Spring. Spring cleaning. Allergies. Blue Bonnets. Cameras and Kitsch.

Ben and his Mom at Emma Long Park. 

Hard to know when Spring started here in Austin. The trees were already showing their leaves in February and we've had none of the late freezes that marked past winters. Now we're almost submerged in a vast sea of green. We've had good rains and, for the most part, the moderate temperatures that seem to tickle the growth instincts of our lawns, gardens and random flora. 

I generally spend a few days in the Spring getting rid of lots of material objects that I find myself mindlessly hoarding from year to year. Right now I am looking at a Fotodiox 72 inch Octobank that seemed like an especially good idea about four years ago. The fatal flaw for this modifier is that, at nine to ten pounds (steel rods x 8) the soft box is so front heavy that it pops the speed rings right off the Elinchrom flashes and tries the patience of the tightening mechanism on my Profoto monolight stand brackets. The damn thing is a beast. I've put effort into it and about three years ago I just gave up using it. It's almost new...  And it's sitting on the floor with some other junk as I try to decide what to do with it. 

I can say the same thing about an ill (self) advised purchase of an early LED panel. If it was just an LED panel that took double A batteries I would have passed it along to someone who needed a quickly deployed light source that's small. But it's actually a "system" that came with a five pound, lead-acid battery and a big charger. The battery and charger were overkill for the small panel --- except that one could run said panel for eight to ten hours before it would finally dim and sputter. The battery and charger were just too much effort for too little reward and so they've sat in a dark corner, slowly deteriorating, and the LED panel kept them company. 

This is also the year I do something about all the damn frames that live in the studio. They appear to multiply like bunnies. Most of the frames are utilitarian ones that I used for doing photography shows in Sweetish Hill Bakery over the course of the 20 odd years I displayed work there. They aren't quite what we might want to use to decorate in our home and there's little available wall space in the studio. These will probably go to the curb (after I've removed the images) along with a sign that says, "Free to Anyone who Needs Them." I think we are quickly coming to be a "post frame society." 

Then I really have to do something with the growing forest of tripods that threatens to take over my space. I think I hit the tipping point last month when I capriciously acquired a very big Benro tripod that extends up about seven or eight feet in the air. Well over my head without having to extend the center column. I thought I was going to need it for a job but it turns out, no. So, it's joined eight other tripods and the assortment of monopods and I think they are all plotting a takeover of the rest of the space. They are inanimate so they are patient. The patient ones are the dangerous ones...

The sneaky ones are the old tripod heads that seem to be free ranging around the studio floor. I thought there was a place on a shelf for these renegades but apparently gremlins come in and free them every once in a while and scatter them over the floor. They use some sort of high speed computer to calculate the exact spots throughout the room that will do the most damage when I inevitably trip over them.

And then there are the books. Like viruses in a verdant Petri dish, they just keep reproducing in an attempt to overwhelm the bookshelves and give me a complex for not having enough time to read them all; expediently. 

As it is Spring in Texas all my acquaintances who know that I am a photographer, but who have no clue what sorts of things I like to photograph, are either asking me where the most photogenic patches of native bluebonnet flowers are to be found ---- or they are texting, Facebooking and e-mailing me (not so) secret maps the motherlode of these plain, low-lying flowers. I'm sure the last group think they are enabling me to fulfill my pent up desire to photography chubby, cherubic children nestled in among the plants, and, are looking forward to seeing the rosy cheeks of children, over-lit with poorly done fill-in flash. My only advice to them (and it's serious!) is to watch out for rattlesnakes. They love the blue bonnets....

I like to mess with the folks who seem disposed to love the kitschy photographic adorations of the bluebonnets and other native flowers. I always say how much I love to photograph the rich color palette of the flowers but, like Ansel Adams, I always shoot my landscapes in black and white. For all of you who came of age, photographically, just in the last ten years, let me translate: "black and white" means "monochrome." 

I've been cleaning up all morning and trying to find new homes for the endless materiel I've accumulated recently whose value to me didn't match my anticipation. Now I am taking a break to head out for lunch. 

Which camera will I take? Oh, I am so glad you asked. It's the Sony a6000, saddled up with a Sony nex-to-Nikon adapter and an ancient (pre-Ai) 50mm f1.4 lens. All the fun, none of the progress.....

