Why do art? Why paint? Why Photograph?

I was going to write a whole BS manifesto about why I do art but I knew you'd see right 

thru me.  And you'd know.

The instant that

you saw

The Paintings that I did it because it was fun.

Fun.

Fun. 

Fun.

I did it because I didn't want to hand in another in an endless stream of precious

Photos in another endless stream coffee shop gallery.

I did it because I wanted to feel the oily, viscous

nature of the paint sliding across the 

canvas with that

glintzy bit of pressure,

of traction and 

of de-traction that happens.

Because painting is active.

All that matters is how you make the lines.

And I like to paint outside the lines.

And I painted a big

pink 

donut 

with 

sprinkles 

because it makes me 

happy to look at it.

It reminds me of the 

fiction we create 

each time we 

have an

experience.

And most of the time

I

just 

Painted to see

How all the pretty colors looked on the canvas.

But mostly

I painted them

because I could.

Do you ever find life amazingly non-linear?

I took this photograph just for fun.  No assignment.  Just for fun.

Twenty years later it's still fun.

There's so much I should be doing right now.  But I'm painting canvases instead.  Got the idea to do a series of paintings.  No money attached to the project.  Just the fun of swirling paint.  And adding imposto-ed touches of glinty highlights.  Didn't feel like doing any "real" work today.  Just letting a brush glide around, leaving a bright residue of ultra-marine and cobalt yellow.  And doing my "real job" = Having Fun.  That's what my business really pays me to do.

What does painting have to do with photography?   Nothing directly.  But it feeds into my general idea that art is all encompassing and everything we try and see goes into the big blender in our brains and creates the materials for future creativity in all media.

I've found something interesting over time.  The more I write the faster and more fluid it becomes.  The easier it becomes.  I think, by extension, that art must be the same way.  The more you do the more you do and the better you like it and the better you get.  I've come to think that the only people who get "writer's block" or "photographer's block" are the people who do the same thing over and over again. Or those people who wait for an assignment before they engage.  "Artist's block" is your brain's way of telling you to get off you ass and try something brand new.  Or just to do more.

There's entropy and there's stasis and that's as far as most people take things.  I'm not always satisfied with that so I'm looking for the chain reaction. A leveraged boost.  Maybe you should too.

If you're a photographer you might find painting a perfect adjunct. Head to the art supply store and get $50 work of canvases and tubes of acrylic paints.  Hours and hours of creative fun.  And a new way to look at color and control (or in my case, lack of control) and you might find that all that swirling and blending makes its way into your photographs.  Creative osmosis.

Lots of Rousing Debate About Street Photography.

My good friend,  Michael Johnston, posted a blog and a link on this site The Online Photographer to my blog about Street shooting and tacit approval.  That blog got 50 or so very quick responses that broadened the original discussion a great deal.  You can read that blog and the interesting comments, here.
The comments were interesting enough that Michael posted a second blog with counterpoints.  All of it is polite, well reasoned and strongly felt.  If you like my take you might want to see what his readers think.

I presume that there's a lot of cross over between our blogs.  There should be.  He writes stuff that I find interesting.  Check it out.

The shot above was done in a Paris Metro station.  Just to date this image, the slats on the escalator were made of wood.  I did not get permission from the subject.....

Some quick additions to the x-100 files....

The Fuji X-100 in black and white.

I was not as clear as I should have been about the optical finder on the camera.  In the past I've been a big proponent of EVF's but I glossed over how good I think the optical finder on this camera is so let's revisit it just for a moment.  You have a choice of viewing your taking image three different ways.  The first is like a tourist:  looking at the live view on the LCD on the back.  Not ergonomic unless you are on a tripod and using a loupe.  The second is live view in the eye level electronic viewfinder.  This is kinda cool because you can see a simulation of how the camera will handle the exposure you've set as well as the
color balance and any filter settings you might have engaged.  Pretty cool feedback if you are in the learning mode.  But supposed you are in the purist mode.  Here's where the camera shines, in my estimation.   Set the camera so that you are using the optical eye level viewfinder.  Turn of the record/review on the main, rear screen.

