Decompressing from a week filled with photography. Sometimes you just need a break...

I went to Whole Foods for some soup. I also photographed some random flowers.

It was a wacky week of headshot photography, speeches about photography and a full day of doing photography in San Antonio. When I finished with the post production of yesterday's files around 2pm today I was totally burned out so I decided to talk a nice long walk in the sunshine (75 (f) degrees today...).   Of course I wouldn't leave the house without some sort of camera so I grabbed the RX 10 of the dining room table, shoved an extra battery in my pocket and headed out the door. 

The chicken and veggie soup was great and I snuck in a piece of jalapeño corn bread for contrast. I wandered around downtown, marveling at all the new buildings going up. Luxury hotels, more high rise condos and a smattering of office buildings and parking garages. 

The RX 10 rode along with its promotional Sony strap clinging to my left shoulder. I set it up for simple. Aperture priority, ISO 125, auto neutral density filter and AWB. No thought-o-graphy at its best. 

Didn't shoot much. I was trying to just look today. Make my eyes do that infinity thing to counteract that two feet to fifteen feet thing I'd done all week long. I guess we'll take a deep breath and hit the ground running tomorrow.

In case you didn't know (I might have been too subtle), I think the RX 10 is the best camera I've played with for the price ever. While I resize files to 2100 pixels on the long side for the blog I've succumbed to some pixel peeping at 5640 or whatever and the files are incredibly detailed and sharp. At the lower ISO's they just don't break down until you go past 100%. The color is great and the metering is 98% on the money. All in all a great product from Sony. It would be interesting to see just how good a full frame, 28-70mm fixed f4.0 camera would be. The ability to match the lens and the sensor into a non-removeable system may mean less flexibility but I have a feeling that it's one of the last remaining paths to ultimate image quality. 

That said, I eagerly await the arrival of the GH4's. Double slap in the face to the $12,000 Canon video/faux still cameras....

Mixed camera job. Lots of stuff crammed into the weekend.

Penthouse. Sony RX 10.

I got up at 5:30 this morning. I packed the car the night before. I live in an area where you can pack your car full of lights and stands and tripods and leave it overnight with a high expectation that everything will be right where you left it the next morning. But I still bring the camera bag into the house and bring it out to the car in the morning. 

I made an extra big cup of coffee for the road, cobbled together a decent breakfast taco, waved goodbye to my dog (the only member of my family stirring at that ungodly hour) and headed down the highway to San Antonio. 

I was working for an ad agency that I really like. They are located in San Antonio and they call me on a regular basis with fun jobs. Today we were doing a good, old fashion project with lots of interior shots of condominiums and four pairs of people in their condominiums posing for testimonial ads. 

The first kind of shot is pretty straightforward. You just have to make interiors look good. Half the work is already done by whichever designer styled the show units. You just need to balance the interior and exterior exposures correctly and you need to pick the right place to put the camera. 

The second type of shot is a bit more demanding because you have to make the people in the shot look great, balance the outdoor and indoor light and compose around a portrait within an architectural shot. Thank goodness for good art directors. I can think of a thousand ways to compose a shot but my art director was pretty good about picking the correct composition. 

I used a full frame camera for the testimonial shots. I wanted maximum quality in case I screwed up something and needed to pull out all the post processing stops to save a shot. Which did not happen. But the images looked good and the color was nice. 

For the people-less shots of the luxury condominium unit interiors I made a very counterintuitive camera choice and went with the small censored RX10. I set the ISO to the camera's native sensitivity  (125) for highest quality. I used f5.6 because it is the sharpest aperture and also yielded a deep focus. 

I shot raw for more color control. I turned off the image stabilization and used a good, stout tripod. 

The images look good in Lightroom. Both sets of images look good in Lightroom. And the colors between an a99 and the RX10 seem to match up quite well. 

The RX10 was easy to use for the most part. The weak point for all EVFs is the situation where you have a person in an interior location and bright sunlight falling on the scenery outside their window, with the window prominent in the scene. The way around it is to turn on the (on Sony cameras) Setting Effect and then go to manual exposure and change the shutter speed or shutter speed and aperture until you blow out the background but have the right exposure on the face. That's when I do my fine focusing. Then I go back up on shutter speeds until the person is silhouetted and the outside scene is perfectly exposed or even just a little hot. Then I use flash to match the exposures.  To a certain extent, once you leave the slow shutter speeds and the interior darkens you are flying blind. 

