Moving through space and time.

Barton Creek.

Self awareness is an interesting proposition. I've been writing this blog for about four years now and it somewhat constitutes a daily journal for me. While most people come along for the ride to read about the equipment, looking backwards, the most valuable function for me is a reflection of my ever changing state of mind and spirit as I move through familiar spaces. My other surprise is the extent to which a written record also shows me how we move through time.

When I started my journey in photography oh so many years ago I was like a guest at a Bacchanalian feast. I was hungry to try everything and I was mesmerized by the songs of many older practitioners who held sway and tried to hand down traditions and myths about the undertaking of photography, and of being an artist.

Having worked with huge lights and eight by ten inch view cameras, shooting an indiscriminate catalog of subjects, I can see over the decades a paring down, not necessarily of the equipment but of the things I like to shoot. The paring down of equipment is a related process of attrition and transformation. Like flowing along with the current in a stream.

So, what does my four years of blogging tell me about equipment? For the most part I would have saved an enormous amount of time and money with no real impact on the quality of my images if I had just kept the original Nikon D2X that I worked with back in 2006 and the collection of lenses I had at that time. I've worked with a number of cameras since then, most with higher megapixel counts and supposedly better performance but my style of shooting followed a different path than what the designers of the newer cameras seemed to envision. 

I keep using all these machines at their lowest ISOs for my serious work because my subjects are rarely moving around frenetically and I like controlling the light. With this in mind the image quality performance of the D2x was always just fine. The camera and sensor designers seemed hell bent on making high ISO performance the sine qua non of camera progress.  Just yesterday I shot some interiors at a salon/spa. While I could have used the Sony a99 at 3200 ISO I was using a tripod (gotta keep that horizon level...) and it was just as easy to use ISO 100. 

My relentless buying and selling of cameras of course unmasks a basic lack of self confidence in my own vision. That's why we all keep running to the store. We hope that someone will come up with a piece of technology that, in itself, will be so profoundly good that it will mask whatever our self-perceived creative weaknesses are. We continually hope that there's a magic lens which we can use to make our images sing in a different way. In the end we've spent $500 or $5,000 for a new magic lens only to come back to the realization that we've been taken once again....by our own psychological frailties. 

When I look back farther I can see that a camera like the Fuji S5 was a wonderful camera and made very pretty files of people's faces.  But I believed the hype about more megapixels and rushed to buy the next dose.  It turned out to be the ten megapixel Nikon D200 which is the worst digital camera I have ever owned. Especially for portraits... But boy how I tried to believe in it. Only to dump it as quick as I could for those two additional megapixels in the D2x. 

Reading through the blog shows me the stop and start nature of my conviction to logic followed by my surrender to advertising fueled desire. I can read the more thoughtful blog entries and see that I knew with extreme clarity that the cameras were largely indifferent to the process at large. They were basically as interchangeable as mid level SUV's or smart phones. But our desire to have them reveal some inner magic seems (at least in my case) to be inescapable.

What else have I learned? How about: Light is light. Whether it's expensive light or cheap light it's still just light. I've been interested in LEDs but I'd say that part of my interest, beyond a curiosity about new technologies, has always been centered around finding a style that I could call my own. The LEDs represented a differentiation from the mainstream. A way of being special. But in the end they are just lights that don't flash. Interchangeable with other lights that don't flash. Yes, there are attributes and detractions to every type of light but the lure of the new in lighting is just like the lure of this year's smart phone compared to the one you bought six months ago. Faster? Sure. Slimmer? Sure. But are your conversations any more interesting? Have your texts turned eloquent? Probably not. Probably no more than buying a D800 made all your photographs interesting and special.

That brings us to personal growth and I don't know how you measure that and whether the kind of growth most people talk about is really any better than the growth of one's waistline or that mole on your shoulder. I think what most people call "spiritual growth" is just a growing acceptance of the inevitable made a little bit more palatable by the idea that there's some grand plan. Surrender? A willingness to accept a convenience premise? Real mystical stuff that I don't get?

Reading through the blog shows me that I've moved from a point in my career where I thought I knew everything to a point where every day seems like a brand new invention of photography. Especially the business side of the whole deal. At some point I realized that I'd gotten really good at producing stuff that people weren't buying anymore. You can be angry or frustrated or fearful about the market or culture shifting away from your own competencies but if you depend on what you shoot to trade for what you eat you need to move past any emotional attachment to the way we used to do stuff and pay attention to what works now.

