Does your insistence on using the same camera for years at a time hamper your artistic growth? How do you know?

I'm reading a book called, Letting Go of The Camera, by Brooks Jensen. The book is a series of essays by the editor of LensWorks. One of the many great essays in the book talks about the time that Jensen, who had used a 4x5 inch, film, view camera exclusively for over 20 years, finally bought a 35mm type digital camera. He describes the incredible sense of freedom and visual agility he instantly gained because he no longer was constrained to shooting carefully constructed images, on a tripod, requiring long set up times and motionless subjects. The transition helped him to realize that we all tend to be limited by the boundaries imposed by our habits. It's an example of the old saw that goes, "If all you have is a hammer everything starts to look like a nail." 

The main point of his essay is that working with the same tools all the time trains you to find subjects and ways of shooting that convenience or leverage the strengths of the camera and not your unique vision. Another essay talks about the difference between reprising your greatest hits over and over again or finishing with a creative vein of work and moving on to another, different way of seeing. There are photographers who have early "hits" and the approval of their fans, coupled with their basic insecurities, conspire to manipulate the photographer into basically doing the same kind of (popular) images over and over again. It's what their current audience expects and the act of disappointing the people who validate their vision is too frightening to consider for some. Their growth as artists comes to a halt.

But the great artists need to keep moving forward---like sharks---or they stop being creative and become greatest hit xerox machines. I think it's instructive for people to move outside their creative comfort zones as often as possible. Jensen mentions Joni Mitchell and John Paul Caponigro as examples of two artists who are constantly re-inventing their art and their subject matter. And he writes about their constant artistic growth.  The very act of looking at something through different frames may unleash a wonderful new way of seeing and sharing. And the very act of casting your vision onto a totally new subject matter can change everything.

In my career I've experimented with everything from 8x10 inch view cameras to Pen F half frame film cameras. Every time I pick up a new camera it seems to change the way I approach my photography. The acceptance of new boundaries keeps my eye and my art fresher. 

 I was perplexed recently when a very good friend who is also a very good photographer told me that my work looks the same to him no matter what camera I use. We discussed it and what we came up with is that when your work resonates across formats you've hit your innate style. Style seems separate from curiosity or vision or creativity. Style feels more like how you put your pants on in the morning or how you tie your shoes.  It only speaks to how your mind and eyes see ingest the subjects that interest you, not in the way that the a particular camera helps to shape the way you share them.  

I suggest changing cameras. I like to change cameras.  Actually, that's an understatement. Most VSL readers would say I change cameras as often as most people change air conditioning filters. That may be so but it keeps me interested because it makes me work in different ways. And then I can always brag about my real achievement as a photographer===I've figured out the nuances of the Olympus menu.

Chaotic Frame. Fun Frame.

 no clue what it all means. It just looked so layered and at the same time menacing through the camera that I wanted to have the image. Olympus EM-5 and Olympus Pen F 150.  From: Tommy, at Zach Theatre.





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Another set of images from the Olympus EM-5+Olympus PenF 150. Acid Queen.

 l love the energy this actor puts into her role. Amazing. 

Guilty admission: I posted the bottom image even though I know I missed focus by just a bit. If you look at the mesh near her ear you'll see that the lens is "satisfyingly" sharp but I missed the eyes by an inch or so. Goes along with the long lens-low accutance viewfinder-manual focus-f4 aperture and moving actors on stage....   Why would I post a shot that just missed being perfect? Because I think the energy and the overall emotional power of the shot trumps the technical miss. 

I know how to make the sharpest photos in the world. Given time, a medium format camera, some really fast duration Broncolor or Profoto studio electronic flash, a model in a fixed position, a $10,000 lens stopped down to f11, etc. etc. etc. But if you aren't going to do that (and who's going to wait for you to get it all assembled and ready?) and you are shooting on the fly shouldn't the "look" trump having all the boxes checked?

Techno stuff: Olympus EM-5, Olympus PenF 150mm f4, stage lighting. Wide open, ISO 1600. From a raw file.



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Testing, testing. How good is that old 150mm f4 Olympus Pen F lens?

Meredith as Tommy's Mom in the Zach Theatre Production of Tommy (The Who). 

