Continuing look at an Annual Report. The wide shot.

The wide shot.  These rebar constructions will eventually be placed upright, within a form and will serve as the reinforcement for concrete columns.  They are destined to become the support for elevated highway structures.  The subject is an engineer with the firm that creates them.  Canon 7d,  15-85 @ 15mm.  One Canon 580 EX2 from the left side of the frame.


Another blog about the start of the assignment is here.

Just another "hotter than hell" day in central Texas.  Someone will ask why we didn't do this shot some time other than the middle of the day and my response would have to be the question, "When were we supposed to do the shots we did earlier and later?  On an annual report project you have a list of images that you need to produce and usually it's on a pretty tight time frame.  A lot depends on when the people or projects you need to document can actually be scheduled.  Usually a writer is writing or has written a small essay about the person you'll be scheduled to shoot.  If you can't oblige their schedules you'll soon have some gaps in the project and that may eventually lead to gaps in your client list.

This engineer was ready to go at 1 pm so I was too.  We just finished a shot on the other side of the highway from this location and it was on dry asphalt.  For that shot we used the big lights.  But as we started across this field several thoughts occurred to me:  1.  Oh my God!  This entire hundred yard trek is through the thickest, grimiest mud I've ever encountered.  In some places our feet would sink in up to our ankles.....  2.  There's no dry ground for the electronic flash generator, the stands or the sandbags.  Yuck.  And my final thought:  We're starting run behind schedule.....

So this is one of the few series of shots that's not diffused by a four by four foot diffuser or lit with a 1200 watt second powered flash in a softbox.  I brought the most intrepid person from the crew along with me through the sea of mud, oblivious to the insult her brand new track shoes were receiving and we brought along the bare minimum of gear. She held the flash and modifiers and aimed them at the subject, modifying her position as necessary.  The Canon 7D with the 15-85mm lens,  the Canon 580 Ex2,  an eight foot ttl extension cord and a Speedlight Prokit mini softbox with 1/4 CTO filter plastered on the front diffuser.  We used the high speed FP setting for most of the shots and I did some color shifting in the post processing to enrich the blue of the sky.

The image above is pretty much fun.  The 15mm setting on the lens does fun perspective stuff with the rebar structures.  I like the image below best because I like to see faces closer up.

And the tight shot.  All the same specs but with the 15-85 zoomed in.  You should see the full size file.  Nice detail.  Very nice.

You can see how versatile the lens is in these two variations and, to my eye, how sharp and well behaved it is as well.

When we get our shot list neither the client nor I are exactly sure what we'll find when we venture out onto the locations.  We both saw and really liked the giant rebar constructions when we stumbled across  them.  Neither of us anticipated the treacherous mud we'd have to wade through to set up the shots.  We also learned that the extra layer of a safety vest makes uncomfortable look comfortable.....

I was pleased by how well the small flash worked to fill in the subject's face and less pleased by how well hidden and by how obtuse the menu item is for setting FP flash on the Canon cameras.  It would be nice if they just asked their friends at Nikon to show them the right way to integrate a flash feature set....

We stayed through ten or so variations of pose and composition, probably 100 raw frames in all before beating a hasty retreat to the nirvana of air conditioning.  Here's another little tidbit:  You leave the house in the morning with your work clothes and boots on and then, in the middle of the day, the boots get totally trashed with thick sticky mud.  You'll be leaving this location to go to an engineering office in a class A office tower with plush carpeting and crisp, upholstered furniture.  What's a pro to do?

Well, of course you have you emergency change of clothes in the back of the car.  Right?  Right.  A clean pair of black sneakers (from Target) a second pair of pants and a dry shirt that doesn't make you look like a safari adventurer temporarily lost in the concrete jungles of downtown Austin.  Nothing like changing in the bathroom of the closest McDonalds.  But,  you see,  we were on a schedule....

Stay tuned for another installment from the AR project.

Happy, hot Saturday.  Kirk

The anatomy of an annual report shoot.

I shot this job last month and I wanted to post a few pictures and talk about it but there's this thing called "an embargo".  It basically means that you can't (ethically) use the images you shot until your client uses them first or gives you their express permission to use them.  It's part of the professional ethics that you need to practice to make sure you'll have clients in the future.  I had lunch today with the client and she gave me her permission to show photos and to blog about the job.  I knew she would because she understands the power and benefits of long term collaborations.

The client is a quasi governmental agency that plans and builds roadways and toll roads in and around central Texas.  Their core mission is to provide sensible solutions to our traffic problems and to make sure there will be the right kinds of roads in the right places to support the city's growth.  Every year we do an annual report that showcases what they've done and what they plan to do.  In the recent past we've won significant awards for Annual Reports from various professional organizations and we've gotten good at reading each other and playing to our strengths.

If you are new to professional photography this is the kind of client I think you would want.  My direct contact has the responsibility for designing and producing the printed document and repurposing our work on their website.  Before we started the project we had a planning breakfast together in which we went over the goals of the project, the time line, the look and the styles that she wanted to include.  If every client did this kind of pre-planning there would be fewer spinning wheels and a lot more efficiency....

We wanted to showcase the people who do the actual work on projects.  We also wanted to convey that the agency had created several "shovel ready" projects in central Texas that would benefit local companies.  The companies who do the real work.

Our challenges were limited to the weather conditions in Austin.  We completed the job in six long days, mostly during the end of July, and our biggest problem was the heat index.  Nearly all of the shots were exteriors and the temperatures ranged in the low 100's (farenheit).  This meant that we would need to work quickly and efficiently.  We were working on active construction sites so hard hats and reflective safety vests were a must.

