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...

A new feature in PhotoShop. It's called Lens Blur. It seems to work....

I like to keep up with new features in PhotoShop. I wrote a while back about Adobe's introduction of DeNoise A.I. which cleans up noisy files without messing too much with the detail and overall look of files. The current limitation of DeNoise is that it only works with raw files. That's okay if you know that before starting a job on which you pretty much know that things are going to get noisy. 

Today I played around with a new feature called, Lens Blur. I was able to choose a Jpeg file this time and the feature worked well. It's just a grab shot of an advertising person on location, lost in thought. There was foreground stuff and background stuff and a nice looking subject to work with. I used the default lens blur setting but there is a slider that you can use to get more or less effect. This is at the halfway point on the slider. While the image might be improved if I spend some time with it and work on opening up shadows, etc. I was very impressed with how well the software detected the sharp intention in the front and then interpreted where the background blur was needed. The automation certainly saved a lot of selection time which might have been spent outlining the product boxes to the left as well as the bottles and stuff. 

This was a handheld shot, done with a Fuji GFX 50Sii and the "kit" lens; the 35-70mm f4.5-5.6. the image started life as a Jpeg and was shot at ISO 2000. I'll be using this feature a lot...

Why is Kirk posting so much? Hmmm. Well, we're having the house painted, inside and out. B. is out of town so I'm nominally in charge. Occasionally I have to spot check to make sure a custom paint color match actually matches. And I have no idea what the schedule for the painters will wind up being, day to day. So I meet them in the morning, go to swim practice, come back and check in, go out and find myself some tacos for breakfast, and coffee (since my kitchen is shrouded with layers of protective plastic sheeting...), come back and return calls, send bids, write a blog and then go out on a search for lunch. Today it was Whole Foods. Veggies. Some fish. Nice hot bar at the flagship store. Kind of a test kitchen for the far flung empire. Then I come back and check in with the painters. Admire the work. Ask a few obligatory questions and then head back into the office for more calls, returnable emails and, yes, more blogging. Stuff comes up. Now waiting for B.'s return from her adventure in San Antonio. Might have to book a hotel room tonight. The painting isn't over here for today and we're heading toward 6 pm. Pretty sure I don't want to sleep immersed in the paint fumes...

So, blogging. It's fun. It's easy. There's generally always something to discuss. Just thought I'd let you know.  

Power Banks. Power at your disposal.

 I first discovered power banks (rechargeable lithium battery packs generally used to recharge phones, laptops and other devices when one is out and about with no access to wall plugs) way back in 2013 when I was beta testing a power-hungry camera from Samsung for a week or so in and around Berlin. The digital camera had a five inch screen on the back and it also ran a relatively power-hungry version of an Android operating system. Low battery indications were becoming frequent and frustrating and sometimes the camera would choose to shutdown just as I lined up an incredible shot in the EVF. At some point one of my minders from Samsung distributed small battery banks for everyone in our little pod of cameras testers. The USB-A banks were capable of recharging the camera batteries (in camera) for one or two resuscitations and that was enough to take the edge off the rapid depletion of juice. We also discovered that we could shoot and charge the cameras at the same time. Albeit slowly.  It was a big revelation in 2013...

In the Fall of 2020 I produced a three hour, online, live broadcast, fund-raising video show for a local theater.  I wanted the show to be a three camera set up and since the "talent" was competent for live theater but not for a live production I wanted the main, center camera set up with a large teleprompter. All three cameras ( Two Panasonic S1 cameras and one Panasonic S1H camera ) Were run into a digital video switcher so our editor could switch between the three camera views on the fly. The two talents were miked with lavaliere microphones and we could also cut away during the show to pre-recorded video performances to spice things up. To aid the flow.

When you are running three cameras in a live production it's pretty critical that all three cameras stay up and running for the duration. Sure, we could watch each camera closely and run over to change the internal camera batteries as needed but that's a "high anxiety" method of production and the chances of failure are high. We chose camera video codecs that would neither overheat nor overtax the cameras and which would not run into program time limitations. 1080p was the perfect choice. 

