Lead Singer In Church.

I like portraits that look like this. I like all the stuff out of focus in the background and I like the almost defiant stare from my subject.  I like that she's not overly made up. I like that her hair curls up and sticks out on the right side of her head.  The image was done with a Zeiss 85mm 1.4 ZE on a Canon 1Dmk2n.  The light is pretty obviously just what's available.

I guess my point in showing this and talking about it is that I didn't have a traditional client telling me how to shoot.  Rosie and I were out on Willie Nelson's ranch on a misty fall day with no one to please but ourselves.  So much of developing and holding on to a style you like has to do with spending enough time playing and shooting what you want.  Not what you think someone else wants.

I think it's all about practicing the fun.

Ben and Kirk shoot a commercial for Zach Scott's rendition of Xanadu.

Xanadu for the stage is a send up of the movie version from the early 1980's.  And this is the TV commercial that Ben and I worked on to promote the show:

It's fun, it's silly and it's 15 seconds.  Ben and I loaded up the car, set up the green screen and shot a bunch of variations with two of Zachary Scott's talented actors.  Ben acted as grip and sound man while I ran the camera. Creative Concept and Postproduction were done in-house at Zachary Scott Theatre by web marketing guru, David Munns.

Tech Notes:  We used a Westcott muslin ChromaKey green background (10 by 20 feet) lit by four 500 bulb LED fixtures.  The key and fill lighting was done with two 1000 bulb LED fixtures.  The actors are backlit with two of the battery powered Fotodiox AS-312 LED panels, gelled with a weak magenta filtration.  Both of the 1K bulb panels were covered with diffusion materials and the fill was further softened with a Westcott FastFlag diffuser.


We shot with a Sony a77 in the AVCHD 1080 60i setting alternating between the 16-50mm kit zoom and the 80mm Hasselblad Zeiss Planar lens on an adapter.  Focusing was done manually, assisted by Sony's really cool Focus Peaking.


Ben was wrangling a Rode Videomic on the end of a no-name "fishpole." When I looked at the footage on a 27 inch monitor I was amazed at the quality.  Even better, under controlled lighting, than my previous Canon 5Dmk2.  


The theatre is also editing down a :30 second spot to follow up this teaser.

Ben and I will be at the dress rehearsal next week. I'm shooting stills for publicity and Ben will be shooting BHS ("behind the scenes") video for the web.

Just thought I share a little project with y'all.

Edit: Several people asked if I filtered the LED lights that were used as the main lights on the actors.  The answer is no. I did a custom white balance at the beginning of the shoot and it seemed just right.  As the sensors in cameras get better and better so too does the ability to do really good white balances; even with sources that have lower CRI's.

Street Shooting in America. Downtown Austin.

A Whole Different Color Palette, A whole different look.

It's funny sometimes.  I'll mention the color palette or "look" of a particular camera and all the measurement nerds will rush in and tell me in volumes how any image can imitate any other image with a little bit of deft work in Photoshop.  Then I'll talk about the "look" of a particular camera to the newly converted (fill in the blank with: Olympus, Fuji or whatever) owner and they'll wax eloquent about "Olympus Color."  In their minds it's a prime reason to own the system.

But even if it makes technical workers unhappy just about every family of cameras has a distinct look and feel and, while you might get 90% there duplicating that feel from another camera with hours of PhotoShop work, if you have eyes you'll see the DNA of the camera's family come shining through.  I've written before that I own several different camera systems because I like the way some handle some subjects and others handle different subjects.

All of these images are from the Kodak SLR/n. It was the second series of DSLR cameras that photographers could shoot without an anti-aliasing filter in front of the sensor. (The first were the DCS 760 series in which you could choose user changeable IR filters with no AA or an AA filter with IR built in.  The SLR/n was a "no choice" camera. You shot with no filter. That's how it came from the factory.  Shooting without the AA filter made the files much sharper. The detail is rendered at a very high level.  Just like in the new Nikon 800e.  But the SLR/n had big, fat pixels and it could go two or three stops deeper into the aperture ring before provoking sharpness defying diffraction.  The camera was heaven and hell to shoot with.  Some things, like fabric with repeating patterns would cause moiré to pop up like garden weeds. But with portraits and architecture the files would be richly detailed.  

The Kodak SLR/n had a more muted color palette and a longer contrast range than present day cameras.  This meant that the files had lots and lots of dynamic range and could hold on to detail in the shadows and highlights just like a badger.  I'd love to see a DXO rating for the sensor.  I imagine that it clicks all the right boxes for their parameters.

This (above) image is a full frame from the camera.  The file would have been 4500 pixels by 3000 pixels but I've reduced it to 2000 pixels on the long side to make everything load up quicker. 

