I'm tired of inkjet printing at home or in the office. What is the very best print service out in the online world? Best for archival matte papers? Best for high quality, large (13x19 inch) glossy prints? Best Color match to your profiled monitors? Got an opinion or experience? Let's hear it.

 

Fun Lens Adaptations. Here's my "32mm" Len for the GFX.

Homage to twentieth century art photography.

I know some people look down their noses at the idea of adapting older or unusual lenses to their modern cameras. I get it. In the Fuji medium format system using Fuji's lenses means you don't have to worry much about things like vignetting and corner sharpness. Or overall sharpness. Nor do you have to learn/practice focusing manually. But sometimes I look for something other than a perfect rendering from a lens. And sometimes I want a lens that doesn't yet exist in a camera maker's inventory. And, to be frank, there are instances where I just don't want to splash out the cash for a lens that's not an everyday necessity. It's fun to play.

Last year, on a whim, I bought a Voigtlander 40mm lens that's made for the Nikon F mount. It's called the 40mm f2.0 Ultron. It's a smallish lens. Not quite as small as a lens in the same focal length made for the M series mounts, but small just the same. I think I was moved to buy it because I'd been using a Voigtlander 58mm f1.4 lens in the same mount and thought its performance was quite good. That lens was also a Nikon F mount version. I guess I buy the Nikon versions because they are easily and inexpensively adaptable across most lines of cameras. With the correct adapter these lenses are right at home on a Leica SL, and with a different adapter they are equally comfortable when used on a Fuji GFX camera. 

But what every lens adapting Fuji GFX user worries about is whether or not the lens adds too much vignetting to the image and whether it will be sharp enough. My experience tells me that there is no one answer across all the lenses in a particular line up. Nor are more expensive and intensively engineered lenses made for full frame at all guaranteed to work well on the larger format cameras. The 58mm Voigtlander seems to add a harder vignette than does the 40mm, for example. And, the 50mm f1.4 Zeiss Milvus lens, which is a superb all around lens on the format it was designed for (24x36mm), is not as good on the larger format as it just covers the 35mm frame but has a hard vignette on the larger frame. 

There are two things I like about the 40mm V lens better than the very good 35-70mm kit lens from Fuji. First, it's smaller and lighter. Second, it has a fast f2.0 aperture as opposed to the f4.5 aperture that is the max aperture on the Fuji GFX zoom. Another reason to like the 40 is how cool it looks on the front of the GFX with its Fotodiox Pro adapter. There's a red ring for Nikon G series lenses, an aperture ring on the lens, and a well marked, manual distance scale. In a nod to backward compatibility the lens even has the little silver "rabbit ears" that allows it to function (without an adapter) on older Nikon cameras. Even the pre-AI cameras. 

So far I've found the lens to be a good overall performer. One could easily cobble together a complete manual system of these Voigtlander lenses made for the Nikon as a basic package for a GFX incursion. 

The lenses made for the Nikon F mount by Voigtlander include a 28mm, this 40mm, a fast 58mm f1.4 and also a 90mm f2.8. This would give a GFX users a range that included (equivalents) a 22.5mm, a 32mm, a 46.4mm and a 72mm. I've only bought and tested the 40mm Ultron and the 58mm f1.4 Nokton SL ii s in this family (Nikon F mounts) but I have also used the 90mm f2.8 APO-Skopar lens in an M to GFX mount and found it to be a wonderful combination. 

Caveat: Your tolerance for vignetting might vary from mine. I shoot a lot of people and portraits where the corners don't have to be anywhere near as bright as the center of the frame. Since there is a lot of resolution in the GFX sensors it's easy to choose a more conservation aspect ratio and set that in the menu.  For example, I've been using the 40mm in the 3:2 ratio and hardly see vignetting at all. With the 58mm  there is more vignetting but I switch to a 4:5 ratio and it effectively kills the vignetting. All of the lenses work superbly well with a 1:1 crop and you know that's a basic preference of mine. If you are shooting your GFX in a square aspect ratio then the world of adapted lenses is your oyster....

Today I think I'll take the 40mm out for a long stroll. Get the kinks out. Get to know that focal length on this camera (Fuji GFX 50Sii). It certainly is fun. 

I came in close on these day lilies. Then I used the Focus Blur

tool too defocus the background. When I look closely at the closest flower is see

detail upon detail. It works well. 

Here's the what I'm talking about....

Go forth and adapt to your heart's content. 

An adapted lens as a mother's day present?

Your call....

 

In my mind the general purpose of owning and using a camera is to have fun. To capture expressions and memories of your friends and loved ones and to not give a shit about who John Szarkowski idolized.

        

I was living in the upstairs of a two story duplex on the West side of the UT campus. That was back in 1979 and 1980. I was just getting into "real" photography which meant that I worked some extra night shifts at Kerbey Lane Café to save up the money to buy a very, very shitty Novatron 120 electronic flash box and one plasticky Novatron flash head. But the flash head did have a modeling light and that was truly something. I waited tables for a while so I could take the plunge and buy a medium format camera. I was out to emulate my two idols, Irving Penn and Richard Avedon; both of whom used 6x6 cm twin lens reflex cameras for many of their definitive images from the 1950s and 1960s. 

The camera I could afford was a used YashicaMat 124G (not a Rolleiflex or Hasselblad) which was in very, very good condition. A few months later, for my birthday, my parents helped me out so I could buy an actual flash meter. Now I was on a roll. A roll of Panatomic X, that is...

