An "in progress" review of the Olympus 12-100mm Pro lens after over a year's experience with it.

When I bought my first two GH5's I was starting over in the micro four thirds universe from scratch. Because I intended to use the system to make photographs and videos for business rather than for just my personal use, I needed to put together a rational collection of lenses that would cover my professional needs. I don't need exotic focal lengths but I do need to cover what professionals who shoot any system need; a wide angle zoom that's well corrected for geometric distortions, a telephoto zoom (which I use frequently in theater and in the making of certain kinds of portraits) with a fast f-stop and then, most importantly, an all around, standard zoom that's sharp as a fresh razor blade, well behaved and fully useable at a wide open aperture.

When selecting normal range zooms I dislike those with very limited ranges. I'm not a fan of the big, heavy 24 to 70mm f2.8 zooms (on FF) because they are too cumbersome for what they deliver and they can't get me into a portrait range that I like. When I shot with Canons I nearly always had their venerable 24-105mm f4.0 L lens attached to a camera. Now that I'm shooting frequently with Nikon cameras I lean toward the (surprisingly good) 24-120mm f4.0 and am happy to have the extra 15mm of focal length at the long end. It's a nice lens for a portrait photographer! But when I bought the Panasonics I relied on my recent memory of having purchased and used their twin "pro" lenses, the 12-35mm f2.8 and their 35-100mm f2.8. I remember sometimes being frustrated by the limiting 70mm equivalent at the long end of the 12-35mm and miffed at having to always carry two cameras, each with a lens mounted on it, it cover the range at a fast moving event, conference or even theater dress rehearsal.

Those lenses left my inventory in my purge of the Olympus EM-5.2 cameras a while back and so I came to populating the GH5 system inventory with a clean slate. I had the prejudice that lenses with less extreme ranges would be better optimized than those with extreme ranges and that belief made me leery about looking at the Olympus 12-100mm, even though the focal length range is like something from heaven for the kind of work I routinely do. But my (extremely good) experiences with the breathtaking range of focal lengths provided by the Sony RX10 iii went a long way toward at pushing me to at least be open to a trying the longer range on the Olympus professional zoom.

I read many reviews before I decided to try the lens for myself. I borrowed one from a local camera dealer and spent a weekend shooting all kinds of images in all sorts of places. I tried every aperture and every focal length. When I finally sat down in front of my computer and started editing and then post processing my raw files a smile spread across my face. Here was a lens that was clearly as sharp wide open as it was stopped down to f5.6 or f8. It wasn't just "useable" at f4.0 it was superb at f4.0.

It also worked flawlessly with the Panasonic GH5. The system defaults to using the image stabilization in the lens rather than the in-body stabilization but I haven't found that to be a negative. In fact, when I bought the GH5S, which does not feature image stabilization, a lot of my comfort in buying that particular body came from the knowledge that my favorite Olympus lens would do a great job stabilizing images on that body.

I also put the Olympus 12-100mm ahead of the Panasonic twins and the Panasonic/Leica 12-60mm f2.8-4.0 because it is a superior lens for video work. Let me explain why. All the lenses discussed here use "fly-by-wire" to manually focus but only the Olympus (with it's separate setting for MF) allow you to access a marked focus ring which stops at infinity and also allows you to set a repeatable focus point which you can see and return to on the focusing ring. This allows you to easily and accurate preset a distance for focus and come back to it again and again. And, while the focus throw is a bit short you can, with practice, roll focus between two marked points reliably. Not really possible with the other candidates.

I've shot with the 12-100mm for over a year now and last week's big shoot was a good example of why I like using the lens so much. I was covering a conference for three long days, shooting tight shots of speakers on stage, wide shots of branding and stage design, shots with ttl flash and a wide open aperture and even a fair amount of video of the same subjects. I used the lens mostly at f4 and have yet to find a frame (if I didn't screw up on focusing) that wasn't sharp and pretty. I could use the lens on the GH5S and get image stabilization in both video and still photography and there were times when I switched into manual focusing just for the hell of it. After shooting 4,000+ images over the course of the event, everywhere from dimly lit ballrooms, exteriors, tented venues and in crowded team rooms, I found that the vast majority of images were done with this one lens.

A much smaller percentage of shots were executed with the 40-150mm f2.8 (an amazing lens that is sharper than any Canon or Nikon 70-200mm lens I've used) because I used it mostly to get tight headshots of speakers on stage from a discreet position in the back of a hotel ballroom (not a very large ballroom). An even smaller number of images were done with the Sigma 30mm f1.4 contemporary lens and I used it just to see how it handled at its widest aperture. It was great as isolating people in the crowd.

The 12-100mm is not a cheap lens to buy but it is cost effective once you realize that it's usable on nearly every project you'll end up doing with micro four thirds systems. The lens is water and dust resistant, built almost entirely of metal, has very effective image stabilization and, for the range, is not heavy or cumbersome.  An added bonus, if you shoot with Olympus EM1.2 and EM5.2 cameras, is that the lens I.S. and camera I.S. will work together to give you pretty spectacular stabilization.

In the course of the last year I've used this lens extensively in video projects and even more extensively in photography assignments and it is one of the gear investments that paid for itself many, many times over.

The Olympus Pro series lenses are in a class by themselves. They are remarkably sharp and well corrected. I'm not sure how much of the correction is being done by processing in the cameras but I can see that I'm not experiencing image degradation in the corners, even with the 10 megapixel camera, and that kind of image damage is usually a clue of too much processing and not enough file information. I'm not seeing those effects with the 12-100mm.

So, bottom line, how good is the Olympus 12-100mm f4.0 lens? Literally, it's my "desert island" choice. I'm using it for a project this afternoon and for a video on Saturday. It's also the first lens to hop in my camera bag and head for Iceland at the end of October. If I dropped, lost or otherwise didn't have one I'd rush to my local dealer and replace it immediately. There are few other lenses whose absence wouldn't at least trigger a "what a good chance to see what else is available...." but the 12-100mm is a non-negotiable part of my system. The other "must have" is the 40-150mm f2.8 but we'll save that for another day.

Black and White Adds Fiction to Photographs.

