Get "The Lisbon Portfolio" Kindle version on Sale!!!

I am doing a "countdown" sale of the electronic (Kindle) version of the Lisbon Portfolio on Amazon.com. Today the price is only $2.99 (regularly $9.99) in a day or two it will jump up to $4.99 and then go to $6.99 and then, at the end of the week, it goes back to the regular price. 

I thought I would do this for readers who are feeling a bit cash strapped right now but might want to join in the fun and adventure with our hero, Henry White. If you've been waiting for the price to drop it just did. But only for a few days.

Read the reviews and then get my book for less than the price of a medium sized latte at Starbucks. 

You'll be happy you did. I'll be grateful you did!

The Lisbon Portfolio, The story of photographer, Henry White, is now available as a 472 page, 5.5 inch by 8.5 inch printed book from CreateSpace. To get a copy right now click here.  In about a week the book will be in stock on Amazon.com in addition to CreateSpace. If you'd prefer the Kindle version, click here.

I was first alerted to the arrival of the UPS truck by Studio Dog. She leapt from the couch where she had been getting the space behind her ears scratched and raced to the front door either barking out an alarm or, maybe expressing unfettered joy perhaps because she knew what the man in the brown uniform might be delivering.

I brought the box into the kitchen (all important boxes seem to get opened in the kitchen) and sliced it open. Inside were the three proof copies I'd ordered of the novel, The Lisbon Portfolio. Belinda insisted on proof copies as she wanted to make sure that the cover printed exactly as she designed it. When she got home from her real job as a professional print graphic designer she gave the book a thorough exam and declared it fit for consumption. 

Frankly I am shocked at how elated I am to see the book in actual print form and to hold it in my hands and turn the pages. I guess it's because I grew up reading real, paper books with the fervor of a true addict. Something about having a print version makes it so real for me. You've got to consider that I've worked on the story for so long and in an electronic format one's reality is comprised of one visible, tangible page at a time. With the printed copy I could feel the weight and promise of all the pages in my hands.

I abandoned everything else I had scheduled last night and crawled into my favorite chair to see how the book reads. As a book, book. I was intrigued to find that the story seemed so new to me, so exciting. I stayed up late and read my favorite parts. The part with the weaponized Leica. The chapter with the bloody restroom. The mysterious woman in the glowing shaft of light. Every passage, translated onto paper seemed almost new to me. I loved the experience.

We are producing the book at CreateSpace. It's Amazon's print on demand company. You will be able to source the book from CreateSpace at the first link above, right now. In about 4 days the book should (almost) magically appear on the regular Amazon.com site, right along with the list of other books I've written. When that launch happens I will announce a link there as well. Finally, CreateSpace distributes books to most major distributors so there's a good chance that you can order a copy through your own favorite bookseller if you'd like. Fulfillment should be pretty quick.

After reviewing the book I ordered a case of 12 copies to give out to reviewers and my favorite bloggers. I am thrilled with the way the electronic copies of the book are selling and I'm hoping that our readers really come to like the character, Henry White. I'm already hard at work on the sequel.

One thing checked off the bucket list of life. A novel. Now I need to start training for Everest...

Here's the link for the Kindle version: The Lisbon Portfolio

#novel
#actionadventure

A long week of photography and some thoughts about the winners and losers in the camera bag.

And the winner of "Kirk's Favorite Corporate Event Shooting Camera Shoot Out is...." No drama or build up here: The GH4. Love EVFs and fast focus and good low light AF and great files? Stop reading, get the credit card out and go to town.

I've been out working since Sunday at a conference about finance, real estate and the process of taking 80,000 single family houses into a corporate portfolio, re-habbing them and then, ultimately securitizing them. The conference is by invitation only and the attendance is limited to the kind of people who wear really nice suits to the office, every day.

The event took place at the W Hotel here in Austin and also at the Moody Theater. The Moody Theater is where the filming is done for Austin City Limits and the "A" list of musicians who have performed there is...amazing. I was there for the registration and social events at the theater on Sunday and then spent 12 hours a day in the Moody and W on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday photographing every speaker, panelist and keynoter to hit the stage. I also worked in very low light to get audience reaction shots and I worked from the balcony to get wide stage shots to show off the amazing (mostly LED and arc) lighting for the wide stage set. I did "classic" social photography of the dinners and cocktail parties.

