OT: Kirk's ramble about stuff. Today we start out with swim goggles...

This is the usual time on Friday's during which I look at the stats for the blog and wonder where everyone went. We had been averaging 4,000+ readers per day but now it's slipped to about 2,500. Maybe, in a way, this confirms my post from yesterday about the state of the market. Fewer people (who read English language blogs) are interested in photography than at any time since I started writing blog posts. Either that or the quality of my writing has finally fallen through the bottom of the web content safety net and we're plunging toward the abyss of irrelevance.

I guess I don't really care what the reason is since I enjoy writing the blog and will continue to do so until Google pulls the plug on Blogger and entropy keeps me from turning to some other publishing  substitute. And since that's my attitude I think I'll just proceed with what I had in mind to write after I made a cup of coffee for the afternoon.

You think the switch to digital changed photography? Well, just imagine how big a boost it was for swimming when, back in the very early 1970s, swimmers started finding workable and semi-comfortable goggles to wear while working out in chlorinated pools!!! I've been swimming long enough to remember when goggles were a rarity in most programs. We'd pound away at swim practices and then head home with bloodshot eyes and a hazy cloud reducing our visual acuity. It's a wonder most of us can still see today.

Now there is an avalanche of choices in the goggle "sector" and it's dominated by Tyr, Speedo, Arena, Roka, and Barracuda. My pair right now are the Speedo Vanquisher 2.0 goggles. They provide a tight seal around the eyes without having to be strapped on too tightly. I also like the Tyr version with the red surrounds but I have no idea what the model name (or number) is; I only know that I have six pairs of the Tyrs in various states of utility so I must have liked them a lot for a while.

It's possible to pay up to $100 for a pair of swim goggles but, get this! I've been swimming with competitive programs for decades and have never spent more than $18 on a pair of goggles. Can you imagine if I could maintain this sort of discipline in my pursuit of cameras?

The Speedo Vanquisher 2.0s ($16-$18) that I have now come in an optically clear version and a dark shaded version and I have one set of each. I've been using the clear ones lately for the 6 a.m. workouts so I can actually see my lane mate at the other end of the pool in the early morning darkness. Yes, we have underwater pool lights but in breaks between sets it's great to see your partner and yell back and forth about the particulars of the next set. Better still, you can see them getting ready to take off on the set which is your cue to also start.

If I go to a later workout, at a time when it's already light outside, I switch to the deep gray lensed goggles which are also UV resistant. It's a lot more comfortable that dealing with the glare of the sun through non-tinted plastic.

Why does anyone need more than two pairs? Because all the swim goggles are made of plastic which eventually becomes scratched and optically marred. You never know when you'll hit that tipping point of no longer wanting to look through a visual mess of scratches and surface abrasion to you keep a new pair around in your swim bag for the day you find yourself ready to switch.

Why bring a second pair with you to the poolside? Goggles are unpredictable. A pair can work fine for a year; maybe even two, and then one day without warning the seal along the eyecup will no longer seal properly and you'll have one or the other eyecup fill up with water as you push off the wall, flip turn, etc. Once you do swim practices with goggles in a chlorinated pool you'll never want to try to go the distance again without having that back-up pair stuffed in with your other swim paraphernalia at poolside and that means you can do a quick change and not miss the sets you've signed up and paid to swim.

What other failures do goggles exhibit? The weak spot for me with goggles has always been the rubber or silicone strap that holds the goggles onto your face. Now that new materials are being used it doesn't happen as often but the combination of chlorine and UV radiation breaks down most elastic materials and eventually causes them to fail. Tugging too hard on a strap end in order to tighten it is the prevailing cause of strap failure. This is another reason to keep a second set poolside. Sure, in the quiet comfort of your own suburban home, surrounded by your nicely mowed yard, it's pretty easy to replace the broken strap with a new one. But in the middle of a workout, in a shared lane, during a coached session, it makes a hell of a lot more sense to grab your back-up, deck-resident goggles and get right back into the mix. You can fix the casualties over a quiet cup of coffee on your own time.

I keep goggles everywhere. There are three pairs in my main swim bag which I take to every workout. The swim bag also has hand paddles and a pull buoy as well as a set of fins and a collection of different sunscreens.

