Beginning to turn into a "Meander-thal (tm)". Also, the big gear purge, part 3 (of more to come).

If you are a long time, or even medium time reader of the VSL blog you probably read that I officially retired from the business of commercial photography way back in August of 2025. I haven't touched a camera to make money in three quarters of a year, giving pause to the many friends and acquaintances who predicted that I wouldn't last more than a month before accepting yet another $$$ project. I have proven them wrong...

One of my early strategies to reinforce retirement was to switch from a utilitarian SUV to a sedan for my basic transportation. With an SUV there is always the potential of being able to load tons of photography gear into the back which makes it somewhat easier to rationalize taking on another project. With a sporty sedan, with limited trunk space, the allure of packing for a shoot drops down by a number of levels. Plus, if I needed to put photo gear in the trunk then where oh where would I put the overpacked swim bag? And the extra kickboards? And the seven different brands of sunscreen? Oh, and the overflowing collection of sun defeating hats?

That worked well as a first step but I needed to do more. One day I was in a shop and a young person walked up to me and asked me specifically about the Leica M240 I was carrying, slung over one shoulder. We chatted for a while and I discovered that she was aiming for a career in video production. In fact, she was already working on video crews, having resigned from a teaching career. I asked if she needed some video lights and some accessory gear and she said she did. I loaded three big panel LED lights into the car, along with light stands and some other useful accessories and met up with her later at a coffee shop we both frequented. It was a bitter cold day and the coffee was good. We loaded all the gear into her car and shook hands. I let her know that it was a straight forward donation of excess gear with no strings attached. It felt good to let go of excess stuff and it took out one of the mental subroutines I used to run when packing for shoots. "What to pack? And how much of it? Removing the potential removed the relentless momentum toward choice paralysis. At least in part.

A week ago I was walking down S. Congress Ave. and came across a very graceful young woman who was juggling a tattered photo backpack, two or three very sorry and undersized light stands and a tripod that was totally inappropriate/inadequte as a tripod. I asked her what she was shooting and she mentioned a small project she had just finished down the street. At the moment she found out that the Uber she'd been waiting for had cancelled and I left her then to administer alternate transportation. But as I walked on about 20 feet on I realized that this person could probably make much better use of some of my light stands that were sitting idle, as well as one of my "overflow" tripods. I turned around and asked if she'd like some better gear. She demurred, thinking I was trying to sell her gear she couldn't afford. I explained, briefly, my need to get rid of stuff and that any gift to her was free and with no strings attached. 

We continued chatting and I found out that her primary flash was a Godox AD200. I happened to have two of the AD 200Pro lights in the "get rid of this" box at the studio. We agreed to meet up at my studio at the end of the week and she left my place then with two perfect and almost unused lightstands, some umbrellas, a couple of AD200Pros. A bunch of Godox accessories. A Sirui tripod. A light stand bag. A Manfrotto rolling light  case filled with two Nanlite professional LED lights and other accessories, and a copy of Commercial Photographer's Handbook book. 

The office felt light and more airy still. It was fun to see the look on the young photographer's face as we put all of the gear in her car. A big smile. Payment enough for me. 

This is an ongoing project; to give away all the photo stuff I don't need or want anymore. I have my eye's out for the next person walking around with the "wrong" equipment. We can fix that....

Meander = to walk around without an agenda or plan. The bends of a brook or river. Thal = a beautiful valley. An early humanoid creation story. Etc. Guy with a camera and no perceivable road map: Meanderthal (tm). 

I am becoming a Meander-thal. Instead of spending my time in the studio, or glued to my chair and my keyboard, I've been spending more and more time walking around looking, investigating and onboarding the visual pleasures of the world. Could be mannequins in a shop window. A beautiful woman stopping to adjust her sunglasses. An interesting building with a shaft of sunlight blazing across old bricks. A couple sitting outdoors, having lunch. The bouncy small ripple of water in a deep pool. The traffic jam in front of me. A hat in a hat store which looked like it was merchandized just right.

I meandered and became...enthralled with all there is to see. It doesn't matter which camera I'm carrying and there is no agenda or schedule to follow. But there is amazing stuff to see everywhere. I'd rather meander with a camera than do just about anything else (excluding swimming, of course). 

