A casual portrait of my friend, Will. Why I always take my camera to dinner parties.

 

Will. 

My friend Will, and his wonderful wife Mary, love to entertain at their home. And I understand why. They are just so good at it. Knowing that my better half is out of town this weekend they invited me and another good friend over for an extended happy hour with lots of fun food and beverages. They've invited me over often this Spring and we've been lucky with the weather so we get to sit outside in the middle of their vast garden, under strings of lights. 

I am rarely without a camera and Will, a photographer of fame and merit, is more than willing to stop for a quick portrait. On Friday evening I was carrying my Q2 around with me and channeling some of the style I've seen from UK photographer Paul Reid. (look him up on YouTube).

Will was sitting at a counter facing into his kitchen and I liked the way the light flowed down his face. I asked him to lean forward for a few frames and fired off five or six shots with the camera set to f1.7 while using 1/60th of a second and auto-ISO. Some of my best portraits come from times when we are all happily socializing. And my friends are quite used to me having a camera around.

This photo started life as a color raw file and I did most of my meager post processing work in the color space before using a Lightroom Preset to convert the image to black and white. Or as we're now supposed to say, "monochrome." 

The camera has built-in image stabilization and a wonderful lens. The lens goes a long way toward making me appear to be a better photographer than I otherwise might be. 

Will has the same issue I do. He's always the one taking photographs of family and friends but rarely gets photographed himself. Sometimes the gift of an interesting portrait is of great value to the subject's family. And it's fun. I sent the image along to Mary and she really liked it. 

Dinner parties are such a great event to photograph. Everyone is mostly happy and calm. Friends you've had for decades and decades are completely open to you exercising your craft. And the Q2 is weather resistant which is great for those times when someone opening a bottle of Champagne gets too carried away with the drama of the "Pop" and gets a few effervescent splashes on the camera. 

The Q2 is helping to change my mind. To open it up to the potential of portraits made with wider and wider angle lenses. 

Will is a  wonderful subject and hanging out with him and his crew is a really keen way to spend a Friday evening in the Spring time. I'm so lucky to have so many close and long friendships. Makes life even better.

 

ATTENTION Austin Photographers. Eeyore's Birthday Party is one week and one day away. Mark your calendars for April 29th at Pease Park!

Sony a850 camera. Minolta 28-85mm zoom lens.

It's that wonderful time of the year again when we get together at Zilker Park, celebrate Eeyore's Birthday Party and raise money for local charities. With cancellations in 2020 and 2021 there is a lot of pent up demand to jump into drum circles, dance like no one is watching, smoke dope on the hillside, dress like fairies and Pooh characters and generally have a wonderful time. 

I suggest that this is a wonderful event for photographers as well. If you really want to immerse yourself in the fun and visual wildness you might want to leave those creepy, long zoom lenses at home and practice your craft as you would if you became a street photographer. 

The prime time for Eeyore's is always from around one p.m. till dusk. No glass bottles. No weapons. No bad attitudes. A happy gathering. Started by a UT English professor named, Joe Slate, way back in the mists of time. Now an event.

A quick note on photography blogging.

I've got a few ethical questions about blogging about the photography space. Not easy ones like: "should I have affiliate links?" but more along the lines of, "Just how much personal information should a blogger be sharing?" "How much personal information do audiences really want?" "How close to the primary/core area of interest should bloggers stay?" Lately I shared way too much information about my infernal refrigerator. (It's now working as it should and has been for about ten days now.... recompense for expenses  received, warranty extended). And I never mind sharing stuff like how the swimming is going. Or what I'm planning for upcoming vacations. Even something along the lines of fun and positive, but non-photographic events in day to day life. Ben's graduation from college. B's retirement.

But I feel queasy posting about childhood traumas, colossal personal failures, failed relationships, abject  fears of mortality and decay, or non-business related setbacks. I'm also not a fan of family histories or "might have beens." And I definitely would never want to share my financial information or net worth online. For any number of good reasons.

But here's the deal, if we read the same blogs for years at a time we develop a sense of community, and a penchant  sharing, feedback and a sense of mutual give and take. If someone like myself is willing to put life stuff out there in writing it should be assumed that, as long as comments are enabled, I'm willing to accept feedback, praise and even reproach (or gentle course correction) from my readers. I don't always agree with or like the feedback I get from tilling the soil of blogging but I should expect to get it. If it's ad hominem attack material I have the option of deleting a sour comment but generally, even when a reader disagrees with me such as the recent chiding I got for converging architectural parallels I post it argue about it and then, sometimes (as in the case of Mr. Benson's comment) realize that maybe the other guy is right. And that I've over-reacted.

With photographic content this is easier. You can argue fine points about photography for hours and mostly walk away unscathed. But when we start dredging up regrets, painful episodes in life (see my swim post from earlier today) and ruminate over material that's purely indicative of something going wrong or trending in the wrong direction, it's harder for me to see where the lines are drawn between jumping in and commenting or sitting on the sidelines. Always quick to keep an eye out for entropy and dystopia. 

Some of my readers seem to think there is a code for writers which disallows us to rebut bad ideas or awkward philosophies. I don't agree. I think we have the same rights of critique and criticism as everyone else. But, again, I may be wrong. But so much of life is beyond binary. It's endless shades of gray. Or grey. 

