I'm thinking of writing a book called, The Anti-Flash Manifesto. It may be a weird idea but it reflects my feelings about what's happening now in the world of photography...

Zach Theatre. Dress Rehearsal.

We see the world in continuous light and we embrace the constant stream of connected information from that continuous light as our pervasive reality; one critical part of our sensory perception, so why do we default to episodic and intermittent flash to make visual documents of our world? It's really wild. As photographers our mantra seems to be that it's all about the light but the light that it seems to be all about seems to be mostly artificial constructs of our memory of what real light is, as expressed by short flash bursts. Yes, images capture of moment of time but that's hardly how we see those moments or how we sense them. We see our images as a continuous stream and we're most comfortable catching moments from the stream, like a bear grabbing the unlucky salmon from a mountain stream. Seeing your life as a series of lightning storms....

I've been thinking a lot about our flash addictions. The reason flash came into such wide use in our industry has more to do with the rigidity of our early capture materials than it does with any aesthetic concerns. It also has to do with efficiency versus lux inefficiency. In the days of ISO 25 film and the need for rock steady images with no glimmer of motion the choice was often the use of electronic flash or flash bulbs versus thousands of watts of withering, direct lights. Now we can carry the equivalent of big light in a side pocket of our camera bag with portable electronic flash. But what have we lost? 

I'd postulate that we've lost a delicate intertwining of all the different colors and qualities of existing and continuous light sources. We've homogenized color temperatures (which was critical in the days of film) but in doing so we've also homogenized our vision of what lighting could be and how it should be constructed. And in the process we've lost a certain range of voice that made so much art photography so interesting for so long. Over time we've come to understand that it's the little imperfections in art that are the source of interest or the source of engaging frisson and we long for them even as we evict the possibility of imperfection by the meticulous selection of tools that are reliable and consistent.

When I first started working with LED panels my linearly inclined photographer associates were immediately critical of perceived color spectrum failures and the horror of low light output. I embrace the visual differences and am excited by the need to work in the realm of slower shutter speeds and wider lens apertures. When I started working with fluorescent lights I loved the ability to "drag" the shutter and introduce slight movements and the sensation of breathing into portraits. How much more real it seems to me than the locked in sharpness of instantaneous flash.

And it's not even a factor to me that the cameras have gotten better and better at delivering pristine images at high ISO's. Once we learned how to make technically perfect files all that technique became boring and repetitive and bourgeois. The ability to make sharp images with no apparent subject movement became as desirable as making your own leisure suits. Uniformity of tools and purpose becomes an affirmation of a static status quo.

It's been a while since I happily reached for an electronic flash to use in making a portrait. I've surrendered to the wonderful mix of continuous light and live view. I love to watch the image of a person swirl in my electronic viewfinder, me alert, waiting for that perfect moment. Or that perfect movement which may, by its blurry motivation, make a more interesting image than one I could have captured by totally controlling the process.

I am doing a program this week that's all about portrait lighting. I've dutifully packed my studio flashes because I think that's what my producers really want the audience to see. But I've also packed and shipped several fluorescent panels, a Fiilex P360 LED light, a few LED panels and two hot lights just because I think they represent so much of what we've temporarily abandoned, out of necessity, and then out of routine, and I want to show how differently they impel and inform the process of taking a portrait. A rapport is a continuous and evolving process. It seems that the staccato intermittency of flash is at odds with the bedrock gestalt of that process. 

If you've grown up with flash it may be an interesting experiment to play with and leverage some continuous light sources. Digital imaging is allowing us to reinvent and rediscover processes that served our industry ancestors both well and differently. Viva la difference. 

The Fiilex P360 kicks out good light, gives me tungsten to daylight color control and is dimmable from 100 % to 10% and fits in my camera bag. Thankfully, it doesn't flash.

When I'm looking for total light control I generally put away the flashes and get out the lights that stay lit up for the whole shoot. 

The ongoing search for the best 50mm lens for my Sony cameras.

The Sigma 50mm 1.4 lens on my Sony Alpha 850.

I seem to be running about four years behind the times when it comes to buying lenses. Today I went to Precision Camera to buy the lens you see in the photograph, above. It's the Sigma 50mm 1.4 lens and it's received both rave reviews and mixed reviews since its launch in 2008. While I love 50mm lenses on full frame cameras the only 50mm I had for the Sony FF cameras was the Sony 50mm 1.4. Its big advantage is its size. It's probably half the size of the Sigma lens. It's also pretty darn sharp in the middle two thirds of the frame. But I kept hearing good things about the Sigma except from people who think that a high speed normal lens's biggest aspiration is to be sharp from corner to corner, wide open. That's just not going to happen for a reasonable amount of money.  And while edge to edge sharpness is a good thing for people who like to photograph flat objects I've found that perfection sometimes gets in the way of art. We spend lots of time making images with ultra sharp lenses only to spend more time making the corners and edges soft so that by comparison our central areas seem even sharper.

