A simple portrait of a Nikon 50mm f1.4 lens.

James. With an old 50mm on the front of his A7riii.

I still do it. Every single time. When I buy into a new camera system I reflexively pick up that system's trusty 50mm lens (or equivalent).  Probably started when I bought my first SLR camera, the Canon TX. It came in a kit with a 50mm 1.8 Canon lens and it was awesome! I spent a year, at least, as a one lens/one camera photographer and those early times no doubt imprinted the 50mm focal length into my visual DNA.

My very first "real" camera was the now cultish Canonet QL17 which I still have in my filing cabinet, just in case digital goes out of style and we get to revert to photography the way God intended it to be.

I was thinking about this today as I post processed a location portrait I made yesterday. The most used focal length on my zoom lens yesterday? About 50mm.....  I should have left the zoom at home and just taken along the 45mm f2.8 (I was shooting with the Lumix S1).

in other notes: I'm getting excited about the Dia De Los Muertos parade coming up here in Austin on Saturday. Seems some of my photographer friends are already making plans to come in for it.

Also, looking at some travel over the third week of November. I can't believe hotel rates are so low outside the USA. Looks like it's a prime time for a bit of tourism.

Day of the Dead; "Dia de los Meurtos" is popping up all over Central Texas. Let's go.

Parades, costumes, altars, and more are on the schedule in the last week of October and the first week of November here in Central Texas. I'm going to the "Viva la Vida" parade, here in Austin on Saturday, October 26th (I think it starts at noon on East 6th St.) to photograph the costumes and the people. I'm also bringing along the Lumix S1 in full video mode so I can get a taste of the V-Log profile in action. I think that camera, along with the 24-120mm lens, the audio adapter and an Aputure Diety microphone will make a nice, handheld rig... The jury is still out on which camera I'll use for photographs.

After Austin I'll head down to San Antonio for their three day event for the holiday at La Villita in downtown. That will be Friday, Saturday and Sunday (the 1st, 2nd and 3rd of November). I'm sure it's going to be a big deal and admission to the event is free. I'm going for the costumes and the food. 

San Antonio knows how to celebrate big-ly so I'm probably going to book a hotel room on Friday and Saturday so I don't miss anything. 

It's bound to be a street photographer's paradise.... 

Here are the details for the Austin event on the 26th: http://mexic-artemuseumevents.org/upcoming-events/2019/10/26/viva-la-vida-parade

Live far from Austin? Get those airline tix now!

Now that's how you do a back door!!!

Taking a look at some photos I did with the Pentax K1 and the 100mm f2.8 macro at "Dracula". "Bitingly" sharp? "Bloody" good?

A few weeks ago I photographed a technical rehearsal of "Dracula" at Zach Theatre in Austin, Texas. I brought several different cameras with me but I mostly played around with the Pentax K-1 and two lenses. I brought along the 28-105mm f3.5-5.6 (because it's the only Pentax zoom I currently have) and also the new 100mm f2.8 macro. I'd played around a lot with the zoom and was comfortable with the performance envelope provided by it, but I'd just recently purchased (new in box) the 100mm macro and I was curious to see how the lens would perform in a live theater environment. I was pretty sure it would be sharp but I worried that the focus might be too slow.

Both of these images were created using the 100mm and I'm satisfied with both of them. They were taken one half stop down from wide open and the camera/lens combination did a fine job nailing focus and providing good sharpness and tonality in the photos.

Relative to a long (70-200mm) zoom lens, the 100 macro is small and light, and since it is so well optically corrected I had no compunction about using it either wide open or just slightly stopped down. 

Based on the image quality I could see in the images I took that night I pressed the 100mm into service recently to take some portraits. I wanted to use a lens with good resolution and a high megapixel count camera body because I wanted to work in a square format which meant going from a full frame resolution of 36 megapixels down to a 1:1 format resolution of 24 megapixels. While an uncropped, square, 24 megapixel file is adequate (perfectly good!) for just about every use I left a generous amount of space around my portrait subject in order to leave lots of cropping options for my graphic designer/ final client. If she cropped tight, in a vertical orientation, we'd lose another 6-8 megapixel of information and, being a worrier, I always like to build in a margin of safety for commercial work. Everyone was pleased. 

