Some more images from my new "test" camera, the Samsung NX300, and a few thoughts about the state of cameras.

The Lamar Bridge.

 Looking East from the Pfluger Pedestrian Bridge.

Looking North on the Pfluger Pedestrian Bridge.

The intake for the old (decommissioned) power plant.

The curvy side of the Pfluger Pedestrian Bridge.

The old Power Plant with downtown Austin in the background.

I shot the images above yesterday afternoon as part of a nice, hot walk from Barton Springs Pool to the downtown Whole Foods store. I used a small, nimble camera with a fairly big (APS-C) sensor, and an inexpensive kit lens. I wound up using the same camera in a dark theater this afternoon. My friend, Colin, and his friend, Noel Gaulin found an overhead projector, some food dyes and other paraphenalia and they were doing pyschedelic, kinetic art (which they were recording to video on a Panasonic AF100) to be used enormously large for an upcoming play about Janis Joplin that will be staged at Zach Theatre. I was there and decided, in an impromptu way, that we should also have a behind the scenes video about some of the lengths to which our technical staff goes to in order to make great looking  live shows.

This little exercise in the dark showed me just how far camera technology has come. The camera was able to automatically correctly expose for the two faces surrounded by total darkness. Walls painted matte black darkness. The camera's image stabilization worked as well as the in-body stabilization in my Sony's and the focus stayed locked on while I moved.

All of this got me thinking about the nature of the business of photography and the rather rude intersection of camera design and art. We can lie through our teeth and talk about how important top notch cameras are or we can admit that just about every camera over $500 in the market place today can be pressed into professional service to make great images, the primary target for which is now the web.  There are still many situations where a long, fast, telephoto lens is critical and there are probably an equal number of situations where a good ultra-wide angle is a an imperative tool, but the camera bodies themselves have been, across the board, ready for prime time for years now.

The mirrorless cameras don't focus as quickly as DSLRs but when they do focus they are more accurate. It's just the nature of focusing on the same chip that also records the images. The metering on mirrorless cameras seems more accurate than the metering on entry level DSLRs as well. And for me the grace note is that every mirrorless camera is also a permanent live view camera, and that means every image gets pre-chimped, which makes the feedback flow of seeing and image correction much more fluid. 

I know it's generational and I know it's because I wear reading glasses now, but I wish every mirrorless camera....oh, what the hell!?...every camera came standard with an EVF. I really like the files I'm getting out of this little camera (NX 300) very much I just wish I could hold it up to my eye like a real camera without having to resort to a loupe for comfort and convenience. To my kid? No big deal. To me....hmmm.

20 really good megapixels on a sensor with wonderful color goes a long way to make up for a feature set that's one check box off for me...more later.

Canoes were hot property at Barton Springs yesterday.

Barton Springs Canoe Rental. Samsung NX300.

Yesterday morning was busy, busy but after a decent lunch with my first assistant for the summer and some monotonous paper work in the office I made two phone calls I had been dreading and then I packed up my new little camera and went off to Zilker Park. I parked the ultra-high performance Honda CR-V in front of Barton Springs Pool and took off for a grand walk through our downtown park.

After an almost ritualistic nod to the rogue swimmers who swim and frolic for free in the spillway downstream from the actual pool I walked on to the canoe rental stand. It was a hot afternoon, school is out for nearly everyone and the place to be was in the water or on the water. I liked the repeating form of the canoes (above) but I knew when I shot the frame that I'd want to see it in black and white. Sharp, snappy, contrasty black and white.

I am getting comfortable with my new, casual shooting system, the Samsung NX300. I have the kit lens which is an 18-55mm, and I have my Hoodman loupe for those times when the surrounding light is too bright to make composing naked fun. I have two or three things to say about the new camera. First off the files seem archly neutral in the "standard" jpeg setting. By that I mean the colors are very neutral and almost unsaturated in comparison to other consumer-targeted cameras. The same with the contrast range. I find myself tweaking up the contrast by 10% or so in post but when I do so I find that I nearly always like the rendition of skin tones in the more neutral settings. The other thing I notice is that the Samsung does a great job making files look very sharp on my monitor. Not sizzly sharp like you see on a lot of websites but detailed and micro detailed. In fact, the sharpening works so well for me that when I try to add sharpness it nearly always makes the images seem brittle and overdone.

