"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....

Lady Gaga, Britney Spears, Mel Gibson and Charlie Sheen have nothing to do with this blog post. Almost.

To be honest about the blog title, I wanted to see if it's really true that you can drive outrageous numbers to your blog with the silly ploy of using the names of famous celebrities in the headline.  Blogger will probably spank me for even playing around but I think in this day and age of media silliness it's interesting to see how hidden algorithms define what we see and read..... Now on with the Sunday blog.....

I went out for a walk around noon today.  I was wearing a pair of for all mankind (#7) polarized sunglasses and, as I've noticed in the past, everything looks better thru a pair of polarized sunglasses.  Skies get dramatic, colors pop and everything gets a bit janglier.  So I took them off, even though the hot noon sun was blinding, and I spent the next two hours trying to make my camera see the way I do when I have those damn cool glasses on.  That meant cranking up the saturation and doing some mild post processing on my return to the office.  Something I rarely do.

And today, of all days, I actually evesdropped on my own fleeting thought processes as I lined up photographs.  I wanted to know, in the moment, why I took the frames (not the sunglasses, the other frames) I did as I walked around on our first hot Sunday.  And just for the hell of it I thought I'd share those thoughts with you and see if anyone was hardy enough to read all the way thru.

Cute girls on stylish mopeds are always a given.  Flashing by with a short red skirt on the first hot day makes for an almost autonomic response by most photographers.  For some reason Austin is wall-to-wall with scooters, mopeds, electric scooters and motorcycles this Spring.  From a fatherly point of view I wanted to shout out that she should wear a helmet, and some foot gear, and some long pants in case she had to lay that bike down.  But advice is largely wasted on youth and I was too busy manually focusing to follow thru with sage pronouncements.

Why?  Does everyone see it?  It looks like an owl to me.  And if the architects and nature transpired together to bring off a decidedly cubist owl how can I walk away without documenting it?  I was first attracted to the slice of transluminated green on the right side window.  Then the horns on the top pushed me to stop and the glare of the endlessly concentric eyes compelled me to say, "Yes, yes, yes.  A thousand times yes!" As I bracketed a 32 exposure HDR bracketing sequence.  Then I came to my senses, deleted all but one of the exposures and figured I was actually smart enough or experienced enough (or lucky enough) to be able to get good shots that ONLY need on frame.......  I call it "Found In Baggage Claim.."

As I rounded the corner on Congress Ave.  I looked to my left and saw a long table of patrons at the bar of the restaurant on the ground floor of the Austonian.  Packed together in a line eight across were the biggest butts I'd ever seen shoved into Sunday church dresses.  Massive legs ending in fahionable high heeled shoes.  But though I'm cruel enough to write it I'm not cruel enough to stop and draw even more attention and ridicule by bringing to greater attention the plight of the enormous via photography. Even when they sit with their backsides to the giant show window, facing the main downtown street.  So I ambled along a few doors down and found these chairs stacked.  I'd been playing with the EC-S split image screen in the camera and I was amazed at how quick and easy focus was, near wide open, at the bottom of the frame.  And I thought about that instead.

When I started out my walk I went by a tall condominium tower called, Spring.   When I glanced up I saw this intense reflection of the undiffused sun.  Most people would blink and walk away but after the trench warfare of the Olympus EPL2 review (just "Google" "Olympus Red Spots") I decided to see what the difference sized pixel wells in the Canon would do.  Voila.  No red dots.  I'm of the belief that red dots are more of a winter phenomenon..... Then I just decided I liked the angles.  And I imagined that this would be the kind of building that an Ayn Rand-y architect would build if he were working in 2011 instead of 1957.  Who can know?

At some junction I think my brain is just attracted to strong lines and color contrasts.  And I'll shoot just about anything that fits the mold.  Kind of a "find a pattern named Waldo" with buildings.  And I'm a sucker for street lights on the corner.

Why did I shoot this?  Was it something Susan Sontag wrote?  Or Robert Adams?  Or, Claude Levi-Strauss (From Honey to Ashes to Street Art)?  Naw.  I just love it when corporations or the city make art for everyone to enjoy downtown.  This is an inset mural on the brick sidewalk of Second Street and is one of five or sixes pieces of original art embedded on the corner.  It wasn't there two weeks ago.  I snapped the shot to share it with my local ad friends.  Strictly Photography as a communication tool.

I've spent 30 years discovering, rediscovering and coming to grips with the work of photographer, Lee Freidlander, and as I walked down the sidewalk on Fifth St. thinking about cellphones and how lame the whole cellphone thing is, my mind clicked in and said, "Wow, isn't that a wild and chaotic assemblage of colors and shapes and stuff?   Shouldn't you stop being an anti-electronics snob and just shoot the damn thing?"  I was shocked at the intercession of a normally distracted brain and it was so novel to actually get some proactive juice out of it that I jumped to and snapped just as the cyclist hit the panel I wanted him in.  My brain thought it was pretty cool so I printed it just to keep him happy.  I wonder what Lee Freidlander's work would have been like if he'd worked all in color.  I wonder if this image above would have any power if it were in black and white.....

Documentary shock comes when you see something in your own town you didn't know existed.  In this case, actual street sweepers.  Shades of Paris in the 1970's.  Amazing.  I'd never seen it before so this is more of a documention of my protected lifestyle that anything else.

Moving along.  Nothing to say about the enigmatic art installation that's been at the intersection of Lamar Blvd. and the railroad tracks for the better part of a decade.  I shoot it to pay homage to the noble idea of art in public places.  And to mystify the drivers who sweep under the bridge, cellphone in one hand, Big Gulp(tm) in the other.  All faith placed in the steering power of their knees and the weight reducing power of 64 ounces of Diet Coke(tm).

