Portrait in studio. Another one from the archives.

Portrait. In the Westlake Hills Studio.

I'm spending a fun day photographing kids of all ages at the Zach Theatre Summer Camp today. I came home at noon to spend some time with Studio Dog (she dislikes isolation from her "pack" for more than a few hours at a time. Who can blame her?). I'm the one in the immediate family with ultimate schedule flexibility and any time I can choose between client meetings or a nap on the couch with Studio Dog on the carpet in front of me the choice is pretty much always easy to make.

So, what are we doing at Zach today? Well, we're making photographs that will try to capture the energy and enthusiasm of a diverse group of kids who come together for a week or two to learn how to sing, dance, act and perform. I try to do mostly vertical, telephoto photographs of individual kids because that seems to be what the art director who handles promotion for the camps seems disposed most often to use. Two or three kids working together on a routine or performance are also valuable to the art department.... Occasionally, the whole group of kids, kindergarten age to high school, will come together to work on a big project. This afternoon we're working on a cool scene from the musical, "Matilda" set to the song, "We Are Revolting Children" and we'll have all ages on stage doing parts for this fun and high energy scene. It's so much fun!!!

Of course, it's not all perfect for photography. We don't really have time to pose anyone, I have no idea where everyone will end up so I'll have to move quick to get my shots and... with the poor lighting in the giant rehearsal space I'll be shooting wide open at f2.8 and making use of ISO 6400 just to get a shutter speed that might freeze some of the action. This is how I practice for more critical work projects; I shoot and shoot whenever I can and try everything possible to overcome the built-in limitations of a scene.

I worked with several lenses this morning but the one that works best in the space is the 50-140mm f2.8 XF. It's very, very sharp, even when used wide open, and the combination image stabilization with I.S. in the lens and IBIS with the Fuji X-H1 works wonderfully. The camera is quick to focus and, with the right SD cards, very fast in writing files and clearing buffers.

I came home to have one of my favorite lunches: Greek Yogurt (2% fat) mixed half and half with muesli and covered with fresh, honey crisp, cantaloupe. I also made a cup of coffee using the ground Illy coffee from the can in the fridge. Yummy deluxe. It makes coffee house coffee seem like weak, used motor oil by comparison.

Swim notes. Summer is here and the swim schedule has changed to accommodate the rank and file (non-competitive swimmers) at our private swim club. In any other season but Summer we swim in the mornings at two workouts. One is from 7:00 to 8:15 and the second option (which we call "the Executive Workout -- you have to be able to show up to work late....) is from 8:15 to 9:30, but in the Summer, when there is (ostensibly) more demand for pool time, we switch to 7:00 - 8:00 and then 8:00 to 9:00. Each is shortened by 15 minutes. But the coaches don't care about the math, they think we should still be able to complete the same distances we normally do in the compressed time frame. Their workaround? They just shorten the time intervals and any rest between sets. Nice.....

I swam at the 8:00 a.m. workout this morning and it was delicious. I swam with two of my favorite lane mates and we hit it hard. There was a pattern to the sets and it was almost like poetry, except that now I'm tired and my muscles are a bit sore. Oh well, I have 24 hours to recover before the next one.

Thinking about getting a GoPro or similar camera to clamp to the front of my kick board just for grins. I'll let you know how it all works out.

Family notes: Oh boy. It's all insurance companies and a probate circus around here since my dad passed away. I've been sending out death certificates and legal notifications like it was direct mail/self promotion. Temporary, I keep telling myself. Just temporary.

Hope you are having a great Summer. Send some good energy to theonlinephotographer's, Michael Johnston. He needs our good thoughts and best wishes to speed up his recovery. And if you have a little extra folding money you might think of heading to his Patreon site and making a little donation. It's tough enough being self-employed but self-employed and unable to fully function is a whole other thing. See this: https://www.patreon.com/theonlinephotographer Only mentioning this for VSL readers who also read Mike's blog. It's the gold standard in photography. Let's help him over this hurdle and get him back to work; I need something good to read over coffee every morning...

Staying engaged and mostly busy is therapeutic. Photographing dancers is more so. Hello Fuji Jpegs.

