7.21.2022
Three more samples from this morning's photographic adventure in heat management. G9+25mm Summilux.
Revisiting a very powerful pair. The Panasonic G9 and the Leica Summilux 25mm f1.4 type 2. Wow! Sharp and color rich.
7.20.2022
Weird camera and lens combinations involving weird cameras and weird lenses.... Or what we do when it's too hot to play outdoors.
I love being out taking photographs far more than I like talking about cameras but the weather is actively campaigning against me spending much time tromping around in the nasty heat jungle that seems to have settled over Texas. Perhaps it's a karmic punishment for our political transgressions. Maybe it's just a rogue weather pattern that won't let go. But right now we've got an actual temperature of 105° and when you combine that with 30% humidity you wind up with a lusty 112° of heat index; or what it feels like to your body. We're exceeding our "Wet Bulb" threshold by a good margin.
As of July 19th Summer we have had 78 days over 90° (actual temps) and now 41 days in a row over 100°. We're all getting just a little tired of the relentlessness of it all. Can't wait to see the electric bills....sigh.
I've been getting up earlier in order to water the plants and trees that I consider "mission critical" to my long term lifestyle/mental health. The Japanese maples are getting special treatment these days. I've even rigged up a few scrims to block the direct sun on a few branches that were showing signs of heat stress. It's hard work but it would be harder on me to lose the trees. They are quite beautiful.
After I take care of my horticultural chores I make myself a cup of (these days....) decaffeinated coffee, eat a piece of toast and head over to the pool for our coached workout. The water temperature is as cold as we can make it with evaporative coolers but with our daytime highs and nighttime non-lows we're struggling to keep the water temperature under 84°. That's a hot swim and it sucks the moisture right out of your body when you are swimming hard. We each keep a cold, re-usable bottle of water at the end of our lanes and in between sets our coaches encourage ample re-hydration. I didn't used to take it very seriously but this year I'm zealous. Sixteen ounces an hour.
Sadly, or happily, I took a break on Monday from swimming with the team and went to the Deep Eddy Pool which is Spring fed and just freaking marvelous. The spring water is refilled every couple of days and it comes out of the wells at something like 68°. Plunging in on Monday morning was a little bit of heaven. The laps were better than free money. But now I feel that the memory of the perfect water colors my appreciation of our team workouts in the warmer pool. Deep Eddy is a public pool and I'm pretty sure the City of Austin isn't going to invite our whole team over to monopolize all the lap lanes any time soon.
Since the "mercury" has been hitting 100° or higher by noon each day I try to get errand running done as quickly as possible. Our house uses a septic system for wastewater and our septic guy, Bob, recommends we drop a gallon of a special live, beneficial bacteria solution ($48 per gallon !!!) into the main tank at least twice a year. The stuff in the gallon bottle smells really bad but I can tell you that the grass is much greener over the septic field --- and we haven't had any major problems with the system in years. Occasionally a pump fails. It gets replaced. And yes, I do have a septic guy. I hope he never retires...
Except for a few assignments inside chilly high rise office buildings we're dead in the water here, business-wise. And that's okay. Nearly everyone in Austin who can swing it is working from home, nestled in their air conditioned refuges. Few are venturing out in the heat of the day. I'm no different.
If you've read the blog for a while you know I'm usually a big adherent of getting out in the afternoons and walking no matter what the weather. But not in this. If people won't come to work and there's little traffic on the roads it's probably a message from the hive that we should all just slow down and be more careful than usual. So, since I got home with the septic stuff I've been chilling in the house, just reading a novel on the couch. But I got bored so I ventured out the twelve feet from the front door of the house and into the studio. I've been keeping the A/C in there at 85° when I'm not present --- that's what our power company recommends --- so I turned the thermostat down to 78° and got comfortable.
On the floor by my desk I found a camera and lens that I'd put together for some project that never happened but I'm more and more attracted to the potential of the actual "system". The lens is an ancient Carl Zeiss zoom lens made originally for the Contax Y/C system but rejuvenated by the mirrorless revolution and the availability of a huge range of cheap lens mount adapters. Yes. Even for the L mount cameras.
