Re-reading an article about EVFs on theOnlinePhotographer...

http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2012/05/kirks-take-electronic-viewfinders.html

From time to time I get e-mail from people who aren't understanding the appeal the EVFs (electronic viewfinders). I wrote the article above for Michael Johnton's the online photographer. I think the fun thing about the article is all the commentary following it.

If you don't know Michael's blog.....you should.

Crazy Day at the Studio with Some Jeckyll and Hyde Self-Portraits....

Or....What do hyperactive photographers do when they catch a cold, can't swim and don't want to infect their clients? Mostly find silly crap to do around the studio.

I felt it coming on yesterday, late afternoon, as I was leaving from an assignment location in the executive suite of a multinational, high technology firm. I sneezed as I got into my car. My nose stopped working right on the drive home. And then...BAM. I woke up with a head cold. Yuck. 

I decided that doing the outside, 7:00am, master's swim in sub-30 degree weather was contraindicated. (My GP will be so proud). So I've been stuck in my studio since 7am cleaning, filing and drinking way too much coffee.  Way too much. Client called this morning to tell me they'd gotten the files I sent them via Drop Box and that everything looked good.  I cancelled a lunch appointment and wished someone beautiful would come over so I could make portraits. But with a meaty cough and a drippy nose I decided I'd have to look for talent closer by. I elected myself.

In the process I've decided that self-portraits can be as revealing as a visit to a psychiatrist. You have to reconcile the self image (24 years old, perfect skin, handsome, with thick curly dark brown hair, athletic to a fault) with the reality that everyone else experiences when they interact with  you....(57 years old, too much sun, too much skin under the chin and grizzly grey hair). It's almost like a fresh brush with mortality.  Here's my sinister and nordic rendition:

The serious face that goads VSL readers into writing, "Don't you ever smile?" But I like the way the light works on the shadow side. Good cheek definition, for sure. Notice the engineer style adaptation of the glasses, just above my right eye. The screw in the hinge fell out nine years ago and I've been meaning to get the glasses fixed but the smallest size paper clip seems to work fine....a fix straight out of electrical engineering school. I also like the way that the hair swooping up makes me look almost as though I've got little satanic horns on my head. All the better to scare the people in account payables. In truth I had just coughed was attempting to re-arrange my face when I accidentally trigger the wired remote... really....

But I did include a softer look just in case.

If you haven't tried a self portrait lately you might want to save the money you've been spending on your therapist and come face to face with your own reality. It's actually kind of fun. I didn't think about doing this until I saw some really cool self-portraits that my friend, Frank, did. 

While my model is not up to the standards (by any measure) I usually set I do like the lighting in both images very much. Neither is lit with anything other than the natural light (indirect) that's coming through my studio windows. I have a ten foot by ten foot square set of windows that faces northwest. They start about four feet off the ground and go up to fourteen feet. If you position people in just the right spots you can use the windows as a flattering source all day long.

Gear.  I put my Sony a99 camera with a Tamron 28-75mm SP lens on the biggest, meanest, oldest and stoutest Gitzo tripod I own. It's an ancient, three section, five series. It weighs a ton but once you clamp something on it there's NO movement. I plugged in a cheap, generic, wired remote, flipped the LCD screen around to the front so I could compose easily and then banged away. The light isn't strong so I used ISO 200 at 1/4 second, f8. The wall behind me was painted gray 16 years ago. Maybe time for a new coat of paint.

That's all I've got. I get over colds pretty quickly but I sure hate living through them. Color me grouchy...

But animated...

What am I re-reading today?

I bought Vision Mongers, by David DuChemin, a couple of years ago but I was initially put off by his slightly patronizing writing style and (my bad) the fact that he was a poor enough money manager that he had to declare bankruptcy at one point in his career (pre-great recession). I read some of the book then, skimmed the rest and put it aside meaning to donate it to the library.

I don't know what, exactly, pushed me to pull it back off the shelf and give it another read. I guess I was heading out to pick up my kid from school and needed something to read as I sat in the car and waited for the dismissal, surrounded by the cars of the vast contingent of soccer moms. 

I know that the book hadn't changed in the interim so I can only guess that my brain changed since I last picked up the book. This time I had a different experience. While I still found a few things to critique (and what book doesn't have a few?) I thoroughly enjoyed my new read.

The parts I zoomed in on  were mostly about marketing and I'll admit that it was probably my own hubris that kept me from soaking in the information before. David is spot on whenever he talks about marketing. I've been running a photo business for a long time and even wrote a book about the business of photography but I was able to absorb and really learn several valuable ideas that will help me be more efficient and effective in the way I run my business from here on out.

