Sunday Rants and Opinions. March 7, 2010

     It's Sunday and I'm celebrating the end of the week with a walk around downtown Austin.
     (and a vegan chocolate chip cookie at whole foods).

This note from a kind reader:

In your 'The Visual Science Lab/Kirk Tuck' blog, you first wrote nice
provocative piece called 'Sunday Rants and Opinions. March 7, 2010'.
After you got some bad comments, you edited to much milder version and
later regretted that you had done the editing and started to wonder,
if someone would have copy of it. Here is what I was able to find from
Google's cache (search your blog article from there and then selected
Cached version from search results).

And the text of the original post:

[quote starts]
The image above comes from my favorite new lens.  It's a lens I've
grown to respect in the two weeks that I've had it.  It's the lens
that Nikon and Canon will never be able to make.  It's the Olympus
14-35mm f2 zoom lens.  And it's wonderful wide open at f2.  I say that
Nikon and Canon will never be able to make one but that's mostly just
an inflammatory statement on my part. You wouldn't want them to make
this lens for the full frame systems.  Getting an f2 maximum aperture
that covered 24 x 36 mm at high sharpness would probably result in a
five pound lens with an enormous front element and price tag
approaching five figures (US).

And full frame fans will be quick to tell you that because their
cameras have incredible sensors you'd never need the extra stop on the
lens.  Finally, someone with an engineering-compulsive disorder will
also step in to tell you about "equivalence".   A lens designed for
the smaller 4:3rds crop can be opened up 2 stops and have the same
depth of field, when compared to a lens designed to cover the
traditional 24 by 36 inch sensor.  We can all understand that as the
depth of field depends on both angle of view and focal length. But the
"equivalence truthers" would also have you believe that this makes
smaller formats inferior.

Every choice has it's trade offs.  Bigger formats require greater lens
coverage which requires bigger glass elements and most optical
engineers will tell you that every doubling of the size of a lens
element requires 8x the quality control and engineering to get the
same sharpness and overall performance when compared to smaller
geometry optics.  Making lenses that cover smaller sensors gives
optical engineers many more options for speed, zoom ratio and
sharpness.  And that gives photographers more choices while they are
working.

I had an interesting conversation with a photographer I really respect
this past friday.  He'd temporarily bought into the whole mass
hysteria that would have you believe that we should be shooting every
image with the minimum depth of field.  In a sense he was looking for
every image to be a clear example of exemplary "bokeh" ( the smooth or
unsmooth look of out of focus areas in a photo) but he finally
conceded that many times the narrow depth of field really marred the
overall integrity of an image.  Many times, in retrospect, he wished
that he has stopped down one or two more stops so that the fall off of
focus would be gentler and more convincing.

The Olympus 14-35mm f2 gives a photographer the same kind of DOF wide
open that you would expect to get with a lens of equal field of view,
but made for the 35mm sensor size, at f4.  But when we take into
consideration the ability of optical engineers to optimize smaller
lens geometries you end up with a lens that is as sharp or even
sharper than its larger equivalent.  The bottom line for me is that
the 14-35mm f2 SHG lens is one of those rare optics that people rave
about.  I didn't understand the passion until I  put one on the front
of my camera and took some images.  Once I'd seen the results I had to
have one.  In many ways it's the same feeling I had when I made my
first print from a Leica M series 50mm Summicron lens.  There was just
something  different about the way that lens rendered edges and
contrasts between tones.  Hard to describe but you'd know it when you
saw it.

If you've read some of the stuff I've written here at the Visual
Science Lab website you'll know that I love to "burn in" my equipment
by using it a lot in the wild before I trust it fully for assignments.
I broke that rule with the 14-35 by using it as one of my two primary
lenses for the TED Conference, here in Austin.  Today, I had the
chance to walk around town with it for the first time since the
conference.  I took a couple hundred photos with it, using the e1
camera body as its mate.  Here's a little gallery from an gray,
drizzly and dreary day.  I didn't care about the drizzle.  Both the e1
body and the 14-35 are splashproof and handle rain with aplomb.....
[quote ends]

The old state comptroller's building on 6th street.  A detail of the steel siding.

