The Online Photographer

'Lisbon Portfolio' Free Today!

You all know our friend Kirk Tuck, of Austin, Texas, who runs the Visual Science Lab blog and has written several posts for TOP. He'd like you to know that the Kindle version of his thriller novel The Lisbon Portfolio is available for free at Amazon for the rest of today and all day tomorrow. The hero is (what else?) a photographer.

Note that you can get the Kindle app for reading on other devices, such as tablets, notebooks and phones.

Kirk is also the author of Minimalist Lighting: Professional Techniques for Studio Photography.

Mike
(Thanks to Kirk)

Original contents copyright 2015 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Kirk's Take: Electronic Viewfinders

Going cold turkey on optical finders: My experiences with EVFs

By Kirk Tuck

(Please understand that this post is meant to be somewhat tongue-in-cheek. Few new tech innovations are without their faults, just as many mature viewing implementations have on their side decades and decades of familiarity.)

You can look high and low in my studio these days but the only optical finders you'll uncover are those in old film cameras or the ones in digital cameras now considered too eccentric to be sold (the Kodak SLR/n and the Kodak DCS 760C). All of my current digital cameras feature electronic viewfinders. I am now working without a safety net. Really.

It all started with that Olympus EP2 and its little friend, the VF-2 finder. A gorgeously designed camera and one that works well within its file size limitations. And a finder that set the standard for resolution and clarity upon its introduction.

But after working with several generations of mirrorless cameras such as the Olympus E-P3, both the Panasonic GH2 and G3, and most recently the Sony a77 and a57, I became completely addicted to the lure of the mini-TV screen in the eyepieces of my cameras. Here is my list of reasons why:

1. Pre-Chimping(tm). Post-shot chimping, as it is done with current, EVF-deprived cameras, is an iterative process. You can really only compose with an OVF (optical viewfinder)—you can’t see any of the other parameters that the camera will impose on your final image until you actually take the image and then review it on the back screen of your camera. How primitive! So you shoot a test frame and then you evaluate it. Then you change a few things and you shoot again to test. It's a process that, in the hands of a rank amateur, can last a long time. Pre-chimping (tm) with an EVF means that the second you bring the camera to your waiting eye you'll see the composition of your intended image and the way the white balance will handle the scene as well as any sort of digital adaptations you've made to your in-camera shooting parameters such as contrast, saturation, sharpness, or art filters. You can correct as you watch and then shoot. No post chimping required. Once you've pre-chimped(tm) I'm not sure you'll ever want to go back.
2. Have you heard about focus peaking? It's not available in your OVF. You'll need to upgrade if you want this feature. Lots of people like to use older, manual focus lenses on their brand new digital cameras and all too likely they end their experiments in sadness and misery because the focusing screens in the OVFs destined for digital work aren't at all optimized for manual focusing. And all of us over forty years of age seem to have a hell of a time achieving critical focus on our older technology cameras unless we put the camera on a tripod and engage (semi) Live View. At that point we can fine focus our fine old glass using a small portion of the image. It's not so much fun, especially if you are in an area with lots of bright light around you, bouncing off the LCD screen on the back of your camera. If you have a camera with an EVF that includes focus peaking, you'll have a nearly foolproof focusing method that works by showing you color outlines of the things you've gotten in sharp focus. With EVF cameras you can use this method while shooting stills or while shooting videos. You can do it handheld, in bright light and without cropping down to 10% of your image. Very nice.
3. How about a super quick check on an image just to make sure your subject didn't blink during your exposure? Sure, with old tech you could take the camera away from your eye, find the review button, shield the screen on the back from glancing and image degrading ambient illumination and then review, or—you could take advantage of new tech by setting a short duration image review that works in your finder while it's still at your eye. Most of the new cameras will show you a preview and you can go back to a live image with a soft touch on the shutter button. How nice. And if you need to review a shot while on the deck of a boat in tropical sunlight or in a giant field of white sand you'll be able to do it with no more effort than bringing the finder up to your eye and looking. Pity the poor OVF owner, chained to their massive Zacuto and Hoodman chimney finders, awkwardly holding their cameras up with one hand while trying to keep their finder-assisting-extra-accessory from sliding around with the other hand....

There are just a few niggling issues that still need to be perfected for EVFs; but we can't be more than half a generation away. At least when we consider the EVFs in the Sony NEX-7 and the Sony Alpha a77 and a65 cameras as current benchmarks. But I would be remiss not to mention them.

1. Since the camera is continuously taking a sensor image and running it through the processing pipeline before feeding it into the eyepiece monitor there is a statistically relevant time lag. You'll need to learn how to "lead" a fast moving subject. It takes practice but it is do-able. I've practiced on my kid when he runs competitively. I'm not perfect at tracking him yet but I wasn't perfect with an OVF-hampered camera either.
2. Since you are getting a video feed you'll have to change the way you shoot with flash. With an OVF you get the same light level through the finder with any exposure setting. If you set a high flash sync it doesn’t affect the image in the finder. With an EVF enable camera if you set a high shutter speed and medium aperture in a room with low light (as you might when working with a studio flash) you'll no longer be able to see a bright (or any) finder image with the setting most people use for the EVF, which shows what a scene will look like using the inputs and exposure controls you have set. You'll need to set the camera to "gain up" the finder image so you can see your subject and work with them. The darker the environment the more noise in the finder image you'll get. If you work a lot with flash inside you'll want to test out an EVF camera before you trade your hard won Imperial Credits for one.
3. The EVF shows you the approximate gamut of the color space you have set in the camera. This is good because you see how stuff might render in print or on the screen of your computer at home. This is now known as real time visualization (a nod to Ansel Adams's pre-visualization practice). This should be considered a positive, but most people look in the finder and see an image that looks "too contrasty" with blocked up shadows. There are one or two workarounds, depending on how you shoot and what kinds of files you like. If you're a died-in-the-wool Raw file shooter you can go into your parameters and set the contrast on your default JPEG style/setting to a lower value (less contrast). This will add detail to your shadows and highlights. If you are a JPEG shooter you can always set your color space to AdobeRGB instead of sRGB but it won't buy you quite as much correction. There are also brightness control settings for the EVFs and you might want to experiment with them as well. I'm sure we'll have a wider gamut on future screens, but as I stated before, it is an effective pre-visualization for many styles of shooting. But high contrast lighting is the EVF's Achilles heel.

After assessing the pros and cons of the different finders and weighting in my own quirks and my seeming need for novelty on a regular basis, I dumped an enviable accumulation of Canon EOS cameras, lens and flashes and bought into the Sony SLT camera system. I was drawn in by the EVF (really) and the stationary mirror (kinda) and not in the least by the fast 12fps shutter. I've used the Sony a77's now for the better part of a month and recently added their newest camera, the Sony a57. I also bought a mix of both super G lenses and cheap lenses. The two I love the most are the ultra cheap 30mm ƒ/2.8 DT Macro and the 85mm ƒ/2.8 SAM lens. They feel cheap in your hands but the quality of the imaging is superior. (All the pictures in this post were taken with the Sony a57 and the little 85mm lens.)