The shot above is our very first shot of the project.  This is one of the supervisors for a company that digs foundations for, and then builds forms and pours the concrete pillars that support overpasses and flyovers.  We arrived mid-afternoon when the mercury hit 102 and the humidity was nearly 100%.  We could see those tall, threatening thunderheads moving in from the northwest.  I set up quickly and did about 60 variations in the space of eight to ten minutes, sweat dripping down my hands.  The rain did hit and we started to wrap up and put stuff away.  The Elinchrom Ranger I was using got splattered but never paused and never went down.

So,  how did I set this up?  I used a Canon 7D with a 15-85mm IS lens.  I put it on a tripod so I could step away from the camera, invite the art director to inspect the image on the screen and then step back in without worrying about the framing being disturbed.  I floated a sixty inch umbrella with a black cover over the top of the subject's head to cut any direct sun (which kept coming in and out.....).  It's on a heavy duty Lowell stand that's straddling a trench.  I used an Elinchrom Ranger RX AS pack on half power thru a head that was covered with a quarter CTO filter and shoved into a small (16x20) softbox.  My method was to meter for the glowering sky and then set the light from the flash about 2/3rds of a stop higher.

By filtering the flash with a quarter CTO (an orange filter) I was able, in the raw conversion, to bring his face back to neutral which drove the sky into a deeper blue.  That gave me the color contrast I was craving and would try to use for the rest of the project.  (Reference the white on the logo on the helmut before telling me that his face still looks warm.  This is Texas and a lot of us who work outside have excited more melanin than most pasty northerners will in a lifetime.....).  The challenge is to find a balance between the background and foreground that is believable.

This is the look we were hoping to get.  I will tell you that when you work in temperature extremes there is a great temptation to "call it" too early.  By that I mean that you get so uncomfortable that you start to think,  "this is close enough.  I'll fix it in post".  This is a mistake.  You should never walk away from a set up until you are sure you've got exactly what you want.  My goal is to make a shot that I could convert to Jpeg and give to the client on the spot and still be proud.  We shot this in raw and did a little PP but not much.  We stayed until I had it.

To her everlasting credit the client hung right in there and never, for a moment, suggested that we should move on.  Figures.  She runs distance races and practices around our hike and bike trail regardless of the elements.  We finished this shot and then moved on to the next location.  And the next location.  All at 102 degrees or better.

In a week no one remembered the misery of the location.  We were all thrilled with the sixty or seventy different variations we'd done of the twelve or so set ups.  The sweaty shirts got washed.  The mud covered shoes were cleaned off.  We stood under the garden hose to cool off.  The project is in production.  I'm happy I can share it now.

A few shooting notes from central Texas:  We used the Canon 7D because we knew it was about to rain most of the week and that camera is both a good performer and weather sealed.  I made good use of the 15-85 because it allowed me to do a lot of different looks without having to change lenses amidst the dust storms that roadway construction sites can become.

I use the Elinchrom Ranger RX AS because it is designed for use in  rough conditions and always has enough power to overcome direct sun.  At first we recharged every day but as I became more and more trusting of the Elincrhom gear I started charging up every two or three days.  The batteries in these things are amazing.

The trusty Honda Element took anything that a pick up truck could handle without a complaint.  Certainly this is one of the ultimate photographer's vehicles.  If I could custom design one it would have some racks for light stands and maybe a built in water cooler....

I'll post some more shots from the project over the next few days.  In the meantime I want you to know about the anti-workshop in San Antonio on the fourth of Sept.  Read about it here:  http://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2010/08/free-low-key-event-for-anyone-who-wants.html

I want to tell you that these long sleeve shirts are amazingly protective......

And I want to thank my client for their support and creative spirit.  We're on to another project now but this will go down as the best project I've worked on this season.

All the best,  Kirk

If you work in the sun, get good shirts.  Here and here.

If you like the blog you might want to try one of our books.  I think you'll like em:

   

A free, low key event for anyone who wants to come...Sept. 4th. (already in the past but posted for fun and to see if there is any interest in doing one again in Nov. or Dec.).

Belinda.  Many years ago.  Does film look different?

I'll start with the hard facts and work my way down from there.  Freeform, free kinda workshop-ey thing in San Antonio for anyone who wants to come.  Sept. 4th.  The longer version:  It's been a tough three years for everyone and The Market for everything still mostly sucks.  I get between five and ten poorly targeted e-mail blasts a day from photographers touting workshops.  "Learn the secrets of HOT Photoshop (Kelby)"  "Light like a champ" (five hundred semi-employed former professionals)  "Shoot hot models!!!!!!! (future semi-employed professional photographers)  "Learn to make millions shooting video with your Canon!!!!"  (all the guys who couldn't make it as semi-employed professional  photographers who are trying something different) and,  the truly famous, first tier photographers who are doing workshops with fixtures in the photo entertainment industry like the Maine Photographic Workshops and the Sante Fe Workshops (the real deals?).  But the bottom line is "come listen to me and pay for the experience".

Don't get me wrong,  I think a weekend workshop with someone whose art and style you admire, who is not trying to make everyone shoot just like him, someone who's really good at teaching,  like Don Giannatti over at Lighting Essentials, can be a transformative investment.  It's a way of kick starting the basics and showing you the stuff that maybe you can't get your head around in a good book.  I've given some workshops over the past three years and, judging from the feedback,  people felt as though they were taking away some good material.

But if you're like me you're overloaded with all the come ons for all the workshops.  We seem to have hit some sort of tipping point where the market goes from just oversupplied to ridiculously overwhelmed.  When you were in biology class did your teacher ever do the experiment concerning bacteria or algae growth in a petri dish?  You put in a food source (agar) and then you drop in one small colony of pathogen or bacteria or whatever and you chart the growth by counting new colonies.  The growth starts slowly.  Then it accelerates.  Then it becomes geometric.  As all the colonies double and double and double they soon fill the entire petri dish.  They consume the entire food supply and then...........they all die off.

