What a Wacky Week. Also, "The Profit Pairing."

 I left Austin in the rain last Monday. My phone mapped out the best route to Lubbock, Texas where I spent the night and then routed me on in to Santa Fe around lunch time on Tuesday. It was an easy couple of drives and I don't regret my decision to drive to my assignment instead of flying. Our event and my room were at the Eldorado Hotel. I slipped into the valet parking zone in the underground garage and a bellman whisked my luggage onto a cart and followed me to the front desk.

My room was on the second floor facing in toward the infinity edge pools. I had a private, outdoor sitting area and every amenity I could think of. And nearly 28 hours to enjoy Santa Fe before our first event for the corporate client. That event was a rooftop reception at the hotel with the mountains in the far background. This gave me ample time to get settled in and to walk the town. 

I brought a lot of cameras and used all of them for odds and ends or just out of boredom but I always defaulted to one particular camera and two lenses when I was actively working for the client. My choice for work was the Panasonic S5 coupled with either the Panasonic 24-105mm zoom or the Panasonic S-Pro 70-200mm zoom. With that camera and those two lenses I felt like I could cover anything. Add in the dedicated Godox V1 flash and you have an event package that just flat out works. 

If you can't figure out how to leverage this pairing to make profitable photographs then I venture it's not the gear that is holding you back...

The assignment had me shooting in a manner I don't usually pursue. The client wanted big rich files for "later" but wanted, each morning to have a "walk in slide show" of images from the previous day. For example, the first evening there was the rooftop reception for about 250 guests. The weather and the scenery were perfect. I worked the crowd with the aforementioned combo and shot groups of two, four, six or eight along with candids galore. The production company we were working with needed relatively low res images, sized to 16:9, to show on big screens on either side of the stage. The challenge for me was my need to shoot big raw files for future use but to also shoot smaller, jpeg files already sized for video projection. 

Since the S5 camera has two card slots and each card slot can be set to shoot a certain type of file concurrently it was easy enough to direct the raw files to card #1 and the Jpegs to card #2. Knowing that even if I set a crop or a smaller file size for the Jpegs the raw files would be unaffected fit the bill. I used medium sized Jpegs shot at "standard" quality and in-camera-cropped to 16:9. The finder image showed the crop but it's not such an extreme crop from 3:2 that I couldn't figure out how the final raws would look. 

After the event I went back to my room and downloaded the Jpegs onto an SSD drive and then imported them into Lightroom. I'd shot about 500 images in the hour I was working and quickly narrowed the take down to about 200 images which I color corrected and output to a separate folder on the drive. The outputs were exactly 1080X1920 pixels. Just right for the production team to suck into their presentation program and get up on the huge monitors. 

Since I didn't know which images from each day would be in the next morning's slide show I just went ahead and made the two format capture methodology my standard for the week. It was quick and to the point. 

Everything I shot in the hotel ballroom, the reception areas and the break out rooms was done with the S5 and the two full frame lenses. And all the material was shot as both raws and Jpegs. But I spiced up yesterday's off site portion of the day by using the Panasonic GH6 and the Olympus 12-45mm Pro lens instead. 

We wrapped up the day's business sessions by noon and people went off on different fun excursions. Some played golf, some went off-roading in Jeeps with guides and some went out to a wonderful lunch at the fancy Compound Restaurant followed by a walk through the galleries on Canyon Road hosted by one of the gallery owners. You can guess which one I ended up on.... yes. The Canyon Road art tour. 

I set up the Panasonic camera the same way. Raws on one card (the CFExpress card) and Jpegs on the other. I chose the camera and lens because it was smaller and lighter than the full frame combination and I had already decided I would ditch the small tour bus at the end of the tour and enjoy a walk back to the hotel instead. The majority of my photographs from the gallery tours were in bright light and the camera worked like a champ. 

Yesterday was our only long endurance day. Breakfast started at 6:45 and we were in place for the business sessions in the main ballroom by 8 a.m. I photographed speaker after speaker at the podium. Or more likely pacing round the stage. Wide shot, waist up and a series of tight headshots timed to capture the expression that made each speaker look brilliant and interesting. After the session we separated into our groups for the fun activities. There was a non-scheduled break in the late afternoon and the we gathered together again for a cocktail reception followed by a banquet dinner, an auction and then a private concert with the Bellamy Brothers. A very popular country and western duo. They've written an amazing number of hits I only knew because of the other artists who covered them. 

