Circling back to photography and raccoons. 2021 portraits. 2021 raccoon resettlement.

studio portrait. tech exec.

 

I've been working on a series of portraits in the studio again. For my main light I'm using a Godox SL150ii shining into a Godox P120L soft box. We used to call these octaboxes but this one uses so many poles inside we might have to call it a dodecahedron box. 

I like dark shadows. I like the contrast. But some clients don't understand the whole "face sculpting" methodology/aesthetic and want faces to be evenly lit, from side to side. Those are generally clients I need to send to other photographers. 

One of my photography friends comes from the video world and doesn't get lighting ratios for photographic portraits at all. He seems to want to light everything in a 1:1 ratio or, at worst (best?) a 2:1 ratio. I don't know why this is but it's his "style." I guess I should be sending the relentlessly high key clients to him...

This (above) is my current lighting style though I have switched to a darker shade of seamless in the background. 

It is done with a soft-boxed light on the right of the frame (even though I usually and compulsively light from the left), a light in a small soft box aimed at the background and a small LED panel above and behind the subject's head as a hair light. I'm always willing to forego the hair light if there's enough contrast between the person's hair and the background. 

The set up is simple and fast. If you or your clients prefer a softer ratio between the main light and the shadows it's easy enough to put a white reflector on a light stand and vary the distance from the shadow side of the face to the reflector until you get the ratio you want. If you need something approaching 1:1 you'll need to add another light source. I rarely ever go there but when I do I use that fill light source directly above the camera position and try never to go beyond a 3:1 ratio. It just looks better to me.

Since I've been shooting with 47+ megapixel cameras I've found that it's delightful to shoot with the camera in a horizontal orientation. I always got a bit frustrated with the weight of a bigger lens pulling a vertically oriented camera around the tripod screw and having the lens droop towards the floor. I like the horizontal format and figure that, if the client really wants a vertical, there is more than enough resolution to crop. 

Lately, with the ease of shooting and post processing 1:1 images with the Leica SL2, I've been shooting all my newest portraits in a square format. Lightroom reads the aspect ratio data embedded in the raw frame and the files show up as squares in the program. The thing I have to keep reminding myself of is the need to crop less tightly in the square. I have to remember to leave enough room in order to make good crops in either vertical or horizontal. Unless I'm shooting just for myself, in which case the square is the finished product. 

On to the raccoons. 

Yesterday evening the service we hired to remove the raccoons came by and put a rag, soaked in coyote urine (I wonder where one buys that...?) into a wire mesh tube, tied it to a stout string and lowered it down the chimney of our house where it settled on top of the fireplace damper. Right where the raccoons have set up camp. The mother hissed at the new package and all the kits made noise. 

This morning the chimney has been absolutely silent. Whether they have already left or not is still up in the air. Being ever optimistic I think they had enough of the coyote smell and left under cover of the night. The most sage and experienced experts (to whom I will listen) tell me that it takes a couple days for the mother raccoon to go out and secure a new place. Then, maybe, another night to move the family. They'll be by on Thursday to check for the signs.

I feel like a bad host to have ejected the baby raccoons without any due process but there it is. 

Once we have confirmation that they've left a crew will come over and secure the chimney against future ingress. They'll also give the house a careful inspection to see if there are any other potential weak points that can be hardened against future intrusion. 

And that's where we are right now. 

I suggested to my spouse of 36 years that we abandon the house and turn it into a raccoon refuge. She has referred me to a specialist. (kidding, just kidding). But she was emphatic in declining my (whimsical) plan. A dream of paying it forward to the raccoons ---- dashed. 

Apropos of yesterday's article about the world economy....

 https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/12/china/china-taiwan-jets-defense-zone-incursion-intl-hnk-ml/index.html

Never presume something can't happen just because it hasn't happened before.

40,000 Russian troops amassing on the border with Ukraine. Repeated Chinese incursions in the Taiwanese air space. 

America stretched across the globe. 

Interesting times.

I don't want to intrude on Michael Johnston's territory but can we change gears and talk about cars for one post?

Getting from rest stop to rest stop in the wilds of west Texas.

 I've usually bought new cars and driven them for a good long while. Most of the them last me up to about 100,000 miles. I do the recommended maintenance and try to keep them from getting too scuffed up. I know there is a school of thought that recommends driving them until they fall apart around you as a way of maximizing your "investment" in a car but since I use my vehicle to get to and from jobs reliability is a big issue for me and I find that 100K mark is where all the sub systems start to go south. 

I'm the kind of car owner that changes the battery at 3 years even if it's cranking strong. I just don't want to be the guy out in the parking lot on the first cold night of the year looking around to see if anyone has jumper cables. I also replace tires long before you get to the tread wear indicator. It's better in my mind to leave some money on the table rather than getting stuck out in the middle of nowhere with nothing but the little, tiny spare and 100 miles to go...

I've owned all kinds of cars but in the last decade the two that make the most sense for my business and my personal life have been the small SUVs. I don't particularly like the "thrill of driving" the way I did when I was a reckless teenager with a 1965 Buick Wildcat and a taste for speed. The roads are so crowded here in Austin - where I spend 95% of my driving time - that the idea of ultra performance is a joke. There  just are no uncluttered roadways with great curves that you can test out the imputed G force capability of your automobile. They no longer exist. Open roads in Austin are at the same level of impending extinction as fax machines. 

My current car is a 2019 Subaru Forester. It's got a modest but adequate 182 horsepower, 4 cylinder engine. It's all wheel drive. It's perfect for tossing in light stands, big cases full of lights and lots and lots of camera gear. It's even got a roof rack for those times when you really need to bring along more gear than you should. I bought the car with great expectations but the pandemic came along and limited my driving.....a lot. I've had the car for two years and three months and I'm just now coming up on 16,000 miles on the odometer. Or an average of 8K per year. 

When you take your new car in for the free two years of service it seems that the Subaru dealer keeps tabs on the condition and mileage of your vehicle. About six months ago I started getting offers from Subaru's guaranteed trade in program offering me a new, 2021 model for about $4000 plus the trade-in of my car. I ran the numbers and that's actually more generous than the private resale value of the car. 

