One of the four videos we're producing for a healthcare client.

I came back from Canada last month with hours of good video material that we're weaving into various programs. One of the first priorities was a short video message from the Canadian CEO about the 20th anniversary, in Canada, of one of their prosthetic leg products, the C-Leg.

More videos to come.

I finally had time to do a better edit on this interview with Dave Jarrott. I like it now.

Dave Jarrott Interview Solo from Kirk Tuck on Vimeo.

Location Portrait Shooting in 201X. Leverage what's there.

©2015 Kirk Tuck. All rights reserved.

©2015 Kirk Tuck. All rights reserved.

Recently,  I was asked by an Austin-based tech firm to make a series of portraits of a collection of their people. We're consistently moving away from using manufactured backgrounds for nearly all of our "out of the studio" locations and so my first task was to go to the client's location and scout for good, existing, environmental backgrounds. I was looking for clean spaces that would look good and contemporary. I wanted to find spaces where the backgrounds could be far enough away to achieve limited depth of field; even with smaller format cameras.

The building the company occupies is one of the prime, downtown office towers and the office plan calls for floor to ceiling windows on three quarters of the perimeter. So you have a windows on one side of a continuing hallway and offices on the other. The effect is one of open and airy space. Even the conference room, in which I ended up shooting the top portrait, faces out onto a western part of downtown through an exterior wall that is also a huge window. 

When I shot these images I was still working with the Panasonic GH4 cameras. I used the little 42.5mm lens and my amazing Olympus 60mm f1.5 Pen lens for all of the photographs done for this project and I have to say that I was happy with both the tonality of the lenses and the whole system's ability to render a nicely out of focus background rendition; not too much but not too little...

I used a 50 inch white. 1.25 stop diffuser between the subject and the windows. I did this to drop the level of light on the subject so I could control the overall color and quality of light that fell directly on him. In each image I added to the light on the subject with a bit of flash, bounced into a 60 inch umbrella, to control his contrast and exposure. I felt that by using just natural light there would be a bit too much contrast in the images and I'd rather get the parameters right while shooting than having to labor over stuff in post production. 

The flash also neutralized the greenish-blue cast caused by the tinted office windows. You can see the color cast in the background areas but not on the subject. 

I tried my best to use a light touch on the flash but to still exercise the control needed to get what I wanted aesthetically from each shot. While the photos look casual they were both executed using a tripod to help me hold the exact composition I wanted through the whole series of exposures. 

We've been using styles similar to this for most of our portrait clients over the last three years and have been getting good feedback and repeat engagements. It's a nice style and one that also "cuts" well into video projects. Certainly much better than an executive in front of a blue paper background with a spot circle in the middle of it....

Styles and aesthetics change. We change with them. That doesn't mean there isn't a place for the traditional studio but; oh wait; maybe this is an argument against the traditional studio....

Game Over?

http://www.styleshoots.com/live

Go to this link and tell me what you think. "An endless stream of content..."

Sounds about right.

To Paraphrase Donald Trump, "Who knew that video editing would be so complex and time consuming?"

Photo courtesy: ODL-Design ©2017

A few observations about video: Shooting is less than half of the game, editing is where you tell the story. But if you didn't shoot it right in the first place it's very hard to tell the story right. 

I'm kind of a "big picture" guy. I like the big outlines, and because of that I'm more drawn toward the collegial meetings and the hands-on shooting than I am spending days and days in self-imposed solitary confinement; sitting in front of a computer, staring at tons and tons of options; many of which could work just fine in a final video. If you put them together correctly. 

I sent over a rough edit of my Canada shoot to my client about a week ago. I'd worked hard to incorporate everything we talked about in the program I sent along. But even after I sent it I still sat in front of the computer with the video timeline stretched all the way out across my monitor. I was looking at the little telltale peaks and valleys in the audio track. I was trying to track down the spot where one of my interviewees made a "tsk" sound just before they spoke. I could fix that. And then I look for the subtle scrape of someone else's wristwatch across the top of a desk as they shifted and got ready to initiate their response to a cogent question. It seems like no matter how many times you sit down and open up a project there is always some way; no matter how small, to improve it. 