I know it's not just me. I think a lot of photographers have boundless curiosity when it comes to the way different lenses look on cameras. We talk about sensors a lot but so much of the look and feel in an image comes from the lens on the front of the camera. While we have the general belief that newer, computer designed and computer controlled manufacturing has led, inexorably, to the creation of lenses that are much, much better than those from decades ago the reality is that precision manufacturing, tight adherence to tolerances and the right supporting materials are at least as important as the latest designs. A great lens design in a plastic barrel with lots of tolerance for geometric slop may be light years behind a classically designed and produced lens system ensconced in a metal assembly and hand calibrated for best performance.

At some point the whole discussion about old versus new devolves under its own weight but there's an aesthetic component that has more value. The real question what is the end result of the interplay between a given lens and film or sensors. One of my favorite lenses is the Nikon 105mm defocus coupling lens. It introduces spherical aberrations to create a system allowing the curved plane of projection on the sides of an image to be in front or behind the actual plane of sharp focus. The sides can be out of focus in front or behind the center for aesthetic reasons. How strange that must seem to all  the people's whose shallow view of lens quality is just how uniform sharpness is across the entire frame....

But that's just my digression for today. The reason I brought it all up is that last night I was shooting some images of a rehearsal. I'm shooting the actual rehearsal on Tues. so last night was more like a scouting visit to the theater. I wanted to see what the lighting was all about and how frenetic the production of Tommy would be. Since I didn't have to guarantee a perfect set of images, or any images at all, it freed me up to test an old lens I've been circling around to every once in a while. It's the 150mm f4.0 Olympus PenF lens from the late 1960's and early 1970's.  I used it on the little Olympus EM-5 with an inexpensive Fotodiox branded adapter. 

When I shoot theater I tend to use the cameras in the manual exposure mode. I set the ISO at 1600 and tried to maintain a minimum shutter speed above 1/200th of a second. These two shots are from the same frame. The one above is the full frame while the shot just below is a 100% crop. I did apply just a tad of noise reduction in Lightroom 5.0 to take the edge off. I accounts for the smoother skin tone in the bottom image. 

I was pretty impressed by the performance of this ancient lens, especially so since I was using it at it's maximum aperture. I can only think that if I had enough light to go to f5.6 or f8.0 the results would be even more impressive. When I look at the sharp eyelashes I marvel at the camera's ability to stabilize this long lens as well as my own ability to handhold it and to sharply focus it on a moving target, on a dark stage. 

The EM-5 is pretty darn good, noise and tonality-wise at ISO 1600. It's just about exactly as good as the GH4 under the same conditions. How do I know? Well, I shot them side by side last night. The GH4 got the easier job because it was coupled to the Panasonic 35-100mm f2.8 which is very sharp even wide open and it one stop faster than its 30 year old cousin. 

I have used adapters to try a range of different brands of lenses on the m4:3rds cameras but for some reason the hand selected Pen F lenses do the best job of any of the legacy lenses I've tried. Better than the Nikon manual focus lenses and better than my motley selection of aging Leica lenses. I think it's because the Pen F lenses were originally designed for very high resolution because their target was a half frame piece of film. The lens developers at Olympus knew they would have to give the smaller pieces of film every advantage they could and that meant optimizing the lens performance to render tiny detail well. It's probably the same thing the designers at Panasonic and Olympus do with m4:3 designs today. 

I am always interested in how a particular lens imparts a certain "feel" or look to an image. I just thought I'd share this little test....

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We'll both be happy you did!

For a guy who yammers on about "practice" I sure am out of practice...

an image from an annual report shoot several years ago. we used to go out more often with tons of gear poised over both shoulders and a cart in tow. do it every day and it becomes routine. hoist the bags too rarely and when you do get a job that involves portage you suffer.

WORK IS A CRUEL BITCH. It robs you of the time you deserve to spend shopping for fun, new cameras, taking naps and having coffee with friends who are as indolent as yourself.

