The best portraits aren't about photography. They're about connection.

This is my brother in law, David.  He's bright, fun, super-smart, and twenty one years older than this image of him.

Shot with a tiny Novatron 220 flash in a tiny studio with a Yashica Mat 124G camera on medium speed black and white film.  I like this portrait of David better than most of the portraits I've subsequently shot on systems many multiples more expensive and sophisticated.  When did we re-aim our focus and our attention from the subject to the equipment?  How can we move it back?

I expect that the remedy is looking to our early work and finding the things in it that we like.  That's a good reason to sift thru stacks of old prints from time to time.

The outpouring of posts this evening isn't from any hypo-manic compulsion. (Well,  maybe just a little) Rather it is the result of sifting through an enormous number of old favorite photos in order to put together a presentation due up in June.  And of course there is always the five presentations I'll be giving at the Austin Photo Expo the weekend of the 15th and 16th of May.  Maybe it's also the presentation I'm giving to another group this Sunday.   It's fun to see the full circle.

Dark and Beautiful.

There's something about portraiture that makes it the only important part of photography for me.  I can photograph buildings and interiors and microchips if the pay is good.  I can shoot landscapes if there are interesting people in them.  (Who am I kidding?  Confronted with a nice, peopled landscape my first impulse is always to find a longer lens and to crop out all the useless background).  But the portrait is without a doubt the highest expression of photography and, indeed, of all the two dimensional arts.

I'm not sure why but I think it's the same reason why we are so intrigued by beauty.  We want to freeze it and understand it.  We are captured by our imaginations and by the vagaries of human mythos.  Our collective cultures are littered with stories of handsome princes, beautiful damsals, sirens, goddesses and fairies.  Anthropologist tell us that we are drawn to certain types for biological reasons.

I think it's more like a dance.  The better the partner the more thrilling the dance.  The greater the collaboration the more thrilling the portrait.  In the end we're all trying to understand beauty and our relation to it.  It's all proximate.  It's all ephemeral.  And it's the ephemeral and fleeting nature that makes capturing it on an individual basis so bitter sweet......

Another Lens I Deeply Regret Selling.

Sometime in the 1990's I was asked to go to Paris and do a two week job.  It was one of those photographer dream jobs in which a major manufacturer of a product you love using asks you to please take ooodles and ooodles of their product and use it up for free.  Afga was about to introduce their APX black and white films   (incredibly beautiful emulsions in 25, 100 and 400 ISO's) and they needed a bunch of samples showing off what the film could do.  We chose Paris for fun.  It was late October.

At the time I was shooting with the Canon EOS system.  Had I been on a personal shooting trip I would have left those heavy cameras at home and just taken my little Leica and a few small lenses.  But I knew I'd really have to produce a range of images so I shouldered the bag and headed over.  The two weeks were cold and grey and fun.  I have thousands of negatives I've never printed and hundreds that I have.

This is one of my personal favorites from the trip.  I was staying with a college friend of mine who, conveniently, is French and still lives in Paris.  I'd put him up and he puts me up and it all works out well.  One day we got invited to lunch at the apartment this family lived in.  I don't remember lunch nearly as well as I remember crouching on my knees with an EOS-1 and the original 85mm 1.1.2 lens in my hands, trying to catch the last grey wave of pre-winter light gliding liquidly through the a tall window.  Hoping my technique was sufficient to handhold the rig at 1/30th of a second.

The father is falling into the shadows of the window edges.  The child got more exposure.  It's a tricky negative to print.  But it was only possible to take it because of the speed of the lens.

When I got back home I decided that the 85 was too heavy and too slow to focus so I sold it or traded it for some other shiny object.  Only later, when I took the time to print this image as a large frame on a sheet of 16x20 inch fiber based paper did I realize my mistake.   Believe me,  it's the lenses you passed up or sold on a whim that you will pine for down the road.  Not the cameras.

Moments Plucked Out Of Time.

A Random shot at a wedding I did for some friends.


