Here's a video that the people at B&H did with Jack Reznicki and partners. It's very good but it's over an hour. If you need the information....
7.02.2014
7.01.2014
A fun video for Asti Trattoria. Two cameramen. One vision = make the food look as good as it is.
Asti May 2014 from Kirk Tuck on Vimeo.
This video is about Asti May 2014
My friend, Chris, and I both swim with the owner of Asti Trattoria here in Austin. It's been open for nearly fourteen years now and I've been trekking across town for an almost endless series of great lunches and dinners for....fourteen years now. Asti is a neighborhood restaurant. It's located in the Hyde Park area of Austin, directly north of the University of Texas at Austin Law School.
Chris and I both wanted to play around with shooting food on video so we approached our friend, Emmett, to see if he needed a video for his restaurant's website. Bingo. Everyone wins.
We talked about the process a couple of times after swim practice and then set aside two days in which we would document the behind the scenes action at the restaurant. Nearly every second of video is shot handheld. There are a few exceptions like the night shots and the exterior shots. We would have used tripods more in the kitchen but we were working in and around the chefs during their regular service hours and, like any really good restaurant, they stay busy during every open hour. We learned to swerve by the action, lean in and move out without burning our cameras or getting in the way (too often).
I had grand plans for a beginning, a middle and an end but I got some great advice from a cinematic guru. He basically said to scrap the script and just start layering in the good shots with the music we'd chosen. He told me that when I ran out of shots I liked then the edit was over. Good advice.
We did some interviews but they slowed the program down too much. In the end we decided to let the food sell the project... Bon Appetit. If you live in Austin check them out: http://astiaustin.com
Tech notes: I used a Panasonic GH4 while Chris used the GH3. We used both cameras mostly at ISO800 and ISO1600. While convention calls for shooting with very flat profiles and low contrast and sharpening we aimed to get out of the cameras exactly the image we wanted to see in the edit so we aimed for natural or standard settings with very slight modifications. Our lenses of choice were the 12-35mm f2.8 and the 35-100mm f2.8 Panasonic X lenses. We also used several ancient Olympus Pen lenses, including the 40mm 1.4 and the 60mm 1.5. We usually shot with the lenses wide open and I did a lot of my work in manual focus. Both cameras were set at 30 fps. I did the edit in Final Cut Pro X and we output to 720p for the copy that's resident on Vimeo. Ben helped me with a few technical issues that came uninvited into the editing. Man, can that kid troubleshoot. Thanks to Chris and Ben for all their hard work.
This video is about Asti May 2014
My friend, Chris, and I both swim with the owner of Asti Trattoria here in Austin. It's been open for nearly fourteen years now and I've been trekking across town for an almost endless series of great lunches and dinners for....fourteen years now. Asti is a neighborhood restaurant. It's located in the Hyde Park area of Austin, directly north of the University of Texas at Austin Law School.
Chris and I both wanted to play around with shooting food on video so we approached our friend, Emmett, to see if he needed a video for his restaurant's website. Bingo. Everyone wins.
We talked about the process a couple of times after swim practice and then set aside two days in which we would document the behind the scenes action at the restaurant. Nearly every second of video is shot handheld. There are a few exceptions like the night shots and the exterior shots. We would have used tripods more in the kitchen but we were working in and around the chefs during their regular service hours and, like any really good restaurant, they stay busy during every open hour. We learned to swerve by the action, lean in and move out without burning our cameras or getting in the way (too often).
I had grand plans for a beginning, a middle and an end but I got some great advice from a cinematic guru. He basically said to scrap the script and just start layering in the good shots with the music we'd chosen. He told me that when I ran out of shots I liked then the edit was over. Good advice.
We did some interviews but they slowed the program down too much. In the end we decided to let the food sell the project... Bon Appetit. If you live in Austin check them out: http://astiaustin.com
Tech notes: I used a Panasonic GH4 while Chris used the GH3. We used both cameras mostly at ISO800 and ISO1600. While convention calls for shooting with very flat profiles and low contrast and sharpening we aimed to get out of the cameras exactly the image we wanted to see in the edit so we aimed for natural or standard settings with very slight modifications. Our lenses of choice were the 12-35mm f2.8 and the 35-100mm f2.8 Panasonic X lenses. We also used several ancient Olympus Pen lenses, including the 40mm 1.4 and the 60mm 1.5. We usually shot with the lenses wide open and I did a lot of my work in manual focus. Both cameras were set at 30 fps. I did the edit in Final Cut Pro X and we output to 720p for the copy that's resident on Vimeo. Ben helped me with a few technical issues that came uninvited into the editing. Man, can that kid troubleshoot. Thanks to Chris and Ben for all their hard work.
