The Joyous capabilities of the 85mm f1.2 lens. On film.

Le Bouillon Chartier. Paris. 1992

Canon EOS-1 + 85mm f1.1.2

 Do you make photographs of people with wide angle lenses? We can cure that shortcoming. Buy a fast 85mm lens and feel the enlightenment surge through your entire system. Breathe. Then slightly compress your subjects.

I'm on the search for the perfect, fast, high quality 135mm f2.0 lens for my Nikon bodies. Any suggestions?

Latin Fashion Show on the Beach at South Beach, Miami 2001.

I'm 90% sure I'll be buying one of the Nikon 135mm f2.0 DC (defocus coupling) lenses in the next month or so. I keep stumbling across images from as far back as the first 135mm lens I owned for a Canon TX, in 1977, and being amazed at the pictorial effect of the focal length and the background rendering. I should have listened to my friend, Bernard, a few years back when he was extolling the virtues of his fast, Canon EF 135. He was certainly right to elevate this focal length's status to near legend. Especially the faster versions...

Like I said above, I'm pretty certain I'll get the Nikon DC lens because I had a loaner Nikon 105mm f2.0 DC  from Nikon for nearly six months, a few years back, and shot some of my favorite portraits with that lens. The image above is from one of the many 135mm's I've owned but I can't remember off hand which one. The sad thing is that the FujiFilm color negative film I used for the above image must have had a defect because I can't read the exif data....

It would either have been a Contax 135mm f2.8 or a Leica R series 135mm f2.8. Both were really good, but hardly stellar lenses.

Zeiss makes a nice 135mm f2.0 for Nikons as does Rokinon, but the problem is that they are both manual focus lenses and I want this particular lens to be an auto focus lens. When you are playing around with really tiny slices of sharpness, surrounded by intentional blur,  it's really nice to get the focus nailed down quickly and correctly.

Among the brain trust that constitutes VSL readers I am curious to hear of peoples' various experiences with appropriate 135mm lenses. Can you chime in and give me some advice?

I'd like to get this purchase wrapped up before my upcoming birthday.... I can't imagine a better self-present and I can probably stretch and afford a good one.

Thanks in advance.

Be Honest. What Gear Would You Buy If You Were Starting Over From Scratch and Price Was No Object?

I was thinking about this today as I stood in the middle of Precision Camera and contemplated all of the new camera gear. All of the Leicas and Nikons and Canons. All the smaller cameras and used cameras. The overwhelming wealth of choices that would be available to someone with a totally empty camera bag and a totally limitless bank account.

What would I buy?

I played the game as an enthusiast and artist instead of falling into the tired role of commercial photographer. In this role I would not need an extensive inventory of lenses and accessories. I would not need to impress clients. I would not need fast focus or fast frame rates. As I deleted the preoccupations of my occupation I started to change directions entirely. My needs would be so different.

I wouldn't worry about high flash sync or access to a really cool flash system. I wouldn't need cameras with special modes or bracketing features.

I could sit back and look at the way I shoot for myself and start making some adaptations to help my innate style along. After looking through the exif date of the 140,000+ images I have up on Smugmug.com and the 240,000 images I currently have in Lightroom libraries I can see that, among my personal work, I use four focal lengths almost exclusively. Those are the 50mm, the 85mm, 100mm (+/- 5mm)  and the 135mm. Nothing else comes close. Concerned about wide angles vanishes into the void.

So I would want a system that gives me the focal lengths I cherish. Not a zoom or a range of zooms but real, actual prime focal lengths.

I want a body with a full frame sensor and

Trends in Photographic Retailing as Seen in Conversations With One Shop.

I have a friend who has been a photographer for as long as I have known him and that's about thirty seven years. A few years back, in the great recession, he decided to get a job in a camera store. A wise decision, I think. His specialty is working with professionals, state agencies, schools and other areas that are both retail in nature and not directly consumer driven. He handles purchase orders and large order fulfillment and stuff like that. He's a smart guy and he's been around the block a few times. 

I had occasion to spend some time with him this afternoon and I asked him what was new. Now, when I first met him he was an avowed Nikon shooter. At some point, when he became interested in architecture he switched to Canon for the wonderful tilt/shift lenses. But when I talked to him today he told me that, "what was new" is that he just purchased his own Sony A7R2 and he's been shifting his institutional customers away from Canon and Nikon in favor of Sony and Olympus cameras. With dubious innocence I asked him why. His response was more nuanced than the one I have the time and energy to write here but essentially the combination of brilliantly done electronic viewfinders, the absolute accuracy of the on-sensor focusing and the magic of 5 axis image stabilization makes the Sony and Olympus cameras much more usable and virtuous that the cameras with flipping mirrors. 

He mentioned one school district that conceded the superior value of the mirrorless cameras for most things but sighed, "We still need the high frame rate cameras like the Canon 7D mk2 for sports and stuff like that." My friend gently pointed out that the mirror was the roadblock in effective frames per second and went on to tell them that a number of smaller, less expensive cameras had

Thoughts after spending two days with a Nikon 750 in my hands.

This image has nothing to do with the content of this blog. 