I think we're just about there (hyperbole alert!!!!!).   So I'm suggesting that we take a break from the relentless profit motive and just enjoy a day of photography together.  I'll be in San Antonio on Sept. 4th to walk around pretty aimlessly and shoot in the streets.  I'm starting at the Alamo at 8:30 am.  I'll be the guy with the camera (one camera).  I'm starting off the  morning walking around downtown but always heading west toward the Mercado (marketplace).  I'm heading toward Mi Tierra Restaurant for a big plate of Heuvos Rancheros and a cup of coffee.  Maybe a few flour tortillas.  While in restful repose we can chat for as long as we want about shooting photographs.  Not about gear, just about shooting photographs.  Why and How.  Not "which lens should I buy and how do I set my flash triggers????"   Just, how do you get people to pose?  What do you think about when you're out searching for images?  How do you know what will work and what won't?

So after the long breakfast I'll hand  out a rough map with my favorite routes and things to see in the downtown area and then we can all wander off in random directions.  I'm not interested in being surrounded by groups of people.  If you feel lonely you can group up with other people who might attend.  At 4 pm I'm heading over to the McNay museum to see what REAL art looks like  (always great to have some grounding.....) and then, when they close the doors,  I'll head just up New Braunfels St. to La Fonda and have a nice, icy beer, some of their great hot sauce and chips and maybe a Tex Mex plate. I'll also be happy to chat about the How and Why of photography at length.  But,  I'll also be ready to listen to anyone who has something interesting to teach me about photography.  Even if it's highly tangential.   I won't tell you how to use flash triggers or which flash to buy.

Then,  when the conversation dies out or the restaurant starts looking aggressively at the table I'll head back to Austin.  Hope to be home before 10pm but you never know.

The cost?  There is no cost.  Just come down and play.  Use your camera.  Walk the streets.  Feel the rhythm.  Feel the heat.  Snap some pix.  Test out that technique.  Have a plan.  Do a project.  Find a favorite mid-day retreat with cold air conditioning and hot art.  Look at the famous, modern library architecture.  Explore the tourist traps.  Take pictures of each other wearing sombreros.  Bring a hot chick or a hot guy and shoot them someplace new.  You have to buy your own breakfast, lunch and dinner but you'd have to do that wherever you are.

What to bring?  I'm a minimalist.  I'm bringing a camera and one small zoom lens.  Haven't decided whether it will be the 18-55 IS or the 15-85 IS on the Canon 7D or just a 50mm 1.8 and the 5dmk2.  I do know that it will be one or the other buy not both.  I'll bring a hat to keep my head from getting fried.  A shirt with a collar and no stains in case I decide I want to have lunch somewhere nice.  An extra battery and an extra memory card in one pocket......and definitely NOT a camera bag.  No tripod.  No monopod.  If my street shooting technique won't work without a tripod I'll move on to the next shot.  No problem.  Flashes and flash triggers?  Not for me.  Twenty or thirty bucks for random stuff,   a driver's license and credit card shoved in one pocket.  That's it for me.  Anything else just slows me down, makes me look conspicuous and gives me too many choices.  Choices that slow me down and get in the way.

I'll wear a long sleeve shirt in case I need to be in the sun for a while.  But it will be a shirt made of the technical fabric I talked about two weeks or so ago.  With nice vents.  Maybe and ex officio or Sportif.  Comfortable shoes that don't look brand new or too dorky always helps.  I like to bring my sunglasses.

Street shooting etiquette:  This could fill a book.  (Maybe a book on street shooting is overdue!!!! Hello?).  Basics:  1.  If you point a camera at someone and they ask you not to photograph them, don't.  You may have every legal right in the world but you probably don't have an ethical right.  I don't think we'll be doing "hard news".   2.  Figure out the shot before you even put the camera up to your eye.  The less you fidget and fuss with your camera the nicer the images generally turn out.  3.  Not everything is worth a picture.  Some stuff is better savored directly.   4.  Yes.  Pretty girls are pretty.  Take a shot if you want but let's not keep after it until everyone in the area is uncomfortable and the cops,  or worse, her big brothers are on the way.  5.  Respect the environment.  I hope I don't have to tell you that church interiors and the insides of restaurants are best lit with nothing but the light that's there.  As Henri Cartier Bresson once said,  "Using flash is like bringing a handgun to the opera".   At the time it was a poignant statement.  Now, in the USA, you can pretty much count on someone thinking it's just great to bring their handgun to the opera.  But it's still not okay to use your flash at the opera........

6.  Respect private property rights.  Anything is fair game if you are shooting from public property but when you step onto private property all the rules change.  You really do need permission to shoot if you are physically on private property....

7.  It's annoying to see a great shot and then turn around and see a line of photographers waiting behind you to copy it.  I'm just saying.....  Ditto with carefully cultivated models...

8.  Try to be an example for all the other photographers that will come after you.  Be nice and people will generally be nice to you.  This is Texas, afterall.

The schedule waits for no one.  There's no private consultations.  Everyone joins in.

That's about it.  I'll spend the day shooting the way I usually do.  I'd love to have people around to have breakfast and dinner with.  Lunch?  I'll just grab a snack.  Why do this?  Just for fun.

Don't need to tell me if you are coming but you are welcome to use the comments to see who's in and who's not.  How many do I expect will be there?  At least one (that would be me) anyone else is a bonus....

Street shooting and eating our way thru San Antonio.  Most fun.

Are you showing off your skill or are you joining the conversation about art?

