Nothing Beats a Road Trip.

school house on the Johnson Ranch

We saddled up mid-morning, all caffeinated and happy, and headed due west on a road trip to Johnson City and beyond. It was a cold, crisp Friday morning last week. Well, cold by central Texas Standards. The temperature where gloves aren't exactly necessary but sure feel nice.

In the car were the photographer/video guy, the dramaturg/researcher and the public relations person from Zach Theatre. Coming along behind us in a pick-up truck was the theater's artistic director and our actor. Our mission was to research LBJ in order to make the upcoming play more insightful and faithful to the real personality of our former president. 

I was juggling two jobs, something working journalists seem to have been pushed into in recent years. Over one shoulder I had a Nikon D810 all rigged up for shooting video, with a microphone in the hotshoe and a giant loupe clamped to the rear LCD screen. There was an extra battery in my left pocket and the 64 gigabyte card in slot #1 gave me confidence that I'd be able to shoot for hours. 

My relationship with microphones is dicey. I understand them, have had success in the studio and on controlled locations with them but there's something about "run and gun" work in quick changing environments that always leaves me feeling that I've got the wrong tool on at the wrong time on the wrong camera. I started with a small shotgun mic but it sounded to noisy and I didn't have a dead cat wind sock for it so I tossed it back into the bag and grabbed a Rode NTG2. I had the "dead cat" but if I'm anywhere beyond about two feet from someone speaking I can never get enough gain out of that microphone. I ended up sticking an older Rode StereoMic on the hotshoe and it seemed like the best compromise of the three. I would have used wireless lavalieres but the cast of characters ebbed and flowed and grew and I only have two microphones. I'd no sooner mic one person than they would probably walk off while someone brand new would come into the group and toss out that perfect quote... Damn. Sound out in the wilderness can be challenging.

Over the other shoulder I had a Nikon D7100 with an all purpose zoom on it. When I got too frustrated with audio chaos I would let the D810 drop over my shoulder, grab the 7100 and do what I know how to do best---just take photos. Just as I have a love/hate relationship with most microphones I also have a love/hate relationship with Nikon's 18-140mm everything kit lens. On the plus side the range is great, the center sharpness is more than adequate and the VR works like a champ. On the down side the corners are softer than Brie cheese and the in camera distortion correction uses too much of the edge of the frames to do its work. That 18mm quickly becomes more like a 22 or 23mm instead. But the combination of good reach, adequate sharpness and killer stabilization keeps me using it for stuff that happens without a script or a plan.

Hat in LBJ's childhood home.

When we're doing jobs for clients I like using the raw files on the D7100 but I use them on this camera like a modern version of a Jpeg. By that I mean that I've got the camera set to shoot 12 bit raws which are also compressed. And since the menu gives me a choice between lossless compression and compression I'm going to assume that the compressed file is on the edge of being visibly less able than the other option. But this compromise buys me two things: I get to cram about a third more images on a memory card, and, I still get to dial in color temperature, sharpening and the like after the fact in post processing without destroying file info.

Traveling out of town means we get to sample new food in new restaurants. We took the National Park Service Ranger's advice and ate at the 290 Diner in Johnson City. Lovely people. Good food. I wish I had ordered after the P.R. lady. She got a BLT and then had the diner add a fried egg to it. It looked delicious and the bacon was so wonderful looking that it bordered on food porn. 

One of the fringe benefits of a group trip like this is someone else driving. I got to sit in the front passenger seat and stare out the window like a puppy. And if it was boring outside I could close my eyes behind my hipster sunglasses and no one would know I wasn't paying attention or being earnest.

The trip from Austin takes about 45 minutes (assuming you don't want to go at rush hour...) and it takes one through some really pretty Hill Country. You go past the turn off for Pedernales State Park and there are at least two Dairy Queen restaurants between here and there. Johnson City is very small. They are maybe 1800 people who live there but the population might swell to 2,000 during the weekdays as people come in from all around to work at the Pedernales Electrical Cooperative and at the restaurants. Very different from the million + people who live in the Austin area (11th most populous city in the U.S.) and the twenty million who seem to be trying to drive here most weekdays...

I always find the low population density calming...

Anyway, the job was fun. I just followed people around and tried to catch interesting conversations about LBJ and if that didn't work I tried to make pretty pictures. One thing I came to realize is how poorly configured DSLRs are for long bouts of handheld video taping and how unprepared I was to hold a camera of that bulk still and vibrationless for more than a few minutes at a time. I came to love my tripod and hate the times when I had to handhold the rig---example: shooting in a moving car!

