People in public. Originally posted in Oct. 2009.

The irrational fear of people in public places. 

Image from Rome. The Pantheon in the background. Circa 1994 ©2009 Kirk Tuck

My wife will tell you that I spend too much time reading photo fora on the web. I've begun to see that she's right because I keep reading the same stuff in new disguises. This morning a fellow posted a photo at the Strobist Discussion group. He was amazed to find that Cabella's sporting good store might have used an off camera flash to create one of their ads. Amazing. As though we advertising photographers had never used an off camera flash or taken lights outdoors!!!

But the thing that struck me recently is how cowardly people have become about their gear. I've seen ten or fifteen posts in the last week from (mostly Americans) people who want to know how to safeguard their equipment in such dangerous places as: Paris, France and Rome, Italy and even, gasp, Copenhagen, Denmark. The thing that strikes me as funny is that each of these places has a much lower violent crime rate than just about any major city in the U.S. And each of these cities is a pedestrian city where, even in the unlikely event of a crime being perpetrated, you are surrounded by helpful people ready to jump in and help ensure social stability.

The idea that your Canon Rebel needs be locked in a hotel safe or secured to your body with a special strap containing unbreakable wires (what a good way to be decapitated should your camera get stuck in a train door......) is laughable. If you are dragging that much paranoia along on your vacation you may need to invest in other things. Therapy comes to mind. More wide ranging travel is another.

The second kind of post that seems to come up, with annoying regularity, is the idea that, to shoot in the street, you must become a stealthy ninja and your camera should be so small that it becomes all but invisible at any distance beyond five feet. The idea being, I guess, that a hulking American, complete with baggy cargo shorts, a promotional T-shirt for their favorite NFL team, white athletic socks, and day-glo Nike running shoes (never used for that purpose), topped with a baseball cap, will be able to sneak through a crowd of well dressed Europeans and will be able to position themselves in just the right way to SECRETLY take startling good photographs.

Their ideal camera is silent with an incredible zoom lens and a very small foot print. Either that or a Canon/Nikon/Sony/Olympus coupled with a bag full of lenses. Which they are deathly afraid some grandmother from Provencal will slit their throat to own.

Face it. You'll probably stick out. Face it. People will see that you have a camera in your hand. And unless you are doing your tourism in the Sudan you'll see when you look around that almost everyone else has a camera or a cellphone with a camera, or a video camera. They're everywhere. They are ubiquitous. Believe me, people in the European community also buy and use cameras.

Back in 1994 Belinda and I headed to Rome for a few weeks of vacation and photography. I brought along one camera. A Hasselblad 500c/m and a 100 mm f3.5 planar lens. That, and a few one gallon ziploc bags of tri-x 120 film. I spent most of my time walking along shooting whatever caught my attention. If a person looked interesting I'd ask them to pose. Sometimes I'd just smile, nod and shoot.

Books on travel caution newbies to be constantly aware of their surroundings. Hypervigilant if you will. I discarded all that advice out of necessity. After every twelve frames I'd have to stop and reload the 120 back on the camera. Since I was using a waist level finder I often had to stop as the light changed and take incident meter readings. No one cared. Every once in a while an older gentleman would ask about the camera. Younger people ignored it.

After a long morning and the better part of an afternoon spent poking into the nocks and crannies of Rome (and there are many) I sat down for a moment,at an outside table, at the closest food vendor with a direct view of the Pantheon. The restaurant was a McDonalds. The couple in front of me was having an animated conversation. I looked into my viewfinder, framed the shot, adjusted the exposure and fired the shutter. It was not a silent camera given the size of the moving mirror..... The couple turned to look and I smiled and nodded. They smiled back and with their tacit approval I shot several more images where they looked into the lens.

No one was fearful. There was no conflict or even a hint of animosity or aggression from either side. And this is the way it has gone for me and other street shooters for decades and decades. If someone doesn't want to be photographed they'll let you know. If you don't push it they won't either.

I like the image above. With billions and billions of images swirling around out in the attention-o-sphere there is a very small percentage that are relational. I like images that either speak directly to the viewer or show relationships.

The first (and probably only) step is to conquer your irrational fears that: A. Someone is always trying to rip you off. B. That everyone who is photographed instantly turns into a serial killer and they are aimed at you. C. You won't have people's willing complicity.

If you are calm, relaxed and see other people as, well, just other people, you'll probably do just fine. You might want to practice photographing strangers by becoming a tourist in your own town. I find that a nice weekend of street shooting in nearby San Antonio is just the right "warm up" before a trip abroad.

Get comfortable outside your comfort zone!

Bon Voyage. Kirk

Posted 5th October 2009 by kirk tuck

Quiet Photography with an older camera and a shiny lens.

Sundays are all over the map. Sometimes we're all going in different directions and sometimes they are quiet days that seem to exist just to regain our energy and have some mellow time before the start of another week.

A little while ago I spent way too much time thinking, talking and writing about photography but not enough time doing it.  It made me cranky and out of sorts. I figured a good Sunday walk would help take out the kinks.

In my mind I was looking for a sunny day so I could go out and shoot all kinds of contrasty stuff. The kind of images that make for good fodder in articles about sharpness and saturation.  But on this particular Sunday the sky was overcast and every once in a while there were little splashes of warm rain that left pockets of humidity in random spots around downtown.

I decide to go for a walk anyway. Just to clear my head. I looked in the equipment drawers and one comfortable, dependable and somewhat mystical camera called out to me and insinuated that I've have more fun if she went along.  It was my Olympus EP2.  The same one that went with me to West Texas and made such wonderful square images of Marfa and Marathon. The one with the paint wearing off.  My mood lightened. I put the ultra-shiny (disco finish) Olympus 45mm 1.8 on, shoved an extra battery in my pocket and drove close to downtown.

