Impromptu Road Trip to Fredericksburg.

 

Brooke's Bubble Bar. Okay.  

Changing one's trajectory is like moving a skyscraper. It's hard work; seemingly impossible (without dynamite) and more than a little mental "elbow grease."

 

I thought retiring would be easy peasy. I'd stop accepting work, reverse course in the financial arena and start taking money out of accounts after decades of putting it in, apply for Social Security, and then inundate myself with a whole host of exciting photographic projects that I'd put off while pursuing the almighty dollar. It seemed like an easy plan. I'd watched B. do it five years ago and she made it all look calm.  Smooth. Fun. 

So far I'm just winging it. There are routines which make life work. Praise for continuity. I get up every morning and head to the pool to swim. This morning there were three Olympians in the pool when I got there. It was yet another dose of inspiration to keep up the practice. Five or six days a week of fast swimming turns out to be the ultimate way to slow down aging. The hydrostatic pressure is a boost. The coordinated movement is good for body and brain. The higher blood flow for an hour is great at clearing the clutter (both physical and mental) out of one's brain. And the camaraderie of 25 or 30 friends surrounding you and motivating you certainly staves off any feelings of loneliness or isolation. 

It's just that after swim practice there is nothing I have to do. And I'm so used to having had a full schedule. 

I always thought, when I was younger, that the big challenge in retiring would be figuring out how to make the money last. Now I realize that I "over-trained" in that regard and under-trained in the "what is your purpose"/"what is it you want to do?" regard. I can go anywhere, photograph anything, but how does one pick and choose?

For the first few weeks of total retirement from work I spent too much time watching videos about cool cameras and listening to people much younger than me talk about their visits to inevitably overcrowded and over-touristed major cities. At first I thought I should go somewhere cool, like Rome or Paris. But here's the catch: I started going to those cities as a young adult. Back in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. I've been in and out of Paris and Rome at least a dozen times but each time I go back the cultures get more homogenized, the crowds get bigger, and the opportunities to make interesting and novel images seem been wrecked by zillions of versions of the same icons and curiosities shot at every angle, with every filter etc. 

Now it makes me a bit sad to travel to someplace like Paris to photograph. It's still a wonderful city for museums, galleries, restaurants and shopping but the sheer volume of tourists makes it all feel like the mad rush through the doors of Walmart on Black Friday morning to fight with other Americans for that large screen TV on sale for half off. Or to jostle for position in front of the Plexiglas covered Mona Lisa. It's just not fun anymore.

After watching the influencers gush about their first visit to someplace cool, and after watching a young photographer explain the thrill of buying his first Leica everything starts to feel like a sit-com re-run. 

The rest of the time I'm seem focused on reading the many books I didn't think I had time for but now realize that they weren't that good to begin with; at least not most of them... The second Sally Mann book was disappointing. Never meet or read the autobiography of an artist you admired. There is an extreme probability that you WILL be disappointed. I still like Mann's work but I sure wouldn't hire her as my house manager... Or as a life coach. I'm not even sure I would show up for happy hour...

The bottom line, I guess, is that my photography has never been about a "project" or a long series of images documenting an event. Nor has it been about landscapes or the documentation of travel destinations. The reason I loved photography was to be able to make portraits in a way that pleased me and in so doing it getting to sit for a time and chat with interesting and, to my way of thinking, beautiful people, and then to make prints of them. That's pretty narrow but that's pretty much my photo world outside of the old commercial work and the generation of ephemeral images to put up on the blog and on Instagram. 

Finally distilling down to this understanding is good in that it gives me a general direction to take with my personal work. 

This post is not a request for direction. I don't want to mentor anyone. I'd rather write checks to charities I like than torment each other with volunteer time. I taught for as long as I would ever have cared to. I know where to find the subjects I want and how to approach them. I don't need a "project" in order to be motivated to make portraits. By their very nature portraits are episodic and not continuous adventures. You see a face, you become inspired, you negotiate access and then you make the portrait. Then it's over. There is no continuous flow involved and that's fine with me. It gives me time to recharge and to process what I've done in the moment. 

I'm just tossing this writing out in order to solidify what's coming together in my own mind. I know some of you are going or have gone through the same process of trying to figure out how to make the best use of newly acquired time. It's harder than it seems. It's different than anyone thinks -- before it happens to/for them. But the best advice I got in this journey was from our friend, Frank. He suggested that one be prepared to embrace our own irrelevance. At the time I thought he was being ironic but now I see that he was imparting wisdom. 

Some things become irrelevant. The audiences shift and compress. People walk away. The reasons to go ever onward change. If you resist the change to irrelevance it can be emotionally painful. It's hard to believe that you will never be 25 years old again and surrounded by a social cohort of exciting and excited peers. Ready to conquer the world. With everyone basking in the glow of youth and the attendant beauty in the moment. 

Things were better for all of us when we were young and thought we could conquer the world. Now I'm working on conquering my need to conquer the world. A challenge for sure. But at least I have the time and energy to work on it....