This doesn't necessarily mean a wholesale "walk away" from your style, your point of view or shooting what you enjoy but, it sure means that you might need to change the way you bill, the way you charge, the way you shoot and how you diversify. The thread that should run through everything though should be to honestly have fun with your work. You don't have to love everything but you sure have to like the process. But to fall back in love with the process you have to yield to the idea that everything changes. It's always tough to stomach that change must include me...

How does this work in real life? Work is more fragmented. There are many fewer days of continuous shooting and more small, intense work periods. One CEO portrait done at speed versus a cattle call of the senior staff. The work is looser and less formal. The (self-imposed) technical restrictions on what we have to shoot with have evaporated. Seriously, if you could get the best image of a subject with a cell phone as opposed to a traditional camera I have not doubt that it would be workable and acceptable. Not in every circle but in many.

Everything feels more collaborative now. We're not silo'ed by our expertise as we once were and we're not always driving the train. It's more of a shared perspective. I can see that over time, in my posts. And when I look at my work I see change everywhere. We now light to look unlit. We pose to look un-posed and we post process to make our technical competence yield to a more organic or even photo-primitive look.

It's easy for people who don't make their living through photography to say that they/we don't have to change and we should (moral or ethical imperative) stick to our guns and do what we like but that totally disregards the role that clients play in the commercial dance. They taste wide and far and they taste in the company of their peers. There are trends and there are styles. Just as with food clients get to pick and choose from a rich visual menu. We might personally like pot roast but it might be an increasingly hard sell to a generation of kale eaters.

As I've diversified and re-calibrated my business has recovered from the dark days of 2009 and 2010. Part of the recovery is the reawakening of the national economy but part of the recovery is the re-tooling that I've done to make the product mix work. A re-invention.

But when I look hard and read between all of the thousands of lines I've written I do see one trend that makes me sad. The easier it becomes to take a photograph the harder it becomes to really enjoy photographs. To really like photographs. The ubiquity of images and the lack of friction in their delivery takes away any pleasure of discovery. The instant copying of original work and techniques dilutes the relative value of the originals. We, collectively, have become a giant, automated machine like one of the robotic vacuum cleaners. Our machine rolls through the world at all hours, seconds and minutes snapping disseminating, referencing and feeding back images of everything and everyone without pause and without filtration. We have, in essence, become a million monkeys typing at a million typewriters for a million years. But with a faster feedback loop and more feeder bars (feedback sources) to give us treats for micro-completions.

We've almost gone completely from something that felt handmade to something that reeks of mass production.

There are now only a handful of masters and then there's the rest of us. It's part of the change. I'm not sure 50+ year old artists make big changes in the landscape or even their own landscape. Most ride on their laurels or gracefully retire. It should be interesting to see how the next complete inventory turn of photographers re-invents what they do. I hope we still recognize it as photography.

My goals have changed over the last four years. In the beginning, with the blog, I wanted to comment on the "infidels" of new photography (iPhoners, Instagrammers, etc.) and how wrong they were. Then I commented on the over-share issues wherein people were so enamored of their own buzz or seeing their work somewhere that they were turning the conventional rules of commerce upside down for no discernible gain. Then I wanted to talk about the camera revolution and the working evolution that was driving m4:3 and smaller form factors. In each case I was either identifying and obvious trend or trying to push back against the tide.

Now I'm really only interested in the anthropology and cultural contexts of image making. I'm interested in the idea that there won't be a pervasive style anymore but an incoherent mass of individual threads. Some will be obvious homages or thefts and some will be very banal but some threads will be like variations on core themes that we play over and over again. And it's the variations on essential themes that I'm interested in. Especially as they related to the depiction of beauty.

Oh well, I just had a few minutes and I thought I'd share a few more thoughts. Now it's time to walk the dog and do some laundry. Oh, and to unload the dishwasher. Mindful drudgery.

Why the image of Barton Creek? I've always been publicly derisive about landscape photography. It's a prejudice of mine. But in spite of my critical arrogance I've found myself shooting more and more intentional landscapes. Fodder for a future blog....

Please read this astute article about calibration.

This is follow up reading on my monitor selection and calibration article from last week. It comes from one of my favorite photo sites, www.Luminous-Landscape.com :

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/techniques/beyond_calibration.shtml

The author makes the point that rigid ideas about monitor calibration don't always serve photographers optimally.