I keep two pairs in the car in case (God forbid!!!) I forget the swim bag or lose it. I'll still want to swim and with the car goggles and an extra pair of jammers (swim suit) in the trunk of the car I can still make it through a workout without stressing over lost swim opportunity.

Oddly enough, I also keep a couple pairs in my main camera bag on the presumption that I might find myself near a pool or clean lake, waiting for the light to get cool, or a client to show up, and decide to take advantage of the scheduling gap to hop in the convenient body of water for a swim. With two pairs in the camera bag I can always be magnanimous and offer a pair for the client to use.

I realized the importance of goggles for workouts back in high school. We put in a lot of yardage. We hit the pool five days a week at 5:30 in the morning and had a second practice each afternoon. We also did a long Saturday morning practice. By the end of a typical day our eyes looked like Zombie eyes. Read and weepy. Sometimes a bit painful.

I had a date once with a beautiful swimmer on whom I had a crush. We went out to a very fun and trendy Mexican food restaurant on our first date and I would have loved to have stared into her eyes and she into mine. But we'd both spent too much time in the pool and both of us were so visually impaired by the time we got to the restaurant that our eyes watered too much to even read the menu. I figured that when swimming goggle-less hampered one's dating life it was time to take definitive action. I bought us both goggles and we started wearing them to every workout. After a while it became standard.

And, that added equipment was a good thing for teenage swimmers. The last thing you want a police officer to see if they pull you over for a traffic infraction is a kid with bloodshot and bleary eyes. And back in the days of hot cars and cavalier teens the "pull over/stern lecture" happened more often than one might imagine.

So, how do you keep your goggles from fogging up when the water is cold or the outside air temp drops? If you have no other recourse you let a few drops of water in each eyecup, put on the goggles, and then, when swimming, you tilt your head down and let the water wash across the inner surface of the lens. There are also anti-fog liquids you can buy that are specifically made for swim goggles. Speedo makes the most popular formula. I find that it doesn't work much better than a bit of human spit and a quick clean with a human tongue.

Hope your swimming is coming along well and that I can offer you other swim oriented tidbits when the photography entries become too boring. After looking at today's stats I decided it was an appropriate time to start....

The Sad And Frustrating Feelings Engendered When a Relatively New Camera Just Stops Working. Looking Forward to See How Panasonic Will Resolve the Failure.

Ouch. Just...ouch! It's been a long time since I've had a digital camera body fail. Maybe all the way back to my Nikon D2x days. It's never a comfortable thing and the resolution; even when the company that makes the product steps up, is time consuming, frustrating  and ultimately erodes the idea of the camera's reliability. Dead cameras suck.

The camera in question is a Panasonic Lumix S1R. I bought it on November 28, 2019 and I've used it sparingly. I bought it as a back-up body for another S1R that I purchased about a month earlier. The camera has never been used in the rain, travels in a Think Tank backpack, has never been on a plane, or even a badly sprung pick-up truck. Of all my Panasonic cameras it's the one with the least mileage on it and since the advertising for the camera touts its robustness and impeccable build quality its untimely surrender of usability just galls me.

So, what happened? I'd set up a portrait session here in my studio with a good friend and had the camera set for a revisitation of my older style of portraiture. I was using it in the 1:1 crop mode and shooting raw files to a tested and almost new CFexpress card. The camera had a fresh battery in it and gave no hints of its impending demise. I was working with the camera on a tripod and lighting the session with LED lights. Room temperature around 68 degrees (f) and just enough humidity in the room to extinguish any static electricity.

I'd shot about 225 frames, reviewed some of them normally, and then stepped away from the camera for a few minutes to adjust lights and chat with my friend. The camera went into sleep mode and when I pushed the shutter button to wake it back up again it stayed dormant. I turned the camera off and turned it back on again. I got the following message: "turn camera off and turn back on again." We tried that a number of times but it was a loop that brought me back to the same message over and over again.

I didn't want to waste my friend's time or truncate the session so I reached into the equipment toolkit and pulled an identical body out of the drawer, put the 85mm lens on that camera and proceeded to finish the shoot (because that's exactly what professionals are supposed to do...).

After the session was over and my friend was off to some other engagement I went through the standard trouble-shooting protocol: I changed batteries. I tried different lenses. I swapped out memory cards. I turned the camera on while holding down various buttons. Nothing would allow me to leave the cycle of: turn on, get message, turn off.

