Just thinking about what it must have been like to grow up with a photographer father...

 All my other careers; the advertising agency, teaching at the University of Texas at Austin, short order cook and teaching assistant, were long relegated to the rear view mirror before Mr. B. arrived on the scene. By the time he joined the family I had been doing photography as my sole source of income for something like ten years. I never stopped to think about how different our lives were from families in which the parents had "real" jobs. 9 to 5. Two weeks of vacation. Some sort of financial security. Not a lot of free time.

For most of his life at home I worked in the same office I do now. It's a converted garage and storage building that's situated about 12 steps from the front door of the house. Sometimes, when I was playing around with a camera in the office I'd remember that I had a "model" right across the walkway and I'd grab the camera and head into the house. B. was usually very patient and understanding. At least in his younger years. Of course, there were a few times in those teenaged years when he wasn't thrilled about being unpaid talent. 

He always has had a very practical bent which is something I first became aware of when he was quite young. Maybe four or five years old. I was out working in the studio with a marketing director from Zach Theater. We were making photographs of cute, female models (young adults) dressed up as Santa's elves to promote the perennial holiday season productions. The marketing director was also a family friend and, on the spur of the moment he decided that the perfect addition to one of our shots would be to have a cute, young child kiss one of Santa's elves on the cheek. 

I told the ad guy, Jim, that a house policy was that we couldn't push Mr. B. into being talent for anything he didn't want to do and that, additionally, he would negotiate his own terms having learned early on that all clients have budgets and no one should give away time, talent or content for free (if only I had learned that lesson I would have saved a lot of time by not blogging....). 

I went in the house to ask B. if he would come out and listen to Jim's proposal for an ad. He was happy to. Jim walked him through the concept and then my four or five year old exclaimed, "Kiss a girl??? No way. Sorry." Jim was persistent and started offering the kind of payment he thought would appeal to a young child. He suggested that after the shoot we could all go to Amy's Ice Cream (an Austin legendary ice cream shop/the best!!!) and he could get anything he wanted. 

B. smiled and said, "I can already get that from my parents. No deal." To this day I'm not sure any amount of bribery would have been enough to move him off dead center. I was proud though that he stuck to his guns and didn't crumble. He politely excused himself and went back into the house. I made a note that in the future we'd always offer him scale if we asked him to be talent on a real shoot...

Most kids have parents who go away to work. When the kids get older they also go away to school. Everyone meets back at the house in time for dinner. Not so at our house. If I wasn't booked I'd be in the office doing paperwork or marketing or something else to move the whole enterprise of photography along. Most days either me or my assistant was there to meet the school bus in the afternoon.  I was at home/in the office on both occasions of my kiddo breaking an arm at school (3rd grade). His mom was working a "real" job in downtown by then so I was usually on call for school emergencies. Each time I was over to his school in minutes. Single digit minutes. On one broken arm (falling from the top of the jungle gym...) episode my team and I were in the middle of a shoot. We were using our large living room in the house. We had three or four people from the ad agency, a stream of models coming and going, a make up person and my cracker jack assistant, Renae. 

In the middle of the shoot Renae walked over and handed me the phone. "Can you take a message?" I asked. "No! You'll want to take this call." She said, emphatically. She was right. It was the elementary school principal calling to let me know that B. had possibly broken his arm at recess. I was out the door so fast it was like a cartoon. I got to the school. Evaluated B. Splinted his arm with a magazine (Thank You! Boy Scouts of America. And thanks for the first aid merit badge!!!) and rushed him to the hospital. Platinum level parenting service. The pediatric orthopedic surgeon on call was someone I knew from the pool. And someone B. also knew and was comfortable with (kids the same age). 

I was thrilled to secure the volunteer job of official photographer for ten years in a row for B.'s summer swim team at our club. I did the group shots of 150+ kids ranging from 4 to 18, and I photographed all the kids swimming their events at the swim meets. It was a big job but I got to watch every race B. and his friends swam... and it was a blast. 

