Gone out to shoot some squares. Back in a while.

 

SXSW Television Programming Promotion.

We are currently out of the office playing with 

a fast, 35mm lens and a nice camera body. 

Please check back later for more posts.

Wildlife update.

 On the beach. Iceland. 2018.

The raccoons have officially left the chimney. We stopped hearing anything the day after our Critter Control person dangled the "coyote cloth" down the chimney. The mom hissed at it's arrival and there was a lot of chattering from the kits but later that night things quieted down. By the next evening everything was silent. 

A technician came by earlier today to confirm and spent a lot of time making sure that nobody got left behind. Once he was certain he called in the exclusion expert who applied thick screens and other barriers to the top of the chimney. He also did a couple of 360s around the house to look for any other weak spots. 

We are now sealed up and ready to resume life in a more relaxed fashion. Apparently, no raccoons were harmed in the process but they were inconvenienced and are probably paying high rent in their new digs. 

While I liked all the people that Critter Control sent by I hope not to have to see them in their "official" capacity in the future. 

Just thought it was important to loop back on this topic and provide some closure for those who were tracking the progress of my encounters with wildlife.

Thanks for your interest. 

An art gallery and other expressions of popular culture in Austin. Oh, and a few images just because we like the pretty colors.... Oh, one or two pix? NSFW. Unless you work from home.

Tired of raccoons, tired of cars, tired of tax accounting, and tired of being cooped up. I took a lightweight camera out on Saturday to see what might be going on outside these days. Here are a few images from a dubious art gallery show called, "Provocateurs." And then a few images from the bar scene. And a few images of questionable fashion photography and then just some nice, bright colors. 

When you don't have anything in particular in mind it's nice to take a small camera like the Fuji X100V along with you. Put that sucker on auto and remember to look up above eye level every once in a while.

Bummed to have the end of the month show cancelled, postponed, rescheduled or whatever. Happy the raccoons seem to be gone.

I've been watching the Canon, Nikon and Sony announcements with some interest since this is and Olympics year and if Japan pulls off the Olympics the three big camera companies will all want to be on site in force. It seems like the new, Canon R3 is a nod toward sports photographers who want to go with a mirrorless option and, I'll be surprised if the Nikon Z9 isn't designed with sports photographers in mind as well. Sony has already shown their hand with the Alpha One. I'm still reeling at the idea of 50 megapixel files shot at 30 fps. And that's raw+jpeg, not just one or the other. I'm still trying to imagine how the poor editors sitting in trailers around the various Olympic venues are going to edit that stuff... Talk about filling up hard drive space. 

The problem for Nikon and Canon, and to a certain degree, also Sony is that there are actually very, very few long, fast lenses available for any of the recent mirrorless systems. I'm thinking about the much used sports optics like 400mm f2.8 or f3.5s, the 500mms, 600mms and 800mms that I saw in use by many shooter in the last two games. When push comes to shove I wonder how many photographers will have to retrench into the D6s and 1DXmk3s to get the job done the way they want it done. And how can Sony retrench? It should be an interesting time.

I'm not sure it matters that much these days. I keep hearing from my younger photography friends who are shooting sports professionally that so many of the resources are being aimed almost completely toward the video crews. Many of whom will be originating in 8K and 6K this year. If they increase the shutter speeds and frame rates there is real potential to pull stills from the video footage that rival the generation of 24 megapixel still cameras still in wide use for events like these. 

When one considers how close a 30 fps in stills and a 30 fps in video are it's largely a toss up except that still photographers can opt to shoot higher quality raws. I can't imagine film crews choosing the shoot raw for events like this. The would need cargo trucks to haul off the storage drives...

Mirrorless for pro sports will have arrived when the long, fast lenses show up...

Another shot just because I wanted to see the difference between Leica color and Fuji cameras. Straight out of the camera? Fuji in first place.