Bob Schneider at Lambert's. Getting close but keeping my distance.

©2014 Kirk Tuck.

I spent the middle of my day making faux available light portraits at a law firm. What do I mean by "faux" available light portraits? I mean that I used the available light and carefully supplemented it with light from three different LED lighting fixtures, a collection of modifiers and light blockers. But the real gist of my short blog tonight is to talk about the emotions of the moment clouding one's observations about the workability of specific gear. 

I spent my productive time today shooting with the tried and true, Nikon D750 with the well balanced and proficient Nikon 85mm f.18 G lens. Given the gear the technical parts of this job making portraits of attorneys was a piece of cake. The tough part, as always, is establishing the necessary rapport. When I was younger I always talked to male executives about what sports their kids played and that cracked the shell, so to speak, and got them to open up a bit. We'd find common ground, they'd beam with pride about their son or daughter's amazing future in NCAA soccer and I'd snap the photos; convinced that I was "shooting fish in a barrel" by playing to their paternal pride. 

The partners in the firm at which I photographed today have older kids. College kids. Wanna build some rapport with a 55 year old? Ask him where his kid is going to college, and how he or she is doing. Then we can commiserate together about the cost or the "empty nest" or the hijinks of our offspring and also make a common connection. The key is to find the subject that triggers something outside the confines of their business. 

So, while I'm getting to know my clients, I was ruminating about how well the D750 was performing until it dawned on me that I'd been unfair in my recent camera comparisons. I'd placed the Panasonic fz 1000 in a Kobayashi Maru Scenario (Star Trek reference) where there was no chance of success. I was trying to make it sort out the horribly mixed lighting of a room with orange theatrical gels over most of the lights, mixed with nasty light, mixed with Jumbo-tron blue glow. And I asked the camera to do all of this at an outrageous ISO. The D750 wasn't that much better but for some reason I felt compelled to pick a "winner" and a "loser." 

The reality is that if I had pressed the fz 1000 into service today it would have preformed almost identically to the D750 in almost every parameter except the slope of the out of focus ramp provided by the camera with the larger sensor. Noise? No problem. Color integrity? Probably better with the fz. 

I associate the D750 with a higher performance level because I let it play to its strengths while I mark down the performance of the smaller sensor camera because it doesn't win in "no win" situations. 

The image above was taken last year at a small, private, corporate party. Bob Schneider was opening for Lyle Lovett. It was shot with a Panasonic GH4 and an ancient, Olympus 60mm f1.5 lens, nearly wide open. The image doesn't fail because it's not being pushed past the point of no return. There's white light on Schneider's face. The fast aperture allows for a usable ISO setting. His constrained pose meant that shutter speeds down around 1/125th of second were quite acceptable. It was basically a "softball" pitch. 

I thought about it again as I was shooting today. Our emotional perceptions and our frustrations at prevailing conditions often prejudice us into thinking that this or that camera, or format, has failed  when, in fact, we've failed to manage the circumstances of the shoot. Bad lighting? Instead of changing cameras why not fix the light? Or walk away from bad lighting and tell the client they have to do their part too. It's a thought. We can't always perform miracles. We should own up to that.

Two shots from my Sunday walk, juxtaposed for color contrast.

Okay. So in my usual hyperbolic enthusiasm I got carried away with the fz 1000. Then, on corporate shoot I figured out that the camera does have a few limitations. But then I picked it up today and realized that it's still as fun to shoot as I first imagined. It can be wickedly sharp and at the same time subversively understated.

I have been using it as a single focal length camera. Let me explain. There's a setting in the menu that allows you to set the camera's zooming mechanism to stop at each marked focal length. Additionally you can program the camera to return to the last zoomed focal length when you turn it on. I can set the camera at a 50mm equivalent, turn the power off, and then five minutes or five hours later, come back and turn the camera on and it will go straight to 50mm. Or whatever you last shot.

I like all this and think it's very cool.  I have also turned the LCD finder around to face the body so I don't both pre-chimp and post chimp. That's a time and attention saver, to be sure.

The camera shoots a bit flash and a bit low on saturation. I like to think it's doing some fancy and very beneficial S-Log thing like the S-Log my video friends rave about in their professional video cameras. Whatever the reality is a few minutes of play in SnapSeed and I end up with files that I love. And files that look like they have significant dynamic range.

