Sometimes the secret to getting an image you want is for everyone to just slow down a bit. Take a breath. Get still.

Lou. Studio. 

Seems the harder we try to be good at something the more elusive success is. I think the old masters of every craft knew that rushing things ruined them. That patience is a way of letting 

what you are learning soak in. That calmness is a path to beauty.

Yesterday's simple and fun event photography for Texas Appleseed.

the poster show begins to ramp up.

I'm trying to throw off the mental shackles from a time when a clean ISO 400 file was a miracle to behold and when flash absolutely ruled all aspects of night time event photography. There's a penalty for having decades of experience; sometimes you are held back by old information and truisms that are no longer even remotely true.

Using the Jpeg setting on my Fuji X-H1 I am fearlessly (hmmm....) racking the ISO dial all over the place while shooting at events. And yesterday I substituted the little, tiny Fuji EF-X8 flash in the hot shoe of my camera instead of a bigger, more traditional flash unit. Kinda nuts but it worked.

Texas Appleseed is a non-profit you can learn about here: Link to Appleseed.

In order to fund their initiatives they do the usual fundraising but they also do a bunch of event stuff that I think is fun and cool. Yesterday was their annual poster show. Working with sponsorship from the largest ad agency in town they select a group of artists/graphic designers and get them to design posters that incorporate current messaging about justice and legal issues people face in Texas. The top print houses in town donate the printing, and the posters, signed and numbered by the artists, are sold for $75 each; both at the show and on the Appleseed website. It's exciting because it brings in a segment of Austin's very hip advertising community and not only raises money but also creates community awareness in a new demographic.

And, of course, nearly everyone in Austin loves an excuse for a good party... There was ample catering by Austin restaurant, El Dorado, (EldoradoCafeATX.com) and several open bars. No charge for admission to the show and no charge for drinks or food. Felt like the old boom days in Austin...

The pop-up gallery was at 800 Congress Ave., just a few blocks from the capitol, in the middle of downtown, and people started trickling in when the doors opened at 6pm. By 7 pm the place was packed and posters were flying out the door.

In the days of yore I would have been concentrating on making big flash work. I would have a large guide number, articulated head flash in the hot shoe and it would be topped with a Rogue reflector or a large, DIY foamcore reflector, held up by tape and rubber bands. I'd be working at f5.6 to f8.0 if shooting full frame, and I would be working around ISO 400 to ensure noiseless files. As darkness closed in I would come to rely on the AF-illumination light to get focus in the dimmer areas of a big ballroom.

I did none of that yesterday. I put on the 16-55mm f2.8 and used the lens mostly between 2.8 and f4.0. Near the big windows on the east side of the large room I used ISO 1250 and, instead of pounding flash and watching the background go to black, I was shooting down around 1/60th of a second and being very, very mindful to catch people in pauses where subject movement wouldn't ruin my photos. I got some blurry hands but I decided it doesn't matter and I didn't care.

In the back half of the room I worked around ISO 3200 and, in really dim areas I took a deep breath and set the ISO dial to 6400. And, amazingly, it worked. It all worked.

Most of the time I wasn't just depending on the ambient light, I was using the small, included-with-the-camera flash to fill in and get me a little closer to clean color. I had the flash set to minus 2/3rds of a stop, in TTL, and I worked a bit to get a reasonable level with the ambient light; sometimes (usually) opting to keep it about a half a stop dark. Seemed just right for the combination of tiny flash and room light. They worked together to get me very close to a perfect exposure out of camera.

Here are a couple samples showing the ambient + flash in action:

The small, EF-X8 flash seems to come with every Fuji X camera that I buy and I had ignored them for a while. Now I'm keeping one on the top of my camera almost all the time, just in case it comes in handy. 

The EF-X8 doesn't take batteries; it uses power from the camera's battery(s). I used to worry about battery drain but I was using a battery grip last night and after shooting from 5pm (set up and posters) till about 8pm (party winding down...) I was still on the first battery in my grip. Not bad considering all the stuff it was running....

