Posting a Portrait of Michelle. Thinking about how important the light is...

 

©Kirk Tuck. 

I think in the middle years of my career as a photographer what I really spent most of my work time doing was designing and contructing light. And mixing it with dark. 

Sure, the rapport with a friend who dropped by for a portrait was important but the lighting was equally a priority for me then. 

For this portrait of Michelle I came into the studio hours and hours before she arrived. I started by setting  up my favorite canvas background far behind her. It was an era when space was cheap in Austin and I had about 60 feet from my camera position to the back wall to play with. I love the look of a background so far away that there was no way to keep it in focus. Then I'd bring in other drapes in between to play with cascading feelings of depth. I always used flag to tone down light anywhere on my subject but the face. 

My goal in those days was always to light a person so my light could come into the frame from the left (from camera position) and produce a triangle of light just under the eye on the (model's) left. I don't know why I always preferred to bring my main light in from the top left of the frame but it just felt so much more comfortable to me. 

My favorite expressions were the quiet ones. The contemplative moments. 

We had lots of cameras back then as well. It never seemed to matter which one I used as long as it was bigger than the 35mm frame and we had the right film in stock.

But however we shot one thing was constant --- I always printed my own final prints. There was just too much creative potential in a negative not to try and coax it out onto nice paper. 

I'm not sure it's a style I'm still completely comfortable with now but it's a nice starting point. 

My only tip: Long, long lenses and lots of distance. It's a look I don't see often these days and it's so visually interesting...

Regressing to happiness.

 

There was a period in my adult life when I was working as a creative director at an advertising agency. We all worked long hours, celebrated every success, emulated Mad Men before it was a TV show and basically were totally immersed in the creativity of advertising for nearly six years. But during that time my relief valve from the pressures of a "real job" was my hobby of photography. 

It's funny, in a way, to have a hobby that parallels what you do for work. I might spend a Friday supervising a still life photo shoot for our shopping mall client, working with an established photographer to make fanciful images of products for a co-op ad, and when I finished up at his or her studio I knew it would be Monday afternoon before we'd see any images. That meant I could put the work project out of my mind over the weekend and instead pursue something fun just for myself.

I'd put some gasoline in my ancient Volkswagen "Bug", grab one of my two cameras and head down IH-35 to San Antonio. I'd park a couple blocks from the Alamo, make sure my Olympus half frame camera was loaded with slide film, and then I'd head out to make images in the vital part of downtown that included long stretches of Commerce St. and then Houston St. I had one lens for that little system that was a favorite (and still is). It was the 40mm f1.4. It was bright, easy to focus and, at f2.8 it was sharp.

The meter in my Pen-f was never very accurate. I defaulted to using the pictograms that came printed on the inside of the Kodak film boxes to set my exposures. After a while, I splurged and bought a Gossen Luna Pro light meter. I quickly figured out that as long as the light wasn't changing you could make one reading and not change exposures until the light dropped, or radically changed. 

I was a bit fearless in those days because so much of  the nasty parts of human history hadn't happened yet. At least not here. Not to me. There weren't drive by shootings that I was at all aware of. People weren't in such a hurry. Nearly everyone on the streets had a camera with them because it was that era and we were all milling around in the ground zero of tourism, in one of America's most touristic cities. And, as I've come to understand, the walking and the absorbing of all the visual stimuli and the montage of cultures, was as important to me as the photography itself.

When you are young, single, professionally employed and mostly satisfied with the trajectory of life in the moment there seems to be a force field around you that keeps out stress and anxiety. When you have little or no real responsibility there's not a heck of a lot to worry about. Which makes me wonder why we shoulder so much as we get older...

Since I didn't have clients waiting to judge the photographs I was making for myself I didn't artificially curate my images for anyone else. There was no internet on which to fish for approval. No social media on which to share pictures made and slanted for other peoples' approvals. I just made images because I liked what I was seeing and I liked the process of translating real life into slides and prints. 

In the ensuing years I worked for a few decades with packed schedules, started a family, welcomed a child and bought a succession of houses. Each step called for new expenditures. In the business it was mostly expenditures of time and energy. In nurturing a family there were expenditures for mortgages, private schools, college funds, groceries, utilities, car payments, health insurance, life insurance and, of course, taxes. 

