Fadya in the studio. An exercise in lighting with HMIs from K5600.

I know a good percentage of photographers are wed to their flashes. They use em for everything. I'm more promiscuous with my lighting choices. At any one time we'll have racks of professional florescent fixtures, boxes filled with various tungsten lights, SMD LED lights, as well as three different flash systems in the studio. And that doesn't count the inventory of battery operated portables.

The fact is that different lights have a different affect on a photo shoot. Repetitive flash feels bouncy and staccato to me while feel of tungsten puts me into a time machine and takes me right back to the 1950's. HMIs are different. The light seems more liquid and at the same time its color response on sensors creates a look that's different from other sources. Color correct but a stretched out color range. The constant glow doesn't interrupt the give and take of the subject and the photographer. It's well mannered light.

There is a shutter speed, and it's different for nearly every situation, where constant HMI light gives a shutter speed that's fast enough to give the impression of frozen time but shows micro motion in the details that to me more accurately resembles the way our eyes see things. Sharp and soft overlayed on each other in a wonderful way. The faster the speeds the lesser the effect, and vice versa. I love the look I get with the shutter around 1/4th to 1/8th second. It's not a blur but it's not the sort of actinic sharpness that signals techno-fiction.

And, of course, everyone looks best in black and white.

The Sony RX10 ii was a perfect reporter camera for documenting the construction of Cronuts.

The public relations agency that represented  New York City celebrity chef, Dominique Ansel, hired me to cover an event at which the chef created and shared both his world famous Cronuts (a combination croissant and donut) and a new dessert which was a chocolate chip cookie baked in the shape of a small glass. The cookie cup was filled with cold milk and served as a combination dessert/beverage. In a reversal of typical consumption the cookie cup required the lucky recipient to first drink the milk and then eat the remaining cookie... hmmm.

At any rate I covered the event with several cameras but quickly came to rely on the Sony RX10 model two. I used that camera mostly with a bounced, manual flash but the images above were done in a well lit hotel kitchen. The camera easily handled the required ISO 800 setting and the automatic white balance was right on the money.

The beauty of that camera for this kind of work resides in a  combination of strengths. First, it is small and light and requires no ancillary lenses. The range of 24mm to 200mm is ample for most event work. The image stabilization of the camera, in combination with the deeper depth of field, makes handholding in low light a pleasure. And the EVF, in combination with bounced flash made shooting manually a breeze. The instant feedback in the EVF allowed me to fine tune the fish exposures in stride.

While I am happy with the two RX10 models I currently have I do have a suggestion for a future RX10 product which I hope Sony will consider. I'd like to see a model with a much more limited focal length range that is optimized for low light by having a lens that would cover 28mm to about 105mm (equivalent/35mmm) but which would be an f1.8 throughout the range.  I can't imagine that I'm the only event documentarian who would enjoy the extra light gathering ability combined with still decent depth of field when used wide open.

Did I have a Cronut? You bet I did. It was delicious but it required me to swim and extra 15 minutes the next morning to shed the calorie load...  Sacrifice, sacrifice.