With Vampires in the neighborhood everyone was having a bad day. 

I've also found a new use for the two Pentax K-1 cameras and that is shooting with flash at dimly lit events. We're doing our yearly photographic assignment of making candid portraits of about 400 people (200 couples?) gathered at the Four Seasons Hotel here in Austin to raise money for the Texas Appleseed Foundation (legal and constitutional issues...). I've used all kinds of cameras in the past as I've photographed this event annually since the days of film. It's the one kind of photography assignment that I've come across where a traditional optical viewfinder can be superior to an EVF. Mostly because it's all lit with flash in a not so bright interior ballroom.  

With an EVF camera if you keep the camera in the "Constant Preview" mode and you are shooting at f5.6 or f8.0 at 1/60th of a second (or faster) at ISO 400 with flash you'll find the image in the EVF to be very dark. VERY DARK. If you take the camera out of the constant preview mode the EVF has a slow refresh rate, lots of noise in the frame, and an automatic exposure setting. Neither option is particularly good for working with on camera flash!!! 

I've used mirrorless cameras in this venue/event before and my work around was to switch to using totally manual flash exposure, and carefully maintaining the same camera to subject distance whenever possible. But I've also shot with cameras like the Nikon D800 with TTL flash and walked away with more keepers more easily. 

This year I'm planing to lean on the Pentax K1 with a Godox V1 flash, using TTL exposure. I've got a second body as a back up and a couple of fully manual hot shoe flashes as a back up for the Godox. My lens of choice for the social hour of the event is the 28-105mm zoom lens.

I just took delivery of the flash today and as soon as the battery (a big, lithium one) is fully charged I'll start testing it around the office. 

Funny/strange to buy a flash for the Pentax because doing anything to flesh out that system seems counter-intuitive. I really can't help it though as I've been loving the files I'm getting out of the system. And, as I wrote, this is one situation where the traditional DSLR really seems to shine....

In related news: I had lunch with my friend, Andy, at El Mercado on Burnet Rd. today. Every time I have lunch with Andy it ends up costing me big bucks $$$$$$. The issue is the close proximity of the restaurant to Precision Camera. After a great lunch of Tex-Mex food we tend to talk each other into dropping by our favorite camera store to see what's new. Last time we lunched I went with him to Precision Camera where I stumbled across the first Pentax K1 and ended up buying it. That's where the slippery slope of Pentax-ality all started for me.

Today I was irresistibly drawn to a $1,700 lens. Not for the Pentax..... but I guess we can discuss that here on the blog tomorrow. 

Hope everyone has had a good start to the week. If you are having problems with alcohol please see Michael's Sunday post on his site. If you just want to read about the unplanned purchases of a serial camera buyer then come on back here.... we'll be waiting. Sitting here reading the latest catalogs...

Designing the perfect lens for me. Balancing needs and wants.

Photo review sites spend way too much virtual ink describing, reviewing and deliberating about camera bodies. They spend too little time discussing lenses, and that's too bad because most good photographers think lenses are where the magic is. I remember back when Modern Photography Magazine was still published. It was generally a big deal when a camera got reviewed; especially since new camera body models were rushed to the market far, far less often than they are today. What the magazines concentrated on instead was the reviewing of several, or a handful, of popular lenses along with one or two speciality lenses thrown in just for good measure. Nearly every month. 

Instead of comparing the Nikon Z7 to the Sony A7r4 camera bodies I'd love to see a side-by-side comparison and in-depth review of each maker's "holy trinity" of zoom lenses (14-24, 24-70, 70-200) to see where the whole system stands, not just the naked body. Perhaps a comparative overview of all the different macro lenses on the market. How about a toe-to-toe exploration of zooms in the 100-400mm focal length ranges? And with all the new and pricey 50mm lenses coming out maybe we could see a nice comparison there. 

Just one of the many problems with this idea is that most reviewers are very ham-fisted about how they measure stuff and I'd hate to see a lens with beautiful characteristics get denigrated because its corner sharpness was a few lines per millimeter less than a crappier lens that has a flatter focus field and maybe slightly faster focus acquisition. I'd always like more data than just easy to understand, cookie cutter data.