You think it will all abate once you've launched that kiddo off to college. Or better yet, when he nails down his first professional job but then you discover that you've become the parent to your parents. 

But that's over all too soon. And one day you wake up and you wonder "what's next?"

I've lived with a camera over one shoulder (or both shoulders) for the better part of 35 years. It's a habit. But these days I don't see the camera as a tool for profit or personal advancement in the way I have viewed  cameras for all the work years. Now I'm coming to see the cameras as quiet companions. Welcome adjuncts to being outside and immersed in current culture. Almost like friends. 

The last two years, with Covid and the general tenor of the world, have made me realize that I don't really need to schedule so many paying jobs if I don't want to. I've stopped worrying about money and I'm trying to stop worrying whether I am relevant in the same way to the industries I labored in for so long. I'm picking and choosing and my choices are based more of whether a job will be fun or not. Whether the people I'll work with are happy and a joy to be around. Whether the work projects will introduce me to new people who are interesting in and of themselves and, a bonus, new people to photograph just for me. 

Everyone loves to give advice. I "should volunteer." I "should travel relentlessly." I "should mentor someone." I "should devise a massive personal project." I "should become a philanthropist." I "should ditch all those nasty and over-priced Leicas." "Life is short; you should buy a Porsche." "You should write more about gear on the blog." "You should write less about gear on the blog." And finally, "You should work relentlessly for charities." 

The problem is that I'm more or less immune to advice unless I seek it out and pay for it. I pay my attorney because she keeps me from making expensive mistakes. I pay my CPA because his advice keeps me solvent. I pay my doctor because he's good at catching medical stuff early --- before it becomes a big deal. Those three, and my spouse, seem to be the only people whose advice has a track record. A history of success. And it's funny to me that with the exception of B. they are the only ones I actually pay for advice. 

I think you have to find your own way to happiness in life. And it changes as you age through. Right now I'm actually enjoying stepping away from a relentless schedule in commercial photography. Right now I'm enjoying swimming more than at any time since high school (when we were all immortal, beautiful and thrilled with life). Right now I'm enjoying going back in time to those early days in advertising when my idea of a wonderful day was to walk around a city, smell it, taste it, feel it and capture some of that feeling in color slides. Or black and white prints. I'm finding that this is a constant with me. It's been restrained for long periods when all those other priorities seemed more vital. But it is kind of thrilling to realize that I can go out now, at will, and practice what I like to do to my heart's content. 

Perhaps it's comfortable to feel, for the first time in decades, that I don't need to make photography an all encompassing thing in my life. Just a very fun part of a larger existence. 

I was told in a comment that pros overwhelming use Nikon and Canon gear and that Leica users are "B" team. No mention of Sony?

 

Made with a dinosaur camera and lens. The Nikon D810 and the 80-200mm f2.8.

People tend to get stuck at whichever point in time they seriously entered into photography. That makes sense; people are most comfortable with what they think they know. They are less comfortable with facts that point out how the world has changed since they acquired whatever knowledge they persist in relying upon. 

Is a fat SUV with a big V-8 motor really faster off the line than a Tesla S? Is a Nikon D850 really a sharper and better camera than a Sony Alpha One? Is coal the ultimate power source? Are we still cranking out large, glossy color brochures on thick, premium paper? Do we care at all which camera someone else is using?

Photographers, like nearly everyone else, tend to be tribal. They embrace the ethos of the tribe and then part of their sub-routine of life is to fly the flag of their tribe whether it's right or wrong. It's more important to remain within the tribe than to try new things and risk being cast out. 

If you tap on the shoulder of most people who've been in the photo industry as photographers for a decade or two you'll find their understanding about what tools content creators use in real business is more or less ossified and set to the standards they learned on entry.

I wrote a blog post talking about firmware updates for the Leica SL2, which is a camera I own and use for a bunch of different commercial projects. It's a good camera with an easy to navigate menu and a color palette that's more pleasing to me than the Canons or Nikons I've used (amply) in the past. I knew a fair number of photographers here use Leicas and would be interested in the information. But one photographer was not at all interested. And he or she let me know. His/her argument being that (and I'm paraphrasing here): most professionals use Nikon and Canon and most of us don't give a "hoot" about Leica news. 

