When it rains it pours. Two new cameras come into VSL studios.

I think my friends knew that this would be inevitable. I was on the fence about buying the Sony a99 until I spent a few quiet hours handling one and then I knew I had to have it. I've played with a Nikon D800 and I shot a few things with a Canon 5Dmk3 but in my humble opinion the Sony a99 is currently the best all around photographic production tool for most professionals right now. I picked one up today from the folks at Precision Camera and I couldn't be more pleased. I went right into the menus and, after having spent many months with the a77's I doubt I'll have to consult the manual for anything other than how to set up the focusing range stuff.

To Sony's credit they left all the stuff that worked well alone. The menus now seem absolutely logical to me. And just as importantly the batteries are interchangeable between my Sony a99, a77 and a57's. What a nice touch! Instead of having to wait for the battery in the box to charge I could toss a fully charged battery from the Sony drawer into the camera and get started configuring the camera to my preferences.

What led me to water and forced me to drink? With the local economy recovering I've had several large, and venerable clients come back into the fold and now we're booked up in December, right into the holidays. Several of the jobs are multi-day corporate events with lots of available light shooting and even though I am now more comfortable shooting high ISO with both the a77 and the a57 the images I've seen from the a99 are at least two stops cleaner. That, and the fact that Michael Johnston at the Online Photographer upped the blogger ante by plunking down for a Nikon D800 and some jolly lenses and you know that we really must keep up with the Johnstons. (just kidding, really!)

My first real test of the camera will be at Zachary Scott Theater this week when we do the dress rehearsal shoot for White Christmas. It should be a hell of a lot of fun.

I have also done several video projects lately and missed having manual audio level controls and a headphone output on camera. To say I am excited about the a99 is an understatement. Looking through the viewfinder is a big affirmation of my decision to go all EVF all the time.  I cannot see much difference, if any, between a good optical finder and the EVF in this camera.  I'm heading out to shoot some stuff just for fun in a few minutes so I guess this is the first in a series of rolling reviews on what is now my new flagship production camera. Thank you, Ian, for putting one aside for me.  You know me too well.

But wait, there's more.

I also picked up a Sony Nex 6 to add to my Nex 7's.  Why? I like the new interface and I like being able to choose a less dense, less noisy sensor for certain kinds of shooting and it seemed like the right thing to do while I was already in the middle of hemorrhaging money. I just happened to have an extra battery and memory card in my pocket so I had the camera strapped, lensed and fully operational before I even stepped out the door from the store. It's going to be a busy week breaking in cameras and taking test shots but I guess that's part of what I signed on for.  So far the Nex 6 is working well with images snapping in to focus and the finder showing sharp and snappy images.

I have the 19 mm Sigma on the Nex 6 and the 30mm Sigma on the Nex 7 and we'll be testing all of the permutations of those combinations in the very near future as well. So, two new Sony cameras in two days along with two lenses in two days. I guess I am officially getting over my Post Recession Trauma Disorder and getting on with my life as a photographer.   Off to shoot and look.

We'll know more soon. 

A repeat: One of my favorite "technical" blogs of 2012...

http://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2012/05/interesting-job-with-mixed-light.html

Celebrity Baby Photo.

Mamiya 6 camera. 75mm lens.

An interesting lens. Not sexy, just useful and apparently very sharp.

The Sigma 30mm f2.8 for the Sony Nex.

For quite a while the web-o-sphere has been shaping our desires when it comes to the gear we lust after. The Shelby Cobras of the lens world are the fast glass crowd. If you are looking for an 85mm portrait lens chances are you're lusting for an f1.4 or even an f1.2, even though you know that the f1.8 or the f2.8 will all function very well at the aperture of f4 you'll need to keep someone's face in sharp focus....  In the 50mm's we've been locked in a love hate relationship with the ultra fast fifties since, well....the 50's.

Even in micro four thirds and the Nex family the underlying rythme of the drums is a hope for more and more fast glass to come to market. So in the midst of all this Sigma goes all counterintuitive? What the heck are they thinking?

They've introduced two optics that are very interesting by dint of not being obviously interesting at all. They are a 19mm and a 30mm set of prime focal lengths with the plebeian maximum aperture of.....2.8.  But before you dismiss them out of hand I have two cogent things to say that may push you to consider adding one or both to your selection/collection of optics for your mirrorless camera. 1.  According to all accounts and every review site I've stumbled across in my Quixotic research, these lenses are both very sharp wide open and maintain that sharpness as they are stopped down.  And, 2. They are tiny and dirt cheap. (That's actually three points altogether).

