Cold, Wet and Rainy here. But I'm celebrating something new...

Ben in his favorite chair 16 years ago.

Contax G2, 45mm Zeiss lens.

Tri-X.

You may recall that I did three photography courses for a company called, Craftsy.com a little over a year ago. Craftsy.com is an online learning company that offers a range of arts and crafts instruction. They are putting together an impressive selection of video classes about photography and are attracting some really great teachers. One of the paid courses I taught is about Studio Lighting and Portraits. The second class is about Being Your Own Family's Photojournalist. I've included links to each if you want to go and watch the trailers and check them out.....

But the thing I'm excited about today is the third class. It's one I did about Location Portraits. It's one of the few classes Craftsy.com offers absolutely free. Their strategy is that if you like the free photography class you might come back and take a paid class. At any rate, my free class on Location Portraits has, in its first year on the site, garnered over 100,000 students. As of today 100,900 individual users have signed up and watched that class! I think that's absolutely amazing and something I want to celebrate. 

Craftsy.com classes are unique because once you purchase a class it's your to watch again and again forever. You can stop and start the program to make sure you really get the material down pat. And I think one of the biggest bonuses is that you can ask the instructors questions in a forum dedicated to your class and they will personally answer your question within a few days time (at most). 

The links above will give you $25 off the full price of the class---if you are interested. 

Kind of fun to look at the class reviews for the Location Portraits class. Not often I get thousands of five star reviews. I'll take em.

Great lenses should be great values and fun to use. I know which one I liked best in 2014 and which one will see some hard use in 2015...

The Battle Collection. 

Photography is an interesting thing right now. All the focus for the last ten years seems to have been firmly placed on cameras. People wait breathlessly for reviews of the newest camera bodies. They place themselves on waiting lists to make certain that they are in the vanguard of early recipients. Hobbyists agonize over various camera faults. They boil up into angry mobs when they discover red disk reflections in mirror less cameras or, as in the current case, shaded flare, when shooting the new Nikon D750. But I am rediscovering something that I've always known and seem to keep forgetting; the real magic is in the lenses. (Actually, the real magic is in just showing up and doing the work---but that's a whole other subject).

There are advantages to buying the most modern lenses from the company that makes your cameras. They fit together precisely and the lens and camera are programmed and firmware calibrated to take advantage of all the nuance-y feature sets they each bring to the table. But it's good to understand that lens design itself can be a trend or depend on a style of design and construction which gives the camera/lens system a specific look. A really specific look. And it may be a look that doesn't necessarily correspond with your way of seeing the world. 

Everyone seems crazy for Zeiss lenses lately but even though I've owned the ZE version of the 35mm f2.0, the 85mm f1.4 and the 50mm f1.4 I can't say that any of them really knocked me out and generated a set of images that wowed me. The 50mm and the 85mm both have a lot of focus shift as one stops down from wide open to about f4.0 and that can make them hard to use when manually focusing. Wide open they are smooth and mellow but not particularly bite-y. I like some of the current Nikon primes but they tend to be too snappy and saturated for the portrait work I like to do. Don't get me wrong, I like a sharp lens but I don't need the lens to add more snap to my tonal pallet or to make my reds look raunchy with saturation overkill. But here's my real beef with a lot of modern, autofocus lenses: They are too imperfectly perfect.

There are two ways to design a lens like a high speed 50mm lens. One method is to bow to the market and try to make a lens that is sharp all the way across the frame at as many aperture settings as possible. The idea is that a "good" lens should have the same resolution and contrast characteristics across the frame and into the corners. But since all fast 50mm lenses depend on large, spherical front elements the design parameters and the nature of lenses is in conflict. All spherical lenses are sharper in the center third than on the out two thirds of their frame field. As one stops down a greater and greater amount of the frame comes into higher sharpness. 

But current users believe that the lenses should have homogenous sharpness across the frame so designers have to do a number of things which ultimately compromise a different style of performance characterized by an extremely sharp center core and a natural fall off of sharpness in the corners and on the edges. I prefer a fast lens that loads tremendous sharpness in the critical middle section of the lens for the fast apertures understanding that the curvature of the front element mandates that performance style. It means the stuff I want to see most is very well defined and the stuff I don't care about falls out of sharpness and out of focus quicker and with a natural looking slope. 

To achieve high homogenous sharpness requires a more complicated design with more elements and more esoteric kinds of glass or grinds, or, in less expensive lenses, more plastic coated variations of aspherical lenses with their own compromises (plastic/glass interfaces and interference patterns). More elements creates more issues with manufacture and assembly which is troublesome at a time when most lenses are made with plastic cells with no tolerance correction fixes and are machined to fit a range of tolerances in a design that can't be hand tuned. The short version is that the cells that contain the glass elements have to have enough wiggle room to accommodate slop which makes the designs more vulnerable to decentering, depth discrepancies and angular positioning errors. 

