Image of Michelle with enlarger post processing.

I write a lot about portraits here.  I mention the lenses and cameras and even the lights being used but I find it more difficult to convey what rapport is and how to work at establishing rapport with your portrait subjects.

When I was younger I used to think you had to have all kinds of lines and jokes to use in a session. I thought you needed to sound incredibly smart and look like you have it together every second of the shoot.  The typical stereotype of a professional photographer by aspiring photographers.

The reality is that connecting on a human level is much more important than getting every mechanical part of the shoot right.  People will forgive a lot if the expression and the engagement between the model and the moment are just right.  People are unforgiving of a technically excellent photograph of a despondent and disengaged subject.

In television people will forgive crappy video by they won't tolerate bad sound even for  a minute.  It's the same thing with portraits.  A real expression is more valuable than a Profoto Air 8 power pack and a box full of heads.

I know you've heard it before but I always sit down with my subject and talk for a bit to get to know them before we shoot.  I talk about how I work, ask them what they like.  We do small talk and we share.  How long?  Could be ten minutes, could be an hour.  Depends on what they have to say.

I work slowly.  I talk people into poses over time.  I shoot slowly.  I never use continuous shutter settings.  We stop and I give them (positive) feedback about how our session is going.  It's always "our" session, never "my" session.  If the lights are not working right I stop and tell them what's going on and how I'm going to fix it.  I tell them when they look beautiful and I talk them into another pose if I see something I don't like.

I always stop to fix things that I think are important.  I never presume I can fix something in post.

The session lasts as long as it needs to last. Sometimes for hours and sometimes for as little as thirty minutes...if we both know we got something great.

No phones or cellphones in the shoot.  We turn them off, not down.  I ask models and crew to leave theirs in the cars.  I turn off the studio phone.  If I have crew I like for them to be quiet and discreet during the shoot.  I am trying to build a rapport and a momentary relationship between me and the subject.  It's not a communal Koffee Klatch.

My goal by the end of the shoot is to have made another close friend and to have both of us want to shoot together again, soon.  That all sounds so easy.  It's the only hard part.

The Walk-Around Camera.

Ben.  September 1997. On the move in Austin.

"The dollar doesn't go as far today because people won't go as far for a dollar... " -old folk saying.

Could it be that photographs are being devalued, in part, because we don't put as much of ourselves in them as we used to? I was trying to figure out why I have such an instinctive dislike for the idea of pocket cameras and phone cameras. I understand that technology has gotten better and better and the images from iPhones are pretty good, technically.  And I know from experience that the 10 megapixel wonder cameras that are pocketable are also pretty good picture takers.  So what is it that's going on in my head that keeps me thinking that defaulting to the tired old saw, "The best camera is the one you have with you." Which implies that you, as a photographer, are too damn lazy to carry around the right tools with you to do the job so you're happy to default to  whatever is most convenient; if even you know it compromises your vision and your style.

For casual amateur photographers I get it. They aren't interpreting a scene they are documenting it and in their minds as long as the content is conveyed they've accomplished their mission.  And usually their mission isn't to go out and get great images it's to do something totally unrelated to photography but with the potential to create an image that speaks to the reality of their experience to all their friends on Facebook or Pinterest. 

Where does that leave the artists?  Where does that leave real photographers? Trapped between convenience and intention.  For years now I've spent Sunday afternoons walking around with a camera.  It's a nice change of pace from the studio and the pool and it gives me a chance to practice with whatever camera I've chosen to carry along.  

I go through phases. For nearly a year after the Olympus EP-2 came out it was rare for me to go out with anything else.  I carried it because it was small and light and because the VF-2 finder let me configure the camera as a square shooter.  That spoke (in a slightly diminished way) to the style I've been working on for nearly 25 years.  Shooting big square images with a Hasselblad film camera and a normal or slightly long lens.

The EP2 kept me happy enough but somewhere deep inside I had the gnawing realization that many times the final image was a compromise from the way I see things.  I had chosen small, light and free over the exacting parameters of my real vision.  With an equivalent angle of view the backgrounds didn't look the same as they did with my bigger camera.  The meatiness of the black and white negative was missing.  The rounded shoulder of my Tri-X film had been replaced with a snappy curve that clipped highlights quick in order to make the files fit into a color space.  

That all started me thinking about the difference between carrying a camera as a diletante as opposed to carrying a camera with a sense of my own real intention.  If you pack a camera in your pocket in order to be ready for the unexpected you are, on some level, like the guy who carries a condom around in his wallet on the off chance he might get lucky.  You're out on a beer run or buying something at the hardware store or drinking with your friends and you have your phone--with built-in camera--- in case Chuck drinks too much and hurls, or you see a power saw and need a price comparison photo. Or you and Chuck and Joe want a photo of yourself bracketing some poor girl who works at the car show.  Your primary intentions are to leave the house to do whatever normal people do in normal life. The camera is an afterthought.  The iPhone is a substitute. It's the Power Bar instead of the nice lunch. It's the instant coffee instead of the stuff they brew at Caffe Medici.  

So lately I've been trying to match my cameras to my intention.  Really.  I'm trying to match up the cameras with the reasons I bought them in the first place.  More and more my Sony a77's come out when I'm going to work for a client.  We have images in mind and we use the right tools to get them into file form.  Long and short lenses. Big files. Tripods and lights.  But it's rarer and rare that they go out on walks with me.

My Olympus EP2 and EP3 cameras come out when I'm shooting personal projects that are all about color, shape and textures and abstraction.  I really like them when it's my conscious intention to go out and look for patterns and symbols embedded in the urban landscape. The smaller cameras are like the Moleskine notebooks full of inferences and descriptions instead of the finished novel.