My intention to come away with fun or striking photographs kept blocking my seeing. The more I wanted to see the less I saw. When you are looking for a supermodel in a bikini dancing with reckless abandon in the middle of Congress Ave. you overlook all the quieter subject matter.  Your intention to find sparkle drowns out your ability to see something else.

I stopped and sat on a bench for five or ten minutes.  I closed my eyes and told myself that all I expected to get out of the afternoon was a good, brisk walk. (And maybe a cookie at the end, at Whole Foods...). I tried to take my photographer ego out of the mix. I reminded myself that, in the end, I was the only audience and it didn't matter what I saw or how I saw it.

For a couple of minutes I just concentrated on my breath. On the in breath and then on the out breath. Once or twice my mind tried to trick me into action. I let the thought that I was surely missing some unique visual opportunity interrupt my concentration on just breathing. But when I examined those thoughts and let them pass I went back to just concentrating on my breathe.

When I felt calm, relaxed and happy I stood up, tossed the camera over my shoulder and walked on toward Congress Ave.  Now I wasn't looking for anything special.  And now little details would peek out at me and I'd stop and photograph them.

As I finished my route through downtown, about a block from the end, I looked over the bridge that spans tiny, trickly Shoal Creek and saw the trees and the leaves. After last Summer's drought and the ample rain of the Spring they looked fresh and alive.  The rocks, the leaves, the trees and the little touches of color and texture.  That's what my walk wanted to be.  I just needed to get out of the way...

A First Look at The Nikon D3200. Kirk Tuck tangles with cheap ultra-megapixels...

First Studio Portrait with the D3200.

The Nikon D3200 is a very interesting camera.  The sensor inside is currently the highest resolution sensor in the entire APS-C menagerie (with the Sony a77 and a65 sensors just a gnat's whisker lower...) and yet it is one of the least expensive DSLR cameras on the market.  You can buy one with a decent (but not great) 18-55mm VR lens for just under $700. I handled one at Precision Camera earlier in the week and ultimately went back and bought one.  Why? It seemed like a good replacement for a nest of point and shoots I'd just cleared out of the studio.  I sent a bevy of old Canon G models and Nikon Canon-Wannabe_Point&Shoot cameras off to a host of new owners and the only pointy and shooty type camera I had left was my old Sony R1, which for nostalgic reasons I seem unable to sell...

The body of the D3200 is made of non-metallic materials but it seems well built.  It's not much bigger from side to side than my Olympus EP-3 and not much heavier (without lenses attached to either camera). It's slightly taller if you don't count the VF-2 finder that has to be on the EP3.  But it is resolutely of the jelly bean design style of cameras.  All the corners are rounded and there's a decent grip for the right hand.

The menus take about five minutes to master but I miss being able to change menu settings as quickly as you can with most of the major settings on an Olympus Super Control Panel menu.  On the Olympus cameras you can see all the major settings on the rear screen and use the dials to quickly change things like ISO, frame rate and color balance.  On the Nikon you can bring up a panel that quickly shows you what is set but you'll have to jump back in to the main menu to make a lot of the changes.  

Edit 6/22:  Photographer finally reads manual...  I missed it.  The Nikon does have the equivalent of a SCP on the back panel.  The thing I was missing is this:  You push the "i" button once to access the information panel.  You press the "i" button again to be able to navigate through the menu items represented.  You can change:  The file quality (raw/jpeg), the WB, the ISO, the frame rate (S or C), the focusing mode, the autofocus points, the metering pattern, the flash mode, the exposure compensation and the flash compensation.  Additionally, some of these controls can be access directly through buttons.  The FN button on the front of the camera directly accesses ISO, for example.  Thank you to my Nikon readers for pointing out my inaccuracy here.  

The eye level finder is a disappointment after having used the EVF's on the Sony's and the Olympus and Panasonic cameras.  It's right back to the tunnel vision condition that writers have bemoaned since the dawn of cropped frame cameras.  Since the EVF can be made any size, independent of constraints of the direct optical systems their finders, whatever other issues they may have they are much bigger and easier to work with.

Likewise, once you've enjoyed the pleasures of a rear LCD that can be extensively repositioned it's hard to go back to a fixed one.  

And the three paragraphs above are pretty much my list of faults for the D3200.  Now, with that out of the way,  let's move on to the pluses...

The biggest plus, and one measure that will tell you how long I've been shooting digital, is the 24 megapixel sensor.  When I bought my first digital camera in the mid 1990's you had the choice, really, of paying $16,000 for a Kodak DCS 460 or 660 (depending on where in the 1990's you entered the race...) or a 1.5 megapixel Fuji Camera with no LCD and a dinky compact camera squinty finder for around $3,000.  Your choice.  The idea that we'd be snapping up 24 megapixel cameras for about $600 (discounting the lens) seemed, at the time, like science fiction.

I think this is the same sensor that Sony is using in it's two top of the line APS-C cameras, the a77 and the a65.  When I push the camera to higher ISO's or when I underexpose and then correct a stop and a half or two I can see very familiar noise patterns, albeit the Nikon seems to have one half to one stop noise advantage over the Sony's.  The sensor's triple strengths are:  Very wide dynamic range. Incredible resolution and very nice color.  Even in its cheap, Nikon implementation the sensor does really nice colors.  I find the jpeg files a little flat but if you go into the menu and boost the contrast a bit they snap up nicely.

Edit: 6/22:  According to several sources the chip is NOT a Sony product but it a Nikon designed chip.  Apparently Nikon has supplied their own chips for most of the current higher end cameras, with the exception of the D7000, which is definitely a Sony 16 megapixel chip.  Conjecture almost always comes back to bite one on the butt.


