Out photographing with the ancient Canon G10 last Sunday. It's a wonderful little camera.

Kenny Williams is an actor I met at Zach Theatre well over 20 years ago. He's toured the world in the ensuing years as a gifted singer and performer but we've managed to keep up with each other. He texted me last week to see if I was interested in going for a walk through downtown. He has an interest in photography and wanted to see what I do when I take a camera for a walk. I was happy to have him along with me for a couple of hours. 

We both made odd choices of cameras. He claimed it was too hot (it was!) to carry a big camera around so he prudently opted to take his phone instead. I'm just eccentric and I chose the Canon G10 because it was on a shelf right next to the door and it seemed so obvious, in the moment. 

But I'm almost always interested to see just how great an older, smaller, cheaper camera can take photos if all the parameters of the shooting experience mesh with the capabilities of the camera. Full sun? Check! Slow moving objects? Check! Raw files available? Check. Well then, off we go. 

First off I'll say I'm shocked at how well the G10 handled the scene above. Kenny is in open shade and we can see the sunlight street and sidewalks behind him. Yes, some parts are burned out but I'm impressed by how well the camera (set to "P") handled the exposure and how well the raw files dealt with the background. I'm getting better results from this camera than I remembered and I'm going to chalk that up to the idea that raw converters have been continuously improved so the raw files from cameras follow those improvements in lock step. Even from cameras that are 10 or more years old. Have raw file, will process.

In the photo just above I'm impressed at the differentiation in the greens of the image. From the leaves on the trees to the water behind them. A Jpeg shot at the same time gave me greens that were much less differentiated and actually started to blend into each other. 

I find the colors from the older CCD sensor to be richer and deeper than the colors from the newer CMOS sensor in the G15. Funny. you'd think newer would be better but that's not always the case. I think CMOS trades off color depth and color saturation for lower noise and longer battery life. I'd rather have the colors....

My final observation concerning the G10 is just how sharp the 28-140mm lens can be. While Blogger limits the reproduction size here I was surprised at how competitive the G10 raw files were with more modern cameras fitted with bigger sensors and much, much more expensive lenses. 

As you can see in the image just above, the trade-off for high sharpness and lack of vignetting with the Canon G10 lens is some slightly more complex than simple barrel distortion on the edges of the frame. Not the camera you want to use to photograph projects for architects --- but I think that falls into the category of common sense. Right?

Kenny and I walked through downtown to search for new murals and street art. A lot of the good stuff from the early days of the pandemic are now gone. Taken down as businesses on East Sixth St. rushed to take the plywood off their doors and window and open up for business. Makes me happy I made multiple trips down to document them. 

One of the biggest losses I encountered was the "paint over the top" of the Superman and Wonder Woman mural I showed a week or so ago. Senseless removal as it was replaced by......white paint. Sad. So Sad. 

Another perfect morning at the pool. I wonder if I can get paid to swim?

I hit the pool at 6:00 this morning. The air was cool (62 f) and dry. The water was a chilly (but wonderful) 77 degrees. It was dark when I got in and fully light when I pulled myself out of the deep end, grabbed my phone and took the images above and below. Yesterday I forgot all my swim gear at the pool. It was waiting for me in a small bin at the side of the deck when I got there this morning. So nice. 

I hope Austinites and Texans are smart enough to continue doing the social distancing and face mask wearing so we don't  have to shut down the pools again. It would be sad to let the pandemic win when there are still thousands of potential swims left. 

I use Blogger to create the blog posts. They've changed the whole interface and it may take me a day or two to get used to the new way of doing things. I hope there's no interruption of service and I hope also that I don't get myself into a technical pickle and mess stuff up. It would be a bad time to do so since my technical staff is busy troubleshooting the small cold fusion reactor we use to power the labs, etc. 

Now off with a odd mismatch of cameras: The S1R with the 85mm Sigma Art lens and the Canon G15 (with freshly charged batteries...). Have a great day! Drink lots of coffee! Play hard.

