I've been shooting more in black and white. Sometimes I think wide angle views benefit the most from that format.

 

A while back I bought a cheap, TTArtisan 21mm f1.5 lens for the L mount systems. I used it a couple of times but I thought, at the time, that I just didn't see well with very wide angle lenses. I usually have a wide angle "limiter" in my brain that cuts off anything wider than 28mm. But last month I came across the lens again at the back of a drawer and thought that I should either give it another try or move it out and along to someone who might appreciate it more. What a difference a sunny day can make...

I used the lens in conjunction with a Leica SL2 camera and I could see that setting the camera to "monochrome" did more than just desaturate the colors. Leica seems to have created an invisible (as in: not in the menu) preset for monochrome Jpegs that takes into consideration the way black and white film works. Panchromatic black and white film. I also noted that they seem to have tweaked the way the camera responds to different colors. Almost as if when using it this way you are getting the result of a yellow filter or maybe even a weak orange filter. Skies get dramatically darker and contrasts seem to pop. 

My earlier dismissal of the lens was premature. I paid less than $300 for the lens, new, and when I looked carefully at these more recent results I was much more impressed than I was with my first outings --- which were on cloudy, winter days. The lens has some geometric distortion. Yes. And it has some smearing of details in the corners. Sure does. But it delivers a good level of sharpness in the center of the frame and when shooting in black and white I love the way the lens, at least in the center 2/3rds of the frame, renders things like clouds and hard lines of buildings. 

Since I'm not a power user of wide angles, and since I don't attract clients who would be best served by ultra-wide angle photographs I find this lens is more than adequate for my casual/artsy use. But, of course, when I get good stuff from a focal length like this one my thoughts immediately go to how much better the results might be if I invested in something like a Carl Zeiss 21mm f4.5 ZM. A much smaller and much slower lens. And maybe a much better corrected lens. Chances are I'll stumble across one when I least expect it and I'll mistakenly take its abrupt appearance as a sign from the photo gods that I should snap it up and try it out. Bad wiring, I suspect. 

Last week it was freezing and today we're walking around in shorts and t-shirts. Clear skies and 70°. Nice. I was reading a book last night called, "Letting Go of the Camera" by Brookes Jensen...

the secret night life of mannequins.

In the book of essays, mostly done for "Lens Work" (a periodical about fine art photography) Jensen makes several points which closely align with what I've written here. When it comes to making good photographs we both believe that engaging with photography on a daily basis is important. Vital perhaps. The more you copy yourself the more you fine tune your own vision. And the more you practice the more fluid and competent you become. But what does that really mean? Do you really need to be out roaming around with your camera in hand every single day?

No. You just need to be engaged with your photography practice every single day. There are days when I take no photographs at all. But on those days I still carry a camera with me everywhere I go. Not only for "just in case images" but also because having it on my shoulder or in my hand normalizes having the camera always with me. It doesn't feel awkward of out of place. Always there for an unexpected gift from the muses or the gods of photography. In a way I stop thinking about it. In the same way that I don't dwell on which socks or which pants I'm wearing. As long as I am wearing pants....

Some days I don't go out walking with a camera but instead stay in the office post processing images I've shot the day before or the day before that. I don't subscribe to the practice of photographing for days and days until I fill up a memory card and then going through the images at a much later date; in a large batch. I want to make the post processing as tightly connected to the actual photography as possible so I have a keen memory of what the conditions were like when I was making the images. I want to remember how it felt to line up the composition. I want to remember what kinds of corrections I made to the camera's suggested exposure and color balance. The near contemporaneous feedback loop reinforces the learning; the distillation process. When too much time goes by your motivation for making the shots gets hazier; more opaque. You forget the choices you  made and why you made them.

But on days when I am in the office, at my desk, looking at images, seeing just how far I can push the ISO on a ten year old digital camera before the files start to fall apart, I still have a camera on the desk in front of me --- or just by my side. Almost as if it's engaged in the process but mostly so I can reference in my mind how I was holding the camera while shooting and how I might improve my technique.

