6.01.2014

Ben Graduates from High School. Headed east for college.


Over the years I used Ben as a model, an assistant, a sound engineer, a second camera operator in video, and so much more. He's a wonderful kid and he just graduated from one of the top three high schools in Texas. One of the top 50 high schools in the country. He was in the National Honor Society, a varsity cross country runner, awarded as a distinguished athlete scholar and so much more. He graduated with a grade point average over 100. Seven of his eight classes last semester were Advanced Placement classes.  He'll be attending a private college in upstate New York in the Fall. He earned a merit scholarship to the school that he chose. Suffice it to say I will miss the best assistant and most patient model I ever had. Without a doubt the smartest kid I ever met.  But I think he'll have a blast for the next four years. 

Makes every karate practice, soccer practice, swim practice, tutoring session, boy scout meeting,homework helping session and Pokemon card tournament I ever went to with him seem like it was all worth it. 

What does he shoot with? Still using a Sony a57 and a couple of inexpensive lenses. But he's mostly a video guy. Will be follow in my footsteps and pursue a career in the visual arts? Naw, I hope we've done a better job raising him than that...... :-)


It's a VSL tradition: The Sunday afternoon walk. Today it's all about Samsung's 85mm 1.4

©2014 Kirk Tuck
www.visualsciencelab.blogspot.com 

Early on I downgraded the Samsung NX30 for several reasons. The main reason was that the EVF is not spectacular and doesn't match the rear screen. The secondary issue was the silliness of dedicating so many resources to NFC and Wi-fi. Which I still consider a supreme waste of resources. So I was lukewarm about the camera and hell bent on making the m4:3 cameras work for everything. 

Then I shot a job for the people at the Appleseed Foundation and I realized that the combination of the really good 20 megapixel sensor and the insanely good 85mm 1.4 lens made the NX30 a very powerful tool for a portrait photographer. I grabbed that camera as I headed out the door today and walked around downtown just looking for stuff to shoot. 

The image on top is my favorite. Not because of the content but because of the wonderful way the building is rendered out of focus in the background, along with the almost impressionistic drawing of the clouds. Have a super fast lens combined with a detailed sensor is a nice thing. 

While I love the performance of the GH4 there's space in my photographic tool kit for a worthwhile combination like the NX30 + 85mm 1.4.  I've also discovered something uniquely interesting about this camera. The EVF is actually showing me the real parameters of the raw file. It's always a little lighter and less saturated than the jpeg file. I never realized this until I switched the camera to shoot raw+jpeg today. I'd look at the image in the finder, like it and shoot. When I chomped it on the rear screen it was darker and more saturated. I had chalked this up to a mismatch between screens but when I opened both files in PhotoShop I found that the Raw files matched the look I got on the internal, EVf screen while the jpeg versions matched (perfectly) what I saw on the external screen. Weird, right?

But knowing this I know have more leeway in deciding how to use and interpret the information. I'll be testing the EVF more and depending on it from now on. Not a fault but a feature not listed in the (damn) owner's manual. Now I have more respect for the camera. In addition the detail I'm getting in the raw files is astoundingly good. As good as what I used to get with the Sony a99 at 24 megapixels. I'll chalk it up the the 85mm maximizing the interplay between lens and sensor. I am smitten with the 85mm lens. I almost did the unthinkable and picked up the phone to call my contact at Samsung to see how cheaply I could get another NX30 body. I was mentally juggling the idea of making it into a full professional system for some of my stuff. I stopped myself and reminded myself not to be so mercurial. How could I be so fickle when just a week ago I'd been gobsmacked by the video performance of the GH4? All the cameras are so good now. It's just that they are all good at separate things....

©2014 Kirk Tuck
www.visualsciencelab.blogspot.com 

©2014 Kirk Tuck
www.visualsciencelab.blogspot.com 

©2014 Kirk Tuck
www.visualsciencelab.blogspot.com 

©2014 Kirk Tuck
www.visualsciencelab.blogspot.com 

©2014 Kirk Tuck
www.visualsciencelab.blogspot.com 

©2014 Kirk Tuck
www.visualsciencelab.blogspot.com 

©2014 Kirk Tuck
www.visualsciencelab.blogspot.com 

©2014 Kirk Tuck
www.visualsciencelab.blogspot.com 

©2014 Kirk Tuck
www.visualsciencelab.blogspot.com 

©2014 Kirk Tuck
www.visualsciencelab.blogspot.com 

©2014 Kirk Tuck
www.visualsciencelab.blogspot.com 

I had to buy a camera yesterday to use as a prop for the cover of the soon to be published Novel...

