How am I shooting now? What's changed in the past few years? Months?

hardly looks like hydrogen to me...

I'm nothing if not flexible in my adaptation to new toys and tools in my business and hobby. For years I worked mostly with big Nikon and Canon cameras and I would buy "point and shoot" compact digital cameras for fun shooting, or in situations where the image was secondary to the actual experience. I bought into that paradigm for the same reason we all do; it was the prevailing thought structure for photographers, reinforced by advertising and group reinforcement. A perpetual motion machine, stuck in place by its own inertia and centrifugal force. For me the walls of the construct began to change with the introduction of really convincing point and shoot digitals like the Canon G10 (which I sorely regret selling a few years back), and various, similar cameras like the Panasonic LX-5. I even went through a dalliance with long zoom range bridge cameras and my equipment cabinet was littered with Canon SX20's, 30's and 40's until Ben and his friends sacrificed a number of them to the vagaries of kinetic video production or random skate boarding accidents. We still have one or two hanging around for "high risk" situations...

But the cameras that broke the big camera hegemony for me were the second generation of Olympus Pen micro 4:3rds cameras and their subsequent Panasonic cousins. With the Olympus EP-2, and later, the EP-3 I experienced comparable image quality (compared to my previous bigger cameras, not exactly to contemporary big cameras) which allowed me to embrace the smaller cameras and do work that was very satisfying for me. The proof of value for me of the new, small system cameras became evident on a spur of the moment trip I took to Marfa, Texas (and points west) in the Spring of 2010. On that adventure I took only EP-2 and EPL cameras and assorted lenses. My images were everything I'd hoped they would be and the 12 megapixel files were fine and dandy for prints up to 15 by 15 inches. (Go print something from a small frame camera like a Sony RX100 or a Nikon V1 and you'll likely end up questioning your previous cache of beliefs about quality and camera cost/size equations. Really).

As of the beginning of this year I had only one remaining prejudice/long held belief/precept of faith and that was the firm and tenacious religiously held belief that I could not and would not use a camera that had no eye level viewfinder. Just wouldn't do it. Interesting that for the last month I've been coming up to speed with a camera that has......no eye level viewfinder. It's a Samsung NX 300. And in the spirit of total disclosure I must state that the camera was sent to me by the folks at Samsung for free. They have given me the camera. The tenuous string they attached (but without a legally binding contract...) was a request that I post 4 images a week to their Facebook page between now and September. Considering that I tend to shoot four images in any given hour of the day I thought it would be an easy mark to achieve. 

My finder prejudice made me a bit reticent to accept the offer but only a fool turns down a free camera with lots of potential so I decided to put aside my own self induced moratorium re:  this class of camera and give it the old college try (but without the faculty politics).  Long story short the casual viewfinder style of shooting is so different and even purging to me that this has become my de facto carry around camera. While it might have seemed churlish and challenging for me to bring my full frame Sony cameras to Chris Archer's grand video project it seemed natural for me to bring along a small and inoffensive, tourist-style camera with which to capture behind the scenes images. And  truth be told it was remarkable facile to use in the low light and dusty environment. Since I have only the kit lens I wasn't about to change lenses with the sand flying around and I found two ways to hold the camera (by using tension on the neckstrap) that allowed me to hold the camera without much shake at all.

What initially drew me to use the camera more and more were the very clean files and the very neutral look of the color. Very nice files with a high degree of sharpness. The second thing that cemented my daily, casual use of the camera is its innocuous look. While it's nicely designed it does scream "consumer product" in its very contenance. 

On my first outings in bright sun I had all the viewing problems I'd anticipated, the screen was all but invisible to me without prodigious efforts to screen it with my hands, black baseball cap, part of an discarded garbage bag. As a result I started taking a large Hoodman loupe around with me when I knew I'd be shooting in the sun. The other detriment to anyone in my age group will be your ability to focus on the screen with acuity. I can do it well enough for casual images but I work better if I stick a pair of reading glasses in my pocket as an assist. Now that I do that I've started to leave the training wheels (the loupe) at home and work with more confidence in the field. It may also be that I've narrowed down the feature set I like to work with and don't need to hit the menu as often.

