A PSA for Zach Theatre's Show, "This Wonderful Life."

This Wonderful Life 2 hi res SQ from Kirk Tuck on Vimeo.

The folks at Zach Theatre needed a PSA for their one man play starring Martin Burke. Martin plays all 37 main Bedford Falls characters in this somewhat wacky play based on the Jimmy Stewart movie, It's a Wonderful Life. I had some free time on a Saturday afternoon just before one of Martin's first performances so I was happy to help out.

I used four of the Fotodiox 312AS LED light panels to light Martin on the stage. I stuck a Panasonic GH3 camera on a tripod, used a Rode NTG2 boom microphone and ran the audio straight into camera. Since Martin was moving off his mark I was able to set the microphone on a stand and aim it pretty precisely. I monitored his levels through a set of headphones plugged into the camera. The taking lens was an older Olympus 40mm 1.4 Pen manual focus lens used at around f2.8.

This was a classic "one man crew" project with me doing the grip work, the audio, the direction and at the end, the editing.

The folks at Zach had local radio talent, Dave Jarrett, do the voice over and we dropped that into the mix. The 30 second spot was edited in Final Cut Pro X running on an ancient Mac Pro laptop.

Every time we do one of these I realize that I need to move the camera more and I need to edit tighter. I'm sure friend Frank will have some good critiques for me. I listen to him because he knows what he's talking about. An even better idea would be to start with a script instead of just starting with a loose idea.

I promise. Next time I'll write a script. And the time after that I'll do a story board.....

edit: If you want to see the high res version click on one of the links under the video window and go see the HD version at Vimeo. 

A Curmudgeon's Delight!!! Making predictions for the New Year. One prediction at a time.

This is the year (2014) most people give up on print. Not everyone. There will be magazines for a while longer and printing on product packages but I'm pretty sure that the days of spending money to print a nice, four color brochure to hand out to clients (who will look at it once and then toss it in the recycling bin) are largely behind us. Yeah, I know that you love print and I love print but the smart companies are already in the habit of sparse printing. Just try getting a nice, multi-page 9 by 12 inch five or six color product brochure from Apple. Probably not going to happen. Come to think of it, the last time I went out to buy a car no one at the Honda dealer was rushing to put slick car brochures in my hands either. My graphic designer wife says they still print brochures for medical product companies but really, that's just because professional medical practices don't subject themselves to endless e-mail and the purchases they make can require time in committees to approve.

When my plumber came by to show me some new faucets for the kitchen, he wiped his hands off, grabbed an iPad and scrolled through the choices from Kohler and the other makers.  It seemed natural enough to me. Consider the last time you bought a pricey camera. I'm going to bet that the real manual came on a disk. The manual for my Galaxy NX came....from the web. None in the box. No more print. Print isn't vanishing everywhere. It will leave the middle of the market first. The rich will still be courted with nice print pieces because it's codified as part of the dance. And the poor will still get printed information because a web infrastructure is still cost prohibitive for more people than we think, along with the barriers to the sort of mainstream acculturation that seems to let us (the educated middle class) know almost by telepathy where the good information lives.

When I say "Print" I mean brochures, magazines, direct mail and point of purchase materials. You'll of course understand that I am a commercial photographer. I am not necessarily saying that from this point on no photographer will print their own work, have a show of prints or print a portfolio. But think about it. We've been trained all of our lives to accept and understand the printed piece. How will the mass psychology of the marketplace shift when we make the collective decision to let so many pieces of print go away?

The advertising won't vanish. It will go where it's been  heading for the last fifteen or twenty years. It's all heading relentlessly toward screens. We've done a masterful job weaning the newer generations off print entirely. We react with screens in a different way. There is an implicit understand that the images contained on screens are ephemeral, fleeting. The images will ultimately become short fuse consumables instead of physical artifacts. And maybe for industrial prosperity and efficiency that is a good thing. Disappointing to the generations whose primary interaction was with prints and the printed page but probably inevitable.

Fortunately, even for the curmudgeons, the screens get better with every generation and that gives them less to bitch about. Funny to think about the future of gallery shows... Instead of walking around in a room full of prints perhaps we'll be ushered to chairs and we'll watch images float by our eyes on giant screens---with all the resolution and color we've wanted---one image after the other. Cycling around again and again.  Perhaps there will be multiple viewing stations where little groups of gallery goers can congregate and they'll be able to set the speed at which they are able to consume the proxy of the art.  Probably cheaper than framing and mounting.

At any rate I hope they don't do away with the wine and a nice buffet at the art openings. That would be too much!

I just had to laugh....

Shot on film. With a Leica R8...

