Little camera. Big shoot. Nice stuff. The paradigm of what constitutes "professional gear" keeps changing...

My friend, Lane, asked me to volunteer to shoot portraits for Aids Services of Austin. Every year they do an "Aids Walk" as a money raising event to continue their good work of providing critical services to people in central Texas living with HIV. Lane is producing public service announcement/television spots to promote the Aids Walk (more information: here). Lane needed an assortment of images that represents a cross section of ASA supporters and I was happy to help out. He started casting a couple weeks ago and by yesterday morning we had a roster of 38 people who were eager to help by being on camera talent. We scheduled 20 minute sessions starting at ten a.m. and ending around six p.m. 

We wanted a cool, gray background and Lane wanted the images shot in 16:9 to fit (without cropping) in his HDTV frame for TV. I set up a gray background and lit it with a 18 inch beauty dish covered with some white diffusion. I added a 1/2 tungsten to daylight conversion gel filter to the middle of the diffusion on the light to cool down the spot that would be created directly behind my subjects.  I used an Elinchrom flash into an 80 inch, white umbrella as my main light and used no fill whatsoever, depending on the white walls of the studio to provide enough bouncing fill light to keep our shadows from going inky black. I was very happy with the light. 

Now, here is the interesting twist....instead of pulling out one of my full frame Sony cameras I decided to put my philosophical money where my mouth is and use......

....the little, Samsung NX300 camera instead. I've been writing about small cameras for years, and using them since Olympus came out with the very first Pens. And I've used them as back-up cameras and as main cameras on smaller projects or person work but I've never really pressed them into service as full on commercial cameras for a day long shoot. My biggest concern was that the two batteries I had on hand wouldn't last through the day with constant shooting and chimping. I was wrong. My first battery lasted nearly 1,000 frames and my second battery was still going strong as we ended up the day. Our total frame count was around 1350. I was pretty much stunned by the battery performance.

One of my other concerns was my own prejudice that the contrast detection AF, while very good in bright sun, might fail me in the darker studio. I set the AF for single shot and engaged the face detection   magic. This is NOT how I would have shot in times gone past. The camera was set up at ISO 100, shutter speed at 1/160th and the aperture around f5.6 to 7.1.  I used two Elinchrom monolights and I triggered them with an older, Wein infra-red trigger that I mounted in the (pleasantly conventional) hot shoe of the NX300. In the Sony cameras, if you want a bright image in the studio in your EVF you have to click a setting called, "Turn setting effect off."  Samsung calls the always bright setting the "framing mode" so I set that in order to compose images with a bright image on the back screen of the camera. 

I mounted the camera on a tripod and we got started. Once I got to the point where I trusted the camera to nail the focus on faces (every time) I stopped trying to be a control freak and let the camera do the face detection AF for everything. I shot in the super fine Jpeg mode and I was very happy with the camera's choices of contrast and color. I left the imaging parameters in "standard" with no customizations. The files come into Aperture needed a little bit of contrast boost and, frankly, that's just the way I like them. Better to need to bump up a little contrast rather than trying to pull contrast out of an image. And I think the way the files are set up they do a good job protecting against blown highlights.

Lane and I have worked together on photography and video projects for over ten years now. We've always used typical, big cameras in the work we've done for his advertising agency. He took one look at the Samsung CSC camera, shrugged and never blinked. The idea that non-photographers care about which camera is used on a shoot is, for the most part, a silly myth invented by forum rats to justify their camera purchases.

We used the kit lens for this project and the long end was just about right for covering a nine foot wide roll of seamless paper from a good shooting distance. I would have preferred a longer focal length for a few of the close ups I did but they were not for the client, the close ups were just for my own fun. When I look at the results from the 18-55mm lens I'm pretty much satisfied. We were shooting about a stop down from wide open at the long end but the lens still delivered very sharp files. When you consider that the primary use for the files will be in 2K television you realize that you'll just be throwing sharpness away at a certain point. And we had a lot of sharpness we could throw out, if needed.