Finally, A quiet shot done at the mysterious insistence of my new focusing screen which has convinced me in short order that every time we remove something like autofocus we are not losing tools so much as gaining directness with the objects in front of the camera.  Let me say it succintly:  Autofocus works well but it's a sucky concept meant, for the most part, to assuage the fears and trepidation of people who are too lazy to learn the totally cool art of taking charge and doing their own focusing.  Not to worry.  I'll find a reason for autofocus tomorrow.

The high point of the walk was seeing a wealth of people in the downtown area eating at packed sidewalk restaurants.  The lure of downtown is getting stronger and stronger and it feels so vibrant and un-American (in a good way).  People walking for blocks.  People moving without their cars.  People being nice to each other because they don't have four thousand pounds of steel around them and so must be responsible for their own words and actions.  Amazingly equalizing.  Just what a culture needs.

I headed over to Whole Foods and had a wonderful chopped BBQ sandwich with purple onions and sweet pickles.  Washed it down with a Pale Ale (on tap) and headed home.  I continue to be more and more pleased with the old Canon 1dmk2n and the 50mm Zeiss Planar 1.4.  Used them for my walk and never entertained the thought that I might need anything else.

Shooting tomorrow and Tues. but hoping to have my Michael O'Brien video done and approved by Weds.  Hope the week treats you well.

Postscript:  I finally gave into peer pressure and bought an iPhone.  Now I can stumble thru Whole Foods transfixed to the screen, walking into other people, head-on, who are also transfixed to their screens and once in a great while I'll use the hipstamatic app on the iPhone like all the other aging photographers in their desperate attempt to recapture the cool they assumed they had sometime in the past.  Just what the world needs.....  But at least now I'm connected.....oh brother.




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The invitation to coffee that will almost assuredly cost me $1500.

This is the new OM-D with a Leica 25mm f1.4 Summilux hanging off the front.

I should have used caller I.D.  I should have feigned some contagious illness but I didn't.  I accepted an invitation to have coffee with my photographer friend, Frank, and now I think it's going to cost me.  Big time.  You see, I've been trying to avoid looking at the OM-D EM-5 directly.  When I go to Precision Camera I avert my eyes away from the Olympus case and chant, over and over again, "Sony. Sony. Sony."  I've been an Olympus Pen fan since the 1970's and I've been a digital Pen fan since the first day the EP-2 hit the stores.  Especially with the grace note of the elegant VF-2 electronic viewfinder perched regally but functionally in the accessory shoe.  I rushed out to buy the first EP-3 in town and it's so good I thought I'd never want to upgrade to a new Pen so quickly.

But there it was.  Unassuming but gaunt and with hip understatement.  Frank knew how to play me.  Like a sommelier showing off a wonderful vintage bottle of Petrus.  Almost daring me not to try a sample. He reached into his Domke bag and pulled out the OMD and presented it to me with the ultimate, modern Olympus lens cleverly clicked into the lens mount.  It was the 45mm 1.8, a lens that compels me to never sell a Pen body again.  Not even to make room for a new one.

I lifted the camera up, switched on the power and brought it to my eye.  I was expecting the same electronic viewfinder performance I got with the VF-2 because the specs are similar but it was nicer.  More refined.  The optics in front of the screen were clearer and cleaner.  The image was so well calibrated that I could move my eye from the finder then to one side to directly observe the object I'd focused on and the effect was almost identical.  The finder easily rivals the clarity and color accuracy of the Sony a77 or Nex7 EVFs.  

At this point you can head over to DPReview and read all the specs.  You can also read their test reports.  They'll tell you that the OMD is on par with the best of the APS-C cameras, like the Nikon D7000 or the Canon 60D.  That the high ISO is clean as fresh laundry right up to 6400 ISO.  That the buffer is quick to clear with the right cards.  That the frame rate nearly twice as fast as a D800.

But here's the one thing they won't tell you and it may make all the difference in the world to you if you are a camera sensualist:  It has the nicest and quietest sounding shutter I've heard since the Olympus e1 camera from 2004.  But it's even quieter and more refined than that high water mark of shutter elegance.  It may be the perfect camera shutter from a auditory point of view.  The sound of the the shutter is what I imagine the door of a Bentley car feels like when it shuts.  Reason enough to own the camera even if it were only as good in the files as its predecessor...

But as the web at large will tell you, the images are wonderful.  

I don't have any first hand information (yet) about the images.  But I trust some of my friends who got their cameras early and have been raving about them ever since.  No one is bothered by the much discussed noise from the image stabilization, in my crowd.  I put my ear to the camera while sitting at an uncrowded Starbucks at the end of the day and I couldn't hear it at all.  If the noise bothers people they must be living in anechoic chambers and shooting with the cameras right next to their ears.  The camera had me at......'snik'.

If you plan to get one I'm recommending the black body because it looks so stealthy with the Leica 25mm mounted on the front.  It also looks really good with the black battery grip attached. More advice?  If you don't already have a collection of Pen or Pan lenses then forego the kit lens and select the 12mm Olympus, the 25mm Leica/Panasonic and the 45mm 1.8.  You'll have the important bases covered and the whole kit will weigh less than a Canon 24-105mm L lens (without body attached!!!).  If you want to branch out you'll find a good mix of lenses between Olympus, Panasonic, Leica and Sigma. Not to mention the millions of other brand lenses you can press into service with the right adapter.  It's an amazing leap forward for Olympus.  Did I mention how much I liked the EVF?  Oh?  I did?  Okay.