    The offices of Simmons, Whatever and Graeber, just off Sixth Street across from Whole Foods.

    Posters on the side of Mellow Johnny's Bike Shop.  Lance Armstrong's establishment.

A confluence of corrugation and stucco.  Rendered large and saturated.

Xeriscaping meets downtown night club.  Fused with racous blue.

Another detail in the old comptroller's building.  Brick meets brick meets space age metal.

Old buildings were so cool with the interior being millimeters from the exterior.  All the office buildings I see today are behind buffers of wall and implied space.  Wow.  Nice geometry on the edges.  Good correction for a zoom.  No correction on my part, or on the part of the camera.....

This is one of those "downtown regents of UT" offices that are built like 18th century Regency palaces.  Complete with columns and arches and a preponderance of bigness.

Did I mention the big, regal, University of Texas presence in the middle of downtown Austin? This is where the elite meet to decide what happens at THE university.....and a string of lesser schools.  No offense intended to graduates of Texas A&M...

    It's fun to walk around without a care in the world and snap whatever catches your attention.  At f4 I don't worry about what might or might not be in focus.  I'm looking for intersecting planes and intersecting realities.

Speaking of reality.  I'm heading out this coming Friday for a long over due road trip.  I'm heading West through Texas.  I plan on stopping and shooting whatever I see in Del Rio, Alpine, Marathon, Marfa and all points in that area.  If you live there or know someone interesting who does, could you drop me a line?  I'm planning to do art so I don't need someone to "show me around" but I'd welcome a few contacts who might help me stay on the right track.  You can leave a comment here or you can always reach me at kirktuck@kirktuck.com

That's about all for today.  When I finalize my packing I'll do a quick blog  to let you know what I'm taking and why.  When I get back I'll put up a quick blog to let you know which gear choices were a disaster and which ones were genius.

Best, Kirk

A Youth Misspent at the Printer.

When I ran an advertising agency I spent a lot of time doing press checks at the printers around town.  Never done a press check?  Sounds more glamorous than it is.  Or to quote early Ian Fleming, "It reads better than it lives."  Most printed pieces aren't very chic.  They tend to be utilitarian and straightforward.  You go to the press check to monitor quality.  It's your job to make sure that the guy whose responsibility it is to make sure all four colors line up together, and that there isn't a color cast or banding or weak colors does his job correctly.  And, as most veteran art directors will tell you.....most press checks happen in the middle of the night.  After a nice dinner and a glass of wine you tend to sit around the house waiting with a certain amount of dread for the phone call that lets you know, "We'll probably have your job on press around 11:00 pm."  When you get there you'll find out that printers have a whole different way of telling time and it's usually an hour behind whatever watch you're wearing.

So, you're a photographer, why should you care about the four color printing process?  Well, isn't this where you'd ultimately like your images to end up?  Are you content seeing them at 1200 pixels, splashed across Joe IT Guy's uncalibrated Dell monitor from 2002?  If you're like most photographers you dream of seeing your work in wonderfully rich magazines, in books and in annual reports and brochures.  And on that ultimate of two dimensional reproductive porn, the poster.  Well this really won't help much because photographers are rarely asked to do press checks unless they are good friends of the art director or they are paying for the job themselves.  

I didn't intend this to be about the nuts and bolts of four color printing anyway.  It's just that I came across this DVD in the archives and I'd forgotten all about this job I did for Hixo back in 2005.  We were illustrating some technical software products that were meant to bring tight and repeatable color management to the wet and sloppy craft of super high quality printing.  I never did find out what happened to the job but I did get paid and I did file these images under, "completed".  Which meant that I did my part.  (But here's a wretched secret I need to share with all those people dreaming of joining into the remarkable fun of freelance photography-------half the jobs you shoot get killed.  The best of the best rarely see the light of day.  Some concern or shift in the marketing strategy kills them as quickly as cyanide.....thought it only fair to warn you).   

I spent a day at the old Lithoprint printing plant just off IH-35 near downtown Austin.  We shot all the steps of having something printed in four or five or six colors.  I love the industrial ethos of the forty or fifty foot long Heidelberg presses.  I love the smell of the custom mixed inks sitting next to the giant grey machines in gallon sized paint cans.  And I love the guys who master the craft and, after years of training and apprenticeship, fire up these big monsters and get every step perfect so that spinning blankets and wet colored goo end up making discreet spots on paper with no shift from color to color.  Fast, wet color.

