The S1H handles the color red very, very well. Maybe the lens has something to do with that as well.

folding "Coke" chair at a new, South American café.

 

An afternoon with a decidedly inappropriate camera and lens for street photography. Too big. Too heavy. But I got to watch a big production, car photo shoot...

A large scale photo session for a Chevy SUV.

I'd never seen a bigger crane arm attached to an automobile before. 

Fascinating.

I was feeling a bit glum most of last week but usually a nice long walk with a camera helps to clear my head and adjust my attitude. After my swim today I feel chipper and optimistic. Funny how that all works. But yesterday, with my head in the fog I selected the least appropriate lens and camera body to drag along through the streets of my home town. It was the Panasonic S1H and the 50mm f1.4 Lumix S-Pro. If ever you feel untethered from gravity this combination will hold you down tight to the firmament. 

Don't get me wrong; the S1H is a wonderful production camera and, I think, the state of the art for video cameras designed for professional quality/state of the art video in small crew,  commercial environment. I absolutely love working with this camera when I have it snugged onto a good tripod and plugged into a range of supporting peripherals. I find the 50mm f1.4 lens to be the sharpest lens with the cleanest and most transparent output of any lens I have ever used - even across all formats. 

But carrying the combination around, over one's shoulder, with a shoulder strap, is an exercise in masochism. And this opinion is coming from a photographer who used to carry around a Hasselblad with a medium format Zeiss lens on it through the streets of many cities for hours and days at a time. The S1H + 50mm S-Pro just isn't at all comfortable for easy and casual photo walks. I'll take it along on days when I have a mission in mind and need its special attributes, and I'll take in on just about any kind of commercial job I can imagine, but as a fun camera for leisure walking and snapping? Ahhhh. NO. 

Before I move on to the story about car shooting I will say that of all three of the S1x model cameras I think the S1H has the best out of camera color and tonality in the files. Even the Jpegs are crisper and richer. I can only conjecture that this camera has faster processing, or more nodes for parallel processing, and so is engineered to apply more complex corrections to each file as they fly through the camera's processing pipeline. I'm sure Panasonic would demure from confirming this because of the torrent of feedback they would no doubt get from S1 and S1R owners but I own all three models and find a small but notable difference between the S1H and its siblings. No data to back this up but that has never stopped us before. 

Car Shoot. I don't often work in big teams and I have never, ever had to do a high end shoot where the car was the star, but I'm always amazed when I see an "old school" photography production in full bloom in this day and age. I ran into just such a shoot around sunset on the "Butterfly" bridge that connects downtown proper to the area around the library. I've posted countless images of the curved, yellow spans here on the blog so I'm sure you'll remember it. 

I knew I was heading into a big time photo zone when I came to the intersection just to the east of the bridge and found it blocked off. I knew it was a legit project because there was an off duty police officer manning the blocked street and a set of orange cones set to restrict access. Pedestrians, however, were unconstrained. 

On the outsides of the curved spans are sidewalks while the two lane road runs between the spans. The sidewalk with the sunset in the background was blocked both for this shoot and because of some adjacent building construction but the north side walk was accessible.  

As I crossed the bridge I saw ten or twelve people clustered around a Chevrolet SUV and was immediately struck by the insanely long crane arm that was anchored to the right side of the vehicle and extended across the front and about eight to ten feet past the left side of the truck-ette. It was a large, square arm made, I'm sure, of lightweight aluminum and as you can see in the photo just above it has a right angle connection to the car over on the far side. At that junction point a technician can raise or lower the angle of the arm to give the camera at the far end of the arm the ability to shoot at a low angle or a high angle --- or any angle in between. The crane arm is also assembled in spans so the crew can make the main arm longer or shorter. 

more below

There were a couple of guys whose job it seemed to be to fluff the actual product. Between takes they'd get to the car and dust it or shine the edges or clean some part. When they were done they'd hand the set back over to the art director and photography crew. I presume at some point they took

Back in control. Back in the pool. Back to stasis.

 

flower pots in a Roman window.

The alarm clock on my phone went off at 7:15 this morning and I finally grappled with the age old battle between comfortable sloth and dutiful discipline. I dragged myself out of a warm bed on a cold, foggy morning, drank a cup of instant coffee with gobs of milk and then, with a bit of hesitation thrown into the mix, finally got myself to swim practice. I've been out of the pool for nearly two weeks and my first inclination, fostered by fear and uncertainty (how quickly do 65 year olds lose their edge? how slowly and carefully should I embrace re-entry?) was to demote myself to a slower lane and take a lackadaisical approach to the first, post operative workout.