I'm pretty comfortable with my knowledge base when it comes to most stuff that's photographic in nature. And I think I have long since learned to navigate doing business in a profitable way. When it comes to close personal relationships I try to stay relentlessly positive.  I have only to post a celebratory note about celebrating our 38th wedding anniversary to bring a smile to my own face. But where I get in to trouble is when I assume that all other people will make smart decisions on their own behalf. When I assume that people want to be happy. When I assume that some attitudes and habits are symptoms of misplaced martyr syndromes. Or pathways to depression. But I'm only seeing the top layer, not the whole cake.

If content creators were physical friends instead of virtual friends I would have no hesitation in sitting them down and trying to help. And I would expect the same in return. But with web friends, other than having read and commented on common material we have no other common, personal touchstones, no real bonds and no real understanding of the underlying person. We can conjecture, read into the material in a sort of "between the lines" manner but we might be wrong much more often than we are right. And our ability to change someone else is iffy to negligible. 

As I look over the 5,000+ blog posts I've shared I find that this one itself is so far afield from the subject matter that this channel is supposed to be about. I wonder if most of the long term photo bloggers have so exhausted our primary subject matter that we are now either into endless repetition or, on the other hand, the airing of our grievances with the bad hands we think we've been dealt in life, or just the unexamined but desperate desire to cling to some vestige of relevance. I know the last part is true, in some sense, for me. 

It's disquieting. This misplaced sense of wanting everything to go back to what it was. Wanting blogs to be as fresh as the day one discovered them for the first time. Almost desperately wanting them to be about what they advertise. When I feel like this I should learn to just turn off the lights in the office and go for a walk. No one asked my opinion anyway.

 

I just took two online surveys. It's interesting to try to divine what the companies are searching for. Adobe and Leica...

 Having worked with surveys fairly frequently when I was at advertising agencies it's always very interesting to me to actually be part of a survey. You know from the outset that the company doing the survey is looking for direction or validation from their targeted customers. This morning it was both Leica and Adobe reaching out. And in both contacts it was explained that they identified me as a registered customer of their products.

I could see in short order what the idea behind Leica's survey was. There were no in depth questions about cameras; only about lenses. And what they seemed to be trying to understand was why people choose the lenses they do and how much size, prize, weight, optical quality and innovative features make a difference. But what they were really trying to get at --- in my opinion --- was: are we still in a consumer environment in which there is a good market for lenses that: Are of the highest optical quality possible, regardless of any other parameter. Or, Do actual Leica buyers and users want a different combination of features including smaller, lighter and less expensive version of lenses that already exist across focal length ranges? Another question popped up in which Leica asked if made in Japan versus made in Germany made a difference to buyers. They had a graphic showing two identically spec'd lenses but one labeled "made in Japan" and the  other labeled "made in Germany". They also showed the presumptive prices. The German-made version at around $6000 and the Japanese version at around $3200.

What I'm seeing, reading between the lines, is a decision making process about having more and more Leica lenses made outside of Germany versus a deterioration of the brand as a result. I expect we'll see a lot more "design collaborations" between Leica, Panasonic and Sigma. And some jockeying on pricing and imputed benefits selective to the brand. 

I'm predicting, based on the long survey, that we'll see two lines of SL lenses in the near future. One line will be the bigger, heavier and more premium products which will most likely carry the label "APO" and a smaller, lighter and less costly version of each focal length labeled, "APSH." 

Adobe's survey was more rambling but it was mostly focused on the Lightroom series of apps. I use the LRC or Lightroom Classic almost exclusively and I'm never really interested in the mobile variants at all. The idea of color correcting and retouching, or cataloging images on my phone seem silly and a waste of time to me. 

But at the core, after qualifying the responder, the real impetus of the study seemed to be about finding out two things. Firstly, what the market wants in terms of features that are made possible with A.I. and M.L. Do we want to use text to use features? For example, do we want to be able to type, "Make Sky Darker" and then have the program respond and complete the functions required? And, do we want the program, like a super sophisticated "Spell Check" to anticipate or recommend creative decisions to us in order to improve our images. As in, "Hey buddy, look what I've done here with Naomi's face to make her look "better." "Cool, yeah?" Well, maybe not. But Adobe seems to be trying to find out where people's comfort zones with new tech are and where it's felt they might be stepping over a line.

The second thing they want to find out is exactly where all this created content ends up. Which social media outlets mostly. No questions whatsoever about printing or sharing in print but plenty of questions about how we share our images electronically. And whether we want them to make it easier and easier to go directly from Lightroom to our favorite social media outlet. I think it's all easy enough right now but apparently some folks want to just say outlaid, "Hey Lightroom, toss this image over onto my account at Pinterest!" and then go back to watching TV.

My one piece of advice for Adobe would just be to make image cataloging and storage easier. And my one piece of advice to Leica was to get moving on making me a smaller, slower short standard Leica branded zoom lens. Something like a 35-85mm f4.0 Vario lens. Just wide enough to shoot casually in the street and just long enough to make a flattering portrait. Why f4.0? Well, to make it smaller, lighter, cheaper and equally good optically. Where the rubber meets the road. 

