Playing around in the studio with the LEDs.

I met Noellia six years ago.  She answered a casting call and we (the ad agency and I) used her in an ad campaign for the Austin Chamber of Commerce.  She was eighteen at the time.  When I embarked on my first lighting book I needed a patient and attractive person to sit still for lots and lots of the example shots.  She is the model on the front cover of my Photograhic Lighting Equipment book as well.  Noellia is an accomplished theatrical actor and she's been in New York City for the last year.  (Maybe that's why I didn't get any photography books done in 2010.....).  But she came back for the holidays and I convinced her to come by the studio and help me with illustrations for my LED project.  We worked for six hours today and got lots of stuff done.  The photo above is something I selected pretty much at random from the horde of thumbnails skating across the Lightroom window at the end of the day.

I used a Canon 5Dmk2 with an 85mm 1.8 for most of the day but I thought I'd throw some 60D shots in the mix just to have a real world comparison.  The 60D was equipped with the 70-200mm f4 L (non-IS) lens.  I used the tripod collar on the zoom and threw the whole rig onto my wooden tripod.  I shot wide open at 1/50th of a second @ 800 ISO.  The actual focal length was 126mm which is pretty darn long for the APS-C format.  The image was lit with three sets of lights and a really big scrim.

First up is the main light:  Two 500 bulb LED fixtures and one 1,000 bulb LED fixture pushed light thru a six foot by six foot Photoflex light diffuser.  The diffuser is mostly forward of Noellia's position and over to the left.  My camera is actually looking thru the edge of the fabric and the light stand.  It's a big wash of light and one of my favorite ways to light people.

I have one 500 bulb LED fixture illuminating the background, which is a gray painted wall in the studio.  I've turned off one bank of lights so I guess I was only using 375 bulbs directly into the wall.......

Finally, there's a little 183 bulb panel over to the back right of the set that throwing some obviously ineffective backlight into the mix.  It's a pretty straightforward design.  I notice that it's a lot easier to color correct the 60D raw files than those from the 5Dmk2.  I'm not sure yet why that is but I'm working on coming up with an answer.  I like the skin tones quite a bit.

 To add to the mystery I did a custom white balance for the 5Dmk2 but when I capriciously reached for the 60D I just set the WB on auto and blazed away.   The gray targets I use are these Lastolite flexible reflectors.  I have them in two different sizes and have come to depend on them for critical shoots with the full frame camera.  I also use the custom white balance on the big Kodaks.  But I do have a work around for color casts........I just throw my hands up and convert to black and white.

When I got into the rhythm of shooting I found that the 85mm on the 5D2 matched my intention most of the time.  Once or twice I wished I'd used the 50mm but I rarely framed anything that I felt needed to be tighter.

I still think the LED panels are absolutely cool  (literally and figuratively).  Every time I write this a handful of people (who must think that I missed out on the whole flash revolution) write back to me to let me know how deluded I am and to let me know that flash is the modern light of choice.  Not so fast my highly linear friends.  I'm starting to find the sweet spots for these lights and I'm convinced that I'm on to something that will bear fruit.  It's fun to see what happens when I mix the little LED panels with daylight on locations.  Sometimes I feel like flash demands that users clearly see that lighting has been done.  My intention in photographing is to show the subject in a way that I visualize it.  I'm aiming, on location, to make found reality match my concept of processed reality in a way that showcases or elevates the subject without showing the "magic trick" to the audience.

My early mistakes all sprung from one mistaken assumption.  The idea that all lighting was interchangeable and "cross platform" when it reality you, as the artist, are obligated to play to each source's strengths and weaknesses.  I want to get to the point where the deficiencies in my work come from my inability to concept and perform the dance well, not to be limited by my slavish dedication to doing something in the old way that belonged to another light source.  I think I'm getting there.

But mostly I wrote this to share the unalloyed and unspoiled joy of spending a day shooting a pretty girl in a series of experiments for a project that both captivates and motivates me.  Happy to have a busy mind today and someone to help me bring ideas to fruition.  More to come......

