Some thoughts on managing entropy.

Jeez, I'm feeling ancient these days. My hair has just about finished turning light grey, I'm slowing down a bit in the pool, and huffing and puffing more when running the hills. I don't hear quite as well in my left ear as I used to. I always feel like taking a nap around 3 in the afternoon. I have less tolerance for people who waste my time and even less patience for unnecessary meetings and phone calls. One glass of wine at dinner and I'm sleepy. I can accurately guess the plot and the ending of any movie after the first ten minutes; which takes all the fun out of watching movies. 

I had a client tentatively book a couple of portraits for today but they never got back to me with times, etc. They called in a panic yesterday afternoon to see if I could still accommodate them today but I assumed, when everything went radio silence that they'd made other plans. So I made other plans. 

They were stunned when we e-mailed today to tell them that our next open day would be November 9th. I don't know what happened to this year. We started out in the Spring with everything cancelled. Nothing stirring. No jobs or projects. And now we're booking a month ahead. 

But the real issue for me is how to gracefully reduce the amount and types of work I've done in the past so I have more time to play before entropy catches up with me and puts caps on the quotient of fun we're allowed. The quantum of joy.

It's a delicate balance between boredom and that feeling of obligation. I think everyone who works at something they are passionate about has mixed feelings about paring down their time commitment. I've started eliminating jobs that I just don't want to do anymore. I'm burned out on studio headshots so I've been declining that kind of work left and right. There are a few clients who I like a lot, personally, and I'll continue with them but I no longer have the emotional bandwidth to sound excited about: "sharpening my pencil" to make a competitive bid for strangers at companies with which I have no history. Especially clients who want boring, safe, normal photos.

I've also been ruthless about turning down the sort of bread and butter commercial work that's stupid, exhausting and which has a half-life of about 3 months. To wit, we no longer accept catalog-type jobs shooting products against white backgrounds. Those icky products would be things like desktop computers, electronics and assorted tech gadgets. 

We just declined to bid on a project to shoot tons and tons of food images in one 8 hour day for a national restaurant chain. It was an unrealistic "ask" and I didn't even want to go through the usual routine of either bidding it high enough to make them go away or default to telling them "we're already booked." I finally, honestly just said that we weren't interested and suggested that there are many hungrier photographers out there who could really use the work. 

This new resistance to work extends to big studio projects for national manufacturers. Someone got in touch to see if they could book two days in December to have me photograph very large metal cabinets filled with servers and electronic stuff, in my studio. The enclosures measure eight feet by nine feet. They would not even fit in the studio door. And we know how those "two day" jobs expand. First there's an endless flurry of phone meetings. That's followed by a few reschedulings. Followed by a request that we be on-hand to receive a couple of multi-ton products a couple days in advance. Followed by two days of unrealistic expectations and those endless: "this was a demo/prototype/loaner/damaged in shipping item. Can you extensively Photoshop it to get rid of all the scratches, uneven paint, broken parts, etc.?" Followed by, "The soonest the freight company can come by and pick up these things taking up all your space is....next week," Ah....two days. We'd like to book a two day shoot that will take over your life like a virus...

So, those jobs are gone. Rejected. Trashed. But I guess it's about time to prune the deadwood of jobs. 

I love taking portraits. Haven't slowed down in the least. But I just want to pick the people I photograph, not the people who get sent over by companies anxious to populate a boring website with their "team." 

Really, I'd love to just keep working on getting better and better at making little movies, and personally interesting photographs of people. Of course, if we weren't in the middle of a raging pandemic I'd want to spend lots and lots of time traveling. And hanging out in cool places with Belinda. 

Things are good within the confines of our little half acre. We've always got personal projects on which yo work. We have our morning walks after my earlier morning swims. We cook meals together and enjoy each other's company. But I've never been so aware of the passage of time. Or the oppressive nature of being bound into one geographical area so tightly. 

I'm assuming so much of what I'm feeling today is a result of dealing with the shock and horror of turning 65 years old this month. I guess this new reticence to do any boring commercial work started around the time I had to figure out Medicare. That was last month. It required me to admit that even though I have the maturity of an 18 year old I really am transitioning to, um, middle age. With only forty or fifty years left in front of me I'm thinking it's past time to concentrate on the stuff I really want to do as opposed to all those projects I used to feel that I had to do. 

I'm guessing the majority of my readers have already figured this out. I used to think it was different for everyone but more stuff is the same than it is different. We get gray. We slow down. We want to stay relevant as long as we can. Ah well, enough complaining. I need to pack. I'm photographing an outdoor concert at Zach Theatre this evening and I want to bring fun toys to experiment with. First concert shoot using the Lumix S1H. The other camera is the S1. It will be interesting to see if they are interchangeable or if they each have their own quirks. But that's a blog for another day.

 

Exhausting, frustrating but fun workday.