So, how have I fared in the post optical imaging universe? I am serious about this: When I shoot with continuous lights (like my favorite LEDs) or by modified window light, I am very, very happy. I can control my shoots while rarely taking my eye off the finder. I was shooting food for a new Austin restaurant, handheld, last Saturday, and getting a level of fluidity in my shooting that I've never experienced before. I could look at the food and turn a knob to adjust exposure while I watched the effect in psuedo real time. It's a great way to shoot food.

I'm now so used to the pre-chimping method I described above that I rarely find myself lowering the camera anymore to post-chimp. (The rear screen seems to exist now as a conduit for showing my results to my clients.) While not necessarily directly related to the EVF, I have found that with the stationary mirror and the electronic first shutter curtain, coupled with in body stabilization, I am able to perform magic tricks with blur-free slow shutter speeds. The different systems all work together to yield a final result that seems very, very sharp.

I have been shooting video for years now and I can't tell you how much more efficient a camera becomes if it can do full time phase detection autofocus while shooting video. And being able to see it in a light-protected finder is such an operational plus. When you add in focus peaking, you are getting close to the wish list for many videographers. (The only two video features I want to see in the next Sony camera are manual level controls for the audio in video and a headphone jack, à la Nikon and Canon's latest cameras.)

The one place where I know the EVF is less effective than OVF is in the use of studio flash. If you are working with powerful modeling lights it won't bother you as much, but if you are working with little 60-watt peanut modeling lights stuck in big lighting modifiers, you won't be as happy with the speckles and pixie dust that dances across the screen while you view.

I'm not suggesting that anyone abandon a system and an approach to still photography that they love and are wedded to, but the EVF is something that I think will filter down into most cameras because, as the price of sensors continues to fall, the single most expensive part of every SLR camera out will be the semi-silvered glass pentaprism and mirror assembly. As consumers demand more for less, and as OLED screens become more ubiquitous and hence less expensive, it doesn't take a telescope to see big changes coming in viewfinders.

EVFs and LEDs are a great combination. Add in a great, low noise sensor and you're in the sweet spot. I always hear that "it's not the arrow, it's the Indian." I think we're switching from the long bow to the cross bow, though. The endless march of progress.

Kirk

Kirk Tuck is a monthly contributor to the Online Photographer. He is the author of five books on photography and lighting including his most recent, LED Lighting: Professional Techniques for Digital Photographers. He makes his living photographing for corporations and advertising agencies in and around Austin, Texas. He is also a masters swimmer and spends far too much time in the pool.

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Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by Don: "Kirk, the English longbow was a vastly superior weapon to the crossbow. It's why the French were defeated at Agincourt. The English (and Welsh) archers whipped off the strings and stuck them under their caps when it rained. The French archer's crossbow strings got wet and stopped working. Crossbows take time to reload—in that time an English longbow will have fired multiple arrows. On Sundays every Englishman was required to practise archery with a longbow after church. The French so feared our bowmen they used to cut off their fingers when caught so they could no longer draw a bow. Hence the origin of the two-fingered salute—given by English archers to the French to let them know what was about to come down on their heads.

"The English/Welsh archers using the longbow completely outclassed the French with their crossbows."

Featured Comment by John Ashbourne: "Don's featured comment only refers to part of the reason for the outcome at Agincourt. Another major reason was the French emphasis on dated technology—elaborate and cumbersome armoured cavalry which bogged down in the clinging mud due to exceptionally heavy rain. there is an obvious parallel here—of which I am uncomfortably aware when I take out my 1Ds3 and 70-200mm rather than the X-Pro1—but then had circumstances been different at Agincourt the heavy cavalry would have come into their own just as in some circumstances there is nothing so good as the 'mighty Canon.'"

Featured Comment by Roger Bradbury: "The idea with the longbow was to get as many arrows into the air as possible; you are bound to hit something. Are you sure you weren't interested in the Sony's 12 fps Kirk?"

Mike replies: First of all, the topic was viewfinders yet here we find ourselves arguing about weapons technology at Agincourt—yet another demonstration of why I love this blog.

Just wanted to point out in relation to Roger's comment that in my recent book rec Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History, author S.C. Gwynne goes into considerable detail about weapons technology on the Southern Plains and how it affected the struggles between the main players. He points out that until the advent of the six-shooter—the main purpose of which was to be used on horseback, not in duels as in the movies—Comanches' bows and arrows were actually superior as weapons to the slow muzzle-loading rifles originally used by the Mexicans and the Texans, and gave them an advantage.

The various analogies to cameras seem perilous to me, albeit admittedly tempting.

Featured Comment by Rodolfo Canet: "Given the path the discussion has taken, never has the tag 'shooting techniques' been more appropriate!

LED Lighting for Photography: Kirk Tuck

Why LEDs? And what was I thinking?

The "classic."  A one-foot-by-one-foot panel from Litepanels. One of the few U.S. companies making LED panel products. Also, one of the very first.

By Kirk Tuck

So. I finished writing four books and I was ready to take a break. Then I ghost-wrote a marketing book for a friend and I was really ready to take a break. But my publisher was insistent. Didn't I have something I wanted to write for them? Well, I did have one thing I was keenly interested in, but I wasn't sure anyone else would really care. I pitched the people at Amherst Media on a book about LED lights, and they went for it.

Once I signed the contract the reality of what I'd done kicked in. With my previous books I could fall back on a rich library of past assignments done with flashes and various cameras. I could fall back on twenty-odd years of experience divining just how best to use the lights of the day. I could steal from the best, like Jon Falk, who really was so instrumental in turning us all on to portable lights, homemade battery packs, and off-camera lights.

But when it came to LED lights I was as naked and uninitiated as the next guy. In fact, when I pitched the book, I'd only done a handful of commercial assignments with the lights and just a couple of small, industrial videos. But I had a nagging sense that LED lighting equipment, mostly small panels, was poised to change photography. And video production. With that in mind, I spent a year experimenting and playing and learning everything I could about the lights. Then I sat down and pounded out my book.

Since every studio has an equipment cabinet full of electronic flashes in the form of monolights, pack-and-head systems, and battery-powered flashes, why would anyone care about a relatively low-output light source that needed some color correction intervention? Why indeed.

But as I looked over the photographic landscape I noticed a few things that gave me pause. Since everyone was using essentially the same kind of lighting and the same kinds of modifiers (flash, with umbrellas and softboxes and grids) everyone's work was starting to look like everyone else's work. Sure, some few photon workers had some post processing they'd throw into the mix for a bit of differentiation but the foundations of the images all cloyed together like visual and cultural mud.

