Preliminary Tests of the Sony a57. A walk through downtown Austin.

I finished up a day that saw all of my will bent toward marketing my services as a photographer.  Wow.  That sounded dedicated and diligent.  Actually, I did a swim practice first, from 8:30 to 9:30.  Then I dropped by Starbucks to drink coffee and check my e-mail.  I worked for a couple of hours doing marketing and thinking about cold calling before I headed out to eat some really good Tex-Mex food for lunch.  After lunch I headed to a medical client's office to make sure my LED panels could be corrected to match their florescent fixtures.  Then I can home and did a bit more marketing and by 6;00pm I was all wound up.  So I grabbed the newbie a57 camera from Sony, wrenched an 85mm 2.8 Sony lens on the front and headed through the random chaos theory of traffic and went for a walk through downtown.

I walked through Whole Foods, tasted some wine and shot all of these food shots with the camera set to ISO 3200.  Click on them.  Look for noise.  It's really wonderful.  When I looked at the rounds of cheese somewhere below I almost cried because the files were so clean.  The lemon tarts are marred by the reflection.  Or,  I intended the diagonal reflections to be there as an indictment of expensive tarts........Can't quite decide on the right manifesto.  So I ate one instead.

Also 3200 ISO.  Jpeg.  Fine.

The three images above are also 3200 ISO, f2.8 with the 85mm.

These are Jpegs I can be proud of.  The colors are great and the sharpness is high.  Very high. The Auto ISO kept the camera around 100.

Ditto.

This is Todd Williams.  He is a very well known fine arts photographer.  And a workshop instructor at the Sante Fe. Workshops, among other places.  He is not homeless.

Like a venal paparazzi I captured him outside the entrance of his tony, downtown gym.

Click on the images and look at the skin tone.  Everything automatic.  Right down to the ISO.

When I started shooting the a57 any reservations I had about the quality of the EVF image or the low noise attributes of the sensor just slinked away and ceased to even be relevant.  This camera is the perfect adjunct to the a77. One is the finest low ISO/Super resolution camera (the a77) and the other is the high ISO camera Sony's been looking for.  And a damn good "all-arounder" for just about any kind of shooting I can think of.  And, oh.  Yes.  The 85mm 2.8 is amazing.  More so when you consider that up until two weeks ago it could be had new for only $249.  I should have bought more.

That's my first full day of shooting with the camera.  I had my doubts.  When I saw the files I was sold.  End of story.

http://www.kirktuck.com

How many ways to rationalize a camera purchase?

Behold !  It's the latest camera from Sony.  It's called the Alpha 57 and it's biggest claim to fame (from my point of view) is that it uses the same sensor that's been making the rounds in the Nikon D7000 and the Pentax K5.  Both those cameras are known for two things: Very clean high ISO performance and very wide dynamic ranges.  By extension, using the same sensor, the Sony a57 should do well in both of those areas.  And I think this will be important for Sony going forward because as much as Sony shooters love the dense, detailed and dynamically well disposed digital files they've been getting out of the a77 and a65 cameras the feedback about high ISO is less than sterling.  I've written about the a77's difficulties with noise in previous columns.  I really like that camera and, for 90% of the stuff I shoot, I find the files quite good.  

When I shoot raw (a77) and use DXO Optics Pro or the supplied Sony software to abate noise I am happy with the output with no caveats up to 1600 and, at 3200, it's very workable with a little elbow grease and the right subjects.  At ISO 50 the camera just squirts out beautiful, long tone files with oceans of detail.  A little small detail sharpening and I'm happy.

