Common Sense and Buying Compact Cameras.

Olympus ultra compact interchangeable lens EPL1 with zoom 

This camera will not fit in the pockets of my tight Italian jeans.  And it might not fit in yours either.  But it's not much larger than the Canon G12 or any number of extended range point and shoot cameras on the market.  And it will fit in a the pocket of my favorite LA Axis sport coat.  Last week I was looking around Amazon with the vague idea of seeing what compact camera I might like to sport about.  Something to take to the opera or out clubbing or whatever it is that all of you profess to do with your "pocket" cameras.  And I came to the conclusion that you either buy a pocket camera or you don't.  And when I think pocket camera I'm thinking (and I think most rational people are thinking....) something like the Canon S95.  Something you really can cram into a pocket and forget about for a while.  I'm not a pocket camera guy.  And I would ask the majority of you.......Isn't that why you have a camera on your iPhone?  My current phone is a Nokia that I got from Cingular (remember them?)  It doesn't do camera.  It barely does phone.....

But if you want something a little stouter, something with a bigger sensor, something with more tools (like a hot shoe) the days of the premier point and shoots, like the G10's and G11's I carried around in years past,  seem temporarily gone.  The LX-5 and the G12 are just the same as the cameras that came before them.  And in the case of the Canon line the S95 uses the same chip and processor as the bigger brother camera so what's really the point?

During my search and coinciding with my sudden interest in the EPL2 I stumbled across the product page for the EPL1 with lens and I was stunned by the price.  You can pick up a camera and zoom lens for around $400.  Less than the companies own recently announced, fixed lens "super" camera and less than the Canon G12 or the Panasonic.  And what do you get when you "settle" for a slightly bigger camera?  Interchangeable lens capability.  A much bigger sensor.  Really nice Jpegs.  The ability to add the best eye level electronic viewfinder on the market and entry into a world of legacy lenses and inexpensive adapters.  For the same price or less.

I can guarantee you'll have better low light performance.  And if you throw my current favorite lens (the Olympus 40mm 1.4 for the original Pen half frame film cameras) or the Panasonic 20m 1.7 on the front of this camera you'll be able to exercise much, much control over depth of field and maybe even that mysterious function called bokeh.

You know why the price has dropped.  Olympus is about to throw the new upgrade on the market.  But the upgrade is little more than the addition of a dial on the back and a few less buttons.  Nearly everything I like in the EPL2 is already on the one.  The sensor is purported to be the same (and the nearly the same as that used on the new e5).  You can use the same VF-2 eye level viewfinder.  It already has the incredible jpegs and the unbeatable blue sky mojo.  So, what does the new camera buy you?  A nicer body design.  A slightly faster interface.  The ability to use the groovy new PenPal.  And......did I mention the nicer body design?

If you were about to pull the trigger on a super compact I'd like to make the point that this represents a great gob of what we've been professing to love about smaller cameras along with features we asked for for nearly ten years and at a selling price that matches some slightly smaller, much slower, much less adaptable, and less handholdable cameras for the exact same price, or less.

If I did not already own one..........

I have three little Pens in my bag right now.  The EP2 (the prettiest and slowest), the EPL1 (the cheapest body with the biggest interfacial learning curve) and the EPL2 which is as fast and sharp as the EPL1 but better looking and slightly faster to use.  I'll probably buy the EPL2 because it's a good camera.  I haven't decided yet, though, because when I look at my files I'm not seeing that much on sensor improvement over the EPL1.  I haven't done my high ISO tests yet so some stuff remains to be seen.  But you'll be the second to know.

But I'll tell you this, with cameras this good at this price, I'm not giving much love to the super compact category of fixed zoom lens cameras.  And I'm pretty sure that's a good thing.

Finally,  I shot the EPL2 alongside the Canon 5Dmk2 today.  If you were banking on getting close on high ISO performance you'll need to stop smoking whatever you've been lighting up.  The Canon is still the undisputed champ of low light in my camera bag.  But everyone in the medical practice thought the Olympus was cuter.  I don't have a metric for that.