 This image has nothing to do with the post below. I just liked it and wanted something to put at the top of the post. And...dog. 

There is something exhilarating about working in a medium where you are still very much a "student." While I've been feeling that photo assignments have been growing stale for me lately the challenge of working at the very edge of what I know in the video editing world is both daunting and very satisfying. 

My friend, Kenny, is a wonderful singer and he was asked to "cover" a couple of songs from an upcoming, virtual, online holiday party. The client wanted him to have us create two videos of him singing; one for each song, with a bit of comedy at the end of the second video. Kind of a "sign-off" for the evening. 

Kenny and I worked on a bunch of video stuff for Zach Theatre (you saw him in the opening video of the virtual fundraiser last month - the guy sitting on the bench, on the bridge, at the very beginning of the video. He gets up and leads the first group of people towards the camera) so he called me and asked me to produce the video. The budget was minuscule and the resources scant, but it was a chance to try out a few more video techniques in the service of a friend. I jumped at the "opportunity." 

We shot all the footage on Saturday and I started editing last night. The actual files look amazing to me. My edit? Less so. The files have some of the best color I've seen. It actually appears richer and has more apparent depth than the stuff I've shot on much more expensive cameras. I think the secret was shooting 1080p in a high data rate, All-I file. That, and getting a nice white balance at the very beginning of the shoot. 

But yesterday and today reminded me of how much I still need to learn in both planning projects and in editing them. Let me tell you what I learned and re-learned.

I shot Kenny in wide, medium and tight shots with a gimbal mounted camera and got great footage. What I didn't get and what came back to bite me on the butt was b-roll. Or the abject absence of enough b-roll. Even though Kenny has a nice enough face and a warm and engaging personality it gets boring to watch the same person sing a song for three minutes and twenty seven seconds. 

I should have shot more: hands on the keyboard, playing the piano, more fun martini shots, some "grand piano hammers hitting strings" shots, and even some shots of just his hands in close ups. I flubbed the b-roll and paid for it with some painful editing sessions today. Part of the fault lies with my lack of pre-planning and part with rushing through the shoot.

Here's another super-genius thing I learned when I started editing on a big screen: Stuff that looks great and sharp on a tiny, tiny rear LCD on a camera doesn't necessarily always look sharp on my monitor. I updated my camera firmware and the big benefit was supposed to be much better C-AF. And it sure did look good on the pixie screen but sometimes the camera hunted and I'd be in the middle of a nice clip only to have it fall out of focus in the middle. Wouldn't having more b-roll be a nice thing?

I had to scramble to find better shots and figure out how to edit to cover up my camera's grievous errors.  Lesson? If I insist on shooting with those Panasonic cameras I need to make sure I'm using manual focusing instead of relying on the cameras. Sure, go ahead and let me know in the comments just how great those Sony A7Siii focusing features are. I'll read it. 

But the thing that saved me in the edit was the fact that these songs and the overall presentation could be a bit campy and a bit retro so I used some transitions that good taste had previously prevented. Aesthetics go out the window when you need to deflect. And entertain.

I did learn a bunch of new editing techniques that work well for making music videos. Since all the clips of Kenny performing were done with the same sound track playing on them I was able to select all four clips (different angles, different focal lengths) and the soundtrack and have them all synchronized automatically instead of trying to sync up each clip individually. I could lay the four visual tracks on the same timeline as the audio track and then cut back and forth between the takes to make the edit. It was a much faster way of working. Very similar to multi-cam editing.

I also learned that when stuff looks good in Final Cut Pro X but parts don't play back correctly after you export everything the safe fallback is to go back to the timeline you edited, copy the whole assemblage, open a new "project" and then paste everything into the new project. I dodged two bullets that way.

Okay. That's enough about video editing for now. I guess it's time to look forward on the schedule and get ready for tomorrow's live theater photography and then another video project on Saturday. Seems like I'm back in the busy mode. But I really am turning a lot of stuff down. I'm only interested in the fun stuff right now.

New motto: Never Enough B Roll.

A lens update. A very satisfactory outcome. And a walk through America's most sought after city with the new lens glued at f2.0. Time to amble.

When I first entered the Panasonic S1 system I was replacing, wholesale, an entire previous system and I made some knee-jerk purchases based on all the systems I'd used in the past. Every time I've gotten into a new camera system I've made sure to buy certain lenses that I always thought of as "mandatory." 

In my mind the mandatory inventory of lenses looks something like: 20mm, 35mm, 50mm, 85mm and something over 100mms. It's now the age of zooms so I cut myself some slack on the long end and bought the S-Pro 70-200mm f4.0. I also initially picked up the 24-105mm f4.0 to have as an all-around, grab-and-go lens for all those times I want a wide range of focal lengths but I don't feel like carrying more than one lens and one camera body. 

