Finally loving the 28mm focal length. It took a rangefinder camera to convince me.

Something about looking through the little window and trying to see the frame lines makes it all a lot more fun.

*******

Can you believe I've been writing blog posts for over 15 years now? That's just crazy!!!

I wish I had all those hours back... Think of all the network TV shows I could have watched instead...From "Gunsmoke"  to "the Big Bang Theory". And all the sports broadcasts I could have watched while drinking American beer. Even shows for sports that are stupid and hopelessly, well, stupid. Like baseball and football and other stuff manufactured to keep people happy and docile....

Ah well. I've missed so much

 

Odd Combinations. Doing some portraits with an "Odd Couple." The huge but amazing Zeiss Milvus 50mm f1.4 and the tiny, featherweight, cropped frame Leica CL.

 Toss in a lens adapter for extra size and weight. What you end up with is a nice portrait length (75mm) equivalent on a small body with an image that's mostly sharp at the maximum aperture. That, and stares from people who think the combo looks a little insane. This lens adds back all the heft you lose going with the APS-C body.

Try it. It's fun.

Travel can broaden the mind. Most of the time it just gives you sore feet...

Tree. Garden. Montreal. Old Town. 

 

Currently competing in the World Curmudgeon Contest. Trying to decide just how often a good rant might be called for. Or "how we used to do everything better in the good old days."

I use myself too often as a stand in for clients. Judging by the type on the badge neck strap I must have been at Austin Radiological Associates setting up for a portrait session with a radiologist. I seem to have dozens of images, done over decades, of me testing my lighting by using the self-timer on a camera and me as a model. Only after everything is set and tested do we get started with the real talent. 

No one likes to wait around while you tweak.

For the ultimate in curmudgeon-ness it seems one needs...  

I'll stop right there. 

 

Coffee. To go.

 

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 got something to say? do it here

I went to a V.I.P. reception for a photography show at the West Chelsea Contemporary gallery today and fell in love with a Ron Galella print....

This is not it. This (above) is an original Kirk Tuck image...

I like the gallery but usually, almost always, they mostly show paintings and some modern sculpture. Tonight was the V.I.P. opening for their first Austin, all photography show. Local photographer, Greg Davis, (National Geo regular!) was there and giving a talk. Much of the photography was at a very high level but some work is not for everyone. Greg's was really wonderful. A very classic sensibility. 

Prices ranged from $550 for 8x10 inch prints of celebrities by Ron Galella,  to $75,000 for a large constructed mural of nature. Most of the work was priced between $4500 and $35,000. 

I found a wall full of black and white prints by Galella and there were three or four I really wanted to buy. There was a print of Avedon with Kate Moss, a print of Mick Jagger with John Lennon and Yoko Ono and a print of a young Woody Allen with an even younger Diane Keaton. All wonderful stuff.

But the print that B. and I really appreciated was a close up of Andy Warhol and Bianca Jagger. A really nice, tight study of two incredible faces. I decided I liked it enough to actually splash out the cash and buy it. I'll probably go back and buy the Woody Allen print as well. 

This is the 3rd print I've bought from contemporary photographers in the last six months. My acquisition of a Wyatt McSpadden print was the episode that opened the dam. Which all begs the question: Do you collect current or recent photography? What metric do you use to decide what you'll pay money for and. what you won't? 

Since I'm also a photographer I don't want to display other people's art in the "public" rooms of my house because I don't want guests to confuse other people's work as mine. Instead I've got one room which I mostly use for writing and that room is the designated photographic display area. That's where I put prints I've collected.  Including a print I bought 40 years ago from an artist who was displaying his black and white prints on the sidewalk in front of MOMA in NYC. Seems appropriate to make one room of the house a gallery.

Have you recently bought work you admired? Where do you display it? 

I don't buy art prints as an investment so I only buy stuff I really like. You might have a different point of view and if so I'd love to read it. 

I'll pick up the print and a C.O.A. (certificate of authentication) at the end of the show; sometime in late April. After that B. and I plan to make a trip to San Francisco to the De Young museum to see the Irving Penn retrospective. That should be exciting. So much great art to look at. And it's everywhere. 

If you are in Austin be sure to drop by the West Chelsea Contemporary Art Gallery and see Greg Davis' work in the show. It's certainly worth a visit. 

All good here. Fun to buy interesting art. 

 

Edited: I was transfixed with her eyes and I forgot to measure the xxxxx with my xxxxx. How will I know if my image is subjectively xxxxxxx? All humor expunged. Now safe for everyone. Now much less value.

 

Ah. The joys of acquiring a new computer. Especially one which comes complete with a xxxxxxx.

this is my former assistant, Renae. We were working on an

annual report for a company called, Concero. We had finished

our projects for the day and were just goofing around. 