My upstairs apartment was Austin Chic at the time. It was about six blocks from the UT campus, situated in an older, residential neighborhood and surrounded by trees. I had an (seemed like it at the time) enormous living room, a separate dining room, a bedroom that looked out onto a forest of trees, a workable kitchen in which I personally made the finest quiche Lorraine I have ever sampled, and the kitchen fed out onto a second story patio that was perfect for parties in temperate weather. I can't remember if I had an air conditioner but this was pre-global warming and we were used to the mid-90s for Summer temperatures. I am certain I had a box fan and that was pretty good too. 

I'm sure you know how it is when you first get stung by the photography bug and decide that you might want to do this for, well, the rest of your life. Every day was an opportunity to shoot something new, rush to the Ark Co-op Darkroom to hand develop my film (one roll at a time; all I could afford), and then spend long nights in the darkroom, making prints on Ilfobrom, double-weight, graded paper. I'm pretty sure I wore out a couple pairs of flip-flops pacing back and forth, waiting for film to wash. 

In one corner of my living room I set up a photography area that consisted of a short roll of gray seamless paper, my single flash head on a stand, and the electronic flash generator box -- which scared me when it occasionally sparked and smoked. The flash head held a 42 inch, translucent/white umbrella that some kind soul passed along to me, a spindly tripod and, of course, my Richard Avedon and Irving Penn wannabe YashicaMat 124G. No Polaroid. No previews. Just blind faith. 

One afternoon B. came over in the heat of the Summer. I asked her to pose in front of the gray seamless. In those days, in order to conserve the pricey battery in my flash meter I'd done some tests and I had a string attached to the light stand and I had tied a knot in the string at the point where the flash meter had shown me the best exposure. Rather than fire up the meter I'd have my subject stand so they were just at the knot point of the string and I'd set the camera for the exposure implied by that simple tool. 

I made prints that I still have in a box in the file cabinet next to my desk. They’ve withstood the test of 45 years without yellowing, staining or losing their ability to bring an huge, warm smile to my face. 

I used the "string method" of exposure control for a couple of years and just like the guide number routine for on camera flashes, it worked pretty well. Not anywhere close to "state of the art" in 1979.

I sometimes wonder if my modest assemblage of gear in the early years goads me to spend like a drunken sailor now that I've figure out the money end of the equation. I'd ask my shrink. If I had a shrink. 

So, these images are nearly my first go-around with a medium format camera and definitely among my first forays with studio electronic flash. Pivotal year 1979. Gosh, it was such a financial reach back then to get a set of background stands and a cross bar. Probably helped me keep the weight off after I stopped competitive swimming; post college. Food or gear? Food or film? Film or rent? The last one was easy enough to calculate since I liked sleeping indoors. 

I recently unearthed this roll after many years. A whole roll of images. Twelve of them. And you know what? They look pretty good. And that can be interpreted three ways... On the one hand it may tell us that photography is not that hard to master; or at least be proficient at. On the other hand it could be that I'm just an amazingly talented photographer. But the most obvious answer is that I've cheated by nearly always having models who were so cute, and beautiful, and animated, that the technical stuff didn't matter at all. That's the idea I'm going with. 

I worked at an Austin restaurant for about two years. I was a short-order cook who did the Saturday and Sunday brunch shifts (the money makers for the business) as well as several "bar shifts." We cooked burgers, fajitas, omelettes, eggs to order, enchiladas, salads and four kinds of pancakes until the wee hours of the mornings. We helped the folks who closed down the bars get some solid food into their beer and liquor saturated bellies at 3 in the morning. But the schedule worked for me because it left the normal workday hours open for me to do portfolio shows at magazines and ad agencies, small jobs and much daylight experimentation. 

I eventually discovered and locked onto Tri-X as my preferred film but seeing how nice some of these shots from 1979 look I wonder if I've been barking up the wrong tree. Panatomic X seems pretty nice to me. 

Much later I succumbed to the lure of the 35m cameras. At least for a while. Canon TX and then, afterwards a Canon EF. My great, great, great aunt brought it over on the Mayflower. But it worked well. Never did like those batteries though. 

Renae with organizer. For an ad done for Pervasive Software. A company long since dissolved by the ravages of business. Leaving me with a folder full of transparencies and a pleasant memory of a fun afternoon playing with cameras, lights and film.

 

so much easier back in the days when you'd shoot transparency film under electronic flash and everything would turn out perfectly, right out of the camera. Not like now when everything seems to need "just a touch" of post processing... Ah well. 

Building a shot by sticking around and trying stuff out instead of "hit and run." Just rummaging around in the photography bin...

I've been trying to pay attention to how other photographers shoot when they are out in public places. Some "lock in" and shoot frame after frame from one position with one crop. Almost like they are afraid they haven't "set the hook" and the photo is going to get away from them. Some shooters are methodical and pre-programmed. You can see their brains working as they shoot. It's like they are following a formula: wide shot, medium shot, tight shot, low angle, high angle, done. But the one's who I think might be missing the mark are the hit-and-run photographers who whip their cameras up to their eyes, grab one frame and then walk off trying to look like nothing ever happened. Perhaps routinely driven away by fear and trepidation...

I really like to build shots and I guess I have a bit of the old formula in my brain when I go out. But my formula isn't all about getting higher or lower or lefter or righter, it's more about peeling the image down. I'll see something I like in a wide shot; like the young woman near the center who is eating ice cream while trying really hard to ignore the amorous couple sitting right next to her. And  the look on her face is classic. She looks angry. It's a look beyond concentration. She's really not happy. That's the scene where I start but not where I end up.

In the retrospect afforded by having these images in a triptych over my desk for years I've come to like the wide shot the best but I remember in the year or two after I took these images in Piazza Navona (Rome) that I liked the tight shot at the bottom were the woman is separated from all the people around her. 

