Multiple slices of happiness and satisfaction this morning. Already a great day! (Short lens eval. after some "gray space" about swimming...).

 

discipline and motivation. to feel fast and strong is empowering.

I'll get to the photographic subject matter in a second but first I just have to luxuriate in the memory of this morning's swim practice. We've had good luck, in spite of the heat, in getting the water temperatures a bit lower in the Western Hills Athletic Club pool over the last several weeks. From a high water temperature of 85° in the worst of the hot and humid days we've seen a pretty rapid decline into the upper 70s lately. 

I thought we'd hit the best we could hope for when I was in the pool on Tuesday morning. It was 79° which is close to perfect--- but today.... Today the chatter on the deck was all about the new, low pool temperature for this Summer. A perfect, competition-ready, 76-77° degrees. Just absolutely perfect. And we could feel the difference in our workout. It was like free money. Or the fountain of youth.

It's Thursday so coach Jenn delivered her usual I.M. (Individual Medley) practice with lots of sets of butterfly, backstroke and breaststroke. Not long yardage but yards with a bit more intensity. It was good. We all swam well. And the water continued to be amazing. Exhilarating.

I can't wait for tomorrow's swim adventure. And Saturday's. And Sunday's. It's almost as fun as buying new cameras...

But you probably didn't come here to read about swimming. I'm thinking we're still mostly focusing on photography. At least I am....

After swim practice today I headed back to the office with a sense of mission. I was scheduled to photograph a new hire for the radiology practice I've worked with for over 25 years. I have hundreds of folders and galleries of the practice staff on Smugmug.com, some going back to the film days, and I was looking forward to adding a new doctor to the collection this morning. 

I was anticipating this session in my studio because I was going to use a new lens for the first time for work. It's the Mitakon 135mm f2.5 lens that's made in a Fuji GFX mount. It's a long, heavy lens with not even the slightest nod toward automation. There are no electrical contacts between this lens and the camera. And, obviously, no auto focus. Just the good, old focus by hand that we all used to do so well....

I bought this lens specifically to do portraits in the studio. It's the equivalent of a 106mm lens on a full frame camera. And even though I had no real expectation that it would be sharp across the frame at f2.5 I knew I'd be using it most of the time at f5.6, or in that neighborhood. After all, most clients really do want both the eyes and the tip of the nose in focus on their portraits...

The Fuji GFX50Sii is very tolerant of older, non-system lenses. I used the combination mounted on a tripod and I took advantage of the image magnification feature of the camera to make sure I was sharply focusing on my subject's eyes. I also had focus peaking engaged so I could tell if we were moving around too much front to back and back to front. The exposure, with my LED lights in various modifiers, was aperture of 7.1, shutter speed of 1/60th of a second, and ISO 320. I shot Raw+Fine Jpegs mostly so the previews would be ample and detailed. All the better to fine focus with. 

My take on the lens is that it's nicely sharp in the center two thirds of the frame from f4.0 up the scale to at least f16. The only place where the lens falls short for me is that at a portrait focus distance (about 6 feet) and at f5.6+ there is corner vignetting that is small but visible. I left a bit of extra "air" around my subject just in case and used that extra compositional slop as crop space to cut out the vignette. The trash space was about 1/20th of the frame. Not a big deal if you know about it in advance. 

I know that the Fuji 110 f2.0 lens is supposed to be the flagship lens of the whole system and a heart throb portrait lens but for my use in studio this 135mm does a fine job. And that's how I'll end up using it. As a studio portrait lens. Is there a Fuji 110 in my future? Who knows?

I did have a back light on the set but saw no flaring. Again ---- it's a heavy lens and having an L bracket is a blessing for tripod mounting. 

The young doctor I photographed arrived right on time and I ushered him into a temporarily chilly studio. I'll turn the AC back up to 78° now that he's gone. But I had to give the guy a break since he had to wear a suit and tie... He was amiable and very happy to have nailed a great position with a really good practice here in the city where he grew up. And, in fact, the practice I do these images for has been named as one of the top ten employers in the city every year, for over a decade. So.....lucky him. 

When I do these portraits I try to sit down as soon as the subject exits and import them into the system. Mistakes seem to happen more often as time goes by... I import all, edit out the frames that don't make the grade and then do a quick, global tweak before exporting big Jpegs for the online gallery. I make the Jpegs "beefy" so I would be able to use them in a pinch if anything happened to the other two sets of back up images. 

