Tomorrow is Eeyore's Birthday Party in Austin, Texas. Will you be there in costume, cameras blazing? Pease Park. All day long.

Help keep Austin weird.

We are currently supporting a play about LBJ called, "All The Way." How are we helping? With marketing photographs, research video interviews and more.

Show logo.

I've been producing photographs for marketing and advertising at Zach Theatre for 24 years now and I love it. Everyone on the casts and crews is so focused on doing the best possible production they can, show after show. For the current show the marketing and public relations people have taken their efforts to a higher level. We've done five different assignments to create photos and video as well as making research interviews with which to inform the cast and give them insight into a personal side of the former president.

Our first shoot was at the LBJ library where I documented Steve Vinovich interviewing the head curator, soaking up the displays and collections and actually giving me an interview at the museum's replica of the Oval Office. I switched back and forth between one Nikon camera on a tripod (for video) and one Nikon handheld for photographs. 

Our next shoot took place in Johnson City, Texas. Steve V. and the artistic director from the theatre toured the boyhood home of LBJ, had a wonderful lunch at the 290 Diner with the head park ranger and got a tour, in a convertible Lincoln Continental complete with "suicide doors", of the LBJ Ranch and even got a private look at the inside of the main house. Again, with two Nikon cameras I was able to record the interviews and the tours on video while also stepping over to the photography side to make interesting images.

Next up was a long interview with several of LBJ's contemporaries, two men who worked with him in the White House during his presidency. Again, once I got the camera rolling for the video recording of a nearly two hour interview I was able to move around the large room and grab additional photographs.

As we got closer to the show we scheduled a "studio" shoot with Steve Vinovich on one of the three stages at Zach Theatre. We shot various images with Steve in character, all against a white background. Once they had selected a good frame the art director at the theater dropped in the background that you see in the image below. In about 15 minutes we had twenty different poses to use. 

Steve Vinovich in his role as LBJ.

The final assignment was to do our regular dress rehearsal shoot. It's a long play and there's a lot to cover so I ended up shooting about 1300 photographs divided between two Nikon cameras.

While it may seem like a lot of coverage we collectively wanted to do whatever we could to fill the 300+ seats in the theater every night and to tell a compelling story about LBJ to the community that grew up in his own backyard. The show runs through the 10th of May and you can get more details about Zach Theatre's production of "All the Way" here: http://www.zachtheatre.org/show/all-the-way

Twenty four continuous years is a long time to serve a client but I really love the relationship. I can truly say that after hundreds and hundreds of productions I completely understand their mission, their vision and the best ways that I can help them succeed. I feel like it's an honor to be their photographer.  

No sexy photographic tools here. Just the nuts and bolt we use to get jobs done.

I was struck, as I was filtering through six years of blog posts, by just how many cameras and lenses I had written about. Some breathlessly as though the cameras were destined to change the very fabric of our industry. Every step forward by the camera makers was analyzed and pored over as though the addition of 4 or 5 million pixels would change lives. One stop less noise would cure malaria in our lifetimes. I know why I wrote those reviews and why you read them, it was because the new products represented a form of movement and being a predator species we are drawn to movement. In millennia past the recognition of movement was how we hunted down prey.

Unintentionally we've sent the message out to new photographers that the road to mastering the making of images rests with magic cameras and lenses.  But every day I find, in video and in still photography, that the camera is just one part of the puzzle and it's a part that's interchangeable, for the most part, between brands and specifications.

When I look across the studio this little corner is one of the vignettes my eyes land on and it's probably the most cost effective and hardest working gear in my studio. Without the stuff here I would have trouble getting to the spot in which I need to be with my cameras, I might not be able to see through the finders of my cameras and I certainly couldn't make the lighting work. The fun/interesting/sensible thing about this collection of things is that they have remarkable longevity.

To the left, by the door, is a hard sided, Tenba light stand transporter. It's hexagonal and holds even my tallest light stands and tripods. The hard, internal panels are covered with ballistic nylon. I bought this bag/case to transport light stands, tripods, umbrellas, soft boxes and electrical cords in around 1991 from a camera store that has long since closed. The bag/case has been on dozens and dozens of airplanes, even making a round trip to St. Petersburg, Russia. It has travelled on hundreds of trips in half a dozen cars.  In 24 years of service I've never had a broken piece of gear emerge from it. I've long since forgotten what I paid for the bag/case but it didn't seem like much. That's a good investment in gear.