But almost predictably true to course I decided that if I was in for a penny I was in for a pound and I chose to swim in one of the faster lanes with two younger swimmers who have a propensity for going fast and hard. Even on my best days I could never match their performance. I'd love to say that today was exceptional and I drove my young lane mates hard but that would be a lie. Fake swim news. 

I did swim all the sets on their intervals and I made each repeat on the interval, but just by the skin of my teeth. Still, it felt great to hang with the fast folks and to return to a pursuit in which I've been able to delude myself into believing that it's something over which I have complete control. 

It was foggy and cool outside and everyone seemed to be in a good mood. I had negotiated a quick return to the pool with my surgeon on the proviso that I wear a waterproof bandage over my incision site. The waterproof bandages actually work! No leaks. 

The hardest part of the workout was a set of ten 75 yard swims. We started out doing two on a 1:15 interval then two on 1:10 (these were to be any stroke but freestyle-I chose backstroke) then two on 1:05 and then two on 1:00. The last two were snappy and I'll admit that I got my pulse rate a bit above 130 and was out of breath for a minute or two at the completion of the set. The rest of the workout was moderately hard but not outside my normal comfort zone. 

With a successful swim under my belt I felt, mentally, that all the jigsaw pieces of my regular life were falling back into place.

I'm signed up for a full roster of workouts in the week to come and anticipate that as I get back into good shape there will be naps galore.

It's not as though I've been inactive since the day after my medical procedure. I've tried to walk five or six miles a day. Once with a friend, or Belinda, and a second time with an amiable camera in my hands. It's just that swimming hard is a whole different adventure. Don't worry, I won't dwell on swim posts, or snooker tables, too much in the next week or so. We've got other things to cover.

Hope you are all happy and well and continuing to move. -Kirk

Hanging out at the old Sweetish Hill Bakery on a Sunday Morning. Back when we had so few responsibilities or worries that it now seems like paradise.

B. has always been a reticent subject for portraiture. She thinks the process should be quick, painless and infrequent. It may have been misguided for her to marry a photographer. Especially one who is much more interested in making portraits than taking landscape images. 

We went to Sweetish Hill Bakery at least once a week for about 30 years. Coffee and pastries. Eventually the beloved owners and originators aged out of the business and sold it to a fashionable but mostly soulless restaurant group. They've turned what was once a neighborhood bakery into a frou-frou enterprise; Doubling the prices of the products and cutting the quality in half. Pre-pandemic it had become newly chic.

I can't recall ever going to the bakery without a camera over one shoulder or the other (usually the left...) and on this foray I'm sure it was a Leica CL. I used the 40mm lens and got a bit too close. I should have bought a 90mm for that camera but I always considered it to be a quintessential point-and-shoot camera. I  also didn't think the finder was very accommodating for use with longer lenses. 

At the time I probably overlooked this image because I didn't like the wide angle perspective and the way it worked to change the geometry of B's face. Now I find the image a wonderful artifact/treasure from an age where cameras were always full frame and nearly always just eccentric enough to enjoy. 

Tri-X all the way. And, no, that's not a digital frame edge, that's the effect of filing out your own personal negative carriers. Unique. 

 

Inside the Ellsworth Kelly Chapel at the Blanton Museum.

 

Documenting the stained glass "windows"

I like scrolling through old folders marked with cryptic words like: "Desktop Blog Art late 2018"

I find things like a batch of perfect photos done with the last GH5 or GH5S I owned. Makes me feel good that I still like the photos. Makes me feel silly and a bit dumb to realize how good this cameras were in the moment and how unwise it was to sell them off and then have to buy them again. 

Funny, if you wipe all the projects off your calendar then all of sudden you stop dreaming about how X piece of gear would be "just the ticket" for upcoming job Z. I've been shooting video with three and sometimes four cameras at the same time. Now I have zero video projects on the books or waiting in the wings. The extra cameras I bought end up cooling their heels. 

This time around I'm keeping them. If I don't feel compelled to use them I'll just pull the batteries out, wrap them in paper and shove them in a drawer. The next time I'm anxious to buy something new I'll reach in and unwrap one of them. Like getting a new camera all over again.

I can't believe I'm making good on my resolution not to work in December. Everything banished from the calendar. It's an unsettling exercise.

Sometimes I think I have the same expression on my face as this robot. Stress.