A few years ago I wrote a piece for another person's blog wherein I made an impassioned case for electronic viewfinders. To say I was skewered again and again would be an understatement. At the time the mantric response was, "I'll never give up the glory and majesty of a true optical viewfinder!" 

And yet, I was just visiting said blog when I noticed that commenter after commenter mentioned their desire to have a Sony A7 camera. And many of them gave as one reason.....the electronic viewfinder.

Funny how much time sits in between early adopters and the big hump of the Bell Curve. Are people that resistant to change?

How easy are we willing to make the process of making photographs before we admit how much we've lost?

I was watching a video program from PBS about Richard Avedon a few nights ago and it made me  sad. Not sad for the person (Avedon--who passed away a few years ago) or the people in our industry but sad for just how much good stuff we've (as an industry) been willing to let go of in the thoughtless pursuit of the "free" practice of digital photography. And how complicit we've all been in our own artistic decline. I am as guilty as the rest of you. If you still shoot larger formats than 35mm you are excused from this discussion and from automatic inclusion amongst the collective guilty.

Let me explain what I mean before the fire breathing forum experts go into spiteful overdrive.

Regardless of whether we work in digital or film photography there are certain aesthetic manifestations resulting from the use of different sized imaging sensors, or different film sizes, just as there are obviously different effects that come from using different focal lengths of lenses to achieve the same angles of view across formats. Newer technologies in sensors might yield less noise or higher perceived resolution but all the new advancement(?) comes at the expense of a truly diverse range of tools. And the ones that have mostly gone away are the larger formats. The same formats that made most of the amazing images from the last century. Six by six. Six by seven. Six by nine. True, in camera large format panos. 4x5 inch and bigger.

When discussing different styles of cameras most people aren't well educated enough to get very far beyond counting the number of pixels on a chip. Most don't understand that there are many visual differences between the constitution of different kinds of sensors and most don't understand the very idea of movable (non-parallel camera movements) lens and film planes. But the biggest issue is that we all chose to ignore the obvious visual differences that come from the inter-relationship of sensor size and focal length/angle of view.

We're like happy ants toiling in the tiny garden of m4:3, APS-C and good ole fashion small format 35mm frame sizes. We've completely tossed away medium format, wouldn't know what to do with 4x5 inch sheet film and are probably depressingly unaware that once film could be readily had in 8 by 10 inch sheets---and larger. And we're equally unaware that many, many practitioners of the recently past era didn't use the larger sizes to get more "megapixels" they worked in the larger formats because the larger formats gave the artists different looks. They delivered images that looked unique by format----not just stylistically but fundamentally. Down at the level of physics.  If you could make a snap shot with an 11x14 inch view camera it wouldn't look like a 35mm camera used in the same spot with a lens having the same angle of view. It would look totally different. The much, much longer focal length of the lens (for the same angle of view) used at the same subject to camera distance would have yielded a totally different depth of field in which sharp focus would fall off at a much steeper rate. These were the days of giants in the field of photography. The gear and the people.

The disconnection between micro adjust AF settings and the nature of lens design...

This is a Sigma 50mm f1:1.4 lens with a Sony A mount. It's a great lens but my camera can't reliably focus it and neither can yours. Even if you use a focus align jig and take great pains to calibrate the hell out of it. Is there something wrong with the lens? Nope, I get the same behavior from the Zeiss 50mm f1.4 for the Canon and also the manual focus Carl Zeiss 85mm 1.4 in any of the major brand mounts. So what's the deal?

It's pretty simple really. All these fast lenses have a common attribute called focus shift and the simplest explanation is that the point of correct focus shifts as you stop the lens down. The micro-adjust AF controls in all of cameras are amazingly simple and stupid. They are all made to do one calculation per lens. But if you calibrate for the wide open setting (f1.4) which is the stop you paid all that hard earned money for the lens system's focus point will shift as you stop down. The setting at f2.8 when used on my Sony a99 is three or four points different than the f1.4 stop. In theory you could test and divine a calibration setting for each f-stop but there's no way to load more than one setting into the camera for each lens.

If you were amazingly compulsive you could calibrate all the critical stops and third stops and make a chart. Then when you grab your camera to shoot you can check your f-stop, consult your data and set the correct number of every f-stop. You'd probably only need to do the stops from wide open to about f4 because at that setting depth of field masks the errors. Mirrorless cameras set focus at the shooting aperture for their contrast detection AF so they tend to be much, much more accurate. I wonder if there is a downside to the inclusion of phase detection AF points on a sensor as relates to focusing point accuracy.

The project that was the most fun for me this year.

 My Craftsy Family at work on a horse ranch outside Boulder, Co.

