As I was recuperating this week I had a crazy thought. What if people who wrote long paeans to old lenses (and new ones) and how glorious they were (and are) routinely supplied photographs taken with those lenses to prove their assertions of optical magic? Wouldn't that be cool?

 

In some ways I tend to be a throwback to a different time. A time in which we were required, in math class, or engineering, to show our work. To show how we arrived at a solution. To offer a proof, as it were, that our hypotheses were valid and the solutions repeatable. We could not just write a paper and say, "The Answer is 11.395. You'll just have to take my word for it." That would never fly. Imagine buying a house with some property attached but without having a survey or access to a previous land survey. "Sure. It's 1.52 acres --- take my word for it." Says the seller. And you happily write the check. 

There is a saying on the web when someone tells an outlandish story. A story that aggrandizes the teller and at the same time strains the credulity of the listener. That saying is: "Photos or it didn't happen." 

Along the same lines there are far too many photo bloggers, website copywriters, and some v-loggers who spin endless tales about miraculous lenses from the 1960's, 1970's, 1980's and the 1990's. Thick with nostalgia these lenses become talismans of great photographic power and seemingly their powers were only appreciated by an anointed few. The true cognoscenti.  A priesthood sharing of cultish photo knowledge which they now insist on passing down like a story of a lost "grail." To hear the tales it's as if these lenses had magical powers which lent images taken with them a special and almost indescribable affect or power. Like Harry Potter's wand. Or Excalibur.

When "less" educated photographers try the lens out on their own and fail to "appreciate" the specialness of the optic the members of the cult are quick to explain that this or that neophyte just doesn't (yet) appreciate the special "character" the lens can bring to an image. And round and round we go. 

A few lenses go on to achieve the highest level in the pantheon of camera lenses. But their charms are only apparent to people from the "hallowed" film era. People over 50 or maybe 60 years old. People representing the religion of the Tri-X, the beliefs of the coven of Kodachrome. But to lay people, often the special powers of the lenses are hidden behind opaque curtains. The acolytes must first enter into a suspension of disbelief, engendered by a new belief in the cult master, who will lead them to the appropriate epiphany.

The cult master becomes the reference standard and gate keeper of great knowledge only after repeating over and over again how special and deep his knowledge and understanding are. As Goebbels and Roy Cohn knew all too well, repeating something endlessly turns it into fact --- over time. 

Though we are mostly aware that technology moves on and lenses get better and better, as do cameras, we still want to believe in the magic being peddled. And this isn't just aimed at ancient and obsolete equipment but also a new gear. The gist of all this is the idea also of context. 

When I was a young photographer I happened to be on a beach in Mexico with a beautiful girl who was dressed in next to nothing, striking an alluring pose in front of the most amazing sunset I have ever seen. Golden hour everywhere. Soft, billowing, cascading light. I took a photograph on slide film. The image was, to me, incredible. I praised the lens to the heavens though on some level I knew it was a huge confluence of things, all at just the right time, that made the shot work for me...spilling punctum everywhere. But I let everyone I knew hear about the magic of that lens. I took a photograph months later. It was on a job. I used the magic lens to photograph an unattractive scientist who was bored, boring, far too fat, and we did this shoot in a florescent lit room decorated by mimeographed notices and dead houseplants. The lens was horrible. Who could work with such a lens? Why had I fooled myself so badly?  I sold the "holy" lens a short time later. 

This is all to say that after hearing that X 50mm lens from the 1970s is one of the best 50mm lenses ever for the 1,001th time I decided never to believe the written word about magic lenses ever again. If the writer of an article, blog post, or memoir starts to rattle on about some mythic lens I want to see the proof. I want to see actual results. Not results 640 pixel on the wide side. Nope I want to see proof that makes me sit up and notice. 8K or better. With a sworn statement promising that the image is right out of the camera; no clarity slider action, no complex sharpening, no multi-step color regeneration. 

I want the writer to put his lens where his keyboard says it lives. Making photographs. Proving a point. 

Memory is fickle but memory is always our personal ally. 

It's almost never fact.

Show me, or it never existed. 

Contax Aria camera with Contax 28-70mm zoom.

contax 50mm f1.7

Mamiya 6. Mamiya 50mm f4

Sony R1 (NOT RX...) with built in zoom lens.

Hasselblad 500 C/M with 150mm f4.0 Planar

Canon 50mm f1.4 FD

Hasselblad 500 C/M + 150mm f4.0 Planar

Nikon D700. Nikon 24-120mm zoom. 

Minox ML. Built in 35mm lens. 

Samsung Galaxy NX + 85mm Samsung lens.

Canon Rebel film camera. Canon EF 50mm f1.8

The power of a lens depends on the context and the content of an image.

All lenses are beautiful if you point them at the right subject with the 

right lighting and the right styling. 

Try not to let paranoia interfere with your photography. And if you step over the line and get called out for it maybe think twice before reflexively rushing to use your long-tenured sense of entitlement to fix something you created. Too many photographers seem too quick to play the victim card.