There is nothing magical about these shots, although the tourists with the guidebook in the right corner make me smile; as does the man with the newspaper across his knee on the left, bottom corner. But I do like them all because they reference a time and place in which people lived more outdoors. Where the urban scape was lived in. Not like my city where everyone rushes around in cars and spends time in the urban scape only for events like concerts in the park. But not an everyday thing.

I was hardly invisible at the time I shot these images. I was using a Mamiya 6 medium format, film camera and I had a camera bag hanging over one shoulder. I was walking by and something in my head prompted me to stop. I guess it was the feeling of depth provided by the groupings of people in layers. And with an angry women with ice cream right in the middle. I went for the wide shot. 

But I didn't walk away. I tried to figure out what it was about the scene that drew me in and I decided that it was the contrast of the "happy' couple and the dour ice cream women. It seemed distinctly like a juxtaposition you don't see in "too cool" Austin. At least not often.  So I stepped in and framed the shot a bit tighter. And shot a couple frames. 

I liked the tighter crop but I stayed around to see if one more variation would add to my appreciation of the scene. I wanted a shot of the woman isolated with her thoughts and her ice cream. Maybe it works okay. But really, after looking at the images for years it was the initial shot, the wide shot, that I think is the keeper. 

I guess my point is that if you are motivated enough to stop and look at a scene it certainly makes a lot of sense to spend some time with it and explore a bit. I know many people would find it uncomfortable to get closer and closer but nobody really paid any attention to me. I guess most of us assume we're standing out when really the people in front of me might just have thought I was trying to get a good image of the fountain. After all, isn't that what most tourists with cameras do? 

 

I'm happy with the way a standard lens worked on a square framed, medium format camera. It's elegant. I guess these days I might be tempted to take a zoom lens, stand in one place and get the three different looks with a twist of the zoom ring. I'm sure the images would be fine but they definitely would create the same result as using one focal length and then zooming with one's feet. There is also more friction of the process when putting yourself closer to your subject. At some point you might step over the line....

And yeah, I know. It's called "Gelato." From Tre Scalini. They make pretty decent gelato...

Let's take a break from the gear and talk about...photographs.

 

Michelle in the studio. 

I like this photo because it's calm and her stare is direct. Just on the verge of being questioning.

When I scanned the negative I was intending to crop out the black frame lines, the arrow and the small part of an adjacent frame. But as I looked at the raw image I felt like the added details conveyed the idea that this was captured in a continuing stream of images instead of being a "one off." 

It's fun to remember that I was so hands on with the negatives and generally marked small arrows in the space between frames to remind myself that my first thoughts on seeing the contact sheets were:

Print This One.

This is a photograph of my friend Michelle. Over the twenty some years that we've known each other she's been one of the muses who have kept me interested in photography. While I have cast her in a number of print advertisements most of the photos I show of Michelle here come from the informal and relatively unplanned photo shoots we've done over the years just for fun. 

I might be toying around with a new way to light portraits and I'll call and see if she's available for a session in the near future. She's always interested not in photography, per se, but in how the psychology of a portrait sitting works. By working with each other in a close collaboration I think we both came to the same conclusion a long time ago. A good portrait session is really a conversation with someone you'd like to get to know a lot better. Someone different enough from you to bring a perspective about some things that you'd just never thought of before. 

It's also a chance to be beautiful in a safe space and to admire and document beauty in a reciprocally safe space. I know that many people think there is often an awkward, almost predatory angle to photographing beautiful people but it's something I wouldn't dream of allowing in my studio. The lifeguard for the studio is my sweet wife who is generally around on the days and evenings we photograph. Our house is 12 steps from the studio and it more or less mandates complete transparency in my work. Not that I would have it any other way. Honest intention means so much less anxiety.

Michelle and B. have known each other for years and get along well. We've started nearly every shoot with Michelle arriving at the house first, spending some time catching up with B. then selecting an outfit and heading out to the studio. It's a very comfortable, almost family-like relationship. 

It's that transparency and familiarity that make the space we photograph in feel very safe and comfortable. We can literally and metaphorically let our hair down...

When we start to photograph the camera work usually occurs in between conversations about life, loss, happiness, dreams and the feeling of being connected. Austin is a small town and we both know dozens and dozens of the same people. We continually cross reference people I think Michelle should know and she connects me with people who she thinks need to be photographed. 

We've more or less grown from youthful exuberance into calmer adulthood together and we've got the photographs to show the progression of time and experience. 

I hate doing "quick" photo sessions. I like to sink into session slowly and build images step by step. The course of the conversation will bring up a happy thought or a thoughtful look and that will engender an expression I find interesting. A look I want to share. I take note of the expression and the body language and try to capture it if I can. Sometimes I'll show Michelle an image I liked by showing her the screen on the back of the camera and we'll work to get back to that expression if we've lost it. 

Sometimes the lighting works and sometimes my experiments go awry. It really doesn't matter if it works or not because every "failure" is a learning point. An intersection that pushes me away from something that doesn't work and pulls me toward different lighting designs that work better. But always  in the service of making the person in front of the camera look as beautiful and interesting as I can. 

It seemed somehow easier in the film days. A shared black and white Polaroid was a real, physical manifestation of the evolution of the work. The pauses to load a new roll of film were like a natural cadence for the shoot. The ever growing pile of spent film was an indicator of the time and energy spent. A marker of the arc of the session. 

I wonder how other people approach portrait shoots. It would be interesting to know...

M. J. is doing a deep dive into memory cards. Specifically SD cards. If you wanted to get up to speed on SDs (pun intended) you might want to visit the link in my text.

