Walking downtown on the last day before the big freeze and I saw these birds at twilight. Then they vanished and the light soaked in for the evening.

I have a tiny suspicion that the lens I used, the Nikon 24-85mm f3.5 to 4.5, has just a pinch of vignetting when it's used near its widest aperture..... Just a suspicion.

The race for bigger cameras. Been there, done that, redoing it.

Image from Leaf A7i file.

Many of the more recent arrivals here at the Visual Science Lab like to give me advice like: Try a full frame camera! Or, You should learn how to shoot with a view camera! Or, The pros all use three fast, f2.8 zoom lenses for all their work! You might want to try out the 70-200mm!!! Or, You should get your hands on a medium format digital camera and try it out!!!

The last one is my current favorite. The implication being that we're all new at this and we're all shooting everything with Olympus, Sony, Nikon, Canon or Panasonic. It's a pretty fair assumption given the sheer numbers of bloggers and camera sites on the web. Outside of www.Luminous-Landscape.com you won't find many sites that have a depth of experience, and user/members, with experience in buying and using medium format digital cameras. The reasons are pretty simple, the MF cameras are ruinously expensive for most people and the compelling uses for them are more or less rarified in this day and age of everything going to the web.

But in my defense I think I should point out that three different companies started sending me medium format digital cameras (and attendant lenses) to test and review around 2009, and occasionally we still get the random, big-ass camera tossed over to us through the transom.

In 2009 I took possession of a Leaf Aptus a7i medium format digital camera and a 180mm f2.8 Schneider lens for the better part of two months. That camera was built like a rock but it had its own handling issues. Still, the 40 megapixel images were enormous at the time. The biggest thing from Canon back then was a whopping 16 megapixels.... I shot a bunch of portraits with the combo and I liked the way the lens rendered portrait subjects very much. But the camera was clunky to use and at around $40,000 for the camera and one lens it seemed a bit out of whack in the market of the day. A wonderful image surrounded by too many caveats. For me.

The next camera we got on long term loan was the Mamiya budget MF camera of the time with a 29 megapixel sensor. While they sent along a nice zoom I much preferred the images I got out of the camera coupled with a 150mm f3.5 manual focus lens I had for the Mamiya 645e. Was that camera any good? Well, we got a lot of images like this one....

...So I could never really complain about the image quality under good lighting. Though most of the medium format digital cameras previous to last year had issues with noise once one crested the 400 ISO mark.

But again, the camera crossed over the intersection of cost versus performance at a different quadrant of the curves than I thought was good and so, after a few months of evaluation and a nicely done review in a photography magazine distributed to other professionals, I sent the package back to the manufacturer and soldiered on with the 35mm form factor cameras I had as my regular tools. 

The next camera was a Phase One camera that boasted (yet again) 40 megapixels and a much improved interface. I wrote about it pretty extensively and used it for more portraits but it was as expensive the previous Leaf camera and, after I used it to make many images for my book on studio lighting it got packed up and sent back as well. The review for that camera got published in Studio Photographer Magazine. I didn't notice any great uptick in acquisition of the units after my review came out but I was happy to have had the opportunity to live with the camera for a couple of months. 

Kirk in Studio with Leaf A7i camera.

The Phase One. Sitting on top of my wooden tripod. 

What I discovered in almost every engagement with the three medium format cameras above and the Leica S variants I have worked with since is that the lenses are critical and that the sensors in most of the MF cameras need to be bigger. Not denser, just physically bigger from side to side and top to bottom. The thing that makes MF images look better (to my eye) is the way the lens draws on the bigger surface area of the sensor. 

I keep get lured back in. But my new search is to find ever faster lenses that are still good near wide open for the two full frame cameras I have in house. I'd love the longer lenses of MF for the same angle of view but I'm still not convinced that the small difference in overall look is worth the investment. I see these systems the way cinematographers see high end production movie cameras; they rent them when they need them and bring them back to the rental houses when they wrap. I've rented several of the cameras from several sources when I felt the need for something that looked entirely different to me and my clients, and every time I breathed a sigh of relief when I returned the gear. 

But I would like my newer readers to understand that when I make these kinds of choices for myself ( renting versus owning? Shooting everything with one system?)  I do it with the background of having actually shot with five or six different medium format camera samples over a cumulative time frame of about a year. My opinions are rarely the result of having read and then parroted back something that some else wrote on the web. I have lifted the weights of medium format and broken a sweat with the 16 bit machines. So please stop recommending that I "try" one. Believe me, I have. I just can't justify using it to shoot images for websites and I'd rather put that kind of money into a retirement account. Your mileage may vary. 

At this point I think the new flurry of high resolution Nikon, Canon and even Sony cameras are a very good and sensible compromise. 

A quick advertising note: Craftsy is offering a bunch of course at up to 50% off. It's a good way to learn new stuff. You might want to browse their photo offerings. I'll be looking at the cooking classes.....   Here's the link!