Will they listen? Who knows? Everyone wants everything these days. The on suggestion Leica did ask for was whether or not to build a 35mm f0.95 M lens. That stopped me short. Were they actually considering tooling up and making such a weird optic? Or are they now at the point where they might be reconsidering re-branding a popular Chinese product? That would not be good for the ole snob appeal. 

But kudos to both companies for actually reaching out to discover what actual customers are thinking about. The info might build a better model for further inflaming desire.

That weird space between 35mms and 50mms. A focal length in the middle.

 But first, an off topic personal ramble. When I was in high school my friend, David and I were both on the swim team and we hung out together because neither of us was part of any discernible outlier cohort. We were resolutely normal. Middle of the median. One Saturday morning our swim coach, who had been an amazing college swimmer, and was the older brother of an equally amazing distance swimmer on our team, waited for us to meet him at a pool in downtown San Antonio for an all city, invitational swim meet. We'd be swimming against all the other high school teams in our area. This was back in the day when high school swimmers were expected to get to events under their own steam so David and I "borrowed" his older brother's Chevy Malibu SS396 automobile, grabbed our swim gear and headed on toward downtown. 

When I say swim gear I mean each of us had one pair of small, uncomfortable goggles which, for some reason, were referred to as "Swedish Racing Googles." Maybe it's because they came from Sweden. We didn't really care, we were just happy to have goggles. We'd both swum all through childhood without any goggles at all. Not having bright red eyes at the end of every swim practice seemed like such a luxury at the time. 

The rest of our gear consisted of one racing swim suit and one towel per person. Everyone on the team wore Speedos. There wasn't much else back then. They were tiny little skin tight nylon racing suits that left little to the imagination. But I guess that's why we always had a pair of baggy pants to pull on after our races. Just to cover up. Pants we didn't mind getting wet and saturated with chlorine. Again and again.

We were more or less model students and well disciplined athletes.  All of the swimmers. We both maintained high grade point averages, never "underachieved" and always tried to do our best. Even when we weren't feeling 100%. The idea of not at least trying to place in a race was absolutely foreign and distasteful to us on a number of levels. Pretty much everybody on the team had the same mindset; the same ability to establish goals and work toward them. A large percentage of our high school swimmers went on to swim for their various colleges and a surprising number became doctors, lawyers, engineers and tenured academics. The rest just went on to become CEOs and company owners. Most benefited from the discipline they learned and developed through two swim practices per day, the first at 5:30 a.m., Monday through Friday and the second practice at the last period of the school day --- stretching out for two or more hours. Oh, and yeah, we also had swim practice on Saturday mornings. All were mandatory if you wanted to swim on the team. 

In the years that I swam for our high school we won state twice. We didn't fool around. We were too busy with A.P. courses in math, science, English, etc. We got into the pool. Got our work done and then went straight home to study. Once in a while we'd take a Saturday afternoon off --- just to relax. But the bottom line is that we learned how to work hard, set and meet goals. It was great training for getting through STEM courses at the University (and here in Austin we say, "THE" University because UT is the greatest school of higher education in all of Texas. We would never have infantilized our alma mater by referring to it as "Uni." 

I guess the real reason we didn't slack or goof off in competitions  was that swim meets were scored with a system of points for each place. Each of the top six finishers got points for the team. So, even if you weren't first, second or third you tried your best to place so the team could win, overall, with high points. That's part of competitive team sports. Every place counts. Every race counts. And the racing experience you got was cumulative. Plus, winning feels good.

Anyway, David and I were heading downtown and we realized we were starving. We'd been swimming hard all week and we had both left our houses without much of a breakfast. We drove by a donut shop, looked at each other and then pulled a u-turn and slipped into a parking space right by the front door. We were reactive back then. We saw donuts and we reacted. We each bought something like a half dozen donuts. And not just simple glazed ones but also examples of creme filled and jelly filled. We also each bought a quart of milk to wash the donuts down with. I guess we thought we could digest these little hockey pucks before it was time for our events.... But we gobbled them down like.....donuts. 

The pool we were swimming at that morning was at the Lone Star Brewery just south of downtown in San Antonio, Texas. The pool itself, a full 50 meters long and ten lanes across, was built into the side of a manmade lake. So, concrete swim walls with chlorinated water on one side (regular, regulation pool with lane lines, etc.) and an actual lake just on the other side of three walls. 

We staggered into the swim area a bit unsettled from the massive sugar high and we stumbled right into our coach. He was tall and had amazingly wide shoulders. He also had a temper. Apparently we were late. Our events were coming right up. The only thing he was happy about in the moment was not having to scratch my event. It was set to go in about five minutes. I ran to the locker room to change into my suit. David and I had missed warmup. I'd never swum in this pool before. My stomach was filled with white flour donuts and endless sugar. Plus some weird donut creme. And milk. Lots of milk. A bad combination for an upcoming race...

I made it out to the deck as the first heat of our event got onto the blocks to race. I was in the third heat. The last heat. The fast heat. And it came up quickly. The race was 100 meters, long course, of butterfly. I was in lane five. I was less worried about finishing well than I was about losing my overindulgence of donuts in the middle of the pool. That would be embarrassing. And my coach of many years would demand to know "what the hell happened?" 

