My friends are packing. Not heat. Cameras.

Summer vacation at Barton Springs Pool. Austin, Texas  (Sony R1 camera).

I'm the last person to tell someone not to buy gear.  I'm like the guy at the buffet table who likes everything and I'm always trying to slide it on my plate.  But even though I'm well stocked and hitting buffet table over and over again I'm not trying to slide the table thru the door and onto a plane.  Because I've been there and it's not pretty.  At some point in the parabola of passion that is photography we get the notion that we've got to have everything "covered".    Simple but insidious concept.  Like mold in that air conditioning evaporator pipe.  "Covered" means the inventory grows as you discover new stuff that fills in gaps you didn't even know you had before.  "Covered", when it comes to lenses means you've got zoom lenses and prime lenses that stretch to supply a focal length at every degree from 5 to 180.   If you are truly "covered" in the brainwash sense of the word then you've got the widest and longest lenses offered by your camera company of choice and no unavoidable gaps in the focal length continuum.

I know that no one intends to take every lens they own when they go on vacation but even to be "covered" from 14-200 means some hefty poundage.  Especially if you are partial to the f2.8 constant aperture zooms from Nikon and Canon or the f2.0 constant aperture zooms from Olympus.  I maintain that thru practice you could generally find three individual focal lengths that will do everything you really want and provide other benefits as well.  I am reminded that, for decades, the holy trinity of primes was something like: 28mm, 50mm and 105mm.  If you were a minimalist Leica shooter it was probably either 28mm and 50mm or the 35mm and the 90mm.  The zoom (r)evolution gives use more flexibility but at the cost of having to become a porter for the gear.

But as bad as the lens choice dilemma is the body conundrum may be worse.  And it's more insidious because in so many ways it's an intersection of conflicting benefits and detractions.  To that point, I have a friend who is a Nikon shooter.  He's going on vacation.  And he'll be doing a fair bit of traveling and hiking in another country.  He's lucky enough to have both a D3s and a D3X but his good fortune is also part of his travail.  He knows it would be crazy to take both.  Especially since the 24-70 2.8 and the new 70-200 2.8 are a foregone conclusion.  But how to choose?  The D3x, used at lower ISO's is perhaps the best imaging DSLR ever created and easily the most detailed.  But the D3s is very, very close in quality, has a couple stops advantage in low light and brings a smaller file size bonus to the table.  They weigh about the same.  Which one do you put in the camera bag and which one do you leave at home?    Then there is always the argument that you need a "back-up".

The back up craze is a wonderful boon for camera companies because it implies that cameras are inherently unreliable.  Most of us have racked up tens of thousands of exposures with lots of different cameras and I rarely hear of a failure these days.  Doesn't matter.  Every pro that's survived from the film days wouldn't be caught dead without a back up camera on a job and that seems to trickle down into the thinking of advanced amateurs who channel the pro vibes.  So, do you bring two D3s's or do you default  to the idea of a small, agile camera that's cheap and nearly expendable as your back up?  Something like a D5000.  If you were a Canon shooter you could default to a Rebel T2i as the back up for your 1DS Mk III.  If you go the first route, two D3s's then you have the weight to consider.  If you back up with a D5000 you have the additional second battery type and additional charger to think about.

Then there's the question of backing up the files.  Do you bring a laptop and back up to the hard drive and perhaps also to a DVD?  Certainly will make your evenings thrilling.....(Yawn).  The missus or mr. will be so excited.  "Oh boy, honey.  We can watch Baywatch in German, like God intended, while I burn these disks...."  Or do you buy one of those gold plated Epson back up appliances?  ( I find the price of CF cards at places like Costco are soooo cheap that it makes a lot more sense to buy ten or so cards and use them like old style film.  Use em up and put them aside and pull the next one out.)

Here's another interesting avenue to pursue:  Do you lean on the VR/IS in your camera or do you schlepp around a tripod.  And if you take a tripod, just how big and competent should it be?  If it's too small it ends up being a useless burden.  Too large and it becomes a heavy, but more useful, burden.  Maybe that's why the people at Leica invented the ultimate table top tripod...