But now, when I take images of family, friends and interesting people I'm most likely to bring along my Hasselblad because it makes the kind of images of people that I know I'm going to like most.  Even with the 80mm Planar there's something very different about the way the lenses and the system differentiate my subjects and "remove" them one step from their environments.  To go one step further I usually use the medium format cameras with black and white film.  Not because that's some requirement from the art cult but because, when I started out shooting, color film was too expensive for me to use for personal work and too finnicky for people who did their own darkroom work.  But I learned to love it and look for tones and graphic separation of things and that love hasn't diminished.

It would be much easier to go out with the Pen EP2 and bang away with the aspect ratio set to 6:6 (1:1 in reality; Olympus was just riffing off the fact that square medium format is also known as 6x6...) and then take the raw frames, massage them and then run them through Silver EFX.  But the range of tones would be different and the ability to grab tenuous and precariously balanced highlights would be gone and the optical magic that happens when shooting to a bigger frame would also be gone.  Could I replicate the look and feel with lots of little PhotoShop tricks?  Sure but it won't be the same.  It will be a diluted fascimile of something that can still be done first hand. 

So now, even if it looks dorky, when I leave the studio and my intention is to photograph people I put the Hasselblad strap over my shoulder because that system is closest to my intention.  And life it too short to continue down the avenues of half measures and recitations about how something is "almost as good."  It never is.

Am I making some sort of statement to the effect that everyone should rush out and buy a Hasselblad even if your very first camera was a Canon G2?  Nope. I'm saying that if you work as an artist you will have some perfectly formed aesthetic that bangs around in your mind day in and day out.  That aesthetic is served by a unique set of tools and when you know and feel which tools are the ones that can best recreate your vision you have an obligation to yourself to match your aesthetic intention and your tools, even if they don't fit in your trouser pockets or allow you to tell everyone on Twitter that you are now at Denny's and will be ordering a Grand Slam.  (For my European readers: Denny's is a down market chain restaurant that specializes in packaging traditional American trash cuisine with maximum fat calories.  The Grand Slam is a breakfast special for four people, served to one...).

We have a vision in our minds of something we collectively call a "walk around" camera or a "street shooting" camera and we judge it to be something that will focus quickly, not be heavy or bulky and also be somewhat discreet.  We love the idea that Henri Cartier Bresson and his confederates roamed the streets of the world with small Leica rangefinder cameras, swathed in black tape to diminish their profiles, almost invisible to the world.  But those were their only cameras! Hank didn't have a Leica in his hand and a bag full of Rolleiflexes over his shoulder or a view camera waiting in the car.  All of his work was done with the same camera. (He changed models as improvements came along but the ethos was always the same: small, light, simple.)

His camera perfectly matched his intention. It was perfectly chosen to match his vision. As were William Klein's cameras and Robert Frank's cameras.  But my vision is not a "middle distance" vision of a scene unfolding so my choice of cameras shouldn't be the same. Even if it's in the nature of a walk around camera.

Many of my friends and associates have been drawn into the lure of the new walkaround cameras. They are currently flitting between the Olympus OMD EM-5's and the Fuji Pro 1's. The more financially robust are sticking with the Leica M9.  But they also have Hasselblad digital systems and Nikon D800's or Canon 5Dmk3 and their day-in-day-out vision is more accurately described and ascribed to their integration with interpreting through those systems.  Most of the folks I know honed their vision looking through the finders of 35mm SLRs.  A smaller sub-group gravitated early on to either medium format or, in the case of landscape and still life shooters, even bigger cameras.

Their training, their vision and their technical demands all scream "No!" to the cameras they feel compelled to acquire for their "leisure" work.  In my mind there is no difference between the leisure work and the heartfelt work.  An innate style is hard to change and even harder to translate to new and varied tools.  Few make the transition successfully.  

So I've moved back to shooting with what the little voice in my head keeps telling me I should have been shooting with all along, the big square.  And it's hard to "go backwards" on some fronts.  We've trained ourselves that everything we shoot is free.  Needs to be without cost. (financially and emotionally).  No more film purchases, no more lab costs.  If we go back to our big black and white square we're back to paying to shoot.  Client or not.  We're back to scanning our work.  I'm putting up one or two scanned frames at a time to share instead of glops of twenty or thirty similar but not quite identical digital frames.

But as I look through notebooks full of old school negatives and contact sheets I remind myself that we figured out how to pay for our own personal work back in the day, why can we not figure out similar budgeting compromises today?  Film, for my family, may mean that we don't go out to eat as much or that I keep my car a year or two longer than I intended.  Since all the work I'm doing with film is personal (for me first) I don't have to rush to develop it.  I can put it in a light tight box in the file cabinet and dribble it out when budgets are plumb, delay the processing when times are lean.  Opening the box and taking five or ten mystery rolls to the lab will have the same celebratory feeling we used to get when we'd pop the cork on a nice bottle of Champagne (Louis Roderer Brut, SVP) at the end of a lucrative project.  Film processing and celebration for doing well in your occupational art.

The bottom line here is that I'm not making any impassioned plea that you return to film or arrive at film as a virgin but that you choose your vision camera  and be true to that camera and that vision when you have the intention to go out and do your art.  Even if it's a tight squeeze to get that Hasselblad in the pocket of your pair of tight designer jeans.  But don't kid yourself that you somehow have  secondary vision and that it's being well taken care of with popular but inappropriate tools.  Whether or not a tool is appropriate depends solely on where you are in the process.

I wish my vision were all about the Fuji Pro 1 today. They look really cool.  But what's the use for me when I'll just end up cropping it square and trying to make the background go away in a very distinct fashion?  I'm looking for a digital back for my Hasselblad film camera.  I want one that has a big square.  When I find one I can afford I'll see if it can replace film.  Maybe.  Maybe not.  Only me shooting it for me will tell.

