Sometimes you have to go back and reconsider files from a job. With a little time it's easier to see how to make an image work.

I photographed this scene last Fall when I was totally immersed in a corporate project. The art director and I had gotten up early, driven like crazy people, met with a group of engineers and contractors and then followed them up dirt roads, cut into the sides of mountains, until we reached a spot where the consensus was that I might like the scenery. Yes. I loved the scenery. And I appreciated that we got to the site just as the weather was perfect. And I was even happier when the weather held together long enough to use the site to do nearly a dozen different portraits.

I'd more or less forgotten I'd made a photograph without people in it at this remote location until I was preparing files from that long and involved job so I could create an e-mail promotion about ---- making portraits on remote locations. As I looked through the folders this image stuck out to me specifically because it didn't have people in it. When I took it my intent was more or less just "visual note taking" and now I realize that it was a portrait of the location; the most important part of our canvas.

Another aspect of re-reviewing work done months before is that you approach appraisals of the file quality; the camera performance, with a more honesty. I've been toying lately with downsizing my collection of m4:3rds cameras and lenses but my review of not just this file but so many of the portraits convinces me that the work I've been doing with the Lumix G9 cameras, and the best of the format's lenses, can go toe-to-toe with just about everything on the market I've shot with. While some cameras obviously have higher overall resolution these cameras have wonderful color palettes and, when using a lens like the Leica/Panasonic 12-60mm f2.8-4.0 the system provides its dual I.S. which is head and shoulders better than any one else's image stabilization but Olympus. We actually ended up ditching the tripod after the first trip on this assignment.

As I sit here in my comfortable office I could rationalize using cameras and camera systems of just about any size and bulk. We forget about logistics of transporting all our gear when we're fantasizing about how that next bigger format may help us take better photographs. But when I look at my work from last Fall and remember how great it felt to be able to fit my entire camera and lens kit into a small backpack that could even fit under the torturous and diminished seats of a ragged little commuter jet I realized that getting to the locations I needed to and not having to worry about whether or not I'd have to gate check a camera bag, or pack full of the tools with which I make a living, added to the quality of my day to day life. It eliminated one recurring stress point.

But mostly I just like looking at this photograph and remembering how isolated, quiet and peaceful the location was for us on that Fall day.

Can a new camera or lens make you a happier photographer? I'll vote "yes."

A work photograph. One of those times when everything should be in focus.

Sometimes it works for me to separate out act of photography from experience of owning and using a camera. The more rational among us will choose cameras that are cost effective, fulfill some needed photographic mission, and are straightforward and logical to work with. Apparently, as people age, they also gravitate toward cameras that are lightweight and easier to carry....

None of this really enters into my eccentric process for seeing, choosing or buying and then using cameras. Sure, they have to meet certain minimum criteria; they have to produce salable files, they have to make photographs on demand and on my schedule, but as long as they check the right boxes for image quality and reliability everything else is more negotiable. But the one thing that's not really negotiable is that the camera be fun. Fun to shoot, fun to own and aligned with my particular nostalgia of what a camera should look like and how the physical controls should present themselves.

I'll be frank, I get a lot of pleasure out of owning certain cameras and also trying out new stuff that's well made. I'm sure my predilection for the craft of camera making is a hold over from having come of age in photography at a time when there were a number of different cameras made to the highest physical quality. From mid-century Leica M series cameras to titanium Nikon models to the stellar construction of the Hasselblad SWC series cameras, the bodies were made to be handled for decades and to be totally stable platforms for the films moving through them, driven by gears and cams. At that time in camera history a dense and well made tool conveyed one of great accuracy (tolerances were important for film flatness in the gate and accurate focusing) and reliability. The idea of reliable cameras was especially important to professionals as camera bodies, pre-digital, were expected to earn their keep not just until the next cycle of Moore's Law but for spans of a decade or more of near daily use.

I like well made cameras. I don't particularly care about size or weight. A camera has to be big enough so that the controls aren't crowded and finicky. A good user camera for a person who is mostly mobile has to be limited, at a certain point, where weight and portability are concerned too. I remember testing the Leaf Af7i medium format digital camera. The camera, prism finder, digital back and the 180mm f2.8 Schneider lens together weighed in at nearly ten pounds. That's a bit much to drape over one's shoulder and use as a walk around, street shooter....

On the other hand I've handled a number of smaller cameras that are nearly unusable because their external controls are so minute, and clustered so closely together, that any real use of the camera is largely luck and hit or miss. Those smaller cameras are usually plagued with equally diminutive batteries as well... There are "right sizes" for cameras and they have evolved in the same way hammers and garden tools have evolved; after years, decades or even centuries of trial and error designers have largely figured out what configurations work (for most people).

