When photographing seriously, seriously, take off your sunglasses. Especially if you are using an EVF....

If you wear polarized sunglasses you will have difficulties using an EVF. There is a cancellation effect that makes viewing the whole frame well pretty much impossible. And I'll have to say that when you are in a dimly lit convention center, even with an optical viewfinder I think you'll find composing a photograph easier if you are able to get your eye close enough to the finder to see the edges of the frame.

Just a public service, education posting. Sunglasses. Hmmm.

The camera I just recommended to everyone who asked me this holiday season, "Which camera should I buy for someone who.......????"

It happens. You are a professional photographer. Your friends have this idea that you must know everything about every facet of the imaging business. I get phone calls asking me about weddings. I get phone calls asking me about shooting baby photos, and twice a year I get a lot of phone calls from friends asking me what camera they should buy for: Their spouse, their graduating senior, their college junior about to do a semester abroad, their small business, their once in a lifetime trip to XXXXXXX. Very few of these people really wanted to get mixed up in the sticky spider web of photographic technique practiced at the highest technical level. Those I send to Ming's site. To the rest I end up recommending the camera above. 

Interesting thing about the Nikon entry level, APS-C camera line, is that they all pretty much have the same absolutely excellent, Sony, 24 megapixel, imaging sensor. This means that the camera is 90% of the way to fulfilling the real technical needs of just about anyone out there. The camera represented above has shared the same basic body design, with a host of similar cameras, for fifteen years; ditto  the menus. Nikon has had a lot of time getting things just right. And to understand how to craft a camera for beginners.

But the reason I recommend the package consisting of the D3300 body and the lens above is that the kit lens, the VRII version, is sharp and well corrected, and adds vibration reduction to the system. It's the equivalent of a 28-70mm. The camera is small and light and pretty much bulletproof. Plus the batteries last twice as long as most mirrorless camera batteries. 

One of my friends came to me yesterday and wanted to know what to buy. He'd had someone recommend a Sony RX100iiii to him, or, at a lower cost level, the new Canon G5X. I looked at both of those cameras and laughed. My friend didn't want to spend $800+ on a camera. He's got big hands too. I know the one inch sensor in both of those cameras are really good but, to someone who is a casual shooter I know they'll be more comfortable dropping $395 and getting a camera that has the potential to outshoot both of the above mentioned cameras. The Nikon focuses faster, the chip has better high ISO capability and, down the road my friend or his kids, can add a flash, add more lenses or use the same lenses on updated or upgraded bodies. 

I've had neophyte friends buy trendier cameras and struggle to use them well. The Nikon line just works. If a person has been indoctrinated in believing in Canon cameras I am happy to research the equivalent Rebel. I just believe that this class of cameras are the best bargains out there today and that they provide the best platform for people who are just starting their photographic journey, beyond the cellphone. 

I was looking at yet another little camera as a possible "take everywhere" camera when I started researching cameras like the D3300 as well. Half the price for more performance, and I can put a Sigma Art lens on this puppy and get amazing results. No sense recommending more. You'll just have nominated yourself as the "camera support/teacher/coach for someone's longer learning curve. 

That's my stock recommendation. 

The camera and lens I recommend instead of a point and shoot.

A triptych from Berlin in Fall of 2013.

Need to do some online shopping? Here's a link to five good photo books and one fun novel:

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Kirk+Tuck

In a San Antonio shop window. Near the San Fernando Cathedral.

I love walking through the streets with a camera. It's a great excuse to get some exercise and stay intimately familiar with your camera and lens. Sometimes you see things you wouldn't see if you stayed home and watched TV.  If you've grown accustomed to the sights in your own city that gives you a great excuse to travel to the closest big or small city near you and start a walking exploration all over again.

To recap: Walking keeps you from getting fat and out of shape. Seeing new things keeps your mind interested. Sharing images gives you an intention that drives you to walk and see new things. I guess that makes exploring with a camera medicinal. That's my prescription for today.

Need some gift suggestions for photographers on your gift list?