The Prop Camera.
Nikon F4s with ancient 50mm 1.4
©2014 Kirk Tuck

The novel, The Lisbon Portfolio, is out of my hands and in the hands of my book designer. My proofreader loved the story and had a grand time showing me each and every inconsistency and misspelling. We are nearing the finish line and everything is looking great. In two or three weeks, at the most, you'll be able to grab an electronic copy from Amazon. A short time after that you'll be able to order a printed copy from Amazon, if you'd rather read from real paper. 

The story takes place at the dawn of the digital age. The year is 1999. Our protagonist, Henry, is sporting a couple of Kodak professional DSLRs but his personal camera is still loaded up with film and clicking along. Henry is off to cover a corporate trade show in Lisbon unaware that he is about to be sucked into a world of corporate espionage and double dealing. It's an action packed story with enough twists and turns to rival a mountain road. Will Henry escape with his life? Will his photographs turn out? 

But, in order to get the book out we needed to have cover art. The cover design that won our in-house contest juxtaposes a man shooting with a camera up to his eye on one side with a hand pointing a gun on the other side. And in the background is a ghosted back image of Lisbon from my own archive. 

We had the image of the hand with the pistol and, of course, we have the image of Lisbon, but we needed a good, silhouetted shot of the man with a camera. Full length, in a dark suit. Holding a camera of the era....

All the design elements were bouncing around in my head yesterday as I walked into Precision Camera to torture myself with another peek at the Nocticron 42.5mm f1.2.  I went to Precision to buy a new camera strap to replace the promotional strap on my Sony RX10 (that's a good sign; it means I'll probably be keeping that camera for a while...) I also wanted to get a boom pole holder for my Gitzo microphone boom. And I wanted to replace an umbrella that was damaged on a shoot last week. It was one of the Westcott 43 inch collapsible umbrellas. They fold down really small and they're only $20. 

At any rate, I was nosing around, trying to avoid the huge and unexpected crowd who had come for the in-store Photo Expo when I stumbled across a beautiful Nikon F4s in the used cabinet. It's one of my favorite models since it has the MB-21 battery pack which runs the camera from 4 double "A" batteries. I thought that this camera, coupled with a vintage 50mm 1.4 lens would be the perfect prop for my book cover model to hold. Granted, it's not digital but it has the correct gravitas and I was pretty sure it would be inexpensive...

I bargained like a rug dealer in the Grand Bazaar and walked out the door with it. On Tues. or Wednesday we'll set up the shoot and use the new prop. My original intention, once the shot was done, was to put the camera on a shelf with some old Leica rangefinders, an ancient Alpa camera and Nikon F2's and F's. But then I made the mistake of loading a roll of Tri-X into the thing and.....away we go. At least a full weekend of nostalgically shooting film. I'm sure I'll be sobered up by the bill for processing I'll get sometime next week. Oh well. A small price to pay for the perfect prop. 

To reiterate: The book is in production. It's being beautifully designed and laid out. And it's being done by someone who, unlike me, does not procrastinate. For a certain demographic of photographers this may be the hot book of Summer 2014. Stay tuned.



Studio Portrait Lighting

A Sunday afternoon, off topic blog about making poached eggs.

Samsung 85mm 1.4 lens. NX30 Camera.

I opted to go to the 10am swim workout this morning and I found it packed with fast people. We did a lot of yards, circling in the lanes, packed in like sardines. My favorite set was a "golf" set.  One of the secrets to swimming long and fast is to make sure your stroke is very efficient. That means getting from one end of the pool to the other in as few strokes as possible.

The golf set is designed to make you concentrate on efficiency in your technique. In golf the low score wins. That's the premise of this drill. Count your strokes for 50 yards, add in your elapsed time to swim the 50 yards and you have your "score."  We did twenty 50's on a minute. It's a long interval and you get X seconds rest (depending on your speed). All totaled that's one thousand yards. 

