Morning out with a Leica TL2 and the Sigma 24mm f3.5 lens; complete with an L mount...

 

automation comes to Barton Springs Pool. 

Pre-purchasing tickets speeds up the line to get in. 

Having a pool pass makes things even quicker.

It's a little after noon and the heat index is already at 109°. That's okay. I got out earlier this morning when it was still a brisk and cool 90°. Complete with a refreshing four mile per hour breeze --- but only if you were walking a 15 minute per mile pace...

As reflects my ever advancing chronological age I was able to park in front of Barton Springs Pool courtesy of my newly acquired "Senior Season Pool Pass." It's good for free admission to all of the Austin public pools and an added bonus is a hang-tag for the car that gives the holder free parking as well. Double bonus. 

I wanted to walk before noon because my TL2 came to me in a dream during the night (I blame the full moon) and indicated that I wasn't using it enough. It felt neglected. I can understand. There are only so many days in a week and there are so many cameras that need walking around. So after early swim practice and a meager first breakfast I put on some long pants, grabbed a big hat, slapped on some sunscreen and headed out the door. Oh yeah. I also took the TL2 outfitted with Sigma's dandy little 24mm f3.5 Contemporary lens. A far more amiable package than the Art series 24mm 1.4 and the big SL2. 

I really liked being able to park near the pool since it's on the hike and bike trail around Lady Bird Lake. It's a good spot to start a walk from and an even better end point for a long walk on a hot day. 

I've gotten better at dealing with cameras that have no eye level finders or EVFs. I even had luck today shooting in bright sunlight. I guess it's a matter of training oneself. It's not my preferred way of shooting but it's not as odious a routine as I once suggested. Either that or rear LCD panels have gotten a lot better. 

A quick shot before starting my walk. Pool attendance was brisk today. 

And remember, if you want to come and swim laps for free you can do so between 

five a.m. and eight a.m. It's not crowded then either. But there are no 

guards and there are no underwater lights. Keep clear of the sides 

in the dark so the snakes don't get you......

One silver lining to the tremendous heat is that as the day goes along

there is less and less traffic on the walking trails. 

funny. That building wasn't there last time I looked...

I am enjoying the colors I get out of the .DNG files from the TL2

They are also very easy to work with in post. Lots of D.R.

Just on the other side of the bridge is the spot where a garbage truck driver 

tried to take the curve too fast and lost control of his huge vehicle. It skidded over

the curb and right into the hike and bike trail just as then governor, George Bush, was jogging by the same spot with his security entourage. The truck missed him by "that much."

And now we'll never know what history would have been like if we hadn't been 

manipulated into attacking Iran's arch-enemy, Iraq. Only to find that,

just like voter fraud, there were no weapons of mass destruction....

Thanks George. It's a Wonderful Life.

The 24mm lens and the TL2 body work seamlessly together. 

The angle of view is much like that of a 35mm on a full frame camera.

At the end of a long walk I was hot, tired, covered with sweat and a bit drained from the heat. But since I parked across from the pool and I had a brand new pass I.D. card in the car, I tossed my camera, wallet and pocket junk into the car (don't ever try this in San Francisco...), grabbed my swim pass and headed into the pool. Minutes later I slid into the 68° water and could actually feel my core temperature dropping minute by minutes. Once I felt good and cold I got dressed and headed back to the neighborhood on the daily search for coffee. Oh, and a blueberry bran muffin. Second breakfast. Now heading for lunch...

My first attempts with the Leica TL2 were misguided. I tend to treat every camera as I would a professional camera. I expect to spend time intervening in the settings, carefully examining the frames, adding my input where I felt it was appropriate. But the TL2 isn't like a Nikon D850 or even a Leica CL. It's really designed, I think, to be about as welcoming of "outside" instruction as a cellphone or an artist. 

