Dancing with Digital.

Chuy's Propeller Art.

There are some weird aspects to doing photography for a living. One is that my emotional connection and excitement about photography, and especially commercial photography, go through pronounced ebbs and flows. For a while I seems to have abundant energy to engage and make images and then, after a binge of non-stop shooting there seems to always be a period in which I don't want to walk into the studio in the morning and I avoid picking up my camera(s) for days at a time. 

When we worked with film there seemed to be natural rhythms based around the workflow. There was the planning, then the excitement of the shoot followed by a time and process mandated cooling off period in which your film was developed and contact sheets made. Then there was the serene and quiet solitude of hours and hours spent in the darkroom. Making images as prints that you could share and wanted to share took time. There was a commitment.

And here's a weird little secret about how my brain works, the expense of buying and dealing with film at every step of the way always worked as a filter for me. The gushing/hemorrhaging of earned money helped me prioritize what I looked at and how important a subject was to me. The expense also implied, on some level, the value which the image had to me. A perfect image might have been the final result of several boxes of pricey printing paper and lots of time, but when I finally held the print in my hands there was an intrinsic value that was most probably just an overlay of my thought process. My need to hang a value on something so costly to produce.

In my film days I rarely shot any of the things I now routinely walk around and photograph. I would never shoot a landscape, rarely shoot a photo of a building. Never really shot a cup of coffee and if I did it nearly always had a very beautiful person on the other side of it. That rigor meant I didn't shoot as much but when I did I was incredibly engaged. Now we just walk around looking for stuff to feed into our camera and the main filter is whether or not the image might fit the parameters that make it "share-able."

And in a circuitous way I think somewhere in the left or right sphere of my cerebellum all of this gets mixed into the almost autonomic buying of camera equipment, for me. If the process has no inherent cost my thought process needs to lead me in some way to incorporating a cost. No film? Okay, how about we substitute an endless flow of cool camera bodies? There seems to be some short term (placebo effect) pop to changing stuff (cameras and lenses) around in that the first month or so of ownership (and having spent money) pushes me to go out and use the cameras to make some art. The effect wears off when my accounting brain (admittedly very tiny) assesses that I've used the camera enough to "recover" its cost. At that point the camera is a camera and no longer a cathartic lever. And I start the cycle over again. (Self awareness can be embarrassing and sucky...). 

So, when I really meditate on what we've been doing, collectively, over the past few years it's really a massive attempt to re-balance the value proposition of seeing and sharing and the awkward personal creation of "skin in the game." This won't make any sense at all to anyone who came of age as a photographer in the age of total digital but it seems to make sense to me.  We need to feel as though we've spent something valuable to make the results of our creative processes seem valuable to us. I think it's a pattern we might want to break. Might need to break in order to get back to the pure business of just having fun with photography again.

While it seems that I must have amassed a veritable horde of cameras in the past few years they come and go. One in one out. Yesterday I sent a Samsung NX30 and two lenses to a friend who wants to do video and multimedia projects but didn't have a camera budget. That set is no longer swirling in my "constant inventory rotation awareness" gland. All the point and shoot and bridge cameras have been surrendered in my quest to focus in tighter. I keep trying to winnow down but the cycle is hard to break, especially when the rationale of better art through buying is behind much of the cycle...

No matter how impregnable you think your mind is to the suggestions that torment mine I think the thought patterns I've described, that I am plagued with, are almost universal artifacts of affluent, post industrial socio-economic beneficiaries like me and the people who read the blog. We have the blessing and the curse of being able to buy what we want. And we've grown up (mis)understanding that the more energy (read= money) you put into something the more intrinsically valuable it becomes (even when it's not). By extension the subconscious idea that a photo made with a Leica trumps a photo made with a phone or a photo made with a Canon Rebel is obviously(?) trumped by the "magical" output of a Phase One medium format camera.

