The Curious Incident of the Zoom Lens that acts like a bag full of primes.

It seems like I never stop learning about how to push back on the perceived limitations of the photographic process. I've been locked in a battle that resembles a sine wave. I want to do things in a different way than before but I come to doubt my motivations or my resolve or even the premise of my undertaking and then rush back in the old direction to re-embrace a comfortable but unexciting methodology. I swing from risk to comfort like most people. I guess our hope is that each swing into newer territory has us walking forward by five feet and retreating by "only" fifty-eight inches once we lose our nerve...

I'm back in the m4:3 sensor camp for now. It will take a bit to nudge me away this time because the format caught up with where I always wanted it to be. 

I have a confidence in the format now that I never used to and a belief in the best lenses for the system that dwarfs what I felt I got from large format system lenses.  In a sense so much of why systems excel or fail has to do with the synergy between body and lens. 

I was at ZACH Theatre last night photographing a new production called, "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time." The play is from a popular novel the protagonist of which is an autistic teenaged boy in England grappling with a shifting and ultimately unsettling family landscape. The play depends on projections and dramatic light changes to push the audience into the mindset of the main character. 

It is harder to photograph plays that are about ideas or about concepts than to photograph more "narrative" plays and plays with multiple scene changes and costume changes. Those productions have visual texture on which to hang technique. This play is more cerebral and spare. But, of course, I gave it my best shot. Or multiple hundreds...

Given my selection of the first five images in this blog you can see the scene I liked best; in visual terms. It's meant to be a small group of people standing next to a subway track, waiting for the next train. Our hero, in the red jacket, is observing so he can learn how to use the "tube." 

Last night was my first attempt to use just one camera and just one lens to photograph the complete dress rehearsal of a play at ZACH Theatre. We had a live audience and I was constrained, once again, to be mid-house; half way up from the stage and pretty much dead center. It should come as no surprise that I was using the GH5 camera body nor that my choice of lens was the Olympus Pro 40-150mm f2.8. With this system if I could see something clearly on the stage the camera was able to lock focus instantly and capture the image without much fuss. 

This series (the first five) of photographs documents a scene set near the rear of the stage. I needed the full reach of the lens for the tighter crop and still a tight focal length to get everyone at the "stop" from head to toe. 

Since the lens is as sharp as the sting of a wasp, even when used wide open, I had no reason to stop it down. At f2.8 I was able to stay in the 1/250th to 1/400th shutter speed range, and I kept  the ISO at 1600 for the entire evening. If one part of the exposure triangle needed to be changed to compensate for changing light levels it was always the shutter speed I chose. 

I watched part of the tech rehearsal on Sunday evening and I quickly surmised that the color temperature of the light on our people changed frequently and, massively. With a warm light cue the dominant light on stage was around 3200K, + or - 200K. In the cooler cues the lights sat at around 5700K with a healthy dose of magenta in the mix. On this play I set up three different white balances in the custom WB settings. As I was shooting I'd watch for different light cues and assess their white balance. With the camera to my eye I could hit the WB button on the top panel of the camera without having to look. The submenu opened to the current balance and the flick of a control wheel took me to the next white balance. One hits the "set" button to make the change. 

Setting up the camera in this way, and having an easy "touch to identify" physical button meant that I could soon make the changes almost subconsciously. This turned out to be a time saver in post; I was in the ball park in nearly every situation and could concentrate on just tweaking exposures and shadows for my conversions to Jpeg and subsequent delivery. 

Following along on my "one lens, one camera" experiment last night I can also report that the entire evening's shoot was accomplished with just one battery.

It's odd to try to watch a play and to photograph it at the same time. There two completely different brain uses involved. One is passive observation while the other is active editing with continuous, mini, calls to action. Look, frame, commit and then push button. Repeat. If I knew a "non-photogenic" few minutes came along in which I could put the camera down and just watch and listen but there was an inertia that slowed me down from switching back over the active mode. It seemed like a case of always wanting to be doing the opposite thing. 

So, I was working at ISO 1600 and, in post, boosting shadows in Lightroom by plus 25 or plus 50. I was also tweaking exposure, adding anywhere from plus a quarter stop all the way up to adding a stop and a half of exposure. These are all things that should lead to noisy files. Especially in shadow areas. But when I look at the images I've included here I find them to be no more noisy than the images I used to get from my Sony A7ii or A7rii. In any event files from either system were easy to "sweeten" with a judicious lean on the noise reduction functions in Lightroom or PhotoShop. 

