Aida. For Zach Theatre. Classic studio lighting.

All material ©2014 Kirk Tuck and presented exclusively at www.visualsciencelab.blogspot.dom  If you are reading this on another site, without proper attribution it is not an authorized use of the material. If you are reading this on unauthorized site DO NOT CLICK on any links in the body copy as it may infect your computer with serious viruses. Sorry to have to put this warning here but a recent search turned up dozens of similar infringements. Thanks for your authentic readership. 

©2014 Kirk Tuck, All Rights Reserved.

I've been cleaning up the studio/office and throwing stuff away like crazy. I've tossed out white formica and endless worn frames and pounds of shredded old invoices and correspondence. As the studio becomes less visually cluttered my desire to do more portraits seems to grow. Clean slate syndrome.

I was heading out the door to buy another roll of seamless just now. A light brown. Kind of a burnt sienna. But I detoured to Michael's art supply store instead and bought a tube of acrylic paint that matches perfectly. I'd rather paint what I need on the endless sea of white seamless I already own. Seems more fun and wastes less paper. Also saves me a long drive through our "treacherous" arctic conditions....still 26 degrees here in Austin.  Now, where did I put my paint brush?

The above was shot in the studio against a black background. Main lighting is a medium octabank while the backlight and side light are both small soft boxes used in close and at very low power. Shot on a Kodak DCS 760C camera with a Nikon 60mm micro lens. f 5.6-8  

All material ©2014 Kirk Tuck and presented exclusively at www.visualsciencelab.blogspot.dom  If you are reading this on another site, without proper attribution it is not an authorized use of the material. If you are reading this on unauthorized site DO NOT CLICK on any links in the body copy as it may infect your computer with serious viruses. Sorry to have to put this warning here but a recent search turned up dozens of similar infringements. Thanks for your authentic readership. 

A Whole Different Color Palette, A whole different look.

It's funny sometimes.  I'll mention the color palette or "look" of a particular camera and all the measurement nerds will rush in and tell me in volumes how any image can imitate any other image with a little bit of deft work in Photoshop.  Then I'll talk about the "look" of a particular camera to the newly converted (fill in the blank with: Olympus, Fuji or whatever) owner and they'll wax eloquent about "Olympus Color."  In their minds it's a prime reason to own the system.

But even if it makes technical workers unhappy just about every family of cameras has a distinct look and feel and, while you might get 90% there duplicating that feel from another camera with hours of PhotoShop work, if you have eyes you'll see the DNA of the camera's family come shining through.  I've written before that I own several different camera systems because I like the way some handle some subjects and others handle different subjects.

All of these images are from the Kodak SLR/n. It was the second series of DSLR cameras that photographers could shoot without an anti-aliasing filter in front of the sensor. (The first were the DCS 760 series in which you could choose user changeable IR filters with no AA or an AA filter with IR built in.  The SLR/n was a "no choice" camera. You shot with no filter. That's how it came from the factory.  Shooting without the AA filter made the files much sharper. The detail is rendered at a very high level.  Just like in the new Nikon 800e.  But the SLR/n had big, fat pixels and it could go two or three stops deeper into the aperture ring before provoking sharpness defying diffraction.  The camera was heaven and hell to shoot with.  Some things, like fabric with repeating patterns would cause moiré to pop up like garden weeds. But with portraits and architecture the files would be richly detailed.  

The Kodak SLR/n had a more muted color palette and a longer contrast range than present day cameras.  This meant that the files had lots and lots of dynamic range and could hold on to detail in the shadows and highlights just like a badger.  I'd love to see a DXO rating for the sensor.  I imagine that it clicks all the right boxes for their parameters.

This (above) image is a full frame from the camera.  The file would have been 4500 pixels by 3000 pixels but I've reduced it to 2000 pixels on the long side to make everything load up quicker. 

The file below is (once you've clicked on it, opened it in a separate window and then clicked it again...) a 100% crop from the image above.  I have compared it with similar files from both the 24 megapixel Sonys and the 24 megapixel Nikon D3200 and, to my eye, the Kodak actually resolves slightly more detail. This image was taken with the standard 50mm Nikon 1.8 lens.

Debates rage as to which D800 people should consider but you would do yourself a service to read Thom Hogan's recent review here:  Hogan's D800 Review  You might be startled by what you find out about the effects of diffraction and the differences between cameras.  I'll cut to it. The D800e (without filter) is best at wide apertures with fast lenses.  Neither is amazing once you stop it down.  Not the ultimate camera for people (architecture photographers) who need f11 and f16.

While my Kodak cameras are getting long in the tooth and starting to have handling and button issues I am still happy every time I pick up the SLR/n to shoot. I find that it's combination of full frame, wonderful colors and high sharpness is pretty wonderful.

I prefer it to a number of more recent and highly regarded products from other companies.  A pity that Kodak's products were ahead of their times (and the discernment of general users) while their marketing was ten years behind.....

