Self portrait in Crew Café. Using the SL2-S and the Thypoch 21mm f3.5 lens.
It was a rainy morning in Austin. I got a notification from Air Canada at 5:30 in the morning letting me know that my departure was going to be delayed for three hours. I rolled over and went back to sleep until later. I hadn't flown since our trip to Chicago last Fall and was expecting the worst from airport security and the general chaos that has been rattling air travel for months. I got to the airport earlier than I needed to, got into the Pre-Chek, Global entry line and made it through the gauntlet in.....twelve minutes. Didn't have to take my shoes off or get patted down. It helps, I guess, that I didn't have any checked luggage and I was also a "priority" passenger. Not something I earned, just something that comes along with the first class ticket I paid for.
The airplane was older and showed a bit of wear and tear around the edges. I had a lively an interesting person in the seat next to me. The next thing I knew, four hours later, I was dragging my roller bag, with my camera bag strapped to the top, through the airport in Montreal. Followed by a bus ride into downtown and a Metro ride to the general area of my hotel. A quick check-in and an unpacking ritual and I was out looking for a late supper.
Before I left Austin I tried everyone's patience by going around and around, both here on the blog but also in real life, with the indecision of camera packing. Clothes? Didn't give it a second thought. I could have landed half naked and bought enough clothing locally in a couple of hours to last for the trip. But cameras? Somehow the idea of the "right" gear assumed the gravity of a holy quest. This is what happens when one retires and has too much bandwidth for random play.
At the last minute I jettisoned everything I had packed and replaced all of the M cameras with two SL variants and a small smattering of lenses that conformed to my basic comfort zone of focal lengths. Happy nowadays with most stuff between 28mm and 75mm. Of course I overpacked for the trip but it's important to constantly note that at no time did a camera bag ever accompany me to a museum, on a walk, or in other other part of my stay. The camera bag was dormant and forlorn from Monday evening until it was time to pack up and come home on Sunday. And, as importantly, at no time did a second camera of any type accompany me during the five and one half shooting days. Nope. Not once. I walked with always only one camera hanging off my left shoulder.
My routine when getting ready to leave my hotel for a walk, a museum visit, a meal, or just lounging about in glorious but a bit grimy downtown Montreal, was to stand at the desk, look at the gear spread out in front of me, think about where I was going and what I was likely to want to see, and photograph, and then make a selection of one camera body and two lenses. That's it. That's all. For most daylight shooting I seemed to gravitate towards the Leica SL2 --- mostly pairing it with either the R series 35-70mm zoom or the Sigma 45mm 2.8 (cult lens). If I knew I'd be out roaming around after dark I'd pack the SL2-S and the 50mm f1.4 and, usually, the 28mm f1.4. You know, for low light...
I say I "packed" them but in truth I put a lens on the camera and slung the whole contraption over my left shoulder on a lovely, cheap SmallRig leather strap. A profoundly retro looking brown leather strap. The camera hung quietly and comfortably until needed. The second lens found solace and comfort in one of my jacket pockets. Were I braver I would have just chosen one lens at a time so I could stick both hands in my pockets when they got chilly.
Embarrassing confession. I wore the same pair of pants for all seven days. But I never really took the same lens out with me on every outing.
I had all kinds of preconceptions about what lenses I would use the most and how I would use my cameras. I always talk about the lure of the 50mm lens but I actually used the 50mm lens less than the old, rugged, manual focusing Leica R-35/70mm. The ability to tweak focal lengths around that 50mm spot was a bit addicting. And the 35/70 is a fraction of the size and weight of my 24-90mm back home so it felt --- fine. I'd say that about half of the images I shot were with the old, short zoom. In fact, if I traveled out and around and wanted to go as gear minimal as possible; meaning one lens/one body, it was always the 35/70 I reached for.
But the big surprises on the trip were two lenses that I never considered when I was doing all the mental gymnastics about what to pack. One of those two lenses is the Thypoch Ksana 21mm f3.5 ASPH with its vaguely explained multicoating. It's the lens I'm using in the image at the top of the post and also the one I used to photograph the two interiors just below.