Where does this leave me? I'm currently thinking that all cameras are good but that all cameras take time to understand and time to practice with. There needs to be a shoot-look-shoot-look break-in period. A time in which you learn where the breaking point is for files from each system and each model. You learn where these negative inflection points are and then you learn to compensate for them. And if you are doing your job right you come to find that, with a few tweaks, the camera you enjoy shooting can pretty much match its competitors for image quality. Now you can safely choose the cameras you want to use by how they feel in your grip and what kinds of features you think are most beneficial to the way you work. 

I must say that my regard for the GH5 cameras grows with every use. The bodies are extremely solid and convey a sense of indestructibility. The files seem to say to me that if I do everything in "best practices" mode I'll be rewarded by beautiful technical file attributes. 

Nail exposure = get no noise. Hold the camera still = get sharp photos. Nail the color balance = get malleable and pleasing color right out of the camera. 

These practices are not limited to a brand or a format but are things we should be consciously practicing every time we do work with our cameras. 

After reviewing the 600+ files I presented to the client today I have to say that my purchase of the Olympus Pro series 40-140mm f2.8 lens is one of the smartest purchases I've made for photography in the last year or two. It makes my work look better than it should. Actually better than a bag of primes...

"The GH5 and the GH5S are so big! Why are they so big? I thought the whole reason for making m4:3 cameras was to make tiny, tiny, tiny cameras. And lenses! Right?"

No. Wrong.

If you look at cameras as wearable jewelry you could be forgive for imagining that the new generation of smaller sensor cameras should be tiny enough to wear around your neck on a chain. Or fastened, all bling-style, to a heavy, gold-plated wrist chain that also features the dangly parts emblazoned with signs of the zodiac and your various allergies to medications. 

If you really want a camera that fits in all your pockets it really does make sense for you to pick up a nice phone and learn to use its feature set to its highest potential. If you are looking for a camera that's small enough to do your own D.I.Y. endoscopy/colonoscopy then I suggest that you may misunderstand many of the reasons that we own the cameras that we do.

I can't think that anyone with a functioning brain looks at a GH5 and thinks, "Yep. That's the camera for me. It's so teeny-tiny. I'm sure it will fit in the watch pocket of my Levi's 501 classic jeans...." The reason for the GH5's existence and popularity have little or nothing to do with its size relative to other cameras and everything to do with its deep list of features and capabilities. 

Let's start with 4K video. Yes, Sony offers 4K video in some of their A7 cameras but there are some caveats. First of all, the entire Sony line conforms to the EU standard of limiting recording time to slightly less than 30 minutes. With a GH5 you can record until you run out of space on two UHS-11 cards or until you run out of battery juice. Put two V-90 SD cards in the two slots on the camera, add a battery grip to the bottom of a GH5, and you'll be able to shoot for hours and hours. Your only limitation will be the size of the files you choose. And, unlike the Sonys, you can shoot All-I files at up to 400 megabits per second directly in the camera. OMG! That's insane. But good insane. This capability alone creates a demarcation between professional and advanced amateur when it comes to video equipment that can really be used in the field. Nikon, Canon, Sony, etc. None of them can match this kind of performance, even at two or three times the price. 

But there's more. The Panasonic is seemingly impervious to the heat generated when making enormous, detail rich files. But not so with the Sonys we've owned in the past. All but the RX10 series have been plagued with thermal shutdown issues. There is a workaround that was introduced to quell consumer revolt with the A7Rii model and that was to allow the temperature to rise and allow the cameras to deliver noisier and noisier files. Panasonic purposely designed the GH series of cameras to handle heat by making them big enough and thick enough to house highly effective and highly efficient heat sinks. I've run my GH5s for several hours in Texas Summer heat and never had an issue. I've run various Sonys in the studio and suffered heat warnings. An amazing achievement by Panasonic when you consider that the camera is pushing through about 4X the data stream that the Sonys are managing....

Apparently Panasonic is using the total volume of the GH5 body in a way that maximizes performance and equipment longevity while ensuring the highest quality of their files in actual daily use. Now that's novel. 

