What do you do when your camera is too small and your lens is too big.

Chihuahua mates with Great Dane.

Yes. I was going to use the Sigma fp camera to shoot some video this evening and I decided to use the Sigma 85mm f1.4 Art lens as the primary lens. But after a few seconds of trying to put the Sigma fp directly onto a video tripod with that giant, honking lens sticking out front I realized that we had a crazy mismatch. The lens must be five or six times heavier than the camera body and even if the lens mount can stand the strain the whole assemblage felt so out of balance it make me laugh.

I grabbed some cage kit "tinker toys" and got to work. I've got a set of 15mm rails mounted directly to the tripod and then the camera is mounted to a plate on top of those rails. The lens is supported by a little device that also fits on the rails (to the front). Its sole task is to prevent the dreaded lens droop.

I have the lens support further back in this example so the front ring on the lens, which is the manual focusing ring, is unencumbered. That's a mandatory thing because I'll be focusing manually.

Once I finish the set-up I'll have a monitor up on the top bar and an SSD drive hanging close to the side of the camera. It's a nutty set-up but I think it's better than letting an unsupported multi-pound lens hang way off the center of gravity. Talk about front heavy...

I have extra time to figure this stuff out in advance now. Moving at a leisurely pace and already dreading the editing on the back end.

Consider this your dose of "Rube Goldberg" engineering for the moment.

A long overlooked, but delightful, small camera got some attention today and got out for some fresh air. Here's what my Panasonic gX85 saw today.

Of all the cameras I've owned over the years I've got to say that some of the smaller (m4:3) models have been among my favorites; at least where digital cameras are concerned. I've been shooting with the full size Lumix S1 cameras for a while now and I feel the weight of the combined body and lenses when I go out for just a casual walk. As an alternative to always having a full size camera along I bought myself a very small and very "on sale" camera just before the holidays last year. 

It's not a brand new model and it "only" has a 16 megapixel sensor but I think it does a fine job making photographs. And it's nicely size-matched to the two lenses that came in the kit. I parted with a bit less than $450 for the camera body, the 12-35mm, collapsible kit lens and also the 45-150mm zoom lens. 

All three of the products are small, light and very good performers for the money. Obviously, the small sensor camera, coupled with smaller aperture lenses, is not going to be the ultimate low light camera but I rarely go out for long walks in low light so maybe it's a better match than you might think. For an "only" camera system it may not have all the bases covered but I am fortunate that it's only one of the tools in the box for me. 

I haven't played with this little system as much as I should have but I'm out to remedy that. The menus are similar enough to the S1 and the (sadly missed) G9 cameras from Panasonic so there isn't that discordant hesitation that comes from crossing over from one brand of camera to another in day to day work. 

When I left the house it was still raining this morning and even though it wasn't coming down hard I took along a rain jacket with a hood for me and a small, plastic bag (as a rain cover) for the camera. 

I parked in the now totally empty parking lot at Zach Theatre since the complex is adjacent to the lake and the trails. I pulled up my hood, retied by old Ahnu walking shoes and headed over to the trail. The rain dusted my camera from time to time but I kept a well worn and washed-a-thousand-times handkerchief and wiped off the drops from time to time. I kept the plastic bag in reserve for more dramatic downpours. 

I brought only the wide to short normal kit lens (12-32mm = 24mm to 64mm on an FF sensor) and was happy with my choice. My brain seems to just adapt to whatever I end up bringing along and I rarely have much remorse about not having X or Z lens along with me. You just start looking for things that fit the lens parameters and start ignoring the stuff that might have required a longer lens...

I've been noticing that on recent walks I've done with a camera I was so intent on replacing the lost exercise of swimming that I was trying to walk as briskly as I could and ended up with one or no photographs as a result. I also noticed that the faster I walk the less I look up and the less frequently I look side to side. I guess I'm so intent on keeping a faster pace that I tunnel in and start ignoring things outside my primary peripheral vision. Today I gave myself conscious permission to take it a bit easier and to pay more attention to the visual rewards along the way. 

