Streamlining life.

Coffee and conversation, face to face, with friends. 

Nature abhors a vacuum. At least that's the saying I always hear. But I think this applies also (or mostly) to humans. They seems to have the need to fill everything with: a philosophy, a schedule, a tighter schedule, a bucket list, days scheduled in 15 minute intervals, maximum streaming content potential, rabid connectivity (human and electronic...but mostly electronic), movie reservations, restaurant reservations, forum arguments, too many time commitments, and too much need for massive income to support the endless momentum aimed toward filling the time, the space and the social expectations. 

My wife and I went to a new restaurant recently. Neither of us brought our mobile phones with us. The hostess at the restaurant suggested that they would have a table for us in five or ten minutes. Could I give her a telephone number? Why? So we can text you when your table is ready. No phone, can't you just look over about twenty feet, see us and then walk over and tell us the table is ready? Okay, sure. 

Then there was the parking garage that the restaurant uses. You need to use your phone to scan a QR code at the restaurant in order to exit the garage when you are leaving. No phone? No exit! So, of course, we pushed the "help" button and explained that we were in the small minority that evening of phone-less people. Someone somewhere pushed a button and released us from captivity at no cost. 

In some sense the arrival and ubiquity of smart phones has streamlined some things. And eliminated the need for other things all together. You no longer need a camera to take most day-to-day photos. You no longer need "audiophile" equipment to listen to music. You no longer need to buy music on physical media you can generally stream anything you want through your phone. You don't need to have a newspaper physically delivered to your house, you can get it on your phone. Plane tickets and boarding passes? On the phone. Medical test results? Phone. Credit cards? Naw. ApplePay on your phone. Remote control for your camera? Nope, app on the phone. Egg timer? Phone. Encyclopedia Brittanica? Phone. Flashlight? Phone. Check your investments? Phone. Read Michael Johnston's blog? Phone. Want food? Door Dash --- on your phone. Want someone to chew your food for you? .... not just yet.

The phone and its friends, the laptop and the iPad all conspire together, along with A.I., to fill every moment of modern life with tasty, alluring content and convenience. And they are so, so, so addictive. I often see people in moments of panic when they have misplaced their phone and are unable to find it again within seconds. The panic is palpable, extensive, in some sense ( imagined loss of control) terrifying. And the hidden costs of all this "convenience" while mostly hidden, is outrageous. There are hundreds of dollars spent monthly in keeping the connections to your family's cellphones alive. Many apps and streaming services come with never-ending subscription costs. But the real cost is the disconnection with actual, visceral happiness. The content, taking advantage of human nature, has successfully filled for most people whatever empty spaces there were in people's lives. Now they are busy all the time. And it may turn out that the quiet, unscheduled, empty spaces turn out to be the most important part of life --- at least when it comes to real happiness and calm satisfaction. The unscheduled moments. Sitting quietly watching the sunrise. Walking without agenda or end goal; just for the sake of moving and seeing life beyond your usual neighborhood. Meeting up with people just to see what they have to say.

When I go to a restaurant the last thing I want to do is monitor my phone. Or watch my dining companion sneaking peeks at the screen of their phone. I've pretty much stopped going out to see movies because other people's attention spans have been so severely eroded that they need to look at the bright and glittery screens of their phones even more often than they look at the giant screen in front of them that they paid to experience. I am not delighted to see bright flashes of blue screens bounce around a dark auditorium while all the action I paid to see is up on the singular screen. I think we've hit the point where people's screen addictions are harming them. Not just a random person here and there but the majority of our first world population. And no, Karen is not a good enough driver to both navigate a school zone in her Suburban SUV, at speed, while holding a latte in one hand and texting with the other. So, in fact, the always on screen is daily, hourly and minute by minute endangering innocent bystanders' lives.

We as photographers benefit from streamlining life. Cutting out the distractions of contrived convenience and everyday always on life in order to be able to bring more intentionality to the things we photograph. To see with intensity instead of trying to multitask between work, domestic connection and social media. I guess my challenge to everyone would be, Can you disconnect for hours at a time just to really enjoy actual life? To experience uninterrupted satisfaction?

I try to streamline by leaving my phone at home. If I need to bring a phone to pay for Austin's silly, city parking fees (which no longer accept, in most locations, cash or credit cards but can only be accessed online) I buy parking time, turn the phone off and leave it in the car while I run my errands or make photographs. I let my friends and family know that email rules apply, for me, as far as responding to texts is concerned: I'll get back to you by the end of the business day, or, where applicable, in 24 hours. I am not an emergency room doctor or firefighter. I am not ON CALL. You cannot reach me instantaneously, on a whim, "just to check in." You think you are having a medical emergency? Call 911.