The Panasonic pro bodies are also subject to being paired with professional quality lenses. The lenses, not compromised by size constraints, are being designed for sheer optical quality. In this instance I am thinking not only of the professional caliber lenses from Panasonic but also from Olympus. Some pros demand a "no holds barred" optical performance from their lenses and the get it from the high end products offered by Olympus and Panasonic. Some of the fast (and glorious) lenses such as the Olympus 40-150mm f2.8 Pro from their Pro series are built like tanks. They are hefty. And if you are going to hang them off the front of a camera you need to design that camera's mount, and the surrounding infrastructure, to handle the load. This means that the mount and camera in general have to be generously sized to ensure longterm plano-parallelism and reliability. Logic dictates a certain minimum camera size for that as well. 

Now we have two things that mandate a certain camera size: mechanical tolerances with high reliability and effective heat dissipation/management. 

We can easily toss in a third parameter that strongly suggests a certain minimum camera body size and that is overall handling characteristics. Is there enough space on the exterior of the body on which to place good, tactile buttons and controls without crowding them and making them tactilely confusing? Is there enough space for professional connection points for things like a full sized HDMI cable, headphone jack, microphone jack? Is the camera comfortable to hold while using a heavier lens? Is the camera body big enough to accommodate a battery that doesn't need changing every 45 to 60 minutes of on time? Can there be a rear screen that's big enough to evaluate stills or video without overwhelming the overall space on the camera back? Is there adequate space for two SD cards slots (both of which are UHS-II)? Can your pinky finger find purchase on the grip of the camera or is it dangling painfully under the body of the camera?

I learned during my time owning various Sony Nex cameras that there actually is a minimum camera size commensurate with sure and happy handling and the Sony Nex cameras that I owned missed that metric by a good 25%. Not so with the professional cameras from Panasonic. 

Finally, uninformed pundits often opine that since the camera is X size it should have a bigger sensor. Generally these people are "pie-in-the-sky" techno-Luddites. They just don't get the idea of compromise. Panasonic might have been able to put in a bigger sensor but they would have had to compromise on: rolling shutter, heat dissipation, file size, writing latency, inferior in body image stabilization, worse performance on most file edges due to optical issues, and they would have had to make lenses even bigger and heavier to get close to matching the performance currently being delivered to the right sized format  of the current Panasonic cameras. 

The GH5 is not a heavy or burdensome camera. Even a feeble and out of shape person like me has little problem schlepping a couple of these around. The people who are calling for ever smaller cameras instead of calling for ever evolving and improving performance are pissing up the wrong rope. They are busy transitioning from the rational pursuit of serious photography into a world of bad fashion and worse user experiences. 

Big umbrellas for soft transitions. Weird rigging for just the right modifier illumination...

Inverting. 

Hyper-verting.

A little eccentric? Probably. But I wanted to use this big, 72 inch umbrella to light a nice actor and, after messing around with flash for a while, I decided that I really wanted to use a couple of bright, highly corrected LED lights. The problem (opportunity?) is that the Aputure Lightstorm LS-1/2 lights aren't made with umbrella holders or anything else that would allow one to sensibly attach an umbrella. A double conundrum because I actually wanted to use two of the lights to get that extra stop of light punch. What's a photo-practitioner to do? Improvise. 

I looked into the black, canvas bag that holds most of the grip gear and clamps and I came out with an "arm" that has 5/8 inch studs on each end and is pretty flexible in terms of moving stuff around. That would be a good device on which to mount the lights but I then needed to mounted the articulated arm onto something that would fit on the top of a light stand. An all-purpose grip head was just what the Light Doctor ordered. I was able to mount the two lights on a positionable articulated arm and then put the arm on top of a C-Stand. The lights could be positioned in any number of configurations in order to most evenly illuminate the enormous number of square inches of soft whiteness that the umbrella offered. 

It all worked in a straightforward way and I was able to get a couple hundred solid shots this way. I'll do it again. In fact, I have this lighting set up in mind for an upcoming video interview as well...

Just thought you'd like to see today's zany approach to "real universe" lighting. 

Hyper Acuity Archivable Collector's Prints available... (not really).

A first attempt with a regular C-stand arm, a couple of grip heads and a super clamp. Ho Hum. No articulation = no excitement. 

The Real Deal. ARTiculation galore. The flash head was already there holding up the umbrella. If I forego the flash head I'll use the umbrella mounting technique shown in the image just above this one. 

