Painted patriotism at the Graffiti Wall. Just in time for the 4th of July!

Flag at the Graffiti Wall. Austin, Texas. July 3rd. 2016

Camera: Sony A7ii

Lens: Contax 28-85mm

©2016 Kirk Tuck

This is a pink house. Very pink.

In the Clarksville neighborhood of Austin. Just minutes from downtown. 

A re-test of the Contax 28-85mm f3.3-85mm without using Super Steady Shot. Oh my goodness...

I sure liked the color I was getting out of my new, old, used but "like new" Contax C/Y 28-85mm f3.3-4, Zeiss Vario Sonnar zoom lens the other day, but I wasn't too thrilled with the apparent sharpness (or subtle lack thereof) when I really dove in and examined the frames at 1:1 in Lightroom. Even though I am just a humble artist I tried real hard to figure out what an engineer or other technically adept person might do by way of more rigorous testing. I wanted to see if the lens was at fault or if I had mis-set something on the camera to cause an issue. But gosh golly! That kind of analytical thinking comes hard to flighty arts and crafts people so I called to see if there was a "genius bar" at the local camera store, you know, to see if any one had some ideas about, you know, sharpness. 

That didn't work out but I was lucky enough to meet some young geniuses up at the swimming pool when the lifeguards cleared the pool of kids at the top of the hour (to do a body count? To let adult swim laps for ten minutes?) I turned to a couple of the five year old dudes who were sitting next to me on the deck and asked their opinions about the whole lens sharpness issue. One of the kids told me he just didn't keep up with the mirrorless products but the other kid, right off the bat, asked me if I'd had the Super Steady Shot feature of the A7ii engaged. I told him that I had. He just shook his head and chuckled. "Look." he said, "I know everyone loves Image Stabilization but it's really a mixed blessing with those old legacy lenses. Especially zooms." 

"But why?" I asked. 

"Well, because you can't lock in a single appropriate focal length setting for the zooms in the camera menu and that means you are always either over compensating or under compensating with lenses that have no data sharing." The kid adjusted his goggles and snuck another look at the Rolex Submariner Jr. on his wrist. He was anxious to get back in the water.

His friend chimed in: "You also have to consider that with the 4x size of the sensor, compared to smaller sensor cameras, the mass of the moving assembly is harder to control. You'll never get the same results as you would with a smaller format camera; especially one with 5 axis image stabilization." The kids started fidgeting as the clock counted down the seconds till the pool re-opened. I was about to ask about nano acuity (always puzzling for artists but never for engineers and the technically blessed) but the lifeguard blew his whistle and the two kids jumped back into the swimming pool and sped away. 

I got up to leave and the lifeguard leaned down toward me from his perch on the lifeguard chair and said, "Sir, I really wouldn't worry about the idea of perfect sharpness, it's an oversold idea in photography, and so much more depends on your focusing technique anyway..." I nodded and grabbed my towel, and I looked for my flip flops because the deck had gotten hot. 

As I walked away one of the mom's supervising some of the smaller children in the kiddie pool walked over and said, "I'm sorry to eavesdrop but I had the same problem with a Noctilux and an adapter on an A7sii. You really can't fully trust focus peaking either. Especially with higher res files. Be sure to try punching in the magnification and fine focusing at 10X or more. Then you'll know if it's the lens or your technique. But really, the kids were right about the compromises with legacy lenses and Super Steady Shot. Sometimes I'm just tempted to go back to my Mamiya RZ67..."  She gave a little laugh and turned back to smear sunscreen on one of her kiddos. 

I'm a bit slow to understand lofty technical ideas so I sat in my car in the parking lot for a few minutes and wrote down what I thought I had learned on an index card. When I got back to the studio I asked a teenager to Google the owner's manual for my camera and read, several times, about how to turn on and off the SSShot. Then I got the teenager to help me set the control to "off" on the camera. 

