Flare? We don't care about flare. In fact, I'm starting to search for it wherever I can find it.

I was kinda sad I couldn't make this sunspot reflection flare more yesterday. I was doing everything "wrong" so I presumed that all the unnecessary perfection of the system would break. I had on an ancient, wide angle lens. I had a cheap polarizer on top of that and I put the direct reflection of the sun up on the top 1/3 of the frame. Still no drama.

My goals for the month? More flare. More stuff that's crazy backlit. And tons more black and white.

I'm so over technically perfect images...

Settling into a groove with the Nikon D750 camera and some of the older lenses.

I fall in the love with the idea of a new camera pretty quickly but I warm up to them slowly, once the blush of initial excitement wears off. I see it, I want it, I buy it --- but then it takes a while for me to get comfortable with the menus, with the placement of the buttons and knobs and with the way a particular camera makes colors and tones. 

I more or less cheated with the D750. I'd spent a fair amount of time just before getting this camera ranging around with two of its immediate predecessors, the D610s. My hands were comfortable with the size and my brain had figured out most of the menu items. A lot of my recent time spent with the new camera has been spent working on the stuff that has changed. Little things like color profiles and the nuances of the AF system. 

My first really deep dive with the D750 was a video and still assignment for an ad agency's own self promotion campaign. I spent several full days shooting stills on locations that were lit by either daylight, tungsten or LED lights. Nothing fast moving but everything had to be just right. Another full day was spent shooting video and I'll say that working with a camera for 8 hours straight is a great crash course in what can be done. But it's in the post production and editing where you see how the camera really did its part of the job. While I still think the D810 is a tad sharper I am very happy with the overall performance and video handling of the D750. It's my preferred shooting camera for work now over the D810.

One thing I never thought I'd use on the D750 is the 1.2X crop mode. I was shooting portraits in the studio this week and wanted to use the 85mm f1.8G because it's a sweet optic and it nails focus very well for head and shoulders work. The problem was that I wanted a bit tighter crop. Of course I could crop in post but I really like to see and shoot for final crop in the camera. With the camera set at 1.2X I could shoot at the equivalent of 102mm which was absolutely perfect. I lost some pixels but I didn't miss them. With crop lines in the finder it was almost like shooting on one of my old, rangefinder cameras. 

I'm in awe of you guys out there who can memorize a camera menu, understand all the custom function buttons and master a camera in a weekend. Even more fascinated by those of you who profess to be able to put the camera aside for weeks or months and then pick it up, fully ready to go without even a dry run in between. I confess that I really need to live with a camera, a lot, to get comfortable with it. When I'm working with a relatively new camera I might carry along a "known" back up camera for months until I am willing to let go of the training wheels. 

A case in point: I've had this camera for a month or so and only yesterday did I discover (and then use) the ability to set "clarity" in the  monochrome settings. Hadn't needn't it before and never went looking for it. But there it is, along with the slider for sharpness, contrast, etc. 

Yesterday was also the first day I had willfully gone out and forced myself not only to use the camera's built in HDR feature but to also use the camera with an older, manual focus Nikon lens and a polarizing filter. Lot's to mentally manage at one time but a nice exercise in camera operation, nonetheless. 

I chose to use the 25-50mm f4.0 lens because I think there is something really cool about it. I haven't put my finger on quite what the coolness is but I think if I use the lens enough I'll find it. It may just be that it's from such a different lens design era and it just looks different enough to me from the modern lens designs to make it a visual standout. I know it has a good deal of distortion at various focal length settings but I also know it's pretty sharp and highly flare resistant at f8.0. 

After a spell of letting both my Nikon and Olympus cameras do their autofocus thing during jobs and personal shooting it was very, very refreshing to get back to using a manual focus lens with hard stops at infinity and close focus. And unlike the "fly by wire" autofocus lenses for the Olympus it was also refreshing to go back to a lens with a marked distance scale. I was shooting in bright sunlight so I set the camera to manual exposure. As long as I shot images drenched in Texas sun I never, ever needed to change exposures or even look at the meter indications. It was just like shooting with an older Leica M3 and having the Kodak exposure chart Scotch taped to the bottom plate of the camera. 

Once you nail down the right exposure you never have to think about it until the sun starts to set or until you step into shadow.  By the same token a 25mm focal length lens, stopped down to f8.0 has a pretty generous depth of field. I found myself zone focusing most of the time when I was in the wide region of the zoom range. As I got closer to 50mm I took more care to fine tune. But when shooting buildings that sit one or two hundred feet away at 20mm-28mm I was pretty darn comfortable rolling the lens to the infinity stop and blazing away. It's a different way of shooting than what I watch most photographers do. Mostly they use AF lenses and automatic exposure. They lock focus with a half press of the shutter button and then commit. But the whole process more or less coaxes one to compose to the AF squares. Not as much fun (or as fun to look at) as a more chaotic and alternative compositional style. 