A photographer in a less affluent society might not carry the same misguided burden around with him because he or she may not have the option of adding gear, trading gear (and continually loosing out to depreciation...) and generally not having the excess time to walk around aimlessly looking for something to give his camera and his vision a reason to exist... But I may be wrong and my thoughts might be either universal or singularly pathological. You never know when you are your own context.

Digital changes the nature of the dance with art. It can be a firehose that never shuts off. It can be as cheap or as dear as you want to make it. The cameras never seem to be a zero sum tool. There's always more pie. They don't run out of potential. How do we mould all of this into a different and more helpful way to do our art now? I imagine it's all about identifying what you really wanted to do with your craft in the first place and heading back to re-emphasize that connection. That inspiration. 

Could it be that we have been our own worse enemies by looking to the digital camera as a source of endless visual refreshment and sustenance only to have gorged on it's ease and renewability until we've made ourselves obese with choice? Maybe it's the same with texting and cellphones. People are gorging on communication now but are becoming intellectually and social diluted by the ease and endlessness of it. Would texts be smarter and better if they were limited to one or two per day?

How do you dance with digital? Who leads, you or the camera? And why do so many other cameras seem to want to cut in?

Low Tech Obsolete Gear of the Day.

For the last few weeks I've been stuck in post production prison. I've shot a lot of assignments and most of them are portrait intensive. That means lots of after the fact work. I usually shoot too much but I'd rather have some selections I love than stop before the good stuff even happens. This all needs to be edited (when I say "edit" I use it as we used to understand the word. I choose the good frames from the bad frames). Once the stuff is edited and key worded in Lightroom I go through and make some global processing adjustments. These might include an overall sharpening if the camera warrants it (especially older cameras with chunky anti-aliasing filters), general exposure adjustments and a bit of "clarity" to pop the files a bit so they read well in our next step, which is the creation and uploading of galleries for our clients.

The real work comes when the clients come back with their selections. I'm never sure where to stop because we participate in a craft that can be endlessly perfected but we work with budgets that are just computed for excellent. This afternoon I edited exterior portraits of seven different executives. I masked the subject so I could blur the trees in the background a bit more. And I ended up adding a graded blurring with ever contracting selection parameters and some feathering thrown in for good measure. I fixed stray hairs. I switched one person's left eye out for a re-worked version of his right eye (remembering to switch the catchlight from one side of the iris to the other) so his eyes would appear to match. The subject had a tendency to always squint one eye.... I gave form to chins, banished stray hairs and even fixed lumpy collars. And all that takes time. But I like to do this kind of post production all in one go because the corporate client will almost always be using these portraits together. I wanted there to be continuity in everything from color temperature to the general feel of the out of focus backgrounds.

By the time I hit the button to upload 500 megabytes of files (various file types two different color profiles) I was ready to get out of the studio, get a camera in my hand and start shooting something. Kind of a knee jerk reaction to an afternoon chained to a chair by work. So I grabbed a couple of lingering cameras and headed out the door. I got in the car, clicked on an old Bob Dylan album (Blood on the Tracks) and pointed the car toward the ever present downtown.

But I didn't get very far because I just wasn't feeling it today. I walked the space yesterday. I turned the car around and parked it at the house. My friend, the Studio Dog, was waiting for me at the front door. I walked through the house and grabbed two tennis balls and Studio Dog lit up with bouncy enthusiasm. We played search and rescue with the balls until the last glow of the sun started fading and then we sat on the back porch and just watched the light change. She stuck her chin on my leg and sighed a contented sigh. At that point I realized I'd spent far too much time with my cameras and not nearly enough time with her.

And I also realized that I didn't have a current photograph of her that I really liked. I grabbed one camera off the dining room table and came back out. We spent the next ten minutes in the quickly fading light horsing around and taking dog portraits together. Studio Dog is a born collaborator. She'll stay still on command and stare up at me through the bushy overhang of her wiry fur with a whole menu of "looks." She is the Zoolander of dogs....