I've been doing a lot of work lately that goes like this: Assistant (Ben) shows up and helps pack gear into cases and then into the car. We arrive at some high technology company headquarters or advertising location and Assistant helps load all the junk onto a stout cart and helps navigate to the elevators and onward to the final location. Assistant and photographer set up and usually spend a fun, happy, coffee filled and engaging morning or afternoon making portraits, or shooting products, or making photographs of people using their products. Then Assistant and I load everything back into the cases, return to the studio and I head to the computer while Assistant unloads car, then cases.

In previous times the business was more heavily weighted to two kinds of imaging that required more "big bag on shoulder" work. The image above was just one of six taken on six locations throughout a long day. Most of the locations were not the kinds that you could drive a car right up next to, hop out and work out of the hatchback. A job like the one above might require a quarter mile trek through some gravel and some mud (which always precluded the use of a cart). I'd put the camera bag, laden with all those too heavy, full frame or APS-C cameras and their huge lenses and assorted battery powered flashes, over one shoulder put the 18 pound Elinchrom Ranger RX AS pack over the other shoulder and grab a stand with a flash head and modifier to carry in my hands. Then we'd traipse off into the heat and find a great spot to in which to shoot.

The other type of carry it all around with you job is the corporate showcase or event. Imagine a sprawling convention center with half a million square feet of space, a client break out room or demo area or main tent speaker session at every end of the building and on every floor of the space---and events happening continually. I used to do these with a big Domke camera bag over one shoulder that held multiple, big, fat cameras, the usual holy trinity  of lenses (wide zoom, normal zoom, telephoto zoom), several flashes and lots of batteries. Most of the time you never put the bag down. You were shooting and then moving on to the next spectacle continually from the time you arrived (before dawn) till the last of the proscribed and required social functions; well past 10  pm.

If you were wise at all you'd switch the bag from shoulder to shoulder to try to even out the abuse.

But, as I wrote above, the work I'm doing these days requires more carting (too much studio type gear) and much less camera bagging. So I was rudely surprised at the end of the day yesterday when my left shoulder hurt, my left forearm was sore and my lower back was flashing the "if you do much more I'm going to punish you!!" symptoms.  I'd spent all day shooting. And for five hours of it I walked around with the heavy camera bag and too much stuff hanging over my left shoulder.

Here's the sneaky thing about all those super small and lightweight micro four thirds cameras: They take up less space so you can take more. I knew I'd be shooting with the Panasonic GH cameras because part of one shoot was video. But I also wanted to drag along the EM-5 with me to do some comparison shooting for an upcoming GH4 review. But of course any time my brain is in the testing mode you know that additional boutique-y, prime lenses and legacy mania optics are also coming along for the ride. Ben and I shot at the museum (he carried the bag full of flashes and LED panels as well as the light stands, the tripod and the clipboard with model releases) from 11:00 am till about 5 pm and then we headed home. I dropped him off, picked up different gear and more batteries and headed to Zach Theatre for an evening of rehearsal shooting, also with the comparative camera combos.

One of the things I was testing is Oly Jpeg files versus GH4 Jpegs. Not really a gnat's whisker difference in overall quality if you know how to set up the menus. The real fun part of the evening was working with the IBIS in the EM-5 along with an ancient Pen F 150mm f4 lens from the early 1970's. Amazing what you could do with that stuff if you actually got it in focus and stabilized.

At any rate, when I woke up this morning I was sore. Some of that could be three days in a row of 1.5 hour, holiday swim practices but the left shoulder and lower back can only be credited to being out of shape with the bag.

Other than reconstituting the type of jobs I'm searching for (and accepting the painful ones)  I don't know how to maintain that kind of conditioning. It would be too goofy to go for long walks with big camera bags. But there it is.

I know enough now to at least pawn off half the load to my Assistant. As I become less excited about dragging bags around maybe I'll just have to start surrounding myself with an entire assistant entourage. Naw...who am I kidding? I'm too cheap to feed more than one assistant per job...

At some point I guess every photographer has to come to grips with the fact that what you could carry through the day in your thirties changes when you hit your fifties. Doesn't make it any more palatable.




Need some action and adventure in your Summer? Try the photo novel of the Summer: 

We'll both be happy you did!

A quick discussion about camera batteries.

