Business is just business except when it's also art.

I love business portraits. I love it when I have carte blanche to create. The stuff where the client tells you exactly what they want? It benefits no one, but sometimes it pays the rent...

(From back in the days when I really knew how to print...)

The death of commercial photography has been overstated. Wildly overstated if you consider the health of the bigger category of imaging.

There's been a thought trend that the photography business morphed into something new and diminished; at least financially, during the maturation of digital imaging and the massive destruction of the economy from 2007 until 2013 or even 2014. We assumed (collectively) that the business had changed into a blue collar undertaking with much lower pricing structures and a default to letting clients dictate new rules about intellectual property and ownership of images.

What I am seeing in Austin right now is a resurgence of interests on the part of clients in both traditional fields and start up technology fields in using respected artists and smart, well educated practitioners to collaborate in creating new styles of images and combinations of imaging technologies. They are no longer looking (if they ever were) for the lowest priced, technical button pushers, rather they are looking (as clients have since the dawn of creative photography) for people who can guide companies through the part of the process of branding by creating innovative visual work that reflects the feel and dress of the business entity. It starts with their portrait assets and diffuses into the rest of the visual, public facing representations of the company. Does the architectural imaging (and the architecture itself) reflect the look, style and feel of the portrait images? Does the video reflect the same messaging and feel as the still images?

Companies have come around to the idea that really good and really innovative industrial design (hello Apple, Ikea, Tesla, Sony, etc.) is very valuable to consumers and now that the technology inside products has become ubiquitous and invisible to the eye the quality of design and build is a major differentiator in people's desire to buy and own. The logical extension is imaging as part of the industrial design matrix. After all, the design of a company and their product is all represented to the market via video and photography.

Of course I am not talking about wedding, baby and family portraiture; styles and tastes there have always traditionally followed the marketing space by a decade or more...

While large parts of the USA are still dealing with lost jobs and declining wages for many a look at the major technical markets; from Boston to SF, from Seattle to the twin cities, unemployment is hitting record lows. Numbers not seen in decades. Here in Austin we just hit the official number of "under 3%" unemployment. I have friends with fine dining restaurants whose businesses are almost in danger of failing because they are consistently unable to fill positions throughout their enterprise. From cooks to waitpersons. I hear from retailers who are unable to find clerks even at wages quite a bit beyond any minimum.

The recovery works to buoy the value of our work by, on one hand, removing people at the lower end of the market who had not yet found ways to make their forays into photography financially successful (but who have successfully found traditional employment) and, on the other hand, by providing an ever more sophisticated market for ever more sophisticated imagery.

I think the secret is constant experimentation and a deep dive in the currency of being current. But knowing what is selling is only half the equation. Instead of replicating the styles we see it's incumbent upon us to figure out how to integrate the styles that are aligned with our own vision with the stream of current taste. Everyone must figure that out for themselves. But I will tell you that the market feels to me more like it did several decades ago when we were hired as both image makers and professional imaging consultants to collaborate on the projects instead of just taking orders for cookie cutter services. The vital aspect in all of this is to having to go out and show your new work.

Nice to see the market appearing to support a more professional and in depth approach to our partnering of companies with our expertise.

On a different note there was an interesting article in the NYT about how our lack of workforce mobility (actual, physical mobility) has caused this recovery to be slower and less effective than previous economic recoveries. Jobs are portable (ever more so) and move from market to geographic market pretty quickly. The most successful people across many industries are the ones who can move to follow the rise of markets in certain areas and then leave the markets during their decline. It seems that previously in our national history this was a recurring pattern with as much as 20% of the working populace relocating in pursuit of work every year. Photographers can be mobile. If one is stuck in a rust belt city with a declining population and a receding business market it can be more or less impossible to "market your way out" or "just up your game."

You might want to consider targeting the markets that are doing well and to relocate, or at least visit and test the waters. You may find that there are many support jobs available in hot markets that will allow you to work part time in a different field while settling into a much more active and profitable market for your skills.

