I am becoming my own Cindy Sherman. These are still images from my yet to be made movie. One day people will be able to buy them in a gallery. The payoff will be spectacular.

anonymous urban photographer.

 anonymous artist working in the photographic medium.

The very first lens I ever bought for an interchangeable lens camera. Somewhere back in the 1970s. Still works.

 

Back when I was a poor, poor student I worked part time at a "hi-fi" store that was situated at the bottom of a high rise dormitory just on the edge of the UT campus. The bottom two floors of the building were for retail and restaurants. Across the walk way from our hi-fi shop was Austin's preeminent camera store, Capitol Camera. They had all the good stuff. When I started working in the shop in 1976 everyone around me was also into cameras and photography. Really into it.

I'd been photographing with a Canon G3 QL17 and loved it but the path forward was obviously an SLR with a "real" lens on the front of it. I saved for months and months and bought the least expensive Canon SLR at the time. It was a Canon TX and it came in a kit with that 50mm f1.8 FD lens (above). The camera, lens and I were inseparable. Home-rolled Tri-X film from a bulk loader and a membership to the Ark Cooperative Darkroom rounded out the my early and long initiation into the wonderful world of photography. 

The camera got traded in a long time ago. It was perfectly usable but pretty primitive. The top shutter speed of 1/500th of a second was the sticking point that moved me along to my next camera. I think that one was a Canon EF...

But the lens stayed around. This morning I put it on a cheap adapter and then onto a Leica SL camera. This puts me mostly back into all manual territory but with a few perks. One is that I can use the rig in aperture priority automatic. Another is that I can use auto-ISO. And the best perk is that I can magnify part of the frame for very accurate (manual) focusing. It's important to also know that you are always working in the stopped down mode with these adapted lenses. Whatever aperture is set on the lens is the aperture you are viewing and focusing with. But it's neither an impediment nor a blessing. It just is.

Even though this particular lens is about 46 years old the aperture ring works fine, the blades stop down correctly and the focusing ring is still mostly smooth and still pretty well dampened. The glass is clean and clear and the distance scale, even when the lens is used on an inexpensive adapter, is accurate. 

In our current time when lenses have become huge and everyone seems obsessed with optical perfection it's a wonderful vacation to work with a "lesser" lens. But I don't mean to imply that there's anything wrong with the lens. Just that it only has six elements in five groups, there are only six aperture blades and they are NOT curved for bokeh enhancement. and the lens coatings are primitive when compared to current products. 

If you have an interest in working with a vintage product like this you'll find zillions of them on the big auction site and generally there are always some available on KEH.com. Expect to pay less than $50 for all but the most exquisitely "mint" copies. In exchange you'll get a small, light, easy to handle lens that you'll want to stop down to about f 3.5 or f4.0 in order to get nicely sharp images. More aperture....up to f8.0 keeps improving the sides and corners and....adds to the already sharp central core of the images. 

When I came back home from my exploration with this old friend I was so happy with the way it worked in the "field" and the way the images looked in Lightroom that I called my local camera merchant and asked my expert if they had any other Canon FD glass in their used inventory. I'm currently looking for three focal lengths. I'd like a 35mm f2.0, a 50mm f1.4 and any one of an assortment of 85-100mm lenses. As long as they work and the optics are good I'll take em. 

Why? Because sometimes perfection isn't as perfect as it's cracked up to be. And most of these lenses are still very good performers with unique "fingerprints." Couple that with "smaller and lighter" and you have the winning formula for making the kind of images I like. Kind of consider it embracing "good enough" in trade for smaller, lighter and less stuffy. 

By the way, the kid is doing well. Eating like a horse (I forgot that 26 year olds can really put it away...) and recovering quickly. 

Here's some images from this morning: 

This is where I park when I go downtown. It's shaded from about 1pm onward. 

It's on a quiet, non-residential street and it's in front of law offices, etc. 

It's safe and I've never had to pay a meter there...

That white car is mine.

This place closed early in the pandemic (2020) and nothing has happened yet with the space. 

I'm endlessly curious about it. It's a really nice restaurant and bar space...

note the presence of direct light and no flare. Seems people could make 

very satisfactory, cheap lenses even 46 years ago.

 I like the black and white straight out of the Leica SL. It's nice.

A different color palette.

Plenty detailed. The lens has a decent ability to deliver resolution and sharpness when used 

at f4.5 or f5.6. I'd use it to this day; even for work.

