A damning review should be followed by a positive review. Just to get the bad taste out...

Yes, there is some amazing gear out in the world. And some much less than amazing gear. I wrote about a worrisome flash earlier today and then I sprinted out the door to shoot a job in exciting, downtown Austin. But I meant to follow my review of a flawed product with my quick review of a product that just plain works exactly the way it's supposed to and that is....well. 

I'm writing about my Panasonic/Leica 25mm f1.4 Summilux for micro four thirds. I am on my second copy. I bought the first one back in the earlier days of m4:3 and in the two year interlude in which I tried to bend the Sony cameras to my will I ended up selling it to blogger and local photo celebrity ATMTX. He seems to love the lens.

At any rate it was one of the first lenses I re-bought when I ventured into the world of Panasonic GH cameras. It's a focal length (equivalent) that I really love, and this particular model is exemplary. I keep it bolted on to one of my GH3 cameras at all time. 

I don't really have much to say about it other than to point out that it is sharp, constrasty and very simple. There are no levers or buttons on the lens. The focusing ring is fly-by-wire which pushes me to spend most  of my time shooting the lens manually. The performance of the lens is extremely good and it seems to render detail and dimension in a convincing way. In fact, the quality of this lens has me moving quickly and seemingly unstoppably toward the acquisition of a mysterious Nocticron. The Nocticron is the 85 mm equivalent in the Panasonic family and according to current legend the lens is completely sharp at its widest aperture and able to resolve a zillion giga-lines of resolution and happiness. 

But, back to the little brother. The one complaint everyone has about the lens is about the size of the lens hood (included in the box) but I'm thinking that Panasonic and Leica optimized the hood for ultimate lens performance. It's part of the system that makes sure the light making your images is image forming light and not extraneous photonics bullshit. Otherwise known as flare.

The 25mm has my highest accolades: 1. I bought it twice. 2. I take it everywhere. 3. Some of my favorite pix result from using the lens. It does exactly what it is supposed to do and it does that thing very, very well. That's all I can say about it. 

Summer BlockBuster read: 



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A very critical equipment review. The doggiest flash I've owned.

The Sony HVL-60 (no link!)

I read a lot of equipment reviews and it's very, very rare for reviewers these days to come right out and say, "Hey! Don't buy this. It's a piece of ©$@&." I guess that's because most of us bloggers are consciously or unconsciously chasing ad link dollars in one form or another. We'd rather ignore a piece of crap than write it.  But there is a purchase I made that I so regret that I must warn others of my experiences. 

The item in question is very pricy. It had a lot of marketing "promise" but in nearly every category it fell short. It's the Sony HVL-60 flash. I bought it when I was shooting with the Sony a77 and a99 cameras. In a word? It sucks. It's a $600 package of non-performance. 

The number one issue is yet another non-standard hot shoe implementation. It looks like it's nearly a standard set up (if you ignore the small wires on it) but it would not work in my Flash Waves (radio trigger) receivers which work with every other flash I've owned. I get that Sony could implement all kinds of gadgety faux cool stuff with all the extra pins but maybe they should have thought about getting the flash connection right first! So, first strike: once you take it off a dedicated Sony camera you are going to have a hell of a time triggering it. Added to this is the fact that there is no additional PC socket (old school) on the flash. This would have allowed me at least to trigger the flash if nothing else worked. 

It's a crappy shoe and I'd rather have the older Minolta shoe Sony got so much flak for keeping. If I had an unpopular product feature (Minolta proprietary hot shoe)  I'd make it a point to make my upgraded product truly universal. Sony just doesn't get the off camera flash, multiple flash ethos. Yikes it's bad. 

But it might have been well worth it if you could put the HVL 60 in the shoe of your dedicated camera (Sony a77? or Sony a99?) and bang out perfect flash images every time. Right? But the joke continues. No matter how I set this flash (other than in full manual) I got remarkably inconsistent exposures. It's slightly better with the a99 but un-usable for any fast breaking professional work. One frame might be nuts on while the next frame is one stop under and the next frame is two stops over....and NO, I did not have flash bracketing engaged.  Really remarkably bad exposure control. And I have to tell you that Nikon had perfect flash figured out nearly eight years ago!!! Yikes.

But all of this is only academic because as a working pro you'll only have a short while to experience all of the frustrating things that make this unit so dreadful. Why? Because once you've shot ten or twenty exposures, bouncing off a twenty foot high ceiling (no matter how much time between exposures) your HVL-60 will shut off, flash a little thermometer on the LCD screen, and refuse to do anything for at least ten minutes. Dead. Dormant. A useless lump of plastic and capacitors. 