I've shot with it before and posted about it here. The lens is big and bumbly. It's a 35-135mm and I have to say that this must be the absolutely perfect focal range for me. I don't miss the wider angles at all and I love being able to zoom out to 135mm. It's slow by today's standards in several ways. First the variable aperture is from f3.3 to f4.5. Certainly not a problem on a camera like the Panasonic S5 or the Sigma fp. Those two cameras can pretty much see in the dark. The lens is also "slow" because it's a manual focusing lens with a long throw focusing ring and that makes for sloooow focusing. Finally, it's a one touch zoom in that the zoom ring and the focusing ring are one and the same. The whole front of the lens trombones out as you zoom to 135mm. It takes practice to make this combination of focusing and zooming efficient.
When I use the lens on a non- image stabilized body focusing gets progressively harder as the focal length gets longer. Why? because the finder image shakes. We're spoiled by new tech.
I mounted this slow, plodding lens on the front of the weirdest camera I have in the studio. That's the Sigma fp. It's an eccentric little genius of a camera and when you get everything just right the files are wonderful. They just exude "art." But it's a demonic looking system when put all together, as above.
I'm only comfortable using it on a tripod and for this particular lens I really have to have the big Sigma loupe attached to shade and magnify the rear LCD. I'm pretty sure I'll never run into anyone out in the field who has exactly the same set up. The odds are long.
But when it's hot outside and you're playing with your toys in the miracle that is air conditioning it's all good. Can't wait till we get some cooler days so I can get out and shoot with this beast of a system. Stay cool.
https://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2022/06/testing-old-lens-thats-new-to-me-and.html
7.19.2022
Camera guys love to "modify" their cameras. I am no exception. Just added....
7.18.2022
Photographing in very hot weather.
My first suggestion for working in extreme heat is to weigh carefully the necessity of doing so. Can the project wait? Are you acclimated to working in the heat or will you be putting yourself at risk by doing so? Remember that taking a chance and getting injured means you'll be taking up emergency resources and potentially even putting the first responders at risk as well. If you are not used to the heat and haven't built up a resistance over time my best advice is to find somewhere chilly and settle in until the heat wave passes. But, if you don't like that advice let's get into what you can do to stay reasonably safe.
1. You've got to stay hydrated. I usually don't carry a camera bag or backpack with me when I go out shooting during most days. The exception is when I'm working in the heat. Anything over 95° makes me more cautious. If I'm being cautious I bring a small shoulder bag or backpack and I bring along two 16 ounce bottles of water. If I'm being indulgent I fill one of the bottles with ice from the freezer and top it off with water. It'll stay cool for a while. I start drinking before I start feeling thirsty and you should too.
Figure on downing at least eight ounces per hour. Minimum. If the heat and humidity combined yields a heat "index" (or "feels like") of 105 or higher then double that. If you are bigger than I am add more to the total. Your goal should be draining your last supplies just about the time you make it back to your car or your air conditioned destination.
I also keep a 32 ounce bottle of water in my car, right next to my swim gear. If I'm feeling a bit overheated when I make it back I will soak my shirt and hat (but not my straw hat!) with some of the water and couple that cooling power and the evaporative cooling with that of my car's air conditioning. Even standing in the shade, soaking wet, with a slight breeze will go a long way toward lowering my skin temperature and helping to lower my core temperature. When we worked in the vineyards last August for the Texas Wine project I tried to keep my shirt and hat damp and cooler as I worked. It sure helps.
2. When walking through city streets you'll usually find one side of the street is in shade and the other in direct sun. Obviously you want to walk on the shaded side which generally means avoiding being at a location during a time when the sun is directly overhead because.....no shade. For downtown Austin this means the best shooting times are from sun up till about 11:00 a.m. and then again from 2:30 p.m. till sunset.
3. Think about devising ongoing shade for your black bodied cameras and their black bodied lenses. I love shooting photographs with a Leica SL but there's a design flaw that comes to the fore when you get out in super hot, direct sun. The body is made of black metal and it acts as a heat magnet. If you leave it out in the sun it can get hot enough to burn your hands and, even worse, the heat affects the electronic noise of the system which makes your images noisier and peppered with various visual artifacts. There are a couple solutions. I have actually thought of painting one of the two SL cameras white. I'd do this to reflect the sunlight and reduce the heat absorption. It's a radical idea. But a more practical idea would be to bring along a small shoulder bag that's made in a very light color and keeping the camera and lens in the bag until such a time as you need it. Sure, it's not a quick approach to street photography but the upside is no burned hands and no images ruined by noise caused by excessive heat.