Currently "testing" two different cameras. From nearly the same era. But what does "testing" really mean in this instance?

Belinda cleaned out a closet and found an older camera. It's an Olympus epm-1 which is a very small, very thin m4:3rd camera that hit the market around 2011 and did not take the world by storm. At the time the Olympus offerings, regardless of price, were limited to a sensor resolution of 12.3 megapixels. The epm-1 is the smallest interchangeable lens mirrorless camera that I've come across yet. It's just a tiny bit bigger in one dimension than an iPhone XR and smaller in another dimension. But I don't want to get too multi-dimensional here....  Olympus sent it to me out of the blue. No request to review. No request to write about it even in passing. It came to me some time in 2012 along with a tiny flash that fits in the hot shoe and a highly promotional, super small, black backpack to hold the camera, charger and flash unit. I spent a day trying to figure out where they hid the controls and then, frustrated, I gave it to Belinda to see if she could get any use out of it. Turns out that she is much smarter than me and she used it right up until she discovered the Canon G15. At which point she handed back all the epm-1 stuff to me.

It's funny because the epm-1 arrived back in the studio this week and shortly afterwards I took possession of another G15 so I could have one too. A confluence of weird cameras. (They seem right at home with the equally eccentric - but loveable - Sigma fp).

So, right now I'm "testing" them. What does that really mean? Let me explain.  I have a camera test pedestal that is a massive lead and nickel alloy tripod head on top of a reinforced concrete pillar that goes down through the floor of the lab  (without touching the actual floor --- too many vibrations!!!) to bedrock forty seven and a half feet below. I mount the cameras on this and use a laser interferometer to get the camera perfectly level and parallel to the NASA test target that I had micro-etched with blue lasers onto an 8 by 12 foot sheet of one inch thick titanium. It's a good test target. It seems dimensionally stable.

I can't be in the room at the time of actual testing because we create a complete vacuum in the space in order to rule out atmospheric anomalies during testing. This also helps to prevent dust from impinging on our test results.

The room isn't state-of-the-art since we only filter particles down to 1.5 microns but we're working on improving our technologies because of the important work we're doing here with used, $100 to $150 dollar cameras, which were created nearly a decade ago.

Before we have our robotic interface run the actual tests we mould the center of a 30 pound warhead core of spent plutonium into the shape of the exterior of the camera and place the final plutonium construct on top of the camera to minimize any residual, external vibrations. A tight fitting, low gamma emitting plutonium pseudo "bean bag" is just the right solution for any shutter shock that might be resident in the cameras as well.

Once everything is clamped into place we test the cameras over a vast range of temperatures starting with an immersion in liquid nitrogen and then increasing the temperatures up to the point of failure, or until the camera's exterior begins to melt.

All professionals should know the "melt" point of their cameras if they are to truly deliver the best results for their clients. So far, of all the cameras VSL has tested in this manner, the Pentax K-01 tops the scale for heat resistance and resistance to electromagnetic vituperative lashings. It did, however, fail our test for high pressure immersion in Diet Coke (one of the toughest tests our lab currently has, in house, for satellites and cameras).

Once we've gotten several thousand terabytes of "metrics" that cover aspect from Nyquist quiescence to  all the relevant Ferbil integers from our lab tests, we feel more confident in taking said unit out into the "real world" and "making" test images to evaluate its actual performance. It's a months' long process as we need to shoot the camera in all natural lighting and weather conditions and we sometimes wait months for the right intersection of temperature, humidity and astrological star stage.

Finally we give it to our physics guy so he can take pictures of his girlfriend standing next to her mountain bike. That's the crucial end point of the testing.

We're in early days on the two cameras mentioned above. Really early days. How early? We're still in the battery testing stage at this point. How do we test the batteries? Glad you asked that. First we fire up the cyclotron and.............

Somebody make coffee! This might go on for a while...

But in all seriousness (if I have any left) I'm having fun playing with fun, basic, stupid and cheap cameras this week. Maybe I'll discover something no one else has. Maybe they'll end up back in a drawer for the next 10 years.

