Kim.

 

Photographing for fun. It's different from work.

 B. brought an upcoming event to my attention last week. It's the ten day long celebration in San Antonio, Texas called: Fiesta. There are parades through the main streets of downtown, parades on the river that runs through the Riverwalk. Dances, cultural showcases, turkey legs, gorditas, street parties, oyster bakes, rodeos and just about anything else you can imagine. 

Like most festivals and events the San Antonio Fiesta was cancelled in 2020 and 2021 but is on track for a comeback starting this week. The kickoff is tomorrow.

I started attending Fiesta events after I became addicted to photography but not before. Fiesta was pure street photography before we started using the term "street photography." Back then it was just a search for images, documentary sociology, active anthropology, and a good exercise in trying to make images in the spirit (if not the style) of our heroes of the time; HCB, Robert Frank, Josef Koudelka, and Susan Meiselas. Motivated by the images of William Klein, Danny Lyons and Elliott Erwitt. Among others.

When I started photographing the outdoor events that made up San Antonio's Fiesta I worked mostly with color slide film. Terminology now upgraded for the digital era: transparency film. My first love was always Kodachrome 64 but for convenience it sometimes got replaced with Fuji's 100 speed, E-6 process slide film. Fujichrome. 

There were no autofocus cameras around for the first seven or eight years I spent driving down from Austin to work the crowds and make images for myself. There was never a client involved and never more of a plan than that of walking through the crowds, the parades, the rodeos and the rest with a camera and a good lens. I learned by going out day by day for eight, ten or twelve hours, to focus quickly, to trust my understanding of lighting and exposure and to get over the typical fear of convincing strangers to pose for me, or at least not to object to being photographed. 

I learned that the light in full sun doesn't change in intensity between about 10 a.m. in the morning till sometime after five p.m. and as long as I was photographing in full sun I didn't need to change exposures at all. Even if the meter bounced around as I pointed the camera at different subjects, different scenes. Now people seem to live or die by the automatic meters in their cameras and then must spend hours in post production making up for the meter's inability to differentiate lighter or darker subjects from the (non) changes in the actual intensity of the light. Or, the "correct" exposures. 

In those early days my cameras were almost always basic SLRs with either a 24mm, 50mm or 135mm attached. Mostly it was a 50mm and that worked just fine. But not an expensive, super fast, esoteric 50mm. Just the run of the mill 50mm f1.8 that usually came packaged with cameras at the time. 

I started with a Canon TX SLR (fully mechanical with a top shutter speed of 1/500th) but eventually moved up to an AE-1 along with just about every other photographer in the country. I stuck with Canon stuff for a long time. Many years. It worked fine and the lens quality and resolution of film seemed a good match. Eventually I branched out and bought a Leica M3 with, again, a 50mm lens and I used that in conjunction with the Canon stuff. Why? Color film in the Canons and black and white film in the Leica. 

With the Leica, always Try-X. 

The game plan was always the same. Take some vacation time away from running an ad agency or teaching at UT, head to San Antonio, bunk at my parent's house, ride the bus to downtown (ooooh. I bet my European readers loved that sentence...) because there was never anywhere to park, and then spend every waking moment walking, looking, snacking, snapping and smiling my way through the seemingly endless celebration of.....life. It was very affirming. A wonderful cleanse from the workaday world. 

Then I got busy at work and it got harder to take time away. The ad agency got bigger and bigger and as a principal it always seemed that there was some "fire" that needed to be put out, some client mollified and an ever present stack of proposals and pitches that needed writing. The Fiesta lost out. By extension I lost out. 

We're back on.  Starting Saturday. My parents are gone and I've sold their house. I'm older and wiser(?) now so I need to be more cognizant about wearing a hat that covers the tops of my ears and also to slather any skin that shows with sunscreen. I'd hate to have another brush with skin cancer since I've survived this long. 

