I wanted to learn all about the new cameras coming out at Photokina but I was too busy taking photographs...

So much cool stuff has been announced lately that my brain is in acquisition overload. And yet there's a backlog of equipment I heard about last month... and last year that I found tantalizing and wished I could try out and now I'm finding it hard to change gears, abandon my enthusiasm for cameras that seemed so....just right on a few months ago, and switch my full attention to the latest shiny objects.

Here's a case in point: I've been using several Panasonic GH5 variants in my work over the past year. I love that camera line. I think both the GH5 and the GH5S are wonderful working tools, for a number of reasons, some clearly counterintuitive to many people. 

I was hired to photograph at a three day conference this week. The project was a high tech symposium that would take place mostly at one of Austin's cooler, downtown hotels. I have several camera system options available to me and I grappled for a bit between taking a couple of Nikon D800x cameras and their attendant lenses, or the two Panasonic GH5x cameras and three (or more) of the nice lenses I've put together for that system. 

It's an interesting show for an interesting, cutting edge, high technology/software company and one of the things they've always done differently than my other clients is to make immediate use of the images and video we generate, all day long. That means workflow efficiency is paramount and is a higher priority than ultimate image quality. The truth of the matter is that 99% of the imaging content I'm creating for them will be compressed and used (in some cases almost immediately) on the web in social media, or in websites. While the idea of very high resolution coupled with class leading dynamic range might seem like important qualifications and a good rationale for using the 36 megapixel Nikons those features are actually a bit of a negative for the job at hand. 

Let me lay out what we accomplished yesterday as a typical example of this kind of work and why I chose a smaller, lower resolution, not full frame system for what we needed to get done. 

Every corporate conference planner has a laundry list of images and video they'd like to get done, some locked into immutable schedules and some handled as pick up work when there are gaps in the primary agenda. We start by making lifestyle-ish photographs of attendees networking together at a sit down breakfast. Once I have a nice range of images there I move on to documenting interactive displays, signage and people engaged with demonstrations at various booths. 

The producer of the technical side of the show, a contractor for the same corporate media planner I server, approaches me and asks if I could also photograph his stage set and the interactive displays his company produced for the show. Since he is an old friend, and a constant source of (really good) referrals I am happy to try and work in as many documentation shots as I can...

I work on this kind of pre-show documentation until we are about half an hour from the start of the show. The benefit of working with a well funded corporate at a five star hotel is that one never goes hungry, you never have to eat poorly, and the coffee is ample and four or five notches above the swill that passes for coffee at lesser properties... I drink good coffee as I set up and shoot images of booths peppered with interactive screens and implementations of A.I. and machine learning. 

About half an hour before the kick off, all hands presentation in the main ball room, I head to the "team" room where I've laid claim to a tiny bit of real estate that comes complete with an electrical outlet. I pull out the new laptop, get connected to the symposium's super-fast wifi and pull the memory card out of the camera I've been using. I download the files to a sub-folder in a master folder for the event. I take a cursory look at the color and density of the files and then pull them all into their subfolder. The first sub-folder of the day is entitled: company name: day two 1st download.

I've tested downloading via a USB 3 cable from the camera, using a wifi connection or using a fast, Thunderbolt card reader and the card reader seems fastest. I probably shot 150 images on a GH5S in its ten megapixel, highest quality Jpeg mode so each image clocks in at about 5-7 megapixels.These get sucked onto the SSD drive so quickly that the transfer is done before I get a really good sip of coffee. 

I then upload them to Smugmug.com (my "cloud" supplier since 2005 or 2006) and they go into a client folder with the newest images up front and the older images constantly headed down the catalog. In this way my client has immediate access to everything we shoot and, since they are dipping into the collection and using them on all kinds of social media all day long it's most efficient for them to have the material in ascending order. The gallery is password protected but I've enabled full resolution downloading from the gallery for my clients' convenience. With a fast broadband connection I've uploaded 150 images in about as much time as it took me to write this paragraph. And I am a fast writer.

I ping the technical/marketing person who is interacting with the images to let him know there's a new batch to choose from. Then I reformat the SD card and head back out to catch the beginning of the "main tent" session. Note that the files are backed up on the second SD card in the camera (a running tally of images) as well as one the laptop and in the cloud.

