Robin Wong discovers that older cameras can be very good photography making machines.

https://blog.mingthein.com/2018/08/20/digital-classic-robin-reviews-the-original-canon-5d/#more-17429

I guess a lot of us are wrapped up in a mid-first-decade of the new century reappraisal/re-appreciation of just how good the camera tech was for the third generation of full frame gear.

Would be interested to hear back from the newest D700 users to see what they think. Chime in!

I spent $17 on a total "piece of crap" lens and I had a fun time shooting with it yesterday. Hello "Holga for Nikon." Can't wait to use this "glass" on a new Nikon Z with an adapter......hmmm.

I had a serious purpose for being nose deep in Amazon.com on Thursday. We'd just gotten the "thumbs up" on fun video projects from three different clients and I wanted to buy a Thunderbolt SSD drive to put all my footage on for faster editing. I found what I hope will be a good drive but when I was on the site I made the mistake of looking around at the Nikon lenses to see if there was any particular focal length I had missed and needed more than oxygen....

Nothing from Nikon bubbled up but when I started looking at third party lenses I came across the most counter-intuitive lens I could possible imagine. The Holga people have begun packaging the famous(?) Holga 60mm f8.0 lens that has been "featured" on their cameras for decades for various other brands of camera. You can now buy a 60mm Holga f8.0 for your Nikon, Canon and micro four thirds cameras. The lenses come with the appropriate mount for each brand. The build quality is utter crap and focusing is strictly by zone. There is no way to change apertures and even the smartest cameras with the best Auto-ISO will be mystified by exposure with this "gem." 

I should mention that there is one decent feature set: The Holga lens comes complete with front and rear caps.

The vignetting is so strong that the lens acts like a t16 instead of an f8.0. The edges are monstrously dark and I found that the highest precision approach to both focus and exposure was ---- trial and error. Much error, even more trial. 

I should mention that the lens (which I assume is a one element lens design) is not sharp anywhere in the frame. The one benefit for all you people obsessed with camera weight and size is that the all-plastic lens body construction probably weighs in at about 2 ounces and it will fit in the front pocket of your most hipster trousers.

Here (above and below) is my gallery from Saturday's Holga Photo Safari in downtown Austin. See the attack of the electric scooters!!!! See the dark edges!!! No Instagram filters were used in the degradation of these images!!! See flare an anamorphic lens lover could be proud of!!!!

Why did I buy it? Why do I do anything? Lack of impulse control and a credit card balance that the issuing bank seems to be ignoring.... Will I keep it? Well, of course. How else will I be able to invent a whole new style for myself for the future?

Can't wait slap an adapter on the lens and mount it on the GH5S. With the vignetting and distortion of the lens coupled with some V-Log and beginner color grading I think I'll have the kind of winning new "authentic" vibe I need to reach a whole new generation of photo buyers. Cheers!

We're heading into the busy Fall season.

Selena R. at Willie Nelson's Ranch.

It seems to always start out slow in August. After the first week or two with little, or no, business I begin to panic; certain that no e-mail and no texts means I'll probably never work again. The phone doesn't count as clients forgot about calling when they learned I'd respond to texts. I start planning to pull money out of my savings account or to sell plasma, or both. I tell Belinda we can no longer afford anything other than beans and rice. We turn the thermostat up a little bit more, even though we're mired in the hottest month of the year. 

Then the dam breaks and work starts to flow in. Next week is spoken for. A solid week that weaves stills, video, stills and then more video. The first few days of the following week are set aside for editing, and after that we start on a big project that will have me and my videographer in San Antonio for a couple days a week for most of September. And there's stuff starting to fill in around the edges. 

We've re-introduced fresh vegetables into our diets and the thermostat has crawled back down. Belinda reminds me that this happens every year. We call it "The Sigh Before School Starts." Parents scramble to get their kids ready and then the race to get half a year's worth of projects done between now and the 15th of December starts in earnest. 

We'll have the same sinking feeling from Dec. 15th until January 15th. Would someone please remind me in January that things cycle up as the holidays recede into the past?

