After nearly two months of constant rain and cloudy skies I am overdoing it with post processing in an ill advised attempt to make up for lost time with dramatic renditions of SKY!!!

I know I am overdoing it. I know I should lay off the "dramatic" filter and the "structure" filter in Snapseed but I've lived through so many gray skies that I just want to make up for lost time and create my own version of giant, Texas skies. I'll get over it. I swear! 

I am so confused. I must be doing something wrong. All the lenses I buy, which have reputations for softness, are far too sharp and detailed for my liking. Example: Nikon 24-120mm f4 G.

It was a holiday here in my country so I decided to do something different today and go for a walk in our ever growing downtown. Astute readers will remember that I bought a Nikon 24-120mm f4G lens about a week and a half ago. I almost didn't buy it because even though the long range of focal lengths and the relatively fast, constant aperture made it look great, on paper, I read many reviews which would have left a saner man running in the opposite direction from this product.

The two biggest knocks against this lens are that it is a crazy basket of distortions and that it's just not very sharp in the corners or at the longer focal lengths. Of course I have two replies. The first one is a quick acknowledgement of the fact that the lens has geometric distortions across the frame at different focal lengths. It's most pronounced at the widest setting. Most of the lenses people shoot with these days have the same kinds of distortions to some degree but the relevant thing is that the distortions can be automatically corrected by the camera, if you are shooting Jpegs. If you are shooting raw files the correction is one mouse click away in Lightroom or PhotoShop. Problem solved. Moving on.

The sharpness thing has me baffled and it may be that I'm just not keen enough to see it or smart enough to know what I should be looking for. I used the lens this afternoon to shoot lots of pretty pictures and I came back to the studio to fix them up and play with them on my computer. No matter what focal length I used to shoot the images they all looked sharp to me. And by "sharp" I mean they resolved lots of detail and that the transition between tones has high enough edge acutance to show off the detail in a convincing (and satisfying) way. I was using the Nikon D810 at ISO 64 and I don't think that's cheating. The camera can only pull as much detail out as the lens puts in. Right?

Stop reading lens reviews and test the lenses you are interested in for yourself. You might be surprised to find that most modern lenses are pretty good and that there's more to a lens than extreme corner sharpness. I hate corner sharpness. I put clear filters on my lenses and rub vaseline into the edges so it softens my corners up nicely. That way a file with too much sharp detail won't harm my eye with over sharpness.  (kidding. Just kidding).

But seriously, if you are a Nikon user, try whatever lens might suit you for yourself and ignore the internet experts. They are aiming for something different than you and I and it probably isn't the happiness of making nice photographs.

Happy Fourth. Independence can even extend to lens evaluations. Fun/Fireworks.

Too much fun playing with filters in SnapSeed......

Robin Wong (wonderful photo blogger!!!) reminded me of this piece I wrote five years ago. It may be the second best thing I've written about photos.

http://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2010/11/passion-is-in-risk.html

Would you please read it and tell me what you think?

Loading the multi-DVD player for a long weekend of director's cut movies down at the office. Getting away from the routine at home....

Now. Who's got the darned remote?

(shot for Motorola to illustrate one of their fabs. It was a long day of "bunny suit" hell with a couple of Hasselblad cameras that had been repeatedly swabbed with alcohol....Ektar 25 film. Stay still!)

A Dial That Measures Your Ennui.

This is the second in my limited edition, "Industrial Art Meditation" series of photographs. For some mystical reason I can only print this image very large. I call the process "Struth-ification" and it means that prints are wildly, ruinously expensive. If you are interested in owning one of the 10 x 15 foot images for your country home or ski residence please send along your banking details and we'll arrange an understanding....

Ah. The magic of machined metal. 

Magic Lamps. Piss colored backgrounds.

Sometimes, during a long shooting day on location, I find myself looking for images just to please myself. Things the client usually won't want. Things that have a form and color combination that makes them a bit surreal. Or hyper-real. I was at a company that machines all sorts of things. I was shooting mostly scenes from their production floor. There is a transparent, yellow, plastic curtain that separates two areas to contain dust. This light sits on our side of the curtain and is lit by a mix of daylight and fluorescent lights. I was intrigued by it and returned again and again to try to make better images.

