Nasty Hot Weather Does Not Put a Crimp in Today's Shoot.

Can't pass a mirror without taking a selfie. 

CL with the Sigma 24mm.

So...what have we got going on in Austin, Texas today? Let's start with the smoke from Mexico. Just as in India the farmers in northern Mexico burn the leavings after harvesting their crops. The prevailing winds are from the south right now so Austin and the surrounding area is covered with a blanket of white smoke.  Throats are irritated and eyes itching. And the weather experts have indicated that we're at a level of about 154 for air quality instead of our usual 20-50. Add to this a dome of high pressure and record heat and you've got a perfect storm for misery. While the temperature today is only 100° the high humidity is giving us a current heat index of between 108° and 110°. It's less than delightful...

Now would be a good time to throw a giant musical festival in the park. After a week like this one we'd never have to deal with out of state folks wanting to move here and goosing the housing prices. Or the highway capacity. And I'd never have to hear about how they mix mojitos in Malibu again. Misery does not love company!

Oh...and ERCOT (the Texas energy guys) are warning us about running up against the max. capacity of the grid. You know the "grid." It became famous during our ice storm of 2021 when pretty much everyone in Texas lost electrical power for days, which precipitated a loss of water for more days, and left some unlucky folks with enormous utility bills. Wacky stuff. 

Today marked my third day of work in a row. I can tell you right now that the whole process of work is highly overrated and each time I head out I get a little bit more reticent about doing it again. Today was a mellow and fun shooting day but I still had to rush over after swim practice and that chapped me.

I was photographing five different people who needed to have portraits made over at my favorite P.R. agency. Somebody bungled the schedule a bit so I spent some time sitting in on their creative conference about generative A.I. and got a sense of the general direction that advertisers are interested in taking with the new tech. The message was clear. This is here now. Not next year or next month. "Now how can we use it to keep clients happy and make money?" Yeah. That was the question. 

The set up for today's shoot was decidedly minimalist. Two battery powered flashes and a flash trigger. One big umbrella and one bouncing off the ceiling. I took advantage of the agency's in house video studio and used their green screen as the background. All the images we end up using will be composited into other backgrounds that I've already shot. The green screen was perfect. And I didn't have to bring background stands and a roll of seamless paper.

Kinda stupid of me but I decided to go in a different direction than usual and just take the Leica SL2 body and the brand-spanking new 50mm APO LANTHAR lens from Voigtlander. I pressed it into service as a portrait lens by switching the camera to APS-C mode from full frame mode. That made the lens a 75mm equivalent which worked well since the composition wasn't a tight "head and shoulders" but instead was a loose, waist up shot. Works well for compositing. And it's still a 22 megapixel file size. 

In between portrait sessions I grabbed a Leica CL, equipped with the Sigma Contemporary 24mm f3.5, and shot "fly on the wall" images of the ongoing A.I. workshop. Lots of smart, young people figuring out the best use case for all these different programs. What I hear repeatedly/emphatically was that generative A.I. was going to be incredibly useful for presentation materials. Creative teams can make very detailed comprehensive layouts for their clients which takes a lot of the heavy lifting off the account executives who never seem particularly good at selling/pitching creative concepts to clients in the first place. Makes sense. A picture is worth a thousand words. A picture is worth a purchase order?

The client fed me well. We had nice coffee, fun donuts, and breakfast tacos early on. Lunch was a make your own spicy Mexican food bowl with tons of freshly made guacamole. If I had stayed around till the finish of their workshop they promised a happy hour as well. But I had pressing things to do. I wanted to see how the lens fared. It fared well. 

I used the Voigtlander 50mm mostly at f5.6. Not for any reason other than to have the right depth of field. The files I got were insanely sharp and contrasty. Beyond the measure of most other lenses. And I was happy to find that Lightroom includes a custom profile specifically for the 50 APO. Not that the profile made a big change but then I didn't expect a thousand dollar "nifty-fifty" to need too much help in post. 

The lens is nice and small. Has no confusing features and focuses nicely. Well, what I mean is that focusing ring feels just right as I focus the lens nicely. 

It's dreary outside now. Looks like we might be adding some nasty weather to the mix. 

Done working for a while so I can concentrate on swimming, strength training, napping and novel reading. 

