DXO ONE. Greatest thing since deep fat fried Snickers candy bars or dumb stunt camera that makes your iPhone an unwieldily mess? Caution: Rant.

Brains are tricky things. They are built for and operate around the concept of doing one thing at a time with concentration and doing it well. The more micro stops and starts a brain has to deal with the less efficient and enjoyable the process being performed becomes. At a certain point it's only possible to do repetitious tasks and not creative tasks when the brain becomes overloaded with attempts at multi-tasking. 

With this in mind I am almost always opposed to complicating tools that we use for day to day tasks. Hell, I am against complicating tools even if we only use them sporadically.

So I am always at odds with otherwise smart people like Thom Hogan when he goes on his rant about  the ways to improve cameras to make them sell better. His consistent suggestion to Nikon is to make the camera more connected. He likes connectivity. He love the concept of connectivity. If Nikon were to take him seriously about connectivity (and I always hope they do not!) I can just imagine him in a blind somewhere, camera at the ready, waiting for some interesting predator to wander into range, taking a breather to play a few interactive rounds of Candy Crush with some kid who's online in Plano, Texas. You know, just to take the edge off.  As the camera's connected sonar app senses movement in the brush Thom mutes the game and begin lining up his shot of the massive timber wolf that's lumbered into the clearing. He's using the electronic shutter for silence and so far the big wolf doesn't sense his presence but the camera is thumping against Thom's hands to signal an incoming text from a high value sender and he directs his attention to the rear screen of his camera to read the message. The wolf lopes off into the pines of the permafrost as Thom successfully orders another shipment of razor blades from his online source.

Then, after checking his stock portfolio at Bloomberg.com he quickly looks through the shots of the edgy timber wolf and then watermarks them and sends them off to who knows where in order that they get somewhere quick. I don't know about Thom but I find that most of the work I do benefits from editing and post processing. Nothing is absolutely perfect out of the camera...  So I can only imagine that he's sending the images to his own cloud site where he'll be able to download them back to his working computer and, well, work on them with concentration and diligence. So here he is in the wild and the camera is willfully sucking down his battery charge by grinding out files to send and then sending them over some sort of network, the maintenance and use of also sucking down battery juice like a parched vampire.

I don't get it. I really don't get the advantage of all this race for interconnection. If you are a teenager and you are using social media to connect to your group and you do this by uploading every minute of your day via photos from your phone to your crowd then I guess the interconnectedness makes a certain amount of sense.  But we're mostly grown ups trying to concentrate on finding and capturing images. The editing and post production is all much better done on big, calibrated screens in environments designed to enhance color and tonal accuracy.

I think that industry and industry pundits alike are confusing why people like to send quick snap shots of themselves made with phones and the need for the same speed and connectedness on production work cameras. The number one benefit of the phones is simplicity. On the iPhone you are one button push away from shooting and one button push away from sending. And you already have the phone in your pocket. A stand alone camera features changeable controls in order to give you control and artistic mastery when shooting a subject.  I assume that an iPhone with the right software can give you the same but while I might want my iPhone camera to have more capabilities within its standard size I can't imagine that a camera which doesn't fit in ones pocket (especially when combined with a fast, long lens) would become the same sort of epicenter even if you put the clearest, cleanest cellphone imaginable right into the battery grip. Rather I think it plays into the stereotype of 50+ year old mens' love of add-on gadgetry.

Someone always trots out the argument that the need for connectivity revolves around the need for speed. That getting the images in front of the mythic client right away is of paramount importance. Well....first I'll go back to the need to do good post production and editing----which means at worst you've already downloaded the images to a big tablet or laptop in order to clean them up, add metadata and copyright information etc. I would propose that once you have the images on an external device it's silly to put them back on the camera to send them and most of the devices mentioned already have robust connectivity.

But unless you are a news journalist the argument for speed carries no real weight when it comes to clients. They (advertising clients) are not generally waiting breathlessly next to their workstations just hovering, anxious to press send and speed a file off the the printer the minute your (unedited and unprocessed) image comes whipping over from your camera's connectivity device. Most clients want retouched files. At least mine do. And so do the clients of everyone else I know in the industry, with the exception of newspaper photographers...all three of them.

Where Thom and Nikon and Canon all miss the magic equation is in understanding that a big driver of newer and smaller cameras is not connectivity but electronic viewfinders and better rear camera screens. Now people who didn't understand the nuances of camera settings can see exactly (more or less) what they'll be getting on their memory cards when they push the buttons. This is so because they can see it right in front of their faces! The ability to send the images is an add on. It's this year's 3-D.

You can chalk all this up to me being a cellphone hating Luddite but please remember that I danced on the cutting edge of this connectivity trend at least two years ago when I had the mixed pleasure of shooting with Samsung's highly connected camera, the Galaxy NX.  That camera had a full Android operating system on it, could upload images to Dropbox automatically, could send e-mail via wi-fi connections, and could even be connected via cell networks. And yes, you could play Angry Birds on the huge rear screen. If connectivity had been a prevailing consumer demand you had to believe that the camera would have excited the average millennial user to no end. In fact, this seems to be everything that Thom asks Nikon for. But in reality the mixing together of capabilities was like a man with five legs, all pointing in different directions trying to run a foot race. Turn off all the ancillary stuff and the camera could actually turn out amazingly good images for its class. But the combination of stuff went a long way toward crippling the camera instead. The rush and demand? I can't imagine that more than a thousand were sold, worldwide.

