Did you ever photograph portraits with 4x5 inch sheet film and a view camera? Did you do a Polaroid test? Did you keep your Polaroids? I did.

 

Clients loved 4x5 inch sheet film. Not just because of the amazing detail, amazing depth of field control and the ability to make geometric corrections in camera, but also because a commercial shoot involved the use of 4x5 inch Polaroid test shots. It was a format art directors could really come to grips with. The Polaroids were big enough to see clearly without having to use a loupe. They could be written on for note taking. The clients could sign the backs of the prints so photographers could prove later than the client really, really did approve the shot before final film was exposed.

I loved the results of Polaroid's 100 speed, black and white test materials. A lot of people used Polaroid Type 55 which also produced a printable negative but for me the Polapan Pro 100 was the ultimate. 

A lot of people back in the 4x5 inch film days used color Polaroid test materials but I hated doing so because temperature controls were important in getting anywhere close to a representation of the color that transparency film would finally deliver. People spent way too much time on set trying to get "perfect" Polaroid colors apparently not realizing that there was no way (other than luck) that the color of the test prints would end up matching the transparency films. 

Polaroid tests were my favorite way to test out new lighting set ups and the relationships between background levels and foreground subject levels. 

This is a Polaroid test I made back in the late 1980s. B. was the art director on the shoot and she graciously agreed to stand in during the lighting design so I could see what was good and also what might need to be changed.  She was a patient subject because it was her project on the line... And because she's by nature quite patient. 

The image was made with a Linhof Technika 4x5 camera and, obviously, a Rodenstock 210mm lens with no filters. 

Now, if we needed big test shots we'd just tether a camera to a computer. But what's the fun in that?

I love my collection of old test shots. I only kept the good ones. 4x5 shooting was time consuming but really it was easy and fun and offered so much control. And, as I've written, clients loved it. Put a four inch by five inch transparency next to a 35mm slide and it was laughably easy to know which one the client would pick. And once addicted to large format it's very rare that they ever went back to 35mm...

Last post of 2023. Stay safe tonight. Come back tomorrow. 

Goodbye 2023. The year in review.

 

2023 was a crappy year for a lot of the world. Wars, poverty, economic downturns, rampant inflation and climate issues galore. But for those lucky enough to dodge most of the sad and desperate things happening in the world many days worked out well. Some were great, and a few were superb. I count myself as one of the lucky ones -- to be alive in this time, in the this location, in my local economy. 

This was the year I came to grips with the idea of slowing down the business or retiring altogether. In all, I did sixteen days of work out of 365 days in the year. That's not much of a workload. With this kind of trajectory I'll probably slim down the commercial engagements to six or maybe eight in 2024. Actually one a month sounds just right.

I dreaded turning down work at first but after I did so, in most cases, I felt a sense of relief. Of being unburdened.  A sense of having more finite control over my own time. With the exception of two days no other obligations to any client intruded or interfered with my daily morning swim workouts. That's an exceptional achievement for the year.

Of course declining work means that one source of fee income that I've gotten used to over the past 40 years became pretty much non-existent. You have to get used to changing your financial perspective if you are going to turn down paying work. You take money from different pots instead of living via business cash flow. It's a psychological reset but you get used to it over time. Repetition goes a long way toward instilling comfort. And, I've had good mentors show me the way to do good financial "wing walking". The secret is to not let go of one strut until you have a good grip on the next one. 

One would think that after jettisoning a previous source of income that my passion for buying new cameras and lenses would have abated; or at least slowed down. But that wasn't the reality of 2023 for me. If anything I stayed at par for fun expenses. I dipped a toe into M mount cameras and lenses and then, after some testing and shooting, I dove in with abandon. In fact, my last purchase of the year was another Leica M 240, acquired just last week. The M mount stuff joins the Fuji GFX 50Sii stuff as the "big" acquisitions of the year. 

The end result? The new gear is fun and interesting. I used the GFX for two big assignments so I made some money with that system. The M cameras, not so much. But they were really fun to photograph with. In fact, I took only an M240 with four M mount lenses, and a Leica Q2 with me on a seven day solo photographic vacation in Montreal. One of my favorite cities in North America. The combination of the M camera and the Q camera was great and helped me be productive while not dragging around huge camera bags full of stuff. I loved the vacation. More like that....

Everyone in my nuclear family weathered the year with very few bumps in the road. No health scares, no job loses and no big personal losses to speak of. 

One thing I took up late this year is "camera scanning" of last century black and white and color film negatives. Being able to access those old negatives is like having access to a time machine. Only with new PhotoShop features and camera capabilities you can pull so much more out of the film. I'm actually looking forward to cold and rainy days so I have a good excuse to stay in the office and go fishing for images I overlooked before. This will, of course, necessitate the purchase of ever more hard drives for storage...

Looking forward.

I'm committed to blogging for at least another year. Unless my readers get all judgmental about me being judgmental and start opening their comments with the phrase: "you should....." There are so few blogs left that actually discuss photography without heavy doses of malaise and moroseness that I sometimes find I write just so I'll have something to read later....

With all these wonderful M series Leicas and lenses at hand I'm ramping up travel. I don't want to go anywhere during high travel seasons when all the fun venues are crowded to the max ---- and hotels and plane fares are exorbitant --- since I have the flexibility to travel in the off seasons. And I'll be taking complete advantage of that. 

Ben had a great time in Japan so that's got to be my next adventure. Dates pending. He's a great source of logistical info. Istanbul is also near the top of my travel radar. I was in Istanbul many years ago and I'm curious to see how much has changed and how much stayed the same. 

