What can you shoot in an hour with a 40mm f2.0 lens and an older camera body? Daido Moriyama sez: (paraphrasing): "blaze away and shoot anything that captures your interest. No hierarchy of subject matter. Don't think! Shoot! His first piece of advice for newbies? Get Outside!!!

Sometimes it takes me a while to warm up to a lens. Not so with the 40mm f2.0 Ultron Aspherical, version 2, from Voigtlander. I bought it brand new, in a Nikon F mount, adapted it to the L mount, put it on a Leica SL and only take it off if I want to use its bigger brother, the 58mm f1.4 Voigtlander --- also in a Nikon F mount. They even share a lens hood...

Why a Nikon F mount and not a Leica M mount? Cheaper. More real estate to park your fingers on. Bigger (more standard) filter ring. Exactly the same optical formula. Easy to adapt to any mirrorless camera AND --- who knows? We might devolve back to DSLRs in which case my choice would have to be a Nikon D850. The lens has the electronic contacts to communicate aperture and exif to digital Nikon bodies.

Do I like the lens? Hell yeah. It's easy to focus, it's pretty sharp wide open. It's deliriously sharp at f5.6 (where I find myself using it most often) and the colors out of it match up well with the color science embedded in Leica's first gen., full frame mirrorless camera body = The Leica SL 601. A camera so nice and so cheap on the market that I bought two. (Cheap is relative; I know. But $1800 bucks for a body that cost $7500 just a few years ago works for me. Plus, you know, I sell the plasma...).

Here's my assortment of images from a brisk walk through the area just to the West of the UT campus. When I lived there it was all hippy co-ops and weird re-dos of old houses into tiny apartments. Almost everyone rode bicycles for basic transportation. When my bike got stolen I walked. Or rode the bus. 

Now it's a sprawling neighborhood of giant, high rise luxury dormitories and condos. Looks a lot like Dubai but with scruffy, rich kid students roaming around in flip flops, board shorts and odd t-shirts. Boys seemingly are required to wear their baseball hats backwards. Sunglasses at all times. 

Several of the newer high rise dorms have lobbies that look to have been designed by the same folks that design the Four Seasons Hotel and Ritz Carlton Hotel lobbies -- only these are bigger and nicer. And get this: Five of the high rise dorms have, wait for it, valet parking for the students. 

That never happened when I went to UT. And back when I was on the faculty we drove old VW bugs or harshly used Volvo station wagons, not the latest M5 BMWs or the almost ubiquitous (all over West Austin) Porsche Macans. You can now tell the students from really wealthy families apart from those who are just well off...The really wealthy ones have the Macan S Turbos while the "riff raff" are driving the standard models or the Newports.

Nobody to photograph on the streets....they're all driving around behind tinted glass...

But here are the images my house manager selected for me to share. I hope our personal chef agrees.

(both would be --- me). 

 A message from Daido Moriyama: "Get Outside!"