An inexpensive (relatively) SDXC card that works perfectly for video with a GH4.

If you are looking for a cost effective card that works with full on video on the Panasonic GH4 or any other camera that requires a very fast SDXC card for best performance you might want to take a look at this Transcend card. The model I bought ingests big video without issues and it also writes raw files very quickly which speeds up most cameras' performance.

I bought two of the 64GB versions and they have worked flawlessly for 4500+ images last week and lots of 4K video the week before. I have re-formatted at least ten times and I have seen no glitches or anomalies with either card. If you hate the idea of shooting video with your camera you'll be happy to know that they will store gazillions of high res still images, unsullied by video files if that's the way you roll.

Well worth the money to me at less than $50 each....

Here's my artsy portrayal of them:

They make a 128GB size but I haven't tested that yet.

My favorite photo accessory of the week?

I was introduced to the Lastolite Ezybalance white balance targets by Will Crocket. I had been using a scuffed up Kodak 18% gray card to do my custom white balances with but this is a much better solution. They come in three sizes, fold up just like a collapsable reflector and take up very little space in the camera bag. One side is white with a gray target in the center and one side is gray with a white target in the center. I like the gray side because if you are using an automatic mode on your camera the camera will set approximately the right exposure and it will make the whole process easier. I also like having the target graphic right on the center because this gives the AF sensor something easy to lock onto which means you don't have to go into manual focus to make your reading. 

The targets come in three sizes: 12 inch, 20 inch and 30 inch. I own all three. Why? The small on is small enough to put on a lanyard and have around my neck all day long as I traipse down the hallowed halls of corporate America and make custom white balances by holding the target in one hand and holding the camera in the other, filling the frame with the target and taking a reading. 

I own the middle target because it's just the right size to hand to portrait subjects and then zoom in from camera position to fill the frame, take the ready and then move back. I own the large target because it's wonderful to put it into a scene in the studio or on location and have a big "target" to hit. I use them on almost every shoot. Sometimes I get lazy and all infatuated with raw (although I can easily prove that you'll get better files if you custom white balance in the camera....) and shoot AWB and balance after the fact. I find it's always much quicker to do your white balance settings in post production if you've included a target in your first or last frame. Then you can click on it with the eyedropper tool and at least get into the ballpark. 

These are simple devices that are well implemented. Whether you are a heretic and always wait until post processing to try to get your whites, white or whether you are one of the infinitely wise photographers who know that creating a custom white balance in camera will give you the ultimate quality you'll want something like this to speed up the process. Whether you choose to do it the right way or the wrong way!

I used mine last week and I used them this morning. They go into the case with the light stands and the tripod. That way I never forget them....

The small and the medium. Just hanging out in the studio. 

Coming soon. Yes, raw is not the ultimate cure for white balance. 

And when you get tired of white balancing and you're ready to relax, 

consider a good book....

The good assistant. The story of a morning shoot ending in a pleasant lunch.

Poor Ben. Dragged out of his bed in the early hours of the morning by his mean father and made to go along and assist on yet another photographic assignment. It's it any wonder he's counting the days until college? Is it any wonder that he chose a college as far from Austin, Texas as geographically possible?

I'm sure I mentioned it the day before....The schedule...but it seemed to come as a complete surprise to him as he tossed some peanut butter on some whole wheat toast and washed it down with a bit of coffee. The assignment was to go to the Texas State History Museum and make portraits of ten or twelve of the executive team. Some in the board room against a gray background and a few outside in front of the giant Texas Star. 

I'd pretty much packed up all the gear the night before. We just had to wrangle everything into the car. Ooops. He borrowed my car last night and when we fired it up today the little needle that tells us how much gasoline we have was perilously plunged into the "red zone." The car's computer estimated we had enough fuel left for 22 miles. We decided to risk it.

We packed three different backgrounds. One canvas, one muslin and one seamless paper. We ended up using the seamless paper. We packed four Elinchrom mono lights, we set up four and used three. We toted along the Barbie Make-up case and put it to good use on one person. We brought a GH4 and a GH3 along with us but we just ended up using the GH3. It's a great raw file shooter. I also brought an embarrassingly rich selection of expensive lenses but ended up using the cheapo Sigma 60mm f2.8 DN lens for almost everything. It's nice, sharp and well behaved. 

It was good to have Ben along on the shoot. He helped carry all the junk to the car, listened patiently (for the hundredth time) to my sage, fatherly advice on the way over and back. He kept the posing stool from falling off the top of the cart and destroying some rare Texas artifacts. But most importantly Ben was the stand-in for every set up we did. The image above shows his almost reckless excitement at sitting in for the initial tweak of the lights.  A 60 inch umbrella to the right and a (passive) silver reflector to the left side of the frame. A little hair light from the right in a small, black umbrella and a background light which was simply a mono light with a standard head, fitted with a grip spot. No black painted straws, just a Broncolor 20 degree grid spot.

