Back in the office. Polished the computer and the hard drives. Sorted cameras. Sat back and admired clean, white walls. Went swimming.

If you like the look of a 40mm, full frame lens you might be interested in grafting a

Carl Zeiss ZM 28mm f2.8 onto the front of a Leica CL. It's a nicely compact

package that makes really nice photographs. Unless you are afraid of the smaller

format. And the fact that the camera has been discontinued. Still.....

it looks so darn cool...

The studio looks great. I'm just now moving everything back in and trying to come to grips with the idea of leaving the walls bare for a while, just to enjoy the "blank canvas" bright white look of it all. This morning I moved the computer, hard drives and printer back into the office space and hooked them all up. I would have done it earlier but I was reluctant to spend a lot of time inside until the paint smell receded and mostly vanished. That was today. 

I love the clean look so much that I'm getting more and more serious about tossing tons of extraneous stuff out. I've got a bag full of microphones, mixers, cables and more microphones and mixers that I'm going to take to the camera store and "trade in." I'd try to sell them online but I have no patience for things like Ebay. I'd rather donate stuff than wade through the pathos and insecurities of online buyers. 

Same with buying stuff from individuals. I'll buy a lens or a camera from a good friend but I'm always hesitant about buying stuff online from anywhere but a well known retail store. Or the same retail/web storefront. I like the guys at Camera West. I'm happy to bite the bullet and pay a bit above market price for used gear at The Leica Store Miami. And, of course, for lots of new stuff there's always B&H Photo. Each of these vendors does a good job of standing behind the products they sell and taking care of their customers when things don't turn out as intended. Not so with strangers online who seem to vanish at the first sign of trouble. 

For the first time in a long time I'm not really in the market for anything. I thought I might resell the two Leica CL cameras but I took them out and used them again and I'm right back in love with them. I've found that Leica stuff holds my interest in a different way than other camera brands. Take the Leica SL camera for instance. It was launched in 2015 and the sensor tech in it is older. It's strictly contrast detect auto focus which drives a lot of photographers around the bend. It's hefty and the battery life is less than stellar but it's adorable, solid and the files that come out of the camera, when used well, are really quite good and, in many ways very different aesthetically than the files that come out of most other (non-Leica) cameras. 

If one purchases a brand like Sony I think a lot of the reason for that choice is to stay up to date with the latest features and technology. If that's a primary reason to buy than it's only logical that those are also the good reasons to want to constantly upgrade. To keep up. Since the Leicas are constantly at least a generation or two behind when it comes to features, and some pizzazz technology at the time when you buy them new, you come to understand that maybe we're buying them for different reasons. 

Since I'm not really in the market for a new camera or lens I find myself rotating through the existing inventory with a sense of new discovery. As in: what have I overlooked before?  On Monday I'll pack up a few LED lights, grab the Fuji GFX 50Sii and head over to my favorite law firm to make an environmental portrait of an attorney. 

I'm delighted to do so because it's a chance to re-visit the TTArtisan 90mm f1.25 lens. Yes, it vignettes quite a bit at the edges of the medium format sensor and it has some geometric distortion built in, but it's also a fast, fun lens. I'll shoot at a safe aperture to start out. "Safe" from the perspective of ensuring enough depth of field to cover from the tip of the attorney's nose to the backs of his ears. Once we have an ample number of keepers I'll ask if he'll collaborate with me by hanging out while I make more exposures at wider and wider apertures. When we're operating in safe mode while doing commercial portraits I mostly stay "North" of f5.6. Venturing as high as f8.0. But after we've got good stuff in the can I want to venture all the way down to f2.0. I know the lens has wider f-stops but by f2.0 the depth of field is so shallow that anything under f2.0 and you're just showing off mindless bokeh rendering techniques, not solving an issue that needs resolution. (And I'm not sure the lens is sharp enough at and near wide open to make this kind of tiny slice of depth of field viable....). 

As far as vignetting goes I tend not to use the 4:3 aspect ratio since various other ratios don't include the far corners and that's where the darkening is most pronounced. Even 3:2 sidesteps most of the vignetting that this lens delivers. Finally, the closer the subject the less vignetting occurs. 

In the end, knowing myself as well as I do, if I find myself shooting a lot of portraits with the Fuji GFX I will almost certainly buy the 110mm f2.0 lens which is almost universally adored by people who use the system. But not until I've hit a wall with the 90mm TTArtisan lens. Not today.

Outside of the commercial portrait arena all my other "fun" work recently has been shot with various cameras set to black and white. It's this week's trend. And with all the controls and presets available now in Lightroom black and white has become such a joy. I like boosting the contrast and I like making images darker. The scenes seem more realistic when I darken them and the increase in contrast makes images a bit more exciting. I'm so over endless tones of mushy grayscale that I almost can't look at flat images anymore without feeling a tremendously underwhelmed.

Shooting all the time sucks up memory space in the office. Currently have six 12 terabyte drives attached to the iMac Pro. Three of them back up the other three. I'm also using a couple of fast SSDs for temporary work. Stuff I'm processing in the moment. The trade-off for speed is limited size. They are each 1 terabyte. Seems to work as long as I continue upgrading, migrating and transferring. But it's a constant reminder that film was/is a pretty robust back-up medium. 

Finally. Having a blast at the pool. Yesterday I swam with an outrageously fast swimmer who won gold in the Sidney Olympics. The coach paired us up in adjacent lanes in order to mirror each other. It's a training method in which one person leads and the other person tries to mirror their stroke cadence and pace. It's a great way to learn subtle (and not so subtle) stroke improvements. Then we did a set of 50s in which my coach set (too fast) targeted repeat times for me, and my partner would estimate how much time difference in our starts would allow him to sprint and try to catch me. He pushed off the wall about five seconds after me. The logic behind the exercise is that trying not to get caught, or trying to catch a leading swimmer, on each repeat makes each person act, maybe subconsciously, more competitive and thus makes each one swim faster. Outside their comfort zone. It worked for me. I probably swam those ten 50 yard "races" faster than any I have in about 15 years. 

My fellow swimmer caught me five out of the ten times. I sprinted well but thought he might be holding back ---- just a little. It's one thing to try racing against someone about half your age but it's another thing entirely when that person is a six foot four inch tall former record holder who never stopped swimming. A bit intimidating? Yeah, I guess so... Required two lunches afterwards... and a long nap.

Winter is coming to Austin sporadically. Cold and wet today. But that means something different to us here than it does to people in, say, Montreal. Cold here is 60° and wet is --- well, wet is the same. Still, it's nice to break out sweatshirts, jackets, etc. Can't wait for another 20° drop. Then I can pull out the trench coat and pretend to be a 1950s spy. Fun with winter clothes.