My favorite camera store doesn't close until 7pm on weekdays so I called my trusty sales person and explained the problem. He took down the details and sent a message to the Panasonic technical representative. I'm now waiting for a call back from someone to find out what we do next. My optimistic side wants the resolution to happen like this: I get a secret formula of button presses and reset options from the tech support people. Once we bring the camera back to life we reload the firmware and everything turns out to be just right. 

My second choice is that the store, the rep and the company decide to immediately make everything right by shipping me a new camera body overnight while the local store accepts the old one and takes responsibility for getting it back to Panasonic in trade for my new one.

My pessimistic self tells me an uncomfortable saga wherein fingers are pointed everywhere, the camera is sent in for warranty repair but it takes months to come back and then, two weeks later, the same problem resurfaces. I hope I'm absolutely wrong about this imagined option.

In one regard I've been proven correct about the need for professionals to have back-ups for their important gear. Lots of back-ups. That I was able to reach into a nearby drawer and pull out an identical camera model and finish the shoot the way I intended was a good thing and made me feel like a competent business person. I would never really tolerate having to tell a good client that I couldn't continue the job at hand because my "only" camera failed.

But this does break the feeling of trust in the equipment that I've been enjoying. Now I'll be on guard and nervous every time I take one of the S1R cameras out of my camera bag and start to use it. And that's a sad thing because it diminishes the joy of using gear you thought you could rely upon to work, as long as you kept it fed with batteries and safe from abuse.

I'm waiting (im)patiently for a response from someone today. There's still the second S1R and two S1s here in the office. I am not without workable tools. I'm just frustrated and a bit pissed off.

In other notes: We actually got a dusting of snow last night here in Austin. There was snow on the roof of the house and even across the windshield of my car. Studio Dog was delighted because she seems to love the cold (but I made her wear her sweater for her walk just so I'd be warm....) and now she's delighted because the sun is out and there are still spots of snow in the backyard that she can romp through and then track melted snow through the house. 

It was 30 degrees (f) when I got to the swimming pool this morning. The air was cold, the water was warm and the sun was brilliant. The sky was clean with those nicely saturated blue hues I always like in photographs. 

We did a good, long set and I worked on my freestyle technique with an extra dollop of diligence. I didn't think of my broken camera even once during the workout. I saved that nagging tug of concern for the drive back home. 

Camera Death. So sad. I'll let you guys know how it all turns out. This is Panasonic's opportunity to show off their customer service and make a blogger who just celebrated his 26,000,000th page view this week happy....

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

What are you willing to give up for more performance?

Performance has many metrics.  Sharper. Faster. Brighter. More resolution. More snap. More speed and more endurance.  And it seems inevitable that for every push forward in one of the performance metrics something somewhere has to be sacrificed.  For instance, if you want a faster lens you'll need to accept the trade-off that you will have a bigger, heavier lens.  If you want a full 35mm framed digital camera you'll pay a higher price and have less depth of field.  If you want bigger image files you'll need more storage and perhaps a computing system with a faster processor.

The trick is to narrow down your choices and figure out what you really want (need?) and what you're willing to give up to get it.  If I wanted the ultimate in photographic resolution would I be willing to give up part of my retirement fund or to go massively into debt to buy a Phase One 180 eighty megapixel digital system with incredibly expensive glass to go with it?  It would mean doing without lots of other things and the trade off might only have temporary benefits that might get lost in several quick generations of new camera/sensor designs.  What would I be willing to trade?

Recently I confronted two "wants" in two different fields that are strangely linked by one strong addiction.  I wanted to swim faster and I wanted to be able to handhold my cameras at longer exposures at least as well as I did in my "fresh and happy" twenties.  I also wanted to reduce my hereditary propensity for anxiety and all its nasty symptoms.  What was I willing to give up that would accrue me advantages in all three areas? What beloved ritual/habit/addiction would I be willing to abandon in order to become faster, steadier and calmer?

About four months ago I realized that I had some anxiety when I tried to go faster in the pool.  Increased anxiety manifested itself as tighter muscles (which cause a certain amount of physical resistance) and more difficulty effortlessly breathing as well as an elevated heart rate which slows down recovery between sets.  Even as a college swimmer I was plagued with a certain amount of performance anxiety that could degrade my overall speed and endurance.  Around this time I also realized that I was slowing down.