If you are a working professional covering a corporate event and your flash dies after the third person walks across the stage to shake hands with the CEO and get their award then, barring a non-HVL-60 back up, you are toast with that client. Just toast. I've kept the flash around anticipating that I'd use it with the RX-10. But just looking at it makes me angry so I'm taking it back to the dealer and they can deal with it. 

Why the late epiphany? Eh. I spent the best part of the last two years experimenting with LEDs and fluorescent lights. They trigger every time... But really, the wake up call came when I went to outfit myself for last week's shoot. I'd sold off most of my older flashes. Those were the ones I used for off camera zaniness when I wrote the first few books on lighting. I needed to replace them for a portable, airline checkable, low weight flash system and I ended up with some Yongnuo flashes. I didn't expect much from the Yongnuos but at around $50 each they ran circles around the $600 Sony fiasco flash. They fired every single time I clicked the shutter. The built-in optical slaves meant I never even had to pull the radio triggers out of the case. The cheap flashes never, ever shut down or flashed me the thermometer of death. 

When I looked at them this morning, lying next to the outrageous Sony flash, my little brain made a direct comparison and then I recalled all the ways in which the Sony flash disappointed me. Don't make the same mistake I did. 

If you must buy a flash for your A7, A7r or A7s and you think you want this HVL-60 model be sure to go to a bricks and mortar store, put the flash on YOUR camera and bang away for a while. Make sure you can live with the exposures and make sure you can push the button as many times as you'll need to push the shutter button in a real life job. Be aware that you could buy 12 Yongnuo 560 type 2's for about the same outlay of precious cash. Even with a 50% failure rate you'll still be light years ahead. Or at least six flashes ahead. 

Oh, and I just checked one thing....every one of these Yongnuo flashes has a real, traditional PC socket tucked right under a little rubber flap on the side. They are (so far) a good cheap flash for manual only work. 

So, that's my GRRRRRRR! product review. If I had it all to do over again that flash would never come near my camera bag, or make a dent in my bank account.  Your mileage may vary but you are forewarned.

(no links to product on this one....).

A wild morning at the pool. Fun with crowds.

Warm Up Lanes at Masters Nationals. UT. 2008.

I was gone for most of last week and one of the things I missed most (besides Studio Dog) was getting in the pool and swimming like crazy every morning. Didn't have time to find a pool in Denver; heck I didn't have time during those math days to swim even if I had found a pool. So I was excited about getting back to the routine this morning. 

I got up early, drank a big glass of water, brushed my teeth and headed to the pool. I was ten minutes early but people were already pulling into the parking lot and rustling their swim bags out of their cars. 

I hopped in lane three and started swimming the warm-up 400 with Julia. In short order four other people hopped in and we swam in the standard, counterclockwise circle: up on the right, back on the right. When we finished the warm up I looked around the pool and was amazed to find six or seven people in every lane. Now this is not a 50 meter pool, this is a 25 year pool so circle swimming works best if everyone in each lane is about as fast as everyone else in their lane. We had good lane synergy today. 

Coach Chris (he's the one who does the really hard, early workouts on Tues.) immediately recognized the heavily populated dynamic and wrote a bunch of sprint sets. That worked well since there's a chance to regroup often. While we didn't get as much yardage in we did swim at a faster clip and it was good to see that fiercely independent adults could efficiently share lanes and make adjustments without metaphorically stepping on each other's toes (there were literal but unintentional episodes of stepping on each other's toes....). 

An early morning swim makes every day seem more efficient. When I got back to the studio I was ready to tackle today's work load. Just helps to get warmed up and focused. 

Photographic note: Have I mentioned that I'm enjoying shooting with the GH4? 

A simple location lighting kit. Cheap flashes. Skinny stands and a dinky tripod.

Background light at one sixteenth power.

Main light (on the right of the frame) one quarter power. 

Fill light (near the center of the frame) at one eighth power.

Back in 2007 I wrote an entire book on the use of small, battery powered flashes used in the practice of professional photography. It's called Minimalist Lighting and it's still selling well on Amazon.com and in bookstores. The premise was the using small flashes with radio triggers or camera manufacturer's built in infra-red controllers would replace (in many applications) the older and more expensive traditional studio flash lighting we used to use. That book and David Hobby's Strobist site changed the landscape of lighting for professional and advanced amateur photographers. 