Microaggressions. That's when your camera won't switch modes as fast as you want it to. But it seems to require sentience from a camera and that may be a stretch. Conversely maybe it's really the action you take against the camera when it doesn't perform as you'd expected. But really, isn't that why we test?

It's June 10th. Absolutely nothing is happening today and that's okay. Sometimes it's nice if life just proceeds on its own.

Yesterday was super hot and sticky here. This morning I woke up at 5:30 this morning and it was a cool, dry 65 degrees. Just right for a swim. Actually, just right for anything. Yesterday's early swim practice was packed with people. I had to share a lane with Olympic gold medalist, Tommy Hannan; it was intimidating. He's half my age, twice as fast and...well, a gold medalist in butterfly. We pretty quickly determined that we should split the lane instead of trying to circle. No way I was going to swim on his intervals. It all worked out. We're still on speaking terms...

Today was a lightly attended workout; I had my own lane in the pool at 6 a.m. The water was cooler today. That means someone at the pool turned on the aerators last night. It's easier to swim faster in cooler water. 76 degrees Fahrenheit is optimum for racing but anything under 82 is fine for an hour long workout. 

The sunrise did its beautiful light show once again, this time with a deep, French blue background and warm, magenta-hued clouds accented with soft orange. I with I'd had a camera in the pool with me because at one point the whole balance between pool lights, sky, clouds, and the pervasive glow of ambient light was astonishing. I swam backstroke while I watched the colors build to a crescendo and then, like flicking a switch, just turn into normal morning light. No big yards today. Just a long, strong swim in perfect water and perfect light. 

I went home, cooked two over easy, fried eggs, made toast from sourdough bread, and tossed in a slice of ham for good measure. Yummy. But after I washed my dishes and thought a bit about sitting in front of the computer aimlessly working on....something/anything...I decided not to waste such a beautiful morning indoors. I put on an old pair of Merrill walking shoes, grabbed the Sigma fp camera  and headed downtown. 

The Sigma fp is a fun camera for casual shooting. I use it mostly bare (without an auxiliary finder) and almost always in the aperture mode. The 45mm Sigma lens I use has an external aperture ring which is handy and oh so nicely made. The 1/3rd stop clicks are just about perfect. The lens is supposed to be "soft" at f2.8, which is its widest aperture. I'm not so sure "soft" is exactly the right description for what happens to the image at f2.8. I think it's more a lowering of contrast than a major loss of resolution. That being said, if you are a stickler for absolute, corner to corner prickly sharpness then maybe using f2.8 will be problematic. 

With this in mind I like to set the lens to f5.6 and shoot just about all my street photography and little fine-artsy documentations at that setting. I find that f4.0 is also very nice: sharp and contrasty but I like that extra depth of field I get from 5.6 for most normal focal length shots on full frame. When I'm shooting bigger vistas I generally opt to go to f8.0 so I can get reasonable focus in more depth. Sharpness, and extension of sharpness in depth, are also quite dependent on the focusing distance as well as lens design. Some lenses perform better as the subject-to-camera distance increases. Most film lenses used to be optimized for best performance at a distance of 50X the focal length of the lens. I'm not sure if that changed when lens makers started implementing close up corrections that are done by moving various lens element groups independently while focusing or not. It stands to reason that a lens would be optimized for one extreme or the other. The moving groups are an attempt to have performance at both ends. And in the middle.

I remember using earlier macro lenses from Canon and Nikon (pre-CRC*, *close range correction) and experiencing noticeable decreases in sharpness as I focused closer to infinity. 

One thing I love about shooting with the Sigma fp for casual work is the ability to bring up a waveform monitor on the LCD and work with exposure the same way I do when shooting video. A waveform gives me more actionable information than a simple histogram. I just make sure the waveform doesn't go over 100% and I know that nothing in the highlights will burn out. 

