Pre-Shoot Rituals. Going through the steps to make sure everything is up and running.

Bizarre post production flaw. But I liked it enough to keep it.

tomorrow will be interesting for me. An old friend and sometimes video production partner recommended me as a still photographer on a film project he's involved with. The shoot will consist mostly of interviews with teachers and b-roll shots of youngsters who participate in a program and teachers. The majority of the set-ups will be outdoors, in a large, community garden. The priority, of course, is the success of the video footage. The producers would like me to set up photographs between the live interviews to mimic the look and feel of the interviews. They'll provide the lighting and turn the scenes over to me when they've gotten the performances they need. It's a tight schedule and it's going to be chilly but it's nice to be part of a bigger team. And it's almost relaxing just to be a bit player instead of being in charge. 

I'm taking a pared down kit with me. Two camera bodies, three lenses. One speed light. Extra batteries. A warm jacket. Several pairs of gloves (and some extras in case someone on the set forgot theirs...). A big, warm hat and a smaller warm hat. 

At the last minute I thought to bring along a small lighting kit, something to keep in the trunk. Just in case. A couple of people in the loop mentioned that they are "going really light." In my mind, after having done hundreds of these over the years, there's almost always a shot or two that needs just one more light than the crew rented....

I've got a 300 watt LED light, a small octabox, a sturdy light stand and a 50 foot extension cord all packed up and ready to go into the trunk of the car. I won't pull them out unless they are needed but extra stuff always comes in handy. And...I was actually, in real life, a Boy Scout. So..... Be Prepared.

My call time is 8 a.m. and I'm making a scheduling exception for this client in that I'll miss my Saturday morning swim workout. With that in mind I hit the 8 a.m. workout this morning and went back for another hour at the noon practice. I should sleep well tonight... 

The location is about 15 minutes from my house and the producer assured me that there would be craft service on site. Including breakfast tacos and hot coffee. Catered lunch. Civilized. 

My pre-shoot prep process is mostly about making sure each camera body has two formatted cards (the second one as back-up), that the cameras are each set up identically for file format, color profiles, WB, and so on. Each camera has two batteries dedicated to it. All four are relatively new SCL-6 Leica batteries which are about 20% more powerful than the SCL-4 batteries that came with the cameras. I also have stash of four more SCL-4 batteries in the gear case in the event that the cold weather robs the batteries of some potency. Also packed is a power bank since both the cameras can be powered via USB. All the batteries are being topped up as I type this...

My main camera is the SL2-S with the 24-90mm lens. It's probably the one I'll use for everything. The back-up camera is an SL2 and I've packed a 35mm f2.0, an 85mm f1.4 and a 135mm f2.8 for use with that camera and as back-ups for the zoom. The 135mm is a Leica R lens on an R to L adapter. It came via UPS yesterday and was tested all morning today. Nice. Fun. Hefty. 

Just got a note from the director of photography. He suggests wearing my Long Johns because it's gonna be cold, cold, cold. Heading to the closet to find mine.... An unusual wardrobe addition for Central Texas but there it is.

I hate to leave stuff to chance. Every shoot gets a pre-shoot shake down and battery charging session. A good way to prevent anxiety at the location. 

First all day shoot of 2025 for me. Can't wait!!!!

 

Transcending the weather? More like just rolling with it. Wet, cold and delightful.

 I guess I have myself to blame. I should have bought a nice condo in Majorca years ago. I'd be there now with my yacht anchored just up the beach. Sun warming my old, tired bones. My cute house manager rubbing sunscreen on the parts of my back I just can't reach. Getting ready to eat some fresh caught fish expertly prepared by our cook, Gabriella. But no. I wasn't smart enough to escape. So here I am in Austin, Texas taking black and white photographs with a decade+ old camera, in the rain and the cold. I guess I'm Okay with that. 

