Irrationally rational lens buying. Cine ready Nikkor. No longer naked in the 35mm focal length range.

Nikon 35mm f2.0 MF lens. An optic for the affluently-challenged. 

I've always been a 50mm adherent, when it comes to primary lenses for full frame camera, but lately my vision seems to be widening out a bit. I've been wrestling with the idea of an efficient and economical, two lens kit that could do a majority of street shooting and personal work and I finally settled on pairing an 85mm f1.8 and a good 35mm lens. I looked at the Sigma 35mm Art lens and while I would dearly love to shoot with it I would despair of carrying it around. I remembered that I liked the Rokinon 35mm t1.5 cine lens when I had one for the Sony a99 but it's big and not the most comfortable lens as far as holding it in my hands. Too many rough edges and hard rings.

Today I looked at the Tamron 35mm f1.8 VC lens and I was impressed by the general fit and finish of it but if I'm honest with myself I've been craving a more "blue collar" solution. Something small and comfortable and simple. After playing with the Tamron and the Sigma for a bit I wandered by the (danger! danger!) used cases at Precision Camera. There was the lens I was looking for. It's an old, traditional, manual focusing, auto indexing lens from the 1970's or the 1980's.  It is the 35mm f2.0 lens. One that used to be in the bag of nearly

A Working Wednesday with two different camera systems. And finally, some sunshine...

All images here today are from the Panasonic fz 1000, taken for my downtown art project.

It was early this morning when I dragged myself out of bed, microwaved a sausage, Gouda cheese and egg breakfast taco, fired up a double cup of coffee to go in the Keurig, and hit the road. I'd loaded up the CRV yesterday evening and all that was left was to drag the camera bag out to the car and head the car in the right direction.

I hit Johnson City at 8:15 and headed to the LCRA Park to meet up with a bunch of people from my favorite electric utility company for some photographic fun. We arranged 13 Kubota all terrain vehicles in an attractive, modified chevron pattern with the Pedernales River in the near background, and then the Hill Country in the far background. Each Kubota vehicle had an lineman standing next to it, in the company uniform, wearing shiny, new hard hats.

We photographed from ground level and it was good. But we had more resources available in the form of two, large bucket trucks. These are trucks with boom arms that allow one to rise to any occasion; up to about 50 feet in the air. We directed one bucket truck into the area behind our formation of ATVs but in front of the river. We positioned the other one just behind the point at which I had set up my tripod. One of the linemen handed me a harness and a hard hat and I climbed up on the truck and into the bucket. A few seconds later my Nikon and I were about forty feet above the ground, shouting  directions down to our art director and getting everyone positioned for a shot that encompassed a lot of space and a lot of detail. 

Par for the course, we shot with the linemen wearing hard hats, and also holding the hard hats under one arm. We shot with the second truck in the background, and without the second truck in the background. Then I made a series of detailed photographs to accompany the big, wide, group photograph. 

For this morning's shoot I felt that using the Nikon D810 was an obvious camera choice. The sharp, detailed files it is capable of creating are perfectly suited to a wide shot with 14 vehicles and 13 different people scattered across a fairly big field. It also helped that, at ISO 64, the dynamic range of the sensor is pretty much unmatched by other cameras in the same price range. I paired the D810 with the sometimes maligned, sometimes praised, Nikon 24-120mm f4.0 lens. 

While some find that the lens has too much distortion; especially at the short end, the reality is that the lens is very sharp and there were no obvious straight lines when looking down at a landscape of yuccas, scrub brush and a meandering river. The main attribute I was looking for in a situation like this one was sharpness/resolution, followed by focal length flexibility. Lack of geometric distortion wasn't even on my radar.

With the camera set to an optimum ISO and the lens set to an optimum aperture the only thing that remained on my check list was to toss as much fill light as I could into the front vehicles and the men standing next to them. The sun was coming in at a 45 degree angle from one side. I placed an Elinchrom flash head with a 42 inch silver umbrella at the camera position and turned the power all the way up. All 1100 watt seconds. But since the umbrella and light were easily thirty feet or more to the closest subject the effect was barely noticeable. I would be depending on accurate exposure and the combined power of the camera sensor's great dynamic range, and the power of the shadow slider in Adobe Camera Raw, to pull up detail on the shadow sides of the ATVs and the men who drive them. 