I wore a suit and tie and shoes that had been polished within the last 30 days. It was the complete package. I can't show the work from the show or discuss exactly what was discussed (NDA) but what I can do is pick apart what worked photographically and what didn't. And since I am crazy enough to try out three different camera models all within the same show I can say what worked for me and what worked less well. I was surprised actually and what I found out made me reconsider almost everything...

Urban Lifestyle Specialist, ATMTX, pens a short (very short) review of the Lisbon Portfolio.

Go see it at his blog here: http://blog.atmtxphoto.com/2014/08/25/haiku-review-the-lisbon-portfolio/

I love it.

For Readers of "The Lisbon Portfolio." Henry White sent along one of the shots described in the novel...

© 1999 Henry White & Kirk Tuck

From a trade show many years ago in Lisbon, Portugal. Image taken with a Leica M4 and a 50mm Summicron lens. It was a week and a half of indecision. Sometimes I wanted color and some times I wanted black and white and I tried only to take one camera along with me on my walks so I was constantly trying to decide which way to go. I  thought I never really got it right but to be perfectly honest I've never been the best judge of what works in which medium. Somehow, ten or fifteen years later is seems that no matter which decision I made in the past it was the right one. 

The funny thing about photography is that it's all about forks in the road. Do I go left or right? Are those the only choices? Can I go foreword or backward? Can I stand right here and see what happens next? Our decisions are always less about what camera or film to use and more about which path to take on our walks. Which path determines everything. And ultimately it doesn't matter which path you take because there's something to see everywhere......

Trending. #The Lisbon Portfolio. Get one now.

The battle ground expands. Did the jump up in megapixels in the Nikon D7100 outflank Micro Four Thirds?

Love doing the research and looking at all the different permutations of what's available out in the market. While I was mulling over full frame bodies from Nikon, Sony and Canon yesterday I ventured over to look at the sensor scores for each camera at DXOmark.com. DXO tests sensors and while some people think that the test scores don't always correlate with visual reality I've found them to be pretty spot on in terms of what I'm seeing with various cameras.

While comparing different cameras I had the disquieting thought (occasioned by the list) that there might actually be something in the APS-C range that tested close to what some of the FF cameras deliver. I started looking at the descending order of wonderfulness as it related to sensors and I was pretty amazed to find one or two APS-C cameras that really stuck out. Of these the camera that seemed most correspondent to my needs was the Nikon D7100. Now, I know I started yesterday's column with the premise that the only reason to buy a full frame camera would be to use the 85mm to 105mm lens range as it was intended to be used when it came to depth of field, depth of focus decay and angle of view.

The reality is that I'm doing fine with the M4:3 cameras and recently had a lovely shoot with great results using a Samsung NX30 camera and the NX 85mm 1.4 lens in a manner than made the system look great. The portrait assignment was with 12 different people at outdoor locations where shallow focus was part of the assignment. We shot in open shade and mostly with apertures at f2.0 to f2.8 and shutter speeds in the 1/320th range. The lens is magnificent. I wish I could adapt it to every camera I own....

Book Notes. Getting a fresh copy of The Lisbon Portfolio.

Just a few notes about the novel. It's selling well despite the fact that our first version had too many typos and some inconsistencies. The vast majority of the glaring faults have been corrected with help from VSL reader, Michael Matthews (good eye!) and design elbow grease from Belinda. If you buy the Kindle book from Amazon.com today you will be getting the latest version. But if you bought and downloaded the book a week ago you probably got the first version. But don't worry, it's a pretty easy fix.

The neat thing about Kindle books (app available free for all kinds of tablets, laptops, regular computers and even phones....) is that a book becomes upgradable. Like firmware its content can be updated by the author and re-downloaded by users. In order to get a fresh version here's what you need to do:

Go to your account on Amazon.com and click on: Manage Your Content & Devices. Once that page comes up you'll see three different headers. One says, "Your Content", one says, "Your Devices" and the tab on the right hand side says, "Settings." You want to go to "Settings."

Once you are in settings scroll down to a selection that says, Automatic Book Update. By default this is off. You should turn it on. It lets you upload the latest version of a title that you've bought but may have subsequently deleted from your device. The default to "off" is for people who have done detailed annotations of books and who do not want to lose those changes by getting a new version...

Once you've made those changes go back to your device and delete the current book. (DO NOT DELETE THE BOOK IN THE "YOUR CONTENT" SECTION OF YOUR ACCOUNT PAGE ON AMAZON OR YOU WILL LOSE THE BOOK UNTIL YOU PAY FOR IT AGAIN!!!!!). Then head back to the cloud on your device and download the book again. This will be the new version. 