Later, once he was in high school, B. took a semester of video production and video editing. We did a role reversal. Now he was the expert and I was the student. He fixed more of my videos for clients with a keen eye and a strong arm on the tiller than I would really like to admit. 

For the last three years of high school he ran cross country. I never missed a meet. I also never missed getting up at some ungodly hour of the morning and driving him to 6:30 a.m. cross country practice at Zilker Park. I really had to. My dad did the same for me when I swam in middle school and high school. Only back then our workouts started at 5:30 a.m. Paying it forward? At least after delivering him to cross country workouts I could head straight to the pool and begin my own exercise...

We talked often about freelance work, photography work, video work, writing, and how all the finances worked. He paid attention. If there is one thing I think I taught him it's that you can do whatever you like in life and you can figure out how to make it successful, if you want to. Sometimes it's up to doing hard work and long hours, sometimes it's more important to be a good negotiator, but mostly it's critical to believe in yourself and to set boundaries for those with whom you work. Good relationships with clients and crew are the glue that binds everything together at work.

I have mountains of photos of the kid but I'm very careul about what I post because I know his privacy is important to him. He's not a typical millennial. You won't find much of him on social media. He's okay being mostly off the grid. 

I'm happy he moved back to Austin after his four years at universities, split between the North East U.S. and also Seoul, S. Korea. It means we get to see him at least every Sunday evening for a family dinner. More often if we have something special to celebrate. Or if I can wrangle him for a weekday lunch halfway between our houses. With a few exceptions we haven't missed a Sunday in at least three years. And always we're talking about my work and his work. And where marketing is headed. And how photography has changed. And how tech companies are using images. And, sadly or happily (not sure), I've come to grips with the realization that he's far smarter and more capable than I was at his age. More grounded and focused. A better skier, runner and rock climber too. Gosh, now I feel like such a fitness slacker...

The image at the top was taken on one of those easy Summer afternoons when I stepped into the house to grab a cold drink from the fridge. The light was coming through the double French doors in the dining room and I picked up the Hasselblad camera that was usually sitting on the dining room table, figured the exposure in my head and asked him to stand still. I shot five frames and then we were both off again, back on our own projects. It was nice to be around for the photo opportunities. It's easy to miss stuff; important stuff, if work is always the priority. 

Nice now to have a kind, bright and well launched kid. (oops. Adult). Wouldn't trade that feeling for all the Leicas in the world. 

Tech: Available light. Tripod. Medium format camera. Short telephoto lens. Tri-X film. Scanned from the negative here in the office. 

Portrait scanned from medium format Kodak Portra B&W 400. And also colorized....

Ize.

Playing around with the scanning rig again today after lunch. I was curious how chromogenic black and white film would look when scanned so I dug into the files and found a nice negative of Ize and fired everything up. I started with a 7200+ x 7200+ multi-res scan, inverted it in Photoshop and then started playing around. 

I go into levels and pick up the eyedropper tool for the shadows. I click it on the film edge that's supposed to be black and turn it black. I use the mid-tone eyedropper tool and use it on Ize's forehead to get into the middle gray range. Oh, and I convert the image from a color file to a black and white file. The files always come out with a little color cast if I don't make them black and white. 

I went into the neural filters and selected "skin smoothing" and used that at a 25% setting. It seems to work well. Everything else is just small tweaks. 

I wanted to show you how well the scanning rig handles detail so I included a 100% crop into her right eye for some kind of reference. The original negative was shot with a Rollei 6008i and the Rollei 150mm f4.0 lens. 

When I was in the neural filters, just noodling around, the "colorize" filter caught my eye and just out of curiosity I thought I should give it a whirl. The image just below is what the program rendered from the original black and white file I gave it. While the lipstick color is a bit over the top the rest of the image looks pretty cool. I think you could actually get away with colorization of some older black and white portraits in a pinch! But calm down, I'm not going to start making all of my old black and white work into colorized versions. 