This is a photo of my friend, Bernard.  We were having lunch at Artz Ribhouse, the latest casualty of the recession.  I love the out of focus areas in the background. The 50mm on the Kodak is pretty sweet.

Nostalgia for the good old days....of early digital.

This is not so much a walk through remembrance gardens as it is a quick salute to one old war horse of a camera.  My Kodak DCS 760's last battery bit the dust.  It holds enough charge to get off maybe ten or fifteen images before shutting down altogether.  I've made no secret through the years that this is my favorite digital camera for all the same reason I've always talked about here.  I doesn't have an extensive menu of choices.  It was built to be a RAW only camera and Jpeg capability was added later via a firmware upgrade.  There are very few user settings to work with.  There's no "dynamic range enhancement" feature because the camera already kicked butt when it came to dynamic range.

There's only two focus modes and while you can set single and continuous for frame rates you'll only get 1.5 fps as your fastest throughput.  There are no "sports modes".   There's no "vivid"  or "landscape" setting.  The body is based on Nikon's venerable F5 and the whole thing is a nearly five pound block of metal.  The screen on the back is miserable.  It pushes you to double check what you're doing with a good light meter.  And, even in their prime of life, the batteries sucked and the camera sucked down batteries.

So why do I love this camera?  Well,  it's the same reason any photographer should love any camera:  The files look so nice.   So very, very nice.  Even today I love the look I get from this camera.  It's enough to make me plug in the A/C adapter and get busy.  When I look back over the last ten years at all the digital cameras I've owned this one consistently gave me images and campaigns that looked different and better.  Almost magical.   In fact, one of the things that attracted me to the first generation of  Olympus professional cameras (as exemplified by the E1's that I still own.....) was the look of the files from the Kodak sensors.  So different from the other solutions on the market.

Yes,  I've been using PhotoShop for decades.  I can probably emulate the look with enough post processing but the point is that the art just squirted out of this camera with reckless abandon.

The shot above was part of a series for the Austin Lyric Opera.  We shot it with a Nikon 105 DC lens nearly wide open.  It was lit with a six by six foot screen to the left of frame, very close in and slightly over the top of Meredith.  The main light source was a 1,000 watt Profoto ProTungsten, continuous halogen light.  The background (nearly 60 feet away) was lit with a single 300 watt DeSisti spotlight.  I used an 80B filter on the camera to bring up the blue spectrum and avoid blue channel noise in the file.

The image was processed in Kodak's Photo Desk software and then tweaked in PhotoShop.

I had other cameras available to me at the time but I chose this one because it matched my vision of the palette I wanted for this job.  Too often we buy one camera or one system then shoehorn everything into that one set of tools.  And it's not always an optimum choice.  The painfully high res camera may not always be the ultimate choice.  One system may have lens strengths in one area by not another.  Your mood may change.  Even now,  with all the feedback I've gotten over buying some Canon gear it's good to remember that I shoot with more than that one system.

Granted, it's easier to shoot with the cleanest, highest res LCD's as guides.  It's nice to have great high ISO performance.  But I still keep two different Kodak cameras around for their unique color and file contrast.  I keep a Sony R1 around because it love that lens for outdoor stuff.  I love the Pen series from Olympus for its feel and its gorgeous jpegs (and good movie mode) and I still keep a drawer full of Rollei SLR MF film cameras when I want real black and white and not just the canned SilverFX  looks. (I'm sure I'll hear from SilverFX fans so I'll just say that they're really good.  They're not Tri-X on Seagull warmtone or Ilfobrom Gallerie).

I'm not writing this to suggest that you rush out and buy old cameras.  Or even new cameras.  I wouldn't have brought it up at all if I hadn't just put together a portfolio full of portraits and lifestyle shots and spent the better part of a month selecting and printing images.  I assumed that the old Kodak images would fall apart compared to some of the newer stuff I'd been shooting on the Canon 5D2 but it just wasn't the case.  When it comes to portraits it's a whole different ballgame than technical subjects with lots of detail and sharp edges.  At 13 by 19 it all looked technically good.  And that included images from the 6 megapixel Kodak, a ten megapixel Olympus, some Nikon D2x files, some Canon files and even an entry from the Leaf AFi7 system (39 megapixels).  They all coexisted just fine in one book.

I showed the book yesterday at a design firm called Pentagram.  The designer I showed the book to stopped and savored the four images from the Austin Lyric Opera series.  I included a variation of the one above.  To her, the look outweighed any sort of technical differences.  It might have been a different ballgame if I'd been showing landscapes or big production ad shots.  But for portraits.  I think I was right a year ago.  The Kodak's were a milestone.

Note:  I wrote this last Summer.  And I'm reposting it today because I was able to get brand new batteries for the DCS 760 and so I've been shooting with it again.  It's wonderful.  It's also written as an argument for people who want to hold my feet to the fire for not sticking with one brand, one style, one way of being a photographer.  Photography is a celebration of diversity and evolving ideas and techniques.  Not a hobby embedded in the amber of "best practices."  That's great for doctors and engineers but nonsense for artists and visual communicators....