When you bring the camera to your eye and hit the shutter button to focus you'll see a white rectangle that serves as your frame for accurate composition.  Notice that the frame moves up and down and left and right as you focus near or far.  The camera is moving the frame to compensate for parallax.  Over the the left of the finder you'll see a scale that lets you know if you've dialed in exposure compensation.  You can also move the focusing point.

Now what you have is a camera that's removed many layers of distraction.  If you practice with it for a week you'll find the technical interface disappearing and being replaced by a more intuitive sensibility.

This is the charming part of the camera that "old-timers" keep referencing.  Jan says the camera styling is like putting an old phone dial on an iPhone but I disagree.  The design of the body is echoing the time honored ergonomics of the rangefinder genus.  Form is following function.

This is what makes the x-100 unique.  If don't value this feature then the camera is probably not a strong choice for you.  But as person who's extensively used rangefinder cameras I have experienced first hand how freeing it is artistically to have your camera become, for all intents and purposes, more transparent.

Note:  After I posted this my friend (and very able photographer), Jan Klier sent me a note pleasantly disagreeing with a few things I said previously about the camera.  I figured it would add to the discussion to append Jan's reply so I asked him if I could.  He obliged.  Here's his point of view:

Hey Kirk,


Just read your follow-up blog post.


I totally get your point about the camera ergonomics being such that the camera disappears. In fact that is why I just recently bought a rangefinder for my street shooting, because I didn’t want to carry my Canon 1N around. It’s not conducive to the type of photography you want to do on the street or when you’re just out and about and want a ready-to-shoot, not overly complex camera that doesn’t grab everyone’s attention. It allows you to interact with your environment and bring the camera in when desired. The one I bought recently is a Cannonet QL17. Can’t get the mercury batteries anymore, so no AE no AF. Just purely mechanical, simple 35mm film. Requires solid technique, but not much thinking. Just what you want.


But I’m also a stickler when it comes to product design. I hate products that have crappy, thoughtless, or confused design. My iPhone analogy actually had a specific point – the other day I was listening to NPR on a story about Steve Jobs, and the fact that the four most influential innovations of the computing age are all attributed to him. He’s obsessed with product design, and rightfully so. In fact the story recalled how they went back and forth on the material choice for the box the iPhone ships in and measured how long it takes for the iPhone to sink into the box when placed, to approx 4s. It’s all about the experience. There are many features that are missing on the iPhone, but those are conscious choices and saying ‘no’ as often as saying ‘yes’ in order to have a consistent design where every minute detail is thought about and has proper intent.


That’s the aspect that I find so jarring about the X-100. There’s no clear intent, it’s a compromise that’s pleasing too many. It’s like a Samsung phone instead of an iPhone. Here’s I think how that camera could have been designed (single choice, not multiple choice):


-          Focusing on retro – people that like the styling of the old range finders, but just don’t want to bother with film: Build a camera that looks and works just like a film camera, with the one exception being the medium. Use the classic elements and design of alloy chasis, etc. Even go as far as limited ISO choices to typical film (100, 400, maybe 1600). And then just insert an SD card where the film used to be. No LCD. You can see what you got when you download the card.
-          Focusing on rangefinder ergonomics – people that like a simple camera that disappears in the background but performs superbly. Build a range finder with great LCD, digital control, ideally may be a touch screen or other advanced control. Build it solid, but use modern product design standards, such as the iPhone. No dials and levers. Just buttons (unless touch screen). Make it best possible user interface that does what range finders do – intuitive, focused on the essentials. Don’t put stupid gimmicks like video in it.


PS: The review of the X-100 on Luminous Landscape made a similar observation about the design of the backplate: http://www.luminous-landscape.com/reviews/cameras/fujifilm_x100_test_report.shtml. He called it the ‘A-Team’ for the top controls, and the ‘B-Team’ for the backplate.


Jan

Do you ever buy weird lenses, test them and really like them?