One thing I am sure of is that buying all the different cameras is a great way to move you further and further from what it is you really know you want to shoot.  Happy is the man or woman who has found his subject, his format and his camera and who can now settle down and just use them over and over again.

When we are willing to go all the way to make photographs that fit our vision they will have more power and more draw. They will be truer art.  When we choose a tool for convenience it's hard to push past "pretty" to "wonderful".  People talk about using the right tool for the right job but maybe we've been confusing ourselves as to what the real job is......

Steven Pressfield has a new book out that will be of much interest to many of the VSL readers.  It's called Turning Pro and it's a follow on to his great book, The War of Art. I recommend both of them highly.  I am thinking of writing a rejoinder called, "Turning Amateur: Making Photography Fun Again."  But that might be too much.

Love the Theater, Love the Postcards.

I shoot a lot of plays and images to market plays for Zachary Scott Theatre. My favorite piece of marketing for the shows is the post card.  The theatre creates one for nearly every show we've done in the past decade.  They go out to season ticket holders and targeted, high income households in certain zip codes. Each one is designed to reflect the feeling of the play and each one has its own logo treatment and design touches. At the same time the look and feel are consistent and professional.

I often make the mistake of believing that all print is dead and that may actually be a result of working in the advertising business, tangentially.  We always see the stuff heading to television and the web and sometimes we think of print as the bastard child. The afterthought. But the marketing director tells me time and again that there's a particular appeal of getting something physical and well designed in the mailbox. It's a nice respite from the sea of bills.  But most of those are going online as well.

While I enjoy the documentation shots we do at the dress rehearsals my favorite types of assignments are the set up shots done well in advance of the openings.  The set up or studio shots all seem to happen about six weeks ahead of a show opening and get sent out to their target markets at least a week in advance of the debut.

I took a fun group of friends to see Fully Committed on Friday evening. We started out at a close by restaurant for drinks and appetizers before the show and then walked over in time to be seated. It's an amazing one man show.  My favorite actor, Martin Burke, does all 39 parts in the play.  He got yet another well deserved standing ovation.  Amazing.  Live theater is like nothing else.

Have you ever tried to finish writing a book?

We've talked here about the idea of resistance. The resistance to finishing projects. The resistance to getting important work done. I've recommended a great book on the subject called, The War of Art, by Steven Pressfield.  That book has helped me get over the anxiety that comes with trying to finish something for the first time.

I re-read that book every time I get a new contract from my publisher to complete a book on photography. It really helps. I can identify the things I'm doing, unconsciously, to sabotage my writing efforts and I can work harder to get past those pernicious road blocks.

But golly.  I sure am having problems finishing what is to me one of my most important projects. And reading the Pressfield book again just doesn't seem to help me budge this one.

You see, I started writing a novel in 2002. It was a dark time for me.  The events of 9/11 temporarily destroyed my business and a profound health issue almost made everything else irrelevant.  I couldn't really work as a location photographer for months. And we topped it all off with a king sized dose of unrelenting anxiety.  But the one thing that made it all bearable was a book I started writing.  In fact, I finished all the principal writing in that year.  I spent a lot of time squatting at a table at the local Starbucks and I finished up in december at a table at the Caffe Medici on West Lynn.

The book is a novel. It's a fun, quirky story about a photographer who gets an assignment to go to Lisbon to cover a big, week long trade show. But he is quickly drawn into a dangerous adventure as someone else's bout of attempted corporate espionage goes south. A past job as an intelligence researcher, and a U.S. government without many resources on the ground, propels my hapless photographer/character into unwanted action and narrow escapes.  And all the while he tries to do a good job on the corporate assignment because....he desperately needs the money.

I had a blast writing it. I'd been on a similar assignment several years earlier in Lisbon so I knew the general lay of the land. I've read a zillion spy and detective novels and I was ready to try my hand at story telling.  Especially with a character who is a working (but aging) photographer, in over his head.

But here's the downside:  A novel takes a lot of time to polish.  And at the end of my convalescence and the end of the year we got really busy again in the photo business and I was determined to make up for lost time.  Then the book contracts for the non-fiction books started arriving one after the other and the novel was mothballed.  But I couldn't give it up.  My friends who'd read it loved it. They kept pushing me.

When things slowed down in the business again this year I decided it was now or never and started taking a run at re-writing and polishing again.  But the resistance to finishing gets harder and harder as I get closer and closer.  There always seems to be some pressing thing I have to attend to.  A short term opportunity that clouds the long term potential of getting the book out the door. A need to lock down money and resources that takes precedence over a personal project.

Why am I telling you this?  Because, in a way I feel like the readers of the blog are like friends. We share a lot of similarities and we've shared a lot of virtual ink together.  And I'm telling you so you'll understand if my blogging gets a little sporadic in the coming month.  I've given myself a deadline.  It's the one thing this project has never really had.  I'm giving myself till the end of July to make the timeline flow, to flesh out the characters a bit and to convert some of my plot shorthanding into flowing narrative.

At the end of the month my designer and I are planning to put this work up on Amazon.com as my first piece of long form fiction. I love the character and I have plot lines for subsequent books ready to go that riff off my experiences in Russia, Mexico, Monte Carlo and Rome....all as a working photographer. The mix of real, everyday photography and the fictional co-story of spies, terrorists, random evil and professional pratfalls seems fun to me.

It's my hope that every single one of the thousands of daily readers of the blog will rush out and buy a copy as soon as the book goes live.  I'm also planning to make the book available in paper.

A long winded explanation but I wanted you to know.  And to push me back to work if you see me meandering around the web adding my opinions to various dead end forums instead of shackling myself to the desk in the basement of the Visual Science Lab and getting some damn work done.

I want to make Steve Pressfield proud and actually finish this.  Save up your $9.99 and get ready.