I went out today and tried my whole test over again and I was amazed. The five year old swimmers were right. Turning off the Super Steady Shot was just the ticket. When I look at these images on my monitor, even at 100%, they are just as sharp as they can be.

I hope those two kids are at the pool again some time this week, I have some tax questions I want to run by them.

The relentless pursuit of making things easier for consumers. Manufacturer tyranny.

I wrote a piece yesterday concerning the loss of hands-on craft in our commercial business of photography and what I think we have lost as a result of pulling back from a real immersion in the pursuit of our art. After talking to an old friend yesterday, who works in the retail camera industry, I thought I would turn my ire toward one more pernicious aspect of "modern" photography, and that is the desire on the part of camera makers, and perhaps their target audiences, to make everything easier.

There are two things that camera makers like to add to their cameras to increase their appeal to the mass market: One is any gizmo or techie sounding feature that promises to do something that might otherwise require, taste, skill, time, discipline etc. Over the years these "improvements" have included all kinds of crap that most people use once or twice before going right back to the way they have been using cameras for many years. I include in this list: Scene modes (fireworks, baby's first vomit, sports, sunsets, autumn, kaleidoscope and countless others), the much despised auto HDR mode and the even more hated, Effects (miniature trains, grunge, super vivid, fractal-ated, ultra-grainy, old fashioned and, my favorite, the boring picture setting). I would also include the "features" that one percent or fewer of people use on their cameras such as wi-fi and GPS. (Yes, I know you can control your camera via wi-fi, save yourself a lot of aggravation and get a $25 remote...works every time).

The other stuff that cameras makers tout and camera buyers buy is anything that reduces the customer's need for any kind of skill or discipline, or learning of the actual craft. Fool proof auto focus modes, fool proof exposure modes and faster and faster frame rates. The idea being that if one just holds down that shutter button long enough.....

There are camera trends I can't really argue with. Those would include anything that gives the user the potential to exceed the image quality of previous generations of cameras with meaningful improvements like increased dynamic range, more bit depth and lower noise.

One trend I am ambivalent about is size and weight. And the orientation or flexibility of rear screens.

My friend's pet peeve, especially acute when he teaches photo classes, is that everyone is looking for the quickest and easiest way to do something. Along the lines of: "I saw this photo by Richard Avedon that was really cool. Is there a filter on my Canon Rebel that will get me the same look?"
The current state of the industry is such that almost every camera buyer believes that it is no longer necessary at all to have a learning curve beyond finding out where the button lies that will automatically do Scavllo, Penn, Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, or even the Joel Grimes or Joey Lawrence looks. The customer belief is that the difference between what they've been able to achieve and what famous photographers have been able to achieve lies solely in a filter that can be enabled on demand.

I'm amazed at regression toward apathy but even more amazed at people's sense of automatic technology entitlement. A case in point, some moron was going on and on, in a photography forum, about the Sony RX10iii. He was complaining about the sorry state of that camera's image stabilization when shooting 4K video, handheld at 600mm PLUS the full digital zoom. He was blaming the camera for not being rock solid while hand held at 1200mm.  In video! Because, with the right button, no one should ever need to buy a tripod  again. Right? (The reality is that most competing cameras don't even offer real (non-electronic) image stabilization in 4k and, if image stabilization is critical, dropping into 1080p will allow RX10ii and iii users some of the very best video image stabilization on the market today). I was stunned at the writer's misguided assumptions.

The magic filter. The infallible camera. The automated settings for volcano eruptions or pub crawling. They all exist so camera makers can convince most consumers that ANY knowledge is absolutely unnecessary in the making of "great" photographs....and videos.

The end result of all this is very, very interesting. By eliminating the need, the want, or the chance to make meaningful use of good cameras' underlying strengths (bigger sensors, high speed shutters, low noise, fast apertures, etc.) the camera makers, by relentlessly pushing simplification and automation, are pushing potential buyers right into the waiting and gloriously uncluttered arms of the iPhones, Galaxy Phones, iPads and Surface tablets as the preferred imaging tools of choice. And why not? If you convince a consumer that simplicity and/or automation is the name of the game then what could be simpler than using the phone? It makes life easy. It eliminates the need to make choices. And you can apply all the filters you might ever want, after the fact, right there on the phone. (I guess that's another bonus...).