 

I have a camera in my hands. I should be able to step around the velvet rope, poke my head into private property --- just gettin a better snap. Ooops. Now I've been asked to follow the rules. It feels like I'm being punished; yelled at, when all I did was... break the rules. But for photography. Yeah. Well, because I'm special...

And the ground swell that follows in the conversation: Me too! I've been violated, emotionally, just for trying to get a better photo! Oh yeah? Well, I have every right to push my camera inches from a stranger's face, you know, to get a better photograph, but they yelled at me!!! Don't they know who I am? 

Ah...the generation raised with more privilege than any other generation in history gets their nose out of joint when... they violate the social contract. When they trespass. When they demand special privileges. Because....photographer!!! 

Just because you can physically do something doesn't mean you should. Nor does it always mean you have the right to. And does the comfort and perceived security of a subject fall short in value compared to the whims of an amateur photographer's demand for access?  Not thinking that to be the case...

We used to live in a free society. We're quickly becoming residents of a police state. Any wonder normal people are getting less comfortable being photographed just so someone can get "likes" on IG? 

Stings a bit but I'm as guilty as the next pompous, entitled photographer waving a copy of the law around in my hands while I make a binary decision about someone else's privacy. Or someone else's expectation of privacy as it applies to their own private property. Sometimes that horse gets so high I'm actually afraid of falling off. 

Life doesn't need to be "us versus them" on every encounter we have with our cameras and the rest of the world. Common courtesy would be nice --- if we could just get the people with grand senses of entitlement to believe the need for common courtesy applies to them as well. Just sayin'

I guess courtesy is not so common after all...

Progress on the shoulder: Better every hour. Two weeks should fly by. 

To keep myself from being bored I thought I'd drive my car through the fence at the airport and tryout my new lens by standing at the end of the runway photographing airplanes as they land.

I know there is a sign that says, "No Trespassing" but I'm sure that message is 

meant for people who aren't as important as I am. Right?

I mean, I pay taxes, I must be entitled.

And in case you didn't get it, that last bit about the airplanes was supposed to be 

pure sarcasm. 

I have survived. All systems heading in the right direction. Two weeks till launch and counting down.

B.

I looked around the house and assembled my stuff for my visit to the Austin dermatology practice that houses my dermatologist. I took with me a book to read. It's a poem of freeform poems by one of my favorite writers, K.B. Dixon. The book is called, "The Dogs of Doggerel: Irregular Poems." I am halfway through the book and I can't put it down. It's fun, insightful, opinionated and pretty much everything I like about reading books. In fact, since traffic in Austin is so unpredictably bad I found myself about 20 minutes early for my appointment to have a bright and talented woman stick a knife in my back. No problem as I had K.B.'s book in hand. I found a nice easy chair, declined the offer of a fresh coffee and settled back to read and giggle. Yes, I drove myself to the appointment...

I found myself actually disappointed when my favorite nurse came to retrieve me about ten minutes early for my scheduled appointment. With a sigh I stuck a bookmark between the pages, hoisted my small camera bag filled with errata and meekly followed the nurse down the hall to room #1. Maybe, I thought, they'll leave me in this procedural room for a long time and I'll be able to get some uninterrupted reading done, but luck was against me and everything happened so quickly.

Not to worry Mr. Dixon, I picked up where I left off when I got back home and found a comfortable chair as a cup of espresso. It's a great book.

The main event today was the surgical removal of a nasty and ambitious spot on my back. On my left shoulder blade, to be specific. Nurse Kaylie had me squiggle a signature on a form on her iPad which basically said that no matter what unfortunate things might happen to me the practice would practice a cheerful and nonchalant attitude of innocence and life would go on one way or another. 

Minutes later I was face down on an operating table making small talk to my young nurse while she jabbed a series of injections all around the site to be excised. "Does anything hurt?" She asked. Yes, I can feel every jab. Well until the first round took effect, deadened the area, and then all I felt was pressure on my skin. Once she finished jabbing me into painlessness she smiled and went off to find my doctor. Time for the excitement to begin. 

Dr. S. got right to work. She did a play-by-play as she worked. But she toned it down so I didn't freak out. Twenty-one stitches later and about twenty minutes later she announced that we were done with the scary work and asked if I'd like to see the stitches before nurse Kaylie applied the pressure bandage that I'd need for 24 hours. I demurred and they finished up the patching work. I got the instructions about post surgical care of the site, paid my whopping $40 co-pay, and headed back out to the car where my phone was blowing up with texts from swimmer friends, photography friends and family wanting to know how everything went. 

I drove home and was able to get off Mopac Expressway before the worst of rush hour ( which runs from 12:01 am through 11:59 pm nearly every day. I got lucky today. Straight shot, no stoppages. 

Now comes the fun part; fourteen days of sloth, laziness and lack of good exercise. Sure, I can go for walks as long as I take it easy. Seems getting the blood pressure up might open up cauterized blood vessels or, an inadvertent muscle flex (picking up a camera with that Leica 24-90mm on it) might pop a stitch. And I guess Dr. S. is totally aware that a useful swim practice is going to require a couple hundred long arm and shoulder movements - per practice. The swimming shut down was non-negotiable. 