But at the time of the S1 camera launch the selection of nice, single focal length lenses was....sparse. In the 50mm space I had the option of the $2300 S-Pro, 50mm f1.4 lens, the big Sigma 50mm (which didn't focus as quickly or surely, but only cost $1199) or the Leica Apo-Summicron L lens at something well over $5,000. I chose the middle ground and have been quite happy with the Panasonic 50mm. 

The choice in the 85mm focal length was a bit tougher; I could go with the big, fat, heavy and slow to focus, but infinitely sharp!!! Sigma 85mm f1.4 Art lens or um, go back to that Leica catalog and try to find something in the ballpark.  Again, for somewhere north of $5700 the Leica 90mm Apo Summicron was looking good. I hovered over the link for that Leica lens for a few minutes before the blood came rushing back to my brain and I stepped back from the keyboard a bit chastened. I sprung for the chubby Sigma by default and for no small part, financial self-preservation. 

I've used the Sigma 85mm f1.4 DG Art lens (let's just call it "v.1") for nearly a year and every time I used it I came away with mixed feelings. The images were the best I'd ever seen out of an 85mm across all the brands of lenses I've used. Even wide open the darn thing was just flawless. But the world's most cumbersome 85mm was enormous and dense and weighed in at a little less than 3 pounds. You expect that kind of mass from an f2.8, 70-200mm zoom with a tripod mount attached but it's a bit radical for an 85mm and it basically ruined that lens for me as an option for casual shooting in the streets, and also as a "take anywhere" lens. 

I'd pull it out for controlled situations like portraits in the studio or casual rehearsal shoots over at Zach Theatre, but the idea of putting it on an S1R and walking for a full day through the streets of Austin or San Antonio was a daunting thought. Something I might do on a challenge, if there was money involved, but not for sheer pleasure. I figured I'd keep the Sigma 85mm v.1 around and hope that Panasonic or Sigma would eventually come out with a lesser spec'd and slower 85mm that would be a much friendlier companion for a man who lacked Sherpas. It was a sad compromise since every time I used the big Sigma I was blown away by the sharpness and contrast that jumped out of every frame; if it nailed the focus. And if we had time to wait for it...

On the plus side I will say that my left bicep is now twice the size of my right. Partially from holding hefty gimbals but also due from hefting the 85mm v.1 lens on shoot days for clients. Ouch. How lopsided. 

As you probably know, Sigma recently came out with an all new version of the giant 85mm. It is supposed to be an even higher performing (optically) lens (if you don't look at the pincushion distortion!!!) but in addition to being potentially game changing in its performance the new lens, the 85mm f1.4 DG DN Art lens is about a full pound + lighter and about half the overall volume of its predecessor. The filter diameter has slimmed down from a harder to find and more expensive to buy 82mm to a much more available 77mm. The new lens got a physical aperture ring and, as a bonus, you can flip a switch and "de-click" the ring to make it silent and step-less for video. There is even a function button on the side (but I haven't messed with it yet). 

I wanted to get one of the new lenses to test but as soon as they were launched the markets snapped up all the available copies and the retailers started putting people on waiting lists. At the time I decided to just ignore the new lens. I rationalized that the old lens was fine for my commercial work and, at some time in the past year, I bought a Leica 90mm Elmarit  R f2.8 lens and an adapter and figured I could use that as a street shooting lens. In the meantime every encounter with the Big Bertha of 85mm lenses pushed me right back into the confusing parfait of emotions: Love the look, hate the portage. Love the wide aperture, hate that it doesn't compensate for it's tremendous weight with at least a tripod mount. Etc. Etc. 

I just finished up a job last Thursday and I was looking forward at the next week's schedule. I needed to replace a gray cloth background that basically fell apart from overuse so I was shopping online at my local camera store. I was just checking out the website to see what kind of backgrounds they might have in stock when I decided to take a shopping detour through the L-mount lens inventory. And there it was. They were showing an 85mm Sigma V.2 DG DN lens in L-moount, in stock. But sometimes websites are inaccurate. I called to confirm. My sales guy, the infinitely wise Ian, let me know they did indeed have one in stock and would be glad to hold it for me. I called the person at the store who takes trade-ins and we negotiated a value for my existing, portly, 85mm v.1 and I headed in their direction. Deal done. 

Today was the first time since I bought the new lens that I've had time to put it on a camera and take it for a spin. It was a beautiful day so I took the new 85mm and an S1R out for a pre-lunch walk. First observation: It's a good compromise between the speed and the size. The lens balances well on a good sized body and is comfortable at the end of a well made shoulder strap. 

Since we always like to say that no one buys a fast lens to shoot all day at f8.0 I decided to shoot every single image at f2.0, which is one stop down from wide open. I could have shot everything at f1.4 but that's such a shallow depth of field that I'm not sure how much I would have learned today; other than whether the camera focused accurately there. 

