Lighting. The chapter in which Pooh discovers lighting Woozles and gets happier.

I've been on a search for good, inexpensive, continuous lighting since the day DSLR camera makers started implementing real HD video into their cameras. The combination of video-ready cameras and electronic viewfinders flicked one of those small but important switches in my mind and it sent an alarm to the parts of my brain that do rational processing. And the alarm went something like this: "Danger/Opportunity. Big Changes Directly Ahead." As I've mentioned too often I think the commercial world of photography is in the midst of a dramatic sea change. If all the different kinds of commercial photography are structured like a pyramid or an iceberg you'd see that the "foundational," entry level, basic work that was, for many, a large part of their ongoing businesses has been eradicated by technology. Simple documentation is now the provence of cellphone cameras. A lot of social and event photography is now being handled by friends and employees and no matter how massively we try to raise the bar in these sections of photography work they are never, ever, ever coming back into the our inventory.

But at the same time we're able to do much more. To offer much more to existing and potential clients. I'm seeing the markets for video growing by leaps and bounds. We just have to suck it up, learn the methods, buy the gear we need and go forward. Why won't the same piranha crowdsourcing eat that market as well? It might but the video market requires more than just point and shoot at pretty stuff. There's no one button editing. People still need to plan, write scripts, build crews, figure out what they need to shoot to cut together logically, how to do sound and a lot more. I guess the thing that makes video temporarily immune to the soccer mom, engineer dad phenomenon is that it actually takes a lot of hard work and the right gear to do a good job. And it takes a whole other level of expertise to do a great job. I'm not there yet and I'm pretty skilled. Give me a couple years worth of weekly projects and I think I've got a good shot of mastering it.

But this is just a round about way of saying that I can justify my current, continuing search for continuous lighting by the expectation of future profits.

I've exhaustively researched the LED lights and I'm good with using them for lots of applications. The newest, upper market introductions have brought lights to market with good  color and strong output but I'm waiting for the prices to drop and the LEDs to migrate to a newer generation of cheaper units. I have seventeen different LED devices in the studio but they span four years of development and have different colors casts. If I had all one version they would be easy to work with. But for right now I want to buy a solution that's uniform and powerful enough to do the kinds of shoots I'm already being asked to do.

The most common is television commercial work I do for Zach Theatre that requires greenscreen. Greenscreen needs a uniform wash of light across the green background in order to easily drop in new background elements. The light on the green screen has to be as powerful as the key and fill lights for everything to work well and to give me (and the editor) the flexibility we both need.

I also wanted lights that were a bit more powerful that my current set of bigger LEDs so I could work more comfortable at 60 fps and medium apertures.

I recently discovered and bought several Fotodiox Pro Fluorescent lights from Amazon. The magic is in the Osram Dulux tubes. They are very well balanced for daylight and have a very, very mild green bump (not anywhere near a "spike") that isn't in the realm of worry. And the ones I bought to test were bright. So I bought more. By the middle of last week I had three. A six bulb version that really knocks out a lot of lumns, a four bulb unit that's half a stop lower in output, and a two bulb unit that's great on backgrounds and as a hair or backlight.

I used the three lights on four different video projects and a bunch of portraits over the last two weeks. And then I had my first failure. The four bulb unit became intermittent and then stopped working all together. I did some trouble shooting and found that the source of failure was a faulty main power switch. I was going to source a replacement and fix it myself and then I remembered that I bought them from  Amazon and I decided to try their return process.

In less than five minutes I'd navigated the return steps. I asked for a replacement and about 15 minutes later I got an e-mail letting me know that a replacement was being shipped immediately (before even receiving my broken unit). I  printed out the RA and a return, UPS shipping label and took my light to the UPS shop a mile away. The scooped up the light, boxed it well (charged me $12...but that's what I get for NEVER keeping the original packaging) and had it ready to go. Their last step was to enter the return into their shipping system. When I returned to the office there was an e-mail acknowledging the receipt by the shipper and letting me know that I would not be charged for any replacement.