2024 is an election year so I'll make sure to avoid all exposure to Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), and most of Instagram. Spam filters on high!!!  I'll donate as much $$$ as we can to our candidates and hope for the best. But I'm not willing to carry around any of the rancor that so many seem to embrace. Almost like a hobby. And I'll work at keeping politics off the blog. If you come here to drop political comments into the mix they will most likely be expunged ---- even if I agree with your position 100%. This blog is supposed to be about a life in photography. Not the collapse of modern civilization...

I'll probably get a new phone this year and it will most certainly be an Apple iPhone. I'll piss off my video production friends by making wonderful videos on it. Ignoring their investments in "state of the art" video gear. I might even reawaken my YouTube channel which currently has no videos and 25 followers. But it's so obvious that video is the future of communications. Maybe not the future of art but yes, the future of advertising and communications. You know it is --- even if you lie about it and claim never to have watched a tutorial or review on YouTube. Or watched a movie...

2024 seems like a good year to maintain a commitment to staying in good shape. After all, if you are going to travel you may as well be comfortable walking ten or fifteen miles a day in order to find the photographs (and experiences) you want on your journeys. No "couch potato" travel here. No shooting photos through the green tinted windows of a tour bus. No skipping a great view because it's off the beaten path. No heading to the bar instead of moving forward. 

As usual, my commitment to myself is to make it to five x one hour swim practices per week. To pay attention to the swim advice and coaching of my highly professional and insanely good swim coaches while having fun and being mostly out of breath the whole time. Let's get those exercise heart rates up to 160 and move some blood through the systems. Few interesting things happen while napping.

Will also continue some cross training by doing resistance exercise at the gym two or three days a week as well as walking three or four miles per day. I knew the spare time freed up by turning down work would be good for something....

And...I will continue to eat whatever I want and enjoy every freaking bite. 

I have no advice for anyone else. And most of my audience believes so strongly that they are imbued with incredible amounts of knowledge already and so wouldn't listen if I did give out advice. That's why we make this blog about the day to day life of an average person engaged in photography and not an advice column. Use whatever camera you want. I don't care. It doesn't matter. As long as we're still having fun. 

Photography has changed profoundly. I don't have all the answers to any part of it. There is no "right" way to do it. There are few to no rules. The next big thing is the next big thing and I have no clue what it will be or where it's coming from. Mining the past is nostalgia. It's addictive but there's so much left to do in the future. Let's go.

A Recycled post from 2012. I liked the photo. And I liked being reminded that it was made with a Leica SL2. Not the digital version... the film version.

 

Kissing the last days of Summer goodbye with a yellow flowered dress and a floppy straw hat.

We spent a few days up around
Fredericksburg, Tx. and around Enchanted Rock shooting a fashion 

spread for a magazine. We were taking a short break on an ancient front

 porch attached to a grand, old, Texas wooden ranch house. I looked

 over and saw my model's look of quiet (tired) repose and I pulled up

 my camera in order to catch not just her youthful beauty but also the

 warm and unhurried feel of the day. It was near the end of September

 and still in the mid 90's. We were all warm but not glistening. I was

 drawn to the line of the young woman's jaw, the tranquility of her

 expression and the little wisp of dark hair sweeping down in front of

 her ear under her light colored straw hat.
Not lighting trickery here. Just the open shade. No post production

 elbow grease here just a curve adjustment in the scanning and a tiny bit

 of sharpening in Snapseed. No Promethean camera here, just an older

 Leica SL2 and an older, used 90mm Summicron. 

Fuji ISO 100 slide film.

Just dropped by to see if the VSL world HQ is locked up tight and bolstered with sandbags at every window. New Years Eve in Texas can get... rambunctious.

 All good here. Nothing to see until the 31st. But mostly from January first onward. Have fun out there. Don't get hurt, or arrested. Just remember what my favorite CEO's body guard used to say to his protectee when we traveled for work:

"Sir. Please be in your suite by 10 pm. Nothing good ever happens after ten."

I spent part of the holiday learning how to scan film with a camera and how to process the files from the scans. Fun.

Note. Not back from vacation. This post was originally published on the 3rd of Dec. but somehow got lost. I'm reposting it... See you in the new year.

When I sat down to distill my archive of photographs into a manageable collection it dawned on me that in addition to hundreds and hundreds of thousands of digital files I also have tens of thousands of various film frames. In fact, the first 25 years of my tenure as a photographer were, of course, all done on film. And a large amount of the work was done on black and white film. In the early days of PhotoShop and digital post processing I worked with a Nikon CoolScan 4000 to scan the 35mm images I wanted to play with and depended on a series of ever improved flatbed scanners to create files from medium format and 4x5 inch pieces of film. Neither of these methods was particularly efficient of fun so after a while I just gave up and took the occasional handful of negatives and/or slides over to Holland Photo and had them scan the film on one of their Noritsu machines. Again, since I couldn't put my hands on that process I wasn't particularly enthusiastic about the results. I had become far too conditioned to spend time doing my own tweaks and improvements during the course of the process. How could I not, having spent two decades hunkered down in my commercial darkroom?

With an ongoing wind down of commercial work since the pandemic I once again turned my attention to the idea of getting my favorite images scanned and out into the wild. Further motivated by the high resolution cameras that have come onto the market. I recently took a big plunge into researching how other people handled their "camera scans." (camera scans is my reference to placing a piece of film into a film holder, putting that on a very good light source and then photographing that frame with a high resolution camera body and a macro lens. After some DIY trial and error I broke down and ordered a Negative Film Supply negative holder and one of their high CRI/TLCI LED light sources. Those, along with a sturdy copy stand are the bedrock of my new scanning methodology. And I find it all works quite well. 

There is one caveat that must be voiced. You have to clean the dust off your negatives/slides before you scan them because every little spot and speck shows up. The worst is scanning black and  white negatives because there is nowhere for the dust spots to hide. Clean film is your friend. Clean film is your time saver. 