I love this review of my blog by quotidian photography.....

The Visual Science Lab I didn't really understand this blog when I started reading it. It's a bit all over the place. When I started reading the author, photographer Kirk Tuck, was obsessed with Olympus cameras and I really couldn't relate, not owning nor even wanting particularly to own an Olympus. But what gear he's shooting with is really beside the point. He is an incredibly prolific writer, spinning out endless essays about the worth of various parts of the photography business and process as a whole. What I love about him most is that he changes his mind almost every week. Yet I wouldn't characterize him as wishy-washy or indecisive. He's just a bit quicksilver, unpredictable. Always a good read. Even when you don't particularly care to purchase or even try the equipment he's talking about.


From Quotidian Photography (blog)

Early Adapters and what that entails.

Can you tell what camera I used for these shots without looking at the EXIF data?  Can you tell when they were shot?  Many people think of themselves as early adopters of digital technology because they started shooting with a Nikon D1x or a Canon 30D.  Others consider themselves to be early adopters because they were using a film scanner to bring images into the fold.  I recently looked thru a folder that contained images from my third generation of digital cameras and it actually holds up very well.

Starting back in 1996 we used a FujiFilm DS300 camera for some of our event work.  It was only 1.3 megapixels but I remember pressing it into service on a Motorola shoot.  We were doing all the documentation with 35mm film but we needed to print and deliver 100 11x14 inch prints over night.  They were going to put the prints on a kinetic display that attendees would walk thru on their way to the first meeting, the next day.

My assistant and I did 100 portraits and we tried to limit our shooting to five shots per person because editing was slow going back then.  Few real image management programs were available then and the ones that existed were glacial and prone to crashing.  We had two of the Epson wide carriage printers.  I can't remember the model number but it might have been the 1200.  The old camera and printers did the job.  There was no preview LCD screen on the back of the DS300.  You shot it on faith.  And you definitely used your flash meter.  Just to repeat:  There was no preview screen on the back.  I love the PCMCIA memory cards we used.  And at $600 for 64 megabytes we were careful not to lose them.

The job above was done for Tivoli Systems back in 1998 or 1999, in Madrid.  We were using film cameras for most of the work but the webmasters insisted that we try to capture and send a generous handful of images everyday for a web display.  We also used digital for quick press release images.  Since digital was an afterthought and I would be carrying a bunch of film gear, and film,  I decided to take the brand new Nikon Coolpix 950 along.  I cobbled together a corded hot shoe for flash and I bought both the wide angle and the telephoto attachable accessory lenses for extra width and extra reach.

Did the wide angle distort?  Just look at the stage shot.  But the telephoto adapter was good.  Just look at the CEO on stage just above.

I shot 800 images with the digital camera over the course of the week and spent my evenings downloading to the brand new Apple Blueberry laptop and burning CD's with a 4x CD burner.  The joy of it all.  At least that camera had an LCD on the back.  And from what I remember it was pretty good, but pretty small.  Amazingly we did a ton of work with that little camera.

But being a very early adopter (Fuji DS300) means finding your own work arounds for everything that pops up.  From computer incompatibilites to card corruptions.  There was very little trouble shooting software for memory cards back then, much less recovery software.  And since about 400 people in the U.S. owned the camera (maybe fewer) there wasn't a big network on the web to consult.  But good technique counted double back then.

A few years later I shot my first website project with a Canon G2 and the food images from that are still great at websize today.

I bring all of this up because I've lived on such a roller coaster over the last year.  I got the Canon 5D2 for its high resolution but most of the images end up on the web or in show productions where 1080i standard is par for the course.  I've recently started working with the Olympus EPL2 which is a consumer camera, one step up from a point and shoot.  People loved the two images I posted from it yesterday.  That camera is cheaper than all of the cameras I mentioned above by a factor of 2 to 5X and yet the images are striking.