I might have mentioned that I initially liked the fz 1000 so much I bought a second one. Now I'm glad I did because I'm going to pack it for a road trip and its twin IS the perfect backup.

Hope your week is starting well. I'm busy as  hummingbird on coffee. Stay tuned.

And here we are again, packing for tomorrow's shoot. It's all about lighting again.

Tomorrow is a continuation of a project I started for a downtown law firm about a month ago. We are photographing all of the partners and associates, and so far we've gotten through about 24 people. Midday tomorrow we'll set up in two locations and photograph 4 more people. I'm doing a style that depends on shallow depth of field and I'll be leveraging the ambient light in the location along with my main and fill lights which will set the lighting style, and the balance, all the other sources. I'll be using black flags to block ugly light from compact fluorescents shining down from the ceiling, and I'll be counting on lots of clean, cool daylight flooding in from floor to ceiling windows, bouncing through frosted glass walls and helping me to add depth to each shot. 

On our first shoot, last month, we used three different LED lights for most of the illumination. The larger light in the bottom left corner of the image above is a RPS CoolED 100. It's pretty bright and the light is very well color balanced when compared to daylight. I'd peg it at 5400 with a very, very slight green cast. The light in the top right corner, closest to camera, is the younger brother of the CoolED 100; it's the CoolED 50 and, wouldn't you know it, it half the power or one stop less than its big brother. 

The third light, which gets used a lot as an accent or hair or background light, is the Fiilex P360 which is an absolutely darling little light. Where the two RPS lights are just daylight balanced the Fiilex allows me to control the color temperature from 2900 to 5500, steplessly. 

My only concern in the last shoot was not having enough power to shoot toward a window. I was about a stop down from the outdoor light with my main light used through my standard diffusion scrim. Since then I bought a second 100 light and will gang them together when I need the extra oomph! I also want to use the two bigger lights together so I can add a second layer of diffusion (separated by about 1/4" from each other) to smooth out the light even more. 

To people who always shoot with flash the fascination with continuous light sources must seem a bit crazy. I always remember though, an interview I read a long time ago with Arnold Newman (who used lots and lots of hot lights over the years), he suggested that having people sit for portraits, done with hot lights, sometimes demanded that they stay very still for up to a full second. He conjectured that the very act of breathing at these longer exposures added something ephemeral to the look of the sitters; a softness within the sharpness that made the faces and the surfaces seem more real. 

It is interesting to look closely at his image of Igor Stravinsky at the Piano, which was done with a single 1000W light. The exposure is something like f16 at 1 second but the overall image is something so different from what we see in the results of most portrait lighting today. 

I firmly believe that the immediacy of feedback one gets from continuous lighting allows many very positive benefits for photographers; not least of which is being able to see IN REAL TIME the exact effect that blending different light sources has on the image. The blending of light sources is also much easier to effect since you can see the effect on the tonal balances as you turn each light up or down. 

I'll be photographing again with the D750 and either the 85mm f1.8 G lens or the older, 105mm f2.5 ais lens. I set the aperture I want for the depth of field I want and then I set the shutter speed to give me the correct exposure. I start out with the lowest ISO I feel I can get away with (camera and subject movement limits) and, if I start getting down to 1/30th of s second I stop there and start raising the ISO until it's all dialed in. I know with the 105mm's aperture set at f4.0 the lens is just about as perfect a lens as one could hope for in the 5 to 10 foot range; if one is framing a horizontal with the subject cropped from just above the top of the head to a bit above the waist. 

My goal with these portraits is to make them look great as horizontal compositions but also have enough "air" around them so that art directors and website designers can also crop a really good vertical from the same selected files.

Working with continuous lighting is more like lighting a movie set than traditional softbox/flash portrait photography. I use tools like 4x4 foot diffusion scrims, nets -- which pull down light levels without introducing shadows or shadow edges, and a host of light blockers to control what hits the subject and what doesn't. That control, along with total control of depth of field, makes the projects seem more cinematic; almost like scenes from movies frozen into single frames. 

