Fashion Week in Paris.

It was a cold October in 1994.  My wife, my parents and I were in Paris on a vacation.  When I read the paper one morning I discovered that our time in the city corresponded with the Fall Fashion shows being held, that year, at the Carousel de Louvre.  I put my Contax film camera in a bag and headed over to see what there was to see.  Security was tight and only photographers with passes were allowed inside the six large halls where non-stop shows were going on.

I didn't have any credentials for the shows and I was about to head back upstairs and wander around the city when I heard a familiar voice calling my name.  It was an assistant art director from a large American magazine I had worked for from time to time.  She asked which show I was covering.  I told here my being there was totally coincidental and I wasn't shooting for anyone.  She reached into her large bag and pulled out a press pass and a second "all stages" pass and handed them to me.  "If you get anything fun you can send it to me when we all get home." She said.  And then she disappeared into the crowd and was swallowed up in the line heading for the Lagerfeld venue.

I took my one camera and two lenses ( a 50mm 1.4 and a 135mm 2.8, both Zeiss) peeled ten rolls of tri-X out of their boxes and headed in to see what was what.  I spent the afternoon shooting for fun.  I hung out backstage at a few shows.  I drank some Champagne with  people celebrating the success of their individual efforts and I had fun.  Thank goodness I thought to wear black.

All the photographers were patient, kind and professional.  There's no real story here.  Just a random memory triggered by a photo in a folder.

No one cared that my camera was a manual focus one.  Nearly everyone else's was too.  Amazing that so many great photographs were taken before the advent of so much automation and lightning fast feedback.  More challenging? Less challenging?  Maybe just different.

Sometimes photography is just plain, clean fun......

Working in your style.

Curious to understand what makes a "style".  I'm not sure I know.  I know I like portraits that seem to connect with me.  I'm less interesting in the technique than the context and less interested in the context than the content.  I want to be interested by the implications of the captured moment.

More square.  More time.  More practice being with people.

A silly holiday image.

    From the Zilker Park Holiday Tree display.  December 2009.


It's been a tough year for most of my friends and long distance acquaintances.  Some times a walk through the park is a good prescription for our mental health.  Hope the holidays are stress free and happy for everyone.

A rant about an editorial in the NYT by Thomas Friedman.

The following is from Thomas Friedman's Editorial in the New York Times from Sunday, December 13, 2009.  I am excerpting it according to the fair use provision of the U.S. Copyright Law to discuss it's interpretations about the new economy......

In this article Friedman is discussing his friend's re-working of an advertising agency to deal with the "realities" of the new economy...........My note are in red....

 "He illustrated this by telling me about a film he recently made for a nonprofit.
“The budget was about 20 percent of what we normally would charge,” said Greer. “After one meeting with the client, almost all our communication was by e-mail. The script was developed and approved using a collaborative tool provided by www.box.net. Internally, we all could look at the script no matter where we were, make suggestions and get to a final draft with complete transparency — easy, convenient and free. We did not have a budget to shoot new footage, yet we had no budget either for stock photography the old way — paying royalties of $100 to $2,000 per image. We found a source, istockphoto.com, which offered great photos for as little as a few dollars.
If there was no money in the budget for any production was there money in the budget to pay Greer's fees?  If so, how did the money get there?  Was it part of a negotiation?  If so, why wasn't appropriate money negotiated for all the other creative resources normally necessary?  In other words, how did everyone else's budget disappear while the budget for Greer remained?
“We could easily preview all the images, place them in our program to make sure they worked, purchase them online and download the high-resolution versions — all in seconds,” Greer added. “We had a script that called for 4 to 5 voices. Rather than hiring local voice talent — for $250 to $500 per hour — we searched the Internet for high-quality voices that we could afford. We found several sites offering various forms of narration or voice-overs. We selected www.voices.com. In less than one minute, we created an account, posted our requirements and solicited bids. Within five minutes, we had 10 to 15 ‘applicants’ ” — charging 10 percent of what Greer would have paid live talent.
(And, of course, when they've succeeded in eliminating all of the "live talent" in the market what will they do when the market recovers and clients demand original, creative and complex voice over solutions?  Will they wring their hands and plead ignorance?  Doesn't the work itself have an intrinsic value? Are all skills merely commodities?)
“Best part,” he said, “within minutes we had sample reads, which could be placed into our film to see if the voices fit. We selected our finalists, wrote them with more specific instructions and within hours had the final read delivered to us via MP3 files over the Web. We could get any accent or ethnicity we wanted. For music, we used a site calledwww.audiojungle.net,” where he could sample thousands of cuts of music and sound effects with the click of a mouse, and then buy them for pennies.
(How can Friedman, or for that matter, his friend Greer, not understand that by decimating each layer of creative businesses by not having the balls to charge liveable and sustainable production budgets they will create  a business model that will quickly go up the food chain.  Pretty soon,  if there is no solidarity among creative professionals the next step is to automate advertising and marketing or offshore it to third world countries.  People might say that this is a new "paradigm" driven by the web but what is really happening is that the massive destruction of creative markets, and other similar skilled markets, is leading to  people making non sustainable choices in order to survive for the moment.  As usual, only the consolidators are making any profit.  Eventually these vulture-like pricing strategies will push most of the creative class into poverty.)
By being able to access all these cheap tools, Greer got to focus on his value-add: imagination. The customer got a better product for less money. But he didn’t create many new jobs. For that, he needs the economy to pick up. “If we could only borrow a buck and invest,” said Greer, “we’d all be rolling again.”
(There is no proof that the client got a better product.  There is no proof the client got a good product. Only a groundless justification for cutting the profit out of three different areas of creative endeavor.  "Save yourself and forget the rest of the passengers!"  "Take him, not me!"  Finally, what does Greer need any additional capital for?  His supplier costs have dropped by a factor of ten.  He's doing his jobs for 20% of what he used to charge.  If his sole value add is imagination wouldn't he be better off eliminating all of his staff and just sit around being imaginative?  ........Imagination is the most readily available resource in all of the advertising world.  Hell, you can get better imagination from just about any six year old than you can from the typical ad man.  The real shortage is of skilled practitioners, and companies like Greer's are picking them off one at a time under the guise of "efficiency".  That Friedman applauds this makes me nauseous.  When the NYT downsizes him out of a job, replaced by random column generators, or "crowd-sourcing"  I hope he'll understand what he helped to destroy.  Makes me want to re-read the Lorax by Dr. Suess.)


