Walking around with a favorite camera and lens. Museum hopping with the Olympus EM5.2 and the Sigma 60mm f2.8 dn.

First there is a break in the work. By some marvel of diligence and happenstance you find that on this particular afternoon all of your obligations have been met and the new projects aren't scheduled to get underway until next week at the earliest. Then the stormy, wet weather abates for a few hours and a handful of delicate sun rays bounce around and entice you out of your safe and isolating office. You realize that it's Thursday and that admission is free at the Blanton Museum and, just down the road, admission is always free at the Humanities Research Center, on the UT campus.

Everyone has choices to make. Do you mow the grass? Do you head to some car care center to get your oil changed? Watch soap operas on TV? Navigate your way from website to website doing vital research on which camera has the fastest shut down time? Or maybe, just maybe you decide to go someplace and look at things that aren't part of your everyday circuit. I vote that I get up from my comfy seat, exit the chilled and quiet studio and actually go someplace. Yesterday it was to the Blanton Museum and beyond. 

If you were going museum hopping what camera and lens would you take? I decided to take the Olympus EM-5.2 and the Sigma 60mm f2.8 dn lens. I thought it would be the perfect combination with which to shoot in those clean spaces and even more perfect a focal length if I chose to crop all of the images into little squares. In camera. 

I love handling the EM-5.2 when I have it properly configured. The HLD-8 grip is pretty much mandatory. I bought the grip because I thought I would get a lot of use out of the headphone jack that's designed into the section that attaches directly to the camera. In reality the combination of both parts of the grip makes the whole unit fit nicely in my medium sized hands and spreads out the area that contacts my hands which in turn makes the buttons feel perfectly positioned. I've put HLD-8 grips on both of the cameras. It makes the feel of the cameras just right.

The added benefit of the grip is the addition of the second battery. Since the battery in the actual camera body is harder to get to when the grip pieces are used I've gone into the menu and asked the camera to "please use the battery in the grip first!" This means I can go through grip batteries, replacing them as necessary, for a long time before I have to deal with disassembling the whole melange and fiddling with the camera's battery. 

The 60mm Sigma feels solid and the hood doesn't have a tendency to fall off so I usually stick the lens cap in my pocket when I start out my shooting sessions and leave it in my pocket until I get back in the car to go home. 

While the camera is rugged and lightweight I've developed an psychological need to let the camera dangle from its conventional strap in a configuration that most of us would consider backwards. On most cameras I would let the machine dangle over my left shoulder with the eyepiece side or backside of the camera next to my lower torso or upper hip (depending on the length of the strap). But with the Olympus cameras I generally positioned them so that the lens faces inward instead. 

I do this because I've found the rubber surround for the eyepiece to be a bit delicate and to have no scruples about falling off or being bumped off the camera. It doesn't sound like a big thing but you really would be amazed at how that little bit of rubber around the top and sides of the finder window changes the feel and handling of the camera when you bring it up to your eye.  I think Olympus should give each owner half a dozen eyepiece surrounds with each camera. That way the owners can see just how tenuous the connection between eyepiece cup and camera really is before they need to start spending their own cash on an endless stream of replacements. 

When I'm heading into the museum spaces to make images I tend to use the lens at its wide open aperture, or close to it. In the case of the 60mm that's f2.8. Sometimes I'll get conservative and go all the way down to f4.0 but it's rare. I set the camera for aperture priority exposure and I use the auto-ISO. All of this allows me to shoot quickly when I feel I can depend on the camera's automation---which is most of the time. When the camera shows me a finder image that's too light or too dark in the EVF I can quickly and handily use the front dial (which feels luxurious) to dial in a more accurate exposure compensation. 

I regard the Olympus EM5.2 as the perfect museum camera because the shutter is quiet and has a very nice sonic profile. The combination of the small, non-intimidating size and the gentle noise of the shutter activation makes the system generally welcome in quiet areas. 

The one thing I think that spoils EM5-2 users the most is the almost magical image stabilization. It's hard to go backward once you've gotten a good taste of just how effectively the camera can remediate the effects of over-caffeine-izaton of the user. Most of the interior images I am showing here were shot handheld at around 1/15th of a second. I've gone slower and gotten good results but I just didn't feel like showing off yesterday. 

I started off at the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum but truthfully, I just stepped in to use their restroom on the second floor. It's very nice and always spotless. The museum was setting up the atrium for some sort of big gala so I hurried along and headed across the street to the Blanton Museum. Last month I saw an incredible show there wrapped around the subject of the civil rights movement in the U.S.A. in the 1960's. I would have liked to see the show again but I missed it by a week. 

I concentrated on looking for gems among the permanent collection and some of the smaller, temporary exhibits on the second floor. Still loving the exhibit: Wild and Strange: the Photographs of Ralph Eugene Meatyard, which are on loan from the enormous collection of photographs at the HRC. I saw the show a few weeks ago and it's reminded me how wonderful smaller, more accessible black and white prints could be. There's a photograph of the installation, just above.

When visiting the Blanton I always try to do one nice image of the Battle Collection of 

Sculpture casts. I like the intersection of the profile and the soft blue, just above.

The 60mm seemed perfect for this kind of spatial compression.