But I'm also lazy and able to rationalize new purchases at the drop of a hat. I wanted to find an inexpensive addition to my Sony "work" system that would give me drop dead gorgeous high ISO files right out of camera.  Maybe even in Jpeg.  So I've been following the roll out of the Sony a57 and reading all the reviews I can get my hands on.  But nothing is as accurate ( to answer to your own point of view ) as getting a camera and writing your own review.  Amazon.com is backordered on the camera and the website last night indicated a wait of two to four weeks.  That doesn't work for me.  Once I decide on something I want that instant gratification.  I called Precision Camera here in Austin and spoke to one of the owners.  Wonder of wonders!  I had a camera in my hands the next afternoon.  And.... it's a mixed bag. But what it doesn't do as well as its bigger brother is mostly "cosmetic" to me so I think I'll keep the camera because it does what I asked for when I first rationalized its purchase. (Damn, that sentence doesn't make any sense at all but it's exactly true to my thoughts....).

I paid right at $700 and I headed straight home with the box, excavated the camera, tossed in a battery from my stash of "500" series Sony batteries, carefully inserted a 32 gig card and got to experimenting.  Here's what I found:

First issue.  Only one dial (on the front of the camera ) to control both shutter speed and aperture.  Yikes.  I know there's a way to switch between them.  Oh yes.  Hit the AEL button on the back. Disaster averted.

Second issue.  A bit thornier.  I started with the OLED finders of the a77 and find them quite good. Nearly as convincing as a big ass optical finder even if they get a bit noisy in low light.  But the finder in the a57 is not as good.  It's as big it's just not as crisp and clean.  It almost seems to have a little flare in the system.  Usable out of the box but not great.  I've played with it extensively now and have one tip for new users:  Set the EVF screen to the "minus one" setting.  The contrast on the screen looks better and it seems to be a good match for most situations.

The body is smaller and lighter than the a77 and the battery is supposed to give maybe 100 more exposures per charge than the bigger cameras.  The handling is great and the focusing is equally snappy and assured.

That leaves me with the pressing question:  How is the high ISO performance of the camera?  We'll have to do more extensive shooting but I spent all evening yesterday walking around the house shooting at 6400 ISO and I found it to be much cleaner than the untreated (jpeg default settings) of the a77 at 1600.  I would guess that it's on par with the Nikon D7000 or perhaps just a smidge worse, given the light loss at the mirror.  But, it's a big improvement and adds what I needed to the system for those times when I'm sitting in the front row at Zach Scott Theater trying to line up a shot of moving actors under dramatic, low light and I'm already at f2.8 on my big zoom and wishing for 1/60th of a second.  That makes up for a little loss of "EVF happiness" and banality of only one dial.

I've had the camera now for only a day.  Less than 24 hours.  I'll carry it with me all week long and shoot everything from the parades in San Antonio to Eeyore's (countercultural) Birthday Party here in Austin.  And every shred of life in between.  In a week or so I expect I'll have a fleshed out report on the camera.  Right now it feels like Sony needed sorely to get a camera into the SLT system that could go toe-to-toe with other brand APS-C cameras at ISO 3200 and 6400 and my preliminary tests show that they've largely succeeded.

Now, the process of rationalization.  Here we go:  As you know, if you read the blog regularly,  I dumped a two and a half year accumulation of Canon EOS equipment after using it for two and a half years because I like the whole idea of the EVF's (electronic viewfinders) and I find Sony's implementation works well for me.  I assessed the system and decided it would be a good fit for most of what I do:  Portraits and set up (lit) advertising images.  I also shoot video and find the Sony video to be very good. 

The disconnect in the whole house of cards is this:  I shoot theatrical dress rehearsals once or twice a month and I needed a bit more low light performance.  I'd also like to shoot more evening work without lights and better ISO performance would help that as well.  For only $700 I get to plug a hole in the system.

The camera has a nearly identical menu and overall operational workflow as the a77 so there was no learning curve when it came to picking up the camera and engaging directly.

The camera is smaller and lighter which makes it a nice "carry around" camera to have with me.  I put the 50mm 1.4 Sony lens on it yesterday and can't think of a good reason to take it off...

I could also write a long review about the camera, post it on my blog and then link the product to its product page on Amazon.com and hope that legions of readers, seduced by my clever words, would rush there and buy the camera thereby helping to claw back some of my purchase price through referral fees (which have no impact on the final price of the product to you, the customer).

