Pursuit of beauty in photography. That's why we make portraits.

I have a small studio in Austin, Texas.

I like to make portraits there for myself.

I use all kinds of cameras and play with lights.

I'm looking for a quiet intensity.

People being actively alive.

It's more fun than working.

At the Barton Springs Spillway with an Old Sony A56.

Old School Portrait. Back from the Canon days.

Belinda. In studio. 

In all the excitement of new, smaller cameras, I love to slow down, go through the files, and see what images looked like from a more "primitive" time in digital photography. This image was taken with a Canon 1DSmk2 and a Canon 85mm f1.8 lens. The shutter speed was 1/20th of a second. The aperture was f2.5. Seems to work okay considering the "vintage" contraption with which it was taken....

Studio Dog Curates Images from the Desktop and Selects a Winter Winner.

On second street in Austin. Looking for a place to pee while freezing your ass off...

Image taken with Sony RX10 Classic. 

I let Studio Dog choose this image to show. It's one of her favorites from last winter when the temperatures actually dropped blowing freezing for a little while. Here we are in February and the forecast this week is for temps in the high 70's. Hmm. 

A Few Thoughts About the Sony RX10-2 and Why a Smart Working Photographer might want to have one around.

Sony RX10 ii. 

Continuing in the vein of our recent glorification of cameras with one inch sensors I thought I would draw your closer attention to the current king of the one inch sensor cameras, the Sony RX10 ii. It might just be the contemporary Swiss Army Knife(tm) of cameras aimed at workaday journalists and corporate public relations staffers. The camera is almost identical to its predecessor on the outside, using the same lens, the same rear screen and the same control interfaces, but the camera is much improved in some regards. The two big improvements being a higher (kinder) resolution EVF, and the inclusion of a very professionally fitted out 4K video capability.

If I were a journalist today, working for a newspaper (how quaint) or an online news channel, this would be a compelling tool. I would be able to use it to capture most subjects (with the exception of fast moving, hard news and sports) as high resolution, very high quality photographs and I would also be able to hit the video switch and record a 4K video signal that uses full sensor read out for very high quality imaging with very few artifacts. Much cleaner and sharper video than you will get out of a $3200 Nikon D810 or a similarly priced Canon 5Dmk3. All of this in a small, complete and unintimidating package that can go anywhere. In any kind of weather. 

On the video side the camera features time code, zebras, focus peaking, a microphone port and (vital) a headphone jack. It can write its 4K, 100 mbs onto any U3 SDXC memory card --- in camera. The RX10 ii is also a great tool for creating conventional 1080p video content when you need to conserve card space...

It's a very nice and very worthwhile upgrade to the Sony RX10 (original model) but, with the recent upgrade from ACVHD to XAVC S in the RX10's video codec the need for most videographer to upgrade seems less urgent. The RX10 is now a more powerful and clean 1080p machine! The reason to upgrade would be the need for 4K video or the desire to have the more detailed and enjoyable EVF.  A secondary reason might be the deeper buffer and more complex file processing enabled by the new BSI sensor, with on chip processing and buffering. You'll be able to shoot more

A keystroke into oblivion...

Dear VSL readers. I woke up early and found 8 really nice comments waiting for my moderation. I selected all and then totally screwed up (blaming the lack of life giving coffee....) and hit the delete button instead of the "publish" button in the Blogger software (they are adjacent and the trackpad on my laptop loves to leap while clicking is in progress.....)

I would love to post your comment if you have time to give it another try. Most were in response to yesterday evening's post on the "Rise of the One Inch Sensors."

Sorry about that.  KT

The rise of the "one inch" sensor cameras.

Added: New links for the "research impaired" (DP Review readers) at the bottom.

Amazing that, for once, Nikon could be accused of getting to market too far ahead of everyone else. I'm talking about their initial foray into the "one inch" sensor camera market. Four years ago Nikon surprised most of us by introducing the V1 camera and a small collection of lenses. I snapped one up because it was so interesting. I also bought three of the lenses. At the time the sensor was 10 megapixels but that didn't stop me from shooting some journalistic-type jobs with it, including a project photographing Dell's CEO, Michael Dell, at a visit to Austin Easter Seals; which I wrote about here on the blog.

The camera was very good and very fast. The icing on the cake was that even back then that little mirrorless camera (at about $1,000) focused, and locked focus, much faster than the current mirrorless, full frame cameras from Sony. The images looked really good, too....as long as you didn't go too high on the ISO scale. But Nikon wasn't able, and hasn't been able, to get much traction with the system. They were on the wrong side of the razor. And they made a critical mistake in having a step down camera (the J1) that DID NOT have an EVF or any way to add an EVF. The market really wasn't ready for the idea of the smaller sensor camera at a price that was higher than Nikon's competent APS-C consumer cameras. They just didn't figure out how to give the targeted users a compelling reason to acquire this particular tool set.