I've decided that the optimal way to use the TL2 is to consider it a smartphone without any telephony capability. You trade the ability to make phone calls and trade on the stock market for a bigger sensor and interchangeable lenses but your approach to this camera should be the same as your approach to your iPhone. Wake the camera up, point it at the subject you'd like to capture, half press the shutter button to focus and then....commit. 

I have my TL2 now set up to shoot Raw+Jpeg Fine. AWB. S-AF. Single Frame. Auto-ISO. I point, make sure the green square lights up and then shoot. That's it. I never check a histogram but that's because I permanently have the camera set for minus two thirds of a stop with the exposure compensation. I figure if the frame is too dark I can easily fix it in post. This is, for all intents and purposes, a point and shoot camera; the iPhone of mini-cameras, etc. If you want to be more serious in your pursuits you might want to consider something more festooned with controls.

At some point my obvious contrarian nature will rear up and present itself by taking this small camera (with no finder) and putting the biggest and most expensive lens on the front of it. Something that absolutely dwarfs this little box. Then I will attempt to shoot a big and complex project with the odd and totally counterintuitive pairing. Stay tuned. 

For now I'm getting comfortable learning to enjoy this little camera in the way I think it was designed to be operated --- and enjoyed.

Also learning to ignore (for the most part) the heat and get on with life. It's all a mindset. 

Just remembering the great bar at Manuel's Restaurant on Congress Ave.

 

We shot more than a few ad campaigns there. It's been closed since the beginning of the pandemic. The north location is open. I keep wondering if the (hugely popular) downtown location will ever come back. 

Cameras and martinis. A good photographic combination. Add in great Tex-Mex food and you're set.

Untitled. Shot as a three story tall background for a Stephen Dietz play. A play with a constant reference to Jack Kerouac and "On the Road."

 

Erin Barlow. "Honey."

The photo looked great when it was projected thirty or forty feet tall. At the rear of the stage. We also projected video in exactly the same image style. It was nicely slow motion.

https://www.austinchronicle.com/arts/2013-03-29/mad-beat-hip-and-gone/

Portrait from 1979. Scanned from a print.

 

B. 1979

Everyone was beautiful and mysterious back then. It was a time before the "great rush" of life. The cellphones, the overnight delivery expectation. The instant "proof" on the rear screen of a camera. People had time to work on stuff and to sit for a while in conversation. Wish we could just grab some giant handle somewhere and slow everything back down. 

rumor on the web today is that Nikon (and by extension, Canon) are fully exiting the DSLR camera market. Now more moving mirrored mainstream cameras. I guess the real question is: "Does anybody care?" 

Visualizing Cooler Weather. Thanks Jennifer.

Jennifer heading out to ski.

On film. Hassleblad Camera. 180mm Carl Zeiss lens.

The weather people were all over the map. Predictions of another 110° day and dire warnings about the fragility of the electrical grid. It did get up to 105° but then, around 3:30 pm, we got a cooler front in from the West and even enjoyed about 17 minutes of mild rain. And a bit of wind. Nothing dramatic but in the space of thirty minutes we had a temperature drop of about ten degrees. And that was most welcome. 

Snow skiing. Yep. That's what I'm visualizing in the late afternoon. Goggles ready. Now we just need snow.

 

How is that new (to me) Leica CL holding up? How well does it work with the Sigma Contemporary 18-50mm f2.8 lens? Images from today's walk at 108°. Kinda stupid to do that....

Update: It officially hit 110° Fahrenheit today in Austin. 

Forecasting the same or higher for tomorrow.  

YIKES!

In case you can't tell I really like the color and sharpness of the files that come from the CL. These are all Jpeg files so my assessment includes that. The quality of the Jpegs is really good. And it's fun to have a small, light camera as an amiable companion. I'd buy it again. Oh....I did. 

 

This is Jo's Coffee on S. Congress. 

It's basically a giant kiosk in which coffee is made and tacos, pastries and sandwiches are sold.

There is no internal dining and no air conditioning. 

That didn't slow down business on this hot afternoon. But...

why would it? I mean....Coffee. 