The sensor is not a high speed savant. It's excellent to 800 ISO. Very good at 1600. Reasonable at 3200 ISO and really starting to groan and spit out grainy, monochromatic noise at anything higher.  Quantum Physics show its hand.  On the other hand 100 and 200 ISO are pretty near perfect.

I know that I like the camera for its sensor but I'm a bit confused as to why Nikon chose to put this big sensor into a camera that is so obviously aimed at beginners and rank hobbyists.  It may be marketing or Sony may have made this generation of sensors available at a price point that was actually lower than the previous generation of 16 megapixel sensors.  That and the inclusion of the new Xspeed 3 processor means you basically have  state of the art pipeline in this camera.

If you happen to be a rank amateur you'll likely find the menu and GUI un-threatening.  There are lots of consumer touches like a guide menu and a dial with lots of pictograms to walk you through the process of taking photographs.  I've set my camera as I set most of my cameras.  Either "A" mode or "M" mode. Raw. Selected white balance. Center focus sensor.  Single frame. S-af. ISO 100 for daylight.  ISO 400 for most other stuff.  What did you expect from someone who also shoots film in a Hasselblad?  That I'd let the camera choose the focusing point? That I'd want the camera to choose the ISO?  Get real.  In the crazy world of today your camera is one of the few things that you can have complete control over so why would you abdicate that?

Essentially, I'm suggesting that if you want to stay out of the cotton candy menu you can set the camera just about the way you would have set your favorite Leica or other film camera and make all the tiny adjustments when you process your files in raw.



I took my camera with me to swim practice today but of course I left it in my car.  After practice I headed to Barton Springs (above).  Ben's high school cross country team starts and ends at the pool for their two hour morning practice. I headed there to pick him up.  When I got there the sky was beautiful and the pool nearly empty.  I was ten minutes early so I decided to take the new camera out for a spin.  Is it any wonder that Austinites love the giant spring fed pool?  68 degree water flowing through all Summer long.  All year long...

The D3200 handled the wide dynamic range of the landscape well. One note:  while the DR is wonderfully wide the camera is contraindicated for HDR denizens.  Those dwellers in the aesthetic basement of photography will be extremely disappointed to find NO auto bracketing available in this camera.  Either Nikon was just being cheap and holding out features to drive consumers to more expensive models or they share the effete sense of disregard that more evolved photographers have for the disco ball aesthetic of technicolor crap.  Just saying that if you love to do HDR you might want to skip this pup....

The D3200 does not have top mounted window to show information.  You'll have to get it all from the back panel.  The camera is also missing a dial.  There's only one control dial for both the shutter speeds and the apertures but if you are in manual mode you'll have to push the +/- button while turning the one dial to change apertures.  Not very pro.  And the 4 frames per second with a 7 frame raw buffer probably won't impress anyone who's used any number of pro and prosumer cameras on the market.  My response to this is:  You should see the full res files at 6000 pixels wide.  You should see the dynamic range and, did I mention that the camera sells for $700 with a lens?

You probably won't dump your Nikon D4 and take this to a professional sport shooting job but then again, if you put the right lens on the front and time your shots carefully (remember skillful reflexes as opposed to brute force???) you certainly will get shots of the same (or better) image quality.   Put this camera on a tripod, use a remote release and focus carefully, via live view, and this camera will do landscapes and urban scenes and studio work as well or better than anything short of a D800.  And haven't we always been saying that it's the image quality that really matters?

I met this young woman at the end of the Barton Springs Pool. She was looking at the rising sun and getting ready to plunge into the crisp waters for her every morning swim.  She asked if I wanted to take her photograph.  I did.  I stuck the camera on 5.6 and snapped away. I guess I was looking like a pool tourist.

While the lens isn't the greatest piece of glass I've ever stuck in front of a camera it's very usable and when you do it right (middle apertures, VR on, good holding technique) you are rewarded with detail-rich files that will blow up and up and up.  This is a camera that will go either way.  You can shoot 6 megapixel jpeg files and share them pronto.  There's even an attachment (extra) that will send your images to your android device/phone.  So sad though since most advanced civilizations use iPhones....

On the other hand you can use the camera like a mini-view camera, put it on a tripod, shoot at 100 ISO in raw and exactingly process the files in Lightroom 4.x and you'll get stuff that looks amazing.  No more excuses for bad work just because you don't have the budget for a $3K or $4K camera body.  This is another step in the ongoing democratization of photography. 

One of the feature sets that compelled me to go and buy the set, and an extra battery or two, is the video set up.  Remember when the Canon 5Dmk2 came out and everyone salivated about being able to do video with their DSLR?  That was only three years ago, right?  But the camera wasn't really all it could have been at the time.  It needed a couple of firmware fixes to get the goodies it needed.  In the meantime there were all kinds of workarounds and hacks.  Need manual audio level controls?  Then how about adding a digital sound recorder and getting a copy of Pluraleyes?

Don't want second sound?  How about a BeachTek JuiceLink mixer box to trick the AGC circuit in the camera into staying put?  Too many wires?  Wait for the hack.

Well, here we are with a camera at one fifth the price that does:  Full manual exposure control video. Fully manual audio gain control with meters.  1080i at 24 and 30fps.  20 full minutes of recording. A stereo microphone jack in the standard size...(hello Panasonic! What's with the 2mm plug?)  So how does it look, file-wise?  Pretty damn good.  Finally, a camera with manual controls and a really good file that I can afford to hand to a teenage video producer without cringing.  They tend to be tough torture testers of gear.