A man has to have priorities...

That's all I've got for today. Thanks for reading.

(written by a survivor of 38+ years of professional photography and still making a living at it. No armchair pundits here...just contemporary, real world stuff).

 

Voigtlander 50 APO LANTHAR arrives and .... I'm too busy to go out and shoot with it right now....

 First of all, I have to blame a writer for putting a major crimp in my schedule. I found a book on my shelves that I bought a while back with the intention of reading it on vacation. That vacation got cancelled by the pandemic and I shelved the novel for later... lost in my library for several years.

I rediscovered the book yesterday morning and I seem to have acquired a problem in that I can't put it down. The writing is too captivating; too real, and the plot is as exciting as a long string of free Leica lenses. The dialogue is pitch perfect. Who could walk away from a perfectly crafted story to do anything else?

It's by some obscure writer, last name of Sanford, and his protagonist is a cop named Virgil Flowers. The book is entitled, "Deadline." I am suggesting that you give it wide berth because once you turn past the first page you'll find that you've stepped into a dangerous reader's tar pit. You won't want to leave  your chair to eat and you sure won't want to waste time sleeping. 

The big issue for me is that I'd booked a second photo shoot here in the studio for a client at Abbott U.S. and I wasn't sure I'd be able to pull myself away from the paper pages long enough to set up the studio and get the client in and out. I was able. Just barely. 

But now I'm sitting at my desk trying to read while simultaneously watching files upload and download and get written to thumb drives. This addictive book has tossed a bag of nails into my schedule.

You know a book is a winner when you'd rather keep reading it than to open the box from B&H with the newest miracle lens nestled inside. Tragic. Almost unthinkable. 

And patently unfair. In fact, if I am ever able to track the culprit down I'm going to be giving this Sanford fellow a piece of my mind. Not that I have lots to spare. but the productivity loss...

I was able to pull myself away from the novel for just long enough to photograph some very small medical appliances with the Leica SL2. I had to compose with a lot of room around each piece in order to have enough depth of field to keep the entirety of each product in focus. To make this work I fell back on my old trick of using the multi-shot hi-res mode to create 180+ megapixel raw files which I could then crop into and still give my client about 40+ megapixels of good, noise free data to work with. 

Thank goodness for bright LED lights and also the awesome performance of the Sigma 70mm f2.8 Art Series Macro lens. Today's optical MVP. 

The 50mm APO will have to wait for its turn at tomorrow's portrait shoot. A super sharp, contrasty lens and a bunch of bright faces....what could go wrong?

Stay tuned. 

I passed three lenses on to a friend this morning who will use them more than I will. I sold two Panasonic zoom lenses to another friend last week. Why?

 

To make room for a new toy.  Tool !!!  ( I really did mean "tool" - honest). As you probably know I have a thing for normal lenses. Meaning, of course, 50mm lenses. I've been doing my research and there are two 50mm lenses that are widely regarded as the two top lenses extant for sharpness and lack of issues or compromises. One is the $9,000+ Leica 50mm APO Summicron and the other one, pictured above, is the Voigtlander 50mm f2.0 APO-LANTHAR. Which is all of $999. I added $16 bucks to my ticket to get it here tomorrow. Brand new. In the box. From an official dealer. You know them --- they're big. But they aren't paying me to advertise for them...

I'll use this one on the SL2, the SLs and the Panasonics. It's supposed to be blistery sharp even wide open. Love the focal length. This is how you know you are truly addicted...you keep buying versions of the same focal length lens over and over again.

With this addition I will have assembled a nice little collection of M mount lenses which can be easily used on the SL cameras and will lie in wait should the day ever come when I convince myself to venture back into the hallowed camp of Leica M camera users. I guess I'm waiting for M10s to drop in price. Maybe I'm waiting in hopes that some rational person will pull me back from the edge. Or that I win the lottery and can afford a couple of those pretty M11s. Yeah. It could happen...

In other news I seem to have skated around the edge of retirement only to plunge back into the mix of corporate work. I completed an assignment here in the studio last week for Abbott US, the big medical products company, I have another assignment for them booked for tomorrow and on Thursday I'm scheduled to do five or six environmental portraits for a fun/nice/big public relations firm. Should go a long way toward cash flowing my Summer.