The photograph above and the one below really do show just how well corrected 

the Sigma 60mm f2.8 dn lens is. The images are filled with parallel lines that do a 

great job of staying straight and true. It's really a nice performance for an

inexpensive lens used at its widest f-stop.

I left the Blanton galleries and went across the courtyard to the little museum café to get a pre-made ham and swiss cheese sandwich before soldiering on to the Humanities Research Center a few blocks away. I'd been hearing about the Alice in Wonderland show and wanted to see it. There were a number of really great images from the second half of the 1800's and the show laid out an interesting progression of re-interpretations on a 150 year time line. Below is one of Lewis Carroll's notebooks. I particularly like the last passage on the page...

One of Lewis Carroll's notebooks. The Humanities Research Center.

Austin, Texas.

I think the Alice in Wonderland show is fun for art buffs as there are lots of very interesting materials, across media, that I was surprised to discover. My favorites were a series of comic book covers featuring Alice, and also a series of illustrations done by Salvador Dali for a unique edition of an Alice in Wonderland book. Those surrealist illustrations alone are worth getting out and seeing the show...

I know we're all jaded about what cameras can do these days but the comic book cover and lantern slide box, just above, still amaze me in terms of how well stabilized the frames were and how perfectly rendered the details are from a camera handheld at ridiculously slow shutter speeds. And that's why I grab the Olympus stuff when I go out to shoot for fun.

Oh, and by the way, these are Jpegs from the camera...small exposure tweaks, that's all.

Three Distinct Ways to Build Your Olympus Micro Four-Thirds Len Inventory. (but you can always mix and match).

 

Leica 25mm f1.4 Summilux on the black EM5.2

Shot with the Sigma 50mm Art lens at 1.4

If you bounce into and out of systems, never plan ahead and then waste money like a drunken camera rep then you've just about gotten into the flow of how I plan my equipment acquisitions; and especially lens buying. But if I, for once, walked into system absolutely cold and could buy all the lenses and accessories in any fashion I chose I would follow one of these three plans I'm going to outline below. Each is predicated on looking the camera system differently. One potential buyer wants the system because it can be small and light. Another buyer wants it because it can produce great images in a smaller package that the big, full frame cameras and this buyer wants to maximize quality while covering every possible focal length.  The third buyer is looking to use the system with primes to squeeze, potentially, the last picoliter of quality out of the system. Everyone else is some sort of elastic collage of the first three types. 

Give me complete focal length coverage and range...

The easiest way to buy into the Olympus M4:3 system just changed. With the introduction of the 7-14mm f2.8 Pro zoom lens the user can make the same choice so many professionals and advanced enthusiasts do when buying a bigger Canon or Nikon system. You buy the holy trinity of super high quality zoom lenses. In M4:3 you can go two ways and not get burned in either direction. 

You can buy the über-cool three Olympus lenses and get the reach of optical systems that go from 7mm all the way to 150mm and have the luxury of all of them opening up to f2.8. The people I know who have the Olympus 12-40mm f2.8 and the 40-150mm f2.8 are deliriously happy with the performance of both. The 7-14mm will be available next month and should be just as good. In fact, looking at the specs and construction details, it may be the best of the three. No small praise as Olympus can be one of the best lens designers in the world when they aim for it.  Three lenses, two EM5.2 bodies and you are ready to go. That would be the logical path for people who shoot lots of different stuff and want to be covered with high quality focal lengths at either end of the spectrum and everywhere in between. 

Staying with the same basic considerations (coverage) you could alternatively go for the Panasonic trio and the benefit you would accrue is the ability to use the lenses on either the Panasonic or Olympus system but the bonus is that when using the two longer Panasonic lenses (the 12-35mm f2.8 and the 35-100mm) on a non-Olympus body like the GH4 you'll be able to take advantage of the in-lens image stabilization. If you are solely a Panasonic shooter this is probably the better choice. If you're sporting the OMD cameras you'll get more on the telephoto end of each of the longer Olympus lenses than you will with the Panasonics and you'll be taking advantage of the in-body I.S.

I can speak directly to the quality of the Panasonic lenses having own the all three and used them extensively in video and stills. The 7-14mm f4 is one stop slower than the upcoming Olympus version but is smaller. I found it to be sharp wide open but with a bunch of vignetting at max aperture. That goes away mostly by f4.0 and completely by f5.6. People can grouse about "equivalence" till the coffee gets cold but if you are using a wide angle lens like this you probably are smart enough not to expect to drop the background too far out of focus. You're probably using the lens to, A: Get everything in without backing up. and, B: You need to emphasize near/far relationships and, C: You'd like to get pretty much everything in the frame, from front to back, in acceptable focus.  I like the Panasonic lenses a lot. Even after the last big purge I just couldn't let go of the 12-35mm, it's really, really good. All three are well designed, well behaved and as sharp as you'd want them to be. 

Give me a minimal footprint...

