A quick discussion about camera batteries.

I bought an Olympus EM-5 a few days ago and I decided that I wanted to use if for one of the two projects I'll be shooting tomorrow. Love working on Sundays---it gives me a jump on the week.  So I started putting together a shooting kit for the two different jobs this morning and I hit the wall. I am so conditioned to taking back up batteries for every camera that I couldn't get mentally around the impediment imposed by having on a single battery for the EM-5. But I am hard headed and I really wanted to use it so I went online to see how much Olympus batteries cost. I was shocked to find that this tiny rectangle of plastic and lithium ion runs about $55.

I was on Amazon so I went ahead and checked for OEM batteries and I found a brand I've used before in several different cameras, Wasabi Power. The offer two batteries and a charger for just $23 dollars but Amazon can't get it here (at a reasonable shipping cost) before Monday, which does nothing for my compulsive desire to use the camera tomorrow (Sunday). I ordered the Wasabi Power batteries on the assumption that one day I'll want to take the EM-5 on a shooting trip or prolific shooting assignment and I'll want multiple batteries so I don't have to worry about on the job charging.

Then I got in my little car and headed to Precision Camera to pony up the full $55 for the Olympus brand battery. Which they did have in stock. Need an excuse to love your local bricks and mortar camera store? How about that the battery was a twenty minute drive away today. And its brother or sister will be there tomorrow if I need another one right away?

I needed to head out there anyway for some white seamless paper but we don't need to talk about that yet because it's a job for another day...

I got my battery and I charged it. Now it's in the camera grip. My compulsive nature is taking a rest.

But my consumer brain wants to know why the name brand batteries are cost a tenth of the price of a new camera. Why? And why are the people at Wasabi (and I assume countless other battery re-namers) able to deliver a battery with the same level of performance for 1/4th the price of the Olympus batteries?

And it's not just Olympus, I see the same differential with Panasonic and Sony too. I guess, with the diminishing market for actual cameras they have to make up margins somewhere else.

I'm not that happy about tiny, $55 batteries. But, on the other hand, I am happy to have the battery in the camera and ready for work... I guess it's all a mysterious trade-off.


Need some action and adventure in your Summer? Try the photo novel of the Summer: 

We'll both be happy you did!

Man buys obsolete camera after saying he "probably will" buy the camera nearly two years ago. The same, exact camera, not just the same model...

I used to have too many cameras and then I got rid

of a whole bunch of them and I felt a little naked

even though I had the three cameras I needed so I bought 

one more that does something a little different from 

the other three. Sue me. 

My friend, Frank, bought this camera (above= Olympus em-5) in May of 2012---about a week after the camera officially launched into stores. He didn't fool around either. He bought the battery grip right up front. We met for coffee so I could fondle the camera and see just how cool it was and then I went home and wrote a column about how this camera might eventually cost me $1500. I was postulating that I would probably be inspired in short order to rush out and buy one with the grip. That's about what they cost new back then. 

Frank has pretty much stayed the course with Olympus and Panasonic and has not made the fun but financially disastrous missteps that I have by also buying into the Sony Alpha system and, simultaneously, the Nex system as well. At one point recently I had overlapping systems (not just cameras) that covered Pentax, Samsung, Sony, Sony and Panasonic. It was insane. I never knew what camera to take out the door. And if I could decide on a brand some times it was a whole separate thing to decide on a format...

Now my sole point and shoot camera is a Sony RX10 and, until yesterday afternoon, my other (work) cameras were all Panasonic GH series cameras. I won't apologize for a giant mix of lenses as long as they all fit, with adapters, on the m4:3 cameras.

So I bought the mildly used camera (above) yesterday afternoon and I've spent some time with it. The rationale for stepping outside the Panasonic universe? It's for the times that I want to use the 17mm 1.8, and the 45mm 1.8, and the older PenF lenses with the benefit of image stabilization. That, and a need to understand why people were so emotionally loyal to the EM-5 camera.

I cleared off the dining room table last night and got out my steam powered slide rule (with genuine leather case), a pdf of the owner's manual blown up into hundreds of poster sized pages and laid out on the living room walls, and gathered five different large screen TVs, each with a YouTube video queued up from some OMD  web expert or another's attempt to demystify the menus. The entire team of Visual Science Lab experts dragged over the portable bar from headquarters and we spent the better part of 11 hours straight mixing martinis and daiquiris and trying to decipher and make sense of the labyrinthian Olympus menus. 