I discovered the black and white fine tuning late in the day and didn't have as much time to experiment as I would have liked but it's got me reset back into my old black and white film days. I came home and put a 50mm on the camera and locked the ISO to 400, just like Tri-X of old. 

There's a bonding process that occurs when you carry the same camera with you a lot of the time and shoot with it over and over again. You get comfortable with it and it's not that it disappears but more like it starts to collaborate with you and allow you more emotional range while shooting. 

I am smitten with the D750 and would like one more. All cameras should travel in pairs. Like rattlesnakes. It's good to shoot with identical cameras; it reduces the conscious thought process that sometimes slows down good seeing.

Have you seen our Cantine Cafe and Bar video?

We didn't shoot it with Nikons but I think you'll like it. 

Take a peek: https://vimeo.com/137964319

I've always loved black and white. The Nikon D750 does a good job offering a big range of parameters to make monochrome work well.

Like most digital cameras the Nikon D750 has a color setting for monochrome. And like most higher end cameras the options within the monochrome menu include different "filters." You can set the red filter to make skies dark and dramatic with puffy, white clouds. You can set green to get nicely nuanced skin tones and you can set yellow to get a good overall balance between the colors with the sky going darker than it would with the filter boxes left unchecked. This is just the way panchromatic films worked with actual, colored glass filters.

Just like most other high end cameras the Nikon will also let you fine tune sharpness, contrast and brightness. But where the Nikon shines for my use is that they've included a "clarity" slider that allows you to have some decent control over the mid-tone contrast.

My recent experimentations are showing me that I can fine tune the camera in monochrome to get a look that's very close to what I used to aim for in the darkroom when using various Agfapan B&W emulsions and my favorite print papers.

If you are shooting with a current Nikon model you owe it to yourself to go deep in the settings menu and see just how far you can go in fine tuning your camera to your own black and white vision.

I like it.

I found a mysterious menu item in my camera called, HDR. When I enabled it....

...the files I was shooting with my snappy lens and my snappy camera starting coming out all flat and lifeless. Fortunately I was able to save them in PhotoShop by adding contrast and color back in. Can't imagine why they have this menu on the camera.

An image taken during a morning walk around Lady Bird Lake in Austin, Texas. I got out there around 10 am and it seemed like everyone else was gone. I guess working. I strolled under the old Lamar Blvd. bridge and I was admiring, for the zillionth time, how the bridge creates one half of an arching frame that now encompasses the condo towers across the river. My attempts to make a good photo of this composition have been mostly thwarted by the dynamic range between the highlights on the buildings and in the clouds, and the deep, almost black shadows on the underbelly of the bridge.

I had time and leisure so I decided to give the HDR setting in the menu a grudging try. I was using a Nikon D750 and the Sigma Art 50mm f1.4. As I never bring a tripod along for a casual walk around the lake I handheld the combination. In the menu there are various things you can set but "auto" looked good to me.

I tried my best in post to not make this look like technicolor vomit but I'll leave my success or failure up to the many critics of the internet.

I will say that today's clouds, all over Austin, are gorgeous and dramatic. This afternoon would be a great time to skip out of work and capture some stock clouds. I'm skipping out right now....



The video.  Go see it again! https://vimeo.com/137964319

Some days you just have to put on your hard hat, your steel-toed shoes and your safety glasses and go photograph bucket trucks. Hey, you might get lucky and get a magazine cover. Sorry, no supermodels today.

I can retire now. I've finally gotten the cover of American Cranes and Transport Magazine. 

All kidding aside it's fun to show images from actual client shoots. We spent three hours on the location and did lots of different stuff. This was a quick shot done for the magazine's art director who just happened to be at the location that day.  Apparently the September cover is an especially good thing to have because they print extras and incorporate a tradeshow guide inside for the big truck/crane show in Louisville.....Score.

Shooting with bigger LED lights. A follow on from an earlier post about the RPS CooLED 50. It's big brother.

The RPS CooLED 100

We take up where we left off yesterday and plumb a little deeper into the RPS line of SMD LED lights. These are the kind of lights that I think are the next step in the evolution of LED lighting for photographers and videographers. Not that RPS lights specifically are the "next step" but that the SMD LED technology is beginning to roll out not just in higher end lights but in lights that just about everyone practicing their imaging craft can afford. The RPS models are just the first, lower price options, with the kind of power and configurability I need that hit my radar. There are lots of competing brands out there at higher price points and from recognizable photo oriented brands.