I'm also not sure I'd take a Swiss Army Knife to a knife fight if everyone else was sporting tactical combat knives with wicked eight and ten inch blades. Doesn't matter much in the heat of things if your weapon also has a eyeglass screwdriver....and a nail file.

Nikon will win back market share when they implement a really great EVF in a really great camera. Nikon will win back market share when they implement really, really good and flexible 4K video into a really great camera. Nikon will win back market share when they implement a mirrorless strategy that is backward compatible with 50 years of lens making. People want to see what they are getting without a lot of hassle. Nikon has great sensors. Some high end Nikons feature wi-fi (D750) but they are still seeing declining sales. Looking to phone capabilities to keep them from drowning in losses is amazingly dense. As we discovered with the Galaxy NX, few people will come out of pocket to buy a data plan for their cameras when they are already paying on a data plan for their phones. And the phones aren't leaving any time soon.

And this long preamble brings me to the DXO One. What is it? It's an almost tiny camera that comes with almost no buttons and absolutely no viewing screens and it gets hooked onto your iPhone (and only your iPhone!) through the connection port and turns your sleek phone (which already has a very good camera, all things considered) into a two piece, non-ergonomic photo assemblage which might give your better images if you care to work around a boring and fixed focal length. What does it do that the iPhone can't do? Oh, yes. It has a bigger sensor. And a silly price tag.

My prediction on all this connectivity crap, whether it is resident in the camera or as part of an assemblage of pieces that include a separate camera and phone, is that it is all meaningless. The phone will be the epicenter of sending and receiving for years to come. People will not pay more for a camera-to-phone accessory just because it might be marginally sharper, especially if it has to be wedded to their phone. I am sure DXO will have nice software inside that makes images juicier looking than phone photos but I doubt the photos will be so exemplary as to move the millions (billions) who are habituated to using the their phones to take images to change. If you argue that it's aimed at a more sophisticated market of photo enthusiasts I'll say that they missed the mark here as surely as Thom and Nikon have.

Photographers buy cameras for many reasons but most of them do so for a level of flexibility combined with image quality, not exclusively for the image quality. They want longer and shorter focal lengths. They want control over the exposures and frame rates. But mostly they want the flexibility to shoot a tight shot of a dancer on a stage or a wide shot of the Grand Canyon with the turn of a zoom ring or a quick change of lenses. I watch the general public at trade shows, in the streets, at events and if they want to send an image to a friend they do so with their phones.

I think DXO has also misjudged the marketplace for cameras. The idea of spending $600 for a fixed lens add-on device for a phone that already has an integral camera (the best selling camera in the world?) doesn't make economic sense for the vast majority of enthusiasts and it certainly doesn't make any sense for professionals. That leaves only the great "unwashed" as a marketplace and they have already spoken with their wallets and killed off the traditional compact cameras. Those cameras were trampled under foot in the rush to embrace cameras embedded in phones and I know those people will never look back.

Just as real Leicas are the cult cameras of the well to do Nikon should position their cameras as the cult cameras of the middle class. Accessible and almost affordable by most people working professionally but still pricey and exclusive enough to sell well. Put in an EVF. Kill the cheaper models. Raise the prices on all the remaining models and became a niche maker. DXO? They should stick with software.

If DXO really wanted to make money and help photographers create they could come up with a usable and super high quality raw file that could be universally adopted by camera makers, and their customers. After all, their core competency is in imaging software, non?

Of course, after all this I could be wrong about everything. Tom could understand the race to connectivity much better than I ever will. He's got his ear to the ground on this whole topic. Nikon could be right and maybe they're just waiting out a fad (but I don't think so.....). And DXO could be right on the money. People may want to spend more money to take photos which they will continue to upload via their phones which also have cameras. People might also want to stick more and more stuff into their pockets when they head out the door. And they may want to play "put the puzzle pieces together" when they stop using their phone as a phone and rush to use it as a camera dock. But I don't think so. And I'm going to guess that a couple dozen Samsung Galaxy NX owners could tell them, "I don't think so."

Final thing: Any device you have to attach to your phone, boot up, call up an app, etc. is a way of slowing down photography and making the combined devices less useful not more useful. DXO One? A prediction of how many they might sell...

Note: I haven't met Thom Hogan but I've read his website (bythom.com) for years and I trust his reviews of Nikon products more than anyone else. I also like when he writes about the economics of the industry. I am disagreeing with his assessment of how to improve Nikon sales, not making an ad hominem attack here. I also read his Sansmirror.com site and find it well done. We agree about most aspects of cameras and shooting, with the exception of connectivity in cameras. He thinks it is a wonderful thing while I think it's the tool of Satan. That's all.

Kirov Ballet at the Mariinsky Theater. St. Petersburg, Russia. February 1995.

©1995 Kirk Tuck.

"Firebird" from the Czar's box.

Paris Fashion Show. Carrousel du Louvre. 1994.

©1994. Kirk Tuck.

A couple of images from Lisbon Portugal. By Henry White.

©1998 Henry White. 

©1998 Henry White.

Sigma 24-35mm f2.0 lens. An exciting product announcement for full frame users.

If you shoot with a full frame camera from any company I thought you'd like to know about this particular lens. I think it's both amazing and exactly what I wanted to fill a hole in my collection of lenses. I wouldn't have taken Sigma so seriously if I had not been shooting with their 50mm Art lens on the D810 for the last month or so. It's wickedly good and its performance sets me up to want to rush out and buy one of these.

