How's that negative scanning coming along? Can you really make a decent black and white by rephotographing the negative? I think so.

 

A group of young people in Italy. I asked if I could photograph their group

and they instantly coalesced into a line. Sometimes you just have to ask...

I took a trip to Europe in 1996. No reason for the trip other than to get out of town and try out the new, at the time, Mamiya6 camera and its trio of lenses. A 50mm, 75mm and a 150mm. The camera was a rangefinder model and made 6x6 cm images, just like the Hasselblads I was using at the time for work. Kodak gave me a bunch of film to shoot with; no strings attached. While the 50 and 150 were nice to have I got the most use out of the normal focal length; the 75mm (equivalent field of view in Leica world format would be 50mm). 

I had no itinerary and no family in tow. For the next seven or eight days I set my own agenda and roamed through Rome at random. I shot through several hundred twelve exposure rolls of black and white film and one day, just for something different, went through about 60 rolls of color negative film. 

My favorite hotel in Rome is the Victoria. It's at the top of the Via Veneto, just across a busy street from the Borghese Gardens. It's an older property and at the time it was also very laid back. I'd eat breakfast in their very regal looking dining room each morning then grab my camera bag and head out for the day. I kept a journal so I could share interesting locations with friends who might also head to Rome. 

At the end of each day I'd head back to the hotel to dump off the day's shot film and to clean myself up for dinner. I had a friend in Rome who is a native. I met him one day at a restaurant. He was Italian but studied photography at Queens College in London. One night he and his wife took me to a secret restaurant that was off the beaten tourist track. It was Fellini's favorite restaurant in all of Rome. He made me swear never to share the name or location. The walls of the restaurant were covered with signed photos of Fellini, some even on set of his most famous movies. 

There is something very freeing for an artist or photographer about being unencumbered by schedule or a companion, if your goal is to explore the visual space of a city.

The issue when I got back home was that there were far more fun negatives than I had the bandwidth to make into prints. I rushed through an overall edit and picked out 30 or 40 negatives that just popped off the contact sheets and made prints of them for a show and for a portfolio. Say 40 negatives out of several thousand. We were busy parenting, working for clients, being part of a sandwich generation. For one reason or another the negatives sat in a binder on a shelf, undisturbed for the next 28 years. 

Last year I bought a copy stand, a light source and a set of negative holders in various sizes and experimented with using a Lumix S5, in its high res, multi-shot mode to try "scanning" some of the images from Rome. Yes, it's really just copy shots of negatives but I'm still going to call it scanning. 

The process worked. I practiced for a couple of protracted work spells until I ironed out most of the kinks involved in shooting and then post processing the negative files and now it takes about 30 seconds to insert a strip of film, blow the dust off (there is always dust. No matter how careful you think you are), line up the negative and then shoot the copy. You'll nearly always need more contrast in post but you want to shoot "flat" in the capture to make sure not to burn out highlights or drown the shadows. 

Now I can walk into the office, grab some negative sheets and get down to a much more granular approach, to really seeing what is in those negatives I shot so long ago. I can bang off about 20 frames per hour with some fine tuning of exposure to get into an acceptable target range. 

In Adobe Lightroom I bring in all the raw files and on the first one I use custom Tone Curves to convert from negative to a positive image. Then I batch apply that setting to all the images in the folder. Now they are all very light, very low contrast positives. They all require a bit of work in post to make them satisfactory. Mostly adding contrast and clarity. 

It's a fun way to revisit negatives that escaped attention the first time around. And, the passage of time makes them seems a bit exotic. Like a window into a totally different era. Here are some scans I liked yesterday.....

When I was scanning the streets I saw this father/daughter scene from a distance. 

You can see the first shot just below. I hoped they would continue in the same basic "pose"

as I walked through the crowd, past the dog and over to the little family to grab this

shot. Scanning ahead is a good skill for someone who wants to shoot in the streets. 

The wide shot that presaged the shot one frame above.

Sometimes good shots are made good by the process of distilling down.

I must have had my cloak of invisibility with me on this day because I stood about eight feet in front of these two woman and made six or seven exposures with a fairly big, medium format camera. 

I wanted a range of expressions because it told some sort of story with no discernible 

plot. Like movie stills. They never seemed to notice me...

Hard to imagine that there was once a time when the Spanish Steps weren't overwhelmed with tourists. 