When I looked into the reflective glass on the side of a too many stories tall residence tower on 3rd St. it finally dawned on me that I am such a photo nerd. Out playing with cameras in the dire elements while all my brilliant friends are sitting in front of environmentally friendly fireplaces stoking the electric elements that are throwing off heat and light thanks to the huge batteries in their Power Walls. Electing to use the solar power held in reserve for no other reason than luxuriating in the hubris of having planned their game out so well. We still use grubby little logs that smoke like burning tires.

I realized how far down the rabbit hole I've gone, as a photographer, when I looked at the reflection of my gloves. They are made by photo supplier, ProMaster and I bought them in our local camera store. These are my second pair. I gave my first pair to a homeless guy who seemed to need them more than I did in the moment. 

The gloves have the requisite little, sticky rubber nubs on the palms and the inside curl of the fingers. All the better to grip even the slimiest, slipperiest cameras. They also have a little zipper pocket on the top of the wrist that's perfect for storing that extra SD card or smaller battery. And the final thing that makes them "photographer" gloves is a construction which allows one to uncover one's index fingers and thumbs in order to better operate tiny controls on cameras and lenses. 

I consider my hat to be, if not a certified photo hat, at least an efficient choice for imaging because it has no front bill to intrude into my upper peripheral vision nor will it block the rangefinder windows. The big question now is....does anyone make really cool photo shoes? If so, what are they and where do I find them? Birkenstocks just don't make the cut in sloshy wet, cold weather...no matter how many pairs of thick, German socks I put on. 

Half way through my walk today I stopped at Torchy's Tacos on 2nd Street, just across from the older Google building. A brief respite from the howling (8 mph...) wind and cutting (38°f) temperatures. The bacon, egg and cheese taco, paired with hot coffee was just the inspiration I needed to continue. 

In the winter I grow more partial to making images in black and white. It's not a bother, really. My mind doesn't require dramatic reconfiguring to make the aesthetic change over. In fact, it's mostly just one menu item on my camera. 

After I shot enough I headed home to wait by the door like a restless golden retriever ready to wag my tail when the rushed and beleaguered UPS guy comes up the driveway with my new ancient used happy lens from one of the Leica Stores. Something to look forward to in a gray and forbidding afternoon. Not quite held captive by the elements. At least the car still starts...

I hope I spelled every word correctly because I'm almost never in the mood to make revisions.

I'd rather look at lonely fire hydrants. Mysteriously located in fields far from buildings or houses.

Random Urbanism.

A smaller part of that curved building I've shot so many times that the owners are considering naming it after me. Or suing me. I can't remember which.

I consider metallic gray mannequins to be zombie mannequins. They are a bit off-putting. 

But perhaps more interesting than the headless ones.

couldn't help it. These were just down the street from Torchy's Tacos. 

I guess it was the caffeine boost that motivated this round...

visual cacophony. 

Yes. Yes. But install what exactly?

Alternate view for the back of the album cover. 

My readers from the vast wastelands of the north will laugh when I write that I've

really, really enjoyed the heated seats, heated steering wheel and side mirror defrosters on the new studio squad car. I might only get to use them for a couple weeks out of any given year but

it's still cool to have them. Or warm. Or, well, whatever. You know.

Lucy Lumen more or less nails it in her YouTube video about: "Are photographers too serious?" And I agree 100%

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NwN3CfpjL8

my all time, personal favorite photograph.

Technique? Sharpness? Dynamic Range? What's that?

It was a cold and gloomy evening.

 

But it sure was fun to be out photographing. And to wear the winter clothes we seldom get to pull out of the closet. 

Just another day spent mostly outside. No special cameras. Nothing to review. But I did buy something yesterday and it's supposed to be here in time for Saturday's video project.

I woke up. I drank water. I ate a handful of raw almonds and washed them down with a cup of coffee. I drove to the pool and used the heated steering wheel function in my car for the first time. It was pleasant. The walk from the locker rooms to the outside pool was quite chilly. The ambient temp at 7:59 was 28°f. No time for chit chat poolside. We were diligent. We swam a couple of miles under the mindful supervision of coach Jen. She likes to keep the swimmers moving. After the swim I had a breakfast of egg whites and kale. And black bread toast. And more coffee. Not a moment of my cuisine was time limited or calibrated like a fine Swiss watch. And it was all delicious.