Here's how we did the drill: You swim your first 50 and count your strokes (I averaged 15 per length or 30 total for the 50). Then on each successive 50 you try to drop your stroke count by at least one. When you hit the point where you can't improve or you miss your previous low you are required to sprint the next 50 hard and then start the stroke count descend over again. At the very end of the drill we each sprinted a timed 50 with the intention of combining speed and efficiency.

If you swim a 50 yard sprint in about 30 seconds and you can hold your stroke count to 30 then your overall score is 60. My best score today was a middling 68. Some of the fast guys (like the young Olympians in lane six) were actually "shooting" well under 60. As with everything it's a combination of technique meeting intention and practice.

After the "golf" set and a bunch of other, assorted, yardage I headed back home and I was hungry. I decided to make some poached eggs and serve them to myself on some toasted, sprouted grain bread. But first I had to look up how to poach an egg. It's surprisingly easy and may be the healthiest way to eat eggs. 

Here's how you do it: Use the best eggs you can get. The ones from chickens that are free-ranging omega 3 eating, organic-vegetarian feed eating birds. Let the eggs sit out for thirty minutes so you aren't putting them into boiling water cold. Boil two quarts of water in a deep pan and add a bit of vinegar to the water. Just a tablespoon full will do. Crack your egg and divide the shell in one quick motion so the egg drops into the water in a uniform structure. This is the spot that is crucial. If you "pour" your egg into the water in a long flourish it will have many tendrils and the white won't surround the yolk in an aesthetically pleasing way. 

With the water at a gentle boil let the eggs cook for three minutes. A bit longer if you want a solid yolk. I use a pasta scooper to gently pull the eggs out of the water and deposit them on my toast. Voila. You have poached eggs. Three are just right after a nice work out. 

If you intend to photograph your poached eggs I suggest a nice, longer focal length macro lens. My favorite "egg" lens is the Nikkor 55mm Micro lens from the 1960's. Sharp but not too contrast. Convincing and not overly edgy. That, and some big soft light.



Studio Portrait Lighting

5.31.2014

Another image from the museum trip yesterday...And off topic domestic stories.

©2014 Kirk Tuck, for www.visualsciencelab.blogspot.com
The Sony RX10. At the Blanton Museum.

I bought my kid a phone today. I thought it only fair. He's graduating from high school and while many of his friends, with parents in the high tech industries, outfitted their children with state of the art, smartphones many years ago poor Ben has been laboring along with a nasty little flip phone with service provided by TracFone. It's one of the companies that allows you to buy minutes in advance. Use up your minutes and you have to come back and buy more. I thought this solution would provide two advantages: First, it would teach the boy to conserve his minutes and prioritize his phone use.  Second, it would limit the damage a runaway binge of texting would inflict on my finances (as I was paying for the service). 

In the end the first phone we got was so odious to use that Ben texted only in dire emergencies. Those times when one had to find out, "where are we meeting for dinner?" Or my favorite, "Is there cross country practice this morning?" Thankfully he has never gotten into the habit of gratuitous and continuous texting and messaging. The tiny keys were a good deterrence. 

I thought we should acknowledge his maturity and scholarship with a new phone. One he wouldn't mind using. After all, when he leaves to go to school in the Fall we do want him to call us or text us on a regular basis. So I started to study various cellphone "plans." Which quickly led me to understand that the service I had contracted for years ago was......not state of the art. 

I hated texting at the time and still do, but now it seems that more and more clients default directly to the tiny keyboard to stay in touch. I did not originally have free texting on my plan and recently realized that I was paying twenty cents per text. All the time. Then I came to understand that my wife and I were sharing a data plan with 500 megabytes of data per month. Something like five big files transferred. Finally, I remembered that in my dogged determination to save money, no matter how much it cost me, I had set up the plan to share 500 minutes of talk time with my spouse...

Clearly not a good plan for the 21st century.

After conferring with the boy we decided on an iPhone 5s. And we landed on some sort of "family plan." Now we have unlimited texts and calls and we're sharing 10 gigabytes per month of data. Grudgingly moving into the 21st century. Who knows what might happen next. Is there any real reason to have cable television? Naw. I didn't think so. 

5.29.2014

A visit to the museum is rejuvenating for the eyes and the mind. Also, how art taught me to stop caring about sharpness.