Thank you to all the hundreds of people who've purchased the Lisbon Porfolio and a special, extra thanks to the people who've gone to Amazon here in the states and in the U.K. to leave reviews. While most of the reviews are currently five stars even the three star reviews (generally nicking the typos) usually end with, "But all that aside the story is really fun and I'm already waiting for the next book."

For everyone who doesn't like reading on an electronic device we will have the paperback version up on Amazon shortly and it will have all the corrections of the current e-copy. The book comes in at around 480 pages. It should be fun. I am ordering a case. You know what I'll be giving out over the holidays.....

Thank you, Kirk

Love letter to a lens? (Chapter one).

I didn't need you. I hadn't planned on bringing you home. It just seemed to happen. Oh sure, I was messing around with micro four thirds cameras when it happened. I just spent too much money on a trio of promising, fast zoom lenses and I guess they really are nice, and have good personalities, but they lack the romance you bring to our relationship. There's just something about you single focal length types that takes me right back to my early days as a photographer.

Those were the days when zooms were the trailer trash of the camera world. Brazen thugs who could shift around into different lengths but they were mostly no good. Not the kind of lens you'd depend on when things got tough. The kind of optical system you just knew was going to leave you in the lurch the minute the smallest dollop of direct light hit his front element...

Hanging around in the camera bags they were always like, "Hey, I'm so cool. I can go from a wide shot to a tight shot and back again standing in one spot. And you," they would taunt the 50's and 105's, "all you can do is your one trick pony act."  But they always seemed to drop the ball. They'd make excuses: "what the hell do you mean 'wide open'?? I wasn't designed for wide open. Set me at f8 or don't bother taking me out of the bag!" Then there were all those embarrassing episodes with flare. And again the rationales: "Dude! I saw it in Life Magazine. Flare is cool. Flare is artistic. And watch this! I can make iris rings show up right in the middle of your photograph. I swear, I saw Ernst Haas do it...."

But those zooms mean nothing to me now.

I still remember the day I sat, bored and at the same time busy, in front of my mighty computer. I was half listening to a client on the phone and half cruising through Amazon.com's website when I came across your profile. It might have been your photo that caught my attention. Was it a selfie? At any rate it looked....enchanting. Then I read your profile and I was really interested. But the thing that made me initially fall head over heels was your price. Only $209.  I'm sure I've paid more than that for a Leica lens hood.

It was an impulsive decision. You had to be mine. I hesitated when I saw your twin sister in the silver finish but for some reason I can't explain your smooth, black exterior was too alluring.

I remember the afternoon the guy in the truck pulled up and let you out. I rushed into the studio with you in my hands and peeled you out of all those unnecessary wrappings. And there you were, naked and gleaming.  The Sigma 60mm f2.8 dn. I sighed. I was smitten.

But we were both a little shy until we went out for that big walk through downtown. Me with my hat and walking shoes, you hanging off the front of a hulky camera body. And it was magic. Over the months my regard for you has grown and, though you don't say it out loud, I think you enjoy our time together as well.

But lest all the readers think us cloying and saccharine let me take a moment to more objectively catalog your charms:

1. The 60mm focal length is really nice for tight portraits and graphic close ups with the small format cameras.

2. The lens is very sharp in the center even when its aperture is wide open. By f4 the whole thing is sharp and by f5.6 it blows the doors off the same focal length on my zoom for that feeling of edgy good sharpness.

3. It is small and light and focuses quickly on all my modern m4:3 cameras.

4. I have had no issues with flare from glancing light or little pin points of direct photonic contact.

5. It's so inexpensive I never worry about it.

I took the 60mm Sigma out on a walk with me today and fell in love with it all over again. I have the 19mm and the 30mm and like both of them as well, but the 60mm is special. If they made a wider focal length to match the existing trio of lenses, say a 12mm, I'd buy it in a heartbeat. That would be a wonderful basic system of primes for any of the m4:3 cameras.

Ahhh. Summer romance.

This is one idea about portraiture and skin tone. We shot it with LED lights for a marketing campaign.

Erin. Photographed last year for the play: Hip, Beat, Mad and Gone.

It's a different way of making portraits.

If you need a good Summer read or a book for a long plane ride I hope you'll give our first photo/fiction/action book a go. As always, I appreciate your support!

