Texas Road Art.

I love big open skies and sweeping overpasses. I like monumental architecture. I like concrete that soars up into the sky. And I like skies filled with every kind of cloud, from the little "puffies" to the stringy "sliders" that come racing through when the weather changes.

You'd think a self proclaimed portrait shooter would run screaming from an assignment that was all about spending quality time with no one but myself. Even more so when you realize that I've heard all my own tall tales any number of times. But there is something quite liberating about being handed a list of potential locations and a wide open schedule.

The client and I agreed about a fixed price for the project. I would get to choose the days, the times, the angles and the feel of the shots. As long as I understood the budget I was pretty much on my own. I could be early. I could be late. As long as I turned in the stuff they wanted everything was fine.

I shot for six days. I'd trek out in the morning and when I got to the location I'd look up at the clouds and try to divine whether they were about to break and let the blue sky through or whether they were fixin to well up and cry down on me. If the portents were good I'd start the search for the angles and the lay of the light I wanted.

My only nemesis was the heat. I did this project in August, just north of Austin, Texas. The sun beat down on me like a bad drummer from a 1980's metal band. But after a while you learn to wear floppy shirts and a big hat. You learn really quick to bring your sunglasses along. And I learned, after my first Photoshop review of the take, that you should always take a light tight loupe to evaluate your take on the rear LCD. No matter what the maker says, no screen is accurate when the sun is bouncing and banking all around you.

I liked the parts of the highway project that were new because commuters hadn't yet incorporated the route into their routines. That meant that three or four minutes would go by without any cars. In early afternoon the roads would be silent for even longer spells. But my favorite part of the project was crawling around and under the sweeping and majestic overpasses, trying to contain the mighty dynamic range of real life and slap it down to sensor manageable blends of photons. My biggest allies were my Polarizing filters. My most important technique: absolutely accurate exposure metering.

Nearly all of these images were done on either an Olympus e520 or an Olympus e1 and nearly all three thousand shots were done with two lenses: The 14-54 and the 11-22mm. Other indispensable equipment included my water bottle and my cheap Nevados brand cross trainer shoes from Costco.

It was a quiet and contemplative job that was full of straight ahead work and satisfaction. The kind of job everyone needs to wedge in the middle of a hectic schedule. And working in opposition to my typical ways made it all the more refreshing. I did another job like this for another client about a year ago and shot the whole thing on small cameras. G10's, SX10's and the like. The results were equally nice.

Not having the client there made me realize how far down the line of decisions the choice of the camera is. And how mightily we've tried to elevate it. The number one goal of this job was to create good images without succumbing to heat exhaustion........

Maybe the best current zoom lens in the world?

Much as I love my new Canon G11 I still find it rewarding to shoot with other cameras. I was out shooting photos on Sunday with my friend, Emily and I wanted to do some images that utilized shallow depth of field; not a strength of really small sensor cameras.

I decided to use a lens I've come to value above all the others in my equipment collection: The Olympus 35-100mm 2.0. My images just don't do justice to this optic. It's not a shortcoming of the lens it's because I need to spend more time getting my brain dialed into the things that make
this lens really unique. It's incredible sharpness when used wide open and the fact that wide open for this particular zoom lens is f 2.0.

Here's a sad admission: As analytical as I'd like to think I am I tend to work more by reductive trial and error than by illuminated epiphany. I don't really go out on a shoot with a fully formed image in my mind. I have to set up and shoot, then look and change. Rinse, repeat. Eventually I'll luck into a confluence of lighting styles, background treatments and even expressions that work for me and I'll spend time repetitively polishing those few meager skills until they work as a cohesive combination. Only when I reach that point do I get any kind of nice feedback about my images.

I bought the 35-100mm to replace the longer focal lengths I sold off when I switched from the Nikon system to the Olympus system. I like the idea of the lens alot. I've used it for a number of straightforward jobs but nothing that would really test the unique qualities it provides. That's the sad aspect of buying gear while the economy is in the toilet, there are fewer opportunities to do the kind of big production work that lends itself to pushing gear to the edge and marveling in its performance.

