Snapshot from the film days. Beginning of Winter in Texas.

 Belinda and the Boy. Camera: Rollei 6008i.

It's just a couple of days till the Thanksgiving holiday here in the USA. In the past it meant endless football games on TV, too much food and lots of family friction for many people. The lucky ones had nice families who never fought and family members who could fix a perfect turkey with all the trimmings. They also sat around and read books or took naps after dinner and never thought of turning on the television. These families are mostly mythological....

Over the years various traditions have been added to the holiday. My least favorite until recently was the "Black Friday/Midnight on Thursday Shopping Hysteria." A prank by retailers who offer a limited number of "deals too good to be true" to lure in hordes of price sensitive shoppers determined to save money on stuff they might be better off without. 

In the Black Friday tradition we photo enthusiasts have recently been subjected to an added circle of hell; we've added the Photobloggers and Review Site Writers Top Ten Lists to the menu. To boost clicks they'll have cunning lists of the: The top cameras of the year! The top photo accessories of the year!! The top flash gear of the year!!! Lenses that will cause you to die if you do NOT own them!!!! and each site will feature their lists in the form of a daily countdown toward the number one item in each category. All with links to Amazon and B&H.

While most sites will choose the most popular photographic items in the hopes that their choices will drive the most click through sales from you, you can bet than Canon, Sony, Nikon and Olympus will be well represented on almost everyone's list. Everyone will, no doubt, toss in an inexpensive medium format camera as well. It's just the season for it.

Now, make no mistake, the writers are in no way representing that they have ever touched, seen or handled a lot of the gear in question. They might add a Leica to their list just to ramp up the perception that the writer is among the elite or cognoscenti of photography, but you can be sure there will be several budget DSLR cameras mixed in that have bigly selling potential as well. 

I plan on participating in my own eccentric way ( I am a photo blogger after all), but I'm going to give the holiday a break and not start into the list making until the first part of December. I'm only going to put stuff on my list that I've actually owned and used. It's going to be a shorter list this year. I might only have three top cameras on it. 

If we were all being honest we'd just write lists with top ten things for our fellow artists/photographers like: 

1. Plane tickets to someplace I've always wanted to photograph.

2. Extra cash for model fees so I can do that conceptual photo shoot I dreamed up.

3. Better coffee so I can enjoy being more awake while I post process files. (Wanna get me coffee for the holidays? Send me a can of Illy medium roast, pre-ground. I'm not much of a snob but this is my coffee of choice, you can get it on Amazon...hint to #1 son).

4. Some faster memory cards so I can make that video about Winter Masters Swimming at the 400 mb/s setting video setting.

5. More free time to walk around aimlessly and click a currently owned camera at random stuff that catches my eye(s). 

6. A season pass to local area art museums for the year so I can see every show without thinking I should just save on admission for the next great lens.

7. A gift of better discipline so I can finally spend the money on framed prints for my show instead of the next great lens.

8. A photo book full of absolutely false (but authoritatively written) reviews that laud pedestrian and affordable gear and trash high speed, state of the art gear, so I have more incentive to stick with gear that I can afford. Such a book would save marriages, budgets and countless hours of internet "research."  Chapter one: "The Panasonic 25mm f1.8 lens is the most under appreciated lens in the lens cosmos. With astringent sharpness even wide open it is peerless at every f-stop and defies completely the physics of diffraction...." 

9. A reverse switch for major internet sites so you could deliver a shock to bloggers who write inane stuff about new gear without having so much as changed a battery in the "reviewed" item. Also a trapdoor for the gaggle of bloggers that want to keep arguing the Jpeg v. Raw war well into the middle of the century...

10. A mute switch for the big sites who profess to have an "on staff" physicist who tries to prove just how many angels can dance naked on the head of a pin while pushing camels through the eye of a needle in order to justify writing 19 articles in one week about a newly introduced wundercamera. All without any rhyme or reason. Let me hear you save Nyqvist just one more time on your way to describing the hermeneutics of aperture equivalence....or whatever your newest religion is...

Ah well. It's part of the new responsibility of being a photographer/consumer in 2017. I'd put a link to some product at the bottom of this but I'm currently engulfed by ennui...

