Quickly declining engagement with the site is leading me to consider that blogging, at least as I do it, is quickly becoming obsolete. Thinking about options.

 The photo market has changed radically since 2013. Compared to a decade ago, when this site was still young, camera sales have dropped to the point where they are 15% per year of what they were at the peak. We're seeing more and more small product iterations and fewer and fewer big leaps in either technology or in the actual art. Digital imaging is quickly becoming mature so there's less novel stuff to write about. 

Few people want to read about happy, reasonably well adjusted, financially comfortable swimmers who are also photographers. More people seem drawn to the individual trauma and drama of writers that I just find droll. 

By this point I'm pretty sure that every reader here knows how I feel about pretty much everything related to the industry and if they don't know exactly I'm sure they can conjecture pretty accurately. 

The trend in the blog here and in other photo blogs I follow is to either continually "rediscover" all the stuff we've previously gone over ad nauseam and to "mini-tweak" stuff into a new post or to wander off the path of covering all things photographic to instead slip into the day-to-day tedium of other hobbies, interests, foibles, addictions, personal financial peril, jousting at the windmills of change, and other subjects that I find...boring. 

My current analogy comes from child rearing. To wit, you look at your own child's art and find it fresh, fascinating and wonderful. Everyone else's child seems to be struggling. You are required to like your own child but you are not responsible for the rest. That's where blogging is for me right now.

I think, even though I enjoy the process of writing and I enjoy the ego gratification of having an audience, I should at least alter what I put here or cut the cord and retire from blogging entirely. I guess this comes from spending too much time this morning (and on too many other mornings) moderating out several dozen spam comments offering clipping path services, Russian brides, "free" solar panels, and various "guaranteed" money making schemes but not having to moderate a single comment (today) having to do with the actual content of a blog post. 

My personal beliefs about the direction of photography are mostly at odds with many in my current audience who seem anchored into a different value assessment of last century's photography truisms and prejudices than mine. They still value the physical object of the print to excess and have an overinflated idea of the value of much "traditional" photographic work. Still waiting for the "Fred Picker Retrospective" at which we celebrate one photographer's understanding of.....how to operate a camera....

I'm tired of being mostly polite about politics here and even more carefully polite not to call out "emperors in our blogging field who have neglected to dress from time to time." No one really cares about what we studied in college, how we set up our lights in the 1990s and what we're going to do with that huge garbage bag filled with Kodachrome slides that we really haven't looked at in the last quarter century. We just seem, as a generation of image makers to have run out of steam. Or have failed to match our perspectives with the times. But I also feel that print is dead so I might now be the best source for understanding relevance.

All that being said, I feel more strongly than ever that it's much more important, on an individual basis, to spend whatever time remains out photographing for fun than worrying about legacies, histories, archives and the mundane errata of our long transition through various stages of image making. 

I'll leave the blog up in its current form and use it going forward as a nice place to just share my newest images but without the voluminous written component. But, if engagement numbers continue to drop I'll then consider pulling the blog down for good; mostly to mitigate internet security issues that are bound to plague all of us in the future. Too much and too detailed an amount of personal information is dangerous.

I have nothing to sell here, no engagement on the VSL site with clients of any sort, and no real rationale to continue pouring time and attention into writing about stuff that is ever-shrinking in our cultural awareness. Not convinced that there is value in it in either direction.

Heads up though. I am mercurial in the best of  times so if there are articles you enjoyed here and would like to keep I suggest you download them in the next week or so just in case I decide it's better to have a definitive end point for the blog.  You've been warned. 

I've made a lot of good friends here. Thanks. 

Some will try to decide for themselves why I'm metaphorically tossing in the towel now. Or "this time." I'll save you some conjecture time. No one has pissed me off or critiqued me unfairly. I am not destitute. I have not become uninterested in photography. I haven't monetized the blog in years and don't need to do so. I am not having any medical issues. No family issues. I just think photography has homogenized itself past the point where my previous professional insight/knowledge might have been more valuable to readers. 