And when I looked at the professionals a couple of generations younger than me I saw a group of people who could swim back and forth between video and stills with a fluid effortlessness that made me envious. These were people who could shoot both sides of the divide without missing a beat. But they were trained by people like me who were already mired in the sticky status quo of photographic tradition. We made sure they knew how to flash. What they needed now weredual-purpose lights. Lights that could do still life, portraits, product shots, and movies and videos without changing a thing. They were pushing for them. And I realized that was exactly what LED lighting was all about. It could go either way.

Here is the "behind the scenes shot" of the lighting set up of a product shot. Always on means always visual.

The shot from the setup above.

After two years with the LEDs I am more comfortable shooting a portrait with a continuous light source than a flash. We've started to light stuff more like DPs on movie sets and less like 1970s portrait studios.

I've done some research and I've found that my subjects are more comfortable too. Seems that repeated flash causes the pupil to contract and expand over and over again. That causes optical fatigue and headaches. It affects both the shooter and the models. Flashes also encourage blinking because people subconsciously gird themselves against the popping onslaught of photons. (Are they waves or particles? Or waves of particles?) The continuous light allows use to become habituated. Comfortable in a way that flash never does.

Soft, directional light is important to my portrait style. So are quiet poses. Nothing the output of a few inexpensive LED panels can't handle. 

I've assembled enough LED power to put a prodigious amount of lumens through a big diffusion panel and still get exposures like ƒ/5.6 at 1/250th at ISO 400. With a good camera I can push the ISO higher and get even more action stopping exposure settings. And it seems natural.

In the course of writing the book I've come across dozens of experts who tried an LED panel or two back in the early part of the century. They came away with the permanent prejudice that the lights were all over the map color-wise, and not nearly powerful enough to use with the still cameras of the day. (I remember how bad the high ISOs were on cameras like the Kodak DCS 760.) That's all changed. And the days of being dependent on using ISO 80 to get good quality are long gone.

There are compromises. They will change. Right now only the most expensive LED panels have real CRI's (color rendering indexes) of 90 or more; 90+ is thought to be the gold standard for getting really accurate color spectra. Most of the less expensive imports advertise CRI's of 80. But most of us don't shoot under "gold standard" studio conditions anyway. We've learned to shoot well in mixed light, florescent light, and combinations of daylight and artificial light.

This outside shot, done in open shade, shows that small panels can be pushed into service as fill lights. It also shows a decent color match between the fill light and the ambient daylight.

LED panels, especially the inexpensive ones, have some rough edges. They could be brighter. And almost all of them suffer from a treatable green spike (or magenta dip) in their overall spectrum. But now they are easily correctable with appropriate magenta filtration. And when using a camera like the Nikon D3s or the Canon 5D Mark III, you'll have more than enough clean ISO to do just about any kind of photo short of filling in shadows in direct sunlight.

I think they have their place in providing a new way to shoot. I'm particularly happy with the portrait work I like to do in black and white. The tonality is different from other light sources, and the subdued magenta makes for better skin tones. I like the calmness of working with them when shooting people who are unused to a traditional "flash" studio experience.

Black and white image of Amy made with one 1000 bulb LED panel "pushed" through a six-by-six-foot diffusion scrim.

So, I wrote the book and discussed what I'd found. I tossed in 250+ samples and examples and I talked about using the lights for video as well. If you've been curious about what's out there beyond flash, this book might be for you. The video guys have pushed the "new tech" market hard. There's innovation and value pricing everywhere. It's all to our advantage. The push of efficient lights with better and better rendering characteristic means we photographers pay much less for good LED lights than ever before. It may be time to stick a toe in the water and see what it's all about.

Kirk

Kirk's new book, LED Lighting: Professional Techniques for Digital Photographers (U.K. link)

Kirk's Recommended LED Products
Fancier 500 LED Light Panel ($179.99). This is the basic 500 LED light. It's got four switches on the back to ratio power. It's bare bones. No color control or battery adapter. But it's cheap and rugged.

Fancier 160 Dimmable LED Camcorder Light ($59.99). These are my favorite cheap, battery-powered LED Panels. We use them for everything. Even put them in jack-o-lanterns for Halloween. They use AA batteries or cheap, generic Lithium batteries that are a copy of the Sony camcorder batteries. They have a stepless control for power. No color control, but a slot for supplied filters.

Litepanels 1x1' 3200K/5600K Bi-Color LED Flood (pictured at the top of the post) ($2,329.95). This is definitely the high-priced spread. This is what they use in the White House News Room. And in network TV. And in the photo studios of the still photography demigods. It's the Litepanels 1x1 LED with two set of colored bulbs, daylight and tungsten. By cross fading between the two sets you can shift color balance from 3200–5600K. These are the "gold standard" of the industry. (Kirk says, "I want four. Hello, Santa?")

Fotodiox 1000ASV Still/Video LED Light Kit ($429.95). Kirk's big favorite. Here's a light that is dimmable with a rotary knob and, with a separate knob, will cross-fade between tungsten and daylight bulbs to hit any color temperature between 2300k and 5600k. It comes with an AC power adapter and is wired and plugged to accept Sony V-type 12V batteries for location use. For the price it's pretty astounding. You'll still need to add in a bit of filtration for the green spike.

Fotodiox 312AS Still/Video LED Light Kit ($158.95). And here's a smaller, lighter unit that does the two-color cross-fade along with the stepless dimming control. Comes with two generic Sony-type camcorder batteries, a charger and a set of color filters. I'm buying one right now, today, before this post goes up, so I can be sure to get one for myself [me too. —Ed.]. A perfect size in a nice kit.

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Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by Gerry Morgan: "I've just finished reading Kirk's LED Lighting book and it's superb. The little I knew about LEDs before reading it I had gleaned from Kirk's blog. The book was a fun read and a great primer. Armed with Kirk's technical information (and safety warnings—don't stare at those LEDs), I now feel ready to get started."

Featured Comment by Rick: "...Me too! Thanks, gentlemen—I never really looked into this, as a quick search made it look like $X,XXX to get into this. But I'm now on my way.... :-) "

Featured Comment by Mike Plews: "Great piece. I'm a TV news shooter and we keep Fancier 500A fixtures in our cars for live hits. In the last year we started going from traditional live trucks to IP-based live reporting. TVU backpacks if anyone is interested. The problem with this is the loss of a full truck with its generator to run a couple of Lowel lights.

"The Fancier runs just fine off a cigarette lighter inverter or a 12v battery. The 500A also has a dimmer in addition to the individual switches. That means on night hits you can set up the camera to get the background where you want it then stand the talent in place and use the dimmer to balance it all out. You can do the same thing by feathering the lights or walking them back but when you are up against it just being able to spin a knob is very cool.

"We also put Litepanels micro instruments on top of all our cameras for run-and-gun shooting. If you want to get cute you can pull the light off and hold it at arms length to get nice off-axis light when working in the dark.

"The progress in LED lighting in the last couple of years has been amazing. You can really get a lot of light for not much dough these days. That's a good thing."

