Trying to summon some affection for my least loved camera. Yes.....we've circled back to the Leica TL2. Now discontinued but still functional. I'm getting there.

Who thought it was a good idea to ask 66 year olds to swim sets of 50 yards butterfly at workout this morning? Let me speak to the manager! Kidding, of course. It's just par for the course. But I have to say that having about a quarter of the hour long workout being comprised of butterfly stroke can be....daunting. Although the 20 year old in the adjacent lane didn't seem to be struggling at all...

"Fast is wasted on the youth.."

Seriously though, if you want to get your heart rate up and sustain it there nothing beats sets of butterfly in the pool. Maybe tomorrow we can spend the morning doing innocuous stroke drills instead???

So, after swim practice and a nice breakfast of scrambled eggs with smoked salmon I thought it would be a good time of the day to head downtown and walk over to my bank (which is on my usual route) and actually make a check deposit in person. Mostly because I was curious to see if banks still really have physical tellers who you can see in person, and such. They do. And the ones at my bank were very friendly. The walk to the bank was a thinly veiled excuse to try to build a bit of love... or at least grudging acceptance....for what is my current least favorite camera in the studio. And that would be the Leica TL2. 

I didn't do it any favors though. I put the TTartisan 17mm f1.4 lens on it and mostly used it at f8 along with some half-assed zone focusing. The ultra bright sun was a good challenge when it came to composing on the rear screen. The searing heat made concentration hard. So most of the images are just random snippets of visual errata. I finally gave up when the soles of my shoes started melting into the sidewalks and went home...

I'll grudgingly admit that the screen was bright enough to see well; even with my sunglasses on. And I'll also admit that I really like the colors and tones from that camera. They are right in line with files coming from the CL and the SL, both of which I really enjoy. This particular version/sample of the 17mm lens is also quite good. Yes, there's a bit of distortion but it's easy enough to fix with Lightroom. So, unlike tests in the past with the same camera, I'd put today's effort down as an overall success. 

Things I liked? The lighter weight. The quality of the .DNG files. The general competence of the rear screen ---  even when used in bright daylight. A surprising bout of endurance from the battery. The overall cuteness of the camera and the little, bizarre looking lens. 

Things I disliked? Easy. The fact that the camera often switched to video when its rear screen rubbed against my shirt. That nuisance of the camera changing modes from "A" to "S" if I touched the screen inadvertently. The cryptic nature of hunting for some settings in the menu. 

But if you are going to judge a camera by the files it creates I'll have to say that I'm changing my tune about the (now discontinued) TL2. Maybe I'm liking it more because of its new status as a discontinued underdog. But for whatever reason I seemed to have a more enjoyable time with the camera than I have had ever before. 

But take all this with a grain of salt since my brain and my assessments of the camera might have been addled by the overwhelming heat as we soared to 100+ by noon. And we'll still be at 98° late into the evening.  Stay hydrated but don't spill water on the TL2, I'm not sure it's at all weather sealed.

24 megapixels of APS-C goodness. A good selection of competent-to-excellent lenses. A natty little black leather half case. What's not to like? Well, besides all the stuff I listed above...

 

                             

Every truck in Texas seems to have those metallic (but plastic) windshield heat thingys. 

Satisfied with my portable flash system. And I've used a lot of portable electronic flashes over the years...

 

Godox AD200 Pro in a silicon body glove to prevent impact damage.

Also features the "round head" and dome diffuser. 

Love mine.

There's been a big shift in lighting toward the use of more and more LED lighting. I'm a fan of continuous light sources and I even wrote a book on the topic, for Amherst Media, which was published back in 2010. That seems like ages ago. But not every type of photographic assignment can be shoe-horned into existence with one particular set of tools. Sometimes you have to take into consideration components of a job that demand a different solution. 

A case in point would be photographing a portrait subject in front of a set of windows. Especially if the scene outside the windows is a sun-drenched Texas landscape. You'll quickly realize that even at ISO 100 you'll be shooting at 1/250th of a second at f5.6 or higher. You could do that with a powerful enough LED light, after all, they do it when filming movies all the time. But you'll need an incredibly powerful light source and most likely your subject will be squinting and uncomfortable through the whole process. 

A simpler and time honored solution is to use flash. Electronic flash has the benefit of freezing subject motion but also allowing a photographer to match the exposure levels so that what is lit by the sun outside the windows can be lit to the same level inside. Where the air conditioning is...

I was hired to do a photograph of a new CFO for a privately held financial services company today and I knew exactly which flashes I wanted to use.