What does this have to do with a column about photography?  Plenty.  In nearly every avenue of our lives big business is trying to figure out how to squeeze more and more cost out in order to  return huge profits to a smaller and smaller group of people (not necessarily the stockholders).  By denying quality suppliers a sustainable profit they drive the suppliers out of business or off shore.  By doing so they decimate support for local communities.  Photographers have been especially hard hit in the last few years by stock photography marketeers that market to the dreams of a vast army of amateurs, convincing them to work below their own costs (the very thing our government routinely accuses China of doing....it's called "dumping" when countries do it).  In this way legions of people, hungry for some sort of misplaced artistic recognition, subsidize companies owned by powerful corporations.   In a way it's similar to the way that state lotteries prey on the ignorance of the poorest segments of society.  They show off the "big winner" to a demographic segment that doesn't understand the statistical relevance of "one in ten million..."


In the same way the legions of microstock photographers don't understand that they are part of a system that drives the cost of "marketing intellectual property" to zero for companies so they can more efficiently take even more money out of the pockets of the very people who subsidize them.  Corbis=Microsoft.  


When mega corporations have succeeded in driving off the musicians and artists and filmmakers and all the other people who bring beauty and relevance to our lives what exactly will be left?  Canned music over fries at McDonald's?  Endless animated movies?  Billions of nearly identical photographs?  A broke middle class?  A poverty stricken class of skilled workers?  And when Google finally figures out which legislators have to be paid to make all books available free who will ever want to write a book again? Then what will you read?


Finally analogy:  If you take a great bottle of red wine and dilute it with several gallons of water is it still a great bottle of wine?  And if you train a new generation of people to drink the diluted wine will they have actually experienced good wine?


If we as a culture are willing to settle for less and less, where will it all end?  What will we have done to ourselves.....?  

Wacky times with lens adapters.

Above, and above but not just above.... :  The well regarded Nikkor 50mm 1.2 lens.  Mounted on a Nikon to 4:3rds adapter, mounted on an Olympus 4:3rds to micro 4:3rds adapter then mounted on an Olympus EP2 camera body.  


Just above:  A shot of the front of the Canon G11 made with the Frankenstein set up in the top two images.


But Why?


Well.  I think it's because I really like shooting square with this little camera and I like the way the finder looks.  But, when I use the kit zoom lens I can't really make the DOF dramatically shallow.  And, with the exception of the 50mm Macro, Olympus e series lens, there are really no fast lenses for the system.  I bought the Nikon adapter to use the 50 1.2 on the e series cameras.  I like the effect on the e30 and the e3.  But when I bought the adapter to use e lenses on the EP2 this seemed like a fun experiment.

I haven't had time to shoot any portraits with the set up because of the holiday crush but that's next.