Bad mural on the side of Hopdoddy's burger restaurant.

They are not good with marketing. They stay in business because

the burgers and fries are very good.

Oh look! Colors.

Oh Look! A 1966 Buick Skylark.

What do crazy people with cameras do on a day that's so hot the weather service is "strongly" recommending we stay inside? I can only speak for myself....

Update: It officially hit 110° Fahrenheit today in Austin. 

Forecasting the same or higher for tomorrow.  

YIKES!

Joseph. A fellow photographer hanging out at Jo's Coffee, sporting a nice, new

Sony A7R4 and some cool lens with an ND filter on the front. The heat doesn't 

bother him. He's from Louisiana...

You know how northerners and Canadians sometimes say stuff like: "It was so hot I could have fried an egg on the pavement."? And then they go on to say they really knew someone who actually did crack open an egg on the asphalt, in the hot sun and, by God! it actually fried. Took a while but it cooked. 

In Austin today I saw families over at the park putting ten pound briskets on the black top in the parking lots and cooking them to a medium rare in about 20 minutes. A 20 pound roast took a little longer... No need to boil water for coffee today, just put the kettle out in the sun for a few minutes and then bring it in and do your pour over. But be sure to use your oven mitts. Oh Hell! What am I saying? You might as well take those oven mitts with you everywhere. You might need to touch a door handle or pick up dropped car keys off the street. 

How hot is it here? Well, we had to cut morning swim practice a bit short because the water was starting to bubble and it got hard to see through the rising steam... One real danger is that it might get so hot that one's tires melt and the car gets stuck on the road. I'll stop now....

 But right now, at 3:33 p.m. it's already 108°

Look at the detail below. If you factor in the humidity 

the heat index spikes up to 115°

That's just nasty in anybody's book. 

Apocalyptic screen captures

 from the weather app on my phone.

It's interesting. We've seen these kinds of temperatures for the last few days but it's worse today than I've felt it in years. It's weather that's our equivalent of a blizzard day up in the north. We mostly get stuck in the house, praying that the baby Jesus doesn't decide to deliver a death blow to the Texas electrical grid, patting ourselves on the back for replacing every window in the house this Spring with multi-pane, UV coated, Space Shuttle grade windows, and checking to make sure we paid that last utility bill. In short, we....or at least I...have been hanging close to the air conditioning for so long I was starting to get cabin fever.

And there was a fresh and mostly untouched Leica CL hanging around that needed some love. And I bought a new polarizer for the Sigma 18-50mm f2.8. And, of course, I constantly delude myself into thinking that I'm still 25 years old, still in good enough shape to run a marathon and practical enough that I'll know when I've had enough exposure to the sun and will head back indoors before permanent damage sets in... Ah the delusions under which we operate. Mortality cozies up closer than I give it credit for...

About 11:30 a.m. I made sure I had a fresh memory card inserted and formatted in the most recently arrived Leica CL. I cleaned the front of the attached polarizing filter and put an extra battery in my pants pocket. Right next to my ring of keys. Then I fired up the Formula 500 Edition Subaru Forester and pointed it toward Austin's most popular Sunday gathering area; once a hot bed of state legislators cruising for prostitutes but now the red hot shopping and dining area know as "South Congress." Or, as no doubt influenced by the truncated language skills of UK inhabitants: "SoCo." (From the people who also brought you: "Uni", "Journos", "togs" "bangers and mash", and --- the hellish game of snooker). 

I parked at the far south end of the mile long retail/dining strip, crossed over to the popular side of the wide street and started walking with the idea that, since it is so damn hot, I'd make it to Jo's Coffee and then throw in the sweat soaked towel and head back to the car with a handful of images to play with for later. You know, for when it really gets hot. Some time around 5-ish.