While the three point hold with the Loupe as the third point goes a long way to stability I'll never understand how anyone anywhere can hold a camera of that weight and size out at arm's length to view the naked screen and have any expectation of stability. I know I could never do it, no matter how much I might practice.

After grappling with the D810 for a while I realized that one of the features and flaws of shooting video with a big-ass, full frame camera is that one had a very limited depth of field. Great for those narrow depth of field shot of the half naked beauty rising from a nap on a gloriously lit set but sheer hell when trying to keep multiple people in reasonable focus without always having to shoot wide. 

At a certain point I gave up the much better video image quality of the D810 and switched over to shooting video with the D7100 I'd brought along for still shooting. The smaller frame, using the same aperture on the 18-140mm got me a happier number of in focus shots. One of the unsung benefits of using the M4:3 cameras as video cameras, at least in these kinds of situations, is the forgiving nature of more ample depth of field for the same angles of view. All in all this kind of work would either drive me back to using the GH4 or EM5-2 all the time or maybe even buying a dedicated video camera with a nicer form factor. There's a time and a place for shallow depth of field and equally there is a time and a place for deep focus. It's so much fun learning and re-learning on the job. 

Telephone in LBJ's childhood home.

I was happy to shoot video and photos but happier still to be part of a small, road trip community. We stopped at an isolated McDonald's for coffee. We zoomed around LBJ's ranch in a Lincoln. We heard amazing stories and we say some beautiful ranch country. And then, best of all, someone else did the driving back home. As I dragged my gear back to the car I thought about my usual litmus test for projects and their fun quotient: would I want to do it again? The answer for Friday would be: Yes.

Wash basin in LBJ's childhood home. 

If you come to Austin for SXSW and you are disappointed 

at the highly diluted nature of the festival and the 

massive crowds of similar people you might want to 

rent a car and head out to Johnson City.

It may be a good cure of overweaning hipsterism.

A quick advertising note: Craftsy is offering a bunch of course at up to 50% off. It's a good way to learn new stuff. You might want to browse their photo offerings. I'll be looking at the cooking classes.....   Here's the link!

The benefits of simplicity. A street photographer's zen.

Lisbon, Portugal.

When we work with fully manual cameras that have no meters, no autofocusing mechanism and no zoom lenses we tend to work more quickly because we aren't slowed down by having to make choice after choice at the time of shooting. 

When I shot with a Leica M4 and a 50mm lens I followed the same routine when I was outside. I would Scotch tape a Kodak exposure guide (small slip of paper with pictograms on it) to the bottom of the camera. I would walk outside and judge the light, then I would look at the guide to decide the right exposure setting. I would set it on the camera and it would stay set until I noticed that the light had changed. 

I liked working at f5.6 or f8.0 apertures on the 50mm when I worked with Tri-X because in any light short of full sun I could use those apertures and work within the limitations of the camera's 1/1,000th of second top shutter speed. I would preset a hyperfocal distance that would cover the usual subject and if needed would fine tune depending on the distance from my camera to the subject. 

With the camera set this way taking a good picture was as easy as seeing the subject, raising the camera to the eye and then pushing the shutter button. No thought. No second thoughts. 

Once the moment is captured we might try to fine tune. It is usually futile as the clearest seeing of the image seems to be the moment of recognition. 

Auto focus introduces conscious thinking. Everything from deciding on the focus points to confirming focus. None of it is instantaneous. None of it is reflexive. It's different. Ah well.

A quick advertising note: Craftsy is offering a bunch of course at up to 50% off. It's a good way to learn new stuff. You might want to browse their photo offerings. I'll be looking at the cooking classes.....   Here's the link!

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The physical ins and outs of shooting video footage and making the camera move. It's so much harder than it looks to me. Yikes! Occupational Therapy Learning Curve. OTLC.

This image has nothing to do with this particular blog post.

It's an image from Lisbon in the late 1990's.

I liked the tile on the side of the building.

Leica M6. 50mm Summicron. 

I got hired by a photographer for today. He was shooting the installation of an art project at an airport and needed someone to provide video documentation of the installation as well. The installed art work is hundreds of feet long and covers two expanses (two walls) of a great room. We had control of the location from 10am until 2pm. There was "hard stop" at 2 pm because an arriving international flight would disgorge passengers who needed to transit through "our" space. 

