A status report on the Visual Science Lab Headquarters and the safety of our personnel...

First, I want to thank all the readers who got in touch to make sure we were okay here at VSL during and after the epic rains we've had both this weekend and last. We got about 8 inches of rain on Friday morning between midnight and 10 a.m. but other parts of Austin, including the airport, got up to 16 inches in the space of just two hours! Whole neighborhoods were evacuated and flooding was widespread. It was a bad coincidence that we'd had 16 inches of rainfall the weekend before because the ground was too saturated to soak up any of the new rainfall and the water had no where to go but where it was led by gravity.

Fortunately, our house and our offices are located in the Westlake Hills area which is west of downtown and across the lake. We are 690 feet above the base water level of Austin so we are immune from most catastrophic flooding. We are mostly dealing with spots of nuisance flooding where water is coming down the grade from the properties just above us and is jumping the gutters out in the front of our house. If the rains comes down too quickly it sometimes overwhelms the French drain on one wall of the studio and causes water to seep through the masonry and onto the floor.

The main house is never in danger of flooding and, after having lived here for nearly twenty years I'm pretty confident that we don't need to worry about the house proper. The floor in the office is concrete with dense foam tiles laid on top. These tiles are interlocking and easily removable and replaceable; and not expensive. If I get water on the floor of the office I use a wet vacuum, designed for sucking up liquids safely, to remove the water and then, when the weather changes (general in a day or so) I take the tiles outside and let them dry in the sun. The vacuum is plugged into a GFI plug and should be safe to use even in standing water as long as the unit isn't submerged.

All camera equipment is store in rolling tool cabinets that stand eight inches above the floor and all other gear; from backgrounds to light stands, is stored on Metro shelving with the bottom-most shelves set at about 12 inches. Even plugs and power strips are positioned on blocks of dense foam that keep them well above the 1/8th inch of spreading water we get on occasion. Our flooding is more of an inconvenience than a real danger and, so far the wet floor has only happened, at most, once a year; on average.

The real danger would come from driving though the low water crossings that dot Austin. A number of people are drowned each year in central Texas trying to drive through rapid water and being swept away in their vehicles. We're a bunch of sissies. If it looks dangerous we're quick to re-schedule shoots because no shoot is more important than our safety or the safety of our clients. A side issue is that even without danger of drowning, etc. the traffic in Austin comes to a screeching halt with any weather event and it can take hours to get several miles, even on the major highways.

The house and studio have brand new, 40 year roofs on them; installed last month. The gutters are clean and the French drains near the studio are usually functional. Nothing in life is guaranteed but we're feeling pretty safe and mostly dry over here.

Our hearts go out to the people who have been flooded out both in May and now this weekend. We are suggesting that locals can do the most good for those effected by contributing money to the local Red Cross chapter or a similar charity that helps provide emergency aid and shelter to displaced families.

To keep this somewhat photographic....when I went out to shoot some shots of the raging waters at a nearby low water crossing I made sure to take a water resistant lens and camera body. My choice? The Olympus OMD EM-5.2 with a Panasonic 12-35mm f2.8 lens. Like the Nikon D750 last weekend, the Olympus spent about an hour in moderate to driving rain and has suffered no ill effects. As I am not a competent weather photographer the images were not very inspiring. That's why I decided to erase them and start over fresh next time.

Thanks for all the good wishes and the concerns for our well being. I appreciated hearing from so many VSL readers. Have a safe week ahead.

Did Apple just give their users 10 bit color at the monitor? Is it usable on older systems?

iMac:

  Display Type: LCD

  Resolution: 2560 x 1440

  Pixel Depth: 32-Bit Color (ARGB8888)

  Main Display: Yes

  Mirror: Off

  Online: Yes

  Built-In: Yes

              See the type just above? It's from my system profile on my 27 inch Apple iMac. Look down to the

              third line. It shows the pixel depth for the monitor to be 32-bit. This is one of the changes that Apple's new system software (10.11.1), El Capitan, delivers. That might mean that we're now getting 10 bit per channel color! I love the idea of it but have no idea yet whether the increased bit depth is only available in Apple programs like Photo and Preview and not PhotoShop, etc., but I'll wait to hear from our more technical and enlightened readers before I stumble into meaningless conjecture and outright Male Answer Syndrome.

                     Intersting, yes?

Crazy Rain Again in Austin. Two weeks in a row...

Sixth Street.

