Kid heads off to NY for his senior year of college.

Last lap. Ben's back at school, hitting the books and having fun. This is a photo of him from his grade school years hacking away at an old Mac laptop. He's having an after school snack of grapefruit and blue cheese. 

Time goes so fast. If you still have young ones at home don't ever put the camera away. Shoot even the most mundane stuff. You'll love it later. Believe me.

Sometimes photographers get way ahead of their clients. More like spinning your tires than making progress... Sometimes clients have the roadmap we need.

I forgot to use the "ultimate" camera on my job....

I got up early, drank coffee and drove north yesterday morning. I left the house way too early for an appointment at 9 a.m. but you'll have to give me a little slack since the never-ending road construction on Loop One/Mopac can be a mercurial bitch. One day you breeze on to your destination and the next you sit motionless in the fast lane, staring at the tail lights and listening to someone droning away, cheerfully, on NPR. Yesterday was a miraculous day for me on Hwy. Loop One. From 7:45 a.m. on the traffic never slowed down between Westlake Hills and Round Rock. I made the trip in 25 minutes. Which left me about an hour to cool my heels at a local Starbucks before walking into the lobby of a long time client. Thank goodness I brought a book!

My assignment was to photograph the CEO of this local/national/global tech company, together with a giant prop. We needed him pictured alone, and surrounded by a group of about 25 happy, enthusiastic employees. The shoot took place in the lobby and while I shot stills the in-house video team (supplemented by a freelance sound person and a second camera operator)  captured video and then, after the CEO exited, went in for some interviews with a few of the employees. I needed to provide a bit of direction for the group photos but after getting the individual CEO shot and the group shots I  chilled out and just grabbed some candid shots of the event.

I brought the Panasonic cameras for the event. I was a little concerned (but not much) that the client would not be happy to see me shooting with a smaller sensor, lower resolution camera since everything I read on the web about professional photography would have one believe that clients routinely demand particular cameras or camera types; that those cameras reflect the current state of the art, and that clients understand the difference --- and I read way too much on the web.

I have worked with the head of this particular company's video department for well over 20 years. We run into each other at major events and shows and sometimes, just at the office. He asked me what I was shooting with and I told him. "Those are really cool!" he said. "But don't send us big files. This is all going to end up on social media."  So much for any trepidation I may have been fomenting...

We were on location early. The video guys were setting up two different cameras; one getting a wide shot and one with a shoulder-hefted rig with which he would roam around. The sound guy had his "belly bag" full of Sound Devices goodies and a nice shotgun microphone on a pole. After we figured out our angles and our working choreography I decided to add a light to the mix. I put that new Neewer 300 w/s flash on a stand and bounced it off a wall directly behind the camera position to create a nice, broad fill. The light I used is the one with lithium ion battery pack so no extension cords/power cables were needed. I didn't have to spend time taping down the cords. Progress! The flash also has its own dedicated trigger so that's nice too.

Once we got set we had time to kill and, as normally happens, we stood around and talked shop. Since the video department head has nice equipment budgets and works all over the world I assumed that they were producing everything at the very highest technical levels imaginable. I presumed 4K capture for all video and buckets of SSD drives with which to record everything in 12 bit 4:4:4:4. I asked about their equipment expecting to feel like a rank amateur with a toy camera.

In fact, neither of their video cameras were necessarily anything to write home about. One was an inexpensive Black Magic Cine camera and the other an older Sony ENG camera. No Arri Alexa, no Sony F55, no Red camera, etc. A wide cinema prime (Sigma) on one camera and an EOS zoom lens on the other. No external monitors, no gingerbread. And, not a light anywhere.

I asked if they were shooting in 4K and they looked at me funny. Turns out the only time they venture into 4K is when they are working with green screen and need high definition for masking. They shoot mostly in 1080p. Why? Because nearly everything they shoot is destined to go straight to the web via their own website or one of the social media sites. Everything seems to end up over at YouTube which mostly just crunches the hell out of everything via compression.

After the event I went home to post process the photo files and get them sent off quickly. Usually I shoot raw and then work on the files a bit. The client emphasized the need for speedy delivery so I shot raw+big Jpegs. I pulled the Jpegs into Lightroom and they looked really good. I selected about three dozen shots and uploaded them to Smugmug, making enhancements only to the files containing the CEO (I knew they'd get the most use....). I had the files uploaded within 20 minutes of hitting the front door of the studio. The clients gave me thumbs up on everything.

But this all seems antithetical to what we learn on the web. What I read always leads me to believe that everyone else out there is getting demands from their clients to use and deliver files from the biggest and most expensive state of the art cameras around. As though the clients are tapping their feet and thinking, "OMG! Are we still using those ancient Nikon D810s? When is my photographer going to get his hands on the D850?!!!. We might believe that clients are demanding that everything be sent to them as 16 bit Tiff files and that each file be retouched in Byzantine detail before they see them. But this rarely seems to be the case --- in the real world.

