It's fun to see how the work gets used. Here's an ad for the upcoming Zach Theatre production of "Beauty and the Beast."

There were a lot of different uses for the image above. A full page newspaper ad. Website illustration. Marketing materials to partners and affiliates. Large post card mailers. Full size lobby posters. Who knows what else?

We shot the image on the main stage at Zach Theatre using a Nikon D800e, a Nikon 24-120mm f4.0 lens, and we lit the shot with three Neewer Vision 4 monolights. Design of the above ad was by Rona Ebert of Zach's marketing team.

It's always fun to do a project like this one and to see how the images end up being used. We'll be back to photograph the dress rehearsal and more the beginning of next week.

Now it's time to get back to work on the next project.....

Some strange conjecture about a future collaboration between Samsung and Nikon.

Wiring Harnesses. 

I was reading an article over at Andrew Reid's website, EOSHD.com and it seemed both obvious (in retrospect) but also very prescient. Here's the original source for today's thoughts https://www.eoshd.com/2018/06/samsung-joins-forces-with-fujifilm-will-apply-new-tech-to-large-sensor/

If you read all the technical papers about the chip technologies used in the late, somewhat lamented, Samsung NX1 you would be amazed to see that, at the time, Samsung was bringing to market some incredible design and manufacturing prowess. The sensor in the NX-1 used fast copper interconnecting technology, was BSI before BSI was a buzz acronym, was based on 4.5 nanometer technology which surpassed other makers by orders of magnitude, and much more. The marketing problem was that Samsung lacked experience and panache at haptics, desirable industrial design and an ability to relate well to ( or to even understand ) their primary buyers. 

They had the state of the art sensor but every previous camera they made had serious handling or firmware faults that crippled their ability to frame the sensor well. Kind of like dropping a modern, high performance car engine into a Yugo chassis and expecting people to applaud the performance of the motor alone....

According to Andrew's sources Samsung has continued to push serious money into sensor R&D ($13 billion thus far....) and could whip out an incredible full frame sensor at the drop of a hat. It seems that they are partnering with Fuji to advance the technology but that doesn't necessarily mean that Fuji will end up being the primary user of a full frame version of the joint sensor technology. They would have to re-tool their entire line of lenses to introduce a full frame camera wrapped around that sensor. It might happen; there might be a product extension down the road, but for some reason the first camera maker that popped into my head was Nikon. 

They source a lot of sensors from Sony and like any other business it can be downright dangerous to find yourself wedded exclusively to one supplier. A new, state of the art sensor that can go toe-to-toe, or even surpass, the current Sony product line could be an important differentiator for Nikon at a time when proving their continuing tenure as a cutting edge photography company is vital. It would be interesting to see Nikon roll out a flagship mirrorless camera with a unique and powerful new sensor at its heart. 

If Sony and Canon finally have a large and powerful competitor at the top of the innovation mountain it can only benefit consumers across all camera brands. My experience with Samsung showed me that while they were still immature as a maker of easy to use and easy to handle cameras their sensors were first rate. In fact, reviewing some of the work I did with their (ill fated and over engineered) Galaxy NX camera was a revelation. They had the sensor tech nailed down. It was betrayed by an odd fascination with infecting their late cameras with an Android Operating system...

And no one wanted their camera to automatically update Candy Crush (shutting down camera operation temporarily) just as they were about to photograph the final goal of the World Cup...

It will be interesting to see how Samsung caters to the existing camera market. It may be that they come back into camera manufacturing with a new understanding that the real money (for right now) is either in Phones (which they have covered) or in the high end of the stand alone camera market. Could be another game changer.  Just some Monday Thoughts. 

A nod to Andrew Reid for the topical awareness. 

Self Portrait While re-Testing a Gift Lens.

Yeah. It's July in Texas. You feel it especially well on the humid days when the heat index rises up into the triple digits and you sweat walking from the house to the car. For the last week we've also had a weird atmospheric haze caused (absolutely true) by an enormous dust cloud that arrived from the Sahara Desert. Air quality dipped to "moderate" which is never a welcome sign. 