I bought an Olympus EM-5 a few days ago and I decided that I wanted to use if for one of the two projects I'll be shooting tomorrow. Love working on Sundays---it gives me a jump on the week.  So I started putting together a shooting kit for the two different jobs this morning and I hit the wall. I am so conditioned to taking back up batteries for every camera that I couldn't get mentally around the impediment imposed by having on a single battery for the EM-5. But I am hard headed and I really wanted to use it so I went online to see how much Olympus batteries cost. I was shocked to find that this tiny rectangle of plastic and lithium ion runs about $55.

I was on Amazon so I went ahead and checked for OEM batteries and I found a brand I've used before in several different cameras, Wasabi Power. The offer two batteries and a charger for just $23 dollars but Amazon can't get it here (at a reasonable shipping cost) before Monday, which does nothing for my compulsive desire to use the camera tomorrow (Sunday). I ordered the Wasabi Power batteries on the assumption that one day I'll want to take the EM-5 on a shooting trip or prolific shooting assignment and I'll want multiple batteries so I don't have to worry about on the job charging.

Then I got in my little car and headed to Precision Camera to pony up the full $55 for the Olympus brand battery. Which they did have in stock. Need an excuse to love your local bricks and mortar camera store? How about that the battery was a twenty minute drive away today. And its brother or sister will be there tomorrow if I need another one right away?

I needed to head out there anyway for some white seamless paper but we don't need to talk about that yet because it's a job for another day...

I got my battery and I charged it. Now it's in the camera grip. My compulsive nature is taking a rest.

But my consumer brain wants to know why the name brand batteries are cost a tenth of the price of a new camera. Why? And why are the people at Wasabi (and I assume countless other battery re-namers) able to deliver a battery with the same level of performance for 1/4th the price of the Olympus batteries?

And it's not just Olympus, I see the same differential with Panasonic and Sony too. I guess, with the diminishing market for actual cameras they have to make up margins somewhere else.

I'm not that happy about tiny, $55 batteries. But, on the other hand, I am happy to have the battery in the camera and ready for work... I guess it's all a mysterious trade-off.


Need some action and adventure in your Summer? Try the photo novel of the Summer: 

We'll both be happy you did!

Man buys obsolete camera after saying he "probably will" buy the camera nearly two years ago. The same, exact camera, not just the same model...

I used to have too many cameras and then I got rid

of a whole bunch of them and I felt a little naked

even though I had the three cameras I needed so I bought 

one more that does something a little different from 

the other three. Sue me. 

My friend, Frank, bought this camera (above= Olympus em-5) in May of 2012---about a week after the camera officially launched into stores. He didn't fool around either. He bought the battery grip right up front. We met for coffee so I could fondle the camera and see just how cool it was and then I went home and wrote a column about how this camera might eventually cost me $1500. I was postulating that I would probably be inspired in short order to rush out and buy one with the grip. That's about what they cost new back then. 

Frank has pretty much stayed the course with Olympus and Panasonic and has not made the fun but financially disastrous missteps that I have by also buying into the Sony Alpha system and, simultaneously, the Nex system as well. At one point recently I had overlapping systems (not just cameras) that covered Pentax, Samsung, Sony, Sony and Panasonic. It was insane. I never knew what camera to take out the door. And if I could decide on a brand some times it was a whole separate thing to decide on a format...

Now my sole point and shoot camera is a Sony RX10 and, until yesterday afternoon, my other (work) cameras were all Panasonic GH series cameras. I won't apologize for a giant mix of lenses as long as they all fit, with adapters, on the m4:3 cameras.

So I bought the mildly used camera (above) yesterday afternoon and I've spent some time with it. The rationale for stepping outside the Panasonic universe? It's for the times that I want to use the 17mm 1.8, and the 45mm 1.8, and the older PenF lenses with the benefit of image stabilization. That, and a need to understand why people were so emotionally loyal to the EM-5 camera.

I cleared off the dining room table last night and got out my steam powered slide rule (with genuine leather case), a pdf of the owner's manual blown up into hundreds of poster sized pages and laid out on the living room walls, and gathered five different large screen TVs, each with a YouTube video queued up from some OMD  web expert or another's attempt to demystify the menus. The entire team of Visual Science Lab experts dragged over the portable bar from headquarters and we spent the better part of 11 hours straight mixing martinis and daiquiris and trying to decipher and make sense of the labyrinthian Olympus menus. 

