Rehearsal Photograph from "An Night with Janis Joplin" at Zach Theatre.

Camera notes:

Lumix S1, 24 megapixels (16 megapixels at the 1:1 crop), Jpeg fine, custom white balance.

Lens: Sigma 85mm Art lens at f2.2

Post: Lightroom Develop Module

"A Night With Janis Joplin" is coming to Zach Theatre and they asked me to sit in on an early rehearsal and take some photographs...

Last week was a full one for me as a working photographer. I spent a couple of days shooting corporate portraits on location for a large, national accounting firm, I photographed a couple of radiologists here in my studio for a big radiology practice, and then shifted gears for the next two days and photographed a fast moving event/symposium, produced for spinal surgeons from all over the country, at the Fairmont Hotel here in Austin, Tx. By the end of the week; the end of the day Friday, I'd already put an additional 5,000 frames on my Lumix S1 cameras. But we had one more project to shoot on Saturday. It was a rehearsal of "A Night With Janis Joplin" over at Zach Theatre's rehearsal facility. And it was the most fun job of the week. Few other jobs are so self-directed and also accompanied by lots of Janis Joplin's music. Plus, actors are a blast to work with.

Mary Bridget Davies plays the lead and has Joplin's voice and mannerisms nailed down with incredible accuracy. Living close to Austin I had the opportunity to see Janis Joplin live, at Threadgill's on Lamar Blvd., back when most of us got just about everywhere in this (used to be) small college town on bicycles and traffic was just a laughable idea. I've seen several different Janis productions in recent years but Ms. Davies just gets everything so right...

At any rate, I was just off a week of non-stop commercial work and feeling pretty exhausted when I packed up to head to the theater. I'd been shooting mostly with zoom lenses all week and wanted a complete change from the f4.0-f5.6 mentality. Knowing I could work in close to the performers I selected three lenses for the Janis project: two Sigma Art lenses (the 35mm and the 85mm) along with the Panasonic Lumix S Pro 50mm f1.4. The space we would work in has boring walls and hideous lighting so I wanted to work nearly wide open with each of the three lenses in order to drop the back walls out of focus and to eliminate as much clutter as I could. I was also ready for a bit of limited depth of field. And I'm always interesting in putting the cameras and lenses to tests at the limits of their operational envelopes. 

I chose the S1 model over the S1R cameras because I knew we'd never need these files to go really big. Most of their use will be in advanced press, and on social media, and even the 24 megapixel files will be greatly downsized before use. But my real reason for choosing the lower resolution cameras is my new found appreciation for their wonderful image quality at ISO's I used to consider emergency use only. 

Under the most dreadful lighting around I was able to generate nearly noiseless image files while shooting mostly between ISO 3200 and 6400.  And to give you an idea of how low the lighting is from ceiling mounted florescent light banks hanging 40 feet up I was sometimes using exposures like: f2.2 at 1/250th of a second with ISO 3200. The misery of the rehearsal space is that there's a wall of mirrors along one of the long walls and the stage markings (to match the actual stage next door) are faced to the mirrored wall so people can work on the choreography together. What this means for me as photographer is the banks of fluorescents that provide all the lighting in the cavernous space are behind the actors most of the time. 

I almost cried in joy when the actors' blocking occasionally placed them in the middle of the room and I could get front light on their faces....

The first thing I do after getting and giving hugs to cast and crew is to pull out the camera and set a good, solid custom white balance in the middle of the space. While this is a good thing to do you have to be aware that when an actor moves into a space where light bounces off a different part of the floor or a different part of a wall you'll probably get different color cast that you'll want to tweak in post production... But having a legit starting point makes life easier. Of course, I could just shoot it all in black and white and forget all the color stuff but not everyone wants to flash back to the 1950's with me, as far as photographs are concerned.

Nothing I'm showing here was set up for me or posed. I'm supposed to be like the proverbial fly on the wall trying to capture good shots of the actors  that the marketing team can use to generate pre-show buzz before the costumes are ready and the sets are done. I did as much as I could in terms of moving trash cans out of my view lines and moving people's backpacks and stuff out of the line of sight as well. 