It's interested to note that everyone starts out their film scanning/camera scanning with the presumption that the highest megapixel camera is the best route to success. Of course, this all depends on your final target. But I have found that 24 megapixels digital cameras that have a good "multi-shot" high resolution mode are very good choices. Especially if that's what you have in house and don't feel like splashing out a lot more cash for what is really, mathematically, a relatively small amount of improvement. 

The lead photo of this post (above) was shot originally on Agfapan 25 medium format film. I think I did a good job processing it (Rodinal 1:50) and washing it because it's clean and stain free after 40 years of storage. I camera scanned this using a Panasonic S5, the Sigma 70mm f2.8 Art Series Macro lens and the above mentioned Negative Film Supply gear. I brought the raw file into Photoshop and inverted it (adjustments menu) and then worked on it by adding some contrast and some basic tweaks. It took about five minutes for me to get it just right. Much less time than my old flatbed scanner took to do a worse job....

I use the camera in the Aperture preferred mode. I set the aperture to between f8 and f11. ISO is set at 100. I use a blower brush on the front and back of the negative to get off as much dust as possible. I use a daylight WB. The LED is bright enough to give me a shutter speed of around 1/160th of a second. I've been using the camera set to multi-shot, high res and raw. So far it's been a good way to work. 

Of course I am manually focusing since we're down at near life-size. I have to say that some modern conveniences such as focus peaking are most welcome. It makes getting focus much easier. 

Since I already owned the cameras, the lens and the copy stand I've only had to come out of pocket for about $300 worth of additional gear. But, unlike cameras the film holder and light source don't become obsolete and are not "objects of desire" so it's all pretty much a one time expenditure which, I hope, will provide years of entertainment and material. 

A camera scan from a medium format color negative of Lou. Original photo 

done with a Hasselblad 500 CM + a 180mm CZ lens. The lens has the worst 

bokeh of any lens I have ever used and I blurred out the background a bit so

you would not have to see the harsh highlights caused by a five bladed aperture/shutter. 

The film was Agfa Portrait which was a lower saturation negative film.

From the Spanish Steps. Photographed with a Mamiya 6 camera and a 150mm lens.

Exposure info not recorded but the edge print of the film tells me that it was

captured on Tri-X film (TXP-6049). 

this was originally photographed on a rare film stock. It was Agfa Scala 200, a black and white positive transparency film. It was quite contrasty and sometime rendered reds too strongly. But it's a fun look and even more fun to scan. 

This image started life on Verichrome Pan film.

A nice and long toned black and white negative film; kind of an opposite of

the very contrasty Plus-X that was also popular at the time.

shot on a Hasselblad; I just check and found the little "Vs" in the film edge.

I'm breaking the scanning into projects. First up are my favorite old black and white negatives from multiple trips to Rome. Then I plan to dig in and scan tons of portraits --- family and friends; interesting other people. It's an interesting rabbit hole. Already having much more fun than I thought I would. 

Questions? Sure. 

For the aggressively pendantic. I'm currently calling the conversion of analog film to digital files "scanning." Call it whatever the heck you want. But it's not a straight copy shot anymore. That train has sailed....

This image was "copied" directly from four dimensional "real life" directly through the camera sensor and onto a solid state memory card. It required additional steps for me to be able to post it here. 

Give me a break.

Film scan from Agfapan 25 MF negative. ISO 25.

 

Bye for now. Taking the rest of the year off for the holidays. Enjoy the year end festivities.

Wreath on a house in Iceland.

 A second M 240 comes in for a soft landing.

Coffee at Mañana to reset the menus.

Or...what I'm doing on my December vacation.

End of day coffee break.

 Coffee and quiet at Mañana Coffee.

Soup. Just Soup. Medium Format Color Transparency Film

 

No edge notches so it must have been taken with a Rollei 6008i camera and appropriate lens. For some reason I couldn't find the exif information for this one....

My one Christmas wish? Besides world peace? Besides eliminating hunger and disease? Oh that's easy. It would be for either Hasselblad or Fujifilm or some other bold camera company to come out with a digital medium format system built around a 6 x 6 cm sensor. Full frame for medium format. The perfect aspect ratio. At this point I'm not sure I even care about the price. I guess I could always sell one of the cars and get a nice electric bike. But wouldn't it be great to

Last Minute Sales equal Last Minute Shopping.

Surprisingly, or maybe not so surprising, as we get closer to December 25th more and more of the things I am interested in are going on sale. I'm assuming that as consumers run out of gas for buying more expensive "luxury" items those items become overstocked and a drag on future earnings for retailers. Of course, we should point out that one person's "luxury" items might be someone else's basic necessities. After all, who doesn't need another short telephoto portrait lens or two? Or three?

I watched another video about using high res cameras to replace film scanners and it renewed my interest in the Negative Film Supply light source for camera scanning of film. I looked it up and found that it was currently available at $100 off its regular price. They made up for the lost profit when I went ahead and also ordered a medium format film holder as well. I was tired of using old flatbed scanner film holders and duct tape.

I took advantage of a flash sale to get the Voigtlander 75mm lens at a hefty discount as well. If I were shopping for a good, hybrid photo and video camera I would immediately take advantage of the $450 temporary discount on the Panasonic S5ii. It kind of makes sense. They need to move niche product. 

And I've constructed a reality in which I feel like I need niche products. What a good match! 

There is another shopping theory playing around in my head right now. It's the idea that many people at the higher end of the photography market will be upgrading to "exciting" new products this season to "reward" themselves for a full year of being mostly... just more privileged than everyone else. In the Leica world this means Leica will be selling M11 cameras and Q3 cameras full tilt. And they'll sell every one they can piece together. The folks who will rush to buy the M11s and M11Ps are almost undoubtably current Leica M10 and Q2 owners. Many of them don't share my own personal mania for having multiple cameras and so will trade in those gently used M and Q last generation models. 

