11.06.2015
A Gallery of Sixth Street, SXSW images from earlier. A small, Friday portfolio.
flowing through the streets of downtown Austin watching the swirl of people.
Small, black OMD EM5.2 + Panasonic 12-35mm f2.8 X
You can click on any of these and see them in a gallery 2100 pixels wide...
The Olympus EM-5.2 and the Panasonic 12-35mm f2.8 lens. A very nice combination to shoot with everyday.
The beauty of owning several camera systems, one big and super high res, the other nicely sized and brilliantly portable, is that you can select the one you feel aligned with in the moment and leverage both the emotional connection to the camera as well as the technical attributes you feel you need in the moment.
I've owned a couple of the Olympus EM5.2 cameras for many months now and find them to be wonderfully compatible with my nature when it comes to ambling around aimlessly, waiting for unexpected images to fall into my lap. I use the camera with the optional battery grip and find the combination just right. Without the battery grip parts of my right hand just don't fit anywhere and hands hate to exist without good operational boundaries. The grip with the extra battery also provides that existential calm and reassurance that one's camera won't become useless halfway through a walk, presaged by the orange, blinking battery symbol.
You may have noticed that I don't like to carry multiple lenses with me on these unstructured walks; usually I select an normal focal length, which for me is a 50mm to 90mm equivalent, but I am equally happy with wide to short telephoto zooms. On the day I took the image above I intended to walk into downtown to see what was happening in the streets around the SXSW conferences and musical stages. A light rain had been falling all day and I decided to use the 12-35mm Panasonic lens on the camera to take advantage of the weather sealing provided by the pair.
The camera function perfectly and, when I was immersed in non-photographic moments, hung almost transparently by my side.
Emotionally I love the little Olympus and Panasonic cameras most of all my gear. Intellectually, I like the Nikon D810 and the 85mm f1.8 best of all my gear. I'm sure people who have reconciled the two sides of their brains, and the emotional versus intellectual frisson can be happy with one well researched choice. But it certainly is fun to order up something a little different every day.
After shooting the flowers I trudge downtown and shot on the slick streets. But that's the next blog...
11.05.2015
Spending the day printing portfolio photographs with the Canon Pro 100 I recently bought (dirt cheap...). Success.
I've been guilty, over the last few years, of not printing nearly as much as I should have been. Partly, I avoided printing because my older printer had seen many miles on the print head and it just wasn't giving me the quality of prints I wanted. But even more probable is my (perhaps misguided) idea that prints had lots their cachet and their primacy.
My older printer, a Canon Pro9000, temporarily gave up the ghost about three weeks before the start of the one job I do each year where I need to print a bunch of prints overnight. While a reader supplied the magic fix to revive the printer the next day, I had already pushed the button on my computer and bought a replacement. The older printer, full of brand new ink, got passed along to a younger photographer who desperately needed any printer she could get her hands on.
I bought a second set of inks and plenty of paper and one stormy Saturday night, two weekends ago, I sat in the studio at a little after midnight and started printing out 70-80 color prints to deliver a bit later in the morning. I was printing right out of PhotoShop and I got the color and density dialed in pretty quickly. The client spilled Diet Coke over some of the prints which required a quick reprinting but that's a different story.
The new printer, a Canon Pro 100, was good for seven or eight dozen 5x7 inch prints and a handful of invoices and it still was running on the original ink cartridges.
In the second half of the week things finally slowed down and I was able to start thinking about marketing once again. I decided that it would be good to update my printed portfolio and show off some of the work I've been doing in the last year. This would give me something interesting and new to show to existing clients; a reminder, if you will.
Looking around the studio I realized I had several empty 13x19 inch, leather portfolios as well as a nearly full box of 13x19 Moab Lasal Photo Matte inkjet paper. Now it was time to really zero in the new printer and get some work together to show off. I've spent time today, between swimming, napping and lunch, printing twelve different images. Some came out of the printer just perfect and some required a print or two more to get just right. The printer is not fast but it's also not slow. It takes three or four minutes to print out a 13x19" print at the highest resolution.