An amazing environment in which to savor coffee, pastries and other fare.
Crew Café on Rue St. Jacque.
Having been mostly averse to ultra-wide angle lenses all my career I've seen a caravan of 20mm and 21mm lenses come into the studio over years only to see little use and, generally, a quick exit. But there is something different about this particular lens; even if I'm using it on a mirrorless camera body (mine is an M series lens), or maybe because I am able to use it on an SL body. Unlike previous very wide lenses that have come and gone this one is pretty much sharp all the way into the corners and it's also sharp at its widest aperture; which is pretty cool for a $600 lens...
This was the lens I put in a pocket any time I went out with the short zoom or the 50mm lens. I have lots of images that I took with it and figure that it helped bring about 25% of the images from the trip into existence. It was a last minute packing decision based on the fact that I still had some space and I remembered some tall buildings on narrow streets. It's definitely a lens that I will now bring along with me on any adventure. It's that good.
Besides the 35/70mm there is one other lens that I felt pretty comfortable with just taking along by itself. No accompaniment. No back ups. That was the Sigma 45mm f2.8.
I had convinced myself that I was a macho photographer who didn't need the crutch of autofocus or other modern niceties to make my art. I'd venture forth with a few basic, fundamental rangefinder lenses and their adapters and that should be enough for me. But then, at the last minute I chickened out and tossed the 45mm into a gap between t-shirts in my roller case. And I'm happy I did. It's the lens I took along with me to the museum when I went to see the Avedon show and also the Roman Sculpture show. All the statues and most of the museum detail shots were done with the 45mm. It worked perfectly and it's sharper and better behaved than I remembered. I used it for an entire day then stuck it back in the bag and rotated through the other lenses for the rest of the trip. But the images I made that day were great. Some of my favorites! Like the two just below....
There's another shot from the museum day of shooting that I want to share, just below. It's a black and white photo done with the 21mm and I include it because it shows off how well the Thypoch lens and the SL2 cameras work together to make black and white photos. There's little to no field curvature and there's no functional decline in the corners or on the edges. It's a mechanically well corrected lens that made do, quite well, without the additional boost of camera firmware/lens profile corrections. That's the mark of a good lens!
Staircases at the Musée de Beaux Arts in Montreal.
The problem with lots of photographer's travels that I read about or see in videos is the relentless movement. Like sharks who have to constantly move forward to breathe the photographers seem driven to keep manically hunting for something new and interesting to share. And they do so by working crazy hours and moving from spot to spot and city to city. I was not at all interested in the churn of "five cities in four days" or anything like that. My way of exploring a city through photography is the opposite.
I've also done lots of budget travel for business, staying in noisy hotels with cramped rooms and bad to worse beds. Showers that dripped onto a shower floor designed like a tympani drum --- for extra drip sound volume. Hotels with doors slamming all nights long and drunken fellow guests using their "football stadium" voices with each other at three in the morning out in the hallways. I think I am over any enthusiasm for pursuing budget accommodations...
I want to travel for one day and then stay for six or seven, or ten days, or two weeks. I've never been a fan of marching from tourist attraction to tourist attraction just to check off stuff on a bucket list. That's kind of the American method of sucking as much fun as possible out of vacation travel. So, I checked into my room at the hotel and unpacked all my stuff and put it into a wardrobe and an ample chest of drawers. Then relaxed into the idea of staying put for comfortable, somewhat glorious six nights. (See my shot of my room/suite in the image just below...).
My goal on this trip wasn't to come back with the biggest collection of the best photographs I could take under the circumstances but to enjoy myself and find pleasure in making my own schedule and living in the city a bit more deeply. B. and I talked about it and agreed that even if I came back empty handed and without any image worth a crap the trip would be worth it if I had been able to achieve a complete reset from the work mentality to a non-working/relaxing/artist mentality. And I think the trip went a long way to providing that.
Something relaxing about twelve foot ceilings...
