I like taking industrial landscapes and it doesn't really matter to me what camera I use.

Industrial Landscape. Austin 2011. Hasselblad film camera. Scan.

It is nice if I can shoot it square....

OT: Butterfly clinic. Swimming with both arms in sync.

Our masters team did a butterfly clinic today with coaches, Josh and Kristen who are both accomplished swimmers. Butterfly, done correctly, is perhaps the most beautiful of the four competitive strokes and it's also the hardest to swim well. It requires an undulation of the body that seems hard to learn in later years. Part of the difficulty in learning to swim it well comes from the sheer effort required to swim it incorrectly. The stroke requires both arms to pull through the water simultaneously, the rhythm of the breathing is critical and the two pulse dolphin kick must also be integrated into the mix at just the right times. Until you master the timing you mostly get through the water by brute force. If you master the rhythm and undulation then your whole body creates forward thrust and the stroke becomes easier.

We started with a short, 600 yard warm up and then proceeded through a series of kicking drills. It can be frustrating to dolphin kick on your back with arms by your side. Compared to regular swimming you have the feeling that you're just not making much forward progress. But the kick and the timing of the kick (which should start at the shoulders and roll through your body to your legs) is critical to getting everything else right.

After the kicking we integrated the arms into the whole stroke with a series of sets that mixed up butterfly with freestyle and backstroke. Near the end we put on fins and did a series of 50 yard swims in which we dolphin kicked under water halfway down the pool then came up to the surface and swam butterfly with a fast arm turn over to the wall, turned and swam back down the pool (recovering) with a easy, loose freestyle.

What I've decided is that my weak spots, and the weak spots of many other swimmers who'd like to improve their butterfly stroke, are the power, or lack thereof, of my kick and my overall lack of flexibility. To get faster means I'll have to work on keeping my back, shoulders and hips flexible and I'll have to get by the pool on my own to get a lot more yards in doing the dolphin kick.

We learned and we swam. We all walked away with a good aerobic workout and some new ideas for improving our butterfly stroke. At the end of the workout the coaches brought out a crate full of PowerBar products and we stood around eating protein recovery bars and talking about technique.
A great way to start a Sunday morning. Not as a passive spectator but as an active participant.

The "sky effect" lens. 14mm.

We got lost a couple of times. Once when trying to find the wastewater treatment plant outside Abilene and another time trying to find a park but when we finally got our sense of the layout of Abilene we had no trouble finding the pistol and rifle ranges for the Abilene Police Department. It was fun (in a very American way) to photograph cadets and officers firing magazine after magazine at various kinds of targets. Some targets were engaged from static positions and others required the officers to move laterally while shooting.

I may have been wearing my safety glasses and a set of ear protectors but it didn't stop me from seeing this amazing cloudy sky just a quarter of an hour before the onset of sunset. I put down the GH3 and the telephoto zoom and grabbed the Sony a99 with the zany Rokinon 14mm and tried a few shots. I was happy with the result. This is one of those fun lenses that pushes one to try it over and over again with all kinds of subject matter until you basically burn out on the effect and go back to your regular way of engaging. But I'm still in the fascination period and having a blast making skies look dramatic.

The Rokinon 14mm Cine t3.5 Lens. Fun.

I had fun in Abilene and enjoyed using a new system and a new lens on an existing camera.

Concrete Expert. From an Annual Report three years ago.

I'll quickly admit that I'm more comfortable with medium telephoto lenses than with very wide angle lenses any day of the week. But that being said I'd like to talk about my new "favorite" lens, the 14mm t3.5 Rokinon Cine wide angle.  It's a lens I bought in anticipation of an upcoming project. I've been talking to a potential client who makes CT scanners about making video programming in some very tight spaces where their machines are installed. We're talking about very large machines in very small spaces. I've done a number of still images in similar installations and no matter how wide a lens I bring I always wished it was just a little bit wider...

I'm hoping to use the lens on a Sony a99, mounted on a slider, for the wide, overall shots that are critical to establishing the video.  Like all projects, nothing is certain until the ink is on a contract and we're watching the red light blink on the location. But it's always best to get some practice with a new tool so you have and idea of what are can do with a lens when you get onto an actual location. With that in mind I stuffed the 14mm and the Sony a99 into the left side of my big Domke bag and took it along with me on my assignment in Abilene, Texas.