Within an hour of our session the gallery has been sent to marketing and I get to move on with the rest of my day. 

So, my takeaway vis-a-vis the 135mm Mitakon is that you would never want to use a manual focus lens with a long focus throw like this for sports or action but for controlled work in the studio the lens is a good option. Super sharp eyelashes, if that's where you focused. And nice overall tonality. I'll probably spark up the final files with a bit of the ole clarity slider in post production but really, the images are sharp enough already. I sometimes just like a little extra sparkle. 

Happy subject. Happy client. Happy photographer. Happy, happy swimmer. Today, right now, this is how life is supposed to be!!!

I thought it might be fun to show off all the variations of the stuff I shot yesterday. A stream of visual consciousness. One walk/one lens. An ongoing workshop.

 

My fave of the day.

Fuji GFX 50Sii +

Carl Zeiss 50mm f1.4 ZF.2 lens.

What I learned when I spent a couple hours photographing in the late afternoon with a Fuji medium format camera and an older lens designed to cover a 35mm format: If you want "character" in your lens then it's fun to try out some of these older, manual focus lenses but don't expect perfect performance across the bigger frame. Even when cropped to the square the CZ 50mm shows some vignetting. It's fixable in post but.... it's pretty heavy vignetting compared to even the Voigtlander 58mm f1.4.  The Zeiss lens also has more distortion. It's mostly simple barrel distortion and fixable with a +5 correction in the lens correction panel. So, if you are looking for perfect correction (which is probably a combination of computational correction and just having been designed for the larger sensor) you'll most likely want to look at Fuji's AF lenses designed specifically for this system. In my short experience lenses like the GFX 50mm f3.5 and the GFX 35-70mm f4.5-5.6 don't vignette and have far less distortion. 

But where's the fun in that? 

The "pros" of adapted 35mm lenses are: 1. You probably already own them. 2. They are much smaller and lighter; even with adapters. 3. Stopped down to f4.0 or f5.6 they are very sharp in any region outside the vignette zone. 4. They can be had dirt cheap. 5. They have a different look than the more modern lenses and that can match some people's preferences for images. Both in color and out of focus rendering. And 6. Did I mention that they can be had dirt cheap?

I had walked with the same camera and a different lens on the same street last week. At the time it was about 105° and humid. After ten minutes or so my hands were dripping with sweat. My endurance waned. My tolerance for failure dropped like a rock. And whenever the camera was exposed to direct sunlight I got an overheat warning --- if I left the camera on between shots.  

What a difference seven to ten degrees make. At 97° I felt almost cool. Dry hands. More cognitive focus. No fatigue and a greater willingness to backtrack to a location and try a shot in several different ways. It almost felt like being on vacation.  And we have a full week of high 90s to enjoy going forward. 

Last week I might have seen this powder blue pick-up truck and taken the easiest shot I could before moving on. Yesterday in the early evening I took my time to circle the truck and shoot from different angles and different directions. I was willing to wait for breaks in the traffic to go out into the street and get front shots. And generally I was more patient with both myself and the process. 

There's nothing earth shattering here. Just casual observations with a camera. But it's nice to be out where you can notice day to day changes for the better. And also notice how the variations in temperature can so affect one's approach to making photographs. 

Wall Glow.

The chair for the guy who controls the parking lot at Vespaio Restaurant.

Wall chaos. 

middle row. Second bulb from the front. That's where I put my focus.

OMG Shoes!

Prop in an optician's front window.

Prop in an optician's front window. Part two.

Lovely focus fall off from front to back.

Stetson hats. 

A retreat back to the "high comfort" of the REI Bucket Hat. At half the weight. But with 150% of the charm...

The First Day in 62 with temperatures under 100°. A day for celebration and a late afternoon walk with a new lens and camera combo.

 

I won't belabor the details. It's the Fuji GFX 50Sii and the very eccentric

Carl Zeiss 50mm f1.4 ZF.2 lens. Shot square to take care of vignetting and 

to make me happier with the compositions. 

Two of my favorites from this afternoon.

I've thought long and hard about why photography seems less enjoyable with every new iteration of cameras.

 

Street scene in Siena. At dusk. 

I've spent some time thinking about what it is that's making photography less interesting. To me, at any rate. There is a line of thought that says we were just "technicians" back in the film days but now people have been freed from the "drudgery" of taking photographs and can now just concentrate on "seeing" the photos they want to capture; unfettered by having to learn how to photograph.

