We celebrated the opening of the grand new theater at Zachary Scott last week.

I photographed Meredith onstage just moments before the house opened to welcome V.I.P.s for a stunning hour and fifteen minute preview of this season's shows. I used a Sony a77 camera at 640 ISO and a 16-50mm lens. The new Mort Topfer Theater is an exciting new space for Austin performers. And audiences. The first show of the year will be Ragtime. I can't wait.

A new plug for a great "how to" book.

I talked about this book last week. I'd purchased the Kindle version and was just knocked out at how great it looked on my iPad and how well written and illustrated it is. That, and a $13 price on Amazon prompted me to immediately order a printed version for myself. I found it in the mailbox today and all I can say is.....WOW!!!!!
It is so well designed, well thought out and well written that I'm going around showing non-photographers the book. The images are wonderful and ample, even better than what I saw on the iPad and, of course, much bigger and richer.

If you have any interested in food photography at all this is without a doubt the best book I've come across on the subject. The bonus is zillions of pages of really wonderfully done food.

A continued appraisal of the Sony Nex 7 and the cult of the mirrorless.

The lunch special at El Arroyo Restaurant at the ditch.

Cheese enchilada with chili con carne, rice, refried beans and a beef taco.

I've spent the last few blogs talking about the relevance of apparently disconnected photographs so I thought I'd take a mental rest break and talk a bit more about a camera that I'm really enjoying, the Sony Nex 7.  Some photographers are making the claim that there's a giant, mirrorless camera revolution going on right now and I'm not sure I disagree with them but I think the new revolutionaries are missing an important element and that is the electronic viewfinder, a relatively new development in cameras aimed at advanced photographers and one that I think was instrumental in hastening the onset of the revolution.  I first experienced electronic viewfinders in the eyepieces of video cameras I used back in the 1990's. They were black and white and rudimentary but they worked well and they gave videographers lots of critical feedback concerning exposure settings.  My first brush with EVF's in serious still cameras was the EVF in the Sony R1 (an amazing camera) and while that screen can't hold a candle to the current screens on the market it worked well when I would go out into bright sunlight to photograph buildings and people for advertising projects. I also loved the amazing articulated LCD screen.

While I enjoyed the different Olympus Pen offerings and several cameras from Panasonic the Nex 7 seems to be a tour de force that rendered all the other mirrorless contenders irrelevant for me. Three reasons: 1. A really detailed and richly color accurate imaging sensor.  2. The best EVF currently on the market. 3. The logical and straightforward operation facilitated by the Tri-Navi system of two control wheels and one meta-menu selection button. Basically, from both a file quality and an operational standpoint the camera is the best of the breed.

I've spent about a month with the camera. At first I found the menu a bit daunting but in reality it's pretty well configured for a shooter who uses the camera in pretty much the same configuration most of the time. I operate mostly in the aperture priority or manual modes and what this really means is that I only have to master the two control knobs that sit on top and protrude to the back of the camera. When I shoot in manual one control changes the shutter speeds while the other control changes the aperture. You are free to over expose or under expose as you desire but you can always check your exposure against the camera's recommendation on an exposure scale visible in the EVF or on the back screen (if you are doing "stinky baby diaper" camera hold).

If you are shooting in the aperture mode the left most control knob changes the aperture while the right knob becomes an exposure compensation control. 

The third leg of the stool  for the Tri-Navi control is a button positioned on the top right of the camera, just in front of the right hand control knob; it's just to the right of the shutter button. This button, in its default configuration, calls up several control screens. One push gets me to a screen with which I can reposition the autofocus sensor anywhere on the entire screen. I mostly use a single autofocus point so having the facility to use it everywhere comes in handy. The screen adapts depending on which focusing method you have selected. If you have it by group the screen allows you to move whole groups, etc.

The next screen that pops up when you push the Tri-Navi button again, is the white balance settings screen which gives you fine tuning control over warm/cool and green/magenta (hue balance). This is great for critical images that can use a little tweak.  It also allows you to set the color to your taste for global shooting.  Another push of the button gets you into the D-range settings which gives you quick access to in camera HDR (either "auto" or in six strengths, from subtle tonal enhancement to technicolor vomit) as well as the camera's user adjustable DRO menu which holds onto highlight detail while boosting shadow detail and levels. You get can set "auto" or six different strengths here as well. Finally you have a creative styles menu.  This allows you to fine tune any set imaging style (vivid, portrait, standard, etc. ) by giving you control over contrast, sharpness and saturation.

I understand that the button that controls these menus can be reconfigured with different combinations that call up different setting controls but I think Sony made some good choices for me so I haven't changed anything yet.  My two most used controls are ISO settings and WB settings and when I start to modify buttons I'm sure these two will be configured in. I'm coming from the Sony a77 DSLT cameras so much of the menu uses the same nomenclature and logic. After about a week of intermittent use I felt pretty much at home.