(remember that short period when I bought a Canon 1D mk3 and some Zeiss lenses and played around with that camera for a while? It was actually pretty good).

Photography as ever changing content in today's advertising paradigm.

Selena. Singer with "Rosie and the Ramblers."

 It's interesting and bit depressing to understand how the role of photography has changed in the realm of advertising. I know many of my readers are hobbyists and don't really care how some art director in San Diego or Miami intends to use images in the course of her work but there is a shift in the basic understanding of how photography works in advertising that affects its role and value to each of us across our cultural map. 

In the days of limited and expensive distribution which defined print advertising it was impossible to cost effectively provide consumers (and specific target audiences) with new visual content that changed daily. The mandate then was to create advertising that had a temporal stickiness to it so that the visual impression an ad created would have enough impact to provide results over the span of weeks or months. The strength of an ad's impression was also a determined by how many times people passed along a magazine, newspaper, brochure or direct mail piece to another audience member. 

Since advertising agencies and their clients had limited and expensive vehicles for their advertising it was important to the process to develop a truly creative message for delivery. This meant that quality time was spent conceiving and testing their "one way" communication with a target market. Since photography and illustration were the primary sources of stickiness a lot of time (and money) were invested in getting just the right image to carry the message and branding for the client. 

In a time when national advertising placement in magazines could cost as much as $100,000 per insertion, per magazine; and when multiple magazines and newspapers needed to be used to effectively hit a complete target market, the costs of media always exceeded, by an enormous multiple, the cost of image production. But because each volley of ads was (relatively) so expensive and needed to have a long shelf life no expenses were spared in really fine-tuning the photography or illustrations used to market client's goods and services. Even for a simple, industrial shot in the studio we might have a day of pre-production meetings, several days to acquire or build props, followed by a full day of photographing in order to squeeze out the absolute best image possible. The image was the lever that made the expense of advertising work.

After our jobs as photographers were done the final images were sent out by the advertising agency for color separations which were then delivered to the magazine or printer. Good color separations were always a blend of art and science and, with retouching, could cost thousands of dollars. The negatives sent to each individual magazine could cost hundreds of dollars per set. No wonder art directors paid so much attention to detail and to a workflow that gave ample time for fine-tuning and quality control at every step. 

And, I am sure that a digital variation of this exists at the high end of national advertising even today. But I'm equally sure that the dollars spent on traditional placed media are a tiny fraction of the share they used to command in the overall pie of advertising expenditures. Access to the web changed everything. Advertisers have trained consumers to expect daily (and sometimes hourly) engagement; complete with spontaneous feedback loops. Now that "placement" on the web is just about free there is far less concern with getting individual messaging absolutely correct and able to withstand a long run cycle. It's been replaced with the need for constant content constantly supplied to an ever hungry audience. Trading a quantity experience for a quality art product.

If advertisers needed to make each image as creative and well produced as they did back in the time when print was dominant the cost of production, because of the demand for quantity and diversity of images, would be insurmountable and not sustainable. Now the image is secondary to just "having the door open" and rotating new visual inventory to the daily audiences on the web. The need for quantity is also driven by the granualization of the overall media landscape; even on the web.

We are rarely called upon now to make one glorious and remarkable image for clients these days. Instead, we are called upon to work quickly, with minimal pre-production, and to make a wide range of images (an image library) over the course of one engagement such that we can provide an inventory of diverse images which can be pushed into the ever hungry delivery channels as quickly as "content providers" can package an image with a terse little marketing story, whipped out at speed by an "associate" copy writer or a copy-writing app. 

Often, when I show current work to old school photographers they (rightfully?) grouse about little details that would not have passed through the previous workflow process without correction or retouching. A wisp of hair out of place, a wrinkle in a shirt, a hanging thread at a seam, a less than perfect composite, a slight color shift, all things which would be critically deficient for an image destined to lead a month long or quarter long campaign, lingering like fine perfume on the market. But none of those things are now deal breakers (or even speed bumps) in the current hourly manufacture and upload of content for the web. 