I shipped the light on Friday and my replacement came this morning. In the meantime I'd ordered a second, used light of the same type which had arrived the night before. Frankly, I'm shocked at how good and efficient Amazon is. They made the process seamless for me.

So now I have a full complement of flo lights for video projects and stills. The WB is quick and easy, the light is ample and soft. And now I have enough fixtures to do two strong lights on the background and still have a main and fill light for the front. I'm planning to do a portrait shoot this week with all four lights pushed through my favorite 6x6 foot silk. If there's enough power I may even try a second layer of diffusion. 

The continuous lights are so nice to work with. In concert with a great EVF they are an absolutely elegant system. And when I use them in place of electronic flash no one blinks...

Inventory.

total investment for four lights? Less than $1k.

Abandoning my "technical" approach to photography and video and embracing my "beginner self." It seems to work.

Lauren Lane in Harvey at Zach Theatre.

I know people who can tell you exactly how your word processor is programmed and coded but can't string together a coherent, creative sentence. I've met people who know every rule of grammar and every permutation of spelling who've never produced even a rudimentary piece of writing because the process rules dominate their thought processes. And I know some damn good writers who would perish without proofreaders. And there, in a nutshell, is the hierarchy.

The idea and the ability to express the idea carries the most value. Why? Because it can be applied to a universal product (the mercenary tangent). Because the new idea approaches culture with a new way of thinking about something. Because the idea and its express alone can push you to feel emotion and trigger your own strings of creative thought. New ideas, well expressed, create an intellectual resonance that ripples outward. Mastery of technology is self contained.  At its bottom line a creative idea, once given birth can be brought to further fruition by a technology master but without the idea the tools are rendered either idle or endlessly relegated to churning out "more of the same."

I realized yesterday that I was approaching videography in the same way I approached photography and I was afraid I might get the same results. When I started out I was captivated with just being able to make a good photograph and I pointed my camera at whatever interested me without the filters of "that won't work because....." or "you can only do this kind of shot with this tool..."  At the beginning, when I was a beginner, I was open to anything I could see or imagine. But with every layer of control and new technical knowledge I gathered I also gathered almost a permission to stop seeing clearly because my search was now for images that could be "optimally" taken with the tools I had at hand.  I let my ideas of the tools' limitations create boundaries for the way I took images. When I learned how to make images sharp every image from that point on had to be sharp.

When I learned how to light every subsequent image had to be lit. The technical knowledge I kept acquiring also led me into the voluminous catalogs of gear and I become obsessed with finding the "perfect tool" for every contingency. This cost money which caused me to work harder. But I couldn't work harder on exploring new visions, I had to work harder on jobs that returned money which I would then plow into the gear which would help me work harder.

And, sadly, when I look back at the work I produced the images done in the age of my greatest technical mastery are a diluted and sad shade of work I did earlier in blessed ignorance. Why do we show our earlier work? Because the content is more immediate and more pure. The impact of the work (in spite or because of its imperfections) is more visceral and sincere.

There's a mythology that real artists go through a virtuous cycle. They start with beginner ideas, then they move to master their tools and, at some point, like a beautiful butterfly emerging from its cocoon, the artist achieves true mastery and the tools become transparent. The use of the tools by such a master is almost unconscious. And, unfettered, the artist emerges with a fuller and more holistic approach that magically binds together the awe of the beginner with the technical mastery of the craftsman. In this was, according to the myths, an artist is born.

But based on what I've seen and experienced it is all so much bullshit now. The tools we use and the "canvases" we paint upon are constantly changing and whatever mastery there is becomes clouded with automation and new shortcuts. Looking back on the last ten years I would count technical mastery to be the least important aspect of being a "great" photographer while I would say, emphatically, that being able to connect to the innocent mind of a beginner and be able to look with wonder at the world is far more important. And, to be crass, far more sellable a gift.

But how do we reattach that creativity to our present selves? It's so hard and so simple. We need to step away from our need to control every process and just let stuff happen. We need to be able to find the point wherein the idea always trumps the camera we use. We need to explore the fun side.