On writing and giving birth to a book. Most especially fiction.

From Hip, Mad, Beat and Gone.

I love to tell stories but I hate the details of writing. I've always been this way. I am a poor speller and an even poorer copy editor. When I wrote ads and TV commercials in my ancient career as an advertising agency copywriter I had people all around me who specialized in taking my thoughts, and ideas, and finding the little glitches and "gotchas" that necessarily remain when typing and thinking are done at speed, under a tight deadline. If the proofreaders and junior writers didn't catch stuff there were always a couple rounds of client approvals as well. 

I rejoiced when I was asked by the publisher at Amherst Media to write a book about lighting back in 2007. "At last," I thought, "someone will have the job of editing what I write and making it beautiful." Alas, I found more than a handful of typos which made it through the gauntlet of multiple readers and editors and into the book. And in each ensuing book a few typos always slipped through as well. But I felt I was absolved of blame (for the most part) because there was a formal distinction between being an author and being an editor or proof-reader.

But with my own book, The Lisbon Portfolio, I found myself in uncharted waters and, until recently, without a real life guard. Here's the background: In late November of 2001 I had some health issues that required me to take months of time to recuperate and get back to work. I spent my (unwanted) free time writing a novel.  I did it the way I generally do stuff; I got an idea and I sat down and plowed through it until I was done. Essentially I wrote the first, long draft of The Lisbon Portfolio in about six months. Then my health recovered and I got back to my photographic work and back to the regular pace of real life. 

Everything possible interceded between me and the book over the course of the last twelve years. The field I work in went through radical and unpredictable shifts and then the world economy went upside down and I feel like I spent the last five years navigating a leaky boat through the rough and chaotic waters. During all of those years I wanted to finish the original writing project but something always came up and I kept loosing the thread. I wrote five non-fiction books about photography but somehow I could never circle back to the book that had the most meaning for me.

2014 has been one of the most stable years for me that I can remember in a good, long while so I finally committed myself to getting this project done and out. I read the manuscript over and over again but I've come to the conclusion that if you are the one who writes something as long as a novel your brain somehow cancels out your ability to see the errors on the pages, after the fact. It may be that as the creator I keep getting caught back in the story instead of being able to make a dispassionate survey of possessives and subjunctives and all that vital stuff. For one reason or another the individual words have become greek to me. But one of my blog followers has stepped in to help me. He read the story and liked it. A lot. He got in touch with me to see if it would be okay for him to submit an edited manuscript with corrections highlighted. 

I am thrilled! He is half way through the correction process already and I'm standing by to implement all of his changes upon completion. The wonderful thing about self-publishing a book as a Kindle book is that when you find things (or things are brought to your attention) that need to be fixed you can wade back into the formatted manuscript and make those changes. Within 24 hours of making corrections the revised manuscript goes live on Amazon.com and every copy downloaded from that point onward has the new changes.

If we have started with a paper book the first buyers would end up having to live without the changes. But if you bought a Kindle version of my book as soon as the revised copy is uploaded you can trash your current copy and download the newer copy at no charge to you. It's like a firmware upgrade for a book. 

I know that many people believe that a product has to be perfect before it goes out the door and I would love to have delivered one of those six sigma products. But the story is the story and it's not going to change (much...if at all...). But it was vitally important to me, personally, to finish up The Lisbon Portfolio and get it out. I wanted to share it with my readers and I needed to move it out of my mental inventory to make room for the next writing project. No, it's not going to be another book about lighting or portraits. It's the next "Henry White" novel and it's already starting to gel. 

I love telling stories and I love writing about what I know. While the action and adventure depicted in The Lisbon Portfolio is totally fiction the surrounding threads of a corporate trade show are all crafted from an amalgam of my professional experiences. 

In the first week readers have already snapped up hundreds of copies of the book. We have our first four reviews on Amazon.com and I am proud to say that none of the reviewers are family and none were bribed to write their reviews. I'd like to share them all below: 

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The Cure for a Sluggish Pulse June 24, 2014

By Michael Rosiak

Format:Kindle Edition|Verified Purchase

I recall reading “The Exorcist” one night (back when it first came out – the early 70’s), and I just could not put it down. Page after page, tension mounting, my heart racing, I pushed through to the end. At about 3 AM!

“The Lisbon Portfolio” got to me the same way. I began reading on the plane from Philly to Dallas. (To about 20%, according to the Kindle reader app’s little gray note on each page.) We were visiting with some of my wife’s family, but there were periods when I had time to myself, so I’d open the Nexus tablet and plow on. All were amused by my periodic “percent complete” reports. I finished it by the end of the second day.