Do we buy the new cameras to assure ourselves or because we really need them for work?  I guess we do both.  But if I didn't do this for a living I sure would have thought long and hard about giving up some of the early cameras to upgrade.  The Nikon D200 wasn't much of an actual upgrade over the D100.  The Fuji S5 didn't blow the S2 away and the Olympus e3 sure didn't wallop the e1.  In some regards the user is still more important than the camera.  But so much depends on the intended target for the images.  A Nikon Coolpix 950 against a Nikon D3x for a 20 by 30 inch enlargement is the obvious comparison but below 8x10 inches things look like more and more shades of gray.

Review Notes: I'm working on my EPL2 review but I want to manage your expectations.  If flare rears it's ugly head, I'll talk about it, but I won't go out shooting into the blazing sun looking for it.  Ditto red spots.  I'll slap on a 40mm 1.4 and shoot some high ISO stuff but I won't be doing the DPR thang where I shoot a boring still life set up at every single setting.

I'm shooting the camera and the two lenses they sent along just the way I'd normally shoot a camera and that's what I'm going to talk about.  So far it seems promising.  Takes a day or two to get in the groove.

Olympus EPL2 Review, first installment.

This afternoon I shot my first stuff with the EPL2.  Fadya came over to the studio to help me do photos for an upcoming book and I pulled out the camera with the 40-150mm zoom and the VF-2 mounted on top.  I stuck the unit on top of my tripod and grabbed my meter to take an incident light reading from Fadya's position.  When I looked through my finder, set in the 6:6 crop mode it so reminded me of the images I used to get from my old Hassleblad that I switched the color setting to monochrome and started shooting.

We were using a since light source.  It was two LED lights thru a 4x4 foot diffusion panel.  The lights far back and the panel close to Fadya.  I used a couple of black flags, one on either side of the diffusion panel, to keep light from spilling directly on the camera or on the back wall.  I used an ePhotoInc 1000 and a 500 LED fixture for the light.

My first two observations are these:  1.  The lens is very sharp, even wide open.  2.  The camera does a better monochrome Jpeg than the ones I get out of the Canon DSLR's.  Someone actually took some time to make a great conversion algorithm.  It's almost exactly how I would have liked a roll of black and white film to turn out.

I'll admit that I'm flustered by one thing:  I can't seem to reliably have the super menu come up on the back screen.  That sucks but I guess I just need to hit the manual again.

The focus was fast and the shutter noise wasn't bad at all.  Most of today's shoot was done on other cameras but I did knock out 50 or so frames and liked em just fine.  Fun little camera and it seems to work well with the BLS-1 battery that CAME IN THE BOX.

More to come.

Ooops! Almost forgot.  The camera does do color.  Very nice color.  Here's a jpeg:

Biking in the pouring rain? Naw, head to the studio.

I have a wonderful relationship with an oral surgery practice in Austin.  One of the campaigns I do for them is a monthly, "meet the doctor" print ad.  I interview the doctor and find out what their interests are, outside of the practice, and then I photograph them in a way that reflects that passion.  It's amazing how wide ranging their interests are.  From competitive ski jumpers to ranching and rodeo the range of ads has been wonderful fun.

For a recent ad we (the doctor and I) decided that we'd photograph him on his bike.  He doesn't long distance rides all over central Texas.  The problem came in the form of a fast approaching deadline and a weeklong forecast of rain and cold.  We changed gears and decided to shoot indoors.

This is a typical studio shot of a person against a white background, with a sky stripped into the background, courtesy of PhotoShop CS5.  The aspect that makes this different for me was the use of large and small LED panels as our light sources.

The main light to the left of the frame was a 1,000 bulb fixture aimed thru a Chimera ENG panel with a one stop diffuser on its frame.  Two 500 bulb fixtures washed  the background while a 183 bulb portable (battery driven) panel provided the backlight.  I need a tiny bit more fill so I pulled in a white board on the right of the frame and bounced a bit of light in from another small, battery driven fixture.

Your monitor may disagree but on my monitor, in print and on printed cards the color is bright, saturated and spot on.  It was easier building the light for this shot than most of the stuff I've done with flash because I could see exactly what I was getting and I had infinite control over the output of each light source.