   This is a desperately bad photograph.  It's blurry.  It's not sharp.  The shadows are blocked up. The white on the headlight/handlebars is burning out to white.  It's too tightly cropped.  It's one of my favorites.....  Rome.  1994.

There's always some way to technically improve a photograph.  I was jarred into thinking about the difference between the joyful discovery of beauty and/or truth via a camera, and the hard work of compulsively honing both equipment and technique in the pursuit of perfecting the recording process of capturing a photograph.

I say "jarred" because I seem to have forgotten, almost entirely, the time I spent in the retail audio business back in the 1970's.  For me it was a way of making some extra cash to spend on dates while pursuing a degree of some kind from the University of Texas at Austin.  For everyone else around me;  customers and fellow employees, audio was a passion.  And, if you read carefully you'll see that I wrote "audio"----not "music".

You see,  the pursuit of perfct audio has nothing at all to do with music other than the fact that recorded music is used to show off the clarity, richness and noise free fidelity of the sound created by the machines.  Sound familiar?

So, this morning I had coffee with an "audiophile" and he was telling me about a new turntable and tone arm.  He sold off a world renowned "reference" turntable in the every escalating compuslion to squeeze even more "transparency" and accuracy from his collection of long playing records (LP's).  Vinyl, of course.

We spoke for a good while about audio and I still don't know what genres of music he enjoys or who his favorite artists are.  We never got around to talking about music.  He did mention that the current "state of the art" home audio system currently costs around half a million dollars.  We also reminisced about a zany friend of mine, also an audiophile, who was so obsessed that dreaded "low frequency, vibration induced rumble" might be affecting the ultimate sonic performance of his turntable (this was in the late 1970's) that he cut thru the floor of his "pier and beam" house,  poured a reinforced concrete pillar that reached down to bedrock, and mounted his machine on that.  Then he surrounded the whole assembly in an insulated closet. His next task was to tackle the obvious problem of convection currents......

Surely the emotional need for the illusion of perfection has its roots in the human need to quantify and qualify the parameters of an experience while ignoring the experience itself.  After the series of reviews I recently wrote on the Leica M9, the 35mm Summilux, and the Canon 7D,  I got the usual e-mails (never comments) that pointed out ways that I could improve my technique, adding various suggestions for cameras and lenses of even greater performance and generally took me to task for not providing charts and graphs....as though the experience of handling the camera has become meaningless.  As though the image itself, and the clear path to its acquisition, was secondary to squeezing the ultimate technical juice from whatever image I might be able to capture.  All assumed that I was avidly looking for specification driven and measurable perfection.  I generally am not.  I'm pleased if anything at all comes out......  Usually it's my human approach and my timing that are the limiting factors, never really the equipment.

In music a good musician might appreciate a great piano or violin but the interpretation of the music is all that ultimately matters.  (My tattered LP's of Pablo Casals, Bach Suites for Solo Cello readily attest to my belief that the artistic rendition beats quality of recording every day of the week).

I'm beginning to understand that the pursuit of an idea vs the pursuit of technical prowess is the dividing line between artists and the great unwashed.  Not between pro and non-pro.  There are a ton of pro's who are fixated by the process and don't have much to say.  There are many non-pro artists making good and valid art with any old camera they can get their hands on.  The quality of the equipment is wildly secondary to the well thought idea behind an image.

I guess the universe was trying to punish me for even suggesting that various cameras might make you a better photographer.  I've tried to write about the holistic experience of using various lenses and cameras but someone did point out to me lately that "all the lenses I review are 'devastatingly, breathtakingly, rivetingly' sharp and wonderful.  But if you read between the lines maybe what I've been saying all along is that all this equipment is pretty damn good if you use it in the service of your vision.....

The universe can be cruel.  Perhaps it is just random and chaotic....

At any rate I had coffee in the afternoon with an friend and his acquaintance.  The acquaintance asked me about getting a photographic education at one of the three main local schools of higher education here in Austin.  I described all three programs to him.  (I feel competent to do so since I've been on the advisory board of one program for four years,  I taught in another program and am a frequent guest lecturer still, and the third program is headed by a friend....)

First up is Austin Community College and I described the 2 year associate's program as a "blue collar" curriculum.  Which to me means,  "Teach me how to make money with photography by showing me how everything works.  And the steps required to do business."  (My use of "blue collar" is not intended to be at all perjorative!!!!  It's a really good program).  They'll teach you how to set your camera, how to use lights, how to compose and shoot, as well as all the steps you'll need to know in order to have an efficient and knowledgeable PhotoShop workflow.  But they won't teach you how to do art.  They won't teach you "Why" to shoot.

They assume you had a reason, an angle or a vision that you likely wanted to pursue in the first place. Or that you (misguidedly) thought commercial photography might be a high profit business opportunity.

The second program, the school in the middle, for all intents and purposes, is a private four year college named, St. Edwards University.  It's four year curriculum teaches the basic nuts and bolts.  Enough to provide you the tools to move forward in the service of your artistic vision.  Bu they also teach art history, and critical theory behind photography, bolstered by a traditional and vital liberal arts education. They help you hone a philosophical point of view as it relates to creating photographic art.

They assume that you were motivated to be a photographer in order to communicate an aesthetic, an idea or a way of seeing that deeply resonates within your psyche.  They give you the tools to dig out the vision intact.  They deliver the rudimentary practical tools you'll need in order to get your points and styles across.  But they assume you DO have a point.  Or at least a point of view.