If you have followed Kirk Tuck’s Visual Science Lab blog for any length of time, you can get a sense of who the man is. And I think Kirk Tuck is “The Lisbon Portfolio” protagonist Henry White. But, Henry White is not Kirk Tuck, even though they both hail from Austin, Texas. Not unless Kirk has been keeping his NSA and CIA adventures a secret from us. Just today (Monday), Kirk describes his gig at the RLM Math Conference in Denver, and it could easily have been a passage out of the book, as Henry Smith describes how he plans to shoot the Global Data Systems (GDS) 4-day international conference in Lisbon. He even brings in references to his Leica cameras. (Hint: a film Leica plays a significant role in an exciting scene in the book.)

Having spent the last several decades in the Corporate IT world, I could relate to his depictions of the GDS annual sales conference, aka “the dog and pony show,” intended to entice current and would-be customers to take the chance on the next (buggy) software release. Read more ›

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The good news is the title indicates this is book 1 June 27, 2014

By Bob Dales

Format:Kindle Edition|Verified Purchase

Fast paced thriller featuring the James Bond of photographers. The good news is the title indicates this is book 1, hopefully more are to come.

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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Intricate and deadly June 18, 2014

By michael matthews

Format:Kindle Edition|Verified Purchase

This is one well-paced, intricately plotted spy-vs-spy story, featuring high-tech weapons theft and black market dealing. The author is a professional photographer and writer who knows what he...and his hero...are doing.

Nothing about the book requires an interest in or knowledge of photography (it never gets bogged down in technicalities), but for those who do have an appreciation of the craft there are tasty photo-nuggets here and there which draw the reader even further into the story.

Plenty of action, none of it forced, all of it credible. You can follow the fate of a man pulled into a dangerous situation way over his head and see how he survives. If he survives. Along the way, get to know the bloodiest public restroom in Portugal, perhaps in all of Europe.

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4.0 out of 5 stars A fun read for photographers who also like mystery/adventure novels June 29, 2014

By Victor Bloomfield

Format:Kindle Edition|Verified Purchase

Kirk Tuck is a fine photographer, specializing in portraits and corporate work, who has a widely-followed, well-written blog. He also, apparently, is a fan of the Tom Clancy, Ken Follett genre of adventure fiction. He combines these two interests in this tale, drawn from his past experiences in overseas corporate event photography. The story moves along briskly, through lots of short chapters, with the requisite levels of suspense, daring and lucky escapes, international and domestic villains, and unlikely coincidences. There are many novels that follow similar patterns, but this one will be particularly attractive to readers with strong photographic interests, since there is a lot of technical detail about equipment, lighting, and the demanding business of corporate event photography. Tuck also writes poignantly about the pleasures of personal photography with a Leica M4 film camera, and the stresses of earning a living as a self-employed photographer.

I deduct a star, however, because - to my surprise given Tuck's good writing on his blog - this novel could have used a much more stringent editorial scrubbing than it seems to have received. Apostrophes are frequently misused: it's for its, who's for whose, etc. Sentences are overloaded with adjectives and with often unnecessary and repetitive descriptive detail. I think the book could have been 10% shorter, and proportionally more enjoyable, if the annoying shrubbery had been removed by a good copy editor.

Despite these criticisms, I enjoyed the book and found it a good companion on my Kindle while traveling in Eastern Europe. I recommend it to photographers who also like mystery/adventure novels, or to fans of adventure fiction who are curious about the life of a professional photographer.

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If you need a good Summer read or a book for a long plane ride I hope you'll give our first photo/fiction/action book a go. As always, I appreciate your support!

A Total Immersion Week with the Panasonic GH4. Or, Kirk Does the Math.

It would seem that the big news around here is the launch of the novel, The Lisbon Portfolio. But as much as I wanted to sit behind the computer and send e-mails to everyone I knew announcing it, the day after our publication on Amazon's Kindle Store I was on a Southwest Airlines flight heading to Denver Colorado to work as the event photographer for what has become my favorite show. It's the RLM Math Conference at which Inquiry Based Learning is discussed in depth by math teachers and professors from all over the country. I spent Weds. through Saturday soaking in the math gestalt in a wonderful building that was designed by the architect, I.M. Pei, back in the 1960's. And I'm not kidding, I had a blast.

