A study in blue and green and concrete. Panasonic fz 1000 at ISO 125.

Been having fun with the discrete focal length settings. Here I am grooving on the 135mm equivalent. I can't think it would be much better with an Otus lens and I had enough cash left over to buy a cheap car. But I didn't because I already have car.

Cheap, good cameras --- the more you use them the more fun they are to use.

Liquids and the circumstances of their creation.

Last shots done by me with the old Sony a99 and the Rokinon 85mm f1.4. Some people didn't like that lens particularly but I thought it did interesting things to the out of focus areas. I lent out my last one on a long, long term loan. May have to get myself a Nikon version of the Cine variation. That might be fun....

I love hanging out at bars. I'm not a big mixed drink fan but I sure the love the theater of it and the loyalty to nonsense that regular drinkers bring to their "craft."

These shots are from Garrido's, which, sadly, did not make it all the way to the resumption of the economic boom here in Austin. David is now the executive chef at "Dine." The fine restaurant at the Raddison Hotel on Caesar Chavez and Congress Ave.

The a99 was a fine camera. It just all needed to be......faster.

Bob Schneider at Lambert's. Getting close but keeping my distance.

©2014 Kirk Tuck.

I spent the middle of my day making faux available light portraits at a law firm. What do I mean by "faux" available light portraits? I mean that I used the available light and carefully supplemented it with light from three different LED lighting fixtures, a collection of modifiers and light blockers. But the real gist of my short blog tonight is to talk about the emotions of the moment clouding one's observations about the workability of specific gear. 

I spent my productive time today shooting with the tried and true, Nikon D750 with the well balanced and proficient Nikon 85mm f.18 G lens. Given the gear the technical parts of this job making portraits of attorneys was a piece of cake. The tough part, as always, is establishing the necessary rapport. When I was younger I always talked to male executives about what sports their kids played and that cracked the shell, so to speak, and got them to open up a bit. We'd find common ground, they'd beam with pride about their son or daughter's amazing future in NCAA soccer and I'd snap the photos; convinced that I was "shooting fish in a barrel" by playing to their paternal pride. 

The partners in the firm at which I photographed today have older kids. College kids. Wanna build some rapport with a 55 year old? Ask him where his kid is going to college, and how he or she is doing. Then we can commiserate together about the cost or the "empty nest" or the hijinks of our offspring and also make a common connection. The key is to find the subject that triggers something outside the confines of their business. 

So, while I'm getting to know my clients, I was ruminating about how well the D750 was performing until it dawned on me that I'd been unfair in my recent camera comparisons. I'd placed the Panasonic fz 1000 in a Kobayashi Maru Scenario (Star Trek reference) where there was no chance of success. I was trying to make it sort out the horribly mixed lighting of a room with orange theatrical gels over most of the lights, mixed with nasty light, mixed with Jumbo-tron blue glow. And I asked the camera to do all of this at an outrageous ISO. The D750 wasn't that much better but for some reason I felt compelled to pick a "winner" and a "loser." 

The reality is that if I had pressed the fz 1000 into service today it would have preformed almost identically to the D750 in almost every parameter except the slope of the out of focus ramp provided by the camera with the larger sensor. Noise? No problem. Color integrity? Probably better with the fz. 

I associate the D750 with a higher performance level because I let it play to its strengths while I mark down the performance of the smaller sensor camera because it doesn't win in "no win" situations. 

The image above was taken last year at a small, private, corporate party. Bob Schneider was opening for Lyle Lovett. It was shot with a Panasonic GH4 and an ancient, Olympus 60mm f1.5 lens, nearly wide open. The image doesn't fail because it's not being pushed past the point of no return. There's white light on Schneider's face. The fast aperture allows for a usable ISO setting. His constrained pose meant that shutter speeds down around 1/125th of second were quite acceptable. It was basically a "softball" pitch. 

I thought about it again as I was shooting today. Our emotional perceptions and our frustrations at prevailing conditions often prejudice us into thinking that this or that camera, or format, has failed  when, in fact, we've failed to manage the circumstances of the shoot. Bad lighting? Instead of changing cameras why not fix the light? Or walk away from bad lighting and tell the client they have to do their part too. It's a thought. We can't always perform miracles. We should own up to that.