I've tried for years to figure out why I prefer to look at black and white photographs of many subjects. It finally dawned on me after watching the movie, "La Dolce Vita" for the millionth time.

Removing color removes a layer of implied reality from the art. When that layer is removed we get to look at the image or movie as more of a fiction or story and less as a documentation of reality.

The lack of color, and the beguiling interplay of tones, allows us to put aside our presumption of objectivity and dive into whatever visual narrative the artist wanted to present.

And if you are just buying photographic art as an investment you can buy black and white prints without the worry that some of the colors in a color print might clash with your couch or your decorator's choice of wall paint.....

Having realized all of this I now want all camera makers to concentrate on giving us better and more customizable black and white modes. Regardless of sensor size or quantity of megapixels.

Why would they not want to give us the opportunity to make better black and white photos?

I wouldn't cost much to add better profiles to most cameras on the market.

My first subdued romp through the naked city with a Panasonic G9 in my hands. Like a photographic Godzilla through Tokyo.

Next week I'll spend a day at this hotel making portraits for a high technology company.

I've shot with Panasonic cameras since the days of the GH2. I've owned and used the GH3, GH4 and now two versions of the GH5 and most recently I've added a G9 to the mix. Largely on the strength of my almost visceral reaction to the splendid files I've been getting from the GH5S. Not huge files by any means, but extremely well built files with great color and tonality. I figured the newest color science might actually run in the family and so, here we are with a G9. And just in time as our dance card is filled with assignments as far as the eye can see.

I hate diving straight into shooting paid work with a new camera. There could be new settings or buttons that stump me while I'm right in the middle of a project or the camera could (rarely) be defective in some way and it's better to find that out and get it swapped out for a new one ASAP.  My routine is to put a known lens on the front and head out the door to shoot the camera for a couple hours or a couple hundred frames and see if there are any surprises. Certainly I would hate to pack an untested camera and take it on a trip out of town. That would be my idea of a nightmare scenario.

I put a new battery in the camera and a Hoodman Steel 128 GB V60 UHS II SD card in the "A" slot on the camera, formatted the card, and then added a 25mm f1.7 Panasonic lens to the package. I put the camera into the "A" mode, set the aperture to f 4.0 and headed into downtown. It was a warm and sweaty day with temperatures in the 90's, and the humidity was just a tad lower than a a wall of steam. Good weather for a photographic Godzilla to terrorize small villages, or the whole of downtown Austin by waving a little camera around in my hands and trying to breathe fire. Which did not work. 

Thankfully, the camera did. 

I had previously tried out the camera at the bricks and mortar showroom, but only in the most cursory way. I noted that the finder had a bit of pincushion distortion and that the shutter release was very, very sensitive (too sensitive, I thought at the time...).  The finder was large and bright and that stuck with me. But standing at the counter at a camera store and aiming it at the staff and clicking off frames under wildly mixed light is hardly the best way to assess the potential of a camera. Right?

Since I was shooting with an inexpensive 25mm lens which does not have image stabilization the first thing I noticed was how good the in body image stabilization is with the G9. While pressing the shutter button just before shutter actuation you can see the image become rock solid. I quickly learned to accommodate the sensitive shutter and now have no issues with it at all. The combination of the slight pressure needed to trigger the camera, coupled with top tier image stabilization means that I can handhold the little 25mm lens down to at least 1/4th of a second and at that setting expect good and convincing sharpness. 

As to the perceived pincushion distortion....I have a theory that the EVF is showing us the pre-corrected file as a preview and only applies the geometric lens correction post exposure; during the writing out of the file to the memory card. Once the image is committed to the card and called up for review it doesn't seem to have the same pincushion distortion. This could all be conjecture on my part but that's my stumbling around in the street observation. At any rate, my facile and interesting brain sorted out the issue of the pincushion-ism rather quickly and cancelled it out of my conscious thoughts while I was shooting. 

Of all the cameras I've shot with from Panasonic this one has the most pleasing shutter sound and is perhaps the quietest when used with the mechanical shutter. Of course, all the recent models have a silent, electronic shutter setting so I guess the underlying point is moot. If you need quiet you can dial it up. But it's nice to have the aural feedback of the mechanical shutter, it makes the practice of photography seem more real. 

One thing I am very happy with, even though I've barely spent time with the new camera, is the color and tonality of the files when shooting Jpeg. I assume I can get even better results with raw files but there are many instances when the Jpegs will work well. More emphatically so when one already likes the color one is getting from the camera. 

The camera is not too small and not too big so I guess this makes it less of a Godzilla camera and more of a Goldilocks camera, but that's a good thing. The buttons have a much different feel than the buttons on the GH5 but, again, within a few blocks I had already compensated and changed my neural subroutines to match my desired perception: = nice buttons. 

All of the images here started as standard, non-inflected Jpegs. I dragged them through an app called SnapSeed and applied a light dose of "structure" or slight exposure "course correction" but no heroics were performed to save or overly enhance the files above or below.

What's my first day's response to the camera? This is the 2018 equivalent of the 1955 introduction of the Leica M3. A nicely sized and weighted camera with a beautiful finder (yes, I am referring to both) that balances nicely with a 'normal' focal length lens and does beautiful work without calling too much attention to itself. I was not loud, didn't suck down the battery at a rapid clip and turned out files that were exactly what I wanted. I don't know what more a sane person would ask from a camera. 

The web tells me what insane people might want from a camera and I think it has some of that stuff built in but things like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are not intrusive. I'm pretty sure there's no built in GPS so I guess we should count our blessings. The package works well.

But let's also take a second to talk about the lens. The 25mm f1.7 Panasonic is kind of a sleeper, always overshadowed by either the Leica 25mm Summilux or the Olympus 25mm f1.2, but it's actually a very competent performer, especially at f2.8, f4.0 and f5.6. It's quite usable wide open but it really shines at the smaller apertures. It's not the simple design you might be accustomed to if you've shot with so called "nifty-fifty" lenses from Canon and Nikon. It's actually a more complex design with an ultra high refractive element in the front, two aspheric elements somewhere in the mix and eight elements in seven groups; which is more complex than most of the "kit" lenses on the market. It seems reasonably priced at $249 but frequently is offered, on sale, for around $149, at which price I consider it to be a bargain. Nay, a steal. 