What you end up with are generally lenses with less bite wide open and a more plastic rendition of tones in the range of usually useful apertures. Part of what people pay for when they buy Leica high speed lenses is high sharpness in the center brought to you by designs that are made to be adjusted for ultimate performance, by hand. While both choices are compromises the lenses we seem to love best have nothing to do with corner to corner acceptable sharpness and a lot more to do with high amounts of micro contrast over most of the frame and a convincing profile of sharpness that is diffraction limited at the maximum aperture. At this point it's almost all theoretical since the lens makers in Japan are going to go on designing most of their lenses based on the base marketing preference for measurable uniformity over ultimate center performance and decent edge performance. Apparently most people would rather have the uniformity throughout rather than the brilliance in the sweet spot. But that brings me to my topic: What lens did I buy last year that wowed me the most?

While the two fast lenses for the Panasonic G cameras, the 12-35mm f2.8X and the 35-100mm f2.8X lenses are good performers they are a bit bland because their interpretation is more aimed at frame homogeneity and less at imperfect brilliance. I like them for most work but end up shunning them for personal stuff. 

The same is true for most of the modern Nikon lenses except for the 85mm 1.8G lens. It's so sharp across the frame at f1.8 that it's seems it has a foot in both design camps. Perhaps that's an advantage of a longer focal length. But the family of lenses that is more like the alternative of design----high center sharpness  with improving sharpness in the edges and corners when stopping down---came to me in the form of the Rokinon/Samyang lenses.

I bought the Rokinon 14mm f2.8 last year (a new Nikon version to replace the departing Sony mount version) and while it has plentiful distortion and fall off it's also amazingly sharp, even wide open. But where it is sharpest is right through the middle two thirds of the frame. After my positive experiences with the 14mm I bought the 85mm 1.5 in the cine dress and was delighted with that lens. I was saddest to see that one go when I got rid of the Sony Alpha system (the a99 and a77). While I am happy with the performance of the 85mm Nikon f1.8G lens I am still planning to get a copy of the Rokinon 85mm f1.4 because of its distinctly different sharpness profile across the frame. It's the style I like.

I would have been happy just to stick with the Nikon lens had I not stuck my toes into the Rokinon/Samsung inventory once again just last month. I bought the 16mm f2.0 lens in a Nikon mount with the intention of using it as a wide angle on the Nikon APS-C cameras and as a wide/normal lens on the micro four thirds cameras. The images in this post are both from the 16mm f2.0 Rokinon and they re-sell the lens to me every time I look at them. These were shot on a Nikon D7000 and with that set up the combo is equivalent to a 24mm lens on a full frame camera. While there is a bit of distortion in the frame (easily correctable in DXO or Lightroom) the camera, even at f2.0 has a center sharpness that's very, very good and a fall off that appears natural and even tempered.

The image below shows the lens at f5.6 and I am very happy with the performance there as well. The rest of the frame comes into very acceptable sharpness. In fact, in the full resolution version of the file I can almost read the type on the thermostat on the far wall behind the man leaning on the pillar. It's a different style of lens that Nikon's and Canon's. The performance wide open in the center is very high with lots of good detail. For some reason, to me, it's more photographic. But everyone's taste is different. It may be that most of my early photographic experience was with lenses from the alternative design school of letting the spherical reality of the lens exist and designing around it rather than disquising it's basic personality under layer after layer of design additions meant to average out the performance characteristics. As I said above, both approaches are compromises and the members of the mass market get to pick their own poison. 

I'm looking forward to acquiring more and more of the Rokinon lenses to use on the front of the Nikon D610 on which I will see the differences most clearly. I love the look of sharp faces coming out of a blur of defocused side areas which are partly created by lack of depth of field but also (and maybe even more interestingly) transformed by the focus shift toward the edges created by the very sphericity of the primal lens. (And yes, I will be trade-marking "primal lens.").

This year I look forward to adding the following Rokinon lenses in Nikon mounts:

24mm f1.4

35mm f1.4

50mm (cine) t1.5

85mm (cine) t1.5

Not to replace the lenses I've collected for the Nikon cameras but to give me a wider choice of rendering so that I can overlay my own sense of photographic style and voice to various projects. Not everything I shoot needs or wants to be homogenous across every square millimeter of a frame. And I'm pretty sure I'd rather have a big chunk of imaging that's breathtakingly sharp and detailed for some stuff, even if it means that the stuff in the background of an image, at the edge of the frame isn't "perfect."

A look back at my favorite project from 2014. The website for a school.

Butterfly release. Nikon D7100+18-140mm lens+flash.

Looking back over a year's worth of assignments there are some that really stand out. It may have been the subject matter or the environment, or just that the people being photographed and the photographer were all in their own perfect grooves on that one particular day. For me the project that made me smile the most was the couple of days I spent making images of the kids at St. Gabriel's School in Austin for the school's website. Here the website, browse through and see for yourself. 

Working with clay. Nikon D7100+85mm f1.8G lens. Available light.