I grabbed a camera off the end of the dining room table where it mysteriously ended up yesterday evening. It was the Leica M-E (typ240) and it was wearing a 50mm Planar ZM lens. I bundled up in a light down jacket, my favorite SmartWool hat and even traded the Birkenstocks for some sturdy leather shoes and thick socks. Then I went to Whole Foods for lunch. The flagship store has a wonderfully diverse hot food bar. I dived in and "curated" a fun lunch for a cold day. 

Chicken nuggets, mashed potatoes, green beans with carrots and red peppers, and some broccoli for good measure. A pleasant young woman sat at the table next to mine and, seeing my little camera asked if I was a photographer. I was able to answer "yes." She asked what kind of photographer and I told her I mostly photograph advertising for corporate clients. She smiled and went back to scrawling on the screen of her jumbo iPad with some sort of stylus. A new way of working outside the trad. office.

After finishing lunch I headed out for a walk though familiar territory. Sometimes I think it's silly to spend time walking variations of the same route on many days. But then I remember that most people go through their lives with real jobs. Jobs that require them to spend seven or eight hours every day, five days a week, fifty weeks out of each year, at a desk firmly anchored in the same spot under the same lights surrounded by mostly the same people and no one thinks to question that choice. Thinking about that makes my choices seem more comfortable to me. At the very least I can spend a lot more time practicing my distant vision and breathing mostly fresh air. And the options for coffee are also extensive and varied. And I don't spend time next to a cadre of annoying co-workers or employees. 

Today's route was a familiar three mile circuit. Nothing stood out as visually exemplary but I was paying more attention to the winter light. It's different. More angular. Bluer. More clinical on sunny winter days. I tried to capture that feeling in the images I took. I'll spare you the usual mannequin content. I felt as though the window dressers let me down today... for the most part. 

What lens did I buy? The one I'm waiting for? That would be the second generation Leica 135mm f2.8 R series lens. I'll use it with a Novoflex R to L adapter that a friend handed me. It's supposed to be very precisely machined... I owned the original V1 of the Leica 135mm f2.8 R lens many years ago; back when I was shooting with several R series bodies. Like the R5 and the R8. The lens worked well for me back then and the V2 is supposed to have a reworked optical construction. I bought this new (to me) copy from the Leica Store Miami. I like to buy Leica stuff from them because it arrives on time and in better shape than I expect each time. This particular lens was just cleaned, lubed and adjusted by a Leica technician and comes with a warranty. It wasn't particularly expensive because I waited to buy it until after the new year when the store dropped prices on used gear that was still sitting around. 

I don't expect this lens to knock me over with amazing optical performance but I do remember it being a very good performer when stopped down one stop. Even wide open the center of the frame is credible. I bought it because I have always liked the focal length and have divested all my longer zooms so I felt I needed, at least, to have that focal length covered to isolate subjects and also, at an upcoming banker's conference in Santa Fe, it will come in handy for photographs of speakers on stage or crouching behind a podium. For those applications its performance will be quite satisfactory. I wish Leica, Panasonic or Sigma would make a nice, compact single focal length 135mm f2.8 as an addition to all the various zooms on offer. But maybe that's just because it's how I got acculturated back in the film days. Back before zoom lenses were very good. My total outlay for this lens was a whopping $425. Not a wild amount. Not enough to raise the anti-veblen hackles of even the most parsimonious of blogger...

So, I did what I do every day. I exercised. I wrote stuff and I took photographs. With intention. The intention to be outside and immersed in the world. The photos I liked are below.

I take a stab at urban landscape photography. It's vague and pointless.

Henry White is certain to make fun of me for including this.

looking down at the plant beds at the power plant. No rearrangements were done. 

wouldn't want to trigger A.I. paranoia...

We'll have four or five nights where the outside temperatures will drop 

under 32°. All the businesses in downtown; well, the ones with outdoor plants,

we're busy yesterday and today covering the shrubbery with plastic. 

It made for odd decor.