I hate to tell him/her but....professional photographers are a tiny, tiny segment of the camera market (far less than 1%) and no one really gives a flying fuck anymore about what "pros" use. No even the pros. The diehard Canon fans of yesteryear, who work professionally seem to have found a nicer home in the Sony camp. Sony users who've tired of the Sony color palette and atrocious menus seem to have found a welcoming tribe over in the Nikon camp and the "real" professionals have long since moved on from DSLRs and small sensor cameras altogether, transitioning (as they probably should) to medium format digital cameras from Hasselblad, Leica and especially (because of the price advantages) to Fuji. Can you really hold your head up and call yourself a "professional photographer" if you aren't currently using MF? (sarcasm implied).

Well sure. Because with the exception of wedding photography and event photography a huge swath of actual business photography is being done now by people who don't really identify as "professional photographers" but are multi-disciplinary "content creators." These are the people who work in marketing departments, in-house a large companies, and at huge advertising agencies across the world. They create the majority of images that are used for commercial advertising and.....I'm sorry to tell you....but many of them use their smart phones to create images for their clients. 

Why? Because, if you disregard broadcast television and radio formats, the main target for most ads now is web advertising and social media. It's mostly going onto the internet. And given that most users are seeing the end results on the screens of iPhones and Android phones there is no technical reason to use any of the cameras our generation learned on and coveted. Their reign is over. Except for that tiny percentage of advertising photographers who are still called on to shoot big campaigns the likes of which have multiple uses across multiple formats, including print. You know, the guys who are using the big MF cameras because they are the ones who have the clients who can pay for them and uses that might actual still demand ne ultra plus technical quality. For everyone else? There's an iPhone. Or somebody else's phone. 

Today's ad agencies are filled with young people who've grown up using stock images and making composites and adjustments in post processing. Once web ad placement crested 75% of their total usage of photos, and their targets stabilized at approx. 4K resolutions, just about any camera they could get their hands on that was near 12 megapixels filled the bill nicely. These folks are hyper proficient in dropping out backgrounds, creating artificial but believable bokeh and piecing together the reality they want to see in an ad. But mostly they are now transitioning more and more to quick videos. Another area where Canon and Nikon are just now catching up to Sony (in non-dedicated video capable cameras) and an area where smart phones really shine for just about anything that's web use. 

So, if the majority of content for commercial intent is generated by smart phones is it really true that "professional photographers" only use Nikon and Canon? Of course not. Not anymore than most taxi drivers drive F-150 pick-up trucks. Or that most professional caterers serve Big Macs. Or that fashion models source their wardrobes from Walmart. 

It's funny that the commenter took a swipe at Leica, saying that their users are the "B" team. But that's such a subjective thing that I'll just ignore it and soldier on, remembering that when I entered the stream of professional photography the only photographers who didn't have or want a Leica were the ones who could not afford them. Today, at least with their camera bodies, Leica's prices are right in line with the top of the line cameras from N&C. They just look and feel better and have nicer menus and better color. But I guess that doesn't matter.

Sure, there are still people making a living with older DSLRs and such, and the latest rash of high resolution single purpose cameras. It takes time to turn a glacier around. And yes, there are still projects that benefit from larger, more potent cameras but.....

The owner of this particular blog is currently using a handful of cameras from Leica so, logically, you're going to see samples shot with those cameras, articles written about using those cameras, and even posts that note additions to the capabilities of those cameras. If all this is as agonizing as broken glass in one's eyes to you then this might not be the blog you want to read. "These are not the droids you are looking for...."

comment at will, I'm feeling feisty today. And I have the power of moderation. 

Revisiting one of my favorite posts from the first year of the blog: 2009.

 https://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2009/12/the-cave-you-fear-to-enter-holds.html

A really good article on making and using presets in Adobe Lightroom Classic.

 David Farkas, part of the braintrust at Leica Store Miami, wrote a really good and really understandable article on making and using presets for cameras. He published it a while back on Reddotforum.com

I re-read it yesterday as I wanted to fine tune some presets I've been using for various Leica bodies. 

But this is not something exclusive to Leica gear. It works for all cameras. You can fine tune the typical settings you use for a camera, as a starting point, and create an individual preset for that camera. You can apply the preset to all files at an import or selectively apply the preset onto individual photos. 