Blanton Museum ceiling. Main lobby. 
©2014 Kirk Tuck

I've been doing my part to staunch the flow of gratuitous images by not shooting anything that doesn't serve a purpose or inspire me to look at my newly captured image twice. I walked downtown yesterday and shot some more or less meaningless photography and then I did popular culture a favor by erasing the card on my way back to the car. But there are still things I like to see. And there are a few concepts I wanted to share that might be more effectively presented with images to show my point,  along with the words.

I went to the Blanton Art Museum on the University of Texas at Austin campus today and I had the same reactions I seem to have every time I visit. It's almost like reliving epiphanies. I'd say that I wouldn't have to go back if my memory were better but the reality is that time spent quietly with art is always rejuvenating and each time I go it's a totally difference internal experience. I guess that's because so much of every experience revolves around where our minds are, in the moment. 

My first reaction is that Art is so much different viewed in person than when viewed on the screen of my computer. For one thing it's generally framed and presented in its own space, free from visual intervention. My monitor is on a desk covered with hard drive enclosures, post-it notes and the general hysteria of technology. I am always amazed at how much I react to the different scale of all the pieces. 

Some paintings are huge while some are as small as 8x10 inches. I saw a octo-tych of Andy Warhol images of Marilyn Monroe that were each about the size of postage stamps. The Battle statue collection is mostly life sized. The various modern paintings can be the size of a fairly big wall. The point is that scale is so much a part of each work and it's the first thing to be denuded by viewing representational on a set screen size. 

There's also a lot to be said for being able to look at work from an angle or from a different vantage point. While it's true that you can move your head from side to side when looking at your monitor it is hardly the same thing. There's a satisfying feeling about being able to move close, within inches, to a painting in order to examine the very texture of the underlying canvas and then being able to move back to the other side of a room to take in the entire room and see the art work in context. 

Consider also that the room (gallery) in some ways become part of the work because it's almost impossible to divorce the work from its surroundings. The galleries at the Blanton are cool and dark and the paintings sit in little puddles of perfectly placed light. The dark surrounding submerges distraction while the bright light showcases the art. If you've seen art poorly presented ( and really, who hasn't ) then you'll understand exactly what I mean. 

As far as paintings go seeing the actual pieces, under optimum lighting and presentation conditions, is like seeing in infinite bit depth and with endless dynamic range. Reducing the interplay and inter-transparency of a painting to a 6 or (at best) 8 bit screen representation makes viewing the work a whole different, and wildly less satisfying, experience. 

I am a fan of classical painting but not for allegorical or hermeneutical considerations. I am a fan of the sensuous lushness of the color palettes and the unashamed sensuality of the rendering of most of the subjects in the paintings. They are beautiful to look at. The best paintings are richly layered with lights and darks and endless colors. 

Take the image of the painting "Flora" by Sebastiano Ricci. (below). It's intention was to be a celebration of "voluptuousness." I love so much about this piece. I love the modest rendering of Flora and the archly realistic rendering of the flowers in the foreground. I love the depth of the painting. Flora and the putti to the left, along with the flowers and heavy vase that anchor the right hand edge of the painting all sit in a foreword plane. The putti behind the flower pot is in a transitional planar layer. The figure just behind Flora with his finger to his mouth is one plane further removed while the two putts to the top left of the frame are distanced not only by the forced perspective but also by the atmospheric distancing caused by making them lighter, less saturated and less detailed. It's a frame that may not work well from the perspective of a computer screen but one which is wonderful to stand about four feet in front of and scan from side to side and from face to face. 

One of the realizations I have every time I visit a good museum is that good art repudiates our bourgeois desire for Perfection. Our culture seems to over reward measurement and under reward abstraction, creativity and the beauty of things which don't lend themselves to quantification. 

On photographic fora the mainstay of discussion is about resolution, sharpness and dynamic range. All of which can be, for better or worse, measure and quantified. We can give each parameter an objective number rating, a place on a scale, from "good" to "bad." And the engineer in each of us pushed hard to optimize each of the measurable features of our tools. We've created a culture in which "sharper" is better. In which more detail is always better. In which the widest range of tones possible is the aim point. 