I head to the main ballroom with two cameras (a GH5 and a GH5S), two lenses (12-100 and 40-150mm) and also a Benro monopod with a "chicken foot." And here's what I do throughout the day:

Each speaker on stage will present for anywhere from 25 minutes to 40 minutes. During the first part of the presentation I capture tight, medium, wide shots of the speaker engaged in the talk. I shoot a lot of frames because getting the perfect expression with the perfect composition is a gamble. I'm working the odds. And 10 megapixel files are cheap. The stage lighting is awkward because of the size and configuration of the room itself. I tried a custom white balance but even it need to be fine tuned via the cameras' hue controls.

I shoot the tight head and shoulders shots from the back of the room with the longer lens and use the shorter lens for wider shots and audience reaction shots. Once I'm pretty certain I've got nice photographs that represent the speaker well I put the GH5S on the monopod and reconfigure my settings for video. We're shooting 1080p video here because, again, it will be compressed and used on the web, mostly in social media. The GH5S is mainly talked about as a great 4K camera but I think it may be the best 1080p camera I've ever seen. The Olympus Pro 12-100 gives me good image stabilization and my technique using the monopod continues to improve; I can pull off twenty or thirty second clips that seems as though we're locked down on a good tripod. 

We do this kind of coverage for each speaker until we get to a coffee break. I hustle back to the team room and do the same download, transfer, upload to gallery routine that I outline above. I'll do this throughout the day. I check camera batteries, reformat the #1 SD card in each camera and then grab a coffee and get ready for the next volley of sessions. 

The GH5 cameras make it very easy to switch between video and stills and the EVF is helpful in isolating my eye to prevailing light so I have a fighting chance of evaluating the actual color balance I'm getting in the files. I also like the live histogram I'm getting in the bottom right hand corner. 

At the end of a long day we move on to a nightclub that the company has bought out for the evening. They're serving up delicious BBQ and there are open bars everywhere. A local band is blazing away on the first floor but there's a rooftop terrace for people who are looking for a quieter social gathering. I'm shooting basic event shots here until I feel like I'm becoming a nuisance instead of a benefit and then I pack it in and head home. Once there I'm putting batteries on the chargers, downloading the files from the last events of the evening and uploading them to the master collection on Smugmug. By the time I walk into the venue later this morning (7?) many of the images will already be circulating with their friends, the hashtags, coming along for a ride. 

So, in the midst of a month long work jag we've got Photokina spilling out new camera tech at a dizzying rate and all I can really think about is how I suddenly want to try the Panasonic G9 alongside the GH5s. I think about calling Precision Camera and having one delivered to the hotel and then I get ahold of myself and realize how beautiful the files are looking from the cameras I have in the bag with me today and I change my mind. 

I will have shot maybe 10,000 frames this month and had a camera in my hands for dozens of hours. It's actually a good remedy for gear acquisition syndrome because you really come to understand the camera you've got and you come to trust it; and by extension you come to trust that you know what you are doing when you use that cameras. I think the camera lust is at its worst when you are idle, have nothing fun to shoot and start imagining that somehow a new camera will kick start the whole process over again. It won't. You'll just have to pay for another camera. 

So, I was up at 4 am this morning to drive Ben to the airport. A business trip for my young public relations professional, to San Francisco. I'm packing up and headed back downtown. I'll get in early so I can photograph some of the exhibit displays without people in front of them. Then I'll get a great breakfast from the W Hotel and start the process I've described above all over again. 

Tomorrow is a totally different job. A different kind of project. I've already decided to use the Nikons for that for all the reasons I didn't use them today. 

Hope you had a good week. I'm heading out.

"DSLRs aren't going away anytime soon..." And other fantasies. And now it's time to discuss the Panasonic announcement.

This camera, with a "normal" 50mm lens and a flash weighed in at over 6 pounds...

It was once "state-of-the-art." 

I remember my first cellphone. It was made by Motorola and it was one big brick. I can't even remember if it had a screen on it but I can remember that my monthly cellphone bill was breathtaking and that the phone was big and ungainly. It didn't send texts or allow me to read e-mail or ask Google how to chew gum but it was, at the time, "state-of-the-art." The "non" smart phone died quickly. Very quickly. And now --- we grapple with the slow fade into obscurity of the DSLR camera. Photokina was the death knell; a note heard around the world. 