The fly in the ointment is obvious, though.  Here I am writing about the one product  that is currently out of stock for maybe the next full month.  By the time it's back in stock this missive will long since be forgotten and relegated to the bottom of the blog pile.

Final rationalization:  Well, at least I'm running a photo business and will be able to depreciate my camera purchase at tax time.....

Say, that's a good rationalization.  I wonder if they have any other expensive lenses I might need to "review."

visit kirktuck.com

An observation about the increasing importance of raw conversion software in critical photography.

I loved the way the light looked as it wrapped around handle of this white dish.

Shot at 6,000 by 4,000 pixels.

When I looked at the file at 100% (ISO 400) I could see colorful speckles of grain.

I ran the file through DXO Optics Pro and it handled the noise very nicely. 

I have a confession to make.  I thought cameras had gotten so good that I could just shoot Jpegs and be done with the whole mess of post processing. I know some photographers relish the butt time in front of the computer as much as the rest of us dislike it but, given a choice I’d rather work on a book or  talk a walk my city around and look at the real world.

I recently bought two Sony a77 cameras and, for the most part, I’m happy with the system I bought into.  There’s one thing that bugs me, though; the files have some noise in them, even at ISO’s as low as 400.  Now I’ve read Michael Riechman’s  comments about the noise and the cameras and I know he’s probably right.  We’re too busy looking at this stuff at 100%.  The images at 100% on our screens would represent huge prints and there’s no way we’d be standing so close to them that we’d even be able to see the grain.  But it’s like knowing how they make sausage.  Once you’ve looked at your files at 100% you’ve always got that queasy feeling when you think about big prints and fussy clients.  

And that’s kind of nuts because part of the lure of a 24 megapixel camera is the idea that you’ll be able to print large.  Really large.  In normal sized files I thought the images looked fine and to my clients there was really no difference between what I’d given them, file-wise, from last year’s cameras or the cameras I owned a few years before that.  But the tragic thing was that I would know. Compulsive behavior rears its ugly head.

Here’s what I think is happening.  I think most sensors are noisy little devils on their own and manufacturers pull the images off the sensors and then progressively slather on noise reduction as the sensitivity goes up.  At a certain point you reach a hinge point where you can either have nice detail, peppered with noise, or you can choose a smoother look and sacrifice the impression of finely delineated hair on striking blonde goddesses. 

The most egregious manipulation happens to Jpeg files and it’s horrible because once the camera spits them out they are well nye impossible to fix.  Once they are slurped and greased you can’t un-grease them even with the best software.  Why do manufacturers do this?  I think it’s really a question of how much per camera they want to spend on real time image processing in the camera pipelines.  The finer the control and the tighter the quality integration the more processing speed and buffering you’ll need.  And there’s always a calculus of intersecting value curves that yields the most effective, “I’ll buy it - curve” in the world of marketing.

Sony builds great sensor semiconductors and they are in use in many great cameras. Including famously noise free cameras like the Pentax KR5 and the Nikon D7000.  But they don’t seem to get where the tipping point is on noise and noise artifacts, or what constitutes excessive blurring of the files.  For most people it really doesn’t matter.  It isn’t a life or death issue.  It seems that Sony wants to build in super fast frame rates and big files with skinny buffers and the way they make it all work is with rudimentary “on the fly” noise treatment. Strictly mid-tier.  Nikon and Canon are either putting more effective processors and more complex noise reduction algorithms in their cameras or they have a vat of fairy dust somewhere with which they sprinkle their outbound cameras.  Either way, they leave Sony product in the dust.  Or so I thought...

After reading around the web and revisiting some of the product essays at Luminous Landscape I decided to make an all out effort to make my Sony a77 raw files the very best they could be and to pit them against the high ISO files I’ve accumulated from the Canon 5Dmk2 camera which I owned.  This might seem to be a “Sony-only” blog post but nothing could be further from the truth.  What I’m writing here pertains to a number  of cameras that have gotten a bad rap for high noise (although nothing will save a Kodak DCS 760C at ISO’s over 160....).

