A New Camera Showed Up On My Doorstep Friday. It's the Samsung NX30. I Took It To SXSW.

What is it? It's a Samsung NX30. A 20 megapixel, APS-C, Mirror Free

Interchangeable lens camera. It arrived on Friday in the Fed Ex 

shipment and I've agreed to shoot with it for a while and post a few images on a regular basis. 

No other strings attached. 

When I experimented with Samsung's experimental Galaxy NX camera last year I was very happy with the sensor but less so with the paucity of physical control interfaces (buttons and knobs). I also felt that the inclusion of the Android operating system and all of the software and connectivity bells and whistles interfered with the pure photography aspect of the camera. My final criticism was about the low res and not very color accurate EVF. When I sent the camera back to Samsung I also included my notes about what I wanted to see in a future gen camera. In almost every respect that camera is the new NX 30 camera. Samsung's P.R. agency sent me one and a kit lens to use with it last Friday. Here's a report of my first 24 hours with the camera:

The box was small. The camera is small. About the size of a Panasonic G6 but with a rounder design aesthetic. The camera body itself is smoother and more rounded. The camera is a mirror less, APS-C sensor camera that uses the entire range of Samsung NX series lenses and has both a "twisty/bendy" rear LCD screen as well as a nicely done EVF. The EVF is a much higher resolution than the previous Samsung cameras and it's nice to look at. It could use a bit faster refresh rate for fast moving objects but it's a big improvement and it's at least competitive with the majority of EVF finders in it's class. The EVF does have one magic trick. You can pull the finder eyepiece out away from the camera body and angle it up to 90 degrees. Nice for low angle shots and an advantage for studio table top work. 

Like most of the new cameras I've come across lately it doesn't come with a conventional charger, the camera comes with a USB charger and cable that restricts you to charging in camera. Since I currently have only one battery I don't really mind... yet. From my point of view there's a lot to like about this camera. It's got a nice 20 megapixel sensor that seems to perform well. I shot stuff from ISO 100 to ISO 3200 yesterday and noise was not problematic. On a few frames I thought the noise reduction was a bit heavy handed but that's probably what I get for not shooting raw and not paying attention to the noise reduction settings in the menu. I've now opted for "off" because I love to go to extremes. I'll get it fine tuned as I continue to use the camera. 

The exterior control buttons give me quick access to most of the operations I want to use and pushing the FN button gets me a few more. Once the camera is set up you'll rarely have to dive into the menus but if you do you'll find them logical and well structured. The camera has all kinds of connectivity niceties but as you might guess I've turned off as many of these as I could find. There's still a little drain to the battery but I'll try to hunt that down and squash it as well. For me a camera should be ALL about taking the image. Anything that interferes with that, even if it's just a quicker battery drain, is to be avoided. 

I know that many of you feel uncomfortable if you can't upload your images immediately but until everyone gets the shooting experience of the cameras just right that fast access capability is just a distraction. Agree or disagree. But I'm speaking from my own experience. 

So, on the camera you have buttons for a quick menu call up (FN--which is programmable), WB, AF, Drive Modes, Display, Metering pattern, a big exposure Mode dial and two control dials. There's also the EV compensation button and an AEL button. If you need more controls you can enable the touch screen and customize the quick menu on the rear screen. Also, some of these controls are available by pushing the fn button on many of the Samsung lenses. The settings come up on a dial and I actually like the representation and the sound effects that go with them. This is the first camera on which I have not totally disabled sound effects. Almost forgot, there is also a movie start button on the top panel of the camera. All of these physical controls are a good thing because I don't care how good a touch screen might be there are situations like cold, dry weather that interfere with the touch interface and nothing is more frustrating to me than a camera that can't be controlled at will. My will. 

I'll confess that I didn't read the owner's manual. I felt like my experiences with the Samsung Galaxy NX would put me in the control ballpark for this camera and, so far, I have not been wrong. I charged the battery while I worked on a proposal and when the green light came on I packed up my stuff and headed out. We're in SXSW (South by Southwest Interactive, Film and Music Festivals) for two weeks. 50,000+ people from around the world descend on our town for this and the parking goes from tight to non-existent to $100 a day. I walked a half mile to our neighborhood bus stop and rode the bus to the epicenter of the excitement. It cost a buck. Chalk one up for mass transportation!