The bottom line is that the light is just an element of the portrait mix. The photographer will have to make so many other decisions. The distance from the subject to the camera is determined by how large you would like to have the subject appear in the final image. That also depends on the focal length of the lens. But an aesthetic consideration is also how far do you want the subject to be from the background. Too far from the background and you risk losing any detail in the far image plane, and that means you risk losing the feeling of real depth. Too close to the background and you risk objects coming too much into focus which ultimately robs some of the viewer's attention from your main subject. It gives viewer too many spots on which to linger. 

But all of those considerations are meaningless if you can't work with the subject to get to a collaboration in which they are comfortable giving you an expression and the energy that their friends and families will recognize as "genuine" and "engaging." Get all the other stuff right and then flub this and you've failed. Getting a priceless expression while not getting the technical stuff perfect isn't nearly as bad. You can cover up a lot of shooting incompetence with a bunch of PhotoShop skill. Get both sides of the equation  right and you might just be able to earn a living doing portraits. Even in 2015. 

I'm loving the LED lights again. This time around I have the tonal control AND perfect color right out of the box. I can hardly wait to drag my cart, overloaded with gear, into the service elevator and get started. 

Fiilex P360 LED light. Nice stuff.

A status report on the Visual Science Lab Headquarters and the safety of our personnel...

First, I want to thank all the readers who got in touch to make sure we were okay here at VSL during and after the epic rains we've had both this weekend and last. We got about 8 inches of rain on Friday morning between midnight and 10 a.m. but other parts of Austin, including the airport, got up to 16 inches in the space of just two hours! Whole neighborhoods were evacuated and flooding was widespread. It was a bad coincidence that we'd had 16 inches of rainfall the weekend before because the ground was too saturated to soak up any of the new rainfall and the water had no where to go but where it was led by gravity.

Fortunately, our house and our offices are located in the Westlake Hills area which is west of downtown and across the lake. We are 690 feet above the base water level of Austin so we are immune from most catastrophic flooding. We are mostly dealing with spots of nuisance flooding where water is coming down the grade from the properties just above us and is jumping the gutters out in the front of our house. If the rains comes down too quickly it sometimes overwhelms the French drain on one wall of the studio and causes water to seep through the masonry and onto the floor.

The main house is never in danger of flooding and, after having lived here for nearly twenty years I'm pretty confident that we don't need to worry about the house proper. The floor in the office is concrete with dense foam tiles laid on top. These tiles are interlocking and easily removable and replaceable; and not expensive. If I get water on the floor of the office I use a wet vacuum, designed for sucking up liquids safely, to remove the water and then, when the weather changes (general in a day or so) I take the tiles outside and let them dry in the sun. The vacuum is plugged into a GFI plug and should be safe to use even in standing water as long as the unit isn't submerged.

All camera equipment is store in rolling tool cabinets that stand eight inches above the floor and all other gear; from backgrounds to light stands, is stored on Metro shelving with the bottom-most shelves set at about 12 inches. Even plugs and power strips are positioned on blocks of dense foam that keep them well above the 1/8th inch of spreading water we get on occasion. Our flooding is more of an inconvenience than a real danger and, so far the wet floor has only happened, at most, once a year; on average.

The real danger would come from driving though the low water crossings that dot Austin. A number of people are drowned each year in central Texas trying to drive through rapid water and being swept away in their vehicles. We're a bunch of sissies. If it looks dangerous we're quick to re-schedule shoots because no shoot is more important than our safety or the safety of our clients. A side issue is that even without danger of drowning, etc. the traffic in Austin comes to a screeching halt with any weather event and it can take hours to get several miles, even on the major highways.

The house and studio have brand new, 40 year roofs on them; installed last month. The gutters are clean and the French drains near the studio are usually functional. Nothing in life is guaranteed but we're feeling pretty safe and mostly dry over here.

Our hearts go out to the people who have been flooded out both in May and now this weekend. We are suggesting that locals can do the most good for those effected by contributing money to the local Red Cross chapter or a similar charity that helps provide emergency aid and shelter to displaced families.

To keep this somewhat photographic....when I went out to shoot some shots of the raging waters at a nearby low water crossing I made sure to take a water resistant lens and camera body. My choice? The Olympus OMD EM-5.2 with a Panasonic 12-35mm f2.8 lens. Like the Nikon D750 last weekend, the Olympus spent about an hour in moderate to driving rain and has suffered no ill effects. As I am not a competent weather photographer the images were not very inspiring. That's why I decided to erase them and start over fresh next time.

