Finally, a blog post that's just about a lens...

Whether you are an "F 64" fan or a "bokeh-liscious" fan I think most of us would admit to liking the effect of shallow depth of field from time to time, especially if it's not too heavy-handed. As a portrait photographer I vacillate; I'm thrilled with the effect sometimes and rail against it at other times. No consistent world view here when it comes to just how much detail I like to see in the backgrounds (and foregrounds) of photographs. No manifesto in one direction or the other from me. The over application of most styles and techniques ages the effects more quick. A case in point would the ever recycling use of ring lights in fashion and portraiture, another classic case being the overuse of overdone HDR.

But if you are going to do an effect it's a lot of fun to buy just the right tool with which to perform your attempts. I'm a sucker for lenses which are, A. Aimed at portrait photographers. B. Able to be used to make very sharp images when the particular special feature of a lens isn't warranted. and, C. I'm a sucker for highly specialized, niche lenses. I think the lens I just picked up from Precision Camera here in Austin fits the bill across the three parameters...

When I entered the Fujifilm X family of cameras and lenses I vowed not to step into the "tar of desire" too deeply but almost immediately I began to break my vow by first researching, and then acquiring, the lenses that I thought would be most interesting for making portraits. After the primary workhorse lens, the 50-140mm f2.8, I picked up the 60mm f2.4 macro and explored its potential. It's a very, very nice optical system wrapped in an aging focusing mechanism, and it sure could have used a manual focusing clutch for those times when one wants full focusing control. Alas, your hand and wrist will get a workout should you attempt manual focusing with it. You'll need about 720 degrees of turn to go from close focus to infinity. I'm keeping the lens because it's nice and small and delivers very nice looking files.

I moved on from the 60mm to the 90mm f2.0 and lately I've been using the longer lens in any capacity I can. It's extremely sharp, has very nice out of focus rendering in backgrounds, when used at the first three apertures, and it focuses fast, like a rocket. But.... the focal length is a bit too long for comfortable portraits in my small studio space. I have a clean 24 feet to work with in each direction if I have my back against one wall and my background against the opposite wall. The angle of view on the 90 doesn't give me much room to have a "loose" frame and still have sufficient distance from the subject to the back wall. "Missed it by that much..."

The 50-140mm f2.8 has been giving me nice service in the studio. The zoom makes for good framing flexibility and, for the most part, the maximum aperture provides enough sharpness, and just enough ability to toss the background out of focus enough, to make the whole proposition workable. But if you know anything about crazy artists you know they keep tinkering till they find the "ultimate" tools for their favorite tasks (and yes, painters do discuss their favorite brushes with one another just as audio experts can spend an entire coffee break talking about various microphones...).

Several VSL readers have pushed me to try Fuji's 56mm f1.2 R and I've resisted out of a sense that, with all my prior buying choices, I've already overdone my burgeoning inventory of Fuji lenses. I've put that lens into my "cart" and taken it out of the cart many times since becoming "Fuji Aware." But each time either my budget has stopped me or my desire to be a good fiduciary of my own enterprise has pulled me up short. That, and the idea that the lens is just a bit too short.

That was the situation right up until I had lunch at Maudie's Tex-Mex with my photographer friend, Andy. He's seen the light lately and has started to acquire more and more Fuji X stuff. To be fair, he's keeping his hands on his micro four thirds stuff as well. So we were catching up and the conversation turned to Fuji. He's a regular visitor to Precision Camera, our home grown camera candy store, and he mentioned several great finds he's picked up in the past month or so. I asked him to let me know if he saw anything cool the next time he was by the store. He sent me an e-mail a couple hours later from the showroom at camera ground zero and let me know about a few new deals that had arrived in the store, used.

One of the items was a 56mm f1.2 APD lens. For those of you unfamiliar with the ways of Fuji this is one of their rare specialty lenses. The APD designation is short for "Apodization" which I find to be a strange word but which means, essentially, that they've taken a regular 56mm f1.2 and placed a specialized filter just in front of the diaphragm that smooths out the bokeh (or out of focus qualities) without touching the native sharpness of the lens. In fact, MTF curve comparisons between the two lenses show that the APD version is oh so slightly sharper than the vanilla version. The APD lens delivers its effect most obviously when used wide open and then matches the vanilla version almost exactly for both light transmission and optical performance by f5.6. The APD filter reduces overall illumination at the wider apertures; when set to f1.2 the relative T value (transmission) is more like f1.7. There is an additional scale on the lens to remind you to compensate at the wider apertures for this exposure differential.

The effects of the APD filter seem subtle, judging by samples at the better websites. But since I was able to purchase a mint, used APD version for $625 while the current retail price is $1499 I was ready to take a chance and check it out. So far, I am not disappointed in the least. It's a lovely lens.

The one knock against the lens is that the APD filter has some property which makes phase detect autofocus unavailable. Everything is contrast detection. But it's still faster, on the X-H1 and X-T3 bodies than the 60mm macro..... and that's with the macro making full use of PD-AF.

The lens includes 11 elements (not including the APD filter), two of which are ED elements and one of which is an aspherical element. The APD filter is said to be a breakthrough attributed to Fuji's nano technology R&D. Sounds cool to me.

I have two jobs coming up this week that are perfect matches for the potential of this lens. I'm breaking it in on a long walk tomorrow. I've shot some stuff around the house and studio and have been impressed with the basic performance of the lens. Even without the APD functionality it would be a stellar performer. We'll see what the whole package delivers on Tuesday and then again on Friday. I'm  back to being busy in the studio. Much stuff booked. Much to deliver.

Interesting how quickly Fuji converted me to their system. I think a lot has to do with my comfort level gaining all the exterior controls. It reminds me of the photographic gear I grew up with. Nice. Now, did someone mention medium format???

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.....