The process of "standing in" so we can figure out lighting and what needs to be cleaned up.

Amy stands in for a Radiologist as we begin the prep of the scene.

I've been working for one large radiology practice here in the Austin, Texas area for nearly twenty years. They are fun to work with and have lots and lots of cool gear that looks great in photographs. Every few years, as the gear changes and the practice evolves, we get to do a series of daylong photo assignments in order to help them build an ever-changing image catalog that the practice's marketing team can use for advertising and public relations. 

Yesterday Amy (my assistant) and I met up at one of the practice's mid-town clinics to make environmental portraits of doctors and health navigators. Our client wanted to use selective focus in the images in order to focus attention on the people and pull attention away from unnecessary background detail. It was an opportunity to give one lens in particular a workout. I used the Rokinon 50mm f1.2 lens as frequently as I could and supplemented with the Sigma 30mm f1.4 when I needed a wider angle of view. The important thing for my was how well each lens worked at or near its widest aperture. In that regard both lenses passed my tests. 

Since we were aiming to work with the taking lenses used as wide open as possible I decided to skip electronic flash and do all of our lighting with LED panels. Working this way made it easier to get an exact balance between the room illumination and the brightness of the reading screens that were somewhere in nearly every frame. 

My method in setting up lighting was: First get the right illumination intensity on the dominant computer screens. Second, set up lights that would mimic the direction and type of light illuminating the face of someone sitting in front of a monitor. In the case above we had a tight space to work in behind the computers (less than a foot). I taped white paper on the wall in front of Amy, behind and above the monitors and bounced a small LED panel off the paper. It made a convincing computer monitor light source that was controllable. 

The next step is to balance the primary illuminate on the subject with the illumination on the screens. This is straightforward as most good LED lights can be adjusted from 10% power to 100% power in tiny increments. After the balance is achieved we bounced several lights from the ceiling to bring up the overall light levels so we could seen into the shadow areas in a believable way. 

Once we got everything lit we started cleaning up the clutter that would be in the shot. We removed the lighting fixture just behind Amy's head, cleared off papers, eliminated the bar scanner in the bottom left hand corner of the frame, etc. Only then were we ready to bring in our physician and start the process of posing and fine tuning. If we are photographing someone in a white coat we keep the portable steamer close at hand to get rid of wrinkles. 

Since I was shooting at or near wide open it was important to go beyond focus peaking and punch in as far as possible in preview mode in order to get a highly magnified section of the frame for fine focusing. I compose the shot and then move the target for focus to the eyes of the subject without moving the camera. Focus and recompose is NOT an option with narrow depth of field....

I've also learned (the hard way) to check focus frequently. When manually focused any sway on the part of the subject might be just enough to kills the sharpness where it's needed. We worked on a tripod for all but two of the shots in our assignment yesterday. It helps. 

Amy stands in for a classic "hallway" portrait. 

Clients sometimes like backgrounds that dissolve away. But with m4:3 cameras making backgrounds dissolve works best if the subject is fairly close to the camera and the background is fairly far away. We found the hallway above and decided it would be a great place to make portraits of busy doctors. 

My first impulse was to block the existing light with a scrim and then re-light the subject but when I put Amy into the location the art director and I decided on I noticed that the ceiling lights were indirect, firing into a white barrel vault ceiling that made the lighting very soft and flattering. All that was really needed was a white reflect just under the bottom of the frame to bounce light back under our subjects' chins. Before Amy set the white reflector in position we used it as a target for a quick custom white balance. When the art director saw the results on the monitor she decided that we could do two other people in the same location. As with the first image I am using a tripod, shooting wide open and re-focusing frequently. 

(Note: if you are using an AF lens in a situation like this, and it's one of the Olympus Pro series, make sure to switch the AF off on the camera body. Using the manual clutch on the lens is great but once you take your hands off the lens barrel  and then touch the shutter button the camera will re-focus your lens UNLESS you have set the camera into MF).

Our biggest challenge in the shot above was to keep people out of the background. While we were shooting after hours we had a bunch of talent waiting for various shots and they wandered in and out of the hallways. A lot. Had the budget been even more generous I would have hired a second assist and tasked them with keeping people corralled and keeping an eye on clients who wander away from the set just when I'm looking for shot approval.... :-)

Having a stand in is great because getting busy doctors to stand still while we change this and that is a money losing venture of the practice and they are not nearly as cooperative in the pre-shooting part of the exercise as a good assistant.

