Upcoming Events. Random Thoughts. Changing business models. Changing Names.

I asked my peers on the advisory board, "what will I talk about for an hour?" 

They responded, "You'll fill the time, the problem will be getting you to shut up."

By Austin Photographer, Kirk Tuck ©2014

First off, events. While I question their wisdom the Association of Texas Photographic Instructors asked me if I would give the keynote speech for their convention/conclave/gathering in Austin this year. I have agreed. The speech will take place at the Texas State Capitol in one of the auditoriums large enough to comfortably seat 300  high school photography students and a like number of their instructors. The topic of the speech is largely up to me but I have been given a bit of direction. It was suggested that I show a few images and tell a few stories to establish my bona fides, my legitimacy to speak at all.

Imagine the peril of trying to come up with a speech about photography that will graceful span the interests of 300 high school juniors and seniors along with an equal number of adults who've been in the teaching trenches for various lengths of time. Kind of analogous to picking out music for mixed audiences.

The task in front of me right now is to go through tens of thousands of images I've either shot recently or have digitized from the film days and narrowing the torrent down to a trickle of 100 or so. Then I have to put them into some kind of coherent order and figure out how they will illuminate whatever the heck I choose to talk about. Which, of course, brings me to the next point on the agenda: What can I really tell kids today that is unfailing true and also valuable?

That the business used to be more profitable? More fun? More challenging? And ask them to turn the lights out when they leave? Or do I reach past the confines of my own ego, grapple with my own relentlessly approaching intersection with mortality and conjure up good news for a whole new generation?

The problem is that none of us who've lived through the transitions and who lived enmeshed in a certain work paradigm can be nearly as prescient about what is being created right now by the very generation who are inventing it.  I may learn their visual language (I've tried to find the Berlitz CD's) but they invented the language and are native speakers. I scoff at social media marketing while they are immersed in it (hopefully) and pushing and pulling levers that I don't even know exist.

I'm all set to tell them to diversify and get into video and design but that brings up a very salient question that I need to grapple with myself. To wit, is the world of still photography dead or highly diminished? If that's the case how is it that I'm still doing jobs? And if I am still doing jobs why couldn't I market to a wider swath and get more jobs? And if I got more jobs wouldn't that prove that photography is not really dying it only needed to be re-approached and re-united with a business model that works better on both sides of the transaction?

So, if you do corporate head shots and you've done them for while and your volume drops does that mean the market has ebbed away or does it mean that you haven't changed the way you market your product and you are loosing important mindshare? Are you still sending out e-mail blasts long after that well has run dry? Did you lean on direct mail back in the early 2000's but haven't tried new mix of media to reach new markets? Maybe you stayed on your spot and your potential markets shifted around you. It's entirely conceivable that the markets still need what you are selling but the players have changed, the way of reaching the new players has changed, and if you can find the new approaches to the landing zone you'll earn back the business that you presumed had become extinct.

I'm leaning toward telling them that business has always had the same rules: Invent something people need or want and sell it to them in a way that they can understand. But to sell to people you have to be clear on what you provide. What do you deliver, as a value proposition, that's different from what everyone else is selling? Is your lighting unique? Do you work with a make up person (when doing portraits) who is a valuable synergistic partner for your skills? Are you fun and funny? Can you make people relax enough to take your great direction? Can you turn the client's "brilliant" creative concepts into visual art? Are you a reliable partner for an ad agency? What makes your product (vision) and services unique?

I've been saying for years that each generation of artists grows up with their creative counterparts. A person just starting out in photography today, just graduating from school, probably has scores of friends in related fields like graphic design, web design and advertising. They may be interns right now but in the blink of an eye they will be associate art directors and quicker than you think they evolve into senior art directors, art buyers and partners. And the relationships that are forged in the beginning seem to have a way of lasting and growing and spreading. Kinda of like Linked In is supposed to do only in a genuine and real life way.  It's a process of aging together into affluence.

