Just reporting in with a bit of Arctic-palloza updates.

Taken before the icing marathon.

There we were, skating along on my good looks and impeccable luck, and just about feeling untouchable when the power went off with a huge green flash and a loud bang. I thought we were at war and someone just dropped a bunker buster bomb on the water treatment plant about a third of a mile away. But no, it was just a catastrophic physical failure of a transformer cluster. We love putting them up on high poles so the wind chill works better, they're more of a challenge to fix (and who doesn't like a challenge?), and so the high school kids don't challenge each other to lick the HV wires. 

So, the power went off at 5 am and stayed off until just a little while ago, about 5:15 pm. 

But, the water treatment plant was offline for while so now we're under a "boil water" alert for at least the next 24 hours. I need to research how that all works. For now Belinda translated for me. It means: "don't drink the water unless you boil it for a while". Hope that boiling works on cryptosporidium. And brain eating amoebas.

Anyway, we have heat back. All the exterior faucets are alive and dripping well. But I also wrapped them around the exposed pipe area (but did not block the drip flow!). We are able to cook, microwave and shower. And we can do so at 68 to 70 degrees. 

We've been lucky but there are more obstacles to overcome. Tomorrow night will be out last night in the teens so we still have time to do one more round with no heat. The power has been out at the three local (to us) grocery stores so they've either had very limited hours or shut altogether. That's okay, I guess, because panic shoppers stripped the shelves, and the wait in line to get in and fight for the meager remainders was about an hour long. It makes shopping for groceries in the old Soviet Union sound better. 

I'm not too sad about the stores since it's still not safe to drive on the ice covered streets. Remember, we're not like all you "first world" states where people come out and sand or salt your roads for you after plowing them the minute they get dusted with snow. Nope, we get the old truck with the baldest tires and drive as fast as we can. The idea being that the longer you are on the road the more opportunities for something bad to happen. And if you are going to have an accident don't you want to get it over with quick? So you can get on with your day?

On clear roads Texans (and southern Californian transplants) drive 60 in a 30 zone. But when we have a mix of black ice and black ice they like to go just a little faster. Gets the adrenaline pumping. 

Hopefully we'll be getting back to normal by late Saturday. Probably just in time for an earthquake or an inconvenient lava eruption. But I would not rule out a pesky meteor shower..... You just never know with the folks in Texas. Might be a legislative pact with the devil coming back to haunt us. 

Safe and warm and thankful right now. Subject to some change. But always thankful. 

Just a quick note for Fuji camera users: They have new firmware available for many, many Fuji cameras today. I was interested in the X100V firmware. It adds the ability to use the built in ND filter for video now. Also allows you to record both Jpeg AND raw when using the two digital teleconverter settings. And lots more. 

I actually bought the Fuji X100V to shoot studio still life photographs. Very cool and very counterintuitive.

 

The studio was warmer today. I was able to go out and shoot 

if I wore wool socks, insulated hiking boots, a thick sweatshirt

and a fleece hat. This is one of my "famous" still life images 

of a camera I recently purchased. For this blog post 

it's just a prop.

In the age of the cellphone even a faux rangefinder with a 35mm equivalent lens can lay claim to being a fine still life camera. I'm embarrassed because I avoided using a Fuji X100 series camera for a long time and then, once I got an X100V in my hands I just can't seem to let go. I'm using it in the streets, like everyone else, but I don't always grab for bigger, more expensive cameras when I want a nice still life. If it's not a "macro" shot I'm just as likely to grab one of the X100V's and blaze away. Handheld. Without even looking. 

I'm also embarrassed because I presumed that the X100 series cameras would be just as power hungry and battery savaging as the XH-1 and I didn't relish the thought of carrying around one or two dozen NP-W126S batteries. They are small enough but they add up and to carry enough for use with the XH-1 for a day of shooting would require big pockets. Huge pockets! And now I find out that the X100V is downright parsimonious with electricity. Two batteries is great. Yesterday I spent an hour out walking in 12° (f) and I reasoned that I should bring along an extra battery since cold weather is famous for the quick drain. 

I wore the camera on a strap, on my chest, like a tourist. It was outside my coat. No protection from the biting cold and the harsh wind. But an hour and 142 images later the camera display was still showing all of its battery level bars. Color me impressed. 