Kirk's Take: Leica 25mm Summilux Review

It's the available lenses that make Micro 4/3 an
easy choice. Especially this one.

By Kirk Tuck

There's a lot of pressure put on reviewers to be fair and balanced in a way that seems the same as the social pressure to give everyone who participates in a contest a medal or a trophy. If we say we really like a small camera, we feel some sort of compulsion to moderate the statement with a rejoinder like, "for a small sensor camera...." It's almost as though there is consensus now that an objective prioritized list of camera features exists, and we, as writers and as astute image makers, have to hew to that conventional value.

Yes, the new Nikon and Canon cameras have bigger sensors than the Olympus and Panasonic Micro 4/3 cameras. By extension, we realize that the big cameras will have less electronic noise in the images taken at higher ISO settings. But does that really make those cameras the "obvious" choice for all serious photographers?

From my point of view a lot of what makes a system work is the available lenses. And for many of us there are one or two focal lengths (or, more precisely, the angles of view) that we keep coming back to over and over again for our own work. If the system we shoot with has a great example of the lensmaker's art in the focal lengths that we gravitate to, then that system has more value. If the cameras are much more fun to shoot with, then that has more value as well. The combination of great optics and great handling goes a long way to minimize the perceived value differences between "differently abled" systems.

I'm a sucker for two specific angles of view/focal lengths. On a full frame, 35mm-type camera I am drawn to the way 50mm and 85mm or 90mm lenses make images look. I think of the short telephotos as my "normal" lenses, and what most people think of as normal lenses I consider my moderate wide angles. So I was interested when I started hearing good news about two recently introduced lenses for the Olympus/Panasonic Micro 4/3 system: the 25mm Leica Summilux ƒ/1.4 and the Olympus 45mm ƒ/1.8. I bought them and I've been using them (to the exclusion of everything else) for the last two weeks.

Nighttime image taken at ISO 1250, 1/60th sec., ƒ/2.2. Handheld with no image stabilization. Lens: 25mm Summilux. Camera: Panasonic G3

I like them both very much. But for now I would like to report my opinion of the Leica 25mm Summilux. It slots into the Micro 4/3 world as a very high quality high speed normal optic. In a word, it is superb. On my first foray out with the lens, attached to a Panasonic G3, I walked all over Austin. I was heading back to my car in the dark when I came upon the architectural detail above. I aimed the camera, took a meter reading and shot. The auto white balance of the camera nailed everything in the scene, from the deep, rich blue of the sky to the white light indoors.

But what I really found compelling about the shot was the structure of the image and the impression of sharpness. Considering that the shot was taken at ƒ/2.2 I find the final product even more interesting. I'd done a similar shot with a Zeiss 50mm ƒ/1.4 ZE on a Canon 5D Mark II a few weeks earlier, and found that the lens needed to be stopped down a lot to yield the same impression of sharpness. The smaller format and the greater depth of field of the shorter focal length lens creates a different look that, for things like architecture, seems better than longer focal lengths on bigger sensor cameras.

This image is interesting for another reason. There's a series of bare street lights just outside the right side of the frame—but there isn’t a hint of flare or veiling. This structure and lack of artifacts is good news but there's one aspect of the lens, and indeed most of the recent Leica lenses, that is harder to describe. It's an almost three-dimensional character in the images. It may not be obvious in the small, compressed JPEGs that accompany the article [the blogging software also degrades images subtly —MJ] but if you borrow the lens from your local dealer and shoot it you’ll see what I mean. It's just more...dimensional.

This image shows both a resistance to flare and the 3D quality I tried to describe. In the larger file the edges of the bright areas roll off more gracefully, but even in this smaller file I think the overall effect will be noticeable.

This afternoon I had the assignment of photographing one of Austin's top chefs and a highly successful restauranteur, Emmett Fox. I have photographed Emmett on other occasions and have always brought along lights, stands and high-dollar cameras and lenses. Today I decided I would go in light. Very, very light. I tossed a Panasonic G3 with the 25mm Summilux over one shoulder and I stuck the 45mm ƒ/1.8 on the front of an Olympus E-P3 and slung it over my other shoulder. I brought along a tripod just in case but I left it in the car.

Emmett greeted me at the door and I decided to get started right there.

ƒ/2.8 @ 1/3200

This next series of images is a full frame image followed by a 100% image followed by a 250% image. Even though I was handholding the camera and shooting nearly wide open, the lens is sharp across its plane of focus, lusciously contrasty and full of detail.

Just for the record, Emmett’s Apron is the robin’s egg blue that you see in the image. It's not an anomaly.

What I discovered during today’s shoot is that the Leica 25mm is much sharper at its maximum aperture and in the range of one stop down than my Carl Zeiss 50mm ƒ/1.4 ZE is until you stop it down to ƒ/4 or ƒ/5.6.  And the combined "system" of the G3 camera and the 25mm lens also gave me the opportunity to cheat. I did something I'd never been able to do on a commercial assignment before. I used the face detection autofocus for every shot. And of the 220 or so images I ended up taking, only a handful needed to be rejected for minor focus issues.

All the images in this article were done with existing light in the restaurant.

The real magic in using a "normal" lens is that you can step in a create the illusion that the lens is longer or, as in the image just above, you can step back a few feet, include more environment, and mimic the feel of a shorter lens.

Emmett and I worked around his restaurant and I felt freed up not having lights and cable and triggers in tow. The small cameras worked well and the files have the necessary image quality to be used in  printed publications, and certainly on the web. The ability to shoot quickly and without effort was a different experience for me. I am used to setting up in one or two locations, lighting the subject and the background, putting the camera on a tripod and so on. Working without all that made changes of direction quick and seamless.

The color rendition of the lens is unobtrusively neutral. It’s not a lens
that calls attention to itself.

My tests show me that my copy is sharp in the center two-thirds of the frame even wide open. As I stop down it becomes even sharper in the center (although its wide-open performance more than satisfies me) and the sharpness spreads across the frame so that by ƒ/2.5–2.8 you've probably reached the maximum performance of the lens.

Being able to shoot at those apertures brings the whole Micro 4/3 system to life and explains why Micro 4/3 photographers like their Panasonic 20mm ƒ/1.7 lenses. In comparison, the 25mm is a good bit sharper wide open and has a solid feel to the frame. It maintains a certain feeling of depth to the details in the files that the Panasonic doesn't share, right through the useful aperture range.

The 25mm is big. The supplied square lens hood makes it appear nearly twice as big. The aperture "chatters" in bright light when mounted on an Olympus camera but there is no issue with the visual quality. If you manually focus you'll be "focusing by wire." Those are the cons.

Wide open table top. The front fork is in focus.

As I mentioned in the beginning of this article, I also brought along the Olympus 45mm ƒ/1.8 and I find many things to like about that lens as well. I included two images of chef Emmett taken with the 45mm and the Olympus E-P3. In this instance I got to cheat even more. I used face detection auto focus and I "instructed" the camera to focus on the closest eye. It did. If we’re going to demand cameras that do all the heavy lifting, we may as well use the features.

