A much better documentation of this photograph of Gov. Ann Richards.

 ©Kirk Tuck.

A Portrait in belated celebration of the vernal equinox....

 Michelle.

What Zoom Lenses Am I Currently Using? How do I like em?

My lens collection is almost like a living organism. Some stuff wanders in from the street and makes itself comfortable in the gear drawers, some succumb to ennui and slowly vanish while some eventually are injured and die. Zooms seem more susceptible to transitioning in and out than single focal length lenses but I guess that's the nature of this particular life form. 

I have a little flock of zoom lenses that, I must admit, I'm looking to change around a bit. But I'm not sure where it will all end up. But here's where we are today. This is what my choices are when I need to stock up my camera bag and go out for fun or profit: 

1. Panasonic 24-105mm f4.0. My all around, most leaned on, extended normal lens. It covers everything. If I were a rational human I'd just own this lens and the next one on my list and I'd get back to my job as a statistician who enjoys the benefits of a calm cup of decaf....

2. Panasonic 70-200mm f4.0. As above. This is a wonderful longer zoom and it has no discernible personality. It's totally transparent, just does its job and goes home to watch the weather channel. I love it for its high performance but dislike it for its lack of drama and excitement. 

3. Panasonic 20-60mm f3.5-5.6. This lens makes me feel like I have the wider focal lengths adequately covered. I owned a 20mm Art lens that weighed three times as much and cost me twice as much but I never, ever used it on a job. With this little, cheap, plastic lens I feel as though I've given the concept of very wide angle focal lengths the attention I believe they deserve. 

4. Leica R 28-70mm f3.5-f5.6. I had very low expectations for this one because it was cheap and a little beat up but have come to like it more than all the rest because it has....personality. It can be really sharp. The colors can be very deep and accurate. But sometimes it flares and usually the corners are...whimsical. The built in lens hood has lost its grip so I've lashed it into its fully extended position with ample helpings of black gaffer's tape. The first R to L adapter I used on the lens was a bit loose so the lens vacillated between focusing on infinity and just pretending to focus on infinity, which made for a bit of healthy user friction. But every once in a while the camera and this lens really bang out some nice images and it's the most fun to use. 

I like all the lenses but I like the little, cheap, used Leica zoom the same way I like a clumsy puppy. It's adorable and has potential. 

What am I saving up all my discretionary cash in order to buy next? 

I think I would really love to play with the Leica 24-90mm f2.8-4.0 SL lens. It's supposed to be really sharp and contrasty and it covers my favorite focal lengths well. It's big, fat, heavy and ponderous but we'll keep the smaller Leica zoom I talked about just above. 

I turned in all my post production, etc. this morning. I delivered it to the client on a 1 terabyte HD. I'm happy with how smoothly the whole process went. Ready for the next round. 

 

Has the mania for ultra-fast lenses hit a peak? Will it now subside and allow lens makers to concentrate on better compromises?

another portrait. 

I'm the first to admit that I've been suckered into the wild enthusiasm camp about lenses with very fast apertures for most of my time in photography. When we shot with film cameras a faster lens meant a brighter viewfinder which meant easier focusing. An added benefit of focusing with a fast aperture lens at its widest setting was very narrow depth of field which also helped with nailing focus. 

Since everyone (most people?) were able to focus their faster lenses more accurately a mythology about the lenses existed. Since the lenses were better focused the resulting images at any aperture were sharper so they looked better. This led people to believe that the faster and more expensive lenses were also capable of higher overall performance. It made sense to people because they were, daily, judging the results of more accurate focusing and mistaking at least some of the benefit as coming from a better designed lens when compared to slower lenses. 

In the mid-1990s autofocus technology got better and better and camera makers didn't need to make focusing screens that were optimized for highest acccuracy (at the expense of brightness). Since nearly everyone buying newer and newer cameras used AF for almost every shot the camera makers looked at the compromise matrix of focusing screen engineering and changed the mix to favor super bright screens at the expense of manual focusing discrimination. All in all it's a compromise that makes the most sense for the most users. 