Our best bet was the black market guidebook that translated the Romanian version of the manual back into English. Somehow it was the least obtuse. We went on to spreadsheet all the various matrixes, all the possible combinations of settings and quickly realized that this could become more complex than encryption to the 12th place. 

Then Ben leaned in and turned on something called "SCP." and everything became much simpler. You could see all the important stuff in one place and take needed actions. Now, if only we could figure out what "SCP" means...

An interesting factoid that we discovered as we were slamming down benzedrine and trying to stay awake at sunrise while we continued learning to operate the menu in it's entirety,  is that if you go though all the menus in reverse, move each letter up or down in the alphabet by two steps ("m's" become "o's" or "k's") and go through that process eight times and then repeat interspersing letters represented by pi numerals in sequence while skipping every third menu line you will eventually write a perfect copy of James Joyce's novel, Ulysses.  Not complicated at all.  (Where the hell is the green zone...?).

After a 30 minute nap and five cups of coffee I decided to go out and at least try to shoot with the camera. I was pleasantly surprised. As long as you don't have to change anything in the menus it is an elegant and fun picture taker. I might be able to manage ISO and white balance settings on my own but I did bring along three technicians with laptops poised to get straight through to the geniuses on the forums at DPreview but....surprisingly I did pretty well on my own. Tomorrow we'll get that diopter thingy just right....

Need some action and adventure in your Summer? Try the photo novel of the Summer: 

We'll both be happy you did!

Independence Eve Swim. With camera in tow.

I got up ten minutes before the seven a.m. swim workout, grabbed my towel and my suit from the rack in the bathroom, filled a water bottle with a mix of cucumber Gatorade and water, grabbed a Samsung NX30 camera with the 85mm lens and headed out the door. The pool is about a mile from my house and I made it, suited up and was in lane four warming up by 7 sharp. The pool was packed. The workout was fun. We got in about 3,000 yards in an hour and then hauled ourselves out to make room for the 8:00 a.m. work out people. 

Usually I get dressed and then go on a focused search for coffee but today I decided to pull the camera out of the car and snap some atmospheric images of the 8 a.m. crew pounding through their workout. Jimmy B. was the coach on deck and he wrote a good series of sets. The coaches write the sets on a dry erase board, explain the sets and then as the swimmers execute the written workout the coaches watch for stroke mechanics that need correcting. They also shout out encouragement. 

Most of our training tends to be interval training. We mix long sets (series of quarter mile swims) with more speedy/agressive sets of 50 and 100 yard repeats. When our two former Olympians coach they each emphasize hard kicking sets to build speed. We older swimmers hate the kick sets because they invariably become anaerobic but they really do help increase the potential to go fast. 

The lanes are segregated by the sustainable swim speeds of groups of swimmers. On the far left side of the pool are slower swimmers and swimmers recovering from injuries. Lane two swimmers might be able to repeat 100 yard intervals continuously on a 1:45 pace, lane three on 1:35, lane four on 1:25, lane five on 1:15 and the fastest lanes might choose to repeat 100 yard intervals on something as crazy as a 1:05 interval. Not bad given that the average age in the fastest three lanes is probably around 35 or 40. 

In some of the images here you'll see swimmers wearing hand paddles. The paddles greatly increase the surface area of the hand/water contact component and build strength. They also reinforce good technique because any flaws in the arm stroke are magnified by the increased surface area. Some coaches only allow us to use hand paddles sparingly because they do modify body position. Other coaches using pulling as a reward because the increased speed one is able to attain is.....a little addictive.

I love the hand paddles because I have good upper body strength and a mediocre kick but one of our coaches, Tommy, says that swimming is kicking and he's bent on making me a better kicker, even if it kills me. That said, I notice that his ban on my pulling with a pull buoy for flotation has already improved by body position in the water. In swimming it seems that good technique is everything. Endurance and strength is important but it's all trumped (at least in sprints) by better technique. Which requires constant practice and focus.