As you probably know, if you are a regular VSL reader, that I (brilliantly or with misguided, momentary enthusiasm) bought a Leica SL2 a week or so ago. Sadly, I haven't had much of a chance to take it out and really use it. The weather is breaking for the better on Friday and Saturday and I'm sure to be out with it then. And after our long week of brutal weather I have a hunch most Austinites will be out there with me trying to get warm and soak up some sunshine. But even though I've put fewer than a thousand actuations on the Leica I do have a bunch of observations I'd like to make and, usually, when I write an article about a camera I like to start out by taking a "glamour shot" of it.

The sun is out today and it's bright in the studio. It's all indirect light but it's bouncing off tons and tons of bright, white snow and it's more or less perfect to use for impromptu camera beauty shots. I put the Leica on a Smith Victor side arm and put the whole rig in a nice spot of light just inside my studio door. Then I grabbed a convenient X100V, set the aperture to 5.6 and let the camera choose the shutter speed and ISO. The camera and I both like 1/125th of a second so that's what I've got set as the bottom limit in the auto-ISO set-up menu.

I like a little bit of compression so I rotated the all purpose ring on the lens which set the focal length to 70mm. It's interpolated and it's a bit like gambling; sometimes the file is nice and sometimes it's got that over processed video look. Today the Fuji gods were with me and blessed me with a nice result.

I would have used a tripod but the cold has me moving as slow as a turtle and I'm sleepier than a bear stuffed with honey. I just frame up, got the green focus square where I wanted it and pushed the shutter button. Now I have a decent image with which to illustrate my ramblings and circular writing about the Germanic-Photographic-Heartthrob camera. That's coming as soon as I can stop taking naps and get more coffee into my blood stream.

The new(ish) Fuji camera has a very good lens on it and the 26 megapixel lens yield a wonderful amount of detail for web-illustrations. Even when cropped in to 70mm. I think it's my new, casual still life camera. At least for today.

On a lifestyle note: We seem to be dodging the rolling, eternal, electrical blackouts that hundreds of thousands of Austinites are living through. A neighbor down the street enlightened me as to why. It seems our houses sit on the same electrical grid as a huge, gigantic and vital water treatment plant. That sucker doesn't go down. Yes, we have blackouts limited to specific groups of houses but those are mostly caused by ice or trees on local power lines. Those are physical whacks that don't affect the entire grid. For instance, last year one of the close by transformers exploded. It was loud. The water plant was unaffected as were the houses on the other side of the street from us. I'm not sure if I totally believe my neighbor but it seems plausible. 

Belinda and I went out and walked in the sunshine today and were happy since the temperatures crested 20 for the first time since Saturday. We have three more cold (but not record-breaking) nights before everything evens out and a couple of ice storms coming in tonight and tomorrow but we can finally see both real and metaphoric light at the end of a short tunnel.

I'm focused on gently warming my exterior faucets in the hope that if I have the right "bedside manner" I'll be able to convince them to unfreeze but to do so without rupturing and ruining my weekend, and beyond. 

We've rehabilitated two so far so I only have two to go. I better not get over confident....

The side arm is useful when doing slide and negative copies with a camera. I'll write a brief, "The wrong way to copy slides, but the way I always do it" for a future blog.

Thanks for all the hints, tips and tricks about "enjoying the burdens of cold weather." I think I've used them all. Except for the hint that one anonymous commenter tried to leave about burning old truck tires on the living room floor to stay warm. We don't even have an old truck the tires of which we could burn. I'm thinking that is NOT a Canadian custom as he suggested.

A long, cold day in Austin. A lot of time spent fixing stuff around the compound. A lot of time checking on friends. An hour walking with a camera.

 

It was amazingly cold when I got up this morning but the television newscasters tell me it's going to be even colder tonight. Then we have three more days that are warmer, but still below freezing, to look forward to. I re-wrapped and re-insulated exterior pipes today, resuscitated a toilet and created some wind breaks to lower the likelihood of more damage from wind chills that are forecast to be anywhere from minus five to minus 15 degrees over night. But I count myself among the lucky Texans. We still have power, we still have a functional, gas powered furnace and we still have running water throughout the house. We're working on rehabbing the exterior faucets as well. 

