OT: Post Swim Croissant Tasting at Cantine Italian Cafe and Grill in Austin, Texas. Post workout fun.

Croissant Trio from Pieous, Dripping Springs, Texas.

I woke up this morning, gulped down a cup of hot Irish Breakfast tea with milk and a tiny bit of sugar and headed out the door for the 8:30-10:00 a.m. Masters Swim Practice. I was a few minutes late getting to the deck and when I got there all the medium pace lanes were filled up. I ended up sharing a lane with a notoriously dedicated triathlete whose workout philosophy is harder, faster, better. She dragged me through 4800 yards and I was spent by the end. Feeling virtuous but physically spent.

Afterward fellow swimmer, Emmett Fox, asked me if I had my camera (yes, always) and reminded me that we'd be forsaking our mundane local Starbucks for after-swim coffee in preference for a morning at Cantine Italian Cafe And Grill. Emmett and swimming spouse ( partner of one who swims... ) Dr. Jim Grubbs were going to host a tasting event to decide, once and for all, which bakery had the best croissants in all of Austin. No burnt coffee and refrigerated pastries at Starbucks this week!

Cantine, the restaurant, is closed on Saturday morning so we had the entire place to ourselves. Jim and Emmett had put together a selection of eight candidates from favorite local bakeries, as well as one mystery entry, the identity of which we discovered at the end. They put out three each of the croissants on nine plates and numbered the plates. No one was told the provenance of the pastries until the tasting was over and the scores tabulated. The eight local candidates for butter and flour supremacy were from: 

Baguette et Chocolat, Texas French Bread, Sweetish Hill Bakery, Easy Tiger Bakery, Cafe No Sé (S. Congress Hotel), La Patisserie, Elizabeth Street Cafe, and a bakery near chef Emmett's home in Dripping Springs --- Pieous. 

We tasted in small amounts, clearing our palettes with wonderful, stout coffee (thanks Cantine!) and we made notes and rated each entry on a scale of 1 to 5. The results were tabulated and the winner (by consensus) was Pieous Bakery from Dripping Springs. The very, very close second was the entry from Café No Se. 

I brought a Sony RX10iii camera along and made images of our encounter with good food. It was a fun way to spend a toasty and humid Saturday morning; swilling coffee in the air conditioned comfort of one of Austin's best restaurants while chewing on croissants. Especially fun for me as I had my camera in my hand. 

So, the surprise inclusion, made, I am sure, tongue-in-cheek, was three croissants that Jim bought in the frozen section at the local Trader Joe's Market. He took them home, followed the baking instructions and included them in the artisanal mix. Anonymity didn't matter, even the least discerning in the group was able to understand the difference in texture and overall taste. Like one other in the group the Trader Joe's version had added sugar, which we believe D.Q.'s it from being "authentic." 

We disbanded and went our separate ways, planning to meet for next week's coffee at Cafe No Se.

An earlier motion to move to McDonalds was roundly vetoed.

Why the move from Starbucks after 15 or so years? Easy, they remodeled the local store and did an incredibly bad job with the remodel. It is much louder, the overall seating was reduced and the seating that is left is almost impossible to configure for any group of more than four. The final straw is the chain's new devotion to costumer confusion. They changed the flow and now no one knows how or where to line up to order their stuff. Instead of a line you get a confused group of people who would dearly love to get coffee but have no idea of who is next or why. No signage. No stantions. No directional supports. It's very sad when companies make customer experiences meaner and dowdier. And whoever sold them the pin spot LEDs that shine in everyone's eyes, no matter where they sit, did no favors to people who are sensitive to good lighting and/or good design. Next time they remodel they might consider hiring architects, or at least consider keeping the ones they use (if they did) sober and rational. So there is a basket of good reasons to shun this member of the chain and search out better. local providers. My advice? Short the stock...especially if all their remodels turn out as poorly as this one did...

#5. My personal favorites for flavor and texture. From No Sé at the South Congress Hotel.

The overall winner.

The runner up. By a nanometer.

Our host was Cantine; my favorite South Austin restaurant. Renowned for their great pizzas. 

Emmett preparing the blind taste test. 

Martha takes notes.

Rating for appearance. 

Incidentally, Pieous wins for best appearance. 

discussing the fine points of baked goods. 

The Co-Captains: Dr. Jim Grubbs and Restauranteur, Emmett Fox.

Lisa Fox (co-owner, Cantine) slices croissants into sample sized servings. 

Patty and Jim get serious with their evaluations.

Stout and virtuous, free flowing coffee to cleanse our palettes between samples...

We rated on both texture and taste.

Olympus OM5-TWO Delivers the Goods in the High-Res Mode. Two jobs in one day with more pixels that I know what to do with!!! An amazing keeper.

I started out my day at a tech company. My job was to photograph several servers and then a rack of servers against a white background. We'll be clipping out the backgrounds later tonight. Recently I did a job similar to this one for the same company using the Nikon D810 and several different Nikon macro lenses. That job was very successful. The client will use the images in everything from website illustrations to trade show graphics. 