We got through our shoot, re-packed everything and then went across the street to see the new "Dogs and Cats" show at the Blanton Museum. A very nice exhibit which included five beautiful prints by Elliott Erwitt, a print of Igor Stravinsky holding his cat---by Henri Cartier-Bresson and a luscious print of Sandy Skogland's, "Radioactive Cats."  There were paintings, three dimensional pieces and sketches that spanned the centuries, from the ancient Egyptians to the near present. In all, a good show and well worth the $9 admission. Of course we didn't pay a cent. It's Thurs. and the museum is open to all for free. The show is certainly worth more than that. 

After our brush with art we headed out to our favorite, local Chinese restaurant where my child was greeted like a rock star. He had the Mongolian Beef. I had the "Happy Family." Then we came home to unpack. Seems like a good use of child labor except that he's now eighteen so I can no longer tease him in the work place. He's much too serious for that. 

Why flash instead of __________??? Who knows? It's been a flashy kind of month. I guess when you are busy with jobs on location it's comfortable to default to the well known routine. Either that or I'm going through another crazy artist phase were I eschew all novelty and delightful uncertainty in my life in an exchange for the safe and known. (Boring).  I'm sure it's a passing fancy. 

I've come to the sad realization that when Ben leaves for school in the Fall I will need to break in and train a new assistant. This is going to be a difficult process. 

Early reviews of Photography's block buster, action adventure novel of the Summer? Go see for yourself...

Three different images. Three different stories.

I write almost monthly about photo projects that I do for Zach Theatre here in Austin and it dawned on me that I rarely show the theater. The physical space. Here's an image of the entry space at the new Topfer Theatre which is one of three theater buildings on the Zach Scott "campus." It's nearly brand new and it's a state of the art facility, from the way the air conditioning is delivered to the acoustic design of the auditorium. It's beautifully finished and even includes three full bars. The theater seats 300 people and the stage incorporates a pneumatic lift and a fly tower. I love watching productions there because it's spacious, comfortable and always in sync with Austin culture.

The image of the theatre was done hand-held with a Pentax K-01 camera and a 50mm f2 Pentax lens.

Just thought you'd like to see one of my "offices."

We write a lot about cameras and we always tell each other that they are just tools or machines but I've always said that some cameras have something special about them that makes them a pleasure to work with while other cameras just leave me cold. I like the way the Sony RX 10 looks and feels but for the first time in my working life I actually wish there was a switch I could flip that would make the shutter sound louder. The camera is so quiet that I feel cheated out of part of the process. I'll look through the menus again and see if I can turn up the volume on some weird digital shutter noise. Other than that my feeling for the camera borders on fan-boy-ism. There's something about the big sensor Sony bridge cameras (the RX10 and R1) that just gets me. Maybe it's the smartness of the design or the completeness of the package. Whatever. I just like these cameras a lot.

I don't want to make a big deal out of it but I did use my Sony RX10 a couple of months ago to shoot a day long assignment for a shelter magazine. I took other cameras along and just meant to use the Sony for some comparison shots but by the end of the day I'd shot only with the RX10. I shot perhaps 40 set ups, mostly available light----some available light plus a little nudge from some bounce flash. The art director for the magazine called later to tell me how much she loved the images. Not a shallow art director raised on 640 by 480 fluff but the real deal. Time in the trenches. Decades of working with separations from big cameras. Yes. She loved the fact that everything was in focus and  nicely rendered. I didn't feel courageous enough to open the can of worms that goes along with working with tools that skew from the acknowledged mainstream but I think I'd consider myself a wimp if I never followed through on my curiosity about how different tools work. Even if they are somewhat counter-intuitive.

In the image above you see the RX 10 outfitted for another task it does better than most other $1300 cameras. It's ready to go out for a bit of video street shooting. Yes. Video street shooting.

Until I started practicing photography I never saw people get so wrapped up into the weirdness of brand loyalty (unless it was the field of cars). Nikon guys love their stuff. Canon guys can't imagine shooting with anything else. Leica users worship their stuff---honestly, I've been to some of their houses...they have little shrines with the white and red boxes, and there are candles and incense. And I sometimes feel like I really want to feel the love the same way. That ability to ignore new stuff, better stuff, sexier stuff. To accept the warts with hair growing on them that every system has and just keep the stuff around because it's so familiar. 

