How to make your Canon 7D (or lesser camera) shut up and be stealthy. Cheap.

Here's a garden variety Canon 7D.  I like the camera because the shutter is already far quieter than the 5Dmk2 or the 1D series cameras and it's noise characteristic is less obnoxious than the 60D's.  But sometimes you'd like, or need, your camera to be a lot quieter,  more unobtrusive.

The camera as seen in the wild. Held by primo assistant, Ben.

I grabbed an old Zing camera cover I'd bought to protect camera bodies back in the days when we did a lot more travel.  I thought the neoprene would dampen vibrations on airplanes and keep splash and dust off the machines when not in use.  They worked pretty well.  But we started using one expensive digital camera instead of four comparatively cheap film cameras and I stopped using the Zings.  They sat in a box with other "one time use" stuff like Manfrotto tripod leg "shoes" designed so your tripod doesn't sink into sand at the beach.  For a while there was a raft of products designed to fit on your tripod legs to create a little cradle beneath the center column.  You were supposed to put things there you might need in a hurry.  A light meter, extra film, the polaroid back or even your loupe.  But as film dimmed so did the need for these accessories.

The box now provides a home for small flash accessories that people sent me to test.  Most were used once before I came to the conclusion that I could do this or that better with stuff that was already on the market.  I called the inventors or makers and they weren't interested in paying to have the units shipped back.

Here is the Zing Camera Case made from very thick Neoprene.  This case was made big enough to fit a full sized professional film camera with motor drive to it is more than roomy enough for an unadorned 7D. Notice how the top flap comes over from the back of the case and encircles the lens....

The case, as delivered, has a snout on the front that covers and protects a short zoom or normal focal length lens.  A flap comes over from the back and wraps around the lens snout to secure the packge.

Lately, the box has started to fill up with video camera stabilizer grips.  Cheap ones and expensive ones.  I've come to the conclusion that the cheap ones are most effective while the pricy ones look best.  But most of the time the tripod wins out.....  And, of course, the box is also home to many connecting cables.  I recently threw out all the SCSI cables when I realized that the last SCSI peripheral left the studio circa 2001.....

I took a pair of scissors and cut the snout right off.  Just did it.  No guilt.  Actor/Model/Patient Son is showing how a lens will stick right thru the newly created hole.

Anyway,  I cut a hole in the Zing camera cover so the lens could stick out and then I cut a hole in the back so I could look throw the finder while the whole package is bundled up and now I have a home made blimp.  It actually does a fairly good job of turning a noticeable noise into just background clutter.

Here's the raw case.  It's been modified before to work with a Nikon F5.  See the hole just about in the middle?  That was for the previous camera's finder.

Amazing what you can do with stuff from the box.....and a pair of scissors.

The lens is shoved thru the front opening and the rest of the case wrapped around the camera.

I've cut a new opening so I can see thru the 7D finder.  The case is open at the top because of my previous experiments but that works because you can look down through the top hole and see the screen for a quick preview.

Finally, the whole package in the hands of an expert.  There's enough play to get a shutter finger in under the top lid and enough play to reach in and make control adjustments.  The neoprene is dense and almost one quarter inch deep so it does a good job dampening noise.


It's not that much fun to shoot with but when in a stationary position it certainly serves it's purpose.


And that's the whole story of the sound deadening device (SDD) that I created to shoot during a live performance at Zachary Scott Theater.  You asked.

Ben's first babysitter writes a best seller.

If you've read the blog over the last two years you've probably seen this photo and other photographs of a young woman named, Lou Ann Lofton.  I met Lou Ann at a coffee shop called Quakenbush's Intergalactic Bakery and Coffee Shop on the main drag across from the University of Texas campus, here in Austin back in 1991 or 1992.  How did we meet?  I looked up when she walked into the coffee shop, her arms loaded with books, and I though to myself, "this is the most beautiful woman I've ever seen in my life."  I walked up, introduced my photographic self and handed her a card.  A few weeks later I made a portrait of her in my studio and we became friends.  In addition to being beautiful she was and is one of the smartest people I've ever known.