And then there's the luggage.  Unless you're planning on buying your vacation wardrobe abroad you'll be bringing a checked bag and then a bag full of camera gear.  Will it be a Think Tank airport Psycho with all the trim?  It's got to have rollers or you wear yourself down.  But the cases themselves are heavy.  Maybe that has you considering a Gura bag.

So why have I started on all this?  Well, I have a friend who loves photography and he and his wife are going to Prague and points east.  He's a doctor in Austin with a very successful practice so this is hardly a once in a lifetime trip for him.  He wants to take great photos but he also wants the trip to be enjoyable for his wife.  He's been worrying the travel inventory for a good while.  He called me over the weekend to pick my brain (or what was left of it after nearly a week without an air conditioner in my car......).

We did the logic thing.  One body, one lens.  In his case an Olympus e3 and a 12-60mm lens.  No flash. We talked about a tripod but I reminded him that everywhere he would want a tripod it was probably forbidden to use a tripod.  In the end we decided that the imperative was to enjoy the romance and not let a camera get in between.  That was the deciding factor.  That's something people don't think about.  Enough.

I've been doing this for a long while and have made many trips to shoot professionally and for fun.  And I've made trips with the family where I've taken only a point and shoot.  Here's my general advice:  If you are doing the job professionally take everything you know you will need.  Don't assume you can rent great gear in Lisbon or Tanzania.  If you are going on vacation with your family take a good snapshot camera with a wide ranging zoom lens and pass it around to everyone in the family.  Make sure to take a lot of group shots.

If you want to do art do what the big boys do:  Buy one plane ticket.  Choose your favorite (most productive camera).  Choose three of your absolute favorite primes or one zoom.  If you can do it with one prime--more power to you.  Then clear your mind and shoot without a schedule and without compromise.  You can't serve multiple masters.  You need to be clear about why you're traveling and why you have people with you or why you don't.

It's not hard to figure out but the desire to have it all is crippling.  Don't delude yourself, you can't do art on a schedule.  You can rarely do art with an audience and you'll rarely have fun running to catch up with the rest of the group.

It was interesting for me to have my behavior reflected back to me by another parent at a swim meet recently.  I was diligently shooting all the kids diving and racing during the swim meet.  Deborah, a parent of one of Ben's peers (my 14 year old son) came up to me somewhere near the end of the meet and she said,  "It's so fun to watch you.  You concentrate on getting pictures of all the kids.  And then when Ben gets up to swim you put the camera down and watch every second of the race.  You never shoot his races.  It's weird."

I know why.  I want the pure experience.  In the moment.  Not filtered by the camera and the process.

Have a nice vacation.

I thought this was professional gear.......

I figured out the almost fatal flaw of shooting Canon.  Maybe some of you really smart people out there can fill me in and educate me.  Lord knows I need it after this week.  Okay.  Where to start?  When I shot with Nikon you could ditch the silly "DCS...." at the beginning of every file and you could change the naming structure so that each camera's files had a unique identifier.  I called one camera KRT, another camera was D700 and a third camera was BOY.  And here's the important thing:  As long as I never reset the counter there was NEVER the possibility that I would have different files with the EXACT same name and number anywhere in my workflow.  Never ever.  I also knew which camera was having a maintenance issue because I could instantly identify troubled cameras by their three letter "call sign".

Seems eminently logical to me.  And to millions of photographers around the globe.  But not to Canon.  Canon will allow you to write copyright info to the metadata but you can't change the naming config. (If you can, let me know how---in the camera----and I'll send you a copy of my book.  One person only).  Who cares if you only shoot with one camera body?  But what do you do if you shoot two pretty new cameras like a 5d2 and a 7D?  When I shot my project on weds., thurs., fri. of last week I came home and started doing my regular workflow.  It was then I noticed LR 3 tagging some files with a "-2" which means that there's already a file in the folder with the original name.  Yikes.  I went back and looked at everything I shot and there was a 250 or so shot overlap.