Nikon blazed new territory and, for that, I am somewhat proud of Nikon. But now I have a sense that the one inch sensor's time has come and that the cameras being designed around variants of this size sensor are about to take their place in the camera hierarchy as competitors to the current crop of micro four thirds machines.

Why do I say this? Hmmm. Sony and Panasonic tied me down and forced me to say this in exchange for hundreds of thousands of dollars and truck loads of free gear!!!? Well, would you believe, instead, that I've had such good experiences with the two different models of "one inch" sensor-equipped cameras that I am quickly coming to embrace them as everyday photography tools? I wish the former reason were true but I'm afraid it's really the second...

In the past week I've done two assignments with the small chip cameras and had, what I consider, excellent outcomes. In one instance, which I shared here on the blog, I photographed actor, Jimmy Moore, for a marketing promotion for Zach Theatre. The camera in question was the Panasonic fz 1000 which is currently available for a whopping $695. All you get for your money is a Leica designed lens that is very sharp and gives you 25mm to 400mm (equivalents) along with a 2.36 million pixel EVF, as many frames per second as you want, solid and beautiful 20 megapixel raw files and pretty darn flawless 4K video. Oh, I forgot to mention the really, really good image stabilization.

This is the kind of job we might have used our full frame cameras on before but if you think about the nuts and bolts of shooting people on white backgrounds (who will eventually be cut out from the background) the smaller sensor just makes sense. At f8.0 the entire person is in focus so the clipping path becomes easier to make. If the quality didn't match up it wouldn't matter about the efficacy of the clipping paths but the reality is that, at ISO 125, shooting raw and metering accurately, the files were impeccable. So that's one application. And, interestingly enough, the smaller, cheaper camera (relative to my D750 or D810) does such a good job with face detection AF that I use it and never suffer from inaccurate focus. Tell me you always nail AF with your big DSLR and I'll laugh along with you....

In the same week I pushed a Sony RX10 into service to photograph a prototype techie machine on a white background. As I explained in yesterday's post the impetus was to be able to use a camera with a sharp lens and more depth of field than even my m4:3 cameras, at the same angle of view, without any apparent loss of image quality. I am confident that we succeeded. In fact, that job may well have led to a much bigger video project; which might also be perfectly within the technical abilities of the smaller sensor-ed cameras.

In a similarity race with the Panasonic the Sony RX10 includes a faster lens, designed by Zeiss and just about everything I described about the fz 1000 above. And, in a head to head competition, both were equally proficient and, in fact, cut down on my post production time in each case.

I said, in my blog yesterday, that it would crazy to go out and buy yet another one inch camera but that's exactly what I intend to do. I am convinced that there are many assignments that would actually benefit from getting beyond our knee jerk prejudice for bigger cameras. The older Sony with the new XAVC codec and the newer model with its 4K capability and high video frame rate (great for slow motion effects) are not only good still cameras but are really first class video cameras. In concert with the fz 1000s we can be out shooting video with multiple, high quality "B" cameras ---- limited only by how many tripods I own....

While the imaging sensors have gotten better and better with the bigger cameras it's equally true that the sensors have improved in the one inch cameras as well, and, obviously, designing high quality lenses for the smaller sensors is easier and more cost effective than designing lenses with similar angles of view for larger sensor cameras.

I have a little side bet going with myself. One of my personalities (the risk taking artist) thinks we can do just about every job with one of the "one inch" cameras. Another one of my personalities (the linear, insecure engineer) thinks we should be safe and careful and always shoot with something "professional." While the day to day personality (capricious and insouciant business guy) says, "oh what the hell? let's give it a try!!! In response, my personality who is "accounting guy" fainted and hit his head on the desk again... At any rate the bet is whether or not we can pull of half of our video productions and still photography assignments with a combination of the three best one inch superzoom cameras on the market. It's a fun contest and the winner gets nothing but the glory of being proven right.

I just can't get over how great the files keep looking from these all-on-one super cameras. And if Nikon gets one right I'll try that one too.

I'm thinking this is the year that one inch sensor cameras become mainstream and get pressed into an enormous variety of paying jobs. Of course, I've been wrong before so I'm hedging my bet by keeping the big cameras of various formats around the studio. After all, the first lesson of "wing walking" is to grab hold of the strut in front of you before you let go of the one behind you....

Here's some affiliate advertising if you are antsy to get started shooting smaller





Buy one instead of yet another lens...