I'd gotten a cool old lens from a reader and fellow blogger and a few weeks back I did a cursory test of the lens. At the time I was having a brief love affair with polarizing filters and had one on the front of the new (to me) test lens. When I posted the images more than one person commented that the photographs had lowered contrast, or a hazy veil over them. I blamed the lens and moved on. But my sloppy test technique was keeping me up at night and so on Friday I took the lens back out and shot some more, but this time I ditched the filter. 

The lens in question is an inexpensive, older Nikon. It covers a focal range that I really like. It's a Series E 36-72mm f3.5 and is manual focus. I've posted some new samples here and I am growing to really like this lens. It has personality. It also has vicious barrel distortion at the wider focal length settings. It corrects with about a +3 slide in PhotoShops Lens Correction distortion panel. But here's the deal, you can have less distortion in a lens design but something else has to give, usually it's overall sharpness. This lens is very sharp in the center two-thirds of the frame and that suits me fine. 

I have a lot of lenses that cover this range but none are as petite and amiable as this one. Of all my lenses in this range the one that continues to surprise me for it's high sharpness and lack of distortion is the Nikon 35-70mm f3.5, two touch, manual focus zoom. It's built like...well....an all metal lens, and there are no design "nods" to small size or light weight, it just performs well vis a vis image quality and is remarkably accurate when manually focused on a D800e. It's refreshingly retro-technical. 

I can't counsel anyone to buy the smaller, 36-72mm Series E lens if their main interest is in capturing rectilinear architectural photos, although I've included one I corrected below. I can suggest that it's very fun to use and the limited range of focal lengths works well to focus your attention. 

Without the polarizing filter (Bad lens tester. Bad!) the sharpness is absolutely fine and I don't see the veiling haze or low contrast that I experienced before. I'll definitely keep it around for those times when the walk is necessary but the need to haul around "professional gear" is not. Thanks Stephen!

The quick and successful search for an affordable and feature rich monolight. Why and what.

Neewer Vision VC-400 HS.

Last year I got rid of a lot of old, battered and obsolete monolights. It was a clean sweep. I got rid of ancient Profoto units as well as orphaned Elinchroms and a pair of Photogenic monolights. It felt good to push out stuff from the "early" days of studio flash lighting, to streamline my studio space and to rationalize the inventory. I don't regret the "massive purge" for a second. 

And while I'm happy shooting most portraits and non-moving subjects with a brace of Aputure LightStorm LED panels there are times when I do need to use flash to do some of my work. After a bit of dancing around on Amazon.com I came across a product from a company called, "Neewer" that seemed to fit the bill. It was the Neewer Vision 4 and it had features I wanted at a price just about anybody could afford. At the time the light was $289 but I noticed (probably due to a decline in general interest in lighting) that recently they've been priced as low as $189. A full featured monolight for a fraction of what we used to pay for a brand name, hot shoe flash. 

I bought one Vision 4 to try it out. Here's what I liked: It doesn't have a power cord, all power comes from a big rechargeable lithium ion battery that's nicely incorporated into the body of the flash. The interchangeable battery is rated to provide up to 700 full power flashes. Nothing to sneeze at since

Yesterday I was putting together a slide show of theater photographs to share at a presentation. Then I thought I would also share the images with my readers here at VSL. I thought you might be interested in what we show.

Jill Blackwood in Xanadu. Zach Theatre. Austin, Texas

I write a lot about photographing for theaters here in the blog. Probably so much so that some of you think I must have an office at Zach Theatre, or that I do nothing but shoot for them. The reality is that most work done for private corporations is more tightly controlled and I sometimes have to jump through hoops to display it. But theater is different because the images are made with wide and diverse distribution in mind. The shelf life (from a show marketing point of view) is very short; about six weeks to two months for most work. But there's a pressing need to get it into as many media and social outlets as possible. 

This makes it easier for me to share with my readers on a regular and frequent basis.

I love these photos because they require me to be quick on my feet, always thinking ahead, yet at the same time reacting to the constant changes of lighting color temperature, exposure, blocking, composition and timing to make good work. If I do stuff well I get happy clients. That's a dangling carrot in which I am always interested. 