I worked around f8.0 and f11 as my preferred apertures to get the depth of field I would need as well as the optimum performance from the lens. Being used to working with EVF enabled cameras made me miss the LCD loupe I neglected to bring along. I had to use my black baseball cap as a light blocker so I could see what was on the rear screen more clearly. I used the histogram as my crutch of last resort. But I needn't have worried as the images matched the metered value given by my Sekonic incident light meter. 

After we wrapped the Johnson City shoot we paused first for breakfast tacos (from a local place called, Charro's. Very, very good) and then we paused at the office of the client so I could download 17 gigabytes of very juicy raw files to her company's server. The client will be doing the post production on the files for this project. It's a rare thing for me to let go of but I trust the client and it was the only way to make the budget work for everyone. 

With the car packed and a fresh cup of coffee in the central cup holder I tuned into NPR on the radio and headed back to Austin. When I got home I downloaded the files onto my system ( you can never be too careful...) and put the Nikon camera battery on the charger. 

I swung by the house to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and have a big glass of milk. I unloaded the car, grabbed a new camera and headed for downtown. You see, I've been waiting to shoot a second project that I think is crazy good fun, but it is a project that depends on nice, clean skies to work the way I envisioned it. I've educated the client and agency about the need to patiently wait for the light to get neat, and the way I figured it I had about 2.5 hours of excellent sunlight of which to take advantage before I could switch everything off and head out for Mexican food and a local IPA ale. 

I'd spent the morning shooting "big" and traditional so I was ready to switch gears and embrace smaller and more modern. Almost jet age. A camera with a great EVF. The Panasonic fz 1000. 

I shoved a couple extra batteries in my pocket, put a polarizing filter on the front of the lens and headed over to the wedge of Zilker Park that butts up to the south side of the Pfluger Pedestrian Bridge. There's a little parking lot there that's free and, if you get there on a weekday before school and work let out, there's almost a 50-50 chance of getting a space. Today the parking gods were benevolent and ushered me in to a prime space. 

I spent the rest of the illuminated afternoon walking around shooting interesting shots that may or may not end up, in rotation, on my adventurous client's website. Large. Across the screen. 

I generally set the camera to ISO 125 and shoot in the Aperture priority mode. The dial on the back of the fz 1000 has a push button incorporated. It's how one switches between setting the aperture and setting the exposure compensation with the same dial. I was mostly shooting raw but every once in a while I'd find something that would look better with a more extended range to the highlights and shadows and I would engage the in-camera HDR. I usually set the HDR app to give me a three stop spread and that better be enough because, on this camera, you only get the choice of 2 and 3 stops and I always err on the bountiful side. 

It's harder to feel loose and unrestricted when you realize that your photo walk has the prospect of money-in-exchange for performance aspect to it. Suddenly the kinds of images I usually see on a downtown walk become more important (and seemingly more scarce) to come by.  For the most part the built in HDR works well with landscapes and building-scapes. 

By the end of the day I'd been moving from 7 to 6:30 pm and I was ready to call it over. I'd found some new angles in the old town and I was feeling as though the Panasonic camera and I had really bonded. The Nikon D810 has better looking files, technically, for sure. But the Panasonic is super fun and tremendously easy to use as a "sketch book" style camera.  A fast shooting and stable platform from which to go out and blaze away at everything that catches my eyes. 

In the end I made a handful of good images this afternoon. I'll keep banging away at it until my client looses patience with me --- or until I need to get a check to cover some silly expense or another. The day is supposed to be sun filled and magnificent tomorrow and I'll try to shoot for more hours between a location scouting meeting in the late morning and a gala shoot starting at 6pm.  

Tomorrow will be the flip of today where cameras are concerned. I'll shoot with the Panasonic for the exterior building project for most of the day. I'll give it two batteries worth while working around the scouting meeting. Then I need to get home, change into a dark suit with a loud tie, and get over to the Four Seasons Hotel for the annual fund raiser for Texas Appleseed, a charitable organization that matches pro bono work from major law firms who work to provide social justice. In our state they have been taking on the Juvenile justice system and, most recently, payday loans. I like their work and more importantly they get results. 