There may also have been some teething about how to walk in a time of pandemic that influenced my paucity of images from previous walks. I was being more careful about spacing around people which meant I was paying much more attention to boundaries and anticipating moving around people in a judicious way as I passed them. I was also factoring in people coming from behind on bicycles who would be passing me as well. I can normally hear the wheels as they crunch over the cinder trail but since I was giving more space around people in front of me I needed to plan earlier and take the bike riders into consideration further in advance. 

Today I stayed as far to the right of the trail as possible since I wanted to pull off to the edge of the trail more often to make photographs. 

The GX85 is a small, unthreatening and anonymous-looking camera. It's the quintessential point-and-shoot camera of the digital age; except that it does take interchangeable lenses. Compared to the denser and bigger S1 cameras, and even the small but densely packed Sigma fp, the GX85 seemed almost weightless. Even with the 12-32mm collapsible lens extended for business the whole package is smaller in one profile than my phone! If this thing hurts your shoulder it may be time to find a willing sherpa for your walks. 

I put the camera on P for program and trusted it, for the most part, to suss out a decent exposure. From time to time I'd nudge it into a darker exposure compensation but then again, I was shooting in raw and knew I'd be better off protecting the highlights with a little underexposure and then lifting shadows in post processing. 

I used center focus, S-AF and was never let down by the system. The deeper depth of field is interesting and somewhat happily compelling after flirting for months with the extremely shallow depth of field offered by the bigger format cameras and the faster lenses I have for them. 

Another benefit of the camera is its very good dual image stabilization. It just works. I feel like a walking tripod sometimes. 

The sun started to peek out just as I finished up mile five of the walk so I trudged back to my car and headed home for lunch. 

Belinda and I can never finish a large pizza from our favorite pizza shop; we always eat what we want and toss the rest into the freezer. Now that there's no business or cash flowing in we've found a treasure trove; literally pounds and pounds, of frozen pizza already on hand. Today, in our ongoing attempt at frugality and cash management, we had a nice lunch of oven-revived pizza. We each got to select our own, personal favorite slices. I had two. One was spinach, mushroom and feta cheese while the other was a blend of vegetables like spinach, green peppers, red peppers, mushrooms and diced tomatoes. 

Regardless of the virus or the financial ruin we're enduring I feel duty bound to have a camera by my side. But in an age (hopefully very temporary) of diminishing expectations it's sometimes nice to have that camera be small and light.  My one day review? The GX85 was a good buy and a nice take-anywhere camera. Not quite state of the art but very much capable of making great images with relative ease. If you can find the set for around $450 new, it's pretty compelling --- unless you already have a camera you are happy with....

Here are some images from this morning with lots of experimental post processing. What are you walking around with this week?

Spring has been so wet and mild that the H&B trail feels like a jungle.

Can't make up my mind but I think I like the color version best....

Social distancing and a small group of cross country runners in the distance. 

Got a text from an old friend who is a bit depressed about the state of the world and 

also his isolation from it. He lives about a half an hour west of Austin. 

We're meeting at his place to re-invent social coffee. 

I'll park at the end of his driveway and bring a lawn chair. 

He can bring a lawn chair from his back yard and we'll sit about seven or eight feet 

apart to drink coffee (I'll bring my own so we don't get into the weeds 

about cup logistics and washing....) and try to solve the problems of modern times. 

Be there for people so they can be there for you. 

What works for a mostly suburban, mid-sized city is probably not going to work in a city of ten million people. We still get to go outside. Officially.

South shore of the hike and bike trails that runs around our downtown river.

Staying inside all the time sucks. Kids hate it. People interested in fitness hate it. Maybe the only people that are enjoying this self-isolation are highly addicted, online video gamers... We're all staying out of shops, restaurants and bars because we're nervous about everyone else and, well, because almost everything is closed.  Besides, we're mostly all freaked out about not having enough money to last long enough; better not to spend big chunks of what remains on stuff we don't really need.