Stories about my car purchases, my swim practice, my air conditioner replacement, my favorite place to get coffee, etc. should NOT seem so compelling and I may, in fact, be robbing you of small parts of your days which would be better spent engaged in something you really love to do for yourself. 

There's no longer any need for me to be a "buyer's guide" to cameras and lenses or an instructor about lighting or business. That era no longer exists. That's why we now have YouTube and Google. 

There's lots to commend the idea of leaving on a high note. But that would have actually been back in 2014. It's been a long, slow slide since then.

Portrait of Anne.

Anne. 2022.

Camera: Leica SL2

Lens: Sigma Contemporary 90mm f2.8

Location: Studio

 

VSL Micro Four Thirds Revival. Looking through past files shot with m4:3 gear.

 

Camera: Panasonic G9

Lens: Olympus 12-100mm f4.0

Location: Iceland

Location portraits without compositing still work fine.

 

A few years back I found myself at the top of a mountain in rural Virginia just before a blizzard was forecast to move in, trying to quickly make impromptu portraits of about 12 different people at the location for an infrastructure company's annual report. For context it was the company that installed the high voltage power lines in the background. 

I was using the new (at the time) Fuji XT-3 camera with the 18-55mm f2.8-f4.0 zoom lens with the zoom set to about 40mm. The shutter speed was 1/200th of a second and the aperture was f9.0. I used a X1-T Godox trigger on the camera and a Godox AD200 portable flash, held by one of the dozen participants, over to one side. 

The background and the foreground are all part of the same unretouched, original photo file. And believe me, the flash made the image look so much better than the reality on the ground. It added the direction to the light I needed, and the sparkle. 

Since sleet was already coming down, mixed with cold rain, I had the AD200 wrapped in a plastic Baggie. My other big concern was keeping water drops off the front of the lens. That, and keeping my chattering teeth and shaking hands from ruining my shots. No IBIS in that camera...

When we finished with the last portrait this band of hard working, four wheel drive  pick-up truck driving technicians and construction workers suggested I take "my girlfriend's" car and get down the one lane dirt road that wrapped around the 7,000+ foot elevation before the ice and snow hit. My "girlfriend's" car was a mundane Toyota Camry rental car I'd driven all the way from Charlotte, NC on an 18 day pilgrimage of unusual construction sites across the east coast and the deep south. 

Their advice was good since the car was already slipping and sliding on the mud and there were no safety barriers on the dirt road. I made it down the mountain by the skin of my teeth, took a deep breath and headed toward Christmas, Indiana for my next photos. Always trying to stay an hour or two ahead of an encroaching white out. Or whatever you northerners call it when it's bone-chilling freezing and you can only see about 20 feet in front of your windshield wipers because the snowfall is so dramatic.

This is one of my favorite photos from the project. A project that mostly involved photographing people at projects far off the beaten, urban paths. I like the way the background here recedes and I love that we got the ratio of light on the subject's face just exactly as I wanted it. 

We decided to pull each person out of their winter wear to make their images less seasonally anchored and after five or six minutes in the worsening weather they were thrilled to get back into their down jackets and warm hats. 

Here's another  subject from the same project. By the time we finished photographing her we were soaked in cold and ready to call it quits. Something about not being able to argue with the elements. But still happy that even operating mostly on muscle memory I was able to get the photos we needed. 

Man, that was an intensely scheduled project. Just before the pandemic....

Sunset in the north Atlantic.

 

Panasonic G9 + Sigma 30mm f1.4 

03.23.2022.GH5ii+Pen25mmf2.8 Yeah. It works just fine. Updated 03.24.2022

Added on Thursday morning. Before today's portrait assignment: 

I have to admit that I was stunned by the performance of this nearly fifty year old lens on one of the latest cameras from Panasonic; the GH5ii. After having used the lens on the original PenFTs and understanding that the focusing accuracy of the ancient and dim finders in those cameras and also using the same lens on the first Olympus EP-X cameras with their low res EVFs and thick sensor filter stacks I'd pretty much thrown in the towel. I figured that it must be something endemic to the lens that limited the performance I was able to get. 

