Sometimes, when you are photographing a model, it helps to create a small story to share...

Not always, but sometimes, when I work with a model to create images for our mutual portfolios it is helpful to both of us if we come up with a narrative or a short story that helps us imagine what the images are about. In this case the story was about a young woman who'd come to town to meet her old boyfriend only to be stood up. These images are from the originally intended rendezvous. We made other images outside, downtown, as she searched for her boyfriend in all the usual places. Needless to say, this was self assigned.

The venue for these images was Little City Coffee House on Congress Ave. A very early, independent coffee house in Austin which closed at the end of last year. The model is Jana and the camera was a Canon 5D mk2 fitted with an 85mm 1.8 lens.

Creating little stories seems to be more effective than lumbering around hoping something interesting will happen....

Going Shopping with a Camera in my Hands. Looking for Color, Texture and Grooviness. Sony Nex 7+ 35mm DT

Okay. I surrender. I'm using the built in HDR feature on both my Sony a77 and my Sony Nex 7. And it works.

I don't like a lot of the HDR stuff that I see on the web. In fact, I hate the flattened look and grainy, clarity overkill that I plainly see in so much of the work. But my friend, ATMTX, seems to have a light touch with it and he's always pushing me to stop being such a curmudgeon and try doing things like using the concepts of HDR to improve my work as well as using the rear screen of my cameras to compose with. "Use the force!"  He says.

After a recent post I read about throwing away a lot of stuff I knew I knew I decided to shelve my prejudices about photography and just go out and respond willingly to the stuff I saw. No big agenda. Just like moth to flame or a child to colors.  I gave up some control by putting my ISO on auto.  But I gave up a lot of control when I decided to turn on the in camera HDR in my Sony Nex 7.  This will seem old hat to some of you but in the Sony Nex there is a menu in which you can select HDR and then make a second selection for how many stops difference you want between each of the three shots that the camera uses to combine into one final frame.

The camera shoots the frames really fast and then micro aligns them and processes them into pleasing HDR files. For the uncertain it's nice to know that the camera also gives you a separate untouched jpeg that is the "correct" or center frame of the the three frame bracket.

All of the images in this particular blog post were done with in camera HDR and at ranges from 3 stops to 5 stops. I think they look darling and I didn't have to buy a book or go to a workshop in order to get them. Which makes me think that Sony is making a pretty damn sophisticated camera to be able to do exactly what I want it to do without any intervention from me....

All but the last image in this series were taken at the Austin Hilton Hotel, just across from the Austin Convention Center. I was out test shooting with the Sony LAEA-1 Alpha to Nex lens adapter, the 35mm 1.8 DT lens and the Sony Nex camera.  I like the combination very much and I can see using the Nex 7 as a primary shooting camera for professional work. I think mirrorless has come, now, totally of age and it's ready to compete with traditional camera paradigms. The Nex cameras, the Olympus OMD and the upcoming Panasonic GH3 are/will be capable of delivering nearly everything a typical, regional working pro needs in order to supply clients with professional images.  There will always be exceptions to this statement. I freely admit that micro four thirds and mirrorless Sony aren't ready to tackle high end architecture photography. Not because the sensors aren't ready but because there are no tilt/shift optics available and adapting the ones out there that are made for other formats isn't a solution because they are too long...

What I found after pixel peeping my take this afternoon is a camera that out resolves everything I've used before, handles like a dream and basically-----kicks ass. The other thing I found out is that the Sony DT series of inexpensive prime lenses kicks ass, squared. You can read tests based on flat resolution target bullshit or you can go out and shoot with the optics you are interested in and make up your own mind. I'll take the latter path every time. In my experience the Sony 35mm 1.8 DT, the 85mm 2.8 DT and the 50mm 1.8 DT are some of the finest performing optics I've shot with. But I'll be the first one to tell you that I don't shoot newspapers tacked to the wall or air force resolution charts.  And neither should you.  

If you want to test a lens you put it on your camera and then shoot the stuff you enjoy shooting.  Look at the results and make up your own mind.

So, all of these images are hand held with the camera setting shutter speeds between 1/60th and 1/80th of a second. I am consistently amazed at how the camera is able to align all three of the frames and make such perfect images.  If I'd had the camera on a tripod and the ISO set to 100 I can only imagine just how great the images could have been. But would I have liked them any better?