The wonderful thing about being a photo meanderthal is that no other equipment is required. Just a camera and a lens. No tripods, no light stands, no lights, no entourage, no assignment sheet, no shot list and no hurry. Can't think the it gets much better.

 

A Quick, Long Overdue, Review of the Leica 18-56mm Aspheric Lens for the CL System.

 

So, to do the picture justice just open it up on your 30 inch Apple Studio Monitor and enlarge to

100%. I'm betting you'll think it's pretty darn good. On your phone? Really?

Not so much.

I've owned a Leica CL (digital) for about three years now. It's a great, small, discreet, black camera that's easy to carry around and use. The menus are in the same family as those of the SL2 and SL2-S cameras I shoot with all the time so there's very little wasted start up time when I switch from the big cameras to the smaller one. In short, I like the camera very much and the new A.I. noise reduction capabilities in Adobe Lightroom give the little camera an updated,  elevated value. Now, instead of wishing for image stabilization in camera I can just set a higher shutter speed in the auto-ISO menu and process files that need to be a bit "cleaner" in that application.

The reason I hadn't been getting enough value out of the system is that I initially bought the wrong lenses to go with the camera. I was dismissive of the Leica "normal" zoom lens for the system because it was expensive and had smaller apertures, both at the wide and end and, more egregiously, at the long end --- where it's 85mm equivalent focal length had to make due with a "paltry" f5.6. Instead, I bought the Sigma version (18-50mm) which is a constant f2.8 max aperture all the way from wide to tele. But here's the rub; I didn't get along with that lens. It seemed to vignette pretty much all the way through its range, when used wide open. And it felt incredibly plasticky. It's serviceable, for sure, but not by me.

Instead of biting the bullet and buying the other, prime Leica lenses for the camera I bought the Sigma Contemporary lenses that were designed for APS-C format cameras, including those in the L mount systems. I bought and still have the 16mm f1.4, the 30mm f1.4 and the 56mm f1.4. All fast, and all good performers. But the basic problem is that their size (bigger) and weight (more) was in conflict with the small size of the camera. And, for a walk around system the idea of bringing all three lenses and changing them every time I saw something that needed a tighter crop or more magnification, or a wider view, seemed overly complicated and fiddly. And too many lenses to mind juggle.

The camera languished in a drawer for a while...

Then, out of the blue, one of my favorite Leica dealers got in one of the Leica 18-56mm lenses, used, and offered it at a price I could stomach. It was a couple hundred dollars less expensive than another one they got in around the same time. I called to find out what the differences might be. It's the old Leica thing: If the unit is accompanied by all the original packing and paperwork the price goes up. The camera in its naked state? The price is adjusted downward. 

I bought it immediately. No hesitation. In the time since I sold off the Sigma lens I'd read up on just what makes the Leica 18-56mm an interesting lens. In a nutshell, it's the high optical performance. You lose f-stop/speed but you gain correction and Leica lens coatings, etc. It's been so well reviewed across so many user forums that I thought I could not go wrong. But, to paraphrase Ronald Reagan's famous quote ("Trust, but verify!") I routinely trust but test every lens I get --- just to make sure. 

The lens arrived yesterday and today, after breakfast and the ritual reading of the news sites, I grabbed a couple extra batteries from the Sigma fp battery stockpile and headed over to S. Congress Ave.

I shot some black and white images yesterday evening when B. and I went to the gigantic, Affordable Art Fair. If you think $8900 is "affordable" for a mediocre painting that just screams, very derivative but without the talent, then you exist in a different tax bracket than I.  The image just below is from the show. The original is in color, and while I love the movie, "The Wizard of Oz" I know I wouldn't be able to live day-to-day with a cartoonish "homage." But I do like the way the camera and lens handled the lighting and tones....

Now, let me emphasize that I was not over on S. Congress with a new lens and the intention to shoot important images that would go directly into my (non-existent) portfolio. No. These are all test shots. Photographs made to show off features or flaws of the new lens --- and nothing more!!! So before you get your panties in a bunch and tell me that you've seen my cowboy boot photos or my Jo's Coffee photos before and "meh", just calm down and see them for what they are: Images that show how the lens, and the lens + camera, work in real world situations with apertures near wide open. All images are handheld and shot at either 1/125th of a second or 1/250th of a second. 