A random portrait. Yes. I asked permission. 

These women were modeling for a workshop or photo class. The one on the right is the same 

person as the one in the direct portrait just below. 

I asked this young woman for permission to photograph her. 

She was happy to oblige. We had a very brief conversation, I took 

a few frames and we moved on. I have a print on the office wall that's 

24 by 24 inches. It looks fantastic. 30 seconds of photography

but a pleasure to look at almost 30 years later. 

Yes, I went to swim practice this morning. It was wonderful. 

A Sad Surrender to the Heat...

 

I don't think the heat is getting so much worse, I think I'm getting older and the very basics of aging mean it's harder to carry around a big camera and withstand high heat. When I was younger I often ran the five mile lake loop in the late afternoons in August. Sometimes in conditions that seem insane to me now. One day I ran the loop and when I got back to my car an sat for a few minutes with the air conditioning blasting I listened to a favorite local radio commentator who mentioned that it was currently 105°. In the next minute he told his audience he was going out for a run after the broadcast. Why? In the hottest part of the day? "Because, the trail is far less crowded. Nobody else is crazy enough to run in this heat..."

For the last ten years I've been out walking around with a camera through most of the Summer's wretched excess. Back then my line in the sand was a "feels like" temperature (heat index) of 105°, anything higher than that got me back into air conditioning and skipping the melting point insanity. 

Everyone told me that I'd be less able to handle hot environments when I got older. I didn't believe them. I didn't want to believe them. I thought I could go on ignoring common sense for... well, a long time.

But this Summer seems different. It's not that I couldn't survive the heat it's just that too much heat isn't fun anymore. I think we age in spurts no matter what our best intentions are to try and hold the effects of aging back. A faltering at around 40. A slow down at 70. Another drop at 80 and so on. But each person starts at a different level of fitness and resilience. If one is sedentary, eating poorly, plagued by chronic conditions they are starting out at a much lower level of fitness to begin with compared to a healthy marathon runner of the same age. A fit seventy year old might be in better shape than an average 40 year old (and have less stress into the bargain) so that gives all of us something to aim for. But we'll all decline at some point. 

I'll be seventy in October. This is the first Summer I can remember; maybe the first time I can remember, that I grabbed a camera, hopped into my car, headed downtown and looking at the outside temp gauge on my dashboard (100°) said, "fuck it!" and headed back home. I surrendered partly because I knew that carrying around a heavy camera in that heat, combined with the heat sink properties of all the blacktop running criss cross through downtown, amplified by dozens of reflective buildings bouncing the sun back into the mix, would be no fun and could be...actually...dangerous. A negative "bonus" that affected my decision was the fact that there weren't any people anywhere walking downtown and it's hard to photograph when there are no subjects. 

I felt foolish to have wasted half an hour only to come home feeling defeated by the elements. But, on the other hand, I didn't suffer the heat load and physical stress of trying too hard for too little reward. 

I pulled up to the house and grabbed my shiny, black camera off the passenger's seat. I walked into the house and luxuriated in the 74° air conditioning. The 40% humidity. The comfort of a it all. I pulled some iced tea out of the fridge and thought about all of this. 

Remedy? Tomorrow I'll get busy earlier. Like right after swim practice. When the "mercury" has yet to crest 90°. When people are getting their stuff done early as well. Out of the heat. Like sane people.

This is where I make the case on the blog that I need to have a chrome/silver finished camera with a silver finished lens on it. So it reflects heat. So it doesn't transfer heat to the electronics inside. And just like that I can rationalize a limited edition, silver SL2 or a silver M240. So, something good came of this truncated exercise today after all....

blog note. the near relentless accrual of massive page views here seems to have subsided. I was noodling around in Google Analytics and found that my current total pageviews have crested 92 million. Wow! That's just insane. But I guess nearly 18 years of daily typing tends to attract some readers over time. 

I just wish I knew how to make better use of this...

that's the look of a beleaguered runner in mid-Summer. 

At least the trail around the lake has tree cover in many places. 

And if you get too overheated you can always jump in the lake to cool off...

the hat brims are getting bigger this year. And the sunscreen is getting stronger...

Virtual desert? Naw. The weather here is more like the tropics these days. 

Still my favorite hat. Not my best hat but my favorite. 

Somewhere out in New Mexico. Where it can also get quite hot. 

Get some altitude and at least the humidity calms down. 