Here are links to the two most recent articles about memory cards from Mike Johnston's: TheOnlinePhotographer blog: 

Read this one first: https://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2024/05/sd_cards.html

Read this one if you are price sensitive and want to see cards available with a small range of differences in parameters from different suppliers:

https://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2024/05/price-comparison-for-top-sd-type-cards.html

As your resident contrarian I have differing views about SD cards than Mike and many of his commenters.  But everyone's use case is different and that's important to keep in mind. 

Most commenters on his site talked, with pride, about using small storage size cards from years and years ago and that they were perfectly happy with the performance, speed and even capacity of UHS-I cards originally purchased with cameras of previous generations. All well and good. No sense putting a huge capacity memory card into a camera like my Canon G15 or G10. Likely the camera wouldn't know what to do with one if offered.

And that's perfectly understandable since the vast majority of readers here and at Mike's site are not working professionals. Are not looking for super fast transfers between camera and computer and are not looking for the ability to record high spec 4 or 6K video with their cameras. They just don't. 

For the great bulk of casual imaging that all of us do we can get along just fine with cards that are reliable, hold themselves together well, physically; and are fast enough not to make waiting to shoot more frames into a habitually frustrating nuisance. No matter how well engineered and how "of the moment" some of the cards I own are nothing on the card side (once you are using UHS-II cards with V30 and above ratings) is going to make my old Leica M240s write faster or stop hitting the wall to take their time buffering ..... seemingly forever. I'm pretty sure the logjam is the bus speed of the camera. But we try our best to work around these flaws. Or features...

I have tons of Sandisk, Lexar and Transcend UHS-I cards in 32mb and 64mb that have been in the studio for years and years. I can put one in an older camera and they do just fine. If I'm not shooting enormous raw files at fast frame rates I could certainly continue using the old cards even in new cameras  like the SL2 and the current S series Panasonics. But where faster cards become more important is when you are out on a job, shooting high quality video, or shooting over one thousand big raw files at a go. 

That's where the dividing lines are between why we spend more money on good cards and why legions of people are happy to settle, on the other hand, for good enough. Because, in the digital world, if the file gets reliably written to the card without corruption, and you don't need to be endlessly efficient, then it's all binary. It either works or it doesn't. The cards, other than providing speed and capacity, have nothing whatsoever to do with the quality of the files. That's just not an issue. Your files won't have less dynamic range or less accurate color if they are saved to an 8 megabyte SD card. They'll be as creative and sparkly and full of pizzaz as the same files saved to the latest and most expensive cards. Really. 

So why do crazy commercial photographers buy crazy fast cards? Why indeed?

Nearly everyone who responded to Mike's first article reported never having had an incident or accident with a memory card. To read through the comments one would think that SD cards are bullet proof and will stand the ravages of time immemorial. And maybe for users with a light touch on the shutter button this will be true and continue to be true. But that's not been my experience. In my experience cards can and will fail. And mostly they start to fail after lots of use. LOTS of use. Format-shoot-format-ad infinitum.

Where some hobbyist might go through one or two thousand images in a year with their primary camera I live in a different reality. In a recent portrait session with two attorneys I shot nearly 300 fifty megapixel raw files in order to get some variety in expressions and also to play around with subject and background variations. Sometimes shoots grow on their own as you see better and better images arrive over the course of a session. Stop too early and you might miss some fun stuff. 

The week before I was at the bank conference in San Antonio and logged about 2300 images with my SL2. I was happy to have fast cards loaded into the camera because I wanted to catch fleeting moments and expressions and it's frustrating to work with a camera/card combination that slows down as the action heats up. 

In pre-Covid times, with 60 to 100 jobs per year and an average of 2,000 shots per job I was going through 200,000+ shots per year with maybe another 40 or 50 thousand personal shots as well. Work eats up time. Shooting takes time. More so if you have to wait for your cameras to write to slower cards. Or you end up hitting the camera buffers because the card creates a funnel. Like slowing down on the freeway when construction (or more likely, a wreck) causes lanes to drop from four to two to one. You might have a super fast camera but in the end it'll likely be a card that causes the hold up. And then you deal with a similar problem on the other end: transferring slow cards to your computer. The slower the card the longer you'll wait. My new MacBook Pro with an M3 processor and a fast SD card slot will really show up the difference between fast and slow cards. In some cases it's painfully obvious.

I don't shoot as much video as I have in the past but I still do the occasional interview with several cameras and I want to make sure I can deliver the highest quality possible to an editor so he can mess around with the files without damaging them too badly. Shooting in All-I in 4K, especially at higher frame rates generally calls for cards that can really write very fast and sustained data rates. I think most of the big video files require cards with something like 400 megabytes per second of sustainable performance, not just peak performance. Sadly, at least where economics is concerned, those kinds of card performance parameters generally call for V90 cards. The more expensive option, for sure. And since the files are really big, and coming at the camera fast, the cards need to have a much higher capacity than I would ever need for routine still photography projects. In fact, I'm trying to short term future-proof my memory card inventory to take this into consideration. 

In the past I had a few Delkin Black V90 cards but it was rare for our day-to-day video needs to press too hard on even V60 cards (vanilla 4K). The issue I've come to grips with lately is that many of our video shoots work best with three cameras running simultaneously. And with paying jobs, now that cameras are so equipped, I like to use two cards in each camera, backing up each other.  (Edit: I just checked in response to a comment by fellow Leica shooter, Chuck, and come to find out that my SL and SL2 don't write 4K video to two cards in a camera simultaneously. I've been inserting formatting and setting my cameras up with the assumption that they were writing/backing up video to two cards but I was wrong. I've never needed to resort to the images on the second card as a result of primary card failure so I just assumed that back ups were happening. I am now chastened. Sorry for the misinformation!!! Always test). And, some interviews can go long. Really long. 

