7.06.2018

What do I expect from Nikon's new mirrorless offerings? And do I think the rumors are even true...?

Image taken with a traditional Nikon DSLR; the D700.
Lens: Nikon 85mm f1.8 D. 

I think the Nikon D5 symbolizes why it's so hard for Nikon to truly make a transition into offering a line of professional mirrorless interchangeable lens cameras. On one hand their real history, as a camera maker, is tightly wrapped around a stream of heavy duty professional cameras ranging from their first rangefinder cameras, through the mechanical tanks represented by the F and F2, and continuing along with heavy, reliable, and overly engineered cameras like the F4, F5 and so many of their top-of-the-catalog digital cameras like the D2, D3, D700, D4 and D5. There seems to be a dominant current of thought in their engineering DNA that drives them to make cameras that are engineered to take years of abuse in stride and to offer a protective shell for their electronics that, in most cases, will far outlast the innards.

But now they seem to be aiming at competing with Sony and Fuji in the mirrorless space and they seem set to abandon their timeless approach. Big, highly engineered and overbuilt picture taking machines. Stuff working pros love.

The catalyst for fashionable change? the witless wags at countless blogs and websites which have continually conflated mirrorless with small, light, handy, pocketable, dainty, delicate and able to fit nicely into a lady's handbag. Even a small clutch. In my mind, and in the minds of other actual, working photographers, we've always valued the idea of the mirrorless camera as being a combination of new technologies rather than defining the genre by size or lack of structural integrity and comfortable handling in the service of dainty-ness.

The rational selling points for a mirrorless professional product should revolve around its newly added capabilities rather than its pared down size and diminished robustness. Two things come instantly to mind: the always on nature of mirrorless camera's live view and the ability to integrate an EVF for more responsive viewing and previewing. A secondary benefit, which is a result of removing the moving mirror and all the linkages required by lens stop down mechanisms, is the very pertinent removal of expensive moving parts. Parts that are expensive to create and expensive to assemble and calibrate.

Marketers of professional mirrorless products should be touting a more direct feedback mechanism as a result of continuous live view through an EVF as a more fluid and instinctive way to create images while also heralding both a cost savings and an increase in reliability as a result of few moving parts and fewer parts requiring calibration and adjustment.

So, if Nikon rushes out two tiny, plastic cameras and a new line of three or four mostly hobbled and slow zoom lenses and expects professionals to embrace a new generation of inexpensively made point and shoot style, interchangeable lens digital cameras while shirking a continuing development of their more traditional DSLR models they will just accelerate their descent into irrelevance.

I expect that Nikon will come out with two camera bodies that are similar in size to the Sony A7 series but will design them with more rounded corners and a traditional, small body work up that tries hard to blend a retro SLR look with an equal amount of retro rangefinder glitz. They will likely not succeed in pleasing advocates of either fashion camp.

If rumors are accurate we can expect to see two models in the beginning; one that gives a nod toward the idea of "professional" by investing in it more features. The features will be the usual meaningless stuff like extended bracketing modes, faster frame rates, a better than Nikon-Typical set of video features, but also a good EVF. If they continue with their practice as in past introductions the second body will be aimed at consumers and might even lack an eye level viewfinder, depending entirely on the youthful eyesight of millenials for composition rather than actively catering to the user demographics that can actually afford to buy camera bodies and lenses on a regular basis.

This mistake will doom the entry level body just as the J1 models eventually doomed the V series line.

The biggest mistake Nikon could make (and so almost certainly will.... ) would be to introduce the two cameras with several consumer oriented, variable aperture zoom lenses that cover wide ranges with mediocre specifications and performance. A cynical new, full frame approach to something like the venerable and mostly unloved 18-55mm f3.5-5.6 DX lens models. Coupled with bad little trio of such lenses and no plan to leverage the millions and millions of decent Nikon lenses already in the hands of millions and millions of active Nikon users the product introduction wouldn't make any sense at all --- and so, that's how Nikon will go.

Sure, they'll introduce an F mount to new camera mount adapter but it will be hobbled with asterisks. It will only work with the new AF-P E lenses. Only with G lenses. Only with etc., etc. It will offer limited AF performance. And the adapter itself won't be available for months and months after the introduction of the new mirrorless Nikon camera bodies.

The paucity of lens choices, the lack of a functional and available adapter with which to use current Nikon lenses, and the hobbling of said adapter will kill overall sales of the new line, which will lead the older Nikon engineers to shrug their shoulders and say, "See, we told you no one wants mirrorless cameras!" But by then it will be even later in the game.

So, if that's what I expect to see then just exactly is it that I want to see from Nikon? I want both bodies to be big enough to hold comfortably, all day long, in adult sized hands. I want both bodies to be crafted out of fabulous metal alloy cores and built to take "drop it in the camera bag" punishment. I want the two initial cameras to be mostly identical in terms of external features like a 3.5 or 4.0 megapixel EVF, a uniform (and robust) battery size, and the ability to work with all older AF lenses. I'm willing to wave goodbye to using manual focus lenses on the cameras, natively, but not AF ones. I would want Nikon to ship the cameras with an F mount-to-new mount adapter in the box!!!!!

