There's a sale going on at Craftsy.com. It's a great time to try photo courses from experts like Chris Grey and Neil van Niekirk. (and Kirk Tuck).

Click here to take advantage of the sale prices on classes from now until Weds. 

Sept. 9th. Lots of photo classes are half price!

 I've been a Craftsy.com instructor now for several years and I think their courses are well done and a good deal. Once you buy a class at Craftsy.com you can go back and review it over and over again. You can pause it, watch parts of it again, and even send the actual instructors direct questions on a course forum. You'll get real answers from the people who are teaching the courses, generally in a day.

When I first started watching the Craftsy.com courses I only watched photography programs. Since then I've branched out into the cooking programs and I had a great time learning how to make chocolate croissants. And then sauces. And then bread.....

There are lots of craft courses that other people in your house might like. They include subjects like: Painting, gardening and even course on making better pizzas. I think the courses also make great gifts for people who are really into their hobbies.

Clicking on the Craftsy link here takes you to the site and also gives me a small commission which has no effect on the price of your classes. But it does help support my coffee habit and keeps me writing new stuff. And by the way, we've just crested the 2500 article milestone for the Visual Science Lab. I'll celebrate over the weekend.....

Check out Craftsy.com. Every class has an intro video you can watch before you decide whether you want to buy it. Wouldn't hurt to take a look....

The croissant link...

Hey! Go watch my Cantine Video. Shot with Olympus OMD EM5.2 cameras. You'll like it.

The real reason many of us photographers worked in black in white early in our careers.

I pretty much "re-fascinated" with black and white photographic imagery these days. I've found fun ways to shoot in monochrome with digital cameras I own, I've had much fun with a program called, DXO Filmpack, which converts images from normal digital images into emulations of various film types (while there are color profiles in Filmpack my interest is in the emulations of many of the b&w films I used to use), and I've found settings in an free program I use called, Snapseed, that work pretty well. I know that I am being guided by my own nostalgia but I was working backward in trying to understand the continuum and to remember just why most practitioners in my cohort started out shooting their first, tentative photographs mostly in black and white.

While it was a mainstream way of working in the middle to late 1970's I must be honest and say that it was a combination of cost and learning curve that kept us shooting black and white and printing in our own darkrooms.

Color film was at least twice the cost of black and white films and, if you were willing to roll your own film from a bulk film loader, the cost dropped even more. I remember saving up cash to buy 100 foot rolls of Kodak Tri-X, inserting it into the Bakelite bulk film loader and counting the clicks to make sure I loaded just enough frames into each film canister. I preferred empty Ilford canisters because the top and bottom rings that held everything together clicked in with more pressure and were more resistant to unhappy failure. I got the canisters from the professional lab that used to be on 19th Street in Austin.

It was the same with printing. A box of black and white, double weight, fiber paper was about a third the cost of a box of color paper and the chemical used for developing the black and white paper lasted a long time.

Long before the advent of PhotoShop, etc. the common way to print one's own color prints was to do interactive test strips and then develop the prints in drums. There was so little control and for every print that was a success there were an embarrassing number of failures. With no color casts or shifts to worry about black and white promised quicker success and, as in hand grenades, a lot of variation fell into the "close enough" camp.

I remember decades of standing in my various darkrooms sloshing prints around in trays and then baptizing them in the archival washer. It always seemed like a quiet and meditative process, even under the tightest deadlines. But the magic was almost always there as you stood, holding your breath, and waiting to see the first glimmer of an image emerge in the developer tray.

Now I have all sorts of rationalizations for shooting in black and white: It's more abstract, there's no distraction from needless color, it distills an image down to its composition, black and white is more about graphic design, it's easier to see into the subject instead of being seduced by the color, etc., etc.

I don't know if any of the rationales are really apt but I do know that one becomes acculturated and comfortable with what one is familiar with. Since black and white images were my first love my own inculcated prejudices always serve to position color work lower in the hierarchy for me. Now black and white imaging is popular again. Now we'll get to see if there is more to it than sentimentality.