Last weekend the city of Austin (and the race track at Circuit of the Americas = F1 venue) the mysteries of nature dropped about 16 inches of rain over the course of two days. It was a thin and whipping rain that soaked everything. Zillions of smaller rain drops but delivered in awesome quantity. It generated a lot of flooding and shut down the prelims for the Grand Prix on Saturday. 

I think most Austinites presumed that this was going to be our one Fall drenching and, par for the course, the rain stopped and the sun came out as the last of our car-centered visitors left for their next engagement. We had a wonderful week of moderate temperatures and light winds. 

When I headed for bed last night there was a forecast saying we'd get some rain today but no big panic on the part of weather casters.

Sometime in the early (pre-dawn) hours the rain started falling. By eight a.m. it was falling down a lot. Big, fat, fast, juicy drops. There gutters up on the street looked like white water. The never-ending homebuilding project next door starting sloughing off unprotected topsoil by the ton and diverting it into the storm sewers, and around 9:30 a.m. water started seeping through the low lying East wall of the studio. 

I was working at the computer and I turned around to notice a slow moving sheet of water moving out into the room. I really need to get an expert out to check what's happening with the French drain that runs along the wall but I think I already know = 6.5 inches of rain in about three hours, coming in on top of the 12-16 inches that saturated the ground last week. 

The vacuum cleaner sucked up the water and I cancelled a coffee appointment. Lightning had precluded any idea of early morning swim practice. But I've been lucky,  I just had a little bit of water on the concrete floor. All over South Austin whole neighborhoods are getting evacuated and the airport was completely shut down for four or five hours this morning. I headed out to Trader Joes to get some stuff for dinner and just in my neighborhood several roads were closed. 

Today, in Austin, it's good to have some weatherproof cameras. We've got a few more bands of heavy rain to get through and then the weekend cleans up its act and we get some sunshine and clear skies.

Just in time for Halloween photos. Have fun. Stay dry.

Sponsorships, free product; good intentions meeting subconscious manipulation.

No one at Apple has ever offered, or given, me a computer. They won't even let me cut in line on new release days, and yet I sing their praises whenever the subject of computer appliances arises. Olympus paid me once to be a presenter at a show. I traded long hours of speaking and showing work that I had done with cameras I purchased at retail stores for full price. In direct exchange they traded me a 14-35mm f2.0 lens for my Four Thirds camera system. End of the deal. A one time shot. From that point on I subsided back to being one of the rank and file customers; but I always get a friendly nod from the tech reps with whom I have worked.

I have borrowed gear from our local Nikon rep from time to time. She loans me fun optics because she thinks I might buy one or two if I had the chance to use them. So far I'm winning and I haven't bought any of the esoteric stuff I've tried out. But the last time I borrowed anything was back in 2006 so I'm pretty sure I'm not subconsciously feeling beholden to Nikon because of their ongoing largess.

One time a rep from Leica loaned me a 15mm f2.8 and it was kinda scary because the lens was so frantically expensive. I only used it around the house because I was afraid I might accidentally destroy it out in the wilderness and it was worth more than the car I was driving. Leica didn't get anything out of the loan because there was no such thing as blogs back when this transaction occurred and I didn't even get to brag about using it. Until now.

The same progression holds true for Leaf Systems, Phase One and Mamiya, who all sent me evaluation equipment back when they thought medium format digital equipment might make some headway in the market. I did fair evaluations of their equipment for a magazine that is now defunct, and immediately sent the equipment back to them. I was happy to test the cameras but they may have been less happy with my evaluations.

I have been invited to participate in several junkets from various camera makers while I was shooting with their gear but declined until I got invited to play with the Samsung cameras. I liked the people at the PR agency really well; they are fun and super professional. My problem was always with the cameras. In a way the Samsung cameras and I just have different personalities. It was like having me work on a computer loaded with Microsoft, Windows Eight. Try as I may I just didn't bond with them. The glass was good and some of the sensors were as good as their competitors but the whole mix didn't work for me.

I did a trip to Berlin with Samsung to shoot and write about the Samsung Galaxy NX, but I think all of us (me and the PR company) realized that the social networking leanings of that camera weren't quite in line with my personality -- which is more private and plodding. I was fine shooting the camera but hated the idea of stopping everything to spend time uploading, and social networking, the images.

I continued on but lost my enthusiasm for new product from them because I preferred the cameras I kept buying from other makers and we severed our agreement and went our separate ways. They did send me product  in a  quid pro quo but, for the most part, it didn't work out as either of us planned and all the Samsung cameras have been given away to friends and younger photographers.