Added on Sunday for all the people with no institutional memory for the writings and research here at VSL: We were early adopters of one inch cameras buying the V1 from Nikon the month it appeared, the Sony RX10 two years ago, etc. Here are some links re: our engagement with the Nikon Series 1: 

http://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2011/10/nikon-1-counterintuitive-crazy-and.html
http://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2013/09/a-camera-reviewers-indecision-and.html
http://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2012/02/yesterday-was-about-marketing-and-fine.html
http://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2012/01/take-bodhi-bike-downtown-take-pictures.html
http://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2011/12/small-sensor-systems-practical.html
http://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2011/12/my-top-gear-of-year-stuff-i-bought-that.htmlhttp://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2011/12/nikon-series-one-10mm-100mm-kirk-review.html
http://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2011/11/shooting-dress-rehearsal-with-tiny.html
http://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2011/11/some-images-taken-on-rainy-day-with.html
http://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2011/11/how-good-is-vr-or-is-on-nikon-v1.html
http://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2011/11/im-always-amazed-at-how-entrenched.html
http://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2011/11/just-quick-post-with-few-more-nikon-v1.html
http://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2011/10/nikon-v1-part-two-wet-performance.html

Chaps my ass to read on DP Review, in the Nikon Series 1 forum, that I am "a late arrival" to the one inch sensor camera club..... lazy jerks.

A link to my Studio Portrait Lighting Class with $25 Off.

Food Photography. by Andrew Scriviani

Off Camera Flash Photography. by Neil van Niekirk

One of the original Craftsy Photo Classes and 

still one of the best! 

Night Photography. by Lance Keimig

I met Lance a couple of weeks ago in Denver

and found him to be really fun and knowledgeable 

this class reflects what he teaches in hands-on

workshops in Ireland and Iceland, as well as 

cool places around the U.S.

Narrative Photography: Storytelling with Photo

Essays. by Mike Hill.

How to make what we shoot into a cohesive

train of visual thought.

Flip-Flopping on gear? Or making smart selections based on the final image targets? That's part of the job...

I'll start with an analogy: I have several friends who are chefs. They own their restaurants but they still get in their kitchens several times a week and "work the line" because, beyond their restaurants being businesses, they also enjoy the art/craft of cooking. Of making stuff with their own hands. A couple of these guys are in their mid-fixities and have a good thirty years of food service experiences under their belts. They've learned some valuable information about successful cooking that makes them fast, efficient and, by extension, profitable. 

To help them in their work they've learned to choose the right tools for each process. And few tools are as important to a chef as their collection of knives. They have paring knives for fine work, they have big cleavers for heavy duty chopping, and they have assorted serrated and non-serrated utility knives for chopping and filleting and slicing. But, here's the important thing! They don't do every task with one magic, perfect knife. 

It just doesn't work that way. They select the knife that will work best for each kind of work they do. The could do okay with a few well chosen knives but it would not be as much fun and it would just make their work take more time. Some dishes might suffer from the relative mismatch of tools and ingredients... Fingers might get nicked. So, selecting the right tool = good. 

What does this aside have to do with us photographers? Well, there seems to be a pervasive mythology in photography at large that somewhere, in some mythical camera store out there, exists a perfectly sorted camera for every user. One all purpose machine that is a perfect fit for everything the photographer might ever want to do. One need only find their own mythical

Showing off my security system.

Red Head in front of Gallleries Lafayette in Berlin.

 click on the image to see it bigger. The reflections are really pretty...

When I visit a new city the first thing I do, after checking into my hotel, is to get a good street map and memorize (in a very general way) where everything is. I won't know exact street names and such but I will understand just where the cool stuff is located. Once I've spent an hour or so with a real map I grab one camera, and the lens I think will make me happiest, shove an extra battery in my pocket and head for the front door.

I think the best way to see almost any city is to invest some shoe leather and walk the streets. The city will reveal itself to you, if you are open to it.

The image above was shot with a Samsung Galaxy NX camera. It was an infuriating camera and yet, an endearing camera. Infuriating in that it operated like an overgrown phone and was prone to, well, freezing up or shutting itself off at the least advantageous times. Endearing because when it did work the files could be quite beautiful in a way that was visually different from the usual Canon and Nikon files.

I was always a little surprised that the folks at Samsung dropped that camera so

A photo from a mystery camera comes out of the old Aperture files to confound me.

Does this happen to you? You come across a photo that you like for some group of technical reasons and you immediately cogitate that it must have come from one of your expensive super cameras festooned with some high priced, German lens. You play with the image and sniff around the edges and, after a while you remember that you can click that little "info" button and find the real provenance of the photograph. Then, sometimes, you have to come to grips with the reality that the image was made with a camera that you dismissed. That your own elitism deprived you of.

And it's usually a case of the camera being so inexpensive and unremarkable that you were comfortable bringing it along everywhere and even taking the chance that someone might spill beer on it. You might drop it but you knew a crack in the polycarbonate wouldn't make you cry.

And, all that is probably the same set of reasons you don't take that D810 or A7R2 with you when you pop out for a cold one with friends. And so, that camera; the precious one, is hardly ever present with you when you are out dipping your toes in the rippling streams of daily life. So it's rarely there to capture the fun stuff either.