I sat down with my pocket calculator and did some conjecture math. When I hit 20,000 miles with the current car I planned to buy a new set of tires. As I said above, I don't try to squeeze the very last mile out of tires, I replace them when they still have good sidewall flexibility and structural integrity. There's about $1,000. We'll have two routine maintenance visits to the dealer during any given year at about $150 each for $300. We might have to replace other stuff. And there's always the (remote) possibility that something expensive, like the entertainment/control interface electronics could fail. I'd put aside $2,000 over the next two years just to cover the unexpected. We're already close to the difference in cost between keeping the existing car or getting one that's two model years newer. 

Then you might consider depreciation. The older car will obviously have a lower resale value given its age relative to a car that's two years newer and two model years newer. That's not a small amount. 

Finally, the 2019 marked the introduction of a new chassis design and body changes for the Forester line. Nothing ever goes exactly to plan for a complex machine like a modern car and I'm certain that there have been a number of unannounced changes, modifications and improvements that will all have the effect of increasing net reliability in the newer model. While dealers can't fix as much stuff in cars as camera companies can with firmware updates in cameras the trade off is that each new model year car makers can fix the stuff that was found to be "off" in the previous year or years. 

So, here I am with an almost new car in my driveway trying to decide whether or not to go for the trade up. As I understand it the profit for the dealer is more nested in factory to dealer rebates, the ability to order more product to get better discounts, and the fact that recent, low mileage vehicles that are popular are easy to move quickly. 

In effect, I'll spend $4,000 or maybe a bit more to get a car that's two years newer, hopefully mechanically and electronically improved, has a start the clock over again new two year warranty and free maintenance for the next two years. And, as I've said a couple of times before, reliability is a big, big issue with me....

I know that some of you are more informed about cars and car stuff than am I and I welcome feedback. Is there a hidden "gotcha" that I haven't been able to figure out yet? Does this seem like a rational thing to do? It's not as if I'll need a loan or have to make payments; it's my intention to write a check for the amount. 

I really like my current car. I really like the idea of replacing it with the same model, but two years newer. 

If it doesn't work out as projected I really have no problem sticking with the current car. But if it does work then I'll have a big smile on my face for about two more years. Just trying to plan smart. 

Your take?

Why the Leica SL is more fun than the SL2.

 There are two reasons I like playing with the Leica SL more than the SL2. The first is that none of the buttons on the back of the camera, with the exception of the on-and-off switch, are labeled. It's an "art" thing and not a performance parameter. I like the way it looks and I've quickly figured out what the buttons do and where they take you when you do either a long or a short press. I re-programmed one dial to reverse the direction of the aperture control but everything else is just as it comes from the factory. The guys who programmed the camera actually gave a lot of rational thought as regards how some people operate their cameras. Their presumptions match mine pretty well. No button labels is fine because there are only four buttons to choose from. Not having more function buttons means not having to think about taking advantage of more buttons. Easier to remember the functionality of four buttons than seven or more buttons which have white type on them but can be changed to be something else. Now that's confusing.

My second reason to like the older camera better in actual use is that it cost me 1/3rd the price. If I accidentally destroy it I'll only cry one third as much and I'll replace it two thirds quicker.

After using the SL with all my different lenses the one I like best for just strolling and shooting at random is the 45mm f2.8 Sigma. It looks perfectly matched to the camera, creates very nice looking photographs and is small and light. It's a lens made for fun. Bigger, heavier lenses are made for business. Or super serious art. 

As far as aesthetics go I prefer the bare metal front of the SL over the leather trim on the front of the SL2. 

It's all silly I guess, since all the cameras I have at hand are really good photography instruments. Each has its own strengths. From the Fuji X100vs to the S1R. 

But we're still winnowing down the overall inventory. Trying to decide if it makes sense to slim down the camera body selection a bit more.... We'll see. 

Back to thinking about cars for the rest of the day. 

Drive or fly? Drive or fly? What's the right calculation?

 In days of yore I had a radius from Austin beyond which I would not drive on an assignment. Every once in a great while I broke the rule and drove a bit further away but those were usually when an assignment called for more gear than one could safely and economically transport on a commercial airline. For example, jobs that called for: lots of big strobes, lots of large lighting gear, huge scrims and lots of redundant cameras and lenses. For the most part my boundaries equal the distance and time to drive between Austin and Dallas. 

It's a pretty big circle and includes most of the major cities in Texas. When one can drive to Houston in three hours it just doesn't make sense to spend two hours getting to, and waiting at, the airport, deplaning at the other end and wrangling luggage, getting the luggage to the rental car depot, etc, etc. Your time commitment may actually exceed that required to just drive there.

But on the other hand, when I was doing jobs in places like North Carolina one day and Florida the next driving between the two was out of the question. And driving to either location from Austin would have been about as inefficient as I could imagine. 

That was all before the pandemic upended travel in a dramatic way. Now the lines at the airports are even longer (because of social distancing, etc.) and rental cars are as scarce as ice cubes in the desert and pricier than a mortgage. Now I feel like I need to recalculate the driving radius and figure out some new boundaries. 

Also, just because I've been vaccinated doesn't mean I want to take chances with a Southwest Airlines flight full of dumbass yahoos who think the earth is flat, viruses are the will of a vindictive baby Jesus, and that face masks are for sissies and liberals. In fact, when I called my dentist to reschedule an appointment because of my travel schedule they wanted to know if I was flying since their policy is to wait for at least ten days after any flight before admitting one into their office. I figure there's good logic to that and it conveys also to me seeing clients after a flight!

So, here's my current planning conundrum: I am booked to photograph an assignment in Sante Fe, NM. at the end of this month. I looked up travel information and found that there are no reasonable direct flights from Austin to Sante Fe. I would be booking Southwest Airlines to fly from Austin to Dallas and then from Dallas to Sante Fe. When I get there I'll have to have a rental car. There are none.