I looked around the equipment cases this morning and there's a logical argument attached to anyone of the cameras and lenses that live here. The big Leica promises to deliver the most resolution and sharpness. The tiny CL promises pretty great image quality in a small package. The GH cameras toss in the promise that if I seem something amazing in full motion I can easily capture it. The old Leica SLs promise a nostalgic reference to the cameras of yore and an ancient Nikon F and its buddy the F2 basically taunt me and challenge me to try everything old school. For old time's sake.

But Saturday is a long way off and who knows? I may have sold off everything by then and decided to stumble around the Fiesta setting up and tearing down an 8x10 view camera. I might also wear a monocle and a jaunty beret....but I don't think so.

If you fancy yourself a street photographer and you've got a lot of pent up photo-energy just bursting to be set free you could do a lot worse than heading to San Antonio for any part of Fiesta. If you live in Austin it's pretty much a "no brainer." It may not be the same as the old days of the late 1970s when I could walk through, in and out of, around and immeshed in a public parade without even the thought of needing a press pass or other credential but I constantly remind myself that --- right now --- today --- any day with a camera in your hand and interesting subjects in front of your lens --- is the golden age of photography. 

If you head down for the parades and the parties and street festivals you'll probably see me with a floppy (non-Tilley) hat, a shirt with a collar and long sleeves (we don't have to look like crap to do street photography) that breathes and wicks away sweat while providing an SPF of something north of 30, the same kind of pants, comfortable shoes and a single camera and lens. I'll be the guy smiling at a grandmother who is making fresh tortillas. Or at kids with giant blooms of cotton candy. Or half drunk couples with plastic beer cups in their floaty hands. 

Because on Saturday I'll remind myself that right now is the golden age of our photography. It's never going to get better than this. It never does. But it always does. The present is always the present.

The most misguided camera ever devised by an otherwise rational camera company.

 

Leica is mostly a rational company. How else to explain their long tenure in a highly competitive market and their ability to price their wares at astronomically high prices? And, for the most part, their stuff works well. At least well enough to satisfy a small percentage of the worldwide market for cameras and lenses. But occasionally Leica goes a bit crazy and makes a product whose target is so opaque that even brilliant photo writers and Leica apologists like myself are dumbfounded and mystified. 

One such product is the Leica TL family of cameras. And my critical final evaluation of the TL2 is especially damning given that it is the third iteration of mostly the same camera body but replete with three chances to get stuff right or fix stuff that was just nonsensical. 

Let's start with obvious fashion touches that degrade the product when it comes to reliability. First up are the strap lugs. Leica, Nikon, Sony, Canon....oh just name a camera company... have all converged on ways of making camera strap lugs that all do their basic jobs well. They are strongly attached to the camera bodies and they do a good job allowing for the tight connection of a camera strap to camera with which to carry the camera. But Leica got cute and "re-invented" the camera strap by making the strap lug removable. The reason? So the arduously fashionable could plug the holes with spiffy black metal plugs that match the body finish letting the fashionista carry the camera completely unencumbered by a strap or any vestige of a strap. The removable lugs are very small and imminently losable but have no fear, Leica can replace your lugs for "less than $100 USD." A very elegant looking solution. A miserable exercise in mechanical engineering in search of a reasonable goal. 

While we're on the subject of fashion driven failure what can really be said about the exterior finish of the camera body? I know, we could take this slippery, shiny impact-magnet finish and coat it with an extra layer of Teflon. That, or an application of mineral oil to the exterior are the only two ways that come to mind of how to make a camera that will, and almost must, slip right out of your hands and propel itself toward any bit of cement, rocks or concrete in your vicinity. The camera is built out of a block of aluminum alloy and that's pretty cool but grippy surfaces on the cool finish would have make the camera a bit more usable. 

Oh, what am I saying? Any improvement in grippy surfaces would have increased the expected "accident free" life of the camera by about 90%. Maybe more. If the camera designer's intentions were to create a nice product to put on a shelf and admire then the TL2 might qualify but from a usability point of view it's always a two-handed operation with one hand clinging to the camera with a frantic death grip.  Never, ever usable as a one-handed shooting camera. Don't even think about it unless your hand is covered on all sides with duct tape and other powerful adhesives. 