We work closer with the LEDs than I have with flash and I'm not sure why that is but the quicker fall off means that I have more tight control in each quadrant of the image.

The image was shot with a Kodak SLR/n Pro and a 50mm lens.  Yes.  The Kodak.  Last month.

I like the shot because it's fun and simple and it was the perfect application of studio LED lighting.  We knew we had what we wanted the instant the lighting was complete.

Seeing yourself shoot is eerie. And if you think I'm mercurial about my camera choices look what I was shooting with that day!!!

We were busy shooting images of Heidi for the second book.  The one on studio lighting.  I'd forgotten that we were testing the 40 meg Leaf AF7i at the same time.  Gosh, that was one gorgeous lens.  Sure impressed the heck out of the two photographers that dropped by the studio that week.  The clients.  meh. No reaction.  All those shallow people cared  about was the images.  Go figure.

And so it begins. My first impressions about the EPL2 Camera.

It's a fun day when cool little cameras come from beyond and I get to play with them in a consequence free environment.  If you've followed my blog for any time at all you'll know that I have a real soft spot for the Olympus Pen cameras.  I think these guys are fulfilling a vast market segment that caters to non-professional photographers who want a small and light camera that can use long lenses to photograph their kids at soccer games and little league games but at the same time can be put in a purse or a really big pocket.  Pros and advanced amateurs like their big cameras but only because they tend to think of themselves as "outliers" who need that extra 5-10% of performance and features that the big manufacturers cram into their full size cameras.  The camera that came today is one I reached out and asked Olympus if I could review.  It's their new EPL2.  It's not meant to be their top line camera, it's a refresh of the EPL1.  In the next week I'll be shooting with it and carrying it with me as much as possible and on Monday the 24th I'll post an in-depth user's report about the camera and both lenses.

Why am I so interested? Because I've shot with the EP2 for a year and the EPL1 for almost a year and find them to be wonderful art cameras.  The kind of non-threatening, street shooting camera that will give you good results under most conditions and give the option of using an incredible range of legacy lenses from a bunch of sources.  This camera line has spawned an aftermarket in lens adapters for marks as varied as Leica and Nikon.  The updated camera should give me better high ISO performance, great video and easier handling with the new surround dial on the back.

Another thing that interest me is the Penpal PP-1 which is a bluetooth device that sits in the accessory shoe and should enable me to transfer images from the EPL2 to any other bluetooth enabled device.  That means I could send images to my laptop or you iphone via the camera menu.  Pretty darn cool.  I'll see how well it works with a couple of Mac laptops.

I guess the guys at Olympus PR didn't know about my stash of Pen and Pen compatible lenses so they sent along the new 40-150mm zoom lens.  It's incredibly light and should be silent enough to use with the video mode and, hopefully, not register on an audio track.  I'm more interested in putting on my 60mm 1.5 lens and shooting some portraits but I'll put the 40-150mm thru its paces as well.

I just threw this image (above) in because I like the way it goes out of focus on the edges.  Not because I'm making a special point about the lens.  Just wanted you to know.  I was shooting this stuff with a Canon 7D and a 50 macro 2.5.  The lighting is solely from an LED ringlight, which I think is really cool.

My first impression of the overall system is how small and lightweight it is.  Even with lens attached and battery installed.  It feels much lighter than the EP2 and even a bit lighter than the EPL1.  This is probably the last time you'll see an image of this camera while in my possession without the EVF-2 electronic viewfinder.  I think that this is the pivotal accessory that makes this whole system covetable.

The screen on the back is bigger (3 inches) and much higher res (460K).  Not quite the same as a Nikon D3x but wildly better than anything we had on a camera three years ago at just about any price.

Having the wheel on the back should make it easier to change aperture and shutter speeds.  I love the black finish.  It's fine with me if they make a chrome one as long as I don't have to buy it.  Overall the camera and lens package is not much bigger than a Canon G12 and I can think of a bunch of reasons why I'd much rather spend the extra cash.  Here are some of the reasons:  Nikon 50mm 1.1.2, Leica 35mm 1.4 Asph., eight Olympus original Pen FT manual focus lenses.  If you need more reasons then how about a sensor that's over five times the surface area and gives a  (we'll see) clean 1600 ISO and the potential to go to 6400.