The fruits of my labors...

Now I'm comfortable using the camera like a hipster. Eventually I'll find a small screen protector that folds out and shades the screen a bit. I'll keep the glasses at hand. But it all started me thinking today as I was reviewing images I'd been making with the camera. Beyond my own weaknesses (proximate vision) what was at the heart of my prejudice against using the camera in this fashion?  Afterall, I'd spent the better part of 20 years staring down into a reversed, ground glass screen on my Hasselblad (the big difference being that the H-Blad screen was much darker, much less resolved and much harder to see without popping up the magnifier and essentially sealing off the viewing system from outside light). And it was the same manner of viewing for the many Rolleiflex and Mamiya twin lens cameras I owned and used promiscuously over the years...

So really, all the Samsung NX 300 needs to make me love it without conditions is the equivalent of the Hasselblad waistlevel finder with pop up maginifier that worked so well for so long.

Once I jump that hurdle there is really nothing I like less about this camera's interface or image quality than what I get with my Sony Nex cameras. In fact, the menu in this camera is much, much cleaner and better! The images are different. The Sony's seem to have a bit more color and tonal bite than the Samsung but the Samsung files are more open and don't have an oppressive or heavy feel to the colors.

Here's something I didn't expect when using the rear screen...I've reverted to a much more careful compositional rigor than I employ when I use an eye level composition method. Much more rigorous! I look for the out of focus stuff in the background and I'm much more aware of juxtapositions of shapes and people. I'll admit it, I'm kind of hooked. 

Note to Samsung: Send me a couple more bodies and three or four juicy lenses and I'll trade you for my Nex stuff. I'm learning a new way to shoot and, yes, I could do the same with the screens on the back of the Sony's but I have to do it this way with the Samsung. Maybe I needed to be pushed more...

At any rate the Samsung is a hands down winner in my book and I'm adjusting quickly to my hipster/dirty baby diaper camera hold....well as much as I can. I still look around to make sure no "real" photographers are around before I do it. Old habits and pretensions die hard.

Kirk Tuck tries the "retro" setting and is mildly pleased.

Ahhh. Caffee Medici. A variation from coffee on a hot summer afternoon. Loving the out of focus areas in the background.

Muted color and long dynamic range means lots of room to play in post...

It's Friday morning and I'm procrastinating because I have two writing assignments due by the end of the day. I'll make it.  By the skin of my teeth....

More water under the bridge. Hello to 14,000,000 pageviews.

Seems Zany Crazy to Me But We Just Crested the Fourteen Million Mark for Pageviews here at the Visual Science Lab. We've given Kirk Tuck (creative content creator, photographer and writer) a few hours off and we'll let him start his late night shift a few hours later than usual to mark the milestone.

We have some interesting news coming up later in the Summer about online education. Stay tuned for the announcement in the late, sizzlely part of the Summer. We're in massive pre-production at this point. Maybe that's why Kirk seems a bit scattered and more prone to write in the third person...

Let him know that 14 million pages eyed is no mean feat by writing him a random comment below. He'll appreciate it at five when we give him his cup of instant, decaf coffee, an old donut and his assignment for the day tomorrow. Every little bit helps.

Wild, massive, fun, scary, edgy creative projects help keep everyone on their toes and force you to learn new things.

A construction inside an old airplane hanger at Meuller Airport.

I have a friend that I met through swimming named, Chris Archer. He's an awesome former UT swimmer and all around good guy and he's been working as a photographer for the last few years. I used him as an assistant on a food shoot for a major hotel last year and really liked his personality and his work ethic, so when he asked me if I would help him with a complex video project I was pleased to say, "yes."

Chris is relatively new to video and up until recently most of his shoots have been done with a Nikon D800, and mostly handheld. But Chris is a disciplined professional who can jump into new stuff and study it deeply.  Chris teamed up with a modern dancer named Amy to brainstorm a really cool video project that would be a gem in each of their portfolios. Amy created a dance that takes place on a field of sand, against a curtain of falling sand, set against limbo black and Chris created a way to shoot that creative construct with fine control and very high production value.

This is the basic set construction. The wooden structure provides a place from which to 

pour sand and anchor our black background. Note the two troughs for sand that radiate out from the center point, near the top of the structure.

