Packing up to shoot the dress rehearsal of "All the Way." The play about LBJ's time as President. What to pack?

Tonight is the big night for me on this show. It's when I pack up the cameras, figure out the best seat in the house and spend a couple of hours trying to get the absolute best images I can wrangle of a big, wonderful, complex show. A lot has changed since I first stated shooting marketing images at the dress rehearsals for Zach Theatre nearly 24 years ago. Back then I shot everything in black and white because that's what the daily and the alternate newspapers were willing to run. In those days I shot every show with a couple of Leica M series cameras. One with a 90mm f2.0 Summicron lens and the other with a 35mm f2.0 Summicron lens. I kept a 21mm f3.4 in the bag --- just in case we really needed a wide shot of the stage. 

While there were faster films around at the time my favorite was always Kodak's Tri-X. I shot it as if it was ISO 800 and pushed the development in D-76, diluted one to one. After the show I would head straight over to the darkroom to process the eight to ten rolls of film I'd shot, keeping track of two or three development tanks at a time. Once the film was through the wash I'd dip it into a Photoflo solution to prevent water spots, hang the film up with clothespins and then head home and get some sleep.

The next morning I'd go back into the darkroom and, if we had time, I'd make contact sheets to share with the young, new marketing director. Sometimes we would be on a tight deadline and he and I would have discussed the shots we thought might work best the night before and he'd leave the edit up to me. Either way we'd figure out five or six different "hero" shots and I'd make five eight by ten inch, black and white shots of each on RC paper (resin coated, it processed and dried quicker). 

As soon as the prints dried I would rush them over to the theater so they could distribute them to the various media outlets. Then I'd wait to see if the papers would give me a photo credit. Yes for most of the little one. No for the bigger ones....

But today is now. And I'm packing up to go and shoot a dress rehearsal that starts in a couple of hours. Here's what I'm packing and it seems like nothing to me. A Nikon D810 which will be paired with the Nikon 80-200 f2.8 and a Nikon D610 which will be matched up with a 24-85mm f3.5 to 4.5 G zoom. I've also packed the old 105mm f2.5 (just in case) and the 50mm G f1.8 (again, just in case). Each camera has a 64 Gb card in it and I've got extra batteries in the front pocket of my battered and tattered Domke "little bigger bag." I'm carrying along a small Benro monopod with a small bracket on the top in case I want to stabilize my unstabilized long zoom. Can't use flash so I'm not packing it and don't really want to mix formats. Full circle. All the way back to two shooting cameras and two shooting lenses. I think I can handle that.

These are shots of Martin Burke (superb and justifiably famous Austin actor) horsing around on a theater chair. They were originally shot as a fund raiser for the new (now three year old) Topfer Theatre on the Zach campus. I love working with Martin. Off camera he is quiet and thoughtful while on camera he's a maniac. Just one of the hundreds of great artists I've met through Zach Theatre. 

 If you are in Austin for the month of April you might want to saddle up and get to the theater to see "All the Way." It's going to be amazing. But you know you'll see images from the performance sometime tomorrow. We'll have them up in the afternoon.

Now that I'm packed for the evening I'm making two final changes to a video project that morphing into a three week long assignment. I think I've learned and used every control in Final Cut ProX.

Wrapping up means I now get to bill. One of my favorite parts of every job.

Hope you are having a swell week!

Sorry, no ads today. 

Homemade soft lights for almost every purpose.

If you are tired of spending money on photo gear but you need a good light consider what we did for a project. We bought four fluorescent "under the counter" lights at Home Depot, taped them all together and bungee-corded them to a light stand. Spent $24 bucks + sales tax. Worked perfectly for the project we had in mind. There's more than one way to skin a Scheimpflug Principle....

The dour assistant is extra.....

It's a great way to practice your custom white balancing skills.

OT: I'm curious to hear what all you smart VSL readers think about the Apple Watch. Will it offer something to photographers?

Image done for Austin Lyric Opera. No real connection to our Apple Watch question. 

But would note that the model is wearing a watch, being lit with tungsten light and photographed with a Nikon 105mm f2 DC lens on a Kodak DCS 760C.

I am interested in what the upcoming Apple Watch will eventually offer to photographers and videographers. Since the watch will be linked to the iPhone will it be possible to do some of the stuff we normally do directly with our phones on the watch? 

For instance, if I am running the Olympus Share camera app on the phone could I see the menu on the watch? If I can see the menu on the watch and control the camera from the watch could I trigger the camera's shutter with a deft touch of the watch face? Could I arrange it so the live view is shared on the watch screen? Can I also watch my heart rate increase if I accidentally drop an expensive lens onto the concrete?

