Yesterday afternoon. The first downtown Austin walk of the new year. Strolling with a Sony A7ii and a 50mm f 1.8, just like the old days.

City centers shift. In the years that I was an undergraduate student at the University of Texas at Austin downtown was definitely NOT the place to be. Blocks of it were just empty buildings, warehoused with the hope that someday development would come back. The 1980's saw a revival of our downtown with the construction of skyscraping office buildings, better and better hotels and an invasion of decent restaurants and trendy bars. In the 1980's and 1990's the pace of gentrification and development was fast and reckless and wonderful. The locus of power had been the state legislature at the north end of what we considered downtown. The southern border was the Colorado River which was always called, Town Lake, but was recently renamed as, Lady Bird Lake, after former first lady, Lady Bird Johnson. 

I'd say that downtown peaked somewhere in the late 1990's or just before the bust of 2001 and has been on a downhill slide ever since. Yes, we have built dozens of towering residence condominium projects and yes, we have subsidized retail all the way down an entire street but the fine restaurants and upscale bars and music venues that were the original and foundational drivers of downtown's energy are going or gone, replaced by seedy clubs serving jeep drinks and bad rock and roll. 

A new development in what we used to call "North Austin" (but which is now more or less the geographic center of the metropolitan area) opened up a few years ago and this year saw the blossoming of a host of new food and drinking establishments. Nearly 50 openings this year. And the development is attracting the audience that fled the squalor and potential danger of the sagging downtown. The development is called The Domain and was built on land that had been owned by IBM. It's home to stores like Nordstroms, Tiffany's, Apple (retail) and many other high end retailers. The development is being relentlessly fleshed out with high rise condominiums, office towers and carefully planned social infrastructure. There are boutique hotels and a Westin. There are niche, local restaurants and chain steakhouses. It's a soulless representation of Dallas writ large right on the shoulder of our old city, and it's sucking the party life out of the traditional downtown. 

Funny how these things go in cycles. The locals have left old downtown to the tourists, the convention goers and the fans of SXSW. 

But at the same time downtown is feeling less corporate and less homogenous than it has over the last ten years. There's still good energy here, it's just mixed with some bad. That makes it a fun place to wander around with a camera. 

Yesterday I stripped down the A7ii. I took it out of its cage and unscrewed the battery grip from the bottom. I tossed some effete Zeiss lens into a drawer and clicked on the cheap 50mm 1.8. I felt like I did when I bought my first SLR so many years ago === unencumbered by complexity or technical pretension. It was the present day analogy for the Canon TX and FD 50mm f1.8 that I sported around Austin about four decades ago. Nice. 

What prompted my revisionist urges? I had just been to the HRC to see the exhibition of Elliott Erwitt's great work and I was pounded over the brain, again and again, by just how wonderful making photographs could be with the very simplest of tools. No function buttons were disturbed during the walk and none of the menus consulted. I was shooting in Jpeg and willing to treat the whole experience the way we did with slide film. Eliminate the unnecessary choices so you can spend quality time thinking about the important stuff = which way to turn next...

There's a recent trend in our old downtown and that's the appearance of painted murals hidden around various corners. My walk yesterday kept introducing me to torrents and patches of color I hadn't seen before. The smaller side streets were like outdoor galleries. Visually, it was so much fun. 

So, today is the 2nd of the year. Everyone who could is taking today off as part of the long, weekend vacation. I'm cleaning up. (Actually I am procrastinating about cleaning up by blogging instead...). We have a project we start on Weds. and I'd like to get the studio part of the job set up, tested and ready before I go to bed tomorrow night. It's always more wonderful to get an early morning swim in before the excitement starts and it's hard to justify racing to swim practice if there are still loose ends to tie up. 

The studio works best when its clean and tidy and everything is in the right place. Then I can tell my assistant how to put his hands on a certain piece of gear, diffusion material or magic arm without even having to think about it. That makes the process of photographing smoother. The smoother the shoot the longer we'll be able to linger at lunch with our client. 

