Sometimes I like to post stuff just because it's fun. Like really beautiful women and very narrow depth of field. Makes the committed m4:3 users "jaw clench."

Jana helped me by modeling in the studio for my book on LED lighting. You can still buy the book here. It's a fun read. But her "audition" took place on a hot Sunday in the middle of a blistering, record setting Summer afternoon. We met for coffee at Little City Coffee house on Congress Ave., just south of the capitol building. We proceeded to shoot outside, in the heat.

I shot pretty much everything that afternoon with the Canon 5D mk2 and a lens I actually miss, the 100mm f2. It's a lens I tried always to shoot at f2 or f2.8. I doubt the aperture gizmo in the camera ever introduced the lens to anything smaller than f8.

We stayed in the open shade or under covered shade for the hour or so that we worked at making photographs. Jana graduated from UT two years ago and is now working for some powerhouse marketing company on the east coast. She was ultimately professional in every aspect of every project we worked together on.

I liked the fact that she understood advertising and marketing so well. It made her work as a photographic model or talent that much more convincing.

Seeing this image again makes me want to rush out the door, hop in the car and go to Precision Camera to buy a Nikon D610 body and a 105mm f2.0 DC Nikon lens. Same look with an even better sensor. The problem with impulses like that always comes later when I find that the system back or front focuses and does it in a non-linear fashion. That's what effectively killed my enthusiastically sought after relationship with the 85mm 1.4 Zeiss lens for Canon. Wonderful combination if you are lucky enough to get a pair with no focus shift and no crazy back focusing. Nothing makes you look like a dumb ass photographer more than an  image of what could be a beautiful girl whose ears are sharply defined while her eyes and lips look like soft focus mush.

Oh, now I remember why I love shooting with the Panasonic GH4......

Marketing. Just a side note because it all happened in 24 hours.

The sharp eyed readers of VSL may have noticed that I put up a strange post on Ripe Camera yesterday. It consisted of a lot of images from food and beverage shoots and some copy about my experience and qualifications shooting food and drinks. You can read it/see it here:

http://ripecamera.blogspot.com/2014/08/drinks-and-food.html

So you may be wondering what the heck that was all about. Well, I thought we'd take a break from the holy camera wars and the intriguing dives into the icy waters of lens lore and optical sorcery to discuss the plain nuts and bolts of the photo business. (Ooops! We just lost half the readers.....).

Yesterday morning I got an e-mail from an account person at an advertising agency I've worked a lot with over the years.  The e-mailer asked me to bid on a job. The agency is working on a alcohol makers account and needed to commission some well done product shots of nice drinks made with Tequila for their client's new website. The request laid out all the details nicely.

They wanted me to come and shoot at their location. They would hire a drink stylist directly. They would be in charge of assembling props and product. I would come in, design the lighting and shoot 12 mixed drinks, in various glassware, individually and deliver beautifully post produced files against white for use on posters, some collateral and on the client's website.

I pulled together a list of questions and a preliminary, "ballpark" estimate that would qualify them as either 'serious', 'fishing', or competitive bidding. I thought the project would take a day to shoot and another day to post produce the files. I already knew the rights package they needed.

After I sent along a ballpark estimate that was essentially one number with a dollar sign in front of it.  I got a "hey we're definitely in the ball park and we need a detailed quote with terms and conditions." The one thing they requested that sent up a little warning signal was the request to break out my photo bid into an hourly cost. That always scares me because if I am good and do the job cleanly and quickly I should benefit from the application of my years of hard won experience. Because of this I always try to bid based on the value of the needed usage for the images but I am happy to break out hard costs that are external to my licensing fee.

While I came highly recommended by a senior creative director, and also a well known art director another firm, the person who requested the bid also wanted to see some F&B shots I had done. She wanted to be able to share them with her client. I handled that request by quickly assembling some fun, recent work and making the blogpost you see at the link above. They liked the work and we jumped over another hurdle in the process. We were getting closer to the purchase order. I could almost taste the tequila in my glass.