But since we small city people mostly don't live in high rises that force us into small elevators and cramped stairwells, and since there are far fewer of us per square feet in small to medium sized, spread-out cities, we do get to go outside and get exercise. Sanctioned by local health authorities and supervised by our friendly police force.  I'm bummed because all the pools are closed but I'm very happy that we're still able to make good use of the hike and bike trails. As long as everyone follows the rules and uses good judgement... 

To make sure we get the message(s) the Trail Foundation of Austin has been putting signs all around the trail and it's hard to miss them. They aren't strident or preachy but they do get the important messages across.

The signs are everywhere and, in case some people are too lazy to read them there is plenty of group "encouragement" to get the message across. Veteran trail runners are quick to ask people to "stay in their lanes." It's important for new walkers to learn to treat the trails as they would a two way street. In the USA we drive on the right, we walk on the right. Not in the middle of the trail. "On your left!" is a nice way of saying, "I'm about to pass you on your left and you've got your big, fat ass hanging way over the middle of the trail." 

People learn pretty quickly, especially when subjected to repeated reinforcement. "Share the road out there." The trail is nice and wide but it was never intended for entire families to walk side by side and cover all the square footage from one side to the other. Hopefully, in a few weeks, people will be able to get back to work and stop tormenting mid-day runners. Or they will learn the etiquette of sharing our open spaces.

Just a note: If you bring your camera (and I think you always should) be sure not to stop in the middle of the trail to leisurely focus and compose. Pull over to the right and stand at the edge of the trail while photographing so people still in motion can get by. When you are done take a look over your shoulder before re-entering the trail --- just as you would when pulling your car back onto the road.  Thanks!

Revisiting a film portrait. The medium format negative was scanned on a Noristu printer.

Old school portrait. 

I finished my time critical work early this afternoon and I spent some time looking around the web for potential camera bargains. I found two at Precision Camera's website; on the used digital section. Both were Mamiya Pro cameras (digital only) that sported the popular 80mm f2.8 lens AND an Aptus II-5 22 megapixel digital back. Both in EX+ condition.  I'd shot with the Aptus-7 back and found it to be really good in its time. The Aptus II-5 back was introduced for around $8000 in 2009 and boasted 12 (real) stops of dynamic range and (real) 16 bit files. Oh, and the sensor size was 36 by 48mm. The finders on these cameras are/were very good and the camera, lens and back combo retailed for around $12,000 new. Precision Camera has two of them listed for $1299 each. Less than the price of a new Fuji X100V. And yes, that includes the lens.

I almost called to reserve one but I took a beat and remembered that I promised myself I would not buy medium format camera until someone put a model on the market with a (native) square sensor and a sensor size of at least 48 by 48mm. My real interest right now is in acquiring a perfect, used Leica SL as cheaply as I can.

There are several Leica dealer sites that I've been following which each have a fair number of used 9+ condition SLs in inventory. I'll explain my interest in the SL in a different post but my goal today was to take a run at seeing how firm listed prices are from a representative dealer. I selected what looked like the highest serial number, like new in box, camera, priced at $2599 and asked, pleasantly, if the prices were absolutely firm or if they were in flux, what with the imminent arrival of the newer/new SL2 bodies. It's also good to know that the SL came to market with a $7500 price tags while the improved SL2 debuts at $5900 (or around there).

I got an e-mail back almost immediately letting me know that I could have that camera for $2295 and it would include free, second day shipping. I think I'll wait a while and see if they drop down under $2,000 in a mid-to-short time frame.

A program note: I lived in Turkey for two years and I really do enjoy bargaining for purchases. It's fun. 

Emboldened by this new information I may make an offer on one of the used, excellent condition Panasonic GX-8's now taking up space at my local retailer. If the stock markets can dive 35% and still find buyers then why not the same with aging digital cameras?

The image above reminded me that I originally purchased the 47 megapixel S1R cameras (X2) to use in the square aspect ratio as a portrait camera. I guess I'd better find some people who need to be photographed from six or more feet away and see if we can't get busy making more portraits. Time is always running short.

virus note: The city of Austin seems to be doing a decent job of social distancing and other measures to slow down Covid-19 spread. We have just recorded 160 positives for the disease along with one death. The local health authorities say that the person who died was over 70 and had "significant" and severe pre-existing conditions. One interesting data point is that a large percentage of people testing positive are under 40 years old.