The final "thumbs up" that I'll give to Olympus is that they've kept the battery the same so that all of us who already shoot various Pen models will be able to use our stash of batteries interchangeably.  Thank you.

Stay tuned for more random explorations.  It is really pretty.  I can hardly wait for the battery charger to give me the green light.

Note:  If you do Twitter you could follow me.  Just hit the link on the left side of the blog....

A meeting of the minds. Working pros meet academia.

For the last few years I've been a member of the advisory board for the photography program at Austin Community College.  Once a year all the members of the advisory board meet and exchange information with the chair and the faculty of the program.  This exchange of information helps the faculty by supplying real world feedback to make sure that their offerings reflect the industry.  Since the working pros come from different sectors of photography their points of view are all a bit different and that helps to smooth out the outliers.

The program yields an associate degree and, per Texas rules, is very much a vocational program aimed at turning out people who can go to work in the field.  It's not a fine arts program that doesn't need to take income earning potential into consideration.  It is also the second largest associate photography program in the country (USA).  The quality of education is very good and the facilities would leave many working pros panting in envy.  State of the art Macs abound as do Epson 3880 printers, high end film scanners and a king's ransom in Profoto Lighting gear and accessories.  It's a good school and they make a point of pulling in guests to do evening lectures on a wide range of topics.  In a short space of time I listened to presentations from Jack Reznicki, Vincent Laforet and Will Crockett.

Austin is already a heavy duty photo town with UT's art and photojournalism schools turning out their share of students as well as a great program at St. Edwards University.  There's even an Art Institute just up the road that churns out photographers.  But the ACC program does a better job than any of them to prepare students for the business aspects they will encounter in the real world, and they do at least as good a job (I'd say better) teaching the nuts and bolts.  You want a big dose of art history or art theory or visual rhetoric with your technical knowledge?  Not going to happen at ACC.

But back to my point.  What did we discuss and what was our consensus?  To a person, from real world experience, we've come to the conclusion that in a second tier, regional market like Austin, jammed packed with aspiring newcomers who drive the market down, anyone wanting to make a living and earn $60 to $80K per year will likely have to become more than "just" a photographer.  We will have to be flexible enough to create, or for us veterans, rebrand ourselves as multidisciplinary content creators.  I spoke with two of the leading photographers who service the wedding and portrait markets and their sales are way down.  The corporate guys have seen their budgets cut in half.  We agreed that we'll all have to look beyond the traditional role and create new profit centers in our businesses.

Some of the avenues we talked about were obvious.  Most of the corporate shooters are already knee deep in becoming video producers for their existing and new clients.  One wedding photographer is branching into wedding planning.....and that's a natural and organic extension.  I spend as much time writing about photography and supplying the copywriting for many of the ads I shoot as I do behind the camera.  Others have gravitated into one-on-one teaching, group workshops and workshops that offer experiential entertainment.  A glamor photographer is busy creating apps of his most popular work for people to load onto tablets and laptops for a modest fee.  In nearly every niche photographers are stretching out to find natural adjuncts to their basic skill sets.

As a side note we talked about rationally identifying whether or not what we are selling is what the consumers want to buy.  The consumer side of the business was always monetized around the idea that people wanted to have prints.  And that the print represented the value source. But a whole new generation gets their hit of family photos, wedding photos and more on a 50 inch LED TV or an iPad or a phone screen.  They're just not interested in prints and if they do buy them they are looking for small and manageable, not big and framed.  So, why aren't the photographers upselling the shooting part of the equation and then delivering it on a customer friendly platform?  Why shouldn't wedding couples look for their coverage to be delivered on a tablet, with a back up on DVD?  Why should they have to want prints if they don't?

And in commercial photography why do we keep aiming all our focus on advertising agencies if they are the prime users of cheap stock?  Why not also go directly to the clients and put our selling proposition to the final arbiters as well as their de facto gatekeepers?