The best way to show the installation on video was to move across the length of the art. Fortunately we had a floor that was smooth as glass and a large cart with soft wheels and a true bearing. My most important shots were done by placing a stout tripod on the top of the cart, loading the cart with ballast to give it more inertia and then practicing my pacing. I'd line up the shot and then use the joins on the floor to stay on the right path, perpendicular to the wall.  When I first started planning the video portion of the project I was thinking "wheel chair" as a quick and inexpensive alternative to laying a couple hundred feet of dolly track but the cart was even better.

We needed a fun opening shot and a perfectly placed escalator allowed me to descend into the room and into the art in a very visually fun way. Through experimentation I found that the best way for me to hold a camera very steadily on moving stairs is to use a loupe/finder over the rear screen and have a three points of contact strategy. The three points being my left hand, my right hand and my forehead/eye socket.  I also engaged the vibration reduction on the lens I was shooting. 

We tried using a slider but the room's volume and dimensions, as well as the placement of the art in relationship to the lighting, really necessitated using longer lenses from further back. There's not enough relative movement in some long lens shots to get the feeling of movement across to the reader in any convincing way using a slide movement. If we'd needed to shoot close and wide it would have been a different story. 

Some of the best shots of the day were a result of just finding the right vantage points for good side to side pans. We had the usual hurdles like mid-room pillars and non-removable signage but we can make short work of those by using some judicious dissolves to and from the b-roll I shot. Panning is much less a technical consideration than it is a matter of coordination and lots of practice. I haven't done it enough to get perfect pans every time so I need to do lots of takes and work all the time on my technique. I can only imagine that the guys who are really good at getting pans at just the right speed and smoothness must practice for months and years before getting their technique just right. No workshop shortcuts available...

Like most brain functions combined with hand functions it takes practice making the two work together. Pans can be unforgivingly obvious when they aren't done in a skillful way. I'd like to think a better quality ($$$) fluid head will make my panning moves much better but I can already see that there's no magic bullet. Some stuff just has to be gotten to straight through before it really works. My big hope is that perfect panning is not another one of those things that takes ten thousand hours to accomplish. 

I do know that the pans worked better when I used one hand on the camera and one hand on the tripod arm. I know now that it's easier to do a fast pan than a slow pan and it's almost impossible to do a really good very slow pan; at least for me.

I've learned in previous projects just how useful detail footage and shots from other angles are when editing. If a part of one pan goes bumpy it's always possible to cut away to a different angle and then cut back when my overall performance improves somewhere in the original shot. 

I'm back in the studio now and looking at footage. It doesn't look bad. I know enough to know that I don't know enough and don't have enough practice yet to be good. But I can, at this juncture, get stuff that's serviceable. Studio dog is in the studio basket with her PolarTec bathrobe (and inadvertent "gift" from me) right next to the little radiator heater. She is subtly trying to tell me to wrap up this blog because we're falling behind on the schedule. The schedule goes like this: Retouch a couple of headshots, play fetch. Retouch a couple of headshots, play fetch. Retouch a couple of headshots, play fetch. Retouch a couple of headshots, play fetch. Retouch a couple of headshots, play fetch. Retouch a couple of headshots, play fetch.........

Working with professional actors. A quick take.

Steve Vinovich as LBJ.

I spent Wednesday, Friday and Saturday following NYC actor, Steve Vinovich, around the LBJ Museum, Johnson City, the LBJ ranch and also to an interview with two of LBJ's staffers before ending up at the Whisenhunt Stage at Zach Theatre yesterday in the late afternoon. Steve and the artistic team at Zach have been researching everything they can for their upcoming production of, All The Way. It's a play about LBJ's presidency. 

There are three cameras I've used to shoot "run and gun" video, more controlled video interviews and still images and all of them are Nikons. The best of the batch for video and still images is the D810. It's big and solid and it creates great files in both spheres. 

Why the VSL posts are now truncated in RSS readers.

 A few readers have asked me why the posts are suddenly truncated in their news feed apps. I thought I would explain. For years I've been writing this content. It takes time and effort. The end product is intellectual property. By putting the full post on the RSS feed it makes it super easy for unsavory and unethical people to automate the theft of the entire post, with images, automatically. These gutless slime then take the articles, wrap advertising around my content and present it as their own content on their websites. They use my site name and my name and content to drive eyeballs to their sites in order to generate advertising click throughs. If I truncate the articles you have to go through the "arduous" task of clicking through a link to read the FREE content. Sorry for the heavy lifting (sarcasm richly intended).

