Just finalized travel plans. First solo shooting trip in a long time.

 

Lemons in the Jean Talon Public Market in Montreal. By B. She shot this with her Canon G15 point and shoot. She's a better photographer than I am. I was walking around with some big, state of the art full frame camera and didn't get images half as good. 

I really enjoyed my last two visits to Canada. I'm happy they are still allowing Americans to travel there on vacations. That's very "Canadian" of them.  I have only been to three different cities there. Once, to Montreal, pre-Covid, with B. It was chilly on our late October 2019 trip but chilly for Texans in a welcome and exhilarating way. I was in Toronto back in early 2018 just in time for a blizzard, a quick tutorial on driving on black ice, and a series of video projects that were well received by the German company funding the whole shebang. We made a daring trip to Vancouver in 2022 during a welcome pause in the pandemic and, again, had a blast. Great hotels, great restaurants, great scenes. 

Of the places I've seen in Canada the one that is most compelling to me as a photographer is Montreal. It has a wonderful vibe, it's inexpensive to operate in without abandoning a bit of luxury, and the food scene is incredible. The Old Town has some terrific architecture and some of the neighborhoods in various parts of town are just ---- totally cool. I might even get to Quebec.

I've been anxious to get out of town and spend four or five (now six) days by myself with a good camera or two in tow. When I looked at all the travel destinations out there my thoughts were that I needed to let the European hotspots recover from a satanically hot summer and the overwhelming hordes of American and U.K. tourists. I'll give them a few months to decompress from the giant swell of Summer-Panic-Oh-My-God tourism. 

So, when I started looking around for a place to spend time, shoe leather, SD card memory space and what not I immediately pegged my next destination to be Montreal. 

There are no direct flights from Austin, Texas to Montreal but if you work the schedule correctly you'll find well scheduled flights from the major carriers that can get you from here to there in about six and a half hours. And then get you from there to here in about seven hours. Not at all outrageous and cheap as underwear from Walmart. (Just making fun of Walmart. I've never actually been in one....). 

I booked a room at a nice, small, boutique hotel in the Old Town for six nights. I'll take the bare minimum of wardrobe and buy what I need if I find out that I didn't pack right. I've scheduled one arrival day, on departure day and five days of doing nothing but walking around with a camera or two photographing everything that catches my eye(s), my attention. Oh, and also eating like I just got out of prison. No vegan diet that week. For damn sure.

B. encouraged me to go and shoot by myself. She'll be here holding down the fort and relishing her days without my constant mansplaining and anxious check-ins. We'll pick somewhere else to go for a different sort of vacation later in the Fall. 

Deep down I think most photographers relish (at least they should!!!) the idea of getting away from any and all schedules, clients, chores, routines and family obligations and just having unfettered time to walk around aimlessly, or even with good aim, taking photographs with their favorite cameras. I might even bring a small tripod and stay out later than my bed time making street photos by lamplight. It could happen. 

Go re-read my post: Lonely Hunter, Better Hunt. ( https://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2011/10/lonely-hunter-better-hunt.html )

I'll be up north from the last week of September till the middle of the first week of October. If you are in Montreal and want to meet up for coffee at Crew drop me a note at the email on my actual website. I'm thinking of setting aside one morning to meet up, if anyone is interested. Don't plan on flying over from Tokyo just to meet me for coffee --- I'm not that interesting in person.

I love booking non-refundable trips. It's always the best incentive to follow through... $$$

Yeah. I really like the M240. But how is that Carl Zeiss 35mm f2.0 ZM lens working? Well, I shot the two together today to find out. Take a peek. Click to see them large. G'Night.

 

Damn fine color and detail in this particular shot of a very familiar subject. 

Punch in to see it at its best. 

Do different cameras affect the way you shoot in different ways? I think so. They make you look for different subjects. And different ways of photographing.

 

I Love composing with the bright frame lines of a real rangefinder camera. It's different than EVFs and pentaprism finders. You get to see past the edges. You get a taste of what else you can exclude or include in a shot. You aren't stopped cold because you see some fault more clearly with an image preview. So you shoot and hope for the best. Then you might have to fix stuff in post. But if you'd been coerced into passing by an image because a preview told you it wasn't working when your eyes clearly saw that it was you don't even get a shot to play with. Maybe you can't save it but....maybe you can. 

"I think it is not so much about what the camera can do, but what you can do with the camera." 

-Thorsten Overgaard. 

Leica M240. Carl Zeiss 35mm f2.0 ZM lens. f8-ish. 

"On the road again." Cars at the end of the day. Just parked along 2nd St.

 

Our prowling around again with the new camera. I can't sit still when the sun is out and the thermometer  stays under 90. I was exploring more of downtown with the M240,  this time decorated with a wonderful Carl Zeiss 35mm f2.0 Planar ZM. "ZM" being a Zeiss for M mount. The lens focuses exactly right and it makes files that make me smile. 