I finished a project I was doing for myself. It's a site with 100 portraits that I like very much.

http://kirktucksportraits.blogspot.com

http://kirktucksportraits.blogspot.com

I always feel like my portfolios are jumbled and mixed. I wanted to create a site full of portraits that showed some of my range but more importantly some sort of cohesiveness. To that end I started sifting through hundreds and hundreds of portraits I've shot to find the ones that I liked to look at.

It's a good exercise and in my case it pointed out to me where I am weak and where I need more depth in the work that I share.

It's not a definitive collection. 100 images is little more than a tasting platter of the thousands of portraits I've shot. But it's fun to work toward a goal and my goal was to have this group of photographs that I could share, without reservation, with my clients from across many industries.

I'll use the gallery to create an e-mail campaign to existing clients. For many it will be a reminder while for the clients who hired me to shoot product or lifestyle, or who hired me on someone's recommendation (without seeing a portfolio or the work) it will be an opportunity to deepen their understanding of my core work.

Many, many people write comments to this blog and talk about how they can't stand to read talk about gear. Others state that the only thing that matters is the image. I could argue that our page views drop to near zero every time I show work or talk about photographs and rebound into the tens of thousands every time I write about an Olympus m4:3 camera but instead I'll just show the work and see what happens over on the sister blog site.

I hope you'll drop by and visit. The site is meant to be dynamic and you can change the way you view it by selecting from the menu across the top. I like "mosaic" for this presentation but you can customize it to work for you.

It's freezing here today. I hope you stay warm wherever you live. Kirk

Renae in the leather chair at the old studio. An exercise in lighting and expression.

Renae and I set out to make this photograph because we were experimenting with a bunch of different black and white looks for an upcoming annual report for which we were preparing. We would be photographing different business people in different locations and the two constants would be the lighting design and the chair.

When we are gearing up for a large project I tend to test out a number of different options well before the shooting dates so we know what we're aiming for at the outset.

It always seems to me that getting the relationship between the subject and the background is the hardest part of any portrait shoot. If the background is too de-focused it begins to look detached from the person; almost as if the person had been dropped into a second image of a backdrop.

The design aspect that gives me the most pleasure is the balance of lights and darks through a frame.

The final piece of the puzzle with this project was the printing and toning of the image. I used a Portragon under the enlarging lens to partially blur the corners of the image and to reduce overall contrast throughout the image. It's lost technology now (for the most part) because the Portragon depends on the optical process of enlarging to impart its look.

I marvel at how clear and uncluttered our shooting intentions were at the time and the amount of craft we tried to bring to bear...

We don't give away free samples but if a client wants to see a test we oblige. Someone wanted to know how big they could go with a D810 file. We sent them some Tiffs.

Advertising agencies are going through an interesting little adjustment right now. At least the bigger ones with national clients who are flocking back to trade shows. They're are moving from aiming all their stuff at the web to the opposite extreme: Posts and huge trade show graphics. The two common denominators are a need for lots and lots of resolution and also the need for content to be sharp. Unlike billboards posters, point of sale materials and trade show walls are all media that consumers can get right next to and put their noses on.

The top image is on of a hand full I sent to the agency. At full size it's a 215 Megabyte tiff file. The Image just below is a close up of my left eye. Seems to blow up pretty well.

The agency is mollified and we are continuing in our conversations....

Have a sharp day.

Meanwhile, back on the factory floor...

The Nikon 105mm f2.5

I had a blast yesterday. I went to a big hotel in Austin, set up cool lights in a large room and made a big window with lots of greenery outside my background. Over the course of the day I made portraits of 16 people that will be used in the marketing of a legal services client. We've just now uploaded a web gallery to the client for their selection so I won't be posting any of the images here yet but I was so happy with the performance of one piece of gear that I wanted to write is blog post and talk about it.

I've really wanted to put the Nikon 105mm f2.5 lens I have through it's paces. How to best show off what the lens can do? Well, how about putting it on a high resolution body like a Nikon D810, sticking it on a good tripod and shooting in a mostly electronic flash lit environment (with plenty of backlighting aimed back toward camera) and then shooting this 1977 (or older) lens at or very near wide open. To make sure we're getting the highest performance for the whole chain we used the camera set to ISO 64 and carefully metered. The lens was focuses via live view at nearly 100% magnification.

The chanting around the photographic playground is that the new generation of high resolution cameras (36 to 50+ megapixels) will be a challenge to all but the greatest (read: most expensive) lenses. A second refrain of the wisdom of the web is that only the newest lenses, optimized for digital will play at the rarified levels required. The implication is that if one isn't shooting with a Zeiss Otus lens or a Sigma Art lens or one of the ruinously expensive Nikon lenses that the new cameras will handily exceed the capabilities of that crappy, last decade glass-tastrophy you've tried to cobble onto the front of the camera. Older lenses? We're counseled not to even consider them.

Right....