My days started with coffee and fresh croissants and progressed on to walking through the Old Town on Rue. St. Paul, or figuring out the connections to use for the Metro to get to an obscure market or interesting small neighborhood in which to photograph. Lunch was anywhere but dinner with a bit more intention. I spent the week in the city without ever having to diverge from the use of public transportation. Which, for a Texan, is about as novel as you can get.
So, what is the benefit to a photographer of traveling alone and spending time in a big city? If you can clear your mental plate of things that must get done before traveling and the opposite side which is: things that must get done the minute you get back to your own home town you'll be able to relax and spend some unencumbered time with yourself. No external static or coercion. Wanna walk aimlessly down a street that no one has ever recommended to anyone? Fine. Wanna eat burgers and fries one night and dive into fine dining the next? Okay. Tired of looking at art in the museum after ten minutes and would rather be walking around the neighborhood with a camera in your hand? Cool. Leave now. No contract to sign. Wanna get up early? Works for me. Wanna stay up late and read a book? That works too.
But getting really quiet is almost like waiting for mud to settle in a glass. Once the mud settles the view through the glass is clear. Once you get your mind to settle and stop chattering life gets clearer. And you can sit quietly and think about what you might really, really want to be doing --- outside the constraint and well intentioned pressures of family, friends and society in general.
I liked using the bigger, Leica SL and SL2 cameras for all my photography. I used them only one at a time. The other got left behind in the hotel room. A bigger camera fits my hands better and can be such a stable platform for good lenses. While the SL2 has more pixels the SL2-S has fatter pixels which means it handles higher ISOs better. You give up resolution for noise free see-in-the-dark performance. You give up a bit of high ISO performance for more tiny details in your files. Everything is a compromise. It's all in the root locus of the problem solving of taking the right photos.
Being unencumbered by clients or families means you don't have to carefully negotiate your schedule if you want to go and have mid-morning coffee with your Canadian friend, Pierre. You just text Pierre and the two of you decide upon a time and place. No other fuss involved. Then you show up and talk, and walk and take photos of each other until you both agree that it's time to part ways and go get other stuff done. But you end your coffee meetup organically and not because a third party has an agenda you have to be compliant with. (This is one of Montreal's absolute, best photographers, Pierre Charbonneau. (Just below).
Pierre.
People carry around too many lenses. Or maybe just lenses that are too big. Why? Because they've been taught that, as photographers, they have to be prepared for any eventuality. Any event of confluence of forms and colors that pops up. But the truth is that it's okay to go out and see what you can see with just one lens and one camera body. In fact, it may be a better way to photograph. With normal sized cameras and lenses more things are accessible to you. The more you carry the less you can see. And the quicker you'll get tired and cranky and ready to get back to your room for a nap.
I felt like I cheated against my original intention of going all Henri Cartier-Bresson. His method in Paris was to walk with one camera and one lens and to shoot everything with that small package. I had the intention of doing pretty much the same although my cameras of choice turned out to be quite a bit bigger and more ponderous. But my real cheat was my time to time substitution of a mild but insanely optically wonderful short zoom lens instead of a "mythical" and magical 50mm lens. Or, this year, maybe a 40mm lens. The short zoom is basically a normal lens (50mm) that can be adjusted on the fly to be just a little bit longer and a little bit short a focal length.
If I left all the other lenses in the hotel room the 35-70 would have suited me just fine. (If you buy one please be aware that it has several "flaws" that are easy to work with. It has some distortion but there are profiles for that distortion correction in Adobe Lightroom. The corrections are calculated individually for the 35, 50 and 70mm focal lengths. It also vignettes a bit when used wide open at the widest aperture).
Everyone seems to have a 24-70mm zoom lens for their camera of choice. That might be the best all around travel zoom lens but it begs the question of whether or not you'll be further ahead shooting with a smaller prime. Maybe the ubiquitous 35mm focal length.
On days when I wasn't meeting a friend for coffee or hanging out at museums I spent all the daylight hours walking and looking. Shooting sparingly. I'm trying to break out of the habit of overshooting instead of putting the camera down and just plain looking at the scene around me. The events happening around me. It's only when I found things that looked and felt unfamiliar or strange that I pulled the camera up and made images. I have enough "normal" images already.