Now lenses both fast and slow would benefit from the same accuracy in autofocusing because the focusing was no longer done on the screen but buy an AF sensor instead. So, essentially, the need for super fast lenses for higher focusing accuracy was cancelled. But the mythology continued. 

I read an article which I can't source at the moment but it was about lens design. It may have been written by Irwin Puts about Leica lens manufacturing but it essentially made the point that more modest aperture lenses were much easier to manufacture with consistency and high quality than faster lenses. 

It seems that every time you need to increase the diameter of the lens elements to increase the speed of a given focal length a doubling of diameter requires many times more manufacturing accuracy than a slower lens. Also, fewer elements are required for optimal correction. 

For the first ten years of mass acceptance of interchangeable lens digital cameras (roughly 2000-2010) the one reason to own faster lenses was the rather poor noise performance of then available sensors. On my Nikon D2Xs any ISO over 400 was mostly unusable for commercial work. Noise reduction apps for post processing proliferated like bunnies. An argument could be made that companies like Sigma started designing their ultra-fast Art series line of primes in order to provide a sharp, wide open aperture to compensate for the low ISOs we needed to use at the time. But that never meant that fast lenses could be designed to out perform slower lenses for things like: contrast, sharpness, resolution and lower distortion. 

And those are all the things needed in most lenses to make them successful.

Now we've entered a new age with digital. It's the age of miraculous ISO performance in cameras. One no longer has a rationale, beyond the look of a particular lens design, to splash out two or three times (or more) money to buy a faster lens if an f2.0 lens offers all the performance of an f1.2 or f1.4 lens that weighs three times as much and takes up a lot more real estate in your camera bag. 

I write this because I'm trying to reform my bad lens buying habits by introducing some rational thought into the process. I guess my epiphany came when I struggled with the weight, size and ponderous AF of the original Sigma 85mm f1.4 Art series lens. It was a monster to handhold, and, if truth be told, it, like most ultra-fast lenses, was a one trick pony. It could do really great zero depth of field images. But after you've seen a few years worth of strangely narrow depth of field you come to realize that it's not a vital part of usual and successful imaging. Better to concentrate on shooting at apertures that let one actually see the majority of a subject clearly and with acceptable focus. 

Another rude awakening has been my odd dance with the Panasonic S-Pro 50mm f1.4 lens. Optically, it's magnificent. At f1.4 it's as sharp and contrasty as any Leica or Zeiss super star lens I've ever tested. When you stop it down it gets better and better. But it's ponderously large and also weighs a ton. I find that I very rarely take it out and shoot it for pleasure. Though I've had it well over a year I can count on my fingers and toes the number of times I've actually needed its particular performance envelope in the work that I do. And the work I see most commercial photographers pursue. 

When I head out the door for fun I look into a drawer filled with lenses and ponder. I like the 40-60mm range and at first I look to the 50mm lens and fantasize about how wonderful all the subjects I photograph will look by dint of the lens's amazing performance. Then I quickly become more rational, realize that I'll mostly be shooting at f4 or f5.6 and move on to finding a more comfortable and more than adequate alternative. Usually it's something like the Contax/Zeiss 50mm f1.7 or the Sigma 45mm f2.8. Lately, I've been shooting more often with the Sigma 65mm f2.0 and am finding it to be a powerful imaging tool. Very sharp at f2.0 and among the very highest performance long normal lenses extant, when used at f4.0 and f5.6. Why carry the weight if the f-stops at which you'll be photographing are in the middle of the range?

Even older lenses made for film cameras, if well designed and built, are delivering surprisingly competitive results at middle apertures. Even at f2.0 most of my lenses hold up well. Making the purchase of ultra-fast lenses kind of....stupid. 