So, all the images here were shot at f2.0 and minimally processed from raw files. I am very happy with the performance of the lens and can't wait to use it for a night shoot coming up on Wednesday. 

If you look through the images you'll find several building shots where I've included a direct reflection of bright sunlight off highly reflective window glass. While I can see a slight flaring on small parts of the image there is no veiling flare at all and everything remains "crispy" even though the super bright highlight is included in the frame. 

It seems that Adobe has included an 85mm DN DG lens profile now in Lightroom because there is none of the pincushion distortion in the frames which I had seen in early reviews, which were pre-software update. 

This is a situation in which trading up to a newer design pays off well. The lens is infinitely more manageable and easy to carry. It's easy to use and has more features. But more to the point, Sigma was able to deliver all this at the same price point as the older model. We even got extra goodies such as the external aperture ring. That's a plus even if you never shoot a second of video. It's all about having operating options. 

That is one bright running shoe. Damn, that's ugly.

I shot a number of images like this one where the foliage is in focus and the buildings in the 

background are out. It's interesting to see the effect. More depth?

I mentioned in the title that Austin is now, once again, the most sought after re-location destination in the entire United States, according to a recent article (today) from Forbes. You can read it for yourself: 

https://www.forbes.com/sites/petertaylor/2020/10/11/covid-19-has-changed-the-housing-market-forever-heres-where-americans-are-moving-and-why/#2ff5989861fe

People are moving in droves from last century cities looking for warmer weather, the ability to be outside for more of each year, the presence of smart jobs and the presence of an embarrassing oversupply of high tech employers. The wildfires are chasing people out of California and Oregon, last century hate politics  and lower educational achievement are making Southeastern states unbearable for nice people and smart people, and the rust belt has run out of jobs. Everyone else is trying to escape the cold. 

But if you have visions of re-locating to Austin you should know that it's currently the most expensive city in all of Texas in which to live. Property taxes are high and housing prices in the city proper are much higher than national averages. You'll need one of those high tech jobs to make it all work. So dust off those post graduate degrees before you fire up the mini-van and load up the roof rack. 

Current prices for "tear downs" in the most desirable neighborhoods of West Austin have, on average, breached the one million dollar mark and even at those prices the market is red hot. I never imagined we'd see single family house lots hit that dollar amount but here we are. And if Forbes is right this is only the beginning. 

Funny that "bluest" city in Texas, replete with a liberal, democrat mayor, boasts first place as the desired destination for employers and families in a comparison with the rest of the country. 

On my walk today I saw and cataloged at least ten new 20 story or higher buildings in various states of construction in the core of downtown. That's just in one small area. The giant cranes are a fixture in every corner of the city and in many of the quickly growing small towns that surround our city. It's a region poised for quick and continued growth. Just remember, markets ebb and flow...

The perils of divided attention. Or...why audio stuff is always the video component that bites you on the ass.

 

On a side street in Rome. Taken with permission. Mamiya 6 and 75mm lens.

You never know when but you know you're going to screw up something at some point. 

I worked all afternoon on a video project with a good friend yesterday. We did our filming at a location about 20 miles from our respective home bases. I was working as a one person crew and every was going very smoothly. When I got up this morning I swam, had breakfast and then headed into the studio to scrub through my footage and make sure everything was good. I also wanted to get the files imported into a Final Cut Pro X library and also back it up on a second drive. When I spot checked each clip they all looked great. Same exposures, same colors and very good focus throughout. I was happy. 

After lunch I circled back to check out the audio we did for the "opener" and the "goodbye" sequences but I wasn't too concerned as we were having Kenny lip sync the two (important content) songs from recordings he made in the studio --- which also sound fantastic. 

I checked the audio in all the opening sequences and it was right on the money. I remember setting the levels and also monitoring the audio with a pair of earbuds. It sounded great. I was elated. We shot some other stuff in between and then took the camera off the gimbal, added the same audio interface I used for the "hello/welcome" speech and placed the microphone exactly. I must have been tired/distracted/stupid or concentrating too much on the visual side of things but at some point the phantom power button on the audio interface got turned off and no power flowed to the microphone. I carefully watched Kenny's performance to make sure we nailed focus and I guess I just assumed that we were getting the same good audio I'd monitored on the earlier shot. 

The sad thing is that I know better and I got sloppy. I should have had a set of headphones on and been monitoring everything in the "intro" and "outro" speeches. I should have been paying more attention to the audio levels. I would have caught the mistake immediately. But I got overly confident in my "one man band" abilities and now I get to fix my mistake. 

Our options are to re-shoot at the same location (more difficult) or to have Kenny come in to the studio and try to ADR to his original speech by watching his own lips (still difficult). We'll try recording in the studio first and if we can't make it work we'll default to plan "B" and reshoot that precious (and needed) 8 seconds of audio, along with its matching video, on Tuesday evening. Thank goodness we don't have an immediate deadline to deal with. 