It was shot with a Nikon D610 equipped with the old, push-pull 80-200mm f2.8 lens. I used the lens at 80mm and the combination of camera and lens were stabilized on a wooden tripod.

It is available (of course) as a 24x36 inch archival print for $12,000. The edition of these prints is limited to 100,001. We will honor your check.

You'll enjoy owning this piece. It has its own insouciant effervescence. 

The Three Graces. An afternoon at the Louvre Museum.

The sculpture of "The Three Graces" was done in Roman imperial times and by most accounts was inspired by an earlier Hellenic work. While many people are attracted to the Louvre Museum for it's immense collection of paintings I am almost always happiest looking at the sculpture. My favorite piece is one I found on the second floor back in 1978. It's called, "Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss", by Antonio Canova.

But every time I go back I find something new to like. This image of the "Graces" was shot on a cold, wet, rainy afternoon in the early 1990's. Agfapan 400 film. Camera brand lost to memory but most likely a Leica rangefinder with a 50mm or 75mm lens.

When I first started visiting the Louvre you entered by a small door off to the side of the main plaza. There was no pyramid, no escalators or elevators. But more to the point there were far fewer people going through each day, which meant you could almost always find quiet and uncrowded corners, filled with new (to me) treasures. And before digital cameras and phones there was no giant horde of "guests" thronging around the painting of the Mona Lisa, making selfies and ignoring the "no flash" signs. The museum has given up policing the "no flash" policy and put a much, much thicker piece of protective glass in front of the painting.

That's okay, I'd much rather get closer to the sculptures.... That's good stuff.

Required reading for real photographers and wannabe photographers who want to be real photographers. Thank you NYT. It's about Robert Frank.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/05/magazine/robert-franks-america.html?smid=nytimesphoto&_r=0

This is a wonderful article about Robert Frank who is one of the greatest living photographers today. If you don't like Frank's work then you...... 

Back to the crack. I mean gear. I've been testing a prototype zoom lens that's under wraps. I think it must be a Zeiss Otus Zoom lens because it's very heavy and very good...

Amazing. Micro-contrast within micro-contrast. At 20mm it's at least 87.5% sharper across the frame than the Zeiss 21mm f2.8 prime. The color purity redefines delta. The coatings must be the tiny particles that together make up nano-crystals only mixed with gold and platinum to resist both flare and the dreaded banality coefficient. 

It was a dark and stormy night and even though it was humid, and the mercury had come to rest near the ninety degree mark, the man in sunglasses who approached me was wrapped in a black trench coat and had his wide brimmed hat pulled down to drop the rest of his face into shadows. "Are you Tuck?" He asked with a trace of a growl and more than a dash of some Germanic accent. I nodded my head and waited. He thrust a small package into my hands. It was wrapped in brown paper and secured with twine. It felt heavy. Dense. Expensive.

The mysterious man nodded curtly and said, "The boys at the lab would love for you to shoot this and write about your results. But be careful. What's in this box is capable of such high sharpness there is the chance that the wrong sort of use might actually slice your eye." With that he turned and stepped into a black sedan and peeled out of the parking lot of the Seven-Eleven convenience store where I had gone for my working photographer's microwaved, burrito dinner. I went without the luxury of a meal (such is the fate of the freelancer in this era....) and headed home to open the package in the privacy and security of my tiny, cramped office.

I locked the deadbolt and turned on the old, flickering desk lamp which threw a tiny beam of troubled light onto a desk piled high with bills and cancellation notices. I pushed the rejection letters for my books off to one side, to create space, and set the package down. It was no bigger than the boxes that camera lenses come in. I hesitated and then pulled the John Ek, EK4 KA-BAR commando knife from its sheath on my right ankle and sliced through the twine. I carefully peeled through the brown paper with the tip of the blade and then opened the plain, black box inside. There, nestled in Andalusian, model grade, foam peanuts was

Fashion Show. Transparent Jacket.

It's funny to think how much photography has changed since I was a younger person walking around with a camera. Now we can display images on the web with a few deft clicks and thousands or millions of people will see them. We've made enormous transitions from film to digital and supposedly lenses have gotten better and better. But when I go back into a box of 11 x 14 inch, black and white prints and really look I am struck by how much the same the actual images look from then to now. As if we've changed all the external parameters and left only the core event untouched.