I see myself as mostly a portrait photographer and I have a lot of good lenses that cover the 50mm to 200mm focal length range. I have a lot of good choices when it comes to do a nice, tight portrait but I fumble a bit at the wide end. I have the Nikon 25-50mm f4.0 and it's fun and can be really good but using it for finicky commercial stuff is slow and I always feel that I should be in live view to make sure the focus is on the money. I've also got the 24-85mm f3.5 to 4.5 Nikon Zoom and while it's a very, very good step up from a kit lens it's not "ultimate" in image quality at any one focal length. Nor is it particularly fast (as in wide aperture).

I've recently toyed with the idea of getting the new crop of Nikon f1.8 wide angles; the 35mm, 28mm and 24mm but the thought of paying for all three (nearly $2,000) and carrying all three around and changing between them in a dusty environment gives me pause. Then this comes along and it replaces all three of the Nikon options in one swoop.

The Sigma 24-35mm is an f2.0 optic. Amazing. Wonderful; especially if it's sharp and geometrically well-behaved. This is one of Sigma's Art series lenses and the vast majority of user reviews and reviewer reviews say that pretty much every lens in the Art line is superb. Sigma states that, in the focal lengths covered, this lens is the equal to their own individual, prime lenses when it comes to imaging performance.

The lens is also usable with their USB dock which will help micro adjust any focusing discrepancies for users.

I haven't seen a price on it yet but if it's under $1,500 I'll take it. If it's around $899, like the rest of the lenses in the line up I'll take it and be thrilled. I'll wait to see how the smart people review it before I actually spend the money but I'm impressed with Sigma for the recent spate of fun innovation.

How fun!

Off Topic: How bad neighbors degrade quality of life. Or---the project that never ends.

We are fortunate enough to live in one of the nicest and most sought after areas in Austin, Texas, itself one of the most alluring cities in the U.S. just now. We bought our house nearly 20 years ago when property and houses were much less costly --- by a long shot. When we first moved into the neighborhood it was a sleepy, quiet place and the big excitement of the week was when the garbage trucks would roll in to pick up the trash. It stayed that way for a long time.

It was heaven for a writer/photographer working from a studio on the same property as the house. The professional people who lived around us took off for work in downtown Austin in the morning and rolled back in the evening. I could look out into a wall of trees and write quietly for hours.

Then we became a city on the fast track to something else and our neighborhood became the "must live" area because our schools were rated (academically) #1 in Texas and #7 in the country. About seven years ago people started buying perfectly good houses and tearing them down to the dirt in order to build much bigger and more expensive houses. Huge houses. Most of this was happening a block or two away from our street so it only impacted me when I walked Studio Dog.

But the frenzy continued and the prices continued to skyrocket so that now, whether or not there is a house on the lot, the price is nearly $1 million per. Crazy money.  House after house has gone down only to be replaced by someone's wet dream of a perfect house. Most with all the good taste of an Atlantic City casino.

About 18 months ago the long time neighbors in the six bedroom, rambling house next door sold their place to a couple whose business seems to be flipping properties. And they've left a trail of neighbors in various parts of the area who seem to uniformly dislike them because of the way they work.

They allegedly cut corners. They try to get away with bending the rules. And they use the most sinister looking subs they can find. The biggest problem though is that they seem to do stuff in fits and starts so the construction of new work goes in stops and and starts. It's unpredictable.

It all started when the enormous, industrial dumpster arrived at 6:30am in their driveway. The unloading of this Moby Dick sized dumpster could have been mistaken for a small earthquake. Over the course of the next three months we enjoyed the dulcet tones of jackhammers, air chisels and sledgehammers as they dismantled the existing house. In true Texas "entrepreneurial" fashion they left enough of the foundation and one wall. For permitting purposes, presumably.

In addition to the symphony of power tools and front end loaders we were privileged to hear the portable radios of all the sub contractors belting out  whatever droll country and western crap was currently on the airwaves. No open windows at our house in what would have been a very pleasant Spring...  Nearly every day I would walk up my driveway to the street and try to explain to contractors in giant pick-up trucks why they could not park directly across my private driveway. Sometimes I got to do this many times a day. For months at a time.

Occasionally the jackhammering would stop to make way for the cement trucks which came accompanied by the cement pumping trucks and they would pound away slurping cement via hoses to almost inaccessible parts of the new construction.

At each point of completion we'd relax a bit, thinking the endless ordeal was over, only to be woken up a week later by some new early, loud ritual of construction. When I complained to the new owner about the city noise ordinances he made all the right gestures and nods which led me to believe he understood what I was saying only to be treated to 6 am Sunday morning recitals of Jackhammer suites. Sometimes solo and sometimes accompanied by rock saws.

Finally the house was complete and the new neighbors/owners moved into the house. This was less than six months ago, more than a year after the start of the project. We thought we were done with the endless  sonic and logistic abuse. But no. The next thing up on the agenda was the demolition of an old swimming pool and the construction of a new, three level, much more ornate pool. Cue the jackhammers. Cue the rock cutters. Cue the cement trucks.

Two weeks ago a sub-contractor's crew showed up to do the rock work and within a day our cars and the side of our house were covered by white rock dust. The creation of which comes with it's own piercing soundtrack. Seems that there are OSHA rules that mandate dust control when cutting materials containing silica but the pool contractor didn't think the safety rules applied to his crew. And especially not in Texas. I spoke with an OSHA agent who sent me the right written materials about the federal rules and we quickly shared them with the contractor.  That seemed to have worked for a while.

But just before the pool work started the new neighbors moved out, which required three moving trucks and two days of frenetic activity. Now the house is empty and I've been told that it had been sold. See tax statutes about inhabiting a residence for 18 months to prevent the payment of capital gains taxes....