I hadn't paid much attention to Samsung until now. I didn't have an opinion about their cameras and I never used on before but I will say this: Sony and Olympus should rush to Samsung, do some industrial espionage and find out who is producing their online owner's manuals and who is programming their camera GUI and menu system and then kidnap them, pay them cajole them and beg them to do the same for their cameras. I've learned the Nex menus and I'm good with the image quality and the hand/camera interface but it really shouldn't take weeks to feel comfortable with a menu. Two days, tops, for an experienced shooter. With the Samsung NX 300 I looked through the online manual once and I've never looked back. Nor have I been unable to quickly find and change any parameter. I don't know if that's the make it or break it for any camera choice but it's a comfortable way to present and leverage whatever benefits your camera might have.....

I will also say that the implementation of the touch screen is very good and the screen is mostly responsive. I prefer buttons but I know a whole generation of photographers who are being raised on iPhones will find it an almost transparent accommodation to their current system interface.

I read in one of the forums yesterday that I am being short changed by only having the kit lens but I disagree. I happen to be a big fan of kit lenses. I was happy when my Sony a58 came with a new and improved kit lens and I've made good use of it. I think if more people spent time really working on their fundamentals they'd see that the choice of lens and the quality of the lens might be, in most situations, the least of their photographic handicaps....

Why black and white canoes when there a beautiful people out in the world waiting to be photographed? Well, when I was in fifth grade I went to a YMCA summer camp and we had an overnight canoe trip. I took a number of black and white photos with an old, zone focusing Argus A-3 camera. At some point on the return voyage my canoe tipped over and many of my possessions, like my sleeping bag, my clothes and my fresh copy of the first Marvel comic book to feature the Fantastic Four, slowly settled to the bottom of the lake but the camera miraculously found it's way to my right hand and emerged unscathed as I treaded water. I tossed it into another canoe and then worked with my camp councilor to right my dodgy craft. The film went to the drugstore after camp and six or seven images of canoes, among some badly done images of marshmallow roasting, found their way back into my hands as 3.5 by 5 inch, deckle edged, black and white prints. It was an exciting time and the canoes triggered some memory ripple of a simpler time somehow faintly connected to photography. And there I am.

 Canoe 2. Samsung NX 300. Converted to black and white in Aperture.

Ben and I go out on an early assignment.

Early. At the Pool.

Can't get away from the pool and wouldn't want to if I could. Usually, at 7 am, I am over there in lane three or four trying to keep up with the other people in my masters program and the boy pictured above is out running with his cross country team, but this week is the down week after school lets out and we needed to shoot this project so I convinced Ben to assist me for the morning shoot.

We were commissioned to make individual photographs of the Rollingwood Waves Summer League swimmers and then do four big group shots of the different age groups. By the end of the morning we'd photographed 85 swimmers and the aforementioned groups and we were ready for iced tea and a couple of Las Palomas Restaurant combination plates.

We always like to show the pool in the background so we set up beside the pool deck, under a high canopy that would block most of the direct sun. My lighting was simple: I used an 1100 watt second Elinchrom Ranger RX AS power pack and one head. The head fired into a 28 inch Fotodiox beauty dish modified with a white diffusion cover. The metal reflector never seems to have the kinds of problems with wind that umbrellas or softboxes have and the light was between hard and soft. Mostly perfect for young swimmers.

I set up the light for each swimmer so that the bottom of the beauty dish was slightly above their chin line and that made for flattering illumination all the way around. The only technical aspect was to keep the look of the background (pool in full sun and pool with cloud cover) the same with changes in cloud cover and sunlight. Nice thing about cameras that pre-chimp is that it's so easy to see the background change. With an OVF your eye makes instant accommodations but no so (at least for me) with the EVF. It shows me the background getting lighter or darker in a very real way.  I adjusted the shutter speed of the camera to compensate.