I’m going to boil it all down for you.  The way to creamy, dreamy files with good bite and low noise, even at ISO’s like 1600 and maybe even 3200 is to do this:  Turn off the high ISO noise reduction entirely.  All off.  Shoot in raw.  Yes, big, fat raw.  Then bring your files into a conversion program like DXO Optics Pro and handle your noise there.  Or in Capture One.  Even the Sony Image Data Converter program.  You’ll have much more control over the noise reduction protocols and you can offset the reduction in micro fine acutance with adjustments to all the parameters in unsharp masking menu.

I like DXO Optics Pro because, with my Sony a77, shooting in raw, the program will correct for the most common lens distortions, vignetting, chromatic aberrations, known sensor anomalies and other issues all at the same time.  I can override the noise recipes in the program and fine tune each file if I like.  It takes more time and the program is much slower than Lightroom.  I’m upgrading Lightroom as my next step so I can play with the same kinds of controls there and see who have the best combination of speed, convenience and image quality.

What I’m seeing now is that my a77 files are a pretty good match against the Canon 5D2 files up to and including ISO 1600.  The process of running files through DXO is more time consuming up to a point.  But in truth we’re keeping to our basic workflow and only optimizing files in DXO after the client has made a final selection.
  

We may shoot a thousand images in a day or two and after an edit we may be sharing several hundred with our clients.  We ingest the files in LIghtroom 3.6 (currently) and do quick global and “regional” corrections of the images before resizing them and batching them into web res images for online gallery display.  Once the client selects their images I run them through the DXO process and then send the files as Tiffs to PhotoShop for anything that requires selections, layers, or spot color corrections.  And of course, the obvious cloning, healing and retouching.  Starting with a higher quality file that’s geometrically “mended” is a load off my mind.  And it adds a lot of value to my new cameras.  At lower ISO’s they are more than competitive with cameras like the 5D mk3.  

While they probably will never come close to yielding a low noise file at ISO 6400 I rarely shoot at those settings anyway.  It’s a lot more routine to try and shoot at lower ISO’s in order to get the maximum dynamic range. That's why we own various lights.  And at ISO 50-200 the Sony’s are as good as anything but a Nikon D800 for total dynamic range and endless detail.  And at less than half the cost.

The whole point of my blog post today is to point out how critical software can be in grinding out the very best potential images you can get from any camera.  Some camera makers actually make software that shows off the best of their cameras.  Nikon is one that comes to mind.  And some make kludgy software that barely passes muster (like Sony).  If you know where the issues are you can experiment with the best solutions for their resolution.  Whether inside the camera or inside the computer the changes all come down to different software and processing choices.  Sony is betting that most people will find their fast throughput, lower quality solution adequate.  Thank goodness you can choose to take their raw data and make it much better.  If you couldn’t improve on the pictures then no one would bother making and selling the aftermarket processing software.  

In the next few weeks I’ll try to shoot some images that clearly show what I’m talking about here but in the meantime don’t take the limitations for your camera for granted.  The internal software of your camera might be like the cheap tires on an otherwise high performance car.  They’re relatively cheap to replace and you may be in for a much better ride.

Now I’m happy with my cameras.  With the right processing software they do exactly what I want them to do.  

Saturday is restaurant day. Photographing food. Celebrating new beginnings.

Saturday was a fun day for me as a photographer.  I'm a real "foodie" and I love it when I hear about great, new Austin restaurants that are poised to open.  So at the behest of one of my favorite restaurant marketing companies I headed down to the vibrant Rainey St. neighborhood to meet Iliana and Ernesto and to make some photographs of their incredible cuisine that is defined by their time in Oaxaca, Mexico.  The art director I worked with wanted to keep the images light and simple.  We had a short window of time and a lot to do.  I packed light.  We moved fast.

These are the owners of El Naranjo, Iliana and Ernesto.  They are joined in their newest venture by their daughter who trained at the Culinary Institute of America.  