The file below is (once you've clicked on it, opened it in a separate window and then clicked it again...) a 100% crop from the image above.  I have compared it with similar files from both the 24 megapixel Sonys and the 24 megapixel Nikon D3200 and, to my eye, the Kodak actually resolves slightly more detail. This image was taken with the standard 50mm Nikon 1.8 lens.

Debates rage as to which D800 people should consider but you would do yourself a service to read Thom Hogan's recent review here:  Hogan's D800 Review  You might be startled by what you find out about the effects of diffraction and the differences between cameras.  I'll cut to it. The D800e (without filter) is best at wide apertures with fast lenses.  Neither is amazing once you stop it down.  Not the ultimate camera for people (architecture photographers) who need f11 and f16.

While my Kodak cameras are getting long in the tooth and starting to have handling and button issues I am still happy every time I pick up the SLR/n to shoot. I find that it's combination of full frame, wonderful colors and high sharpness is pretty wonderful.

I prefer it to a number of more recent and highly regarded products from other companies.  A pity that Kodak's products were ahead of their times (and the discernment of general users) while their marketing was ten years behind.....

This is a photo of my friend, Bernard.  We were having lunch at Artz Ribhouse, the latest casualty of the recession.  I love the out of focus areas in the background. The 50mm on the Kodak is pretty sweet.

Mismatched cameras and lenses. Fun for an afternoon.

I like heading out the door with a camera in my hands and no real agenda to follow.  Sometimes I use my walks as a time to hand test cameras I'm interested in or cameras I want to write about but sometimes I just want a camera with me for random visual note taking and messing around.  Yesterday morning I had a delicious swim and then Ben, Belinda and I went to P. Terry's Hamburger restaurant for burgers. I had the veggie burger. Plus one for the whole wheat buns and the good jalapeños.  Then I got in the car and went over to Precision Camera where I spent some time playing with the Fuji Pro 1 (a beautiful camera with lots and lots of focusing issues), a Fuji X100 (hit the buttons three times before they work?) and this year's swim suit model of cameras, the Olympus OM-D (all the parts are just right and the shutter sounds sweet but.....I just can't pull the credit card out yet).  Can't figure out why this camera always makes me feel better when I hand it back to its owner or to the sales clerk...probably something in my wiring, certainly nothing wrong with the camera. Not in the face of the reviews and kudos it's received from all the people I trust.

I guess I have my eyes on the new Sony full framer and I just don't want to get too badly side-tracked in the languorous Summer months.  

So I headed downtown to walk around and shoot with a wild pair.  My second favorite Pen camera of all time, the EP3, and a weird lens choice, the Panasonic 14-140 HQ zoom lens.  Earlier in the day I vacillated between taking the Olympus 45mm 1.8 (too purposeful), the 25mm Summilux (too chattery on the EP-3) or something else.  Then I spied this beast of a lens and thought, "Why not?"

Right off the bat there was one thing I really loved about this combination. The lens has its own IS built in.  I could turn off the body IS and turn on the lens IS and I would have a stabilized image in the finder of the camera.  In fact, that's why I bought a Panasonic 14-45mm lens as well.  Even at the longer focal lengths the camera's finder image becomes rock solid.

If my own habits are any indication this must be one of the most overlooked lenses around. I've owned it since I bought my first GH2 and yet the only times I think about it are when I'm getting ready to shoot video.  Several reviewers give the lenses some lukewarm praise with the usual stuff  accentuating mediocre corner performance or the lower contrast at the longer end but I've found, overall that it's a really good performer.  Especially on the right camera.  It's also nice to have focal lengths (35mm FOV)  from 28mm to 280mm and have them all be very usable.

I walked to Lance Armstrong's bike shop (Mellow Johnny's) to look at transportation/street bikes and ran into a guy I'd met years ago on a photoshoot at Dell, Inc. He noticed the weird mismatch between camera and lens and that's what got us talking.  I saw some really cool bikes  from a company called, Public Bikes.  Here's a link to their website:  Public Bikes V7 (the one I'm thinking about...).  Still pondering the bikes. I love my electric Bodhi Bike but sometimes I just want a light framed manual bike....for those manual moments.

(above) That's a good looking bike but I don't really like the front rack. I'd like a back rack and maybe a pannier to one side.  Good to see people out biking all over downtown yesterday.  There's still an incredible number of really fit humans in Austin. Not everyone in America weighs 300+ pounds.......at least not yet.

Being fit, however, doesn't mean people will always make good choices about their shoes...