A few minutes later our heat was called. We stood on the blocks. The starter called out: "Take your marks." And when we all settled he fired the starting pistol and off we went. I tried to ignore my gastric distress. We hit the first wall and everything was going okay. The last fifty yards though were agonizing. I got touched out at the finish by three other swimmers (eight per heat) and one of the timers told me my time. I don't remember the exact number but I'm pretty sure it was three or four seconds off my best time for the season. I knew my coach would be pissed. But at that moment there were more pressing things to attend to. I yanked myself out of the water and ran as fast as I could to the restrooms where I launched/divulged/out-boarded/surrendered the contents of my stomach. Again, very embarrassing. But in that moment I learned the importance of planning, scheduling and executing on those plans. And not doing things that are self-defeating. I was ashamed to have let down my team by not placing higher. I was crestfallen at having missed hitting my race goal by so many seconds. And it was tough to make eye contact with my coach. 

One of my rivals that day was from MacAuthor High School. His name was Bob Davis. He kicked my butt. Many decades later I was hired to photograph the CEO of insurance and banking giant, USAA. Turns out the CEO was one of my competitors that Saturday morning, so many years ago. He greeted me at is office warmly and we talked about the race. The five minutes the P.R. agency told me I had in which to photograph Bob stretched out to an hour and a bit more. Swim connections. Powerful stuff. 

When I showed up for workout at 5:30 on Monday morning, a couple days after the meet, and started warming up the coach came over to me with a small white bag in his hand. He stopped me and I moved over to the side of the lane to let my lane mates pass me by. Coach pulled a Bavarian Creme donut out of the bag and waved it in front of me. "Do you need another donut to motivate you for the workout?" He asked,  words dripping sarcasm. He'd found out. I was humiliated. And he spent the next few days pushing me hard in workouts to drive home the lesson. "Don't Fuck Up." And never on purpose. 

This story, of course, has absolutely nothing to do with the aspect of photography I wanted to cover. It just seemed like the story wanted to tell itself. Kind of a nod toward taking some things in life seriously...

And, now, on to the photo gear essay. 

Over the last few years I've been playing with more and more variety in my lens choices. Taking advantage of a slowing market to play more with angles of view that I'd never really warmed up to in the past. I know I'm a bit fixated on 50mm lenses and some slightly longer than 50mm but over the last three years I've dipped my toes into 35mm, the 28mm on the Leica Q2 and even a nice 20mm Nikon lens my friend Paul handed off to me. Now, after all the experiences experimenting with other than 50mm lenses I seem to have broadened my horizons a bit. Now the 50mm sometimes seems a bit long. The 58mm seems almost like a portrait lens. But I still am uncomfortable with 35mms. It just seems too wide to be serious but not wide enough to be....exciting. 

I bought a 40mm rangefinder lens to use when I went on vacation last Fall to Vancouver and I liked the focal length but have some issues with the lens. It's too small to be comfortable. And the focusing is off which means no zone focusing. No hyperfocal shenanigans. On the advice of a commenter here I borrowed a Leica M to L adapter thinking the focusing foibles of the lens might be down to several bad/cheaper adapters but, NO, that didn't help. 

I'll send the lens off to someone and get it calibrated some day. Or maybe I won't because I just recently bought the Voitlander 40mm f2.0 lens in a Nikon mount and I have to say that I really like the focal length but even better, I love the handling and even the look of that 40mm. The thing is that I've come to like a focal length that's in between. Not too wide for me and not too long either. It's in the sweet spot of focal lengths for me when it comes to an all purpose, "walking around" lens on a full frame body.

The 40mm seems special to me I think because one of the earlier Leica rangefinder cameras I owned was a Leica CL and it came equipped with a 40mm f2.0 Summicron lens. The lens was the sharpest and most contrasty lens I had ever experienced back in the very late 1970s. And I loved the way it looked when I was making black and white 11x14 inch fiber prints in the darkroom. 

But I also like this new lens a lot because it's designed and built like some of my very favorite Nikon lenses from that era was well. A big, robust and all metal focusing ring. A bright and narrow metal ring you can grab to twist the lens on and off the camera, and a real aperture ring measured out in one stop clicks. The "closer" with this lens (and indeed also with the 58mm Voigtlander) is the ultra-smooth focusing ring. It's so just right. Finally, a lens with a lovely depth of field scale and well marked distances on the barrel. Almost heaven. 

A fun, "full spectrum" system for those who want to travel lighter and who don't mind using good APS-C ("cropped frame") cameras.

 

Boston Mannequin. 

Photographed with a Sony a6300 and a 50mm lens.

Whether you photograph with Sony's APS-C (6000 series) cameras, Fuji's, or the recently discontinued Leica CL digital cameras I consider all of them to be contenders for really good travel "systems." The common thread through these particular makers' cameras are: smaller size, dense and very good imaging sensors and the ability to use Sigma's line of Contemporary lenses designed and made for the smaller formats. 