It's one situation in which a regular viewfinder is superior. But you've just read my work around. 

It's been a long day as it's nearly 9pm. I've logged nearly 200 miles of driving and eight straight hours of lighting, cajoling and shooting. I'm still at my desk because the executive staff at the Visual Science Lab have a strict policy that all camera memory cards be downloaded and backed up at the end of every shooting day. Saves us from any errors of delay. But while I'm shepherding the images through the first part of their processing journey I'm also making sure to put batteries on the chargers and put the lenses and the cameras back in the cabinet.

I included the shot above because I loved the tall ceiling and the rich sky. It was a fun thing to shoot.

Hope the weekend is going well. I'm checking off boxes day after day. I won't complain. My memory of the great recession is too strong for that....

I have succeeded in speaking to the Association of Texas Photographic Instructors and 300 of their students without embarrassing myself too badly.

Here I am obsessively compulsively adjusting the projector....

photo: ©Bill Woodhull 2014

 I was the keynote speaker for the Texas Association of Photographic Instructors and I took my job very seriously. I spent a couple of days editing down images to show and I wrote two complete, and completely different 40 minutes speeches. I showed the first one to my son, Ben, and asked for a critique. With brutal honesty he let me know that the first script might cause high school students (of which there were about 300) to run screaming from the building in the first three minutes. Asked why he went on a  riff about narcissism, self aggrandizement and the unassailable fact that 58 years old of any ilk should never reference rappers in a presentation. To anyone. 

I changed to plan B which was a heart felt script entitled: The Golden Age of Photography is Right Now.  There wasn't a single reference to my work and few references to my career. No rappers. No jokes and, as prescribed by Ben the word "cool" was expunged in over 23 places.

At the end of the presentation I got a standing ovation from the kids at Frisco High School who were brilliant and incredibly motivated. Go Frisco!!! The rest of the kids applauded vigorously----but from a seated position. 

At the end of the presentation we called for questions and opened the floor to "selfies" on stage with the speaker. I now have many new followers on Twitter. #vizsciencelab

The teachers were incredibly welcoming and obviously dedicated. I am less worried about the future of photography with such steady hands on the helm. The entire afternoon of workshops, contest and portfolio reviews in the conference rooms of the state capitol building was great. 

In order to true new stuff I left the car in the driveway today and road the #30 bus from my neighborhood to the capitol. It was a great experience and one that I'll do again. Saved me between $12 and $18 for downtown parking. I got to do some work on the speech while someone else did the driving. 

Finally, I want to say how much I appreciated VSL regular, Frank, for taking time from his schedule to come and listen to my speech. I felt better with a friendly face in the audience. Thanks.

Also thanks to my long suffering wife who also came out on a frigid friday just to watch me talk. Like she doesn't hear enough at home.  But seriously, it was nice. The kid, of course, was nowhere to be found. But that's okay, now I don't have to sit through the post mortem critique. 

I wanted to go out with the instructors and have dinner and drinks but sadly I have to be on the road to San Antonio tomorrow where I have a full day of photographing in a luxury high rise. I'll be on the road at 5:30am. No party for me tonight. 

Just thought I'd wrap up the loose ends on the whole "public speaking" thing. Good night.

My next camera? A really professional combination for still+video producers.

Panasonic GH4.

You'll probably remember that I fell for the Panasonic G6 at the Photo Expo last Fall, bought one and then subsequently bought two of its big brother, the GH3. I have been using the GH3's for video and still work since November and I am convinced that it beats the video performance of any un-hacked DSLR currently in the market. The video is wonderful. And lately I've had the opportunity to compare the video output to much more expensive, dedicated video cameras and I've found the GH3 video to be close. Certainly competitive for all but the most rigorous and technically demanding programming. According to my friend, Frank, the difference between good video cameras may be less important than the difference that good versus mediocre lighting design...