After decades of severe and focused control I've started using my cameras on automatic settings. I used auto ISO to record a play yesterday and I put the camera into the face detection mode and made it responsible for keeping focus on the face of The Little Mermaid while I worked on composition and enjoying the spectacle in front of me. I'm out to give up thinking as much as possible about the endless details of production.

I don't believe that control and creativity go hand in hand. I think they are natural opponents. We need both to do our work but we should never lose sight of the idea that one is the treasure we search for while the other is merely a willing servant. Without the idea we are just documenters and some day our tasks will be taken over by robots. They too know every page of the gear catalog. The idea, the style and the power of concepts are what make life for an artist worth living. And those attributes are what make the work worth sharing.

My intention in all my work is to try and better channel the playful kid I hope is still alive inside of me. It's time to let him out, he could use the fresh air.... At the same time I am convinced that the engineer who's been running the show could do with an extended vacation.

Finally, I watch actors a lot. I've documented over 300 plays in the last decade or so. Good actors bring with them their own ideas about their characters in each play. They have no gear to dally about with. They are ultimately exposed. And it's what is inside them, their creativity and spirit that compels us to sit quietly in front of them as they do their work.  Just a thought.

I like to make portraits. It's always fun to spend time with interesting people. And 99% of all people are interesting. The remaining 1% is interesting by dint of not being "Interesting."

David Steakley.

Mr. Steakley is the artistic director of Zach Theatre here in Austin, Texas.  I recently had the good fortune to photograph him for the theater's public relations work. The only problem with getting the assignment to photograph Dave is that his schedule is insane. When he's not directing wonderful shows he's in New York or some other cool city looking for new projects to bring back to Texas.

For this portrait I used the new Fotodiox fluorescent light fixtures. One small one for the background, another medium bank with only half the bulbs on for the backlight, and a six bulb bank blasting through a Chimera diffusion bank as my main light.

I used the Sony a99 with the Sony 70-200mm 2.8 G lens at around f3.2 at 1/80th of a second. The focal length was 105mm.

While I often need to prompt and cajole sitters into giving me a "look" that I like Dave fell right into what he thought his role should be. I guess it comes from watching and directing actors for the better part of 20 years.... He is masterful in his direction and I've photographed images for marketing for well over 100 of his plays, including his own well received, original play, Keepin Austin Weird.

I think one of the things that makes Dave such a successful director is that he comes to each project with a vision and he is fearless about pursuing his vision for a production without compromise. In that aspect I feel he is like a mentor to me. His vigilance in his work against unnecessary compromise or capitulation pushes me to say, "No" to bad requests more often.

His current project is "Harvey." If you read the blog you know that I photographed it on Tues. It's an amazing play in that it comes almost unchanged from the 1940's but Dave has managed to craft it so that the core message of the play isn't lost in the wonderful comedic moments.

This may not be the image that the theatre finally uses but it is certainly one of my favorite portraits to come out of my studio this year. It borders on intense. And, actually, we like that.

A spot on critique.

I loved everything in this blog and wanted to share it with you. We're (pretty much) all guilty of the same things.... at least I know I am...

http://www.thephoblographer.com/2013/05/16/this-is-why-your-pictures-suck/

"Harvey" Dress Rehearsal at Zach Theatre. The Sony a99 and a58 trade punches. In some respects it's a draw....

I've been shooting marketing for Zach Theatre for about 19 years now. When we started it was with Hasselblad cameras and Tri-X film. When we went to color I switched to Leica M's and Kodak 320T tungsten balanced slide film, pushed to ISO 640. Now I routinely shoot the shows with a variety of digital cameras, all of which look better at ISO 3200 that the retired Kodak film did at it's native speed.

At the theatre the light's getting sexier and more complex and the incorporation of moving sets and pictures that move on the sets make for a layering that's as captivating as it is difficult to capture. The straightforward shots of the plays are easier. 