As is the case with most successful projects I've been involved with it wasn't that the photography was the star but that the producer of the whole project carefully crafted every single component; from the writing to the design, to the pacing and even the cropping of the images. In many regards this assignment represented a "dream job" for me. The school is in my community. I know some of the families whose kids attend the school. I'd done a video (with my friend Will van Overbeek), for Glasstire Magazine, about the art teacher. I felt at home.

But more importantly the marketing director trusted me to make the aesthetic decisions for the photographs. She gave me a list of the kinds of images she needed but left the selection of subjects, locations, lighting and gestures/expressions up to me. I was free to move from classroom to classroom and to stop and spend time where the images were working and to cut short locations or activities that didn't quite gel.

This was one of the first projects that I did in 2014 entirely with the Nikon cropped frame camera, the D7100. Over the course of the two shooting days the majority of the images were shot with either the wide ranging 18-140mm or the 85mm f1.8. I shot in raw but and trusted camera at all ISOs from 100 to 3200. I processed my files in the most up to date version of Lightroom and delivered high resolution Jpegs. I came to trust the performance of the camera and the zoom entirely. The 85mm needed some mid-course auto focus fine tuning, now it's perfect too.

The school is lovely. The buildings are pristine and inviting and the campus is situated in the middle of an very affluent neighborhood with rolling green hills to all sides of the school. The kids were great. They all seemed thrilled to be at school, curious and ready to learn. For the most part they ignored me and I got on with the process of taking pictures and they got on with their lessons. Most of the time I had only one camera out and in my hands. I kept a second camera and a few other lenses in a small, easy to carry bag. The only light I brought along was a Metz flash which was used mostly to fill in outdoor shots. Even the post processing was direct and straightforward.

Definitely my favorite project of the year.

Winter swimming and today's workout.

Young Ben. Nikon 50mm f1:1.2. On a warmer day.

It was windy and cold this morning in Austin. Oh, the northerners won't think so but 34 degrees, air laden with moisture and a snapping wind all add up to the Texas version of a cold, cold day. Especially so for outside swimming. The truly hardy swimmers in our town get to Barton Springs Pool in the early morning, before the eighth mile long, spring fed pool is officially open, that way they never have to pay an entrance fee to the city. The masters swimmers who still want to push the envelope of high performance and relive the glory of their Olympic or near-Olympic years get up earlier still and head over to the UT Swim Center to be lovingly tortured with long sets, short intervals and high expectations by coach, Whitney Hedgepeth (one gold, two silvers....). 

But those of us who have transcended our need to swim so hard and so fast that the rest of the day is consumed with yawning, napping and recovery stretches head to the finest masters program in the entire world. It exists at the Western Hills Athletic Club (aka: The Rollingwood Pool), nestled in the heart of Austin's two most affluent and desirable neighborhoods, Rollingwood and Westlake Hills. The pool is the heart of the club. It's a 25 yard pool situated on a slight rise, surrounded by majestic live oaks and shielded from view by a grand hedge that fences in the property. The pool is outdoors and we swim there all 52 weeks of the year. In the summer the water is chilled and refreshing. In the winter the water is heated to a consistent 80 degrees and the pool is covered at night with insulating covers to efficiently maintain its thermal bounty.  Yeah, there are tennis courts and basketball courts but those are only there for the people who can't swim...

It's the holidays and I'm taking time off from work and obsessive exercise. I bailed on the 7:00 am practice this morning when I heard the wind slapping the branches around, and besides, it was still dark then. But some hardy band of my swimmers made it to the workout, took the covers off the pool and did their yards under the watchful eyes of coach Dale.  It was no warmer when I showed up at 8:15 and headed toward the new locker rooms to change into my Speedo Jammer. I grabbed my fins (in case we needed them for kicking drills), my hand paddles and buoy (for pulling sets; my fave) my swim cap (black with pink butterflies on the side) and my low profile goggles. I moved quickly up the stairs and across the deck, pausing to grab a kick board from the bin next to the digital time clock at the south end of the pool. No one wasted time hanging on the deck or procrastinating about getting in. It was far too cold and windy to spend time equivocating...

I jumped into lane three with two guys who are both named, Mike. One is a life long competitive swimmer (and finance professor) the other is a well regarded younger triathlete who is also an electrical engineer. Our warm up was something like this: Swim 400, Pull 400, Kick 200 yards. We put our heads down and got to work. The swimmers are distributed through the lanes by their repeat times. The fastest people are in lanes 6 and 7. The slowest in lanes 1 and 2. But every day is different and the mix changes based on who is in attendance. Some days (when I am motivated) I might swim in lane 4 or even lane 5 but no matter how groggy or tired I am I try never to drop below lane 3. Today, at the end of a string of long and hard workouts the slower pace was just right for me. Kind of a celebratory last go for a good year. The warm up was 1,000 yards.

The next set was 15 x 100 yards, freestyle. As usual there was a pattern. Go the first three on a tight-ish interval (maybe 1:25) then drop five seconds from the interval on the next three (maybe 1:20) then come back to the first interval for the next three (1:25) then drop ten seconds from the interval for the next three (maybe 1:15) and then go back to the original interval of the last set of three. There are no rest intervals between the sets, you just go straight through. It's a fun, tough way to crank about a little less than a mile and keep a brisk pace. 1500 yards.