Our best bet was the black market guidebook that translated the Romanian version of the manual back into English. Somehow it was the least obtuse. We went on to spreadsheet all the various matrixes, all the possible combinations of settings and quickly realized that this could become more complex than encryption to the 12th place. 

Then Ben leaned in and turned on something called "SCP." and everything became much simpler. You could see all the important stuff in one place and take needed actions. Now, if only we could figure out what "SCP" means...

An interesting factoid that we discovered as we were slamming down benzedrine and trying to stay awake at sunrise while we continued learning to operate the menu in it's entirety,  is that if you go though all the menus in reverse, move each letter up or down in the alphabet by two steps ("m's" become "o's" or "k's") and go through that process eight times and then repeat interspersing letters represented by pi numerals in sequence while skipping every third menu line you will eventually write a perfect copy of James Joyce's novel, Ulysses.  Not complicated at all.  (Where the hell is the green zone...?).

After a 30 minute nap and five cups of coffee I decided to go out and at least try to shoot with the camera. I was pleasantly surprised. As long as you don't have to change anything in the menus it is an elegant and fun picture taker. I might be able to manage ISO and white balance settings on my own but I did bring along three technicians with laptops poised to get straight through to the geniuses on the forums at DPreview but....surprisingly I did pretty well on my own. Tomorrow we'll get that diopter thingy just right....

Need some action and adventure in your Summer? Try the photo novel of the Summer: 

We'll both be happy you did!

Independence Eve Swim. With camera in tow.

I got up ten minutes before the seven a.m. swim workout, grabbed my towel and my suit from the rack in the bathroom, filled a water bottle with a mix of cucumber Gatorade and water, grabbed a Samsung NX30 camera with the 85mm lens and headed out the door. The pool is about a mile from my house and I made it, suited up and was in lane four warming up by 7 sharp. The pool was packed. The workout was fun. We got in about 3,000 yards in an hour and then hauled ourselves out to make room for the 8:00 a.m. work out people. 

Usually I get dressed and then go on a focused search for coffee but today I decided to pull the camera out of the car and snap some atmospheric images of the 8 a.m. crew pounding through their workout. Jimmy B. was the coach on deck and he wrote a good series of sets. The coaches write the sets on a dry erase board, explain the sets and then as the swimmers execute the written workout the coaches watch for stroke mechanics that need correcting. They also shout out encouragement. 

Most of our training tends to be interval training. We mix long sets (series of quarter mile swims) with more speedy/agressive sets of 50 and 100 yard repeats. When our two former Olympians coach they each emphasize hard kicking sets to build speed. We older swimmers hate the kick sets because they invariably become anaerobic but they really do help increase the potential to go fast. 

The lanes are segregated by the sustainable swim speeds of groups of swimmers. On the far left side of the pool are slower swimmers and swimmers recovering from injuries. Lane two swimmers might be able to repeat 100 yard intervals continuously on a 1:45 pace, lane three on 1:35, lane four on 1:25, lane five on 1:15 and the fastest lanes might choose to repeat 100 yard intervals on something as crazy as a 1:05 interval. Not bad given that the average age in the fastest three lanes is probably around 35 or 40. 

In some of the images here you'll see swimmers wearing hand paddles. The paddles greatly increase the surface area of the hand/water contact component and build strength. They also reinforce good technique because any flaws in the arm stroke are magnified by the increased surface area. Some coaches only allow us to use hand paddles sparingly because they do modify body position. Other coaches using pulling as a reward because the increased speed one is able to attain is.....a little addictive.

I love the hand paddles because I have good upper body strength and a mediocre kick but one of our coaches, Tommy, says that swimming is kicking and he's bent on making me a better kicker, even if it kills me. That said, I notice that his ban on my pulling with a pull buoy for flotation has already improved by body position in the water. In swimming it seems that good technique is everything. Endurance and strength is important but it's all trumped (at least in sprints) by better technique. Which requires constant practice and focus.