Ben assisted me by handling the paperwork and the payment from parents. We're primitive on these shoots. The parents fill out the name of their kid on a sheet of paper and we have the kid hold up the sheet for the first shot, zoom in and make sure we capture a face and a name so that I have a clear identification of the child when I do post processing and order prints. Silly simple. A constant reference.

Also, Ben is better than I am at turning down  any unreasonable requests or parent drama (of which there was none).

I used a Sony a99 camera with an older, Minolta 24-85mm 3.5 to 4.5 zoom lens. Why? I like it just fine and the focal length range is just right. The flash was triggered by a set of FlashWaves radio triggers. I used the camera at it's 10 megapixel, highest quality Jpeg setting. The biggest prints will be the 5x7 inch group shots and the main lighting was unerringly consistent so it really wouldn't have made any sense to shoot RAW or even bigger. How much more time do you want to spend in post? How many pixels do you want to throw away?

We wrapped around noon and headed off to our favorite, neighborhood Mexican food restaurant and settled in for a nice meal. Another job, another notch on the tripod leg. 

Hello readers. I hear you loud and clear. You are not interested in hearing about video. We'll try to keep it to a minimum. Really.

 This is NOT a grab frame from a video...

Putting the marketing construct to the test...Making photographs and video in the same session.

Equipped for fast moving work.

Things move fast when your intentions are linear and well defined. I've been working on a marketing message for hybrid creative content and I believe I know where most of my mid-tier corporate clients are sticking their feet in and testing the waters. They want video interviews and short programming for their websites and associated web marketing and they want still images to compliment or introduce the video. My message is very succinct and direct: I can help you get both halves of the equation with one set up and one appointment. We can set up lighting that works well for both video and still imaging. We can provide big, rich digital still images at very high resolution and we can turn right around, at the flick of dial and give you juicy, 1080p, 60fps video with great sound. We set up one set of lights and use them for everything. We set up one camera and get you the kind of stylistic and visual continuity that wasn't even possible just four or five years ago.

The still and video images can be intercut or dissolved between with none of the obvious technical disconnections (different depth of field, different color renderings, etc.) that come from using a big sensor still camera and a smaller sensor video camera. If we can capture it all on one sensor I just makes sense that the imagery will match up. And that's important when your message needs to be able to go back and forth from still to motion, seamlessly.

We are currently using large, fluorescent light banks, modified by cinema-style flags, diffusers and nets to create lighting that works well for either medium. By using weaker diffusers we can add additional snap to the video and by adding more diffusion we can create softer transitions for still imaging which can be more easily enhanced in post production.

matching impedance is a lovely thing.

So, how is all this working out? Well, we've done two hybrid shoots nearly back to back with the most recent one taking place yesterday morning. One of the large medical practices (think: over 100 physicians) is investigating an app which can scan an image on a print advertisement and then delivery a targeted video directly to your phone or other mobile device. Their idea? Click on the doctor in an ad and go straight to a video that dissolves from the still into a full on video of the doctor giving the positive talking points about the practice. Seems interesting since everyone has a smart phone now.  They asked me to come over and provide both halves of the equation for two different subjects. 

When I first arrived we were scheduled into a big meeting space but the air conditioning was so loud that it almost drowned out the noise from the ice machine! We steered the cart down the hall to a smaller, much quieter conference room and set up there. 

I like to be at a shooting location about an hour before our first subject is scheduled to walk in. It gives me time to set up lighting and backgrounds and test all the system. 

I lit the set up with two identical fluorescent lights (four bulbs each) as the main and fill lights. I used one with a two stop diffuser for the fill light and one with a 3/4 stop diffuser as the main light. Big, bright and soft. I lit the gray, seamless background with a small, two bulb, bank, and added a very subtle backlight with a Fiilex P360 LED fixture. We were shooting at ISO 160, f4 at 1/50th of a second (1080p at 24 fps). I set up a Rode NTG 2 microphone on a microphone stand and plugged it into my Beachtek mixer which acts as a transformer to match impedance between the microphone output and the camera's microphone input. I monitored the sound with closed back headphones and it was gorgeous.

