I blame it all on my birthday. Why else would I decide to buy a new camera once I got home from Iceland?

It was a strange moment. I had a long layover in the JFK airport before my flight to Reykjavik. That's sometimes the nature of living in a city that's not a hub for a major airline. I was cooling my heels and reading some work by Emmaneul Kant (doctrine of transcendental idealism) when I decided to take a mental break and pander to the primordial side of my brain. I wanted something vapid and easy, like cotton candy, to read. Of course, my first thought was the lugubrious equipment reviews at DP Review.  So I pulled out my laptop and went for a look. Morbid curiosity? At any rate they had a review of a camera from a company whose cameras I haven't used since well before 2006, and that would be Fujifilm. So, there was the new review for the XT-3 and looking at photographs of it sure reminded me of dozens of old, film type cameras I remember playing with. It's festooned with all sorts of dials and buttons that harken back to the days when living, and shooting, was easy and straightforward.

I made a mental note to do more research when I got back to Austin. In my sometimes jejune manner I reasoned that a long journey, with arduous periods of enforced inactivity, on my birthday, had somehow earned me the right to pop for a new camera. A 63rd birthday present to myself.... I knew no one else was going to get me one...

In the intervening nine days I worked with my Panasonic G9 and was delighted by the technical quality of the files. The color, especially, is exactly to my liking --- even in Jpeg files pulled directly from the camera. But once the glands in my brain that secrete hormones regulating (or accelerating) acquisition come into play my desire for something new and different can be very difficult to dislodge.

I was back home for a couple of days and decided to go to Precision Camera...just to replace the Godox AD200 flash unit I demolished in Fayetteville, North Carolina. I had a little free time so I handled the new cameras I'd been reading about. They had the Nikon Z7 and I liked the way the shutter sounded and felt,  and the quality of the EVF, but I wasn't crazy about where my pinky finger ended up when holding the camera; with my average hands that finger falls right off the bottom of the camera.

I took a look at the new Canon R but it didn't budge the excitement meter that should at least register when one holds a brand new camera in one's hands. "Have you played with the Fuji?" Asked my professional camera equipment consultant. No, I had not. For some reason I'd been subconsciously been avoiding contact with the brand, even though my friends who own them have raved about the files they get from theirs.

I guess it's the tales of weird and wacky raw conversions from the X-trans sensors and solemn denouements of the older Fuji cameras' autofocus that stopped me cold. I kept waiting for stuff to smooth out over successive updates to the line. But with a nice, new BSI sensor, new AF performance improvements and a total revamp of the video capabilities, the XT-3 camera suddenly became interesting to me.

I bought a black one with the basic (and well reviewed) 18-55mm f2.8-4.0 OIS zoom lens. I thought about having it gift wrapped for me but decided that was one step too far.

I've had the camera for three days now but I haven't shot anything with it yet. I've had so much to catch up on, including downloading about 100 Gigabytes of material from Iceland and another 50+ GB of material from my corporate shoot before that. I also needed to head down to San Antonio for a first hand visit to my dad. I wanted to be sure he had been well taken care of during my absence. He was.

I took the camera along with me today to shoot some promotion images for a renowned magician but I ended up lighting everything with studio flash and, at the time, didn't know what Fuji calls the setting which gives you a bright view of a scene instead of a preview. You need that if you are going to shoot with studio electronic flash. Now I know what they call it and where it lives in the menu. (Vital info). I keep meaning to head out the door and head downtown to do a circuit with the new camera but it's gray, cool and rainy outside and I'm still a bit jet-lagged (actually, make that: Lay over lagged). I have time tomorrow, I'll give it a good workout then.

I've already identified a missing lens from the Fuji line up. I want a 70mm f1.4 or f2.0 as a portrait lens. I might order a Pen F to Fuji adapter and see how the ancient Pen F 70mm f2.0 and the 60mm f1.5 work on the new body. I hope I warm up to the camera and lens soon. I really can't return it as it was a gift from someone special...