We think of the whole field of photography as something that moves forward with different styles but we feel that its basic nature doesn't change very much.  But I find that it isn't true.  In the past decades the core of photography seemed to be more about "discovering" truth and beauty in the world.  Now it seems more possessed with using the world as raw material.  A big canvas on which to paint with multiple flashes, filters and gimmicky techniques.  Once upon a time recognizing and capturing beauty or history sufficed.  Now that sensibility seems to have been relegated to the old box in the attic, filled with black and white prints and old flash bars.

I was photographing a wedding and I turned around to see this woman putting some powder on her face.  I tried to make a good composition.  I snapped the shot.  I'm pleased by her profile and her rapt attention to the tiny mirror in her powder case.  I love the shaft of light in the background.  Nothing needed to be lit.  Nothing needed to be post processed or HDR'd to death.  Multiple flashes would not have made the scene more tranquil and happy for me.

In fact, I liked it so much that I tried another angle and another version.

I had lunch with an art director today.  We talked about styles.  They all come back around.  I think, collectively, we've been through a visual period akin to the tequila drinking binges of college fraternity boys.  We might be ready to go back to sipping a cold beer on the back porch.    Just a thought.

The Argument in Favor of Obscure Lenses.

I've always loved this image.  It's of the actor, Rene Zellweger long before she acted in her first movie.  Probably shot in 1991 or 1992.

Of course I love the pose and the hands and the way the images falls off to black but I also love the look of the lens that was used to make the image.  These days everyone is obsessed with absolutely sharpness above all things.  Well, that's not entirely true......some amateurs are also obsessed by home many different focal lengths you can cram into a zoom lens.  But most photographers love the process of quantification and measurement (I know I do....) and so DXO test that "objectively" measure overall quality reign supreme.

But what if you don't want pathological sharpness?  What if you're looking for a softer portrait?  A more subdued landscape?  Are there other lenses that no one ever talks about.

I took this image nearly twenty years ago but it's important to understand that the EOS system was already on the market.  In fact, the same lens mount is still in use and the lenses designed for the EOS film cameras are still around.  I shot with some Canon EOS film cameras back then and in this instance I used a lens that I didn't appreciate as much as I should have.  It was Canon's 135mm f2.8 soft focus lens.  It had a setting ring on the front that would allow you to dial in three strengths of softness or use the lens as a very sharp optic with no "negative correction".  I'm pretty sure it worked by introducing aberrations or softness by putting the elements at the "wrong" distance to each other.

At any rate, Rene and I were just messing around in the studio on a Saturday morning.  Her right arm is draped over the back of an old wooden chair that I also neglected to appreciate enough.  To her right (camera's left) I was using a 250 watt incandescent light bulb shining through a tattered and stained 40 inch umbrella.  I had a stack of softboxes at the time but came to think of this umbrella as magic.  I think I still have it.......  The umbrella was as close to Rene as I could get the curved surface while the light was as placed to just evenly cover the edges of the umbrella.

I souped the ISO 50 Pan F film in Rodinal 1:100 for nearly 18 minutes and made the original print on a soft surfaced (G surface) Kodak paper.  I've reprinted it many times but it just wants to be printed on a matte surface.  The above image is a copy shot of the print.  It conveys what I want you to see better than a scan of the un-interpreted negative would and retains the lower contrast feel of the paper.

That lens is long gone from my equipment drawer but every time I see this image, and others from the same day,  I have a twinge of regret that stings just a bit.  I let the momentum of the market push me onto a different path and spent years chasing sharper, sharper, sharper  when I should have let the subject whisper to me just how it wanted to be portrayed.  

There are other lenses that I regret selling.  I'll try not to make that mistake again.......

New Portrait Style. Getting Outside More.

I've been shooting more and more stuff on the pedestrian bridge that connects north and south Austin for walkers, joggers and bikers.  Last Fall we started using it to make portraits.  Kind of a cool location since there are cityscapes in every direction and it all depends on what time of day you choose as to what backgrounds work the best.

We hit the bridge with a scrim to put over the top of Chad's head which blocked the direct sun.  It was a bright 3 pm in late Fall.  I brought in a Profoto 600b with one head.  The head sported a small (2x3 foot) Westcott softbox that originally came as part of a Spider TD-5 florescent light kit.  I the image with an Olympus e3 and a 14-54mm zoom lens.  We did a little post processing on the sky and played around a bit with the highlight and shadow controls in the PhotoShop adjustments menu.

