Thinking about the closure of Bowens. Where is the flash industry headed?

People on various forums and on photo industry blogs have suggested that Bowens, a long time maker of electronic flash equipment for photographers, was forced out of business because they either could not compete with the lower priced gear coming out of China or because they were unable to innovate fast enough in order to stay relevant to consumers. 

Of course I think there is a quite different reason for their demise and it's one that must be haunting Profoto, Elinchrom, PhotoGenic, and even Alien Bees. I think there is a tidal wave of change coming in the practice of photography and it's rendering traditional working methodologies, gear and business constructs obsolete. And it's happening at an accelerating pace...

While photography is a growing hobby and pastime the traditional approaches to photography as a business are in flux. The mainstay customers for studio electronic flash gear (especially stuff that plugs into the wall); the kind of lighting Bowens was selling, was aimed at, and mostly purchased by, photography studio owners. The gear was set up in a "camera room" and used on a daily basis for years and years. Every studio had its own collection of electronic flashes and as technology advanced the studio owners might upgrade or add to their collection. 

In the beginning nearly everything on the market was some variation of a central power pack/generator and an orbit of flash heads with long cables that were plugged into the generators. When I taught photography in the early 1980's the only people we knew who

It's hot here in Austin. But that didn't stop the intrepid VSL testers from taking a long walk with a GH5.

Selena.

We matched a long standing heat record here in Austin today. It was 104(f) at camp Mabry which matched a record from 2000. With the humidity moderately high the "feels like" temperature is simmering around 108. To be frank, it's a crappy time to be here in Austin. The lake water is about 86 degrees and keeping the swimming pool cool enough to actually do heavy duty swim workouts requires running multiple aerator sprays all night long. It also means that working outside is iffy for a lot of people.

If you are working outside you move a little slower and try to always stay in the shade. A nice, insulated bottle of water helps.

I swam this morning and then I had stuff that had to get done today in the morning. Around noon I was ready to take my first excursion with the new camera. I put on one of my favorite anonymous shoulder straps, latched in a 64 gigabyte SD card, and headed downtown with my newest camera, the GH5.

I have only two things to report. First, the EVF is very nice and much preferred to an OVF. I love being able to see a representation of the camera's reality in the finder. This one is beautiful. The second thing I have to report is that there's nothing remarkable to point a camera at in downtown Austin today. I have made much progress though in getting deep into the 300+ page owner's manual.

Since I had nothing of substance from the walk to post I thought I'd toss up this image of Selena from a few years back. As I remember that was a pretty hot day as well....

More soon. KT

The GH5 in VSL. First Up: The rationalization. Sure to be an interesting flight of fancy....

Ah. The "good old days" of shooting fill flash with film. We actually used light meters then....

I was pretty sure I'd get a lot of responses to my latest purchase along the lines of: "He needs an intervention." "Here we go again." "He's back into m4:3." "But wait, I thought you said Sony (Nikon, Canon, Leica) was best!?!" "It's just Gear Acquisition Syndrome." etc., etc.  But I was equally sure I could come up with at least one convincing rationale for my seemingly illogical purchase.

A few years ago, around 2013, I looked at the market for photography and made a few decisions. My read of the trajectory of paid photography was not optimistic. I saw evidence of financial decline in the actual profession that mirrored the slow down in the camera sales world. Not being anxious to ride the trend to the bottom without some sort of plan "B" I started looking around at options which could leverage the position I built in my market and also leverage many of the skills sets I'd learned over the years. While re-engaging with my advertising background seemed possible it was more of a long shot, in my mind, than ramping up my comfort level with video production and setting marketing goals to sell more video services. The benefit with this second choice is that I would get to play with technical toys (always a plus) and learn new things. If I played my cards right

So, which VSL reader had "July" as the anticipated tipping point month for a GH5 acquisition?

