Great Response to Tuesday's invitation to share information about each other. I wish there was a way on Blogger to "pin" a post up at the top of the main page. But there isn't. I'll keep posting comments to that post as long as the comments keep coming. Thanks to everyone!!!

 

Birkenstock Atacamas in action. 

I like Birkenstocks and now that I've attained full adulthood I have 

no fear of even wearing them in cooler weather with wool socks. but...

I love the way Birkenstock's original sandals feel on my feet. The arch support, the footbed, in fact, just about everything is perfect. But the originals have one big issue that bugged me. My two pairs of Arizonas have very thin and wimpy soles on them. The bottom tread. It's definitely a sandal that's made for indoor use. On tile, on carpet and on hardwood floors they are very much in their element. But if you take them outside and walk on roadways, sidewalks, and over any rough ground you'll wear out the bottom tread within a month. At least I will. I had almost given up on considering wearing my comfy originals past the threshold of the front door of my house --- which is sad. But do you really want to blast through a pair of $160 sandals on a monthly basis? Seems a bit wasteful to me.

Austin is a weird place for shoes. It's rare we need or want to wear big, insulated hiking boots and there are so few places left anymore to wear those bespoke, formal suits and fine oxfords and still fit in Austin Fashion Wise. We've got a couple months of comfortable, temperate weather and then most of the Summer, at least till November, we're dealing with hot, sweaty, sticky weather. The kinds that begs for short pants, thin, moisture wicking shirts and almost bare feet. Or at least feet exposed to air flow...

Of course you can't really go barefoot as the pavement everywhere is hot enough to quickly cook pancakes on. You wouldn't make it two blocks without third degree burns on the bottoms of your feet. So the solution for the heat, humidity and just plain awfulness of feet confined to shoes is sandals. I have all manner of other brands but the Birks are the most luxurious. The "Leica" of ventilated footwear. 

In anticipation of the upcoming Summer I started doing research and found that Birkenstock has introduced a bunch of new product with ---  much more rugged and durable soles. Big tread. As thick as the grippy tread on the bottoms of my Keen hiking shoes. Oh joy! I bought the first version they introduced. They are called Atacamas. They don't have the famous suede leather over cork footbed. They are made of some sort of composite materials. But they work, and were comfortable enough for me to have done a handful of three to four miles walks through the city. I'd put a link to them but I don't want to rob you of the joy of doing your own research. 

Yesterday I circled back to the Birkenstock website to find yet another product that melds the best of the Atacamas with the best of the traditional sandals. It's called the "Arizona Rugged." Oiled leather uppers, tranditional suede leather footbed but with a much more rugged bottom. Advertised as an outdoor, adventure shoe. I'll be ordering a pair of these as well since the suede footbed insole will most likely be more comfortable than the non-porou, poly material of the Atacama. Sadly though, they are about $25 more. 

The Atacamas are perfect for wet environments (going to the pool) and getting caught in the rain since they won't be bothered by water. That's the biggest trade off. The Arizona Ruggeds will eventually experience deteriorated cork inner soles if you don't take pains to wax the surfaces regularly.

So, what the heck does this have to do with photography? Well... happy feet make for happier photographers and un-sore feet mean more potential ground covered during photo walks. The rationale works for me. And...they are made in Germany. I can hardly wait for the Leica Editions. Where to put the red dot???

So, yesterday, after all my office chores were done, I slipped into my Atacamas and headed downtown to make some more Carl Zeiss empowered photographs. I was out to see how well the colors and the general contrast of the Carl Zeiss Planar 50mm f1.4 ZF.2 matched up with the 28mm and 35mm CZ Biogons. But what makes visual lens testing a bit of a challenge is the changing quality of light from day to day. 

With the two Biogons I was making photographs on bright, sunny days. Whereas yesterday it was pre-stormy, grey and sodden. And cloud cover, etc. sucks the saturation and contrast right out of most images. I decided to give it a go anyway. After all, I was there with a camera and lens in hand. 