I recently ditched Sony full frame cameras because I didn't like the way their cameras felt when I was holding them. Sometimes just holding them in my hands and other times when holding them up in the shooting position. It's all very nice that a camera can produce a pretty, 42 megapixel file but it's much nicer if the camera's design makes it look and feel good while you are using it. Same for the Nikon D810. It felt a hell of a lot better to hold than the Sony but was ungainly for carrying while urban hiking, just the same.

Truth be told, the Fuji XH1, when combined with battery grip, is just a bit too big for comfortable, long walks as well. But when stripped down to it's essentials the body is more or less just right. I like it a bit better than the XT3 and I love the design of the basic body. I haven't shot enough with the XH1 but I'm carrying it with me everywhere because it feels like a real camera and that makes me happy. Other cameras that had that feel (but missed on other parameters) were the Nikon 600 and 610, the Sony a99, and even the Canon 7D. Not too big, not too small. And with good proportions and control layouts.

I'd guess that many photographers are less immersed in their cameras. Mine travel with me everywhere, from the car to the pool to lunch and back home. I carry one into my doctor's office and it works great as a kind of security blanket. Once, in the midst of a medical emergency, I stopped by my office to grab my Leica M4, and took it with me to the emergency room and into ICU. It was a comforting companion and never complained about the hours or the service.

There are times when I've left the cameras behind. Usually when the gravity of a situation (which by its very nature is non-photographic) mitigates against it. I don't take a camera into the pool with me (although strapping a Go Pro to my kick board has crossed my mind... And I don't take cameras to funerals or business meetings (although there is always one in the car).

Sometimes the ownership of a fine camera is less about taking photographs than having the intention to make photographs. And sometimes carrying a camera is less about making a good photograph and more about having the potential to make a good photograph should the situation arise.

Intention and potential. That, and an appreciation of the (too few) times when camera makers get everything just right.

The unsettling realization that your images were better when you just started out. Is it just because your social circle was younger and beautiful?

I remember taking this photograph as though it was yesterday. I was playing around with graduate school, working in a high-fi store near the UT campus, and doing photography as a hobby. A few months before I shot this I'd stretched and bought my first studio electronic flash. It was a Novatron. It came as a metal box (horrible build quality) with two plugs on top and put out a total of 120 watt seconds per pop. Of course the system also had a (plastic) flash head at the end of a ten foot cord which plugged into the box. I stretched my budget a bit more and bought a 42" shoot thru umbrella and the least expensive light stand I could find. I experimented with it for a while and added a background stand set and a roll of dove gray seamless backdrop paper. I remember that one roll of seamless lasting me over a year...

My camera of choice back then (I had two) was a used Yashica Mat 124G. The "G" stood for gold because the camera had some gold contacts somewhere in the mix, I guess. The other camera, the one I wore on my shoulder during almost every waking hour, was the Canon Canonet QL17 iii. I liked to play with different film types back then and at the time the image above was taken I think I was in the middle of a deep dive into Kodak's Panatomic X; a 32 ISO, black and white film. That is not a typo, the film was rated at 32 ASA/ISO. 

I generally left the gray seamless background paper and the flash gear set up in one corner of my living room. It was a time in Austin when one could rent the top half of a sprawling and beautiful house on Longview, just a few blocks west of the UT campus for under $100 a month. And that included utilities. As my then girlfriend, now spouse  would remind me, I left the background and lights up because I never got around to straightening up anything back then. Even laundry was an iffy thing, left in situ until it became an emergency situation. Then the scramble for quarters for the laundromat would commence....

I figured out the exposure of the flash and umbrella by trial and error; which, in those days meant shooting a test roll of film at various apertures and then heading into the darkroom to mix chemicals, roll the film onto reels, and then processing it by inverting the developing tank at set intervals for a set amount of time and then stopping the process by pouring out the developer and pouring in an acid bath, followed by a sloshing in liquid fixer. Oh, and one could not forget the archival wash and the application of Photo Flo. A couple hours later, or maybe the next morning the film would be dry and ready for me to make contact sheets and then suss out which frame might be the correct one. 

I might then pull out the trays, mix chemicals to develop paper, and make a few prints, just to test my findings more rigorously. At that point I might have found that having the umbrella and light six feet from my subject would give me an exposure of f5.6. I would grab a short piece of rope or ribbon and cut a piece to exactly six feet and tie it to the light stand. All future shots (until something got moved or I used a different film with a different film speed) would start with me positioning the subject and then moving the tip of the ribbon or rope to the subject's nose in order to ensure that the light was at the same distance it was when tested. As you can imagine, the subsequent shots were the nadir of consistency... You might ask why I didn't use a flash meter back then but in the mid to late 1970's the price of good meters was huge and my budget was small. I did long for the day when I would be able to afford a camera with a Polaroid back and the additional budget to get some Polaroid test materials...

