The unimaginable has happened. I'm nearly certain it was a mistake or a moment of radical incoherence but....

 I was making fun of Tilley Hats on Amazon.com with a friend and I "accidentally" ordered one. It was on sale. 30% off. Whatever excuse I can find. It arrives tomorrow. I'm taking the day off to walk around town and see what all the fuss is about...

This is how bad the heat stress has gotten ----unsupervised shopping insanity and the general destruction of my reputation as a fashion forward influencer on the web. 

Photos tomorrow. 

Blank space. discarded copy. Sadly self-censured. Taking all the fun out...

But the lead is: Tilly Hat + Kirk

Sunday, August 20th. 2023. Midday, Urban Landscape Photography.

current favorite camera of all time: The beat up, oldest Leica SL I own. It's just wonderful. Like an old, broken in pair of jeans. current favorite lens for Leicas: The Voigtlander 50mm f2.0 APO-Lanthar. Sharp like a scalpel. Bursting with personality. Goading me to enjoy the "miracle" of vignetting...

Tree with intersection. Finished with diagonals.

A brick billboard for taggers. (note: parallel sides. Yay! me.).

The new Texas fad of "grass tanning." The trees will be next.

the number one, must have Summer car accessory. Get a back up. Just in case.

I tried one of the Lightroom presets for the sky. Tropical neon. Never again... maybe.

today was "red car" day on the walk. I seemed to have seen them everywhere...

They had me at "ring pops." 

Store mannequins doing double duty directing traffic.

Meditative mannequin. Looking outward to infinity. 

Summer wardrobes. Big water bottles. Weird cars.

Towers. Version one. With birds and wires. 

Towers. Version two. No birds, no wires.

fencing. Epée. Riposte. Sabre. Chain link.

Hallucinogenic wiring for train engines. Lovely color choice.

coming nearly full circle. 

Cooler today. Only 105° (f). 

I woke up with a weird and rebellious thought this morning. Our neighborhood is in the middle of an extended bout of people buying up 50 and 60 year old houses for anywhere from one to two million dollars and then tearing them down and building four and five million dollar houses on the lots. The original neighborhood was mostly a nice collection of 2,000 to 3,000 square foot 3:2 and 4:2 houses on big lots. The lots have to be big because ours is one of the last small neighborhoods with septic systems. Septic systems need drain fields. Hence the bigger lots. 

I get a little riled when people buy up perfectly good houses and then scrape them off the lots. And I'm starting to be annoyed by older couples, empty nesters, who believe they need five thousand square feet of living space, covering most of the square footage of their lots. Delusions of grandchildren visiting frequently...

My idea was to buy the lot next door to ours, tear down the houses on both lots, Join the two properties together and then put two "tiny" houses on the big, combined property. That's it. Just  two tiny houses. About 450 square feet apiece. One for me and one for B. Maybe we'll build a dining pavilion right between the two homes. Everything else goes into landscaping. Kind of the antidote to excess size and minimal taste. Might be fun.

On the other hand. We can just stay the course and watch the California-fication of Austin springing up all around us. Either way my current pronouncement is: "Long live the mid-century ranch houses." Destined to be collector's items --- in a big way.....

circling back to actual photographic talk.... that APO Lanthar lens is quite something. A good bit better than my iPhone lens I think. 

 

Professional Tip: Always bring a ladder.

The aftermath of a morning golf photograph...

I met with my friend and sometimes client, Dr. Jim Grubbs, for lunch last Monday. He showed me a comp the cover mock up for his third book about golf and psychology. He asked me to photograph it for him. 

Yesterday I pulled out the camera and lens I wanted to use and made sure I had charged batteries, two formatted memory cards and that all the settings were in the ballpark for use on a sunny morning. Since it's been hotter than Hades here for a long time it was just a reflex to grab a 4x4 foot white sheet of nylon fabric and a couple of clothes pins for use in covering up the black camera, lens and dark camera bag ---- there's not a lot of shade on a putting green...the direct sun on gear is contraindicated during the Austin Summers...

I knew I wouldn't have to light anything but as I was going over the shoot, step-by-step, in my head it dawned on me that a bit of elevation was going to make the shot work better. Jim's scouting photo was nice but he's also about 6 foot five inches tall and I'm 5'8"; his perspective is different than mine when it comes to shooting at a down angle. I knew I'd want some space to back up (literally "up") so I could get the perspective right.

That meant bringing along the step ladder. The ladder is six feet tall and the only way it would fit inside the Subaru Forester is if I reclined the passenger seat all the way back. But you know what? I'm over trashing the interior of my cars with dirty ladders and accidental upholstery destruction. But, for the first time in my long career I finally have a car that has a built in roof rack and crossbars. 