Just to the right of the Tenba stand bag/case is a wire container filled with light stands and arms for C-stands. I have always liked to be able to look across the studio and see what stands I have readily available as I pack or when I am shooting in the office. Bags like the Tenba are good for travel but they cloak the inventory and make it less immediately accessible. One day in 1988 I was shopping around in a Container Store and found this little container. It was designed to hold rolled up blueprints or CAD drawings. The top has a wire grid which separates the blueprints from each other, it also works well at keeping light stands separated. The container has wheels on the bottom so I can roll it around the studio. I paid $14 for it and it has survived rough light stand insertions and random studio accidents better than I would have ever imagined.

To the right of the wire frame stand container is a small, two step ladder. It's made of lightweight aluminum and it allows me to shoot at eye level with people much taller than me. It's also helpful when you need just a little bit of "looking down" point of view. Being five feet, eight inches tall in a world of giants, the ladder gets a lot of use. It's also nice when I need to get seldom used gear off high shelves... That particular ladder arrived in 1995 to replace a wooden version that didn't survive a really rough project. One more thing! The new ladder also doubles as an extra sitting stool when all the chairs are taken and people keep pouring through the door.

I am constantly amazed when I meet photographers and videographers who do not have the pleasure of owning a stout and compact-able cart with which to move the mountains of gear that are sometimes required on location assignments.  I bought one of these carts many, many years ago and after much abuse we were finally able to kill it by moving a thousand pound, fully configured server rack across one building at Dell Computer. As we reached our intended location the front wheels hit a bump and the entire front of the cart collapsed under the weight of modern computing.

Mea Culpa! I read the instructions, the weight limit was a stated 500 pounds. But I did mention that the stalwart cart did not give up the ghost until after it delivered the goods to our shooting location. I went out the same day (sometime in 1993) and bought another one. At the time it cost about $125 but I feel, some 22 years later, that I am getting my money's worth from it. A decade or two more and I should have it fully amortized. I cannot imagine going on a shoot with eight or ten light stands, a stout tripod, a case of camera gear, two cases of lights and all the accessories and attachments and not having a rigid cart for transporting it all from car to client and back.

Finally there is the green PVC pipe. It's a more recent addition, purchased from a photographer exiting the business in 2009. It's filled with frames for diffusion clothes, nets, black flags and other light modifiers. A good pro can use just about any light source to deliver enough photons but the real secret of good lighting is in shaping it, diffusing it, sculpting it and keeping it from going where you don't need it and don't want it.

Those are the things that I see in that particular corner of my studio/office and they remind me that cameras and lights come and go like leaves turning or budding in the seasons but the power tools of the craft, the support stuff, is all there for the long haul.

Funny to me to look at the various stands in the stand holder. The oldest one is nearly as old as my business and the younger ones are at least five years old. There are two more nests of them around the office space. Some are small Manfrotto stands that fold up short and were bought to hold speed lights. Three are C-Stands bought to hold anything you need held, and the rest of come in like stray cats looking for regular food and shelter. Who would have thought I'd have such loyalty to my light stands? But, in truth, they've never let me down.

There are some things that are unchanging in our businesses.

Starting over again. We're archiving the past and starting fresh. VSL re-imagined: Post #1.

2300 blog posts is a lot of words.  And a lot of images. The original content on the Visual Science Lab covered the years between 2009 and yesterday. We discussed a lot about cameras and lights, tripods and books, workshops and industry trends. But that's all in the past. If you read them I'm happy, if you didn't it doesn't really matter because reading them now would be nothing more than looking back at the wake of a boat to see where it has been instead of looking forward to where each of us is going. By eliminating the previous posts I can start fresh. No baggage. And believe me, the stewardship of all those posts was starting to drag me down...

What is happening right now? Today? In the next five minutes? With life? With our art? That's what we'll talk about as we move forward.

The Visual Science Lab has always been about the art and business of visual work. From now until some time in the future we'll continue discussing cameras, video, writing, books, coffee and swimming. If you want to come along for the ride you are welcome.