The Nex 7 is turning out to be the camera I really wanted from Olympus and Panasonic. But it's even more eccentric which endears it to me even more.  So much performance.  So many wild features. So many lens choices.  Has there ever been a better time for the actual practice of photography?

Finally, I've spent the last two years denigrating the whole idea of HDR. Do I feel guilty? Was I wrong? NO. The stuff that became known as HDR in common parlance was atrocious stuff. And it was applied to all kinds of inappropriate subject matter. I'm changing my mind and finding that judicious use of a three frame blend adds another tool to my creative and professional tool box. And that's okay. It's only when carpeting steps over the line to lime green shag that we have an aesthetic problem.....

Final note: The more I use the Nex 7 the less I want to use anything else. 

Out for a Sunday Afternoon Stroll with a customized Nex 7.

The very next day after receiving the Fotodiox Sony Alpha to Sony Nex lens adapter I found a Sony branded one, the LAEA-1, on the Precision Camera used shelves so I bought that one too. Today I put my LAEA-1 on my Sony Nex-7 and put a 35mm 1.8 DT lens on that.  Then I went out for one of my long, Sunday afternoon walks. About an hour into the walk I came across a small group of people at 6th Street and Brazos who were painting each other's faces and I asked them if they'd mind me taking a few photographs.  Of course they were more than happy to oblige.

I used the lens and adapter combination in the same way I would normally use the Nex 7, minus the autofocus.  I keep describing the Sony LAEA-1 as not having autofocus capability and I keep getting corrected by sharp eyed readers who are quick to let me know that, technically, the LAEA-1 will autofocus with most of the recent and current Alpha lenses.  I am here to tell you that while the reader/correctors may be technically correct no one in their right mind would describe the painful process of LAEA-1 try-to-focus as true AF.  Let's just say that if you have infinite patience you could use the Sony adapter in the AF mode and eventually you might have a frame creep, with great hesitation, into focus. Of course your chances are better if you are in bright, bright light (say a daylight scene supplemented with an 18,000 watt HMI for fill) and a focusing target with more detail than a ten million piece jigsaw puzzle... But why stress over it when the Nex 7, in combination with the 35mm 1.8 DT lens, does an amazing and quick job of assisting you in manually focusing with focus peaking?

I'm probably just responding to the newness of the process but I'm really enjoying the pleasures of manually focusing my photographs. It seems to also give me back more control over my sense of composition.  I'm not always starting from top dead center in order to get and hold a focus lock.  The focus peaking works over the entire frame.

So have I found out anything new by using the Sony Nex7 with an adapter and an Alpha lens? Yes. I've found that the Sony Nex 7 becomes the most responsive camera you can imagine because you'll never have to wait for focus lock. The lens info even shows up in the exif info in Lightroom.  Just don't think you'll be enjoying laser fast auto focusing. It's not in the cards for the economy model adapters.

A little ambiguity is bad for your anxiety but may be just what some photographs crave.

I photographed Jana downtown. It was a hot, clear day. The kind that makes your eyes see into the colors and the details of everything. We didn't talk much but we did create the outline of a little story and I just followed her around and documented our "story."  It seemed a fun thing to do on a Sunday afternoon.

I hope no one has decided to spend their Sundays indoors with the TV on and some sports team running back and forth on the screen, in between commercials for beer and Viagra. There's so much fun to be had outside. Camera in hand.

The Canon 85mm 1.8 seems to have "Modigliani" bokeh in the background. Look at the way the two people on the right side of the frame make hemispherical slices off into nothingness.

For once, a do everything camera that combines high image quality with ultimate flexibility.

Advisory for newcomers to the blog:  This is not a review. This is an article which talks about bridge cameras and specifically the Fuji camera. It exists because the product being highlighted might be of interest to my long term readers. There are no charts or graphs. There are no "conclusions."  I like the idea of the camera. That's all that really matters here on this blog.

With all the attention that's been focused on FujiFilm cameras like the X-100, the S Pro 1, and the X-10 there's one product that hasn't gotten anywhere near the attention I think it deserves. Maybe that's because it resides near the top of a category that many of us serious photographers have more or less written off, long zoom lens "bridge cameras."  Just calling the category bridge cameras seems to demean the value of the niche in the minds of those of us who crave ultimate machines like Leica M9s and Nikon D800s.