As a high school student in the early 1970s I loved cars. My very first car was a well used but still serviceable 1965 Buick Wildcat bought from a friend's dad in 1974. It had three wondrous attributes that seem lost to car design now. One was air conditioning that could keep beer cold --- if you put the beer near a vent. Another was bench seats a mile wide and more comfortable that most couches. And the third was a 425 cubic inch engine with double quad carburetors generating 360 horsepower. And yes, gas was almost free back then. A really fine car in which to head to the coast for a weekend break...

You could fit an entire photo studio in the trunk. Those times are long gone but these cars served to tickle my memory. And fond memories they are...

The M240 does nice raw files in the .DNG format. Lightroom Classic likes them. 

Portrait of a Texas chef taken on the fly. Between video takes.

Johnny S.

I like to stay busy on the set so if we're between takes on a video project, and I have the time, I try to round up people for quick portraits. They are already working "on camera" that day and they are happy to pose. Most of the portraits done for myself are tucked in at the end of other work. I asked Johnny to walk into my mini-set and stand in front of my camera for maybe sixty seconds, during a break in the action. I shot 12 frames, all intended as square format photos, and we were done. He headed back to the video set and I headed over to the small inset studio to catch a few food shots before "taping" resumed. 

Some of my favorite shots come from working through breaks on sets. 

This image was done with a handheld Fuji MF camera and what we are calling, I guess, the "kit lens." It's the 35-70mm zoom for the GFX system. It's a thousand dollar lens but I was able to buy a brand new one during a sale when it was half that price. I couldn't resist....

And it's turned out to be a really good performer. Sharp and fast to focus. And a good focal length range to boot. 

Working in between work. An efficient way to get more images. 

I switched cameras, found a fun event to shoot. Worked it for an hour and grabbed at least three shots I really, really like. NOT A CAMERA REVIEW. More like a Kirk's shooting practice story.

 

An Austin take on the bucket hat. Eat your heart out Tilley Hats!

I was anxious to get out after lunch and spend some quality time with the new camera. Then we had a 30 minute torrential rain burst. It cleared up but the weather reports predicted more showers through the afternoon. I didn't want to drown my newest camera during its first week with me so I decided to leave it in the sealed titanium camera case (with its own oxygen supply) and take a different camera and also a lens I'd been ignoring for too long. 

I've had mixed feelings about the Voigtlander 40mm f1.4 Nokton Classic since I took it with me to Vancouver and discovered that the M to L mount adapter I was using was inaccurate and allowed for focusing past infinity. The adapter also hampered my ability to focus the lens via scale focusing and finally, the flawed adapter limited my minimum focusing distance.....by a lot. The bad feelings lingered I guess. The lens has languished in drawer number 3 for the better part of a year. 

But recently I splurged and bought a Leica branded M to L adapter and it's been great with my other M mount lenses. I thought today would be a fitting day to put the 40mm on the SL2, take it downtown and see what the lens is really capable of. Warning: You might not see a profound difference between the technical qualities of these photos compared to other similar photos from other lenses. Believe the words if you are at a loss...

The 40mm Voigtlander Nokton Classic turns out to be a very nice lens once you learn to use it correctly. 

I was absolutely entranced to find a bit of flooding in the downtown area. 

We've been without rain for what feels like ten years so just having water in the 

street seems miraculous. Wow. 

To prove my fallibility I spent a bit of time with my shooting camera, the Leica SL2, 

set to the wrong ISO and was shooting at shutters speeds between 1/30 and 1/13th of a second.

Happy accident since I liked the moving subjects around the centered family blurring in

an artsy way. I probably should have pretended that I intended for this to happen...

1/13th of a second.

Scary people with dogs. 1/20th of a second. I guess I can still handhold stuff

even though I drink too much coffee.....

Same effect here. Notice the left arm of the woman on the right hand side. Movement blur. 

It's like magic. 

Soon I discovered my mistake and decided to switch from shooting Jpegs to shooting raw files. I also started using auto-ISO. The three images just below, shot in shade, were basically f8.5 and ISO 3200. 

I thought the files from an SL2 at that ISO setting would have more noise but this seemed to work well. 

I have been discovered and happily got a smile instead of a rebuke.

contemporary art style.

Ah. The wonderful dynamic range of a Leica DNG file. 

And the high sharpness of the VM lens when stopped down to smaller apertures.

Downtown acrobat, swimmer and diver. 

man with kind dog. 

The Pecan Street Festival was under the watchful eyes of our public servants. 

This shot was done wide open. Before you decide it's not sharp

look at the lens ring around the front element.

Above: documenting the photo combo. 

Not selling or reviewing either. 

Just mentioning them in passing. 

Fun with zone focusing.

This event was a downtown craft fair. 

All of the images above are from the one 

hour I spent walking down one side of Sixth St. and back 

on the other. I feel like I can say that I am

able to shoot "street photography." 

And portraits. 

Everyone I encountered was polite and  kind. 

Maybe they were reacting to my energy.

I was trying to be polite and kind. 

The SL2 and the 40mm VM are great for this kind of work.