I took the neck strap off my EP3 a couple of days ago and stuck a cheap wrist strap on it instead.  I don't walk with anything in my hands and I leave the cellphone in the car so I was able to keep the camera in my left hand for the entire time. It was a refreshing change from having the camera banging away at the end of a strap, at my side.  And it was much more "ready."  

When I shoot with the EP3 I always use the VF-2 finder so I don't have to wear my glasses and also do the "baby with a stinky diaper" pose, holding my camera way out in front of me with my arms outstretched.  While the EP2 is my favorite of the Pens for nostalgic reasons when it comes to having fun shooting, and getting great results, the EP3 is a bit easier to work with in terms of response.  I kept the camera on the aperture mode, trying to keep the lens at or near its wide open settings for most of the time. I'd correct exposure by riding the exposure compensation button while viewing the image in the finder.

I was shooting on a bright day so the camera had no trouble at all focusing quickly and locking on, even at the long end of the zoom where the max. aperture hits 5.6.

Don't know why but today I was fascinated with manhole covers.  They really can be such fun industrial art.

While the EP3 isn't as advanced as the EM-5 I like it because I feel as though I've mastered the menus and I userstand all the shooting potential of the camera. I've mentioned before that I think 12 megapixels is somewhere close to the sweet spot for digital cameras at the moment. Big enough to look detailed on the coming generation of retina computer screens yet small enough to work quickly in post processing.  I was processing files today from the Nikon D3200 which creates 25 megabyte files alongside the raw files from the EP3.  The difference in speed is pretty stunning. Even with a fast manchine.

I also prefer the look and feel of the EP2 and EP3 bodies to anything else.

Circling back to the lens I must say that while there are single focal length lenses that produce somewhat sharper files the Panasonic lens does a fine job.  Especially when you run it through the sharpening and clarity filters in one of the post-processing programs that are ubiquitous.

I prefer to import my files into Lightroom 4.2, give them a brief once over and then size and send them to a program called, Snapseed.  I look at Snapseed as an almost universal "quick adjust and enhance" program. I use the general brightness and saturation settings and also do some sharpening in that program.

The series of images (above, just below and one more below that) are on good argument for using a flexible, high quality zoom like the Panasonic. At the long end I have very good reach for pulling in subjects which are at a distance from the lens. But I can also turn around and get a wide angle shot.  With the Panasonic I can shoot mostly wide open and still be sure that I'll get usable shots.

I'm certainly not advising people to run out and buy what I use. Everyone's taste, hands and sensibilities are so different. In fact, from day to day the cameras I use tend to change. But every once in a while it's nice to have a comparatively small system that does powerful work.

Copyright. I know we're all having fun playing with our cameras but please read this...

http://thetrichordist.wordpress.com/2012/06/18/letter-to-emily-white-at-npr-all-songs-considered/

It's an incredibly well written piece aimed at enlightening copyright infringers about their moral and ethical obligations to artists. In your particular job it might not mean much to you right now but things change and you may want to try your hand at being a professional musician, writer or photographer someday and all of a sudden it will mean something to you.  Getting paid or not getting paid....

Thanks for taking time to read it.  If you have the inclination you might consider forwarding it to a young person who likes to download free music.  Or you could send the link to the guy in the next cube who thinks it's okay to download (steal) photographs for that big PowerPoint presentation....  

What is the real secret behind the success of the new wave of mirrorless cameras? And the OMD in particular?

Everywhere I look, here in Austin and on the web, I see people snapping up micro four thirds cameras or writing about them and discussing them.  It started out quietly a couple of years ago with the Olympus EP1, EP2 and the Panasonic cameras and now, with the Olympus OMD it seems to be building at a feverish pace.

The OMD and the GH2 have gone a long way toward establishing the technical legitimacy of the format and its place in the modern pantheon of attractive cameras but what is it that really got the ball rolling, long before Olympus launched their 16 megapixel DSLR killer?  

I know that people like smaller and lighter cameras but various form factors have come and gone.  The G series from Canon was/is popular, but not like this.  It can't be the overall performance because while the chip in the new camera is great it's still not as good as the chips in a number of APS-C cameras and it's not about to challenge the overall technical prowess of the newer full 35mm frame cameras like the D800 or the Canon 5D mk3.  But the popularity was building quickly even before the OMD was announced.

I found an old Leica screwmount body (I think it's a 2f or 3f) sitting around the studio the other day and I moved it over to the case that holds the Pen stuff.  I pulled out a Pen EP3 body and put them side by side and gosh golly!!! The dimensions were too close for coincidence.  So here's my theory:  Just a Steve Jobs had a singular vision for Apple Products (the design of which turbo charges sales)  Oscar Barnack, the inventor of the Leica, had a singular vision for his first series of cameras.  His vision revolved around the idea that you could make a small camera that would be comfortable to carry and comfortable to shoot and you could, through careful technique, come close to the image quality that you would get with the larger film format cameras of the day.