Over the last three years I've photographed executives for this company in the same location. Some in the boardroom, some in their lobby and some in both. I knew they'd want some continuity with past portraits so I set up and shot on both locations and I'll have them make the final choice. But the flash equipment? That's my call.

So, the offices are on the second floor and the easiest way to access the offices is to park out front, go through the front door of the building and then take the stairs to the second floor. I wanted to put together a lighting and camera package this time that fulfilled a number of requirements.

1. The main light would have to be powerful enough to match sunlight even if I was using the main light in an umbrella or softbox. 

2. I would require three identical lights. I planned to photograph with two lights at the shoot and wanted a third light as a back-up; or in case I wanted to get fancier with my lighting design. 

3. The three lights, along with extra batteries and accessories, would have to pack down into a fairly lightweight case that I would be able to comfortably transport from car to stairs to the interior offices with one hand. And without breaking a sweat. 

4. The flash batteries needed to have enough stamina to keep working even if I got carried away and shot more than 200 or even 300 exposures.

5. All the lights would have to be controllable and triggered by a radio control sitting in the hot shoe of my camera. I wanted to be able to adjust both lights (or all three lights) individually and from camera position. 

6. I'd like for the lights to be reliable.

The lights I combined into my location kit were three of Godox's AD-200 Pro units. They are 200 watt second flashes and the thing that inures them to me is that they have interchangeable flash heads. The stock head looks like a conventional flash front end. A rectangular reflector with a diffusion panel facing the subject. This flash head also contains a small LED modeling light. 

The units also ship with a bare bulb head which spreads light very evenly in all directions. I like to use the bare bulb head inside soft boxes. The one thing the bare bulb heads lack is the modeling light. There is a third type of flash head/reflector and that's the one shown in the photo at the top. It's called a "round head" by the maker and it's a well diffused, round head with a circular flash tube inside which also has magnets in the front that allow one to attach a number of different accessories to it. The accessory/modifier I have attached above is a diffusion dome which further softens and spreads light from the unit. 

I've been using one round head on my main flash for a while now and, in combination with an umbrella, is my favorite light source. So, when I broke a flash tube by dropping it on the floor last Friday I decided I'd replace it with a round head instead. One advantage beyond the soft lighting and nice spread delivered by the round head (and especially when used with the dome!) is that the round head contains an LED modeling lamp that stays on as long as you'd like and also has three power settings. 

It's not a bright modeling light when compared to the old halogen 150 watt bulbs that were used in traditional flash heads but it's a godsend when working in a low light environment and since the lights aren't very big or heavy the flash's LED becomes a good flash light when the shoot is over and we're packing up in the dark. 

All the flash gear fits into one modest sized tool bag from companies like Husky or Black and Decker. The B&D bag I'm using cost all of $30 at Lowes, is strong and well made, and is a good  travel bag for anything except airline travel. I haven't weighed the bag with the three flashes and accessories in it yet but it's easy enough to move with single handed. 

I have an ancient Tenba stand bag that's soft and light (no padding) and I've got three fairly light, aluminum stands in it along with several different sizes and type of umbrellas. That bag also hold my (must have) tripod. It's a Sirui with a ball head and it goes up over my head if the center column is extended. 

The heaviest thing in my new, portable location kit is my actual camera and lens gear. Today I was carrying a Leica SL2, a Leica SL, the big Leica zoom and the Panasonic 24-105mm zoom as a back up. I also packed a light meter, a bunch of batteries for the cameras, a couple of flash triggers and also batteries for the triggers. All of this fit into my newest luggage acquisition: The Gitzo Adventurer 30 L backpack. The backpack is a bit over-engineered and I could do without the waist belt but it's nicely padded, holds everything safely and I can carry it on my back which frees up my hands for the other two cases. 

With my subject at a diagonal to a wall of windows that looked out over the Texas Hill Country I positioned a flash in a 45 inch umbrella just to the left of my camera as a main light. It did a great job of illumination without a reflection in the glass and, at a quarter power (used close in) it was powerful enough to balance with daylight. The second light was used much further back along the windows and worked as a well aimed backlight or glancing side light. The third head stayed in the case awaiting its eventual turn in rotation. 

In the course of shooting in two different locations and with a necktie change or two during the process we banged through 200+ exposures and got some really great expressions as my time with the subject went on. 

Repacking and getting back to the car was as easy as getting in at the beginning. The total cost of the three light system, which is completely battery powered, is about $1,000. I think it's a bargain. And, with a hard case added you could travel anywhere with these lights and have a reasonable expectation that they'd work on arrival. 

