'Vita. Character created by Jaston Williams. ©2020 Kirk Tuck
Saturday, November 07, 2020
Second Entry: Portrait from a project with Jaston Williams. Different characters for a one person play about a small town in Texas. More coming.
Sandee. Character by Jaston Williams. ©2020 Kirk Tuck
Thursday, November 05, 2020
A Nice Distraction from the Post Election Day Jitters. How about a concert under the stars?
Chanel at Zach Theater's "Songs Under the Stars" concert.
An amazing voice coupled with a wonderful stage presence.
Last night was a night to go a little retro. I was asked to photograph Chanel's show at Zach Theatre for their outdoor concert series. I was delighted to be able to do so. It was a relaxed and chilled out evening and that was in stark contrast to the pervasive angst many people are experiencing because of the election drama. I showed up for our outdoor concert, grabbed a box of buttery popcorn from the concession stand, along with a plastic cup of Cabernet Sauvignon (and a straw....) and grabbed my little square of space. It's a space where I can see all the angles of the main and secondary stage but not be in any audience member's line of sight.
I preset my cameras and munched fresh, hot popcorn as the temperature dropped into the delicious 60's. If my tripod actually had a cup holder I would have put my wine there but I didn't even bring a tripod so even my libation was strictly handheld. I do find it impossible to shoot well with a camera+long lens in one hand and a beverage in the other so I parked the wine cup on the ground, next to my extra camera. I figured they could keep each other company.
I didn't want to carry in a bunch of camera gear because I'm getting lazy and jaded and starting to believe my own propaganda about the photographer being much more important than the gear. Instead of the big S1x cameras and their ponderous (but exquisite) lenses I chose to shoot the entire show with a doddering old Panasonic GH5 (firmware 2.7) and the newly acquired Pana/Leica 50-200mm f2.8-4.0. As an acknowledgment of the high magnification of the lens I grudgingly pulled an ancient monopod from the cargo areas of America's most coveted high performance car, the Subaru Forster. I used it for almost every shot, flurry of shots, collection of images, etc. Belinda gave me that favored monopod for my birthday in 1980. Remind me to tell you about it. Wow. A forty year old piece of photo gear.
Old habits die hard so I brought along a Panasonic G9, and the other Pana/Leica lens I use; the 12-60mm f2.8-4.0. It spent the night keeping my cup of red wine company, down near my feet. I just can't leave home for a job without a back-up solution...
The concerts last about an hour and fifteen minutes and the lighting doesn't change, shift, turn other colors, etc. so once you've ranged in your color temperature and hue corrections, and arrived at a good exposure for each part of the stage areas, your brain work is all done and all that's left is a responding to your visceral reaction to the music and the showwomanship of the performer. And Chanel (love the one name thing) is very much a world class singer. She is performing here in Austin this week but heading over to London's West End theater district to star in a production about Tina Turner. That's the big time.
I over-shot. But that's hardly unusual. I was in the mood so I photographed with raw files instead of Jpegs and the only real difference that makes, which impacts my workflow, is that it takes twice as long for Lightroom to convert from raw to jpeg than from jpeg to "other" jpegs. I was aghast when I looked at the frame count. It was about 1100. I edited down to a bit under 400 for delivery today but I sure left a lot of really good stuff on "the cutting room floor."
There's no job-ness feeling to the stuff I shoot for Zach Theatre. I decide when I'm going to show up. I decide what I'm going to photograph and what I'll deliver. It's up to me to select cameras, lenses, etc. I can wear my most comfortable shoes. I can get discounted beverages from the bar...
When the show ended and the applause died down I tossed a camera over each shoulder, finished my wine and sealed up my popcorn box. I brought the half full box home thinking I'd munch more popcorn as I edited files today but Ben and Belinda beat me to it and wiped out my popcorn stash last night while I worked, unaware, out in the studio.
Job overwhelmyness. I've been shooting non-stop this week and tomorrow we'll cap the work week with a full day of product and process/demo photography over at Luminex. I'm working with a fun and kind art director but he wants us to be there by eight. Yes, a.m. I'm working with a new assistant, a guy named Austin who also designs and implements stage lighting at Zach Theatre. I have high hopes that, with a good assistant, I can become ever lazier and still get overpaid. We have a full day ahead of us, working in the belly of corporate America. I am steeling myself for the experience. But there will be breakfast tacos and coffee so all is not bleak.
On Saturday we're doing a three camera video shoot of Chanel's concert back at the theater. Sunday is set aside for seemingly endless postproduction and archiving. I am three jobs behind on photo retouching at this point. Monday we're back at Luminex till 2:30 and then back over to the theater at 5:00 to film Chanel for a different (undisclosable --- at this time) project. We'll be doing a three camera filming adventure on the theater's main stage for this. Tuesday we have a full day booked in our studio by an ad agency to shoot lifestyle portraits and then, Wednesday, I'm back at the theater to shoot video of an entirely different concert.