At this point you could just stop, say, "That was easy as pie." and go about the business of making cool images. Unless..... you fall into the minimalist category. If I wanted to go super stealthy and ultra-pared down I would be using one body and two lenses. You couldn't go far wrong with the Olympus 17mm f1.8 and the Olympus 45mm 1.8 lenses. Both are small, light, well designed, sharp and relatively cheap. When I want the maximum flexibility with the minimum fuss I drop those two lenses into a bag along with an EM-5.2 and one of the new, little Olympus flashes that comes packaged with the new OMD camera and I'm pretty well set for artsy/photojournalistic style shooting. 

And this brings us to the third discrete shooter style: GIVE ME THE ULTIMATE IN IMAGE QUALITY....

In this arena I'm also going to go for the ultimate snob choices because I secretly believe that the zooms are so good that most (98%?) of users are never going to see a real difference in overall quality. Where they will see the difference is in maximum apertures and depth of focus control. This is the part of the market that will want prime lenses. Single focal lengths. Fast glass. A little more stabilizing heft in the hand.

While the zooms are good at wider settings the single focal length Olympus 12mm opens up to f2.0 and is pretty sharp all the way through the aperture range until you hit f8 where diffraction kicks in, as it does with just about every lens in this sensor format and size. The maximum aperture is quite usable and it low light it gets you one full shutter speed stop faster than the zooms. 

Next up you could pretty much take your pick between the Leica 15mm f1.8 and the Olympus 17mm 1.8. I'd go with the Leica as it sits in the middle between the typical 28mm equivalent (for full frame) and the most popular medium wide lens which is a 35mm equivalent (for full frame). Since me next choice will always be the 25mm Leica f1.4 Summilux the 15mm makes more sense for me as I think the 17mm and the 25mm are pretty close to each other and I either want to go long (the 25) or I want to go obviously wider (15mm). 

Both are good lenses. The 17mm seems to be optimized for a flatter field and more uniform sharpness all the way across (better if you like to photograph brick walls) while the Leica seems optimized to have higher sharpness in the center and shrugs away the lack of sharpness in the corner as being endemic to the overall design. In other words, a compromise. 

I've owned the Leica 25mm Summilux f1.4 since it hit the market three or four years ago and I like it very much. It would be hard to persuade me to go in another direction. Fast, sharp, small and contrasty. It's everything I want in a normal focal length!

Next up is the short telephoto. While Olympus has their very good and very small and relatively cheap 45mm f1.8 in this range and Panasonic has just introduced their version of the lens, if you are going to set up a whole system rationale based around optimum quality you can't duck out on this one. It's got to be the Leica Nocticron 42.5mm f1.2. If this lens ever sits on your camera mount, even for a moment, and you pick it up and shoot with it wide open there's no way to resist it's gravitational pull. Sharp at f1.2. Sharp at f8.0 and sharp everywhere in between. It feels great and the images it generates are breathtaking. Add to this the fact that the lens comes with image stabilization for those GH4 sometimes video shooters and you'll be forgiven for starting to think that $1400 might just be a bargain for everything you are getting. 

But don't stop there. There are two other lenses to snag before we stop putting together the super-image-quality-prime-lens option. 

While the 45mm gets you into a nice, short telephoto that's good for most casual portrait work you'll want to pick up the cheapest great lens in the system for tighter headshot and anything that needs a bit more compression along with freakishly good image quality. That would be the Sigma DN 60mm f2.8. It's a gem. I find mine to be sharp, wide open. It's a nice, longer medium telephoto length and you'll only be out about $200. It's an amazing bargain. And it fits beautifully on an EM-5.2.

We round out the system with the almost obligatory Olympus 75mm f1.8. Long, sharp, fast, elegant... I'd get mine in silver.  Don't know why but I would. And I would use it in the middle of the Summer with my chrome EM-5.2 body and it might even stay cooler....but I wouldn't count on it. 

Those are my takes on approaching the Olympus system when it comes to lens buying. But you can always go a totally different way if you are a contrarian. For example, one weekend I was shooting downtown and a friend walked up and loaned me his Sigma 60mm dn lens, telling me I just had to try it. I did. I shot with it on the older EP-3 for a couple of hours. I post processed the files the next day and I was surprised at the overall quality of the files. At f4.0 there wasn't a single criticism I could level. I cruised to Amazon.com at the end of my editing session and bought all three of the focal lengths, the 19mm, 30mm and the 60mm. I had owned the earlier versions of these lenses in the Sony E mount and I had chalked up their good performance to the 24 megapixel sensor on the Nex7. Now I understood that they were just really good lenses regardless of the camera. 

I bought mine in black. I wish I'd bought the silver ones just because they look so different and so much like pieces of modern, minimalist sculpture. 

Once you have your system put together you'll be ready to head out and shoot just about anything that comes along and still know that you've got great tools in hand. Next time I'll do some comparisons with the ancient Olympus Pen FT half frame lenses. You don't need to rush out and buy them but they do have  completely different look to them and sometimes the aesthetic differentiation is just as important for a project.  

One last thing: If you've decided on buying an EM-5.2 you might consider two extra batteries. If you shoot a lot of video then make that four extra batteries. If you think the Oly batteries are too expensive you'll be happy to hear that I've been using the Wasabi Power batteries (less than half the price) for several years, across a bunch of Olympus cameras and have never had issues. 

thanks. Kirk

Why I keep the Olympus OMD EM-5.2 cameras around. "It's not the horse it's the arrow!"