There is one other control that I find myself using when I shoot under low light. That's the switch on the back of the camera that chooses between AEL and AF/MF.  In the center of the switch is a button and when the switch is set to AF/MF you can push the button to toggle between manual focus and auto focus. When you choose manual focus turning the focusing ring of a Nex lens brings to bear both a magnification of the frame to facilitate fine focusing as well as the focus peaking indicators.  Your ability to accurately fine focus both manual lenses and what are usually AF lenses is very much enhanced. Buried in the menu is the ability to toggle or hold your switch between AF and MF. A toggle means on switch gives you one frame and then reverts to the preset configuration. Hold means it sits there on the configuration you've chosen until you hit the button again or turn the camera off and back on again.

With the inclusion of focus peaking into the Nex 7 it becomes, among the mirrorless offerings, the ultimate camera to use with legacy and current manual focus lenses from Leica to whatever. I've been using the camera extensively with several of my favorite Pen lenses and it's very easy to achieve accurate focus. Much easier for me that the process of enlarging the frame, fine focusing and then reverting to the shooting frame as on the Olympus and Panasonic cameras. The speed comes in not having to enlarge the frame but in being able to trust the focus peaking indications in the EVF. The only downside when using non-Nex lenses is the loss of image stabilization which, in the Sony Nex family, is built into the lenses.

El Arroyo corn chips.

In its basic configuration the camera is both a perfect "take anywhere" camera and a solid commercial tool. It's small size and all black treatment, with the kit lens, give the Sony Nex 7 a small and discreet profile. When I'm in the coffee shop or on the street the people that I meet and photograph seem to think it's just basic "hipster" photography and they are happy to be included, for the most part. But I've used the Nex 7 side by side with my DSLT a77 cameras and they are both equally good in getting professional quality shots of food, portraits and architecture. In fact, with an inexpensive lens adapter or one of the Sony adapters you can use most (if not all) of the Sony Alpha lenses on the Nex 7.  

The cheapest way to go with with an adapter from Rainbow or Fotodiox. These are pretty much the same product and are available for under $30. The allow you to focus right on out to infinity but you lose auto focus and automatic diaphragm control. If you use the camera in "A" it will still automatically figure out corresponding shutter speeds for you. You stop down or up up the aperture with a ring on the adapter that interfaces with the stop down lever on the Alpha lenses. It's nice not to have to buy duplicate lenses for focal lengths that you might rarely use on the Nex but which are used daily on the DSLT's. 

A pricier option for mounting Sony Alpha lenses on the Nex is the Sony LAEA-1 adapter. This unit will give you total exposure automation when using the Alpha lenses but it lacks any ability to autofocus any lenses (not usually a hassle given the value of focus peaking).  If you want full bore automation and you'd like to supplement the slower contrast detection AF of the Nex system with the aggressively fast phase detection AF of Sony's mirrored cameras you can get a Sony LAEA-2 adapter for under $300. This adapter contains a fixed pellicule mirror and the required electrical interfaces to give you full bore, fast PD autofocus with selected Sony Alpha lenses. The only lenses that won't AF with the lenses are the older lenses that use the little screw driver connection between bodies and lenses to effect AF.  It works well with the SAM lenses I've got.

But focusing on getting Sony's bigger AF lenses to work on the small body isn't nearly as cool, in my mind, as using adapters to couple weirder lenses to the elegant little black body. On my desk right now I have the camera set up with an adapter ring and an Olympus Pen 40mm 1.4 lens. It looks cool and performs very well once I've stopped it down one stop or more.  Michael Reichmann did a comparison between the Nex and the Leica M9 that's interesting.  His point? Now you have a choice of two top resolution cameras on which to mount your collection of M series lenses.  

So, if the performance of the camera was no better than similar offerings from Panasonic or Olympus then my transition to the Sony system (and this article) would be pretty much meaningless. But here's the deal, if you shoot the way I do you'll likely find the performance of the Nex 7 better. I shoot a lot of controlled stuff. I'm happy to be in control. It means I can use the sweet spots of the cameras I choose. And for the most part I'm selecting for high resolution and high sharpness with rich color and low noise.  And no matter how you slice it low ISO's and careful technique beat the image quality of most other working methods. One of the reasons I embraced and still use the Sony a77 for my portrait and food work (hell, almost all of my work) is the fact that the camera does ISO 50, 64, 80 and 100.  And if I read the charts and graphs on DXO Mark correctly the ISO's under 100 are not "pulled or faked" ISO's but provide meaningful reductions in noise with no change in dynamic range. Go look for yourself before you slavishly believe what you've read elsewhere...). 

You'll see the difference in the choices camera designers make if you put competing cameras on good tripods and make use of some of the slower shutter speeds. At ISO 100 the files from the Sony look better, in terms of color and dynamic range, that what I've seen from my old Canon 5D mk2 files at the same magnifications.

The heart of the Sony Nex 7, beyond looks and ergonomics, is that sensor. Many argue that cramming 24 megapixels into such a small space was a mistake and that Sony should have chosen a 16 megapixel sensor instead. If your overarching metric is low noise over ISO 1600 I guess I'd have to agree but if your tastes lean more to "just how good can a file be..." than I disagree. I guess different people are attracted to different cameras for a reason.

