I went "off script" yesterday and photographed the dress rehearsal for "Dracula" with a couple of Pentax K1 cameras. It wasn't insanely difficult...

When we make a change, say from a DSLR system to a  mirrorless system, it's generally because the emotional part of our brain got triggered into desire mode by careful advertising, marketing, or some other lure, and our logical side of the brain is then given the (after action) task of rationalizing our emotion's actions. We might never know what compelled our emotional brain to ditch a perfectly good system and venture into the great unknown but we know it probably had to do with a deeply held need to keep up with the Joneses, a need to make a statement about where you fit into the social hierarchy, or the idea that having the latest and greatest stuff might make you more attractive to the opposite sex, thus tipping the scales in your favor that you might one day mate and replicate. All this desire is mostly driven by thousands or millions of years of evolution and there's very little you can do about it.

Funny to think about how desire pushes a species forward on a general basis (desire for consistent food supply helping to create agriculture?) while it can actually impede the happiness of individuals. For example: you might think spending money on a Sony A7R mk4 will make you happy. Happier than you are now with your Canon Digital Rebel. You scrimp and save, spend more time at work than you'd like, and then you walk into the camera store and finally buy the camera of your dreams. For a while you are happy. Everyone around you is impressed with your new camera. But then adaptation takes over and you get used to your camera. Familiarity breeds contempt. The fizz wears off. The sparkle seems to dull. And you start saving up for the next big purchase which you hope with bring you lasting happiness and which will change your life. And you follow this pattern until you can no longer afford to make these kinds of emotionally driven camera purchases. Or you impoverish yourself through the misuse of credit...

You've lost the opportunity to invest the money you spent on cameras and you've lost the income's ability to purchase necessities that might have actually improved the quality of your life, your relationships, and your actual social position. You've effectively traded real happiness for short term attempts to be happy through ownership of stuff you didn't need but allowed the linked camps in your brain to foist upon you.

And the logical part of the brain (which is actually very rarely consulted during the ramping up of desire and the final culmination of the buying cycle) is repeatedly called upon to do the heavy lifting. It tells us that 2 more megapixels will make a profound difference in our work. That 1/3 of a stop more dynamic range will fix everything that currently vexes us. That having a mirrorless camera will make us "future proof" and will provide so many vital features that it just makes sense to own one. There's even a special sub-routine in the brain that clicks in to help us rationalize things like the construction of our desired object in carbon fiber or titanium. The logical side of the brain instantly supplies the rationale (after we've bought the new camera) with something like: "Well. In the near future we'll be moving all of our photography work to nature and wildlife images and the titanium will reduce the weight of our kit and also add more strength to the body. The new camera will last much longer, making the selection of the "Boy Metal" a long term.....investment, when compared to a traditional finish..." 

So, what I've found when I've made the plunge into a new system or a new kind of camera (mirrorless versus DSLR, for example) is that my logical brain jumps in to bail out the emotional part of my brain, which seems to have an iron grip on my wallet, reduce the post purchase second thoughts (post cognitive dissonance) with wave after wave of reasoned justifications. My current favorite is that I must  have the latest Fuji mirrorless cameras because the ability to pre-chimp is so vital to my success in capturing good images during dress rehearsals at the theater. If there's no time to test lighting and to make changes on the fly then seeing the preview of an image in the EVF (pre-chimping) helps me to make quick changes that ensure my success. Which ensures my place in the social hierarchy. Which should make me happy. 

When I picked up a couple of Pentax K1 cameras I'm certain it was an impulsive act driven by a recent deposit into one of my accounts of cash I didn't need in the moment. I was either rewarding myself for completing a long and arduous task or taking advantage of a disruption in the dealer's pricing model when I made the purchase. The after-action booster talk from the logical part of my brain mollified me by assuring me that the full frame sensor in the new cameras, in conjunction with the 1:1 format, and a handful of lenses, would open up a brilliant new way to make classic black and white portraits in the studio; where I would have the leisure to use live view to nail perfect focus. Another argument my brain dredged up was that a new system might motivate me to get back into the game after a tough year of domestic administration. Either argument could have prevailed because what my brain was interpreting from my emotion's actions was that I deserved the new gear and I could afford it without negative consequences. Well done, logical and emotional brains, you saddled me with yet more gear....