I think, for many of the people I saw while I was out walking, the brain damage from the heat already happened. I saw couples and foursomes huddled into whatever shade they could find, sitting at outdoor dining venues in 105° temperatures, ordering hot food and alcohol. Pitchers of alcohol. They'll most likely be dead by morning. Perhaps it's a Darwinian thing. They seemed to be trying so hard to have --- fun.

I saw families in which every member was obese trundling along the sidewalks in full sun with sweat flowing off their bodies like Champagne fountains at a wedding. Faces beet red and emanating heat I could feel five feet away. Sorority girls dressed in black tights and black t-shirts sweating with equal intensity. And the whole time I was thinking "what's wrong with these people?" They were not homeless or even poor. Not if they were shopping and dining on South Congress. Why didn't they postpone their stroll and huddle in the nurturing bossom of air conditioning like the rest of us. Oh wait. I was out there too. Also sweating and turning red... 

The 18-50mm lens is wonderful on the CL camera. It's small and light and provides a nice range of focal lengths for street shooting and general fooling around with gear pursuits. Today's adventure was all about playing with colors and the polarizing filter. I wanted to make the skies darker and more saturated and I wanted to take the haze or reflection off painted signs and windows. I set the lens to f4.0, and sometimes f5.6 because I know them to be the best settings to get the wall-to-wall sharpness that makes wider shots pop better. Had I been making portraits I would have gone for f2.8 and then let the corner sharpness fall where it was going to. 

Everything was shot as Jpeg/large. The white balance was set at the little "sun" symbol because --- today --- it's all about the sun. I depended on the AF of the camera and lens and let everything else skitter about where it wanted to go. Auto ISO, for sure. 

It was hotter than stolen Leonardo da Vinci originals out there. You first feel it as an all around pressure on your skin, your face and your neck. After a few minutes of exposure you start to feel a slight overall sweat forming. And the sun and heat work in sync to sap your energy and reduce your peripheral awareness just enough to start missing stuff you would have noticed as potential photo subjects in cooler times. 

As the heat and humidity start to wear down your resistance to it you start to ration your energy. You look twice and maybe three times before walking down a long side street to see if a particular mural or brightly painted fence is... photo worthy. Will it reward you enough to balance out the additional heat stress? As you get hotter and hotter you start looking for the lowest hanging fruit of imaging. And even then you decide that you can only expend the energy needed for one or two frames before your brain once again drives you to the task of finding shade in which to walk, or into an interesting retail shop that seems promising for cold air conditioning. I must have looked at Stetson hats I had no intention of buying for the better part of 20 minutes. A welcome break after an hour of walking in the bubbling stew of red hot Summer. 

Jospeh's hat. Adapted and adorned by Joseph. Who, by the way, was 

shooting black and white files in his camera today! 

The mannequins are "saucier" on S. Congress.

Jo's Coffee is the magnet for the area. It's adjacent to the well gentrified 

San Jose Motel which is the destination of writers, musicians and movie makers 

who are "in the know" but not yet requiring the higher security of the Four Seasons Hotel. 

On the side of Jo's is the famous graffiti that was painting years and years ago. 

It's a popular Austin icon and has probably been repainted a couple dozen times over the years. 

When people, families, dates, etc. come to South Congress it's almost socially mandated

that they will make selfies or pose for photographs with the wall in the close background. 

Even when it is 108° 

When I came by today a line was forming. Patiently waiting their turns to be 

immortalized in front of the wall. Charming. 

Camera operated in full sun as if it was a phone....sad. 

There is no "indoors" at Jo's. By its very nature you will be drinking your coffee, eating your pastries and tacos, etc. outside in the heat. There is shade but it didn't hide anyone from the heat today.

 After an hour and a half I was starting to get that early warning signal one learns over the years of running, hiking and working outside in Texas Summers. It's a little voice that says something to the effect of...."You have about 30 minutes, maybe less, in the reserve tank of your heat resistance. After that you will become dramatically more "mortal" than you think you are. You will require water and air conditioning between now and that deadline. Go!" 