So I went into the LR3 menus and figured out how to do a rename.  But it's a pain the butt because you have to conceive of a naming convention and make sure to keep track and reset for each camera you download from.  What a stupid idea.

My searches on the web were interesting.  I quickly learned that most people buy a re-naming program and run it on the folders after they are downloaded from the CF card to the hard drive.  Adding a big ole step.  And again,  you have to figure out a consistent way to tag the right camera.  So if you have  pocket full of CF's to download you are in a for a mondo fact finding session before you can get anywhere near messing with your files or doing any editing (in my book editing is "thumbs up or thumbs down" on images, not post processing.....).

I ended up buying the best reviewed of the renaming programs and I'm sure it will work fine but I shouldn't have had to do it.  It should be a simple matter to make the camera work for me rather than the other way around.  I guess this is in the same category as Nikon forcing people to buy Capture NX instead of bundling like Canon does with their software.  But what if you are in the field shooting for a magazine with two bodies and you need to do stuff quickly?

It just plain sucks and it makes me a bit angry.  What do you guys who shoot Canon do?  Don't tell me your whole workflow but what do you do to ingest images and how do you decide how they will be labeled or renamed?  These are pressing questions for me.  Last week, from Sunday to Sunday we shot nearly 4800 files.  I want to make sure that this first step (ingesting) doesn't screw up the rest of my workflow.  Anybody got suggestions?

Again, if I'm wrong, you know I'll apologize to Canon.   But if I'm right I'm sure I'm not the only one pissed off about getting dozens of menu options I'll never use but not getting the one feature that every pro would use.........

If it's Tuesday Night it must be a dress rehearsal at Zach Scott Theater.....

I love the call from Jim Reynolds that starts with, "Well, The Drowsy Chaperone is opening on Thursday and I wanted to see if it's possible to get on your schedule for Tues. night so we can have you shoot the dress rehearsal."  Like they need to twist my arm.  If you aren't shooting for a great local theater you are missing out on big fun.  Yeah, you'll get some good press because your credit will be next to fun images that go viral all over town.  And yeah, you'll get to use some of the very best stuff in your portfolio.

It doesn't hurt that the actors give you better expressions and gesture than you'll ever find in a non-actor model.  Or that highly professional costume designers are doing your wardrobe for you.  Or that set builders are making things look great.  Don't forget that you've got a lighting designer making  your images look ultra dimensional.  Did I mention that you'll be helping a group of dedicated artists fill the seats and keep working in the field that they love?  Did a I mention that theater people throw the absolutely best parties imaginable?

But the real reason to shoot for a great theater in your city is the fact that you have a front row seat for the best drama, comedy and musical performances I can imagine.  I'll tell you a secret:  Belinda and I hardly ever go to movies anymore because live stuff is so much more exciting.  A movie is the same. Over and over again. But in the theater every performance is absolutely brand new.  A different interpretation.  And every night the actors put everything on the line.  No retakes.  No retouching.

This past Tues. I dragged a bag of gear over to the theater to do the dress rehearsal for the funnest and funniest play I've seen in a long time.  It was called, "The Drowsy Chaperone".  The cast was packed with Austin's favorite actors.  Meredith McCall, Scotty Rodgers, Martin Burke, Jamie Goodwin and many more.  Even with the IS technology in several of my lenses I had a hard time holding my cameras still enough because I was laughing so much.  Amazing.  I'm getting eight tickets for next Saturday night so I can enjoy it without any distractions.  Like full CF cards.

No doubt someone will want to know how I shot it.  I took the Canon's this time.  5d2 and a the 7d.  The 24-105 on the 5 and the 70 to 200 on the 7D.  Everything on manual.  Spot metering.  Color balance set at 3000.  Most of the files were shot at medium res.  I didn't use lights and a tripod would slow me down too much.  I just paid attention to hitting focus and hitting the timing.  That and getting the exposures right on the money. (Meter caucasian skin and open up 2/3rd's of a stop.  Meter white with vague detail and open up two stops.....etc.)