I might tell them that each generation grapples with scary change and that what follows is a new normal that they can build on. I see the last 13 years in the economy as a strange disruptive cycle that exceeds everything we've seen in ages. Because it wasn't just about a financial services meltdown it was about the retirement of an old technology and the introduction of a whole new way of thinking about technology. Gone are the Marxist constructs of power going to the people who own the tools or the factories and they've been replaced with a paradigm that's not yet totally up and running but it's based on aggregating value from mass distribution and fractional payments for enormous sharing. Will it work? Maybe. But my generation won't be the ones to ride it hard when the kinks are ironed out. That's going to go to the generation just coming into the markets today. The future is super bright it's just that most people don't have the right sunglasses.

But the thing I know I'll tell them is to constantly prepare for change, to constantly experiment with new ways of doing old things and old ways of doing new things. To go out and try stuff and mess up and improve and try again. The victories, I am certain, always accrue to the brave, the determined and the prepared.

The big event is Friday, February 7th, 6:30pm at the State Capitol Building. Austin, Texas. Hopefully the Texas Rangers will keep the hecklers and protesters away.

On another note: I'm mulling over the idea of changing our regular business name to The Visual Science Lab and relaunching the business. The thought process is that we are emphatically doing more stuff in more different ways than before. We're hooking up with other creative services providers on projects and then separating to work on solo work. Having a business with the name "photography" in it seems so antiquated and limiting. We're too small to get a big conference room at a hotel, gather a large focus group of targeted creative services users and dig down for hours and hours looking for an answer. Then it dawned on me that I have a very talented group of defacto experts here on the blog and I could query them.

So here are my questions: To market to new clients, ones whom we've never work with before and for whom my company has no name recognition, which sounds better, more modern and more effective for a company that actively markets both still imaging and motion imaging (including all the necessary disciplines therein):  Kirk Tuck Photography or The Visual Science Lab ? Toss your votes into the comments and we'll see how the consensus pans out.  I'm partial to the Visual Science Lab but I've lived with the other name all my life and it may just be stale to me...

Random Thoughts: Somehow being ill last week really focused me on the future. I've pretty much recovered though I am not quite up to eating an anchovy pizza with jalapeños just yet. But I keep thinking about how to continue to gracefully continue a career in such a weird and physical market. I was pondering this on Saturday morning as I loaded my car with lights, stands, sound gear and cameras for the quick shoot across town. I was moving slow. And when I got back home I hit the couch for a necessary nap. This is an anomaly and it's random but I wonder when I'll run out of energy to load up hundreds of pounds of gear and head out on locations day after day.

On the other hand that's the work I really like to do. I like it more than sitting behind the computer working on files or messing around with writing assignments. I just wonder if photography careers are time limited by dint of exhaustion and waning spirit.

A camera thought: I was downtown for a much needed walk today. It was 70+ degrees and sunny here in Austin and everything felt so positive and new. Construction everywhere. I took a camera that I haven't written enough about here because I'm loathe to leap to its defense or to appear to proselytize it. That camera is the Panasonic GH3. I've spent a lot of time over the past week diving back into its menus and checking out all of the customization options. But today I finally understood why I really enjoy that camera enough to have two of them (and pine for one more). It's because it fits perfectly in my hand and it does everything without drama or over complication.  I want to love the OMD EM-1 and I am convinced that it makes wonderful, incredible images but I remember my experiences with previous generations of Olympus Pen cameras and I just find all of the custom functions, function buttons and deep, deep menus to be overwhelming. I know, everyone tells me that you only have to set everything once and then just use the quick menu but what they generally mean is that you assign the buttons to the tasks you generally use one time and you'll just need to remember the buttons.

But that's not the way photography ever worked well for me. I would need a laminated card with the changes I had made and I'd need it for a while. With the GH3 the optimizations aren't as Draconian or complex. And the camera body itself seems molded for a man of about five feet, eight inches of height with average sized hands. Any smaller and the buttons are pushed together, any bigger and the camera becomes a burden.

There are a few glitches to the GH3. The color of the EVF rendering doesn't match the (more accurate) color of the rear LCD. And the finder optics aren't at the level of the VF-4. But that's about it. The rest of the camera just seems incredibly straight forward, fast and usable to me. I squired it around with the Pana/Leica 25mm f1.4 on it today. I think I shot three images during the entire walk but it really didn't matter. If I saw something great I felt confident we could get the shot. Today, the walk was the important thing.

In my mind this is a camera that pushes you to pre-edit. You really start to look only for stuff to shoot that's worthy of the camera and of your own time. There's enough junk out there without grinding out more useless imagery. Maybe I'll tell them that at my speech...