Is it any wonder that sales of traditional cameras have fallen from a high of nearly 10 million per year in 2010 to barely more than 2 million, per year, this year?

If our own writing (the photo blogger community) constantly emphasizes the ease with which a new camera can be used, and we emphasize as important the ability of a camera to fit into one's pockets, and we emphasize in our writing how "retro" a camera is, and we talk about how cool it is to have NFC, GPS and filter modes, then it's little wonder that the camera makers bend over backwards to make those features universally available. And little wonder the makers don't feel the need to make real strides in parameters that actually make pictures better.

The boys at DP Review aren't doing anyone favors by focusing on trivial crap like touch screens and in-camera raw processing instead of a camera's core performance. They are essentially signaling to a whole generation of buyers that gimmicks trump performance in the camera market. The analogy being the way minivans are sold: How many cup holders and how many DVD screens for the kids? Not gas mileage, safety, resale value, or even necessary performance to drive on the highway.

I buy cameras in spite of the gimmicks and not because of them. I think most of my readers do the same. But eventually, if the camera makers follow Apple down the rabbit hole of design and features we'll all be left with nothing to shoot with but our phones ---- or weak imitations of the phones. And that would be sad.

Finally, can we just stop using the phrase: "It's a deal killer for me." As in the nearly universal: Well, it had the highest resolution sensor, the best high ISO noise numbers, the best optics, the best AF system, and the best dynamic range, but....the screen on the back of the camera only rotates through 180 degrees; not 360 degrees, and that's just a deal killer for me.

Another variation: "I needed a camera with perfect 4K video, super high resolutions, Zeiss lenses, microphone input, headphone jack, phase detection on the sensor, great still image performance, lightweight, great handling and an EVF. I looked at the XXXXX, and the YYYYY but they both had only one SD card slot and that was a deal killer for me..."  Must have been that guy who learned how to load two rolls of film in the same camera at the same time to shoot back up film in the film days. Critical. Right? (Slow film goes first in the film gate and then the faster film fits in behind it....).

In my mind there are only two "deal killers." One is that you just can't afford the tool you want to buy. The second is that the camera lacks a integral imaging feature you desperately need to do your work. Everything else is just a dilettante's way of saying, "Since I don't really use my camera for anything meaningful I can wait forever for all the stars to line up and the camera makers to exhaust every possible combination of good and bad crap until I see just what I want."

I don't think people who are immersed in their art have the luxury of waiting around for "the perfect list of features." They need a camera that is close enough right now...

Spinning rims, cupholders, voice activated tray tables, etc. Yawn. Panorama mode, auto HDR, Smile detection, etc. Yuck.

Do you miss your craft?

Almost every day for the past sixteen years I've gone to swim practice at the same pool. I get in the water and swim the workout that the masters coaches put up on the white board.  Sometimes it's sets I'm not fond of but I trudge through it. Sometimes there are sprint sets that are just a joy. It doesn't matter. All that matters is how good the practice of swimming and hour or an hour and a half each day makes me feel. You would think with all this practice I would have the goal of competing in swim meets, racing other swimmers, racking up trophies.

I share the lanes with like-minded swimmers. John has been swimming in the program as long as I can remember. He's a great swimmer and he loves being in the water, and being good at swimming. But as long as I've known John he's never gone to a swim meet. There is something about the practice and the continuity he enjoys. Maybe it's just the idea of having more or less total control over one aspect of life for an hour or so each day.