Seriously though, does this presage a plunge into the Fuji camp? Only time will tell.

If you are a Fuji user and feel like providing me with good, operational tips or lens selection tips I'd love to read them in the contents.

A big wind up here but no big pay off. Just another somewhat irrational camera purchase. I wish I could tell you I finally broke down and bought a 100 MP Phase One camera and a box of lenses to go with it but I can't bear the idea of working with those huge files.

Just getting work done here. Four days booked next week and I'm still behind on laundry. Some things never change.

The false, tongue-in-cheek reveal of my newest camera "system."

I promised to reveal my latest camera purchase tomorrow but I thought I'd write something more fun today. I mean, really, who cares what I bought myself for my birthday anyway? It's nothing rare and fascinating. Just another toy for a spoiled 63 year old....

Here's today version:


So I was at this church parking lot and I went to back up my car. When you put the car in reverse the back up camera springs into action and a screen on the dashboard gives you a view of what's behind. I was fascinated by the in your face reality of the image I was seeing. A whole different way of seeing. If only I could capture this unique vision it would bring a whole new level of insouciance to my already tortured personal work.

I quickly drove home and pulled the Honda CR-V into the underground, thirty car, parking garage underneath the Visual Science Lab headquarters and started taking the car apart to see just how the camera and lenses that comprise the back up system were made. It seems pretty obvious that it's a video feed but as a still photographer I wanted to capture stills from from the feed. I grabbed a few Alien Ware gaming computers we had strewn about the shop floor and installed power supplies in the laptops that would work with 12 volts of DC electricity from the car's electrical system. I split the cable providing the video feed and ran it through a de-stabilize/re-stabilize archrinic filtering system in an attempt to improve the signal. It was getting better all the time. It was very, very Nyquist. And accutance-y. With profoundly muddled adjacency effects.

One fault of the camera is that it's a bit noisy and as you know I can suffer absolutely no noise in my images so I knew I needed to add light to anything I'd photograph with the system. To this end I put a serious roof rack with an inverse ceiling grid system to work and put several Broncolor flash systems on the roof of the car. I can trigger about 6,000 watt seconds of flash power with a big red button I wired directly onto the dash board. I decided the flashes were no good used directly so I opted for small softboxes on the six heads I intended to use. A quick test trip revealed that the wind generated at speeds in excess of 110 mph tore up the conventional softboxes in short order. To be honest they weren't doing very well even at 10 mph, so I had the VSL machine shop whip up six 30 by 30 inch stainless steel soft boxes with frosted 3/4 inch frosted Lexan for the fronts. You know, to diffuse light. With a bit of wind tunnel streamlining and some back and forth with the design team rev#13 gave us the aerodynamic profile I was looking for.

Once I'd color corrected and built a profile for the camera and rear facing lens we were ready to test. The routine is to find a scene that looks like a good candidate for the car camera and then turn the car around and back up toward the subject. This scared several mothers of cute young toddlers as we rocketed toward them in reverse, trying to get exactly the right angles and crops. The screeching of the tires and the sound of metal on metal from the brakes caused the small children to squeal in delight. Their mothers were less enthusiastic about our efforts to meld cars with photographic art. In the end we prevailed, the flashes worked and we pulled some stunning 600 by 400 pixel images out of the effort.

Now that file size might not sound like much but remember that we're deeply into the age of computational photography so running the resulting files through an Apple iPhone for a couple hours cleaned up the image nicely.

Now it looks something like this: This is the final output from hours of computational photography, machine learning and A.I. graphics restructuring. Unlike anything one could get from a conventional camera system.....

I think, if you squint and use your imagination, you'll agree that we're on to something here. I've been told that the back up cameras on the bigger Lexus SUV's have better bokeh so we're looking for volunteers who will let us rip the cameras and the imaging guts out of any 2018 Lexus SUV of which they are not especially fond. It's for art and research, who could resist?

Tomorrow we'll circle back to more conventional, boring cameras. 

Some alternate looks at Iceland. In town and out of town.