So, I make mistakes. I'd almost forgotten that. It sure hit me in the face this time. 

I'm putting myself back in remedial studies. For the next ten shoots I'll pull out the laminated check list and do every step by the numbers. Thank goodness I'm not a brain surgeon.

I just remembered why big productions have a sound engineer and a different guy on the camera and another guy on lighting and another......

The best way to deal with screw-ups is to figure out where you fell down and how to fix it and to own up to your mistake as soon as possible. Procrastinating can limit your client's options and make things worse. A timely "mea culpa" followed by a good fix is always the best way. 

Jeez. And here I thought I had it all going on.

Gone Fishing. Well, not me. But a doctor who fly-fishes. And we only went fishing to make a print ad.

I don't fish. I really never warmed up to the whole idea of fishing although I can see the appeal of getting out of town, standing thigh deep in cool water and taking a break from the real world. But just like golf there are activities I know I'll never have an inclination to take up. 

My photographer friend, Paul, loves fly-fishing and has gone on adventures in far off places like Patagonia armed with just a (nice) point and shoot camera and his fishing gear. He's gone for weeks and always seems to come back with a smile on his face and stories to tell. Oddly, the stories are hardly ever about fishing and much more often about great meals he had in places like Argentina, where he stopped along the way. 

Like photography fly-fishing seems replete with opportunities to impoverish oneself. There is costume (waders, vests, special shirts, and trendy hats) and there is gear. Rods, reels, flies and special lines. But a lot of the cost is that you need a nice river in which fish and those are hard to find right next to hot and dusty Texas towns. 

If I were to take up the hobby I'd want to practice it somewhere delightful. Like in a nearly frozen stream in Iceland or someplace picturesque like Scotland. 

So, how did I get on the topic of fly fishing? Well, we do a bunch of imaging for a cool group of Oral Surgeons here in Austin. Each time they add a new associate they "introduce" him to the community with a run of print ads in community newspapers and general interest magazines. Each doctor is presented doing something they love. One of the ads featured a competitive water skier, another surrounded by his carpentry projects, and still another on a nice road bike. 

The practice's latest addition, Dr. Szalay, is an avid fly-fisher. Since he grew up around Austin he knows all the local (within 50 miles?) places to go out for a day and cast a line. When I was hired to take his photo he knew just the right place. We met there just before labor day, parked near a crowded park and walked for a while to get to this secluded spot. It was a hot day and the sun was blazing but every once in a while we were blessed with a little cluster of high, puffy clouds marching their way through a clear blue sky. 

I positioned the doctor for just the right composition and we talked about how we both wanted the image to look. Almost on command a small herd of fluffy clouds performed their duty as soft diffusers, floating their way between the sun and my subject, and we shot 25 or 30 frames of him casting out his line. Looking through the photos it was the 10th image that contained everything the art director had asked for. 

We walked back to our cars and chatted mostly about how much Austin has changed since I moved here and since his childhood. We also talked about fishing. I'm still not a convert. It's a messy hobby. 

The art director and the marketing director were happy with the shots and we did the post production on the selected raw file on the same day. They had a deadline to hit on the next day. 

The trip down to our location took an hour. The trip back was a bit longer. I drove back the long way so I could luxuriate in the rolling hills out to the west. Anything to stay off the north/south highway from hell we call I-35. The actual photography took just ten minutes or so. 

It was one of those jobs that just rolls through the camera almost un-propelled by conscious thought. I used a Lumix S1R and the S-Pro 70-200mm but honestly, I could have used just about any camera with a reasonably long lens. The S1R does a great job holding on to the highlights, and since the files are so large and detailed I had no fears about the effects of a big crop. 

Sometimes things just fall into place. Either that or practicing this kind of work thousands and thousands of times actually pays off. 

Nice afternoon. Good subject. Great client. 

That's my fishing story. Now I have to start editing my latest "music video." 

 

Yesterday's job was a classic example of where we are right now in assignment photography. An ever increasing mix of video and photos.

At some point it's all about the rubber chicken. 

I'm starting to get more and more selective about the projects I accept. If I get the impression that we're being asked for sheer quantity; a shoot till you drop affair, I won't take the bait. Life is too short. But I'm not above mixing and matching a couple of disciplines if the client is good and the project is comfortable. 

While the advertising agencies I usually work with generally have their hearts in the right place they can't always control their clients and sometimes communication gets frayed. But in most instances it's just a case of clients not understanding how long it might take to do something, or misunderstanding a bid based on usage, not high volume production. That's an important point. 

With portraits taken on location often a client doesn't understand that there is always post production involved and that post production is the part of a job that's like an iceberg; 90% of it is under water and unseen by them during the shoot. 