The photographic requirements of this job call for many "grip and grin" images of attorneys and their spouses hanging out with other attorneys and their spouses, as well as documenting the speeches, the giving of awards, and the giving of more speeches. There will be the typical, elegant, Four Seasons dinner and ample open bars. I'll be pressing the fast focusing D750 and the 24-120mm lens into play, along with a TTL flash from Nikon or Metz. The real secret to success in these situations has very little to do with gear and everything to do with how confident you are, how fast you can work and how authoritatively you are able to move people into small groups and get them to face the camera and have everyone in the group flash you a winning smile at the same time.

I'll put some sort of little bounce card on the flash to soften its light but mostly the evening's toil will swirl around establishing a nice rapport with many of the same people I've seen at these events since the early part of the century. That, and not over thinking the whole thing. It's sometimes very important to know how to stay out of one's own way. 

That's the long and short of it. Hope you are having fun with your projects.

Colors in layers. A sad painting at the Graffiti Wall.

I was depressed on Saturday when I heard about the attacks and deaths in Paris. I watched the news and looked at the stories on Google but it was too much to absorb all at once. It looked like it would rain outside and the day was getting on but I decided to pick up a camera and go out for a walk. I was curious to see what people were up to at the Graffiti Wall near Lamar Blvd.

The sky was dark gray and every few minutes I'd feel drops of rain. The "Wall" was filled with people. They were there to take photographs of themselves, their friends and their families, in front of a new painting that had just gone up that morning. It was a giant French flag with the Eiffel Tower/Peace Symbol on it.

I took some photographs. More to document the moment in time than to make any sort of art. I just felt, at the moment, that it would be good to have an image to remember.

Here's the straightforward photograph I ended up making:

I cropped out the people in the front and the color confusion at the top of the frame.

After I shot different angles and different groups of people the rain decided to fall less intermittently, and more emphatically, and I took off my cap and covered my (non-water resistant) camera preparing to walk the quarter mile of so back to my car. 

As I was leaving the park I noticed the riot of colors represented in the top photograph and pulled the camera out for a moment to capture the saturated mess. It seemed like a nonsensical counterpoint to the heavy implications of the photo I had originally come to take. It's an awkward balance.

Learning more and more about customer service from real life. The saga of buying an iPhone with a defect.

Portrait of the back of my head, by Amy Smith.

On a shoot for the Pedernales Electrical Co-op.

I'll admit it, I abused my iPhone 4S. I decided that the industrial design was so beautiful that putting it in a protective case or sleeve was inappropriate. Sometimes it lived for days on the floor of my car; even days when the temperatures crested 105 degrees. It got dropped and it got rained on. In short, I was a test case for real world use.  Sadly, that cute, perfectly sized phone gave up the ghost on Sunday and went to phone heaven, where the ambient temperature never gets above 68 degrees (f) and the humidity always hovers around 50%.  It just wasn't up for another week of overcharging, coffee drenching, etc. 

So, when I knew the end was nigh I pointed the car to the AT&T store, near downtown, and threw myself on the mercy of one of the clerks who was most helpful, and who walked me through the process of spending even more money on phones that I had ever imagined to be possible in the days of yore. 

I played with the big screen iPhone 6s+ but I already have an iPad so I couldn't imagine why on earth I would need two tablets with big screens. Then I played with the 6s (regular size) but compared to my 4S the phone seemed positively monstrous. I finally settled on the iPhone 5s which felt just right. I figured that all of them were capable of making phone calls in real time, right?

We set up my Space Gray, 16gb, iPhone 5s and it was a fairly quick and convenient procedure. The salesperson was so fun that I popped for buying a protective case there even though I was pretty sure I could get the same case on Amazon.com  for a lot less. I headed home with a happy feeling of sheer, unadulterated consumer joy.

After dinner I headed back out to the studio to play with the incident light meter iPhone attachment that someone at Lumu had sent me. It's a really cool incident light meter which has an app for the iPhone. The incident dome plugs into the auxiliary (headphone) jack of an iPhone. I meant to try the meter a few months ago but my iPhone 4s headphone connector stopped working nearly a year ago. I wanted to set up the Lumu and use it for the rest of the week so I could write a review about it....