The project required about two tons of sand and a lot of lifting. Inside each trough, in separate compartments, are electric sanders that provide vibration to even out the distribution of sand. The construction of the super structure took the entire day, last Sunday. Once the structure was finished we tested it and fine-tuned the flow of sand. 

Then Chris was able to bring out his camera and start figuring out where the edges of the frame were and how to set up to take advantage of the confines of the set. I got busy lighting stuff. I brought along my gray case full of grip gear in order to safely and securely set up lights overhead. We knew we wanted a soft, overhead light for our main camera work so we settled on a Chimera Pancake, with skirt. We attached it to the safety rail of the structure, right over the spot in which Amy would be dancing. The light source inside the Chimera Pancake was a 1,000 watt mogul bulb (big ass tungsten).

Chimera Pancake Lantern with skirt for blocking off spill light and directing illumination into a smaller circle.

If you look at the image below you'll see a rare example of my attention to both safety and detail. I needed the light to be at least two feet out from the support in order to hit the "sweet spot" of the dance set below so I used one Super Clamp to attach my rig to the 2x4" board. The rig consisted of a Super Clamp, holding a Manfrotto Magic Arm, connected to a stand adapter and then to the light. You can see a second Super Clamp near the bottom of the frame with a wire attached. I have a tether wire running to both the Magic Arm and to the speed ring of the light itself. This way, if anything chooses to detach itself, all the materials would be caught by the tether wires instead of raining down on dancer or crew. Safety first with overhead instruments.

A view of the Magic Arm and its safety harness.

All the principal photography was done with the new, Sony F55 camera which shoots in uncompressed 4k, uses a full frame sensor, and was set up with a PL lens mount. We used Zeiss Super Speed Cine Primes for the entire project. Chris's choice of lenses was the 35mm t-1.5, the 50mm t-1.5 and the 85mm t-1.5, and yes, they are worth the cost. Each of the lenses was amazingly sharp at its widest aperture. Sharp in a way that very few camera lenses I've played with really are. The camera is not light at 13.5 pounds and gets incrementally heavier with every attachment one adds. Like high performance battery packs and one of the most detailed EVF finders I've ever looked through. Interested in the F55? Look at one here. Sony made this camera for people (Hollywood) who want to make feature films.

Sony F 55 on Sachtler sticks with Zeiss Super Speed lens.

As you can imagine, we all worked hard at keeping sand off the camera and especially out of the optical pathway. I didn't try to take any still shots with it but I'd guess with the huge pixel wells on a full frame, 8 megapixel sensor, the low light shots would be amazing. Interesting fact: the native ISO on the camera (base ISO sensor sensitivity) is 1250. But the camera is nothing without the idea and the nuts and bolts production.

By Monday Afternoon we had thirty feet by nine feet of black flocked material stapled into place

and the volunteer crew was loading up the sand troughs and filling up the dance area.

Volunteering to help Chris and Amy with their project was an good move for me. We got to try out lots of things I haven't done before in a shoot. And helping them with their creative project reminded me of the enormous value of shooting for yourself; following your own creative muse with a disregard for cost and time. Getting things right because you want them to be right, not because you need to get paid. I think the process of self-assigning kicks up the creative juices to a higher level because your audience is so much more discerning and, at the same time, less compromising. The cost of a project like this? I'll estimate just the rentals and raw materials at about $ 6,000. Time is a whole different matter. This is not a Kickstarter project or a project funded with other people's money. This was a project that Amy and Chris did because they had a vision and wanted to see it through without compromise or distraction. 

Chris and Amy did about two weeks of planning and preproduction for the shoot. The stage assembly, video shooting and set tear down was four, twenty hour days in an airplane hangar with no air conditioning or amenities. In Texas. In the Summer. The edit will probably take weeks of time. Do the rest of us have the same commitment to creating our own art? It humbles me and makes me think that I'm just playing around at being a creative person sometimes. Working on a project like this (as a volunteer) kicks your ass in a number of ways. First, you want to make sure your friend is able to achieve the vision he had when he started. That should be a matter of pride for any volunteer. Second, you are learning by example how to be "all in" for a project. Chris and Amy sweated every detail and spent an incredibly concentrated amount of time during the actual shooting. No breaks for play-off games on TV (what a crappy waste of precious time that would be). No end of day re-caps at the local watering hole. Just work until you get "it."