72 inches seems to be a glorious sweet spot for umbrellas. 

And cheap as dirt compared to a nice softbox.

Swing em. Turn em. Rotate em. ARTiculate them. Done.

So....Just how nice is that cheap Sigma 60mm DC DN lens I bought (again) for my Panasonic cameras?

I've been getting a lot of use out of the little, cheap-ass Sigma, metal barreled miracle lens over the last few days. Yesterday I shot portraits of Sidney in the studio. She's an amazing actor/singer from Zach, and as soon as I can narrow down my favorite of her from the hundreds we took I'll show you want the 60mm lens looks like in a studio setting...

Today I put the lens on the front of a G85 and went out for a big walk. All of these images were done on the Sigma 60mm at either f2.8 or f4.0. I've got a full frame above and the 100% magnification just below. Sharp. Very sharp. I wish the 30mm and 19mm from the same family were as good. I'd snap them up in a heartbeat. But I've had em and shot em and I've got to say that

I like the idea that imperfections help make an artwork more accessible. I translate this to mean that portraits which are over-styled will never be as satisfying as portraits that are a reflection of the moment.

Usually I crop a bit tighter to the top of the frame. My first thought is that I've left too much head room in this portrait of my friend, M. But when I try to crop it I lose the square and too much of the wonderful and energetic background. I see the wisp of hair that's come away from the well tended majority and created its own extra diagonal just over M's left eye. Common practice would be to have a stylist rush in an cement that errant wisp back into the fold. But the "imperfection" makes the portrait more real for me. And to stop the process of interaction we had embarked upon in order to maintain order seemed like a bad gamble as well as a nod toward too much compulsive neatness.

The common practice now seems to be a push to strike a "sexy" pose when young women are photographed. I like seeing M. look into the camera in a strong and confident way. Style dictates a slight turn of the body so one doesn't photograph squared shoulders but, again, I think the shoulders balance the image in a way that adds a graphic element often missing in portraits.

Finally, I understand that I've (unintentionally?) centered the image around M's eyes. I have no explanation or excuse other than the idea that this was a reflex on my part because I found her eyes to be so compelling.

It's a portrait replete with "errors." It is a portrait of a beautiful person. The errors make the whole of the work more accessible to me.

Just how much lighting does an image need to make it work?

This is a portrait of Mark Agro. Mark is the president of Ottobock Canada, a health care device company. Several years ago he was in Austin, Texas for a week long meeting and we were called on to make a portrait of him for use in advertising and on the web. We had at our disposal the new U.S. headquarters of the same international company. It's a beautiful office on the sixth floor of a new building at the Domain Center in north Austin.

One of the features of the building that every portrait photographer would enjoy is the floor to ceiling windows along one entire side of the building, facing north. The light coming through the windows is soft and gorgeous. The interior of the building provides a lot of architectural stuff that looks good thrown out of focus.

I set up one, big soft light directly above and behind my camera position to provide an almost invisible fill light. I used a 60 inch, white umbrella and a small, Yongnuo strobe to provide the illumination.

For this image I used a Sony A7Rii and the Sony 70-200mm f4.0 G zoom lens at f4.0 to f5.6.

The flash was set at  something like 1/16th power and was about 15 feet from Mark. While the web is filled with forced examples of people using very expensive strobe kits to do the same kind of lighting an expense of $58 for the strobe is really all that was needed. If I remember correctly the umbrella cost a few dollars more than the light source.

It's easy to read too much stuff from people who are directly or tangentially linked to strobe or camera manufacturers and come away with the idea that certain pieces of expensive gear or complex techniques are mandatory for professional work but the truth is that knowing where to put a light is much more mission critical than which particular light you might select. The same applies to cameras and lenses.

The portrait was successful. It is one of my modern favorites and it led to dozens more executives being photographed in pretty much the same spot with similar variations of the same lighting. It was additionally successful in that I got to meet Mark and share a pleasant conversation which ultimately led to a very nice friendship.

In an earlier segment of my career I would have shown up with a bunch of Profoto lighting gear, run cords all over the place, and probably butchered the wonderful natural light that was freely available. I would have been so fixed on technically based solutions that my honest rapport and easy conversation with Mark might never have happened. So, how much lighting should you use to make portraits? The absolute minimum you need is just about right....

