I joined a gym. I have a personal trainer. She kicked my butt today.

 

Ice cream shop mannequin. Playing with wide open enthusiasm.

I started my day with a long walk to the bank. Some checks came in over the weekend and that always makes me happy. I could have deposited them via a phone app but I think any excuse for a good, long walk is a great excuse so I headed into the downtown area, parked my car a mile and a half from the bank and did the round trip. It's weird to actually go into a bank. I have one bank in San Antonio that I've done business with for nearly 40 years and have only physically been there once. It was when I had to deliver documents for an estate, in a hurry. I use an investment firm at which I have never met anyone -- in person. Amazing to me that we trust strangers to handle our important money when we'd never hire an assistant or doctor or lawyer without meeting them in person first. But I digress. I made it to the bank and then back home and the walk was pleasant. Even nicely cool.

I took a camera, shot some photos, looked at them when I got back to the office and then erased them. They weren't "bad" photos but they weren't interesting either. 

After doing mindless chores around the house and the office I changed into "workout" clothes and it was weird. With swimming it's the same wardrobe every day. Swim cap. Black Speedo Endurance Swim Jammers and a pair of Speedo goggles. On a cold day maybe a pair of Crocs on the feet to get back and forth on the freezing cold pool deck. But for time at the gym you need a whole different set of clothes. And shoes. And they have to be clean and not smelly. 

Loose t-shirt, athletic shorts (whatever the hell those are...) and a close-toed athletic shoes. Mine are Tevas. A protest against Nike? Naw, on sale at REI. And if you want to conform and be a pleasant gym member it's pretty much advised that you come not reeking of sweat and other noxious body odors. 

I joined the gym for two reasons. First, it's free because a gym membership is included in my health insurance policy. There's a convenient and well run gym less than a five minute (mid-afternoon, not rush hour) drive from the office. Makes it easy. The second reason is that my swim coaches and fellow swimmers keep proselytizing about the absolute need for older swimmers (over 50? over 40? Over 60? what?) to lift weights and do more weight bearing exercise to maintain muscle mass. To fight sarcopenia. And to swim faster.

I've been to the gym now three times. The first time I overdid the bicep curls and paid for it for days. But the facility offers a free hour of personal training so I decided today to take advantage of it. I met Renee, my personal trainer, at 2pm for an hour of fun torture. Renee is short, dark, ridiculously fit, and has a larger than life personality. But as nice as she seemed when we first met today she knows how to cajole, demand, request and coach more work out of a client than I ever imagined. Not that I'm complaining. Too much...

She took me on a painful tour of all the pertinent machines of torture on display there. I bench pressed and leg pressed and worked all manner of upper body muscles with a vengeance. We ended the hour with some much needed stretching. I enjoyed the pain, the expertise, and the external discipline so much that I'm contracting  with her to coach me once a week for the next few months; until I become my own strength/fitness expert....

We did all the major muscle groups and then concentrated on swim muscles. Tomorrow I will either feel faster in the pool or I'll be so sore I'll need Floaties (those inflatable floats little kids wear on their arms when first learning to swim...)  to survive the masters swim workout. But if it weight training  works......yow! Look out. 

So I am adding three days a week to my schedule for visiting the gym for an hour of grunting, lifting and machine handling. That's in addition to the five to six days of swimming and the three or four walking adventures each week. I may not have enough time to actually work on work. Does anyone know if you can get paid for just staying in shape? Maybe some sort of advertising ambassador-ship with Pfizer or Abbott? 

In photo news: The Voigtlander 58mm f1.4 lens was a fun experiment but it's heading back to its owner. Why? I tested it head to head against the Carl Zeiss 50mm f1.4 and decided that I liked the overall look, out of focus rendering, and even the handling better on the Zeiss. So why endlessly duplicate? My friend wasn't at all chagrined. He imagined I might chose the Zeiss. He's breathing a sigh of relief that the V58 lens will soon be back on the front of his Leica SL; where we both imagine it belongs. 

Still interested in testing a few more 50mm lenses but more interested in planning a shooting trip somewhere interesting. Just waiting for B.'s return. 

Now playing around again with the Leica CLs and the weird collection of lenses I have for them. Look for a lot of CL work to be done in a couple of weeks when Austin "welcomes" SXSW. Always fun and always like shooting fish in a barrel. All while riding the city buses into the town's center for a change ( the only way to get into and out of downtown without having to invest in massive amounts of time trying to find parking....). 

time to just put those cameras into Program mode and start shooting. Why overthink it?

It was a black and white day in downtown Austin.

It was a quiet day yesterday. I went to swim practice and then came back home to an empty house. B. is out of town tending to a family member in hospital. I've been left to fend for myself. After some basic house keeping I got bored and decided to go out for a walk with my camera. It was a gray day and one that I thought would be better imaged in a monochrome representation. 