The flight time is a little over seven hours for both legs. Add two hours for initial arrival and check-in. That puts us over nine hours. Add an hour to fetch luggage, get a rental car (none currently exist) and get to my hotel. We're looking at ten hours and change to go from door-to-door. That's contingent on no one on the flight tossing down their face mask and challenging a flight attendant which might require us to sit at a gate and wait for police to come and remove the nut job. 

The drive from Austin to Sante Fe is about 650 miles. The estimated time on all the mapping apps is about 11 hours of drive time. Add in some breaks for the restroom, coffee regeneration and food and we'll call it 13 hours. I have a new-ish car with only 16,000 miles on the odometer. I can bring all the camera gear I'd ever want to play with and I can hang up suits and dress shirts so they are fresh and ready to go the next morning. 

I'm definitely driving and I guess this means that for now I'll extending my boundary range from Austin to a max of about 700 miles. I'd bill for travel days on either end of the project anyway. 

It's interesting that we now have different pain points to take into consideration when traveling for work. On some level I think air travel is probably safer than indoor dining at restaurants but I think you are still taking a risk given that we don't know whether or not vaccinated passengers, exposed to the Covid virus, can pass it on to unvaccinated people in turn. My concern is not so much for my personal health but concern for those I'll subsequently come into contact with. 

I have always wanted to do a project in Sante Fe. I think driving there is actually more fun given that my return trip isn't bookended by any particular schedule or obligations and I could come back through the White Sands area and the through El Paso and on to Marfa, Texas before heading home. Lots of places to stop and take photographs. 

Look for the silver lining in every choice. There's generally always one there. 

A review of a recently unearthed 35mm lens that I have re-evlauated and added back into active service.

 Back in the early days of my Panasonic S1 system purchases I bought three different Sigma Art lenses. I knew I wanted a fast and sharp 85mm. I thought I could get a long of use out of a fast and sharp 35mm, and I presumed I'd want or need a 20mm lens and there was one in the Art series that seemed like the best choice for optical performance. It was the hefty 20mm 1.4 Art lens. 

The one thing all three lenses shared was a far above average size and weight. And most would say, slow autofocusing. The original 85mm 1.4 was replaced this last year by a new version that is 50% smaller and lighter and so I traded up immediately. The new version is also a very high performance lens and delivers great images, even when used wide open. I don't have nostalgia for its predecessor.

The 20mm lens was big and ponderous and I ended up using it on a commercial assignment once. Used wide open the amount of vignetting was beyond amazing.  I just don't shoot much super-wide and I thought I could do as well, for the kinds of work I need to do with a very wide angle lens (inside industrial plants, weird landscapes) with the more recent, small and light, 20-60mm Lumix zoom lens. And, as a side note, the 20-60mm is not a bad "walking around" lens. The performance at 20mm when stopped down to f5.6 or f8.0 is absolutely fine for those times when I think I might need to be super wide and it's easy to handle. Having some good range coupled with a big resolution camera means it can often be a solo lens, if the intention of the day is specific to the angles of view on tap. 

That left the Sigma 35mm f1.4 Art lens as the odd man out. It's the lens (and focal length) I've had trouble warming up to until now. It's bigger, heavier and bulkier than the slower 35mm lenses I've used in the past so I put it in a drawer and moved on to trying other solutions. I have a 28mm f2.8 Contax/Zeiss lens that I like a lot but it's sometimes too wide for the way I see things; especially when photographing anthropologically, on the streets. I have three different zooms lenses that also include the 35mm focal length in their range and I'm sure any one of the these would work adequately well if stopped down a little bit. But lately I've been missing the crispness of the Sigma 35mm f1.4. It's really sharp in the center of the frame when used wide open but when stopped down to f4.0 it's astonishingly good all across the frame and it delivers a level of detail that I just don't see when using any of my zoom lenses at that focal range. 

Recently I saw a video with the lens designer for Leica and he extolled the virtues of his company's lenses (as we knew he would), but under persistent questioning he acknowledged that their 35mm f2.0 SL Summicron was the best of the best. I started thinking about that lens, but was slowed down from purchasing it by two things: The nosebleed pricing of $5,000+ USD and the idea of spending so much on a lens that is less interesting to me than other focal lengths. I wondered just how much use I would get out of a lens with that price tag. And I daydreamed about retiring and ending up with only the 50mm f2.0 SL lens and the SL2 camera --- for everything!

Fortunately, I have a friend who is not constrained by ideas of budget and is also the owner of much recent Leica inventory. I asked him if he had an SL35 and (un)amazingly, he did. I borrowed it for a day and shot with it in a testing sort of way. Trying to discern how it might be better than the lens I already had sitting in the tool cabinet. It's a beautifully made lens but it's also nearly as large and maybe just as heavy as the Sigma 35mm f1.4. 

But here's what I found on the optical front when using each lens on the 47+ megapixel Leica SL2, anchored on a big tripod:

There is a look to a 35mm frame when shot at f1.4 that is unique. When used close in the fall off in focus is striking and a look I haven't appreciated enough in the past. You can get a similar look at f2.0 but it's not quite the same and sometimes the subtle differences are important to a photographer's way of seeing. 

When both lenses are used at f2.0 the Leica does a better job keeping the corners and edges of the frame critically sharp. I conjecture that the lens is better corrected for field curvature and so doesn't appear to degrade at the periphery in the same way. The Sigma Art lens is just as sharp in the center of the frame and, if you move away from my old school, center focusing methods and move the focusing square over something closer to the edge of the frame the lens is actually sharp there as well; it's just that you can't presume focusing in one plane will include sharpness for both the edges and the center. 

By f4.0, where I usually end up working the most, I couldn't really tell a noticeable difference between the lenses. The Leica was a bit contrastier which gave the files from it the appearance of more acutance but when adding contrast to the Sigma I could get the looks pretty close. This is where the logic of spending an extra $4400 dollars fell off the rails. If the lenses were close enough to be considered within the margins of user error at the most used settings was there any logic at all to parting with ever more money? 

No.

The one area in which the Leica lens was noticeably better had nothing to do with its imaging performance and everything to do with focusing. In both single AF and continuous AF, in video and regular photography, the Leica's focusing was much quicker and locked on tighter. If AF performance is a higher priority than price, and it makes a difference in your day to day work, then a case could certainly be made that the Leica was worth the spend. Especially when used on a Leica body.