In other news, Ben asked me to make him some passport photos today for use on a visa. I thought about the process and decided that we should, instead, get in the car and head to Precision Camera and have them make the shots. They have a dedicated passport camera and an intelligently lit, dedicated spot with white background, just for this kind of work. We walked in and walked out 10 minutes later with two sets of prints for $12. If I had done the same thing we would have had to pull out a roll of white seamless, set up lights, test, shoot, post process, size the images, apply a profile, send them to the lab to be printed, driven to the lab to pick them up, etc. I figure we just saved hundreds of dollars in opportunity costs to use someone else's system. Done.

Alan left a comment today and asked me why I didn't run the sound for my video productions into a separate digital audio recorder instead of sending them to the camera as my final target. That's a question I get fairly frequently. The underlying premise of the question is that the dedicated recorders are much less noisy/of higher sound quality than the microphone pre-amplifiers on the cameras. The other premise is that it's simple work to sync up everything in post. 

I'll agree that in the early days of DSLR video recording that the Canon and Nikon cameras had pretty bad audio inputs. Hell, in those days you couldn't even disable the auto level control (ALC) in most  cameras. No wonder they had such bad reputations. The embracing of digital audio recorders was a work around mostly for the poor implementation of camera sound. But a heck of a lot has changed since 2008. 

Both the Tascam and the Zoom recorders I use do have lower noise floors than the Sony cameras the overall quality of the sound beyond the noise floor is hardly poor. I think it's basically solid. Noise floors are important where sound is the reason for the content. That being said nearly every video we make for corporations has some music added to the bed of the program and, if we do a good job with microphone placement and input matching we can get pretty darn close with our cameras to what we are getting from the external devices. Now, you might be insanely organized and able to find and match up separate audio tracks and video tracks from two or three different machines but I'm not. I like the security of having the sound permanently attached to the video. 

I use my digital audio recorders like mixers and interfaces but that doesn't mean we don't enable recording at the same time that we're sending out a signal to the camera. This makes for wonderful safety tracks in the event that we do find the camera sound underwhelming. But, having to juggle everything when shooting (sometimes) as a one man band is just a recipe for messing something up. I want to monitor what I'm getting in camera because it's all part of the handling package. If it sounds good in the camera, and I'm also recording it externally, then I know I've got everything nailed down. 

Everyone works in different ways. I'm hoping we get so busy shooting video this year that I'm able to hire a sound person whose only job will be getting beautiful audio and channeling it everywhere I need it. For now, I'll stick with the camera being my final binary check. I either have it or I don't. 

And, by the way, I found the audio circuits of the late Sony a99 to be really, really good. Tascam or Zoom good. I guess some day I'll be able to afford a SoundDevices recorder and everything will change. Not yet. 

I saw a lot of people downtown yesterday with cameras. I guess we were all celebrating the temperature in the 70's and the perfectly clear, dirt free skies. I used to take that for granted but that was before I did a lot of traveling. Now I understand that we're lucky most of the time. Fresh air is a wonderful thing. And the late afternoon light in the winter is mesmerizing to just look at. It's a great time to be out walking. And today looks pretty much perfect too.

I've spent most of today re-reading and memorizing the information in the manuals for my Zoom H5 Audio Recorder and the Aputure Video Monitor. I've used every control at least ten times to build a memory for each setting. I've put them through their paces. I've wired up six different microphones with various power or termination requires and figured out how they sound best. I feel so ready for our project to begin that it's all I can do to keep from calling the client and begging her to get started tomorrow. I guess patience is one of those things I should work on. 

What I'm expecting (as a working photographer) in the New Year (2017).

Author metering in Scottsdale, Az. 

With the near collapse of the middle of the camera market and the crazy fallout from the 2016 U.S. presidential elections the crystal ball of most photo-futurists is murky. We are good at predicting the past. The future? Not so much. But I thought I'd at least let you know what I'm planning on and hoping for in the year to come. Not as a politico or social commentator but as a guy in Austin, Texas who owns a very small business that makes creative visual content for regular businesses, big corporations, medical practices, associations, and advertising agencies. There's nothing earth shattering here because the direction that your business takes is more often driven by your clarity in marketing and outreach than external economic changes or short term social upheaval.