We moved pretty quickly to get everyone through yesterday and not clog up the works. We had couples with babies and moms with toddlers and a mom and fourth grader team. Everyone really got into the spirit of the day and relaxed and played. The images I've included in this blog are just quirky, fun selections I made while scrolling through the thumbnails in Aperture. 

While I was using the Samsung NX300 in this instance, it's safe to say that any of the cool, little mirrorless systems would have worked equally well on this project. We weren't in a situation (more than once or twice) where we were shooting individuals, we were mostly shooting groups of two and three where focus on everyone in the group was much more important than using a style that calls for extremely narrow depth of field.

I decided to use the smaller camera because it seemed like a fun thing to do. We were in the studio. If I concluded that something wasn't working I was just a step or two from the equipment cabinet. But what I've found is that the whole industry is changing and camera selection along with it. Smaller and lighter is more fun and less precious. I was sure the smaller camera would do a great job and I like the way the jpegs work in that camera. I didn't want to shoot raw and process through 1300+ big, 24 megapixel raw files to get to what we wanted. When you decide that you are going to shoot Jpeg in the studio, at normal ISOs, you basically put most cameras on even footing. Once you set a custom white balance in a studio space you've eliminated a lot of the reasons that people choose to shoot in raw.

I've written a lot about my camera selection here but it was really one of the unimportant decisions in putting together this shoot. We're getting to the point again where most of the new cameras are interchangeably competent and that's nice because we can stop making them such a focal point in our process. A bigger concern for me was how to create the kind of back light Lane had in mind and how to do the amount of vignetting on each frame to match the ad agency's original vision for the lighting.

I struggled in trying to decide what kind of lighting to use. I've been working pretty steadily with my new fluorescent fixtures which I augment with a few LED lights but for this project I decided to play it ultimately safe by choosing electronic flash. I figures that I'd have some fast moving babies and toddlers as well as very active adults and I'd want the "freezing" power of flash. I also want to use a big light source that wouldn't suck up all the space in the studio and which would be easy to move around and reconfigure for smaller and larger groups of people.  That meant that I was less interested in setting up a six by six foot diffusion screen and all the attendant light stands and more interested in a combined solution, like a big umbrella or a big soft box. I chose the umbrella light because I like the wrap around of an 80 inched and I really valued the portability and flexibility for this project.

The choice of camera and lens took all of 30 seconds while the lighting took just a bit longer. The hard part of the shoot was making a uniform style for all the images and then working to keep everyone's energy levels up so they felt good and genuine in front of the camera. That's the part that took up the next six hours.....

Sometimes I think we focus on the wrong parts of photography. Choosing and buying cameras is the easy part. So is reading the owner's manual and figuring out the right settings. The hard part of this business (or craft or art form) is figuring out what to shoot and what you want your images to ultimately look like. Lots of stuff is binary but the human reactions you want to get from your subjects in a photo are totally out of the science grid and firmly in the random, chaotic and unpredictable category. It's really your experience and your ability to mentally and emotionally change gears that makes or breaks projects that depend on getting good performances from other humans. All the spread sheets in the world aren't much help there....

We've seen workshops about the Zone System and about One Light and every permutation of waiting for the light in landscape photography but I'm going to be first in line for the workshop about how to make people happy, engaging and part of a collaborative approach to making fun photographs. That's a course I never see and it may be the only important or useful course for smart ( or overly smart) photographers.

To wrap up and summarize:  We had a project that needed to yield images for television, social media and some print advertising. We used a smaller camera but I didn't worry because it cranks out sharp, nice, 20 megapixel files in a competent and straightforward way. The lighting was much more important than the camera and lens selection in this instance and keeping people engaged and giving their best energy to the photograph was more important than the lighting. If nothing else the use of a non-traditional camera in this setting was like a tacit excuse to be a little less serious and have a bit more fun. Certainly there was nothing intimidating here for the portrait subjects. They had a great time....