Barnack's drive to make a small but potent camera came from necessity.  He was asthmatic and tired of trying to carry a large compendium bellows view camera and tripod with him on walks through the forests near his home.  Since he worked alone, unencumbered by committees and focus groups and the input from marketing hacks he hewed to his own vision and made a camera that fit his hand perfectly.  And by extension, the hands of millions of other users.  

Cameras got bigger when people (and committees and ad hacks) started demanding more attachments, more geegaws and more convenience items. More ways to sell you something new.  As we moved away from pure picture popping prowess we moved away from optimum haptics.  Optimum ergonomics.  Perfect designs for human use.  Yes, we got motor drives and we could use longer lenses and all that but the purity of the design slowly became more and more compromised and generations of photographers and consumers put up with it because they got silly stuff they never knew they needed  in return.

Once the camera companies hit their stride in the digital arena a curious thing happened.  When we hit a picture quality that was good enough for the masses lots of people started demanding less.  They/we were willing to give up a lot of stuff we'd been sold as part of the holy grail of photography.  A lot of people started to consider 12 megapixels good enough for most of the stuff they routinely used cameras for.  Once the camera hit this point Olympus realized that a new differentiator could be size. And design.  I suspect someone high up in their product development dept. had one of the old Leicas on the shelf and, having shot with probably every other conceivable camera in the market he came back to a nice, cherry Leica 111f and held it and decided it was absolutely perfect in conception and told/ordered his staff to shamelessly steal as much of the size and shape of the original Leicas as they could.  Not for nostalgia's sake but in deference to the genius of its original, human centric design.

In the next round of product development I think you'll see more concentration on rounding the corners of the bodies than in upgrading sensors.  When people looked at the new OMD in illustrations on the web or on the shelf many were put off by the apparent size or the design touches.  The selling of the camera has been a process of putting the camera into the hands of the customer and letting them feel the "just-right-ness" of the design.  What I hear from everyone is this, "I was on the fence till I held one in my hands...."

Another aspect of the OMD that makes me think that the Olympus powers that be ruthlessly and shamelessly have been copying from the original Leica rangefinder family is the noise that the shutter of the OMD makes when it goes off.  It's quiet, subdued and contains no piercing high frequency resonances.  If you shoot a screw mount Leica shutter and compare it you'll hear an uncanny similarity.  

Even the use of the VF-2 finder in the accessory shoes of the EP2's and EP3's harkens back to a day in cameras when you needed a separate finder to use any but the normal 50mm focal length with the cameras.  When you bought a wide angle or a telephoto lens for your screw mount Leica you also bought a separate viewfinder that sat in the accessory shoe and showed you your angle of view.  The Pen series, preceding the OMD, is a modern day adaptation of that concept.

Many otherwise rational adults are buying cameras now based on how they feel and sound.  But is that irrational?  There is always a mind/body/camera connection that artists take into consideration when they adapt and embrace certain tools with which to give birth to their singular vision.  They can't turn off the feelings of attraction or repulsion of their tools just because someone tells them some aspect of performance is better or worse.  Only disengaged or casual shooters can do that.  And it's different for everyone.  The feel of a camera in the hand is unique to each person.You generally know you've found the feel in one day.  

I'm sure some people think I'm making the connection between the old screwmount Leicas and the new Olympus (and other m4:3) cameras to damn Olympus for brazen design theft but nothing could be further from the truth.  What I really want to say is that Oscar Barnack had it just right, everybody fucked things up and now Olympus is reaching back to that original genius to give people what they really wanted all along:  A comfortable companion for mobile shooting.  An almost instinctual tool for capturing what you see.

I played with another OMD this week.  They are pretty darn amazing.  Not a breakthrough like the original fathers of all 35mm style cameras (Leica SM)  but a beautiful and very useful homage.

Hello Camera Designers:  No more "jellybean" cameras please.  Now that we can miniaturize nearly everything can we get some more cameras that feel just right?  Even if they don't have the biggest whatevers?

Now, if Olympus could only fix their menu.  Of course Leica shooters never had to worry about that...

Did I mention that I really like 50mm Lenses? Really?

Sometimes I think buildings are just something to offset beautiful skies. I was out shooting the sky around Austin the other day and this building was near my starting and ending point. I'm not sure I like the architecture especially well but I don't dislike it. I keep coming back and shooting it because it seems to attract those beautiful cloud swirling blue skies that seem like something out of an old western movie done in Technicolor.