OMD EM5.2 shot with Nikon D610 and Sigma 50mm Art.

Oh sure, I love the big Nikon full frame cameras, especially when I have the time to put them on a tripod and take test exposures and chimp. Seriously though, it would be hard to dispute that for many applications that require very high resolution and very high sharpness the combination of the D810 or even D610, coupled with a killer lens (like the Sigma 50mm f1.4 Art), is tough to beat. But that presupposes that every shooting situation requires those very structured and measurable performance attributes. Your jobs with a camera may the same day-after-day and year-after-year but mine sure aren't. And when I'm off the clock and shooting for pleasure my mind wanders into other areas. Other camera system strengths. On most routine jobs the bigger cameras are overkill.

Don't get me wrong, I love overkill as much as any other red blooded American male who grew up driving big block V8's too fast. Always nice to have some in reserve in case you need to pass...

The flipside  is that I also sit in the other chair. The editor's chair. The post processing strato-lounger. The Eames chair of file enhancement. And setting there for a long time takes the creative starch right out of you while making your butt bigger.  I re-discovered this yet again on Tuesday morning when I sat down to convert about 900 D610 raw files into Jpegs and Tiffs. The fast SD cards (UHS3) and the quicker buffers of the newest generations of cameras make it easy to shoot fast, and shooting fast generally ends up meaning, "shooting a lot."  I could have shot less but you never know what you'll get next and....the cameras make it so easy. Hand me another slice of pizza...

But dang! Processing those files took longer than I'd like and in the end I'm going to guess that 98% of the images won't make the final cut into the two or three ads that are planned. And in the same vein once the client finds those three killer images they'll probably abandon everything else from the day's take and use the "keepers' over and over again. In this instance I felt like I needed the high ISO performance that the D610 provides. It's no little deal to pull off ad-ready images while hanging out at 6400 ISO.

When I shoot for myself I mostly come right back to the Olympus micro four thirds cameras and the motley assortment of Panasonic, Olympus, Sigma lenses, and the weirder, third party lenses I have adapted to the format. And I sat down today to figure out why.

I started shooting with the micro four thirds Olympus cameras the minute they got the first EVF enabled body ( the EP-2 ) into Precision Camera in Austin, Texas. The size was perfect and it was the first camera I could really use the Olympus Pen FT lenses from my half frame collection on. While we'd never call the 12 megapixel sensor "state of the art" the camera made mighty good images from day one. In fact, when I go back and look at work I did with that camera in 2010 I find that I love the color and really can't see the visual manifestation of lower dynamic range the way I thought I might. The color is as gorgeous as I remembered.

The full frame Nikons are great for things like theatrical photography where I need to make images during a dress rehearsal performance of a play.  The size of the sensor and the speed of available, long lenses makes subject isolation easy while the high ISO performance of the same sensors makes getting good, rich exposures with low noise easier as well.

The Olympus OMD cameras make nice enough images of stage performances but they have lose out to the high ISO performance of the D610s by at least two stops. The alternate reality is that the OMDs have great EVFs and that means every bit of action I shoot during a show comes pre-chimped and well corrected before it's even been shot. And the 16 megapixels on the sensor is the absolute sweet spot for almost every application while keeping editing from being a full time, cave dweller job.

Where the OMD cameras come into their own is travel. Whether you are traveling from your house to downtown and then walking around for hours at a time or when you are traveling to faraway places and need to pack and carry what you'll be wearing and playing with for weeks at a time the smaller cameras just have it all over the bigger, heavier ones. I can pack two cameras and three small lenses in one of my smallest bags and have everything I want in a package that camera be carried across my shoulder for an entire day without screaming for a chiropractor to fix my lower back, shoulder and neck as a result (not that I would ever willingly see a chiropractor...).

The OMD is much more at home sitting on the edge of the restaurant table at lunch and

Keeping up with the Joneses. Competing on the set against the new super video cameras. Dang, that's fast.

Dan Powers operating the FS7 camera on a jib. 

(This image made with house lights on...)

My photography assignment yesterday called for me to shoot still images during a video shoot for a large radiology practice here in central Texas. In the past still cameras handled noise better than video cameras and most sets were so well lit that we could routinely shoot at ISO 320 and get great images. Things are changing very quickly. Now the video cameras have the advantage; especially when they are equipped with a file called S-Log that allows the camera to shoot a very flat image, capture tons of dynamic range and start (yes!!! Start!!!) at ISO 3200. That's their baseline when shooting in some of the Sony S-Log profiles.  

Yesterday I worked side by side with videographer, Dan Powers. When you shoot on a video set you basically depend on the lighting the video crew is using for your light because, quite frankly, no one is going to wait around while you toss together a totally different lighting design hammered together just for the still guy. When the schedule starts to slip and crew overtime looms in the near future the still images take a back seat to making sure the motion team gets exactly what they need. 

Dan had recently taken delivery of a brand spanking new Sony FS7 camera. The camera can output enormous 4K video files and that's exactly what Dan was doing. The files feed into an Convergent Technologies Odyssey digital recorder and were also backed up to second hard drive. The camera is really amazing, and especially so for the price. One of the things that makes it such a killer tool is the ability to shoot 4K at ISO 6400 with almost no noise and no perceptible degradation of the image quality. 