Will van Overbeek and I met this afternoon so I could return his X-100.  I'm proud to say I didn't put a scratch on the camera.  But Will needed more hand's on time with the camera so we decided to take a stroll around downtown.  Couldn't be a better day for it,  temperatures in the mid-90's and a healthy dose of humidity to boot.  I agreed to walk because I had something else I wanted to shoot and test out.  

It all started when I left a part out of a consignment package.  The lighting unit sold and the buyer wanted to know if I could supply the missing part.  Silly me, it was right there on the shelf.  I headed over to Precision Camera to drop off the piece.  I lingered a bit and browsed.  Always a dangerous thing in an "adult candy shop."  And wouldn't you know it, right there in the consignment case, nestled in with a comfortable group of Canon zoom lenses was a lonely Tamron wide angle zoom.  I asked to see it on a camera and I decided to take it home.

What is it?  It's a Tamron 11-18mm SP AF Aspherical DX2 UD IF.  It's a wide angle zoom that was released in 2005 and superseded some time between then and now by a 10-24mm with even more initials behind it's name.  The DX in the name indicates that it was designed for cropped sensor cameras; in this case, the Canon APS-C frames.  Unlike the Canon EFS lenses it will mount on a full frame camera or (my favorite= the APS-H frame with a 1.3X crop factor).  Mounting it on anything other than an APS-C camera almost guarantees that you'll get some vignetting when you shoot at the widest focal lengths.  I expect that.  But I learned when I owned the Nikon 12-24mm DX zoom that as you zoom to longer focal lengths on some of the zoom lens you increase the image circle and it's entirely possible to use the lens as a superwide for bigger formats.  Really!

Here's what I've found to be true.  At 11mm, when used on my Canon 1dmk2 I get vignetting in the corners.  To see how much go straight to the bottom two images in the stack below.  One is shot at 18 and the other at 11mm.  See how much vignetting there is at f8?  Not nearly as much as I thought there'd be.  And my goodness, that's a wide angle of view.  See the one shot at 18mm?  No vignetting at all.  And I didn't remove anything in post.  Initial tests are making me happy because all of a sudden I've got a very wide angle lens for my two APS-H 1dmk2 cameras.  And for the 7D and the 60D Yippee.  More after this next photo......

Recently I've been testing the very sharp and very expensive Zeiss 21mm ZE lens for Canon full frame. It's a very sharp lens and it's very well corrected, geometrically, but it does have one little fault.....I found that it has more flare than I'd want.  Especially if there's a light source in the frame or near any one of the corners.  To be fair, I was doing the worst case scenario= an interior with lots of dark accents and light thru the windows.  But it was still worse than I expected and I ended up doing some remedial repair in PhotoShop.  I didn't expect a used, $350, third party wide angle zoom to do any better but today I was pleasantly surprised.  I shot this image (just above), including the shadow side of the building, with my camera pointed up to include direct sun.  And while the lack of flare was impressive even more impressive was the lack of ghosting in the image.  That's some pretty remarkable resistance to flare for a wide angle zoom lens. 

But in the back of my mind I kept thinking that, when my evaluation of the Zeiss 21mm was over I should probably go ahead and purchase it because it did show high sharpness when I shot it on a job last week.  So I almost resigned myself to the expense but figured I'd shoot a few more things downtown and see if the Tamrom was anywhere near as sharp.  I had my doubts.....

Nice sharpness for a handheld at 1/20th of a second....

Definitely a bit of geometric distortion but most of it was simple barrel distortion that could be corrected with Photoshop's Lens Correction filter...  That's my reflection in the middle window.  

Tacit approval?  No, active approval.  I smiled, pointed at my camera and he gave me the "thumbs up" sign.  I shot and then smiled again and waved "goodbye"

It's always hard to tell things from small jpegs on the screen but when I looked at this raw file at 100% I was happy with the sharpness at infinity.