All of the images here are from and evening walk done two days ago. I'd just finished up a portrait session in the studio and said "goodbye" to the client. I noticed it was five o'clock and I wanted to go for a walk to make some evening/twilight shots with one of the Leica M (240) cameras. I'd read often lately about how "weak" that camera model is with high ISOs and dark environments. "Too noisy!" seemed to be the consensus. But I'm thickheaded and obdurate and I like to see things for myself. Everyone seems to have different tolerances for things like noise and, even more importantly, the post production environment has also changed radically. Noise reduction with A.I. is nearly unimaginably good. So I wanted to see for myself if ISO 3200 could look good. How about ISO 6400? And, like a tolerance for heat or loud noise, everyone's tolerance for visual noise artifacts and patterns in pictures is equally individual. I know how much I want to tolerate and I know it's different than even my peers whose judgements I respect. 

I also want to know how the files look because I want to make sure that when I work for clients the camera and post production combined are adequate to satisfy even people who are more sensitive than I am about noise. It's part of the ongoing testing we should all do if our aim is to satisfy a paying client.

When I really want to see what a camera like the M Leica can do I pair it with a very high performance lens. Right now I'm testing the SL and SL2 noise performance in conjunction with Lightroom's "Denoise" control in the develop module. I'm using what I believe is my highest performance lens for that system (that I own....) and that's the new (to me) Carl Zeiss Milvus 50mm lens. But on the M cameras the lens of choice for me is the Voigtlander 50mm APO Lanthar f2.0. So that's the lens I chose for this foray. 

When I went out to walk and see what the M camera, lens and Lightroom can do I made judgements about the way I habitually work with this camera. Neither camera nor lens has image stabilization. So I normally shoot the camera with a 50mm lens at a shutter speed of 1/125th of a second or above. On this particular evening I was trying to stick to 1/250th of second for as long as I could, riding the ISO dial up as the light dropped. In this way I more or less eliminated the effects of camera shake in my post shooting evaluations of the resulting images. Too easy for the mind to conflate a technical shortcoming for a camera shortcoming so why not eliminate some variables.

Some people have trouble with rangefinder focusing. On this subject one thing I can say that might help is to make sure your rangefinder windows (two on the front) are very clean and don't "feature" fingerprints on the glass. Also make sure your viewfinder window on the rear of the camera is equally clean. Adding "organic soft focus filters" via finger prints or nose grease to the glass is a quick way to screw up your ability to find good focus. Clean is good. 

I practiced rangefinder focusing with various Leica M film cameras for nearly a decade before switching to digital cameras. The techniques came back pretty quickly when I started shooting with the M cameras again. And sparkling, clean glass is a benefit I well remember from the film days. 

What I found when I opened up all the files today is that I can still hand hold a camera from 1/60th of a second upward fairly steadily if it's got a 50mm lens (or wider) on the front. I learned that the Leica M sensor from 2012 has shadow noise once you crest 1600 on the ISO setting. But I also learned with this morning's experiments in post processing that Lightroom's Denoise has the superpower to clean up the noise without any deleterious effects on sharpness or detail. Score!!! That makes ten+ year old Leica rangefinder cameras still eminently usable right now, in 2024. 

While shooting I appreciated that the optical viewfinder seems superior in low light to EVFs because it doesn't slow down (refresh rate with slower shutter speeds) or get noisy or jumpy. It's as bright and clear as your vision allows. I learned once again how much I like bright line finders that allow me to see what is coming into the frame but not quite there yet. I also like how the frame, with information outside the frame, helps me to fine tune composition. 

There is a danger in reading information about cameras from people who very rarely actually practice it in real life, and with a collection of modern cameras. You end up getting mostly information the writer gleaned from whenever his formative years with a camera happened. If that was in the film days and the writer was mostly a 35mm film shooter you'll be getting information that's a bit stale and not as relevant to modern cameras and modern shooting techniques as you might want. We don't have to fill the frame to avoid cropping (a la the slide film days). With 50 or 60 megapixels, or even 24, you can certainly crop with near reckless abandon.