The colors seem to match what I'm seeing on my 27 inch iMac screen pretty faithfully. And, looking at the prints, I realize how much I like the ritual and pleasure of looking at prints. Holding the large prints in my hands and walking over to the good light coming through four large windows makes me realize the actual improvements in the cameras I've been using. The prints are remarkably noiseless and there's no banding anywhere.
My goal between now and next Monday is to have 20 beautiful prints done, sequenced and in the portfolio binder. I can hardly wait to go around to the various agencies and clients I provide photographs to in order to share this new work with them. It's so different than sending a link on an e-mail and hoping that someone clicks through and sees the work. Often, I think, people get an e-mail like the one I envision and, while sitting over coffee at the local coffee shop, open up the link and quickly scroll through the work on their phone. Sitting in a conference room flipping outsized pages and being able to really look into the details of a printed photograph should be a totally different marketing (and viewing) experience.
The printer is nice. So far it's problem free. It does like to eat the gray inks more than anything else but the complete ink sets aren't too expensive and I doubt I'll evolve into a "power user," going through $$$$ worth of ink each month. We generally only update portfolios once or twice a year.
If I were printing fine art prints for sale (wishful thinking?) I'm sure I might have been better off getting the new Epson 800. I'm pretty sure it's a great 17 inch wide printer but I'm equally sure that, if I made that big of an investment in a printer, I'd quickly be off in the tall grass, spending hours and hours trying vainly to make each print perfect. In the end I would end up with a big, big stack of wonderful prints but a big, big hole in both my wallet and my diminishing store of spare time.
Still though, it felt great to be printing again. I will say, I think the Canon consumer printers are for people who just want to push a button or two and get a really decent print. The Epsons seem like printers for people who love to fuss and chase that last 5%. In the end any direction you go with these ink sponges is a compromise.
11.04.2015
The mania for lens speed is limiting our rational choices...
I used to carry around a 135mm f2.8 lens for my Contax film cameras. It was a nice companion to the 85mm f2.8 lens and, when I also had the 50mm f1.4 lens along for the ride, I felt as though I could cover anything in my usual style. It's only in the age of rampant generalism that I feel the pressure to also cover the desperately wide focal lengths as well.
But something nasty happened when we ventured into the populist age of digital photography; the masses adored the idea of zoom lenses, and they love the basic 70 or 80 to 200 mm versions best of all. At some point I guess the single focal length lenses that were covered by that range just fell off the radar entirely. At one time Nikon made a 135mm lens in f3.5, f2.8 and f2.0 variants. If you needed the speed you carried the weight. If you needed the focal length without the speed you were rewarded with a choice of two very well corrected lenses at two lower price points. My favorite was the ais version of the 2.8 which was small and not too heavy. It fit nicely in a bag and compressed images well. Best of all, being a single focal length lens it was very well corrected and very sharp for the price.
My first 135mm was a Vivitar 135mm f2.8 that was in the original Canon FD mount, and though it was only $79, brand new, it was a great lens and could be shot wide open with reasonable results. The camera I mostly used it on was my first SLR, the Canon TX, a fully manual, all metal camera body with shutter speeds up to a whopping 1/500th of a second... That camera had one great feature: It was impossible to break.
I dragged the combo across Europe one Fall and came home with a number of great Tri-X images.
Lately I've been hankering (Texana) for a 135mm lens that fits those same parameters. Not too heavy and not too big, but plenty sharp and better optically than the "fast" zooms. Sadly, the only prime 135mm left in the Nikon catalog is the 135mm f2.0 DC lens, which I consider a specialty optic. Yes, it's very sharp and also has the feature of being able to dial in spherical distortion for a more pleasing bokeh, but the damn thing is three times as heavy as the old 135mm and three times as expensive. Great fashion lens --- crappy lens for walking around.
Almost every 135mm lens out there is a variation of a fairly simple optical formula so I can't think that the mid-speed ones are expensive to build, but because of the influx of people into the craft who always think, "faster is better" and "zooming is better", the choices we used to take for granted have disappeared. If you happen to have an old 135mm Nikon f2.8 ais or ai lens you'd like to get rid of you might want to drop me a line. It's the current gap in my portrait pantheon that's driving me a little nuts.
