Fellow photographer roaming the festival with a Nikon Z9 over one shoulder and a Nikon film camera over the other. Fist bumping happened. Sweet guy.
The Pecan Street Festival is pretty lame but it still draws a crowd. Lots and lots of vendor booths selling everything from jewelry to grape free "flower wines" to timeshare vacation packages. And lots of art. And food that isn't very good for you. And beer. And more beer.
I drove down and parked a mile away from the five or six blocks that have been closed off for the event (continues on Sunday). I needed the walk. Nice to get out of the office, out of the pool and to wander carefree with a small package of gear.
I took a Leica SL camera. I guess I have to admit that the older SLs are my absolute favorites at this point. I pick them up first and put them down last. I was going to go with just the 58mm Voigtlander lens but at the last moment I put the Carl Zeiss 28mm f2.8 Biogon ZM in a very small sling bag. The slim sling bag I bought as a hedge against rain on my visit to the Blanton Museum of Art on Thursday. The sling bag held the extra lens, two additional batteries for the SL (not needed), my phone and a lens cleaning cloth (also not needed).
I split my hour or so of shooting between the two lenses. I started with the 58mm and transitioned to the wide angle about half way through. Just wandering through the crowds stopping to snap a frame whenever the spirit moved me. When I felt hungry and thirsty I looked around at the culinary offerings and determined that I'd be much better off raiding the pantry at home. When I left the house there was a new triple creme brie, a demi baguette fresh from the bakery and a nice bottle of Bordeaux Superior lingering on the butcher block table in the kitchen. I thought some variation/combination of those ingredients might refresh me.
But first I sat down at the computer, edited down the take to about 70 images, went through to crop and tweak them and then edited down the stack to what you see here. Took about as long to do the post production work as it did to shoot the images in the first place.
I have to say that the endless depth of field of a 28mm lens, stopped down to f11 and used with auto-ISO is an infinitely faster way to shoot in the street and get stuff that's nearly always in focus. That's nice. The 58, shooting wide open, needs care and practice if you are going to nail stuff. My "keeper" rate for the 58mm was pretty dang low today. Much, much higher for the 28. Which leads me to suspect that the legion of street photographers don't really "LIKE" the 28mm focal length no matter how vociferously they laud that focal length, they are just too afraid of failure to shoot with a manual focusing, fast 50+ mm lens; even if it's secretly what we ALL think we should be shooting with ALL the time. In this regard I think the 28mm is a cowardly choice.
Out of all the images I took today only one person objected to having a picture made. It was the mom of a toddler in a stroller who had his face painted like Spiderman. The mom didn't want her child's photo on the internet. I totally agreed with her and promised I wouldn't put it there/here. Sorry. Of course it was the best shot of the day.
Here's some OT.
I heard on a secret information sharing site just for bloggers that the latest ploy for goosing up readership of photography blogs is to go completely off topic and discuss anything at all about cars. Not cameras. Just cars. So, not wanting to be left behind, here goes. I buy cars when I need them. I buy them new. If inflation raises the price of new cars I'm pretty sure that the yearly increases in my fee income compensates for the higher prices and renders the idea that cars are getting more expensive mostly moot. Things only seem more expensive if you are not raising your prices to match market reality. I'm driving a 2021 Subaru Forester. It has 15,000 miles on the odometer. I wrote a check from my business account to the dealer to purchase the car. I don't do car payments. My father (wise and kind) once told me that if you had to pay over time for something that means you really can't afford it. The only exception he made was for the purchase of houses. (He drove Honda Accords even though he could easily afford to purchase any car on the market).
All current cars seem pretty good. I never really exceed the maximum Texas speed limit of 75 mph so faster cars or cars with bigger engines are meaningless to me. My CPA handles the math for depreciation and the like. A car is like a utility (gas, electric, water). If you live and work in Texas you more than likely need one. You can get a very good and reliable car for about $30K, brand new. When my current vehicle feels "old" I'll buy another one. After a day or two of research. I've owned a number of different cars. The most costly to buy, service and "enjoy" was a BMW 540i. Went from a "magic carriage" to a "costly piece of shit" as soon as the 48K mile warranty expired. Not much fun but a quick "good riddance" and off I went to buy something reliable. That time it was a quick transition to a new Honda. The cars most people consider fun or desirable I think of as poor bargains. I rarely hear complaints about reliability from Toyota Corolla owners. I hear complaints endlessly from Range Rover owners and BMW owners. I also hear that it's painful to point a loaded handgun at your foot and pull the trigger. And that sums up everything I need to know about cars.