Is the age of "professional photographer" over? A popular re-run from earlier this year.

Is the age of "professional photographer" over? 

More people are taking more photos than ever before and it's a wonderful time to be a photographer.  It may even be a wonderful time to sell pictures occasionally and to make a little side money but I think we're seeing the passing of the "Professional Photographer" (in caps) as a profession in the same way typesetters vanished from the face of the earth within ten years of desktop publishing hitting the marketplace.  Same with traditional labs.  In the old days typesetting required skill and taste and equipment.  But it cost money to do it right.  We paid the money (in the ad agency days) because that was the way it was done and that was the cost of doing business.

But when Pagemaker and QuarkExpress hit the market it became possible (mandatory, from a cost point of view...) for art directors and graphic designers to do their own typesetting.  While early versions of the desktop graphic design programs lacked the ultra fine control, and the massive number of fonts traditional typesetters offered, the programs offered something that accountants couldn't resist:  The Idea of Free,  and they offered something a generation becoming fascinated with computers couldn't resist:  The Idea of Personal Control over the whole process.  While there are tiny exceptions the vast majority of professional typesetters and typesetting services are gone.  Not transformed, just gone.  We don't have a group who "upped their game" and made a viable argument for the value proposition of the very best typesetting in the world we just don't have any typesetters.

While more and more photos are being taken, as a percentage, far fewer are being taken by professional photographers than ever before.  And that includes images being used in ad campaigns and in  the general course of commerce.  Wedding photographers have seen a radical decline just in the last two years in total sales and revenue.  And it's not a question of not seeing the future.  Professional photographers don't know how to make money doing what they have done in the past in the future they do see.  Everyone who needs a photo for one use or another is stepping up with their own camera (or phone) and taking their best shot.  PhotoShop and it's lite cousins are the Pagemakers and Quarkexpresses that are driving the total market adaptation.  Time and budget are relentlessly driving the market for images.

Why did I start thinking about this?  It was the news that Kodak might be filing bankruptcy that started me down this tortured thought trail.  If the company that invented digital photography can't figure out how to survive in the age of digital photography what hope can there be for the professional photographers?  Yes, we're more agile and able to change quickly, but we're doing what all the devolving industries have done when confronted with their decline,  we move into other related fields, each of which is probably also in decline.  A great example is video production.  

When the 5D mk2 hit the market, and Vincent Laforet did his video Reverie, it struck a match of hope in the hearts of photographers looking for a secondary income stream.  How simple.  We would all become video artists.  But in the last two years so much programming has moved to YouTube and the numbers in the professional side of that industry are, if anything, worse than those confronting the majority of working photographers.  Some photographers have starting offering web design but that market is flooded as well.  

I've heard the chorus before.  It goes like this:  "Up your game and the world is your oyster."  But the reality is that, for most, even the perfect game isn't going to compete against free, or almost free. And it's not enough to compete against the concept of "good enough."  With tens of billions of images available at the fingertips of people who used to have to assign work, and pay real money for it, the odds are that perfect isn't going to be in the budget again for a long, long time.

Kodak was, for me, the symbol of photography as I knew it.  And the guys at Kodak weren't and aren't dumb.  They are/were some of the best and brightest.  They just didn't plan on the market shifting at the speed of light.  They didn't anticipate that disruption would occur faster than T-Max 3200.  And we, as professional photographers, are now standing where Kodak stood before the Toons dropped the safe or the grand piano on their heads  (Who Killed Rodger Rabbitreference).  Will we be able to do a better job of creating an alternative universe for ourselves?  It remains to be seen. 

I think the markets will continue as they progressively wind their way away from traditional assignment work.  Photographers will transition as designers have.  In order to stay in the middle class they'll need to diversify into video, digital presentation, writing, web publishing and more stuff that we haven't even invented yet. We'll likely become "content providers" working in concert with designers and agencies. Designers work with type, work with graphic elements, shoot their own source materials when necessary, design for the web and print and outdoor and for mobile apps.  Would they prefer to concentrate on pure design?  Sure.  But they also like to eat, pay the rent and buy stuff.  

Our industry will make a similar transition.  We just haven't figured out the whole roadmap yet.  And the people who don't want to learn to swim (all four strokes)  will be left behind, clinging to a fragment of the battered haul from a ship that's sinking quickly into the deep, cold waters of incessant progress.

Ian Summers summed it all up best with his motto:  "Grow or Die."

The only reality check I can offer is that Professional Photography is a much, much bigger and more diverse industry than Typesetting ever was.  And there are, of course, segments that will keep holding on even as most of the formerly profitable market is destroyed.  To make an analogy to video, while people are shooting their own webcasts with small digital cameras, or the cameras in their laptops, they don't want to give up the quality of professional camera and video work they see on broadcast NFL football games.  That level of work still takes a lot of skill and experience.  But a quick training video or "how to" video for in-house use?  Forget it.  Parts of the industry will go on.  But large swaths of what we always considered "the bread and butter" will not.  Not in the same way.  And without foundational work there's no real chance the majority will make it being photographers, exclusively.

Do I write this because I am angry or cranky?  No, I write this as an honest opinion.  It's as inevitable as the waves on the beach.  How can we battle  it?  We can't.  We can sort through our options and figure out our futures but we have to recognize that things changed quicker than anyone thought and, that old models are breaking down.  My business used to be completely devoted to assignment photography.  Last year a large percentage of our income was from publishing royalties.  Another segment came from several video projects.   Another part of the pie came from web marketing.  And some money even flew into the coffers as a result of teaching at workshops and seminars.  I may be a curmudgeon but I'm embracing change as quickly as I can.  Wanna buy a Visual Science Lab T-shirt?  

I hope Kodak makes it. Not because I believe they must for nostalgic reasons but because it would validate my thoughts that we can, as an industry,  retool and we can re-engage our markets (and new markets) in different ways.  