I've gone back to the bridge again and again and every time we do it's a bit different.

This shot is a totally different style but we're standing in the same spot and shooting in pretty much the same direction.  I was using the 70-300mm IS Nikon Lens on a D700 and trying to shoot as close to wide open as possible.  This shot was done on an overcast day that was still kind of stingy bright.  I blocked the almost directional light by putting a 1/2 silk diffuser between the general position of the sun (over my shoulder) and my model.  Amazing how different one location can look.  But we've been back again.....

This was shot in January and it's about 90 degrees to the east compared to the last two shots.  Again, I'm using the Profoto 600b but this time I'm using an Elinchrom small shoot thru device that's about 36 inches in diameter.  The shot looks entirely different than the first two.  I need to take some subjects up there at twilight.

On another note:  I bitch a lot about the business but I thought I'd tell the story of a more or less routine but delightful shooting assignment.  My PR client, David, asked me to shoot a data center; one of those anonymous buildings that houses hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of blade servers in racks and basically houses most of the web content that flies around the fiber these days.  The buildings are very secure and a typical feature is a cluster of giant, diesel generators over to one side or another of the building.  Having a total electrical failure is considered a very negative feature set.......

David and I have worked together on projects like this before but it had been a while.  I suggested that we meet the day before and do a walk thru of the building's interior to get an idea of what we'd be dealing with.  David added that we should meet for lunch and then do the scouting.  It's this kind of thinking that makes David a good client.  We settled on Sushi.  His suggestion and my pleasure.

We went into the building carrying an Olympus EPL1.  Not the camera you've come to know but it's other permutation as a small color temperature meter.  I took a white card and the camera and then used the custom Kelvin settings to take images of the white card at each Kelvin setting until I struck gold.....or white.  The Phillips florescent bulbs that covered acres of the ceiling gave me every indication of being 4100 degrees Kelvin.  That's a great starting point.  I grabbed the Lee filter catalog and looked at the chart of conversions from daylight.  Bingo.  The Lee 442, otherwise known as half CT Straw (an orangey yellowish filter) was a good match.  After we scouted I headed for GEAR on far east Caesar Chavez Blvd to pick up some filter gels.  Unlike those Strobist moochers (who rip the samples out of the filter sample books and tape them together on their flashes)  I actually BUY the stuff a couple feet by one yard at a time.  I also stocked up on some 1/8th CTO and some garden variety 1/2 CTO just to be safe.

When I got home to the studio I cut each of the gels into  a little stack of filters that would cover a Metz or Olympus flash as well as some larger squares that would fit over a Profoto head or an Elinchrom head.  Then I packed and went off to have some semblance of a balanced personal life.  

This morning we started our shoot at a very civilized 10 am.  I used a Canon 5D mk2 and mostly a 20mm and a 100mm prime lens to shoot both portraits in the data center and the architecture and comportment of the center itself.  I lit the portraits using two lights.  One was a Metz MZ 54 in a small softbox with a Lee 442 straw and the other was a Vivitar 383 with a small grid over it to spot it down as a small separation light.  The Vivitar was about forty feet back from the portrait subject at 1/16th power with a Lee 442 filter on it as well.  Blended with the ambient florescents (which matched color almost exactly) the effect was soft, yet directional.  My intention was to gently boost the contrast in post.

The rest of the time was spent looking for great angles and visual alleys.  We used ourselves as blurred, moving models to jazz up the scenes.

At the end of the session I had three  great portraits fifteen or twenty nice interiors and an inventory of technical shots.  The post processing was snagless and the galleries of images are already up and awaiting David's arrival at the office tomorrow.

This is how I remember photography.  Livable budgets, fun lighting challenges, gear that just works,  clients who are gracious, welcoming and appreciative of all the touches that come from years of experience in the craft and a direct client who understands the value you bring to a job.

I came home, petted the world's best dog, took the boy to swim practice and ate some vegan soup Belinda made for dinner.  Now I'm sitting in the office drinking a nice glass of a California Cabernet Sauvignon and typing on my spiffy computer.  This is how a photographer's life is supposed to look.

I think the nasty spell of 2009 is broken.  Thank goodness.

