I critiqued Sony and now I have to praise them. It's all black and white...

I stand corrected. The engineers at Sony have given me exactly what I want in order to make perfect out-of-camera, black and white jpegs. I can control the tone curves in the highlights and shadows, as well as controlling the panchromatic color response of the system. Just like using the filter presets in other brands of cameras but with a much more profound level of control and customization. Too bad their marketing people seem hellbent on keeping this advanced level of performance a closely guarded secret....

Backing up for a moment. I had recently written bemoaning the idea that Sony lagged behind other brands (and especially Fuji and Olympus) when it comes to providing a great experience when shooting black and white in camera. Almost all cameras now have a monochrome or black and white setting among their creative settings. Fuji seems to lead in this feature set by having not only color filter emulations but also presets for some of their most popular black and white films. When I dive into the Creative Style menu of the Sony cameras I find only the basic setting and controls for only sharpening and contrast. It's a very limiting feature set and the results are

A blog note and a warning. Please read.

I looked at the site stats yesterday and am a bit alarmed. I've sent some notification to Blogger (Google) but pretty much all of a sudden I'm seeing traffic numbers that are a bit crazy. We went from 5,000 to 7,000 page views per day to10,000+ yesterday and already 18,000+ today. They are all originating from a site listed as http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1

I have tried following the link only to get a redirect warning notice from Google. Note that the address uses "google.co" instead of "google.com".

I don't understand it but I am always wary of web anomalies. As I wrote above, I have sent screen shots and samples to Google/Blogger and am waiting to hear back.

While I like the idea  of having a legion of followers I really only want to write stuff for legitimate human beings. If you are an internet genius and you have some ideas about this please toss me an e-mail or leave your pearls of wisdom in the comments.

If this persists I may shut down the blog for a few days while brighter minds get to the bottom of all this.

Help?  Kirk

Someone mentioned a "redirect virus" although Blogger is not hosted on my computer. Just something to be aware of and cautious about.


Added note: Smarter minds (thanks Chuq) have pointed me to some FAQs about this issue. It seems to affect only the internal stats, conveys no viruses to readers and is a known issue at Google. I will leave this up for a few days just to let everyone know. Thanks for the quick responses from my professional audience!

My boss gave me the day off for Labor Day so I've just been hanging around playing with a cheapie battery grip on the A7ii.

What the heck was I thinking this morning? We swimmers had the special treat of getting a scheduled master's workout on Labor Day. Gold Medal Olympic butterflies, Tommy Hannan,  showed up to coach us and the lanes were packed with enthusiastic swimmers. For some reason that I have no recollection of really buying into the swimmers in my lane, all younger than me by at least a decade, decided that I needed to lead the I.M. sets. For some insane reason, surely having to do with excess ego and minimal common sense, I decided to got for it and lead this train of swimmers through that part of the set. The I.M.s seemed to go on forever. (For the non-swimmers out in VSL land the I.M. means "individual medley" and consists of equally dividing the distance required by all four of the competitive strokes. For example; if we were doing sets of 200's we'd do two lengths of butterfly, two lengths of backstroke, two of breast stroke and two of freestyle). We pounded through three or four rotations of I.M. sets, followed it up with some four 125 yard repeats, followed by six 100 yard repeats, followed by ten 50 yard repeats (sprinting each of the 50's all out). I successfully kept the younger, stronger piranhas I swim with at bay for the mixed stroke salad but by the time I got home at 10:15 this morning I was shot. I ate like a pig and settled in on the couch for a little nap. Four or five thousand yards of fast, hard swimming sucks the calories right out of a person. I've been grazing since I got up from that nap.....

But that rarely stops me from grabbing a camera in my free time and heading out for a walk. My camera of choice for casual walks these days? It would have to be the Sony A7ii, but with a twist.

Last time I took the A7ii out I didn't take a spare battery and only made cursory check of the battery already in the camera. The gauge told me 65% remaining and I presumed that would work for my short jaunt. But then I got side-tracked. I found more stuff that needed exploring. I found new people to talk to and by the time I was heading home, in the final stretch of my walk, I saw a great image, pulled the camera to my face and had the battery crap out entirely. This made me less than happy. 

