Before you sell that old camera go back and look at some of the work you created with it...

There's always new photo stuff coming out and I'm as fickle (or more so..) as the average photographer. It took all the lip biting and jaw tightening self restraint I could muster not to buy into the initial hysteria surrounding the Nikon D800 cameras and plunge into another system shift. The thing that saved me was my embracement of the EVF world view and the hold that superior technology has on me. In retrospect it was good to stick with my Sony cameras and leverage their special advantages for video. While the D800 files might be a tad more detailed that would be the only real advantage of the camera for me, and for my way of working it's not much of a perk.

But I never seem to learn and the other day I was handling yet another camera at the camera store and my undisciplined brain started leading me down a pathway that promised a newer, better and snappier set of tools than those I had in my own camera bag. Well, I'm pretty taken with the Sony SLR stuff (this is how the thoughts progress...) but I haven't used the Sony Nex stuff in a while (damn Samsung NX300...) and I could probably trade in all of my Nex stuff and get the new stuff. An ill-conceived plan began to form and before I knew it I was heading home to fetch gear and all the while my gear driven dark side of the brain was tossing out little cupcakes of imagined happiness....if only I had that new gear to play with. Ah, almost seduced once more by nothing more than the beautiful sound of a wonderful, mechanical shutter mechanism and some nice exterior design. But if I had gone through with my thinly considered plan I'd have ended up with two overlapping SLR systems and no fun, little toys.

I'd like to write that my good sense and reasoning bubbled up and overwhelmed my more random and emotionally driven acquisition glands but the reality is that my plans were thwarted by the drudgery of maintenance. 

I'd been on a trip to Boston in the Spring with the family and took only the two Sony Nex 7 cameras (Michael Johnston is wrong; I do not have seventeen of the cameras. But I suppose I would if money were no object). I also took only three small but potent lenses. Two from Sigma and one Sony. The focal lengths were: 19mm, 30mm, and 50mm. I shot a bit and when I came back I stumbled into project after project and never really paid much attention to the images I'd shot. Well, as I was cleaning up folders, making space and generally getting ready to incorporate the new Mac Pro machine into my workflow the minute it is released I came across my  Boston Images folder. When I looked at the images I found them compelling and different than images from my past and present cameras. I found that I really responded to the tonalities and colors in a direct way. I resolved that, whether or not I flirted with newer or different cameras, I would have to practice camera polygamy because the Nex flagships were too cool to give up. I guess they will eventually go into the stack with the Kodak cameras from the early years of this century and I'll trot them out to prove, in 2019, just how good today's technology was. Is.

Once upon a time we considered a 6 megapixel file to be the Holy Grail for digital cameras. Can you imagine going back?

Production Image from Aida.

I'm going back through a lot of older portrait work, looking for fun images so I can put together a presentation next week in Denver. I'll be presenting in front of video cameras for three days and I wanted to have samples of the kinds of images we'll be talking about and creating. Since I was in an exploratory mood I didn't put any date restrictions on my search but I did want to stick to good digital files and not get into a marathon of film scanning and post production.

Today's foraging brought up some images I hadn't played with in a long time and I was surprised when I found these promotional shots for a production of Aida at how much I liked both the lighting (which is simple and straightforward) as well as the tonality I got from the files. The color in the shadow to highlight transition areas is very clean and the transitions themselves are smooth and detail without much evidence of banding.

I was in Bridge so I checked the info on the file and was surprised to see that it came from one of my earliest professional digital cameras, the Kodak DCS 760. The image was taken at ISO 80 and lit with Profoto strobes. The lens was the Nikon 28-70mm 2.8 zoomed, used at f11 and around 55mm. The original file is 2000 by 3000 pixels but when I examined the file at 100% I found it to be tightly structured and fairly noise free. I tried a quick blow up just using the interpolation in PhotoShop CS6 and found that the file could be res'd up to much larger dimensions with very little loss in quality. I was impressed to see how well the old technology holds together in a modern workflow.

I have made a mental note to myself to go back soon and convert all the Kodak raw files to .dng files as I'm almost certain that fewer and fewer raw conversion programs will continue to support cameras from a functionally defunct camera maker.