Crafty and parsimonious buyers who couldn't stomach or justify spending the full retail price of new M10s will hover and, just after the holidays, start to pounce on all the recent Q2s and M10 (of all varieties) that will doubtless flood the small market of Leica users with many used models. In order to justify their upgrades to newer M10s and Q2s those second string upgraders will, in turn, start off by trading in their solid and trustworthy but largely obsolete previous M and Q cameras. 

With this in mind I am keeping the proverbial "powder" dry. Saving enough to snap up one or two more mint condition M240s or even an M262 when they start to appear, at lower than today's prices, on the 2024 used market. It's just a matter of time. And patience. 

This plan probably won't work as well for lenses because, as many people say, "You date the cameras, you marry the lenses." But that's okay because I've got scores of lenses I can use already. 

Sadly, now that I've revealed my master plan I fear many of you will see the amazing logic thereof and rush to beat me to the prizes. But believe me; I will be vigilant. But the vigilance will start only after I've had my fill of pecan pies, eggnog, and Champagne and movies about Santa Claus. Somewhere in the first part of 2024 we'll go treasure hunting. Until then I'm just cherry picking some of the stuff I wanted but thought was too expensive. Now it's on sale. More cheer for the holidays.

A thought. Prudence is good. But if you've resisted spending on things you'd love to have because you want "to leave a financial legacy" to the next generation you might want to listen to what psychologists say. That giving your kids a largely unneeded "golden parachute" robs them of motivation, resilience, the ability to make smart financial choices, etc. Yes, you actually might be doing more good for them with your purchase of a new Phase One medium format camera, a bag of lenses, and that long put off trip to the Galapagos, than you might think. Interested in changing direction? Start out gently. Maybe just pick up the newest top of the line camera featured in the brand in which you are already invested. You can't take all the money with you when you go.... but you can take some fun cameras along with you on your own personal ride right up to the gates of final entropy. 

Or you could just write some checks to good charities. But, if you've been frugal enough you might be able to do both!  

(Kind of kidding...mostly. Don't worry, kid).

SXSW will be here before Austin knows it.

"Forks next to knives." A more moderate point of view.

Sunday Afternoon Swimmer's Party. New Lens Ordered. Life on an Even Keel.

 

We had the annual Holiday Party for our Masters Swim Team today. One of our fellow swimmers hosted it at his home. The party was scheduled to run from 11-3 and was well attended. Coaches were there, tons of swimmers were there. The open bar was there. The catering was there. The sunshine was there (one of those great houses open to the outside with lots of space to mingle and come together in small groups). A groaning dessert table. Tons of healthy side dishes and near endless cheer. It's a favorite party of the season for many of us because we have time to really get to know our fellow swimmers --- and their non-swimming spouses. 

What was missing? Negativity. Gloom. Self-pity. Helplessness. Loneliness. Envy. Comparison. Sermons. The ill-used word "should've." And out of shape people.

All of which reminded me of why I swim. Every day. Why I love being around people for whom success and happiness is a daily thing. Not a goal. Just a way of being. Swimming year round in the outdoors, in a sparkling, clean pool, surrounded by happy and seemingly well-adjusted people, is so incredibly therapeutic one wonders why pharmaceutical companies haven't tried to bottle it and sell this kind of joy for a king's ransom. 

A bit before 3 we headed home and I found myself looking forward once again to Tuesday morning's swim practice. And another full year of swimming, camaraderie and being able wear the same size pants I did when I was in college. As my doctor routinely says at yearly physicals: "Whatever you are doing....keep doing it." Being in shape may not extend your life at all but it will sure make the time you have a lot more fun. Can't buy that with an Amazon link. 

******

I finally decided what I wanted the company to give me as a Christmas bonus for all my hard work at the VSL idea and content factory. I talked about it to the boss. I let him know that the Leica 75mm APO Summicron SL was the ticket. He laughed (a bit too derisively) and mentioned that my silly idea of gradual retirement had cost the company tens of thousands of dollars in profits this year. I sat quietly on the edge of my chair, my tattered cap in hand, looking down at my worn socks poking out of my Birkenstock sandals and waited for the next shoe to drop (and me without toe protection). My boss got up from behind his desk and walked to the whiteboard that hangs on the wall to one side of his collection of Napoleon statues and Neville Chamberlain knick-knacks. He pointed to a graph of clients to whom I'd waved "goodbye." And the he flipped over a transparent overlay showing the decline in income caused by my happy enthusiasm about waving ponderous clients "goodbye." 

"This!" he said, "This is why you are NOT getting a hopelessly overpriced Leica lens as a year end bonus." And then he hastily drew an image of a lens on the whiteboard. I didn't have the heart to tell him we'd run out of dry erase markers and I had substituted big, bold Sharpies instead. And he said, "After discussing your disappointing performance with the board of directors we decided that you deserve one tenth of what you're asking for. We're done with this discussion. You're getting a Voigtlander 75mm f1.9 M Ultron lens and you'd better enjoy it. That's all. No fruitcakes. No hams. No car battery jump starters. The VM lens is it." 

Oh, I'll take the lens. That's for sure. But little does my pompous boss know that I'm the majority stock holder in the company and I'm firing him and the board at Christmas. A clean sweep going into 2024. 

In retrospect though, I guess the VM lens makes a lot more sense. It's smaller and lighter. Less bulky. Marginally faster. And thousands and thousands of dollars cheaper. I like M lenses. I can use them on everything from an M camera to  SL cameras to a Panasonic S series camera to a Fuji 50Sii. ( They won't cover the Fuji's extended frame but they will sure look cute on the big camera....). I'm hoping to gift wrap it, forget I bought it and put it under the tree so I can open something really cool on Christmas morning. That's the initial plan at any rate. Too late to back down --- it's on the way.