When we visited her house I was constantly amazed at shelf after shelf of books that surrounded a comfortable chair in her living room.  She read constantly and, even in her early 20's, was fascinated by financial markets, commodities markets and especially equities markets.  I cast her in one of the first commercial videos I produced and I used her in several ads and editorial projects.

And when Ben was born she volunteered to babysit for us and.....was Ben's very first babysitter.

She moved out of Austin over a decade ago and is one of the brains behind the Motley Fool financial website.  And, she's written a book.  And I am certain it will be a good book on at least two levels.

First, it will be a rare product.  A very well written book that will reward avid readers with elegant and addictive prose.  Second, it will teach people how to invest for the long term......from the view point of a successful investor.  The book is entitled, Warren Buffett Invests Like a Girl, And Why You Should Too.
I've pre-ordered it from Amazon.com because everything Lou Ann ever told me turned out to be right.

Hit the link and see what you think.

And yes,  she was a great babysitter.

What to do when the mercury hits 105. Get shooting.

Rollingwood swimmers go round and round in the baby pool at Barton Creek Country Club to stay cool while waiting for their events at the swim meet.


It was very, very hot yesterday.  There was no breeze.  The glare off the water was not helpful.  But the cameras kept working, the kids kept swimming, the parents kept timing and judging and the staff manned the full bars.  Ah, a Texas swim meet among the captains of industry in the citadel of privilege.

Two 60D's.  One with an 18-55 kit lens and the other with the 70-300 IS.  Nice and light.  Cheap enough to be splashed without panic.

Hairspray. Zachary Scott Theater. A stationary shoot during a preview performance. Praise for the Canon 7D.

The last play I shot at Zach was a very intense, three person performance called the The Book of Grace. I shot that with my Canon 5D2, my 1dmk2 and the holy trinity of Zeiss primes, the 35, 50 and 85.  All manual focus.  All super duper sharp.  That photoshoot was a workout.  Since the theater was "in the round"  I had to:  anticipate where the action would unfold,  get to the right spot to shoot, choose the camera with the focal length I wanted,  focus dynamically with the action and.....watch the exposure and shift it manually when the light changed.  We ended up with a bunch of good photos but I had to shoot a lot and work the ratio to get enough coverage to make me (and the marketing director ) comfortable.

Last night we shot the musical comedy, Hairspray,  and I approached it from a totally different technical point of view, largely driven by some tight constraints.  This is a big and complicated show with lots and lots of cast and lots of movement and lighting changes.  We've had a tough time scheduling a dress rehearsal shoot because I'm booked with lots of conflicting corporate work and, a show like this is always a work in progress.  Our one day to shoot without an audience would be next Tues. but as luck would have it I'll be in San Antonio shooting at a conference for a production company.  Last night was a "preview" show with a small audience.  The marketing director and I decided to try shooting during the show from a seat that's just off the center seating area, near the front.  It's a one seat row with no one in front or on either side.  From a line of sight aspect it worked well.  The big task would be shooting quietly so I didn't disturb the audience.  And for the first time in years of shooting performances I would not be able to move freely around the sides of the stage.  In fact, I spent the entire evening in my seat.  That called for different gear and a different approach.

Choosing the right camera.  I knew the minute we talked about shooting in a paid house that we'd need to do something to ameliorate the camera noise so I started by choosing the camera with the quietest shutter.  And the shutter whose frequency is least annoying.  In the Canon line up that's the 7D. When I shot Nikon that would have been the D300.  In Olympus it was the E1.  All of these cameras are far quieter than full frame cameras in their families because the mass of the shutters is much smaller and they are incredibly well damped.  But I thought I needed to take it a step further and I fashioned a homemade blimp.  Not a full on Jacobsen blimp, ala Hollywood, but a Kirk Tuck blimp ala Zing.  I grabbed a thick Zing brand neoprene camera cover, one that was made for a camera with an attached motor and I cut a hole in the front snoot so the lens could stick thru.  Then I cut out an oversized hole in the back so I could look through the finder at eye level.  The Zing was oversized for the 7D but that worked to my advantage because I could stick my fingers in and around the pouch to work the controls and quickly pull down the back to check images from time to time on the LCD screen.  The black KT blimp did a great job cutting down sound and it blocked out light from the LCD review so I wasn't guilty of "texting" the audience with a blast of light every time the camera reviewed.  The assemblage wasn't beautiful but it worked well and took only a few seconds to remove for lens and card changes.  I always wanted a blimp for my cameras and now, with an old Zing and a few deft moves with scissors I have it.