With a camera that's well sealed against moisture and dust intrusion you might even consider wetting down the camera bag to take advantage once again of evaporative cooling. Works best on canvas bags. The same bag that carries your water supply.
4. Hopefully you will sweat as you walk out on the streets in the heat and humidity. That consistent sweat goes a long way towards keeping you alive. But it's a bit problematic when it comes to camera handling since sweaty hands are slippery hands. I carry a small, white terry cloth rag with me, stuffed into the side of the camera bag or in a back pocket. I use it to wipe the sweat off my hands before handing the camera. In a pinch I can wet the rag and use it around my neck to cool off. Sweating though is good but it's also a sign that you need to keep drinking water. If you stop sweating on a hot day you are already in trouble and need to seek shelter and help as quickly as possible.
5. It's hard to find sunglasses that are not polarized but it may be well worth the effort for two reasons. First of all I'm sure you've noticed that everything, every sky, every lake or pond looks better and more exciting through polarized sunglasses so if that's your point of visual reference you'll be disappointed when the images you photograph don't match the enhanced sizzle that you see through your polarized sunglasses. A pair of sunglasses without the polarization will still do a good job blocking UV and IR energy from hitting your eyes and bringing along the prospect of long term, progressive damage, and you'll be able to see your intended photo subject in a realistic way. And deal with it accordingly.
But the second reason is that with some EVF viewfinders and LCD rear screens you might lose the view altogether. I noticed recently that when used the Leica CL in the landscape mode I was able to see the rear screen with no issues; even with my polarized, prescription sunglasses on but when I turned the camera to portrait mode the viewfinder blacked out. The polarizing screen and the grid screen on the camera cancelled each other out. In that case I pulled off my sunglasses and composed the now revealed image again but it delayed the shot and also gave me something else to keep my hands overly filled.
I fished around in the center console of the car later that afternoon and unearthed a pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses that were not polarized and found that, while the sky didn't look nearly as exciting, the screens of my camera didn't black out when I turned them by 90 degrees. If you are into pre-visualization the polarizing nature of some sunglasses isn't doing you any artistic favors. Yes for driving and boating but, sadly, no for working with cameras of various vintages. ( I first saw this effect, the blacking out of a screen, with the optical finder of the Mamiya 6. I think owning several of those cameras is what drove me to buy the Ray-Bans in the first place.
6. Dress for it. Going out in a "Summer" wool suit with a Nicole Miller necktie is very much contraindicated. You'll roast and probably spend a fortune getting the suit cleaned back up. The reaction from people unaccustomed to severe heat is usually to wear a pair of shorts and a tank top or t-shirt. Maybe a pair of sandals. A baseball hat (uniquely American?). And that's okay when you are dealing with lower temperatures and lower UV energy ranges (thinking 70-95°) but it's the super strong rays of the sun that drive up the heat so you need two things: clothes that breathe and wick away sweat for better cooling, but also clothes that cover as much skin as possible. You really don't want to sport a bad sunburn in conjunction with uncomfortably high ambient temperatures. It's discomfort squared.
I want a long-sleeved shirt made from a very thin fabric that invites breezes and does a good job wicking away sweat --- again, thinking about the evaporative cooling effect. But I also want a shirt that is rated at 30 or 40 or more SPF or UPF to keep my skin from burning. A shirt with vents is also great. And do yourself a favor --- we know artists are supposed to go around dressed in black --- but just for this special situation consider light colors. White, near white, almost white, sorta white and, in a pinch a very light beige. You want the most reflection of heat and radiation you can get commensurate with providing enough protection. Sure, you won't look as cool without the black turtleneck but you'll actually be cool(er).
Same with pants. Unless you want to play "Where's Waldo?" down the road with various skin cancer tumors you'll want to cover those "I mostly work indoors on a computer" legs. There's a clothing maker called Kuhl that makes great long pants with vents hither and yon and they are cool to wear. My favorites are the REI Sahara pants which feature thin fabric, stated protection and the ability to zip off the legs of the trousers, below the knees. Which in most situations (other than extreme heat) is tres nerdy. I wear them long when in the sun for all the reasons we've already covered but I sometime zip off the lower legs when I'm somewhere with cool air so they can help me lower my core temperature. I hide behind my sunglasses while doing so.