I don't mind writing the blog content for free but I sure have a big problem with people leveraging my work to sell stuff that makes them money when I go out of my way to keep advertising on the site to a minimum. And when we do advertise for something it is at least topical.

The web is a such a wonderful place for criminals but at least it's hard to get physically mugged online...

Click the link or just give up and read something over at someone else's site. I'm doing my part; it's the writing and photography. Ease of distribution isn't anything I necessarily signed up for. Just thought you'd like to know.

Spending time in the great shadow of LBJ.

It was a nice day in Johnson City, Texas. The temperature for most of the day was in the 50's. The sun was shining and I was surrounded by people and things of great interest. I'd been commissioned to go along with a group from the theater to document a research trip into the life and legend of Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Actor, Steve Vinovich, artistic director, David Steakley, P.R. genius, Lauren Lovell and I met with a National Park Service Ranger named, Russ and we explored LBJ's boyhood home in town and just about every square inch of the ranch and the "Texas White House" with an expert. To make it all the more spectacular we did most of our tour in a convertible Lincoln Continental, circa 1965. This is the exact model of car that Johnson insisted on driving for most of his life in politics.

I went back and forth between two cameras but I leaned on the D810 the most. I shot a mix of video and stills that we'll use to create marketing pieces for the show, All The Way. 

I came home with about 20 gigabytes of images and video and I think I could have shot more.

No lighting today and mostly a microphone on camera. But it's important to understand that this was a fast moving day with no budget for assistants and crew, and no room to drag them along with us. We'll use the footage mostly with a voice over track but there are a good number of audio gems in the data and I hope we can use those as well.

We're shooting more tomorrow but it will be people who live in Austin and were close to LBJ during his life. I've shot more video in the last two days than I have in the last two months and it feels great to be engaged in it. The more I shoot the more I learn about the current process. Also, the more I add to my future shopping list. Hello audio gear....

Tomorrow is a big day. I've got swim practice (of course) followed immediately by the video interviews of people who lived history. When we wrap that I'll be back to the studio to dump the video gear and grab electronic flashes and a white background and then I'm back to the theater to shoot the advertising promotion shots against white. I would normally put Monday aside for a binging of editing and post production but I'm booked on another video project in another location. Looks like Tues. and Weds. will be a couple of those days when I find myself chained to the computer trying to get everything sorted and off to the client and the editors for the projects.

I know I said I wanted to do more video but I'm starting to get the idea that I should be more circumspect about the things for which I wish....but right now it's fun!

Gotta get one of those Lincolns. What a cool car!!!

Best comment: "But when you really think of it, isn't it a minor miracle that you can do all those things so very very well with such a tiny collection of gear? Ten years ago we'd have burned you for a witch!"

Photo ©Lane Orsak.

VSL reader, Amolitor, made me laugh out loud when he responded to my whiny column about not being able to find just the right gear to handle-----everything---perfectly. "Ten years ago we'd have burned you for a witch!"  

When I think back ten years the idea that we'd be firing away at 36 megapixel was fairly believable but that the same camera could switch, at the touch of a button, in a near state of the art video camera would have been a bit much to believe. 

I guess I should think more before I write!  :-)  (But frankly I was just happy to be back writing!).

Some thoughts on simplicity and photography.

continuous light sources rock. Except when they don't... and other stuff. 

More than just about anything else in my business is my own ongoing desire to simplify. Once you enter the commercial arena and market yourself as a bit of a generalist there is a push or inertia to be ready for any contingency! This week is a great example. My work has been a royal mix of portraits, run and gun video, video interviews on locations, and some vague photojournalism. We used studio flash for one set of portraits at one downtown law firm and LED panels at a different law firm. In all, twenty five or so portraits. The video interviews were lit with one small LED light which gave just enough boost to make everything look natural. In the last three days I've worked with a video tripod with fluid head, a stout studio tripod and a smaller tripod that live in the car most of the time.

And between every assignment there's the rush back to the studio to reconfigure the cases and add or subtract gear. Add microphones and a boom pole. Take out the portable flashes, etc.

But the scatter doesn't seem to stop at the packing and shooting. When we get back to the office some of the work gets done in Final Cut Pro X and some goes into Lightroom while other images go straight into PhotoShop. It's enough to make one feel stretched.