Austin, Texas is on the cusp of having the top tier of pandemic alert levels triggered either this week or the next. Cases of Covid-19 are once again accelerating and the public health department changed the daily number of hospitalizations that will prompt "level five" from 75 down to 50. The reason? An overwhelming of our local medical professionals along with an ongoing tightening of available ICU beds. I think my decision to keep clients and members of the public well beyond arm's length for now is a sound one. I'm even questioning my return to the pool; and that's a big thing for me. 

But for what might be the first time in my adult life I'm not busy with work. I basically have tossed out the majority of structure that gave shape to my daily life. I feel like a leaky row boat that's broken its tether and is now aimless drifting on whatever currents there might be. 

One somber realization is that with free time comes a lot more time to indulge in endless news reports, New York Times updates, Washington Post analyses and a potent mix of mindless photo and video dreck on YouTube. 

I'd love to be spending the time off making wonderful portraits of beautiful people but I'm sure you can see the disconnection. Yep, public safety. And my family's safety. Just because you want to do something doesn't mean you should. If I needed to work to put food on the table I might be tempted to roll the dice but just as a salve for my own boredom? I consider it reckless.

But that doesn't mean I'm not thinking about making portraits. I'm revisiting some of my favorite work and playing with lighting in the studio. I can't remember the name of the cinematographer who came and gave a talk to our local ad club chapter about his motion picture work back in the 1980s but I remember being so profoundly impressed by his work lighting people for movies that I spent an hour after his presentation listening to him tell a very, very small group of interested photographers just how he did the lighting that we found most captivating. 

If you have seen the movie, "Dangerous Liaisons" starring John Malkovich, Uma Thurman, Glenn Close and Michelle Pfeiffer you will have seen, in the bedroom seduction scene with Uma Thurman, the kind lighting that we were all marveling over. In a sentence, it's "hard light within soft light ---  with a very large dose of controlled fall off." 

We all thought we were masters of soft light back then. We all had the requisite 4x6 foot soft boxes for our electronic flashes and we used them in close and smiled as we saw the light wrap around our subjects. But what the cinematographer showed us was lighting done on a whole new level. 

He explained that (in his opinion) the light we were using fell off at far too rapid a rate. We were using our soft boxes extremely close and so, given the constraints of the inverse square law, the light from one side to another of our subject fell off very quickly which reduced any sense of realism or authenticity for the light. 

He was right; our lighting looked canned. 

He walked us through an image he'd made as a test. In a huge space he'd put up a 20 by 40 foot diffusion curtain that was either quarter stop or half stop diffusion material. He put his model close to one side of the diffusion material and then, on the other side, he moved a huge movie light as far back as it could go. Think fifty or sixty feet, easily. 

For his example he was using an 18K watt movie light with a front fresnel to concentrate the light a bit. Conventional logic would suggest that the distance from the light to the diffusion material is not pertinent and that it's only the distance from the surface of the material to the subject that determines the rate of fall off, but he suggested/claimed/demonstrated that quarter or half stop diffusion, and in particular some of the diffusion materials made for cinema, would allow through a mix of direct and diffused light simultaneously and that the thinner/looser the weave of the diffusion fabric the more the ratio is tilted to direct light. 

The result is that the direct light has a less steep slope of fall off from one side of the scene to the other; because the light source is so far away. It also looked much more like natural light than a fixture and modifier being used much closer. The added softness to the light comes from the percentage that is diffused by the material.

The cinematographer was also less willing to use any more fill on the shadow side of a subject's face than was minimally necessary. In fact, in some of his work he was happy to let the shadow side of a subject go wherever it was going to go without any interference. 

The effect was like being in a room lit by enormous windows which were themselves lit by strong but diffused daylight. It was beautifully lighting. I'm still envious of those professionals from the 1980s and 1990s who could afford huge studio spaces that would allow this sort of experimentation. 

This was the opposite of some of the very dramatic and almost harsh lighting that Albert Watson used for some of his black and white people work. Some of my favorite work from Watson in the 1990s was also done in big studios but for different reasons and effects. 

He would work with one smaller soft box and use it just above the subject's head, letting the light fall off very quickly because of its very close proximity. With a forehead tone that was just a mouse squeak from blowing the highlights one found the light almost plunging into blackness by the time it got to a subject's chest. The ramp of the fall off, in accordance with the inverse square law, yielded, almost, the very dramatic effect of  a spotlight. A spotlight with the character of a small soft box...