Photographers are being regaled this month by a torrent of "news" about a new 50mm f1.2 lens from Sony. It's supposed to be really good, and maybe it is. But it's too expensive and it's not going to deliver a better photographic experience for most users compared to good lenses in the same focal length with which they already use. It might be better at f1.4 but by the time it gets to the optimum picture taking apertures of f2.8-f8.0 most of the benefits essentially are limited by the resolution and imaging potential of the camera sensors and the techniques of the users. But they will have splashed out big cash to mostly end up with performance that's a near even match with lenses with smaller maximum apertures. 

I'm also seeing an endless parade of 50mm lenses from Chinese makers that boast f.095, f1.0 and f1.1 apertures. Interest seems to be running high among the faithful. 

I've tested a couple of these and find them to be very difficult to focus well, wide open, and not very high performers when used that way. When stopped down they become....adequate. That's a pretty sorry review for modern lens. 

I'm more interested in lenses like the Sigma 45mm f2.8 which I've written about here from time to time. It's not great performer wide open but in the middle ranges it out performs just about any zoom lens and is better than similar focal lengths from Sony and several other makers when stopped down just one stop. Soundly outperforming them at two stops down (f5.6). It's built like a tank, is fun to use and still compact enough and light enough to be a 24/7 carry lens.

I think the reasons to own fast lenses are diminishing and as our hobby and industry continue to change I'm betting we'll see more and more lenses done in a traditional way = a fast enough aperture for any real use. A small enough footprint for comfort, convenience and handling, and a price that is affordable to many more users. I count all that as a win. 

Interested to know how you feel about this. Am I once again totally off base and wrong? What benefits (if any) do you get from using ultra-fast aperture lenses? Share?

Program note; written a few hours later:  Matti Sulanto is a Finnish photographer and a Lumix Ambassador. He has a nice and informative YouTube channel where he discusses nuts and bolts, reviews cameras and goes out for photo walks in all kinds of crazy weather. Today I wrote this blog post and ten minutes later I was on YouTube at Matti's channel only to find that his post today was also about the same subject. We posted almost simultaneously!!!

Here is Matti's take: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04InY8cyuEY

He's got a very slightly different take on it than I do.... but mostly we're in agreement. check it out.

I photographed a set up for a book cover a while back. I just got a high res version of it. Fun.

 

I'm not a golfer though I once played 18 holes with boxer, Sugar Ray Leonard, (but that's another photo story for the a future blog post...). But my friend,  Dr. Jim Grubbs is really, really into the game. By day Jim is a psychiatrist but I'm willing to bet that these days he spends more time chasing the little white ball around some beautiful golf course here in central Texas.

I shot the image for the cover of his first book three years ago and it was fun. The book sold well and everyone was happy. So when Jim got a contract to do his second book he called to set up a quick shoot and he arrived with props in hand and an idea ready to go. 

Book cover images are a vital part of marketing books in many genres. I've done a fair number over the years and, surprisingly, the cover I like least is one that was used on one of my own books. Again, a story for another day...

The first book Jim wrote was pretty great. I can hardly wait to dig into this one.

Here's a link that doesn't benefit me financially. It might benefit Jim, but only if you enough are into the psychology of golf (and other applicable pursuits) to buy his book: 

Jim's new book.  

Here's the cover of the previous book:

Some notes on post production in the Spring of 2021.

 I thought I'd change gears here for a day and talk seriously about post processing in this day and age. 

We did a photo assignment last Thursday which generated nearly 3,000 large (24 mpxl) raw files. The project was to photograph six individual models in white lab coats. The brief called for the models to be "animated/excited."  The "take" needed to be edited down and then quickly shared with the client. The client made 36 selections yesterday and I spent the better part of an eight hour day enhancing the files and dropping out the light gray background we used. 

The photography part of the equation; the actually pushing of shutters and positioning lights, is probably old hat for most of you. It was a straightforward exercise in lighting with soft boxes and electronic flashes. The one addition, driven by the need to preserve detail in the lab coats, was the constant use of a "net" to block some of the light falling onto each model's shoulder. The shoulder closest to the main light. Nets are like neutral density filters for the light coming to the model. They can be feathered and they are constructed so that there's no shadow line on the subject. Useful for controlling how much light you want on specific parts of a subject. 