Thanks for all the good wishes and the concerns for our well being. I appreciated hearing from so many VSL readers. Have a safe week ahead.

Did Apple just give their users 10 bit color at the monitor? Is it usable on older systems?

iMac:

  Display Type: LCD

  Resolution: 2560 x 1440

  Pixel Depth: 32-Bit Color (ARGB8888)

  Main Display: Yes

  Mirror: Off

  Online: Yes

  Built-In: Yes

              See the type just above? It's from my system profile on my 27 inch Apple iMac. Look down to the

              third line. It shows the pixel depth for the monitor to be 32-bit. This is one of the changes that Apple's new system software (10.11.1), El Capitan, delivers. That might mean that we're now getting 10 bit per channel color! I love the idea of it but have no idea yet whether the increased bit depth is only available in Apple programs like Photo and Preview and not PhotoShop, etc., but I'll wait to hear from our more technical and enlightened readers before I stumble into meaningless conjecture and outright Male Answer Syndrome.

                     Intersting, yes?

Crazy Rain Again in Austin. Two weeks in a row...

Sixth Street.

Last weekend the city of Austin (and the race track at Circuit of the Americas = F1 venue) the mysteries of nature dropped about 16 inches of rain over the course of two days. It was a thin and whipping rain that soaked everything. Zillions of smaller rain drops but delivered in awesome quantity. It generated a lot of flooding and shut down the prelims for the Grand Prix on Saturday. 

I think most Austinites presumed that this was going to be our one Fall drenching and, par for the course, the rain stopped and the sun came out as the last of our car-centered visitors left for their next engagement. We had a wonderful week of moderate temperatures and light winds. 

When I headed for bed last night there was a forecast saying we'd get some rain today but no big panic on the part of weather casters.

Sometime in the early (pre-dawn) hours the rain started falling. By eight a.m. it was falling down a lot. Big, fat, fast, juicy drops. There gutters up on the street looked like white water. The never-ending homebuilding project next door starting sloughing off unprotected topsoil by the ton and diverting it into the storm sewers, and around 9:30 a.m. water started seeping through the low lying East wall of the studio. 

I was working at the computer and I turned around to notice a slow moving sheet of water moving out into the room. I really need to get an expert out to check what's happening with the French drain that runs along the wall but I think I already know = 6.5 inches of rain in about three hours, coming in on top of the 12-16 inches that saturated the ground last week. 

The vacuum cleaner sucked up the water and I cancelled a coffee appointment. Lightning had precluded any idea of early morning swim practice. But I've been lucky,  I just had a little bit of water on the concrete floor. All over South Austin whole neighborhoods are getting evacuated and the airport was completely shut down for four or five hours this morning. I headed out to Trader Joes to get some stuff for dinner and just in my neighborhood several roads were closed. 

Today, in Austin, it's good to have some weatherproof cameras. We've got a few more bands of heavy rain to get through and then the weekend cleans up its act and we get some sunshine and clear skies.

Just in time for Halloween photos. Have fun. Stay dry.

Sponsorships, free product; good intentions meeting subconscious manipulation.

No one at Apple has ever offered, or given, me a computer. They won't even let me cut in line on new release days, and yet I sing their praises whenever the subject of computer appliances arises. Olympus paid me once to be a presenter at a show. I traded long hours of speaking and showing work that I had done with cameras I purchased at retail stores for full price. In direct exchange they traded me a 14-35mm f2.0 lens for my Four Thirds camera system. End of the deal. A one time shot. From that point on I subsided back to being one of the rank and file customers; but I always get a friendly nod from the tech reps with whom I have worked.

I have borrowed gear from our local Nikon rep from time to time. She loans me fun optics because she thinks I might buy one or two if I had the chance to use them. So far I'm winning and I haven't bought any of the esoteric stuff I've tried out. But the last time I borrowed anything was back in 2006 so I'm pretty sure I'm not subconsciously feeling beholden to Nikon because of their ongoing largess.

One time a rep from Leica loaned me a 15mm f2.8 and it was kinda scary because the lens was so frantically expensive. I only used it around the house because I was afraid I might accidentally destroy it out in the wilderness and it was worth more than the car I was driving. Leica didn't get anything out of the loan because there was no such thing as blogs back when this transaction occurred and I didn't even get to brag about using it. Until now.