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Kirk+Tuck

Taking a new look at an older lens. The Nikkor 135mm f2.0. ai.

I've been on a search for the right 135mm lens for a while now. I've had the Rokinon 135 f2.0 in and out of my shopping cart on Amazon a couple of times. I've tested the Nikon 135mm f2.0 Defocus Coupling lens and I spent a day with the Zeiss 135 f2.0, shooting around town. Through all of this I had a niggling thought in the back of my mind. I kept thinking that the lens I really wanted was one I'd owned many years ago. Decades ago. 

I like old Nikon lenses. The fully manual ones. The ones you have to manually focus. The ones with hard stops at infinity. The ones with external aperture rings. The ones that were so well built they might never fail. I'm tired of the plastic exteriors. I'm tired of complexity. I have really come to love the big, accurate focusing rings. I wanted a fast aperture.

My friend, Paul, had been in Precision Camera yesterday and called to tell me that, as a result of a recent expo at the store, there was a lot of great used gear getting put out on the shelves. When I woke up this morning I had visions of the old 135mm Nikkor f2.0 lens I used to use, mostly welded to the front of my F4s camera. I shot many of my favorite portraits with that lens and many more with that focal length across other brands. I walked into the store and straight to the used, manual focus shelf at the back of the store. There it was. Perfect glass. No abuse. Light use. 

My favorite store clerk uses a Nikon D600 to do great food photography and he's a good judge of lenses. He's never steered me wrong. And, to his credit, he's steered me away from more lenses than he's steered me towards. His pronouncement? "That lens is incredible!"

It's really not incredible but it is very good, has lots of personality and feels good to use. There are several 135mm f2.0 lenses that might be a little sharper, if you focus them just so. And that's only at the widest aperture.  All of them have some field curvature designed right in so none of them will be sharp across a flat frame from the center to the far corners, wide open. All of them get sharper as you stop down. But for a lens designed back in the late 1970's it's nicely competitive with the rest, once you factor in price and intended use. 

You know how I'll use it. I'll be shooting portraits under continuous light, from a tripod. I will summon up the courage to shot it wide open as long as I'm on the tripod and using the live view function of the D810 or D750 to nail critical focus. But that's how I've always intended to use every fast, long lens I buy. That's also how I use the sibling of this lens, the 105mm f2.5 ais. It works well. 

If I only shot still images with these cameras and lenses I guess I'd be happy to have autofocus capability but I keep shooting interviews and fun video and I love being able to shift focus while shooting, and to preset two focus points and rack between them. It's something these older optical systems do very well.

I could parrot what others have written or I could rely on my faulty memory of shoots done a long time ago, but I prefer to get the lens on the front of the D810, round up the usual suspects (beautiful people) and do my own optical testing with this particular sample. My preliminary shots are making me happy. Stay tuned and I'll have more to say about this one after I've gotten some portraits done. 

Feeling a bit giddy. It's not every day that you conjure up the image of the perfect portrait lens and then walk into a store that has just what you wished for. And at a price significantly lower than anywhere else. Merry Consumerism! To one and all.

An old blog post about making portraits. Reprised by popular demand.

http://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2011/09/portraits-what-really-happens-in-good.html

I just re-read it and I like it better than I did when I wrote it.

Thanks Andrew.

It's getting to feel a lot like Christmas....

Nothing warms me up for the holidays quite like bouncing back and forth between seasonal plays like David Sedaris's, Santaland Diaries, and Dave Steakley's pop infused, re-envisioning of Dicken's, A Christmas Carol. 

Above and below I've assembled some of my favorite photographs from Zach Scott's recent Holiday plays for your visual enjoyment. I wish I could label each one with the camera and lens it was taken with but those details are lost to the passage of time. Just think: Sony and Nikon and Canon and Samsung, Olympus and Panasonic and Kodak and Fuji. You're bound to be right some of the time. 

As usual, click to see the gallery of bigger images. They should click up to 2100 pixels on the long end...

On Tuesday I found a good reason to use the Nikon D750 and the Sigma 50mm Art lens. NEA.