Here's a case in point from yesterday: Part of our job was, on paper, to photograph 5 or 6 people from the blank company. There was an outside location at their H.Q.  that they'd used in the past which was shaded by a tree and had a shaded, non-ugly background that could easily be put out of focus. I set up my camera, and a flash in a smaller Octa-box, and roughed in my lighting. These were quick portraits and I shot maybe 20 or 25 images per person instead of the 70-100 I might shoot for a classic, studio portrait. 

We finished photographing the first six people but more and more people came out to have their portraits taken. The final tally was 13. This was not something discussed beforehand but I have a twenty+ year relationship with the ad agency and decided not to start a discussion about it with the agency owner in front of the client. It was easy enough and took a short amount of time in the moment.

But...what the client won't see, and the agency might not explain, is that the amount of post production time goes up a lot. I have to do a global correction for each person's files since skin tones, etc. are all different. There's the editing down to a handful of selections and then the creation of individual galleries for each person. Finally, we'll get back the clients' selections over a random time period, piecemeal, which takes any efficiency out of doing a final retouch and delivery process. Adding six people might add only five minutes per person on the front end but might adding an hour on the back end. Or more. Next time we bid for that agency we'll just pop in a per person price up front so they know that each person they add will also increase their final bill. 

Next, we moved into the company's manufacturing area and started a quick discussion of how to handle making some beauty shots of products and also how to include some b-roll video. Previously we would have totally separated those two functions. We would have done all our photography sequentially and then packed up that gear and started in on video.

But the creative director presented the idea of shooting high enough quality video to allow for pulling still frames out of the b-roll video for use on the website, etc. leaving the photography of just a few actual products to the still camera ---- because they might need those images for printed pieces and conference graphics.

I put one camera on a gimbal and set it up to have the best shot at making general content that would also work as a "frame grab" resource. I set another camera up on a tripod so I could make high resolution photographs with lots of depth of field.

The frame grabs might work might work. They might not. The b-roll will work for b-roll. The high resolution stills will work for print. But I think grabbing lots of good stills from video is still a bit of a crap shoot. With that being said, we decided to shoot at 60 fps on a GH5 and set the shutter angle at 180° (1/120th of a second) and shot in the Long-gop format. We weren't doing any fast moves and I tried to put in static shots as well as moving shots so we'd have a better chance of having a good range of frames in which the action was more or less frozen. I'd love to have shot in All-I but that's not available at 60 fps in 4K so we tried a compromise.

While I shot in a Long-gop format in the camera (which allowed for 60 fps, 10 bit, 4:2:2) when I pulled the footage into Final Cut Pro X I transcoded it into ProRes HQ which is an All-I editing format. After a bit of color correction on the footage I output it for the client in ProRes 422 which created a whopping big file of about 80 gigabytes. It gives the web designers the best shot of pulling out good still frames from the video. We also output the same extended clip in H.264 so they could scrub through it very quickly and find what they need.

But the idea of frame grabbing brings up some interesting questions. At least I find then interesting.

When the Red video cameras were introduced about a decade ago one of the marketing messages that followed the launch was the assertion that the Red Code Raw video files were so detailed and good that one could use them as still images instead of limiting usage just to video. That was a big ask at the time but there were some sample shoots done by a New York headshot photographer and also by a fashion photographer/videographer which showed some pretty good results. 

Ten years on and now we have cameras like the S1H that can shoot 6k (18 megapixel) raw files, downsampled from even higher resolution sensors and we've got so much more control over the post production. Sure, you have to go through a lot of frames to find the perfect images, and the storage demands increase dramatically, but think of how nuanced your selection of the "exact" perfect moment(s) could be. 

Camera sensors now have very large dynamic ranges and in-cameras tools like vector scopes and waveforms can help us drill down to perfect color and exposure settings. Being able to shoot a continuous burst of frames might be just the thing for a "twitchy" portrait subject. And it might be easier to put a camera on a tripod and shoot a three second burst of video raw files and blend them in Photoshop for products than to switch out between photographs and video on a fast paced shoot. 

One of the downsides I can think of would be the practical inability to use electronic flash. But that's not an issue for most kinds of subjects and LED lighting has gotten so good that it's a nice substitute for scenes where matching the power of sunlight or dealing with fast moving subjects isn't an issue. 

Another interesting point is the pace at which what used to be photography jobs (only!) are morphing into either combo jobs (video and stills) or have progressed to video replacing photography. While we aren't used to the idea right now don't we suppose there will come a time when we can shoot 24 megapixel cinema DNG raw files that will look as good as the best Jpegs from the same cameras? After all, Jpegs are currently on 8 bits while raw video can be 10 or 12 bits and Jpegs have a more limited color subsampling. 

