Taking a walk and thinking about old tech versus entropy.

Here's an interesting exercise:  Grab any old camera and go walk around somewhere eminently accessible for two hours and shoot whatever you find interesting in a style that you find....interesting.  I've recently become interested in the idea that some of the technology that we've casually tossed aside over the last ten years may have had some hidden talents.  I've tossed aside the new Canon stuff and taken, over the last week,  my old Olympus e520,  my newish Olympus EP-2 and an old, old Contax T vs film camera out with me when I leave the house or studio.  I'm always pleasantly surprised that for every weakness I find in a "vintage" camera I also find some hidden treasures.

Yesterday I went to swim practice (crowded and rowdy) had coffee afterwards where I spilled a cup. (I was trying to be "green" and brought a cup with a lid that's damn hard to get off......).  Belinda, Kirsten (our "Yard Coach") and I spent most of the afternoon clearing brush and doing Landscapy things.  At four I'd had enough strenuous physical exercise and decided to grab a camera and take a two hour walk around downtown Austin with my old, Sony R1 camera.  In my opinion the R1 was the ultimate "bridge" camera:  APS sized chip (reportedly the same basic chip that the Nikon D2x sported....) a really cool swivel screen in addition to a usable EVF and, the capper,  a fabulous Carl Zeiss 24-120mm equivalent zoom lens.  A lens that DPReview proclaimed to be worth the entire price of the camera alone.

None of the photos is earth shattering or particularly tricky but I'm happy with them all.  Even the last one, hand held at some obscenely slow shutter speed with an almost unusable ISO 3200.  The camera just flat out works.  I'd done a bunch of jobs with this camera and a twin back in 2006 and 2007 and I remembered it as a great performer when you could use it at ISO 160 or 200 but it was a recent reviewing of a review that reminded me of it's really good long exposure capabilities.  I didn't have a tripod with me but I stabilized the camera on the railing of the pedestrian bridge over Lady Bird Lake and made a series of 15 and 30 second exposures of the afterglow from the sunset, behind the Lamar Blvd. bridge.  I think they turned out well.  Not something I usually shoot but I guess there's no law that says I have to spend all my time shooting beautiful people.......

While the R1 has a raw mode it takes five or six seconds to write a raw file to the buffer and during that time the camera locks up and won't shoot.  With that in mind I always shoot Jpegs.  My last technical observation about the camera is that its ultra-quiet shutter will synch with flash all the way up to 1/2000th of a second, its highest shutter speed.  I put this camera into the "under rated, under praised tools of the decade" category.  You'll never shoot sports with this camera but portraits and still life are natural subjects.  In many ways it reminds me of medium format cameras.

Along the same lines, the previous blog essay showed off images taken with two Kodak cameras that came on the market back in 2001 and 2004 respectively, the DCS 760 and the DCS SLR/n.  I was so happy to look at those images that I went online and ordered two new batteries for each camera.  I fully intend to shoot the heck out of them before something goes south.  Why?  Because they look different and in some ways better to me than my cameras that embody current tech.  And because I already own them.  And when I pull them out of the drawer after a hiatus of months and months it also satisfies my urge to buy something new......

We are nothing if not creatures of trained habit.  I've traded in too many cameras that I later wish I'd kept.  The lure and allure of the new is powerful.  The Sony R1 is a reminder that previous technology is also fun.  A formalist exercise?

What did I learn from my exercise?  I tend to shoot tight so I made it a practice to shoot near 24mm when I could.  I tend to believe AF, sometimes to my detriment, so I concentrated on placing focus manually, exactly where I wanted it.  I took hyperfocal distance into consideration instead of just arbitrarily assigning a focus.  I played with the edges of the frame more.  I'm trying to loosen up my composition.  Got a lot done in two hours.....

the holidays are upon us.  I humbly submit that a good book about photography will be most welcome by the photographers on your list.  Here are a few suggestions:

   

   

   

   

Lunch was happy, happy.