If you're that guy who loves to argue with me about monitor calibration and the need for every "serious" and professional photographer to calibrate to within a nano meter of perfection and with our eyes on the studio cesium clock you'll be chagrined to know that, since this is someone else's work, I've decided to disable comments on this post. My intention is to give those interested in the subject a "heads up" about an interesting opinion....

Crazy Lens Stuff. Wide Open and Up Close.

I met my friend, Anne, for coffee last week at my favorite coffee shop, Caffe Medici. Out of native silliness I pulled out my camera and made a cursory shot, from a high angle, of my cappuccino and a luscious chocolate croissant. It was a throw away image. Something I might look at for a few seconds before I re-formatted my memory card in preparation for something else.

Anne looked at the image on the back of the camera and then gave me a wry look. "Really?" she asked. "That's all you've got?"

A bit ashamed at being caught in full on hipster photographer mode I sheepishly grabbed the camera again, set the lens at it's widest aperture, focused at the closest focusing distance and pulled out the LCD screen so I could shoot at a much lower angle than I usually do. I snapped a series of three images and then we put the camera away and had a nice chat.

I didn't shoot much else during the day and when I got home I took a look at the images. I was about to erase them but I stopped and took an extra couple of minutes and put them on my desktop.  I took a good look at the images and, like the nerd I am, started blowing them up on the screen to see what a lens really does do when pressed into its worst case scenarios.

And that triggered a whole train of thought for me about why we buy the lenses we do and what misguided metrics we use to make our selections.

When we look at lens tests we look at measurements that are made of a flat target but I rarely find, in real life, that I have a lot of call to photograph flat objects. When I do need to photograph flat objects I can easily reach for a macro lens that was make to photograph flat objects. But most of the stuff I photograph is three dimensional. This cup shot is an example of "real world." No matter how potentially sharp the edges or corners of the Sony 50mm 1.4 might be at its widest aperture, for the most part we'll never see the potential realized because the limited depth of field combined with the three dimensional nature of most scenes negates our ability to see those imagined results.

At the center point of this image, which is the same as the focal point, the image is generally sharp. Outside of this narrow boundary the sharpness and resolution of the outlying areas becomes immaterial.

This is the bane of most lens buyers. We don't have the ability to model accurately the critical factors of a lens in a meaningful way so we trust sites like SLRgear.com and PhotoZone.de and even DXO for their OCD testing of the lenses in which we might be interested. We also treat lenses as totally separate, stand alone tools instead of understanding their real role as integrated parts of complex imaging systems.

I suggest that we actually shoot lenses in the manner we will normally use the lens and make our choices on the merits of the lens in actual use. How does the image look compared to your initial intentions.

So, with all of this in mind I was in a vulnerable state when I made yet another fateful trip to the lens monger here in town, late yesterday afternoon.

Long story shortened, I bought a lens yesterday. It was an interesting buying adventure for me. I've been stalking this particular lens for a while. I am captivated with wide ranging, normal zoom lenses lately. I bought the much vaunted 24-70mm f2.8 Zeiss lens recently, tested it and returned it. Why? Well, the reason to buy the lens, for me, is the performance of the center part of the lens.  The people part. I don't shoot architecture and I'm not so concerned about corners and edges but I do like a sharp, very sharp inner core. I thought the 24-70mm CZ would be a big step up from the "interim" lens I bought back in early December for a PR job. It was the Tamron 28-75mm 2.8 SP lens for Sony. When I shot the two lenses side by side I found that the Tamrom was at least as good in the parameters I found to be important: Core Sharpness and Good Contrast near wide open. At f4 both lenses were good. Equally good. Why drop another $2000 on a lens that was no better than the lens I had in my hands? Not much. Back went the CZ (always keep your boxes until you are certain).

While my friends are much more impressed by the big Zeiss lens my wallet and my financial advisor are much more impressed with my pragmatic assessment of relative quality.

While I liked the idea of the extra reach of the lens I really wished for another 20mm or so on the long side of the Tamron and I really would have welcomed 24mm on the short end. My biggest beef with the CZ 24-70mm is also the very limited range of focal lengths. Shorter on the long end is even worse for me. Something like a 24-85mm makes a lot more sense in actual PR and event shooting. Even more length would be better.