We are very lucky to be Austin swimmers because we can swim outside all year round. Our club does a great job maintaining an 80 degree temperature by chilling the water in the summer and heating it in the winter. I can no longer imagine getting up every day and going straight in to work at a real job. I've done a good job over the past twelve years of weaning myself from the mentality that showing up all the time for work is a good thing. My perfect day---and I am engineering more and more of them---starts with a good, fun, friendly workout at the pool followed by coffee and some fun protein---like the Otto breakfast taco at Taco Deli. What is an "Otto"? A whole wheat tortilla, slathered with refried (vegetarian) black beans, slices of fresh avocado, a couple slices of applewood smoked bacon and a little drizzle of salsa verde. A couple of those will hold you until a late afternoon lunch. 

Only after the morning fun rituals do I consider sitting down and working on work. There are some mornings when I have to sacrifice a morning swim to meet a schedule but those times are getting further apart as I try to schedule more and more shoots to start around 11 a.m. and end by 6 p.m. After all, we're not selling our time we're selling what we know...

Synchronized flip turns. Cool. There's something about coming off the wall after a good turn that's magic. Getting the maximum glide through the water before beginning your stroke is, in my opinion, the closest most people will ever really come to the sensation of flying without a device. It makes one feel so alive.

By the way.... I am buying an Olympus OMD EM-5 today...just to see what all the fuss is about. Can't wait to compare its files to those from the GH3s and GH4. My rationale? I needed one body with IBIS for those times when I want to use the 45mm 1.8 and other non IS lenses in low light. Good rationale, huh?

The photo/fiction action/adventure blockbuster of the Summer. 

A "must have" as the antidote to boring time

spent in airports and on planes...

A little hazy on the copyright law (U.S.) and need more info about how it affects photographers?

Here's a video that the people at B&H did with Jack Reznicki and partners. It's very good but it's over an hour. If you need the information....

A fun video for Asti Trattoria. Two cameramen. One vision = make the food look as good as it is.

Asti May 2014 from Kirk Tuck on Vimeo.
This video is about Asti May 2014


My friend, Chris, and I both swim with the owner of Asti Trattoria here in Austin. It's been open for nearly fourteen years now and I've been trekking across town for an almost endless series of great lunches and dinners for....fourteen years now. Asti is a neighborhood restaurant. It's located in the Hyde Park area of Austin, directly north of the University of Texas at Austin Law School.

Chris and I both wanted to play around with shooting food on video so we approached our friend, Emmett, to see if he needed a video for his restaurant's website. Bingo. Everyone wins.

We talked about the process a couple of times after swim practice and then set aside two days in which we would document the behind the scenes action at the restaurant. Nearly every second of video is shot handheld. There are a few exceptions like the night shots and the exterior shots. We would have used tripods more in the kitchen but we were working in and around the chefs during their regular service hours and, like any really good restaurant, they stay busy during every open hour.  We learned to swerve by the action, lean in and move out without burning our cameras or getting in the way (too often).

I had grand plans for a beginning, a middle and an end but I got some great advice from a cinematic guru. He basically said to scrap the script and just start layering in the good shots with the music we'd chosen. He told me that when I ran out of shots I liked then the edit was over. Good advice.

We did some interviews but they slowed the program down too much. In the end we decided to let the food sell the project... Bon Appetit. If you live in Austin check them out: http://astiaustin.com

Tech notes: I used a Panasonic GH4 while Chris used the GH3. We used both cameras mostly at ISO800 and ISO1600. While convention calls for shooting with very flat profiles and low contrast and sharpening we aimed to get out of the cameras exactly the image we wanted to see in the edit so we aimed for natural or standard settings with very slight modifications. Our lenses of choice were the 12-35mm f2.8 and the 35-100mm f2.8 Panasonic X lenses. We also used several ancient Olympus Pen lenses,  including the 40mm 1.4 and the 60mm 1.5. We usually shot with the lenses wide open and I did a lot of my work in manual focus. Both cameras were set at 30 fps.  I did the edit in Final Cut Pro X and we output to 720p for the copy that's resident on Vimeo. Ben helped me with a few technical issues that came uninvited into the editing. Man, can that kid troubleshoot. Thanks to Chris and Ben for all their hard work. 

Relentless Gear Snobbery and The real reason why Canon will not "lose the war" to m4:3.