There should be my usual grousing about the lack of an EVF but I knew when I bought the camera that I could add an EVF if I wanted to so I'll give Leica a break on that one. Still... the added EVF is so obviously a kludgy afterthought.

Next up let's talk about batteries. The TL2 has the same cute battery compartment complication that you find on the SL, SL2, Q2, etc. The battery is flush mounted with the bottom of the camera and there is a lever adjacent to the battery's bottom. Push the lever and the battery partially disengages from the camera but doesn't drop out. A quick press on the bottom of the battery fully releases it into your hands. It's actually a nice way to ensure your battery doesn't drop to its death if unwittingly released. And what an expensive death it would be. 

Replacement batteries for the TL2 are dear. About $110 USD dear. Per battery. But the painful part of tossing away that kind of money is that the average hearing aid battery has more power in reserve than one of these "well designed" batteries from Leica. But I learned a while ago that when it comes to all Leica products requiring batteries this is an important lesson: Buy a back up battery the minute you buy the camera no matter what it costs. Waiting will ensure two things. First, the price of the battery will soar relentlessly higher and higher as you discover ever more painfully that extra batteries are a must if one is to fill up even a 16 MB memory card on one charge. And second, that when you decide that you are finally ready to plunk down cash for a second (or third, or fourth) battery you will find that they are now back-ordered. Sometimes for years. And sometimes they are impossible to find at all. 

It might all be worth it if the "streamlined and modern" menu listed as a valuable feature lived up to its own advertising but sadly...no. I learned to use the menu in an SL pretty fluidly in about a week. It took three or four more days to get really comfortable with the Leica CL menu but the TL2 with its very bizarre menu distribution/scattering and opaque direction has now taken me at least three months to even partially master and I am sometimes still baffled when I haven't used the camera for a week or two and go back to pick it up. Daunting? Yes. Challenging? Yes. Fun...no f*ing way. 

But all can be forgiven when you finally coax a file out of the eccentric picture taking machine, right? Not so fast my friends. The focusing is not slow it's just undecided and headstrong. You and the camera might disagree over what's important in the frame. I should amend this and say you'll mostly lose that argument with the little putative machine. If this happens often I find the best solution is to drive back home, lie down in a darkened room and put a cool, wet washrag on your forehead. You are not going to win. 

Would I say that the TL2 is my camera purchase failure of the year? Nope. I'd amend that statement to read "The worst camera purchase of the past decade." And, as you probably know I've stumbled around enough with eccentric cameras to add additional emphasis to that statement. 

Has this soured me forever on Leicas? Not a chance. Has it put me off using the TL2? A bit. But you know how much I love a challenge. Would I consider selling this to another photographer and washing my hands of my misguided ownership? Absolutely not. My religion teaches me never to hate someone that much.

Got some cash burning a hole in your pocket and looking for an act of willful self-flagellation? Step right up and look for a use Leica TL2. Now gone, I think (hope) from the new camera marketplace. And not a moment too soon. 

Makes a conversational paperweight though. You gotta give it some credit where it's due.

By the way..... I'm still blogging. 

Clarification of yesterday's post.

Yesterday I wrote that I was pondering what to do next with this blog. One of the reasons was/is the declining engagement I can see in the numbers. I didn't mean that my loyal readers had lost interest or that I needed to hear from them more often in the comments (though that is always pleasant). What I was referring to was strictly numerical. Over the last several years there has been a decline in the number of overall visits to the blog and a decline in page views (which are two different metrics).

What I think we all know from my assessment of the marketplace in my 2013 blog post entitled, "The Greying of Traditional Photography" is that fewer and fewer people are embracing photography the way my generation has practiced it and are, instead, using their phones and making as their final targets sharing sites such as Instagram which more or less repudiate the need for large files, high degrees of production value and technical skills. Forget dynamic range and resolution! It's not good or bad but the trend replaces large files which are meant to be printed and seen in stasis with quick, off the cuff images destined for short half lives and writ out at 2200 pixels. And always keeping in mind that most screens are about 6 bits... Something different from older bloggers' firm ideas that the black and white print is still the gold standard and something every artist/photographer should be aspiring to.