But look for yourself. The images here were all done with the Panasonic 25mm and I'm not finding much to complain about. Even the one with the huge specular highlight on the top corner of the office building is actually well controlled for flare, etc. 

All-in-all I'm finding a lot to like about the look and feel of the G9 files as well as the basic handling of the camera. Someday I'll program all the function buttons and make a "cheat sheet" so I can remember what is where. Until then I think I'll just use the controls I know and leave the rest to fate.

The camera is now on the short list for the trip to Iceland. So is the lens. 

If you have a G9 can you tell me what sort of logic you used when programming the function buttons? There's so many options to choose from.....

Packed up for a quick shoot nearby.

Environmental art on the Lamar Blvd. underpass. Nice. 

Getting in and out of the country quicker and better. And getting around inside better as well.....

B. at the Met.

The last time I flew back into the U.S.A. from outside the country was in 2017. I drove back in from Mexico earlier this year but the border crossing in a car wasn't anywhere near the ordeal that coming back home on a plane was.

In the airport in Toronto there were long lines to clear customs and many delays. It seemed unusual to me since I was definitely not traveling during a peak travel season.

I've also noticed many more delays and clogs when going through security for domestic flights as well. I usually get the TSA PreCheck on my tickets though I've never signed up for the program and that's a great help but often my kid will barely make a plane because of the regular lines for airport security and that's even if he arrives an hour or two before his flight. It may be that Austin-Bergstrom airport is just getting relentlessly busier and this is part of the overall growth pains of living in a bursting city.

At any rate, I seem to be racking up travel commitments left and right. I have the workshop in Iceland coming up in late October thru early November, followed by another workshop in the U.K. the first week and a half of December. Before I go off on those fun trips though I have four or five travel days to the east coast in the last two weeks of October. That's a lot of climbing on an off planes but it's also potentially a lot of standing in TSA security lines and taking shoes off and putting them back on again.

I can't complain because the work is great and the workshops have the promise of being incredibly fun. But I've decided that I need to make the airport/Kirk interface more efficient so, after much research I decided to apply for a program called Global Entry that's run by the Customs and Boarder Security Agency. Once you sign up, have a background check and a face to face interview, turn over your fingerprints, Oh, and pre-pay a non-refundable $100 application fee you might get approved. The agency is very clear that there's no guarantee and if you don't get approved  you aren't getting your $100 back. Tough love.

But...if you do pass the background check and all the screening you become a member of this program called Global Entry which makes you a "trusted traveler" and allows you to skirt customs and get into the country in an express lane at immigration. The bonus is that the same program and fee also provides the TSA PreCheck benefit. You get to go through the short line and forgo the privilege of taking off your belt and your shoes!

So, I started the process online and filled in all the blanks. I've had the same job for 32 years with the same employer (that would be me...) and I've lived in the same house for 22 years. I have never been arrested or investigated or implicated. I'm like a darn Boy Scout. I thought the whole thing would be a slam dunk but there's always a catch. The catch here is the backlog. It's either a very popular program or one supplied with meager resources.

I'm told by the website that I should have a conditional answer within 3-4 weeks and then I'll need to schedule the face to face interview, for which there are no more open slots anywhere in the Southwest U.S. for the rest of the year. Interesting conundrum, yes? As a person with an overwhelming sense of entitlement I immediately queried whether or not I could expedite the process by paying more but that doesn't seem to be an option.

I guess I'll just have to wait out the process and use the new privileges when, and if, they become available.

I'm writing this to ask if you have applied or used the program and to hear/read your responses about it. Can you please share your actual experiences with me? It would be much appreciated. In the interim I'll head over to the DMV to practice my waiting skills.........

With the whole world drooling over full frame, mirrorless cameras I just had to pick this moment to buy a Panasonic G9. What was I thinking?

Okay, let's set the stage for all the people who will read the blog for the first time and start screaming, "fanboy. I bet he's never even tried out a full frame brand X!!!!!" I have one job and it's to create visual content for commercial clients. To that end I have two full frame, Nikon D800x cameras, a couple of older full frame D700 cameras, and, at one time or another I've owned or borrowed and shot with just about every full frame digital camera on the market, including Canon 1 series cameras and 5 series cameras, including both Sony's mirrorless A7xx series cameras, and SLT a99, as well as Sony's more conventional a850 and a900 cameras. In fact, the only camera maker whose full frame (meaning: just about equal in size and shape to 35mm film) camera I haven't played with is the Pentax. I've also shot with the medium format digital cameras from three different companies. But, in the end, the cameras I have the most fun and, sometimes, the most success with seem to be the one's from the two micro four thirds vendors; Olympus and Panasonic. And lately Panasonic seems to be bringing to market more and more of the cameras that seem just right for me.

After shooting nearly 5,000 frames in the service of three different clients, last week, I looked back on what worked and then what worked better and after a dispassionate review; and after having looked at nearly all 5,000 of the images, I drove up to Precision Camera at rush hour, on the jam-packed Mopac Expressway (cruelly mis-classified as there is nothing remotely "express" about it) walked inside and asked one of my favorite sales associates to grab me a brand new Panasonic G9 and take my money.

But why? There's not one particular thing that moved me to make the purchase, instead there were dozens of small things that I think about as I'm shooting that cause me to either appreciate or regret having brought along a particular camera (or lens).  In the case of the Panasonic top tier of camera models it's all about a combination of features and performance.

I thought it would be tough to beat the video imaging performance of the GH5 until I bought and started using the GH5S. The camera is dismissed all the time for being "only ten megapixels" and for having no built in image stabilization. But if the people who dismiss the camera for not having their favorite features would actually test the camera and shoot the camera I think most would be amazed at just how beautiful and different the GH5S files can look. 