Even in marketing we've gotten pushed into a narrow structure.  At some point everyone decided that all marketing could be done electronically.  We abandoned post cards and print ads and shows on the walls of chic coffee houses and bars and we made everything virtual.  But everyone did it at once and now we have a billion needles in one really large haystack and most of the people who come to the haystack aren't even in the market for our services.

Interesting to me is that everyone talked about how much market share of holiday shopping ended up at Amazon.com.  But, reality check, e-commerce only accounted for about 9% of total holiday shopping.  The other 91% of the money walked into the stores.  And we need to understand, as working photographers, that while the allure of "free" advertising and marketing on the web is a powerful concept it may not be effectively reaching the people who write checks to us.

If I had the budget to experiment (and fewer pressing projects on the schedule) I'd look for local advertising the reaches my market (executives and upper tier marketing folks) and I'd probably do well running radio spots on news and talk radio during drive time.  I'd also do well with a few quarter page print ads in the business journals.  Wouldn't be sexy web marketing, and it sure wouldn't be free, but I bet I wouldn't have a single competitor crowding the airwaves and I'd have a pipeline straight to the likeliest buyers instead of everyone out there who has enough time on their hands to cruise the web and drink coffee.

So, will the curriculum change to register these new directions and thoughts?  If it does I think it will be more glacial than the speed of business and in a year or two we'll be identifying new areas to concentrate on.  But it does remind me that all of this (photography, marketing and business ) is a moving target and the sooner we deal with it the more successful we'll be.  The web?  Maybe.  Postcards?  Definitely.

Self assigned and out of my comfort zone. Push and grow.

 Belinda buys these bags of clementines every time she heads to the grocery store.  I'm not a real clementine fan but she sure is.  Loves them.  Yesterday she came home with another bag and for once I paid attention because I'd just put away this cool glass platter and I thought the two colors would look great, contrasted.  So I grabbed the bag of clementines and the glass platter and headed across the walk to the studio.  I'd been itching to wipe out the big LEDs and light something other than a human face.

I must have tried 50 or 60 variations to get stuff I liked.  And it was hard.  Like getting back into swim practice after taking months and months off.  I'd try a few clementines on the platter and I'd try all the clementines on the platter.  I had three different lights I was using.  I had my 5d2 on a tripod with the 24-105mm lens.  I tried different angles and different focal lengths.  I tried different lighting ratios and everything from one light to all three.

I played with live view, to good effect.  I've posted these images just to show what I was working with.  I'll never show them to a client but I'll chalk it all up to research.  And I'll try this again next time Belinda brings in a large bag of clementines.  I'll try until I master the art of clementine and platter photography.  Because I'll be able to apply what I learn to other jobs.  

So, what did I learn in my two hours of mini-orange juggling yesterday evening?  I'll start with the most important thing:  If you want a good white background don't even bother to start out with a piece of foamcore.  Go right to the shiny white formica.  And make sure there's some rear light illuminating said background to drive the detail in the whites to zero.

Live view is cool but it doesn't show you what the image looks like at f16 until you push the stop down button or take the shot and review it.  

Using one light on many clementines at a very low angle yields gloppy looking areas of shadow and it's not very attractive.

Big LED lights work really well for still life work, even without diffusion.  More is more fun.  I used two of the 500 bulb fixtures and one of the 1,000's.  Color correction was a non-issue.

Clementines actually taste pretty good.

I'm not a designer.  It's always better for me to have a great art director standing by to arrange things and decide on points of view for any subject that doesn't smile back at me.

I learned that you can try and try and try but at some point you have to give credit where credit is due.  Art direction can be crucial.

Thankfully, after several hours of pushing and prodding and focusing and mumbling, the phone rang and it was Belinda, telling me that dinner was ready.  Saved by the bell.

But today I was out shooting a portrait and I felt that my compositional skills seemed just a bit better than usual.  Maybe these kinds of exercises convey the same benefits as physical exercise.  

I like the platter.