What sort of camera madness have I participated in today? Oh, I remember, I swam the masters workout and then headed to Precision Camera to buy a brand new camera. I really, really needed one. Hmmm.

The Nikon D750 with the reasonably good 24-120mm zoom lens.

August is a dangerous month. Fraught with all kinds of odd impulses. Way too hot for rational thought to prevail. What's a guy going to do? But let's set this up first and at least give me a chance to rationalize yet another zany and seemingly inexplicable camera purchase (full price, no special dispensation for brilliant blog writers...).

I've been playing diligently with video this year and I'm mixing with bad company. These video guys make photographers look like depression era shoppers. And when they add stuff to their "carts" the prices seem astronomical to me. According to them you can buy a Sony FS7, 4K super 35 video camera for a bit less than than $9,000 but in their opinions the camera requires another three or four thousand dollars invested in cages, follow focus stuff, monitors, memory cards and such before you can really, you know, use it. And then you'll need a lens. Or lenses.

These days all the video guys are excited and fidgety about the newest Sony camera, the A7R-2 and they are lining up only to be told that it's now effectively backordered. Amazon.com had them yesterday but today they are saying "deliverable in one to two months." But you know how those guys over at Precision Camera are always looking out for my best interests so they took it upon themselves to place me at the top of the pre-order list for the Sony A7R-2. Yesterday they called and let me know that they'd gotten a handful in and they had one with my name on the box. Did I

Recalibrating my fear and paranoia with a good walk. Plus, a high temperature test run with a new camera and lens

If you spend too much time listening to the radio, watching the news on TV or scanning Google News on the internet you will eventually develop anxiety and a brace of related mental health disorders. The media is a cruel filter and saturates the more compulsive members of its audience with a never ending stream of doom and gloom. I respond by battening the hatches and hunkering down into the bunker of the studio, anxious for the storm to pass and for light and decency to prevail. But are things really so wretched?

I recently got rid of a huge mess of gear in the spirit of distilling down. Focusing on one system. One set of cameras and one small collection of lenses. I decided to abandon the system I've been working with all these years and go with a fresh canvas, a counterintuitive side step. (I have more space in the drawers of my cabinets since I started back into the business in 1987...). I decided to take a break from the internet and the TV and all the other voices of misery and take my new camera for a walk. A real, get down and play with your camera, sort of walk. And it was so cathartic.

I grabbed a tiny little Olympus e520, popped an 11-22mm lens onto the front, jammed a 4 gig card in the side and fired up the Honda Element. What I needed was a little bit of downtown adventure. When I parked the car near the city's hike and bike trail around 11 am the temperature was already in the mid-90's. I pulled out a hat, put up the windshield reflector thingy and headed off over the pedestrian bridge to downtown.

Here's what I found as I walked through the downtown area: Dozens of high rise, luxury condominiums. Some built and occupied, some under construction and some breaking ground. None of the projects was on hold. The streets were filled with people in suits or shirts and ties walking to meetings or early lunches. By noon the downtown eateries were full and in some there were lines for tables. Not too many "sale" signs in the boutique windows. Most people seemed pretty happy. Pretty content.

None of the "doom and gloom" wasteland scenario.

And then there was my new little camera. I've long since given up caring what the exposure meter says to me. On a sunny day like today i learned to set the right exposure at least 25 years ago. Put the camera on manual and set for ISO 100, set exposure at 1/500 @f8. Unless something changes, don't move the dials.

At the end of three hours the temperature was cresting 100(f) and I was sweating like a boxer. I'd re-acquainted myself with humanity and made at least an introduction to my new camera so I headed home. Less fearful about the economy. Less paranoid about the localized representation of the human condition and happy with my photographs.

The 4:3 format suits me well. The lens is great. The finder is good. I can be happy working with this camera.

I bought a couple of battery powered flashes today. They are both Vivitar EF-383's. They have built in slaves. They supposedly work in ttl on my new Olympus stuff. They are less than a third the price of the Olympus flash. I'll let you know how they work out. They are coming on the snail express from Amazon.

Three or four of the images above are from my little stroll around Austin today. The other one came from my first adventure with the new cameras. I was out last friday and I shot this with my friend, Emily. We were playing around with a 4x4 foot scrim over her head and a flash bounced out of an umbrella for the main light. It's all fun.

No presumption that any of the images are great art (or even minor art). I'm in that stage where I'm getting the new stuff all dialed in and that goes for the economy as well.