The third school is a major university, my alma mater and home of my first teaching job,  The University of Texas at Austin.  Their four year, fine arts curriculum is nearly devoid of technical hand holding and almost totally consumed by aesthetics, art theory, artistic voice and expression.  They assume that you are able to read your camera's owner's manual and that you get the rudiments of a subject (photographic technique) that you've chosen as your university major at least competently  mastered.  They teach the "why" and assume the "how" is a given.....or something you should pursue on  your own.  And let's face it,  photography in the age of digital is hardly complicated.  There are only four or five camera parameters that are essential for image creation...... and now we all have litte TV sets on the backs of the cameras that iteratively feedback information to us on our progress.  You can experiment day and night pretty much for free.  How complex could it be?

All three programs assume you are coming into the mix because you have something you feel compelled to offer to the "discussion".  (And by discussion I mean in the context of the world of art.  Or commerce).  None assume that technical mastery of your camera is an end goal.

But as I spoke to the acquaintance of the friend  it became clear to me that he considered the valuable part of education to be the technical mastery.  He  deflected the higher values of the pursuit.  He consistently devalued the creative impulse as it related to direct transmission of ideas and gave value to the output of the machines and their ultimate transparency as a product of ever more technically advanced tools.

The desire to gain proficiency in something that can be quantified "sharper than",  "highest acutance",  "more accurate" color,  x degrees faster, etc.  He saw art as something to conquer, a medium solely in which to actively display his proficiency.

And it became so clear to me over the course of the conversation that  obsessing over process, workflow and technical proficiency were the surest signs that people with these priorities would not make art.  Were not capable of making art.  Copying its trappings, yes.  But a clear physical creation of their own visual voice?  No.

Well...........sorry.  There's no guarantee anyone will be able to make meaningful art.  Art which tells us what it is like to be human.  And there's no fast track to becoming good at the intangible parts of the photographic process.

But in the end the only things that really do matter are the absolutely intangible properties.  In a photo:  The story.  The narrative.  The rapport.  The message.  The feel.  The vibe.  And the point of view.

And all of the technical candy won't do squat to fix a poorly imagined or poorly seen photograph.

My bottom line message for anyone looking to spend some money and time on a photographic education?  If you don't have a passion, a message, a voice.....a visual thing you want badly to show to other people because you think it's important or beautiful or disturbing......You'll be wasting your time.  As an artist.

I'm going to be pre-emptive here and state that none of this means you shouldn't buy a camera and have a great time using it and making photographs that you enjoy, regardless of how far you want to push your vision.  Cameras and the taking of photos have no greater or lesser value than doing puzzles, collecting stuff, skateboarding or any one of a thousand popular pastimes.  I take family photos and they are not intended to be art (though I'd love it if they were) and I shoot lots and lots of commercial images that are not, by any stretch of the imagination, art.  But I do it because it supports my intention to do art in my personal work.  Seeing, exploring and, most important for me,  sitting in front of people, sharing a moment and capturing an expression that can be translated as the shared transmission of a human experience is the essence of photography for me.  The more I know about you the more I come to know about me.

What started all this rant?  The revelation that some people don't truly understand the passion to do art and instead use the medium as a way of showing off their chops.... I might have over reacted but maybe not...

If you think lenses are everything you've got to read this......

I'm taking a break today to get an amazing amount of post production work done.  Tons of raw file conversions and retouches.   I'm happily slammed.  But I thought everyone who espouses the credo that camera bodies are meaningless and lenses are the holy grail, should read Ctein's column on TOP today.

Here's the link:  http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2010/08/lens-not-more-important.html

I've always believed that some cameras can be "great on paper" and still suck in your hands.  And vice versa......

    Go swim.

An in-depth look at Metamorphosis. Two Cameras Deep.

Here's a link to a whole gallery of images I liked from the Zach Scott Play:  Metamorphoses.  (Ovid, not Kafka.....):  http://gallery.me.com/kirktuck#100252&view=mosaic&sel=0&bgcolor=dkgrey

I shot most of it with a Canon 5Dmk2 paired up with a 24-105mm L series lens.  I shot the rest of it with a Canon 7D coupled to a 60mm EFS lens.  It was a fast moving play and it was hard to know where to be in relation to the actors and the action.  The play is done in the round and the action continually moves.  It's blocked to play to a 360 degree audience.  Yikes.  I'd probably have more keepers now that I've seen the production a couple of times.

And I'll probably go back again because it's that good.

I'd tell you lots more stuff about shooting this production but I don't really think there's much to tell.  You'll need to shoot stuff like this with manual exposure.  You can see all the black in the background.  It will drive your meter nuts.  You'll need to get attuned to the changing light levels and have some sort of reference area you can meter.  The African American actors chest is close to 18% gray so I metered him pretty regularly when he was on stage, using the spot setting.

You'll also have to go back and forth between auto white balance and a couple of pre-sets.  You can always tell when.  You'll need AWB when they wash a scene with color and you'll need tungsten or 3000k when they use predominantly white light.

Finally, there is a scene with full frontal nudity.  As a photographer you really have to decide in advance how you're going to handle the scene.  I wanted to make sure it was organic to the play so I made sure to always include a lot of context in scenes with the nude actor and to stay away from close-up shots which might seem exploitive.  Probably don't want to send your conservative, hell fire preacher to this one......

But I judged the whole show to be fine for my 14 year old son.  Just when we got to the one part where I had some second thoughts I looked over to see his reaction and he had dozed off.  No counting for taste. (In his defense he'd had a couple of late nights in a row before we dragged him out for some culture....)

This kind of production is a challenge to capture, both because of the changing orientation of the actors in the round and the contrasty and quickly changing lighting cues.  That's what makes it so much fun.

If you are in Austin you need to go see it.  Just staring at the lighting is a photoworkshop worth in two hours........


Coming soon:  The Canon 50mm shoot out......