But at some point I "fell off the wagon", went "cold turkey" on the "little flash Kool-aide" and started pulling out the bigger flashes again. Maybe I missed the modeling lights or maybe I got tired of changing batteries---I don't really know but it happened. Until the conference in Denver moved up the priority scale and I realized that I needed to put together a make-shift studio to take a series of group photos and head shots in. I wanted to travel light as there was no budget for an assistant and I hate dragging tons of stuff through airports (bigger lights generally mean bigger stands, heavy cables, extension cords and bigger cases!).  At that point I realized that I'd sold off all the Nikon flashes, all of the Canon flashes and all I had left was a little, dedicated flash for the Panasonic cameras and a nearly useless Sony HVL-60 flash from my a99 days. 

I did my research, bought some Yongnuo 560 type 2 flashes, charged up all the Sanyo Eneloop batteries I could gather together, and packed a case with stands and on-camera flash adapters. Those and a brace of cheap umbrellas. Everything fit in one case.  And it was a case with wheels on it. 

I got assigned to the "Gold" room, which I thought was a good omen. I set up the flashes as you see them above. Lost to the angle of the photo is the beautiful, muslin background that I dragged along. 

We did maybe a dozen head shots and a big group shot and then I packed everything back up and continued to do my mobile work for the rest of the conference. 

I learned (once again) that $120 for three flashes that have their own built in optical slaves is a screaming bargain. I learned that 1/4 power rocks for most stuff....especially now that all cameras are graceful at 400 ISO. I once again learned that traveling light is traveling happy. Small cameras and small flashes are just lovely for the post "fun to travel" times.

Stan Y. and Kirk test the lighting set up.

Stan and Kirk have a genuine good time at the Math Conference shoots.

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Color Balance inaccuracies are not always "errors."

On Sunday I wrote an article about shooting a conference. I went on and on about the need to do custom white balances---especially if you are hellbent on shooting everything as a JPEG file. I forgot to mention (although most of you already know it...) that sometimes it's okay to use the "wrong" color balance setting.

I had just walked out of the very tungsten-y main ballroom and came across a rack of glassware that the hotel was bringing out to set up for a reception/happy hour. I love shooting repeating glass patterns so I grabbed the camera with the 12-35mm and banged off a few shots, neglecting to re-apply color sanity. Since all my cameras are "pre-chimp" capable I saw the issue right away and corrected back to "interior with predominant daylight" setting.

But when I got back to Austin and started editing and polishing the 3600+ images I'd taken I came across the "mistakes in glassware" and found that I loved the effect of the cold blue. Similarly, a "correct" white balance can also kill the wonderful colors of a sunset. When I shoot sunsets I've learned to set the camera's white balance to the little "sun" icon which puts the camera at 5500K with no hue shift. In this way I get all the rich, warm colors of the sunset because the prevailing color is much warmer and more color nuanced than direct sun would be.

Gotta love it when being wrong is more beautiful that being right...

Be sure to get the Novel! It's the perfect action adventure Summer Read for serious Photographers. 

A Total Immersion Week with the Panasonic GH4. Or, Kirk Does the Math.

It would seem that the big news around here is the launch of the novel, The Lisbon Portfolio. But as much as I wanted to sit behind the computer and send e-mails to everyone I knew announcing it, the day after our publication on Amazon's Kindle Store I was on a Southwest Airlines flight heading to Denver Colorado to work as the event photographer for what has become my favorite show. It's the RLM Math Conference at which Inquiry Based Learning is discussed in depth by math teachers and professors from all over the country. I spent Weds. through Saturday soaking in the math gestalt in a wonderful building that was designed by the architect, I.M. Pei, back in the 1960's. And I'm not kidding, I had a blast.

But to stay on photo topic part of my reason for being happy was that this was my first chance to deeply immerse myself in shooting a full on event with my completed Panasonic GH system. I shot well over 4,000 images and the bulk of them were done with the new GH4. The rest were created on two different GH3s. And I will say that spending a cumulative 20 hours with one type of camera in your hands is a wonderful way to find out what you like and what you don't about the system....

But first a photo that the Panasonic marketing people should really enjoy:

Kirk With Cameras.

Image ©2014 Stan Yoshinobu

Used with Stan Yoshinobu's permission.

The image above is a fair representation of how I equipped myself for my time in Denver. Three cameras with three different lenses, extra batteries and a small flash in the pockets of the jacket. Totally equipped without a camera bag in sight....

Let me set the stage: The project was to cover a conference about Inquiry Based Learning in Mathematics. My brief was to document all the "main tent" sessions, the dinners and the social components of the conference. But the most time intensive part of the job was the need to photograph presenters presenting in five different locations, concurrently. An almost continuous cycle of parallel sessions that lasted almost all day long each day. 