By adding blur to the periphery of a frame with a person near the middle we also use focus to direct a viewer's attention to that which we want to emphasize. At one point, long ago, the people at Leica wrote something defending the idea of curvature of field and center sharpness in their fast 50mm lens. It made sense when I read it but I'm not going to drop into the rabbit hole of lens design versus shooting philosophy so you'll have to beat up someone else over that.

All mysticism aside there were two reasons I decided to buy this lens: 1. I've come to respect many of the offerings from Sigma over the last few years. To wit, the 70mm Macro, which may be the sharpest single focal length I've ever owned. And the 19 and 30mm lenses for the Nex are very good optics at very good price points. Even the 10-20mm wide angle zoom I bought last year performs beyond my initial expectations. It jumped nicely over the bar I'd set.  2. The other motivator was the drop in price engendered by a $100 rebate which has dropped the current price of this lens to $399. At that price it's hard to lose and it becomes almost a bargain.....if it delivers.

The 50mm 1.4 Sigma is a new optical design in a field of lenses that were mostly based on a Planar design from 60 or 70 years ago. It uses a molded aspheric element that supposedly goes a long way toward reducing chromatic aberrations and the rest of the design is supposed to have advantages in terms of reducing vignetting and increasing central sharpness.

I've only had the lens for short while but I've done some preliminary shots, both wide open and at f5.6 and I've been impressed so far. I'll spend some time with the lens tomorrow and hope to have some images to post on the blog.

Why the 50mm? Interesting question. I'll explain it with a story about an interview/conversation conducted by Ibarionex Perello with me and photographer, Seth Joel. Seth does corporate photography and his modus operandi is to use wide lenses like the 35mm 1.4 for Canon or Nikon, close in and nearly wide open. His photographs of people have lots and lots of background context. We were talking about different styles and when we turned to my work it was almost the reverse; very little background context and a much more isolated main subject. As we explored the subject further I admitted that I like the 50mm focal length but I love the 85mm focal length and, except for cliché uses, I just don't understand anything wider than the 50mm in any meaningful way. In fact, I'm heading to Denver on Weds. for a project about portrait lighting and the shortest lens I'm packing is the 85mm 1.5. I just don't feel really comfortable shooting wider unless I've already got cropping in mind.

If you love wide angles you do yourself a disservice following my example.....

Somehow a beautiful portrait makes my day better every time.

I'm sure you've seen a variation of this portrait before. I tend to re-work and re-work the portraits I  like and I'm sure next week I'll come back and decide that this is too processed and I'll look at it again. But for today, after a tedious ten hours of selecting and post-processing images for my presentation and waiting for the delivery thing to be sorted out I'm happy to just look at my computer screen and look at Amy's beautiful face.

When I feel down or tired or like I'm loosing ground I look back at work I like and realize that it's proof that I can do good work. Just like looking back at remarkable jobs is proof that we can do profitable work. Sometimes it's good to just sit still and appreciate what you've gotten done so far.

I spoke with a very nice person at UPS customer service. She actually helped me. I loved it. It almost made up for how crappy their online forms are....

The image above is how grumpy I looked this morning when trying to ship three large containers of gear to Denver, CO. I'm heading up to Denver next week to do a teaching/online project and I needed to have my familiar and tested gear with me to do the best job possible. I'm taking my cameras and laptop with me on the plane... (I wish I was driving...I could take more stuff).

So, I need to show how I do portraits and I needed to pack stuff like my six by six foot frame, my big flashes, my frames and my clamps and umbrellas and all the little fun lights I like to play with. My partner/client asked me to send all the heavy stuff via UPS. Normally I avoid them like the plague because they can be horrible to deal with, especially for a freelancer who hates just hanging around the studio waiting for that "We'll be by sometime between noon and 7pm..." thing.

My partner sent along a sign in and password and presumed I'd be able to hop on line, navigate some of the absolute worst automated programming in the world today and then magically my packages would be whisked away safely. Oh that it was so easy. With my key board in front of me I entered the first circle of Hell. The non-responsive interface. Before I was in too far I asked my contact if I could just drop the packages by one of the ubiquitous UPS stores and have them wayfind their own path through their own cruddy software. I was assured it would be no problem
Into the vehicle go the three large 50+ pound cases and I drive off to the local UPS shop. I haul all three cases in a wait for too long and finally it's my turn and I explain what I need to do and the person behind the counter just shakes his head and tells me, "I can't access nobody's accounts. They don't let us do that. You need to have them air bills printed out and attached to the boxes and then I can take em."

I put everything back in the car and race back to the studio to try again. This time I get an error message about the client's address. I call the client and am assured that the address is hunky dory. I push onward. Finally we get to the summary page: Three packages, three day shipping, $685. Right, I could just buy the cases a seat on Southwest Airlines for that. We try again for ground delivery and the price drops by half. Now the problem is that the magnificent software (done, no doubt by the lowest bidder in the universe) won't allow me to print out the airbills I can see on my screen ostensibly because I am not the account holder.