Also interesting because it ties into a book I read several years ago about this upcoming generation being the "renter" generation. Renting bikes, skis, camera lenses, etc. instead of buying them because, well, it makes economic sense. The book also talked about the nations in Europe (at the time) with the highest rate of home ownership and the lowest rates of home ownership and how this effected income and career success. The poster country for home ownership, with over 90%, was Portugal which, not coincidentally, had the lowest income levels in the E.U. (at that time). The country with the lowest level of home ownership (a nation of renters) was Switzerland which, you guessed it, had the highest per capita income and the most entrepreneurial success.

The finding pointed to geographic mobility as a predictor of job success and income levels. A renter can leave to pursue opportunity while an owner is tied to his location by his single biggest financial asset. A Swiss person plying a career is able to take assignments across his country or around the world with short notice. He is able to follow the flow of success. While a home owner, particularly in a declining economy, is moored to his investment and unable to pursue the same opportunity.

Americans may argue that home ownership is vital for economic success but study after study shows that there is continual financial/investing opportunity loss, and that homes, in general, rise and fall in value slower than equities markets. It's something to think about when someone starts to rant on about, "The government is fudging those employment numbers! Everyone in my town is out of work!" Yes. That the second part of that argument may be true but it's up to the individual to create as much opportunity as possible for himself. Sometimes that means following the work.

The above is about the idea of home ownership and job mobility and NOT about politics. Political responses will be moderated into the void. You are forewarned. 

Getting snagged and befuddled by the practice of using the same camera for stills and video. Too much stuff.

I tend to glom onto a camera that I really like and use the hell out of it in spurts. I know, you are so much smarter than me; you use one camera forever and ever and know it better than you know where the zipper is on your pants. Too bad I'm not as gifted. I forget stuff, get in a hurry and overlook stuff. And with modern "do everything" cameras it's a bit harder to change gears all the time. Especially when schedules get tight and clients get pushy.

It should come as no surprise to anyone who reads VSL that I've lately had an infatuation with the Sony RX10iii and have been using it as both a still camera and as a (wonderfully capable) video camera. But, truth be told, I've stumbled over my two left feet more than once this week by getting in a rush and not making sure I had everything set correctly as I went back and forth from video to stills.

I'll start with the least obvious thing. This camera allows you to set a wide range of styles, profiles and effects. When I shoot video I use a setting that I found while testing all the settings. It's a Rec709 look with a nice, flat gamma. It looks good and the colors fit into the gamut represented by ProRes video. Great, right? Well it's not the profile I'd want to use to shoot Jpegs and it's a pain to batch change profiles in raw as well. I started shooting some still photographs one morning without really paying attention to all the settings. Yep. I had the 709 Picture Profile set instead of the Neutral Color setting I like. I only started paying attention when I reviewed the first few images and everything looked flat to me. Not the great colors I'd come to expect from the neutral or standard settings. Damn it.

Another thing that just messes me up is going into the movie mode and not remembering to set the AF to manual. I usually shoot in S-AF and I expect to be able to hit the shutter button, lock focus and roll on. But the Sony cameras don't work that way. They don't do S-AF in video. They switch to AF-C without telling you. Working under pressure; and with the memory of past still practice, you'll probably think (as I did) that everything is great. And it might be but you'll probably have a nice, sharp background with a fuzzy person speaking in the foreground. I need to get into the habit of switching to manual, punching in on the magnification to fine focus and then keep my hands off the lens. But thirty years of habit is tough to break.

On Thursday we were shooting in the rain with an "A" and a "B" camera. I was setting up the shots along with my wonderful assistant and I couldn't understand why the RX10ii (B) camera was three stops underexposed compared to the A camera at the same overall settings. The client was pushing the schedule and I was starting to question my sanity. I did what most of us do and started going through a mental list of possibilities. Aha! The built-in neutral density filter. That was the culprit. A three stop difference solved by the pressure makes for stress and stress isn't good for working artists.

Focusing modes, profiles, timing settings, annoying zebras versus welcome zebras. It's a lot to change back and forth. Even resetting ISOs from one situation to the other requires diligence. And how many of us have some niggling doubt about the integrity of our files when we put our cameras on tripods and forget to turn off the image stabilization. My least favorite mistake to make, although not destructive, is to come home from a shoot and realize that I didn't format the card I used since its last shoot and it now has two shoots on it. When you go to import it becomes a time consuming mess.