The one thing left to handle was the requested price breakdown. I handled it by walking the person through my thought process. It went something like this:

"We don't, as a rule, work by the hour in our advertising projects because it's the work itself that has value to you and the client, not how long it took or how difficult it was for me to complete. You've already agreed that the pricing we're offering is what you were looking for so we know you'll be happy with the budget. The downside for you, if I estimate this by the hour is that there's no real cap to the costs. No way to know exactly how long it might take if everything goes slow, if the beverage stylist is slow, if we go over on time. Say we agree on $300 per hour and our estimate is based on an eight hour day of shooting. What happens when the ice machine breaks down and we have to send someone out for ice and wait for them?  What if the chosen glassware adds complications and it takes longer for us to figure it all out? What if I'm just stupid that day and I have to do things over to get them right? What happens if the creative director and the client are on different pages and have to work toward some shared vision----and that process takes time? If we estimate by the hour that clock keeps ticking and you may end up spending more than the job is really worth. 

Another thing, say every photographer you ask quotes you "a day rate" based on eight hours of work.  If I'm in the groove and I work well with the stylist, and the food and beverage gods are with us. I might get the whole thing done in six hours, while it might have taken Joe or Steve ten to twelve hours. If we get your images done in six hours they still have the same value to everyone as if I had taken the full eight hours to get the work done. But since you heard, "by the day" or "by the hour" you may think that you are entitled to get a full eight hours of work from us. If you are like some clients we've worked with you might decide to add three more drink shots to the mix. But this isn't what you asked for in the beginning and you need to understand that there will be an additional usage charge of each of those three additional image licenses as well as an increase in the retouching and post production charges. A better idea would be to use those extra two hours that my skill and efficiency bought you as a gift to get something else done, bill someone else more money or take off early and spend more time with your children.

And there's the flip side. If you accept my offer and it's based on the value of the final, supplied images in the uses that you have specified then you know exactly how much you and your client will be paying. It's a fixed amount. If I'm having an off day then I eat the overage. If I need to send out for something then I eat the delay. If one of the images is a doozy to retouch and takes me a full five hours then I eat the miscalculation. If I didn't figure out that cherries and olives require different approaches to styling and lighting and have to spend more time on set getting stuff right then I eat that and you end up paying.....exactly what we said you would at the very beginning. You get the exact value that we calculated the images had for you. I can even tell you, right now, how much more a buy-out would be. And if I do go over my bid I pay for the assistant's extra time right out of my pocket. It's such a win for you to have this all locked down! There's so much incentive for me to do it efficiently and right.

So, how did it all work out? Well, the creative director called to tell me that he loved the bid, loved working with me and had approved his end of the paperwork/permission routine. As far as he was concerned we were a go. His one caution? The only uncertainty would be the client.

I sent along the long (4 page) agreement form which outlined usage, how we would work, delivery schedules, pricing, rights package, and (most importantly) when we would get paid. The account supervisor was happy with the paper work and got ready to send it along to the client for final approval. Then the phone rang on her desk. It was the client. "Good news!" he said. "One of my friends, who is a photographer, owes me a favor and is willing to shoot the whole thing for free!!!"

I got a sad e-mail back from the account supervisor. She filled me in on the terminal glitch.

End of the story? Nope. In my experience many of these "friend" deals don't work out and we get the job anyway. In the meantime I got to educate a critical, new person at an agency I've worked with for a long time. Next time the bidding process will be even easier. I was gracious with the news and didn't complain. That's just good marketing. Finally, it gave me something to write on the blog that didn't include a paean to yet another winsome and flirtatious camera. Gotta like that.

Now, someone tell all those non-commercial photographers that it's safe to come back into the blog....

The most powerful lighting tool in my inventory...

Do you see the instrument? Is it a Profoto? Is it Broncolor? Is it a fluorescent? How many watt seconds? What's the CRI? How about the color temperature? Do I have a beauty dish in the mix? Is it bare bulb? I can barely restrain myself. Is there a radio trigger? Is it a good one? Is it a Pocket Wizard? How high can it sync? Can I change the exposure from the camera position? Well, maybe.

But of course you know that I'm not talking about whatever metal and glass unit is hidden behind the 74 by 74 inch white diffusion screen, I am talking about the diffusion screen itself. It cost me about $100 ten or fifteen years ago. That included the soft, shimmery, nylon diffusion material as well as the frame. It's held in place by two ancient light stands.

And I have used this as a light modifier in hundreds and hundreds of shoots, including three or four of the shoots from which I've posted images here in the last week or so. I've used it to diffuse terrific Texas sun on outdoor shoots. I've used it as a big reflector. But mostly I've used it the way we would have used a big, wonderful soft box in years gone by. It's been an integral, defining part of many of my shoots.

It's been used along side of Kodak, Canon, Nikon, Leica, Hasselblad, Olympus, Panasonic and Samsung cameras. It's seen twenty or thirty or forty thousand dollars of cameras and lenses come and go. But it's still here. It's still the bedrock and aesthetic magician of many, many shoots and it still only cost me ..... $100.

