West Texas Landscape. Marathon, Texas.

West Texas Fence.

Olympus EP-2

Visual Note Taking. Active Looking. Passive Thinking.

You develop instincts with experience. You gain experience by trying many, many things. I carry a camera with me nearly everywhere, not because I think I'll make some piece of art that will grab a curator by the gut and make me famous but because the process of looking for visual patterns and then using the formal boundaries of the rectangle to fence in the patterns and cut them into neatly accessible notes about everyday existence. Why do it? Beyond the idea that hunting for images is a fun challenge and a nice pass time? Well, the constant trial and error of composing and exposing rectangular slices of scenes that catch my eyes seems to help me when making photographs for clients; for money. The language and rhythm of reducing three dimensional space to a two dimensional representation becomes more fluid when it can depend on hundreds and thousands of previous episodes of trial and error; and more importantly, trial and success. 

When I leave home with a camera and lens (and it's very rare that in my own private time I carry more than one of each) I choose a lens that I want to explore and I work with it for several hours; looking for visual constructions out in the world that will show off the focal length I've selected. 

Often I'll select a long lens only to find that the sky is brilliant that day and the play of light across wide spaces is glorious and fun. I momentarily wish I'd brought along a 24mm to lasso it all in but if I set my mind to it the shots might that benefit from tighter compositions, and even a bit of compression, start to grudgingly reveal themselves. 

There are other times when I've remembered the expanse of sky and landscape and I'll bring the 24mm only to stumble across beautiful face after beautiful face which I'm desirous of capturing in tight compositions, with backgrounds that blur to cotton candy and compression that pulls infinite space in to a tight wad of stacked layers.

My usual compromise, especially after a few disjointed forays, is to eschew both extremes and make due with the 50mm lens (or its focal length equivalent on whatever format camera I'm using at the time). As I've written many times, I think of the 50mm as a wizard lens which is able to emulate a wider or longer lens based on how you use it. The neutral focal length keeps one from leaning on the attributes of the wide angle or telephoto perspective in order to make an image interesting. And interesting is always more valuable that exciting. "Exciting" is something that grabs you once and then losses it's power. Like a huge swig of a sugar-laden soft drink which is followed shortly by the insulin pumping crash.

The neutral focal length gently insists that you find something inherently interesting to record. Something you'll find pleasant, or interesting, or informational on repeated viewings. 

On a topical note: It's the time of the season for tax filings. Afterwards you can sit in a dark room with a glass of cheap Scotch and bitch about government spending and the tight pinch on your wallet, or you can grab a nice camera, and a lens you love, and walk all through your city, town, rural landscape--whatever--- and do the thing you love = take photographs you'd like to look at again and again. Something soothing and smooth, or colorful and quiet, maybe even regal and glorious. And, in the moment, let your enthusiasm for the play of photography be the thing that informs your day. 

I filed my tax return today (Thanks to my CPA, Barry) and, after writing the usual check, I'm putting that task behind me and cleansing my palette with a lovely duo that's just right for today's walk; the Nikon D700 and the Sigma 50mm f1.4 Art lens. 

It's sunny, bright and hopeful outside. Let's see if I can harness the promise of the day and infuse it into my everyday life. It's all just a click away.

Just another Saturday morning. A new (to me) camera. Swim practice. Some shop worn rationalizations.

We'll start with the swim and get that out of the way first. The wind was blasting in twenty to thirty mile per hour gusts and the temperatures were hovering around fifty degrees this morning when I made my way to the pool. I was moving slowly after our anniversary celebration last night. But I woke up quickly when I hit the water and started moving. After a long mile warm up we did a set that went like this:

Swim 3x100's (25 yards butterfly+75 yards freestyle) on 1:40 intervals.

Swim 4x25's butterfly

Swim 3x100's (50 backstroke+50 freestyle) same interval

Swim 4x25's backstroke

Swim 3x100's (25 breast stroke+75 free) same interval

Swim 4x25's breast stroke (with a double pull out off the wall).

Swim 3x100's (50 fast freestyle + 50 fast "over kick" freestyle) same interval

Swim 4x25 freestyle sprints

followed by a "pyramid" that went: 

200 yards pull > 150 yards pull > 100 yards sprint swim > 50 yards sprint swim > 2x25 sprints

> 50 yards fly > 100 yards choice stroke >150 yards pull > 200 yards pull. 

We moved pretty quickly in our lane and didn't have much time to hang on the wall and chat. I was sore by the end of the hour and a half but I'm not sure how much I should blame on that second glass of Stag's Leap Cabernet Sauvignon I had at dinner last night. 

