Spent part of the day scanning medium format chromes from the 1990s and part of the day playing with new, cheap, great lens. Oh yeah....and swim practice.

Back in the late 1990s I was doing a lot of assignment work for Prevention Magazine. We did a fitness shoot for one issue and I recruited most of the fit women that I knew at the time to be models. I'd mostly forgotten about an editorial assignment from a couple decades ago until B. and I had a dinner recently with one of the models and her husband. She asked if she could get some copies of the images she posed for back in the day. 

I was worried that I might not be able to put hands on film files from at least twenty-five years ago but amazingly I was able to hunt down multiple sheets of chromes we shot for that one edition. I guess I'm not as unorganized as I thought I might be... All of the images existed as 6x6 cm transparencies so I needed to scan them for my friend and send them along as Jpegs. I grabbed the Negative Film Supply rig and got to work scanning the film. I think it holds up well for antique, analog work. I sent about twenty of the images to my friend/former model and she was delighted to have them. I was happy to see that we had mastered fill flash in sunlight way back then. I credit the leaf shutters in Hasselblad cameras of that time period. And big flash generators from Profoto. 

I had a call last week from a photographer friend who currently lives and works in Paris. It out of the blue. We caught up for while and then he asked me if I was still shooting with the Leica SL stuff. I said that I was and he said he had a lens suggestion for me. He knows me pretty well and knows how much I like 50mm lenses. He suggested that I look into a 50mm f1.8 lens, made for the L mount system, that's autofocus and cheap as dirt. It was the 7SevenArtisans 50mm f1.8 AF lens. It came out about a year ago and then was relaunched a few months ago with some operational improvements. 

I went to B&H's website, read a few reviews, looked at the price and ordered one. I figured that if it was complete crap I'd only be out $228 USD and I could pass it along to some young photographer who is crazy enough to plunge into the L mount system family. 

The lens came today. It's gorgeous. I mounted it on an SL2 and walked around taking photographs of just about everything in my environment. It works well with the SL2, focuses quickly enough for me and is very nicely finished. Good build quality. No "deal-killers" that I could see and, very sharp at f1.8. At least in the middle 2/3rds of the frame. I'll take it out for a walk tomorrow --- if the sidewalks have not become molten lava...

Love a good 50mm. Or two. Or three. Or....

Swimming continues to be fun, entertaining and therapeutic. Today was I.M. day ( individual medley) which just means that rather than focusing mostly on sprint or distance freestyle we paid more attention to butterfly, backstroke and breaststroke. The coach constructed a three stage matrix on the white board. The first set looked like this: 

8 x 25 yards butterfly on :30 seconds. 

6 x 25 backstroke

4 x 25 breaststroke

2 x 25 freestyle

200 yards pulling freestyle

100 yards I.M. (all four strokes) 

We go through this three times rotating strokes and numbers of repeats.

So the second set starts with 8 x 25 backstroke and then 6 x 25 butterfly etc. etc. 

I love sets like this. The brain work and the physical work combined makes the hour fly by. 

Yardage is good. Technique is better. Discipline is best. I am hardly obsessed. I spend less than two hours a day to get to the pool, do the workout, shower and get home. Then I turn off my swim brain and concentrate on something else. But where else can you find people in their early 70s repeating times (plus a few seconds slower) they swam in college? And if you are looking for chubby people you've come to the wrong pool. 

There is a pro level swim competition going on at the UT Swim Center today and tomorrow. A bunch of Olympians will be facing off. And we know it's one of the fastest pools in the world. Much better than football or baseball or basketball or, etc. etc. We have a saying at the masters: "fill in the blank with a non-swimming sport, is only for people who CAN'T swim."

Swimming or not swimming isn't the important thing. The critical takeaway is that to proceed well into your 70s, 80s and even 90s you need to exercise hard six days a week and have the discipline to always show up. Wanna get filthy rich taking photographs? Show up. Everything about success is about showing up every day and doing the work. There is no free ride. No unfinished projects.