I'd like to pretend that shooting Jpegs instead of raw files at a theater tech rehearsal is a brave step, but, of course, it's anything but. After having shot for a bit less than a year but a bit more than 25,000 frames with my little collection of Fuji X series cameras I have come to believe that Jpegs are made for photographers who enjoy the process of taking photographs while raw files are for the photographer who is an avowed Do-It-Yourself-er. I'm being a bit flip as I know there are many situations in which shooting raw and being able to fix and fine tune things that may be out of your direct control during a shooting session can be an absolute career saver. And any really important, "once in a lifetime" session is an almost mandatory candidate for the Raw+Jpeg Fine setting on the camera. But...there are many, many, many situations in which we shoot where we don't need the ability to whiffle around with every frame and spend hours in dark rooms in front of computer screens while life swirls on outside. 

There are things I can do well in raw. Those include big changes to color and big changes to contrast (and under the umbrella of contrast control, the ability to use the shadow and highlight slides to gain the appearance of higher dynamic range) but I am equally sure that a properly set up camera with tweaks made to the files in the menus is nearly always better than me when it comes to sharpening and noise reduction. Almost every time. I'll confess a real admiration for shooting contrasty stage settings with the  Fuji Eterna profile/film emulation. Eterna gives me a bunch more detail in the shadows and seems to make the highlights (when well exposed) almost bulletproof. In fact, now when I shoot rehearsals I'm much more comfortable shooting Jpeg/Eterna than raw. When I look at the photograph of the dancer (above) from the large file on a 5K screen it's subtle and rich. When I look on Blogger at its 2200 pixel iteration it just looks flat. But the beautiful thing about a flat profile is that one has the ability to add contrast for days. The obverse is almost never true. 

I photographed the Tech Rehearsal for "Immortal Longings" at Zach Theatre on Sunday night. I drove through driving rain, with tornado warnings on the radio, my cameras and lenses snug in a photo backpack protected by its rain cover, to get to the rehearsal. Once there are drip dry I pulled the cameras  out and started setting them up. I start from neutral every time. Sunday was no different: Jpeg Fine, Large. Eterna. ISO 800-1600 (PRN). Noise reduction = minus 1. Highlight tone = minus 1. WB = K = 3800. Center AF sensor. S-AF. 

Once you develop good methods to judge color balance on the fly your "need" for raw-ness in your files is diminished by half. Once you learn how to "trust" the EVF in your cameras for exposure you reduce your dependence on raw even more. 

The benefit, for me, of shooting Jpegs on jobs like this is that I tend to generate a ton of files and having a reduced file size makes selection (which used to be called "editing" before the kinder-digi corrupted the long honored use of the word) of the good images so much quicker and since so much of what raw acolytes do in post processing is already baked into the files you save so much time on processing as well. It took me about 4 hours yesterday morning to "edit" down 1500 files to 650, tweak them (not re-work them) as necessary, save all the changes and output the finals to a folder and then to upload all 650 into an online gallery. Bonus was that all the originals and the finals fit onto one 32 GB memory stick.

My two takeaways from Sunday's session: The 90mm f2.0 lens is magnificent and the Eterna file should be renamed, "use this to shoot theater!!!" 

Adding contrast and saturation after the fact. Playing around with images. 

What do you do with all the photographs you take?

I thought about that today. I shoot all the time and I'll assume you have a good idea what I do with the photographs I shoot for clients. I sort them, polish up the selected ones and send them over in whatever file format they need to be in, and then archive and mostly forget about them. Very occasionally a client calls looking for a picture of Chip or Judy that we took at the (whatever) conference back in 2002 but mostly the bulk of the images I shoot for clients end up (they never "land up" --- is that an English language glitch that got introduced in some other region? "Landed up"????? WTF?) populating various folders in the cloud(s), folders on my active hard drives, folders on in-active but routinely "exercised" hard drives, DVDs and, from back in primitive times, on CDs. But I'm not really thinking of the commercial stuff. Those photographs will take care of themselves.

I'm thinking about all the stuff I shoot for myself; from portraits to zany Austin buildings, interesting signs, street scenes and culture in general. I know from looking through my Google Photos folders that I've shared at least five thousand individual images on the blog over the last TEN YEARS, even taking into consideration that some photographs keep getting re-published and re-published....