Any hints on what to do with a stout and heavy, Canon promotional ball head from 25 years ago?

Didn't think so....

It's a quick assessment but I thought I'd write a hands-on review of the Sony 18-105mm f4.0 G lens I bought a few days ago.

Front door to the pool.

After I bought the little Sony a6000 I upgraded the firmware and then started researching lenses. I really have no intention of making a very deep dive into Sony's E system but I wanted a good, all around, walking around, all terrain lens. Something I could keep on the camera for all the times I'm not shooting old Nikon lenses, or even older Olympus Pen-F lenses, with adapters.

I would have loved to have purchased some exotic Zeiss lens. If I couldn't find an E mount Otus 12-120mm f1.4 zoom I would have enjoyed shooting with the Zeiss 16-70mm just fine. But, like almost everyone else, I do have to operate with some budget constraints. Boy in a private college, property taxes soaring quicker than my income, that sort of thing. So I looked for a good compromise. I remember some basic math from my days in electrical engineering school at UT Austin and I ran the numbers; realized that $600 is less than $1000 by a lot percent, and decided I might be able to be happy with the Sony 18-105mm f4.0 G lens. After all, it's a servo zoom and has an extra switch on the side that the Zeiss dream lenses do not. 

My preliminary research pulled up formal lens reviews from the early days of this lens's appearance. I read that the corners (especially at 18mm and thereabouts) were not "critically" sharp and that the lens has some distortion. Imagine that! a 6x zoom with distortion. After I got confused by the melange of conflicting opinions from the professional testers I defaulted to the user reviews on Amazon.com which led me to believe that, while not in the stellar, once-in-a-lifetime, high performance category of lenses, this one made the majority of people who bought it with their own money pretty happy. Four or five star happy. I'm of the opinion that older technical reviews aren't always a good indication of the state-of-the-product as it exists two or three years later. I think conscientious lens makers probably go back and tweak stuff over time; especially based on user reviews. I found that this lens's performance was closer to what I was reading in user reviews and much less odious that what I had been led to believe by the reviewing "savants" of our industry. 

The lens is simple. The only external switch is for a servo zoom. That's a motorized zoom that is also endowed with variable zoom rates; depending on how precisely you can push the button. There is no I.S. on or off switch, no manual/autofocus switch and, of course, no aperture ring. There are two rotating rings near the front of the lens. The one closest to the camera body is the zoom ring, which duplicates the work of the servo toggle (the lens is zoom by wire and focus by wire). The forward ring is the focusing ring. In manual focus and DMF you can grab that ring and control focus. There's not much resistance but I found it easy to get used to after only a couple days of playing. 

The lens is long and gets wider at the front end, culminating in a 72mm filter size. It comes with a fairly big, tulip lens shade. While it looks big the lens is actually quite lightweight and rides around on the camera without making a big deal of its presence. Just be prepared though; the lens is much bigger than the a6000 camera body itself. 

Heading up to the pool from the locker rooms.

Not as much distortion as you might think;

the rock wall is circular....

I'm not going to go into depth in this article with an exacting analysis of the lens's f-stop by f-stop performance. I'm just going to say that I used the wide angle settings and I can blow up the image above and see clearly defined and well reproduced leaves on all the trees (even the ones on the edges). I shot this image at f6.3 and think the vignetting is well under control, the sharpness quite good and the general image quality more than acceptable for my work.

I shot wide open at the wide end and wide open at the telephoto end, and at random settings in between. I notice that, wide open, and with light bouncing around everywhere, the f4.0 aperture can give an overall image that's slightly veiled by overall flare but this is gone by the time you get to one stop down. This means it's probably not the optimum lens for shooting directly into the sun....

When I shoot in Jpeg the lens seems to have no distortion at all. When I shoot raw I see some distortions at the wide angles settings but nothing much worse than I see with the wide angle setting of any other zoom lens from any other maker. My Nikon 24-120mm f4.0 (which I like very much) has much worse distortion at the widest settings....

From the deep end of the pool, an hour before the noon workout on Friday.

So crowded. But I guess the 75 degree weather was keeping people away. 

Fortunately the pool is heated to 80f. 