I am expecting more and more photographic jobs to come with shorter face-to-face client engagements. We'll see more one person portrait shoots and fewer daylong "cattle call" shoots. More "We need this particular image done in this particular way" rather than a daylong trawling for likable images that may be used sometime in some unknown future. There are advantages here. We move away from the tendency to bid things by day rate and start pricing by the value of the image to the client, along with the complexity of the shoot and the knowledge and talent that will need to be brought to bear.

I've already seen this in the business and while, at first, I had some concern that billings would drop I find that we end up making nearly the same money in fees but our time (both mine and the client's) becomes more flexible and manageable. If I don't need to be somewhere first thing in the morning and then need to hang there all day long it's easier for me to schedule in my morning swim practice, an afternoon walk or a delicious nap.

We'll still have reasons for doing daylong shoots, sometimes it's more efficient to just make a list and get stuff done, but we are moving away from commodity photography into a nicer realm where we are being engaged (hopefully all of us) for things that can't be easily done by the shipping clerk with a Canon Rebel. In turn, this adds to the (rightful) perception of value that makes it easier to ask for profitable fees.

Clients have been treated to lots and lots of bargain photography since the market declined back in 2008 and they've become keenly aware that poorly produced images have a net negative effect on their brands. Lately, my new clients are all concerned about one issue that I find interesting: They want to know if I can light, and if I have lights, and, if so, will I bring them along and use them on the job I'm potentially doing for them??? It seems that everyone everywhere who is in the position to hire outside photographers (and videographers) has been burned, and burned badly, by the available light expert.

2017 is the year that we acknowledge that we have great cameras (better than we need) and we understand how to use all the neat settings and whiz bang function buttons and that nobody gives a crap about what camera you own or what lenses you use. Now clients just care about results. What it all adds up to, in my mind, is that this is the year we ignored cameras and concentrated on learning to light and light well. If a new photographer is really adamant about "upping their game" my first recommendation is to thoroughly learn all the basics of lighting. The ISO dial on a camera is not a substitute for a brilliantly motivated key light or a subtle and elegant fill light. Clients are figuring that out too. It can be a differentiator for those not too lazy to learn some skills...

No curmudgeonly photo-luddite is going to want to read this paragraph but I look at it as a bit of tough love. We are no longer in the business of "making photographs." Clients don't want "a photographer" they want someone who is a creative problem solver who creates visual content. All kinds of visual content. Every year the percentage of our income from video grows. It's growing faster. Our second job out of the gate this year (in the first week of the new year) will be producing a 1:00 video for an international medical devices company. We'll have to know a bunch of different ways to move the cameras, how to light the interiors of practical locations, which shots we'll need to have on hand to make good edits in post, and how to handle audio; from interviews to voice over narration.

We'll be shooting video and photography on the same locations with the same model and clients and we'll need to deliver lifestyle photos as well as the video programming. But as you can plainly see this opens up 100% (or more) increased billing for us over just doing the photography alone. Not everyone wants to go out and produce video and it's not my intention to build a new army of photo-videographers. If you aren't comfortable with that end of the business you can also look at the other end; building websites and live sites and offering those kinds of services.

If you have no other talent or skill set beyond taking photographs you might want to consider heading back to a good community college to pick up a complementary skill set in addition to photography because I will tell you this, clients are looking for turnkey solutions. The worker bees of American Industry are already working too much and anything you can take off their plates (in terms of creative content creation) is a big relief for them. Do the photography for the website and then design and produce the website. Do the photography and then switch into video and do the video content.

It's not that there will be less photography to do, in total, it's just that clients will expect vendors to be able to offer a wider range of associated skill sets that usually go hand-in-hand for corporate projects. You can bet that if there are photographs required for a new website that there will also be a video component for the same website. Still images for the annual meeting? Those stills will probably be produced, in part, to fit into the video that will also be produced. The reverse is also true. You might find yourself commissioned to do the video only to have your client ask, at the beginning, or halfway through the job, if you can also provide still photography.

If you are a good portrait photographer, with a good grasp of creating rapport and directing portrait subjects, you may also have a talent for producing interview footage or announcement footage with the same CEO you have in front of your camera for portraits. It's a nice and efficient use of time for the marcom people who are always, ALWAYS, frugal with their top executives' time.

