Welcome Back. Happy New Year.

Portrait of Belinda. December 30, 2012

I trust everyone had a restful, relaxing and fun time over the holidays. I missed writing the blog but I really needed the time off just to refresh my brain and spend some time shooting just for myself. I'm working on my portraits this year and I thought I'd start a little bit early with this image of Belinda.

I'm always trying to simplify my lighting set ups and this was no different. It's the simplest lighting design I can imagine. I set up a light gray seamless paper in the background and lit it with one small LED panel on a short stand. The main light consisted of a 48 by 60 inch translucent panel (a cheap pop up type) with three of the same type LED panels pouring light through the white material. There's no fill on the opposite side.

I used three panels through the diffuser just to get an even spread with the right amount of power. The LED panels were the Fotodiox 312AS panels I've been buying this year. I centered the white balance dial midway between daylight and tungsten and eyeballed each one to make sure that I was getting the same color. At the center point between tungsten and daylight the light output is at its highest. If I were shooting for color it would be a simple step to make a custom white balance measurement. Since I knew I'd be aiming toward black and white I set my camera to AWB and blazed away.  My basic exposure was f2.8 at 1/30th of a second @ iso 200.

I shot with the Sony a99 and the ultra cheap but really nice 85mm f2.8 Sony lens. The camera was on a tripod with a ball head. The a99 is much quieter and less frantic than any conventional DSLR  with which I've shot. It calls less attention to itself. Couple that with continuous lighting and you've got the recipe for a laid back and non-intimidating portrait session. One of my favorite sitters pronounced it: "Much more comfortable."

The image started life as a raw file, saw some remedial action in Lightroom 4.3 and then was converted to a jpeg which then headed into PhotoShop for some mild retouching before jumping over to SnapSeed for a painless conversion to black and white.

Blog Notes. I'm back in the office and gearing up for an exciting year. After an intense intra-holiday session with senior management at the VSL there was general agreement that I should focus on my core interests and keep pursuing portrait photography in earnest. You'll probably have to wade through more and more blog posts that revolve around portraiture but we'll sneak in a camera or accessory review from time to time. If I find an interesting book or website we'll toss that in too....

Not much will change from last year. I think we've hit a nice groove and I intend to keep honing the messages I think I concentrated on last year: Gear is great but knowing what to do with it is even greater. Tools and technology continually change and you need to keep an open mind to new ways of doing photographs. Art has value beyond money: Art teaches us what it is to be human. Style comes from continuous work. Having a style trumps having a nice bag full of cameras. And...What passes for common knowledge is almost always outdated and now wrong.

Agree, disagree and argue. That's what the comments are for. But keep it civil and on a collegial  level. Ad Hominem attacks will be flushed. Too much attitude (meanness masquerading as humor or presumptive expertise or pithiness) won't be tolerated. We don't censor, per se, but I do have an itchy delete finger. Don't make me use it.

My predictions for 2013. The economy will continue its recovery. More cameras will be introduced. More social media sites will come online. We'll continue to work professionally. Photography will continue to evolve. I will make little movies. I will swim.

Cheers.  Kirk

Not back yet, but I liked two things today.

Someone sent me a thank you for this article published in 2011 and I had forgotten all about it. I like the article and since we have so many new readers I thought I'd put the link here for fun:

http://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2011/01/thinking-about-art-while-swimming-how-i.html

It's an essay on how I shoot some portraits.

The second thing I found out today is that the batteries for my brand new Sony a99 work flawlessly in my older Sony R1. And in reverse, the R1 batteries charge right up in the a99 battery charger. That means no more "in-camera" battery charging for R1 batteries. I like the whole concept of backward compatibility. Just thought I'd let the R1 owners out there know...

Stay warm. Stay safe. Have fun.

My own personal Camera of the Year. Everyone's mileage will vary.

Sony Nex 7 with absurdly retro Olympus Pen FT 60mm f 1.5 lens.

In this instance I think the "why" is more important than the "what".  Why do I think the Sony Nex 7 is my favorite camera purchase of the year? More so (by far) than the a99 and any other camera I've purchased this year? Because it is eccentric, with flashes of genius. That's why. 

Used as a snapshot camera it's no better (and sometimes much worse) than many lesser cameras but it is also a camera with a lot of potential and one that rewards a careful study of its best use. What do I mean?  While, for me, part of the lure of this camera is the jewel-like construction, small size and elegant design, the main advantage is conveys is the use of a sensor that, according to me and DXO is the best APS-C sized sensor on the market. If you use it correctly it rewards you with images that rival the best cameras on the market today. If one takes DXO readings at face value then at lower ISO's this camera walks all over the Canon 5D mk3 which is currently over three times the price of the Sony. Essentially, for around $1,000 you get a camera body that, with the right lenses, is a better image maker than  you could have purchased for anywhere near the price.