The set we were shooting on was draped in black and the floors were black plexiglas. There were two main lights on set and each of them was dimmed way, way down. I needed to be very mobile to work in and around Dan who used his camera on dolly track, on a tripod and, at times, on jib. This meant that I needed to figure out the exposures that would allow me to handhold non-stabilized lenses without loss of image quality due to camera shake. 

I'd brought along an incident light meter and I stepped in and took a basic reading of the position in which our talent would be standing. I can handhold a 50mm or an 85mm lens pretty well at 1/125th of a second and faster and I want to be shooting them at around f2.8 to f4.0 in order to get enough depth of field so that the backgrounds aren't just mush. The extra depth of field also helps to give me a wider window of acceptable focus in case the talent or I drift a bit during series of exposures. Basically, in this lighting set up that meant using ISO 6400 as my standard ISO for the day. In some configurations I needed more light and I weighed the pluses and minuses of shutter speed versus aperture based on the focal length range of the lenses. 

While Dan's FS7 handled the low light with ease ISO 6400 meant that even with my least noisy, state of the low noise art cameras, I would still need to apply some noise reduction fine tuning in post processing. I guess there's still no free lunch for still photographers....

Before arriving at Dan's studio I was set on using the D810 for my shots. The camera does great files in most situations and I love shooting the flat profile and then tweaking in post. But I took one look at the light levels and tossed the D810 right back into the bag. While that camera is great for lots of stuff it really shines in good light and starts to fall apart (just a bit) around ISO 1600. My choice for this shoot had to be two Nikon D610s. Those cameras are quick and uncomplicated to shoot and they are at least a stop better in high ISO situations that the D810. My primary lenses for the day were the Sigma 50mm f1.4 Art lens and the Nikon 85mm f1.8 G. Both cameras nailed focus with both lenses with no need for micro-adjust (whew!).  How did I come to have two D610s in the case? That's a story for another blog....

While the FS7 is a low light machine one of the additional issues for someone using a full frame still camera is that the FS7 has a "Super 35" sensor size which is smaller than full frame and just a tiny bit smaller than the APS-C size. This meant Dan also had one more stop of depth of field that I would and so could open up one stop more on his lens.  Since he was capturing in 4k he also had the luxury of shooting wide and then downsampling in his edit to hide even more noise as the final product for the client would be several 2K commercials. I guess the underlying point of my article today is that in the near future videographers will be able to shoot full motion at ISOs that leave still cameras behind and we'll have difficulty pulling the stills we need for clients because of the lower light levels. 

The low light levels made sense in this project because they had four or five large monitors hung around as part of the set and it was critical to get well exposed images on all of the screens. And those exposures needed to match the light on the subjects. Plenty dicey stuff. 

Funny to think that just two weeks ago I was using my cameras at their lowest ISOs and marveling at the detail and dynamic range I was getting from the files....

I often write about using nets to control lighting in my shoots and here is a perfect

example of how useful a two stop net can be. The jacket is bright, bright, bright but the hair light was needed to separate the doctor in the image just above from the inky black background. 

A grip is moving the net around to see where he can get the maximum effect on the jacket and the least effect on the doctor's hair. Once the right position is determined the net will be positioned on a C-stand and we'll shoot around it. 

The Sigma 50mm 1.4 Art lens is a trouper. This is shot with a tungsten light aimed almost 

directly into the lens and the lens is almost wide open. Its ability to resist flaring is very

good and the high levels of sharpness and detail are most welcome when the ISO goes up...

Make up and jacket styling are ongoing throughout the shoot. 

Above, our make-up person jumps in during a lens change to 

fine tune a pesky collar.

Net in place. Jacket highlights tamed.

Working close in to the video camera is a challenge. The video camera is always moving when it's on dolly track and the still photographer needs to have two conflicting focuses. He needs to get his shots but he also needs to dodge the video camera and avoid tripping over the cables that run from that video camera back to hard drives, monitors and power taps. 

This shot (above) is a more telling representation of the lighting levels than 

the shots done with the work lights on in some of the crew shots above....

As in: "You'll need a flashlight to see your shoes."

With a bit of Lightroom post processing the files turned out quite well. 

I was impressed by the low noise and detail I was able to get out of 

the D610s and the lenses I chose. 

Some interesting points (at least to me) about the shoot were Dan's DIY servo controlled dolly that smoothly moved the camera through a wide arc. The dolly wheels ran on round, hard rubber track so re-locating the track was quick and easy. Dan and his assistant were using a wireless follow focus mechanism to hit their various focus points at different locations around the track. Dan controlled the camera motion while his assistant shifted focus using a wireless controller to rotate the focusing ring on the lenses they used. They never really needed to touch the camera unless they wanted to start or stop recording, change lenses or change batteries. 

I shot about 1,100 shots and edited down to fewer than 900. Unlike the video team I had no script to work from and the potential uses of the still photos are wide and varied and undetermined at the moment. They include everything from new content for the client's website to printed ads in magazines and newspapers (yes, we still have a daily newspaper in Austin....).  Not having a comp or ad design to shoot to meant I needed to capture wide and tight shots, horizontals and verticals, and as many different facial expressions as possible. 