Swims going well. Back in that groove. 

In the heat I take a small, light colored camera bag with me.

I keep my black camera with its black lens in the bag until

I'm ready to shoot. And I stuff it back in when I move on.

that's a fat, western Haiku. 

This came back up in the feed from earlier days:

https://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2009/07/practice-makes-competent-plus-some.html

Snapshots from Rome. I am my own workshop...

 

Today I am giving myself workshop advice: Grab camera. Go someplace filled with interesting people. Make photographs. Post process photographs. Put up on Blogger. Go have dinner with beautiful spouse. 

All done. 

Borghese Sculpture Museum. Thoughts about modern photography...

 Photography today is in search of its own relevance. There is so much of it out there that it's hard to understand what is truly new and innovative. Judging by endless articles and vlogs about photography there is an undercurrent of desire to go back to the simpler, more documentary style of black and white editorial journalism. Or classic, black and white fine art work. Photographers who love photography seem afraid that A.I. is here to ruin everything. And that may be so. But maybe not. But it sure explains why we praise the standouts from the 1940s until the days of digital. 

It used to be that photography was something that was connected in a way to aspirations of getting exposure via magazines, books and early curated websites. Now it's different. Maybe not for you specifically but in a general way. Now photography has become analogous to the ping that your cellphone continually sends out to cell towers letting them know that you are here and your phone is on. Your photos, uploaded to Instagram, Flickr, Smugmug, Facebook and more are a consistent ping that lets your cohort of friends and followers know that you are still alive, that you had a visually interesting lunch, dinner, sailboat ride or fashion moment and you are pinging it out as proof of life. Proof of contemporary existence. Proof of your idea of personal coolness. And the photos don't really serve that much more of a purpose anymore. Even in advertising.

It seems like uploading photos to your favorite "share" site is the modern version of tricking people into watching your slide show of vacation photos. "Here's is Gertrude in her new hat at the beach. Here we are eating hot dogs at the fair. You can't really tell from this angle but just around the corner was a big statue of Mickey Mouse. I didn't really get this one in focus but it's a shot of the twins eating cotton candy... etc. etc. etc. And really,  you'd have to have given birth to the twins to accept every shot of them as "brilliant." The unspoken presumption is that if I look at your stuff you'll look at mine. Like em or not.

I'm of a certain generation. We thought we were hot stuff because we could get things in focus just using our own fingers. We could figure out exposures; sometimes without even a meter as an aid. Printing well was hard to do so when we got lucky we had something we really felt we could show off. When we watched TV and wanted to change the channel or the volume of the program we actually had to get up off the couch and physically touch the actual television set. There was more friction in every day stuff. 

There are billions and billions of publicly displayed images that are instantly accessible on the web. It's easier to do now that it is to drive a car, or make decent toast. As a reaction to the overwhelming nature of this "bounty" the folks of my certain generation seem to be regressing back toward that time of more process friction. There are altars made to worship the folks who became famous for their photography from 1900-2000. Made famous specifically because they had fewer points of competition to consider and so stood out as beacons. Magazine pages were very limited and editors played it safe by mostly showcasing proven stars. A virtuous circle. Few people were willing to put up with all the friction and uncertainty and embrace the profession at that level. Sometimes it was just the realization that making good photos took some talent and some taste. That made our predecessors who had these attributes into standout examples and we lavished attention and approval on them. 

Now? Taste? When a large chunk of the population thinks wearing track suits or "coach" shorts out in public as day-to-day wear I don't think we can rely on requisite taste to make or discern good photos. Or to recognize valuable work either. I guess that's why we look backwards. Most people looked so much better in tailored suits than in lumpy Spandex or stuffed into sleeveless t-shirts. Men wore hats then but now everyone is hatless in order to show off poorly conceived and badly executed hairstyles. The disintegration of culture through mis-directed attempts at style...

I continue to do photography because the process is fun for me. It's habitual now. It's an excuse to see the world around me each and every day. But I have no expectation that anyone shares my enjoyment in the same way I do when I make my own images. And, for the most part, I don't enjoy looking at most other people's images. Why? Because at this point in our combined history everything looks pretty much the same. There's very little new. Sure, half naked female model images will always get a "like" but I'm equally certain that the expressive photography involved is not even close to being the primary driver of that big "thumbs up." Go look on Instagram. Do the math. Mostly naked, non-chubby young woman, poorly composed and badly exposed, gets thousands of likes. Wonderfully done images of anything else? A casual nod. 