Bottom line for me was his explanation of why we can't waste time being jealous because on of our competitors got a great job or a great account. He explained it in a way that just reached in and turned a switch in my brain.

Essentially he said that you and your competitor are like apples and oranges. If a client wants an orange and you are an apple, painting yourself orange isn't going to work. If the client chose the orange they were never going to choose the apple so you never would have gotten the job in the first place. The underlying message is also that if you are an apple, sell apples.

I wish I'd read the book with a more open mind in 2009. I could have used the information well over the last three years. It might have changed the way I market what I do. Maybe not but now I'll never know.

The book is full of success stories and interviews with people like Joe McNally and Zach Arias; two masters of social media marketing. But the real guts of the book are about being true to your photographic vision and your business vision.  And the golden core is the marketing.

If you work in a field where you must market stuff, services or yourself the book is well worth the twenty five or thirty bucks you'll spend. It's kind of fun when a book I've put aside comes back into my orbit with new life. But what I guess it really means is that I've changed over the last few years. Less pompous? Maybe. Open to new information? Definitely. All in all the book gets a "thumbs up" from me. I'm going to look for another one by David and see what he has to say in the present.

Settling in for a new year. The market continues to shift around.

Mint Julep for Liberty Tavern at the Hilton Hotel.

At heart I am a very optimistic cynic. I am watching the news about Dell, Inc. and the talk about a group of investors taking the company private. Their company lost 1/3 of its value last year and their shrinking piece of the PC pie, and the shrinking of the total PC market, has Dell looking for a new business focus. They are saying that by going private they'll be more nimble and less constrained by shareholder When I hear about going private I remember watching Freescale Semiconductor to the same thing. And for the last three years they have been operating with a $12 billion debt load while sales in the semiconductor industry have remained constant or shrunk.

The cynic in me tells me that the majority stockholders in any company going private are using this sort of transaction partially as a way to cash out at a temporary, artificially boosted stock price while saddling the new owners with the debt. The optimist in me sees that if you already own the stock and the rumors become truth you will see the typical spike up in the asking price of the stock which will at least get you back to parity. I wish the people at Dell very good luck because they have been a very good corporate citizen here in Austin.

But what this really shows me is that all markets are always in flux and even the best and the brightest have trouble predicting the future. What chance do we, as single person, freelance businesses, have?  Well, for one thing, if we've been frugal we don't have anywhere near the burn rate of a big company with the attendant need to always be feeding that cash flow monster. And, hopefully, if we don't let ourselves become constrained by aping what everyone else is doing, we have a shot at creating new niches and new ways forward to profit.

I'm like a broken record when it comes to talking about changing every parameter of the way we do business. From the cameras we use and the lights we bring to the jobs doing it the same way we've always done is kind of like driving while fixated on the rear view mirror. I hear from photographers who are locked in a print mentality. They still see the print as the gold standard. But from my point of view (at least as a commercial photographer) the print is long dead and it's now five years since I tried to fire up an expensive inkjet print and do any sort of printed product for a client. In advertising and corporate work it's all about the digital file. If a client needs a trade show graphic they'll have an in-house or agency procurement manager working with a high end output house in order to get what they need. Our responsibility ends at the point where we deliver the image. (No, it's not practical to become a middleman for this work---the files go through a design shop which is a subset of the ad agency or a design shop hired directly  by the company to do apply their branding to the images (type, logos, etc.) and they are just as specialized as we are).

I've finally come to grips with the idea that Dell, Freescale, IBM and any other big company out there is no longer going to be sending photographers around the world for weeks at a time to do annual reports and other high profile projects. That train has already sailed....

What it means to me as a small business owner is that I have to find new markets and new ways to deliver to the same markets and to the newer disruptive players in markets. You wanna know what one of my differentiators in my markets is? I'll tell you anyway:  I know how to light stuff. And light it well. That alone eliminates a large swath of my competitors. People have become so invested in the idea that their cameras do incredible, crazy high ISOs that they've forgotten that most of the reason to use lights is to create a lighting design that makes the image different and better than it would have been without additional lights. We use lights to create a direction in the light, to emphasize some things while diminishing the prominence of other things in a scene. We use light to create three dimensions in a two dimensional space. We use light as a retouching tool. 

Back when we competed against other well educated professional photographers we could never have sold lighting as a nearly exclusive feature but in the day and age when a speed light is considered a Cadillac coming in with multiple, specialized lighting tools and modifiers makes it seem like we're using the Aston Martins.