I had to make some decisions last week about which camera system to bring to a three day corporate event that required me to be fast, mobile, discreet and efficient. I needed to be able to shoot a lot of stuff, make it look good for multiple uses and also make files that were efficient (small) enough to be easily upload able --- in bulk. Part of the job was to provide instant access to the files for the client via a shared web folder. This kind of job is no place for finnicky, fussy practitioners who can only pull off a decent photograph if they shoot it at 45 megapixels in raw and then spend half a day massaging it and working with the file in PhotoShop. I needed to be able to send Jpegs that came straight out of the camera and I like the challenge of doing that. 

I was torn between using the Nikon D700s because they are "full frame" and the files are the right size. But man, are they ever loud. Then I considered the D800e and D800 but it's the same thing. The advantage of those cameras is in the raw file potential, once you start working in a file size that makes sense for the kind of project I was doing it doesn't make much sense to drag a big camera and big lenses around --- and I couldn't figure out how to make the cameras quiet enough and discreet enough to make them comfortable working tools for a highly focused conference. I ended up shooting the show with the GH5 and GH5S cameras, both set to 10 megapixels, because they checked all the right boxes. They are small, quiet (even when using mechanical shutters they are 1/3 as loud as the D800s) an easy to carry around all day long. The capper was that my client wanted some short video of each speaker doing their presentations up on the stage and I couldn't think of a better camera and lens combination for that than the GH5S and the Olympus 12-100mm f 4.0 Pro lens. You might be able to pull something video-like off with the Nikons but I guarantee you'll be working a lot harder for your money. 

By the third day I knew I'd made the right choice and chance hammered the point home for me at the start of the main tent session that Friday. I'd gotten to the venue ( a very nice hotel in downtown) early in the morning, had a nice coffee on a terrace overlooking the city, and I got to savor a sunrise and the first cool air of Fall. Just before the start of the morning's program the first speaker came into the main ballroom followed by a woman with a big camera bag, a light stand and several big Nikon DSLRs around here neck. She started to set up a light but the head event planner for the company holding the conference quickly let the newly arrived photographer know that flash during the presentations was NOT allowed. 

The woman looked around and identified me as the show photographer and came over to explain to me why she was there. She'd been hired by the speaker to get some "action" shots of him speaking. I smiled and welcomed her to the venue. Then I made a bee line to my contact to let her know that if she heard loud shutter noise during the presentation that it was NOT from me. My cameras are quiet but also have a fully silent mode that I use when I think silence is called for. 

The show kicked off, the speaker bounded up on stage (and he was very good!) and then all hell broke loose with the clacking of a mirror and shutter. It was amazing, I'd been photographing the previous two days from near the back of the room and most people in the audience had no idea I was in the room. Once the speaker's photographer let loose with the Nikons half the room turned around to look. She soldiered on and the audience eventually lost interest but the message was not lost on me = there is a better way.

But I didn't make up my mind to buy another camera until later. On Sunday evening, freshly back from my visit to my father, in San Antonio, I sat in front of my big screen and started evaluating files from a range of assignments I'd done over the past six days. There were studio portraits of several doctors that I'd shot with controlled lighting and the full 14 bit raw files of the Nikon D800e. There were 500+ shots I'd done for a Zach Theatre rehearsal I'd made shooting raw files with the Nikon D700 and there were several thousand shots and a bunch of video I'd done with the GH5 (vanilla version). All were good but I've got to burst some bubbles here; there aren't huge and glaring differences in quality between the formats or the cameras. In some instances I see the color from the D700 as superior to the D800e and I don't really see a lot of difference in noise profiles between all of the different cameras I shot. But then I started looking at some still photographs I'd shot with the GH5S.

The images from the GH5S are really nice. Even though I was photographing with Jpeg settings the files were rich and the color was superb. But the biggest thing for me was how nice the basic contrast of the files was and how much detail they showed without being oversharpened. I'd go so far as to say that the files from the GH5S are some of the nicest I've ever seen coming out of a modern, digital camera. 

I had the idea that a fair amount of what I'm seeing comes from new color science in the most recent Panasonics which is likely a result of a generation of faster processors that are capable of doing a much more nuanced job of file construction during shooting. What I've read in reviews led me to believe that this same color science I was seeing in the GH5S is embedded in the G9 as well. 

If I was an amateur and I was photographing only for my own pleasure I am almost certain I'd be happy with the GH5S, but as I said in the first paragraph, I do this photography thing for a living. While a hobbyist will be fine with one great camera my event job this week was a perfect example of a situation in which two (identical) camera is better, more efficient and more effective. When shooting a speaker on a stage, or a group of people at a happy hour, or any other event in which you constantly need to shift from wide, establishing shots to medium shots and also to tight shots that are almost headshots, all from one position, you learn that you need at least two zoom lenses on two cameras. You don't want to take time to change lenses on a single body, you want to be able to pull one camera up to your eye and shoot with the long lens and then, when you know you have that shot, you let that camera and lens combination hang over your shoulder on its strap while you bring your camera with the short lens up to your eye and shoot, with no delay. It's a much more fluid way of shooting than digging into your bag to grab a different lens and then trying to get the lens mount squared up in the dark. 

After seeing the color and tonality (and the perception of sharpness) from the GH5S I knew I wanted that but in a camera that matches the GH5 more closely. I want to use in body image stabilization when I need to and while the I.S. in the Olympus lens works well with the "S" body the image stabilization in the G9 lets me use any lens and still get the benefits of I.S. 

I also wanted a second still camera that matches the GH5's high resolution of 20 megapixels; not because I need it all the time but because there are projects and genres of photography that do benefit from having the right number of pixels. Since all three of the camera bodies take the same batteries I can take all the cameras on location and intermix batteries at will. 

I'm just now testing out the G9 but it's so familiar, having spent a year with two GH5's and their very rational menu structure. There's not a big learning curve. I'm shooting a quick job with the G9 on Thursday this week and again two days next week, and if it makes photographs that are as beautiful as those from the GH5S then the G9 will be the primary camera I take with me to Iceland on the 27th of October. With the GH5 coming along as a great back up.

There are many things I like about the G9. At least in theory. I like the bigger EVF. I like the idea of the high resolution mode. I like the huge USB 3 port on the camera almost as much as I appreciate the full sized HDMI port. For the faint of heart the G9 comes with two card slots and both of them are fast UHS II slots. While QXD cards may be faster SD V90 cards that can handle up to 400 Mbs are no slouches. 