Relentless Gear Snobbery and The real reason why Canon will not "lose the war" to m4:3.
I've been thinking a lot lately about the relentless way in which most of my friends and colleagues, even those insufferable boors who pretend they care nothing about gear and posture that they are not moved by avarice or gear lust, rely on their idea of the intrinsic value of their chosen cameras to bolster their enthusiasm for the process of making photographs. I buy into it as well even though on so many levels I know that none of the goodly-gook we spout is true. A metal shelled mini-camera won't get you to Moonrise over Hernandez New Mexico any better than plastic... Knowing my psychology at least half of my decision making is about choosing the anti-hero camera. The dark horse. The outsider choice. Which is hilarious since most photographey is a total insider experience. And I can't imagine any one more in the mainstream circle than myself...
I'm beginning to think that we buy our cameras as fashion statements and not logically as we would with a selection of righteous tools. A cross cut saw for on application, a framing hammer for another. In hand tools we would look for solid construction and the right fit in the hand. Carbon fiber handles? Ridiculous. But I think the last four year wave of camera buying has everything to do with American Appareling and Tommy Hillfigering of hobbyist photography and not the performance we say we are chasing...
Since I seem to be as big a slave to the fashion of photography as anyone else what is the reason for this particular column? Why am I revealing to myself and anyone who reads this that we are, in our chosen field, as fickle and as bendable by the fashion of the moment as the women who wore bad, pink sweatpants with "Juicy" emblazoned across the rear end a few years ago. Most of us are manipulated by camera fashion even as we rail against the concept that we are embrace cameras not for what they can do for our picture taking but what we want them to do for our status and image.
My abrupt epiphany came a few days ago when I played with a non-photographer friend's Canon Rebel T3i camera and two kit lenses. I hadn't played around with one of these cameras in years and years and I expected it to feel like cheap trash in my hands. I expected every frame to be marred by the cheap lenses' mediocre performances and I expected every image file to be rendered banal by the camera's many imagined compromises. But it didn't really happen that way and when I shot a few frames I kind of sat up a bit and started paying attention.
My friend didn't have any kid's soccer games on her calendar for the next few days so she lent me the camera to play around with. It's like every Canon APS-C camera in that it uses the traditional mirror mania and it comes complete with the Canon standard 18 megapixel CMOS sensor. And interestingly enough the sensor is pretty good. Oh, I am sure the D800 will blow it away once we get around to printing stuff really large but I've gone five years now without having more than one or two requests for any prints bigger than 12 by 18 inches and I think just about all the cameras I've played with in the last ten years can handle that pretty well.
The camera feels consumer-y (another snob designation) but my friend tosses it around her Suburban and drops it on the soccer field a lot and even lets her six year old boy use it for long periods of time and it's held up remarkably well. I can see where little, inconsequential stuff, has been broken off but like a Timex watch the body seems to "take a licking and keep on ticking." Could it be that the consumer-y polycarbonate is at least as bullet proof as the precious, milled metal dials and multi-position touch pads that keep falling off my other friend's more expensive and chic cameras?
The bottom line, at least as we keep defining it in our relentless need to justify new purchases, is the ultimate imaging performance and certainly there's no way a $500 camera (and that's with two lenses....) can rival, say, my new GH4 system, right?
Hmmm. Well, if you are doing video for clients I'm going to say that the Panasonic is generations better. The video is sharper and available at higher resolutions. There are also ports for microphones and headphones as well as manual level controls. But...if you are shooting the kiddo trying to keep up with a soccer ball and you are playing back the Canon 1080i 720p video on your Samsung or Vimeo 540i quasi-HD television set I'm going to say there isn't really a big difference. The end display being the ubiquitous weak point in all of this.
And guess what? If you go head to head on sensor performance for noise and resolution, again, not much difference, if any. But surely the lens performance between my Panasonic X glass and the woeful kit lenses of the Rebel is outrageously huge, right? Well sure. If you always shoot wide open you'll get a faster and (as far as I can tell) sharper lens but here's the deal, if you go all real world and you are shooting that swim meet under the blistering, Texas sun or that soccer match under some other state's more tepid sun you'll be spending most of your time around f5.6 or f8 and I'm going to bet that at f8 there's not a lot to cry about with either lens. Keep thinking $500 versus $4400.... Put a 50mm 1.8 on the Canon for an extra hundred bucks and all of a sudden you've got a low light shooter that gets close to the performance of any m4:3 system. Really. Especially when you factor in the money.