I would walk out the front of the hotel, decide whether to turn left or right and proceed. When I went out one morning I was looking for the Museum of Contemporary Art. It is supposed to be near McGill University. I found the building but it is currently closed pending moving to a new location. After walking the campus neighborhood I went back into the Metro and set my sights on the Mont Royale area. Home of a more bohemian demographic and replete with tons of small businesses, world famous bagel shops and some keen graffiti.
I saw one place that had delicious looking flat bread pizzas so I stopped in to order one and take a food break. And to drink a 500 ml bottle of water in order to placate my recently acquired urologist... Delicious.... but I rarely photograph my lunches. I walked and walked until I realized that I'd gone a couple miles and what I really wanted to do was head back to my hotel and take a break. Write some details in a little journal of the trip that I was trying valiantly to keep up with. Turns out I was equadistant to two different Metro stations, each about a mile and a half away. I chose the one I'd never gone through before and started walking. It became immediately obvious that I was no longer in a tourist zone and I walked through a neighborhood filled with modest two and three story apartment buildings.
I still found small architectural details that looked interesting and stopped from time to time to photograph the details with the long end of the zoom. I got to the Frontenac station, waved my Opus card over the card reader and went underground to connect with the line that ran closest to my place. I stopped one station before which put me at the big convention center where I got in line to get a donut and a cup of (Yikes!!!) decaf coffee at a Tim Horton's. Don't judge me, I was running of fumes at the moment and wanted the comfort of trash food. Besides it's on my new time limited diet (eat anything at any time between 12:01 am and 11:59 pm).
I always shot on two cards in each camera with the card in one slot backing up the other so I never spent any time sitting around managing memory cards, archiving stuff, or looking deeply at what I had been shooting. I figured it would all come out in the wash.
Since I had no one to impress, day-to-day, I packed four identical army green t-shirts and one dull green, heavy sweatshirt. I did pack one dress shirt which I wore when going to finer restaurants. The repeat of green t-shirts under a green sweatshirt took away almost all of the wasted time trying to decide that to wear. I packed one pair of pants which were an identical copy of the ones I wore to fly in. I didn't spill Poutine gravy on them and they never smelled badly so I guess I could have decided against extra pants altogether. But you'd hate not to have a back-up pair if you needed them.
One other thing I didn't pack --- on purpose, was a battery charger for the SCL-6 batteries. I have five or six of the batteries and had charged them fully, before traveling, at home. I used the camera body which would stay home on a give day as a very heavy, very expensive battery charger since both SL variants I brought along can charge batteries internally when used with a USB-C cable. Worked a charm. Charged an extra battery during the day while I was out being a tourist and then charged another one overnight. I averaged using two batteries per shooting day so that worked out just right.
When people go on one of those tightly time-limited vacations the tight time constraints push people to spend every waking hour walking around looking for something, anything to photograph. One of the benefits of staying in one place a lot longer is that after a long, happy and wine soaked dinner one has the option of taking off one's shoes, grabbing that novel you never seemed to have time to finish before, laying back on a nest of pillows on the sofa and spending the postprandial hours, relaxing, recharging and getting some really good reading done. Plus, having the break from the "work" of taking photographs far into the night means you are refreshed and ready to go again the next morning.
Kirk, Dude, bring more pants.
The 50mm Thypoch got packed because I knew there might be a need for a fast aperture lens to shoot with after dark. The lens has an f1.4 aperture and, with a Leica M to L adapter it works perfectly on either of the SL cameras. I used this lens for most of the "after dinner" shots that I did take. It's a great lens. I also used it in a bunch of market shots (veggies, fruits, cheezes, etc.) because I could easily limit the depth of field while working close in to get the background satisfyingly out of focus.
The 28mm f1.4 Thypoch languished. I used it for a few shots one day when I walked around in conjunction with the 50mm lens but I found, when choosing a lens for an outing, that the 28mm was too close to the 35mm on the zoom and, if the 35 on the zoom wasn't wide enough then the 21mm was more satisfying since it's character and the way it made photos was more obvious and, to me, quite novel.