Today I built a gallery with a couple hundred images on my Smugmug.com site. My thought was to share it not only with my VSL readers but also the corporate clients who may never see my other work beyond my regular,  meager marketing efforts. I'll share it with them via an e-mail blast and a few handwritten letters. 

I'd love to know how you like the gallery and whether I should do more galleries of different photographic subjects. We have a pretty extensive archive to play with. I'd hate for all that work to just sit there and not pull its own weight......

particulars for this image: shot with a Sony a99 (yes, I even had one of those) and the Sony 70-200mm f2.8 (which, so far, has been the best of all the f2.8 zooms I've owned). 

Here's the link to the gallery: 

https://kirktuck.smugmug.com/Photography-from-Live-Theater-Productions-and-Live-Music/Photographs-from-Live-Theater-Productions-by-Kirk-Tuck/

Type. Type. Type.

3700+

Why do I feel more comfortable with Nikon cameras rather than FujiFilm cameras? I never really gave it much thought till...

...someone asked me about my preferences at last evening's talk in Dripping Springs, Texas. I gave a cursory answer at the time but I've thought about it more today since we are in the period wherein all the blogs, photo websites and YouTube channels promoting cameras begin the concentrated glorification of the newest Fuji; the XT-100. For the next week or so we'll learn that this new, small, inexpensive camera is "Surprisingly good!!!" "Worthy of Serious Consideration!!!!" "A sleek and beautiful RETRO design" "Punches far above its weight class!!!!!" and, "Has a REVOLUTIONARY bayer pattern sensor!!!!!!" It's that magical period in which every writer newly discovers that cheap and simple can be really good. Especially if the site is in the business of getting click throughs and profiting from generating sales for giant camera stores and, well, Amazon.

If I were a fan of Fuji and already owned some of the lenses the breathless adulation for this $599 camera might have already pushed me to pre-order it. Indeed, it looks like a pretty good deal if you are just interested in taking photographs. But I'm not interested, which begs the question: What have I got against Fuji cameras?

The answer? Either: Absolutely nothing. OR: I've had some less than gratifying experience with the company's cameras, going all the way back to the Fuji S2.

In the early days of digital I shot a lot with the Kodak DCS digital cameras. My first experiences were with the DCS 660 but my favorite early digital camera was the DCS 760 with its 6 megapixel APS-H sensor and removable AA filter. It was a beast in more ways than one. It was built on a Nikon F5 chassis which meant it was rugged and fast. It weighed nearly five pounds so it could hardly be called convenient, but the most beastly factor for owners was that this 6 megapixel camera cost $7,000 and could only really be used at ISO 80 and ISO 100.

When the market for APS-C digital cameras from other makers took off there were competitors like the Nikon D1X, but it was still a pricey unit and didn't offer any real image performance advantages over the DCS 760. Enter the Nikon D100, a camera that never gets mentioned today.

The D100 hit the market at around $2,000 and made very nice images. It had a tiny raw buffer of four. Yes. 4. It took a while to write to the card but the camera was well behaved and rarely crashed or froze. I bought one and used it for a while. But it was (on paper) outgunned shortly afterwards by the Fuji S2. The S2 employed a novel new sensor that promised the equivalent of 12 megapixels. The sensor was continued with additions and improvements in the S3 and the S5.

But let's look at the first camera I bought, the S2. It was based on a Nikon N80 body but it required two different sets of batteries. Four double A batteries went in the extended bottom segment of the camera while the regular camera portion used two (non-rechargeable) CR123 lithium batteries (which we ended up buying by the bucket load ---- not an efficient energy user...). You could load all the batteries at the same time but it was almost guaranteed that they would die in opposite cycles from each other. And with alarming frequency. Change the double A batteries, shoot some more files, change the CR123's, shoot some more files, etc.

And when one set or another died they did so while corrupting whatever files were still left in the buffer. In fact, the S2 and S3 corrupted more files than any other camera, or camera system, I have ever owned. Regardless of CF cards used.