This essay is aimed solely at the people in the audience who make a living from taking photographs.  If you don't fall in this category you are either luckier or less lucky than we are.  If you get beyond the idea that the people at Kodak are not intelligent and you can understand that they were at the mercy of the data they had at hand you'll likely do a better job with your re-invention.  It starts now.  

Could there be a better time to buy used digital cameras and lenses?

Martin Burke in "Fully Committed" at Zachary Scott Theatre.

I shot the image above with a Panasonic GH2 and an old Olympus Pen lens, the 60mm 1.5. Last year the GH2 was a stand out camera. It had arguably the best video/movie mode and video controls of any camera on the market and it's resolution is still top of the class for m4:3rd cameras but now prices of used ones are dropping like rocks.    Along with the recently obsoleted models from Canon, Olympus, Sony and Nikon. (That's because of the rapidly solidifying rumors of an imminent, new model, the GH3). It's part of the natural process of the market, there will always be people who want or need the very latest stuff and are willing to take a loss on recently purchased equipment in order to have what they would consider to be the best available in the moment.

I just came back from my favorite camera store, Precision Camera.  They take trade-ins on popular cameras and, for special customers, they will accept consignments. They are literally awash in recent model used cameras.  The very cameras we salivated over last year and a few years ago.  In some cases just a few months ago.

I found a shelf filled with Canon 5D mk2 cameras. They've been rendered useless by the Mark 3. ( sarcasm alert for the differently configured: Kirk is being facetious. The cameras are still very, very good performers ).  Likewise, the arrival of the Nikon D800 has led to a deluge of D300s, D700, D3 and even D3x cameras.  And if you are willing to go down market or down years the range of cameras on offer is incredible.  All at bargain prices.  Many used only by amateurs and sitting there in mint condition with fewer actuations on the shutters than you might believe.

The "on again/off again" rumors of the Olympus 4:3 E system's demise means that there are ample recent e cameras and lenses at fire sale prices as well.

Everywhere I look the Olympus OMD EM5 camera has radically displaced the EP2.  You can buy new EP2's for around $275 and only 18 months ago they were scratching $1,000.  Will it take long for the EP3's to follow?

What does this really mean to you? Say you are a young photographer who is just starting out in this business.  You have the opportunity, during this almost unprecedented surge cycle to put together a really decent system for less cash. If you can do without 36 megapixels and you want to shoot Nikon it's time to snap up something like a used D700 or a D7000 and some of the lenses that have been cast out by the newer G series versions.  The new lenses might have some small advantages over the previous models but remember that the old models were capable of making images for professionals that sold and sold well just a few months ago.  We may crave the new but  your clients won't see the difference.  And you probably won't either.

If you shoot Canon you can walk into bigger stores and look through a sea of bodies and lenses. The 1DX is pushing used prices of the 1Dmk4 down and the prices on 1DS2's has never been lower.

Can you imagine if the car market was like the camera market?  We'd be changing cars every eighteen months!  The average length of ownership, in the United States, of new cars is now 71 months.  Just a month shy of six years. Thing is that the cars last that long and deliver good service, for the most part, during that time frame.  But then so do cameras. 

I would venture to say that you could go out for most jobs equipped with the original Canon 5D or the Nikon D2X and a few older generation lenses and do most of the jobs that fall to photojournalists (are there any left?) and most local commercial photographers. Especially if the images are heading to the world wide web.

If you separate the business side of photography from the pleasure side of photography there's not a lot more we can do with the latest raft of cameras and lenses that we could not have done with the previous generation of same for most of our work.  Especially if the new stuff is seeing most of its action handheld and bumpy.

Just a suggestion, if there was a camera or lens that you really liked but which has been discontinued you might find that it's still a really good shooting camera and it's probably available on the used market at a great savings. Check out the good, local camera stores and see what you can find.  And if the price seems to be a bit high don't be afraid to offer less.  Most of the cameras that come in on trade have a pretty healthy margin and a shelf life like milk.  Shoot a little bolder and older and keep some money in your pockets for the adventure.

Silly me.  I'm still buying up $125 Nikon F2's and $500 Hasselblads.  Do you know what these cost new???

By way of review.

Why don't you try a MF digital camera?

A reader of the VSL blog recently wrote to suggest, after reading my post about photographing Lou with my film Hasselblad, that I try out a medium format digital camera before making the assessment about which path will ultimately yield better results. I thought I would remind my readers that I've been down that road before, for months at a time, and with three different systems. In 2009 and 2010 Studio Photographer Magazine commissioned me to test and write about three of the MF digital cameras that were just coming on to the market.  My two most memorable tests were of the Leaf AFi7 with a 39 megapixel back and the Phase One 45+ because, at the time, they were the state of the art.

I also reviewed the less expensive Mamiya entry camera.

Once you got over the fact that you'd just signed for a $45,000 system (when the two delivered lenses are factored in) the Leaf camera was nice.  It made beautiful files.  The 180mm f2.8 Schneider lens was superb.  It gave really nice out of focus performance and even better in focus performance.  But it's autofocus was slow like paint drying and the tandem batteries in the camera and grip did their best to die often, and always out of sync.  Would I still be shooting with the camera if someone bestowed it upon me for free?  Yes.  Was the calculus there for me to buy it and make more money with it? No.

The Phase One was as close to being the perfect medium format digital system I've shot with so far. The camera is much lighter and better set up than the Leaf and the lenses+body were small enough and light enough to be used handheld and to be carried around town.

The Mamiya was heading in the right direction price wise and I thought the files were just fine.

But with each of these cameras I kept coming back to the idea that I could dump the $25,000 or more into film and processing with cameras I already owned and get files that were just as good.  And I could side step the handling and battery problems. The bottom line is that my clients didn't need the bigger files and I didn't need the additional expense.  Not in the middle of the great recession...