So, back to the lens I've been stalking since I adopted the Sony Alpha system. It's been discontinued since 2008.  It's a rebadged Minolta lens. It's the 24-105mm f3.5 to 4.5. It's much smaller than either of the two lenses I mention above, in fact it's probably smaller than the Sigma 50mm 1.4. In fact, I'm certain it is.

I looked at it and rejected it back in December in favor of the faster Tamron lens but yesterday I looked at it one more time. But why?

At times I can be a sucker for "finder image."  When I put the small zoom on the a99 in the store and carefully set the camera's diopter I found myself liking the image in the finder. Really liking the finder image. I had two lenses in front of me. One was the Carl Zeiss 85mm 1.4 for the Sony and the other one was the 24-105mm 3.5/4.5. I pulled the 85 up to my eye and focused on some boxes about ten feet from me with the lens wide open. The type on the box wasn't particularly out of focus but it sure wasn't sharp. I chalked it up to AF focus error so I switched to MF and magnified the frame to fine focus. And it still wasn't sharp. Not critically sharp.

I started stopping down and checking and right at 2.8 I started to get succinct, sharp type in the center of the frame. I switched lenses and AF'd on the box again from the same position. The zoom rendered the type much more sharply. Wide open. I tried it at various focal lengths. Same results.

Stopping down one stop gave me excellent sharpness.

I tried the test again with the Sigma 50mm 1.4 for the Sony. It could match the sharpness of the zoom, in the center of the frame at around f2.8 as well. I wasn't seeing focus shift as I was focusing stopped down and using MF with magnification.

Since the zoom had been discontinued four years earlier and had been a shop demo for a long time I was able to negotiate an advantageous price and I bought it.

What does all this prove, if anything? That we tend to overlook many good, medium aperture lenses because they lack sex appeal but, in fact, are very, very good. Many people swear by super fast lenses but I find that they don't really deliver incredible performance at their widest apertures. My take is that our penchant for super fast lenses is based on two ideas, one of which is deeply flawed and the other was made irrelevant by our almost ubiquitous dependance on auto focus technologies.

First of all I think that super fast lenses became popular in the 1960's, 1970's through the 1980's because back then people mostly manually focused their lenses in SLRs and the faster aperture meant more focusing accuracy on the screen. The more limited depth of field also helped us get to sharp more quickly. Now that all our cameras are AF these parameters are rendered more or lens meaningless and further impaired in designs that exhibit focus shift upon stopping down.

The second parameter that comes into play is something that Erwin Puts talks about a lot. It is (according to Puts, a Leica expert) eight time harder to accurately make a lens element that is twice as large. Each increase of one stop makes the chances of creating a great optic eight times harder, times the number of elements in a lens. EIGHT times TIMES the number of lens elements.

I first noticed that some lenses that performed very well were slower than the lenses that were most popular or most used. For instance, I would say that in many regards that the Nikkor 55 Micro f3.5 is a sharper lens at f3.5 to f11 than just about any of the much pricier fast lenses on the market. Recently I purchased a Sony 85mm 2.8 lens and my results mirror those I've read in review sites. The lens is very sharp wide open. So sharp it can excite aliasing even wide open. Amazingly sharp. You hear similar stories about the older Contax 85mm 2.8 as well.

In my experiences with 85mm lenses the two Sony 85's tell the story. The big, expensive 1.4 lens is impressive to look at and impressive to look through. But it's hard to get sharp performance wide open due to the vagaries of AF and the added struggle with focus shift as one stops down. By 2.8 the lens is critically sharp (according to most tests) but then it is just on par with its much slower sibling. The 85mm 2.8 matches (to my eye) the performance of the bigger lens from 2.8 up to the diffraction limits of both lenses.

But the real thing a long term photographer should ask about the tools is, "is ultra narrow depth of field something I'll use a lot?" And then weigh that against, well, weight and price. I find most controlled shoots with longer lenses take place between f2.8 and f8.0. With a full frame camera an f1.4 aperture gives one such a narrow slice of sharpness that it becomes schtick.

Given a choice these days I would rather have a lens that's critically sharp but a little slower than a prestige lens that really only delivers when stopped down. In an odd twist the users of smaller formats may have an advantage when it comes to buying smaller, faster lenses (such as the Olympus 75mm f1.8 I talked about last week) because they use smaller diameter lens elements that can be more accurately machined and polished than optics made for larger circles of view...