What this means for a blog like this one is that the effective audience is ever aging and there is an unspoken pressure on the writer (me) to conform to my generation's expectations and tastes when we collectively discuss "photography." Ansel Adams would be so proud of us...

So, declining audience, schism between where modern culture is taking the "idea" of photography as an art form and what we think of as "correct," and an aversion to endlessly repeating myself. The problem is that there are so few blogs about photography left standing and, in truth, there are a lot of people who do a good job talking about photography in a more modern and sensible way on YouTube and other video sharing channels. Someone mentioned that I could transition to YouTube successfully and I'm in general agreement but I'd be starting over from scratch to build a new audience since my general audience and age cohort grew up reading the printed word and seems to prefer to get their entertainment/information about photography in that medium.

Building a video channel and marketing it is hard work. If I needed to make money I could find dozens of ways to do it more effectively and with more assurance. But that's the weird disconnect in all of this; I don't monetize the blog. I don't sell other people's prints and take a cut. I don't review cameras with an eye to the affiliate revenue should my review be enticing enough. I'd feel weird accepting Patreon funding when it's not needed to fulfill a worthwhile end result. And, being of the same generation as the majority of my readers, I really enjoy the process of writing and reading.

The choice for me is not to morph the content into something new or to change the channel or re-start as a YouTube producer. It all really boils down to a choice between spending personal time (which is happily now more plentiful) making my own work or dividing that time to write blogs just because I have written blogs consistently in the past. 

That's what I'm really grappling with. In our generational cohort, as it intersects with photography, there are two blogs that I can identify as "popular" though both are suffering from declining general audience interest. Those two are mine and Michael Johnston's. And while we most likely share the same views on politics we are worlds apart on so much else. Michael's site is a bastion of traditional photography. And traditional writing styles. He owns that space. We might be bored to tears by snooker or vegan diet fads but at the core his passion is the black and white printed image --- on paper. And it's a shared passion with the majority of his audience. You can see it in every engagement on his blog about actual photography.

On the other hand I'm more or less ambivalent about whether an images is printed or not, or what its provenance is, or its position in the hierarchy of traditional order. And whether or not its creator is historic, well known or otherwise culturally vetted. I find most landscapes profoundly boring and discussions of how we used to work in darkrooms about as interesting as discussing rotary phone dial mechanics in the age of cellphones. 

The issue for me is that MJ has succeeded in finding and catering to a specific audience centered around a singular common passion while my ambivalence to tradition and lack of embrace for the icons of the past in our field robs my audience of any way-finding landmarks with which to anchor them to my writing here. I'm too transparent and too opinionated to create the stickiness required to become a "personality" in the blog sphere. And that's always the sine wave of my feelings about the blog. It's mostly written for me and that makes me feel guilty in that I don't customize the content for the greatest marketing impact.

I'm just coasting with the blog right now. I like having it as a place to share thoughts and images but at the same time I don't like overt conflict and I'm reticent to share things that will just rile up vocal parts of the remaining audience. We all know Trump was an evil psychopath, that trickle down economics never worked, that we should be discarding fossil fuels and that we should have social systems that help us take care of the neediest parts of our population. We know that white supremacy is evil and that trans fats are bad for our health. But we don't talk about these things because I don't have the temperament to argue nicely with mis-guided idiots who believe the earth is flat and that Jesus saved us by killing off the dinosaurs. Vaccines work. Repressive voting laws don't. The only people who committed voter fraud, interestingly enough, are republicans. But who wants to argue with people who are incapable of objectively reading history or using logic and compassion simultaneously? Not me. 

Most current photography is bland. Most writing about it is even blander. Most emulation of past century techniques just for the sake of replicating stuff from the past is boring. But why is it so hard to move on?

Just a few thoughts while waiting for a portrait customer who called to say she is running late....

 

Another Black and White Afternoon in Paradise. April 3rd - 2022

A scene repeated all over Austin. Bikes everywhere. Strapped to the backs of big Lexux SUVs

and on tiny Mini-Coopers alike.