"Please pay your income taxes!" My government says to me. And then they ask me to give them other valuable stuff as well. Would I work for free for the U.S. Government? Not any more than I already do....Thanks.

I am a generally patriotic U.S. citizen. I pay my taxes without cheating. I keep my lawn clean of refuse and I pay what I think are enormous property, sales and income taxes every year. And I rarely ever complain about it. In fact, this will be the first time I've complained about my money and the government on the blog.

But this is what happened this morning:

I opened my e-mail program and found an e-mail from an employee of the Voice of America Online. It's part of an agency that's sponsored and funded by the U.S. government to disseminate good propaganda about our country in the hopes that people overseas will believe it,  won't really hate us, and won't try to kill us. The VOA gets about $200,000,000 per year to "spread the good word."

The e-mail referenced some images I had made of a mall in Austin being renovated for re-use by a local college. You know, transformation story. Good stuff. The images I did of the project ended up on Atlantic Monthly's online site. The VOA saw them and thought they would like to use them to reach some of their 40,000,000 yearly unique, page viewers. But here's the problem....they wanted to use them without paying for them. Not a red cent. No trade of value anywhere on the board

.....except they did toss me one little bone.... in accordance with copyright law they would go ahead and give me a credit line. If I gave them the use of my valuable content free of charge.

I counter-offered and suggested a very reasonable $250 but the woman I was negotiating with told me very clearly that editorial clients NEVER pay for content and that everyone else is VERY happy to have this valuable credit line.

Of course I find it exhausting and counterproductive to work for free, especially for a government that I already financially support (no tax refund checks here...) so I asked the woman a few questions.

1. Are you a volunteer for VOA or do you get paid for your work?

2. Do you receive benefits and retirement credits at your job or must you provide those from your own pocket?

3. Aren't you ashamed to be asking a struggling, middle class artist, who's trying to put his kid though college, to provide you with valuable creative content for free? If you are not you should be!

I may be missing a good bet here. I'm certain there is a prince in Nigeria who frequents VOA Online just searching for a nice photographer to split his fortune with..... Yeah. He'll see my credit line. For sure.

My short, sassy review of the Samsung NX-1. A hybrid that's good in both camps: photographs and video.

Disclaimer: In the past Samsung's P.R. agency has sent me cameras to shoot with. If I agreed to participate in their program, Imageloggers, and post weekly images on their social media site I could keep the cameras and lenses they sent along. I did so in 2013 and for part of 2014. While some of the cameras were wacky (two different white cameras with heavy "selfie" credentials) and some were half-baked (like the Galaxy NX---Android OS camera) there were two that stood out as competent shooting cameras. One was the NX 300 and the other was the NX 30. Both of these cameras could and did generate really nice files.

Last Fall I kept hearing about an amazing new Samsung camera coming down the pike. I waited and waited but it never seemed to come. I wasn't disposed to continue on with Samsung's program or to make any sort of wholesale switch to using their cameras instead of the Olympus and Nikon cameras I preferred (compared to the Samsung cameras available at the time) and so I stepped away from the program and gave away most of the cameras I'd been sent. Then Samsung launched the NX1 camera and, on paper, it looked fabulous. The two lenses that Samsung paired with the camera also looked pretty sweet. One was the 16-50mm f2.0-2.8 which had been out on the market for a while and the other was the brand new 50-150mm f2.8. If I had no other equipment investments these two lenses might be enough to entice me into the system....

When I looked at the initial specs for the camera I'll admit I had a few feelings of regret for exiting their Imagelogger program before I could actually get my hands on the camera we'd all been waiting for. It seemed to be everything I wanted and had talked about over the years. It has a big, bright, detailed EVF. The resolution is class leading for APS-C cameras. It features in-camera 4K video and it shoots fast. What's not to like?

The way I saw it this camera might be the camera of choice for one part of the market; it would be great for people who weren't invested in an interchangeable lens system yet, who also wanted their camera to be a true chameleon. A state-of-the-art still camera and a production ready video camera. But in the end the camera will probably appeal most to people who are looking for a less noisy but similarly priced competitor in the 4K video market, when compared to the Panasonic GH-4.

