Yes. Strange but true. We were able to make decent photographs with older gear. In fact, maybe better.....

that's Ben in the lead (above) during a high school cross country meet, back in the day. He still runs nearly every day. I photographed this race for fun with a Canon 1D mark 2 N camera and the Canon 70-200mm f4.0 L lens. Even though neither product is a Sony and both were made over a decade ago I was able to focusing on people running, get the exposure correct and subsequently print the image as large as 16 by 24 inches. I know that will sound unbelievable to those who feel that having the most current camera gear is essential...

The story of the image below is equally a stretch for gear junkies. Strange as it may seem I took this image with a camera from a line of cameras that has been totally discontinued. Lens now orphaned. A relic of the dark past of digital imaging. The photo was taken nearly ten years ago, unposed, with a Sony a99 camera and the Sony 70-200mm f2.8 lens for the "a" mount Sony cameras. I expected it to be a soft, grainy mess but here we are. Sharp enough, perfectly exposed and used many times over in the theatre's marketing. 

All from cameras that have been long since relegated to the junk pile of photographic gear.....

Ah well. Just reminiscing. Click either image to see it larger.

 

Spring time. Dinner parties. Weird flashes. Fun stuff.

 

It's been a crazy Spring. I'm getting busy again with work but we've also spent a lot of time doing some renovations to the house. After a few weird cold snaps we decided that we needed to replace all the old, crappy, drafty single pane windows around the house with really nice, well sealed, double pane, UV shielded windows. Pricy but we hope the reduction in utility bills (and our home's carbon footprint) is worth it. Certainly there is a much more even temperature consistency throughout the house and it's much better at resisting the intrusion of outside noise. Then there are the new skylights for the back porch which make it very welcoming for those two or three weeks a year of mild temperatures here in Cen-Tex. We've had two dinner parties out on the porch this week alone. Trying to make the most of the current mild-to-cool temperatures and the comfortable breezes. 

We put flowers around the house but every time we host a dinner our guests bring endless flowers. The living room and dining rooms look like a florist's shop. I'm documenting the daily droop and decline of the tulips just above... When all the cut flowers die we know it's time for another dinner party...

We've had some zany weather this Spring but for the most part it's been cooler and drier than usual. We've left windows open and we aren't being attached by mosquitos out in the yard as badly this time around. The trees are now in full bloom and the whole neighborhood is awash in green. Even our small, red-leaf Japanese maple is coming along nicely. But we're at the point where we're  hoping for rain.

A friend brought over some Meyer lemons and I think B is working up a dessert recipe that incorporates them. I thought they were just a photographic prop but got schooled about that. Still, if you're going to wrap bright yellow lemons in a deep purple cloth I think the idea that they are prop-worthy is reasonable. 

I did three different portrait jobs this week and the connective tissue between the three projects was my use of what I consider "eccentric" flash equipment. 

The three flashes just above are Godox AD200 and AD200 Pro flashes. They are powered by batteries and can belt out between 400 and 500 full power flashes at 200 watt seconds on a charge. They have interchangeable flash heads. The one on the right is wearing a round head and that head incorporates an LED modeling light that has three power levels and stays lit for a half hour. At the highest modeling light power setting it's very functional for studio work. The two on the left are shown with accessory reflectors over bare bulb tubes but I can interchange to a standard, rectangular flash head as well. When used with dedicated radio triggers they can be controlled in both manual and TTL modes and the triggers offer five different channels to control five different groups of flashes. 

I originally bought two of these to do a job with back in 2018 because they packed down small for air travel and they were great to use in the field when no other electricity was available. I destroyed one with an unintentional experiment in durability. A wind gust lured a flash down from a ten foot high light stand to the hard ground almost instantaneously and it was too much for the unit to handle. I recently replaced the dead unit with an updated AD200 Pro unit and then, in a fit of pre-planning, bought one more to make a complete, three light portrait system that can fit in a large camera bag. 