.....take some time off. Read a good book. Take a photograph of something that actually interests you. And if someone who writes a blog tells you that "pros" only shot RAW then metaphorically punch them in the face with a withering comment...and be sure to post it anonymously. Always pisses me off....

The Weekly "De-Brief" with the Panasonic/Leica/Olympus System. Thumbs Way Up.

I was already booked to photograph the technical rehearsal of Zach Theatre's rock-and-roll version of "A Christmas Carol" when I got a panicky call from one of the technical crew. Several principal actors would be subbing out their roles for several days in the first few weeks of the show. Sudden schedule conflicts!!! There were several actors who could fill the roles but they haven't been in all the rehearsals and might be hazy on choreography. Could I set up a central video camera to record the whole show from beginning to end so the fill-ins could watch the video over and over again to see the blocking they needed to know? 

I added a Panasonic FZ2500 to the kit, along with a stout tripod, and headed to the theater to set up. 

In MP4 at HD the camera can shoot fairly small files. They are about 20 mb/s which means that a 128 GB memory card will give nearly six hours of run time. I set the exposure based on a middle of the road lighting cue, white balanced the camera and then turned the rear screen in to shut off the review and gain me some battery life. We rolled the camera for the entire 2 hours of the technical performance on one battery!!!!!!

With the camera manually focused on the middle of the stage the depth of field was adequate to cover most of the stage from front to back. The camera delivered great files for the intended purpose. Exposure wasn't alway optimum but as a reference for the actors it was exactly what they needed. They can clearly see the blocking and gestures and their relationships to other actors on the stage. Easy to accommodate and a big help to my Zach family. 

At the end of the performance we downloaded the SD card directly to one of the production team's laptops and it ran in Windows Media Player without issue. For $1,000, or thereabouts every pro practicing a hybrid video+photo model should have one of these Swiss Army Knife cameras.

I wanted to bring the discussion of doing a profitable business with a team of small sensor cameras out of the studios of full time YouTubers and breathless DP Reviewers and just tell you my experiences over the last ten days...

"Memory is getting so cheap these days that file size doesn't matter any more." LMAO, ROTFL,

Behind the scenes at a three camera interview.

We decided to shoot a video project with multiple GH5s over the last two days. We also decide to shoot in 4K and to shoot 10 bit and 4:2:2. If you do that you'll quickly find that while the GH5 camera is a robust and stable platform it does demand fast memory cards in order to push through high density video signals. I'd been using UHS-1, class 10 cards with 95mbs write times but found out the hard way that once you go with big files your SD memory card speed has to upgrade with you...

Here's what I learned: You can get away with using slower cards in certain situations. If the camera doesn't move. If the talent doesn't move very much. If you don't shoot stopped way down (which vastly increases the detail in video files, increasing dynamic file size) and if you aren't recording with all the available camera bells and whistles on. If you are running next to a subject who is also running and you are shooting at f16 and you have image stabilization engaged. Your crappy UHS-1 card will sooner or later generate a camera screen message that says "Recording was cancelled due to slow card write..." Or something like that. 

What other things stress the system? Well, how about automatic diffraction compensation? Better to just shy away from apertures smaller than f8 and to keep this control off. Same for corner shading compensation. Just click "no." Some of the bells and whistles slow the whole process because the internal processors have more to do but the biggest culprit is cards that just can't suck up data fast enough. And, since you paid for all those other features you might feel entitled to use them....

In that case it is incumbent on you to supply your previously deprived camera system with a kick-ass fast SD card. If you are planning to take advantage of everything the GH5s have to offer you might use in-camera, 400 mb/s, All-I files as the gold standard to shoot for as a performance target. To play on this playground you are going to need a card with the following attributes: It should be a UHS-II card. That means it will have a second row of gold electrical contacts just below the usual UHS-I contact configuration. The UHS-II cards are speedier at reading and writing (anyone want to explain the technical reasons? We've got room in the comments....). The card should have a V90 rating. This is, as far as I know, the top rating for current SD cards. Oh, and you'll need a write time about 3-4X faster than a really good "Extreme" UHS-I card. Ready, set, let's drop $100 per card for 64 Gigabytes.... Or $278 for a 128 GB card...