At any rate I would pull everyone who came by my house into the living room "studio" and make their portrait with this very barebones set up. In the 1970's very, very few of my friends and acquaintances were overweight or would qualify as "couch potatoes." Most were former or current athletes and the lack of fat padding their faces seemed to let the camera see a more natural facial shape, complete with cheekbones and a neck below; things nearly hidden in the majority of people I photograph today. 

Of course, it didn't hurt that we were all in our early 20's and it was really an age of great innocence and openness. People were willing to be photographed without having to negotiate the process or be overly self-conscious. 

I was always falling in love back then and one of the manifestations of that was my desire to capture the beauty I found in the people to whom I was attracted. After a photo session I couldn't wait to be in the darkroom to develop the film and get started making prints. My favorite paper was double weight Ilfobrom #3. It was a superb paper and, when I started out, was very inexpensive. Now, when I pull them out of archival boxes I realize that we were working at a specific time in photo history when printing papers were like visual gold and the purchase price of a box was peanuts.

So there was the magic set of bullets. Beautiful, fit people. Young and fresh. Innocent and, for the most part, joyously happy. Films that still rival the best image quality we can get from digital but with ancillary, subjective benefits. Papers that were like magic and were, by their very nature, imbued with artifactual gravitas. And time. We had so much time. Time to linger over a session. Time to linger in the darkroom, sometimes going through an entire 50 sheet box of paper to get EXACTLY the look we wanted. Time to wait for processes. Time to share prints face to face, heart to heart. 

So now, decades later, I sit in an office surrounded with layers of the best gear money can buy, sitting in front of computers laden with thousands of dollars of processing software, a dozen feet away from a drawer filled with your choice of flash meters, and nothing I shoot these days comes close to delivering what I shot then. Perhaps the constant compromises of doing photography as a business have all but extinguished the thrill. Perhaps it's just the relentlessness of it all...

Sobering. 

If you have a happy, optimistic counterpoint I'd love to read it...

I photographed a play yesterday evening. It was called: "THIS GIRL LAUGHS, THIS GIRL CRIES, THIS GIRL DOES NOTHING." It was my first rehearsal shoot using both the XT3 and the XH1.

I was walking around the Zach Theatre campus and looking at the photos that are on the walls of every building. I realized that over the last several decades of photographing for them that I've shot dress rehearsals and marketing shots with every camera format from 4x5 inch sheet film to one inch sensor digital and, literally, everything in between. So it should come as no surprise that I was back over to do a quick project with a relatively new camera. At least new to me...

The play, This Girl Laughs, The Girl Cries, This Girl Does Nothing, is not a big blockbuster play; it's aimed at family audiences and is being presented on the theater's smallest stage. The Whisenhunt Theater seats about 100 people and almost all the plays presented there are done in the round. All the lighting is mounted on grids and floats under the ceiling about 25 feet up in the air. Because of this it's hard to get soft, frontal light, or even fairly low angle spots on the actors so the lighting is always a bit more problematic in this venue. It's also the last theater of the three production spaces on the campus that still uses all tungsten stage lighting. 

All the walls and all the overhead space is painted matte black so the room is a big light sponge and you can't depend on reflected or bounce light from the walls or ceilings to help bring down the contrast range. Shadows go to black pretty quickly...

Yesterday was a dress rehearsal and I was able to move around the theater to shoot. That's a luxury I don't always have when we're photographing in our biggest theater, the Topfer Stage, because the cost of producing in the bigger space is higher, schedules are tighter and we almost always have an audience during the dress rehearsals of the major plays and musical presented in that space. That can make shutter noise an issue.

"This Girl Laughs...." is a joint production between Zach Theatre and the University of Texas at Austin drama department. We had four actors on the stage and one musician over on one side (stationary). As you can see, the stage dress/props is minimal so the play depends heavily just on performance.

I took two Fuji cameras; the XH1 and the XT3 along with a smattering of lenses. But the play is short and moves fast and there was scant time to waste with lens changes. I put the 18-55mm kit lens on the XT3 so that combo would take advantage of the lens's image stabilization and put the faster, 50mm f2.0 WR lens on the XH1 to give that combo equal access to image stabilization. Both cameras were set to ISO 3200 although, when the lighting got dramatic enough (meaning: very low levels) I did go all the way to ISO 6400. I used each set up with the lenses nearly wide open so I could get a shutter speed of around 1/250th of a second which gives me a fighting chance at keeping hands and moving feet from blurring too much. It was weird, for me, to use the ISO dial as my basic exposure controller but I felt compelled to stay in the shutter speed range and if I ran out of light there was no where else to go except UP in ISO. 