We are very lucky to be Austin swimmers because we can swim outside all year round. Our club does a great job maintaining an 80 degree temperature by chilling the water in the summer and heating it in the winter. I can no longer imagine getting up every day and going straight in to work at a real job. I've done a good job over the past twelve years of weaning myself from the mentality that showing up all the time for work is a good thing. My perfect day---and I am engineering more and more of them---starts with a good, fun, friendly workout at the pool followed by coffee and some fun protein---like the Otto breakfast taco at Taco Deli. What is an "Otto"? A whole wheat tortilla, slathered with refried (vegetarian) black beans, slices of fresh avocado, a couple slices of applewood smoked bacon and a little drizzle of salsa verde. A couple of those will hold you until a late afternoon lunch. 

Only after the morning fun rituals do I consider sitting down and working on work. There are some mornings when I have to sacrifice a morning swim to meet a schedule but those times are getting further apart as I try to schedule more and more shoots to start around 11 a.m. and end by 6 p.m. After all, we're not selling our time we're selling what we know...

Synchronized flip turns. Cool. There's something about coming off the wall after a good turn that's magic. Getting the maximum glide through the water before beginning your stroke is, in my opinion, the closest most people will ever really come to the sensation of flying without a device. It makes one feel so alive.

By the way.... I am buying an Olympus OMD EM-5 today...just to see what all the fuss is about. Can't wait to compare its files to those from the GH3s and GH4. My rationale? I needed one body with IBIS for those times when I want to use the 45mm 1.8 and other non IS lenses in low light. Good rationale, huh?

The photo/fiction action/adventure blockbuster of the Summer. 

A "must have" as the antidote to boring time

spent in airports and on planes...

A little hazy on the copyright law (U.S.) and need more info about how it affects photographers?

Here's a video that the people at B&H did with Jack Reznicki and partners. It's very good but it's over an hour. If you need the information....

A fun video for Asti Trattoria. Two cameramen. One vision = make the food look as good as it is.

Asti May 2014 from Kirk Tuck on Vimeo.
This video is about Asti May 2014


My friend, Chris, and I both swim with the owner of Asti Trattoria here in Austin. It's been open for nearly fourteen years now and I've been trekking across town for an almost endless series of great lunches and dinners for....fourteen years now. Asti is a neighborhood restaurant. It's located in the Hyde Park area of Austin, directly north of the University of Texas at Austin Law School.

Chris and I both wanted to play around with shooting food on video so we approached our friend, Emmett, to see if he needed a video for his restaurant's website. Bingo. Everyone wins.

We talked about the process a couple of times after swim practice and then set aside two days in which we would document the behind the scenes action at the restaurant. Nearly every second of video is shot handheld. There are a few exceptions like the night shots and the exterior shots. We would have used tripods more in the kitchen but we were working in and around the chefs during their regular service hours and, like any really good restaurant, they stay busy during every open hour.  We learned to swerve by the action, lean in and move out without burning our cameras or getting in the way (too often).

I had grand plans for a beginning, a middle and an end but I got some great advice from a cinematic guru. He basically said to scrap the script and just start layering in the good shots with the music we'd chosen. He told me that when I ran out of shots I liked then the edit was over. Good advice.

We did some interviews but they slowed the program down too much. In the end we decided to let the food sell the project... Bon Appetit. If you live in Austin check them out: http://astiaustin.com

Tech notes: I used a Panasonic GH4 while Chris used the GH3. We used both cameras mostly at ISO800 and ISO1600. While convention calls for shooting with very flat profiles and low contrast and sharpening we aimed to get out of the cameras exactly the image we wanted to see in the edit so we aimed for natural or standard settings with very slight modifications. Our lenses of choice were the 12-35mm f2.8 and the 35-100mm f2.8 Panasonic X lenses. We also used several ancient Olympus Pen lenses,  including the 40mm 1.4 and the 60mm 1.5. We usually shot with the lenses wide open and I did a lot of my work in manual focus. Both cameras were set at 30 fps.  I did the edit in Final Cut Pro X and we output to 720p for the copy that's resident on Vimeo. Ben helped me with a few technical issues that came uninvited into the editing. Man, can that kid troubleshoot. Thanks to Chris and Ben for all their hard work. 

Relentless Gear Snobbery and The real reason why Canon will not "lose the war" to m4:3.