The 24 megapixel sensor in the Nex 7 is apparently the same on that sits in my a77 cameras and I find the performance in the Nex 7 to be outstanding. The noise is manageable up to 3200 and the lower ISO files are wonderful.

Lenses: This is an area where I don't have much depth of experience in the Sony Nex system. I've been told by anyone (except Trey Ratliff) who can grind out a review of the camera that the "kit" lens is unbearably bad but I haven't found that to be the case at all.  At all the middle apertures it seems sharp, well behaved and color rich. One disconnect is that camera users tend to focus on things (real photo subjects)  between 100 times the focal length of the lens and infinity and they mostly shoot three dimensional objects while lens testers tend to shoot flat, two dimensional, charts from three to five feet away... That basically means that testers and users are applying to totally different sets of demands to every lens. 

The 18-55mm is supposed to be sharp to very sharp in the center areas of the frame but is supposed to be icky in the corners and on the extreme edges. Really?  I find it convincing over most of the frame for the stuff I shoot and even at 100% enlargements (which are huge, relatively speaking, with a 24 megapixel camera) I see good detail and sharpness in the critical parts of the frame.  If you require a flat field lens you might be in the market for a macro lens. Unlike general purpose lenses they are constructed to shoot flat objects. That's why they uniformly test well in the tester world.  In his review of the camera Mr. Ratcliff seems to agree that the lens in question is in no way a "dog" of an optic...

I like the 18-55mm because it is a good universal lens but I also like it because, in black, it looks so good on the black Nex 7 body. But when I shoot portraits I have a new favorite. It's the Sony OSS 50mm 1.8. I couldn't find a black one but by this time I just don't care anymore because I like using this one so much I wouldn't want to take any chances on a different sample...

The lens is nicely sharp as opposed to "bitter" sharp. It feels like it's resolving more layers of stuff that I see on the "surface" of the files. I think of it as a portrait lens but many times I leave the house with just this one optic for the day. Some people gravitate toward wide angle lenses and some to short telephotos. I think the ones who choose wide angles have problems distilling their vision down to the essentials...(that was meant to be a joke.) I always want to get in tighter and tights.  Along the same lines one of the Pen lenses that seems to really resonate for me on the Nex 7 is the 70mm f2.  While the lens has some "old school" optical characteristics the focal length is very satisfying for portrait work.  The full 35mm frame equivalent of a 105 mm lens.

There are two things about the Nex 7 that are almost universally unloved.  One is the movie actuation button on the upper right side of the back of the body. It's mentioned everywhere. I've hit it a couple of times but it's so obvious that you've done so in the viewfinder that I can't think people are letting the movie recording go on for too long. Some have tried "fixing" the problem by glueing rubber grommets around the button to ward of their errant thumbs. I spent some time doing thumb exercises to prevent unintended thumb actuation. You'll have to find your own approach.

The second fault of the camera will most likely only resonate with people who use shoe mount flashes or need a universal hot shoe for radio triggers and the like. Here's the deal: All the current Sony cool cameras still use a Minolta hot shoe that came in to being when they launched their Maxxum AF cameras back in the 1990's. No one else uses it. No one. Sony should have changed this the minute they bought the company but sometimes Sony soldiers on with odd crap. You can still use many Sony cameras with a Sony Memory Stick. Kinda nuts. But for only $11 you can buy a Seagull branded converter  that turns your propriety Minolta/Sony hot shoe into a universal shoe. The converter has a handy lock so it doesn't slide off and it also gives you a PC plug on the side for sync cords. Remember those?  Order four or five and keep them in all your camera bags. Or reconcile yourself to the idea that you use flash with other cameras and creativity and ingenuity with the Nex 7....

Lately I've become aware of just how "last century" my way of thinking about cameras usually is. Here I am focusing manually and exposing manually even when I have in my hands a camera with enough computational power to do a lot of day to day stuff for me with a high degree of proficiency. So I let go of my control freak ways and set the camera to the dreaded "green zone." Sony calls this setting, "intelligent auto."  It takes away almost all of my decision making power. No compensation, no control over AF areas, etc. I walked around and shot stuff for about an hour yesterday afternoon just to see what the camera could do and.......I was fairly impressed. It's an alternative methodology for street shooting.  If you set the camera to use "eye start AF" the camera will start focusing the minute you bring the EVF up to your eye. The computer in the box examines hundreds of areas within the scene and makes a series of educated guesses, most of which turned out to be right. I find it very usable in good light. Where it falls down is if you need to focus on something that isn't necessarily in the center of the frame or the closest thing to the camera. 

And I figured that, while I was at it, I might as well play with and report on the various "picture effects" in the menu. The one above is called "posterized." It's pretty obvious and not one I'd use a lot. Especially not for portraits, unless I was trying to go all "Warhol."

I'm not a very organized tester so I don't even recall what this one (above ) is but it doesn't hurt my brain too much... (just figure it out; this is "pop color").

This one (above) is, of course, "toy camera." Hmmmm. Seems like we just went nuts with the vignette menu in Lens Correction...

And where would we be without "contrasty black and white."?

I skipped "soften" and "high key" but I did want to see what "retro" looked like (above).