I now have a new rule that I won't write about gear at all if there is any financial tie between me and the company that makes it or markets it. That means no pre-release trips to shoot a new product line in a nice locale. No acceptance of gift cameras or lenses with the idea that I will write about them and say nice things. In fact, you may have noticed that I've stopped reviewing new products in the month or so after they come out if I haven't wanted them badly enough to go to the store and buy them by giving my personal credit card a hard workout.

The problem is that any special treatment given to a reviewer immediately gives the appearance of preferential treatment that probably goes in both directions. Added to that is the fact that my sense of ethics winds me up so much that I become too heavy handed in my reviews and actually step over the line in the opposite direction by becoming too critical of the gear. Marking it down for insignificant flaws that were small potatoes in the grand scheme of a camera's design.

To be clear, none of the companies whose cameras I am currently working with had anything at all to do with my selection process and nothing at all to do with my decision to buy. No early deliveries were offered and no discounts proffered. The Olympus, Nikon and Panasonic cameras I own were all bought new, and at retail (same price for me as for you..dammit.) at Precision-Camera.com in Austin, Texas. All six cameras.

I mention this because I see all over the web that so and so is a "fanboy" and must live at Nikon or Canon's teat. I want everyone who reads one of my reviews to know that I'm tossing my money into the same pit everyone else is and those greedy bastards at Olympus, Nikon and Panasonic haven't even stepped forward to offer me a mouse pad, a pen, a promotional baseball cap or a t-shirt with their logo emblazoned in 100 point type, across the front and the back.

If I toss my money away buying a second Panasonic fz 1000 you can rest assured that I didn't get to go to Bora Bora or Tahiti for free in order to pick it up. Its passage of ownership from the store to me was not presaged or dependent on a good night's rest and dinner at a Ritz Carlton or Four Seasons Hotel, avec room service. My mastery of the camera; or at least my mastery of a language to describe the virtues of a camera, were not earned over canapés at the pool in Beverly Hills or effected by shooting bikini clad super models in some coastal paradise.

I really have quite an idyllic existence here in Austin and like to think I'm harder to buy than the general forum reader presumes.

Which leads me to my next line of thought: Why do we go back again and again and read the stuff that our jet set reviewers write about cameras? How are they so magical that they can hold a camera in their hands for a week or so, totally understand its every nuance and menu item and then write about it so prolifically? If they are working photographers then where in the heck do they find the time? if they are not working photographers who've given the machines a long and sweaty workout under pressure then why do I care what they say?

There are good sites that do honest reviews. We mostly all read them. But I'm starting to get annoyed at the sites where the entire raison d'être is the uniformly gushy camera review and nothing else. Maybe these guys could spice it up a bit by writing about photographs too. Or at least the occasional ten point list about "how to convince your models to take off their shirts." To hear that the placement of X button is "about one point five millimeters too far to the left for their comfort" is......boring.

Good working tools for an event photographer. Going traditional.

I just finished an event assignment and I know there are some readers who are interested in what kind of gear an I used on the job and why I made the selections I did. I'm sure the vast majority of our VSL readers are not the least bit interested in gear but I do like to indulge the tiny minority who believe that the gear influences the shooting and the shooting is an influence on what gear you pack and bring to the job. Writing about what I just used helps me either confirm that I did as well as I could or, make me realize that I may have fallen short and might want to reconsider what I drag around with me next time.

To set the stage most of the four and a half days were spent walking around in ballrooms, restaurants, bars, and conference rooms as well as in reception rooms at a race track, in the grand stands and on the Formula One track. In almost every situation the goal was to document people. Small groups of people. Couples. People on a step-and-repeat background with a band, groups of four or five in the grand stands, couples in a fine restaurant with the ambiance of the space and the group behind them. I also photographed some interior spaces and the set up and display of some amazing food. With the exception of portraits taken on the first day there was never a light stand or tripod in sight. 

Everywhere I went and everywhere I shot I needed to be able to work in with just the gear I could carry. If I couldn't carry it for hours at a time I left it in the car. That should set the stage.

Let's start with the small piece of gear up above. It's a pack of filters that Rosco put together for all the fans of the Strobist.com website. It has pre-cut color correction filters that fit directly over the front face of most battery powered strobes. The filter kit includes a range of CTO filters, including an 85 which is a full correction of daylight flash to 3200K tungsten. The filter pack also includes "plus greens" and CTB filters. I bought the collection of filters years ago and was delighted to find that the most popular ones (the ones I like) have included duplicates. Handy for multiple flashes or just as back ups for what is, ultimately, an expendable. 