The bus ride also gave me time to go through every menu on the camera and personalize it to my shooting requirements/proclivities. S-AF, Single point AF, Auto-ISO, diopter fine tuned, Jpeg Super/turbo fine, matrix metering, etc. By the time I hit Congress Ave. I felt like I'd used the camera for weeks. Easy and straight forward. 

I walked around downtown and shot a couple hundred snap shots. I was looking for things like: How fast the focus locked in (very fast! Snapped in is more like it...must be the PD on chip), How quickly the camera shifted from LCD to EVF (quick indoors and slower in full sun. When I shoot in full sun now I just go into the menu and choose EVF all the time. Works great. 

The camera is a great size for my average hands. It's also a good size for my wife's smaller hands. 

When I started my journey to the great intellectual marketplace being held downtown there was a weak but present sunlight punching through wimpy patches of clouds but as the afternoon wore the clouds moved in and everything was over cast. I took a very small leather backpack along with me for the usual collection of modern clutter. My cellphone. A pair of reading glasses. A back up camera in the form of the Panasonic G6 (in case the sole battery for the Samsung raced to zero) and two extra batteries for it. I also dropped in my Kindle Fire so I could read Anthony Artis' book, Shut Up and Shoot. (A good but slightly dated resources for videographers who do documentaries, interviews, etc.).

At first I was a bit put off by the camera for two reasons, both associated with viewing. The EVF is about a stop hotter than the LCD in its rendering of scenes. The LCD and the histograms agrees and my computer agrees with them too. But while there is a control to change the brightness and color of the LCD I haven't found the same control for the EVF. The second point was that in bright, exterior lighting the sensor that decides when to switch between the EVF and LCD seems to see too much ambient light and is loathe to switch to the EVF unless you crush your eye socket right into the eyepiece. Well, I don't much use LCDs in bright ambient light so I found the menu item that would allow me to select my viewer manually and I set it to always be the EVF. That will come in handy when shooting theater as well. Then I set up the menu display to always show the live histogram and I was making a subconscious accommodation for the bright finder within the hour. Done. 

The rear screen is just like every other rear screen on cameras that I use. It's bright, sharp and detailed as long as you are in the studio controlling the light. If I'm are standing around in the sun shine I can't see a damn thing on the screens. And if I'm wearing something reflective like a white t-shirt I can see even less... This is why for the last few years I've railed about the need for all cameras to have some sort of eye level viewing mechanism. Even if it's the contrived, giant loupe I have for my Pentax K-01 Super Cameras. The screen on the NX 30 is no different. A pleasure in the studio or in a restaurant or bar but a freakin' nightmare in high EV settings with lots of photons bouncing around. Thank you very much, Samsung, for the EVF. 

All in all my initial reaction to this camera is different from my reaction to the Samsung Galaxy NX. That camera refused to work for me, out of the box, until I logged on  and registered it online. The new camera comes with the connectivity in the "off" mode. And in no way does the mania for wi-fi or NFC effect my ability to snap the shutter in a timely fashion.

I've used two lenses on the camera so far; both with very good results. The first is the kit lens (18-55mm) which I originally got when Samsung sent me an NX300. It's a good kit lens and it has a control button on the side that you can push and the camera ratchets through four frequently used controls, including my favorites, EV and WB. The lens seems sharp enough and the range is nice. But the one I really like a lot is the 30mm f2. It has neither the I.S. nor the function button on it but it's small, light and quite sharp. 

I was nervous about battery life so I found myself turning the camera on and off again much more so than I do when I use a camera which I have a pocketful of batteries for. But during the course of my shooting the battery indication never dropped below 70% and the battery does seem to charge pretty quickly. 

I think Samsung has made a good competitor for the rest of the mirror less systems on the market. While it's not as polished as the Olympus OMD EM-1 the bigger sensor offers some advantages. Will I switch everything, drink the KoolAide and shoot everything with the Samsung? I think you know me better than that. I would get bored to tears just shooting one model or brand of camera. But I will stick a strap on this one and squire it around for a while to see just what I can get out of it.

Below are some images I shot at SXSW yesterday. Nothing spectacular but I was looking for technical stuff on this go around...

