The Visual Science Lab : A morning spent bouldering in Pedernales State Park. I take another stab at becoming proficient at both defying gravity and also making landscape photos.

After months of tormenting heat we've finally gotten a few days of Fall-like temperatures here in Austin. It's nice to be able to sleep with the A/C off and the windows open at night. Lows got down into the 50s last night. Wow!

With the good weather the current center of our attention I decided to make good use of the opportunity and get out of town this morning. I'd been wanting to get back over to Pedernales State Park to see how the hot spell affected the park and I wanted to spend some time playing around with the Fuji GFX 50Sii; just to take a break from "Leica, Leica, Leica." Pedernales State Park is also kind of the opposite of a location like Montreal. Non-urban. Nature without the rough edges shaved off.

The "Falls" area is a huge field of rocks and boulders that have been worn and shaped by millennia of water sporadically and sometimes emphatically rushing through a narrow valley. Sometimes it's dry but after upstream flooding the whole area is subject to flash flooding.

The boulder fields are varied. None of the Falls areas is even remotely ADA accessible and quickly navigating some parts require making leaps and jumps over from one high rock crown to another with ten to twenty foot deep chasms in between. I like the challenge but as I get older I tend to be more cautious. I'm not less able to leap but I don't trust my sense of balance as completely as I did just a few years ago. You don't want to make a jump, fail to stick the landing, and then flail in an attempt to not fall to down into a rocky crack in the earth. It could hurt. It could be embarrassing. It might even be fatal.

Kids love the rock fields. And kids can be absolutely fearless. Dogs are more focused and deliberate. Didn't see any cats out climbing the rocks today.

Since I've been completely obsessed with the Leica M lately I thought it would be smart to take a break and instead sample what the Fuji GFX has to offer. I took two lenses. One is the Fuji GFX 35-70mm zoom. It's pretty much perfect for stuff like this because it's sharp, goes wide, and it's a nice range of focal lengths. As the counterpoint I brought along a lens I haven't used much lately. It's the Mitakon 135mm f2.5 for the GFX mount. It's heavy and completely manual but where the 35-70mm tops out at a FF equivalent angle of view of about a 55mm the Mitakon reaches out to about a 105mm equivalent. So, it's quite a different look.

The big lens (Mitakon) went into the very small, black backpack along with a quart of water, my phone and a small white towel. And a small first aid kit. I was once a Boy Scout. Accidents happen. "Be Prepared." I've nearly always carried a first aid kit along on shoots and outdoor adventures. I've bandaged up models, assistants and sometimes just unlucky strangers, many times. The worst was when a model on an ad shoot decided to wade barefoot in a stream while we were all focused on shooting something else. She stepped on a broken bottle and got a bad and bloody cut. It required all my Boy Scout skills to clean the wound, pack it, wrap it, and staunch the bleeding. She survived. But it sure put a damper on the shoot.

The first aid kit was not required today.

After a couple hours of photography and some more pleasant hiking around and looking at stuff. I headed home to have a late lunch and to look at the results of my photographic handywork. See below for examples...

Even though the weather is mild the sun was still bright and direct. And you know what that means! Wide brimmed hat, long sleeves with some sort of ambitious SPF rating, long trousers and grippy hiking boots. I need to make a clever cover for the GFX body so it doesn't overheat in next year's sun fest.

The images below were all shot with the GFX body and the Mitakon 135mm f2.5.

Everything is manual and I'm never certain I'm getting the best focus accuracy if

I just depend on focus peaking when the lens is already stopped down to a taking aperture of

f8.0 or f11. My process, when I have time, is to open the aperture all the way to f2.5, focus with as much accuracy as I can right there, and then stop down and take the image.

It's a pain in the ass for anything that's moving in any direction other than parallel to the camera.

But for portraits in the studio it's a technique that works just fine.

The Mitakon required an increase in saturation, contrast and sharpness to make it more closely match the Fuji lens. But it's certainly not bad. Especially not for the princely sum of $250.