Black and white images for a gloomy day of photography.

Who doesn't love silver party dresses?

Yeah. It's an endless cycle of swimming, doing as little work as possible, long walks with a camera and writing the blog. Broken up by dinners with family or friends, or family and friends. When I get motivated I go to the gym for some resistance workouts but mostly I fritter away time trying to write the second "Henry White" book and swilling coffee in various coffee shops. If the stars line up, and the cameras stores catch up with me while I'm in a vulnerable/gullible mood, I rush to buy some esoteric camera or lens for which I have no real need. When the buyer's remorse kicks in I rush to a computer to see how the stock market looks in a snapshot. If it's in positive territory my angst is assuaged and if the markets are falling I too am crestfallen. Again, the inglorious cycle.

I bought a new light this week. It's a 14x26 inch, flat LED panel made by Nanlite. More or less takes the place of a small soft box and since it's only three inches deep it takes up less room on a set. I like it enough to want a second one. Until I stop myself and remember that I'm trying to go cold turkey on all jobs that might require new equipment. The new light does work well, and it is of the "bi-color" variety, so that's fun too. 

I spent the morning doing a long walk through the hills. I went to the noon swim practice today.  I got to the pool and it was cold, gray, rainy and windy. I changed into my swim suit and walked out to the pool deck. I was the only one there. Then, right at noon, our coach Annie, showed up carrying a small white board with the sets written on it with colored markers. I put on my swim cap and adjusted my goggles. I wondered if it would just be me, my coach, a couple of lifeguards, the groundsman and the club barrista. Yes, I am kidding. There is no club barrista. If you want coffee to drink while you swim you have to bring your own from home or suffer through something from the guard shack's Keurig machine. 

About five minutes into the warm-up Moira showed up, which was a relief. I would have felt guilty keeping a coach out in the weather just to supervise one person. Maura and I swim well together. I have the years of hard won technique on my side and she, at twenty-some years younger has the endurance. 

I have one more commercial job to do before we shut down everything for the year-end holidays. It's a single portrait that I'll photograph in the studio sometime next week and then composite together with a conference room image as a background. I've already shot the conference room. That image is sitting in a folder on my desktop--- as a reminder. Then we're on to the next year. 2025. I don't know what to expect. I'm guessing it will be much like 2024 in that my interest in doing work for other people will continue to diminish until I've alienated or scared off the rest of the clients. An interesting goal to work towards. 

Just a quick note about the Thypoch 28mm f1.4 M series lens I bought a couple of weeks ago. It's very good. I didn't like using it at first for the same reason that I didn't really warm up, at first, to the Carl Zeiss 28mm I bought earlier in the year. The frame finder lines in the viewfinders of my M series cameras are hard to see well with or without glasses. Recently I bought the bright line finder that Ricoh made for the GRiii; the 28mm equivalent version of the camera. The optical finder fits right onto the hotshoe on the M240s and is a much nicer viewing experience. Both lenses are now vindicated--because they are now a cinch to use. The CZ is sharp everywhere but slow at f2.8. The Thypoch is almost as sharp but one gets two extra stops in the low light and that's nice too. 

When I use the Thypoch 28mm on a mirrorless camera, like the Leica SL2-S, I appreciate that it focuses closer than does the Zeiss lens. Something like .4 meters versus .7 meters. Doesn't sound like a lot but in practice it's convenient and visually --- different. But when I get tired of juggling cameras, adapters, bright line finders, et al I find it much more convenient just to drop the Leica Q2 in the camera bag and depend on it for my wide angle pursuits. Horses for Arrows, Courses for Indians. Which is no longer politically correct to write but....hardly matters in the current milieu. 

Now considering driving back up to the camera store to buy...just one more of these darling light panels...I wonder how the traffic is today.

Air conditioning at the tiniest bar in Texas. 

Yep. That's me. Getting longer every day. On the bridge between the library and downtown proper.

And now ---- the mannequins. 

Industrial equipment at the retired Seaholm power plant always looks good in black and white. 

Want details? We got details. And brick walls! Micro-contrast galore.

One day one hundred years in the future the important museums will dig into my enormous archive of day-to-day, mundane photographs and create an entirely new theory about what all went wrong in the 21st century. Count on it. I bet the curators are digging through my trash cans right now....

A note to other bloggers: Please don't tell me again how we used to do things in the "good ole days..." Seems those topics are on an endless loop at various blogs. 