Those settings are different from the menu called, "creative style" which includes what I would basically call "camera profiles".  We have all the usuals like, standard, vivid, neutral, portrait, landscape but there are also some called, clear, deep, light, sunset night scene, sepia, and black and white. But the one I am drawn to, as much for it's prosaic directness is "autumn leaves." Autumn Leaves does something to the camera to make it sharper, crisper and warmer in certain color areas.  Silly, but I really like it.

The real power of this camera is that it can be small, unobtrusive, and  and at the same time immensely powerful for real image making. No excuses image making. No more, "isn't this a great picture from such a tiny camera?" In the guts of the camera is an unhobbled 24 megapixel sensor that I consider to be state of the art. When the camera was tested by DXO in April they judged it to be among the top ten or eleven camera sensors they had tested to date.

If your technical and aesthetic skills are up to it the camera will match you. From ISO 100-800 it's all you might want in a digital file. I can see noise start to creep in after that but I still think it's usable up to 3200 with good results if you use noise reduction in Lightroom or PS. It will give you the flex to shoot just about anything you need, with two caveats: I wouldn't feel comfortable shooting field sports with it. The CD AF is good but when it comes to following fast action and offering some level of predicative AF I just don't think it's ready to go toe to toe with PD AF cameras like its sibling, the SLT a77.  If action runs parallel to the camera there's a lot to be said for its burst speed; it will do 10 fps for a second or so... But life on the big playing fields is too random and kinetic for the current AF tech in mirrorless (non-PD) cameras. This will all change this year as hybrid focusing system cameras hit the market. The Nikon V1 led the way in that regard.  

My second caveat is one that I don't care about but thought I would mention: If you shoot weddings you won't be impressing cousin Sheldon or uncle Frank with your shooting rig. They will most probably best you in both weight and cubic inches with their tog tools. We've stopped thinking about that in the advertising world. The machine either works or it doesn't.  

I used this camera recently on a shoot with the very art director who moved me from an Olympus E-3 to the Canon 5Dmk2 several years ago. We did a shoot and, plainly, the small, overly AA filtered, small pixel count encumbered E-3 just didn't resolve enough detail for a big output. When we shot with this little camera on the most recent shoot he was flat out impressed. 

A couple of weeks ago, in the middle of August, I took the camera out with me for a long and dusty walk. I ended up getting my sweaty hands all over the camera and I felt like it needed some more protection. Now, in the old days I always thought the little cases that fit over cameras, which were called, "Ever Ready" cases, were dorky and unnecessary. Oh judgemental me. How my point of view has changed. I went on line and started looking for a cool case, passed by the "must be gold plated" incredibly expensive Sony case and found a "no name" case on Amazon, here.

I got some sort of lightning deal price and the case came out to a whopping big $10. I love it. I keep the bottom of the case on the camera and it enhances the feel of the system. I pop the top on when I'm heading out for a long walk to give the camera some protection from the heat, dust, rain and the perspiration of its intrepid owner.  Never thought I'd own one. Now I'm thinking about getting them for all my cameras....

Last week I was a guest at the first preview of the new Mort Topfer Theater at Zachary Scott Theatre. I took along the Nex 7 and the kit lens. I was seated up in the middle of the house and I took images of some of the short previews. This one is for the upcoming show, Rag Time. I was shooting at ISO 400 and nearly or at wide open on the lens. I include this because I was happy with the 100% crop below.  You can click on any of these to see them bigger, in their own windows.

To sum up this chapter of my flowing and intermittent reviews of the Sony Nex7:

Better overall image quality than all the other digital cameras I've owned up to this point in time. Slightly better high ISO image quality than my workhorse Sony a77's.  Not a high ISO champ but certainly better than the middle of the pack. 

If I'd shot with this camera before trying the a77's I would probably have been quite happy going with two Nex 7's, a small shoebox full of lenses and nothing else. I can do and have done demanding and professional work with this camera!  I can hardly wait to see how Sony improves it.

In between frames. Unpolished moments.

If you're anything like me you don't stop shooting in the "in between" moments of your photo shoots. I keep my camera handy and I find that the images I seem to like, in addition to the target images that we're all working for, are the moments in between the serious shooting.

Renae, on the right, was my studio manager back in the go-go days of the 1990's.  We worked nearly every day as a team.  Amy, on the left, was one of Renae's good friends. When we finished with paid assignments we often spent time just making images for fun.  Or for someone's portfolio.

This particular day was the first time that Amy and I worked together. I was suggesting something or answering a question when I took this random frame. I don't expect anyone else to understand it but I've always thought it was humorous. Amy's stoic look.  Renae's half caught comment.

Leica R 8 and 80mm Summilux. Agfa 25 APX film. Scanned.

Ah. Context. These two need it.