The concert lasted till ten p.m. but I exercised my prerogative to de-camp at 9:30 so I could get a jump on editing down to a reasonable number the selections for the day. And to also have time to tweak whichever images needed a bit of help with contrast, exposure of general white balance. I handed off the hard drive around 11:30, showered and went immediately to sleep. 

We did one more business session in the main ballroom today and then most of the attendees scampered off to make their flights back home. Whoever home is. 

My client booked me in for an extra night at the hotel (fabulous hotel!!!) so I could recuperate and also have more time to enjoy the trip. I hit Café Doline for lunch and then hiked back to Canyon Rd. on a more circuitous route to look in on the galleries we missed yesterday and then over to a gallery on Marcy St. to look at some oil paintings I'm interested in. Of course, the one day I have mostly free is the day we get the most smoke from the wildfires raging in nearby parts of the state. Since we're at 7100 feet above sea level here the compounding of the altitude and the thick smoke started to take its toll on my interest being out and about. When my Apple Watch showed me my blood oxygen was down to 92% I decided to pack it in and head back to my hotel room. I may be in good shape but....

While I think the best image quality came from the S5 and the big lens combo I have to say that the highest degree of photographic enjoyment most certainly came from the GH6 mated with the Olympus 12-45mm. It just feels so perfect when you're actually walking around all day photographing stuff. 

I've backed up all my raw files to two hard drives and I'm leaving the camera cards untouched until I get home and get them all uploaded to the cloud. I've overshot, as usual, and I'm hell bent on thinning out the herd of photos before I start correcting and post processing.

I also brought along the Leica SL2 and a bevy of single focal length primes. They were the least used of any of the inventory. In fact, the one afternoon I went out shooting just for fun I left with the SL2 and the 65mm only to come back to the hotel with fewer than a dozen images on the card. I dumped the camera into a bag, grabbed the Panasonic GH5ii with the 25mm Summilux and headed straight back out. And I didn't come back until I had hundreds of decent shots. It's just more fun a camera to move quickly with. Especially as you become oxygen deprived. 

This blog post should be longer but I'm taking a break to take a nap... Ciao. 

Early Work. The First Book Cover. Arrival in Santa Fe.

Some time, way back in 2008, I finished writing and photographing for my first book. All except for the cover illustration. The subject matter was "professional lighting on location" and the hook of the book was using small, battery powered electronic flashes for the lighting. Seemed appropriate to make a portrait on location and to use small, battery powered flashes. I went online to look for an appropriate model and then called the historic Driskill Hotel to ask if I could use one of their nice august banquet rooms for a location. 

I guess the usual way of doing a photo like this would be to shoot a bunch of poses and then move to multiple other locations and shoot more bunches of poses. I am not so indecisive. In this case I had an idea of what I wanted. We shot the image. I paid the model and we were done.

It's not the most spectacular portrait I've shot but I liked the red dress and the model's expression and importantly, I shot it in an aspect ratio that worked well for the proposed cover. I did a bit of retouching that is not reflected here and then sent the image to the publisher as part of the whole book package. The publisher provided no feedback and ran the image as sent. So much for the idea of a tight relationship between editors and writers...

Looking back at my gear from that period I'm fairly certain I used a large umbrella on one side, a reflector on the other and a couple of flashes aimed back toward the background. The flashes were Nikon SB-28's or something similar and I used a Nikon trigger in the hot shoe to make it all go "flash!"

I thought to write about this right now because I was asked to deliver some images quickly after an event tomorrow evening and I wanted to make sure I had the latest rev of Lightroom on the laptop I brought with me to Santa Fe. I wanted to make sure I had the right password for the Adobe Creative Suite in my brain and I wanted to get a folder set up to streamline the process tomorrow evening.  And this photo was sitting in a folder on the desktop. A sign from the blogging gods…

I often think of myself as someone who flies by the seat of my pants but really I might be overly prepared instead. Why else would I bring along two quarts of Subaru's synthetic motor oil (just in case) when the car has only 8,000 miles on it and was serviced by the dealer last Monday? If I were scattered and relied mostly on luck then why do I have eight fully charged back-up batteries for the cameras I intend to use on the job and four back-up batteries for the third camera I brought along....just in case? And what about that first aid kit in the rolling duffle bag? And eight pairs of socks for six days of travel? And the portable fusion reactor?

