What do I like to photograph when I'm somewhere other than Austin? Not landscapes. Not monuments. Not sunsets. Just regular, day-to-day stuff.

 

Now that's a really great size for a scrim. A silk. A huge diffuser....

 From a movie set on street in the Old Town, in Montreal. 

I love lighting through big silks on hard frames but the biggest one I have is 72 by 72 inches. 

Change of scenery coming up. Exhilarating swimming when the pool heaters are broken... Sigh.

I've spent way too much time in Austin lately. I guess that's only to be expected since, well, I live here. Last year I kept making plans to get away for a week or two to make personal photos only to have them foiled by little medical kerfuffles and family obligations. This year I had high hopes for an early, early Spring jaunt somewhere that's not Austin but then... another delay. This week I resolved to just go. Made reservations at my favorite hotel and also on a non-stop flight to my favorite city in North America; Montreal. It is, for me, the perfect city to visit, to wander around, to photograph, to visit museums and galleries, to eat fun food, and to just chill out in. When I visit there I don't feel hurried or hassled. I can spend an afternoon nursing a coffee or tea in a wonderful café and not get anything done beyond writing a few travel notes and jotting down ideas. And then there is the wonderful Metro...

I'm heading up in a couple of weeks. I'm ready for some solo photography. Solo travel, and working with only my own personal agenda. I'm looking forward to cooler weather. And I'm looking forward with relish to heading to the biggest art museum in Canada to spend a day looking through their fabulous collections and spending an hour or so diving into the Richard Avedon show there that I've been anxious to see for some time now. 

Since I am quite eccentric when it comes to photographic gear I'm thinking about doing a "one camera/one lens" sort of thing. My current consideration is the Leica SL2-S (wonderful low light chops and all around great files) combined with the Leica 50mm APO Summicron SL. Having been a Boy Scout I'll have to take the little Leica Q2 along as a back-up. (Same batteries). But only as a back-up in case something show-stopping happens to the bigger camera. Sure, the SL2-S and the 50 APO are big and heavy but if they are the only pieces of gear you have to carry with it all averages out. I have a lot of ideas for things I'd like to photograph while I'm there and I'm hoping that the food markets are open. There are still neighborhoods I haven't explored on past trips and that's also a lure. I'm booked in for six nights so I've got time to slow down and dive into whatever interests me in the moment. 

But today... For the last several days the heater at the pool where I swim with my masters team has been out of commission; broken, in need of professional attention. This, of course, conveniently? happened just as we're experiencing what might be our last cold snap of the Spring season. Temperatures overnight have been dipping down at night to the upper 40s and the dry air makes evaporative cooling faster and more efficient. When we swam yesterday the water, which is usually a consistent 82°, was a chilly 73°. 

While that might not seem off-putting to our more Northerly readers it's all about what you are acclimated to. A drop of nearly 10° is something you feel the minute you hit the water. When you watch the swimming in the Olympics (and I'm sure ALL OF YOU do!!!) you probably find yourself wondering: " I wonder what the water temperature is for competitive swimming at the games?" And I'm here to tell you that they keep the water as close to 78° Fahrenheit as they can. If the water is too hot you lose your feel for the water and also, on longer races, have issues with fluid loss (osmotic pressure...) and heat exchange. If the water is too cold then muscles tighten up and the water saps core body temperatures which hampers optimum blood flow. Especially, again, on the longer races. 

To have consistency in things like world record performances it's critical to limit variations tightly. Evening the playing field as it were. 

Today the pool was closer to 70°. I wore two swim suits and two silicone swim caps to try and retain as much body heat as possible. The first entry into the pool really wakes one up. Dramatically. In the middle of the workout we hit a good spot where we felt our muscles warmed up enough to get through our usual sets and distances but at the 45 minute mark the cold was really sinking in. And since we mostly swim in warmer water we mostly don't have anywhere near the body fat that "polar bear" swimmers carry with them. So, without the insulation, we all started feeling the energy slowly draining away. By the hour mark we bagged it and headed to the hot showers. And, even though it was already in the upper 60s by the time I crawled into my car I put on the seat warmer for my ride home. An added boost to the warming cycle initiated by the warm shower. 