Are there focal lengths that you loved that have disappeared? Would you buy it if it re-appeared? Or are you as happy as can be with the "holy trinity" of f2.8 zoom lenses?
Sometimes you have to build stuff to get the shots you want.
A couple of years ago my friend, Chris Archer, talked to me about a project he wanted to do. He'd just bought a Sony F55 Cine Alta video camera that was capable of shooting pretty decent slow motion and he had a friend who was an accomplished dancer. He wanted to shoot her in front of a wall of cascading sand as she dropped into the frame from above, and he wanted everything but the sand and the dancer to drop into total black.
During the course of his experimentations he decided that he really needed to shoot with a Phantom camera for even slower, slow motion. He also decided that he needed to build this rig to drop the sand evenly across two, large intersecting planes. Chris had carpenters build the entire rig/set for this in an airplane hangar at the old, Mueller Airport, here in Austin.
Chris asked me to help out with the lighting. We wanted a semi-hard source that was somewhat directional but had soft edges. I figured a 24 by 36 inch, heat proof softbox with a 2,000 watt, open face tungsten light would be good. I skirted the box with black fabric to cut down on spilling light so we didn't contaminate the background of black felt. We were able to pull f2.8 at our high speed settings something like 600 frames per second. With the fast, Zeiss cine lenses we were using that aperture was the perfect combination of sharpness and depth of field control (sharp subject, sharp sand, not sharp black material). We added a few highly controlled spots for fill in light but they had little overall effect on the scene. I could tell they were there but they were subtle...
Once Chris had his angles figured out we started placing the two thousand pounds of sand on the set.
The resulting video was pretty amazing. It takes eight or ten seconds from the point the dancer enters the frame until she lands on the sand. Every grain of sand that puffs up is clearly delineated. I liked the concept. I loved the fact that Chris was so committed that he engineered every piece of a custom set that took weeks to concept, design and implement. Sometimes that dedication to doing things exactly right goes missing when clients show up with budget restrictions and a general lack of understanding just how much goes on
11.03.2015
A popular blogger has written a blog in which he implores camera makers to let him consult. For free. Hmmmm. Not sure I want that.
Jules. The on site photographer at the Graffiti Park.
Note: if you are coming here because someone posted the link on DPReview and you disagree with what I've written, please be advised that: 1. I have read the blog article in question quite thoroughly --- and more than once. 2. I have used "hyperbole" (exaggeration) to make a point. 3. You are welcome to comment but if you just came here to act poorly I will, of course, delete any comment you make...this is NOT a DPReview forum...
Hubris is a cool word that basically means you think you've got more superpowers that you really do, and it's just a matter of time before you try to fly and hit the sidewalk. At least that's my translation. Blogger Ming Thein wrote a piece that he posted last night cataloging many of the failures of the mirrorless cameras on the market. In his estimation either the manufacturers are stupid, out of touch, reticent to admit failure or....they just don't understand photography. Or cameras. He provided a list of all the things every camera maker should include on their products in order to pass muster. It was a long and detailed list along the lines of..."My perfect car would get 100 miles to the gallon and go 150 miles per hour, it would seat eight comfortably but still fit in the compact spaces..., the interior would be as cleanly designed as an Apple phone but would have 30 cup holders. etc. etc.
Some of the points he makes are obvious. We all wish every camera had as good an image stabilization system as the Olympus. But what if the trade off for IS performance is sensor size? The smaller sensor with smaller mass is easier to control. Full frame cameras will always be a few steps behind. Instant start up is desirable, of course, and as soon as the entire supply pipeline is filled with faster micro controllers all the cameras will start up quicker. Most people want weatherproofing which adds to the cost and complexity of the product. But doesn't everyone also want prices to fall?
I hate to burst his bubble but the reason there isn't a "perfect" mirrorless camera on the market is precisely because everyone seems to want their version to be customized to their wants and needs rather than being a universal design with all the compromises that entails. I want my m4:3 cameras be bigger. Most people I know love that they are small. I love the EVFs in all the cameras but
Some of the points he makes are obvious. We all wish every camera had as good an image stabilization system as the Olympus. But what if the trade off for IS performance is sensor size? The smaller sensor with smaller mass is easier to control. Full frame cameras will always be a few steps behind. Instant start up is desirable, of course, and as soon as the entire supply pipeline is filled with faster micro controllers all the cameras will start up quicker. Most people want weatherproofing which adds to the cost and complexity of the product. But doesn't everyone also want prices to fall?