Here's a link to the article: https://www.reddotforum.com/content/2020/04/lightroom-presets-for-leica-cameras/

I made presets yesterday for the SL2, the SLs, the CLs and the TL2. Should save me some time and effort when importing big folders full of images. At least it gives me a better starting point than the Adobe Default. 

Pool full of potential happiness.

Leica CL camera. Sigma 18-50mm lens.

Portrait of Renee. Fixing stuff around the house. Planning a trip to Germany for Autumn.

 

This portrait came from an afternoon test shoot in my old studio in East Austin.  Shot on black and white film, printed on black and white paper and then, years later, copied via a digital camera so I could share it on the web. It's cropped square but I seem to have a specific memory of playing around with a Pentax 6x7 camera that day. When I used that big, thunderous beast I alway used the mirror lock-up before triggering the shutter. Otherwise, with the slow flash sync and the huge moving mirror, it was sometimes difficult to freeze motion in the frame or in the camera just using it "raw." 

I met Renee through a mutual friend with whom I shared a bakery. I'd head down on slow days to read the newspaper, swill coffee and occasionally indulge in some lavish pastry. My friend was a painter and had many beautiful friends. She introduced me to Renee and we set up several portrait sessions as tests. 

Life in old Austin was easier back then. Less traffic and less rushing around being busy. This must have been around 1995. You could actually buy a house back then for a reasonable amount and restaurant prices seemed....reasonable too. As did the price of film. Of which I seem to have shot ... lots and lots. 

I miss the days when everyone had time to play. Life has gotten more expensive for so many people that they've had to move faster to stay still. It's not good for the practice of art. 

Domestic crap: So, our old and well loved refrigerator died after 17 years of noble service and it had to be replaced. Parts were no longer available for a repair and believe me, I loved that old fridge enough to have willingly paid a "new refrigerator" price to have saved it. I hate having to recycle stuff that's designed well and made to be visually unobtrusive. 

We finally tracked down a decent unit that would work in our kitchen and which could be delivered within ten days and so we bought it. It got delivered to the house last Monday but the ham-fisted delivery people nicked our front door frame trying to shove the machine through without thinking about geometry. They also damaged a vital hose that runs up the back of the machine. 

I figured a repair person could fix or replace the hose in less than half an hour but big box appliance stores don't function that way. There was no option but to have the delivery people come back out, remove the damaged fridge and bring a new replacement along. We had to pay again for the new one but would be refunded the payment for the first try as soon as it got back to the store. What a fucking mess.

The trade of damaged for new happened on Wednesday. I wanted to be here to supervise but had already booked a portrait shoot downtown for that morning. Not to worry, B. was at the top of her game. The problem seems to have been one of the delivery people's inability to read a tape measure. The width of the front door is 35.75 inches. The width of the refrigerator is 33 inches. But they wanted to position a dolly on the side of the refrigerator and bring it in sideways. That's exactly what they did the first time around. But the depth of the machine is right at 35.50 inches and they were experts at misjudging distances and angles. 

When the delivery people arrived they decided that they would remove the doors and then the unit would slide right in. The problem that B. saw when she watched them take the doors off the old unit to get it out of the house was that none of the deliver people had a clue about how to remove the doors correctly and they banged and banged and ball bearing spilled out across the floor. 

B. told them in no uncertain terms not to attempt to do any disassembly on the new unit. But when she walked up the driveway to supervise the delivery people were just about to visit the same havoc and amateur hour deconstruction of the new refrigerator. She laid down the law. (She's Not the Person I would tell one thing to and then try to do the opposite).... She had the store manager on the line in minutes and the delivery people were "inspired" to at least try putting the machine in through the door as we had planned. 

Guess what? Measurements work. The new unit came in unscathed and was summarily hooked up to the water line and then B. went through every single step of customer quality control double-check one could imagine. We now have a workable refrigeration solution in place. The store offered a 15% discount on the final purchase price to compensate us for all the slapdash theatrics surrounding the two deliveries and we're now working with them on having them pay to rehab the door frame. Which, if B. has anything to do with it, will get repaired to like new. 

By the time I got back from my shoot the general atmosphere at the house was ..... distinctly.... on full alert. But she's much quicker to let stuff go than I am. I'm glad I skipped this one. 