Today is a mellow day. Lunch with a friend who was one of my favorite advertising clients. This afternoon I'm looking forward to a long walk through downtown or the UT area with the camera and lens combo I described above. I'll use it daily before my trip to make sure my own interface with the camera and lens I'll be shooting with on my vacation is as dialed in as I can make it. Muscle memory and all that. 

Here are some photos from my previous, Fall 2023 visit to Montreal. Why do I like the city so much? Because it's so, so, so different from Austin. Not that there is anything wrong with Austin but familiarity is cloying.... Spring! Who knew it could so fun? Wish we had the pool heaters fixed right now.....

Walking through the old town.

Tiny kids on a food field trip.

Amazing blast from the past: A working Bell payphone.

(in) famous photographer tests a Leica Q2 in a convenient mirror.

Montreal mannequins have a relaxed panache. 

Parade of restaurant chefs.

young gourmands sampling cheeses at the Marché Jean-Talon market

self explanatory

Yes. Coffee shop/bakery/café and art. Big art. 

The Weather in Montreal in late April??? Will I need socks for my Birkenstocks???  

How do you get "better" as a creator of photographs?

Gear will always change. Styles change. Most of the photographs we're making right now will look quite trite in ten years. But some small fraction will still have resonance and appeal. That's what we're working for. That fractional quantity of good work that comes from working on our stuff every day. Planning? Research? I'm sure those things are good as long as they aren't being used as fancy procrastination tools. Remember when monitor calibration was the exciting technical side trip of digital image making? It was really mostly an effective way to put off heading out the door to make photographs. 

Perfectionism destroys creative vision. Waiting until all the stars are perfectly aligned destroys careers. Waiting too long to embrace the work makes photographers poor. 

There's always an excuse not to do the work. It could be as droll as staying home all day, waiting, so you don't miss the Federal Express delivery of your new lens. Or your aversion to the light misting rain scuttles your plans. Or you feel you must watch the  new YouTube video from Dave Herring trying to convince you that film Leica cameras are a bargain but digital Leica cameras will take centuries to pay off. And you have to wade through to the end to understand whether you need a film Leica or a digital Leica before you can really start in earnest. 

Or you are trying to get through a famous photographer's autobiography before you really ramp up your shooting, in hopes that he or she will uncover for you some secrets of the people who have "made it" so you can find a short cut to being really, really good. Without trying too hard. 

Or your knee hurts. Or the world seems to be falling apart at the seams and it's all so overwhelming that you are paralyzed. 

I have a solution that I think I read as a quote from writer/photographer, Bill Jay. He was asked what to do if you were at a loss for motivation. Didn't know what to point your camera at next. His response was to grab your camera and go shoot anything --- just to start building up your photographic momentum. 

I try to go out with a camera every day and find something interesting to photograph. Not because I need  something new and amazing in my endless catalogs of photographs but because the act of engaging in the practice itself keeps moving you forward and the momentum of a daily practice gets you over those moments of weakness when nothing seems like pursuing anymore. The practice takes over and the momentum of the process itself pulls you back on track. 

Or, maybe you are genuinely over being a photographer and just want to be a person who takes photographs occasionally. Or maybe you've lost the spark entirely. I guess that's okay. Now you'll have time to figure just what it is that you really do want to spend your time pursuing. And that's good too. 

I just read: Everything is Photograph. A Life of André Kertész by Patricia Albers.

It's an exhaustive and exhausting 428 pages of detailed diving into one photographic super star's life. I'm not sure yet if I can recommend the book to any other than big time Kertész fans since so much of the detail is about the photographer's ability to self-sabotage his own success over and over again. And his easy ability to complain about it to anyone who will listen.  But it does inform me about how incredibly different it was to be a "known" photographer in the 1930's - 1970's versus being a "known" photographer twenty-five years into the meat of the digital photography age. 

That Kertész was a very talented photographer is indisputable. And he was a relentless worker. His archives contained thousands and thousands of prints and hundreds of thousands of negatives. He worked relentlessly for a Condé Nast publication, House and Garden, and delivered more assignments and images to the magazine, year to year, than any other photographer delivered to any of the Condé Nast publications in the years he held a contract to work with them. 