While most previous bridge cameras look like miniaturized DSLRs and come with long range zooms they've mostly been plagued with tiny sensors that were overpopulated with tiny little pixels.  If you shot them at their base ISOs they would yield fairly good files but once you started to crank up the gain (increase the sensitivity) they files quickly fell apart.

There are some good, current cameras in this class, like the Canon SX-40.  Panasonic has a couple as does Nikon. Most use the same smaller sensor sizes (1/1.7) and nearly all of them feature fairly big swivel screens on the back and okay to good EVFs.  One of the early favorites of mine, a camera that pretty much busted out the category, was the Sony R1. It had a wildly good Carl Zeiss zoom lens that gave you 24-120mm equivalent angle of view performance and it had a sensor that was just about APS-C size. Many times bigger than most of the other cameras. But the R1 came at a cost that most wouldn't pay for a camera with a non-removable lens, and the early EVF was coarse and slow.

The camera I handled today the FujiFilm x-S1, is the first bridge camera since the Sony R1 (2005) that made me go, "Wow!"  First, let me show you the camera and then I'll tell you why.

Could this be the first almost perfect, do everything camera?

The camera is wonderful to hold in your hands. It's beefy and much heavier than its competitors. Whatever coating they used over the exterior of the body I think is just the right blend of sticky-I-can-hold-on-to-this and comfortable. It's not much smaller (if it actually is smaller) than a Canon Rebel or a Nikon D3200. The thing that grabbed me upon picking it up was the heft and the feeling that it was wonderfully solid. And very well built. (love the metal knob that just begs for your right hand thumb to caress it...).

But here's the deal, you get a camera with the same sensor they've put into the wildly successful X-10. It's a 2/3 ich EXR CMOS sensor that does the same tricks as it does in the X-10.  You get 12 megapixels which means every pixel is bigger and better defined and this very good sensor performance is combined with a 24 to 624mm zoom lens that starts at f2.8 and finishes up at the long end at f5.6

I didn't get to spend a long time with the camera but I did go through the menus and try out the focusing and the EVF. The EVF is a 1.44 million dot LCD monitor which looks very similar to the EVF image and imaging performance in the EVF of Sony's a57 DSLT camera. The refresh is fast enough to have made me unaware of tearing or blurring when I moved the camera while framing.

The screen on the rear of the camera is 3 inches with 460,000 dots. The camera can shoot at highest priority at 10 fps (short burst) but only in medium and small file sizes. If you need a full res file you can still get 7 fps. Of course the camera also has RAW file capability and RAW+Jpeg file capture. In fact, it has just about anything I would look for in a full bore, higher end DSLR or DSLT including Fuji's film emulation modes.

It may also be an efficient video production camera for web destined videos. It shoots in the H.264 (MOV) format and offers resolutions up to 1920 by 1080.  And yes, there is a standard plug in for external, stereo microphones.

This camera and lens weigh almost twice as much as my Nex 7 with its kit lens so if you are trying to lighten the load you may be looking in the wrong place but you have to consider the tremendous range of lenses you get over the range of the zoom. Early reviewers have praised the lens, with the same caveat that it is better at the wider to mid ranges than at the extreme telephoto end. The only critical issues I've heard relate to slow focus under lower light and some difficulty locking focus at the very long end of the zoom.

So, who is this camera perfect for? Anyone planning a round the world trip with  the need for flexible and high quality imaging and video capability. If I had a ticket for year's unrestricted travel I'd snap one of these up so fast it would make my own head spin. Then I'd buy four or five more batteries and a case of class 10 SD cards and grab my passport.  It would also be a perfect tool for the in-house web designer who needs to be able to capture good video and still photos under lots of different conditions with lot of flexibility.

Like most cameras that are too feature-rich you'll need to spend some quality time with the manual in one hand and the camera in the other but from what I've seen in sample images it might just reward you in a way that will surprise photographers who've long dismissed this category.

The camera generally sells at a street price of $799 but Amazon has it listed these days for $599.95 which I think is an absolute bargain. But then I like the idea of Swiss Army Knife cameras like this. They are so closed loop that they free you from so much excess decision making and that can be really good when you are out and around and working the shutter release in response to the world in front of you.

Sadly, this one will probably get lost in all the noise and introductions at the upcoming Photokina and that's too bad because it may be just what so many people who are moving up from compacts and phones are looking for.  Ditto for people tired of the lens rat race and the constant upgrade cycle. Oh well. Good to read some of the reviews, handle one, and see what you think.