I took this with a Contax SLR and I used a Zeiss 135mm f2.8 lens. There was no image stabilization and the noise was what the noise would be using Tri-X or Agfa 400 speed black and white film. The printing was limited by my own skills at the time. The black edge is actual light from the gap between the "live" film and the edge of the negative carrier. The negative carrier was filed out one evening so it would always show the full frame.

But seeing the image when I was taking the image; the when of pressing the shutter button and the framing overall, those things haven't changed with the new technologies. Those things are innate to the artist, not the cameras.

Convection ovens are invented, juicers are modified, knives are re-invented but at the end of the day it is all about the flavor of the food served in a fine restaurant. Pretty much the same with photography. Images are to be eaten by the eyes and enjoyed. Doesn't matter which "oven" they were baked in.

recipe for model on runway at fashion show, old school:  carefully meter white runway. Set exposure 1.5 stops slower than meter indication. Pray you nailed exposure for skin tone. Stay in the 2 by 2 foot box/boundary that you taped onto the floor of the shooting platform so you don't jostle the other 50 shooters who have also marked their territories on the crowded shooting platform. Remember that you only have 36 frames on the roll and you don't want to be re-loading during a fun imaging moment. Be sparing with your shutter finger. Pre-focus into the zone in which you think you'll be shooting and then make small corrections in real time (no AF on that camera...). Don't get too excited early on and use up all your film. Save a couple of rolls for the grand finalé. 

A man responds to Art.

©kirk tuck.

The look. The runway.

©kirk tuck.

Siena.

©kirk tuck

A moment between moments of endless creativity.

©kirk tuck.

A good position at the shows is valuable. A camera with a trustworthy lens, even more so.

©kirk tuck.

Backstage at the Karl Lagerfeld show, October 1994.

©1994 Kirk Tuck

Rene Z. In the old studio on San Marcos Street.

Rene Z. ©Kirk Tuck

Belinda drinking cappuccino on a chilly October day.

Walking through Paris with a Contax camera. 1994.

©1994 Kirk Tuck.

A new way of working after all these years. Getting monopodial.

Self portrait with a Rokinon 85mm lens on an EM5.2.

I've been writing a lot lately about using the Berlebach monopod in my work at events. I never took monopods seriously before even though I've dabbled with a baker's half dozen of them over the years. One of the first presents my then girlfriend and now wife of thirty years gave me, early on, was a Leitz Tiltall monopod. Black, lightweight, sleek and good. I still have it now 35 years later.  But it was the Berleback 112 with the little wooden tilting head at the top that finally made me realize the value of this support system. And I happy to have finally solidified the connection.

I used the Berlebach monopod at the Freescale Semiconductor FTF show last week to stabilize my 24-120mm lens as I made images of displays and demo areas in their Tech Lab, shooting with a Nikon D610 in raw mode. I hold the monopod near the top with my left hand and I pull it in close to my body so the connection with my stomach creates a non-moving point of contact. This goes a long way to stabilizing the motion from side to side. Pulling the assemblage tight to my body also gives me something to pull into which stabilizes my left hand. I hold the grip of the camera in my right hand and try to make the shutter tripping as smooth and easy as possible. Finally, I press the camera against my suborbital ridge to establish another solid point of contact. With a bit of practice I am able to get a convincingly sharp, wide angle shot at around 1/8th of a second, and do so reliably.

A major benefit of using the monopod instead of always being handheld is that the monopod does the work of defying gravity which alleviates a large portion of the physical stress caused by holding onto a three to six pound package for hours at a time. Being able to let the monopod fight gravity instead of my arms means that I'll have less shake due to exhaustion than I would normally

Getting copies of annual reports on which you've worked is like Christmas in June. Here's the latest one from the Pedernales Electric Co-op...

I like working on annual report projects because it's a quick, deep dive into a company and it's a concentrated photography experience that really calls on various skills for success. There tends to be a very high shooting to use ratio with the images, but that's to be expected. Art directors like to have a big "catalog" of possibilities to work with when they sit down after the shooting to finalize their designs. And in large companies there are always more people with input who might like to try something a bit different. 