My local Trader Joe's is playing an "A" game in their ongoing engagement with our community. They have been fully stocked for most of the week, have made special accommodations for people over 60, and have been managing customer controls (distancing, anti-hoarding) nicely and firmly. I'm impressed. I was in and out in under 7 minutes today --- it took me longer to wipe everything down with Chlorox wipes when I got home --- and I was able to get everything I needed, including Trader Joe's hand sanitizer.

I hope everyone is safe and sound. My "thoughts and prayers" are for all the people who suddenly find themselves out of work and feeling precarious. It's a tough position to be in, more so because we all hate uncertainty. Do what you can for the people who need it most. Might be a good year to shift your usual, generous donation to the opera over to the local food bank. Just a thought...

Stay safe and well fed. And don't forget to pick up and use that camera every day. KT

The hardest part of the "shelter in place" regimen is not being able to make portraits.

I've had enough to keep myself busy this week. Today I fixed a broken gate to the backyard. I also retouched ten really nice portraits I did on location for a law firm, just before the pandemic reared its ugly head in the U.S. I made my own lunch. I said, "yes, yes, yes!" when someone e-mailed and asked me if I'd like to bid on a nice video project we might do in August. I talked my friend, Joe, off the financial ledge for the second time this week ( a bad time, I think, to sell everything and buy an RV).

The house is stocked and the bills are paid but the one thing that's driving me a bit nuts is not being able to call a friend and set up a play date for taking portraits. I have all these great cameras and lenses just burning a hole in my camera bag and I can't really leave the neighborhood to point them at people and get them to smile. Can't have them in the studio either...

I did have fun retouching today and I do have a suggestion that should be in compliance with our current social distancing rules while being a breath of fresh air.

On the retouching: I photographed individual attorneys in an office that had a great view out the window of one of the offices looking out to the central Texas hill country. I lit each attorney as well as I could and tried my best to create lighting that would suggest a connection between interior and exterior. I also worked hard (but somewhat unsuccessfully) to keep a reflection of me and my camera out of the big window. But the new selection tools in P.S. make fixing that a breeze.

I shot the files with a Lumix S1R and the 24-105mm lens, mostly at 105mm. Knowing how well the camera's raw files handle the shadow areas, and how well they respond to the shadow sliders in post, I purposely underexposed the images by about two thirds of a stop which gave me a good degree of safety in terms of preserving highlights and the look outside the window. I used a variety of Godox flashes to light the subjects and the interiors and they all worked perfectly with the little remote controller/trigger in the hot shoe of my camera.

I brought them into PhotoShop via the raw converter and did the big lifting of exposure correction in the raw panel. I also did some rough cropping and a lot of color correction before opening the files into PhotoShop. It's my philosophy to do as much correction as possible in the raw files and then pray for forgiveness in the application.

Today I did a split of the controls between PhotoShop and  Luminar 4.0. I used Luminar as a plug-in so I could take advantage of its sky replacement feature to add a bit of glamor to the view outside the window. I've found Luminar to be pretty good as a sky replacer and general tweaking tool; even more so since I found the control that lets me put the cloudscapes and imported skies controllably out of focus with yet another slider. At some point the haze of boredom crept in and I started using a second Luminar control that allows you to add stuff to sky backgrounds you've put into files. I knew I had gone way too far when I put an eagle in the sky just over the shoulder of a younger lawyer. I laughed at myself but I made a copy of the file to share with him, just for fun.

Some of the controls in Luminar are very useful and I'm happy the program handles raw files.

I delivered an assortment of Jpegs, .PSDs and Tiffs to my clients at the end of the day and finally had the feeling that I'm getting something done while working at home.

On the first sunny day this week I'd had enough of walking through the various wings of the house, and looking out over the "estate." I got in my car and went for a medicinal drive. All the windows were sealed tight and all of the outside air comes in through a HEPA filter. I brought my own coffee so I'd never have to stop. I drove west and headed for Johnson City.