The last Sunday Blog/Rant of 2010.

I gave this camera and lens to my wife about 20 years ago.  It's an Olympus Pen FT with a 40mm f1.4 standard lens.  The kit came with a 50 to 90mm zoom lens as well.  She loved the camera and took it along on trips many times.  But eventually she abandoned it for a little zooming, point and shoot camera.  She got tired to trying to explain the whole "half frame" deal to labs.  Sometimes they'd get it right, other times they'd just print two frames up on a 4x6 and in worst case situations they'd cut the film in odd places.  Her little Olympus 35mm full frame camera, with zoom and built in flash, fixed all that and this little beauty got filed away in a box in her office.  Long story short.......she re-gifted me and I was thrilled about it.

The granddaddy and inspiration for the Olympus Pen digital cameras. With one of the grooviest lenses,  the 140mm 1.4.

While the zoom lenses from the mid-1960's to the early 1970's were no great shakes these little standard lenses really rocked and the esoteric ones are getting harder and harder to find.  So what?  Who's going to shoot half frame film anymore? Well, the film shooting is another story but the reason some photographers care is that they love putting these fast little optics on the front of the new generation of Olympus Pen's (with adapters) and Panasonic G cameras and getting to shoot with fast, fast primes and all that entails.

I glomped the 40mm onto the front of my Olympus EPL-1 12 megapixel super mini camera and shot these test frames:

Did I shoot raw?  Of course not.  It's an Olympus camera so I don't need to.  Are the three frames I'm showing you a fair test?  Gosh no.  They're shot in direct sun.  Sun that's coming at a nice hot angle from the south.  And the lens is stopped down to f5.6 or f8.  How could they not look sharp?  But for a lens that's older than most of the people who frequent Flickr, cobbled to a camera it was never intended to be mated with, it's got a lot of promise.  Tomorrow I'll do a worthwhile test and shoot it in the studio with some of those LED panels I keep talking about.  I'll shoot it at f1.4 and 2, 2.8 and 4 and we'll see just what this baby can do.

It was Sunday here and I'd been entertaining, being entertained or finishing up projects all week long.  I spent vast hunks of quality time with my loving family but I'm cognizant that they can only take so much of my bubbling enthusiasm in one long sitting so I decided to get out of the house and take a good, long walk.  I started at Whole Foods because I love looking at all the fresh produce and making silent resolutions about just how much healthier I'm going to be in the next year.  It's also a convenient and accessible bathroom stop if you're heading out to walk thru a downtown that's otherwise pretty closed down for the holiday.

I meant to spend the day shooting with the 40mm lens and leaving it at that but I brought along the Olympus Pen 20mm f3.5 just for balance.  The 40 is fun but if you're going to shoot one nearly wide open on a Pen digital camera, and you want the results to be sharp you'll want to make use of the magnifying feature and really pop the image up to at least 7x to fine focus.  But that gets old quick when you're walking down Congress Ave.  I pulled the 20mm out of my pocket and started shooting with that instead.

Olympus EPL with an ancient 20mm Zuiko lens.  Beyond retro.

Two thoughts popped into my head:  The first came as I stuck the 40mm, with metal hood, into the front pocket of my jeans.  "Wow.  I have the equivalent of an 85mm 1.4 in my pants pocket." Amazing.  The second thought was this:  "What is wide angle, really?  Is there a demarcation line between standard and wide that's measured in mm's?  Or is wide totally contextual?  To the guy who shoots birds in flight with a 400 or 500mm lens I would guess that 100 or 200mm's seems wide.  To an architectural photographer who shoots interiors all day long with a 17mm or 24mm shift lens on a full frame body I would guess that only 15 and shorter really means wide angle. I tend to shoot in the portrait range a lot and lean on my 85mm and 100mm lenses for so much of my work that the 20mm on the Olympus Pen EPL felt wide.  And since just about everything in the omniverse is in focus at f8 (with the lens set to the proper hyperfocal distance) I could set the lens once and be assured that everything was going to be pretty sharp.