Two shots from my Sunday walk, juxtaposed for color contrast.

Okay. So in my usual hyperbolic enthusiasm I got carried away with the fz 1000. Then, on corporate shoot I figured out that the camera does have a few limitations. But then I picked it up today and realized that it's still as fun to shoot as I first imagined. It can be wickedly sharp and at the same time subversively understated.

I have been using it as a single focal length camera. Let me explain. There's a setting in the menu that allows you to set the camera's zooming mechanism to stop at each marked focal length. Additionally you can program the camera to return to the last zoomed focal length when you turn it on. I can set the camera at a 50mm equivalent, turn the power off, and then five minutes or five hours later, come back and turn the camera on and it will go straight to 50mm. Or whatever you last shot.

I like all this and think it's very cool.  I have also turned the LCD finder around to face the body so I don't both pre-chimp and post chimp. That's a time and attention saver, to be sure.

The camera shoots a bit flash and a bit low on saturation. I like to think it's doing some fancy and very beneficial S-Log thing like the S-Log my video friends rave about in their professional video cameras. Whatever the reality is a few minutes of play in SnapSeed and I end up with files that I love. And files that look like they have significant dynamic range.

I might have mentioned that I initially liked the fz 1000 so much I bought a second one. Now I'm glad I did because I'm going to pack it for a road trip and its twin IS the perfect backup.

Hope your week is starting well. I'm busy as  hummingbird on coffee. Stay tuned.

And here we are again, packing for tomorrow's shoot. It's all about lighting again.

Tomorrow is a continuation of a project I started for a downtown law firm about a month ago. We are photographing all of the partners and associates, and so far we've gotten through about 24 people. Midday tomorrow we'll set up in two locations and photograph 4 more people. I'm doing a style that depends on shallow depth of field and I'll be leveraging the ambient light in the location along with my main and fill lights which will set the lighting style, and the balance, all the other sources. I'll be using black flags to block ugly light from compact fluorescents shining down from the ceiling, and I'll be counting on lots of clean, cool daylight flooding in from floor to ceiling windows, bouncing through frosted glass walls and helping me to add depth to each shot. 

On our first shoot, last month, we used three different LED lights for most of the illumination. The larger light in the bottom left corner of the image above is a RPS CoolED 100. It's pretty bright and the light is very well color balanced when compared to daylight. I'd peg it at 5400 with a very, very slight green cast. The light in the top right corner, closest to camera, is the younger brother of the CoolED 100; it's the CoolED 50 and, wouldn't you know it, it half the power or one stop less than its big brother. 

The third light, which gets used a lot as an accent or hair or background light, is the Fiilex P360 which is an absolutely darling little light. Where the two RPS lights are just daylight balanced the Fiilex allows me to control the color temperature from 2900 to 5500, steplessly. 

My only concern in the last shoot was not having enough power to shoot toward a window. I was about a stop down from the outdoor light with my main light used through my standard diffusion scrim. Since then I bought a second 100 light and will gang them together when I need the extra oomph! I also want to use the two bigger lights together so I can add a second layer of diffusion (separated by about 1/4" from each other) to smooth out the light even more. 

To people who always shoot with flash the fascination with continuous light sources must seem a bit crazy. I always remember though, an interview I read a long time ago with Arnold Newman (who used lots and lots of hot lights over the years), he suggested that having people sit for portraits, done with hot lights, sometimes demanded that they stay very still for up to a full second. He conjectured that the very act of breathing at these longer exposures added something ephemeral to the look of the sitters; a softness within the sharpness that made the faces and the surfaces seem more real. 

It is interesting to look closely at his image of Igor Stravinsky at the Piano, which was done with a single 1000W light. The exposure is something like f16 at 1 second but the overall image is something so different from what we see in the results of most portrait lighting today. 

I firmly believe that the immediacy of feedback one gets from continuous lighting allows many very positive benefits for photographers; not least of which is being able to see IN REAL TIME the exact effect that blending different light sources has on the image. The blending of light sources is also much easier to effect since you can see the effect on the tonal balances as you turn each light up or down. 