The wonderful thing about this combining of disciplines is that there is an efficiency gained from mixing the tools and skills from each. My most current realization of that revolves around the use of small, field monitors in both areas. I find tethering to laptops, in the field and in the studio, to be a cumbersome waste of time that is a holdover from the early days of digital where multi-shot cameras required computers to drive them and to also capture each file directly. I suffered through the early days of lost cable connections and crashing software and I'm very aware that most computer screens are utter crap in full sun. I much prefer attaching an HDMI cable from the camera to a good 7 inch (or larger) field monitor that is originally designed for video work ---- especially when shooting photographs with an art director, client or combined entourage in tow.

We did a photography shoot in the studio right before Christmas which required shooting from an overhead viewpoint for all of the shots on our (extensive) list. Putting the camera up over the set was easily accomplished with a high rise C-stand and a solid arm. Controlling exposure and triggering the camera was straightforward with an IR trigger or an iPhone but seeing the review image could be problematic.

With a monitor attached we could see exactly what we were getting for each frame. And because the monitor is designed as a video tool it comes with focus peaking which came in very handy for getting our camera and lenses zero'd in, as well as false color  which let me see just how white I could get the background before blowing it out too far. We hung the monitor on a shorty C-Stand making it easy for me, the designer and the art director to all see, and to collaborate on the project. We also used the monitor to review shots on location for several annual reports this year, and, of course, we used it on our video projects.

I originally bought the previous set of LED lights with the idea of using them mostly for video only to find that, using them, I've evolved a new style (for me) of on location portraiture that is perfectly suited to the use of both LEDs and continuous lighting. Here is a sample:

The same is true of the diffusion panels and flags I bought to use for video productions, but which have been pressed into service in making portraits because they offer more control than just a typical softbox or umbrella modified flash. 

The mix of photography and video will continue to emerge as its own media. Magazines, which have morphed into websites, are already evolving the style of the mix and are voracious for content. 

No, the market for visual content is far from collapsing, abating or slowing down but it is morphing into a different thing than the heavily silo-ed constructs we've worked with for so long. I'd say that the classiest thing you could call yourself today; when dealing with agents from big enterprise, is a producer. It brings everything together. It's a job title that works for a new, layered and more complex, paradigm of imaging. And it seems to command higher rates and more creative control than clients are willing to invest in just a photographer...

I spent some time with Belinda this afternoon at the Elliott Erwitt exhibit at the Humanities Research Center on the UT campus. Today is the last day of the show and it was crowded. What I saw was what some might refer to as the Golden Age of Photography. Erwitt worked for multiple magazines and spent decades on assignments all over the world. His work ran across pages and pages of magazine paper and thrust his work into the spotlight for readers of what were once homogeneous touchstones of collective culture. These magazines were the places where we got our stories and saw the news.

They were usurped by television and later everything was usurped and divided by the endless selections of the web. While we are never going back to Erwitt's golden age we have to figure out ways to navigate and take advantage of what our golden age offers. This blog is an example (although a bit dated) of what the new paradigms and distributions of content and access look like, on a small scale.

To date, I've reached audiences all over the world. I've connected with some human beings nearly eighty million times (according to Google data) and I've delivered my thoughts and showed off images that I like to an audience I could never have imagined back in the days when print was king. 

Not everything is about monetizing the display and sharing of our art. Sometimes it's the sharing and dialog alone that are critical to artists. To that end the current paradigm is much richer for many, many more people. In earlier days very few people had a shot at a cover photo on Life Magazine. But currently everyone with a keyboard and access to the web can share their art and ideas to their heart's content. The only wall is the need for patience to build an audience. 

If we default to the current pop culture cliché what we are trying to do is to tell a story. The difference between now and then is that "then" we were basically putting our images on a sheet of paper and passing it around to our friends and family. We were lucky if the image made the rounds inside a space of ten square miles. Today we are using a giant delivery system buoyed up by satellites, acres of server farms, gigawatts of power and the potential to go viral and splash our work across millions of screens in places as far away as Mongolia or Aukland. As business people we have to acknowledge the change, not only in distribution but also taste, style and media preference. 