The $100 price tag is just about double the price of previous generation of 64 Gb cards which  I purchased. So maybe memory isn't quite as cheap as the pundits proclaim....

But wait! There's more! Each GH5 comes with two card slots and unlike some of their less well spec'd brethren both of the slots are UHS-II ready. This means that if you are using two cards for simultaneous back-ups your camera can only write as fast as the slowest card can accommodate. This means that in practice you'll want/need to have a V90 UHS-II card in both slots. Now you have $200 per camera for basically the same 64 GB. Shooting three cameras deep and begging for simultaneous back-up? That's three cameras X $200 per camera or about $600 for a little over thirty minutes of 400 mb/s All-I shooting. That's $1200 per hour. More or less. Thank goodness the cards are re-usable. 

We opted for a lower intensity codec on this project. One with an average throughput of 150 mb/s. But a faster card makes for a more responsive camera system whether you are shooting big video files or slamming through a bunch of raw photo files. The faster the card the better advantage you can take of a big, fast buffer. After all, you paid for it....

Even if you never shoot a lick of video a good UHS-II card with a fast rating will make your raw+jpeg shooting Texas Jackrabbit fast. Even as it puts your credit card on a hard diet...

I'm using a combination of Delkin 128 GB, V60 cards and two Hoodman 64 GB, V90 cards at the moment. I'm sure it's advertising bravado but Hoodman labels them as 2000X cards. 8K, ultraHD capable. Guess if I want to be a really serious pro I should buy another handful...

I'd buy the 128 GB cards but they're way too pricey...

The Three Graces. Louvre. 1986.

©1986 Kirk Tuck

People keep asking me where the Sony cameras got off to. And why they seem to have vacated the premises...

Sigmund Freud is credited with saying: "But really, how can you actually know which camera you like best if you have not used all of the available cameras? Now, what would your mother say? What do your dreams tell us?"

I woke up one morning and there was a stack of one hundred dollar bills bunched up under my pillow, along with a note from the Camera Fairy. The note read, "You seem less enthused about that big pile of Sony cameras and lenses than you used to be before you bought that Panasonic GH5 and that Olympus 12-100mm Pro lens. Just like my cousin, the Tooth Fairy, does with old teeth I've taken it upon myself to remove the no longer cherished cameras and replace them with cold, hard cash. Good luck!"

We're a month and a half shy from closing out 2017 and it's been a year of interesting changes. I've gone from a business model that was based almost entirely on making photographs for businesses to a totally different sort of undertaking. This year will mark the first year in which the majority (just a bit more than half) of my income has been derived from producing, writing, shooting and editing video. In nearly every instance the companies I created video for approached me directly or I approached them, and this will mark the first year in which the vast majority of my engagements were directly with the final client and not finagled or funneled through a third party, such as an advertising agency or public relations firm. Those are big, huge, changes. I believe that these changes are a reflection of the greater market shifting---

---but that's a subject for a much lengthier and more analytic post.

What changed in regards to cameras? My ownership of the Sony cameras (and the Nikons before them) was based on the idea that I'd continue doing my business with a traditional photography workflow and that I'd be called upon to create high resolution images for print and trade show use. I bought cameras like the A7Rii and the Nikon D810 for the same reason people buy all kinds of stuff. It was the tradition, of a sort, in my industry. Everywhere you look people who purport to make a living with photography are sporting around big Sonys, big Nikons and big Canons. They all seem to love big lenses as well. But unless they have aimed themselves at the retail side of photography (weddings, babies and family portraits) I believe they are gearing themselves up for a business model they've been seeing in the rear view mirror of time. A working model from the past that's diminishing year by year. With the new awareness of a business model that's shifting (for me) into video and rejecting traditional printed photographs, the requirements for the cameras I want to work with have shifted away from the idea of "ultimate image quality at any cost" toward something less gear rigorous and more thought intensive.