At some point I'll put my foot down and command myself to take the rest of the year off. And that will be good because I'm about to write a fabulously nasty diatribe about Adobe ruining my life (very short term) by changing everything I've spent 20+ years learning in Photoshop. Rat Bastards! One day all my adjustment panels are there and the next....poof! they're all gone. Grrr. Hours and hours wasted yesterday. Stay tuned and I'll help you understand my rage at them. But I am still using their products so I guess, ultimately, they win.
I hope the election stuff doesn't have you mired down in angsty depression. Every body is couching it as the battle royale between socialists and death cult Nazis. But I think that's wrong headed. Democrats aren't socialists...... they're pretty main stream.
Tuesday, November 03, 2020
Monday, November 02, 2020
Seen in downtown Austin yesterday.
They passed the intelligence test.
How can I tell? They're wearing their masks.
They are protecting me while I photograph them.
It's the opposite of selfish.
also, they are not screaming obscenities at me from the cab of
a pick-up truck....
Zooms Versus Primes All Over Again. But with a 2020 perspective.
Noellia at Zilker Park.
50mm Sony lens on an APS-C Nex7.
While growing into photography and all through my career I've understood the underlying truth of lenses as being tools subject to a strict divide; that the very best optical results always come from prime/single focal length lenses while zoom lenses are useful for convenience and, while constantly improving, zooms will never, ever be as good as the best primes. The law of lenses was demonstrably true when I started in photography in the 1970s. Today, maybe not so much.
Back then you had three choices: good single focal length lenses, cheap and crappy zoom lenses or expensive and....usable zoom lenses. As zoom lenses improved there was a new thought wrinkle tossed in to appease the hurt feelings of people who really, really want to use zooms. It was a new amendment to the law which postulated that while zooms would never match the performance of the same range of individual prime lenses the shorter the zoom ratio the better your chances were of getting something decent out of your zoom. But the new amendment was always greeted with the sideways look of disdain and the assumption that pros and real artists always pulled a prime lens out of their bags when they were aiming for perfection.
Change comes slow when it's wrapped in unsubstantiated opinion. Somewhere in early 2000's camera makers started producing zoom lenses that gave film era primes a decent run for their money. In particular the optical performance of the more expensive 28-70mm f2.8, 24-70mm 2.8 and 80-200mm f2.8 lenses took a big leap forward. Followed by several extra-wide angle zooms. I remember being surprised and impressed by the first Canon EOS 20-35mm L zoom and then again by Nikon's 14-24mm zoom. For the first time these zooms actually produced better images (in most regards) than some of their contemporary single focal length brethren.
Ten years later the dam burst open and the majority of photographers opted to make the "holy trinity" of zooms (16-35, 24-70 and 70-200, all f2.8) their first choice for professional tools. But in spite of this lens makers continue to design, make and offer ever more complex and performance intensive primes. And some of us keep buying them. It makes me wonder where the truth lies. Or if there are different truths for every user.
In my mind, given the wonderful quality I'm getting from the Panasonic S-Pro zooms, and the great optical quality I see from Canon and Nikon premium zoom lenses, I'm starting to wonder if the only reasons to own prime lenses anymore are for situations that call for very fast apertures (and every new prime seems to be entered into a race for the biggest maximum aperture) to create very, very narrow depth of field or....for bragging rights created by the enduring presupposition that the primes are "always" better.
I sometimes allow myself to be seduced by the promise of almost infinite quality available from some prime lenses. How else to explain the expenditure of $2300 for the Panasonic 50mm f1.4 when I have a perfectly serviceable Sigma 45mm, a Zeiss 50mm f1.7, and a few other adapted 50s; along with two different, high quality zooms that cover the same 50mm focal length. I've never had occasion to use the S-Pro 50mm for any commercial assignment at anywhere near its maximum aperture and while I like the manual focus clutch mechanism it's hardly worth the money I paid for the lens. I understand that if I had a style of photography that was dependent on shooting everything wide open this would be a good solution for that focal length but therein lies the rub.
There are a number of times that I do want to shoot with a fast lens wide open but usually it's not at the focal length of the lens at hand. I might see a shot that would look great at 30mm or 90mm or 75mm or 22mm but which looks boring at 50mm. It's true that I could buy lenses that are approximate to almost every focal length I might want to use but I'd be carrying around a bag (or several bags) with dozens of pounds of lenses in it. And then I'd have to sort through the selection, find the right lens, remove the existing lens from the camera, place the chosen lens on the camera and then watch as whatever subject I was getting ready to photograph exits the area and vanishes altogether. Wholly un-photographed.