Ize was invited into my studio by an advertising guy who thought she was beautiful. I couldn't disagree. She came along with her mother and her younger sister. It was a fun and unexpected session devised by an ad guy who took a chance that I might have a break in my schedule. We did this portrait about 15 years ago. I still like it. 

I keep getting comments and emails asking, demanding and cajoling me to post more portraits. I thought I may as well comply. And now? Back to work. 

Having fun working on projects. Beats sitting around waiting for the pipes to freeze...

 

I spent time last year conjecturing about retirement. I was a bit premature. At least as far as my clients are concerned. We started off 2024 with a project for a tech start up. Five portraits in the studio over the course of two days. When they selected their finals I retouched them and composited them into urban landscape backgrounds (mostly against tall, out of focus buildings).  I wrapped up the final processing on them last night and sent the large .Tiff files off to an art director in NYC. All good there. 

The photography for the second project of the month started yesterday morning and wrapped up just before lunch time today. Five advertising partners against green screen. I've just finished creating galleries for each person and once they make their selections I'll composite them into defocused industrial backgrounds. It's a style they wanted from the outset. 

We did the first shoot here in my studio just before the weather went bad. It was very straightforward and went smoothly but nothing compares to photographing on site at a very fun advertising and public relations agency's headquarters. That's where we did the second shoot. 

Sure, I have to pack stuff up and transport it. I have to snag just the right conference room for my temporary studio and set up equipment. But the energy in a bustling ad agency is so much fun. These are people I have known and worked with, in some fashion, for nearly 30 years (the principals...) and they are surrounded by young creatives and marketing people. The conversations we have during sessions are eye-opening and totally at odds with the understanding of the markets and the trends that most of my peers cling to. Wanna know what's trending? Ask a 28 year old, social media ad buyer. And they don't work on conjecture or anecdotal evidence --- they've got the data to back up their viewpoints. Data, not opinions.

I worked across two days at the agency. The first day I was still feeling the glow of the new (to me) Zeiss 50mm Milvus lens so I used that on a Leica SL2. I set the camera for APS format to get the equivalent of a 75mm lens. It worked great. But when I was in the middle of post production yesterday evening I kept looking across my desk at the older Leica SL camera and started thinking about how it might work when paired up with another recent lens acquisition; the Voigtlander 75mm f1.9 --- for the M. I tossed a Leica M to L mount adapter on the older camera, clicked on the lens and took them with me this morning. It was glorious and the photos look just as good at the ones from yesterday. 

On the job in my studio I used an FS-300 Nanlite LED fixture, aimed at a big umbrella, as the key light and on a white background I lit with two more Nanlites for even illumination. Those images were all shot on a tripod to compensate for the potential movement of the camera while using continuous lighting. 

For the job on site at the ad agency I used electronic flash instead. It's smaller, lighter, easier to carry, etc. My "go to" kit for location flash consists of three Godox AD200Pro flashes and two Godox V1 flashes. All of the AD200Pros are equipped with round flash heads which match the round heads on the V1 flashes. They all put out a nice light and all of them can be used with the same front of the flash accessories. I only used three lights yesterday and today. Two AD200 Pros, each into an umbrella. One into a 45 inch umbrella as the main light and one into a 60 inch umbrella as a fill light. I used a very small Godox TT 350 flash to light the green screen. It only needed a small splash of flash.... (see above).

On one of the days of the "big freeze" I also got an email from the marketing guy at our big radiology practice which has spread out to serve most of central Texas. Now we're trying to schedule nine individual portrait shoots between now and the end of January. These will all be done close to home; in my studio just across from the house. Since I don't see any schedule conflicts I hope to be able to light one time and then leave everything set up for successive appointments. This will be my 23rd year in a row to provide doctor and P.A. headshots to the practice. A really nice run!

It feels like a typical January month for business. It's a bit strange since I really haven't done any marketing in a long, long time. The last time I sent out a marketing blast of any kind was probably since before the start of the pandemic....