An irreverent, emotional and nostalgic review of the Leica M9 and the latest 35mm Summilux.

Leica M9 with latest version 35mm f1.4 Summilux M lens.  The current flagship of the Leica M Series digital cameras.

It's very important for you, dear reader, to understand that I don't review lenses and cameras in the analytical way that scientists do.  I'm interested in how sharp an optic is but I'm also interested in how it handles.  What the ancient greeks called "haptics".  What modern culture refers to as ergonomics.  On another level I'm constantly trying to figure out where an lens fits into the way I see the world and how I would use it.  I put the lens on an appropriate (and sometimes also inappropriate) camera and go out and shoot and shoot.  I make a mental notes of the things I like and the things I don't.  I look at the final photographs.  I even pixel peep.  But here's the deal in 2010:  We have to look at the whole system, we can't really assess the lens on it's own.

If every lens could be fitted to a very high resolution camera such as a Nikon D3x we could designate that camera as our test camera and make some sort of objective appraisals.  But there's no way Leica M lens or Olympus SHG lens would work on the majority of cameras that have deeper distance between lens flange and sensor.  In the days of film testing was easier because the tester could choose one kind of film and use it in every camera.  It afforded a good objective measure.  Now we have to evaluate a given lens in the context of its intended "system".  That would include the body and sensor as well as the firmware and, finally, the RAW conversion software.

Finally, FTC housekeeping:  1.  I am not an employee or subcontractor of Leica.  2.  I have not been given or promised any product of consideration in exchange for writing this review.  3.  I have been loaned the lens being reviewed directly from Leica and they expect me to return it promptly.  4.  They are not holding my family hostage in order to leverage positive comments.  5.  I borrowed the M9 body from Precision Camera in Austin, Texas in order to test the system.  Points 1, 2, and 4.  pertain to Precision Camera, as well.  In the spirit of total honesty I have, over the years, walked out with at least a dozen of their promotional, ball point pens.  I asked the staff if I could take the pens.  I think they were just being polite when they told me it was okay.......

What I am  ostensibly reviewing is the brand new, best in the universe, 35mm Summilux f1.4 lens that was just released by Leica in July of 2010.  What I am in reality reviewing is my long term, on and off again, affair with Leica M series rangefinders, and the confusing and perhaps ultimately useless pursuit of perfection.  The question at the heart of every recent Leica discussion, if distilled down to its core, is:  "Does it make sense to spend a small fortune in order to get the last 5% difference in ultimate performance?"  It's not a logical exercise.  I will presume I just lost all the people with accounting and business degrees.  And yet, there are people in the world who are sensitive to the last 5% of anything.  You see it in quarter million dollar Bentley cars,  half million dollar home sound systems and in any number of pursuits where craftsmanship, art and technology become intertwined.  We could just as easily be talking about shotguns or yachts.  But, as the world expands the opportunity to have brushes with perfection seem to be shrinking.  And where does the Leica M system fit into the whole mix?

I am not new to Leica M cameras and lenses by any stretch of the imagination.  I wrote an article for Photo.net back in 2001 that sparked nearly a decade of comments and, for me, hundreds of e-mails from Leica lovers and haters around the world.  You can read it here:  http://photo.net/equipment/leica/m6

I was asked to review the M8 and three Summarit lenses back in 2008 and you can read that here:  http://photo.net/equipment/leica/summarit-m-lenses/review  In the 1990's and the early  years of this century I shot many of my corporate event photographs with a system that consisted of several variants of the Leica M6 ttl and a bag of M lenses that included:  21 Elmarit, 28 Elmarit, 35mm Summilux 1.4 (two versions ago) 50 Summicron, 50 Summilux,  75mm Summilux and a 90 Summicron.  Over the years I probably shot somewhere near 100,000 frames through various Leicas.  I started out with an M3 and a dual range Summicron and have owned most of the models between that and the M7.  Once I started shooting digital for clients it became harder and harder to justify shooting and developing film.  But handling the Leica M's is like riding a bicycle.....

Belinda at TacoDeli on Barton Skyway, Austin, Texas.

Let's cut right to the chase.  I'm not a big fan of 35mm focal length lenses on full frame cameras.  I don't currently own a prime 35m lens for any of my cameras.  They're there on the zoom lenses but so are a lot of other focal lengths that I seem to like better.  Give me a 50mm any day.  But......the above photo is what 35mm 1.4 lenses do very well and why they are so important to photojournalists.   They show unfiltered context.  A 50 mm lens would exclude so much more of the frame.  A 24 or 28 would include so much that the lack of filtering would,  I think, reduce the impact of a single subject within a frame.  What the Leica lens adds to this is twofold.  It adds a fast aperture, 1.4, which yields a very narrow depth of field for this focal length.  In some ways it tricks the viewer.  Most of us are used to shots taken with lenses of this angle of view having much deeper focus.  The quick fall off of focus incorrectly cues one part of our brains to regard this as a telephoto shot.   The second thing the Leica M lens adds is sharpness at this wide open aperture.  That reinforces the power of the illusion created by the limited depth of field.

I don't usually do this but I included a 100% crop of Belinda's right eye so I could show you the sharpness from this shot, which was handheld at a 1/125th of a second.

I don't put much credence in 100% crops like this on the web because I think they are pretty meaningless.  If I were being rigorous I'd find a file shot at ISO 100 instead of ISO 400 and one that was made on a tripod instead of handheld after a cup or two of TacoDeli's strong and delicious coffee  (also not holding my family ransom....).  But I do see impressive performance for a wide open aperture.Here's another example,  it's an image of my friend, Will van Overbeek, being a bit silly at Trianon Coffee House.  If you blow it up a bit you'll see how detailed his face is and how quickly and elegantly the background goes out of focus.  