Sunday. Nostalgia-rama

Teenage Benjamin, illuminated by the glow of his MacBook Pro.  Sitting in the dining room at sundown.  Taken with a Kodak SLR/n and an old Nikon 50mm 1.2.  ISO 320.

It's Sunday evening and it's been another week spent in the trenches of art.  As many of your know I usually try to put aside some time on Sundays to go out for a long walk in Austin's ever changing, ever growing downtown.  During this time I take photos for an audience of one:  Me.  And I don't really care if anyone else likes them because that's not the point of the excursion or the point of the photography.  The stroll is like walking meditation punctuated by anti-photos and photos that I would normally resist taking because I couldn't think of a rational market for them. And that, in itself, is even more reason to take them.  The images wouldn't resonate if something subconscious wasn't ticking away and tickling the alternate vision gland.

Everything about my photography seems to be a multi-track, multi dimensional process.  By that I mean that I'm drawn in a lot of different directions and tend to go backward and forward in assessments of gear and technique, subject matter and motivation.  2009 was the year of abandoning the traditional Nikon/Canon path and downsizing into Olympus gear, and more importantly, the micro four thirds gear. I've loved roaming the ranges with palm sized photo machines and snapping away with immediate feedback.  This afternoon I started to reach for a mini camera and I froze.  I knew I was pining for a taste of the old times.  Something big and brutal and manual.  A camera I would have to work at and beat into submission.  I opened some drawers and found just the right thing=the Kodak SLR/n and a Nikon 50mm 1.2.  When I purged the Nikon stuff last year ( I still remember how soulless the D700 was.....) I couldn't bear to send off the Kodak.  At some level I didn't want to let go of Kodak as a company and as a concept so interwoven in the lives of American photographers.  And no one who's ever used the 50mm 1.2 would willingly send it away.

Here's the deal with the Kodak SLR/n and the Nikon 50mm 1.2:  You get the right format, frame and focal length with the combo.  You get a very high res camera.  In fact, I'm planning to test it next to a Canon 5D Mk2 to see which one is really sharper.....Canon fans, get out your handerchiefs.  There may be tears......  But you get a combo that has to be manually focused, exposure set manually and there will be a total reliance on the histogram because the tiny screen is beyond useless for checking quality and exposure.

A downtown landscape punctuated by a vine that's captured a telephone pole.  Exposure calculated by conjecture.  Focus by zone and composition by chaos.  SLR/n+50mm

Sounded perfect to me, so I grabbed the combo, a couple batteries and an extra memory card and headed out the door.  I remembered that manually focused cameras can be "set once/shoot often" cameras and started to forget about the center autofocus sensor reality and started filling frame any damn way I wanted to.  I also remembered that, in full sun you can, "meter once/shoot often" so I metered once and stopped worrying about it. So, to recap:  No worries about focus, no worries about exposure.  All that leaves is:  see picture, compose picture, shoot picture.  Wow!  So simple and so straightforward.  Makes photos fun again.

The vampire power plant.  Shut down years ago, it just won't go away.  The camera was already set for the exposure and focus, all I had to do was lift it to my eye and compose.  How easy is that?

The walking was the part that showed some intentionality.

 I headed downtown in the high performance (satire intended here) Honda Element.  At first the total manual experience was frustrating and mind occupying but then, at a certain juncture, I stopped caring about whether or not the images turned out as turned my attention to the walking and the seeing.

This is the modernist awning above David Garrido's restaurant, downtown. 

It was cool not to care.  It's not that I didn't care, I just didn't have a dog in the hunt as it related to the final output.  I was playing scales, practicing stroke drills, working on the technique, screwing off, snapping at random.  The more playful I was the more fun I had.  The less I cared about the outcome the more I cared about the experience. And what I see is that the camera has less and less significance in the photography and my state of mind has more and more significance in the photography.

Let's face it, the lens is forty year old technology and the camera, in digital chronology, is an ancient relic.  And yet, in every instance, they were more than adequate for the tasks at hand.  The colors are no better or worse than my last year's Nikon or my this year's Olympus.  The difference is the quantity of my engagement.