Kirk daringly executes a selfie. 

The Cavernous "Check in and Get your Badge" area.

People of the floor.

I like to stick images up on the wall and look at them and try to figure out why I like them.

Back in the days of film and darkrooms 

we used to make 20 by 24 inch work prints

like they were free Xeroxes. 

I just wanted to see what stuff looked like

BIG.

So, after a long day of paperwork and planning and phone meetings I came back into the studio after dinner and played. I looked through boxes with hundreds and hundreds of large, black and white prints and I pulled some out and laid them out on the floor and thumbtacked em to the walls. I pulled out some fun nudes we did back in the 1990's and some great portraits from the 1980's and few from last month that I just got back from a real lab and I laid them out and just walked around the room looking at them. 

I'm not planning a show or anything like that-----I just wanted to see how work looks when it's big and it's aged like a fine, old red wine. And it's really having an effect on me that I didn't anticipate. I'm happy with my portraits. One thing I've been missing from digital is printing stuff really big. Printing it really big and printing the perfect frame and the frames on either side and the frames on either side of those. And then living with the work for a while. Big.

It's curious. After the passage of long years I seem to like the alternate frames. The ones I didn't show. The nudes between the sensual and the prurient. The expressions that were just to one side of alluring. 

I'm thinking I need to send more stuff out to be printed big. There's no question that today's cameras can handle it. And I'd like to have another dozen or so boxes of 100 prints or more in the "just because I can" vault before I hang it up. 

Maybe I am thinking much more along the lines of what I see in this project (motion/film/video):

http://thecreatorsproject.vice.com/blog/exclusive-video-look-into-godfrey-reggios-new-film-visitors-as-it-looks-into-you

Hope you are having a nice Thursday. Any time to go out today and look at stuff?

Oh fashion, thou art a cruel mistress...

The mindset of one photographer.

All the business stuff we talk about exists only to support my inherent laziness and my desire to walk around with a camera and point it at stuff that might only interest me. Cameras are props that allow me to stare longer at people and situations by circumventing typical social conventions concerning direct staring and spatial intrusion. Everything I shoot is source material for future fictional writing. Or it's a resonant reminder of amalgamations I want to remember.

Everything I shoot for myself is a form of archival memory of a feeling, a thought, a visual  juxtaposition. My goal is rarely the printed image hung on a wall. My sharing mainly consists of putting images up on this blog to illustrate what I write about.

The images are self contained historical artifacts that I use to prove to myself that I've lived and experienced the things I have. If other people like them then my ego is happy. If no one liked them I would keep shooting but stop showing. How can the images have the same resonance for others that they have for me. None of us share the same unique set of experiences.

We are all on a journey through life and the only important thing in my mind is to understand where I've been and where I might be going. The camera helps me keep track of my progress. This is selfish but it's true. I don't do this (writing or photography) for anyone else and I suspect anyone who says that their over riding motivation is to share their work for other's benefit of either trying to fool their public or trying to fool themselves.

I had a thought today when I was talking to another professional photographer over coffee. Maybe the cameras that help us elicit our best work, the machines that help us break through the clutter. are the ones that give us the most friction and the least handling satisfaction. Maybe  having to fight against a recalcitrant machine is an important part of some sort of process. Maybe the operational friction makes us bear down harder and commit to our purpose more forcefully.

I was reminded when I selected this photograph that I was working at the time with the Samsung Galaxy NX camera and there were things I didn't like about the apparatus. The EVF was mediocre and the operational speed of the camera was much doggier than my usual cameras. Saving files was more an art than a science.... But it was the camera I had in my hand at the time. (and in its defense still very much a beta product). But somehow I felt more invested in the images that I successfully shot because each one required more of my attention and more of my focused intention.

Maybe we've been thinking about all this photography gear in the wrong way. Maybe we should be looking for cameras that create more challenges for us. More obstacles to overcome. Maybe the determination to win is vital to mastering the image rather than being handed the image on a spoon, with tremendous ease. Perhaps the challenge brings a deeper spirit to the fore and moves us to think more clearly.

Then again maybe all current cameras have become more or less transparent. The obvious ones being too transparent.  And it's the very transparency or lack of effort that diminishes our feelings of satisfaction and competence.