All my photo stuff fit in my small, Think Tank backpack. I brought along the Fuji X-E3 with an 18-55mm f2.8-4.0 kit lens as well as a 35mm f2.0 Fuji-cron, neither of which I needed to use; but you know my feelings about always having a back up.... I also brought along a big, Godox flash, dedicated to the Fuji system as well as a radio trigger. This did come in handy for shooting the posters as I could have someone stand ten feet to one side of, and at a 45 degree angle to, the art work in order to get clean shots without a lot of fall off and with no glare. 

I could get used to a minimal kit like this! In fact, someone should write a book about it...

The last thing I wanted to mention was transportation. I could have taken the super high performance Subaru Forester downtown and parked it in a garage. I could have spent $26 and taken an Uber from the house to the venue. But in the same spirit of carrying everything I needed in one small pack I thought I would also reduce my travel footprint. To that end I chose to take a city bus to work. 

The bus comes to an intersection about a half mile from my house. An easy and leisurely 15 minute walk. The bus costs $1.25 and gets me to downtown, within a block or two of the venue, in about 25 minutes. Easy-Peasy. I cheated on the way home. Belinda is working downtown and has garage parking at her agency. She met me at the show and when it was time to head out we walked two blocks to her garage and then sped off into the night. In a Subaru Impreza. All fun. 

That's my take on yesterday's photo festivities. Hope you aren't pining too much for the days of complex flash, slow film and the need to deliver stacks of color prints to your clients. It wasn't really that much fun. This is better. 

I remember the line that Ian Fleming wrote at the end of "Diamonds are Forever." He was talking about James Bond's life as a spy. He wrote, "It reads better than it lives." Brilliant. Just brilliant. 

Back in the water. Coming back from an illness is rough. I guess the secret is to never get sick...

Boy Howdy! That last week was a doozy. I had a cold, a cough that wouldn't stop and a nasty bout of insomnia on top of everything else. I was out of the pool from Sunday the31st all the way until yesterday (April 9th) because I literally couldn't get one lap in without stopping to cough like a three pack a day drifter...

The combination of having been sick, deprived of about half my usual sleep and out for so long was felt in its entirety during my first swim back. I woke up early yesterday, packed up and headed to the pool. It was still dark at 7:00 when I hit the water. My stroke felt perfect but there was very little energy behind it and I tired quickly. I finished the hour and fifteen minutes but only by judiciously skipping a lap now and then; taking a few liberties with the written workout. That's a masters swimmer's prerogative. 

I came home, ate breakfast, drank coffee and then hit the couch (Gosh! I love our couch!) and took a nap for the better part of an hour. I needed a bit of recovery before I could drag myself into the studio and start making calls. I'm looking for a talent for a shoot on Tuesday. The whole thing came up rather quickly and finding just the right talent takes....time. If you know a male, late 40's/early 50's, caucasian, who is in good shape and can take some time off on Tuesday, be sure and let me know..... I'm looking for someone to play the part of a doctor in scrubs, face mask, etc. And, yes, there is a talent fee in there somewhere...( Austin area ). 

The rest of the afternoon was dedicated to unpacking from our condensed video shoot last Friday (didn't have the desire to grapple with gear while infirm..) because those rechargeable batteries are not going to charge themselves, the batteries in the wireless microphone receivers and transmitters tend to leak if you leave them in for very long and, it's nice to know the camera lenses are snuggly back in their slots in the equipment case. Ready and easily findable because....they are in their correct spot.

                                 
The most important part of the whole organizing and unpacking process is the getting the memory cards backed up. I'd already pulled all the video files from our shoot out and put them on a little SSD for my client/collaborator; the guys who is tasked with doing the actual edit. But he's still on the client side and my paranoid expectation is that if there is a way to lose, corrupt, misplace, reformat-over, the files I gave him it's almost a client's imperative to attempt it. I wanted to get a complete set of the files on two identical 7200 RPM G-Tech drives that I use when I edit. Now that I've done that and asked the client to back up to their server I am finally able to re-use those SD cards. I like my new Delkin Devices Black 128GB V60 UHSII cards. They are fast and new. All the better to play with...