Was it the same wag who called the fz2500 a "gateway drug?" I was working on video files today and marveling at how great the files looked from the fz2500 camera. Then I grabbed some of the handheld video files I'd taken with the G85 and marveled at them. The next thing I knew I was driving up Mopac Expressway toward Precision Camera and Video with the intention of grabbing for the new gold ring of consumer video cameras; the GH5. It just came over me like sun stroke. But with far fewer ill effects.

As of 3:30 pm, CST, I am in possession of a GH5 and two extra Lumix batteries. I'm setting up the menus this evening and the daily reporting about the camera will most likely begin tomorrow. I have to shoot some stuff first.

Here's how the reporting will go: Part one = The big rationale.  Part two: All the stuff I like about the camera and the files I get from it.  Part three: The stuff that bugs me.

Since the temperature hit 104(f) at the house today and the "feels like" temperature was closer to 108(f) I wonder if the purchase was a subliminal response. You know, buying a camera that isn't prone to shut down from overheating.....

So far it's almost exactly like the GH4s I used to own only with a much more complex menu and a much more robust video feature set. More tomorrow....

I tried to put into words the "personality" of some older lenses I was using; maybe photos are worth thousands of inaccurate words...

Yesterday, in a blog I wrote, I was trying to describe the difference in the look and visual "personality" of a set of older Olympus Pen FT lenses. Lenses from the late 1960s and early 1970s. As I swam this morning I wondered to myself, "Why talk about it? Just show some images!" So here are a dozen images from the shoot I did on Tues. evening at a Zach rehearsal of "Million Dollar Quartet." They were shot in a 16:9 aspect ratio so I can slip them into video without cropping. All shot with a Panasonic G85 camera and mostly with the 60mm f1.5 and 40mm f1.4 lenses. 

These were not made as "standalone" images for public relations or marketing but I'm sharing them here so you can see what I mean when I talk about a "rounded" sort of sharpness or a richer color palette. I guess it's all subjective. I hope Google's Blogger doesn't compress these in a ham-fisted fashion. Ah well, back to the edit...

Two interesting shoots done nearly back to back.

Portrait of Sarah shot years ago on film.

Works comes in with no particular pattern. On Saturday afternoon I videotaped four interviews with the four musical leads for the musical/play, "Million Dollar Quartet." I liked each of the interviews and on each one we shot with a second camera to get different angles, but even so I knew I needed some interesting shots to use as "cutaways" for those (numerous) times when I need to cover over visually obvious edits in the program. I also needed to get interview footage of the director who was unable to make it by for his session on Saturday. I cleared yesterday afternoon/evening with the stage manager (48 hour notice needs to be given to equity actors when we schedule media shoots) and showed up with an assortment of cameras with which to capture stage shots in rehearsal, along with the lights and microphone I'd need to capture the missing interview.

The play celebrates an actual event, an evening in the 1950's (December 4, 1956) when four musical talents all met in an unplanned session at Sun Studios and played together. The musicians were: Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins. 

I got to the theater around 3:30 in the afternoon and grabbed an

A quick note about providing all of my Sony A7xx, RX10xx and Panasonic fz2500 with instant dual card slots.

The argument generally revolves around shooting a "ONCE IN A LIFETIME" "MISSION CRITICAL" event or person or launch. How can one be a professional videographer using cameras with ONLY one SD card slot? ( I wonder how the old guys got two Beta SP tapes crammed into a single Betacam.....).

I can't help photographers who want to shoot raw still images with fault tolerant redundancy but I can help all the hapless Sony and Panasonic (not counting the new GH5...) owners who feel helpless and vulnerable shooting only to their one bare and rickety internal SD card!

If you shoot with an Atomos Ninja Flame or the Shogun model of external video recorder you can default to 8-bit capture and send video to both the camera card and the recorder's SSD. You'll have the back-up video you've been pining for over the years along with the bonus of having a great monitor. 

Problem solved. At least for video. Might even be a hack to record still images on your external recorder. I haven't looked into that yet. Growth market for Atomos?

A Few Thoughts About Shooting Green Screen.

West Texas Rest Stop. 