At any rate I am happy with the GH3s and they've staved off my yearning for an OMD EM-1 by virtue of their dual photo/video nature. The one feature that would be nice to have in the GH3s would be the same kind of in body image stabilization that the top Olympus cameras feature. As for image quality I'm pretty sure that when I shoot in raw I can match files pretty evenly.

But here's the deal. I don't really need the GH4 just for video. The video in the GH3 will work fine for the next year or so of production. The market is shifting to 4K video but not so rapidly that we need shift today to stay relevant. No, the real reason to add one of the new cameras to inventory is the handful of improvements and additions Panasonic have made.

The two that come to mind for me as a still shooter are the improved shutter with 1/8000th of a second top speed and a faster sync speed: 1/250th versus 1/160th. The shutter life is also rated at twice the life of the GH3 or 200,000 actuations. 

As a videographer the major reason to add a GH4 is the accessory that interfaces with the body and gives one dual XLR inputs for professional microphones. It's a usability issue more than anything else. 

One thing I like about the introduction is that the basic camera body is largely the same as its predecessor. That means the buttons are all in the same place, there's good chance they didn't screw up the menus and that means I'll know my way around the camera from the minute I pull it out of the box. Maybe they'll even keep the same battery type. 

Should you get a Panasonic GH4? I guess it all depends on what you do with your cameras and where you are in your camera buying cycle. I'm definitely on board but it's because of the shift in my business. I'll be testing the heck out the camera to see just how much good still work I can squeeze out of the sensor before I dump the FF stuff I'm using for some portraits. But all in all I think the writing is on the wall. Smaller, faster, better and more workman-like than most of the cameras I've come across. Now, if we can just keep the price point under $1500. 

on an unrelated note: I will be speaking this evening at the state capitol. My speech ending up being positive and uplifting. Most of it is true. And wouldn't you know it, the schools are closed again today because of the freezing weather. It's 30 degrees (f) and there's no snow or ice anywhere. But they closed the schools just to be safe. Amazing and, even as a Texan I'll admit====it's downright wimpy. But ATPI tweeted that the conference is totally on and the classrooms are open and ready to go. It should be fun. 

Testing. Testing. Always Testing.

Poor Belinda. We have so many half finished portraits of her... So many times I say, "Don't worry about your expression/shirt/hair/something else, this is only a test." And I mean it at the time but then I look at an image and think that I really like it and I want to talk about the technique so I want to share it and the next thing you know it's up on the web, here at VSL and I'm sure she's mortified that people in France or Malaysia might be saying, "Can't that woman do something with her hair???"

So, I was too cold and lazy to go all the way to the other side of town to buy a warm, brown background for this afternoon's shoot of two different executives so I did what any self respecting eccentric does and bought a tube of paint instead. And I proceeded to paint onto a white seamless background.  It's actually a mix of paint and cold coffee. I thought, since we're in a drought we don't want to waste water.

I painted the background before lunch and it had big brush strokes in it but I figured it would dry smoother and after I had some cheese enchiladas everything would be okay. But it wasn't quite what I wanted in terms of texture so I decided to shoot some tests. Since every one in the universe is suddenly bored with the Sony RX10 I switched gears and decided that today's portraits would all be made with a Sony a850, at 100 ISO and to put an extra spin on things I'd use an ancient Hasselblad 150mm Sonnar f4 lens on an adapter with the Sony. Yeah, that all seems rational to me.

So I decided I'd need someone to sit in and let me play with the light so I could see  just how that background was going to work out. I walked into the house and cajoled Belinda and she came to my aid.

What a nutty camera rig. So, I have the Flex Lens Shade on the front of the lens. It can be bent to any sort of angle or position to block stray light. It's attached to the hood of the Hasselblad C T-star Zeiss  150mm f4. I have the lens attached to the camera with a Fotodiox H-blad to Sony A adapter.

The camera is an ancient Sony a850 shooting raw files.

The trigger on the top is a Wein SSR Infra Red trigger that I've had for 25 years. 

Sooooo much more fun that a radio trigger.

Here's my main light. It's some sort of Elinchrom moonlight firing into a Balcar Silver and White Zebra umbrella left over from the 1980's. It's covered with a Photek 60 inch soft lighter 2 sock.