I had the idea, after buying a Nikon D810, that all the work would slowly get aimed over to the big Nikon and I'd stop picking and choosing gear before each outing but in the short run it doesn't seem to be working out that way. The main benefit of the D810 is the resolution and beautiful dynamic range of the full frame sensor but when I'm shooting portraits I love to shoot and shoot until I get just the right expression and composition. If I shoot with the D810 as it is meant to be shot I go home with enormous amounts of data for images that will eventually find their highest and best use as content on websites or as quarter page magazine fodder. Don't get me wrong, we have those assignments where having the biggest file available is a decided advantage but....in the meantime I find myself generally grabbing a D610 for portrait work and even then I find myself wishing it had the half and quarter sized raw file choices that Kodak so brilliantly put into their DSLR/n cameras.
We could shoot most of our portraits as six megapixel files with no problems at all but I don't want to give up the flexible post fix-it-up potential of the raw files.

On one recent job I just got fed up with the file sizes on the D810 and started shooting medium sized Jpegs. And you know what? They worked pretty well.

Then I thought I'd be happy using the D810 for video work but even there one has to make a few compromises. I'm happy using the camera for most video projects. The files are nice and the controls are simple and straight forward. BUT.... just this morning one of my clients called me all excited to let me know that we got permission to film a complete interview with an celebrated politician. There's not time limit to the interview, it could go to an hour. But here's the nasty deal, the high res file setting on the Nikon D810 will only give me twenty minutes of shooting before I have to stop and then re-start. Back to the GH4 for long form motion stuff.

If I simplified my business what would it look like? I'd have one camera model, two copies. The camera would shoot amazingly high resolution raw files but it would also have the choice of medium and small raw files with no compromises. The cameras would have EVFs. Really, as nice as the D810 optical finder is the reality of work calls for an ever increasing amount of video and an EVF would also (hopefully) mean much faster contrast detect autofocus.  I'd want the camera to shoot full frame so I could get that wondrous depth of field control. The camera would have a pretty video codec and a way to set the microphone sensitivity during recording. And every camera that comes out from this date forward should allow the user to shoot right up until the internal memory card is full or the battery is exhausted.

Any perfect camera should have a big ass battery like one of the pro Nikons or Canons. One of those 4500 shot kind of batteries. Lots of oomph. And as long as we're spec'ing an ultimate camera we can't leave out really good, in body, image stabilization.

If I could get a cosmic product blender from the Marvel Universe I'd toss in a Panasonic GH4 and a Nikon D810 and give it a long whirl. Maybe I'd toss in the EVF from the new Sony A7ii...

But that still wouldn't solve all the issues of scattered business syndrome. I've actually come to realize, through deep reflection and meditation (humor implied) that most of my adventures with different lights have been done in order to find the perfect (non-existent) lighting for a photographer who would like to hopscotch back and forth from moving to not moving images. I thought fluorescents would work (and they are good for video) but even the best units cause some banding when we use shutter speeds over 1/60th of second. I liked HMIs but even with electronic ballasts they have some flicker or banding issues I ran into. Again, perfect for video but not quite there for all still work. My battery powered LED panels are rock solid on the non-flickering front but like all the other lights mentioned here the Achille's heel is working in conjunction with sunlight. You just can't overpower the sun without frying your client's eyes.

And it always leads us back to electronic flash. And then it's portable flash versus high power flash. Both of which I believe I need (from time to time). What a mess I've created for myself. Sometimes I wish I were in one of those occupations where there's one way to do what is required and that's how you do it over and over again. No choices. No additional inventory or knowledge required. Just plug and play.

On the lighting front it would be so cool to have a small lighting instrument, the size of a 12 ounce Coke can that could belt out about 600 W/S but could be dialed way down to 12 W/S. It would also be capable of TTL flash with all the major brands and, as a bonus, it would double as an incredibly powerful but flexible LED source. Like a Fiilex P360 on steroids. The added bonus to the bonus would be the ability to control both color temperature and hue for all the permutations of light the instrument was capable of putting out.

So, after using it as a daylight flash source in the desert you could dial in a tungsten balance, switch to LED and use the same source through a diffusion scrim to use for video.

The real issue is not that we want to do so many things but that clients have different needs and different ideas of what is right for them. I guess we can make the scope of our offerings very narrow and turn down all the square blocks that don't fit into the round holes or we can just suck it up and master as many tools as we find we need.

Now, where is the Marvel Universe Cosmic Camera blender I've been asking for?

Today's adventure was all about using a Nikon D810 to complete a video assignment.

This photograph has nothing to do with today's topic. It was taken a number of years ago with a  Fuji S5 camera at a waste water treatment plant in Biloxi, Mississippi. It was late in the day and I had one of the first Nikon 12-24mm lenses on the front of the camera. Later on we did some night shots that I loved. Of wastewater holding tanks. Go figure. 