That's okay as long as everyone is having fun. But underneath we wish someone out there was actually the god of curation and could find and show us the real, current "good stuff" that's hidden under miles tall piles of nearly identical images. Wouldn't that be nice?

Remember a time when cameras were considered so dear an expenditure that many people kept them in leather "ever ready" cases to protect them from bumps, scratches and other forms of camera mortality? People felt invested. Now we go from camera to camera like food reviewers going from restaurant to restaurant. It's different. In the same way we try on new style after new style.

Photos. Used to be artifacts and souvenirs. Now as consumable as a Mojito at a swim up bar. 

Did we swim yet? F#ck yeah, we're swimming every day.

KT's "happy place." The Western Hills Athletic Club Pool.

Human beings were designed and built to move. We can sweat so we can run further than most other animals. We can figure out, intuitively, hydrodynamics and physics so we can swim. We're built to walk miles and miles every day. We were not really made to sit around all day doing nothing. In fact, a lot of experts believe that it's mostly inactivity that kills people before their potential expiration dates. 

The previous two weeks were a bit of torture for me. I had surgery on my face and the surgeon was pretty adamant that she didn't want me in the pool, or doing any sort of "strenuous" exercise for at least two weeks. I was compliant. Didn't break a sweat. Never went to the pool. Didn't even do the daily push-ups. But once I got the thumbs up to get back to it I was in the pool so fast you'd think we were diving for free money.

I tossed on a bunch of sunscreen yesterday morning, drank a big glass of water, and headed over to the pool early. Just to savor the scene. I watched a newly arrived swimmer named Alex tearing up the fast lane, saw his tattoo of his Olympic rings and realized why. A recent grad from UT learning now to really enjoy swimming outside... 

I was worried that I'd lost my touch for the water. Worried that my level of fitness would relegate me to a slower lane. That I'd embarrass myself. That I'd be relegated to lane one and start over from scratch.

Naw. We had a great workout. Lane 5. An hour of constant movement and the thrill of gliding through the water at speed. 

It felt so good I hurried back over this morning for more. And I'll be there tomorrow morning. And Friday morning, and Saturday morning, and Sunday morning. But on Monday I'll have to go to the Deep Eddy Pool because ours is always closed on Monday for maintenance... and to let the water chill out. 

I missed this a lot. More like this. You can keep the cameras, I'll take the pool. 

Calvin and Ben back when they swam age group. many years ago.

Warm ups at UT for the USMS 2009 Masters Nationals Short Course meet. 

this is the finishing shot for Ben's first one mile swim at age 7. 

Good job. He's still swimming. And running. And biking. 

It's good to be fit.

 

A few thoughts about the newly announced Sony RX1rIII. And other random stuff.

 

KT on the Eiffel Tower in 1978 scanning the horizon for wine merchants.

I bought a bottle of wine to take to a friend's house so I wouldn't arrive for a happy hour/dinner empty handed. The wine was a Sauvignon Blanc. A Chateau Briot labelled as a "Grand Vin De Bordeaux. Not a very expensive bottle at under $20. In the course of a pleasant Spring evening spent around an outdoor table filled with delicious treats we got around to opening that bottle and sharing a few glasses. While everyone's tastes differ I thought it was a remarkably good wine. Especially for the price. 

A couple weeks later I decided to splurge and buy another bottle to share with B. over a quiet dinner at home. Again, I was impressed by everything about the wine. I took a photograph of the label so I could ask for it again if I couldn't find it out on the shelf at my favorite wine merchant. The shop just at the end of the street. The place I've been buying wines since 1996. 

Several weeks ago I went in to pick up another bottle for yet another dinner with friends but couldn't find it on the shelves. I asked Chip (store manager) about it and he took a few moments to wax on about how that was one of the staff's very favorite, affordable bottles of all time before delivering the bad news. They were out of stock and didn't know when they might have more. I pushed a bit since the store is part of a big Texas chain and Chip got onto his computer to check inventory at other stores. There was one store that apparently didn't move much white wine in their area. They had one case in stock. And it was from 2023 which was a good year for Bordeaux. 