Just love that Norwood Tower in the middle distance.  Can you believe that one exposure setting and one focus point could last you on an entire two hour walk through downtown?  Well I did cheat by changing it once or twice when walking through some open shade.  But those weren't the photos my brain wanted.

If you've just sunk thousands of dollars or Euro's into some topflight gear and now you have the post cognitive dissonance because you shot with it in the front yard and it did not transform your every glance and gesture into a higher level of fine art, may I make a suggestion?  Put the damn miracle machine in manual everything, stop worrying about the ultimate image quality and then hit the streets and walk around until your eyes engage your mind in some sort of fun game.  Then shoot only what interest you and you alone.  No thought for your spouse's approval or how you think the image will play on some website.  And you'l be amazed that half the fun is just being by yourself, setting your own direction and pleasing yourself.  It's the value of less automatic equipment.  The more manual gear actually engages you in a much more immersive way that is much less about showing off and much more about being happy.  Or I could just be totally full of shit and maybe just needed a nice walk.....Whichever, it was a fun tromp through downtown.  Loving the character of the old Kodak.  Maybe I'll get some sort of ectoskeletal amplifier suit and drag out the Kodak DCS 760 after this............

Whatever you do for a living during the week be sure to spend the time appreciating the present rather than being fixated on a future that might not exist.  If the sun is shining and hitting a building or landscape in just the right way, shoot it now----don't come back later and hope is will all be the same.  It's never the same.  Just live now.  It's the most fun.

I had three epiphanies today:  I love coffee.  Anxiety is contagious.  Art is really totally about trying to bring order out of chaos.

Short post about a product that I really like...

 a one hundred dollar, dimmable, daylight balanced LED light source.

When I was writing my book on lighting equipment I wanted to touch on everything that was available to photographers without stepping into the insanely expensive and highly specialized gear.  I reviewed an LED light from a company called, LitePanels.  The product I reviewed is called a Micro and you can see it on there website, here.  It was designed, initially, for use on camcorders and even though the output isn't really high it does provide a nice kick of front light that helps most autofocus cameras provide faster and better focus lock on.  At the time the light was priced at $265 and had a run time of 1.5 hours.  At the time I was a bit conflicted.  I felt that it was important to mention the product and the category because it seems that LED lighting is destined to take over the continuous lighting crown from both florescent and tungsten fixtures.  The benefits of LED's are: consistency, low energy use and color matching.

So, fast forward to a couple of weeks ago.  I head over to Precision Camera to buy some memory cards and look at lenses.  I'm an addict.....what can I say?  Since I've recently redeveloped and interest in video I stroll over to the case that holds their video cameras, microphones, faux Steadicam rigs and portable audio recorders.  There on one shelf is the LitePanels Micro Pro LED light.  Right next to it, in a bigger box is the ProMaster 42LED light.  I have a sales person pull one off the shelf so I can check it out.  It's got more LED's than the LightPanels,  takes 4 double "A's",  comes with an A/C converter, has a control to reduce power and seems to work like a charm.  The kicker is the price tag.  It's $99.00.  It quickly became and impulse purchase and I'm glad it did.  The next week I did a job for a shelter magazine.  We were doing an article on shopping locally and we were shooting in a famous, local bookstore.  I was using my friend, Ann as a model (she's the ultimate quasi-urban, soccer mom, in shape, upscale, thirty to forty something woman) and we're shooting available light under ceiling mounted industrial florescent fixtures.  I think there's too much top light and that we're getting raccoon eyes.  I'm shooting wide open at ISO 400 and I reach into the camera bag and pull out the ProMaster 42LED.  At half power from six feet away it puts in just enough fill light to clean up the shadows and add a bit of pop to the scene.  I could have used it right on top of the camera and dialed it down until the fill was subtle and shadowless but I like just putting it on a neighboring table in the bookstore's cafe and letting it mix in.

Amazingly, the flo's and the LED weren't that far apart in color temp.  The RAW files cleaned right up in Capture One.  Since then I've tucked the light into my Domke bag just in case.  If I don't use it in the shoot I sometimes end up using it as a glorified flashlight.

The Pro's?  Cheap, light, bright, doesn't weigh much,  good battery life, A/C adapter, bigger light source than the competitors,  a shoe foot that lets you mount it directly on your camera,  and able to be powered by double "A's".