Finally, they show me by example what it takes to make a vision not only come alive but to do it in a way that faithfully captures the initial dream. Not "good enough" but exactly "what I saw in my mind's eye."

This is the incredibly talented Amy. No Diva here. She hauled sand, carried in drinking water and repeated tough motions over and over again for the camera. Graceful as they come but also tough as nails...

At one point we needed to go harder and stronger with the lighting. So we did.

We were shooting some footage for slow motion and needed some extra light power for the exposure. We decided on a bare Arriflex 1000 watt open face fixture with barndoors and used the rudimentary controls to tighten the beam a bit. We also added a front fill light which was an Arriflex 650 watt open face fixture in a Chimera video softbox with a 3/4 stop front diffuser. You'll notice our black Westcott FastFlag running interference between the fill light and the left side of the set. We wanted to keep as much light as possible off the black.

Amy Smoothing the Sand Before a Take.

The view above gives you an idea of how our light ended up looking for the slow motion sequences. You can get away with a harder light on video since your subject is in constant motion.

Chris operates the ten foot jib. 

On Tuesday morning we broke out the ten foot jib and assembled it. The jib comes packed in pieces in rigid travel cases and sometimes feels as though it requires a degree in mechanical engineering for assembly. Fortunately Chris had the foresight to ask the rental house here in Austin (GEAR) to show him the set up procedure, and while they took him through the steps he documented each one on his iPhone. Major plus for us. We stuck the Sony F 55 on one end and just about 90 pounds of counterweights on the other end. Along with the internal slider weight we were able to achieve a totally neutral balance. You could operate the whole rig with one finger (if you were brave enough to do so with a camera that's more expensive than my car at the other end...)

The Camera at the end of the ten foot jib. Chris was as smooth an operator on his first go around as I've seen with seasoned pros.

I'm a real baby where safety and expensive gear are concerned so you can see in the image above that I've insisted on safety tethering the camera unit to the super-structure of the jib. I didn't want the camera to come loose and fall on Amy or into the sand pile. It never budged but I'm paranoid enough to think that something might have happened if I'd had the hubris NOT to tether the camera.  The purple cord is to the LCD monitor at the back of the jib that allows Chris to move the massive arm with assurance.

Amy during a take with sand falling and camera moving smoothly.

Chris operating the boom while monitoring the frame in the small monitor on the end of the arm.

While we had missteps and false starts and issues with every imaginable part of the project Chris and Amy were able to problem solve, resolve and move on with the performance and filming with a discipline and endurance that was astounding. I saw a lot of the footage as we were shooting and lighting and I'm very excited about the project. I can hardly wait for the weeks it will take to edit, and then edit some more, and then finally put it into a form I can watch from head to tail. I already know it will be amazing. Chris has definitely stepped up to the creative challenge of high production motion and made some great art. One showing at the right agency and he'll be moving into the role of director in no time.

I was happy to be a small part of the crew. It made me think. It made me work with some new passion and it made me reflect. That's a lot to get in return for volunteering.

 I love this last shot because it shows off the use of the boom (jib) and divides the frame in a nice, offset diagonal with the triangle of the slightly offset hangar door echoing the white glow of the hot light on the set. Note the black flag to the side of the soft box to keep light off the black set wall. Note also the equipment case that gives Chris a safe spot to "land" the jib between shots. It all seems so cool.

P.S. All of my "behind the scenes" shots were made with the Samsung NX 300 camera and kit lens.

Making portraits of people you find captivating is like trying to explain how joy works in life. And none of the little details matter in the least.

Ring light. Nikon D2x. A photograph. My studio. 2007.

Making a conference fun? Just do the math.