I asked if they could transfer the case to our store and Chip said he'd work on it. Sad to think that getting a favorite wine is now getting as hard to do as getting delivery on a Fuji X100VI or a new Leica M. But this afternoon I got a phone call from the store. The case had arrived. It was set aside with my name on it. I dropped by to pick it up and was happy to see that even on my special order I was given a 30% case discount. The unit price came out to $15 a bottle. A nice price at a time of perilous price increases on products from the E.U. 

Tongue firmly in cheek Chip reminded me not to leave the case of wine in the trunk of my car for a couple of days. Good advice since the current temperature outside is a lovely 98°. The wine is already on the bottom shelf, bottles laying flat, on one of the shelves about five feet under the studio's air conditioning vent. Pretty much a constant temp zone.

If you like white wines that aren't too high in alcohol content you might want to try a bottle. It's delicious and comes in at 12.5% alcohol by volume. Low "octane" by today's California standards where even Chardonnay wines are routinely nearly 15%. By comparison it's almost healthy.

The secret to wine is to always drink enough, never drink too much and always consume it with food and friends. That's why it exists. And for those of you with a religious bent --- wine's in the Bible.

On to the today's camera ramble.

One of my friends, who is a very good photographer, has had the previous model of the new Sony RX1r III   (the RX1rII) for a number of years. I've borrowed the camera from time to time and found it to be a good photo tool for a number of reasons, but hampered by a few drawbacks. The new model seems to have answered the few things that kept me from seriously considering ownership. 

What is the RX1r III? It's a compact, fixed lens camera with some style and panache. It's got a full frame, 61 megapixel, state of the art sensor, and a Carl Zeiss 35mm f2.0 lens  which is perfectly matched to the sensor. Really, the lens is made/designed for this camera specifically.  The camera is smaller and lighter than a Leica Q3. It has Sony's current top line AF systems (PD-AF on sensor) as well as A.I. processors for subject recognition stuff. It's a lovely camera, has an EVF, seems custom made for travel photography and I don't know what else to say about it. 

No one has one in-hand and the announcement earlier this week seemed to have surprised everyone; after all, it's been ten years since its predecessor was launched and it seems a bit odd for Sony to have circled back to this form factor after all these years. But it's right in line with the resurgence of popularity for compact, fixed lens cameras. Fuji, and especially Leica, seem to have shown the way with the X100 line and their Q3 line respectively. If you create a smart, especially well built camera consumers will likely find it and love it. And pay a premium for it...

The prior version of the Sony had the same lens as the new camera and that was always reviewed as being one of the finest implementations of a prime lens, permanently mated to a high resolution camera, in the whole camera market. So, nothing has changed there. 

The EVF is no longer a pop-up and somewhat gimmicky module; it's now a permanent and integrated feature on the new body. One caveat though is that the finder diameter is smaller as is the magnification of the new finder. Also, in a time when Leica Q cameras routinely come with 3.68 MP OLED EVFs the Sony makes do with a 2.36 MP version finder. I think they were trying as hard as they could to keep the total package small which is probably why they also abandoned the tilting rear screen in favor of going back to the fixed screen of the original version of the camera. The rear screen is also 2.36 MP.

In addition to faster and more complex focusing chops and a higher resolution sensor they did vastly improve on what was the biggest bitching item from most users on the previous camera. Those older cameras had horrible, terrible, crappy battery life. The new one is bigger and has about 50% more power. But if you are going to splash out for this camera ( and you probably should if you like the product concept ) you'll want to buy a couple extra batteries as the CIPA rating gets you about 300 shots. And none of those are with flash because there is no flash. Three batteries, with those specs, would just about get me through a day of artsy street shooting. 

Taking a cue from Leica you can also drop more cash at Sony by buying a (not included???) lens hood for around $165 as well as a thumb grip ( I'd want one ) for around $200. 

I'm not going to write about the video specs because you'd have to have some very odd and very specific video use cases for this camera to make any sort of sense as a preferred video camera. And Sony kind of lets you know that by equipping it with a micro-HDMI socket and no mic or headphone jacks. You also only get one card slot. It's an UHS II slot but it's still only one card slot. Not an issue for me but I can already hear the howls of "DEAL-KILLER!!!!!"