I did have the foresight to buy two pounds of organic, medium roast, Columbian Supremo coffee just before the roads became impassible and we're pounding through that with reckless abandon. The fridge and pantry are fully stocked so we're eating well and could probably shelter in place for a couple of weeks before running totally out of provisions. Our supply of wines is also adequate. And yes, we have chocolate. 

After getting everything as well set as I could I bundled up and took advantage of the warmer temperatures near the end of the day and walked up to the small shopping center at the end of our neighborhood. I once again brought along the Fuji X100V and was very pleased with the color and overall look of the casual files I made. 

I have a number of friends who've been unfortunate enough to have lost power in the middle of the night last night. It's 11 pm here and they're still waiting for power, or at least an estimate of when their power will be turned back on. I'm learning that, in some respects, old tech can be better than the latest stuff. Case in point. My friend Paul lost power late last night. His water heater is one of the "on demand" heaters. It uses gas, like my old fashioned water heater but it requires electrical power to control temperature and maintain safe operation. No electricity, no hot water. 

The city of Austin and ERCOT, the body that controls electrical distribution in Texas, have totally dropped the ball in this emergency. They originally stated that they were going to do rolling black outs which would last only 45 minutes per area. Once they got into the process they found that they couldn't bring people back on line because they'd actually lost, across the state, the ability to generate enough electricity. This was not a case of downed power lines that got iced up. They just didn't push all the smaller generating parties to adequately winterize, even though it's a mandated part of the program. Seems like someone wanted to save a bit of cash and now something like 2.5 million people in the Lone Star state will spend a couple of nights with sub-freezing temperature and absolutely no heat or lights. Sitting in running cars to charge cellphones has now become an Austin thing.  Heads should roll for the lack of oversight, but they won't. 

In a nod to basic survival the city and county have opened up one on the big, municipal convention venues, the Palmer Center, as a heating station for regular people who just happened to have found themselves without heat and without other options. Wouldn't you know it? The hotels booked up quickly. Especially the nice ones. 

It really sucks but you can't really push back on Mother Nature, and ultimately, that's the real problem here.

This is the last image I saw before I walked in the door and called it a night.

Looking west up over my front door. 

This was the sign on our neighborhood Walgreens Pharmacy.

This place is normally quite busy but every shop was closed and it was like a ghost town.

This is our place. The building in the front, just left of center, is my office and studio.

It's a nice space with lots of room but the one thing we never invested in was a good 

heating system. I guess that's going to change now.

I feel so powerless in situations like this. I'm waiting for the big thaw to see how many pipes will burst and how quickly I can turn off the main cutoff for water. Then we'll need to join what I think will be a very long queue to find a plumber. I'm sure it's going to take some time so I'm already looking at hotels because I don't think, at this stage in our lives, that we really want to go days and days without plumbing. Not to mention that we're still socially distancing because of the pandemic. 

But as Belinda constantly reminds me: It could be a hell of a lot worse. 

Leave those faucets dripping and pull out the down comforters. I can't imagine how people dealt with this kind of stuff 100 or 200 years ago. At least I've got some fun, weather resistant cameras and lenses to play with. 

Be safe and warm. Lights out. KT

Walking in a Winter Wonderland (and freezing my butt off.....) with a nice, easy to use camera.

I bundled up and headed outside this morning. It was a "balmy" 12° Fahrenheit and the wind was whipping around but I was determined to get some photographs of our record snow storm and deep freeze. I had two cameras sitting on the dining room table and it took me a few minutes to decide which to take. On one hand there was the Leica SL2 and a 45mm f2.8 Sigma lens. On the other hand there was a Fuji X100V. I decided to put the X100V in full program mode and take it because it's so easy to use as a point-and-shoot camera. 

When I stepped out the front door I noticed a pile of snow in front of the office door. The bank was about 3 feet high and I used a broom to brush it all away. I wanted to check and see how my office, the hot water heater and the utility space next to the outside wall with all the pipes running through it had fared overnight. 