In my other world, photography, I noticed that I had developed more shake in my hands and body and that I wasn't able to hold a camera as still as I had before.  While image stabilization worked fine not every camera and lens I want to shoot with has image stabilization built in. (Hello.  Hasselblad...).  Often I like to shoot on the edge of what might be possible.  I like to get lucky shooting candid, available light portraits with medium telephotos like the 85mm 1.4 lenses; handheld.  Wide open.  The longer lenses magnify any sort of operational shortcomings and not being able to hold a camera still is a big operational shortcoming.

I made the (for me) momentous decision to stop drinking caffeinated coffee.  Yes.  You read that correctly.  Kirk Tuck no longer drinks super strong, deep black, potent caffeinated coffee.  The physical transition was quick enough, a few days of crabbiness (but I'd been so crabby on caffeine that no one really noticed a change...) some mild headaches and of course the standard bleeding from the eyes and ears and the grand mal seizures (just kidding about the last two symptoms..) but the psychological addiction was harder to shake (ha. ha.)  I've read about addiction and overcoming addiction and I realized that I couldn't do this halfway.  I couldn't vacillate.  I mean, look at what I had at risk: Faster swimming, better photographs, more patience.

After the first two weeks I noticed that my swimming improved.  Slowly at first and then more radically.  People I had never been able to hang with in workout suddenly came into my sights.  I no longer feared sets of 200's and 400's.  My butterfly stroke endurance increased by leaps and bounds.  But most important to me, my performance anxiety faded and then snuffed itself out altogether. I became both faster and much more relaxed in the water.  During this time I was also able to concentrate more on the mechanics of my freestyle stroke.  I watched an amazing swimmer named Kristen and began to copy her longer and more aggressive arm extension at the front end of her freestyle stroke, her perfectly delineated forearm catch and the decisive and powerful hip roll that kept it all rhythmic and flowing.  Just this weekend my times for 50 and 100 yard repeats dropped again.  I was muscle sore at the end of yesterday's workout but that was because the increase in my speed and endurance added another 1,000 yards to my usual workout.  My fellow swimmers and coach noted and commented and that was nice.

But I know most of you don't really care about swimming and that's okay.  In the realm of photography I started to notice that, in the first few weeks after my caffeine abstinence, my calmness (bordering on drowsiness) was yielding a diverse menu of positive results.  My grip and hold on cameras gets steadier and steadier.  At this point I feel as though I've regressed to my early thirties.  A 50mm 1.4 is generally sharp for me down to a 1/30th of a second when I am mindful of the process.  The bigger reward is more patience.  More proclivity to wait for the right moment instead of hurrying through a shoot or a scene or a moment.

A surprising side benefit of eliminating the liquid speed and slowing down my brain is a calmness in other work situations. The best example is my recent portfolio show where I was able to be less guarded and more affable.  I wasn't overly worried about the outcome and it translated into a better engagement with all the people I met and showed to. In all honesty, it was my first non-anxious portfolio show of my entire career. (that's sad just to read).

So, what did I really give up?  The psycho-chemical effects were easy to give up.  After two weeks all of the cravings were gone, physically, but I realize that I'd been drinking juiced up coffee religiously and with reckless abandon for the better part of thirty five years with very, very few breaks.  The culture of coffee was interwoven in everything I did.  I made extra time to get to shoots so I could drop by the coffee house and get a big cup of hot speed.  On the way to track meets and swimming meets and other events with my son, Ben, the coffee cup was a constant companion.  And I can't remember business meetings that didn't somehow revolve around the intoxicating elixir.  Locations were sometimes determined by their proximity to the best coffee in town.  And a bad shot (of espresso) could ruin my morning.

But I quickly learned that if I could get over my visceral repulsion to decaf that the meetings would still go on.  I've saved over $7,000 in the last three months on coffee purchases (just kidding, my habit was maybe $5 a day) and that's enough to buy a new camera and a couple cool lenses.

The biggest benefit is that fact that I now sleep like a baby, don't yell at bad drivers, and I can handhold a camera steadier than I've been able to in at least twenty years.  If that's not worth giving up an anxiolytic substance I always have my ace in the hole:  The best set of 100 freestyles I've swum in nearly a decade.  All for free.

What would you give up for better performance?

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