This new wrinkle has accelerated pool construction and seems to have engendered a whole new jackhammering project on the driveway, which is adjacent to ours. The first pick up trucks arrive around 7 am and the jackhammering commences shortly afterwards. The noise is such that even with Led Zeppelin playing through my Stax headphones I can't quit shut it out.

My wife advises that I "let it go" when I complain but she gets to leave the neighborhood in the morning, work in a cushy office, in a downtown high rise, and then return just as the last of a never ending rotation of anonymous and highly scruffy workers drives off.

I don't know how much longer I will be able to take the noise before I crack and become completely  irrational and unable to work. Whether intentionally or just as a by product of their avarice the buyers (now sellers) are quickly making the enjoyment of my own property nearly impossible during daylight hours. My only hope is that the new buyers will like everything about their new purchase just the way it is and are not buying this multi-million dollar property as another in an escalating series of "premium tear downs" where they drop major cash and then spend another 18 months re-doing everything all over again,  in their own "unique vision."

Do I write this just to complain? No, I write it by way of explanation and as excuse for any shortcomings in my writing performance you may be perceiving here on the blog. I blame all typos, all grammatical imperfections and all poorly thought out blog posts on the intellect reducing effects of construction noise. The lack of continuity of thought I blame on having to walk up the driveway in sporadic intervals to move errant vehicles from our right of way.

I have learned some valuable lessons (again): Things change. Economic booms have unwanted consequences. Many people have no empathy for their neighbors. It's hard to be creative when you can't hear yourself think. Construction is a shitty business. Tax laws need to be changed. Police do a poor job enforcing noise ordinances. Perth Australia looks like a fun place to live.

We've talked about all this at home, at length. If the house on the other side of us goes up for sale we're renting out our property for the duration of the inevitable sacking and re-building, and living somewhere quiet and interesting. Somewhere without the traffic. Somewhere without the rampant sense of entitlement that leads people to build 2,000 square feet of house per family member. Someplace where early morning jackhammers and rock saws with no silica dust abatement are illegal.

And to keep this rant remotely tangential to photography, after listening to the jackhammers everyday for a week I sympathize with the users of that first generation of Sony A7 and A7R cameras. #shutternoise?

Euripides.

Euripides. Dude!

Slow down and savor what's all around you. Why the rush to get through life? Look once and then look again. Be late for work but early for a good sunrise.

Looking back over centuries.

From the Battle Collection at the Blanton Museum. 

My interpretation of a timeless sculpture.

I think it's good to have a favorite artwork in each museum you go to. The work that most engages you gives you a reason to go back and see more.

This image is my favorite painting at the Blanton Museum. I like it a lot and I never visit the museum without going upstairs to this quiet gallery dedicated to religious paintings and looking. I'll sit down and absorb the painting for fifteen or twenty minutes before I move on and when I do leave the room I take some of it with me in a certain way that's unexplainable.

There are a number of works of art that get me in exactly the same way, even though they are completely different. I would fly to Rome just to see the Bernini sculpture, "Apollo and Daphne" at the Borghese Galleria even if it's the only work of art I got to see before heading right back to the airport and coming right back home. It's that incredibly powerful to me.

The Bernini sculpture, "The Ecstasy of St. Theresa" located above the altar of the Cornaro Chapel in Rome's Santa Maria della Vittoria, is stunning. Just riveting. 

Upstairs in the Louvre Museum is another favorite sculpture by Antonio Canova, called, "Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss" that is the most romantic (and sensual) work of art in the entire city of Paris. I have been haunted by it since I first laid eyes on it in 1978.

I was surprised to see the Leonardo Da Vinci painting, "Madonna Litta", in the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. It's wonderful painting and equal to the combined inventory of the Chagall gallery in the same museum. There's so much amazing art in the world and it's all there all the time for us to see and reference and learn from. It's just amazing. 

We can't create well in a vacuum. We either reinvent a lesser wheel or we lose the thread that ties everything together.  We as photographers and artists are part of a continuum. Our value is in our understanding of whose shoulders we stand upon and how we can reach up and forward instead of making narcissistic work that doesn't let your voice out in an honest way.  Um....go look at art. You'll get it.

Looking at Art on a quiet Thursday. Another trip to the Blanton Museum.

click on the photos to make em bigger.

There is a new show of paintings at the Blanton Museum. I didn't have much to do today so after walking with Studio Dog, and giving a very stinky Studio Dog a bath, I headed over to the UT campus to visit the Art. The show is a retrospective of Caribbean artist, Francisco Oller. The show is entitled "Impressionism and the Caribbean" and it contains some wonderful work by contemporaries of Oller like Monet and Pissaro. It's a fun show. I'll go back again and soak it up next week, if I have an open schedule. 

After I see the new shows on the first floor I like to go up to the second floor and see what's shaking. I amble around and look at my favorite stuff. Today, for instance, I was drawn to the Andy Warhol painting of Farrah Fawcett. It's so much fun and if you look closely you can see the screen pattern from the silkscreen. Nice. 

There's also a Ben Shahn painting in the permanent collection called, "From That Day On", which deals with the atomic bomb attack on Japan. I like to see it and also "Oil Field Girls, 1940" by Jerry Bywater. The painting collection is an eclectic selection of work from the renaissance to now. It's interrupted here and there by interesting sculpture by people like Louise Nevelson.

Sometimes I just like the concept of looking into a gallery from another gallery. Seeing how a sense sees the division of space. Like the images above and below. Both feel like I am actually looking into the room instead of being a flat piece of art. 