Having exited their program (amicably) I left a message for the folks at the P.R. firm and requested an evaluation copy be sent along. I wasn't seeing a lot of reviews and I thought I'd run the camera through its paces and see what we'd come up with. It took a long time to get a review copy. A really long time. By the time it showed up my enthusiasm had cooled a bit and large swaths of the market were already moving on to the next big thing. It's a fickle gear market, that's for sure... but I am happy I had the chance to put the camera through its paces.

I'm not going to detail the specs and stuff because you can find that at DPReview and if you have any interest in this camera I'm sure you've already read their review. I'm just going to quickly cover how I feel about the camera.

Here's the good: If this camera had come out a few years ago Samsung would have trouble ever keeping it in stock. Right now it matches most of the best points of the mature APS-C products on the market, like the Nikon D7200 and the Canon 7D2 with little concessions on each side. The image quality of the 4K video files can be quite good. As a video camera it would considered an insane bargain but for one short term glitch (which I'll cover below). The files from the NX1 are very detailed and rezzy but the trade off is a bit of dynamic range. The frame rate is terrific but the focusing acquisition in low light levels leaves a bit to be desired (by comparison). The camera handles well and feels comfortable and the battery life is good.  The image quality is very good and while the color palette is different from the Canon and Nikon cameras I doubt that any of them is a reference standard for true color. I actually appreciate having some choices in color response.

The bottom line is that if you are in the market for an APS-C format camera that's a great all around photographic performer and you like using the raw format for shooting stills, and you go with the two, fast, f2.8 zooms you'll most likely be just as happy with this camera as you would be with the competitors from Canon and Nikon. If you are keenly interested in video you'll be even happier. The 4K video is really very good and relatively noise free up to 1600 ISO. It's a fair and even alternative for many uses that currently fall to the GH4 from Panasonic.

But here's the bad: My first observation, and it's one area in which I strongly disagree with the reviewers at DPReview.com is about the EVF. While I love the idea of EVFs and I enjoy working with good examples the NX-1 I've been loaned isn't seamless. It jutters and jitters a bit, visibly, when I pan it. And I'm not panning like a  centrifuge, just a nice, easy pan.  I thought I might be having a too critical moment so I grabbed the EM5.2 out of the bag and did the same pan with the same equivalent focal length and confirmed that the EVF on the Olympus is  smoother and less plagued by refresh lag than the NX-1 when panned in the same fashion.  The EVF on the NX1 is also darker by default but can be adjusted. When I mentioned this to the folks at Samsung they were concerned since they hadn't had the same complaints from any other reviewer. I'm presuming that the camera I had in my hands has an earlier version of the firmware and that this has been remedied. But the careful buyer might still check.

Samsung seems to be following a good trend in that the firmware fixes are coming fast and furious for this new camera. It's always nice to see new features added and performance improved on a camera you already own!

To put it into perspective the EVF, as it is now, is fine for most of what I would use the camera for. That's video. No one does fast pans in video. More like slooooow pans. In all other regards the EVF image is quite good. I just have to be honest and say "ouch. let's not too pan fast.

(edit: After some feedback from Samsung I re-tested the EVF. As shutter speeds go higher the effect subsides and lag becomes almost invisible. The critical juncture seemed to be at 1/125th of a second. To put it all into context most fast panning will be done trying to capture sports and that will be done at shutter speeds of 1/500th and higher where this camera performs as well as any EVF camera on the market. At very low shutter speeds I stand by my original assessment. ) 

On video: Samsung is like that guy who comes to the party and gets just about everything right but ends up accidentally sticking his hand in the punch bowl and then wiping his hand off on the white tablecloth. The guy who gets the up to the podium, delivers a great and riveting speech and then knocks over the microphone and trips over the cord. For some reason they've always made decisions that end up compromising the products that should have done well. To my mind having an optional EVF would have made the NX300 a wonderful and very cult-y camera. With  the stinky baby diaper hold rear screen only it becomes just another good performing snapshot camera. The Galaxy NX was also an interesting product and might have succeeded if not for the 28 second start up time and the ever intrusive nature of the Android OS. It was a camera for God's sake, not a downmarket laptop... But the screen on the back with a hood to block sun would have been a videographer's dream if that camera had done video like the NX1 does....