Layers and layers of photography...

Half a week of craziness. And then some video.

 Sidewalk Chalk Artist in Berlin.

By Austin Photographer, Kirk Tuck ©2014

Sorry for missing so much time here at the blog. Don't know what I ate or if some disgruntled former VSL reader slipped something poison into my coffee but somewhere around 8 pm on Thurs. I felt some stomach pains which grew in drama and intensity and culminated in me spending the night getting to know my toilet much better than I had ever imagined. It was the most sick I've been in a concentrated time period that I ever remember. But as quickly as it came upon me the symptoms receded in an equally quick reverse trajectory. On Friday morning I was desperately tired and  sore but nothing hurt anymore and there was no urgent need for bathroom proximity.

I tried to make Friday productive but we had our first really big ice storm of the year overnight and all traffic ground to a halt. Good thing since I could barely make toast before having to lay back down and nap some more. A quick call to a couple of clients found them equally house bound and a round of rescheduling ensued. Sadly, the miraculous powers of physical recovery that I had in my 20's, 30's, 40's and the early part of my 50's seems to have subsided to a more normal, human level and I found myself alternately napping under a quilt or trying to stay awake long enough to make it all the way through a movie on the television. Fortunately, I didn't have to feel guilt for missing swim practice as the whole swim thing was cancelled for the day because of ice on the pool deck and the generally inability of anyone with a key to make it down the hilly, treacherous "black ice" roads surrounding the club and to open the front gate. I am almost certain that there was the usual crowd of obsessive swimmers waiting there just to see if someone would show up.

Anyway, I hope this explains why I haven't produced the long awaited for review of the OMD EM-1 versus the Nikon D800e or the New Hasselblad MF camera.   And, what happened to the long awaited review of the Zeiss Otus 50mm lens versus the Pentax 40mm pancake lens for the K-01. Or, for that matter the Otus versus the newest Lens Baby Optics.  I hope that it also excuses the missing essay on all kinds of equivalence as well as the essay on all the bright spots of today's heart warming, real life stories of how we're all using the built in wi-fi capabilities of our new cameras to make a difference for the better in the world these days. And you'll have to be patient as I put the finishing touches on my ground breaking blog about jettisoning Ming Thien's ideas about Sufficiency in camera equipment and replacing it with a call to buy  more and bigger and more often!!!

But seriously, I did venture out of the house today to help a friend shoot some cool video for a mutual friend for her Kickstarter campaign. She's the bandleader and singer for a really great quasi-country band. She and her band are trying to get a full length album produced and they've turned to Kickstarter to raise the money for studio fees and to pay band members. The funniest thing I heard in her pitch was the reward for donating $1,000. For that level of donation Rosie will have your initials tattooed on her arm!!! If she makes it big, and I think she will, you'll have visual proof that your donation made a difference...

We met at a run down club in east Austin that reminded so much of a run down club in just about anywhere in Austin back in the 1970's.  My friend Chris is the lead on this project and he was shooting with his amazing (and envy-worthy) Sony PMW-F55 CineAlta 4K Digital Cinema Camera.
(the above is linked for informational purposes only. VSL has no affiliate relationship with B&H).

He also brought along his case full of Zeiss Cinema Prime lenses. Also enviable and drool inducing.

We set up Rosie on a stage with red, velvet curtains in the background and red LED backlights. Chris was shooting the main camera and he was center stage and straight on Rosie. I set up a slider over to one side, put the Sony RX10 on it and shot tight, head and shoulders comp of Rosie for cutaways.
We recorded sound straight into Chris's camera using my Sennheiser wireless microphones with a lavalier on Rosie's collar.

The two Sony's both made images that looked great but since the PMW-F55 has huge pixels and a native ISO of something like 640 I'm going to presume that his footage will look a lot cleaner than my dinky cam  with a native ISO of 125 pushed to 1,000.  Doesn't hurt that he was shooting in 4K either.

We were humming along (like the refrigerators in the background---the ones we couldn't find the plugs to...) when we had a jarring sound interrupt a take. Something hit the ceiling tiles right above us and then scampered around for a while. It's always a bit weird to have nothing between you and wildlife than a much used acoustic tile ceiling...