I was shooting with one of the cameras that keeps me from buying esoteric new toys like the Olympus OMDEM5 or the Fuji Pro 1.  It was the Sony a57 and it was sporting a 50mm 1.8 DT lens.  If you've read the blog for any amount of time you probably know that I really have an affinity for the classic 50mm lens in any of its permutations. And it's no different now that I'm shooting primarily with the Sony crop cams.

When I use a 50mm lens on a full 35mm format camera it's pleasant and neutral.  When I used it on an APS-C crop frame it's burrowing into the "nice portrait length" territory.  When I use it on a Sony a57 or a77 camera it becomes something even more flexible and special and I'd like to explain why.

There's a Jpeg-only option on these cameras called smart telecon.  It's a digital teleconverter.  On the a77 it gives you a choice of 1.4x and 2.0x magnification. The effect in the finder is seamless and there's no additional light lost as there would be with an optical teleconverter. The camera essentially just zooms in on a crop but the finder shows the crop as a full frame in the finder.  We wouldn't have used something like this in the 6 megapixel days but with the a77 I've got pixels to burn. When you set the camera to use the 1.4x setting on the smart telecon it drops the overall resolution to "M" which is still a big, healthy file.

One touch of the smart telecon switch makes my 50mm into an 84mm which is the angle of view equivalent (on APS-C sensors) of my all time favorite portrait lens, the Nikon 105mm 2.5.  If there's a drop in quality I sure can't see it.

On the a57 the control works as a digital zoom and allows a continuous range of magnifications, from the existing focal length up to 2x.  

I didn't use the telecon settings on the photos above.  I changed size and perspective in a very old fashioned way.  I moved my feet and brought myself and the camera closer to the building.  It worked well.  I'll have to teach a workshop about it someday to all the people who were raised on zooms.

Why do these cameras keep me from buying other cameras? Well, there seems to always be another setting or feature I have yet to discover and I find the files to be really nice.  The way we used to think about the colors in Olympus Jpegs. All the stuff works well but the real reason is that I am curious to see what their next full frame camera will be.

My most trusted source in the camera industry (hasn't been wrong in over 20 years...) tells me that the full 35mm frame Sony is a "done deal" and should arrive this Fall.  If they do a great job with the sensor I'm ready to snap the 70-200mm 2.8 G lens on the front and get cooking.

Reading the freakin manual is a great way to unlock the astounding secrets of your camera.  Any camera. I knew that this feature was there but I thought, "amateur."  It was only when I explained the feature to Ben that I got, in a flash, why it was so cool for me.

Mixing old and new technologies. Creative Soup.

This image started life as a frame of medium format black and white film.  I walked into the house one afternoon and Ben was sitting at the dining room table working on something. I had a Hasselblad 501CM over one shoulder with an 80mm Planar lens on it.  I opened the lens up, set the shutter speed at 1/60th of a second and snapped a few frames.

When I got the developed film back from the lab I stuck this frame into the desktop scanner and did a fairly neutral and flat scan at 10 by 10 inches @300 dpi.  I scan images a little flat in order to get the longest range possible and to preserve detail in the highlights and shadows which can be more finely controlled in PhotoShop and other programs.

I "spotted" the file using the healing tool in PS before I resized the file and dragged it into SnapSeed where I banged on it for a little while. I wanted soft skin tones but I wanted good, inky shadows and most of all I wanted a nice patina of grain. I played with the slider controls till I got what I wanted and then I saved a few versions.

The conceit on the web is that everything right out of the cameras of professionals is absolutely perfect and ready to run across two pages in a glossy magazine.  Of course, nothing could be further from the truth.

Here's what the file looked like right out of the scan with no PP work:

This is exactly how I would expect an enlarger print of the negative to look on #2 graded paper from a well exposed negative.  Like a negative a good digital file is the starting point for a photographer's interpretation. I like deep shadows more than I like high key presentations so the first thing I reach for is the curves control, or in Snapseed, a combination of brightness and contrast controls.

Once I have the tonal scale right I work on sharpening.  Then I work on adding grain and vignettes to drive viewers' eyes to the right quandrants.  When it seems a bit edgy and handmade I let go and save a version.

It helps sometimes to go over the top.  I played around with a more colorful "vintage" look and saved a few versions of that as well.

While I would have denounced such experimentation just a few years ago I'm working hard to understand and implement relevant modifications to my images that may, in fact, enhance them.  When we stop experimenting with our personal point of view and denounce every new invention and shift of cultural fashion we might as well hang it up and go somewhere to teach "how we used to do it in the old days."