My intention yesterday was to give the lens one last shot at redemption but I discovered that it's not the lens that needed redemption it is the supporting technology that needed time to catch up to the 1960s. With the GH5ii and especially with the GH6 we see, in the first case, a much reduced filter stack and either the absence of or the muscular slimming down of the AA filter which should give older lenses a big leg up in edge and corner performance. And looking at the image just below I can see amazing detail I've not seen from this lens before. 

Next, both of these new cameras make punching in, or magnifying, the frame in the finder for fine focusing easier than ever before. The magnification is greater and, in combination with state of the art image stabilization in the body the image in the finder stays more stable which also makes manual focusing easier. 

In fact, I spent some time focusing with a non-magnified finder and then checking how well I'd been able to hit sharp focus by then punching in to max magnification. This immediately showed me that any self-image I had about being an infallible focusing demi-god was total crap. I suck at non-assisted, non=magnified focusing. 

While the lens won't win any sharpness awards when used wide open it's probably time that we acknowledged that there's a whole world of photography out there that benefits from using any lens at a small enough aperture to give us good sharpness through most of a frame and not just in a narrow sliver of space. For a lot of work (landscapes? architecture? street? reportage?) having a "fat plane" of focus is a real benefit. 

Finally, your camera can make up for some of the performance shortcomings of older lenses if you are just willing to dive into the menus and tweak. For instance, I know that some of these older lenses are lower in contrast than contemporary lenses designed for digital cameras. Knowing that limitation I generally head into the camera menu and increase the contrast in the color profile. Adding contrast that way benefits the process in that you can more accurately see when composing how your final image will look. The higher contrast (or normal contrast in digital terms) also aids you in manual focusing. The same goes for the sharpness control in most in-camera color profile tweaks. If you know your lens is a bit less than stellar in the sharpness department it's not against the rules to add some sharpness in advance of photographing instead of waiting for later. 

The one thing I would caution all users of older lenses like the PenFT 25mm f2.8 is not to shoot into the light. The lens coatings of the time were nowhere near as good as they are now and you'll get flare, aperture artifacts and more. On second thought this could be just the artistic overlay you may be looking for.....

Summing up, if I implement my tweaks and am careful when shooting these lenses can be very, very good. Extremely useful adjuncts to modern zooms when you just feel like going bare-bones and single focal length oriented. 

I have to remember one important thing concerning some of my adapter rings... they don't deliver accurate distance information. The marked distances on the lens focusing rings don't match up and I can also go past infinity so any "zone focusing" has to be done by testing and re-marking hyper focal settings. Ah well. You can't expect to have everything. 

color profile: neoclassic

color profile: vivid

reflecting on my morning photography.

 

Storm Clouds on the Horizon. Walk Down Third St. What's Next?

©2021 Kirk Tuck. Please don't re-purpose. All rights reserved.

 

I always dread these words: "The pool will be closed for three days next week for maintenance." Especially when they are coupled with: "We're trying out a new pool maintenance company for the first time in 25 years. I'm sure everything will work out just fine..." 

So, if you happen to see me curled up in the fetal position after Friday of next week you'll know that something has gone horribly wrong with the plan. Horribly wrong. And the three days will have stretched out to three weeks or worse...

Our beautiful pool will be closed on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday of next week for "routine" maintenance. The more dedicated (compulsive?) among our masters swim team are already researching and planning for trips to alternate pools. We hope to stay wet and out of breath throughout the closure.

Storm Clouds Indeed. 