But most of what I like about the Panasonics are that the differences between the bodies are not big; certainly not insurmountable. If you could find your way through a GH4 menu then a GH5 menu was hardly a challenge. It's the same with the G9 menus. The learning curve is slight and comfortable, not something that will force you into therapy like some other menus I won't mention...

The bottom line in my decision to flesh out the M4:3 cameras is the desire to balance ease of use, tight and useful imaging feedback via the finder, very good raw files, just the right file size for most stuff and when needed the ability to make video that is so good it will make a cinematographer smile with surprise. 

Here's my packing list for my nine day trip to Iceland: One fG9. One GH5. One Olympus 12-100mm lens. One Panasonic 8-18mm lens. One Sigma 30mm f1.4 contemporary lens. One sigma 16mm f1.4 contemporary lens. Some batteries. Some fast SD cards. Total weight? Negligible. Total imaging power? Significant. We'll see how everything fits into my carry on backpack but there may yet be room to sneak in the GH5S. Might need it for all the low light stuff....

Does this mean I'm rushing to sell off the Nikons I've been lauding for the last six months? Gosh no. They still have their place in the inventory. The D800s do wonderful work in the studio, and for those odd times when noise doesn't matter. And those D700s are too endearing to get rid of. Not to mention that they are so cheap I wouldn't get much on a trade or straight out sales and I like to use them because for some reason I can't really explain they seem to bring out the best in 50mm and 85mm lenses. That's reason enough to use them.

I decided to buy the G9 at this juncture because they are currently on sale everywhere in the USA for around $1,500. It's a $200 savings from their recent retail price. You can argue that you can get a full frame Canon 6D2 or a recent Sony A7ii for that price or less but you'd miss the point that, to me, the full frame sensor is not that big a deal. It's more like the idea of having a car with a big, big eight cylinder engine. Your opportunities to see any performance differences between that and a more efficient car with a smaller motor shrink daily. As we all move from print and from making prints we see the space in which cameras really have room to show off their potential (the potential you pay for) is extremely limited by your final uses. All the potential in the world is meaningless if you don't have a consistent venue in which to show it off. There are few (very few) times when there is so little traffic on Austin streets that you would be able to drive over 60 mph without immediately rear-ending the car in front of you. By the same token, with most of our work heading to the web, and being showcased on screens, the potential of larger format camera (if the glass on all contestants is equally good) is wasted. 

Part of the reason I switched in and out of the earlier m4:3 systems was down to my own bad lens buying strategy. I scrimped on lenses and blamed the cameras. People do this all the time. The two lenses that have effectively cured me of this are the 12-100 and the 40-150 Olympus lenses for the systems. They cut down the overall difference in quality between the smaller format and full frame by a huge amount and more or less evened the playing field; at least where optimum ISO settings are concerned. 

I'm not saying you need to choose one format over the other. I think, if you are a commercial photographer with wide ranging interests or a large number of sub-disciplines you should have multiple cameras and lenses at your disposal because all formats (and brands) have their strengths and weaknesses. Panasonics just seem to have fewer of the weaknesses right now. 

Next time around let's talk about why I prefer the Olympus lenses. That's another piece of the puzzle. In the meantime be sure to go out and buy several different camera systems so we can all discuss the differences between them with the (radical) benefit of experience and hands-on working comparisons. Shoot 5,000+ good frames in a week. You might just amaze yourself.

Photographing a play made just for children ages 3 to 5. We made images during a rehearsal but not on a traditional stage...

Leah and Michael as Brother and Sister Bear.

After a long week of making photographs and video at a corporate event in a downtown hotel it was fun to change gears this afternoon and photograph one of the final rehearsals for a kids' play at Zach Theatre's small, north Austin satellite mini-theater.

The "auditorium" is more like a regular class room and the stage set was spare but the actors are two veteran professionals with credits from Zach's main stage productions and other top companies in Austin. 

I spent a lot of time in the last few days with a Panasonic GH5 or GH5S in my hands. I did a few portrait shoots earlier in the week with the Nikon D800e so it was a nice change of pace for me to grab a Nikon D700 body and shoot a thousand and seventy seven frames in the service of some fun art. 

I'd gotten a "heads-up" from the program director just yesterday that the space didn't have any theatrical lighting; in fact, it had only the mis-matched ceiling fluorescents that seem to come as standard equipment in older shopping centers and well used classrooms. I brought along four of the Aputure LightStorm LS-1 lights and bounced them off the ceiling at strategic points in the room. I wasn't looking for anything fancier than a nice wash of better light than that which I'd get from five or six different varieties of fluorescent tubes mixed together.....

Once I got the space lit up I made a custom white balance using a Lastolite gray/white target and then actually used a handheld incident light meter to get an accurate reading of the light throughout the shooting area. I tried to space the LED panels, bouncing off the ceiling, so that no area was different in exposure than one half stop. If I could keep it in that area it would make post processing a breeze. I think I did a good job of achieving that goal as few of the images I finally selected needed any post processing compensation. 

There was one additional wrinkle to today's shoot and that was a last minute request to also record the whole production (half an hour?) concurrently on a wide, stationary video camera. So after nailing down all the parameters needed for the still photography I got to work rigging up a Panasonic GH5S, the ever present Olympus 12-100mm f4.0 Pro lens, and several cardioid microphones (placed as close to the "stage" as possible without being in the frame...). My exposure for video clocked in at ISO 1,000, f5.6 (needed the depth of field) at 1/60th of a second. The audio will be a compromise as the air conditioning was noisy and turning it off was non-negotiable. That, and the fact that I was banging away with a photography camera that has a ...... profound shutter acoustic profile (to say the least). But I have a suspicion that the video is intended for b-roll with narration and music supplied. 

The shoot was fun, primitive and low key, by comparison to all other  recent projects. But how nice it was not to have a pressing deadline, nervous clients and a committee to answer to. 

Kind of reminds me that sometimes we do this photography thing because it can be fun. Novel that. A nice capper for the week. 

I'm thinking the images look pretty good for 1,600 ISO on an ancient camera.

Answering some production questions. Shooting corporate events.