So. What to do? Well, I'm setting up every Sony camera in the rolling tool case with the same settings on the custom buttons. The bottom right hand corner button (#3?) is always focus magnification. There is also a function menu that includes six shortcut settings. I've got a set figured out that I want for video and a set I like for stills. What a pain in the butt to go back and forth. I have two options to consider and I'm guessing you have your suspicions about the course I will ultimately take....

You can, of course, vote.

Option one (the logical course):  Make and laminate a check list for stills and video settings including recommended function menu items for each use. Keep the check list in every camera bag and case. Refer to it whenever changing modes. The advantages here are cost and satisfying the need to also run through a checklist before important shoots anyway. I've never had a formal camera check list but I think pilots do this every time they fire up a 747 and go out for a drive, and what we're doing is at least as important....

Option two (the gear head solution): It would be much more fun to figure out which camera is getting the most "crossover" use; the most switching between video and stills, and buy a second, identical camera. One camera would have all the settings permanently set for video use while the companion camera would have still imaging setting. The cameras could be identified with stickers or perhaps different colored camera straps to cue the busy shooter into making the correct choices.  I'd still like to do the check list just for all those times when a clients agrees that you need an hour to light and set up for a shot but then the CEO comes 55 minutes early and marketing client expects that you'll automatically flood your system with adrenaline and get set to go in five minutes or less. You know, pretty much every other shoot.

The downside of this option is the extra cost and the required space in the camera case but, consider this: You'll be getting s second battery!

Seriously though, I am fine-tuning the function menu items and putting them on two checklists. I am also referencing where to find each menu item in the menu so I can do this quickly. If you know a quicker way to change between two sets (which I have not yet discovered) please chime in and let me know. We've got one more mixed mode shoot coming up on Thurs. and it would be nice not to be caught flat-footed.

A quick break from my vacation break to add to my rambling review of the Sony RX10mkiii. Video.

The Texas Sky Over the Top of My House. 

I'm taking a break from my break to quickly talk about my recent good and mediocre experiences with the Sony RX10mkiii camera. I've been using it non-stop since Monday so that makes over forty hours of hands-on use this week. I've learned more about the camera. 

I used the iii to shoot video on Monday. I was following a crew from an electric utility company as they restored service to various rural customers after heavy rains hit last week. I used the camera under an inexpensive rain cover as well as naked in the mists. I used the camera on a stout, video tripod and on a shoulder mount. I used it as a still photography camera this week to shoot archeological artifacts of the Southwest U.S.A. and I used it for four day this week as a production video camera. Here's what I know now: 

I'll start with stills. I needed an all purpose camera that could take images of all sizes of native American artifacts in a temporary studio setting against a black background. The artifacts ranged from less than an inch across to about four feet in length. I lit the small "studio" with two SMD LED lights in 24 by 36 inch soft boxes. All the images are very well detailed and the color; set with a custom white balance on a Lastolite target disk, was very accurate and matched what my eye was seeing. I used a Gitzo tripod, sometimes with a side arm, and also used a 2 second self-timer setting to kill vibration. The result was high sharpness and detail right into the 100% view. 

The pluses in this set up were the lens flexibility, the very accurate color and the convenient operation of the camera (loving the "punch-in" magnification for fine focusing....). I should also mention that I got through about five hours of off-and-on shooting before I needed to swap out the battery. All very cool. 

The minuses were twofold: The AF hunts as the focal length set on the camera gets longer and longer. It's not a camera I would choose for low light, super long telephoto work. In good light it is superb. In less good light it hunts. The other minus is that its minimum focus distance is too long for good magnification of close ups of small objects unless you go to really short focal lengths. I want the angle of view I want and I want close focusing. It's a lot to ask but I want my fast, 24-600mm lens to also let me focus down to fill the frame with a one or two inch object. I don't always get my wish so sometimes I pulled out the RX10ii which focuses closer. Problem solved; just not very elegantly. 