The unit on the right is in a silicon sleeve mostly to protect the rear screen of the unit which has proven to be the most vulnerable area on the flash. The two flashes on the left are protected by silicon protectors that just cover the bottom third of the flash unit (again, protecting the weak spot) but are easier to remove for packing. 

I love using these lights for portrait work and have gotten very comfortable with them. I'll use one in a big modifier, like a 60" umbrella, as a main light, one unit, somewhat diffused and aimed at the background and the third in a small soft box as a back light/hair light. I have a larger A/C powered monolight but only end up using it these days on jobs that go on and on through a working day. Sometimes having an endless source of power and a very bright modeling light make work easier and quicker. But I love not having cables running across the floor.

The trigger shown here (just above) is an older product called a Godox X1-T. I can program it to work fully manually with the Leica stuff. The only thing it will do is manual flash, triggered via the center pin of the hot shoe, but it can also change the levels of all channels of the flash from the camera position. It won't grant me TTL capabilities and that's the way I prefer to use the system. I'd rather be in total control of the camera and flashes. 

I have a nearly identical trigger that's dedicated for Olympus and Panasonic cameras. I use that one in manual as well but if I ever get adventurous I can use the whole system in TTL mode and even use the HSS flash mode. 

I'll be using two of the flashes and a trigger later this week to photograph a corporate group shot outside. With 40 people in the shot they won't by any stretch of the imagination overwhelm the full sun but they will add a bit of frontal fill light. And I can always pray for high soft clouds...

I have fun stuff on tap for the rest of the month. There is a corporate leadership event this coming week. I'll spend half the week at a nice resort photographing meetings, team building and general socializing. It's the perfect chance to test out a hybrid combination of Panasonic S5 cameras with the new GH6 and GH5ii cameras. All of which share the same batteries and the same flash dedication.

After I wrap that project I have a full week booked for a banking conference in Santa Fe at the end of the month. My plan is to make that event an "All Leica" event with the SL2 backed up by an SL and supplemented by the CL and a fun selection of lenses. 

It's kind of exhilarating to have a month of bookings that will yield the kind of income (and fun) the business was generating before the Covid shutdowns. I had almost forgotten how much fun it can be to stay in really nice hotels, have really nice dinners and lunches and to document interesting speakers and panels. All in a very cool town.  Nice to be back in the saddle. 

More about the upcoming work in a future blog.

One or two gear notes. I've been working through a backlog of files I shot with the Leica CL and two lenses that are quickly becoming my favorites for that sub-system. Those are both Sigma Contemporary series lenses. Specifically the 18-50mm f2.8 and the 56mm f1.4. Both are extremely sharp and contrasty through their ranges and both are small and lightweight. Finally, comparatively speaking, they are dirt cheap. 

They interface seamlessly with the little APS-C Leica and give me a great walk around camera to use for my personal work but also as a supplement to projects on which I'm mostly shooting full frame, L series cameras. The CL uses the same lens mount as the big SL2 and also the whole family of Panasonic S series, full frame cameras. For large parts of my corporate jobs I can use the CL and the 18-50mm by themselves and cover what I need to without much operational friction at all. 

From what I can divine from the marketplace the CL is more or less discontinued and won't be replaced. I guess it makes more sense for Leica to concentrate on the bigger L mount stuff and their bread and butter M series stuff but I find there is a lot to like with the smaller camera and a range of small but highly competent lenses.  Your mileage will almost certainly diverge.

Swimming. I made it to swim practice this past Thursday at noon. For some reason it was a lightly attended practice. What do I mean by "lightly attended"? Well, there was me. And there was the coach. And the pool. My choice of all eight lanes. I took advantage of the situation to ask my coach ( Clark Smith, Olympic Gold Medalist at Rio de Janeiro, simultaneous NCAA record holder in the 500, 1000 and 1650 distances in his time at UT Austin) for a little advice on improving my freestyle stroke. He had me work on my (miserable) freestyle arm recovery, recommending a much higher elbow position and a more relax entry at the front end of the stroke. I noticed today that I swim about 5 seconds per hundred faster as a result all while clocking a 10 beat per second slower heart rate. Wow. That's a huge improvement from one session. 

