Support an art project being done by a long time VSL member. It's fun and easy.

My table is set for some fun art appreciation.

So, there's this guy named Andrew Molitor and he's a fine art/photo-radical artist currently working in photography and hellbent on making small books. Here's Andrew's Blog which I like very much. He works mostly in black-and-white when he's not writing very insightful and somewhat academic posts about modern life and non-pretentious photo topics. 

Andrew e-mailed me recently to let me know about a project he's doing that he's trying to support with a Go Fund Me campaign. The TLDR is: he's making small books with 90+ pages of photos and an essay by a famous photo writer. He's offering the books for $15 each, which covers shipping in the USA and Canada. He's doing the entire project as a non-profit adventure and any money left over from production and shipping will be donated to an arts organization in his community. Here's the info: https://www.gofundme.com/f/9x5sm-vigilante

 

I love projects like this one. I think it's great to support artists who are trying new stuff and new ways of delivering art. I put my money where my blog-writing is and ordered two of his books. They will probably be delivered in mid to late January, which will be perfect, time-wise, for an evening spent next to the fireplace with a nice cup of highly caffeinated cocoa. I can't imagine that most of us couldn't let go of $15 to give this a try. And while Andrew is certainly not depending on this project to feed his family or pay the rent I think his example is valuable for the rest of us and merits our support. Maybe buy a book as a small X-mas present to yourself. And when your book is ready you might find that Andrew has softened up the market a bit to make your own book that much more successful. It's an idea at any rate...

Go Andrew! Go book!

For some odd reason I like photographing buildings and sky with a 50mm lens. Must be a glitch in the programming...

I often find a new building I want to photograph when I'm out and about. If there's one thing downtown Austin is not short on it's new buildings. And construction cranes. Sometimes walking half a block will reveal a totally different look and feel to the same building, as in the examples above and just below. The more interesting thing to me is that though I own too many lenses, and have at my fingertips good ones that go  to very wide the angles of view,  I seem to like best when photographing "urban landscapes" to use a standard 50mm focal length on a full frame camera. The scenes done that way just correspond so nicely with the way I actually see things when I'm looking at them directly. It's not that there's anything wrong with my peripheral vision; I've had it checked, it's just that funneling in too much visual information into a frame tends to be overwhelming for me. Is it any wonder I never became a traditional architectural photographer?

All of the images here come from one casual walk last week. You know how people talk about comfort food? That there are things they eat out of nostalgia or because the bio-chemical reaction makes them feel good and calm in the moment? Well, I think there are "comfort camera systems." These would be combinations of cameras and lenses that just feel so right when you are holding them up to your eye and composing a shot. Everything falls into place and seems balanced. 

For me the "comfort" gear at this point in time, for me, would be the Leica SL (original) with the finder set to show a 5x7 aspect ratio, coupled with a 50mm lens. In this case it was the 50mm f1.4 TTArtisan lens which I found to be very sharp when used at the apertures needed to provide a good depth of focus for longer range shots. I came to use the 5x7 aspect ratio because lately I've been feeling that, for me, the 3:2 frame was just too long (or tall) and the square format wasn't conforming to the subjects I was photographing outside of my practice of portraiture. Portraits NEED to be shot square but everything else? Maybe not so much...

Somehow, with that slight adjustment to the aspect ratio of the frame, each of these frames felt more organic and balanced than they might have been with excessive, random information at each edge. Just trimming a small percentage from either side of the frame seems to anchor the subject. And I have to say that the manually focusing lens is really great for me with this sort of work for no other reason than that fine focusing with a magnified view of the exact spot I want to use to target focus slows me down and makes me consider the frame more than for the fleeting seconds I generally give a frame when shooting with an auto focus system. 

I think my camaraderie with the "normal" lens stems largely from my need to distill stuff down. I was raised with copies of Life Magazine around our home and it seems that a majority of the images I paged through in my early years were done with normal lenses or, if not exactly 50mms, close enough. I can tolerate 35mm focal lengths and am always happy but unsatisfied with 90mm lenses but with a 50mm all things are pleasantly possible. Still, I constantly try to like other focal lengths. It's been a career long struggle. I hope to master multi-focal-length-ability before I exit the darkroom of life...

When I write about my love for the "standard" focal length I usually get responses from people who abhor that view and want to tell me how wrong I am and then also what their favorite focal lengths are. And that's okay. It's good to have variety. Then there are the zoom people. They mean well but what they are really saying when they make their impassioned pleas for flexibility is that they are...indecisive.

How do you know when an angle of view is just right for you? Well, with the right lens you can get everything into the frame that you want and you can exclude everything from the frame that you don't want. And you'll never have to crop in post. Sounds just about right.

 

I saw this yesterday afternoon. I took a photograph so other people could see it too.

 There's no meaning attached. 

I don't really photograph buildings. They are just in the frame as counterpoints to the sky behind and around them.

Many years ago, long before the pandemic lockdowns and long before the rise of the full frame sensors, a blog tourist complained that my images in the blog were incredibly boring and that all the architecture in my town was mundane and without merit. He suggested I immediately decamp, fly to a city in Europe that featured ancient architecture, and the create imagery that might please him. I suggested that he go and f#ck himself because he clearly misunderstood the reason I make photos of my city's downtown. It's certainly not to please drop-in blog consumers and it's not to create a compelling catalog of the "great" architecture we have on display in downtown, because a young child with a box of blunt crayons and some blank newsprint could do a better job of architectural design that we get here, mostly. 

Nope, what I really like is photographing the sky and the way the colors in the sky imprint themselves, in endless variation, on the sides of so many reflective buildings. Every time I walk there the buildings are largely the same but the sky is never the same twice. It changes through the days and through the day. In many ways my photography of the sky, and frames for the sky created by the buildings, is an active meditation on the nature of modern life. The prize for my time in downtown is the walk itself. It's the happy chance to absorb a sense of unvarnished reality from the culture in which I live. There is a process of looking and seeing that is enjoyable and important to me because the art of embedding myself in a certain external rhythm of life helps me feel...connected. 

Yesterday was a great example of what I mean. I loved the soft look of the sky. It's much different than the jewel-like saturation of a clear sky on a sun-rich day. I saw the sky in the late afternoon yesterday as something akin to a sky in a painting, gently faded with time. As I walked along I saw a couple in love stop and kiss. I saw small children playing with happy dogs on an expanse of Astroturf, outside, in a downtown retail space, their parents happily ensconced in colorful, plastic Adirondack chairs, with coffee in their hands and relaxed faces. 

I saw the very small homeless woman with strawberry hair sitting on a bench, deep in conversation with herself, surrounded by bags and backpacks, smoking a cigarette as the light in the sky fell quickly. 

In the middle of downtown I passed by an older, white haired, homeless man who demanded I give him money. I walked on as he screamed and swore at me. He screamed that he was hungry and here I was trooping around with an expensive camera and he just couldn't take it anymore. His rant followed me for the next block or so as part of the score for the early evening. Then he turned his anger and frustration on someone else. 

Across the broad Congress Avenue that leads up to the state capitol building is an Italian restaurant that takes over their swath of the sidewalk to allow outdoor dining for their customers. Even through they are blocking nearly the entire sidewalk the staff casts suspicious looks at pedestrians who must either thread their way through the tables or take their chances with traffic on the street. The diners are illuminated by small and desperately flickering candles on each table as well as by threads of tiny, white bulbs on strands of Christmas lights strung up on lonely trees, planted in open square spaces, surrounded by dead sidewalks. 

And on a warm December evening groups of people, likely extended families, stroll. Couples consult their phones for direction and then walk off with purpose and all the while the sky changes colors and cloudscapes and changes again. 

In the end the camera is just a weak excuse for the walk. We live in a time and culture that usually demands we do things with purpose. With a goal in mind. I can ably lie and say that my photos will be part of a big project documenting urban life but that's not the case. The camera in my hand is like a hat or my bifocals. They are along for the ride. They are accessories to the walk and not much more. And I guess that's why the camera I currently hold in my hands is irrelevant. It's largely just a prop. Something to focus the walk around. But it's the walk itself that's important because the walk is an invitation to experience the sky as it is now. Today. Through my eyes. 