In the example above I was shooting for Zach Theatre. The magic light unit of the moment? An old and crusty 1,000 watt, open faced tungsten light. As cheap and old tech as dirt. The final result?
A wonderful season brochure and accompanying ad campaign. The sale of hundreds of thousands of dollars of theater tickets. The paychecks of dozens of actors and staff. From a well used modifier and an old, non-automated light. And, an older, 12 megapixel camera.

The most powerful tool in the lighting inventory is little more than a bed sheet. Charge for what you know. Charge for how you see. Not for the dollar value and novelty of your tools.

Is it all about the magic camera? Naw....

The single most important parameter in the success of a photograph is, without a doubt, how interested you are in the subject.  The second is the way you look at or consider the subject. Then it's all down to how you incorporate that consideration or emotional point of view with your lighting.

From a technical point of view the success of an image is so much more dependent on the quality, direction and motivation of the lighting than the camera will ever be. Honest.

If you've been chasing cameras and lenses for a while and you feel constantly frustrated it may eventually dawn on you that you may have been chasing the wrong things. Learning to light well takes a lot of time and experience. Learning to use a new cameras well (not the initial learning curve of photography and camera use in general) takes an evening to read the manual and about a week of shooting to get used to the controls. Lighting? Much longer. Lighting well? A life time.

We talk about cameras here because they are like the lunch of the photography world. Should we go out for a burger? Are we celebrating with steaks? How about that romantic little French place. But lighting is like breathing and meditating. It's what the real masters had to master.

People have chided me for having no allegiance to cameras but really, I consider them now, in the digital age, like the Tic-Tacs of photography. A temporary Pez dispenser of imaging. It's the lights and the lighting and the subjects I'm really interested in. A new camera just gives you something fun and novel to play with while you are waiting for your real subject to show up or when you are waiting patiently for the light to get neat.

Making your own light well is hardly ever about the brand no matter  how hard we try to make it that way. Give me twenty different flashes of equal power and decent color consistency and once I put them through a modifier or a diffuser (or even a bed sheet) I defy you to tell me which one was a Nikon Speedlight, which one was a Yongnuo 560 and which one was a Broncolor Mobil. Just flat out don't believe you can tell a different.

So, magic cameras? Naw. Magic lenses? Maybe for certain stuff. There aren't any magic lighting units. But the ability to mold the lighting to your vision-----that's where your magic starts to happen.



For Henry White it's all about the light....

A quick look back at my favorite digital camera of all time and a magic lens.

This image was done for the Austin Lyric Opera. It was done in the early days of digital imaging. I shot it with a Kodak DCS 760 camera and a wonderfully eccentric lens, the Nikon 105mm f2.0 DC lens. The DC stands for "defocus coupling". All I know is that the lens had a sharp center core and the ability to shift the out of focus areas behind or in front of the main subject.

While the image looks like we just found amazingly nice available light it is actually lit. I used my favorite big scrim for the model with a 1,000 watt tungsten light as a source and a direct tungsten spot light on the back wall some 50 feet behind her.  I love the way we were able to frame her head in the little pool of background light. I like the lighting in here more every time I see the image and that amazes me since I liked it a lot when we shot it. Learning more stuff isn't always better....

Swimming pool re-visited.

Photographed for an article on water features for Tribeza Magazine 

I keep thinking about this image for some reason. I think it's because I am a sucker for diagonal lines, triangular shapes and the interplay of the opposite colors in the closest part of the pool. It's an image that's all about patience and planning. I needed to pre-visualize the effect I wanted, get there in time to figure out the composition and then sit back and wait for the pool light and the twilight to balance. 

Negative edge pools are neato. 

Just for the record, I am currently having much fun playing with fluorescent lights.

Late last year I explored what was available in the realm of fluorescent light fixtures for still and video production and I bought four fixtures from Fotodiox. The biggest one has six double tubes, the two next biggest ones have four double tubes and the smallest one has two double tubes. All but the smallest have switches that allow you to turn off one or even two banks of tubes for more control.

The bodies of the lights are made of heavy metal and they have metal barn doors that close over the tubes to protect them during travel. I have used them now on six different commercial video projects and dozens of still photography shoots and have had no issues with them at all. I like the quality of light and the color is easy to manage by either shooting raw files or by doing a custom white balance before shooting.