We were having coffee after practice with our usual group of swimmer friends. John and I were at one end of the table and we were talking about business. Out of the blue he asked me if I liked the way my business was now, because of digital. He was pretty sure I would say that I liked it better because it was so much easier to know when you got a good shot, or because I had to spend less time doing things like buying film, developing, making prints and all the rest.

I thought about it and I asked him, in return, if you knew you could get up on the starting blocks on any given day and bang out a 100 meter freestyle in a minute or less, without coming to daily practice would you stop coming to swim practice? Of course not. We love the process. We love the feel of the cool water on our skin. We love the way camaraderie continually pushes us to come to the pool and stay in shape. We love the feeling of mastery. We love the feeling of being in the water.

As I thought more about our conversation I realized that the thing that has frustrated me most about our business since our transition to digital is that there is no more in-depth process. We trade real process for "researching techniques on the web." When digital eliminated the uncertainty of whether or not we'd gotten the shot it stole from us the comfort and practice of process. Gone were the necessary trips out to the store to buy film and Polaroid, replaced with guilty trips to look at the latest gear. Gone were the quiet hours in the darkroom and the boisterous bonhomie of running into peers at the processing lab.

And, most grievous, the quickness of getting the shots robbed us of spending time getting the shots; and that time represented part of the richness of being immersed in photography.

There was a joy in problem solving in the camera. There was a mission to get everything perfect. It required higher levels of craft; of skill. Now, craft is quaint and post processing for improvement is the norm.

Do I miss the craft aspect of my profession? As much as I would miss my daily swims.

You may color this line of thought as sentiment or nostalgia but I would refer you to a book called, Art and Fear. It's a wonderful book about the life of artists. There is one story in the book that sums up the loss in a different way for me.

There was an experiment in a University ceramics class. The professor divided up the class into two halves. One half was told that they needed only make one perfect piece in order to get an A in the class. The other half was told that they would be graded solely on the sheer weight of the ceramics they created in the semester. More pounds of ceramics made for a higher grade.

One would conjecture that the people who had time to research and ponder and plan for the perfect final piece would obviously come up with the best work. But the reality, semester after semester, was that the class charged with producing sheer quantity of work, consistently, also did the best work. It seems that being enmeshed and immersed in the flow of process led to quicker feedback loops, learning, and finally comfort with the methods and techniques. A fluidity. With that in mind is it any wonder that we can't think of any real, single titan of photography that has emerged since the days of film? No new Avedons, no new Penns, no new Elliott Erwitts, No soaring replacement for Henri Cartier Bresson.

Seems that time and quantity are important ingredients to creating and solidifying a real and unique vision. Today paid work comes more sporadically and it's over quicker. The average photographer works his photography as a second or third job and orbits in and out of the pursuit. The giants of yesteryear probably produced as much photographic work in a year as most new photographers will do in ten, or even twenty years time. How can they hope to rise to the top when they'll hardly be through their own, Been there, done that, what's new phase?, and be ready to embrace their own mature style? How will they make time for the daily iteration that seems so much a part of the process?

Do I miss the process we used to do our work with? Yes, the process was the fun part. Not the sharing or the showing, or the completion. The good work was the part where we had our brains and our hearts fully engaged and were hellbent on making art; not just coughing up another one to share on Instagram.

I think we get too intellectual about photography. Trying after the fact to explain why our images work. As though there is some formula more important than, "I love the way this looks through the finder."

Diagrams, color theory, golden rules, rules of third are nothing more than attempts to explain why humans like what they see. Mostly postulated by people who are unsure of their own vision. Uncertain about the relevance of their own seeing. We are an irrational species. Sometimes we just do stuff because we enjoy it.

If you need to have a manifesto in order to grapple with the promise of success I would suggest you switch to painting or performance art or conceptual art. Either that, or get brave enough to appreciate your own work without the need to dissect it.

Comedians know that there is not a joke in the world that is bettered by the need for further explanation...

Everything about photography seems to be constantly changing and yet, in the commercial world, it seems like we keep doing the same old thing. Over and over.