Just for grins yesterday I thought I'd repudiate my logical brain's argument about the need for mirrorless cameras in order to do my best job in live theater photography. I had agreed to photograph the marketing images for ZachTheatre.org's new production of, "Dracula"  and I thought I'd substitute the older, DSLR technology and see just how "important" those mirrorless attributes actually were. 

To that end, I shot the bulk of last night's technical rehearsal with the following: Two Pentax K1 cameras, a 28-105mm f3.5-5.6(!!!!!!!) zoom lens and the 100mm f2.8 Macro WR. Sure, I dropped a couple of 50mm lenses in the bag (unused) as well as a really old and crusty 135mm f2.5 Pentax manual focusing lens (also unused) into the camera bag. 

I got off to a slightly rocky start but soon settled into the old way of working with cameras that expect me to know what I'm supposed to be doing. Exposure and color balance are always the linchpins for a good theater photo, I don't worry much about focusing because I seem to have that figured out. At first I thought I'd need to shoot exclusively in raw, just as a safety net, but after the color temperature I'd set matched what I wanted to see in random image reviews I felt fine switching back to fine Jpegs and blazing through the show. 

Both lenses worked well and that's saying a lot when it comes to the 28-105mm zoom. It's basically an upscale "kit" lens and I was using it mostly wide open, which has got to be the worst case scenario, but it seemed to deliver sharp and well detailed images 95% of the time. The other five percent are probably due to my sloppy technique or a mis-focus while shooting a very dark and contrasty scene. 

The 100mm Macro lens was slower to focus but when I got the focusing right the images were great. I shot that lens at f3.5 which is about a third of a stop from wide open and got good images from it as well. 

The trick to shooting the K-1 cameras under low light is to be patient and wait for the green confirmation light to come on before committing to the final shutter push. It's an interesting kinetic ballet (and what kind of ballet would not be kinetic) that requires one to time stuff around the time it takes for the camera's focus to lock in. 

When I looked at the images today on my computer I was happy with the rich tonality the presented. Then I remembered all the hundreds of shows I'd photographed with SLRs, DSLRs, actual rangefinders and even medium format cameras over the course of nearly 30 years and reminded myself that the camera is secondary to the instruction book in your brain. 

Mirrorless cameras can make stage documentation easier a bit easier and can be less noisy, but you can still do great work with antiquated cameras ---- if you take your time and have the right mindset. I will say that the sensor in the Pentax K1 is less noisy at 3200 and far less noisy at 6400 than my X-H1s but the trade off is that the X-H1 and the "killer lenses" (90mm f2.0, the 50-140mm f2.8, and the 16-85mm) focus much more quickly and lock in with more authority. 

Not quite ready to try photographing theatrical stuff with my iPhone. I think I'll have to wait a rev or two for that.....

Fuji announced the new X-Pro3. The fans go wild. The haters go insane.

I really like cameras set up in a rangefinder style. Keeps my nose off the LCD...

It looks like the X-Pro3 from Fujifilm will be arriving just in time for my birthday. As the very happy owner of several of it's predecessor model (the Fuji X-Pro2) I can only say, "lucky me." I will order one of the new cameras right off the bat because of all the tweaks the new camera is said to have included. To wit: A much better optical finder (more room and less distortion). A much improved EVF (with more space, much higher resolution than the finder in the current, X-Pro2, and better, more accurate color). And a new body structure that is made of titanium (boy metal) and will be stronger and lighter than the structure of the camera it replaces. In addition to all this wonderful stuff there will also be several different coatings, or final finishes, to the "sheet metal." You'll be able to order the basic black or you'll have the option of two different colors of a "Dura" coating (silver and black) which is reported by Fuji to be more scratch resistant than stainless steel and almost as hard as sapphire. Come on! That's just so cool.

To my way of looking at cameras this will continue on the tradition of being a special use camera coveted by fine artists and street shooters. The rangefinder-styling and construction includes everything that's nice about a rangefinder camera (direct viewing, seeing beyond the edges of the frame, no shot black out) but adds the option to switch into EVF mode to pre-chimp or review images already taken. The one thing it removes, when compared to a "real" rangefinder like a Leica M6 is the actual coincident rangefinder mechanism. Some might miss that but a real rangefinder depends on careful, manual calibration to work well. It is also costlier to build than what Fuji has designed for us here, and, in all honesty, works less and less well with longer and longer lenses because the actual image size in the viewfinder gets smaller and smaller the longer the focal length of the lens. In my experience with actual rangefinder Leicas it's already a big bit of a compromise at 90mm and by the time you hit 135mm with an actual, optical rangefinder you'll be begging to use an SLR instead. Heading north from a 135mm? That becomes very, very challenging in actual use. 