And while everyone was quite satisfied with the output from Nikon's best camera I am never one to leave well enough alone, nor do I like to shoot similar stuff the same way every time I head out the door. As I was packing the night before I decided to take the Olympus EM5-Two cameras along with me this time, instead. I packed the two camera bodies and about ten little lenses into a Pelican case, grabbed five LED panels of assorted sizes, and my favorite location tripod and headed up to North Austin to set up a temporary studio in my client's big conference room. 

I have finally really mastered the Hi-Res mode in the Olympus cameras and I was determined to give the system a workout today. I used the Panasonic 12-35mm lens and shot everything at f8.0. That's the smallest aperture the system will let you set while using the Hi-Res mode. I am curious to find out if I can cheat and use an old manual focus lens on an adapter but that's for another time. I set the Hi-Res to give me a full second delay between touching the shutter button and starting the eight shot process+processing.  The Gitzo tripod I used settles down fast and I was as delicate with the shutter button as could be. Like a surgeon. Seriously.

(Quick addition for those uninitiated into the Hi-Res world of Olympus: The Hi-Res setting is a menu item that allows the camera to shoot eight fast frames of a subject. The camera moves the sensor between each exposure by half the pixel size. The oversampling creates files at a size of 40 megapixels and does so without the danger of aliasing or moire. The color is sampled in such a way that it is more pure than color from a single shot camera. It MUST be done on a tripod or you'll just end up with a mess. This new feature is very, very good.)

I was nervous about using the feature on the shoot but reviewed every single shot fired, at 14X. They were all perfect and perfectly detailed. Re-badged Dell servers never looked so good. I was very happy with the results, more so because my paranoia at what might go wrong pushed me to make a series of careful custom white balances and to meter more intently than I might have if just shooting routine, 16 megapixel raw files. I wrapped up that shoot and headed back toward downtown to my next appointment. 

You'll remember that I've been working on a video for a new restaurant called, Cantine. My friend and partner in video crime, James Webb, and I, had shot a bunch of live action cooking and bar shots last week, using the Olympus EM-5-Two cameras and the same buffet of lenses. We decided that we wanted to incorporate some hero shots of the food into the video so we arranged to get to Cantine after their lunch rush and have the chef prepare four or five dishes for us to videotape (with a bit of camera movement) and also to make still images. 

I manned the still camera while the more seasoned and experienced motion artist grabbed the video duty. I set the camera for the Hi-Res mode and did all of my static shots with the bigger files. The top images of this blog is the full frame of the 40 megapixel shot (reduced to 2100 pixels for the blog) while the bottom image, just below, is a 100% crop of the same image. 

I am very happy with the color, tonality and sheer resolution of the photograph. I think it's wonderful. I might select a lighter version for the final use but I grabbed this one first because I was so excited to see just how well the system handled this sort of shot. 

The lens used on this image was the Sigma 60mm f2.8 dn Art lens that I so eloquently praised not long ago. I think it's great wide open and even better stopped down to f4.5 or f5.6. If you shoot m4:3 and don't have this lens you should consider spending the small sum of $220 and adding it to your collection. It's a very nicely done lens and it turns in one great performance after the other. 

I've now shot about 6 hours of video with the Olympus EM5-Two cameras and a selection of lenses and I am upgrading my appraisal of this camera considerably. While the learning curve is a bit steeper than some other cameras I shoot with it is capable of pretty tremendous still image quality and very good video files. I don't regret my choice to upgrade to these cameras in the least. 

The usefulness of the Hi-Res setting for food photography, technical products and architecture should endear it to a lot of users who are eager to downsize from bigger systems while keeping the quality of their deliverables high. If you try one you will almost undoubtably love it.

James and I should have the video up in the next week or so and I think you'll be impressed by the footage(?) these cameras can turn out.

That's all I wanted to say. Now I need to get back to making my clipping paths and retouching fingerprints off the server chassis. That's what I get for not bringing along my cotton gloves to the first shoot.....

Added June 18, 2015: About the iPhone App: The iPhone app for the EM-5.2 will trigger the camera but NOT in the Hi-Res mode. It only works with regular Raw and Jpeg settings. In a previous blogpost from my first adventures with the camera I was mistaken about being able to trigger the camera in hi-res mode. I was working (and being frustrated and on a schedule) I shot a number of images with the Hi-Res mode released by hand and then tried to do the same thing with the phone app. I reset the camera to raw at one point and continued doing the job. When I looked at the images later there were a number of Hi-Res files that were sharp and well done and I assumed that those had come from my the phone app triggering, not remembering my switch back to raw. Instead they were a result of my delicate touch. But it was hit and miss. I am beyond happy to finally find, and learn how to use, the delay method and it works solidly every time. Sorry for my inaccurate testing procedures on the first go around. I blame it on the staff here at VSL.... And the lack of an 8.5 x11 inch, color illustrated, leather bound owner's manual from Olympus....