I carry a different camera most visits. Today I was in a 50mm mood. I wasn't looking for stretch or compression; I was looking for verisimilitude in the first order. The feeling of seeing something with human point of view and perspective. I shot with the Nikon D610 and the 50mm Sigma Art lens. 

That lens is engaging in a way that most optics aren't. Don't care about the numbers but love the way it creates photographs. I'd use it for everything if I could. 

Long story short: Go see art. It will effect the way you see and the way you shoot. Mostly for the better. 

A few "between the real shots" shots from yesterday's restaurant shoot at Cantine. The 40 megapixel files are wonderful. So are the 16s.

EM5.2+ Sigma 60mm f2.8

The look of the Hi-Res, 40 megapixel files is different than the look of the regular 16 megapixel files. I can't put my finger on it exactly but it may have to do with the color purity. The actual color is more accurately sampled in this method and that may lead to fewer things that trigger my subconscious assessment of the photographs. The smoothness of the surface of the coffee cup seems so different...

On another note, I love working in restaurants like Cantine. While we're shooting we can always get a really, really good espresso. And the snacking while shooting is first rate.

EM5.2+ Sigma 60mm f2.8

I was photographing a salad in the little sweet spot of light we'd selected when I looked over and saw the way the light was hitting our plate of salmon and blistered tomatoes. I turned the tripod and shot the angle above. I think the color purity of the tomatoes is stunning. The Sigma 60mm lens is obviously doing a good job.

                                                              EM5.2+ Sigma 60mm f2.8

Even the aftermath of dining can be interesting in the right light. 

This one is a Nikon 610+105mm f2.5 shot. I brought this combo along for BTS shoots. 

I used it for fun extras.

EM5.2+ Sigma 60mm f2.8

I have to hand it to Olympus on the quality of the regular files out of the camera. They have a wonderful balance of colors and tonalities. I would give credit to the camera for the clever white balance but I was using one of the presets so that hardly counts....

EM5.2+ Sigma 60mm f2.8

We wanted to shoot some video of a wine pour but I couldn't resist getting a few still shots on our second version. My video partner, James Webb was doing a great job covering the handheld video work so I had the freedom to just play around a bit. Love the look of glasses illuminated by big windows. And I love what the wide open 60mm lens is doing with the stuff in the background. I am not a "bokeh" expert but the out of focus bottles in the background look gentle and kind.

Another random D610+105 shot. It's fun too.

This wraps up my week of Olympus commercial shooting stories. The cameras work very well and as we use them more and more either we or they are getting more efficient in overall battery use. We both had plenty of reserve at the end of the shoot. I had done still life in the morning and then the food and pour shots in the afternoon with the same camera and battery combination. Next time I won't bring the little Pelican mini case with the seven extra batteries. I'll just stick one in my pocket to be safe....

Olympus OMD EM-5.2 makes good images of servers. This is part two of yesterday's Hi-Res Mode saga.

Yesterday I wrote about using the Olympus EM5-2 on two jobs but I only showed the salad we shot at Cantine on the second job of the day. I wanted to come back and show one of the products we shot in the morning for our tech client, Salient Systems. I love the fire engine red front bezels for their server units. They look really cool all stacked up in a rack mount configuration.  

I didn't have time yesterday to do the post processing I needed to do on the job before I wrote yesterday's blog (a consequence of being a one man band) but I did finish up clipping paths and dust spotting around midnight last night so I thought I'd show this example while it the whole topic was still fresh in my mind. 

The server was shot in the company's conference room. I brought a short roll of white seamless paper and rolled it out from a set of background stands across the end of a big, conference room table. The room has a wall of windows that were covered by shades but the shades were not completely opaque; in fact, the sun through the shade material lit the room beautifully. I used three Fotodiox 312AS LED panels to light the server from different sides. In a departure from my usual practice I used the three lights without any modifiers other than the plastic diffusers that come with the lights. I also used a Fotodiox 508AS as my main light; again without additional modifiers. 

The OMD EM5-2 was outfitted with a 12-35mm Panasonic X lens set at f8.0. I started out by doing a customer white balance, setting my ISO at 200 and going into the camera's Hi-Res mode. I hadn't checked to see if the latest rev of PhotoShop CC had a converter for the raw version of this mode so I set the camera to the finest Jpeg setting. I focused in manual so I could more accurately distribute focus across the product. 

When shooting at 7296 x 5472 pixels you get to see all the specks of dust you really can't see with your naked eye unless you are twelve inches away from the product. My post production consisted of creating a clipping path around the product so the client can "lift" the image and put it into different layouts, and a more or less

Olympus OM5-TWO Delivers the Goods in the High-Res Mode. Two jobs in one day with more pixels that I know what to do with!!! An amazing keeper.

I started out my day at a tech company. My job was to photograph several servers and then a rack of servers against a white background. We'll be clipping out the backgrounds later tonight. Recently I did a job similar to this one for the same company using the Nikon D810 and several different Nikon macro lenses. That job was very successful. The client will use the images in everything from website illustrations to trade show graphics. 

And while everyone was quite satisfied with the output from Nikon's best camera I am never one to leave well enough alone, nor do I like to shoot similar stuff the same way every time I head out the door. As I was packing the night before I decided to take the Olympus EM5-Two cameras along with me this time, instead. I packed the two camera bodies and about ten little lenses into a Pelican case, grabbed five LED panels of assorted sizes, and my favorite location tripod and headed up to North Austin to set up a temporary studio in my client's big conference room. 

