The Visual Science Lab

Monday, May 26, 2014

Another Enjoyable Evening Making Photographs for the Theatre. "Vanya" at Zach.

Now, on with the show.....

Cassandra and Vanya practice voodoo...

It was a moist and muggy afternoon and I was packing up to go shoot a dress rehearsal for my live theater client, Zach Theatre, here in Austin. This was my first time to shoot a dress rehearsal on the Topfer stage with the two, new (to me) Panasonic X lenses: the 12-35mm and the 35-100mm. Both have 2.8 maximum apertures and are weather resistant (which never comes up in theatrical documentation....). I had just spent two full days earlier in the week putting the new GH4 through its video paces and I felt like I had a good handle on its capabilities re: ISO limitations and focusing.

I packed the two lenses, the GH4 and a GH3, along with two extra batteries (unnecessary) and two extra memory cards (totally unnecessary). I also brought along a second GH3 body with a lens adapter. The second GH3 body hosted an ancient Nikon 50mm 1.4 lens and it was set up to shoot monochrome. I brought it along just for fun. I thought about including a monopod but my experience with the in lens I.S. on both lenses convinced me that it would be a non-essential burden. I left it in the studio.

"Sonya" makng a point.

The two primary cameras and lenses fit in my smaller, Domke bag and I dragged the third camera along over my left shoulder. Security blanket? Mindless distraction? Who knows?

It was my intention all along to use the longer zoom on the GH4. Most of the images I would be taking didn't require capturing the full width of the stage and I knew from experience that I would be able to handle 90% of the work with a 70-200mm equivalent. I was anxious to put the GH4 to a real world (for me) test and this was a quick way to put 1200 frames on the camera and lens in short order under fun circumstances. I've often said that the only way to really get comfortable with, and to understand a camera, is to spend a lot of concentrated time with it. I figured two full video shooting days and a three hour dress rehearsal would be a good start.

Still walking around with 2012 camera prejudices? Don't think "Mirror-Free" cameras focus fast enough? Watch this:

All material ©2014 Kirk Tuck and presented exclusively at www.visualsciencelab.blogspot.com 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 an 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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=up8K_xd_iwU&list=UUqpOf_Nl5F4tjwlxOVS6h8A

I love the camera reviews that are done by the Camera Store on YouTube. Their spokesperson, Chris Nichols, is bright, fun, informed and very good in front of a video camera. For most cameras they are definitely part of the information well I go to with my bucket to find out about new camera capabilities.

In the video I linked to above they test the continuous auto focus, tracking autofocus and point to point, single autofocus of the top four mirror free cameras: The Sony A6000, the Fuji XT-1, the Olympus EM-1 and my personal favorite, the Panasonic GH4. Their control and comparison camera is the current king of the hill for action shooting, the Nikon D4s.

Things I learned from shooting video for two long days with the Panasonic GH4.

My new food lens. The 35-100mm f2.8

Panasonic X lens.

My friend, Chris, and I shot video at one of our favorite restaurants this past week. The restaurant needed a nice video spot to plug into their website and we needed some fun stuff for our reels so we pitched the project.

Ravioli with Pesto and tomatoes.

Panasonic GH4 with 35-100mm f2.8 lens.

We wanted to do a quick paced, day-in-the-life of the restaurant, from opening to closing, with a series of shots of food, food preparation, cooking, serving and even a shot of a couple walking out at the end of a nice evening. We scheduled two days to shoot the project with two people operating cameras. We did only one interview so most of the stuff we shot did not require having a sound person on hand.

I used the new GH4 Panasonic camera as my shooting camera and Chris used a GH3. Since our project will end up on the web, required tons of individual shots, and since I'd be editing it on a non-state-of-the-art computer we decided to shoot everything in 1080p at 29.9x frames per second. We used reflectors but did not use lights. We were looking for an available light aesthetic and, since we were shooting while the restaurant was open, and filled with paying customers, we wanted to be discreet and unobtrusive.

Enough with bad "AD SPEAK." Stop calling your small camera "mirror less" and start calling it "MIRROR FREE".....

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.

I can almost guarantee that your camera will get more respect. "Mirrorless" implies that it is lacking something while "Mirror Free" implies that a burdensome vestigial device has been removed from a modern design.

Likewise, could we lose the incredibly confusion "Micro Four Thirds" format name and start calling the format something sexy and fun? Something like "Super 35" which means it's almost the same size as standard, Hollywood movie film.

Let's steal advertising know how from the 1980's and start calling it the "Ideal Format" instead. (used by makers of 645 medium format cameras in the era).

Or, better yet, let's call it: Ultra Frame. Just because we can......

Notes about finishing a project. A long project. And, by the way, welcome back!