I'll be photographing again with the D750 and either the 85mm f1.8 G lens or the older, 105mm f2.5 ais lens. I set the aperture I want for the depth of field I want and then I set the shutter speed to give me the correct exposure. I start out with the lowest ISO I feel I can get away with (camera and subject movement limits) and, if I start getting down to 1/30th of s second I stop there and start raising the ISO until it's all dialed in. I know with the 105mm's aperture set at f4.0 the lens is just about as perfect a lens as one could hope for in the 5 to 10 foot range; if one is framing a horizontal with the subject cropped from just above the top of the head to a bit above the waist. 

My goal with these portraits is to make them look great as horizontal compositions but also have enough "air" around them so that art directors and website designers can also crop a really good vertical from the same selected files.

Working with continuous lighting is more like lighting a movie set than traditional softbox/flash portrait photography. I use tools like 4x4 foot diffusion scrims, nets -- which pull down light levels without introducing shadows or shadow edges, and a host of light blockers to control what hits the subject and what doesn't. That control, along with total control of depth of field, makes the projects seem more cinematic; almost like scenes from movies frozen into single frames. 

The bottom line is that the light is just an element of the portrait mix. The photographer will have to make so many other decisions. The distance from the subject to the camera is determined by how large you would like to have the subject appear in the final image. That also depends on the focal length of the lens. But an aesthetic consideration is also how far do you want the subject to be from the background. Too far from the background and you risk losing any detail in the far image plane, and that means you risk losing the feeling of real depth. Too close to the background and you risk objects coming too much into focus which ultimately robs some of the viewer's attention from your main subject. It gives viewer too many spots on which to linger. 

But all of those considerations are meaningless if you can't work with the subject to get to a collaboration in which they are comfortable giving you an expression and the energy that their friends and families will recognize as "genuine" and "engaging." Get all the other stuff right and then flub this and you've failed. Getting a priceless expression while not getting the technical stuff perfect isn't nearly as bad. You can cover up a lot of shooting incompetence with a bunch of PhotoShop skill. Get both sides of the equation  right and you might just be able to earn a living doing portraits. Even in 2015. 

I'm loving the LED lights again. This time around I have the tonal control AND perfect color right out of the box. I can hardly wait to drag my cart, overloaded with gear, into the service elevator and get started. 

Fiilex P360 LED light. Nice stuff.

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.

The agony and the near ecstasy of using the FZ1000 for an event. (note: for rain, low light, and flash, keep your DSLR at hand).

Just a fun photograph. Not even tangentially associated with the 

subject matter of the blog. Shot by me for a telecom company in 

the earlier days of digital.

Ah. It was the ultimate in hubris from a smart ass photographer who thought his skill and talent could overwhelm and cheat the laws of physics only to end up chained to a rock, waiting for the eagle to come by and gnaw at his liver....

So, I had a little luck in some nice light in the middle of the day and shot a few images I liked with the Panasonic FZ 1000 and then I went off the deep end. I capriciously decided that I could press the one inch sensor into any job at any time. My luck held until the second day of a four day long job. I showed up bright and early for an assignment in a hotel ballroom to discover that someone had gelled the ballroom down lights of part of the room with orange theatrical gels. Other parts of the ballroom were lit with naked fluorescent can lights and at the back of the room was a 10 by 16 foot, high output LED video screen which would show massive versions of speakers' PowerPoint presentations.  

The lights were turned down low to prevent washing out the LED screen, but honesty, the screen was so bright they needn't have bothered. The room had four color sections: One part was cast in deep orange with scant little from any other part of the spectrum. The second were the outposts of greenish, unfiltered fluorescent lights. The third color section was the ever changing wash of mostly blueish light coming off the amazingly powerful video screen. And finally, there were areas where attendees at this large, roundtable discussion were not lit. At all. This was a location designed to kill the spirit of any photographer. Especially one who had accepted the client request not to use any sort of flash. 