Going forward we have to keep our eyes on the reality that 60% of the stuff we put up online goes to cellphone screens and not 30 inch Retina monitors. Video goes vertical. Written content is relegated to so much "gray space." The change is irreversible but not so overwhelming that we can't figure out how to make it work for our work. That's our challenge in the 2017 and forward: Understand the new things that people want to see and understand just as well how they want to see them. And then figure out how to become a valued supplier of the new media. 

Hey, back in the early 1990's, for the vast majority of people, the web did not exist as media. Now it's the dominant target for nearly everyone. More people are making more money online than the superstars of the last century did across any combination of magazines. There's a generational divide right now but nothing that can't be understood and leveraged. You just have to have the will to do it. 

And, after online content and advertising matures (like TV did) there will be a new wave of innovation but I can't talk about it here because, as far as I know, it has yet to be invented. (No, VR isn't it. VR will be the next 3D TV. It's a filler format in between giant surprises). But when the new thing arrives a whole new generation will explore it, conquer it and profit from it. 

As far as cameras go we've hit the spot where 35mm cameras were just before the tipping point into digital. Mature products that produce flawless results; even in the hands of idiots. 

I do have one idea that I consider to be controversial and it has to do with business success. What I've found over the years is that all new technology tends to physically isolate people more and more but at the same time, with the encroaching isolation comes a desperate need to connect on a real human level. A face to face need that won't be conquered no matter who trots out metrics trying to debunk it. It's why Trump's rallies worked with his followers. It's why people pay enormous amounts to see their favorite musicians or comedians in person. It's why sales people for major corporations still get on airplanes, go see their prospective clients, sit with them over steaks or sushi and drinks, and close their deals with handshakes and bows. This is the way humans like to transact. Efficiency may try to kill it but someone will always pop up to show that this business intimacy works and works well. 

If we are smart we'll try to make everything we do deliver a business intimacy that no one can get from the web or from teleconferencing. It will continue to be the ultimate differentiator between a "metric driven approach to business" and a successful, longterm business. Amazon to the contrary.

So, for 2017, I'm looking for many more opportunities to create video and to also mix photography and video as new media. I'm planning on demonstrating to clients that having a more wide reaching approach to creative content creation makes the most sense for them and that having me produce it makes their jobs easier and more fun. 

In 2017 I'll be honing my lighting skills and trying to create looks and styles that help to brand me as an artist. I'll use the cameras that make pervasive media easier to produce instead of looking at the last century paradigm of trying to find the "ultimate" camera or the one with the most titanium in its build.

I'll look at visual cues from movies, graffiti walls, nightclubs, fashion shows and live theatre and take fewer visual cues from the anachronistic echo chamber of the web. 

But most of all I will continue to swim, walk, eat well, have coffee with friends, dinners with colleagues, and more frequent glasses of wine with clients and future clients. Through it all I'll try to find a balance between making my art the way I want to, spending enough time playing fetch with Studio Dog, and giving the most priority to spending quality time with my family. Life is too short for anything else. 

The future moves, tells stories, has sound, gets spread around, and is unstoppable. You have to be like water in a stream, happy to change direction and go around any boulders that just happen to be in the way. 

Done right, we'll profit. By that I mean we'll make enough money to pursue happiness and enough happiness to make the pursuit of projects that pay that much more fun. And I'll understand that since I've been amply rewarded by life I should give back in ways that are meaningful to me. 

Happy New Year to everyone who reads VSL. Let's make the world look better. Let's be nicer to each other...

My second to the last purchase of the year? Just an upgrade of my Zoom Hn4 to the Zoom H5 digital audio recorder...

There are several devices that I employ when I'm using microphones with XLR connectors. If the microphones have good, robust levels and I just need a connection, and possibly a way to reduce their levels, I'll use the little Beachtek D2a box. It's passive so it doesn't require batteries and it works with most of the microphones that don't need phantom power, or more pre-amplification than my cameras can handle. Ah, the vast nest of details involved in producing nice video...

For microphones that need phantom power, or those that just need a boost in the pre-amplifier stage in order to match the camera for less noise, I have been using the Tascam DR-60ii. It's a nice unit and has a plethora of features but it has an ungainly form factor and it eats double "A" batteries like candy...