It's safe to presume that what were considered failings of earlier lenses used on earlier digital cameras has been largely remedied by toning down the AA filters on newer, higher res digital cameras and also making the filter stacks thinner so light rays didn't get clipped as they moved toward the corners and edges of sensors. Better sensor technology lifts all lenses. Even these older, "made-for-film" lenses we've held onto. 

Got any old Canon lenses sitting around? Ready to get rid of that 100mm f2.0 or f2.8? No use for that 50mm f1.4 that's just sitting on the edge of your desk in your Summer house? No space in your Leica drawer for "lesser" glass? We can help.

Oppressively hot here but I'm staying indoors and acting as the boy's butler this week. I'm hoping for a generous tip but you know the reputation these millennials have.....

Okay. I have to partially reverse my previous position on Peak Designs camera straps. Familiarity overcomes contempt.

I have composited myself into this background. I shot the "Kirk" shot in 

the studio against a gray background. Beats using a tripod and a self timer out in the sun.

I have a new strap attaching method for conventional, "old school" camera straps. It's a little complicated but it's so secure. The other day I had to unstrap one of my Leica SLs to put a Buff gaiter on the strap. The Buff gaiter is a tubular cloth construction meant to worn by humans as a protective scarf keeping your neck safe from UV. I figured if it's good enough for a photographer it just might be good enough for my camera. By running the strap through the gaiter tube I can...... oh wait.... I wrote a whole blog post about this in 2014. On the 28th of July. Right around this part of the year. To learn more, read here:

https://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2014/07/finally-kirk-stops-horsing-around-with.html#more 

Anyway, I spent a hot afternoon using the new, white and gray Buff device (as described in the link just above...) and then I disassembled the strap and fully intended to re-strap the camera the next morning. But the boy's accident superseded the strapping agenda and time became unfixed. So when I reached for my favorite SL (and yes, they each have a personality...) it was strap-naked. Not wanting to spend time on my more rigorous strapping modality I instead pulled the much maligned Peak Designs strap out of the "reject" drawer and attached it. The work of seconds instead of minutes. And then I headed out the door. 

It's really the first time I've seriously tried the cross chest carry of a camera since, well... never. 

I always carry a camera over my left should in a traditional strap that has some built in stickiness that helps prevent shoulder slide. On the Peak Straps that stickiness is on the wrong side of the strap so I decided to go with the flow and at least attempt the cross body carry. I adjusted the strap length for comfort and headed out for a long morning walk. Hoping to get in three or four miles before the humidity returns and the afternoon heat becomes oppressive and dangerous.

Everything worked out okay. I got used to pulling the camera up from the side to shoot and letting the slippery strap slide around. It was fine. I guess I could get used to it if I really needed to. The quick attaching and detaching is the primary selling point for me. Maybe Peak Designs could do a thinner strap with the sticky friction stuff on the correct side and the same round quick release parts included. That might actually be a good strap. 

From an aesthetic point of view I felt as thought I'd fashioned a camera strap out of a 1975 Chevrolet Nova seat belt. Same basic material and same color schemes. Hopelessly tacky. 

But, usable and not at all uncomfortable. See? I can change my mind. Under temporal distress. 

As a partial and lukewarm apology I've decide to put up a link to their site. I am not affiliated and no one. Literally, no one, is paying me.

https://www.peakdesign.com

The Sky Is The Limit. Endless Blue Skies Over Texas. And a "Progress Report" from Austin.

Today is wicked hot. And humid. I had stuff to do today and in a rare lapse I didn't bring a camera along with me nor did I make it to swim practice. We had to get our young one to the surgical hospital by six o'clock in the morning. That really sucked. But the procedure went well. The arm is on the mend. The boy seems to recover quickly. 

Eight a.m. was nice. B. and I had "breakfast croissants" at Central Market while we waited for news from the orthopedic team. We sat outside and enjoyed the shivery cold breeze and the mild, 83° temperature under the shade of the long porch. And that's as low as the temperature got in central Austin today. The croissants were good and since Central Market is a big, upscale grocery store they came with sides of fresh fruit salad. Nice.

I was preparing for trauma and all manner of medical panic today but apparently the combination of a really great surgeon/specialist and a twenty-six year old in ultra-marathon good condition augers well for a quick and drama-free recovery.

It's rare for me to leave the house without a camera and it's even rarer for me to go all day long without at least touching one. Truthfully though I didn't miss it. I think my cameras and I needed some alone time apart. We'd been getting too chummy lately. 