It seems that no matter where I end up I walk around and find public art/graffiti that I really love. This painting took up the whole side of a building and you can see that it wasn't a "spray and dash" initiative but a work that took time and no little measure of skill and good taste. I was amazed when I saw it as we drove by in the dark on our first morning, coming into town. I despaired of ever finding it. But one day I slapped on fresh boots, lots of warm clothes and a micro four thirds camera and went hunting. I must have a nose for it because I seemed to head straight to the part of town where this wall art lives. There was more. I'll show it later. This seemed just the sort of photography that actually calls for a wider view so I made use of the 15mm Leica/Panasonic lens and was happy to have brought it along. The weather is hard on outside art in Iceland. Just about the opposite kind of damage that the harsh sun inflicts on the Texas versions. 

My fascination with doors and doorways began back in 1985, the first time Belin and I headed to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. The doors there were more gothic and primitively finished and have been the subject of many photo essays over the years. I'm not familiar with a similar collection of door photographs from Iceland but these two door in a central neighborhood in Reykjavik just called out to be photographed. I tried to be very careful to get and keep my verticals straight up and down, and in the final image I may crop out the railing on the left of the frame. I used the square aspect ratio that the G9 provides, not because I am incapable of cropping, but because I wanted to make sure I got what I wanted the first time around. I guess it's some kind of wacky attempt at proto formalism. 

The image just above was one of my many efforts to get layers of depth into my landscape photographs. I'm sure if I had used a larger format it would have been much easier to have parts of the image out of focus. But I'm pretty sure that's not what I was going for....

I loved that there were buildings with red and blue roofs in the lower middle of the frame. It was my attempt to show the scale of the mountain in the background. I couldn't resist keeping the white fence in the foreground. I realize a technique that's new to me and then I become like a dog with a bone and try to overlay that technique on everything I shoot... Tragic. Sad. Fun.

Kirk's idea of landscape heaven. Lots of "human evidence", diagonals, leading lines, Disney skies and fence that starts in the (right hand) foreground and goes ambling off in a classic example of "vanishing point" perspective. Now, if the building in the foreground had only been a coffee shop and bakery with hot muffins coming out of an oven and a perfect cup of coffee waiting for me on a spare and glistening countertop....

I'm waiting for my VSL group critique of the landscape stuff. It's all new to me...

I'm a bit single minded about photographing people. With a camera in my hands I'm always looking for someone to put into my scenes. Sometimes it's to show scale. Sometimes it's just for fun...

Our guide, Albert, pilots our Sprinter van toward our first photographic destination of the morning. Who can resist some nice direct sun flare. I'm sure my B+W UV filter helped generate some of that..

I liked sitting in the back row. It was four seats across and no one else liked to sit there because when we hit bumps the person in the back would bounce off the seat like crazy. Fine with me, I laid down across all four seats and napped between stops...

I can't resist a leading line, and S curve and some foreground/background contrast. I know I should have been looking at the waterfall but I couldn't wait to get some people into the foreground of my first variation of establishing shots. The red jacket against the green grass is always a bonus. 

The glacier is behind me. But the people are more fun. The smile and interact. The glacier just sits there being cold and imperious. And cold.

Foreground, mid-ground, background. And a bit of sun on the mountain top. What's not to like? Oh, and diagonals. Diagonal lines are always a bonus for me.

These were my second favorite hiking boots. They are comfy but the old Lands End boots (from their heyday in business) were the most weather and cold resistant. 

All images happily shot with a Panasonic G9 and either the 12-100mm Olympus Pro lens, the 15mm Leica/Panasonic lens.

Guess which camera will join the Panasonics in the VSL studios.

I'm buying a new camera. It's not a Panasonic. I thought I'd make it a bit of a guessing game and see who gets closest to the right answer. Let me know in the comments and all will be revealed on Thursday.

Hint: It is a current product.

I had a blast in Iceland. What would I recommend for a photographer traveling there in the Fall/Winter?