But to stay on photo topic part of my reason for being happy was that this was my first chance to deeply immerse myself in shooting a full on event with my completed Panasonic GH system. I shot well over 4,000 images and the bulk of them were done with the new GH4. The rest were created on two different GH3s. And I will say that spending a cumulative 20 hours with one type of camera in your hands is a wonderful way to find out what you like and what you don't about the system....

But first a photo that the Panasonic marketing people should really enjoy:

Kirk With Cameras.

Image ©2014 Stan Yoshinobu

Used with Stan Yoshinobu's permission.

The image above is a fair representation of how I equipped myself for my time in Denver. Three cameras with three different lenses, extra batteries and a small flash in the pockets of the jacket. Totally equipped without a camera bag in sight....

Let me set the stage: The project was to cover a conference about Inquiry Based Learning in Mathematics. My brief was to document all the "main tent" sessions, the dinners and the social components of the conference. But the most time intensive part of the job was the need to photograph presenters presenting in five different locations, concurrently. An almost continuous cycle of parallel sessions that lasted almost all day long each day. 

The conference took place in the I.M. Pei Building of the Sheraton Hotel complex is downtown Denver, Colorado. That's nice for me since Denver is quickly becoming one of my favorite destinations in the country. It's only two hours from Austin by direct Southwest Airline flights and the idea of embracing 50 degree weather each morning with coffee and a warm croissant in hand is enticing. Especially when the humidity and heat kick in for the Summer here in Austin...

All photo jobs are different and all the parameters are different as well. For about eight hours each day the conference ran the parallel sessions which lasted about 40 minutes each. The classes, filled with academic mathematicians were spread out all across one large area of the conference center. I would start the cycle by photographing the speakers and activities in the main ballroom and then move on to classroom A, the B, then C, and finally classroom D. I shot a lot of frames because I was trying to capture good expressions in which  subjects' eyes were open, hands were gesturing in a natural way and peoples' mouths looked as though they were caught, mid-sentence, saying something really bright and insightful. The important idea here is that I did this circuit, from ballroom to class to class a dozen or more times each day and I packed gear with a conscious thought to keeping my load of equipment as light as possible.

I did the same conference (here in Austin) last year with the Sony a99 and Sony a77 cameras along with some giant lenses (the five pound 70-200mm 2.8 comes to mind as a particularly painful thing to sport around on the front of a camera...) and a large camera bag packed with all kinds of stuff with which to support the "full frame mystique." The gear was heavy and many times the limited depth of field worked against me as I attempted to shoot in a documentary style using available light for small groups of people.

This year (as you can see above) I brought two Panasonic GH3 camera bodies and one GH4. (I wish I could wave a magic wand over them and convert all the cameras to GH4's....). For most sessions I actually carried only two cameras: the GH4 with the Panasonic 35-100mm f2.8 X zoom lens and a GH3 with the 12-35mm f2.8 X wide angle zoom lens. With one camera on each shoulder and a third sometimes draped around my neck (GH3 with 25mm f1.4) I barely noticed the weight or the bulk of the gear. 

Two things to mention here: I was happy to shoot wide open with any of the three lenses as they perform very well at their respective maximum apertures. This is something I was rarely able to do with my previous cameras since the edges and corners of the lenses for the larger formats were never as well corrected when used at their maximums. Lens designers have pointed out for years how much easier it is to design well corrected lenses for smaller formats----at least theoretically. 

The images I'm seeing today in Lightroom are sharp and well constructed and the extra DOF, even with the lenses wide open, is welcome. This selection of lenses really does prove to me that the smaller geometry of the sensors was quite welcome. It meant that, in most cases eyes and ears were both in focus but I could still drop backgrounds out of focus with the longer focal lengths of the 35-100mm lens. 

One of the way I kept the file management manageable was to shoot high quality Jpegs instead of Raw files. My take on the real, current reason to people prefer Raw files is that most people don't take the time to do really good white balances while they are shooting! Seriously, if you shoot without getting the color right--in Jpeg or raw-- correcting in post after the fact makes a huge negative difference in both noise and exposure accuracy. 

While the effects are evident in both kinds of files (in my experience) it's obvious that there is less potential to make large corrections in Jpeg files because each color correction step introduces complimentary color shifts somewhere else in the spectrum (or usually at multiple points along the color distribution) as well as causing non linear shifts in each of the three color channels.  And some of those non-linearities are not correctable.