Last night I packed up an old, worn, black Domke camera bag with two cameras and a little assortment of lenses. Almost like a chocolate sampler box.... There were some things I just wanted to play with and I brought them along. The main camera was the a99 with the 70-200mm f2.8. It's a great utilitarian combination. I set the aperture at f4 and the ISO at 1600 and I just let it fly. 

The other camera, the a58, was my trial cam. I wanted to see how it handled 1600 and 3200 and I also wanted to see what it would do with my cheapy favorite optic, the 55-200mm DT lens. I brought a few other lenses for some wide shots on both cameras and I brought along an ultra wide that I never got around to using.

The play was "Harvey." This was a play, made famous in 1950 by a movie of the same name, starring Jimmie Stewart. The basic story is that Elwood Dowd is a wealthy man in his 40's whose best friend is a 6 foot 1.5 inch rabbit. Actually a "Pookah" of Celtish origin. The only problem for everyone in the play (except Elwood and Harvey, the rabbit) is that the rabbit is, well, invisible. 

To complicate matters Elwood generously makes his beautiful home available to his sister and his niece. The niece is having a hard time attracting suitors given that she's living with a man who has a giant, make believe friend with whom he goes drinking nearly every evening. 

When a plan is hatched to have Elwood committed everything gets crazy. And funny. 

The play is being produced in the new Topfer Theatre and the sets and scale are perfect for this intimate and acoustically perfect venue. So, back to the  photo stuff....

I'd like to make the mechanics of all this seem so complex and endowed with such heady craft that only an accomplished genius could pull this level of photography off but that would be a lie. It's so much easier to shoot moving action and changing lights with a state of the art digital camera, a fast zoom and all the trimmings. Now all I really need to pay attention to is the action and the framing. Which is also important but much more subjective than binary measures of quality. 

So, here's my tech boy take away: At ISO 1600 everything looks good on both cameras. I can shoot people full length and still count the eyelashes. Both cameras use new noise filtering algorithms that process different parts of the frame differently. Flat areas are more aggressively filtered while areas with detail are less processed, the noise hidden within the detail. Both cameras have great EVF finders. (I do need to calibrate the EVF to the LCD on the a58. The interior screen looks beautiful but it's too dark right now...I defaulted to the histogram...thankfully, both screen are adjustable separately.)

Another funny thing is that the lenses are almost equally good. The $200 lens wide open seems about as good as the $2,000 stopped down a stop. At least at the long end of the lenses. I was very happy with the way the 55-200 handled tight compositions at its extreme focal length. 

I'm not making any claim that there's no valuable difference between the $2799 a99 and the $599 a58 but what I am saying is that in the sweet spot of use, where neither camera has to really break a sweat, you don't get to see that last 10% of image quality and elan that you paid so much more money for....

For my day to day work the a99 proves its value in a number of ways, one of which is the inclusion of a headphone jack and manual audio for my video projects. Still, it's nice to know that an entry level camera is well enough engineered to deliver 90% of the goods for a quarter of the price.

If you live in the Austin area the television commercials and PSAs that we produced for the play have started into rotation on many of the Time Warner Cable stations and a few local network affiliate stations. I watched one as I edited the files today and remembered that the camera that shot the promos also shot the dress rehearsal. Two different worlds colliding on one sensor. In my mind it's a great example of the idea of Hybrid Photography. So, after last week's excitement and all the Adobe bashing what software program did I edit my images from last night in????

I used Apple's Aperture. The more I use it the more I like the choices their designers made for the aesthetics of sharpening and the way the program renders the tonal curves of the files. It also does a great job holding onto highlights. Or maybe that's just a new generation of wide dynamic range sensors from Sony. (Ahhh, the Sony sensors. The real reason people like the new generation of Olympus and Nikon cameras... :-) ).

I whipped through the 1281 files I shot and color corrected in batches. I originally shot as full sized, extra fine jpegs and I saved out at the same res as quality 10 jpegs. I delivered about 8 gigabytes to the marketing people just after lunch today and, I am sure, that as I sit here writing this that they've already tightly edited and are knee deep in the routine of offering the images out to the many editorial outlets (mostly web) that blanket Austin like those blobby things that congeal around Mr. Incredible in Syndrome's lair in the movie, Mr. Incredible. All that's left is the sending of the invoice.