But all those doubts evaporated for me when I leaned into this shot.  The Fuji X-100 is my target and when I blow up the file the engraving around the lens is rendered with a high degree of sharpness.  This was shot both handheld and wide open and the lens acquitted itself well.  What is of interest to me is the pleasant bokeh of the out of focus areas in the background.  Common wisdom has it that ultra wide angles don't have good bokeh.  But I venture to say that this one is pleasant.  And sharp.

If you've read my blog for very long you probably know that I'm not typically a wide angle lens shooter.  So what drove me to buy this lens?  It all started when I got a call to shoot interior images for an electronics company.  The interiors were in a very posh and very private club somewhere in central Texas.  (NDA signed).  I wanted to do a good job and, while I shot with a four by five view camera and Schneider Super Angulons for years I'd basically sent all of my "would be" architectural clients to my friend, Paul Bardagjy, who is a wonderful architectural photographer with a feel for design and a head for detail and quality.  I decided to do this job because the client and I go way back, and there would be interesting technical shots that I thought I could do a good job on.  My only reservations were about optics.  I'd be shooting the job with a Canon 5dmk2 and the widest lens I had on hand was a 20mm Canon EF lens that is a bit less than sharp on the corners and tends to have some chromatic aberrations even when stopped down.  It's not a bad lens, it's just not as good as it should be for straight lines and images that require across the frame sharpness.  For most of the stuff I shoot with it I'm happy but straight lines in rooms is another thing.  

I'd been invited to borrow a new 21mm  Zeiss so I did and I enjoyed the shoot.  Far easier, in a way, than the old days of view cameras but I was reminded by Paul that the rules are the same:  Watch for the details, flag the flare, use the polarizers, bring grad filters, style, style style.  The job went well and the client has two more projects in the chute.  Hence my search for a lens that I like, that works, that won't break my budgets.

Have I found it in the old used Tamron? Maybe.  It's pretty darn good. But I'll go on looking and see what's out there.  Next on my list is the new Canon 24 T/S lens.  I'll try that one on for size as well.

But I will hang on to the Tamron, it's a very usable set of focal lengths, especially for the format it was originally designed for.  And I'm impressed with the center area sharpness.  I also want to try out its replacement, the 10 to 24mm.  But that's another day.

This is the lens on a 1dmk2 (1.3x crop) used at 11mm.  You can see the vignetting in the corners.  But the rest of the image is very well behaved.  I love giant window posters.  

What did I learn from my latest experiment?  That some older lenses can be bargain gems.  That the common wisdom that Di, DX or other lenses designed for APS-C are unusable on bigger sensors is wrong.  That cheaper lenses can have better flare characteristics than some of their pricier competitors.  That zooming can be fun.   That's about it.  Thanks.


    

Saturday at Lady Bird Lake. And stuff.

public piano on the pedestrian bridge in downtown Austin.

Love this crazy city.  As an art piece, these fully tuned and playable "art" pianos are cropping up all over downtown Austin.  People are encouraged to sit down and play.  I was downtown shooting a few cityscapes,  I need to drop one into the background of a portrait.  The bridge is my favorite place to start.   I was traveling "light" with the 1Dmk2n and the 24-105L.  Nice combo.  Nice files.

Wedding?  Prom? Graduation?

There's a great spot for downtown shots right next to the Palmer Auditorium.  The city made a hill there and people go up and look across the lake at the buildings.  I was heading there to fill in my needed shots when I saw this mass of people rushing about on top of the hill with lights flashing.  The guy in front of the lightstand with the shorts is the photographer.  I never figured out what the event was but he had a nice angle working and his fill flash seemed pretty well thought out.  I shot some BHS shots and moved on......

I never saw this reflection in the glass of the Long Center before.  I guess I just wasn't paying attention.
That's it for the Saturday blog.  Why didn't I post a "walking around Austin Sunday blog?"  Well,  truth be told I spent the afternoon painting four paintings on beautifully gessoed canvas.  One is an instant winner.  Two are honorable mentions and the fourth gets scrapped and earns a "do over."  It's fun and purging and challenging and different to paint instead of photograph.  But not so fun to blog about.....

Kirk Tuck Spends Some Quality Time With The Fuji X100.