In a shooting scenario like this one I shoot as much as I can to avoid getting caught short with a memory card full of blinks and grimaces. I'll want the client to make the subjective choices for expressions and compositions and so I tend to give them a wide range of files. 

When I sit down at the computer my goal is to do a quick pass to dump all the blinks, smirks, shots destroyed by subject motion, etc. And, of course, we edit out anything that's out of focus or out of the safe range of file enhancement. Once that's done I do a second pass to color correct in groups and tweak shadows, highlights and sharpness and noise reduction. On this job I've spent about four hours in post to get to the point where I am confident to send over 800+ large minimally compressed Jpegs at full size. If the client selects an image that needs more work we'll be happy to charge them to go back to the raw files and work on the originals. 

I really enjoyed being a still photographer on a video shoot. This is something I used to do on a regular basis for Time Warner and several production companies in town. I knew about half of the crew and the lighting director and I had worked together on video and film projects for over two decades. Nice to see the continuity in that part of the market. But really, next time can you give the still photographer a little more light? And maybe a little more fill in the shadow areas---just around the talent?  I know, I know... we were going for an effect. On the other hand I didn't need to carry lights, stands and all the other heavy equipment, only a case full of cameras and lenses and a tripod that saw minimal use.

I can't wait to see what the finished product looks like from the video production company. Dan was one of the hardest working directors I have seen and quite the technical wizard. I've still got a lot to learn. 

One of my favorite old blogs about context (and cynicism).

http://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2012/09/ah-context-these-two-need-it.html

Camera Stuff. Traditional photography has been transformed. You can still do it any way you want but....

I traveled around Austin and across the country this week and I can truthfully say that, based on my current observations , coupled with our knowledge of the trends of the last two years,  the age of traditional photography as we knew it in the film days, and in the transitional days of the last decade, have come to an end. The ever present, single use cameras that were once part and parcel of every mom's, hipster's and gray-haired enthusiast's daily wardrobes have largely vanished from public sight
almost overnight like pay phone booths and DVDs.

It's not just that people in every walk of life have traded in their Nikons, Canons and random other dedicated, interchangeable lens cameras for the latest iPhones or Android phones, with their very precocious, built-in video/photo cameras rather, the great majority have given up the traditional pursuit of the traditional image. The act of taking an image with a large, single lens reflex camera seems as dated, in our current culture, as making a career out of painting in an abstract expressionist style.

We've truly entered the age of photographic minimalism, driven by the evolved informality of the share culture of web as represented by posted pictographic mini-conversations (a relatively scattered activity; at times not much more than a visual grunt ). The sharing is not the same as a traditional presentation in that now the photographs are part of a seemingly endless stream of good and bad imagery. A stream of unconsciousness, reflexively recharged ad infinitum.

Not only has the hardware used to create the images profoundly changed but with the prevailing subject matter becoming ever more restricted and self-referential, and the approach to (interpretation of) that content being shed of substance and meaningful context at a surprising rate as our culture has completely morphed our understanding of photographs from icons and sign posts to something as readily consumable as coffee. Which, coincidentally, is a large part of what gets photographed.

Photography has also moved from a visual dialog about things external to the artist and has become almost completely and exclusively about the artist. The selfie being one of the most obvious examples of encroaching and pandemic narcissism available in the entire history of mental health.

What used to be a symbol of one's dedication to imaging as a passion (the conventional camera) has become an almost embarrassing relic that instantly pegs one as being of a certain generation and mindset as surely as wearing a (non-smart, or is it "unsmart") wristwatch that merely tells time --- or ordering drip coffee as opposed to french pressse or espresso based coffee. The larger camera, festooned with a long, fast zoom lens, is as expressive, and potentially embarrassing a symbol (in today's pyramid of personal, wearables) of one's obsolescence as sporting a Palm Pilot or listening to music CDs on a Sony Walkman CD player.  The world, with a more or less anemic, quasi-cathartic shrug just moved on and this complete transition happened in the space of about two years. Tops. The eery thing is that all this seemed to creep up on us but we would have seen it coming if we'd only been paying attention.

I wondered why I felt the need to do my purge of all the extraneous cameras I'd built up, like calluses, over the years just a few months ago. I wondered the same thing when Michael Johnston started the process of shedding his camera collecting surplus all of a sudden and just a few weeks ago. Were these episodes the result of coming to some sort of subliminal tipping point in our collective psyches?
In a flash years of rationalization and earnest resolve re-directed in a reaction to an unseen but no less real shift of priorities and positions, styles and fashions.

For the first time in the month after the purge I never really felt a sense of loss for the equipment I had worked and researched so hard to accrue. All those cameras represented transitional tools without much future---even though they can be used in the same way they were always used, for years to come. The reality is that the precious stuff we tried to translate into substantive imagery missed the boat like paisley patterns surrendering to the next fashion wave.