So I am switching from a collection of mostly 64 and 128GB V60 cards and standardizing on 256GB V90 cards. At least two for each camera in a three camera set up. Of course all of these cards are UHS-II. That's not to say that I won't use lower spec'd cards for still photography projects. All those V60 cards of various sizes are still perfectly applicable for those situations. 

One more thing about having enough cards. When I come home from a week long event shoot there's a lot of post production that needs to get done to photography files. I pull the images from the cards and ingest them into Lightroom, depositing them across two different hard drives. But I fear a catastrophic computer meltdown that takes multiple hard drives down for the count before I have time and opportunity to upload the edited files (the saved files) to cloud storage, which is generally the third leg of my three-legged stool of short term archiving for work files. And precious family files. 

My short term solution is to pull the cards from the shoot and put them in an envelope with all the job details marked on it. The cards are moved from the office and languish in the house until everything has been edited, sent to the client, archived to the cloud, and to several drives in the office as well. If I use two cameras on a job that's usually four cards that are temporarily held out of service. If it's a three camera fun-fest of a job then that's six cards held back to stave off the ravages of Murphy's Law. 

But jobs don't come in on some logical, linear schedule. The delivery of images doesn't always happen before the next job wants or needs to start. Sometimes projects come in clumps. In sets of three in a row. Whatever. But it means we need more cards so we can offer the same safety and security across jobs. And that means more cards. 

I always assumed that 128GB cards would be enough to handle most big photo files until I bought a medium format digital camera. The camera is "only" 51 megapixels but each raw file is something like 121 megabytes. Those files add up quickly. All of a sudden, even for still photography work, the 256GB cards are looking better and better. 

And it's only a matter of time before I move from a 47 megapixel SL3 to a 63 megapixel SL3, even more sensible would be an upgrade from the Fuji 50Sii to one of the 100 megapixel medium format cameras. So even with still imaging the higher megabyte capacity cards and higher speeds represent an attempt to do some short term future proofing. 

As Kenneth Tanaka wrote in one of this comments (at theOnlinephotographer) it seems pretty inevitable that high end cameras will more and more follow Leica, Zeiss and Hasselblad's leads and start incorporating high capacity (1TB, 2TB,+) SSDs in their cameras and then just offering one card slot of some type or another for file transfers. When that day comes we'll have lots and lots of SD cards to play with. Maybe they'll end up being used for project file storage. Or maybe they'll just get passed along as we trade in the older gear. Hard to know. 

For now I'm loving the SD cards. Sure, twenty years ago we had failures using various cards in early Fuji cameras. And then there were cards that just wouldn't behave in early Sony A7 series cameras. Occasionally you might accidentally pull a card out of a camera that is still writing and corrupt the card that way. Once a card shows me an error message I pretty much lose my faith in them for client work. And fun stuff I care about. I relegate those cards for use when just walking around shooting mannequins and skyscrapers to annoy people. Stuff that wants to be erased pretty much right after it's shot....

I laughed when I read Mike's very serious and complete run down of the state of the art of SD cards for no other reason than that we must be on some similar wavelength; some frequency of the universe that the two of us are tuned to. Why? Because the day before his column came out I had just ordered (and am auditioning) four ProGrade 256GB V90 cards from B&H. They arrived today. Right now you can buy them in twin packs for only $351. What a bargain!!!

Which brings me to another interesting difference between hobbyist card users and hard core working photographers. The idea that memory cards are "expensive." Many of Mike's commenters talk about buying cards as cheap as $10 each --- or even less. Or about holding on to cards for decades at a time; ostensibly to save money. 

I wonder where are these people were during the film years. How did they survive? I looked back into accounting ( business tax returns ) to see what our highest film and process expenses were in the "good old days" before $10 memory cards were even an idea for most people. My accounting adventure took me back to 1995. It was a bountiful year for work. Working across three formats and with the inclusion of lots and lots of Polaroid test materials. In that year I spent something close to $50,000 on film, processing of the film, and some scanning of the film. Included in that amount was Polaroid test material for two of the three formats. Sure, clients reimbursed me for the bulk of it but I'd estimate that I still spent thousands of dollars out of pocket to feed my personal work. Film for fun, self-assigned stuff. 

When I compare five figures of expense in order to capture images in a year with a few hundred dollars of memory cards that can be used over and over again for two, three or even five years the idea that SD memory is now expensive seems humorous to me. That the prices of ever cheaper memory cards are now considered an impediment to practicing the craft is... bizarre and "pound foolish." 

New cards are better and are getting even better than ever before. Having more capacity is always better than less capacity; no matter what camera you use to generate the images. 

My buying habits and use cases seem a bit extreme --- even to me sometimes. But my recollection of how the photo businesses used to work mollifies me a bit. After all, if I spend $1,000 on memory cards this year to do the work I want to do I am saving something like $49,000 1995 dollars on what are basically expendables. 

Go out right now, today, head over to MJ's site. Click through to B&H and buy yourself a really, really good, over the top, SD card for your favorite camera. Go crazy. The feeling of NO CARD LIMITATIONS will feel great. Spend a couple hundred dollars on a card and I can pretty much guarantee that you'll keep much more careful track of its whereabouts than you will a $10 card. Really. 

Big vacation this Summer? Two 256GB cards, backing each other up, should just about do it. And if you aren't doing video it's A-Okay to go with the V60 cards. They'll likely do just as well. 