I arrived at 10 a.m. shot till 11 and was packed and back to the car by 11:15. When I got back to the studio each light's battery still had more than half a charge left and I considered that great since they were on for the entire time of the session and that includes having the modeling lights on as well. 

I have each light encased in a protective silicon sheath to prevent breaking the rear screen (something that happened dramatically on a remote location about four years ago....) and I think that the "bumpers" or sheaths are a screaming bargain if it prevents light death. 

We used the same lights on our seafood shoot on Friday. I saw the "client approved" double truck ad from that project today and I also approve. The AD200s are great. I don't sell them. There is no link. 

I just seem to have used them pretty much non-stop for the last four years and thought I would shout out to them. That's it. 

Learning to enjoy the hot afternoons. Bring comfortable shoes. New 100°F workshops!!! Learn how to suffer better. Sponsored by Gruff and Associates, Experts in Provocation.

 

Finished painting the fence this morning, ate left over Father's Day BBQ for lunch and then got bored with staying indoors. Grabbed some comfortable sandals, the Leica CL with the 23mm f1.4 lens and one of those obnoxious hats and drove downtown. The heat wasn't that bad. You learn to walk on the sides of the streets with the most shade. Seems obvious but it's taken me a lot of tries to get it right.

At the end of the walk I found myself at REI buying my favorite REI t-shirts because they were on clearance sale. Still too expensive but whatcha gonna do? I bought six more. They're soft and cool. They're UPF 50. They wick moisture. They're antimicrobial. And did I mention they were on sale?

Today's exercise was to figure out how I make the skies in my urban landscapes so nice and dark. I didn't set anything special so I have to tell you that I don't have a clue. Maybe I'm generating some sort of electro-magnetic field that makes skies bold and sassy. Or maybe all those "elitist scum yuppie Leica owners" are actually on to something here. Who knows?

We took the day off from "real" work but the week looks like non-stop post production. I guess it could be a lot worse.

Go snap up a Leica CL before they disappear altogether. Or wait five years until everyone decides they've become collector's items and you can snap one up for twice the price. But don't forget to buy the super-cheap TTArtisan lenses to go with yours. That's the secret magic ingredient. 

B. Scolded me last year when I told her I was thinking about Crypto. 

Since she scares me a little because she's so smart I decided not to 

take the plunge. I asked her about it again  in January but she was too

busy shorting the market overall to answer me....

And if you believe in Crypto I'm here to tell you that Lawrence Welk had the 

presidential election stolen from him back in 1956.

no. The sky was not stripped in...

A mannequin with intensity.

Austin City Limits drops the hammer on cellphone addled fans.

and one in color as the "control group".

Seen around town in black and white. Plus...."wealthy" suburbanites painting residential fencing...

 

Seen in black and white on the streets and in the galleries of Austin, Texas.

I'm really enjoying photographing in black and white, in the streets of Austin,  across a selection of fun cameras. The Leicas have the fewest controls or settings for their monochrome settings but seem to do a great job of rendering black and white images with the tones I like best. Who knows why? (And that's not really a rhetorical question...). 

Today is too freakin hot to care about technical details and the "pursuit of perfection" so I'm making do with the little (and lightweight) Leica CL, paired up with a TTArtisans 23mm f1.4. And I may switch that lens out for the Sigma Contemporary 24mm f3.5 just so I don't have to waste the energy focusing for myself. 

Like many other Americans we're currently roasting in place with a high pressure dome overhead and record heat all around us. We're in good shape to "weather"  it if we stay inside but I'm already suffering from permanent cabin fever and I'll go out walking this afternoon; at least for a little while...

In a related story, I did "blue collar" work today. We've been trying to get our wooden fence repainted this year. Sure, the costs/charges have gone up a lot since the times before the pandemic, but our biggest issue is that the labor market in Austin is all screwed up. House repair and maintenance demands are at an all time high and the myriad waiting lists for.....everything are untenable. 

For example. In the Fall we ordered new windows for the house. It took nearly four months to get them built and delivered to Austin but another two months to get on the schedule with the company's installers. Half a year for a dozen windows.  Used to be two weeks. 

I finally got tired of looking out of our new windows at the ever-weathering fence and decided that I'd just do it myself. I've been getting up each morning at 6 a.m. for the past couple of weeks to get in a few hours of painting before swim practice. I finished today. We don't swim on Mondays. The pool is closed for maintenance. So I wrapped up with a marathon painting session and even remembered to clean all the brushes. 