There's more to a good camera than the quality of the sensor and I have no doubt that the new lower priced, full frame cameras will change the playing field of camera buying in 2013. Especially if Nikon can get all of their quality control issues sorted out.

There are lots of other choices in the market and I certainly haven't researched them all but I know that when I pick up the Nex 7 the feel of the camera trumps the feel of my DSLT cameras and just about any other camera I have used in the past few years. Even though it is nothing like an M series Leica it is, in some regards, like an M series Leica in that when I have the camera all set up for the way I like to shoot the only two controls I need to use are the two wonderfully machined knobs on the top right. The two "Tri-Navi" (hate the name) dials.  One for shutter speed and one for aperture. If I'm shooting raw there's really no need to touch anything else. 

The camera takes me back to the days when, once the ISO of the film was set, my only controls were aperture and shutter speed.  And that's the way I shoot with the Nex-7. Full on manual, one dial for each exposure parameter and full speed ahead. It's a camera for fluid action. Very few other digital cameras work as well in the same suite of settings.

The primary reason is the instantaneous feedback supplied by the EVF. Turn the shutter speed knob and you instantly see the effect on exposure. Ditto with the aperture control knob. Instant visual feedback. On a conventional (non-EVF) camera the same kind of operation requires either a leap of faith or a careful and continuous monitoring of numerical readouts of exposure coupled with your fast, seat of the pants assumptions about how the exposure should be inflected, followed by a post shot (once in a lifetime?) review of the LCD on the back of the camera (color veracity impaired by the effects of ambient light....).

It's the confluence of simple control and tight feedback loop that make the Nex-7 such a joy to shoot. And that's a good thing because I'll be the first to admit that the menus are a disaster and the focusing is slower than I'd like. 

One of the reasons I like the who genre of mirrorless cameras so much is the short lens mount to sensor distance. This bit of engineering cleared the way to let photographers use just about any lens they can find an adapter for on the front of their cameras. 

With an LA-EA2 I've got a camera that's as fast (with Sony Alpha lenses) as the a77, which is a speedy focusing and shooting camera. The Sony adapters mean I can use all my "A" series lenses on the Nex-7, without restriction. But I can also use Nikon, Canon, Leica, Pentax and even Olympus Pen FT (old half frame system) lenses on the camera with few restrictions.

None of this would matter if the images were good. But the sensor has one of the widest dynamic ranges ever in a non-full frame sensored camera. The colors are great and, in raw, infinitely malleable.

Currently, my favorite set up is to use the camera with the 50mm 1.8 OSS lens on the front. It's a sharp optic and provides really good image stabilization.

Earlier I said I like the Nex-7 better than anything I've bought or played with this year. Really? Is that hard to believe given that I just bought an a99?  While I'm certain that the image quality from the a99 is perhaps the second best in the world (just behind the Nikon D800e-----not considering MF digital in the mix right now...) and it shoots fluidly and logically, it just seems boring to me. Staid, burgher, vanilla, routine, dependable.

What the Nex-7 delivers is flair, panache and......for a better phrase: enjoyable eccentricity. It is profoundly an artist's camera and not an engineer's camera. 

But what this reveals (if anything) is just how personal camera choice can be. There are hundreds of features, options, specifications, curves and haptic variations to consider in any camera purchase and there are few cameras that are universally loved for anything more than the quality of their image output. But the Nex-7 is, for me, all about the fun of photography. 

It is my personal choice as my camera of 2012. 

I'm sure you'll disagree so I'd like to hear from you. What one camera did you buy, inherit, invent, uncover, rediscover this year that would be your camera of the year????

Sony Nex 7 in it's half case with a Fotodiox Alpha adapter and the 30 macro for Sony DSLT.

A "nerd delight" configuration.

Happy Holidays from Austin.

I ran by Whole Foods on Sunday to grab a cup of coffee and a berry kolache for a late afternoon snack. Just outside one of the doors they had this set up for people to take photos with. I liked it plain. Nex camera with Sigma 30mm.

Every year since I moved to Austin in 1974 the city has used the giant "moon tower" in Zilker Park to create a giant tree of lights for the holidays. In the old days mostly students and hippies came down to frolic under the tree, spin around, get dizzy and fall to the ground. I still remember the many years when it used to get cold here for Christmas and you could see the lights through the condensation your breath would make as you spun around. Today is was 82 degrees fahrenheit at 5:33 pm, when the sun set. I snapped this series of images from just before sunset until about twenty minutes later. I love to watch the balance change between the ambient light and the lights on the "tree."