 While we always hated and feared the press check because of the big monkey wrenches it could throw at us we always walked out satisfied and proud of the work.  Going back as an observer.  A paid observer felt in some ways, privileged.  As though I'd skirted some recurring rite of passage and been invited into the lion's den without being hazed.

The thing I always forget is how loud it is in the busy print shops.  Big presses make big noise and the sound of large, thick press sheets being sucked off their tray and into the gaping maw of the German presses had it's own unique quality.  It's cliche but most of the time presses run like....well oiled machines.  None of the nozzle clogs that used to vex us ink jet printers.

So, I needed to use cameras that I could depend on for good available light performance and high sharpness.  I also wanted thick, rich colors.  For me, back a few years that meant two cameras that I loved using.  One is the Olympus e300 with it's 14-54 lens used at 400 ISO and the other camera, the one I used predominantly, was the venerable Kodak DCS-760 with a whopping six megapixels.  AND ABSOLUTELY NOISELESS AT ISO 80!!!!!  While everything moved we learned with slower camera to pay attention to the peaks of action where momentum would stop and people would freeze.  We also learned how to put these miracle cameras on tripods, making them as sharp (indeed, in many instances, sharper) today's 24 megapixel cameras.  

I will confess to loving a mix-matched lens/camera combination back then.  Nikon had just come out with the 10.5 mm fisheye lens for use on their DX cameras.  I disregarded protocol and jammed one on the DCS 760.  Look!  It vignettes on the edges.  And especially in the corners.  Of course I could crop that out but I really like the look.  

Most of the shots done here were shot at shutter speeds ranging from 1/2 a second to around 1/30th of a second.  No crazy 10 frames per second needed or wanted.  And white balance was all over the map.  But amazingly both cameras could be custom white balanced on the spot and this made post processing a snap.  That being said, I wanted the cyan and yellow mix that I got in the unbalanced photo below because it was more emotionally exact while being a bit dramatic.

Shooting on site, at someone else's office, by their grace and patience means that you can't be demanding and you can't be insistent.  You learn to be like water in a Zen koan and learn to divert around the rocks in the stream and find the paths of least resistance that move you forward on your path.  If you don't know how to make friends quickly, and show an honest interest in someone's daily work process, then this kind of work isn't for you.  Me?  I love industrial documentation almost as much as I love portraits and I love to do portraits more than most people love chocolate or money.  We got what we wanted. Made few friends.  Burned no bridges and didn't spill any ink.  It was a day well spent.

 We always talk about cameras and lenses but I must give an ample share of credit for the quality of these images to my noble tripod.  it's a ten year old Gitzo with a lot of miles on it but it's never gotten loose or shaky and it handles everything I throw at it.  It's nice to have a piece of gear that can actually freeze motion.....and freeze time.  All the best, Kirk

The Olympus SEMA-1 Arrives.

If you've read this blog for a while you know I've been an Olympus camera fan for a while but I've been critical of Olympus for shipping a really nice crossover video camera (the EP2) without shipping the one attachment that every video user needs/wants/craves.  That would be an attachment that would allow us to use external microphones while recording video.  Today I came home to find a Fed Ex package by my door and I was so happy to find that it contained the SEMA-1.

It's not a big thing but every video maker worth their salt wants to be able to use the right microphone for the job.  On my last video we made good use of a Sennheiser shotgun microphone to get decent sound without showing the microphone. The SEMA-1 consists of two parts.  The important one is the EMA-1 adapter which has the same plug interface as the EVF finder.  It replaces the EVF finder and provides you with a mini plug that accepts stereo microphones.

Some will wail about the tragic loss of the beautiful EVF finder and while I will mourn the loss while making videos I knew that was the deal when I purchased the camera.  With one of the Hoodman 3.0 Loupe wedged up against the back LCD it's not really that big of an imposition.

