Catering services at the VSL World HQ. Quick food snaps.

The current breakfast of choice for two of the three executive level staffers at the VSL HQ:

Joe's O's (Trader Joe's version of Cheerios) +organic blueberries+handfuls of 

walnuts+organic, whole milk.

Consumed with coffee and the NYT Online.

Yesterday's lunch at the executive dining room of the VSL.

Linguini + Pesto + cherry tomatoes.

We are constantly working on the catering services for our executive level staff.

Today the entire kitchen staff is on a team building retreat to learn 

new skills and new ways to grill our CEO's favorite foods. 

Since the dining facilities are closed senior members will go off site for lunch.

Do I hear the siren call of Maudie's Tex-Mex Plate?

I think I do. 

Photographs via the Olympus EM-5.2 ( a very discreet "table" camera) and

the Panasonic 42.5mm lens. 

Dine well.

Seemed like a good morning for some color from the historic Clarksville Neighborhood.

Stock Photography = Lost Imagination.

The use of boring, generic stock photography by allegedly "creative" advertising people is nothing more than looking in someone else's rear view mirror and grabbing stuff they've used, chewed up and then spit out. It's creative cowardice. It's creative compromise. It's "B" team creativity. It's sure not that world class performance you were promising clients when you signed them on...

When we need a cool picture of corn soup drizzled with olive oil my clients don't rush to the web and spend hours looking for something that's "good enough" for a client to grudgingly approve. We turn on the creative juices together and shoot the damn thing EXACTLY the way our clients envision the subject. That way they never, ever have to worry about their biggest competitors using exactly the same image in THEIR advertising or editorial content. Plus the client gets the thrill, privilege and honor of actually being part of an ongoing creative process instead of doing the ad agency equivalent of selling used Kleenex at a discount.....

Just something to think about next time your account executive demands that everything come from royalty free stock. The cure? Say "no." Tell em you signed up to BE creative, not to be an intern/researcher/kiss ass. If they argue the point then gather up your stuff and head for the door. You need a better place to work.

Trucks Shot.

©2015 Kirk Tuck.

Do you want to see a completed Annual Report project that we finished up in May? It's public now so I can show it.

Here are the front and back covers; the cover image wraps around:

If you click on the link below you'll go to the client's website to a page that shares a PDF of their A.R.

http://www.pec.coop/docs/default-source/annual-reports/pec-s-2014-annual-report.pdf?sfvrsn=11

I'm very happy with the design and the way everything turned out. The company is headquartered in Johnson City, Texas.

Let me know what you think...

A shot from antiquity. A disquieting feeling that your best days as a photographer were your last days as an amateur....

How simple were the tools? A Yashica Mat 124G. A small flash in an umbrella. A piece of string to measure the flash to subject distance. Pretested. Panatomic X film. ASA 32.

Kirk Tuck's Very Colorful, One Day Review of the Panasonic 42.5mm f1.7 Lens For Micro Four Thirds.

Painting team at the Graffiti Wall. Austin, Texas.

This will be a short and sweet review of the Panasonic 42.5mm f1.7 Lumix lens. Why? Because it's all good and no bad. I've owned the Olympus 45mm f1.8 lens twice. Each time I was enthralled with it at the outset and then gradually used it less and less. The barrel was too small to hang fingers on when shooting and when you really, really pushed the image size you could see that it was a little less than perfect wide open. I didn't really care because with the tiniest bit of post processing you could snap up the whole image pretty well and there were other lenses in the kit. If I wanted something right in that ballpark (especially since getting the EM-5.2...) I generally grabbed for the solid, little 40mm f1.4 Pen FT manual focus lens and used the focus peaking or I attached the 60mm Sigma lens and stepped back a bit. For whatever reason I used the Olympus lens less than any other M4:3 lens in the drawer except for the 17mm f1.8. But that wider one is an awkward focal length for me...

But like a guy who isn't really delighted with his girlfriend I kept my eyes open for a suitable (better) replacement. At one point a friend let me shoot with his Panasonic 42.5mm f1.2 Leica Supreme Platinum Deluxe Lens and it really caught my attention in two ways. First, the image in the finder was perfect and second, the price was insanely stratospheric for a user with multiple systems. Somewhere in the file cabinet just past the temporal lobe of my brain my subconscious filed the message: Panasonic Lens ---- Good. Revisit.

I had a bit of time on my hands one day so I played with the Panasonic Leice Supreme Platinum Deluxe lens's little brother; the lens under test, and came away thinking I liked the look, the feel, the finder image and (just in case I buy another Panasonic camera body) the in lens image stabilization. The lens had me at "finder image."

The Panasonic 42.5/1.7 is svelte and well constructed. It comes with a good lens hood. In the box. Included in the price. The lens focuses quickly and very accurately on the EM5.2 body. I like everything about it. I would talk about the color rendering and the sharpness, etc.; I might even prattle on about the micro-contrast or the mini-contrast or the third order harmonics of the system but I thought it would be more in keeping with a photographic tradition to just shoot with the damn thing and show you some photographs. Let you make up your own mind about what you might be seeing.

I bought my copy at Precision Camera. Same price as the one listed at Amazon and B&H.

Here are some images I took at the wall. Almost everything is shot at f4. It works well at all the other apertures too. ..

Yay! Action Figure poses.

This is Nikki. She sells spray paint, Red Bull and other necessities at the Graffiti Wall. 

Woman on Rock. Discovering America.

The climb to the top is steep and treacherous. Except for those with m4:3 cameras...

America's favorite post climb pass time. (love the rhyme).

Multi-planar sharpness test. 

The Panasonic lens handles the selfie subject matter with ease. 

Is it possible that the girl with the selfie stick is contemplating using said stick to prod her 

companion over the steep edge? Sinister selfie stick behavior afoot. And the perpetrator could simultaneously document her own crime....

The painter's emergency step ladder. Details below.

It's been a wet Spring in Austin. You can see the results in the foliage...