One area of lens evaluation that Roger Cicala at Lensrentals.com has brought to light is that, because of the complexity of new lens design and the equal complexity of the manufacturing processes involved in assembling modern lenses, there is a lot of sample variation even among identical models of lenses. Centering of the elements is a big issue as is calibration of the overall optical system. Any really meaningful evaluation of lens performance should probably included testing at least three samples of each model.... That's a ton of work and much harder than just deciding that one likes to have cameras with panorama modes or that one doesn't like cameras that can't process their own raw files. As if those "features" matter to any of us...

It's also clear that when popular sites do get around to reviewing lenses they tend to always do the reviews about big fast zooms and almost totally disregard really stellar single focal length lenses, unless such a lens comes with such a high price tag that the price becomes good click bait news. 

So, here is a suggestion to the big review sites: Review some lenses! Review some that aren't extreme wide angle zooms, or boring but fast 24-70s, or endless iterations of the 70-200mm models. Review some portrait primes. Review some normal focal length lenses that are price-accessible for the average camera buyer. Review some slower, standard zooms. But don't just stop with lines per millimeter measurements. Try your best educate your reviewers to understand that different kinds of sharpness profiles and rendering characteristics can also be good and interesting in real world use. 

For years Leica designed lenses for high center sharpness and acutance, and the trade off was lower performance in the corners. Not lenses that measured "well" across the frame but lenses that were loved and in demand by some of the world's most discriminating lens users. Currently, lens designers are trying to make reviewers happy by giving all of us lenses that have the same sharpness characteristics across the frame. The lens makers generally have two choices in the design process: they can make the lens equally sharp across the frame but at a lower overall level of sharpness than the numbers they could get from a lens that had its highest sharpness in the center and allowed the corners to degrade, or.... they could make the lenses equally sharp, across the frame, but only by making the overall lens enormous, costly and very heavy. (Hello Zeiss Otus. Hello Sigma 50mm ART). 

I recently bought a lens that is a counterpoint to what I consider the blunt hammer of current lens design and marketing. It's a small lens made for the L-mount system. It's a normal focal length (45mm) but it's slow, relatively speaking, as it only opens up to f2.8. It's also a bit unusual in that it isn't necessarily blindingly sharp across the frame when used wide open. The center is pretty much perfect but sharpness falls off towards the edges and corners. It's a really nice look if you have something interesting in the middle areas of the frame and want sharpness to fall off a bit at the edges. Stop it down to f4.0 and it's nicely sharp across the frame. Stop it down to f5.6 and it's perfect. 

But it's also small, light, well built, and one of the few lenses made for the L mount system that's under $1,000. 

So, as I mentioned in the title I'd like to design the "big picture" parameters of a lens that's personalized for me; for the way I most often use my favorite lenses. This isn't to suggest that you'll want anything even close to this for your own use. This is just my pipe dream....

I'll start with focal lengths and I am defaulting to a zoom lens. I want something that starts at 40mm and tops out at 110mm. According to the metrics from various Kirk Catalogs of images this is the range I use for 90% of my day-to-day, having fun, imaging. If I want something wider I can bring along a discrete 24mm or 20mm. If I want something longer for a particular I can be like everyone else and default to a 70-200mm zoom instead. 

By limiting the focal length range I think a good lens design team could design these focal lengths into a decently small package even though I would want a constant aperture f2.8 for my zoom. But they needn't give me something that's super sharp even into the edges, wide open. I'd be happy with a lens that consistently delivers a very sharp image in the central 2/3rds of the frame and then delivers average or adequate results in the corners. The corners and center definitely don't have to match! 

I also don't really care if the lens has absolutely zero distortion. As long as what distortion there is can be corrected with mild measures, by software, in post production. This would keep the size and weight manageable while still providing me with a performance profile that would work well for my usage. 

I want a real manual focus setting ring, delivered via the pull back clutch mechanism that Olympus has on their 12-100mm Pro and their 35-100mm f2.8 Pro lens. It's nice to know exactly where infinity and also the closest focusing point is on my lens. This is also something that the L-Mount Panasonic 70-200mm has...which moves me to consider that lens as a potential buy too. 