That covers the middle but don't forget the top and the bottom of the package. You know you need a hat. But it's not the time for a beaver pelt, Stetson, Open Road hat. They don't breathe at all and they insulate your head like crazy. You'll fry your brains! You need a good bucket hat or, God forfend, something like a wide brim Tilley-esque hat. Something that casts shade on your face and especially the tops of your ears. But also something with some flow through ventilation near the top.
I have more hats than I have cameras and that's saying something. But a good hat can help keep you cool, will protect your skin and has the added benefit of acting as a lens hood for your own optical system; your eyes. If I'm planning be outside for a long period of time I grab for the hat with the biggest brim in the stack. The bigger the brim the more available shade for your neck and shoulders, and it's just basic science that the less radiant heat you soak up the better you'll feel and the longer you can go. This Summer's favorite is a bucket hat I bought from REI. It's their store brand. I like it because it's very light weight, has a wide enough brim, and the brim is flexible enough to give when I press a camera up to my eye. And about a third the price of a Tilley chapeau. The Billingham bag of hats....
At the other end it seems to make sense to wear sandals but you would be wrong. On a nasty hot day you have too much danger of getting parts of those naked feet burnt to blisters by the sun. But another consideration is the surfaces you'll be walking across. If you are spending a lot of time on pavement or, even worse, asphalt, you'll find that the ground beneath your feet has done an exemplary job of soaking up heat. Especially black top. A sturdy pair of hiking shoes or mid-weight hiking boots is actually the optimum tool for the job. The thicker soles do a better job of insulating you from the pavement. The thicker soles slow the heat transfer way down. Long term your feet will get less hot even though that seems counter-intuitive. Plus good, enclosed shoes are better for stomping on scorpions or accidentally stepping on broken glass or nails.
7. With extreme heat comes extreme UV radiation so it almost goes without saying that you should cover any exposed skin with a good sunscreen. Even the parts of your face that exist under your bucket hat. Remember, there is such a thing as reflection. You might even consider using a reflective umbrella. Create our own, wider shade...
8. Plan your activities with an eye to accessing cooling interior spaces. If you start to get too hot take refuge in a hotel lobby, a library, a museum or a coffee shop. On the days where my planning is off and my immediate feeling is that I've bitten off more than I can chew (heat-wise) I make a straight line to the W Hotel. They have a cool lobby and it's rare anyone is there. I mean, in the lobby. In the winter I sometimes go in for a ridiculously expensive coffee but I don't mind the price since I consider that I'm offsetting my taking advantage of their largess in the Summer months. Twenty or thirty minutes of cooling, along with a good act of re-hydration, can literally be a lifesaver. And if you feel as though you can't go on you've got a nice place to wait for a car share ride back to your vehicle.
I've got downtown planned out so I'm rarely more than 800 yards from some refuge from the heat. You should plan for that too.
9. Park your car in the shade. Put up the windshield sunscreen. If you can't find a shady spot or there are no shady spots then go ahead, piss away the money, and park in a garage. You'll be much happier if you come back to a warm car rather than a raging inferno of a car interior. And your car will thank you for at least temporarily reducing the heat stress. If it's hot for more than a week be sure to monitor your car's battery. Heat is one of the biggest causes of premature battery death. And being stuck somewhere when the temperatures are hitting the danger zone is absolutely no fun.
10. This is my final number and a catchall for everything else.
Don't bring along a lot of black metal. Like that enormous, black metal Benro tripod I own. The metal soaks up heat like a sponge and transfers it efficiently back to your waiting hands. Ditto black light stands, etc. Leave all that stuff at home. You'll quickly get too tired to carry it as you spend more time in the inclement heat. It has a way of draining energy from even the most disciplined workers. Same with black hats, black backpacks and the like.
Walk slower. You don't have to walk in slow motion but if you usually walk at a brisk pace tone it down about bit because every added bit of speed takes its toll on the body. Find a pace that's comfortable instead of competitive. It might take a bit longer to get anywhere but with street photography and what not isn't the journey the important thing? I walk a about sixteen minutes per mile in comfortable weather. I measured last Sunday when it was near 110° and my pace was about 25 minutes per mile. For about a mile. Before I realized that walking in that dangerous stew of heat and humidity might kill me.