This is the Rokinon Cinema style 35mm f1.5 lens. It's great. We used its big brother,

the 85mm 1.5 for yesterday's project.

I worked by getting my portrait done first. This allowed the art director and I to fine tune the image. Once we had a good portrait on the memory card I switched over to video mode and we worked to match the expression and placement of our subject as well as we could and we starting rolling on the first part of the scripted presentation. The idea was to be close so we could bring the video out of the still via a dissolve.

When I got back to the studio office I pulled the large, RAW still portraits off the memory card and processed them in Aperture. I tossed away about half the images for each subject so my client wouldn't have to wade through half closed eyes, weird grins and the typical stuff portrait subjects come up with as they struggle with the self-conscious selves in front of the camera. Once I edited and color corrected the "keepers" I exported the files as mid-sized jpegs and uploaded them to Smugmug, into a private web gallery so the client could browse through and select the keeper from each subject. I'll take each selected file and make all kinds of tonal corrections, and retouch blemishes and skin issues via either PhotoShop or Portrait Professional 11. Or both.

Once the gallery was sent off I got to work on the video footage. Now, I'm not the editor for this project but I do believe in providing good quality footage and, just as in still imaging, there's a lot you can do to fine tune a file in post production. I use the first clip for each subject to build a series of corrections which I can then stamp on all similar clips. I use Final Cut Pro X and I do scoped corrections for exposure, saturation and color. I want snappy and open but with a good, black base.

I turn over the corrected footage and the original camera files on a DVD to the client with notes about what I did for the corrected footage. It's delivered in Pro Res 422 and the files can be large.

I know we photographers get carried away in praising our tools from time to time but I really do want to share just how great the a99 is for shooting video. From the focus peaking to the real time audio level control just about everything on the a99 is optimized to help me create good, solid video products.

The client was very pleased with both halves of the project and we talked about doing one or two of these a month for the near future. Our previous project was for a high tech manufacturer's website video and, while there isn't ongoing work there they were very enthusiastic about the idea of only having to sit in front of the camera once in order to accomplish two very different (but very similar) tasks. 

I am continuing to promote this kind of hybrid approach to content creation. Once we've got it wired in I'll start on phase X, the writing of the scripts... but I'm having so much fun learning to do this stuff step by step.

(Note: We don't normally use a microphone on camera but did it here for the sake of the photograph. We'll use the photograph, taken with the new Samsung NX300, for some of our direct print marketing.)

Classical Product Photography. New York. Primary Packaging.

extreme close up.

the wide shot.

The assignments I cherish are the ones where the art director or client says, "I loved your (fill in blank) work. Can you go to this printing factory in New York City and just make art the way you see it?"

The correct answer is: "Yes. Thank you."

Time in the water. I heard all about it yesterday from my kid.

You've probably read me making the point that you only get better as a swimmer if you spend time in the water. More practice usually means that your body learns subconscious corrections during swims while your brain does some iterative trial and error with new techniques, layering them in with tried and true techniques. Over time your hands and feet and your brain develop a feel for the water that makes your swimming more fluid and enjoyable. I say it all the time. Mastery is all about time in the water.

So I've been trying to master video editing and it's hard and frustrating. Not the technical stuff; I know which buttons to push and how to make my clips look the way I want them to but it's the actual sequencing and the cadence and knowing where to end one segment and start another one that seems difficult to me. These are stylist choices and aesthetic choices. I guess a video editing style reflects a person's story telling styles.

So last weekend my son edited some food preparation footage he'd shot for school project and I was mesmerized by the way the quick cuts and the music created a 1:30 piece that riveted my attention for the enture duration. Yesterday we were out jogging around the lake in the heat of the afternoon and I asked him how he learned to edit so well. Was it the classes at school?