The camera I was using was the old, used Nikon D7000 I picked up recently. I seem to be pushing it into every shooting scenario. I guess I'm just not afraid of messing it up. I don't baby it like I do with other more serious cameras. And I really can see why people have been singing the praises of that sensor for so long. It's smooth and rich and sharp.

We took a break for one of Studio Dog's nightly rituals. The dogs who live behind us are a motley crew of chihuahuas and other lap creatures. Every once in a while (at least three times a day) they are let out of their house and they make a bee line for our shared fence, growling and barking in a menacing fashion. Studio Dog loves nothing more than to run at top speed to the fence and use her most gravelly, growly voice to warn them off.  On each side of the fence they run back and forth and the two camps make a thunderous and primal noise. Then Studio Dog saunters back toward the house taking time to stop and pee. Which further incites the dogs on the other side of the fence.

While she was engaged I grabbed a different camera and when she was satisfied with the match we shot one more portrait. This time I used one of the many Olympus EM-5's that seem to be multiplying around the studio. It was fun to hang out with a too often neglected member of our little nuclear family. It was nice to stay home and watch the light shift and fade and go to black. At that point we headed inside to find water and wine. A nice end to a job heavy Sunday.

Seriously wondering if we haven't overshot on camera technology. I keep thinking that the EM5 and the D7000 look better than anything else I've shot or tested lately. Am I wrong or just contextually nostalgic?

Craftsy.com Photography classes all on sale through Monday December 1st.

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That's the boilerplate from Craftsy.com but I really do think their photo classes are a screaming bargain at these prices. You can watch them as many times as you want, communicate with the teachers in a dedicated forum and learn new stuff from people who are really good at what they do. It's pretty much a zero risk proposition. My classes are on there too. Even the free one.
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Just a quick, commercial message. Now, back to our usual programming.....

The most boring part of my business. The back up. The back up. The back up.

Just mixing it up. Garrido's Restaurant.

A measured response. Garrido's Restaurant.

I used to back up in two different ways. I would write the files from a job to a DVD or multiple DVDs. When files were smaller I would burn two sets of DVDs as a back up. One from a particular manufacturer's brand of DVDs and one from an alternate brand, just to make sure someone at the factory wasn't having a bad day that might make my life miserable down the road. After burning the DVDs I'd make a back up onto two different external hard drives. It was a miserable use of time but you could always write a blog or a novel while you were waiting to feed the DVD burner....

But then there came a day when, because of the increase in raw file sizes, every job was requiring four or five DVDs and by the time you made a back up set you'd spent some real quality time sitting in the office trying to future proof work for a client. And many times (most times?) the advertising work has a more limited life than the DVDs or the hard drives themselves. The sheer volume of work in a good year means going through some respectable number of terabytes to get all the original and finished files from every video and still photography projects safely tucked away.

When fast 7200 rpm drives became more $$ available I started using them in the video editing cycle and in the image or edit processing cycle of a job and then writing everything out to additional, large but slower hard drives for back up.

I noticed on my last trip to my local Costco that 4 terabyte drives could be had, on sale, for $114. These are Seagate USB 3 drives in nondescript enclosures and they work with Macs and PCs. I bought some. Now I am in the process of making a third point of back up for the work I've done in the last quarter. I am transferring 842.95 gigabytes of job files from one of the previous 3TB drives. The files will also remain on that drive and the original drive on which they were ingested and edited.  Of course the back-up is automatic at this point but it still boggles the mind that it will take three hours to complete the task. I have to admit that it's a heck of a lot faster than the original USB1 ports I started out with. After SCSI that is...

I tend to buy the hard drives in pairs and now that we're under the $150 mark for a 4TB the transactions are not as painful. I would council everyone who uses a method like this for backing up to get a slap of white tape and write the drive "name" and date of beginning and end of service (taken off system because it is full) and put it on the drive. I also recommend making a list of all the files on the drive and putting it in a notebook for quick reference should you need to find a precious file in a moment of desperation.