I felt like blue collar craftsman using bungee cords to secure the aluminum ladder to the top of the car. But it was great. It didn't fall off on the freeway and snarl traffic or kill someone.  I can't wait to buy a roll of nine foot seamless and attach that to the topside as well. Hell, give me time and I'll have an entire studio full of stuff tied to the racks...

My sleek Forester will eventually look like one of the those overloaded car/trucks from the FSA photos of the Dust Bowl times in the Great Depression. Or, maybe the VSL CFO will step out, take a look and shut down my plan. Calmer minds prevailing and all that. 

Jim arrived early, carefully planned out his shot and got it set up and ready. I arrived punctually at 9 a.m. and walked over empty handed to check out the props and the angles. We made one small adjustment. I went back and grabbed the ladder and the Fuji GFX 50Sii with the 35-70mm lens. Took one more look and then climbed up three steps on the ladder and started shooting. Damn, those 16 bit, uncompressed raw files are big. About 108.5 megabytes apiece. On the other hand they sure are hard to screw up. Get onto the target and you can post process a "bullseye" nearly every time. 

We started shooting at 9:05, did a few variations, shot a few with passing cloud cover and then called this part of our project completed. Time at the finish was 9:12. The ladder went back on the car and, after a nice handshake, and a quick schedule check to get the book's interior shots on our calendars, I was heading back home. Seven minutes for a book cover. A new record for me.

The shoot was a good reminder to always think about bringing a ladder on a shoot. We might not always use it but it sure is handy when you need one. 

This will be my third book cover for Jim's golf books. Relaxed, fun, happy shooting. Almost like being retired. 

 

I had to go scout for a project today. Back in the saddle.

Mitakon 135mm f2.5 on the Fuji 50Sii. Full frame.

100% crop just below. 

My favorite creative director asked me to do a photography assignment for him. It involves photographing fruits and vegetables in bins on shelving. The images are for a regional food bank. They'll be using 6-8 images as wraps for large, refrigerated trailers. Since my creative director friend is smart, and since we'll be shooting at the client's location, he decided that we should scout the project. We should go look at everything we could.

The client H.Q. is on the other side of town. We were scheduled to meet there at 2:30 this afternoon. I left the house early because with Austin traffic you just never know. Add to that the temperatures and tempers on the road and, well, it's better to take it easy and risk arriving early. 

It was a routine, almost stereotypical scouting adventure. The facility is huge. We all met in the lobby. I was joined by the C.D, the art director, the client's marketing director, and one of her associates. We looked at the trailer that would get the wrap. We discussed the proportions of the photos and how they would be applied to the long, horizontal structure. We walked through one of the huge refrigerated food warehouses to get an idea of what kinds of props/products we'd be working with. And we scouted for some location in which to shoot. 

It's really good to do a scouting trip before a shoot. You can prevent a lot of misunderstandings and lost time on the shoot day. For instance, if you are going to shoot a shelving unit that's six feet tall and four feet wide and you don't want to see a lot of perspective distortion between the front legs of the shelves and the back legs you'll need to back up a bit, use a longer than normal lens and also have space behind the shelves to put up a white background and to light that background separately. What a client thinks might work and what actually does work can be vastly different. 

Moving produce (fruit and vegetables) from a very cold storage space into a warm and humid shooting space will cause a bunch of condensation on the products. Might look good or it might not. In shots like this control over the final look is important....

We ruled out one shooting location because the closest electrical outlets were about a hundred feet away. We ruled out another location because, well, it was on a different floor and also on the other side of the facility. By the time we left we had a working agreement on where and when we would do the job and a good idea of how to proceed. That's a time saver. And an anxiety preventer in anyone's book. 

A good scouting adventure tells a photographer: The best location at which to photograph. Where to get ample electrical power for lights. How to schedule the most popular conference room because it's the best shooting location. What to expect in terms of styling the product. Where to load in on the day of the shoot. Who the decision makers on the client side are. And how long the set up and actual photography will take. 

We have a tentative schedule and I feel more comfortable about the details of the job. I think it was worth the time and travel. Even if my car did tell me that the temperature out on the road today was 114°. 

There's another step before the shooting day. The art director and I need to have a phone meeting to discuss technical stuff. Like, how he wants the files and how big he'd like the files to be. The "look and feel" of the lighting. And who will be responsible for styling the shots. We'll get into that tomorrow. 

But for today it seems like were pretty much on target. 

I read a review on DPR of a lens I had just tested. Don't know if it's sample variation or what but......

A former staffer for DPReview posted his assessment of the TTArtisan 90mm f1.25 lens on that site today. He suggested that the lens he shot with was "soft." After I read his piece and looked at his samples I went back to look at the images I made with the lens to see what it was I might be missing. 

In a way we might be comparing apples with oranges since my lens is outfitted with a Fuji GFX mount and his was mounted on a Nikon Z9 --- which leads me to believe that his is outfitted with a Nikon Z lens mount. 

