I don't know if you read this one a while ago but some people found it helpful....

http://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2012/01/how-to-shoot-far-more-interesting.html

Graffiti in Denver.

What am I expecting to see at PhotoPlus?

I'm heading up to PhotoPlus in two weeks. It's a big photographic tradeshow/gathering held every Fall at the Javits Center in NYC. I've been thinking about the show and the huge and pervasive yawning sense of apathy that seems to have settled over the photography industry in the last few months. I think we're going to see a lot of re-hashed product, hear a lot of seminars about how to get ahead "in the new economy," and every once and a while we'll be surprised by an announcement we probably didn't see coming.

To start off with I think that Samsung will make big waves with their new Galaxy NX camera. It took me a while to understand the value proposition of its features but now I get it. I'm starting to see it through the lenses of younger generations. The camera is either getting better and better to shoot (could be firmware updates that happen automatically when the camera is in a wi-fi network) or I'm finally getting comfortable with the new ( to me ) control interface. The sensor is good, the lenses are good and, for people who need quick access to.....everything current sharing technology has to offer... it's the only game in town. I'll be demonstrating it along with Philadelphia photographer, Nick Kelsh and we won't just be shooting nice images of beautiful models----we'll be putting all of the connectivity features through the wringer.  But it's certainly not the only game in town.

I'm especially interested in what Sony will be announcing. Those guys are nearly as fickle as I am! If the rumors on the web are true we'll be seeing the introduction of a Nex-styled, full frame camera for under $3,000. But this makes me a little bit nervous since I have a lot of resources tied up in what we've been calling "Alpha" stuff. I thought the product line was split between the DSLT's (Alphas) and the mirrorless offerings (Nex) but lately Sony's been slapping the Alpha signature on everything, including the little piece of cr*p camera they are calling the a3000. Does the introduction of a full frame Nex mark the incipient demise of the traditional camera line? Will my a99 be obsoleted and abandoned? Will the a850 become even more obsolete? Will we be howling in the wilderness looking for bodies to mate with our orphaned lenses? I guess we'll find out at the big show.

I hope someone at Sony has done their market research and not just taken notes over at the DPReview Sony Nex Forum....Even if they throw all their resources into the Nex style line of cameras and abandon our last century configurations I'm sure the Sony engineers have figured out how to make cute and expensive adapters for our full sized Sony and Zeiss lenses.... But, I'd rather have a choice and be able to get cameras that still have some real estate for my hands and enough build to hold big flashes up and big lenses in some sort of balance. Are you listening Sony?

Is anybody going to show any new studio flash products? Oh, I'm sure there's going to be some new cosmetic touches on existing technology but I sense that the high end studio lighting market ( focus on professional studio use) is falling through the basement floor and rapidly being replaced by more and more, small, light lithium battery powered options that allow flash anywhere.  The focus on flash lighting that was aimed at perfectionists is being disrupted by the reality that so much of the market has moved from making art to making consumables. Not works meant for the test of time but images that have a "use by" date measured in hours and days instead of months and years. No one working for those markets (outside a small circle) really cares about that last 1% of UV light suppression or 1/10th of stop consistency on the 900th pop...

I'm sure we'll see lots and lots of cr*ppy LED lights that are rushed to market for low price points but I hope we'll see some really good, new stuff from Fiilex, Lowell, Arri and others. I am still a big proponent of LED lighting. I may have been a year ahead of everything I wanted coming to market when I wrote the LED book but when I look at my newly repaired crystal ball, five years from now, I'm seeing LEDs routing flash in many, many current applications. What am I looking for at this show? A fresnel, focusable spot LED with a whisper cooling fan for the electronics and enough oomph! to bounce into a big diffuser and give me enough shutter speed and f-stop to rock even a portrait with some movement in it. And, call me "crazy" but I'd like to get it into my studio for less than $1,000. Three in a nice case for $2,500? Keep the cheesy stands and just give me the good stuff....