Which company introduced a new, flagship, state of the art DSLR at Photokina this year? Was it Canon? Nope. Nikon? Not this time. Oh. Maybe Pentax blew everyone's doors off with the newest super mirror cam? Naw. Not even close. The one company that showed a traditional DSLR design is the one company whose medium format camera is NOT going to fly off the shelves. The sole DSLR style camera that I could find coming out of this year's Photokina (Giant German Photo Show) was the newest Leica S3 with a new 64 megapixel sensor. Not sure the photo-rabble will line up to grab the S3 as the purchase price will rival a new car. And that's before you start adding lenses....

The overwhelming focus of this year's show is mirrorless. It includes the latest Fuji APS-C, XT3 with its 26 megapixel sensor. The Nikon twins were there as was the fat and happy bourgeois mirrorless camera from Canon. And promises for many new lenses. And many pathways for using older lenses. 

But what we don't see are promises of updates to traditional mirrored models. I think it's fair to say that all the R&D emphasis for the next five years is going to be in the mirrorless space and, if you see your mirrored cameras as "investments" I'd be shorting the market right now. I don't think they've got anywhere to go but down from here. 

The amusing thing will be the disconnection in time frame between what consumers expect and what manufacturers will deliver. I said above that all the R&D will fall to the mirrorless space in the next five years but I didn't mean that DSLRs would happily motor along for the next five years and then have sales fall off a cliff. No, they are falling off a cliff now and have done so since at least 2013. That's five years ago. 

I think the fall of in popularity and sales will be a much brisker rate of decline as mirrorless cameras lean on technology to correct every single user objection to their current state. We've already seen EVFs get remarkably good. The frame rates in the new mirrorless cameras (using electronic shutters) have eclipsed the mechanical shutters in DSLRs by a factor of two. And it seems that more and more features will actively depend on raw processing power instead of mechanical components. We can comfort each other and tell each other that DSLRs have mystical powers but it's not true. 

Photographers of a certain age will continue to have soft spots in their nostalgic constructs of photography for older technology but they'll be displaced in the blink of an eye as the main market for all cameras in the near future. In a decade the only DSLRs still in use will be the ones used as props, signifying a point in time, in movies and TV shows. That doesn't mean we need to immediately give up and toss the older cameras out in the trash but you need to be prepared for a tidal shift that will make DSLRs "legacy" products, churned out in ever smaller numbers just to service the large number of lenses already in the hands of ever aging consumers. 

I wouldn't be so defiantly definite if I'd seen Nikon or Canon roll out a new full frame DSLR at the same time as their mirrorless offerings but clearly, that's not going to happen. 

So, don't I feel stupid for stocking up on Nikon stuff when I could have waited and gotten a mirrorless, full frame Panasonic instead. No, not so much. I'm playing the nostalgia game with myself while hedging my bets with the GH5 series cameras and a nice selection of lenses. I use the Nikon D800s and D700s fully aware that I'm playing with what is already starting to be considered "retro" equipment. But I still know how to use them and how to make nice portraits and art projects with them. I'm not in a rush but I'm also happy I've just been flicking small change at them instead of rushing whole hog and buying the latest lenses and a couple D850 bodies ( remind me to cancel my order for the D850....).

The camera that fell directly into my sites today was the 24 megapixel mirrorless camera from Panasonic. It's called an S1. It's a full frame camera that uses the existing Leica SL mount and  promises to deliver the perfect balance of features and performance, dancing around the shortcomings of cameras from the majors. 

I'm sure the BSI sensor will be wonderful. But that's not a hard assumption as all the 24 megapixel full frame sensors are good and have been for at least four years. But it's the little things that will make the Panasonic S1 a camera I'll covet. It's specs call for impressive video performance that's still a step ahead of everyone else's. They've spanked Canon (hard) by having image stabilization in the body and a dual I.S. system that also leverages I.S. in lenses to make a hard-to-compete-with performance metric that other products, even those just announced, will not come close to matching. The only close competitor to overall I.S. performance will be their own m4:3 cameras and the latest cameras from Olympus. Win, win, win. 