NEWS FLASH: I'm going to be a presenter at the CREATIVE PHOTOGRAPHIC RETREAT in Dallas, Texas on the 23rd, 24th and 25th of July. Should be fun.

IN AUSTIN: On Sunday, August 9th, I'll be giving a lecture and a lighting demo for the Austin Photography Group at Book People, third floor from 7pm on. I think it is free and open to the public. I know my friend Paul will be coming by to heckle. I'll be showing some work and then showing my favorite ways to light portraits. If you are in Austin please come by. I'm sure we'll head out for coffee or a glass of wine after we wrap.

EVENT: Thinking about a happy hour this coming Monday. 5:30pm at Threadgills at Riverside and Congress. If you are in Austin and want to go hang out, have a beer and talk about art drop a line or leave a comment. One dollar Lone Star Longnecks all day long.......Look for the guys with the camera.

Trading Camera Systems. Why do we cheat on whatever system we own?

I know why we kept our Hasselblads for decades, they always worked and no matter what year you` purchased yours it was capable of generating the same quality images as the latest or oldest one. It was the lenses that we stayed around for. But in this day and age the digital bodies are more akin to buying a few bricks of film and they go out of style and are superseded almost yearly. When I first came to photography we had to be "jacks of all trades" which meant keeping an arsenal of glass on hand. If you shot with Nikon you probably had everything from an 18mm wide angle to a 400mm telephoto and everything in between. And then even lenses started to change. Zooms superseded primes (but maybe not....) and then new revs of the zooms overtook the ones we bought just a few years earlier. Now we're slinging around glass and bodies like we're in a flea market. And I find that as my style stabilizes I use fewer and few extra long or short optics.

The logic is to buy the latest digital body and use it up quick. Sell it before the new models are announced so that you get the maximum value in the next trade. This year you'll be able to shoot everything at 3200 ISO but next year it will be 6400 ISO. I can't wait. Or can I?

In the old days the only even marginally available information about lenses was the anecdotal test stuff we'd read in the mainstream photo magazines. And they only came out once a month. Now every website has a precision testing rig based on DXO or IBF and we can see, right there in the four dimensional graphics, just how poorly last year's lens performance in the outer 12th % of the frame is versus this year's glass. If you are a Nikon shooter you are suspect if you aren't sporting a D3x and at least a 14 to 24mm and a 24 to 70mm. How can you possibly produce professional results without it all?

Not to generalize but the women photographers I know only seem to replace their cameras and lenses after someone drops them several times and an assistant accidentally spills Coca Cola on the main body while changing lenses. Could it be that many new camera purchases are nothing but sublimated male sexual desire? Have we transferred our biological imperative to go out and seek mates endlessly into a less (socially) destructive desire to chase camera systems instead?

I just finished writing a book and shooting a big ad campaign for an agency. I have the strongest desire to change systems today. No, my current system did not screw up on the big shoot. No, there was no lack of optical integrity among the lenses. In fact, I think they gave me their best effort. But there is much truth to the saying that familiarity breeds contempt.

I was talking about this to a friend in New York who just happens to be a psycho therapist. He laughed at my Freudian interpretation. He suggested that the desire is much the same in any area of art wherein the practitioner is finished with one cycle and ready to embark on a new cycle. He refers to this "sweeping the clutter off the desk" as a way of starting with a fresh canvas. A blank page. A new perspective.

The idea being that the hand/mind relationship (haptics and all that) predisposes one to work in the same fashion over and over again and only by making a conscious attempt to change the tools will you change the construct and the paradigm that keeps you slavishly locked into the same subconscious fabrications. The psycho therapist had to get off the phone at that point. You see, we'd been talking about the really cool f2 zoom lenses for the Olympus E system and he wanted to go play with them right away.

I'm between books and projects. I'm pondering cheating on my Nikons and getting some more Olympus gear. I like the color and the size but I know those are just facile justifications. I think I'll start with the 50 Macro. That's supposed to be a good one.

How do I reconcile all this? Well, a good shrink will cost me $250 a visit and it may take years to come to grips with my compulsive need to try new cameras. How many new cameras would that buy? How much painful introspection will I be able to avoid?

(For those who take everything literally please understand that approximately 15 to 20 % of this blog was meant to be "tongue in cheek" I'll still buy the gear but I'll laugh at myself while I'm doing it..........).

Note: I'll be teaching workshops on small flashes for two days at the Creative Photographic Retreats in Dallas, Texas on July 24th and 25th. Come on up (or down) for the happy hour intro on the 23rd.