When I am working in a restaurant, bar or other venue with true incandescent lights I like to put an 85 filter on the flash to get the overall color temperature into the same range. Most dim incandescent lights are between 2600-2900K so there's still a gap between the color temperatures but it's not so obvious and jarring and means that ambient light can be used as non-polluting fill light! Fun and games. A good camera and flash do all the necessary exposure calculations so I just sit back and enjoy images that are more neutral, overall. 

Metz 44 AF-1

The filters would be pretty useless without a flash to put them on so I brought along a dedicated flash for the Nikon DSLR cameras. It's not a Nikon brand flash but it also doesn't have a thermal protection circuit that's more protective than a mother bear and it cost about half of what one of the better flashes from Nikon costs. It's not as flexible in use but it certainly serves my purposes for event work. Here's why: Even though it takes four double "A" batteries it's lighter and smaller than the big Nikon flash units. It meshes with the D750 pretty seamlessly. By that I mean the TTL works well and I'm rarely ever surprised by the exposures. It has a good, powerful AF-illuminator which is a red pattern instead of a white light. It swivels and bounces. The output is lower than the max you can get out of the bigger Nikons but that also means it sips batteries at a much reduced rate. It's pretty common for me to use this flash with a diffuser, a reflective modifier or just bounced and still get 350-500 flashes out of one set of Eneloop batteries. Nice not to have to worry about quick changes in a crowded and noisy venue. 

There are some things I will look for in my next flash. I would like a metal shoe. The system that holds the flash head up for a ceiling bounce could use a stronger detent to hold up my Rogue Flashbender (more on that to come). That's pretty much it. Oh, yes, I would love to have a big, physical dial on the back of the unit with which to turn the flash compensation up and down...

When I use on camera bounce or modified flash I try to keep the flash exposure 1.5 to 2 stops above the ambient light. If my flash is too bright the room goes to dark. If the flash is dialed down too far there's a lot more change of mixed light ruining the look of someone's complexion or of capturing camera and subject movement by "dragging" the shutter. 

Phottix off camera cord, SC-28. 

I always carry my ancient Phottix off camera cord with me because if I use a diffusion dome on the flash (but never a Gary Fong Tupperware cup...) I like to get the flash up as high as I can reach and direct the flash over to one side (usually my left). This cord was bought as a cheap alternative to the Nikon product and I always meant to buy the more expensive one down the road but this one has been amazingly resilient. Doesn't matter what brand you use but in many, many situations getting that flash off the top of the camera just makes the lighting look so, so much better. I am grudgingly impressed with the cord and I just noticed it does have a metal shoe!

Rogue Flashbender.

I got tired of using little scraps of foamcore, business cards and rubber bands, index cards and tape, or whatever to attach to my flashes and get some soft front fill while at the same time bouncing a certain amount of light right off the ceiling. Then I found this device and I've been happy carrying it around whenever fast, portable flash is on the menu. The Flashbender has a thick connecting strap that uses a combination of tight, stretchy stuff to hold it on tight as well as a grippy rubber interior surface to the strap that keeps the unit from sliding around on the flash. Inside the square are three piece of armature wire that can be bent and hold that shape in order to form the diffuser to your customized desires. It's nicely done and folds in thirds, in one dimension, for easy packing and transport. Well worth bringing along when you want to fling some photons around... 

The event camera. The D750. 

I'm having a mini-lovefest with this camera this week. I shot several thousand images with it and less than 5 % required much tweaking in Lightroom to make them highly acceptable or perfect. I like this camera because it does nice Jpegs. I've been using it in the 13.x megapixel mode (medium size) because it's almost unheard of for a client to want to use an event photograph of clients for anything more than a commemorative print, an image on an event gallery or included in electronic collateral for the following year. Translated, that means most of the images could be well shot at 6 MP but I like a bit of comfortable security so I opt for the middle ground. If things are vital and not re-shootable then I'll switch to raw but that's getting rarer and rarer for me in event situations. 

When I use the D750 this way the downsampling in camera seems to create smoother tonalities and less noise in the files. Score! I can store more of them on every card. Score! They take much less time to post process and export, as well as less time to upload into galleries. Yay! On another score, the D750's flash technology is pretty mature so it meshes well with portable flashes in automatic modes. 

The D750 is also just the right size to use as a flash+camera imaging platform. Smaller cameras feel dwarfed by big flashes and small flashes yield harder light and work less well with diffusers like the Flashbender. 