I shot it with my friend, Noellia, for fun. 

It was done with the Nikon D750 and the Nikon 85mm f1.8G lens. 

I've spent the last two days shooting portraits for a company in Georgetown, Texas that does chemical engineering. We photographed 125 of their employees, one at a time, for use on a holiday card. It's an elaborate card that folds out and is used as a primary piece of marketing for the company. 

I set up a nine foot wide, soft blue seamless background and created a lighting design that would make people look good while minimizing skin texture. The background was lit by an Elinchrom 500 watt second moonlight that was suspended from the acoustic tile grid on the ceiling by a scissor clamp. We wrangled the cord over to the wall with a second scissor clamp made specifically for cable wrangling. We did this because the light needed to be exactly there and, as a side benefit, it kept a long cable run off the floor --- which makes for a safer set. 

I brought a flat, white three foot by four foot shiny masonry board for people to stand on. This contained the portrait subjects and kept them in the area that represented the "sweet spot" of my lighting design. It also made each engagement totally repeatable, as far as lighting and exposure were concerned. 

On either side of the subject I had black light absorbers parallel to them. These helped to put a darker edge on the white shirts everyone wore which should radically reduce the post processing work of making clipping paths. 

Finally, I had two 3 foot by 4 foot soft boxes set up as main light and fill light in front of and at 35 degree angles from the subject. These were both up high enough to cast shadows under the chins of my sitters which is a flattering way of defining the chin and neckline. Since the images would be clipped from the background we were highly uninterested in experimenting with shallow depth of field or experiencing the "bokeh" of our taking lens. We shot at f11 in the interest of keeping everything sharp and tidy.

The two front lights were Photogenic Powerlight PL1250 DR mono-lights in Photoflex soft boxes.

My assistant and I had some interesting times during

Sometimes I really, really like my job. This morning comes to mind... In the Hundred Acre Wood at Zach Theatre...

Sara Burke as "Piglet" and Russel Taylor as "Eeyore".

My parents read Winnie the Pooh stories to me and my brother and sister when we were young kids. They were the perfect bedtime stories. For a period, about fourteen or fifteen years ago, I read the same stories to my own son and it always brought back memories of my mostly happy childhood. I love the story where Pooh and Piglet are out tracking 'dangerous animals' and keep following their own tracks in a circle. Every time they go around they are convinced that a new animal has joined in with the pack they are tracking, unaware that they keeping making and following the new tracks. 

My favorite characters are Piglet and Eeyore. I still have the crayon-marked, hardback compendium of Winnie the Pooh stories on my bookshelf. I pull it down once in a while and sit in my most comfortable chair and re-visit some of the stories. They always bring a smile to my face...

That's why I was delighted when the marketing director of Zach Theatre called and asked me if I would be "open" to photographing their production of a Winnie the Pooh play. No, this is not an adult version of W.T.P. it's a play for children and families and people like me who seem to have never grown out of our fondness for Milne's wonderful stories. 

Back to the question: Would I submit to sitting through a one hour play of my favorite childhood (and parenting) stories, done by brilliant actors, and would I be willing to be paid for my time? Would I mind if there wasn't an audience and I could move around and photograph from any angle I wanted? In other words, would you mind if we produced a show just for you?  To be honest, they had me at "Pooh."

I drove over to the theater this morning with a Nikon D810 and one lens. It was the 24-120mm f4.0 (latest version). I laughed and smiled and photographed my way through a really wonderful production. As I drove away I kept thinking: "I can't believe I get paid to do this."

I had lunch with a friend who wanted to sit and talk to me about the Sony RX 10-2 and then I went home to spend the afternoon petting the studio dog and processing image files. Now, where did I misplace that nap??? A sincere "thank you" to the cast and crew for a wonderful morning away from corporate image making.

Sara Burke as "Owl."

J. Quinton Johnson as "Rabbit."

Big Firmware News from Olympus! Camera bonus!

Go read the details here: http://www.olympus-global.com/en/news/2015b/nr150915omde.jsp

Olympus has announced some firmware upgrades there's one exciting add on for each of the top two cameras in the line up. The EM-1 gets upgraded to version 4.0 and to my mind the stand out feature is the addition of FOCUS STACKING. When shooting macro images (and I assume it would work for any image...) the camera shoots 8 images, varying the focus point between each shot, and then processes them together automatically to create an image with deeper focus. It's all done in camera.

Hit the above link to see what else has been added to the EM-1.

The EM5.2 gets something that I am overjoyed by! The firmware upgrade to version 2.0 gives the camera a FLAT profile for video. It has been suggested that my writing here about the camera as a video tool may have been instrumental in this offering. (Go VSL blog). What this means is (hopefully) a file with much more usable dynamic range with which to edit. The lack of a flat profile was one of the big omissions on this camera as a video production tool. I will be downloading and testing it as soon as possible since I have a production coming up quickly and would love to use EM-5.2 because of it's amazing image stabilization. THANK YOU OLYMPUS.

To read about the rest of the details for all the cameras benefitting, again, hit the link above...

Nice when new, useful features are added to a camera you already own and like.

Hope everyone is having a happy Tuesday.