We seem to imagine that the painters of yesterday worked as diligently as they could to reproduce the perfect version of reality onto their (almost) two dimensional surfaces. We think of great art as having been created by perfectionists and regard only 20th century art as the unknowable provence of sloppy, messy (Jackson Pollack) unintelligible sham. 


But one part of my realizations for today was the very obvious reality that for many painters in classical times it was the feel of the piece and the totality of the piece that mattered to them and not the obsession with endless master of detail. 

In the painting of Flora I was able to see several things that many would regard as flaws. In our current, binary culture a thing is either perfect or it is not. It's acceptable or rejected. But look below at the detail of the central flower. Notice the paint drip from the top right area of the flower. An imperfection caused by haste? An intentional spill? Or the decision of an artist who wanted to acknowledge his own imperfection because that is essential to what makes him human? A nod to the idea that imperfection is what finally makes a person or object truly beautiful.


I went pixel peeping on the painting (you can do that just by standing closer and putting on your reading glasses!!) when I noticed that there are defects in the canvas as well as a few discolorations (see below). But stepping back three feet, and viewing the work as it was intended, all the faults vanish. 


My final "craft" observation is that "sharpness", and the obsession with sharpness, is very much an affectation of our age. I looked at beautiful painting after beautiful painting and in very few instances was there any observable attempt to render the subjects with the razor sharpness that we seem to demand today. And it's not just that photography is a different medium because there are many beautiful and poignant examples of photographs through the decades, that work and deliver their emotion message, and visual magic, without the benefit of undue sharpness. 

That's evident in the work of Robert Frank, Alfred Steiglitz, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Cindy Sherman and many, many others. And those examples stand apart from the obvious repudiation of sharpness by the Photo Secessionist of the late 19th and early 20th century. Some of the work by Weston isn't overly sharpened and it's still collected by top institutions. My take away thought is that sharpness became important when photography became a commercial form of documentation and, because we do a poor job with visual education for most, the widespread adaptation of sharpness in cataloging and making marketing marketing representations infiltrated directly into the hobbyist sector and pushed its way into becoming an understood part of current photographic culture. Why communicate a feeling or an emotion if you can go straight to the vivisection? 

While the work of David Hamilton (look it up) is gooey with overly romantic images of young girls and women and I conjecture that a big part of its charm is the soft rendering of reality which allows his viewers to romanticize what many critics thought of as "soft core" pornography. While his content was  perhaps overly prurient his technique was in some ways a repudiation of the quest for sharpness and contrast that was on the rise during his working career. His work with young women is, in some ways, the technical counterbalance to the sharply etched aesthetic of Jeanloup Sieff's take on the same subject matter. 


While our cameras are very good at getting us to "sharp" they aren't nearly as good at getting us to "evocative". My all time inspiration for wonderfully romantic and flattering portraits is the head of the angel in Leonardo Da Vinci's, Madonna on the Rocks (madonna on the rocks louvre). She is the figure to the right of the Madonna. But I also like the image of the woman in the center of the painting, Three Marys at the Tomb, by Jacopo Chimenti (below). There is a softness to the skin that augments the affect of the soft light transitions and it's richly romantic. 


I like to visit museums because they remind me that we can have experiences outside the realm of our computers and our devices. That, when it comes to art, technology is a poor substitute for vision and concept. That Bernini's sculptures drove future sculptors into more and more abstraction, not because abstraction was, per se, the direction they wanted desperately to pursue, but because even with endlessly advancing technology no one can come close to the work Bernini created centuries ago. To continue making work in that classical styles means to be continually compared to his work. Better to differentiate oneself with a new and novel (manifesto driven) approach than to suffer by comparison. But isn't that the root motive for all attempts at differentiation? The realization that one pathway in a field had reached its zenith?

The past is interesting in some regard because it is littered with treasures. Those who have never taken time to savor those treasures are condemned to working without good boundaries and, to a certain extent, without inspiration. Mindlessly redoing the easy work of art over and over again and hoping that the newest tools will prevail where concepts are non-existent. 

5.28.2014

My friend, Chris, says: "You date the cameras, you marry the glass."


I think about that now every time I buy a camera or a lens. Which is the alpha product and which is the submissive and subservient product? There's a certain thrill to buying the latest camera because you are accessing the "latest technology" which usually means a better sensor and a better surrounding electronic infrastructure that supplies faster processing and, by extension, more detailed and effective processing.