As you can imagine, with only two weeks to go till the opening the restaurant is still a work in progress.  Tables and chairs are arriving in patches.  The floors are still being finished and the paint on the walls is still fresh.  I brought along several LED lights in case I needed to construct a lighting design but as I walked through the restaurant I noticed how the light came billowing in through the windows of one of the dining rooms.  I brought a small table close to a convenient, southfacing window and used a big, white diffusion panel to soften and direct the sunlight.  I could tilt the top of the panel toward or away from the food if I needed control of highlights and bright spots.  It's really a wonderful way to work with food.

This is the complete lighting set up. There was sunlight bouncing around the room, reverberating from the white walls and providing a nice, natural fill.  While the light changed direction over the course of the two hours in which we shot the diffuser helped us maintain a continuity that will be important on a website.

Of course, I could have brought along ten or fifteen thousand dollars of electronic flash equipment and a car full of assistants in order to duplicate the natural light and ensure consistency forever.  But to what end?

I started out shooting from a tripod with a Sony a77 camera and a Hasselblad 120mm Makro lens but I wanted to work quicker, with less restraint and I wanted to get even closer that that big lens would allow so I took the camera off the tripod, set the ISO at 400 and started working, handheld, with the Sony 30mm macro lens.  The shot just above was just what my art director was looking for and then we were off and running, looking for variations.

As each dish came out of the kitchen we'd wipe it down with small towels to make sure there were no fingerprints or unintended drops or spots on the white dishes.  We knew we wanted the close, angled point of view for each dish but I also wanted to shoot from directly over the top of each dish so that whoever ended up designing the website would have choices.

None of the food is in any way adulterated, oiled or treated.  To do so is really a misrepresentation.  Good food that looks good should photograph well without the kind of tricks that led the FTC to mandate certain rules about food advertising.  The primary rule is that the "hero" of the ad (the product you are selling) is representative of product that the consumer could find on the shelves of a store or in a restaurant.  No oil or shoe polish allowed.

I bring this up because there's a myth that the food in a food shoot is inedible.  Not so.  I gorged myself on this incredible avocado-rich ceviche.  I could make it the mainstay of my diet....

My wife loves good soups and the caldos at El Naranjo will bring a smile to her face.  My intent was not to bring the whole bowl and all of the ingredients into sharp focus but to create my impression of the soup.  It is somewhat maddening to try focusing in close to a warm bowl of soup and being able to smell the delicious and intoxicating vapors without tossing the camera aside and grabbing for a spoon.  

The specialties of El Naranjo include many traditional molés from Oaxaca.  The dish above is a medley of vegetables sprinkled with a white cheese and paired with a bright red molé sauce.  A delicious vegetarian treat.  To photograph this plate I planted my elbows firmly on the table and leaned right into the food.  I exhaled slowly and release the shutter three or four times in a row.  I was testing the "Ken-Rockwell-Slow-Speed" methodology which advises getting steady and then releasing a bunch of frames.  The idea being that your body will settle somewhere in the process and yield some sharp frames.  I'm not sure if it's Ken's methodology or the in body stabilization but I didn't lose too many frames to movement.  I worked with shutter speeds ranging from 1/30th to 1/160th.  But higher magnification has a way of amplifying movement...

I love the optimism of a new restaurant and I love the freshness of a restaurant space before the first smudge appears or the first scratch of a chair puts a scar across the wooden floors.  The bar stool were just arriving.  Interesting to shoot and then look at the exposure setting.  I was working at 1/13th of second for that shot.

Not having my camera locked down on the tripod gave me a freedom to wander around between shots and snap interesting little vignettes.  I like the view from my side of the pass window into the kitchen.  I love to see the new stoves and machines out of focus in the background.

This is a fish  that is wrapped in leaves that have a taste like licorice or anise.  The poached fish was perfect.  It's interesting to me just how good the small and cheap Sony 30mm DT macro lens is.  For around $200 I had an optic that was sharp and color neutral.  And capable of focusing down to lifesize on an APS-C camera.  The combination of the a77 and the 30mm macro equals a lightweight but powerful shooting package.