Then Panasonic turned around and just embarrassed the crap out of Nikon by delivering (or promising to deliver) two card slots. One slot uses the robust and super fast QXD cards while the other slot uses UHS2 SD cards (which include V90 cards that are already capable of 400 mbs recording IN CAMERA!!!). All the nervous Nancies can use the second slot for back ups while I use one slot for stills and one slot for video. (Finally decided on a justifiable reason for the dual card existence --- but I would have also accepted one card for Raws and one card for Jpegs). 

If you are a perfectionist the agreement between Leica and Panasonic means you can spend as much money as you want seeking that perfection in the Leica lens line. If you just want to make great photographs it seems that the Panasonic lens line will be affordable (a relative measure). And then Sigma is signed on to develop for the lens mount as well which adds another high quality option for great lenses. 

In my estimation, if Panasonic really does deliver on all the stuff they've introduced at Photokina then they will be a powerful contender in the new mirrorless zone. They are strutting into the coliseum with deep pockets of cash, some great technology, a sterling reputation for delivering great video performance and an equally great reputation for reliability. It's actually early times for full frame mirrorless and there's a distinct possibility that the video+still hybridism might really be the next innovative and desired camera space. If so, Panasonic and Sony have a head start and there's no reason to believe that Panasonic can't be number three in this fairly new space. 

I'm holding on to the old Nikon stuff for the moment. I can't just sell it off and replace it with suggested delivery dates from Panasonic. But I don't have that much invested in the system and I'll be happy just to dig into my pocket and put some seed money into my new Panasonic FF system while keeping the GH5s around as a smaller, lighter choice. 

I can't imagine we'll see much more from Nikon in the traditional full frame space; with one exception. They will deliver a full frame super sport camera (a D6) in time for the 2020 Olympics. But it be astronomically priced and will represent the final bow, bringing down the curtain on 60 years of DSLR development from them. 

It will be interesting to see it all fall out. Canon will hang in at the top of the mix in the short term by sheer power of overwhelming market share; at least for a while. Right now it's Sony's game to lose. They need to up their body design game to confront more mature and more usable designs from their competitors. Panasonic may become the new workhorse brand for professionals and may even ditch most of their amateur/consumer camera products to concentrate solely on making professional tools. It could be an interesting market niche and, with a growing world market (with growing income), the potential is there for a bigger pie. I think they've got their eyes on that. 

Of course, I could be totally wrong. But I've called a number of trends pretty well since my 2009 embrace of EVFs, mirrorless, and my prediction of the market decline in an article I wrote in Fall of 2013. I know this, the pros coming into the field now and next year will be shooting with decidedly different blends of cameras than we are using right now. 

OT: Today's swim. Trying to keep up with Bruce.

On the street in Paris.

Leica M3. 50mm Summicron

Okay, so right now I'm sitting in the comfy waiting area at First Texas Honda getting my car's oil changed, tires rotated and brakes re-done. I can't wait to write the check for $598. I'm kind of kidding but the car has been like a great horse for me; never throws me, never sick and always reliable. I figure routine maintenance is the hedge against standing alongside the highway waiting for a tow truck...

As I sit here I'm getting work done. I just wrote a piece describing what I'll be (casually and informally) teaching during my nine days in Iceland (we're about a month out). I wrote an equipment recommendation list as well. Too bad the full frame Panasonic cameras won't be ready by then; I'm sure they'll take the world by storm. 

But what I really want to write about today is this morning's swim practice. I got up early this morning, brushed my teeth, kissed Studio Dog on the top of her head, and headed out the door at 6:45 to make the early swim practice at 7:00. It was still dark when we filtered out of the locker room and made our way to the pool deck. And since it's been raining a lot lately the water was cooler than it has been. 

We call the early Tuesday and Thursday workouts the "varsity" workouts because it's when a lot of the hardcore swimmers on our masters team come to really plow through fast and competitive yardage under the watchful eyes of the somewhat scary coach, Chris. 

