Images from the Sigma 50mm 1.4 lens on the Sony Alpha 850.

Spring Condominium.

I like to photograph the Spring Condo building. My friends, Perry Lorenz and Robert Barnstone, developed the property and I like the way it works from many angles in the Austin skyline. I also like this view from the corner of 5th St. and Lamar Blvd. because of the bizarre maze of power cables and telephone lines that run through the intersection. Mostly though I like the building as a foil for the clouds...

You may remember from yesterday's post that I picked up a new copy of the Sigma 50mm 1.4 lens. I did it because the lens is currently being rebated (verb invention) and the price of $399 seems just right for a good, fast 50mm. If it delivers. After I picked up the lens at Precision Camera I headed downtown to pick up a couple bottles of wine and some razor blades at Whole Foods Market. Razor blades at Whole Foods Market? I wanted to experience organic shaving at least once in my life...

I shot a couple images of the Spring building and later I did some pixel peeping to see how the lens was at near infinity, f5.6. I think it's pretty nice but I've also attached an enlarged section to show how it handles detail. So far I'm happy. Now I'm waiting for some low light opportunities to shoot some available light portraits at the more adventurous apertures. I'll probably have some opportunities at a dress rehearsal at the theatre tonight around 8:30. I'm documenting the performance of a new Janis Joplin production. Of course, most of the capture glory will end up going to the 70-200mm but that's just because of its reach.

Section from Spring shot above.

This final shot is a display on the walk outside Whole Foods. I like the way they do their folksy, handmade-esque signage. It's so well done you'd almost believe that they had someone back in produce paint the sign by hand, out on the loading dock. Too bad I didn't bring an on camera flash, I could have nuked the hell out of those shadows and really opened them up. (sarcasm alert).

I'm happy I got the new lens. It's big and stout. So far it's proven to be very sharp and well behaved. I'll post more when I've had a chance to use it closer to the extremes. The 50mm 1.4 Sigma is also available in Canon and Nikon mounts. With the Sony cameras it can take advantage of the in body image stabilization. But sometimes I turn it off, drink three espressos and see what I can get away with......

Testing the limits of overexposed RAW Sony files. Unintentionally.

 Accidentally overexposed by about a stop and a half in the camera.

Two stops of "pull" in Aperture.

I'm always curious to see how various cameras handle over and underexposure. In digital we probably fear overexposure more because when there's no detail there's nothing left to recover in post production. I don't do tests where I intentionally screw up files. I screw up enough on my own. So when I came across this file instead of trashing it I saved it in my "bloopers" folder and just today decided to take a look at what could be done to save it. Well, I moved the exposure slider to the left. And there you go.

File taken with a Sony Alpha 850 camera and the cute, little Sony 85mm 2.8 lens. Very nice lens, and dirt cheap. I know the file wasn't totally blown but a couple of generations ago I wouldn't have even considered the file to be salvageable but now I guess I'll look at anything that doesn't appear pure white on the screen.

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.