Finally, I am not interested in having image stabilization in the lens. I would depend on the image stabilization in bodies like the Fuji X-H1, the Pentax K-1 and the Lumix S-1 to stabilize my jitters for me. This also reduces the needed size and complexity of my "perfect" lens. 

I'd love to have this built as well as the 45mm f2.8 from Sigma and I'd be willing to pay up to $2,000 to own such a lens. I'd be even happier to spend about $1200 instead!

The lens I'm describing would be for full frame cameras but you can shrink the focal lengths proportionally and offer it as an APS-C lens with a max aperture of f2.2 or in micro four thirds (shrunk once again...) with a maximum aperture of f2.0. Olympus was on the right track back in the pre-micro days with their two fast zooms for the 4:3 system. The 12-35mm f2.0 and the 35-100mm f2.0. The later was way too heavy and big but it was a killer optic. The 12-35mm was just about perfect. ...

So, the 40-110mm f2.8 Kirk-O-Flex lens has now been described in detail. I just need to sit back and wait for Sigma or Panasonic to make me one. You can have one too. I hope they make lots of them. 

If you could design a personal lens, just for your own use, not considering whether it would be widely sellable, what would it look like and what would it do? Just curious how far off the mainstream I might be.....

Thoughts?

A much overdue gear review. My new goggles.

Tyr Velocity Goggles.

If you swim in a swimming pool you're going to need a pair of goggles. Otherwise the chlorine and other chemicals pool managers put in pools to keep you from dying of stuff like cryptosporidium or brain eating organisms are going to make the whites of your eyes turn red, temporarily mess up your vision, and make you look like you just smoked a big bowl full of hash. From a competitive swimming point of view it's a hell of a lot easier to swim fast if you can see clearly where you are heading. Finally, the clear, underwater vision provided by goggles will probably keep you from having collisions with the other swimmers in your lane as you circle swim. 

For many swimmers goggles are something they use for more hours during a normal day than they do their cell phones! If you are competitive and doing two workouts a day you may be spending up to 4 hours each day in the water. You'll want to find goggles that are comfortable, optically non-distorting, and which don't leak. Some people have faces that make selecting goggles tougher than others. Just as I'm a 40 regular and can buy business suits off the rack, my face is pretty easy on goggles which means I have a wider range that work well for me than some of my buddies with deeper eye sockets or noses of a certain shape and proportion. 

My big issue is that I'll find a pair of goggles that I like only to have them be discontinued (like fashion) and replaced with something that's different enough to cause me some operational friction. I've been using several sets of Speedo goggles for the last few years; buying them in batches of three, but I can't find the ones I like anymore. And, no! Goggles don't last forever. The nose pieces break over time, the straps degrade with extended exposure to UV and pool chemicals, and sometimes they just get....misplaced. 

My last pair of Speedos was nearing end of life (always a bittersweet moment) when I ventured in to Austin Tricyclist to get another tranche. The ones I wanted were gone but I was drawn to this set of TYR goggles because they were a close variation of the Speedos. 

I bought a couple of pairs (big spender!!! Yeah, they cost $16.95 each....) and adjusted them to my face. The first step is to make sure you have the right interchangeable nose piece (the part holding the two eyepieces together) in place. The goggles come packaged with three nose piece variations. Once you've got that done your only other real task is to tension the strap so that it keeps the goggles in place when you are doing your most dramatic flipturns and racing dives. But you don't want them so tight that they create an uncomfortable pressure on your face. The little, soft rubber cups surround the eyepieces go a long way toward keeping the goggles comfortable but if you have them on too tight you'll have "raccoon" eyes for the rest of the morning....

A good fitting set of goggles will feel so comfortable that you'll forget you are wearing them after a few minutes. But a good performing goggle is also set you can wear for a couple of hours without any leakage. Low optical distortion is important to prevent eye fatigue and to not visually misrepresent where the wall is when you are coming in for a turn. 

I give these goggles top rating for everything but racing. If you are hellbent of going all out and doing a perfect racing dive at the beginning of the race, you'll probably want to pick a pair with a lower profile and a tighter fit. It's hell when, after your dive, your goggles slip down around your neck and you have to swim the rest of your race half blind....