There is a family resemblance between all three of the lenses. They render subjects a bit differently than the Voigtlander lenses. A bit more contrast and slightly harder tonalities. And the Zeiss lenses are just a bit cooler in color than the Vs. I like the idea of tromping around with fixed sets of lenses. One day might call for the 40mm and 58mm Voigtlanders as a nice duo for uncrowded urban shooting while the Zeiss trio might shine in a more crowded space. 

Oh. And I heard or read something from a street photographer that interested me a lot this past week. He was talking about what lenses he uses for street photography (what I might call 'urban landscapes') and he suggested that a 28mm is a good lens for crowded and tightly configured spaces like the ones he finds in Asia. Think Hong Kong. Think Tokyo. Places where there is a lot of sidewalk traffic and less space to back up. 

His choice for the spread out cities of North America (think Austin, Vancouver, Seattle) is a 50mm because that focal length tends to compress space better. And in Austin there is nearly always room to back up...

Now I'm thinking of my lens groupings by their real potential. The 40 and 58mm Voigtlanders for general use in spread out cities. The 28mm and 35mm for crowded cities and smaller spreads. Adding the 50mm CZ for those times when a classic portrait is called for. I know it's a bit short for a real classic portrait but that's why the photo gods inventing judicious cropping. I haven't been to London since the 1990s. Is it a crowded space or a wide space? I don't remember.  Let me know if you can...

At any rate here are some images I shot yesterday. I was underwhelmed with everything so it's fine with me if you are too. I'll toss some captions in for fun. 

50mm f1.4. All lenses are good-to-great at f8.0. This one is no exception.

The 50mm has some barrel distortion but very little vignetting, even wide open.

And the sharpness is deceiving. The depth of field is so thin that you have to 

hunt for what's in focus to make any sort of accurate assessment. 

Hot. Humid. And with the sun peaking out just enough to make

sunscreen desirable but annoying. Nice colors though. 

50mm focused as close as I could. Stopped down to f2

Fascinated by fast food buildings. Not that they make fast food there but 

it seems the construction is aimed more at getting the stuff up quick but ignoring 

any imperative to make the buildings at all attractive. Or interesting. Or both.

50mm. This is one of those images with a lot of sharp detail that would 

probably look its best enlarged quite a bit. There's a lot in the frame; especially the right hand side building, and the sky is interesting to me as well. But I'm pretty sure it doesn't translate well 

to a small screen. Now I'm starting to sound like MJ...

downtown Austin is now commissioning artists to paint original work (not graffiti) on

all the downtown utility boxes and traffic light control boxes. It's a nice touch. 

I'm not always a fan of all styles but there is something for just about 

everyone. 

I saw this just after reading JC's comment about how many hundreds and hundreds of 

real photographs he found while looking though a copy of Architectural Digest Magazine. 

I get that there are still a lot of print magazines. And most of them still have photographs. 

But as a percentage of overall creative content I judge most of them to be outliers aimed at 

a certain limited range of generations and certainly at higher income demographics. 

I think the young man wearing this t-shirt might agree. 

I disagree a bit with JC on this. I think the robots have us in their sights.

Since we always talk about the blog as a community wouldn't it be great to get to know each other? Better still maybe we could create social connection locally by getting in touch with other blog readers local to us and maybe have coffees and discuss photography? Maybe?

 

First off, my name is Kirk. I live in Austin, Texas. I'm 67. I love taking photographs. Mostly casual people images but urban landscapes as well.  Now it's your turn. Who are you? Where do you live? What did you/do you do that you'd like to share? What's your particular interest in photography? Do you have friends close by whom you meet for coffee? 

Now to the crux of this post: Wouldn't it be cool to know someone near you who shares a lot of your interests and who might be interesting to talk with about photography? And life? And stuff?