The workout this morning was much better attended with four and five people to a lane. We blazed through the yardage even though Sunday's are usually less serious workout days. My lane logged about 3300 yards over the course of our hour practice. And the weather was perfect. 

It's exhilarating fun to actually be able to improve on technique at 66. If you want to you never have to stop learning and improving. That makes life fun for me. Oh, and dinner parties....

Walking around SXSW with a CL and the 56mm f1.4 Sigma. With a few from the 18-50mm f2.8 Sigma. Thoughts on fitting in with the crowd.

Man on a phone.

If years of reading about  "street"  photography on the web have taught me anything (which is debatable) it is that most photographers are frightened and/or uncomfortable photographing strangers who are out in public. If the subject of one's photographic interest is outside of the photographer's own demographic (age, race, economic strata, etc.) it seems to become even more difficult. This would account for many, many millions of street photographs that only show strangers' backs. 

I find that the best documentarians are the ones who shoot the most and who have reconciled themselves to the idea that most of their resistance is self-propelled. Self-inflicted. Or that the photographers make the error of trying to be "outside" of the flow of humanity which they are trying to photograph. They want to stand to one side and shoot images with a long lens. Conflict avoidance taking precedence over access. Being sneaky...

I enjoy crowds of people. Especially when they are out enjoying themselves. When I headed downtown to photograph a bit of Sixth Street SXSW life a few weeks ago I had no qualms whatsoever about diving into the crowds of musicians and music lovers and making images because I saw myself as part of the crowd and not as an external gawker. 

Part of this is a lifetime of experience but some of it is just being comfortable with things that are different. When I was growing up. I spent my second and third grade years ( in the 1960s) in Adana, Turkey. At the time it was the third or fourth largest city on the country. We lived smack in the middle of downtown. We bought candy and sodas from the street vendors, hung out with Turkish kids, got lost in neighborhoods that our parents considered to be dicey. We kids picked up the Turkish language and often visited friends as guests in their schools. When I attended my friend Susan's school from time to time I stuck out like a sore thumb with different clothes, a different haircut and a different complexion. And when I opened my mouth to talk I cinched the idea of "different."

But... I watched what my Turkish friends did and how they played and acted and I adapted to them, and over the course of time learned to fit right in. A smile and a willingness to fit in worked wonders. It's the same now when I'm in downtown Austin. Or San Antonio. Or NYC.  When I am approached by a homeless person I may decide not to give them money but I always stop and listen to their questions and acknowledge them as people. When I meet with my banker downtown I try to fit into his environment as well. When I photograph doctors in my studio I try to find the commonalities of interest we share and make our time photographing a collaboration rather than procedure. And when I walk  through a crowd of young music fans hanging out on Sixth Street I try not to remember that I'm 66 years old, live in Austin's most affluent neighborhood and am a quintessential middle class guy. When I am in the crowd I try to embrace my curiosity and give more energy to my desire to fit in by not worrying that I might be the one who is....different. 

If someone shouts at me I don't turn around and scurry away, I walk over to them and talk to them. I show a willingness to engage on whatever level they want to engage. 

One fear I hear a lot from photographers is that they are leery of carrying around thousands of dollars worth of camera gear in crowded, urban environments. They are afraid they will become targets for thieves who will separate them from their Nikons or Leicas or Sonys and leave them feeling victimized. I find this odd since most people these days (and I would conjecture this is true of thieves as well) are over wanting cameras or wanting to carrying them around. A thief might want your wallet; most likely your cash, but I can't think they'd covet an older Leica CL or something like that. But when people spend lots of money on stuff they start to worry about it. It's like turning on an electro-magnet. I guess the more one worries about their gear the more paranoid one gets and that anxiety and chaos is what probably attracts potential predators. It's a toxic reaction to low odds when you consider you'll probably end up buying a new camera next year anyway. 

