I like to use a "stand-in" for the final portrait subject when I'm getting my lighting set up. Sometimes everyone is at lunch and the stand-in is me.

I pretty much know how the light from a soft box is going to look, and the same goes for a light in an umbrella, but sometimes you end up in a location where you are shooting against windows and there's all kinds of light bouncing around outside (and inside) and you really need to make sure there's not going to be a big reflection staring back at you in the glass....

After I get my lights roughed in I like to ask someone to stand in just so I can see how everything is working out. And I like to do that before the star of the photo session walks in so I don't have to waste his or her time resetting errant lights. It's also good to know just how much depth of field you are going to end up with at a given subject-to-camera distance and also how it will affect the background. Right?

So, I was setting up to photograph the CEO of a hedge fund late last year and when I finished my set up I found that everyone in the office was either in a meeting or out for lunch. My assistant for the shoot was me. So I grabbed my assistant and demanded he stand in for some test shots. He grumbled a bit, told me he didn't get paid enough to do this, but I finally got the guy to cooperate while I set the self-timer on the camera and walked back to stand on the mark I'd made with white gaffer's tape, on the floor. 

I was then able to assure myself that we'd have a fighting chance of getting a decent shot of the CEO as soon as the cast came back from meetings and lunch. It all worked out fine but even though I've done this sort of shoot for decades it's nice to have the extra layer of assurance that comes from a decent test shot. 

I now realize that self-timers on cameras were invented specifically so photographers could do a one-man set up and test for on-location portraits. Anything else they tell you about self-timers is B.S. 

I don't always look so stern but when I have to switch roles and become the stand-in/assistant I want to make sure the photographer knows I'm taking my job seriously. Those photographers are demanding bastards; that for sure!

No assistants were harmed in the making of this self portrait. 

(Damn. I should have retouched......).

A Camera with a different character. The Sony RX10 series.

A friend who is not a "photographer" and doesn't want to start collecting gear, asked me to recommend a great camera that would make good images and allow him the most flexibility for shooting everything from wide angle scenes to kids playing sports. I thought about all the interchangeable lens cameras I know about but my friend is a guy who is unlikely to want to change lenses or keep several lenses in a bag. It was a weird moment for me to realize that there are lots of other, sometimes better options, out in the world besides our traditional, mirrorless or DSLR system cameras, with their raft of lenses, accessories and operational traditions. 

I thought back over all the work I've done in the past ten years to come up with a camera that I had personally used and enjoyed, but one which would also meet the more limited operational parameters requested. After I cut out all the interchangeable lens cameras I was left with a handful of choices. There are the artsy-hipster-advanced artist, fixed lens prime cameras like the Ricoh GRIII and the ever-iterating Fuji X-100x series but the wide, fixed, prime lens is far too limiting for anyone other than a person who might want to have a small camera to play with but who also possesses a massive inventory of "real" cameras for those times when portraits and other long lens scenarios come into focus...

Eliminating the "art school" camera set left me with just a couple of options. There's the compact, zoom lens cameras like the Sony RX100x's and the Panasonic Lumix LX100ii but I think they are too tiny and fiddly to work with. Then I found a folder of images I made one year when I took a Sony RX10iii to the big Spring party in Austin called, "Eeyore's Birthday Party." Smiling as I flipped through the images in the folder I realized that really good, longer telephoto capability is one of the things that separates really useful, impactful and highly competent cameras from "fun, handy" cameras. 

I sent along the information about the Sony RX10iii, let him know that there's a newer model but that I hadn't used it yet, and I also sent along a folder full of color and black and white images I'd taken with the camera. He was hooked. Then he saw the pricing on the RX10 series and paused. He's using a borrowed RX10iii right now but every time we speak I can see that the camera is sinking its highly capable hooks into his wallet. And his visual vocabulary.

I love the RX10 series. Each new model had something to recommend it (and a deletion to bitch about....) but I'd almost forgotten that the lure and allure for me on the two later cameras is the absolutely first class long end of that 24mm-600mm equivalent zoom. I can isolate subjects, defocus backgrounds and get stellar stabilized results with much less hassle than trying to do the same with a professional, full frame body and a bag full of lenses that, when used together, give me the same kind of reach but with the burden of more weight and complexity than most people (who aren't being paid to make photographs) want to endure.

I should never have opened the folder and re-visited the images. Now I feel the attraction of the RX10IV. Resist. Resist. Resist.

Some images from my vacation to Montreal, Canada. Re-imagined in black and white.

Coffee at Crew Café. Montreal, Canada.

These were all taken with the Pentax K-1 I was using back in October. Along with either the 28-105mm lens or the 50mm f1.4 lens. I photographed in color (Jpegs) and converted to black  and white in Adobe Lightroom. It's fun to see them in a different way. One of the pleasant things about seeing new work and then setting it aside for a few months before coming back to it fresh.

 

One small soft box from top left and one small soft box on the background. That's all we could do in the space.

For Samsung Project in NYC.

If you click on the image you can see it bigger and I think that makes this better...

