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...

I bought some interesting cameras this year. Some are better than others. But let me tell you which one was the most FUN.

The joyous camera.

Men, guys, males seem to love measuring the horsepower, noise, teraflops per second, megapixels and degrees of weatherproofiosity more than they love actually using their cameras to make artsy stuff. Or even stuff that looks like art. When colleagues call to ask me about a camera or a lens the things they want to know all center around the overall impressions of sharpness, lines per millimeter, delta of color accuracy and other very objective measures. They rarely ask me things like: "How loud is the shutter? Does it have a nice sound or a clacky chintzy sound? Is the camera nice to hold in your hand? Does the camera feel good when you use it? Does the lens have character? Does the lens make people's faces look nice?"

For this reason most of the professional shooters I know tend to make a bee line for the cameras that check the most boxes in the categories of things that can be measured and quantified.  They tend to gravitate toward high megapixel counts and sensors that make less noise at high ISO settings. They even love battery statistics. For these shooters the number panel and lists of comparisons on DXO Mark is a godsend. They can research cameras by the numbers and buy confidently without ever having to touch a camera first. This is the primo target market for gear like the Nikon D810. Or medium format cameras with the new Sony MF chip. Yes, if they buy based on those quantified reviews or spec sheets they will indeed have a camera than can do most of the stuff they expect but I feel like buying cameras is more like dating.

You could have a checklist when dating that goes along the same lines as a spec sheet. If you are looking for a person to date you could find out how fast they run a mile, what their imputed I.Q. is, how tall they are, where they got a degree and in what, and other similar metrics but until you actually sit across the table from a prospective romantic partner you'll never really know if you click. You'll never know if spending time with them is more of a burden than a joy, an obligation rather than a treat. I contend that the same relationship exists with cameras otherwise everyone in the amateur and general professional ranks would be shooting with whichever camera clicked all the boxes with the most ("if some is good more must be better!").

But when I watch my female friends or my acutely artistic friends chose cameras the whole process is more or less turned upside down. They may ask the consummate linear thinking guy to share the results of his hundreds of hours of painstaking camera research when they go to buy a camera but all the pages of charts and graphs and numbers go right down the drain when they actually go into a store and start playing with all the stuff that's available (and they will).

The artists and most of the women photographers I know go into the selection process with a whole different mindset. They are looking for an extension of their hands and eyes. They are looking for something that will integrate into the way they move through their artistic lives and they seem unwilling, almost incapable, of being happy only with the measured "best," A camera has to be more than the sum of its numbers to make this demographic pull out the credit card and get the transaction into gear.

To this group the way the camera feels in their hands is the number one consideration. If it isn't immediately comfortable and in some way tactilely familiar they are not motivated to "give it time" and "get used to it." So, they are looking for a solution that matches what their hearts and minds tells them is the right choice. To this group design is also a major factor; in some cases the quality of the overall design might even be the most important consideration because these folks are truly visual people and they will only buy products and devices that they can enjoy looking at and handling for long periods of time. Much the way that artists and design oriented people will gladly spend hundreds more dollars to buy a beautifully design Apple iMac computer rather than a workable and efficient PC. They know that they will have to look at the product they buy for years to come, in some cases for hours every day and they have a much lower tolerance for mediocre designs. Their brains don't balance out the cost/performance/design equation the same way in which spreadsheet jockeys do.

For them there is a visceral aversion to poorly designed tools or interfaces that drives them away from using the product so that any cost savings is savaged by their aesthetic filters. And they have a point; why introduce yet another piece of visual pollution instead of producing something that adds value? Bringing anything into their domain means that the product must contribute to the overall ecosystem rather than just sitting around churning and whirring.

I am drawn to cameras that have certain characteristics. I want them to have a visual personality. I want to be comfortable looking through the finder. I am not looking for the most exact finder but the finder that is most inviting and engaging. I want shutters that thump like the closing door of a Bentley automobile rather than clacking around like unmuffled industrial machines. I want to feel an affinity for the haptics of a camera. Holding it should make me want to hold it more. So, I am often at cross purposes with what most people assume is the role of the camera in a professional business. The belief is that a pro buys the camera with the highest resolution, the highest degree of sharpness and the lowest possible electrical noise at all settings.  By general "guy" consensus I'd have a box of D810s unless I could afford the finest medium format digital cameras.