When I read something written about a camera I want to know if the writer is still an active photographer. Does he or she get out and use cameras on a regular basis? Every day? Every week? Once a month? What are his or her priorities. Are they tied to a "real" job or do they have time to experiment with their cameras at all hours of the day and in all kinds of weather? Have they shot ten thousand frames with the camera they are writing about or are they just giving you their impression after the first hundred or so frames? 

So much of what we learned while shooting films is like ancient lore. Passed down from photo generation to photo generation and venerated by some even as it becomes increasingly obsolete. When I think about this I think about car tinkerers who've never learned how to work on fuel injection systems but who can talk to you about carburetors for hours and hours. Folks who imagine that purists only drive with manual transmissions. Computer veterans who wish we still used punch cards. Swimmers who think the waterline should hit you mid-forehead while swimming freestyle. Doctors who still think stomach ulcers are caused by stress and cured by bland diets. 

When I write about cameras here it's because I've found out interesting things about them while using them nearly every day. Looking back at one week in 2023 I note that I shot 2,300 images with a Leica M in Montreal. Another 970 images during the same week with a Leica Q. You learn a great deal more when you use a camera for hours and hours a day, for days at a time. And you learn even more when you sit down and post process your take all the while experimenting with the new features and controls that your software programs deliver to you. 

Brookes Jensen has some interesting ideas that stand the test of time. He believes in self assigning projects. He means that you might decide on a subject matter that you really love and you plan a project around that. He also believes in setting finite goals. He would suggest that you attempt (and succeed) in setting your project goal to make 100 portfolio prints of your chosen subject. Not work prints but finished prints you'd be proud to show off. He wrote about that over 20 years ago and I'd modernize it a bit by saying 100 perfect portfolio images that you could place in an online gallery and share with friends and colleagues. 

Either way projects represent a big investment in time and a requirement to knuckle down and do the work. But at every step of the way he suggests you will learn new and valuable skills and new ways of looking at the work you want to make in the future. And that's very valuable.

I have a friend who got an English B.A. from a very prestigious school. He's a writer for a large corporation. He's always wanted to write a book. His whole sense of self as a writer revolves around the idea that he will one day write a book. He stops and starts on book projects but never completes them. 

Finally, after I wrote five books in a row, over the course of two years,  for Amherst Media, and then a 465 page novel, he asked me how. "How do you get through the process of writing a book?" It's all very simple. You get assigned or assign yourself to write a book. You make an outline. Then you work relentlessly on the damn book until you finish it. No excuses. Doesn't matter if it's great or not as long as you finish it. Once you finish it you can make it better. You can edit. You can hire an editor. You can revise to your heart's content. But to my mind it's the resolute act of just finishing one that makes everything work. Once you've done your first book the second is easier and the third is easier still. It's like a photo project. The big thing is to set a goal and follow through until you've completed the goal. 100 prints? Cool. And once you've gotten to those 100 great prints you can take a deep breath and see if there are better images out there that you can also include or swap in. But it's meeting the initial goal that's the most important step. 

Brookes Jensen says that setting the goal and achieving it opens up so many more opportunities. And he's not talking about doing this for professionals. He's talking about hobbyists doing projects and setting goals. It gives your work the structure you might find most helpful.

For now my immediate goal is to explore the limits of my rangefinder cameras. My overriding goal is to shoot enough beautiful portraits to fill a book. And then to write the book. I think I can figure that out.

The M Leica is a fun camera. It's not the all purpose camera that most people might look for but as an alternative to a work camera it is a heck of a lot of fun. 

Question? How do you write a blog everyday? Um. Sit down and write your blog... That was easy.

exactly as I saw the scene.

Nuts and bolts. What I'm using for flash photography right now.

the round flash heads of the Godox V1 are perfect for use with a bunch of accessories, like these barn doors, which attach via magnets.

I've used a number of "plug in the wall" electronic flashes in my various studios over the years. These have included: Novatron (dangerous!), Comet, Elinchrom, Norman, Profoto and Godox. There are a few others but they were largely inconsequential. It seems like a lot of brands but you have to consider that these purchases were spread over 44 years. And flash technology kept changing; getting better and safer from time to time. I was probably most invested in Profoto having owned their battery powered Acute Packs for location work, their monolights, and their studio packs. 