I've increased all fees and expenses by 20% this year and, so far, no one has so much as squeaked. The reality locally is that business is brisk, suppliers are hard to come by, skilled suppliers harder to come by and budgets have become largely immaterial. Surf while the waves are good. 

One rule I have been following though is that Tuesday through Saturday no job can start until after 10 a.m. I figure if I don't set boundaries people will try to schedule earlier and that will mess with my swim workouts. The swims are now much more important to me than the work so the rules are hard and fast. You need an early morning start? Try Monday. The pool is closed then. 

What does this all mean? Not much. It's just more of the same. I am kind of amazed though that I still find this to be so much fun. 

Fussing around with the lights. Waiting for the onsite barista to bring me a latté. 

the luxury of traveling light. someone should write a book about the idea.

I have a good suggestion for a title. They could call it: 

Minimalist Lighting: Professional Techniques for Location Lighting.

It might sell...

Strolling with the ZM 50mm f1.4 Milvus lens. First long walk in a week. First walk with the new lens. First walk since the big freeze began. A lot of firsts.

 

What if Stephen Shore and William Eggleston hooked up and then their offspring 

became fine art photographers in the modern age. Would it look like this? 

Or is this one not boring enough?

There are limits to dining al fresco. 

currently in love with the reds that result from the Leica SL2

And I think the new lens helps maintain the high level of "red overkill."

ice sculpture outside a bar on our popular Sixth St. 

if Ed Ruscha photographed buildings in Austin.... But with better technical chops.

would you believe that Frank Lloyd Wright designed this parking garage?

I didn't think so...

loose homage to Larry Sultan

Not a chance.

my friend Mary baked me a lemon cake embedded with pistachios.

made with almond flour, no white sugar and lots of ricotta cheese.

they serve this in heaven. It's amazing.

first frame out of the camera with the Carl Zeiss Milvus 50mm f1.4 distagon

Just in. The numbers tell all. The world famous VSL blog site just topped 31,000,000 direct page views. If you are reading via RSS feed well.... those aren't recorded by Google....

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Moving on from how we used to do stuff. Not much fun for traditionalists...

 

Taken last year this scene already looks dated. Outmoded. Obsolete.

 When I first met my friend, Paul, he was becoming one of the key architectural photographers in our part of the country. He was a proponent of doing his work in the best possible way and with the best possible tools. At the time we met, back in the early 1990s he was firmly wedded to his Linhof technical view cameras, the best 4x5 lenses he could find, and a catalog's worth of big, Profoto electronic flash lighting. The big cameras, big film and exquisite lenses were the bedrock of his business right up until digital photography became mature enough to at least get close enough to the quality he was able to get from the film gear. When he converted almost completely to digital he looked for the best equipment on the market. And his work allowed him the budgets to pick and choose instruments that I, for one, would never justify affording for my business. I use him as an example here. Not as an example of what to do or what not to do but as an example of a time in our industry when it was considered mission critical to deliver the absolute best technical imaging products one could manage. 

I think that mindset came to us in the last quarter of the 20th century because for most of its maturing process film photography was hard to do consistently at a very high level. To get the absolute best color from transparency films one had to pick and choose between different batches of the same film; different production runs, and upon finding a well tempered emulsion one needed to buy it in case lots to ensure that jobs would be well supplied by known film products which had been tested and re-tested. And then stored in refrigerators. But even having access to large quantities of carefully chosen and stored film didn't vaccinate professionals against the vagaries and mysteries that could plague even the best processing labs. A change in water pH or a processing machine with an issue could wreak havoc on the color and even the exposure consistency of finnicky slide films. Many times I think the professional predilection for top quality gear was the hope that very precise mechanical and optical equipment might provide an extra margin of safety when all the things that were out of our control ended up going out of whack. 

And in the days of big film, medium sized film and better budgets taking a chance with "lesser" gear was tantamount to accepting the near certainty of failure somewhere along the chain of inter-related processes and gear to film interfaces. No one got fired for choosing to work with Hasselblads... Or Linhofs.