Each lens is available for around $199. They are plain matte black (think very discrete) and don't come with image stabilization. No big deal for Olympus shooters who have world class IS built in to their cameras but a possible non-starter for our shakier brethren shooting Sony Nex.  What they do have is new configurations complete with aspheric elements and small, sharp elements.

Here's what Erwin Puts, the world's leading expert on Leica optics (with the exception of Leica engineers, of course) about slower lenses: (to paraphrase) Every time you increase the diameter of a lens element (essential in the design of fast glass) you increase the complexity of grinding and finishing that glass by a factor of 8X. It is far, far easier to design a high performance (meaning great image quality) lens with a slower (smaller) aperture than to make one with a large aperture.

And this is why most fast 50mm lenses, for example, are soft and of low contrast when used wide open, with atrocious corner performance, and only get better when stopped down a couple of stops. It is also why fast lenses that can  be used at their maximum f-stops cost thousands of dollars.  

I am putting down my keyboard in about 60 seconds to walk out the door, get in my car and drive over to Precision Camera to pick up a 30mm Sigma for the Nex that they have on hold for me. I haven't decided if I will also pick up the 19 mm but I sure am considering it. I'll have my first report on your desk in the morning.  Bye.

Making Movies. What's more important than the gear?

My recommendation for a great book on making films, videos and for better visual story telling.

As a commercial photographer I see people rush to embrace video all the time. They figure that all their cameras come equipped with HD video and stereo sound so how hard can it be. If you trawl the web for information you'll find lots and lots and lots of technical information about the gear, how to use the gear, where to buy the gear and how to measure the gear but you'll find very, very little about how to make a visually compelling video that tells a story without losing the audience.

If you need to read about which camera to choose or how to make a slider work you can go to Phillip Bloom's site or peek in at Vincent Laforet's blog. They'll tell you about bit depth and codexes and focus following rings made out of titanium and unicorn horn. And don't get them started on fluid head tripods or you'll be there all day.

But, just as in still photography, the technical stuff is just the top layer. The congealed fat on the top of the påte in the mould. You need to dig down under the top layer to really make a useful and watchable project because so much of film making is about how to shoot scenes for continuity of action, so that the time line makes sense, so that they are believable.

I'm always looking for books that teach me how to see rather than how to capture and it's no different in making movies and videos. I ordered this book, Cinematography: Theory and Practice, by Blain Brown, about six months ago and I've just recently had time to sit down and start thoroughly digesting the information.

Brown discusses lighting but only in as much as how it affects mood and action. His real job in this book is to teach you why a film makes sense to viewers and how you can maximize good story telling practice to make better projects. At nearly 400 pages and an accompanying DVD it dives into good detail.

Chapters include: Writing with motion.  Shooting methods. Visual language. Language of the lens.  Visual storytelling.  Cinematic Continuity, Lighting basics. HD Cinematography. Camera Movement. Image Control and much, much more. It is complete with good illustrations and has zero body fat = no fluff.

If you've plowed through workshops and DVD's and endless blogs and you now know which camera has the lowest signal to noise ratio at ISO650 and which slider has the lowest coefficient of friction and how a jib arm works but you understanding of visual storytelling hasn't improved one lick then this is a great book for you (and for me).  It's dense, informative, well written and a tier above all the meaningless crap that the technogeeks love to spew.

You will learn more than you thought possible if you read this thing cover to cover. And it will improve your videos and your still photography. I can almost guarantee it.

It's a different way to come at learning more about imaging. And it may just resonate with your brain in a different and better way than the prototypical stuff from yet another stills only photographer.  I'm re-reading it as soon as I finish it. It's really that good.

I took the day off and wandered around with this lens to see how it would work with my Sony Nex 7.

Being able to use legacy lenses is a wonderful reason to own one of the mirrorless cameras. Any one of the mirrorless cameras.  But don't do a search for lens company called, "Legacy." That's just what everyone calls older lenses that, against all logic, can be made to fit on new cameras. 

Mirrorless cameras.  

Right of the bat I've got to tell you that I love the Sony Nex 7 and the files it produces. But I'm tired of continually buying lenses for this camera and that so I decided to try the self-reliant, after all civilization collapses approach to putting lenses on the front of the camera. I reached into the Olympus Pen FT drawer and pulled out some of my favorites. They came to my camera pre-bought. That's the nice thing about leaving old stuff in the drawers long enough: sometimes it becomes new stuff all over again.

