Nasty Hot Weather Does Not Put a Crimp in Today's Shoot.

Can't pass a mirror without taking a selfie. 

CL with the Sigma 24mm.

So...what have we got going on in Austin, Texas today? Let's start with the smoke from Mexico. Just as in India the farmers in northern Mexico burn the leavings after harvesting their crops. The prevailing winds are from the south right now so Austin and the surrounding area is covered with a blanket of white smoke.  Throats are irritated and eyes itching. And the weather experts have indicated that we're at a level of about 154 for air quality instead of our usual 20-50. Add to this a dome of high pressure and record heat and you've got a perfect storm for misery. While the temperature today is only 100° the high humidity is giving us a current heat index of between 108° and 110°. It's less than delightful...

Now would be a good time to throw a giant musical festival in the park. After a week like this one we'd never have to deal with out of state folks wanting to move here and goosing the housing prices. Or the highway capacity. And I'd never have to hear about how they mix mojitos in Malibu again. Misery does not love company!

Oh...and ERCOT (the Texas energy guys) are warning us about running up against the max. capacity of the grid. You know the "grid." It became famous during our ice storm of 2021 when pretty much everyone in Texas lost electrical power for days, which precipitated a loss of water for more days, and left some unlucky folks with enormous utility bills. Wacky stuff. 

Today marked my third day of work in a row. I can tell you right now that the whole process of work is highly overrated and each time I head out I get a little bit more reticent about doing it again. Today was a mellow and fun shooting day but I still had to rush over after swim practice and that chapped me.

I was photographing five different people who needed to have portraits made over at my favorite P.R. agency. Somebody bungled the schedule a bit so I spent some time sitting in on their creative conference about generative A.I. and got a sense of the general direction that advertisers are interested in taking with the new tech. The message was clear. This is here now. Not next year or next month. "Now how can we use it to keep clients happy and make money?" Yeah. That was the question. 

The set up for today's shoot was decidedly minimalist. Two battery powered flashes and a flash trigger. One big umbrella and one bouncing off the ceiling. I took advantage of the agency's in house video studio and used their green screen as the background. All the images we end up using will be composited into other backgrounds that I've already shot. The green screen was perfect. And I didn't have to bring background stands and a roll of seamless paper.

Kinda stupid of me but I decided to go in a different direction than usual and just take the Leica SL2 body and the brand-spanking new 50mm APO LANTHAR lens from Voigtlander. I pressed it into service as a portrait lens by switching the camera to APS-C mode from full frame mode. That made the lens a 75mm equivalent which worked well since the composition wasn't a tight "head and shoulders" but instead was a loose, waist up shot. Works well for compositing. And it's still a 22 megapixel file size. 

In between portrait sessions I grabbed a Leica CL, equipped with the Sigma Contemporary 24mm f3.5, and shot "fly on the wall" images of the ongoing A.I. workshop. Lots of smart, young people figuring out the best use case for all these different programs. What I hear repeatedly/emphatically was that generative A.I. was going to be incredibly useful for presentation materials. Creative teams can make very detailed comprehensive layouts for their clients which takes a lot of the heavy lifting off the account executives who never seem particularly good at selling/pitching creative concepts to clients in the first place. Makes sense. A picture is worth a thousand words. A picture is worth a purchase order?

The client fed me well. We had nice coffee, fun donuts, and breakfast tacos early on. Lunch was a make your own spicy Mexican food bowl with tons of freshly made guacamole. If I had stayed around till the finish of their workshop they promised a happy hour as well. But I had pressing things to do. I wanted to see how the lens fared. It fared well. 

I used the Voigtlander 50mm mostly at f5.6. Not for any reason other than to have the right depth of field. The files I got were insanely sharp and contrasty. Beyond the measure of most other lenses. And I was happy to find that Lightroom includes a custom profile specifically for the 50 APO. Not that the profile made a big change but then I didn't expect a thousand dollar "nifty-fifty" to need too much help in post. 

The lens is nice and small. Has no confusing features and focuses nicely. Well, what I mean is that focusing ring feels just right as I focus the lens nicely. 

It's dreary outside now. Looks like we might be adding some nasty weather to the mix. 

Done working for a while so I can concentrate on swimming, strength training, napping and novel reading. 

A man has to have priorities...

That's all I've got for today. Thanks for reading.

(written by a survivor of 38+ years of professional photography and still making a living at it. No armchair pundits here...just contemporary, real world stuff).