Short lighting. It's a nice look for portraits. Packing for five flights in the next week. Sticking to my guns in disparaging over-connectivity.

This blog post will be a bit of a collage-y mess because I've been working a lot and I'm a little wrung out like a wet washcloth. But writing feels good so I may as well do it. 

I came across these portraits of Kara when I was looking through folders of portraits for good examples of short lighting. I photographed Kara for a potential book cover but my publisher had other ideas and, well, publishers own the book covers.... We did these on the steps that lead up from my living room to our dining room and I was happy with the combination of flash and coming in from the French doors in the background. These were done around 2009 with a Kodak SLR/n, 14 megapixel, full frame camera and I liked the look of the skin tone very much. Pretty typical for the Kodak professional digital cameras which all seemed biased to deliver great color for portraits.

I've been on a portrait roll lately. We did portraits for a large software company last Thursday, a telecom company on Tuesday (yesterday) and I'm just packing up now for a shoot with a national accounting firm tomorrow morning; and yes, it's another portrait shoot with 8 to 10 individual portraits on the schedule. I shot yesterday with the G9 and the Olympus 40-150mm Pro lens and I really liked the overall look of the files so I think I'll use that as my starting point tomorrow. We're shooting against a middle gray, seamless background so a large part of the look is predetermined because we're matching what we did last December and earlier this year on similar shoots for the same clients. I like these kinds of shoots because I've done them often enough that I feel comfortable with the process.

The hardest part of corporate location photography now in Austin is finding parking close enough to the client's building, getting your gear loaded up and down the street, and then reversing the process. I got lucky yesterday and found a metered parking space adjacent to the Westin Hotel, right in the middle of downtown. Since it was pouring down rain I didn't even worry about paying the parking meter. No one checks them in the middle of a series of thunderstorms. But the lightning and drenching rain made pulling a cart with a couple hundred pounds of gear down the sidewalk that much more exciting. I'm practicing my use of rainwear for my upcoming adventures in Iceland....

But before I get to head to Iceland and have fun with photography I've got a solid week and a half of travel ahead of me. An client from a few years ago circled back to me recently. She is now the V.P. of an large, national construction company that does giant infrastructure projects across the country. She's been saving up some photography assignments for me that revolve around photographing corporate officers on location with their infrastructure projects behind them. A challenging combination of dramatic landscape photography combined with editorial style portraiture. Just the kind of stuff I love doing. Except that we're pursuing this work in cities all over the eastern part of the United States. Next week we start in Asheville, N.C. and by the end of the week we wind up in Tampa, FLA. Each day involves waking up in a different hotel, rushing to a remote job site, figuring out how to shoot it and then wrapping up and rushing back to the airport in order to bunk down in a different hotel, in a different city, by the end of the night. Dams, electrical generation, bridges and more. It's the kind of work that makes one happy to be a problem solving photographer. 

Much of this work is destined for very high quality (printed) annual report publication, editorial submissions and even some big trade show graphics so I've decided to use the D800s for this project. About half of my flights will be on smaller, regional jets so I've been thinking a lot about how best to pack for the project. I want to be bring along several self-powered mono-lights as well as a 4x4 foot diffusion scrim and three stout light stands. I know I'll need a tripod, batteries, mafer clamps and some other modifiers so I'm planning to drag along a big, wheeled case like this:

I don't need to do video on this job so I can fill the case with cool lighting gear and useful grip gear. If I need more than three light stands I should be hiring a crew anyway. The real magic will come in trying to keep the load+the bag itself all under 45 pounds. I'll have an assortment of flashes and triggers but there's not going to be anything in the case that's super valuable or irreplaceable. I've got two versions of the big case; a Tamrac and a Manfrotto. The Manfrotto (above) is lighter weight by at least five to eight pounds but the Tamrac is better padded has a bit better layout for gear distribution.

I'll pack them and weigh them and then make my choice. I'm sure the airlines will be gentle and respectful regardless of which case I choose......  I'm also packing a small suitcase to check in filled with.....clothes and shoes. But the real issue is: how to pack the cameras and lenses.

Any way I slice it I come back to the (almost) fact that any rolling case is going to end up getting gate checked as soon as we leave the comfortable confines of a 737 and venture into the smaller jets. You know, the ones you can't stand up straight in even if you are only five foot, eight inches tall...the jets with seat so small they make me feel fat. I learned the hard way with a Think Tank Airport Security International rolling case a few years back. It's a dandy case and holds everything I need but it doesn't fit into the shoebox sized overhead compartments and, even with much protest, I had to check the case if I wanted to ride on the plane and make it to my next destination. Can carbon fiber tripods bend? We found out the answer....