From the Samsung Smart Watch Introduction in Berlin, 2013.

The same event at which Samsung's CEO claimed his company 

invented the first tablet with handwriting recognition and a pen. 

Go back in your time machine and introduce yourself

to the Apple Newton. It would have ruled the tech world if only 

the right processors had been available at the time....

I've shot literally hundreds of corporate events and they are all different but the same. The same part is that someone is trying to sell something to their audience. It may be a product, a concept, a new corporate direction or even the need to downsize but they are all aimed at leading attendees to a desired conclusion. In some instances a show might be about teaching better ways to use a software or hardware product but the end desire is to create happier users which should lead to more sales or at least more referrals. What's different at every show is the "look and feel" of each company's culture, the size of their budget --- which determines the production quality and complexity of their show ---- and what exactly they want from their content creators. For our purposes: what do they want from their event photographers and videographers?

Many clients want a small collection of images documenting important moments from their events that can be shared online and used in publications. These might be images of famous keynote speakers, dramatic product demonstrations or flattering images of the CEO and other top company officers speaking on stage while looking smart and honest. 

If the client needs well polished images we shoot raw and convert. But these are generally situations in which the clients are not expecting heroic turnaround times; they'll be happy to get the images a few days to a week after the event. If I'm photographing a concentrated collection of images and the image quality is paramount then I shoot in raw format and generally use the highest resolution camera I have, assuming its image quality will be top tier. In any situation that I can't light (most corporate event presentations) I work really hard to get a good custom white balance. Sometimes a quick custom WB isn't enough and you have to dive into the color setting and also fine tune the hues on the blue/yellow and green/magenta axes. If you have time to take a good, portable monitor (Atomos?) or a properly calibrated laptop you can more accurately review color but it's important if you do that to take the monitor out into known lighting in order to properly evaluate a stage scene with lots of gelled or otherwise colored lights.

I shot an event like this recently and the workflow is arduous, especially if you tend to be a promiscuous  shooter like me. Since the client expected polished images and does not have an in-house creative team that wants to take the raw images and polish the ones they want to use in-house I have to assume that everything I give them is going to be used and needs to be fine-tuned or corrected in some way so I start the process by editing down the number of images much more tightly that I otherwise would. Then I try to group images that are most alike together so I can do as much batching as possible. 

In the past clients asked for Tiffs but now Jpegs are equally acceptable so I tend to deliver Jpegs at the full file size and with the absolute minimum compression. I've never had a client complain about the file type but if they do I'll be happy to convert all raw files to Tiffs provided they show up with an external hard drive to deposit them on. If a designer still requests Tiffs we generally have a discussion about the merits of PhotoShop .PSD files and they generally get the idea that the .PSDs are equally good but more flexible within their Adobe universe.  Tiffs can get mighty big for not enough benefit.

The client I worked for this week (three day engagement+post production) has a good, and large in-house media department who are young, smart and love to get their hands in the mix. It was more important to them to get an almost minute-by-minute documentation of their event, with a wide range of speaker expressions and compositions than it was to get ultimate image quality. We still aim for great images, technically, but we shoot them with the idea that they might be used within the hour and with no quarter given for any sort of enhancement. That's another reason to pay close attention to white balance. Much of my work over the last three days was used, literally, SOOC (straight out of camera).

The two cameras I used for the show were the Panasonic GH5 variants; the original and the lower resolution "S" model.  In Jpeg I like the standard profile setting in the largest image file size and the lowest compression (finest) for this kind of work.  But I find the preset sharpening to be too much and generally tone it down by three steps from the factory setting. I also drop the saturation by one or two clicks as well. With contrasty stage lighting I drop the contrast down by two clicks and also make a custom curve in the shadow/highlights setting menu. One up for shadows (lighter) and one down for highlights (darker). 

If I'm shooting Jpegs I am almost always going to be shooting them in an sRGB color profile because that's what works the best on the web and on most computer monitors --- and that's where the images are most likely to be seen. If a client decides to use the file for something else they always have the option of converting the file to their preferred setting.

When I shoot stage productions, speeches, demonstrations, etc. I use a manual exposure setting since stage light can create pools of light and dark that fool camera meters. I try to nail a good facial exposure by either eyeballing (with an assist from Mr. Histogram) or I set zebras and have them trigger at the %+5 I like for flesh tones, seasoning according to complexion.

The video I shot at this show was rudimentary b-roll to duplicate, with motion, the kinds of images I was already shooting of the people presenting. Most presenters love to roam around the stage and it's fine when shooting video. In this situation I'm not supplying any audio other than scratch audio coming off the internal microphones. B-roll is really meant to be used under an announcer bed, or music, and if the client wants beautiful audio there's generally a bigger camera (supplied with an operator by the staging/production company) who is recording the show for posterity ---- and that operator is generally taking sound right off a sound board. 

I have been hired from time to time to shoot the stage event in video with sound. Almost every time I get an XLR cable drop to my camera and run it into a mixer via line in/out to camera. With the Panasonics, using the audio adapter, you can set the input to mic or line level and then deliver to the camera exactly which levels it needs. 

Miking multiple speakers for stage presentations requires more staff. Someone needs to run a sound board and ride levels across multiple microphones. I hand those situations off to bigger production companies but occasionally I have to record sound for one event speaker. I use two Sennheiser wireless lavaliere microphones and pray the person doesn't thump on their chest like Tarzan or wear burlap shirts that rub against the mics of the cables.... I like to use two mics with two transmitters just in case one frequency has interference that destroys the sound in one mic.

If I have to play at being a news camera man and get video of a single speaker in an "on the street" video interview I have two methods I like to use. The easiest one and, to my mind, the best sounding, is to use a Rode Reporter microphone hardwired to my audio mixer/interface in the camera hot shoe. An omni or uni-direction microphone used close to the subject (think 12-18 inches, max) does a great job of isolating voice and rejecting sounds further away. If I have an assistant or someone actually conducting an interview and we don't want to deal with seeing a reporter microphone in the video frame we default to using a good shotgun microphone. I use an Aputure Diety or a Rode NTG-4+ and have the person holding the microphone get it in as close as possible without showing in the frame. I also have them point it toward the interviewee's mouth. Most fast moving situations aren't conducive to setting up lavaliere microphones. If we are in a dynamic and uncontrollable situations, accoustic-wise, then I buck tradition and take advantage of auto level control and a limiter.