I don't know if this has occurred yet in your geographic local but most businesses I deal with (coffee shops, camera stores, grocery stores, bookstores, etc.) no longer take cash. Your folding, paper money is no longer in vogue. So I carry with me one credit card. It works for everything. I have no affinity cards, no store cards, no duplicate cards, no separate cards for business. Just a credit card. It works everywhere. It's a Visa card. You can tap it. It's all purpose. I pay it off every month, like clockwork. Having one point of payment simplifies accounting and makes it easier for me to keep track of expenses. I don't care about "points" or "cash back" or any other permutation of credit cards which might encourage one to "spend more money to save more money." 

We have cars. We live in Texas. But now that my schedule doesn't include working for clients I try to take the one bus that exists about a half mile from my house and which goes directly into downtown as often as I can. Yes, I can tap my credit card upon entering the bus and pay my fare that way. In a nice way riding the bus in order to go downtown streamlines my street photography process because I don't need to pay attention to traffic, find parking in downtown and pay $20-$40 to park somewhere inconvenient. Yeah, good luck finding a metered space...  I pay a dollar and fifty cents for the bus ride and arrive in downtown unhurried and unmoored from the time clock. Same thing on my return to the neighborhood. 

Another thing I find sadly funny is the way people, in general, vacation. Most working people in our area would tell you that they are scheduled so tightly they barely sleep. Between the demands of corporate jobs, shuttling multiple kids from one activity to the next, shopping, watching football games on TV, staying up late to answer emails from their company's overseas offices and getting everything ready to hit the ground at the same speed the next day they barely have a moment to breathe. So, after half a year of this insanely frenetic activity they feel entitled to a vacation. But rather than finding a nice place to chill out, tune out and relax they bring the same process of daily work life to their vacations. Rushing their families to crowded airports, going from tourist intensive city to another tourist city every day. Never lingering long enough in one place to really know it, much less enjoy it. Tight schedules dictated by airline schedules, the tyranny of hotel check out times, group tours and the whims of restauranteurs who routinely tell the most frenzied tourists that they can accommodate them at the 4:30pm seating or the 11:15pm seating but, sadly, there is nothing in prime time. 

The average tourists come home jet-lagged, sniffling with whatever virus they caught from other tourists on the plane, and so exhausted from the tightly timed break from work that work starts to look relaxing. We don't do that. We pick a place, land there and spend a week or so diving into the experience. Quality of attention instead of quantity of destinations.

Routines are nice. Not making unnecessary decisions is nice. If you live somewhere wonderful it's probably always going to be better than anywhere you go on a trip; especially while on a budget. We've both traveled so much over the years, for work, that the idea of a nice vacation, for me, is trying new restaurants in our city, sitting in a comfortable chair in our lovely house, catching up on reading. But never reading non-fiction!!! Always traveling through an imagined life created by gifted writers. Never reading about how to maximize my efficiency or anything about an interesting battle between nations in 1395. Or about investing. Or about diets. Why make your brain work on stuff it can't possibly enjoy? Why when there is so much valuable fiction to be read?...

I've given up scheduling lunches or coffee get togethers with anyone who is: habitually late. often on their phones. rude to restaurant or coffee shop employees. makes the restaurant check into a complicated spreadsheet of who owes what. Life is too short. I'll also include people who put their phones on the table. Invite others to join us without notifying me about the additions. Chew with their mouths open. Talk too loud. Talk too much.  Life is way too short. 

So, kill your phone. Turn off unnecessary subscriptions. Stop bucket listing your life and just find out the things you really enjoy. Things you'd likely do if you had all the time in the world and no one to listen to you brag about your latest bucket list cross off. Schedule less. Don't feel like you always have to join in. Stop going to Super Bowl parties if you really don't enjoy passively watching football. Don't reflexively respond to every text. Set fewer goals. Sleep in. Drink coffee more slowly. Savor. Walk further. Take a camera with you but don't set goals for your camera, your photography or your "legacy for the future." Not everything you've touched needs to be archived. In fact, the less time you spend archiving all that stuff the happier you'll probably be. Instead of thinking about legacy or how history will treat you spend that time enjoying the present moment. The person in front of you. The food you always wanted to try. The Now-ness of it all.

You can rush through life but it's all going to be over too quickly no matter how you schedule or what you get done. If you streamline out all the stuff you really didn't want to do in the first place you'll have a hell of a lot more time for the things you really did. 