My fall back is either to a conventional Domke camera back (the big one) or to a non-wheeled backpack like the one I took on my adventure in Toronto in the winter of 2017.

Into this case (Amazon Basics Photo Backpack) I will attempt to stuff two Nikon D800 series bodies, a 24-120mm f4.0 VR lens, a 70-300mm VR lens, a Tokina 16-28mm f2.8 lens and a few juicy prime lenses, along with as many batteries as I can fit in. I'll also fit in the new (ultra slim) MacBook Pro and a few chargers (extra chargers go into the clothes luggage. it's a hefty package to carry around all day but we're going to each location in cars or trucks so it's not like I'll be hiking the Appalachian Trail with this 20 some pound monkey on my back.

I will also wrap up a D700 in bubble wrap and stick it in one of the other bags as a final back-up. 

Five flights (actually more, if you count connecting flights) seems like a lot of travel to me. But we do three more out of state shooting days the following week and then head off to Iceland at the end of that week, on the 27th. I already know what I'm packing for that: Two GH5S cameras and two Olympus zooms. If I don't have the right cameras for the tasks at hand then I'll just change tasks. Good to remember that I'm there to teach not to return with pristine photographs for picky clients.

Finally, some of you guys took me to task for ripping on the Zeiss hyper-connected concept camera announced at Photokina. Hmmmm. I thought about it a lot after reading your critiques. I took them to heart. And then I decided that I'm definitely correct in my assumptions and that time will prove me prescient about the real need for features that only distract from paying attention to the image right in front of your cameras. If you need to make a call on your camera then you need some real intervention. Or you could just quit photography and start reading Michael Johnston's quirky new car review blog site. It's still called: theonlinephotographer.com

Believe me, you'll be better off ignoring fluff like wi-fi, gps, and bluetooth and just knuckling down and making the photographs better. Multi-tasking is the devil's work.

I laughed my ass off when I saw the camera Zeiss was proposing at Photokina. Don't these manufacturers ever learn from each other?

The Samsung Galaxy NX. How many hundreds sold worldwide?

I laughed and laughed when I saw what Zeiss was proposing the build. It's a camera with a fixed lens, a huge screen on the back and the ability to run apps like mobile Adobe Lightroom right on the back screen of the camera. If I read the promo material correctly it's based on the Android operating system...

Can you say, "Deja Vu?"

I sure can because I was part of the crew that tested and shot with the Samsung Galaxy NX camera. It featured a big and bold screen on the back. It ran Android's Jelly Bean implementation. It could run many apps. It was the most connected camera of all time and included: Bluetooth, Wi-fi, and full on Cellular connectivity. It even did the Zeiss pipe dream one better by providing an interchangeable lens system that could take advantage of some really well made and impressive lenses. But it was one of  the biggest camera failures in recent history and, in my opinion, was a strong component in Samsung's decision to exit the camera making market altogether. Be careful Zeiss. Be very careful.

Why did it fail? I'm sure there were as many reasons as their are photographers with opinions but for me it was all about actual usuability. Since the camera ran a consumer operating system with many installed apps (feature or sabotage?) it took a long time to start up once you hit the power switch. On the first samples we're talking as much as thirty seconds from switch flick to useable. If you had cellular enabled and you didn't change the default which asked the camera to look for software updates upon resuscitation you could doom yourself to longer waiting periods (with little or no recourse) as the camera downloaded and installed the usual patches and crap. Nuts to you if you saw a scene with Lady GaGa and the Pope making out on main stream with UFOs landing in the background ---- you weren't going to have a camera that would take photographs until your Galaxy NX finished downloading and installing the latest rev. of Angry Birds. 

So, if you have a camera in which the controls are apps and they are embedded with communication apps and gaming apps you just got yourself a menu that makes the Olympus OMD menus look like, "See Jane run. Run Jane run." I made notes. They hardly helped. And I guess I should have expected it because every software update meant new application icon positions and permissions. 

And while the IDEA of a really big screen sounds enticing (yes, you could probably watch a movie on Netflix on your flight home from wherever) it's a shitty idea on many levels; or at least in the levels that have anything do to with taking photographs. 

I'll admit that the screen was nice when shooting stuff in the studio but only until you experienced one of the (regular and frequent) OS crashes and had to restart. Again. And Again.