I thought about this lens when I looked at the price for the Zeiss 24mm lens that's made for the Nex cameras. Now, I've sure that the Zeiss optic is stunning to use and rests in the hand in such a perfect way that once you pick it up you'll never want to put it down. But it's also not a focal length ( about 37mm on a FF) that I rush to pick up when I make photographs. A great 50mm eq. gets my attention every time but 35-37 is really nothing special or particularly inviting for me and the thought of spending $1000 on a lens I'll use sparingly was too much.

The 25mm Olympus G. Zuiko Auto-W f2.8 is a lens I picked up in 1985 for $65. It's absolutely solid and the focusing ring is as smooth as the day it came into the studio. The glass is clean and the aperture ring still turns and click stops with authority. I didn't use this lens much on my original Pen cameras because I was more captivated by the fast 40, 42 and 60mm lenses. I had no idea how it would work on a very modern digital camera with a very high resolution sensor but with nothing to lose but time and shoe leather I was game.

I packed a very small bag with the 60mm 1.5 and an extra battery for the Nex 7. I stuck in my iPhone and a couple bucks as well as my car key and parked the car in front of Barton Springs Pool. The whole park was empty today. Thursdays the pool is closed for cleaning and the rest of the park is being decorated for the annual Trail of Lights.  I set the camera to manual exposure, big jpegs, fine, landscape creative setting, etc.

I've shared with you all recently that I am not particularly gifted with the use of wide angle and even moderately wide angle lenses but someone left a shred of advice in one of the comments. That was to use the near/far relationships for drama and depth. So that's where I started. The image above is the spill way at the end of the Barton Springs Pool. Those are the lunar rocks in the foreground. Well, not really lunar rocks but if you lit them just right and waited until it was dark outside and....

The lens is lower in contrast than current lens designs so I added some contrast and a little saturation in post. Good lesson. More contrast. Easy to do.

I use the Sony Nex 7 in the bottom of a leather never ready case as it adds some more grip-able surface to the camera and protects at least part of the camera from my episodes of not paying attention and then walking into doors or repeatedly dropping the camera down concrete stairs.  (Is that covered under warranty?). I was looking for purple fringe around the leaves in the image above but I was disappointed. No fringe. No purple.

This is what I'm talking about when I think about wide angle chaos. I like the brightly color trees but look at all that crap in the foreground. Never happens to me with a 50mm or longer lens... (Is that an Olympus blue sky or a Sony blue sky?).

So, I'm walking along the south shore of Lady Bird Lake (yes, really. They re-named it after Mrs. Johnson) and I'm about to pass under the Lamar bridge and I actually thought,  "Someone is going to take me to task for shooting nothing but distant shots and they'll complain that it's hard to see if the lens is sharp, or whatever. I should find something I can shoot at the near focusing limit of the lens." And just then I notice that someone has systematically stacked dozens and dozens of flat river rocks on top of each other in little pyramids. Almost like a wild, impromtu Zen garden. (What did the Zen Buddhist say to the hot dog vendor? "Make me one with everything."  Bazinga.)

So I crouched down and put my elbows on a little wall of rocks and carefully focused using the focusing magnification and I put the focus on the stack of rocks on the left hand side of the frame.  Thought perhaps we could do a bokeh test at the same time.  To make everything more obvious I included a close up section of the foreground rock construction in the frame below. It is a crop from the image above.

In my seat of the pants analysis the lens is adequately sharp. Wonderfully sharp compared to some I have used... If you click on the image above it will open bigger in it's own window but the brilliantly programmed Blogger software will probably throw you back to the beginning of the article when you dismiss the window. (21st century? Right...)

Gotcha's? You bet. This lens wasn't designed to work with sensors. Film works differently. For the most part everything is hunky dory but I found out the hard way that once you stop down past f8 you will start to get a magenta color shift around the edge of the frame. Go to f16 and it's absolutely pronounced. About 26 points of magenta.  Very apparent in the sky areas. The image above was shot at f16 and it was gruesome. I tried to neutralize it with the adjustment brush in Lightroom but was stymied by sheer laziness. That's why there's still some magenta in the top left and on the far right of the frame. Oh, I meant to leave it in there to illustrate the copy.....That's the ticket.

I stumbled around the downtown area for a while being drawn in by clementines and appalled by all the relentless building. Everywhere you turn in Austin companies are digging GIANT pits that will become parking structures which will sit at the bottom of high rise resident towers.  It's like we're playing trust funder musical chairs. They're moving here in droves because of our city's reputation as one of the coolest places to live on the planet. And here I do have to take some blame for being a living example.....(meant as a joke. Notation for the humor challenged.)... of my city's coolness...But at some point it will be like bacteria on a petri dish and they'll realize that by sheer numbers they've sucked all the coolness out of the city and everyone will start moving somewhere else. I'm already looking.  Desert? Patagonia? San Angelo?

