Follow up to previous post... One made with electronic flash instead...

This looks totally different to me than the image I posted on the previous blog. I like both of them but this seems like a more substantial portrait. I'm not sure if I am mostly responding to the pose and the expression or if I like seeing all the detail in Sara's hair and wardrobe.

Curious which one you prefer.

This was done with the same A7ii camera but with the Sony 70-200mm f4.0. It's really a delightful combination for portraits. I wonder why I ever stray to other set ups....

A portrait made with a 135mm f2.3 lens, shot wide open. Always wondered what that looked like.

Sara and I had just mostly finished up our portrait session. We'd been shooting with flash and the Sony A7ii with a 70-200mm f4.0. I noticed that the afternoon light looked really nice coming through the diffusion I had up over the window so I asked her to be patient while I found my 135mm lens in a drawer. It's a manual focus lens so I was depending on the focus peaking feature in my camera to help nail focus. I'd pretty much given up shooting wide open with long fast lenses when using traditional DSLRs because I had so much trouble with front and back focusing at various distances with that style of camera. With the Sony cameras I am getting my close focusing, wide open confidence back again.

I shot a selection of images with the camera on a tripod and then we called it a day. 

Today I noticed that Sara had selected several of the wide open images. I retouched them in my usual way and sent them along. I really liked the feel of this one so I wanted to share it here. 

The long, fast lenses are why I am loathe to consider changing systems from Sony.....

Here's the lens I was using: 

A mind blowing microphone revelation makes my day. Talking video production here...

Samson C02 Microphones.

Like nearly everyone who enters the field of video as a generalist I always thought that the choice for on camera interview microphone was either between different brands of shotgun (hypercardioid pick up pattern) microphones or between different brands and models of lavaliere microphones. Then one day I stumbled across a person on the web named, Curtis Judd. He's got a terrific YouTube channel that's all about professional, production audio for video. The information there is pretty amazing and the bonus is that he has a thoroughly professional, on camera-demeanor which makes his video programs a joy to watch. 

Here's the latest video that tweaked my thinking about recording dialog: Curtis Judd/Mics

It was here I discovered the Samson C02 supercardioid (and super cheap) microphone and came to understand it's usefulness and high quality as an indoor dialog microphone. Here's that article: Curtis Judd/Samson C02. But first let me back up and explain what I learned....

When I started getting back into video it seemed  that every article I read and every magazine that discussed video production recommended getting a good "shotgun" microphone. These are microphones that have strong