Someone recently remarked about the image of the art historian that I put up that they didn't understand. Was I pranking my viewers? The image had graininess and wasn't acerbically, surgically sharp. Could my reader have missed the entire point of a portrait or did I misunderstand the need for technical perfection in every modern piece of art? Non-perfection. The new feature set.

A good reminder from Thom Hogan... The value of "unique."

http://www.dslrbodies.com/technique/technique-articles/improving-the-photographer/outrunning-those-just-behin.html

Had coffee with an interesting person this morning who pointed me to Thom's column. It's a good read.

Important announcement from the CEO of the Visual Science Lab: All serious cameras are now better than they need to be.

If you are ancient enough to remember the early days of digital photography you might remember that Kodak (the people who largely invented digital imaging...) announced that the "Holy Grail" of digital would be to match the performance of slide film.  Estimates varied but most experts at the time figured that the number to hit was about 6 megapixels. When we hit that number with the Kodak 660 and 760 cameras a lot of professionals and well heeled amateurs figured we had arrived, dumped the film cameras and stared bravely into the future. And that's when the whining started....

All the cameras are better than you are...

There were few arguments about having hit the original metric. We had achieved the goal of replacing the cameras most of us used to shoot film with cameras that would shoot digital files equally well but at that very moment the marketing race lunged off the starting mark and began dragging the marketing carrot around the track with vigor. Was 6 megapixels enough? Well, of course, but it didn't take long for Canon and Nikon to realize that this was a new game and one they could rig by playing to our uncertainties. Our insecurities as artists. After all, if your competitors only had 6 megapixels wouldn't you be more....infallible with 8 megapixels? And then 10? And then 12? And then....

I remember when we hit the 12 megapixel mark. Canon had their 1Ds (full frame) camera and Nikon had their D2x camera. Both were superb. Both could knock images out of the ballpark when used appropriately. What do I mean by appropriately? Well, if we shot them the way we did in the film days (when we were more than reasonably happy with the performance of our film+cameras) that would mean using good techniques. And good techniques meant using the lowest ISO possible, choosing the optimum aperture and providing a stable base for the camera. Easy stuff.  I looked back recently at some portraits I'd done on the D2x and wonder why I fell for the next campaign of fear and uncertainty and "upgraded" from there. 

But I know why we upgraded. The camera companies did a remarkably good job at creating the appearance of competition between photographers. When they ran out of megapixels they turned their attention to another area they could exploit; the ability to deliver cleaner files at high ISOs. With a Nikon D2xs you were safe shooting anything under 400 ISO but you were definitely on shaky ground once you passed the ISO 800 mark. And anything over 1600 qualified you as a photo-pointilist. The Seurat of imaging.  And rather than embrace and hug our tripods or turn up the volume on our plentiful flashes we followed right along and bought the cameras with the cotton candy ISOs. Everywhere we looked people were shooting mediocre, unlit images at 3200 ISO. So many crappy images were shot with no noise that it actually changed (by sheer inertia) the basic styles in which we shot. Everything became poorly lit and had tiny planes of sharp focus.

Once gifted lighters became, almost overnight, "available light" photographers. That just meant that even though they knew that "motivated" lighting was superior they were willing to be lazy and just depend on whatever (usually crappy) light they found on whatever location they were working. My friends in the film industry call this "New York Lighting" which suggests that a New York D.P. walks into any room/location, no matter how heinous the light, and if there are enough aggregated photons floating around (no matter how green or uni-directional), they consider the room "well lit" making the effort of additional lighting unnecessary.

Almost overnight all of the best practices of generations of photographers were thrown out the window and an endless cascading chorus of, "DON'T WORRY, WE'LL FIX IT IN POST" resonated in advertising agencies and Starbucks hosted photo offices almost overnight. The sad thing is that most of us bought into this "space race" mentality and slavishly followed along. 