Speaking of storm clouds, it's been unnaturally cold here lately. This morning it was in the upper 40s when I got up for swim practice. It's been chilly all day. So I checked the weather forecast only to find that we'll have a strong weather front sweeping through the area tomorrow around midday. Wouldn't you know it? I've got a new car and the forecast includes "likely" enormous hail, torrential rain and even possible tornados. But the risks exist only in a thin, two hour slice of time. Say from 11 am till 1 pm. It's the hail that bothers me. As a reader of ancient Greek literature I can't help but wonder if I'm being punished for the obvious hubris of having bought a new car.

Photography: Yesterday I had a wonderfully fun and uplifting photoshoot with my good friends at Esther's Follies. Esther's is a comedy troupe that does laugh till your sides cramp skits about current culture, politics (both sides get skewered equally) and celebrity shenanigans. There is also a magic show. They are an Austin treasure and have made people smile and laugh for going on 50 years! They've made it through the pandemic and are getting ready to open again in the early Summer. I'm sure they'll do it safely and with reduced audiences but it's thrilling to see their perseverance pay off. I asked them if they needed new visual content and off we went!

We used to shoot the rehearsals with whatever props or set pieces were on the small stage but lately their advertising and marketing designer has gone down the deep rabbit hole of image compositing and from what I've seen he's got talent. So yesterday I came by, in the maiden work voyage for the Subaru Forester, grabbed a free parking space on Red River St. and dragged my usual case of lights and stands into their theater. While doing so it dawned on me that I've been photographing their shows a couple times a year for nearly the last 20 years. 

The cast had a nine foot wide green screen set up on the stage and the plan was to shoot everything in front of the green screen. Now, at the outset I should say that these folks move quickly. This is not like a corporate shoot where we can test and test and tweak and tweak. We shot something like 35 set ups in a bit under three hours...and that included my initial lighting and exposure tweaks and the tear down at the end. It's a brisk pace and it calls for lighting that works well without further major adjustments. 

I lit the stage with two 300 W/S lights (monolight electronic flashes) from the front, positioned about eight feet away from my central camera position. I got them up as high as I could and put smallish soft boxes on these two fixtures. Then I put up two more lights (same kind) at more rakish angles to the stage and used them direct with 7 inch reflectors. I set the ratio between these side lights and the center lights at about 1.5:1. I admit it; the light ratio was flatter than I usually work but it felt just right for the space, the stage, the actors and the final use. 

I used the Panasonic S1 camera and it surprised me. I'd almost forgotten two things: First, how good the camera is and how well it works for this kind of project. And second, that I hadn't used it since I did the most recent firmware update which tweaked the AF and more fully implemented the dual ISO feature of the camera. I chose to use the low ISO range and set the camera to the top of that range at 800. 

The 24-105mm f4.0 zoom from Panasonic was perfect for this photo-adventure since I could go from a wide stage shot to a "waist up" personality shot while standing in one position. Nice. The lens was set to f7.1 (based on an incident light meter reading from the center position on the stage, facing the camera) and the shutter speed was set to 1/100th of a second. Since we were pretty tightly tested and locked in, and I had set a custom white balance for the flashes, the client and I decided to try our luck and shoot the entire project in Large, Fine Jpegs. No horsing around with raw files yesterday! 

And, interestingly enough, this is the first theater shoot I have ever, ever done where in post processing I didn't have to tweak anything. No changes at all to the files as they were shot!!! Instead of making tweaks here and there and then saving out a whole new set of Jpegs the files I uploaded to the theater client (all 1500+) were camera originals. SOOC. Inordinately large time savings. Much happiness. 

Now let's talk about autofocusing. 

I didn't bring a tripod and I worked with the camera handheld yesterday afternoon. It's vital on people shots, and even more vital for people shots done on green screen, for faces, eyes, etc. to be in sharp focus. It's far easier to composite images with sharp edges and then soften the transitions than trying to start with a soft image to composite into a background. I opened the S1 menu and went to my usual AF mode which is usually "1 area." I typically work by moving the little AF square around the frame, trying to put it over people's faces to get good AF. I had never seen the ability to modify the single area control before. 