If you regularly read the blog you know I bought everyone's favorite photographic accessory this week; a new laptop computer. A machine for event work, writing books at coffee shops, reading the Wall Street Journal over breakfast and... especially for writing impromptu blog posts. Like this one. 

I tend to do my "real" work on a 27 inch iMacPro. The rich set of ports allows me to connect five or six 12. Terabyte HDs or other fun peripherals. The big Retina screen makes fine editing on photos fun and easy. So, why do I always have a laptop?

Let's count the ways: 

1. An up-to-date laptop makes a good back-up computer should anything happen to the big, desk bound studio system. It's easy as pie to pull one or two of the big SSD drives from the main machine, put them onto the laptop desktop and continue working on projects. Both computers are running the same Adobe Photo Bundles. You can have two machines with the software at one time. ( A menu pops up if you have it loaded on two machines and try to open one of the programs on a third machine. You get to decide on which two machines your license allows). 

2. In the early days of online galleries and services everything ran faster with desktop computers. Laptops tended to be underpowered and slower. The internet (at least in most hotel rooms) was much slower and much less reliable. So, if you were covering a big, multi-day event and wanted to back up a days work to an online service you could pretty much count on spending a huge part of your evening nursing the connection instead of sleeping soundly. Now the laptop on my writing desk in front of me is multiple times faster than the top of the line desktop machine I bought back in 2018. I can take it to most major hotels, get on line quickly and send files in a short amount of time. So, the speed and portability are major pluses. 

3. A fourteen inch, Retina quality screen is big enough for any kind of writing I want to do and this means I can continue with my practice of writing books at coffee shops. The first five photo books I wrote were written, mostly, at the neighborhood Starbucks or Medici Café. I thrive in busy environments and have little patience for quiet and solitude. Laptop to the rescue. 

4. Power independence. I was working an event job at a big hotel and I was working under a crazy short deadline. There was a lightning storm. The power went out across the property. Not so for my laptop. I finished the job, created a hotspot with my phone (cellular service) and uploaded all my work to my client with no delays. During the big freeze back in 2021 we lost power at the house and studio for about eight hours. Ben and I worked through the event on our laptops. Since I was a Boy Scout my laptop was fully charged when the power stopped. Ben was not so lucky. But, of course, I had an Anker battery pack and was able to give his 13" MacBook Pro a full charge --- with plenty of power left over. We both completed our work for the day without further stress.

5. The nature of the appliance, with all the necessary equipment built in, including a very nice and well thought out keyboard, means no more "research", foot dragging, or excuses for efficient workflow. So easy and straightforward even a small child can figure them out.

6. Look like a hero. Pass down your replaced laptop to a struggling niece or nephew, if you have one. They'll likely appreciate your full spec'd out previous machine. Especially if you've recently replaced the internal battery. 

7. It's always great to have the laptop around at breakfast. You can do most of your work schedule before that second cup of coffee and have the rest of the day to play with other stuff. 

8. On photo shoots your Leica SL2 can unload files to connected storage (an assortment of Samsung T5 SSD peripherals) giving you extra back-up. You can also control your camera and do tethered shooting projects via the new USB4 ports. Nice. 

I'm sure you know all of this but I'm just settling in with the new machine and still in that stage when I marvel at how much faster everything is. 

On a different note: Prevention. I hit the dermatologist last week for my every six month total skin check. All good. Complete cleaning and dental check at my dentist's office yesterday. No mouth cancer, no cavities, no broken crowns and no gum disease. Clean bill of dental health. Blood pressure also taken in both locations. Each time about 115/70. Both practices asked if I was on BP meds. Nope. 

Hit the optometrist today and my prescription is running exactly as it was a year ago. No signs of glaucoma, macular degeneration or cataracts. Ordered a new set of high precision progressive glasses. Never hurts to have new frames and a back up pair of work glasses. Beside, insurance mostly covers it all. 

Well, that's all I've got today. Getting ready to go to a gallery opening this evening. Should be fun.

Did you guys know that there's a big Irving Penn Retrospective at the De Young Museum in San Franscisco? There I think until June 19th. I think B. and I will go at the end of April and try to miss the giant American vacation onslaught. Love Penn's work. 

More photography, less philosophizing. That's our current mantra. 

This entire post was done just as an excuse to use one of my favorite shots of Renae...

 

I got a new xxxxxxxx!!! It came already attached, programmed and working well on a new MacBook Pro !!!! It even has a fingerprint reader !!!!!

the path to the center of downtown.

It's been a mellow week. Well, except for this morning when I drove over to FedEx and picked up my new computer. That seemed exciting for me. Something new.  I set it next to my old computer and asked them both to transfer over the applications and various files from the old to the new. The machines got to work immediately. It was fun to see them cooperate so well. Chatting back and forth and sharing so nicely. About 26 minutes later the new machine was up and ready. I went to lunch with the client for my upcoming project and let the new MacBook Pro settle in and get its newly arrived files well sorted. 