I remember sitting in a restaurant in Rome across the street from the Borghese Gardens a while back. I had two of the then brand new Mamiya 6 cameras with me. My waiter asked me about the cameras. He was quite knowledgable about them even though they had not, at that point, been introduced into the EU market. He asked if he could hold one of the cameras. I asked if he wanted to take it outside and snap a few images to see how it worked, and to me, more importantly, how the shutter sounded. He was surprised but he took me up on the offer. My lunch companion, a fellow photographer from the U.S. was shocked. "What if he steals your camera?" 

I laughed. The waiter seemed perfectly legit. And why would he risk losing his job over the camera? 

The waiter of course returned minutes later and thanked me for letting him try out the camera. We struck up a conversation and he invited us to dinner at his favorite restaurant. My fellow photographer was nervous and declined but I was thrilled and met the waiter and his wife at their apartment and we walked together through Rome's back streets to the restaurant. It's was a restaurant I've never found in the guide books and it's not on any list of popular restaurants but it was Frederico Fellini's favorite in all of Rome. The walls were covered with signed portraits of Fellini as well as his favorite actors. We had a wonderful dinner. 

Turns out his wife wrote, designed and had published children's books in Italian, Spanish and Portuguese. She gave me a handful to take back home to baby Ben. Turns out the "waiter" studied photography at the Royal Academy in London and was a wonderful large format photographer. He also inherited a family farm in Tuscany where he did photographic workshops. 

How sad if I had allowed fear and paranoia to rob me of a wonderful chance meeting and a new and very talented friend. But all I ever hear from tourists is the overwhelming fear that if they take a nice camera with them to XXXX they will be pick-pocketed, robbed, bushwhacked and leave without their precious stuff. I'm sure everyone has a story about someone they know who has been robbed or lost stuff to larceny when traveling. But I'm equally willing to believe that their own abject paranoia attracted their misfortune in the first place. 

It's no different in crowds in your own town. If you treat everyone as you expect to be treated (assuming you expect to be treated well enough...) you never really attract trouble. Sure, you are always playing the odds. But I'd rather trade off a camera instead of avoiding a life time of fun and interesting experiences. I'm betting you would as well. 

Another man on a phone. 

I don't "hide" my camera at waist level. I don't often prefocus. I pull the camera up to my eye and telegraph my intention to take a photograph. It's the only way I'm really comfortable working. If a person doesn't want to be photographed they'll let you know. Otherwise you smile and continue. And maybe even nod a "thank you" as you pass by. 

Cameras are super valuable targets? Naw. See the sign just above.

Don't buy anything you'd be afraid to take out of the house.

I couldn't decide what expression I liked best on the woman above with the magenta hair. So, instead of "grabbing" a shot and scampering away I stopped and waited and shot and waited and shot again and if someone turned at looked at me I smiled and kept on photographing. That's how I work. 

I like the black and white photo best....

Okay. So I come across a guy getting his hair cut out in the middle of a three lane street in the most popular part of the entertainment district. Should I pretend he doesn't like attention or that he'll leap up from his seat and take umbrage on the photographer? Or should I acknowledge the bizarre nature of the situation and just go with it? That's a rhetorical question....

It goes both ways. I get photographed too.

I get more keepers when I get closer. To get closer you can't fear your fellow 

participants on the street. You acknowledge and document them. You join in the 

shared energy of the moment. 

the fact that everyone is snapping away with the phones has made people less conscious of being photographed. They just roll with it. When someone asks what I'm going to use the photograph for I tell them I might put it up on my blog or on Instagram. And that's the truth. Sometimes, if they are interested, 

I hand a business card with just my Instagram contact on it. Works for them. Works for me. 

 No one brings a ten foot, live snake with them to the bar district unless they want attention. The idea that one would fear snapping the photo is funny. People might be better off if they don't take themselves so seriously. Really. 

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.