So, over the last month we've replaced the kitchen door and door frame, had every door in the house re-weather stripped, had the sweeps under all the doors replaced, had one set of our five french doors repaired by a master carpenter, and we seem to just be getting started. 

We're getting estimates for repainting two bathrooms, a living room with very high ceilings, the exterior trim (Thankfully most of the house is rock which doesn't need paint) and both the studio door and the front door of the house. After all of this we will need a vacation. 

Thoughts about vacation: It's been so long since we traveled far. I had a blast in Berlin when I was there for the IFA show for ten days back in 2013. B. Hasn't been to Germany. I think it might be fun to go in the mid-Autumn time, squeaking in between trade shows, and seeing Frankfurt, Berlin, Leipzig, Dresden and, of course, Wetzlar. 

The idea of travel to Germany came when Lufthansa Airlines openly a weekly direct route to and from Austin, Texas. Ten hours and ten minutes from city to city. A complete bypassing of my least favorite airport in the known universe, Heathrow. And the rates in the off season (which for Americans means, "not Summer") seem cheap. There's 38 trains between Frankfurt and Berlin each day and the three hour trips costs a princely.....$10. 

Like all creatures of habit I have a favorite hotel in Berlin. It's inexpensive as well. We'll splurge outside Berlin but really, most hotel rates in Germany seem very reasonable. 

We're now jockeying with dates. We're trying to line up our favorite house sitter. We might actually follow through.  I wonder if there is a Leica Outlet Mall in Wetzlar. You know.... for scratch and dents...

Kidding. Just kidding. 

Now setting up for a portrait here in the studio for tomorrow afternoon. Not a beautiful woman but a very jaunty male oral surgeon. Now trying to decide between flash and LED lighting. Oh well, I have time to figure it out.

Just hope I can stop spending money on the house for a while. I walk around and look at a project and think: "OMG! That's a Leica SL2-S right there! Darn it." 

Leica Keeps Adding Cool Stuff to the SL2. It's like getting an upgraded model every few months. But why no mention of the update on the World's Biggest Digital Camera Review Site?

 

No question here. I'm a big fan of the Leica SL series cameras and especially the SL2. High resolution, beautiful color and beautiful industrial design. Besides the price, what's not to love?

I just became aware that Leica updated the firmware in the camera from 4.1 to 5.0. In doing so they added an internal perspective control feature, which I think is really great for all those architectural shooters out there, but what they added for me that put a big smile on my face is the ability to pair an old manual (non-Leica) lens with the camera's really good image stabilization. 

Previously the camera would look at whatever lens you put on it to see if it was: A. A native L mount lens from one of the three participants in that lens family. B. An R Rom lens mounted to the camera with a Leica R to L adapter. C. A coded Leica M lens mounted to the camera with a Leica M to L adapter. If you had Leica lenses that were not equipped with coding or rom you could look in the lens profiles and choose your Leica lens. There was no option to just key in the focal length of a non-profiled lens and take advantage of the in-body I.S. 

Sure, you could cheat and select a lens from one of the Leica lens on the profile lists and make due but the profile for, say, the 50mm R Summilux, includes more than just the focal length. The engineers built profiles that take into consideration things like color shifts across the frame and those are different from lens to lens. Same with distortion characteristics and vignetting. Using an included profile not specific to your actual lens might give you I.S. but it might also provide you with a host of unwanted issues as well. 

With the update to 5.0 you can now go into the menu and select a specific focal length for a "mystery" lens and the camera will use the information for the purposes of stabilization without messing up other parameters of the lens's imaging. It's really nice to have. 

The update to 5.0 also enhances the performance of other makers's L mount lenses (Think: Sigma and Panasonic) when used on the Leica SL2. I'd conjecture that we'll see greater battery life and more responsive AF performance as a result.

This and the previous major firmware update (4.0) both added to the camera's depth, performance and video chops. It's a continuous transformation of an already great product. 

But I have a pressing question.

Why is it that the world's "largest" digital camera review site made no mention of such an important upgrade on a current, production camera? Has DPR given up reporting on Leica products altogether or are they too busy noting what's in Chris Nichols's backpack when he goes out on a canoe ride to bother reporting major camera upgrades from a company that is both a legend in the industry and the most profitable (per unit) camera maker in the world?