But he valued the larger spaces for a different reason. He loved the depth. He would use long lenses for his portraits, usually on a medium format camera, and place the camera far away from the subject. Then he'd place the subject very far away from the background. The effect was subtle but exhilarating because it married compression with an increased sense of depth. But it required maybe 100 feet of linear space to achieve a look in exactly the way Watson wanted. 

I can only get a shadow of these effects in my smaller studio but I do have a few tricks up my sleeve. I have a big square of windows on my west studio wall that measure about 10 by 10 feet in all. The top edge of the windows is up at about 12 feet.  If I place my main light outside the studio and up high on a stand, shining back down through the windows, and then into the same kind of diaphanous diffusion the cinema guys use I can get a much better overall lighting effect than just using a modifier and light in closer proximity to my subject. 

I spent many years doing my own, watered down version of the cinematographer's design. I use a 6x6 foot panel with one sheet of diffusion on it as close to my subject as possible and then put as many LED lights as I can on the opposite side and as far away as I can. My diffusion is a bit too opaque and the distance less that half of what it should be for the lights but it's more consistency interesting to me than pulling out a soft box. Too bad the diffusion panel and LEDs require so many light stands. In a much bigger space I would be able to leave all that equipment set up and just walk in on a day-to-day basis and take spur of the moment portraits. 

Life is full of compromises. We're lucky when we get to choose the compromises we want. 

Spending time with a very enigmatic camera. One that's both potent and at the same time "under-spec'd" for a photographer.

this window on 2nd St. is a Holiday Display for a law firm. Interesting.

I bought a GH5S camera recently to use on video projects. We'd been doing work that required our video camera to be on a tripod and to run for anywhere from an hour to an hour and a half without stopping or overheating. The GH5S is actually considered a "pro" camera by Panasonic and it was the perfect tool for the job. In fact, after the first go-round I made it my flagship standard for work not requiring in-camera image stabilization. In most of these projects it was one of three Panasonic cameras rolling simultaneously and it matched the look and feel of the GH5 and S1H pretty much perfectly. 

I've been shooting a lot of full frame stills lately and I decided to change things up on my walk today and take something in the micro four thirds range. I was all set to head out the door with the G9 or GX8 until I glanced over and saw the GH5S lingering on a case, wearing its battery grip. I put the little Sigma 56mm f1.4 on it and exited the studio. 

The reason I say the GH5S is under-spec'd is that the sensor resolves all of 10 megapixels. In an age where our full frame cameras start at 24 megapixels and cap out at 47 megapixels the "paltry" 10 megapixels seems insufficient. And I guess if I were out shooting landscapes or incredibly detailed tableaux I'd find it to be lacking. 

But the reality is that the camera's sensor produces amazingly sharp and detailed files while adding an extra "snap" that seems to be missing from more muscular cameras. 

I shot sparsely today. I had a lot on my mind. I was mulling over a client situation in which I could have acted better. Not necessarily my fault but perhaps my response was out of proportion in the moment. At any rate that's one things walks are good for; introspection and a calm distance to parse stuff. Unlike our world leaders I am not adverse to apologizing where appropriate...

At any rate I was curious to see how much post processing I'd end up doing to the files coming out of the camera so when I got back home I made some coffee and sat down to play. Amazingly, none of the files I selected could reasonably be improved by my attempts at enhancement. They looked perfect right out of the camera. I'd shot Jpegs and was a bit surprised to see that the colors and especially the acutance of the files was just what I wanted. I've included a few here but no doubt Blogger will compress and darken them to take some of the glamour away. 

The funniest part of the shoot was my brain's insistence of shooting everything at f2.0. Everything. I was impressed at least as much by the lens. I think the sharpness at a nearly wide open aperture is pretty much state of the art for a short telephoto lens.  Take a peek. See what you think. Click the files to make them bigger. 

I met a guy named Shawn who had six or seven various vintage iPads on his bench.

At his feet were all these chargers and battery banks. We chatted for minute.

I asked him which was his favorite among the iPads. He pulled a phone out of his pocket and

said, "I like my new, 5G phone best." Shawn comes downtown to charge stuff on the 

city's dime and then goes home and plays with the gear. 

More mural painting under the 2nd St. overpass at Lamar. 

I was nervous for the artist when he climbed up on the very narrow 

scaffolding. It seemed precarious to me. 

Another painting crew on the other side of the street. The murals are fun. And bright.

That's all I've got. Don't "hold any thoughts" on my account.