I know that my son's demographic currently has little to no interest in wearing watches and I am genuinely curious (as long time Apple stockholder) to see whether Apple's marketing clout will change that. But I am also interested in what you think about this. 

The watch isn't cheap. The least expensive one is reported to cost about $350. Is this something you will buy? Is it something you would use?

I remember when the iPad was announced. It was soundly ridiculed by everyone on the planet and spoofed on the TV show, Saturday Night Live. By October of 2014 Apple had sold 225,000,000 of the units at an average price of over $600. ( or, $135 billion U.S. dollars of product in four years).

Will the watch enjoy similar popularity or will the need for it to be tied to second product, the phone, limit it's success. Which then introduces another question: if the Watch does become popular enough will Apple also release on that works with Android phones. Will we one day be able to buy an Apple watch to use with a Samsung phone?

What am I waiting for in an Apple Watch? The same thing I've been thinking of since I jotted down a note in 1982. That would be to have an incident light meter in my wrist watch; no matter what company it came from. But, of course, if it all comes to pass I'll need a stronger pair of reading glasses to use it to it's fullest extent... Naw, that's too much.

I'm interested to read your opinions. Hit the comments. 

Thinking about lighting today. Something about sunny days in Spring.

I have one simple lighting design that I use a lot on sunny days. Today is our first sunny day in a while so I thought I'd share an image I did of Emily a while back. We wanted to shoot an image of her toting her bike, along with some other triathlete imagery so we went to the lake and found some nice foliage in the background.

It was full sun and in most cases like this the full sun combined with electronic flash always seems to give me too much fill. I generally put up a 6x6 foot diffusion scrim like the one you see above. It's anchored to two light stands and the connections that hold the scrim to the stand are also wrapped with gaffer's tape to keep them from coming apart in the breeze. 

The scrim is in a position to block almost all of the sunlight striking Emily. We've positioned it to provide a small amount of backlit on Emily's head. Probably just a bit too much....  But we were having too much fun and no one wanted to walk back a mile or so to the car and get a second, smaller, weaker diffusion scrim to finesse the highlight. 

I like to light this way because I can use a big, soft umbrella modifier for the main light and get the highlights to roll off into the shadow areas exactly how I want them to. The main light was a single Profoto Acute B head running off a battery powered Acute 600B generator. The extra power of the Profoto rig allowed me to place the main light exactly where I wanted it (not too close and not too far away) and get exactly the effect I wanted. 

It's just a fun photo and not a big deal but I thought it would be fun to show an actual set up for a change....

A very useful accessory for people using DSLRs and Mirror-Free cameras to produce video. This is a low cost favorite.

BeachTek DXA-2T. A tough little box.

The three different cameras types I have all allow for shooting decent video. The D810 has the best look to the images while the OMD EM5.2 is a great handheld, ENG camera. The image stabilization is nothing short of amazing. In an ambiguous third place is my inexpensive, Nikon D610 which has decent looking video (not as nice as the D810) but no real image stabilization. The one thing all three of these camera have is the ability to manually adjust sound levels. All three also have microphone inputs on the camera as well as headphone jacks for monitoring audio. 

The other thing all three camera types have is not so good. All of them use menu driven (not physical knob controlled) audio level controls. This makes adjusting sound levels during recording a more complicated undertaking. For the lazy filmmaker it may be just the thing to push us into using auto level controls instead of working a little harder to get the audio just right. 

I cheat. I use the little box you see under the camera (above) to do three different things for me when I make video that has to have good sound.

1. I run any external microphones through this box because it has a hard knob (with detents) for each channel (left and right) so this allows me to set a middle level on the camera, say minus 12 dB, and then have the ability to adjust the levels downward via the knobs on the box. The DXA-2T is passive and won't amplify signals but it's a clean way to manually prevent overload into the camera's audio circuits without resorting to ALC and heavy handed limiters. And it beats trying to open up menus on the screen while shooting... 

2. I can run unbalanced stereo mics in through a 3.5mm plug or I can plug in real, balanced mics to the XLR plugs on the box. The advantage here is that the box has internal transformers that match the input characteristics (resistance, etc.) of professional microphones to what the camera's little, pixie pre-amp circuits are expecting. The best match is to microphones like the Rode NTG-2 which has the option of running its own internal pre-amp via a double A battery instead of requiring phantom power (which this box does NOT provide).  The transformers seems to have the effect of reducing noise and matching output and input more efficiently which translates into a stronger, richer signal delivered to the camera.  Being able to adjust the knobs on the box during recording in order to reduce overall volume is a big plus. The only time you'll need to go into the menus are when you need to boost the signal.