I've been thinking a lot lately about the relentless way in which most of my friends and colleagues, even those insufferable boors who pretend they care nothing about gear and posture that they are not moved by avarice or gear lust, rely on their idea of the intrinsic value of their chosen cameras to bolster their enthusiasm for the process of making photographs. I buy into it as well even though on so many levels I know that none of the goodly-gook we spout is true. A metal shelled mini-camera won't get you to Moonrise over Hernandez New Mexico any better than plastic... Knowing my psychology at least half of my decision making is about choosing the anti-hero camera. The dark horse. The outsider choice. Which is hilarious since most photographey is a total insider experience. And I can't imagine any one more in the mainstream circle than myself...

I'm beginning to think that we buy our cameras as fashion statements and not logically as we would with a selection of righteous tools. A cross cut saw for on application, a framing hammer for another. In hand tools we would look for solid construction and the right fit in the hand.  Carbon fiber handles? Ridiculous. But I think the last four year wave of camera buying has everything to do with American Appareling and Tommy Hillfigering of hobbyist photography and not the performance we say we are chasing...

Since I seem to be as big a slave to the fashion of photography as anyone else what is the reason for this particular column? Why am I revealing to myself and anyone who reads this that we are, in our chosen field, as fickle and as bendable by the fashion of the moment as the women who wore bad, pink sweatpants with "Juicy" emblazoned across the rear end a few years ago. Most of us are manipulated by camera fashion even as we rail against the concept that we are embrace cameras not for what they can do for our picture taking but what we want them to do for our status and image.

My abrupt epiphany came a few days ago when I played with a non-photographer friend's Canon Rebel T3i camera and two kit lenses. I hadn't played around with one of these cameras in years and years and I expected it to feel like cheap trash in my hands. I expected every frame to be marred by the cheap lenses' mediocre performances and I expected every image file to be rendered banal by the camera's many imagined compromises. But it didn't really happen that way and when I shot a few frames I kind of sat up a bit and started paying attention.

My friend didn't have any kid's soccer games on her calendar for the next few days so she lent me the camera to play around with. It's like every Canon APS-C camera in that it uses the traditional mirror mania and it comes complete with the Canon standard 18 megapixel CMOS sensor. And interestingly enough the sensor is pretty good. Oh, I am sure the D800 will blow it away once we get around to printing stuff really large but I've gone five years now without having more than one or two requests for any prints bigger than 12 by 18 inches and I think just about all the cameras I've played with in the last ten years can handle that pretty well.

The camera feels consumer-y (another snob designation) but my friend tosses it around her Suburban and drops it on the soccer field a lot and even lets her six year old boy use it for long periods of time and it's held up remarkably well. I can see where little, inconsequential stuff, has been broken off but like a Timex watch the body seems to "take a licking and keep on ticking."  Could it be that the consumer-y polycarbonate is at least as bullet proof as the precious, milled metal dials and multi-position touch pads that keep falling off my other friend's more expensive and chic cameras?

The bottom line, at least as we keep defining it in our relentless need to justify new purchases, is the ultimate imaging performance and certainly there's no way a $500 camera (and that's with two lenses....) can rival, say, my new GH4 system, right?

Hmmm. Well, if you are doing video for clients I'm going to say that the Panasonic is generations better. The video is sharper and available at higher resolutions. There are also ports for microphones and headphones as well as manual level controls. But...if you are shooting the kiddo trying to keep up with a soccer ball and you are playing back the Canon 1080i 720p video on your Samsung or Vimeo 540i quasi-HD television set I'm going to say there isn't really a big difference. The end display being the ubiquitous weak point in all of this.

And guess what? If you go head to head on sensor performance for noise and resolution, again, not much difference, if any. But surely the lens performance between my Panasonic X glass and the woeful kit lenses of the Rebel is outrageously huge, right? Well sure. If you always shoot wide open you'll get a faster and (as far as I can tell) sharper lens but here's the deal, if you go all real world and you are shooting that swim meet under the blistering, Texas sun or that soccer match under some other state's more tepid sun you'll be spending most of your time around f5.6 or f8 and I'm going to bet that at f8 there's not a lot to cry about with either lens. Keep thinking $500 versus $4400.... Put a 50mm 1.8 on the Canon for an extra hundred bucks and all of a sudden you've got a low light shooter that gets close to the performance of any m4:3 system. Really. Especially when you factor in the money.