Right up front you have to know that this $400 lens is not going to be anybody's first choice for architectural photography. It's got a lot of geometric distortion. Really....a lot. There are several shareware profiles out on the web that will go a long way toward correcting the distortion in Lightroom but I didn't really care about the distortion for the shots I was working on the last two days and in video the 16:9 crop takes away the worst of the distortion which occurs mostly along the edges of the full frame.

What the lens does have is very, very high sharpness in the middle of the frame, and, at f8, excellent sharpness over the entire frame. A bonus of the super wide angle of view is really deep depth of field. I found that I could get sharp focus at 10 feet and use a quick hyper focal calculation to essentially make the lens a "focus free" optic. By that I mean that if you focus correctly and set the aperture to f8 you'll have enough depth of field for just about anything you can think of.

I used the lens a lot yesterday to do full body shots and group shots close to the camera and leaned on the lenses ability to do dramatic wide skies in the background to add interest to the shots. It was a technique that worked really well.  I anticipate that most of my use with this lens will call from cropping down to a focal length of around 21mm since that seems more comfortable to my eyes.

The lens is very well built and fun to handle. Even though the front element is huge it's fairly well protected by the built in lens shade and there's a decent lens cap as well. The lens balances well on the a99 but may be too front heavy for a smaller camera. I'm not sure I'd be comfortable using it with an adapter on a smaller system like the Panasonic m4:3 cameras. But as a specialty optic is sure delivers what I wanted: Lots of information in the frame and a very dynamic way of rendering subjects in space.

My recommendation?  I'd buy it again.

That brings me to the primary system I used in Abilene, the Panasonic GH3.  I wanted to travel lighter this year. Last year I brought along a couple of Sony a77 cameras and a bag full of fast Sony lenses. I also brought along too many lights and too many accessories. This year I wanted to pack smaller and shoot smarter. And let me emphasize that by not being a "lens snob" I was able to largely accomplish those goals.

I packed a couple of GH3 bodies, two kittish lenses (the new 14-42 and the 45-150mm) the PanaLeica 25mm 1.4 and several manual focus half frame lenses (which I wound up not using), and a couple of manual, battery powered flashes. A much, much lighter assemblage of gear! And I had no trepidation about its ability to perform after having shot nearly 2,000 images with the same system under available light conditions last Saturday.

Here's what I liked about using the GH3 all day long yesterday: It's lightweight but it doesn't feel under built. It's rock solid, only lighter rock solid. The EVF is great and is also adjustable for luminance which means you can match it more exactly to match the image on the rear screen. The lenses focus quickly and surely. The flippy screen is great when using the camera low on a tripod and with an external loupe.

I've had the cameras for a very short time but the menus have already become second nature to me. I liked being able to move the AF point anywhere on the rear screen. You can also use your finger on the touch screen to set the AF point while looking in the EVF. Nice.  I got a lot of use out of the standard kit lens and it was more than adequate. Quite sharp in the middle and good on the edges, even near wide open! The longer zoom is optically very good and, at f8, sharp beyond my needs.

But my go to lens was the 25mm 1.4 which I tended to use at f3.5 or f4 for single subject shots. It's a really good lens which I reviewed about a year and a half ago. Nothing has changed my initial high regards.

I owned the previous camera from Panasonic, the GH2 but the GH3 seems like a completely reworked camera that's been upgraded, modernized and made more highly functional. They paid close attention to making buttons the right size, getting the auto switching between the EVF and the rear LCD just right and lots of other small details. One of my favorite things about the new camera is the battery life. The camera uses a much bigger, higher capacity battery (which may account for the increased size of the camera overall) that's about the size of the battery in my Sony a99.  I was able to shoot a bit more than 16 gigabytes of RAW-Jpeg information yesterday and still have the 2/3rd full indicator left on my original battery. For a mirror less camera that is nothing short of amazing. If I'm shooting more or less continuously and not chimping all the time I can get an enormous number of Jpegs. Last Saturday I shot well over 1,000 files with each of my two GH3s and never changed a battery. Nice.

There's one feature I did not even know the camera had and that's the auto switch in the hot shoe that senses when a flash is attached and turned on and sets the view screens to give one a bright finder image regardless of the camera settings. It's what you get when  you use a Sony a99 and switch "Setting Effect" to off. If you use an EVF or Live View camera you know that when you attach a flash you generally need to switch to a different viewing mode to get a scene bright enough to focus and compose in when you are in a dark environment. It's nice that his camera will do it for you. 