And finally, for every boring, plastic and utilitarian lens in the new line up I want a fast, sexy, enormously well performing prime or fast zoom introduced and delivered at the same time, alongside the cheap stuff.

If Nikon is really planning to compete in the mirrorless segment I can only hope they bring their Nikon SP rangefinder chops to the game. If they bring their "Action Touch" sensibility then they deserve to go home with their collective noses bloodied. They should not stop making "real cameras" just because everyone else has defaulted to pixie sized toys. The Panasonic GH5, now that's a good target to aim for.......

And yes. I think the rumors are mostly true.

A very nicely done use of my photos of Brianna as "Belle" in the upcoming Zach production of, "Beauty and the Beast." And a well done website!

https://www.blacktexasmag.com/home-1/2018/7/2/zach-theatre-announces-cast-for-disneys-beauty-and-the-beast

The two images in the article are the ones done in the photoshoot on stage at the Topfer that I recently wrote about. It was the assignment that finally pushed me to buy a monolight with a real modeling light in it. Shot with a D800 and the 24-120mm f4.0 AFS VR lens.

I love it when editors use my images large and well.

Happy Friday!

7.05.2018

A Day Spent Rediscovering the Nikon D800e Camera and Two Lenses.


I was at loose ends this week. My regular corporate clients all seemed to take advantage of a mid-week 4th of July; they all took the whole week off! American productivity took a five day nose dive...
I knew this was coming and you know how much I hate to have idle photo hands, so I sent an e-mail over to my friends at Zach Theatre and offered them my photographic services on any project they might have in mind but didn't have the budget for. If it was fun then I was in. (They are, after all, a non-profit community theater). It took a bit of schedule adaptation but they quickly got back in touch and asked if I could spend a day shooting their Summer kids programs and create images for future use in brochures and on-line collateral. I agreed.

I've photographed so often, and in every nook and cranny of the theater, that I felt like I knew just what to bring. I'd be making candid, non-lit, images of kids under florescent lights (for the most part) and we'd be working on two stages, one rehearsal hall and in two temporary buildings. The kids ranged in age from 5 to 18 and I knew I'd want to use longer lenses so the kids wouldn't be too intimidated by a photographer who was right in their faces. I settled on one main camera; the Nikon D800e. I chose it because it does very well in mixed light, makes great Jpegs and has enviable low light/low noise skills.

The way I chose to use it today was to shoot in Jpeg. I used the fine setting but I shot in the medium size setting. This gave me files that were 5520 by 3680 pixels for a 20.3 megapixel file. More that ample for the theater's use, quicker to shoot, and since the camera is downsampling from the full size file it generates even lower noise files that it would at full res. A monster win on all counts.

Having cut my digital teeth on early Kodak cameras and cameras like the Nikon D2X I always have a certain amount of reservation when using any camera at ISOs higher than 1600 but I know that with my main lens selection and the lower levels of illumination I'd need to shoot in the range of 3200-6400 to get the shutter speeds (and depth of field) that I'd want. I've read in many places that this camera is capable of doing well in those settings but I still a bit reticent.

I packed four lenses today and used two of them. I carried along a 50mm f1.4 G lens as well as the 24-120mm f4.0 VR lens but both of these stayed in the backpack. I also packed an 85mm f1.8 D lens and a 70-300mm f4.5-5.6 VR lens and I used these two for everything. I used the 85mm when I was photographing in horrible light and the 70-300mm for the rest of the shots (about 85% of the total).
Since the 70-300mm maxes out at f4.5 and slips to f5.6 as it zooms to its longer focal lengths the ability to handle higher ISOs with some grace was a vital parameter in the selection of the camera

Photographing kids of various ages in a theater setting can be a hit or miss sort of assignment. The kids are outside their usual routines and are very active and engaged. Since most activities revolve around actively acting, or dancing and acting, and since nothing is choreographed or rehearsed, I'm constantly trying to anticipate movement and spatial relationships between the kids, the stages and to assess the general lighting. A longer zoom lens is very helpful in isolating just the action I'm interested in.

So, how did it all work out? Well, I must say that reports of the mediocre optical qualities of the 2006 vintage, 70-300mm f4.5-5.6 VR AFS lens are highly exaggerated. If you can't make sharp images with a good copy of this lens at nearly every focal length you might re-visit your handling techniques, minimum shutter speeds and better take into consideration the vagaries and pitfalls of subject movement. I was shooting images at up to 300mm, handheld, at 1/160th of a second and, with a human subject comped from the waist up, able to get sharp eyelashes most of the time. And this, generally, at ISO 3200 or 6400.