I was early and as I stared around the hellish ballroom (both figuratively and color wise) I got angry, frustrated and a bit nervous. I still held out hope, however, that by sheer dint of experience, I would be able to pull it off. "It" being gorgeous, thoughtful photographs of people engaged in the give and take of spirited debate and conceptual sharing. 

Well, the problem with orange gelled anything is that it narrows the available spectrum for the camera sensor. Essentially the wavelengths being delivered to the sensor in this case are almost entirely in the red spectrum and any attempt at color balancing causes the camera to push the blue and green channels to the limits. That's where the noise lives. And then the noise reduction kicks in and everything is a mess. I gave it a valiant try but I could tell the files were always going to be either mostly orange or mostly noisy. Especially above 1600 ISO. 

Fortunately, a stint in the Boy Scouts back in the 1960s left me with the mindset of always being prepared. I tossed the little(?) Panasonic back into its bag and went up to my hotel room to fetch the "safety" camera; the Nikon D750 and it's pal, the 24-120mm lens. The images will still be mostly orange but the camera handles the noise better at the elevated ISO at which I had to shoot. 

I learned a lot by pressing the wrong camera into the wrong job. I learned that the one inch cameras are good at low noise file production if the circumstances are optimal. That includes full spectrum light sources and enough light to register. For the record, the fz 1000 had no trouble focusing on anything I wanted it to focus on. It was at least as good in focusing as the Nikon D750. Maybe better. 

I learned that I can only get the flash exposures I want with the consistency I need if I use flashes in a manual exposure mode on the mirrorless cameras (a lesson I learn again and again). I set the flash at 1/8th or 1/16th power and use the guide number method for determining exposure. It works all the time but it's not automatic. Your brain has to be engaged. When I switched over to the Nikon the flash on full TTL auto was right on the money time after time. 

Does this mean I'm over the fz1000? Not at all. But I'll use it more intelligently in the future. It's a great walk around camera and a great daylight camera but it's hopelessly outclassed by the D750 when it comes to creating files under mixed light at ISO 6400, no matter how badly I wish it wasn't so. 

But, let me tell you where the fz 1000 does shine; it's a wonderful and inexpensive 4K video camera. My kid's birthday was last week and he's off at school 2,000 miles from home. I thought it would be fun and would make him smile if I could put together a video of his Austin friends wishing him well for his birthday. I went around with the fz 1000 and a small microphone and interviewed as many of his friends as I could find. I also got on camera birthday wishes from the chefs and owners of his favorite restaurants, etc. In every case the video was perfect. Highly detailed and wonderful skin tones under lots of different available light sources. 

I wish Panasonic had given me a headphone jack so I could monitor what kind of sound I'm getting but it's not a deal killer for a camera that generates such nice files. I'll work around that one oversight. 

I mentioned the ecstasy of using the fz 1000 as well as the agony outlined above. Here's where it shines: I needed to photograph two concerts. I used the camera as an available light concert camera and having a 400mm equivalent along with massively good I.S. meant I could zoom in and create tight headshot without having to huge the stage and be in everyone's face. The images were great.

We also did a "grip and grin" session with a band and some clients, against a step-and-repeat background and once I dialed in an off camera flash correctly the camera was very easy to work with and the files matched the quality I would expect from a much more expensive camera and lens combination. Use this camera at ISO 200-400 and you'll get wonderful images. Use it at 1600 ISO in the right light and you'll still get wonderful images. Use it in an impossible situation for any camera and it's guaranteed to fail.

I'm keeping mine around. It's a perfect casual shooter and a seriously good video camera. Just don't be experimental (stupid) to the extent that I was. There are laws of physics that are not changed by even the grandest hubris.

The taboo subject that no photographer or blogger really wants to write about. But it's part of the spectrum of our professional (and personal) existence...

Self Portrait on my Sixtieth Birthday.

It is often said that "photography is a young person's job." There are few professional football or baseball players who last in the leagues over 40, much less 50; and sixty year old sports stars are almost unheard of in professional sports. Same thing with photographers. Most of them are smart enough to find something better to do by the time they hit their forties. The drop out rate of professional (working) photographers gets higher as the years advance. Many people credit aging with the greater and greater market acceptance of smaller, lighter mirrorless cameras: they are easier to carry around on battered shoulders and by people with bad backs.