OT: An amazing day on the stock market. Congratulations to those folks who bought Apple Computer stock last year. Or the year before. Or the year before. Or.....

I remember sitting in a meeting for vendors, at one of Apple's main competitors back in the 1990s, when the CEO was asked (in a Q&A session) about Apple as a competitor. The young and brash CEO chuckled and said that Apple was on the way out and if their management was rational they would give the cash and assets on hand back to the shareholders and turn out the lights. That was then....

Today the company run by that CEO has a current market cap of about $39 billion while Apple hit a record today with a market cap of $1.3 trillion. Apple, as a company is now worth nearly 40 times what  that particular competitor is worth today. And, with just cash on hand, Apple could buy that company outright. It's an interesting turn of events. Apparently, beautifully designed products really do matter to a very large swath of consumers. So much for specsmanship and racing to the bottom with pricing. 

So, in March of 2019 you could have bought say, 6,000 shares of Apple at $142 for around $852,000 and now, less than one year later, your investment would be worth $1,800,000, not even factoring in Apple's ongoing dividends to shareholders. That's a better return than one could expect from even a decent photography business!

Of course past results are no guarantee of future performance and what goes up usually comes back down. It's just an interesting time and I took note of it because one of my friends who used to be a photographer called me today to breathlessly talk about his good fortune. I wish we were all so clairvoyant? Strategic? ...... Lucky? 

I just wish Apple would make a camera other than the ones in iPhones. I'd probably buy one...

Off to a good start this year. I hit the pool this morning for the 8:15-9:30 a.m. workout and it was sublime.

WHAC Masters a.m. workout.

Coach Jimmy was on deck today and he wrote out a daunting set on the white board. 800 yards of warm-up, followed by a 300 yard pull set, then a 200 yard mixed I.M. and freestyle set, and then 20 X 75s on 1:10 followed by 20 x 25s on :30 followed by a couple hundred yards of shooters (try to make each 25 yard length completely underwater/no breaths. We knocked out about 3500 yards in an hour and 25 minutes and then surrendered the pool to Ian Crocker's (gold medal Olympian and past world record holder in the 100 butterfly) elite group of younger swimmers (high school). 

So of us were a bit worse for wear for having been out of the water since Sunday morning but nobody dropped out. No one drowned.

Before firing up the new computer I did some dry land exercises here in the studio: 25 crunches, 25 push-ups and some work with hand weights. Hey, if you're going to buy heavy cameras you'll probably want to get in some weight training, right?

Now I'm off to clean and organize for our first photo shoot of the year: tomorrow. 

A contingent from our Masters team started the year off New Year's morning with a plunge into the cool waters at Barton Springs. Not so dramatic yesterday with an air temperature of 56(f) but in years past it's been as cold as 24 and we still had some brave participants...

Swimming Pool in breeze.

No lofty resolutions here, just the same daily practice we've done nearly everyday since childhood. If you never stop you never have to go through the agony of starting up again. Hope you're moving and moving happy. KT

A Few Quick Observations about The New VSL Computer, the iMac Pro...

 Trying a softer look. Just for fun.

Belinda remarked to me yesterday, as I was grappling with the idea of spending money on a new computer, that I think nothing of buying camera bodies that are about the same price, sometimes in lots of two or more, and yet I've been nursing along an iMac 27 inch computer that first hit the market in late 2013. Sure, it has 16 gigabytes of memory and it's been solid and reliable but she was quick to point out that I'd save a lot more time and money by getting a new computer rather than impulse shopping for more cameras....

I brought the iMac Pro home last night and got to work migrating all the apps and files from the old machine to the new one. I knew the iMacPro would be much faster but what I did not expect was that the screen (a 5K Retina) would be so much better than the screen on the older machine.

The improved image almost immediately pushed me into looking at old files on the new system. I was amazed at how much more revealing the higher resolution is (and the wider gamut). I'm happy I've bought a few new cameras that create nearly 50 megapixel files because the new monitor allows me to see some artifacts in shadows I never saw before as well as some color casts that I thought I'd taken care of by calibrating the old screen every once in a while. It also brings home to me the advantages of working with bigger files. Now I can see more profound differences between cameras.

Just as getting new cameras and lenses seems to supercharge my interest in getting out and taking more photographs getting a much more capable desktop is pushing me to dive into post processing with greater diligence than I brought to the digital darkroom before.

Also, I tested the new system against the old in a task that I do nearly every week. That's to convert batches of corrected files from raw to jpeg in Lightroom. I selected a folder with 650 24 megapixel raw files and converted them to large, fine Jpegs on each system. As I anticipated, the task took the better part of a half hour on the older machine and about four minutes on the new one. That's enough improvement right there to make me sit up, take notice, and then pat myself on my own back for my smart purchase.

I've also bought a couple of external 1 terabyte SSD drives to use as scratch and "in process" disks. That makes everything go faster as well. I can hardly wait for our first job of the year to come through the door on Friday. I'll be spending Friday evening with a big smile on my face in fast, post processing paradise....