The Con's?  It's cheaply made.  All plastic.  The battery doors feel flimsy and uncertain.  The color match to daylight could be better.

The bonus points?  It comes with a plastic or resin filter that fits over the front of the light, diffuses it a bit and converts the light source from "daylight" to real tungsten.

Here's what it really looks like:

Mounted on top of a Kodak DCS SLR/n.  Shot in my studio with a little, Olympus EPL, Panasonic 20mm 1.7, lit with an Elinchrom Ranger RX Speed pack thru one head into a 60 inch Octabank.


What would I use if for?  A little kiss of fill light in an available light portrait just about anywhere.  Or even as just an "eyelight" to add some sparkle to a model's eyes.

After I took the first shot with the panel on the Kodak camera I took the ProMaster LED42 off the Kodak and put it on the Olympus Pen EPL and used it as a direct light for this image.  ISO 800, f5.6 @ 1/60th (approx).  The little camera locked on quick.


If you are a Canon 5D mk2 or Nikon D3s user this may be all the light you need for Stygian weddings, breaking news and wacky studio shots.  It's so easy to set up, doesn't need to be sync'd and works at all shutter speeds.  If you own fast glass, this is your "gild the lily" light for available light situations that need a touch more control.

Here's what it looks like raw.

And here I've just laid the tungsten filter on top.  There are two screws that hold the filter in place on the front.  I just wanted you to see what the filter actually looked like so I didn't bother to engage the screws.


The bottom line?  I've spent more on a nice lunch with a client.  It's handy in the back of a camera bag and even handier when shooting quasi-available light video.  All lighting situations can use a helping hand.  I've been wishing for a light like this since the latter film days.  Now I have it and I can't wait to use it on more and more projects.

My next project is to shoot executives in a data center.  I'm scheduled to to it this coming tuesday.  We'll be in 60,000 square feet of florescent space.  All I really need is a little touch of fill.  I want the extensive square footage of the facility to show.  I'll go to ISO 800 on a camera with great high ISO (haven't decided which one yet.....) and then fill in with a couple of these behind a bit of Rosco diffusion material.  I'll be scouting on monday and I'll take one of these along as well as a few strengths of plus green filtration and try to work out a very slim filter pack to match up all the light sources.  If I can pull it off I may have found the "Holy Grail" of indoor fill light augmentation for a hundred bucks and a handful of alkaline batteries.  Now that is Minimalism.

Half frame mania. Starring the 150.

This is the rig.  The EPL1 with the Pen (film) 150mm f4.  I got a call from my friend, Keith, asking me to meet for lunch and knowing that he's into the new Olympus Pen cameras I looked through one of the drawers in my equipment cabinet and pulled out a lens to share with him.  I'm not sure the exact year I got my hands on this beauty.....probably in the mid-1980's....but the glass is incredibly clean and the lens looks like it's never been on a camera.  After lunch we headed out to a local museum to play around with out respective cameras.  He brought a very serious Nikon D3x with one of the Nikon Shift lenses and I played the eccentric outsider, bringing the above rig and popping a 38mm f1.8 Pen (film) lens in my pocket.

One of the amazing things about the whole micro four thirds revolution, as presented by Panasonic and Olympus, is the very short distance from the lens mount flange to the sensor in the camera bodies.  This allows people to make adapters for just about any lens from any maker whose lens was designed for a deeper distance between flange and film or flange and silicon.  There are currently adapters that will allow you to use Nikon, Canon, Contax G, Contax N, Leica M, Leica R, Olympus e series and OM series and Pentax K mount lensesFotodiox Lens Mount Adapter, Olympus PEN F Lens to Micro 4/3 Four Thirds System Camera Mount Adapter, Olympus PEN E-P1, PEN E-P2, PEN E-PL1, Panasonic Lumix DMC-GF1, GH1, G1, G2, without restriction on the the EP series and the G series cameras.  I originally bought into the new Pen system just so I could use my old Pen film lenses.