Who is this new camera really for? I'd venture to say it will poach some of the market for the Leica Q3 cameras ---- especially for those who have a grudge against the idea of Leica or those who just really hate good, clear menus and user interfaces and want more friction in their camera operations. If the Leica Q cameras didn't exist I'd probably be in the market for one. The price is a bit sobering at a little over $5,000 but you probably won't hear a lot of grief from Leica users who are currently paying something like $6700 for a stock Q3 and $7400 for the (cherished) Q3-43. Hard to play the whiny budget card if you've already shown your cards --- German style. 

It's fun to see the relaunch of this camera line. Sony will probably make good bank from it. And it really does offer more choices at the higher end of the market. A "bargain price" Veblen good? We'll have to ask the "expert" about that. 

Why am I sitting here writing about yet another camera? A camera I probably won't buy. Mostly because it's too damn hot to walk around with a camera in the heat of the day here. The humidity still has a lock on us and now we're getting hit with a cloud of Saharan Dust. No lie!!! Dust all the way from the Sahara. Got asthma? Maybe don't do any long walks outside today or tomorrow. At least this blogging thing keeps my fingers busy. 

Whaddya think? Are you going to rush out and buy one of the new Sony RX1r-iii's? I notice that B&H indicates shipping in July.   Of this year.   (sad we have to be that specific...).

Camera review over. Now going OT again....

Everyone seems to be giving sleep tips this week so I thought I'd jump in and share my closely held secret for getting almost exactly seven serially attached/contiguous hours of sleep every night. First, you should be at your optimum weight. Your preferred BMI. Most breathing issues in sleep are caused by obesity or just plain overweight. More fat = more snoring. Oh....and sleep apnea. If you are 5 foot 8 inches tall and athletic you might want to aim for something between 155-160 pounds. Next, you should get an hour or two a day of vigorous, getting your heart rate up, getting out of breath, exercise every single day. More if you have the time. Swim a couple miles, walk five or six miles. Sure...if you want play vigorous tennis for three hours a day that might work as well. Don't eat stuff in the three hours before your bed time. Put your head down on a nice pillow and don't worry about stuff. Whatever you like to worry about will be there tomorrow. 

Or you can build wild spread sheets, make complex plans, consult voodoo priests and generally worry the process even more. Your choice. Always your choice. 

Just remember......the keyboards......

Reporting from Austin on yet another rainy, super humid Sunday. Today's favorite camera? The Q2. Because it's water resistant...

 

We've made it to another Sunday. It's rained here in Austin for at least ten of the last ten days. I got out of the house yesterday when the sun was lifting moisture from the ground up into the air for a while. At least we had real sunlight to work with.  I took the Q2 and did my old walk through downtown. I took that camera in case it rained while I was walking.  Nothing much had changed. 

Some big bank buildings are in the middle of renovating their large, ground floor spaces to make way for new tenants. There are more homeless people out on the streets than I remembered. People still drive like shit and ignore traffic rules. And even the idea of crosswalks.  Nearly everyone is either kind of too fat, way too fat or Methamphetamine thin. The number of tattoos per capita has risen since I was last out and about with a camera. But mostly it was the humidity that made the walk seem uncomfortable. Imagine standing in a hot shower for a while... A really hot shower. For a really long time. So humid you resist going into air conditioned spaces because you know your front lens element will instantly fog over when you walk back out. 

The test lab at VSL seems to be closing in on the best choice of hats for the Summer in Austin. We've tested many and come to the conclusion that there is no "one hat" which will fit every Summer circumstance. But having three choices seems okay. After all, the two not in use can ride around in the back seat of the VSL staff car until needed. 

The right hat (or hats) has become mission critical now that I've waded through a bout of skin cancer surgery again. My wonderful surgeon made me promise not to let sunshine touch the scar until it is 100% good as new. So now that everything is on the mend I start out every adventure outside the house or the VSL bunker by slathering on sunscreen and then auditioning hats. I actually wore the white (dorky) Tilley hat the first day back outside, mostly because the brim is nice and floppy and flops down just right over my left cheek to keep sun off the X. I bought a new Stetson hat but I'm not fond of it yet. The straw weave is too loose so the sun protection is mostly surrendered. But an even more recent acquisition; the Outdoor Research Oasis Sunhat has a really nice, wide brim which holds its shape well and is lightweight on the head. Anything to keep future visits to the surgeon at bay...

The new air conditioner in the house works so well you could chill a six pack of beer in a short amount of time by propping it in front of one of the vents in the dining room. Now sleeping soundly with two down quilts on the bed and a fire in the fireplace. Nixon-style. Aiming for maximum condensation on all the outside windows...