Pop a Rode stereo microphone in the standard hotshoe (Hello Sony !!!!!) and you're ready to go out on your ENG quest.  Beats the crap out of my Canon 7D that couldn't do manual audio....

Will it focus as fast as the PD focusing on one of my Sony's for video? No.  Do the video files look as good? Yes.

My overall impression? It reminds me of how much I love working with good EVF's.  Nikon will have a dramatically good entry the minute they take all these features and tack on a great EVF instead of just a "good" OVF.  The camera is small, light, quick to operate and gives you incredible files.  It's $600 cheaper than an Olympus OM-D with lens.  It's $1300 cheaper than a Sony a77 with lens.  And if you use good glass with the camera it will run with the big dogs and you'll never be able to see a real difference unless it's the extra 8 million pixels you get when weighed against the Oly, or the extra half stop or more of low light performance when compared to the Sony.

Am I going to sell off everything I own and buy nothing but Nikons?  Again?  Nope.  But it sure as hell makes a great point and shoot camera.  I'd take it over a Canon G1x any day... And keep an extra $100 in my pocket.  

The best way to shoot this camera is to shoot in raw (which is a compressed format of raw) and output the files in Lightroom.  I find the AWB to be problematic with most cameras in most scenes with big areas of color so I prefer to set the WB to settings that match the conditions.  It's hardly difficult.

I've been carrying it around with the kit lens on the front and looking for subject matter that works within an old fashioned equivalent of 27.5mm to 82mm.  I have three different normal Nikon lenses that will work on the front of the camera.  My old 50mm D 1.8 will work in all exposure modes but will require me to manually focus.  My ancient 50mm 1.4 and my Micro Nikkor 55 f3.5 will both need to be manually focused and manually set for exposure. I still need to check and make sure they'll mount.

If I had to put together the D3200 camera and just one lens I'd probably choose the Nikon 35mm 1.8 DX lens.  That would get me a nice, normal view on the cropped frame camera and most of the tests I've read concur that the lens is sharp, especially in the center, fast to focus and focuses down to about one foot.

Any one of the new AFS 50mm lenses would also work well.  

I like the battery charger. It doesn't have a cord (Hello Olympus !!!!) it just plugs right into a wall socket.  The charge light blinks while charging (90 minutes to a full charge) and then goes solid. I'm still on my first hundred exposures so I haven't had a chance to give the battery a good test but  I'll get back to you on that.

Who should get this camera and lens?  Your friend who is just getting into photography.  Your son or daughter going off to school who's ready to leave the limitations of their cellphone camera behind. People who are both methodical workers and also in need of great image quality.  Someone who wants to start a photo and film company with no discernable budget. And people who want a great, light weight, walk-around camera with good battery life and access to an ocean of lenses.  

And who should take a pass?  Anyone with a bag full of Canon or Sony glass.  Anyone who's been bitten by the EVF bug. And, anyone who thinks you have to spend big to be taken seriously or to produce serious work.  Seriously? A great, 24 megapixel sensor, good performance and great files for next to nothing.  Moore's law comes to photography again.  What will they do next year?

48 megapixels on a full frame for $499?  Sign me up.

The camera shoots nice raw files and it saves them to SDHC cards. I've been using the 16 GB Transcend class 10 cards but I'm about to upgrade to the 32 GB ones.  Ben and I are shooting the first of what I hope will be dozens of video projects next week and I'd like to have memory to spare.....I know a lot of people groused about the changeover to SD cards but I like them.  Small and light and cheap.  After using them exclusively for six months I find CF cards a bit clunky.  Kinda like floppy drives...

Putting a Human Touch on Healthcare. An assignment for a medical practice.

My assignment a month ago was to put a human face on the practice of radiology.  We've seen lots of ads with heroic looking radiologists reading arcane scans on bright screens but in the day to day world of radiology so much of the client contact is done by the highly trained and skilled technicians and nurses.  I was invited to make images of the people that actual patients see when they come into the clinic for a diagnostic test.  Real people.

We also wanted to show the machines.  CT and nuclear scanners and MRI machines.  

I'd done a few campaigns like this back in the days of film and flash and I can honestly say that shooting digital was great. I wouldn't have shot film on this job even if the budget was there.  When I first started shooting work like this we were using Hasselblad film cameras, ISO 100-400 speed transparency films and powerful monolights or even box and head flash systems.  We'd get to a room with a CT scanner and the first thing we'd need to do (besides figure out a basic composition) is to figure out how to overpower all of the florescent lights.  We'd usually turn them off and construct a lighting set up that was a mix of light bouncing off the ceilings in three or four places as well as a few direct facing softboxes.  It worked but it was tough to make a totally believable lighting look given the very short time we had access to the rooms or the machines.  We overpowered the light because it was always important to get the color temperature right and electronic flashes were the primary way we instituted color accuracy and consistency in a shoot back then.....

So much has changed. In the image above I used three Fotodiox 312AS LED panels in concert with the florescent room lights.  One panel, firing into a shoot through umbrella was used just to the left of the camera to light up the subject's face and fill in for the top light coming from the florescent.  Another panel was used on the far right side of the room to add light to the right side of the CT scanner.  A third light was positioned behind the machine to help light the back wall.  I had tested the lights and the rotary controls for changing color temperatures during our scouting trip the week before.  I'd marked the color control settings with tape so I could come back to them without trial and error.  We were in an out of the room in about fifteen minutes with lots of good shots and variations.

This young woman volunteered to be a patient for one of our shots and I was delighted to find that the machine faced a wall of windows that brought indirect north light into the room.  We used a couple of Fotodiox 312AS panels, set between daylight and tungsten balance, to light up the back walls.  Took about as much time to set the back walls as it did to write about it just now.  A far cry from even the days of portable strobes which needed to be tested, iteratively...