That being said, I find the 35-100mm is so good that it gives me more confidence in even the most pedestrian jobs. Combined with the image stabilization built into the Olympus e30 body the whole unit is formidably well suited to shooting anything I would have done with the Nikon equivalents with the exception of black cats in coal mines. The smaller imaging sensor gives me the same kind of depth of field at 2.0 that I got from the Nikon 70-200mm 2.8 at f 2.8 but with much better image correction wide open. Stopped down to f4 I feel that I get the kind of sharpness that the Nikon provided between 5.6 and 8.0.

Honestly, either system would work equally well. So would the Canon equivalents or the Sonys. Wide open depth of field is something special and when you want it no amount of Photoshop manipulation takes its place.

Does this invalidate everything I've said about the Canon G11 compact camera? Hardly. Wide open DOF shots get as repetitive as anything else in photography. It's just another technique. When I'm ready to move on I find the smaller cameras have equally important advantages. Sometimes, many times, more depth of field is the "hot application" but it's good to have avenues to both techniques.

While I was out on Sunday I did find a short coming that is endemic to all the current SLR's that isn't shared by their pint sized proteges. It's the flash sync speed. What good are all these fast optics if we have to shoot them at f11 in order to do cool fill flash in bright sunlight? I set up a large scrim to block the sun and took test shots for natural light. Everything looked pretty cool at 1/4000th of a second f2.8. But the scene just fell into the "blah" zone when I added in the light from an umbrella'ed Profoto 600b. Why? The sync speed on my e30 stopped at 1/250th and that limited the range of f/stops I could use to those that gave me too much DOF.

I shot some stuff on my G11 at 1/800th of a second at f 7.1 but when I tried to sync faster I ran into the relatively long burn time of the Profoto 600b at full power. Going up on the shutter speed, even though it would still sync, gave me less and less light because of the flash becomes less efficient. It stays on longer than the shutter stays open.

This is an ongoing issue. Especially for people in Texas who want to shoot at impractical times.

I'm adding a new camera parameter to my short list of requirements. I want an SLR that can sync at all shutter speeds. Every darn one of them. If I want to shoot wide open with a fast lens in sunlight then by God, in the 21st century we should have that option. It was available on the Kodak Retina Reflex 35mm SLR film cameras over 50 years ago. It's absolutely not rocket science.

It is a feature that the new Leica S2 offers on their new series of announced lenses for their new medium format camera. But in light of the current economy I don't think it's practical to spend $35000-45,000 just for this particular feature. Might just be more cost effective to dust off one of the old Rollei 6008's and a some of the PSQ lenses.

The other option is to use FP flash but, as with the Profoto, the faster the shutter speed the lower the power I get with them. This limits me to bundling a bunch of expensive shoe mount flashes together or working with the light ridiculously close to the subject. I'm give it another try.

But back to the main topic. Fast zoom lenses. They fall into the categories of problem solvers. They make stuff look cool. And f2.0 with a 70-200mm equivalent is something we could only dream of just a decade ago.

Workshop Notice: There is still time to sign up for my lighting workshop. It's this Sunday here in Austin, Texas (October 25th). I'll be teaching a daylong workshop with small and conventional flashes. We'll do most of the morning inside the beautiful One World Theater on Bee Caves Rd. and we'll spend most of the afternoon trying to wrestle sunlight to the ground outside. You can register at www.precision-camera.com Hit the link for more details.

It's the last lighting workshop I'll be teaching in 2009 and it should be raucous good fun. Your choice of one of my books is included in the workshop price. Just saying.

Canon G11. The new professional camera?

(Samples at the bottom!)

So where do I start? How about a list of stuff that a G11 (a $500 compact camera from Canon) can't handle. There's sports, of course. And very fast moving action. (Unless you manually prefocus, and consider one frame per second fast). Then there's anything that requires a super wide angle lens or an extreme telephoto lens. I wouldn't use it for weddings----not super at focusing under very iffy light.