When I was clearing off the desktop I found a folder full of landscapes with very nice clouds. I thought I'd share them. They are my only point of contact with photography today... 

Downstream from Barton Springs Pool. 

Where the water is almost always 68°

Currently the ambient temp outside is 103° with a heat index of 108°

Just looking out the window watching the grass grow brittle and brown.

 

The end of photography is nigh. The economy is falling apart. But...

 I answered emails today and got booked far ahead for a corporate event starting on the17th of November and a more detailed project starting on October 24th. Both traditional commercial photography.

In other news clients are paying their bills quicker. About a five day gap between billing and receiving  payment these days. Based on this year's transactions.

And...clients are taking price increases in stride. We've raised rates by between 20 and 30% this year (depending on the type of assignment) with no push back from nearly a dozen clients to date. 

We're trying to track our billing to inflation and our track our spending with a recession in mind. It's all a crap shoot but I'm not really seeing any of the doom and gloom come to fruition. 

I am seeing the trees and landscape drying out and turning brown. But business? Still green.

One of the Google buildings in downtown. 

Long term clients are a nice thing to have.

The dystopian edit and the non-dystopian edits.

These are not exactly the same frame. They are sequential frames. Each edited in its own way.

Sample images by request of a reader... 

Polarizing Filters and Magic Skies. Cheap pre-post-processing.

I used to harbor a prejudice about putting filters in front of good lenses. Any filters. Any good lens. But shooting video has broken me down. If you are going to shoot video outdoors you are going to have to come to grips with the reality that you'll need neutral density filters. And since it would be insanely time consuming and therefore frightfully expensive on an ROI basis to post process say, a sky in a video during post production we quickly found that a circular polarizer goes a long way to restoring most of the drama you see in skies speckled with clouds... if you take time put on the filter as an efficient method of pre-post production. Get it right in camera and you have a lot less twiddling and swearing to do in your editing suite. And, of course, this all ports over to still photography. 

If I photograph an urban-scape image in color and the sky is lackluster there are several common treatments I can do in Lightroom. You can use the selection tools to "select sky." Once your mundane sky has been selected and automatically masked you have a range of controls like exposure, contrast, clarity, saturation, etc. with which to enhance the difference between the white clouds and the blue sky. 

I like to select skies and then increase the saturation just in the blue channel to make the blue of the sky pop against the clouds. Adding a bit of contrast can be visually useful as well. It's cheating but cheating exists in this realm on a sliding scale and it's not "as cheating" as a full scale sky replacement complete with rainbows and circling bald eagles. And hints of unicorns.

But everything takes time and it takes experience to know where the line is between presenting your audience with believable images or stepping over that line and just insulting them. 

On Sunday I took a 28mm lens out for spin and I put a circular polarizing filter on the front of the lens. Never took it off. By carefully orienting the filter for each shot I was able to get the same kind of enhancements directly in camera, tweaking the exposure of the captured skies a bit, after the fact, just for fun. No other big moves needed to be made. 

It's a lot of fun. 

Make sure you test your filter so you don't shoot a bunch of stuff before you find out that your inexpensive, "bargain" filter has a rude color cast.

I now have a box in the lens case filled with N.D. and Cir. Polarizers ranging from 52mm to 82mm and I'm starting to carry the polarizers with me when I go out to shoot photographs. The N.D.s generally only come out when we're shooting video. 

just to be clear: I am still against using "protection" filters on great lenses. 

I'm only willing to slightly degrade the expensive optics if there is a real

payoff.

Swimming: I swam in the chilly, spring-fed, Deep Eddy pool this morning. Unlike a coached workout I just hop in and swim a leisurely mile or so these days. It's more of a recovery workout from the hard swims we do over the weekend. I've been doing swims seven days a week for a while now and the consistency made it nice. 

I read an article a few days ago about the health benefits of swimming or just hanging out in colder water. Apparently it can reduce immflamuation throughout the body. It's also used in some advanced mental health practices as a therapy for anxiety, depression, and a handful of other disorders. Seems the experts are finding that swimming, and even just being in the water, is presenting more and more health benefits with each new study. 

Maybe, if you are feeling bit down or off this week, you could find a chilly body of (clean) water and spend some time partially submerged in it. I know that the cold water's effect on me lasts for hours and hours after I've spent time paddling about in the early hours. 

We're lucky here. We have a big, spring fed pool with lane lines and bottom line markers. We also have the 1/8th mile long spring fed Barton Springs pool. Both are city pools and both are generally open year round with constant water temperatures between 68° and 74°.  Real wealth isn't a Rolls Royce or a private plane. I measure it in access to a good swimming resources and the spare time to use it. Often.