Some nice things to know if you are considering this lens is the fact that it's all internal focusing and doesn't change lengths as you zoom or focus. The focus is absolutely silent, and, in good light, very fast and accurate. Since there is no distance scale, and the lens resets itself to the wide angle setting if you turn off the camera, you probably won't be using the lens to zone focus in the manual focus setting mode. That's okay with me. I have other lenses sitting around for the times when I want to play street photographer with an "old school" methodology.

The lens seems exactly designed to be a good, basic videography lens; something you might get a lot of use out of on an FS5 or FS7 camera. And, even in a 4K mode, the lens out resolves the format by a factor of a zillion. It should make for crisp video. With very few exceptions I am happy with the images I get out of the lens wide open. That bodes well for its overall performance. 

From the shallow end of the pool. The clear, blue sky can get a bit monotonous during 

long swims. It would be nice if we could get a smattering of puffy white clouds --- at least during 

swim practice ---. You know, just to break up all that infinite blue...

So, this lens is the Sony E counterpart to Nikon's 24-120mmf4.0 and Canon's venerable 25-105mm f4.0. It's not as wide as those two at its widest setting (approx. 27.5 in full-frame speak) but it extends the angle of view out a bit further on the telephoto end to give you the equivalent of a 157.5 mm. Not bad at f4.0. The lens also offers image stabilization but I have no real way of measuring the efficacy of Sony's implementation. It's good but it's not in the Olympus OMD EM5.2 ballpark. Just not. 

This is the workout the coach put up on the board for the Thursday noon workout. 

It was fun. The downward pointing arrows instruct us to "descend" our times 

which means the time elapsed for each repetition needs to be faster....

The secret? Don't go all out on your first 100...

Should you rush out and dump all your other cameras and lenses and buy one of the Sony a6000s and the 18-105mm f4.0 G lens? Well of course not. Just about any camera we shoot with today is pretty spectacular and at least competent to

It's a holiday weekend. We're technically on break. Can I interest you in a thoughtful piece about drones? It's a reprint....

http://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2014/08/drone-enabled-ceo-portrait-session.html

Interchangeable lens Sony cameras have been off my radar for a while. But this week I bought a couple of Sony odds and ends.

We've lately been inundated by news and reviews about the new, Sony a6300 interchangeable lens, APS-C camera --- for a couple of weeks now. It ends up getting re-re-reviewed in some way or another on the front page of DP Review almost daily, and everybody who does a fun web tv show about photography got invited by Sony to Miami Beach for a big, showy launch of that camera. So you see the cigar roller shots and the cabana girl shots everywhere. But.... This is NOT a review of the a6300. This is not a review at all.

This is a blog post about curiosity more than anything else. In the ramp up to the launch of the a6300 Sony trotted out a sales story. According to them the a6000 was the best selling, interchangeable lens, APS-C camera ever minted. Blew the doors off everything else. Outrageous sales! (Which makes one wonder why they didn't take advantage of that leverage to make a bunch of killer APS-C E lenses to go along with the momentum). After I read that, with the sense that I'd blinked and missed some important milestones in the camera industry, I went back and started reading old reviews and assessments and tried tracking down photographers of note who use/used the a6000. What I found is that a lot of people loved the camera ---- inspire of its faults.

Nearly every breathless review of the newer model, the a6300, starts out by comparing it to the a6000 and, if you read between the lines, the cameras have largely the same image quality (the new camera uses the copper wire sensor tech which makes overall processing faster, which leads to a bit more nuanced noise management in shadow areas --- anecdotal, not my first hand experience).  The reviews also mention

What's on the agenda for today? Oh, that's right, I get to give a presentation to the Photographers of Dripping Springs. Yikes! I'd better get organized...

You all know me as a lovable and Quixotic blogger, sequestered in my little studio, typing out opinions about photography and swimming to a vast, and nearly anonymous, audience. Tonight I'll venture out of my comfortable comfort zone and confront all my darkest fears as I give a bout of public speaking a try.

I've been invited to speak at the monthly meeting of the Photographers of Dripping Springs, in Dripping Springs, Texas. I rarely do this sort of thing now but I thought I'd give it the old college try. I'm taking a lot for granted but then, so are they. I'll probably start with a nervous synopsis of where I am today and how I got myself into this messy career. Then, of course, I'll be seized by stage fright and default to the usual photographer's dodge, which is to show a series of unrelated images, curated in an attempt to impress my audience in any way that I can.