It's an unusual contrast to go from warm and sunny Austin, Texas to not so warm and not always as sunny Iceland. Here at home we get many more minutes of daylight in the morning and evening. The sunrise on the day I left Reykjavik was around 9:15 am. The sun is generally gone by 5 pm. 

Since the span of daylight is limited I suggest that you plan the longest parts of your travel to various sites so that your arrival at each site is just before sunrise so you can be in place if the light happens to be good. That might mean getting up a couple hours earlier and traveling in the dark. By the same logic you'll want to make sure you're in a good spot for the last light of the day so if you work your way backwards through your schedule you might be at a location less than an hour's drive from your home base and you'll want to stay and work the scene until all the light vanishes, returning to your hotel in the dark. 

I'm suggesting you work with your guide or driver to determine when the best light is on the scenes you want to photograph. It can be frustrating to arrive at a dramatic mountain only to arrive after the eastern sun has become western sun; if your mountain view means shooting from the east. You'll either end up with a mountain in shadow or the baldest sky imaginable....

We spent so much time talking about winter wear before I left but cold temperatures aren't that big of an issue unless you plan to trek in to somewhere remote, leaving your car or mini-bus far behind. Most of the time basic jackets, long underwear and good hats and gloves will do you just fine but I do suggest that you bring along some rain proof over-pants for getting close to waterfalls and to continue shooting in light spray and rain. My cheap Texas coat and my standard REI gloves and hat were more than enough warmth. I can't imagine being comfortable in a giant, puffy down jacket unless you go deep into the interior and walk for long periods on glaciers. In which case I'd venture to say that the warmth of your feet is more critical. 

I did bring a dress sport coat, tie and button down shirt but I can tell you that I never found a place that required it. Iceland is quintessentially casual. 

Here are some gear recommendations: Lots of places get iced over and while the country's people do a good job of keeping most roads clear some of the walking paths, sidewalks, et al, can be slick as the devil. If you can get a pair of crampons that fit on the bottom of your hiking boots you'll be a lot more stable in a lot more situations. REI has sets for as cheap as $50. You can get better ones for more money... But even the basics beat walking on ice with your Vibram soles, especially on glaciers with dangerous drops on either side of the trails. 

I also strongly recommend another product I routinely buy from REI. They are Buff brand headwear. They are really stretchy microfiber cloth tubes that you can wear as a scarf, or pull up over your mouth and nose to protect your face or even devise a balaclava to augment under a stouter hat. I'll update this entry once I shoot one. I used mine as a scarf, and as a face shield on most days. Small, light, cheap --- it fits the bill for me. I even used it as a camera protector.

Bring two pairs of really good hiking boots. You might think this suggestion is crazy but hear me out.

When I was running every day I used to rotate through three pairs of running shoes so they'd last longer. One day on and two days off give the dense foam padding that constitutes the sole of the shoe to reform after the compression of a long run. It also give the shoes a chance to dry out entirely between use cycles. 

If your hiking boots are water proofed or water resistant and you wear good wool socks you'll find that going from cold glaciers to warm vehicles will cause your feet to sweat. Having two sets of well broken in boots will allow you to change out every other day providing the boots with ample dry time in dry, warm rooms. Change those socks everyday too.

If you are not on a low energy tour you need to be ready to walk. A lot. Uphill and downhill. The last thing you want to lug is a big-ass camera bag filled with every lens and camera you ever bought. The weight will quickly make hiking a hell of a lot less fun and the imbalance of wearing a bag over one shoulder will make trail walking a bit dicier and increase the chance that you might fall. Choose a good, well designed backpack. Or better yet, grab the lens you need and a favorite body before you leave your vehicle and begin your hike. One camera around the neck trumps 20 pounds swinging by your side any time. My usual motif was to clamp a 12-100mm Olympus lens on the front of one of the G9 cameras, dump an extra battery in my pants pocket (to keep it warmer than my coat pocket) and to leave the Think Tank photo backpack in the car. It's just not that practical to change lenses when there's flurries of snow, sleet, or consistent drizzle. Eventually you'll have a change in luck and some (un) lucky drop of water will find your sensor and ruin your day. With a big, comfy jacket on you'll surely have space for the matching neutral density and polarizing filters for your chosen lens, along with a protein bar and a compass....