And, so how did I like the play? Gosh. It was good clean fun. Well acted and well blocked. The scenes were built on a large turntable (think fifty or more feet in diameter) and the whole stage rotated for scene changes.  I'd neve seen that done before.  Just good clean fun flown in on the Zach time machine from the 1940's. (play from the 40's, movie from 50.)

If you click on the images you can see them at 2000 pixels wide. That's as big as I like to upload and as big as Google likes to accept on my account.  Take my word for it, the 6000 pixel files are pretty as well.

The end.

Pernicious camera envy.

I've got a temporary case of it and I'm fighting it....

But Olympus and Magic Lantern aren't making it easy. Let's start with the ground breaking change to the Canon 5D mk3 first. If you are a still photography only person this may not shake the ground under your feet or cause you to do much more than walk down the hall for another cup of coffee, but for the people who want to do commercials, movies and other kinds of video with their hybrid (still+digital) camera this is big.

There is a company/group/source called Magic Lantern and they've made a hobby of writing terrific hacks for cameras that can do video but seem to be a bit crippled by their manufacturers. When the Canon 5D mk2 first came out videographers flocked to buy it because it was the first time a full frame (35mm frame) camera could be pressed into making video and that meant that film makers of all stripes could take advantage of the big sensor size to do all sorts of effects with shallow depth of field. But the camera had some flaws for video production. The biggest was no control over audio. The camera handled external microphones about the way a point and shoot would, it used automatic gain control, which results in compressed dynamic range (audio) and a lot of hiss and noise during quiet moments.

The industry went into work around mode. Film makers started buying up digital audio recorders and shooting second sound. This means they shot video with the 5D2 and recorded audio on a separate device and then tried to marry up the two tracks in post production. That led to another workaround in the form of some software called, Pluraleyes, which automatically sync'd up the tracks. The camera was also locked at 30 fps while film makers also wanted access to 24 fps.

So Magic Lantern created a "hack" that gave the 5D2 both fully manual sound control and 24 fps. Embarrassed, Canon later added both features in a long overdue firmware upgrade. Something they may have never done if the Magic Lantern folks hadn't showed the buying public how easy it was...

Now we've got the Canon 5Dmk3 and it comes factory equipped with both of the features that were missing at the previous model's launch. But video makers keep evolving and what they currently, desparately want is video with much better codecs or, even better, no compression at all. The current holy grail is to be able to shoot raw files. It's something offered by the Red cameras and a few other manufacturers but not by any DSLR hybrid maker. The general wisdom is that the thing holding back full frame video from ultimate quality is precisely the codec, of the way the files are compressed and then uncompressed.

You guessed it. About a week ago the Magic Lantern people announced and have distributed for beta testing a hack that does just that. It allows the 5D3 to shoot in raw. And the content I saw on EOSHD (yes, click the link for samples and details) is pretty compelling. It leapfrogs the 5Dmk3 well ahead of many dedicated, high end video cameras in the nose bleed price territory. Even those over $20,000. And unliked the uncompressed files you can get from some camera via the clean HDMI output into a digital recorder the hacked 5D3 will write directly to fast CF cards.

So now budding film makers can scale the capabilities of their 5D3's to match final use, creative expectations or client budgets. While the camera is still a 2k device there is the potential to sample from the entire frame and get a higher level of resolution as well.  Do I wish I also had a Canon 5D3 for the times I want the ultimate in video quality? Yes. As a still shooter do I have the same grass is greener on the other side of the fence envy? Nope.  Go to this link and read all about it because this will change the professional film and video market: http://www.eoshd.com/content/10324/big-news-hands-on-with-continuous-raw-recording-on-canon-5d-mark-iii

The potential downside (and we may already be seeing this in the introduction of new lenses like the 24-70mm 2.8, is that high end videographers may drive Canon to up the quality levels of their premium lenses and to (expensively) optimize them for shooting video. It all depends on where the market momentum winds up.... At the moment, through no hard work of their own, Canon takes the lead.