Today was "detail day." I used a program called, Motion, to build moving titles and I spent time kerning type and worrying about line spacing. I spent a lot more time nudging the color so it would be exactly the way I wanted it. I think I tried every transition technique in Final Cut Pro X to get to the one I finally settled on for one pesky edit. 

What I realize now is that you have to approach every editing project with a plan. You have to know how you want to start out and how you want

Shooting with a new, short zoom. The Sony 28-70mm f3.5 - 4.0. Nice.

You know that feeling that you get when a new (to you) lens gets dropped in your hands? You know it's probably just another reasonably good, modern lens but you just have to put it on a camera and try it out for yourself. Secretly you are always hoping that this one will have that little bit of extra magic that just makes your photographs sing. On key. That's the way I felt when my friend sold me his relatively new (and hardly used) Sony FE 28-70mm lens. I knew it wasn't going to blow away the stuff I already own but I was hoping it had some endearing quality which would become known to me as I shot with it. 

It was gloomy and overcast yesterday afternoon. The threat of rain hung over us like a boring dinner guest reaching for that last slug of great red wine at the bottom of the bottle. I had just finished reading Ian Rankin's gloriously good new novel, Rather Be The Devil, and I was ready to get out of reading chair and get outside. I put on a jacket, grabbed the A7ii and headed away from my sleepy, cloistered neighborhood toward the promise of a hipster downtown. 

Since it was cloudy and flat I set the white balance control to the "cloudy" icon, selected auto ISO and set the lens for f5.6 in aperture mode. All done and ready to shoot randomly and happily. 

I walked from Treaty Oak over to the Graffiti Wall to see what new art had appeared since my last visit many weeks ago. The place was hopping. I brought the camera up to my eye and one of the first things I noticed was how nice and stable the image stabilization seemed. As I understand it the camera system uses both the lens stabilization and the body stabilization in tandem. That gives you full five axis performance. 

There are no external switches on the lens. It's extremely spare. I thought the images had a nice bite to them. 

There is something nice about having a small, lightweight package that wasn't priced to break the bank on the front of my beater camera. I was still careful to keep it from getting drenched in a sudden downpour. That's why I keep a one galloon ZipLoc bag in my jacket pocket on days like today. I got wet but my camera stayed dry. 

All in all I am a fan of the lens. It's pretty nice. 

When will we see a refresh of the Sony A7xx series? Here's what I think we'll see in the next revisions.

Every working photographer has his or her own favorite camera system and most of them are pretty loyal. Once you find a brand you are comfortable with it takes a lot for most people to abandon the known and comfortable for the supposedly greener grass next door. I bounced around from system to system until I landed squarely in the Sony camp and I couldn't be happier. So happy that I've been able to give my credit cards and bank account a vacation for the last full year. And most of that warm, fuzzy feeling about the Sony system is due to the big lifeguard in the Sony pool, the A7Rii.

The "big" Sony flagship combines very high resolution (cherished by some clients) with near industry leading dynamic range (making photographers and videographers smile) to make it a great still camera for a large swath of users. While I would not recommend it as a sports camera or a fast action camera those of us who make portraits, shoot products, produce lifestyle shoots, make landscapes, photograph food, etc. have embraced it for its exemplary image quality.

On the video side the ability to shoot high quality full frame, and even higher quality APS-C cropped 4K video, and to write that 100 mbs video directly onto the camera's SD card makes it the top of the current full frame cameras, mirror-free or DSLR, for shooting video. In fact, it's only real competitor in the full frame (35mm) range of cameras, for shooting video, comes from its own sibling, the Sony A7Sii.

Just knowing I've got this camera in the case makes me confident that I can photograph pretty much whatever a client throws at me and that I'll be satisfied with the results.

In the Sony camera line there is another full frame camera