Last year, as both part of my desire to radically downsize my lighting inventory and my desire to use more and more LED, continuous lighting, I donated all of my non-battery powered flashes to several deserving and underfunded students who had recently attended photo courses at the local community college. I figured they would need a leg up in today's photo business world. And I was tired of carrying the stuff around a looking for convenient wall sockets. And those fat, 50 foot extension cords I sometimes needed are too much to carry around from location to location on a long shooting day. So, now any flash that needs to plug into a wall socket to operate is long gone. And I'm happy about it.

I am currently following the advice I gave when I wrote my first book way, way back in 2007. I am using portable, lightweight, battery powered flashes. Again. Instead of traditional, big flashes. The most powerful of which is a 200 watt second model. And none of the lights I now use cost more than about $250. I worried I might need more features and power but that worry has passed as I've pressed the lights into service over and over again. 

There was one project that I did in 2018 that really showed me just how much smaller, lighter flashes could improve the experience of traveling to make commercial photographs. It was a multi-day project for Phillips and Jordan which required lots and lots of travel to smaller, rural areas across the USA; mostly on small commuter jets. Once at the location starting point I'd transfer my luggage and gear to a rental car and head for remote areas or wilderness areas where no convenient A/C power existed. Having battery powered units was just a rational choice. 

That Fall I did about 32 flights, shifted in and out of 16 different rental cars, and used just two big flashes (backed up by two V1 flashes). One of which got destroyed on the last day of the project. On every one of the legs of the trip I was solely responsible for transporting the gear every step of the way. A financially sound reason to really work on staying in good physical shape....

The lights I used were the Godox AD200 flashes. They look like black, elongated bricks and can be fitted with a normal looking fresnel head (the standard), a bare bulb flash tube, or a round flash head with a built-in modeling lamp. The flashes work well in conjunction with the Godox line of inexpensive flash triggers and to make them even more effective they are powered by ample lithium ion batteries. With an inexpensive adapter the units can be configured to accept Bowens mount modifiers such as soft boxes or large reflectors. There is even an adapter which allows for two of the units to be combined and work as one more powerful unit (400 watt seconds). And that adapter has its own modeling lights which are much brighter than the ones in the standard heads. (No modeling light capability otherwise with the bare bulb flash tubes).

The flashes yield about 400 full power flashes from a fully charged battery and additional batteries are available for around $60. Seems that two batteries per day per unit are just about enough power to get one through a busy, busy day of shooting outside.

In spite of the fact that the AD200s worked well on locations I kept using traditional wall socket powered flashes in the studio because I needed/wanted strong enough modeling lights to help even the most incompetent auto focus cameras achieve quick enough and accurate enough focusing. I loved those 100 to 150 watt modeling lights. Once I bought the "two units in one" adapter I decided that the modeling light it created was good enough and I could finally achieve separation from cords and the artifacts of the last century. 

I have nine portraits to make in the next week or so. Each one a radiologist from a very large medical practice. All in the studio. I first thought about using the Nanlite LED fixtures I like for continuous light but decided that I'd rather have the subject freezing feature of flash for this very straight forward project instead. 

For this project I am using five lights in total. Six if you count the one strong LED I'm bouncing off the ceiling in order to raise the overall brightness in the studio to get subjects' eyes to stop down a bit and show more color around the pupils. My main light is actually two of the newer model of Godox's AD200, the AD200 Pro, in the dual flash adapter. I chose that pairing because I want to take advantage of the brighter modeling light the combination adapter provides. 

That light combination is used in a Westcott 32 inch Rapid Box (a small octagonal soft box). One of the older AD200s is being used to light up the shadow side of the face and is modified with a soft, 45 inch umbrella. 

I am photographing the doctors in front of a white, seamless background so I don't need to add a back light or hair light but I do like using two more crossed flashes to evenly illuminate the background. I have a pair of Godox V1 flashes (the baby brothers of the AD200s) which have the same kind of round heads and can be used with the same accessories as those of the round heads of the bigger flashes. I've got these set up with small, magnetically attached barn doors on them.