At the time the lure of the S2 through S5 was the idea of getting what might be considered a 12 megapixel camera at a time when there was only one other 12 megapixel camera on the market; the Canon 1D full framer (nearly $7.000). We were paying about $2400 each for S2 cameras that extrapolated 12 megapixels from a six megapixel sensor, used an amateur camera body with a 92% viewfinder, and had raw files that, upon introduction, were only usable in the world's worst raw processing software.

But, hope springs eternal, so we gave it a go when the S3 came out. Bought two. There were two things to like about the newer camera: first, the sensor kind of really had 12 million pixels on it. Half the elements were big ones and half were small ones. The big ones were good for low light while the tiny ones were optimized for highlight detail and the combo provided better dynamic range than many competitors. Second, the camera did away with two sets of batteries and settled on one set of 4 double A batteries instead. It came with a set of metal nickel hydride rechargeable batteries which might get me through a hundred or so images.

I did a lot of work with the S3 cameras but the files never had the detail and ease of processing that I could get from the then competitor, the Nikon D2X. I finally switched to Nikon, which wasn't that difficult as both systems were DX (APS-C) and both systems used Nikon lenses. This was before the magic time when Fuji started making lenses for their mainstream consumer products (Fuji has been a supplier or professional film and video optics for decades, and they have a sterling reputation in that field).

The choice was all about camera bodies. The Nikon blew the Fuji away for handling, speed, battery life and focus. It wasn't a hard decision.

So, that was my early history with Fuji digital cameras but what about now? Now Fuji seems to be the "Gold Standard" for many advanced amateurs, and lots of pros are starting to shoot with them as well. Why not give it a try since I've dragged myself through Panasonic, Olympus, Canon, Nikon, Sony and Samsung in the last eight years......?

I rushed out and bought a Fuji X-100 when it first hit the market and hated it. Passionately hated it. The shutter sounded cheap and frail. The software was half-baked in the first production cycle and the finder was an insult to any Leica user. It went back to the store and I was even happy to pay a re-stocking fee just to get it off my depreciation schedule.

When the X-Pro-1 came out I decided I'd been too harsh on the Fuji cameras and, knowing the solid reputation for their lenses, I read all the reviews of the camera and the new lenses and went to Precision Camera with a checkbook in my hands. I was sold by the incredible marketing. I loved the look of the bodies which was a nod to the Leica cameras I'd used all during the 1990's. We were just coming off some big project and I had the extra cash with which to scratch this Fuji itch.

I played with the camera. Loved the overall feel. But the finder looked blurry. I couldn't find the diopter adjustment, you know, the eyepiece control that comes even on the most basic point and shoot cameras... Right? I asked the sales person. Nope. There was no built-in eyepiece diopter. I would have to order a screw in lens for the finder. Did they have them in stock? No. Could they be ordered and delivered quickly? Maybe in six months.....

Later a rep for Fuji insisted that I try the revised X-100T. A "much improved" product. It wasn't. I sold it to a friend who really wanted to want it. He too was less than bowled over.

At that point I called it quits, at least temporarily, on Fuji cameras. I'll give them another generation or two to sort out everything and then I may dip my toe in with whatever their flagship camera at the time is. That and a 50mm equivalent lens. I'm sure it's all vastly improved at this point and will be even better in the next rev but... snake bit three times and you want to give yourself a rest and let the anti-venom do its job...

If you want to read stuff about the Fuji XT-100 give DP Review a few days and no doubt you'll have dozens and dozens of "first impressions" "hands-on" "is it a Nikon F killer???" and other articles to plow through. Some might be interesting. A few might even be helpful. But we're not really interested in covering it here.

It's Friday. I'm looking forward to the weekend.

Finally, why is the Nikon F at the top of the article? Hmmm. It's a symbol for what I really want in a professional digital camera. I wish we had a digital camera with ISO, WB, RAW and a review screen. All the other junk you want could be done in post. That's the camera I have consistently wanted. A simple to operate, fully manual camera with about 25 million pixels of good, solid resolution and dynamic range. No more decisions to make on set. The antithesis of most cameras offered today.

"Thank you" To The Photographers of Dripping Springs. We talked. We shared. We had great Tex Mex food.