 

Poor Man's Construct of a Passable Leica Q or Q2 Competitor... Vroom.

Open this one up large to see how three dimensional this image looks.

That old, old 28mm does a wonderful job with depth and separating planes.

 who wouldn't want a brilliant, olive green and Kevlar wrapped Leica Q2 faux rangefinder camera to play with out on the streets? But who wants to pay U.S. $6,000+ for the privilege? While I am sure many of my readers have the wherewithal to order one on impulse and not lose any sleep over the expense I am equally sure that for most of us it would be a stretch. And if one is streeeetching one has to wonder if it's all worth it. Or if one can put together an equally good street shooting set up, based on a nice 28mm lens, for a lot less money. And if you cobbled together a substitute could it match the frothy reputation of the Q2 and also deliver the goods; the images? 

In my mind, if you disregard the difference in build quality and implied prestige of the Q series Leicas and you are looking for pure performance as your deciding metric I would have to suggest that, if you can deal with a little bit longer fixed lens, you might look instead at a Fuji X100V. I've owned two and they are wonderful cameras. Especially for the money. But if you can't move away from that 28mm focal length and you don't want to sell a kidney you could consider building your own street shooting conglomeration. 

A reasonable choice might be something like a Sony A7(x) body coupled with their 28mm f2.0 lens. That might just get you in the same ballpark. You'd have to work on the color science difference with a bit of diligence but eventually you might be able to get close and then make a preset for Lightroom that you could use to automate a bit of the processing. If you really want to stick to using a Leica camera for their killer color science you might consider doing what I did today: Put a Contax Y/C Carl Zeiss 28mm f2.8 (accessible used for around $300 in good shape. Look for the MM version denoted by the f22 number on the aperture ring being green)  on an Y/C to L mount adapter and popping the lens onto a "vintage" Leica SL (usually available for around $2200, in good shape). 

I was thinking about the Q or the Q2 and it dawned on me that I already had enough of the pieces in my collection to toss together an ersatz combo. I set the camera to raw format, set the white balance to daylight, selected the aperture priority mode, and let the auto-ISO range between 50 and 12,500. All I really needed to do was compose, focus and shoot. Sure, every once in a while I'd tweak the exposure a bit with the exposure compensation dial but other than that I was working mostly by touch. Or camera telepathy.

It was stinky hot outside so I stayed on the shady side of the streets and did my usual walk. When I started to feel the heat I'd duck into one of my favorite taco restaurants and grab an ice tea. There wasn't much going on downtown but that was okay with me because another thing I was playing with was messing around with a circular polarizer on the lens. That more or less ruled out photographing fast moving objects today. So did my compulsion to magnify the center part of the frame on a lot of the shots in order to confirm, or acquire, sharp focus. 

I think that older Contax 28mm lens is really good. Especially when you are willing to work stopped down to f5.6 or, even better, f8.0. Since I'm very happy with the overall results I consider that I saved over $6,000 today. The polarizer was free. It's a Minolta polarizer that came attached to a lens I bought and then sold long, long ago. The lens was crap, the filter was really nice. Still is.

When it hit 103° and the heat index parked itself at 107° I decided to pack it in and head home. The sunscreen and bountiful selection of wide brimmed hats are all good and well but no substitute for the comfort of a cool pool or a studio luxuriously awash with air conditioning. 

So, the SL+Contax 28mm is a good substitute for the Q in my mind. Not as small and not as compact but with a bigger, better battery. And dual card slots. But no I.S.  If you really, really need more megapixels you might consider a used Panasonic S1R (around $1800 on the sporadic used markets) and the same lens. If you are lucky enough to already own a Leica SL2 you can sub that into the mix for a full on, toe to toe, replacement. It's got the same high res sensor and the same color science family/look. With the higher res cameras you have the equivalent of a Q2...at least imaging performance wise...

That's all I've got for today. I sure hope it snows tomorrow. I'd settle for rain. Hell, at this point I'd welcome highs in the mid-90s....

 

I absolutely love the girl on the gymnastic rings painted around and under the small window unit A/C. 

Use a much worse 28mm lens if you want Purple Haze. 

Polarizer. Engaged.

It always bugs me when my bodyguard accidentally steps into the frame. 

I guess everyone's been there at one time or another. Right?

And sadly, for the absolutely humorless and literal among us:

I don't have a bodyguard. I was making a joke. It's okay.