New Year. New Light(s). Fun with Continuous Lighting...

It never really stops.

It was a "first world" problem. I had too much cash in my pockets. Too many large denomination bills vying for space with my car key and my extra DLUX camera battery. Something had to change. So I pulled out the offending currency, crammed it into an envelope and mailed it to B&H Camera store with a cryptic note. It basically said, "Keep sending me stuff. The office is not full yet! Best, Kirk." 

Today the Fedex man pulled into the driveway and disgorged a box from his truck. We stopped for half an hour to play pickle ball and he left in a huff after I beat him soundly in the game. As I always do. Only then did I pay attention to the box. It was from B&H. I decided to look inside. 

The image above is a good likeness of the actual product they sent along. It's an LED light but instead of all the ones I've tried before this one is a "full color" system. In past iterations one could only buy a single color temperature unit (usually 3200° or 5600° Kelvin -- but not both) or one could buy a bi-color unit. The bi-color units are made up of 50% daylight emitters and 50%  tungsten light balanced emitters. One can increase or decrease the percentage that each group of individual LED locations spits out which gives you the ability to range across the color range with the proviso that you'll only get about 1/2 the power output that you will get from a single color temperature unit. Why? Because if you want, say 4400 K as your color temperature each set of LED bulbs will be operating at 50% and combining their output together. 

The other issue with bi-color or single color LED lights is that you can end up with a green spike or an over-corrected magenta spike on some of the light units. The only way to remediate the color cast is to find the right filter to put over the front of the light and making a global correction for the spike. 

The Full-Color LED lights are also called RGB LEDs. They have the ability to not only shift across a wide range of color temperatures but also to make huge and precise corrections to the green/magenta hues in order to delivery a completely neutral light output. That's beyond cool. So beyond cool. 

When I saw the output of the new light and ran it through preliminary tests I was hooked. I grabbed my satellite phone, shushed the super models frolicking in the hot tube, and called the team at B&H right away. Would they send a second one to keep the first RGB LED light company? Of course they would. 

The light I'm somewhat gushing over is the FS-300C. It's a true RGB unit. It's fan-cooled but so far the fan noise is acceptably low. The light is heavy but forgoes the usual external power supply --- which makes it easier to set up, easier to use, and easier to pack. The unit's name is an indication of the power of the output. It's 300 watts. That's a lot. And it's a very bright unit. With a color meter one can get painstaking accuracy for both color and hue. And it works with all the other accessories I have for my other Nanlite FS lighting machines. 

The team at B&H inferred that they chose to send this product along because it's really good, fits with my previous purchase patterns, and because they knew that it's $200 discount from the usual pricing would fit into my wheelhouse since I am an incredibly frugal, retired photographer. They seemed delighted when I ordered a second one. But  you know my rule: things photographic should travel in pairs. Same with coffee. And hiking shoes. Two pairs. Always...

This unit is an astounding bargain at $299. They are usually priced at $499. And ten years ago buying this sort of technology and performance would have cost many multiples more. 

Yeah. I know. I was just writing last week about having given away three big LED panels. But sometimes you have to be strategic. I might use them for something very worthwhile. You never know. If not I'll have some of the most accurate office lighting in all of North America.

And so, the New Year starts with its characteristic bang. Desire temporarily quenched. 

The image above was made with light from one of the FS-300B, bicolor units. They look so much alike from the outside.

Thank goodness for the labeling on the sides. 

Rush out and get one. Or not. Either way doesn't affect me. We are consistently non-profit here at VSL. At least for the moment...

 

This is a self-paced blog post. It's New Year's Day so I'm bailing on writing stuff. Nothing happened worth sharing. Just basic happiness and walking around with cameras. Make up your own captions if you'd like...

 

Has anyone else noticed that Michael Johnston is cranking out a lot 

more content since he is now unable to moderate comments?

Nice to have fresh stuff to read with more consistency. 

An unexpected advantage to moving onto a new platform. 

It's New Year's Eve. Time for retrospection...

Can't wait to see my new series hanging next to Thomas Struth 

at the Museum of Indulgences. Mine is called, "Strange Restrooms

in Strange Places." It's a masterpiece of a concept.

Note the Justin Mott style hat! And the new jacket. Styling for Winter.