I'm back to shooting the theater stuff in Jpeg because it's so much quicker of a workflow and I get so many more images on a card.  I can shoot like one of those New York fashion photographers from the 1970's who had two guys who just kept loading identical Nikon bodies with film and handing them to the "artist" as he blazed through roll after roll.  I love to shoot a couple thousand shots during the dress rehearsal.  You never know what you'll catch.  I guess if I can to two or three rehearsals I'd know what to anticipate and I'd be able to pare down the take....but who's got that kind of time?

The important thing in shooting theater is to keep your head in the game.  There's always a cute actress you'll want to fall in love with.  You always end up fascinated by the good lighting that's being done.  And for people that are moving!!!!! But you've got to keep your head in the game.  Watching the action outside the viewfinder and anticipating the blocking.  Most importantly is to watch for gesture and expression and keep remembering that the money shot for the newspaper is two or three actors, close up, interacting with lots of energy. The love scenes.  The fight scenes.  The glorious finales.

Watch the backgrounds and keep an eye open for good color contrasts.  I love white on white with silhouettes in the background.  And I love stuff that moves.

And not much beats actors on roller skates.  The moment before the kiss is more exciting than the kiss because of the anticipation.  The lead up to a punch is more exciting than the punch.  And the lead up to implied sex is better than the stage version.  There's more emotion in wanting than there is in getting....

I go to a lot of theater.  I shot this play on Tuesday evening and the night before I was shooting a Shakespeare production at Richard Garriott's place  (yeah.  I'm name dropping.  Really, Shakespeare...) but when Zachary Scott Theater pulls out all the stops and does a big production musical comedy....well, they had me and my cameras at "Hello."  If you live in Austin and don't go see this you're either on life support or you don't know the highest and best way to spent your entertainment resources.

It's all worth it to see the reigning master of Austin theater, Meredith McCall, as.........The Drowsy Chaperone.

If you fancy yourself to be a photographer.  If you want more exposure.  If you need some other art in your life.  Find a theater to support.  They'll thank you, but.....you'll thank yourself.  

( I love the shot just above.  It's not my shot.  It's the best collaboration of a marketing director, a photographer, a prop master, a costume person, a lighting designer, a set designer and a great acting talent.  Beats sitting at home.)

Tested by the mischievous gods of photography.....a tale of relative woe.

Before I plunge into my "tale of woe" let's get one thing straight.  All hardship is relative.  I'm not for a minute suggesting that my set backs this week are anything more than a minor annoyance.  Compared to famine, disease, amputation or even a severe headache my travails are less than a mosquito bite on the ankle.  And a bite inflicted on someone with a very high tolerance for mosquito bites.  Still, it's interesting because life's foibles are part and parcel of the photo trade......


I was lucky to be asked to do a fun job by one of my favorite ad agencies last week.  I'd just finished a job for a tech company from the mid western U.S. so my brain was already cogitating in the sphere of industrial pictorialism and I was hungry for more.  I won't go into details about the shoot or the actual clients because I signed some NDA's.  But I'll give you the big picture.....

The job was ultimately for a company that does printing and just about every type of advertising delivery and mailing you can think of, with the exception of television and web content.  They own plants in several cities.  They own and operate web presses (not presses for the web but giant machines that print high volume stuff with ink on paper.....) and sheet fed presses.  Complex mail stuffing and sorting machines.  Pre-press machines and much more.  And they needed an assortment of photographs that would show how they span the chasm between good, old fashion high craft and very modern and very high tech integration of digital data.

