Monday, October 13, 2025

I took a black and white camera with me to Chicago...I just had to take the color out of the files before I realized it. Make that two black and white cameras...

The giant fountain at Millennium Park in the hellscape we used to call, "Chicago." 
(Sarcasm. Chicago is just fine...).

When I built my photography studio in downtown Austin back in the 1980s one of the things I required was a fully functional black and white darkroom. Clients were fine with big transparencies for ads because they would be drum scanned for use but black and white prints were still the gold standard for black and white (or duotone, quadratone, etc.) uses. I didn't just print for a few years and then move on to other interests. I have zero propensity for ADHD. I souped black and white film, made contact sheets and printed large black and white prints almost daily. For well over a decade. It was very rare for me to ever send out a black and white print job to an outside lab. There were always reasons but mostly it was because I was never satisfied with anyone else's interpretation of my negatives. My way of looking at finished prints. 

I'll estimate that in roughly 20 years I produced about 10,000 black and white prints. And not prints just aimed at pleasing me but also aimed at pleasing the art directors who were making ads for international companies like AMD, Dell, IBM, Motorola and many more household names (well, household if you were in tech). I was well paid for the prints and nearly all of them went out not as "easy to do" RC (resin coated) prints but as toned, archival prints on double weight fiber paper. That's a level of experience with black and white printing that is generally only achieved by people who spend their careers in custom print labs, working the trays. For us it was part of the profession.

The markets changed at the end of the 1990s. Color became cheaper and easier to produce and to reproduce. Clients moved into fully color mindsets pretty quickly and the darkroom became a refuge from work. A place where I could print my own stuff on my own schedule.

When I closed the 3,000 square foot studio and moved my office into a smaller building adjacent to my home I closed the door on the darkroom and around the same time made some big investments in digital cameras and related technology. While my peers were drawing lines in the sand and making statements about how they'd never give up film I sold off the film gear and spent a fortune on big Kodak digital cameras, grappling with $12,000 budgets per camera (you'll have to do the math for inflation). 

I never gave up personal shooting with black and white in mind and even when I shoot a Leica in color I'm doing it in a .DNG format and in the back of my mind is the constant thought of "how will this look if I convert to black and white?" 

When I went on vacation at the end of September this year I went with my spouse to Chicago. We had a great time. Friendly people, no stress, no conflicts. I took two cameras and shot mostly in raw. When I got back home I tossed the files into Lightroom and worked towards making the color in the images pop. I posted some here on the blog and also on Instagram. And then I left the files to ripen for the last couple of weeks. 

This afternoon I sat down and started exploring how selected street images might look if I reworked them into black and white. And that's what this post is all about.  

The two cameras were both Leicas. I wanted to see which of the two I'll want to use more in the future; the Q2 or the smaller DLUX-8. And part of that assessment is looking at finished files from each camera and seeing what works, what doesn't and what is similar across both cameras. But also, how they'll look when I convert their files to black and white. 

I find some photographers put in way too much time making things like black and white conversions way too complicated and unnecessarily painful. It doesn't need to be that way. In fact, I found a preset that comes with the current edition of Lightroom Classic that was a good starting point for nearly every file here. 

So, I set aside a few hours this afternoon and cherry-picked the files that I liked and toyed around with them. Since I don't write about theory much I am showing a lot of images which should serve as proof of procedure. If an image took more than five minutes of cajoling I abandoned it and searched for lower hanging fruit. 

While I like diving into files that have been freshly shot I've spent time this year going back to big, square negatives I shot 30 and 40 years ago, scanning them and making them into black and white files as well as some larger (24x24 inch) black and white prints. Kind of the same way in which I'm approaching these Chicago files. I let them sit for a while after the initial color foray and now I've come back to them to see how they look in "monochrome."

The raw files from the Q2 are marginally better but the DLUX8 is a much more solid camera than a lot of people give it credit for. Especially if you consider it to be a "raw-only" device. The Jpegs are solid but the raw files are better. 

Take a peek. Blow them up if you want to. None of these are for clients. I got rid of the clients last week. These were just for me. 


Washers of tall windows. 
temporary crosswalk companion.
Travel companion waiting for food and drink. 
Leica photographer met in the street. 



Johann Buis. Standing in front of Central Camera.
B. takes photos in her inimitable way.



The "Bean." 
the plastic women at Macy's department store.

Street photography, or one way of looking at it.

"Crossing the street" photography.

Early morning in black and white.
Chicago River Walk.


Hanging out under the "Bean". 
Testing the DLUX-8 flare at the "Bean". 

Stairs to the third floor at the Cultural Center.

A hallway into the contemporary galleries at the Art Institute. 

Gallery fuel. 


Taking a break in the late afternoon before heading out for dinner. 







The thoughtful pose and expression of an art director.  

The furrowed brow and scrunched eye of an Austin photographer in Chicago.



Engagement photos right in the middle of the main stairway at the Art Institute.
Amazed that they allowed this commercial adventure on a crowded Saturday...

Bean-ography.


Heading down Wabash to somewhere...



I love being out in the street shooting photographs. Do I think it has tremendous staying power as my sole art form? Naw! But not everything in life needs to be hard work. Fun is highly underrated. Grabbing a camera, a pocket full of cash and a bucket of time is a wonderful way to navigate through a vacation. Vacation, not work. Fun. 

I enjoyed sharing these images. Some were "one click" conversions via a Lightroom preset. Others were adjusted to taste. All were taken over the course of a couple of days. The rest of the time was spent going from museum to museum and front gallery to more galleries. Now home and having fun exploring the possibilities. 