If you want to read what I wrote about the cameras for the magazine (now discontinued) you can read them at these links.

http://blog.mamiya-usa.com/?p=94

http://www.imaginginfo.com/print/Studio-Photography/Leaf-AFi-7/3$4159

http://www.imaginginfo.com/print/Studio-Photography/An-Enhanced-Medium-Format-Digital-Camera-/3$4670

So, how are those LED lights working out?

I read stuff on the web and die hard strobers are always telling people that LED's are too dim or that the color can't be used for professional jobs. Those people are limiting their own work by thinking in such a linear and bracketed way.  While LED's aren't the perfect solution for everything they are great to have in your tool kit. I did a job with Ben on Tues.  We shot video for a television commercial and stills for print.  We used four LED panels to light a greenscreen background and another three on work main subjects.  When we finished shooting video we clicked the camera over to the manual mode and banged off some raw files.  All of them were beautiful. You'll see the commercial as soon as it's edited and approved.  I don't use LEDs for everything but when I do I know it's a good choice. A recent job for a healthcare company was also done with all LED's.  The difference it that those LED panels were all battery powered.  We were able to move through location after locations almost as fast as if we had been shooting available light and the images were just right.  The check cleared the bank. 

This image has nothing to do with LEDs.  I just like the graphic and the message.

The best use for LED's is in product and food shooting.  I wrote about this in my book and I've blogged about shooting food this way here on the blog: http://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2011/02/kirk-tuck-photographs-food-at-jeffreys.html

The set doesn't get hot, you can work closer in to your subject and the color is easy to white balance.  The use of continuous light gives you a level of control you'll never really have when using flash.

And when we rev up the cameras for a video shoot there's nothing I'd rather light with right now.

Photos of me by Amy Smith.

Finally.  Could there be a better time to buy used stuff?

Method, Mechanics, Art and Madness.

I spent some time shooting downtown in the middle of the day recently. When the sun is out and the sky is clear the light just doesn't change its intensity from minute to minute.  I find it very freeing to guess at the exposure, set it on the camera and then use it without changing as long as I'm working in the same direct light. My guesses aren't really guesses, they are suggestions from Kodak that I memorized long ago when working with Kodak transparency films.

I am sure I've mentioned more than once that, because of the nature of a camera's built-in, reflective metering a camera can be easily fooled into setting the wrong exposure if the metering elements are pointed at a scene dominated by bright colors or dark colors.  By setting a known exposure for the prevailing conditions (or by using an incident light meter) you eliminate the variations in exposure caused by difference levels of reflectance in a scene.  The old examples are still pertinent.  If you point a reflected meter at a white wall it will return a grey file.  If you point a reflected meter at a black wall it will return a grey file. The meter wanted to put every scene into a blender and render it some shade of neutral grey.  An incident meter measure the light falling on the subject and in this was it could be said to be objective.  A known light source, like the Summer sun is constant (from two hours after sunrise to two hours before sunset).  If your subject is illuminated by direct sunlight a standard setting can be set with no real fear of failure.

Many websites and authors of authoritative articles about metering make the exposure process much more daunting than it really is or needs to be. I think this is a result of the societal/cultural shift from art to measure. We've become a culture that is more adept at measuring stuff and comparing it than anything else.  I think being able to measure what we've decided to call processes gives the ready illusion that with measurement comes control.  I used to hear the heads of corporations talk in hushed tones about "metrics."  Many had more faith in metrics than in listening to actual customers and more than a few of their companies have exited the market.

Not all art is directed by process and the success of art rarely has much to do with metrics. If repeatability and quality were primary concerns of art we'd still be listening to Strauss waltzes and Souza marches exclusively instead of the rich diversity of the music-o-sphere.

Where does the madness come in? I must be mad, or at least intellectually deficient. I post things about the feel of a camera or my perceived differences concerning a file that began life in a digital camera compared to a file that started life in a medium format camera and a certain percentage of my readers (no doubt very advanced and so in control of their emotions and perceptions of reality that they rival the Vulcans...) chime in suggesting that equalizing all the parameters in similar cameras will net me a set of equivalent files.  Images with nearly identical values.  The idea being that my need to touch and handle certain cameras in order to make certain photographs is an emotional attachment on par with a child's security blanket. The implication being that if I only took the time to equalize the technical parameters the seeing between cameras would be identical. The judgement is that cameras are interchangeable as long as the specifications match.

And it must be madness on my part but for me every camera has a certain feel and a certain energy of inclusion or exclusion in relation to me.  I could probably figure it out and explain it in detail, given enough time. But in real life sometimes I'll pick up a camera and it will immediately perform some sort of Vulcan Mind Meld that makes me comfortable with its handling and operation, or not.  The haptics remove some sort of resistance to use that I feel with other cameras.

For instance, I like the overall idea of the Nikon D3200 camera.  It's files are good.  But it seems a bit lifeless in my hands.  It's not that the camera isn't intuitive, it just doesn't push a little button in my brain that starts up the subconscious engine that says, "Go Shoot, Go Shoot, Go Shoot." Rather, it says, "I can take a technically correct image at your direction."  And that doesn't sound nearly as good to the part of my brain that craves the adventure and romance of shooting. I held a friend's D800 over lunch recently and it was the opposite experience.  I was smitten by the feel and balance of the camera at first touch.

When we date we aren't just looking for partners who are proficient in the practice of sex we also desire the company of someone attractive and fun to be with. Features are fun but the overall user experience is more than the sum of the parts. And I find it the same with cameras.