I love shooting stuff like this and I love working for companies that produce a physical product because it's visual.  Can't tell you how many software companies we've done projects for that basically have nothing visual to represent their "product" but the wrapped box the program disks come in.  We shoot two basic things for those kind of companies:  People meeting.  People working at their computers.  In the shoot I just finished we got to shoot precision gears, pulsating metal rollers, sluicing ink, platemakers, pressmen pulling huge sheets and much more.  We did the IT think with people making data but the bulk of the job was real people using real mechanical machines to make real stuff.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.  I need to throw the woe at you first.  So, when you estimate jobs like this you have a few calculations that go something like this:  How much time will I spend shooting?  And post processing? And meeting?  And traveling?  And, ultimately, what sort of usage licenses are we conveying to the client?  We'd be shooting in Ft. Worth on the first day and Austin on the second day.

Ft. Worth is (on a good day) about a three hour drive from Austin so it makes a lot more sense to drive it than to wait at the airport, fight about baggage restrictions, get delayed, fly to DFW and wait for a rental car, etc.  I decided to leave Austin mid afternoon on Weds., meet with my client for a preproduction pow-wow in the evening at my hotel and then, refreshed, hit the ground running on Thurs. morning early.  It would be a full day and it didn't make sense to get up at 5am and drive up, shoot all day and drive back at night.  Especially with an equally big and important chunk of the job continuing in Austin on Friday.  Sounded good to all involved.

I had my car's oil changed and a good "once over" done by my Honda dealer the day before and they gave my car a clean bill of health.  I had a ripping good lunch at Sullivan's Steakhouse with good friend and art director, Greg, dropped by Precision Camera to pick up yet another lens and then, at 2:30pm I headed north on Interstate IH-35 for my dat with destiny.

I'm tooling along with the cruise control set at 70 and Elvis Costello's, "King of America" on the music machine when, up ahead, the tire of an eighteen wheeler goes "Kaa-blam!"  and sends heavy rubber shrapnel everywhere.  On particular piece is guided by the mischievous photo gods right into the lower right hand side of my windshield where it leaves a nasty scar of a crack.  Why do tires explode?  Not sure but I think some it has to do with high temperatures and that afternoon it was up around 100 degrees in the shade.  The car thermometer was telling me that the roadway temp was around 121 (f).

The sudden smack against the windshield sure woke me up.  I weighed the risks and my relative position and decided that the windshield was virtuous and would hold for the next few days.  My heart stopped racing and I pressed north.  Then the next shoe dropped.  I was 45 minutes out of Ft. Worth proper when the air in the car started to feel warm and clammy and then warmer and clammier.  I turned off the air conditioning and attempted to restart it which causes a grinding noise and made the car shudder.  The air conditioning gave up the ghost and joined all the other appliances that have let me down in a circle of hell where they no doubt wait for me to arrive.  Ready to put me to work......

Windows open, I press on into the maelstrom called Ft. Worth rush hour.  True to form, trouble comes in threes.  I was making good time in the heart of the city, looking for loop 820 when everything ground to a halt.  A truck driver flipped his rig.  All traffic was blocked for the better part of an hour. Which is generally just annoying when your AC works and you've got a handful of good CD's or something ripe and saucy on the iPod.  But with no water in the car and the temperatures on the asphalt in the Mojave Desert range I was getting a bit nervous.

I stumbled into the Courtyard by Marriott, handed over my credit card and begged for water.  I'd made it.  But what do you do when your schedule is tight and compacted over the course of three days and your horse is crippled?  My response was to suck it up, get the job done, get back to Austin, get the job done and then see to the car this coming monday.  It was a miserable drive back home.  It got hotter and hotter and the crack on the windshield got bigger and bigger.  But the bottom line is that I'm quite capable of spending time in the heat.  It was a matter of comfort and not safety.