Amy stands in on our "consultation" location. 

A lot of location photography is about moving furniture so it works for our compositions. Consultation rooms and exam rooms are small because....they don't need to be big and square footage in Austin is expensive. But the tighter the space the harder it is in which to light and compose. Our quick stand in shot showed me that we needed to cant the small couch and the matching chair about 20 degrees counterclockwise in order to best show both faces of the talents who would be in our consultation shots. Since the room was tiny and my back was against the wall we needed to have the art director and the talent wait outside the door as we brought in three lights, some modifiers and a bounce card or two. It's easier to put a plan into place if you aren't dodging closely packed people.

The shot above is our starting point. There is a process which involves putting up the lights you think will work and then fine-tuning and the looking, again and again. Better not to bore your subjects or your art directors with too much picky rearrangement; especially when you have a good and patient assistant in tow. 

Our final location. Another spot for consultations. 

We were on our way to another consultation "closet" when we walked past a big, welcoming waiting area and it dawned on me that this would work much better, photographically. I liked the nice, warm light in the fixture at the back-left of the frame and the colors were great. We switched around some chairs and then started lighting by using the illumination of the "practical" light as our starting point. Some top light and a bit of back light from the right side of the frame were just right. I backed up as far as I could and shot with the 50mm Rokinon (which is the equivalent to a 100mm in full frame). 

About two hours into the shoot Amy walked up to me and handed me a bottle of water. "Drink." She commanded. She is aware that sometimes I get into the rhythm and schedule and forget to stay hydrated. It's good to have assistants that are watching out for me.

The entire shoot yesterday was lit with two Aputure Amaran 672S daylight LED panels and one smaller Amaran 96 panel. The bigger panels both use Sony NP970 batteries which are enormous and heavy. The benefit is that we were able to shoot for about five hours and still come back to the studio with at least 50% in reserve for each light. Since both of the big lights take two batteries I also packed two more sets. Just in case. You never know when you'll need to run at full power for long set up.....

I think of yesterday's shoot as a warm-up for our shoot coming up on Saturday. We'll be on location for a full, long day at a different location. We'll have about 12 models and 3 marketing staff with us as well as a hair and make-up person. The client is arranging craft service and, so far, they've done an exemplary job. 

The Panasonic GH5 continues to exceed my expectations ---- as long as I use premium optics and use them correctly. The LEDs are priceless for work like this. But the best productivity on jobs like this is a good assistant who keeps an eye on schedule, clothing details, stuff intruding into the frame and more. Amy is a great assistant! On a busy location it's best not to cling too strongly to the "one man band" concept of production photography.

Hope your week is good. We're packing up for tonight's video project. More on that tomorrow...

Trailing lens reviews. The Sigma 60mm f2.8 DC DN Art. Nice.....

If you own a small sensor camera, be it a micro four thirds or an APS-C Sony mirrorless, you might seriously consider picking up one of the absolutely cute and very high performance 60mm f2.8 DC DN lenses that Sigma has been making for a number of years now. This is the third time I've owned this lens. I first bought the early version that fit on the m4:3 cameras but it left in a purge on my way toward the Sony system. One of the first lenses I bought for the Sony a6300 (a high performance imaging camera with a huge deficit of handling comfort) was the Sony version of the same lens. And once I migrated back to the m4:3 system late last year it was a lens I quickly searched out.

Here's why: It's small, light, cheap, fun to look at and.....it delivers wonderful and pristine optical performance even when used at its widest aperture. It has a wonderful combination of bite and realism. It's capable of high resolution with high contrast and, one of my favorite lens test sites, Lenstip.com, raves about the overall imaging performance of the lens -- across all the systems for which it is available.

For people who need wide angle lenses because they just can't make up their minds about what needs to be included in their photos and what needs to be excluded from their photos it might be a little long (focal length, not physical dimension...). But, if you like to isolate subjects and have definitive ideas about cropping the focal length is very good on the m4:3 cameras (equivalent to a 120mm on a 35mm, full frame camera) and perfect on an APS-C camera (90mm equivalent).