In the video markets we photographers/aspiring videographers seem to believe that the way forward is to offer the highest performance codecs we can afford to create. Take the biggest files we can hammer through a GH5 and send them to an external recorder so we can upgrade them to huge Pro Res files before delivering terabytes of programming to clients who may have only wanted a nice little piece to put up on Instagram. The community of new arrivals to video presume that every shot is done with V-Log (S-Log, C-Log) and that every frame will be color graded to the nth degree. (That's the way I've been thinking about it...).

There may be some parts to the overall equation of corporate production to which we are not always privy. The client's need for speed being one of them. Everything we shot yesterday will be edited and presented as a very small part of an "all hands" meeting presentation that will be broadcast to 100,000+ employees via the web. The video will be a minuscule part of the overall presentation. But it will need to be slim and right sized to work on monitors and connections all over the place. Not big and bloated and hypothetically perfect. Some employees will no doubt need to watch the presentation on phones...

At the end of the session yesterday the video operators pulled out their memory cards and quickly transferred the files to a thumb drive which they handed off to the client's video director. No big fuss.

Were all eyes on me? Hardly. Were the clients or the videographers carefully inspecting and passing judgement on my choice of gear? Not for a second. Did we all deliver right sized media for our client's needs? You bet.

The world of our work is changing quickly and the days of producing work for giant print graphics are fading away. If we keep focusing on the wrong targets we'll probably miss the right ones by a long distance. Much as we'd mostly like to concentrate on getting our work printed on double-truck spreads in magazines or seeing our video work on huge movie screens the reality is that the work we do for clients is very much headed in different directions. They're aiming at UHD monitors or projectors as being the high end use of video currently but, honestly, the vast majority of uses are still 1080p and smaller. The work we're mostly doing is much more transient than ever before so storage is less anxiety provoking. The "sell by" dates are quicker and few of the projects will be re-visited a year from now. And, across the board, the production time frames we're being handed are continually shrinking. (edit:) I had a phone conference with an ad agency creative director this afternoon about a series of videos for one of their clients. Their research showed that in their client's audience  80% of video views were on mobile phones. 80% !!!!!

If we look in the rear view mirror we can be made to feel that we MUST have the biggest and the best gear available for all engagements. In fact, the biggest and the best might be an impediment to delivery speed, flexibility and fluid action. If we look at where media and content are headed we can see that everything is changing and most of it is moving in a direction that's vastly different than the print orientation currently shared by many established photographers. Clients may be way ahead of us here.

The final thing I was thinking about as I sat in front of the monitor watching the progress of my images uploading was about how we business people allocate our assets and how it affects our bottom line. I have friends who firmly believe that they must have the world's best gear in order to compete. They routinely seek out the "best" cameras and the "ultimate" lenses to shoot with. This made sense when everyone's aim point was the lushly printed page and the state of "best" wasn't all that great (think about the first two or three generations of digital camera bodies...) but does it still make sense when the limitations of the targets (screens of various sizes) for most of our work will blind and obfuscate any differences in image quality between any of the modern cameras, across formats?

In a time when fees and budgets are under constant attack and are, in fact, lower when adjusted for inflation than any time in our careers, can we continue to justify the brutal expenses of "the best" when good, solid gear will get the job done just as well or better?

My client's video producer could probably requisition just about any cool video gear he feels he needs. He might be able to outfit his crews with $50,000 Arri Alexas. He might be able to pony up for sets of Leica cinema lenses (@$125,000 per set). But he doesn't. Why not? Perhaps he knows that good enough works great and that saving the corporation cash means more value added to his 401K. Maybe we freelancers would be smart to follow those instincts. After all, isn't it really our talent we're selling?

The Age of the Image. By Stephen Apkon

I was rummaging through the shelves of books about cinematography at our local, independent bookstore, BOOKPEOPLE, when I came across this book. It was published in 2013 so it's not exactly cutting edge topical but it's an important book to read for all the people who say, "I have no interest whatsoever in video..." 

The book is a well researched romp through the changing history of language, communication, symbology and understanding. It traces the paths from the embrace of the written word as a primary method of communication and shows how quickly, thoroughly and globally we are moving from the written word to the language of motion pictures. The author makes a convincing point that, in the near future, to be truly literate will mean understanding the grammar and language of video; both how to decode it and how to create it. 

Toward the end of the book are examples of current educational theory about communication and the embrace of moving images on all manner of screen. In the chapters leading up to that are some general explanations about how to make better video programming. Also, how and why a good video can trump the printing word for global dissemitnation of ideas, memes and, of course, brand messaging. 