And it looks like they've done it again. They created a camera that's competitive with the big guys in the market for almost all kinds of still imaging. They came out with two really great lenses to hang on the front of it. The brought out a sensor that has the resolution, dynamic range and the high ISO performance people want. It even has 4K video that can be saved in camera. On memory cards.  If we stop there we'd all love the camera. Really good 4K video and great still image quality? We can overlook a little bit of low light focus anxiety.  After all, the Nikon D600 and D610 were no great shakes when the light got low. We might  be able to overlook the EVF's problems (in my sole experience) with fast pans.

But Samsung didn't stop there. They just couldn't help themselves. They seemingly just had to stick that crazy hand in the punch bowl. They decided that instead of suggesting that potential 4K users buy good, fast memory cards they chose to use a brand new video file standard called H.265. The advantage of this "codec" is that it creates really small, very compressed video files that fit onto SD memory cards. You could write lots and lots of minutes of good 4K video on smaller, slower and crappier cards. People could use cheaper, older SD cards --- and that would be good?

(Edit: One of my video buddies took me to task for being unfair to the NX-1 and Samsung's choice to use the new H.265 codec. He pointed out that the power users in video are now looking for cameras which can output a clean (no words on screen) and relatively uncompressed (much bigger) file over HDMI. That makes the in camera codec more or less meaningless to the group that will use this camera for many and more complex projects. He also pointed out that Samsung could have (and perhaps may in the future) used the new codec in a different ways, leaving the file size on card the same as the competition but doubling the quality of the footage. Apparently there are choices within the codec. Okay. So, with an "inexpensive" Atomos Digital recorder one could pull uncompressed video out of the camera that should be amazingly good. That's a plus, not a negative...)

But there's no free lunch. If you use a new compression scheme to write tiny files to the camera's card at some point the files have to be converted/expanded to something else in order to be edited in one of the two 800 pound gorilla editing programs, Adobe Premiere and Apple's Final Cut Pro X. Both of those programs run optimally with a codec called ProRes. It's almost an industry standard. But converting those H.265 files requires a few things that those programs don't provide. The first is a conversion or transcoding application. The second is a super fast, insanely powerful computer with which to crunch lots and lots of data during the conversions.

Remember those little foam dinosaurs that came in little capsules and the advertising copy that accompanied them which claimed that if you soaked them in water they would magically grow to 100X their size? Well the Samsung 4K, H.265 files do just that when you convert them into something you can edit with like ProRes. They seem to grow to about 10 times their original size.

All of a sudden you've got about three times more storage needs than if you'd have shot the same 4K files on a Panasonic GH4 camera with it's nice and easily editable 4K files. But the files don't just take up space--it takes lots of time to do the conversion. Running our liquid Nitrogen cooled Cray CS Cluster Super Computer with 80 processor nodes the conversion time was still daunting. (Sheer hyperbole! It's not really that bad...). To be fair once you convert H.264 files to ProRes they too vastly increase in size...

This critique is the hit a company takes when they decide to be the first adopter of new technology or new standards. I'm sure, in a year, lots of other makers will offer cameras with the choice of H.265 because the quality can be stunning or the space savings effective (but not both at the same time) and apps will be optimized for the workflow required. But right now it's an issue for anyone who has cobbled together a good workflow with existing video file types. And according to my very professional and hardworking video expert many clients are now asking for shooters to use cameras that output ProRes directly! But I think that's a bit crazy too.

Wrap up. The NX1 can be very good. Many who started with other brands will find the human/machine interface a little eccentric but we can chalk that up to familiarity versus change. I can tell you that I mastered the NX1 menus about ten times faster than the Sanskrit Encyclopedia that is the Olympus OMD menu system... There are some little operational glitches but most can be cleaned up with future firmware updates. If you are starting from scratch and have no preconceptions about how cameras should handle or how menus should work this is a good, feature rich camera to look at.

If you are really into video and lust after a cost effective 4K tool with a bigger sensor than the one in the well regarded GH4 this is also a good video camera for the money. The same operational issues plague it as plague Nikon and Canon and most other DSLRs that are pressed into service as video cameras; to wit, the menu driven control functions like microphone levels instead of external dials---so we can't be too critical. The NX1 trumps Nikon by having focus peaking in the system and trumps both Nikon and Canon by offering very pretty 4K files right out of the camera.