Always tempting somewhere along the route to stop in some where for a cold, frosty beer. Normally I'd be right there with you but in extreme heat that brewski will dehydrate you at the speed of light. And the affects of the alcohol will be enhanced. But if we're talking extreme conditions it's the exact time that you need all your wits about you because the heat saps your attention and your reasoning skills.
Finally, if you start to feel bad get into someplace out of the heat and get help right away. Heat kills far, far more people every year than even the worst cold. Quick action saves lives. And, if you want to be a good guy, be sure to keep an eye on all those people around you, watching for signs of heat exhaustion and other distress. Your quick action might save, or at least improve, some stranger's life.
Also.....finally, finally, don't take your dogs out in this. The pavement will torture their paws and they don't shed heat nearly as efficiently as humans. Taking Rover out in an urban heat jungle is just cruel.
Bring an extra battery for the camera. The heat affects them too. Keep your cameras cool enough so the lubricants in the lenses don't vaporize and coat the internal elements. That'll save you money.
Be careful out there. And, if this is a wildly unusual circumstance for you then you have my empathy and my sympathy. Go slow and stay in the shade. And have that water bottle handy.
all done for now.
7.17.2022
Reading the blog on small iPads. Hmmm.
One of my readers wrote to ask about the readability of the blog on an iPad. I'll take a stab at answering but I probably need some additional info from other readers who have a successful time reading the fonts on their iPads.
As I understand it, Blogger, who hosts the blog and provides templates for content creation, makes several formats available. One is formatted for traditional desktop viewing and another is set up for iOS or phone operating systems. The iPad uses iOS as its operating system so the hope is that the iPad automatically gets the slimmed down version with font sizes optimized for viewing on the smaller screen.
When I open VLS on my phone it seems to automatically select the right format and it is readable even on my small phone screen (10XR).
There might be an icon up in the bar with the URL that one can click to switch between systems or formats.
Can someone who uses an iPad to read the blog respond and flesh this explanation out a bit?
Thanks, Kirk
Thanking Phil for pushing me to research the intent of the T-shirts in a previous post.
Turns out it's anti-Joe Biden, anti-Liberal, hate thing promulgated by the reich-wing here in the USA. You can Google the t-shirt slogan if you want more info. I'd suggest you not bother.
I'm not a fan of fascism or child indoctrination in hate speech so as soon as I researched this I raced back to the blog and deleted those images.
Sorry to not have done my research sooner.
I have friends on both sides of the aisle but I draw the line at nasty hate speech and adolescent innuendo.
Reasonable people can disagree but there it is. Ageism is just as nasty as rascism.
thanks for the push Phil.
7.16.2022
Brain fried after a week of retouching and compositing portrait files for two different clients. Be careful what you bid....
Ab Astris Winery. Grape Harvest. Summer 2021.
Camera: Sigma fp
Lens: Sigma 24-70mm f2.8
Over the last several weeks I had a couple of clients who really wanted to get a bunch of environmental portraits done of their people. When I talked to the people requesting the photos they each suggested that they really liked environmental shots done either outdoors or in various locations that were indoors but showed the outdoors through windows.
When we first started talking the temperatures in Austin were already stultifying. In fact, we just set a new record last week for the highest average temperatures in a seven day week. Our average temperature (coolest night time and hottest daytime - averaged) was 92.5° Fahrenheit. Over the last week, during working hours, the high temps ranged from 110° and 105°. And we are not living in a super dry desert; we bundle the heat with the humidity for heat indexes as high as 115°.
After talking to both sets of clients I realized we needed to deal with two different issues. One client wanted all outdoor shots and the heat made that ... inadvisable. No matter where we shot in Austin anyone in work clothes would have to get to a good location and there were none we know of (or that the client liked) where someone could drive up in an un-air conditioned car, hop out, get photographed in a few minutes and then leap back into the comfort of their still running vehicle and drive away. So we needed a solution for shooting exterior Texas location portraits without dragging employees into the great, baking outdoors. Otherwise I'd need to take a crash course in retouching sweat covered faces and melting make-up.
The solution I presented was to photograph each employee against a light, neutral background, in an air conditioned space, and then drop them into a previously shot image from one of the environmental backgrounds we all agreed we liked. So that's the way I photographed them. A bunch of people on soft white seamless and then a bunch of actual location backgrounds from a quasi corporate location. I brushed off the whole process of doing convincing composites as being "easy as pie"; especially when armed with the new selection tools in PhotoShop.