Since you're likely looking at a screen of some sort I could just go ahead and tell you that I think this little lens punches well above its weight class. (Kind of a pun since it's very light compared to the other Leica lenses I use....). But if you aren't trying to quality check them on your phone screen, through the plastic screen protector, in a bouncing Uber, then go ahead and take a peek on a decent monitor and see what you think. In my mind the lens is a definite keeper. It makes the system work as intended.  A small, light and highly capable camera for carrying around while looking at stuff. That's it.

Not a mannequin but an actual dog!!!

Lightroom Selenium filter.

Not a dog but an actual mannequin.

Fun with cameras and lenses. 

Twenty-One Millimeters. Okay. Now I get it.

erstwhile photographer tormenting the mirrored doors at Crew Café.

I must be a slow learner. I spent a career as a commercial photographer trying to avoid using any lenses shorter than 35mm. I felt like it was almost impossible to control the composition of very wide angle lenses and I always struggled with the idea that I'd end up, always, with too much foreground and a tiny background. But I made one more effort before giving up. 

I bought a Thypoch 21mm f3.5 lens, coupled with it with a Leica optical finder that gives me settings of 28, 24 and 21mms and started trying to incorporate the lens into more and more of my shoots, my walks and my vacation time. Three of the images here were shot with the 21mm lens, which came with an M mount, adapted to a Leica mirrorless body. Finally! It worked great for me. 

There are times when overwhelming context is called for. Times when you can't back up just that little bit more that you need to. But it's a focal length that rewards a photographer for being careful. To take their time finding a composition that works with the wide view. A situation in which you can make the foreground a real part of the picture instead of just a bunch of dead space at the bottom of the frame. 

I'd love to have a coffee house here in Texas with ceilings like this.... (Crew Café, Montreal). 

Someone's garage, just of Mont Royale. Montreal.

these are the day lilies in my backyard. They can be glorious. 

I got in as close as I could with the 21mm lens mounted on a rangefinder camera and 

shots some frames this morning. Just before swim practice. 

I really like them. 

Now... go wider? I'm too apprehensive right now.

Give me time.

 

Why some photographers love photographing store front mannequins... Myself included.

 

As a professional writer I was prepared to write a blank page draft, then rewrite it sentence-by-sentence, put it aside for a few days, then revise it all. After another month or two of very meticulous word choosing and much grinding about punctuation, fluctuating tenses, and a lot of investigation into critical theory, I would rewrite each sentence several more times time but this time with a thesaurus at hand so I could find the most obscure or antiquated words to replace the less filigreed words and so make comprehension something only the true cognoscenti of readers of the blog would understand. Or even care to struggle through themselves.  Methinks. Apropos of nothing. Tally ho! And in this way I would struggle through months of writing in order to explain a very important concept: That there is something fun and attractive about photographing mannequins, in situ. 

But as I sat with my four dimensional, bifurcated, extruded, titanium keyboard, a cup of herbal tea and a lot of self-conscious ego bolstering I came to the conclusion that a long and windy explanation wasn't really required. Hence, to wit, the withering punctum: 

I like to make photographs of mannequins because in a sense I think I'm working to document the interesting work of artists from another field. As an exercise for me it's revealing to have an immovable model to work with so that I can experiment with subtle or big changes in camera angles, lighting, composition and tone. To move five or six inches in one direction, to create space between two mannequins, or to choose just the right aperture and camera-to-subject distance in order to create a focused image of a closer mannequin and a slightly, but obviously, softer rendering of a mannequin just a few feet further back.

In a well done store display a window designer creates a tableau; a visual story, with the way the "models" are dressed and how they are accessorized. How they are arranged. How they are lit. And if they are not lit then how the light at different times of the day affects all of the other variables. Often, the window tableaus will look even more interesting after dark, when only minimal lighting is used.

Most of the mannequins I photograph are facsimiles of women. Some, like a grouping I photographed in Boston many years ago, are fully featured with detailed eyes, facial features and plastic molded hair styles, and even perfectly included, permanent make up. Many current mannequins are featureless. Some have sunglasses and some do not. But in a certain sense they are a symbol for the power of shopping, the thrill of discovering new fashions (also an art form in most cultures), and also represent a certain aspirational cultural form (thin but feminine, unmoving but still graceful). 