The next set was 15 x 50 yards with a different pattern but also on a tight-ish interval like 50 seconds per 50 yards. If you swim them fast you get more rest between each one but the higher degree of effort will make you appreciate every second on the wall. The pattern was kick/stroke/freestyle. That translates to a 50 kick with a board, a 50 of a stroke other than freestyle (we alternated butterfly and backstroke) and then a 50 freestyle. You repeat that pattern five times for a total of 750 yards.

At the end of the workout we did a set that was all about breath control. The entire set was designed to discourage negative thinking about oxygen deprivation. We did 15 x 25 yard sprints on a tight (25 second) interval. What makes this set hard is that on the first 25 yard sprint you get to take three breaths, on the second 25 you get two breaths and on the third 25 yarder you get one or zero breaths (depending on your ability).  There's another 325 yards. Then we warm down; usually something like a 200 yard easy swim----gives you a chance to cool down and work on your technique and your flip turns. While not a long distance work out we sure kept moving, had little time for chatting and were pretty tired by the end. Total=  3575 yards, a bit more than two miles and change in an hour.  I like the Saturday and Sunday workout where we get to go from 1.5 hours. You just get more done.

I stuck around to get some coaching on my butterfly stroke (watch out Michael Phelps :-)). No matter how nice you think your stroke must be it's always nice to have a learned set of eyes appraise it regularly. Sure enough I was coming a bit high out of the water and not getting my head down quick enough after my breath. Something to correct in the new year. 

The hardest part of the workout on a brisk day like today is getting out and making the minute long hike back to the locker rooms and the hot showers. My feet were thoroughly cold when I stepped over the threshold into the warmth of the new bathhouse. How can life be anything but wonderful when you start each day out like this? I've got to write a note reminding myself to pay our club dues for the year before the 15th of January. Wouldn't want to mess up the delicate balance of life.

A thank you! to Fred for reminding me that I haven't written nearly enough about swimming this year.

Ben during his swim team tenure.

A work photo of a zero edge pool in Westlake Hills.

Emily at the pool.

Off season swimwear.

Masters swimmers don't use ladders. If you can't pull yourself out of the pool without 

using your knees or a ladder you might as well give it up.

Summer at Barton Springs where the water is always 68 degrees. 

Start them swimming young and they'll get fast.

Mixing Photography and swimming on assignment.

Perfect head, arm and body position for freestyle.

Don't forget the body roll! Critical for speed.

One of the most fun pools I ever swam laps in, 

The Prince Ranier Commemorative Pool in the bay 

at Monte Carlo. 50 meters of straight up fun.

Personal yacht parked just outside, optional.

You might want to consider making a New Year's resolution to stay in great 

physical shape this year. It sure helps when you are carrying heavy photo

gear around all day. Keeping the waist line in check is an asset.

This is a visual business, after all.

Nikon D610+NIkon 85mm f1.8 G at the Austin Graffiti Park and Downtown.

I like the Graffiti Park in downtown Austin. Today I finished up lots of stuff in the studio. I went to the noon swim practice. It was unsettling to exit the pool in 40 degree weather with a chill wind blowing and walk, soaking wet, to the locker rooms. I ate a wonderful left over lentil and ham soup. I had a square of dark chocolate with almonds and sea salt as a dessert. At 3pm I got in the car and drove over to my favorite parking place, near Treaty Oak, and walked over to the big walls. 

I didn't have any sort of mission in mind I just wanted to get out of the house and out of the studio. A true workaholic can only take so much holiday cheer before one's thoughts turn to taxes and marketing....

I took along the newest camera and one of the newer lenses to arrive in the studio. It was the Nikon D610 and the 85mm G f1.8 lens. I wanted to play around with depth of field and see what the real difference is in every day shooting between the larger format and the smaller formats. I also wanted to see how the 85mm lens looked when shot wide open. DXO rates it as the second best medium telephoto portrait lens in the entire Nikon Pantheon. I wanted to see what that looked like, not how it read.

It was much colder than I thought it would be and on the five minute walk to the wall the wind cut through the zipper on my hoody like a squirt gun filled with ice water in the hands of a crazed account executive. I stopped by the Goodwill store on Lamar Blvd. to see if they had any hats. They didn't. I pulled up the hood, stuck my gloved hands in my pockets and trudged on. 

The park was hopping today. It's become a stop on the out of town family tour of Austin. It was also "selfie central."

I think the focus in right on the money with this camera and lens combination.

BFFs taking a moment between making selfies to compare notes.

The Graffiti is international.

Children on adventures, mothers in distress and artist shutting it all out.

 

 This family brought a special stick with which to position their designated cellphone/camera

far enough in front of the group to do an extended, multi-generational selfie. 