The image above was shot with a Nikon D750 and the 85mm f1.8 G lens using available light. Conversion to black and white via Snapseed. 

Noellia on the new sectional couch. Nikon 85mm f1.8. Some groovy processing just for fun.

Hey! Noellia! If you happen to stumble across this photo go ahead and click on the link below so you can see the Cantine video that James and I did, okay?

https://vimeo.com/137964319


The Craftsy Educational Promotion Continues: 

Click here to take advantage of the sale prices on classes from now until Weds. 

Sept. 9th. Lots of photo classes are half price!

 I've been a Craftsy.com instructor now for several years and I think their courses are well done and a good deal. Once you buy a class at Craftsy.com you can go back and review it over and over again. You can pause it, watch parts of it again, and even send the actual instructors direct questions on a course forum. You'll get real answers from the people who are teaching the courses, generally in a day.

When I first started watching the Craftsy.com courses I only watched photography programs. Since then I've branched out into the cooking programs and I had a great time learning how to make chocolate croissants. And then sauces. And then bread.....

There are lots of craft courses that other people in your house might like. They include subjects like: Painting, gardening and even course on making better pizzas. I think the courses also make great gifts for people who are really into their hobbies.

Clicking on the Craftsy link here takes you to the site and also gives me a small commission which has no effect on the price of your classes. But it does help support my coffee habit and keeps me writing new stuff. And by the way, we've just crested the 2500 article milestone for the Visual Science Lab. I'll celebrate over the weekend.....

Check out Craftsy.com. Every class has an intro video you can watch before you decide whether you want to buy it. Wouldn't hurt to take a look....

The croissant link...

Hey! Go watch my Cantine Video. Shot with Olympus OMD EM5.2 cameras. You'll like it.

I like what fast 85mm lenses do to the backgrounds in photographs.

This is shot either wide open at f1.8 or 1/3rd of a stop down at f2.0. It was taken with the Nikon 85mm f1.8G lens. I have come to really like this lens because it seems to perform well at every aperture. The model is Noellia. She has been working with me on commercial shoots and books for nearly 12 years. The location is the long hall in my house in Austin, Texas.

It might not be a style you appreciate but it's one I've liked since I first took up photography.

It's fun to make portraits like this.

Flare? We don't care about flare. In fact, I'm starting to search for it wherever I can find it.

I was kinda sad I couldn't make this sunspot reflection flare more yesterday. I was doing everything "wrong" so I presumed that all the unnecessary perfection of the system would break. I had on an ancient, wide angle lens. I had a cheap polarizer on top of that and I put the direct reflection of the sun up on the top 1/3 of the frame. Still no drama.

My goals for the month? More flare. More stuff that's crazy backlit. And tons more black and white.

I'm so over technically perfect images...

Settling into a groove with the Nikon D750 camera and some of the older lenses.

I fall in the love with the idea of a new camera pretty quickly but I warm up to them slowly, once the blush of initial excitement wears off. I see it, I want it, I buy it --- but then it takes a while for me to get comfortable with the menus, with the placement of the buttons and knobs and with the way a particular camera makes colors and tones. 

I more or less cheated with the D750. I'd spent a fair amount of time just before getting this camera ranging around with two of its immediate predecessors, the D610s. My hands were comfortable with the size and my brain had figured out most of the menu items. A lot of my recent time spent with the new camera has been spent working on the stuff that has changed. Little things like color profiles and the nuances of the AF system. 

My first really deep dive with the D750 was a video and still assignment for an ad agency's own self promotion campaign. I spent several full days shooting stills on locations that were lit by either daylight, tungsten or LED lights. Nothing fast moving but everything had to be just right. Another full day was spent shooting video and I'll say that working with a camera for 8 hours straight is a great crash course in what can be done. But it's in the post production and editing where you see how the camera really did its part of the job. While I still think the D810 is a tad sharper I am very happy with the overall performance and video handling of the D750. It's my preferred shooting camera for work now over the D810.