The stuff that interested me this time was the post production. As soon as the shoot was over and I was back in the studio I did a very quick edit in Lightroom and dumped about 1,000 files that were flawed in one way or another. I converted the remaining 2,000 files from raw to Jpeg so I could upload the Jpegs to Smugmug.com. I didn't need outrageous file sizes or ultimate resolution so I made the Jpegs 3200 pixels on the long side with a Jpeg quality setting of 90. The iMac Pro I bought 15 months ago whipped the files out fairly quickly and the upload was snappy and uneventful. 

I like presenting galleries on Smugmug to clients for a couple of reasons. If I save the files at their full size and highest quality settings (still as Jpegs...) I can use the resulting galleries as a third tier of my back-up. The client is able to access their gallery from anywhere. Multiple people on the client side can use the gallery at the same time. This would allow a large company, with locations in multiple cities or countries, to get buy-in from associates in far-flung offices. I can set a maximum download size and let clients download files individually. They like this because they can use the images for placement in comps while figuring out exactly what image and which cropping would work best in a layout. I can assign a separate password for downloading privileges so marketing people can decide who has access to shareable content. 

The gallery of images for Thursday's client was up and running on Friday morning and they quickly selected the 36 images included in my bid for post processing. That's where the real story starts for me about post production...

Here's the way I did it. If you have a better workflow, please share it!

I open the raw files one at a time in PhotoShop via the Camera Raw interface. In that interface I make as many corrections and adjustments as I can. These include fine tuning color temperature, opening up shadows, creating a custom curve to hold onto highlights in white lab coats, and cropping the image into a usable size. 

When I finish doing those things I used the new "Enchanced Enlargement" tool just introduced in the latest update to PS. This doubles the pixel count while using A.I. to refine and sharpen details. What I end up working on with this additional processing are 140-200 megabyte files in 16 bit. 

Once the files are open I make any additional color, tone or retouching corrections and then I go to the selection tool and click on it which opens two buttons in the top menu bar. These are "select subject" and "Select and Mask." I hit the first one, "select subject" and the program does a very good job (if I've shot everything correctly...) selecting the actual subject and rejecting the background. I can see by examining the "marching ants" outline that the tool either worked or failed. Once I've examined my outline selection and am happy with what it has selected I hit the "select and mask" button this uses the subject selection to create a good, tight mask which separates the subject form the background. 

This part of the process is rarely perfect. There's always some things that gets included but should not or something that gets masked out (the tops of ears! the ends of fingers! ) that very much needs to be included. This is the part of the process where you get to go in and try two different fixes to get your file selection exactly as you want it. When I'm in this stage of the process I like to work with the image at 100% and carefully check every edge. 100% on a file that's 12,000 pixels on the long end is quite a close range observation but you catch more artifacts and glitches this way. 

The first of the two tools is the "refine edge" brush tool. You can change the diameter and use the tool to smooth edges and make small adjustments to what stays in and what goes out. I like to use this for hair as you can make sure you've selected the hair from the background so it looks realistic when the client drops the image of a person onto a new background. I use it around edges that might look a bit rough due to the initial selection process. It's a great tool and the associated menu gives you an almost infinite amount of control for edge detection, feathering, contrast and other fine-tuning parameters. Light touch or heavy touch? It's totally up to you. The tool works best when there is a good contrast and color difference between the background and the subject. The more alike the foreground and background the worse the performance. 

The second tool is a brush tool which adds to or subtracts from a selection mask. I might have part of a white sleeve that doesn't get selected along with the subject. Since the mask visualization is 50% opaque ( you change the percentage) I can see detail under the mask that may need to be included but is currently outside the mask. I use the brush tool to wipe over the desired but excluded detail and it erases the part of the mask blocking the detail from showing up. If I've included details I don't want on the edges I can hold down the option key while brushing and it adds to the mask.