On a day like today, when my photography is ultra-casual, I really end up shooting in a modified "program" mode. I want control over the f-stop so I use the "A" setting but then I also set the camera to auto-ISO. Most of the shooting was done in bright sun so I certainly didn't fear that the camera would select an unusably high ISO. I'm happy with the sensor performance all the way to 6400 ISO and even beyond but the camera was mostly selecting ISO 100. I also can't use the camera's digital image stabilization with raw files so I want to make sure I'm shooting at a shutter speed I can predictably handhold. For me, with the 45mm, I try to be conservative and set the auto-ISO lower shutter speed limit to 1/160th as a bottom/slowest speed. 

My most used control is the exposure compensation dial which is the control wheel on the back of the camera. Usually, I'll tweak an exposure up a bit for a lighter than average subject to make sure we're not dropping the mid-tones too low. With the waveform monitor engaged it's a simple strategy. I just look at the photo preview on the LCD and turn the dial in the correct direction until the waveform is where I want it. Shooting raw is part of my point and shoot strategy with this camera. I can be underexposed by up to four stops (I'm usually not...) and still get a usable file in post production. If I know a highlight might burnout I'll under expose by a decent margin knowing I can hold the highlight in post and normalize the image with a  shadow slider and some mid-tone contrast correction. 

Today I wore the camera 1960's tourist style. That's where you wear the camera on a neckstrap, have the neckstrap around the back of your neck and let the camera bounce around on your chest or stomach. That way the camera strap doesn't keep sliding off my shoulder and the camera is instantly ready to be grabbed in both hands and used. It also makes one look very photo-nerdy so everyone just assumes you are a harmless tourist...not an opportunistic artist.

I would have taken the new (used) Canon G15 out for a spin but UPS seems to have mis-delivered the package. I got a notice telling me the package had been delivered to my front door but the time stamp for the drop was supposed to have occurred when both of us were home and paying attention. I usually hear the trucks pull up and usually the driver rings the door bell before running off. Not today. So, I've started the sad process of tracking down the lost package. It's so frustrating. I may never buy anything that needs to be shipped ever again. My local camera store will be delighted to read that... Now I'm waiting for someone at the local UPS distribution center to call me back. Right. We'll see if that happens. No big deal, I guess. It's not like I was depending entirely on that particular camera to change my life.

As I was photographing buildings and signs on Congress Ave. I noticed that the LaVazza coffee shop was open so I ducked in to get a cappuccino to go. I was the only customer in the store. That's got to be pretty safe. The coffee was as good as I remembered. They make a great cappuccino. I also like to drop by there because Elliott Erwitt did a calendar for the parent company and this shop has a big, mural sized, black and white of a couple with a small baby drinking LaVazza coffee will waiting to catch a train in some far off land. The baby is looking right into the camera and the parents are otherwise occupied. It's a wonderful photo. Seeing it enhances the effect of the coffee.

I also love the fact that their to-go cups have an insulating sleeve that runs down the entire expanse of the cup. It's a small touch but thoughtful. I haven't enjoyed a cappuccino that good in months. Really. It was that good. It was comforting to know that LaVazza is still there since, sadly, Medici Caffé is now closed up and gone from Congress Ave. Alas, it was one of my favorite haunts.

A giant, yellow wall. Too yellow. But sharp. Oh so sharp.

There were so few people downtown that it reminded me of the first week or so of the lockdown, back in March. No one was heading into any of the big office high rises and no one was in line for coffee, etc. The only people I ran into were various homeless people and private security people who are tasked with preserving the "sanctity" of all the private property. 

The homeless are at a double disadvantage in downtown these days. They have historically survived by panhandling from the downtown workers and a never ending stream of tourists, but both of those streams have effectively vanished. Secondly, they are the epitome of a "cash" enterprise since they don't have checking accounts and don't have credit card terminals. Few people walk around with cash anymore. I'm not entirely against a handout if their story is good and my (sometimes flawed) intuition prods me but I've long since stopped using cash or even carrying it around with me. I don't think I'm an outlier in this regard either.