One of the things I love about my job is the enormous variety of people I get to meet and work with. This is a photograph of Stan and me. Stan is a professor of mathematics in California and a reader of the VSL blog. Stan recommended me for an assignment here in Austin. It was a conference about math education and we just wrapped up our third and final day a little after noon today. As you might infer from the images above and below part of the assignment called for me to set up a "studio" in one conference room and spend part of yesterday making portraits of organization's board members, officers and other VIPs. Most of our efforts were much more serious than these shown and I tried to be on my best behavior for most of the event. I even wore socks.

Here's how this event worked. The framework was something like this: start each day with a general session in the main ballroom of the AT&T conference center (on the UT campus) and hear presentations from distinguished speakers. Then each day gets divided up into series of short and direct "break out" sessions where speakers work in 15 minute cycles and share best practices, new methodologies and insights with their colleagues. Interspersed at wide intervals are meals, snacks and the occasional, large joint session. My brief included getting at least five good shots of every presenter (spread across four rooms on two floors and running concurrently...) as well as casual images of the attendees networking, sharing and hanging out.

The organizational portraits were another layer.

On the first day I arrived in the parking garage and loaded up the cart. If you work on location and you don't have a good, four wheel cart to haul your light stands, lights, tripod, cameras, posing stool and half case of Red Bull (kidding) then you are just wearing yourself down and you should stop reading right here until you've ordered a good cart. Mine is a Multi Cart, I've had it for at least 10 years. It's indestructible and folds down enough to fit gracefully in the back of my car. Since I wanted to basically bring along a complete portrait studio I packed: four Elinchrom D-Lite 4it 400w/s monolights, extension cords, reflectors, umbrellas, grids, and  diffusion scrims. Along with a background and background stand system, a pneumatic posing stool and some extra tungsten lights that the production company mentioned they might need. Not an unreasonable amount of gear but maybe five or six trips back and forth to the car if you don't have a cart...

Of course I can never decide what to bring, camera-wise, so I brought an assortment with which to play. The most used camera/lens combination was the Sony a99+Sony 70-200mm 2.8G lens because it gave me just the right amount of reach for close podium shots and high sharpness even when shooting wide open and fully zoomed out to 200mm. Noise was very, very well controlled at ISO 3200 and perfectly acceptable (and usable in dark rooms) at ISO 6400. The "big two" camera makers don't have a lock on clean, high ISO files...

The next most used camera for the first two days was the Sony a58, coupled with the Rokinon 85mm 1.5 Cine lens and it was amazingly fun to use. I'd put the camera in manual exposure mode, have a preset custom white balance for the podium of the main room and I'd bring the camera up to my eye with the manual aperture ring wide open and then I'd roll the aperture down toward f4 until the image in the EVF was perfect. Then I'd shoot. The whole procedure takes much longer to write but effectively gave me absolutely perfect exposures every single time I hit the shutter button. 

The external, manual aperture ring was like magic. You could see the exposure firm up as you watched and you knew just where to stop. I also liked working with the manual focusing, coupled with focus peaking. As I racked the ultra smooth (not fly by wire) focusing ring I could see little glistens of red come into being on the edges of a subject's glasses or even in the reflection of the highlight in the subject's eyes and know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the camera and I were both focusing on exactly what I wanted to have in focus. Once I started working this way with the 85mm and got such rock solid fine focus results I also took the 70-200mm off AF and worked with it in the same way. Control is a wonderful thing! Especially with very narrow DOF.

I brought along a few other lenses, including the Rokinon 35mm 1.5 Cine lens, the Sony 20mm and various wide to medium focal length fast zooms. But the 85 and the 70/200 easily saw the most use.

Before I started using the LED EVF cameras I was always torn about which way to go for file format at events. I am a.......promiscuous shooter and I figure that if 500 frames in a day is good then a thousand must be twice as good. At least it gives me a statistical advantage vis-a-vis overcoming blinks and awkward facial expressions. So, in the days of 6 megapixel sensors and so-so Jpeg performance (along with bad LCD monitors) there was always the motivation to shoot raw. The cameras back then didn't give you enough fast and accurate feedback to nail color and perfect exposure every time and it was comforting to be able to rescue miscues and mistakes with raw converters.

