A few days ago I wrote a post about lighting on location with LEDs. Here's how the final image looks.

Portrait Subject. 

Several days ago I wrote a post that showed how I was using LED lights to illuminate portrait subjects at a law firm here in Austin. I wanted to follow up that description of the technical stuff by showing what the final result looks like so you can better understand what I was trying to accomplish at the shoot. The image above may not be the one finally selected by the client for inclusion in their website but it is a good example of what we were going for. No major retouching has been done.

To refresh, the taking camera was a Sony A7R2, using a Rokinon 85mm t1.5 cine lens set at f2.8. My goal in lighting is to first make the subject look great while matching to a consistent look for all the thirty+ images I've made for the same company over the last few months. My lighting goal is to control the color and quality of the light on the subject while effectively blending the existing light from three different, continuous sources (exterior through the windows (blue/cyan), mixed spectrum florescent, and more yellow spectrum from compact fluorescents in ceiling cans). The effectiveness of precisely targeted, custom white balancing can not be underestimated.

That's it. 

(Sorry for the delay between the first blog and the example photo. I wanted to receive permission to use my client's portrait before posting it here. Not necessarily required but very appropriate....).

Images from my coverage of the Keller Williams RED DAY event. Shot with the three different Sony sensor format cameras. And a small smattering of lenses. Click to enlarge.

A7R2 w/24-70mm

A subset of the KW in-house video crew.

I have written, yesterday and today, tangentially, about my photo assignment to document a day of community service by a company. With permission to use some of the images from the shoot in hand I thought I would show a range of shots taken over the course of the day, along with some camera information; just to  give an idea of the scope of the project. Plus it's always fun (at least I think it is) to see what the real versus imagined differences are between cameras. Different end targets will demand different levels of quality but...if you click on these images and look at the bigger versions at least you will see what the three different cameras look like at 2200 pixels wide on the long end. 

The client was real estate company, Keller Williams. Here's how their company describes yesterday's event: "Inaugurated in 2009, RED Day (Renew, Energize and Donate) is Keller Williams Realty’s annual, company-wide day of community service. Keller Williams associates are asked to “give where they live” and dedicate a day to renewing and energizing the communities they serve."

To recap: There were about 200 volunteers (here in Austin; thousands more across the country) doing things as diverse as fixing up a playground, reading and recording books onto video for hospital bound kids, painting and repairing schools; donating, labeling and shelving books for school libraries, reading to elementary school classes and even putting on a comedy/drama (with five live shows) for the entire third grade of an elementary school. My role was to be a visual documentarian of the day. To do that I used three different cameras and two different, interchangeable lenses. The cameras were: The RX10iii, the a6300 and the A7R2; all current Sony products. The lenses were the Zeiss 24/70mm f4.0 and the Sony 18-105mm f4.0 G lens. The fixed lens on the RX10iii covers angles of view corresponding to 24mm-600mm (yummy!).

A7R2 w/24-70mm

A7R2 w/24-70mm

Chris, the CEO, reading for the camera.

A7R2 w/24-70mm @1250 ISO

Checking in books and labeling them.

A7R2 in crop mode @5000 ISO

The "Hero" of the school plays!

A7R2 in crop mode @1600 ISO

A quick look at the corporate messaging.

A7R2 in crop mode @5000 ISO

The dramatic comedy team at Perez Elementary School.

A6300 + 18-105 @2000 ISO

CEO being interviewed by local media.

A6300 + 18-105 @2000 ISO

Pre-kickoff orientation meeting (with real breakfast tacos).

A6300 + 18-105 @2000 ISO

A6300 + 18-105 @2000 ISO

A6300 + 18-105 @2000 ISO

A6300 + 18-105 @2000 ISO

A7R2+24/70mm @ 1600

One of the youngest volunteers sorting books at BookSpring 

A7R2+24/70mm @ 1600

A6300+18/105mm @4000 ISO

A6300+18/105mm @4000 ISO

RX10iii. 

Fixing up the playground at an early childhood development center.

RX10iii. 

RX10iii. 

RX10iii. 

RX10iii. 

RX10iii. 

RX10iii. 

RX10iii. 

RX10iii. 

RX10iii. 

RX10iii. @ISO 2000

Back to the drama at Perez Elementary.

RX10iii. @ISO 2000

The angst of possibly having to cancel Summer vacation.

RX10iii. @ISO 2000

RX10iii. @ISO 2000

RX10iii. @ISO 4000

At the breakfast launch. Me just showing off the AWB and ISO 4000 performance (under insanely mixed lighting---) with the RX10iii.

A7R2+24/70mm ISO 800

I've never yet met a photographer who looked forward to making group shots. 

The A7R2 did nicely for me. It's a tight squeeze but no one is puffing out at the corners....

These kinds of jobs require me to mix with CEOs and other corporate people, become one with the bigger corporate team, and also get by to a number of schools, and other institutions, and to do it without drawing too much attention to myself. I want to make everyone comfortable and happy in front of the camera; at least as much as is possible. The rest of the time I want to hide behind my cloak of invisibility which is most easily done by being right in the middle of things. 

I had an absolute blast. While the RX10iii can't match the other two cameras for high ISO it does quite well in the lower ranges and I'd be comfortable using it in jobs like this all the way out to 1600. If your final target is the web you can get away with higher ISOs but you can't always go to 100% magnifications and not see some real noise reduction going on. I set the camera to High Iso Noise Reduction: Standard because I knew the images would look fine for my client's intended use (web P.R.---team building). In fact, the images from the smallest sensor camera might have looked better if I had turned down the noise reduction and dealt with it in post, but the only people who will notice that difference are other photographers peeking too closely behind the curtain. 

Remember, you can click the images to see them larger.  

A quick look at one lens that fits into a popular mould. The Sony 70-200mm f4.0 G.

Sony's answer to Nikon and Canon's 70-200mm f4.0 lenses.

I bought a new camera on Friday but you know that no one really buys into a new camera system without grabbing some new lenses to go along for the ride. I bought two. In this blog I will write about the one that makes me most happy; the 70-200mm f4.0 G zoom. It actually has more letters in its name but I can't keep up with all the abbreviated garble. 

For the last two years I have been using one of Nikon's 80-200mm f2.8 zooms. It's an earlier, push-pull design and I have absolutely no complaints about the optical performance I got from it. It's really sharp! Even though we now require lenses to be sharp from corner to corner, wide open to consider them passable, that lens from the 1990's was a very competent optical system for use in the real world. 

The thing that bothered me about the lens was the weight and the lack of a tripod collar. Given the design and the operational target of that lens there's really not much Nikon could have done about the weight. Their reasoning for not including a tripod collar was a bit disingenuous though. They suggested that the lens was aimed at photojournalists who would rarely ever want to use a tripod and who needed fast, handheld operation. The time spent removing a collar might mean precious seconds that could spell the difference between winning that Pulitzer or not....

But it was a disaster for a studio/tripod shooter. I liked the