Given that most work now goes up on the web I think this could still be a viable studio camera. This isn't the first time that the DCS 706 surprised me in a good way.  I guess that, and nostalgia, are the reasons I keep the camera, lenses and bit and pieces around still. That, and the fact that five pounds of hard alloy are good for driving nails when I forget to bring the studio hammer along on projects.

I sometimes feel that we've all been chasing the wrong rabbit. The cameras are fine, it's the education on why and when to use them that we should have been (should be) working on.

Metering is a wonderful thing.

I have two lazy habits that sometimes sabotage my best intentions when making photographs. I've gotten used to using cameras in automatic settings when shooting quickly, outside. I let the cameras set the white balance and the basic exposure. It make sense in a lot of situations but when you get into the studio and you are inventing the light it pays to do two things on every shoot. The first is to use a light meter. In my opinion an incident light meter is the only metering tool that works every time. The second thing I always do, if I am being mindful of quality in the studio, is to make a custom white balance. Here's the tricky thing: White balance affects exposure. Exposure affects white balance. I always meter first and then I do my custom white balance.

When I do a custom white balance I use the exposure I've gotten from metering instead of relying on the camera to compensate.

You may be able to make adjustments in raw to your exposures and your overall color balance but they will be compromises and you'll see it in non-linear color casts in shadow areas and you'll regret not metering when you find that the histogram in your camera convinces you to underexpose in nearly every situation. That under exposure robs you of detail in your shadows (if you want it) and adds color noise to the overall file as you "lift" exposure to get where you should have been all along.

We (collectively; not royally) tend to use RAW as a 24/7 crutch and a convenient excuse not to practice our craft with the diligence and mindfulness that we could. We've come to believe in an industry wide mantra which states that RAW is always better than a Jpeg file. I've done some technical digging and I'm here to tell you that a Jpeg file that is accurately metered and color balanced at the time of capture spanks the heck out of an underexposed RAW files that's brought back under control in post. And part of the problem is color shifts due to exposure differences.

I don't care what the web says on this. Every studio photographer and videographer needs to own and know how to use an incident light meter to work at a high quality level. And every photographer and videographer looking for consistency and quality should know how all their cameras make custom white balances. Over time it will save one much time and energy. Once you practice mindfully using your meter you'll walk off your shooting sets knowing that you've nailed the technical stuff. Getting the emotion right is a different beast. Don't let the technical get in the way of the wonderful....

And, yes, I get the irony of using a black and white image as the illustration for the top of the article. For all the literal folks, here's a color version:

A quick review of my time with the Leaf Aptus AFi7 medium format camera.

I wish I still had the Leaf Aptus 39 megapixel, medium format camera in my studio; especially if I had gotten to keep the 180mm Schneider short telephoto lens as well. At the time the files were much more detailed than anything we could have gotten out of a 35mm style DSLR. Nowadays? The only advantage might be the real 16 bit files but you'd have to be looking at great prints or a $2,000 monitor to really see the difference between those files and the ones that start out as 14 bit files in our current cameras.

When I found this file in my archives I looked for a similar file done with the Sony a99 and compared them both at 100%. The colors were close and could be matched without too much brain sweat. The shadows are more nuanced with the bigger file camera. But I can get very close to the Leaf in post with the Sony.

What I loved about the Leaf was the combination of lens and sensor size but lately I've found that a good 85mm at f2.8 gets me so close to the same look. And pragmatically, my audience has changed as well. Most clients are working more and more on the web and at 8 bits the discriminating factors between the files vanish. At that point any good business person has to consider the price of ownership differential and the cost/benefit analysis.

The medium format package as I was using it was close to $40,000. The Sony a99 with a Rokinon 85mm 1.5 lens tips the total to $3200. The Sony files are easier to do the day to day plumbing work of photography with and the camera is much more agile in use. I'm glad to have kept the extra $36,800 in my pocket. It went a long way toward shepherding my business through some tough times. Sometimes the only way to make a real assessment of the value in your hands in to put the gear in your hands and try it. Anecdotal stories are too imaginary to use as decision making metrics. Now, the real question is whether or not the Sony/Zeiss 85mm 1.4 is worth the difference. I'm getting one to test. Should be an interesting and potentially embarrassing run through. More later.