We reviewed the footage and the audio before we packed up and it all looked good. I was going to use the wi-fi to upload my takes for Chris but doing 16 gigabytes that way....well it didn't look like the progress bar was making much progress. We opted to download it to an storage device instead. Now we have 16 or 17 hours of our lives back.

Chris and Rosie went off to celebrate over lunch and I trudged back home to take another nap.  I'm feeling better by the minute and can hardly wait to dive into the creation of a new blog debating the relative merits between PhotoShop 6.01.3 and PhotoShop 6.01.4.  Are the reds slightly better? Did this improvement come at the expense of inter-disinterspatial transparency in the final image? What about micro-constrast?  And how do we measure that?  Stay tuned.

Stupid camera tricks. This is the future of camera tech?

By Austin Photographer, Kirk Tuck ©2014

Suddenly every camera I own (hyperbole alert: statement does not include mechanical film cameras, the august Pentax K-01 or any camera purchased more than a year ago...) has some sort of "connectivity" included. You can wi-fi stuff or you can NFC stuff and, if you want to you can drag my Galaxy NX camera out, put in a SIMM card, pay for a data plan, and even cellular data transfer your stuff. Each one of the protocols, in some way, has the promise of being able to move the image you just took, off the camera and, through some circuitous route, onto your favorite social image sharing site.

Let me put aside the buzz words for a second and explain this for someone like my non-technical older brother:  I can snap a picture and it will be automatically sent to my iPad or iPhone. I can look at the picture and even "fix" it and then send it to Facebook."

At which point I'd probably be asked, "Couldn't you always take a picture and send it to Facebook? Isn't the only different now that you don't need a wire?"  Well.  Yes. There is no wire.

But I would quickly jump in and tell him that I could control the camera remotely by using this new technology. He might ask, "So you can change exposures and colors and sizes and sharpness and all that on your camera just from your phone?"  And I'd have to tell him that no, I could zoom the lens and tell the camera when to take the photograph. That's about it.

"But didn't you buy a fancy camera with a nice finder so you could make careful compositions and quick setting changes?"  Well, yes, that is the reason I spent over a thousand dollars on a camera. I wanted to compose through a nice viewfinder and make quick changes to things like exposure and color balance but....isn't it cool that you can tell your camera to shoot NOW! and it will do it? From your phone!!!

And then he might ask, "So, if you can't control everything you could when you have the camera in your hands is the real advantage that the transfer of the images is so much faster than the old way you did it? Like, faster than when you used to stick the little card in the slot on your laptop and transferred files directly. Does this new, remote method save you a lot of time and work?"

Then I'd have to explain to him that it really is a LOT slower to transfer big Jpeg files over a wi-fi connection but I can do this just about anywhere and I can even use my phone! I can make the files smaller to compensate...

"Wait a second!" He'd no doubt reply. "A couple of weeks ago you gave me a big lecture about shooting pictures onto something called "RAW files" so you could get the highest quality. Are you able to transfer these RAW files to your phone or your iPad and send them right away?"

Well, no. Maybe I could with the Samsung GNX, after I pay for a separate cellular data plan. But none of the social sharing sites accept RAW files....

Then, being an academic, I'm sure he'd start to drill down... "Well, it seems to me that if you are shooting your art or for a client you'd probably be using RAW files which you couldn't really use with the connectivity in your new cameras. Is that right? And it seems to me that you'd probably want to make your Jpegs smaller and more compressed so they transfer over (camera) wi-fi a bit faster and then upload to the sites a bit faster, right?"

Being honest I would have to admit that he was right.

"So, if you can't send files that you'd use on a job for one of your clients, and you can't control all the camera controls on a phone or pad that you could if you had the camera in your hands, and everything takes longer to transfer and you can't even use the raw files, then why don't you just shoot the stuff you want to put on Facebook with your iPhone? Didn't you tell me the camera in your phone was pretty good?"

Then he might add: "You know, you spent all that money buying a camera that would do your mysterious RAW files and I've heard you talk (too ) many times about how nice the new electronic finders are on the mirror less cameras, and you can transfer more files more quickly and even do better processing with them on your laptop.  So why did you waste all that money?"