It was the last third of the 1990's and we, as a culture, thought technology could solve everything and make us all wildy rich and sexy in the process. So a group (start up addicts) of us were sitting around at the Driskill Hotel Bar drinking Vodka martinis and doing calamari shots when one of our potential investment angels starting talking about behavior problems he was having with his teenage, and just barely adult, children. Finally, we had something we could sink our teeth into.  We quickly ginned up a proposal for a behavior modification device that could be remotely controlled with the then nascent Bluetooth technology to modify the behavior of children and convicted criminals and we sold the concept hard to former savings and loan investors and self-make real estate millionaires. Many decks of PowerPain slides...  In no time we had millions and millions of dollars in joint venture capital which we proceeded to blaze through by buying vintage Lancia Beta Scorpions and small planes (for corporate travel) as well as renting offices decorated with rare, white tiger pelt throw rugs and ancient growth mahagony paneling.  Our administrative assistants (all former models) were legend.

We had a bullpen of psychiatrists, behavior specialists and electrical engineers and we stocked their areas with pool tables, pin ball machines, original Star Trek uniforms and a scale model of the Millenium Falcon.  We also had a 24 hour buffet complete with a sushi fountain and a chocolate mountain.  Many people still fondly recall Dimitri, the bartender. God! he could make a Whiskey Sour that would make you cry...

We were getting near the end of our funds when we had a breakthrough. Electrical stimulations in certain delta patterns, enhanced by painful electromotive feedback could, in fact, modify (short term)  the behavior of our test subjects.  We moved final testing overseas to a break away republic of Switzerland to avoid the heavy hand of the FDA and local Child Protective Services restraints on free trade, and testing on minors, and launched a full series of human tests.

Well....the idea was golden but the execution was a bit more like aluminum foil. A few of the test subjects will never be able to make change, much less get into Harvard but, dammit, we tried. Nevertheless the whole enterprise crumpled like a tinfoil hat.

The above images were made for a campaign that never ran. The copy was vague and lyrical.  Something like: "The essence of happiness is obedience. Control your family's happiness wirelessly."  And, "brainwaves even a warden could love..."

In the end we thought it best to divvy up the remaining funds and call the project a failure. But as any entrepreneur will tell you, failure is the prelude to astronomical success. Thank goodness for the liability shields offered by our corporate entity. Corporations may be people but in this case ours was the brick wall between us and prison.  People can be so touchy about long term negative results...

In the end the military bought our technology at the bankruptcy auction and they've soldiered on trying to make it work.  In fact, I think much of Halo depends on our ground breaking research. Too bad the FDA won't let them use the helmet and electrodes that go with the game.....

The images (above) were the result of a committee's choice of both model and the "moody" countenance of the model. I shot them with a Hasselblad camera and a 120 Makro lens (they really do spell it with a "k") on some groovy black and white film.

After years of litigation the feds and other "injured parties" finally threw in the prosecutorial towel and walked away. They'd become aware that we "pierced the corporate veil" long before they had and moved most of the remaining cash and snow leopard throw rugs and Air Hockey tables off shore to create more opportunity for someone.  And that's the context for these two images.

(Actually, none of this is true. Except for the info about the camera and film. I was just bored waiting for Lightroom to process 40 gigabytes of images and my hands wandered to the keyboard just about the time my brain wandered off altogether. Lou and I did these images as a joke many years ago  Now my other files are done and so is my little flight of fancy.)

Restated Humor Alert:  The article is not true. It is made up. That means it's fiction. Not real.

Shooting runway shows can be fun. Unless you're doing it too seriously.

Atsuro Tayama runway show. Carrousel du Louvre. Paris. Contax 35mm camera (ST?) with 135mm Zeiss lens. Agfapan 400. ©Kirk Tuck.

Portrait of a business man.

I was in New York to shoot on the floor of a specialty printing company when the art director for the project asked me to also include a portrait of the company's owner.  I went into his office which was filled with wonderful art. Paintings, lithographs, antique clocks and furniture. Photographs from the late 1800's and so much more.

He was at his desk when I walked in and you could tell that it was a spot in which he was very comfortable. The perfect spot for him.  The art director wanted to do the classic shot where the business man sits on the front edge of his desk, looking powerful so we did that first. It was awkward and unbalanced for all of us. When I asked him to sit back down and do some work while I reconfigured my one light it was as though a weight fell from his shoulders and mine.

I liked his direct and assured expression so that's what I set out to capture. It was one of those sessions when you get just what you need in twelve frames and then you pack and get the hell out.

This was shot on a Hasselblad camera with the classic 150mm f4 Planar lens using Tri-X 400 film.  Camera on a tripod and light provided my one Profoto 300 w/s second monolight bounced into an old, worn, yellowed umbrella. Printed on Seagull Portrait DW paper.

To my mind this could have been taken any time in the last 50 years.  And I like that.

Why arguing about how to perceive photographs is so much more fun than arguing about which gear is best.

This morning I wrote a post about whether or not photographs need context to be relevant. While I seem to have a combative writing style (I thinks it's just emphatic...)  I wasn't trying to be particularly defensive about my photographs, only the defense of my position that they don't need captions/context. In the course of the ensuing commentary I came to grudgingly see both sides of the argument. BUT in truth I really enjoyed the process because it made me think about something I generally have always taken for granted and that is the idea that photographs exist and are consumed as stand alone objects.  And that when working outside the structure of journalism that captions don't add critical weight. Now I am more carefully considering the benefits of captioning and contextual embellishment.