Monday Morning Portrait. It's 50% lighting. It's 50 % engagement. And it's 100% collaboration.

Heidi.

I loved photographing Heidi. She came to my studio at the suggestion of my assistant, Amy. We were doing a book project and we needed a beautiful person to photograph so we could illustrate what I was writing about lighting. I lit her in what I've come to know as "my style" of lighting. It's a really big umbrella (could be a softbox if you prefer) used over to one side and fairly close. The other side gets a black blocking card to control the depth of the shadows. The little glimmer of backlit hits the top of Heidi's check and adds and inference of shaping to that side of her face. The grid spot on the background creates a vignette effect on the background.

We were using an Leaf/Rollei Aptus 7 back in the studio at the time but I found that I preferred a regular Nikon DSLR and a medium telephoto zoom lens instead. The files on the bigger camera might have been easier to work with but the smaller camera was 95% there on the quality and much more fluid with which to work. A variation of the image above appeared in the second book; the one about studio lighting.

I came across this image because I'm preparing to give three day, concentrated workshop on portrait lighting and portrait creation for a private company. I've looked through over 900 digital portraits I've made in the last decade with nearly 40 different digital cameras. My take away? All the files look nearly the same as artifacts because lighting and aesthetic attention trump the somewhat benign differences in cameras. Shop all you want but whatever you shoot with you shoot with your own brain first. Hard to overcome that hurdle, if you consider it to be a hurdle. On the other hand it certainly speaks to a triumph of purpose. Go with your flow and you'll drag whatever camera along with you....

Happy monday. Hope the week treats us all well.

The Return of the "Hot" Walk. Burning up with a camera in your hands.

 Ben reading "Old Path, White Clouds" in the reading room.

After a fairly mild Spring and a calm Summer yesterday felt like a reprise from the Summer of 2011 when we suffered through 105 straight days of over 100 degrees. Many of the days pegged out over 110. Although we don't hit the desert temperatures we're more like the Houston ship canal in the Summer where the high temperatures are leavened with ample humidity. Yesterday we heard the weather forecast telling us that the high temperature for the day would be around 109 (f) while in the heat sink of downtown we could expect a few degrees more. What a perfect afternoon to take a compact camera out for a walk and see how it would handle outside of its stated operating parameters...

I baselined the test with a shot of Ben sitting, motionless, in a comfortable chair with the ambient interior temperature hoving around 78 degrees. Even at 640 ISO there's little discernible noise. In a nod to the heat I found a light colored and thin ball cap and drank a glass of water before I walked out the door and steered the sprightly studio vehicle toward downtown. I had my trusty NX300, a Hoodman Loupe (I don't care how great your eyes are none of those rear screens is in its element at EV 21...). Ever the Boy Scout I tossed an extra battery in the pocket and tossed on a pair of non-polarized sunglasses. 

A moment to discuss sunglasses: Anyone who works outside and anyone who wants to keep their vision intact to their old age should wear good, optically rigorous sunglasses which block both UV and IR energy. Keep those retinas and corneas happy. But....don't go out for your photo walk with a pair of polarized sunglasses because the random interference patterns will obscure parts of the screen, which is also polarized. Also, polarized glasses greatly increased the dark tones in the skies making the clouds stand out dramatically. Unfortunately you won't see the same effect in your camera files unless you put a polarizer on the front of the camera too. I like polarized sunglasses when I drive but not when I shoot. Too much disparity between my human perception and the camera perception.

The Barton Springs Spillway.

I presumed that the general population of Austin would wither and hide from the heat in cool, little caves, in malls and theaters. Naw. The soccer fields were jammed with people kicking the balls around in the direct sun. Barton Springs and Lady Bird Lake were both filled with splashers and paddle boarders and kayakers and swimmers. No different than a mild day.

Mercedes. Buy a raffle ticket. At Zach Scott.

