Too Many Menus

Three Cameras, Three Menus, Three Sets of Controls

Fuji X-Pro1, X-T1, X-T20

In 2017, I changed brands of camera equipment for the first time in 24 years — from Canon to Fuji, The changeover did not happen all at once; it took place over several months as I sold my Canon cameras and lenses and then used the money to buy into the Fuji system.

Everything was bought used from internet fora, such as Fred Miranda, POTN, and the Rangefinder Forum. I don't think I've ever bought a defective item from members of those fora. (I'll write a post on the art and science of buying used equipment on the net sometime soon.)

My first Fuji acquisition was an X-Pro1, a delightfully quirky and idiosyncratic camera with which I immediately bonded. As Bobby Tingle wrote on the Cameraderie forum:

"I feel like the X-Pro is all about the shooting experience. It is not a tool meant to get out of the way of working. Instead, the X-Pro is meant to be part of the process of making the photograph. Taking more time and putting more thought into each push of the shutter button."    

Tingle was speaking more specifically about the X-Pro2, but I think his comments are even more applicable to the X-Pro1, the first camera for which I’ve felt actual affection since my Olympus OM2n of many years ago. It's the camera that hangs over my shoulder whenever I leave the house unless I know I’m going to need a different camera for some reason. And although I have used it for work, I don’t consider the X-Pro1 a “work camera.” It's my fun camera.

I picked up two more Fuji bodies in quick succession: an X-T1 and an X-T20, both in like-new condition, although the X-T20 was a little more so.

I quickly found the X-T1 to be one of the most user-friendly cameras I've handled in a long time. Kinda like my Olympus OMs in that regard. And although 16 megapixels is considered a bit outmoded these days, it's enough for most of the things I do, especially since most of the photography I'm doing these days is for books and magazines, along with an occasional business portrait gig.

My final camera buy was the X-T20. I had never actually handled one before, and when I unwrapped it, I was surprised at how small it is -- smaller than an Oly OM-D E-M5, in fact. Although I have large hands, I've always preferred small cameras. But the X-T20 was even too small for me. A snazzy little black half-case from Amazon fixed that, though, and made it handle very much like the X-T1. The Atlanta wedding photographer with whom I occasionally work as a "second shooter" complimented me on the "pretty" (her word) files from the the X-T20.

So, it looks like I'm pretty well covered. Or am I?

Actually, I've inadvertently wound up with three different cameras with three different sets of controls and menus. Not cool.

The menus and controls aren't terribly different, but different enough that they can cause a bit of confusion when I'm in a fast-working situation. (The X-Pro isn't part of the problem, because I have it set up the way I want it for general use, and since I don't normally use it for work I seldom need to make any quick changes.)

After considerable thought, I decided the best course was to sell both the X-T1 and X-T20 and buy a pair of clean, used but not abused, X-T2s, with identical controls. The X-T3 was out, because, even used, they are still too pricey. And the X-H1? I didn't know what to think about the X-H1. Even at the deeply discounted prices for which they are currently selling, I certainly couldn't afford two of them. On the other hand, the X-H1 is a very high-grade camera. I might not need two of them.

Oh, and one other thing: I wanted at least one of my bodies to be able to take a battery grip, not for the better battery life, but because it would help the camera balance better with my heavy Canon 580EX2 flash.

Following the sites listed above over several months, I found that used X-T2s in excellent condition were scarce, but when available, were selling for $625 to $750. So I would be looking at $1250 to $1500 for a pair. 

Then I found an ad on the POTN site offering a like-new X-H1 with battery grip for $850 or best offer (OBO). The seller was a young man seeking to raise funds to go to South Africa to serve as a volunteer doing educational work with an NGO. I offered $800, he accepted, and I am now the happy (so far) owner of a Fuji X-H1. I like it very much, and think I will get along just fine with the one body plus the very capable X-Pro1 as an emergency backup.

Now to sell the X-T1 and X-T20. If you're interested in either, email me at djphoto@vol.com.