How did each camera do? Well, when it comes to telling them apart the only way I can tell without looking at the file info is to look at the angle of view in the frame. If it's wider it had to come from the XT3 if it was tighter and had shallower depth of field then it probably came from the XH1 and the 50mm. The colors matched well between the cameras and as far as noise performance goes I'd call it a tie at ISO 3200. 

But for all the ballyhoo about the XT3 having better autofocus I'd say that was immediately cancelled out by the one stop difference (or more) in aperture. If one camera has more exposure on the sensor it stands to reason that the AF performance is going to be better and that was the case here. I used S-AF for both cameras and they both did a good job. I can't imagine anyone complaining about either camera if you were outside shooting under an 18 EV lighting situation. But even here in the near dark each camera locked in well and quickly and neither hunted for focus at all. 

I have to say that my experiences so far make me partial to the XH1 with battery grip over the handling of the smaller and daintier XT3 without grip. I am also much more impressed with the almost silent mechanical shutter in the XH1. Yes, you can always switch either camera to its electronic shutter mode and go completely silent but there are some situations in which that's a non-starter for me. When I shoot performances at the bigger theater all of the lighting is done with LEDs. Mostly high output LED spots made for theater, not for filming! They trade a certain amount of flicker free performance/resistance for throw and power. Shooting with fully electronic shutters is an invitation to non-stop banding if you are shooting at shutter speeds that are high enough to freeze motion (anything from 1/125th up...). I've been down this road with Sony, Panasonic and Nikon as well and none of them are immune from the nasty combination of theater LEDs and electronic shutters. It's all venetian blind patterning all the time. Being able to use a nearly silent but fully mechanical shutter may be specific to my work but it makes a huge difference to me. I can't wait to sit through the dress rehearsal of the next big production, with a full audience, with two gripped, XH1s in my camera bag, both set to fully mechanical shutters... If there's music no one will ever hear the shutters....

Both the XT3 and the XH1 have basically the same menus and the same control layouts. Since I was shooting in manual exposure with both cameras I didn't have to test whether or not the removal of the exposure compensation dial and the addition of a top of camera info LCD was a good or bad thing. I will note that being able to see a bunch of important camera info in the top mounted LCD was a plus.

Basically, the cameras are so much alike that I can go back and forth without having to overthink anything. It's pretty straight forward. I do find that I like having the battery grip on the XH1; partly because I can use the camera in the boost mode and would never have to worry about running out of electrical juice during a long performance,; and mostly because it makes shooting in a vertical orientation easier and more comfortable.  

If there's a difference in resolution between the two cameras it more or less gets lost at the higher ISOs. While both cameras had well controlled noise profiles at 3200 I've seen better from cameras like the Nikon D750 and the Sony A7Rii. 

One thing I've learned about evaluating the image quality of files is not to rely on the "standard" previews that are the default in Adobe's Lightroom. They are invariably higher compression than the final processed files will be and have more noise and less detail overall. I was depressed one day when I looked at some files shot at high ISO in Lightroom. I thought I'd be spending a lot of time cleaning up noise. But after sending a few test files all the way through the process and looking at them in PhotoShop, or even online at Smugmug.com (at the highest magnification), I could see that they were much better than the previews might have us believe. Now I either use 1:1 previews or I sample files in PhotoShop to make sure that anything negative I'm seeing is a result of the preview creation and not inherent in the files themselves. 

If you must have an opinion about which of these two cameras I like best I'll say straight out that I prefer using the XH1 to the XT3. I like the bigger body and the advantages of the grip. So much so that, after last week's shoot for "Hedwig" (another Zach play/musical) I ordered a second XH1 and grip. It arrived today and, for the time being, the twin XH1s seem to have earned the prime spot as my live theater photography cameras. 

Now it's high time to flesh out the lens inventory a bit. Next on my list is the 14mm f2.8 XF and then the 90mm f2.0. New year/New gear.

I do have some thoughts about lenses and shooting in a smaller studio space. The 50mm f2.0 was about as tight as I needed for yesterday's shoot. I could have, or perhaps should have, put the 23mm f2.0 on the XT3 and just done a classic two lens shoot. Then again, I'm sure I would have thrown myself a curve ball in the process somewhere...

That's all I've got today. I'm happy to have an XT3. I'm looking forward to using it for video. I'm happier to have two of the XH1s, I'll use them for all the still photography stuff. Fun cameras!

One more odd observation. I recently updated the firmware in my first XH1 body to rev. 2.0. It added a lot to the camera. The camera I got today was brand new, in the box and came straight from B&H. And it came with the original 1.0 firmware. As soon as the batteries charged up I updated the firmware. I guess I just assumed that new, shipping cameras would have the current brain food in them. I was wrong. Maybe Fuji just wants us to learn how; you know, just in case we need to update in the wild.....