85mm 1.4 Zeiss ZE Rocks for me.

It was a long, happy day yesterday.  I spent my morning and part of the early afternoon at St. Gabriel's School here in Austin taking photographs for their marketing and "look book."  I photographed young students with their older mentors, kids learning, drawing, playing, looking at Texas snakes and even playing under a giant colorful parachute.  It was a good job.  One that moved fast.  One that actually made good use of my ability to direct kids and teachers.  As soon as I wrapped that job I headed back to the world headquarters of the VisualScienceLab and headed into the top secret lab to download around 1500 raw files I'd shot.  I used three different cameras, including:  The Canon 5Dmk2, the Canon 60D and the Canon 1Dmk2N.  I used several Canon L zooms but my favorite lens of the morning was the Zeiss 85mm 1.4.  The images I shot with it seemed to have a sparkle and a snap that's more elusive to capture with the zooms.

So, after downloading the files and checking for any issues, and after recharging the batteries for all the cameras I got to packing for my next job, my service as the volunteer photographer for the mighty Rollingwood Waves swim team.  It was a hot day.  The meet started at 5pm.  I'd been trying to cover everything at previous meets and had been hauling around two 1D series cameras along with a 24-105mm L lens and a 70-200mm L lens.  I wanted to change up everything and in the process change my point of view for the rest of the afternoon.  To do that I committed to one lens and one camera body and headed to the pool.  I chose to work with the morning's winning combination:  The 1Dmk2n + Zeiss 85mm 1.4.  I have the 1Dmk2n fitted with a split image rangefinder screen that's optimized for manual focus and it works very, very well.  Especially in bright sun.

The pool area was packed.  There were 180+ swimmers on our team and over 200 swimmers on the Westwood Country Club team.  Add in three hundred or so parents and coaches and you have quite a big crowd.  Our pool has electronic timing and we tend to run a fast meet but even so it took nearly an hour and a half just to run thru the 25 and 50 yard freestyle events.  Heat after heat.  In the heat.

Instead of shooting the swimming action I spent the day photographing the kids.  And, in the process, remembered the things I love about the 85mm Zeiss lens.  It's great to work in close and to be able to drop backgrounds out with luscious, soft transitions.  When focused correctly on peoples' eyes there is a sparkle that gives images extra dimension.  The focal length on the 1D camera equals about a 113mm lens on a full frame 35mm camera so I can fill a frame with a person's head and not be right on top of them.  The Zeiss lens isn't necessarily sharper than the 85mm Canon lens I had been using but it seems cleaner and, for want of a better word, more "accurate" to the way the scenes look to my eyes.  But the snap and the sparkle is the thing.  I uploaded these files in a larger size than I usually do so you could click on them and see a much larger image. Note the detail in the boy's eyes above.  I may not be putting what I'm seeing in words very well but maybe the image will show you what I mean....

There's a distinct operational advantage to working with one lens and one body.  It's easier to get into a shooting rhythm because you start to anticipate, well before you bring the camera to your eye, what will be in the frame and how the background will most probably look.  That's a cool thing because you begin previsualizing how your shots might look instead of bringing a camera and zoom lens up to your eye and then zooming around hoping to find a workable composition.  I've always thought that the fewer choices I have to (or can) make the more powerful the photos.

 After my experiences last Sunday trying to photograph Suzan-Lori Parks in a dark rehearsal studio I was a bit nervous about my ability to quickly manually focus with autofocus based cameras.  I guess the morning's working session helped me get my focusing eye back in shape because there were very few missed in the afternoon's take.  I stayed at apertures around f2.8.  Sometimes playing with f2 and occasionally messing around with 3.5 but never stopping down past that.  If someone goes out of focus in the background then that's how the art was meant to be.  I know the Canon 5Dmk2 is supposed to have much better IQ than the three generations older 1Dmk2n but I like the way the older camera shortens the reaction time and fires with much less shutter or system lag.  And I am convinced that, for the most part, the inherent quality in both cameras still exceeds my abilities to extract it.  The 85mm lens gets me closer to my goal.

I'm happy with the images I got for the might Rollingwood Waves.  And I'm glad I was only carrying around one camera and one fixed lens.  The part of my brain that usually has to keep track of which zoom is on which body and which one would be best to shoot in a given situation got to take a rest.  And I found out just how much system resources that constant set of subroutines demands.  Freed of largely unnecessary decision making the rest of my brain could spend time analyzing the scenes in front of me and figuring out how to fit them into a fixed construct.  It was like working a with a reduced instruction set computation.  More a+b= photo than a convoluted equation with lots of variables and multiple correct answers.