Why did I start with film? The ability to hold good highlights and the wonderful fall off of focus from a sharp core here to a soft and diffused, shadowy rendition of a chair in the right side and edge of the frame.  The larger format adds a sense of increased dimensionality that I find gives the image more weight and a sense of complexity.

Can I do this with digital? Sure, but I'm privileged in that I don't have to.

A quick blog note on Ben:  He's going to start working for the rest of the Summer at Zachary Scott Theatre.  He presented a demo reel of video work that was well received and he handled himself very professionally as my grip and sound man for a recent TV commercial shoot we did together. They've asked him to come on board to shoot behind the scenes videos for the shows, construction documentation and to help edit in Final Cut Pro X for the theater's extensive online showcases.

He'll be using one of the VSL's Sony a57's (good video, great phase detection AF during video and focus peaking for decisive manual focusing- where appropriate.) He'll be using the 18-55mm kit lens, a 50mm 1.4, and he'll have access to the studio inventory if he needs something in a specialty lens. He's got his own Gitzo tripod with a fluid head that he picked up last year and he'll be recording sound with a Rode shotgun microphone. With FCPX on a recent 15 inch i7 MacBook Pro he's pretty much set to go as a one person ENG team.  We should start seeing his work online shortly.

I'll keep you posted and, if you are interested in video adventures, I might even persuade him to write a brief blog about his experiences as a 16 year old media producer. 

Proud father but quick to remind him that the graphic arts are not what I have in mind for a good career.....

Fun Summer Moment:  We discussed various video formats and some sound recording techniques after my swim practice and his cross country run this morning at a favorite breakfast dive. The family that nerds out together..........

Image of Michelle with enlarger post processing.

I write a lot about portraits here.  I mention the lenses and cameras and even the lights being used but I find it more difficult to convey what rapport is and how to work at establishing rapport with your portrait subjects.

When I was younger I used to think you had to have all kinds of lines and jokes to use in a session. I thought you needed to sound incredibly smart and look like you have it together every second of the shoot.  The typical stereotype of a professional photographer by aspiring photographers.

The reality is that connecting on a human level is much more important than getting every mechanical part of the shoot right.  People will forgive a lot if the expression and the engagement between the model and the moment are just right.  People are unforgiving of a technically excellent photograph of a despondent and disengaged subject.

In television people will forgive crappy video by they won't tolerate bad sound even for  a minute.  It's the same thing with portraits.  A real expression is more valuable than a Profoto Air 8 power pack and a box full of heads.

I know you've heard it before but I always sit down with my subject and talk for a bit to get to know them before we shoot.  I talk about how I work, ask them what they like.  We do small talk and we share.  How long?  Could be ten minutes, could be an hour.  Depends on what they have to say.

I work slowly.  I talk people into poses over time.  I shoot slowly.  I never use continuous shutter settings.  We stop and I give them (positive) feedback about how our session is going.  It's always "our" session, never "my" session.  If the lights are not working right I stop and tell them what's going on and how I'm going to fix it.  I tell them when they look beautiful and I talk them into another pose if I see something I don't like.

I always stop to fix things that I think are important.  I never presume I can fix something in post.

The session lasts as long as it needs to last. Sometimes for hours and sometimes for as little as thirty minutes...if we both know we got something great.

No phones or cellphones in the shoot.  We turn them off, not down.  I ask models and crew to leave theirs in the cars.  I turn off the studio phone.  If I have crew I like for them to be quiet and discreet during the shoot.  I am trying to build a rapport and a momentary relationship between me and the subject.  It's not a communal Koffee Klatch.

My goal by the end of the shoot is to have made another close friend and to have both of us want to shoot together again, soon.  That all sounds so easy.  It's the only hard part.

The Walk-Around Camera.

Ben.  September 1997. On the move in Austin.

"The dollar doesn't go as far today because people won't go as far for a dollar... " -old folk saying.

Could it be that photographs are being devalued, in part, because we don't put as much of ourselves in them as we used to? I was trying to figure out why I have such an instinctive dislike for the idea of pocket cameras and phone cameras. I understand that technology has gotten better and better and the images from iPhones are pretty good, technically.  And I know from experience that the 10 megapixel wonder cameras that are pocketable are also pretty good picture takers.  So what is it that's going on in my head that keeps me thinking that defaulting to the tired old saw, "The best camera is the one you have with you." Which implies that you, as a photographer, are too damn lazy to carry around the right tools with you to do the job so you're happy to default to  whatever is most convenient; if even you know it compromises your vision and your style.

For casual amateur photographers I get it. They aren't interpreting a scene they are documenting it and in their minds as long as the content is conveyed they've accomplished their mission.  And usually their mission isn't to go out and get great images it's to do something totally unrelated to photography but with the potential to create an image that speaks to the reality of their experience to all their friends on Facebook or Pinterest. 