But shooting out in the streets you quickly realize that the screen is for shit in bright sunlight ( and will be equally or nearly as bad on the Zeiss --- no matter what the sales brochure says.... One Million Nits....!!!!!) and all the money spent on the big rear screen meant scrimping and saving on the low res and slow refreshing EVF. You may think you love doing everything on the rear screen because you are young and stupid and don't know any better, having cut your teeth holding a phone out in front of yourself like a dolt, but when you start photographing with intention you discover how important and enabling a good eye level finder can be.... That's why we don't use twin lens reflexes or view cameras anymore. 

I hope Zeiss doesn't scrimp on the EVF, it will kill the camera before it hits the local Hermes shop. Perhaps they'll stock them at Gucci as well....

Thom Hogan and some small handful of tech-y photographers constantly pine for massive interconnectivity but I'm betting that when they get a bad taste of the distraction and cumbersome nature of their phone, laptop and camera having sex and giving birth to a Frankenstein-ish all purpose appliance they'll want to go back and edit out everything they ever wrote about wanting to process images on their cameras and then uploading them to the millions and millions of buyers who are, in their imaginations, just waiting for their photographic produce to come banging over the bandwidth to their (tiny phone) screens. Multi-Tasking is just another conglomeration of words that essentially means, "I like the gimmicks more than the art. I can't concentrate on one task for more than a few seconds. And, everyone wants to see my stuff RIGHT NOW. Even surgeons pause their procedures just to take a gander on their phones of someone's latest ferret foto). 

I can see it now. Legions of people misled by false technology messiahs spending Frustration Fridays uploading a new version of Lightroom to their camera. Uploading new versions of Android to their...camera. Playing Angry Birds and  Candy Crush on their cameras.  Waiting for their cameras to reboot so they can catch the last few moments of the asteroid that is about to decimate the planet. 

Me? I'll laugh and photograph them slamming their new interactive, interconnected cameras down on the hard concrete in frustration as they come to understand that real creativity requires real, undiluted attention and focus. Yeah. A one tool per job mentality. It's why we don't have Sporks in Michelin star restaurants. Multi-tool camera clutter is why Zeiss's latest grasp for the gold plated ring will result in abject failure. 

I'd go the other way and make a camera with three controls: Aperture, shutter speed and ISO. Everything else we'd handle in post. It's true. If you don't believe me go find a Samsung Galaxy NX and give it a whirl. Yes, I can write this because I used one for a year. And yes, I'd never buy another camera like that again. Even with YOUR money. 

Most photos above: Berlin 2013. The launch.

Choosing between micro four thirds cameras and full frame, Nikon D800 cameras for tomorrow's portrait assignment.

A self portrait from 2013 with the failed Samsung Galaxy NX APS-C camera.

I have an unusual assignment tomorrow. I'm going to a hotel in the downtown area where I'll set up a temporary studio in a large meeting room. The studio will have a gray background at one end and a black background at the other end and a bunch of lights in between. I need to photograph about 25 people that work for a telecom company because each of them needs a new headshot for LinkedIn and other social media. 

I'll photograph each person against the black background and then move them over a few feet and photograph them against the gray background. I'm not sure why the need for two different backgrounds but that's what came in the bid request. I connected with this client through a telecom client in San Francisco and, in spite of needing two different backgrounds the shoot should be fun and lighthearted. 

I was down scouting the location today so I'd know what to bring tomorrow. I've packed four monolights to use on the shoot (main light and back light on each set) as well as two pop-up reflectors for fill. I'm also packing two speed lights to use as background lights for the gray background set. But the decision that made me pause was about the cameras. 

Should I bring the Nikon D800s or the Panasonic GH5 cameras?

In the end I decided to continue my successful run with the Panasonic cameras, packing the GH5S and the newer G9. But I paid attention to my thought processes and the way I came around to deciding on which system to use. I thought it might help instruct me in future engagements...

The first part of the equation is that we'll have to shoot the equivalent of 50 portraits over the course of the day. That's a lot to shoot but that's a hell of a lot to post process. I bid the job differently than I usually would because I'm trying to streamline the amount of work I need to dedicate to post production. What I told the client was this: I'll shoot between ten and twenty shots of each person against each background. At the least that's 500 images and at the most around 1,000 images. In the past I would have made a global color correction and exposure currection, put the edited (meaning "culled down") images in a gallery on Smugmug.com and had the client go there to pick out the best image of each person. Then I'd retouch that single image for each person. But that makes the process cumbersome and time consuming. A lot of people take their time getting back with selections and there are few things I hate more than projects that come back to me in dribbles and drabs. 