Loving the sunstar from the Carl Zeiss 50mm Planar. 

It's pretty nice at f8.0.

the logo on the front building reads: HyperGiant. I am mystified. But I was too lazy to go out of my way to find out more. Maybe I can find the entity on the web...

Medici Coffee on Congress Ave. has an outside seating area. This quote is the decoration 

on one of the short walls...

This light looks like "winter" light to me. And the clouds look like winter clouds.

Maybe I'm reading in too much since I was also shivering at the time.

Next winter adventure item? Gloves.

New construction everywhere I looked.

My nod to Stephen Shore. Not one of Henry White's faves...

This one's going to have 57 stories. It's smack in the middle of downtown. 

I'm not comfortable with extreme heights. You'll never see me hanging out 

at the top of one of these cranes. Not in the cards... we'll send that job to Joe McNally.

This is a high tech device that will strip the Bayer filters right off your sensor in one go. 

I've heard Leica uses one of these to convert Q3 cameras to Q3M cameras. 

Or maybe it's for natural gas distribution. I'm just a photographer. 

How would I know? 

Off to find a scrumptious dinner with friends. 

More swimming, eating and photography tomorrow. For sure.

No revisions were wasted on this short blog post.

 

Perfectionism corralled. Knowing when to stop beating your head against the wall is the difference between a virtuous headache and a concussion...

 

It's all over the news today. The Arctic Blast is on the way. Soon we'll all be shivering under stacks of blankets, wrapped in layers of down and trying to figure out the once every two or three years secrets of the flue. How to open the flue. Why open the flue. And most important; how to start and maintain a warming fire in a small, mostly ornamental fireplace. Skills the average seven year old Canadian knows by heart. 

The fear of even the possibility that our pool will be closed because of weather on Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday drove attendance to today's two morning swim workouts beyond the usual scope and the parking lot was worse for it. Being at least as entitled as everyone else on the team I made my own parking space by taking over the spots generally reserved for the silly golf carts some people in the neighborhood use to drop by and play pickle ball. They are obviously not a priority use. Not when timely attendance at swimming is factored in...

So, here's what we know: It might get cold. It might freeze during the early morning hours. The weather people are generally wrong so we might as well prepare for the worst and then revel at the end about the overly pessimistic predictions of our TV meteorologists (what? do they study meteors???). 

This has been a week of high mileage aquatic pursuits. We did 3,600 yards on New Years Eve, another 4,800 yards on New Years Day, solid yards on Thursday, Friday and Saturday and another 3400 yards today. The weather was gray and gloomy this morning --- at least at the start --- and just as we exited the locker rooms and headed out to face the day, post swim, the sun burst through and we've been under sunny skies ever since. Now the north winds are headed in and you can feel the temperature drop minute by minute. 

I predict that we'll swim every day of the week but Monday. That's when the pool is closed to settle itself and rest.

If anyone is keeping score I did re-write that last sentence twice but to no great improvement...

But now, with swimming reports complete let's talk about perfectionism in photography. My take? The more perfect the technique and execution the more boring the photograph. The images most of the fans of Photography (capitol P, as in Art...) prize and revere are those by folks like Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, Elliott Erwitt, Martin Parr, Alex Webb, Bruce Weber, and Josef Koudelka. Images that catch life on the fly. No time for fussiness. No time for perfect hospital corners. No time for relentless previsualization. Catch as catch can. Grab it (the scene) while it's hot. Gestalt reaction over ponderous calculation. And anyone that tells you that all these folks think much faster than any of the rest of us and are making adjustments at the speed of light are bucking against any semblance of reality. They are just a bit more fearless about reacting to stimulus by pushing the shutter button instead of taking yet another moment and reflecting. 

Those who fuss and fuss and fuss don't show up on any of my lists of top artists. I see them as plodding perfectionists who spend too much time sucking the life out of scenes in order to anesthetize the action and clean up the ragged corners of life enough to rob it of authenticity or even mildly joyous discovery. 