The images for the Pedernales Electrical Co-op project were mostly shot in the last week of April and the first week of May. The art director and I traveled all around the central Texas area photographing people working with clients and at infrastructure facilities. We made about a dozen shots of the CEO in different locations and made hundreds of images of an electrical substation so the AD could get the exact angle and configuration she wanted of the final cover. You can see from the shot above and the shot below that the cover is wraps around to the front and back; it's a highly cropped image that, in person on the printed piece, stands up very well. No noise, no grain and no softness. 

The image was shot using a Nikon D810 camera and the inexpensive but potent Rokinon 14mm f2.8 lens. A lens profile was applied in PhotoShop. And yes, I was pretty much shooting directly into the sun...

I got a copy of the AR in the mail last week and it has a few mailing nicks and bungs but I wanted to share it with you since I wrote about the assignment when it was in progress. It's fun to finally be able to show the printed work. While I realize that a lot is lost in translation when the brochure has been photographed (with a few unfortunate glare spots) and radically down sampled for the web but I do consider the double truck spread printed on a traditional printing press to be the litmus test for technical quality and file integrity. Also, at 11x17 inches (print in hand) you'll be able to see every glitch you created or passed by in post processing. Personally, I'm happy to see that there's no trace of banding in the uniform sky areas. 

Below is a partial sampling of the spreads.....

Scouting locations is a wonderful thing. We knew exactly at what angle to put the trucks to get light on them and still get some modeling....we'd been there before.

The key to doing projects like this for me is to know what to expect in advance, to pack a kit that allows you to move quickly but still handle a wide range of lighting challenges, and to always be genuinely collaborative with your creative partners and polite and respectful to all the people you'll need to cajole into cooperating. I depended on the Elinchrom Ranger RX AS flash system for the heavy light lifting in some shots, the Cactus triggers and various shoe mount flashes in most interior locations, and the Nikon D810 with the 14mm, 25-50mm f4.0 ais lens, the Sigma 50mm 1.4 art lens, the Nikon 105 f2.5 and the ancient but sharp as a tack 80-200mm f2.8 Nikon zoom. Nothing fancy but nothing crappy either. 

One of my most important tools on this job was my tripod. Lots of the images in the other spreads, as well as every portrait in the AR were done using a tripod for support. A simple tool but worth so much when you are aiming to print big and deliver consistent quality. 

As I tell Ben, "This is what I do at work."

Math Conference. A wonderful opportunity to try out different cameras, lenses and approaches. A fun and interesting way to spend three days!

Kirk and Stan Y. at the Math Conference. AT&T Conference Center at UT.

Three years ago I got an e-mail from Stan, who reads the VSL blog and also teaches at Cal Poly, in the  Math department. He works with a group that spreads a way of teaching Math called, IBL or, Inquiry Based Learning. Each year there is a gathering of mostly university level, but also some high school level, Math educators and they share new knowledge and techniques with their peers. Speakers present new methods that they've used to make learning deeper and better. Less rote memorization and more actual learning. Stan asked me if I would be interested in photographing the conferences. I immediately said, "Yes."

I offer the conference a number of different photographic services. I set up a temporary studio in a meeting room at the conference locations and we make portraits of speakers, board members and others for the IBL people to use with articles on their websites. This year I used a Nikon D610 with a 24-120mm lens to make the portraits, and I used three Cactus V6 transceivers, one Cactus RF60 flash and two Yongnuo flashes to light the portraits. It's a quick and easy lighting set up with enough power to adequately photograph small groups as well. 

I cover the main sessions in the large ballroom and try to get a mix of speaker shots along with shots of the attentive and inquisitive audience. After the large "main tent" sessions the conference has a daylong series of "break out" sessions that run concurrently. Each break out last for half an hour at a time and there are four classes in four different rooms. I try to get by each room during the half hour to photograph the speakers and the engaged participants. The sessions go on until the coffee breaks and then, fully fueled, they begin again. Like most conferences there is a fun banquet on the evening of the first full day and this year's keynote was light-hearted and enlightening. Just as in almost every other profession the rate of change in colleges and in teaching is astounding!

I worked on the IBL conference in this same venue two years ago and knew that two of the presentation rooms would be dark. They were especially dark in the spot where the presenters podiums were situated. The lower illumination levels are actually good for the screens upon which the speakers present notes, graphs, illustrations and PowerPoint stuff but it also means that the photographer is best served (when shooting available light) to shoot with a camera that's very clean at 6400 ISO. Knowing this I decided to use the Nikon D610s for the first two days of the conference. Those were the days on which the rotating classes were most concentrated. 