We now have clients who bring iPhones to the shoots with the stated intention of shooting everything we do during a shoot and sending the BHS images off to a remote designer who packages them and inserts them at Medium.com, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook, often creating a buzz campaign before we've even taken a break for lunch. This is not surreptitious behind-the-scenes behavior; it is mapped out as part of the shoot experience at the stage of preliminary negotiations. 

A recent shoot for a theater featured me shooting marketing stills, a video production company shooting a BHS video for immediate upload, and a photographer from the daily newspaper shooting the same BHS images and uploading them in bursts to his editor. The press photographer's images didn't hit print, they were delivered directly to the daily news feed on the newspapers website. And, of course, as soon as I got back to the office and started post production on the primary marketing images I was busy selecting my favorites and uploading them to this blog and to Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn so I could  grab a tiny bit of attention while the stuff was still fresh......

When each image has a lighter load to carry, and each image is desperately disposable, then each image is far less valuable. They become less like distinct art objects and more like the nightly local TV news. Bland stories, competently (barely) told, there to act that the mortar between bricks of advertising, and gone stale five minutes after the sign-off. Whether you admit it or not this downward appraisal of the value of individual images permeates through the collective psyche of our social structuring/ our culture. The endless flow diminishes the value and the attention paid to each individual pin prick of photographic presentation. 

The most interesting aspect for some of us is the way a diminished level of production value is rationalized; the way the shortcoming are re-packaged to become features. Any flaws (either in conception or image making ) are supposed to have been done intentionally in the pursuit of "authenticity." The idea being that flawed or poorly constructed images or messages will be more positively received by their intended audiences precisely because they "appear" to be a more honest message capsule. Less a corporate message and more just a slice of life. 

Am I depressed or "bitter" about all this? Not really. I presume that the overall market will rush to the bottom and soon nearly all web-ad images will be made quickly, mostly on the way to lunch (which will be recorded), by whatever phone is handy, and will become so bland and undifferentiated that data analysis will come to determine that all the energy wasted in loading up the web is ultimately inconsequential to sales which will bring a new generation of ad pros around 180 degrees, hellbent on creating a brilliant, standalone message that will be printed beautifully on thick and expensive card stock and then hand delivered to intended recipients, with a flourish. All of a sudden the mantra will be: They were so innovative. They were the first agency to reject the homogeneity of the web and embrace a whole new category: We're calling it "High Touch" marketing. Carefully crafted messages, exactly delivered. 

The new marketing will be touted as a break through, hybrid approach that combines state-of-the-art data-mining of demographics and combines it with quality messaging that is unique in both creative power and delivery. 

This may be critical marketing theory once we come to grips with the fact that the demographic over 50 years old controls over 75% of all wealth in the USA. And they may remember a time when advertising was delivered to them instead of just pushed off onto a screen. And they will probably remember that they liked feeling as though they were getting quality message, aimed directly at them, in a medium they enjoyed engaging with. Not all products and services will be able to slice down into the most cost effective slivers of the markets so there will always be mass market advertising that depends on the cheapness of the web. 

It will all be moot when video routs the final still imaging holdouts. The only thing that was holding video back was bandwidth and most of the fertile consumer markets have long since jumped that hurdle. Are we "looking forward" to a time when advertising just stream content 24/7? I'm not so sure but I may be outside that demo as well....

What does all this have to do with the image at the top of the article? Not much, except that I still like to see beautiful images that stand on their own. We may be the last few generations of people who share that regard. It makes me sad when photo reviewers like Thom Hogan write that the biggest impediment to success for companies like Nikon is not having software on the cameras that will easily and automatically send images immediately to the web. Why? So those images can join the millions of others queued up in the firehose? Seems like two concepts battling each other; the idea of a necessary and immediate flow of poorly considered images, flooding to the internet, versus brilliant concepts, careful planning and a process that would result on in glorious and stunning images that stand the test of time. 

Sad, if you believe that we can't have both. We can. Just not in the same wrappers.... 

Just stuck my camera out the window and blazed away today. Someone else was driving the car up the "Devil's Backbone."

The landscape looks more exciting when it blazes by at 85 mph. Wear your glasses in case the June bugs come a splattering.