Traditional, healthy businesses have generally learned one set of lessons well and this is something everyone needs to revisit from time to time. The lessons are: Learn to serve your clients, not just take orders. Teach them how to leverage your product.  Under-promise and over-deliver.  Wow them with your creativity but be sure to also give them something they'll be comfortable using. Be honest when you fall short. Then fix it.

Finally, a differentiator missing from the younger market.....learn how to sincerely say, "Thank You" to your clients. Believe me, in their day-to-day lives they don't hear this enough.

Market changes? Going back and forth between stills and video demands new lighting skills and new lights for traditional photographers. Cameras with built-in EVFs also have an advantage when shooting video.   The days of many assistants flitting around the set now only exists on the set of Creative Live: Learn how to be self sufficient. Travel light but light well. Improve your cameras not by buying new cameras but by learning best camera practices: Use a tripod. Use your optimum ISO's (hint, even if your files have no noise at higher ISOs they lose dynamic range linearly every step up from their base ISO). Use the optimum aperture on your lens. Work on your focusing technique. Do more with less by doing it better. 

Finally, what do all the major client's gyrations, shifts and paradigm changes hold for my business?  Growth. They need to re-brand and re-engage their customers along every step of the way. And we're here to serve them. Change is neither good nor bad. 

A quote I read recently:  When God closes a window a Navy Seal kicks open a new door.

Start kicking those doors open.

Old Tech in Optimal Conditions = New Tech.

Shooting with old tech makes me feel confident that my vision is the driver, not the technology.

It's tempting to look outside yourself for your power but you'll feel like less of a photographic wimp if you don't depend on your gear for your sense of value.

In the end it's the image that matters, not how you got there.

Camera: Nasty old Kodak SLR/n. Lens: Ancient Nikon 70-200mm f4.5-5.6. 

PIcture Stories in Austin.

What is it about the Olympus OM-D that makes it such a game changer?

The Olympus OM-D. Everyone's Camera of the Year in the 2012 Round-ups.

It's nearly unanimous across the web. Everyone's choice for camera of the year in 2012 was the elfen pro, the OMD. But why? It's not the most comfortable to hold (in its native configuration) nor is it invested with the highest image quality on the market. It's not part of the biggest contiguous system of lenses or accessories on the market nor is it the cheapest high performance camera on the market. So why all the gushing and glorification?

I postulate that the market was ready for three critical technologies to come together in one nearly perfect package at a price that was almost universally acceptable to working photographers and artists.

What are the three critical technologies:  At the top of the list I would place equivalent performance to established DSLRs at a fraction of the size and bulk, made possible by the maturing of the mirrorless technology and attendant advances in the autofocus capabilities of this class.  

Secondly, I would state that this camera, even more that Sony's (on paper) technically superior versions, made real world use of electronic viewfinders acceptable. And as soon as they were accepted and put into widespread use an enormous swath of the market came, almost instantaneously, to understand the real value of seeing the image as the camera would record it instead of being steps removed and requiring a level of pre-visualization that comes with only years of practice; as with a conventional optical finder.

The third critical technology or product feature was, without a doubt, the fast growing number of lenses optimized and created for this format. From the Leica/Panasonic 25mm Summilux to the cost effective and brilliant 45mm Olympus 1.8 lens to the 12mm f2 lens, everything in the system started to gel in a way that directly appeared to experienced users.  This third category will only accelerate with the two new professional zoom lenses introduced by Panasonic which cover both the 24-70mm and 70-200mm focal lengths with f2.8 constant aperture lenses. I've had the pleasure to handle and shoot with both and they are really great.

On top of all these features is the idea of interchangeability between brands a la open standards. One can now buy marvelous optics from Olympus, Leica, Panasonic, Sigma and a growing number of suppliers and use them interchangeably on any m4:3 standard camera, across any system.  If you are an OMD user and discover your love for video you can acquire the GH3 from Panasonic as a second camera for back up and video with the assurance that all your investment in glass is protected. Imagine how powerful it would have been, when Canon introduced the 5Dmk2 if all Nikon glass also fit and worked on that camera. If you had been able to cherry pick cameras between systems without worrying about obsoleting a big and costly selection of lenses.

The thing that tipped the point was the fact that Olympus produced the camera perfectly. It exudes precision, good materials and great workmanship.  That it currently has the best, in body, image stabilization system in the world is the cherry on top of the whipped creme.

When I played with one VSL member's OMD last week I was once again impressed by the system. More so after putting the Panasonic lenses on the camera. I went back to the studio and looked up the current price. It is now an insanely good value in addition to being the top of the 2012 pile. Well done Olympus!