In the studio it's the same story. That nasty, consumer-y 70-300mm zoom becomes very well behaved portrait lens when you clamp it onto a tripod, stop it down a little bit and stop all unwanted motion with a diffused blast of studio electronic flash. You'd be hard pressed to tell the difference under those conditions (at f5.6 or f8), at a decent enlargement, between the masterful D800 and the mighty Rebel.
I think this calculus of price and performance is the dirty secret that keeps the faux rangefinder GX-7s and Fujis X's, as well as the retro Olympus OMD's and mini-DSLR styled Panasonics at bay in the war to gain total market share. The fact that for a fraction of the cost (and a hit to your style consciousness...) the entry level, traditional cameras do a remarkably good job at keeping up with what matters----ultimate image quality. They are not the best overall but they may be the best compromise. For most actual users. All bets are off if you just buy the gear to wear it.
The D800 is the best IQ producer in the 35mm style, mass production cameras at the moment. Let's peg it's performance, on sensor, at 100. And let's be generous and give the 24 megapixeled Nikon cameras (APS-C variants) a solid 90-92% for on sensor goodness. And maybe all of our other wonderful mini-framers come in between 85 and 90%, but that doesn't mean that the recent Rebels make a failing grade of 59. Far from it. If we X out handling and frame rate, X out the so-so viewfinder, and shoot all the cameras in Raw I think we'll find the Rebel is also in the wonderful 85-90 % range which signifies a solid B+.
We overlook it because it is not pretty as understood by today's design ethos. It's more like the Juicy sweatsuit knock-offs of yesteryear. We would also like more dials. But at the heart the T3i is one of the top selling cameras in the entire world because Canon gets something that the photo cognoscenti don't really seem to understand: To the world market the Rebel is a tool that delivers everything most people need (for taking photographs) except the high fashion aspect of it's physical style. No faux rangefinder. No small enough to fit into the pocket of your dinner jacket. And the exterior styling is as exciting as a 2002 Toyota Corolla body. But, like the Corolla, it's a reliable, and for the most part comfortable appliance and it gets you where you are going.
Does this mean that I plan on abandoning all the gear I've accrued to date in order to pursue a rational course with Rebel gear that's good enough ? Not very likely but from now on I'll work a bit harder to separate actual performance that matters from stylistic touches that have very little real value.
I still remember my lust to get my hands on the Fuji Pro 1X when it first came out. I was at the door of the camera store waiting for them to open. I loved the feel of the body because it reminded me so much of my old Leica. And then I brought it to my eye and the finder was out of focus. I looked in vain for the diopter adjustment, a feature that's been standard on even the meanest, little viewfindered compact camera for well over a decade. The Fuji Pro 1X did not have one. I left the shop without one. I watched my friends, confirmed raw shooters, agonize over the new, non-Bayer sensor's special needs. I read about the focusing issues, etc. Yes, it was a fashionable camera but I'm pretty sure I could have outshot it in a heartbeat with a Rebel. For one third the price.
Pride of ownership? Not with a Rebel. Rational behavior? Not with a Pro 1X.
I'm picking on the Pro 1X but we could just as easily pick apart the new Sony A7 or the oil and dust spattering Nikon D600. Or the devil-spawned menus of the OMD EM-1 (as well as the product name...). The bottom line, whether we like to concede it on not, is that most of our camera purchases these days have little to do with technical proficiency of the tools and a lot to do with our fashion sense. It's good to be honest about it. Doesn't mean we have to change.
Anymore than those lovely young women wearing seven inch heels are thinking about the logic of wearing a nice, comfortable (safe) pair of running shoes.....
This line of thought coincided with a good article on The.me.com here: http://www.the.me/a-hobby-for-the-very-wealthy/
I think we tend to skew our priorities because, in one sense (financial) we can really have just about any camera we want and so we look beyond workable to aspirational or "the best" just because we can. It's an interesting confluence today. At least I think so.
6.30.2014
This is one idea about portraiture and skin tone. We shot it with LED lights for a marketing campaign.
Erin. Photographed last year for the play: Hip, Beat, Mad and Gone.
It's a different way of making portraits.
If you need a good Summer read or a book for a long plane ride I hope you'll give our first photo/fiction/action book a go. As always, I appreciate your support!
6.29.2014
On writing and giving birth to a book. Most especially fiction.
From Hip, Mad, Beat and Gone.