The two images above were taken with the 45mm ƒ/1.8 Olympus lens on an E-P3 body. Adding the 12mm Olympus lens to the two I've written about here would give me an easy-to-use and very high-performance camera system that can be packed into a shaving kit and which is able to go toe-to-toe with just about any system out there.

The 25mm Summilux is quickly becoming the anchor in my small system. I'm loathe to take other systems out anymore. The addition to a product line of an exceptional optic (or three) can make all the difference in the world.

Kirk

Photographer, photo book author, and photography blogger Kirk Tuck is a successful commercial and editorial photographer in Austin, Texas. His latest book, about "the hottest new trend in lighting technology"—LED lighting for digital photography and video—has just been published by Amherst Media.

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Featured Comment by mbka: "I couldn't agree more. I had the sister of this lens (the 4/3 version with adapter on a Panasonic G1) and when the native Micro 4/3 version came out I bought it right away. I have shot literally thousands of frames with it (mostly preschool kids assignments) and the quality is superb. But the eeriest thing was right at the start, when I stuck the lens on my aging G1 in the store to check it before I bought it. Even on the so-so back LCD of the G1 the image seemed more plastic, with much better color than the kit zoom I also had around. I now almost loathe to use any other lens. It's that addictive."

Featured Comment by Kenneth Tanaka: "I agree that the Leica 25mm ƒ/1.4 DG Summilux is a wonderful little lens for all the reasons you cite, Kirk.  I, too, really like the 50mm field of view and jumped at the first availability of this lens for my E-P3.  (Although, no, a 25mm lens does not produce the mild compression of a real 50mm...my personal gritch with the Micro 4/3 format.)

"Of course I immediately wanted to know how this light plastic lens compared with the 'real' Leica Summilux 24mm ƒ/1.4 ASPH M-mount at less than 10% of its price tag. [The 24mm Summilux ASPH is $6,995 when it's available, which it isn't now —Ed.]

"Short answer: On my E-P3, this little lens easily takes the crown for sharpness, contrast, and, of course, all-around usability. The 'Lux 24mm is unquestionably the superior optic. On a Leica M body it features very good corners, excellent flare resistance and beautiful rendering at nearly all apertures. And, of course, it's built to withstand a D-Day invasion. But on my E-P3 the 25mm DG 'Lux, no doubt in cooperation with the E-P3's firmware, produces a superior wide-open image to the big guy. (Of course the 'big' 24mm 'Lux can only focus down to three feet...ah, that rangefinder intimacy!...versus the cute 25mm which focuses to a few inches.)

"I posted four casual comparison images for those interested.

"My main complaint with the Leica 25mm on my E-P3: that incessant chattering!  I don't know if it's really the iris, a stabilizer, or if the damn thing's cold up here in Chicago, but it drives me nuts. Chat-chat-chat-chat...shut up!"

Featured Comment by Marcin Wuu: "I absolutely love the first paragraph of this article. I just hope you're willing to cut some slack for those of us photogs who like our cameras properly black, bulky, and big...

Featured Comment by Oskar Ojala: "Nice review, thanks. However, it makes me want to buy the 25mm ƒ/1.4, even though I have a perfectly working 20mm ƒ/1.7! It's comforting to hear that other people have similar experiences.

"I'm completely sold on face detect; my last portraits with the 45mm ƒ/1.8 were entirely with face detect AF and the eyes were perfectly sharp, even when the subject was wearing glasses. It allows me to practically ignore focusing, so that I can pay more attention on the composition and the subject, a very important factor to me."

Mike replies: John Kennerdell wrote a nice piece here on TOP about using face detect...and trans-species face detect.

Kirk's Take (Kirk Tuck #4)

They stole our choice of aspect ratios. Now we’re getting them back

By Kirk Tuck

When I started taking photographs, back in 1978, I picked up a 35mm camera because that's what matched my budget and, I thought, my needs. I spent some years trying desperately trying to confine my vision of what a scene or portrait should look like into a long and stringy frame that never quite worked. When I needed to shoot horizontally I always needed to slice off all the junk that showed up on the either side of the "good part" of the frame. When I shot vertically there was alway twenty five or thirty percent of the top or bottom of the frame that needed to be chiseled away to calm my eyes.

Gradually I became habituated to the long, skinny and mathematically clumsy frame and tried my best. I figured that having a photographic vision that was fluid and smooth and easy must be for people with some innate, natural talent. Like those lucky bastards who can just pick up a guitar and make wonderful music after a handful of lessons.

Then one day a friend who was also interested in photography showed me a camera he'd just picked up. It was a twin lens YashicaMat rollfilm camera that shot 12 square frames on each roll of 120 film. Square frames!

My friend couldn't warm up to the reversed image in the waist level finder and suggested that I give the camera a whirl. I reached down and pulled the finder apparatus into position, flipped up the little attached magnifier, looked through and focused. And, in an instant, something somewhat magical happened: Everywhere I pointed the camera a perfect composition sprang into being. I could point the camera at the intersection of a concrete curb and the asphalt of a street and, there it was, perfect composition.

And the joy I felt when I lined up my first informal portrait was wonderful. It eclipsed everything I'd done in photography to that point.

I felt like I couldn't afford the camera. I was still in school and working a part time job. But when I started down the stairs of my apartment, intent on returning the YashicaMat to my friend, I realized that I couldn’t afford not to buy it. The effect was that powerful.

When I decided to pursue the rigorous and noble undertaking of professional, commercial photography I went right out and bought a used Hasselblad 500 CM and 150mm Sonnar Lens. Every time I looked through the finder of that camera I knew the one thing I wouldn’t have to worry about would be framing. I had found my perfect aspect ratio.

And I found, when looking at the work of others—even masters—I have always had a prejudice for the calmness and formal structure of the square. I have friends who've used panoramic cameras and all the other formats. I've dabbled (mostly unsuccessfully) with 6x7 cm, 6x9 cm, 6x12 cm 6x4.5 cm, 4x5 inch, and 8x10 inch cameras and almost every time I find myself chaffing at the aesthetic discomfort of all that wasted space.

"No Problem." I thought. "I'm happy just shooting these marvelous, magical squares of color and black and white." And I did. Cartons and cartons of Fuji and Kodak films. Mostly Tri-X, but other flavors when the menu called for them.

And then one day it all collapsed.

We made the transition to digital. Clients loved it. You could shoot quick. You didn't need Polaroid. Etc., etc. We’ve heard it all a thousand times before. But the thing that really never got talked about was the most important thing we lost: aspect ratio choice.

If you bought a professional level digital camera you had no choice of aspect ratios. You got stuck with the nasty old 35mm, 3:2 ratio whether you liked it or not. And my battle with wasted and unusually configured space returned. And it was nasty. One maker of digital backs offered a square back but it was priced for people working for jumbo clients in world class markets. I was stuck with mainstream.