Anyway, I noticed that Sony has an app called Play Memories that you can load onto your iPhone (or Android phone) or a tablet and it will show you on the device screen what the camera sees. It will allow you to zoom and it will allow you to trip the shutter. Once you trip the shutter it will send the resulting Jpeg file to your device. I downloaded the app last night. It worked as I described it. The files transferred pretty quickly. I was able to work on them in the tablet version of SnapSeed and then send them along to a sharing site. I e-mailed myself one of the photos to use on the top of this blog post.

The only reasonable application I can see for such a sparsely featured transfer program is to check composition on a remote camera that's positioned in a place that's hard to get to. That place is not my tripod. The only other added benefit I can see is to allow a client to review or preview the image the camera sees on a bigger screen. That is not a new feature. In the ancient days we could do this via an arcane process called, "tethering."  It even worked with my circa 2002 Kodak DCS 760 camera via Firewire. But when I tethered I had a lot more control over camera parameters.

So, explain to me, exactly, what is the benefit of having wi-fi or NFC in my camera?  I really want to know. Maybe I'm missing something golden.

Enough love showered on the Sony RX10. Now I turn my attention to the NIKON !!!!!

©2014 Kirk Tuck. Do not reproduce.

By Austin Photographer, Kirk Tuck ©2014

Yeah. You heard me. I said, "Nikon." But no, I don't mean the ponderously large cameras or the antiquated camera mirror antics. No, when I say "Nikon" I mean Nikon lenses for my micro four thirds cameras. Today I was packing up to go and photograph some kids at Project Breakthrough so we could select one of the kids for the cover of the annual report. (Project Breakthrough is a non-profit organization that prepares underserved high school and middle school students for successful college careers...).

I put together a really small and straightforward kit but enough to do exactly what the comprehensive layout and the attending art director asked for. I took a Panasonic GH3 to shoot with and a second one as a back up. I grabbed the kit lens, the 45-150mm lens, the 40mm and 60mm high speed Pen lenses and, just for grins I tossed an old Nikon 50mm 1.4 (pre-au), rigged on a couple adapter rings, into the the bag.  I took a couple of flashes but assumed (correctly) that I would only need a manually set Sony A-58 HVL flash firing into a big, 72 inch umbrella, triggered by a Flash Waves radio set.

My intention was to use the 60mm 1.5 lens as my primary lens and have the others along in case someone chimed in with, "as long as you are here would you mind shooting......XYZ ???"  But when I started setting up that old, battered Nikon lens kept calling out, "Try me. Try me."

Of course it was just the right focal length and these color corrected but otherwise un-retouched images tell the story. The lens is sharp, well balanced and gives a very smooth rendering to the various tonalities. It's a different look than the exaggerated over sharpness I see in lots of modern lenses. The ancient Nikon, shot at f2.8 is subtly rounded in its rendering while delivering detail you can see in the enlargement of our subject's eye, below. 

When used properly the GH3 is a wonderful camera. The files are neutral and transparent and, I think as good as anything out in the market at 16 megapixels. At least on par with the Olympus OMD EM-1. The camera requires the operator to make good choices and to use good technique. I find it to be equally transparent in its usability. It just gets out of the way and facilitates the process for me. It's an interesting choice of camera. Even more so if you are also inclined to want to make lovely video files...

I have three Nikon lenses left over in my drawer. I tried the 50mm 1.4 today. I have an older 55mm f3.5 micro lens and a 58mm 1:1.2 Nocto Nikkor and I look forward to testing each of them on the pixie-style camera bodies. You never know what you'll find when you mix stuff up.

©2014 Kirk Tuck. Do not reproduce.

I guess I read a lot of lens reviews that are done by people who photograph watches and wheat stalks and micro fine wiring harnesses. Clockwork and landscapes, intricate weavings and giant, industrial architecture. They all seem to like their lenses sharper than wire through cheese. And sharp everywhere, even in the hidden parts of a photograph. Seems like scalpel level sharpness is the general vogue.  

Portrait photographers might do well to break from the herd and seek other metrics of lens selection. Everyone would benefit from trying a number of lenses in the focal lengths that are most important to them and then choosing the ones that feel right to them. In a way it's like selecting wines. Some people like big, bold, high alcohol content, Cabernet Sauvignons while others enjoy softer but more complex wines. 