From this angle it appears that the family is worshipping the little white box. Or they are 

all fascinated to find that "The Grinch that Stole Christmas" was playing just then

and they had all promised each other that it was a very important movie 

that they would all catch together during the holidays.

I thought the glowing red nipples made this one a PG-13 mural. 

You know, for suggestive content....

But at the other end of the walls we have the G rated section, 

home of endless selfies. 

Graffiti Tourism is so right now. I'm glad I was there to document it.

A few walks through the graffiti du jour and I was ready to head downtown to Caffe Medici to meet a friend and have a redemptive cup of milky coffee. On the way there I say this red chair in a shop on second street. They always have very cool chairs and lighting fixtures but they are very pricey. I thought it would be fun to see how the lens and camera would handle the mixed light and the narrow depth of field from using the lens at f2.8. 

In the end I learned a few things. I learned that I should bring along a hat when I get out of the car and am already cold five steps away from it. I learned that 85mm lenses can be fun and that this one is sharp and nails focus. I learned that the Graffiti Park gets old when the work is chaotic and you haven't brought along your own model. I guess that means the trend is winding down. I learned that Medici makes a very nice Latté and that the woman behind the counter making my coffee is still very beautiful. I still have her contact information in my wallet. I guess I should follow through on my suggestion that we get together for a portrait shoot. There's always next year. It's right around the corner. 

The main thing I found out is that I like the sound of the D610 shutter. It's subdued. It's not like the gun shot shutter of the D700 which is one of the reasons I fled the Nikon system five years ago or so. I'm happier with this one. 

On a final note of the year (maybe) I am reminding my daily VSL readers that the sale price on the novel of the year, "The Lisbon Portfolio" Kindle version goes back up from $3.99 to $9.99 on the first of the year. You have about eighteen hours to purchase your copy at the lower price. You'd better hurry and get an electronic copy before they run out......

Here's a blanket, end of the year, post that covers my new equipment choices, what we got done this year and what I hope to get done in 2015.

photo: Amy Smith.

First a quick housekeeping note: There were four comments awaiting moderation for me this morning and I tried to approve them on a cellphone. My clumsy fingers brushed the "delete" button instead of the "publishing" button and there is no way for me to reverse the process. If you left a comment this morning, or over the night before, I apologize for sending it off into the netherworlds. You are, of course, welcome to repost and I'll be careful to do my moderating on a real, full sized computing machine today. Sorry about that.

Marketing.

It's the end of the year and seems to be a clichéd and routine time for reflecting back over the year. I'll plunge right in. First of all, my most successful marketing effort of the year was a simple letter writing campaign that I did last January. I sent out letters to 30 or so handpicked clients letting them know I was looking for some fun work in the field of video. Those 30 stamps were a good investment. We got calls from a handful of clients almost immediately and quickly got to work on an assignment which had me connecting, writing, shooting (and traveling to shoot), and finally, editing. It was a good project for a good client and it is still being used in all of their trade show and web marketing. Other, smaller (but no less profitable) jobs came from other clients as well. 

The video projects helped to remind clients that they could depend on me for a range of creative content which also led to increased billings per client for regular still photography assignments. 

Given the success of the letters and the minuscule cost of generating them I'll certainly be starting off the marketing this year with a letter writing campaign (or two). I am also planning to make more use of my Vimeo membership to create projects aimed at advertising clients to sell them both content services (writing, photography, etc.) and video production services. It's a wonderful time to market and the recovering economy in the sectors I mainly serve means that opportunities exist right now.

Equipment.

I am so well equipped with camera equipment that I am starting to turn my eyes more and more to marketing material as equipment. Just as I have drawers filled with cameras and lenses I'd love to have drawers filled with great mailers, great video programming on memory sticks and lots of promotional stuff meant as "leave behinds" and small, visual gifts. Always remembering that the best marketing is a job well done and client who has fun in the process.

But there's always a play to add a few more pieces of gear to the treasure trove. First thing that comes to mind is the 40-150mm f2.8 Olympus lens for micro four thirds. I'd like one just for the extra reach it would give me over the existing Panasonic 35-100mm f2.8 I've been using. I don't suspect that it will be a "better" lens when it comes to sharpness, contrast, etc. but I would like the ability to get tighter on actor's faces from a stationary position in the theater. It also looks like it would be a great lens to pair with the GH4 for some exterior video shooting. Yummy. 

I'm also looking into the possibility of picking up a used Nikon 24mm tilt/shift lens for the D610. I know the Canon is supposed to be a better performing option but I'm not a heavy/habitual T/S user and just want one in the "tool box" for those times when a corporate client presses me into doing some cool wide portrait shot in an architectural wonderland. Don't worry, I'll test anything before I buy it. If the Nikon T/S isn't the right one maybe a Rokinon 24mm T/S would do. 

I am more and more interested in video production and would like to buy an outboard digital recorder. Most of the recent cameras I've bought from Nikon feature a clean HDMI signal that provides 8 bit 4:2:2 video and I'd like to see if those files, recorded in ProRes, stand up better than straight "write to card in camera 4:2:0" files in post production when color correcting and sharpening. 