Mulling over some nerd-side new gear acquisitions for the office. I'm toying with the idea of replacing my (2015) Apple 27 inch iMac with the new i9 processor iMac. I'd like to get one with a 1 TB SSD for the OS drive and 32 GB of RAM. I also want to trick it out with the fastest video card they offer just to give me a bit of a speed boost for video editing. The current machine is absolutely fine for photography file processing but I'd like to give the h.265 video file format available in the X-T3 a spin and I've read that the h.265, while a space saver during shooting, requires some intense processing to edit.... (yes, I am sure you are super smart, brave and infinitely skilled and can make your own machine for 1/10th the cost but I think I'll save a bit of time and just buy one ready made, thanks!).

And, over in the realm of the irrational (one of my specialties), now that I've worked out my one audio issue with video recording on the  X-H1, I'm actually toying with adding another one while the camera+grip+three batteries are still on sale as a package for $1299. We used three of them on our video shoot Friday and as we slip further down the greased slide of video production toward the revised mosh pit of commerce, multi-camera shoots seem to be the routine and not the exception. And how often can one acquire a full on back up, with accessories, of one's current favorite camera at such an advantageous price?

I'll wait on all the purchases since my recent illness has made me a bit loopy. My bank called to ask me "what I intended?" on my last deposit. Apparently, I transposed numbers left and right.... Glad someone is watching my back. Thank you! Bank. Maybe I'll be thinking straight after a few more swims and a bit more recovery time.

Photographer retracts criticism of Fuji X-H1 headphone sound while monitoring.

File this one under: Don't I feel stupid.

The issue: I heard some distortion through my headphones while testing an X-H1 at my desk last week. I tried changing out all components but still had a niggling distortion. I even tried my two other X-H1 cameras in the same configurations; all while sitting at my desk.

I was not happy to hear the distortion and reached out for answers. Later, I used the cameras and microphones and monitors at a sound studio and did not hear the same distortion. I tried to duplicate the problem today in my living room, far away from electrical devices and was surprised when I could not duplicate the issue.

Here is my addenda to the article I wrote about the distorting monitoring circuit last week:

Edited on 04/09: Interestingly we did not have the headphone distortion problem on a shoot we did last Friday, using many of the same components. To be fair to the Fuji X-H1 I went back and re-tested again. This time I did it in my living room. Components all over my coffee table. But the times I tested the cameras before were all done at the desk in my office. I took the camera, headphones and a microphone back to the office, sat down and listened again and there was the distortion. So I started looking around my desk to see just what the heck might be causing the distortion I was hearing.

For starters my desk is the epicenter of about ten hard drives, each in their own enclosure, each with its own power supply. Then there is the 27 inch iMac about two feet from my little test area. Oh, and there's also a dual band modem/router, and, and, and...... As I moved the camera set up closer to the desk and tested it the distortion was a bit more obvious and when I moved away from the desk it diminished. And when I moved to the living room, about 30-40 feet from all electrical circuits, the microphone pre-amplifiers were as silent as mute angels.

So, this is a big mea culpa. Sometimes we imagine that technology has perfected all the routine stuff and that it will work perfectly no matter how much we try (wittingly or unwittingly) to fuck it all up. The pre-amps are a bit sensitive to huge, giant, unsavory electrical fields. Can you blame them? 

I am now chastened and must send an e-mail to my friends at Fuji to apologize to them for blaming my bad technique on what I see is now a nearly perfect camera.

In addition, all the audio that we ran into three X-H1 cameras at our video shoot last Friday is perfect. Not a trace of distortion or noise. 

I'm sorry to have been so far off on this and will try to be much more careful in my testing of microphone and headphone circuits in the future.

As you can see I made a bone-headed mistake and mischaracterized the performance of the camera. I am sorry for that and I also want to apologize to Fuji for unfairly dissing their camera instead of eliminating such an obvious source of interference. 

Now I will never be able to say that I am without flaw again. So sad. But that's the nature of a mea culpa.