I'm sure there are those among us who can look at a 3:2 frame and immediately, and comfortably divine the "presence" of the square without assistance. Good for them. I'm not one of them. I like a little assistance from my camera in the form of clearly defined boundaries. Edges. Guide posts. When I look into the finder of my camera I want to see a square frame and I want everything not in the square frame to be excluded from view. And given the popularity of square frame cameras from the 1950s right up to the age of digital, I'm sure there are many who agree with me.

I suspect that rigorous boundaries are helpful because they eliminate one variable of choice and so let us concentrate on composition in a different way, regardless of which format you favor. Cropping after the fact is not the same.

One of the reasons I have been so passionately enamored of the mirrorless cameras is that removing the optical finder from the equation means camera makers can give us back our freedom of choice when it comes to the configuration of our framing via the electronic viewfinder. I bought the Olympus E-P2 with its electronic viewfinder largely because I can set the camera so that, when I bring the finder to my eye, I see a square image framed by black. And every EVF capable camera I can think of strikes the same blow for Freedom of Choice.

If you like wide, they give you 16:9. If you like that pedestrian and ubiquitous 35mm frame they're happy to give you the option to "3:2 it" all you want. And, true to most of the sensors in the mirrorless cameras I tend to use, they also offer the stodgy and boxy 4:3 ratio. You are free to use any of these "lesser" aspect ratios or join me in re-embracing the most intoxicating of formats, 1:1. It even sounds uniquely balanced. One-to-one.

Given the quality of camera files these days I've come to believe that flexibility in setting your preferred aspect ratio is one of the most important factors for overall photographic success and, that the move back to a gracious banquet of aspect ratios is a sign that we're moving past the gnawing hunger for more pixels and less noise into the more lofty sphere of actually thinking about the content and artful arrangement of our images instead of just their legibility.

If you are consistently uneasy composing images I would suggest that you and your present camera format may be at odds. If you have access to an electronic viewfinder camera with changeable aspect ratios you might want to take it out for spin and see what works for you. One size fits all is rarely a good plan in the mystical world of art. Or in the pragmatic world of photography. And if you really love the 3:2? Well aren't you just as happy as a pig at the trough?

SUPPORT ASPECT RATIO FREEDOM!

Kirk

Photographer, photo book author, and photography blogger Kirk Tuck's monthly column on TOP appears on the last Saturday of every month.

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Kirk's Take (Kirk Tuck #3)

The Synergy of one system from two companies. We're talking about Micro Four Thirds.

By Kirk Tuck

My friends thought I was nuts when I went out and bought another compact mirrorless camera to add to the growing collection in drawer number three of my capacious Craftsmen rolling tool chest. But then, my friends had probably already made that diagnosis long before cameras became digital.

Let me back up and fill you in on my "progress." Like everyone else in the business I spent the early years of digital photography bouncing back and forth between Nikon and Canon and Olympus digital SLR cameras, looking for the "Holy Grail" of feature sets. When we first embarked on the brave journey of digital, the only way to get files that clients wanted to use was to bite the bullet and buy the big stuff.

If you are a Nikon shooter you probably progressed from the D1x to the D2 series and then on to the D3 and its variants. If you are still in the Nikon groove and you're a traditionalist, then you've probably salivating at this week's announcement of Nikon's latest super camera, the D4.

If you are a Canon photographer then chances are you got your feet wet with a 30D and then, satisfied that we weren't going to slide back to film, you started the slog through the 1D cameras with, perhaps, a side adventure with the 5D and the 5D Mark II. Now we're all waiting, breathless, for the new Canon 1DX.

But somewhere along the way I got sidetracked by a strange attraction to smaller cameras, and that led me to try the Olympus E series cameras. I really liked some aspects of the system but the smaller cameras didn't necessarily come bundled with smaller lenses—and though I liked the color I got from the cameras, the slightly smaller sizes didn't make much of a difference in handling.

I headed back over to the Canon side of the tracks and waited, like a good customer, for their next jelly-bean-puffy body to come out. I thought I'd be resigned to spending the rest of my time as a photographer anticipating nothing but a routine and unsatisfying increase in megapixels, coupled with a non-stop introduction or re-introduction of more zoom lenses.

And then Panasonic and Olympus busted out with their mirror-less Micro Four Thirds camera concepts. They had me at "accepts most legacy lenses." I hesitated through the first introduction but firmly committed once the Olympus Pen E-P2 camera hit the market. The accessory that put me into the system is the wonderful VF2 electronic viewfinder. Once you've used a really good electronic viewfinder you'll never go back to the dorky-ness of holding a camera out at arm's length and trying to compose something on an LCD screen. "Honey! Can you get me my reading glasses?"

I loved the E-P2 for so many reasons. I'm a proponent of electronic viewfinders in general, having been happily introduced to the benefits by the groundbreaking Sony R1 camera in 2004. I think it's wonderful that I can put a Leica 50mm Summicron on the front of a 12-megapixel digital camera for one kind of shooting and a 300mm ƒ/2.8 Nikon lens on the front of a different kind of shooting by simply changing out adapters. And, as a collector of Olympus Pen FT lenses, I'm very happy to be able to use them all on the new cameras, without a hitch.

New Olympus Pen with old Pen lens.

I initially chose to buy into the Olympus camp because the cameras are beautifully designed and aesthetics are important to me. The E-P3 is an even more refined camera than the E-P2. And the major benefit of Olympus Pens, if you buy only one camera in the mirrorless space, is the built-into-the-body image stabilization. With any of my Olympus Pen bodies I get optimizable image stabilization with any optic I choose to use. From the lowly kit lens to a Leica R-series 90mm Summicron.

The trade off, right now, between Olympus and Panasonic bodies is in the sensors. The Olympus sensor seems stuck at 12 megapixels while Panasonic's newest cameras feature 16-megapixel sensors that are generally thought to be at least a full stop less noisy than the Olympus sensors at higher ISOs. The reviews of the Panasonic GH2 and the G3 hit the gland that generates camera acquisition hormones in my brain. I started looking in earnest. But the thing that finally drove me to add a GH2 to the inventory was straightforward usability.

The very feature that attracts me most to the Olympus cameras, after the cool way they look and handle, is the problem that vexes me with the system so much. I shoot using the EVF exclusively, but I also spend a lot of time in the studio, and when you put the EVF in the hot shoe you lose the ability to gracefully trigger studio flashes with the E-P3, and you lose the ability altogether with the E-P2. The finder takes up the only accessory slot on the camera. I can shoot in the studio with the E-P3 if I used the pop-up flash on manual and dial it down to 1/16th power. But the built-in pop-up flash is not always pointing in the right direction, and all the little workarounds seem silly and amateurish this late in the game.