Finally, in "group" mode AF the camera is surefooted with center area, S-AF autofocus. So, the images are sharp, tasty, in focus and well exposed. Just what I want. The final feature? The battery for the camera will take me all the way through a typical event shooting day. Go camera. 

The Nikon 24-120mm f4.0. Current version. 

I've tried event photography with everything from Hasselblads and Leica Ms to Panasonic fz 1000s and everything in between. It all comes down to the lens. The right lens can make your day or evening of event shooting comfortable and straightforward or turn you day into a nightmare of juggling optics on and off a camera. 

While there are sharper and better corrected lenses out in the world I'm happy with this compromise. It's actually more than sharp enough for any kind of event work that revolves around people so I don't ever ding it for sharpness. In fact, this past week I shot close to wide open at a lot of the focal lengths and didn't have any issues at all. Now, if you are an architectural photographer this puppy will have you running out of a room screaming. At the wide end the barrel distortion is right there in your face. Even after turning on the in camera distortion correction or working with the profile in Lightroom there is some residual wonkiness. If I use the lens for the purposes it was designed then I have no complaints. If the bulk of my business was straight lines I'd be looking at the new, Sigma 24-35mm f2.0 Art lens instead. Or maybe one of the better corrected, single focal length lenses. 

But what I love about this one is that I can go from big group to tight head shot without much effort, and I have a reasonable assurance that the lens will work well in both circumstances.  If I know that I'll be at a big conference with speakers on stage I will add an 80-200mm f2.8 to the mix. But lately I"ve been experimenting with using this lens (24-120mm) along with the DX crop in the D810 instead. That yields me a 180mm focal length and still delivers good pixel density in the range of 16 megapixels. It may be the perfect all around event tool but the D810 is bigger and heavier than the D750 and not as good as ISO6400. 

To top it all of the whole combination, along with extra camera and flash batteries, a back up lens and bits and pieces, pens and notebooks, all fit into one small, moss green, Tenba backpack. It's comfortable to carry and does a good job of protecting the gear. When you can show up and do a good job with the contents of small, comfortable, not too heavy backpack you've figured it out well. 

Do I need more back-up gear? It's rare to have a camera or lens go down but I've always kept an extra body and lens in the car. Now I'm starting to use the fz 1000 as a back up instead. Smaller overall package but still ample performance in a pinch. 

Just another day at the "office." A shot from the pits at the Austin F1 Grand Prix.

Walking through the pits with a Nikon D750+24-120mm f4.0. Though I had on a rain coat and was holding an umbrella the rain was a 360 degree, immersive experience and I was soaked to the bone when I got back to our suite at the Paddock Club. The camera and lens were both thoroughly soaked but worked fine and continue to work. The weatherproofing that camera makers have been implementing really does seem to work.

The preliminary rounds of the F1 were canceled on Saturday but the rain finally broke on Sunday and the race scheduled the prelims and finals on the same day. I was not there to photograph the cars or the race but to support a corporate clients whose sales event was partially wrapped around F1 festivities.

As the photographer for the business event I worked four very long days and evenings. On Saturday night I was making prints until 4 am for a next morning delivery. But I got to see lots of fast Porsche races before the main event, had a spot just over the finish line from which to see the race and had dinners in some of Austin's finest restaurants --- always with my camera right next to me.

A fun and entertaining weekend of "work." Now we're back to normal life. I've vacated my provided room at the Four Seasons and have made it back to my own neighborhood and, more importantly, our swimming pool.

The pool area was dark this morning when we arrived. We pulled off the insulating covers and watched the steam, backlit by the pool lights, rise into the air. I was swimming some backstroke as the sun came up over the horizon and turned the sky pink and then blue. Our coach, Kristen, wrote a beautiful, almost lyrical workout that had a main set that looked like this:

4 x100 yard freestyle (fast)  on 1:35
50 freestyle (recovery) on :60
3x 100 freestyle + 1x 100 individual medley (fly, back, breast, free by 25s)
50 freestyle
2x 100 freestyle + 2x 100 individual medley
50 freestyle
1X 100 freestyle + 3X 100 individual medley
50 freestyle
4X 100 yard individual medley
50 freestyle

It was beautiful. With the warm up and some other sets we managed to plow through 3100 yards this morning before most people had their coffee in hand. Nice feeling. I missed that over the weekend. I had the coffee; no problem, but the swims were nowhere to be found.

Back in the groove and happy about it.

Another day at the "office." Hanging out with the Doobie Brothers in Austin.

I'm the guy in the blue striped shirt.