Don't Quit Your Day Job

Heritage High School Library

Catoosa County, Georgia
(for Derthick, Henley & Wilkerson Architects, Chattanooga, Tennessee)

Canon 5D Classic, EF 24mm f3.5 T/S (tilt/shift) lens

To anyone who may be considering a career change to professional photography, may I give you a few cautionary words? As many have said, "Don't quit your day job!"

If you are far enough along in life and in your career that you could retire today and continue to live at the level you prefer with no additional income, then go for it. But don't count on making any money for a while, and maybe never. And don't count on spending much time doing photography. You will spend 80-90 percent of your time doing marketing and peripheral tasks such as post-processing. If you do not do the marketing you will make very little money.

Another factor to consider is this: pursuing a career in professional photography can become an all-consuming monster that will devour your life. Think carefully about this. If you can do something else that will allow you to live a life that leaves time for your family and for the photography that really matters to you, you will do well. You can be a photographer, even a successful one, without being a full-time pro. Something I've long observed is that you can nearly always make money at photography if you don't have to, but if you depend on it for your living it can become very difficult.

When you read about a successful photographer filling his days with interesting and profitable assignments, remember two things: 1, he is almost certainly a master marketer or has someone good who does it for him; and 2, he has been doing this for a long time and has built up an extensive list of good clients.

I went for it as a self-employed photographer and writer 42 years ago after working for other people in the photography and advertising fields for several years. Before that, I was a teacher.

So, how has it been? Truly, a mixed bag. My own self-evaluation is that artistically, my career has been a modest success. Financially, not so much. I've been able to go to many interesting places and do many interesting things because of my photography and writing. But I have been neither a good nor a diligent marketer, and if my wife had not loved me enough to work all these years so that I could pursue my dream, we would not have much. (Health insurance is an especially expensive problem for a self-employed person.)

Louise at 69

She is now retired from her career as a Nurse Practitioner, and thanks to her diligence, we have enough to live in reasonable comfort.

I'm still working, though not as much. Most of the people who gave me work over the years have retired or moved on to other things, and the younger art directors have a bit of trouble relating to me. But I can still travel, photograph, and write, so I concentrate on books and magazine articles these days. My latest book was published by a major publishing house in 2017 and I have several more in various stages of development.

One of my conscious goals going into photography was to have a career no one could make me retire from. So that part, at least, has been successful. But my very best advice to you is still this:

Don't quit your day job.

Photography and Politics

Russian Girl in the Arpatskaya, Moscow

Olympus OM2n, 100-300mm f4 Tokina lens, Fujichrome 100 RDP

Edward Steichen, one of the all-time great photographers, said near the end of his long and distinguished career, "The function of photography is to explain man to man and each man to himself. That is no mean function."

Documentary photography is about human beings and their doings. One cannot delve very far at all into the doings of human beings without running up against politics and religion, because they are two of the principal motivators of human action. It is disingenuous to think that photography can be divorced from these two great motivators.

From earliest times, most of the great photographers have been people who have had a point of view and have used photography to express it. In fact, it would be safe to say that is often the reason they are regarded as great photographers. Their points of view have invariably been molded by politics and/or religion (or the lack of it, which is a religion of its own).

We must recognize and respect the power of political ideas in the work of other photographers, even if we do not ourselves espouse those beliefs. I might find that another photographer and I are political opposites. But if he has a definite point of view and uses his photography to present it effectively, I must respect that and attempt to do as well in advancing my own point of view.

We may proclaim ourselves apolitical and may deeply wish to be so, yet, we cannot escape politics. It is integral to all human endeavor, photography not excepted. Instead of being contentious and flaming every one whose beliefs vary a hair's breadth from our own, let's use our cameras to express our own points of view about what's right and what's wrong, and what is valuable. Democracy thrives in the free marketplace of ideas, and truth will ultimately prevail even though it may be willfully held down.

If It Looks Good, Shoot It!