Here is an image of one of the "middle-way" banks:

Unlike portable flashes these lights are heavy and need to be on stout stands. It might also be a good idea to toss a sandbag or two on those stands as well. You'll also need electrical power. But not the amount you'd need to make a nice tungsten soft light....

I've seen people use them "bare", with no diffusers or modifiers but I prefer mine to be pushed through a nice diffusion silk. A "one stop" silk is just right. Used with diffusion these already large light sources become lush with softness. The Dulux bulbs are powered by electronic ballasts that are supposed to be flicker free. At the price point I'd take that with a grain of salt and test them before you do any high shutter speed work or high fps videotaping for eventually slow motion effects. All I can say is that I've never seen any flicker or banding in my use.

The one caveat I'll toss out is that no big assortment of tubes like this is going to travel well. I limit my travel with long tube fluorescent lights to cars only, no airlines, no shipping services. If you are looking for a little change in your still life, portrait or video work these might just move the creative needle a bit. They are cheap enough to try out.

Checking off the days on the calendar. Ben is off to college on the 30th. My team of mental health care practitioners should be here on the 31st.

Just to confuse all the camera pixel peeking activities, this is one of my favorite images of Ben. He's just out of the pool having raced in a swim meet.  The eccentric camera of choice I was using at the time was the Kodak DCS 760. All 6 megapixels of it. It had an APS-H (1.3x crop factor) CCD sensor from Kodak. It had a removable AA filter but I used it without. Since the lens mount was Nikon I was using a Nikon 50mm f1:1.2 lens stopped down just slightly. I can't remember the exposure settings but the ISO was either 80 or 100 as we didn't dare go much above that for fear of noisy files.

We have a very large print of this and it is sharp, noise free and fabulous, which again makes me question the need for more and more little, tiny, skinny pixels when big, plump, fat ones do so well.

We talk about the "why?" of photography from time to time but nothing brings home the value of preserved memories to an individual's life like someone you love moving away...

For Readers of "The Lisbon Portfolio." Henry White sent along one of the shots described in the novel...

© 1999 Henry White & Kirk Tuck

From a trade show many years ago in Lisbon, Portugal. Image taken with a Leica M4 and a 50mm Summicron lens. It was a week and a half of indecision. Sometimes I wanted color and some times I wanted black and white and I tried only to take one camera along with me on my walks so I was constantly trying to decide which way to go. I  thought I never really got it right but to be perfectly honest I've never been the best judge of what works in which medium. Somehow, ten or fifteen years later is seems that no matter which decision I made in the past it was the right one. 

The funny thing about photography is that it's all about forks in the road. Do I go left or right? Are those the only choices? Can I go foreword or backward? Can I stand right here and see what happens next? Our decisions are always less about what camera or film to use and more about which path to take on our walks. Which path determines everything. And ultimately it doesn't matter which path you take because there's something to see everywhere......

Sunday Morning. Local seeing.

My chair is the one in the background. 

We were out of town yesterday. Ben and I came back late last night and hit our beds. I woke up at sunrise this morning and Studio Dog and I went out for a walk before the sun had a chance to heat up the pavement and make its presence felt. While I was walking I was daydreaming about all the places that I'd like to go to and take photographs. I'd like to head back to Lisbon, I can never get enough of Rome and I haven't been to Istanbul in years. I thought about all the photo opportunities that might present themselves and when I got back to the house and started to make coffee I remembered an essay I'd read in Brooke Jensen's wonderful book, Let Go of the Camera.  In it he tells about his pilgrimage to Point Lobos to take large format landscape images like Edward Weston. In the end he realizes that there was really nothing special about Point Lobos, there was something special about Edward Weston and the way he saw things. 

Weston probably returned dozens and dozens of times to the famous park mostly because it was available to him. He was able to infuse the scenes with his vision and his point of view. He distilled his feelings about his vision over time and then overlaid them onto the subject matter at hand. 

With this in mind I started to look around my own dining room and kitchen, noticing the play of shadow and light. Noticing the juxtaposition of shapes and objects. I realized that "where ever you go, there you are." (Buckaroo Bonzai). I finished a particularly fine cup of coffee and went out to the car to rescue a camera I'd left there last night. I went into the studio and grabbed a small tripod and then I came back in and started looking for images that just "felt right" to me.