But when I reach across the brand barrier and try something new, and then show it to my photographer friends, they don't see anything different. They say that I have a style and that the work would be the work regardless of the camera I use. I hope that's try. After thirty years of trying to bend cameras to my will I'd hate to think they had performed some sort of Akido move on me and were really in control of how I shoot. 

The above image was done in a tiny area of a loud, frenetic booth on the floor of a crowded trade show with a weird camera and a wonderful lens. It's the Samsung Galaxy NX camera and the 60mm macro lens. Looks to me just like what I get when the model and I are alone in my "spacious" studio. I guess it's all relative...

And that's pretty much what I'm thinking about today. Relativity. 

I just finished jobs for the entertainment industry, the academic industry, the private equity industry, and a big museum. I just delivered them all and billed them all. I launched my novel. I'm tired and happy and ready for whatever is next.

Action. Adventure. Photography. The best reading Summer novel of 2014. Get yours today.

A damning review should be followed by a positive review. Just to get the bad taste out...

Yes, there is some amazing gear out in the world. And some much less than amazing gear. I wrote about a worrisome flash earlier today and then I sprinted out the door to shoot a job in exciting, downtown Austin. But I meant to follow my review of a flawed product with my quick review of a product that just plain works exactly the way it's supposed to and that is....well. 

I'm writing about my Panasonic/Leica 25mm f1.4 Summilux for micro four thirds. I am on my second copy. I bought the first one back in the earlier days of m4:3 and in the two year interlude in which I tried to bend the Sony cameras to my will I ended up selling it to blogger and local photo celebrity ATMTX. He seems to love the lens.

At any rate it was one of the first lenses I re-bought when I ventured into the world of Panasonic GH cameras. It's a focal length (equivalent) that I really love, and this particular model is exemplary. I keep it bolted on to one of my GH3 cameras at all time. 

I don't really have much to say about it other than to point out that it is sharp, constrasty and very simple. There are no levers or buttons on the lens. The focusing ring is fly-by-wire which pushes me to spend most  of my time shooting the lens manually. The performance of the lens is extremely good and it seems to render detail and dimension in a convincing way. In fact, the quality of this lens has me moving quickly and seemingly unstoppably toward the acquisition of a mysterious Nocticron. The Nocticron is the 85 mm equivalent in the Panasonic family and according to current legend the lens is completely sharp at its widest aperture and able to resolve a zillion giga-lines of resolution and happiness. 

But, back to the little brother. The one complaint everyone has about the lens is about the size of the lens hood (included in the box) but I'm thinking that Panasonic and Leica optimized the hood for ultimate lens performance. It's part of the system that makes sure the light making your images is image forming light and not extraneous photonics bullshit. Otherwise known as flare.

The 25mm has my highest accolades: 1. I bought it twice. 2. I take it everywhere. 3. Some of my favorite pix result from using the lens. It does exactly what it is supposed to do and it does that thing very, very well. That's all I can say about it. 

Summer BlockBuster read: 



Get your copy today before the Kindle Store runs out of stock!!!

A very critical equipment review. The doggiest flash I've owned.

The Sony HVL-60 (no link!)

I read a lot of equipment reviews and it's very, very rare for reviewers these days to come right out and say, "Hey! Don't buy this. It's a piece of ©$@&." I guess that's because most of us bloggers are consciously or unconsciously chasing ad link dollars in one form or another. We'd rather ignore a piece of crap than write it.  But there is a purchase I made that I so regret that I must warn others of my experiences. 

The item in question is very pricy. It had a lot of marketing "promise" but in nearly every category it fell short. It's the Sony HVL-60 flash. I bought it when I was shooting with the Sony a77 and a99 cameras. In a word? It sucks. It's a $600 package of non-performance. 

The number one issue is yet another non-standard hot shoe implementation. It looks like it's nearly a standard set up (if you ignore the small wires on it) but it would not work in my Flash Waves (radio trigger) receivers which work with every other flash I've owned. I get that Sony could implement all kinds of gadgety faux cool stuff with all the extra pins but maybe they should have thought about getting the flash connection right first! So, first strike: once you take it off a dedicated Sony camera you are going to have a hell of a time triggering it. Added to this is the fact that there is no additional PC socket (old school) on the flash. This would have allowed me at least to trigger the flash if nothing else worked. 

It's a crappy shoe and I'd rather have the older Minolta shoe Sony got so much flak for keeping. If I had an unpopular product feature (Minolta proprietary hot shoe)  I'd make it a point to make my upgraded product truly universal. Sony just doesn't get the off camera flash, multiple flash ethos. Yikes it's bad. 