I brought two cameras with me to the park today. One was the Sony Nex 7 with a 50mm OSS lens on the front and the other was the Sony Nex 6 with the older kit lens on the front. The Sony Nex 6 turned out to be defective. The user had forgotten to replace the SD card into the memory card slot on the camera after his last adventure and subsequent download.  That camera became a lens holder instead.

Around 6:15pm the light turned really nice and the park started to fill up with little families from all over the place. While the base of the "tree" had always been commercial free in older days it is now "serviced" by concessions. You can get home made gorditas, nachos and other Mexican fare. You can get kettle korn. And, of course you can get funnel cakes and hot chocolate. I tried the kettle korn; you could die eating this stuff. It's sugar, popcorn, way too much salt and it's popped in some oil that doesn't exist on its own in nature. But the people seemed to enjoy it and that's what counts.

Here's my final shot from the original vantage point, of the tree. I think it's important when photographing at and around sunset to decide how you'll color manage the process. If you use AWB the camera tries to neutralize everything. If you set the camera for "sunny" you tend to get much richer blues as the sun sets completely and the color temperature shifts. That's the city skyline in the background. I blew this up and found that the image stabilization works pretty well. 

In this photograph I tried to replicate the effect of swirling under the tree but there's not enough movement in the image. Grab your monitor and spin it around really fast and you'll get a good impression of how it would have looked if you had been there enjoying the real time process.

But after a while one craves a fairly well defined horizon line and this is what the action looks like under the "tree."  Once the people have enjoyed the tree lights for a while they cross the big, blocked off street and go to the other side to walk through the quarter mile long Trail of Lights.

But we've got to save something for later in the week.....

I hope that wherever you live, and whatever your beliefs, you are enjoying the year end holidays with your favorite camera in hand. From time to time you might want to put it down and actually participate. I've heard that this can be rewarding. I might try it this year.

Peace and Love, Kirk

A reprint of a blog from a few years ago. An echo of today's post.

Roar with intensity. Be clear about your path.

I've done so many things over the years.  And shot so many different kinds of photographs.  I still like the challenge of bringing tiny microprocessor dies to life and making big, industrial machines look sexy and potent.  On a good day I can even find pleasure in photographing products on white backgrounds.  There's a meditative charm to doing good clipping paths, after the fact.  I love to shoot events.  The constant flux and mixed vibrance of people hellbent on sharing ideas is alluring.  And the exchange of knowledge can be intoxicating when something totally new is broached.

But those things are not really why I got into photography, either as a hobby or as a profession.  To be absolutely truthful there are only two types of photography I wake up thinking about.  One is shooting on the streets and the other is classical portraiture.

The shot above was done on film with a Contax G2 and a 28mm Biogon.  Ben was running towards me with a joyous bluster and his mom trailed behind him.  It was a Spring day and we were at Emma Long Park, which borders Lake Austin.  The park was nearly empty because we were there on a weekday, in the early afternoon.  There's nothing planned about the shot.  I just pulled the camera up to my eye, focused and shot.  But I like so much about the shot. I love Ben's little shadow. I love his stride. I love the diagonal pattern of the boards in the dock.

I never leave the house without a camera.  There's just no way of knowing what you might miss.  I see street photography and this sort of ongoing reportage as a way of writing a visual book.  It's all part of a larger narrative that I just haven't been able to tag with a beginning, a middle and an end.  But it's writing a visual novel all the same.  That's why I love this kind of imagery.  It unfolds chapter by chapter and you work in collaboration with chance, fate and destiny to distill the images from the swirl of life around you....

And then there's classical portraiture.  The image above, of my friend and former assistant, Anne is my favorite portrait ever.  I know I'm supposed to like portraits of my kid and my wife better but this is the portrait I'd be happy to have define my work for my entire career.  And in a way this image sums up everything that I think is wonderful about portraiture in the studio.

Every square inch is exactly as I wanted it. The lighting is exactly what I previsualized and created.  Anne's expression is exactly what I wanted her to convey.  It's a wonderful record of a beautiful and deeply thoughtful person.

If I could customize my career I would spend the next twenty years doing portraits just like this.  All that's needed are a few lights, a few backgrounds and one camera and one lens.  That, and the time to sit quietly with each subject and get to know them as individuals.  As fellow human beings.   I would shoot sessions every day and spend the rest of the time massaging the tones and textures into prints.  Not screen fodder, but actual prints that people could hold in their hands and cherish.

In many ways these kinds of images are almost unattainable now.  People want to move too fast.  Get stuff done and get on to the next thing.  Do you remember the last time you had an hour long conversation with someone?  Did they glance at their phone every so often, reminding you of the split nature of their attention?  Were they booked so tightly that, from the minute they arrived  they were anticipating when they would have to go.  Between planning to arrive and planning to depart did they give a thought to how they would be "in the moment?".