Some readers more or less jumped to my "defense" while others were quite objective and stood solidly in neutral ground. I enjoyed the whole exercise because we were engaged in actually talking about the art of photography instead of the gear or the business.

When you talk about gear you can go at it from two distinct viewpoints. You can talk about how the gear feels in your hands and how you react to the physicality of the design and the mentality of the user interface, or you can put the machine into the arms of other machines and derive some sort of vaguely objective measure aimed at giving you a series of numbers so that you can graph the relative attributes of the camera in question, via their number scores and come to some aggregated understanding of the camera's potential performance.

No matter which path you take you discover two things: 1. That any preference based on emotional acceptance or "feel" is so subjective that a large portion will hate the very parameters you love, and vice versa.  And, 2. That no matter what you measure when you aggregate all the numerical data points some outweigh others in relative merit based on the tasks in front of the camera while other seem altogether useless to one set of users and critical to others.

Fighting and teeth gnashing always seems to ensue, the owners of the numerically triumphant cameras trumpeting their victory over the cameras of the lesser kingdoms, while the legions of "defeated" camera owners talk about the obviously overlooked faults of the victor and the even more obviously overlooked, nearly magical attributes of the maligned cameras.

As an example: For me the Nikon D3200 is a highly usable, high resolution camera at a very affordable (paradigm shifting?) price point. To fans of HDR the camera is poisonously unusable because it lacks the most critical feature: auto bracketing.

When we talk about art though it seems that we're all on more even ground.  We may like or dislike a piece or a style but we can still talk about it in more interesting ways because of the art's wholesale subjective nature. There are no machines that measure the validity of a piece or the paucity of its contribution.  And if we make cogent arguments they can be used to expand understanding instead of contracting understanding and dividing it (demolishing it) between two warring camps.

Now, does anyone want to take a crack at explaining to me the value (beyond the tasteful enhancement of tonal range)  in obvious HDR photography?

I know a lot of photographers who meet for coffee and end up talking about gear.  Wouldn't it be cool if we each brought a work or book of a photographer we liked and made our discussion over coffee about the merit of the work?   More seemly, I think, to have a smackdown over Avedon versus Helmet Newton than Canon versus Nikon...

Does a photograph have to "be about something" to be valid?

This photograph is currently without context or validity. Or even a caption. But I like the way it looks because it speaks to me of quiet isolation and melancholy. In fact, it was a quiet moment in a light hearted shoot. Context is a capricious bitch.

I recently posted an image of an older man, surrounded by other people, at the Vatican in Rome. The photograph is part of a disconnected series of images I took in and around the front of the building on a rainy day. I don't know who the man is or why he was there. I just liked the look and feel of the moment and decided to take the photograph. In retrospect I could supply all kinds of pseudo-psychological rationales for taking and printing that particular shot. But I doubt that any of the reasons that I can think up now would have been in play at the time.

I posted the image in part to thank a reader for some kind comments he made earlier on his own blog.  I didn't think anything more about the photo or the blog entry until I reviewed a comment left by Kenneth Tanaka who called into question the value of posting a photograph cast adrift from any sort of context.  Here's exactly what he asked:

This is an excellent example of a competently-captured photograph that becomes lost without context. Who is this man? Who are the faceless people greeting him? Why is the reported location significant? It's Exhibit A in the thesis that photographs, in fact, do not really tell stories in the absence of language or richer context. Eh?

While I'm fairly sure that Kenneth's question was genuine I was a bit taken aback. I don't mind a serious critique of any image but it seemed as though he was saying that a photograph must have some sort of context in order to be valid or to have a reason for its existence.  In short, that all images must be contextual, informed and substantiated in order to have any relevance whatsoever to the engaged practice of photography.

In my mind one of the traditions of photography, and especially street or documentary photography is about capturing life in the moment and sharing it. We make images of things that ping our subconscious and try to share the jolt or micro jolt of curiosity that caused us to point our lens at a stranger and make the photograph in the first place.

Ken implies, by way of his question and a later follow up comment, that without a overarching context, and perhaps the support of other faces turned toward camera that images like the one in question "do not really tell stories in the absence of language or richer context." His statement seems to imply that images without context have no value or ability to connect with viewers.

I'm still trying to process exactly what Kenneth's rhetorical intentions are and in the process I went to a site he's produced of his own photographs and read his own manifesto/statement of support for his own work.  It goes like this:

"I am most interested in the challenge of discovering and capturing the ephemeral beauty, incongruities, discontinuities, ambiguities, and humor in the everyday world. This, to me, is what the determined, observant and patient camera is uniquely able to do. "

(I added the bold type face for emphasis--Kirk)

And here is a random sample of his work from his site:

©Kenneth Tanaka

I guess what I am trying to come to grips with is just what is different, contextually, between the image I put in the original post and many of the images that Kenneth has shared.  And, in a larger sense, whether all images without written stories or journalistic captions, and without instantly recognizable celebrities are less valuable and less accessible without some context.

In many ways the history of photography as art is the history of discarded or non-existent context. The shot of your child may have relevance to you but in the ocean of images on the web it's hardly more than a disconnected document of another human.