And, being a guy, I do bounce back and forth, caught between prevailing convention and personal taste. I just bought a Nikon D610 to assuage my insecurities after being pounded, day after day, by the assumption that any professional portrait photographer would absolutely want a full frame, high resolution sensor so they could create noise free, smooth skin tones images that also have the potential to create portraits with very, very narrow depth of field. One eye in focus and the other one out. Go fast, long lenses!!!

I buckled and I'm not proud of it because I absolutely know I can get the images I really want and need from APS-C cameras and even the best M4:3 cameras. But I have the money and I can buy the "safety blanket" type of cameras for those every once in a while engagements when clients presume to know about the business of making portraits and will demand gear that is au courant. In most regards it goes back to our previous blog discussions about the safety of staying in the median levels of the herd.

You might not always win but you probably won't lose.

This is all a lead up to my basic assertion that prodigiously spec'd cameras are rarely the most fun cameras to carry around and use. Especially if you carry a camera with you everywhere (and I do mean everywhere except in the swimming pool) and use it often. In fact, every full frame, high specification camera I've ever owned has been relegated to the trade-in zone within six months or so of initial acquisition. Many of the Canons and Nikons were disposed of because of their boring jelly bean designs. Some were dumped because they did everything very, very well but they felt wrong or were too bland. Some didn't put up enough fight to be challenging and provoking. But most are just too large and ponderous and obvious.

And before you call me a format snob I'll put the GH4 into the same camp as the bigger format jelly bean cameras. It does everything it should do perfectly. Its menus are clear and concise but, in the end, the GH4 is a boring camera. Why do I keep it? I keep it for the projects I do for the clients who need video and I keep it because it does all those work things perfectly. But the handling and the mind/hand/camera integration isn't exciting or captivating or inspiring. It's just good, like so many other cameras out there.

When I look back over this year of Samsung, Nikon, Panasonic, Sony and other cameras the ones that  I've consistently enjoyed working with, playing with and shooting have without a doubt been the Olympus OMD EM-5 cameras. I've paid the least money for them and I've bought the least esoteric lenses for them but they flat out get down on their hands and knees and beg me to take them out shooting. To take them out walking and out to eat. In fact, there are a number of jobs I've done for clients this year that could have been done much more efficiently and with less post processing, hands on correction than the EM-5s but the EM-5's innate appeal caused me to push the more capable cameras out of the way and chose the more interesting and engaging EM-5s in their places.

I'll go further and confess that even though the EM-1 has a much superior finder, and I love looking through it, the overall design and understated profile of the EM-5 trumps the EM-1, in my mind, every single time.  It's the camera I compare every other new camera to. It's the reason I've divested other cameras. There's something about the combination of good results (NOT the best results), good handling and sublime design that keep me coming back.

So, yes, I have a Nikon D610 on the way (Where the hell is the USPS???? I got their text that the item is "out for delivery" at 8:05 am this morning---who are all these people in front of me?) and I have GH4s and Nikon D7100s and 7000s languishing all over the office but when I get a call from a friend with an invitation to go out for coffee it's one of the EM-5s that swings over my shoulder, on a very specific strap, and comes along for the ride. If I see some scene of great beauty the camera is almost transparent to me and to the subject. It helps me remove a cognition barrier between my eye and the subject and that's the highest quality feature of any camera I can think of.

When I shoot with a big camera of the highest possible technical potential I find myself avoiding shots where the technique at hand would be detrimental to the overall performance of the camera. I would not try to handhold a D810 with a fast lens (which might have performance issues in the corners) at slow shutter speeds because I feel like it's an affront to the potential of the camera. I have no qualms about trying shots that don't always have the highest possibilities for success with the EM-5s because the camera encourages me and seems to goad me to take chances. And why not? They are agile and stealthy enough (even when used directly) to make the attempts painless. Not so with an uber-camera which subtly infects your sub-conscious with the idea that you should have brought a tripod, you should stop down to the sharpest aperture to take advantage of the amazing resolution, that you should have also brought some lighting to make sure......blah, blah, blah. Just another case of trading joy for measurement.

When we go through this exercise and talk about cameras being fun someone always writes to let me know that I am wrong about which camera I should like. Someone will recommend I try a Pentax K5sii or a Leica M240 (as through it never dawned on me to test one). They misunderstand the most important part of the whole argument that the non-technical-metric-centric camera buyer already knows: It doesn't matter which camera you like. My brain, my hands and my eyes are different from yours. We all have to find the cameras we like on our own. It's the basic reason why all technical camera reviews are mostly mindless numbers crap. All current cameras are, for the most part, more advanced and capable  than their owners. It's more important to find the fun, addictive camera than the "best" camera. The people who leave the hobby or give up the profession are generally the ones who have collected all of the best technical gear only to find that it didn't really make a difference in their visual experiences and, for the most part, just got in the way. The people in it for the long haul learn, over time, that there is a balance and that the fulcrum of that balance sits much further over to the side of handling and visual design parameters than it ever did on the technical side.  

And all this is pretty much why I am declaring the Olympus EM-5 the absolute most FUN camera I have the pleasure of using all year long.

Buy the book.

Resume following me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/KirkTuck

My Favorite online Photo Class of the Year-----Was Neil van Niekirk's Off Camera Flash Course. It's at Craftsy.com.

I've spent a lot of time watching other photographer's videos on various online channels and the one that I enjoyed best of all the stuff out there this year was Neil's Off Camera Flash Photography course at Craftsy.com.

Neil covers all the important bases and does so while showing some really good images. He demystifies daylight+flash and he will make you believe that you can do just about anything with a handful of battery powered strobes and a well chosen selection of flash modifiers.

If you are snowed in, snowed over or just over the snow you could do a heck of a lot worse, as either a professional photographer (who might need a bit of brush up or inspiration) or a happy amateur (who wants to take the uncertainty out of getting the flash off the camera and using it well), by taking this 2+ hour course. Let me put it this way, I wrote a whole book about this stuff in 2007 but the refresher I got from Neil's course made it seem fluid and fun again.

Here's a link: Neil's Course. And remember, Craftsy.com has a 100% satisfaction guarantee (which I doubt you'll be using...).  See Neil's commercial website here.  I also included Neil's images and some of his working methodology in my 2012 LED lighting book. He's good.

Nice way to combat cabin fever.

Happy Holidays to all the Visual Science Lab readers!

A special thanks to a few people here at the end of a wonderful year. Thanks to Frank for being a constant source of feedback and positive encouragement. A wise friend is an amazing gift. Thanks to Fred who made my kid's first semester in a college far, far away bearable for me and Belinda. Many thanks to Michael for volunteering to read and proofread the Lisbon Portfolio  book manuscript. If you think it has some typos now you should (not) have seen it before he got his hands on it....

A thank you to all the really great professional photographers here in Austin who provide both competition and friendship. They show me how good the business can be and are generous with their advice, guidance and support. Paul, Park, Wyatt, Matt, Tomas, Michael, Dan, Will, and too many others. Austin is distinct in that we have the most open and sharing community of pros in the country. It makes working here a bit like toiling in paradise.

I want to thank Rosemary and Jerry at Precision Camera for 32 years of kindness, generosity and support. They've been there for me during the bleakest moments of my career and during the times when we could all celebrate exhuberantly. They are the foundation and bedrock of photography in Austin, and there camera store is a great place to spend my extra cash. In the same spirit I want to thank my Precision Camera confidant and camera consigliere, Ian, who sometimes prevents me from destructive buying or selling and is quick to pluck the gems that come along for me and let me know they exist. It's good to know someone else in the camera business who has an eye for the long term relationship instead of the quick sale.

I am thankful to a list of 70 new and returning clients who made this year financially successful for me. I hope I helped and returned the favor to them with good work.

I always appreciate the Boy who hit the ground running (literally) 2,000 miles from home for his first semester in college. I'd brag about his 4.0 GPA but it might embarrass him so I guess I won't. No arrests, no calls for more money! He even arrived back home with gifts in hand. Studio Dog nearly fainted when she saw him----she'd given him up for dead. For her the boy's reappearance was a Christmas miracle.

I can never thank my partner and spouse, Belinda, enough. Without her subtle (but firm) guidance this business would have been dead in the water at least a decade ago. And I would probably long since have been in jail or else homeless.  Smart, beautiful and kind; a nice balance to my questionable "attributes."

Finally, a thank you to Studio Dog who is: Trustworthy. loyal, courteous, kind,obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave clean and reverent. She is on constant patrol against badgers, coyotes, snakes, vermin and especially cats and mailmen who sometimes attempt to cross our yard. She's a fearsome gatekeeper and a charming companion.

Thanks to all the loyal readers who share time here and comment (letting me know there is someone out there...). I hope to write better stuff for you in the year(s) to come.

A note to the camera makers: keep making cool stuff. There's a more than reasonable possibility that, over time, I will buy all of it.

A Few Bargains to be Had on the Day Before Christmas. #1 Bargain full frame.

The Nikon D610. Hello Santa.

I'm not immune to the siren call of the full frame sensor. I've owned enough cameras to see the differences between a large sensor and all the smaller format sizes. While I rationally think that I don't need anything bigger than the sensor in my terrific Panasonic GH4 there are times when emotion and insecurity take over and the full frame sensor seems like a panacea for just about everything. Usually I can resist the temptation to jump in with both feet because the prices are high relative to the use I think I'll get from the camera. Then there is always the fact that I've owned and used Kodak, Canon and Sony cameras with 35mm sized sensors and those cameras didn't make me any more creative, smarter or a better artist. So, just when I think I'm safe with my current inventory of m4:3 and APS-C cameras something comes along to rock the boat.

I'll set the stage. Earlier this year I decided I needed a high res camera and I did a bunch of research and decided that the sensor in the Nikon D7100 fit the bill nicely. The camera has done well in the situations I thought it would; big images that can be closely examined. When I bought the camera is was around $1200. Now it's dropped in price to a little under $900. During the course of my research I read all about the D600 and its tragic oil spot and toxic waste on the sensor. I read about its successor and thought to myself, here's a camera that Nikon had to get just right to neutralize the P.R. nightmare of the previous model. 

I looked a little closer, read some reviews and actually played with one at Precision Camera but at the $2,000 price point I just wasn't biting. The folks at DPReview liked nearly everything about the camera and gave it a gold award and a score of 87. You can read their review here.  The folks at DXO Mark, who look at raw file sensor performance were equally laudatory, here. To sum up their findings they see the D610 as the #6 camera on the market with their score of 94. How does that compare with it's direct competitor, the Canon 6D? The 6D scores an 82 (sitting under the cropped frame D7100 in 

32nd place). So, the D610 would appear to be a good choice for people who are looking for full frame in a easily handled package. It's one of the best low light, high ISO sensors currently available anywhere and the body seems to be a rock solid, much improved iteration of the D600. 

So, why all my interest right now? Well, the camera is about a year old and in the interim Nikon has roiled the full frame market buy launching and incredibly well hyped upgrade in the form of the D750 at $2295. They also re-established their supremacy at the high end of 35mm style camera with a big refresh of the D800 in the form of the D810. In a seeming effort to quickly reduce old inventory the "buy new" prices on the D610 have dropped to $1499 on Amazon.com and early adopters have dumped their D610s in droves to snap up the D750 or to upgrade to the D810 and this means tons of lightly used D610s are currently flooding the market.

If you shoot with Nikon stuff and you've been waiting for a cost effective upgrade path to a well done full frame camera with a great sensor inside you can, with careful shopping, pick up a used copy with less than 6,000 clicks on the shutter for as low as $1249 (if you want the protections of buying from Amazon or another big dealer) and I imagine in the private markets you can find decent copies for around $1,000.

My grand plan? Jeez. Twelve hundred bucks for a full frame camera with 24 megapixels and glorious dynamic range? That's too good a bargain to pass up. I ordered one yesterday. I waited until today to write this so I could be sure of getting mine. Pretty selfish, I'll admit but then I've hesitated before and been disappointed when prices rationalized. 

What will I do with the Nikon D610 when it arrives? Same old stuff. Throw a 105mm f2.5 ais lens on the front and take some portraits in the studio. At the current prices this camera fulfills all of my criteria to be called a bargain.

Have too many cameras?

Buy a good book instead....

Get yourself something fun and something that will improve your photography in 2015!

click here to see all the photo classes that Craftsy.com offers. 

By now, I'm sure you've shopped for everyone else. But what about yourself? You certainly deserve something special for spreading all that joy (and I'm not just talking about a nap!). Treat yourself to the gift you've most definitely earned, with all Craftsy classes for just $19.99 or less now through the 25th, and learn from the best instructors in the best online Photography classes of 2014 here: http://www.craftsy.com/ext/KirkTuck_holiday

There's usually one camera that's so different or so good that it's the camera that changes the direction of the industry. Even if only a little bit.

Pentax 645Z.

This is a prediction. Just a prediction. I am data-free about how this camera is currently doing in the marketplace but I think it may hit a tipping point and change the commercial field of photography in 2015. Here's why: The overwhelming majority of professional photographers in every field of commercial and social (weddings and portraits) photography are basically using some version of the two most popular pro cameras of the day; the Canon 5Dmk3 (or mk2) and the Nikon D800 (or 800e or 810). Almost to a person they depend on three primary lenses; the 14-24mm (16-35mm in Canon), the 24-70mm f2.8 and the ultra-ubiquitous 70-200mm f2.8. The upshot is that the quality and even the composition options available to each practitioner are homogenous. Routine and over used. 

While a photographer may have a "magic mix" that they apply in post processing the cameras dictate the aspect ratio (yes, people could crop but most slavishly follow the camera's lead...) the files sizes and the basic color palettes. There are a few outliers who shoot on Leica rangefinder style digital cameras and of course a smattering of Fuji and Olympus users but the number of professionals shooting on bigger than a Nikon D800 camera file size cameras can probably be counted on just a few hands in any market outside of NYC, London and Paris. 

But there are reasons to use medium format cameras. The bigger sensors mean that longer lenses must be used to get the same field of view and that means you get a different look to the images as focus falls off more quickly and visibly. The bigger sensor also allows for bigger pixels which can mean more dynamic range and greater appearance of acutance and sharpness. Finally, the bigger sensors now seem to start the resolution revolution at about 54 megapixels and given better quality pixels as well the cameras provide both a different image style than the sea of 35mm style cameras and they do so in a way that kicks ass. Figuratively. 

The Best of 2014. From my point of view.

The Big Picture: 

None of us operate in a vacuum. If you are a commercial photographer you need financially healthy clients who are willing to spend what it takes to do great work. The rise and fall of the photographic marketplace are intimately linked to the health of both the national economy and the local econosphere. You could be the best photographer in your marketplace but unless your marketplace contains people who are spending money on photography you'll most likely be dead in the water. That's why the economy (generally in the U.S. and more specifically, in Austin, Texas) is my top choice for Best of 2014. According to numbers released this morning the annualized economic growth numbers for the third quarter were over 5%. Unemployment in Austin plunged to well under 4% this year and our client's spending patterns certainly reflected a return to strength and a willingness, across the board, to spend money on advertising, marketing and public relations; our bread and butter. The news this morning from Bloomberg is that the Dow crested 18,000 for the first time in history.

This may not be the best time to be a blue collar worker or to be entering even this robust economy without a university degree, and I understand that there are many areas that haven't seen the bounty of this economic recovery but in major metropolitan markets and especially those that have linked their fortunes to tech, finance and biomedical there is a tremendous boom afoot.

I know there will be pessimists who will tell me (correctly) that every economic cycle is like a parabola and that no matter how high we rise we'll fall by the same amount after the bubble burst. I get that economics are cyclical. But the take away message is that the overall economic numbers and my sales numbers say the same thing: 2014 was a good year to be in the creative content business. I only wish I had done more marketing more quickly...

The Used Market: 

I love a bargain. I suspect almost everyone here does as well. The fast pace of camera technology from 2008 to 2013 gave me an unsuspected bonus in 2014. Used camera prices on some of the finest cameras ever produced tumbled this year. By the fourth quarter we could have picked up low mileage Nikon D800s for less than half their new price. The Fuji XE-1s plummeted at one point (with the good kit lens) to around $550 and the 2012 superstar of the market, the Olympus OMD EM-5 was selling for 1/3rd or less of its new price. I bought a number of them for less than $400 apiece, and most were festooned with ergonomic grips or battery grips. The same advantages were available in any market where a maker superseded a good product with a "tweak" product. ( A tweak product is something like the Fuji X100T where subtle handling issues are improved but the basic image producing pipeline is largely unchanged from its very capable predecessor ).  People lunged for the tweakers and abandoned the same basic technology wrapped in a slightly older package. Bargain time.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. As more enthusiast bail from bigger, older DSLRs and embrace mirror-free cameras there are bargains galore in the traditional camera space. I mentioned the D800 from Nikon in the paragraph above but recent models from Pentax, Canon and Sony also keep coming on to the market at firesale prices. And the year of trade-ins also extended to lighting and studio gear. As people abandoned studios and bigger, AC lighting gear traditional power packs and head (electronic flash) prices for used gear plummeted. If you like continuous light and you don't mind the inefficiencies there's probably never been a better time to buy tungsten movie lights for ten cents on the dollar as the rest of the user market follows the call to LEDs and, to a lesser extent, fluorescent lights. As LED panels improved in color rendering the older models have also started hitting the used markets.  The used market this year was more fun and more bargain worthy than any year in the digital age because, for the first time the cast offs were within a few percentage points of being as good as the products that were replacing them. In some regards they were better.

The "Best" Cameras of the year:

Across the board the camera that I saw make the most ripples in the pond of photography this year was, without a doubt, the Olympus OMD EM-1. Introduced at the October NYC camera show in 2013 it's a product that is almost universally loved by anyone who has picked one up and used it. While it validates my ideas about the used market (the EM-5 may have had a more pleasing sensor...) it's a breakthrough camera that brought unrestricted high imaging and handling performance to the micro four thirds sector. We've gone a full year with the EM-1 in the market and it still is a top seller at its original introduction price. In fact, the silver version sells at a premium.

What do you get for your $1299?  A very solid body, a beautiful (I looked again last night: a very beautiful) electronic viewfinder, 16 solid megapixels of very pleasing image potential and entry into a giant number of lenses, both from Olympus and Panasonic, as well as from the treasure chest of the entire market. There are few lenses that, with the use of an inexpensive adapter, can't be used and used well on the EM-1. The focus peaking helps very much with manual, legacy lenses while a fast and sure AF system is great for everything but tricky and kinetic sports action. If I were counseling a generalist in the acquisition of a camera system I'd direct them to the EM-1 and the pro lenses available for the camera. The new 40-150mm f2.8 (wish it were f2...) is supposed to be stunning and Zack Arias describes the Panasonic/Leica 42mm f1.2 Nocticron as one of three "magical" lenses in the whole pantheon of lenses. I use a wide array of new, used, old, cranky and eccentric lenses on my bucketful of EM-5 cameras and I am rarely disappointed with the results.

Another stunningly good and subversively popular camera that hit its stride this year is the XT-1 from Fuji. If I was choosing a new system and didn't fall for the ergonomics or sensor of the EM-1 the XT-1 is the first camera from Fuji that would pull me right in. I call it subversive because at a casual glance it reminds me a lot of the Rollei lines and Fuji lines of SLR cameras from the 1970's. Small and light, with a traditional pentaprism hump and all those buttons and dials that surely appeal to everyone who handled traditional film cameras in the day. But inside, of course, the camera is very current; in many ways state-of-the-art. The EVF is widely praised as the best in the market today while the handling is sublime. If you like the Fuji sensor's color and tone rendition this one is the best they've made yet. But no camera is good without great lenses and that's where Fuji has been making inroads. The best of their lenses are constantly compared to the legendary Leica lenses and they've been smart in peppering the line up of lens with speed optics that leverage the sensor's good points while using sharp speed to compensate for the sensor size vis-a-vis full frame. In truth the XT-1 is an evolutionary step from both the Pro-1 and the XE-2 but it's a big, chasm leaping evolutionary step and it makes the camera a prime contender for "best sweet spot" camera of the entire year.

In the traditional, big DSLR space everyone right now seems a big gaga over the Nikon D750 and the D810 but the real story is the maturation and defacto acceptance of the older model, the D800, as the high end professional camera of most of 2014. While the D810 is a great "tweaker" the real story was the leap to 36 megapixels of great imaging potential and not the incremental improvement that the new product provided in the second half of the year. In 2014 if you wanted to go traditional the D800 was the elephant in the room. And it's still a pretty agile and elegant elephant, if you put the right lenses on the front. The D800 is always in the back of my mind when client starts talking about enormous tradeshow graphics.

If I were in the market for a big bruiser of a camera right now I wouldn't even consider the D810 at full price when I could snag a very low mileage (under 10,000 actuations) for under $1700. I'd pocket the difference and maybe spend it on cool lenses. Which brings me to.....

The Best New Lenses of 2014: 

We all love the aspirational lenses. The Leica 90mm Apo Summicrons and various esoteric Zeiss winder-lenses so I can't write a piece on great lenses without mentioning the Zeiss Otus 55mm f1.4 Distagon. The lens is huge and priced at over $4,000 but by all accounts is the sharpest and nicest rendering standard lens in the whole pantheon of great lenses. It does amazing stuff when used on the right camera and at the right apertures and when aimed at the right subject matter and when stabilized on the right tripod. Amazing. Stunning. And way out of my price range for a lens that would see limited action for most of my work. But we need to know that it is there and that the lens can do crazy good stuff so we can use it as a measure of what is possible in the world of lens design.

In one sense Sigma wouldn't have gotten the huge bump for its 50mm f1.4 "ART" lens if the Zeiss Otus had not existed. Since the Otus does exist how wonderful was it for Sigma to have dozens of reviewers reference just how close the ART line of lenses comes to the Otus at a quarter of the price. That seems to be one of the roles of aspirational lenses----to show just how close a lens designer can come to the "gold standard." To be frank, most of use aren't limited by the performance of our lenses (or our cameras or tripods or lights) we are limited by our technical skills to a large extent but even more we are limited by our inability to always know what to shoot and how to shoot it to get the emotion and the ideas across. But taking a weakness out of the link (replacing a Nikon 50mm f1.4 G with an Otus) eliminates one controllable variable in our ability to regulate sharpness and overall image quality....

Through the course of the history of photography there have always been lenses that were "special" or that stood apart as known examples of the best of the lens maker's art. The old Nikon 300mm f2.0 was one. The Leica 50mm Summicron is another. Some of the Pentax DA lenses seem to have a special quality. The lenses for the Contax G series cameras were pretty amazing. And this year we've seen some new stuff that seems to be aiming for the rarified levels of these past gems.

Some of the lenses I mention here may have been introduced in 2013 but they hit their acceptance, stride and availability in 2014 so I'm counting them. First on my list is the Sigma 60mm f2.8 Art Lens of the micro four thirds. It's small, elegant to look at and very, very sharp----in a nice way. The capper for this product is that it's not a quarter of the price of an Otus but at around $200 would be less than the local sales tax on an Otus. It's a great studio portrait lens for the smaller sensor cameras.

There are two lenses from Rokinon (Samyang) that I either have or will have shortly. The first is the 16mm f2.0. It's wonderful. I recently posted some results I've gotten when using that lens on a dense sensor Nikon D7100 and then, with adapter, on a Panasonic GH4. It gives me the full frame equivalent of a 24mm on the Nikon and almost a 35mm on the GH4 and in both instances it is sharp, sharp, sharp at its wide open aperture of f2.0. This is a lens that is perfect for APS-C users who need fast AND sharp lenses for their chosen format sizes. The lens does not cover full frame but for the amount of money paid (>$300) it's the perfect fit for the wider end of most people's lens collections. With very little mystery distortion and just a bit of the good ole barrel distortion it makes a good lens for interior architecture as well.

The second Rokinon lens that I'm looking at is the 50mm f1.5 Cine lens. I'd actually prefer this in Rokinon's ordinary, still photographer dress with clicking apertures and a softer focusing ring but they've launched it first in its "Cine" iteration which means gearing contact points for focus follow and aperture control. I'm not as interested in that as I am in the optical performance of the lens which I have read to be very, very good. While the m4:3 version is a bargain right now at around $300 I really want to be able to use the lens on both the Nikon D7100 and (with adapters) also on the GH4 and the EM-5's and that means that unless I buy two different lenses with the different lens mounts I need to select for the Nikon mount and adapt  from there. I can't go the other way around....

Why yet another 50mm? Hmmm. The short answer is that every different permutation of the 50mm lens has its own look, its own signature. I'm hoping the Rokinon 50mm t1.5 cine is one of those gems that's sharp enough wide open to work as a depth of field star on m4:3 and also on the APS-C frame of the Nikon D7100. You know, sharp wide open and a quick sprint to glowing unsharpness as the focus drops off with distance.

The lens at the top of my theoretical wish list (the one where I have no child to send through college) is the Panasonic/Leica 42.5mm f1.2 Nocticron.  It's a large and heavy lens for the format and only 2/3rds of a stop faster than the Olympus 45mm f1.8 but I've handled it and shot with it and it's got extremely high performance wide open and just gets better and better all the way to f5.6. I'd have one now if I could justify the cost. But if you want the best medium telephone lens for the format this one is it, in spades. If you have the cash to do so, order it today. It's one of those lenses that will be legendary and collectible the minute it's retired from the market.

Three amazing new lenses that many users across many brands will be able to enjoy are the new(ish) Sigma 35mm, 50mm and 85mm f1.4 Art lenses. All three are big and both are in the $1,000 territory but they cover a full frame sensor and trusted reviewers consider them a big step up from the lenses of the same basic specification from all the other camera makers. If you were a traditionalist photographer from the 1950's this trio would be your "holy trinity" of lenses and you'd be set to shoot art like Robert Frank or Hank Cartier-Bresson.  What a wonderful trio: Fast, sharp, nice tonal characteristics and from consensus of reviewers, good bokeh. Sure, you might need something a little wider to round out a professional collections but if you used a Nikon D8xx or a Sony A7r you'd be able to use the 85mm Sigma in a cropped mode and still get a nice, juicy file with a focal length equivalent of around 128mm.

Part of the Fuji plan to become class president revolves around giving pro and extreme enthusiast photographers the kind of lenses that most shooters dream about and salivate over. High speed primes. High speed primes with really great performance. A line of lenses without losers. What better way to sell a sensor or camera than showing it off with great lenses on the front. The two lenses I hear about the most from the shooters I admire are the 23mm f1.4 XF lens and the 56mm f.12 XF lens. They are fast wide open. They are design to yield most pleasing tones and colors and they focus quick. They look sexy and they shoot well and they are the perfect pair for a slimmed down, two lens system. A 35mm equivalent and a slightly shorter than 85mm equivalent, both of which can be shot wide open with good results. No, great results! Hey Sony!!! Listen up. That's how you sell a system. Offer people some great lenses to put in front of those quiet, high dynamic range sensors instead of just a confusing array of mediocre kit lenses....

Finally, I'm going to applaud the nutty people at Nikon for getting with the program and launching some professional lenses that are a bit slower than the big dogs. The lens that caught my attention is the Nikon 70-200mm f4G VR ED lens. With the cleanest high ISO full frame sensors on the market this is the lens that hits another sweet spot. Wide open it beats the performance of its bigger brother but loses some of the weight and size and nearly half the price. Around $1399 for the package. Canon has had two lenses (three, actually) in this range for nearly a decade. I owned the Canon non VR version and it was sharper from f4 down than its f2.8 counterpart. Shooting outside? These slower (but ultra sharp) optics are just the ticket.

Best Book of the Year For Photographer who need Fun Reading during travel and on their down time:

Yes, that would be The Lisbon Portfolio by Kirk Tuck. It's a novel with a commercial photographer as a protagonist. It's exciting, features gunplay and havoc and skewers the clichéd corporate event overseas. It features interesting uses of photographic gear and after the story is set up it moves at the speed of light. The niche of Photographic Fiction is very small. This helps add to the inventory. If you buy a Kindle copy you'll be one of the cool photographers in your MSA. Buy a paperback version and you'll instantly turn into a patron of the arts... But seriously, I'd love for you to try it out.

Click here to buy The Lisbon Portfolio

Best Lighting trends of the year:  

It seems like everyone got over using too many lights and putting them in too many obvious places this year. What I'm seeing more and more of is the use of more available light augmented and carefully improved by little touches of light from small LED panels or extra light puffed through effective diffusion. The motif seems to be lighting stuff to render high quality files and nicely motivated light but without the low rent drama of over the top rim lights, hair lights and multiple Grimes-ean kicker lights. Also receding is gratuitous use of the clarity slider for every portrait of every athlete and every grizzled old man. Thank you! Now maybe we can work on creating images with long, luxurious tonality. Might not be as monitor aligned but in print I think it would be spectacular. 

Best online educational classes for up and coming photographers:

Without a doubt it would be Chris Grey and Neil van Neikirk's classes about lighting and studio photography on Craftsy.com. The classes are much more organized and coherent than most of the stuff on Creative Live and are so much better produced than just about anything you'll see on YouTube. Sample their classes. Craftsy.com does a great job producing and editing the programming and they often run sales on the photo classes that make them as cheap as $19.99. There's a lot of good information just waiting to be sucked up. And the classes are entertaining too. 

Here's the link to My Studio Lighting course and My Family Photography (beginner) Courses

Best reason to keep taking photographs that you love: 

Because the process of creating art is so enjoyable and seems to be hard-wired into the human spirit. Most of us will never become famous, never have a large audience, etc. but you have no idea how your work and your example may affect other people and the influence the next generation of photographers. Keep doing the work. The process of making art, even for yourself, makes you a better human being and keeps you in tune with the big questions of our existence. At least it does that if your work is something more than shooting test charts and lens tests.

If you're still on the fence about getting yourself something nice for the Holidays there are some classic books out there that you'll want to grab. Check out the photo section at Amazon. That's where I found this wonderful book about Guy Bourdin , master fashion photographer. I still have five photo books there you might like....

As a Holiday Bonus I'm offering my Craftsy.com Studio Portrait Lighting class for $10 bucks off. Take advantage now. Also, here's a link to my favorite, non-photographic class on Making Incredible Croissants at Home. Enjoy!