I have finally really mastered the Hi-Res mode in the Olympus cameras and I was determined to give the system a workout today. I used the Panasonic 12-35mm lens and shot everything at f8.0. That's the smallest aperture the system will let you set while using the Hi-Res mode. I am curious to find out if I can cheat and use an old manual focus lens on an adapter but that's for another time. I set the Hi-Res to give me a full second delay between touching the shutter button and starting the eight shot process+processing.  The Gitzo tripod I used settles down fast and I was as delicate with the shutter button as could be. Like a surgeon. Seriously.

(Quick addition for those uninitiated into the Hi-Res world of Olympus: The Hi-Res setting is a menu item that allows the camera to shoot eight fast frames of a subject. The camera moves the sensor between each exposure by half the pixel size. The oversampling creates files at a size of 40 megapixels and does so without the danger of aliasing or moire. The color is sampled in such a way that it is more pure than color from a single shot camera. It MUST be done on a tripod or you'll just end up with a mess. This new feature is very, very good.)

I was nervous about using the feature on the shoot but reviewed every single shot fired, at 14X. They were all perfect and perfectly detailed. Re-badged Dell servers never looked so good. I was very happy with the results, more so because my paranoia at what might go wrong pushed me to make a series of careful custom white balances and to meter more intently than I might have if just shooting routine, 16 megapixel raw files. I wrapped up that shoot and headed back toward downtown to my next appointment. 

You'll remember that I've been working on a video for a new restaurant called, Cantine. My friend and partner in video crime, James Webb, and I, had shot a bunch of live action cooking and bar shots last week, using the Olympus EM-5-Two cameras and the same buffet of lenses. We decided that we wanted to incorporate some hero shots of the food into the video so we arranged to get to Cantine after their lunch rush and have the chef prepare four or five dishes for us to videotape (with a bit of camera movement) and also to make still images. 

I manned the still camera while the more seasoned and experienced motion artist grabbed the video duty. I set the camera for the Hi-Res mode and did all of my static shots with the bigger files. The top images of this blog is the full frame of the 40 megapixel shot (reduced to 2100 pixels for the blog) while the bottom image, just below, is a 100% crop of the same image. 

I am very happy with the color, tonality and sheer resolution of the photograph. I think it's wonderful. I might select a lighter version for the final use but I grabbed this one first because I was so excited to see just how well the system handled this sort of shot. 

The lens used on this image was the Sigma 60mm f2.8 dn Art lens that I so eloquently praised not long ago. I think it's great wide open and even better stopped down to f4.5 or f5.6. If you shoot m4:3 and don't have this lens you should consider spending the small sum of $220 and adding it to your collection. It's a very nicely done lens and it turns in one great performance after the other. 

I've now shot about 6 hours of video with the Olympus EM5-Two cameras and a selection of lenses and I am upgrading my appraisal of this camera considerably. While the learning curve is a bit steeper than some other cameras I shoot with it is capable of pretty tremendous still image quality and very good video files. I don't regret my choice to upgrade to these cameras in the least. 

The usefulness of the Hi-Res setting for food photography, technical products and architecture should endear it to a lot of users who are eager to downsize from bigger systems while keeping the quality of their deliverables high. If you try one you will almost undoubtably love it.

James and I should have the video up in the next week or so and I think you'll be impressed by the footage(?) these cameras can turn out.

That's all I wanted to say. Now I need to get back to making my clipping paths and retouching fingerprints off the server chassis. That's what I get for not bringing along my cotton gloves to the first shoot.....

Added June 18, 2015: About the iPhone App: The iPhone app for the EM-5.2 will trigger the camera but NOT in the Hi-Res mode. It only works with regular Raw and Jpeg settings. In a previous blogpost from my first adventures with the camera I was mistaken about being able to trigger the camera in hi-res mode. I was working (and being frustrated and on a schedule) I shot a number of images with the Hi-Res mode released by hand and then tried to do the same thing with the phone app. I reset the camera to raw at one point and continued doing the job. When I looked at the images later there were a number of Hi-Res files that were sharp and well done and I assumed that those had come from my the phone app triggering, not remembering my switch back to raw. Instead they were a result of my delicate touch. But it was hit and miss. I am beyond happy to finally find, and learn how to use, the delay method and it works solidly every time. Sorry for my inaccurate testing procedures on the first go around. I blame it on the staff here at VSL.... And the lack of an 8.5 x11 inch, color illustrated, leather bound owner's manual from Olympus....

Adobe releases PhotoShop CC 2015 with many new and interesting features. Austin and central Texas prepare for more intense rain and flooding.

 This downtown Austin building shot up like a weed.

There's no real signage on it anywhere and no 

big corporate logo on it either. I'm naming it

"the Anonymous Building."

I just finished a seamless and pain free upgrade of my PhotoShop CC application to PhotoShop CC 2015. There's a bunch of new stuff under the hood and I will spend some time this week finding the stuff that's relevant to photography and dive in to the learning curve. I've poked around in the "Blur Gallery" and think that's pretty cool now that a number of the filters are content aware. 

There was much sturm und drang at the launch of PhotoShop in the cloud and many photographers gnashed their teeth and grumbled about "owning" their copy of the program, etc. I had a few misgivings but I dove in because I am an avowed camera junky and I knew that having the automatic updates to Lightroom and PhotoShop would ensure that I'd get the latest upgrades to the raw converters needed for new raw camera files. In the real world the $10 a  month I'm paying to have the constantly refreshed programs isn't even a blip on the old tri-corder. 

