I live in Austin. I should show some photographs of live music performances. Don't want to get typecast as someone who can only shoot corporate......

Austin likes to call itself the "Live Music Capitol." We get a lot of musicians, bands, performers through the city on a extremely regular basis and there's well over 100 venues for live music every night of the week. So, if you've been a photographer in Austin long enough you've probably done some concert shots or performance shots. I know I have done my share.... Here's a small selection from my collection....

A small set up for quick, run-and-gun video conversations.

Panasonic GH5+Olympus 12-100mm f4.0+Camvate Camera Rig Cage+ Saramonic SmartRig+ Pre-Amp + Aputure Diety microphone + Audio Technica isolating headphones. 

Manfrotto fluid head and Berlebach wooden tripod. Add batteries. Push red button. Make sure you see the flashing red indicator or nothing really happened.

Test it all before you go out the door. 

Make sure you can look through your viewfinder without poking yourself in the eye with the back of the microphone.

Test the lens with the body you're going to use it with. 

Have a plan to take the whole rig off the tripod.

Work with your pre-amp enough times that you know where the gain knob is without having to look.

Grab the correct release lever. Nothing worse that watching a camera slide off the rails.

Figure out how you're going to hold that puppy when you want to move around. 

Do you really need an external monitor if you need to be very mobile (not with the GH5 at 30 fps).

Can you access all the menu items quickly?

Is your cage rock solid?

Did you set the headphone levels correctly? (Any alternate advice on the proper way to set headphone levels? Chime in please!).

Did you bring the right tripod or do you wish you could go up another foot?

Did you get the advance check?

Did the bank cash it for you?

It's fun to look back at old campaigns. Reminds us of what we are capable.

In the early days of digital imaging I worked with an agency called, Dandy Idea, to create a series of magazine print ads and posters for the city of Round Rock, Texas. They wanted to up their tourism profile and didn't think being the headquarters for Dell, Inc. was really a major draw for families. 

Since they have great public soccer fields, an enormous number of great baseball/softball fields and lots of areas in which to give road bikers a workout the chamber decided to position the city as a destination for sports. The theme for the campaign was "Game On." and the ads used the stencil type I'm used when I created these images for my portfolio and for direct mail. 

Of course, as scheduling would have it we did the shots in the middle of an especially hot Summer. I got a lot of practice drinking Gatorade(tm) and finding convenient shade. I worked with one of my all time favorite art directors, Greg Barton, and we had a great time looking for locations and doing crazy stuff like me lying belly down in a ditch filled with stingy plants to get the bike shot, or getting my car stuck in the mud on scouting shot (rescued by some good ole boys in a pick-up truck equipped with a winch). 

The photos ran everywhere and the response exceeded expectations. Everyone was happy. You'll probably be happy to know that I can't quite remember what camera and lens I was shooting with back then so I guess it really didn't matter. Right? Just thought I'd share a blast from the days when digital cameras were barely out of the crib......

Actual Competitive Cyclist.

Little Leaguer. 

Inexpensive flash accessory. Not much money for much enhanced performance in my softbox.

Godox AD200. A fun flash. Portable and Powerful.

The object above is the business end of my Godox AD200 which is a cross between a portable flash and a mono-light. It's small and agile and comes with a powerful, rechargeable lithium ion battery that pounds out about 500 full power, 200 watt second flashes. The even cooler thing is that the AD200 comes with two different, interchangeable flash heads. One is the bare bulb flash tube in Pyrex that you see in the illustration. The other is a more conventional flash head, like the ones you see used with on camera flashes. That head has a small, LED modeling light incorporated into the package. The bare bulb head has no modeling light. 

The reason to have the bare bulb flash tube is for how well it spreads light into a softbox or even big umbrella. But there is a diffuser that gives you a bit more control over that spread. With the diffuser in front you get a 180 degree light spread which is more efficient (and slightly less "spill-y" than the bare tube). It's well designed and even has ventilation for the flash tube. That's a nice touch. 

I used it both ways; with and without the diffuser and I found the light across the front of the 32x48 inch softbox I like to use to be more even and to have a softer quality to it overall. And there's very little light lost -- maybe 2/3rds of a stop. For a bit less than $20 it's a great addition to your AD200 flash system. Nice when a cool tool is so affordable!

Can a $70 lens (brand new) deliver decent results on a Micro Four Thirds camera? VSL investigates.

7Artisans 25mm f1.8 lens for Sony E series or M4:3.