Seems my self-image is awkwardly skewed. 

How's the trip going so far? It's been pleasant. Over the course of two driving days I think I've discovered a long lost state of calm existence. Being quiet with myself for hours at a time. No music on the car stereo, no texts, no e-mail, no phone calls. Just driving and musing about life, love and the process of existing without an overarching agenda. The drives turned out to be peaceful, non-eventful and reflective. 

The hotel is very nice. The client was thoughtful enough to put me in a room on the second floor that opens out onto a private patio which in turn opens out onto the swimming pool area. The pool isn't long enough to swim good laps in but I could practice endless flip turns --- with a breath in between each one. 

I got into Santa Fe around one p.m. and was able to check right into my room. There followed a pleasant conversation with my client and with the event director and then I got to go have coffee with a famous writer of thriller novels, John Camp. That was a wonderful two hours over coffee. He's a remarkable man.

I hope I listened well enough!

I've got 24 hours now to do with as I please. I think I'll pull out a camera and go out for a long walk. Watching late afternoon evolve into evening and then into night. 

Sometimes the benefit of getting away is just re-learning how to spend time with myself. Nice.

 

Packed. Car serviced. Previous work completed. Next week is a clean slate.

 

I'm heading West to Santa Fe in the morning. Fun stuff on the agenda.

On most trips I've undertaken in the past there was nearly always the undercurrent of "jobs still in progress" "clients rushing to complete selections before the lights went out" and odds and ends of everyday life that seem like tentacles grabbing my consciousness and bifurcating my attention. But not this time. No...not this time. 

All the grunt work of small-businessing has been done. I also got in a full week of six swim practices in a row so....no guilt in grabbing a walnut scone and a coffee on the way out of town. B and B are handling the home fires and even my car seems anxious to get out of town and have some sort of adventure. Two days of business and five days of self-propelled recreation in Santa Fe, NM.

I've overpacked my suitcase but I'm ready for warm weather, cold weather, formal banquets (coat and tie?) or tromping over rough ground with my recently waxed, favorite pair of hiking boots. I've got credit cards just begging to be flogged and a case full of gear that I'm dying to point at West Texas and Northeastern New Mexico. Running shoes for the hotel gym and maps to all the swimming pools in the Santa Fe area. 

My client checked in last week and all systems are "go." 

I stuck with my previously stated inventory of "work" cameras which will be all Panasonic (S5, GH5ii and GH6). I packed a separate camera bag for personal work. It's got a Leica SL2 body and all four of the Sigma Contemporary prime lenses I own. Those would be the 24mm f3.5, the 45mm f2.8, the 60mm f2.0 and the 90mm f2.8.  I also stuck in the Sigma 56mm f1.4 APS-C lens....just in case I have a hankering for something fast and sharp. Sure, the camera will drop down to the APS-C format automatically but with a starting point of 47 megapixels I'm not too worried. 

If I find fun stuff to photograph or if I stumble into an interesting adventure and survive it I'll try to blog at least a couple of times during the week. But this will be my longest out of town since the start of the pandemic. And I can't wait.

With luck and planning I should be back in one week. Wild stuff. 

(always while remembering that what matters is "here and now.")

A small but growing collection of L mount lenses that work across all three brands of available cameras and are also affordable.

When I first dove into the L mount system I did so because I thought the Panasonic S1, S1R and S1H were compelling tools for professional image makers. They obviously weren't designed for old duffers who complain at every turn about the size and weight of the cameras. The cameras all met my expectations admirably. The only thing that gave me pause was the paucity of the kinds of lenses we used all the time in the film days. Small, sharp and economical. I can tolerate a heavy camera if I'm getting something in return but most of the lenses that were available for the L mount in 2019 were very fast ones and because they were mostly f1.4 or f1.2 aperture lenses, and designed to be top of class, they were enormous, more expensive and, because of all the heavy glass inside, they were slow to autofocus.