Nurse at Crawford W. Long Hospital, Atlanta

(Now Emory University Hospital Midtown)

Canon EOS 10D, 28-70 f2.8L lens

In 1972, I was hired as an intern/assistant/general dogsbody at a small, strictly non-Hollywood film production company. We made what were called in those days “industrial” movies (basically short films made to promote and/or sell a product) and also made many training filmstrips, mostly for the fast-food industry. (For the younger set, I should explain that a filmstrip is a series of photographs arranged in a story-telling sequence on a single strip of film and shown by means of a special projector.)

I had been involved with photography since 1968, and was eagerly looking for a way to make a career out of it.

My first out-of-the studio assignment was to go along as a helper on a shoot for some audio-visual training filmstrips for Arby’s Roast Beef. We went to a brand new store in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, where everything was still sparkling new and clean.

As I said, my company was by no means a large operation. Usually, a two-man team was sent out on jobs like this: a director, who was also in many cases the script writer, and a photographer. I was just along to help out and to gain experience.

Our lighting setup for this kind of work usually consisted of three 1000-watt daylight blue tungsten floodlight bulbs in 18-inch reflectors which we called “scoops.” I was salivating with anticipation, because this was finally my chance to learn all about lighting ratios and exotic stuff like that.

We set up the lights at the work area and the photographer moved them around a bit. He turned to the director and said, “That look okay to you?” The director said, “Looks good to me. Shoot it.”

And thereby I learned the most valuable lesson I’ve ever learned about photography: photography is all about how things look. If it looks good, it is good. Shoot it!

(And then rearrange a few things and shoot it again. It may look even better.)

Serendipity Again

Serendipity, defined as "an apparent aptitude for making fortunate discoveries accidentally," has been a major theme in my photography. I've written about it before, here and here. I keep bringing up the subject because I believe that with some attention and awareness you can learn to use it to improve your photography also. Here are three more ways to cultivate the muse.

           

Go for Bold Graphics

Greenville Museum of Art

Olympus OM, 28mm Zuiko, Kodachrome 64

Even on days when you can't find much to photograph, you can often find subjects that lend themselves to a bold, graphic treatment. As a bonus, the harsh light and deep shadows which make mid-day so inappropriate for many subjects often enhance graphic shots. An assignment to produce a book about the city of Greenville, SC, did not permit the luxury of photographing only in morning and evening light. This view of the Greenville Museum of Art was made in early afternoon with strong light flooding the scene while storm clouds drifted in overhead became the cover of the book.

Make Color the Message

          

Paintpots, Kids Outdoor Art Class

Pentax 6x7, 105mm Takumar lens, Fujichrome 100

 Another way to find photographs when none seem to be available is to look for color: bold color, subtle color, contrasting colors, complementing colors. This is easier than it sounds, and once you've opened your eyes to the colors all around you, you'll be amazed at what you've been missing. The great Jay Maisel is a master at this and any photographer can learn a great deal by studying his work. 

I happened by just after small children at an outdoor art class had left their paint pots and gone on to another activity at the Chattanooga, Tennessee RiverPark.

Look for Story-telling Details

Civil War Bugle

Chickamauga National Battlefield

Nikkormat, Vivitar 100mm lens, Kodachrome 64

          

If you're like me, you may spend too much time looking for the black-buster, tell-it-all-in-one picture and overlook the smaller, detail shots. But very often it's the details which give a real sense of what a place or event is all about. Photographing a Civil War re-enactment, I covered the marches, the camp life, the interaction between the characters. But it is this close-up of a bugle hanging on a tent pole which most completely captures the feel of the event.

I Hereby Highly Resolve. . .

Leslie's Wedding Portrait

Canon 10D, EF 28-70 f2.8L lens

Sorry, I can only show the digital file. The 6x7

negative was probably discarded with other

old wedding negatives some years ago.

. . . that we had enough resolution a long time ago.