The future of traditional photography? I don't have a crystal ball for that... Camera sales? Here's the latest bad news...

https://www.digitalcameraworld.com/news/photographic-industry-in-freefall-camera-shipments-down-a-shocking-35

Sales of real cameras (not phones with cameras) have collapsed by 84% since 2010. Canon's CEO recently predicted the market will implode by up to 50% more in the next two years. Just comparing this year to last year (which was not a stellar year for cameras) is sobering; a drop of 34% so far.

I know what this means for camera companies and I suspect that you do to, but what do the numbers tell us about the practice of, and the business of, photography?

I'm currently waving goodbye to any camera, lens or lighting company that doesn't have deep pockets. Really deep pockets.



04/09: adding a few links to older posts that discuss this trend: 

https://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-graying-of-traditional-photography.html

https://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2015/10/some-observations-after-speaking-to.html

https://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2014/09/after-gold-rush-where-is-photography.html

seems like we've been thinking about this for a while....

I have officially shaken off all vestiges of that nasty cold I wrote about last week.

Here's my favorite thought about colds: My doctor says most colds resolve in seven to ten days. He gave me a miracle drug. He said it might cut down my suffering by a day. He just wasn't sure where in the 7 to 10 days that day might fall....

Two Samples Made with the Fujifilm 90mm f2.0 Lens. My thoughts...

First off, I have to say that I'm absolutely loving the Zach Theatre production of the play/musical, "Matilda." I have the song, "My Mommy Says I'm a Miracle." bouncing around in my head most days now. The play is wonderfully written and the huge miracle is that a cast of Austin, Texans can do a better English accent than most people I know who are actually from the U.K. 

As you know, one of my favorite assignments is going to the theater for the dress rehearsals (many times it's the first performance with full costumes and completed scenes and props!) to make photographs that will be used for marketing, public relations and other uses that effectively sell tickets; even non-profits have budgets to hit...

I like to lean on tried-and-true equipment for the shoots so I don't stumble because there aren't any "do-overs" but lately I've engineered in some comfort factor that allows me to be a tiny bit more ---- experimental. The new padding is that I now hit both the technical rehearsal and the dress rehearsal. There's no audience at the Tech rehearsal and there might be one or two visual rough spots that the crew is still working on but I get a great preview of the show which helps me understand how to best shoot it. I also shoot hundreds of shot in the first night so I can go back to the office and see how everything worked out.

If all is good then I am more disposed to bring a new toy or two along to the dress rehearsal. 

And that's exactly what I did last week. Twice. One monday I brought along the 14mm f2.8 lens for a bit more emphasis on wide stage shots. Then, on Tuesday, I brought along the 90mm f2.0 XF lens to see if it was really so super groovy as everyone says. 

Of course, it wouldn't be much of a test if I took a fast, well corrected, single focal length lens and used it stopped down to f5.6. That would only tell most of us what we already know; that almost every prime out there is great once you've stopped it down past the trouble spots...

So, I put the 90mm on an X-H1 and shot it wide open. f2.0. And I took a good look at the files I got. They were all pretty much as good as I thought they'd be. Which, if you think about it, makes talking about all really good lenses a bit boring. What do you really say after you've mentioned how sharp they are and how nice the blur is and how well controlled the flare is? I guess you could dive into the rough and talk about focusing speed and accuracy but those seemed fine, too. 

If you don't mind spendy, and you have a recurring need for a moderately fast prime that's about the equivalent of a classic 135mm on a full frame camera, then this is the best choice in the Fujifilm collection. It's also the only one. Unless you include the same focal length setting on a zoom. But if I wanted that I would have used a zoom. 

Where this lens shines is the close portrait; from waist up, or even tighter,  in an environment where there is fun stuff to put out of focus in the background. I wish I had a couple of jobs like that right now. Maybe I'll go out and look for some. Could be fun. 

Do I regret splashing out for the 90mm? Not at all. It's a nice, classic focal length and (sometimes) fits my style of shooting. I must say though, that shooting live theater is always easier done with nice zooms. Framing on the fly is golden. The 90mm is one of those "serious" lenses you pull out when the focal length is right and the potential for an extremely beautiful photograph exists. At least you'll know you pulled out all the stops...