I can see a time when we might show up, arrange a scene the way we like it and then "direct" the subject of a portrait sitting through a range of expressions while running a video/hybid camera shooting 6K raw video. With a little practice I think we would become proficient in knowing when we got good stuff and not running the camera for too long. Bore down to the ranges of frames you want to consider and erase the rest.

It's pretty instructive to watch what camera makers are launching into the market right now. The Sigma fp is much more about raw video than it is about being a still camera. Same with the Lumix S1H; although ti is a much, much better still camera while being more facile than the fp with video. The Canon C70 is a much talked about product in video circles and still imaging is almost an afterthought with that camera. The Sony A7Siii is resolutely a riposte to Panasonic's S series cameras. 

Everything coming out has moved the hybrid imaging game up a lot. The files are much beefier and more detailed. The raw capabilities add so much more control for us over image quality and our ability to set a wider and wider range of codecs and profiles is liberating. 

I get that most of us taught ourselves the pleasure of shooting one frame at a time and that this would be a huge earthquake change for us to get used to but in many ways we're already doing it with our iPhones. The same folks who might say, "I never want to shoot video." might not be aware that some of what makes iPhone photos work at squeezing great images from tiny sensors is the fact that the camera in the phone is blazing away, shooting endless video frames until you press the "shutter button" and is then almost instantly stacking large numbers of those frames, dropping out anomalies and noise while integrating all of the color and detail from multiple samples. It's basically shooting video even when it's not shooting video, it's just that the processing is taking place under the hood. And it's blisteringly fast.

And the video is set up the same way! We're already shooting the way I'm talking about with our phones and I think it's only a matter of time till it comes to our cameras. Under the hood at first but then fully customizable. 

Seems more and more like the future is raining down on us and we can either get soaked or roll with it. 

From a hobbyist point of view no one is calling on you to take any action. Keep on shooting exactly as you like. But if you are one of my readers who is trying to make a living shooting some kind of visual content it behooves you to learn and experiment all the time. It's inevitable that your photography clients will ask for moving pictures at some point in the future just as it's inevitable that all you video guys are going to increasingly be asked to pull great frames out of the video content you just shot and re-purpose them as still graphics. 

A lot to chew on for a Friday evening. 

Currently packing up to do a one person, music video with my friend, Kenny Williams, tomorrow afternoon. A couple of James Bond theme covers.... Nice.

 

The role of social media influencers in the camera market.

I spent eight years working in an advertising agency that specialized in "retail marketing". Now we'd probably call that B-to-C; business-to-consumer advertising. When I was working directly in the industry, as opposed to my current indirect role, we didn't have anything resembling social media and the closest we had to social media "influencers" were the hoary celebrity endorsers. Usually well known sports figures or television personalities who would pitch products and services on TV and in print ads. The idea that someone whose only accomplishment was being alive and documenting their homogeneous existence on a free video channel on the internet would have been mostly unthinkable. But here we are. 

We now have a family of women who are famous they shop, apply make-up and workout, and they are becoming social media billionaires (the Kardashians). We have a desperately under-qualified, sociopathic, social media expert as the president of the wealthiest country on the planet (though seemingly, not for long), and we have a bunch of people in their twenties making seven figure incomes because they are good at telling their personal stories on YouTube; and also getting all gushy and drool-y about products that are sent to them to "review." There is even an elementary school boy who  pulls down millions each year reviewing toys for other children. 

But I have to think hard to understand whether or not social media influencers in the camera and photography space have done more harm than good for the industry; and for their audiences. 

Advertising strategies for camera companies were relatively easy before the web rolled around. There was a handful of national and international magazines devoted to photography and nearly every ardent photographer subscribed to one or more monthly publications (or read them on the newsstands). They ranged from a magazine that started out as a local trade publication for professionals in NYC (Photo District News -- raise you hand if you remember when they used to be tabloid sized and printed on newsprint!) to wide ranging, glossy, general interest publications like Modern Photography and Popular Photography. All more or less relegated to oblivion now by the ever-encroaching web.

If there is an apt analogy to the print age then Digital Photography Review's website is the working combination of Modern Photography and Popular Photography with a little bit of Darkroom Photography thrown in for good measure. The critical focus across each of these media is the reviewing of product, the advertising of the same product, and a conduit with which to link buyer and seller. Now it's the ubiquitous "link" while in the days of old it was the endless advertisements in the back pages of every issue. 

In the magazine age there were few alternatives for advertisers beyond printed ads in targeted publications with a flourish of trade show excitement thrown in for good measure. I suppose the influencers at the time were the top tier photographers of the age. Mostly the editorial ones whose credit lines graced widely published photo stories in large scale, prestigious magazines. But it was a different era and many photographers worked across two or three different camera systems at a time. Every assignment might be different. The tools changed with the job and the publication. This made it more difficult for anyone to commit to a single brand. Photographers as influencers were much more gear promiscuous. 