This is the same room as the one we photographed the young woman in, above.  I had my back against the window and a Sony 16-50mm f2.8 lens on the camera and I kept zooming out until I found a composition that worked for me.  Both of my LED panels were pressed into service to light up the background.  Wonderful to be able to turn a dial and watch the light get brighter or dimmer.  I knew I hit my good balance when a quick spot metering showed everything within the handling range of the camera's sensor.

The panels I've been using run off two cheap Sony camcorder batteries and each set of batteries is good for about two hours of continuous run time.  We'd switch them on for the set up and shoot and then off when finished shooting at each location.  We made it through a long day of shooting and about ten location with battery juice to spare.

Nice thing about shooting with EVF cameras like the Sony a77 is the ability to pre-chimp (tm). I can set up a light and have someone turn a light up or down and watch the effect on the entire scene in the electronic finder as it happens.  I see it the way the sensor is seeing it.  It's an amazingly efficient way to light.

This consultation scene is lit with three panels: One to the left of the doctor to provide fill (the ceiling mounted florescent fixtures are providing the "main" light.  One to the right of the patient to provide good fill to the right side of her face and then one to light up the back wall.

This kind of job takes three things to do well:  The confidence to light quickly, the ability to establish a quick rapport with your collaborating subjects and a good schedule and plan of attack. I depended on my art director to round up our subjects and get them where we needed them on time.  I depended on a Think Tank Airport Security rolling bag to carry my LED panels, two cameras and three lenses.  A tripod strapped to the side.  Light stands and umbrellas in a small tripod bag.

We used the Sony a77 in its full 24 megapixel mode.  I will say this for the Sony cameras I've been shooting with,  they really are good at nailing very pleasing flesh tones. Best than the Canons with which I had been working.  And the detail in the files is amazing.  We shot nearly everything at 800 ISO and the noise was well controlled with just a nudge or two in Lightroom.  I can barely wait until Sony launches the new full frame camera. 

Making good use of available light.

I can't tell you how many times I've hired a new assistant, gone on location and had him or her start setting up lights willy-nilly once we get to a location. I don't always want to set up a light let alone many lights... So many scenes are just better without extra lights. I find that more and more situations just call for a judicious dose of fill in lighting, limited to very small areas. A color balanced LED panel or just a tiny squirt of flash.

In the case above I was perfectly happy to put my camera on a tripod, compose and shoot.  If you need to stretch out your day then, by all means, start grabbing the light stands and sandbags.  But if you bid your job correctly and you're getting paid by the use or by the image a quick test shot and some good location juggling might be just the key to getting what you want. Quickly and with no fuss.

Camera: Canon 5D2. Lens Zeiss 85mm 1.4. Lights? Whatever the architect spec'd.

This guy's photography is absolutely amazing. I love it.

     ©Paul Szynol

Go here:  http://www.paulszynol.com/  look at the work and then come back.  I'll wait.  Take your time and really look.

Okay. This is how great documentary and street photograph looks to me. We can argue about all kinds of minutia but in the end the guy who goes out with a sharpened vision and crazy good curiosity gets the win.

Did I mention that you should go and see this guy's site?    http://www.paulszynol.com/

Thank you to Paul for sending me this link.

Working in an Operating Room. How many pixels do I need?

Canon 5Dmk2, 24-105mm.

I spent two days at a hospital in San Antonio and shot a bunch of stuff. This is a set up shot in an operating room. I used a Canon camera and lens and shot with the lights in the room.  The biggest issue is the wide range of light from the hot spot on the "patient's" chest to the shadow areas on the anesthesiologist. The 5Dmk2 was a nice camera.  A bit clunky, but nice.  All the cameras I've played with in the last year are up to this kind of work.  Most of it will go in brochures and on the web.  Nothing will go up bigger than 9 by 12 inches.  Makes you wonder what we're chasing and why when we get into that megapixel fixation and slap the credit cards down.

I made an observation back in 2009 that more and more of our work would be going to web advertising (ignore this if you never sell your work and are making large prints for your own pleasure....).  At the time the big screens were almost 2000 pixels by something. I made the suggestion that all the cameras we were using at the time were capable of satisfying those needs, handily.

Now we've got Apple introducing Retina screens into everything and all of a sudden we're about to grapple with 2500 pixels wide by something.  But last time I checked that's still within the technical scope of a 12 megapixel camera.  Maybe our current cameras (especially the 24 megapixel ones) are relatively protected from obsolescence for while longer.  I guess we'll see.

Funny to hear all the gnashing of teeth and pounding of chests about the D800 given that all the examples we've seen so far are only a couple thousand pixels wide....

My favorite camera today?  Strange choice.  It's the Olympus EP-3 with the Panasonic 14-45mm lens on the front. VF-2 is always implied.  It's bright and sunny here.  ISO 200 is fine.  I'd use 50 if the camera had it....

The perfect summer. The perfect day.

I don't know what the "perfect day" looks like to you but to me it's never the big banner days of giant projects, wild celebrations or "once in a lifetime" events.  I've come to enjoy days that don't revolve around breathlessness and adrenaline.  I like small pleasures that have the promise of being repeatably enjoyable. I prefer the quiet and personal photograph to the big production. I prefer simple to complicated and I like my aesthetics clean and uncluttered by the make-up of the moment.

I may be having the best Summer of my life.  And today is an example of one of the best days of my life. I would have shaken my head in disbelief if I'd found myself saying something like this a few years back. I was caught in the relentlessness of being relentless.  Always busy. Always scheduled. Always moving. This Summer is a slow one for my business. I don't have a publisher's deadline to goad me. I'm not booked on lots of small, busy jobs. I'm just coasting in commerce and savoring the downtime.