On the other hand a good lens is a thing of beauty to real photographers because it makes every sensor that much better. And a great lens has both a clarity and a character than shines through despite which camera in the system you use.

I'm happier buying m4:3 lenses than I was when I was buying into totally closed systems because I have a range of choice when it comes to bodies. I can use my Sigma, Panasonic, Leica, Olympus lenses interchangeably on any m4:3 body from Panasonic or Olympus, and maintain most of the features of the lens/body system.

I'm looking at a new lens for the system that I would never consider if I were locked into a single system scenario. I want to reward myself for finishing up the novel with a brand new Panasonic/Leica 42.5mm f1.2 but I haven't finished building the rationale yet. That pesky college bill that's coming down the pike means I need to up the amount of self-delusion I need to generate to make plainly irrational purchases.

I haven't hit the new tipping point yet, but......

Some updates.

To date nearly 60,000 (sixty thousand) people have taken my free course on Craftsy.com. My two other classes are doing well. Not 60K well but right in line with everyone's expectations.

I turned over a final manuscript to my editor and book designer last weekend. The novel, an adventure with a professional photographer dropped into a web of intrigue and deception while on assignment at a big foreign trade show (write what you know), is complete and is now being cross checked and elegantly designed to be the best looking e-book on the entire market. It should be available in the next few weeks and I won't be shy about trying to promote it.

Ben has successfully graduated from high school and has selected a wonderful, private college in the northeast U.S. and will head there at the end of the Summer. We are proud of his achievements to date and especially happy that his braininess and general good character earned him some healthy scholarship offers.

My swimming is undergoing a new evolution as Tommy Hannan, one of our new coaches, is placing a LOT more emphasis on kicking. I feel faster (and more exhausted) already.

I am loving the video files I've been getting with the GH4 and hope to have a fun video to share by the end of next week.

WELCOME TO SUMMER.

Studio Portrait Lighting


5.26.2014

Another Enjoyable Evening Making Photographs for the Theatre. "Vanya" at Zach.

All material ©2014 Kirk Tuck and presented exclusively at www.visualsciencelab.blogspot.com  If you are reading this on another site, without proper attribution, it is not an authorized use of the material. If you are reading this on an unauthorized site DO NOT CLICK on any links in the body copy as it may infect your computer with serious viruses. Sorry to have to put this warning here but a recent search turned up dozens of similar infringements. Thanks for your authentic readership.

Now, on with the show.....
Cassandra and Vanya practice voodoo...
©2014 Kirk Tuck

It was a moist and muggy afternoon and I was packing up to go shoot a dress rehearsal for my live theater client, Zach Theatre, here in Austin. This was my first time to shoot a dress rehearsal on the Topfer stage with the two, new (to me) Panasonic X lenses: the 12-35mm and the 35-100mm. Both have 2.8 maximum apertures and are weather resistant (which never comes up in theatrical documentation....). I had just spent two full days earlier in the week putting the new GH4 through its video paces and I felt like I had a good handle on its capabilities re: ISO limitations and focusing. 

I packed the two lenses, the GH4 and a GH3, along with two extra batteries (unnecessary) and two extra memory cards (totally unnecessary). I also brought along a second GH3 body with a lens adapter. The second GH3 body hosted an ancient Nikon 50mm 1.4 lens and it was set up to shoot monochrome. I brought it along just for fun. I thought about including a monopod but my experience with the in lens I.S. on both lenses convinced me that it would be a non-essential burden. I left it in the studio. 
"Sonya" makng a point.
©2014 Kirk Tuck

The two primary cameras and lenses fit in my smaller, Domke bag and I dragged the third camera along over my left shoulder. Security blanket? Mindless distraction? Who knows?

It was my intention all along to use the longer zoom on the GH4. Most of the images I would be taking didn't require capturing the full width of the stage and I knew from experience that I would be able to handle 90% of the work with a 70-200mm equivalent. I was anxious to put the GH4 to a real world (for me) test and this was a quick way to put 1200 frames on the camera and lens in short order under fun circumstances. I've often said that the only way to really get comfortable with, and to understand a camera, is to spend a lot of concentrated time with it. I figured two full video shooting days and a three hour dress rehearsal would be a good start.