More on the horizon. But not too much. I'm getting too comfortable with my scheduling freedom to wish for a return to my old work schedule. 

And, yes, I did tell both of this week's clients that I could not start the projects until after swim practice. We're aiming for a very civilized 10:30 a.m. start on both days. After all these years I'm finding out that you basically just have to ask for what you want and usually it works out. 

Meteorology chat: So last week it was the northeastern states that got hammered by the nasty smoke from the wildfires. We've dodged the smoke but mother nature is gearing up to take a swing at us central Texans by both jacking up the temperatures and tossing in heavy doses of humidity. We're already under a "heat advisory" for today and it's only going to get worse going forward. Highs on Friday, and through the beginning of next week, will be 105°-106° without factoring in humidity, and if you add in the effects of the nearly liquid air we're going to experience "feels like" temperatures in the 114°-116° range. Nasty stuff, for sure! 

I'll be hitting the pool as early as possible each day and saving the afternoons for time in the air conditioned gym. Already drinking lots of water....

The weather is just a mess. But then again, this is Texas in the Summer. Hard pressed to sell Austin as a tourist destination right now --- when heat stroke is one of the major events on offer. 

Thank God for air conditioning. Hope the grid holds.... (sigh.).

Everyone is so different... Plus....I dropped a camera for the first time in decades. Ouch. But not ouch...

 Everyone is so different. I was reading replies to my reposted, "Lonely hunter...." post this morning and baffled at how many people rushed to defend the practice of always traveling with their spouse. The not doing of which was part of the whole point of the post. But Ted Lasso and B. reminded me not to be so judgmental so I guess it's just a different perspective from mine. Or I'm more selfish than most people. Which makes sense given my enormous sense of personal entitlement. You want to have company while you shoot? Go for it. Life is too short to slavishly hew to someone else's dictates. Or suggestions. Or something. Just know that your work will most likely suffer. But if you're okay with that.....

On a sad topic: You know that icky feeling when you're trying to get out of the house to make it somewhere on time and you're juggling your keys and your sunglasses and your regular glasses and a few other stupid items like your cellphone and you feel that camera strap slip through your hand? And a microsecond later gravity introduces your camera, or your camera and a favorite lens, to the hard reality of a Saltillo tiled floor? 

And maybe it even bounces once or twice? And you're just ...... instantly deflated. 

A few questions for the Universe...

Why is it that cameras never accidentally drop onto soft, padded carpeting? 

Why is the fall of a camera nearly always from waist level or higher?

Why is it never our cheapest "beater" camera that takes the plunge? 

Why is it always our newest, shiniest and most cool camera that impacts the hard tiles?

Why do we make the (unconscious) decision to let the camera slide instead of that pair of cheap sunglasses?

So, B. and I were leaving the house to go out for lunch on Saturday. I was juggling too much crap. I was just about to the door when I realized that my grip on my camera was only (tentatively) on the actual strap and not on the camera body itself. And the strap was slipping through my fingers because I just wasn't paying attention correctly, or at all. 

The camera slid down with about two feet of uncontrolled trajectory and hit squarely on the hard surface of the Saltillo tiled floor. I looked down at my nearly new Leica Q2 and sighed. Just sighed. It's been, literally, over a decade since I've personally engineered a camera taking a nose dive from altitude to absolute, unrelenting ground level. I'd like to chalk up the blame to having use a faulty Black Rapid strap but I would never buy or use one on my own cameras; I only gift them from time to time to my least favorite competitors. As mean gag gifts. It was really just a matter of me not paying attention. 

I expected the worst. A complete totaling of the wonder camera. But --- Thank goodness --- I had placed a cheap, thick leather half case on the camera the week before and that absorbed most of the energy. There are two tiny spots on the lens hood that now have no paint. About the size of a pin prick. The camera fired right up when I tested it. And, after lunch I came back to the office to shoot some test shots and make sure there was no mis-alignment of the lens or the sensor. 

I dodged a bullet this time but I gave myself a severe talking to and in the future might take the painful step of hot gluing the camera strap to my hand before venturing out. 

Couldn't be the Canon G15 or the old Alpa? Nope. Had to be the newest Leica in the small flock. 