The same progression holds true for Leaf Systems, Phase One and Mamiya, who all sent me evaluation equipment back when they thought medium format digital equipment might make some headway in the market. I did fair evaluations of their equipment for a magazine that is now defunct, and immediately sent the equipment back to them. I was happy to test the cameras but they may have been less happy with my evaluations.

I have been invited to participate in several junkets from various camera makers while I was shooting with their gear but declined until I got invited to play with the Samsung cameras. I liked the people at the PR agency really well; they are fun and super professional. My problem was always with the cameras. In a way the Samsung cameras and I just have different personalities. It was like having me work on a computer loaded with Microsoft, Windows Eight. Try as I may I just didn't bond with them. The glass was good and some of the sensors were as good as their competitors but the whole mix didn't work for me.

I did a trip to Berlin with Samsung to shoot and write about the Samsung Galaxy NX, but I think all of us (me and the PR company) realized that the social networking leanings of that camera weren't quite in line with my personality -- which is more private and plodding. I was fine shooting the camera but hated the idea of stopping everything to spend time uploading, and social networking, the images.

I continued on but lost my enthusiasm for new product from them because I preferred the cameras I kept buying from other makers and we severed our agreement and went our separate ways. They did send me product  in a  quid pro quo but, for the most part, it didn't work out as either of us planned and all the Samsung cameras have been given away to friends and younger photographers.

I now have a new rule that I won't write about gear at all if there is any financial tie between me and the company that makes it or markets it. That means no pre-release trips to shoot a new product line in a nice locale. No acceptance of gift cameras or lenses with the idea that I will write about them and say nice things. In fact, you may have noticed that I've stopped reviewing new products in the month or so after they come out if I haven't wanted them badly enough to go to the store and buy them by giving my personal credit card a hard workout.

The problem is that any special treatment given to a reviewer immediately gives the appearance of preferential treatment that probably goes in both directions. Added to that is the fact that my sense of ethics winds me up so much that I become too heavy handed in my reviews and actually step over the line in the opposite direction by becoming too critical of the gear. Marking it down for insignificant flaws that were small potatoes in the grand scheme of a camera's design.

To be clear, none of the companies whose cameras I am currently working with had anything at all to do with my selection process and nothing at all to do with my decision to buy. No early deliveries were offered and no discounts proffered. The Olympus, Nikon and Panasonic cameras I own were all bought new, and at retail (same price for me as for you..dammit.) at Precision-Camera.com in Austin, Texas. All six cameras.

I mention this because I see all over the web that so and so is a "fanboy" and must live at Nikon or Canon's teat. I want everyone who reads one of my reviews to know that I'm tossing my money into the same pit everyone else is and those greedy bastards at Olympus, Nikon and Panasonic haven't even stepped forward to offer me a mouse pad, a pen, a promotional baseball cap or a t-shirt with their logo emblazoned in 100 point type, across the front and the back.

If I toss my money away buying a second Panasonic fz 1000 you can rest assured that I didn't get to go to Bora Bora or Tahiti for free in order to pick it up. Its passage of ownership from the store to me was not presaged or dependent on a good night's rest and dinner at a Ritz Carlton or Four Seasons Hotel, avec room service. My mastery of the camera; or at least my mastery of a language to describe the virtues of a camera, were not earned over canapés at the pool in Beverly Hills or effected by shooting bikini clad super models in some coastal paradise.

I really have quite an idyllic existence here in Austin and like to think I'm harder to buy than the general forum reader presumes.

Which leads me to my next line of thought: Why do we go back again and again and read the stuff that our jet set reviewers write about cameras? How are they so magical that they can hold a camera in their hands for a week or so, totally understand its every nuance and menu item and then write about it so prolifically? If they are working photographers then where in the heck do they find the time? if they are not working photographers who've given the machines a long and sweaty workout under pressure then why do I care what they say?

There are good sites that do honest reviews. We mostly all read them. But I'm starting to get annoyed at the sites where the entire raison d'être is the uniformly gushy camera review and nothing else. Maybe these guys could spice it up a bit by writing about photographs too. Or at least the occasional ten point list about "how to convince your models to take off their shirts." To hear that the placement of X button is "about one point five millimeters too far to the left for their comfort" is......boring.