An Afternoon at the Texas Book Festival. People looked at books. People signed books. Some people bought books.

It was a beautiful day yesterday. The first cool afternoon in quite a while. The kind of afternoon that some might spend riding around their lawn on a riding lawn mower, or waste by watching yet another in a never ending series of football games. I couldn't stand the idea of either of those options. And, in fact, I have never owned a lawn mower. So I grabbed one of my cameras and headed downtown to see if thee was anything to photograph at the Texas Book Festival. But you know what? There really wasn't much that inspired me. But that's okay because the walk and the playful interaction with the camera was enough to satisfy me in the moment. 

I parked a mile away and walked over to the event. It was held right in front of the state capitol grounds and for a few blocks to the south of the grounds, on Congress Ave. The book fare drew a good crowd on Sunday. I think a lot of people were inspired in the same way I was --- looking for a fun way to leverage the good weather. 

I brought along a camera bag in defiance of my usual routine which mandates carrying only one camera and one lens. When I got ready to leave the studio yesterday morning I just couldn't decide between two lenses I'd been playing with; the Leica 35-70mm f4 ROM R series lens (a short, manual focusing zoom lens) and the fun and sparky Carl Zeiss 50mm f1.4 ZF.2 lens. Both have to be used on adapters and both are completely manual in focus and operation. I put the gear and two extra batteries and my phone in a dark green Domke canvas camera bag and carried that. I felt oddly out of balance and over provisioned. 

The midday sun was bright and made all the exterior shots very contrasty. Maybe that's why there were only one or two other people there carrying cameras --- out of thousands of people in attendance. 

I think we finally have to admit that photography, as we've been practicing it for decades, is all but dead to the general population. No interest. No uptake. For not the first time I felt very much an outlier to the population by which I was surrounded. It makes sense since there is no real market or venue for the kinds of photos I ended up making. At some point we're just using any public event as an excuse to show up and make photos for our own enjoyment. Nothing beyond that. Quite the sea change from 20 years ago...

The gap between fine art celebrity photographers and the main stream seems to be growing as quickly as the wealth gap between billionaires and blue collar workers. Congratulations if you are making collectible work that sells. Or at least gets into juried shows and wins the approval of curators. For everyone else there's Instagram or Flickr. Good luck wading through the ocean looking for the prettiest fish. 

Long tents. Lots of tents. Filled with niche books and educational books. 

If you love eclectic books you would have been right at home there. 

Three authors posing at the book signing tables. 

I thought this was an odd prop for a book fare. But they had a big tent 

and apparently they were sponsoring a best seller political book. 

And streaming their speakers' presentations.

I guess the AARP is well dialed into their demographic. 

So many of the people I saw at the Texas Book Festival 

were more than eligible for AARP benefits.

Here you could toss rubber axes at grabby targets and go 

home with a prize from the organization. You didn't 

need to give them money to play; just all your personal information.

This is the one outlier frame. It was shot with a 50mm lens. 

Everything else was done with the zoom.

Signage adjacent to the Book Festival. On Congress Ave. 

I spent most of the afternoon making photographs with one camera and one lens. 

The camera of choice was the Leica SL2-S. The lens was the Leica R 35-70mm f4 ROM. 

The self portrait above was shot at 12,500 ISO. I had to add a bit of noise/grain in post to make it believable. A very nice combo for slow moving shots. Not a sports lens....

Unattended maintenance cart. So yellow...

Documenting parking lot striping. Semi-Self-Portrait.