I work in much the same way no matter which camera I use. I set the camera to S-AF, I set the AF mode to either center square of center zone, I point the camera at an object or person I want to photograph, press the shutter button halfway down, lock focus and then push all the way down to actuate. I don't do "back button." I don't do "AFL" or any other permutation of button oriented control. If I need to lock in focus I turn the camera or lens to "MF" and fine tune. I know it's not the way everyone else works but it's my methodology. 

Once I thought about all this it became clear to me that I needed to come to grips with my thoughts about the Sigma. It's a very powerful imaging tool in a very valuable focal length. And it's actually quite affordable for what it is. Sigma also produces a new, i-Series 35mm f2.0 and I've considered buying one of those and selling the Sigma Art but I have a sneaking suspicion that the trade off for lighter weight and smaller size is a compromise of overall optical performance. It's interesting that right now one can buy the 35mm f2.0 for about $639 or the Art lens for $799. The compromises are straightforward. 

In the moment I lean more towards the less compromising overall performance of the Art lens. But take that with a grain of salt. I'm waiting for my local camera store to get in their shipment of the i-Series 35mm lens so I can try one out and compare it. If the visual differences are negligible I'll trade the speed for the smaller profile and reduced weight. But as it is I newly enjoying taking the Art lens out for a spin. It's really very good as far as its ability to produce really snappy and detailed images. And it's not as if clients are falling all over themselves to have photos made at the highest end of possible production quality. 

I'm happy to have the 35mm Art lens for another reason; I think Sigma pushed to bounds of design and craft to make the original Art series lenses and created optical systems that are as relevant and near perfect as this lens was at its introduction in 2012 (the family of, not this particular mount). It's a bit of a classic and in the future we'll have different choices such as stepping up to the Art 35mm f1.2 or stepping down to the i-Series. The 1.4 will have its own distinctive look and it's possible that it's a look I'll like better than what I'm offered in the future. 

I'm off for a walk with a Leica SL and the 35mm f1.4 Art. I just updated the lens firmware so the power consumption vis-a-vis the battery reads correctly to the camera. I guess I'll see if I ever get comfortable with the 35mm focal length. It's a struggle.

Photo taken with the Leica SL and the Sigma 45mm f2.8. 

mmmmmm. Donuts.

Just a thought: Panasonic did announce a 35mm f1.8 on their most recent roadmap. That makes for another contender is the leisurely contest of 35mm lenses for the L-mount.

There is always something affecting the worldwide camera market. Will it be the shortage of semiconductors this time?

One of Kirk's chip die photos done for Motorola back when they were all about 

semiconductor production and had large fabs working around the clock in 

Austin, Texas to supply all kinds of industries.

 There are two scenarios that give me pause right now. Both are related to the production of high tech gadgets as well as mission critical tools like cameras. One is a world wide shortage of many different kinds of micro processors, micro controllers and various other families of semi-conductors. Ford and GM have both announced slowdowns in production of new vehicles because they are unable to source the semiconductor parts they need to complete vehicles. It's only a matter of time before the same shortages hit Tesla, Dell and Apple. I presume the short supply is already affecting high end camera production which is largely about assembling silicon parts together with a lens mount. 

It's easy to predict that we'll start having back-order issues in short order. It may be one of the reasons behind the two month backlog of Leica Q2 cameras. It may already be the primary reason camera makers like Panasonic have fallen behind on lenses already announced on their product roadmaps. 

But a bigger concern in the long run is the increasing aggression of the mainland Chinese government against Taiwan. The Chinese military have stepped up all manner of harassment against the tiny island nation in their quest to assimilate it back into communist control and ownership. But some of the biggest and most advanced makers of semiconductor components are located on Taiwan. Should open hostilities break out companies like Apple, and other computer makers, and car and truck makers, will run out of supply for parts for new laptops, iPads and, eventually, phones. Not to mention Ford F150 trucks; which would cause widespread panic in Texas.

Any disruption measured in time longer than days will roil the markets for just about all the fun toys we love. From cars to TVs, to our beloved cameras and lenses. 

I'm not sure how firmly this is showing up on most people's radar but in the case of a company like Apple a month long glitch in critical supply would cause panic in the stock market which might retard any economic recovery and cause a net loss of hundreds of billions of dollars of investor capital. And a lot of jobs.

The current shortage seems to have stemmed from the quick shut down of demand for the first six to eight months of the pandemic. Ramping up for increased production is complicated and takes time. 

But a shooting war between China and Taiwan would result in a disruptions the likes of which we haven't seen in a long time. And the fall out will include a lot more than delivery times lines for cameras and lenses. 

Just something to think about. As if we don't have enough to worry about....

Am I missing something? Do you have additional (factual) information that might make me less anxious about the whole situation? Share it please. 

The Hot Pursuit of Excellence or the careful testing and adaptation to what you already own?

I recently went through the exercise of trying to decide if it was worth it to me to buy a new zoom lens. My foray into Leica SL cameras started pushing the buttons of avarice in relation to that company's one and only standard, SL zoom lens; the 24-90mm f2.8-4.0. At a lusty $5500 even the most spendthrift among us might take pause and at least investigate to see if there are more rational options. 

Of course, the obvious choice is the lens sitting on my desk and currently muttering derisive remarks about my lack of credit given to its exemplary performance. That lens would be the very, very good Panasonic Lumix 24-105mm f4.0. I've used it over and over again and have always been happy and satisfied with the final results but the powerful lure of Leica legend always makes me wonder if their lens will supply just that tiny bit more "edge" or "magic" that will elevate images and make each image sweeter. 

It's interesting that I find myself so interested in the cameras and lenses at a time when there are still so few real opportunities to push the creative envelope and do the kind of work that might elevate a great lens above a pile of really, really good lenses. But as I've read recently so much of our feelings of boredom, lethargy and lack of initiative are a direct result of our feelings of lack of control. We're not completely in charge of our ability to go to the places we want to go or to photograph the people we want to photograph in the same way we did before the pandemic hit. This translates directly into our feeling as though certain potentials of control have been taken from us. 