I hate to burst his bubble but the reason there isn't a "perfect" mirrorless camera on the market is precisely because everyone seems to want their version to be customized to their wants and needs rather than being a universal design with all the compromises that entails. I want my m4:3 cameras be bigger. Most people I know love that they are small. I love the EVFs in all the cameras but
Still chuckling after re-reading Andrew Molitor's fabulous blog post a second time. It's well worth reading.
Here's a link: http://photothunk.blogspot.ch/2015/11/science-she-is-hard.html#comment-form
Have we been measuring things all wrong?
Have we been measuring things all wrong?
The importance of taking the down time.
I tried to compensate. More push ups in the evening. More planking between post production spurts and lots of swims, by myself, at odd times of the day. But man, it sure felt good to get back into the water with the pack. The daily competition and discipline was like a breath of fresh air.
I think there is a compulsion among all self-employed people to stay constantly busy. Part of it is the fear that nothing will be coming down the road, work-wise, if we aren't constantly priming the pump and part of it is habit; we tend to work when there is work. The work compulsion is a mixed blessing at best. Yes, we have cash flow, but at what cost?
One of the features of freelance work that nearly everyone mentions is the ability to have flexible time, but so few people take advantage of it. We live in a society where the mantra seems to be, "always push forward." There is an old adage from the Tao Ching that says, "Keep filling your glass and it will spill." Another is: "Keep sharpening your blade and it will become dull." When we are busy we tend to settle into comfortable grooves and do the same thing over and over again. When we get into that rut we tend not to try new things, not to take risks (how could we schedule around the failures?) and not to have fun.
I hit the pool at 7 this morning and loved it. Even when I got clobbered on the side of the head by Anne's errant butterfly stroke recovery I loved it. Then I ate steel cut oatmeal with fresh raspberries and walnuts and I loved that. But I loved it all even more because I didn't need to rush off right after and "get stuff done." I'm slowly unpacking the gear from yesterday while making lunch appointments with friends for open days this week and next. After I have BBQ with a friend today I'm pretty sure I'll be heading right back home to take one of those delicious naps with Studio Dog.
I'll start thinking about work again around mid-day on Weds. But even that is just a planning meeting. I could do all sorts of marketing this week or get cracking on some judicious financial planning. But I think I'll put it off and see how a week of leisure suits me. It seems novel now....
Freelancing is a funny thing. You can't really plan your schedule the way you would with a real, steady job. You take the good stuff that comes through the door and, hopefully, over time you start to recognize the jobs that make you crazy and take up all your time and energy. If you get over the fear of not working then those are the jobs you decline. It's the stuff you turn down that really makes your business work. It's tough, sometimes, to stay centered but it sure makes what we do more effective. Both for us and for our clients.
11.02.2015
A study in blue and green and concrete. Panasonic fz 1000 at ISO 125.
Cheap, good cameras --- the more you use them the more fun they are to use.
Liquids and the circumstances of their creation.
I love hanging out at bars. I'm not a big mixed drink fan but I sure the love the theater of it and the loyalty to nonsense that regular drinkers bring to their "craft."
These shots are from Garrido's, which, sadly, did not make it all the way to the resumption of the economic boom here in Austin. David is now the executive chef at "Dine." The fine restaurant at the Raddison Hotel on Caesar Chavez and Congress Ave.
The a99 was a fine camera. It just all needed to be......faster.
Bob Schneider at Lambert's. Getting close but keeping my distance.
©2014 Kirk Tuck.
I spent the middle of my day making faux available light portraits at a law firm. What do I mean by "faux" available light portraits? I mean that I used the available light and carefully supplemented it with light from three different LED lighting fixtures, a collection of modifiers and light blockers. But the real gist of my short blog tonight is to talk about the emotions of the moment clouding one's observations about the workability of specific gear.