 

Lately I've been wondering how the high ISO performance of the ancient Leica SL stands up. I now have a "real world" sample.

Because of my history with digital cameras, early on, I've always had the prejudice that shooting at the base ISO is the only way to fly. Unless you desperately need more light. When everything I shot was for a commercial client and the light was low I would do the logical thing...add more light. But for the last year or so most of what I've photographed is stuff for myself. Odd moments. Street scenes and the like. And mostly photographed during the day when light was more or less plentiful. Sure, as cameras have improved I've ventured into what used to be dangerous territory; getting more and more comfortable shooting anything at ISO 800 to even 3200 without hesitation. 

Over the course of the last six months I've purchased two gently used Leica SL camera bodies. I love the industrial design (see rationalization: extra credit: here) and really, really like the way the solid, dense bodies feel in my hands when I use them. But since they were designed prior to 2015 and released in that year we are talking about cameras that are almost seven years old. My copies could have been made more recently (and looking at the serial numbers I'd peg them as 2018 vintage...) but the facts are stationary; the sensors inside were from at least two previous generations of 24 megapixel sensor technology. While I love the way they render color (and YES! even in Jpegs) I've often wondered what I'm giving up in terms of image quality at higher ISO settings. According to the ever Leica-Knowledgeable Sean Reid I'm giving up a stop of image quality under 3200 and the gap grows progressively worse, when compared to the newest SL2-S, as you go up the ISO range toward 50,000. It makes sense as the newest camera is using the coolest new sensor know how.

I'm still in awe of being able to shoot at 6400 without too much of a penalty and I had no agenda to do a camera test last night, but I was walking through downtown after dusk when I came across the beginning phases of a Beto O'Rourke for Governor rally at Republic Park. I hung around hoping to get a glimpse of Beto and, from time to time, I clicked off a random frame as we all waited for his tardy arrival. I thought the security guy (in the two frames) who was watching the crowd looked like he was out of a Jason Bourne movie so I clicked off a few frames. I should have been using something like my Sigma 85mm f1.4 Art lens with the aperture wide open since I was giving up 2 and 2/3rds stops with my Panasonic 24-105mm zoom lens. But, since digital files are mostly no cost, I shot anyway. 

I'd set the camera for auto-ISO and when I came home and looked at the files on my computer I noted that the camera had reached all the way to ISO 12,000 to grab the shot at a shutter speed of 1/125th of a second (my usual lowest shutter speed setting in auto-ISO...). Both of these images are cropped down to about half the frame I started with, and I pulled up the exposure by half a stop in post,  but I'm mostly impressed with the camera's performance. There's certainly noise but it's not color speckle noise and it more uniformly looks like film grain to my eyes. Since content mostly trumps technical perfection I'm now finding ISO 12,000 to be totally acceptable for my uses. Still, it's not something I'd necessarily put in front of a commercial client but happily satisfactory for an editorial usage. Or my own brand of eccentric Fine Art (manifesto coming shortly). 

These two images are mostly random shots taken while bored and waiting for a low priority event to start. I eventually got tipping-point-bored waiting around, packed it in and walked the next mile onward to my waiting, elitist sports car. That would be the super high performance, base model, Subaru Forester. A car that will go zero to sixty. And has adequate cup holders. And a net in the rear hatchback compartment for storing damp swim suits and goggles. It's a head turner in basic white. And I upgraded the seats from leather to cloth... Big spender...

To sum up, I'm surprised at how well the older Leica SL cameras handle higher ISOs. I wouldn't go above 12,000 unless I happened upon vicious aliens from outer space casting illegal ballots in a remote Texas county for their evil spawn, Ted Cruz, and needed more exposure, but I can certainly live with the results at 12K for the kinds of weird images I usually like to shoot after the lights go down. 

When I left the house I carried only the camera and the Panasonic 24-105mm lens. It's clever to say that I should have taken along a 135mm f 0.95, just in case, but that lens actually doesn't exist and if it did I'd hate to have to carry it around. Sometimes just have to dance with the partner you brought along. Brace yourself and exhale slowly while you gently squeeze (not press!) the shutter button. May the photography force be with you.