Before I closed up and came in last night I placed the little radiator heater in the utility space to help keep pipes and stuff warm. A quick check with the digital thermometer said we were nestled right in at about 78° this morning which meant the small space with the good stuff was just right. The studio and office space was about 45°. I won't be working in there today because it would take a lot of energy to heat it and we all need to conserve. There are currently long, rolling blackouts across Texas. The utility space is less than 100 square feet, well insulated and separated from the office by solid core doors. The little heater didn't have to work hard too keep that space from freezing.

I ventured out in the snowscape and was immediately surprised when my hiking boots sunk down a full foot and a half into the snow. It was deeper than I thought it would be! 

I know this all sounds a bit silly to people who live north and deal with this for months at a time but it's different for Texans. I think. The cold is like evil magic to us and we don't have the metaphoric strands of garlic to ward off its curses. 

I'm glad I took the smaller camera with me because shooting in the cold with gloves on is crazy. All I wanted to do was push the shutter button halfway down, lock in the exposure and focus and then push all the way down. Sounds simple but the bigger your gloves the warmer your hands while the bigger the gloves the less haptic feedback there is on a shutter button. The Fuji works well in fully auto mode and I know the camera quite well by now which makes the whole process less thought intensive. Somehow, when it's too cold my brain seems to go all reptilian and thought processes slow down to a crawl. I tried to concentrate on showing what my neighborhood looked like the day after our record storm but ten minutes out my toes, nose and fingertips started their whiny protests and I called it a day and marched, slid and trudged back to the house.

After 20 minutes in 12° I expected the battery to be diminished but was happy to see all the indicator bars present when I got back to the house. Just before I walked in the front door I remembered about not bringing a highly chilled camera into a warm house (and, with all the power outages I was definitely hoping it was still a warm house!) so I stopped by the car to grab a plastic bag in which to wrap the camera for decompression and condensation protection. If any one is keeping track I took the black one out today, hoping it would absorb heat from the sun....Yeah. Right.

When I got home my fellow home residents informed me that one of the toilets was non-functional. This was something I had been dreading. I used the bucket flushing method to clear out the bowl and then got to the problem discovery part of the adventure. Yep, the toilet sits next to an outside wall and shares a cold water pipe with an outside faucet. Even though the faucet was wrapped and under styrofoam it seemed to have frozen over. It took the rest of the pipe with it...

So I did what any photographer would do and grabbed a monolight from the studio and focused its 150 watt tungsten modeling light on the pipe that extends in from the wall to the toilet intake valve. Then I went back outside and went insane on re-insulating and re-covering the outdoor faucet. Layers of bubble wrap, Polartec, styrofoam, foam insulation, duct tape and mylar all covered with a waterproofed cardboard box filled with construction insulation. Two light stands, wedged against a wall hold the huge melange of insulation firmly in place. 

About two hours later I checked to see the progress of the rogue toilet and was enheartened when it flushed normally and then also refilled normally. My family actually gathered around and cheered. It was so great to have a ready and appreciative audience for one of my few plumbing successes...

A few hours later and I'm thrilled to report that it's still functional. And nothing is leaking.

At sunset today it's forecast to be 18°. By midnight the forecast is 10° where it will stay for the next eight hours, with brief flirtations with 8 and 9 degrees. Then we warm up a bit tomorrow afternoon (if we've survived) and the day will cap out at 34 °  just before delighting us with a few more sub-freezing nights. This is just incredibly insane. But there it is. My deepest wish, in the moment, is to not lose power. I'll light a candle to the saints of electrical power generation, just to hedge my bets....

Here's some hasty photos:

A snow covered front yard.

A snow covered car. 

ATV tracks.

The VSL compound.

Peering north. Kids sledding down the hill.

Tropical plants facing certain death with quiet courage.

As you may have surmised, it's impossible to drive right now. 

And, it seems contraindicated to be outside. 

I'll go with the flow and hit the couch with a good book. 

Stay safe. Stay warm. 

Now, who is supposed to send the St. Bernard with the little cask of brandy?

I'll be waiting by the front door.

 

Happy Valentine's Day. From the frozen, mid-Texas wasteland.