I shot still life artifacts all day on Tuesday and processed files till late in the night. Delivered via FTP in the early hours of the morning. Why the rush? Because I had three long days of video production ahead of me and didn't want to have to split my attention. Better to be done and billed than changing gears all the time. In hindsight, I would have loved to have shot the still life stuff on Monday but the video schedule required that Monday, as my time and involvement revolved around the schedule of a lineman crew and several large trucks. You can't always schedule perfectly --- as evidenced by the fact that this is the first work week in months in which I had no time to get to the pool and swim with my master's team. Absolutely tragic. 

I shot on Monday with three Sony cameras. I used the RX10mkiii to shoot rainy roads, low water crossings, and skilled technicians forty feet up in the air fixing electrical lines. We also shot footage of a crew fording a river in an ATV. I used the RX10iii for long shots with nice compression, I used the RX10ii as a stationary "B" camera and I substituted the a6300 with the 18-105mm G lens when I needed to do continuous focusing while following a fast moving ATV parallel to the camera, and coming toward the camera. This was all video which I shot in 4K at 24fps, generally at ISO 100 and usually with a variable neutral density filter gracing the front end of the cameras. 

The VND filter slowed down the continuous AF on the RX10iii.  Compromises abound.

On the other side of the coin are two things the cameras (the RX10mkiii and the RX10mkii) do very, very well; those are video and audio. 

I've now shot over half a terabyte of 4K video with the cameras and am consistently amazed at the quality of the images when viewed on a 27 inch monitor. The detail is amazing and, with few reasoned adjustments to the picture profiles, (reducing sharpening by half) the tonality and integrity of the images matches what I am seeing from the A7Rii in the Super35 mode, right up to ISO 400. The images hold together past ISO 800 but you start to see more noise in the shadows than you will get from the A7rii. I think that's fair considering the difference in price and the mix of features. 

The true testament to the quality is when an experienced videographer walks into your office, looks at a paused frame on the monitor and asks if it's a still photo from the camera. The 4K files are that good. 

But the other thing I wanted to mention is about the sound quality of the cameras. I read a lot of stuff that led me to believe that you could NOT get good sound in the camera. That in order to get reasonable quality one would have to buy the hotshoe interface kit from Sony, with its own pre-amps, or resign yourself to shooting double sound. Here's my experience: I plugged a Sennheiser wireless receiver into a Tascam DR60ii and caught the signal from the Sennheiser lav mic. I adjusted the levels with the DR60ii preamps and fed the signal from that machine into the microphone input of the camera; being careful to adjust the levels to a minus 12 average (in terms of Db). The sound I've recorded on the SD cards is noise free and very clean. There are no negative inflections to any part of the sound. The issue I think most people are experiencing in their glancing trials of the camera's audio system have to do with the fact that there is a mismatch in terms of input/output levels from some microphones and,  in those cases, the camera must boost the signal more that it was designed to do. 

Given a good signal to work with the audio circuits are amazingly clean. 

I have one warning about using one feature on the camera!!! If you choose to use the face detection AF in movie mode you'll be walking a dangerous line when the light levels drop. In good light the camera locks onto faces and holds on to them tenaciously. As the light drops the camera loses its ability to grip onto those faces and starts flailing around, looking for something with more contrast to grasp for. If there are nice, solid lines and angles in the background that's where it's going to set focus. 

If you aren't shooting in enough light to keep your exposures at ISO 100/200 with f4.0 you need to switch to MF and punch in to focus. Just a word to the wise... Every feature has its limitations; don't get bit on the ass by exceeding the "envelope" of engineering promise. 

If my studio burned to the ground and everything inside melted the first two things I would replace would be the Sony RX10iii camera and my Apple Computer. Everything else could wait. It's really amazing how good this camera is. 

Now, I'm going back on break. I've got a full week of editing to do and the client just added another video project in which I'll be dealing with making the CEO look good. Counting down the days until I am once again unencumbered by the reality of earning a living and am able to saunter back to the keyboard to chat about life, love, copyright infringement and why I don't have a Fuji camera......(kidding about the Fuji, just kidding).