It was a beautiful day to drive through central Texas. The wildflowers are starting to bloom and, because of all the rain we've had, along with the mild temperatures, everything was lush and green. And the sky! With most people just hanging out in their homes the roads are essentially empty and there's no pollution or yellow haze at the horizon. The skies were the kind of luxurious blue that I remember from driving the Devil's Backbone highway in my youth.

I looped through Johnson City and the headed South to Blanco, Texas. Of course absolutely nothing but gas stations was open. But the empty roads, the forty thousand foot sky, and the splashes of roadside color were amazing. It was almost like moving through a living painting.

I never took a camera off the passenger seat to take a photograph. There were no people. But when I got home a couple of hours later I felt lighter, happier and less anxious. It was a good process. No one was hurt in its undertaking.

**************

How far are we taking our family commitment to social distancing? Well, we usually order pizza on Thursdays (a ritual left over from Ben's school years...) and I usually call in my order and then go pick it up. Today I went online to make my order and I pulled up short. There was no longer the option to drive over to the pizza place and pick up our order myself. Our only option was delivery.

I filled out all the order stuff online and paid for it with a credit card. I added a generous tip for the driver. But then Belinda asked me how I was going to deal with the box. Multiple people will have touched the pizza box by the time the pie make its way to me.

We actually had a quick meeting and worked out a plan. I would accept the box from the delivery guy and bring it to the welcome mat at the front door. I would then open the box and spread out the sides of the box. Belinda would bring our big, wooden pizza peel to the door and slide it under the pizza while being very careful not to touch the edges of the box. It worked! Once she had the pizza securely in the house I took the box to our recycling bin and tossed it in. Then I stepped into the open door of the house and drenched my hands with the sanitizer on the ledge near the door. Then I went into the kitchen and washed for 23 seconds with soap and lots of attention to every square centimeter of my hands.

Then we ate good pizza.

Life. It's a process.

How are you handling this day-to-day stuff?

Staying Home and Playing with My Time Machine.

If you are anything like me your rate of photographing far outstrips your rate of printing or post processing the pictures you are making. I have about ten banker's boxes filled with black and white negatives from the 1970s-2000. That's the amount left after fierce rounds of tossing out commercial stuff that no longer had value to me. (Every year I try to wipe out all the rote commercial work from the files that's five years old or older. Better for me to get it into the trash than burden the family with making choices later....).

While there are few to no silver linings to our current pandemic crisis the total pull back of work and projects certainly gives me time to search out and rediscover images I made twenty or thirty or more years ago and to evaluate them through the prism of years of experience.

This (above) was a small print I came across when I was looking around like a studio archeologist this morning. It's a photo I took back in 1984 or 1985 with a Pentax 6X7 camera and the 150mm f2.8  Pentax lens. I scanned the black and white negative sometime in the late 1990s and played around with selective gaussian blur in Photoshop. I was trying to match the feel of darkroom prints I used to make using a selective blurring tool called a "Pictrol."

I think my interest in selective blurring came from reading about how Richard Avedon achieved certain blurring effects in his prints in his earlier days, when he actually spent time in the darkroom. My techniques were different but motivated by the same aesthetic ideas. Pools of blur to put more attention on the sharper part of the images.

I love coming across tiny test prints like this one because it helps me to see a certain trajectory that still influences the work I do now.

I understand we may be socially distancing for quite a while longer and it's disheartening because...well...at heart I am a portrait photographer and that's pretty much off limits to me now. But as a  consolation I have a huge backlog of wonderful images to explore and the gift of time in which to explore them.

Being the eternal optimist I imagine a time in the very near future when we'll be unleashed from our isolation and the positive energy will flow back into every second of work we do going forward. "You don't miss your water till your well runs dry." It's up to you to dig a new well.

Latest news on the gear front. High speed camera storage is pleasant.

Samsung SSD Drive and SmallRig mounting clamp. 