I'd put a link here if I did affiliate sales stuff but I don't. Mike does and he's a good guy. Go there, read the articles first. Laugh a bit about the endless desire to save a few bucks and then use his links to go a bit nuts and get the card your camera really wants. It'll thank you for that. 

Aventures in scouting a location. A quiet way to spend a Monday morning.

In a couple of weeks I'll be heading to the offices of a company that provides insurance to the Texas legal community. We'll be doing the usual images for a new website type of photography. It's an association that I've worked with for about ten years, most recently photographing their board of directors in front of interesting urban landscapes. The upcoming shoot in the offices is the kind of project I've been doing for decades. Making every day corporate work spaces look streamlined and inviting, and helping the people who work there look interesting and engaging. 

This client moved offices since our last website shoot. And because I hate to drop in cold on the day of the photography I made arrangements to drop by this morning to do a quick scouting. I wanted to see which of the two conference rooms works best for a meeting shot. Which offices have good light and nice scenery out the windows. How high the ceilings are. Where the coffee machine is and what kind of coffee to expect... And mostly to say "hi" to the gatekeepers who make most companies, and by extension, most shoots, run smoothly.

The client offices are about three miles from my office and, at ten in the morning, the traffic was light. My scouting adventure took about 20 minutes and provided me with all the information I need to do the project the way the web designers would want. 

I've done plenty of projects over the years without scouting them. In a number of cases a few moments pre-scouting could have saved a lot of time and frustration. Like the time one huge computer maker wanted me to set up a seamless background and do executive portraits in a ten foot by twelve foot conference room that came complete with a table that could seat eight people. The tiny room even came complete with tiny ceiling height. About nine feet. It was a nightmare. And, on the day of the shoot no other conference rooms were available...(right...).

Or the time we arrived on site to photograph a server farm only to find that it was a work in progress and none of the servers had been taken out of their shipping boxes and set up. We essentially had an enormous space lined on the sidewalls with stacks of cardboard boxes. The video interview outside that coincided with jack hammers working next door and construction going on for months. But, of course, you had to get the front of the building in the background of the interview... The shot of the swimming pool for a new, five star hotel ---- the one without any water in the pool when we arrived at the appointed time.

How many times have we been scheduled to shoot a CEO in the "lush gardens" surrounding the front of HQ only to  arrive and find that all the plants died in the heat wave, were removed, and we were faced with shooting across an expanse of mud? Or how many times have we been asked to photograph a CEO or important company officer outside, in August, on one of those day when the temperatures hit 108 degrees? And the spot the marketing people wanted to use would put their mission critical exec in direct sun? In a suit and tie with a bright red face, covered with sweat. (Can you retouch all the sweat out???").

Dispatched to photograph a product that never arrived? Ben and I spent three days in a sorry motel in Baton Rouge waiting for UPS to find a product they lost that was mission critical to an advertising project. I know that's a different issue than what might be called scouting but it's pre-production and that counts when it comes to efficiency and effective use of time.... Especially if the missing product is also the star of the shoot.

Today I observed that some of the furniture in the client's main conference room had torn up armrests. We talked about repairing or replacing in the next two weeks. We also fine-tuned a shooting schedule so we would have sun in the right place at the right time to get the looks that the art directors asked for. We talked about who would be responsible for having lunch delivered, where to park, wardrobe for the employees, etc. 

There's no guarantee that scouting a location will ensure everything goes smoothly on the day of the shoot. But at least you'll know what you have to work with; in terms of the space, decor, lighting, etc. And you will be better prepared to hit the ground running. You'll know what kind of lights you'll likely need, and how many. You'll know if you need a really wide lens or if your 24mm will work just fine. If you were observant you'll know where to plug stuff in or whether to be safer and just bring battery powered lighting. What still image to use on the screens for the fake Zoom call images and much more. 

In a number of ways a casual visit well in advance of the shoot day is just good politics. You build more trust and collaborative spirit in every encounter. It all adds up to a smoother experience for everyone...

Don't go into a shoot naked and clueless. Spend some time to understand the 

underlying lay of the land....

Not my client's office front. 

Just some downtown photos from yesterday's adventure. Now making notes about this morning's meeting. All relaxed over here... 

A Needed Break from All That Leica Nonsense. A Celebration of International "God, That's an Awful Hat Day." And so much more...

 

Can't pass up a reflection in a window when I've got my premium hat on...

As popular taste continues to restrict my choice of "acceptable" subject matter for photographs here on the blog (no more graffiti, skyscrapers, mannequins or anything fun....) I was thrilled when I read in my online calendar that, not only is today Cinco de Mayo, but it is also International Bad Hat Day. A day made famous by the Tilley Hat Company, makers of some of the most atrocious civilian headwear since the Papal Crowns of the 17th Century. Today is that day of the year that people concerned with fashion, good taste and an acute sensitivity to popular outrage find and document hats that make us queasy. Or queasier. 

I'm starting out just below with a picture of modern Cerberus, the three headed guardian of the entry to Hades. And for good reason as, in this blog, they sit just above the sartorial gates of Hell when it comes to head coverings... I'm not sure if I should label this post NSFW or not....

Modern Cerberus on the prowl to enforce good taste. 

So, here we go....

A popular Mother's Day choice.

 I enjoy going to the Pecan Street Festival each Spring with a camera in one hand and a white flag of surrender in the other. Surrendering, of course, to the visual collage/onslaught of middle America on fashion parade. An endless stream of families and singles navigating our famous Sixth Street, from Congress Ave. all the way east to the freeway.  A broad avenue covered with white pop-up tents and featuring everything from window and door sales people to turkey legs vendors and cotton candy pushers. From bad art to fun sculptures made from metal hardware. From empañadas to soy candles. And hats. Lots and lots of hats. 