Each camera system provides at least a 24 megapixel sensor and those sensors are densely packed with pixels which can give images of very high resolution and sharpness when combined with really good lenses. All three brands make decent lenses for their particular cameras buy none of them, in my opinion, match the overall performance of the three Sigma prime lenses I own for the Leica CL cameras and none of them have as well rounded and compact a standard zoom lens as that provided by Sigma in the form of its 18-50mm f2.8. And recently Sigma released their own 23mm lens for those systems. 

All of the primes share one attribute: Their fastest aperture is f1.4. So you will be able to put together a system of primes ranging from 16mm to 56mm and all of them will be of very high speed. With the zoom lens there is a similar benefit, at least over the dedicated lenses that were sold by Leica for the APS-C cameras. Their system standard zoom is the 18-55mm f3.5-5.6. I don't own one and haven't shot one but the maximum aperture of f5.6 at the long end doesn't really make me passionate about adding one. Especially at the premium price...

I currently own three of the primes and with my recent order of the 23mm I'll have all four of their current, fast primes. The 16mm f1.4, 30mm f1.4 and the 56mm f1.4 have been paired up with my Leica CL cameras for about a year now and they bring a lot to the image making table when you consider the difference in size and weight when compared to my full frame cameras and lenses. 

A lot of people like the idea of f1.4 lenses and the Sigmas are decent at that wide aperture but where they really start to shine is from f2.0 on up to f8.0 or even f11. Once you start to stop any one of the primes down you get better and better performance. Actually stellar performance for the price.

I'm writing about them today because I just learned about a photographic retrospective that interests me. Linda McCartney ("The Beatles" Paul McCartney's late wife) was a very active and competent photographer who, in most of her career, had enviable access everywhere she went. She didn't become successful as a photographer as a result of being married to Paul McCartney but had already achieved high esteem for her work previous to their relationship. In fact she was the first woman to have a cover on Rolling Stone Magazine. Here's the wiki about her: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_McCartney

The show is at the The Center for Creative Photography in Tucson. At the University of Arizona. It opened in February and I guess I didn't do a very good job of keeping up. But, thankfully, the show is up until mid to late August 2023. The Center for Creative Photography houses collections from 2200 photographers including people such as Ansel Adams and David Hume Kennerly, and W. Eugene Smith.

The McCartney retrospective is displaying over 124 prints, many very large, and is a treasure trove of music industry images from the 1960s through to the 1990s. 

I decided I need to make a quick trip to Tucson to see the work directly. I also want to see if I can get access to several of the collections by other artists that the CCP houses. I'm putting together a fairly quick itinerary and will probably go toward the end of next week. I'll head over on Wednesday and return Friday evening. I also want to photograph in and around Tucson. Many years ago, in 1985, my advertising agency did a photo shoot at dusk in the Saguaro National Park, just outside of Tucson. I have fond memories of that gonzo event in the park.

It was a wild shoot on which we hung Christmas tree lights over a number of big cacti, lit them up with a large generator and photographed the glowing cacti from dusk into the darkness of night. Or course we had a permit from the National Parks, traffic police for the one lane of the nearby highway we needed to commandeer (much, much less traffic back then), millions of dollars of liability insurance (mostly for the cacti), cherry pickers to allow us access to the tall Saguaros and a team of dedicated stylists to make piles of wrapped gifts and gift-wrapped books under each visible cactus. My assistant and I were shooting as fast as we could as the light fell, knowing there would only be  a few minutes when the light from the cacti matched up well with the sunset and afterglow. I used a Hasselblad with a 50mm lens while my assistant fired away, endlessly bracketing a Nikon F3 and a 28mm lens. Of course these were the film days so if you were going to spend $20K or $30K of a client's money it was just good form to come back with at least one usable frame! And we shot that assignment on unforgiving transparency (slide) film.

The shoot was done for BookStop Bookstores which my agency had helped to grow from two Austin locations to a large chain that spanned 120 stores across the southern U.S.A, from Florida to California. Even to a store in Beverly Hills. They were bought out by Barnes and Noble in 1986 or 1987. I remember doing that shoot, which ran a double truck (two page) spreads in regional editions of Time Magazine, Newsweek Magazine and a few other popular consumer publications, on a financial shoe string. 

In fact, when my assistant and I finished wrapping the shoot, paying the local teams, getting all the gear packed and ready it was 4 a.m. in the morning. With our budget spent all the way to the tipping point and three magazine deadlines looming in a few short days we headed back to the airport for our 7 a.m. flight to Austin and got a quick nap in our rental car before turning it in. We were young then. You could do a few days like that and survive. 

And like most overworked advertising people of that time we just considered actual sleep to be a perk and not an absolute requirement. 

It's fun to think back and realize that we've been doing zany projects like this for real money since the late 1970's. And when you've got money in the mix you can 't just "wing it" or "spray and pray" you actually had to know what you were doing. And have back up plans. A quick way of saying that when we talk about gear here on VSL it comes from hands-on, high stress, actual experience. Not just conjecture and academic hearsay....

I'm looking forward to seeing the Linda  McCartney Retrospective. Her images come from a time when my generation was just coming of age. It should be an interesting step into something like a time machine.