I'm resistant to shooting "off the cuff" green screen for clients. Like anyone not directly in our business clients tend to have a simplified view of the technique required to do it well. We use green screens in order to easily drop out the green background behind a subject and replace the background with a different image. Compositing is so easy in still photography now that one rarely even needs to bother with a green (or blue) screen but video comes at you at 30 frames a second and it would be more than a little time consuming to go into each frame and do selections, etc. so green screen is still standard if you want to layer in a different background behind a person or object in video. 

Like everything there is a right way to shoot green screen and a wrong way. The wrong way is to set up a green background without lighting and hope that available light and luck will get you a clean enough background to composite. It kinda works but requires a lot of post production masking to deal with variations in tone and color that make automated background drop outs tough.

I've done half-assed green screen in the past with reasonable results but I'm shooting a big video project tomorrow for a larger ad agency. It's mostly green screen and I wanted to understand the best way to do the work and what kinds of things to watch out for. Nobody likes having to make excuses

A Short, Celebratory Note: Another Mile Stone.

Barton Springs Pool. My new Monday morning habit.

1/8th mile long. Temperature +/- 70 degrees.

A great training pool for distance swimming.

Not too crowded at 6 am. 

The counter on the VSL blog just clicked over the 23,000,000 mark. That's a count of page views which happen here on the site. The Google counter for all reads (RSS, etc.) now exceeds 90,000,000. I'm pretty happy with either metric. I use the 23,000,000 for analytical purposes. 

We've shared over 3,000 posts in the last eight years. We're in the middle of a slow motion embrace of video but I still consider myself a photographer. The core audience I write for is fellow photographers.

I appreciate all the loyal readers I've gotten comments and e-mails from over the years and look forward to many more. 

Occasionally I put up little Amazon ads but I've made it a rule not to ask for donations, not to do Kickstarter campaigns and not to work as a shill for any manufacturers. I hope you know that the writing comes from my honest opinions about trends and photo-philosophy, and my discussions about gear derive from my having purchased said gear and pressed it into use for my own commercial enterprise. Although I do reserve the right to discuss new gear that I don't own but find interesting enough to consider.....

Your only responsibilities as a reader are: To enjoy the writing. To share your knowledge and opinions in the comments. To comment with compassion to the author and to fellow readers. To disagree with me when I've run off course (but gently, gently). To share the blog with like minded friends. That's it. 

I hope you'll stick around for the next 3,000 posts and be part of the next 23,000,000 views. It's been a fun ride so far...

An Audio and Video Sample from Sunday's Interview Sessions. How does it sound? How does it look?

So often reviewers will write about products without having any real skin in the game. They use the  cameras to shoot "real world tests" which generally involve pointing the handheld camera at a cute person across a table from them in a murky coffee shop, shooting with no thought for the lighting, and then posting the brutally compressed results as "samples." Occasionally they'll present the raw version of the file to allow readers to download and play on their own.

I sometimes do something similar in that I spend a lot of time walking around downtown Austin taking snapshots and then using them to illustrate what I write about here. But generally I try my best to present work we've actually done for clients to showcase the performance of certain pieces of gear. It's better to do it this way you, as a reviewer, are trying to use the equipment exactly as you would use it for a paying job, because.... you are using it for a paying job. Or a real and ongoing personal project.

I've recently been writing a lot about the Panasonic fz2500 camera and how much I like shooting it as a production video camera. I've done a few projects with it that I've posted here including my Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill  video. In this article I'm posting a small clip from a new series of interviews that Ben and I shot last Sunday. There will be a series of five interviews and my edits will become social media content to help sell the play. The material will also be repurposed for television commercials and public service announcements. In other words, real "real world stuff. "

 While the clip above has been compressed by Vimeo.com this too is part of the "real world" scenario. This is how clients will use it. We'll test and tweak and load and re-load until we find the best exposure for the compression....after making all the edits.