What will Nikon and Canon show? Probably not much. This show is out of sync from their typical schedule of product announcements. Nikon seems to be flailing and I'm not sure the new D610 is a confidence builder. Rather than looking at DSLRs the real logic for Nikon is to do something great for their mirrorless line. The V cameras could use a new body that's aimed at enthusiasts. If Fuji can iterate three or four mirrorless bodies in the space of a year I would think that Nikon could pop out a rangefinder style variation of the V bodies with the updated sensor without breaking a sweat. If it's good and fun and priced right it might sell. As long as it doesn't spray oil all over the place....

I noticed that Canon withdrew their horrible EM mirrorless camera with very little fanfare. Apparently the critics did not appreciate its operational nuances. Wouldn't it be nice if they re-entered the space with a camera that could focus in fractions of a seconds instead of haltingly and in slow motion? That might sell too. And the prices that the camera finally sold for proved that every camera can be successful once the accurate value proposition is rationalized.

The company that once made the greatest compact camera ever (the Canonet QL 17) should be able to go toe to toe with Sony and their RX1 and if they could do a well designed product that competed for a much lower price they would doubtless have success in that market as well. Canon needs to launch a prime lens camera with a 35mm focal length and a full frame sensor that's as well designed as the old Canonet and nearly as accessible. Wouldn't it be great to see an f2.8 model for under a grand? And the heck with AF. If real rangefinders are good enough for Leica then they should be good enough for Canon.

I think the real news at the show is going to be in technology and sharing. One of the reasons the iPhone quickly became the most popular camera in the world is that it not only took reasonably good photographs but that the images could be worked on, in camera, and then shared instantly. Look for the market to reverse polarity and start pushing easy sharing right back up the camera hierarchy. There will be legions of "experienced" curmudgeons who will denounce any additional features in a camera. Look at the venom thrown at video implementations in DSLRs. People are fond of saying that the camera makers could have made the cameras cheaper if they made them without video, but from the camera makers' points of view the inclusion more than outweighed the sour grapes of last century enthusiasts by opening up a potentially huge new market of people who would have previously skipped still cameras altogether and just bought video cameras.

Adding wi-fi sharing or NFC sharing to a camera can't be that costly and if it attracts a whole new generation to consider a camera in lieu of a cellphone for their work then that's an enormous (if temporary) benefit to camera companies.

Finally, I expect to see a bunch of new monitors, screens and televisions aimed at the emerging 4K sector. Not just in video but also for photographic presentation. We'll be shooting images and showing them on large 4K TV's and we've been discussing the need to shoot at full res in order to utilize the full power of the screen resolution. We are at an inflection point where framed art on the walls of homes, businesses and stores is going to be replaced by large screens. The ability to go back and forth between motion and still, and at enormous resolutions (which give our images much better and richer tonality) is priceless: both from a marketer's point of view and also from the consumer's point of view. The experience will be enhanced and everyone's photos will look better (or worse) than ever before.

We're moving toward a ubiquitous screen experience. That's the real message I keep taking away.

What role will instant access have in the working lives of photographers?

It's no secret that I've been playing with a camera that is nearly always connected to the web, if I want it to be. And it's forced me to start thinking like a 17 year old instead of a 57 year old. To wit, what will the next generation of cameras bring me when it comes to workflow, efficiency and value to my clients, if anything? I've more or less come to grips that it's really all about changing my mindset.  I think there are rewards for being in the forefront of new ways of delivering images. That's why I'm exploring them.

I grew up in the golden age of traditional photography and made a relatively quick and easy transition to digital in the late 1990's. The technology isn't an issue but the baggage of "how it's done" is almost a crushing burden. If you started out with black and white film in your hands and the print was your target then speed wasn't the real driver, just getting through the process correctly and with a good end product was the driver. We came to value craft and repetition as the secrets to making uniform products that we could sell, lease or license to our clients. We were creating artifacts. We were creating physical products. But that really isn't the world I live in today. Now we're making Virtual Consumables. And part of the consumable ethos is relentless freshness. We're now creating images to consume rather than images as permanent artifacts. At least commercially...