Photographers on the (now sadly defunct) Digital Wedding Forum were boasting of making and selling excellent 30x40 prints from four-megapixel cameras such as the Nikon D2H and the original Canon 1D in the early years of this century. When the Canon 1DMarkII came out with eight megapixels, I remember reading a post on the forum by celebrity wedding photographer Denis Reggie in which he crowed that it would no longer be necessary to turn the camera for verticals because with all that resolution verticals could simply be cropped out of horizontal frames!

For myself, I learned early on that huge amounts of resolution are unnecessary for most of our purposes. I made the switch to digital in 2003 with the six-megapixel Canon 10D and, like many, worked it into my wedding workflow over several months, finally doing my first all-digital wedding on June 28, 2003.

My first assignment after acquiring the 10D was a bridal portrait, for which I packed my usual equipment – a Pentax 6x7 loaded with Fuji NPH color negative film. Just for fun, I decided to take along the new 10D and do a few shots with it as well. I wound up shooting every pose with both cameras, and because I didn’t yet know about the advantages of RAW, I shot jpegs in the 10D.

(For those of you who came into photography after the big changeover to digital, I should mention that the 6x7cm -- [2¼ x 2¾ inches] -- was revered, along with its sister format 6x9cm, as giving the highest quality available in a readily hand-holdable camera. The 6x7 format made a negative or transparency seven or eight times as large as the APS-C [half-frame] sensor in my 10D.)

After looking at the files, I said to myself “Hummmh!” I selected a file and a 6x7 negative from similar poses and took them to my local, very good, professional lab and had a 16x20 print made from each. When the lab owner gave me the prints, he said “Hummmh!” Another commercial photographer friend, a Mamiya RZ67 (also 6x7cm format) shooter, walked in just then and when he saw the prints and was told what they were, he also said “Hummmh!”

Then he said “I was saving some money for a trip to Europe this summer, but maybe I need to look into this digital thing!”

To shorten the story, I showed the prints to a number of my commercial photographer friends and several art directors I worked with and asked them to tell me which was which. Only one could tell them apart, and that was because, as I later learned, the digital file had more depth of field.

The fact is that a group of experienced professional photographers and art directors couldn’t tell the difference between a 16x20 printed from a jpeg from a six-megapixel digital camera and one printed from a 6x7 film negative!

I've shown these photos before, but I'll show them again: This is a pair of pileated woodpeckers working on a tree in my backyard, taken with a Fuji X-T20 (with a 24 megapixel sensor about the same size as my old 10D) and the Fuji XC 50-230 lens -- by no means a premium lens. The camera was hand-held at 1/60th second with the lens wide open.

And now we have cameras offering 30--50--60 megapixels and beyond. How much image quality do we need, anyway? We have way more than enough to do just about anything we would ever want to do.

Photographers are like lemmings, eagerly lining up to pay out their money to take a dive over the more-resolution cliff. And then they come back and do it again next year.

Just Looking. . .

Fire on the Mountain!

GA Hwy. 136 at Burnt Mountain Road,

Pickens County, Georgia

Photography is both an art and a tool. You can do all kinds of things with photography, and as a long-time commercial photographer I've been involved in many of those uses. Yet, with all due respect for its other aspects and uses, the photography that most interests me is just looking: the art of observing and exploring the things I see as I go through life and documenting them to share with others or simply to revisit for my own enjoyment.

The very great Elliott Erwitt was an extremely successful commercial photographer, but it's his personal work for which he is best known.  In that regard, we share the same philosophy:

“It's just seeing - at least the photography I care about. You either see or you don't see. The rest is academic. Anyone can learn how to develop.”

Clinging to Life

GA Hwy. 22 at Covered Bridge Road

Oglethorpe County, Georgia

In this sense, the observant photographer is like a little boy who finds something interesting and wants to tell everyone about it. He runs to his friends shouting "Hey, look what I found!"

Others may have different ideas, of course, but to me, that's the art at the heart of photography.

Hey! Look what I found!

Praying Tree

GA Hwy. 262, Decatur County, Georgia

 

Rise of the Swamp Monster

GA Hwy. 201, Whitfield County, Georgia

Air Mail

Cavender Creek Road

Lumpkin County, Georgia

 All photos are from my book Georgia: A Backroads Portrait.