I spent my productive time today shooting with the tried and true, Nikon D750 with the well balanced and proficient Nikon 85mm f.18 G lens. Given the gear the technical parts of this job making portraits of attorneys was a piece of cake. The tough part, as always, is establishing the necessary rapport. When I was younger I always talked to male executives about what sports their kids played and that cracked the shell, so to speak, and got them to open up a bit. We'd find common ground, they'd beam with pride about their son or daughter's amazing future in NCAA soccer and I'd snap the photos; convinced that I was "shooting fish in a barrel" by playing to their paternal pride.
The partners in the firm at which I photographed today have older kids. College kids. Wanna build some rapport with a 55 year old? Ask him where his kid is going to college, and how he or she is doing. Then we can commiserate together about the cost or the "empty nest" or the hijinks of our offspring and also make a common connection. The key is to find the subject that triggers something outside the confines of their business.
So, while I'm getting to know my clients, I was ruminating about how well the D750 was performing until it dawned on me that I'd been unfair in my recent camera comparisons. I'd placed the Panasonic fz 1000 in a Kobayashi Maru Scenario (Star Trek reference) where there was no chance of success. I was trying to make it sort out the horribly mixed lighting of a room with orange theatrical gels over most of the lights, mixed with nasty light, mixed with Jumbo-tron blue glow. And I asked the camera to do all of this at an outrageous ISO. The D750 wasn't that much better but for some reason I felt compelled to pick a "winner" and a "loser."
The reality is that if I had pressed the fz 1000 into service today it would have preformed almost identically to the D750 in almost every parameter except the slope of the out of focus ramp provided by the camera with the larger sensor. Noise? No problem. Color integrity? Probably better with the fz.
I associate the D750 with a higher performance level because I let it play to its strengths while I mark down the performance of the smaller sensor camera because it doesn't win in "no win" situations.
The image above was taken last year at a small, private, corporate party. Bob Schneider was opening for Lyle Lovett. It was shot with a Panasonic GH4 and an ancient, Olympus 60mm f1.5 lens, nearly wide open. The image doesn't fail because it's not being pushed past the point of no return. There's white light on Schneider's face. The fast aperture allows for a usable ISO setting. His constrained pose meant that shutter speeds down around 1/125th of second were quite acceptable. It was basically a "softball" pitch.
I thought about it again as I was shooting today. Our emotional perceptions and our frustrations at prevailing conditions often prejudice us into thinking that this or that camera, or format, has failed when, in fact, we've failed to manage the circumstances of the shoot. Bad lighting? Instead of changing cameras why not fix the light? Or walk away from bad lighting and tell the client they have to do their part too. It's a thought. We can't always perform miracles. We should own up to that.
11.01.2015
Two shots from my Sunday walk, juxtaposed for color contrast.
Okay. So in my usual hyperbolic enthusiasm I got carried away with the fz 1000. Then, on corporate shoot I figured out that the camera does have a few limitations. But then I picked it up today and realized that it's still as fun to shoot as I first imagined. It can be wickedly sharp and at the same time subversively understated.
I have been using it as a single focal length camera. Let me explain. There's a setting in the menu that allows you to set the camera's zooming mechanism to stop at each marked focal length. Additionally you can program the camera to return to the last zoomed focal length when you turn it on. I can set the camera at a 50mm equivalent, turn the power off, and then five minutes or five hours later, come back and turn the camera on and it will go straight to 50mm. Or whatever you last shot.
I like all this and think it's very cool. I have also turned the LCD finder around to face the body so I don't both pre-chimp and post chimp. That's a time and attention saver, to be sure.
The camera shoots a bit flash and a bit low on saturation. I like to think it's doing some fancy and very beneficial S-Log thing like the S-Log my video friends rave about in their professional video cameras. Whatever the reality is a few minutes of play in SnapSeed and I end up with files that I love. And files that look like they have significant dynamic range.
I might have mentioned that I initially liked the fz 1000 so much I bought a second one. Now I'm glad I did because I'm going to pack it for a road trip and its twin IS the perfect backup.
Hope your week is starting well. I'm busy as hummingbird on coffee. Stay tuned.
And here we are again, packing for tomorrow's shoot. It's all about lighting again.