Another thought that just occurred to me is that as a voracious reader since middle school of all kinds of science fiction, and now living in the blossoming field/industry/promise era of robotics, I also see mannequins as symbols of a society rushing headlong toward the accelerating creation of human-like robots. I only hope that Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics come along with the robots themselves. 

And since many of us are creatures who value aesthetics is it any wonder that we'd like at least some of our robots to be classically beautiful?????

It's nice to work with "models" who don't make weird faces and complain about how much weight they've gained or why they "hate" photographs of themselves. And, at least for editorial uses, the mannequins aren't asking for talent fees....yet.

Why did I take these photos? Why are they in black and white?

Traveling is interesting. For the first few days in a city everything looks new and different. Everything seems worth a shutter click or two. After you've walked the city for a few days you start separating the subjects that have become routine from subjects that are resistant to inspiring boredom or nonchalance. 

If I come back to a building again and again it tells me that there is something I'd like to explore visually. In Montreal there are a number of buildings in downtown and in the Old Town that bring me back early in the morning, late at night or whenever the sun is in the process of surrounding puffy, white clouds with jewel-like blue sky. But for me the way I most like to see buildings is in black and white. It's part of the process of distilling down the building into pure design or pure existence. And making images in black and white means that the subjects don't depend on the seduction of colors to make their points.

I love to see buildings with big, classical columns. They seem so permanent and regal. So unlike the glass towers that get thrown up all over my home town. I love that certain buildings in other cities are artfully spotlit at night while our glass covered, stolid cube buildings here mostly sit in darkness. 

And, most of all I like images where majestic buildings are conjoined with humans; pedestrians. Something so different from Texas towns that seem to be populated, in the public spaces, only by cars.

When I was in Montreal the temperatures in the evening and overnight drifted down into the lower 40s (Fahrenheit). I love walking with no fixed agenda. Just a vague chill on my cheeks and the exciting freshness of chilled breath. A camera slung over one shoulder. Stopping to look up at an interesting construction. Pulling the camera up to my eye and trying to figure out just how to expose a photograph that I know can't contain both detail in the deep shadows or detail in bright highlights at the same time. Where is the sweet spot? For me, it's nearly always about maintaining at least a bit of visual detail in the highlights. Letting burning light fixtures slip over into pure white. Letting shadows own the inky blacks. 

Then putting the camera on its strap back over my left shoulder and walking on to see what else there is to see. 

When I look at the more graphic building images; those taken far after sunset I love the combination of tones which I don't ever see during the daylight hours. Then, after a few hours of walking, I head back to the hotel, have a glass of wine in the lobby bar and then head up to bed. 

I take the photos because they both remind me of times before I ever thought to have a camera, but they also remind me of the pleasures of looking intently and with a certain modicum of joy, at buildings from another age. 

The kind of camera is immaterial. It's the process that's most valuable. Not the final result.

Sony fans like to claim the A7 as the first full frame, mirrorless, hybrid camera. Sorry, that honor goes to Leica. They debuted the M240 in 2012. Sony followed with their announcement in the Fall of 2013.

 Leica also patented, and built to proof of concept,  the first autofocus system as far back as the 1960s. Never commercially produced. 

Everyone acts as though Leica is lagging. They're just waiting for everyone else to catch up...

I have been reading books and listening to blog posts about the mechanics of successfully retiring. Most suggestions have nothing to do with money...

 

I read too much. I guess that's better than watching too much TV. Or watching sports on the internet. Lately I've been trying to get through books about successfully retiring. About meaning in life. About dealing with loneliness --- and it dawned on me that the perspective of most of these articles and presentations is aimed very specifically at people who had or have regular jobs. And by "regular" jobs I mean that the full time, employed worker received from his company/employer a set of daily, weekly, monthly and yearly expectations. They were required to be in an office, or on the floor of a factory or retail establishment, for a proscribed number of hours per day. They had a set number of days they had to work during the week. They had tasks that they were mandated to routinely execute. In a sense a lot of the rote decision making of life was made for them and they accepted it all in exchange for a salary which came more or less reliably, as well as a handful of benefits such as healthcare and matches to their 401ks. 

