How I screwed up yesterday without screwing up my whole project.

I got a call a few days ago about a video project. Could I come out and do a very short interview that would be inserted into a larger project? I've come to like shooting real interviews and I don't mind the quasi-interview process that is prefaced to the interview subject like this: "Hi Mr. Smith. We've got a thirty second gap that we're holding for you in our video. Can you touch on this (the "big" subject) and then say, quickly, how our company helped to solve the problem for your people?" I've come to see these little, episodic plug-ins as extremely valuable; especially when requested by the CEO who "owns" the budget for your overall project.

The brief was to shoot video of one person on location in another city and to come away with about thirty seconds of great messaging. We didn't need B-roll so I left Ben behind to tweak our ongoing edit, promising I wouldn't come back with anything that would run over 32 seconds. Something about  retiming all the audio. 

I'd scouted the intended location before and, since it was a sunny day, didn't think I would need lights; but I brought some anyway. While I had been shooting with the RX10 cameras I capriciously decided to mix things up a little bit. Make a few changes 95% of the way into a project....

I packed two cameras: The A7Rii and the most recently acquired A7ii.  My intention was to shoot with the A7Rii and just bring along the other camera for snapshots and back-up. I packed three lenses; the Zeiss 24-70mm, the Sony 18-105mm G lens and the Rokinon 85mm f1.5 cine lens, with an adapter.

The night before I sat at my desk and went through the A7Rii menu several times to make sure all the menu settings were on target and that I'd set up the function menu for video capture. My intention was to test out the 1080p output of the camera since the final output for the project would also be 1080p. We went into the project with the idea of shooting everything in 4K but a certain percentage of the material we ended up using was archival footage (fortunately only from a couple of years back) which was 1080p so we ended up putting everything on a 1080p timeline. Everything looked great and the camera was ready to go. I stuck it in the case along with the rest of the gear and packed the car.

The trip to Wimberley, Texas was really pleasant. Ranch to Market Route 12 is really pretty, with lots of rolling hills and fun, gentle "S" curves to glide through. I'd had the Honda CRV serviced the day before and the car just hummed along. The cherry on the ice cream was the almost total lack of other traffic. Almost like a holiday from the relentless Austin traffic...

I got to Wimberley (hippie, artist, trustfunder, escape destination for exhausted Austinites....) and found our location in the local community center. I found a room with a bank of windows on one side and no real visual or audio distractions and started setting up. I'd use the soft, indirect, window light as my main light and bounce an LED panel off the ceiling for some vague fill light.

At this point the client arrived and started talking to me in detail about the many facets of the overall project. I paid as much attention as I possibly could but in the back of my mind the countdown clock until the arrival of our talent was clicking away with urgency.

I pulled out a camera, formatted the 64 gigabyte SDXC card and slapped a microphone mixer/impedance matching device to the bottom. I attache a quick release plate to the bottom of the audio device and put the combination on the tripod. I've been wanting to try the 85mm Rokinon 1.5 (cine) lens on the A7R2 for some time so I put it on the camera.

My client stood in while I roughed in the composition for the shot. She also held a white test target so I could get a nice custom white balance (God, that makes the whole editing/grading process so much easier....). I loved the look of the shot so we marked the position for the subject on the floor with some orange tape. The last task before we got started was to set up the wireless microphone and get the levels set. During this whole process I am carrying on a somewhat technical and detail-laden conversation with my client. Lots of stuff to hammer out...

The subject walks in and we chat for a few minutes. I get the microphone position on his dress shirt and show him how to drop the cord inside his shirt and run the wire out the bottom (out of frame) and around to the radio transmitter I'm attaching to his belt. We discussed what the video project needed and what we needed him to say.

Just before we got rolling I went to change the shutter speed and the camera told me that I couldn't do that function in the current setting. The warning showed me that while we were in the movie mode the camera was set to movie/program exposure. Odd, I thought. I was almost certain I'd set that menu to manual weeks ago when I first got the A7Rii. No matter, I found the setting, changed it and then modified the shutter speed. The finder info told me we were shooting in XAVC at 50 mbs and 24 fps. I was happy and ready.