It's the same in parts of my photo business as it is in my blogging. If I don't provide timely new content for the blog the audience falls off in some sort of mathematically proscribed fashion until we hit single digit readership. The fresher and more relevant the content the more readers and the more growth the site enjoys. In making and disseminating images I'm finding that more and more clients are using the content on their sites they way I am using content on this blog. They are looking not for news but certainly for fresh. I'm not at the point yet where all my clients want everything right now buy we're getting closer and closer as our businesses get more intertwined and collaborative.

When I worked for Dell, Inc. at their Worldwide Conference last year there were parts of our shooting that required immediate turn around. When I photographed President Clinton with 60+ different people one morning part of the brief was that I would hand off a copy of the images to his public relations people before they left the building. And they were leaving the building about five minutes after the shoot. I brought along a computer and a couple of flash drives and we transferred as fast as I could. We made the deadline, but just by a nose hair.

As I worked with the new, wi-fi and cell enabled camera I've been tested it dawned on me that I could have set up a folder in DropBox and sent each image to the folder as I was shooting at the Dell Event. The client would have their copies in the cloud immediately. And in a format and "place" where everyone in their team could have nearly immediate access.

Then I started thinking about the basic format of shows and the need to send images to so many people. I would be shooting one part of an event and get an urgent call from someone in another department who had an immediate need for photography we'd taken a little earlier. If we were constantly streaming into a shared folder I could take myself out of the equation and let the PR people handle the access to the images internally.

When I started down that line of reasoning I immediately thought of our shoots for the theater. We end up shooting dress rehearsals the day before the first openings and the PR folks need images to send to websites and press first thing in the morning after the dress rehearsal. Our routine is to shoot, head home, download, back up, do a rough edit and then put all the images on a portable hard drive and either deliver them to the theatre or have them picked up by a harried marketing person from the theater.  Wouldn't it be much cooler and less agonizing to start uploading images to a shared folder from the very beginning of the show? Depending on the speed of the network the camera would inevitably get ahead of the upload but it would catch up during intermission and on the drive home. Maybe the final files would load from wherever I left the camera (in my own wi-fi or cell zone) when I went to bed.

The delivery is happening during the process. If time is of the essence a marketing person could be sitting in the office reviewing the images as they populate the folder and do a rough edit and cull. Once I hit the house I can head to bed. Later on I can go back to the shared folder and download all the images in order to back them up or I can go "old school" and back them up from my cards.

I have a client in California who hires me to shoot portraits of her company's executives here in central Texas. How great it will be to start sending test images as we set up and wait on make up and all the rest of the pre-production. I could get immediate approval or input on lighting design and the overall look.

But even thinking more traditionally, Wi-fi networks and NFC (near field communications) networks can be much quicker to use for virtual tethering than actual tethering or FTP based sharing systems. Make one shared folder and invite everyone to share via tablets or even phones and you can do a big production shoot with everyone collaborating and sharing.

All this stuff is scary for me but it works. It's not scary for people who never shot film and who grew up interfacing with screens and menus all day long, all life long. And they are our competition going forward. I'm not sure I want to be left out just to be a champion for the "the way we've always done things." I don't want to be in that part of the graph with the people who were sure that color television would never catch on. And I don't want to be the last guy selling color prints to people whose wall space is a big monitor. I'm not willing to sacrifice my access to a new generation clients just to bolster and defend an anachronistic set of traditions.

I know that a lot of my readers have been perplexed by my decision to accept and embrace this learning experience, especially given my long history of being a curmudgeon and a person who pushed back on trends. But the bottom line is that this is a business where you learn, grow or fade away and take early retirement. My CFO counsels me that the last choice isn't an option for at least the next four years so I've made the conscious decision to swallow my pride and step up to look through the window and see what the future is delivering right now. And to find a use for it or even reject it totally. But even if I reject it I owe it to myself to understand it.