Take off the flash, or just turn it off and the camera reverts to your previous viewing setting. 

I originally bought the two GH3s for my video projects but they've grown on me as still cameras. I didn't find any situations (other than the lack of a super wide lens...) that made me want to grab another camera at any time during the whole shooting assignment. I did use the a99 sparingly but only as a partner with the new 14mm lens. 

Here's my short list of "pros" for the GH3:

1. Small size and happy weight

2. Good EVF and good auto switching with LCD

3. Nice selection of lenses, both Panasonic and Olympus

4. Wild and crazy good video performance

5. Best in class battery life

6. Optimum files size for long run still jobs

Here's my current shortlist of "cons" for the GH3:

1. 

Edit: I'm removing my paragraph about Formula One in Austin. While I am vigorously opposed to the government subsidies larded out for this event I've come to realize that some people like it. I don't but then I don't really like most mass gatherings so I've decided to remove my judgmental comments and the e-mails they engendered and we'll hew to the topic of imaging instead.

Packing up and getting on the road.

Berlin.

It's Weds. morning and I'm moving through the studio with a sense of purpose. An art director I've worked with for years is meeting me here at 1:30pm and we're heading up to Abilene, Texas, about four hours north of Austin. We'll be shooting images for an annual report and I'm in the sorting and packing mode. What will I need and what will fit in the Honda CR-V?  

We'll cruise up at a leisurely pace this afternoon, spend the night and then get right to work first thing in the morning. If past assignments are an indication we'll be shooting people working indoors and we'll be shooting big public works projects outdoors. Last year we did photos of giant fire engines and first responders at the start, shot airline maintenance somewhere in the middle of the day and finished up shooting alligators at the zoo. What it means is that we have to be prepared for a range of things.

I'm packing light. I'm taking a couple of Panasonic GH3s and four m4:3 lenses that range from 14 to 150mm. I'd like to shoot as much as possible with the 25mm Summilux and the 60mm Olympus Pen FT 60mm 1.4 but I have a suspicion that the wide end is where we'll see the most action. I finally tested the Rokinon 14mm Cine lens yesterday and it's fit for service so I'll bring it along attached to a Sony a99 body for stuff that needs to be really, really wide. I know that this lens has a lot of distortion but I've found a really good profile that I can use in Lightroom to straighten out the edges...

I'm going equally light on light. I've packed a few battery powered, on camera flashes but I'm also packing the enormous and heavy Elinchrom Ranger RX AS flash unit and two heads. This system is capable of belting out 1100 watt seconds about 250 times in a row, if needed. I plugged in the batteries last night (primary and a spare) and we've got green lights everywhere. I'm bringing along two Elinchrom modifiers. They're like enclosed shoot through umbrellas. One small, one large. 

The lighting kit gets rounded out with two light stands and, of course, a tripod. A wooden one since it's going to be cold up there and I hate touching the bare metal on tripods when we get down to the freezing zone.

What else do I do to prepare for a couple days on the road? I make sure to get a fast, hard swim in so I hit the pool with a bunch of people from my master's swim team at 7:00 am. It was 36 degrees and steam was coming off the pool. It's a heated, outdoor pool. One of my favorite coaches was on deck and writing the workout on a white board. Her name is Kathleen Hersey and she swam butterfly in the 2012 London Olympics. She has amazingly good energy and a cheerful heart. We swam a bunch of different sets and knocked out a couple miles at a good pace.

I'm happy that I'm still excited about hitting the water on a cold day and pounding out the yards. You'd think that after over fifty years of swimming up and down various pools and watching the black line on the bottom one would get bored but every time in the pool is exciting and fun for me. It's active meditation, it's competition and it's concentration. Lots of good stuff for your body and brain to do before that first cup of coffee...

As an afterthought to my packing I realized that I needed a good, fun (non-work) camera to drag along and take silly snapshots with so I stuffed one of the K-01 Pentax cameras into the car. I'm taking the black one with silver knobs. I think of it as my "formal" clown camera. And just to be different I've stuck the kit zoom, the weather resistant 18-55mm version, on the camera. I know it seems pedestrian but I've come to like it pretty well. 

I can hardly wait to go shoot. This is the kind of straight forward work I really like doing. 

Stay warm!