Relieved that I don't have to send it away and wait. That's what passport renewals are for.......

Pro tip: Don't drop your camera. Especially don't drop it on hard stuff. It's not fun 

Pro tip #2: In that moment of relief that the camera has survived be sure not to share your sense relief with your spouse too quickly. Had I dragged out the drama I would have had a better excuse to upgrade to the Q3. Now that extra rationale has been vacated. My mistake.

Getting a running start on handling a hot week.

We don't have masters swim practice on Mondays. Our club pool is closed on Mondays for cleaning, maintenance and to let the water "settle." I hope someone on the lifeguard staff turned on the aerators last night to keep the water cool. Nothing makes swim practice tougher than too high a water temperature. In fact, for hard swimming anything over 82° is uncomfortable and anything over 84° is dangerous. 

So, my regular pool is closed today and we've got a week of increasing heat in front of us. How to get a jump start on staying cool? I got up this morning, looked at the seven day forecast, grabbed my swim gear and headed straight over to the Deep Eddy Pool. It's run by the city of Austin and it's filled with spring water from deep underground. The average water temperature in the Summer months is around 72°. They drain and refill the pool every three days to insure the purity of the water but even so, by the end of the Summer the pool takes on a green tinge. Nothing dangerous; just a bit green. 

When I exited the car to join the small band of daily swimmers waiting by the gates for the nine a.m. opening I took note that the ambient temperature at the time was already 85°. All forgotten and forgiven when I slipped into a shaded lane in the deep side of the pool to swim some laps. The difference between our swim yesterday at Rollingwood (84° water) and my swim today was over twelve degrees. So refreshing and so delightful. Not cold enough to shock me when sliding into the water but cool enough so that even after a mile it still felt ....... refreshing. Cool. Sweat free. 

After I got that mile in I stayed in and paddled around luxuriating in the chilliness. The lanes were full this morning but there wasn't a line of waiting swimmers. The lockers and showers are in an open air courtyard and I had forgotten the joys of taking a post swim shower under open sky, surrounded by landscaping, with birds ducking and diving overhead. An absolutely lovely way to start out the week.

By early afternoon the Gen-Zs and the Millennials will be awake and the pool will be thronged with lap swimmers and, on the other side of the wall between the lap lanes and the huge, shallow pool there will be groups of small children with moms and dads in tow living life large in one of the nicest pools in one of the nicest cities I know of. Too busy to bother with swimming laps after the morning crew. Too many people waiting for lanes to open. Too many people who don't know the protocols. But first thing in the morning and you have a chill buzz for the rest of the day. Almost feeling down about "having" to go back to the club tomorrow and plow through the warmer water..... almost. 

Now, after coffee, I'm procrastinating about billing Thursday's project, thinking vaguely about marketing, wondering when my passport will arrive and playing around with combinations of cameras and lenses. 

Life is pretty damn good.

The hot part of Summer arrived in Austin. Time to carry a smaller, lighter camera. The temperature in downtown today was 103°....

It had to happen eventually. The heat. I just looked at the weekly forecast. It's going to top 100° every afternoon; over 105° on Friday this coming week. I could convert that to centigrade for you but it sounds hotter in Fahrenheit. Either way you look at it the heat has arrived and it's time to get acclimated all over again. I only hope the smoke from Canada doesn't come with it...

My doctor tells me that as you age your body is less tolerant of temperature extremes. I pay him to tell me these things so I guess I should believe him but I hate to think I have to make smart choices = that flies in the face of my Maturity  Deficit Disorder. And what's the fun of hibernating in air conditioning all Summer? You'll just get...chubby.

So I put on my best pair of Keen sandals, some cool, cotton short pants and an REI long sleeve, SPF 50 shirt, wide-brim, non-Tilley hat, and fired up the all weather Subaru Forester (mercifully painted white). I hit downtown around 4:00 pm. It's about five degrees warmer there (urban heat island...) than it is up here in the hills West of downtown. We also have a lot more trees up here. Big trees. Good shade. But if your plan is long term acclimation you might as well go into the very belly of the steamy beast...