We can be like that in photography if we are mindful and fully engaged with our choices. 

No. I will not pick out lenses for you!

(Note, these files are reduced from their original size to a maximum of 1500 pixels on a long edge in order to fit in the parameters of the Google Blogger format. I will note that the detail in the originals, while not bombastic and obvious, does go on and on).

A re-post from 2009 about re-launching your career and why to kill off the previous one.

5.13.2009

Time to talk a bit about marketing. Yikes

Article and photo ©2009 Kirk Tuck.

Is it possible to be in the market for too long?  I'm not talking about the stock market.  We all know the answer to that one.  I'm talking about the photography market.  If you are forty or fifty years old and you've been a photographer for the last ten or twenty years you know that we've been through some gut-wrenching changes.  We've all devised some self-serving and optimistic ways of looking at the decline of our traditional markets.  Some people walk around telling anyone who will listen, "Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger!"  But they never mention the scar tissue...  Others say, "This too shall pass!" Implying that the pain we feel now is but a temporary sting that will give way to a rosy and prosperous tomorrow.  "If you can make it through this economy you can  make it through anything."  As though it isn't possible for the economy to get any worse.

I've been thinking a lot about this lately and I've come to some conclusions about our position as photographers in this new world and how things might work out.  I'll say up front that if you are twenty five and surrounded by marvelous designer friends in some cool and unaffected part of the economy then just don't even bother to read the rest.  Everyone's kilometerage will vary.

Let's start by going around the room and admitting we've got a lot of baggage.  I know I do.  It's hard not to.  If you were working in the booming 1990's you no doubt remember when one of the hardest things to come by was a day off.  Day rates were climbing and corporate clients were throwing out stacks of money to advertise new web based companies and services. Traditional agencies with long pedigrees understood the rationale of usage fees and were willing to negotiate based on these historical payment agreements.

We used real cameras that spit out physical products.  We lit stuff and the lighting looked good. Clients didn't (and still don't ) understand lighting and they were willing to pay well for people who did.  Checks came from local offices and agency people understood mark-up.

We remember all this and some part of our brains feels like that's the marker for what should be a normal photo market.  But that's our baggage.  Can we still feel the buzz and get all enthusiastic after the whole model irrevocably changes?  Can we get pumped to do amazing stuff for less money?  For much less profit?

The market has flattened and once clients have tasted nearly free stock, used it and waited for an apocalypse (loss of market share, damage to the brand) that never came we are confronted with their version of a genie that's been released from the bottle, a ship that's sailed, a horse that's already out of the barn.

The selling mantra against dollar stock was fear.  "What if all the businesses in your sector used the same stock image in their campaigns?  Wouldn't you be devasted??  Wouldn't you perceive the tremendous value of a commissioned shoot? You'll never get fired using a proven supplier!!!"  That's pretty much a paraphrase of an essay up on the ASMP site.  But here's the disconnect:  Many of the art buyers, art directors, creative directors and marketing directors who learned their trade in decades past have been swept into other areas and out of negotiation with photographers by two big, catastrophic economic downturns in the first nine years of this century.

They've been replaced in legions by much younger and cheaper people.  These people were raised with dollar stock use or limited rights managed stock as the norm.  That's their baseline. There is no nostalgia driving these people back to the traditional assignment model.  There never will be. They add their own value to the stock stuff with tons of manipulation.  To be clear, clothing catalogs and product catalogs will continue being shot.  CEO's will continue being  photographed.  Stuff will still be assigned.  But it will be the exception rather than the rule.  Only a tiny percentage of images will be assigned and only for specific, proprietary products.

Here's another critical driver:  Advertising clients have scaled back in all print media and have poured more resources into online advertising.  By some counts webvertising is up 20% this year over last.  Consumer magazine ad pages are down nearly 35% over last year.  What happens when the recession finally ends and clients find that web and cable satisfied their needs almost completely?  I think they will channel more and more dollars into the web and TV and less and less into print.  

Let's face it.  The web isn't a challenging medium.  My medium format cameras are definitely overkill for most web uses.  For that matter my Canon G10 is overkill for most web use.  The subordinated quality of web versus traditional media is just another barrier to entry knocked down.  The challenge on the web is pushing people to the site but that seems to be the provence of social marketing and viral marketing.  