He glanced over and then said, "Well, you have to consider that I started playing around with video when I was about ten and that my friends and I have been through a lot of trial and error in trying to edit our stuff for the YouTube channel and stuff. If you add in the three years of cinematography classes at school you'd get that I've edited a couple of hundred pieces. That, dad, is how you learn an editing style."

Then I asked his if he wrote the scripts first and if the narration was an important framework. He responded, "Video is basically a visual art. I know what story I want to tell but I start with all the visual pieces and I put them together first. Then I add in the basic narration. But here's the deal: a good video is a like a children's picture book. The pictures are what captivate the kids. You only need enough words to drive the story along and no more."

We jogged on. He looked at me and decided I needed a few words of encouragement so he added, "Dad, it's just practice and paying attention. Do more videos for yourself and don't concentrate on client work. Once you've got a hundred fun videos under your belt you'll have a style and your clients will probably like it. It just takes time in the water."

I always give that advice to other people. Sometimes I need to hear it too.

I'm playing with a new camera. I've agreed to shoot it all Summer. But not exclusively...

The Austin Children's Museum. Late afternoon. 

I won't beat around the bush and be coy. I'm playing with a new camera that Samsung sent along. It's the NX 300, a mirrorless system with a very nicely designed body and a really nice 20 megapixel sensor. I'm going into this with a totally open mind as I've never owned a Samsung camera or shot with one. I'm not planning on writing one of my long winded reviews on the system but you will see samples on the blog at least on a weekly basis. 

I was sitting in the studio this morning when studio dog growled and rushed barking to the door. She has the little sideways angled gait that dogs sometimes do and the way she half growled and half barked I knew instantly that it was her greeting specifically for the morning Fedex woman. We were right. I accepted a small box while keeping myself between the doorway and my dog.

Half an hour later I was finished reading the (very well done and very understandable) owner's manual and I had the camera charging up one of the two batteries. At this juncture I would just like to stop and congratulate Samsung's public relations team. I've tested cameras for years and never had a single manufacturer send along a second (and fully charged) camera battery. Bravo guys. That's what photographers want in the real world.

The system in my hands consisted of the NX 300 body and the 18-55mm kit lens. The extra battery. And an itsy-bitsy shoe mount flash that gets its power from the camera. This is a camera that doesn't have an EVF. It's all on the back screen. Almost against my religion. But----remember that open mind thing....  I took it outside into the shriveling, glistening, baking Texas sun and I had some difficulty seeing the screen, especially without my reading glasses, so I did what any normal photographer does: I went to the bottom drawer of Craftsman Rolling Tool Chest #3 and I selected one of the many loupes I've bought over the year to check shots on Nikon and Canon cameras that I've owned. What luck! I selected the Hoodman Loupe that has the elastic cords for securing the loupe tight against the screen. It worked well and it also has a generous optical adjustment so that even with my eye right up to the exit ocular the view was pristine and sharp.

It was only 95 degrees in downtown Austin in the late afternoon so I knew it would be the perfect time to take the new camera out for a spin. Early verdict based on looking carefully at about 50 choices out of the 300+ shot is that the new sensor is very, very good. Very neutral colors and a very high sense of both sharpness and resolution. Kinda fun using the loupe. The hipsters didn't know what to think as they held out their phones and small cameras in the classic: "dirty baby diaper hold.." 

Caffe Medici. Late Afternoon.

Apart from my misgivings about the lack of an EVF I'm finding the camera to be fun, fast and facile. More to come, sporadically.

A fun image from my event photography in December 2012. President Bill Clinton and Linkin Park's, Mike Shinoda.

©2012 Kirk Tuck. 

Sometimes I write blogs complaining about the pitfalls and setbacks of life as a photographer but most of the time it's just straight out fun. Back in December I got to shoot images of Mike Shinoda playing with a new, touch screen Dell computer and making original music in front of 5,000 people and then later shaking hands with President Bill Clinton. It was like a weird meeting of cross-generational stars. I got to meet both of them and the things they have in common are an uncanny charisma and the ability to see a bigger picture that most people do (myself included).