Our shoot this early evening got pushed back from 6:30pm to an 8:00pm start so I have enough time to convert my thought process about image legacy into a blog post. Lucky us. Here is an answer (or series of answers) that many of you might find heretical: With the exception of family images (Ben, Belinda, Studio Dog, close friends) I am very lackadaisical about what happens to the images I take. Sure, I love to look at them but I don't sweat too much about whether they are pristinely preserved and well archived or just relegated to an old hard drive because I'm much more interested in going forward than in continually looking the rear view mirror. I don't want to become one of those photographers who presume that their best images or their "heyday" is all behind them and that their tasks, going forward (in time) is all about re-working and re-working the images they made years ago. There may be value in that if you have a venue for the old work but for me the value of doing photography is in the enjoyment of the process of actually making the photographs.

Yesterday presented yet another example of my interest in the process but my relative disdain for the back end drudgery of the craft. I walked through downtown Austin with a Fuji X-E3 and a 35mm f2.0 lens and I snapped images of bright blue skies and soaring buildings,  many fat, fat, fat people perched precariously on a now overwhelming infestation of electric scooters, and a few shots of disoriented tourists dodging said scooters. I'm sure you would mostly agree that there was little of real value on the SD card by the time I finished my work. 

While I could have been swayed by the persistent lore of our industry/hobby to believe that all shutter presses and their discharges are wonderful, creative and imaginative, and worthy of being saved on multiple hard drives, preserved from fires and floods in the different safety deposit boxes sprinkled about the state, I chose to believe the opposite. That some days you venture forth with a camera and come back with a bunch of ...... crap. As I waited for my car's air conditioner to un-preheat my car's interior I took a few minutes to buzz through the newly minted images on the rear screen of the camera. Seeing nothing new and striking I stumbled into the menu and reformatted the card. Better luck next time. Right?

Was I crestfallen, depressed, discouraged? Not at all. I enjoyed the walk. I probably enjoyed it more knowing that I was not required to come back with a whole bouquet of visual masterpieces. There is value in just looking and there is value in having the camera in your hand and being ever more comfortable and at home with the process. The path towards more success is to become more critical, and the path to being more critical is mostly littered with rejected images or their digital residue, such as it is. Almost as if what you throw away is more important than what you keep. Or something Zen-y like that.

I'll grab a camera tomorrow morning when I leave the house. It will be new day and mostly a change of attitude changes one's perception of the value of the images. I am excited about the images I hope to get tonight at the technical rehearsal I'll be shooting at Zach Theatre tonight. Always a challenge to create great stage shots on a constrained and strict schedule, having never seen the blocking, or stage sets before. Dear God, I hope they have the lighting set high enough this time. 

What do you do with the thousands and thousands of images you shoot every year? Do you have a venue in which to share them? An audience with which to share them? And how many photos do you throw away? What percentage are "keepers?"

On another subject my lightweight, carbon fiber tripod came today. Studio Dog rushed to the front door of the house to bark at the delivery person. She forgot to take the low coefficient of friction on the Saltillo tiles into consideration and slid right into the front door. She's got a bit of a limp right now. Left front paw. But she's pretty confident that's one Amazon delivery driver who will never be back. Solely because of her ferocious home protection skills (I didn't point out to her that the man was on the other side of the closed door....dogs need to maintain their dignity....).

At any rate the tripod is just.....darling. It's sooooo tiny. It weighs 2.2 pounds, including the petite bullhead on top. I certainly wouldn't say this is built for heavy duty use and I might be hesitant to put my 100-400mm lens on top, but it's just what I had in mind to hold the camera in one spot while I move with a hand held strobe to another spot and trigger the whole assemblage remotely. If the camera holds up for a few long corporate events before expiring I'll be happy and will just start thinking of featherweight tripods as billable disposables. It's a Benro Slim like this one:

Finally, a personal note. I was able, for the first time in a months and months, to make it to both a Saturday and a Sunday swim practice on the same weekend! I got to swim in a lane with my friend, Leslie, and while we weren't the fastest people in the pool today (not by a long shot) we were absolutely diligent and made it through the whole hour and a half, working hard. Nice to be exhausted two days in a row. It's a good cure for just about everything.