The blog was down because it was getting hammered with hundreds of thousands of pageviews. It seems to be resolved so here we are. But, as a reminder to the people who were "annoyed", the blog exists for my enjoyment as much as yours. When you get "annoyed" because the free content was unavailable for 24 hours it annoys me that you are annoyed. And when it annoys me it all starts to feel like work. Like something that needs to be scheduled and maintained. And when it feels too much like work I'll be happy to switch it to "authors only" and limit access to only one person. Me. 

The blog is here only because people still come here and read it. Say "hello" once in a while so we know you're here and not watching sports on TV instead. 

 

All of a sudden I became interesting in seeing how well the EV-2 EVF finder for the Leica M240 works. What better way that testing it in practice?

I currently have three variations of the Leica M240 cameras. Each one seems perfectly paired with one particular lens. The ME, which is a late, 2019 introduction in gun metal, seems to be most at home with a 50mm lens in the mount. One of the black ones, the one with the most wear and tear, seems comfortable with the 28mm in the mount and a 28mm bright line finder in the hot shoe. But the third one, a pristine, black enamel version that looks like it just came out of the box, is the one that is a jack of all trades. Meaning that when new lenses come into the gravity field of my camera cabinet this is the body that greets them and takes them out for the first spin. 

Over the last few years, as I acquired the three bodies, I also came across, from time to time, the auxiliary EVF that Leica sold to go along with that particular family of cameras. They call it the EV-2 and since I owned an Olympus EP-2, which used a remarkably similar external EVF, I was able to compare the Leica version with the Olympus version of the finder. Excepting the logos on the front of each unit they are identical and, in fact, interchangeable. Each time one of the Leica versions came up for sale at my favorite Leica dealer --- for a low enough price--- I bought one. Now I own two. But I always thought I wasted my money because the live view with the M240 slows everything down (you have to enable live view to use the EVFs...) and causes a not trivial amount of finder refresh delay. I tried each one out to make sure it worked and since then they've languished at the back of a drawer filled with other orphaned accessories. 

But all that changed when I recently bought two lenses in quick succession. The first one is the Carl Zeiss 85mm f4.0 ZM lens. It's an M mount lens that even has the six bit information on the mount that interfaces with the cameras and conjures up an in-camera lens profile. The second lens is the much more recently delivered (by the skin of its teeth) Thypoch Ksana 21mm f3.5 lens. Also with an M mount. 

The 85mm was the first impetus for pulling out one of the EVFs. Why? Well because there are no frame lines in the Leica M finders for 85mm lenses. You can default to 90mm and use your mental powers to understand just how much more of the image will appear outside those frame lines or, you could put an EVF in the finder, implement live view and get very exacting compositions. And, as you focus the lens via the focusing ring the M240 camera will punch in and show a magnified image that makes fine focusing as easy as it can be with any mirrorless camera. Since I wanted to give the 85mm a really good test and I really wanted to see how hard or easy it would be to work with what is now an antiquated EVF, I took  both the lens and the EVF out for a photo-stroll. 

All of the images here were made with the 85mm lens and the EV-2 finder using an M240 camera. Not the highest resolution EVF  these days, by a long shot but, remarkably, still very adequate for composition and fine focusing. But what I found is that with a lens that is well calibrated to the M camera rangefinder the optimum way for me to work is to: see something I'd like to photograph, put the rangefinder window up to my eye (ignoring the frame lines), focus quickly via the rangefinder patch and then just use the EVF for composition. It's actually a fast and efficient way to work with dedicated M lenses. It's slower if you use the EVF for both focusing and composition but you sure don't have to work that way. The camera rangefinder is always on...

There is one compromise. The M240, used in the conventional way, without an external EVF, is legendary for its amazingly robust battery life and its parsimonious sipping of that stored energy. You can shoot a lot and go days with the same battery if you shy away from live view. Even more so if you forgo the EVF. But even so, I shot about 150 raw frames this afternoon with live view and the EVF and kept the camera on for long stretches of time. When I got back to the VSL H.Q. I checked the battery status on the camera and it was still showing 85% full. Not a bad performance at all. 

It's also nice to use the EVF with the 85mm because the image fills the finder window while the 90mm frame lines in the camera viewfinder are quite small and you'll do a fair amount of squinting if you really want to frame precisely. The EVF and live view also cure parallax. So as you focus closer you don't see your framing compromised. 

The only other compromises are color and contrast of the image in the EVF. The EVF image is notably less contrasty than what you are going to end up with on your monitor for post production. And you'll find that color precision is much lower than the modern EVFs which have four or five times the resolution and much greater ability to render believable dynamic range in a scene. 

I'd say that working with 21mm, 75mm, 85mm, 90mm and 135mm lenses on an M240 works best when you use the EVF. It's not the quickest way to work but you'll have confidence about what will eventually be in or out of the frame. If you need speedy frame-to-frame performance you'll have to revert back to using the rangefinder/finder window on the camera. But it's nice to have good options for different kinds of work. Landscapes and urban architecture are a natural for the EVF. Fast moving stuff? Not so much. 