When these folks decided to retire on their own volition, or were forcibly retired by their employers, it generally constituted a sudden and profound shift in their lives. Left behind was the feeling of having a set routine that formed the basic structure of their lives. They left behind the implied safety of the employer's structure and status. They left behind their identity as a specific sort of officer or specialist. They left behind the ritual "friendships" of their once daily companions of 20, 30 or even 40 years. And they left behind a certain meaning or direction in their lives. And they left behind the paycheck.

Most conventional wisdom about retirement posits that once retired the former worker is confronted with a loss of sense of purpose, a loss of some sort of social network of work friends, a loss of financial security, and gains a sense of anxiety or depression about their new situation. They are advised to keep a hand in by volunteering in their area of expertise. (Doing the same sort of work as before but for no money...). Mentoring someone who could use their guidance within the field in which they had been highly proficient. To spend more time ginning up new friendships in church and to quickly grasp for a hobby to give a certain framework to their continued existence. 

Husbands and wives who mostly had separate careers and routinely saw each other only in the evenings --- and a few glimpses in the morning, as well as weekends, now would grapple with having to fill the void left by the removal of work friends and engage each other in conversations far beyond what they had been experiencing with each other during their work years. And to do this on a fixed and fraught budget. 

It all sounds absolutely dreadful to anyone who ran their own business, did art as part of their commerce, and whose long term friend circle mostly includes people with the same schedule ownership and professional flexibility. 

Much of the advice I've read or encountered seems to have been aimed at some mythic character that sits far outside my own work life experience, and my first year of retirement experiences... 

My routine has changed in that I now have complete control of my schedule and make my own "assignments." But what I do is the same in some ways. I love to take photographs and self-assign projects without being encumbered in any way by clients or people who seem to think that the money they are willing to pay gives them the ability/right to decide how I will do the projects, and when, and for what benefit. The clients, and most of the headaches of running a business, are gone but the thrill of doing the art remains. Nothing has changed for the worse in that aspect of retiring. Most artists go on working just as they have always done but without the monkeys on their backs, looking over their shoulders and offering bad advice. And ill-informed critiques.

People made lonely by their abandonment by work friends seemingly took the lazy path in early life and didn't make friends based on the kinds of people they wanted to have as friends but the people that were conveniently available to them at the time. When I was working I mostly interacted only episodically with clients. I didn't have contact with the same clients on a day-to-day or even month-to-month basis. We agreed that we would be "friendly" with each other but those sorts of business "friendships" were always confined to the working day. We did not meet up later to play snooker at a smoky bar or watch mindless football games together while drinking lite beer and eating bag after bag of potato chips. Or frozen pizzas. 

When the work was done we each strolled to our cars and went off to pursue our own, separate lives. 

Is it unfair to point this out since most employees were/are constrained by the company schedule to spend days, months and even years in close proximity  with each other? Who even had the bandwidth to make real friends outside the workplace? 

My answer? I'd conjecture that my weekly schedule for work during my most productive years was intense and composed of many long weekday and weekend work periods. But no matter how intense the work schedule became I still got up every morning and went to swim practice where 25-30 fellow swimmers gathered to generate lactic acid in our muscles and a sense of fitness in our bodies. But more importantly, after swimming together for decades many of us became real friends. Not bound by work but by a joint sense of joy about our mutual love of swimming. Our kids grew up together at swim meets. Our lane mates often head for the coffee shops after a workout to catch up and share news with each other. One group within our larger group have become close enough to plan week long ski trips together each season.  Many of us compete together in long open water races (relays) where there's lots of time on chase boats to cement the bonds of friendship. And core groups within the group form tighter bonds and share a social structure that reaches out to embrace also spouses and kids. These are people I could call in the middle of the night with an emergency and be certain that they'd be at my door, ready to help, within minutes. And I would do the same for them. 

We'll swim six days straight in the next week. On Monday we take a break and recover. This Monday I have to be home because we're having painting B. and I bought for an anniversary, professionally hung at the house. But after practice on Tuesday morning I'm having coffee with a younger swimmer (late 50s), a former Olympic gold medalist, now a hedge fund owner, to go over his recently acquired Hasselblad X-Pan camera (I owned one in the 1990s and used it commercially). We'll talk about cameras, swimming, travel and Summer plans for both families. It will be fun.