I don't know how we ever got anything done in Decembers past. Seems like one dinner party, reception, opening, gala, fund-raiser and family event after another this time around. Just keeping dinner jackets in decent shape and shoes polished is turning into a chore....

Hope you have happy chores to attend this season. Beats watching football on TV. (How would I know? I've never watched a football game on TV....).

That's my wrap-up for the weekend. Hope yours was spectacular.

Montreal. Old Town. Casual Walking.

 ©2023 Kirk Tuck

No reason to walk around except for the pleasure of walking around. And seeing new things. And old things with new light. And people out on a beautiful late Fall, late afternoon. And not bitching about being too busy to have fun.

 

It was 3 in the afternoon. I'd written a blog earlier. I'd watched a new hard drive mirror the previously most recent hard drive right up till completion. I took a good look at the stock market trends for the day. I watched Apple stock head back towards its historic high. I tossed some bills into the fireplace. Then I fished them back out because I'd forgotten to stack wood or light a fire. I tossed back a big glass of tap water to wash down that re-heated, leftover pizza I had for lunch. I stood in front of the desk in my other office, in the house, and spent ten minutes going back and forth trying to decide what camera to take with me on a walk through Austin's downtown. I knew from the beginning it would be the M 240 and a 50mm lens but I had to talk myself into it first. After I got organized I hopped into my car and navigated my way into my favorite part of downtown. To my "reserved" parking space across from Treaty Oak, just a block away from the ole Whole Foods flagship store and I started a walk through familiar streets without the aid of a schedule, an agenda, a process or a deadline. All I really knew was that I should be home by 7:30 for dinner with B. And that it was my turn to go by the wine shop and buy a nice bottle of wine that would pair well with a bahn mi bowl filled with fresh veggies, rice and smoked salmon. That's how the walk started. 

I guess it's official. I'm going to do an international project documenting mannequins in major metropolitan centers around the world. But first I have to write a proposal to myself, re-write it a couple times and then create a five year plan on a spread sheet and then.... Oh, who the fuck am I kidding? I'll just as likely decide to hop on a plane and go somewhere when I wake up one morning and look for luck, and the awkward sense of humor of the universe, to show me the good stuff. People plan too hard. People prep too much. I guess it's a wonderfully seductive way to procrastinate and also to run out the clock without having to take much of a chance. 

There seems to be a casual contest happening on Second Street. A race to upgrade the mannequins and increase the turn over of new displays. I stopped into one store to compliment them on replacing old, worn mannequins with brand new ones. They were so pleased. I was the first (only) person to notice and then to say something about it. But the shop keepers deserved it. They've upped their game in a good way. I'll pay more attention to their windows now. Too bad I'm not in their sales target market. 

Seems like art is just about everywhere. You just need to get out of your car or off the bus and walk along and look for it. This was a door inside a small restaurant on East Sixth St. I actually loved the painting. I'd buy that door. If it was for sale. Maybe I should surprise myself and ask next time I'm by. Might be a wonderful addition to my collection of odd art. 

I walked for miles and then turned around and started walking back West. My goal was to hit Mañana Coffee, have a latté on their comfortable patio, watch the runners come cascading across the pedestrian bridge towards me and then watch the sunset. But to get there I had to walk past the big, old power station building (photo just below). And I got there just as the light started getting wonderful. Cinematic. Glorious. Soft. Happy. And welcoming. 

I snapped a bunch of images and worked to underexpose enough so that I'd have some detail in the sky. I loved the shot and when I got back to the office, after dinner, and the finalé of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel on Prime, I played with the file a bit. The trees were almost black but I had nice detail in the sky. I used some shadow recovery to get detail and color back into the trees, created a mask layer to separate out the sky --- which I darkened a bit, brought up the blue and the saturation. Made a few final adjustments and then applied Lightroom's powerful DeNoise option to kill the noise that's a result of an older sensor, low light and a pushed up raft of shadow areas. Works well. I'm actually a bit in love with the image and the one just below it because they just scream "dusk" and remind me of the time I was closing up the advertising office in the Fall and Winter evenings so many years ago and would stop and gawk at some incredible skies.

The painfully young people working at the coffee shop always seem a bit surprised and baffled to see customers with white hair. It's a young person's city. Especially downtown and on the running trails. Maybe I should dye my hair gray. How sad would that be? At any rate they recovered, were able to process my transaction and even produce a wonderful coffee. I sat out on the patio as the last of the sunlight exited stage West, with a flourish and couples walked by in running clothes, with cute dogs, on leashes. It was a wonderful time to be out and to feel the hopefulness of ordinary people doing ordinary things. While I sat at a small table with a paper cup of steamed milk mixed with coffee and enjoyed breathing in the fresh air. Wonderful. 

I looked at my watch and saw that it was time to head home. I took the unofficial path back to my car. That's the path that goes behind a big parking garage and then across the railroad tracks. I've heard so many warnings about trains and train tracks. But just to be bad and take chances I put earplugs in my ears, blindfolded myself with a Leica promotional kerchief and tried "feeling" my way across multiple train tracks. I emerged unscathed. It's a wonder. Since it's the busiest rail line in Austin. (Didn't really happen that way. No blindfold. No earplugs. Calm down.)

Having successfully gotten over the tracks I took off the blindfold and extracted the earplugs and ambled down the road and through the pedestrian "protection" tunnel just above. I drove up to our house just in time to wash my hands, put my jacket in the closet in the guest bedroom (where my overflow of winter coats lives), open a bottle of Bordeaux Superior and join Ms. B. for a lovely dinner.

Say what you will about old sensors and old cameras but I find them charming. And I like walks. And I dislike the idea that we should all be busy all of the time. 

It's 11. I'm calling it a night and heading into bed. They aren't going to delay swim practice in the morning just for me. And I sure don't want to miss it.