My June days have been spent in the relative luxury of laziness.  Not a "do nothing" laziness but a "do fun stuff" kind of laziness.

Yesterday was my idea of my ideal.  I got Ben (my teenage son..) up at 6:30 am, we both drank big glasses of water and had a spoonful of local honey.  I drove him to Barton Springs Pool where he met up with the other members of his cross country team for a nice two hour run.  I turned the car around and headed to the Rollingwood Pool, just a mile away, and was in the water with my swim friends--coach on deck--by 7:00 am.  We pounded out about 3000 yards and in between sets we watched the most beautiful clouds swirl in three directions, three layers deep across the blue sky.

After workout I put individual envelopes containing 147 portraits of the Rollingwood Waves Kid's swim team (and team pictures)  into their folders at the pool so their moms and dads could pick them up when the kids came to practice.

Then I headed back to Barton Springs Pool to pick up Ben.  It was a warm day and we had nothing pressing on the schedule so Ben's crew all jumped into the pool to cool down the road miles.  I sat in the shade of a giant cottonwood tree and read a chapter from a book I'm reading on Creativity.  After the swim we headed to P. Terry's, an Austin style, drive through organicky burger joint to get breakfast sandwiches of scrambled eggs, cheese and sausage, chased down with Ruta Maya coffee.  Ben and I sat at one of the robin's egg blue picnic tables enjoying the breakfast and watching the amazing swirl of cloud ballet against the blue of the sky.

I dropped Ben at Jack's house.  They're working on some sort of project.... and I headed in to the studio to check on e-mail and phone messages. Nothing life or death.  I made few phone calls, addressed a few post cards, sent out some gratuitous e-mail and called it a day.  In the early afternoon I picked up Ben and we met my photographer friend, Paul, at the Whole Foods flagship store for lunch.  We had an odd mix of sushi and barbeque.

In the afternoon Ben slogged through another novel and I went horizontal on the couch to finish reading about creativity.  The dog curled up on my feet and snored softly.  I did a load of laundry.

Later in the day Ben's friends came over to play video games and horse around.  I retreated into the studio to read all the crazy stuff on the web.  Then Belinda came home.  We opened a bottle of Stag's Leap Artemis wine and made dinner.  We sat down to Sopa de Lima and quesadillas just as the last magenta slash of sunset kissed the sky.

I could worry about business but I've come to realize that there will always be an ebb and a flow and I can always make myself busy with a book or a project if I want to. But I only have two years left before Ben goes off to college and spending the Summer with him makes me feel like a billionaire on my own private island.  I'll get back to the business of photography just a little later...

The photo above sums up the pleasure of photography for me. A small group of us were lazily taking images along the banks of the Pedernales River.  We were all wading in and out of the running water.  I asked my model to close her eyes and feel the laziness of a hot Summer day and then I photographed here with an film SLR and a 180mm lens. No schedule, only a hazy agenda and all the time in the world.  If you chase it too hard you might never catch it...

Have we hit the point where photographs don't have to be sharp?

This image started life as a kind of accident. That was part of the beauty of film, sometimes you made mistakes and discovered that you liked the look of the mistake more than the initial intention.

When photography started to be practiced in earnest it allowed painters to stop trying to accurately reproduce subjects.  The need for verisimilitude vanished, taken over by the new medium. Now that stock photography can provide for straightforward documentation of just about any subject under the sun does that free photographic artists to transmute their reality to correspond to a new aesthetic? A new mindset of creation?

There's so much I love about the photo above. The obscuring of the right side of her face, the bold, graphic, black shadows that run at diagonal through the frame. The look of surprise and disbelief on the subject's face.  The belt buckle echoing here lone visible eye.  The way one side of the subject's blouse is lighter than the tone of the background while the other side is much darker.  And finally, the undulation of tones across the otherwise flat background.

The photograph seems to pose a question with no answers.  It works not as an information conduit but as an freestanding object where the graphic patterns and contrasts are at least as important as an inventory of the content.

Harder to define.  More fun to look at.  All this image needs is a manifesto....

Hot lights. Fun lights.

Hot Lights.  Fun Lights.
by Kirk Tuck

Written and then lost before posting nearly two years ago.  Finally resurrected for your consideration.....

A few days ago Michael Johnston, the writer/owner of a website called www.theonlinephotographer.com,  proposed a “new” learning exercise to master photography.  He suggested that the best way to learn is to buy a Leica rangefinder camera (film version) with one lens.  He suggested a 28mm, 35mm or a 50mm lens.  My choice would always be the 50mm but then I see everything in that focal length.  He further suggested using only a 400 ISO speed black and white negative film like Kodak’s Tri-X or Fuji’s Neopan 400.  His theory is that the finder is unexciting so the photographer must previsualize what he wants to shoot.  The film is a standardization so that one doesn’t spend time spinning wheels with too many choices.  The limited focal length choice teaches exactly what one will get in the frame every time.

Michael estimates that one should do the exercise with only the one camera, lens and film type for one year and that a photographer will learn an incredible amount about photography.  Since that’s basically the way I learned (out of student budget necessity) I’m inclined to agree that it’s a wonderful way to learn the craft.  And I would go further and say that if you are unsure about your skills in using a flash or doing lighting in general you might consider my lighting exercise.

I’m suggesting that you bag the flash altogether and get your hands on a basic hot light.  Believe me, you won’t be breaking the bank.  I’ve used Lowell DP lights and a bunch of other 650 watt to 1,000 watt hot lights from a number of makers and find that as long as you satisfy a few parameters just about anything will work.