Landscape photographers are the oil painters of our generation. Static. Plodding. Occasionally a lovely riot of color but rarely worth a second look --- except maybe as candidates for staid decor. 

Writers are different. Words are different. I guess writers can ruminate and wrangle over exactly how to say something. How to write something perennially clever and illustrative. They don't have the burden of a binary response. An abrupt yes or no.  And if they gloss over the appealing angle of authenticity they have the special privilege of going back into a manuscript and resurrecting it. How wonderful. If that's what they are doing. But waving a flag and screaming "look how smart I wrote this!!!" is counter to the affections of an audience who never wants to see behind the curtains. 

Forcing tricky language to do too much makes the story flaccid. Sometimes the first thought is the best thought. Sure, you can mould it a bit like a flower vase in a ceramics class but eventually your interference in the process (sometimes called "tweaking") can destroy the original intention of design and turn your work from something that's perfect for displaying sprays of flowers into something you have to save by making it into another ashtray. Best not to touch a soufflé too often if you want it to rise as it should. Otherwise you just end up with a fancy but not very adequate omelette. 

When I rail against re-writing a story or endlessly re-bracketing and re-composing a photograph I'm never against the idea of improving the art but in many instances I see writers and photographers try too hard for something that's never going to be absolutely perfect. And most stuff has no chance. Poets can try endlessly to create the perfect carpe diem poem but they will never exceed the sheer brilliance of Andrew Marvell's "Ode to His Coy Mistress" no matter how many keystrokes they expend. And all the film or digital card space you can bring to bear will never really improve a poorly chosen photo subject rendered in poor light. Or create a worthy rationale for the existence of yet another Stephen Shore "urbanscape/baseball dugout" photo. Regardless of the hoping that a different format will provide some magic.

Getting art right is like falling in love. No one I know plans out the act of falling in love. No spreadsheets are created. Nowhere is there a perfect mechanism for getting someone to love you back. You have to be yourself. Be brave in putting yourself out there into a relationship and not be afraid to make declarations that are neither rehearsed or rewritten. You fall in love the way you make art. Second by second, inspiration in the moment. Unalloyed and undecorated by second thoughts and re-dos. You never get an arrow back once it's shot. There are no do-overs on a rocket launch. You just have to go for it. 

In my advertising work I sometimes have to throw away something I've spent time and energy on when, after sleeping on it, I get a flash of insight that there is a better way to show something. When that happens, if it's possible, I go back and reshoot. But when I'm shooting for myself there is no template I'm trying to match. I'm trying to recognize something as it is and capture it. And that always works better, looks better, feels better than anything I can set up and revise again and again. There is energy in the first attempt that goes missing on all subsequent desires to control the outcome. Tossing the muse out with the bathwater. 

A click of the shutter is the inception. The first draft is the inception. I can improve a lot of my favorite photographs in PhotoShop and I guess, in a sense that's revision. And if a story is well conceived making corrections that move it along even better is the kind of revision I can countenance. But to re-write for the sake of re-writing or because the story repeatedly falls apart because it's a failed story is outside my boundaries. At least for my process. Maybe it works for others. Fiction is stranger than reality and maybe you have to beat it with a stick for a while to make it work. But a non-fiction essay is straightforward enough to spring from most rigorous minds as close to fully formed as it needs to be. Puffing it up? Security blanket for the ego...

These are just my opinions. There are no studies to prove or disprove what I'm suggesting. But I'm certain that photographs get brutally re-worked much more often in the days of endless digital potential than they ever did when changes were hard and expensive. By the same token I think endless re-writing has become a more common process/practice since the days when Flaubert and Tolstoy committed their stories to actual paper with ink pens and no escape to "white out." Just a thought. Maybe modern convenience such as word processing software and computers has led all of us to overthinking and over nitpickiosity. Too much time trying to gild the edges of already perfect lilies in a vain and human attempt to make them more beautiful.

I think I'll buy some black and white film, put it in the old Nikon F and go out shooting gestalt style. Might take the tatty taste of perfectionism out of my mouth for a spell. 

If there are typos above rest assured I intended every one of them.