Shoot essentials: Cold, bottled water for everyone. Coffee for everyone in those critical, first two hours of the morning. A lunch break where we could leave the studio, sit around the dining room table and decompress and talk about what's working and what's not. A close by bathroom. An extra camera battery. A lot of energy. The stamina to be on your feet for six hours and the patience to wade through a thousand images.

Just another 

fun day 

at work in the orchard of photography. 

Support the Aids Walk.

Some fun, Friday afternoon notes. From the desk of an unorganized photographer...

What the heck was I doing in Denver last month? I'd been invited by a company called, Craftsy.com, to make a video course on Studio Portrait Lighting. I worked with a producer from the company to put together an in-depth outline that covered everything from which lights I work with and why, through basic portrait lighting, and into a little behind the scenes of how I work. The program took days to commit to video (hey, I'm a photographer not a professional actor) and almost a month of post production and editing to get just right. What we ended up with is a 2.5 hour video that people can purchase and watch online (and once purchased can watch forever...). I hope that people find it interesting and useful. It's for people who've mastered basic photography concepts and now want to extend their expertise into the realm of studio work. In particular, portrait work.

My only fear, now that we're approaching the launch date, is that there's some sort of very embarrassing blooper reel I don't know about that the producers are going to release to pay me back for being a newbie on the set. Seriously though, I had a great time working with the company and I hope they invite me back for more. I'm not posting  any links yet because I don't want people to go prematurely and be disappointed that the programming isn't there yet. Look for more details in the next two weeks.

An added benefit for me was a deep immersion into studio video production. Spending ten hours a day in front of two and three cameras at a time was like taking a crash course in how to do more adventurous and polished video. And yes, I still think sound is the most important consideration!! Well, sound and having someone incredibly beautiful in the program with you.....

Quick Equipment Review: I don't know if it's the sharpest 50mm 1.4 lens in the whole world, in fact I suspect that just about any current 50mm lens from Leica will handily beat it, but I really like shooting with the beefy and imposing Sigma 50mm 1.4 lens that I recently bought. I've used it pretty extensively over the last month and it's a great match for both the full frame Sony's that I own. For the last week I've had it spot welded onto the front of my Sony a850 and am attempting to shoot (as much as possible) at f1.4, f2.0 and f2.8 just for kicks. I mean, why else own a fast lens? The reason I'm using it on the a850 is that I'm a contrarian. The a850 reminds me of Kodachrome 64. You can't really push it up to very high ISOs so I'm making a conscious effort to shoot everything where that particular camera shines. Most of the time I leave it at ISO 100 and when push comes to shove I crank it on up to ISO 200 and live dangerously. At those speeds I don't think the camera has any competitors that are head and shoulders better. You could argue for a Nikon D800, but only one that focuses on both sides of the frame....

Once you've dialed in an a850 you're working with a really great image maker with a smaller IQ sweet spot than some of the newer 24 megapixel cameras. Interesting point for the DXO true believers: the Sony a850's overall score of 79 is only two points lower than that of the Canon 5d mk3 which is four years newer... The a850 still spanks that camera in the dynamic range realm which means more to a studio type photographer than just about any of the other measurements the inscrutable ones do....

Anyway, back to the Sigma 50mm 1.4. When it first hit the market a lot of people had trouble with front and back focusing but so far (knock on wood) mine is right on the money with both varieties of the full frame cameras. In terms of sharpness most people will take points off for the fact that the lens is very sharp in the middle but that the far corners need to get close to f5.6 to be really, critically sharp. Since I only use the lens for human-style, three dimensional subjects and not ever for flat copy work I understand that this metric is meaningless for the intended use of the lens and joyously use it at all apertures, counting on it to be less sharp in the corners and far edges when I'm shooting images of people. But it's really no different in that regard than the older Sony 50mm f1.4 or those that I've owned from Canon and Nikon. If you need sharp edge to edge, near wide open then you are in the market for a macro lens, not a high speed lens.