I liked making DVDs much better. While it took longer it's been exceedingly rare for me to have a CD or a DVD go "stupid" on me. I recently pulled some Kodak Gold CDs from 1999 of work I'd done in Madrid for Tivoli Systems and all the disks worked well. No corrupted files. But I do like the speed and ease of the HD back-ups. I just hope they are making them more and more reliable. But, unlike the film days I find myself not caring that much about older, client work files. We've instituted a policy of telling all clients in writing that when we hand them files the storage and maintenance of the files (including future migrations) is their sole responsibility. I make every effort to keep my hands on the work and the work on a working set of disks but no one can guard entirely from multiple, coincidental failures. And I might drop over dead just when they need their files the most. I will not delay my departure just to do more client tasks. :-) (Not planning on leaving any time soon).

I listened to Vincent Laforet talk to a group of our students a few years ago he dived into incredible detail about his back up strategy which calls for storing all files in RAID arrays in closet sized enclosures as well as making multiple tape back ups of everything. At the time he was estimating that his cost just to cool all the drives and the servers related to the drives was about $800 per month. Added to that one of his office assistants was constantly in the process of migrating terabytes of information from older drives to newer drives. It was stunning to listen to him and calculate the total monthly outlay he blew through just on back ups.

I've outlined my current back-up strategy above. I know some of you have far more technical knowledge about storage than I do. If you have any suggestions that might benefit all of the readers don't hesitate to chime in. If it's cost effective and better we're ready to change.

In the meantime I looked around Amazon to see what kind of deals I could find on external HDs. I limited my search to USB3's and Thunderbolts. Now might be the right time to add another layer to the back-up strategy or at least its redundancy.

This is the model I just picked up. You might be able to get a slightly better price at Costco but if you hate braving the crowds and already have an Amazon Prime membership AND you want to support my work here at the site this is not a bad price.....

And while you are waiting around for your back ups to happen it might be nice to have something exciting and photography oriented in your hands to read. Here's nice novel with a photographer as the protagonist. He's also a Leica aficionado. The Kindle version is on sale from $3.99 for the rest of this year. If you prefer to get your intrigue and adrenaline on paper we've got that too....

Real World Testing an Old Lens Just for Fun. And because it was such a nice day outside.

It was in the seventies here today with bright sun and sparse clouds. 

I've done my AF fine tuning with the AF lenses but I wanted to 

get out, walk around and see how another lens I recently bought 

actually performed. 

I put the old, Ais Nikon 25-50mm f4.0 lens on the Nikon D7000 and went for a walk through

downtown. I used the camera on manual. I set the lens at f8.0 and the shutter speed to 1/250th with the ISO set to 100. Occasionally I strayed a bit. I shot a few wide open. 

I shot a few in "A" mode with auto ISO but for the most part, as above.

The color is different than my newer lenses. So is the contrast rendering. 

But the resolution is very high. 

At f8.0 I suspect nearly every lens is beautiful. 

That's all I cared about in my shooting today.

Sharp versus SHARP. Taking time to fine tune the AF performance on each camera.

I got lots and lots of great feedback on the last blog. The one about diffraction and sensor size. And one of the things that commenters drove home is that a lot of what we were discussing is theoretically interesting but that diffraction effects, as they impact sharpness, are just one part of an assemblage of "moving parts" in the practice of real world photography. Yes, you'll see an erosion of sharpness as you push past the diffraction limited f-stops of your cameras but for many, many users that degradation will be amply masked by many other factors, from lens performance to sloppy user habits. In effect, to worry about diffraction effects while hand holding a camera and shooting a landscape is a bit daft.

I've had a busy, busy year and when we get swamped we always tend to look for magic bullets and quick fixes rather than just taking a deep breath and remembering how to do stuff right. A couple of weeks ago I mulled over the acquisition of a D810 or a D750 in a non-essential search for low hanging, sharp fruit. But a glitch during my photography at the Zach Dress rehearsal of "A Christmas Carol" did wonders to snap my brain back into "optimization" mode.