Once I think the selection and masking are optimal I can choose a number of ways to save the image. Since I'll be delivering these to a graphic designer who will be compositing them into a background she'll be creating she'll want the image with the background dropped out and the subject floating in a transparent layer. I select "new layer" and PS adds a layer with the subject visible and the background dropped out above the original background image which is how the image looked after the raw ingestion but before the selection process. 

I save the completed file in layers as a 16 bit Tiff. The file sizes of the finished 36 files ranged from 300 to 400 megabytes apiece but they are big, sharp and easy to use. The client will most probably convert from 16 bit to 8 bit but might want to stay in 16 bit if they have some additional, tricky color work they'd like to do on the files.

The time consuming part of each image refinement lies in the fine-tuning of the selection edges before committing to the final step of outputting the file to a layered format. I can spend half an hour getting the hair and edges of an image looking just right but I have to say that it beats the heck out of the "old school" way of selection in PhotoShop, using the pen tool to make point-by-point clipping paths...

On projects like this one which include bigger rights packages (yes, that's still a thing...) I like to give my clients a folder of the finished Tiffs as well as the original raw files (in case I get hit by a truck and they still need to use the files) and the intermediate .DNG files which are created in the Enchanced Enlargement process in Camera Raw. 

While I have to give up a bit of control, giving the client the raw material means fewer panicky phone calls from folks looking for different files or wanting to create different looks under super tight deadlines. They are generally as good at post production as I am and can grab the file they want to do their own post processing. Post processing isn't really a profit center for me; I have fun and make my money shooting the images and doing the production. The post production stuff can be creative but I don't have the mindset to make it too complex and creative. I feel sometimes that it's like washing the dishes and pots and pans after cooking dinner. It's not as much fun as cooking, far less fun that eating a good dinner, but a necessary part of the whole project. 

A few things about shooting with the intent to drop out backgrounds:

1.  Working with higher resolution files works better than working with lower ones. 

2.  Automated selection tools work better with files that are in sharp focus. 

3.  Soft focus or soft edges can be problematic with automated selection tools.

4.  My highest success rate comes from files shot at f8 to f16.

5. Flash is a good idea for this kind of work because it freezes most motion.

6. Automated selection tools are almost never a good match for images with motion blur. 

7.  The "refine edge" tool hates soft edges. The brush tool for adding and subtracting masked

     areas is ambivalent about soft edges. 

8.  Nailing focus is important and the corollary for me is the discovery that eye detect AF

     doesn't work as well with subjects who are jumping up and down. Best to make D-o-F your

     friend on these kinds of shoots. 

9.  Take some extra time to fix stuff on your set, like burned out white areas on a medical 

     white coat. It will make life easier in post production. 

And, finally, be sure you have the life affirming elixir we call "coffee" at hand when you need to take a break, walk away and find, once again, a reason to go on....

So, after swim practice yesterday I spent most of the day huddled down in my office; mouse in one hand, keyboard under the other, grinding away on the images I'll be handing off tomorrow. And that's enough work for this month...

A Caption-Fest Blog. Unconnected splinters of reality while cruising along in sunglasses and a hat. And yes... pants.

Every time I leave the house with a Fuji X100V I use it in a different way but when I look at the images after I get back to my office I'm always a bit amazed at how much I like the files. I had no real ambition today other than to cover some miles and get some fresh air but the camera can't be denied when it's ready to shoot. I've grown insanely fond of the built-in, four stop neutral density filter. I can shoot stuff like the stickers on this pole at f2.0 and join the "endless bokeh" crowd without even breaking a sweat...

Everywhere I go in central Texas there's a company making whiskey. The only local stuff I've tried is Nine Banded Whiskey (because one of my fellow swimmers is a partner in the venture...) and Milam Whiskey, from Blanco, Texas. They're both pretty good but then I'm probably a highly flawed judge since it's not something I enjoy on a regular basis...

