I have survived. All systems heading in the right direction. Two weeks till launch and counting down.

B.

I looked around the house and assembled my stuff for my visit to the Austin dermatology practice that houses my dermatologist. I took with me a book to read. It's a poem of freeform poems by one of my favorite writers, K.B. Dixon. The book is called, "The Dogs of Doggerel: Irregular Poems." I am halfway through the book and I can't put it down. It's fun, insightful, opinionated and pretty much everything I like about reading books. In fact, since traffic in Austin is so unpredictably bad I found myself about 20 minutes early for my appointment to have a bright and talented woman stick a knife in my back. No problem as I had K.B.'s book in hand. I found a nice easy chair, declined the offer of a fresh coffee and settled back to read and giggle. Yes, I drove myself to the appointment...

I found myself actually disappointed when my favorite nurse came to retrieve me about ten minutes early for my scheduled appointment. With a sigh I stuck a bookmark between the pages, hoisted my small camera bag filled with errata and meekly followed the nurse down the hall to room #1. Maybe, I thought, they'll leave me in this procedural room for a long time and I'll be able to get some uninterrupted reading done, but luck was against me and everything happened so quickly.

Not to worry Mr. Dixon, I picked up where I left off when I got back home and found a comfortable chair as a cup of espresso. It's a great book.

The main event today was the surgical removal of a nasty and ambitious spot on my back. On my left shoulder blade, to be specific. Nurse Kaylie had me squiggle a signature on a form on her iPad which basically said that no matter what unfortunate things might happen to me the practice would practice a cheerful and nonchalant attitude of innocence and life would go on one way or another. 

Minutes later I was face down on an operating table making small talk to my young nurse while she jabbed a series of injections all around the site to be excised. "Does anything hurt?" She asked. Yes, I can feel every jab. Well until the first round took effect, deadened the area, and then all I felt was pressure on my skin. Once she finished jabbing me into painlessness she smiled and went off to find my doctor. Time for the excitement to begin. 

Dr. S. got right to work. She did a play-by-play as she worked. But she toned it down so I didn't freak out. Twenty-one stitches later and about twenty minutes later she announced that we were done with the scary work and asked if I'd like to see the stitches before nurse Kaylie applied the pressure bandage that I'd need for 24 hours. I demurred and they finished up the patching work. I got the instructions about post surgical care of the site, paid my whopping $40 co-pay, and headed back out to the car where my phone was blowing up with texts from swimmer friends, photography friends and family wanting to know how everything went. 

I drove home and was able to get off Mopac Expressway before the worst of rush hour ( which runs from 12:01 am through 11:59 pm nearly every day. I got lucky today. Straight shot, no stoppages. 

Now comes the fun part; fourteen days of sloth, laziness and lack of good exercise. Sure, I can go for walks as long as I take it easy. Seems getting the blood pressure up might open up cauterized blood vessels or, an inadvertent muscle flex (picking up a camera with that Leica 24-90mm on it) might pop a stitch. And I guess Dr. S. is totally aware that a useful swim practice is going to require a couple hundred long arm and shoulder movements - per practice. The swimming shut down was non-negotiable. 

It's now about nine o'clock in the evening and I'm still not feeling any real pain from the wound on my shoulder. Which is kind of amazing since the injections of numbing agents happened a little after one o'clock in the afternoon. Either that's so long acting anesthetic or I'm just being oblivious to the discomfort. 

Take away from today? If I get reincarnated as a swimmer I'm going to literally bath daily in sunscreen from the first time I step out into sunlight. But hopefully, in this imaginary future, all skin cancers will be taken care of with one pill that has absolutely no side effects. .. Sure, it could happen. But then again I might come back as a camel in the middle of a desert and never swim again. It could happen. 

All this stuff aside let's talk about the photos. I chose random photos of beautiful people. Just for fun. To remind myself that photography is supposed to be fun. 