I guess when Barney left we ended up depending on DPR's "B" team for timely info only to see laid bare that their real focus is on.......only contemporaneous, mainstream product launches and leaky articles about technology on which they have a very shaky grip. Caveat Emptor.

https://leica-camera.com/en-US/photography/cameras/sl/sl2-black/firmware

The recovery walk that continues into the weekend with a Leica TL2 and the "now popular" Sigma 45mm.

This was an image shot in Jpeg of my kitchen in mid-morning. The lens was set to f4.0 and the ISO was 6400. Looks pretty clean to me. The focus was on the bottle of cleaner in the left hand third of the frame.

Reader MM, was asking about the color I'm getting from Leica cameras and it made me curious to find out if there was some commonality across the line of modern, L or T mount lens cameras (pretty much the same thing) and, if so, what it might be. I'm not sure I know so I made a bunch of photographs today with a Leica TL2 and a lens that seems to be getting a lot of play in the media recently thanks to our friend, Michael Johnston's new found fascination with the Sigma fp and its companion lens, the Sigma i-Series 45mm f2.8. 

It was bright and sunny today and almost everything I shot was with the lens set to an aperture of f5.6 with the camera doing AWB and the ISO determined purely by the machines. My post shooting intervention was my usual routine of opening up shadows a bit, clamping down on highlights just a tad, adding some clarity with the Lightroom clarity slider, adding a bit of saturation (I normally photography on that camera with the saturation turned down by half and then adding to taste after the fact) and then hitting the "export" button with vigor. All my street post production is generally done in Lightroom while my paid work is usually finished in PhotoShop. Believe me, there's no magic in my tail post production routines...

But I'll be darned. The files and the colors do look a bit different. I'll add a bunch of samples and let you smarter VSL visitors tell us what we might be reacting to. May just be the "credit-card-placebo-effect." 

What do you think?

"Oh crap! How do I turn the video off?"

 

Post Vaccine Recovery Walk. The healing powers of the Leica CL....

My current favorite modern art gallery: West Chelsea Contemporary. In Austin. 

I figured I could sit around on the couch and watch all the old Star Wars movies again or I could ignore the fading side effects of my two vaccines from yesterday and get back to normal stuff. I chose the normal stuff. I've been having a renewed love affair with the Leica CL so I decided to take one of the pair downtown along with the tiny Sigma 18-50mm f2.8 Contemporary lens. It's the one that only covers APS-C. Almost a perfect match for the CL except for a little bit of vignetting... Not much. Just enough so that I find myself correcting it if there's a lot of "sky" in the photographs...

The gallery is across the street from my usual parking place so it makes for a nice transitional launchpad into a good, downtown walk. The gallery leans strongly toward graffiti inflected works and that's just fine with me although they do toss in a statue of Kip's Big Boy every once in a while; just for fun.

Michael Johnston can be a powerful, subliminal influencer and ever since he embarked on his quest for "purity" in black and white digital imaging I've been trying more and more often to do my own tests and my own work with "monochrome" in mind. I'm not willing to go as far as MJ and mutilate a sensor in order to make it permanently into a black and white camera but I am constantly trying new processing formulas and camera settings to see what I can get. The "Butterfly" bridge that connects downtown to downtown is a willing and patient subject. It's twice as nice now that both sides of the pedestrian sidewalks are now open. 

The lure to black and white seems strong for some in my generation and I think it's pretty obvious that this is because most of us learned the craft by shooting (then) less expensive black and white film and learning to do our own processing and printing in black and white darkrooms. I know that I have an affection for black and white even when I presume that many photographs look better in color, or have their reason to exist based in colors and hues.

It seems obvious that black and white works best for very graphic subjects but lately I see it pressed into service in many of the niches that perhaps should be left to color. Almost as if, in the rush to make everything black and white we end up with "missing pieces."

I felt "sludgy" and slow when I started my walk but the cadence and rhythm of walking got me back into alignment. I felt so much better after the first two miles. That, and I stopped by the Cookbook Café for a coffee and a piece of their addictive berry and nut blondie bar. Sugar and caffeine, a sure cure for a double vaccine hangover. Motivated by my desire to be out walking with the Leica CL. 

Plenty of good image making power in a small and light system. A nice change from the bigger cameras.