I guess physical labor can be fun. I don't find that to be the case for myself. I'll work harder in the future to sock away more cash to trade for someone else's time doing that kind of work. I think I'm more productive when I'm taking photos. Not when I'm (carefully) sloshing paint on a fence and trying to schedule the work around staying out of the brunt of the heat. 

But someone had to do it. And those waiting lists....

In another related story I discussed with a long time restaurant owner on Friday, the unintended consequences of every economic action. She's had a tough time staying in business. Her vendors are being hit by everything from a shortage of truck drivers to the ever escalating cost of diesel fuel (which has gone up more dramatically than gasoline). The prices they charge her have gone up. Some dramatically.

It's harder than ever to retain employees even if you are paying unskilled people twice the minimum wage and offering some benefits. But on Thursday the city of Austin announced that they were raising the lowest tier city worker wages to $22 per hour + benefits. A good thing for workers but another blow to small businesses.

Most people believe that working for any part of any government is easier and cushier than working in the private sector so now lifeguards, gardeners, parking ticket issuers and many others will start at the new wages with the city and create yet another huge diversion of workers out of the service industries and into "public service." My client's prices will have to go up if she is to stay in business. 

But with all the talk of a pending recession and the collapse of various financial markets the customers she is counting on are tightening belts, learning to cook at home, reining in non-critical credit card expenses and generally becoming highly price raise resistant. It's anything BUT a virtuous circle...

It's at times like these that not having employees seems to have been a wonderfully wise decision. And it seems that even something as droll as painting one's own fence is a decent strategy for capital conservation. And a quick way to ruin a pair of pants...

It's a changing world. 

Finally....Texas Republicans. Really? "Thoughts and Prayers" that Texas survives the colossal vitriol and obvious insanity of the State GOP. Just astoundingly evil. You can't make some of this stuff up!

I've been cleaning out the studio. I looked in some boxes I hadn't gone through in half a dozen years. I found lots and lots of prints.

At one point in my photo-trajectory I had a habit of printing my favorite frame from every job or project. The only exception was the typical "headshots." Nobody really needed to see large prints of modern office workers standing or siting in front of seamless backgrounds. But everything that looked good to me as a print got the treatment. 

My process was simple. I'd select a frame, do a bit of post processing that would make images look better on printing paper and then send them over to my local Costco to be printed on their lustre surface paper at a uniform and mostly uncropped size of 12 by 18 inches. If I was impatient or just wanted to see what variations might look like I'd fire up the inkjet printer and make prints on Canon's Photo Paper Pro Platinum or Lustre. I always had the idea that the process of printing all the work I liked would quickly give me a huge variety of really nice photographs that I could place into custom configured portfolios when needed. 

But over time I realized that I never got around to showing a book anymore and that all the art directors and creative directors I wanted to work with were more than happy to go to my website and look around there. So now I have storage boxes upon storage boxes and hundreds and hundreds of large prints that I can't bear to throw out. I still like most of the images very much. 

It's fun to look through the boxes and shuffle through the prints. I can see the evolution of digital cameras over time but, also the disappointing realization that, in these sizes, the quality differences between the 24 and 36 megapixel cameras and the more "primitive" 6 megapixels cameras comes nowhere near to matching the hysteric promises and marketing of camera makers and their legions of reviewing minions. 

I guess if we all shot everything in very, very dark settings, and needed all of our printed pieces to be made as large 48 by 60 inch murals, you could make a decent case for the constant camera upgrade mania but if you are a rational human being (rare) and you can put images shot decades apart side by side for evaluation you'll most likely be disappointed to discover that every dollar spent after a certain point was just money being tossed onto a hot fire. 

In the images I randomly tossed in to fill out the visual component of today's blog there is an older (2012 era) micro four thirds camera represented, an older Nikon APS-C camera, a Canon 5Dmk2 camera, a Nikon D2X camera, and even a Fuji S5 camera. But laid out on the floor, adjacent to each other, each printed image looks sharp, mostly noise free and aptly color balanced. Much more alike than they are different.

Of the prints here the one of the kids is the one I like best. And it was taken with a camera most would consider the least competent. Sometimes perspective can be both valuable and a bit painful...

And in book publishing news.....

 https://www.kut.org/life-arts/2022-06-13/bringing-us-together-the-ann-richards-legacy-project-releases-new-book-the-one-ann-only

Gov. Ann Richards. ©Kirk Tuck

I appreciated being included in the writer's very short list of photographers along with Annie Leibovitz and Ave Bonar.

A Couple More Indulgent Pix on Father's Day. No text.

 

Happy Father's Day.