What I am attempting to show here is the quality of video I am getting from the Panasonic running into an external digital recorder. We filmed in 1080p, 10 bit, 4:2:2 and brought the files from the recorder into the Final Cut Pro X timeline. The compression makes the video just a bit darker than our reference monitor and just a bit more yellow...we hope to compensate for this in our finals.

Of special interest to Ben and me is the quality of the audio. You have to understand that we were filming this in a room with metal walls on one side (which you can see in the video) and a full wall of glass windows with no window treatments on the opposite side. I'm using one Samson C02 microphone on a boom about two and a half feet above my subject's head. There are industrial bar refrigerators operating in the background that could not be turned off. In spite of any of these obstacles it's my opinion that the audio is very good; very listenable.

I've tweaked the video slightly. I dropped the saturation a bit and pulled 2 small points of green out of the mid-range area. Nothing else has been done to it.

The audio is absolutely straight out of the camera. No E.Q. No sweetening. Not even a touch of level control or loudness normalization. The thing that impresses me is that this is audio from the shooting camera, our microphone runs into the pre-amplifier and then into the microphone jack and is finally written to the SSD in the Atomos recorder. The sound is not from an external audio recorder.

The combination of the different microphone, the introduction of the Saramonic SmartRig+ preamplifier to our tools, and a better understanding of audio level settings seems to be delivering very clear and detailed sound with no hiss or noise (other than room noise...).  It's performance that I am happy to be able to achieve with such an inexpensive camera combined with an even more inexpensive microphone.  Curious to know if you are seeing and hearing what I am here.

At any rate, this is authentically a "Kirk Tuck" real world sample ---- from the world of commercial content creation.

Follow up to previous post... One made with electronic flash instead...

This looks totally different to me than the image I posted on the previous blog. I like both of them but this seems like a more substantial portrait. I'm not sure if I am mostly responding to the pose and the expression or if I like seeing all the detail in Sara's hair and wardrobe.

Curious which one you prefer.

This was done with the same A7ii camera but with the Sony 70-200mm f4.0. It's really a delightful combination for portraits. I wonder why I ever stray to other set ups....

A portrait made with a 135mm f2.3 lens, shot wide open. Always wondered what that looked like.

Sara and I had just mostly finished up our portrait session. We'd been shooting with flash and the Sony A7ii with a 70-200mm f4.0. I noticed that the afternoon light looked really nice coming through the diffusion I had up over the window so I asked her to be patient while I found my 135mm lens in a drawer. It's a manual focus lens so I was depending on the focus peaking feature in my camera to help nail focus. I'd pretty much given up shooting wide open with long fast lenses when using traditional DSLRs because I had so much trouble with front and back focusing at various distances with that style of camera. With the Sony cameras I am getting my close focusing, wide open confidence back again.

I shot a selection of images with the camera on a tripod and then we called it a day. 

Today I noticed that Sara had selected several of the wide open images. I retouched them in my usual way and sent them along. I really liked the feel of this one so I wanted to share it here. 

The long, fast lenses are why I am loathe to consider changing systems from Sony.....

Here's the lens I was using: 

A mind blowing microphone revelation makes my day. Talking video production here...

Samson C02 Microphones.

Like nearly everyone who enters the field of video as a generalist I always thought that the choice for on camera interview microphone was either between different brands of shotgun (hypercardioid pick up pattern) microphones or between different brands and models of lavaliere microphones. Then one day I stumbled across a person on the web named, Curtis Judd. He's got a terrific YouTube channel that's all about professional, production audio for video. The information there is pretty amazing and the bonus is that he has a thoroughly professional, on camera-demeanor which makes his video programs a joy to watch. 

Here's the latest video that tweaked my thinking about recording dialog: Curtis Judd/Mics

It was here I discovered the Samson C02 supercardioid (and super cheap) microphone and came to understand it's usefulness and high quality as an indoor dialog microphone. Here's that article: Curtis Judd/Samson C02. But first let me back up and explain what I learned....

When I started getting back into video it seemed  that every article I read and every magazine that discussed video production recommended getting a good "shotgun" microphone. These are microphones that have strong