Perhaps a little Atomos Ninja Star. I'll also pick up an portable, outboard monitor after conferring with video-saavy Frank, who researches these things. And tries them. 

A reader wrote asking what, to me, were the differences between the Nikon D7100 and the Nikon D610. In other words, "why did I grab a 610 when I already had a perfectly good 7100 which has the same basic body, better AF and just as many megapixels?" Since we're talking about gear I thought I'd take a stab at answering that. 

I have a range of clients. Some are practical and want images wherein the subjects evince nice rapport and where everything that should be sharp is sharp and well defined. Then I have clients who follow trends and fairly often I'm asked to do my style but with the added request to, "get that really, really narrow depth of field look!" Well, if I have room to use longer lenses and to control my camera to subject and subject to background parameters I really a have no problems getting the kind of look they are referencing with either a fast medium telephoto lens (85mm?) on an APS-C sensor camera or a really fast (50mm f1.4?) on a micro four thirds camera. It gets tricker when I work in smaller spaces where the distances between the three main factors are constrained. In those situations I may need to use wider angles of view to get what's needed but my client might still want "the look." 

I once wrote a review about the Leica 35mm f1.4 Aspherical lens that was lent to me for reviewing. I conjectured that the reason for the existence of what might be the world's best corrected semi-wide angle lens (especially when used wide open at f1.4) was the need of some photographers to show a subject in an environment with enough discretion in depth of field choices to show the subject sharply etched while pushing the background sufficiently out of focus to keep the details from competing with the main subject for visual attention. The trick is to use a wide lens that's sharp wide open... 

If I use a 50mm f1:1.2 Nikon lens at f2 (the point at which good correction sets in) to make a portrait of a person in an environment using a full frame camera I'm certain to get a reasonably sharp person in the foreground and the kind of popular mush in the background that makes clients feel like they are part of the current milieu. It's a different look than that which I can achieve at the same angle of view (getting the same amount of background at the same distance) with current (affordable) lenses in smaller formats. There are also times when I would like more isolation in the theater when shooting actors with longer lenses. 

The $1200, like new, Nikon D610 is a wonderful camera for that but it's really just a temporary fix. What I really would like is a bigger sensor. Like three or four times bigger. But I'll even settle for a 645 variant. But seriously, $1200 bucks for a camera with a sensor that kicks serious butt in all metrics? That's dirt cheap. 

So, to compare the 610 and the 7100 is pretty straightforward. The 610 has more ability to get a specific kind of look. It's also a stop better in low light. And that's it. No other magic. Since both of the cameras can be had together for less than $2,000 and both also shoot video it's just a good business decision. One is a nice shooter of stylized portraits and the other a wonderfully proficient back up camera that's rugged and reliable. This week I'm working with them to see what the video really looks like. I have a feeling we'll continue with the GH4 as would main video tool but might want to supplement with the D610 when shooting in dim, available light or at those times when we only want the narrowest slice of focus in a shot.

I like two things about the pairing of the two different Nikon cameras. Both bodies take the same batteries so there's one charger and one battery inventory. The second thing I like is the fact that the two menus are almost identical so no new learning is required. 

Someone else asked why, since I like EVFs so much, didn't I just buy a Sony A7 at around the same used price. My quick reply is that the D6210 is a better build camera that focuses quicker, has a much, much nicer sounding shutter mechanism and handles very well. For the same price it's just a better built tool and I think Nikon has done a much better job with their implementation of raw files and Jpeg artistry. When Sony fixes that awful shutter I'll be a bit more interested. And while they are adding space to the A7 series with bigger grips they might also think about putting in a real battery. 

The most used (profitable) gear of the year of 2014? That would be the Panasonic GH4s and the three really good X lenses, the 7-14mm f4, the 12-35mm f2.8 and the 100mm f2.8. Those and my Sennheiser wireless microphone set were all flawless and efficient, even if they do lack a palpable sense of excitement. The runner up was the Nikon D7100. I suspect changes in 2015.

The one big change is my focus on getting a Pentax 645z and a few portrait lenses for that camera. I'm not sure when but I'm pretty sure that camera is on the horizon. Remember, I consider the Nikon D610 to be a temporary fix....

Any other gear? Yes. Always more lights. LED, Flash, HMIs, Fluorescent. You name it, I'll find a use for it. That's the secret cool gear of photography (and video). And one can never have too many good microphones. 

Writing. 

The elephant in my humble hut is my writing. I have to confess that I loved the process of writing The Lisbon Portfolio (Novel about photographer, Henry White) almost as much as I'm loving having published it and having it read by friends, family and the VSL crew. Now comes the big marketing push to try and reach a bigger audience. I just got in another case of the hard copy books and I'm sending them out to bloggers, reviewers and anyone who has a power connection with Creative Artist Alliance in Hollywood (kidding? Maybe not...).