From the Zach Theatre production of "Alice in Wonderland." 

We've moved from sheet film to roll film, to small digital, and then to larger and larger digital, but we still tend to photograph in much the same way we always have. We're a bit more carefree now since our experimental indulgences have fewer temporal or financial consequences; but really, if you are a working photographer you are mostly doing the same stuff over and over again for decades. It just seems that in every decade we have a whole new set of tools in our hands and slightly different lights on the stands...We wear more black now but we photographers still make silly poses while we shoot and scrunch up our faces to look into the viewfinders. 

Thirty years ago we shot portraits for clients. They weren't for anyone's website, they were mostly used as prints (5x7s) that got sent around to various magazines and newspapers to be used with business articles, or business profiles. If we did a great job, and thought about our work in a wider sense, it sometimes made the jump from a couple columns in the local newspaper to inclusion in an annual report or capabilities brochure. Most of these images were shot with medium format cameras and, of course, they were done on film. The process was more involved but the holistic arc of creation was pretty much the same. If we were working for an ad agency we shot the portraits and then produced contact sheets for selection purposes. If we were working directly with clients, who were less familiar with the photography process, we'd produce 4x5 or 5x5 or 4x6 inch proof prints; depending on the camera format. It always seemed easier for corporate marketing departments to look at the bigger prints when they were working out exactly which frame would make Mr. Smith seem the most... impressive. 

Once they made a choice we'd make prints, or have prints made, which the clients would then distribute to the media channels. If one of the images made the cut to the brochure level, and we'd originally shot it on color negative film, we'd have the lab make a custom 8x10 inch print to deliver to the color separator. Most color separators back then were not happy to work with a negative (and I didn't blame them). 

The process is so very much the same now. We shoot images for portraits and then we build a web gallery for selection purposes. Agencies are competent to make their choices from web galleries but direct clients like to see a selection of images right next to each other. Corporate marketers seem to have no mental persistence of vision in their tool kits. They'll make a preliminary selection set and then we'll put all three or five or eight selected images into one canvas so they can scroll around their screens and see the images together. Once final selections are made we retouch and color correct the images and then deliver them as high res files so our clients can distribute them to the media channels, and maybe consider them for corporate websites, and advertising collateral; both electronic and traditional print.

The client needs haven't really changed. They need to have images that make their people look painless to do business with and they need to look contemporary. Whether that look is still a well tailored business suit or a black t-shirt and jeans is immaterial. 

Our overall process breaks down in the same way: Acquire the client. Create the raw product in a portrait photography session. Share the many iterations that were created during the session via some sharing method. Get the final selection(s) from the client and then scrape off the rough edges and enhance the final product for delivery.  Wake up tomorrow and do it again. 

The clients change from time to time; depending on which industries are ascendant in the moment. But oddly enough, present day mass media generates a homogeneous range of visual styles that are mostly easy to replicate or morph. The images we shoot today could have been shot with the tools from decades ago, easily. The only things that have changed are lighting styles, posing styles and color palettes.

As a portrait photographer I hear the same jokes from generation to generation. "I am so ugly I am afraid I'll break your camera!" "Can you make me look 20 pounds thinner?" "I'm ready for my close-up." "Say cheese." "Cold Blue Steel."  For some reason grown up adults in each generation think it's funny to photo bomb their colleague who is being photographed. Men love to tease each other about the idea of wearing make-up; even if we aren't doing make-up. Nobody but the OCD crew ever seems to remember that today is the day we're doing portraits and so they show up in their Daft Punk t-shirts or a dreadful golf polo with a garish logo on the front. Someone else will always chime in to assure said sartorial moron that the photographer can PhotoShop that out!" 

In the event that we're hired to do environmental portraits no one ever follows through on their promises to clean up the offices and take down the Mardi Gras beads and the My Pretty Pony stickers. The faded safety poster is just where it was pinned ten years earlier. 