I used a Sony a77 to make the image, lit it with an Elinchrom Ranger RX AS electronic flash, and left it alone with only minimal processing..

Nervous at the time of the shoot but happy with the memory of the event.

What does ISO 6400 look like on an a58?

I shot this in the low, low light of twilight at the end of the swim suit fashion show on Thurs. I can see some splotchy noise in the lefthand woman's left cheek. Part of the noise comes from a bit of underexposure. I had to increase exposure by half a stop in Aperture. Otherwise the image is unprocessed and no noise reduction was performed. While this performance doesn't put the camera into the rarified top classes of noise free cameras I think it's pretty respectable for a $600, 20 megapixel amateur-oriented camera.  Just an observation for anyone who is interested and also to show Mr. Lonien what the camera looks like there.

Of course, when the noise gets sticky the cowardly run to the black and white settings. A little monotone hides lots of sins...

Thom Hogan does a film camera site. Wow. That's so counter-intuitive. But talk about niche-ing the market...

One of the few 35mm cameras whose build quality made Leicas M's look like mass market trash.

Thom Hogan is stirring the nostalgia bucket with a new website dedicated to great film cameras of yesteryear that can still be well used today. If you are interested you might want to give his new site a spin:  http://www.filmbodies.com/  Thom is a good writer with an amazing depth of knowledge about photography. He comes from the techno/engineering side but his reviews and articles have a good left/right brain balance. And, remarkably, he also likes to write about the business of cameras. 

But all his new site did for me was to rekindle my lust for fun cameras from yesteryear. While I still have Nikon F's and F2's and F3's and an F4 rumbling around in one of the equipment cabinets I'm much more of an elitist snob that Thom so I dug out what may have been the ultimate in camera construction in all of the twentieth century to ruminate about. Yes, it's the Alpa 9d, individually hand built in Switzerland by a company that also made precision parts for the premier watch companies. 

While Leicas are very nicely built and probably are the ultimate expression of assembly line cameras nothing out there beats a camera made by hand, by Swiss craftsmen, using thick and rugged alloys like surgical steel for critical parts. When I hold a Leica M in one hand and an Alpa 9d in the other one feels "well made" and the other one seems like absolutely alien inspired, bulletproof, indestructible and timelessly crafted.  The Pignon company started making cameras in the 1940's and stopped in the late 1970's and, in all, produced fewer than 40,000 cameras of all kinds, total. Very clean copies of any Swiss Alpa (Cosina made a modern version but it never sold well) go for insane prices at auction. These were cameras with shutters that could be set very precisely, and in third stop increments, in a time when other maker's fully mechanical cameras had shutter that could only be calibrated down to one stop increments.

But as great as these single lens reflex camera bodies were the icing on the cake was the selection of apochromatic 50mm and 100mm lenses they had made (Also by a Swiss company). Photographers routinely dismissed the lenses from any serious competition because they were very expensive and they ruined the grade curve. They were that good in their time.

"The Kern Macro Switar lens was a 50 mm lens at F1.8 or F1.9. It was an apochromat, and is still highly regarded as possibly the best standard lens ever offered." --Wikipedia

Pretty much the gold standard for ultimate 35mm image quality in the 1960's was a roll of Kodachrome 25 film, a Kern-Switar lens and an Alpa precision crafted body. The example in these photos is of my favorite Alpa 9d, because it's the one I own. I am in the middle of restoring the cosmetics and I've stripped off the peeling, 40 year old leatherette and am trying to order replacements (yes, someone still does it...). The camera itself still functions flawlessly. Since there were so few made and so few sold in the U.S.A. I've never seen one at a photo walk or on a Flickr forum. Or for that matter anywhere outside a collector's glass cabinet.

 The entire camera bottom and back must be removed to load film or extract it. Every part is, at least, handcrafted steel alloy. You think your camera is weatherproof? This one is volcano and earthquake proof. And like a Bugatti engine the fittings are so precise and finely machined that it seals without the need for gaskets. You think a Leica is tough? This camera invented tough.

Is it fun to use? Now that's an entirely different question....