My second hunk of envy is much more straightforward. I was an early Olympus Pen adopter. I owned the original Pen film cameras, those cuddly little half frame cameras with the extra dose of great industrial design, that came out in the 1960's and soldiered on through part of the 1970's. I also bought several of the newer digital Pens. I loved the EP-2 camera and the EP-3 was even better but when we seemed forever stuck at a kludgy 12 megapixels I got lured away by the siren call of the IQ in the Sony Nex 7.

When Olympus came out with the OMD EM-5 camera last year I looked at it and played with it a dozen times but I didn't like the way the body was designed and it didn't evoke the warm and fuzzy nostalgia for the OM-1 that Oly hoped. I bonded with the cleaner and more logical EP/rangefinder-esque bodies and couldn't make the leap. But I did love what I saw from the camera and I still wish, from time to time, that my current cameras had the same prodigious image stabilization as the OMD EM-5.

The new EP-5 is nearly everything I wanted in a camera configuration I wanted when Olympus came out with the OMD EM5 instead. One thing that makes the new package even sweeter (and better than the OMD) is the upgraded EVF. The new version more that doubles the resolution of the VF2 while shortening the already good lag time down to 30 ms.

The other thing Olympus fixed was the fiddly control dials. Now there are hortizontally oriented control dials on the front and the back of the camera. There's other relatively meaningless stuff, like WiFi but the camera seems to have hit the sweet spot of both industrial design and performance. It's making me sweat a little when I look in the Nex equipment drawer. I'm sure I'm not the only Nex user who's saying: "Where's my Nex 70mm 1.8 ?????"

For more information go to the metrics source, DPReview: http://www.dpreview.com/previews/olympus-pen-ep5/

Just try not to get embroiled in any good forum fights while you're there....

Sunny and happy in Texas, and looking on the other side of the fence...

Lighting tools and camera synergies.

Chartier.

I was looking across the littered studio this morning and noticing that I'm not really a camera junkie as much as I'm a lighting junkie. As I looked through the little piles of lighting fixtures I starting into the reductive mindset that tries to eliminate clutter by pushing me to make choices and get rid of everything I don't need.

The two piles most in conflict, at the moment, are the new fluorescents over the older LED panels. They both cover the same shooting situations. They both provide continuous lighting for video and good lighting for just about everything on my bucket list. But here's what you have to know about bigger continuous lights (the ones that plug into the walls).....they require more overall stuff in your lighting package when you leave home.

If you use flash you can put each flash on one stand, then apply a softbox or an umbrella as a light modifier directly to the light fixture without having to use a second stand. When I set up my big fluorescent light or LED light there's no easy way to attach a softbox or umbrella and, honestly, I wouldn't want to if I could because it would take away too much light and drive my exposures towards lower shutter speeds or noisier ISOs.

So when you want to modify your big LED panel, or your even bigger fluorescent panel, you generally use a separate diffuser on a frame which requires a second light stand and an attachment mechanism. You gain some lighting control since you can carry a range of diffusers and nets, etc. but you definitely add to your packing craziness.  Four flashes generally means four light stands while four fluorescents generally means seven or eight light stands (you might not need two stands for the background light...) to do the same basic lighting set up. More if you want to bring along black flags and modifiers for the modifiers.

My recent excursion into the world of location video/photography required eight light stands, a background stand system and two tripods (one for the video set-up and a second for the still work). It also required collapsible frames for the 4x4 foot diffusion scrims along with clamps to hold them.

While it would be nice to light exclusively with one type of light the real world makes this difficult. If I worked only in the studio or other interior locations where sunlight was something we looked forward to seeing on our way to lunch I'd be happy enough with my new fluorescents.

But there are still a lot of assignments that require me to go on locations and balance man made light with bright sun and, for still photography, that's still the territory big, portable flashes like the 1100 watt second Elinchrom Ranger RX flashes work best in. 