With the second group we didn't have to discuss much to get them "on the bus" when it came to photographing everyone inside. In fact, it worked well for them because they had their annual board meeting at a local hotel and were happy to rent an extra conference room there and schedule all of their people into a four hour time chunk of time. The bigger challenge was getting a good selection of background images that represented corporate environments and which would also read well when made out-of-focus so we could keep the attention on the human subjects.
The shoots came off without much of a hitch. I did learn one thing that was interesting to me. I've heard for years from other photographers that some lenses are just too sharp to use when taking portraits. I never really experienced that, or believed that, before. But with both of these portrait sessions, just days apart, I used the new (to me) Panasonic/Leica 42.5mm f1.2 short telephoto lens on the new GH6. Okay. The lens is too sharp for portraiture. When I opened the files in Photoshop they revealed every nook and cranny and every pore on every face. In the raw conversions the preset for sharpening is something like +40. I had to set the sharpening during raw conversion to "off" (or zero). Anything else was just cruel.
I've been making portraits of people on locations for .... decades. I have that part of the process down. But the part that's relatively new to me is compositing something like 32 different people's images onto a collection of backgrounds of office interiors, industrial exteriors and general corporate environments.
I bid a day to do the post production work on the second job. It took two full days of sitting in front of my computer fixing double chins, getting rid of layer matting, matching colors and general contrasts, and even just trying out a certain background with a certain person and quickly realizing that the two images just didn't resonate well with each other --- which sent me back to the "selected backgrounds" folder to try a few other options instead.
I'd never really admit it to a client but a lot of the time was spent using the liquify tools to take the appearance of weight off various subjects. That, and fixing double chins were the two most time intensive parts of the process but I'm happy to let people believe that I'm just really good at lighting them well. I never really want to explain just how much retouching actually gets done on some photographs. It would be borderline cruel.
I delivered the files to both clients this week. The bigger job just went out yesterday, at the end of the work day. I took a few notes:
I'll never bid a project with intensive post processing without first testing the procedures I'm going to use first, and keeping track of just how much time each image will take. Especially the worst case scenarios. I thought I could ballpark it but I guessed wrong. I'm also out of practice at sitting still for long periods of time and my attention would wander over to that newish pair of hiking boots in the corner....and the lovely camera and lens on the edge of my desk. And that hot dusty trail that might need human company...
So, why would I put myself through this work stuff? Why not just stop working and retire? Hmm. When you've built a client base and have been successful at raising prices to at least keep up with inflation there's always the lure of potentially living from your cash flow. You may have saved up a huge nest egg of cash and you may have done so well that you'll never run out, but if you've been running a business for decades, and living completely from the cash flow that the business generates, then actually accessing your own savings instead is a new and painful process that has (yet) to be mastered. And I'm not about to learn this new trick yet. Especially when the markets are down.
I know my brain well enough that I can almost hear the little hamster wheel spin when I think about which jobs to accept and which ones to pass on. Knowing our family's general burn rate and also my general tolerance, or intolerance, for being trapped by scheduled work I'm always looking for jobs that can be completed in three days or less which have the potential to return enough in fees to cover one month of our minimum burn rate. If I can consistently do three days (or a few more) in a month and hit the needed budget then that's one more month that retirement investments can remain in their accounts and create more future money. "Photographers become exhausted. Their money never gets tired of working...." (Robert Adams).
The balance is to find the types of jobs, and the clients who have the jobs, that provide a good working base. The other part of the balance is to get rid of the clients whose jobs you don't enjoy, who don't want to pay what you need to offset your burn rate with the least amount of long term work or commitment.
Next time I'll know to bid more on the post processing part of a job. It's part of the ever-present segment of the learning curve.
Oh, and next time I shoot a portrait for a client I'll find a less over-achieving lens with which to do it.
The Nocticron is great for shooting gritty, contrasty, ultra sharp art portraits and photos but there's no instance in which I would describe it as "flattering."
Learning to live well with the heat. Or in spite of the heat. Pray for our fellow humans in the UK. They are about to experience the same kind of intense heat wave but, for the majority, without the gift of air conditioning.... Yikes.