Out of an abundance of caution and our great concern of the safety of VSL readers we are temporarily putting the blog on hold until such a time as humor, irony and sarcasm become safe again.

Currently AFK.

If you need me you know how to reach me....

I have a "Bingo!" Now all booked events through March are fully and resolutely cancelled because of the COVID-19 pandemic. I now declare March a non-work month.

Channeling my inner-Eggleston.

entitled: Red Chair

The process is complete. All six assignment days for corporate events in March have just been officially cancelled. In polite parlance: rescheduled. Except we don't have a future date so I guess that should be: potentially rescheduled. I knew this was coming the minute I heard that the giant SXSW Festival was cancelled. All the clients were very kind. Each asked if there was some sort of cancellation fee they owed me for holding the dates but, of course, it's part of customer service to say, "No" except in egregious circumstances such as a cancellation from an event that is still happening. Especially egregious when that sort of cancellation happens the day before a show...

No, we are kind to our good customers in the hope that they will actually re-book us when the new dates for the events are put on the calendar. I often say, "we'll need their money just as much then..."

While I think I understand, intellectually, what all this means; the social distancing, the fear of contagion, the desire to stay safe, I'm not sure I was processing it in the part of my brain that understands solid, practical stuff. So I went out for a walk through the city today to get a gauge on the emotions and the general vibe in downtown. Would it be a ghost town? Would everyone have on a mask and latex gloves? Would trucks be driving slowly past the residence towers with loudspeakers blaring, broadcasting the call from medieval times, "Bring out yer dead. Bring out yer dead."? 

I took the little, happy and ebullient Sigma fp with its whimsical companion lens, the Sigma 45mm f2.8. After spending the afternoon with that camera and a cheap, big loupe for the rear screen, I can't imagine why I was thinking of getting a Panasonic GX8. The answer of what to buy next was right at the end of the camera strap. The little Sigma fp kept whispering to me: "Wait until the Dow drops under 18,000 and then buy some more Apple stock...." 

Green Table.

As I walked across the pedestrian bridge into downtown everything was quiet. Looking out toward the west of the lake I thought I'd see the usual dense fleet of paddle boards and kayaks but there were only one or two, drifting aimlessly, their pilots glued to their phones, no doubt watching the minute by minute gyrations of the stock market or the else reading about the conflicting, ever changing and self-serving manipulations of our criminal government. Ah. A halt to payroll taxes...that way, after the election we can strip out social security and medicare with the claim that they will inevitably become insolvent... Another in a series of victories for the robber barons of 2020. 

But I digress. While I saw fewer people rushing around today doing commerce I did see more people out walking their dogs. I saw very, very few people in the restaurants lining 2nd St. and Congress Ave. and I noticed that traffic was so light today that one could find not just one or two but dozens of available parking places around the city. 

I trudged on to what should have been the epicenter of SXSW; the convention center. It was empty. Only the maintenance people remained and they were busy hauling unused signage to the dumpsters. 

I crossed the street to the adjacent Hilton Hotel. Normally, it's packed during SXSW and the lobby is overflowing with coffee swilling tech boys and girls. Today you could chase tumbleweeds through the lobby blindfolded and never chance hitting another guest. The taco restaurant was closed, I think, out of sheer despair, and the loading docks were overflowing with cases of unwanted tequila. 

trying to channel my inner Stephen Shore but I couldn't find any scene boring and mundane enough. 

I settled for colorful chairs. 

What made the eery quiet so strange today was the fact that all the clouds had dissipated and the sky was clear and beautiful. The temperature was in the low 80's which is usually a strong lure for Austinites to be out and about, tanning and preening and enjoying outside. 

It was a comfortable walk. Social distancing was not a problem. The sidewalks were nearly empty and the streets were quiet. As I walked along with my camera clutched in my left hand I found myself daydreaming about what to do for the last half of a month with no obligations, no reservations and no schedule. Looks like I'll start with a trip to the coast followed by a trip to the deserts of west Texas.

The Sigma fp is raring to go. But we might bring along a few extra lenses. That 20mm is begging me to accelerate my dicey learning curve. I need to become a bit more comfortable with wide, wide angles. 

Everything else is a caption. 

The last time it hit 80 with bright sun you could have walked across the packed kayaks and paddle boards to the other side of the lake without getting your Birkenstock sandals damp. Today? Not so much.

Channeling W.E. #2

Spring sprang about a month ago and everything is green and blossoming. 

Shadows and highlights with no intervention from the sliders.

Oh. Yay. Another downtown building. I wonder which Austin landmark they tore down this time to make another posh nest for attorneys....?

A mural at the convention center Hilton Hotel. 

A chair at the convention center just longing to be sat upon by a SXSW attendee. 

Denied. 

the next three photos are the empty venue. 

Even the space around the new library is as empty as in one of those movies where everyone is dead and only zombies remain and all of a sudden they rush out of the crevasses of the city and try to eat your brain. But today the library didn't even play host to zombie hordes....

Scooters went unloved. 

Steps untrod. 

And men were reduced to carrying pink bags for girlfriends who had YouTube programming playing on phones, phones clutched behind their backs like secrets. 

The dogs were the happy ones. No competition from bad bands from Poland and Belgium...

And that's the saga of the immediate impact of COVID-19 on the photo scene in CenTex. 

Photographing through glass. Make sure the position from which you are photographing is much darker than the scene in front of you.

and maybe try to shoot a second angle.

But sometimes reflections are okay.

Fun with portraits. Leaving studio backgrounds behind.

Mark Agro. Former CEO of Ottobock Canada.

After decades of photographing people in front of various shades of gray background paper I'm pretty much ready to call that part of the business over. We still do some shots in front of white or gray seamless for the sake of continuity for our clients but what I want to do, and what everyone seems to like, is going onto locations and finding a spot where I can improve the light while using a background that looks beautiful as it goes progressively out of focus.

In the last seven days I've been asked to do environmental portraits for three different law firms here in Austin. Each law firm has offices in very different kinds of buildings. Yesterday's assignment was at an office park out in the hill country, west of Austin. The space, while nice, had few architectural features that would be conducive to making good backgrounds. But what it did have was nice, big windows that looked out over rolling hills.

As always, there is a need to marry the inside space with the outside views in a convincing way and that mostly depends on both getting the balance of lights right, and also being able to drop the background out of focus enough to separate it from the person being photographed while being mindful not to make the separation so abrupt that it looks as though two images were merged together in Photoshop.

I use a soft light source for my main light and have recently started using a second light source as a soft fill light. My fill light is generally three or four stops down from my main light. I also use a bit of high, soft back light to give the impression that there is light coming in from the background window.

When it's sunny outside I find I need an ND filter to drop the sunlight exposures down and balance them better with interior light.

At another office in the middle of downtown's nest of skyscrapers I preferred using an interior, glass wall that had undulations of light playing over it and through it. That made for a nice out of focus background as well. The set-up also had the advantage of being more controllable over time.

There are few things in photography as frustrating as finding a location that appears just right, getting set up, and then having the arrival of subject delayed. You mood drops as you see the sun move, or clouds move in, and change the whole look of the shot. I scramble sometimes to reverse my camera and light positions to shoot toward the interior of buildings when my view out of a nice window falls apart.

It's Moore's Law that the delayed participant will arrive just minutes after you've decided and committed to changing everything.

Some of my favorite locations are long hallways that are very well lit. The best are those that have frosted glass walls on one side. If the glass walls get sunlight through them they add a very nice dimension to the overall look of the receding background.

In another big change in portraiture we've moved away from verticals being the default orientation and have been working more and more in horizontal orientations, with lots of "air" around the subject. This allows me to show more of the idealized, out of focus background and to get more of sense that the subject is situation in the frame rather than being artificially added to it. And, in a pinch, we can use the huge files to crop to other aspect ratios...

With a horizontal orientation and a looser crop I am able to get more use out of my 85mm lens. I use it mostly at f3.5 to f4.0 but occasionally, when I am willing to take a few risks, I head to f2.5 or even 2.2 but usually this is for more casual "working at the desk" shots.

I am noticing that smaller spaces actually do well with longer lenses and I know that seems counterintuitive but the tight crop helps to isolate a smaller area of the background which is more compositionally controllable. While the 70-200mm f4.0 does a good job in these situations I think I would prefer a fast 135mm lens for these kinds of situations, and also for use in vertical portrait set ups.

I have a minimum charge for location work based on my travel, set up and one person's portrait. We add per person charges for each additional set-up.

When it comes to post production my biggest task is always to get skin tone correct. I find that when I shoot with too much foliage in the background I end up with files that are far too magenta on the skin. This even happens for some reason when I do a custom white balance. The best way I've found to correct this is to go into the hue menu and move the red slider to the right (Lightroom) until the flesh tones are better balanced. In Texas, land of too much sun/tan, it's also good to drop red saturation down a bit too.

I noted during yesterday's shoot that with the otherwise perfect set up, shooting a big set of windows as the background, I ended up with a small reflection of myself in the lower left side of the window. Otherwise everything else was just right. In the film days I would have spent much time trying to figure out how to remove myself and might have put up a big, black gobo. Or compromised on the composition.  But as I was reflected quite small in the frame, and nicely out of focus against a sea of patterned foliage, I decided that it would be much easier just to clone myself out of the shot in post.

I'm loving my presentation process these days. I come back to the studio, edit out the non-keepers, color correct in batches for the rest, make quick crops if that was what I intended in the shooting, and then output high res (47.5 megapixel) minimal compression Jpegs and upload them to a gallery on Smugmug.com. With very fast broadband I can upload 10-20 gigabytes of files in minutes. The new iMac Pro has also cut my conversion time from RAWs to Jpegs by two thirds. My post processing all the way to the point of presenting to a client is now much shorter than each of those many times I used to drive to the lab with film.

A common thread in my engagement with three law firms and one hedge fund in the last seven days: the marketing director or partner in charge of marketing in each company asked me about doing video productions for them. So now I consider executive portraits the new gateway drug for future videos. Nice when your paid work is also part of your marketing....

I need a sign for my studio that reads, "Just Say No To Background Paper."

Just a quick note: Being on time is important. Being routinely late is a business relationship killer. But you already knew that...

The perilous worklife of a freelance artist. Save some $$ while you are working a lot. Everything is cyclical.

And, in an instant, all the big shows were cancelled into the foreseeable future...

Being a freelance artist means riding the financial cycles like a surfer riding waves. Sometimes you wait in the water with your board for hours till a great wave comes by and other times the waves are too choppy and the water too cold to venture off the beach.

The COVID-19 virus, coupled with some tricky Russian oil market shenanigans,  just triggered a sell off on Wall Street which should cause concern for everyone who works for a living. Especially for those who are self-employed and doing something that's (short term) not mission critical for the clients they serve.

The fear of contagion just shut down the biggest yearly event in Austin. SXSW brings in, according to the city of Austin, nearly $355 million dollars to the local economy. That's all gone now and it's not recoverable. For many small businesses there's no way to make it up. Some will tighten belts and some will fade away, buried by bills and salary expenses. 

If the country goes into recession in the next few months then this will be the fifth or sixth recession I will have navigated in my working life as a photographer. Each was different and each was the same. The decline of assignments starts early and then accelerates. After an awkward % of the business dries up and vanishes then the remaining clients start aggressively price shopping and, while some of us dig in our heels and pass on projects with too low a price tag attached, there are generally legions of artists who are scared, panicky and hungry enough to chase the market for their services to the rock bottom. 

I scraped and starved through my first recession and learned just how much more valuable having some money in the bank was than having the latest miracle camera or life-changing lens. We started tossing about 10% of our profits into savings accounts and liquid investments. With each new recession we were in better shape than in the previous ones and the panic around us pounded in the message of how important it is to save for a rainy day. Or year. 

This potential recession might be short. It might be long. But from a business point of view it's already following the traditional pattern: the freelancers are the "canaries in the coal mines." The assignments have started vanishing left and right. We'll be the first out and the last in for the recovery and, for the first part of the recovery we'll probably be struggling to get our pricing back up to a sustainable level against the pushback of clients newly trained to expect more for less. 

I've positioned myself as a portrait photographer for wealthy business people. It's the last market in photography to dry up. I'm still booking portrait work. Event work is more skittish. The cancellations just after the SXSW show cancellation are stacking up. The calendar is becoming more porous, like Swiss cheese. 

So, What will I do???? Well, for starters I think I'll not panic. There are several older cameras I've been itching to try out along with those old Olympus Pen FT MF lenses I keep writing about. I have my eye on a used Panasonic GX-8 but I can't decide if I want one in silver or in black. If you shoot with a GX-8 I'd love to read your mini-review and get your thoughts about it. I know all about the "shutter shock" stuff but I'm interested in learning how the I.S. is and how you like the handling...

Next up, I'm itching to buy a Leica SL2 but they seem not to be shipping at the moment and no one seems to have stock. In the meantime I'd love to hear from people who've shot with the previous model, the SL. I know they are different cameras altogether but I'm assuming that lots of the handling DNA will be similar and I'd love to hear stories about what separates the images from mortal cameras. 

As you know (and part of my huge, sinister plan) the Panasonic Lumix S Pro lenses are interchangeable with the Leica lenses so my total investment, if I want to dip my toe back into Leica-dom, is just(?) the cost of a body. If my ship ever comes in maybe I can cherry pick one or two Leica lenses for the ecosystem. That 50mm Apo Summicron at $8,000+ looks like just the thing to totally disrupt someone's retirement account....

And, if you are dumb enough to take financial advice from a photographer then 

here's my strategy as sketched out on a paper napkin over coffee:

Wait for the Dow Jones Industrials Average to hit 21,000 and then dump

a bunch of cash into a Vanguard Stock Index Fund. 

then, grab my favorite camera, go for walk and ignore the market for a while.

Sunday Show Notes. A week in the rear view mirror.

Self-portrait with Sigma fp.

It was an interesting week. We had the medical drama I mentioned yesterday, some decent photo assignments, a white knuckle drive to San Antonio and back, and not much time for any photographic fun. The capper on the week was the Friday afternoon announcement that the Austin event with 34 years of continuous existence, The SXSW Festival, was cancelled due to the Novel Coronavirus. 

So far the cancellation is hitting freelancers especially hard. I talked to a sound engineer today who is losing about 12 days of work this month. And it's a bit late in the game to replace the lost work with new jobs. My favorite videographer and I commiserated over the loss of three days apiece next week and the litany of economic destruction goes on and on. Zach Theatre usually leases out the main stage for two weeks for the Film Festival portion of SXSW the cancellation of which effectively kills off all profits for March since they don't have anything they can rush to the stage to make up for the lost revenue. Then there's the cost to the freelance workers who would have staffed the venue. 

I thought the writing was on the wall a week and a half ago when the big names like Amazon, Facebook and Apple all dropped out of the SXSW show, but the "entrepreneurs" that own the show tried desperately to find a pathway forward since they stand to lose the most. In the end it was the city of Austin that put them out of (or further into) their misery with an emergency declaration.  There are a lot of bars that ordered and stocked in tons of inventory for private parties and showcases that are now cancelled. I hope their clients paid in advance for the alcohol and that the venues can at least make some profit selling the bountiful stockpile of liquor, beer and wine to alternate customers. 

While I would have enjoyed the money my clients would have paid what I'll really miss are the streets 

filled with people who made such fun and ample photo subjects. I had plans for some artsy looking, black and white video that would have been (fingers crossed) amazing. I'll have to figure out something else. 

We're all watching the stock market, et al, to see what's going to happen next. I swim with a few guys who are real estate developers (things like high rise hotels, big condominium towers, industrial parks) and the after-swim talk lately is all conjecture about where the markets are headed, how the correction will affect the local economy and when to push ready cash back into the market. I can't play in their league but it's fun to hear all the points of view. If your brother's plumber's best friend has any sure fire stock tips I'm sure we'd all love to hear them. 

Testing the nose bleed ISOs in the Lumix S1s. As you know I'm pretty conservative about leaning into the higher ISO settings when shooting commercial jobs but I did one today that opened my eyes to what's possible. I had an assignment to photograph a "table reading" for a new play that's aiming for Broadway but which has some local producers in the mix. The theater put on a reading of the play for an audience of financial influencers and patrons. There were about 250 people in attendance and the performance was done with 15 actors reading and singing the parts. 

The production was done in our dungeon-like rehearsal space. You know: the one with really bad, flickery, florescent lights way up on very high ceiling.... It's my least favorite place to photograph, at least as far as lighting is concerned. The first thing I did was walk up to the stage and, using some white paper, do a custom white balance for both of my cameras. That was a big help. 

I also metered with an incident light meter at the stage position and what I came up with was: f4.0, SS = 1/125th, ISO = 6400. Several actors had darker skin and when I zoomed in for closer framing I ended up increasing the ISO to 8,000 for them. 

What I learned from earlier tests is when shooting for Jpegs as your final file (in camera) the cameras progressively smooth out the detail from the files in an attempt to control noise. You can, however, go into the menu and reduce the amount of noise reduction the camera delivers. The scale is minus 5 to plus five. When I hit ISO 6400 I pulled the noise reduction for Jpeg down by -2. When I went to 8000 I pulled down by -3. The files actually look great on my 5K monitor and hold up okay even when I magnify the images to 100 %. They look like ISO 400 files from just a few years ago and they do this magical feat while retaining good color and pleasing color saturation. I was actually delighted. 