The first series of images are of my dining room chair. Belinda painted and finished these chairs about 20 years ago and they've been part of my family's dining experience for the entire 18 years that we've spent raising Ben. The dining room has a set of double French doors on the South side of the house. In the mornings they get soft, diffuse, indirect light. The light makes soft shadows.  I like my chair images because they extend back into their space, and they also anchor my feelings about family meals and being together and also of being apart.

I am always careful not to bump or scrape the wall behind me. Not everyone is as careful.

We'll need to repaint that wall sooner rather than later.

I turned my camera to our living room and tried to capture the feeling of the wide open space and the tall ceilings with light pouring through from both sides of the house. I spend a lot of high quality time sitting on that couch writing and laying on that couch, reading. Ben and his friends move the furniture around a lot so they can all crowd around the big screen and play video games. It disturbs my sense of order but we each bend to make life comfortable for one another. 

I took photographs of a long hall but they didn't feel like much to me. I was looking for something else. I photographed my white chair. It sits in our bedroom and in the afternoons the French doors let in beautiful light. It's indirect and then diffused through thin, white curtains. 

I bought this chair when we moved into our house years ago. For a long time my lovely black and white cat staked it out as her territory and defended it against all comers. She was gracious enough to share it with me if I would let her sit in my lap and if I remembered to scratch  gently under her chin. She lived to be 20 years old and her last days were spent lounging in this chair. 

A few years after her passing we got a puppy who prefers to be known on the blog as, Studio Dog. The chair has passed to her and she settles in for naps there in the afternoon, and after she gets Ben to bed at night and makes sure he's sleeping she hustles back down the long hall and curls up again in the chair, positioned just right so that she can keep a watchful eye on me. Occasionally Belinda gets to use the chair to read in. It's usually at a time when Ben and his horde of friends have taken over the living room and the sound levels rise at that end of the house. The chair has a matching ottoman and my favorite portrait of Ben as a very young child was taken while he was sitting on it. Funny how many stories my chairs seem to have...

I'm not sure about anyone else but I have "favorite" articles of clothing and prefer them to everything else. This Summer I got a new shirt and no one seems to like it but me. It's plaid and that may be the problem. Most of my artist friends still dress in black. The shirt is made out of a special, lightweight technical fabric that breathes, wicks away moisture and is ultimately comfortable. My new shirt even has its own SPF rating. It's 50 SPF. I guess that means my shirt won't get sunburned easily.

If you read the blog on a regular basis you know that I walk. A lot. With cameras. All that walking demands good walking shoes. I've done enough impromptu walks in flip flops to know that the right footware makes the whole photo exploring a whole lot more comfortable. I've been in a shoe upgrade mood this Summer and upon evaluating some my old standbys I was amazed at how worn down they'd before. 

Life is full of little doodads and trinkets.  My night stand seems to attract old phones, old watches and reading glasses of every variety. 

It was a calm and fun project to just walk around and make photographs that are tremendously local. It's probably good to get out of the mindset that we can only take wonderful images at far flung travel destinations. It's a bit desperate to start searching out the geographic locations that others have shot well and then try to put your tripod down in the same spot and make a variant of someone else's vision. My experiment didn't produce anything I want to put in a frame or in a portfolio but it's a start.

As it is August I've started inviting friends over for informal portrait sessions. A fun fantasy: What if all your art could be done in your own studio and in the borders of your own home? What a time saver that might be....

Trending. #The Lisbon Portfolio. Get one now.

Yes. Not HDR. Just real life.

Fifth Street and Lamar Blvd. "Red Car."

Is it more honest if you just happen to catch it all in one exposure while you are holding the camera in your bare hands? Is HDR just a reflection of our lack of patience or our need to have everything happen in a controllable way? Does the reliance on a few techniques rob us of our spontaneity? 

Restaurant Counter Reflections.

Bar at Asti.

I had to look at the exif info to see what camera I used. They are all the same now. Homogenization complete. Unless, of course, you are still shooting film...

What do I want to see at PhotoKina? The wish list for my stuff.

A detail from Sandy Skoglund's installation at the

Denver Museum of Art. 

Everyone will have a different take about the stuff they want to see at Photokina. And I'm going to approach this blog post a bit differently. I'd like to know what you guys would like to see and why. What is missing from your brand of choice? What would you like to buy for the bag? And what do you think will be the successful products from this show?

I'm going to make some predictions and we'll see soon enough if I'm right. I'm not working on any insider information and no one's "suggested" anything to me yet. But I love making predictions because, if nothing else, it seems to clarify my acquisition pathway.  So let's get started and please, remember to chime in via the comment section about what you are expecting and what you want to see. 