 Well. We're heading toward the coldest part of the current massive freeze. It's about to start snowing and the temperatures are starting to head down to a predicted 9°. Swimming got cancelled this morning, not because the pool isn't functional but because there is slick ice on most of the roads in Austin and it would have been unsafe for the coaches to get there. 

That's all okay. We're having a fine time settling in after a day of trying to find everywhere cold might get into the house and studio and then fixing it. I've made a few discoveries that seem to be working for me. 

The house stays nice and warm. The gas furnace seems to do a great job keeping the house at 70° with lots of umph in reserve. We have the fridge and pantries well stocked and the faucets dripping away with both hot and cold water. 

The office/studio is a bit different. I only have a small, oil filled,  radiator style, electric space heater in there and while it's great for our usual 40-50° winter weather, and serviceable for an occasional romp into the 30's, it seems to be overwhelmed by the 20's and teens. The space (about 650 square feet with high ceilings) is very well sealed and insulated, and all the windows are double-paned but without a big enough heat source it gets uncomfortably cold and I'm not yet resigned to working on my computer in a parka with mittens on my hands. The mittens, as you northerners probably know, make it hard to hit just the right keys on the keyboard.

I thought I'd sit for a while, give the situation some thought and conjure up some temporary fixes, and a few things that came to me under duress seem to be panning out well. 

At some point, when LEDs became reasonably attractive light sources for domestic lighting I went through and replaced all of the lighting fixtures in the office with them. I put all the older, incandescent bulbs in a box. Today, I went through and changed them all back. Even though there aren't that many they seem to be helping to maintain a more livable temperature even as the cold blows in from the north. 

With success on that front I ate some dark chocolate with almonds and sea salt and meditated about heating some more. 

The next thing that came to me was the realization that I have four monolights which each take a 150 watt, tungsten modeling lamp. I pulled out one fixture and aimed it under my desk. Now my feet are happy and warm. The glass desktop keeps the heat from rushing toward the high ceiling too quickly and seems to be sufficient to keep my fingers flying across the keyboard. My toes inside my hiking boots are toasty warm.

With success on that front I pulled out another monolight and stuck it into the equipment closet where, incidentally, the water pipes run through the south wall. I've got the monolight about four feet from the back wall and it's doing a good job keeping that small space acceptably warm. I have two more monolights but I think I'll take one into the house because the one space I like to sit and read in is the furthest corner of the living room from a heater vent and closest to a row of double French doors which, no matter how well weather stripped they are, seem to be less sealed than say, a sheet rocked wall. 

I think I'll put one of those monolights on a shorty stand and aim it at my feet for that little touch of....ahhhh. Should make some evening novel reading a bit more comfy.

One choke point for me, while coming and going between house and studio, is that the 15 feet of walkway is totally exposed to the ravages of the north and quickly gets icy. The one thing I forgot to stock in yesterday was a bag of rock salt or a bag of sand that I could use to treat the stone expanse. I thought about it in a panic this afternoon when I almost slipped and spilled my hot tea on the way back into the office. Then I looked over on the floor near the studio door and saw five film/photography sandbags. Four of them are 30 pound bags that are permanently sealed by one is a Tenba bag that's about 20 years old and has two compartments which seal with zippers. The bag is refillable. I originally bought it for travel. You could dump all the sand out, stick the bag in the luggage for plane travel and the refill it on arrival. 

I filled the bag once, years ago, and never did put it on a plane. But today I unzipped it and found 20 pounds of beautiful, dry sand, just ripe for the spreading. I used the sand from one of the two compartments and now have both a safe passage way between domicile and work and also a reserve supply of emergency sand in the other compartment. Nice. 

One more equipment note. You might not know this but if you park your car outside during an ice storm the windshield and back window tend to get covered with ice. I've already been cautioned a few times NEVER to pour boiling water on the iced windshield unless I want to drive in the bracing fresh air without the protection of an intact front barrier, but we've never had to buy a "windshield scraper." I wouldn't even know where to get one... and one day deliveries from Amazon aren't happening in Austin right now so I could not order one. 

Not to worry. I have found that plastic lens hoods are marvelous for the task. I try to keep that big, rigid plastic one I have for a 82mm filter size lens that's long since gone on to a different home in the car now in case I need a quick scrape. And it did dawn on me that it might have been a mistake to skip the heated front seats in my new car..... But since I have no talent for driving on icy, slippery roads it's more or less a moot point since I won't leave the property for the next 24-48 hours unless there is an emergency or a half price sale on Leica SL lenses....