But the responses I got from other photographers ranged from all over the place.  One suggested that I should have hired an assistant to pick up my car at the client's facility and spend the day shepherding it through the local dealer.  But there's never the guarantee that you'll get the car back on your schedule.  Every corporate person I talked to suggested, cavalierly, that I get a car service to pick me up, take me to the airport and that there simply must be a service that deals in stranded cars for busy execs. (I don't fall into that category).  Several wealthy doctor friends suggested that I should have just called my bank and whatever car dealer I favored and bought a new car and had it delivered to the workplace in time for the drive home.  No muss, no fuss.  One worn and battered old assistant suggested riding the Greyhound Bus but I'm not that cheap yet....

I guess it would be fun to hear what you guys would have done........  


The job went off without a hitch and the client couldn't have been more gracious. We shot 1500 frames in two days and I've already edited the take down to around 800.  In addition to the facilities and machines we also photographed their senior executives.  Everyone was so down to earth.  Another reminder that, perhaps, companies that make real things are a bit more grounded and nicely process driven......

It was a fun, old fashioned (pre-recession) style shoot.  Lots of moving around.  Lots of images and permutations of images.  Grizzled crafts people.  Bright technicians.  Lots of "show off" photo opportunities.  Given a choice I'll take industrial assignments every day of the week over just about everything else out there.

Your car, like your camera and your lights, is part of your kit.  I guess I need to start making contingency plans for transportation just the way I have back ups for everything else..........one more thing to worry about....

Best, Kirk

Summer Time is Swim Time.

Ben's been on the Rollingwood Waves swim team since he was five.  Now he's fourteen.

In a week the Summer league swimming will be over.  We'll have an awards picnic at the pool.  We'll have a show of images using an LCD projector and some white seamless paper tacked to the side of a wall.  Kids will laugh at photos of each other.  Parent's will say, "Awwwwww.  That's so sweet."  when they see  random photos of their kids.  And things will calm down.    Then Summer will be over and Ben will be in high school and it'll be back to the endless studying and relentless projects.  He's taking a film class (movies) this year.  It emphasizes screenwriting.  But they also shoot a project.  And then Summer will be over and only the master's swimmers will come to the pool with any sort of regularity.  I'll miss it.  So I'm shooting a thousand images a week.  Trying to lock in visually what I feel emotionally when I'm at the pool.  It's so much more than swimming.  It's about growing up.  The tidal flow of life.

Don't remember the camera or the lenses.  Just the race.  And later, when I get in to swim, I imagine the same cool water across my face.  Maybe the only magic in photography is the power to condense so much into memory.

Wonking out with a blingy new lens.

Canon 7D with 15-85 used (with boundless enthusiasm at.......50mm.


So I convinced myself that I needed a lens that would cover a lot of focal lengths.  You know, a "walking around" lens.  And I convinced myself that, since the Canon 24-105mm lens was really computed and designed for full frame cameras that perhaps it wasn't really optimized to give me the very high resolution performance that an EFS (lens for Canon cropped sensor) lens might give me.  I pored through the test reports and then capriciously bought an EFS 15-85mm 3.5 to 5.6.  I would never have done it but the single best zoom lens I ever shot with on an APS sensor Nikon was the 16-85mm and I was hoping that this lens would be Canon's answer.  Big deal.  Almost all of my favorite shots are taken around 50mm.  Like the one above.

But I did shoot at both ends just to see what it would do.  Straight out of the camera there's distortion galore.  And vignetting to beat the band.  Not use to seeing that after using Olympus's better lenses for the last year... But, after I pushed the right buttons in LR 3 the lines straightened up, the corners got brighter (but not too bright) and everything settled down.

I'm not saying this lens is good or bad.  I kinda like it but that's more because I like the way it feels and looks.  When I shoot for pay I go with known good performing lenses.  But I'll keep pounding away with this one till I like it or sell it.  One thing though,  it's a great set of focal lengths.  About 22mm to about 130mm in one tube.  Groovy.

Here's what it looks like wide with some wild polarizing thrown in just to make it fun:

I love Texas skies when they're crystal clear and laden with big, puffy clouds.  And I always love walking around the downtown lake.

Here's from about the same vantage point using the other extreme of the lens:

You can see the above power plant in the wide photo, near the middle....