Endless Q2 photos here. That's the camera with the very good black and white mode. But at the touch of a menu item it can also shoot in color. Sadly, I hear that I lose 25% of the resolution to the interpolation of the Bayer pattern layer on the sensor. That's okay with me because the sensor has 47.5 million pixels. I can afford to go without a few. Especially for images that get used on the web. 

Not that I'm keeping close track but.... we hit 32,000,000 direct page views earlier today. Not bad for a site that was on vacation for a while...

 

Yes!!!!!

But wait! How about the next thirty two million??? What about that?

celebrating with a large, Columbian Supremo with a dash of creme.

original painting of a to-go coffee cup by Kirk

A cool and slurpy morning. What to do? I know. How about a walk in the rain with a camera?

 

It was chilly this morning. Well, not by the standards of the northern reaches but still enough to entice me to pull the warm covers up tight and get an extra half hour of sleep. Something novel happened next. I awoke to the sound of persistent, random raindrops smacking against the roofing shingles. Amazing that rain could seem so novel but such is the experience of living through a series of long droughts. 

It was 48° here when I finally climbed out of bed and threw back the blackout curtains. The morning outside was foggy gray. So was my head. Both literally and metaphorically. I tossed on a favorite sweatshirt, the pants I wore yesterday, and the day before, and capped off the outfit with an old pair of comfortable, somewhat water resistant, walking shoes. Made my way down the long hall to the kitchen to carefully make another perfect cup of coffee.  

I found an old, worn rain jacket in a bedroom closet, grabbed a small, point and shoot camera and drove onto the center of town to walk through the sometimes mist sometimes rain and to see what the town looks like when thoroughly damp. It looks...shiny-er. Like when the production crew sprays down a street with water on a movie set. Cue the water truck.

At first I tried to cover my head from the rain with the jacket's hood and also to keep the small camera under the wrap of the garment. But the hood screwed with my peripheral vision and I quickly abandoned it, tossing it back and then vaguely worrying about it slowly filling up with rain water. 

I was wearing my eyeglasses when I left the car but without the protection of the jacket's hood they soon became rather useless as tiny rain drops multiplied, covering the front of the lens and making everything seem novel and somehow poorly filtered. I wiped the raindrops off on the front of my sweatshirt and put them into a convenient coat pocket. Writing this reminds me, in the moment, that I need to go and rescue the glasses from that coat that's hanging on a hook in the studio simultaneously drying off and also dripping onto the hard floor....otherwise I'll consider the glasses lost and spend forever searching them down.

Taking off my glasses was good and bad. Good, in that I could now see the full frame in the camera's viewfinder without having to move my eye around, but bad in that I needed to stop, find a relatively dry spot, the overhang of an awning, to adjust the diopter for the camera's viewfinder. Problems I didn't have earlier in my career. Before glasses. Oh shucks. The ravages of age. 

Austin has a property that is a distinct negative for photographers who like to walk the streets and look for interesting things/people to document. That property is a lack of pedestrian traffic anywhere. The city possesses such an overwhelming car culture that people stare, almost surprised, through their windshields, at lone pedestrians who are crazy enough to walk through the rain, into and out of the crosswalks, with a camera in their hands and no "common sense" in their heads. This is doubly so when it rains, or gets too cold or too hot. But what it means for the ambulatory artist is a paucity of humanity out and and around to add some spice to our photography.

I settled for the sides of buildings. Naked trees. Repeating patterns. The skeleton of of downtown. The less exciting fallbacks of a frustrated, would be, art photographer. 

Then, when my hair, the lower legs of my trousers and the top of my camera were thoroughly soaked, and I had completed the walking circuit I had in mind, I came home to monk-like prepare a solitary lunch of greek yogurt, Swiss muesli, walnuts and fresh blackberries. 

I ate my usual concoction while watching a doltish vlogger complain about the awkward design of the Leica Q3-43 camera as it relates to handhold-able comfort as he held the camera in one hand at the end of a fully extended arm and shot by squinting at the rear screen.

I sent him a note suggesting that a two hand hold of a camera (any camera) was the correct way to use it and....a much more comfortable hold on any camera. He responded by saying that I should be aware that he has "only two hands..." By which I think he was suggesting that he needed to do the precarious and painful one handed, arm fully extended, vertical hold on his $7,000 camera so he could have his other hand free to navigate and manipulate his video camera. Very droll. And quite stupid. Especially if you are trying to explain/complain about camera haptics to an audience of experienced professionals. The camera in question hardly being "entry level." And a camera body design possessed of 70+ years of nearly unchanged tenure testifying to it's comfortable use by millions of right-minded photographers.

The photos here aren't my best work but I did diligently use both hands on the camera in their creation. I blame a photographer named, Manny Ortiz for propagating the silly process of holding heavy cameras at arm's length so he can create a disjointed video of the photography of ample, female subjects cavorting like models while he extols the virtues and vices of whatever the latest camera sent to him by the clever P.R. agencies of the camera makers. It's a vicious cycle on YouTube. One person shows off bad technique and the world rushes to emulate. Tragic. It's all so "one handed."

I'm back home safe and dry in my office. The little space heater is roaring in the background. I need to work on post processing a project for a client but here I am, once again, pounding away on my keyboard fully cognizant that some overly anxious and pathologically kind reader will take me to task for having the temerity to call out a "fellow" photographer for his egregious display of bad camera handling. And the vlogger's subsequent complaint about an innocent camera's hampered haptics. Again, Tragic. 

Jeez, Golly. It's well past time for a haircut...

The city of Austin decorates a public park in an upbeat and happy way for the upcoming holidays. I hear one of the other parks is showing statues of zombies hungry for brains. Okay. Onward.

The repeating pattern goes one way.

The repeating pattern goes the other way.

The jolliest of Christmas decor in all of downtown is found, appropriately enough on the window of a night club. Making that connection between holiday cheer and pricey drinks. 

Brick wall test?  No. Just a brick wall.

Gloom scrolling. 

And this was the general feeling throughout the day.

Chilly and wet. Gray and damp. Nothing much going on.

A photo rich blog post. And...where do we start???

Added this morning (12-5): a really good, tangential video about this general theme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QltxZ-vPMc

Good viewing.

Just a few years back. I've gotten into the habit of buying fresh flowers once a week. B. likes it and it makes the house seem more.... inviting. Shot with an older 50mm f1.4 Canon FD lens...

I just listened to a lecture about...happiness. Not from a spiritual point of view but from a neurological/pyschological point of view. Seems I was right all along. Adding friction to the modern, first world lifestyle adds more happiness. But it's more complicated than that. The premise is that life has always been hard. In the past, for millenia, the basic struggles for survival provided most (all?) of the friction of daily life. Finding enough food. Staying warm and uneaten by predators. Surviving all manner of disease. Avoiding participation in wars, etc. 

Since the middle of the last century life has remained a struggle but for profoundly different reasons. At a certain point in time,  in first world countries, most people didn't and still don't struggle to get enough food, or shelter and, at least in the USA and other prosperous countries, wars have been distant and not existentially dire on an individual level. So why is life still hard? In a word? Boredom. Most of our day to day lives, once we've attained adulthood, are...boring. Which is depressing. And since the human brain craves stasis it will push you to do what it can to counteract depression. Which, for current people, means distracting ourselves with entertainment. Virtual anti-boredom. Which mostly translates to scrolling through websites on our phones and computers, going through our daily routines and scrolling some more. While we might not be ecstatic while we're scrolling we are okay--- but the minute we stop the flow the realization of our boredom pushes us back to depression and the cycle continues. 

What's the antidote? Likely it's not to "find" meaning in life as much as it is to "create" a sense of meaning in life by choosing interesting things to do. It's likely why people attempt to climb Mt. Everest, sail across oceans, run marathons and, yes....even go out and take photographs. We're mostly attempting to do things that we can infuse with value or "meaning" that we also enjoy. And most of those undertakings are successful because, unlike endlessly watching sports on TV or the web, these activities attract us because doing them entails working against friction. Embracing friction. Working alongside friction. 

If a task is easy and mundane it's generally something we dislike. And avoid. But even if a task is tough, hard, requires increasing skill sets and also comes with a strong chance of failure it also comes with something to push against and to win against. And mostly that's the friction entailed in the process. 

Think of the happiest people you personally know. How many of them sit on a couch and browse the latest offerings from television and the web? If you really look you'll probably find that the happiest people in your lives are the ones who are busy doing work they value or which adds value to them and the people around them. Or they are the artists who are wholly committed to the near endless pursuit of their art. Or they are out challenging themselves. Pushing their hobbies from time frittered away to time spent challenging themselves to get to a higher level of achievement and proficiency. Done by working against friction. 