My first digital audio recorder was the venerable Zoom Hn4 but it had one fatal flaw (as far as I was concerned) the only output available to my cameras was set up as a line out with a much higher level than most cameras could deal with as an input. Since I like getting the final sound into the camera this was a pain in butt. There is a workaround which calls on using an "attenuating" cable between the Zoom Hn4 and the camera which reduces the juice heading to the camera so as not to overload the camera inputs, but.....it's another speciality cable to buy and of which to keep track. And cable tracking is not one of my strengths.

I was able to pick up the Zoom H5 to replace the Hn4 and I was pleased to find the output to camera was fully menu-adjustable. There are also several other bonus features: Longer battery life, physical level controls which are separate for each channel, and much "cleaner" pre-amplifiers.

After using it for a couple of days I find it's just right. I like the way the files sound, it plays well with my Sony cameras (which is good because my primary use of the external audio recorders is as a pre-amplifier and XLR interface, NOT as a recorder). The difference in battery life between the Tascam and the H5 is striking. I'm on my first set of two double "A" batteries with the Zoom and I've run it a lot. The Tascam runs for about 3 hours (tops) on a set of four regular alkaline double "A" batteries. Ouch. Zoom suggest that I'll get around 15 hours of service from two batteries on the H5.

The one real benefit of the Tascam, and why I'll keep it around, is that when it's mounted under a camera I can easily see the control panel and screen. I'm still figuring out workarounds for the Zoom.

In one of those "hit and miss" sales on Amazon.com I was able to buy one for $219. last week. I looked again the next day and they had gone right back to $269.

Another good use of the Zoom H5 is when using the AT Dynamic, side address, narration microphone I bought last Summer. It needs both phantom power and a nice, strong pre-amplifier. The Zoom checks both boxes.

If you aren't shooting video I'm not sure you need one of these. I guess it would be nice to have if you are a musician. I like them because they have a high "gadget-to-price" ratio and I rationalize that I might do some wonderful recording with it in the future.

We are zeroing in on the New Year; I hope everyone is well and has safe and fun plans for this evening. To my friends and readers in Europe....HAPPY NEW YEAR!!! 😁

End of the year light purchases. A little upgrade in the LED division of VSL. Light Storm.

If there's one sector of photography that's changing as fast as camera technology (or faster) it's in the area of LED light engineering. The lights keep getting brighter and brighter while the color accuracy gets closer and closer to 100 CRI. There's a more modern standard for color accuracy that's being used in broadcast and that's TCLI. Here's a quick overview: TCLI

When I first started buying LED panels in 2009 they ranged in the 80-85 CRI range and I can imagine that they would have fared even worse in the new TCLI tests, which measure spikes and chasms of color response in these kinds of lighting instruments. The lights, at the time I wrote the book about LED lights for photographers, also put out much less light. We worked higher up the ISO scale and made other accommodations. 

Last year, and part of this year, I started buying what I call, new technology LEDs, in that they use SMD (surface mount device) technology which has yielded a much higher output. The first of these lights for me was the cute and cuddly Fiilex 360. But I soon augmented that lower powered light with a brace of RPS CooLED, 100 watt fixtures. They used a new SMD designed, dense, 1/1 inch LED that acted more like a traditional open-face lighting fixture and less like a panel. I liked that because I could use my soft boxes on those lights. While the color was better than previous generations it still required that I pay attention and make custom white balances and use caution mixing the "daylight" LEDs with actual daylight...

I'd heard rumors that the newest generation of lights were getting closer and closer to 100 CRI but it was only when my friend, James, a very color-picky cinematographer, bought the latest DraCast LED panel lights and started gushing about them that I sat up and took notice. I've spent the last week or so researching and what I finally landed on as the best compromise of price, color, output power and rugged build was the new line of lights from Aputure marketed under the name, Light Storm. And the products I liked best brought me back around, full circle, to the panel form factor.

With a fairly big video project looming, and an intense studio still life project just around the corner, I decided to improve my light inventory by getting a set of the Aputure Light Storm panels. It didn't hurt that I needed to buy and put a few more things into service in order to reduce my tax burden....