The downside of shooting something in a really dark space, using lenses at or near their widest apertures, and trying to nail focus on the eyes of moving, dancing and singing people is that even the best eye AF has trouble nailing focus every time. I spent much of the day with the camera set to continuous AF at a high frame rate with face detect AF engaged. I won't call what I did "spray and pray" but at some point you have to trust that the camera will drill in and nail the focus you want and that the event of nailing focus corresponds to one of the decisive moments you might be looking for...

Yes, the S1 and S1R do the wobbly in and out of focus thing in the EVF when you shoot with the camera set as above but the hit rate can be very good if you let the camera settle in before mashing the shutter button. I used the faster frame rate with the continuous AF to give myself a better statistical chance of getting technically good stuff. It's a decent technique if you are trying to cover your ass but the downside is that I generated something like 2800 images by the end of the five hour session.

Mary Bridget Davis as "Janis."

I ended up using the 85mm f1.4 for almost everything and tried keeping it right at f2.2 or 2.5 so I could get the thin depth of field but using the hysterical edge of the cutting edge by attempting f1.4 all the time. Being down one stop gave me at least a fighting chance of getting and keeping and eye in focus most of the time. The other two lenses are great and I'm sure they are as sharp as the 85mm for what I use them for but the 85mm had the focal length I wanted so I would be able to get a tight crop without stepping across the line into someone else's personal space. Had there been more "two shots" and small group shots I probably would have defaulted to the 50mm or the 35mm.

I had always hated shooting in this room because of the flicker and exposure inconsistencies I would get from the ever present florescent lighting units. On this foray I experimented a lot with the flicker control feature offered by the camera. In the past I was too impatient and it didn't seem to work but the reality is that you have to (this is conjecture, but working conjecture on my part) half-press the shutter button and let the camera figure out the flicker rate before you proceed. Once the camera figures it out your can shoot for as long as you want in a single series --- as long as you maintain at least a half-press. Once you let go of the shutter button you'll need to half-press and hold while the camera finds its pace again vis-a-vis the lighting. 

You can actually see, in the finder or on the rear panel, a dark diffuse line slowly roll up the screen. That's the darkened line or area that you would capture if the camera wasn't helping you by getting the exact timing of shooting the frame calculated. Once you let the lines go through a time or two if you keep the shutter half pressed you'll most likely notice no repeating dark area scrolling across the screen. This is a godsend for event photographers since we are mostly now working under either flickering florescent lights or flickering, commercial LED lights. 

Shooting at a fast frame rate and not spending much time (at all) in review, I was able to get about 1250 shots out of my first, freshly charged battery. I was using the grip so the camera automatically switched to the second battery. I'm sure I could get double that rate out of a DSLR but it's certain not a "deal killer" for an very advanced mirror-free camera that incorporates such a high resolution EVF. The EVF and the image stabilization put a heavy load on the batteries...

Yesterday I was shooting to a C-Fast 128 GB card that writes at 1400 megabytes per second. I was also shooting in Jpeg fine. You'll just have to believe me that it seemed as though the camera had an infinite buffer. I could shoot sustained bursts and never have to wait for the camera to be responsive. I like the C-Fast cards, they are pricy but fast and seemingly indestructible. They are the same form factor as the XQD cards but are more advanced, internally. Now I'm back to having a mix of cards by generation. This includes: UHS-1 SD cards, V60 and V90 UHS-2 cards, several sizes of XQD cards and two of the C-Fast 128 GB cards. Some work well with conventional card readers but the C-Fast cards download more quickly and reliably just using the cameras USB-C connector.

The cast did a partial run through of the play at the end of the day and wrapped a little bit before 7pm. I was happy to join them because I felt less like a "supplier" and more like part of a very sweet and hardworking team of artists. It's a whole different mindset. 