Would it have killed the budget on the Pen project to have included a little sync port somewhere? Really?

For some reason that can only be explained by an in-depth psychological study, I had the idea that it might be fun to put my ideas about the future of still photography to the test and shoot all my work, for a period of time, with the mirrorless cameras on the market. The lack of a ready sync in the EVF-laden Olympuses was the fly in the ointment.

And there was my rationale for adding the Panasonic GH2 to the mix. It's like the racy Pen's staid, burgher cousin. The GH2 eschews the stylish lines and refined rangefinder references of the Pens. Its industrial designers opted instead for a total reference to the mainstream silhouette of the typical DSLR. Only much smaller.

With the GH2 I get true separation between the function of providing a great viewfinder and the usability of the camera's hot shoe. The EVF is built in and always available. Ditto for the hot shoe. With a small Flashwaves radio trigger in the shoe and my eye to the EVF we're ready, once again, for some studio flash business.

GH2 with flash trigger.

The GH2 also has a dedicated socket for using external microphones. Again, that means I get to use an external microphone and the EVF when shooting video.

The practical part of my brain says I should just slide into the Panasonic system and dump the Pens, but thankfully the practical part of my brain is well atrophied and the indecisive part of my brain wants both. One system for shooting legacy lenses with IS and the other for...full service. There's nothing remotely logical about the way I buy and use cameras. And I'm sure someone with a more "structured" approach to photography will just assume that one of the cameras has better image quality than the other and so is the logical choice.

When it comes to noise and resolution, I'm fairly certain that the Panasonic GH2 and its newer, tiny sibling, the G3, are ahead in that race. But I'm equally sure that the Olympus Pens generate much prettier everyday JPEG files and are a bit more fun to hold in my hands and shoot.

But, the beauty of this melange of cameras and companies is that we get to cherry pick from an ever expanding selection of cameras and also, lenses. As Michael has mentioned recently, Olympus really stepped up and delivered several interesting high performance lenses with their introduction of the 45mm ƒ/1.8 and the 12mm ƒ/2 lenses. You can use them on either camera line (Pens or Panas) but with the Olympus Pens is the IS. Given the success both lenses enjoy I'm certain that Olympus (if they survive their financial crisis intact) will follow up with many more prime lenses.

On the other side of the fence I find that Panasonic has a few lenses which will strongly appeal to anyone who fantasizes about making Micro 4/3 their primary camera system. I've used the 7–14mm ƒ/4 lens and love it. I'm currently playing with the 14–140mm lens on the GH2 and love the 10:1 zoom ratio and the smooth finder image I get with the lens-based IS. And then there's the Leica/Panasonic 25mm ƒ/1.4 which would look lovely on cameras from either side of the fence.

The GH2 is currently one of the best "video" DSLRs on the market. It gives the Canon 5D Mark II a real run for the money where video quality and function are concerned. And the ability to use so many older specialty lenses is a powerful benefit for film makers.

While the most expensive and extensive DSLRs from Canon, Nikon and Sony have an edge on image quality with their full frame sensors, does it really make a difference in handheld, day-to-day shooting for most people? Are there tradeoffs that make the smaller cameras equally valuable in day-to-day use? I'll say there are.

In full production advertising mode it's hard to make the case for walking away from the top tier of production cameras like the Nikon D3x and the Canon 1Ds Mark III. People are working on sets. The structure of the shoots is controlled. The use of the cameras is obvious. But how many of us spend our days doing traditional advertising?

I'd conjecture that the great percentage of users are interested in traveling light, being discreet, maintaining a low profile and still getting shots of very high quality, and I think that's where the new generation of smaller cameras takes us. I recently shot a PR job for a major computer company and I chose to shoot the entire project with a Nikon V1. It's small, stealthy, nearly silent (or completely silent if you don't need the aural feedback) and the image stabilization is amazing. But the real point was that, in a room full of non-professional subjects, the camera was a small distraction instead of a distraction with a capital "D." The camera and lens receded from peoples' attention in a quick and satisfying way and helped me get closer to the goal of being an invisible recorder. It was much different in tone and result than shoots I've done with traditional professional cameras.

While I use, and like, the Nikon V1, I find the Micro 4/3 system a much better resource since it's not a "closed system." The ability to have "ultimate lens flexibility" is a very powerful lure. And the cameras are reassuringly similar to cameras we've used in the past.

The world of photography is incredibly diverse. And it evolves (at least in the commercial space) much faster than ever before. Sometimes the tools mold the style and sometimes styles mold the tools. At least with the little Olympuses and Panasonics the entry prices are low enough to allow us to take a few chances and play more. Where photography is concerned maybe it's more important to look towards the future than to talk about the past. If a few of my "experiments" with small cameras fail, that's okay. At least it will be fun.

That’s my story for the people in accounting, and I'm sticking to it.

Kirk

Photographer, photo book author, and photography blogger Kirk Tuck's monthly column on TOP is currently floating in terms of its scheduling...when it finally settles down on one regular date, we'll be sure to let you know.

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Kirk's Take (Kirk Tuck #2)

Photographer, photo book author, and photography blogger Kirk Tuck's monthly column on TOP was planned to appear on the last Saturday of every month, but he was on deadline for his next book on lighting last Saturday. A week late is better than never, I think you'll agree.

I'll be travelling Sunday and Monday so unfortunately the comments to this post will go up late, but I'll be back shackled to the leg of the desk again by Tuesday. —Mike

Action vs. Activity. One makes you an artist,
the other makes you tired.

By Kirk Tuck

Action and activity are two very different things and it's important for an artist to know which one they're focusing on. Action derives from need or reaction. You are hungry so you eat. You need to get somewhere quickly so you walk faster. You need to get warm so you head for shelter. You have a vision you want to interpret as a photograph so you do the process of making that photograph. You are pushed to eat from necessity and you are pushed to create the photograph by necessity. One driver is physical while the other pursuit is driven by passion. Both are pretty unencumbered pathways and both have an immediate aim. Eating gives you the fuel to go on while creating art gives you the emotional fuel to enjoy life.

Kirk's Take (Kirk Tuck #1)

Series Introduction: Photographer, photo book author, and once and future photography blogger Kirk Tuck will be writing a regular column on TOP that will appear on the last Saturday of every month. That's the plan, at any rate. Welcome, Kirk. —Mike

What I learned when I stopped writing a photo blog

By Kirk Tuck

I’m a slow learner. I started writing a blog about photography back in the early part of 2009 and I didn’t do the business school routine of "establishing metrics" or "laying out a concise framework of goals and concepts of monetization." I really started writing the blog because I was bored, felt isolated and got tired of reading so much really bad information about photography on the web. I thought it would be fun to write honest and sometimes self-deprecating but true articles about the fun and the folly of actually being a professional photographer.