If Social Security works out I might even be able to afford gloves...

What an interesting year was 2025. Not one I want to repeat. There was some good and then there were the usual, uncomfortable brushes with mortality, with career changes, and all the geo-political crap. But this here is a photo blog and we're going to skip the regurgitation of the skin cancer surgeries, the tariffs, the wanton corruption of the current ruling party --- along with the horrible mess they've made of the world. We'll just talk here about work, and non-work, and some cameras and some other fun purchases. If that's okay with you. 

We're in our fifth year here without any wholesale equipment system changes. No rush to divest of Leica gear. No need to wring hands and re-learn other system menus and interfaces. I count that as a big win. And something calming for me. It feels like, in some ways, I have conquered the addictive clutches of the gear acquisition syndrome. But not completely...

Short version. I have to say that the particular Leica called the SL2-S makes the best color files I have ever seen come out of a digital camera. Shooting with it makes the process of getting good, rich, accurate colors almost bulletproof. I find myself grabbing that camera much more often than the other 10 Leicas strewn about the studio. It's really that good. I reach for an older SL2 when I think the extra resolution will be helpful. I reach for an M camera when I want to feel like an artist, it's bright daylight outside, and I'm feeling fifty millimeter-ish. Channeling my inner Elliot Erwitt. Just a bit.

I bought two Leica cameras in 2025. When the bottom fell out of the used SL2 market I picked up a second one for a really low price. It's in perfect condition and goes along with my philosophy of having two identical work cameras. Appropriate because for the last five years my original SL2 has been my full time work camera. The second camera to join me this year was the Leica DLUX8 which I have absolutely no regrets about purchasing. It's small, light, very capable and easy to bring along anywhere. 

I think my favorite job of the year was the one I did back in the Spring, in Santa Fe. It was a banking conference for the seventh largest banking organization in the USA. The keynote speaker was from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. A business school set up and funded by a great, great, uncle from my father's side of the family. The banking part of the family. The presentations were lively. I flew in and out of the local airport and got an upgrade to first class on American Airlines. The entire contingent stayed at the Eldorado Hotel which was comfortable and convenient. The food service was right on the money and my room was right next to the swimming pool. Who could ask for more?

The highlight of the trip, beyond the paycheck, was meeting world renowned author, John Sanford, for lunch at the diner on the Plaza. That man has more energy and more interesting things to talk about than just about anyone I've ever met. That's real fun. He even took a photo of me with my new DLUX8. Now a collectible photo, by default. 

I did buy a few more lenses this year; just to round out the collection. One of my photo friends dropped a Leica R series, 35-70mm f4 ROM lens, in mint condition, into my hands for the very affordable price of $600. It's an amazing lens and I used it to make the two images below. There's even a profile for the lens in Lightroom Classic. No bad for a product from 25 years ago. Is it good? No, it's great!

After a thorough testing of the Thypoch 28mm f1.4 lens I'd bought earlier I went ahead and bought both the 50mm f1.4 and the 75mm f1.4 Simera lenses as well. They are both really good; especially for the reasonable prices. 

I have divested myself of several tripods, three big Nanlite LED panels, a bunch of audio gear I bought when I was making video content, three enormous and weighty C-Stands with arms, three large, air damped light stands and a bunch of smaller flash equipment --- all since I decided to retire from the field back in August. It feels good and now there's more room in the studio. 

Yesterday I made one last purchase of gear for the year. I bought one Nanlite FS-300-C RGB fixture. An LED monolight, if you will. When I wrote the 2010 book about LED lighting for professional photographers there were no RGB LED lighting fixtures available anywhere outside of Hollywood. At least none that were available for less than the price of a new Toyota Corolla. I'd been reading up about the two technologies involved in RGB LED units and decided to see how much more accurate the color could be by upgrading from a typical bi-color LED unit to one of the newer RGB versions. Having a magenta/green control alone is probably worth getting one. B&H had the 300 watt unit for sale at nearly half price and it was too good an offer to pass up. It gets here this week and I'll most certainly experiment with it and write about it in short order. I hope it fits in well with my multiple daylight balanced units and also my 300 watt bi-color model. Or....if they don't match well I could become a "one light" portrait shooter. 