The other part of the package is a nifty little stereo microphone with an extension cable and a tie clip for attaching the microphone to people's clothing.  Nice touch.  I used the microphone to record some audio in the the studio with the mic clipped to my shirt.  And while there is some hiss this comes totally from the ALC (auto level control) on the camera side.  Canon's 5D was also ALC when first launched but yesterday they announced a firmware upgrade that brings up the camera to professional standards by adding manual level controls.  I don't expect that Olympus will do that on a consumer level product but we can always ask.......

In my mind it will be enough for countless crossover video/photographers to consider using the EP2 as a professional video tool.  In my mind I'll be able to use the  EMA-1 and my choice of microphones for most of my interview jobs.  If something is really "sound critical" I'll record it on a separate digital audio recorder, just to be safe.

The cable supplied is only six feet long but it's a standard termination on both ends and you can always pick up a longer and better shielded cable at you closest Radio Shack or from Amazon.com's endless resource of vendors.

Below is how the SEMA-1 looks all packaged together.  My take?  I think it is a simple and elegant solution that let's me get back to work.  If you are at all interested in recording good sound with your EP2 or EPL you'll want the EMA-1.  I'm almost certain that it will only come packaged with the microphone but that seems to be the way marketing committees work.  I may come to like their little microphone.  Time will tell.

When you've got everything on a fluid head tripod it works pretty well even without the best EVF finder around.  Tools are just tools, after all.  Here's my brief review of the microphone sound after my brief test, described above:  It's not bad.  It picks up a lot of room resonance and echo and is a little weak in the bottom registers but the overall effect is clean and crisp.

Now I'll get to work and put the camera and a shotgun mic through the torture test and report back.  For now we have achieved a state of happiness.  Of sorts.

A video about the Magnum Print Collection.

The Magnum Photo Collection from kirk tuck and will van overbeek on Vimeo.
An interview with Harry Ransom Center curator of photography , David Coleman, about the Magnum Photo Collection which the Harry Ransom Center will be working with for the next five years. David talks about the contents and significance of this collection which includes some of the most important journalistic photographs of the twentieth century.

Imagine standing next to curator, David Coleman, on the quiet fifth floor of the Humanities Research Center, as he carefully opens an old Ilford photo paper box and starts to leaf thru a whole sheaf of vintage Henri Cartier Bresson work prints.  We turn one over and see the penciled signature and the appended, typewritten caption on the back.........

Let's rewind for a second.  A little history.  In the 1940's thru the 1970's most photojournalists  shot their assignments on black and white film and the medium of delivery to clients (mostly magazines and newspapers) was a black and white print.  The prints were intended to be returned to the photographer or the agency after their use.  Over the years the world's preeminent photo agency, Magnum, stockpiled nearly 200,000 work prints by the greatest names in documentary photography.  Now, in an age where most intellectual properties are digitized for delivery, they no longer required these prints to do their business.  What to do with two 18 wheeled tracker trailer trucks full of the 20th century's most important prints?

The answer came from Michael Dell.  He purchased the collection and is loaning the entire inventory to the Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin for the next five years.  Students and academics will be able to study all aspects of the prints.  I'm anticipating some really great shows of the work at the Center.

That's the background.  How do I fit in?  I got a call from brilliant advertising photographer and sometime video shooting partner, Will van Overbeek, who asked if I would help him shoot a video about the new collection for online magazine, Glasstire.  When I heard the details of the project I was in. (I would have been in anyway for another chance to work with Will..).

We hauled our usual assortment of gear over to the Humanities Research Center and found a fun location amidst stacks of portfolio boxes with labels like, "Henri Cartier Bresson: China",  "Joseph Koudelka", "Yugoslavia", "Gill Peress".  We interviewed David Coleman, the curator, in the middle of this rich treasure trove of images.

I was amazed to see dozens of new prints from masters whose work I thought I knew well.  Many had never been presented to the public before.  It was a rare privilege.

Will and I shared directing and editing duties.  We used his Canon 5D mk2 for capture.  

Will is no stranger to the Humanities Research Center's photo department.  His 2008 show of Barton Springs is in their permanent collection.  

If you are in Austin the HRC is a must visit.  The first two exhibits when you walk in the front door are the Gutenberg Bible and the first photograph.  Amazing.