Tomorrow is a continuation of a project I started for a downtown law firm about a month ago. We are photographing all of the partners and associates, and so far we've gotten through about 24 people. Midday tomorrow we'll set up in two locations and photograph 4 more people. I'm doing a style that depends on shallow depth of field and I'll be leveraging the ambient light in the location along with my main and fill lights which will set the lighting style, and the balance, all the other sources. I'll be using black flags to block ugly light from compact fluorescents shining down from the ceiling, and I'll be counting on lots of clean, cool daylight flooding in from floor to ceiling windows, bouncing through frosted glass walls and helping me to add depth to each shot.
On our first shoot, last month, we used three different LED lights for most of the illumination. The larger light in the bottom left corner of the image above is a RPS CoolED 100. It's pretty bright and the light is very well color balanced when compared to daylight. I'd peg it at 5400 with a very, very slight green cast. The light in the top right corner, closest to camera, is the younger brother of the CoolED 100; it's the CoolED 50 and, wouldn't you know it, it half the power or one stop less than its big brother.
The third light, which gets used a lot as an accent or hair or background light, is the Fiilex P360 which is an absolutely darling little light. Where the two RPS lights are just daylight balanced the Fiilex allows me to control the color temperature from 2900 to 5500, steplessly.
My only concern in the last shoot was not having enough power to shoot toward a window. I was about a stop down from the outdoor light with my main light used through my standard diffusion scrim. Since then I bought a second 100 light and will gang them together when I need the extra oomph! I also want to use the two bigger lights together so I can add a second layer of diffusion (separated by about 1/4" from each other) to smooth out the light even more.
To people who always shoot with flash the fascination with continuous light sources must seem a bit crazy. I always remember though, an interview I read a long time ago with Arnold Newman (who used lots and lots of hot lights over the years), he suggested that having people sit for portraits, done with hot lights, sometimes demanded that they stay very still for up to a full second. He conjectured that the very act of breathing at these longer exposures added something ephemeral to the look of the sitters; a softness within the sharpness that made the faces and the surfaces seem more real.
It is interesting to look closely at his image of Igor Stravinsky at the Piano, which was done with a single 1000W light. The exposure is something like f16 at 1 second but the overall image is something so different from what we see in the results of most portrait lighting today.
I firmly believe that the immediacy of feedback one gets from continuous lighting allows many very positive benefits for photographers; not least of which is being able to see IN REAL TIME the exact effect that blending different light sources has on the image. The blending of light sources is also much easier to effect since you can see the effect on the tonal balances as you turn each light up or down.
I'll be photographing again with the D750 and either the 85mm f1.8 G lens or the older, 105mm f2.5 ais lens. I set the aperture I want for the depth of field I want and then I set the shutter speed to give me the correct exposure. I start out with the lowest ISO I feel I can get away with (camera and subject movement limits) and, if I start getting down to 1/30th of s second I stop there and start raising the ISO until it's all dialed in. I know with the 105mm's aperture set at f4.0 the lens is just about as perfect a lens as one could hope for in the 5 to 10 foot range; if one is framing a horizontal with the subject cropped from just above the top of the head to a bit above the waist.
My goal with these portraits is to make them look great as horizontal compositions but also have enough "air" around them so that art directors and website designers can also crop a really good vertical from the same selected files.
Working with continuous lighting is more like lighting a movie set than traditional softbox/flash portrait photography. I use tools like 4x4 foot diffusion scrims, nets -- which pull down light levels without introducing shadows or shadow edges, and a host of light blockers to control what hits the subject and what doesn't. That control, along with total control of depth of field, makes the projects seem more cinematic; almost like scenes from movies frozen into single frames.
The bottom line is that the light is just an element of the portrait mix. The photographer will have to make so many other decisions. The distance from the subject to the camera is determined by how large you would like to have the subject appear in the final image. That also depends on the focal length of the lens. But an aesthetic consideration is also how far do you want the subject to be from the background. Too far from the background and you risk losing any detail in the far image plane, and that means you risk losing the feeling of real depth. Too close to the background and you risk objects coming too much into focus which ultimately robs some of the viewer's attention from your main subject. It gives viewer too many spots on which to linger.