So, I wanted to take along a small and light system with me for my visit to the gallery show and also to have for grabbing fun shots around a Tucson that's grown up a lot since I was last there. The idea of hauling around the big stuff for three days as well as on and off planes didn't seem very appetizing so I decided to piece together a mini system of two Leica CLs, a 16mm, 30mm and the 56mm Sigmas. All of which I own as L mount lenses. The CLs are magnificent little cameras and together with the fast Sigmas represent a formidable system. If the 23mm comes in before I leave I'll likely sub it for the 30mm. Just for grins. 

I've gotten plenty of great images from cropped frame cameras over the years which bolsters my decision to go small and light for what is basically a long distance gallery hop and mini-personal vacation. 

We'll see how it all pans out. 

Digging a little further into one of the new Lightroom Presets. "Polished Portrait."

 I think some readers were a bit hasty to give the human version of the images I showed yesterday a quick win. I'm not sure everyone understands that it's not a "me" versus "binary setting on the machine" contest that I was trying to communicate. What I was trying to do is to point out that the new preset is a very, very good starting point for anyone trying to retouch a portrait. And here's why:

The settings you get when you choose Polished Portrait (or any other of the new, A.I. driven presets) is not a binary setting, etched into stone that you must either accept or decline. Far from it. Rather, the preset does a lot of heavy lifting to quickly mask all the parameters you might wish to further enhance in a portrait in one smooth step. I've included a screen shot of part of a sub-menu in Lightroom from a similar test this morning. Yesterday's sample gave me back 17 different layers which allowed for corrections in small parts of the overall image. Today's sample gave me 9 layers. You can see in the screen shot that Polished Portrait gives me nine discreet, masked layers along with the option to add additional layer masks manually. The number of layer choices will vary by image and also by any work you have already done on a file. 

When one clicks on one of the masks, like "eyebrows", you get a full menu of controls like the one on the right side of the screen shot. The image of the subject shows you, via a color mask, which area you are working on. You now have many options just for eyebrows. You can increase or decrease the shadow slider which makes the eyebrows darker, and which appears to make them also look fuller. You could enhance clarity, change colors, even apply curves if you want to. The range of control and the amount of final changes to the file are limited only by your choices. But, importantly, each of the very accurately masked selections is there for you to enhance, de-enhance or ignore. The preset is there as a powerful assist, not an arbiter of style or taste. 

If I had dived more deeply into the file created yesterday I might have pulled some of the shadow out of the eyebrows since that seemed to be the area that vexed most readers. I personally liked the way the preset presented the eyebrows to me and if the image was made for myself I would have gladly left it that way --- but the point is that you have absolute control over each of the masked selections. That doesn't make my manually arrived at version "the winner." It just means I didn't make the same choices as the preset and it didn't make the same choices I did. 

There were a few things that sidetracked some readers. One being the skin color. It was suggested that the preset made the skin tone too yellow. But checking the selected mask for skin tone showed me that no changes had been make in the preset to the skin color. That was a global adjustment I made after the fact. That one is on me. 

But I think people have the tendency to want to prove automatic analysis and automatic setting suggestions like this as "not ready for prime time" and in doing so they miss the absolute value of the automation for making precise masked selections for adding overall control to image editing. 

If we divorce this time saving addition to portrait retouching in LRC from the existential angst currently being generated by generative A.I. programs like DALL-e and Midjourney, and also ChatGBT we can see that at it's core this is a method merely to identify and mask selective parts of the image and then "suggest" changes/enhancements to each individual segment. Don't want to change the eyebrows at all? Then disable that selection. Want more control over the whiteness of the subject's teeth? Well, click on that selection and get to work. 

But to couch the process as some sort of contest between a human photographer and the machine is the wrong way to look at this. It would be similar to all those early Photoshop users, myself included, who used the program before you had "command Z". There was not such thing as an "undo" command. You saved and saved and saved your work as you went. And I'm sure there were some hot shot early adapters who thought everyone who wanted an "undo" command was some sort of tyro pussy who couldn't understand the value of neolithic computing. No layers either. No...  I could go on. I usually do...

Each step forward in programming like this is a time saver and wholly welcome by the folks who already spend a lot of time retouching. And it's all under your control.

It's okay, I guess, to hate technology, and by extension, any change. But let's not assume that because you got a sample from me that you didn't like that all the fault lies with the program or that the things you didn't prefer aren't readily changeable and controllable. Now more than ever before. 

The presets are supplied to you for free. It's considered an upgrade by most. But you don't need to click on them if you prefer to do all the selections, masking and layering for yourself. It's always your choice. The thing we should be on guard against are programs that don't give you any choice. Now that would be bad.

Let's resist the temptation to toss the screaming baby out with the bathwater. Let's just learn to take advantage of some extra control delivered with less work. No contest here.

I drink coffee sometimes while I'm driving. I don't want a clutch and a manual shifter. I love the convenience of automatic transmission. YMMV.

And here is a version of Rebecca based on exactly how I would retouch the file. It's a different frame. But from the same shoot.

before.

After.

Trying out the new "Polished Portrait" preset in Lightroom Classic. Samples.

 

These two images are from the same image file. I opened the image in the developer screen of LRC and cropped it square. I saved the bottom image as it was when first opened. No changes made to the raw file. The top image had a "one click" change made to it. I selected the "Polished Portrait" preset from the preset menu. 