DVD of the Novel in the foreground. My writing computer,

Nastasha, in the background.

I have this older Apple MacBook Pro with silver keys and I've been using it over the last three years to edit the final version of a novel I have been writing, on and off, since 2002. It's not really fair to say I've been writing it for that long since the bulk of the story and the writing was all done in that first year. What really happened is that the novel needed re-writing and editing and proofing and .... real life kept getting in the way. Some years prosperity delayed the work. The photo projects were coming in fast and furious and I made the choice to maximize my income in those years. Then the lean years happened and I concentrated on instant money makers, like writing non-fiction books about photography.

There always seemed to be a good excuse to do anything but finish the novel. A big job. A giant recession. The blog.

But I finally put my proverbial foot down and set a deadline. That deadline was 5pm today. And I missed it. But only by an hour and a half. At 6:30 pm today I turned over a DVD to my graphic designer so that she could design the looks and feel of the book in a program called, InDesign, and then convert the whole project to the .mobi format for use on Amazon.

This project is one of the most fun projects I have ever done. I love the protagonist and I must love the storyline because I've probably had to read it at least 100 times and I still like it. I still tear up at certain parts and I still feel the suspense in others.

But it's also been one of the most oppressive projects I've done because it never stopped. There was never a satisfying hard stop. And I'm used to projects that last a day, a week, or at most, a month. Not twelve years.

It's like knowing you should file your taxes but putting it off for twelve years. Things just pile up and the non-ending nature of it all means that the project is always right there, over your shoulder. You really can't start something new. You need that sense of completion.

I thought that this week would be a perfect one in which to finish once and for all. I stopped writing on the blog and I pushed most assignments into the future. But there is one project I just couldn't turn down. That was to shoot a video for my friend, Emmett's restaurant, Asti, here in Austin. Chris Archer and I had been looking for a fun video to do that included food and lifestyle and this one was dropped into our laps. We spent all day Tues. (until late, late) and most of the day Weds. shooting food prep, food cooking and all manners of behind the scenes restaurant stuff with a brand new Panasonic GH4 and a Panasonic GH3. So much fun.

And while I wanted to sit down and edit right away I was able to resist the temptation and work with discipline on the novel.

I spent all day yesterday and today putting in finishing touches and making sure the timeline calculated out. I fixed unintentionally changing names. I proofed for the 50th time and still caught stuff.

So now I'm done and my "team" is ready. Belinda is designing the look and feel of the book and making the final conversions. Ben and I are shooting all the components for the cover and I'm busy investigating the best way to get an e-book up onto Amazon. My procrastination is over. The ego part is done. Everything else is step by step mechanics.

The schedule? We're aiming to have the final, formatted design ready for upload by the middle of June at the latest. The book should launch within a week of that date. As soon as the copyright submission is complete and we have an ISBN number I'll start letting you in on what the story is all about. Suffice it to say that if you are interested in PHOTOGRAPHY you'll probably love the book.

If you have a wealth of knowledge about putting e-books up on Amazon, and you've been through the process yourself, could you post knowledge and guidance in the comment section here? It would be much appreciated.

On another note: I've spent some quality time with the GH4 as both a video camera and a still camera and I'm going to start sharing information about our use of the camera starting with tomorrow's blog. If you are interested in that camera be sure to stay tuned.

Thanks for your patience this week in dealing with a quiet blog. I can't tell you how many times I wanted to toss down the "novel" laptop, just over here to the desk and start banging away on something short and fun. But I must say that it was the process of finishing that made this all worthwhile to me.

I'm glad to be back. More to come tomorrow.

(and by the way, we lost two followers over the fallow period, if you are not already a "follower" of the VSL blog I hope you'll consider designating yourself as such. It costs you nothing and allows me to see that there really is a dedicated audience for what we share. Thanks!)

Friday, May 16, 2014

AHH. Down time. Taking a week off to finally finish the novel.

I started writing a novel about a photographer, caught in a web of intrigue at an international trade show, back in 2002. Life got in the way many times, compounded by the almost universal bane of artists and writers everywhere, resistance. To read more about the idea of resistance and how it relates to the arts please pick up a copy of The War of Art, by Stephen Pressfield.

I've put off finishing my writing project for every imaginable reason. Anxiety attacks, cardiac scares, assignments out of the country, kid soccer games, swim practice, blog writing, gratuitous camera testing and so much more.

Every time I sit down to proof read I think of some new thing the novel "needs" or some way to make a passage clearer. But I'm at the point now where the inaction and resistance of getting this project done is starting to effect everything else in my life. I feel like I'm in some sort of hellish holding pattern and I'm bound and determined to get this book done and out by the end of the month.