But the real question is: "What's next?" It's hard to juggle too much stuff but I think I have the bandwidth and discipline to both earn a decent living as a photographer (defined by keeping the mortgage paid, the SEP funded and the child in an exclusive private college in the northeast) and still be able to finish all the writing and coffee shop haunting required to produce the next book in the series. I have the plot and the outline and I've been writing encapsulated scenes since last Summer. 

I wish I knew whether or not I have the talent to make the novels really work but I don't think it's important. Not as important as actually having the fun of writing them. 

In the meantime the existence of the blog is pretty safe. I would love to get more reader comments and feedback but that's also a two edged sword, because, frankly, I really only want to hear fun stuff and don't want to have to deal with moderating all of the assholes.

This subject is almost certainly in the "wait and see" category so I guess we'll just take it one step, one book and one blog post at a time. 

Goals.

The perennial goal is to make more portraits that I like of people that I am interested in looking at. But I do have goals beyond that. 

     Swimming.  

I'd like to be disciplined enough to make every weekday, 7 a.m. workout offered. That's Tuesday through Friday. And, barring work or family obligations, I'd like to make every Saturday and Sunday 8:30 a.m. workout offered all year long. My goals are to get my 100 freestyle time back down around one minute and my 50 butterfly time down to around 30 seconds. Kind of crazy but everyone should have some painfully aspirational goals. I've added some weight training to the mix so we'll see what happens. I'm fine with small, incremental improvements. My long term goal is to outlast everyone else so I can sweep the USMS Nationals when I'm in my 90's. With that in mind I am pacing myself...

     The Writing Goals.

I'd like to have the next Henry White novel written, edited, designed and ready to go by next October. If you read the first novel and liked it you can help by pushing me from time to time in the comments to get this project done. The story takes place and St. Petersburg, Russia and is based to some extent on work I actually did there in the mid-1990's. You will like it. 

I'd also like to write and produce photographs for a small book that I envision publishing only as an e-book, about portraits. The How and Why of taking portraits in the digital age. It's been banging around in the back of my mind for a couple years and I think we can toss this into the scheduling matrix and complete it. 

     Business Goals. 

Hmmm. Everything I said coming into last year still counts. I think we're in a good recovery period and that allows me to be more of a specialist and less of a generalist. That means a lot more corporate and editorial portrait work. It also means finding the "art way" to make better videos for the same kinds of clients. Lyrical, visual poems about the same people we photograph. The money panned out fine in 2014 so the real secret will be to get paid in the same ball park while being more selective and having more challenging fun. 

The wrap up. The kid loves college. He's making good grades, connecting well with the other students and the faculty and he's managing his money well enough so that we got no panicky calls for more cash. I'd love to see more semesters just like that one. My spouse and partner is brilliant, relaxed and manages the financial side of the business like a banker from Goldman Sachs. She's also fun and wonderful to spend time with. For 2015?  More just like that.  The Studio Dog is, of course, absolutely perfect. No changes necessary on that front. 

I think I could be a bit more disciplined and definitely spend a heck of a lot less time this year on the web and in the online forums. And I could expand my circle of non-virtual friends and contacts. I had a great time last year just getting to know new people------and a good number of them came from right here on the blog. Almost magic. More like that.

One thing I don't want to change is the amount of walking and personal shooting I do. Even if no one else likes what I come home with. 

I hope your year wrapped up nicely. Y'all come back again for more in the New Year. I'll be as happy as a pig at the trough if you do. 

No more blogs planned until the New Year (not that it's ever stopped me from piling on at least one more....). I hope you have had a great 2014 and are planning on an even better 2015.  

Happy New Year! 

No ads today.

A Sunday Morning Walk with two new applicants for space in the equipment drawer; the Nikon D610 and the Nikon 24-85mm G 3.5-4.5.

The Nikon D610 ( which, incidentally, nudges out the new D750 at DXO by a full point! ) and the 24-85mm G VR lens are a good combo. The lens is sharp and the camera is well endowed with dynamic range and low noise. But, of course, there are little things to complain about. The 24-85 has lots of distortion at the wide end which is not fully corrected in Lightroom conversions from raw. The camera is pretty much as nice as a camera can be while suffering the lack of an EVF. What a perfect world it would be if Nikon and Canon were able to take their flagship cameras tomorrow and outfit them with really, really nice EVFs without changing any of their other performance attributes. 

I am certain that it's just a matter of time and the integration of really fast processors. That being said I am happy with the performance of both. On Tues. I've booked some fun, personal portrait sessions and I'll put the 105mm f2.5 ais to the test. I've also soothed the color performance of the Fotodiox 508AS LED panel and I'll have samples to show from that light source (which I really like from a strictly operation point of view). 

Back to the lens. While I'm very satisfied with the performance of the camera body I'm a bit less so with the performance of the lens. In addition to the barrel distortion at the 24mm end and the pincushion distortion at the long end the images at certain focal lengths don't look quite as sharp as I've seen with some of the better lenses. Almost everything I shot today was shot at f5.6 but I'd hate to think that I have to stop the lens down to f8.0 to get critical sharpness. 