But a few years ago the myth all started falling apart. A company called Olympus chummed up with a company called Panasonic and they introduced a tiny new format called micro four thirds ( a really dumbass name, to be sure...) and they started making cameras that reminded us of the fun, smaller cameras we used to have. The ones that didn't weigh a ton. And we started to use them. At first they weren't as good as the cutting edge "fat boy" digital cameras of the day but over the last two years they have become almost unimaginably better. Surely within striking distance of everything in their price class. And while the adaptation rate in the U.S. (lower education standards than most of the rest of the world) has been slow many parts of the world are snapping them up and eroding market share of the conventional mirrored digital cameras. This is even more interesting since the smaller cameras had the misfortune to be launched during the biggest financial meltdown of our generations (yes, plural!).

But recently, when some well known photographers compared the best of the m4:3 cameras to the newest generation of full frame, high megapixel cameras they came to an interesting conclusion: The files from the smaller cameras looked just as good or better. Russell Rutherford (famous fashion and sports shooter) went into a store to buy a Sony A7 and came out with an Olympus EM-1. People started leaving D800s at home in deference to Sony, Fuji and Olympus mirror less cameras. And the people who did this found out a very interesting fact: Since about 2008 all of the better cameras (non-budget, non-point&shoot) made files that were.....good enough. Really. For every use other than critical work at huge sizes the files---when used with identically good technique--- they were the equals of each other up to about 16x20 print sizes. But really, who is still printing large prints on a regular basis?

The other realization that seems to have sunk in is that most people----make that nearly all people--- who profess to be photographers end up sharing the bulk of their work on the web. Not just half their work but something like 95% of their work. And that includes everyone from advertising photographers to photojournalists. The only group not included here is fine art photographers who live and die by print sales. They haven't quite figured out how to monetize the web...(but few other photographers have either...).

I looked around the web and was stunned to find that the vast majority of pros and demi-pros who show work on the web show it at 1500 pixels on a long side or less. What happens to the other 4000+ pixels on that long side? The ones we paid so much for, over and over again? They get tossed. Just tossed. Oh, we all have the good intention of going back and making "amazing" prints from the files but the numbers just aren't there. While we've been focused on the overall decline of camera sales we seemed to have missed the numbers that point to a decline in high end ink jet paper sale and the slow down of ink jet printer ink for the high end of the market. We've finally admitted that though the print was the gold standard of the film age that quantity and relative quality of the web is the standard of the digital age, and though we grouse about it, we all seem to be accepting that and showing work there and doing our commerce there. And, for the most part, you are paying fast and loose with the truth if you say you aren't. 

Being a good consumer I bought into all of the endless megapixel hype. I rushed to buy a Canon 5Dmk2 and when Sony camera out with a higher megapixel camera, the a99, I rushed to buy that one too. But then I made two critical errors. The first one was buying a Sony a850 camera made in 2010 but based on the technology of the a900 introduced in 2009. Then I shot the cameras side by side in the way I had always shot my cameras---in the studio with lights---working at the optimum apertures and optimum ISOs (native). And amazingly the cameras' performances were nearly identical. If anything the a850 has better color separation. Or finer discrimination between colors. It's a camera that amazes me with its image quality in the same way that the Nikon D2x still amazes me. According to DXO the D2x is a piece of crap. If shot correctly it's largely still competitive for most working photographers who don't "need" to work at high ISOs. And for even most print applications the camera works well...

And the second mistake? Recently I've been working with smaller and smaller cameras like the Panasonic GH3 and even the Sony RX10. And what I keep seeing is that at most of the settings I routinely use the limiting factor is not my camera but my laziness with technique. I've written it before but it bears repeating: 

A bad camera on a good tripod generally delivers better image quality than a much better camera that's handheld by an adult who drinks coffee. 

A mediocre imaging sensor shot at its native ISO will nearly always outperform a much better sensor that is pushed to extremely high ISOs. Translation: A Canon G10 will deliver a better file when shot at ISO 80 than a Leica M240 with a $5,000 lens pushed to 3200. 

An image with great content, shot with a shitty camera, will always beat an image of your cat sleeping on the carpet shot with a medium format digital back and priceless German glass. 

A current m4:3 camera with brilliant image stabilization will almost always produce a more detailed handheld image than a full frame, 36 megapixel camera. (If the small camera is competing with an A7r with the non-optional shutter shock then make that "twice as detailed.").

