Just another perfect Friday. Great Swim. Fun Walk. Booked a multi-day job in Santa Fe for April. Playing around with cameras.

Happy to get to the pool today after yesterday's storm induced shut down of swim practices. Bright sunlight and cool breezes. Topping out at 72° this afternoon...

Got a note from a long, long term client in financial services. Could I photograph a conference in Santa Fe? You betcha. I've done this for the client four or five times and each time I had a blast. Plus, I might be able to meet up with a literary luminary out in Santa Fe for a hot chocolate and a riveting bit of conversation. One can always hope.  Something to look forward to in April. I hope it's back at the El Dorado Hotel. I really like that property for big shows...

Yesterday Henry White spilled the beans about my latest camera purchase. Nothing earth shattering. Just a back up copy of the reliable SL2, the original of which I bought back in 2020 and have used extensively. I'll venture to say that I've taken over 100,000 on the first one. The second one should be here in a matter of days.

With that in mind I decided to go out today and photograph in one particular way that I've enjoyed in the past with this particular camera model. I like to shoot it in the square format because it has enough resolution to make 31+ megapixel files when used that way. It's a camera with massive punctum ability. One of the many other things I like about the SL2 is the way it makes black and white files when set to the high contrast monochrome profile. The images are snappy in the way I liked my film files and the camera does a good job putting detail into skies and contrast into middle tones. Like Tri-X on #3 graded printing paper. And just as nice. Without any post processing intervention from me.  The images below are Jpegs made using the in camera-monochrome HC profile.

On a different topic, I am re-reading a great book of essays about photography. I read this book a couple of years ago but was busy with family matters, logistics during Covid and an ever-shifting business environment and didn't give it the attention it deserved. 

It's entitled "Too True: Essays on Photography" by one of my favorite writers; K.B. Dixon. 

When I read the essays I sometimes find myself nodding in agreement, or chuckling, or even disagreeing but the writing and subject matter always seems to sink a hook in deep. 

Take for example this from an essay about Roland Barthe's book, "Camera Lucida" as it pertains to the idea of "punctum.": 

"If Helen's face launched a thousand ships, Barthe's coinage of "punctum" launched a thousand tortured essays. It was catnip to the explicating classes, a favorite of fledgling poseurs everywhere. I have always had a problem with it -- first as a word, but more importantly as a concept. As a word it has always struck me as unnecessarily ugly. (but then, of course, it may sound sweeter to the classically-educated Francophone's ear than to a State University-educated Anglophone's.) As a concept it has always seemed trite. Early in part one Bathes takes an analytical axe to his subject (the essence of Photography) and divides it into competing parts: Stadium, the ostensible subject of the photograph, the source of viewers "polite" interest, and Punctum, a tangential detail that provokes a personal reaction, that breaks through the complacent response, "an accident that pricks." To me this seems an almost meaningless tautology__ a needlessly obscure way of saying that certain photographs have a certain something about them that makes them special to certain someones-- a commonplace that when draped in Latin becomes a shiny original thing, a breaktakingly sophisticated utterance.

    Find the Punctum became a popular game for a while--a 'Where's Waldo' for academics.  A futile game, I'm afraid."

In less than a page of fun and informed writing Dixon summed up for me my belief that Barthes' entire discussion of Punctum and Stadium is an academic case of "The Emperor has no clothes." 

But the book is so much more. And I'm devouring it like a tasty supreme pizza from Baldinucci's. 

You might enjoy it too. Especially if you've been overly subjected to academic speak and all of its attendant pretension. After all, most academic writing is engineered almost solely to keep out the riff raff rather than to impart meaningful context to art itself. Just sayin.

But on to the pix. They are jam packed with compendium. And sauced with motus. And yes, I took Latin in middle school and high school. Cave Canem. Carpe Diem, and Gung Ho.

(I also took a typing class....)

We had a bit of rain and a lot of wind on Wednesday night into Thursday morning. 

I threw a car cover over one of the Subarus to keep the leaves and dust off it.

Now I'm waiting for it to dry out so I can stuff it back into its storage bag. 

Playing around with the monochrome features in the Leica SL2.

The thing I like about a black and white setting in most of my Leica models 

is how well it replicates sky values. Many cameras go too light on skies and milky 

on highlights. Not here.

Yet another stroll through Maufrais hat shop on S. Congress. 

Another reason I'm partial to the SL2, and just ordered another one is that

there's enough resolution to shoot square and still end up with a 30+ megapixel file. 

That's a nice balance. Oh, and the B&W files look good right out of the camera. 

Poster boy for shopping in S. Congress. I actually bought something there on 

Tuesday. Not at Sezane, but down the street at Madewell. Best, thickest, logo free

hoodie I've ever found. Nice for cool days in Austin.

I came across an army of cinema workers. They were screwing up traffic on S. Congress, filming and photographing a  fully stationary Waymo automatic, self-driving car for a commercial and some ads. In the old days we would have done a shot like that with three people, a couple of off duty cops and 

a model or two. These days? It's an enormous crew...

Okay. It's just a mannequin shot of a white mannequin in a black leather jacket but

I was stopped by the reflections in the window that made the image...weirder.

Two young women in boots stopped to take selfies of their outfits in the mirrored sign in front of this store. It's an odd fashion statement. Boots for everything.

And again with the sky straight out of the camera...

Traffic blocked in an entire lane. Just in time for rush hour.