At the other end of the focal length ranges sits the new Thypoch Ksana 21mm f3.5. It's a tiny lens with very, very good optical performance. See the blog post previous to this one for lots of examples of this lens's performance capabilities. I used it in that outing with a Leica SL2 camera body. It worked well. The EVF in that camera is pretty much state of the art and so easy to compose and focus with. 

But using the Ksana 21mm on a naked M mount rangefinder camera is tough even though the lens is natively an M compatible lens. The finder in the M240 cameras maxes out at 28mm and even with a 28mm lens I struggle to see the edges of the frame through the camera's optical finder window. At one point Leica made an elegant 21-24-28mm zoom finder that fits in the hot shoe of cameras. It doesn't adjust for parallax and doesn't feature a built-in diopter. But the frustrating thing is that the finder doesn't have bright frame lines. In fact it has no frame lines at all. You click from focal length to focal length and the magnification in the optical external viewfinder changes to show the effect of the focal length you choose. 

But without hard edges showing the boundary of the frame getting a perfect composition is a crap shoot. The external zoom optical finder is great for quick shots with a zone focus lens but if you need to be more precise you'll end up back at live view. And if you want it to be comfortable and fun with live view you'll add an EVF to the mix. 

I've tried the 21mm lens both ways. Even with the slight delay between frames I much prefer the EVF to the external optical finder. If you are like most users of 21mm lenses you'll only need to use the EVF to focus if you have the lens locked down on a tripod and you are taking great care to place the focus very precisely. Most Leica M users who are using wider lenses like this one are much more apt to zone focus the lens and then use an aperture like f5.6 or f8 to add a bit of "in focus insurance" to the mix. The depth of sharp focus with a 21mm focused at 10 feet and with an aperture of f8 gets you pretty much from four or five feet to infinity of sharp focus. Used this way the external finder or the EVF can both be used just for framing up the image. You can pretty much ignore picky focusing. 

I've use the 21mm and the M240 both ways. The EVF and the Optical finder both have their advantages and disadvantages. Since the optical finder doesn't require power you get back your legendary, long battery life with the M240. Since the optical finder doesn't require or need live view you save yourself from shutter lag and buffer molasses syndrome. You give up parallax accuracy in close focusing, a well defined set of boundaries for the frame and the ability to see how the camera is handling exposure and color. But remember that the EVF itself is no great shakes when it comes to color accuracy or, for that matter, easy to gauge exposure accuracy.

The main selling points of the EVF are that it provides compatibility for composing, via live view, with any focal length lens you are able to attach to the lens mount. from 10mm all the way to, and over 1,000mm, if you can find something like that in an M mount. Or something compatible with an adapter to M mount. The other selling point is the precision of the compositional capabilities. With the EVF you know for sure where the edges of your frame are and what will and will not be in the final image. 

In theory I like the optical finder better. In practice I like the EVF better. But frankly, if you are using a Leica M240 I am of the belief that you should stick to lenses from 28-75mm and when you get further outside those focal lengths it's much more convenient, efficient, quick and accurate to just default to a mirrorless AF camera. In the Leica system, for me, that's almost always an SL2 when using stuff like a 20mm or a 200mm lens. It just works. 

I have used both of the above mentioned lenses on both M240 cameras and on Leica SL cameras and for the most part, if I'm not embracing the idea in the moment that friction makes creativity better, the working methodologies of the SL cameras are much easier because these two lenses are good examples of the ragged edges of the rangefinder's frame line performance envelope. 

If I were to buy an M11, Leica's most current M series rangefinder I would not hesitate to buy the much more capable EVF Leica has for that particular camera. It can make a rangefinder camera at least competent as an all-around camera instead of a specialty tool for street and travel photography. But most important consideration is the fun quotient. It's fun to be able to take time and do things a bit old school --- unless a client is looking over your shoulder and your next month's rent is on the line. Then the fool proof solution takes precedence. Almost always.

 

So. Kirk. How do you like that new Thypoch Ksana 21mm f3.5 M mount lens you picked up last week? Is it good?

 Hmmmm. See for yourself. Look on a real computer screen. Blow them up big. Scroll around. I think it's a pretty good wide angle lens. And oh so small. I'd write more about it but if you can't tell from the pix I'm not sure the words will help. Sharp? Yes. Prone to color shift across the frame? A bit. But not with M cameras. These were all done with an SL2 body and it doesn't appear to be too much of a problem... The lens is cheap. Buy one and test it out.