I'll hem and haw through a disjointed slide show, adding in gratuitous comments and trying to make jokes. Hopefully the audience will reward me with at least a few dry chuckles...

After that, to atone for the slog through my visual yesteryear, I'll try to cobble together a demo on the way I like to shoot portraits. I wish I knew how I really liked to shoot portraits because that would make the demonstration more compelling. Right now I'm kind of planning on falling back to the ole giant modifier, continuous light, used close in, dodge. To that end I'm packing some LEDs on the premise that, well, I wrote a book about LEDs and maybe I should walk the walk.

If history is any measure then the demo will be a disaster. Something won't turn on, the overhead lights will be controlled somewhere outside our powers and we won't be able to extinguish them so people can see the effects I'm desperately trying to show.

Then we'll wind down and the two or three people who've managed to fight off boredom for the duration of my humbling public speaking engagement will politely ask if they can help me pack. It's inevitable because they'll see me struggling to pull down scrims without everything coming down in a cascade of chaos and damaging the windows or furniture.

It all sounds dreadful for the audience. So what's in it for me? Well, my therapist believes in exposure therapy..... and there was the promise of a free dinner...

See their website for details: http://photographersofds.us

How sharp do we need this to be?

So. How sharp do we need this to be? I guess that's what we'll be asking clients this year. Can I shoot this with a run of the mill zoom lens? Do I need to step up to one of those Nikon lenses with the gold band around it? Maybe I'll need to go up the ladder a few more steps and shoot it with that Sigma Art lens, right? Not good enough? Pull out the Otus?  But to what end?

If you are aiming your image at the web you can probably get away with putting that kit lens on the front of your D810 and shooting the camera in the APS-C mode. I can't imagine too many commercial clients making huge prints but, then again, there are those pesky trade show graphics to think about. Are you doing a lot of those?

I shot the image above for a client who called me up, told me they needed to shoot a picture of an falcon that would need to be reproduced really big. "What kind of files could I produce?" they wanted to know. I shot a bunch of still life stuff to give them an idea of my technical performance with the D810 in uncompressed, 14 bit raw, and I also shot this self-portrait as a humorous rejoinder to their query. I sent over a bunch of enormous, uncompressed tiffs for the advertising agency to evaluate.

Sharpness and resolution was, according to the art director and art buyer, absolutely critical for this project. "We might want to go as large as 40 by 60 inches." they said. We had several phone meetings and they liked what I'd sent them. We talked about logistics. We talked about using high speed flash to freeze motion and add to the technical quality. We even talked about specialized lenses in order to wring the last few nano-slobbers of sharpness out of the scene. We were honing in on the parameters we thought we'd need to lock down in order to give the client the amazing image quality they so richly deserved, and demanded. 

But then I didn't hear from the agency for a couple of weeks so I circled back around, called my agency contact and just...you know...bluntly asked them how the project was going.

There was a sheepish and embarrassed silence for the better part of 20 seconds on the line. "Um. The client  sourced a stock image that we ended up having to use..." they responded. I take that in stride because it happens all the time. But I always ask, "How did it all work out? Was everyone happy?" Again, there was a silent pause.

"Well, the image was shot a while back. It was done with a 6 megapixel camera. We sharpened it up and then sent it to a retoucher to have some more work done on the file... We hope it's going to work but, well, there is a lot of pixelization."

Then it was my turn to be quiet for a few seconds. Then I asked, "Why didn't we just shoot the darn thing?"

"Um. The client wanted to save some money. They'd already spent half a million dollars on the trade show booth and they didn't want to spend a ton of money on photography. The stock shot was only $250."

"Well, thanks for asking me to bid. Maybe we'll do the next one for them."

"Uh. Probably not. Their CEO took one look at the first round of enlarged prints and blew a gasket. We kind of got fired from the account."

"Sorry to hear it. But at least we found out how sharp my camera could be...."

Taking a breather. I have a novel in hand that's too good to put down....

©2016 Kirk Tuck

"Even Dogs in the Wild."  by Ian Rankin.

A wonderful book.