over and over again.  They started taking photos with a (fill in the blank/advanced amateur camera) simple, basic camera, shot lots and lots of fun stuff that people really liked.  Went "pro" and bought all the trappings and then spent the next twenty years trying to get back to that simpler time. Why? Because everyone, including themselves, loved the images from the time when the pictures were about the idea or the emotion instead of the magnesium alloy and product positioning.

Remember the early cellphones? Remember when you owned the Motorola "brick"?  Was that more professional than an iPhone?  Could it do as much?

Remember the Buick Electra?  Remember when you owned that Suburban? Was it better transportation than your Mini Cooper or your Outback?

"Professional" is such a lovely advertising buzzword because it connotes acceptance of a defined standard. But what is professional video in the time of the Canon 5Dmk2 or the Panasonic GH2?  Is it still a $50,000 Sony Betacam?  Will it matter on Youtube?  Does it matter on Vimeo?  What if the smaller cameras create files that looks just as good? Or better?  Now you can afford to be a videographer.  Now more people can afford to be photographers.  All they need to supply is intelligence, taste and elbow grease.

In medicine and law "professional" means more training, not more gear.  

Old School Photographer = We conjure up the hip guy in black with a warehouse full of studio space, surrounded by high power popping flashes in enormous umbrellas telling hot models to pout with more energy.  The guy is surrounded by legions of assistants.  Some look at big screens as the photographer shoots.  Some shout out encouragement.  Some flirt with the hot client.  Some flirt with the coterie of hot models waiting in the wings.  Some flirt with each other.  All wait breathlessly for the magic.  All vie to be the next one to hold the prestigious medium format camera.  All wear their black baseball caps backwards. It's only for webcasts, only for TV.  Only for the movies...

The Reality? = For most it's a process of daily marketing, a trip to a client's store or factory or restaurant to shoot.  Setting up a few lights.  Taking good photographs.  Billing reasonable amounts and delivering images that will help to move a client's products and services.  Sometimes they'll bring along an assistant to help carry some gear up the inevitable stairs or across the parking lot.  Headshots in our smaller and efficient studios.  The day-to-day needs of local commerce.

Back to the original question.  Most clients who know the difference between professional camera models are themselves deeply interested in photography and would have shot their own products or people but they needed you to do so because something needed to be lit or people needed to be posed or the client could belay their ego and admit that you routinely found better compositions than they would have and they were willing to pay for your services.

If they know nothing about the nuts and bolts of photography they probably hired you because they went to your website and looked and saw what they needed to see and have/had a reasonable expectation that you'd deliver a similar and satisfactory product.  They didn't see your camera or your lights or your computer when they hired you.  Nor (I hope) did you bring the gear along to your pre-production meeting.  If you want to be considered professional your first obligation is to deliver at least to the level that you advertise on your website.  And the kind of gear you need in order to be able to do that is something that's up to you.  My wife is a graphic designer.  She couldn't care less what camera or lens I use on her jobs.  The final tally is binary.  I got the image she wanted or I didn't.  End of story.

Professional is how you act and deliver, not something you lug around over your shoulder.