The attendance started out a bit light and for a while I actually had my own lane. The warmup was a Chris classic: 400 freestyle. That's it. When the 400 yards are over you know the hard stuff is just around the corner. We started with a set of "sprint-y" 300 yard swims. 3 x 300 on an interval that, if you swim them fast enough, gives you about a ten second rest in between sets. I've been working on my head position lately, trying to keep my head more in line with my body. It's starting to feel more natural and it is improving my freestyle pace. 

I was about to start the next set when I looked over and saw all the fast lanes had filled up with fast swimmers who'd straggled in during the warm-up. Bruce D. joined me and in a flash I no longer had a lane to myself, I'd just inherited one of the fastest masters swimmers in my age cohort, anywhere. Bruce was an All American at prestige swimming school (especially in the early 1970's), Indiana University, where he swam for the legendary coach, "Doc" Councilman (author of "The Science of Swimming.").  Bruce missed making the 1972 Olympic team in distance events by something like a tenth of a second. He's never slowed down but decided, today, to come down to my lane and "hold me accountable." His quote, not mine.

Our next set was 3 x 150 yards on a tight interval followed by 3 x 50 kicking. We cycled through this set four times for a total of 1800 yards. I put on hand paddles and went as hard as I could and even then it was an exercise in watching Bruce just continue to pull away and leave me in the proverbial dust (we really don't have dust in the pool).  After that set we did a final set of 8 x 50's, swimming down freestyle and back in our choice of alternate strokes. Bruce let me/insisted I go first on this set but he (benevolently) spotted me  :20 seconds lead so he wouldn't end up catching me at the end of each 50. 

It was hard work and I was out of breath by the end of the workout. We went for an hour and fifteen minutes, straight through, and nailed down something like nearly 3,500 yards. It's an interesting way to start a day... And it sure makes you hungry for breakfast. Swimming a workout with someone much faster is a good way to improve; at some point you just get tired of being left behind...

I sometimes wonder why I swim as often as I can but then the pants I wore in college still fit, my resting pulse rate is usually around 50, and my blood pressure is generally in the range of 115/65. I attribute this to consistent and challenging aerobic exercise. It's all helpful when you need to hold a camera for hours on end and still have the energy left to take a few flights of stairs two at a time.

Wouldn't you know it. The Honda people sent me a text (hey! dude! I'm sitting right here!) and let me know my car is ready. Ah well, it's an end to the free coffee and power bars. I was just getting settled in. 

Blog news.

I got annoyed having to click the boxes with ostriches in them in order to leave even my own comments on the blog. I finally had enough and turned that off. I hope I don't get spammed but I'm weary of being subjected to too many barriers to the comments. Have fun. I'll still moderate.

Please, no Asian brides or low cost clipping path ads!

Added on Saturday the 29th:

And just as soon as I turned off the word verification for the blog it got inundated with spam and crap. So, all bets are off. We're back to word verification because the one thing I don't have time for is to wade through spam.

Sorry for the inconvenience. Blame all the assholes on the web...

Another look at photographs from the GH5S. Just looking at color and tone today. Also, a nod to the Sigma 30mm f1.4 Contemporary lens.

Very pleased with the new laptop. Ready for the fast pace of our corporate job this week.

Statuary in Dresden, Germany.

Samsung Galaxy NX camera.

It was a zoo at the Apple store on Friday when I went to pick up the new MacBook Pro I ordered online. I chose, inadvertantly, to pick up my computer from the neighborhood Apple store on the very day that Apple's new phones were released to all the people who pre-ordered them. I don't know what Apple's initial sales numbers on the phones are but the traffic was enough to crash their fulfillment servers across North America.

Laptop computers fulfill three functions for me. I don't use them to do heavy post process "lifting" for either photographs or video, instead I use them: In my favorite chair in order to read stuff on the NYT, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal websites, as well as my favorite blog sites. I use laptops when I am on location for clients who require tethered shooting or super fast (on site) turnaround of files. Finally, I seem to buy a new laptop every time I start on a book project. The gap between my previous machine and this one was almost seven years; years in which I did not start any new book projects.

My main impetus for buying a new machine right at this moment was the project I'll be working on this Weds., Thurs., and Friday. I have a need to shoot photos and videos throughout the three days while quickly uploading selections for concurrent display across a range of social media sites for my client. I did the same thing for the same client last year and the narrow point of the funnel was, inevitably, the speed of my laptop. I decided, this year, that life is too short to wait around for older processors and tired hard drives to do their work....