So, what was the snafu? Well, I had tested the 18-140mm Nikon lens on both my D7100 and my new D7000 bodies and found it to be very sharp wide open. Being a bit lazy and optimistic I assumed that this meant both cameras were focusing correctly and, by extension, would focus all lenses hung off the front of them correctly. Right? My previous experiences with the D7100 using the 85mm and 50mm lenses wide open showed me that that camera was pretty nicely zero'd in. It turns out that not all was merry and bright with the newer/older D7000. I had used it with a 50mm before and found it to perform well wide open but this was not the case with the 85mm 1.8G.

At the start of the performance I had the 85mm on the D7000 and I didn't like what I saw when I spot checked the first few frames at the maximum magnification of the review screen on the back. It just wasn't rendering a sharp image! I exchanged lenses between the two cameras and instantly saw the sharpness I expected with the D7100+85mm combination. Grumble, grumble.

I spent all day Weds. post processing files from four different jobs and then, after dinner, I headed back into the studio to do billing and to read through comments here concerning my thoughts on diffraction. A couple comments about how many different factors effect sharpness really resonated with me and I decided that it was time to check the AF accuracy of all the lenses I have on the D7000.

There are probably many methods that could be superior to my autofocus check process but this is what I do. I printed out resolution charts and taped them to the wall. I worked at getting my camera parallel to the wall and my exposure just right. I tethered the camera to Nikon's capture software and I went into "test mode." I went into the camera menu and found the AF-fine tune controls. I used the conventional AF, watching through the finder to make sure the green confirmation lit came on during focus. I had the camera set for center focusing point, S-AF. Once the focus showed a lock I switched the lens and body to manual to lock in the focus and then hit the live view switch. Then I painstakingly set and checked the lens at ever point, from +20 to -20. I had my monitor set for 100%. At that magnification it was easy to see the differences.

Once I knew where the ballpark of sharp focus resided I spent a while refocusing with the AF and reconfirming the sharpest setting. Turns out that the worst culprit in the tool box is the 85mm f1.8 ON THAT BODY. It needs a -19 correction to focus correctly. I suspected some sort of camera issue but the 50mm f1.8 required only a minus 3 to be convincingly sharp.

That led me to suspect that something must be wrong with the lens itself. So I put the lens on the D7100 and tried the same tests and found that the 85mm is right on the money with no calibration on that camera. The mysteries of cameras and lenses.

Cutting to the chase I went ahead and did the same testing with all the AF Nikon lenses on both bodies and fine tuned the crap out of the whole system. While some lenses were pretty accurate at zero most needed + or - tweaks of five points (out of twenty possible on either side of zero) or less to be as sharp as they are ever going to be on either camera.

Doing this convinced me of three things. First, that I'd been too lazy about technical stuff recently and I could see, immediately, the effects of increased sharpness in the photographs I took during my post calibration test drives. Secondly, that if I'm going to worry about things like diffraction and sensor size it behooves me to zero out and optimize as many parts of the equation I have control over. And, third, that the cameras we have in hand are already great performers once we've taken the time to optimize them and use the best technique.

One bright or sad note (depending on your particular camera inventory) is that the majority of my lenses, in combination with the two bodies, could use a bit of tweaking to get my money's worth when it comes to sharpness.  I did spot check a few of my mirror less bodies and found no focusing issues that I could test for. I would jump in and enthusiastically say that there were "no" problems but the cameras don't give me the tools to actually check the point of highest sharpness as driven by the camera's AF systems so, in fact, we really don't know if the mirror less (mirror free!) camera actually are any better in this regard. Maybe a bit more research is needed.

Now, when I shoot my 85mm lens at it's highest non-diffraction limited f-stop I'm actually getting all of the benefits designed into the lens and camera system and I'm hopeful that I'll see globally improved results. A fixed up camera and lens system is a good defense against incipient camera lust and delivers the same benefit of washing and waxing your old car = it makes you happier with it all.

Just a thought if you've already put in a twelve hour day and you need something to do after dinner. A sharper system is a happier photographer?