As everyone gravitated toward using digital cameras for work the same sort of high-end practitioner followed much the same trajectory for digital gear acquisition. My friend, Paul, was the first architectural photographer I knew who branched out from 4x5 film gear to a medium format Leica digital camera and lenses to match. He also sought out mechanical experts who could make custom converters for all varieties of medium format and large format tilt shift lenses that would allow them to be used on the first, the Leica S camera and then a series of Hasselblad medium format cameras. He was the first person I knew to take delivery on the new Fuji GFX cameras as well. 

But something disconnected. When film was dominant his clients were thrilled to order huge display prints to hang on their walls. When high end cameras of all kinds seemed to be required for his work it was routine to see said work in a variety of shelter magazines like Architectural Digest which hewed to the highest printing standards. The work worked for the traditional targets that defined what commercial photography was until the middle of the first decade of the 21st century. But then web bandwidth expanded and sped up for everyone and all of a sudden websites, Youtube, portfolio sites and other online resources blossomed. At a certain point it became clear that clients has stopped paying $40 or $50 to Fedex in a portfolio of luscious, gorgeous prints in order to shop for the right photographer. It was easier, cheaper and faster to just look at portfolios on photographers' websites. And it was all "free." You could look at "books" online from photographers located anywhere in the world.

But the targets changed too. Sure, there are still lots and lots of magazines but if you wade through most of them you'll find the paper being used is thinner, cheaper and doesn't hold ink nearly as well. And most of the magazines use images in smaller sizes while the photo "stories" that run more than a couple of pages are rarer than free money. Everything seems perennially headed for the web. And, if you are honest with yourself, you head for the web far more often for reading, entertainment and educations than you head to paper magazines for your content. How many of you have more than one "paper" magazine subscription? Is it a journal from your profession? Do your get it free for paying your annual dues? Would you pay for the printed magazines if they cost money from your own pocket? I didn't think so. 

In one regard we are a distinct demographic. And the demographic I'm talking about is: professional men over 50 years of age who read stuff on a big laptop or a very big desktop computer. We're trained to see flaws in photographs and a 27 inch screen helps us find them. One of our own flaws is thinking and believing that everyone is just like we are. But in the real world most of the younger people are looking at your photographs and the photographs of Annie Leibovitz and Josef Koudelka on screens just about the size of their palms. ( more likely looking at YouTube influencers we've never heard of..). There are some who are sourcing their visual content on 13 inch laptops and while that's a step up none of these applications requires, or can take real advantage of, the ways in which we used to create photographs. A 180 GB scan of a 6x9 cm transparency is mutilated in the downsizing required to put it up on the web and share it. Destructive overkill. 

I've said for years and years now that most of the work people do is destined for the web. Peter McKinnon's work will end up on the web. Allan Schaller's work? The web. Paul Reid may make a few prints but the only way the vast majority of people will only see his work is through the magic of the web. 

Which brings me back to Paul who recently did a job with big cameras but took along his new iPhone 15 Pro. Which he used to take video and stills alongside his Nikon D850 outfitted with some really nice Zeiss glass. He was up in a cherry picker and after shooting the requisite "big" photographs he pulled out the phone and covered the same ground over again. He also took video with his phone while the crane operator executed a very slow and smooth ascent, at twilight. The footage from the phone was astoundingly good. Sure, if we project it at a theater we'll probably see all kinds of artifacts and soft areas. But on its intended media? The web?  It will look superb. Better than the raw material coming out of the bigger, heavier, more expensive and more intensely needy Nikon. But he has both. From the "traditional" camera and from the new tech. He can use the images straight off the phone, he'll need to post process the ones from the traditional camera.