Tomorrow I thought I'd reacquaint myself with the Sigma fp and the tiny Voigtlander 40mm f1.4. It's a fun little lens and the fp is about as eccentric/niche as they come. I'll lean on people's sympathy to convince them to pose for me. It could work. At least it might work if I try it....

Not real sutures. Believe me, now I can tell the difference. 

shades of Dr. Suess.

We humans are a frail bunch but since we only get one shot and it's all over too quickly it's important to make the best of the time we have. Shoot more. Walk more. Share more. Ask more. Give more. And wear that sunscreen....and a hat.

Thanks for all the nice feedback. 

(if only I had followed my restricted eating diet and also eaten more kale.... Aw, the heck with that. I'll depend on early detection and talented healthcare specialists. It is the 21st century, after all. 

Go get K. B. Dixon's book. It's fun enough to distract even a highly sensitive 70 year old from the aches and pains. 

Here lies the book  

And by the way. I didn't cry, throw up or faint. I felt like that was pretty brave....

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 there 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 photographers 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 vast visual 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. 

Revised scheduling for November.

 

Love 50mm lenses. From lowly to lofty. All good. 

Well heck. I was planning on taking an out of town trip in November. I thought it might be a good time to re-visit Montreal. But real life has a way of intervening in human plans. Seems my dermatologist found a suspicious spot on my left shoulder blade and decided to biopsy. Wouldn't you know it, it was a squamous cell tumor that needs to be removed, and I'd hate to wait on it and have it spread. Ounce of prevention vs. kiloton of cure... 

This little "treatment" will probably involve stitches and, if so, I'll be out of sorts and out of the pool for at least ten days. Then there is the irritation of having a spot positioned just exactly where I can't reach it. As with any surgery I'll need to change the bandaging and clean the site daily, at first. Since I can't see it or reach it I'll be depending on B. to act as chief nurse for four days a week and my doctor's nurse to change it each of the other three days in that first week. Not something I'd really like to ask a hotel concierge in a foreign city to do for me... if  you get my drift. My dermatologist assures me I'll survive nicely but won't go as far as to say I'll be "comfortable" for those first few days. I hope any scar looks wicked and cool...

My bigger issue is the idea of no hard physical exercise, and especially no competitive swimming or water sports of any kind, for those first ten days. Grrrrr. 

My primary physician and I chatted and he's reserved a time certain for me to come by each day that I have to for the post procedure care I'll need (clean and re-bandage). He's been my doctor for well over 30 years and I find it's great to have a relationship with a concierge medical practice even if it's not something that's covered by Medicare. The personal service has always been outstanding!

Of course this will hamper my regular activities right up till nearly Thanksgiving. And with the latest airline flight delays and cancellations I have no intention of flying in these holidays. I couldn't think of anything less fun in this moment of history. I'll be celebrating with family and friends and hopefully getting back to swim workouts instead. 

It all works out to mean that the best time for me to head out on a photo adventure, cross borders, is the first two weeks of February. I'll schedule to make sure I get to see the Richard Avedon "Immortals" show in Montreal around the 12th of that month. You'll just have to make do with Austin and central Texas photos until then, interwoven with scanned "greatest hits" from the film days. 

And more silly blog posts about my love for 50mm lenses; and their currently popular sibling focal length, the 40mm. All good to my way of thinking. 

Below is a shot of the kid taken with a 50mm lens mounted on a Leica R8 camera. The good old days. Shot on slide film to make it all more challenging. 

Ben. Leica R8 + 50mm Summilux R.

The skinny little 40mm isn't so nice and skinny with an adapter attached. 

the Voigtlander 40mm Ultron for Nikon. Adapted. 

A really nice, shorter "50"...

A perenial favorite! The Canon 50mm f1.4 FD. Practice your MF chops...

And, of course, the cheapest lens I own...

And it's still pretty darn good --- if you are willing to stop it down a bit.

Currently walking around with a Carl Zeiss 50mm ZF.2 lens with a Nikon mount and the required adapter. It's a very pleasant and sneaky lens. Stop it down to f5.6 and it's sharper than a scorpion sting. I really like it...