But, if you are a step by step, left brain kind of person who likes to shoot in the streets, loves setting things up carefully. Thinks portraits can be considered and gracious affairs. Loves to shoot things with lots of sharpness and depth of field I can certainly recommend the G11. I've shot close to a thousand frames since I got it a week ago and I've done my share of pixel peeping. I could shoot portraits in the studio with this and portraits out on the street. I could (have) shot some product shots with the little sucker and no one was the wiser.

Let's be honest. Most of us like to do one type of photography and our focus on that genre makes us better at it than the types of photography we do because we're considered "generalists". If we're being frank I'll say that when I shoot for myself, from the old days of film right up to today, I've never wanted to shoot wider than 28mm or longer than about 105mm. My favorite subject is the human face and I don't sneak shots I take portraits with the full collaboration of the subject. Which means I have time to compose and chimp and generally get stuff right. This is the world of the G11. And it's better than anything I've shot except for an M series Leica because the camera tends to just disappear and the whole even becomes a calm walk in the park as opposed to the ominous frippery of a "serious" shoot.

In a studio with a big Octabank plugged into a Profoto air monolight I can use the G11 to make portraits that are wonderful in their own right. If you've been in this business for a while the greater depth of field would give the images away as being the progeny of a small format camera but you wouldn't know it based on quality and color. I'll put it up against a string of Nikons or Olympus cameras I've owned or currently owned. In fact, the instant Live View (no waiting for flopping mirrors) makes it an even more valuable studio portrait camera.

In the street, pre-focused, it's as fast as my Leica M6. In a dimly lit restaurant the combination of a new, clean ISO 400-800 and great IS gives me the opportunity to shoot sharp the way I would have with my previous gen Nikons.

So what's not to like? Well, I guess it's scary for some because it's not a camera that will wow the clients. But then isn't it the photos that are supposed to wow them? I interpreted statements by the APA crowd that we needed to "raise the bar" to mean that we needed to be more creative and more visually advanced than the "proletariat" crowd of "proamateur" photographers. I didn't see the statement as a manifesto to outspend everyone in an "arms race" to the whispery thin heights of ultimate machinery. The air is too rarified up there for most rationale practitioners....and it's time we acknowledged that the equipment "barriers to entry" are largely gone.

I'll go one step further. If you are shooting in good light and you can't make a great image on a G11 (or the previous generation G10) then you aren't as good a photographer as you think you might be...

What I like about the G11:

1. Great form factor. It feels nice in the hand.

2. Wonderful analog feel to the dedicated controls you'll use most often.

3. Great ISO performance up to 400. Very good up to 800.

4. Standard hot shoe allows you to use a range of flashes, from Canon's big guns, to generic single contact flashes to a wide range of radio triggers.

5. Sync speeds of up to 1/2000th (and not just in an "FP" mode.....)

6. Decent battery life.

7. Articulated LCD screen on the back.

8. The snappy look of the "positive film" setting in the color controls.

9. The incredibly sharp, just right focal length range of the lens.

10. Nice standard definition movie performance.

11. RAW file format. (can hardly wait for the Capture One upgrade...)

12. The $500 price tag.

I was an early adopter of digital and I've spent enough on cameras to buy a fairly nice boat but I will say that this little camera blows away the performance we were getting from most SLR's at multiples of this price only a few years ago.

Things I don't like about the G11:

1. The crappy optical viewfinder with the built in parallax distortion.

2. Um......???

Finally, I've included images from a day of shooting around Austin. Your kilometerage will likely vary. And if you just sunk $100,000 in a Leaf Medium Format System I expect you to disagree with me on every point! But that's life. As Jay Maisel would say, "It's hard to take a picture if you don't have a camera with you." And that's the whole point of the G11. It's the camera you will have with you because it works so damn well and it disappears even better.