I predict that knowing the phone images and video footage looks so good will push him a bit into embracing a new way of navigating image making. Using easier methodologies. Smaller form factors. Taking advantage of massive Apple image processing. Oh, he'll never give up the big cameras because that's what he grew up with. That's what he made his mark with. And in Texas we always remember the saying from the UT football coach, Daryl Royal: "Dance with them as brung ya." But I have a hunch that the phone as camera will make far more frequent appearances than before. Even though Paul is emotionally wedded to working at the demanding edges of the "envelope." He's wise enough not to waste time in overkill driven by nostalgia. The right tool....

I often read blogs by people now eligible for Medicare. They grew up with black and white images at a time when the only way to share them and get them in front of people was to go into a darkroom, measure chemicals, work under a red safelight and make black and white prints. It was a slow and cumbersome process. And then the print came out of the wash was dried flat and, after it was spotted, got shown around. If the photographer was lucky enough to have a local audience willing to take the time to meet and view the work firsthand. Most prints from that era got a dozen or two dozen views before the photographer ran out of steam and tossed the print into an archival box and went back to work on something that would pay the bills. But for some reason this imprinted on my generation as the "gold standard" of photography. Too bad the rest of civilization passed us by. Or was it that we were to inflexible to change?

Now even a poor photo of your cat, taken with much more pedestrian photo gear, has the potential of being seen by hundreds or thousands of people. And the image hits this market almost instantaneously. The print from yesteryear just can't compete. Well, unless you scan it and put it up on the web.... And then, really, it's no longer a "print."

If we lived in a world where a pervasive reality ruled our actions instead of reactive emotions, sentimentality and an overly ripe respect for tradition, we would all see how the markets moved, the sharing modalities changed, the portals to seeing images shifted from physical to electronic/digital images seen on screens of all sizes. We'd understand that trying to match the images we made with supremely great, silver rich papers that no longer exist is pointless. The galleries that would have shown such work, locally, are long since closed. The plastic cups of red wine and the little cubes for white and orange cheese are no longer being served at gallery show openings because galleries have become almost extinct. 

And yet, here we are shooting for yesteryear's media. If we were videographers would we be making 5:4 aspect black and white 480 video in reverance to its roots? Gee. Probably not. 

Just a thought after having bought yet another huge, over-engineered, full manual 50mm lens.... sigh.

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.

Cold. Well, just Texas cold. But still cold. Oh, and I traded someone a zoom lens for a prime lens.

 

fun with front elements.

This is a 50mm Milvus lens from Carl Zeiss.

It's often referred to as a "mini-Otus" but

from my point of view there's little that's "mini" 

about it. A favorite among cinematographers, for sure.

Monster sized lens for a 50mm. 

We started getting news of incoming "the Arctic Blast; 2024" three or four days ago. Most homeowners here in the Austin area are still a bit in shock from "Ice Stormageddon 2023" and the deadly "Arctic Winter Blast of 2021." More than 200 people in Texas died when the power went out and 4,000,000 people were without electricity, heat, etc. For some the 2021 winter storm effects lasted over a week. And the clean up from the last two events took months. Water pipes burst all of the place and falling, frozen branches did a number on the infrastructure last year. Little wonder everyone is a bit on edge today. 

Last time a little forest of sweet olive bushes that sits outside our bedroom windows was nearly wiped out when the lows dropped under 9°. And stayed there for a long while. This time around I spent the afternoon yesterday wrapping them with "plankets" (permeable blanket coverings for plants and shrubs) and inside the wrapping I included strands of incandescent Christmas lights to keep the bushes at least tolerably comfortable. Many beds of succulents are covered with double layers of tarps as are the two flower beds just outside my studio door.  

I have covered everything with mulch. Covered the four outdoor faucet nibs with insulated covers and even added air pressure to the cars' tires. I also had a service come by last week to clean and inspect the rarely used chimney and fireplace. Then I stocked in three boxes of DuraFlame logs. If the power goes out we'll barricade ourselves in the living room and light log after log. If it looks to be worse than we expect we'll decamp to a downtown hotel. And, yes, I know where the turn off valve is for the water and have the requisite tool for turning it all off. 