I think that by the time this market recovers 80 to 90 % of the people we veteran photographers dealt with before the collapse will have moved on to other jobs and other industries.  More and more we'll be dealing with a brand new crowd.  None of them will know anything about your brand or your history in the market.  In fact, having a history in the market will mark you as a dinosaur.  Everything that we've learned over our careers, in terms of marketing, is going to be upside down.  New is the new good.  Fast is the new production value.  And coffee is the new martini.  The Canon G10 is the new Nikon D3x.  Just as Strobism is replacing studio flash equipment.

This is just my perception.  Everyone else's mileage may vary.  But the real question is what to do about it.  I think this year is going to be a wash out.  It's a great time to get personal projects done, it's strategically smart to stay in touch with as many clients and potential clients as you can.  It's important to build some new portfolios and some new self-promo and get the website ready.  But here's my "from out of left field"  "brain-stormed" (or lightning struck) idea for 2010.......

Shut your existing business down at the end of this year.  Shut down everything.  Close the doors.  Toss out all your preconceptions about how a photography business should be run.  Toss out your nostalgia and your mythology.  Everything.  Total purge.  Career colonic.

Then, on the first of the new year (or when your gut tells you we're heading back to a prosperous overall economy) emerge and totally re-invent yourself from the ground up.  New look.  New marketing.  New point of view and new ways of doing the business.  Because no matter what you do you will be participating in capitalism's biggest "hard reset" ever and it's pretty much and even bet that, except for premium brands like Coca Cola and Apple and IBM and Starbucks, everyone else will be sitting in on the same reset.  

Tired of buying endless gear? Maybe your new business model calls for rental of all lighting and grip gear.  Tired of getting tooled around for payment?  Maybe your new business model calls for nothing but credit card payment.  Tired of your old clients?  This is a time to reset.  Tired of that filing cabinet of legacy headshot files your clients will never need again?  You've gone out of that business, remember?  Toss the stuff you don't need and make room for the stuff that will make you money in the new paradigm.

I've been in Austin a long, long time.  My old clients will use me for  a long time to come.  The people who've been here as long as I have and haven't used me aren't about to start because they've already pigeon-holed me for one reason or another.  When new people move into existing jobs they bring their own people or they go out looking for those people.  By killing off our old business persona we get to be the people they bring in to replace us.

Let me repeat that:  By killing off our old business persona we get to be the people they bring in to replace us.

Being a new business gives us an excuse to get pumped up again.  To throw a big opening party. To invite people into our new process.  

I'm still thinking about all this and working the kinks out of it.  But it seems right to me on a number of intuitive levels.  Everything changes and everything evolves.  I don't want to wait around and be a miniature GM when I can be the next new thing.  I know there are many holes and pitfalls to this new idea.  And I'm not saying that I am rushing to implement but I do think it is interesting and we should discuss it.

I know it's not as sexy as talking about gear but that's the next thing I'm looking at.  Really.

Looking forward to the re-launch.  What form will it take for photographers?

By Austin Photographer, Kirk Tuck ©2014

Think That Fancy Bokeh Isn't Possible with a Sony RX 10? Let's put it to the test.....again.

For some reason I can't let go of zeroing in the Sony RX10. Something in my photo brain tells me that this camera is something special and that I should play with it more and with a more serious attitude.  I've only got my first six hundred frames on it and I'm of the opinion that you need to be somewhere near your ten thousandth frame before you really have a good camera figured out.

I'd been reading comments on various peoples' web reviews of the camera and the biggest single issue most people bring up is the inability of the camera and lens to make images with a narrow depth of field. Okay. I get that. I can look at DOF tables and see as well as anyone that your options will be more limited than they might be with a larger sensor and a faster lens. But where do we call it quits? I can trot out stuff we shot with a 110mm f2 Zeiss Planar on a Hasselblad 201f and we can laugh at all the people who think you can get decently narrow DOF on 35mm (full frame) cameras. But I get what they are saying. The RX10 isn't the right camera for you if you find you always want wide shots with narrow focus. But just how much control do you have?

Well, I met these two guys on the street today and they stopped to ask me a question. Here's the question: "Who do I think will go down in history as the most famous between these two athletes; Mohammad Ali (Cassius Clay) or Michael Jordan?" We bantered about that for a few minutes and then I posed a "Between Mark Spitz and Michael Phelps?" question. They left no doubt in my mind when they asked, "Who is Mark Spitz..."