Life in Montreal, at least the parts I went to, has gone mostly cashless. The only time I needed to have real currency was when I was leaving the hotel at the end of my trip and needed to leave behind a gratuity for the floor maid who did a wonderful job keeping my sloppiness under control, the linens changed and the washroom clean and presentable. I found an ATM and got some Canadian currency and subsequently left it all there. That was the sole use I had for actual paper currency through the course of my seven day stay. Interesting for someone of my generation...
In some ways I let my habits developed over 40 years of working professionally color a few of my choices; especially when it came to packing gear. Which gear to take and why. I think my early instincts were probably the ones I would have been better off respecting. My mania for ensuring everything is backed up shouldn't be relevant in this kind of undertaking. If I bring only one camera or one lens and it breaks I should be able to either ignore the disruption and enjoy the sights and experiences or.... I should be able to walk five minutes from my hotel to CamTec camera on Rue Notre Dame and buy a suitable replacement for either piece in a matter of minutes. I don't need to bring a case of gear in order to be happy when traveling now. No bills will be unpaid if I'm struck with a gear "disaster." No clients will be inconvenienced and belts won't be worn tighter as a result.
That 21mm Asana Thypoch is really nice for improptu street photos.
My original gear strategy was to bring only one camera and one lens. It could have been either of two combinations. Either the bigger Leica SL2-S and the much bigger Leica 50mm SL APO or the Leica M240 M-E and the Voigtlander or Carl Zeiss 50mm f2.0 lens. Probably the Voigtlander for its high APO performance. Either system gets finished out with a handful of batteries. A lens cleaning cloth and a bulb blower.
Either choice would work fine for most of the images I wanted to take and, if I limited my choice to one camera and one lens I'd probably find my vision for my images modifying itself as well. The M240 looks cooler but the SL2S has better all around shooting capabilities. It's more or less a toss up. And it sure would require one less piece of luggage.
Shooting on the rare 28mm frames on the trip...
And the choice of camera and lens systems brings us to the topic of laptop computers. Over the years a functional laptop with some of the extras has been de riguer on every single commercial shoot I've undertaken. If you were traveling you needed your laptop within reach. Great for keeping track of work correspondence, backing up work daily, and sometimes even more often, checking in for airline travel, even for entertainment while waiting for stuff. But on a trip like this? When you are trying to practice unplugging from every day life? Best for me to leave the laptop at home. There's nothing, in terms of travel logistics, that can't be handled by a recent vintage smartphone. With two card slots there's really no reason to go totally compulsive on making end of day data back ups of solo vacation photos.
Not having a computer with me on this trip meant I was not tempted to keep up a daily blog post flow. All that could wait until I got back home, messed with my files, and attempted re-entry into my usual Austin life. There was, no longer, client correspondence with its usual angst and the presumption that I'd be available almost all the time. Keeping up with the home front just required an occasional text and one nightly phone call to the chairperson of the board. But not having the computer meant no added bulk to the all carry-on luggage. No extra plugs to search out. No temptation to check in on the usual websites I might visit over coffee at home. Its absence was actually one of the finer continuing attributes of the vacation and I'm glad I made the decision to leave mine behind. Plus, I wasn't tempted away from reading a real, printed book, which requires energy and cognitive thought as opposed to the passive entertainment of Netflix or Apple TV. No news watching. No talk shows. Nothing.
Again, regaining a regard for the power of "quiet" was a positive thing.
All the vacation details were straightforward and easy to navigate. I was through security in both directions in a matter of minutes. All the costs incurred have already been paid. There is no overhanging debt from the adventure. The Canadian border folks were fast and friendly. The US border folks pretended to be super serious but more or less just waved me in. And the Uber home was (happily) uneventful. All in all it seems like a perfect break from the mentality of work and a nice intro to the idea of doing whatever the heck I want. All the time. Thanks for reading. More later.
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