I love to tell stories but I hate the details of writing. I've always been this way. I am a poor speller and an even poorer copy editor. When I wrote ads and TV commercials in my ancient career as an advertising agency copywriter I had people all around me who specialized in taking my thoughts, and ideas, and finding the little glitches and "gotchas" that necessarily remain when typing and thinking are done at speed, under a tight deadline. If the proofreaders and junior writers didn't catch stuff there were always a couple rounds of client approvals as well.
I rejoiced when I was asked by the publisher at Amherst Media to write a book about lighting back in 2007. "At last," I thought, "someone will have the job of editing what I write and making it beautiful." Alas, I found more than a handful of typos which made it through the gauntlet of multiple readers and editors and into the book. And in each ensuing book a few typos always slipped through as well. But I felt I was absolved of blame (for the most part) because there was a formal distinction between being an author and being an editor or proof-reader.
But with my own book, The Lisbon Portfolio, I found myself in uncharted waters and, until recently, without a real life guard. Here's the background: In late November of 2001 I had some health issues that required me to take months of time to recuperate and get back to work. I spent my (unwanted) free time writing a novel. I did it the way I generally do stuff; I got an idea and I sat down and plowed through it until I was done. Essentially I wrote the first, long draft of The Lisbon Portfolio in about six months. Then my health recovered and I got back to my photographic work and back to the regular pace of real life.
Everything possible interceded between me and the book over the course of the last twelve years. The field I work in went through radical and unpredictable shifts and then the world economy went upside down and I feel like I spent the last five years navigating a leaky boat through the rough and chaotic waters. During all of those years I wanted to finish the original writing project but something always came up and I kept loosing the thread. I wrote five non-fiction books about photography but somehow I could never circle back to the book that had the most meaning for me.
2014 has been one of the most stable years for me that I can remember in a good, long while so I finally committed myself to getting this project done and out. I read the manuscript over and over again but I've come to the conclusion that if you are the one who writes something as long as a novel your brain somehow cancels out your ability to see the errors on the pages, after the fact. It may be that as the creator I keep getting caught back in the story instead of being able to make a dispassionate survey of possessives and subjunctives and all that vital stuff. For one reason or another the individual words have become greek to me. But one of my blog followers has stepped in to help me. He read the story and liked it. A lot. He got in touch with me to see if it would be okay for him to submit an edited manuscript with corrections highlighted.
I am thrilled! He is half way through the correction process already and I'm standing by to implement all of his changes upon completion. The wonderful thing about self-publishing a book as a Kindle book is that when you find things (or things are brought to your attention) that need to be fixed you can wade back into the formatted manuscript and make those changes. Within 24 hours of making corrections the revised manuscript goes live on Amazon.com and every copy downloaded from that point onward has the new changes.
If we have started with a paper book the first buyers would end up having to live without the changes. But if you bought a Kindle version of my book as soon as the revised copy is uploaded you can trash your current copy and download the newer copy at no charge to you. It's like a firmware upgrade for a book.
I know that many people believe that a product has to be perfect before it goes out the door and I would love to have delivered one of those six sigma products. But the story is the story and it's not going to change (much...if at all...). But it was vitally important to me, personally, to finish up The Lisbon Portfolio and get it out. I wanted to share it with my readers and I needed to move it out of my mental inventory to make room for the next writing project. No, it's not going to be another book about lighting or portraits. It's the next "Henry White" novel and it's already starting to gel.
I love telling stories and I love writing about what I know. While the action and adventure depicted in The Lisbon Portfolio is totally fiction the surrounding threads of a corporate trade show are all crafted from an amalgam of my professional experiences.
In the first week readers have already snapped up hundreds of copies of the book. We have our first four reviews on Amazon.com and I am proud to say that none of the reviewers are family and none were bribed to write their reviews. I'd like to share them all below:
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Kindle Edition|Verified Purchase
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
By Bob Dales
Format:Kindle Edition|Verified Purchase
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Kindle Edition|Verified Purchase
Format:Kindle Edition|Verified Purchase
If you need a good Summer read or a book for a long plane ride I hope you'll give our first photo/fiction/action book a go. As always, I appreciate your support!
Retail alchemy turns loser flash into sparkling 17mm lens. It's like magic.
Playwright. Stephen Dietz.
Many of you who tuned in to VSL last week read the saga of the flash that wouldn't. It's the sad tale of a frightfully expensive flash that is so moody and unreliable that it drove me from the world of TTL flash to a more pedestrian and workaday model of flash that eschews automation altogether.