In the studio it's the same story. That nasty, consumer-y 70-300mm zoom becomes very well behaved portrait lens when you clamp it onto a tripod, stop it down a little bit and stop all unwanted motion with a diffused blast of studio electronic flash. You'd be hard pressed to tell the difference under those conditions (at f5.6 or f8), at a decent enlargement, between the masterful D800 and the mighty Rebel.

I think this calculus of price and performance is the dirty secret that keeps the faux rangefinder GX-7s and Fujis X's, as well as the retro Olympus OMD's and mini-DSLR styled Panasonics at bay in the war to gain total market share. The fact that for a fraction of the cost (and a hit to your style consciousness...) the entry level, traditional cameras do a remarkably good job at keeping up with what matters----ultimate image quality. They are not the best overall but they may be the best compromise. For most actual users. All bets are off if you just buy the gear to wear it.

The D800 is the best IQ producer in the 35mm style, mass production cameras at the moment. Let's peg it's performance, on sensor, at 100. And let's be generous and give the 24 megapixeled Nikon cameras (APS-C variants) a solid 90-92% for on sensor goodness. And maybe all of our other wonderful mini-framers come in between 85 and 90%,  but that doesn't mean that the recent Rebels make a failing grade of 59. Far from it. If we X out handling and frame rate, X out the so-so viewfinder, and shoot all the cameras in Raw I think we'll find the Rebel is also in the wonderful 85-90 % range which signifies a solid B+.

We overlook it because it is not pretty as understood by today's design ethos. It's more like the Juicy sweatsuit knock-offs of yesteryear. We would also like more dials. But at the heart the T3i is one of the top selling cameras in the entire world because Canon gets something that the photo cognoscenti don't really seem to understand: To the world market the Rebel is a tool that delivers everything most people need (for taking photographs)  except the high fashion aspect of it's physical style. No faux rangefinder. No small enough to fit into the pocket of your dinner jacket. And the exterior styling is as exciting as a 2002 Toyota Corolla body. But, like the Corolla, it's a reliable,  and for the most part comfortable appliance and it gets you where you are going.

Does this mean that I plan on abandoning all the gear I've accrued to date in order to pursue a rational course with Rebel gear that's good enough ?  Not very likely but from now on I'll work a bit harder to separate actual performance that matters from stylistic touches that have very little real value.

I still remember my lust to get my hands on the Fuji Pro 1X when it first came out. I was at the door of the camera store waiting for them to open. I loved the feel of the body because it reminded me so much of my old Leica. And then I brought it to my eye and the finder was out of focus. I looked in vain for the diopter adjustment, a feature that's been standard on even the meanest, little viewfindered compact camera for well over a decade. The Fuji Pro 1X did not have one. I left the shop without one. I watched my friends, confirmed raw shooters, agonize over the new, non-Bayer sensor's special needs. I read about the focusing issues, etc. Yes, it was a fashionable camera but I'm pretty sure I could have outshot it in a heartbeat with a Rebel. For one third the price.

Pride of ownership? Not with a Rebel. Rational behavior? Not with a Pro 1X.

I'm picking on the Pro 1X but we could just as easily pick apart the new Sony A7 or the oil and dust spattering Nikon D600. Or the devil-spawned menus of the OMD EM-1 (as well as the product name...). The bottom line, whether we like to concede it on not, is that most of our camera purchases these days have little to do with technical proficiency of the tools and a lot to do with our fashion sense. It's good to be honest about it. Doesn't mean we have to change.

Anymore than those lovely young women wearing seven inch heels are thinking about the logic of wearing a nice, comfortable (safe) pair of running shoes.....

This line of thought coincided with a good article on The.me.com here: http://www.the.me/a-hobby-for-the-very-wealthy/

I think we tend to skew our priorities because, in one sense (financial) we can really have just about any camera we want and so we look beyond workable to aspirational or "the best" just because we can. It's an interesting confluence today. At least I think so.

Martin as "Elwood P. Dowd."

Martin in "Harvey." At Zach Theatre. 2013.

This is one idea about portraiture and skin tone. We shot it with LED lights for a marketing campaign.

Erin. Photographed last year for the play: Hip, Beat, Mad and Gone.

It's a different way of making portraits.

If you need a good Summer read or a book for a long plane ride I hope you'll give our first photo/fiction/action book a go. As always, I appreciate your support!