How Green is my Austin. Let my 35mm lens show you...

    

Canadian friend of the VSL blog (and of Kirk) named, Eric,  responded with surprise to a recent post of mine that showed a lot of fresh Spring greenery in Austin. Seems that during the same week in which everything in Austin seemed to be in full bloom, his area of central Canada got something like twelve inches (30.38 centimeters) of fresh snow and the temperatures there were once again just a bit above absolute zero. 

For all our bitching and moaning about random and debilitating ice storms followed by months and months of roasting, humid Summer, we do have spells of weather in Austin that are more or less perfect. Good examples are the weather we've had for weeks and weeks now. Low temperatures in the upper 40s and highs rarely cresting 80 degrees. Ample rain. Followed by days and days of soft, nurturing rain. 

I remember taking two years of French language at the University of Texas at Austin. Back in the day all  university students were required to learn (or at least try) a foreign language in order to graduate. As I also remember there was one group in the system that had an "out". Those were the business majors. Bless their souls... 

In my first semester, while mostly studying electric engineering, I took a French class that was taught by a young woman who was a French native and who had just arrived in Texas, from Paris, for the first time and was here only a handful of days before the start of the semester. When a number of us trouped into class she seemed a bit nervous. The class went well but afterwards she asked me to stay as she had a pressing question. "Why?" she asked "Do so many of you wear holsters to class? Are guns allowed on campus?"  

At first I didn't know what to make of her question. Her concerns. But then she pointed at a case I was wearing on my belt (yes! hyper-nerd alert!!!). I suddenly realized that she'd mistaken the case for my big, shiny new, Texas Instruments TI-51 calculator as a holster for some sort of weapon. She was very, very relieved to know that I and the various other engineering majors in her class were not actually "carrying." 

Her next question was more of a statement. She remarked, "I had no idea that Austin, Texas was so green. So many big trees. So many flowers. Everything blooming everywhere. When I was growing up all the books about Texas showed deserts and cactus and tumbleweeds. None of the images showed anything lush!" 

Sometimes I forget that Texas did a good job pretending to be very inhospitable. That's not true of all our geography, only the politics. 

For all the readers who have never been to Austin I thought, when I headed out to take a walk yesterday, that I would assign myself to make a few shots that had green trees and plants in them. Even in the middle of the urban downtown. A note though, we no longer ride horses through the middle of the city. It disturbs the car-bound people too much...

But first... Here's the area around the house and studio and how green it is for most of the year. The trees drop their leaves in the very late part of Fall and start to bloom again in mid-March. Our area of Austin is covered with elms and live oaks. And several very cute Japanese maples.

The view from the doorway of my office.

Trees in the front yard.

Looking at the front of the house (studio on the left)

Looking down the street.

Front of the house. from the street.

What I see when I walk up to the front door...

So, to my Canadian friends, and all others who might be unfamiliar with Austin, I have to share with you that we have our own collection of wonderful trees, well (un)tended gardens, thick grass and all the other luxuries of landscape which defy the stereotypical depiction of hardscrabble land in central Texas. We also have lakes. And sometimes they are full of water. Not always! But sometimes. 

Anyway, here's what I saw when I went looking for green in downtown....

My old favorite, the Seaholm Power Plant. Now an office, shopping and residence center in downtown. 

Across the street from the main library...

On second street. A nice fixture in downtown.

Shade all the way to Congress Ave. 

And, as you can see, the mannequins are getting ready for the Summer season.

Little hints of green all across the bottom of the frame. 

the continuation of Second St. on the east side of Congress Ave.

Even untended fields are bright green.

Evidence of ivy climbing up the exterior walls of ancient buildings.

The back alley that runs between Sixth St. and Fifth St. 

In some sort of nod to Spring I pulled my most perfect Leica M240 out of its place in the studio. It's the first one I bought. It's absolutely mint. Such a pleasure just to look at. I used it on this particular day with the 35mm Carl Zeiss Biogon ZM lens. And I suddenly realized why I like shooting with the rangefinders more than any DSLR or mirrorless camera. It's because of the way the lenses are set up. 

Whether you buy a Leica M lens or a Voigtlander or a Carl Zeiss lens; any designed for use on an M series rangefinder camera, you'll get an actual distance scale, a depth of field scale as well. Right there on the lens. When you look down at the lens all is revealed. This makes zone focusing so, so, so much better than trying to do so with a focus-by-wire lens of any brand. With the focus by wire lenses you just don't get to set it and forget it when it comes to setting a focusing distance. And depth of field? Guess work at best. 

I used my camera just like the most primitive of old film cameras. I set the aperture to f11, focused a bit past 15 feet, I set the camera to auto-ISO and set the slowest shutter speed to 1/250th of a second. Higher than that? No problem. Lower than that? Not needed. If I saw something I liked I could just bring the camera up to my eye, compose and shoot. No other intervention needed. No fears about AF locking on to the right detail. No opaque-ness to slow down the reaction to visual stimulants. Just see and shoot. A very speedy and fluid way of working. 

And... I think the little Zeiss 35mm f2.0 ZM lens is absolutely great. With the Leica M240 camera I just set the lens profile to that of the Leica 35mm Summicron. The pre-aspheric model. Seems to handle all the stuff like vignetting and potential color shifts quite well. Of course, now you can also access the actual Zeiss lens profile in Adobe Lightroom...as long as you've shot in Raw.

When I got back to the car to head home I checked my phone and discovered that the afternoon temperature topped out at 78°. Nice. 

Happy hour at my friend, Will's house. We sat in his garden with one more usual friend. By the end of the evening, after the sun set, it was already down in the 60s. Just the way I always thought Spring should be. YMMV.