The Crushing and Relentless Power of Entropy.

 I never thought that the decline and ultimate failure of an inexpensive hard drive would stir up so many thoughts about how attached I am to physical things, outcomes of day-to-day events, the feeling of needing to be in control and, mostly my attachment to the idea that there is a comforting constancy to my life. 

The reality, at least as I see it, is that everything we have, including our own lives, has a parabola of existence. In the example of lifeforms we are born, we grow, we learn, we thrive and then at some point we reach the top of our arc and begin to participate in the process of entropy. The downward slide from the peak of our potential. 

Here's my favorite simple definition from the Oxford Dictionary: the degree of disorder or uncertainty in a system. 2. a. : the degradation of the matter and energy in the universe to an ultimate state of inert uniformity. Entropy is the general trend of the universe toward death and disorder.

Our own slides toward dissolution can be relatively quick or agonizingly long. At least in context. 

When I realized that I was unable to access the information on one of my hard drives I felt a sense of betrayal. I know that doesn't make a lot of sense but since so few of the hard drives I've used up till now have actually failed (as opposed to just getting "filled up.") I had the illogical presumption that life would go on in the same fashion from now until much later. This started me down the path, yesterday, of assuming that the life and death cycle of all the things I think I depend on might be accelerating. After all, it was just last week that our microwave oven gave up the ghost...

I'm not totally unused to things failing and becoming unusable. The plastic lenses on swim goggles eventually become fogged by chemicals, abrasion and UV light and they eventually become unusable. I have no issue with that. I understand the process and replacing them with new goggles is easy and inexpensive. Shoes are another thing that wears out. And most modern shoes aren't really made to be repaired. When the soles decay beyond a certain point it is time to replace them. Sometimes I feel a twinge of loss when I have to let go of a great pair of hiking shoes but, again, I understood from the beginning that those shoes would have finite useful "life span." 

In the case of this hard drive though I felt a different kind of loss since it was a vessel for my work. Both personal and professional. Logically, I know that if the files are so very important that I can have them recovered and moved to a series of newer and newer hard drives but where does it all end? How does it all end? I was letting the loss of the HD become a metaphor for my life as an artist. The loss of files a symbol for the loss of control over small parts of my own, personal art universe. A harbinger of a coming, accelerating decay toward an end. Had I become that attached to my self generated perception of the value of the work? Had I become the victim of my own identification with what my job and my art represents back to me? It appears so.

As I left the house this morning to go to the swimming pool I said to myself, "Oh Hell, Entropy is going to end up being my word for the day." I was in a quiet and sour mood. I even allowed myself to conjecture that perhaps swimming had no real value beyond being a vainglorious attempt to slow down or control my own physical and mental entropy.

But then I got in the water. I could feel the flow of the swim. As I focused on having as technically perfect a "front catch" as I could my mind started off on its own, processing all the feelings I was having and had over the previous 24 hours. I realized in the moment that I had forgotten the most important concept I learned from studying the life of Buddha. ("Old Path White Clouds" by Thich Hat Hahn). That concept being the value of resisting or rejecting desire. Non-attachment to physical things or outcomes. I had made the files on the drive important even though, in the long, medium and short run, their loss was neither good nor bad. It just was. And all the energy I was putting into battling against their loss was just causing me to be sad. Frustrated. And ineffectual. 

I don't believe in the idea that everything happens for a reason. I think most things are random and chaotic. And physics tells us that entropy is a reality for....everything. We'll all die. All (statistically) hard drives will eventually become dysfunctional. Batteries will run out of energy. Tires will wear out. Our brains will slow down and eventually become less stable. We might be able to slow the process but we joust with an "opponent" that holds all the high cards. 

The best way to "fight" the loss of something is to let it go. But dammit! Why do I still want to show that hard drive who's boss?  Mostly because life on the way up the parabola of my existence has been so easy and fun. Few things go wrong. But now? Will the journey into chaos accelerate? What's next? 

Swim Zen tells me to stop fighting things that are out of my control. Concentrate (be mindful) on doing the right things day to day. Concentrate on having the right thoughts every day. And to let go of the need to hold onto stuff so tightly; as well as the almost compulsive need to try controlling the processes. 

I should have learned by now that you have to loosen up the reins on life if you want to let in a bit of creativity, whimsy and happiness. This might just work out. One way or another I am almost certain that it will. As I've said before, "Happiness is self-inflicted." The same can be said for sadness.

My swim was quite nice. 

Finally back in the pool. It's been too long! Toasted Hard Drive. New Rounds of Back-up Imminent. How droll.

The only thing I miss about photographing with film is that once you got film processed, and you devised a safe way to store it, you didn't need to worry about a favorite image, or folder full of favorite images vanishing overnight. The film I shot in 1978 is still in a folder, in archival sleeves, looking as good as the day I shot it. Not so with digital images on hard drives...

My ancient 4 TB, USB-2 Hard Drive, which I labeled "Bob" stopped cooperating with me this week. I've run Apple's "disk utility" on it a number of times. There's something wrong with the partition map. The disk spins and, after a time the disk icon will show up on the desk top but clicking on it to open it results in a finder crash and general system malaise. 

I'm not too concerned since all the client data that was on that disk is backed up onto at least one other drive. And most of the client files are aging out of usefulness. Old head shots. Old projects. All stuff that would need to be updated anyway. There is one folder I missed backing up. It's on there somewhere. But if it goes away I'll take the blame for a spell of laziness eventually being punished by the resulting loss.

Still, the death of the drive spurred me to stay current with recent files of all kinds. I have two 10TB drives that back each other up. Amazon delivered me another 12TB hard drive so I can mirror the information on the existing (new as of October) 12 TB hard drives as well. Then there's the cloud back up. And the off site back up disks for critical client work and essential family pix. 