The one concession I made toward some measure of sanity was to jettison the heavy SL2 and its coterie of large, heavy, full frame lenses and select instead a Leica CL (APS-C style) and one of the much, much smaller Zeiss ZM lenses. I thought I'd try out the 28mm f2.8. No need for a faster aperture. Not while under the white hot glare of the Texas sun. 

I kept the walk to under an hour and I'm glad I did. I was a bit wiped out by the time I made it back to the car. Nothing serious, just some nausea, a closing down of my peripheral vision, a nagging headache, a touch of delirium, the inability to sweat, and a feeling of accelerating dread. Oh...I really meant I was a bit sweaty and warm when I got back to the car.... Not all that other stuff.

In Texas, when we buy cars the more experienced among us order our vehicles with double air conditioning. Two compressors, two fan systems, double the chilling power, etc. Sure, it costs a bit more and it requires more fuel to run but the power of two air conditioning units in a car ensures that you can keep a six pack of beer cold if you put it next to the vents. And I mean icy cold.  It's also good for rapid cooling of incautious humans. 

Got back home, parked and reached into the passenger footwell to grab an ice cold beer. Tossed a can to my neighbor as well. He was just getting ready to go for a run. I thought he might need some extra hydration. He's young --- still thinks he's bullet proof.

I couldn't find a damn thing to photograph that you'd really like to see here on the blog. Most of the interesting people had long since retired to their cool, dark lairs earlier in the day. I did have one embarrassing moment when the pavement got so hot the bottom of my shoe started melting and I was afraid I'd get stuck to the pavement in the direct sun. ("Photographers get in but they can't get out....") but a passing motorist with Florida plates took the corner a bit too sharp and bumped me (not too gently) back onto the sidewalk... thank goodness for that famous Floridian "stand your ground" driving aggression.

Since I was hot and no one was posing out on the city streets I just snapped endless photos of boring architecture and told myself it was a worthwhile pursuit for two reasons. One: I was testing the limits of my now 67 year old self to endure gunky, snarly, ostensibly dangerous heat. And, Two: I was getting a good sense of how the 28mm Zeiss lens performs on a cropped frame sensor. I do like it. 

And, in a nutshell, this is one of the reasons I like to swim in the early mornings for exercise. Unless the water gets too hot or I go too late in the day I don't have to worry about exercise induced heat stroke. 

This post was not written by a ChatBot. 

But just to give you greater confidence that this post was human sourced I thought I'd tell you something funny that happened at swim practice this morning. One of the people in my lane is a real, authentic Texas woman. Old school.  It was a hard workout and we were in the middle of a hard set. The water was a bit warm. She decided to sit out a 50 (that's one "down and back"). I stopped and asked if she was okay. Of course she was. Her reply? "I'm just taking a hostess break. I'm going upstairs to check my make-up and to smoke a cigarette. I'll be right back with you." The other person in our lane was heading back in our direction. After he turned we fell in line right behind him and finished the set. Sometimes you just have to know when to take a break. And have a good line ready to drop some humor into the near thankless task of staying in shape past your twenties... 

The tallest building west of Elgin, Texas and east of San Angelo, Texas. At least that's what they are saying. 

 

A refresher post for Karmagroovy who slyly suggested that I might be booted out of a "Club" photowalk....

 https://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2011/10/lonely-hunter-better-hunt.html

Not bloody likely....

Last year's model. Cameras as a fashion statement.

Fashion is predicated, to a certain extent, on making aesthetic gestures and flourishes different from season to season and from year to year. As in most industries there are influencers in fashion who drive the dialog about who will wear what in the upcoming months. The clothes that are custom made and worn by super models on the catwalks of Paris, Milan and NYC are the referents for high productions of the same basic styles in the mass retail markets, but at a lesser price, made lower by the magic of mass production. Some fashion, conservative and aimed at the highest demographics, stands the test of time and becomes iconic, almost immune to going "out of fashion." The Chanel inspired "little black dress" or the classic Armani blazer. Oxford dress shoes (not Brogues --- according to a reference from the movie, "The Kingsman.") and the meme-worthy black turtleneck shirts, a la Steve Jobs. 

A lot of over the top fashion is meant to shock or amaze. Most fashion trends are tired and over with in a short stretch of time. The influencers move on the next rhinestone studded frock or Nehru collared blouse, only this year they are available in different colors and with subtle changes to shapes and fabrics. They also switch from Summer to Winter and all the seasons in between.