I was about to walk away when I remembered my question: How do I show off the available control of DOF with an RX10?  I asked if they would pose for a test image. I stuck the guy in the sleeveless shirt about 7 or 8 feet behind the guy with the glasses, opened up to f2.8 and zoomed out to the 200mm equivalent focal length. This is what I got. By the way........Nice Bokeh !  Here's some more samples:

Utility pole at 25 feet and crane at approx. 100 feet. 

That was fun but guess what? I did my entire walk wide open. Well, I mean I left the lens aperture at f2.8 and I engaged something I haven't read about elsewhere. I engaged the automatic setting for the three stop neutral density filter. That's right, an automatic setting for the neutral density filter. 

I set the camera on "A" mode, ISO 125, f2.8 and walked around banging out stuff I liked without a care in the world. And that's BIG since the shutter in the RX10 doesn't go very high. I think it caps out at1/3200th of a second. slower at wider apertures...

Here are some of the images, all shot wide open at f2.8....even the corners....

Above. A couple of shots at the wide end of the lens. Wide open. Auto ND. 

70mm equiv. at wide open.

Need a lens with some range?

The next four images are a progression of shots from a very wide, establishing shot to an extremely tight shot done with the digital zoom. All were shot from the same position and with the same basic camera settings. Including the wide aperture and the auto ND filter setting. 

24mm EQV.

Above = maximum real optical focal length.

Above = Maximum focal length with digital zoom engaged. 

Just thought you'd like to know.

Filling Information Requests About the Sony RX10. Well, two of them.

By Austin Photographer, Kirk Tuck ©2014

One of our readers tasked me to do two things. One was to shoot a portrait wide open so he could sample the depth of field that the RX10 yields. The second was to shoot a portrait near the long end of the lens so he could see how that looked as well. The third point of information is one that I added to the test inadvertently but which to me was the most important test....

I asked Belinda to take time our from being the best graphic designer in all of Texas (need a logo?) and to stand still for me in the living room of our house so I could do the test shots. Late afternoon sun light was coming in behind me and bouncing off the glossy surface of our Saltillo tiled floor. The camera needed a little help with exposure so I dialed down a stop and a half to compensate for the confused metering difference between the light on her face and the much darker living room space. I was cued to do this by the zebras that came on when I pointed the camera in her general direction. I'd set them at 95%.  Once properly compensated (nice EC dial on the top right of the camera with firm click stops) the camera was successful in also producing a very neutral color balance in Belinda's face despite the orangey-warm color reflection off the Saltillo tiles as the main light source. (The bounce off the floor also explains the "spooky" under lighting....).

The camera nailed focus on her eyes and I noticed, when zooming in to 100%, that the tip of her nose is just starting to go soft. The window in the background is very soft.

But here's the crazy thing. I picked up the camera and it was in Aperture Priority so I didn't bother to check the other settings. I presumed that with all the light bouncing around that the camera would set something like 1/125th at ISO 200 or 400. I misjudged the light intensity and it was only when I inspected the image at 100% that I noticed my "mistake."

I noticed it because I could see just a trace of noise reduction on the image file that I didn't put into the image in post and I started to worry that maybe the camera was being too aggressive in its anti-noise intervention. So I checked the info palette and was stopped cold.

The frame was shot at 1/250th of a second, f2.8 at ISO 1600 !!!! The noise performance is a factor of three better than my Sony a850 full frame camera and as good as the performance I've been getting in careful use with my Panasonic GH3 at the same ISO. I think the files are big enough and juicy enough that I may go into the menus and turn down the standard levels of noise reduction in Jpeg to minus one or minus two. I wouldn't mind a bit more believable noise at 1600 ISO !!!!!

So. There it is. The camera can make things in the background go out of focus. The camera files are sharp and detailed, even at 1600 ISO. And the situation looks pretty nice at f2.8.

I decided to do a screen shot of the sizing menu so I could show off a real 100% (in relation to the top file) image blow up.

The head Visual Researcher here at the VSL lab was confabbing with our secret board of directors and we're in consensus, the RX10 is a good camera.