I've been thinking a lot lately about the relentless way in which most of my friends and colleagues, even those insufferable boors who pretend they care nothing about gear and posture that they are not moved by avarice or gear lust, rely on their idea of the intrinsic value of their chosen cameras to bolster their enthusiasm for the process of making photographs. I buy into it as well even though on so many levels I know that none of the goodly-gook we spout is true. A metal shelled mini-camera won't get you to Moonrise over Hernandez New Mexico any better than plastic... Knowing my psychology at least half of my decision making is about choosing the anti-hero camera. The dark horse. The outsider choice. Which is hilarious since most photographey is a total insider experience. And I can't imagine any one more in the mainstream circle than myself...

I'm beginning to think that we buy our cameras as fashion statements and not logically as we would with a selection of righteous tools. A cross cut saw for on application, a framing hammer for another. In hand tools we would look for solid construction and the right fit in the hand.  Carbon fiber handles? Ridiculous. But I think the last four year wave of camera buying has everything to do with American Appareling and Tommy Hillfigering of hobbyist photography and not the performance we say we are chasing...

Since I seem to be as big a slave to the fashion of photography as anyone else what is the reason for this particular column? Why am I revealing to myself and anyone who reads this that we are, in our chosen field, as fickle and as bendable by the fashion of the moment as the women who wore bad, pink sweatpants with "Juicy" emblazoned across the rear end a few years ago. Most of us are manipulated by camera fashion even as we rail against the concept that we are embrace cameras not for what they can do for our picture taking but what we want them to do for our status and image.

My abrupt epiphany came a few days ago when I played with a non-photographer friend's Canon Rebel T3i camera and two kit lenses. I hadn't played around with one of these cameras in years and years and I expected it to feel like cheap trash in my hands. I expected every frame to be marred by the cheap lenses' mediocre performances and I expected every image file to be rendered banal by the camera's many imagined compromises. But it didn't really happen that way and when I shot a few frames I kind of sat up a bit and started paying attention.

My friend didn't have any kid's soccer games on her calendar for the next few days so she lent me the camera to play around with. It's like every Canon APS-C camera in that it uses the traditional mirror mania and it comes complete with the Canon standard 18 megapixel CMOS sensor. And interestingly enough the sensor is pretty good. Oh, I am sure the D800 will blow it away once we get around to printing stuff really large but I've gone five years now without having more than one or two requests for any prints bigger than 12 by 18 inches and I think just about all the cameras I've played with in the last ten years can handle that pretty well.

The camera feels consumer-y (another snob designation) but my friend tosses it around her Suburban and drops it on the soccer field a lot and even lets her six year old boy use it for long periods of time and it's held up remarkably well. I can see where little, inconsequential stuff, has been broken off but like a Timex watch the body seems to "take a licking and keep on ticking."  Could it be that the consumer-y polycarbonate is at least as bullet proof as the precious, milled metal dials and multi-position touch pads that keep falling off my other friend's more expensive and chic cameras?

The bottom line, at least as we keep defining it in our relentless need to justify new purchases, is the ultimate imaging performance and certainly there's no way a $500 camera (and that's with two lenses....) can rival, say, my new GH4 system, right?

Hmmm. Well, if you are doing video for clients I'm going to say that the Panasonic is generations better. The video is sharper and available at higher resolutions. There are also ports for microphones and headphones as well as manual level controls. But...if you are shooting the kiddo trying to keep up with a soccer ball and you are playing back the Canon 1080i 720p video on your Samsung or Vimeo 540i quasi-HD television set I'm going to say there isn't really a big difference. The end display being the ubiquitous weak point in all of this.

And guess what? If you go head to head on sensor performance for noise and resolution, again, not much difference, if any. But surely the lens performance between my Panasonic X glass and the woeful kit lenses of the Rebel is outrageously huge, right? Well sure. If you always shoot wide open you'll get a faster and (as far as I can tell) sharper lens but here's the deal, if you go all real world and you are shooting that swim meet under the blistering, Texas sun or that soccer match under some other state's more tepid sun you'll be spending most of your time around f5.6 or f8 and I'm going to bet that at f8 there's not a lot to cry about with either lens. Keep thinking $500 versus $4400.... Put a 50mm 1.8 on the Canon for an extra hundred bucks and all of a sudden you've got a low light shooter that gets close to the performance of any m4:3 system. Really. Especially when you factor in the money.