I'm shooting an event for a company this evening, downtown.  I probably won't have time for dinner.  So Belinda and I headed over to El Arroyo to have lunch.  I had the Sante Fe enchiladas and she had the "lite" plate.   The photo above has nothing at all to do with today's lunch other than it was lunch once.

I've done a fair amount of food photography over the years.  I've got two cookbook credits and I've done several dozen magazine spreads and probably a similar number of projects for the hospitality industry.  The photograph above was done at Uchi, here in Austin, for a lifestyle magazine.  I loved all the food that the owner/chef prepared for me.  What I like most of all was the clean and simple presentation.  I try to make the food look like it was lit by beautiful, clean daylight but in truth I lit it with a big white diffuser very close in to the left side (as you look at the food) and a white reflector four or five feet over to the right.  I used the reflector a bit further away than I might typically because wanted the little heart shaped shadow of the herb leaf to show well on the bottom right side of the frame.  I used a Kodak SLR/n and a 100mm macro lens.  I still use the camera from time to time and every time I do I wonder why I ever bought anything else.  And then I remember that it's not the most ergonomic or fast solution for anything other than slow studio work or studio-type work on location.  But what a magnificent file you can get out of it.  Just amazing.  The colors, tones and contrast is just wonderful.

It's a pity photographers didn't appreciate the Kodak products more for what they really do well instead of  insisting that every camera be the uber-camera.   You know, the super box that can shoot in inky blackness AND lock focus on five soccer players running in five different directions, simultaneously.  The camera of today:  The Swiss Army Camera.  "We can do it all."  Just not nearly as well as a precision crafted tool created just for a particular job.  I pity Kodak.  They made an incredibly good product (for portraits and food)  and then tried to sell it to the wrong market (weddings).  And, in some ways, we do that as photographers.  Hard to be good at everything.  That's why there's a lot of stuff I don't shoot.

But I like to shoot food.  And I like to eat it.  And if I can have lunch with a different fun and interesting person every day of the week I count myself happy.  As in "lunch was happy, happy."

(side note:  Many of you may be too young to remember this but Kodak basically invented digital photography in the 1980's and 1990's.  The earliest Canon and Nikon professional cameras were hybrids with mechanics by C&N and electronics and sensors by Kodak.  They owned the market until 2001 when Nikon came out with their own D1x and Canon came out with their D30.  Even then Kodak's "beast" the DCS 760 was (in my opinion) the camera to have.  It out muscled the other two in resolution and had a bigger sensor (1.3 crop factor).  It's real strength, and one rarely mentioned by reviewers or dilletantes was.......drum roll, please........Dynamic Range.  Used in raw, the files could do absolutely amazing stuff and the market is just now, nine years later, beginning to catch up.  I had reason to go thru older files today and look.  I'm still amazed at the quality of the files and the depth of the range from shadow to tweaked highlight.  The camera also had an stout buffer.  Twenty or so full raw files at one frame pers second was about three times the throughput of the other cameras of the day.  At one time I liked the look so much I had three of the cameras.  Now I keep one around for nostalgia.  At 6 MP they aren't resolution competitive with current cameras.  But for jobs that aren't going to leave the web?  Magic.)

Here are two samples from the DCS 760:

 This was shot on a sunny day for a sports medicine practice.  They have a 24 by 36 inch poster on one of their walls that is breathtaking.  All it took was a good interpolation tool at the right lab to bring out the quality inherent in the file.

This was shot for the 2006 Annual Report for the Kipp School.  It was blown up to a similar size for a fundraising event by the same lab.  People assumed it was from a Hasselblad negative........

And finally,  another example from the Kodak SLR/n.  I think the skin tones and shadows are amazingly good.

Amazingly good cameras.  Can't say I like the files from my Canon 5d2 any better.......

the holidays are upon us.  I humbly submit that a good book about photography will be most welcome by the photographers on your list.  Here are a few suggestions: