Packing for an out of town shoot is like a negotiation with myself, the airline and my rental car....

Photograph from "The Great Society" at Zach Theatre. 

I thought packing for photography shoots was painful but packing for video and photography shoots mixed together is....well....more painful. One issue is with the way I use LED light when doing lighting designs for video (and stills now...) I use diffusion on frames to modify the light from the fixtures. I like this because I can control the character of the light by moving the light closer or further away from the diffusion, and I can add more control by moving the diffusion closer or further to the subject. But! It requires two light stands instead of the one light stand I could get away with if I was using something self-contained, like a soft box. 

As I delve deeper and deeper into the practice of recording sound on location I'm learning that different sonic environments require different microphones. A room with carpeting and lots of padded furniture and drapes is a location in which shotgun microphones can be used with good results, but a room that big and bright and echo-y might not be as good a match. In that situation a shorter, slightly less narrow pick-up pattern microphone might actually be a better choice.  And in areas of utter audio chaos we'd probably want to default to a lavaliere microphone. That means we're bringing all three kinds. 

Since the shotguns and hypercardioid microphones sound better to my ear in most situations that's what we'll mostly end up using the shotgun microphone on a boom. Since I'm working with a skeleton crew (or by myself for a few interviews) I won't have the luxury of a dedicated sound person so that means I'll be putting the shotgun microphone on a boom pole and attaching that boom pole to a light stand. Another stand goes on the packing list...

I'm pretty adept at using two lights for most situations but I'd never travel out of the studio without a few back up lights so that means we're packing an extra copy of our main light and tossing it the new "mini" LED light as a "last resort" back-up. 

I packed a smaller tripod last week but I spend a lot of time with my cameras on a tripod and it kept bugging me that I would not have my preferred tool on site so I pulled the smaller tripod out and replaced it with my big, happy, comforting tripod; the one with the leveling ball and the super smooth pan-ability. 

On my interviews I know I want to set up a stationary "b" camera to shoot my interview subject from a  difference viewpoint so I've packed a table top tripod for a second camera. 

While the main mission of my upcoming assignment is to get good video we'll also need to capture good supporting still images for complementary collateral and campaigns. That means camera and lens inventory is going to be a bit different. On my last shoot I depended mostly on the Sony a6300 and Sony rx10iii and both of them were good, solid choices for video. But I've spoiled this client over the last year by delivering mostly photograph files that originated as uncompressed 42 megapixel raw files from the Sony a7Rii, which is a wonderful and expressive still photography tool. It calls for a slightly different selection of lenses to work the way I like. That adds to the packing. 

In the end I've settled on three checked bags and one carry-on. One checked bag (a Tenba Tri-Pack) holds the big tripod, a few light stands and a couple of Manfrotto grip heads (one for the boom arm stand and one for the Chimera diffusion frame). The next bag holds the lighting and audio gear, along with audio cables. It's a wheeled (and very sturdy) Tenba air case. The third bag is the catch all. It's got the clothes I'll need, along with an extra pair of shoes, and also holds the diffusion frame and silk, a pop-up reflector, some clamps, the portable monitor (in protective case) and a set of Sennheiser lav microphones (in a tiny Pelican case). 

I can strap the tripod case to the Tenba air case in a pinch and then I'm just shepherding two cases with wheels and wearing a back pack. 

The backpack holds the cameras, lenses, memory cards, (way too many) batteries for the cameras, as well as batteries for the monitor. It also contains the script/shot list/meeting notes/contact info and, in a  nod to past practices..... a Sekonic incident light meter. 

In the best of all possible worlds I'd be traveling with a 1990's style entourage and would bring cases and cases of gear to play with. But I wouldn't want most of the people to hang around my sets all day and I certainly couldn't afford to pay them all out of the budgets most clients have these days. 

No, I think the stuff I've settled on will be just right. Anything else I need I can buy or rent on site. 

Packing really does seem like a negotiation. You quickly get to the point where, if you want to add something to the mix you absolutely have to dump something out that you've already packed. 

The nature of the beast.

Lighting with HMIs.

I loved using K5600's smaller HMI lights. They sent them to me to test. There is something about continuous light that makes me happier about photographs; portraits especially.

This is my friend, Fadya. I love photographing her because she is so interesting to talk to. We can sit for hours with a few cups of tea and converse and intermittently photograph. What a wonderful way to spend the better part of an evening.

