A "progress report" from the frozen Southwest. All Okay at VSL HQ.

 

Entertainers on Sixth St. the week of SXSW 2023.

Wow! It's been freaky cold here for days. But by all appearances the citizens of Austin were well prepared this year. It helped that we didn't get blasted with snow and ice. What we're working against is just sheer freezing cold. But I guess the entire country is engaged in the same sort of survival tactics. 

The two things that frustrate me when I have to admit that the weather wins are: No swimming at the Rollingwood Pool. We pride ourselves on swimming in tough conditions but after Sunday's early morning swim I think most of us were willing to throw in the towel for the next few days. Sunday morning was low 20s cold but it came with 40 to 50 mile an hour wind gusts. Now I truly understand the concept of wind chill. 

The other thing I've missed for the first half of the week is being able to walk around for hours with that new (to me) Carl Zeiss 50mm f1.4 Milvus lens. Sure, it went right onto a Novoflex Nikon - to - L mount adapter, and then onto a Leica SL2 but as I walked out to the car it became evident, even to someone as stubborn as I, that walking around in (yesterday morning) 15° cloudy weather, complete with perilous wind gusts and random icing was not brave or heroic but more like....stupid. I turned around and made a hasty retreat back into the warm house, tossed the camera and lens into a comfortable chair and haven't messed with them since. 

I don't know how you folks who live (and report to me) in places where the actual temperatures for days and days are sub-zero and the wind chill temperatures can get well down by double digits. They just don't make gloves thick enough and warm enough to deal with that kind of weather. That's surface of Neptune cold. But I often see lovely images of snow covered landscapes and old barns that stoically soldier on, season after season. You must have far thicker blood than I. 

Today is shaping up to be tolerable. It was 15° when I got up for coffee. The sun is shining and the predictions are that it will keep shining (but with little warming effect) all day long. The high today should be around 3pm when the "mercury" rises to a comfortable(?) 34° before plunging back into the teens tonight. I'm determined to cover myself with expensive down filled clothing and head outside in the bright afternoon and take some photos --- just to feel my thickly gloved hands on a camera for a while. 

We learned many lessons from the last two damaging and dangerous freezes. We replaced all the windows in the house with amazingly multi-paned ones that don't let even a squeak of cold air in. We had all the doors re-weather stripped. We had the chimney cleaned and inspected last week. And, I bought one of those small, Russian, military surplus nuclear reactors and had it install out back. Seems they experimented a lot with those in conjunction with the design and manufacturing of small, two man attack submarines back in the 1960s and have been trying to figure out how to "decommission" them for quite a while. We were able to get one in pretty good shape for a song. One of the metal seams seems loose and glows at night but the reactor does a good job providing ample power when the grid falters. I do worry a bit because every time I turn on the reactor and rev it up we all get hacking coughs and spit up a little blood. I'm pretty sure it's just a virus going around and nothing to do with having an unshielded and unregulated nuclear power plant in the back yard, just next to the sweet olive bushes...

But we live in Texas and we don't take zoning very seriously so, what's the harm? Now I just have to figure out where to get the plutonium pellets when the current ones run down. Oh, and I have to have a garden hose dumping water over the reactor's cooling fins when it's on. From what I can grasp from the Google Translation of the Russian owner's manual, the water cooling is vdyry critical. Otherwise? Possible meltdown. Not good for the landscaping or the lawn. 

(No Virginia. We don't have a nuclear reactor. Just a pipe dream after reading Thurber's short story about Walter Mitty). 

I am back at work. At least for this week. I'm working on compositing portraits and urban backgrounds for a start-up company's website. It's going well. Once you learn to use Photoshop it's like falling off a bicycle. Or something. Glory to the new selection tools. All praise Lightroom's AI DeNoise and Raw Detail enhancer. Thank goodness for making a library of urban scenes months and years in advance of need. 

Tomorrow, after shaking off the cold of the night time low temperatures (16°?) with intravenous coffee, I'll load up the car with some gear and go over to my favorite Austin ad agency to photograph five more key partners and do basically the same kind of compositing when they get around to choosing their favorite images. Just to jumble things up (since it is a new year...) I'm going to make the portraits using the new lens (50mm) along with one of the Leica CL cameras languishing in the gear cabinet. The combo yields a 75mm equivalent which should be just right for some nice portraits in a small studio space, on site. Joining the tiny camera and huge lens will be my favorite Godox AD200 Pro flashes and several umbrellas. A 40 inch and a 60 inch. A scrape of white seamless paper and we'll be ready to rumble.

I like visiting this ad agency. The people are nice, the coffee is first rate, and they pay their bills at a speed that's stunning. There might even be pastries....

We swim again starting on Thursday. There is so much pent up demand that all three practice times on the schedule will be filled with anxious swimmers ready to make up for lost time. I'll be more reserved and just settle on one practice. No sense rushing into things. 

Twelve more composites and a lunch stand between me and my manifest destiny to search out odd scenes in modern life and immortalize them in photographs. And then supper at a good friend's house. 

Just a progress report because several people checked in yesterday evening to see why there had been no recent posts. Can't say. Other than I was probably just mesmerized by the fire in the fireplace and it was too cold in the studio to go out and type.....

cheers.