On a whim I bought an older, 28-70mm f3.5-4.5 Leica Vario Elmar-R lens. It is well used and the built-in lens hood is floppy and rattles. I wondered if I could get some of the character that gets credited to Leica lenses in general with this lens. The price was too good to pass up so I added it to the collection and bought an "URTH" brand adapter to mate it to the SL body. 

It's interesting to research some of these lenses and learn just how intertwined camera makers and other brand lens makers were (are?) intertwined. This particular lens is a re-badge of a Sigma lens from the early 1990s. Leica's input apparently extended only to the cosmetics of the exterior design but didn't involve any optical design input. Perhaps the lens coatings are different from the Sigma version but that's just conjecture on my part. So, essentially you are putting an older lens from what was at the time a very second tier lens maker on the front of a much more modern and capable camera. What could go wrong? 

Apparently this lens suffers from mediocre build quality and that's evident in the floppy, built-in lens hood. At some point Leica decided to find a company that might do a better job with the basic lens construction so they partnered with Kyocera and also took a more direct hand in the mechanical build quality; but the optical design stayed the same. The newer version is NOT the version I have....

I got tired of the lens hood self-retracting and rattling around so I extended it to its full position and gaffer taped it there. Then I went out and shot with it. One thing you can say about the lens is that it appears very sharp and contrasty in the middle of the frame. Another thing you can say about the lens is that the geometric distortion at the edges of the frame is very, very high at 28mm and vacillates all through the focal length range. Ending up with above average pin cushion distortion at the long end. 

And, in my first tests I found the lens to have oddly manifested vignetting. With extremely dark corners that were hard to correct; if they could be corrected at all. I compared it with the Lumix 24-105 and found the later to be so much better. So I stuck the older lens in a drawer and ignored it for a while. 

But at some point this last week I woke up in the middle of the night and wrote down, on a small sketch pad, "faulty hood." and went right back to sleep. Yesterday I re-visited the 28-70mm and also looked around the web at the very few samples I could find from this lens. I wondered if my middle of the night writing was somehow intuiting the issue. I took off all the tape and pulled the lens hood into its fully retracted position and re-taped it there. I took some shots around the house and noticed that the aberrant vignetting had vanished. There was still the usual vignetting of a lens of this type, and it becomes more apparent it a time when most new lenses are corrected for vignetting in the camera software. But it was nothing like the bizarre vignetting I was experiencing before. 

I decided, after photographing several lawyers during the work day, to go back to the downtown area and take some test shots with the newly "modified" 28-70mm lens. At the end of my experiment I found that the lens still distorts like crazy --- but I never expected that to change. It's pretty easy to correct in post processing so I don't worry about it. But I really don't worry about it because it's not a lens I'd chose to use for exacting architecture for clients... The vignetting, however, was massively better and completely correctable in Lightroom. 

I do like the look of the the colors and the acutance of the lens. I understand that it was designed to have more contrast and to only match the needed resolution of film at the time but the impression of sharpness for so much content that hits the web makes this lens seem more modern than it otherwise might be. 

The vignetting clears up almost in a linear progression with stopping down. By f5.6 or f8.0 it's mostly gone and easily manageable with one of the Lightroom sliders. 

To be frank, while I like playing with this small and likable lens it's really the great performance of the 24-105 Panasonic lens that quells my desire for the big, fat and pricey Leica lens. If I'm honest with myself there's probably never a use case which would dictate that I need the Leica lens. I can't think that any client would see a demonstrable difference between the Leica and the Lumix in real world use. But the expensive lens and all its promise hovers around in an orbit just on the edge of my consciousness, waiting for a moment of weakness, a glitch in my fiduciary logic, to pounce and ingratiate itself into my camera system like an invasive species of bamboo. 

Till then, I guess I'll get along well enough will all the other toys in the collection...

P.S. I thought I should explain the silly and over the top posters below. 

When I was on the 23rd story of a downtown office building photographing an attorney I looked out one of the windows and saw, down on Colorado and Third streets, a big crane with a nine-light (giant cinema fixture) on the front of it and a gaggle of movie grips trying to look cool, professional and on the ball surrounding said crane. I knew they were movie grips because they were busy attaching sheets of color correcting gels to the lighting fixtures. And they had the little, worn grip pouches hanging off their belts. And the production company T-shirts, mostly in black. And the black, cotton baseball caps, ala Ron Howard. 

When I came back downtown to do my lens test with the 28-70mm Leica I walked over to that area and conferred with the intelligence experts out in the field. Those would be the two young guys running the valet parking station across the street. They had the scoop. Austin is currently home to filming the re-boot of "Walker Texas Ranger" and the production company is using a number of downtown locations for the effort. These posters went up on the first day of shooting and are nothing like the usual posters downtown. They are obviously a movie art director's idea of punk rebellion coupled with dated commerce. 

The production had also taken over on the store fronts on Third St. and created a canopied entry for a fake business. On every corner was a large grip truck with grips hanging out smoking and desperately trying to look like the prevailing stereotype of a movie crew. I thought the posters were funny and photographed them. Nobody seemed to mind me being in their (temporary) space. It's almost always interesting...

 

The kind of photography I'm missing these days.

 Over the years assignment photography has gotten more and more controlled and to the point. We get a brief about the project, maybe some samples or comprehensive layouts, and then we work to deliver something that exists only in a very narrow envelope. I understand that this is an "efficient" use of time and resources and that people are in a rush but there are other ways of working and those are the ways I miss. 

I like this off hand photograph of actor, MATT McGRATH as Sergei Pavlovich Diaghliev in the late Terrence McNally's last play. McNally came to Austin to produce his final piece, Immortal Longings back in 2019. 

I made it a habit, back when the theatre was open and running, to drop by the early rehearsals and try to get some interesting shots that we might use for human interest stories and stuff like that. Maybe short teasers for the news outlets...