Internationally famous advertising and editorial photographer, Will van Overbeek, playing to the camera at Trianon Coffee House in Westlake Hills.


This is a jpeg that right out of the camera.  We're sitting in a coffee house with windows on two sides and mixed lighting coming from florescents and MR 39's in the ceiling.  While the M9 is sometimes critiqued for color balance issues I sure didn't see that in my tests.  The colors were very accurate.

So, the reason to own this lens is to do sharp images with defocused backgrounds.  The selling and value proposition is that it is sharper, constrastier and has other, less tangible but no less valuable, optical characteristics that other optics can't match.  Can I prove it?  Nope.  I can compare it with shots I've taken on the copy I had from two generations back (the first aspherical)  and from images I've taken with a 35mm Summicron but most of my images from those optics are on film and, after scanning and film quality constraints I think we'd be comparing apples and oranges.  I think it's an impressive lens.

I shot several hundred test shots with the lens and I did dumb stuff with it too.  Like shooting at meaningless apertures like f8 and f5.6.  Most lenses do well there.  Here is another image.  This is a shot of me taken by fellow professional photographer and part time psychiatrist, Keith Kesler.  It's his first time shooting a digital Leica M.  He usually shoots with Nikon D3x's.  But he nailed focus like he'd been using it for a while.......

Your somber author, sitting patiently while another photographer plays with the "Leica on Loan."

And to prove it,  I've also included a 100% crop of my left eye in the image directly below......

I focus with the other eye.  I use this one to look seriously at people.....

Uh-Oh,  need to do something about those bushy eyebrows.......  But you can see that the lens is very sharp and well behaved wide open.  By the time you get to my ears they are going out of focus and the background is wonderfully unsharp.

Sure it was 102 degrees today but who could resist tooling around town with a black M9 and a 35mm Summilux.  I shot the image below at the Texas capitol.  The young woman was there to have photos taken for her quinceanera (sweet sixteen celebration).  I used an aperture of around f3 at 1/1500th of a second in the open shade of the building.

An innocent bystander at the state capitol building gets included in the Leica mania.


It's got the two attributes that will make this lens one that journalist will be able to rationalize:  High subject sharpness with lots of context and it falls out of focus quickly and elegantly.....

Just for grins I thought I'd snap a few interior shots at the capitol.  I didn't know what to expect.  You assume that great depth of field is generally required for architectural shots but I just went ahead and shot it wide open so I could handhold at a reasonable shutter speed.  I was fairly amazed when I went for the 100% crop to show detail.  See below:

I'd focused on the second level of the rotunda so I grabbed the 100% er from there......

But then I decided to shoot some stuff outside and to see what a lens like this might look like at it's middle apertures.  I was thinking that you'd be a little nuts to buy a lens that's this expensive if you weren't going to use the speed but I figured if I bought one it would end up being my only 35mm so I'd hope that it was at least as good as my older Summicron when stopped down to f6.7......

Here's our magnificent state capitol from just across the street.....

And here's the 100% crop of the Lady of Liberty on the top of the building.....

The one thing I can see in the englarged portion of the image is some aliasing.  This is happens because Leica has used a compromise that I endorse.  They are using an 18 megapixel, full frame, sensor from Kodak that DOES NOT have an anti-aliasing filter on the front.  We've seen this in previous Kodak professional cameras like the DCS 760 and the SLR/n and it's brethren.  Here's the compromise:  You get incredibly sharp files.  Much sharper than my Canon 5Dmk2.  Maybe as sharp as the Nikon D3x.  Incredible amount of detail.  But, with some scenes you might get some aliasing artifacts.  These can be removed via software.  It's a design feature that allows you to squeeze out the full optical potential of the Leica lenses.

Then I decided to do something decidedly naughty.  I took the Leica 35mm Aspherical Summilux off the M9 body.  I walked across the hallowed halls of the Kirk Tuck Studio and, using an adapter, I put the Leica lens on the front of another manufacturer's body.......The Olympus Pen EPL.  $500 body,  meet $5,000 lens.  A perfect fit.

With the crop factor the 35mm makes a snazzy 70mm portrait lens equivalent for my Pen EPL.  It works perfectly!!!!  With live view magnification I can zoom in to check critical focus and then go back to reckless shooting.  I walked into Medici Coffee shop later today with the LeicOly around my neck.  I ran smack dab into a committed and serious Leica aficionado and watch his eyes bug out.  He stammered, glared at me and then walked away.  It was priceless.   But it's fun.  Mating one of the world's finest lenses with a camera body that's one step up from a point and shoot.  But such a nice step up.  I didn't spend a lot of time doing comparison photos because, again, it's apple and oranges.  The focal length changes so the lens philosophy changes.  The sensor on the EPL is the ultimate limiter in the equation.  It's good but it sure doesn't challenge the Leica optic.  You can see than when you look at the relentless detail in the M9 files....All you see in the EPL files is relentlessly beautiful files....

Belinda.  In the garden.  Camera:  Olympus EPL.  Lens:  Leica  35mm 1.4 Summilux      Aspherical with adapter.  Wide open.  ISO 200.

I've been giving you 100 % crops all along.  Why stop now?

100 % crop.  Belinda's Eye.  Olympus EPL.  Leica 35mm Summilux.

Long and rambling wrap up.  These reviews never seem to end well, do they?  You wind up thinking, "What the hell is he trying to say?"  "Should I buy the lens or not?"  "Will this purchase launch my career as an artist?"  "Is there a god?"  "What's on the other side of infinity?"