Saturday, October 11, 2025

It's Saturday. It was 64° when I left the house for our swim workout. The water was perfect. The swimming was fun. Here's a reminder of a fun event coming up in Austin, Texas:

On October 25th we'll be treated to the annual "Day of the Dead" parade and festival in downtown Austin. Lots of fun! Here are the details: ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT AUSTIN'S DIA DE LOS MUERTOS EVENT !!! 

Here are some photographs I made a few years ago... Always a fun subject to document... 










Friday, October 10, 2025

Going Old School and Reviewing a Lens that I Can't (Won't) get Rid Of. Right.

 


I'm writing today about a miraculous lens that I've used on and off for, well, decades. Not always the same one but the same model. It's the Canon FD 50mm f1.4 and it's wonderful. I've adapted it to work on a number of cameras and since the dawn of the mirrorless age its value to me has only grown. In fact, an earlier Canon 50mm FD lens, the f1.8 version, is probably to "blame" for my long term addiction to the 50mm focal length on a full frame or 24x36mm sensor or film frame. It's just so right for the way I see. 

The 50mm f1.4 FD lens (breech mount) is the "chrome nose" version and not labelled as a "SSC" (Super Spectra Coating) version but both variants have the same 7 element, 6 group construction and it's widely believed that after the first version the coatings stayed the same but Canon just chose to drop the SSC on the front ring. The chrome nose weighs 13 ounces, is made of glass, brass and complementary metals. It feels dense and even though my current one is at least 40 years old it operates as smoothly as they did when brand new. The aperture works perfectly as well. The lens focuses as close as 1.5 feet but close focusing wasn't really a big selling point for fast 50mm lenses from the 1970s.

While there are many newer lenses and some improvements in glass formulae by the mid-1970s the very, very popular 50mm f1.4 lenses from all the major camera makers were considered the flagships of their lens lines and were, by this point, very mature and well tested designs. Most improvements since then have focused on fixing that last 2% of unsharpness in the far corners when modern lenses are used at their max apertures. But, and this is significant point for me, from f4.0 down to f11 the best of the premium 50s from the 1970s deliver performances that are indistinguishable from the results from contemporary standard lenses. And those older lenses accomplished this very high level of achievement completely without the aid of in camera software. 

That being the case I was pleased to find that Adobe has a lens profile for the Canon 50mm f1.4 FD lens in Lightroom and it brings this lens even closer to the performance of more modern lenses. 

I like using this lens on a high resolution camera like the Leica SL2. It's such a solid platform and the in body image stabilization works well with legacy lenses like the Canon. Set the focal length in the camera menu and it fine tunes the IBIS to match. 

Obviously, a lens from 1970 is completely manual focusing. Another plus point for the mirrorless revolution is that one can "punch in" to a high magnification in the EVF of the camera and fine focus with an accuracy that would have been like science fiction in the film days. That alone is probably responsible for the good performance of the lens --- even on a camera that provides nearly 50 megapixels of sensor resolution!!! 

Since the lens was designed with mechanical linkages for an old Canon film camera it's also obvious that the lens in no way communicates with a new digital camera from a different camera company. Especially so when used with the necessary adapter to mount it on the body.

I find the lens to be good wide open if your basic photography goal is great portraits. It's sharper at f2.0 and really, really good by f2.8. From f4.0 onward you are in a zone in which there are many rivals but few clearly superior performers. Yes, you could see a difference in super fine detail if you locked your camera down on a tripod but most of us have become acculturated to shooting our fast lenses without the addition of tripods and that small but real drop in quality from camera vibration and human unsteady-ness quickly equalizes the big differences between a modern lens and this older classic. 

I mounted the lens onto the Leica SL2 body and dialed in the focal length in the lens profile menu. The Urth adapter I'm using has a ring close in towards the body of the camera that allows me to focus at the widest aperture and then turn the ring and close the lens down to a preset aperture for shooting. That goes a long way toward getting sharp focus and depth of field to cover any focus shift. The adapter was less than $50. This copy of the lens came on the front of a Canon FTb camera I bought from Camera West for a grand total of $125. I put a 50mm f1.8 lens on the FTb and gave it to a swim coach friend who had just recently graduated from UT Austin and wanted to try his hand at film photography. I kept the 50mm f1.4 lens because that's what I was after all along.

The 50mm f1.4 fits well with the heavier SL2 body and the nearly 6 million dot EVF makes manual focusing, even un-magnified, a snap. The only thing that hints at the age of the lens is a tendency to flare differently when  strong light sources are in the frame. A bigger flare than a modern lens but the parts of the image that are outside the "splash zone" of the flare patch are usually very useable and have enough contrast. 

Using an older, non-coupled lens is slower but there are few things we shoot around here that require lightning fast responses and light speed focusing. There is a sureness to the older tech that reminds you that you are less dependent on the algorithms of the camera's processor and more in tune with you as the actual operator. 

I really like the lens and have no intention of letting it go. 

Here are images I made with this lens and the SL2 on a walk through UT Austin this morning: We show our work to prove our points... 
f2.8

f5.6


Outdoor seating at Dirty Martin's, home of the KumBak burger.

each table comes with a bottle of "presidential sauce." 

the temporary bar at Dirty's...



No clue what these towers (in progress) are for. They looked odd...









My photography has been awarded a "thumbs up." 

The saint of gas meters everywhere....
Sulphurita Dioxidita. Matron saint of odorants.

But, can my "fancy" lens do Monochrome? You betcha.



Couple hours walking and photographing makes one hungry for lunch.

Old school was good school. Now available for next to nothing...