Who would have thought we'd be shooting digital video? Or sharing work and production in the cloud. In a few years most cameras will probably also be communication hubs and resources. I'd rather learn about it all in the front end and be able to pick and choose how I want to use the new technology. It was sad to watch the last hold outs of digital trudge through the well worn path so many had already passed by before them. Change is scary. Not changing can be even scarier.

Note that this particular blog is not about a specific camera. There are several companies doing wi-fi capable cameras. The whole point is finding the sweet spot of the technology and deciding where, if anywhere, it fits into your business instead of waiting and letting it blindside you.

If you do this for fun instead of as a capitalist enterprise you really needn't worry about the subject. But you might find it interesting. First thought my amateur brain had was "instant back up of travel images from anywhere in the world. No computer required." Just food for thought.

Getting back to basics. It's all about the portrait.

Jacob is an actor and next week he's moving to NYC. I've seen him in several productions at Zach Scott Theatre and when he asked me if I'd work with him to create some new head shots to take along I was both flattered and thrilled to work with him.  I set up a simple lighting design in the studio and we concentrated on getting fun expressions and a lot of range so that we could pick and choose.

The main light is a 184 cm white umbrella with black backing used over to the right of frame. The bottom of the umbrella is just a bit above Jacob's chin level. The background light is a a small 12 by 16 inch chimera soft box. The fill (when used) is a 4x4 foot Chimera white reflector to the opposite side.
The lighting for this set up is powered by an Elinchrom Ranger RX AS unit with two flash heads.
The A/S stands for asymmetrical. The head on the background gets 1/3rd of the output while the main light gets 2/3rds of the output.

All the images started life as large, extra-fine color Jpegs but, on a lark I decided to toss them into DXO Film Pack 3 and make them into Tri-X wannabes.

I shot with the Samsung Galaxy NX because it's a fun camera to use in the studio. I love the big screen and being able to touch the point I want in focus and then tap to shoot is kind of intriguing. The camera is extremely responsive to screen taps and the process of shooting reminded me of shooting with my old Hasselblad. There is value, I am finding, to the new, hipster way of composing on a two dimensional screen. I do pay more attention to composition. You might not appreciate that here as I've waded in and cropped the images with impunity. The star of the shoot (besides Jacob) was the 60mm f2.8 macro lens I've been using with my camera. It's like a 90mm lens with a full frame camera and that's right at my sweet spot for portrait lenses. This one is sharp and focuses quickly and surely.

After we shot I dumped all the files into Aperture, edited out the blinkers and stinkers and exported them as smaller Jpegs, destined for a Smugmug gallery. Once that was done I started doing my own edit (see above) and corrupting the images via DXO's black and white conversion program.

Someone is sure to ask about the color images so I'm including one below.

One last word: All studio cameras should have big screens like this one. It makes instantly reviewing with clients or art directors a LOT more rewarding. And I can see the images well even without my reading glasses. Sorry, no connectivity features were used on this project....

One lovely reader asked to see my images from the LES MISERABLES dress rehearsal at Zach Theatre.

You know, the ones I took and ran through post production late into the night just before I left town for Colorado for eight days. I finally had time to go back and look at them and now I want to go see the musical again, but this time without a camera stuck in front of my face.

Technical Details: No big news here. No tripod, no monopod; all just handheld from the top row of the orchestra setting about half way into the theater. Two cameras and two lenses: Sony a99 and Sony a850 cameras. Mostly shot at 3200 and 1600 ISO. 70-200mm G f2.8 on the a850 and a Tamron SP 28-70mm f2.8 on the a99. All images shot as Large (24mp) extra-fine Jpegs. Breath out slowly and massage the shutter button. Recompose and repeat. Wait for the "peak of action." Shoot again. I generated about 2200 files over the course of the show (it's a longer one) and someone else edited them down. Delivered on a pixie sized 500 GB hard drive. Great show!!! Wonderful actors. Cool lighting.