Now I've left myself with two scaled down systems that each represent something different. I think our small, mirrorless camera system were a dodge on our part to try and delay a change that I now think is inevitable. The camera as accessory, as fashion, as daily seeing tool is completely over. We can continue to carry them and think about how much we need discrete, single use imaging tools but deep down the true, underlying knowledge has soaked in and we know that there's no vibrant cultural market for the images that used to be more about mastery than anything else. There's no reason to be "always ready" for the decisive moment if all moments are equally decisive and indecisive. If we're doing nothing more with the images than feeding the firehose that's draining the creative reservoir while saturating the ground our eyes walk on with homogenous product then really, what's the point?

I look at the Nikon cameras that I have in the studio. There are two. One is a D810 and it's a high resolution tool that we bring out to give clients the best technical quality we can bring to bear for a reasonable investment. The D610 is much the same but at a lower resolution tier that's more practical for more jobs. We use both of the cameras to produce video for clients as well. Neither camera is a sexy choice. Neither one emulates the newly trendy rangefinder design of decades past. Neither is whimsically small and compact. They aren't exciting to shoot. They are rudimentary tools and that's the way I see them now.

The Olympus cameras I own are, I think, a last gasp attempt to keep myself rooted in the type of photography that seemed to me to be different from the bifurcated imaging universe I see today; the current milieu divided between images done for money (Nikon) and images done as consumable and wholly narcissistic expressions (iPhones). To me the smaller, mirrorless cameras represent the Leicas we carried in leisure moments and during the shoots to which we brought the big medium format cameras to bear. The smaller cameras resonate with me and my generation because they are a meme and a psychological link to the cameras and photo styles of people whose work and celebrity we both appreciated and envied. The Robert Franks, Alex Webbs, Susan Meisales's, Sebastiao Salgados and so many others who made photography seem glamorous, thought provoking and elite.

We've moved, as a society, from a time when photography was a privileged form of expression--- from people who seemed to be blends of artist and mechanic. They knew the language and they knew how to make the lenses and rangefinders and meters do their bidding in the service of their creation. The turning points for everything in our photographic world came when presentation (in galleries, magazines, portfolios and books) was replaced by the self-involved narrative on the web--- in which the photographer is also actor and subject and a participant in his own constructions. And in many instances, the sole interested spectator.

In the end analysis will probably show that once something that was at one time difficult to do, difficult to present, and difficult to parse, becomes ubiquitous and all encompassing, and as simple as proletariat language, it loses its power in one sense and the power is replaced in a  different way. Now instead of a single image speaking to an attentive audience we have art as capacitor charging up with millions and millions of amazingly similar images until the concentration of images creates a universal reference current of that subject and individual interpretations are completely lost in the inertia to the median.

How else to explain the enormous drop in cameras sales? The drop in enrollment in photography courses? The drop in the use of commissioned images? The general malaise among hobbyists and enthusiasts? The ebb of students from any workshop that's not strictly vocational in service to the craft?

We'll all protest that I've misinterpreted this dip in the rhythm of traditional photography; and it may be that we are just waiting for it to be reinvented in some new way. I'd love for this to happen if it's true. But I think the days of the precious show of landscapes in a stark gallery with white walls all around and appreciative audiences wondering from well crafted print to well crafted print began to die the moment Flickr and the rest of the photo sharing sites were brought forth and flung freely to the masses. Pandora learned the hard way that once the box was open we were never going to go in reverse.

I still go to shows but it's more a reflection of my generational status. Many times the audiences at even the most important shows seem like conventions of men over 50. The world has moved on, we just like to see if we can sense the addictive residue of our time on the walls.

All this rambling doesn't mean for a second that we can't enjoy taking photographs for ourselves. It doesn't even mean that we can no longer create images for money, but it does mean that everything has changed and our culture is shifting. The screen is in peoples' hands now. The images are tiny. Because they are tiny they are much more fun if they are kinetic---always moving. That's where the ads are going and that's where the content is going and no matter how you pitch it the way we absorb images has changed and that makes imaging itself change.

This is neither bad nor good in an existential sense but I can't help remembering that every generation of product development is not aimed at making the consumer happier; it is aimed at making the product itself more economical to put together, less costly to ship, easier to repair  (or replace) and more indispensable. In the same way content is driven in the same direction. How do you make it easier to construct? More appealing to larger demographics? Easier and faster to deliver? And, much more profitable; even if that means millions paying pennies rather than hundreds paying real money?

The current thought poem for the culture of money and art is that rather than make one great thing that shows for a limited amount of time we can manipulate human curiosity by making many, many lesser productions and create a pipeline of continual release that keeps the curious and trend seeking constantly at the trough. That's the current and future middle of the Bell Curve of imaging today.

Is it any wonder that we're all a bit lost about the craft we loved so much?

I love the process. I won't stop. I'll keep shooting and printing even if I'm the only audience left but that doesn't keep me from being sad about what I think we're losing. Flip that around though and a different generation might see the shift as a gift. A plus. A natural part of the evolution cycle.

This may be true but I'm pretty certain that the current camera makers aren't going to be very happy about it either.

Finally, in fine art like painting, every new movement, cenaclé and school pushed out the ones that came before it. Fauvism, Pointillism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, Pop Art and Op Art. Now we're back to Neo-realism (which is manifesto-disguised representational art). Each shift led the successors to destroy the interest in and appreciation of their previous ancestors. No reason why this shift in photography will be any different.

edit:  adding this link from five years ago: http://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2010/04/some-thoughts-about-future-of.html

Just re-read it and it seems cogent.