I ducked into the hat shop for one more look around and one more bout of shedding heat and then headed back to the car, keeping to as much shade as the environment could deliver. I turned on the car, fired up the A/C and knocked back 14 ounces of now warm water I had sitting in the center console. (I know, I know, had my car been in San Francisco that water bottle would be long gone by now. Stolen in an ever escalating crime wave....). 

By the time I got back to HQ the car's thermometer was reading 110° and the "feels like" index was a vicious 115°. One silver lining. My laundry load of swim towels never sees the clothes dryer. I spreed the towels out on the driveway and they are bone dry in minutes. Right nice to the prime rib I'm cooking on the driveway for dinner. 

Dress to be cool. Always wear a wide brim hat. Don't carry too much. Don't wait until you feel bad to find shelter. Drink twice as much water as you feel like you need to. And, just for fun, take a cold shower when you get home. Although the cold water now coming from the city utility is somewhere above 85°. Not as refreshing as it might be in the dead of Winter. Which may never recur.  I think the Beach Boys did an album about the future of Texas weather and seasons. If I remember correctly it's called, "Endless Summer." 

Hope you found the photos wonderful. I don't think the files got too sweaty...

Our idea of contemporary image quality depends on mis-remembering how good we already had it just a few years ago...

I'm as big a sucker for faulty memory syndrome as the next photographer. What is FMS? It's a condition that makes us remember the past as being worse, by far, than what we are living with right now. This condition rarely presents itself when thinking about general social history but does make itself felt when comparing different technologies. It is most prevalent when the victim is pondering things like cameras, cellphones and cars. 

In short the condition causes otherwise rational people to start remembering things they bought in the past in a worse way than reality would show was really true. Just as a random example let's look at FMS as it relates to buying and using digital cameras. If one had purchased a Panasonic GH5 camera in 2016 with the idea of using it for both still photography and video production, and had been satisfied with the performance of the camera at the time, that would establish a neutral baseline for effectively evaluating the results of the camera. If no enormous breakthroughs in technology occur (and history shows us that most camera improvements are incremental....very incremental)  then the satisfaction with a unit's performance should be a straight and continuous line. No change in satisfaction as long as the equipment continues to produce results that are equal to, or actually outperform, the limitations of the media for which the gear is intended. In people without FMS the gear in question, if found to be satisfactory (not the weak link in the imaging chain) would continue being used until such a time as it became non-functional. Or unrepairable. 

After all, the cost of the gear has already been amortized and if it continues to produce exactly the same results then nothing in the process of use or evaluation needs to change. In short, it is usually the performance boundaries of the media that are the limiting factor in most photographic situations and not the imaging prowess or lack thereof of the camera or lens.

But in the minds of victims of FMS a different sort of process takes place. When new gear is introduced to replace previous models the "patient" makes a flawed presumption that any newer model is obviously  superior to the old model and (this is where the disconnection takes place...) that the new "improvements" are so spectacular and so obvious that the new camera (or lens) will make visually obvious improvements that will be discernible in all images created for the same use case/media that the previous model was already ably fulfilling. The mind of an FMS victim makes an immediate assumption that any lost "potential" by way of not having immediate access to the new unit's improvements (however incremental; if they exist at all) will degrade the overall quality of their experience. Even if the potential is never realized in actual practice. The victim will "know" that the work "could be better." 

A good example would be the compulsion to replace a 24 megapixel camera with a 48 megapixel camera when the output from either camera is presented as a 6 megapixel image on a 6 bit viewing screen. If the viewing screen isn't capable of at least 25 megapixels of resolution then both cameras would be equally  capable of meeting or exceeding the limitations of the medium. A fact-based evaluation which is lost on the logic circuits of FMS victims. They invariably presume that any specification improvement will add to the potential improvement of the final image. 