What I wanted was lenses like the ones from the past. I wanted to be able to buy a selection of lenses with much less glamorous f-stops and much less impressive and complex optical formulas. I wanted lenses like the Contax 28mm f2.8 Y/C lens which traded lens speed for great optical performance and smaller size. Not tiny-sized but right-sized. Same with the Contax (or Nikon or Pentax) 50mm "normal" lenses. Even the well regarded Contax/Zeiss 50mm f1.4 from the film days was about a third the volume of something like the Sigma 50mm f1.4 Art lens or the Panasonic S-Pro 50mm f1.4. And most 50mm lenses from back in the day were about 1/4th the price of the new hyper-lenses. Sure, I get that they didn't autofocus but I can do that on my own and in fact often prefer it. 

It was thrilling when Sigma announced a wildly different kind of lens for the L mount systems. It was part of their "Contemporary" series. It was the 45mm f2.8. I bought one, shot it for a couple of weeks and then bought a second one (which came as part of a bundle with the then newly released Sigma fp camera). Mindless critics mostly trashed the lens for one reason; when focused close (within five or so feet) and used at its maximum aperture it was less contrasty, less snappy than other lenses from various makers. Subtlety is lost on the masses of YouTubers. The lens performs magnificently at f4.0 but more importantly it has its own way of rendering images that is lovely. Calm and sharp simultaneously. Stopped down to f5.6 and beyond it can actually become quite clinical. But not in a harsh and frantic way. 

That lens set a style for a whole series of lenses that's been introduced over the last two years. It's well crafted out of metal, has great feeling controls and each of the lenses in the series has a wonderful and well damped aperture ring. But the real beauty is that this lens and the ones that followed are easy to use by dint of being right sized for both my cameras and my hands. While delivering good and even great performance. 

After using the 45mm f2.8s for nearly a year I ordered the 65mm f2.0 lens the minute it was announced. It's a focal length I really like and early testers were uniformly impressed by the lens's optical performance. Sharp and contrasty even when used wide open. A wonderful, short portrait lens!

I also ordered and have been shooting  most of my recent portrait assignments in the studio with the 90mm f2.8 model. It's almost as small as the 45mm and even wide open is probably sharper that every competitor's 90mm lens. 

The fourth Sigma Contemporary I bought was a used one that a friend bought on a whim and never used. He coveted a particular lens I had and we traded. It was the ultra-diminutive 24mm f2.8. I immediately stuck the lens on my Leica CL and used it in the crop mode for a while as a 35mm equivalent street shooting lens. It autofocuses quickly and gave great results. It's just as good on a full frame camera like the Leica SL2. 

All four of these lenses together weigh less than my Leica 24-90mm zoom lens. That makes them comfortable to carry and easy to use on daylong, multi-location shoots. 

Each of the lenses costs somewhere between $549 and $700. There is a 35mm f2.0 version which I don't yet own and also a fast 24mm f2.0 in which I have no real interest. There is one missing focal length which I hope they fill in soon and that would be the classical 135mm f2.8 short telephoto. 

When I packed for a fun couple of days of personal shooting recently I grabbed the Leica SL2 and all four of the Sigma Contemporary L lenses I own and put them into one Domke F2 canvas camera bag. Heaven. 

Another interesting Contemporary lens which I am using in a very counter-intuitive way is the 18-50mm f2.8 that is designed only to cover an APS-C format. I'm using that lens on my SL2 as well. The camera automatically switches to the APS-C mode for me and gives me a file that's still around 24 megapixels. Its small size makes the entire package very manageable and you get great image performance in that tiny package. All for around $600. I know some Leica owner somewhere is reading this and trying to figure out how to censure my heresy but it's wise to understand that just owning a Leica camera body isn't a pact to the death to only equip your SL2 with Leica branded lenses and accessories. Though I'm sure Leica appreciates it when you do....

Can't wait till some third party comes out with cheap batteries for the SL2. I'll buy them....

But for now it's all about the joy of the lenses. 

Final packing for my trip is tomorrow. Monday I'll be heading west into a big storm and then, further West, into the land of wildfires. I hope for the best. 

The two images just above are of the sub-structure of that big curved building I've been showing you for the last several months. These images are from three + years ago and were made with my 45mm lens.