Cityscape with Sony+Olympus Pen 60mm f1.5 #312

I bought something new yesterday. I bought a little Aputure LED light panel. It's daylight balanced, uses generic Sony batteries or double AA's. It rated at 95 CRI and it was all of $59. I bought it because several of my other devices take the same Sony batteries and now that airlines require batteries to ride in carry-on we are sometimes asked to prove that the batteries are batteries by powering something up. Usually the devices that are Sony battery powered are riding in checked luggage. The LED panel is small enough to fit in my equipment backpack and provided a battery demo for the TSA. When not proving my absolute innocence it can also be useful as a backlight or accent light.

It's this one:

Learning how to relax and better enjoy the processes of making video and photographs.

Photograph of Dani taken with a Sony a99 and a Rokinon 85mm t1.5.  Just for fun.

I am anxious person. I worry about stuff I really don't need to worry about. I'm always at the airport three hours early. I have multiple back-up plans. I lay awake in the middle of the night going over my strategy for shooting the next day's project instead of sleeping. I pack as though half my gear will be run through an industrial metal shredder on the way to my next job, to ensure I'll still be able to shoot when I get there...  If something fails on a shoot I tend to feel personally responsible even if there's no one to blame.

It's a tough way to go through work life. The constant buzz of worry is exhausting and building all the "fault tolerant" failsafes into every project takes time and energy, while sapping the will to improvise and the freedom to create at will. If every move must be made bullet proof it's almost impossible to change gears and operate outside the boxes I've carefully constructed.

It wasn't always this way. When I started I had little money and little knowledge of all the possibilities that existed with which to do a project. I used the same camera for everything. I used the same three lenses for everything. I used the light I had on hand and it never occurred to me, in that time, to go out and buy just exactly the right light and modifier to achieve an exact look or style. I spent a lot less time considering what to buy and how to use it and a lot more time pointing the camera at beautiful things and pushing the shutter button.

And now I find myself going through the same (self) destructive process with video. In order to master it I'm spending hours and hours reading about knee, gamma, black point, crispening, vertical and horizontal detail, bit depth, color depth, signal-to-noise ratios, false color, TCLI and much more. I've vacuumed up whole books on digital theory for video and I have three different books on editing, motivated camera movement and audio design. I find myself worrying about whether a super cardioid microphone will record cleaner indoors interview sound than an actual shotgun microphone. But all I really want to do, if I look deep inside, is to compose beautiful shots and tell stories of interesting people.

I hit the wall today. I've been working on non-stressful stuff like general scripting and outlining for a project next week. I've put together an extensive shot list and that's actually a stress reducing process because planning out useful shots is different then dissecting each shot and trying to decide what gear and what techniques have to be mastered to bring the shot to life perfectly. I've diagnosed myself. I am being destroyed by the plague of perfectionism --- as it relates to "state of the art" gear and "presumed" technical proficiency.

I stopped myself from pulling the trigger ( pushing "buy") on yet another microphone. I stopped myself from buying a Sound Devices audio mixer. I pulled back from buying another camera.

I was on the edge of another precipice and I stepped back and took a deep breath. I rolled out an ensolite pad and got down of the floor and meditated. I focused on my breathing. When I felt relaxed again I got up and walked over to the pile gear I was packing for next week. I pulled out two cameras from the four I had packed and put them back into the cabinet. I pulled out two of the five lenses I had packed and put them back in the cabinet. I repacked the audio kit with only the two microphones I knew I would need. I shut off the computer and went to swim practice. Swim practice reminded me that the more relaxed you are the faster you can swim.

It's a struggle to know where the line is between being adequately prepared (and relaxed) and being overly prepared and stressed to the max. The reality is that it's impossible to plan for every contingency. It's impossible for one person to be an expert in everything. Surrendering to this idea that I don't need to master everything feels more like a victory and less like a lost battle. Just being proficient is usually more than enough...

My new goal is to relax enough to get on a plane one day with one camera, one microphone and one script and to land at my destination refreshed and ready to play. Does anyone have a workshop for that? For unwinding all the layers of trying too hard to be too prepared? To be too well equipped? To be too well researched. I've found out the hard way that an obsession with getting everything right is paralyzing. I'm ready for the workshop that teaches me how to have more fun actually doing the work.

"First Impressions Review!!!!" "Hands On Review!!!!" "First Preview !!!!!!!" "Image Gallery !!!!!!" "Our Experts Intuit Camera Performance Under Glass !!!!!" And much more.