I've just had my hands on the X-100 for a few days so this is not intended to be an exhaustive review.  Nothing in depth.  Just a general appraisal that may be followed by a more finicky look.....

I first saw the X-100 in person at lunch on Weds.  Will and I were having Vietnamese BBQ sandwiches at a food trailer called, Lulu B's, on South Lamar.  We sat at a little metal table under the canopy of a giant oak tree and drank Mexican Cokes.  We do things like that here in Austin.  I'd dragged along my latest crush, a massive Canon 1dmk2N and Will brought his new squeeze, the supple, subtle Fuji X-100.

First impressions?  Styled like my old Leica M3,  silent shutter,  very nice EVF and lighter than it looks.  Now I'm a sucker for heft but I have to admit that, as I get older and spend more quality time in the Texas heat (will it hit 100F today?  Will it ever rain again?) I'm starting to believe that we can offset whatever inertial dampening benefit we get from heavy metal cameras with well done, in body image stabilization.  And that's not on the check list for the X-100 (which I will just refer to as "the Fuji" for the rest of this Sunday afternoon keyboard ramble) but with a wide angle lens in the mix it's not as crucial as it might be for a slow zoom.

 In many ways this camera is just what a legion of art-inclined photographers have been begging for since the beginning of the digital era:  the exact equivalent of a Leica rangefinder with a brilliant 35mm focal length lens (in "film talk" equivalents) and hands-on controls for the primary, important stuff.  Throw in small, light and relatively affordable and I'm sold.

Let's get the big stuff out of the way first.  The images out of the camera are very good.  Close to M9 and Summilux good.  And that's about as good as it currently gets for light and portable cameras.  I haven't done exhaustive tests but up to 1200 ISO and down to 200 ISO this camera just flat out rocks.

External dials:  Back when Rollei introduced the first modern 120mm medium format film camera they did something simple and novel and fun.  They gave us an aperture ring around the lens that also had an "A" setting on it.  They gave us a shutter speed dial that had all the usual shutter speeds (and electronically controlled in 1/3rd stops, no less) and the shutter control also had an "A" setting on it.  If you wanted to switch to "shutter priority" you chose a shutter speed and then set your aperture ring to "A" letting the camera select the aperture.  If you wanted aperture priority you set the shutter speed ring to "A" and you chose the aperture, allowing the camera to select whatever shutter speed it deemed necessary.  And.....wait for it......if you wanted programmed exposure  (in those few cases when you wanted to hand the camera to a small child or your grandmother so they could get a shot) you would set both controls to "A" and you'd be sporting a mighty heavy and sophisticated "point and shoot" camera.

That's how the dials work on the Fuji.  And that means you don't have an annoying dial with M/S/A/P/little duck/Clouds/Fireworks, etc. taking up valuable camera top real estate.  Amazingly simple and you'll master the rythme of that in minutes.

From the other end of the spectrum (well, maybe in the middle) Canon got lots of kudos when they introduced the G10 for having a separate, external, dedicated knob for exposure compensation.  Also present and most appreciated on the x-100.  Set up the camera menu for the settings you want and you're ready to head out and do some fun, candid, street photography while channeling the HCB look.  And you could do a lot worse than that.  While the menus are different than my previous S5's or anything from Canon and Nikon the controls themselves are really straightforward so if you're just shooting away in raw and doing all the image tweaks in PS you'll be ready to go after a fairly quick browsing of the manual.  The one thing you'll need to study is how to toggle back and forth between the eye level EVF and the screen on the back of the camera.

Ergonomic answers.  Took me ten minutes to make the grip and the hold all mine.  The camera feels very good in hand but my one complaint is the quick review.  I'm used to shooting at eye level and then looking at the screen on the back to judge the shots.  When you use the EVF on the Fuji and you have it set for instant image review the electronic finder stops showing you what you're pointing the camera at and shows you your last shot.  You'll want to turn off the review for serious, continuous shooting.