One can look at the photo above and think about it in two ways. First, I don't think we actually walked around in the streets and thought to ourselves; "Here is a unique opportunity to hone my craft and show off my skills." Instead, speaking for myself, I was too busy experiencing the differences in my culture versus Italian culture and trying to find ways to show what I was thinking and how I was experiencing the "newness" of it all. Not trying to show how sharp the corners of a lens were when used wide open. In fact in most of my favorite images from that time I was printing with an intention to blur the corners of the frames more, not less.

When I look at this image I think either: "Wow, we really knew what we were doing back then. I remember that it was dusk and the light was low. I had ISO 400 speed film loaded in the camera. In fact, that was the fastest speed film I took with me that month. I was focusing a slow lens (f3.5) with a long focus throw, using a dim ground glass screen in a waist level finder with the image reversed. I set the manual exposure with the aperture and shutter speed controls solely based on experience and a paper "cheat sheet" from an old Kodak film box. I was photographing with a 100mm lens at its widest aperture and, of course, there was no such thing as in camera image stabilization in 6x6cm cameras at that time.

Then, after carrying the exposed film around for the next several weeks, carefully shepherding it through airport security with the dreaded X-ray machines I got it home and in total darkness rolled it onto a metal reel and put it in a developing tank. I prepared film developing chemicals and carefully adjusted the temperature by putting the metal tank in a cooling bath until I zero'd in on the exact temperature for development. I used decades of previous experience to perform an exacting agitation regimen after which I drained the developer and added stop bath (at the same temperature) to the tank, after which I replaced the stop bath with fixer. All timed by a big timer with mechanical hands and glowing numbers. 

Once the film was fixed I could remove it from the developing tank and, while still on its reel, perform an archival washing. The final step was to soak the film for a minute in a solution of distilled water and a product called "Photo Flo" which prevented water spots from forming on the drying film. 

Once the film was dried I cut it into strips of three and placed the strips into a plastic page so I could make contact sheets. Once the contact sheets were made and dried I could sit down with a cup of coffee and carefully review each frame with a magnifying loupe and decide if any of them were worth making larger prints from. 

And that was a whole other process. Is it any wonder that we loved the images that turned out, through all the processes and time, well enough to be proud of? We had so much invested into the experience by the time the image was fully realized on a piece of printing paper. And the print got shared with maybe ten or twenty friends and family members before either being framed for a wall or stuck in a box with some future goal yet to be crystalized."

But in essence what I was really thinking when I took the photo was: "How stylish these people are! How gloriously fit they look. How fresh and happy they look strolling through a lovely urban space; maybe on the way to a nice dinner or a party at a friend's house. How much better dressed they are than people back home! How comfortable they look in their own skins."

Is it any wonder that we have a nostalgic idea of the value of a photograph? 

Or I could now think this instead: "How lovely to be freed up from the drudgery of making photographs in the old fashion way. To be able to walk down a street in any kind of light, see something, whip a digital camera up to my eye, have the camera focus instantly on the closest eye of the subject in front of it, instantly compute the correct exposure and white balance, stabilize the camera's movement caused by my very human hands and capture the image with a profoundly greater dynamic range than we could ever have dreamed of in the film days. 

If I'm in a hurry I can punch up the colors and sharpness in the camera and then send the image to my phone and upload it to my website, to Instagram, to a blog and to a forum in just minutes where it will then be seen by hundreds or thousands of people all over the world, and all without breaking a sweat, learning any skills beyond recognizing a scene of interest and having the motivation to push a few buttons --- from the start to the finish of the project.

It's so wonderful to live in an age when making photographs has been "democratized" to such an incredible extent. And look! My investment in time, skill, and patience is minimal to non-existent. Why do those old guys make such a big deal about the sanctity of the process?"

I'm torn between both ways of thinking. I've done photography both ways. And, as I've winnowed down the thought process to an easy to digest core I've decided that enjoyment of photography.boils down to two things which don't depend on each other for our satisfaction. 

One is that old saw which says: "It's not the destination that is ...... (fun, rewarding, valuable, rewarding, etc.) it's the journey." The value is in the joy of walking, seeing, crafting, birthing an image. One gravitates to subject matter that interests them or immerses them into the process. But it's the mastery of the whole thing that brings a smile to some faces. A quick analogy is that of music. Sure, you can sit on your butt and listen to your audio system playback the work of a musician that everyone agrees they like or..... you can learn to play an instrument for yourself. You can enjoy the process of actually making music. Of interpreting other people's music. But it's the ability to make the music that brings the joy. Not knowing how to build a violin. Learning how to play it. Not knowing how a stereo amplifier is constructed. Not parsing which pick-up is the ultimate one for your turntable. No, the real joy is (or should be) the music itself. And the reward of mastering your own ability to create music is triumphant and brimming with satisfaction. The journey. The learning. Those are great. In the end it's the song that brings the feeling of creativity. It's the creative immersion that brings satisfaction.