Although I did a lot of work with the earlier LED panels ("a thousand points of light...") I had circled back and by this Summer I was mostly using electronic flash again for a lot of my work. It seemed easier. The bigger panels are just big enough to be a handling burden but not so big that they don't still require more diffusion and modifiers to make their effective radiating size big enough to give me the soft shadows I like in a portrait. With a  powerful flash you can bang light through a kingsize bedsheet, if you want, for all the softness you'd ever want. If you need more power it's typically there in reserve.

But then Ben came home from school and I wanted to make a nice portrait of him. Problem: He's the world's fastest blinker. His blink reflexes are off the charts. I was getting a 10 % hit rate with electronic flash in soft boxes. So I switched to a constant light source and a quicker frame rate and all the blinks subsided. A good enough reason to take another look at LEDs.

Shortly after that a big ad agency booked me to help them create video content for their website and we ended up on location in a series of conference rooms; all of which needed to be lit. We certainly couldn't to it with flashes so we fell back to LEDs and it worked well --- but I found myself wishing for harder, stronger light sources and nostalgic about the days when we used to light with tungsten spots backed up by 1,000 watt ratings. I have a bunch of smaller panels and they are great for modest sets or as accent lights to boost an effect but they don't have the punch I really wanted.

When I saw the first RPS light (the CooLED 50) I thought, "well, someone is on the right track and the price is right but.....I'm sure the color will be off or the power won't match the bulk of the unit." I was beyond surprised when I did a color test. I set up a white Lastolite test target and illuminated it with the diffused CooLED 50. I took RPS at their word and set a manual WB by selecting an exact Kelvin color temperature. The box said, "5200K" and that's what I set on the camera. I expected the light to be much bluer and I steeled myself for a trip to GEAR to buy some M/G axis filtration. When I opened the files in PhotoShop CC and stuck an eyedropper on the white (with detail) of the target I was pretty (happily) surprised to find the R.G.B. reading to be something like 245, 246, 245.  No hue tweaking required to get to neutral. I measured the Fiilex P360 (same basic technology and a known performer) and it comes in right at 5400K. Not a big jump and certainly in the ballpark for my work.

When I saw how great the color was I immediately started thinking about the fixture I had passed up at Precision Camera. It was the CooLED 100 and it was, at $299, just $100 more than its baby brother. I got back in the car and went back to fetch it, ASAP. I was in and out of store in 10 minutes and had both lights set up in a favorite portrait configuration within the hour. The only real difference between the lights (besides the cosmetic touches) is the one full stop increase in power.

Both have umbrellas mounts (though I would need wider reflectors to use umbrellas effectively) and both have the same color and overall feel to the light. Both are fan cooled but both are quiet enough to use for all but the most auditorially sensitive video projects. The nice thing about both is that they have PUNCH. If you need extra punch you can take the diffuser cones off the lights and you'll have a 1.5 by 1.5 inch light source that's as specular and hard as you would ever want!!! (for safety reasons never look directly at the bare SMD while lit. The light rays are collimated enough to do real damage to your eyes!!!). The smaller light source (with more power) gives you many more lighting options starting with more through and ending up with more flexibility in choosing modifiers. I think the big light would be at home in a medium softbox, but I mostly push the light through diffusers on square frames. I like the control and I light the subtle differences of the light being closer or further away from the diffuser.  With a weak enough diffuser you can create a hard source within a soft source and that's way cool.

The back end of the CooLED 100 with a five position power knob calibrated in half stop increments. 

The two different RPS lights an the Fiilex P360 banging neutral light onto the back wall of the VSL celebrity studio.

Here's my raw, uncensored test target right at 5200K.

Bottom line: Do I like them? I liked them enough to buy them at retail like everyone else. If you mostly do weddings and events then these aren't the lights for you. If your assignments take you all over the map and you also shoot video then I'd say these would do you well. If you have a bigger budget then there are sturdier and more compact lights like the Fiilex line that might be a better long term investment but these are right there in the same output quality ballpark. I am saving up money to buy a couple more in both flavors. A great light for someone shooting back and forth between stills and video on the same shoot.

We uploaded the final version of our Cantine Video, shot with Olympus EM5.2 cameras. Go see the 1080 version on Video. Thanks!

Here's the link: https://vimeo.com/137964319

Cheers.


For people interested in Olympus as a film making platform this is an interesting read from a cinematographer in Australia. Samples at the very end of a healthy lengthen article:

https://johnbrawley.wordpress.com/2015/02/01/olympus-comes-in-from-the-filmmaking-wilderness/