So I wandered around and shot a bunch of pseudo wide angle shots like these:

I can already hear some of you laughing as you might remember that I have the very well reviewed Panasonic 20mm 1.7 lens as well.  Wide angle?  Do I know that it's the equivalent of a 40mm lens on full frame 35mm?  Well.....yes,  I do know that but I chose to forget it until I got home.  I like the 20 Panasonic lens just fine but it doesn't have focusing scale and I can't get used to focusing that one by wire.  It's so nice to have a series of lenses with manual focusing rings marked with depth of field hash marks.  We used this technique all the time in the days of film Leicas.  It works so well.  Leaves the brain free to concentrate on composition.

 In some ways the depth of field determines what my brain likes to think of as wide angle.  I rarely want more in the frame.....it's just that sometimes I want more of my frame in focus. And that's what these twenties do for m4:3rd's cameras.  Eventually I found my car and headed out of downtown.  When I finally stopped shooting I realized that I was hungry so I went by P.Terry's Hamburgers on S. Lamar and went with a Veggie Burger Combo. Can you believe that they fry their french fries in canola oil?  That they have whole wheat buns?  That jalapenos are only twenty five cents extra?  That their Dublin Dr. Pepper is made with cane sugar instead of high fructose sugar?  It was just right.  So much so that I stopped eating to take a quick snap.  Was I eating outside today?  Of course.  It's Austin, Texas.  We schedule our cold weather for night time.  That way we can sit out in the sun and the mld, 50 degree days to better enjoy lunch.....

One the way from P.Terry's to home I went by one of our very original "trailer food" establishments, Flip Happy Crepes, just to take a late afternoon shot of their trailer.  

Now I'm back home and getting ready to hit the ground running.  One of my favorite models is coming over to help me develop more content for my ground breaking LED project.  We're going to see how thinks look when the panels get ultra close to the subject.  I'm planning on giving the 40mm a bit of a work out.  I'll let you know how it all looks.

My analysis of the 40mm Zuiko?  From f2.8 on to f8 it challenges any of the offerings from Panasonic or Olympus in the m4:3rd's space.  I like the focal length and it's sharp enough to take advantage of the EPL's incredible 12 megapixel sensor.  Finding a clean 40mm 1.4 is tough.  I've seen them go for as high as $325 when you can find them.  My take on the 20mm 3.5?  It's a fun lens to have when you really get tired of AF all the time.  It's not as critically sharp as the 40mm.  On my current "watch list" for old Olympus lenses are:  The 25mm f2.8 and the 25mm f4,  the 42mm 1.1.2 and the 100mm 3.5.  I have the 60mm 1.5 and the 70mm f2.0 and both are exquisite.  I wish I were consistently brave enough to use them on jobs.  Maybe when the economy recovers a bit more I'll feel comfortable taking a few more challenges.......But know this:  m4:3rds really does work well.

To follow up on my discussion from the previous blog,  many people have written in to declare the Leica M9 the 2010 camera of the year and I'd be inclined to agree (where image quality in the only determiner) but I do need a camera that I can put a macro lens on.  Oh, and a lens longer than 75mm  (don't even start about the 90mm's and the 135.......that rangefinder doesn't have the chops to focus them well wide open and you know it.  I'm a big Leica lover and have been since the 1980's but I think of the M's as 24mm-75mm cameras only.....).  If you're going all out with your pick you might as well do as I declined to do and choose the S2.  It really is fabulous.  But my intention was to call out a class of cameras that is both very high performance and at the same time accessible.  I like the 7D because I'm shooting Canon right now.  I'd be equally happy, I presume, with a D7000 from Nikon or the Pentax K5.  It's really the class of these cameras that appeal to me.  Potent, great image quality and affordable.  That's what makes all three of them wonderful.

All the best, Kirk