My friend, Dave Wilson, invited me back to Dripping Springs, Texas again this year to present to their organization, The Photographers of Dripping Springs. They left the topic up to me so I decided to talk about something I had never done a workshop or presentation about before, and that was: the nuts and bolts of photographing live theater.

I put together 187 photos I liked and presented them as a slide show, running continuously in the background while I spoke. The venue had a great projection system! I also showed a video we did for Zach Theatre; it's the one I posted yesterday afternoon on the blog. The purpose of showing the video was to point out how we integrate still images as b-roll in motion projects.

The talk seemed well received as the group then invited me to their favorite Mexican restaurant to continue, more informally, our discussions about photography, cameras (one question that came up was, "Why don't you like Fujis?") and life. The Tex-Mex food was great but the conversations were even better.

The most important thing I focused on was to not ramble on for so long that we missed the open hours of the restaurant. That happened when I came up two years ago and I learned my lesson. Speak for 45 minutes, answer questions for 15 minutes and then shut the heck up. It's a good, working method if you also want to get a nice dinner.

Thank you to PODS for making me feel welcome and for listening. And thanks for showing me another good Mexican restaurant that I'll keep in mind for those times when I am coming home from San Antonio on Hwy 281 (the scenic, back way) and hit Dripping Springs starving. All very well done. I only hope I didn't bore my fellow photographers and that they were too polite to heckle..... (smile emoji strongly implied...).

Ben and I did this video about "The Million Dollar Quartet" almost a year ago. It was for Zach Theatre. It's one of my favorite videos. I love the black and white photos. They're mine too!!!

Gavin Talks about Million Dollar Quartet at ZACH THEATRE from Kirk Tuck on Vimeo.

As I was looking in the archives for shots of live theater production photos I kept stumbling across portraits that I love.

This is one of Afradet. I found her eyes to be amazing. I found her when an art director cast her to play a part in an campaign we did for the Austin Chamber of Commerce. Afradet was just finished with college and launching her career. We did a bunch of photos together after the Chamber project but we've since lost touch in the mad swirl of life...I'd love to photograph her one more time.

Photography as cultural record keeping. Looking at vanishing "Texas" in growing Austin.

This shot is part of a series of original buildings that lined Congress Ave., the street that leads right up to the state capitol. Congress used to be lined with many two and three story brick or stone buildings that had been there since early days. The image above is of the side of a building that started out as a clothing store and at some point became the home of one of our city's most beloved Mexican food restaurants; Las Manitas.

The whole block was recently demolished and flattened to make way for the amazingly bland J.W. Marriott Hotel. A cookie cutter convention hotel that, I am sure, generates money hand over fist for the Marriott corporation. I'm sure the property now also generates thousands of times the tax revenues of the old restaurant and also the surrounding businesses that proceeded the hotel. We've gained some revenue and lost a bit of our heritage.

Progress waits for no one. At least we have a continuing series of photographs that tells a two dimensional story of what was there.

Shot eight years back with an Olympus E-1 and a 50mm macro lens.

Photograph the stuff you grew up with before it vanishes. You might want to reminisce.

It's about one hundred and one degrees here in Austin, Texas. I thought I'd find a ski shot to look at for a while.

A few years back Jennifer and I decided to do a series of sports photos with a bit of a twist. We'd shoot them as portraits in the studio. Back then I was working with one big 4x6 foot softbox as my main light, very little fill light and then one light on the background for separation. Here's the shot we did with Jennifer in a down ski jacket wearing a pair of goggles.

We shot the series with a Hasselblad 201f camera and a 180mm Zeiss lens onto Agfapan APX 100 film and then printed them. This is a copy shot of one of the prints. When I see the photo it reminds me of how cold it was on the day of the shoot --- and how much fun we had doing it.

In retrospect I should have toned it a bit cooler (more blue) to align with a wintry theme...

Playing with new photos over on Instagram. A quick way to put up an new gallery: https://www.instagram.com/kirktuck/

Going a little nuts today over on Instagram. You might want to see new (and old) stuff.

https://www.instagram.com/kirktuck/

Crazy times.

Kirk Tuck Presents his Ideas About Photography for Live Theater this Thurs. in Dripping Springs, Texas.