After doing a quick edit I was able to peel down from 2850 to about 1,000 files which I then color corrected by groups and also tweaked contrast and clarity. Mostly, my post is about neutralizing color and opening up shadows in Lightroom. Easy stuff. But I did want to share that I was very, very happy with the lack of noise and the very detailed and beautiful files I came away with even when facing bad lighting....and not much of it. Good to have some fast, sharp primes in your back pocket...just in case.

Click the images to see them bigger. Look for noise. You won't find much....

A Few Images from the Recent Collaborative Portrait/Kimono Shoot with ATMTX. And some other stuff.

A.O. In the studio. 

I started the year out with a portrait session. It seems so appropriate given my announcement that I wanted to concentrate more and more on portraiture... I was asked to photograph a young woman in her kimono for her parents. We had a professional kimono fitter at the session, a second photographer, and the portrait subject's mom. It was a fun, and light-hearted session and I thought it would be good to (with permission from both mother and daughter) share some of the images from the session.

I photographed A. using one of the Lumix S1R cameras and I chose to use the 24-105mm because I knew we would need to cover a range of focal lengths in order to show the kimono fully and then also do some tighter shots. I generally work from a tripod and am less comfortable shooting more formal portraits handheld. My photographer friend, the blogger: ATMTX photographed a lot of behind the scenes images and stepped in from time to time to shoot available light images in breaks between my photography.

I kept my lighting simple because it seemed to make sense not to overthink weird accent lights and such. We were looking for portraits that were about the subject and about A., not about showing off the latest lighting techniques. 

Everyone seems happy with the results and I now have to go in and do my post production to the ten images that mother and daughter have selected. It should be fun because I'm also playing around with a new software program called, Luminar (4.1). Lots of tools for making skin nice and doing modest amounts of retouching. We'll finish the images off in PhotoShop.

Mother and Daughter in kimonos. 

In other news. I hate to go down the pathway of talking about nutrition and personal stuff too much. I love Michael Johnston but I disagree with a lot of what he believes is correct about diet but.... I stopped having my glass of red wine with dinner most evenings; in fact, I cut out alcohol altogether just after the new year in an experiment to see just how abstinence might affect my swimming and my ability to sleep through the night. 

The result?  Seven to eight hours of continuous, non-interrupted sleep followed by some of the better workouts in the pool that I've experienced in the last six months to a year. In the pool, at any rate, I feel as though I've turned the clock back about a year already. 

I'll keep the experiment going right up to the USMS Long Course National Swimming Championships this Summer and see if I can make some qualifying times for some of my favorite events. The worst case scenario is that my physical and mental health will stay the same but my spend on superfluous wine purchases will go to zero, potentially saving me thousands of dollars a year. Best case scenario? I'll fall asleep at the drop of a hat, be happily unconscious for eight solid hours a night, wake up totally rested and ready to dominate my swim lane. Oh, yeah, and I might have more energy for photography. 

Today's agenda. I made it to the 8:15 workout and we swam for an hour and fifteen minutes in an on-again, off-again rainstorm (no thunder, no lightning). The coach was worried that we might need to clear the pool because of lightning so he front loaded the workout with a lot of fast, long yardage. He wanted us to get our money's worth in a compressed time frame. He needn't have worried because the god of Thunder was compassionate and didn't disturb our workout. At the end of an hour and fifteen minutes we'd gotten in somewhere north of 3500 yards with many reps of negative split 200s and an occasional, fast 400. After it became clear that we were not going to surrender the pool for meteorological reasons we finished up with some all out, as fast as you can go sprints on decently generous intervals. 

A nice way to get your heart rate ramped up before heading off to work. 

Speaking of work...today will be the first event shoot of the year for me. I've got today and tomorrow booked for a corporate event in one of the downtown hotels. Lots of stuff to shoot and a client request that we deliver both raw and Jpeg files at the end of both days. Good thing I got those Lumix S1 cameras so I can put the raws on CFast cards (damn, those things are expensive....) and the medium sized Jpegs on the SDxx cards. 