My client and I had about two minutes of logistics to discuss but we both thought it would be fun to meet for lunch at Jack Allen's Kitchen rather than trying to jabber away on Zoom. I hate Zoom calls; avoid them like the plague. Which, oddly enough, initially gave rise to Zoom.

My instructions for the three days of the show were as follows: "You know what you're doing. Just make nice photographs we can use for marketing. Like last time." That was about it. We spent the rest of lunch catching up and sharing stories. The spicy mango, sautéed shrimp and avocado salad on a bed of greens I had was great. The client picked up the tab for lunch. Bonus. Business well settled I headed back home to see how our newest thinking machine was adapting to my secondary office and to grab an SD card filled with images to import into Lightroom. Testing, testing! 100 images imported and processed into the catalog in about 7 seconds. That's a good start. 

I tried out the Lightroom DeNoise A.I. on a big raw file and it processed the image about five times faster than my big iMacPro,  the one loaded with tons of RAM and a fast server level Xeon processor. That speed and throughput will come in handy. The screen is remarkably sharp and the colors on the screen are nicer even than on my big, 27 inch monitor. All of this will certainly come in handy at the upcoming corporate event. The new laptop even gets email.

Several people chimed in to ask if I compared this machine with a similarly spec'd MacBook Air and I have to say that I did but I like the additional, full sized HDMI port and really, really appreciate the reappearance of a built-in SD card reader. The difference in price was about the price of a nice dinner at a decent restaurant. If I don't skimp on the tip.

But here's the really cool thing : The computer came bundled with a free keyboard. It's already installed. It's right there on the laptop and has all the keys I would ever need to write anything from an email to a novel. The keys are even backlit. And they feel great. I can already feel the improved keyboard starting to take away some of the stiffness I felt in my right ankle this week. It's an absolute miracle. 

How fast is the new machine? Well, before I even started with the post processing I was already through it. It's like my Apple computer is transforming the basic laws of physics. 

As long as we're on the topic of gear I thought I'd mention that I got my flash + Leica camera stuff all figured out. You know, for event stuff. A friend had an extra Leica SF58 flash unit. He used it once in a while and he's kind of compulsive about keeping his flash capacitors well formed, and the flash looks mostly brand new. He let me know that he was now using Profoto portable flashes and their hot shoe trigger and felt like older gear was just piling up. I asked what he wanted $$$-wise for the flash and he just rolled his eyes and handed it over. 

The flash is exactly what I was looking for. Powerful flash output. TTL and Auto flash in one package. Dedicated to Leica stuff --- like the digital Ms and the SL family of cameras.  Once a solution presents itself all research and Marianas Trench-level deep dives disappear and I feel I can get on with my life. Now thinking about more mundane things like what suit and tie to wear to a reception tomorrow. 

A number of you were very, very concerned about my "powdered" camera from Sunday. The camera and lens that celebrated Holi and got covered with dusty powder. I've used the perfectly cleaned camera and lens non-stop since Sunday and I'm happy to report that the are in perfect condition and doing their jobs just as they did before their initiation into dirty work. You can stop worrying now. Please!

Austin has gotten a lot of rain this Spring and the whole city is bright green, dark green, mellow green and happy green. Our trees are looking great and the grass is rich and healthy without any assist from sprinklers. Hope this holds out for the year. Last year almost wiped out the trees. Sustained temperatures over 100° and no rain for months at a time is.... a trying experience for trees. I was especially concerned about my Japanese maples. They are more delicate than the live oaks. 

That's all I have to report right now. Stay safe out there but stop baby-ing your cameras. They really do want to feel useful. Honest.

 The back alley path to Mañana Coffee. 

The Khushfest Gallery. From downtown Austin. No mannequins were harmed in the making of this gallery. A Leica came close to peril.

 

Next time I'll just take a phone.

Ready for the after party.

When I left the house I had no clue that I'd stumble across an event which celebrates Indian culture, in Republic Park. I just grabbed a camera and lens that seemed to be appropriate for testing out my new VF-2 EVF. But I did find the park, and the event, and within minutes I had passed my initiation and my camera and self were covered with brightly colored powders. Once you've been "dusted" you might as well just let your hair down and photograph to your heart's delight. I did. Everyone was kind and in good humor. The powders were flying. The D.J. was blasting music. People were dancing, eating food from various authentic vendors and generally having a great time. 

The camera, and my clothes, cleaned up just fine. It was really just f8 (or f11) and be there. And that's when it's the most fun. Glad I didn't have time to "prepare" and fret over what gear to take. Anything would have been just fine.