I've started to channel remnants of my smart ass youth persona into my photography out on the sidewalks of Austin. I realized that no one takes notice of my quick shots and if they notice no one cares. They are all cared out. Everything is suddenly blooming and green in Austin which makes me want to get outside even more but it also makes me want to check all the air conditioning systems in my life to make sure there's comfort at the end of every adventure. 

According to the weather service forecast on my phone we're heading for a 97° high on Tuesday. Time to break out the short pants and the water bottle. Oh, who am I kidding? Coffee is available everywhere.

Gear note: I bought one more Godox AD200 Pro flash unit and some extra bare bulb reflectors for them. They are great flashes and if you put a round head on one of them and use it as your main portrait light you even get a three step modeling light that stays lit for 30 minutes. Nice. Cheap. Practical. Packable.

And so much cheaper than another lens for the Leicas.... 

Quickly declining engagement with the site is leading me to consider that blogging, at least as I do it, is quickly becoming obsolete. Thinking about options.

 The photo market has changed radically since 2013. Compared to a decade ago, when this site was still young, camera sales have dropped to the point where they are 15% per year of what they were at the peak. We're seeing more and more small product iterations and fewer and fewer big leaps in either technology or in the actual art. Digital imaging is quickly becoming mature so there's less novel stuff to write about. 

Few people want to read about happy, reasonably well adjusted, financially comfortable swimmers who are also photographers. More people seem drawn to the individual trauma and drama of writers that I just find droll. 

By this point I'm pretty sure that every reader here knows how I feel about pretty much everything related to the industry and if they don't know exactly I'm sure they can conjecture pretty accurately. 

The trend in the blog here and in other photo blogs I follow is to either continually "rediscover" all the stuff we've previously gone over ad nauseam and to "mini-tweak" stuff into a new post or to wander off the path of covering all things photographic to instead slip into the day-to-day tedium of other hobbies, interests, foibles, addictions, personal financial peril, jousting at the windmills of change, and other subjects that I find...boring. 

My current analogy comes from child rearing. To wit, you look at your own child's art and find it fresh, fascinating and wonderful. Everyone else's child seems to be struggling. You are required to like your own child but you are not responsible for the rest. That's where blogging is for me right now.

I think, even though I enjoy the process of writing and I enjoy the ego gratification of having an audience, I should at least alter what I put here or cut the cord and retire from blogging entirely. I guess this comes from spending too much time this morning (and on too many other mornings) moderating out several dozen spam comments offering clipping path services, Russian brides, "free" solar panels, and various "guaranteed" money making schemes but not having to moderate a single comment (today) having to do with the actual content of a blog post. 

My personal beliefs about the direction of photography are mostly at odds with many in my current audience who seem anchored into a different value assessment of last century's photography truisms and prejudices than mine. They still value the physical object of the print to excess and have an overinflated idea of the value of much "traditional" photographic work. Still waiting for the "Fred Picker Retrospective" at which we celebrate one photographer's understanding of.....how to operate a camera....

I'm tired of being mostly polite about politics here and even more carefully polite not to call out "emperors in our blogging field who have neglected to dress from time to time." No one really cares about what we studied in college, how we set up our lights in the 1990s and what we're going to do with that huge garbage bag filled with Kodachrome slides that we really haven't looked at in the last quarter century. We just seem, as a generation of image makers to have run out of steam. Or have failed to match our perspectives with the times. But I also feel that print is dead so I might now be the best source for understanding relevance.

All that being said, I feel more strongly than ever that it's much more important, on an individual basis, to spend whatever time remains out photographing for fun than worrying about legacies, histories, archives and the mundane errata of our long transition through various stages of image making. 

I'll leave the blog up in its current form and use it going forward as a nice place to just share my newest images but without the voluminous written component. But, if engagement numbers continue to drop I'll then consider pulling the blog down for good; mostly to mitigate internet security issues that are bound to plague all of us in the future. Too much and too detailed an amount of personal information is dangerous.

I have nothing to sell here, no engagement on the VSL site with clients of any sort, and no real rationale to continue pouring time and attention into writing about stuff that is ever-shrinking in our cultural awareness. Not convinced that there is value in it in either direction.