Sadly, the new iPhone 5s had one defect; the headphone jack didn't work. No sound and, by extension, no meter. It's always vexing to buy a new product and discover something wrong. I called the AT&T store but they quickly disavowed any responsibility, even though I'd made my purchase there just a few hours before. Nice but unhelpful. They sent me to Apple. The AT&T point of view was that this would be Apple's problem. But at the moment it felt very much like my problem. 

I went online and looked up Apple's customer support for phones. I had the best online chat I've ever had in the history of the web, with the Apple representative. I explained the problem and the service representative suggested I take the phone right back to AT&T. I explained to her that AT&T had just pointed the finger at Apple. I expressed frustration. The Apple rep rallied immediately, making the statement, "We will make this right for you!" 

I don't know what sort of agreement they have with AT&T but the support person from Apple immediately assumed all responsibility for the rest of the transaction. She set up an appointment for me with the closest "Genius Bar," she guaranteed, in writing, that they would be happy to swap out the phone and do all the set up for me. She basically held my hand over the internet and made everything okay. If you depend on your phone for business you know how fragile I was feeling in the moment. How abandoned I felt by AT&T, how I was pessimistically waiting for this to all turn into a customer service debacle in which I would be relegated to sending the product back to Apple for "warranty repairs." 

I was still reticent and paranoid when I headed to the Apple store at Barton Creek Mall with my plastic bag full of receipts, the box, and the accessories for the damaged phone. Then an in-store Apple service rep sat down next to me, shook my hand and introduced herself. She listened attentively to my tale of consumer woe. And, when I finished my rant, she looked me in the eyes and said, "I am so sorry. I understand how uncomfortable it is when something is wrong with your phone. I'm sorry you had to experience this. We'll take care of it right now." She looked on her iPad to see if a replacement was in stock. It was. She went and got the replacement and then walked me through the paperwork to switch phones. At this point store procedure mandated that she turn me and the new phone over to someone at a different station to do the transfer of all my info from the old phone to the new phone but! she sensed that I was uncomfortable being passed off to someone else and immediately decided to do the whole transaction herself. Everything from setting up my thumbprint I.D. to making sure my music library transferred and that my headphones worked perfectly. 

They did. 

I felt.....taken care of. I felt that Apple was honoring their commitment to a customer. I left the store with a working phone and a good feeling about an American company. 

Had I tried to do the logical thing and make AT&T responsible I would have had a bad aftertaste for the whole transaction. The product and service would be equally tainted. But what I found at Apple was an incredibly consistent (and wholly successful) effort to satisfy an aggrieved customer and make things right for me. It was the right thing to do. 

The simple message is to deliver what you promise.  Maybe even delivering a bit more than you promised. All the time. In a way that makes the customer feel wanted, needed and special. But this retail "magic" was happening all around me. 

Across the table, at the Genius Bar,  sat a young couple and they were waiting for a service person to help them with their issue. The guy had an iPad mini and it had some issue which made it shut down randomly. He was a military person and told me he was deploying to the middle east on Sunday. He wanted a working iPad so he could send messages back home. His Apple "Genius" arrived,  listened to his story first (an important part of the formula of making people happy) and then informed him that they'd be happy to swap out the product.... if they had the product in stock. She checked and I could see, looking over at her screen, that they did not have the base model in stock. The Apple rep asked the couple to wait for a few minutes; she said that sometimes they got in new stock that hadn't been entered into the system yet. She would go and check. 

She came back a few minutes later with a new iPad mini. It was the 64 gigabyte model, not the 16 gigabyte model that the young couple had brought in. I had already calculated the difference in price between the two and was ready to offer to pay the difference for them. It seemed like a kind and cool thing to do. But Apple beat me to it and offered them the more expensive model at no extra charge. Just to make it right. Then the rep sat down with them and helped them set everything up. 

I was impressed. Floored, actually. I have worked with lots of more mercenary and short sighted technology companies who would never have "thrown away money" on something like this. What they don't understand is that the story is the most important part of both of these transactions. That each person walked away being more than satisfied with the end result. That doing the "right" thing took short term precedence and will probably mean two life long fans and customers. And each of us who were well served today will tell our stories to our friends and our families. 