Mannequins imprisoned behind glass...

The Boston Mannequin Society is the best.

Playing around with the "Dynamic Monochrome" setting in the S5's "filter" menu. It's nice and contrasty. Just the way I usually like black and white...

 

It was a beautiful afternoon. I spent the earlier part of the day finishing reading Sally Mann's new book, "Art Work: On the Creative Life." I have mixed feelings about the book but it's a decent read for people who want direction about existing as a creative photographer. At least "how to" from Sally Mann's rather eccentric point of view. I'll have more to say about the book after I've processed it for a while. Might take some therapy... If one thought Mann's personal life was all an easy road one would be mistaken. She's been through, and to some extent, put herself through the wringer. But there is the thought that for artists to do their best work suffering is part of the recipe.

One thing I did admire about Mann is her take on physical fitness. She and Richard Misrach stayed up drinking gin and tonic one evening. She described him as a lightweight after he stumbled off to bed. She stayed up and loaded her 8x10 film holders in order to be prepared for the possibility of shooting something good the next day. She woke up, looked out the window at the mist and the gravitas of an ancient tree, got her camera and meter and got to work. Afterwards, she says, she got in her daily three mile run in the oppressive Louisiana heat. Priorities, priorities...

At any rate, with my "homework" done and the day beckoning I thought it would be silly to waste a perfect afternoon hanging around inside. I looked at the stack of books people sent along for my birthday and decided they could all wait there turns until after dark. I grabbed that S5 I've been writing about. The one with the 50mm lens on the front. I also stuffed the 75mm f2 in a small bag, along with an extra camera battery, and a lens cleaning cloth, and headed out of the house and into fresh sunlight.

While I mostly used the filter setting I described in the blog title I did, occasionally switch to color for situations in which color was the real reason I was interested in a subject. It's okay to be flexible. It's not a weakness it's a strength. I walked my usual route and snapped whatever caught my eye. Not every image has a caption but one in particular does...

I have no idea whatsoever this thing that was sticking out of a massive, high rise residential tower actually does. It seems.... like the designers had no clue either.

Looks good in color; better in black and white. 

Go Team Birkenstock. 

Self inflicted identity theft facilitating machines. 

Enter this shop at your own (massive) risk. 

And maybe don't give anyone your DNA either...

Necessary caption: I have no patience whatsoever for ASSHOLES who stop right in the middle of pedestrian crosswalks, at red lights. It's so discourteous. And dangerous. And thoughtless. 

For egregious perpetrators there should be harsh penalties. Like making them walk

instead of being able to drive for a month. Or maybe just pulling them from their cars and quietly explaining Texas traffic laws to them. Over and over again. It's become commonplace to ignore pedestrian right of way since a lot of new people moved in to Austin from out of state. Some day someone might accidentally get a DSLR through the windshield. 

That's all. 

Other than two bad drivers and their disregard for other members of

society it was a very pleasant walk. 

How did you like the play Mrs. Lincoln?

Looking up the driveway after the rain.

 

We've been stuck in an extreme drought for the last month or so but it finally rained, and rained a lot this weekend. I was heading out to run an errand and I looked at the street, freshly wet, and decided I needed to snap a few pics. 

The trees have deep roots. They are surviving pretty well. It's the lawns and the ornamental stuff that has taken a beating.

We're happy for any discernible amount of precipitation we can get. This is just a good start.

Discovery in a desk drawer. Not a bad camera. Not a bad lens. And the five batteries hold full charges. Nice.

Every once in a while reality comes back around to bite you on the butt and remind you that you ain't so smart after all.  I bought a camera about six years ago that worked very well for me. It was after my initial foray into the new Panasonic mirrorless full frame system. I'd been using three big S1 variants; the original S1, the S1R (higher resolution) and the S1H (video leaning) and had a nice selection of Panasonic's best, full frame lenses. The only thing I didn't have was a smaller, lighter camera; the kind one likes to drag around everywhere. 

When we worked commercially with film cameras the first choice at that time was a Hasseblad body its matching lenses. Big, heavy workhorse cameras, for sure. But when we headed out to shoot for fun, in the streets, in new cities, we generally had a Leica rangefinder camera or a Contax G2, or one of the small Contax SLRs, like an Aria or an S2 over one shoulder. 

When I worked for three weeks in St. Petersburg, Russia back in 1995, in the dead of a particularly cold winter I arrived with three Hasseblads, including an SWC/M, a bunch of big, heavy Hasselblad lenses, a case full of tungsten lights, stands and modifiers, lots of cable and one hell of a heavy tripod. All needed for the long days we spent photographing at the Catherine Palace and the Alexander Palace in Pushkin.

But in the evenings, and during the rare days off, the last system I wanted to carry as I explored the streets and shops, and hotels, was a big, heavy, very obvious medium format camera and lens. And while 12 exposures was part of the routine for the workdays it was hardly what a "street" photographer wants to deal with in a strange new place, with temperatures well below zero. 