I've done many fun projects this year including a wonderful trip to Berlin for Samsung but the project that I had the absolute most fun with was without a doubt the Family Photojournalism class I taught for Craftsy.com. On one level I was the instructor but on another level I was most certainly a student and, in my time off, a very enchanted Colorado tourist.

It was right at the end of September when it all happened. It was steamy hot in Austin and when the Craftsy producers and I decided on our production dates I was happy to get out of town and head to Denver. We were to produce a 2.5 hour program which at its core is a training program for the person in a typical family to whom the responsibility for taking family photos falls. It's not a class about how to leverage the latest techniques or get the most out of frightfully expensive gear. My counterpart, Josh, was a real world dad who really did want to find out how to take better images of his kids at home, school and on vacation. He showed up with a hand-me-down Nikon D200, a 70-300mm kit lens and an 18-200mm lens that looked like it had been through a war, then a mud fight and finally a trip in the tumble dry setting on a clothes dryer. Instantly vintage.

My instruction of Josh would take place at Red Rocks Park, at his suburban Denver home and at a wonderful horse ranch with a crown of mountain peaks framing the background. We covered exposure, hand holding, tripod use, fill flash and even a bit of Lightroom post processing. And we had a blast following around Josh's wife and two adorable kids.

I was "on camera" for most of the adventure so I really didn't get to shoot much. We were depending on Josh's images to use for almost all of the "B-roll" and he came through like a pro. I stayed busy trying to remember which of three cameras to look at and trying to extemporaneously put together what I needed to say for each segment. (No teleprompter, no formal script and no cue cards!!!).

We worked with a great video crew on the project. Their job was to make me sound good, look good and keep me on track so we had what they needed to do the transitions and be able to piece together a two and a half hour program that made sense, taught the lessons and looked good.  

The lessons for me were all about being on the other side of the camera. I'm used to shooting and directing but being directed and having to remember simple blocking (where to move and when) and deliver spoken content was a totally different experience. Things I took for granted as a photographer seemed really tough when I got put into the role of being "talent."

The biggest lesson is that doing multi-camera work on location requires more crew. In addition to producer/director: Pattie, we had a sound engineer, an editor/digital technician, camera operators, assistants and a make up person. We worked with a lot more gear than I usually do on my "heroic" one person shoots. And with the gear and the complexity of having to simultaneously shoot in multiple angles there is a certain inertia to getting set up and rolling for each shot. The crew used a jib for most of the scenes and that required several people to move it from one location to another. I needed a bit of rehearsal so I understood what we needed to cover, what would show and where I would end up when I stopped talking. 

In most scenes we created some good back and forth with Josh so we had to make sure that we moved as a team and didn't trip over each other.

When you work in the outdoors, especially in public areas, the recording of sound becomes a very complex game requiring much patience and many "do-overs." I might really nail a good line only to have the audio declared "unusable" because of a throaty Harley Davidson motorcycle coming into aural range just near the end of my lines. On another afternoon we seemed to be "sound dodging" a number of private and commercial airplane flights and the attendant roar of engines. 

At one point in the park I waited in the bright sun until car after car went by only to be interrupted by the arrival of trail hikers. But when the silence was on we hit it quickly and got our stuff done. In the down time I got to review the sound to hear just what the sound engineer was going for. With my eyes closed and headphones on I could hear every little chipmunk squeak or candy wrapper rustle you could imagine. It's only by dint of skillful microphone placement and careful timing that we were able to get what we needed. That, and a bucket of patience.

I learned by watching the camera operators the lesson that at least one camera always needs to keep moving. When you are cutting all the footage together being able to cut to moving shots, compressed shots and wide angle "establishing" shots goes a long way toward keeping a program visually interesting.

Another "miracle" of being the "talent" is that you don't have to worry about any of the details that are commonly fretted over when you are also the producer. I never worried about when lunch would arrive...or from where. Never needed to know which cooler had the sparkling water, that just seemed to appear at need. And I never needed to sweat the details of how things looked, a team of professionals was taking care of that for me. When we broke for the day each day I didn't have to load gear into cases, load cases into cars, re-pack for the next day, charge batteries, etc. I could hop into my rental car and head off to my hotel, to a nice restaurant or to one of the good museums in Denver for a bit of site seeing. Where my hands on shooting days generally turn into marathon sessions of both shooting and logistics my talent days ended at a reasonable time and required only a tiny modicum of homework: review the outline for the next day.

I loved being on the other side of the camera but you probably already guessed that I'm a bit of a ham. It's fun to think that I have something of value to share after nearly 30 years in this business/art/craft.