So, how is the "new to me" little zoom? Where I use it, at f4 to f8, usually making portraits, I find it to be a fine lens and one perfectly suited for events. Is it so sharp it will call attention to its sharpness? No. But it's a nicely rounded sharpness that seems to work well for people. It's better on the a99 than on the a77 and I chalk that up to the interaction between the resolution limits of the lens and the resolution density of the two digital imaging sensors.

I'm heading out the door to shoot with the smaller lens right now. For a little while it will join the Tamron 28-75 and the Minolta 24-85mm in the equipment drawer. I'm putting them all through their paces right now and the winner will get to stay while the other two will be sent packing. Right now it's neck and neck between the Tamron and the Sony. More to come.

added later in the evening: And the early returns are good. The 24-105 has a unique look to it. Sharp but roundy..... I'll post a few and then we'll test later, in depth...

Mythology versus the Real World. A Painted Background.

The mythology of our business is so darling. Reams of pie-in-the-sky magazine articles from decades past would have every one believe that photographers can quickly get anything they want from a bevy of ready and waiting suppliers and that clients are standing by with their checkbooks open, just ready to satisfy our aesthetic procurement wishes. I wish that it was so. And I'm sure the stories evolved from some diamond studded studio in Manhattan where a kingly photographer was surrounded by anxious-to-please staff just waiting on the kingly photographer's barest utterance before they flung themselves into action and created props, backgrounds, sets and even models to his exacting parameters. I'm equally sure that, in this far off world, jovial (pre-bubble, pre-recession) clients stood ready to toss gold talents into whatever embellishments to the enterprise the kingly photographer might suggest. Happens in someone's world just not mine or any of the worlds of the scores of professional photographers I know.

Let me walk you through my latest project. We haven't done the photography yet but I've already gotten a lot done.

Since I live in the middle of Texas it was inevitable that I'd eventually be asked to shoot a bunch of cowboy boots for a cowboy boot maker's website and catalog. These aren't nasty, cheap boots that are glued together in a factory in some third world country. No sir. These are hand made custom boots done in an august Texas tradition. Fifteen hundred dollars a pair and up. Booked up for the next year already.  I bid the job based on the parameters given and my bid was accepted. That's when the "extra credit" work generally comes to the fore.

The comps for the campaign have a nice, non-descript, warm background and I was pretty sure we could find that in our own selection of backgrounds or from a rental house. But nothing I could find was exactly what we (the art director) wanted. I looked and looked but the fates refused to comply. As the shoot date drew nearer my art director understandably started to grow nervous. He'd no doubt sold the client on the look and feel of a computer created background and now it was kind of imperative that we deliver. No....the budget and delivery deadline didn't include clipping paths and dropping backgrounds into 80+ images of boots...

What does a commercial photographer do? We get ourselves over to the art supply house and get the stuff we need to make our own custom backgrounds. Like a nine foot long piece of beautiful oatmeal raw canvas that's 54 inches wide, along with some tubes of acrylic paint and a handful of wide brushes. I soaked the canvas so it would accept the very dilute paint into the fabric and then I laid it out on the floor of my studio, soaking wet. And then I started painting. And painting and painting. 

I used a high dilution of water to acrylic paint and the background, which appeared very saturated at first, is now drying to a much more subtle color palette. But that's just the first step. Once the acrylic wash is dried in I'll go back and hit the whole thing again with a spritzer filled with strong tea. I am hopeful that the tea will shift the overall color into a more sepia range and give me a look of something like a weathered parchment. Once the entire piece is exactly the color and pattern I want I'll go back and iron the fabric flat and then roll it around a core to transport it to San Antonio. 

Why go to the extra effort? Well, mostly because I am sure that the AD and I are on the same page and this is what we both wanted to see when we started looking at the comps and talking about the overall feel of the shoot. Would I have loved to pick up the phone and called a set maker in LA, spent some time giving him my vision, having him do some comps and send them back to me before meticulously hand painting a final background? Well, I guess so but I would worry that the background may not work and that by the time we receive his work it might be too late to punt.

As I'm writing this I'm watching the first application of paint dry and I'm loving what I'm seeing. Of course I don't have a studio entourage here to "ooh" and "ahhh" with me. No one to get me a plate of fancy Twinkies and an espresso... No one to fire up the hot tube. And clearly, no one to do the "behind the scenes" video.

I guess I really do suffer for my art... :-)  at least by the standards of the media/internet/photographer's mythology....

A few more hours of dry time and then we'll be ready for the tea....