Cheap Adapter to use Sony Alpha lenses on a Sony Nex 7. It works.

Web pundits besmirch the Sony Nex 7 for its paucity of lenses. Maybe yes, if you want to use only lenses specifically designed just for the Nex system. Positively no, if you are open to spending less than $30 on an adapter and opening yourself up to all the lenses that are currently available for the Sony DSLT cameras. In the image above you see the Sony Nex 7 camera body, the Fotodiox AF-NEX adapter and the inexpensive, but highly capable, Sony DT 30mm Macro lens. The assemblage is easy to work with and delivers really good performance.

Unlike the two Sony branded adapters that are available to do the same task, the Fotodiox adapter doesn't give you any electronic connection between the lens and the camera body, only a mechanical one. The adapter controls the aperture with the ring labelled "lock" and "open."  The ring moves a peg in the adapter which in turn stops down the aperture in the lens. It works totally by guess-timation. There is no readout anywhere of the aperture value.

When the adapter ring is set to open you are shooting with a wide open aperture. When you go to the "locked" position you are shooting at the smallest aperture. And you get to choose an infinite range in between.  You can do it by assessing how much depth of field you need, visually, on the EVF or LCD finder or you can look at the front of the lens and try to make each small increment reduce the circle created by the aperture blades by half to stop down one stop.  Not the right adapter for control freaks who need to see an aperture read out and to know exactly what aperture they are shooting at...

Focusing is more elegant. Set the camera to use focus peaking, grab the small rubberized ring at the front of the lens and------focus. In my camera I have the focus peaking indicator set to strong and red. When the red splotches invade the area I want to have in focus I'm done focusing and it works well as long as there is detail to focus upon.

While I'm happy with the few Nex lenses I have I'm even happier to be able to tap into the entire collection of lenses I've picked up for my a77 cameras.  The 30 macro is a good, cheap macro and I like using that focal length with the cropped sensor. While the camera doesn't auto correct for distortion (not much in there to correct) or CA or vignetting the lens performs well and the camera, in aperture priority seem to hit exposures correctly as well.

There are certain lenses I am hesitant to use on the smaller camera. For instance, I can't see that it makes a lot of sense to mount the five hundred pound Sony 70-200mm 2.8 G lens on the camera. They see to be at philosophical cross purposes.  Same with the big 16-50mm 2.8 zoom.  But with a petite collection of primes the combination really comes into its own. I use the adapter with the 30mm, 35mm, 50mm 1.4 and 50mm 1.8 and the 85mm 2.8. Owning both the a77/Alpha systems and a barebones Nex system is fun now that they're unidirectionally compatible.  But other than the macro or lenses like the 35mm and 85mm which are not single focal lengths provided by the Nex system I really don't think it's a vital tool. 

The Nex cameras excel at being small and discreet---especially with the kit lens installed. The a77 is right at home with big lenses and professional camera performance. It's nice though that they can exist in the same equipment drawer and the addition of the Alpha to Nex adapter makes the Nex 7 a nice back up companion to any Sony APS-C primary system.

The two images above were made with one of my favorite "adapted" combinations. The taking body was a Sony a77 while the lens was the 120mm Hasselblad/Zeiss Makro Planar lens. The couple were joined together with yet another inexpensive Fotodiox lens adapter.  Using the Zeiss medium format lenses on the a77 camera is like coming home again.  Just make sure you use the stop down switch on the Hblad lens or you'll be shooting everything wide open.

This is a quick sample of the 30mm Macro Alpha lens on the Nex-7

If you already own the Sony DSLT system the 30mm macro, on an adapter, is the perfect way to add close-up capabilities on the cheap...

If budget is no object you could snap up either of the adapters from Sony.  The barebones item is the LAEA-1 which is a tube with electronic connections that give control and display power over aperture.  It does provide for autofocus but from everyone I've heard from who's used them the focusing is very slow and doesn't not work with older, screwdriver drive AF lenses.

The LAEA-2 is a bigger adapter and comes with a pellicle mirror and a module that allows for fast phase detection focus when using most of the Sony DSLT lenses.  In the end, whether you need to adapt other lenses to the Nex system in the first place is something you'll have to consider based on how you use or intend to use your Nex 7. Next on my order list is an inexpensive adapter that will allow me to use Leica M series lenses on the same, Nex 7 camera.

Having fun doing it "wrong."