Get a light like the Lowell DP, the Lowell Omni, a Smith Victor or any other fixture that has a way of focusing the beam of light it throws out and also has the ability to easily use a four way barn door attachment.  Make sure it uses quartz halogen lights and NOT photofloods (which have a very short life and quick color temperature decay).  If you really feel broke just head down to the discount hardware store and get a cheap set of work lights.  They won’t focus and you’ll have to make your barndoors out of Black Wrap (heavy duty black aluminum foil) but you’ll likely be able to press them into service for what I have in mind.  If you have money to burn you might want to look at getting a Mole Richardson 650 watt fresnel spot or an Altman or Arriflex 650 watt fresnel spot.  The glass lens on the front helps to focus the beam of light without adding any sharp edges.

Once you’ve got the light start over from scratch and learn to light again with the continous hot light.  The overwhelming reason is that you will see what you are going to get.  The light is the light.  If you’ve worked with flash, even with units that have great modeling lights, you know there is always a big difference between what you see before you click the shutter and what you actually see after the blast of flash freezes time.  The balance between ambient light and flash is always a mystery no matter how many times you’ve set up flashes and lit things.  You’d be lost without an LCD screen or a Polaroid.  Admit it.

But the beauty of the hot lights is that you really do get what you see.  If it’s beautifully lit it’s beautifully lit.  If you’ve got a mix of ambient light and hot light you can instantly see the relationship.
I think it’s best to start over and go through the steps to see how light really bounces around and reflects off stuff.  How little changes in angles and placement can make a big difference and how the continuous light allows you to instantly see all these relationships without even having to fire up your camera.
First things first.  Put a person in a chair and bounce your hot light off a high white ceiling.  Then really look at how the light cascades down that person’s face.  Next, take that light and bounce is off a white side wall and see how the shadows change.  Use a king size white bed sheet as a giant diffuser and see exactly how that light affects your subject.  And keep going until you’ve experimented with this one hot light in every possible permutation.

What you’ll find is that every tool limits it’s user.  It’s hard to drive a nail with a screwdriver and it’s hard to screw in a Phillips head screw with a hammer.  The little flashes you might be used to using seem to call for a harder, more concentrated approach to lighting.  The lust for portability drives most of us to use very lightweight and easily transported equipment.  This drives us to use smaller umbrellas, use smaller stands and less accessories.  The limited power of battery operated flashes pushes us to make decisions about placement and much more.

Studio flashes bring another set of potential restrictions:  We use them near power outlets.  We still don’t get “What you see is what you get lighting”  and even at low power we don’t always get to use the exact apertures we might want to use.  And here’s something else to think about....with flash you set up the lights and camera then you make an exposure and then check the exposure on your screen.  If you don’t like what you see you have to change something and then go throught the whole process again.  Certainly, pros who’ve done this stuff for decades will be able to do it faster than newbies but the disconnect between what you are seeing and what you want to see remains.  Lighting with flash is this amazingly iterative process that proceeds by fits and starts.

Hot lights make the whole process more elegant.  You can watch the light on your subject AS you move the hot lights and you’ll see every change of shadow and reflection.  If you decide to bring in a reflector to fill in a face on the opposite side of your subject you’ll be able to actually SEE those light ratios change.  And while it’s a learning process to interpret what the camera will finally render you’ll be more integrated into the flow of the process with hot lights.

Understand that I’m not advocating dumping your flashes and going back to the 1950’s with big movie lights dotting your studio.  I’m advocating using a hot light as an exercise or workshop because, if you are like me, and you’ve been doing this for a number of years you’ve learned to make accommodations and short cuts with flash and you’ve stopped really looking at the light.  You know how to get an effect because you’ve done it over and over again.  But the hot lights let you see it fresh each time because it’s not filtered through the process of “shoot, look, change, shoot.….”   And we haven’t even touched on how easy it is to incorporate a sense of motion into your images with the long exposures that hot lights encourage.

If you are new to lighting this little exercise can be an amazingly revealing shortcut that’s as cogent to learning as the LCD screen on the back of your camera.  And you can add additional lights by pulling the high intensity lamp off your desk or adding a regular lamp into a background.

If most of your lighting is outdoors in the high sun this is not an exercise for you.
The attached photo(s) were done with two hot lights.  One is positioned to the left of the shooting camera.  It’s a 1,000 watt Profoto ProTungsten light aimed thru a 78 by 78 inch white scrim.  The second light is a little 300 watt spot light aimed on a background about 25 feet behind the subject.  There are several things we haven’t touched on that I love about doing these portraits with continuous light.  First,  with ISO 800 in a D700 I can have my cake and eat it too.  I get smooth, grain free files with shutter speeds in the range of 1/125th of a second to 1/180th of a second at f4 or f5.6.  This means that when a great expression comes along I can lean on the shutter button and grab some great frames at 6 or 7 frames per second.  Second, working with hot lights means I can go anywhere I want on the aperture scale with impunity.  All I need to do is change my shutter speed so that the overall exposure stays the same. This makes shooting wide open at f2 or even f1.4 a snap.  Getting to the same spot with studio flash is a whole can of worms (and in many cases woefully ugly mixed lighting.…)

The photographs are of actors at Zachary Scott Theater.  Over the course of four days in May we photographed nearly sixty people for a season brochure.  The images included theater patrons, board members, community supporters and even staff.  My lighting design changed with each category of sitters.  Some were done on white backgrounds.  Some on canvas.  My intention in using hot lights for this project was to make the images softer and to have very shallow depth of field within the frame.  The continuous source works so well with sitters as there are no blinks from anticipating the flash.
I have another project in mind where I’d like to use all florescent fixtures ( or LEDs)  but that’s something I’ll talk about in a future column.