Camera Predictions: 

Olympus: They show their first 20 megapixel OMD camera and it actually works well and has even less high ISO noise than their current OMD products. EM-1x? Of course that is accompanied by their 25mm f1.2 aspheric lens. As the photo gods always intended...

Panasonic: The only way to improve on the GH4 would be to come out with a "lite" version of the YACKLW add-on unit. It would be small and light weight and would just provide what most people wanted in the first place, a couple of XLR inputs with pots and a full sized HDMI connector for rough and tough work. Screw those SDI ports. 

Second up for Panasonic would be the replacement for the G6. For want of a better naming concept we'll just call it the G7. Smaller and lighter than the GH4 but with the same EVF specs, the same processor and a smaller selection of codecs. We could really skip the 4K on this model and make it a powerhouse, economical production camera for people on a budget. A tight budget. Keep the body style because I think it rocks. 

Canon: The faithful are finally rewarded with a 28 megapixel body that uses new sensor technology from their new sensor fab. It delivers dynamic range that will make the true believers weep openly. And it goes toe to toe with Nikon at every ISO. The added value? Beyond sensor perfection? 4K video that's sharp. Count on this one. I can see it coming a mile away.

The whipped cream on the chocolate sundae of Canon camera joy? They roll out the same kind of sensor technology into their APS-C cameras. 

The interesting adjunct to the otherwise "all positive" success story? They take yet another stab at the EOS-M series but this time they've paid attention to Olympus, Panasonic and Sony and actually deliver something that focuses within the same hour of the button actuation...

Nikon: The 1 series product manager who obviously came from accounting by way of marketing is fired and sent away. He is replaced by a product manager who gets that this 1 series one inch camera line could actually be a miniature professional line if they stopped dicking around and trying to make it appeal to everyone and their soccer mom. We bring back the integrated EVF (WTF was up with the bone head move of taking it out? Crazy! That's why we fired the guy!).   The body gets upgraded with some external buttons to make it quicker in actual use. They launch more fast zooms and faster primes. People go nuts.

The rest of Nikon's line is pretty fresh. I would guess that the D7100 is the only one up for a refresh but I think we see an incremental improvement, mostly in Live View and video parameters which make the camera a much, much better video competitor for Canon. This one becomes the D7200 and its second biggest selling point is a radically expanded file buffer. 

They spend the rest of the show apologizing for the D600 and promising it will never happen again. Then they show everyone enormous blow ups from the D810, everyone pats them on the back and then asks, "When will we get 36 megapixels in a prosumer body?" The Nikon people shake their heads and walk away. 

Sony: My cynical side says that Sony might introduce two or three different new lens mounts on two or three different lines of cameras along with one and a half lens models for each new line, brag about the cameras being able to shoot at 800,000 ISO and talk a lot about video production but my rational mind says they will introduce new lenses for the A7 line, replace the A7r with a version featuring an electronic first curtain shutter and make other small improvements to that line. They will also most likely introduce the successor to the A99 which will do away with the pellicle mirror and feature the same 36 megapixel sensors as the A7r but utilize the "A" mount and be positioned as a sports and rugged camera.  All Sonys will feature a newer codec like the XVAC S which will make the cameras more usable for professional video recording. 

The Nex line is the one that currently needs some expansion and I think there is an opportunity to come out with a "pro" body in that space that is rugged and does a good job with heat management, along with more external controls. Look for more and more hybrid body style mixes like the A3000. 

Samsung: I'll go wild here and predict that they come out with at least two new bodies. The few rumors that circulate on the web are predicting pretty much what I expect: Samsung will announce and launch a very much improved prosumer camera that will go toe to toe with Canon and Nikon's prosumer cameras in the APS-C space. I'm thinking a new sensor with 24 to 28 megapixels, weather proofing, the ability to use a battery grip, a whole new exterior finish with thick, gummy rubber that feels solid and very "pro."  I would further speculate that they've been stung by criticism of their so-so video and will be incorporating some higher end features there as well. Look for 1080p / @60 in 2K and some sort of 4K implementation in the camera. Also, look for a bigger body with double card slots (one SD and one micro SD) along with the usual connectivity cotton candy. Finally look for a faster than everyone else flash sync and a fast (maybe 1/12,000th of a second) high shutter speed. 

The first camera should be enough to scare the crap out of Canon and Nikon while the second one will be the slightly less aggressive consumer model with a lot of the features minus the "over the top" build and materials. I'll consider the camera a successful tool for shooting if they get the EVF just right. And by that I mean it has to be bright, clear and switch at the speed of light from eye level to back screen. No big lag, no hesitation. 