I was buying some cheap bits and pieces for my Godox AD200 flash at Amazon.com a day or two ago and, after getting my pressing flash accessory business squared away, I started doing a little good natured browsing. I was looking to see all the different lenses that are available for my Panasonic cameras. I was especially interested in a fairly fast, normal lens which, on the GH5, would be a 25mm. I was surprised to find a number of choices, including: the (most coveted!!!) Olympus 25mm f1.2 (with 19 elements, no less) as well as the 25mm f1.8 Olympus and it's counterpart, the Panasonic 25mm f1.7. The lens I wasn't expecting to find was a new product by a company called, 7Artisans. 

The lens is a 25mm f1.8 lens that is fully manual in its operation with any of the Olympus or Panasonic cameras. The thing that caught my eye was the price; it was a mild and rational total of $70. 

Usually I read a few reviews before taking any sort of action; even before sticking the item in my shopping cart for later dismissal or acceptance, but in this case there were no reviews. Nada. Nothing. But the lens looked pretty cool, the specs were nice (12 bladed aperture) and I went ahead and

A quick observation, or two, about using older lenses on newer camera bodies. Like the Panasonic GH5.

It was a super hot Sunday night and I took refuge in the chilly air conditioning at Zach Theatre's Topfer Theatre. I was just in time for the technical rehearsal for "Million Dollar Quartet" and I had a strange combination of cameras and lenses in my little Husky tool bag. It was early days for me with the GH5 but I thought I'd push it around for a while and see if we gelled or if I'd made yet another acquisition error. I would have loved to have shot the show with the Olympus 12-100mm f4.0 but it wasn't on my radar yet. I went with the ancient 60mm f1.5 from my Olympus Pen collection instead.

The image above is one of hundreds I made during the course of the rehearsal. This one was shot down at 1/60th of second at f2.8 with an ISO of 400.

There are a number of things I like about using the GH5 with older lenses like this one. First, the camera allows you to program in the exact focal length of the lens you are using, down to the millimeter. Most cameras have a list of possible focal lengths you can program in and usually they are about 5mm apart. Or they are common focal lengths. This tells the camera how to use image stabilization correctly for the focal length. I'm not sure that it makes a real difference but if you are picky it's nice to be able to select 25mm instead of 24mm if 25mm is the actual focal length.

In my limited experience, with older legacy lenses programmed in like this, the camera does a good job with stabilization.

The second thing that's nice for shooters of older, manual focus lenses is the focus peaking. After looking through a lot of frames I've found very few from the evening's shoot where I missed focus. When I first wrote about the focus peaking performance I gave the G85 higher marks because the frames looked better, in review, on the screen on the back of the camera. I gave credit to a better implementation of focus peaking. But after spending time with the files from the GH5 I found that they images were sharper when inspected on my computer monitor. Apparently, and I have duplicated this in camera, the initial write to the card generates a lower res review file but the actual file is almost always sharper. I think the camera is set up this way in order to optimize for speed of capture. Reviewing on the fly is always fraught with peril anyway.

I don't think the camera, in Jpeg, is writing 1:1 review files. There is no advantage to reviewing files at the 16X magnification on the rear screen over reviewing the same files at 8X. That tells me that 8x is the maximum resolution of the review image and going to 16X just shows you the same pixels larger; which looks less sharp. It's one of the many small things that take experimenting and getting used to working with a new camera. A kneejerk reaction would be: "Is the GH5 less sharp?!!" But it would not be an accurate assessment of the actual files.

Another observation is how much better an exposure tool zebras can be than judging a scene in the finder, by eye, or using a histogram. I've started setting my zebras at 75% because that's the point at which most caucasian skin starts to overexpose. If I have a caucasian actor in front of the camera and I'm trying to accurately set exposure I want to be able to ignore the effects of direct stage lights shining into the lens and brighter areas in the scene and just see how my exposure setting relates to correct skin exposure. I shift exposure until I start getting zebra stripes on a face and then back off until the just go away and I know I'm in a great exposure zone for the important subjects on stage. It's a great way to narrow in on getting the exposure right on the subject that you choose. This isn't particular to manual focusing lenses only; it works with all lenses.

I'm coming to grips with more and more features of the camera and as I learn what works well I try to adapt it to my working methodologies. I'll probably put the zebra control on the function button next to the lens because it's nice to be able to toggle it on and off. After I've set an exposure the zebras can be annoying. You can set two different custom zebra settings in the GH5 and toggle between them. It's a really nice way to "meter."