I will be publishing it on Amazon. It will be a kindle book and, if I navigate their system correctly, you should also be able to order a printed copy instead (or in addition = optimist). My plan is to have the final editing and proofing done by the end of next week (May 24th deadline) and have Belinda design and convert to ePub the following week. After that we'll upload to Amazon and announce the availability.

I would love to sell many copies of the book but at this point it's just important to me to get it done. Completed. Launched. Out.

To that end I'm taking a break from blogging until after the 24th of this month. I'll miss the witty repartee with my smart readers (of whom you are one; of course). I'll miss the refuge of being able to duck out of real work and come here to play with words. But we'll settle right back in after the birth of the book.

I always wanted to write a novel. Now I have. The final step is unleashing it into the world. Stay tuned for more and please come back and read more after the 24th...

With nearly 1900 previous blog posts to pick through you might want to catch up on your reading. I may have already written the very thing you most wanted to read.....

Thanks. Wish me luck. Kirk

Thursday, May 15, 2014

A dedicated selfie camera from Samsung. Scaring the crap out of myself 20 megapixels a shot.

Scaring small children with stern selfies.

Mysteries of the universe abound. Two days ago Studio Dog rose from her nap, jumped to her feet and sounded the alarm that tells me the Fedex man is about to turn into the driveway with some package or another. The bark is very distinct. It's quite different for the UPS truck.

At any rate I ambled over to the door and accepted the insanely distorted Fedex box and wished the driver a good day. Studio Dog and I sniffed the box and discerned that it came from Samsung's P.R. agency in NYC. I thought it might be a t-shirt. But it was a bit heavy and angular for a t-shirt. I grabbed a vicious, cold steel stiletto and sliced the box open with the barest flick of my wrist. The contents were padded with some sort of color newspaper pages. When I pulled the box out of the box it turned out to be the container for a camera called a Samsung NX Mini.

And mine is, indeed, white. Right down to its wrist strap.

So what is this all about? Well, it's a tiny, thin, interchangeable lens, mirror-free camera that uses the Samsung version of a one inch sensor. The lens on the front of mine is a 9mm, f3.5 which corresponds (in full frame speak) to a 24mm lens. They also currently make a zoom that goes from 9mm to 27mm, which is about a 75mm big camera equivalent.

I assembled the camera and lens, put in the big battery and tossed in a micro-SD card. The camera spent a little time on a turbo-charged USB-4 terminal, sucked up enough juice to turn the battery light green and then we were off to the races. Scaring small children and mindlessly riding on escalators.

The camera is quick and agile but made with enough metal to give it a bit of gravitas. It has all the stuff I don't really care about, like NFC and wi-fi, and a few things I do care about like raw files and manual settings. And a battery that's rated for over 600 shots per charge.

The big draw of the camera is its selfie enabling design. The rear screen swivels up and around so you can see yourself over the top of the camera. You can click the shutter in the old school method or you can set the camera to trigger upon a gracious smile or a wink. I used the face detection Af and, since I rarely smile, I engaged the shutter with my index finger. We would have waited a long time for smile detection but, given enough time we might have pulled off a wink shutter by dint of some facial tick or another....

If you wear a suit and tie, or it is perennially winter in your locale, the camera is quite pocketable. If you wear a pair of jeans and a t-shirt as you everyday wear it is only pocketable if you like to present with a rectangular bulge in your pocket.

The camera is actually a very good performer. The exposures I took on a dark and overcast day were all very much on target and the AF only failed me when I didn't pay attention to what I should be aiming at. It has all the basic controls and setting parameters of its bigger brothers in the Samsung line up. And the menu beats the pants of just about any Nex I've had the pleasure to own.

It's actually a fun, quick camera to have around. The 20 megapixel sensor seems pretty darn good, the wide angle lens is nice and sharp, wide open and the rear screen is good for most work. If I were shooting seriously I'd have to put a Zacuto or Hoodman finder on the back of it to make it professional but that would almost triple the size of the package and would look pretty stupid.

This is pretty much the perfect camera for a compulsive perfectionist who loves to do selfies for social media but who wants something that generates higher quality files than all the cellphones on the market. It's also good for gruff, old cusses who just want a camera they can keep on the dashboard of the pick-up truck for quick snaps of stuff they come across on a day to day basis; like Sasquatch and Oil Derrick fires, and beautiful landscapes preening under the majestic setting sun of Texas.

A note to the marketing people: White? Really? White? Really? Not that there's anything wrong with white but was black or brown even an option? Really? White?

Ben was intrigued but I decided I'd keep this one around for my incredible number of selfies I expect to take on a day to day basis. Hmmmm. Ready? Crowd in close and we'll get a selfie of us in front of something very Austin-y. Like traffic. Or a music festival.

Added later: Target market???? See below: