COVID-19 Pizza Acquisition Logistics. Yes, this is "off topic" from photography.

Happy Good Friday, tomorrow. 

In the time before COVID-19 it was so easy to order, receive and enjoy a freshly made pizza. You'd hop online, enter your order, enter a delivery time, toss in your credit card information and then get back to retouching something or cleaning off your swim goggles until the delivery driver appeared carrying a box with a hot, fresh and topping rich pie. We kept an envelope of $5 bills next to the front door so we'd always have tip money ready to go. If work was slow and the coffers were running low we'd save the delivery cost and order the pizza as carry out. Then we'd flip a three headed coin to see which of us would go and collect dinner.

The delivery would happen and we'd pop that box open right on the table and start the wonderful process of truly appreciating freshly melted cheese, a robust tomato sauce and whatever savory toppings we craved in the moment. No muss. No fuss. 

Now though we have a virus/pizza box intervention process that we have to go through. Once the pizza is delivered to the front door a family member receives the box and the driver scurries away (we add the tip on line so the driver is pre-tipped by the time he gets here). Once the driver has retreated to his idling car we begin the process. 

It goes like this: The designated pizza box holder remains outside the house and places the box on the welcome mat on the front porch. The same person, who has already been potentially contaminated by whomever before has touched the box, opens the box and folds the sides down to make space for a person from inside the house to approach the box and without touching any part of the exterior of the box and the person on the house side slides a pizza peel (the big spatula used to pull pizzas out of ovens) underneath the pizza until it's stably situated on said peel. At that point she (it's usually Belinda, she's a pro at tossing coins) takes the pizza into the domicile and leaves the door ajar, just a bit . 

The pizza "intermediary" takes the box and places it into the trash can outside. After the box is properly disposed of he (it's usually me messing with stuff that goes in the trash = bad coin tosser) approaches the door and opens it fully with his foot. There is a bottle of hand sanitizer just inside the door and he uses it liberally to disinfect his hands. Then there is a trip to the bathroom to wash hands for at least 20 seconds. Next up is grabbing a Chlorox wipe from the kitchen to wipe down the sanitizer bottle and pump mechanism, and finally the front door knob gets a proactive wipe and the door is closed. Only then can the (now lukewarm) pizza be enjoyed. 

It's a process. And anybody who tells you the journey is more important than the destination is full of shit. Getting a hot pizza is definitely a luxury which I'm looking forward to A.C.-19 (after Covid-19). But lukewarm, safety pizza is definitely better than nothing. 

Side note, if you think the writing here is getting daffy and distracted you might not be all wrong. Monday the 13th will mark our first 30 days of "sheltering in place." Other than a weekly pizza, enjoyed by tradition on Thursday nights, we've been doing all of our meals at home. A strange and quixotic break from the recent good old days of favorite restaurants and favorite fellow diners. I'm not sure how long it will take me to re-socialize.... But I see why there are 400% more mental health issues per capita in rural areas than in cities. One's mind doesn't get pulled into "normal" if there's no social group around to help maintain healthy boundaries.

But, tonight is pizza night! Yay. It's like a mark on the prison wall that let's us understand a relative passage of time. If you order pizza tonight I hope yours comes piping hot. 

We're doing a veggie pizza tonight. With a salad and a bottle of red wine. Takes the edge off self-isolation. Now, if only we can find something fun to watch on Netflix....

How to cut your own hair during the crisis. From someone whose been doing so for about thirty years.

I can't give you advice on how to cut or maintain long hair. I only do "short."

Blog post by reader request....

I'm the most frugal photographer in the world when it comes to haircuts. I bought a set of electric barber's clippers and guards thirty years ago and started cutting my own hair. Something like this https://www.target.com/p/wahl-clip-n-groom-men-s-haircut-kit-with-built-in-finishing-trimmer-79900-1701/-/A-579774 which I found online at Target.com works great. When I heard from one of my friends that he was spending over $100 a month on "hair care" I almost fell on the floor. And when I heard from one of my female fellow swimmers that she pays around $200 a month for her "hair care" I became light-headed and had to sit down. If you invested those amounts in an index fund......sigh....

Okay, so if you have a hair style that requires much complex cutting, trimming and manipulation I probably am not going to be much help. But if you are a typical guy who doesn't really give a hoot about styles then I'm your cheap haircut mentor. I can be capricious, sometimes I just can't be bothered cutting my hair and it grows out like weeds in a garden. But before big client engagements or when I get tired of flying a flag of white hair (which makes every young person around me talk louder and offer to help me cross streets...) I grab the clippers and go berserk. 

Well, not really berserk but I have little fear of failure in this regard. I start with a #4 guard on the clippers. This translates to leaving your hair about a half inch long. The guard keeps you from inadvertently getting it too short....

So, put your #4 guard on the clippers, don't stand on the shag carpet (my bathroom is saltillo tile so it's easy to sweep up...) and start clipping. Generally, I find it most efficient to go against the grain of your hair. Who knew that hair has a natural "grain"?

Take some time to get all that head of hair more or less uniform and you are ready to move on to step two; the hair in front, above and behind your ears. Most of the clipper sets come with guards that are slanted and meant for each specfic ear. They are generally labelled something like, "Left Ear" or "Right Ear." Start with your favorite ear. Mine is the left and that makes sense because I am left-handed. These guards are like graduated neutral density filters; they allow a closer cut on one side and a longer cut on the other. Obviously  you want the close side next to the ear and the far side away from your ear. This will get you a close cut near the ear but a feathering into the rest of your hair. Now do the other ear using its specific guard. 

Now use the shallowest guard, going with the grain of the hair on the back of your neck. You don't want to start low and go high you want to start at the hair line and go down. After that you might just look in the mirror and tune up any rough spots. 

At this point you are done. If it takes you more than ten minutes you are either paralyzed by fear of failure or you are overly obsessed with perfection. If you really screw up you can wear a hat till it grows back. 

Should you want an easier approach you can do as my old pool manager, Brian, used to do and grab the #2 guard and use it everywhere. Once all the hair is uniform you are done. 

Take a shower. Sweep the floor. Put a drop of oil for clippers on the blade and then box up your clippers till next time. 

So, how frugal am I when it comes to hair cuts? Well, I will tell you that Studio Dog (Rest in Peace) and I shared one set of clippers for the past twelve years...   

 this is a "Kirk" haircut about 10 days later. Curly hair. No way it stays flat.

this is a "Kirk" haircut maybe two and a half to three weeks on....

This is from a time before haircuts...Or razors. And yes, it's a black Canon AE-1

I wouldn't take a chance on cutting hair like this unless I had a iron clad waiver and 

a team of liability lawyers on retainer.....

If you screw up (doubtful) you can always wear a convenient and stylish hat.

If you are amazingly good looking no one will even be looking at your hair.

Why pay extra to maintain it? At $100 a month that's equal to a couple of good lenses

or really cool used camera bodies per year....

Springtime in a Pandemic. Is this time different for professional photographers? Yep.

Springtime in the central Texas area. The wildflowers are blooming.

But this year few people will see them. Doesn't make them less beautiful. Eh?

I woke up this morning with the nagging realization that this "shelter in place" existence may go on for months, not weeks. My first thought was about all the people who will be economically damaged by the shut down of our economies. I remember recessions earlier in my career and just how frightening it was for me as a freelancer and a provider to my family when people started losing their jobs, companies cut back on their expenditures and freelancers really had to scramble to make ends meet. But these times are different and worse for the self-employed. In past recessions you could keep trying to make a sale, to convince a marketing person that they'd be riding the wave of recovery with your brilliant photos leading their advertising charge. Or, you might have, in desperation, done work you would not normally do; a wedding here, a child portrait there, or maybe events or some real estate work. But the difference was that if you could convince someone to pay for it you had the opportunity to do the work. 

With the pandemic raging all non-essential commerce is fully closed down. The kinds of face-to-face engagements required for corporate portraits, work with models, events and meetings is just gone. No matter how great your ability to sell you will not be able to will the work into existence. And that's a total game changer. 

My old advice would have been to diversify your services; see if there was another type of visual art that would leverage your skills differently so you could make enough $$$ to keep the business going, the family fed, and the mortgage/rent paid. But unless your talents lie in something like web site design and construction (which you can do remotely) a lot of those pathways are equally moribund. 

It's too late for hoary, old advice about "being prepared" or "keeping six months of expense money on hand"; now that advice just seems like judgement. And I remember how hard it was in the early years of freelancing to keep the next month's expense money on hand, much less the money for a quarter or a year. No, if I were in the early days of my time in the business and I could transfer what I know now to my younger self about how to deal with this particular catastrophe I would tell myself to immediately put the idea of photography as a business on hold and find a job in an essential industry now. Even if the pay was just enough to cover my expenses and keep me running in place. 

I'd look for a job stocking groceries or working construction or doing lawn care. Anything to bring in short term cash and to stop the bleeding engendered by trying to keep a photography business alive (with the burn rate burning) in a time when NO business happens. 

This doesn't mean quit. It means find a way to get the cash needed to survive. You can still maintain your brand for the time in the future when we are all able to get back to work. You can continue to update your website, post on your favorite social media, connect on LinkedIn, but you need to stop waiting for the next project to appear and find a stop gap job with which to pay the bills. With luck, a job that will also provide health coverage (advice, sadly, mostly for U.S. citizens). But your priority is to stop the bleeding.

Is this the advice I would give to my own kid? It's exactly the advice I gave him at dinner last week. He started working as a freelance writer before the national emergency was declared and on March 13th everything he was working on or scheduled for came to a hard stop. He's been applying for all sorts of positions and will take nearly anything that provides a decent paycheck. And he's a lucky one with a great work history, who graduated from a prestigious private college, Magna Cum Laude. If he'll embrace the concept of stocking toilet paper at Trader Joe's until this all blows over then it must be a fairly logical and deliberate choice. 

To those of us further along in our careers...

I thought I'd hang up the invoice template when I either ran out of energy to work or when I just didn't feel like I was having fun with commercial photography any more. I never thought that the business would just retire out from under me. But it's the same business whether you are on your way into it or on your way out of it and it seems like, for now, we're all on hiatus. 

If you've scrimped and saved throughout your career then congratulations, you can consider this a test run of your future retirement. I'm sure the business will come back in some form in a few months, maybe a year... Time to re-design the website, send out assuring messages to your clients who still hold their positions, paint the studio, clear out the organizational paperwork, apply for an SBA loan. But don't presume, unless you do some really amazing niche in photography, that you'll maintain the income and cash flow you historically have. This time is different. 

I'm already getting phone calls from peers who are selling off gear to make payments. It's more important to have cash flow right now than that camera we just had to have last year. Or that 600mm f4.0 lens we thought we couldn't live without. Problem is that we're all pretty much in the same boat so there are far fewer buyers out there to take the gear off our hands and replace it with cold, hard cash. 

You don't need financial advice from me but my CFO is adamant that we're not touching investments or retirement accounts to get through this. You should never sell at the bottom. Even better to take on a bit of debt than to throw out investing discipline. 

Of course, the advice sounds great until the electricity gets turned off and then priorities change. 

I'm predicting that when we all get through this there will be a whole mind change in the small business community and more people will eat at home, drive older, cheaper cars, and vacation locally instead of skiing at Gstaad, or snorkeling in Bora Bora. More money will flow into contingency accounts than into funds for the next big luxury item. More people will abandon premium cable and watch more stuff on Netflix. The really frugal will also ditch Netflix and get the "rabbit ears" antennae out to watch "free TV." Or skip TV all together to work harder on getting that "emergency account" filled up. 

So, how am I handling all this? Sheer panic one moment and calm blog writing the next. We've yet to get carry out food and we're sharing the shopping and cooking responsibilities. I've sent out all the invoices from last month that I felt too paralyzed in the moment to attend to (very unusual for me to procrastinate on paper work) and I'm trying to walk enough in my neighborhood to replace the benefits from the lost swimming. I ordered one piece of swim training gear. It's a resistance band thing. Pretty simple but you can use it to mimic your swimming stroke with variable resistance. It's one thing to maintain aerobic fitness (walking up hills like your late to an important meeting) but it's just as important to maintain muscle mass and muscle memory! And, yeah, it's good to throw some flexibility  exercise in there as well. "Supple trees bend in strong wind. stiff trees get knocked over." 

We could exit the field of play altogether but it would feel like surrender. I'm convinced we'll have fun stuff to do by the fourth quarter and it'll be nice to do something I'm actually good at, for a change. In the meantime I am learning the minute ins and outs of making perfect coffee. There is always room for improvement. 

On another note, since I can't have portrait subjects in the studio, or even on location, I'm on a self assignment to do self-portraits until such a time that everything relents. I actually like to see myself with a camera in front of my face. It's lessens the shock of seeing how much I've aged. Most people who know me well know that, in my subconscious mind, I still believe I am about 18 years old...

Sorry to be so serious today but as a former college teacher and chapter ASMP president I'm starting to get some panicky phone calls and e-mails from younger people in the business. Better to write down my opinions of the options than to free form it every time the iPhone summons me. 

If you are not in the business then ignore what I've written here and continue having as much fun with photography as you can. It's a wonderful way to spend time. And now that I have no $$$ projects to work on I'm certainly enjoying being an ardent amateur!!!  Kirk Tuck, Photo hobbyist.

I'm a bit sad about letting go of the Pentax stuff last year. It wasn't perfect but the camera bodies matched what I think a "real" camera should feel like. It was fun to use. Really fun to use.

I am at the point now where the Lumix S cameras are comfortable and familiar. 

I use them frequently for my current hobby work just to keep the muscle memory intact

for the day when we return to service as working photographers. 

I loved the way the Fuji X-Pro2 looked. It reminded me so much of the many Leica M 

series rangefinders that eventually slipped through my fickle fingers. But from an 

imaging POV I'm not sad to move on. It was good stuff but nothing exemplary.

Ben's generation is really taking it on the chin. 

But he's young, smart, has indulgent parents and no debt.

I think he'll come out of this okay. 

I'm happy to see that he and his (science major) housemates are taking

the pandemic seriously. They have social distancing down to a science

and they are relentless about it. Makes a parent happy. 

That's all for this morning. Off to clean my air conditioner and cut my own hair......

One last thing: If you are a working pro and feeling awful about 

work life right now just remember than none of this is your fault and 

that all over the world all of us are in the same boat. 

No one is judging you. 

I just tracked down one of my favorite portrait lenses from the "golden years" of photography; the 1990's... Yes I bought it.

There were two portrait lenses for 35mm which formed my idea of what a focal length for head and shoulders images of people should be. One was the 90mm Leica Summicron and the other was a 90mm Leica Elmarit. The Summicron was the faster of the two since its maximum aperture was f2.0. It was also a bit more complex of an optical design. But the one I got the most use out of on my R Leica cameras was the Elmarit 90mm f2.8. In the close-up range it wasn't any sharper than the Summicron but that was okay for portraits. Where the lens really came into its own was when I found the magic combination: f4.0 with the focus set at about six feet. The lens became pleasantly crisp but wasn't so analytical that it was mean to people, and the out of focus background rendering at that combination was absolutely gorgeous.

By modern lens standards the optical formulation was nothing to write home about. It's a four element, four group design. But each version of the lens (there were three successive models) was built out of solid metal and the focusing ring was, well, perfect. The final version, which I found in mint shape, was equipped with a built-in, extendible lens shade and a 55mm filter ring.

The lens is small and fairly light (especially when compared to the monstrously huge Sigma 85mm f1.4 lens I use for this range right now.

I like the way Leica's R series lenses render images of people and I can't wait to use it. I pick the lens up tomorrow (one of my friends bought it a while back and never got around to using it or getting an adapter ring for his system) but I have to wait to use it until a Leica R to L-mount adapter arrives on a slow boat from Amazon.com. This is a lens I'd happily pair with my Zeiss 50mm f1.7 lens as pretty much a perfect walk-around set for a Panasonic S1R. Plenty sharp enough but with character and without the need for weight lifting classes to transport by foot.

Can't wait to give it a first try. Fun on the cheap.

And, by the way, in all the years of using digital cameras with older, MF lenses there's never been a camera that's easier to manually focus with them than the S1 Lumix series. Must have something to do with the 5+ megapixel EVF. That, and a convenient button to get quick image magnification. But remember to set your S1 to Raw+Jpeg if you want to get the highest finder magnifications when previewing...

Finding fun stuff everywhere. Wait till I tell you about the new swim training stuff I ordered. It's so cool you'll want to swim right now.

It's Tuesday, the 7th of April, and we're learning day-by-day new ways to entertain ourselves. Mostly with old photos.

A previous (to 2019) production of a Janis Joplin musical at Zach Theatre. 

This is a quick report from Austin to keep in touch with all my VSL friends. Last night I stayed up late looking through boxes of prints that span decades. Wow. Everyone progressively grew up and got older. Buildings in Austin got newer and taller. Theater productions got bigger and the lighting got much, much better. 

Yesterday I played around with the GX8 and the 45-150mm Panasonic lens and it was much better than I remember it being. Or maybe I just shot that lens with older cameras that didn't have the capability to do as sharp and noise free a file as the newer camera. I wish I had some good samples to show you from the combination but I was disappointed with the weather and nothing gelled for me; photo-wise. 

A bit of sad news, but it was bound to happen... The State of Texas officially closed the state parks for the time being. Sad because I was looking forward to climbing Enchanted Rock this week, out near Fredericksburg, Texas. It's also a great trip out because the highways are lined with the beautiful colors of the Spring wildflowers... Seems that people were disregarding social distancing but I think a bigger issue was with the need for much more frequent sanitizing of the facilities in the park. Either way, that's some wide open space that's off the table for now.

A bit of good news. The painters arrived this morning to splash some samples of tinted wood preservatives on an exterior, cedar wall. Belinda (being a picky graphic designer/art director) shot down four different tint samples and we ended up choosing a clear, oil based wood preservative. The house is about half rock and half natural cedar. We've been needing to treat the wood for while... The exterior work is allowed by both city and state ordinances during this time and the two workers came in separate vehicles, are focused on social distancing and are wearing faces masks and other protective gear. 

People need an income stream and we think it's a good idea to keep hiring local companies to do as much as we need, and can legally and ethically manage, in order to help keep folks paid. We've put off interior work until the pandemic subsides. The cedar is looking so much better already...

Since the Easter holiday is coming up and Belinda is trying to limit her grocery shopping to once every two weeks I head over to Trader Joes twice a week to get produce. There are fewer people in their stores, they have a time just for "seniors" from 8-9 a.m. And both customers and employees are wearing masks at all times. They limit the number of people in the store at one time to facilitate social distancing. On today's adventure there I found everything on my shopping list including: bag salads, fresh cauliflower, broccoli and green beans, gruyere cheese, goat cheese, Kerrigold butter, organic milk, my favorite muesli, organic blackberries (so sweet), greek yogurt, sourdough batard, and hand sanitizer.

What more could you ask for? Oh, and though I didn't need them there were paper towels and toilet paper. 

Life goes on here with few rough spots but the lack of socializing is taking its toll in slow motion. I'm so used to seeing friends, colleagues, clients and swimmers, in big doses everyday that our current existence seems like science fiction. At times as though we are pioneers on Mars. But pioneers on Mars with cameras. 

I hope you are happy and well. Don't let dread rob you of the joys of the moment. It's wise to consider the future but not at the expense of the present. Looking forward to making a sandwich with toasted sourdough bread, Dijon mustard, ham and swiss cheese. I stick the half with the ham and swiss cheese under the broiler for five minutes and the whole thing is so damn yummy I can hardly stand it. That's today's lunch --- along with a bit of fruit and maybe a slice of raw onion on the sandwich. Gotta look forward to stuff....

A previous (to 2019) production of a Janis Joplin musical at Zach Theatre. 

Remembering when Samsung used to make cameras. And send them to me for free...

Demonstrating the "dirty baby diaper" camera hold engendered by EVF-less cameras. 

Like my Sigma fp. Dammit. 

Renae and her adorable daughter.

I already miss the agony of modern travel...

Remembering my first (and only) trip to Berlin. It's the #2 destination on 

my list of immediate, future travel plans. Hope they are doing well. 

S. Korean Photographer I met in Berlin. Having lunch together at a Chinese restaurant in 

Germany. How multi-national of us...

Berlin. Opera House lunch break. 2013. 

How to not practice social distancing. Not to worry, this was a few years ago...

 Every night, as I go to sleep, I hope there will be a time again soon when we can make portraits. 

When you clean up you open boxes. When you open boxes you find prints. This is "box art."

I think I've watched every good movie on Netflix and Amazon Prime. All twelve of them. It's no longer a really satisfying thing to do so after dinner I went out to the office to continue with the Herculean task of cleaning up my own Aegean stables...by which I mean, of course, the mess my filing systems have become. Having no rivers to divert I just started opening print boxes to remind myself of what was there. The first clamshell case I got to holds prints up to 13 by 19 inches. Most of the prints in it were 12x18 inches and a few were smaller odd sizes. As I leafed through the prints it reminded me that I used have a lot of my work printed, all the time, because I wanted huge stacks of candidates to put into specific portfolios. A medical portfolio. A portrait portfolio. A black and white portrait portfolio, and so on. At some point, about four years ago I stopped printing stuff. I guess I became convinced that no one wanted to do face to face portfolio showings anymore --- that if an art director wanted to see my work they'd probably just go to an online resource. 

There are 18 four inch thick clamshells cases on shelves in the studio. There are a couple of bigger cases from the time when I tried to keep an Epson 4000 from clogging up long enough to make some 17 by 24 inch prints. Each case holds between one hundred and one hundred and fifty prints. Mostly color. The hand printed, fiber based black and white prints are either 16x20 or 11x14 and they have their own cases. 

At any rate I was amazed at how much I liked the prints and how much more presence they can have compared to seeing the same images on the screens. I thought I'd just point a camera straight down into the box and show you an assortment. I guess it's time to get back to the printer. At least for a while. 

I either need to find a service I like or buy a printer I like. Or both. Prints are a totally different way to experience photography. And I like being able to hold them in my hands and walk into better light....

 When you print for yourself it's always a process for trying variation after variation until you get stuff you like in the moment. But the next time you print it's different. You're different.