In the studio it's the same story. That nasty, consumer-y 70-300mm zoom becomes very well behaved portrait lens when you clamp it onto a tripod, stop it down a little bit and stop all unwanted motion with a diffused blast of studio electronic flash. You'd be hard pressed to tell the difference under those conditions (at f5.6 or f8), at a decent enlargement, between the masterful D800 and the mighty Rebel.

I think this calculus of price and performance is the dirty secret that keeps the faux rangefinder GX-7s and Fujis X's, as well as the retro Olympus OMD's and mini-DSLR styled Panasonics at bay in the war to gain total market share. The fact that for a fraction of the cost (and a hit to your style consciousness...) the entry level, traditional cameras do a remarkably good job at keeping up with what matters----ultimate image quality. They are not the best overall but they may be the best compromise. For most actual users. All bets are off if you just buy the gear to wear it.

The D800 is the best IQ producer in the 35mm style, mass production cameras at the moment. Let's peg it's performance, on sensor, at 100. And let's be generous and give the 24 megapixeled Nikon cameras (APS-C variants) a solid 90-92% for on sensor goodness. And maybe all of our other wonderful mini-framers come in between 85 and 90%,  but that doesn't mean that the recent Rebels make a failing grade of 59. Far from it. If we X out handling and frame rate, X out the so-so viewfinder, and shoot all the cameras in Raw I think we'll find the Rebel is also in the wonderful 85-90 % range which signifies a solid B+.

We overlook it because it is not pretty as understood by today's design ethos. It's more like the Juicy sweatsuit knock-offs of yesteryear. We would also like more dials. But at the heart the T3i is one of the top selling cameras in the entire world because Canon gets something that the photo cognoscenti don't really seem to understand: To the world market the Rebel is a tool that delivers everything most people need (for taking photographs)  except the high fashion aspect of it's physical style. No faux rangefinder. No small enough to fit into the pocket of your dinner jacket. And the exterior styling is as exciting as a 2002 Toyota Corolla body. But, like the Corolla, it's a reliable,  and for the most part comfortable appliance and it gets you where you are going.

Does this mean that I plan on abandoning all the gear I've accrued to date in order to pursue a rational course with Rebel gear that's good enough ?  Not very likely but from now on I'll work a bit harder to separate actual performance that matters from stylistic touches that have very little real value.

I still remember my lust to get my hands on the Fuji Pro 1X when it first came out. I was at the door of the camera store waiting for them to open. I loved the feel of the body because it reminded me so much of my old Leica. And then I brought it to my eye and the finder was out of focus. I looked in vain for the diopter adjustment, a feature that's been standard on even the meanest, little viewfindered compact camera for well over a decade. The Fuji Pro 1X did not have one. I left the shop without one. I watched my friends, confirmed raw shooters, agonize over the new, non-Bayer sensor's special needs. I read about the focusing issues, etc. Yes, it was a fashionable camera but I'm pretty sure I could have outshot it in a heartbeat with a Rebel. For one third the price.

Pride of ownership? Not with a Rebel. Rational behavior? Not with a Pro 1X.

I'm picking on the Pro 1X but we could just as easily pick apart the new Sony A7 or the oil and dust spattering Nikon D600. Or the devil-spawned menus of the OMD EM-1 (as well as the product name...). The bottom line, whether we like to concede it on not, is that most of our camera purchases these days have little to do with technical proficiency of the tools and a lot to do with our fashion sense. It's good to be honest about it. Doesn't mean we have to change.

Anymore than those lovely young women wearing seven inch heels are thinking about the logic of wearing a nice, comfortable (safe) pair of running shoes.....

This line of thought coincided with a good article on The.me.com here: http://www.the.me/a-hobby-for-the-very-wealthy/

I think we tend to skew our priorities because, in one sense (financial) we can really have just about any camera we want and so we look beyond workable to aspirational or "the best" just because we can. It's an interesting confluence today. At least I think so.