What I am essentially trying to say here is that all of the cameras I've come across in the last two years, from the Nikon D800 to the Olympus EP-5 to the Fuji EX2 to the Sony  Nex-6 and Nex-7 and, yes, even the Pentax K-01, can deliver results that are nearly always better than the technique and capabilities  of the person holding them. 

In fact, we the users have become the lowest common denominator in the camera performance equation. We are the filter. We are the limiting factor. And in a nutshell that's why the market has slowed down/declined/entered free fall. We consciously or unconsciously know we have been manipulated into buying the "$200 dollar marathon racing shoes" when we know we can barely run a mile. We've bought the Lamborghini only to find that it bottoms out on our driveway and then, minutes later enters the crawl of rush hour traffic. We've bought the ultimate cameras only to point them at our cats and that pot of flowers while holding the cameras in our shaky hands and setting them to automatic... We slavishly buy better and better cameras and then wonder why our images don't improve.

Now, that doesn't apply to all of you. I'm sure that you (you know who I'm talking about) always use the lens two stops down at the ultimate aperture. I also know that you use the biggest Gitzo tripod on the market and then hedge your bets by locking up the mirror before shooting in order to squeeze the last millimeter of sharpness out of your images. And I'm equally certain that you---that one reader out of every hundred---carefully sets a perfect custom white balance every time you shoot since you know that color balance also effects exposure. And I'm certain that you never trip the shutter unless you have a wonderful image, worthy of sharing, in your sights. Right?

So, here we are. All the cameras have more megapixels than any of us ever get around to printing with. The color out of all the cameras is gorgeous (or can easily be made to be so...) and the noise in even the tiny sensor cameras is pretty good for most rational use. Why then the persistent interest in "the next camera?"  Ahh... the elegant body design. Is that it? Insert laugh. 

Wouldn't it be cool if we collectively decided that everything we have is already good enough for what we want it for and we all stopped buying cameras for a year? That might spur camera makers to: A. Lower their prices. B. Introduce useful features. C. Focus on lenses. Etc. But then it would put the burden on most of us to actually go outside and make interesting images. 

I'm thinking of a T-shirt. It's got a slogan on the front. It says, "My camera is crappier than your camera."  And on the back it says, "But I'm a better Photographer than you are." And we'll give them out to everyone who is able to make great image without having to rush out and buy the newest and greatest camera of the moment. 

It is kind of wonderful to know that we've hit a bit of a plateau and that we really can relax a bit and enjoy the bounty for a while without feeling left behind. Once the equipment barriers fall down it really does help level the playing field. Maybe we'll see some real new talents rise up. Maybe we'll have time to learn how to use what we've got and how the menus work before we trade it in or sell it. That would be novel....

Reality: If you shoot at ISO 100, 200, 400 or even 800 just about any interchangeable camera on the market will do a really good job making images. If you make reasonably sized prints every camera with 16 megapixels or more will do the job well. If you don't shoot sports for a living all of the current camera models will focus quickly enough to make most of us happy.

There are outliers. There really are people who love to shoot sports. There really are people who want to shoot in super low light just to say they could. And there are people who want to carry around the latest big camera because it's generally cheaper than buying a really cool car and more portable too.

But I am not one of them and I'm pretty happy with what we've got now.

My long overdue review of the Sony a99.

It's got a 24 megapixel sensor. It focuses native Sony lenses very quickly. The colors it generates are good. The dynamic range is super groovy. It's fun to handle. It's got lots of nice bells and whistles for video. It's full frame and weather resistant. It has an EVF instead of an OVF. I've had one since the Fall of 2012 and I haven't wanted to get rid of it yet. It's got focus peaking for optimal use with manual focus lenses like the Rokinon 85 and 35 1.5 Cine lens. Everything works just like it's supposed to. If I forget about the nuts and bolts and use it in the same fashion I've used all my other cameras throughout time it helps me make images that are technically good. Sadly, it does not provide inspiration, insight, warmth, context or vision. We have to add those to the mix ourselves.

That's the review. Would I buy it again? If I owned lots of Sony lenses and was upgrading from a previous Sony camera? You bet. Would I do it again, right now, if I had a fat wallet and a totally empty camera bag? Probably not. I think I'd just snag a Pentax 645D and a couple of good lenses and be done with it. All subjective information is subject to change.....