But all of those considerations are meaningless if you can't work with the subject to get to a collaboration in which they are comfortable giving you an expression and the energy that their friends and families will recognize as "genuine" and "engaging." Get all the other stuff right and then flub this and you've failed. Getting a priceless expression while not getting the technical stuff perfect isn't nearly as bad. You can cover up a lot of shooting incompetence with a bunch of PhotoShop skill. Get both sides of the equation right and you might just be able to earn a living doing portraits. Even in 2015.
I'm loving the LED lights again. This time around I have the tonal control AND perfect color right out of the box. I can hardly wait to drag my cart, overloaded with gear, into the service elevator and get started.
10.31.2015
A status report on the Visual Science Lab Headquarters and the safety of our personnel...
First, I want to thank all the readers who got in touch to make sure we were okay here at VSL during and after the epic rains we've had both this weekend and last. We got about 8 inches of rain on Friday morning between midnight and 10 a.m. but other parts of Austin, including the airport, got up to 16 inches in the space of just two hours! Whole neighborhoods were evacuated and flooding was widespread. It was a bad coincidence that we'd had 16 inches of rainfall the weekend before because the ground was too saturated to soak up any of the new rainfall and the water had no where to go but where it was led by gravity.
Fortunately, our house and our offices are located in the Westlake Hills area which is west of downtown and across the lake. We are 690 feet above the base water level of Austin so we are immune from most catastrophic flooding. We are mostly dealing with spots of nuisance flooding where water is coming down the grade from the properties just above us and is jumping the gutters out in the front of our house. If the rains comes down too quickly it sometimes overwhelms the French drain on one wall of the studio and causes water to seep through the masonry and onto the floor.
The main house is never in danger of flooding and, after having lived here for nearly twenty years I'm pretty confident that we don't need to worry about the house proper. The floor in the office is concrete with dense foam tiles laid on top. These tiles are interlocking and easily removable and replaceable; and not expensive. If I get water on the floor of the office I use a wet vacuum, designed for sucking up liquids safely, to remove the water and then, when the weather changes (general in a day or so) I take the tiles outside and let them dry in the sun. The vacuum is plugged into a GFI plug and should be safe to use even in standing water as long as the unit isn't submerged.
All camera equipment is store in rolling tool cabinets that stand eight inches above the floor and all other gear; from backgrounds to light stands, is stored on Metro shelving with the bottom-most shelves set at about 12 inches. Even plugs and power strips are positioned on blocks of dense foam that keep them well above the 1/8th inch of spreading water we get on occasion. Our flooding is more of an inconvenience than a real danger and, so far the wet floor has only happened, at most, once a year; on average.
The real danger would come from driving though the low water crossings that dot Austin. A number of people are drowned each year in central Texas trying to drive through rapid water and being swept away in their vehicles. We're a bunch of sissies. If it looks dangerous we're quick to re-schedule shoots because no shoot is more important than our safety or the safety of our clients. A side issue is that even without danger of drowning, etc. the traffic in Austin comes to a screeching halt with any weather event and it can take hours to get several miles, even on the major highways.
The house and studio have brand new, 40 year roofs on them; installed last month. The gutters are clean and the French drains near the studio are usually functional. Nothing in life is guaranteed but we're feeling pretty safe and mostly dry over here.
Our hearts go out to the people who have been flooded out both in May and now this weekend. We are suggesting that locals can do the most good for those effected by contributing money to the local Red Cross chapter or a similar charity that helps provide emergency aid and shelter to displaced families.
To keep this somewhat photographic....when I went out to shoot some shots of the raging waters at a nearby low water crossing I made sure to take a water resistant lens and camera body. My choice? The Olympus OMD EM-5.2 with a Panasonic 12-35mm f2.8 lens. Like the Nikon D750 last weekend, the Olympus spent about an hour in moderate to driving rain and has suffered no ill effects. As I am not a competent weather photographer the images were not very inspiring. That's why I decided to erase them and start over fresh next time.
Thanks for all the good wishes and the concerns for our well being. I appreciated hearing from so many VSL readers. Have a safe week ahead.
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