My swim goal for the year is to be able to swim a 100 yard freestyle back under one minute. We'll see how it goes.... I really need to work on my turns. 

Camera errata: I've revisited the images here during the week, they were made in 2008 with a combination of cameras, including a Fuji S5 and a Nikon D300. The ones on display here are from the Nikon. I continue to be amazed at how well the image stand up (technically) ten years later! The tipping point for me was when I came across the images I shot in West Palm Beach in the same year with the same camera. Once I saw the color and detail in those images I decided to go ahead and commit to acquiring the clean D300S I remarked about a few days ago. At less than $300 I rationalized that I'd bought more expensive filters. The camera comes with about 25k actuations, two batteries and a Nikon charger. I picked it up midday yesterday and intend to put it through its paces on a walk this afternoon (I really need the exercise?). 

Surprise Lens arrival: In somewhat related news, I went out to check the mail yesterday and found a box addressed to me from a VSL reader named, Stephen. I carefully slit the tape and opened the box to find a wonderfully well preserved Nikon Series E 36-72mm f3.5 zoom lens! There was a nice note as well. I love lenses in this range and have found all the Series E lenses to be optically great. The cherry on top of the whipped cream is the fact that the lens is par focal (doesn't shift focus as you zoom) which also makes it a great candidate for video!!! The lens hasn't been off the D300S since it showed up. It will be part of my afternoon test.

THANK YOU VERY MUCH, STEPHEN. 

So, in the last month we've picked up a D2XS, a D300S, a D700 and a D800e; as well as an assortment of lenses. I'm labeling this "Old School Digital Photography Nostalgia Month" and will be reviewing each of these cameras in depth. What can I tell you right now? If you want good, competitive shooting tools from yesteryear the top two candidates right now are the D700 (for low light) and the D800e for just about anything else (still the best low light, full frame Nikon high density camera, according to DXO --- even better than the D850!). If you are a Nikon shooter and don't already have one a 24-120mm f4.0 VR is a good, all around work lens. So far, nothing over $1,000 bucks.... 

The rationalization: I started with the premise that the lower density, bigger pixel cameras might have a different/better look to the color and general acuity characteristics for files coming out of those cameras. I started buying older cameras in order to test this out. Most are available for a song... We already had many older Nikon lenses sitting around the studio. My blog will start a run on all this older gear and I'll be able to sell it at an obscene profit (seriously, probably not....). 

We've been slow around here this month, work wise, but next month promises to be non-stop with some out of town work, some out of country work, a trip to a college graduation in NY and some parental support for some minor surgery (time for someone's pacemaker replacement-- HIPAA laws prevent naming names...). Stay tuned for more exciting camera news from previous decades.....

And don't slack on that exercise program! You know you want to look great for bikini season (smile emoticon implied). 

Austin selected as the "Best City in the USA in Which to Live" for the second year in a row by U.S. News and World Reports Magazine (And website). It's the blue skies, I think.

When I first moved here to go to school at UT you could get a decent apartment for about $85 a month and the cost of living was nearly the lowest in the state. You could not get a freshly baked croissant but you could find decent biscuits just about anywhere. The town was small enough and compact enough that most students didn't see the need to own a car. In fact, it was so cheap in the early 1970's that my parents could afford to have three kids at the University at the same time; including graduate school. And with fifty cent Shiner Bock beer in bottles and $7 ticket prices at the Armadillo World Headquarters (famous music hall) it was very cost effective to take a date to see the Talking Heads open for the B-52's. Or was it the other way around? And yes! we generally walked there.

All that has changed. You can get croissants pretty much anywhere in Austin but sadly now McDonalds arguably has the best biscuits in town. You need a car if you live and work anywhere outside of downtown, and it better be a comfortable car because the same magazine article points to traffic and road congestion as one of the few big cons of living here. I'll list another big con: the price of housing has been sky rocketing for years. 

We have the mixed benefit of living in a very nice neighborhood in the middle of the school district that just got named (again, and for decades running) as the best overall school district in Texas. Usually in the top 50 school districts in the USA. Demand to get kids into one of these top flight schools is red hot which means that we're deep into "tear down" territory (buying and tearing down an existing house to build a bigger, better one on the lot). People are moving here in droves from the west coast and they don't even blink at the thought of paying a million dollars for a basic 3 bedroom, two bathroom ranch style house just to tear it down and use the lot as the foundation for their new, multi-miillion dollar dream ranch style homes. There are currently five or six houses heading that way just on our block.