In these visits I didn't have a brief, there were no expectations of any particular sort. I'd stay for an hour if the rehearsal was slow and draggy or multiple hours if there was constantly changing visual stimuli. It was totally up to me. And since I was hanging out at the early part of previously unproduced plays I had no idea of how the action would flow or even what to expect.

Occasionally I would read the script in advance but not usually. 

It was early Fall of 2019 when this play was being produced. It changed a lot throughout the process. Even after the first week's "soft" opening the script was being cut or edited or added to between shows. A wild process when compared to commercial work. On the evening I dropped by I was still working with Fuji cameras and I was particularly interested in the 56mm f1.2 lens and how it rendered images. 

I tried to project a low energy, anonymous persona and I tried not to engage anyone while I was shooting. More of a "fly on the wall" sort of perspective. I'd see something I liked and I would shoot a few frames. Then I'd put my camera down at the end of its strap and wait, passively, for something to change or build or even fall apart. It's the only way I know of to get really authentic working photographs. Stuff that doesn't look set up because it's not. 

We used to do something like this process with conventional clients as well. We'd come into their location and treat the project like anthropology. I'd walk around and just look for images that told small stories. Expressions, details, gestures, etc. 

It seems that now we have shot lists, tight schedules, and we have to hurry through them. And when we finish the clients head for the doors and scatter. It's not just a reaction to the pandemic because the "adventure" of advertising photography had been heading in this direction of "cut and dry" non-engagement for while. 

A fantasy I used to have earlier in my career would be getting hired to do a historic documentation of a major company like Dell or IBM (in its earliest days) where one would work in the same way that the White House photographers worked (pre-Trump). Which was with day-to-day and hour-by-hour access in an attempt to create a visual history of an administration. Or the early history of an important company.

We used to do more of this but I guess in today's efficiency obsessed arenas, and with clients who demand total control, the casual, photojournalistic style of documentary photography is failing quickly. 

Too bad. I really liked it. It was the magic ingredient for visual story telling. "It" being time spent exploring and photographing whatever catches your eyes...

From earlier or later on the same evening. 

We're updated! We're updated! Thanks Panasonic!

Leica SL + Sigma 65mm f2.0. 

I've been a big fan of Panasonic's full frame, S1x series of cameras from the moment they hit the market. There is a place in the inventory for each of the three models if you are the kind of commercial photographer who routinely handles wildly different projects. If you asked me to name a favorite I'd be hard pressed to pick. The S1 is a basic, 24 megapixel camera which was, up till today (for me) a really good stills camera and a decent, basic video camera. That all changed today with the arrival of a firmware update to 2.0. If you upgraded your S1 with the SFU video package in the past your camera will now provide 5.8K video, cinema style video (17:9 aspect ratio) and much more. It already writes 4K as 10 bit, 4:2:2 to an internal card but now you can take advantage of much higher resolution files as well. 

Couple that with the ability to use the microphone interface and the ability to write files to external recorders and the S1 becomes are very, very good video camera as well. Almost as good for most video projects as the S1H. If you have an S1 sitting around the newest update is available at the Panasonic Lumix support site right now. And, bottom line, the body is nearly bulletproof while the high ISO performance is at, or close to, the top of the 24 megapixel camera heap right now. 

The newest firmware is most valuable for users who've done the video SFU-xx upgrade which costs $200. But in my experience it's well worth it. The reasons now to splash out for an S1H are for the unlimited recording times with even the biggest and most processor intensive files as a result of it active fan cooling. The ability to shoot video in All-I configurations is great as is the inclusion of an AA filter to cut down on moiré in many instances. Some people are also partial to the swiveling rear screen but most video producers are making use of external monitors in their video set ups. The S1H also got a big firmware upgrade a few days ago with added Black Magic Raw capability (you'll need an external recorder for this) which joins the Pro Res Raw capability, already in progress. With the new firmware (2.4) for the S1H you can shoot 6K raw files in two different formats. Nice for the people working at the highest levels of production....like making movies for Netflix. 

Even the S1R got some upgrades but since it also got 5K+ video in an earlier update the new changes were either small or hidden fixes, under the hood. 

I downloaded the newest firmware for all three of the cameras and had all three of them updated and ready to go in about 15 minutes. No glitches. I am thankful that Panasonic is doing such a great job extending the  utility and relevance of cameras that are, in some cases, nearing the two year mark since introduction. The great thing is that most of the upgrades are actually real features instead of the usual practice from other makers of fixing stuff that was broken or iffy on the initial launches. With Panasonic's S1 series (and the S5) it's like getting more stuff for free. And who doesn't like that?

I guess it's time to write myself a video project and get busy shooting with the newly enhanced tools. But then, there's always the SL2. I guess I've got to do some trials and see which of the cameras makes the files I like to look at the most instead of just spec-believing. At any rate I welcome all new firmware upgrades, be they in lenses or camera bodies. Keep em coming. 

I've always been a fan of deck plate. It seem so....functional. 

And I like the patterns it makes in photographs. 

All images above created with the Leica SL and the Sigma 65mm lens. 

Go look for your camera's latest update. Not only do most updates add or improve features, most also fix small glitches in performance and don't get formal mentions....

 

Enjoying the color rendition of an older sensor and the Sigma 65mm f2.0 lens.

There's something about the color rendering of the sensor in the Leica SL that's different from the images I used to get from Sony sensors. Maybe it's just a different way of interpreting color. I'm not really sure. But I like it. A lot. And the 65mm focal length is such a joy to work with. It's a nice pair. 

Nice light. ISO 50. 

 

Reprint time again. This time around we're looking at a Phase One MF digital camera from 2008. Here's the article I wrote about it. This was "pre-blog." I thought you might enjoy reading and seeing how far the industry has progressed since then.

A re-publication of an article from 2008.

A Medium Format Digital Camera With Enhanced Handling.  Phase One Delivers The Goods.

by Kirk Tuck

In the past few years medium format digital cameras have captured a smaller and smaller share of camera sales worldwide for two reasons:  1.  They seem to come equipped with extravagant price tags... and, 2.  They handled, for the most part, like the Frankenstein inventions they were.  The communication between the removable backs and the traditional camera bodies was kludgy and slow.  Autofocus implementation seemed like an afterthought and the “mix and match” batteries had the endurance of a chain smoker trying to run a marathon.  It’s little wonder that many photographers chose to go with high megapixel DSLR style cameras like the Canon 1DS mk3.