Well,  I'll wrap it up for you as neatly as I can.  This lens is probably the finest high speed 35mm focal length in the entire world at this point in time.  Nikon has a 35mm 1.4 and I used to own it.  It was designed in the 1970's and it was well thought of in its day.  Now,  ho hum.  It's still reasonably good and you'll need good technique to make images that better it but if you do use good technique it shows its age.  Canon introduced a 35mm 1.4 in 2002 but it doesn't get a lot of attention.  It's huge and I'm sure it's pretty good.  The two friends who own them tell me they vignette like crazy and that the corners are less than great at wide open.  I'm betting I'd be pretty happy with it.

Everyone makes a 35mm f2 and all of them are pretty good but you don't get the same look at 2 that you do at 1.4.   That sharp subject, soft background, ample context look is so different.  Especially to a generation of zoom lens users.

Okay, so the lens rocks.  It's three times the price of a Canon or Nikon 35mm 1.4 but so what?  There are ten dollar steaks and sixty dollar steaks and there are people who can tell the difference.  And who are willing to pay for the difference.  Why should it be any different with lenses?

The magical thing is the interplay between the rangefinder concept and optical supremacy.  Neither is obviously superior on their own.  Today I remembered why I liked the M's so much.  When you focus with a well calibrated rangefinder and a moderately wide angle lens you are getting an acuity of focus that is largely unbeatable.  You can nail the exact spot you want sharp with no second guessing of the little computer.  Once you set an exposure in a wide scene with a medium f-stop you can shoot and shoot without touching the focusing ring and you'll come away with sharp images.  I instantly abandoned the need to check AF.  I hit the rangefinder once for a medium distance and I could concentrate on framing and know that I'd always be in sharp focus.

And when I focused right up to the close focus limit of the lens I knew that I could shoot wide open and not be concerned that the lens might be soft, or that it might be front or back focusing.  I could count on a zone of sharpness that I don't encounter with lesser lenses in the same way.

But it's all part of a system.  The lens is great, yes.  But it would be meaningless if left to the untender mercies of the typical anti-aliasing filter.  You win some you loose some.  Especially with optical systems.  Nikons and Canons rarely show any sort of aliasing.  But when you compare their files to a camera that doesn't include that one step of unsharpening (later fixed in software, kinda) you can see just how sharp a lens can really be.  And that may be the unfair measure in all of this.  It is possible that the Canon 35mm 1.4 is remarkably sharp.  But with the influence of the AA filter we'll never know in the same way we know that the Leica lens is bringing the A+ game to the table.

So, would I buy it? Would I invest in the system?  I'll admit.  I can't justify the $9000 for the camera and the $4900 for the lens at this point.  I would also need the 90 aspheric and the 50mm Summilix and a back up body and.........just figure on around $30,000 for a system for me.  I know the lenses outperform my Canon zoom lenses.  They do.  You can see it.  But the argument becomes, "Is it enough of a difference to make a difference?"  And there, you have me.  It depends on what you do.

If money were no object I'd own everything in the Leica catalog in a heartbeat.  I'd sign a contract not to touch another brand as long as they kept producing.  But nothing in this world is so cut and dry.  I'm not another David LaChapelle, and, at 54 years old I finally have to admit that I'm not the next Richard Avedon.  I'm pretty much a regional photographer with a mortgage, a bunch of really nice regional and local clients, a kid to put through college and feeling the impact of the 2009 recession.  I forgot to get a trust fund.  Haven't won the lottery.  Didn't take that "self-actualization" class that would have helped me charge a million dollars a picture.  So when I look at my budget and then I look at the gear I want there is always a disconnect.  Let's call it a chasm.  I want the best stuff in the world but I'm only going to see the difference when I shoot in a way that I don't usually shoot.  I love the look of the 35mm Summilux wide open but I rarely shoot that way.  I love the way the Leica lens and a camera blow up.  But my clients are looking for work that fills magazine pages and websites.

Here's my final distillation:  If you are just getting started as a commercial photographer and you don't have rich parents to support you,  cover your eyes and run away before the siren song of the world's best lenses snares you and drag you in.  You can't rationalize this in any commercial way.... But... if this is your passion and you were lucky enough, through advantageous birth or clever choices or hard won professional acclaim so that this kind of expenditure won't cause you lost sleep, panic or indecision; jump in with both feet.  This stuff is wonderful.  Having the best lens in a focal length in the world puts the onus on you though.  You have no more technical  excuses not to come back with spectacular stuff.

But you'd better like working with rangefinder cameras because that's the only way you'll squeeze that last 2 to 5% of perfection out of these lenses.  And it takes practice.  In many ways all the DSLR's we normally use are just variations of a Toyota Camry or a Lexus.  They are nice and well behaved and easy to drive.  But driving a six speed Ferrari well actually takes skill, practice and talent.  More people wreck high performance cars in the first month of ownership than any other type of car!!!!  You won't wreck your Leica but it will demand a level of skill you haven't had to deal with yet if you've always worked with DLSR's and AF and AE.  The rewards?  The Leica system may just be in the midst of recapturing the high end of the 35mm format world and the medium format camera world at the same time.  Amazing.  These aren't your father's Leicas.  And yet, in every sense, they are.

For me?  I'm pretty amazed by one thing this week.  In years past I would have been filled with adrenalin to be handed the current top Leica and their ultimate 35mm lens to test.  Excited and filled with inspiration.  But I think I'm over an important hurdle.  I find that I just don't care about sharpest and best any more.  I'm not rushing after the best technical gear.  I'm pretty happy just looking for the images.  For the emotion of the image.  For the power of a connection.  And I'm finding that, while it's nice to have the very best......it's in no way "mission critical" for my work.  YMMV.

Go out and have a great week.  Shoot some stuff, just for fun.

   Red cup at Taco Deli.  Austin, Texas.