Image above done with a Sony a99 for my class on Studio Portraits for Craftsy.com. Go poke around at Craftsy and see what they offer in the field of photography. And baking. And food. And while you are there check out the trailers for my three courses. One of them is absolutely free.

Surface Tension or just magic? I'm glad someone is showing off.

From a series of bubble photographs I took in Berlin last year. 

I've been wondering about something and I'm not sure there is an answer but I'm working on at least getting the question right. It's about video. But it's also about the New Dcoumentarians and it's about snap shots and Martin Parr and Henri Cartier Bresson. Here goes: How do you make wonderful small videos that feel like the images that we who love documentary photography grew up admiring and savoring? 

I look at the images above and I remember the warm day, the bright colors of the giant bubbles, the excitement of the kids as they played with the bubble magic and the general feeling of the moment. Short of making a pretentious three minute documentary about bubbles, why haven't we invented the video "snapshot" or the video "street photography" that so captivates us in the other media?

I'm not sure that every video needs to tell a story as much as some might just need to evoke a feeling. Have I missed a genre? Is my education sporting a blank spot in the artistic motion category or is this something that we need to get inventing?

There are so many times during the day that I want to capture a complete moment; whether it's the arch of an expression, a quick kiss on a cheek, the way someone moves through space or even the interplay of wind and fashion in the streets. How do we do this and how do we create a market for it?

I'm serious. I really want to know. Is all video condemned to be a linear story (even if it is sequenced out of linear time)? Does there have to be a beginning, middle and end? Can there be a short moment that's just right like the opening notes of A Stairway to Heaven? 

It's a new interest of mine and if you have something to share about it don't be shy about commenting at length....

Spending time indoors today. Working on some old files I didn't pay enough attention to and writing the blog.

The rear of a building somewhere in Berlin.

It's been a cold, wet, blustery day in Austin. I've been cooped up in a conference room for half the week and crunched up in front of a computer for the other half and bad weather or not I decided to take a couple hours this morning and go for a walk downtown. The city is gearing up for the annual celebration of hip-ism and cultural smugness that we've come to know as SXSW (South by Southwest). I thought we just had the two weeks of it that combines Interactive, Cinema and then Music but I misjudged the show's overall ability to metastasize and continue growing and, of course I left out the newest added week, the SXSW Education conference. Yes, it starts tomorrow.

I carried around a big, black umbrella today. I held it in my left hand and swiveled it into an ever-changing compromise between the rake of the wind and the rain and good forward visibility. In my right hand I grasped the Sony a850 and it's partner, the Sigma 50mm 1.4. I tried for a while to keep water drops off the combination but eventually I gave up and focused most of my attention on keeping the umbrella from dramatically inverting every time I stepped into a new slip stream between large buildings. 

It was nice to get out and walk but I was happy to come back to the studio and settle back in. I fired up the magic imaging box and went looking for the images I'd shot last year in Berlin. I remembered that I'd shot a few good ones and I knew that I set them aside and temporarily lost track of that train of thought. I was on a vague mission of rediscovery today. 

The image above was one of those quiet images that sneaks up on me. I turned a corner and came to this quiet place in the middle of a bustling city and the quiet of the shadow side of this building made me stop and savor the intimate isolation. It felt almost like I was waiting on a rendezvous with a beautiful woman. There was a shimmer to the space that I couldn't explain. I tried to make an interesting image and pull in some of the feeling of amorphous anticipation that kept me company. 

I love the blue of daylight peaking around the right corner and the soft green saturation on the top left corner from the light filtering through wings of green leaves. Diamonds and diagonals. Rich colors and muted colors. It's puzzle and a blend. 

I was using the Samsung Galaxy NX camera I had on loan from Samsung, along with the little 30mm lens. It was a pre-production camera and it brought along its own idiosyncrasies but it was there in my hand at the moment and I used it as well as I could.

There is something so wonderful about wandering without agenda or angst through a city you've never been in before. There is a sense of anticipation and an ampleness of images that swirl by as you walk along that makes me feel as though I'll never run out of things at which to point my camera. 

So, a normal lens and an incomplete camera...maybe that's exactly what I needed in my hands to stop and take this image. Funny. I never thought about it that way before.