Practice something enough and you tend to develop some proficiency at it. I've been doing photography for live theater production marketing for over 30 years now and I think I'm just about getting the hang of it. I've been asked to do a presentation about photograph to a group of photographers in Dripping Springs, Texas this coming Thurs. (June 28th) and I decided to actually talk about something I know: The Nuts and Bolts of Live Theater Photography.

Here's a link to the group's website about the evening: http://photographersofds.us/2018/06/19/pods-june-meeting-june-28-2018-630pm/ 

I'm going to concentrate on walking people through my methodologies. I'm not going to set up and shoot anything. But I promise to at least try and be interesting. Now I've just got to spend a little time going through the archives with the idea that I might want to show some work.....

If you're in the neighborhood I'm sure you are welcome to drop by.

In other news: The West Austin News interviewed me and ran a full page profile. It made me sound smarter and more interesting than..... Sadly, it's print only and they seem picky about copies ending up on the web. I'll ask once more if I can publish just the article here on the blog but it's nothing you won't glean from reading the "Contact/Info" page on my website....

Grabbing a camera as I'm running out the door. What am I reaching for these days?

Mousumi. ©Kirk Tuck

For many years there was no question in my mind as to which camera I'd be casually hauling around for the day; it was always a Leica M3 with a 50mm f2.0 Summicron hanging on the front. In the same way that some cultures use "worry beads" to keep their hands busy and their minds focused I'd find myself sitting, waiting for a meeting or the start of an event, and my hands would be busy working the aperture on the lens while counting f-stops, or rotating the shutter dial while memorizing the positions of the shutter speeds. The camera and I were so well bonded I could load film in the dark and set exposures with my eyes closed. 

I've traded, and bought and sold, digital cameras so often since those days that I have never attained the same level of workaday comfort with any of them. On most of the cameras we use now there are really no physical aperture rings, no nicely knurled shutter speed dials, and, of course, no need to load  them with film in the dark. All the tactile cues have been stripped off and replaced with buttons and dials that have no beginning or final set points. You can't set a Canon 5DmkIV's shutter speed only by touch - you have to look at an LCD panel. You can't set a Nikon G series lens aperture from memory - you have to look at a screen. It's not the way we first warmed up to cameras but it's the way things are...

Lately, I've been defaulting to my simplest camera. That's the Nikon D700. That camera has the fewest menu items, the most streamlined settings and the fewest control distractions. I think the smaller set of choices appeals to me even though more "feature rich" cameras from the same maker can be used in a similar, simplified mode. It's not having to make additional choices that seems to be the appeal. 

When I left the house on Sunday to drive to San Antonio I remembered the full cloudscapes I'd shot the week before. I used the D700 and the very ancient 37-70mm f3.5 lens to make them and I was struck by their unique look and color when I pulled them up on my monitor.

I'm using the camera in a very standard way. I set it to Jpeg fine and select the "standard" color setting. The only modification I make is to drop the saturation by one click. The files look better to me that way. I can always add a bit more saturation in post, if the image requires it.

I also like using a non-AF lens. I've been pulling over and shooting a lot of scenic stuff from the car lately and it's great to set the lens at its widest focal length, set the aperture at f11 and the focus at infinity. When I've got the camera set that way and I'm in aperture preferred mode I can just point the camera and shoot without having to fine tune anything. Occasionally I'll have to dial in some exposure compensation but that's hardly traumatic.

All in all it's a fun way to shoot. And a very big departure from the way I shoot in the studio.

The photo of Mousumi is the result of a much different approach. I spent lots of time getting the subject to background distance just right and even more time lighting the whole scene. I focused carefully and used a flash meter to get my exposure into my favorite printable range. And, finally, I spent half an hour working with Mousumi to get a range of expressions and engagement that we would both find satisfying. The camera didn't need any automation, and that's a good thing since it was a completely manual Hasselblad mechanical camera. The only setting on that old 500C/M was the shutter button. The aperture and shutter speed rings were on the leaf shutter lens. Old school. 

House camera versus road camera. Long seeing versus reflexive snapshots. All fun.