For some people regular work delivers the challenge and the friction people use to moderate the ups and downs of pleasure stimulation and post pleasure pain or emptiness. The stories are legend of the powerful men who are pushed into retirement, dolefully play golf and subsequently die 18 months later. The friction of the business challenge provided the mental physics to hold everything together. Remove the friction and you remove the sense of meaning that keeps people on track. The work and the challenges of work keep one from just modulating between the pleasure and pain cycles all day long and helps satisfy your brain's desire for homeostasis. Without constantly cycling between the momentary "happiness" of empty entertainment and the resulting sadness brought on by stopping the entertainment the brain can more easily maintain a healthier mid-line of emotional energy. There's something to be said for the even keel.

I'm probably going into the weeds here but the basic idea I believe is that re-introducing friction into the lives of the bored population would go a long way toward bringing back more authentic joy into people's lives. 

One of the reasons people are drawn to photography in general and street photography specifically is that the whole practice is fraught with ample opportunities to fail interspersed with sparse opportunities to succeed. But it's that very friction of the attempt that makes it personally worthwhile. And the value really is in the ongoing process and not the random trophies printed and hung on a wall.

To my mind depression and momentary relief from depression is mostly about the cycles of dopamine delivery and dopamine withdrawal. Little pleasures derived from scrolling the web, or being engaged in other entertainment episodes provides a bit of uplifting dopamine but as soon as the entertainment is withdrawn the dopamine drops away. What most of us need but few of us are educated to know is that the pursuits that challenge us consistently tend to smooth out the oscillating peaks and troughs, the amplitude between the ups and downs, and offer a way of living with more satisfaction. And that satisfaction creates a virtuous cycle in your own pursuit of meaning and your sense of fulfillment. 

The more passive your approach to life the less you are able to embrace the feeling that things make sense. The more consistently motivated you are to work on (non-passive) challenging undertakings the greater your long term satisfaction. Imagine how good it feels to write a book. All the way to the end. Or to make a wonderful quilt. Or to produce a well made movie. Or to create and run a successful company. These things may just hold the secrets of our own happiness. Process and completion.

 

Rehearsal with small cameras. Hmmm. 

We can feel good momentarily when watching tennis on TV --- if we like tennis. I don't really see the point. But if we play tennis instead of passively consuming it on screens we can feel the physical and mental challenges and also enjoy accrued benefits such as greater physical fitness and a (hopefully) increasing skill set. As well as a healthy social bonding with our (non-virtual) opponent. If we turn off the TV and our driver of momentary happiness comes solely from passively watching then we are doomed to be deflated, at least to a degree, the minute the program ends. There are no lasting benefits. No new skills learned. Nothing in our lives changed. When the drinking is over there's nothing left but the hangover....

Rome. 1995

Verona. 1986.

the more affluent people become the more they invite constant demands on their time and the more they get done. The happier they report being.  People at lower income demographics have, interestingly enough, more "leisure" time. But less happiness. It's an odd finding but there it is. 

Vatican City. 1986.

Barton Springs. Austin, Texas 2016

Paris. 1992.

Experiences create more lasting joy than objects or products. 

We're planting more and more Lamb's Ear in the back yard garden. 

Photographing is not just about photographing. It's a cultural survey of sorts.

It's exercise. It's a re-acquaintance with where you are and why you are there. 

It's an exploration into human nature. It's a pleasant way to learn about the dynamic graphics of making images --- which most of us can only really learn by trial and error. Right?

It's a chance to roam free like the animals of the Serengeti. The roaming is

both a feature and a benefit....

Children have a sense of creativity that, in too many adults, has been crushed, defeated and killed off. Maybe we should believe in the resurrection of the creative spirit and bring it back into our own adulthood. Beats making fun of the liberal arts majors...

Design evolves faster than viruses....

Okay. Now I know where I am. 

the Ancient Greeks were always at war with some other country. 

Maybe that was the friction that created the next 2,000 years of civilization. 

The friction of Jo's is that of finding any nearby parking...

Naked women statues everywhere. including in this lobby of a Montreal building.

I guess that's friction too.

Getting myself steeled up to do a bit of self brain surgery. 

A few less I.Q. points will certainly add some much needed friction points...

this camera is much more difficult to use well than most current AF, auto everything cameras. 

Maybe that's why I like the images I get from it so much better and it may be why many of the people who pooh-pooh this sort of camera in favor of ultra-auto cameras tend to give up the pursuit so quickly. 

Same. Hard work feels better than drifting around with floaties.

The more challenges life throws at you the more adventures you have under your belt. The more good stories you can tell. The more the simple pleasures of life provide deeper enjoyment. Safe and sound is boring...and will make you depressed. 

Cameras at the ready!!! Charge!!!