But in 2008 the landscape is beginning to shift. Prices seems to be dropping even while pixel counts are rising while at the same time the engineering that matters is getting better and better. The Hasselblad 3D camera system seems focused on providing the tightest integration on the market.  Its totally closed system of backs, body and lenses is a contrast to the less integrated but far more open system that was introduced in the form of the Hy6 body being used by Sinar, Leaf, and Rollei.  The problem with the Hasselblad system is that it is closed to outside vendors which prohibits you from being able to select the digital back you might really want.  An issue with the Hy6 systems is that, in order to provide the most “open” system, the integration of lenses, bodies and backs is less elegant.

The bottom line is that the camera bodies, lenses and support accessories are actually the foundation or platform for an efficient and effective medium format system.  These parts should be a long term investment that stands the test of time while  allowing for backs to be upgraded as technology improves.  Nikon and Canon understand that your real, long term investment will be in their lenses, not in their camera bodies.  Now the medium format digital camera makers are starting to come around.  And the competition will start to heat up.

Mamiya and Phase One have teamed up to take advantage of a truly open platform that promises to run over the competition by dint of having a wide and growing vertical integration of options for medium format shooters.   Phase One makes incredible, high density digital camera backs.  Mamiya makes one of the most comfortable high performance medium format camera bodies on the market today.  Bundled together the combination is formidable competition for everyone in this small market.  And it’s not an entirely exclusive relationship.  If technology moves on and the Phase One back becomes obsolete the open nature of the camera system leaves ample space for you to choose replacement backs from a range of suppliers, including Leaf and even Mamiya.  Kudos to Phase One and Mamiya for establishing a clean upgrade path. 

A fun part of camera reviewing is unwrapping the packages after the FedEx truck trundles away.  I recently reviewed a passel of Leica stuff, including an M8 and four lenses.  They arrived rattling around in a box in a sea of styrofoam peanuts and nothing else.  No manuals, no  original boxes.  No additional protection.  By contrast, the Phase One camera system arrived in a really bulletproof manner:  A solid cardboard box, filled with the requisite peanuts, held a solid hard case.  Inside the highly protective (and water/weatherproof ) case was a system obviously packed by a truly obsessive person.  Every piece had its own compartment and the overall package included manuals, cables, and even a memory stick with an extensive user’s guide.

Here are the basic details of the Phase One camera I tested:  The camera itself is a rebadged Mamiya AFD3 camera body.  The back is Phase One’s latest 39 megapixel back, the 45+.  The back and the body looked like a matched set and featured the same matte surface finish.  The AFD3 is the fourth generation of the Mamiya 645 AF format camera body.  As a camera system that’s been on the market for well over a decade just about any flaw or shortcoming has been eliminated during its long evolution.  What is left is a camera that handles just about as easily as a Nikon D3 or a Canon 1DS xx camera.  The traditional camera functions were absolutely flawless and as easy to understand as just about any camera in the market today. I’ll be frank, I loved the body and the lenses more than any other medium format camera I have ever handled.  And that’s saying a lot since I’ve owned a slew of Rollei 6000 variants, many Hasselblads, as well as Pentax 645’s.  The Mamiya body represents the very best that medium format manufacturers have been able to design.  Your mileage may vary but not by much.

The only caveat I would have about buying the Mamiya camera body would be for users who need to be able to remove the pentaprism finder and replace it with a waistlevel finder or other accessory.  That doesn’t seem like a pressing priority for most photographers as even stalwarts like Nikon and Canon have done away with the removable finders that, in the past,  were always part of their professional camera bodies.

So,  thumbs up to the camera body, let’s move on to the lenses.  All the senuous body ergonomics in the world are meaningless if the glass doesn’t measure up.  I’ve compared it with the Zeiss glass I own for my Rollei system as well as the Schneider glass used in the Leaf camera system (Hy6) and at 100% on my monitor the Mamiya glass definitely makes the grade.  I worked with three lenses while testing the Phase One camera system,  a really incredible 28mm lens, a 75mm to 150mm f 4.5 zoom lens and the 80mm f2.8 “normal” lens.

The 28mm Phase One lens is, along with the digital 28 from Hasselblad, the widest production lens available for medium format digital SLR systems.  With a field of view that matches a 17mm lens on a 35mm camera this 14 element wide angle is a powerful optic.  This, along with the 45mm tilt shift lens offered by Phase One, should really appeal to architectural photographers who miss the highly corrected wide angles they used on their 4x5 view cameras.  The image quality of the 75 to 150mm Mamiya zoom blew away the output of my 75 to 150mm Schneider zoom for the Rollei while the 80 was sharp, well behaved, and a welcome relief from all the big, fat glass of the other optics.  While not silent focusing lenses with integral motors, the lenses were quick to autofocus and bitingly sharp at all medium apertures.  

There’s an additional advantage to the Mamiya system.  They’ve been making a wide range of autofocus and specialty lenses for their 645AF camera system for the better part of 15 years.  The landscape is literally littered with great used lenses at ridiculously good prices.  And all of these AF lenses, as well as many of the manual lenses from previous Mamiya systems, are usable on the Phase One body.  If you are so inclined you can also pick up a real, live film back and shoot your choice of slide, color print or black and white film!

For my money, the Mamiya AFD3 camera and lens implementation is close to perfect.  That leaves the digital back.  Here’s what I want from a digital back:  I want it to be so boring in actual operation that I don’t have to waste any mindshare worrying about it.  It should start up quickly, the menu and control options should be straighforward and easy to set,  it should be easy to shoot tethered, its raw files should be intelligently compressed and write quickly to disk, and the LCD screen should give me a good idea of what I’m capturing under all lighting conditions.  The back should be parsimonious with batteries and should not have any “nervous tics” or idiosyncrasies.  It should give me enormous, high bit depth files that brutally trump the resolution, color accuracy and other rendering characteristic of all smaller format cameras.