All of the above refers to wearable fashion. Especially in the realm of ready to wear. 

Funny. I feel as though this is the year we embraced annually depreciable fashion in camera buying, fully and without acknowledging a sense of irony and excess. 

For a while, during the arc of improvement in digital camera technology we had reasons and rationales for rapid but fake obsolescence we felt in the camera market. Improvements in sensor tech and image processing tech kept giving us less noise, more dynamic range, faster AF and more resolution. Given a facile and quick ability to switch from camera to camera one could, at least theoretically, continue to mine the improvements in successive generations. Not "upgrading" seemed a false economy.

But in the last five or even seven years, if you were looking for excellent image quality and ease of use, all the top level cameras had already made the grade and were delivering the goods. Everything afterwards were just tiny, incremental improvements. Not observably better than what you already had nestled in the folds of that Billingham bag. 

But the influencers have now turned to camera fashion. How do I know? I gauge it by how many "influencers" on YouTube have, this year or the end of last year, flocked to cameras like the Leica Q2 and have elevated them to almost mythical, "must have" status. Even though the Q2 was already long in the tooth, not nearly as well spec'd as many cheaper alternatives and even deprived of the usual "helpful" features like in camera charging, input and output ports, phase detect AF ( which amateurs use to measure the times before and after camera evolutions into the "acceptable" category). 

Now cameras like the Leica Q2 are getting more attention in the influencer space than top Sony, Nikon and Canon professional cameras. Gen Z has become fascinated with Leica M series film cameras. The Ricoh GR111 and GR111X are now getting massive attention by everyone who couldn't find a Fuji X100V which is also an influencer driven camera.  Perhaps the ultimate influencer driven camera. Cameras as fashion. Cameras as a statement. Millions of the same camera sold to help you express your own individuality. Frankly, even though I am often eager to follow along, in retrospect it's just downright embarrassing. 

And it's not just cameras. Consider the move from the good, old fashioned camera strap that came packaged for free with your new camera. The strap demanded an upgrade to the Domke strap or the Tamrac strap (my favorite) and the rationale was being able to instantly unhook the camera from the bulk of the strap and use the camera freehand. This was quickly followed by an excruciatingly unfashionable evolution to the Black Rapid straps; mostly worn bandolier style and oh so ugly. The platform shoe of camera straps. Or perhaps the combat boot of straps. These have been replaced in short order by the Peak Design Straps which, as far as I can see, boast only that you can quickly detach or reattach your camera equally quickly via the red disk anchors, complete with delicate "strings." Each permutation or strap fashion change costing more and more. Now? Oh, the fashion forward photographer has eschewed all manner of shoulder or body strap and now embraces the "hand" strap. Just enough fabric and poly-something to hook your camera to one wrist. Unless you hanker after a newly re-traditional neck strap from Arti Di Mano at a cool $228 (Arte di Mano Reinforced Comodo Neck Strap - Minerva Black with Black Stitching). And then we've gone full circle. $228 for a camera strap when you can get one for free in the box? And I complained about expensive batteries --- what was I thinking?

Ten years ago all the buzz was around speed lights. Now an influencer would not be caught dead shooting with one. LED lights had their ascendency until the new sensors with noise free performance in cameras came along, which doomed using any lighting at all. So much talent now unleashed. 

But back to cameras....

Seems to me that the old Leica M series film rangefinders have become the "little black dress" of the fashion world while everything else is a nod to ever-changing fashion. Everything else is more Thierry Mugler and Versace and much more topical. And Leica has assumed an immediacy in the minds of so many YouTube photo enthusiasts....

I was struck by watching three videos by photo fashion plate, Peter McKinnon. In short order he embraced a Leica Q2 which then gave way to a Leica SL2-S which was trumped by a Leica film camera which he is just now learning to operate  (poorly). But he has expressed that he's now driven to explore film cameras because ----- "digital has no soul." This from an influencer whose sole experience over the course of his always on camera career has been with digital cameras. 