When I shot with the Canon 1DS mk2 and the 5d mk2 cameras I bought and (tried ) to use the vaunted Zeiss 50mm 1.4 lens. When I had luck riding with me and all the variables (like focus) lined up for me the image could be very good with rich colors and pleasing tonalities. But the rub in that set up (and I suspect most situations where one is attempting to connect a legacy style manual focus lens with a modern, autofocus camera (which through ancient design choices does not feature focus peaking) ) is the fact that the 50mm ZE, when used in the most popular part of the focus range (closer than ten feet) had a tendency for pronounced focus shift. Even if your green dot of focus confirmation lied to you and told you the lens was in focus it was not. The only way I was uniformly successful in using that lens was to take advantage of Canon's live view function. As you can imagine it was a major pain in the derriere when trying to shoot in bright light. The ambient light just washed out the screen  image and you wound up basically guessing when you had achieved sharp focus.

Of course if you use a camera with an EVF and integrated focus peaking it's much easier to determine the point of sharp focus on the fly. And with image magnification and in finder live imaging paranoid levels of confirmation are much easier.

I've wanted to buy the fast Sigma 50 for the Sony for some time but already owned Sony's version and it's not at all a bad lens in its own right. I finally grabbed a Sigma 50mm 1,4 when the priced dropped from daunting $499 to a less anxiety inducing $399. I've used it for many shoots and love the images at nearly every aperture. I've sold off all the other Alpha capable 50mm variants I had lying around and I'm breathing a sign of relief at my inventory downsizing. While the lens is big and feels ungainly on my a58 (which is a crop frame camera) it's just the right balance in my hands when coupled to the a850 which is in itself a monster sized cameras.

I love shooting with the combo only because of the nostalgia I have for a time gone past. In days of camera yore every "professional" camera came with a choice of 50mm 1.8 or 50mm 1.4 lenses. And that's how we bought them back then. I remember the succession: Nikon F2 with 50mm ai 1.4, Canon F1 with 50mm 1.4 SSC, Contax RTS III with Zeiss Planar 50mm 1.4, and even a brontosaurus like Nikon F5 with the 50mm 1.4 AF.... Those cameras trained my hands and my mind to favor the fast over the flexible and mass over pocket ability. The Sony a850 is their digital analogue. And I love it when I pick it up.

The Sigma 50mm 1.4 is available for all of the "big three" camera makers and, if the price stays where it is, To summarize: in the center of the lens it's very, very sharp---on par with just about anything not made exclusively for NASA or the military. Far edges? On par with just about all the competitors---better than some, even with others. Size? Enormous and imposing. Cool factor? 8.5.  I think you should check it out if you are in the market for normal/fast. It's a good value.

Travel Plans:  I'll be traveling to Berlin on the third of September to do some serious shooting, to meet with execs from a camera company, and to attend a small part of the annual IFA show (fun, high tech stuff----huge showcase with lots of tech product launches and introductions). I'll be there for about a week and I'd love to meet for coffee with any VSL readers who will be in Berlin during that time frame. Let me know what works and when my itinerary is set we can start making plans.

I'll be traveling to Tokyo in early November and I'd love to hear from Tokyo VSL readers. My schedule is wide open on that trip. The Tokyo adventure is purely for shooting and socializing. I'll be there by myself and it's always nice to meet photographers when traveling.

Books: If you don't already own a "Kirk Tuck" book now is the time to get one. They're still in stock at Amazon and they are still full of the same great information they've always had.  Please check out the links to the books at Amazon.com below.

Yesterday I started making a short movie about what Austinites do when the temperature starts to climb like crazy. I'm trying to edit it quickly and get it up by tomorrow. It's mostly just for fun but it shows off what you can do with a little mirrorless camera like the Samsung NX300. I was amazed at how well it handled the wide range of tones in direct sun. Maybe you will be too. Not much difference between the footage from the small camera and the footage from the a99 or 5Dmk2. Stay tuned.

Amazon links below!!! If need diapers or sardines or car parts or even camera gear and books I'd be much obliged if you'd click through any one of the links below to start your shopping adventures...