It also has the added benefit of being able to focus quite closely as you can see below. While it won't take the place of a good macro lens it will let you cut out a lot of extraneous clutter while maintaining high sharpness. My impression about the quality of its out of focus areas is that they are some and smooth and very desirable. (See image just below).

The lens comes with a hood and a small case and is around $240. While the f2.8 aperture may seem inadequate for some low light uses the two advantages bestowed by the limited f-stop are: It's fully sharp and usable wide open and it's comfortably small and portable. 

I consider it one of the great bargains available for all of the cropped sensor systems. You should rush out and buy one right away. If it doesn't fit on your full frame Canon or Nikon DSLR camera (it doesn't) then this gives you the perfect excuse to finally get rid of that old clunker and step into the wonderful world of smaller and more capable mirror-free camera systems from Sony (APS-C), Olympus and Panasonic.

I figure that any lens worth owning three times over is a lens you'll probably want to try.

Format Agnostic Photography. In defense of almost all sensor sizes.

Image from Eeyore's Birthday Party, 2017. ©2017 Kirk Tuck.

I've been playing with the Nikon D2Xs for the last few days---in between shooting real stuff with my GH5 cameras--- and today was no different. I decided to continue my sentimental reattachment to big, fat, old school cameras by venturing out with the Nikon and a 50mm f1.8, just to see how it might affect my image making process. My head was filled with optimistic memories of my original time with the D2Xs and I was out to see if my good memories were more a result of that camera being about as good as you could get at that point in history, and my ability to accommodate its foibles, or, if it was really a wonderful photo instrument.

The body is certainly more solid than the mirrorless Sony cameras I had been shooting with until recently but the GH5 cameras give up nothing to the Nikon in that regard.

I decided to park at ZACH Theatre, which is just across the river from downtown proper. I would walk across the small campus and head over to my usual walking route via the pedestrian bridge. Since I was at the theatre at the right time I followed the groups of people as they entered the lobby in anticipation of the afternoon matinee of, "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Park in the Night Time."

I stopped in to see who might be playing piano in the lobby bar and to take a look around to see if the life-size posters marketing the upcoming shows had been put up yet. I always like to see how my work is used and how it looks in print. Especially large print.

There are four new, life-size, printed posters up. Two are from the same shoot. That was an assignment I did using the RX10iii and the Panasonic FZ2500. One image is for "Beauty and the Beast" --- it's an elegant photograph of Leslie Anne Leal as "Belle" holding a red rose out in front of her gold dress. She, of course, looks adorable but the surprise is just how good the image looks, technically,  from as close as a three or four feet away. The colors are right on the money and the details are crisp without looking crunchy. Uncropped, the entire frame would be about 4x6 feet. I thought it was a pretty convincing result from a camera with a sensor the size of a thumbnail. I was almost certain it was made with the Sony but I went back and checked and saw that it was done with the Panasonic.

Just a bit further across the lobby was a photograph of an actor in the character of the artist, George Seurat, for the upcoming production of Stephen Sondheim's play, "Sunday in the Park with George." This poster was printed the same size as the Beauty and the Beast poster but it started life as a file in a Sony A7R-ii. While the file was different there were few clues (probably only apparent to me) that the images were shot with different cameras. The posters are classic point-of-puchase-style collateral and they are designed and produced to be seen up close. I will say one thing for consistent practice of technique and that is that you have a much better chance of the final color matching across projects and from various cameras.... if you do the technical stuff by the numbers.

The final image I looked at was from one of our earlier marketing shoots for the current main stage production; The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Park at Night Time. I made those photographs using dim stage lighting and a couple of battery powered LED panels with the Panasonic GH5 and its friend, the Olympus 12-100mm f4.0 Pro series lens. While it was done in a different overall style from the other two posters, and it was presented as a horizontal (a pick-up from the advertising campaign) it still maintained the same overall look and feel of the other two posters.

Seeing this work, across three formats, presented in the same space and for the same client, was a very interesting experience. If I had seen only the Beauty and the Beast poster alone I would have worried that it might suffer by comparison with posters made with other format size cameras and I would have beaten myself up for allowing my own hubris to move me into selecting what many would characterize as the "wrong camera" for this kind of work. Same with the GH5 generated poster. But seeing them all in the same space and being able to approach each of them at the same viewing distance I was impressed to see just how well the smaller formats actually performed.