Odd thought. I think I'll wear a suit and tie to the rehearsal tonight. Just for fun. Just because it's so .... uncalled for. Maybe even a bow tie.....

Crazy fun stuff that I like to buy. This time is a half terabyte external Sandisk SSD drive.

On the Spanish Steps in Rome. 1995. Mamiya Six camera.

I'm photographing the annual Summit conference for WP Engine at the end of the month and I learn new stuff every time I do this three day assignment. We move fast. They move fast. A few times last year we (the marketing team and I) had photographs from the CEO's final speech up on social media minutes before she left the stage. Three years ago I learned I needed a much faster laptop for the conference (no time to head to the studio to process and upload, we did everything within 100 yards from the main stage) so last year I finally retired the noble but painfully slow Mac Pro I had been using and bought a new one with a faster processor, more memory and an SSD HD. It's so much quicker. The narrow part of the funnel last year was how long it took to write files to my conventional (spinning disk) hard drive. So, this year I bought several of the Sandisk 500 GB SSD drives I found on Amazon for $89 each. I've already tested one of the drives and it's super speedy compared to the older tech. Now my big hope is that the new Fairmont Hotel here in Austin, Texas has a nice, juicy broadband connection with which to work.

This will also be my first year to use the Fuji cameras for a larger conference. I'll be shooting mostly photographs but need to also catch some B-Roll video for the client as well.  The X-H1 is particularly well suited to this. The real trick is in the upload. We shy away from 4K when we aim for fast delivery....

Last year, when I was shooting displays, and some demo areas that were in really low lighting, I used a monopod for stability but I ended up anchored to the camera. You can't just walk away from a monopod and think that your camera and the floor won't soon meet up,  and there were times I wanted to set a self timer, use a flash and stand with the hand held flash about ten feet over to one side. I have narrowed down my selection of tripods for photographs to just two. I may have "over narrowed" because while the two that remain are wonderfully rigid and durable neither is light weight and both are a pain in the ass to carry all over a hotel convention space.

I have my eye on a Benro tripod that might fill the bill for a very small, very light, take everywhere tripod. It's called a Benro Slim. It's carbon fiber, has a decent bullhead and only weighs something like 2.4 pounds. I know it won't be as sturdy as my big Gitzo but I also know I can strap it onto the side of my photo backpack and never notice the weight. It's for those times when I want to shoot interior stuff and I need to have the camera on an autonomous support so I can walk away from it to adjust lights, etc. (Darn, I was so enthralled with what I was writing just now and I took a break to look at the tripod specs on Amazon and decided, in the spur of the moment, to just go ahead and order it......).

The interesting aspect of this show for me is the immediacy of delivery that we're going to engineer. I'm working hard to figure out how to continuously, wirelessly, send files as I'm shooting to a folder on the laptop but I can't figure out (right now) how to continuously upload the images from the computer's folder to a Smugmug gallery without having to touch the computer. We use Smugmug.com to share the photographs with the team so they can quickly select and download the stuff they want to use.

If you have ideas for speedy, one man file transfer I'd love to hear them.

Packing my bags for tomorrow's technical rehearsal of Terence McNally's, "The Immortal Longings."

Photographed as an audition for Jana. I needed a great talent to pose for lots of the images in my LED book so I booked a session with Jana and we played around all over downtown but especially in Little City Coffee House. It's no longer there but I still have the photographs. 

The photographs of Jana have nothing to do with the written content of this particular blog post but I like them and thought they should get some exposure. Beautiful woman --- coffee. What's not to like? 

But really I just wanted to write about what I'm packing to take to the technical rehearsal of a new play that's about Diagilev and Najinsky, their relationship, and the revolution they created together in modern ballet. Our theater is hosting the world premiere of Terence McNally's (Four time Tony award winner, writer of "Kiss of the Spider Woman" and "Ragtime") newest play, "The Immortal Longings." 

There are two different rehearsals during which I make photographs. One is the full dress rehearsal (coming up on Tuesday) and the other is the final technical rehearsal. The dress rehearsals usually have a "family and friends" audience which limits my ability to move all over the house to get all kinds of fun angles I like but the tech rehearsal is done without an audience and gives me full license to be everywhere I want to be except on the stage itself (too dangerous and distracting). The photographs I take are used in advertising and public relations, and appear all over Austin and as far away as "American Theater Magazine" and most recently in the "New York Times." 