In addition to added capabilities the folks at Adobe say many parts of the code have been re-written for speed and performance so things like the Spot Healing Tool, for example, are much faster to use. Sounds good to me. I'm just happy that I was able to launch it and nothing crashed...

If you subscribe to Adobe's cloud versions of Lightroom and PhotoShop they are available for immediate upgrades. 

More rain coming.

We begged for water during the worst of the drought and now people in central Texas are wondering when someone will turn down the giant faucet and allow us to dry out and get the mold and mildew out of the crevices. We are under flash flood warnings until Thursday with the most intense part of the storms hitting us this evening around dinner time. I'm worried about getting more unwelcome water on the floor of the studio but my friends in Wimberly are really on edge after all the destruction that happened there two weeks ago. I cleaned out the French drain next to the studio and added a few barriers to re-direct water so I guess we'll wait and see what the quality of my engineering is like later today. 

I can feel my friend Paul's pain though. He's an architectural photographer and he was waiting for things to green up outside earlier in the year, now the whether has delayed or side-lined his projects for weeks at a time. Just when it seems like we'll have blue skies and good shooting weather more clouds roll in....

Swim Early, Swim Often. 

I am now engaged in "hoarding" swim practices, and it seems everyone else is as well. Swimmers pretty uniformly hate it when we have an early morning practice and we've gotten through warm up and are engaged in a main set only to be ordered out of the pool because of approaching lightning strikes. The coaches actually have apps on their phones that track lightning strikes and their proximity. 

This Spring we've been tossed out of a record number of workouts so on any day available we show up en mass to swim. It was five in a lane this morning, all present in anticipation that tomorrow's workout might get cancelled. Nobody really minds the crowds. Most of us swam competitively in high school and college and that was endless practice circle swimming with a crowd in each lane. 

Paradoxically I hope I get wet but I hope we stay dry. I think you know what I mean....

How do you make money in this business (photography)? You ask for it.

A tangled view of downtown Austin. 

First, let me set the stage. I grew up in a middle class family and we never talked about money. My parents always seemed to have enough and anything they denied me (a Pontiac GTO 6.5 liter....?) seemed to be more of a Calvinistic choice than a result of any financially motivated deprivation. Then I went to college with the help of both my parents, and few scholarships, and that seemed pretty straightforward as well. It's only when I finished school and started trying to figure out how to make a living that things got scary and complicated. Asking for money---and then asking for more money was something I had never practiced, never prepared for. As a consequence I didn't do it well.

A series of menial or boring jobs soon followed and I believed that there was set amount allocated for each of these jobs, that the allocation was unchangeable and that I could: take it or leave it. 

I think most of us start our "adult" job life thinking that everything is calculated in the number of hours worked x the rate of pay and we grudgingly leave it at that until we realize that we are being financially under-rewarded for our perceived efforts and we go looking for a better job. It's the hourly thing that's the first hurdle. 

The second thing that hamstrings employees and inexperienced freelancers is the idea that the buyer or employer holds all the cards, that there is an endless stream of equally talented people waiting to take our places and that we must, inevitably, invariably capitulate to the client's desires and accept the proffered deal.  Hmmmm. No wonder so many freelance photographers are poor. We seem to be bargaining from a no-win position all the time. 

Let's take the first idea, the pay by the hour concept. An image has a value that's elastic. If you are buying an image because you need something to grace your ad in a small church newsletter you probably base your budget on the draw or profit expected from the ad. The quality of the image has some value but the overall equation the image is part of is small and so the budget is constrained. You'll have a hard time convincing that local, small town realtor that her headshot for the church newsletter is worth your mortgage payment and I wouldn't try to convince either of you otherwise. But imagine the other extreme. Say you are working on a project for a multi-national corporation that sells very valuable high technology services and equipment in 145 countries around the world and earns tens of billions of dollars per year. Perhaps they need an image of a person as well. But imagine that this image is to be the basis of an ad campaign that will be used by the company internationally for the better part of a year. 

Imagine that they were looking around the web and found an image on your website that matched their vision of what their brand wanted to communicate to the world, perfectly. Imagine it was an image of a beautiful and brilliant looking young woman shot casually in an urban environment and it was relaxed and yet technically well done (congratulations on your technique!). They come to you to license the image. Now I ask you to think truthfully about whether this image and this use of the image has the exact same value as the image of the realtor from Smallville commissioned for

The D810 is fun because you can set the ISO dial at 64. It's just fun. Like Kodachrome 64 only better.

I know that as a blogging, professional photographer I am supposed to make all of the photographic assignments I shoot sound big and dramatic, and matters of life and death (or matters of "Light and Depth" ---the title of one of my favorite books on lighting by R. Lowell---yes, the founder of Lowell Lighting). But the reality is that most of my assignments are re-shootable and most of the photographs I take are actually just for fun. I do earn nearly 100% of my living taking images but that only constitutes about 1/5th of the total images I take. The rest I do because it's fun and the act of photographing makes me feel as though I'm doing something artistic even when I am just taking images of my coffee cup or the same street corner I've looked at a thousand times before.

So, when I proceed to talk about my walk around downtown yesterday with the big, honking Nikon D810 you won't imagine that I was embarking on any solo master class aimed at shifting any paradigms. I was just out to enjoy the heat, the biker rally in downtown and the straightforward act of looking at stuff and playing with the camera. My little exercise for the day was to use the camera at its lowest, native ISO (which is 64) and couple that with my favorite new lens, the Sigma 50mm f1.4 Art lens.  I wish I had seen noble bikers or luscious biker babes but most of the people I saw were obese, middle aged people who just happened to own Harleys. Everywhere I looked downtown it seemed as though I was watching scenes from the Tim Allen movie, Wild Hogs. 