If we make it to Wednesday afternoon unscathed then we'll consider ourselves lucky once again. Wait, I have to grab a fresh orange and cranberry scone and some coffee before I continue....   .... ..... .....

Okay. 

When I awoke this morning the temperature outside was 24° and when the wind chill was factored in it was a balmy 14°. Fahrenheit. Perfect weather for morning swim practice, outside. When we got to the pool the Sunday morning 8 a.m. masters group was just about to exit the lanes so we 9 a.m. masters swimmers could get in and get going. The walk from the locker rooms to the poolside in nothing but a Speedo swim suit and a swim cap was... innervating. The chill on my skin was one of those sensations I hope I never have to get used to. I did stop long enough on deck, in the wind, to admire the icicles hanging down from the edges of the starting blocks. And then we were in the water, moving and trying to keep as much of ourselves under the temperate water as possible. Just a few square inches of head and face to allow for breathing. Which, in itself, was exciting. Glad I opted for the second workout and didn't have to help peel the insulated covers off the surface of the pool. It gets tricky when the wind picks up. 

Our coach was Dale, a former UT swimmer and a great guy to have on deck on a day of rough weather. He was bundled up in a parka, hat, gloves, etc and he'd had to write the details of the day's workout on the whiteboard back in the heated locker room because the Dry Erase markers more of less give up in freezing temperatures. 

The hard part of our hour long workout wasn't the swimming. Sure, we knocked out 3,000+ yards, got our heart rates up, got our muscles singing, but the real hard part was getting out of the pool, soaking wet and making the 30 second journey from the pool edge to the door of the locker room (mis-named as we don't have lockers, we have vertical, open faced cubbies). The hot showers seemed almost luxurious.

Then we grudgingly left the locker room, headed for our cars and sped off to find the life giving elixir of the 21st century: coffee.

A couple of days ago I had coffee with a photographer friend of about my same vintage. We meet for coffee every other week, or so, to catch up, talk about the business and trade gear stories. We also have a penchant for having camera and lens stuff the other guy covets and vice versa. When we met, in shirt sleeves, sitting outdoors in the nice weather, we realized through the conversation that we each had some gear that could be traded. I had my eye on his "extra" 50mm f1.4 Zeiss Milvus ZF lens and he was looking around for a standard L mount zoom lens to use with a recently acquired Leica SL2. I just happened to have a Panasonic 24-105mm S zoom that is wholly duplicated by my (preferred) Leica 24-90mm Vario Elmarit zoom. Shazam. A deal was done over coffee. I now have his Nikon mount 50mm f1.4 Zeiss lens and he has my Panasonic zoom. 

Why another 50mm? Well, they are all different in some way or another so...why not? The lens is beautiful, big and heavy. But it has a fantastic reputation for high optical performance. And I have a drawer full of Nikon Lens to L Mount body adapters. Let the playing begin. 

We did the swap yesterday afternoon. After my bout of domestic storm prep. Today has been a whirlwind of swimming, coffee afterwards (a once a month event with some of my fellow swimmers), lunch with B., napping, and worrying about the upcoming 36 hours of freezing temperatures. I hope to get out with the lens on Tuesday or Wednesday to give it an intense audition. Til then everything is just conjecture. 

So, the list of 50mm and 55mm and 58mm lenses I collect keeps growing. I'd divest of some but so many people have told me for so long = "You date the camera bodies, You marry the lenses." Or, that their regrets, over time, are the lenses that they sold. No one I know really regrets having too much of a good thing and I think that is germane to the collecting of fun 50mm lenses. Besides, this one is supposed to be one of the best ever. We'll see about that. 

Nice thing about heavy lenses? They'll help you build bigger biceps. And, as you know, when you crest 50 years of age holding on to muscle mass is mission critical. That's my story and I'm sticking with it. 

Sorry JC, we'll get that 110mm Fuji next time around...maybe. 

God Bless the Texas Electrical Grid and Keep if from Failing. Again.