When I finished writing my scathing review I decided I would take it to Precision Camera and see if I could make a silk purse out of Sony's sow's ear. I walked in and talked to the people at the repair and rental desk because they also handle trade-ins. They took the flash, tested it and tossed out a monetary value. Since my own estimation hovered around zero I thought their much higher offer was generous enough to preclude haggling so I turned the flash over to them and spent some time looking around for something to spend my trade in credit on.
I played with a used Olympus EM-5 and remembered once again just how nice the shutter sounds on that camera and just how confusing the menus are. I put it back in the salesman's hands. Then I spent a nice half an hour on one of Precision Camera's comfortable leather couches, getting to know the Panasonic GX-7 (which is on my short list of cameras I might want to have if I needed more than four). While the flash trade-in was generous the spread between my trade-in credit and the GX-7 was a bit too wide to justify and so I started concentrating on lenses.
I played with two Nikon lenses that I considered strongly. One is the 105mm 2.5 ai, a variant of at least ten that I've owned over the last two decades...(it's a marvelous lens but it tends to get flushed at transition points from Nikon into other systems or Kodak/Nikon cameras into other systems...) but I eventually decided against it because even though I maintain the overly romantic notion that I will, someday, go back to shooting some images with my Nikon F4s, deep down I know that my days of whipping film through the system are largely over. Especially 35mm film...
As the afternoon waned I came across a silver, used Olympus 17mm f1.8 and I seemed to remember reading something nice about it somewhere so that's what I decided upon. When I came home I read some of the lukewarm reviews and decided to ignore them and find out for myself. The lens is good for almost everyone, anywhere unless you demand absolutely linear performance across the entire frame. Me? I like em blisteringly sharp in the center and if they can do that I'm happy. So color me happy on this one.
I've traded a useless flash for a fun lens. Now I am out the door to see how it handles Austin's amazingly exciting downtown scene.
Don't miss the blockbuster action/adventure photo novel of the Summer!!!!!
Follow the adventures of corporate photographer, Henry White
as he travels to Lisbon for a week of mayhem and photography!!!
Get your Kindle copy before they are all gone...
Using an RX10 as a journalism camera.
Chef being interviewed.
This past March I covered an event at SXSW for New York public relations agency, Allison PR. The event featured chef, Dominique Ansel, making his signature baked product, the Cronut(tm) and he also introduced a new product which is a chocolate chip cookie, shaped like a shot glass or tumbler and served filled with cold milk. As is usual for a SXSW event over 400 people waited in line for several hours to gain entry to the Stephen F. Austin (Intercontinental) Hotel for their chance to taste one of these delicacies.
My job was to cover all the aspects of the event, from the baking and making to the crowds of fans who had a blast sampling the product and visiting the adjacent bar.
I brought along a few full frame cameras but I ended up leaning on my favorite camera of the moment, the Sony RX10. The wide zoom range was valuable for shooting tight in and then whipping back fro establishing shots. ISO's from 200 to 3200 were intermixed and looked great. Certainly more than good enough for the primary use which was a quick journey to the web.
From bounce light in the above image to fluorescent lights in the images below the camera was able to absolutely nail color balance and exposures while being quick and automatic to operate.
Much as I love the RX10 (and I really do!!!) I have to report a flaw that recently popped up. You know that wonderful switch on the bottom of the lens that gives you a choice between defined click stops on the aperture ring and free wheeling action for video production? Well that switch no longer holds in position and the camera constantly wants to shift from the click-y position at which I've set it into the click-less position, in which I have much less interest...
While it's not worth sending it in to fix it is nonetheless an aggravating failure for a camera that carries a premium price in its niche and which has been handled lovingly and with kid gloves. Of course, if Sony values good customer relations they will no doubt read this and send a team over to the studio to fix it on site. Hey! Sony guys! If you are headed this way can you stop by the Starbucks on Bee Caves Rd. and Walsh-Taralton and pick me a up a Venti half caff drip coffee? I'll pay you back when you get here....
making the tops of Cronuts happy places.
Adding garnish to the Cronut.
The chocolate lined cookie shot glasses, awaiting milk.
Many lines are written on the web that would make one think no professional job could be done with less than a D4s or a 1DX but you won't read those ideas here. The RX10 was more than adequate to the task and the images ran in hundreds of places. The event was a screaming success.
Don't miss the blockbuster action/adventure photo novel of the Summer!!!!!
Follow the adventures of corporate photographer, Henry White
as he travels to Lisbon for a week of mayhem and photography!!!
Get your Kindle copy before they are all gone...
Portrait. NYC 2013.
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