If you have the opportunity be sure to give the hot light exercise a shot.  Everyone learns something new with the lights on.….

Window Light in the Early Evening. Some thoughts about scanners.

Scanned from a Kodachrome. Shot on a Canon film Camera with one of the 

First Tamron SP normal focal length zooms.  Something like a 35-80mm.

Scanned on a cheapo flatbed scanner.

I'm going through old slides and making scans for myself. I've owned Nikon dedicated film scanners (both medium format and 35mm) and I've had plenty of film drum scanned but for some reason I prefer to do my own stuff on a cheap, non-prestigious, Epson flat bed scanner.  We're talking here about a scanner that currently sells for around $180.

The machine is smaller than other scanners I've owned and sits on the right hand side of my desk in a constant state of readiness.  The machine's full name is Epson Perfection V500 Photo.  It won't scan 4x5 inch film but will do most conventional medium format formats and it will scan 35mm transparencies and negatives.  Film  holders are supplied for 120mm film and 35mm film in most of its permutations.

The slide above was taken in mixed light.  It's a Kodachrome 64 slide. How difficult and time consuming is it to make an image like the one above?  Let's see.  I put the slide holder on the glass surface of the scanner.  There's guide indention on the scanner body that matches up with the holder. Very straightforward.  The slide holder has four squares in which to drop your slide, still in slide mount. Close the top, open the Epson scan software, click in the film type (trans or neg; color or black and white) decide on the bit depth you need (24 or 48) determine the size you'd like the the image to end up at (dimensions and DPI) then hit preview.  You can zoom in on the image in the preview window.  Once you see the image large you can more accurately crop and adjust.

I go into the curves menu and set the white point and black points on the represented histogram.  If the color needs to be tweaked I go into the color adjustment menu and play around with the R, G, & B sliders till I get what I want.  There are also menus for saturation, contrast and exposure.  In the curves menu I can also set how I want the toe and shoulder of the film to look = soft, rounded curves or straight overly accurate curves.

When I have everything hunky dory in the different corrections menus I go back to the main menu and set the amount of unsharp masking I want and whether I want the canned "color restoration" to kick in.  Then I hit "scan."

I can't use the Digital Ice dust removal with traditional black and white film or with Kodachrome slides. Something to do with the physical topology of the film so I leave these controls unchecked.  It does mean that I'll inevitably be doing some retouching to the files to remove dust spots before I use the images.  So, a straight scan of a film from a slide done at 6000 by 4000 pixels (final size) takes about three minutes.

I hear all kinds of nonsense from people about what's needed  for good scans.  There is a camp that believes flat bed scanners are incapable of doing usable work.  There's another camp that's seen good scans from flat bed scanners but believes that you need to pull slides out of their cardboard mounts and coat them with oil before you can get a good scan and then there's the group that believes the scanners may be usable but only when paired with really good and really expensive software.  Almost as though you have to pass an initiation to join in the cult of scanning.

I don't fall into any of those camps.  I routinely scan all kinds of stuff on the Epson and I'm always able to use the output to deliver jobs or to make prints from it for shows and portfolios.  If you are unable to get a good scan on an Epson V500 or V700 I believe you might be over-thinking the process.  The most important thing is to explore the software thoroughly and trust your perceptions.

The native resolution of the scanner is 4800 dpi.  That means a full scan of a medium formatsquare negative or trans scan is 12,000 by 12,000.  And you can make that scan as a 48 bit file if you are willing to save it as a Tiff.  But I'll tell you right now that this will be one monstrously big file....

If my math is correct you should be able to generate a medium format scan that measures 40 by 40 inches at 300 dpi.  That's pretty darn good.  35mm scans clock in at about 7200 pixels and can make a print, at native resolution of the scanner, equal to 16 by 24 inches at 300 dpi.

My needs aren't that radical and my expectations are that the machine will deliver files for good display of 35mm stuff on the web or on an iPad while the files from medium format film will be good for prints up to 20 by 20 inches. Given that I've been sharing images with you for years which come from this scanner, without any complaints on my part or on your behalf I'd say I'm get pretty good performance from a $180 device that comes with its own software drivers.

I have used Silverfast and VueScan and I like the bundled Epson software best. The other two may be wonderful for people who are really, really interested in scanning and it might get you an extra one or two percentage increase in quality but I'm happy with the straightforward simplicity of Epson's solution.  I am running it on OS 10.7.4 on a MacBook Pro.  Takes a couple of minutes to launch and then it's fast and crash free.

The scanner will allow you to load four mounted slides for scanning and let you preview the four, crop them, color correct and size each on individually and then allow you to batch scan all four without mediation.

If you have a big inventory of  MF slides, can't afford to just dump them on the desk of a scanning supplier and write a check, and are mostly interested in printing and sharing the images you should look at a machine like this one.  If you need ultimate image quality for a big ad client you'll be better off having service drum scan your image.  At least then you've covered part of your ass when people start looking for who to blame in the production phase.

In all seriousness though,  I used to hear that clients would never use digital images from digital cameras for XXXX reasons.  Then I heard the same thing about cheap scanners.  But I've got to tell you it's just not true.

Here's the drill:  launch app > install correct film holder > choose film type > choose preview > Choose zoom > crop > color correct >  choose size (geometrical) and bit dept (24 or 48)  > engage restore color  (matter of taste) > push scan.  A window will pop up asking you where and how to save the file.  Once scanned take the image into PhotoShop and retouch out the dust and scratches in the method of your preference.  Scan one time as big as you ever think you'll need and resize and save copies for other uses.  Kinda fun to be able to engage your film files for the greater good of the universe and your artistic sharing.