Then I watched YouTube influencer, Evan Raft, bumble through a Leica SL2 to a Leica Q2 transition and basically give up in despair before going back and trying Leica yet again. Apparently the lure of the click throughs was too great to deny.  No question that either Peter and/or Evan can make good photographs and may even make money directly from their photographs, but my bet is that the bulk of their incomes are from performances as camera reviewers and lifestyle influencers. Expert at driving legions of people to buy stuff and then, subsequently, reject it all the instant a new product comes into fashion. 

Ever practical James Popsys evolved on his channel from Panasonic M4:3 cameras to full frame Panasonic cameras to Sony cameras (which he suggested were the just right) until --- Lo and behold! He showed up on his channel one day fondling his latest purchase --- a Leica M digital camera and 50mm lens. Today's video compares the performance differences between the Leica rangefinder and his Sony A7xx camera. He can see no differences.... Tune in to see what's next. 

Likewise, Thomas Heaton, whose videos are long on cameras and vans and objects like tripods and propane RV stoves while wandering around endlessly in various UK landscapes getting cold and wet and muttering about not being able to find the "good light." Which is, I guess, okay with everyone who subscribes to his channel. And, admittedly, looking at someone's landscape work over and over again would get awfully boring. But he does a good job at showing his audience just how miserable it can be to go outside and chase after the perfect landscape in an area beset by frost and rain and....flat light.

I bring this all up because, absent a personal profit motive there are really, very, very few reasons to "upgrade" through various cameras now other than to stay abreast of the latest fashion trends. 

A few years back I had lunch with Elliott Erwitt when he was here in town. (Big and obvious name dropping...)  He was carrying a Leica M7 and a 50mm Summicron. Shooting film. Mostly Tri-X. But he never mentioned his camera. It was just there; hanging off his shoulder. He gave no reviews. He didn't sing its praises. He shot it sparingly, as the opportunities arose but his conversation revolved around life, food, art and travel experiences. The camera was, to him, as comfortable as a favorite sweater or a well broken in pair of shoes. Nothing you needed to talk about. Nothing you needed to rush out and buy. Easy for him to say...

Of course Erwitt wasn't making his money hawking cameras and being camera stylish. He was earning money the old fashioned photographer way: He was selling prints of his images to an audience that loved,....the images. Not the camera. Prints made by cameras so primitive that most current generation photographers would be baffled by their operation. Which speaks volumes in itself. (Where is the USB plug on a Leica M3??? Why can't I find the light meter switch? Why does the bottom come off? What? No wireless charging?).

It's funny to me that, as I wind down client driven work the desire to buy cameras for client's sake, which was my my rationale for camera churning, has also wound down. I had coffee with a very wise and dear friend this morning. I mentioned that without the profit motive the act of buying new cameras had become less and less fun. Less rewarding. And without an active audience of fellow photographers to oooh and ahh over a new purchase the buying buzz became so much less buzzy.

He responded that without a good, solid rationale behind the purchase of new gear the purchase itself was bereft of justifiable value. And by extension, much pleasure. 

It's been a while since I bought a new camera. Nothing seems to tickle my acquisitive bones. Nothing has persuaded me to click, "purchase." 

Kind of nice. Less gear to worry about. But I'll quickly lose my photo-fashion credentials without the requisite and showy purchases of new gear --- if I had any credentials to begin with. 

Turn up those collars, grab a pair of Guccis and make sure you have a matching camera to complete the outfit. Yikes ----- photography has now extended its reach into yearly fashion turnover. What next?

Oh...and just so you know....new tripod purchases are so.....last year. As are gimbals. And please....try not to show up with a long zoom. So gauche. 

So, if Leica rangefinders are the perennial "little black Chanel dresses". What are the rest of the cameras? 

I guess Sony would be the Abercrombie and Fitch selection. Nikon for Eddie Bauer and Canon as the Gap plus Old Navy of cameras. Fuji seems very comfortable as Lulu Lemon while Pentax brings up the rear as Burberry's; the classic belted trench coat of cameras...  Olympus has become a Costco store brand of stretch waist Cargo shorts while Panasonic is toiling away trying to become the Carhartt's of photography. An exception for their MF cameras, those are aspiring Tactical 5.11 wannabes.

Sorry, just got so tired of the car analogies....

Revised: Leica, the Hermes of cameras.... That's all I've got.