I need to add one more pair to the mix but this time I'll look for a clear pair instead of a pair with a dark tint. The darker ones work great almost all the time but with the days getting shorter I sometimes get to Barton Springs well before sunrise. Even before first glow. And there are no lights underwater in Barton Springs. Clear goggles provide a bit of situational awareness and safety. You can see the ends of the pool and better see swimmers coming your way. By the same token you'll get a clearer picture in a pool that's not well lit. 

But at $16 bucks I think I can collect a variety of types for a variety of swim conditions. 

I also wear my goggles at my dermatologist's office when he decides he needs to use liquid nitrogen to burn some actinic keratosis (or some such thing) off my face. No sense taking a chance with one's eyes. Right?

If you have a favorite set of goggles please let us know so we can share that information with our entire blog readership who, I am sure, are anxious to get this information. 

on another note: The 7:30 a.m. swim practice was packed with people this morning. Apparently UT is having one of their mindless/gladitorial football games today and people have been "tailgating" since the middle of the week. The UT masters have figured out that on game days nobody is able to get to their pool so we seem to get the refugees from football in our master program. We were four or five people deep, per lane, for the full hour. Fortunately we all circle well together and sharing lanes with four people can be easy as pie. The trick is to distribute people with similar interval times in the same lanes. You don't want a mix of slow and fast in one lane. Everyone in lane seven (the fast lane) should be able to repeat 100's on 1:10 while everyone in lane one (the slowest lane) should be able to do their 100's on 1:50.  The pace clocks are our guides and we try to space a five second interval between each swimmer. 

Good luck to all the VSL swimmers. Crank out the yards. Stay skinny. Live long and prosper.

What a strange day... I started out with one thing in my head and ended up with something else.

Production photo from "Matilda" at Zach Theatre.

I had occasion to use the Lumix S1 camera along with the Sigma 45mm f2.8 lens yesterday and I really enjoyed the images I got from that combination. I also liked using the camera; it was very satisfying. So much so that when I woke up this morning I compiled a list of all the Fujifilm equipment that I own with the intention of sending the list to the used equipment buyer at Precision Camera to get pricing. I had the weirdly compelling idea that I would winnow down all the equipment in the studio (monolights, c-stands, flags, umbrellas, booms, Magic Arms, flash meters, bags, cases, rollers and all the rest of the stuff that seems to collect, like barnacles, to slow moving photographers....) to two cameras and three lenses. These would include: one Lumix S1 body and one Lumix S1R body. The currently owned Lumix 24-105mm lens, the 45mm f2.8 Sigma lens, and, I'd also splash out for the Lumix 70-200mm f4.0 lens in order to complete the ensemble.

Of course, this kind of thinking is nothing new for me. I'm sure, if you've read the blog over time you've seen me embrace and then abandon equipment at roughly the pace of the changing seasons. But by the time I finished my morning swim and had savored a decent cup of coffee I had almost talked myself into going "all the way" this time. Bare walls, empty shelves, an equipment cabinet with ample negative space. Perhaps I'd keep a few smaller light stands and a few LED lights but I'd certainly get rid of the ancient stands that hold seamless paper, along with that infernal boom I've used only once a year since I acquired it.

But why? I know the grass looks greener on the other side of the fence but does that also mean the grass is greener in my front yard than my own back yard?

I think I'm just starting to resent the clutter and, also, the more traditional fixtures are a reminder of how much has changed in the business and how little relevance many pieces of gear have for me now.
The C-Stands are great when you need to put up heavy lights and hang soft boxes securely but we don't seem to do the kinds of big studio productions we did when I bought a lot of this stuff. So much more is being done on location and so much of that is about leveraging existing light in existing spaces, not creating worlds in a studio.

But why get rid of so many cameras and lenses? Especially since I liked them so well and used them to good effect.

I don't know if it was the cleaning out of my parents' house, a process which took months, that made me realize how much stuff people acquire and then rarely use. It could be that I feel guilty for owning more cameras than I can reasonably use up. It could be the friction of having to decide between too many lenses when I pack to go photograph stuff. It could be that my brain is just going over how many batteries, and how many different kinds of batteries, there are for all those different cameras and how most of them are going to decline without adequate use and care. Time which I no longer want to expend.