As artists we have control.  We can set the parameters for a session.  We can ask that phones be extinguished and we can create a space and a mood that invites sitters to linger.  In exchange, we can try each time we shoot to give our sitters a very, very special image.  A portrait that defines this moment in time.  This moment in their lives.

How did this portrait come about?  I'd been experimenting with backgrounds.  I loved the look of folded drape going off into an increasingly blurry distance.  The drape on the left side of the prints is perhaps 12 feet back from Anne.  The drape on the right perhaps 20 feet back from Anne.  Each set of drapes was lit by it's own light in a small softbox.  In this way the amount of light on each drape, and even where it fell, could be individually controlled.

I put Anne in a favorite old, rickety chair and had her lean her arms against the back.  She's quiet by nature and doesn't fidget around much so she makes a wonderful model for a longer session.  I wanted a big, soft but directional light source for my main light.  Like the soft light from a cloudy day billowing through a window.  This was provided by a 50 by 72 inch softbox covered with layers and layers of white diffusion cloth, clothespinned to the front panel.

A white wall over to the shadow side of Anne's face created too much fill so I put a big, black card in between Anne and the wall.  The camera was a Hasselblad with a medium telephoto lens, used at f5.6 (almost wide open for medium format....).

We talked for a while before I started shooting film.  I wanted her to settle comfortably into the space.  When both of us stopped being diligent and trying too hard I started to shoot.  I shot three or four rolls of film and there were many frames I liked.  But as with most portraiture there is one frame that clearly stands above the rest.  In our minds, this one was that frame.

What a wonderful career it could be if I can make more and more of these.......

Back to basics.

As we get closer to the end of the year work slows down and I start spending more time reading, hanging out with the family and cleaning up the studio/office. It's also a time for reflection and soul searching. And pretty much by Dec. 31st of most years I've come to the conclusion that: 1. I'm still too judgemental. 2. I'm still trying to be an "expert" in too many things. And, 3. I still spend too much time arguing my points on stuff that really doesn't matter.

The truth is that there's really no way to do photography incorrectly if you are doing it for your own pleasure. What camera I think is really cool (in the present) should have very little influence on that with which you photograph. The kinds of subjects I like to look at and photograph are as much personal taste as whether one likes broccoli or brussel sprouts, red wine or beer.

I might decry commercial changes in the business of photography but you'll probably hear the same kind of resistance to change in any professional field. The beauty of being a photographer (as a separate thing from being a paid photographer) is that you can always return to your core and revitalize your artistic self by embracing and exploring those things that you love to  photograph.

When you explore on your own you short circuit the interference you get otherwise.

Sometimes I feel that I write too much and think too little. But I know that when I make portraits I'm in the right place. 

A quick note on how we deliver jobs today. Now.

We used to come home from multi-day jobs, edited down the take and then start burning DVDs. A typical job documenting an enterprise conference for a Fortune 100 company might result in 1,000 to 1,500 edited images. We shoot them mostly in raw and deliver them always as high res Jpegs. No matter what they tell you in forums and workshops, event clients want/demand nice Jpegs. The only people who ask for Tiff files are ad agencies and even then they are more likely to ask for PSD files...  But it's so different because in an ad shoot you may only be delivering a handful of images. Ten variations? No big deal. 1500 distinct images? Big deal.

So, we usually had two rounds of DVD burning. The first would be a set of high res edited images that went to the client. With big sensor cameras now we'd  usually be looking at four DVD's. Which means dividing up folders and doing some sort of organization for the client. And while I'm at it I always make them a back up set and an additional back up set for me. Now we're at 12 DVDs. Once those are delivered I'd want to back up a set or two of DVDs with the raw files. Even with a tight edit we're still talking about something like, maybe 32 gigabytes of material. That's roughly eight DVDs per iteration. As you can imagine, babysitting the DVD burn added a lot of hours to our post processing...

Recently I decided to chuck all of that, and to deliver the edited Jpegs on a memory stick. I've been using 16 gigabyte Sandisk Ultra sticks because Costco had them on sale in three packs. The price per 16gb stick came out to less than $10 per. The burn takes about 15 minutes.  I back them up for my storage on a second stick which I dump into the job bag. We also have the images backed up on a quickly accessible hard drive. If I have no requests for additional images on that job (our delivery contract clearly states client's responsibility to make additional back ups and states, boldly, that we no longer are responsible for archiving client images...) after one year we clean out the job bags and return the sticks to ready inventory.

The same sticks are currently $14 a piece at Amazon.com.




The sale is still on at Costco (as of yesterday). Sorry no link for Costco....

But when I was researching yesterday evening I found this cheaper model of flash stick at Amazon:

I can't imagine that it's much slower than the more expensive one, especially for a job delivery, but it's 50% cheaper....