I photographed today with two S1 cameras along with the 70-200mm f4.0 S Pro lens and the 24-70mm f2.8 S Pro lens. Both lenses are good enough to allow me to shoot wide open with no issues. In fact, the sharpness of both lenses at their largest apertures is also surprising to me. They are among the best zoom lenses I have ever used. 

I have one location portrait assignment tomorrow morning, the retouching of images from two of last week's shoots in the afternoon, and I hope by Tuesday I have enough free time to go for a long walk somewhere. Of course, that's the one day that has a probably rain forecast. But I do own rain gear and I guess the cameras don't mind getting a little wet. 

Thanks for sharing your medical stories and advice. I do understand and agree that the best practice is to call an ambulance but one of our swimmers is an ER doctor who I pulled out of practice to help me assess our friend. He suggested that the hospital three minutes away would not be too big of a risk. It would take 15 minutes or longer for an ambulance to arrive...and our "patient" was not in extreme distress. If you are by yourself the absolute best course of action is always to dial 911. The EMS should have the right tools if your health takes a dramatic turn while in transit. You never want to compound the damage of a heart attack by losing consciousness at the wheel of your car and slamming into an overpass pillar at 60 miles per hour. That's pretty much guaranteed to make your situation much worse.

Your pool, health club or other facility should have a well maintained AED (auto electro defibrillator) on the premises and the staff should be trained in its use. We've had several positioned around the swim club since Spring of 2002. Won't do much for a garden variety heart attack but very, very handy to have in case of cardiac arrest! Gearing up with AEDs was one of my initiatives when I was on the board of our club. Purely selfish motives...

My friend spent three minutes in my car, was seen immediately at the ER and started receiving professional treatment within a minute after he had an EKG. Time elapsed from the onset of first symptoms to treatment was likely less than 25 minutes. Three blood tests to assess troponin (given six hours apart) all showed negative. Major bullet dodged. Scary wake-up call delivered. 

Getting older is certainly not for sissies. 

Update on Sigma fp video experiments. Silly me. I just presumed that the cinema RAW DNG files I shot for video would be readable by Final Cut Pro X without any issues. Funnier still when the files all came in as thousands of single frames of 2.8 megapixels each. All unconnected and in no way ready to function as a video clip. That's what I get for assuming that 12 bit, 4K, 4:2:2 cinema RAW files would be a piece of cake to work with....

I'm now learning to use DaVinci Resolve 16 to import, color grade and transcode the files into some sort of codec that can actually be edited by something less than a Cray Supercomputer (yes, Cray is still in business, they were one of my son's accounts at the P.R. firm he worked for...). I'll update once I've gotten the rudiments of Resolve figured out. The new software dance always sucks a bit.

On the other hand, every time I use the Sigma fp to shoot some stills I'm amazing and delighted by its 3D look and its imperious tonality and strangely pleasing colors.

While I had a truncated swim practice yesterday and spent a good portion of the day at a hospital I was back in the pool this morning. Important for my particular psychological make-up to get right back on a scary horse instead of taking breaks. I always fear that if I break for too long I'll never go back.....

That's all for today. 

An evening photograph. Walking across a bridge.

 Early Evening. Early Spring.

Sigma fp.

I had an interesting day today. I was at swim practice when I noticed a friend at one end of the pool looking "not right." I headed directly over and asked what was going on. He had a pain in the left side of his chest. It was a pain or pressure he'd never felt before. We hopped out of the pool while the rest of the swimmers continued their workout. We quickly got dressed and I got him into my car. We headed to the nearest ER. His EKG was abnormal, his blood pressure was sky high and the pain was not going away. He got stabilized, medicated and then transferred via ambulance to a cardiac center with more comprehensive resources and staff. With aspirin, morphine and a nitro patch as well as continuous monitoring, his EKG stabilized, his BP dropped back down to normal levels and blood test showed no troponin. According to the attending cardiologist he probably dodged a bigger problem. 

We're not sure what caused the symptoms yet. It was a tough swim practice but not that much different from usual. At any rate, it was a lesson re-learned for me: If you get a strange chest pain don't ignore it or hope that it will go away on its own. Get it checked out. And for goodness sake, if you are having chest pains don't drive yourself to the ER. 

I have every hope that my swim friend will be back in the pool in no time. We'll make sure he goofs off more and over-achieves less. Not everything in life needs to be a sprint...

A weird day for me as I didn't touch a camera all day long. We'll fix that tomorrow. 

Take care of your friends. They're gold.