If they get this done and introduce two or three different high performance zooms and a couple of sought after primes (70mm f1.8 anyone?) they'll finally have the framework of a complete system offer. Oh, one last thing. How about a flash that's radio controlled and highly configurable? Oh what the hell, they should also toss in dead on accuracy. 

Medium Format: Pentax opened the "under $10,000"  gate a couple or years ago and now they've wedged a doorstop into the whole mix with a 51 megapixel back that, for pretty much the first time in MF history, actually performs well above its native ISO. There's no going back for anyone now. As soon as Pentax and third party lens makers fill the pipeline with good lenses there will be absolutely no compelling reason for anyone to spend the enormous amounts of money that used to be required to get a functional medium format camera in the past. This means that the race is on for Hasselblad, Mamiya, Leica and Phase One to get product into the mix that gets close to the Pentax pricing model as quickly as they can or risk becoming an interesting curiosity of yesteryear. 

My predictions? The long shot is that Canon steps in with their own product under $10,000 and positions the camera as the ultimate step up from their current EOS line. Look for an adapter that allows users to use their current EOS lenses in crop mode on the new camera while also offering a new line of optics that cover the full image circle. 

The obvious next step is for everyone in the medium format space to get "entry level" products on line to compete with Pentax. What will make it hard is that everyone's offerings right now (not "every" but most) are based on the use of the same Sony 51 megapixel sensor. Phase One still offers a bigger sensor but the price differential is so enormous only people who absolutely don't have to care about money will consider purchasing one. 

My overall prediction by the end of the year is an entry level model with normal lens in the price range of $6995. At least announced by the end of the year.

Lighting gear: No one really cares anymore. The focus of everyone who doesn't shoot for money is on cameras with high ISO potential and in most people's minds that means freedom from lighting and, for the people smart enough to understand that being able to control lighting in many situations really means controlling the quality of light instead of the quantity of light, most will find the battery powered options to suffice. Imagine almost ubiquitous variations with the capabilities of Nikon's CLS system. But in every brand. Profoto will continue selling to aspiring pros who know they need to light well and on a big scale in order to differentiate themselves from the legions of semi-pros and occasionally incurring amateurs. There always be instruments for those who demand the best. So the market will support a low end vendor like Alien Bees, a mid-range vendor like Profoto and a high end vendor like Broncolor. Everyone else will fall to the wayside or shift into LED lighting which broadly appeals because of its ever declining learning curve. Praise to WYSIWYG.

What will we see in the lighting arena at Photokina? Lots of low powered monolights. Lots and lots and lots of LEDs. The LEDs will be divided into two camps, the panels with hundreds or thousands of tiny bulbs and the new, more compact, surface mount LEDs which have led to more fixtures reminiscent of old tungsten fixtures. Fiilex had this market well figured out for a couple of years but now it seems as though everyone is rushing an SMD version of an LED light to market. 

The only pertinent questions at Photokina will be, "How do you want to power it?" and "How much output do you need?"

Finally, Photokina has always been a wonderful boost for blogs and sites dedicated to camera reviews and endless arguments about cameras and camera reviews. I think that's quickly coming to an end. The mania for photography as an ever growing and never capped recreational market is quickly dying and page views across all sites are diving. These sites are now pretty much the purview of older men who love gadgets. Myself included. These sites will slowly die off as they become an endless collection of echo chambers, all telling the same stories about the same limited and largely identical products. Oh, yes we could put up pretty photos and talk about our "art" but it's just like grand children and children: everyone likes to talk about theirs but no one really likes to listen to people talk about theirs. The death of gear oriented photoblogs is at hand. I guess we'll go down swinging. 

What would I like to see at Photokina? Really, just a simple but indestructible camera that only shoots raw and has three controls: ISO, Aperture and Shutter Speed. We'd focus with a big ring on the lens and our left hands. Every file would be a raw file. There would be no scene modes, no color profiles, no wi-fi and no NFC. You could buy it equipped with any of the popular lens mounts and the mounts themselves would be interchangeable. That's it. That's all we need to take really good images. Let everything else get taken of phones and fixed up with apps. 

And that's my set of predictions for Photokina. What are your predictions? What would you like to see?

I've also been working on getting nice skin tones in black and white and can report that using

Lauren in Black and White.