Wanna see em bigger?  Keep clicking on them...

I'd been fighting a camera. Then I went into the studio and we became friends.

Jill. For Zach Theatre. 

I took a chance today and took my new, pre-release, Samsung Galaxy NX camera to Zach Theatre as my only camera. Well, not entirely true....I took a second Galaxy NX along as a back-up. When I first got the camera I looked at the huge screen on the back and immediately thought that this particular camera was just begging to be used in the studio. Working with art directors and controlled light. Sharing the huge screen with my fellow collaborators. And I was right.

We were shooting some pick up shots today that will be used in the 2013-2014 season brochure for the theater. Nothing earth shattering but I did light the set with three Elinchrom flash units. A main light in a 48 inch umbrella (black backing, of course) and a 60 inch umbrella as a fill to the other side. I also tipped a third light (eight inch reflector, on low power) over the top of the seamless to work as a backlight/hair light. It was the perfect set up for the Galaxy NX camera.  The art director and I were in a darker area so the massive screen on the back of the camera was bright and detailed. I used a little black card on a stand to block light from the back light from hitting the lens. We comped up the shots and started playing around with poses and expressions.

It's the second time I've ever done a studio shoot entirely without looking through a view finder or an EVF. But with the enormous screen and the dark surroundings behind the camera there was absolutely no reason not to. The art director could see exactly what I was seeing and she and I got into a good rhythm, going back and forth with suggestions and on the fly approvals. Every once in a while we'd stop and check the frame in review. Just like the screens on iPads and cellphones you can pinch and unpinch to magnify or shrink the image and you can scroll around the window by touch. Something I disregarded in a street shooting camera but came, in a few short hours, to love in a studio tool.

Even though I shot the whole project in Jpeg I think the flesh tones are nice and there's no banding I can see in the backgrounds. I took some esoteric lenses with me but wound up using the 18-55mm kit lens for everything. Using the camera like this harkens back to the way we used to use view cameras but with a much more useful rear screen which doesn't (in these kinds of situations) require a hood or a dark cloth.

I must eat a bit of crow with my friend, Andy. With the right screen on the back of a camera this kind of composition can be a convenience and a plus during shoot. It was certainly easier to see the details of the image in the frame.

I have no idea how the images will finally end up being used in the brochure and on the web but I'm pretty sure the art director will be dropping the main part of the image out. By that I mean Jill will end up on a white or colored background. I shot mostly at f8 so we'd have enough depth of field to give her a nice edge with which to use PhotoShop's powerful selection tools.

At the same shoot we did some fun images with Jaston Williams (of the Greater Tuna fame). He's written a new play called, Marian, and we did a ton of tongue in cheek images to use in promoting it next Spring. We loved sharing the images on the back of the camera and the five inch screen kept me from having to go to all the bother of tethering with a laptop and working with two computer systems at once. 

This is a whole new ball game for me and now I'm excited about dragging my family and friends into the studio to play around with everything. Another plus today? Face detection AF. Easy as pie.

Sharing some night time images from the Galaxy NX. Just for fun.

There's were taken on the first night I arrived in Berlin...

These were taken in Berlin with the Samsung Galaxy NX camera and either the 30mm f2 (nice) lens or the 18-55mm kit lens (really nice for a "kit" lens). I think the camera is a great low light shooter. No problems with focus or exposure even though there's a lot of light and dark.

I now have two of the Galaxy NX cameras and I'm starting to use them for some of my client projects. I've gained confidence in the camera and even more so in the lenses.

I'll be speaking about and demo-ing the camera at the Samsung booth in a couple weeks at Photo Plus in NYC. If you are heading up for the show be sure to come by and see me. I think I'll have plenty of time to chat and meet. Coffee is just assumed. I'll be there the 24th-26th.

Hope to see some VSL readers.