Choosing the right lenses.  Since I knew I wouldn't be able to compose with my Nikes I gave some hard thought to lenses that would cover the scenes, work well with the 7D and also give me image stabilization.  I knew I wanted to use the 24-105mm L lens but the long lens was giving me pause.  I have a 70-200 L f4 lens but it isn't image stabilized and I wanted a really long reach on the off chance that I'd want to reach out and pull in a tight head shot......from my seat.  I picked up a lens I've been researching for swim meet use recently.  It's the Canon 70-300mm USM IS f4-5.6.  Totally counterintuitive until you start thinking about big crowds on a well lit stage show.  While we all think we'd love to shoot all theater with an f1.4 or f2 lens all the time the reality is that some shows call for shots of multiple people in the frame and those multiple people are rarely in the same plane.  When I shoot at f4 with the 24-105 I get enough DOF to cover a couple of people and make sense of what's going on in the background.  So, if the light levels are high enough slower lenses don't really present that big a problem.  

The 70-300 gets great reviews, is much lighter than the L lens and has the most recent version of IS.  I found a nearly new, used copy at Precision Camera yesterday, at a good price and I decided to bring it along as the long end of my tool kit.  (See the second shot from the top for a quick assessment of how this lens worked, wide open at 300mm.  On the 7D this is the equivalent of using, handheld!!!!, a 450mm lens.  Two things about lenses:  1.  The Canon 24-105 is a miraculous lens.  It may have some geometric distortion but in the center of the frame it's quite sharp wide open.  2.  It is totally fun to have image stabilization for telephoto lenses.  If you can't put the lens on a tripod it's the way to go.  

Camera set up.  Once you've decided on a camera and lenses you need to take stock of the light levels in the theater and decide just where you'll be comfortable with the old ISO versus Noise versus Action Freezing equation.  Where do all the curved lines on our graph intersect?  If I'd been using the Canon 5D2 I would have been comfortable with 3200 ISO.  On the 7D I'm totally comfortable shooting at 1600 ISO.  In this production the light levels were generally high enough to get me between 1/125th of a second to 1/250th of a second, wide open.  When you add in the image stabilization you'll rarely miss a shot due to camera movement.  And if you shoot for the apogee of the action you'll find there's typically a spot where the action freezes before cascading down.  (See above shot.)

RAW or Jpeg?  I generally like shooting Jpegs because I can go for quantity and look like a hero based on statistics.  But last night, being chair bound, I wasn't sure I'd have light where I needed it and decided to shoot raw.  And I'm glad I did.  Most of the images have a bit of fill light added to them in Lightroom.  And I cooled the color temperature down a few hundred degrees.  They are slightly sharpened.  The one compromise I did feel comfortable making was to take advantage of the Canon's raw flexibility to set different pixel dimensions.  I set the camera to shoot medium raws which are around 11 megapixels.   More than adequate for direct mail printing and the typical use on the website.

Workflow.  I shot 800 images last night which took up nearly 12 gigabytes of card space.  I was using Sandisk Extreme cards (a 4 and an 8 gig).  I only brought the two cards with me so I kept an eye on the frame counter and shot more judiciously than I usually do.  I could tell that I wasn't losing images to subject or camera movement and since I wasn't moving around I could concentrate better on expressions and timing.  It seemed to make a difference.  The percentage of usuable frames was probably my highest yet.