"Our long wait for the ultimate large-to-medium,  format uber-camera is over. We were able to glance through thick plate glass at a clay prototype of the latest GXRXD-1001.5 and come to striking conclusions about its possible capabilities." We think it will be a paradigm shifting, mind-bending tour de force for photographers everywhere. A must have. 

"Join us for a manufacturer's sponsored love fest of the latest miracle from Zarcon Cameras as we shove their sponsor money in our pockets and introduce you, via a lovely video presentation, to our ephemeral tester, Bob Smith, for a hands-on romp with a pre-pre-pre-production version of what might just be the last camera you'll ever need." 

"Now, I do what I call "REAL WORLD REVIEWS" where I do absolutely no scientific or repeatable testing, make no measurements, have no metric for any objective evaluation, and actually just figure out the results from a handful of shots I made with the new camera, a third party kit lens, in exasperating light, taking snaps of my cat and my large and dour drinking buddy. I've had the camera for 48 hours now, part of which I spent unconscious, and I'm ready to make all sorts of recommendations to help you rationalize spending money you don't have."

"I am self-appointed camera expert, Chip Gobsworth, and I'm here to explain why the cameras I like to use are the only ones any sane photographer could even think about having in their bag. We'll start with a brisk discussion of nano-acuity and move on to bokeh homogenization before we tackle gamma ray interference patterns and their effects on the outer 97th circle of confusion in our imaging. My credentials? I have photographed (successfully!) over 1,700 test patterns and charts, 512 brick walls, and, literally, millions of kitty whiskers. I used to work in some vaguely technical industry and hold a vaguely technical degree in something totally unrelated to imaging, optics or photography. I once saw a book of landscapes by Ansel Adams. It was okay."

"Join me and many other retired sales executives, lawyers, doctors and landed gentry as we look at new cameras through the nostalgic lens of our past camera experiences. Read along as I compare everything new to the Leica camera I owned in 1977 and the Hasselblad camera I bought in 1985. Compare dozens of very similar landscape photographs that we'll use to show the massive differences between 36 megapixel cameras and 42 megapixel cameras. Come along for the ride as we take 24 well heeled amateur photographers along with us to the unspoiled landscape of some nice canyon somewhere. We'll mark the spots we used to take our "teaching" photographs so you can put your tripod-mounted camera in the very same spot. You'll know you're doing ART when your photographs look exactly like ours. Plus we drink ancient, single malt Scotch while parsing the differences in tripod heads that sell for under $2,000."

"Take a look at the photo gallery from our rigorous pre-test time with the Dyno-flex 12000. Enjoy over 75 haphazard, handheld photographs of coffee cups, in various stages of consumption. Inadvertently body shame my chubby girlfriend or boyfriend. See how cool it looks when you shoot extreme close up portraits with the wide angle kit lens! Check out the camera's performance shooting in AWB, handheld at a 1/5th of a second, at ISO 120,000. My oatmeal never looked better!!! Our gallery is chocked full of colorful fences, old cars that should be in Cuba, my girlfriend looking bored, coffee cups, shadows of myself on concrete and a blurry shot of my dog running away from me. You'll marvel at the Dyno-flex 12000 performance!"

"We were thrilled to find that the Reguro-D113 is able to nail focus on a fast moving Hyundai while shooting at 15 fps. A huge improvement over the previous model which could barely handle 13.5 fps under the same conditions. But let's talk turkey here! While the camera, sensor and lens were all absolutely perfect, and the images sublime, we had to ding its pre-preview 60 points for two very important omissions: First, Horrors! No in camera raw converter!!! And two, the internal GPS is only accurate down to one meter. Let's move on to BIF."

Is anyone else dead tired and annoyed by all the silly ass previews and specification regurgitations at blog sites and camera review sites all over the web? Do we really need to give credence to the most cursory look at a not yet released camera, with pre-production firmware, no less? Should we pay any attention to the (typically) crappy images that are supposed to be examples of this latest super tech but which really look like first year photography class rejects? I'm exhausted at the hyperbole. I'm exhausted at trying to pretend that the (mostly) children who write this garbage have more experience and understanding of photography than my dog. If they don't have any real news to talk about perhaps they could spend a hell of a lot more time shooting and experimenting with all this "breakthrough" gear before they sit down at some beleaguered coffee shop and pound out crap on their laptops just to fill the space between the click through ads...... I'd rather read about Michael's new Miata than to crack open another "First Hand Preview Impressions" article. What's next? Previews of cameras that might get released. 