So here's my Pen to Pen adapter ring.  It's a whopping $60, which I think is pretty fair given the limited market and the machining required.  When I ordered the adapter ring I didn't have high hopes for the lens performance and I admit I proceeded out of nostalgia more than common sense.  I figured that the normal focal lengths would be pretty good but I though even those would struggle given all the advances that have occurred in lens coatings, CNC machining, optical resins and other cool, technical stuff.  I thought the longer lenses would especially show their age given the advances in ED glass and other tech.  I'll admit that I brought the 150mm along to lunch to tweak my friend given our usual repartee about the sheer poundage of gear he sometimes schlepps around.  After all, the 150mm Pen lens is the equivalent of a 300mm Nikon at 1/5th the size and weight.

A size comparison.  The 38mm Pen versus the Nikkor 50mm 1.2 with its e system conversion adapter.

After a great lunch we headed off to shoot for an hour or so and to compare notes about the new 24mm Nikon TS lens, mounted on a D3x and playing with live view.  Keith is more diligent than I so he took the lead and set up some interesting test shots.  I stumbled around and played with the EPL and the Pen 150.  When I started chimping my shots on the back screen I changed my mind about the older lenses.  

This is an interesting lens.  It's a 50mm to 90mm f3.5 (constant aperture) zoom.  Stop it down to 5.6 and it's really very good.  (above).

We love to talk about pocketable cameras but this is a seriously pocketable 20mm f3.5.  You could actually (but uncomfortably) have a three lens system of old Pen lenses that could fit in the pocket of a pair of relaxed fit Dockers.  If you were willing to wear the Dockers.....

This was the first shot of the day.  I'm stuck in lunch rush traffic on Bee Caves Road.  I shoot some cars through my windshield with the 150 f4.  I wonder why that always freaks out the other drivers.......

So, here's Keith with the power rig:  D3x, Hoodman Loupe, 24mm TSe,  and a pretty cool cap.  He's the kind of photographer I admire because he's out testing his gear and getting comfortable with it BEFORE heading out to a job or off on the trip of a lifetime.  He gets that it takes time and practice to make the hands and brain work together to make great shots.  This is shot with the 150mm at about 15 feet, wide open.  We're in open shade.  I won't show you Keith's shots, that's bad marketing for me....

So while Keith is mastering the Scheimpflug law and the intricacies of lenses that can change their focal plane and move their nodal centers all around I was wandering around shooting things with bright colors.  All of these shots are done with the 150mm lens, handheld, using the A setting on the EPL.  I kept a close eye on the max shutter speed and now I officially want the next camera to go all the way to 1/8000th of a second!

I think you'll agree that the performance is pretty straight forward.  No huge flares, no softness and no weird color casts.  Considering how small and light this puppy is I can see including it in my standard, fine art travel package......

For those for whom the desire for Bokeh is all consuming I present the repeating background, out of focus objects at our widest aperture.  I burned sage as I was shooting this and contemplated sacrificing a small animal in order that the Ephors could divine the len's mystic Bokeh potential but I was short of goats and time.  I'll leave the interpretation of the optic's Bokeh to the more adept........  I like the light bulb.  It's shiny.

Of course,  all the rational critics on DPReview and other sites are absolutely correct:  It is impossible to throw the background of any photograph out of focus unless you are using a "full frame" camera!  I'll keep trying.  

I'm not sure why but there's one website where they review cameras and lenses and they always shoot pictures of gritty rocks to prove or disprove the attributes of their gear under test.  I guess little gritty stuff shows off sharpness or lack thereof.  All I know is that this is what I got, handheld, with the 150mm at its closest focusing distance.

As we left the museum, Keith pointed out these little flowers to me.  I thought I'd shoot em and see if I could drum up any Chromatic Abberation.  Any purple halos.  Any red or green outlines.  Nope.  Just flowers.  Hmmmmm.  Maybe this 40 year old lens is better than most of the consumer type zooms people are racing around with.  The downside of this lens?  It doesn't autofocus......

A request:  If you've read my fourth book:  Photographic Lighting Equipment, would you be kind enough to write a glowing, intriguing review over on Amazon.com?  Of course, if you didn't think it was a very good book you are probably far too busy with other stuff to write a review......

Thanks.  Kirk

Photographic Lighting Equipment: A Comprehensive Guide for Digital Photographers