This misguided assumption triggers a hormone release that floods certain areas of the brain which in turn compels the victim to immediately pull whatever credit card still has an available credit limit attached and rush to acquire the new model. With the new model in hand a process begins in which the memories stored in the camera comparison area (CCA) of the brain begin to mis-remember the performance of the previous camera as being worse and more "impaired" than it was. This leads to comparison differential enhancement in which the victim is hyper-sensitized to any change or perceived change in imaging capabilities between the models. Like "monsters under the bed" each parameter of the older camera that can be called into question will be, even if there is no objective discrepancy between the old and new model in the determined use cases. 

There is even a law called the imagined emphasis of disappointment which comes into play. Stated simply the law of IED says that the lower the skill set of the victim the more emphatically he or she will blame the difference between the old and new camera when comparing contemporaneous images with images taken in the past. Even if, to all other viewers, the images are identical. The idea of past camera disappointment (PCT) grows as the hormones trigger a buy-or-cry response which drives the victim to make the purchase in order to temporarily stave off feelings of depression and photographic inadequacy. 

For a GH5 user this might mean getting a newer GH6. Or, in the case of someone with a severe case of FMS it could even mean having to buy the interim upgraded model, say ---- a GH5ii ---- as a holding strategy until they are able to buy the aforementioned GH6. There is always a linear drive toward the newest or most fully specced model. 

The only cure is to go back and carefully reexamine work done previously with the older cameras or older lenses to evaluate whether or not the new model rises above the limitations of the existing media (a website? An Instagram post?) and yields observable improvements. If there is no visible change in the quality of presentation in the "target" media then no change really needs to be made. 

In most cases, however, the victim remains in denial even after many observations are made by objective and expert third party investigators. At this point one of two things happen. If the victim is financially able they are consigned to having to buy each new product release or even each new camera system, the marketing of which has even the smallest promise of technical improvement. The other solution is to buy in the same way until the victim is either bankrupted, or both bankrupted and institutionalized...  It's generally incurable by logic or argument. 

With all this laid out in front of me I happened to start looking at images taken back in 2015-2016 with an ancient and primitive Panasonic GH5 camera. FMS victims today would tell you quickly that those cameras had "very limited dynamic range" and "were impossible to use with any sort of autofocusing." 

Since I had recently sold off some GH5s and more recently replaced them with, first a GH5ii and then a GH6, I thought I owed it to my last gasp of rationality to go back and see if the files in the older camera were really as poor and woeful as my brain was trying to convince me was the case. Did the potential improvements justify the buying imperative?

First things first. I was shocked, SHOCKED to find that both images presented here were focused automatically by the ancient camera. Diving into 100% magnification revealed that they were, indeed, in focus!!! Then I looked at dynamic range and tried to see the huge impediments to visual excellence that the now obsolete camera must have certainly introduced. I found that the files were at least the equal of the media we used in order to promote the show we were photographing for. The files had ample DR for web use and, remarkably, they could be well printed at sizes up to 11x17 on a four color press without losing highlight or shadow detail. 

Is the GH6 that much better? Not in those two uses. Not at all. I was shocked. I had to take a tranquilizer and lie down with a cold washrag across my forehead. The shock of objectivity was almost too much to bear.

Sadly, slowly, and with great resignation, I had to admit that I'd been infected with FMS and had been remembering older camera performance in an inaccurate way. Through the smudged and dirty eyeglasses  of self delusion. 

Just a cautionary note to those of us who are constantly on the search for "new and improved" gear. We might be suffering from FMS, as it relates camera tech. The cure? Unknown. A preventative? A strong spouse with control over the credit cards. The damage? Still to be determined. 

I am starting a foundation to help photographers afflicted with FMS. We'll be accepting contributions as soon as the website is set up. Please, though, don't send in cameras as contributions --- it just makes the syndrome worse...

Both images were taken using a GH5 camera and an Olympus 12-100mm lens. Long since made "obsolete" to victims of FMS by the introduction of two newer camera models in that line. But still usable and competitive to non-victims.

( just a note for the obdurate: I am not starting a foundation. The mention of it was an attempt at humor).