We are actually starting to think of selling our house and moving somewhere else. But we'll probably be overcome with nostalgia and laziness and just hunker down and wait until we're 65 and can lock in the homestead tax exemption....

I think the biggest attractions of Austin, beside the circus we call the State Legislature, are the beautiful blue skies, the great Tex-Mex food, and the fact that you can still paddle board right through downtown... 

If you decide to move here just remember to bring a big bucket of cash. Home prices continue to rise and, sadly, so do the property taxes...

Infinite growth. Like bacteria in a Petri dish...

Gone boating. Now becoming nostalgic for a clean, low mileage Nikon D300S.

All images: West Palm Beach. Nikon D300 + 18-200mm. 

I provided photographic coverage for an executive retreat for Freescale Semiconductor in 2008. We ended up at the Breakers Hotel in West Palm Beach. The accommodations were lovely. During part of the event, I guess to blow off steam generated by days of arguing and debating over corporate strategy, someone arranged for everyone to go out fishing. I'm not sure why as most of the participants were not big fishermen and most came back to the dock, hours later, with varying degrees of seasickness. 

When I found this folder of images I was reminded that the two cameras I used during that week long event were the original Nikon D300's, Not the D300Ss. The lens I used the most was the Nikon 18-200mm which was more or less the state-of-the-art for image stabilization at the time. It promised (and generally delivered) about four stops of stabilization ---- mostly useful for objects that don't move around a lot). 

I also brought along an 85mm f1.4, a 35mm f1.4 and a 20mm f2.8 for all the work that I had to cover in a sometimes dim conference room. 

Reviewing the shots this afternoon; and running a handful of them through the latest raw converter, reminding me that we already knew what we were doing with digital cameras back then and that the D300 was a damn fine photographic instrument. My interiors and exteriors evoke photography just the way I always thought it should be. I was also reminded that the cameras had great battery life and comfortable handling. 

I made the (ill advised?) switch into the Canon system by the time the upgrade, the 300"S" came out so I never got to compare the cameras directly but I knew the general themes. The newer camera offered remedial video, a much faster and larger buffer and an HDMI out for monitoring. I've been told by various sources that the imaging quality was either "the same" or "much better" on the newer model,  depending on who you wanted to listen to....

What you essentially were offered in the final D300S was a 3 inch LCD finder, a very, very robust camera body, an imaging sensor that was much better at higher ISOs than the previous "flagship" body, the D2XS, a lighter package, card slots for SD and CF (and the CF upgraded to UDMA for much faster read/write speeds) at about a third the price of the earlier D2XS or the D3 that came along around the same time. In many ways the D300S was the APS-C version of the D3 series!

I found one (300S) a couple days ago at Precision Camera. It's cosmetically near perfect and has about 25k shutter actuations on it. I asked them to put it on hold yesterday but got busy today with more family administration stuff. If it's still there tomorrow I'm thinking of picking it up for the princely sum of >$300. That is, unless you guys know some deep dark secret about this model and you're quick to talk me out of it. 

On another topic: It seems chic to be personally confessional these days on photography blogs. I note that MJ has published an essay mentioning his use of online dating services. Lloyd Chambers has gone into amazing detail about the aftermath of his concussion.  I'm joining the party! No. I'm not using dating services, and I'm not a bike rider; just sharing a bit of personal information. To wit, B. and I are celebrating our 33 wedding anniversary tomorrow. Yes, Friday the 13th. Odd omen, for sure. 

Since my wife and I worked together and dated for five years before taking the matrimonial plunge this means we've been getting along (pretty damn well, considering my idiosyncrasies) for a whopping 38 years. We'll have a quiet celebration and then get back to work...

Power Film Maker, James Webb, goes handheld with an Olympus EM-5ii to shoot food back in 2016. He's the real deal.

James at Cantine shooting food with the Oly EM5ii and an ancient 

40mm f1.4 Pen FT lens. See the restaurant video one more time:

The Video.

James's Website

I've been on an older camera bing lately. I thought I'd revisit a contemporary camera that's been on the market for a while now. The Olympus EM-5ii.

I tend to be blinded to the virtues of the stuff I'm shooting in the present by the promise of the stuff I might be shooting in the future. Here's a case in point: the Olympus EM-5ii. I bought two of them back in 2015 when the camera was introduced. I knew I'd probably want to take advantage of the new video codec that yielded an All-I file at 77mbs, which was a much bigger file than the ones coming from my Nikon or Sony cameras at the time so I ante'd up for the battery grips which, in addition to doubling the shooting time also provided a headphone jack with which to monitor audio. 