But though he lived on the income from commercial work he was constantly battling his own frustrations that the work of work got in the way, all through his life, often preventing him from doing the kinds of photographs he wanted to do instead. He made his reputation in Europe in the 1930's and the early work was the material that kept moving his reputation moving forward, in the eyes of multiple audiences, throughout his comparatively long life.

Since the twentieth century targets for photographers were all print: magazines, newspapers, books and gallery shows, having early and privileged access (by dint of reputation and earned connections) to the critical media made him a star in his era. That he was a peer of Brassai, HCB, Szarkowski and many others meant he existed, to 20th century photo buffs, as one of a rarified group of super stars of the medium. 

By the last decade of the 20th century his reputation was cemented by a near endless series of international retrospectives of his work. All sealed for success by the signatory kiss of approval from John Szarkowski, the photo curator at the all powerful Museum of Modern Art. 

It's hard for a young photographer of current times to even imagine how powerfully concentrated the media were back in the days of printed magazine subscriptions, and a very limited number of publications aimed at a general audience of photo hobbyists. Millions of eyes were glued to the pages of Modern Photography Magazine and Popular Photography Magazine and U.S. Camera Magazine every single month. To have work showcased, again and again in all of those publications cemented in the minds of the readers that just a few more than a handful of photographers were responsible for everything great and creative and innovative in modern photography. Really, the reduction to a small pantheon of names made everyone who was lucky enough or talented enough into, basically, the Taylor Swift/Drake/Bruno Mars/Billie Eilish of that time; in that field. 

Today, with ready access to every photographer, and with the easy, ongoing generation of billions of photographs every day, hitting that level of star recognition in photography is now nearly impossible. And we may wrongly worship the previous generations only because they were much more selectively "knowable" than current generations by dint of a very small collection of outlets for the work. Outlets that were known and devoured by the fans of photography. It focused their attention down to a small, consistent group of photographers who had "made it."

Circling back around though, even though fame may have been less elusive in a way, the Kertész story does reinforce the power of getting started and then, relentlessly doing the work. Had Kertész dabbled his way into early recognition but walked away from leveraging early fame of decades and decades of doing the work, making the connections (over and over again) and continuing to make work that tastemakers love he would have dropped off our collective radar long ago....

At some point we don't pursue our photography because it might make us famous, or rich, or cool, but because we love the process and we love, sometimes, the end results. And mostly, that's reason enough.

 

An Easter Gallery from South Congress Ave. taken with a TTArtisan 75mm lens on a Leica SL2-S. Fun on a cloudy day...

 

The lens has a squared hood so you know it's good...

On Topic. Red Wagon. Camera and Lens.

 

The object in the image just above is a Radio Flyer wagon. We bought this wagon for Ben when he was a very young child. Maybe two years old. He loved dragging stuff around the yard in the wagon. The wagon has never lived inside. It's an outside wagon and it gets rained on, snowed on and pelted with all manner of hard sunlight... And yet, here we are some 28 years later still holding onto the wagon. 

B. was using it today to haul bags of hardwood mulch up to her flower garden adjoining our quiet street. How she keeps all manner of flowers and herbs alive during our seemingly non-stop droughts is beyond me; although when she is out of town I do try to remember to douse the area with a hose when the plants start to look... desperate.

I'd been out wandering around with a camera today and came back home to process some photographic files and to remind myself how well I liked or didn't like the very inexpensive TTArtisan 75mm f2.0 lens I'd bought over a year ago. Oddly, I find myself with three 75mm lenses right now. There is this one and then the faster Voigtlander 75mm f1.9 (for the M cameras), and then the even faster Thypoch 75mm f1.4 (also for the M cameras). It's truly an embarrassment of riches...I've thought to thin down the herd but I can't decide which ones stay and which ones go. To be practical I really need only to decide between the two M mount lenses as the first mentioned lens is for the L mount and is the only one of the three that can autofocus and work fully automatically with the SL cameras. 

But since I had the 75mm TTA lens on a SL2-S I decided to take a few photographs of the wagon with it. 