I think it's very important to understand that this is a specialist's camera body and not at all intended to compete as a jack of all trades. Fuji says that it is designed for users who want a "pure" photographic experience and in making it for a smaller market one of their design goals was to reduce the intrusion of the camera in the picture taking process. To this end they've designed a rear LCD panel that is so strikingly against the popular notions of what a camera LCD is "supposed" to be used for that one suspects it was designed this way by Fuji just to enrage the general community at amateur photography sites such as DP Review (where a battle is currently raging between Fuji purists and the great unwashed audience, for which every camera MUST check every box).

The new screen is a flip-DOWN screen which is intended to have its active, screen side folded in toward the camera body when the camera is in use, taking photographs. There is no position in which the screen is flat against the camera's back and facing the user. None. The design goal was to reduce the temptation to mindlessly chimp when one should be taking photographs. I, for one, feel vindicated as this screen design strikes at the heart of the "Dirty Baby Diaper Hold" wherein a photograph holds the camera out at arm's length and does all of his photo business with the camera swaying and bouncing in front of him/her in the least stable hold possible (well, I guess they could do the D.B.D.H. with one hand, just to make it even less stable).  The screen, when in use,  is available in only two configurations: setting one is to fold the screen out away from the camera body and use it as a waist level finder. It faces up and is at 90 degrees from the camera body (it is hinged at the bottom to the camera). You can continue to fold the screen past 90 degrees to 180 degrees at which point it will be below the camera (top of the screen at the bottom of the camera) and the screen will be facing the user.

There is no provision to use the screen in any "selfie" mode and it won't twist out to the side or face toward the front of the camera in any way. Your choices are: waist level viewing, parallel to but below camera viewing, and having the screen tucked against the back of the camera in the off position. 

I love it. I love it because it will save battery power, not distract me, and it's a complete repudiation of composing and shooting on what should (on all cameras) be just a screen for menu setting and leisurely image review. I love it when a major camera maker's design initiatives coincide with my use profile prejudices. It shows me that there are still sane and logical camera users out in the world.

But this same screen configuration means that this camera will be very unpopular with casual video makers who need the back screen to be active and viewable during the video taking process. If you buy this camera with the primary objective of making video content I am sure it will have the electronic bells and whistles you'll probably want but I'd advise you to get an external monitor/digital recorder, like an Atomos, for convenient monitoring! I couldn't really use this camera for video without that addition. And that's okay because not every camera is made to be a complete "Swiss Army Knife Tool" ready to do anything and everything photographic and video-wise. 

Finally, the photographic "unwashed" are on fire with rancor and disgust over something that's merely a whimsical and fun design element; something that has no real effect, positive or negative, over the use of the X-Pro3. Here is the thing that has so many people twisted up and screaming, "deal killer! DEAL KILLER!!!" Fuji has added a small, square frame in the middle of the backside of the main LCD screen. When the main screen is folded in this little screen faces out from the back of the camera. It looks very much like the sub-monitor screen on the right hand of a Fuji X-H1 and it shows various bits of useful information such as the shutter speed, f-stop and ISO settings of the camera. All the information is even visible when the camera is turned off. A clever step is that the window can be set to mimic the look of the end label of a film box. Remember how film cameras had a little frame on the back and you could rip the end off a box of Tri-X and stick it into the frame to remind you about which kind of film you currently had in the camera? It's just like that but it's an electronic display, and the film box emulations are (of course) of Fuji films. It's clever and fun and the kinder-digi over at DP Review loathe the very idea of it. This means that it must be both good and useful to real photographers. 

In summary, sight unseen, I like the newest addition to the Fuji X-Pro collection and plan to buy one. Your ideas about cameras may be different from mine and perhaps you'll have reasons not to buy one. That's okay too. 

OT: Coping with long term success. What's next?

Mulling over the idea that Compound Interest 

can be your Best Friend or your Worst Enemy...

whether you buy cameras or not...