And, of course a tromp through Austin's downtown always leads me to the Frost Tower so I tried the long end on that as well:

Finally,  another 15mm frame of the hike and bike trail bridge and I was done with this most schizophrenic of all optics.....

No big assertions no big review.  I like all the focal lengths.  I don't usually shoot wide but sometimes it's fun to try it out.  I don't like the slow apertures at the long end but what are you going to do with a 5+X zoom?  I will say that the IS/VR operates as advertising.  Even with five espressos (an exaggeration meant to be funny and not serious) I could still hold most stuff still at 1/15th of a second.  In the heat.  Dehydrated.  During and earth tremor.  While standing on one foot.

Okay.

Old Tech. Sweet Tech.

I don't sleep much.  I like to stay up till one or two in the morning working on stuff.  Mostly post processing assignments and doing pre-production when things are quiet.  The dog usually comes out to the studio with me and sleeps on a purple carpet right next to the desk.  I like to get up in the morning in time for the early masters swim workout at 7am.  Sometimes I wake up late and go to the 8am workout instead.  But I guess the point is that I have time to think about stuff.  Maybe too much.  When everyone else in the house is asleep my brain likes to see what's new in the world of cameras......

I'm always interested in what's next but maybe to the detriment of "what's now".  Cameras are a good case in point.  I love the new stuff.  And there's a thousand ways to rationalize it.  Most rationalizations have to do with how much easier it will make my job or how much more accurate the screens on the backs are.  But sometimes I veer over the line and start pontificating about how much better the files are.  And it's true.  Camera files have increased in detail and resolution, and much of the noise and banding that plagued earlier digital cameras has been dealt with.

I've been shooting with a Canon 5dmk2 for the past few weeks and the files are, indeed, pretty spectacular. (not out to start a camera war so I'll pre-emptively say that the Nikon D3x files are probably even better!)  So, just when I'm thinking everything makes sense and I've got it all figured out I do something silly like rearrange my equipment cabinets and stumble across some old tech.

I pull it out, charge up some batteries (yes, in days of old a walk in downtown was usually a 3 battery adventure with many cameras and not just a 20% on one charge kind of thing) slap on an old favorite lens and head out for some shooting.  In this case the camera I stumbled across was the first really reliable, affordable (by some standards) full frame DSLR, the Kodak SLR/n.  Nice specs.  14 megapixels.  Lotta bit depth.  Good raw files.

Lots of downside too.  Horrible, horrible LCD screen.  Bad hump below the eyepiece made for an ergonomic nightmare.  The electronics sucked down battery charge like you wouldn't believe, even when the camera was turned off.  The ISO's above 200 were plenty noisy.  Over 400 they were  unusable.  There was sometimes moire.  And color shifts across the frame.

But.....it was a great camera.  Not to many menu choices.  And in its narrow window the colors and sharpness were superb.  I shot with it a couple weeks ago.  A bit downtown and a few portraits.  Toe to toe with the 5dMk2 for flesh tones and color.  The Kodak actually had deeper and richer color but I guess I could match the Canon to the Kodak with enough saturation, hue adjustment and steeper contrast curve.  But,  the fun thing is that it really is toe to toe in its narrow band of capability.  And this is a six year old camera in a field that changes every six months.

Not saying I'm going to head backwards to 2004 or that you should abandon your D3's or A900's.  Just a nod to some engineering that did a good job putting food on the table and making big, brilliant photographs for a couple of years.  I've sold a lot of cameras as the digital bus has lurched forward from pothole to pothole but for some combination of nostalgia and historical appreciation I've never been able to sell my two favorite Kodak cameras:  The DCS 760 and the SLR/n.  In a sense, the DCS 760 and it's ancestors going back in the fog of time, invented and codified our idea of professional DSLR's.

Sometimes it's fun to see how far we've come.  And all the ways in which we really haven't.

Photo with Kodak SLR/n and 50mm Nikon 1.1.2 lens.