Usually I grab any old camera and a matching lens and wade through the crowd looking for fun images. Today I chose the Fuji GFX 50Sii as my camera of choice; completed by the 35-70mm GFX zoom. It's been raining on and off for days and days here in Texas and I figured that the Fuji stuff is advertised as being water resistant (both the lenses and the bodies) and I figured that if worse came to worse I'd rather trash a used GFX than a more costly Leica M body. And lens.

It was a good choice. And I made ample use of the rear screen set up as a waist level finder. I shot everything as a Superfine Jpeg (which sounds like a rap lyric) and the Standard color profile. The camera is quick to focus, does a great job of nailing exposure and has a highly functional auto white balance capability. 

And it seems to love to photograph hats. Half the time as I was staring in awe as someone in a giant cowboy hat tried and succeeded in getting an entire Turkey leg in his mouth all at once the camera, with a mind of its own, was busy making more or less autonomous images of hats. It seemed miraculous. 

Just the right hat for all of you who were keenly interested in the Kentucky Derby. 

And so fitting. Resplendent as the noon day sun. Now where did we stick that mint julep?

A full day of press coverage for two minutes of horse racing.... yeah. Just the ticket.

Almost makes watching football on TV seem sensible... 

On a serious note, this is D.S. Clarke. He's a painter and, to my mind, a very good one. 

I usually find the "art" at festivals to be eccentric at best and horrifying at the worst but you know my saying/motto from my teaching days at the University of Texas at Austin,  College of Fine Arts:

"I know a lot about art. I just don't know what I like." 

Anyway, D.S. Clarke studied art and painting at the Chicago Institute of Art and he's a fine painter. 

I looked at his work and almost instantly found a piece that was amazingly good and very compelling. I bought it on the spot. We chatted. I asked if I could take his photograph and he asked me to wait until he put on his "Art Hat." That set the tone for the rest of my stay at the festival. Hats. 

I look forward to getting my artwork. D.S. is shipping it to me since I didn't want to walk around downtown with a big piece of art tucked precariously under one arm, camera in the other...

Warning!!! Atrocious hats coming up. Maybe now would be a good time to take a nap instead...

No? Well, here we go: 

As nice as the hats above might be and as much as you might enjoy owning one or two or all of them, I saved the best for last. In keeping with the city of Austin's unofficial motto: "Keep Austin Weird" I give you.....ta da....the ultimate in comfortable, fashionable pate covers, 

The tie dye bucket hats. In regular and wide brim variants.

A shot across the bow of both Tilley and any semblance of good taste. 

So....of course, I bought one of these as well.

After showing these images of psychedelic, tie-dye bucket hats to a specialty buyer at a big outdoor outfitter, retail chain he sheepishly admitted that the next generation of floatable, SPF 50 adventure hats from a well known hat maker with a long tenure in the market, was actually copying the tie dye aesthetic and the company was planning to launch a complete line of Canadian Made, tie dye, bucket hats with the aim of getting the full line of their hats into his stores by Summer. 

Oh Boy!!!!! Just what the hippie golfers ordered. 

Added after first posting:

 

Rainy Day. Scan Time.

 

Every time I go through my archives I wish for a medium format camera with a square, 6x6 cm sensor. And if that camera was very, very good I would pay what most people would consider an outrageous premium for it. At least as much as a new car would cost. There is something about NOT having to pre-visualize how a crop will actually look once you change it, slice it up and crop from some lesser format in post production. There is so much value to me in being able to SEE the final composition in the camera as you line up the shot. Sure. You can crop a square out of anything but it's not the same as experiencing it visually,  with the purity of instant satori. There just isn't. 

And here's my big problem with RAW files. You have to accept the full frame (uncropped) from the camera into your post processing program when you set a different format in a 3:2 camera. Even when shooting the review shows you the edges you didn't want to see in the first place. With Jpegs you get to define the format and work in it. But  then you miss out on the flexibility of the RAW file.

The medium format film cameras I owned spanned a lot of manufacturers product lines. There were many Hasselblads, the Bronica SQ line, the Mamiya 6 camera, and a slew of Rolleis; both twin lens and SLRs. Certainly there is enough of a market in a world with 8 billion people to be able to profitably sell a few thousand premium, big sensor, square format cameras every year. I'm tired of working within the false constraints of semiconductor driven size limitations. Yes, I know smaller sensors are less expensive to make but Rolls Royce is still making two or three hundred custom cars at $2 million and up every year. Aren't really, really wonderful cameras a lot more desirable? 

Ah well. Back to the scans. 

Currently reading a book called: "The Creative Act: A Way of Being" by Rick Rubin. 

It's an interesting way of looking at the life long creative process in all manner of avenues I've yet to explore. 

Rainy day, free from painting, getting up close and personal with a 28mm lens. Just for fun.

Leica M240, Carl Zeiss 28mm Biogon f2.8 ZM, Leica EVF finder. 

I have become a lawyer magnet this month, but in a good way. Roused from the stupor of my short-lived retirement dreams by multiplying texts and emails I've committed myself to three or four more projects (still on the fence about undertaking a video add-on for one project...). With a lucrative income stream nailed down for the next month or so, and my favorite stock busting upwards today, I decided that I'd better focus on my downtown walks and general relaxation with a camera while I have the scheduling bandwidth to pursue sloth. Generally speaking. 