We also live in a youth culture that has a difficult time believing that anyone over thirty has anything useful to say about visual culture. The younger people in our business and our avocation tend to think of older photographs mostly as "landscape" photographers rather than as people who can still have a vital connection to popular culture. We venerate some older advertising photographers but we also relegate them to being workshop producers, club speakers and people busy cobbling together various retrospectives.

In one regard I get it. We tend to shoot a lot of the same kinds of assignments over and over again. I just finished photographing a conference with software executives who are convinced that everything they are working on is new and groundbreaking. That it will change the landscape of modern business. That they alone are gifted enough to pull it off. "It" being the industry and financial success of another "unicorn" business. I shot earnest business meetings and included lots of shots of men in sport coats looking serious and engaged. I sat through dinners and presentations ad infinitum. I laughed (weakly) at the same kind of jokes I heard from the same basic cohort of people thirty years ago. I was happy with the challenges of working with low and drifting light but I was bored by the content and almost resentful about the huge gaps of lost time between and around the various events. It was deja vu all over again. The documentation of the ephemeral nature of commerce...

As we age we tend to get pigeonholed by younger generations based on the stereotypes the media creates about people who are our age. One mythology is that few people at sixty can program a remote for their own television, troubleshoot their own computers, or text with admirable dexterity. They presume that we all have bad backs, heart conditions, hearing loss and need to pee all the time.  The younger photographers are mostly convinced that we are all bitter wedding photographers who've lost our relevance to modern photographic commerce and are coasting unhappily toward retirement with fond memories of our time spent with Mamiya RB67's and portrait films. Pass the Metamucil and the Centrum Silver vitamins and let's rehash whether Dean Collins or Monte Zucker was the better lighting teacher.

Well, I hate to push back on the stereotypes but I'm not ready to give up, get a mini-van and a Naugahyde Lazy Boy Lounger, and sit back watching "Good Morning America" with a cup of Sanka in my hands. Fuck that.

Some of us can still knock out a good, five mile run without reaching for the AED paddles. Some of us can swim faster at 60 than the general population could....ever. Some of us still take the stairs two at a time with a camera bag filled with dead weight, without falling over, panting. And some of us can still take really good photographs.

If I'm sounding a bit put out today it's because it's my birthday and I turned 60. I hate the idea of getting older. I hate the idea (with a white hot passion) of ever retiring, quitting, stopping or slowing down. And I will resist, with all my energy, the entropy that renders one irrelevant. I'm not ready to drop the bag of stands and bag of cameras in order to start the decline into the "quiet and thoughtful" workshop routine. I have no desire to put together a big show of my life's work. I never got into the field of photography to preen and display. I do this because I love the process more than I love the trappings. I show images to prove my value--- in order to get new access, and to gain entrance to new conversations. I shoot the images because they touch something in my heart or my brain.

The human condition is in constant flux. The nature of human physiology changes with the intermingling of our races and societies and creates new faces and new cultural identities. It's a rich mix of ingredients that make portrait photography and documentary photography new and magical nearly every day.

I've come to understand that the best way to prevent sliding off the map is to resist embracing the dated mythologies of the people in my general age group and social strata. Embracing the constant change keeps one in the flow of change rather than on the outside, tutting derisively about "the way things have become." If it's common knowledge it's generally so dated it is now wrong. Discovery.  It's why I shoot with new cameras. It's why I embrace street art and it's why I refuse to do photographic things the "old, proven" way instead of pushing a bit harder at the parts I never liked in the first place.

I plan to shoot and work until no one else will hire me. I intend to go out into the world in the spirit of visual exploration until they stop making cameras and outlaw serious photography altogether.

So, what am I doing for my 60th birthday? Same stuff. Walk the dog. Have coffee. Swim with the master's team. Take a long walk through downtown Austin with a fun camera in my hands. Finish the post processing from a long, four day job and then wind down and have a nice dinner with Belinda.

That, and fight against the stereotype of the aging photographer.

added after posting: http://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2013/04/up-in-smoke-burn-past.html