I came home and shoved the raw files into the computing machine and started looking at the files. Yes, there were some where the clients moved after I made my exacting focus but I was awake enough yesterday to realize what was happening in the moment and then re-check. We've got 25 or 30 keepers for each sitter. What made me sit up and take notice is that when I clicked onto a 100% view the level of detail was hanging in there even at the absolute pixel level. While the images don't have that astringent, clinical feeling of sharpness they have a warm, rounded but complete feeling of sharpness. The nicest thing is that there were no surprises. No soft spots. No veiling flare or chromatic aberration rearing its ugly, jittery outlines. Just wonderful performance is a classic way.

Many of my favorites were shot at f2.8 which is 1/3 of a stop from down open. Now, you know that most lenses clean up their acts by f 11 or so but a thirty-something year old lens wide open? And perfectly behaved? If you are shooting Nikon cameras and you haven't grabbed one of these lenses from KEH, or some other dealer in used gear, you might want to consider it. I paid a little over $100 for a clean copy.

But making this all about sharpness makes the evaluation of the lens incomplete. Another valuable attribute of the lens vis-a-vis more modern super lenses is the contrast rendering of the lens which is a bit lower by comparison. Just like sharpening where the current methodology encourages shooting at a lower sharpness setting and the doing sharpening in post an argument could be well made that having a lower overall contrast range delivers a host of benefits including: more dynamic range, more open shadows and a smoother transition through the tonal scale. While people demanding ultimate acutance might not want this a portrait photographer will find that the lower contrast in the highlights helps to diminish burned out highlights on skin tones and provides a wider range of tonal separations on skin tone.

Right now this lens, the Nikon 105mm f2.5 ais is my current, favorite portrait lens when used on a  full frame camera. Not surprisingly, when I look at files from my time shooting with the Canon 1DS mk2 and the 5Dk2 the Canon 100mm f2.0 was my "go to" portrait lens....

We all have favorites. And it's okay for the favorites to change from time to time but I would be interested in hearing from people who've uncovered other obvious gems like the 105mm f2.5. Would you share your lucky discoveries in the comments?  Thanks!

An older image (circa 2010 with Olympus EP-2) that I love seeing every day on my bulletin board.

Eve's Organic Bed and Breakfast in Marathon, Texas. 

Packing up to shoot can be an exercise in waffling and indecision. Like a puzzle with too many pieces.

Belinda from some decade past. 

I am photographing 16 people tomorrow afternoon. We're scheduled to do one portrait session every fifteen minutes, starting at one p.m.  I'll spend most of the morning in a windowless hotel conference room setting up bright colors and shapes against the back wall to mimic an outdoor urban space which I will attempt to put completely out of focus, or as far out as I can manage, using a fast medium telephoto lens on a full frame camera. The thing that's vexing me right now is what to light both the portrait subjects and the back wall with. My first inclination was to use the large fluorescent instruments because they do generate ample light and they would make it easy to slide the shutter speeds around on the camera to match the fast apertures. I entertained supplementing them with small, color temperature controllable, LED panels as accent lights but I kept thinking that I've shoehorned everything lately into the continuous light box and that it might be nice to shoot with flash for a change. 

The nice thing about the camera I intend to use is that it will shoot at a native ISO of 64 which gives me a bit more control when it comes to shooting with the aperture wide open and using studio flashes. By 5pm today I decided to give the old strobes a work out and I packed them up. I intend to use five monolights firing into various diffusers, aimed at different things and I'm tentatively bringing along three battery powered flashes to throw spots of light onto the background elements when I run out of monolights.  I've packed 11 light stands. Some will hold lights and some will hold brightly colored, geometric shapes back in the mid and background areas of the room to add depth and color texture to the shots. 

Even as I was loading the flashes into the car I was remembering a big Pelican case full of tungsten fixtures; spots, floods and broad lights and wondering if I shouldn't take them instead. I really do love a well made fresnel fixture; especially when it's on the front of a hot light...

I think I'll stick with my plan to use the flashes. It's Belinda's birthday today and I probably shouldn't spend a lot of time waffling over lighting. I'm loading all of the non-precious things into the car right now because I'll want to go to the early swim practice in the morning and won't have time to come back and pack up before the shoot. We're heading out to dinner this evening and I'll be parking the car somewhere that's not really secure so the cameras will go into the car tomorrow morning on the way to practice. 

No matter which lights I ultimately pack I'll wish I'd brought something different instead. That's why I like to shoot in the studio = you can change your mind at the drop of a hat and grab a different light or camera right off the shelf and be up and shooting in no time. Remote locations always call for the use of the "check-list." 

We're heading to one of our favorite restaurants. It's called Asti. My friend, Chris Archer, and I made a video for the place last year. It's on their website here: http://astiaustin.com click on "a peek inside."

Want to see a trailer for my Studio Portrait Lighting class on Craftsy? Here's a link: http://www.craftsy.com/video/course?courseId=427

Regardless which lights we end up bringing I'm pretty sure it will be a fun and interesting shoot. And that's how it should be.