If anything needs to get lost it will probably be some of the endless street photographs that seem to breed like warm germs in a petri dish full of agar. If I lost a bunch of those I doubt I'd cry too much. 

I also have a filing cabinet drawer full of older hard disks that I pull out and fire up once a month. I feel like I am now partially in service to my own archive, knowing full well that most of it will end up being trashed and the drives recycled in the end. 

The only silver lining I can think of in the moment is that hard drive storage really has gotten radically less expensive than it was in years (and decades) past. I guess I should just buy endless 18TB hard drives by the case and do a yearly "all hands" back-up with mirroring from all the previous generations of drives. Not quite willing to add tape back-up ... yet. 

re: the dying disk. I know I can probably retrieved the files on the drive since it still spins, isn't making rude noises and still shows up on a desktop. It would just require buying one of the disk repair apps for about $100 and spending a couple of hours working the buttons. Either that or hire a service to do it. 

But in the long run will it matter at all? Will I spend quality time with the files I recover? Are those 100 or so any more important than the other million plus I seem to have accrued? Probably not. But again, we never had this problem with film....unless we spilled coffee on it or were careless enough to store the film in a Texas attic space. 

An interesting coda to surviving a week with a common cold. 

And what's my real carbon footprint of having so much back-up data spread around?

But, on to more fun stuff. I last swam on Saturday and I've taken off since then, until this morning, both to wait until my cold symptoms abated but also to prevent spreading my cold germs to my fellow swimmers. And with good reason since practices have been packed with people lately. Five in my lane this morning. Makes circle swimming into more of an art than usual. You don't want to come out of your turns too far to the side you arrived on....

But it felt absolutely wonderful to be back in water. Of course, it was a "coach Jenn" workout so there was lots of stroke work beyond freestyle but the workout was still a reminder of how great it feels to feel great. And to move through the water. And to be back in the middle of a huge group of like-minded friends who also love to swim fast. 

Today's diet discussion was all about steel cut oats. Our resident hardcore vegan approves... provided you don't douse them in a flood of whole milk. Or any cow milk for that matter. I was too intimidated to ask about covering the oatmeal with brown sugar....

The social discussion was all about the swim team holiday party coming up this Sunday. It's fun because we actually get to meet the other swimmers' spouses, and learn to identify each other when fully clothed.

Well, that's it for today. Be sure to use our links and.... oh wait! Nothing to buy here. Sorry.  

I have to apologize to a lens. I used the 90mm TTArtisan to make a portrait of an advertising exec. yesterday and it was just right.

 

the first of many unnecessary holiday photos...

Yesterday I did my first portrait session since we got the studio re-painted. The place looks so fresh now. I even scrubbed the floor. It's so different when you take everything off your walls and everything starts to look like a blank canvas. 

I haven't done a very good job explaining why I like photographing with eccentric and non-mainstream lenses but I think I'll give it a try. Over the years I've owned some pretty great lenses. From makers such as Leica, Zeiss, Schneider, Rodenstock and Mamiya. Also some of the best from Canon and Nikon. And every time I've decided that the pricy shit is the best I stumble across a lens for a fraction of the price of a big brand name lens and I find that, with a little experimentation, it can be as good on film/sensor, as the high priced spread. And sometimes the older optical designs that seem rampant in even the newest lens products from makers in places like China have a "look" that's different enough from current state of the art optics to make the images derived from them attractive to practitioners who grew up shooting less highly corrected lenses than are available now. 

Sure, the latest lenses from the big boys, coupled with tons of carefully programmed corrections and enhancements via in-camera software, can beguile one with sharpness everywhere in the frame at every aperture, and provide an almost suspicious lack of any vignetting whatsoever. And sharpness? In spades. 

But I always find myself wondering how a "lesser" lens would fare if it was endowed with the same crutches and boosts that come packaged with our current, favorite, premium brand (and priced) lenses. 

I recently had a hard drive die and I'm thankful for back-up files. But while I was backing up the back-up files I started looking at files I'd done with older zoom lenses from various makers and comparing them with the uber performance of my ______ branded 24-90mm lens. The amazing thing to me is that I liked the overall look of the older, far cheaper zoom lenses better for the kinds of photographs that are most important to me (different from my work photos which, I usually presume, need to be technically perfect) when I compared the old ones with the "reference standard." In fact, I like most of my earlier work, mostly done with less technically advanced lenses and cameras, far more than work from the last decade or so. And some of that is down to my shift from "the best lens I could afford" all the way over to "the best lens out there." A chase for unicorns that seems, at times, to have proven not just ineffective but anti-effective. 

My article about the faults and foibles of the TTArtisan lens (90mm f1.25) wasn't intended to be a savage and dismissive skewering of that lens as much as it was intended to be a true view of what the lens is all about before adding in layers and layers of technical fixes which seem to come standard on the latest lens from the big five camera makers. When you use their cameras...

Given some reasonable work I think a lot of the shortcomings of just about any lens can be dealt with. Unless that lens happens to be the original Nikon 43-86mm f3.5. Which may be the worst zoom lens ever unleashed on the market.

It's interesting to me that when I put up a portrait from my older film days everyone falls all over each other to tell me that this is the gold standard, the target I should be aiming for. The highest photographic achievement I could hope for. 

But nearly all of the greatest hits I've posted from the middle of the career (1990s) are done with a Hasselblad and a 150mm f4.0 lens that flared like a mad dog, was very soft wide open, etc. Coupled with the shortcomings of the lens was also the fact that I diffused the edges of my prints with a device called a Pictrol which feature "flawed" plastic blades which distorted and additionally flared the light when used under an enlarging lens. My goal, at the time, was to create an image that was intentionally not razor sharp. Clinical. Savage. or, in other words, technically excellent. 