And now for the embarrassing coda to my part of the story. I brought the phone in because the headphone plug wasn't working. Neither the headphones or the incident meter accessory worked in the first phone. When I plugged into the second phone I had a similar problem and the Apple person adjusted the protective case I'd bought and realized that the first phone was NOT defective, the jack just was being blocked from being fully inserted by the depth of the case and an off center hole in the case where the jack would go in. 

I was embarrassed and I said to my Genius, "I feel so dumb. You must have realized that it was the case that was the problem." She said, "I wasn't sure and you seemed pretty upset and pretty certain it was the phone. My job was to make you happy with our product. Doesn't matter if we needed to give you a new phone. As long as you leave satisfied, and remain satisfied." 

By this point we had already transferred all the data and reset all the passwords. My rep went out of her way NOT to make me feel like a dumbass. She was also 100% intent on fixing MY immediate problem. My complaint. She was far less concerned about proving me wrong and her right. 

Would I ever buy a phone from any other company? Not likely. But more importantly the Apple rep (and by extension, Apple) showed me how good gracious customer service could feel. That's what I want to do for my customers. Not necessarily for more profit but mostly because----it's the right thing to do. 

I'm a little embarrassed. Not that I didn't troubleshoot my phone correctly but that I sound too much like an Apple fanboy. But I have to tell you, there are only two companies I know of that consistently give me this kind of service. One is, of course, Apple, and the other one is Precision Camera. The owners of that camera store have trained their staff to have the same dedication to customer satisfaction. 

I count myself lucky. And I will pay attention and try to apply the same philosophies to the companies I serve. I just re-learned how good exemplary service makes our customers feel. And why that is important. Bravo Apple.

disclaimer added today: Since I wrote about Apple and praised their service I think I am duty bound to state that while I am not paid by Apple, or given free product, and am not an employee or contractor of the company, I do own stock shares in the company. 

State of the Industry. Are the new "super" cameras enough to save camera makers?

Photographers looking into the mirror.

It's easier than ever to make a photograph these days. It's easy enough to send them as well. And pretty much anything you screw up can be fixed, to a certain extent, in post. So is there anything left to the industry of taking photographs for money? And what is going on in the enthusiast's space?

I just read some numbers from the video/cinema world (Futuresource), the sales of DSLRs into that world (video) fell over 40% in 2014 in Europe with steeper declines expected this year. At its height adaptation of DSLRs for professional video projects comprised about 31% of their total market. Now the rate is closer to 3%. According to the study (http://www.iptv-news.com/2015/06/futuresource-predicts-decline-of-dslrs-for-pro-video/) the reason for the decline is a retrenching back toward traditional camcorders (with XLR connectors, long run times, built-in NDs etc.) or in the other direction toward mirrorless compact system cameras like the Samsung NX1, Panasonic GH4 and Olympus OM5.2. The introduction of less expensive 4K cameras like the Panasonic G7 will accelerate this trend.

In the world of still imaging the numbers, world-wide, are equally bleak. And this in the face of a huge economic recovery in the U.S.A.

My sense is that photography as a 21st century hobby is in major decline. At the recent math conference I attended there wasn't a traditional camera in sight (except for mine). If someone made a photograph of a newly made friend, or to document a demonstration, the whole adventure was done with a cellphone. When I attended the Freescale FTF show it was pretty much the same story. Now, these shows were never overwhelmed by photographers but there were always a contingent with Canon Rebels or Nikon Something DSLRs who were making their own documentations, playing with the camera gear as a "side bar" to the main convention function. Not so anymore.

I've also noticed that among my friends, the ones I would call "committed photographers"; both professional and amateur, have largely stopped carrying their cameras around with them when we meet at restaurants, coffee shops and other routine places. It's only big events where the shooting is easy and the risk of seeming to be an outsider is low where I routinely see any remotely interesting cameras anymore. It seems more of a psychological burden to introduce your conventional camera into regular society now. People are used to, conditioned to, being randomly photographed by camera phones but being photographed by someone with a conventional camera has quickly fallen from the mainstream and become---less usual. More suspect.