I recently received a 30mm f2, pancake lens for my Samsung NX 300. Their public relations agency sent it out to me and I decided that it would be my only lens for the heat walk. It is nice not to have to make decisions in the heat or to change lenses with sweaty hands.  I put the lens at f7.1  and left it there for the rest of the day. It worked well with one exception: I got a tiny bit of magenta discoloration on one side of the frame. I've had the same problem with wider and legacy lenses on the Sony NEX 7. I saw it mostly on side lit images and it may be the very beginning of flare just jumping in there.

When I walked from Barton Springs to Zachary Scott Theatre and I found this Mercedes sedan parked out on the "quad" in front of the new Topfer theater. Kinda bizarre, like a commercial that doesn't move. Or have sound. I put my knee down on the concrete in anticipation of kneeling to make a low angle shot and I quickly stood up because the surface was burning me. Instead I flipped the screen out, popped the loupe on and shot low that way. No weird magenta cast on this one. When I look at this shot bigger the detail is wonderful, deep and compelling. Even better than the detail I see in files from my 20 megapixel Sony a58.

I was amazed at the number of Austin cyclists tooling around in 

the downtown heat wave. The heat didn't seem to faze them...

I'm very happy with the focal length of the pancake lens. It's like a 45 or 47mm lens on a full frame camera and that's what I cut my teeth on back when I bought my first cameras. My Canon Canonet sported a 40mm 1.7, my Canon TX came with a 50mm 1.8 lens and my Rolleiflex TLR was in the same ballpark. 

This giant pit in front of the old power plant will be the home of Austin's new downtown library. We're collectively going to spend several hundred million dollars to build it and I wonder if someone missed the memo about books becoming digital and almost instantly available... 

As I walked from the pedestrian bridge, through the construction alley of new buildings, and over the railroad tracks I turned east toward downtown and wandered past Garrido's and the W Hotel before coming to temporary rest at Caffe Medici. Once refreshed I headed up the street and photographed several buildings, including the Littlefield Building, which, because of the heat, I envisioned in black and white. Or, as my trendy art friends say, "monochrome."

The corner of 6th and Congress Ave.

I've become very agile in using the eyelevel-finderless camera with a big Hoodman Loupe. It makes my process of photography more controlled and more easily reviewed. But I did have an epiphany yesterday ( or heat stroke ). I thought that young people and hipsters used the screens on the backs of their cameras and phones because they didn't understand the advantages of an eye level finder and a diopter optical system for framing and reviewing.  I kinda thought they were... stupid. But I've finally realized that the generation in question are early adopters of what I've been preaching all along: They are choosing live view. They want to see how the image will look as they implement changes, etc. and, since most cut their teeth on cellphone cameras, the back screen was the only option and they became habituated to it.

Not a reason to get rid of the EVF but a defense of that group's disregard for the better method. They were foiled and truncated early on by the dumb optical finders. Funny how heat changes your mind.

Sub Bridge Concert.

After walking through downtown and dousing my hat from time to time with cool water from one resource or another I set my internal GPS to Whole Foods and spent a few minutes wandering through the meat, seafood and dairy sections of the store where the temperature felt almost arctic. Re-refreshed I took the last lap and headed back over the bridge to regain my car. I intentionally took the hike and bike trail to photograph the reflections of the lake's water on the underside of the old Lamar bridge. It was here that I bumped into the violinist, above. He was playing for a small group of people who'd gathered under the bridge to temporarily escape the heat. It was wonderful and seemed somehow organic in the sense that this is how people lived before the age of air conditioning made us soft and prone to collapsing under even the slightest duress....

It was a fine walk. It was a long and happy walk. And at the end I felt cool and satisfied and somehow more integrated into the energy of Austin. Home for a lentil, apple and spinach salad and two glasses of a very nice, Argentinian Cabernet Savignon. And a couple glasses of water...

As you can see, the camera performed perfectly. No extra noise from heat. Not like my Kodak DCS 760 which starts to make happy colored sparkles the relative size of marbles whenever the temperature exceeds 104f. Works for me.

I thought I had it all figured out until I added an image from the Sony a850 and....

....the ultra cheap, totally plastic 85mm f2.8 Sony lens...now all bets are off....

flash exposure.