Bang. Bang. Bang.

This is the reverse view from the back of the studio. Note the 

pop up reflector for fill. Simple tech.

To get exactly what I wanted out of the background light I used a grid spot on it and then covered with with a sheet of diffusion.

As we say in Texas, "This here's a backlight. It's another Elinchrom moonlight firing into a 22 inch dish, also covered with a diffusion "sock." 

No shoot would be complete without the hand painted (and truly disposable)

burnt sienna background. 

Of course, no article would be complete without the view from 

where the magic all happens, right behind the camera.

So the test revealed that at f5.6 I'd get exactly the amount of texture I wanted in the background. The test was successful. f11 would not have worked. An hour later the client came in and we laughed and talked and shot images. The web gallery has already been posted and we're moving on to the next thing. Just another fun day in the studio. 

I decided to type this right now just to keep my fingers warm....

BIG REMINDER: I'll be speaking at the state capitol at 7:00 pm tomorrow evening. There will be a room filled with young minds. I will try to say some smart stuff, some inspirational stuff and some motivational stuff. If I feel like it's not working out I'll just default to telling funny stories. Wish me luck.

Aida. For Zach Theatre. Classic studio lighting.

All material ©2014 Kirk Tuck and presented exclusively at www.visualsciencelab.blogspot.dom  If you are reading this on another site, without proper attribution it is not an authorized use of the material. If you are reading this on unauthorized site DO NOT CLICK on any links in the body copy as it may infect your computer with serious viruses. Sorry to have to put this warning here but a recent search turned up dozens of similar infringements. Thanks for your authentic readership. 

©2014 Kirk Tuck, All Rights Reserved.

I've been cleaning up the studio/office and throwing stuff away like crazy. I've tossed out white formica and endless worn frames and pounds of shredded old invoices and correspondence. As the studio becomes less visually cluttered my desire to do more portraits seems to grow. Clean slate syndrome.

I was heading out the door to buy another roll of seamless just now. A light brown. Kind of a burnt sienna. But I detoured to Michael's art supply store instead and bought a tube of acrylic paint that matches perfectly. I'd rather paint what I need on the endless sea of white seamless I already own. Seems more fun and wastes less paper. Also saves me a long drive through our "treacherous" arctic conditions....still 26 degrees here in Austin.  Now, where did I put my paint brush?

The above was shot in the studio against a black background. Main lighting is a medium octabank while the backlight and side light are both small soft boxes used in close and at very low power. Shot on a Kodak DCS 760C camera with a Nikon 60mm micro lens. f 5.6-8  

All material ©2014 Kirk Tuck and presented exclusively at www.visualsciencelab.blogspot.dom  If you are reading this on another site, without proper attribution it is not an authorized use of the material. If you are reading this on unauthorized site DO NOT CLICK on any links in the body copy as it may infect your computer with serious viruses. Sorry to have to put this warning here but a recent search turned up dozens of similar infringements. Thanks for your authentic readership. 

It's a cold night in Austin. We don't sit outside when it's cold. The wind goes right through our flip flops and makes our feet chilly.

A cold November day in Paris.

I know. You've written to tell me. It's minus 276 degrees in your home city. The polar bears are digging through your trash cans. Your four wheel drive vehicle is locked under thirty tons of black ice and you've been without power for weeks.

But it's a matter of context. You signed on for that kind of abuse when you stubbornly stayed north or foolishly moved there. We didn't sign up for this kind of meteorological abuse. We don't have the parkas lined with the down of a hundred geese. We don't have the boots that are bigger than camera bags, in fact, we barely have heaters. They are an afterthought in our air conditioning systems. 

So we're hunkered down and burning the furniture in the fireplace to stay warm. It's supposed to get down to the low 20's in the hill country tonight. Do you have any idea how cold I'll feel when I walk from the locker room to the outdoor pool in the morning? It's going to be raw. But at least the pool will be heated to 82(f). And the locker room concierges will have the hot towels ready when we get out. But really! Is this any way for people to live? 

Think I'm being "insensitive"?  You'll get your turn when Summer comes and we have another season with over 100 days over 100 degrees. With the humidity. Then you can gloat.