The chocolate is keeping me alert, the monolights are keeping me warm, the "professional photographer" sand is keeping me safe, and the lens hoods are keeping my windshield clear. Any other multi-use photo tips for my cold weather edification? They'll be happily accepted. 

Ben, who is temporarily housing with us these days, is cooking his famous (and insanely good!)  Pasta Carbonara for dinner tonight, along with a fresh green salad. Belinda and I are making lava cakes for dessert. There's a nice Cabernet Sauvignon for the main course and a bottle of Prosecco for the desserts. Seems like we've been able to engineer a fun Valentine's Day after all. And the howling wind outside adds just a touch of danger and excitement to the evening. 

Hope you are staying warm, happy and engaged in your own homes. I know the weather is worser and worser (I know that's not correct!) the norther and norther you go so my best wishes go out to all of you north of us.  In a week it's forecast to be back in the 70's here. For once I can hardly wait. 

Kirk out. (No longer shivering at the keyboard. Oh the sacrifices I make....). 

A Review of a "working" lens; not a "show off" lens.

Some lenses for digital cameras are "show off" lenses. You probably don't need them and you almost certainly paid too much for them but it's so much fun to pull a super-fast 28mm, 50mm or even 135mm out of your camera bag, put it on you camera and marvel at how supersharp it might be while also decimating the detail in a background with the lens's splendid bokeh. It's also fun to see the expressions on fellow photographers' faces when you pull a $10,000 Noctilux out and casually lock it onto the front of your camera. Silly stuff, but most of us do variantions of that (but mostly more subtle). Deep down we tend to believe that some esoteric and frightfully expensive lens has some magic incorporated into its design and if we just try hard enough we'll be able to make wonderful photographs that will once and for all prove that we are worthy, first tier photographers. But after using such lenses, with results that are very rarely any better than our rank and file lenses, we calm down and, if we're excellent at deflection, we blame the camera and start doing research on the newest camera bodies. Ah well. Human nature. 

At some point, especially if you are a "working" photographer (as in: you need to deliver or you'll starve) you come to the conclusion that there are a number of lenses that are in no way prestigious but which are called on time and time again to actually complete assignments with. These are the lenses that are not usually the most expensive but on an income-producing-to-original-cost calculation these are the ones that really deliver most of the profitable images for us. Some are common sense. 

If you are an event photographer you almost certainly have a 24-70mm of some kind and also a 70-200mm lens as well. You might have some fancier, faster lenses in the bag too but if you are honest you'll admit that the hard-working twins, the normal zoom and the tele zoom do most of the heavy lifting for your business. 

I admit that I was absolutely seduced by the alarmingly expensive, 50mm f1.4 Lumix S-Pro lens. It's the "reference lens" for Panasonic's entire L-mount system. It's a lens reviewers rave about and which Panasonic trots out when they want to talk about the quality of their line up. Every rep from Panasonic I've ever talked to about the lens always turns it over to show you the "Leica Certified" engraving on the bottom side before launching into a soliloquy that makes the lens out to be the ultimate achievement of modern optical engineering. 

The only problem is that it's a lens I almost never use. The same was true with my first version Sigma 85mm f1.4 Art lens. I loved the idea of them but I barely got any use out of the 85mm because it was just too heavy and just too slow to focus for anything other than totally stationary subjects. The 50mm is a focal length I love to walk around with. But the S-Pro is so big that it blows any pretense of discretion right out of the water. Too bad I'm so attached to the idea of it that I just can't part with it....yet.  

These are the show off lenses. They sound so good. And in use the image quality of the two I mention above is, indeed, spectacular. But just like a low slung sports car that you'd love to drive more, if it won't clear the traffic humps in the parking lot it's not really useful...even if the theoretics of it are breathtaking. 