To focus solely on the back story of the human face within the map of my entire frame dismisses the other elements of the frame which may have equal relevance to the viewer. In fact, much modern art outside of photography is concerned with tone, shape, color and even the surface topology of the art (minimalist painting?).  Why is it that photography must hew to a higher test that the other arts by making every image dependent on and wedded to its context?

What if, subconsciously, I was drawn to  make the image because I liked the out of focus rendering of the man's hat in the left hand side of the frame, or the repeating pattern of the columns.....?

This is the original image from yesterday's post.

Good, Clean Work.

Lost to the vagaries of the web and a lower res scan from the original neg are the amazing amounts of detail and sharpness in the originals...

I love looking back in the archives and thinking about how we used to work in the days before digital imaging. This is a job for Motorola that dates back to 1996. They had just opened their MOS 13 facility with a large percentage dedicated to clean rooms that were instrumental in fabricating .25 micron geometry microprocessors and microcontrollers. Every industry magazine and our chamber of commerce wanted to be able to take tours into the fab but the company soon realized that having so many people coming through would be a productivity black hole.  Not to mention that keeping out contaminants would be more difficult with clean room newbies.

The marketing team and the engineers in charge of production hired my company to create a photographic tour  of the facility that would show the 12 major steps they take to create chips on a wafer.  We had some challenges.  The first one being that all the images needed to be of high enough quality to be enlarged up to five feet by six and one half feet. The images would be encased in acrylic and hung up in a giant entry hall so people would be able to stick their noses right up to the image. The images needed to be sharp, saturated, grainless and of very high quality. Our next challenge was that we would not be able to bring in any sort of lighting equipment. None. I called a friend at Kodak and we discussed all the parameters and came up with a solution. Because the lighting was very mixed we would shoot on color negative film.  That would allow me and the lab to do lots of fine tuning for color, after the fact.

Since we needed high sharpness and low grain we settled on using Ektar 25 (ISO 25) color negative film. I wanted to shoot 4x5 sheet film but the contamination officer (rightly) wouldn't hear of it because the bellows folds would be incredible dust magnets and the felt traps across the tops of the sheet film holders were also rated as high dust perils.  Seems one small bit of airborne dust could really mess up the process.

We ended up using several Hasselblad bodies with 6x4.5 film backs. The film backs were 220 (we were well equipped in those days...) and held enough film for 32 images in each. The cropped backs helped me visualize the final aspect ratio of the prints while shooting.  We used two bodies because we didn't want to change lenses in the clean room.  Each body had one of my favorite production lenses on it.  One was a 100mm Planar 3.5 (slight telephoto with no geometric distortion) and the other was a new 50mm Distagon f4 FLE (floating lens element) which gave me a nice, but not intrusive, wide angle view.

We loaded a back for each camera and then took out the dark slides and sealed the dark slide slot with approved tape before swabbing down the cameras with an alcohol solution in a semi-clean room. Then we ran everything through the high air pressure entries areas and brought them, along with a metal tripod (also scrubbed) into the clean room.

The Ektar 25 had a very good long exposure characteristic that didn't really show reciprocity until you went over a 1 second exposure. We used the camera on the tripod throughout and always used the mirror lock-up control on the camera to eliminate camera shake.  I shot sparingly because reloading the backs required me to exit the clean room and start the process all over again.

I spent a long day in a bunny suit with rubber gloves and safety goggles on. In the end we produced 12 enormous prints which still hang in the facility (at least they were there last time I visited).  If I were doing the same project today I'd probably use a medium format digital camera with a high quality zoom lens.

I worked with a lab in Dallas called BWC. The did the printing and the acrylic process and they did a great job. Fun to do a job whose results are still in use over a decade later. And fun to remember the role of slow, sharp film and precision mechanical cameras.

For Mr. Lonien, in Germany.

A gathering at the Vatican.

I like making my quick black and white conversions in SnapSeed.

It's quick and efficient and I can add in some grain as well as some "structure" to my files. I don't have a workflow. I just jump in and look at what I can get using the color filter presets and the three sliders. I love a crisp black and a higher value skin tone. Generally, it takes about a minute to get everything the way I want it. Quicker than opening up Photo Shop and doing it in there. The trade off is that PS has more controls and more fine-tune-ability.

SnapSeed is my favorite "cheap" app. It's playful.

The charming characteristics of color negative films.

I don't want anyone to think that I've abandoned digital photography just because I've been discussing Hasselblad cameras lately. As far as business goes film is just a small side issue. But it's interesting when you come across older work and you evaluate it next to a newer, different working technology. For instance, the image above was shot on color negative film. It is a scan from the negative. I originally shot this image with a medium format camera, a longer lens and Kodak film.

It seems quite different to me from the images I get from my digital cameras. One parameter that's obvious is the much lower color saturation in the skin tones. Another difference is the long roll up from the mid tones to the highlights in the image. But the think that struck me when I blew up the original, high res scan to 100% was the difference in the way film and digital render sharpness. It may just be that the defaults in the programs we use to "develop" raw files are set at much higher levels or it may be that film has so much more information that it doesn't have the same sort of high edge acutance that seems to come from digital sharpening algorithms.