On the dreaded forae the most often dredged up stick against the NX1 is the lack of lenses available natively for the camera. I think that's a red herring for most people, including working professionals because most will be very well served by the two professional quality zooms for 90% of their work, and the holes in the system can be plugged by using third party lenses or lenses from other systems that are adapted with lens adapters. Again, a key advantage of most of the mirrorless systems.

If I could change one thing on the camera what would that be? I would ask the engineers at Samsung to offer a choice of both H.264 and H.265 codecs in video. That way people who need to move quickly could use the camera in their current workflows. This would let the user decide where to place the efficiency versus storage fulcrum. And seriously, UHS-3 cards are already dirt cheap.

The Bottom Line: Would I buy one?

Let me hedge a bit here. I might buy one. If I did it would be solely for the video capability of the camera. The features of the still side of the camera are ones that don't really interest me or which I have covered well enough by other systems. I don't care at all about NFC since I'll probably never buy coffee at Starbucks with my camera. I don't care about wi-fi as I'm probably not going to share unedited corporate video over the airwaves. I don't care much at all about fast frame rates or "the world's fastest autofocus." I'd buy one to get around the few caveats I have about the GH4. The Panasonic is a beautiful and useful camera but one that has a fairly high noise floor and which shows noise in shadows from ISO 400 onward. The NX-1 yields a less noisy file that still looks good, sharp and detailed. The camera offers most of the same video usability features as the GH4, including: headphone jack, external mic capability, focus peaking and various set up controls.

I figure that adding a body only and a Nikon lens adapter gets me into a 4K video camera with a lot of capabilities for a fairly low price along with the ability to use an endless supply of manual focus lenses with hard focus stops and physical aperture settings. The bigger sensor and the lower ISO noise can be real benefits and the camera is rugged and seems solid. You could produce good video with this set up. If you want to see a creative piece done with one go here: https://vimeo.com/121238971

With a few more firmware upgrades and a bit of time to let body only prices drop we might just have a killer video production tool on our hands for around $1300 bucks. A bit more than half the price of just the digital recorder you'll need to get actual 4K video out of a Sony A7s..... interesting value proposition, yes?

Oooh. Nikon's 50mm f1:1.2 lens on the front. Lots of big, soft directional lights, acres of detail. I'm guessing that's what Samsung had in mind from the beginning.  Hmmm.

Test the GH4 and the NX1 side by side and it really becomes more about preferences than superiority of one over the other. It's an interesting niche for both of these cameras because it's a clear indictment of Canon and Nikon's foot dragging where performance in video is concerned.

I've finished with my review and I've boxed up the camera to send it back. Just waiting for the Fedex.

The Visual Science Lab clocks in the 2,300th blog post since 2009. Have you read them all yet?

Every time we hit another century mark here I like to call it out to my readers. It always feels like an achievement. At least it's a lot of practice typing...

So I've just posted the 2,300th blog post earlier today and I'm amazed that I'm still enjoying the blogging, the writing and photography in general. Things are no more sure in our industry today than they were six years ago when we started. We rode the crest of the high wave of cameras sales back in 2008-2008 and we've been sliding down the backside of the wave ever since.

When I started writing I was toying with Olympus E series cameras and now I'm happily playing with the m4:3rd series. I'm on my second go around with Nikon's cameras. I've tried a lot of others in between.

I hope you've enjoyed what I've written and you'll support the site by commenting and checking in when you can and think it appropriate. If you need something from Amazon you can support the site by clicking through our links to buy your stuff. If you have something fun to say we'll probably post it.

My tolerance for snarky, anonymous commenters hasn't increased but I am having more fun just clicking, "Spam." when I come across mean copy-grunge. I figure the troll-y ones will give up sooner or later if their handiwork flies off into the void.

I'm not sure how much longer there will even be an audience for traditional camera based photography blogs but I'll keep writing until the daily page views dwindle down too far and then we'll pack it in and shut it down.

For now I'm happy with the frequency and the audience and I'm interested. I hope you are too.

Happy 2300.