3. Sometimes I want to use a Zoom H4n digital audio recorder to record the audio but I also want to run that audio into the camera at the same time. The only way to do that on an H4n is via the "line out" port into the camera's microphone input. But the line out is about 35 dB stronger than what the camera expects (or is designed for) from a microphone and the sound in camera is quickly and sometimes massively overloaded. Unlike the newer digital audio recorders there's no switch on the H4n to drop the signal to match the camera's inputs. But there is such a switch for each channel on the DXA-2T. That means I have the option to run back-up sound right into the camera where I can also monitor it with headphones. 

I could also use the "line in" setting on the box to accept balanced inputs from a mixer like the big one they use at Zach Theatre. Then I can pull clean sound into the camera sound track if I am recording a musical performance without worrying about overloaded signal circuits.

The DXA-2T is a totally passive device which means no batteries and less chance of device generated noise. It's a sturdy little beast and it fits just about anywhere. I carry it in my microphone case along with duplicate cables for everything. It's wonderful not to have to go menu diving to make quick, small adjustments.  I've forgotten what I paid for it which basically means that it's so practical and useful that it's paid for itself many times over. The only issues I have with this box are the times when I forget to pack it and end up leaving it at the studio. 

I am sure you already know this if you shoot Olympus but----Olympus Share is a good remote controller for the new EM-5.2 in "Hi-Res" mode.

Taken in 2012 with a Sony A77 camera.  On Sixth Street in Austin, Texas.

Not an example of Olympus's High Res Mode.

I think I mentioned using the Hi Res mode in the new Olympus EM-5.2 last Thursday during a commercial shoot in central Texas. The client and I were setting up small still life set composed of small industrial parts and then photographing them. I decided to try out the High Res (40 megapixel JPG) mode that is part of the new camera excitement. 

For those of you who've ignored the feature in this new camera it's an ingenuous variation on Hasselblad's method of mechanically moving the imaging sensor and resampling X number of times during a long exposure or a series of exposures. The Olympus method uses 8 separate scans which are then blended together. Because Olympus scans in half pixel segments it gets around the color artifacts of the Bayer pattern on the sensor and should deliver color that's more pure and also devoid of interference artifacts such as moire. The scans or exposures take place over time, require at least a full second and are ruined by any camera or subject movement. But if you get everything right you can get files that are at parity (or at least that's the internet's opinion) with files from a Nikon D810. 

Of course, much will depend on the quality of the lenses on the front of the camera and even more, your technique. Which I found out. To my temporary frustration. 

We were on the second floor of an older commercial building with the tripod set firmly on the linoleum covered floor, the substructure of which was probably 2x6 inch or 2x8 inch joists set on wide centers. As people walked across the floor of the room in which we were photographing the floor would flex just a bit. Enough to ruin a shot. 

We waited for everyone to settle down and then attempted our high res hijinks again but this time sharpness and file integrity were compromised by the initial movement caused by my finger on the shutter, starting the process. I couldn't figure out how to set a delay for the start of the high res process and I was about to give up when I remembered some VSL readers writing to tell me that one could use the Olympus Share software to remotely control the camera. 

I downloaded the free app from the Apple App Store and in a few minutes I was ready to initialize the wi-fi connections between my iPhone 4S (ancient tech) and the camera. The system does this by having the camera display a QR code which is read by the phone's camera. Once up and running I selected remote control from the menu on the phone app and then triggered the camera. I worked. It worked just the way everyone said it would. Okay. I'm coming around. I guess it's okay to put wi-fi on a camera just so long as you are only using it to trigger a high resolution mode on location. :-)

We tried a few more shots with high res and then moved on to making images with people in them. The phone went back into my pocket and the camera went back into human touch controlled camera mode and we got on with the shoot. 

When I got back to the studio I reviewed the shots and found them to be as described by the Olympus web hive. Very detailed and very big. This is a useful feature for people like me who mostly shoot the human/machine interface but are sometimes called upon to make big interior shots, exterior building shots and highly detailed images of still life images. 

Next on my list of things to try is the camera's automatic keystone correction tool but that will have to wait for a clear, bright, saturated day in order to get me excited about the tests. 

Yes. The High Res mode works well. It demands good technique and a stable platform. Stuff commercial shooters preach about all the time. It makes the camera a more universal and flexible tool. Not bad on an $1100 body. 

A photo for the arrival of Spring.

Shot in Fredericksburg, Texas in 1992.

Leica R series camera with 135mm f2.8 Leica lens. Fujichrome 100 transparency film. Daylight.