Then, on the other hand, there are the lenses we find we can't really work without. With every camera system I've owned I find that I eventually need to shell out for a macro lens, for one reason or another. It used to be that I got a lot of calls for micro photography of small semiconductor chip dies. At the time I'd shell out something less than $1,000 for a beautifully corrected macro lens and use it to generate many, many multiples of the purchase price. I also had a wonderful collection of copy stands, macro bellows (loved the Nikon PB-4) and extension tubes. Also, quite a collection of lens reversing rings. 

I've stopped doing that kind of work and I'm several systems past my last collection of macro equipment but after being asked to do a digital copy of an old slide I realized that I have a backlog of stuff that needs to be documented and, until the slide request, had never bothered to duplicate the macro capabilities I used to have previous to L-mount system. 

The Panasonic system and the Leica system are both guilty of having zero macro options in native L-mount versions. Sure, you can source older Leica macros and use them with adapters but even the older ones made for the R series are expensive and hard to find. Thankfully, Sigma has several macro lenses available for the L-mount systems and the one I bought is, in context, downright cheap. It's a "working lens." The kind of lens you buy because it does a few things very, very well and when you need what it does there are few workarounds that will fill the bill; you just need that specialty feature set. 

I purchased a Sigma 70mm f2.8 Art series macro lens in the L mount last Friday and have tested it enough to know that it's a keeper. It's a bit big and somewhat heavy but nothing like the other f1.4 and f1.2 lenses in the Art line up. In addition, the front filter ring is a diminutive 49mms. The lens retails everywhere for around $560 and it also available in other, lesser mounts. 

My first task was to get a perfect high resolution copy of the Ann Richards slide I showed last week. You know your macro lens is good enough when it sharply reproduces the actual film grain, complete with sharp edges on the grain. This lens does that at 1:1 (which is the maximum magnification ratio).  The lens was easy enough to use on a Panasonic S1R. I switched the camera to electronic shutter and set the shutter delay at 8 seconds to make sure there was no movement at the time of exposure. I stopped the lens down to f8 partially because I think most macros are sharpest there, but also because the added depth of field helps to compensate for film curvature if you are shooting your slide while it's in its original cardboard mount. With nearly 50 megapixels of raw detail to work with the slides I shot on Friday, and again on Saturday, were as good or much better than any I had previously scanned with dedicated film scanners like the Nikon LS-4000. And being able to do each copy with a single shot was vastly more efficient than the multiple passes of the older technology. 

The extra stand-off distance of the lens from the subject is nicer for me than the typical 55 or 60mm macro lenses but it also more useful for a wider range of subjects than the 100, 105 and 180mm versions. The Sigma's 70mm is a Goldilocks focal length for me. I like it. 

Besides the heavy weight and bigger size of the lens there are one or two things which you might not like. They don't bother me but then I'm not a universal measure of how things should be done, and my taste doesn't always transfer well if you have different imaging needs. The first thing people complain about with this lens is that when shooting in the real macro ranges it is slow to focus. I find that while the lens dawdles a bit it's accurate and eventually gets where I need it to be without many misses. If you need a super speed, AF focusing macro you might have to look elsewhere.

Another stumble is that the lens is not internal focusing. The front of the lens trombones as you can see in one of the photos below. That's actually a feature; at least Sigma and I think so. Since the front lens element and front tube move forward when focusing the lens doesn't change to a shorter and shorter focal length as you get closer to life-size. That focal length change is similar to the idea of focus breathing in video. 

With internal focusing lenses the lens's focal length gets shorter and shorter as you focus. This changes the composition and the overall look of an image when compared to the same lens used closer to infinity. Not so with the Sigma. It doesn't change angle of view throughout its focusing range. 

If you can live with the lens barrel extending as you go for smaller and smaller magnification ratios (closer and closer to lifesize) then this lens makes sense because, optically, it's pretty darn great and it's about one half the price of competitive lenses from Sony, et al. The one other thing to consider is that the lens doesn't have image stabilization built-in. On Leica SL2 cameras and Panasonic S series cameras this isn't an issue since both company's cameras have very, very good IBIS. 