When I take one of my medium format film cameras out to shoot I feel an affinity towards the camera that makes me want to be a  better shooter. I've owned four other brands of MF camera but my basic Hasselblad seems to ring that little mental bell better than any of the others.  I rented a Mamiya RZ67 for a while and hated it.  Although it was capable of taking great images.  I was not capable of taking great images with it.  Over time the thought of using the camera was a great incentive to sleep in. But I know other photographers who loved that crazy box.

I should love the Olympus OMD EM5 but every time I pick it up I find the only thing I like about it is its density.  When I give the camera back to its owner I'm relieved.  There's something in the mix that keeps us from meshing.  On the other hand I've loved the feel of the Sony a77 from the minute I picked it up.

I liked the files from the Canon 5Dmk2 but there was no resistance to giving it up.  The bigger 1DSmk2 was the opposite.  The files were okay but the feel was so nice. More direct and more real.

I'll make a controversial statement here, if you haven't fallen in love with the way your camera fits in your hand, works and sounds, then you haven't found your camera(s) yet.

The shot above was done with a Hasselblad 501 CM camera and the standard 80mm Zeiss Planar. I scanned the file at 7000 by 7000 pixels and I'm sad not be able to print it out and mail a copy at full res to everyone of you to look at.  It's really pretty.  I imagine that one of the 60 or 80 megapixel digital backs from a company like Phase One would out resolve it.  But I'm equally sure (having handled them) that I wouldn't have nearly as much fun wandering the streets and shooting with one.  Of course, your mileage will vary.  Which is what makes all this interesting.

Of course, this could all just be a result of a big Camera Placebo Effect in which I have an emotional attachment that subconsciously informs and improves my ability to work.

When I made the image above I'd spent the better part of an afternoon walking around and shooting.  I never moved the exposure controls. Every frame on the two rolls was perfectly exposed and I had a smile on my face the whole time.

I'm not trying to denigrate the people who think differently than me.  There's the very real possibility that they may be right...

I find progress, at times, to be amazing. Just amazing.

I was looking around this morning to find a bigger memory card. I want to go back out to west Texas and shoot some video interviews and I hate stopping to change memory cards while I'm shooting video. I may be showing both my naieveté as well as my tenure in digital photography but I am astounded at being able to buy a 32 gigibyte, class 10 (for HD video) SD memory card for only $25.

I remember when memory cards were something you budgeted for and saved up for.  Now big ones like these are no more expensive than two movie tickets for some trashy summer thriller. About the price of two rolls of film with processing and contact sheets...

I have a mixed collection of 4,8 and 16 gb SD cards from Transcend and so far, no failures. I got into the habit of formatting my cards before every use. Seems to work for me.

The latest chapter in my ongoing Nikon D3200 review.

ISO 100

After a week of shooting portraits with black and white film in a medium format camera and shooting a television commercial with a Sony a77 I decided to take a break this afternoon and go for a stroll around downtown Austin in the warm glow of the late afternoon.  As a counterpoint to the lit, on tripod work I've been doing I chose to take along just the little Nikon D3200, the kit lens (18-55mm) and, well....nothing else.  My first observation:  The whole package is small and light and easy to walk with. I do think it will balance better with a single focal length lens so I'm trying to decide between the 35mm 1.8 Nikon lens or its longer brother, the 50mm 1.8 lens.  I'm not into expensive glass for what I consider to be my new point and shoot system so I'll leave my choice right there.

Let's get the stuff that's most important to the web dwellers from hell first. An ISO test.  The above image was shot (handheld) at ISO 100.  It's about as noise free as I can imagine and the large file is creamy smooth and detailed.  All the files from the D3200 seem to want some sharpening if you look at them at 100% but if you don't have you nose pressed to the screen the unsharpened images look natural and.....photographic. 

ISO 3200

The image directly above is the other half of my ISO test. It was shot at 3200 ISO (also handheld). If you blow it up you can see a pepper grain pattern noise that has no color flecking or transmorgification of duplicitous color.  That means there's a pattern that looks like Tri-X film grain but is not bothersome to me and is invisible at normal magnifications and viewing distances.  The nice thing about the Nikon files is how they maintain color saturation at the higher ISO's.  The high ISO's are a little better than the Sony a77 files.  Maybe by one half to three quarters of a stop.  

ISO 3200

Here's one more at 3200 ISO.  The beer in the image is Alaskan IPA ale.  It was delicious. The perfect counterpart to a 100 degree stroll through the asphalt heaven we call home.  I got and drank the ale at Caffe Medici on Congress Ave.  Giving up caffeine doesn't mean that all is lost...

I do wonder what the staff think when we photographers descend upon their workplace and spend time photographing our beverages...

ISO 800

Sometimes, when I am between projects and Belinda is working at the ad agency I cook dinner for the three of us.  I made a dish last night that was kind of fun. I got a handful of red potatoes, the small ones.  I rinsed them, quartered them and steamed them for five minutes and then set them aside.  I did the same with several handfuls of fresh green beans.  I got a big skillet and sauteed sweet onions in olive oil, a touch of butter, fresh oregano from our herb garden and some comino pepper.  Then I pulled the onions out and tossed in the potatoes, cooking them until they started to get brown and crusty.  Then I tossed in the blanched green beans and finally added back the onions and some carrot chips for color.  But I like to photograph while I cook so I set the camera at ISO 800 and kept it next to my chef's knife while I partied on the prep.

ISO 800

The camera and lens combo is good at close distances. The lens focuses down to about a foot.

ISO 800.

Here's my finished dish. I call it "carrot, green bean and potatoe sauté.  The family thought it was yummy.  I served a smoked brisket (lean) along with it and I made a peach pie for dessert. A mix of healthy and fun.  I was shooting in manual and underexposed the two images directly above.  I pulled them up over a stop in Lightroom but the noise didn't come up to badly.  Nice to know there's some safety room there when you're cooking and not paying attention to the numbers in the bottom of the finder.  I served dinner with a delicious Cabernet Sauvignon.  Ben had mint tea.