It's the same, I think, in photography. It's not the gear or the film or the CMOS versus CCD knowledge that makes photographers happiest, it's being able to translate a scene into a photograph. How to make something sharable. Valuable to you as a piece of art. A conduit for communicating a vision worth sharing. 

The other thing that drives satisfaction with photography is its use to record an object or event or person  that you find so compelling that you want to record your idea of that person or thing for eternity. It's not even the process that attracts you but rather the subject itself. The photography you do exists to work in the service of translating, glorifying or sharing a vision or interpretation that's significant to you. And one that you would feel strongly about photographing no matter what camera or lens you have with which to film it. Subject driven photography?

I love the process of making photographs but I love more the result of photographing what I love to look at. The gestures I see mean more. The expressions are the immediate reward. The freezing in time of something I find infinitely beautiful. And being able to come back to the image again and again.

So, back to my original assertion that photography seems less enjoyable to me as we have more immediate and facile cameras at our disposal. I think it boils down to two things. First, we lack a real investment in our process. A deeper investment. Without the labors of creation we miss feeling attached to the process and to the outcome. When something becomes too easy and too automatic it also gets homogenized and represents less value to us, culturally. But secondly, as a result of things like the pandemic, the economy, the transition away from lively downtowns filled with interesting people to everyone working remotely, and more, we see fewer and fewer interesting things. Fewer targets of visual joy to immerse ourselves in. As we become more guarded we are availed of fewer things of wonder.

Perhaps finding value in an image is like raising a child. There is no "mastery" for child reading but the deepest bonds come from just spending lots and lots of time with them.

And part of the decline in value we're feeling (or at least I am) is our own personal experiences of having stepped back from closer kinships with people in public. Being more isolated. Less available.

I just looked up from my computer monitor, taking a break from thinking and typing, and I'm looking at the wall behind the desk. It's filled with prints. Two of B. with her strong and warm smile. One of Ben when he was about five years old, sitting at our favorite hamburger joint which is now long gone. One of Anne B. who was a brilliant and thoughtful assistant and still a close friend. Renae in her exuberant  youth sitting with a Yashica Mat 124 camera in her hands staring right into my camera. Ben holding Christmas lights. Jennifer with swim goggles, her face having been spritzed with warm water for the photograph. Ben at three working on his blueberry colored iBook. A black and white print of a Russian model staring into the lens of my camera while standing on the Spanish Steps in Rome. 

None of these were exercises in just operating a camera. None are visual poems dedicated to acutance. All were exercises in bonding, at least temporarily, with the energy and the spirit of the subjects. All young and beautiful. All filled with such potential and promise. 

I guess what I'm really saying; or coming to grips with, is that we grow old. The things around us change. No camera can make up for the sadness that comes, inevitably, with the passage of time. And no great camera will make it better. We constructed ideas of beauty in our youth. Things of beauty can be so ephemeral.

Walking with a purpose. Seeing what I can expect from a GFX 50mm f3.5 lens for the GFX 50Sii camera. For a good reason.

 

One might wonder why I go out on long, repetitive walks and photograph all kinds of familiar and unfamiliar subject matter during all times of the year. I always have some different lens or camera body in tow. The basic idea is that it's a process that gives me the opportunity to test new gear, reacquaint myself with gear I've owned for a while but have not used lately and to separate truth from myth or unsubstantiated opinions about the equipment that I might want to use on paying jobs for commercial photography clients. Will a lens resolve well at f3.5? How does it look at f16? Where does diffraction kick in? Does diffraction really make a huge difference? Are the controls comfortable to use? Does a lens "ride well" on a particular camera? Do I have a fluid knowledge of where all the controls are on the exterior of a given camera? Can I find a much needed control setting in the menu of a camera that is new to me? Or on a camera that I've haven't used in months?

For a person who makes a living from blogging, or for the hobbyists whose only downside in not being able to deliver the goods is personal dissatisfaction, the performance over time  of one piece of gear or another is not a huge speed bump. A huge proportion of my readership here, and the readership on most photography fora or other blogs, are not using their cameras in order to do an imaging business or to make money. They pursue photography for fun, for their satisfaction, as a delightful way to spend time. 