As soon as I got home from the show I plugged in my UDMA CF card reader and started ingesting the images into Lightroom.  I used the import interface to re-name the files as "HRSPRA-original filename" so I would know what job they belong to and to prevent them having duplicate names (which is very likely since Canon won't let you personalize names for each camera.......idiots).  I also set Lightroom to save each file to two separate 3 terabyte hard drives.  That way I'd have back up.

This morning I opened Lightroom and got to work.  The first thing I did was to assess the overall color balance and make a universal correction for that.  I also enabled the automatic lens correction during this overall synchronization.  Then I got to work batch correcting for changes in density, slight color shifts and corrections in contrast.  During this process I'm sending to the garbage any images I don't like and any which are over represented.  Finally I select all the remaining files and export them as Jpegs using the 92% setting with the longest pixel length being 4000.  Of course they are profiled as srgb's.  I burn two DVD's for myself and one for Zach Scott Theatre.  The marketing director dropped by the house at noon to snag a disk.  The last thing I do before I finish with a job like this is to burn a set of DVD's as additional back-up.  Time consuming.  But that's why I blog.  It fills the time I spend waiting for disks to burn.  :-)

(loving the 70-300mm USM IS)

 But......how was the show?  I can't remember watching a musical play this funny since I watched "Das Barbeque."   It was uniformly good. This theatre has their technical chops down.  The music was great, the miking of the actors was perfect and the choreography and blocking was very well done.  I'm planning to go back several times and bring some groups of friends to see it.  It's happy, upbeat and witty.

I'm sure, as other photographers read this, they will think that the whole thing could have been done better with M series Leicas and fast German glass,  or "see in the dark" Nikon D3's and fast Nikon glass. And the hordes of Canon shooters will opine that I missed the mark and should have shot this with a brace of Canon 5Dmk2's and a tiara box full of L primes.  And I'm sure they are all correct.  For them.

The bottom line is that I shoot what I'm interested in.  If it works I'm happy.  And so far, whether I've shot plays with an Olympus e10,  a Sony R1 or an old, manual focus Hasselblad, even a Leica M3,  I've always been able to deliver what the marketing people want and need.  So I guess that begs the question:  Is there a single "right" answer when it comes to gear?

I'd say it's like hairspray.  Everyone has their own preference.  And sometimes you change brands.  You still have hair.  If you're lucky.

Paean to an ancient camera. Kodak, please come back to us.

This is Missy.  I swim with her.  I also cast her in a series of photographs of athletes for Austin Sports Medicine.  This was shot back in 2003 or 2004.  It's one of my favorite advertising images for a number of reasons (not the least of which was quick payment by the client).  We were shooting on one of those obnoxiously bright days and we were in the middle of a little league baseball field.  I used a 3/4 stop silk on a frame just over the top of Missy to cut the direct light of the Summer sun.  You can see one of her knuckles sticking out into the sunlight but miraculously still holding detail!!!!  I used a small white reflector near the camera to pop just a little front fill onto Missy.  The way the camera handled the giant range between the sun drenched clay field, the tree line and the sky is amazing.  And the other amazing thing is that this image (and other from the same shoot) was blown up and used on posters and looked sharp and rich.

It was shot on the Kodak DCS 760, a six megapixel camera.  I used the Nikon 80-200 2.8 zoom lens.  And, importantly, I used the camera with only the UV filter in place, not the optional anti-aliasing filter. And I think that had a lot to do with the detail the file yielded.

Would my Canon 5D Mk2 do as well?  From a resolution point of view?  Yes.  Probably much better.  But from a tonality and rich color point of view?  Maybe yes.  Maybe no.

For a while this was my favorite camera.  And then I got lured away by the Nikon D2x and the promise of high sharpness and higher resolution.  Silly me.