When I say that I've retired I think a lot of readers consider this a binary decision: all on or all off. But it's more nuanced than that. I'm happy to volunteer if the project is fun, and supports a non-profit that I like. I'm also more than happy to collaborate with friends on fun, personal projects where none of us get paid. And, if the budget is enormously huge and the potential client remarkably creative, and the fun quotient off the charts, I can be dragged back in to some sort of commercial project. As the last James Bond movie declares in its title: NEVER SAY NEVER AGAIN.

But I am no longer actively pursuing commercial photography work. No more promos. No mailers. No phone calls and, thank God!, no more Zoom Calls (a torture tool surely invented by Satan). 

Below are two images I took this afternoon. I'd been getting ready for New Year's Eve celebrations at the house and decided to take a break and walk through the Austin downtown area that I've been using to make photos that have succeeded in boring many VSL readers since 2009. Just one last circuit before the new year. I have other images to show from today's walk but I wanted to show two images shot seconds apart. 

To one side of me, close in, are five big incandescent light bulbs. Bare, not shielded or controlled. The rest of the room I shot in was dark. I noticed when I looked through the EVF that there was a lot of veiling flare because of the lights and the lack of a lens hood (the curse of buying old lenses with odd filter sizes and no ready supply of accessories).  I added some contrast in post to the offending image. 

The image just below this flare-y image was taken with all the controls and stuff at exactly the same settings. The only difference, as you can see, is that I used my hand to shield the lens from the light that was striking it directly. Instantly the flare was (mostly) gone and the contrast in the image elevated. 

Just a reminder that lens hoods are good. Lens hoods should never sit, reversed on a lens that's in use (horrible, amateur move), and that, in the absence of a lens hood, one can and should use anything available to "improve the lie." *

*I think that's what they say in golf. Someone will correct me if I'm wrong. 

"....Stop! In the name of love..."

One sad aspect of the past year was having to sit out nearly a month of much needed swim practice. Two weeks for a surgery on my beautiful face and another two weeks to recover from removing a pesky tumor on my left shoulder blade. The time out was pure hell. Not just for me but for everyone around me as I complained incessantly. Loudly. Unrelentingly. All that wasted energy.... Swimming keeps me from being --- whatever.

Did I swim this morning? On the last day of the year? You bet I did. I showed up half an hour early. While the pool will be closed tomorrow there was some talk amongst three of us (the more dedicated or renegade swimmers) of accessing the key in the lock box on the main door to the pool (two partners in crime are former board members who know the code...) and surreptitiously doing our own, self-guided workout tomorrow in the early morning. In the chilly dark. Before witnesses wake up. But it's only talk right now...

*******************************************************************************

Some worry that by skipping the pleasures of clients and their projects I will become complacent, lazy, unmotivated and will rot away here at the VSL compound. Nothing could be further from the truth. I have an ever growing list of things I want to get done, things I need to get done, and places I want to see...now! More to discuss in 2026. 

I hope everyone has a safe and happy last day of 2025. Hey! 2025! Don't let the door hit you on the way out.

I had lunch with an old friend recently. To say he is currently into Leicas is a supreme understatement. He picked up this one last quarter.

 

How old is this camera? Well, it's from the time between the UR-Leica (the first prototype) and the time at which they made the lenses removable and interchangeable. Yeah. He brought it along to lunch. It reminded me that one of the early screw mount Leica's super powers was its incredibly small size!!!

No wonder the company revolutionized photography. 

The machining on this camera is wonderful and very precision. And yes, this is a working camera.

Amazing. Close to 100 years old.

Just had to share.

The studio gear inventory takes a hit. Yet again.

 I was at the hat shop on S. Congress Avenue again this week. Just walking around with that little Leica CL and that wacky 50mm f0.95 lens I wrote about yesterday. It was a busy retail day and the fine weather pulled people out of their homes and SUVs and sent them out into the wilds of urbania to try their hands at window shopping, zany coffee buying and general passeggiata activities. We'd just say that the sidewalks were packed. I stopped by the hat shop to get out of the stream and because they do such a very, very good job at merchandizing. Even stuff that would look terrible on me looks great on the displays. And I like the way hats look in photographs.