Dave Steakley, artistic director of Zach Theatre (left) shows

NEA Chairman, Jane Chu, around the Topfer Theatre.
The full frame. 

Late Monday I got a text from the P.R. person at Zach Theatre asking me, urgently, if I would be able to come by and take some photographs the next afternoon. I love working with everyone there so I checked my scheduled and confirmed. 

The event was a newsy one. Zach Theatre was being visited by Jane Chu, who is the chairman of the NEA (National Endowment for the Arts). NEA grants have made it possible for the Theatre to produce work with amazing playwrights like Anna Deavere Smith and Susan Lori-Parks, as well as enabling spectacular renditions of Ragtime and Angels in America. 

I didn't have a specific brief but I was there early to greet Ms. Chu and to follow the group of Zach board members and executives through the tour and while conversing over tea. 

I used a Nikon D810 with the 24-120mm and a flash for many of the photographs but in the lobby I could see the benefit of working with the available light and a fast, sharp lens. I like the image above so much more than the posed group shot that was hastily organized below. 

The Nikon D750 seems to nail exposures nicely and the lens is nicely sharp at f2.5. The image below is from the D810+24-120mm combo. 

Working with existing light is fun as long as you keep yourself at the right angles to both the subjects and the light....

Pulled a Pen F out of the drawer today. Why don't modern cameras have rotary titanium shutters that sync at all speeds?

I pulled this Pen F out of the equipment cabinet today and, after coming to grips with the realization that it would have been a much better camera with an integral EVF, realized how cool the technology of this camera was in the early 1970s. That, and the fact that it still works well today.

The finder could be improved but I think that age tends to yellow the mirrors a bit and the focusing screen could probably use a good cleaning. I put the 40mm f1.4 lens on the front and loaded a roll of Agfapan APX 100 that I'd stashed in the freezer. I shot a bit while I was out for coffee but the fun test will be a portrait session tomorrow. Yes, yes, I'll have some sort of digital camera there as well, but I'm willing to bet that this combo, supplemented with the 60mm f1.5 will have a vastly different visual signature than what we're used to. It will also be interesting to see how the B&W film reacts to LED lighting.

I figured it was shameful to have a brace of these in an equipment cabinet and not take them out and experiment from time to time.

72 half frame images on a roll of film. A shutter that syncs with anything all the way up to 1/500th. Some titanium tech inside an all metal body. And a vertical frame orientation. What's not to like?

Do you still shoot film from time to time? What do you use for interesting film shoots? 

A photo from a campaign for the Austin Lyric Opera.

APS-H Camera. Nikon 105 DC lens.

Tungsten Lighting with big diffusion.

I took a day off today. Here's a movie review and a restaurant review...

Beef at Uchi. Not the subject of my review.

I've lived in Austin for a long time and so I am always amazed when I go out of town and find out that there are still "smoking" rooms at major hotels. It's been years and years since we've had local ordinances against smoking in public places or in restaurants, hotels, concert halls, etc in place here. Last week the major chain hotel I stayed with in New Jersey overbooked their non-smoking rooms and, being a late arrival, I ended up one night in a smoking room. It was absolutely dreadful. I woke up with a sore throat, a runny nose and a weird, unhappy nicotine buzz. I should not have smoked the second pack before I went to bed, but they were free and the ashtray was right there.....(just morbidly kidding -- I would never dream of smoking a cigarette). 

The next night I was moved to a non-smoking room and it was like moving from the sidewalks of downtown Beijing to, well, a nice sidewalk in Austin. But by the time I made it home I had contracted a full blown head cold, cough, etc. I am enough of a scientist to understand that the smoking room may not have caused the cold, and that it was probably something I picked up on the plane flight, or even the week before, but it's more fun to focus my anger on the most visible and obvious culprit. 

My schedule didn't allow for illness over the weekend as I had two projects in post production and a self inflicted deadline of end-of-day Monday. I shot downtown on Sunday afternoon and spent the rest of the time working on post processing in front of my computer. A job on Monday evening, and again yesterday during the afternoon, took up more time I could have used for recovery so, at 10:30 last night, when I had finished uploading final files to everyone, I vowed I would take today off from business entirely. 