The conference took place in the I.M. Pei Building of the Sheraton Hotel complex is downtown Denver, Colorado. That's nice for me since Denver is quickly becoming one of my favorite destinations in the country. It's only two hours from Austin by direct Southwest Airline flights and the idea of embracing 50 degree weather each morning with coffee and a warm croissant in hand is enticing. Especially when the humidity and heat kick in for the Summer here in Austin...

All photo jobs are different and all the parameters are different as well. For about eight hours each day the conference ran the parallel sessions which lasted about 40 minutes each. The classes, filled with academic mathematicians were spread out all across one large area of the conference center. I would start the cycle by photographing the speakers and activities in the main ballroom and then move on to classroom A, the B, then C, and finally classroom D. I shot a lot of frames because I was trying to capture good expressions in which  subjects' eyes were open, hands were gesturing in a natural way and peoples' mouths looked as though they were caught, mid-sentence, saying something really bright and insightful. The important idea here is that I did this circuit, from ballroom to class to class a dozen or more times each day and I packed gear with a conscious thought to keeping my load of equipment as light as possible.

I did the same conference (here in Austin) last year with the Sony a99 and Sony a77 cameras along with some giant lenses (the five pound 70-200mm 2.8 comes to mind as a particularly painful thing to sport around on the front of a camera...) and a large camera bag packed with all kinds of stuff with which to support the "full frame mystique." The gear was heavy and many times the limited depth of field worked against me as I attempted to shoot in a documentary style using available light for small groups of people.

This year (as you can see above) I brought two Panasonic GH3 camera bodies and one GH4. (I wish I could wave a magic wand over them and convert all the cameras to GH4's....). For most sessions I actually carried only two cameras: the GH4 with the Panasonic 35-100mm f2.8 X zoom lens and a GH3 with the 12-35mm f2.8 X wide angle zoom lens. With one camera on each shoulder and a third sometimes draped around my neck (GH3 with 25mm f1.4) I barely noticed the weight or the bulk of the gear. 

Two things to mention here: I was happy to shoot wide open with any of the three lenses as they perform very well at their respective maximum apertures. This is something I was rarely able to do with my previous cameras since the edges and corners of the lenses for the larger formats were never as well corrected when used at their maximums. Lens designers have pointed out for years how much easier it is to design well corrected lenses for smaller formats----at least theoretically. 

The images I'm seeing today in Lightroom are sharp and well constructed and the extra DOF, even with the lenses wide open, is welcome. This selection of lenses really does prove to me that the smaller geometry of the sensors was quite welcome. It meant that, in most cases eyes and ears were both in focus but I could still drop backgrounds out of focus with the longer focal lengths of the 35-100mm lens. 

One of the way I kept the file management manageable was to shoot high quality Jpegs instead of Raw files. My take on the real, current reason to people prefer Raw files is that most people don't take the time to do really good white balances while they are shooting! Seriously, if you shoot without getting the color right--in Jpeg or raw-- correcting in post after the fact makes a huge negative difference in both noise and exposure accuracy. 

While the effects are evident in both kinds of files (in my experience) it's obvious that there is less potential to make large corrections in Jpeg files because each color correction step introduces complimentary color shifts somewhere else in the spectrum (or usually at multiple points along the color distribution) as well as causing non linear shifts in each of the three color channels.  And some of those non-linearities are not correctable. 

THE ONLINE PHOTOGRAPHER MENTIONS "THE LISBON PORTFOLIO"

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I hate to travel with gear but I love getting out of town.

Jana. Canon 5Dmk2. 100mm f2 lens.

I'm a worrier. If there is something to worry about I'm on it. Murphy's Law is my mantra and Worst Case Scenario is generally the tune my mind is humming as I go about my business. But few things get me into the butterfly stomach condition quicker than packing for a trip, and the first and last legs of a trip. Don't get me wrong, I'm not wound up like a rubber band for the whole adventure, just the parts over which I supposedly have control: Getting from the house to the airport. Getting from parking to the terminal with two large cases. Getting in line at the Sky Cap station and getting the little luggage tags I forgot to put on earlier into position on the cases while the Sky Cap gives me the steely once over while looking at my unorganized paper work. 

The anxiety notches down from 95% to 90% once the guys have accepted my bags, confirmed my boarding pass and sent me on my merry way. We operate at 90% anxiety for the portion of the trip that requires standing in the TSA line as it zigs and zags through the little rope barriers, putting all my pocket stuff and camera bag into the gray plastic boxes and stepping through the back splatter/scatter x-ray machine for my own personal, hands over head scan. 