Another point I need to make about the set up is about the histogram.  You should be able to set the camera so that every time you review the shot the screen comes up with your preferred information on it.  In my case that would include a histogram.  Unless I'm dumber than dirt and haven't  found the right setting yet, you have to toggle thru the information choices to the fourth item before you get a histogram and it's not sticky.  You'll need to do this each time you need a histogram.

Worst feature of the camera?  The video tease.  Yes, there is HD video (of the 720 variety) but no, you'll never want to use it.  Unless aliens land in front of you and bribe Barack O'Bama at raygun point to have  tea with Sarah Palin......   Here's why:  It's totally automatic.  No audio level controls, totally auto exposure and totally auto ISO.  Even totally auto autofocus.  Just not professionally usable.  But then you really won't be lining up to buy this camera if your number one priority is video.  For that you'll want a Canon 60D or a Panasonic GH-2.

Now let's talk about the big ass elephant in the room, the price.  Would we all like this camera to be $495?  You bet.  Is $1200 out of whack?  Nope.  The camera has a lens that is on par with stratospheric lense like the Leica Summi series lenses in the equiv. focal ranges.  It has a much bigger sensor than any of the cult series pocket cameras like the G-12, S-95, Olympus ZX-1, etc.  That means its image quality is going to be on par with good DSLR's and it's noise performance as well.  But the added benefit is the design.  Isn't that getting to be more and more the case with better products?  We're finally acknowledging the important role of good design as a metric in hand tools and appliances.  And this camera has handling design in spades.

The settings you might be looking for to add nuance to your photos might be hidden in some menu pages but the actual "hands on" shooting controls are right where they should be and the handling is good.  The EVF is not quite up to the electronic viewfinder for the Olympus Pen cameras but then nothing else on the market is either.  There's a little jitter as you pan with the EVF in use but it's nice to see a reasonably accurate approximation of what you'll end up with.  If the jitter annoys you it's always easy to turn off the electronics and use the finder as a direct optical finder.  You'll lose the on screen menu items and focus points, etc. but you'll get a clear, uncluttered and direct view of your subject.

Is this camera a great all around camera?  Can you recommend it to your mom?  Not likely.  It's actually aimed at advanced hobbyist, professionals and artists who depend on being able to gracefully immerse themselves in a scene, shoot inconspicuously and come away with great medium wide angle shots.  If you shoot sports don't even consider it.  If you are into conventional portraits, take a pass.

But if you dragged a Leica M2 and a 35mm Summicron with you as you back-packed thru Europe in the 1970's and you've been looking for the same experience ever since electrical engineers killed true photography (just kidding???) then this is certain to be near the top of your list.

Faster and much better in the hand than its $2,000 Leica rival, the X-1 and light years ahead of the Canon G's and their friends, it's actually in a class by itself.  Know what you are buying and why and you'll be almost guaranteed to like it.  Buy it because you are bored with your DSLR and your huge collection of zoom lenses and I can almost guarantee you'll go one of two ways.....either you'll grow to hate its formalist restrictions and turn it back into your dealer or.....you'll learn the incredible value of a minimalist approach to core photography and you'll never turn back.

It's the camera most of us wanted.

How about me?  Will I buy one after testing Will's for these past few days, and in light of all the nice things I've said about the camera above?  Sadly, it's probably a big no.  And not because of any faults of the camera.  I don't like shooting wide.  I don't really need the context of all the stuff in the background for the work I like to do.  I love the 50mm focal length and I'll wait (probably forever) for a camera maker like Fuji to come out with a version that has a 45 or 50mm lens welded onto the front.

When I pack for work I take long lenses, sometimes even two versions of my favorite focal length, the 85mm.  I always pack and almost always use my Zeiss 50mm but my Zeiss 35mm keeps the stuff in my camera bag company more often than not.  If I want to go wide I want a 21.  If I want longer I grab the 50.  I've spent decades trying to learn to love the 35mm focal length and I'm giving up.  But that's just me.

My final advice?  If you are already a Leica user you'll love this camera.  If you've never used rangefinder style cameras you NEED to go to the camera store and handle the camera.  That's the quickest way to know whether it's for you.  Really.