Where does that leave the artists?  Where does that leave real photographers? Trapped between convenience and intention.  For years now I've spent Sunday afternoons walking around with a camera.  It's a nice change of pace from the studio and the pool and it gives me a chance to practice with whatever camera I've chosen to carry along.  

I go through phases. For nearly a year after the Olympus EP-2 came out it was rare for me to go out with anything else.  I carried it because it was small and light and because the VF-2 finder let me configure the camera as a square shooter.  That spoke (in a slightly diminished way) to the style I've been working on for nearly 25 years.  Shooting big square images with a Hasselblad film camera and a normal or slightly long lens.

The EP2 kept me happy enough but somewhere deep inside I had the gnawing realization that many times the final image was a compromise from the way I see things.  I had chosen small, light and free over the exacting parameters of my real vision.  With an equivalent angle of view the backgrounds didn't look the same as they did with my bigger camera.  The meatiness of the black and white negative was missing.  The rounded shoulder of my Tri-X film had been replaced with a snappy curve that clipped highlights quick in order to make the files fit into a color space.  

That all started me thinking about the difference between carrying a camera as a diletante as opposed to carrying a camera with a sense of my own real intention.  If you pack a camera in your pocket in order to be ready for the unexpected you are, on some level, like the guy who carries a condom around in his wallet on the off chance he might get lucky.  You're out on a beer run or buying something at the hardware store or drinking with your friends and you have your phone--with built-in camera--- in case Chuck drinks too much and hurls, or you see a power saw and need a price comparison photo. Or you and Chuck and Joe want a photo of yourself bracketing some poor girl who works at the car show.  Your primary intentions are to leave the house to do whatever normal people do in normal life. The camera is an afterthought.  The iPhone is a substitute. It's the Power Bar instead of the nice lunch. It's the instant coffee instead of the stuff they brew at Caffe Medici.  

So lately I've been trying to match my cameras to my intention.  Really.  I'm trying to match up the cameras with the reasons I bought them in the first place.  More and more my Sony a77's come out when I'm going to work for a client.  We have images in mind and we use the right tools to get them into file form.  Long and short lenses. Big files. Tripods and lights.  But it's rarer and rare that they go out on walks with me.

My Olympus EP2 and EP3 cameras come out when I'm shooting personal projects that are all about color, shape and textures and abstraction.  I really like them when it's my conscious intention to go out and look for patterns and symbols embedded in the urban landscape. The smaller cameras are like the Moleskine notebooks full of inferences and descriptions instead of the finished novel.

But now, when I take images of family, friends and interesting people I'm most likely to bring along my Hasselblad because it makes the kind of images of people that I know I'm going to like most.  Even with the 80mm Planar there's something very different about the way the lenses and the system differentiate my subjects and "remove" them one step from their environments.  To go one step further I usually use the medium format cameras with black and white film.  Not because that's some requirement from the art cult but because, when I started out shooting, color film was too expensive for me to use for personal work and too finnicky for people who did their own darkroom work.  But I learned to love it and look for tones and graphic separation of things and that love hasn't diminished.

It would be much easier to go out with the Pen EP2 and bang away with the aspect ratio set to 6:6 (1:1 in reality; Olympus was just riffing off the fact that square medium format is also known as 6x6...) and then take the raw frames, massage them and then run them through Silver EFX.  But the range of tones would be different and the ability to grab tenuous and precariously balanced highlights would be gone and the optical magic that happens when shooting to a bigger frame would also be gone.  Could I replicate the look and feel with lots of little PhotoShop tricks?  Sure but it won't be the same.  It will be a diluted fascimile of something that can still be done first hand. 

So now, even if it looks dorky, when I leave the studio and my intention is to photograph people I put the Hasselblad strap over my shoulder because that system is closest to my intention.  And life it too short to continue down the avenues of half measures and recitations about how something is "almost as good."  It never is.

Am I making some sort of statement to the effect that everyone should rush out and buy a Hasselblad even if your very first camera was a Canon G2?  Nope. I'm saying that if you work as an artist you will have some perfectly formed aesthetic that bangs around in your mind day in and day out.  That aesthetic is served by a unique set of tools and when you know and feel which tools are the ones that can best recreate your vision you have an obligation to yourself to match your aesthetic intention and your tools, even if they don't fit in your trouser pockets or allow you to tell everyone on Twitter that you are now at Denny's and will be ordering a Grand Slam.  (For my European readers: Denny's is a down market chain restaurant that specializes in packaging traditional American trash cuisine with maximum fat calories.  The Grand Slam is a breakfast special for four people, served to one...).