Since acquiring and testing both the Sony a99 and the a58 I've abandoned that philosophy and put in the extra work to get the images right in large, superfine jpeg format. (The a58 has only "fine" but it's "fine" is much better than the jpegs I've gotten out of other brands I've used so I'm pretty happy).  The jpegs from my cameras clock in between 6.5 and 10 megabytes apiece while the raw files from the camera range in the +/- 25-30 megabyte range and that's enough of a difference in storage and processing to make a big difference when confronted with the need to edit 2500 to 3000 files from an event.

Since I had my cart and a safe spot to leave gear I also brought along the Sony a850 which I am perennially testing out with the 50mm 1.4 Sony lens, along with the newest addition to the family, the Samsung NX 300 and it's happy kit lens. That camera and lens combination does really good image stabilization and it's 3200 ISO is also quite usable. Better by a long shot than the same ISO setting on the a850.

As I was learning the light in the four main rooms I'd be shooting in I worked with an old Leitz Tiltall monopod with a Leica ballhead for added stability but I tried not to forget that camera movement is only half the equation and subject movement (which punks both camera support and IS) is the other half of the equation. I found that, with IS in the a99 enabled, I could mostly get sharp exposures with the long lens at speeds down to 1/30th of a second, reliably but the movement of my subjects effectively limited my lower shutter speed to around 1/125th and, with highly kinetic speakers (hands waving and constantly moving) 180th or even 1/250th worked better. I could have used more flash but I find it intrusive at conferences and I'd rather go up on the ISO and grapple with noise, if necessary. Fortunately only one of the four rooms required me to either go beyond ISO 3200 or use flash.

Since I use a lot of LED, Fluorescent and studio flash lighting in my usual business routines I hadn't done much in the way of testing out the combination of the a99 and the HVL 60 flash but I did use it in one of the rooms to overcome the sheer lack of light and the overall color balance and exposure worked flawlessly. At one point I finally had to deal with the temperature shut down issue with the flash. I'd cycled it at full power to bounce it off a far wall and a ceiling that was a good 25 feet high. After a cumulative series of 20 flashes the unit shut down and showed me a thermometer icon on the back panel. Of course I had an HVL 58 in the camera bag, with the adapter for the a99 on the foot and all ready to go but I didn't need to reach for it. The 60 came back on line in a matter of a few minutes and worked the rest of the day (with me using it under the conditions that Sony recommends) without any other incidents. I am reading Gary Friedman's book on the a99 again to come to grips with the remote flash capabilities of the combination of flashes and cameras I own and I'll write about that in the near future.

While the conference kept me moving and busy for two and a half days we were well treated by the event committee. (by "we" I don't mean the "royal" we I mean me, the photographer; the sound man and the videographers who were part of the AV team helping to make the conference a success....). We ate our meals with the academicians, took breaks when the attendees took breaks and generally enjoyed a very collegial atmosphere. The food was great, the venue gorgeous and the exact opposite of frantic, and the sense of purpose for the general good gave the event a positive vibe that made the work more enjoyable. It's wonderful to understand that probably every single participant at the conference was there to help teach, or learn to teach, our children advanced math in new and better ways. I'm more used to conferences that are about how to profit from technology so this point of view was refreshing, to say the least.

In the end I shot around 3000 shots and edited down to 2000. About 20 minutes after the last speaker concluded and the event broke up I handed Stan a 16 gigabyte thumb drive with all the images on it. Ten minutes later I handed another one to the production company and a third to a strategic partner for the show. I'll still need to back everything up and make an archive but I'm happy that everyone has materials in their hands for immediate use.

Once I said good bye to the new friends I'd made I headed back downstairs to break down our makeshift studio, load up the cart and trek back toward my part of town. I'll chalk this one up as one of the most fun conferences I've done this year. And one of the least stressful. And that's a wonderful thing. One bonus: absolutely no "pie" jokes. So I'll write one now: 

A Texas Aggie (student at Texas A&M University; alma mater of Gov. Rick Perry) went home to visit his parents. His father asked him about his studies. "What did you learn at that fancy school?" His son beamed and said, "We learned pi r squared."   The father looked a bit frustrated and shook his head. "Son, " he said. "Jalapeno cornbread are square. Pie are round." Bada Boom. 

A big thanks to Stan and all the Mathemateers. Thank you.