If you are heading to Iceland specifically to make photographs of the great outdoors you are probably giving some thought to which cameras and lenses you'll be bringing along. I think it would be smart to think about what your final use of such images would be before making any final selections. If my goal was to make wonderful gallery prints I would struggle because I'd want to bring along a stout tripod; something heavy enough to be mostly impervious to all by the most violent winds. If 40 x 60 inch display prints are what you have in mind you're probably thinking full frame cameras and fantastic (heavy) lenses. But slow down and give this some thought. If you are on a tour with other people you'll be limited by the time and energy expending tolerance of the group. If you are in great shape then, Bravo! you can leap from the vehicle and charge to the furthest point in order to set up and start shooting. But you'll usually be time constricted by the tour guide and group. The phrase goes something like this, "Okay, let's spend 45 minutes here and then we need to get moving to our next location if we are going to see everything by sunset." 

I would say that you'll get better and better photographs (as opposed to pure technical superiority) if you consider smaller and smaller cameras. The reason being more efficient access to the right spots, great depth of field and equally good color. 

My target for my images, after much self reflection, was always going to be web based display. I'm not a passionate landscape photographer so my intention all along was to share images with friends and family over the web. I also wanted to use selected images to illustrate various blog posts here. 

Given my usage parameters there were four formats that would have served me better than 35mm style full frame. And that's a personal statement not a blanket one. Either my micro four thirds cameras and lenses or a very good APS-C camera and lens would be very close, in most handhold able light situations, to the quality one would get with a full frame camera but you would get one to two extra stops of handhold ability by dint of greater depth of field and the ability to use faster shutter speeds in either smaller format and get the same depth of focus. In the m4:3 world my choices would be the Panasonic G9 or the equally good Olympus OMD EM-1.2 coupled with the (now legendary) Olympus 12-100mm Pro lens or the Panasonic/Leica 12-60mm f2.8-4.0 lens. 

In the APS-C camera I'm guessing my best choices would be the 26 megapixel Fuji XT-3, with its new BSI sensor or the most current Nikon or Sony APS-C cameras with those companies' good lenses on the fronts.

In retrospect, the camera I should have taken (along with a massive collection of fully charged batteries) would have been the one inch sensor, Sony RX10 IV. It would have been the perfect (and most generous) collection of focal lengths, giving me a wide enough 24mm and a super telephoto that reaches out to an equivalent of 600mm!!! In good lighting it's got great image quality. Maybe not in the ball park of a full frame, or even the other two formats, when it comes to making enormous prints but, as I mentioned, my use is on the web. On a screen or on a phone. Because that's how my audiences look at most work. And they are mostly your audiences too. 

I was happy to have brought along Ziploc plastic bags (the big ones) because we were constantly going from 28 degrees (f) outside to an overly warm mini-bus all day long. I thought I might not need to use the bags to prevent condensation at first. It only took one experience of having the filter in front of my 30mm lens frosting over to make a true believer out of me. I'd bag my stuff before re-entering warm environments and keep it there until I ventured out again. Worked like a champ. 

If I were heading to Iceland again to make images of nature I'd make sure to take a graduated neutral density filter that worked on my primary lenses. I know how to get my skies more dramatic and darker in Lightroom but a graduated ND gets you closer to what you'd really like to see and can get you a little better quality overall in the photos. Ditto for a dedicated circular polarizing filter. 

Take more memory cards. I usually just shoot either raw or Jpeg but I wanted to be able to mess around with files during a slow January (perfect excuse for raw files) and at the same time have the files ready for a quick run through SnapSeed and up onto a gallery to share with other participants, day-by-day (perfect excuse for good jpegs). Shooting both filled cards quicker. I also bracketed more than I do in studio or controlled lighting situations because, even though it's assumed you can do a bunch of corrections in post it's even better to get a perfectly balanced exposure in camera. So, remember, digital is free (written with a smirk) except for the amazing amount to time you'll waste dorking around with the work...