So, how does it stack up?  

Set up:  One click of its power button and the back springs to life.  It takes three seconds from button touch to open the menu.  All the back navigation is done with four silver buttons on the back and all the menus are straightforward and easy to understand.  I felt right at home with the back in the first half hour of operation.  Unlike other systems which offer a range of profiles and adjustments in nested menus the Phase One 45+ back sticks to the basics, “format, white balance, etc.”  The benefit?  You’re up and shooting quickly.  

Shooting tethered:  Here Phase One cheats.  They offer a big, fat fireware port (not one of those mini, four connector fireware pinholes) with which to tether the camera and then they provide you with one of the best software systems for tethering and raw conversion found on planet Earth right now: Capture One.  To say that tethering the camera and shooting to a Mac laptop is smooth and easy is an understatement.  Do it twice and it becomes as easy and fun as eating chocolate.  In six weeks I never lost connection with the back and never had a crash.

Writing with RAW:  Okay.  Each of these files opens up as a tiff that is over 120 megabytes but... sitting on the card, waiting to be hatched, they are a slim 33 megabytes.  Using Sandisk 4gb Extreme cards gave me a system that shot at approximately 1.5 fps and rarely left me waiting with a full buffer.  One thing I would love would be the option to shoot at a reduced file size as I don’t always need the full bucket of pixels for the kind of portrait work I do.  It’s a feature I always loved on the Kodak DSLR/n cameras.  They were capable of shooting raw files at 14 megs 6 megs and 3 megs.  It was a very underrated camera.…….

Chimping:  The LCD screen is fine in the studio and just okay out in the Texas sunlight.  I bring along my Hoodman viewing chimney along when I head outdoors and with that accessory in hand I was able to see the histograms and check relative light balances.  It’s no match for the three inch screen on the back of a Nikon D90 which costs a mere $999 but then the D90’s not really up to making a 17 by 22 inch print at 300 dpi with little or no interpolation either!  If you shoot tethered the LCD becomes a convenient “menu” screen while all serious evaluation gets done on your laptop.

Batteries:  Like the Leaf camera I tested several months ago the Phase One camera/back system uses two sets of batteries. One set of “off the shelf” double “A’s” powers the camera body and the autofocus functions while the back is powered by one of the ubiquitous and “not interchangeable with any other appliance” lithium batteries that manufacturers have become so fond of.  In six weeks of shooting I never had to change out the Kirkland brand, Costco double “A” alkaline batteries I in shoved into the camera handgrip.  The back was another story.  Depending on how often I checked the image on the LCD the battery for the digital back lasted for between 120 and 240 exposures.  As the back can also draw power from the firewire connection the short battery life isn’t problematic in the studio.  Location shooters will want to take at least three of the batteries with them on the road.  Another bright spot for the camera back was the included battery charger which can charge two batteries at a time and has a nice little info window for each battery indicating where the battery is in its charge cycle.  Cheers for an efficient and well made charger system.

If I were to use the Phase One 45+ back in its un-tethered mode often I would want to have a repair person whip me a up a cable and connector to use with a Quantum Turbo battery or Digital Camera battery for day long shooting.

Cutting To The Chase:  The image quality from the back was very, very good.  Having worked my way through the early generations of digital cameras my proclivity is to always use digital cameras at their lowest rated sensitivity.  I started using the Phase One 45+ at its calibrated ISO 50 setting but after reviewing my first test files I got braver and started playing with the sensitivity settings.  The back is flawless up to 200 ISO and even ISO 400 is amazingly clean.  I didn’t get to do too many long exposures with the camera but I did deliberately try it at 4 and 8 seconds and got back files that were essentially noiseless using ISO 100.

While Adobe ACR works well on Phase One 45+ files, yielding neutral colors and high sharpness, Capture One (the RAW conversion software created by Phase One for a wide range of camera raw files) renders files that are breathtaking.  Fine detail is more translucent while color is rendered with a more lifelike differentiation in tonality and subtlety.  But whatever your software choice for massaging your files you need to be ready for a totally different computing experience than you’ll likely have with something like a Nikon D3 file.  The Phase One files are huge once they are opened and operations that appeared seamless on my Intel processor Mac machine move a good bit slower with the Phase One files whether in ACR or Capture One.

Bottom Line:  There were no stumbles with the holistic Phase One system.  The camera is quite fluid and its operation becomes second nature within minutes of use.  The lenses are as good and as varied as any available for any of the other systems.  There is the added benefit of a decade and a half of lens development which means more choices at more price points.  The back is well behaved and plays quite well with the body.  And the Capture One software is the component that brings all the other pieces together and raises them to the next level.  In fact, Capture One is so good I now find myself using it with my Nikon files instead of the visually splendid but very interfaced challenged, Nikon Capture NX.

Would I buy the system?  If I were in the market for a medium format system I would consider the Mamiya/Phase One option for several reasons.  First, the open nature of the system is wonderful.  An entry level professional could opt for a lower priced system from Mamiya with the intention of moving up to one of Phase One’s better backs as his or her business grows.  Second, the feeling of integration makes the camera and back a joy to shoot.  It actually harkens back to the golden days of film when one could shoot more and think less about technology.  

Who Needs A Medium Format Digital System?  Many argue that today’s 21 and 24 megapixel cameras are “good enough” but nothing in the 35mm style comes close to equaling the look you get with the increased real estate of the Phase One sensor and the way larger format lenses “draw”.  This camera and back combination is the perfect match for any photography that requires very high production value or loads of detail.  In closing, this system (and its direct competitors) is the antidote for “good enough”.  It renews and supports our commitment as artists to aim for perfection.  Even if the only audience that really cares is ourselves!

Kirk Tuck is a corporate photographer in Austin, Texas who also writes books about photography.  His first book, Minimalist Lighting: Professional Techniques for Location Photography, has been a best seller since its publication.  His second book on Studio Photography Techniques is due out in the Spring of 2009, and he is currently hard at work on a third book about which he is very secretive.……..

Website:  www.kirktuck.com