I get that since my hobby is also photography but, as I remind a number of my friends who've long since given up working real jobs, I'm still actively working at the profession of photography as well and my clients depend on me to know my gear and to know how to use it...well. I never want to find out while on a job that a certain lens just isn't capable of delivering. 

In order to get current and stay current with the gear I combine a quiet, walking meditation (no fellow walkers, no phone, no conversations) with a thorough dive into one camera and one lens at a time. I've never wanted to take a bag of lenses with me and methodically shoot each one while aiming at a brick wall. I want to do deeper dives on one piece at a time. Change too many variables and you just get confused. 

I tested the GFX 35-70mm zoom lens over the course of the last several weeks and found it to be very, very good. That gave me the confidence to use it on our shoot last Thursday at the Capitol Area Food Bank. We got a lot of good work done there and the art director, having gone through the final files, feels that the images will do an excellent job when sized up for large truck "wraps." But I would not have proposed using that lens if I wasn't familiar with it. If I had not tested it. If I had not worked through its profiles in Lightroom and Photoshop. 

We have an even bigger job coming up on the 6th and 7th of September. I'll be working with a video crew on two days doing behind the scenes photographs, portraits on set, food photography and maybe even a bit of "b-roll." The cameras that will get the lion's share of use will be the two Leica SLs and the Leica SL2, along with the Q2 for quick grab shots. I'll lean heavily on the Leica 24-90mm zoom and a 50mm APO Summicron but I wanted to do any hero shots of plated food with the Fuji GFX and two different lenses. The 50mm f3.5, which I have. And the 45-100mm f4.0 GFX lens I've ordered. 

Today seemed like a good day to get up to speed with the 50mm, which is like a 40mm on the MF camera. Even a bit longer if you constrain the frame to a square aspect ratio. I'll test the new zoom when it gets here early next week. 

I headed downtown around 9 a.m. It was still in the upper 80's. I walked a slightly different route of about three miles. Instead of going through the middle of downtown I went across the pedestrian bridge that divides north and south Austin, headed east on the Hike and Bike Trail then wended my way around.

The 50mm f3.5 lens is the smallest and lightest of the Fuji MF lenses and I wanted to make sure it at least matched the optical quality I've been getting out of the 35-70mm lens. I shot the 50mm all morning long and at f-stops from 3.5 to f22. I photographed things close up and things far away. All in all it's a great lens and very nice to use. If you stick with medium apertures (f5.6 to f16) and keep the shutter speeds at appropriate settings you'll walk away with tremendously detailed images. And the lens is very neutral in its color rendering. 

I chose to photograph in the square format today; just to make things more interesting for me. I like working in the square and this is the first digital camera I've used that makes generating 38 megapixel, 1:1 files easy and with a natural operational feel. 

If you click on the images you can see them bigger. They start life as 6000+ X 6000+ files and I drop down the resolution to 3200 by 3200 for Blogger. 

I have become much more conversant with the 50S camera. There are some things in the menu which could have been grouped more effectively but it's just a matter of memorizing where the important stuff sits. Really, when you think about it, after you have a camera set up for the way you like to shoot there are only a small number of additional tweaks you might need to make for different kinds of jobs....

I now have four batteries for the camera so I'm confident of getting through a full day of commercial shooting with this supply. On BTS shoots, and as the still photographer on a video production, you can anticipate shooting at least 1,000 shots per day. Batteries become critical.

That's all for now. Today and tomorrow are supposed to be miserably hot and then, all next week, the prediction for our zip code is all days under 100 degrees. It will seem almost like the coming of Fall.

Texas Grass Tanning. This property still has a ways to go. I see patches of green on the ground to the bottom left of the frame...

Window Art at Mañana Coffee. 

the downtown, Saturday morning, Farmer's Market. At Republic Square. 

the downtown, Saturday morning, Farmer's Market. At Republic Square. 

Stephen Shore-ing my way through life.

The Lamar Boulevard Bridge. From the Pfluger Pedestrian Bridge.

Looking West in the morning.

Testing gear is a tradition I don't want to give up. We use most of the gear I write about here on jobs. The jobs vary so the gear varies. Sometimes I switch gear around just to keep things interesting. 

Seriously considering looking at one more camera. The Hasselblad X1D2. On sale right now. Everyone raves about how great the color science of that camera is.... maybe? We'll see.