But it might have been well worth it if you could put the HVL 60 in the shoe of your dedicated camera (Sony a77? or Sony a99?) and bang out perfect flash images every time. Right? But the joke continues. No matter how I set this flash (other than in full manual) I got remarkably inconsistent exposures. It's slightly better with the a99 but un-usable for any fast breaking professional work. One frame might be nuts on while the next frame is one stop under and the next frame is two stops over....and NO, I did not have flash bracketing engaged.  Really remarkably bad exposure control. And I have to tell you that Nikon had perfect flash figured out nearly eight years ago!!! Yikes.

But all of this is only academic because as a working pro you'll only have a short while to experience all of the frustrating things that make this unit so dreadful. Why? Because once you've shot ten or twenty exposures, bouncing off a twenty foot high ceiling (no matter how much time between exposures) your HVL-60 will shut off, flash a little thermometer on the LCD screen, and refuse to do anything for at least ten minutes. Dead. Dormant. A useless lump of plastic and capacitors. 

If you are a working professional covering a corporate event and your flash dies after the third person walks across the stage to shake hands with the CEO and get their award then, barring a non-HVL-60 back up, you are toast with that client. Just toast. I've kept the flash around anticipating that I'd use it with the RX-10. But just looking at it makes me angry so I'm taking it back to the dealer and they can deal with it. 

Why the late epiphany? Eh. I spent the best part of the last two years experimenting with LEDs and fluorescent lights. They trigger every time... But really, the wake up call came when I went to outfit myself for last week's shoot. I'd sold off most of my older flashes. Those were the ones I used for off camera zaniness when I wrote the first few books on lighting. I needed to replace them for a portable, airline checkable, low weight flash system and I ended up with some Yongnuo flashes. I didn't expect much from the Yongnuos but at around $50 each they ran circles around the $600 Sony fiasco flash. They fired every single time I clicked the shutter. The built-in optical slaves meant I never even had to pull the radio triggers out of the case. The cheap flashes never, ever shut down or flashed me the thermometer of death. 

When I looked at them this morning, lying next to the outrageous Sony flash, my little brain made a direct comparison and then I recalled all the ways in which the Sony flash disappointed me. Don't make the same mistake I did. 

If you must buy a flash for your A7, A7r or A7s and you think you want this HVL-60 model be sure to go to a bricks and mortar store, put the flash on YOUR camera and bang away for a while. Make sure you can live with the exposures and make sure you can push the button as many times as you'll need to push the shutter button in a real life job. Be aware that you could buy 12 Yongnuo 560 type 2's for about the same outlay of precious cash. Even with a 50% failure rate you'll still be light years ahead. Or at least six flashes ahead. 

Oh, and I just checked one thing....every one of these Yongnuo flashes has a real, traditional PC socket tucked right under a little rubber flap on the side. They are (so far) a good cheap flash for manual only work. 

So, that's my GRRRRRRR! product review. If I had it all to do over again that flash would never come near my camera bag, or make a dent in my bank account.  Your mileage may vary but you are forewarned.

(no links to product on this one....).

A wild morning at the pool. Fun with crowds.

Warm Up Lanes at Masters Nationals. UT. 2008.

I was gone for most of last week and one of the things I missed most (besides Studio Dog) was getting in the pool and swimming like crazy every morning. Didn't have time to find a pool in Denver; heck I didn't have time during those math days to swim even if I had found a pool. So I was excited about getting back to the routine this morning. 

I got up early, drank a big glass of water, brushed my teeth and headed to the pool. I was ten minutes early but people were already pulling into the parking lot and rustling their swim bags out of their cars. 

I hopped in lane three and started swimming the warm-up 400 with Julia. In short order four other people hopped in and we swam in the standard, counterclockwise circle: up on the right, back on the right. When we finished the warm up I looked around the pool and was amazed to find six or seven people in every lane. Now this is not a 50 meter pool, this is a 25 year pool so circle swimming works best if everyone in each lane is about as fast as everyone else in their lane. We had good lane synergy today. 

Coach Chris (he's the one who does the really hard, early workouts on Tues.) immediately recognized the heavily populated dynamic and wrote a bunch of sprint sets. That worked well since there's a chance to regroup often. While we didn't get as much yardage in we did swim at a faster clip and it was good to see that fiercely independent adults could efficiently share lanes and make adjustments without metaphorically stepping on each other's toes (there were literal but unintentional episodes of stepping on each other's toes....). 

An early morning swim makes every day seem more efficient. When I got back to the studio I was ready to tackle today's work load. Just helps to get warmed up and focused. 

Photographic note: Have I mentioned that I'm enjoying shooting with the GH4?