The realization that the camera is less important to the overall process than things like good (and ample) lighting, the use of a nice tripod, good technical approaches to white balance and exposure, and a good stage-side manner all seem to me to be much more important than the sensor dimensions of the imaging device.

All of this took the wind out of my sails as far as my imagined appreciation for the vintage Nikon camera went. I decided to continue the walk anyway and trudged on making only five or six unimaginative and boring photographs (which I will not share). That's fine with me. Not every day can be successful for photography. But the walk was much needed. I was looking forward to this morning's swim practice but when we'd gotten about 45 minutes into it we got lots of thunder and meteorological excitement ( one swimmer said, "I didn't see any thunder...") and we had to clear the pool a half an hour early. Nothing worse than a truncated swim practice after a long and emotionally draining week. A couple hours of walking, with or without a camera, is a great way to clear out the cobwebs and get back into a good groove.

Thinking of returning the camera and continuing my concentration on the micro-four-thirds cameras and the marvelous range of lenses available for them. Seems like a more fun way to make photographs.

FINALLY !!!! My video of Stephanie Busing for ZACH Theatre is back up and public. Good thing too, I was running out of stuff to write....

Continuing to test the limits of fast lenses on small sensors. A new discipline which may require me to purchase some additional Olympus Pro lenses.

I've got two jobs fighting each other to get in the queue for uploads. We photographed the show at Esther's Follies (a crazy, topical comedy and magic theater) and ended up with 1133 images. I delivered enormous and detailed Jpeg files yesterday via memory stick but my typical practice is to also upload finished jobs (in Jpeg form) to Smugmug.com for safekeeping. If a client eventually loses the memory stick, didn't back up the files and is desperate for a particular photo, I can send them to the gallery where they can identify the photo and download it. A good and neat solution for a busy photo business that can't spend time running down a request for an old image that starts with, "You know, it's that image of Bob. He about medium height. Brownish hair. Medium weight. I think he was wearing a dark suit.... but it's the one where he is smiling....I can't remember if it was from the event in 2010 or 2013..."

At any rate, hot on the heels of delivering the Esther's Follies work, but before I could start the upload process, I had to zoom over to Zach Theatre to photograph a rehearsal of "Good Night Moon" for their marketing. I just finished post processing the take and, since we now deliver to ZACH almost entirely via FTP, I'm uploading 833 files to them. Fun when jobs get stacked up like airplanes over big airports.

I'm heading down to San Antonio for a memorial service. I'll be back this evening and then back down to SA tomorrow to have lunch with my dad. Weekends are becoming busier than the work week. Lots of excitement this week! Two big assignments to shoot on location for a huge radiology practice. I'll be working with my favorite assistant, Amy Smith, and my favorite camera, Mr. Panasonic GH5. Maybe that rogue-ish Nikon will make a small, guest appearance; just to confuse the fanboys on either side....

Too much depth of field in the image just above.... Darn Rokinon 50mm f1.2. But look at the nice sharpness right in the middle.

Are you guys following Michael Johnston's "The Online Photographer"? I may change my mind a lot when it comes to buying cameras but it looks like Mike is having issues deciding on which ones to buy. Look at what he's selected. What great camera is he missing?

Given his stated use parameters (earlier columns) what would you suggest?

The black backpack is packed. I'm heading down to Sixth St. in Austin, Texas to photograph the show at Esther's Follies.

From a "Wendy Davis" skit a few years back.

Esther's Follies is a live theater that's been dishing up satiric political humor, topical celebrity craziness and magic acts for as long as I can remember. For years I've been trundling down there with a box full of studio flashes to make marketing images for them before and after rehearsals. Last year we changed gears a bit and decided to shoot an actual show from within the audience; just to see what we got. 

As usual, I overshot and we ended up with over a thousand images. Some of them pretty decent. A handful really good. It was a good idea and so earlier in the week I got an e-mail requesting a new round of "action" photographs. There are some caveats....