After reading the book I grabbed my inexpensive G85 with the kit zoom, put an ND filter on the front of the lens and headed out to practice shooting interesting scenes. The book inspires one to look beyond conventional wisdom, to stop looking in the rear view mirror of technology, and to think more inclusively about communication and not just one's favorite or most comfortable media. 

I recommend that everyone give it a read. Ask your library to get a copy, drop by your local independent bookstore for a copy, or buy one from the link below....

(This book was purchased with my own funds and was not sent to me by the borrower or the author. No one asked me to write this short review).

A Perennial Conference Photographed with a Different Model and Brand of Camera Every Year for Nine Years.

Every year (except one) in the last nine years I have been hired to photographically document a very unique corporate conference that takes place here in Austin. It's unique because attendance is by invitation only, it's closed to the press and the public, and it's pure sophisticated social+economic content. The invited attendees come from banking, investment, demographic research and governmental agencies. The speakers include billionaires, thought leaders and best selling authors. The subject matter involves finance,  new investment paradigms, demographic trends, global financial trends and new industry creation. The actual content is protected by NDA.

But none of that is really important here. What I want to talk about is how I photographed the show this year, or, more to the point, what cameras I used this year. 

I opted to use two Panasonic GH5s and two Olympus lenses; the 12-100mm f4.0 Pro and the 40-150mm f2.8 Pro. This year I was able to forego bringing along a wider assortment of lenses because the two Olympus lenses covered every thing I needed, from wide stage shots to tight shots of speakers on stage. The robust image stabilization supplied by the 12-100mm (in lens) and the GH5 for the 40-150mm (in camera) meant that this was the first year I could drop any tripod or monopod from the gear inventory and not miss it in some situation or another. 

The system checked all the right boxes for the way I photograph these kinds of conferences. The conference doesn't want me to use flash in during panels or speeches. The system needs to be good enough to operate at ISO 800 or higher without issues so that flash is always unnecessary during "main tent" sessions. Since the show is fairly intimate, with only 250 attendees, and since I work fairly close to the stage, the camera needs to be very quiet or altogether silent. Since I move around a bit during presentations the cameras have to be light and mobile. Distilling down to 2 mirrorless bodies and two lenses is a major plus. 

So far I've done previous shows for this client with: 4/3 Olympus cameras, Nikon APS-C cameras, Nikon FF cameras, Canon FF cameras, Olympus m4/3 cameras, Panasonic GH4 cameras, Sony FE cameras, Sony RX10 cameras and now the Panasonic GH5s. With each system (except the RX10s) I tried to source the smallest number of lenses to cover wide shots of the main ballroom in which the conference was held all the way down to tight head shots of the speakers on stage. In terms of convenience the RX10iii was without peer. But it took tight control to stay right in the small zone of best compromise where subject motion didn't become an issue but neither did noise in the image files. Sometimes I was successful and sometimes not. Underexposed high ISO one inch sensor files can get a bit ugly in post. 

Overall the Sony A7Rii had the best image quality to date but was not my favorite for handling and daylong comfortable operation. The lowest image quality came from the earliest cameras; the 12 megapixel e-3 and e-5 Olympus 4/3 cameras. The worst fit for conferences came from cameras like the Canon 5Dii the Nikon D750 and D700. These were far too loud for any situation which called for a discreet, quiet approach, even when wrapped with neoprene. The shutters and mirrors, even in quiet modes, were just too loud to allow me to sit in the audience and work. This routinely limited the number and kind of shots I could take.

Last year I split the show between the A7rii and the RX10iii. My primary lens on the A7Rii was the 70-200mm f4.0 G series lens. I also used a battery grip on the bottom of the A7Rii to provide longer battery life. The combination became uncomfortable to hold and use during a full eight hours of on again, off again handheld photography. In addition, the A7Rii and A7ii electronic viewfinders didn't track as closely, in terms of color and exposure, as I hoped they would with my studio computer. Finally, it was burdensome to use them in their raw modes because of the enormous size of the resulting files; even with the 24 megapixel A7ii. The 42 megapixel file sizes of the A7Rii pushed me to use that camera as a Jpeg-centric tool since we ended up with nearly 3,400 files by the end of last year's show. 

The RX10iii was very convenient and easy to work with over the course of a long day but the files sat right on the edge of the pass/fail edge of image quality in dim situations at ISO 800+. 

 I decided to test the GH5 in the conference arena by using two of them at this show. I'd done a series of tests leading up to the show so I was pretty confident that they would be adequate to the task. I also knew from testing that the two lenses I chose would be very sharp. They would not be the weak link in the imaging chain. (That would be me....). 