Here's an interesting challenge. Don't write a review of a camera until you've at least shot it for a month and charged the battery five times or more. Don't write a review to tell me your impressions of the "color or sharpness" of the camera sensor if you are handholding it all the time and using the world's cheapest kit lens. Don't pretend that the lack of an internal, raw processing app makes any difference to anyone with a rational brain. Don't ding a camera because you don't know how to use it. But mostly the first thing, stop trying to understand and write a camera review in 24 hours or less from the time FedEx shows up with the box at the door. And for God's sake, don't tell me you don't really like the genre of the camera you are testing but you have to review it anyway. We're pretty smart we'll realize that, if you are a sports photographer who shoots with a big DSLR, you're not going to be happy shooting a Fuji X-100 of any vintage. Fact checking would be nice too. 

Just to be clear: I don't mind announcements of new product. I do mind endless "hands-off" previews of these products... sad. 

See analog world map on the back. Accurate to within a thousand miles.

Experience the gut-wrenching nano acuity of the moulded lens.

We tested it. In the future.

How the decimation of traditional advertising has eroded the market for "professional" photography.

We, as practitioners of professional, commercial photography love to have scapegoats to blame for shrinking markets, eroding margins and disappearing fees. In the recent pass we've blamed: the smartphone and its users, the "soccer" moms with cameras, and, those scurvy dogs, the weekend warriors who would work for free in return for the experience. We've railed at people who are just entering the market for not understanding that it is smarter to charge for the value of a piece of intellectual property to the client instead of gauging prices by how much you might need to make just to buy groceries and keep the heat on. 

But in the same way that robotics and automation will ensure the society-wide elimination of repetitive human jobs and fill those positions with machines that don't need breaks, don't make (many) mistakes and don't need retirement accounts, I would conjecture that the erosion in photography markets is a direct result of the granularization of the advertising channels (display media) and the ability of marketers, via the application of psycho-metrics (thank you Isaac Asimov via the Foundation Trilogy...), which allows much more precise message targeting. The value of an advertising image is based on the its effectiveness times its use over large numbers of impressions. To be useful to a very wide audience an image must be more and more "all purpose" which dilutes its impact and efficiency in prompting action (or, in the case of elections; inaction). The more focused an image is toward a defined collection of customer quirks and attributes the most effectively it will reach its demographic target, the fewer impressions it will have, and the CPM will skyrocket. 

Going forward you and I will not likely see the same advertisements when we search the web. Our buying habits, incomes, political leanings and our basic personalities (things like our introversion or extroversion) will be analyzed (Thank you! Smart Phone, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter) and data mapped and we'll have our attention focused toward ad messages that will be resonate with our oddly unique points of view, as defined by rigorous data-mining of all our public and private actions and choices. If data from my phone shows that I only drink conventional drip coffee at Starbucks then, over time, I will stop seeing ads for Mocha Frappucinos and my ads will point me toward products and services that algorithms have postulated as within my particular buying preferences. 

Your predilection for Pumpkin Spice lattes might swing your ad parade toward various seasonal drinks with high sugar and accentuated taste features. Different images will be used to target the messages more precisely. While more men than women lean republican a much tighter determiner of voting practice might be to look at car preferences instead. The more one prefers American Luxury cars the more precisely likely it is that a psycho-metric marketer can reach out to the same audience that bought a Lincoln in order to sell them a political candidate. 

But the bottom line is this, instead of using one overarching image to reflect the paid advertising of a branded item a savvy marketer now requires a much more tightly targeted collection of images in order to address each of a myriad of smaller, more discrete populations. That means the cost of a photoshoot, or licensing package, can't be spread over a large campaign (greater cost spreading drives down the per unit cost of imaging and makes it affordable to pay more). If a marketer requires 60 images instead of 1 in order to better take advantage of a much more rigorously defined collection of target subsets then each of the 60 images has less individual value in isolation than an all purpose image would have had in the days when mass communication ruled. 

It also means that there will no longer be uniform stylistic attributes that coalesce ubiquitously in mainstream marketing. Each tiny market segment will respond differently to poses, color choices, graininess, propping, styling, the creative narrative, and even casting. An older coffee drinker may be more effectively subliminally manipulated by an image of a woman of a specific age and income class, in a quiet environment, drinking coffee while reading book (novel). This may trigger his unconscious desire to visit a coffee shop ( the visual stimulant, in addition to his decades long caffeine addiction). He might be motivated the promise of a quiet respite from home or office and the off chance of meeting someone compatible. By the same token a slightly younger coffee drinker might respond  to an image of a coffee shop bustling and full of people, who almost all have headphones on, and who are looking at laptop and smartphone screens. The imaging may be driving their desire to go to the coffee shop for greater social connection.  One image promises one outcome while the other speaks almost oppositely to a different demographic target. Both are more effective when used concurrently than one solo ad that tries to hit all markets and ultimately fails to spark a tipping point reaction in any market. 