I made a bold move. I told all the attendees that it would be a good idea to bring a tripod and they got good use out of them when we tried taking photos of the "northern lights" but I didn't feel like hauling one around, didn't care about the northern lights so much, and decided to forgo the tripod. I figured that with the in camera image stabilization of the G9 I'd be in good shape. And you know what? I was. I even got reasonable 20 second exposures for the Aurora Borealis by steadying my camera and lens on a convenient rock. For stuff in daylight the I.S. of the camera was more than adequate. You decide how much you want to give up...

I do suggest you take along a small but powerful laptop computer so you can back up your daily take of photographs in a second location. If you are really, really careful you could also bring along a big, USB 3 memory stick and put all your work on that as well. I used my laptop to stay in touch with friends, family and clients, to check weather, to do quick research about the places on the next day's itinerary and much more. 

Here's a few things you could leave at home, at least if you are staying at the Canopy by Hilton Hotel in the city center: You don't need to bring plug adapters for any of your chargers that get power from USB plugs. In my room there were two powered USB plugs at the desk and two by my bed. I could power my iPhone from one and my batteries could charge plugged into the other. (Love the Wasabi Power battery chargers that run off USB power. They charge two Panasonic batteries at once!). I did bring and use a plug adapter for the Apple laptop computer but just an blade adapter; no transformer needed. So, if phones, cameras batteries and computers don't need a transformer then you don't need to pack one. 

I'd leave all the flash equipment at home except for, maybe, one small flash that you could use to pop some light into a person's face if they happened to be backlit. Probably overkill for anything other than a quick group shot somewhere. 

You don't need cash, traveler's checks or anything like that. If you've got a popular credit card, like a Visa card, you are ready to go. Everyone everywhere in Iceland used credit cards instead of cash. It was the closest manifestation of a cashless society that I've ever seen. Even folks buying a Snickers candy bar just popped their cards into a reader, signed and walked away. Much more fun that the currency conversions of the past. I spent $ZERO cash for nine days. Kind of nice.

Several people, for whatever reason, were shooting with nothing but their phones. Mostly the latest or just past generation of iPhones. And you could have knocked me out with a cotton ball when I saw the quality of images they were getting. If you want to go on a photo tour with your phone certainly don't let a snotty instructor talk you out of it. You may be getting better images than they are, even though ( or perhaps because ) they have massive amount of professional (last decade) gear. 

Finally, leave you attitude and your politics at home. The tour director and I were on the same page about this. We made it a rule not to discuss home land politics while on tour. The potential discord of a heated discussion could have ruined the trip for people on both sides. Just leave it until you get back home and they you and your uncle Bob can argue to your heart's content over Thanksgiving turkey. 

That's all I've got.  Maybe I'll head out and buy a new camera today. It has crossed my mind.....

And, of course, as all the experts know, it's "impossible" to photograph buildings of any kind with a small sensor camera. There are laws against it.

 I have been told several times that Panasonic cameras can't "handle" red.

But I disagree. 

this is actually the house (behind the church) of the president of Iceland.

While there isn't a need for much security they do discourage 

you from ringing the doorbell too early in the morning.

I think they also do a good job of rendering blues. 

And differentiating between different shades of blue.

An external showcase for some of the great photography at a small 

gallery in Reykjavik. 

There's that pesky perfect red again....

In all seriousness I do find that people run into color problems when they are overly reliant on automatic white balance.  Cameras try hard to get things right but it's so, so much easier in broad daylight (full sun), cloudy days and subject in areas of open shade, to just select the right little icon from the menu and set it. Then the colors don't shift from frame to frame. A real consideration when using Jpegs where post production color correction is less accurate and certain. Every photograph could make their own post production easier and get better color results by using the WB Presets or doing a custom white balance. Easy stuff. It becomes second nature over time. Like putting on one's seat belt when starting up a car...

Nice green, I think.