A triptych from Berlin in Fall of 2013.

Need to do some online shopping? Here's a link to five good photo books and one fun novel:

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Kirk+Tuck

In a San Antonio shop window. Near the San Fernando Cathedral.

I love walking through the streets with a camera. It's a great excuse to get some exercise and stay intimately familiar with your camera and lens. Sometimes you see things you wouldn't see if you stayed home and watched TV.  If you've grown accustomed to the sights in your own city that gives you a great excuse to travel to the closest big or small city near you and start a walking exploration all over again.

To recap: Walking keeps you from getting fat and out of shape. Seeing new things keeps your mind interested. Sharing images gives you an intention that drives you to walk and see new things. I guess that makes exploring with a camera medicinal. That's my prescription for today.

Need some gift suggestions for photographers on your gift list?

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Kirk+Tuck

Taking a new look at an older lens. The Nikkor 135mm f2.0. ai.

I've been on a search for the right 135mm lens for a while now. I've had the Rokinon 135 f2.0 in and out of my shopping cart on Amazon a couple of times. I've tested the Nikon 135mm f2.0 Defocus Coupling lens and I spent a day with the Zeiss 135 f2.0, shooting around town. Through all of this I had a niggling thought in the back of my mind. I kept thinking that the lens I really wanted was one I'd owned many years ago. Decades ago. 

I like old Nikon lenses. The fully manual ones. The ones you have to manually focus. The ones with hard stops at infinity. The ones with external aperture rings. The ones that were so well built they might never fail. I'm tired of the plastic exteriors. I'm tired of complexity. I have really come to love the big, accurate focusing rings. I wanted a fast aperture.

My friend, Paul, had been in Precision Camera yesterday and called to tell me that, as a result of a recent expo at the store, there was a lot of great used gear getting put out on the shelves. When I woke up this morning I had visions of the old 135mm Nikkor f2.0 lens I used to use, mostly welded to the front of my F4s camera. I shot many of my favorite portraits with that lens and many more with that focal length across other brands. I walked into the store and straight to the used, manual focus shelf at the back of the store. There it was. Perfect glass. No abuse. Light use. 

My favorite store clerk uses a Nikon D600 to do great food photography and he's a good judge of lenses. He's never steered me wrong. And, to his credit, he's steered me away from more lenses than he's steered me towards. His pronouncement? "That lens is incredible!"

It's really not incredible but it is very good, has lots of personality and feels good to use. There are several 135mm f2.0 lenses that might be a little sharper, if you focus them just so. And that's only at the widest aperture.  All of them have some field curvature designed right in so none of them will be sharp across a flat frame from the center to the far corners, wide open. All of them get sharper as you stop down. But for a lens designed back in the late 1970's it's nicely competitive with the rest, once you factor in price and intended use. 

You know how I'll use it. I'll be shooting portraits under continuous light, from a tripod. I will summon up the courage to shot it wide open as long as I'm on the tripod and using the live view function of the D810 or D750 to nail critical focus. But that's how I've always intended to use every fast, long lens I buy. That's also how I use the sibling of this lens, the 105mm f2.5 ais. It works well. 

If I only shot still images with these cameras and lenses I guess I'd be happy to have autofocus capability but I keep shooting interviews and fun video and I love being able to shift focus while shooting, and to preset two focus points and rack between them. It's something these older optical systems do very well.

I could parrot what others have written or I could rely on my faulty memory of shoots done a long time ago, but I prefer to get the lens on the front of the D810, round up the usual suspects (beautiful people) and do my own optical testing with this particular sample. My preliminary shots are making me happy. Stay tuned and I'll have more to say about this one after I've gotten some portraits done. 

Feeling a bit giddy. It's not every day that you conjure up the image of the perfect portrait lens and then walk into a store that has just what you wished for. And at a price significantly lower than anywhere else. Merry Consumerism! To one and all.

An old blog post about making portraits. Reprised by popular demand.

http://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2011/09/portraits-what-really-happens-in-good.html

I just re-read it and I like it better than I did when I wrote it.

Thanks Andrew.

It's getting to feel a lot like Christmas....

Nothing warms me up for the holidays quite like bouncing back and forth between seasonal plays like David Sedaris's, Santaland Diaries, and Dave Steakley's pop infused, re-envisioning of Dicken's, A Christmas Carol. 

Above and below I've assembled some of my favorite photographs from Zach Scott's recent Holiday plays for your visual enjoyment. I wish I could label each one with the camera and lens it was taken with but those details are lost to the passage of time. Just think: Sony and Nikon and Canon and Samsung, Olympus and Panasonic and Kodak and Fuji. You're bound to be right some of the time. 

As usual, click to see the gallery of bigger images. They should click up to 2100 pixels on the long end...

On Tuesday I found a good reason to use the Nikon D750 and the Sigma 50mm Art lens. NEA.

Dave Steakley, artistic director of Zach Theatre (left) shows

NEA Chairman, Jane Chu, around the Topfer Theatre.
The full frame. 

Late Monday I got a text from the P.R. person at Zach Theatre asking me, urgently, if I would be able to come by and take some photographs the next afternoon. I love working with everyone there so I checked my scheduled and confirmed. 

The event was a newsy one. Zach Theatre was being visited by Jane Chu, who is the chairman of the NEA (National Endowment for the Arts). NEA grants have made it possible for the Theatre to produce work with amazing playwrights like Anna Deavere Smith and Susan Lori-Parks, as well as enabling spectacular renditions of Ragtime and Angels in America. 

I didn't have a specific brief but I was there early to greet Ms. Chu and to follow the group of Zach board members and executives through the tour and while conversing over tea. 

I used a Nikon D810 with the 24-120mm and a flash for many of the photographs but in the lobby I could see the benefit of working with the available light and a fast, sharp lens. I like the image above so much more than the posed group shot that was hastily organized below. 

The Nikon D750 seems to nail exposures nicely and the lens is nicely sharp at f2.5. The image below is from the D810+24-120mm combo. 

Working with existing light is fun as long as you keep yourself at the right angles to both the subjects and the light....

Pulled a Pen F out of the drawer today. Why don't modern cameras have rotary titanium shutters that sync at all speeds?

I pulled this Pen F out of the equipment cabinet today and, after coming to grips with the realization that it would have been a much better camera with an integral EVF, realized how cool the technology of this camera was in the early 1970s. That, and the fact that it still works well today.

The finder could be improved but I think that age tends to yellow the mirrors a bit and the focusing screen could probably use a good cleaning. I put the 40mm f1.4 lens on the front and loaded a roll of Agfapan APX 100 that I'd stashed in the freezer. I shot a bit while I was out for coffee but the fun test will be a portrait session tomorrow. Yes, yes, I'll have some sort of digital camera there as well, but I'm willing to bet that this combo, supplemented with the 60mm f1.5 will have a vastly different visual signature than what we're used to. It will also be interesting to see how the B&W film reacts to LED lighting.

I figured it was shameful to have a brace of these in an equipment cabinet and not take them out and experiment from time to time.

72 half frame images on a roll of film. A shutter that syncs with anything all the way up to 1/500th. Some titanium tech inside an all metal body. And a vertical frame orientation. What's not to like?

Do you still shoot film from time to time? What do you use for interesting film shoots?