I call customer service and a very patient and knowledgeable operator actually assists me and walks through the whole process until I've got airbills printed. Then I ask, "Can I now drop these by the local UPS store and have them receive the cases?" She replies, "Oh sure, unless you've declared a value of the cases." No, I always ship thousands of dollars of lighting equipment uninsured because of my deep faith and belief in prayer...... "I insured them."  She replied, "Well, in that case you'll need to take them to the main terminal (in the middle of rural Texas on the other side of the nuclear waste dumps, just south of the active volcano and slightly north of the massive septic tank truck spill....still in the process of being cleaned up..).  My heart sinks at the thought of wasting my day driving around and waiting to wait for some more waiting. And then she throws me the bone...

"We can arrange for a pick-up." Yes, Please.  "What time would work for you?" How about between now (noon-ish) and two p.m? "Okay, just let me enter that into the system. Yes, you are all set. Is there anything else I can help you with?"  No, thanks for all your help. Be sure to kick your I.T. people in the balls on your way out of the office tonight....

I pull the equipment from the car, slap on the labels and get back to work on something more interesting. I'm happy the cases will go out on time and make it to Denver in plenty of time for my presentations. Then Dave calls....

When I come back from getting coffee there's a message on my phone: "Hello, this is Dave from UPS and it looks like we have a req for a pick up from you. Is that a residence or a business? Anyway, I'm calling to let you know that we can't be there by that time and maybe you could call me back.."

Rising anger and frustration as I hit the number Dave just called from and, after twenty rings, I get a recorded message from UPS and am offered an "800" number. I go back through Dave's message and at the end he's made the mistake (from his point of view) of leaving me a direct line. We go through the typical back and forth of what constitutes a business address and I tell him that one of his people set up the pick up times and I don't want to wait here all day for someone to drop by. Not only that but it's lunch time and I can probably go to the Jason's Deli that's half a mile from here and find six or seven UPS trucks all herding together.... Dave's current placating offer is that he's pretty sure he can have someone here by 7pm.  Yes, somewhere in the next 7 hours. Oh joy. I tell him that's not going to work.

Dave promises to call me back in fifteen minutes with a pick up time. It's be a lot longer now and I'm starting to think that the second circle of hell is opening up and reaching for my ankles. I miss the days of skycaps and $25 per bag airline charges, etc. Why is it so hard to get stuff done now? Did all the embracing of technology usher in (to somehow compensate) a new and receding level of competency on everyone's behalf?

I can only imagine what the next shoe to drop will be..

I hate shipping stuff. I always have. In the future I'll just tell people I have to drive. That way I may arrive tired and road sore but I'll be able to bring all the stuff I want and control it on every step of the way. 

And so begins Canon's journey into mirrorless cameras with EVF finders.....Count on it.

I just read the white paper about Canon's new on chip, phase detect, auto focus technology for the Canon 70D. It basically uses over 40 million pixel elements working under 20 million micro lenses to capture images and to do phase detection AF. Since the camera is dividing all the 20 million pixels in two we can expect two outcomes: 1. The accuracy of the phase detection AF on chip will be really good and the amount of light, cumulatively hitting the AF sensors, will be higher than that in more limited  area systems (current Sony and m4:3rds).  2. The complexity of the processing and control of the sensor will be increased requiring more horsepower from the processors. I also suspect that having two photo diodes at each pixel site will have other, unexpected processing consequences. I'm sure Canon will work it out but it seems obvious that this is Canon's initial step (we, and the world at large, are, for the most part, ignoring their first failed effort...)  in creating an answer to the mirrorless incursion. A new philosophy hoping to deal with the Mongol hordes of mirrorless offerings thundering across the plains of the consumer camera market.

I see this camera as a "proof of performance" sample. The next generation will move to a mirrorless configuration with an EVF because, if the on-chip AF is successful, there's no logical or economic reason to retain the more costly OVF. (To all those who say that cameras with EVFs are MORE costly I would say that you misunderstand. The new cameras may be more costly to YOU but they are much less expensive for the manufacturers and hence shore up receding profits. Not everything gets passed along to the consumer, especially not in a stale market...).

Presuming that Canon's 70D really performs (and the on chip AF is touted as being fully usable with every current Canon lens...) this means that both Canon and Nikon (in their J and V1 cameras) have proven to themselves that they need not have a secondary phase detect sensor integrated with finder optics and can offer a less expensive product at a steady price point to consumers who are acculturated and acclimated to doing most of their viewing and reviewing on big, rear screens. It also means, when Canon pull the curtain open on their mirrorless EVF iterations, that video gets better for most consumers because focus gets better for the video portion of the camera's feature set. And that's been a big source of unhappiness with Canon and Nikon amateur (and pro) video users who've come from faster focusing still systems.

The next step for all the makers is to finish coming to grips with fully electronic shutters. Once that's done we'll have taken out all the moving parts except for the control interfaces and that means faster cycling shot-to-shot and no wear and tear.  Just in time to try and catch up with the mirrorless market that's already crowded in under the big tent.

Count on it.

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.