I was lining up a terrific shot when a young woman wearing a beautiful, gray Stetson, classic cowboy hat sidled up and asked me about my camera. I told her it was a Leica CL and she told me that one of her own film cameras was the Leica/Minolta CLE. I asked if she had the original 40mm lens that was generally sold with that camera and she said yes. This, of course, led us down the path of talking photography and all sorts of related topics....like filmmaking. 

As our conversation progressed I learned that she was very interested in film and video and had just taken several courses at a workshop space created by famous Austin movie director, Rick Linklater. At 33 my new photo friend just had resigned from teaching and switched careers, hoping to make photography and movie-making her focus. As we were wrapping up our conversation (because the mannequins are not going to photograph themselves!!!) I remembered that I had three big Nanlite LED panels that I was bent on getting rid of. I asked if she could use some LED lights. She did. 

We met at Medici Coffee in her neighborhood this morning at 9 a.m., chatted about the industry for a while and then I helped her load the three big Nanlites LED panels into her car. I also passed on three stout, air-damped light stands to go with the lights. She was very pleased and most appreciative but not nearly as appreciative as me since I found someone to take stuff off my hands who will really get good use out of the gear. And I now have additional more empty space in my studio. Which was my primary goal. 

While this certainly doesn't fall under the concept of mentoring I'm pretty sure it counts for the concept of helping to support emerging artists. 

It felt good to pass on gear to someone who is clearly on fire about being a visual artist. It feels good to get rid of more stuff. Kind of like the idea of "Swedish Death Cleaning" only more specialized; as in: "Swedish Death Cleaning for Photographers." While I'm not planning on dying anytime soon the basic concept here is to not leave a pile of unwanted stuff for your loved ones to deal with when you exit the fixer of life and go into the print washer of the great beyond. It takes decades of planning, I am told, to do a really clean, archival exit.

More stuff is heading to the chopping block soon. And I'm finding that giving stuff away is like losing weight. You feel better, your space is less cluttered, your pants fit right, you look better and you've winnowed down the number of subroutines your brain needs to make when you need to make choices between different piles of equipment. 

The weather here turned chilly in the middle of the night. It was 80° yesterday. It's going to stay in the 40s all day today. Fine by me. I got to try out a new jacket! 

OT: I did buy myself something special for Christmas. In fact, I bought twelve copies.

 I like pens but I love pencils. Most people's experiences with pencils revolved around the #2 pencils, yellow, that we used to write with in elementary school. Those pencils were very, very inexpensive. But they worked. And I think a hidden benefit for schools and parents is that using pencils instead of ink pens kept ink stains off clothing, desks, walls and fingers. And off the clothes and faces of the children who might have been targets of others' more malicious penmanship.

I like yellow pencils as an historic meme but when it comes to actually writing with pencils in the here and now I've come to prefer Veblen pencils... Not Leica level pencils but pencils that are clearly a cut above the standard fare. 

The pencils I re-discovered this year are the Blackwing brand and I'm loving them. 

Blackwing pencils were used by art directors, writers, journalists and pencil forward hobbyists for most of the 20th century. They were preferred by the writing cognoscenti -- and well loved. But the corporate bean counters killed them off in the earliest part of the 21st century. People sought out hidden stores of surviving Blackwing 602 pencils and paid dearly for them. People who could not find secret troves of the pencils generally sat in a corner chair in their offices with the lights off, staring out the window and brooding. A palpable malaise covering their affect like a fog. Lost. Despairing.

Someone (meaning some company...) bought the rights, and the magic pencil making roadmap, and revived the pencils in 2010 and brought them back into the market, much to the joy and relief of fine pencil addicts everywhere. 

According to the company the pencils are made with aromatic, California incense-cedar wood wrapped around imported Japanese graphite. The big, rectangular erasers on the word negating end of the pencils are, in fact, replaceable. Good to know when the eraser wears down before the graphite "lead." 

I splurged. I bought a box of $12. The price was bracing! Lofty territory indeed. The box of 12 cost a royal  $30. Even though I knew that mostly rich dentists, lawyers and wealthier photo bloggers buy these as status symbols I actually use them because they write cleaner and better than other pencils I've used. And occasionally it's nice to be able to stop writing and actually smell the wood. To breathe in the subtle scent of cedar and then reflect and continue writing that very special note. 