One thing I never thought I'd use on the D750 is the 1.2X crop mode. I was shooting portraits in the studio this week and wanted to use the 85mm f1.8G because it's a sweet optic and it nails focus very well for head and shoulders work. The problem was that I wanted a bit tighter crop. Of course I could crop in post but I really like to see and shoot for final crop in the camera. With the camera set at 1.2X I could shoot at the equivalent of 102mm which was absolutely perfect. I lost some pixels but I didn't miss them. With crop lines in the finder it was almost like shooting on one of my old, rangefinder cameras. 

I'm in awe of you guys out there who can memorize a camera menu, understand all the custom function buttons and master a camera in a weekend. Even more fascinated by those of you who profess to be able to put the camera aside for weeks or months and then pick it up, fully ready to go without even a dry run in between. I confess that I really need to live with a camera, a lot, to get comfortable with it. When I'm working with a relatively new camera I might carry along a "known" back up camera for months until I am willing to let go of the training wheels. 

A case in point: I've had this camera for a month or so and only yesterday did I discover (and then use) the ability to set "clarity" in the  monochrome settings. Hadn't needn't it before and never went looking for it. But there it is, along with the slider for sharpness, contrast, etc. 

Yesterday was also the first day I had willfully gone out and forced myself not only to use the camera's built in HDR feature but to also use the camera with an older, manual focus Nikon lens and a polarizing filter. Lot's to mentally manage at one time but a nice exercise in camera operation, nonetheless. 

I chose to use the 25-50mm f4.0 lens because I think there is something really cool about it. I haven't put my finger on quite what the coolness is but I think if I use the lens enough I'll find it. It may just be that it's from such a different lens design era and it just looks different enough to me from the modern lens designs to make it a visual standout. I know it has a good deal of distortion at various focal length settings but I also know it's pretty sharp and highly flare resistant at f8.0. 

After a spell of letting both my Nikon and Olympus cameras do their autofocus thing during jobs and personal shooting it was very, very refreshing to get back to using a manual focus lens with hard stops at infinity and close focus. And unlike the "fly by wire" autofocus lenses for the Olympus it was also refreshing to go back to a lens with a marked distance scale. I was shooting in bright sunlight so I set the camera to manual exposure. As long as I shot images drenched in Texas sun I never, ever needed to change exposures or even look at the meter indications. It was just like shooting with an older Leica M3 and having the Kodak exposure chart Scotch taped to the bottom plate of the camera. 

Once you nail down the right exposure you never have to think about it until the sun starts to set or until you step into shadow.  By the same token a 25mm focal length lens, stopped down to f8.0 has a pretty generous depth of field. I found myself zone focusing most of the time when I was in the wide region of the zoom range. As I got closer to 50mm I took more care to fine tune. But when shooting buildings that sit one or two hundred feet away at 20mm-28mm I was pretty darn comfortable rolling the lens to the infinity stop and blazing away. It's a different way of shooting than what I watch most photographers do. Mostly they use AF lenses and automatic exposure. They lock focus with a half press of the shutter button and then commit. But the whole process more or less coaxes one to compose to the AF squares. Not as much fun (or as fun to look at) as a more chaotic and alternative compositional style. 

I discovered the black and white fine tuning late in the day and didn't have as much time to experiment as I would have liked but it's got me reset back into my old black and white film days. I came home and put a 50mm on the camera and locked the ISO to 400, just like Tri-X of old. 

There's a bonding process that occurs when you carry the same camera with you a lot of the time and shoot with it over and over again. You get comfortable with it and it's not that it disappears but more like it starts to collaborate with you and allow you more emotional range while shooting. 

I am smitten with the D750 and would like one more. All cameras should travel in pairs. Like rattlesnakes. It's good to shoot with identical cameras; it reduces the conscious thought process that sometimes slows down good seeing.

Have you seen our Cantine Cafe and Bar video?

We didn't shoot it with Nikons but I think you'll like it. 

Take a peek: https://vimeo.com/137964319