 The greatest gift I think a parent; a father, can receive is the success of their children. Raising smart, kind, curious, and bright children into adulthood is a project that is by turns a frightening responsibility and ultimately rewarding. There are always stumbles along the way but it's the aggregate result that matters. 

Ben is 26. He's happily employed in a job that's near the cutting edge of high technology. He's financially successful and a good steward of his own future. He runs. He bikes. He climbs rocks. He analyzes and writes for a living. He is surrounded by friends.

And on Sunday evenings he comes over to our house for dinner and conversation, and a recap of his week. And many times he makes us all dinner. He is a much better fish cook than his mom or me. He makes great salmon dishes. He's adept at making Brussel sprouts in many different, novel and delicious ways. 

And that's really all I ever dreamed of having on Father's Day.

Let's talk about black and white in the age of digital. It's no big deal to do.

A reader complimented the black and white images I posted yesterday. Another reader asked about my black and white technique. I've always liked black and white photographs very much and spent about 25 years going in and out of my own darkroom, making black and white prints of all the personal work I was making. In one way it was easier to make good black and white work in the "paper" darkroom because so much of the aesthetic heavy lifting was done by the variety and different "looks" of the photo print papers available at the time. And the wonderful and varied tonal renderings of films like Tri-X or Agfapan APX 25. Before the web got popular it seemed, at least to me, easy to lose myself and lose track of time working on a series of nice, double-weight prints. I'd work on images I loved for hours and sometimes would look down at my watch to see that it was 2 in the morning and I had been printing since just after dinner...

I find that it's harder for me to go out now with a camera that's set for shooting raw files, and shooting them in color, and actually visualize how they'll look at black and white images that I'd want to share. My brain really prefers it when I go out with the intention that the final result of my effort will be in black and white. With that in mind, and knowing I have a limited imagination when it comes to previsualilzing things like monochrome results or after-shot cropping, I decide at the outset that I'm going to work in black and white. 

I set the camera to shoot Jpegs and then I adjust the very few controls on my Leica cameras that allow me to shoot the files in black and white. On the camera I used yesterday; a Leica SL, I go into the Jpeg Settings menu and, under saturation, I choose: "monochrome." Then I turn up the contrast. There are only really three settings for contrast in that camera which interest me. There is the null point; the neutral position. There is "medium high" (which is the setting I choose for normal daylight work -- direct sun, etc.) and there is one more step: "high" which I only use on very cloudy and overcast days.

There is also a sharpness setting with the same course choices: Medium, Medium High and High. Again, I default to Medium High almost always.

Now, I understand that most pundits on the web advise photographers and videographers to use low contrast settings and even lower sharpness settings with the idea that all will be fixed and optimized on post processing but I'd rather see it in my camera while I'm making the images. It seems more efficient and, for want of a better explanation, braver to me to try to get close to what you want to see in the viewfinder. 

There is no option to set color filters in the Leicas that I shoot with. That option does exist in the Lumix S1 series cameras and in my (wonderful) Sigma fp but they never seem to have much effect, or more importantly, the effect I want to see when I use them.

I generally import the files into Lightroom Classic to get them into my system and to archive them. To my eye all the images benefit from an increase in "clarity".  I'm liberal with the slider and dial in between 15 and 40 points of clarity for most street scenes and landscapes. I am usually more prudent with portraits. 

I don't have the option to use the HSL settings as I've made my stand to monochrome in the camera. I could only make color channel adjustments with a color file. I can use the color temperature sliders to make the final image warmer or cooler, greener or more magenta. But those are options that are not too useful for the way I like to see my photographs in final form. Though I did play with color temperature on several images in yesterday's batch.

Portraits benefit from a bit more contrast and the addition of some fabricated grain. 

This image was taken several years ago when the big "Sail" buildings was just getting started. This is infrastructure below ground level. I have photos from the inception; from the digging of the enormous pit to the final fitting of door knobs and hand rails on the newly unveiled entrance doors. 

This image has some "clarity" added but is otherwise as it came from the camera. 

The image just above had some contrast added and the exposure was increased from 

the original setting in post production.

Gloomy and rainy days beg for more contrast and clarity. But it's important not to go overboard with contrast to the point where the darker tones block up. A judicious use of the clarity slider and the shadow recovery slider, in tandem, is sometimes called for....

I'm a simple photographer so I try not to make more, and more complicated, work for myself in post production. I also prefer to roam the streets looking for interesting stuff than to spend too 

much time micro-processing every square centimeter of an image. If you didn't get it 

mostly right in camera chances of making radical improvements in the "digital darkroom" are negligible. 

See first. Fix as a last resort. 

Hope this is helpful. 

Happy Father's Day.