My friend, James, and I used the two cameras to do a video for our friends at Cantine Restaurant. While I didn't really appreciate it at the time the cameras, and the combination of contemporary and legacy lenses did a great job capturing the unrehearsed clips that we moulded into what I think is a very nice video about the restaurant. While the EM-5ii files aren't as detailed and rich as the best files from the Panasonic GH5's they are absolutely perfect for what was made to be a web-only, 1080p promotional video. Unique at the time (and maybe still....) was the camera's uncanny image stabilization which worked as well in video as it does in still photography. The files were sharp and detailed and easy to edit in either Premiere or Final Cut Pro X. 

But most of my readers don't give a rat's ass about video, and that being the case I thought I would also make the point that the photographic files were in no way shabby either. I've included three images here from the daylong shoot we did at the restaurant. The brilliant I.S. in the cameras made tripods mostly superfluous but we did use them from time to time; especially if we were using really long focal lengths. 

I shot food and pours and people during the course of the day and used whatever ISO was necessary to get the shots I wanted. I mostly worked between 640 and 1600 and found that the files were as good as any other camera I've shot---as long as I used good lenses. We had high success rates with the Sigma 60mm DN Art lens (this will be the fourth time I have owned that lens....) as well as getting great images from a contingent of older Pen FT lenses from the 1970's. 

When I think rationally about the EM-5ii I wonder 1. Why I ever got rid of them? And, 2. What more could a photographer really want in day-to-day work? If you've never tried one you should. They are pretty delightful. After playing around with the focus on the newest Hasselblad MF cameras I can tell you honestly that, given a choice, I'd take a couple of EM-5ii's and the Olympus zoom lenses I got to use on the Panasonic cameras before I'd consider the H-Blad. Your kilometers may be more scenic....

When people don't smile and look into the camera.

For a few years I did little every day other than take photographs or print photographs. Most paid jobs called for portraits or "headshots" of people looking directly into the camera and smiling as well as they thought they should. But many of my favorite images were taken when the person in front of my camera looked away for a moment. I stumbled across these three yesterday and thought I would share them with you. 

The top one is of Belinda and was taken so long ago that it was done with a Nikon FM film camera and a Tamron Adaptall 28-80mm zoom lens. The quality of the image is quite secondary, in my mind, to the way the light works and the wonderfully disordered lock of hair hanging down on her forehead. 

The image just below was taken during a silly "fashion" shoot for a Texas lifestyle magazine. We were shooting winter clothes in the middle of a heat wave and, since we were in Pedernales State Park, one of the models took a few minutes to put on some shorts and stand in the middle of the Pedernales River ( a tributary of the Colorado River) to cool off. I took the photo at that moment when the shock of the cold water had worn off and the delight of being in that moment caused our model to clothes her eyes and savor it. The image was done with a Leica R8 and a 180mm f4.0 Elmar on AgfaPan black and white film. 

The most recent shot of the three was done at a coffee shop on Congress Ave., just a few blocks from the state capitol. I was working with a talent named Jana Steele (who also graces the cover of my LED Lighting Book) and we were going for a realistic, but posed, shot of someone waiting for a first date to show up. The image was done with available light and a Canon 5Dmk2 along with the 100mm f2.0 Canon lens.

In all three images my intention was never to create a traditional portrait that people would hang on a wall but to create small, opened ended visual stories that presented a tableau from which an audience could launch into their own personal conjecture.

Nothing more than a visual poem with very few lines....

Just a quick post about something that's starting to become apparent to me. Camera sensors aren't necessarily getting better but something else might be...

It's been an interesting day. I've been getting e-mail comments about the flower images and graffiti images from people who want to know if I really shot them with an "old" Nikon D700. They mention how rich the colors are...

Now....I owned a D700 back when it was a "new" camera and got a lot of good use from it for several years but I never remembered it as being such a good camera. It didn't have any big flaws but the files seem humdrum. Well balanced but nothing to write home about. Nothing remarkably better (other than the full frame sensor) than the color or tonality I was getting from a D300 or a D2Xs. But here we are nearly ten years later and I'm loving the color and tonality I'm getting when I process the raw files in the latest revs of Lightroom and PhotoShop. The colors, especially, seem nearly foolproof. And they've also got character.

I know that no one went back and retrofitted all the D700s on the used market to make the hardware much, much better so I started following the chain backwards. I count well over a dozen major upgrades to the Adobe raw converters in the past decade. It's possible there have been more.