After the "main tent" session in the morning I am kept moving all day long. I go from classroom to classroom and always under the time constraint imposed by having to cover four instructors over the course of each half hour. I went in with a different methodology that I usually use. I brought along the Berlebach ("crutch") monopod and used one camera and lens. In the smaller classrooms and for almost all the social receptions I used a D610 body and the new (to me) Nikon 24-120mm f4 G lens. The combination of the monopod and the VR in the lens was perfect. No frames were lost to camera shake. None at all. Occasionally I tossed out a few frames because of subject movement but the camera and monopod never failed me. My ISOs ranged from 640 to 6400 and I was surprised, in post production, to see just how clean the higher ISO shots ended up being. A tiny bit of noise reduction at the extremes was all that was required in order to deliver perfectly usable shots under some really chaotic mixed light situations. 

I had some trepidation during the planning phase for the job about the use of my second lens, the Nikon 80-200mm f2.8 (push-pull design) because it doesn't feature vibration reduction of any kind. I found that VR was largely unnecessary if I used the monopod for all of my shots. I thought there would be a bigger learning curve on getting the feel of shooting with the monopod and a heavy lens just right but after 20 minutes and the first 100 shoots it seemed like a very natural way to shoot with the long lens. 

I know it will drive purists crazy but I did two things that I think make shooting an event like this manageable and shootable. First, I tried to use the lenses at their wide open apertures. I understand as well as anyone else that the sharpest zone for most lenses is when they are used at least two stops down from wide open but I also understand the trade offs of slower shutter speeds or higher ISO settings. My compromise was to always aim at the widest aperture on the lens. After all, why spend money on fast, premium optics in any system if you are afraid to use the apertures you so dearly paid for? Right? In addition to keeping the ISO and shutter speeds in optimum ranges this sort of project is one that benefits from using narrow depth of field to isolate main subjects with more clarity. 

The second thing I did was to shoot in Large Fine Jpeg format for the Nikons. Modern cameras are worlds better than their predecessors at getting good white balance under most situations and post production software is getting better all the time if bigger corrections are necessary. Shooting in Jpeg as opposed to raw meant being able to shoot more variations which gets me a better range of expressions, etc. It means that I'm able to use the DX crop mode if I want more effective reach than using full frame files. The important thing to consider before hyperventilating about a "pro" using Jpeg files instead of raw is that nearly all of the files are destined to be used on the IBL website and not as double truck spreads in a printed annual report. That last 5% (if that) of quality isn't going to be perceivable once the files are down sampled from 6000 pixels to less than 2000 pixels. 

If I found myself shooting the 80-200mm f2.8 to capture the keynote speaker I would, from time to time, click into the DX mode for a 1.5X crop which gave me the equivalent of a 300mm f2.8 lens. It also gave me a tight head and shoulders shot from a distance that didn't impinge (as much) on the speaker's space.  I did the same thing with the 24-120mm lens. I might be in an unoccupied row in a classroom shooting a demonstration and I might decide to get closer than the maximum focal length of the lens allows. A click into the DX mode buys me an instant "180mm" lens to use at f4.0. I realize that I can crop frames after the fact but editing through 3500 images at a whack always makes me appreciate images that come into the mix "pre-cropped." It's easier to see, after the fact, what my primary intention was in the shooting the image in the first place. If you can remember, after the fact, exactly how you wanted all 3500 images you shot in three days cropped in post production then you have more extreme powers of memory and retention than I have ever had...

At this point I would normally complain about the weight of the Nikon full frame camera bodies (I kept a back up D610 in the bag...) and their attendant lenses but I can't this time. You see, I used the big wooden monopod for just about everything. It was quick to reposition and worked well because the head was easy to tilt up and down. But most importantly, if I kept my bag in a central location (usually a corner of the ballroom) and only walked around with one camera and one lens on a support then anytime I stopped the weight of the camera and lens was balanced on the vertical shaft of the monopod instead of upon my shoulder or neck. It's the first three day conference I've shot that I remember waking up the day after the conference without a sore left forearm from carrying and holding up a heavy camera and lens. The Nikon D610 is a fast focuser (and accurate) and it nails exposures the vast majority of times. It also does a good job nailing down color balance in locations with mixed lighting. In many ways it's a great system for events ---- especially when used with a fairly fast (in context) and wide ranging zoom lens like the 24-120mm f4.0. 