As some of you know I bought a really interesting camera a while back. It's called a Sigma fp and while it's a bit limited as a still camera (you will NOT be photographing your kid's soccer game with one ---- unless you are a masochist...) it has some interesting features for those interested in playing around at one of the cutting edges of consumer video. The most interesting of those video features is that this is one of the few inexpensive (relative term) cameras that will allow you to capture video in a raw, uncompressed format. 

Shooting video in raw offers the same kind of flexibility that you are used to getting when shooting raw photographs. You can do so much color correction and exposure correction without "breaking" the files and adding nasty stuff like banding and digital noise.  You can pull amazing detail from the shadows and you'll find lots of detail hiding in what would have otherwise been blown highlights. 

But there is one big issue. You'll be working with files that are coming into your camera at up to 2400 Mbps if you make video at the highest quality settings = 4K 12 bit, uncompressed, 23.98, 4:4:4. It's a data rate that's much too fast for any commercially available SD card. It's ponderous amounts of information coming in at high velocity. 

If you want to play around with the fast, high bit depth, raw files you need a different memory solution and HDMI solutions are not going to fill the bill. 

The recommended fast storage is the Samsung T5 one or two terabyte SSD drive (the lower capacity 500 Gb drive is not certified to work by Sigma). It writes continuously at nearly 600 Mbps, sustained, which is fast enough to record the data set from the camera. I'm not sure I get the math since the drive seems to handle a lower amount than the max capable from the camera but video is variable and so is the data rate. With buffering I guess it all works out...

The drive is light and tiny and connects to the camera through its USB 3.1 port. It works pretty flawlessly with the Sigma camera and I haven't had any stalls or hiccups in my testing so far. The one thing you'll also need to figure out is how to mount the SSD drive to a cage or directly to your camera. I've built a universal, tripod mount cage from parts I get from SmallRig and they make a clamp connector specifically for the T5 drive which I can bolt onto my rig. Not completely elegant but very workable. 

Let's talk honestly though. Do I intend to shoot anything at the maximum data rate possible with the Sigma fp? Probably not. It's fun to play around with and it's scary to see how fast a one terabyte drive fills up. I doubt I will see the difference between 12 bit and 10 bit video just as I rarely see much difference between a 16 bit Photoshop file and an 8 bit Jpeg file on my iMac Pro 5K monitor. But, there may come a day when someone somewhere wants a perfect 30 second clip for a very specific purpose. I'll be ready...

For the rest of the time I will be able to use the SSD to get 12 bit, 1080 (FHD) files that I will have a lot of use for. Also, the bit depth will come in handy when Sigma gets around to creating a Log setting.

One important advantage that I don't see many people mentioning is that you can use the SSD for output at any file setting. That means you can go all the way to the 2 hour limit with smaller or less data intensive files without having to stop and change out memory cards. The flip side advantage is that when your long shoot is over you can plug the SSD directly into your computer for super fast downloads. Hell, if you want to play fast and loose you can even plug in and edit directly on the SSD. 

Pros will stridently suggest that a back-up is always necessary but if you are shooting for yourself, doing tests, working out the kinks or just trying something new, a back-up isn't always absolutely required. Just don't cry if you accidentally lose something. 

Sigma has a new firmware update for the fp. It's  1.02 and it's mostly just a bunch of bug fixes. I'll get around to updating mine today. 

Being a "silver lining" kind of guy I sure am relishing the current downtime as an opportunity to really learn the ins and out of my video gear. I never seem to have enough unstructured time to really dive in deep when we're working on a regular schedule...

A kindly intended note for people who blog for the $$$: You've got a bigger audience right now than you will when everyone goes back to work. You need to feed them content they love in very regular doses. You will be doing a community service. We all want stuff to read and stuff to take our minds off the crisis (me included). Now is not the time to decide that you too will take some time off. We need your stuff more than ever before. So, stop puttering around and get me some fresh content! And remember, we can read all about the virus everywhere else, you might consider writing stuff we enjoy instead. Like about cameras and lenses and photography. 

If we love your blog or your V-log then you are doing everyone a community service by stepping up and being consistent. Just a suggestion.