In most event situations, especially when shooting b-roll, we shy away from 4K footage and other video settings that require massive storage. The GH5S has a nice codec in .Mov that gives you 1080p at 30fps with 10 bit, 4:2:2 color space at a modest 100 mbs. Bigger than the older ACVHD files but much, much nicer detail and color. It's footage you'd actually want to use. 

I leave all the hocus-pocus of V-Log for people who like to spend lots and lots of time color grading and dealing with LUTs and try to shoot everything for corporate events in Rec 709 which gives good color and fits into most applications well.  Even in Rec 709 I think the footage is too sharp and so I'm never squeamish about turning down the sharpening to taste.

If I'm shooting on cameras that take two identical memory cards, and I know I'll be able to get everything in each camera on one card per camera, I do a variation on traditional back-ups. I put in two identical cards (for the last three days each camera has had two 128 V90 SD cards in them) and set them to shoot everything identically on both cards. During the course of the event, since my client is looking for new images on a regular basis, I pull the "A" card, upload the images on it to my computer's hard drive and then upload from there to Smugmug.com and then, when the upload is complete I put the "A" card  back in the camera and re-format it for the next round of images. I do this at nearly every break and even sometimes during a long, long presentation.  Doing it this way and keeping the "A" card fresh makes uploading the next batch simpler and effectively gives me three levels of back-up: the card in the "B" slot, the hard drive in the laptop and the gallery full of full res images in the cloud. 

At the end of a job like this I pull all of the files and put them on a 64GB or larger memory stick and hand them off to the client. Once the client has the files in their hands they have two sources from which to archive; the memory stick or a gallery download from Smugmug.com. Once the client lets me know they are set I erase the files completely from the SSD drive in the laptop and, if it's a client who I know is prone to fumble files I'll make an extra backup on a memory stick to have in the drawer, just in case.

In total I generated about 4,000 photography files in three days and about 60 short (15-30 second) video files. With the lower resolution camera as the main part of the mix, and the use of Jpeg instead of raw files, the entire take fits (just) on a 64GB memory stick. The memory sticks I like to use are Sandisk USB3s and they are currently about $16 each. Not a bad delivery mechanism for bigger jobs. Not bad at all.

Someone asked me about which microphone I use at events and I wanted to reiterate that there are distinct needs and that not one single type is an "all weather" solution. One presenter on stage? Tie into the sound board or use lavaliere microphones. A quick interview in a noisy exhibition space? I'd use a reporter microphone close in to the speaker. A fast moving set of handheld camera interviews in a less noisy space? Maybe a shotgun microphone. But a shotgun is great for outdoor areas where you don't have to worry about sound anomalies caused by bounce wave interference effects. Kinda crazy but no crazier than having the exact lens for every scenario...

Second shooters? Assistants? This show had 400 attendees and was at a very nice hotel. The presentation ballroom was fifty steps from the team room where I did my downloads. Nice waiters in jackets brought coffee to me, sometimes to my shooting location. The pace was never so daunting that, even with so-so time management, I was ever overwhelmed or missed anything. 

If the show was bigger, or at a dicier venue (less security/less service), or had break out sessions concurrent with the main tent sessions, then I would definitely consider some help. But the best situation in those circumstances would be to find someone very adept at post processing and file management and to hand off the computer work to them. I know how to do it but it's boring and I'd rather be shooting or meeting with people. If the conference is so big that one needs a real (and talented) second shooter then what one really needs is a team. And then you have to decide if you are an individual artist or an administrator of subcontractors. With all the issues attached to handling people I'd rather keep it simple and turn down the jobs that require more than two of us doing the primary work. Your choices and needs may differ. If I was in poor physical shape I might need more assistance but I'm not slowing down enough to feel any different than I did in my 30's or 40's. 

I must say that, once again, I was surprised and pleased by the performance of the GH5 series cameras. Low (enough) noise and high sharpness, combined with very pleasing color, even under challenging circumstances. A nice camera system. I'm more interested still in adding a G9. We'll see what kinds of jobs are on tap for October....... my birthday is coming up....

Note from watching yesterday's Senate hearings: It's a good idea not to drink until you pass out...

hard to remember stuff clearly when one is minimally conscious/conscience.

I wanted to learn all about the new cameras coming out at Photokina but I was too busy taking photographs...

So much cool stuff has been announced lately that my brain is in acquisition overload. And yet there's a backlog of equipment I heard about last month... and last year that I found tantalizing and wished I could try out and now I'm finding it hard to change gears, abandon my enthusiasm for cameras that seemed so....just right on a few months ago, and switch my full attention to the latest shiny objects.

Here's a case in point: I've been using several Panasonic GH5 variants in my work over the past year. I love that camera line. I think both the GH5 and the GH5S are wonderful working tools, for a number of reasons, some clearly counterintuitive to many people. 

I was hired to photograph at a three day conference this week. The project was a high tech symposium that would take place mostly at one of Austin's cooler, downtown hotels. I have several camera system options available to me and I grappled for a bit between taking a couple of Nikon D800x cameras and their attendant lenses, or the two Panasonic GH5x cameras and three (or more) of the nice lenses I've put together for that system. 

It's an interesting show for an interesting, cutting edge, high technology/software company and one of the things they've always done differently than my other clients is to make immediate use of the images and video we generate, all day long. That means workflow efficiency is paramount and is a higher priority than ultimate image quality. The truth of the matter is that 99% of the imaging content I'm creating for them will be compressed and used (in some cases almost immediately) on the web in social media, or in websites. While the idea of very high resolution coupled with class leading dynamic range might seem like important qualifications and a good rationale for using the 36 megapixel Nikons those features are actually a bit of a negative for the job at hand. 

Let me lay out what we accomplished yesterday as a typical example of this kind of work and why I chose a smaller, lower resolution, not full frame system for what we needed to get done. 