It's now about nine o'clock in the evening and I'm still not feeling any real pain from the wound on my shoulder. Which is kind of amazing since the injections of numbing agents happened a little after one o'clock in the afternoon. Either that's so long acting anesthetic or I'm just being oblivious to the discomfort. 

Take away from today? If I get reincarnated as a swimmer I'm going to literally bath daily in sunscreen from the first time I step out into sunlight. But hopefully, in this imaginary future, all skin cancers will be taken care of with one pill that has absolutely no side effects. .. Sure, it could happen. But then again I might come back as a camel in the middle of a desert and never swim again. It could happen. 

All this stuff aside let's talk about the photos. I chose random photos of beautiful people. Just for fun. To remind myself that photography is supposed to be fun. 

Tomorrow I thought I'd reacquaint myself with the Sigma fp and the tiny Voigtlander 40mm f1.4. It's a fun little lens and the fp is about as eccentric/niche as they come. I'll lean on people's sympathy to convince them to pose for me. It could work. At least it might work if I try it....

Not real sutures. Believe me, now I can tell the difference. 

shades of Dr. Suess.

We humans are a frail bunch but since we only get one shot and it's all over too quickly it's important to make the best of the time we have. Shoot more. Walk more. Share more. Ask more. Give more. And wear that sunscreen....and a hat.

Thanks for all the nice feedback. 

(if only I had followed my time restricted eating diet and also eaten more kale.... Aw, the heck with that. I'll depend on early detection and talented healthcare specialists. It is the 21st century, after all). 

Go get K. B. Dixon's book. It's fun enough to distract even a highly sensitive 70 year old from the aches and pains. 

Here lies the book  

And by the way. I didn't cry, throw up or faint. I felt like that was pretty brave....

An Afternoon at the Texas Book Festival. People looked at books. People signed books. Some people bought books.

It was a beautiful day yesterday. The first cool afternoon in quite a while. The kind of afternoon that some might spend riding around their lawn on a riding lawn mower, or waste by watching yet another in a never ending series of football games. I couldn't stand the idea of either of those options. And, in fact, I have never owned a lawn mower. So I grabbed one of my cameras and headed downtown to see if there was anything to photograph at the Texas Book Festival. But you know what? There really wasn't much that inspired me. But that's okay because the walk and the playful interaction with the camera was enough to satisfy me in the moment. 

I parked a mile away and walked over to the event. It was held right in front of the state capitol grounds and for a few blocks to the south of the grounds, on Congress Ave. The book fare drew a good crowd on Sunday. I think a lot of people were inspired in the same way I was --- looking for a fun way to leverage the good weather. 

I brought along a camera bag in defiance of my usual routine which mandates carrying only one camera and one lens. When I got ready to leave the studio yesterday morning I just couldn't decide between two lenses I'd been playing with; the Leica 35-70mm f4 ROM R series lens (a short, manual focusing zoom lens) and the fun and sparky Carl Zeiss 50mm f1.4 ZF.2 lens. Both have to be used on adapters and both are completely manual in focus and operation. I put the gear and two extra batteries and my phone in a dark green Domke canvas camera bag and carried that. I felt oddly out of balance and over provisioned. 

The midday sun was bright and made all the exterior shots very contrasty. Maybe that's why there were only one or two other people there carrying cameras --- out of thousands of people in attendance. 

I think we finally have to admit that photography, as we've been practicing it for decades, is all but dead to the general population. No interest. No uptake. For not the first time I felt very much an outlier to the population by which I was surrounded. It makes sense since there is no real market or venue for the kinds of photos I ended up making. At some point we're just using any public event as an excuse to show up and make photos for our own enjoyment. Nothing beyond that. Quite the sea change from 20 years ago...

The gap between fine art celebrity photographers and the main stream photographers seems to be growing as quickly as the wealth gap between billionaires and blue collar workers. Congratulations if you are making collectible work that sells. Or at least gets into juried shows and wins the approval of curators. For everyone else there's Instagram or Flickr. Good luck wading through the vast visual ocean looking for the prettiest fish. 

Long tents. Lots of tents. Filled with niche books and educational books. 

If you love eclectic books you would have been right at home there. 

Three authors posing at the book signing tables. 

I thought this was an odd prop for a book fare. But they had a big tent 

and apparently they were sponsoring a best seller political book. 

And streaming their speakers' presentations.

I guess the AARP is well dialed into their demographic. 

So many of the people I saw at the Texas Book Festival 

were more than eligible for AARP benefits.

Here you could toss rubber axes at grabby targets and go 

home with a prize from the organization. You didn't 

need to give them money to play; just all your personal information.

This is the one outlier frame. It was shot with a 50mm lens. 

Everything else was done with the zoom.

Signage adjacent to the Book Festival. On Congress Ave. 

I spent most of the afternoon making photographs with one camera and one lens. 

The camera of choice was the Leica SL2-S. The lens was the Leica R 35-70mm f4 ROM. 

The self portrait above was shot at 12,500 ISO. I had to add a bit of noise/grain in post to make it believable. A very nice combo for slow moving shots. Not a sports lens....

Unattended maintenance cart. So yellow...

Documenting parking lot striping. Semi-Self-Portrait.