On Wednesday, after swim practice, I'll have a coffee meeting (the coffee is not the essential part of these get togethers...the camaraderie is) with my swimmer friend, Patti. She's a writer/editor who recently more or less retired. I say 'more or less' because her husband writes golf books about psychology and she is editing and prepping his latest book for publication by a university press. She is a few years older than me, still a strong swimmer and one of the most interesting people I know. We'll talk about everything from writing and publishing, to swimming, to upcoming vacations and bumps in the road we've encountered with the mechanics of retiring. But mostly we'll be checking in with each other and supporting each other as we go forward. 

There's a lunch date with a retired photographer that afternoon. A happy hour, later, with a crew that's been getting together for the better part of a decade to drink red wine, eat fun snacks and have long conversations about politics, art, literature and, again, travel. One member of the happy hour is a doctor, recently retired but part of this crew for at least ten years. There's photographer who has "turned off" clients but "turned on" galleries and museum collections with his work. A famous novelist. A tech exec and a few others who orbit in and out. 

 I have to bow out of social events during the day on Friday because are having a 96 inch long credenza delivered which will replace some taller bookshelves in our living room in order to accommodate the new painting. But that evening I'll be cooking dinner for friends who lived next to us about 30 years ago who have diligently kept in touch (as we have in return). We have impromptu dinner parties at each other's homes or at favorite restaurants about once a month. Except when one couple or the other couple is out of town. 

"The kid"; our son, is a standing dinner guest on Sunday evenings and has been since moving back to Austin after college/university. A nice change from the year he spent at Yonsei University in S. Korea. Those were some quiet Sunday dinners, to be sure. 

B. and I been invited to a giant, three day art show at the end of the week which starts with a private showing/cocktail party on Thursday evening. We'll go since we've attended before and had a great time looking at both great art--- and horrible art, and running into more good friends.

So, I'm thinking that, over the years, we worked on these friendships outside the parameters of work and now they are serving us well. One of the benefits of knowing where work starts and stops and real friendships are made. 

As far as purpose in life? Does it really need to be any different than the purpose that's formed your life all along? For me it's the satisfaction of making photographs. Going from self-propelled projects to self-propelled projects as the spirit moves me. Here we are in our 17th year of blogging and I haven't slowed down because it's fun for me, and while the subjects I write about differ now the core idea is the same: sharing the day-to-day nuts and bolts of being a photographer. Of evolving with the field of interest. Investigating new tools and methods. Learning about new, rising stars, preserving the memory of the old masters. 

B. and I were best friends long before we got married. We've always maintained our own separate interests. And because they don't completely overlap we always have something interesting to talk about over dinner, or in the car on the way to somewhere. We're a good fit but that happened long before retirement. As to whether or not we can get along with long periods of "togetherness" I think our eight years of working closely together in our ad agency every day proved that this would not be a problem. 

I think the most important thing people might keep in mind if they are planning to retire is to NOT change all the things you got RIGHT during your working years. And to reject, completely, all the things that you didn't like. Things that felt like impediments to your art or your happiness. It's not about spending all your money on fancy vacations. Vacations that end up feeling like bucket list check marks, but about continuing to do what makes you happy. What always made you happy.  And, by the time you retire you should have that figured out.

Swim every day. Walk every day. Donate your television to someone who has less sense of purpose and fewer ambitions. Fire your "favorite" sports team (worshipping sports teams fosters tribalism. Tribalism fractures societies.). Don't slow down. Don't believe all the crap about falling apart physically or mentally after 60 or 65. Make all those interesting and compelling people who are still doing incredible things far into their eighties or even their nineties your real role models. They've got it figured out. Steal their mentorship for yourself; after all, aging well is as much a skill as brain surgery or tennis. 

Generally, I've found that the money will work itself out on its own. You did your best to earn and save and whatever level you hit is bound to be enough. The real secret is to have the guts to spend some of it. 

Maybe that's why the universe invented Leicas. 

That's all I have for today. Off to do something nice for B. to celebrate Mother's Day. Chin up. Attitude positive. Launch.