While I'm reasonably sure that I could dial down the edge sharpness of digital and work in PhotoShop to match the look of film I am not convinced that I can change the highlight roll off of a digital camera file to match the almost endless range of highlight tones in negative films. It's an interesting subject.

It was fun to go back into the archives, judge images from color contact sheets and then slide strips of negatives onto a scanner.  With current scanner software there is a wide range of control for fine tuning scans. While it's a slower process working with negative film does give one a different look and feel than other methods.

The Best Book I've Ever Read On An iPad. (Food Photography).

Food Photography: From Snapshots to Great Shots, by Nicole S. Young

Today I'm reviewing a book that knocked my socks off.  It's a book I stumbled across on Amazon.com while looking around for books about food photography. The book is written and illustrated by an immensely talented food photographer named, Nicole S. Young. This will sound crazy but the book is accessible on a number of levels, from almost rank beginner to, well, me.

Young writes in an engaging manner, is not too technical but not to "not technical."  She writes with an inclusive voice, welcoming both the casual photographer who is interested in making snapshots of his or her restaurant meals look more polished but she provides more than enough high quality information to keep pros thoroughly engaged. And as good as the writing is the ample illustrations are even better. She has a very modern, light and airy approach to food that works very well for a wide range of food subjects.  Everything she discusses is richly illustrated and most of the "beauty shots" are supplemented with good lighting diagrams.

I bought the book because I was impressed with her suggestions about food styling and lighting and wanted to keep the book around as a reference. I have the strange habit of buying books about subjects that I've just photographed.  I recently did a job food job for one of the world's largest hotel chains and I wanted to see how my approach stacked up.  I was impressed by Nicole's approach and I'll be incorporating a lot of her tricks and techniques going forward.

This is the first book on photography and lighting that taught me valuable new tricks in a long time.

But....the thing that compelled me to write this review is how damn good the book looks when I read the Kindle version on my iPad 2. Unlike many books that seem to lose their formatting and cohesion when converted to digital this one just flat out sings on an iPad.  I bought the Kindle version because it was only $9 and I wanted to see if I liked it before I committed to the print version.  Now I'm in a quandary.  I like the way the Kindle version works so well I'd probably just be happy with that but...it's such a good book I really want to see the illustrations in all their glory. Oh, the hell with it, I'll be back in a second...

I'm back.  I just had to hit the "One Click" for the paper back. It's too good a book NOT to own.

If you are at all interested in food photography this one is a must own.

One note: Don't be put off by the first third of the book. There are very beginner sections about Raw versus Jpegs, rudimentary equipment, etc. Just ignore it. The meat of the book is worth subsidizing the front sections for rank amateurs... the good stuff is in the second half.

Full disclosure:  If you buy the book from the links here I'll get a commission from Amazon. You won't pay more. Further disclosure:  I don't know Nicole S. Young, I don't work with her publisher and we have no "quid pro quo" in place.  Final disclosure:  This book is so ragingly good that I'm jealous as both a writer and photographer. 

Here's the link for the print version: 

Mamiya 6 Adventures in Rome.

Cruising along the streets with my Mamiya 6 in my right hand just snapping away. As I walked up the Spanish Steps this young woman stood up just in front of me and billowed out her scarf. Being usually prefocused around ten feet I lifted the camera to my eye, framed and pressed the shutter. I kept walking up the stairs. I wound on to the next frame. She sat back down.

The Mamiya 6 rangefinder camera is a medium format rangefinder (a true rangefinder, not just a body that's gussied up to look like one...) and it was available with the holy trinity of medium format square lenses: the 50mm f4, the 75mm f3.6 and the 150mm f4.5.  It is one of the ultimate street shooting/documentarian/reportage cameras ever made.  The rangefinder was nice and bright, the camera was like love in your hands and the ultra quiet snick of the in lens leaf shutter was....ultimately discreet.

I took two Mamiya 6 cameras and the three lenses with me on a trip to Rome, along with several hundred rolls of Kodak T-max CN-400 film. The camera was far better a camera than I was a photographer at the time.  So much so that it contrived to change owners during the bloody purge to digital and its sale stands to this day as one of my all time stupid decisions. I didn't know just how good that camera was until I looked into the rearview mirror of time and dug into the folder of juicy, sharp negatives.  The CN-400 was never my favorite film to print but once you throw it in a scanner it's a revelation.  I only wish I had already been scanning my film back then....

There are really only four cameras I regret selling, the Mamiya 6 is one, my original Leica M6 .85 ttl is another, my Linhof TechniKarden (because it signalled the end of big format film for me) and my Hasselblad 201F (because it worked with the 110 f2 Planar lens).  All the other cameras come and go but those were different. Like a girlfriend you broke over with over something silly and have come to realize just what you lost...and it haunts you from time to time.

If you have a Mamiya 6 don't sell it.  You will regret it. If you had handled some of the premier film cameras of their day you might understand the constant search by digital camera buyers today.  You don't miss what you've never had but you sure miss your water when you well runs dry...

Holding tightly to my Hasselblads and shooting till the film runs out..