I say that this post is "on topic" for a "photo" blog because what I really want to write about is how appealing the 75mm focal length is to me. And possibly to everyone else. It's somewhat of a chameleon of lenses being half way between the workaday 50mm lenses and the more specialized 100mm portrait lenses. I've spent a couple hours getting reacquainted with a 75mm today and my takeaway observation is about just how easy it is to separate backgrounds with the lens but at the same time include enough of the surroundings of an object to supply important context. To see around the top, bottom and sides of your main subject. It's a lens that seems to provide the best compromise between details in a wide enough plane of focus and a background that's soft enough so the softness seems intentional. 

The 75mm lenses all remind me of an interesting lens I had for my old Leica R (SLR- film) cameras. It was a similar focal length; just 5mm longer than the 75s at 80mm. It was called an 80mm Summilux-R lens and had a maximum aperture of f1.4. Wildly fast for a longer than 50mm lens back in the day. It was always a "loner" (not a loaner...) in that Leica had, for years, made 75mm lenses of various apertures for the M system but until the advent of the digital SL system they had never made a fast 75mm lens for the non-M cameras. Nor did they ever make an 80 Summilux for the M cameras. 

Leica now has a 75mm f2.0 APO lens for the SL system and it's an interesting option for those who need or want a portrait lens longer than a 50mm but for whom a 90mm is just too long. Too restrictive. It's big and heavy and for now I'm happy with the compromise presented by the bargain priced TTArtisan lens. It functions well and hits focus with the same percentage accuracy of Leica L lenses living in the system. 

The 75mm lenses for the M system from Leica include three 75mm lenses. One is the Summilux (f1.4) which may have actually been replaced/discontinued,  another is an APO Summicron (f2) and the third is the insanely expensive 75mm f1.25 Noctilux (currently priced at a little over $15,000 USD). The surviving and current 75mm APO is an "affordable???" $5,800, new. The TTArtisan 75mm f2 (in black or silver, your choice) is a whopping $195 USD. Less than the cost of a replacement lens hood for either of the Leica 75s. 

The TTArtisan is sharp enough at f2 and gets progressively sharper as one stops down. It's not a just a riff on an ancient "legacy" lens design but is a modern construction featuring an extra low dispersion element and four high index lens elements as well. Ten elements in nine groups as opposed to film era lenses that used simpler designs with fewer elements. Usually something like six elements in four or five groups. 

The beauty, for me, of the TTA 75 is the small size and the very light weight. When used as a walk around lens on an SL camera it does a good job at reducing the overall weight of the system without an appreciable (or in most cases even noticeable) hit on image quality. 

When our kid went off to college he did not take his Radio Flyer wagon with him. And when he started working for his current company he showed no inclination in taking the wagon with him to his new apartment. B. however, has made good, continuing use of the wagon to haul stuff around the half acre. 

The wagon shows no real signs of nearing its expiration date. It soldiers on resolutely. If it saves my lower back when helping to transport mulch, top soil, big rocks and more then I salute the wagon and hope it continues to withstand the tests of time. 

Of the 75mm lenses currently in-house it seems pretty apparent to me that it's the Voigtlander lens that needs to find a new home. The Thypoch is just as sharp (or sharper) at f2.0 but has the additional advantage of a faster (f1.4) maximum aperture. It's bigger and heavier but it handles better and feels more robust. I just go by usage. I've had the VM lens the longest but it's absolutely gotten the least amount of "on camera" time amongst the 75s. 

When it comes to the SL/L mount family the TTA serves me by reducing the burden of constant access. Most of the time I'd be just as happy with the 70mm setting of one of the zoom lenses but it really is nice, if you are just walking around soaking up the good vibrations of life, to have something so small but so aligned with your vision as the TTA. Especially considering how little capital is tied up in its ownership. 

I think it might be the little red wagon of short telephoto lenses for my L system. 

Come to think of it, there is a Sigma 85mm f1.4 Art lens (for L mount) which sits in the gear drawer almost completely ignored. I think that one could go too. It's just too big and fierce looking to wave around in public...It very rarely sees the light of day...

But everyone smiles at the Radio Flyer wagon. It's definitely a keeper...