Monitors can have a way of working against rapport between the photographer and subject. They may be great for chimping, but can sometimes be too much of a distraction when working with average people that aren't accustomed to having a photo taken in a studio environment. Professional talent doesn't get distracted easily but average people can be more difficult to maintain attention. Everybody has a different approach, but tethered shooting isn't a priority of mine when doing portraits.
I hear you there! Tethering can range from a god-send to utterly-useless or even worse-than-nothing depending on the situation.
My friend Natasha came over last night to practice modeling and we played around in the studio (technically on the balcony). She is an actress but in South Beach / Miami there are a lot of good-to-great opportunities for modeling. Having a 30" instant preview helped her see instantly when the pose was awkward or her expression was off; I've never had a shoot where tethering had such a positive impact on the shooting - she adjusted extremely well to the visual feedback and it seemed like she improved on
every frame. In addition we had looked through some inspirational sources (mostly South American fashion magazines) and picked out this image style (the muted high contrast with a heavy shoulder on the highlight curve) and so every shot came in with those (rather dramatic) adjustments already made so that I could adjust my lighting, composition, and lens based on the image WITH the extra contrast and muted color rather than having to guess at what the image will look like with that color/contrast styling. Better yet the "Exposure Evaluation" tool showed me the histogram of the image without any of the adjustments so I could ensure that I was still capturing highlight/shadow detail in the raw even though I was blowing out the highlights with my adjustments; that way if I wanted to reprocess one or more shots with a different look the files would be flexible to the new look. BIG deal for me on this shoot.
Other shoots however I take a few images and immediately understand that the subject is going to suffer from seeing themselves "o no! is that what I look like??" (rolls eyes). In this case I can either unplug (switches instantly to the CF card) or turn the monitor around (we have ours on an Ergotron swing arm - we're an ergotron dealer - that can rotate nearly 360 degrees and from horizontal to vertical). Or I turn it off but keep shooting tethered (the Phase will still show the images on the DB LCD for quick checks)
I've shot the headshots for the University of Miami Beauty Pageant (or whatever PC term they are using now) for three years now and having 12 girls to shoot in a short afternoon I could not do it (sanely) without tethering. Each girl can sit down - I type in their name and take 10-12 shots and then do a quick edit with them to pick their favorite. On my tethered screen is a small focus window in the corner which shows their eyes (they want all the girls in the same composition so none of them appear "favored" in the program and marketing so the eyes are always in the same area) and I can be sure I am getting the eyes in focus. I have enough time between girls to process the select (set to open in photoshop automatically) and run a quick retouch of skin and blemishes and save/close the file. At the end of the day I navigate in C1 to the processed folder where the retouched images are sitting and select to process my Facebook (watermarked low res) and Client-Med-JPG (unwatermarked medium res JPGs) recipes upload the results to facebook and burn a DVD of the JPGs and I'm done!
Shooting tethered is important to professionals in studio ... often working with professional models. It is of zero importance to wedding and event shooters and many who favor mobile outdoor portraits (my personal preference) for whom this camera will have a lot of appeal (price being a top consideration). Many experienced Wedding and Portrait shooters are expressing interest in MFD as a way to distance themselves with the growing hordes of 35mm DSLR shooters entering the business.
Indeed once/if there are local distributors, local service/support I would think this camera should make a great temptation for dSLR shooters who want to distance themselves from their competition but at the lowest possible price. The Aptus-II 5 and used/demo Phase backs have been pretty successful for us (Capture Integration) in that type of situation, and there are clearly some advantages and disadvantages to all those options.
The reason I thought it could make a good portrait camera is because the colors and contrast in the sample photos appear to be a bit muted. These qualities can sometimes be good for portraits of people with less than perfect skin. Fuji Astia and Kodak Portra were popular with many portrait photographers in the film days precisely for their muted qualities.
I wouldn't put much stock in the muted image qualities. It just looks like a default neutral capture base to me ... much like the Nikon D3X is IMO and experience. What will be important is how malleable the files are ... which is a strength of most MFD cameras I've ever used.
My comments about muted quality come from a sensibility that has developed from photo experience which might not be the same as others. We each have a different sensibility and often it's a matter of opinion, but I believe I'm seeing a quality of capture that is the relationship between camera components rather than just processing alone. Maybe I'm wrong and my opinion might change after seeing more images, but those are my thoughts at this time.
I would be very very surprised if it was not possible to tweak a few raw-processing settings and completely invert your impression of the camera having a "muted" quality. The default look of the raw file is about as important to any user as what color box the camera arrives in; it takes no time at all to set a "default style" in Capture One which can be applied to any or all images according to your personal aesthetics.
There have been numerous threads recently discussing it over-arching importance of post programs for MFD. It's a POV I subscribe to based on a fair amount of experience with various MFD systems.
Indeed. Though creating a good dedicated processing software, especially from the ground up, adds (indirectly) to the net price of the system and Pentax is clearly making price one of their chief priorities. It's probably grossly under-appreciated by most end-users how expensive and difficult it is to create a world-class raw processor.
For instance Phase One and Leaf provide their own (accurate) ICC profiles for various situations such as the Portrait / Daylite / Strobe / Tungsten profiles you find with a Phase One digital back in Capture One. Most camera companies provide only one embedded color profile which means they have to balance the opposite needs of pleasing skin color, providing accurate reds for product photography, giving a not-horrible response in tungsten light (where, even after a WB the colors of a camera can be very different if not properly profiled) and then rely on you to make any needed changes on-top of that profile in Photoshop/LR etc.
In addition Capture One provides the Color Editor which is the most powerful ICC profile editor I've seen available in the photo world to provide you a easy way of modifying the EXACT color response of your camera (as opposed to a few scientifically oriented packages by companies like X-Rite that cost a LOT of money and are designed more for color scientists than photographers).
Phase long ago made one of their best business moves ever by not just opening their software to dSLR users but making a huge investment in the software, coming up with their own start-to-finish math pipeline and color engine and adding native tethering for most popular dSLRs. They did such a great job it became the
preferred software for many Canon, Nikon, and Leica users (and a majority of the professional-tethering market) that they were able to charge $500 (now $400) a copy for it,
greatly offsetting the cost to the Phase One community of having a world class raw processing engine that could have processing tweaked specifically to Phase One's digital backs.
Doug Peterson (e-mail Me)
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