Changing Systems, Learning Technology

Two Chairs, Hahira, Georgia

Canon EOS 20D. EF 50mm f1.8 lens

Recently my friend and fellow-blogger Dennis Mook, The WanderingLensman, wrote a post lauding the benefits of the extensive menus built into today's digital cameras. I have a different take on the subject.

I bought my first digital camera right around my 66th birthday and began teaching myself Photoshop. It seems that all I've done since then is learn software and camera menus and I'm thoroughly sick of it! All I want to do is make photographs.

Years ago, I had a small book that purported to teach budding photographers how to use a camera. The author used the acronym SAFE: Shutter--Aperture--Focus--Expose. Personally, I don't think all our complicated menus have improved on that.

Before the Great Digital Switch, I used Canon EOS film cameras for about ten years, and before that used the Olympus OM system for 12 or 13 years. Looking back, I'm sorry I didn't stay with Olympus longer. Aging eyes made it more difficult to focus quickly and accurately on the grid screens that I used, but I could have changed to different screens and kept on using the OMs a while longer.

However, Canon EOS models such as the A2 with its menus and automatic features did help ease the transition into digital. I began with the 10D, then the 20D, which was actually a pretty good camera, the 30D, and then, in 2006, the 5D. The menus gradually grew more complex, but not yet burdensome. (Actually, I should have kept the Canon 5D, which I used happily for eight years.)

All this time, of course, I was also learning progressively more difficult software: various permutations of Photoshop, Capture One, and other programs, all of which were apparently essential adjuncts of digital photography.

To make things even more interesting, in 2010, influenced by the writings of master photographer and blogger Kirk Tuck and others, I bought an Olympus E-PL1. Now there was a menu! But I fought my way through it and wound up using a pair of E-M5s as a secondary system for several years. I learned how to dig out what I needed from the arcane menus to set the camera up to do what I wanted quickly and easily.

However, I switched to the Fuji X system in 2017 and still find myself fumbling through their supposedly easier menus. Go figure.

Sometimes, most of the time these days, I would rather just be SAFE. Shutter--Aperture--Focus--Expose.

If Necessity Is the Mother of Invention. . .

Cover of the Colorado Springs book.

. . . then Desperation Is the Father of Creativity.

One of the first editorial assignments in my fledgling career was a commission to do the photography for a book about Colorado Springs, Colorado. The publisher was Windsor Publications, a California company which specialized in producing magazine-format books for Chambers of Commerce to use in touting their respective cities as ideal places for businesses and individuals to relocate.

I photographed, and sometimes wrote, many such books for them over a period of a dozen or so years, but this was my first, and I made a beginner's mistake: when I returned home, had my film processed, and edited my slides, I found that I did not have a cover shot.

This was a serious problem, especially for someone trying to get established with a new client. The cover shot is the most important photograph in the book. It's largely responsible for sufficiently piquing the interest of a potential viewer to cause him/her to pick up the book and look through it. And I didn't have a single photo in my take that would work for that!

The slide used on the cover needed to be in vertical format because I was shooting Ektachrome 200 film in a 35mm (Olympus OM) camera. The image quality of that combination would not have been sufficient to allow cropping out a vertical section for an 8.5x11-inch cover, so the slide had to be a vertical.

What to do, what to do, what to do? 

Looking through my slides again, I found a vertical format photo of downtown Colorado Springs with Pike's Peak in the background. A 135mm telephoto lens compressed the space and made the mountain appear almost to rise straight up  from the very edge of downtown.

Okay, but still not enough impact for a cover.

Looking through the slides again, I found a vertical-format photograph of a statue of General William S. Palmer, the founder of Colorado Springs. Inspiration struck, and I sandwiched the two slides together in one mount. Viola! I had my cover!

We did things differently in those pre-digital days.

But you can bet that I never again left a location without making sure I had a cover shot or several in the can.