I was talking to B this morning over breakfast and she mentioned an article about loneliness and how it's epidemic in post Covid times. Especially for people over 50. And the health ramifications are dour. I could list them but the one I disliked reading most was: "early mortality." The cure, it seems, is to spend more time with people and to work on maintaining old friendships and building new ones. 

She asked me what I was doing with the blog to help with that. And while I think there are benefits to having friends spread out all over the place (and I do consider a large number of you to be in the "friend" category) I'd love it if we could encourage each other to reach out and connect with at least one new person, local to us, that we could actually meet face-to-face, have coffee with, discuss photography with and get to know. Mutual photographic support. Human face-to-face.

I have a friend here in town named Frank. He took the initiative and reached out to me at least a decade ago. We've met, on average, once a month since then to catch up with each other, trade information about gear we're using and techniques we either tried or read about, and to be mutually supportive. I always look forward to our morning coffees. We don't always agree on every aspect of modern life but we respect each other enough to dodge around subjects that might engender conflict and stay on a brighter, happier path. His advice about business and finance is always so welcome. I know I've benefitted from knowing Frank and I hope he feels the same way. 

I bring up my friendship with Frank because it happened as a result of the blog. We met at a book signing for Michael O'Brien's book on the homeless. A book signing he read about here; on the blog.  

So after talking with B this morning I'm trying to figure out how we can use the blog to help readers all over the place make some local connections that would bring the same kind of benefits to other readers. 

I was thinking it would be good to drop a first name and general (city-wide?) location, from anyone interested in taking a chance, into the comments below. I'm trying to figure out a safe way to connect people via the web so if you have any ideas I'd love to hear them. I want to make sure no one gets scammed or taken advantage of but it would be great if a couple readers in San Antonio, for example, could connect and at least introduce themselves to each other. Share some good news.

It may just be a pipe dream but if you know how to make this work please help me out here with more/better strategies. How can we make connections with other VSL readers?

Another thing that brought this to my attention was a phone call from a long time reader's spouse. She was calling to see if her husband and I might be able to meet up when I finally get to Tucson to see the McCartney show. I was flattered. I'll make sure to get to Tucson and meet one of my long time but never met in person friends. But during the course of a phone conversation it was suggested that calling me or contacting me might be somehow wrong. As though they were intruding. I assured them (honestly) that I'm always open to people getting in touch with me. I don't have an entourage. No one is screening my calls or email. I'm always open to answering question via email. And as long as my schedule permits I don't mind phone calls; especially from long time commenters whose names I recognize. 

But my real intention today is to motivate VSL blog readers here to reach out locally and find like minded folks who might meet up occasionally for a bit of camaraderie and photo/knowledge sharing. Please let me know what you think with a comment. But don't share your social security number, drivers license numbers, credit card numbers or your home address!!!! (I know you wouldn't but I had to say that even if it's partially just a joke). A first name and a city is a good introduction. A few short sentences about what it is in photography that interests you. Maybe even your focus on photography, examples: landscapes, street photography, portraits, or any other interests. 

This may just be a blogger fantasy that results in a complete face plant but most of my readers are way smarter than the average person in the street and perhaps the guidance that emerges in response will add to our success with this. As usual, if this doesn't appeal to you at all you have my permission to ignore the post, and the intention, and just read the stuff you like. 

Fun days ahead. Waiting with trepidation for the budget ceiling drama. Focusing more and more on swimming, vitamins, and playing the role of artiste. Thanks for sticking around and reading my stuff. 

What? Me Worry?

There's so much that feels unsettled. The generative A.I. evolution is pushing everything else off to the side when it comes to content for business publications and technical websites. A financial analyst even went so far to suggest that Apple is lagging behind in A.I. and its stock price will get nicked as a result. (I would never count Apple out. They can buy their way to the top of the A.I. mountain).  Most people who are writing on the subject are pretty glum, bordering on paranoid. I'm not sure where I land on the whole wide spectrum of angst about our computer overlords but I'm not as optimistic as Chase Jarvis who wrote recently about this just being another step, like the move to digital and the popularity of smart phones. A step that savvy creatives might use to their advantage (hmmmm.). Capitalism has a way of weaponizing new technology directly against its own participants. And many big companies love racing to the bottom when it comes to cost cutting; human capital be damned. 