In comparison to the D700, which I also used for about 10% of the images, the D800e does a much better job handling Auto WB. Any corrections I needed to make were much less dramatic with the D800e, even when shooting in exactly the same environment.

With a battery grip attached the camera is the perfect size and has the perfect configuration for both vertical and horizontal shooting. The finder is very good and nicely bright. While I would prefer an EVF for the instant feedback it would provide I am happy to use a good optical viewfinder, when necessary.

With the noise reduction set to NORMAL and the camera shooting medium/fine Jpegs the files have a good combination of fine detail and low overall noise. Shadows at 6400 are just starting to show some color artifacting but it's only really apparent to me when viewing the files at 100%. In fact, I would say the camera does a better job handling noise in the Jpeg files than I am generally able to do with similar raw files.

Why review a camera that's six years old? Well, because it's still a really, really good camera and now available for bargain prices. High resolution, full frame, low noise at high ISO all for half the price of a flagship micro four thirds or APS-C camera? Yes. A bargain.

I'm toying with the idea of buying one more. I have a D800 and a D800e but one more D800e seems like a worthwhile expenditure --- if I can really justify having a third body as a doubly redundant back up. Probably a dumb idea. In the next six months to a year we'll probably see D810 prices drop toward the $1200 mark. Newer technology isn't necessarily a bad thing....

Now uploading 900+ files for the theater. Answering questions for attorneys on a pending house sale and then straight to bed. Priorities, priorities! I've got some swimming to do tomorrow....

Forgot to mention: The 85mm f1.8D lens is just fine at f2.2, 2.5, 2.8 and beyond. And it's quick to focus on the D800e body. I like it. I'll keep using it until I win the lottery and can afford the Sigma 85mm f1.4 Art lens...

7.03.2018

Way too hot outside so I'm inside getting ready for a portrait session with physician. Thank goodness for air conditioning!


I knew we were in for an uncomfortable day when I was driving to the swimming pool at 6:45 this morning and the announcer on the radio told us that the current temperature was 79 degrees with 96% humidity. The high today should top out at 102, which would be pleasant if we had the desert dryness of someplace like Tucson, AZ., but heat index indicates that it's going to feel more like 108. These are all Fahrenheit temps.

Crazy as I may be I'm loathe to go out walking in this stuff and even a bit happy that I don't have to drag a couple hundred pounds of gear in and out of a remote location. There are some days in Texas when it makes sense to swim early, have coffee at the chilly-est coffee bar in the neighborhood and then get home and work in the studio before the sun climbs high. But I guess it's not just Texas that's dealing with the heat today but most of the contiguous U.S. Is this literally or metaphorically welcome to hell? 

My portrait appointment this afternoon is with a doctor from a large radiology practice in Austin, Texas. It's a practice with about 150 doctors and we've been making portraits for them for nearly fifteen years now. When we started I used a pop up background that I wasn't thrilled with but it became our official background for hundreds of engagements. Lately the art director for the practice has decided to go back and change all the backgrounds via PhotoShop. That's freed me up to totally get rid of the old background and to now shoot the headshots against a white seamless paper. Easier to cut people out and drop them into different backgrounds. Easier for me to get consistency.

My main light today is the Neewer 400 watt second flash I wrote about recently. It's in a collapsible 48 inch softbank. My fill is just a passive reflector to the opposite side of the subject. I've got Neewer Vision 4 light aiming into an umbrella as a single light on my background and an additional Neewer Vision 4 with a standard reflector and diffusion sock as my accent/backlight. The background light is flagged off with a black flag to keep it from spilling onto my subject.

Since the art director is dropping out the subject from the overall image in PhotoShop I'm making her job easily by shooting at a smaller f-stop than I usually do. My lens on the D800e is stopped down to f8 and 1/2 so we can keep hair in focus. It makes getting believable selections easier...

I took a few minutes to meter the lighting set up. I'm using an incident meter and getting f9 from my main light, f9 on my background and f7.1 from my hair/accent/backlight. Once the doctor steps in to the set up I'll fine tune a bit.

I'm nearly always set up and ready to go when my clients arrive. I like to offer a bottle of cold water and let my subjects take some time to get acclimated to the space. For a nice headshot we can usually get started, fine-tuned and finished in about 20 to 25 minutes.

I just finished shooting "Alan" a few minutes ago. I'm going right into the ingestion and post processing of the images and should have a gallery up for the art director in about half an hour. Once I know we've got a range of good keepers, and that the gallery is live and functional, I'll send along an invoice as a .PDF. 

"Alan" came today in a nicely tailored, navy sport coat, pressed dress shirt and perfectly tied tie. He also had on a pair of seersucker shorts and some sandals. His nod to the oppressive heat. A perfect combination for the season, and the purpose of the appointment. 

One more project done before the holiday!

7.02.2018

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!









7.01.2018

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