Some of us are laid back and seem content to let life wash over us, making do with whatever the universe decides to send along. This cohort falls into jobs and stumble into careers without much thought. Others of us are planners and worker bees and we tend to set goals, set procedures in motion, and constantly push toward some distant pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

I'm not sure where I fall on the continuum but I am discovering one thing: It's more fun to struggle and work hard, and fail, and get back into the game again, than it is to be finally, successful. Why? Because, if you don't have to struggle; if the friction of artistically participating in life is reduced or eliminated, then it seems like there's no point.

"Success" as described by a freelance photographer or small business owner can have many measures and many definitions. A lot of our culture's measures of success have to do with how well we have done financially. Wealth and security are key yardsticks with which to measure small business success.

When I meet with other photographers (or ad agency people, or illustrators, or filmmakers) there is always a question that seems to get asked after everyone is into their second beer, and that is, "Do you have a plan to retire?" And usually what is really being asked is: "Will you ever be able to retire?" The implication being that people in the arts have made a stream of conscious decisions to reject economic stability and security as some sort of required payment for being invested in creative enterprises. For doing their art. For writing their books or painting their canvases.

I am disheartened when, with each mention of my having bought a new piece of gear, the comments pour in questioning whether I have raided my child's college fund, stolen communal money from the kitchen cookie jar, done this behind my partner's back, or if I have just plunged myself into the bowels of sticky credit card debt from which I'll never recover. My acquaintances who opted for STEM careers seem not to be able to conceive of a non-technical/big vision job (like photography) that isn't wedded at the hip with intractable poverty and, at the end of life, financial ruin.

But what if...... what if you had little business successes every day, week, month and year of a long career in the arts? What if you shied away from endless exotic vacations (those are trips which clients are not paying for) and big, fancy cars, and houses which were clearly a stretch too far? What if you ate evening meals that you or your spouse prepared from scratch, in your own dining room, five or six nights a week, for decades at a time (and actually became better chefs than those in 90% of the restaurants you've visited) and saved somewhere between the $9,000 and $13,000 a year the average American family, whose appetite for meals acquired outside the house, spend, on average (family of four, middle class) eating out?

What if you saved up and paid in cash for your cars? What if you started saving when your child was an infant to ensure that you could send them to the college of their choice? What if you put all your "disposable" income in SEP accounts and Roth IRA's? In short, what if you did all the things people in all those other careers do (mostly in concert with HR departments) while you were happily grinding away at a pleasurable career in the arts?

I had a big epiphany this year as I was working on other people's financial legacies. The reveal was that I had followed in my parents' footsteps by doing the 1950's work/live/save construct in which people get decent jobs (or careers), spend less money than they make, invest that money in things that generate compounding interest, and reject the ideas of conventional, contemporary status seeking. No ten thousand dollar watches. No Ferrari in the garage. No skiing in Gstaad. No gold flakes on my butterscotch pudding...And, no gold toilet seats.

Doing the final math I discovered: that I could have retired (with few financial consequences) a few years ago. That I don't need to accept any jobs I don't want and that I can pretty much purchase any gear I want without  impoverishing or inconveniencing anyone in my family. The house is paid for . Our cars are paid for. We have no outstanding debt. We're not in thrall to our credit cards. There's money in the coffers....

At this point of sudden economic realization I hit the wall and experienced my own bout of post responsibility depression. If you don't need to work then you have to come to grips with what it is you really want to do. Why you want to do it. How you want to do it. And all that this entails. You have to find a new target that has meaning for you. A new thing, besides need and want to drive you to do your work.

The realization I've been batting about is related to something I wrote long ago, called "The Passion is in the Risk." (You look it up, I don't get paid to do research...) The whole idea, in a nutshell, is that art works as long as there is fear and friction, and the chance of failure involved. Get too comfortable and you lose the spark that kept you awake at night (sweating the numbers) and working hard at doing your best work during the day.

I wonder if so many of the readers here at VSL are in the same existential boat. Is our random flirtation and dalliance with gear a substitute for the passion we felt for photography when we had to work harder at it?

I don't really have an answer and I haven't figured anything out. But I wonder, if I had the chance to do it all over again (which I may....) whether I should have emulated some of my younger friends and spent every last cent on expensive alcohol, amazingly impressive German cars, and a never ending stream of expensive and emotionally needy partners. Would my work be better now? Even better in the future?

In the end I'm okay with my choices. Now I have to figure out how we succeed once you've been blindsided by success.

the "serious" business face.