Here's what I like about the combo:

1.  The shallow depth of field!
2.  The amazing center sharpness of this older lens.
3.  The wonderful out of focus feel.

What I've come to dislike about the combo:

1.  I can't really focus it accurately unless I used the quick magnification in the finder.  That gives me an image that is 10x to focus with but it really slows down the process.  Take this caveat with a grain of salt.  I don't have perfect vision and I usually wear glasses for close focusing.

2.  The lens has some nasty green fringing wide open that show in the high contrast intersections.

3.  I lose autofocus.  Obviously.  The lens never had it to begin with.

4.  If I stop down I am looking at more and more gain artifacts in the finder.

5.  If I stop down I lose the visual effect I'm trying to get with this lens in the first place.

What I hope to end up with is a camera/lens combination that gives me back the tight crops and the shallow depth of field I like while being more convenient than other set ups I've tried since the film days.  In truth I'll probably give it a valiant effort and then start using the 50 Macro Olympus lens.  It's almost as fast at f2 and, if I compare them side by side, at f2, the Olympus is a bit sharper and much better corrected for chromatic aberrations.  It will also allow me to set all apertures while focusing and metering at the wide open value.

I'm on week two with the EP2.  Here are my thoughts.  I like it very much.  It requires a bit more control freak intervention on the +/- controls to keep the exposure in the sweet zone.  No problem there.  The IS is astoundingly good with the little kit zoom.  That lens is sharp in the center zone at nearly every aperture I want to use.

Should you rush out and buy one if you already have a G11?  Good question.  I used the G11 to take the photos of the EP2 above and I was impressed once again at what a good job Canon did on that camera.  Unless you have Euros or dollars cascading from your stuffed pockets I would wait a while and push the G11 to its limits.

In fact, I just saw a 16x20 black and white print in my friend's office, made on a G10 and printed with an Epson 3880 this week.  It was absolutely perfect.

If you did pixel peeking you might be able to find a fault but at the normal (and even at the "I'm an opinionated photoshop expert smart-ass" level) it was damn good.   I mean good enough to compete with similar images from the latest DSLR's.  But, this guy has his chops down and the image was well seen.

What to make of all this?  Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.  And sometimes we buy cameras because we just like buying the cameras.  And there it is.

Out for a walk with the EP2. Square lovers rejoice.

    A tree along the Austin hike and bike trail.  Just south of downtown.  EP2 with kit lens.

So, I mentioned that I really love the square.  The Olympus EP2 gives me back the square with elegance and ease.  I am satisfied with the camera.  I'll have to leave off my tests with portraits; it seems all the usual suspects actually had other things to do today.  Bereft of human models I took off on a walk around downtown.  I know it won't sound heroic to my friends in the frozen wastelands to the north but it was a chilly 31 degrees (f) when I left my car and started across the pedestrian bridge into downtown.

Here's a link to a small gallery of images from the morning:  morning with my square camera.

I set the new camera to mostly neutral settings.  Large SF Jpeg.  Color natural.  Aspect ratio: 6x6.  Single AF, etc. No more or less sharpening, contrast or saturation than the defaults.  I look through the viewfinder and see an wonderfully framed image with a bit of black on either side.  I can toggle through the "info" button until I get to screen with no numbers, letters or symbols on it and I'm free to compose unencumbered.

The camera is so small and discreet that everyone takes me for a tourist.  At times I feel like a tourist in my own life but I'm sure my mental health professional friends would label that as disassociative and worry.  Instead I'll say that I love cruising around the same downtown I've walked through almost weekly for 32 years.  I love to see what's new and who's hanging out at the coffee shops.  Lately we've seen some upscale stuff on the main drag from the state capital.  A Patagonia shop opened its doors.  There are three new restaurants.  A state office building is being rehabbed for commercial use. Downtown has two more steak houses.

I don't really know what to say about the camera.  I never had a missed focus.  If I needed exposure compensation it was usually on the order of +1/3 stop.  I tried out the ienhance setting in the colors menu and the tree above is from that group of frames.  I find the lens pretty sharp wide open.  The shutter, once locked in, is pretty fast.  In all you'd have to be a bit clumsy to mess up with this camera.

But for me, the ability to compose in the square with such a nice viewfinder is a treat over all else.  More to come after I get the studio thing figured out.  As you probably know, the finder sits in the hot shoe and the hot shoe is the only way to trigger any sort of flash.  Hello tungsten lights and HMI's.  More to report as I live with the camera.  Raw info:  272 shots with one battery, full time  EVF, and 31-38 degrees over the course of three hours.  Kit zoom lens.