We have a vision in our minds of something we collectively call a "walk around" camera or a "street shooting" camera and we judge it to be something that will focus quickly, not be heavy or bulky and also be somewhat discreet.  We love the idea that Henri Cartier Bresson and his confederates roamed the streets of the world with small Leica rangefinder cameras, swathed in black tape to diminish their profiles, almost invisible to the world.  But those were their only cameras! Hank didn't have a Leica in his hand and a bag full of Rolleiflexes over his shoulder or a view camera waiting in the car.  All of his work was done with the same camera. (He changed models as improvements came along but the ethos was always the same: small, light, simple.)

His camera perfectly matched his intention. It was perfectly chosen to match his vision. As were William Klein's cameras and Robert Frank's cameras.  But my vision is not a "middle distance" vision of a scene unfolding so my choice of cameras shouldn't be the same. Even if it's in the nature of a walk around camera.

Many of my friends and associates have been drawn into the lure of the new walkaround cameras. They are currently flitting between the Olympus OMD EM-5's and the Fuji Pro 1's. The more financially robust are sticking with the Leica M9.  But they also have Hasselblad digital systems and Nikon D800's or Canon 5Dmk3 and their day-in-day-out vision is more accurately described and ascribed to their integration with interpreting through those systems.  Most of the folks I know honed their vision looking through the finders of 35mm SLRs.  A smaller sub-group gravitated early on to either medium format or, in the case of landscape and still life shooters, even bigger cameras.

Their training, their vision and their technical demands all scream "No!" to the cameras they feel compelled to acquire for their "leisure" work.  In my mind there is no difference between the leisure work and the heartfelt work.  An innate style is hard to change and even harder to translate to new and varied tools.  Few make the transition successfully.  

So I've moved back to shooting with what the little voice in my head keeps telling me I should have been shooting with all along, the big square.  And it's hard to "go backwards" on some fronts.  We've trained ourselves that everything we shoot is free.  Needs to be without cost. (financially and emotionally).  No more film purchases, no more lab costs.  If we go back to our big black and white square we're back to paying to shoot.  Client or not.  We're back to scanning our work.  I'm putting up one or two scanned frames at a time to share instead of glops of twenty or thirty similar but not quite identical digital frames.

But as I look through notebooks full of old school negatives and contact sheets I remind myself that we figured out how to pay for our own personal work back in the day, why can we not figure out similar budgeting compromises today?  Film, for my family, may mean that we don't go out to eat as much or that I keep my car a year or two longer than I intended.  Since all the work I'm doing with film is personal (for me first) I don't have to rush to develop it.  I can put it in a light tight box in the file cabinet and dribble it out when budgets are plumb, delay the processing when times are lean.  Opening the box and taking five or ten mystery rolls to the lab will have the same celebratory feeling we used to get when we'd pop the cork on a nice bottle of Champagne (Louis Roderer Brut, SVP) at the end of a lucrative project.  Film processing and celebration for doing well in your occupational art.

The bottom line here is that I'm not making any impassioned plea that you return to film or arrive at film as a virgin but that you choose your vision camera  and be true to that camera and that vision when you have the intention to go out and do your art.  Even if it's a tight squeeze to get that Hasselblad in the pocket of your pair of tight designer jeans.  But don't kid yourself that you somehow have  secondary vision and that it's being well taken care of with popular but inappropriate tools.  Whether or not a tool is appropriate depends solely on where you are in the process.

I wish my vision were all about the Fuji Pro 1 today. They look really cool.  But what's the use for me when I'll just end up cropping it square and trying to make the background go away in a very distinct fashion?  I'm looking for a digital back for my Hasselblad film camera.  I want one that has a big square.  When I find one I can afford I'll see if it can replace film.  Maybe.  Maybe not.  Only me shooting it for me will tell.

One thing I am sure of is that buying all the different cameras is a great way to move you further and further from what it is you really know you want to shoot.  Happy is the man or woman who has found his subject, his format and his camera and who can now settle down and just use them over and over again.

When we are willing to go all the way to make photographs that fit our vision they will have more power and more draw. They will be truer art.  When we choose a tool for convenience it's hard to push past "pretty" to "wonderful".  People talk about using the right tool for the right job but maybe we've been confusing ourselves as to what the real job is......

Steven Pressfield has a new book out that will be of much interest to many of the VSL readers.  It's called Turning Pro and it's a follow on to his great book, The War of Art. I recommend both of them highly.  I am thinking of writing a rejoinder called, "Turning Amateur: Making Photography Fun Again."  But that might be too much.