I woke up early with a nagging cough and made myself a couple cups of hot tea before we went out to walk with Studio Dog. After breakfast I immediately broke my vacation vow by billing the three jobs just completed, but after that I put the big, fancy computer to sleep and went on with my "everyman's" day off. 

The first stop was to the Alamo Drafthouse Movie Theater on South Lamar for the 11:00 showing of the latest James Bond movie, Spectre. Here's what I liked pretty well: Lots of things blew up in interesting ways. The main thrust of the plot aligned with my political prejudice against consolidation of power and the surveillance police state. The cinematography was uniformly great. The 4K projection was top flight. And the five other people in the audience followed the posted rules of the house and were silent during the entire 2+ hours. (The policy of that theater is: no talking, no texting, no cellphones. After one warning the management will kick out offenders with NO REFUND of their ticket price. It's a heavenly atmosphere for hard core movie fans and those of us who have trouble tolerating loud and inconsiderate audiences....).

On the downside, the movie was --- boring. It was predictable, unimaginatively paced and predictable. Had I been in one of the smoking cities I could have gone out into the lobby to smoke a pack of Chesterfields, and come back not really missing out on much of the plot. Or the incredibly convenient happenstances (MacGuffins) that helped to save our "hero."  To be sure, I am glad I saw the movie because I wouldn't like to have the string of Bond viewing broken but I must say that I probably won't go see it a second time. 

When I left the theater I walked down the block to get something to eat. I guess watching someone on the screen work so hard can make one hungry by extension. And I had always wanted to try The Shake Shack for hamburgers. The interior design was nice but staid. The workers gruff, but competent, and the the Shake Shack Burger? Let's just say I expected more. It was well cooked and the bun was softer than cotton candy but other than that it was just boring. I guess we are spoiled here in Austin with P.Terry's Burgers, Mighty Fine Burgers, Dirty's Come Back Burgers, Huts, The Counter and, even the miserably named but well loved, HopDoddy's. All make burgers just as well as The Shake Shack, and most are in the same price range. I was expecting bigger, better, saltier, spicier or something-er. 

After lunch I sat down at a table outside of Medici Caffe and caught myself mindlessly checking work e-mails and texts. When I realized what I was doing I turned the phone all the way off and stuck it in my pocket. I was embarrassed to feel the need to connect back to the business so slavishly. 

Makes me want to turn off all the devices, grab a Nikon F and some film and just give the whole digital world a break for a while. But then who would conjecture about the demise of Samsung's camera division, gripe about the menus in Olympus cameras, pine away online for a Leica medium format camera or admit that I never use "my settings" settings? 

Ten more minutes of this time off stuff and I'm going to rebel and order something online. That Zeiss 135mm f2 for the Nikon looks pretty juicy. It's got to be less boring that the movie and the burger. 

Naw, it's a lot cheaper to take a nap on the couch with Studio Dog and hope this cough goes away by tomorrow. I've got some swimming to get back to...

Have you ever been sitting in a meeting and realized that the light just then was beautiful?

I was at a meeting today photographing. I looked around the room and the light coming through the floor to ceiling windows painted the faces of the people across the table from me in the most beautiful way. I had to take a photograph to capture it. Just the turn of the woman's head in the middle of the frame made it all perfect. I have no idea how the meeting turned out, I was too busy watching life being painted right in front of me.

At what point do the camera and lens disappear and let the image just soak through? Oh. I know. When you learn to ignore the camera even when you have it right in front of your face.

Muscle memory. Reaction. Looking for images not targets. You know the camera is in the way when you have to stop and think about how to set it. You know the camera has become invisible when you can just respond to the scene in front of your face.

All bets are off when you see the Jetson's building....

A late afternoon bicycle ride up Lamar Blvd. in Austin, Texas

I can't remember what camera or lens I used but I sure like the position of the shadows and the intersecting lines on the wall and sidewalk.