Next weekend, at one of our saturday morning swim meets I'm going to bring along a 300 2.8 and shoot some video.  We'll see if that makes it into our end of the year slide show.  Big fun.  Cool water.

If you don't own the company this one is NSFW: Eeyore's Birthday Party. Austin. 2011. Photo Insanity. In a good way....

My favorite party of the year is Eeyore's Birthday Party at Pease Park, here in Austin.  For the last 30 years or so it's been a wonderful excuse to dress up (or undress) and officially welcome Spring and craziness to Austin.  This year was no different.  The barely clad women danced inside the drum circle.  Live bands played all over the park and the smell of pot wafted thru the air like incense in a head shop from the 1970's.  If your city doesn't have a party like this one  you might want to start one.  Or buy a plane ticket and come join us.  

This is, maybe, my 25th Eeyore's party.  In the early years I was a more active participant but for the past few years I've been more of a spectator.  One thing I'm pretty adamant about for my own work is rejecting the easy way out, photographically.  I see a lot of guys with big-ass zoom lenses, trying to take photos of characters and nymphs from far, far away.  I think that's cheating.  I think you should be of the crowd and photograph with the tacit approval of the subjects.  My advice for photographer attendees is to "grow a pair,"  leave the voyeur-zooms at home and get in close.    

To make it easier and to keep from being paralyzed by having to make choices I take one camera and one lens.  If you've read my blog for a while you'll probably guess that the lens is a 50mm.  It makes you get close.  And it's more fun.  My choice of cameras for today was the Canon 1Dmk2N.  And I'm glad it doesn't have a video mode because it would be another layer of choices.....  The camera I pulled out of the drawer is the one I'm using the split image screen with.  It was great with the Zeiss 50mm 1.4.  I set the lens on f4.5, put the camera on "A" and the ISO on 160 and shot raw.  On an 8 gigabyte SD card you get 772 raw files.  I must be slipping because by the time I called it quits (in the heat of the afternoon) I still had a couple hundred images in reserve.  

The party goes on till dark.  But I got hot and thirsty so I walked down the street to Whole Foods for an incredible light ale, full of hops, and then called it a day around 6pm.  Following are my quick edit favorites with captions (when I felt like a caption was called for......).   Will we see you down there next year?  Help us keep Austin Weird !!!

The woods on the west side of the park are like a magnet for the......alternative, alternative lifestyle people.  I spent some time up there photographing but eventually the pot fumes started to make me woozy (and hungry).

The variety of butterfly and fairy wings attached to beautiful women was amazing.  I love the blue.  And the sunglasses...

Moving away from the Milne books this person decided on a darker interpretation of Christopher Robin's childhood stories.  More of a Norse Prince of Darkness vibe....

No public gathering would be complete without the minstrels.  And they sang.

Some people dress up with wings while others have "live snake" bling.  Funny to hear women asking, "Can I pet your python?  Very inappropriate.

While all manner of face and body painting is expected I saw so many tatoo'ed people I thought I was in prison.  Really.  And the piercings were awesome too.

The star of the dance and drum circle.  And she never spilled a drop of beer.

Austin photographer, John Langmore, tests the limits of the social contract by stepping inside the dance circle and inside the five foot interpersonal space boundary to feed his hungry film Leica.  No, really, right in the middle of the dance circle.  Yes.  In the middle.  

This young lady has a very big unicycle.  I didn't care whether or not I shot the unicycle but her face was too adorably cute to pass up.  Angelic?

The dance circle princess leads her people to the western hills.  Right out of a Tolkien book.

This couple forgot to bring their drums or any other musical instrument so they decided to play percussion on her butt instead.  I couldn't hear much but they did have the rhythm "down pat."

The Alpha leader of the main drum circle.  

Part of the Eskimo drum circle.  Did I mention that it was, like, 95 degrees this afternoon?  But still, it was a more seasonal outfit than the guy in the giant Winnie the Pooh outfit......

Thing One and Thing Two.  Perhaps different than Dr. Suess imagined them.... I vote: Most creative.

Hundreds and hundreds of dogs.  Largely, they were not amused.

And no Austin festivity would be complete without......the guys who wear Dickies T-Shirts and give me caps.  Ambidextrous beer handling skills?  Check!

On my six block walk to Whole Foods I went along the hiking trail, under Lamar and saw this wonderfully calm image.  After four or five hours with the nobility of Austin this was a welcome respite.  There's something about industrial piers I find comforting.

What a wonderful end to a busy and corporate sort of week.  It's stuff like this that makes Austin special.  And Eeyore's also serves as a fund rasier for many local charities.  Every beer, turkey leg and waffle cake you buy helps support one non-profit or another.  If you don't like to watch people having fun you should probably steer clear.  It's a judgement free zone for the day.  And that's nice.