ISO 100.

So, what do you give up in what is ostensibly a $600 dollar, 24 megapixel DSLR?  Let's go through them by the numbers:  1. No depth of field button. You're on your own.  I know what f8 will do but it's nice to be able to see it.  2. The finder is small.  It's bright but it's small. I wish they'd just bite the bullet, conquer their fear and put a great EVF in this camera.  (The bottom line is I've enjoyed using cameras with much worse finders and, like anything else in life, if you use it enough you'll get used to it.  It's just hard to use after having used cameras with much better finders.  Kinda like driving an M series BMW and then saddling up in a Toyota Corola...). 3. The HDR (techno V... ) crowd will cry, moan and whine about the lack of autobracketing.  4.  I'd rather piss and moan about the loss of a PC socket. Or, 5. A separate set of control wheels for the aperture and shutter speed settings.

ISO 100

So, you give up some stuff.  What do you get in return?  How about a camera that feels solid but is small, lightweight and comfortable? I like the size and the grip. I think the files are very, very good and very, very detailed. The 4 fps is fast enough for me and, even though the buffer isn't very big it clears very quickly if you are using fast SDHC cards.  The battery life is much better than I thought it would be.  I think you can expect 750 shots with no chimping and about 500 shots, well chimped. You also get to have a really bitching file generator for far less than a grand.

Two other complaints, one that's easily remedied. First, you can try hard but you'll have difficulty seeing she screen on the back if you're out shooting in the daylight.  Especially in Austin in the Summer where we enjoy about 12 hours of harsh, brutal sunlight.  I'm sure that if you live in one of the dark countries you won't even think about it but I had to step into deep shade to be sure I was setting things correctly.  And I just gave up on chimping as it was doing more harm than good.  You could carry a Hoodman loupe around with you but that would just be goofy. No solution for this.  Set your camera before you get out of your car and pray you don't need to change settings in full sun.

The other complaint is that the active D-Lighting has no range of adjustment, it's either on or off.  I'm used to the Sony cameras which have both an automatic setting and five levels of manual setting for shadow recovery.  Easy fix. Turn it off and do your shadow savings in post.  One way or another you'll need to hit the shadows with a little noise reduction if you are making heroic detail saves.

When I first started shooting with the camera I thought I'd be happy just plugging away with large, fine Jpegs. I am not.  It's not that the Jpegs aren't good.  They are as good as they need to be, it's just that you have so much more control over the files in raw.  On most cameras these days I feel the need to boost contrast and crunch down hard on the blacks.  (That means I think the blacks are too weak as the camera companies try to give you the dynamic range you thought you wanted). I think the blacks in most digital cameras are totally un-filmlike and boring. Next time you find some noise in the shadows jump on that black slider and your files will look a hell of a lot better. I swear.

I'm presuming the lens adds about $100 to the overall kit price.  It's worth it.  It's a nice focal range, it's sharp in the center and the corners and edges come in well with a combination of stopping down and lens correction software in Lightroom. What you end up with is an image that is sharp and has good resolution but which needs a bit of a contrast boost and some black bump. I also like to add a bit of clarity slider for most files except for the high ISO files where the clarity slider accentuates the noise.

Should you run out and buy this camera?  Do you already have: A Nikon D800 or Canon 5Dmk3 or Olympus OMD EM-5 or a Pentax K-5 or .......?????? If so you don't really need this one, do you? But if you have a kid who's a budding photographer or videographer, or a spouse who wants a lighter, easier to use camera it's killer.  It is my current, "this is the camera you need for your sports, family photo, vacations" recommendation camera. The files are nice and clean and the VR in the lens works great.  The only thing missing, and something that would make this the ultimate tyro camera, is auto-ISO. Edit:  I found the auto-ISO. Instead of being part of the accessible ISO setting via the rear panel you have to go into the menu to turn it on and off. Painful but okay.  Most people doing auto-ISO leave it on all the time.  The rest of it can turn it off until we overdo happy hour and still want to shoot....

What about competitors? Well, the Canon t4i looks good on paper. I haven't played with one yet but it adds some sophistication to the movie mode with a phase detection/ contrast detection hybrid that seems like it's what we need to focus quicker in the video mode. It shoots at 5 fps instead of 4. The lower pixel count of the sensor, couple with Canon's sprinkling of high ISO pixie dust will probably get you a stop more cleanliness at high ISO's and that's about it.  If you have a bag full of Canon lenses it's kind of a "no brainer." But you will be paying $300 more.  

My final take on the camera and lens as a package is this:  Nice shooting package and very well done by Nikon. Would I like more stuff on the camera? Always.  Do I want to pay more? Naw.  You could do decent, professional work with this combo and, if your client never made eye contact with your camera package he or she would never know whether you shot your jobs with the top of the line or the bottom of the line camera in 90% of all jobs.  All bets are off if you are shooting professional sports for money or you need very high ISO's for paying specialized work.

This one really proves that it's not the camera the operator.  Operate well and the D3200 will reward you.

Good basic field kit?  This body, the 12-24mm (which I owned and was happy with...), the 35mm 1.8, the 50mm 1.8 and the Nikon 55-300 mm DX VR zoom.  Now you're ready for just about anything.  Add specialty lenses to taste.

The telephoto end of the kit zoom is pretty nice. I'd still through in a little more contrast and black.

Nikon will do well with this one.  But I'm not switching systems yet.

Hello Sony.  Still waiting for a couple of things.  I'd like to know for sure that the full frame camera is coming soon.  And, I'd like you to produce a 60mm f1.8 lens for the cropped frame cameras. That would be the perfect portrait length.  Please make it small and light and send it to me now.  The check's in the mail...