The DXO Filmpack 3, Rollei IR 400 profile works well. You just need to bring down the contrast and increase the exposure. It helps to turn down the grain function as well.  Finally getting this stuff nailed in. It's about time.

By the way...for all the sharpness folks....the Nikon 18-140mm f3.5-5.6 lens is very sharp, even wide open. Now if you shoot architecture or other things requiring straight lines you should run from this lens as fast as you can, but----if you just want sharp and tonally well behaved this one is a good one.

Portrait Project. Ongoing. My eccentric thought process/workflow.

Lauren.

You are what you practice. I forget from time to time that portraiture is a process and not just the click of a shutter. You really have to decide what you want from a session and then do the practice in order to make it work. Lauren is one of my clients and I asked her to come into the studio to have her portrait made. She was kind enough to agree and we set up a time and date. 

Then I came to grips with the fact that I'd slacked off doing portraits for fun and portraits for my art over the last few years spending much more time either doing straightforward images for clients or writing about various things on the blog. Frankly, I felt out of practice. 

So the first thing I had to do was go through a selection process. I knew I'd be shooting in the studio but I was unclear about what gear to use. Which lights? Continuous light or flash? What kind of modifiers? Multiple smaller lights or fewer, bigger lights? What kind of background? Plain paper? Muslin with color? (And I still need to work on dropping the saturation in the green channel in post...). What camera should I use? And once I'd chosen the camera then what lens to put on it to get the look that I wanted to see?

Then, of course I'd have to think about posing and what kind of crop I'd like on the final image and even what I might talk to Lauren about to put her at ease and get her into the flow of the session. 

Afterwards there's another slew of process driven questions. What Raw processor would I use for the files? How would I manage color? Would this image be a good one to put through DXO Filmpack and use one of their film profiles? Which program would I use to do a nice vignette? (How about Snapseed?).   And finally, how would I share the image with my check writing audience? 

I chose the muslin background because I had done a recent portrait with it and liked the look. It's bright summer here and we were shooting in the middle of the afternoon and I didn't feel like blocking all the windows to cut down on color contamination from daylight when using fluorescents or LEDs so I chose to got with electronic flash. I used the Elinchrom Ranger to give the batteries a work out and because it has nice, 1/10th of a stop control. The Elinchrom flash heads also give off a nice, warm light. There's no UV spike anywhere as there often is with inexpensive battery powered strobes or cheap monolights. Since I had nearly infinite power at my finger tips I used a 72 inch Fotodiox umbrella that's white on the inside and black on the backside. I also covered the business side of it with a white diffusion cloth. With the flash head correctly positioned to really cover all of the inside space it's a wonderful soft but direction light source. 

I placed two 4 foot by 4 foot black panels to the opposite side of Lauren from the main light to keep the spill from bouncing off the studio's white walls and reducing lighting contrast in the image.  A second flash head, at 1/3rd power (compared to the setting for the main light) was used in a small soft box to light the background. Two lights seemed just right for the effect I had in mind. 

From the zany collection of cameras currently in my possession I selected a Nikon D7100 coupled with an interesting 18-140mm zoom lens. I set the camera to 14 bit raw, lossless compression, in manual mode. The ISO was nailed to 100 and the camera was set to 1/125th and f5.6. 

We chatted and took images for about an hour and I ended up with around 250 image files. I put them into Lightroom to do a quick color tweak and convert to gallery sized jpegs. I'll put the ones I like up in a private gallery on Smugmug so Lauren can make her selections. In the meantime I output the first image of the shoot and pulled it into Portrait Professional to soften her skin tone just a bit and do a few little color tweaks. Then I pushed the file into Snapseed to add a nice vignette---darkening the corners. Finally I pulled the file into DXO Filmpack 3 and converted the image into a Fuji Astia film profile.  I uploaded the portrait to this blog as an sRGB files at 2100 pixels on the long side. 

When Lauren makes her selections I'll first open them in DXO and do my raw conversions there. I'll take large 16 bit tiffs and do my retouching in PhotoShop. From there we'll see where the creative, post production process leads. 

We've had enough columns here about tangential subjects that barely graze the photographic arts---I thought I'd pull myself back on course and write about the stuff I really care about.  That's making portraits.

Edit: I never imagined that each site would compress and display images so differently. Go to 500px to see Lauren's image much closer to what I'm seeing on my screen: 

http://500px.com/photo/78991065/lauren-provia-web-res-by-kirk-tuck?from=user_library

p.s. Thanks Robert for making me double check!