Belinda creating table decor with free rosemary.
On Thursday, early afternoon, Ben and I drove out to Dripping Springs, Texas to Emmett and Lisa's Christmas Eve open house. Lots of people who I swim with were there with their families and friends. Ben got into a long conversation with an old friend who makes his living as a child psychiatrist while I took photos of Emmett (famous chef and restauranteur) using a saber to pop the tops off fancy Italian sparkling wine. Emmett and Lisa are the owners (totally hands-on) of Asti Trattoria which is my absolute favorite restaurant in all of central Texas.
I knew Emmett was going to do something like use a saber to decapitate wine bottles so I brought along a camera and appropriate lens. It was a Lumix S1 and the 24-105mm kit lens. The perfect choice for a sunny afternoon out in the Hill Country.
Ben survived his interrogation conversation unscathed in time for us to head back home and help Belinda get ready for our Christmas Eve Celebration with a family of close friends. We made a standing rib roast which I think was a tactical error. Oh, it was delicious and everything but if you have a nicely marbled hunk of beef you'll be shocked at the sheer amount of grease that ends up on the bottom of the pan, on the cutting board, etc. As designated cleaner I now have an appreciation of just how labor intensive kitchen work can be.
A good selection of red wines and Champagnes was a nice antidote to the very thought of my impending role as head dishwasher....
I photographed Belinda putting together sprigs of Rosemary with the Lumix S1 and the Zeiss 50mm f1.7 Y/C lens, wide open. (it was such a "wide open" sort of day).
We ate and talked and laughed and sang until late in the evening and then, after our friends headed home, all settled down for a long winter's nap.
A blue Santa in the window at Toy Joy.
On the 23rd I took a bit of time to go walk downtown to see if any pretty baubles caught my eye and would make nice gifts. I came home almost empty handed but did manage to take one photograph that I liked. It's the one just above of a plastic Santa in a blue costume. I love all the lights and colors in the background and captured this image with the Lumix S1 and the Sigma 45mm f2.8 (shot at f4.0).
As we say in Texas: "This here is Emmett, fixing to whack the top off a bottle of wiiiiiine."
I've been carrying the big Lumix S1 cameras and the even bigger lenses around for a couple of months now and they've done a great job but they left me desiring a small and discreet kit to carry around with me on long walks and in social situations in which five or six pounds of big, black camera gear seems to be a little out of place.
You probably read my musings about the possibility of adding a Lumix LX100 ii to the herd but I swerved after conferring with my retail camera consiglieri and carefully comparing the LX100xx and its sister camera, the Lumix GX85. For $900 I could buy the little fixed lens marvel but, with a current Panasonic end of year sale I could get the GX85 and two Lumix lenses for.....get this.....$449.
I spent an hour at the store today, going back and forth and walking around shooting stupid stuff with each camera. The GX85 was the definite choice. Don't get me wrong, I loved most of the ethos of the LX100xx but the GX85 stepped up when I reminded myself that I had saved my complete collection of Olympus Pen FT half frame lenses from the chopping block during my last studio equipment purge.
The GX85 can use those lenses (easily) since the mount (with lens adapter) is perfect for them. So, for less than $500 I end up with a body, a 45-150mm G Vario zoom and a 12-32mm G Vario zoom lens. I came right home and put the 40mm f1.4 Pen FT lens on the camera and I've been walking around, happy, ever since.
Guess what? The GX85 menus are so similar to the S1 menus that I had the camera set up and ready to go in about 10 minutes. Bonus.
I have time for a few more blog posts in 2019 so stay tuned. Or not. Your choice, but I won't be changing editorial content to please you.....
17 comments:
Christmas Day was nice too. Hope yours was as well !!!!
"I won't be changing editorial content to please you..."
Nor should you. It's your blog.
Thanks Dave! And a very Merry Christmas to you!!! Thanks for being here for me. KT
The 12-32 is a surprisingly good little lens.
Merry Christmas Kirk! Oh my are you coming full circle? Just teasing, personally I added 2 aputure 120d lights to the studio as my little splurge.
Keep well!
Thank you so much for not taking the week off. I really enjoy reading your stuff.
I love 40+ year faithful wives almost as much as you do. Our wives enjoy this feeling of comfort almost as much as we do. God bless all four of us. Forty six years and counting.
So this comment is actually a question, and should have been appended to the previous post, but, anyway -- you swam your regular 3,200 yards (in the previous post.) Could you tell me which strokes you used in doing that? Was it all freestyle, or was it a mixture? Were any of them restful, or were you going full steam the whole way? How long does a swim like that take? Looking for some encouragement here.
Interesting that you went for the GX85 over the LX100mk2. I am interested in LX100mk2, but the GX9 always looks better. So I buy neither.
I hope Panasonic takes a LX100, adds a in axis tilting screen and cuts off the lens adding a M43rds mount. That would be near perfect for me. Then correct the 25mm f1.4 mk2 mistake and release the camera with a 25mm f1.4 lens with aperture control ring. Would be perfect with my Panasonic 15mm and 42.5mm lenses.
Such a deal! I waffled back and forth between the GX9 and the twice as expensive G9 for several weeks. The G9 won out, in part thanks to the larger size and weight. Ease of handling plus the 6.5 stop dual IS tipped the scale. All of which proved to be true. I thought the EM5.2 was magical when it came to stabilization but this is something from another dimension. It just floats on a cloud of serenity.
Hi JC, I swam mostly freestyle. When I swim at Deep Eddy Pool (which is 33.3 years in length) I tend not to be swimming with my master's team. Normally we swim in a 25 yard pool. Both are outdoors.
On the swim in question I swam a straight 400 yards freestyle as a warm up. Takes about 6 minutes. Then I broke up the rest of the yardage as sets of 10 lengths freestyle interspersed with two lengths of breakstroke, and repeated that pattern changing out the breath stroke with backstroke and then butterfly. At the very end of the workout I always try to do the full 33.3 yards underwater a couple of times just to train myself for better breath control. That's harder because it's somewhat psychological.
The entire swim took me about an hour and fifteen minutes but some of that was idle chatter between sets with swimmers who showed up at random to say "hello."
I did today's workout back in my regular pool with the master's team today. We cranked through about 3400 yards in an hour and 15 minutes with a more complex set that included sets of 125s, 100s, 75s, and 50s. Interspersed between each longer set was a set of 4x50s of each lane's choice. We did ours as kicks.
Breaking up long distances into sets with tight intervals makes it more fun and alleviates the boredom some people encounter in just doing longer distances. Hope that's helpful. KT
Should say, "changing out the breaststroke with....." Sorry. KT
Stop and rest when you get tired. It's much better than trying to muscle through and having your stroke fall apart. When that happens you start incorporating bad technique. Hard to train bad technique back out.
Kirk, maybe it was just my copy, but be careful with the Panny 12-32. There isn't a lot of grip space when mounting and unmounting the lens on the body, and I ended up trashing mine when my fat fingers partially twisted the lens extending mechanism while attempting to remove the lens, and it broke.
Thanks Jim, I'll keep an eye on it. KT
I will be interested to see how you get along with the GX85. Similar to your experience every time I would look at the LX100ii (online in my case) I would see the GX85 or the GX9 for less money. The result in my case was paralysis.
I'd love to see video of that wine bottle decapitation.
i have gx85, it's a nice little camera, i use 25mm mostly but also a 45mm
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