After writing a few posts about the business or about inspiration I learned that it takes time to build an audience. Lots of time. But I also learned that you can accelerate the process by doing exactly what most readers say they do not want you to do. In the case of a photo blog the mantra of the typical reader is that they prefer articles of substance that feed their souls and help them to understand why photography seems so vital to their own lives. In reality, when I wrote articles about why I shoot in the streets or, why I like to do portraits without an audience in tow, the silence in the virtual reading room was startling; depressing. You could hear pins drop and I got the distinct impression that I could drop dumpsters full of cymbals and no one would hear.

But I mentioned above that you could accelerate the number of readers your blog garners with a secret technique. Give your readers what they say they don’t want to read. I started writing equipment reviews of the cameras, lenses and lights that I was interested in. Then the camera brand tribes would come out from their villages and go to war. Everyone had an opinion about the performance of the Olympus EPL2 and its relevance in the hierarchy of current gear. Volumes of vitriol were tossed like gasoline onto the "red dots" cover-up. The review of that seemingly benign camera is still the single most popular blog I have written to date. And every time a wave of brand "true believers" came washing up on to the Visual Science Lab shores a percentage of the wave liked what they read around the edges of the article that had originally drawn them and they stayed on and became loyal readers. And that’s how VLS finally found its momentum and its place on the web.

But as Mike and the one or two other good bloggers on the web will tell you, writing once a week won’t keep them coming back. Just like the coffee and newspaper I consumed this morning, readers want a routine. They want a morning ritual. And that ups the ante for the writer. You start looking around to try and find more relevant content to feed the machine. In my case I wrote every word and took every photograph. I was truly invested in the site and it came to consume as much of my time as my regular photo work. Why? Probably because I grew up with the idea that "If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well." The idea of cranking out something half-assed grated against generations of puritanical upbringing. Doing things halfway was antithetical to the way I learned to make images.

No filters
But there's a dark side to being a blogger. Especially in a field where everyone is an "expert" and most of your readers are in technical fields that require quantifiable measures. To many of the blog readers I seemed to be an anonymous corporation putting out content in exchange for eyeballs. And people seem to have no filters when they communicate with corporate entities. I got some comments that had enough venom in them to take down a mastodon. A large number of ad hominem attacks came barreling into the comments box over "issues" that I would carefully classify as "opinions."

But the worse part of all was the idea that the angry reader had permission to track down my e-mail address and send me their hate mail "off-line." So I did a little experiment and I wrote about a new camera announcement. I wrote it as a "gauntlet toss" and stood back to watch. It got tons of page views. Then I wrote something that I really cared about, in the genre that my commenters claimed they wanted, and the page views dropped like bank stocks. While the gear article garnered dozens of comments in twenty four hours the essay on the reason we photograph managed to cobble together only three or four comments over the space of a week.

My takeaway lesson was that I'd spent two years building a blog for nothing. If readers just wanted information about the gear they could go to the "big daddy" of gear sites and grammatically nightmarish, full-contact forums: DPReview. There they could dissect every camera down to its measurable essence and then argue about the composition of the screws that hold the camera together. I was done. I didn't want to be a camera reviewer; I wanted to write about something different. So I made the announcement that I would stop.

Thousands of bright, serious people
And a funny thing happened on my way to consigning the blog to the scrap heap. I discovered my "silent majority." You’ve all heard the old saw that, "The squeaky wheel gets the grease." Well, the naysayers and vicious commenters had gotten the grease. They'd shut me down because I didn't hear from the other side. To be fair, I had a handful of genuinely wonderful readers who would drop regular comments of support but they seemed, at the time, to be a tiny minority. But the day I announced my (premature) retirement my comment box was filled with hundreds and hundreds of posts. Most started with, "I am sorry I never commented before but...."

And what I found is that there were literally thousands of bright, serious people who started everyday with the same routine, almost to a person. And that routine consisted of fixing a cup of coffee, sitting in front of their computer at home or in their offices, and reading whatever I had written on the Visual Science Lab blog. Almost to a person they had just come from, or would next go to, The Online Photographer blog. That was (and is) still their ritual. They didn’t feel the need to comment, they just enjoyed the reading and the implied inclusion into a circle of people, international in composition, who enjoyed photography and knowing more about why and what other people enjoyed about the art. In the process I learned a very valuable lesson. I had never really invited them to comment and to give me feedback. I’d never come right out and asked for it.

One person was instrumental in the clicking a switch in my brain. Here is what he wrote:

Roy said...
Kirk; You may feel that you have been wasting time better spent on earning a living; not so. Most folks have a sphere of influence that is only as wide as their family and a few friends. Reading these many comments must let you know that your influence is global. Appreciate that as we have appreciated you. I am in my eighties and have just accepted your admonition to walk up to people on the street and ask if I may photograph them. It is still a nerve twister but I've found out it works. Thanks Kirk. I'll drop by now and then to see what else you can talk me into.

Roy kicked my ego-butt and made me realize that I got a value from writing the site that at least equalled my efforts. Even if it was ephemeral and karmic rather than material and measurable. When I read his response, and 250+ others in the comments and another several hundred sent directly to my e-mail, I realized that I'd hit exactly the audience I'd really hoped for when I began.

Kirk Tuck, Self Portrait

I decided to re-start the blog. And it's interesting because I feel like I've gotten permission from my readers to be more personal. To write what I want to write rather than what I think will attract bulk readers. I'm reaching down a little deeper to write things that seem, at times, bittersweet or frightening to me. I'm writing about what happens to us as we become "older" photographers. I'm writing about the "double-edged sword" of our isolation. And I hope I'll continue writing about what amazes and amuses me in my everyday life as an artist. And while this material won't garner me instant numbers growth I hope it will resonate with more and more people who are more curious about the "why" of visual art than just learning how to turn the switches and which menu items to select on their new Turboflex D1000D.

So I’m back. I intend to write a column at least once a month, here, for Mike (who has been a wonderful sounding board in my process of coming to grips with my process...) and to continue my "Chaos Theory" schedule of writing at the Visual Science Lab. While I intend to concentrate on the "whys," I still have a sweet tooth for gear so I can’t totally give up publicly pondering new equipment.

Finally, a warning. If you value what you read each day at Mike’s TOP, remember to say so, often and publicly, and not just here. While writers will write because they must, they also write for an audience. What Mike has done here is to elevate the discussions about art, literature, music and their interwoven effects on our passion for photography, high above the diatribes and mis-information that slops across the web. He reminds us that there's more to it all than just an argument about some arcane slice of techno-crud and he does so in a way that's both enjoyable and challenging. Don't assume that, because he has a few small ads tucked away on the sides of his site, he derives all he needs from the material revenue. Every writer needs the feedback of his or her readers. Let the writers you like know that they're part of your daily rituals and routine and their vision adds fuel and fun to yours. I've seen both sides and I know how important the reader is to the process. Make sure you are committed to doing your part. Let them know they influence people around the globe.

Good morning TOP. It's a beautiful day for photography!

Kirk

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Original contents copyright 2011 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.