This time around I'll light and shoot them to the best of my abilities, do a very precise global color correction and apply (almost like a LUT in video) a look to the files, and put all of them up on Smugmug.com and make every image downloadable in full resolution by the client. I'll effectively take myself out of the selection and retouching process. Taking it one step further I'm shooting all the files as Jpegs (yes, I'll take a hand held meter, and yes, I'll do a careful custom white balance...) which will save me time and space in the backend of the process. To take it one step further I'll use the GH5S as my primary camera depending on the G9 only as my back up camera. Why? Well, the 10 megapixel files, of course. 

I did mention above that the aim point for delivery was files to use on social media...

I considered using the Nikon D800s because they do very nice files. But they are also bereft of things like eye and face detection autofocus, which I want to use in case my attention drifts away from the task at hand and I truly go into autopilot. 

The D800 is less agile about nailing focus; especially when compared to any of the recent Panasonic cameras that do face/eye AF. I also have to admit that I like the color straight out of the GH5S better than anything else I've played with. Better than any camera since the Kodak D760. 

The ten megapixel files have ample detail for any sort of social media use and the ability to use the 4:3 aspect ratio is also a bonus for this particular project. 3:2 vertical just never really looks good on LinkedIn. Using the GH5S allows me to use one of my favorite portrait lenses of the last two years, the Olympus 40-150mm f2.8 Pro. And by using it at ISO 200 and f5.6 I'll get ample depth of field while keeping the needed flash power low enough to ensure that the lithium batteries in the Neewer monolights lasts all day long. 

So I end up with files that absorb fewer archiving resources, are faster to upload to the final gallery and have the color and tonality I like. Seems like a win on every level.

The score would be much different if the parameters of the job were different. If the client was using the images for big, scalable banner ads or full screen graphic I might elect to use the G9 as my primary camera in order to get a larger file. If the client also needed images for print advertising and intended to use the images in advertising or in trade show graphics then I might step up once again and go to the raw files in the Nikon. At some point it's all contextual and the days of re-tasking images for all imaginable uses are long gone. Current clients understand that different images have different uses, different values and can be created with various tools. Part of my job is choosing the right job to both satisfy my clients and my need to continually streamline and drive costs out of my process in places where the requested quality won't be affected. 

We have no obligation to provide our clients with more than they pay for or more than they contract for. If clients want to sharpen their accounting pencils and make budgets smaller we're okay with complying as long as we are able to structure our offerings to reduce cost and complexity. 

But what if one of the participants wants to have his photograph retouched? Well, we have an ala carte price in this job for individual retouching. It's extra and it's billable. And that's how I think jobs should be going forward. 

For all you folks still having issues figuring out how to get the best auto focus from your Panasonic GH5, GH5S and G9 cameras.....

Here is Panasonic's in-depth and very well produced answer/guide:

https://www.panasonic.com/content/dam/Panasonic/Global/Learn-More/lumix-af-guidebook/LUMIX_AF_Guidebook_1809.pdf

It's a full of great answers, suggestions, settings etc. Some of the features discussed are upcoming in a firmware released tentatively scheduled for October 28th but most of the material is relevant in the here and now.

A tip of my hat and a "thank you" to motion picture superstar, James Webb, for sending this along to me. Should make all of us Panasonic users look that much better....

from the Pecan Street Art Festival.

Black and White Image from Saratoga Springs. A few thoughts about using the monochrome modes in the Panasonic G9.

not taken with a G9...

Might be a Panasonic GH4.

I always like to at least try the monochrome modes on cameras. Sometimes you can get lucky. Fuji users seem luckier. Using "monochrome" on my Nikons is an exercise in futility. I thought, maybe --- just maybe --- the newer Panasonic G9 would be better. I tried the different modes like Monochrome L and D and I tried the different color filter settings but the files just weren't very convincing as black and whites. The one thing I will warn you against, if you are intent of trying to make the G9 your "go to" black and white camera is to shy away from using the "add grain" feature. Even at the lowest setting it adds way too much grain and the grain "edges" are way too soft to be even glancingly close to real film grain. Better to bring your files into PhotoShop and do conversions from color there and add film grain with PS filters.

Maybe it's just a control issue...

Framed legs. Austin's Grafitti Wall.

Untitled Image from Austin.