I was a little concerned that it might be focusing errors caused by the camera/lens combo so I came back to the studio and did my AF tune tests. The camera and lens are right on the money at the default settings so I'm chalking it up to lens performance. I am, of course, overstating this because it's the holidays and I'm a little bored. The reality is that tossing a bit more sharpening at the lens cleans stuff up nicely. I guess I am used to the D7100 which doesn't have an anti-aliasing filter and is demonically sharp with good lenses. 

Another possibility is that I've been shooting with m4:3 and APS-C cameras and lenses for so much work this year that what I may be seeing is the everyday flaw in every full frame camera---too little depth of field. I'll sort it out soon. In the meantime I'm getting back to work setting up lighting for Tues. 

I also have a blog note. I am hard at work on the sequel (prequel?) to The Lisbon Portfolio. If I miss a day or two of blog-work I hope you'll understand. Below are additional images from today's walk. 

I hope you are using the holiday break (if it exists in your country...) to undertake exciting personal projects that make you nervous and anxious and ultimately happy. A couple more days left in the year to make sure you didn't totally blow off your art side.

The Book Awaits You. 

Give in to the force and feel the power of your fictional side....

Would you buy a specific type of camera body just to accommodate one particular lens?

It's a pretty sure bet that I would. My recent re-fascination with owning a full frame Nikon camera started innocently enough, I'd purchased a D7100 (APS-C frame) and just for fun I took a gander at the used, manual focus Nikon lens case at Precision Camera. My eyes locked onto two lenses that I wanted to add to my meager, existing collection of good Nikon vintage glassware. I own the Nikon 50mm 1:1.2 ais lens and find it to be pretty remarkable when I stop it down just a tad. I couldn't resist the pricing on two very clean brothers to that lens, the 55mm f2.8 Micro-Nikkor ais lens and the amazing and wonderful, 105mm f2.5 ais lens. These are both well made lenses that were built in the 1970's and 1980's when it was assumed that a lens would be made from metals that worked well together to reduce friction coefficients and to expand and contract, in concert, with heat and cold. Everything about the lenses is industrial strength and there are no small, electronic parts that will eventually fail and be impossible to replace. The glass on both lenses was/is immaculate and the focusing smooth through the entire focusing rack. 

I owned both of these lenses when I shot with the system in the film days and had always assumed (incorrectly) that they had been superseded by more modern designs and manufacturing methods. But the reality is that the lens companies have learned more how to fudge tolerances and assembly variances than they have learned better ways to design lenses for ultimate quality. Most companies still depend on very classic designs and  the makers use ED and aspheric elements to compensate for the necessary slop required to cost effectively mass produce products in large numbers, without hand adjustments. 

The last 105mm Nikon lens I owned was the 105mm f2.0 DC (or "defocus coupling") lens. It's outrageously good and it's the lens I used to make the three images (one above and two below) for the Austin Lyric Opera for an ad campaign years ago. I used the good camera of the time, a Kodak DCS 760 which was not full frame but it was closer than APS-C as it had a 1.3x crop factor. 

Once I bought the (under $200) 105mm 2.5 ais back a few months ago I put it on a D7100 and did a few tests. When the lens was stopped down to f4.0 it was very sharp across the frame. At f5.6 it was brilliant. But more importantly I really liked the very subtle transitions this lens made in tones and the graceful way the focus falls off. It must be one of the "bokeh lenses" that people discuss with such rapture. When I compared it to modern lenses there was a difference not in sharpness or resolution but in contrast and tonal transfers (the gradation from one tone to the next) that made this lens seem much more appropriate to me for current portrait work. The only issue was the focal length; it's a bit too long for a smaller frame and an even smaller studio. 

That was the slow motion rock slide of ideas that started pushing me toward getting some sort of full frame Nikon mount camera. I wanted badly to use this lens especially, but also the 50mm f1.1:2 at the angles of view for which they were designed. Didn't really matter to me which modern body to get as long as it used the right sized sensor to give me back those two focal lengths that I enjoyed using in "the good old days."

Well, after waiting all day for the post man to arrive the D610 I bought landed in the office. I went through and quickly adjusted all the menu items which was simple as they are largely (almost completely) identical to those of the D7100 and the D7000 before it. The first lens I put on was the 105mm f2.5. I plugged in the focal length and maximum aperture information to the camera and shot some test frames. The long focal lengths and fast aperture actually helped me achieve good focus manually and when I framed a few shots I was in my visual happy place. Two lenses make FF fun and situationally desirable: the classic 50mm and the classic 100-105. In third place is that in between focal length, the 85mm. Now I need to e-mail some of my favorite models and do some fun, studio portrait tests. Fadya, if you are reading this......

Below is a shot of the grumpy photographer/writer/editor of this site. What a serious looking guy. This must have been during the years in which he did not own a Nikon 105mm f2.5 ais lens......

Make him smile ( a little ). Buy a Kindle copy of his 

Novel...