It could be that the kinds of things I've been interested in photographing no longer appeal to me and that by starting over I'll give myself permission to do things differently this time. Maybe more in line with my inclinations and intuition and less so because the decisions seem (at the time) to be rational, and an adjunct to a profitable business strategy. Maybe I'm just tired of everything that I've seen for the last few years and ready for a change. Maybe I've become tired of having too many choices.

This time, however, over the course of the day I started taking my own advice. Advice I'd given recently to a friend who was about to go on his own new buying spree. I suggested that he look at recent work to see if there were things he would miss if he changed his working gear. After a review he settled down and stayed with the system he'd been (successfully) working with for the past few years.

But what really changed my thinking was that I stopped thinking in terms of depreciation, obsolescence and work, and started thinking that it didn't matter if I kept or sold the equipment. By selling it I'd never come close to recouping what I'd actually spent and, knowing myself, I might wake up one day having nostalgically dreamed of gear now departed and gone out to buy it all over again. Might as well keep it.

At the end of the day the thing that changed my mind about my all or nothing concept of gear management was the photographs from yesterday's studio portrait session with a medical professional. I ended up not using either the Fuji cameras or the Lumix camera but I embraced the weirdness of the Pentax K-1 and shot all my images in a square, 1:1 format. I figured there would be enough resolution in the raw files to crop in any direction we might want.

I liked the look in a different way than I liked the look of the photographs I'd shot with the Lumix earlier in the day. But I liked the Fuji images I reviewed over the course of today in a way that was totally different than the other two. In the end, at least for today, I think I'll keep everything around until life changes so much that the idea that cameras systems matter at all becomes moot.

Most of the lighting gear is still going to go. I just use different stuff now. It seems more important to get everything onto an airplane these days than to do things at the level of sturdiness that we used to shoot for. Don't know why but it just seems to be the trend.

Finally, I might just move everything into a different room and make the studio more minimal. White walls, tall ceilings, one modern desk and chair, no other furniture. No gear. No prints on the wall.

Funny, when I was younger and couldn't afford exactly the gear I wanted I always wished for more. Now, when I can afford whatever gear I want, I don't seem to want much at all. It's the complicated logic of getting rid of it that now seems daunting.

A few more random shots from that northern paradise called, Montreal.

People in Montreal seem to value coffee almost as much as do photographers in Austin. There's pretty good coffee almost everywhere and truly great coffee shows itself out in the open, from time to time. My favorite locale for a nice cappuccino, or even drip coffee, is Crew Collective Café which is in a giant, ornate bank lobby. Half the huge and architecturally captivating lobby is the coffee shop while the other half is a shared workspace, something like a much upscaled version of WeWorks but without the former's former weird management vibe. 

I had a hand made (not plastic packaged and reheated) breakfast sandwich there on my first morning that was a toasted sesame seed bagel (which, on its own, was divine) on top of which was a generous dollop of nicely spicy guacamole, on top of which was a bed of sprouts brushed with just a little lemon juice. The sprouts formed a nest for a perfect soft-boiled egg. The sandwich was finished with just a bit of dijon mustard. Weird to describe but wonderful to eat. 

So, the giant basilica in the middle of the old town... Did the crew at Disney World light the interior? It was pretty darn fabulous. I liked the shots I got from the very earnest Pentax. I liked Belinda's perfectly composed shots from her little Canon G15 better. But I think, technically, the best shots came from... my iPhone XR. Oh well. That's what my friend, Andy, was predicting over at ATMTX just a few days ago. Something about those phones and big, contrasty scenes is like magic. If you go to Montreal the interior of the giant cathedral is well worth the time. Especially if it happens to be cold and rainy outside.

Phones. Phones. Phones. Phones. 

We're all getting grayer. Some of us handle it better than others. I should pay attention and learn from the calm people.

Yes. I asked Belinda to step into the green light at the Musee Des Beaux Arts....

Note the beret purchased in 1985 in Paris. It travels everywhere there's cold weather.

Newest marital strife, who will be the director of the selfie stick?

D.B.D.H.

Window decor with flickering television set in the background.

And the burglar alarm company logo right in the middle of everything.

All Pentax-y.