The painters were here today finishing up the interior painting but B. was back and a much better paint supervisor than I will ever be. It all looks pretty good to me until she points out the obvious and glaring mismatches to me. This, of course, gives me the out to pass the mantle of authority back to her, stuff some things into a small shoulder bag (fanny pack reimagined as sling/shoulder bag) and escape into downtown to rummage around looking for fun stuff to shoot, and generally being fascinated by the EVF I bought for the M240 camera. It's old tech, that's for sure. It's pretty much the same finder I bought along with an Olympus EP-2 way back in 2008 or 2009...only the logo on the front of the unit is different. 

There is a therapy for various fears called exposure therapy which relies on systematic desensitization to help people with phobias, social anxieties, etc. I am using a casual form of this to get over my hesitation or discomfort when photographing with weird, wide-angle focal lengths. And one in particular. The feared and hated 28mm. With photo therapy in mind I stuck the 28mm Zeiss ZM lens on a battered and bruised, and recently powder dyed, Leica M240 in preparation for an early afternoon walk-n-snap(tm). 

I couldn't decide which way I'd view the composition with the lens but finally lighted on adding the EVF. I figured that of all the digital cameras I've owned I'd have the best shot of making it all the way through my 10K steps on one battery with the M. I was not disappointed in this regard. The EVF sucks up battery power like a vacuum cleaner but the freshly charged battery was up to the challenge and I returned home a couple hours later with a battery boasting still over 50% remaining power. It's also easier to look through than my cheap 28mm optical finder...

There is something to just being lazy and walking around looking at stuff that agenda-driven people have a hard time understanding. I love the currents of chance. Sometimes the universe tosses you boring days but mostly the universe is neutral and you get to decide how much fun you are actually having and how interesting everything is. Or can be.

The painters couldn't stick around and work on the exterior stuff today. It was raining; on and off. Not a big-ass, pouring thunderstorm (like last night) but instead a calm, soft rain that seemed to be on as diffident a schedule as I was. One block walking with rain, the next block without. And so on.

I've come to like the 28mm focal length so much more than I did just a year ago. And I seem to be circling back to it more and more. The one I have, made for M series rangefinders, is wonderfully small and seems extremely well made. The focusing and depth of field scales engraved on the lens barrel are highly legible. And from my limited experience working with 28mm lenses I think it's a good optical performer. 

Curious how many people besides myself had or have trouble warming up to this focal length, or this angle of view. Let me know, if you want. 

Below are images from today's downtown time with captions where I felt captions were either necessary or would be fun to write.

The intersection of Lamar Blvd. and Fifth St. Four lanes across and 

peppered with drivers who are Jonesing to turn right on red even though there

are three signs telling them not to. Some of the drivers don't look for 

pedestrians crossing. We bring along big rocks to throw at their cars. 

Like Boy Scouts, we are prepared. Bring your running shoes in case you 

manage a good rock throw and the person emerging from the car turns out

to be enormously bigger than you are.... (we don't really throw rocks. 

All we can usually manage is a withering glare...). 

Parking lot trees. Next to the railroad tracks. 

Can't pass up mirrored windows. Loving the mismatched, Smallrig camera strap. 

Brown shoes with a black suit?

Tiled building image for that one guys who always comments about converging parallels...

Put a ruler on it, dude. The ZM lens is surprisingly undistorted as well.

and yes! the freight trains go right through the middle of town. big, long, noisy trains coming from somewhere and heading to somewhere else. Not as regular as Swiss trains but still... 

All that stood between me and my favorite coffee joint... 110 cars. I counted.

Stopping to smell the scrub brush and opportunistic vegetation. 

Seaholm Power Plant in the background. 

Taking a break from reading: 

"Younger Next Year: Live Strong, Fit, Sexy, and Smart―Until You’re 80 and Beyond"  

and, of course, you don't have to ask...the secret is vigorous exercise, six days a week, every week, every month, etc. That, and keeping your hands off the deep-fat fried, jumbo-sized Snickers candy bars...etc. Read the book.  Oh, and getting up from the desk chair and walking around. You might find you really don't have to buy into all the cultural crap about getting old early and falling apart. No weird fitness or diet voodoo required.

A show of hands. Who got their 3200 yard swim in this morning? Who did their 10K steps walk this afternoon? 

End of preachiness. 

Here they come!!! It's mannequin time. All dressed for Spring/Summer.

(by popular demand???)

The shop called "Hemline", for the win. 

Man and bush. Cloud and mountain. Beef Jerky and Swisher Sweet cigars.

Equivalents. All praise Minor White.... 

Strangely...."titillating". 

Amazing. The one train route we have in Austin actually runs even when it's raining.

by and large we, as a city, are fascinated when we actually see trains in our downtown space. 

Most of the civilized world has mass transportation. We're just flirting with it now. 

It's a very, very vague relationship. We drive our one passenger cars into downtown 

just to see a train and sometimes take children along so they too can see trains.

They are somewhat amazed that the trains don't speak; like Thomas the Tank Engine.

Remnants and artifacts of what was once a thriving, downtown Italian restaurant located in a series of historic structures. Now left to decay and rot. But they are leaving behind a dandy parking lot. 

I went down a "dangerous" alley. No one cared. I emerged at the other end unscathed. camera as well. 

this guy wasn't so lucky...

Have I mentioned lately how much I like the color from the Leica M240s when I use them in their raw fine, DNG format? Well, I do.

Mother's Day is next week. On the 12th. That's a Sunday.

If you were thinking of surprising the mom(s) in your life 

with the thoughtful gift of a Leica Q3 or M11, or maybe 

an SL3, you'd better get moving. They're hard to find.

You know they'd love one of the above. Much better than flowers 

or a brunch at a crowded restaurant...

Step up. Make their Mother's Day special, and maybe they'll 

let you borrow their new camera...

Nope. Not even going to try going there at my house...