I hate to use the phrase: "It's different this time." But since A.I. covers so much of the work landscape already, from call center prompting and automated phone response systems, to online service chats, to writing everything from marketing copy to technical briefs and certainly, soon, also novels, screenplays and so much more, I can only imagine that anything that's not subjective but is fact based, like accounting and radiology, even law is going to get slammed as far as human pay scale value goes. And in the realm of continuing careers and job tenure.. .. .. .  (my ellipse fascination is just a ploy to trick the A.I. learning algorithms into screwing up... .  .. ) I think we're about to see a very different kind of disruption than we have in the past mostly because this one will affect white collar workers to a tremendous degree. Another metric to be factored into the decline of the value of a university degree. The working press is seeing evidence of this across industries already.

This doesn't begin to cover the destruction of democracy that deep fakes and endless but highly believable visual and aural misinformation destined to come blasting out of the fire hoses of the internet in order to push bad agendas. And both sides of the political system should be equally worried, including the bad guys who already have a history of endless lying in the service of greed and power... 

How it affects photography and how that affect affects you personally will depend on whether you do work for money or you do photography for the fun of the process and the joy of sometimes getting great results. I'll wager that with working photographers if you don't hit two or three must have skill sets in the next year (tops) your days of making $$$ from owning and knowing how to operate a camera and work in PhotoShop are quickly coming to an end. I'll bet that the demand for video of all kinds will continue to explode and, for a few years at least, the ability and patience to navigate creating in collaboration with A.I. will be sellable. Once processor power makes A.I. video creation widely available then all bets are off. Personally, if you've done your financial homework and have saved adequately this might be a good time to step away from the business. If you're still in your working and must earning years you might consider re-aiming or re-training for a new business target that depends less on your skills at knowing your way around a keyboard and a camera menu and much more about critical jobs that people need and can't do for themselves. 

And if you are securely retired and doing photos for fun you should count yourself lucky and more lucky. Because you don't have to change a single thing that you are doing right now. Keep shooting that 8x10 black and white sheet film. We love it.

If I were counseling a young person about career choices and they lived in Texas I can almost guarantee that all but the top 10% of students will, over their lifetimes, do a lot better in the skilled trades than in business administration, advertising, information processing and the like. Plumbers never go bankrupt because when one's toilet is overflowing or a pipe has burst in a wall people will pay whatever they have to in order to get stuff fixed. Ditto electricians. Ditto air conditioner and heater install/repair people. No, I fear for anyone who works with information. From teachers to bank staff to psychiatrists. Everything can be eventually overtaken by ever evolving A.I.  

I've decided to pretend that the only thing that will change in my business is the steady loss of clients and revenue. Other than that I intend to go merrily along, buying random zany lenses, titillating camera bodies and new breeds of lights. After all, my paranoia could be totally misplaced and the value of a human point of view might come to be cherished and  considered luxe in the future. I'll hope for the best and the rest of the time I'll shoot what I like.

And swim. And do strength training. And read inane blogs. And take long walks. This is the way of all things. 

Welcome to work place dystopia. 

Warning! This is not an Art Gallery. This blog post was created to give information, both in words and in images, about the Carl Zeiss 35mm f2.0 Biogon lens for the Leica M mount cameras. Nothing more. Wanna play art critic? Do it somewhere else.

 

As you are probably aware I sabotaged my resolution not to buy more gear in 2023 and went on a wild spending spree, buying several Carl  Zeiss lenses which were originally made to work on Zeiss's own M mount film camera (since discontinued) and also on any Leica or similar camera that uses the Leica M mount. These were in addition to my recent indiscretions in buying the 40mm and 58mm Voigtlander lenses in a Nikon F mount configuration. Woe is me. Will my checking account ever recover? 