Then there are those more complex interior exterior locations like the CEO standing in front of a vast wall of floor to ceiling windows. She'll need to be balance with the sun drenched scene behind her and might require a few supplementary lights behind her, which is efficiently handled by three or four electronic flash mono lights.

So, even though we are now providing hybrid video/still content solutions we still need some variety in our lighting equipment to handle all the situations we seem to get into.

I'm sure some of you have leapt forward to the logical question: "Weren't you all jazzed about LEDs last year? Why now the fluorescents? Have LEDs failed?"

Hardly. But there's an analogy that's something like cellphones. The big LEDs I currently have---the ones big enough to kick out effective levels of light----are very much G1. (First Generation Technology). They require me to jump through a few hoops to make them work well. Mostly they need to be intelligently filtered. And the newest fluorescents with the latest tubes are better, color-wise, and a couple stops brighter than my three to five year old LEDs.

I looked hard and long when I started really moving into motion at replacing my current inventory with the latest panels from people like Lowell. Their Prime Light LED panels boast a 91 CRI and they are markedly brighter than my existing panels, so better light and more of it. But here's the rub, they are about $1800 each and every lighting set up I do seems to require at least three lights. That meant spending $5400 to replace my original investment of about $1200. Would they be demonstrably better? Yes. Could I make a better investment to get the same results? Yes. 

When I visited the Museum of Art in Boston, Greg Heins showed me the Alzo fluorescent lights that his photography and video department use for video programming and interview. Very good light, requiring very little correction and about a third the cost of premium LEDs for the same three light set up. Most of the advantage for the Alzo lights come from a new generation of fluorescent tubes so I started to research all the options and came up with the Fotodiox version. I give up dimming controls but gain a price advantage.

I've used the flo's on six or seven mixed video and photography assignments in the last month and they are working out well. My one concern (and this is where LEDs absolutely rule) is hauling all of those oh-so-very-breakable glass light tubes around. I think breakage is inevitable with the tubes and hardly possible with the LEDs.

There's a second area in which LEDs have all other light sources beaten, hands down. And that's using them with batteries. My smaller LEDs, the color changing Fotodiox 312AS panels use two standard, camcorder batteries for power and can light at full power for around two continuous hours. No other light source is anywhere near as efficient. Which means I have to keep my case full of these lights for those kinds of run and gun shoots where plugging in and accessory light stands are just not in the cards.

And that brings me to the stack of "hot lights" I have sitting over in the other corner. Why the heck am I keeping these primordial light fixtures around?  Well.......first of all they keep me warm in the winter when I use them (just kidding, not a good reason...). But really, I have several Lowell Totalights, a Lowell DP light and three of the Lowell VIP lights that fold up for cartage. I use them for the times when  wall of LEDs or Fluorescents isn't enough for a special application.

Sometimes you just want raw power and, though they are hardly efficient, for their size and relatively minor investmentm, they can really push a lot of photons through big diffusers. They're my go to lights when I need to shoot continuous and I need both low, noise free ISOs combined with medium to high apertures.

So far I'm counting a number of systems here. Two kinds of LEDs. Fluorescents, High Powered-battery powered Electronic Flash, Electronic Flash mono lights and a pile of hot lights (tungsten).

But we really don't stop there. We have to consider the portable speedlights. We have a couple of the big Sony flashes because they work well on and off camera and can be used wirelessly. Then there's also a motley collection of manual-mostly speed lights along with radio triggers, that are left over from the Strobist/Minimalist lighting days.

I use the speed lights for candid shots at events and though it seems like this market is in an off cycle right now I'm sure it will swing around again when I least expected. For their size the on and off camera flashes are a potent lighting tool. Without (real) modeling lights and fast recycling they won't take the place of studio flashes and with their 100-200 watt second flash power they won't replace the large Elinchrom Rangers in sunlight but they sure are handy to have when following an executive around a trade show or whipping up good light for an impromptu portrait.

So, of all these things how can I best consolidate in order to pacify that part of my brain that's rebelling against the clutter and demanding some rationalizing of the vast VSL lighting inventory? I've decided that the first generation LED panels must go.