Does this mean I've abandoned the micro four thirds cameras I just re-bought? Interesting questions and one that I discussed with Stan on Friday afternoon. In politics you could (justifiably) call me a "flip-flopper" because after our discussion I felt a bit of a challenge to come back the next day and shoot with the smaller camera system instead of the big Nikons. Friday night I stuck the Nikons back in their drawer and hauled out two Olympus EM5.2 camera bodies (with attached battery grips) and a small selection of lenses, along with a couple of small flashes. That's what I took with me for the last day of the conference. 

As expected, the high ISO performance wasn't quite as good as the Nikon's (about a stop and a half different) but the color (read off the full sensor in real time) was more accurate and required a little less post processing. The exposures were also better nailed down, but I attribute that to the almost unconscious ability to pre-chimp all frames in the EVF. My one point of real concern was in shooting the instructor shots and the speaker shots because the Nikons had been so useful in the days before for that kind of work. I kept thinking to myself that I should have purchased the fast and sharp, Olympus 40-150mm f2.8 in order to get the reach and speed I might need to replicate the quality of what I'd done with the previous cameras. But it was useless worry when a much cheaper (and to my mind more elegant) solution presented itself while I cruised through the lens drawer....

I found the Rokinon 85mm f1.4 lens for the Nikon as well as an inexpensive Fotodiox, Nikon to micro four thirds adapter. After one dials in the focal length the EM-5.2 camera brings to bear its remarkable, five stop image stabilization and you end up with an effective 170mm f1.4 lens. Just to be safe I used it mostly at f2.8 but I did make a few forays into the world of f2.0 and everything seemed to work well. The long focal length, coupled with powerful image stabilization and very useful focus peaking in the EVF combined to give me images that are within a gnat's whisker of the image quality of the Nikon combinations. There were trade-offs in both directions but the median results from both cameras? Very good!

The image just below is of Southwestern University president, Ed Burger. It was shot with the Nikon D610+80-200mm f2.8 at f2.8, ISO 1600. Great Keynote speech.

The image directly below is of Dave Kung. He is a math educator at St. Mary's College and was our plenary speaker at the very end of the conference. (Incidentally, I expected his speech to be aimed at his core audience (other mathematicians) but the subject matter was so compelling and so well presented that I left the speech with tears in my eyes and a lump in my throat. Amazingly good!!!).
It was shot on the same stage with the same lighting (but from a different angle than the image above) with the Olympus EM5.2 and the aforementioned Rokinon 85mm with adapter at f2.8. Also shot at ISO 1600. Both are equally good to my eyes.....

The bulk of any conference is the social interaction between professionals and this conference was well constructed to give many opportunities to meet new colleagues and share good information on a one on one basis. I like making images of people who are engaged in conversation. It's fun to try and show the energy and joy people have when sharing something they feel strongly about, something they love.

Attendee during a break. 

Whether the conference is for profit or for the benefit of society the one thing that 

fuels early morning sessions, long technical discussions and events that start early and 

last into the night is coffee. Good coffee that never runs out. 

The AT&T Conference Center got that exactly right!

A few images from the conference.

While the budgets for conferences are different between big, profitable corporations and the non-profit associations trying (with no other motives) to move the process of good education forward, I can tell you which ones I like to shoot best: I like these educational gatherings. The attendees and speakers are more relaxed. There's no hierarchy of status or stature. No CEOs to be feared. No nervous "chain of command." Just good people getting together to figure out how to teach our kids (and your kids) math in a way that helps them learn better and for the long haul. These are happy, determined, gracious professional people and I hope it shows in the photographs I took for them. Well done IBL crew!

Tomorrow I'll deliver 2,521 large, Jpeg images on a memory stick. Actually, I'll deliver two sticks; one for the local group that helps to fund the conference, and the mission of the IBL Math initiative, and one stick for them to pass on to the committee that heads up the organization. I hope my images help them expand their "market" and bring in new educators who are interested in learning better techniques of teaching higher math.