The GH5 checked all the right boxes for me. The EVF finder is the best I've owned so far. The camera's shutter is quiet enough to use in its mechanical setting with EFC but has a full-on silent setting if needed. The battery life, with review turned off, was excellent. I shot all day yesterday with one battery in each camera and no need to change. Yes, all day on location with the original two batteries. 

The image in the EVF tracked the reality of my calibrated computer screen much better than any previous camera I've used and the 12 bit raw files are small enough to allow me to shoot (for the first time) the entire show in a raw file format which allowed for much tighter color correction in post. I was able to use zebras to consistently get bright exposures without blowing out caucasian skin which also helped keep noise to a minimum. This year the stage set consisted of white leather couches and a center white desk so I had ample targets, in changing light, from which to set custom white balances. I maintained three custom white balances in three saved banks and was able to move through those presets quickly as the light on the stage cycled.

Having the right color balance and the right exposure means minimal noise in these cameras at ISO 800. Getting it right in camera meant I had less need to boost shadows in post, which is what usually makes noise rears its ugly head. 

A quick note about iPhone software for the GH5 camera. One of the speakers pulled me aside before he went on stage and requested that I get some great shots of him on stage and also asked if I could send them to his company's marketing team by end of day for use on social media. I assured him we could do that and then downloaded the Lumix phone app. It took me about ten minutes to set up a wi-fi network between the camera and phone (while continuing to photograph) and after that I started grabbing selected frames of the guy speaking and transferring them to the phone. When I knew I had a dozen good shots (all Jpegs) I sent them via e-mail to the exec's e-mail address and the e-mail address he'd given me for his social media team. The social media people had the images ready for upload before the speaker left the stage. They were just waiting for final approval as the behind-the-curtain production crew retrieved his lav microphone and body pack. 

Okay, so there are some phone apps that might be useful....

But let's get down to the stars of this particular documentation exercise: The Olympus Pro lenses. I'll go out on a limb here and say that I think the 40-150mm f2.8 Pro lens is the sharpest lens I've ever shot with from any maker, including Leica. I shot with it only at its wide open aperture setting and was amazed at the sharpness, contrast and detail in the final files. It may be that full frame cameras have advantages with their sensors but these lenses go a long way toward equalizing the playing field. The 40-150 is easy to handhold, the manual focus system (with hard stops at close focus and infinity) is elegant, and the performance in the final files is stunning. I'm in love. 

The second lens is one I've already gushed over. It's the 12-100mm f4.0 Pro. While I'll always wish every lens was one stop faster the lens is so nice to use that I know I'll get over that mental block. I was able to shoot about 80 % of the material over the last three days with this lens since it covers such a wide range and does so very well. 

This system is the best compromise across all the systems I've used for this kind of event and stage work. I can hardly wait to use it at the next theater dress rehearsal shoot. The lenses are just right in terms of range and (especially with the 40-150mm) speed. The camera is very surefooted when it comes to the S-AF focusing that I normally use and the handling of the body and body+lens is perfect. 

We get our first big video trial for a client on Tues. but the tests I've already done in studio have been so exemplary where video is involved that I have not doubts about the technical tour de force kit we'll have on hand for our CEO interview. The only thing I worry about now are my own skills at interviewing and operating all the moving parts correctly. 

Photo below: During the last panel discussion on the first full day of the program the show producers send out a selection of beers to all the attendees and all the panelists. We drink a toast before the last panel begins. Sometimes they change up the tradition and waiters come out with Champagne. It's a very civilized show indeed. 

This show, done at an Omni Hotel resort property here in Austin, Texas also gets high marks for routinely providing the very best food. I gained at least a pound this week. Thankfully we've had some killer workouts at the pool. I think I lost most of the extra weight at this mornings 1.5 hour sprint fest...

Last week I talked about photographing two actors on white for the upcoming production of "Singing in the Rain." Here's the first use. A printed post card...

I love to show finished projects. I worked with Rona Ebert who is the in-house design director at Zach Theatre on this assignment. We met before the shoot to brainstorm and plan and it paid off with dozens of photographs of this talented couple that the theater will be using leading up to, and throughout the run of the show.

I really like the way this ended up. In any professional photography job the client pretty much takes things like able camera operation and lighting competence as unspoken, required basics. You wouldn't be in their facility working with paid talent if they didn't assume you had those things managed. The things that keep you on their team are your ability to collaborate with the talent (and the creative team)  to get good expressions, gesture and presence.

Just as a technical reminder, I shot this job with a Panasonic GH5 and the Olympus 12-100mm f4.0 Pro lens. I used a couple of cheap speed lights on the white muslin background, a monolight to the right of the frame in a huge white umbrella as my main light, and a second mini-monolight, at half the relative power, over to the left of the frame, in an even bigger umbrella. I used one tiny speed light to light the talent from the back. That light was used directly and was dialed down to about 1/16th power. It's just the barest twinkle of backlight....