After a couple of false starts concerning viable lens to camera adapters I've finally found one that gives me both correct infinity focusing (without going beyond infinity!) and also has a helicoid for extending the close up range of lenses mounted to it. It's a Hoage branded M to L Macro adapter and costs about $89. I used the adapter and the lens successfully on a Leica SL camera body this afternoon after a few quick tests yesterday evening. Everything tested out well. 

The lens I've been photographing with yesterday evening and today is the Carl Zeiss 35mm f2.0 Biogon lens ZM and I opted to buy it because it is known to be a good optical performer and it's also quite small and compact. Just the thing for long periods of handheld picture taking. When I realized that the new adapter was working perfectly I grabbed the rig and headed downtown. One priority was getting Macchiato from Mañana  Coffee but the over-riding priority was to give the new (to me) lens a trial run. To get a feel for how to focus a lens with a different touch and feel than others I am used to. To see how it renders details. To see if there is distortion and, after the fact, to see how hard (or easy) the distortion was to correct. And...would a smaller, lighter lens work well for me in the field?

I've tossed some captions under some of the images below but my overall assessment, after shooting color DNG's and black and white (oops! Monochrome) Jpegs is that the lens is very sharp and contrasty, overall, and has no major faults anywhere in the chain. The small size is fun and different from the lenses I have been using and would be nice for all day touring, on foot, in major cities. 

A note for people who might have mistaken this BLOG for a virtual fine art gallery: The pix are here to illustrate the copy. The copy is about my subjective appraisal of the lens. It's not a photo essay about street photography. It's not "Sleeping Beside the Colorado River." The photos are definitely not intended to be nor presented as fine art. You'll have to look elsewhere for that. Tough nuts. 

We're starting with a close up of this industrial handle. It's at the close

focusing distance of the lens, combined with the closest setting on the 

lens to camera adapter. If you click in to 100% you can see sharp detail on the 

part of the handle that's in focus. It's really good.  See the 100% crop just below...

Here is the same object at the close focus limit of the lens without the added

magnificiation of the macro adapter. 

And a wider shot just to show off the context of the three images above.

I didn't have a test target at hand so I stopped down to f8.0 and shot

the sidewalk adjacent to the pedestrian bridge. As you can see, it's sharp everywhere. 

That's nice. The sun is just above the frame but there isn't a hint of flare!!

I like the sun stars starting to come out from the highlight area already at f5.6.

Again, filling the frame. At f2.8 and the closest lens (alone) focus.

Wow! blood and urine! Tempting...

Now really enjoying the sun star off the Google "Sail" building. 

And no hint of veiling flare to be seen. Nor flare artifacts in the frame.

Color and detail are crispy but not overly "digital" in appearance.

Don't know whether to credit the camera or the lens or the combination.

But I like what I see. 

B was back for a few days and last night we had dinner with close friends.

Their backyard is beautifully and comfortably landscaped and their outdoor 

dining area table can comfortably seat ten. Our host was just back from 

restaurant hopping in Tokyo and Kyoto and whipped up some incredible 

dishes for us. I brought some wine from our favorite wine merchant.

Hard to beat a good St. Emilion Grand Cru. Even the 2019s are yummy.

Same thing in color. Lens wide open. Camera? SL.

I bought the lens on a lark and now I'm happy I did. It's just want I wanted in a small and lightweight travel companion and, if I ever decide to get back into "M" photography, I now have three lenses tested and ready to go. Might be looking at an M 262. Seems like my speed. But I'll have to wait for my birthday.... And that's a ways off. 

Dinner with B & B tonight. Everyone is doing well and it was great to get back into the tradition of the Sunday Family dinner. Tomorrow is a swim AND strength training day so it's off to bed for me. Fun fact: Ice cream has a lower glycemic index than brown rice. And it's tastier too. 

Eeyore's 2023. Still fun.

 

All images taken with the Q2.