Just how out of focus does every background need to be?

We photographed this image of Selena at Willy Nelson's small Texas town (he's moved a bunch of cool, old, Texas buildings to a ranch somewhere outside of Austin (NDA signed....). It's a popular location for period movies about Texas. Selena had a band called, "Rosie and the Ramblers" and she needed some publicity shots. And there we were.

At the time I was playing around with some Canon 1D mk3 cameras and a complement of Canon glass and I could have easily used a wide open aperture to make all the details in the background nothing more than a blurry wash of colors. It would have been in keeping with the prevailing compulsion among photographers to make everything into a bokeh experiment. But, practical person that I am I assumed that we get permission and travel out to a cool, private ranch just to blur the background into anonymity so I stopped the lens down a bit until I got a balance between emphasis on Selena's face and some descriptive texture in the background.

There's also a bit of flash being used to make the photo but I tried to make that as invisible as possible.

Could I have done the same shot with a m4:3 sensor camera? You bet. Could I have done it with a full frame camera? Yes, of course. The idea though is that neither format would have been demonstrably "better." Each would have resolved the detail we needed for every application we intended for the files. Each could be color corrected into the right box. We just had to decide what was important in the overall look and select the controls that would make the image happen the way we wanted it to.

It was a windy day and that was something we could not control. Saved us from having to rent a wind machine to blow Selena's hair around...

Thinking a lot about backgrounds. And diagonals. And catch lights. And texture.

Woody came into my studio to do a shoot for a live theater production of a play called, "The Illusionist." (Or something along those lines). The marketing director was also looking for some dramatic portrait shots to put into the marketing mix. As strange as it may sound to photographers who came of age in the time of digital we did a lot of our work at the time in black and white; with black and white film, and black and white prints, because some of the newspapers, weeklies, and magazines had large sections that were only black and white. It was a cost saving measure. Their printers needed 8x10 inch black and white prints which were then half-toned with process cameras for printed reproduction on web presses. Images needed their own graphic contrast if they were to survive the process with any semblance of quality.

We learned how to print individual prints for nearly every paper, neighborhood rag and magazine that used our publicity photographs.

I loved tossing light into half the background and plunging the other half into darkness. I loved filtering the lens with a light yellow-green filter so Try-X would add tone and texture to skin. And I loved tweaking each print for its intended destination.

Today, once you hand off a digital file to an online magazine or website you may come back to see what they've done with your work a few days later to find that they've added teddy and inappropriate filters, cropped the hell out of it or cut out the head and dropped it into a totally different background. Butchering your art has just become so easy that it seems touching it and messing with it has become irresistible.

At some point in time printers and art directors appreciated certain aesthetic points enough to keep their damn hands off the buttons and let a well seen print exist as it was meant to be.

At least if one writes and produces one's own blog one can be reasonably assured that one will not come back the next day to find one's work colorized and mezzotinted; much less tortured by Instagram filters.

For me the two things that make this portrait work are the background and the catch light in Woody's right eye. Not the right eye of the print but Woody's right eye. Right?

Here is a quick selection of my photography and food books (English titles....). In case you missed one or two. All still available on Amazon.com. All still readable.

Benro All-Terrain Monopod. And by "All-Terrain" I mean it's equally at home supporting photography and video...

Adjustable arm. Ambidextrous. 

My selection for a monopod system.

This is a Benro A48FD monopod. It's a heavy duty monopod that features the three little support legs at the bottom of the structure to help stabilize the whole unit. It also features a full size Benro S4 video head at the other end. I used to think monopods like this were kinda dumb but now I'm finding them to be very cool. 

Many years ago I got a Leica monopod as a gift. It's a lightweight affair made by Tiltall and it came unadorned; without a head and without the little feet at the bottom. It provided more stability than just handholding a camera, but not by much. The most useful technique with it was to brace one's body against a wall (a corner, if it worked compositionally...) and so get an extra measure of movement curtailment. But until cameras and lenses came with image stabilization a naked monopod was mostly only useful to me to support the weight of heavy lenses that came with their own tripod sockets. Not a common occurrence around here. 

More recently I got a Berlebach wooden monopod and it's nice enough but subject to the sam limitations as the ancient Leica version. When it comes to handling cameras and lenses not equipped with image stabilization nothing beats a good tripod. My big issue with