All of these images were shot yesterday afternoon.  We went through about 450 frames and lots of dishes.  Our lighting stayed the same from shot to shot.  The only variations consisted of moving a plate closer or further away from the diffusion panel to get a softer or harder lighting contrast.  None of the files have been enhanced for final use.  Some need a bit of contrast correction and some will be happier with a little bit of retouching around the edges.  That's a project for the coming week.

All of the images were shot in the full 24 megapixel raw mode.  All the images shown here were done with the 30mm Sony macro and the a77 camera.  The EVF was instrumental in being able to move quickly and with great accuracy as the images could be dialed in for focus, comp and color and shot instead of the more iterative process required when using flash or cameras with optical finders.

I am happily anticipating the opening of El Naranjo. One of the advantages of photographing food for Austin's best restaurants is knowing, in advance, which restaurants will bring a big smile to your face.  This is one of them.

edit:  Image by ©2012 Lane Orsak added below.  

A photo of my eccentric shooting technique while grappling with the tiramisu....

That about sums it up.

Thank Lane!

Which one will you end up with? And what will you want in six months?

The Canon 5D mk 3 and the Nikon D800 are both incredible cameras.  Absolutely incredible cameras.  Each is a wonderful machine with which to make digital images.  But if you were working with a clean slate and a big, fat credit card, which one do you think you'd plump down for?  Which system calls to you with the ultimate siren song?  Or is it like the choice between two great Bordeaux wines?  Both are incredible but you can only open one...

There are some among our numbers who will own both.  A few contemporaneously and most, serially.  If I didn't have a stitch of Canon or Nikon glass and no other legacy bodies what the heck would I do?

I've played with both and I'm stumped.  The Nikon has image quality galore (especially if you are a DXO true believer) while the Canon 5D mk3 shoots much faster and whips through its buffered images quicker. Some people think the Canon has a better auto white balance while others prefer the Nikon.

The bottom line, really, is that both camera are great photo machines and for most people the choice will be simple.  If you have a bag full of L glass the increase in ultimate resolution is probably not enough to push you to change.  You know logically that if the Nikon breaks all kinds of sales records Canon will have a camera to match it in a matter of months.  In the meantime you can walk around pontificating about how 21 megapixels is really "the sweet spot for pro's..."  and you can talk about how much quicker your post processing is and how few hard drives you are filling up by comparison.  Now, there is that pesky light leak thing....  I'm sure someone who used to design LCD panel systems for Canon has been banished to Sigma or some other level of industrial hell for his most grievous errors.

On the other hand, if you shoot Nikon cameras you'll lunge, without a doubt, to embrace the Nikon D800 and won't even cast a curious glance across the fence because, for all intents and purposes, the grass (for once) is greener right in the middle of your currently occupied field.  Enjoy the camera right now.  If you can get your hands on one...

But, if you have neither system, and you were contemplating buying into one, which way should you go.  As you might expect I have opinions about that.

I've been on both sides of the fence.  Most recently I owned a bunch of Canon stuff.  I owned Nikon stuff right up to and including the D700.  I'm pretty familiar with the lens selections in both camps and I think I can make some good judgements.

If you are involved in video production and you think or know that you'll want to use your camera as a primary shooting tool I'd have to give the nod to the Canon.  Not because I think the images will be better or the sound will be better but because it's so easy to use legacy manual focus lenses from so many sources on the Canon.  With the Nikon it's just not as simple.  Leica R lenses, old Nikon lenses (usable on both) and a slew of other stuff.  Zeiss cinema lenses are a good argument in favor of Canon, for the moment.

But if that's not your concern I'd steer you to the Nikon D800.  Why? Because they seem to have figured out (after the devastatingly dismal DX years) what consumers want and how to deliver it.  They want great files, total in camera lens corrections in Jpeg and raw, and they want low noise at high ISO's.  With the D800 you get most of that and you buy into a system in which a backup body such as the D3s gives you all the high ISO performance you can ask for in the market today.
Easy choice.