Heads up though. I am mercurial in the best of  times so if there are articles you enjoyed here and would like to keep I suggest you download them in the next week or so just in case I decide it's better to have a definitive end point for the blog.  You've been warned. 

I've made a lot of good friends here. Thanks. 

Some will try to decide for themselves why I'm metaphorically tossing in the towel now. Or "this time." I'll save you some conjecture time. No one has pissed me off or critiqued me unfairly. I am not destitute. I have not become uninterested in photography. I haven't monetized the blog in years and don't need to do so. I am not having any medical issues. No family issues. I just think photography has homogenized itself past the point where my previous professional insight/knowledge might have been more valuable to readers. 

Stories about my car purchases, my swim practice, my air conditioner replacement, my favorite place to get coffee, etc. should NOT seem so compelling and I may, in fact, be robbing you of small parts of your days which would be better spent engaged in something you really love to do for yourself. 

There's no longer any need for me to be a "buyer's guide" to cameras and lenses or an instructor about lighting or business. That era no longer exists. That's why we now have YouTube and Google. 

There's lots to commend the idea of leaving on a high note. But that would have actually been back in 2014. It's been a long, slow slide since then.

Portrait of Anne.

Anne. 2022.

Camera: Leica SL2

Lens: Sigma Contemporary 90mm f2.8

Location: Studio

 

VSL Micro Four Thirds Revival. Looking through past files shot with m4:3 gear.

 

Camera: Panasonic G9

Lens: Olympus 12-100mm f4.0

Location: Iceland

Location portraits without compositing still work fine.

 

A few years back I found myself at the top of a mountain in rural Virginia just before a blizzard was forecast to move in, trying to quickly make impromptu portraits of about 12 different people at the location for an infrastructure company's annual report. For context it was the company that installed the high voltage power lines in the background. 

I was using the new (at the time) Fuji XT-3 camera with the 18-55mm f2.8-f4.0 zoom lens with the zoom set to about 40mm. The shutter speed was 1/200th of a second and the aperture was f9.0. I used a X1-T Godox trigger on the camera and a Godox AD200 portable flash, held by one of the dozen participants, over to one side. 

The background and the foreground are all part of the same unretouched, original photo file. And believe me, the flash made the image look so much better than the reality on the ground. It added the direction to the light I needed, and the sparkle. 

Since sleet was already coming down, mixed with cold rain, I had the AD200 wrapped in a plastic Baggie. My other big concern was keeping water drops off the front of the lens. That, and keeping my chattering teeth and shaking hands from ruining my shots. No IBIS in that camera...

When we finished with the last portrait this band of hard working, four wheel drive  pick-up truck driving technicians and construction workers suggested I take "my girlfriend's" car and get down the one lane dirt road that wrapped around the 7,000+ foot elevation before the ice and snow hit. My "girlfriend's" car was a mundane Toyota Camry rental car I'd driven all the way from Charlotte, NC on an 18 day pilgrimage of unusual construction sites across the east coast and the deep south. 

Their advice was good since the car was already slipping and sliding on the mud and there were no safety barriers on the dirt road. I made it down the mountain by the skin of my teeth, took a deep breath and headed toward Christmas, Indiana for my next photos. Always trying to stay an hour or two ahead of an encroaching white out. Or whatever you northerners call it when it's bone-chilling freezing and you can only see about 20 feet in front of your windshield wipers because the snowfall is so dramatic.

This is one of my favorite photos from the project. A project that mostly involved photographing people at projects far off the beaten, urban paths. I like the way the background here recedes and I love that we got the ratio of light on the subject's face just exactly as I wanted it. 

We decided to pull each person out of their winter wear to make their images less seasonally anchored and after five or six minutes in the worsening weather they were thrilled to get back into their down jackets and warm hats. 

Here's another  subject from the same project. By the time we finished photographing her we were soaked in cold and ready to call it quits. Something about not being able to argue with the elements. But still happy that even operating mostly on muscle memory I was able to get the photos we needed. 

Man, that was an intensely scheduled project. Just before the pandemic....