But will this change toward fewer public cameras, and fewer hard core pro cameras continue given the introduction of a new generation of "Super Cameras" like the Sony A7r2, the new, beefier Canon 5d's, and the older timer of the group, the Nikon D810? Will the new capabilities of these high performance cameras cause  renewed excitement and bring a wave of new professionals into the fold?

I wouldn't bet on it. While I have no first hand information (having severed my ties with Samsung and their public relations agency over a year ago) I'm inclined to believe the recent rumors swirling about the web-o-sphere that Samsung is withdrawing from the consumer camera space in Europe and north America. After making enormous investments into the NX-1 it seems that they've done new market research that tells them that the overall decline of the camera market coupled with their inability to get any traction at all in these markets with their "ditch the DSLR" campaign, have led them to the conclusion that it's better to exit a dying (or downward trending) market rather than continue to lose money and reputation trying to buy acceptance and market share.

And that's too bad because the NX-1 was actually a good camera: at least after it received numerous firmware updates....

I am paying attention to sales numbers out of idle curiosity but I find it interesting that most of the innovation is coming from the mirrorless space. The exceptions are the cameras from Sony but even there I'm not sure they are gaining new customers to the industry but instead are just capturing Nikon and Canon customers who crave better video, the ability to use a wider selections (and mixed brand selection) of lenses while taking advantage of the always on, live view nature of electronic viewfinders. The CIPA numbers and other measures say the overall market for the "Super Cameras" is still on the definite decline but that Sony's entries are helping only to rearrange the deck chairs on the decks of the Titanic.

There will always be the stalwarts of the industry who will embrace the highest and best of the camera breeds and create an (almost delusional) rationale for the features and benefits of the "best" cameras and lenses on the market but I think the rest of the enthusiasts --- the ones more interested in making photographs rather than comparing test charts --- have come to understand that sufficiency  or good enough is just fine for huge swaths of the profession and general requirements for our hobby.

I think there is still a place for top end equipment if you are willing to leverage the benefits of the gear into your work, and if the work requires that level of quality to be successful aesthetically. Examples would be people who print large or people who require a noiseless final image. Landscape photographers, product photographers, and portrait photographers who want smooth skin tones without having to selectively blur the crap out of their images in post processing.  But things like sharpness and resolution are largely available, across formats and brands, in enough capacity and capability to provide a professional image for most uses, and especially almost any use on the web.

But here's the deal: My observations (anecdotal and statistical) aren't meant as a rending of cloth, a cry of anguish or a note of bitter despair. Far from it. As photography shifts and swirls around from popular to diluted and ubiquitous (but lesser quality) there are fewer and fewer people doing the kind of work I do with the cameras I like to use, and it's clearing out what was once thought to be an infinitely expanding pool of images and distilling new work into a more manageable collection of  high quality content.

There are more and more phone images. More and more manipulated phone images, but fewer and fewer large, printed images. Fewer instances of great lighting design and control. Fewer constructed photographs and more "caught moments of generic exchange." Fewer images that are directly competitive; especially in the professional space. It's almost as if the age of: "I only shoot available light..." photography is coming to an end of sorts, as a viable, full time, commercial venture. Replaced by a return to discipline and control.

The same things are happening in video. There's a movement toward shooting everything with iPhones or their competitors. At the same time the higher end practitioners are moving from the lower budget options of hybrid still/video tools back into video cameras made to work in the traditions of the industry (pro audio inputs, long run times, higher quality codecs, higher bit rates, etc.). It's a shift that's leaving the vast mid-section of the market behind.

All I really know is this: As camera sales have declined my business has returned on almost the same tragectory (but in an opposite direction). We're up in terms of sales and profit per engagement in an almost direct inverse of equipment sales by manufacturers. I can only conjecture that a great number of (talented) amateurs, and in-house enthusiasts at corporate offices,have moved on to other pursuits or have gotten too busy in their core jobs to volunteer to make the critical photographs that move enterprise forward. That's fine with me. I'm happy to be welcomed back.

If you missed it here is a link to a good article at the New York Times about Henri Cartier-Bresson

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/15/magazine/perfect-and-unrehearsed.html?_r=0

His work inspired me to roam the streets looking for images for the last 40 years. Like the one below from a Paris Metro station...

©1994 Kirk Tuck.