Lightroom automatically made 17 masked layers and applied corrections to all 17 layers without any intervention from me. I'm impressed with the changes and while I might make other decisions this preset will be one of the first I'll try on many of my portraits going forward. 

Seems interesting to me.

Studio News: Just as I was about to toss all my lights, stands and modifiers into the garbage and pull back from day to day work several clients called to book up multiple days in late April and throughout May. I thought I might accommodate them. I guess I will. After all, I have to save up money from somewhere to finance that "much needed" Q2 Monochrom. 

A thought came to me as I was struggling to lift some weight on a machine at the gym. Can a person who must shoot only with a black and white-only camera then process images on a color monitor.?While monitors can be carefully calibrated there is always some chance that color casts will "enter the picture." How does one accurately work on a monochrome image with a tri-color monitor? Is it really possible? Does the set color temperature subtly influence the way one looks at images? Actually curious.

Hope everyone is happy and well. 

Fun, great upgrades in Lightroom Classic (LRC) and a really nice firmware update for the Leica Q2. It's firmware 5.0 for both the monochrome and regular models...

Lou. In "real" black and white. Shot on film with a Hasselblad "real" medium

format camera. Not one of the "junior" MF formats.

Scanned from a handmade, double weight print.

 Let's get right to it.

I know the top priority for my readers will be the upgrades to the Leica Q2 so I'll start there. Firmware 5.0's biggest new feature is face and eye detection in AF. I tried it. It works and it's snappy. A plus is that you can use the four way touch pad on the camera to select a preferred eye. Otherwise the camera (like most others) selects the closest eye. It's pretty cool. And needed. And, NO, they can't use a firmware update to give you PDAF.

There are a few other touches such as quicker ways to lock focus in AF-C and the usual hundreds and hundreds of fixes to tiny glitches uncaught before now. It's pretty valuable to have a camera maker continue to make improvements years after a product introduction; especially fixes that obviously benefit the users so much. 

The firmware update, version 5.0, is currently available on all the global sites and ready to be downloaded. 

It may be the "placebo" effect but my Q2 camera now feels more comfortable to hold and the files seems sharper, better and more interesting than they did yesterday...

In other news Adobe announced and delivered updates to Lightroom and Lightroom classic. The one that is most interesting to me is the "Denoise A.I." which can be found in the noise reduction menu. In short the new tool analyzes the image and figures out which parts should have the most noise reduced (think skies and other less detailed swaths of image) and which parts should have noise reduction and raw image sharpening and improvements made. So, instead of just reducing noise the feature is looking at the entire image and finding places where noise has obstructed wanted detail and then gone in and fixed it.

This feature, as far as I can tell, only works on raw files, but it also has some user adjustment to increase or tame down the effects of the processing. I tried it on a 24 megapixel raw files from the Lumix S5 and it worked very well with good noise reduction, good sharpening for detailed parts of the scene and no halo effects. The image took about 20 seconds to process and it left the original file intact while creating an adjusted .DNG file in the same folder. 

A corrected image then converted to black and white.

I am quite interested to see the new presets. Especially the "Polished Portrait" preset. Should be interesting. 

I took a selfie this morning and used it for my annual senior swim pass from the city of Austin.

 Lights in Berlin. 2013.

There are a few benefits to reaching a certain age here in Austin, Texas. One is that you can pay $65, get an I.D. card with your photo on it, and have access to all the public swimming pools in the city's jurisdiction, from the end of March until the end of October. That includes Barton Springs Pool and Deep Eddy Pool. Both are landmark aquatic facilities with a rich history and the potential for some really great swims. Another reason to get a senior swim pass is that you also get, for no additional cost, a hang tag to display in your car that allows you to park for free at Zilker Park, home of Barton Springs Pool. In fact, the hang tag alone is worth the cost; especially if you like to run the hike and bike trail that goes through the park. 

I dropped by the City of Austin Aquatics offices around ten this morning to sign up. I'd forgotten that I needed to provide a photo of myself so I took one on the spot and sent it to the office's email address. Usually it takes two weeks from the time you apply for your senior pool pass until you get your I.D. card and hang tag in the mail but I smiled really nicely and reminded the person in the office that last year I was able to walk out of the offices with both. The kind young person behind the computer smiled back and told me it wouldn't be a problem to process everything on the spot. Happy me. No waiting for my valued credentials. A benefit of visiting the offices before the swim season and the attendant demand start to skyrocket. 

My selfie is not very flattering so I'm not going to show it here. It's functional. That's all I can say about it. But that's the nature of so much photography today. 

Since I'm finally through with life's two major hurdles; broken refrigerators and federal income taxes (at least for 2022....), I got around to having our yard service get up into the tall trees and clear out all the very high branches that were broken during the big ice storm at the end of January. Some branches had broken and fallen on healthier branches and were suspended precariously over our heads. I wanted to have the tree guys control the branches' descent so nothing would come crashing through the double pane glass on our double French doors. Everything went according to plan. But José, our yard guy of nearly 28 years got me up on a ladder to show me some damage to attic vents, roof shingles and a whole bunch of tortured gutters. 