All the lights are controlled by a small and very inexpensive radio trigger, also from Godox. 

I'm always looking for an aperture of f5.6 on the subject's face (two stops less on the shadow side) and f5.6+1/3 on the background. This puts the power requirements for the main lights at 1/8th power, the fill light at 1/64th power and the background lights at 1/32nd power. Basically, it means we could do thousands of flashes without needing to recharge --- if we wanted to. 

While I have signed on to do nine portraits they are not arriving in one efficient cluster. I am scheduling their time with me individually. One on Thursday afternoon, another on a Saturday, etc. I want to maintain consistency in the project but I also like to move the lights out of the way and experiment on other projects. What I decided to do, in this case, is to mark the floor with blue painter's tape at each light or subject position with a notation about the power setting, etc. This way I'll be able to move the lights to one side and do different portraits for myself using the new LED fixtures. It makes putting the portrait lights back into position highly repeatable. More efficient. To put it crassly it makes the whole project more cost effective. More profitable.

I've also narrowed down to one camera and one lens. Of course it's the Leica SL because its 24 megapixel raw files are easier to handle than the bigger files from the SL2 or the medium format camera. And the files look wonderful. I'm pairing that camera with the Leica 24-90mm lens because it's pretty much flawless and at f5.6 the details derived are endless.

I like C-Stands in the studio. They look cool and they are STURDY. 

This is a Godox V1 with a flash reflector attached via magnets.

The flash reflector is meant to combine direct flash with flash bouncing off a 

white ceiling but I use it here as a convenient light blocker for the background. 

I don't want any direct spill on the subjects. 

The older AD200 (original, classic, collectors item) into a 45 inch, white umbrella.

Two AD200 Pro light with bare bulb tubes firing together into the Rapid Box.

SL plus X1T trigger plus 24-90mm zoom. 

Fill light. Love umbrellas. So cheap but so useful.

A different view of the combined AD200Pro lights.

handsome model with Sigma fp camera and 45mm lens. 

Had lunch with an engineer friend (and fellow swimmer) today. We talked about swimming and travel experiences but mostly a lot about Epi-graphene tech and how it relates to semiconductor development. The future arrives right on schedule. Now --- who will get Eli-graphene based semiconductors to market first? And what is their stock symbol?

Didn't get around to the idea that consciousness all stems from one universe wide quantum wave. That's next time...

 

Almost forgot about this video. Seems working with gimbals can be fun. All done with Panasonic GH and G cameras. A blast from back in 2020. Just a quick retrospective.

 https://vimeo.com/462396471

Video still frame. Chanel as Tina Turner.

I'm not doing video production these days. It's too time consuming to do right. And I guess my interest is more focused on enjoying photography. But I do really like some of the projects we did just before and right after the onset of the pandemic. This one in particular is a favorite because I think the footage looks good in spite of having to work quickly, without a video crew and with minimal lighting assist from the theater vis-a-vis stage lighting. Shot back in late Summer of 2020.

Currently parceling out microphones, mixers, etc. to young filmmakers. That's fun too.

One more small collection of color images from the Q2 before I move on to something else.

Unlike some photographers who only drag their cameras out when someone is paying them to do so. Or when they are reviewing cameras for cold, hard cash. I take a camera with me every time I leave the house or the studio. I am a firm believer that muscle memory, hand skills and menu memory are as perishable as mayonnaise on a hot day and that just having a camera in your hands is photo-therapeutic. If you don't have a camera in your hands more often than every other week I'll just assume that you don't really like to make photographs you have just unwittingly volunteered to store depreciating assets at your house. 

I take a camera with me in the car to swim practice. Today I couldn't make up my mind so I brought along two. One was the fp and the other was the Q2. After practice, after a shower, after a convivial conversation with a few fellow swimmers in the parking lot of our club, I went over to the car and selected the Q2. I walked back into the pool area and spent a few minutes trying to find some new angles or new ways of shooting the pool that are different than what I've done before. Just a few minutes there. And just a few minutes of photographing blue sky when I arrived at the coffee shop a little while later. If I'm going to get my teeth cleaned I take smaller camera, like a Leica CL with a tiny lens. And if I'm going out photographing a street festival I take a bigger camera and a lens that autofocuses. 