When I finish up my jobs, back up my files and send out the bills I like to chill out and relax a bit by taking a camera and lens out into the world and practicing my craft. I can't imagine a day without a camera in my hands. I think the way to see photographically is, in a sense, to live immersed in photography.

#addictedtophotographs

I'm a little confused. Some reviewers say that the longest end of the Panasonic fz 1000 zoom lens is not as sharp as the rest of the focal range. I guess they need to work on their handholding skills just a bit more. Or use a tripod...

Go long. Hand held.

The average camera reviewer seems to buy into the "echo chamber" system of camera evaluation. Someone on a different site writes something about the long end of a lens being soft and the writer picks it up and runs with it. Sometimes the weather is crappy and a reviewer (not the camera owner) feels the need to go out in low illumination, gray muck and make some images anyway; after all, shouldn't state of the art image stabilization allow you to hand-hold a 400mm equivalent focal length pretty steady at 1/15th of second?

I read in a couple places on the web that the Panasonic fz 1000 was a little soft at the long end and this concerned me because the long reach of the Leica designed lens was one of the reasons I bought the camera. It's also one of the features I used extensively on my recent, downtown Austin project.

But I did something a bit out of the ordinary for web camera reviewers --- I actually went outside on a nice, sunny day and shot some tests. I shot the tests with the camera locked down on a stout tripod and also handheld. Guess what? The long end of the lens is sharp. The secret is to use it intelligently.

A primer for testers: To find out just how sharp any lens can be turn off the I.S. put the camera on a tripod and use a self timer for release. Make sure you focus correctly instead of depending on some automatic focusing point selection algorithm from the camera. Maybe use that boring, old, center, single point, AF method!  Now you have an understanding of the potential of the lens and if you want to you can take it off the tripod, turn on the  I.S. and shoot tests that might show you how sharp the system can be. But please, tell your readers if you shot the 400mm sample while riding on a street car over bumpy track at twilight, holding the camera at arm's length with one hand, to view the idiot screen, on the back, while your other hand grips the safety rail of your conveyance.

But really, the point I'd like to emphasize here is how important it is for one's credibility to actual go out and do the test instead of taking one of the other web shill's word for something, and then passing on flawed information.

Wow. That sounded like a rant. Okay, well I just get tired of reading misinformed crap.

The ongoing saga of this quarter's favorite VSL picture taking machine.

Click on the photos to see them larger in a separate window. 

All images taken with the Panasonic fz 1000. 

So, I had the opportunity to get paid for one of the photographic pursuits that I do for myself; walking around downtown Austin making images of buildings and stuff. I got to do the job exactly the way I wanted to without active curation on anybody's part. I started out the project using full frame cameras and prime lenses but I quickly came to realize that a wide ranging zoom would be much more effective and efficient. I also wanted to use a camera with an EVF because I was constantly using a circular polarizing filter and wanted to have the immediate feedback one gets from the camera assembling the preview and showing it as one shoots. 

I thought at first that I'd use the Olympus cameras but frankly, I didn't have the lens range I really wanted. I ended up choosing the Panasonic fz 1000 because, in broad daylight, the camera gives up very little to the larger formats when it comes to low noise, sharpness and the general look of the files. I shot raw and did some post processing but most of the files were in an optimum exposure range and already looked pretty good. Camera Raw in Adobe apps tends to yield a pretty flat file from  Panasonic raw files and that's okay because they seem resilient at taking bit corrections and big color changes without falling apart. 

As I got used to the rhythm of the camera the battery life seemed to go on forever. At a 400 mm equivalent focal length the image stabilization (five axis) was pretty incredible.

I loved being able to set the camera to f5.6 and zoom from 25mm to 400mm without seeing any real impact on image quality. This is an amazing camera. Much more exciting to shoot than most other bridge cameras because the 1 inch sensor means I have a great chance of getting competitive files. 

I love this camera so much I bought a second one as a back up.  If you like bridge cameras you should try one. It's amazing. It's the current VSL camera of the quarter. 

Less than the price of a good lens alone....