Many photographers of my age (plus or minus ten, or even twenty years) point to the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson and announce that he did quite well as a photographer and only used his 50mm lens 90% of the time. The implication being that HCB declined to use zooms or even a big range of lenses because he found them unworthy. The reality, I suspect, is two fold: First there were no zooms available in the time period during which he worked, and secondly, he traveled extensively and often declared that he worked best when he packed lightly. He was concerned not with getting the perfect shot but in capturing the perfect moment - which is a much different thing. He was also intent on navigating through public spaces in the most anonymous and discreet way possible. One small camera clutched by his side in one hand so as not to call attention to himself...
I find myself in a quandary created by my own situation of having a foot in each camp; mostly as a result of living through the tumultuous evolution of lenses. From the primacy and availability of single focal length lenses to an age where zooms are ubiquitous, accepted, acknowledged and mostly given parity with primes by all but the most dedicated or deluded photographers and clients.
How else to explain it?
I raise the question after using a number of zooms over the past few weeks. And most recently after having used the new (to me) Panasonic/Leica 50-200mm f2.8-f4.0 zoom on a GH5. While I have a bunch of random primes for the m4:3 system the two most recent zooms, the 50-200mm and the 12-60mm Panasonic/Leica lenses, are giving me results that are every bit as good or better -- from a photographic standpoint -- than the prime lenses. The only real benefit I get from the primes at this point is the ability to use wider apertures for pictorial effect. But that's profoundly offset by the ability of a zoom to cover so many focal lengths well.
I laughed to myself the other night. I had a 16mm f1.4 Sigma lens mounted on my GX8 camera and I was using the combo as a fourth video camera for a project. I presumed that I should be using the fastest lens possible until I thought through the process. I would be pre-focusing the lens to cover a range and then turn the camera on and leave it unattended for an hour. It would crank away creating endless 4K video files. But you already see the disconnection here, I'm sure. How on earth would the fast aperture (even if it's crazy sharp) help me keep a fairly wide range of performers in acceptable focus? Of course shooting at f1.4 would be silly. I selected f4.0 instead and focused carefully so the plane of sharpness would start at the closer performer and progressively fall off behind her. But since she was at 18 feet the f4.0 aperture would just about cover both her and the two performers on the other side of her. At f1.4? Not a chance. But at f4.0 the performance, especially for video, would have been equivalent with a zoom.
When I talked to a friend about the same project and about my frustration at not getting great close-up shots of performers (mostly from a compositional point of view) from a long distance he immediately suggested that I needed to get a 300mm or 400mm f2.8 lens for the full frame system and that would take care of my problem. There were a few issues with that solution. Either one of those lenses would cost me half the price of a new car. But that wouldn't matter since neither focal length is available for my system. And either choice would be extremely heavy. I'd need to buy a much more expensive video tripod and head to hold it all.
Since either lens would have a fixed focal length I'd have absolutely no control over composition as the performers moved closer and further away from my fixed location. Changing lenses during the shoot was a non-starter concept as the performance ran continuously and the video needed to be continuous as well. A fast enough zoom on a smaller format was exactly what I needed and having the ability to go from a mild telephoto point of view to an extreme telephoto one with the turn of a ring was just right.
Of course, there are times when the fast primes are just what the doctor ordered but those times are quickly getting narrowed down by the ever increasing positive evolution of zooms combined with better and better camera sensors.
Just thinking here but are primes destined to follow VHS tapes to the trash heaps of history? Will photographers continue to buy expensive, heavy and fast primes after zooms catch up with current prime lens performance? For many of us the real (and embarrassing) question is whether even our current (lack of) technical skills all but mask any current optical advantage of primes over zooms.
So, hypothetical: If you dropped me into some beautiful city and tasked me to make great images would I rather have a bag full of primes or one really well chosen zoom. Would I go with one body and one lens? Something like an S1 and the 50mm? Or a Leica digital rangefinder and a 35mm? Or would it be something more flexible like the S1R and a wider ranging zoom like the 24-105mm?
With the primes one might find oneself ignoring anything that didn't fit into the provided frame. With the zoom you'd have more options for composition but fewer options for really low light.
You can only carry so much. You can only make so many compositional selections. What is the right mix and, are we even asking the right questions?
I have a foot in both time periods. Both sides of the prejudice. I loved my Leica M3 with the 50mm Summicron. I took one to Paris as an only camera and had a blast not having to make too many choices. But then again, I loved the Sony RX10 3 with it's 24-600mm lens (which was remarkably good!!!) and the opportunity to shoot just about anything.
I'd be curious to know where readers stand on the issue. Or if there is really an issue or whether I'm just making another mountain out of a mole hill.
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