Dresden, Germany

The new machine uses an 8th generation processor, an SSD drive and the memory is twice as big and also much faster. The one downside of the model I chose is that there are only two USB-3/Thunderbolt ports. I bought a dongle which gives me back three USB3 ports as well as an SD card reader and that's just about all I need for the machine. At some point in the future I'll buy an adapter that will allow me to connect an HDMI cable for those times when I need to connect to a large screen TV for a presentation. I may actually have a USB3 to HDMI adapter sitting around anyway.....

The machine delights me most when I go to start it up and it only takes seconds instead of minutes. Seems like magic to me. I am now dragging out some of the SSDs I bought for the Atomos Ninja Flame to use as externals. Solid State is fun.

To those who conjecture that I could have saved a fortune if I'd only been willing to abandon Apple I have to look at the numbers. Seems to me I might have saved money on hardware but spent it back replacing software. Even so I might have been able to save $150 by buying a much uglier machine but since I seem to keep them for up to seven years we'd really only be talking about $10.20 per year in savings and you have to take into consideration that I'd have to look at it everyday during those seven years. Aesthetics does count for something or I've terribly misjudged the potential of what photographers do for a living. 

Next up we'll work on replacing the desktop but that's not going to happen until 2019. Can't shove all the fun into one year....

It's been an interesting year for me as a working photographer and blogger...

Is photography still cool?

 I guess I'm finally experiencing what normal people live with all the time. That there are limits to our time and attention spans. That we run out of enthusiasm for writing exactly what readers want to read all the time (mostly about gear while protesting that no one writes about actual photographs -- you are welcome to comment on any image I post here, honest). I read other blogs just like the rest of my photographer friends and lately I'm struck with just how much (un)nuanced duplication there is on all the photography sites and how little of it is relevant to anything other than the sale of new cameras. 

It's getting to the point where I'm even excited if MJ at TheOnlinePhotographer.com writes about playing pool or trimming his trees. Anything but another article about how much better Fuji's AF has gotten or how people almost are ready to like the color coming out of Sony cameras. Then there is the pervasive "Oh My God, Only One Slot" drama. And the "Is Every Format But Full Frame Doomed?" threads....

I'm guessing some of my current ennui for writing about photography is a result of life burnout. My mom passed away in late December last and I've been taking care of her estate, and my father, ever since. Couple that with the lingering expenses of my kid's last semester of college and I have to be honest, the first half of this year just sucked. It sucked a lot. If you are a reader of VSL I would ask that you cut me some slack and skip over some of the stuff you don't like. 

I'm not bitter but might become so if people keep telling me that something I write sounds bitter (it's probably just a bit of truthfulness that no one wants to hear). I've never yelled at kids to get off my lawn. I don't pine for the "golden days" of photography. I am not a Canon, Sony, Pentax, etc. hater. I am not a (fill in the brand blank) fan boy. I'm just a photographer trying to make a living in an ever changing market while using my off time to play around with photos and written material, and to share my observations on a blog. 

I'm not making money here and have nothing to sell besides the (very) occasional workshop or a (rare) link to a product I think is really cool, even if I didn't invent it. 

I like Chelsea and Tony Northrup's content even if I think their well done YouTube site is more like a shopping mall than a photo school. I like TheOnlinePhotography blog even when Michael Johnston goes way off subject and shares too much. I like Tom Hogan's byThom.com and Sansmirror.com sites because ---- well, he's smart, writes well and writes about things that interest me. I think most of DPReview is a messy waste of time driven largely by ill-informed poseurs and a greedy parent company. I am probably a lot (a lot!!!) more liberal than most of you thought, even though we don't discuss politics here. 

But the bottom line is that we're probably going to disagree about things like the usefulness of GPS from time to time, and I might be snarky about it but.....but you have to take into consideration that the snark that tweaks you is likely only in three or four blog posts out of 3,807 other posts. So, dial back the vituperative sense of umbrage and try to take my few and mostly minor rants in stride. Or just shove off and read something else. I'm sure there's someone out there who will write exactly what you want to hear all the time. But what fun would that be?