I'm going to sell them locally for some price that makes no sense. Live in or around Austin and want to play with 500 bulb panels or 1000 bulb panels? I'm asking $100 per smaller panel and $150 each for the two bigger panels. I won't ship them because they are too bulky and heavy to make it sensible. I also hate to pack stuff. If you want them you can e-mail me and we'll meet up.

Take them all and we'll price the lot accordingly.   Edit: the LEDs have been sold. Thanks.

Another day at the photo office. Working with two cameras. Including the new Sony a58.

A quick summation of last week's hybrid job.

We set up a temporary portrait and interview studio in a big conference/mixed use room. I brought along one of my favorite color management tools, a Lastolite gray/white target. In this room I used the big Sony a99. One click white balance worked for both the stills and the video. I like setting the color correction once in shooting instead of pasting it in post. I lit with two fluorescents and one LED light. And I brought my own stool for the subject's to sit on. The more stuff I can control the fewer problems I seem to have. I went for five hours with one lens. It was the 85mm 1.5 Cine lens from Rokinon.

Using the big Rokinon at wide apertures, in close is what the Sony a99 was built for. The lens is totally manual so I rely on focus peaking to ensure sharp results where I want them. 

I brought the Lastolite target out onto the assembly floor and balanced both the cameras for the existing light. Made it easier to shoot because I only had to focus on composition and focus, not on color balance. I tend to use manual exposure and all of these shots were taken in a landscape format with the camera locked down on a Manfrotto video tripod with a fluid head.

By moving quickly with one camera on a tripod and one camera over my shoulder we were able to move through the space quickly. After every still shot I ran about ten seconds of video and then moved on. We got fifty or sixty set ups during the course of a long day.

I had the client carry a small Fotodiox LED panel around with us but it didn't get much use. I liked the bright way the area was lit and, with the preset color balance the images were easy to work with in post.

My one and only gripe about the 85mm 1.5 lens is the close focusing distance. It's 39 inches. I'm spoiled, the Sony 85mm 2.8 focuses much closer. But then again it doesn't do quite as well at f2...

I unabashedly like the new a58 camera. It may be because I always use it with the 16-50mm f2.8 DT lens. I like the range of focal lengths and I love the high sharpness of the lens. The image above was made with that combo. With all the present generation of digital cameras there is a freedom in being able to comp and shoot a scene as a still photograph and then spin a dial and start shooting the same thing on video. Double threat. Most the work I did on this job with the a58 is available light, handheld and at ISOs of 800 and 1600. The OLED viewfinder is great and the built in IS works well for me. No matter how I handled the camera the metering was spot on.

I decided to live on the edge for this shoot. I realized that there's no way to shoot raw video files on the a58 so I needed to get any video I shot just right in the camera. Just like shooting jpegs. Since they were equally important to the client I decided to go ahead and shoot jpeg as well. I might as well take advantage of the extra care I was using to get things right for video...

The a58, like the a57 before it is small and light and highly usable. The new sensor is sharp and detailed and has as little noise as the a57 did but delivers a much better user experience both in the EVF and the actual sound of the shutter. I can report no focus problems in over 600 shots under regular working conditions.

While this shouldn't be construed as a review I would like to say that the tools are so suggestive to the way I take images. While the a99 was on a tripod, using a longer MF lens the a58 was always handheld and used with a fast wide to short tele zoom. With the smaller camera I found myself moving around the edges of subjects and quickly trying new angles while the locked in camera was used in a more straightforward way.  

All cameras are good these days. I don't care about brands but I know that for my paying work I'll never willingly go back to a camera that doesn't have an EVF as an integral part of the design. Now, after selling off other systems, every camera I have except the Sony a850 is equipped with an EVF. And when I pick up the 850 I have to slow down and think more about operation. That means I think less about the image. I like the real time feedback of the newer finders. They make the feedback loop much more effective.

That's it. Get yout mom an a58. Ask her if you can borrow it. Happy Mother's Day.

The End.

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