If you take the lens out of the studio and use it as a conventional street shooting lens you'll find that with judicious use of the focusing limiter switch you get fast autofocusing and quick lock-on without many episodes of focus hunting. You'll also be treated to a lens that is critically sharp from side to side by f4.0, which is where I tend to set this lens unless I know I need or want more depth of field.  (more following the pix) >

This is the Sigma DG 70mm Macro f2.8 Art lens in the L-mount

attached to a Panasonic S1 body. The lens is fairly large

but about half the weight of the first generation 85mm

Art lens for the L-mount. It's mostly metal and has a very high

caliber finish. It's a solid choice for everyday work.

The 70mm has some controls on the side of the lens.

The top control is a garden variety AF/MF switch while the bottom

switch allows you to quickly set focusing ranges to speed up shooting 

in known distance ranges. I mostly worked with the camera set 

to the 0.5m to infinity range on the street today.

On Friday and Saturday I use the 0.258-0.5m range.

This speeds up focusing and helps prevent hunting. 

It's a good feature to have.

While the lens lacks a traditional focusing scale wrapping around the lens barrel

the Sigma 70mm features a very useful close up scale on the tromboning 

front barrel. It's a different way of working but more precise for 

macro work and easy to get used to. Plus, it looks science-y.

When you get into the macro ranges the manual focusing takes a lot 

of turns of the focusing ring. That means it's slower to manual focus 

but you can be very precise as the long "throw" gives you 

heightened, exacting focus discrimination. Couple this with 

focus magnifying and you'll get ultra sharp stuff 100% of the time.

While my preliminary tests are more in line with my typical use cases for a macro lens I'm always interested in how it performs as a long, normal lens when shooting on location for clients or out on the streets for myself. Today, since the worst of the cold fronts is yet to strike, I thought it would be wise to get in yet another walk. After I lovingly wrapped the last of the pipes and gently applied mulch to all nature of plants and trees, I took the S1 and the 70mm for a quick two miler around the downtown area. I tried to shoot a mix of magnification ranges. I was very happy with everything I photographed. I sometimes forget that the S1 is the spiritual center of the S system and is perhaps the best overall combination of features, resolution, speed, high ISO performance and price. It matches with the Sigma macro very well. And I am always surprised by how good the image stabilization in this camera is.  (more>)

The succulent on the white table just outside a series of beauty salons was a nice test subject with which to evaluate the out of focus rendering of the lens. I used f4.0 and found the background to be calm and balmy, in the best possible way. If you can handle the sharpness the 70mm would make a very good portrait lens. It's long enough and fast enough to give one good control over depth of field with a good ability to blur background detail in a way that doesn't draw too much attention to the effect. 

I was trying to see how well I could handhold the lens and still get a good, sharp and well magnified image. The image just above is the full frame while the image just below is an approximate, 100% crop of the image above. I love the sharpness of the spider webs....

The beauty of the larger size of both the Panasonic S1 body and the Sigma lens is that they are easy to handle and shoot with while wearing gloves. Both are very straightforward and feel like real photographic gear and not so much like artless constructs wrapped around mini-computers. While I'm coming to grips with my new Leica SL 2 I must say that working with the S1 series Lumix cameras has gotten to the point for me where they have become almost completely transparent in use. And that's exactly what I want in a work camera and a work lens. 

The 70mm is a good, inexpensive addition to the overall system and even though some of its functionality matches the recent 65mm lens I purchased they are different enough to each have their own specific uses. The 65mm is a nicer street and travel shooter, is one stop faster and has a unique and adorable optical character. The 70mm will come out for small, technical table top stuff and also slide and film copying. I should probably take a breather on new lens purchases and actually get out and use some of this stuff. I'm about 35 days away from both having the second dose of the vaccine followed by the 15 day wait for full immunity. After that I can travel with relative impunity. That's just what I've been waiting for...

Home Note: I want to thank everyone here again for the quick tutorials on surviving a giant cold snap. Our neighborhood association got 3 cords of firewood delivered and I get to pick up as much as I can stick in the Subaru tomorrow. We got the plants well mulched and added a work light to the water pipe junction box after which I re-covered it. I was going to put a digital thermometer in so I could check the internal temperature via Bluetooth but decided that was unnecessary. We have extra water, tons of food and have covered just about everything that can be covered. With all this planning I'm convinced that the weather people will have gotten the forecast wrong again and we'll have a few snow flakes, a couple hours of bitter cold followed by a week of mild temps. At least that's my contrarian hope.