Which one will I buy? Now that's a bit more difficult.  See, I think all these cameras should have really cool EVF's instead of last century prism finders.  For the moment I'll be content sitting here with my Sony SLT a77's and waiting (patiently?) for the introduction of the much anticipated Sony a99 full frame SLT camera.  If you can believe the pervasive rumors we'll be looking at a body with this century's viewing mechanism coupled with the same chip as the one in the Nikon D800, weatherproofing and lotsa of super cool extras.

For most people in the market for a new camera right now I'd say, "Wait a month or two and just get the new Panasonic GH3.  It will be smaller, lighter, cheaper and for all intents and purposes, as good as anyone will need for any medium or practical use we're looking at today."  If you can't wait for the GH3 then get an Olympus EP3 or OMD.  Heck, they're more fun to shoot than all the bigger cameras I've played with. But if you go with the Olympus cameras don't forget to bundle in the miracle lenses.  Those are the 12mm, the 24mm Leica Summilux and the 45mm.  And don't you dare buy an EP 3 without a VF-2 finder.

Finally, all these cameras have one thing in common.  They'll shoot better video with LED light panels than they ever will with flash.  Pick up one of the Fotodiox 312AS two color LED panels.  Then, at least you'll be able to see what you're focusing on.....

For current Canon and Nikon users the pathways seem fairly clear cut.

http://www.kirktuck.com

Will Crockett always makes me think in new ways. I follow him because he understands customers.

https://shopshootsmarter.com/index.php

Admiration for a simple approach.  Most photographers I know love to complicate a process.  We have all kinds of slogans like, "K.I.S.S. Keep it simple, stupid" but in the end we always look for the process that has, at least, the promise of perfection...if only we can grind down into the details and master it.  But that isn't always what our clients are looking for.  And, truth be told, it's not always what suits us best.

I've always been interested in creating slideshows and kinetic presentations that blend images and video but I've always been put off by the "official" methods of creating them "at the highest levels."  There are times when having to have the best or coolest of everything just makes a process a lot less fun. And if it's too much drudgery you reconcile yourself to waiting until a paying client pokes you with a sharp stick until your actually learn a new technique.

But then, out of the blue, my old friend, Will Crockett, sent me a copy of a DVD he'd just done.  That's a scan of it, above.  The program is aimed at amateurs and even beginner pros.  A lot of the DVD deals with what you can do with smaller cameras and micro four thirds system cameras.  And, guess what???  Will also thinks that because clients ARE demanding "blended" products (video and still images ) the lighting of the future seems to be...LED's.  Wow.  How about that?  (I know, I know, you just love your strobes to death and you have absolutely no interest in video.....)

The video shows, from simple to "better," how to put your images into a moving video program, complete with music and effects = for free.  And then it takes you through the ways you can share the video or use it in your business.  It's really an eye opener for me.  I've been struggling to master Final Cut Pro X but I tossed together eight or ten images in the space of five minutes and, with a website called, Animoto, I made and uploaded a fun little video.  The video costs around $40 and you might know lots of stuff that's on there already but it's a pretty good overview of what you need to know to get started if you are trying to create fun products for yourself or your clients without committing to the major time sink of full bore video production.

Here's my first attempt with some downtown Austin photos.  All videos  under 30 seconds are free on Animoto.

http://animoto.com/play/GHEqiNYECMAKPR2MMOmiAA

Will this revolutionize my world? Naw.  But it opened my eyes to all the free and low cost services out there that can help me share video and still images with friends and clients.  And I have to thank Will for that.  He does a great job explaining technical stuff and his websites are a treasure trove of common sense stuff.  If you want esoteric, look somewhere else.

Empty. Gone. Measured and prodded. We lost the patient when we did the exploratory surgery to find out where the magic lived.

 Photography? It's not in the camera.  It's in the heart.

Lighting is not a substitute for having something to say.  A new lens isn't the same as new understanding.  A new camera is no substitute for knowing your own heart...