There is a trend in Austin, and it may be nationwide, to have bar with lots of outdoor seating and then have a food trailer somewhere adjacent to the outdoor seating. Contained within the confines of the bar's "space" but somehow also separate. Taco Flats was a popular Austin Tex-Mex restaurant back in the 1980's and I guess this is the (final?) iteration --- an afterthought on the grounds of a booze factory.

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that, if you are a UT student and you are getting stumbling drunk on Sixth St. most tacos will probably pass your taste test. With flying colors. Ew. Flying colors....I just got that. The old "Technicolor Yawn." 

I have little to say about this image from a 1950's advertisement plucked from one of the general interest magazines of the period. It actually does a yeoman like job multi-tasking poor taste, racism and sexism all in one go. I'm not really sure why a current company rehabbing a downtown space would decide to paper the windows during construction with ads like this but, on the other hand, there were probably even worse advertising messages back then. Hey, I just report on what I see. Note that the gentleman on the far right is holding what appears to be a Speed Graphic down by his waist...

This is exterior wall art for a new bar on West Sixth St. It makes me think of the Beatles "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band." Maybe that's Mr. Kight. While the drawing of the man evokes a UK or EU image from the past the white and red stripes remind me of the land of the rising sun. A strange melange when taken in with the green fence just in front. 

When I rounded the corner from the weightlifter on one side of the bar I looked up and noticed that there were lights strewn above the roof's edge. They seem to echo the color scheme of the background graphic in the image just above. I was happy the X100V has a digital teleconverter function because the image would have been too far away to work in a 35mm frame. Click on this one because the red lights are quite interesting; at least to me.

This is a building I walk by frequently, but when I do it's mostly in the afternoons and it's right next to some taller buildings that block the direct sun. This morning I saw it this way for the first time in a long time. It's actually a western wall so it is facing away from the sun but all the buildings around it have mirrored or otherwise reflective windows and all the lighting pattern on the brick is a product of the morning sun bouncing off the east walls of the building across the street and reflecting back. I think it's fun. 

I'll just leave it to you to punch in and read the sign. It's a typical Texas story but that doesn't make the whole trope less entertaining. Especially when presented next to a brick mermaid...

There was once a restaurant called Carmello's that sat on 5th street, nearly east to the freeway. It was a traditional and nice Italian restaurant that served big portions, had white tablecloths and black clad waitpeople. One nice amenity was that they had their own big parking lot for customers. You drove in through a little archway and someone valet-parked your car for you. During one of the economic downturns (I think it was in 2001-2002) the business fell off, people started dining more casually, and the owners ran the numbers and figured they could make more money just running a parking lot close to the new Convention Center so they shut down the restaurant. At some point I think they considered doing something else with the property since most of the actual restaurant (but not the parking lot arches) was demolished but then the project was abandoned. Once everything cleared out I discovered that the entire back wall of the parking lot was covered with these whimsical fresco paintings. Some of them are quite endearing. I strolled slowly through the parking lot today as though it was a big, open air museum. Sadly, the harsh UV of the Texas sun will one day fade the paintings into oblivion. If I cared about antiquities I guess I would make a project of documenting them and then researching to find out who painted them. And why. I may actually be too lazy to do that. But I intend to do the photographic part...

We're having devilish weather here. It's been dropping down to almost unbearable lows in the nights. Last night I put bigger covers on the bed and noticed that it was forecast to be a bone-chilling 45° overnight. It was still in the 50s when I went for a walk. I took along a thick, casual sport coat and suddenly remembered how much I enjoyed having jackets with big pockets. I could actually drop an X100V into one of the pockets. It's only going to hit the mid-70s this afternoon and the sunlight is annoyingly bright and contentious. We'll soldier through. What else can we do? And then there's the hat. You may tease me but this image may just get me a gold star from my dermatologist....

And once again....the prow of Darth Vader's space ship. In downtown. See the reflection of the traintracks? Weird, right?