Lately, when I'm heading out with no photographic agenda I'll just take along the camera that's both highly comfortable to walk with (not too bulky, not too heavy, not at all complicated) and also one with the potential to make superb images with very little effort. More often than not that camera is a Q2. I've gotten past my early leeriness of the 28mm focal length and have grown comfortable composing there but I've also gotten over the prejudice that using the in-camera cropping feature is cheating. Yesterday, for example, all those black and white images were done with the camera set to show me 35mm framelines, and, since I was shooting Jpegs the camera made the files with that focal length burned in. 

The Q2 has proven itself to be an exemplary tool when it comes to color discrimination, WB consistency and overall sharpness and resolution. It's small and easy to handle. It's light enough so that the shoulder strap doesn't dig into my shoulder after hours of walking and hanging out. And it's very much weather resistant so that reduced my anxiety if I'm going out and I know, or I think I know, that it might rain/sleet/snow/dust storm. 

I know it's heresy and sacrilege but usually, for non-commercial work, I use the camera in Jpeg mode. I choose the highest quality setting offered. Sometime I even opt for smaller file sizes! On purpose!!! I know that I will end up using a fraction of the images I take and mostly I will only use them once or twice. On Instagram or here on the VSL blog. The idea that everything you shoot has to be captured in uncompressed raw files is just nuts. And I think it creates a mental straight jacket that prevents happy, creative thought. Some stuff just isn't destined to be archived for eternity. Or even for next week. And we get to decide. 

But the reality is that the Jpeg files are mighty good. And if you are starting with a relatively lightly compressed Jpeg files from a nearly 50 megapixel file I can pretty much guarantee that if your technical technique is up to snuff you'll pretty much be able to do anything you want to with those files. No sweat. I mean, come on! Just about every device on which we see our photographs functions in a 6 or 8 bit color space. And usually the hosting venue is viciously compressing our work anyway. 

I know that the building images just below were taken in the afternoon, before our arctic cold front, because the light is coming from the west. I really liked seeing the reflections of the buildings the lake in front of me. It's a fun effect. I usually set my camera to the little sun icon during daylight hours on clear days. The color temperature isn't changing on the objects I photograph but sometimes, when using Auto WB a predominate color in the frame can mess with the overall white balance. Not so if you take the time to set the correct WB. 

I have eight other cameras I can use but I keep coming back again and again to the compact Q2 for casual photography. And I like the results more each time I come back home. One day I will probably succumb to the lure of the Q3. There's stuff in that camera that intrigues me. But for now the Q2 is checking all the boxes. 

The new Google building. Completed just in time for the layoffs. 

I've walked and run the trail around this downtown lake for over 50 years now. 

I'll keep running and walking it until my knees protest. So far they haven't made

any complaints. I like that there are multiple courses based on which bridge you

want to use in order to cross over and make a circle back to your starting point.

There is a 2.9 mile loop. A 4.2 mile loop. A 5.5 mile loop. A 7.5 mile loop and then a 

longer one, the distance of which I don't remember off the top of my head. I'm a swimmer so 

I'm happy enough with the 4.2 mile loop. I call it cross training. 

On the same walk I came back on the downtown side of the trail and cut through

my favorite area on my way to get coffee. The folks at this boutique are taking it up 

a notch. All fun.  This frame at 28

this frame with the 50mm crop enabled on the camera. 

I used to think that a high resolution sensor would get way too noisy as the ISO 

setting on the camera went up. This was shot at ISO 12500 and I think it still looks 

pretty good. Especially after I set the noise reduction in the menu from low to standard. 

I'll try to move on from the Q2. When I do portraits for work it's almost always

with much longer lenses and much bigger cameras. I have yet to do a paying assignment 

portrait with the Q2 but I'm ready to follow Paul Reid's example and start attempting some

art portraits with the camera.

Paul Reid on YouTube

Paul Reid on taking your camera everywhere!!!