Given the outpouring of enthusiasm for the Fuji GFX 110mm lens I almost felt as though I should send some of the commenters, and the people that like to "guide" me in emails, some drool bibs to wear while contemplating what seems to be the ultimate lens of the moment for that format. And they spoke about the inevitability of me purchasing the lens --- as soon as I came to my senses. "Stop saving for the Bugatti and just get the lens!" Seemed to be the message. Disregarding that everything they loved about the "idea" of that lens is mostly antithetical to the style of work I sometimes show here and which delivers the highest praise and admiration. Kind of a disconnection. 

But it's probably mostly my fault for mentioning and writing about every piece of gear I like. 

So, instead of hopping into the car, rushing to the local bricks and mortar Fuji Pro dealer here and dropping more cash on a super sharp 110mm (the performance of which I am nearly certain is well augmented by in-camera software) I looked at my review from two posts ago and decided instead to figure out how to create a set of workable profiles for the cheap ass lens. And then use it on a paying job for a very, very informed, critical and seasoned advertising professional. Different from a lens test done in the living room with a cat, offered on Instagram. 

Lo and behold, it seems one can make a $499 lens look pretty darn good with a little bit of work. The lens has barrel distortion. Yeah. But for portrait work and most non-architectural shooting a correction of +7 with the "distortion" slider in LRC and "Bob's your uncle." Want to tame the obvious vignetting? You probably can't get rid of all of it but for portrait work, at a subject distance of about six feet (as opposed to work shot at infinity and stopped down to f16) and a working aperture of f5.6 you'll see most of it tamed except for the extreme corners and once you drop in a +45 vignetting correction in LRC you'll pretty much have that conquered as well. 

So --- what do you end up with? A lens that delivers a really, really sharp central core from f2.0 onward which is very well behaved when you make a profile with the few changes I've outlined above, and shoot most stuff at the right focal distance and with a reasonable aperture. But you also get a lens which can deliver such a narrow depth of field at its minimum aperture that it's visually amazing; if that's what you want. 

When I first bought the camera and then the lens I think I stated pretty clearly that I was aware of the vignetting of the lens but that my goal was to use the camera and lens as a modern version of the square format cameras I used in the past. Meaning I'd set the aspect ratio to 1:1 (square) and use that particular system to try to get back to the style of my portrait and scenic shooting that most of us profess to like best. And, in fact, the perceived shortcomings of the lens when compared to the technically perfect performances of the hybrid modern lens + camera corrections might just be the characteristic of the lens that I admire. Look up Wabi-Sabi. Understand that beauty can be revealed by its imperfections. 

The problem at the foundation of enjoying photography as experienced through blogs is that it tends to attract linear thinkers. Engineers. Guys who mastered slide rules. Folks who want/crave definite rules and hierarchies. And technical perfection. Kind of a "Bell Labs" approach to life and art. It's nice sometimes to step back and realize that as humans, try as we might to dodge it, we are attracted to the imperfections as a healthy balance to symmetry and perfection. Nature gets it. That's why when we make up portraits with A.I. and the machines create perfectly symmetrical faces of people we instantly understand them as being artificial. 

I read a piece about evolution and asymmetry. One would think divine creation or evolution would always aim for perfection and symmetry in all things. It was interesting to read therefore that men evolved in such a way that their testicles are asymmetrical to each other. Were they perfectly symmetrical and placed side by side they would severely hamper man's ability to run. Or at least to run (or walk) without great discomfort. 

Maybe our goal of making perfect lenses is perhaps making our ability to do some forms of photography....uncomfortable. 

Something to ponder. 

In the meantime, I put in the work to figure out the shortcomings of the TTArtisan 90mm lens when used on a GFX camera and I've created a personal set of parameters which work well. For me. I used the lens yesterday in the late afternoon, here in the studio, to shoot 250+ frames of my subject. Except for a few blinks and/or grimaces on his part, I was happy with every frame. And, amazingly, I can still manually focus a lens. Imagine that. 

A lighting note. I photographed yesterday with three Nanlite LED fixtures. It was delightful. The secret is to have the lights up and running when the subject walks in the door. They get used to the lights almost immediately. No squinting. These lights have the best color of all the LEDs I've used. No. I don't sell them. There is no affiliate link.

Later in the evening, after importing the files we made and doing a global correction for color and contrast, I pulled my old LED book off the shelf. I wrote it in 2009 and the book was published in 2010. The advancements in the quality and power of LEDs in the short 13 years since is stunning. I remember working hard to make those older, multiple bulb LED panels work for color photography. It was possible but it took a lot of time and skill to get close to nearly perfect color. Now? It's amazingly simple. 

So, the takeaway from yesterday's shoot is that I found vignetting from the lens far less imposing when I used the lens as I usually do use a lens for portrait work. Apparently vignetting is not just dependent on aperture but also on subject to camera distance and lens focus distance. But before you laud more expensive lenses it's good to know that ALL lenses have to be designed for peak performance at one certain distance. Everything else is techno-magic. And interestingly, aren't we all opposed to the intrusion of under the hood, hidden tricks? At least when it comes to our photo gear?

Now that I've learned how to use the 90mm I  feel I owe it an apology for making it a whipping boy instead of just rolling up my sleeves, doing the work and getting to know it. 

If I were just starting my career I'm sure I would be rushing out to buy the "best" lens you could get for the GFX and portraits. It might be the 110mm. At this point, as I'm moving away from all commercial work all the time my impetus to buy stuff just because "it makes sense" or it's the consensus (homogenous) choice is much diminished. 

You might be happy to read that I'm almost fully recovered from my bout with the common cold. Tested negative for Covid. And also, the new microwave has landed and is nearly identical to the old one so I don't have to create a new "custom profile" in order to use it.

That's all the news I've got today. Maybe go outside and play with cameras. It can be a lot of fun.