Every corporate conference planner has a laundry list of images and video they'd like to get done, some locked into immutable schedules and some handled as pick up work when there are gaps in the primary agenda. We start by making lifestyle-ish photographs of attendees networking together at a sit down breakfast. Once I have a nice range of images there I move on to documenting interactive displays, signage and people engaged with demonstrations at various booths. 

The producer of the technical side of the show, a contractor for the same corporate media planner I server, approaches me and asks if I could also photograph his stage set and the interactive displays his company produced for the show. Since he is an old friend, and a constant source of (really good) referrals I am happy to try and work in as many documentation shots as I can...

I work on this kind of pre-show documentation until we are about half an hour from the start of the show. The benefit of working with a well funded corporate at a five star hotel is that one never goes hungry, you never have to eat poorly, and the coffee is ample and four or five notches above the swill that passes for coffee at lesser properties... I drink good coffee as I set up and shoot images of booths peppered with interactive screens and implementations of A.I. and machine learning. 

About half an hour before the kick off, all hands presentation in the main ball room, I head to the "team" room where I've laid claim to a tiny bit of real estate that comes complete with an electrical outlet. I pull out the new laptop, get connected to the symposium's super-fast wifi and pull the memory card out of the camera I've been using. I download the files to a sub-folder in a master folder for the event. I take a cursory look at the color and density of the files and then pull them all into their subfolder. The first sub-folder of the day is entitled: company name: day two 1st download.

I've tested downloading via a USB 3 cable from the camera, using a wifi connection or using a fast, Thunderbolt card reader and the card reader seems fastest. I probably shot 150 images on a GH5S in its ten megapixel, highest quality Jpeg mode so each image clocks in at about 5-7 megapixels.These get sucked onto the SSD drive so quickly that the transfer is done before I get a really good sip of coffee. 

I then upload them to Smugmug.com (my "cloud" supplier since 2005 or 2006) and they go into a client folder with the newest images up front and the older images constantly headed down the catalog. In this way my client has immediate access to everything we shoot and, since they are dipping into the collection and using them on all kinds of social media all day long it's most efficient for them to have the material in ascending order. The gallery is password protected but I've enabled full resolution downloading from the gallery for my clients' convenience. With a fast broadband connection I've uploaded 150 images in about as much time as it took me to write this paragraph. And I am a fast writer.

I ping the technical/marketing person who is interacting with the images to let him know there's a new batch to choose from. Then I reformat the SD card and head back out to catch the beginning of the "main tent" session. Note that the files are backed up on the second SD card in the camera (a running tally of images) as well as one the laptop and in the cloud.

I head to the main ballroom with two cameras (a GH5 and a GH5S), two lenses (12-100 and 40-150mm) and also a Benro monopod with a "chicken foot." And here's what I do throughout the day:

Each speaker on stage will present for anywhere from 25 minutes to 40 minutes. During the first part of the presentation I capture tight, medium, wide shots of the speaker engaged in the talk. I shoot a lot of frames because getting the perfect expression with the perfect composition is a gamble. I'm working the odds. And 10 megapixel files are cheap. The stage lighting is awkward because of the size and configuration of the room itself. I tried a custom white balance but even it need to be fine tuned via the cameras' hue controls.

I shoot the tight head and shoulders shots from the back of the room with the longer lens and use the shorter lens for wider shots and audience reaction shots. Once I'm pretty certain I've got nice photographs that represent the speaker well I put the GH5S on the monopod and reconfigure my settings for video. We're shooting 1080p video here because, again, it will be compressed and used on the web, mostly in social media. The GH5S is mainly talked about as a great 4K camera but I think it may be the best 1080p camera I've ever seen. The Olympus Pro 12-100 gives me good image stabilization and my technique using the monopod continues to improve; I can pull off twenty or thirty second clips that seems as though we're locked down on a good tripod. 

We do this kind of coverage for each speaker until we get to a coffee break. I hustle back to the team room and do the same download, transfer, upload to gallery routine that I outline above. I'll do this throughout the day. I check camera batteries, reformat the #1 SD card in each camera and then grab a coffee and get ready for the next volley of sessions. 

The GH5 cameras make it very easy to switch between video and stills and the EVF is helpful in isolating my eye to prevailing light so I have a fighting chance of evaluating the actual color balance I'm getting in the files. I also like the live histogram I'm getting in the bottom right hand corner. 

At the end of a long day we move on to a nightclub that the company has bought out for the evening. They're serving up delicious BBQ and there are open bars everywhere. A local band is blazing away on the first floor but there's a rooftop terrace for people who are looking for a quieter social gathering. I'm shooting basic event shots here until I feel like I'm becoming a nuisance instead of a benefit and then I pack it in and head home. Once there I'm putting batteries on the chargers, downloading the files from the last events of the evening and uploading them to the master collection on Smugmug. By the time I walk into the venue later this morning (7?) many of the images will already be circulating with their friends, the hashtags, coming along for a ride. 

So, in the midst of a month long work jag we've got Photokina spilling out new camera tech at a dizzying rate and all I can really think about is how I suddenly want to try the Panasonic G9 alongside the GH5s. I think about calling Precision Camera and having one delivered to the hotel and then I get ahold of myself and realize how beautiful the files are looking from the cameras I have in the bag with me today and I change my mind. 

I will have shot maybe 10,000 frames this month and had a camera in my hands for dozens of hours. It's actually a good remedy for gear acquisition syndrome because you really come to understand the camera you've got and you come to trust it; and by extension you come to trust that you know what you are doing when you use that cameras. I think the camera lust is at its worst when you are idle, have nothing fun to shoot and start imagining that somehow a new camera will kick start the whole process over again. It won't. You'll just have to pay for another camera. 

So, I was up at 4 am this morning to drive Ben to the airport. A business trip for my young public relations professional, to San Francisco. I'm packing up and headed back downtown. I'll get in early so I can photograph some of the exhibit displays without people in front of them. Then I'll get a great breakfast from the W Hotel and start the process I've described above all over again. 

Tomorrow is a totally different job. A different kind of project. I've already decided to use the Nikons for that for all the reasons I didn't use them today. 

Hope you had a good week. I'm heading out.