I'm packing light today. We'll see how it goes with two cameras and four lenses. The lens choices are: the Sigma 20mm f1.4 Art, the Lumix 50mm 1.4, the Lumix 24-105mm and the Lumix 70-200mm. I'll toss a flash in the bag and a smaller MacBook Pro in the front pocket of my Think Tank rolling case. The case is for transport and extraneous gear storage. A big, black, tattered Domke bag is the main, mobile camera container. That's what I'll drag around the event. 

I can hardly wait to kick off the event and get shooting. My only big decision is whether or not to get my haircut before we start. I'm working on being more eccentric so the ever growing hair is part of the schtick. But then again....corporate. Ah well, what do I know?

Go out and have fun. Life's too short to sit around pouting...

I forgot why they call it "work." Now I'm starting to remember...

I took most of December off last year. It was great. But then I started to worry about whether or not I would ever work again. You know, "freelancer's syndrome."

I'm 64 and have been doing this for a long time. Ever since I turned 40 I've been hearing over and over again: photography is a young person's game.... I keep expecting work to dry up and vanish. I'd be sad but, in the big scheme of things it wouldn't be that bad. I love to work and I love to photograph but there is more to life than heeding the call of every client... That was my mindset at the beginning of January, at any rate.

This week I am back to the regular schedule. We shot a series of portraits Monday, went on location to make 13 portraits of 13 accountants for a firm yesterday, photographed a radiologist this morning and will start a two day event shoot at one of the new, downtown hotels which will take me through long days on Thursday and Friday for a national, medical devices client. On Saturday I have a in depth session photographing a rehearsal of a new Janis Joplin play at Zach. Maybe on Sunday I'll rest....but only after swim practice.

I guess being immature is the next best thing to being young. If so, then I'll take it.

Having a blast slinging cameras around. I hope your new year is off to a brisk start. Never too old to make great photographs. That's my take.

FEAR OF IMAGE LOSS! FEAR OF ARCHIVE FAILURE! FEAR OF LOSS OF ARCANE POTENTIAL! I CAN HELP YOU WITH MY NEW WORKSHOP! "How not to care."

You too can take my workshop about how not to care much at all about photo archiving. It's $17,000 for a weekend; class of 50, and if I can fill up the glasses for three or four weekends in a row then I'll pretty much banish most relevant worries I've ever had....

But this is all about you and your need to horde everything you've photographed since you picked up a camera as a youngster and started plowing through film, memory cards and long nights of massaging your files/negs/slides and then printing them. At a certain point you'll likely wind up with a mountains and mountains of material and you'll also likely never have time to go in and touch, much less print/mount/exhibity much more than 1% of this "bounty."

If you've been a busy commercial photographer since the 1980's you might have many filing cabinets filled with contact sheets and corresponding sheets of negatives, along with floor to ceiling shelves of carefully burned CDs and DVDs with the bulk of your digital work carefully cataloged and stored. If you've bought into the "cloud storage" pet rock fad of the last few years you likely have most of your recent work up on someone else's server; just praying that their business model doesn't crash and burn overnight... along with your best recent work...

But here's the deal: You will most likely have compartmentalized the pile of images that matter most to you and you will have backed it all up so well it might never disappear. These images will most likely include, the negs and prints you made when you were just starting out and were fascinated with the magic of photography. You'll have the images you took of your super hot college girlfriend/boyfriend from those times when you convinced that person how great they would look nude; and then you took all those incredible photographs of them naked. And the photos still look great... You'll have the best images of your children, along with your favorite images of your long procession of wonderful cats and dogs. If you are adventurous you'll have great vacation images and if you included your family on these trips you'll have an even more valuable stash of images/memories.

No one would ever suggest that you NOT back up and worry about the loss of these images because you might NEED the comfort they'll likely provide as you age up, lose people, lose some ready memory and spend more time alone and in need of comfort and some connection to the wonderful moments of your life. Got it. Guard these memories like Ft. Knox. Caption the backs of the prints. Caption the cardboard around the slides. Caption the digital files. And save them like crazy.