An interesting, tangential blog post from Thom Hogan: http://www.dslrbodies.com/newsviews/where-were-headed.html

A fun infographic that explains this better than I did: http://kindofnormal.com/truthfacts/2015/05/11

Back from my vacation in Saratoga Springs and ready to get back to work.

I needed a break so I convinced Ben and Belinda that I needed to head up to New York to help Ben pack up all his winter stuff (coats, boots, comforters, many pairs of gloves, acres of Polartec and GorTex and some towels) for the Summer. The boy is really very competent and quite able to handle all this on his own but if you see a travel opportunity you can couch as a favor it's my belief that you might want to consider taking it. I would then travel back with Ben to Austin. It all worked well except for the trip back. And that's totally on the weather! We ended up being delayed overnight in Albany as nothing was flying in or out of Chicago, our half way point back to Austin... 

I didn't take anything spectacular, camera and lens-wise, along with me to Saratoga Springs. Just a Nikon D610 and the cheap but nice 50mm f1.8G. There were times when I would have liked a lens that was a little longer but I am constantly reminded by my more pragmatic photo friends that "cropping is always an option." 

It's an interesting experiment to limit oneself to a single camera and a single lens in this day and age of near endless choices. While we would have thought nothing of the concept back in the days of the twin lens Rolleiflex cameras (non-interchangeable, normal lens) or as a student with a Leica M3 and a 50mm Summicron (too poor to buy other lenses...) it does seem strange to willingly limit your choices in the grand age of zoom lenses. 

It's a good exercise though, and it's amazing to see how quickly one gets used to the focal length and the constraints of composition. By the end of the first day I was finding good ways to cram everything I wanted into the frame and by the third day my brain was only looking for compositions that would match the angle of view; or,  in a pinch, a slightly wider scene that could be cropped. 

The Nikon D610, on the other hand, seems to have no limitations at all; if you discount the reality that the camera can't natively shoot square format images conveniently....

I enjoyed my time in Saratoga Springs a great deal. Unencumbered by the mountains of gear I'd been hauling around on my annual report project the week before I felt almost naked with only one camera and one lens. Heck, I didn't even go through the first camera battery by the end of my visit. The one thing I did do though was to eat well. Saratoga Springs seems to have more than its share of really good restaurants. My good friend in the town introduced me on the first night to a small place that's been there for decades called, Hattie's. The specialty of the house is fried chicken. Of course that's what I got. When the plate came I was overwhelmed. It was half a chicken. Perfect if you live in town and can take home leftovers....  But the chicken and the sides were incredible. And the company first rate.

The next morning I had a superb latte at my favorite local coffee house, Uncommon Grounds, and then lunch with the boy at the dining hall at Skidmore College. The choices were wide and varied and I made an unlikely but satisfying match of fettuccine Alfredo and steamed kale. I'd promised to take the boy out for an "end of the semester" dinner and I left the choice of restaurants up to him. We ended up at a nice place on Broadway called, Max London's. Nicely done Tuscan hanger steaks, arrugula salads, etc. 

The only glitch I have to report in my travels, and that is totally my fault, was leaving my iPhone charger in my hotel room. By mid-day Friday the calls, texts and voice mails were starting to stack up and I planned on dealing with the communications outbreak during our wait at the airport. That's when I discovered that the charger was missing. I was mulling this over when the weather struck. A possible hurricane moving toward the east coast neatly framed on the other side by a thousand mile swath of tornados and violent thunderstorms from Austin to Chicago and most places in between. 

We ended up spending the night in a hotel next to the airport in Albany and then getting up on Saturday morning at 4:15am to make all new connections. I was nervous because I was scheduled to photograph a gala event on Saturday evening in Austin. Two good friends of mine were the co-chairs and Lucy Johnson, the former president's daughter, was to be the keynote speaker. 

Southwest airlines didn't let me down. While the Saturday morning rides were plenty bumpy we pulled into the gate at Austin Bergstrom airport right on time. Four hours later I was shooting "grip and grin" photographs and looking longingly at the open bar...

I took the same D610 body but with the 24-85mm zoom lens and a 105mm f2.5 lens for a little extra reach during the speeches. I also took along an Olympus EM-5.2 and it's friend, the Panasonic 12-35mm f2.8 zoom and a little Olympus flash. I've never thought of Olympus cameras as being strong on-camera flash systems but the combination nailed just about everything I pointed it at. By the end of the evening I was having fun going back and forth between the two systems, mostly just to see how they handled quick flash stuff. 

Now I'm back in the studio and I have a white board full of things that need to get done before next week even gets started. The coming week is filled with "wrap up" stuff. Final retouching on some annual report images, billing jobs already delivered and resettling gear into an organized holding pattern, making it ready for the next wave.

Tomorrow's assignment is to shoot images for print advertising during a video shoot for a large, statewide, medical practice. I pack the cameras but the production company sets the scene and lights it. Should be good, clean fun. 

All the best to my friends in Saratoga Springs. Nice town you've got there...

Not my hotel. Just channeling Eggleston. Or Stephen Shore.

From my Walker Evans phase.