The comp of the shot and the quick fall off behind the subject was exactly what I was looking for. The interviewee was at ease in front of the camera and had a good, strong voice. I had him say the same thing a number of times and we even stopped and reviewed a couple of takes in the process. By the end of the fifteen or twenty minutes of "hands-on" engagement we all felt good about what we'd shot and I started packing up. The cameras got the lenses pulled off and put into their neoprene pouches. The cameras got their body covers and dropped into their protective cases. Everything went into the big, rolling Husky case and I headed back to the buzzing beehive of Austin. I was feeling professional; very satisfied with the work I'd just done and the ease with which we were able to coach the interviewee into giving us exactly what we needed.

I dragged the case into the studio and then went in to the house to find Ben. Since he is doing the primary editing for our project I thought he'd want to come into the studio and help choose the best take to include.

He came along and we headed to the workstation. I pulled the Sony A7Rii out of the case and pulled the memory card. I stuck it into the card reader and opened Final Cut Pro. On the desktop I popped open the folder in which the video clips should have been. There was nothing! It was blank. I went through every single folder on the card. Nothing. My panic started to well up. I'd have to call the client and re-shoot. Yikes. Ben suggested we put the card back in the camera and see if we could see the images on the review screen. No. Nothing. Another wave of panic.

Then I started entertaining the improbable. Was this the right camera? Had I somehow gotten the cameras mixed up? Me, the perfect technician making a technical mistake? Holy crap! I calmly asked Ben to hand me the other camera body. I pulled the card, stuck it in the card reader and....voila....there were all the precious little files. In my haste to set up in Wimberley I had grabbed the wrong camera. I'd just shot my first video on the A7ii in the middle of a real job. Something I always avoid, just in case.

My initial action was relief, followed by sheer embarrassment. What a huge fuck-up it is to choose the wrong camera. I must be loosing my marbles.

But then we looked at the cameras carefully and noticed that they are almost completely identical and, if I take off my glasses it's hard (almost impossible) for me to differential the little model insignias just to the left of the lens on the front of the camera.

Ben was gracious and acted like this was just something that happened to everyone. But I suspect he was thinking...."Ah, so this is how the inevitable decline begins......"

My two takeaways? The video from the A7ii looked great and it cuts in perfectly. I did my actual job correctly even if I did screw up in grabbing cameras. And? Bring bright orange tape. Put a swatch of it on the shooting camera to differentiate. I got lucky this time; what if I'd still been trying to shoot everything in 4K?

Interesting shifts across the landscape of photography (as opposed to landscape photography...). What's driving the whole industry now?

I probably think about photography too much. It comes from having been around it for so long and for taking such a deep dive into the field as both a hobbyist and a working commercial photographer. I have to say though, for the first time every, I'm feeling as though we've just gone through a monumental shift that more or less makes everything we know about the joy of photography largely irrelevant. Now, before you trot out the ole "bitter old loser" trope I have to quickly say that business is fine, we're making the mortgage, paying our taxing and still scraping together enough to pay for a private college education for our kid. In fact, in the context of this article I have to say that the change is relatively neutral for working photographers who are ready to diversify into tightly related fields; like video. We're still moving the boulder up the hill and the projects are mostly satisfying.

I'm writing more about the public, passionate, highly engaged and fun side of photography. What old timers would call, pure photography. After a decade that saw a massive plunge, by everyday people, into the hobby, the art and exhilaration of making photographs, I think the wave has finally washed up on the beach, seeped into the sand and evaporated. The phone-encumbered cameras have won and, in the process, have sucked the excitement out of the craft, replacing it with a sense of doing social media chores on a subconscious and vaguely peer driven checklist. The camera is no longer separate from the normal run of life but is part of the conversation  enormous numbers of people carry on every minute of every day. Just as once cars were novel, fresh and exciting but now they are just a way to get somewhere while traffic and costs have sucked the remaining joy out of driving --- for the most part.

This seems to be how it goes for most people now:

See a sign with hours of operation on it. Snap sign, send to Bob. Get paper check. Take photograph of paper check, send to bank. Buy lunch. Snap lunch. Eat lunch. See wreck. Snap wreck. Share wreck on Facebook. Go to bar. Stand next to dorky guy with bad hat. Snap selfie. Share on Instagram. Go on vacation. Snap selfie at airport, at hotel, at monument, at powder room, at convenience store, at Target, at Burger King, etc. Dutifully upload into the humble brag section of Facebook so friends can pretend to burst with happiness for your circumstances. Go to work. Snap photo of cubicle. Upload with snarky message to Snapchat. Hope that conversations really do disappear. 