There are lots of things that can contribute to a lens being perceived as "soft." It could, in fact, be the design or manufacturing of the lens. There's a reason some products are less expensive than others. But it could also be a tester's unfamiliarity with a new camera and how best to use its manual focusing aids. Or it could be an issue with the way image stabilization is being used with a lens that doesn't "speak" to the attached camera. It could be that one of the reviewers is just settling into middle age and over-estimates the acuity of his eyesight and his ability to sharply focus on a screen. It could be too much Seattle coffee causing hands to shake. 

Or, I could have been wrong. But I dragged this 100% crop from my recent take and looked at it carefully. It seems sharp to me. Sad that good lenses get trashed because of bad reviews. I remember Roger Ciccala at LensRentals remarking that they test five or more copies of a lens when reviewing it. They want to establish a median parameter that can take into consideration sample variation. And they also test with the camera on a tripod which allows for very careful manual focusing. And, what we may be seeing is a combination of handholding and a very narrow plane of sharp focus. Breathe in and it goes one way. Breathe out and it goes another way.

I'll stick to everything I wrote about the lens here: https://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2023/08/i-finally-got-to-spend-some-time.html

 It stands in stark contrast to DPR's assessment of the lens. I'm okay with that but I wish I knew how we got different impressions and, maybe more importantly, different results. We might never know.

100% Pixels. Grabbed from a very small fraction of the full frame. 

It was only 100° today but more importantly the humidity was much lower. It felt....almost refreshing. I went museum hopping to take advantage of the coolness.

 

After visiting two museums over on the UT campus I stopped by the Medici Caffe for a very nice cappuccino. A very nice cappuccino. I'm not sure why but the staff at this coffee shop always treats me with almost comical deference. I think, since it is across the street from the UT campus they rarely see people who are old enough for Medicare coming in off the hot streets for a coffee. Whatever. If people want to be extra nice to me I'll take it... Did I mention that the product was superb? Cuz it was.

I got all my business stuff done early. I scheduled a scouting expedition for after lunch on Thursday. My favorite creative director has a project that entails food, design and high end photography. I can't wait to see the comps (comprehensive layouts). And the lunch should be fun because it's with an old friend and client who is now the executive director of a big theater in Oklahoma. Can't wait to hear what he's up to and what we might be collaborating on.

I had a lunch yesterday with a psychiatrist/writer/golfer who has written two fun and successful books about psychological approaches to success at golf. I did the book covers for the first two and, over lunch yesterday, I found out that he's almost finished with his third book. We met to go over creative concepts for the book cover images and some fun (and funny) images for the inside. We're booked to hit the putting green on Saturday morning this week to shoot the cover photo. More to follow.

The work day got capped off with introductions to three doctors who need to schedule with me in the next week or so for "official" portraits for their new practice. I have a feeling the 135mm f2.5 Mitakon lens is going to get a workout on those three shoots. Glad I snagged one.

So, with all the work done and the taxes paid I had a free afternoon. That coincided with a drop in temperatures. Instead of a high near 108° (that's coming back again on Thursday...) the heat barely nudged 100° and the lower humidity made everything feel so much better. I tossed on my favorite hat and my favorite sunglasses and fired up the VSL squad car. Raced over to the West campus area, parked and made the rounds. First stop was a quick look through of the Bob Bullock Museum of Texas History. Nothing of note to report. Of my three stops they definitely had the coldest air conditioning and the only café. 

I ambled across the street to the Blanton Museum. I'm liking their new plaza more and more. The main gallery was closed in order to prep for the next big show but I had a great time just going through the modern art collection on the second floor. And taking exterior images of their great arches. And I take every opportunity to walk through the Elsworth Kelly "chapel" to see the colored windows. After that it was time to head over to the HRC and take a gander at...the first photo. Ever. And a nice copy of the Gutenberg Bible. And an exhibit about Norman Mailer. And another exhibit of dance materials by Deborah Hay. I even ran into an old friend who is one of the curators of the Helmet Gernsheim Photography Collection. One of the biggest repositories of 19th and 20th century photography in the world. We had a short conversation about the working methodologies of HCB. Counter to current suggestions on the web.....

After my fine coffee I headed home to play with a few files and to send my next door neighbor some images I took on Sunday at his 3 year old's birthday party. Photos of little kids trying to destroy a piñata. Seems three, four and five year olds aren't so good at piñata destruction. They'll learn. 

So, as I ambled about in the cool 99° weather I took some images. Here are some of them...

Sun shades on the plaza in front of the Blanton Museum of Art.

All images are from the Leica Q2. 

that's about the long and short of it. Now settling in with a Lee Child novel. 

I ran out of John Sanford Novels. But I think another one is coming out shortly.

fingers crossed. 

Looks like I'm back at work for now. It's a good thing. I was getting bored.

Still fascinated with the Fuji 50Sii. Fun galore. Just because it's new and different to me.