To make all three cameras run reliably for over three hours I made the decision to outfit each camera (positioned on tripods) with an Anker battery pack of its own. Each battery pack could deliver, through the USB port of the cameras, about 21,000 milliamperes of energy, or about ten times more power than a typical in camera battery. Since the cameras had been used before in video set-ups I was reasonably sure that we would have between six and eight hours of runtime --- if we needed it. At some point we decided to add Velcro to both the battery and a leg of each tripod so the power banks could rest safely very close to the cameras. At the same time a cable with some slack kept the power bank from interfering with horizontal adjustments to each camera on each tripod. 

At the end of the program I breathed a sigh of relief. Everything worked as planned. And, the client was able to raise nearly $300,000 in one evening which was sorely needed in that particular period, in which live theaters were so hard hit. No audience? No income.

That experience was one of several that opened my eyes to the value of having several power banks in the studio inventory. On another occasion, during the big ice storm that hit Texas in 2021 our son was staying with us and was working on a big project for his new employer. He was working from home since the roads were impassable. Everything was going well until the power went out and his laptop slowly ran out of juice. Added to that our A/C powered wifi router was also disabled by the outage. 

Power Banks to the rescue. Ben was able to work through the rest of the day and the power was back on here by morning. As soon as the power came back I recharged the power bank --- just in case. Also, he used his phone to create a wifi hotspot and that sucks down phone power. Power Bank #2 to the rescue. 

My Leica SL2 is rechargeable through its USB but the SLs are not. Nor is the Q2. But I have a NiteCore charge for Leica SCL-4 and 6 batteries and it's USB-c powered. I bring a battery bank and the small charger on every remote location; even if I have a box full of already charged camera batteries. Just a little extra insurance. 

What I would really like is to be able to connect a power bank to my battery powered electronic flashes in order to extend their on time during long shooting days and also to make up for the power lost to their incorporated LED modeling lights. With a bank for each flash one could shoot hundreds and hundreds of full power flash photographs and the only caveat would be to watch for the flashes overheating. 

My older banks are workhorses but the one thing the older ones lack is PD. PD stands for Power Delivery and it's a newer standard that allows PD enabled devices (most current iPhones and some Android phones as well as some Apple and Dell laptops and iPadPros) to charge much more quickly. The bank can deliver a higher constant stream of power to the device without damaging it. My newest power bank, the Anker Power Core 26800 mAh PD unit has, as its name suggests, Power Delivery capability. (This is not an affiliate  link and I don't care if you buy a power bank or not.... suit yourself). 

I hadn't thought much about power banks recently but yesterday I got a call from my favorite Architectural Photographer and we had a conversation about extra batteries for his new 100 megapixel Fuji medium format camera. He uses it attached to an Atomos monitor so he can work quickly and with great mobility while also being about to show work in progress to his clients. Inevitably, in a client-rich environment, the camera gets left on and in review mode for long periods of time. And, of course, the 100 megapixels use more power per shot than a lower resolution camera would. 

We discussed various powering options and I mentioned that I routinely charge the battery in my Fuji GFX 50Sii via the camera's USB port. Sometimes it's helpful when going from location to location on jobs --- or for more fun shoots. It's always worked well for me....

I have a feeling my friend will quickly acquire one, and will equally quickly take my recommendation and rig up some Velcro for quick attachment of the bank to a tripod leg. I just makes sense. 

In this age of questionable power, and also more and more requests for shoots in remote locations, it's inevitable that we'll want ample reserves of solid, camera and light feeding voltage in our kits. And, as a blogger it's (ha! ha!) mission critical for my laptop to be always up and running. You never know when inspiration will strike and you have to be ready. 

So, for running power hungry video cameras to keep mission critical laptops alive and humming; for charging your Apple Watch, for keeping LED lights running as long as you need them, for charging camera batteries at your remote campsite, these devices are really nice to have. 

Nope, they won't run your air conditioners, your washing machine and especially not your clothes driers. They won't power jackhammers, or power saws, or that old set of Broncolor studio strobes that every English blogger relies on for their very existence. But for all the nice, useful and well designed gadgets we tend to fill our live with they can be nearly indispensable.  About $75 with 60 Watt PD charger. 