Today's project was a public relations assignment. Zach Theatre is doing a play about President Lyndon Baines Johnson. They've cast a great New York stage and movie actor to play the part of LBJ. My job was to accompany the actor, the theater's artistic director and the public relations manager to the LBJ Museum and Library and to videotape conversations between the actor and the museum's curator as they plumbed the depths and reality of the former president's personality and mannerisms.

The actor and artistic director would also be interviewed in the replica of the Oval Office and if there was time (there was) we'd brave the delicate mist that was falling and do a second set of semi-scripted monologs outside with the museum building in the background. Finally, I would need to follow them around the museum while they explored so I would have good B-roll footage to use, where needed, in the edit process.

I'll be doing the same sort of video shooting in Johnson City on Friday and on Saturday we'll do a series of videos with the actor along with several LBJ contemporaries and experts.

The museum was open to the public today so we needed to work around the visitors. This also limited me from using any electrical cords. But these were things I anticipated. I wanted to do all of my video work with the Nikon D810. I've tested it and even when writing to the internal memory card the files are very good and very compact. I knew we'd be moving all the time so I wanted to use a zoom. While I wish I had a 24-120mm f4, truthfully, the 24-85mm f3.5-4.5 worked just fine.

I packed a set of AKG headphones, one Rode NTG2 shotgun microphone, one Rode Stereo VideoMic, extra microphone batteries and extra attachment cables for both. I used a Benro fluid head on a Manfrotto Cine tripod. I brought along a Gitzo mic boom (which I didn't use) as well as a light stand and a boom holder.

I ended up doing a fair amount of handheld work. I used a big loupe on the back of the camera so I could see the rear screen clearly. I put the NTG-2 in the hotshoe for most of the long morning and worked in as close as I could with as wide an angle lens as I could. The sound through the phones was good and I was impressed by the automatic level setting in the audio. It was very nice and didn't have perceptible "pumping" or rising hiss floor.

I did bring along a Fotodiox 312 AS LED panel with me and we used it, in some fashion, for every single interview. We even helped a colleague from Time Warner get some light on our subject so her video would be more successful.

So, here's the basic process: Find a good spot to shoot in and figure out the composition. How wide could I go? How far in could I zoom? Would the location and my position be right for the audio?

Once I found my spot I would bring in my interviewees and finalize my composition. Then, with the camera in live view, I would zoom in and use the magnification to ensure accurate focus. I would zoom back out to start shooting. I kept the camera settings pretty much the same but with one "wild card" setting.

The camera was set to 1080p, 30 fps, highest quality, 1/60th of second shutter, aperture locked at f4.5. The only two things that were allowed to change were the ISO and the white balance.

Once everything was in place I'd bring up a histogram and fine tune the exposure by changing the ISO. I tried to stay around 400-800 but had no compunction at all about running all the way up to 3200. I let the auto ISO do its work in the interiors but when we went outside I realized that the camera's white balance was too accurate and the colors were blue and drab. Once outside I went into the WB menu and selected either cloudy or open shade and the images looked so much richer.

We worked and shot from 11:00 to 2:00 pm and then I headed back to the studio to spot check the work. The D810 gets you a beautiful video file almost automatically. Even f4.5 is wide enough of an aperture to drop backgrounds out of focus when you are zoomed out past 50mm.

We'll be moving quickly on the next two shooting days so I'm going through my packing to better decide what worked well and what just took up space.

The ever increasing amount of video work seems to be a trend. I'm also booked (by another photographer) to shoot the video component of an architectural job on Monday of next week. Seems his clients are moving somethings to video and the photographer ( a good friend) is anxious to create a team structure in which he can confidently offer both services on the same day. It helps that we see eye to eye on almost everything visual...

Note to the folks who are using Nikon cameras to move into video: They have very good color science but live view is a prodigious battery suck. It makes sense to allocated one battery per hour of shooting, on average.

The kit zoom is just fine for video and the VR (everyone else's I.S.) works pretty well to make a coffee addict's hands into almost surgical instruments!

I look forward to doing this work over and over again---especially since someone else will be editing.

I am back from my week of helping out with my family and I'm happy to report stability. When you crest 85 years old you aren't looking for massive improvements as much as you are hoping to maintain. Thanks for all the kind messages from my remarkably nice and well experienced friends here on VSL. It's feeling like home to me.