Canoes were hot property at Barton Springs yesterday.

Barton Springs Canoe Rental. Samsung NX300.

Yesterday morning was busy, busy but after a decent lunch with my first assistant for the summer and some monotonous paper work in the office I made two phone calls I had been dreading and then I packed up my new little camera and went off to Zilker Park. I parked the ultra-high performance Honda CR-V in front of Barton Springs Pool and took off for a grand walk through our downtown park.

After an almost ritualistic nod to the rogue swimmers who swim and frolic for free in the spillway downstream from the actual pool I walked on to the canoe rental stand. It was a hot afternoon, school is out for nearly everyone and the place to be was in the water or on the water. I liked the repeating form of the canoes (above) but I knew when I shot the frame that I'd want to see it in black and white. Sharp, snappy, contrasty black and white.

I am getting comfortable with my new, casual shooting system, the Samsung NX300. I have the kit lens which is an 18-55mm, and I have my Hoodman loupe for those times when the surrounding light is too bright to make composing naked fun. I have two or three things to say about the new camera. First off the files seem archly neutral in the "standard" jpeg setting. By that I mean the colors are very neutral and almost unsaturated in comparison to other consumer-targeted cameras. The same with the contrast range. I find myself tweaking up the contrast by 10% or so in post but when I do so I find that I nearly always like the rendition of skin tones in the more neutral settings. The other thing I notice is that the Samsung does a great job making files look very sharp on my monitor. Not sizzly sharp like you see on a lot of websites but detailed and micro detailed. In fact, the sharpening works so well for me that when I try to add sharpness it nearly always makes the images seem brittle and overdone.

I hadn't paid much attention to Samsung until now. I didn't have an opinion about their cameras and I never used on before but I will say this: Sony and Olympus should rush to Samsung, do some industrial espionage and find out who is producing their online owner's manuals and who is programming their camera GUI and menu system and then kidnap them, pay them cajole them and beg them to do the same for their cameras. I've learned the Nex menus and I'm good with the image quality and the hand/camera interface but it really shouldn't take weeks to feel comfortable with a menu. Two days, tops, for an experienced shooter. With the Samsung NX 300 I looked through the online manual once and I've never looked back. Nor have I been unable to quickly find and change any parameter. I don't know if that's the make it or break it for any camera choice but it's a comfortable way to present and leverage whatever benefits your camera might have.....

I will also say that the implementation of the touch screen is very good and the screen is mostly responsive. I prefer buttons but I know a whole generation of photographers who are being raised on iPhones will find it an almost transparent accommodation to their current system interface.

I read in one of the forums yesterday that I am being short changed by only having the kit lens but I disagree. I happen to be a big fan of kit lenses. I was happy when my Sony a58 came with a new and improved kit lens and I've made good use of it. I think if more people spent time really working on their fundamentals they'd see that the choice of lens and the quality of the lens might be, in most situations, the least of their photographic handicaps....

Why black and white canoes when there a beautiful people out in the world waiting to be photographed? Well, when I was in fifth grade I went to a YMCA summer camp and we had an overnight canoe trip. I took a number of black and white photos with an old, zone focusing Argus A-3 camera. At some point on the return voyage my canoe tipped over and many of my possessions, like my sleeping bag, my clothes and my fresh copy of the first Marvel comic book to feature the Fantastic Four, slowly settled to the bottom of the lake but the camera miraculously found it's way to my right hand and emerged unscathed as I treaded water. I tossed it into another canoe and then worked with my camp councilor to right my dodgy craft. The film went to the drugstore after camp and six or seven images of canoes, among some badly done images of marshmallow roasting, found their way back into my hands as 3.5 by 5 inch, deckle edged, black and white prints. It was an exciting time and the canoes triggered some memory ripple of a simpler time somehow faintly connected to photography. And there I am.

 Canoe 2. Samsung NX 300. Converted to black and white in Aperture.

Ben and I go out on an early assignment.

Early. At the Pool.

Can't get away from the pool and wouldn't want to if I could. Usually, at 7 am, I am over there in lane three or four trying to keep up with the other people in my masters program and the boy pictured above is out running with his cross country team, but this week is the down week after school lets out and we needed to shoot this project so I convinced Ben to assist me for the morning shoot.

We were commissioned to make individual photographs of the Rollingwood Waves Summer League swimmers and then do four big group shots of the different age groups. By the end of the morning we'd photographed 85 swimmers and the aforementioned groups and we were ready for iced tea and a couple of Las Palomas Restaurant combination plates.

We always like to show the pool in the background so we set up beside the pool deck, under a high canopy that would block most of the direct sun. My lighting was simple: I used an 1100 watt second Elinchrom Ranger RX AS power pack and one head. The head fired into a 28 inch Fotodiox beauty dish modified with a white diffusion cover. The metal reflector never seems to have the kinds of problems with wind that umbrellas or softboxes have and the light was between hard and soft. Mostly perfect for young swimmers.

I set up the light for each swimmer so that the bottom of the beauty dish was slightly above their chin line and that made for flattering illumination all the way around. The only technical aspect was to keep the look of the background (pool in full sun and pool with cloud cover) the same with changes in cloud cover and sunlight. Nice thing about cameras that pre-chimp is that it's so easy to see the background change. With an OVF your eye makes instant accommodations but no so (at least for me) with the EVF. It shows me the background getting lighter or darker in a very real way.  I adjusted the shutter speed of the camera to compensate.

Ben assisted me by handling the paperwork and the payment from parents. We're primitive on these shoots. The parents fill out the name of their kid on a sheet of paper and we have the kid hold up the sheet for the first shot, zoom in and make sure we capture a face and a name so that I have a clear identification of the child when I do post processing and order prints. Silly simple. A constant reference.

Also, Ben is better than I am at turning down  any unreasonable requests or parent drama (of which there was none).

I used a Sony a99 camera with an older, Minolta 24-85mm 3.5 to 4.5 zoom lens. Why? I like it just fine and the focal length range is just right. The flash was triggered by a set of FlashWaves radio triggers. I used the camera at it's 10 megapixel, highest quality Jpeg setting. The biggest prints will be the 5x7 inch group shots and the main lighting was unerringly consistent so it really wouldn't have made any sense to shoot RAW or even bigger. How much more time do you want to spend in post? How many pixels do you want to throw away?

We wrapped around noon and headed off to our favorite, neighborhood Mexican food restaurant and settled in for a nice meal. Another job, another notch on the tripod leg.