My camera of choice for casual, personal work on that trip was a Contax S2 which was a fully manual, mechanical camera. It paired nicely with a Zeiss 50mm lens and I kept both a 25mm and 85mm in a coat pocket. Both came in handy when photographing the Kirov Ballet from the Czar's box seat at the Mariensky Theater. But the 50mm was my "go-to" lens for day-to-day "city browsing." 

Hopping ahead about 20+ years and I was looking for a small, light but powerful camera along the same lines as the S2. I found it in the Panasonic S5. I bought it when I realized that it was half the weight of one of the S1 cameras and much smaller to boot. But, amazingly, its sensor actually outperformed the sensor in the bulkier S1. It was one of the first cameras to use a 24 megapixel BSI sensor and the first Panasonic camera to earn a 94 score on DXO Mark. It also features high color depth of 25.1 bits and a measured dynamic range of 14.5. Sure, Panasonic cut some corners compared to the bigger S1 cameras: no Compact  ExpressCF card slot, a much lower res EVF and a new, smaller battery. But the image quality was actually quite superior to the original 24 megapixel S1. And wow! The lower weight and smaller size were just what I wanted for a walk around camera. 

Until I did a search for the S5 in my Adobe Lightroom catalog of a half million or so images I never realized just how much use I got out of that one S5 over the last six years. Entire events in multiple locations, tons of portraits, and recently as a "scanning" camera for my digitization of medium format, black and white negatives. 

I used the S5 in conjunction with LED lighting for portraits because the high ISO was superior to my other cameras. It's on par with the performance of the Sigma fp and, as regards ISO performance, superior to any of the Leicas I bought until the SL2-S which also has a 24 megapixel BSI sensor.

Through thick and thin I've kept the S5 because in my mind it's fully depreciated, financially, but fully and currently competent when it comes to image quality. And it works well with every single Leica lens and third party lens I throw at it. It's the ultimate back-up to a much more expensive system. 

When I took the S5 off the copy stand and appraised it yesterday I came away smiling. It's still a wonderful tool and still seems to hold a large portion of its initial value on the used market. I topped up the five batteries I have for the camera and set it to shoot in one of the filter black and white modes. It's called, "Dynamic Monochrome" and the setting results remind me of the contrasty images we used to make with Tri-X film and #3 contrast Ilfobrom paper. 

Paired with the Panasonic 50mm f1.8 S lens the whole package can be acquired used for around $1K. Maybe a bit less if you are willing to look around for a while. A far cry from the Leica Q3-43 I thought I might want....

It's fun to reacquire a taste for a camera you already own. One that fits almost seamlessly into an existing system of other branded cameras. But there it is. 

The one regret I have about the buying and selling I've done while owning the S5 is selling the 24-105mm f4.0 Panasonic S lens. In retrospect it was near perfect. It was relatively lightweight but its optical performance was/is spectacular. It cost me about $1,000 at the time of purchase. I abandoned it to buy the Leica 24-90mm f2.8-4 lens. The Leica lens is the better optical performer ---- but only by a small measure. And it's currently about $6,000 brand new. 

If I could go back in time I'd convince my younger self to keep my money in my pocket and wring the best performance I could out of the Panasonic 24-105. It would have resulted in the same quality of images, less stress on the shoulder and an additional $5,000 to invest. But knowledge comes from hard experience and it then become a "chicken and egg" thing. Ah well. I can always buy another 24-105 if I want to badly enough, but for now I'm getting a lot of enjoyment out of the cheap, plastic 50mm. It's actually great! And being made "not totally of metal" makes it a lot lighter to carry around. Stop it down to f4 and you'll never see the difference between it and one of my 50mm APO lenses. Just not there. 

Abandoning the Panasonic system was probably not the smartest move on my part. I like the Leica cameras and have a blast using them but....would I be happy shooting the current Panasonic crop of S1-II and S5 variants and lenses? You bet. Funny how that works.

I got sidetracked by video. Now I'm back on track. Upcoming road trip. Starts Wednesday. Details upcoming. 

Cool and sunny in Austin. Time for swim practice.

 

A walk through South Congress Avenue in the middle of Austin. Still practicing with that new (to me) Leica 35-70mm zoom. Basically a 50mm lens that's willing to be flexible...

 

Sixth Street and Congress Ave. both go totally nuts on Halloween. Tons of young people in costumes. Much alcohol consumption. A modicum of disorderly conduct. A dab of good clean fun. This weekend is a home game for UT Austin so Halloween festivities will be even ... better attended. 

I have the right attitude now when using the 35-70mm f4.0 lens. I now think of it as a standard line with wiggle room. 

I thought about going out this evening as photographer, Terry Richardson, for Halloween, but couldn't find those really crappy looking eyeglasses. Decided to go as something even scarier === the guy who designed the camera menus for Olympus...

Out for Ice Cream on Halloween Afternoon...