But the clementines were attractive and useful and if you hit the image above and blow it up a bit you'll see lots of good detail and great color.

This image is my bold attempt to be a landscape guy. I like the image but I think the sky is blah. I guess I could drag the image into Portrait Professional and see if I could enhance it with some pouty lips and bold irises.

Somewhere along the course of the walk I lost a couple of dollars to a coffee shop and eighty nine cents to Whole Foods for a vegan chocolate donut. It tasted pretty good and it gives you a small dose of inner smugness knowing that most of the people around you didn't have a vegan chocolate donut.  Sorry dudes.  But eventually all walks lead back to my pool and I made it over to the Western Hills Athletic Club early enough to take calming photos of the water and lane lines.  Don't the black lines on the bottom of the pool remind you of the declining curves in the DXO tests charts for signal-to-noise over increasing ISO? That means we've been reading too many camera reviews.

At ten minutes of noon I put up the camera and got my bag of swim goodies out of the car. Hand paddles, a gaggle of Speedo Endurance Jammers, my own special goggles with the green straps and my training fins----which failed utterly today.  It was seventy degrees and sunny when I hit the pool. The water was clean and clear. We had a good group at practice today. 

I goofed around too much and got the stink eye from the coach. But that's what happens when you skip out on work and take the day off. Youthful exuberance.  I spent the rest of the day laying on the floor of the studio alternately napping and re-reading the Hobbit with my dog. I'd read her the exciting passages and she'd just look at me and shake her head. Every once and a while I'd give her a dog treat, just to keep her interested.  Like trying a new lens.  It works.

When in doubt about the artistic integrity of one of your images just 

dunk it into Snapseed and pound it with the grunge filter. Then everyone 

will know it's art.

Funniest thing I saw on the web today: My first book, Minimalist Lighting, which usually sells at Amazon at a discount (like all the other books on Amazon.com) was on NOT SALE today for its actual printed list price of $34.95.  I have no clue.

If you're feeling perky go do some shopping on Amazon and use one of the links below to get there. Your purchase of ANYTHING on Amazon will support my blog and it won't cost you a pfennig. Such a deal. Buy a car...please.

The right lens for the job.

This is a portrait of my friend, Jennifer.  We were kidding around in the studio and she ducked into her ski clothes. I thought it was a fun look for an August day in central Texas so I asked her to step in front of a big chocolaty brown and beige canvas backdrop that we used to keep set up at the very back of the old studio on San Marcos St. and I snapped away with my favorite camera and my favorite tight portrait lens.

The camera was a Hasselblad. You can tell by the two little indentions on the left side of the frame in the black surround. Each back has notches on the left side so you can quickly tell which back your film from. Helped if one of your backs developed a light leak...

The lens was/is one of my all time favorites, the Carl Zeiss 180mm f4 for Hasselblad. It's wickedly sharp and has no weaknesses I know of. The 150mm Sonnars flared if you had direct light hitting the front element. The 180 also focused tight enough to get an uncropped headshot like the one above.  

If you do the mumbo-jumbo math of equivalence then this lens is the same angle of view as a 90 on a full frame 35mm camera and a 60mm on an APS-C camera. I tend to linger around this focal length for most of my work but with the APS-C I've settled into two different portrait lenses.

One my Alpha cameras (Sony a77 and a57) I like using the 70mm Sigma Macro 2.8. It's one of the sharpest lenses I've found for the cropped frame camera and the more I use it the more I love it. I'd use it on my Nex-7 if the size discrepancy wasn't so enormous....

On the Nex-7 I turn to the wonderful and elegant 60mm 1.5 Pen FT lens which covers the format with no corner darkening and, stopped down one or two stops, is sharp in a kind way. Three stops down and it becomes a dermatological pore discovery tool. Too sharp to keep friends posing on a regular basis. 

I'd like to think I'm the master of all focal lengths but to be honest really wide angles just baffle me. I don't get it. Who would want to include so much stuff in a shot? Really.  And the long stuff is fun to play with but in the end, monotonous. I'm right at home from the normal 50mm focal length to just about 135mm (all focal lengths based on 35mm FF). Go outside this range and I'm outside my comfort zone.  Interesting to think that one's choice of subject and then focal length are so important in setting a personal style. But there it is...