Since I've prevailed on other fronts (taxes and fridge) I thought I'd try my luck with my homeowner's insurance policy. I've used the same insurance company for 32 years now and they were quite responsive and amiable on the phone. I should hear from an adjuster within 24 hours. No leaks or anything. Just damage to the roofing shingles, gutters, etc. 

The last time we sent our insurance company into action was about eight years ago after a big and mean hail storm. They ended up replacing the roof on the house as well as on the office and then, just for the heck of it they repaired the screens on our back porch and parts of the fence which they felt suffered from the hail. We'll see how it all works out this time. 

I've had fun shooting in black and white since M.J. got all riled up about the Pentax announcement. It could be that we really are seeing a resurgence in the popularity of monochrome photography. And from my point of view any resurgence of popularity in the field of photography is to be roundly applauded.

Hoping that my favorite vendor gets a Q2M in stock soon. I'd like to see what all the dedicated camera fuss is really all about with a hands-on experience. And since Leica is the granddaddy of making monochrome digital cameras I figured I might as well go straight to the source. Bon appétit. 

A follow up from Saturday's post. More monochrome sharing.

 

Questa è la mia tazza di caffè preferita di tutti i tempi

C'è qualcosa nella luce che entra nella mia cucina la mattina presto che mi fa venir voglia di fotografare. Le cose che finiscono nel lavandino hanno un aspetto particolarmente bello. Sabato, dopo aver finito il caffè a casa, ho sciacquato la tazza e l'ho messa nel lavandino. Quando l'ho guardato da un'angolazione mi ha parlato e mi sono sentito obbligato a immortalarlo. Ho preso una Lumix S5 con un obiettivo da 58 mm nella parte anteriore e ho scattato alcuni fotogrammi. Quando ho visto i risultati sui miei provini a contatto digitali (non in Capture One) ho capito che dovevo condividere la bellezza del profilo monocromatico di quella fotocamera. Quando guardo la fotografia mi viene voglia di altro caffè. E più divertenti obiettivi manuali con cui giocare. Se non ti piacciono le immagini in bianco e nero, per favore non essere uno stronzo pedante e fare qualche dichiarazione drammatica che sia offensiva. Menziona solo che ti potrebbe piacere che il colore funzioni un po 'meglio. Eh?

An interesting video about Monochrome sensor cameras by one of my favorite BW photographers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDxHq3Zlbz8

It's Summer in Austin already. It hit 94° Fahrenheit yesterday. The UV warning was pegged at 10 this afternoon. The smell of sunscreen was wafting through the air. The mannequins are ready for the heat. I knew you'd want more...

 Today it's the Sigma 90mm f2.8 lens that's getting a workout. I have to say it's an often overlooked optic but a very, very good one. For several reasons. Let's get into it.

I have the 90mm Sigma Contemporary i-Series lens chambered for the L mount cameras. There are many things about this lens that endear it to me. It's small and relatively light weight. The metal finish is both good looking and lends itself to very good handling. The lens has an aperture ring and I find that keeps me in tune with the idea of controlling depth of field. Aperture control on the camera blurs away from my consciousness and I find I've gone a while without thinking about it. The lens hood is big and useful and protective AND matches the finish of the lens. I like the 55mm filter size because I have a box filled with expensive 55mm filters that I now have some reason not to throw away. 

I like the lens even more when I use it and am reminded of both how sharp and how optically well behaved it is. Even at its fastest aperture of f2.8. But the feature I realized I liked today was the just about perfect feel and operation of the focusing ring when manually focusing. With practice it's both fast and accurate but best of all it doesn't overshoot like many other FBW lenses do. I like the feel of the focusing ring and after realizing that it would give me both accuracy and tactile happiness I switched everything to manual and spent the day shooting that way. 

Even though I don't have affiliate links and your purchases won't benefit me in the least I think every one of you should rush to your keyboards right now and order one of these. You'll thank me after you've tried it out. And....as you can see....it works in color and monochrome. 

Les mannequins sont une métaphore de la vie moderne à l'ère post-pandémique. Ils ne bougent pas donc ils sont. C'est un truc de Descartes. Mais heureusement pour nous, nous pouvons les contourner et trouver les meilleurs angles. Ce sont les petits trucs qui nous font chier mais aussi les petits trucs qui nous font plaisir. Ne détestez pas les photos de mannequin. Ils sont là pour une raison... Yeah.

An interesting video about Monochrome sensor cameras by one of my favorite BW photographers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDxHq3Zlbz8

Getting all the angles lined up perfectly. Every line straight and vertical. So parallel it would make Ezra Stoller cry for joy. Or: ways to suck happiness out of sharing photography...

Remnants of the first banking drive through I ever experienced. 

Boring-techture. By demand.

For those not into architectural photography Ezra Stoller was a giant in the field as

far back as the late 1940s. He used an 8x10 view camera to photography buildings and residences of note. He liked all of the vertical lines to be perfect. 

So wonderful that we demand exactly the same geometric constraints here in 2023.

It's as though styles never change. 

 Bonus: An interesting video about Monochrome sensor cameras by one of my favorite BW photographers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDxHq3Zlbz8