This image was shot at the Austin Kipp School and used in an annual report for the school.  It was lit by one large softbox (54 by 72 inches) using a one Profoto Monolight and placed just out of the frame.  There is no fill.  I used the light in such a way that it mimicked the light coming into the window and across the white board behind.  A month later I went to a luncheon honoring the school's donors.  They decided to take all of the images I'd shot for the annual report and blow them up into four foot by six foot posters.  Austin Photo Images took 16 bit raw files I made for them (unsharpened) and made LightJet prints.  I almost fell over when I saw them at the luncheon venue.  I hadn't tried printing many of the early digital images much larger than 12 by 18 inches and had no idea that, in the right hands, they could be blown up so large and retain so much detail.  And with so little noise!

The camera?  Once again it was the Kodak DCS 760.  And again, the 80-200mm Nikon zoom.

I had occasion in the same year to do big enlargements with the Nikon D2x and, to be honest, the results were not nearly as good.  There was more pixelation, less sharpness.

You would think I would have trusted this camera and continued using it but there was the almost universal drum beat consensus that all digital cameras should be able to handle high ISO settings without noise and with more grace.  The DCS 760 was beautiful at ISO 80 and 100 but beyond that it generated enough blue channel noise to make your eyes go crazy.  And it was impossible to really remediate with Noise Ninja or its competitors.  A succession of cameras followed.  All worked okay but none really made such a convincing and robust file.  To be fair,  I did shoot them at ISO like 200 (a must on Nikons) and even up to 1600 on a Fuji S5, and while the noise was better.......well.....maybe it was a nostalgia for the early days......

At any rate, as I collected more and more cameras whose files were easier to process, whose batteries lasted days or weeks longer than the Kodak batteries, whose LCD screens were actually usable, the Kodak(s) ended up in a drawer in the gear cabinet, unused.

I thought about getting rid of them lately and I pulled them out of the drawer and fired them up.  The ancient NiMh batteries spit out ten or fifteen frames before dying.  I couldn't sell them to anyone like that.  So I hit Amazon.com and started looking for replacement batteries.  What once cost $125 each was now replaceable for around $30.  I bought a couple batteries thinking they would help me find a willing buyer for the whole package.  Then I made the mistake of putting a CF card in the adapter that fit into the PCMCIA slots that were part of the camera's "early days" design.

And I went for a walk around town.  Actually, I started in our kitchen and shot the plates in a drying rack.  And then I moved to downtown.  I couldn't tell what I was getting during the day because of the dismal screen but when I came home and processed them I was amazed at how different the files look that those I get from my Canons or those I got from my Nikons.  The color was richer without being overly saturated.  And the tonality was amazing.  Very long tones.  Very smooth transitions.

A gracefulness that belies the ancient technology.

I'm putting the camera back into service in the studio.  I'm using it to shoot portraits.  Not with little battery powered units but with big Elinchrom monolights pumping photons through giant Octabanks and layers of diffusion.  I love the style and the look and I'll be showcasing some of the portraits here. 

While some technical factors work to obsolete some technologies I think we just didn't understand how advanced Kodak's grasp of imaging technology was and how well it was informed by over a century of making film.  I wish they would re-enter the market with their sensors and their electronic pathways.  It would give us more choices, and perhaps better ones than we have at hand right now.  Wouldn't it be cool if you could choose which sensors you wanted in the camera body you wanted?

I'd love a Kodak sensor (like the one in the Leica M9) planted right in the middle of a Canon 1dMk4 body.  That would rock.

Kodak DCS 760 with Nikon 50mm 1.1.2 Lens.

Luddite thinking?  Not hardly.  I've used and owned newer cameras.  At some point you need to acknowledge that for some steps forward there can always be a few steps back to accomodate the changing tastes of the market.  We've talked about wanting dynamic range and long tonal range for years.  Now if we could just wean ourselves off the megapixel buffet table........

KRT_6528

KRT_6528, a photo by KirkTuck/photo on Flickr.

It's getting hot here in Austin and now I'm nostalgic for the low 90's that we had during Eeyore's birthday party a few months ago. This was done with the Zeiss 50mm 1.4 and the Canon 1Dmk2n. What a wonderful combination.