I ended up getting two of the LS-1s panels, which are very bright, and two of the LS-1/2 panels, which are smaller but only a stop less powerful. According to reputable sources, who have measured them with the latest Sekonic 700 series color meters, both of the units exceed 95 CRI and the smaller unit measures at 97+ CRI. We're well into the territory where the diffusion material you put in front of the lights makes more of a difference in color accuracy than anything else. They are color accurate plus they provide the punch I used to get from a 750 watt tungsten bulb in a decent, open-faced fixture. Hard to beat at the price. (They retail for $695). 

Each light is not exactly self-contained. They come in three "parts." The first is the light itself which is mounted in a sturdy yoke and has no controls or connections, other than a power cable. The cable connects to a control box which allows one to raise or lower the power of the lights in 90 discrete steps. Since the control box is separate you can put the actual panels up high and you'll have two benefits.  First, you move a good amount of the weight off the top of the stand, which makes the light and stand more stable. Secondly, you can adjust the intensity of the light without either bringing the light back down or standing on a step ladder. 

The controller will also allow you to mount up a V-lock battery. With these bigger, more robust batteries you should be able to get about an hour of full power lighting without having to look for a wall plug. That's great for remote locations but the cost of the batteries is atrocious. Ah well, there's rarely free lunch. 

Just downstream from the controller is a black, rectangular power supply. This plugs into the wall on one end and into the controller on the other. So you have three physical devices (light, controller, power block) as well as the interconnecting cables. A bit messy but manageable. 

One more interesting feature is the inclusion, with every light, of a wireless, 2.4G remote control. With the remote you can turn the lights on and off, and you can control the power settings. Great for changing ratios while you are at camera position; especially when the lights are hung up high. There are separate channels so you can control three different banks of lights from one remote. Interesting, but I still keep reaching for the controllers and enjoying the tactile reality of lighting control. 

The bigger light, the LS-1s, uses SMD LEDs but, like previous generations, hides them behind little plastic nubbins or clear lenses that create directionality (or micro focus) for each LED. The way the light is designed gives it a 20-25 degree light angle. It's got more throw that way. If you need a softer or wider beam you can easily put diffusion in front of the fixture. In fact, the maker provides an envelope with sheets of carefully selected diffusion to do just that. 

The LS 1/2 uses its SMD LEDs naked. The light emitting business end of each small "lamp" is right on the surface and the fixture uses nothing to focus the beams. The light seems exceptionally bright but it does cast a very wide spread of light. You'll either want to use them with big diffusion or as background lights. They have beautiful color but you'll need to practice what you learned working with Lowell Tota-Lights from the tungsten era in order to get the most out of them, vis-a-vis modifications. 

So, now that I've had a chance to play with them what's the bottom line assessment?

The color is so clean that this by itself means they've grabbed a spot as my preferred lighting tools. It's just so clean and perfect. The flesh tones require very little (usually none) work in PhotoShop and the power is quite welcome. Since the entire back of each lighting unit is one big, extruded heat sink I'm going to give them two thumbs up for engineering and (hopeful) reliability. 

The ones I bought are single color temperature models. They just do daylight. 5500 Kelvin daylight. I've had bi-color panels in the past and, while the color flexibility is great to have, you lose half the power since the flexibility comes from turning a daylight set of bulbs up while turning tungsten bulbs down, and vice versa. 

I bought four lights in total. Two big ones to use with diffusion as main lights and key lights and two of the half units to use to evenly (and widely) light backgrounds with direct (unmodified) lighting. They pack down smaller than the RPS lights and are smaller and lighter than the previous panels I owned. 

All-in-all it's cost effective package for around $2400. 

I've paid more for less...

Were I to persevere as a still photographer only I doubt I would have even considered the upgrade but one of my goals for 2017 is to drive the business toward a 50/50 split; photography and videography, and a set of Profoto strobes just won't hack the moving part of that equation. One more acquisition to write about before the end of the year. Stay tuned.

The Aputure Light Storm LS-1s fixture on the left, controller on the right.

A closer view of the controller, which also features DMX control.

Professional Limo connectors for a locking fit.

The 1/2 height model. Bright!!!