I'm counting down the hours to my first, post-op swim practice. Tuesday morning. The pool looks good, the weather looks good and the scar is looking good. I'm not sure I will remember how to swim. I might have to start all over again in the slow lane and work my way up. But maybe not. I guess I've only really been out for two weeks come Tuesday. We'll see if my lane mates missed me or gave me up for dead and have already moved on and replaced me with someone new. They can be quite practical...

I'm never going to shoot another video so I'm grappling with pulling out bags and backpacks and rolling cases full of mixers, microphones of all types, endless cabling and too many HDMI connectors with the idea of giving some away to struggling, young videographers or just dropping the whole package to the used equipment expert at Precision Camera here in Austin and accepting like twenty five cents on the dollar for the good stuff. A move that will free up floor space and shelf space. Next up goes the lighting gear. Tired of looking at C-Stands, light stands, a forest of tripods, and way too many softboxes and electronic flashes. Oh, and also a surplus of LED light fixtures of all kinds. 

I'd be so happy to end up with one tripod and a drawer full of cameras and lenses. But even there I am thinking of continuing the process of winnowing down. I've got too much camera stuff. Too many choices. Sometimes I think it would be a fun challenge to dump everything but the Leica M cameras and M lenses and see if it's true that the equipment really doesn't matter. Three cameras, eight lenses and a sack of batteries... Sounds like a plot for a movie. Too bad I'm getting rid of the video stuff....

Found a handwritten, double entry ledger for the business that mercilessly covers the period from the end of my time running a regional advertising agency, the start of my photography business, and right up to around 2004 when we went fully in on QuickBooks Pro and did the accounting on our office computer. OMG!!! I worked a lot over the years reflected in the ledgers. For a while we were averaging well over 250 jobs a year. Keeping one or two assistants on the payroll for years at a time and traveling at least a week out of most months. Photography could be quite lucrative pre-digital. Now I know why I feel like I'm being lazy these days. It's all down to the contrast between then and now. 

Just glad I didn't piss away all the money on crazy stuff. Nice to finally understand what B. was talking about for all those years --- about the power of compound interest. And why, "No!" I could not have a  shiny new Porsche. Or a louche Bentley. Or the analogous example in some other part of the consumer spectrum. Just cameras and lenses. And only ones that could be deducted or depreciated. 

So this is what it feels like to start processing the idea of retirement. Novel. Fun in a way but also scary if one has defined at least part of their identity as a working photographer. Or as an artist. Seems the photograph part and the working part was more important to me, almost always, than the money part.

It's always something. 

Silver lining of the endless rain? The primary lake that provides water for Austin and beyond is Lake Travis. It's been steadily dropping lower as drought after severe drought hits the area. The lake level was  down to under half its full volume recently. All the rains have been incredibly beneficial and the lake is within striking distance of hitting its FULL capacity. Which gives us all some breathing room. I haven't watered the grass for over a month and every blade is emerald green. The mosquitoes are having the time of their short, annoying lives, the frogs are insanely happy, and maybe those water restrictions we've had in place will get relaxed for a bit. 

The weather people have been predicting that we'd have a hotter and drier Summer than average. So far they could not have been more wrong. The highs for July have barely hit the 90° mark. We've had far more wet than dry days. We're still digging out in the surrounding towns from catastrophic flooding and much loss of life. But we're not suffering through the near endless plus 105° days we had in 2023 and 2024. We're halfway through Summer and still expecting more rain. When I drove home from the hardware store today my car's display showed the outside temperature at 79°. A humid and sticky 79 but still not even up to 80°.  It would be even nicer if the humidity dropped. 90 to 100% is pretty obnoxious. 

Today is rushing by. It's always that way when I'm sorting gear to get rid of. Nice problem though. Looking forward to a home cooked meal with B&B. Always affirming and fun.

A small show at the upstairs gallery at the Blanton Museum.

Celebrating the mere idea that I'll be back in the pool in less than 48 hours.

And, as always, celebrating the mannequins. 

Digging around in the old film archives. B and Dad in San Francisco. On the wharf.

Most of the lighting inventory is heading to new owners. Just not yet identified...

Anne with the studio's old Rollei 6008i. Ah....the film days. 

At Jo's Coffee Shop. Mid-1990s. Jo's has been there for quite a while. ..

Umbrellas at the ready