The weather was so comfortable I could have stayed downtown all day. But I'd been up since 5:30 and needed to break for lunch, and also wanted to check on my (failed) camera delivery, so I headed back home to warm up some leftover pizza and check in. 

In closing I guess I have to say that I enjoy the Sigma fp precisely because of its earnest potential and in spite of its small flaws. Things I wish I could change? Not the AF. Not the C-AF. I just want a few little things like, the ability to attach a small EVF like we used to do with the Olympus EP-2, 3 and 5 cameras. I'm learning to modify my dirty baby diaper hold with this camera so I guess I'll survive. That's about it. Amazing that I really can't think of anything else I'd want to change. But if they do make an EVF attachment I'll get right in line to buy one. 

Coda; I talked with two very sharp and responsive people at UPS. They took my information down and advised me that someone would call me in one hour. I got a call 42 minutes later. They asked me to look outside our front door. The package had just been delivered. They were asking me to confirm. Yes! That is the best customer service I've had on a delivery for a long, long, time. Well done UPS. Very well done!!!

If you see my UPS driver would you let them know I'm at 

Latitude 30.2832  by Longitude -978030 ?

That would be nice...

The Resolution: I talked with two very sharp and responsive people at UPS. They took my information down and advised me that someone would call me in one hour. I got a call 42 minutes later. They asked me to look outside our front door. The package had just been delivered. They were asking me to confirm. Yes! That is the best customer service I've had on a delivery for a long, long, time. Well done UPS. Very well done!!!

Just a note to say that I miss walking through the streets and being able to photograph interesting people without face masks...

I wear one. I busted a photographer last week who was about to head into a camera store without his mask. I think we all deserve to be safe. I think we all have a responsibility to keep other people safe.
I'm wearing one until the health authorities sound the "all clear."

But that doesn't mean I don't miss seeing beautiful, naked faces out in public places. And my cameras feel the same way...

Wandering around town with a point and shoot camera while I wait for another point and shoot camera to arrive tomorrow...

Photographers can be wacky. Many believe that they're destined to do only one sort of photography and think they need to find "the" perfect camera and then use it until it's all used up or until something new and plainly superior hits the market. I'm afraid that's not the way my brain got wired. In my wacky and non-linear career I've shot jobs for clients with 8x10 inch view cameras, 4x5 inch view cameras, scads of medium format cameras and more than a handful of 35mm cameras. I've owned (and used) more digital cameras than most people have owned different shirts.

I'd love to buy into the mindset of the "perfect" camera because it would probably save me no small bucket of money and time. But I more or less discard out of hand the mentality of "finding a groove and staying in it." I like to mix things up. When we swim in our masters workouts we don't pick just one stroke and one distance and then put our heads down and slog through the hour, we do practice as a series of sets. One set might be eight x fifty yard swims of butterfly stroke. The next set might be two hundred yards of kicking with a kick board. The next set might be eight X two hundred yards of freestyle on a specific time interval. Followed by some number of hundred yard swims of all four strokes. Butterfly, backstroke, breaststroke and freestyle. We might choose to do drills in which we don't even do a recognized stroke. The mix keeps it fun. The constant movement shreds the time. Every muscle gets a workout.

I can't think I could ever be one of those guys who goes out into the wilderness year after year and lugs along a big, view camera and a monolithic tripod. Ducking under the dark cloth to focus my upside down image. Watching water slow down to mush. Sliding in film holders as the sun beats down or the snow swirls around. It's hard to catch an awkward flirty glance from a beautiful woman in a dusky coffee shop with that kind of rig. With that kind of rigor. With that amount to gear tunnel vision. More like rigor mortis.

We probably still need a big cameras with big sensors to shoot big projects; the ones that require massive files and lots of detail. But maybe that's not rational anymore either. Maybe most of the stuff we photograph that doesn't move could be handled with a $600 m4:3 camera --- if it comes with a high res mode/ or if we remember how to stack stuff in PhotoShop. 