Could it be that the cameras we've been working with were packed with potentially great hardware even a decade ago but we could only unlock a small percentage of the imaging potential because the limiting factor was in the software? In camera processors were much slower and less capable ten years ago which slowed down throughput and encouraged camera makers to optimize Jpeg files for speed rather than ultimate quality. The raw converters of the day were running on older processors, supported by slow and pricy DRAM. Who doesn't remember all the third party programs like Bibble that were marketed because the camera company raw programs were so slow and doggy at the time?

Each improvement of the raw converter software on the market (Adobe+DXO+Capture One) was in part a response to bigger camera files but also faster processor speeds, higher throughput on the desktop and the need to make each successive generation of cameras appear as though they were worth the money to upgrade to.

But an rise in the software "water levels" lifts all "raw file boats" because, at their core the files are all just binary information until they are de-mosaiced and interpreted.

It's entirely possible that the files I am seeing now are not just looking better because I'm remembering the old ones incorrectly but because the newest software is able to squeeze and massage so much more from the raw information provided.

Remember when we used to see movies like "The Wizard of Oz" on broadcasted television when we were growing up? We loved seeing the movies on our old TV sets with their almost square aspect ratios and their low resolution. Except in actual theaters we had never experienced better imaging. Then TVs got bigger and the color got better and better. Finally we're at a point where we can see old classics spread across 60 and 70 inch, 4k monitors and, if the movie has been remastered (re-interpreted using the original information existing in the actual film media) we find the quality to be a good match for modern sensibilities; at least when it comes to sharpness, tone and color.

Did they go back and re-film? Heck no! They just used the latest processing to wring out some more of the potential that was in the original capture all along. Isn't that what happens when we take a raw file from an older digital camera and re-imagine it in the most contemporary and advanced raw converter software? Some things won't improve dramatically. Noise won't get that much better, but color, tonality, sharpness and anything that can be interpreted and augmented by improvements in software will benefit the older hardware and the work we create with it.

Test this out yourself. If you still have an older Canon, Nikon, Sony, etc. digital camera hanging about as a door stop, charge up the battery, pop in an old CF card, shoot a test and then open the file in the absolute latest rev of your favorite flavor of raw converter and see if the camera doesn't transcend your older appraisals of its quality.

Kinda kicking myself for not thinking more about this sooner. Thoughts? Into the comments below!

Flowers. I was interested in seeing what these flowers looked like when shot with a 50mm lens nearly wide open. I like them. You might too.

For some reason my brain grabbed hold of the idea that shooting with a Nikon D700 would be fun and, like a dog with a bone, my brain is refusing to let go of my latest fascination. It didn't help when my friend, Paul, brought a coveted 50mm lens to lunch and bequeathed it to me on an infinite loan. 

I've been having trouble getting back in the work mix since my two month daily on the job training of extended family administration started back at the end of December. I was banging my head against the desk in the office, working on some marketing, trying to move people off the idea of moving projects back a bit on the calendar. It's not that the need for cash flow is a particularly pressing issue but when some great part of your self-identity is wrapped up embracing the persona of a working photographer then not working just.....messes with your brain.

At any rate I figured I'd done enough for one day and needed a break. Something different that shuttling between house and office in an endless search for the next cup of coffee. I stood up, stretched and grabbed the Nikon D700 and the Sigma 50mm Art lens and headed out the door toward the graffiti wall and other fun parts of downtown Austin, Texas (named by U.S. News and World Reports as the best city in the United States of America in which to live --- for the second year in a row...). 

I took a different route from my favorite parking place to the graffiti wall and it took me past a lovely garden plunked down right next to the hike and bike trail that runs right through the middle of the urban concentration of high rise apartments and endless, chic, office buildings. 

It was an overcast and gloomy day and I did what all photographers probably do on days like this --- I pushed the "WB" button and set the white balance on the camera to the little clouds icon which, I'm pretty sure, means "overcast." When I saw the gardens I was immediately attracted to the red and pink blossoms waving back and forth in the breeze against their field of green. I thought that a deep depth of field would ensure that nothing stood out as special so I took the opposite tack and went for "wide open." 

I'm not sure what the "Deep Roots Garden" is all about but I can sure say that I like it. Seemed like an oasis of calm and tranquility in the middle of an indifference to organic aesthetics. 

I don't know if you'll be able to see it in the images as shown here; all compressed and mushed up on the web, but I can see all the little "hairs" and details running down the stems of the in focus flowers. My understanding? It means the lens has no front of back focus and that even wide open it is impressively sharp. 

Spring is in full bloom in Austin. Everything is green and growing. Trying to savor it all before the bleak heat waves of Summer and the arrival of the carnivorous mosquitos...

It was still nice to have a jacket with me yesterday. Hovering between comfortable and chilly.