Just my thoughts on it. Yours will probably be vastly different. Fire away. 

No skyscrapers were defrauded in the making of this photograph at Eeyore's Birthday Party. 

Nor mannequins of any kind....

Fun with photography. It's no longer just a serious undertaking...

 Renae in San Antonio. Winning a stuffed animal. Going to a carnival. Posing for me and my Rollei camera. Having a great time. 

Photography can be so much fun if we don't overthink it. Or turn it into an academic quagmire.

Vegetables and markets. So nice to have them...

I'm a bit jealous of people living in cities like Montreal, Quebec, Canada. In addition to several smaller, neighborhood markets they have food havens, amazing marketplaces, like the Jean-Tolon Market, the Atwater Market and the Maisonneuve Market. For photographers who love to make photographs of lush collections of fresh produce, artisanal pastries, cheeses, sauces and other tasty food, these markets are absolute treasures. On my visits to Montreal, mostly in the Fall season, I've spent full days hopping on the Metro to go from market to market to experience just how visually rich this food culture is. 

Austin has several "farmers" markets but they are a fraction of the size and have an even smaller subset of goods and produce to choose from. 

I have some clients who are decorating some dining and kitchen areas and they've asked me to put together a catalog of fresh food images from all over the place. Multiple mini-installations of images being something they are designing around. Over the years I've been involved in a lot of prepared food shoots but it's such a specialized niche in commercial photography now that I'm deferring to dedicated food pros when clients ask. But that doesn't mean for a moment that I'm not interested in making fun and interesting images of "unprepared" foods. Fresh fruits and veggies. Freshly caught fish. Artfully displayed tarts, cakes and pastries. 

In fact, now that we've replaced floor and are in the middle of an extensive interior and exterior painting project (no. I don't do house painting. Some things are best left to professionals...) B. and I are more and more focused on rehabbing the art around the house and in the studio. What used to be a collage of good, bad and mostly sentimental stuff is slowly surrendering to more tightly curated, and consistently framed and presented, work that we're doing ourselves. For ourselves. 

Our local agriculture isn't as diverse as areas of the midwest and northeast. I like to discover new markets in new places. Makes carrying those cameras around more worthwhile...   

The painting project is humorous. At least it is to me. The painters arrived yesterday morning and started wrapping everything in the interior of the house with sheets of plastic. From floor to ceiling in all the areas in which scrapping, sanding, caulking and painting will take place. The interior of my house is like a weird science fiction movie where the characters have to walk through semi-transparent, semi-opaque curtains of plastic to reach livable areas of the house. The living room, one of the bedrooms and one of the bathrooms are the safe zones. Areas previously painted and not on the docket for this go round. 

When I exited our bedroom and headed to the kitchen to brew the life-giving elixir we call, "Coffee" I had to part the plastic curtains at my bedroom door and walk down a long hallway, the floor and carpeting of which were also cosseted in impermeable wrappings. The kitchen and its appliances existed behind floor to ceiling wrappers as well. 

Our dining room table was moved into the "safe space" of the living room and I sat, wedged into a seat, staring at yet another floor-to-ceiling curtain of ephemeral material. Drinking yet another cup of perfect coffee and pre-visualizing this morning's swim. When I came home from my swim practice I watched our two painters wrap all the exterior trim in preparation for treating the exterior raw cedar with a preservation concoction. The application should take place all afternoon. I remember the same, basic experience from five or so years ago and plan to be somewhere else for the afternoon. I'm not at all acclimated to the fumes. 

The guys have switched to the exterior today because we have a window of good weather dry weather today and tomorrow and when the rain returns they hope to be back inside doing the pretty work. These guys are consummate professionals. They are very, very detail oriented and I guess that's why B. uses them for all our painting projects. She's out of town for two days so I'm marginally in charge of making sure everything goes well. I should sneak out and go to a movie instead....

Currently trying to find exemplary food markets/farmers markets in Texas. Let me know if you know of any and are generous enough to share your favorite spots. 

 I seem to be on a carrot jag today....