The company's motto is printed in gold against the dark green of the pencil shaft. It reads, "HALF THE PRESSURE, TWICE THE SPEED." 

I reckon the box of pencils will last me at least through 2026. I'm happy to have them at my fingertips. I might even start writing in cursive again. Why pencils? Because way back when we were first starting to learn to write that's the tool we used. Most people's creative writing started to fail when they switched from pencils to pens, and then worsened still in the transition to word processors. But it's not too late to go back to the good stuff. It's never too late to revisit your childhood genius.

Note to other bloggers and novelists: You don't have to endlessly re-write if you can deftly erase unwanted words with a simple and handy eraser. Just sayin'. There's a nice eraser on every pencil in the box!!!

I'm sure I'll read in the comments about my flagrant, over-the-top buying habits yet again but even though these pencils are 600% more expensive then those available in a bulk box of 250 yellow pencils  from China it's really all about the handling, the haptics and the way a good pencil can make one feel. Just like a second grader again. And, of course, in your essays you'll find that special Blackwing Look that we all envy.

Cooties. That's up next.

A portion of the profits from the sale of Blackwing pencils goes to support music and arts programs in schools. That sounds nice...

A few years back, when I bought two Leica CL digital cameras (which are APS-C format!), I also bought an odd lens. The TTArtisan APS-C 50mm f0.95. Yesterday I took it out for a re-familiarization run.

At the time I bought the lens (new) from B&H, around 2022, the price of the lens was about $125. Low enough to qualify as a low risk experiment. A couple of days ago I was looking through CameraWest.com's "Latest Drop" of used equipment and I came across the same lens as a used item, in good shape, for sale for $395. I was puzzled. I haven't done a good job of keeping up with what's going on in the APS-C L mount category and wondered if, back in 2022 I had missed something in my initial forays with the product. Was it somehow much better than I remembered? Had it risen to cult status in the market niche? I was up for a challenge and so I decided to take the lens and one of the Leica CLs out for a spin. Seemed like a good idea on a late Saturday afternoon. 

I set the camera for auto-ISO and limited the slowest shutter speed to 1/250th of a second. I mostly wanted to shoot the lens at wide open or nearly wide open because ---- f0.95! I don't have anything else nearly that fast so it makes sense to test it for its most standout feature. Right?

The CL doesn't feature in body image stabilization so setting a high enough shutter speed is important. The max ISO in the CL's auto-ISO menu is 6400 and in the dark you run out of ISO pretty quickly so it's fun to have a lens that compensates with an extremely big maximum aperture. Also, while focus peaking works pretty well with that camera the depth of field is so small with this lens when used wide open that I find it pretty much mandatory to punch in to a magnified view to spot check accurate focus.

The lens is very dense while having a fairly small profile, overall. It feels less heavy on an SL camera. 

An interesting thing about the 50mm f0.95 is that I can actually use it on a full frame camera if I'm willing to accept a small bit of uncorrectable vignetting in the corners of the frame. The closer you focus and the more you stop down the smaller the vignetting effect is. When I put this lens on a Leica SL2-S and I shoot at night I change the aspect ratio of the frame from 3:2 to 7:5. This pretties up the corners and for most images made this way vignetting is much less of an issue. 

The lens is a little soft at f0.95 and progressively sharpens up with each half stop down. By f5.6 it's on par with a lot of the 50mm legacy lenses people seem to like. But again, you are looking for things this lens offers that are more or less unique so I find myself shooting as close to wide open as I can and I depend on several fixes in Lightroom to give the lens back the contrast it needs and the sharpness as well. The contrast slider is your friend. The clarity and texture sliders are equally attractive for this lens. Finally, I tend to shoot this one entirely in raw so I can use things like the "raw details" setting to help out with the overall quality. 

Some photographers, the ones bent on distilling the very last micron of performance out of their photography, might be disappointed at the contrast and detail of the lens at its widest settings and I certainly get that. But if you like a bit of character in your lenses and love shooting in the dark you could do a lot worse. Is it worth $395, used?  God no!!! But is it fun to play with at $125? You bet. Blow up the attached photos and see for yourself. And ---- big treat --- more mannequins!!!!

Linen wrinkles too easily...

Bokeh central.

And that's the long and short of it.