Now we have people who are called influencers, ambassadors, explorers of the light, and other silly titles. 

Instead of shooting for big magazines and then using the awesome quality of their real work as leverage for their camera company clients the new horde of influencers rarely shoot anything for real world clients and are proudly pursuing careers in.....testing and touting cameras. And lenses. And gadgets. And presets. And t-shirts. And baseball caps with logos. Tony and Chelsea strive to be the Kardashian family of photography. All of them got into their influencer niche not because they loved being out photographing but because, for a long while, it was easy money. 

Wouldn't it be super cool if every "influencer" in the camera space was judged by his or her actual work first? Imagine going to a YouTube channel and having the first thing you see be a giant gallery of the influencer's work. Imagine that the work turned out to be was soulless and vapid and not particularly well done. Would you still "highly value" their recommendation of the 25th or 26th camera they have reviewed this year? 

Imagine a reviewer whose whole life revolves around reviewing. Certainly they should be able to sharpen their reviewing stick and really nail well produced and entertaining reviews but... would the value be there for you as the viewer? As a dedicated camera user? Is it enough for you that they talk a good game? Can you trust someone to really judge the handling of a camera if all the handling is done at a sponsor's junket? Would you rather hear from someone who buys the camera with their own funds and uses it daily for months or years until its operation becomes second nature before they write about it or discuss it? Is it enough for their audiences to listen to a regurgitation of the press release and the owner's manual?

Certainly it's the frothiness and the studied earnestness of the influencers that helps us come to think of our recently bought photo gear as quickly becoming obsolete, antiquated and less than capable. Surely it's their smug appreciation of that new menu item or seventh function button that drives us to want to buy and use a new camera just to have access to a control feature we never needed in any of our past photo adventures. 

In one sense the camera market, under constant pressure from the influencers, is becoming tribal and divided as never before. Even though camera sales are dropping like a bag of lead feathers every time a new model launches the appended comments on every vlog and website are strictly demarcated between ardent fans and hate filled detractors. One camp certain that this or that new camera will bring them closer to photo heaven while people in other camera tribes protest with loud conviction that the same camera is a tool of Satan and riddled with booby traps and  crippling failures that will bring nothing but sadness and rent cloth to the bewitched adopters. 

Why am I writing this now; today? Because I just saw a flurry of reviews for a Hasselblad product across nearly twenty YouTube channels by "reviewers" who rarely stray from talking about Canon/Nikon/Sony and who've never, as far as I can see, used or even flirted with medium format digital cameras before this bunched up flurry of reviews.  And I'm baffled. Or cynical.

It's enough to make me grudgingly believe that an old school review site like DPR has merit. Not enough depth but a lot more value than some dingus fussing around with brand after brand after brand, week after week. 

I understand that a unified marketing platform no longer exists on which a camera maker can place a year long buy of ad space and have any chance of hitting 50 or 60 % of all targeted buyers. But I wonder just how influential the social influencers are in moving brands that won't move at all by themselves. 

Or said another way, where are the Pentax influencers? Have the influencers saved Profoto? Do we need the shallow and transient information the vloggers are sharing or do we just visit their channels because we're bored. It's kind of sad.

Hold that thought. 

Circling back, let's have a zoom workshop. right....

Above somewhere in the post I wondered if the influencers do more harm than good for the industry. Think about this for a minute, in the stock market there used to be people who encouraged investors to buy and sell frequently. Jump on a hot tip. Sell in a moment of anxiety. In each sale or purchase the agent or broker made a bit of money. A monetization of their suspect advice. This was called "churn." Some brokers would work their audience (fans?) hard and in the end the investor would lose a good part of their net worth and either change their overall investment strategy or run out of money. 

A good Sony Vlogger works for Sony by churning Sony users (same with Nikon, Panasonic, Canon, etc.) and manipulates them to become dissatisfied with the very camera the influencers themselves recommended only a few months before. The audience capitulates to the sales pitch couched as informational/editorial content, sells their old camera at a loss and pays a premium for a new camera that may or may not be even fractionally better than the one it's replacing. Eventually the buyers catch on and stop buying altogether. Or they realize they've been "marks" who are systematically beggared by a relentless wringing of their financial sponges. And they remember that this is just a hobby and that everything they liked about the hobby seemed much more fun before the gear churn set in. They might decide that their phone is good enough and exit the hobby altogether. Sony (or other manufacturers) in concert with their influencers could have churned away what might have been a long term source of well paced income; if only the product cycles and the churn weren't so relentless. 

We're trained, I think, to regard those YouTube channels in the same way we do television channels. We know where the commercials begin and end on TV but we fail to understand that most photo/video blogs are one big commercial all the way through. And we trust our influencers because we mistake them for educational experts instead of understanding that they are just salespeople priming the overflowing pumps for the camera makers. It's an odd construct and one that leaves me cold.