Once I'm out of the ingestion process and I'm putting my shoes back on, getting my precious camera bag, and re-orienting myself toward the right gate my negative excitement levels ratchet down to about their typical 40-50% levels and I'm okay with that.

What's the deal with my decided lack of enthusiasm for the first lap? Well, part of it is engaging the timing of the whole process. I know with absolute certainty that the plane will leave without me if I don't get every part of the initial timing process correct. My brain works like this: "Hmmmm. The plane leaves at 4 p.m. and if there is a big line at the TSA check in it might cut things close if I don't pad the schedule with an hour. So that means I want to be in the big, squiggly line by 3 p.m. So backtracking from there I have to make sure I get to the Sky Caps with enough time to spare. Sometimes there are crazy lines for both the outside check-ins and the inside check-in areas. Like when SXSW is going on or ACL Fest or F1. I better give myself a half an hour to get through that part of check in so I plan on presenting myself to the Sky Caps no later than 2:30 p.m.

But then there is the complex calculus of how much time to give myself to get to the airport. The traffic lights in the main intersection of my neighborhood could be on the blink again. The last time I drove to the airport the main highway had a detour for road work and the line of cars going through the two lane, traffic light controlled, intersection stretched back about a half a mile. Then there is the very real possibility that all the ground parking and garage parking adjacent to the terminals will be full and I'll have to head to an off site lot and wait for their interminable little shuttles to get me back over to the airport. Better leave by 1:30 p.m. to get there with a generous buffer......just in case. 

And so it goes. Remember my trip to Berlin last year? My wife teased me for getting to the airport two hours early but I was able to find out that all of United's flights to NYC and on to Berlin were cancelled that day and I was just able to snag the last seats on a series of American flights by the skin of my teeth! Being early saved my trip and reinforced my neurosis. 

But the last five flights to Denver had me considering dropping my guard a bit. With light traffic everywhere and TSA pre-check status I got to the airport and through the process so quickly that I ended up cooling my heels in the gate area for two, long hours. 

If I'm flying with carry-on only the anxiety load is never too great. And if I am flying on an opened schedule I can be totally relaxed. But the worst component is always the luggage. I still remember last year trying to fit two, large Pelican cases into a tiny Fiat rental car... No matter how you pack lighting gear, stands, tripods and flashes you're going to have a big load to watch out for and transport. Even getting from baggage claim to the shuttles is a pain in ass. Not to mention the aspect of Murphy's Law which clearly states that the one thing the TSA will destroy or "lose" is the one thing that's not replaceable and it will be the thing upon which all other parts of your job depend.

I did try shipping stuff ahead which everyone here rushed to advise me as the best course of action. The shipping charges clocked in (round trip) at somewhere near $600. I might as well buy the gear a seat on the plane.

But I do have a solution for some of this. There's a Hilton Hotel at the airport. I'll just give up and get to my own, hometown airport a day earlier and I'll have at least cancelled out the roadway and parking travel concerns. (Not seriously considering this. This plan falls under:  hyperbole).

I wish for the slower pace of life that we enjoyed at the beginning of my career. I once did a cookbook for Texas Monthly Press that had me in all the major cities of Texas and I did it all in a little, un-air conditioned, Volkswagen bug. Leisurely driving. Seeing the scenes. Ice chest full of Gatorade by my side. Rest stops located strategically. La Quintas where you needed them. 

Sure, the car broke down once or twice but nothing was such a rush back then. We'd just use the phone at the gas station and tell the restauranteurs that we'd be a day late. Didn't seem to matter to them...

On the flip side of this whole mental health equation I absolutely love getting to new places and I love conferences like the one I'll be attending for the next three days. Lots of fun people, good food, straight forward event photography and all the usual trappings of staying in a nice hotel. Also, I love Denver. It's nothing at all like Austin and that may be what I love most about it. That and the altitude. Nothing beats the free buzz of being oxygen deprived for three whole days!

On another note, I thought I'd be calmer and more at ease when I finally got my amazing-blockbuster-rivetting-can't-put-it-down novel uploaded and published on Amazon.com but now I'm on pins and needles waiting for the first reviews...  I think I've chosen all the wrong careers for a person as nervous as me.

I wrote this novel to open up a new writing category: Photo Fiction. It's all about stories for people who love the practice of photography. Action/adventure/Photography. Seems natural. Hope you enjoy it.