But, the images will need to be differentiated in many ways (both content and style) and this is a cost to the advertiser. Since budgets aren't wholly elastic, and ad insertions have to be made in many more channels, and the cost of designing multiple adds is considered, the soft spot for cost optimization points directly at any external, third party cost. And that would be the photography. 

Additionally, the drive to reduce the cost of photography per ad also drives the whole scale rout toward using enormous amounts of low cost stock photography. Which can now be easily modified to conform to the parameters expressed by the data-mined and interpreted information about the sub-groups.

In the near future A.I. will work with data mining to discover just which images resonate with you, personally, the most. At that point all the thousands of reference points you've provided, and continue to provide, to the cloud of advertising research will be used to construct CGI ads (which require no actual photographer or actual models) that speak exactly to the visual+emotional constructs you have in your own head. To see them constructed and played back to you means you will feel a deeper emotional connection to the advertising in the belief that you and they are "on the same page," and that they "get" you. And at that point they will certainly have gotten you. 

But if you are sitting back smugly in your chair because you "saw the writing on the wall" and dived into video, or some related field, you might want to start studying up on artificial intelligence video editing and artificial intelligence scripting, and technical writing. And consider the implications of face detection, smile detection and automatic camera systems. Far fetched? No! All here right now. 

Much maligned Rode NTG-2 microphone rehabilitated by impedance matching. Harrah!

The internet is a dangerous place to look for specific information. I bought a Rode NTG-2 super-cardioid microphone three or four years ago and used it plugged directly into my camera's 3.5mm input with the help of a plug adapter. When I started using the microphone with my cameras I found the output of the microphone to be very low. I always needed to boost the audio level in the camera. When I did that I ended up with files that were pretty noisy. 

Searching the web led me to believe that mediocre performance is just what you can expect with a $269 microphone. "Get over it. Spend a couple grand on a decent mic." Most sites that dealt with audio presumed that a smart person would get a pre-amplifier for the microphone and only then would it work well enough for professional use. Most people started using them in conjunction with external digital audio recorders, like the Tascams and Zooms, and getting much better audio so I figured the pre-amp was needed and, like a lemming, rushed to buy a Zoom (and a Tascam). And I've been using that microphone in that manner ever since. It's become a habit. A stupid habit. I hate "double sound."

About two years ago I wanted something that would interface between the cameras I use and the XLR connectors that are at the back of nearly every good microphone so I bought a passive unit for those times when I wanted to run a microphone through the box and also have the ability to pad down the levels. 

I decided that since I didn't have good results with the Rode NTG-2 I should look at the reviews for a microphone which I could both afford and get decent sound from. All reviews led me to the Sennheiser MKE 600 and I bought one. But nowadays my habit is to run everything through the little Beachtek interface. I've learned that part of the magic of that little box is internal transformers which help provide the right impedance when combining balanced, XLR microphones with DSLR/Mirror-free 3.5mm microphone inputs. I set up the system with the MKE 600 and the Beachtek and recorded a bunch of voice tests. They sounded great and the levels into the camera were ideal. No maxing out the camera gain just to get a whisper of sound...

With this success in mind I also started using the Audio Technica micrphone the same way. Success! But, of course, I had already developed a fixed prejudice against the Rode NTG-2 so I never got around to testing it with the audio interface. Until today. 

I decided to do a direct comparison between all three of my super-cardioid microphones in order to narrow down my choices for my upcoming video project. I presumed the Sennheiser and the Audio Technica would be the winners but tossed the NTG-2 into the ring just to see how badly it would suck. 

Surprise! Of the three microphones in my test I preferred the overall sound of the NTG-2 to its rivals. This was the first time I'd used the Rode with the audio adapter/interface and it cleaned up everything that seemed wrong with that microphone. Hmm. Proper matching, could it be logical and correct? 

I'm going to say, "yes." 

Funny what you can learn by stepping away from your computer and just plugging all this silly stuff in and playing with it. I'll keep the Zoom H5 and the Tascam DR60ii around for those times when I might need some portable phantom power.... 

Go microphones!