I stopped looking for interesting biker photos and satisfied myself by finding scenes which would show of the capabilities of my camera and lens combination. Setting the camera ISO at 64 means you have to pay closer attention to shutter speeds and f-stops. I shoot mostly in aperture priority when I'm just goofing around so if I set f11 for a sunlit scene that I need depth of field for I must remember to head back to the wider apertures when I get into areas of open shade or walk through a hotel lobby, otherwise I'll end up with some shutter speed like 1/15th and since neither camera nor lens have I.S. it's a real issue.

The interesting thing about shooting the D810 at 64 and using the 14 bit, uncompressed raw files is the sheer amount of dynamic range you end up with in each exposure. You can be a stop or two under and at least a stop over exposed and you can make a beautiful image just by moving the sliders in Photoshop. Of course I love to take things to extremes so when I played with the image above and the image below I went a little slider crazy. My own wacky version of HDR. Only shot in camera and realized in post. 

The amazing attribute of the D810 that I never read about from other photographers and reviewers is the way the camera's sensor renders clouds. The absolute lack of noise coupled with super high resolution means that for the first time since I started shooting digitally I don't see any unwanted texture in the solid blue sky areas. That was my real epiphany from yesterday: The combination of low ISO in combination with high resolution means totally convincing blue skies

Remember me waxing on about how great the wooden tripods from Berlebach are? Did you know they make a wooden monopod? I didn't either....

Berlebach 112 Monopod.

I know most photographers are now convinced that they can pound down coffee by the liter, run up the stairs and still handhold their image stabilized cameras steadier than a tripod while taking photographs that are needle sharp with exposures as long as 90 seconds.  I am not one of those photographers. I think I'm pretty good with my handholding technique but I know my images can always be a little sharper and better composed when my mortal hands have a bit more assist than is provided by a jiggling sensor or a wobbly lens element.

Since I know for a fact that tripods and other supports make for sharper, better images I own a bunch of them. Just like cameras we always seem to be in search of the holy grail of support mechanisms. We were heading out to do some video last week with the Olympus OMD EM5.2 cameras and our intention was to do most of the work handheld. I couldn't help it though. I tossed two monopods and a tripod into the cargo area of the car. Just in case. What I wanted, but didn't know existed, was a wooden monopod with an integral tilting head. The day after we wrapped our shoot mine came from Adorama via UPS. Ah well, opportunity for immediate use thwarted but I'm still just as excited about the new toy. 

I like monopods when used in conjunction with the image stabilized cameras. I'm not trying to use them at insane shutter speeds but in video, if you are lingering on a shot, it's hard to stay stable for more than five or ten seconds. The monopod adds just enough stability to tighten up the shot. 

The usual video monopod has little feet at the bottom and tries to be a weak tripod. The big fluid heads they all sport at the top are ungainly and the overall combination leaves me thinking I should just bring the tripod along. I wanted a monopod with a little, tiltable head so I could tilt up and down. Nothing fancy, no fluid stuff necessary. And even though I have two metal monopods I've come to enjoy working with my two German made, white ash tripods so much I wanted to have the same tactile experience with a monopod. Why? Easy, the wooden tripods and monopods don't conduct heat or cold to your hands like metal does. Metal is efficient, just ask any one grabbing a black metal tripod that's been baking in the Summer sun. Just ask anyone who forgot their gloves and is trying to use a aluminum monopod in an upstate Maine Winter (do NOT stick your tongue on one that's been outside for a while in the snow...). For that matter the wooden monopod is also not a conductor of electricity so it's even safer than I first thought. I won't be using it in a lightning storm to test that part of my understanding....

So it's two days before our shoot and I come across this on the Adorama website and the Amazon website and the Adorama site has it for $99 while Amazon is showing $149. Both offer free shipping.  

I push the button though I am almost certain it won't come in time. When it finally showed up on Friday I pulled it out of the boxes and was immediately smitten. Even more so because it's the first monopod I've owned that doesn't resemble a tactical anti-personnel baton. It looks like something carpenter-y. It looks vaguely technical but vaguely industrial---in a craft way. 

How does it work? Beautifully. I spent some time walking around with it today, using it to stabilize a Nikon D810 and the big, fat Sigma 50mm. The head handled the weight perfectly. The tripod is exactly as tall as I am. It feels good in my hand. It has two sections which means it's not going to fold down all tiny for airport carry-on logistics. It's more a "back of the car near the old plaid blanket and the fix-a-flat can" sort of unit. 

My intended use? A nice little OMD EM5.2 festooned with the impressive and awe inspiring 60mm f1.5 Pen FT lens on top of that little, wooden head with the handle left a little loose. Just enough tension on it to have some feel but not enough to impede a little forward tilt. Running video in 15 to 30 second chunks in situations where a tripod would be cumbersome or dangerous. 

But now that I've played with it I'll confess that it's addictive and I am already planning to use it extensively for corporate shows where I want to use really cool lenses but have hesitated in the past because I needed just a little bit more stability but didn't want to bring the two extra legs along. Once you've tried wood you might not want to go back to conventional tripods. I think I'll specify this white ash wood on the dashboard of my next Bentley. It should be just the right touch with my off-white leather seats. And yes, I've already checked, it will fit in the "boot."

Dare I say, "Simple and elegant." ?