The image above was taken with a long discontinued Sony A57 or A58 and the $200 35mm f1.8 lens. An APS-C camera with an electronic viewfinder and a careful price tag. When I saw the info box identifying the gear I had almost forgotten owning that little family of cameras. We concentrate on the big stars in the camera families like the A99 or A900. But it's the cameras that follow us around that get pointed more often at the good stuff.

Here's another one from a camera I traded away last year (below). Recently I bought a new copy and when I saw this frame in the mix, and the one of the soup just below it, I remembered why I liked that camera so much in the first place.

They are both from the original version of the Sony RX10. A cold day out walking. A quick lunch at the Royal Blue Grocery, across from Lance Armstrong's bike shop. I can't imagine that any "better" camera and lens would have produced anything "more" than what I ended up with. Effortlessly. 

I love the amateur cameras. Psychologically, they rarely get in the way.

Hot color day. Various cameras.

Sometimes it's fun to shoot color for color's sake. When the skies are clean and blue and the sun is direct the saturation and color purity makes me want to grab a camera and get outside. Science tells us that the act of taking long walks is a booster for our cognitive processes and creates a sense of optimism and well being. Doing these walks with a camera over one shoulder is an amplifier of these effects. I recommend a daily dose. The happiest photographers I know are the ones who are always engaged in some aspect of their process, from the walk to the edit, it's all good. 

I have received the breathless entreaties from several retailers to: PRE-ORDER THE CANON EOS-1D X 2 NOW! NOW! NOW! But maybe I'll take my chances and wait....

The truth is that I'll probably never buy a new Canon 1DX2. I am leaving the door open to an impulse purchase of the camera for $500 a few years from now as I did when I decided to give the 1Dmk2I a try a few years back. The camera had been out for a while and lost, what? 90% of its value in less than 4 years? And it was a fun $500 camera; really.

But the truth is that there are very few freelance photographers (outside of a handful of sports photographers) who have much need for a camera like this (or the Nikon D5) and almost certainly very few of our readers here at the VSL who would appreciate the extra weight over what they are shooting with right now.

I've been looking through all of the information I can find about this camera because I had one pressing interest in machines like this; how do they perform as 4K video cameras? The Nikon D5 turns out to be a bust for 4K video --- unless you couple it with a $2,000 external video recorder. And if we need to pay that kind of money ($8000 = camera+recorder) to get basic 4K (without the niceties of XLR mic connectors, etc.) we might as well buy a Sony FS7 or an FS5 and be done with it.

From what I can see the Canon might do 4K for the 29.99 minutes if you are shooting to an internal CFast card. If that's the case then they just did another leapfrog over the Nikon offering but for the rest of the performance specifications it is, for the most part, just another case of: If you have Canon lenses you buy the 1DX2, if you have Nikon lenses you buy the D5. If you have mirrorless lenses you just ignore all of this.

I certainly don't mind camera makers making new cameras all the time, after all, that's their job. What I have come to mind is the breathless faux excitement meant to roil up those left with good credit and get them all excited about being the first one on their block to drop another six thousand dollars on a camera that's tremendous overkill for nearly all of us. Steve, Precision-Camera.com, and everyone else: Just calm down!

In the last two weeks I have been advised to pre-order (NOW! NOW!) the Fuji XPro2, the Olympus Pen F, The twin Nikons D5 and D500, and now the 1DX2. Please, just send me the product information.... Oh heck, don't even do that. If the product is interesting enough it's already on our collective radar.

After the introduction and subsequent withdrawal and then re-introduction of the Olympus EM10.2, the various fixes and recalls of the D750, the light leaks in the Canon 5Dmk3, and the oil leaks and sensor spatter of the Nikon D600 (just to mention a few brand's introductory disasters) I think I'll remember the lesson I learned way back when Leica first delivered the original M8 (purple pollution fixed with accessory IR filters) and wait until the first generation of rabidly motivated buyers snaps up whatever camera body I might be interested in. I'll let them suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous design shortcuts and, hopefully, will be able to jump in after the manufacturer has first denied, and then acknowledged and fixed, whatever issues there might be. Once the product is sullied in the press, and in the forums, and once the product is perfected, I'll be happy to pick one up ----- for a discounted price.

In retrospect, it's been more fun to cheery-cherry pick the best of the used "instant classics" than it has been to experience the trepidation of being a bleeding edge buyer of the latest cameras.

I am certain the 1DX2 is a fabulous camera. I am equally certain that its target market knows who they are and exactly what the updates and upgrades might provide to them. But knowing what I know about the way I shoot, none of these super cameras are anywhere near my wish list. Just saying'.

Sorry, no affiliate link. Not a product I'm shooting personally.