I have a range of cameras and I have an iPhone. They handle different subject matter. That iPhone is darned handy when I'm standing on the deck of a pool at 5:55 in the morning and I'm just looking to prove "I was there." That Lumix S1R with the pricey glass? It's really great for those times when I want to make a big architectural print or play at being a detail oriented landscape shooter. 

All the cameras in between? They're like the four strokes in swimming, with a few drill tools tossed in to keep it all fresh. 

These photos were taken with that ancient Canon point and shoot camera, the G10. I took it along on a walk with me because it was the solution that presented itself (and looked like the best compromise) when I decided to do a seven mile walk around the lake. It's lightweight and highly portable but it's also robust and unflinching. Some people think it doesn't offer enough dynamic range but I think people who worry about dynamic range have just lost the thread when it comes to exposing  their shots correctly. 

On another day there might be another choice. Sometimes we bring out the Lumix GX8 for no other reason beyond my belief that it looks so cool. It's also a good tool and sometimes the camera gets chosen for its ability to work well with certain lenses. 

I'm tired of the idea that we have to defend our camera choices. I think that unless you have a specific use case in mind you might find pleasure in starting to treat cameras more like wardrobe and less like cars. We generally have only one or two very utilitarian cars but we have plenty of shirts and pants. And shoes. Grab the shorts and sandals that are most comfortable for that day in the sun you have planned and, while you are at it, grab a comfortable camera that makes your day more pleasant because of its compromises, not in spite of them. 

There seems to be a disconnecting that happens to photographers. They feel as though they must have a photographic purpose in everything that they do. They leave the house and head to a soccer field to catch a game so they feel they must have just the right camera with a long lens and must spend the time shooting (not watching) the soccer game. The serious street photographer must have a purpose so when they leave their apartments they have their Leica M cameras or their Fuji X-Pro cameras attached to their wrists with an exquisite wrist strap and they embark on the search for the perfect Vivian Maier Moment. Do they have an internal quota of images they feel they must fill?

I can't always be so.....linear. So organized. So regimented. When I leave the house sometimes it's to have coffee with a friend. Sometimes just coffee alone. While I'm out I might walk around the lake for more exercise. I might hang out on the streets in downtown just to soak up the vibe. But everything in life isn't tethered with a steel cable to photography. 

It's almost better to forget that you dragged a camera along and be in the moment right up until some Photo Satori smacks you in the head and demands that you change gears from some leisure activity to switch in the moment to decisive moment guy and get that one great image, after which you can put the camera back down, pick up that cup of tasty espresso and get back to that riveting conversation you were having with that beautiful woman at the next table. 

So, today is going to be really hot. I'm still going for a truncated walk in the downtown space. I want to see if the protest graffiti is still up. I want to see if Intelligensia really does make a good cup of cappuccino. I want to watch the clouds play around above me. But I don't want to carry around a giant Tenba bag or gruesome Tamrac bag filled with heavy cameras and every lens I own because that would put such an excruciating burden on something of leisure that should be much easier and more natural. A simple walk with an indifferent camera. One that doesn't impel me to keep chugging away at it and trying to help justify why it came along on a walk the core mission of which was not the life and death struggle of getting yet another image. 

Someone asked in the comments yesterday 'whatever happened to that poor, neglected GX85 camera?' Don't worry. It's in rotation. It'll resurface at some point. Right after I get through playing around with the G15 tomorrow. But maybe before I pull out the Sigma fp and use it for photographs again...

We're in the middle of a pandemic. I can't work for clients yet (in good conscience) and I'm not comfortable asking strangers to stop, take off their masks and trust me to make important art with their faces. So why all the angst about which camera is best? If we're just walking around looking, and sitting on a bench drinking take out coffee, then what the fuck does it matter? No, really. 

Do you pay attention to the U.S. stock market? What the heck is happening? Apple at $345 a share today. Amazing. 

A study in tonality. Impromptu studio in NYC.

 ©2020 Kirk Tuck

  ©2020 Kirk Tuck

 ©2020 Kirk Tuck

Click on the photos to enlarge.