When I've used face detect in the past I've done it by selecting the control on the far left of the row of options; the one with the person and bird icons in it. When I'm selecting that mode I have a choice of face or eye detection. But when I saw a new sub-menu of controls come up under "1 Area" I thought it would be interesting to give it a try. It's obviously a new update to the system so we gave it a spin. 

Here is the menu set up in the traditional way I use the AF modes.

Single area. Movable focusing target. 

Now you can select "1-Area (Human Detection) and....

We can also choose "1-Area (Human/Animal Detect). 

I swear, these additional menu items were not there the last time I used this camera! I went with Human detection and also found out that you can still set the default AF square's size. The camera will default to the area in that square if it doesn't find a human to lock onto, so you are basically covered. 

When the first person walked on to the stage to be photographed I brought the camera to my eye and pushed the shutter button half way down (don't forget, I still use S-AF and not back-button-mania) and, as it was a full length shot, the camera positioned a large outline box completely around the subject and turned the box green (AF confirmation). I spent the afternoon with the camera set to this setting. 

If I was photographing a waist up or closer shot the camera would detect the face and put a box around the face. If there were multiple faces on the stage at one time it would lock on the closest one but I could override it by tapping the face that I actually wanted to be in perfect focus on the rear screen. If I was closer still the camera would automatically default to focusing on the closest eye. 

Now, I was not shooting under bright stage lights. In fact, we didn't have a theater lighting tech on tap so I was focusing using the illumination of 150 watt modeling lights, all of which were about 20-25 feet from the stage and two of which were shining through soft boxes. Not an optimal way to shoot face detect in AF  but contrary to almost everyone writing camera dreck on the web the Panasonic camera nailed every single frame. We were 1500 for 1500. 

Okay, so it always looks good on the screens on the back of the camera but how well were the frames really focused when we popped them open on a 5K Retina screen at 100%? Well....they were perfect. Every eye on the individual shots was right on the money. All the group shots were perfect compromises and all the people were sharp. I even zoomed into some of the full length shots and looked at the eyes and they were perfectly sharp. 

The web seems to pick up a meme about particular cameras and brands so as to slot them into some hierarchy and no matter how much the cameras improve it seems they are always destined to wear the tag they caught when an early reviewer casually tested and then tossed in a  throwaway review with little science or experience behind it. The slag for the S1 series of cameras is twofold but only one of the parameters is objective. Yes, they are bigger cameras than most of their competitors. If you must have a lightweight system you'll need to look to one of the other brands and also limit yourself to slower lenses. 

The second ever-prevailing black mark on the S1 cameras is to say that they struggle to focus. My experiences show me that they focus very, very well. Accurately and quickly. At least in every still photography assignment I have used them on. 

This particular outing with the S1 was another reminder to me about just how wrong online reviewers can be and how they often find a small nit and then sabotage a great set of tools in service of their own favorite brands. The only issue I found with focusing on S1 cameras was when trying to do AF-C in video, in low light situations. The first few firmware fixes helped but didn't cure the problem. But the issue was never one that should have caused concern for the enormous majority of photographer who aren't doing video or the subset of professional videographers who understand that AF and most kinds of video production are oil and water. 

Yes. I want good C-AF I'm going to put a camera on a gimbal. But a smaller, lighter camera works better in that use case. (hello Fuji X100V). For just about everything else I do in video we're well enough lit to make focusing a breeze. Even manual focusing!!! Heaven forfend.

Bottom line for me is that for the way I shoot the focus for photography is perfectly fine. Just as good as I need it to be. And the same goes for the two Leicas as well. Perhaps it's because I mostly use the 24-105 in fast moving situation like the one I described above, and it's probably the fastest focusing of the native Lumix S1 lenses, but I've also used the 50mm S-Pro for a number of shoots and it does fine as well.

When all is said and done the proof is in the tasting, or the integrity and look of the finished files. I'm happily satisfied. 

Now, what to do about the hail?

A related post from last year: https://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2020/02/a-quick-after-action-report-on-hybrid.html