My gear inventory is simple and straight forward for tomorrow. I'm taking two Fuji X-H1 bodies and one X-T3 body. I'll put the 50-140mm f2.8 lens on one X-H1 and the 16-55mm f2.8 on the other body and use both of them handheld. For the first time since I started shooting theater I am planning to put the 8-16mm lens (at 10mm) on the X-T3, place it on a tripod right at stage level, center; pointing up a bit, and trigger it with a remote release. I'll pre-focus at 15 feet and try to compute a good average exposure level for the spotlights on stage. I just thought I'd try something new and different (for me). 

I must confess that I do miss the days of yore when we would do staged shots for marketing instead of trying to catch our photographs during run of show. I'd drag in multiple strobe boxes and many flash heads with soft boxes, and some with grids, up onto the stage and we'd shoot Polaroids and do a bit of collaboration with the marketing team. It was fun and we never had to worry about "file noise" or things not being sharp because of shutter speed limitations. It was time consuming and hard labor but the photos never looked better. 

Seems strange, all of a sudden, not to be heading to San Antonio in the morning. I'm already missing having lunch the memory care facility with my dad and his two favorite table mates, Marianne and Jimmy. But at least I won't be racing back to Austin in a sweat trying to make it to the theater on time after lingering too long in the afternoon, reading the New York Times to my dad.... and sneaking him small bags of Hershey's Kisses. 

Waiting to meet someone who is perennially late, or unreliable.

The temperature flirted with one hundred degrees today. I officially pronounce the beginning of Summer in Austin.

Model at Enchanted Rock State Park, outside of Fredericksburg, Texas. 

Dressed for the heat wave.

I usually like the hot weather. Today though I was under the weather. I don't know if it was the stress of recent events or a bit of hypochondria but I woke up feeling a bit less than 100%. Some gastrointestinal distress and a bit of a headache. I usually ignore stuff like this and today was no exception....early on. I went to swim practice but I threw in the towel after an hour and headed off by myself for coffee. I came home and took some acetaminophen for my headache and then bowed out of our usual Saturday family lunch to take a nap on the bed. By mid afternoon I was back on my feet. A weird thing about me is that when I'm tense and have a headache the best medicine seems to be to put on some walking shoes, a wide brimmed hat, and some sunglasses and then go for a long walk. Seems that walking meditation short circuits the worry wiring and gives me a lot of relief --- even when the mercury soars. 

In the past I would grab whatever camera I was infatuated with for a hot walk but today I actually thought about size and weight. The choice for today was between the Canon G15 and the Fuji X-E3 with a 35mm f2.0. The Fuji won. But mostly because it was such a bright and contrasty day and I figured the X-E3 would do a better job handling the wide range of tones. I put an extra battery in one pocket and a credit card in the other and parked near downtown. To be honest I didn't see much I was interested in photographing. I came home with five mediocre shots on the memory card which I flushed by re-formatting. But I came home without the headache and that was more important to me in the moment.

I have really come to enjoy the X-E3 in the same way I used to enjoy my old Leica rangefinders. These cameras are small and light and are perfectly paired with the 16mm f2.8, the 23mm 2.0, the 35mm 2.0 and the 50mm 2.0. In fact, I have an urge to buy one more of them (but this time in silver....) and to use them with the above listed lenses as a lightweight travel kit. But being the somewhat lazy photographer that I am I'll probably also drop the 18-55mm f2.8-4.0 zoom into the bag just for those times when, you know, I want to zoom instead of fumble with lens changes. As you are probably aware, the minute I pick up another X-E3 Fuji will announce the X-E4 (or whatever number those superstitious camera makers choose) which will have IBIS, the 26 megapixel processor of the X-T3 and a new and improved Eterna profile.... Ah well. 

At any rate the X-E3 is a perfect camera for people who are looking for small, light and relatively inexpensive. While I wish the EVF eyepiece was a bit bigger and had a higher eye point it does make really nice photographs and I'm actually glad to have one. It's good enough to prevent me wanting an X100F. 

No headache now and my stomach is fine. I guess sometimes a long walk in the warm air really can be medicinal.