The process of photography has become the same as driving a car, in rush hour, to your company's crowded parking lot and then circling for ten minutes to find a parking space. Photography has become the fast food lunch. We (collectively) no longer engage in the craft of it. We no longer linger over lovely images but quickly mine them for their fleeting social messages. 

In one sense this is all an egalitarian delight. We've effectively brought the potential for self expression and global sharing to billions. If we could shake off the nationalist filters of Google, Facebook, et al and really look into the global stream we'd be able to look into the superficial constructs of other cultures. And, sadly, we might find that they are also just snapping selfies at lunch and documentation of the actuality of their vacations. In fact, the desire to endlessly share may actually be a cognitive virus that years ago went pandemic and curses us to an endless wave of nearly mindless uniformity. 

It may be depressing but it's not like there is a viable alternative. We are subject to and surrendered to the tides of progress and "innovation;" both technical and social. This may be the new and current estimation of what photography is for a new generation of "practitioners." 

I would say that this helps traditional photographers get a new grasp on markets for their wares because they are still the ones with cameras, lights and intention but the cameras on phone get relentlessly better and all of the foundational work that used to constitute "jobs" is gone. Replaced by a serviceable snap from the V.P. of Operation's cell phone. 

The top tier of pros survive because they aren't selling a brew of technical experience; they are bundling skills with a point of view. A different vision. An amalgam of taste and style that can be elusive specifically because it is completely subjective and a product of one's life, existence, experience and understanding. We grow as artists or we die as dinosaurs. 

And that brings into focus the fact that this blog is outliving it's usefulness. The number of people who care about gear is in decline and, frankly, if you need to look up a specification or comparison, this blog is a terrible place at which to do so. 

My experiences in the realm of commercial photography and videography are leaking away relevance to the remaining photo-as-hobby culture members because the process of doing the business is highly removed now from just doing the hands-on work. It's always been true that less than 10% of our time is spent with a camera in hand and 90% of the time is spent marketing, networking, thinking, conjecturing, testing, and the general fodder of trying to keep out of the middle of the road. Out of the spaces where progress for the sake of progress casually runs on over our past,  making it flatter than an armadillo that's met the unrelenting tires of an 18 wheeler. 

I've watched other blog sites move from using affiliate links to make money to trying direct merchandizing to make money. It's all so boring and mercenary to me because so few people do it well and balance great content with the sales side of existence. I wanted to do the blog to build a sense of community and sharing but it's not working out that way as our idea (generationally) of what photography means to culture changes. Over the past few months the engagement seems to have been withdrawn. We can all sense the shift in our collective appreciation and joy in doing photography. We get that our friends and family don't really see a difference between what we do with our cameras and what they do with their phones. We've seen the same photo/meme repeated ad infinitum on Flickr, or Google+, or (bundled as a political message) on Facebook. The whole thing (taking, sharing, enjoying individual vision in photography) has moved on and we're a demographic resistant to embracing the change or abandoning our seminal learning in the craft. 

I can't blame readers for the lack of engagement. The decline of interest is woven into the social subconscious at this point. Sharing information about gear, separated from its intended use, is silly. It's meaningless. Of course you can use a better camera for video than an RX10iii but that was never my point in writing about that camera. Of course you can figure out how to crop square after the fact but post processing into squares was not my goal in writing about the availability of different aspect ratios in cameras. 

When I wrote about EVFs six years ago it wasn't to make the point that they were technically superior to other finders it was to mark and recognize a shift toward a technology that is wholesale transforming the camera as tool, right now. But most people just wanted to chime in and say how much they like looking through glass. 

I'm not sure what I'll do going forward with the blog. I like the platform when I can use it to start discussions and poke holes in mindless convention. I like sharing my experiences with gear as a metaphor for embracing technical change. I'll think about it as I drive around Texas this week. 

If you want to move from content guzzler to mindful collaborator you could take a few minutes out of your busy life to tell me what you think. Are we watching the Fall of the Roman Empire as it relates to photography? Will it be followed by the Dark Ages? Where does hope lie? Is the priesthood of photography part of the problem or ....... ? Can we ever learn how to use the Force again?

In the future will all images move? How can we share stuff in a more meaningful way than across the lousy laptop screens of the first world? Should we even give a fuck or just go watch Kai do another video about his bum and today's "exciting" camera?

I sure don't know the answers or I wouldn't be asking you!