The stage is smaller than the one's I shoot on a couple times a month at Zach Theatre and the lighting isn't quite state of the art. The audience is a paying audience and, since there is a full bar in the lobby, they can sometimes be.... unpredictable. This is a situation that calls for a silent shutter and the ability to scope out a location where I will be surrounded by happy and cooperative people. 

I'm taking two cameras and four lenses. I anticipate doing the entire show with the Olympus 40-140mm f2.8 Pro lens and the Olympus 12-100mm f4.0 Pro lens but I am bringing along the Panasonic 25mm f1.7 and the 42.5mm f1.7 just in case. Sometimes the magic act uses lower light levels. I might have time to switch to the 42.5 to capture that but we'll see. There's no intermission, the program is fast and furious, and I don't have the advantage of having seen this particular show in advance. 

I'll be using the GH5's in their silent/electronic shutter mode. Everything will be, by necessity, handheld. The theater still uses tungsten stage lights so my WB selection will be a straightforward 3,000K but I'll hedge my bets by setting the camera to make raw files. 

At least I know what I'll be doing tomorrow morning after swim practice; I'll be post processing a ton of live theater files. I only hope I can get them done by 2pm because I have another theater shoot tomorrow afternoon. 

It's 3 p.m. at Zach Theatre. Another dress rehearsal for another play on one of the smaller stages. But those files might have to wait until Sunday for their author's meticulous attention. I've got a solemn family event in San Antonio to attend on Saturday.

I like the m4:3 system because everything I need fits into one convenient backpack. I never know where I'll find parking in downtown Austin so it's good to have a comfortable way to carry the tools of the trade. 

Have you had one of those months when all the work seems to be crammed into the last ten days of the month? That's the way it feels to me.

Well, time to head downtown. I want to get there before the theater fills up. My one regret? No dogs allowed in the theater. Studio Dog will just have to sit this one out. 

"Forgive me fellow photographers for I have sinned and fallen short. I confess to having used the latest rev. of Portrait Professional software to help in the retouching of my portraits today. My process is now artistically impure."

Yesterday I was looking at a folder filled with files that needed to be retouched. They were all portraits and most of them were shot against the same gray background and with the same lighting. I confess to being severely unmotivated to go in to each file and meticulously work on skin tone, brightening eyes, cleaning up teeth, getting the skin to look nice and all the rest.

I remembered that I'd used Portrait Professional in the past. One iteration from 2011 and one from 2014, but I'd found both of them, at the defaults, were too heavy handed and obvious. I sighed and made coffee. Then I took another stab at creating multiple layers, smoothing skin via masking and blending the uneven skin tones of middle-aged men who spend too much time golfing.

In a moment of bore-stration (boredom and frustration) I clicked on Anthropic's website to see what, if any, changes had been made to their software package. It turns out that they've fine-tuned and automated a bunch more stuff, including automatic masking for backgrounds, and a panel of controls for picture-wide brightness, contrast, saturation, brightness, clarity, etc. With a much enlarged range of controls it seemed to me that one might be able to do most of the retouching necessary for many portrait files without ever firing up an Adobe product in anger.

There's always a sale going on for previous customers so I plunked down my $29 for the upgrade, loaded the app and took a look around. It was un-buggy this time. No support needed.

Portrait Professional automatically finds the important features on a face and, after asking you if the subject is female, male or a child, it automatically makes a series of corrections which include skin smoothing, face sculpting, and general (but this time much more subtle) image flattery.

I pre-processed my selected raw files in Lightroom CC Classic, matching exposures and colors. I exported the resulting files as 8-bit Tiffs (raws not welcome in PortraitPro...standard edition) and tossed them in a folder. Then, one by one, I loaded them and let the program do its stuff. All but 2 of 21 files were imminently usable without any further intervention. The two questionable files were of a fellow with lots of freckles --- always a judgement call.

I'll estimate that the program saved me about an hour and a half of repetitive work today and also provided (probably) better consistency between skin tones than I would have gotten working in my manual, hands on method.

For the $29 upgrade I felt like I'd just secured another bargain. Wow. First a cheap D2XS and now a cheap software upgrade. The week is looking up for me... It's Portrait Professional 17. No link here, that's what Google is for.....when they aren't busy spying on us all.