When I flew back home after spending eight days in Denver (we did a shorter production the week before) I was tired and drained but a bit sad. I'd come to enjoy this new, fun work and I was  melancholy to be leaving it behind. When I got back to Austin I noticed that I immediately started incorporating what I'd learned in Colorado into my own projects. I write scripts now with simpler lines and I write scripts so that my talent has lots of natural break points in which to regroup or for me to cut with in edit. We're trying to write shorter scenes so we don't run out of camera movement before we run out of words.... And I'm trying to break my reliance on artificial lighting and learned to manage existing light better. And by that I mean always being mindful of color balance and exposure so that lit footage can be cut together with natural light footage without huge visual discrepancies. 

The two valuable lessons I learned from Pattie, my producer/director on the project were these: An outline that's been thoroughly discussed, picked apart and improved beats a script because it gets the content across in a way that is more genuine and natural. And, that details are important. Where I was standing when we cut and went back to shoot close ups for B-roll, my inflection, my expressions and even my posture were all important cues to continuity and continuity really counts for believable documentary style work. But finally, the thing I learned that is most valuable is that it's important to stay flexible because sometimes, when you are working with really talented people, a different approach or a happy accident can work better than all the careful plans. 

It's amazing and fun to go from "know it all expert" to newbie beginner student all in the same project and all at the same time. What an incredibly fun and immersive way to learn new stuff. 

Our sound engineer tries  to master all of the outdoors to make me sound good.

Dedication. 

If you go to the on of the links above and click through Craftsy also has a free course I did on family portrait stuff. I'll post a direct link a bit later. I'm running out the door to have fun....

Added note: Nearly 20,000 people have signed up for the free course since it went live in November. Happy!

Happy to share that my favorite camera of the year is also the cheapest one I bought all year. The G6.

I was going to write some long, drawn out narrative about choosing one camera from a list of many to make my "camera of the year" until I decided that the camera one chooses as "their" personal camera of the year is a singular and illogical choice based on so many individual factors that there's no way to choose one universal camera for everyone. We can dance around the Sony products or the further distilled Olympus uber camera but in the end it all comes down, for me, to which camera gives me the most pleasure to hold, shoot, play with and drag images out of.  And, which one is the best value for the amount of imaging fun it delivers. This year, for me, it's hands down the Panasonic G6. 

But it's not just the G6....it's the G6 paired with the Leica 25mm Summilux that makes it all work. And I will sheepishly admit that this is the first combo I've bought in a long time where the lens cost more than the camera (complete with a kit lens). But I'm a perennial sucker for a 50mm equivalent on every camera I've ever played with and this lens fits the bill nicely. 

I haven't had as much time to play with the G6 as I would have liked but I can't complain because that means I've been working on jobs for clients, pressing more situationally appropriate cameras into the projects and looking through countless files and video from Sony a99s, Panasonic GH3s and even the old, standard Sony a850. But I've been holding the G6 in reserve as my "personal" camera. The one I want to walk the streets with.

So, what is it about the G6 that speaks to me?

Taking a day off from writing. Just posting a fun picture of my swimmer friend, Amy.

We did this in the studio after swim practice one day.  Camera and lens information not recorded.

Thinking about creativity and re-invention reminded me of an older article. Allow me to re-share...

http://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2012/09/the-good-stuff-is-in-wiring-dirt-just.html

From: A Christmas Story. Zach Theatre

http://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2012/09/the-good-stuff-is-in-wiring-dirt-just.html

I am of the belief that becoming an expert in anything is the quickest path to boredom, stagnation and being rolled over by progress. People often take me to task for buying new equipment, changing systems, working with different kinds of light. My take on it is that doing the same crossword puzzle over and over and over again isn't sign that you are smart or agile, it's a sign that you are bat shit crazy. 

I work with different cameras to see if they make me see in a different way. Isn't that what we want? Don't we want to differentiate our points of view?  I use different lights to see how they affect my subject, the way motion is expressed or to create a different mood or environment for my subjects. They are mostly people. Isn't exploration something we pretend to value highly?

The tools we use have an influence on how we put stuff together. That's been true since the dawn of time. It was true when we learned that spearing our dinner with long spears killed it more effectively (and safely) than trying to club it to death in very close quarters. Fellow caveman, UGGG, might have invented a better club but caveman, Bob, moved the game forward with his sharp, pointy stick. Fewer cavemen showed up to the Barbecue injured after Bob's discovery went mainstream...

The important part is your story and your own interesting self. But it's folly to think that new technology has no effect on the continuing commercial enterprise of photography.....

An article that I really enjoyed reading. Not necessarily about photography. But maybe.

Which side? (Samsung Galaxy NX camera. Kit lens)

I read this article (below) on Slate today and the last 30 years of my life seemed to make a lot more sense. I found it interesting but you might not.

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2013/12/creativity_is_rejected_teachers_and_bosses_don_t_value_out_of_the_box_thinking.html