In the current milieu there's a newish wrinkle to making good work for the client and their staff and that is the ease with which advertising agencies and web designers can produce look boards and example layouts with stock photographs. The agency puts together comprehensive layouts of "how your website will look" and they use gorgeous, thin, well dressed models, meeting in soaring, open plan offices with lots of groovy modern architectural touches. Across the street, the view out the window, is a gorgeous building with Corinthian columns surrounded by majestic trees; and everywhere you look inside there are curvilinear desks with a bare sliver laptop here and there and no other clutter ----- anywhere. Wildly heightened expectations in most cases.

So, the clients sign off on these architectural and casting fantasies and look forward to seeing their stuff come back in the same basic way. They expect their people and their offices to be beautiful, airy, trim, stylish and sophisticated. Worldly. But their actual offices look as though people had been tossing hand grenades into banker's boxes filled with contracts and kitsch for the better part of a week. The furniture is cheap and utilitarian. The cubicles are crammed together in the same proportion as thirty humans sharing the interior of an Airstream trailer. A small Airstream trailer. Every cube is festooned with heart warming but poorly executed family photos, stuffed, promotional animals, Christmas decorations and the mandatory one gallon, Big Gulp, plastic soda cups. With matching colored straws. 

In the early days of my career most people wore suits and ties or khakis and button downs, to work. Far fewer people were profoundly overweight. It was easier to get light to sculpt faces and easier to work in a more dramatic lighting fashion. Now, not so much. The only people impacted by dress codes today are the "customer facing" folks. Everyone else can come to work dressed "casually." And don't even get me started on poorly done tattoos...or bad hats.

One thing I am certain of is that there is an "aspirational" look and a "reality" look and it's tough for even the most gifted photographer to bridge those two worlds for our clients. Given budgets for models and locations we can make any company look impressive and hip. But, in the real world? Not so much. But it has always been this way. Even in the early days of beige computer boxes and burnt orange shag carpet covered cubicles.

I am fortunate in that most of my clients are in clean, modern industries, and we tend to catch them when their industry sectors are rising stars. Joint venture money has been lavished on the best offices (for recruiting purposes) and the people we photograph are generally from the executive suites and feel tremendous peer pressure to maintain a certain look and quality in dress.

At the end of the day, while the tools we use have changed (somewhat) and the styles we shoot in have morphed (or just cycled), human nature takes longer to evolve. Since I tend to document and interpret those humans I see the similarities, across time, to a much greater degree than I see radical change (or any change beyond hair style and dress). People have not gotten slimmer, prettier, handsomer or better dressed. We now live in a gap between our perceptions of what we should look like and what we do look like. It's driven by the use of imagery that's essentially dishonest and, frankly too desperately aspirational. 

But it was the same in the 1980's. It just wasn't as widely distributed. As avidly shared.

We, as a profession, love to talk about how much everything has changed. Looking closely we see that the core of what we do hasn't changed at all. We use digital instead of film. We love to put most of the frame out of focus now. Next year we'll love to see everything in sharp focus. We use battery powered flashes instead of flashes you plug in the wall (which may partially explain the new desire for lessened depth of field). We use PhotoShop instead of the lab to interpret and deliver what we've shot. But we still go out the door with camera bags and equipment cases. If everything needs to be sharp and in focus we still use the same basic tripods. We still use umbrellas and soft boxes to modify the lights. We still use various lenses to get various angles of view. Make up people still put powder on faces. We use cameras with no mirrors or with mirrors. We accept payments. We license rights. Video is nothing new, we did that decades ago as well; and yes, even back then we knew how to move the cameras...

The only thing (besides the transition from film to digital) that has changed is our idea or perception that somehow everything has changed. But no, the web only made delivery easier. The web is a net neutral as far as our own advertising goes. The move to digital didn't make life easier it added to our workloads and complicated our archival keeping requirements. The only real changes are that we no longer pay for film and processing, and everyone now expects to be miraculously more beautiful than they are in real life. So what's new?