But, if you are like me, and you shoot a bunch of images recreationally; whether you call it street photography or photo walk or visual sociology or landscape photography, you'll admit that if you aren't killing it in galleries with your work, and you aren't actively being collected by museums and institutions by a certain point in your life then you are doing all this stuff for the experience and joy of being in the middle of life and you are probably not going to be the next Mozart of the medium. Not the Picasso of the shutter button. And, if you are honest with yourself you'll come to realize that most of the work, while fun to produce and to share in the moment, is really nothing special. It's the stuff that your kids and spouses will be hauling out to the dumpster a few months after you've moved on to a different spiritual realm.

Then there are all of us who make photographs for a living. Do we need to be archiving and making safe for all eternity all of the outtakes of, say, a portrait sitting for Bob in XXX Company's accounting department, that we did on color slide film in 1992? The company may be gone. Bob may be long since gone. The image has little to no real aesthetic value and its only responsibility seems to be keeping the slide of Agnes, from the same shoot, comfortable in the slide sleeve in the next folder. You're really going to scan all those outtakes at high res, load them on to two locally resident hard drives, burn multiple DVDs of the images, send an SSD to your photographer friend in Des Moines and upload them to two different cloud services? Really?

I'll save you the $17,000 for the workshop. Any client work that you did, prior to five years ago that never even was considered as portfolio work for yourself, gets deleted or goes in the trash. Any work that does not have historical value and now looks old and dated in your "art" files gets left on whatever piece of storage it now inhabits and you stop nursing it on misguided migrations to ever newer storage. From this point forward you tell all clients that they have to keep their hands on the material they've licensed from you....for as long as their company exists.

If you get hired to do a job that's so good it ends up in your dream portfolio then treat it like those family pix. But realize that at some level a lot of what all working photographers do is like plumbing or changing the oil in cars. It's just work. Not art work, just work work. We do it to pay the bills and we do it because we like the process better than flipping burgers or presenting horrible, horrible PowerPoint decks. It's transient. We're not painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. It's more like we're painting someone's office walls and we're not even sure we liked the color they picked out.

Surely you can understand that not everything your camera encounters turns to gold. So why do we treat all of it like we are curating a filing cabinet full of Renoirs. Honestly, you have to fail a lot in order to finally succeed in anything but the really smart artists know how important it is to throw out all the failures and not sit around swimming in the detritus of work done mostly as a series of exercises.

Instead of fixating on saving every chewing gum wrapper from every stick you've chewed, and every negative from every shutter button you've pushed, not to mention hundreds of times more digital files, consider how great you'll feel when you've tossed the vast majority of stuff you'll never need to  confront again and now you have those memory banks and also those hard drives that you can fill up all over again.

I remember why photographers saved so much of their commercial work in the days before digital. They could (conceivably) sell it as stock photography. Many believed that their inventories of workaday Annual Report photos, and editorial work featuring garden homes and new recipes for spaghetti, would continue to sell and make them money. Now those endless boxes of slides are worth......?

Why? Because the digerati responded to their new found digital productivity by flooding the market with trillions and trillions of images. Most priced as close to free as one could possibly imagine.

Styles and looks change. Technology changes. Presentation changes. Not all the work we have should readily comes along for the change.

Worry smaller. Worry about the solid gold stuff. The universe will take care (destroy) the rest of it and you may be better off for it in the long run. I know your survivors, for the most part, will.

That wonderful moment before a rehearsal starts and everyone is standing around just so....

It was last Saturday morning. I was at one of Zach Theatre's smaller auditoriums getting ready for a dress rehearsal of "The Very Hungry Caterpillar." It's a play whose intended audience is very young children and their very happy parents.

The tech folks were doing last minute lighting and sound checks when the young woman in the center stepped into a beautiful bit of light and another cast member stopped to fix the young woman's braid. 

I was getting my cameras ready and I lifted up one of them and clicked off a few frames. I particularly liked this one because her expression is so sweet.

Shot with a Lumix S1 and the 50mm f1.4 Pro S lens. 

And yes, the show was absolutely great.