My fault, of course, for not practicing safe battery protocols. Four hours of

An interesting epiphany received while photographing a radiologist.

It was a typical, unusual Sunday afternoon around here. Most of the day was spent doing "Sunday" things like cleaning up, shopping for the week ahead, berating my wine merchant for sending me an indifferent Tempranillo, etc. The one variation from our usual weekend trajectory was the last minute scheduling of a studio portrait for a radiologist, newly arrived at one of the practices I serve. He had a packed schedule during the week ahead and Sunday afternoon was the only pause in his schedule. I am nothing if not flexible, when it comes to scheduling, so, of course I accommodated him.

The doctor showed up in jeans and a pair of worn cowboy boots but, per the dress code of the practice, he had a suit coat, tie and formal shirt on for his session. It was steamy hot outside so I offered him a seat, turned the air conditioning down to "sub-arctic" and got him a bottle of water. We started to chat and ended up still animatedly engaged an hour and a half later. I finally had to call for an end to our wide-ranging but fun conversation so we could get down to the business of taking his photograph.

When we finished out photographic project he mentioned how similar our businesses were, at the heart of the enterprise. I was surprised and asked him to

One of the things I promised myself during my Summer Break was that I would shoot (and show) a lot more portraits.

So, following a long family tradition I asked Ben to come out to the studio for a "back to school" portrait. We usually shoot

A Simple Request to Sony for Current and Future Cameras.

My Sony cameras all seem pretty well set up to do most of what I want from them; what I expect from them. Whether I'm shooting serious commercial work with the A7Rii or making fun motion projects in 4K with the RX10iii all the cameras deliver what I consider to be a tremendous value for the purchase prices. There is just one area (besides the complexity and irrationality of the menus...) that comes to mind when I'm shooting personal work that I would appreciate Sony fixing.

Their internal controls for black and white or monochrome imaging, in camera, are severely limited. And it makes me a little testy. All I want is what I've had in many of the other cameras I've shot with in recent years. I want Sony to add a color filter simulation to their black and white sub-menu. That's it. That's all. I'd like to dial in a yellow filter in order to intensify the difference between blue sky and white clouds. I'd like to be able to dial in a red or orange filter to make skies go dramatically dark and have human skin go nearly white. But most of all I would welcome a green filter simulation to add a bit more contrast and structure to skin tones. Panasonic can do it. Olympus can do it. Even Nikon can do it. I have to pat Nikon on the back for not only including the filter simulations but also including a mid-range contrast control (clarity) to the menu as well. Fuji takes it up even one more notch with actual film simulations based on traditional film favorites.

There are times when I want to shoot black and white in the way we did with film. We added control at the shooting stage to the whole black and white image process by making good choices of filters. It's a way of controlling tonal differentiation and it's powerful.

Now, before you jump in to teach me all about cameras and stuff I do understand that I can shoot my images in RAW and have total control right there in my post production software. I can use the Nik filters, the hue sliders, the Silver FX tools and many other plug ins to get exactly what I want. I know that but I want to make judgements in the field and then carry back the info to the "darkroom."

If I have to shoot RAW wouldn't it be nice to have the subtle controls for the Jpeg files I can shoot alongside the RAW files? Then I could reference what I was trying to achieve in the field as I sat in my chair drinking Diet Coke and eating delivery pizza (shoot me now).  But, alas. Sony's implementation of their black and white color setting is nothing more than a 101 desaturation.

Still, in the big picture it is a small thing. Not a deal killer. Not a "meh." If we had to juggle features I'd rather live with the limited nature of the B&W setting than to lose something more vital, like a headphone jack, or zebras.

I'm pretty sure it doesn't have to be an "either/or" choice. I think Sony just overlooked this because maybe I'm the only person buying their cameras who would like to have this feature.

I like the look of images in good black and white. Not so enamored of images that have merely been desaturated. But t's not enough to make me switch systems again.