I bought the first Panasonic GH5 on the strength of investigatory work I'd done with its less expensive sibling, the G85. Once I started using the GH5 with really good lenses, like the Olympus 40-150mm f2.8 Pro, I was hooked. The video quality; especially flesh tone rendering, was a clear step above what I had been able to squeeze out of the Sony cameras. All models of the Sony line create video that's amazingly sharp and detailed but I wasn't feeling the love for the color palette the cameras delivered. Where color grading or correction was a struggle when making video with the Sony cameras, it has been very simple and straightforward when using GH5 files. 

I also knew that I wanted to be able to offer my clients technically sophisticated video files that would conform to broadcast quality standards, where needed. I wanted to offer things like the ability to do 4:2:2 color for work with green screens; more tonal separation via 10 bits of information, and All-I files that would tame subject motion artifacts or camera motion artifacts. Finally, for very demanding clients I wanted to be able to offer files with lots of information, like the 400 mb/s, All-I files now available in the GH5. When I combined these features with a wonderful EVF and batteries with stamina I was more or less sold. 

I kept both camera systems until I was able to test out the "goodies" that got delivered in firmware 2.0 of the Panasonic camera and then, when completely satisfied, I dumped the Sony stuff into the used market to help pay for the fun stuff I wanted for the new system. 

I'm not particularly dense so I do understand that the bigger sensor in the Sony cameras will provide some extra quality at high ISOs, but having done several illumination-challenged jobs with the Panasonic FZ2500, with a much smaller sensor that the m4:3 cameras, I'm pretty confident that this won't be an issue for the way I shoot. We also keep a healthy inventory of lighting gear around here which means that most of the stuff we produce that can be lit can be controlled and shot at lower ISOs --- where all cameras look great. 

The other parameter where full frame cameras such as the Sony A7ii and A7Rii have had traditional advantages has been in depth of field control. Or, more precisely, being able to easily put the backgrounds of photographs out of focus by using wider apertures. I'm clearly concerned about being able to continue to do this as it's a look I use in my environmental portraits a lot. 

In this regard I am confident that I'll find equivalent control with the new generation of Pro lenses that are coming on line from Olympus. I have the 45mm f1.2 Pro on order; I am considering picking up one of the 25mm Pros (though my experiences with the Panasonic 25mm f1.7 and the 7 Artisans 25mm f1.7 are both quite satisfactory), and I have had much satisfaction using the very, very good Olympus 40-150mm f2.8 Pro lens at it's wide open aperture. 

In short I'm finding that the fewer different menus (and families of menus) I must recall on the spot the happier and more secure I am in executing my assignments. I have now (for the first time ever!!!!!) winnowed down my collection of photographic toys to the point where two of the cameras (the GH5s) are identical and the other two are from the same basic generation  and have very similar menus to navigate through. Whether I am picking up the one inch sensor FZ2500 or the m4:3 GH5 all the basic menu items are pretty much the same and all the nomenclature now makes sense to me. 

Add to this the smaller footprint and lighter weight of the holistic system and I feel lean and ready to engage in the actual work.

None of this is intended to paint the Sony cameras as a "bad choice" or an ineffective imaging solution. On the contrary, I think that for people who are engaged solely in traditional still photography the Sony family is a great choice. Especially with the new A9, and A7Riii and the RX10iv. I was just looking for a different set of parameters and I believe I've found a system that's closer to my multiple uses than anything else on the market. I mean really, who else gives you waveform monitors and vector scopes in a camera at this price point? Nobody. 

At some point I'm sure I'll hear the siren call of bigger formats and less detail in my backgrounds. I can hardly wait to start shopping for a Fuji or Hasselblad medium format (pixie medium format) camera system but it will be a while before I circle back around to the more conventional choices. 

None of the images here were made with either the Sony or the Panasonic cameras. You can do decent work with just about anything. Make you job easier if you can. Or if you want to....

If it doesn't have an EVF I don't want to shoot with it...

Don't be too literal about guidelines. There are exceptions to everything.

It's hard to stop two young women on a scooter speeding through Rome to ask permission to photograph them as they speed by at XX kilometers per hour... Sometimes you need to shoot first if you are to get a shot at all.

I ran eight miles to catch them and ask permission but lost them on the Apian Way. (sarcasm).

Photos from Downtown San Antonio. With Renae.