Trying zany stuff during a photo shoot of "A Christmas Carol" for Zach Theatre.

Wouldn't it be cool, I thought, to have one camera and one lens with which to cover an entire musical dress rehearsal? So, I looked around the studio and cobbled together what I thought would be a workable system. The idea was to have the gear nailed down so that no decisions would need to be made other than timing and zooming. Of course I'd need to mind the exposure settings and check in on the color balance but no more grabbing camera X for the wide stage shots or grabbing for camera Y for those tight head shots. And, of course there's always camera K with the medium to telephoto zoom. It gets old juggling camera bodies.

Choosing from the inventory in the studio at the time I decided on the Nikon D7100 and the 18-140mm zoom lens. The lens is pretty sharp in the vast center section of the frame and since most of the corners and edges in a theater shoot are dark I thought that would be okay. The 18mm end of the lens is fine for full stage shots but even though the 140mm end is about the equivalent of a 210mm on a full frame camera I knew there would be some times when I would really like a bit tighter crop. I decided that this would be the perfect opportunity to try out Nikon's in camera crop mode.

The camera's sensor is an APS-C, 24 megapixel version. But there is a menu switch that allows for another layer of crop which is a 1.3 crop of the standard DX size (if that makes sense). As near as I can tell it turns my zoom lens's long end into a 280mm lens while, of course, maintaining the same aperture, f5.6 (sorry, no clue about the T-stop...).

The upshot? Well, I shot mostly wide open and I reviewed the stuff today and it was all good. Not pin sharp like we'd use for giant promo posters but we do those in the studio with electronic flash and ISO 100 well before the shows open. This material is destined for publicity and will mostly wind up on websites and in newsprint. Different parameters for different applications.

From time to time I wished for a bit more foreground and background separation but not as often as one would think. It's rare that two or more people are positioned in a straight line, perpendicular to the camera, and so generally we are looking for enough depth of field juice to cover the spread.

One thing I did chaff at last night was having to pretty much shoot from one position.  And by necessity a bit far from the stage. Since we've been doing dress rehearsals with full houses of "family and friends" it's not possible to move around and get close to the stage quickly like it was when we shot in the older theater. That space was much smaller, the house wasn't as expensive to use by the day and we could be relaxed enough not to start our promotions on dress rehearsal night. I was able to roam the edges of that stage and shoot with wider angle lenses, closer. Always closer.

So, when I was using the camera in DX mode I shot in 24 megapixel settings but when I wanted to go tight I switched to the tighter crop and the frame dropped to 16 megapixels. In effect the smaller crop turns the frame into a 3:2 version of an M4:3rds camera.

Even in the darkest scenes the camera was able to nail focus well. I'm old fashioned and tend to stick with center focusing points and S-AF. I'm also happy to report that the VR in the lens should make the Nikon engineers proud. It really does work well. Either than or I am totally resistant now to the effects of caffeine...

But cutting through all of the techno crap I have to say that the production last night blew me away. Even mores when the director, David Steakley, told me that he was still making slight script changes to the play as late as 6:30am that morning. His version of "A Christmas Carol" is not at all traditional. Not the version you see on Masterpeice Theater. The entire production is peppered with modern music and lots of cool dancing. Even the ending, with all the cast on stage and the audience up on their feet, is a powerful blend of theatre and music as one actor does a perfect rendition of Pharrell William's song, "Happy." It's wonderful when theater can reach into your heart and reset that switch that makes you want to be a (much) better person. Belinda and I were humming "Happy" all the way home.

I'll probably shoot the next production differently but it was sure fun to try the "Swiss Army Knife" approach at least this once. If you focus carefully and breathe just right it can work out just fine....

I love the way the lighting designer created depth with the light and dark areas. Nice.

Good photo lighting lesson for me.

"Super Crop Sample"

"Over there....that's where Kirk's Novel is... over there at Amazon....arrrrh."

From now until 2015 the novel (Kindle Version) is on SALE

for only $3.99.  The perfect holiday read for every

photographer on your list.