I took my favorite camera, a crusty, stout Leica SL. I paired it with the new lens "flavor of the week", the Voitlander 58mm. I shoved an extra battery into my pocket and headed down to walk a familiar route. 

Nothing had changed. And as I walked on I felt a certain sense of futility with yet another walk through an all too familiar urban-scape. Another stroll through the most casually dressed city imaginable. Another unfulfilling experience dodging girls in denim skirts riding recklessly fast on electric scooters down the middle of the sidewalks, here to celebrate some bride's upcoming plunge into marriage. Wending my way around the same street people begging for money. Inflation strikes even there. Used to be the active homeless would ask for "spare change" now they are demanding $5 for lunch. For some it seems like a full time, all seasons job. 

I was shooting with a lens burdened by no particular detractions or attractions other than its nod toward nostalgia and the comfort of the familiar. I'm sure every one else has been there. There is now a loneliness in walking around with a camera photographing random stuff. I spent hours in what is one of Texas's top tourist locations and not a single other person carried an actual camera. Sure, people occasionally stopped to photograph something with an iPhone but I was more or less the crazy uncle hobbyist that time and culture have passed by. Even the folks snapping away with their phones seemed less passionate about the endeavor yesterday. Almost as though we've all concluded that with the endless torrent of images being constantly shared everywhere that no individual shot or selection of shots matters anymore. Another drop in the ocean. Another futile attempt to carve out some sort of alternate viewpoint. A different visual perspective of a declining culture. Hello "The Americans" except that now everyone with a camera is a Robert Frank. 

It's almost as if we've become mini cover bands for famous rock groups sitting in dour suburban garages doing our paeans to the classics and the classical originators. Endlessly covering "Hey Jude" or "Tangled Up in Blue" but without the talent, or the advantage of being the first mover. The first person to see in a certain way. Now, seventy years after Robert Frank, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Ansel Adams and so many other pioneers we keep paying homage by trying to fit our tiny feet into the deep tracks they laid into the mud of our visual culture, so long ago. And doing so mostly unsuccessfully but in enormous quantity. 

After a forgettable dinner I entertained myself by watching a movie from Disney's new take on endless "Star Wars." But all the subsidiary shows in that franchise now mash together and endlessly repeat the theme of the redeemed gunslinger working through his past and paying penance with violence ostensibly to help the universe ... in some way or another. So boring. So predictable. From spear throwing Tuscan raiders to warp drive spaceships, all concurrent.

Many, many years ago I loved movies. I was mystified when a much older mentor of mine told me he could no longer stomach movies because, after decades of enduring them, he realized that there were only a handful of plots and those plots were coupled with a financial need for movie producers to pander to the tastes and comprehension abilities of the general population. Watching yet another in an endless series of predictable dramas or comedies was, for him, unbearable. After a while they all seemed the same.

And circling back to photography that might be exactly what I'm experiencing in the moment. The Been There, Done That, Seen That a Thousand Times realization. Now we love endless gray tones. But like all styles that one is ephemeral. Tomorrow we'll see someone's work pushing out high contrast images (Allan Schaller?) and we'll worship that for a few weeks before we slide off into some reveries about highly saturated colors which will give way to subdued pastels. And it's the same for subject matter. We'll always seem to have bandwidth for young, thin-ish, half naked female portraits or suggestive glamor-posing but all the rest of the subject matter just rotates over time through the greatest hits of the genres. Stark monochrome mountain-scapes which give way to close captured shots of random people on the streets which give way to overly constructed landscapes in subtle colors which give way to garish, direct in your face studio portraits. 

And then the vanishing hordes of old duffers like me wandering around with wonderful gear in a vain attempt to re-capture the magic we felt when taking photographs in our youth. Someone should write this as a play, or a soap opera for TV. Toss in a salacious murder, some twisted love affairs and.....Oh! What's that you say? It's already been done? Ah well. 

All I can manage to say for the photographic process now is that it gets one out of the house, moving one's feet, and feeling a small measure of solace to be around other humans who share a common appreciation of coffee; especially when savored in the midst of people marking time, looking at their phones or answering messages on their laptops. All packed together in coffee shops but all so isolated and alone.

And then, this morning, I discover that the new-ish refrigerator isn't cooling the refrigerator half properly. I'd better use up the milk before it spoils. 

How was the lens? and how was the camera?, you ask. Just fine. They worked just fine. But without a spark behind the process all the trappings of the craft are mostly rendered meaningless and banal. Proven by hundreds of millions of random images tossed into the ether every day. And the slightly stinging realization that I'm in no way special or removed from the wave of hollow content producers who accompany me, shoulder to shoulder. Hell bent on somehow feeling relevant. 

B. will be home in a few days. The refrigerator will be fixed under warranty. The laundry will get done. Already the photographers I have known personally are passing away and drifting away from common memory. One foot forward all is darkness. The future is unknowable. The future of photography is predictable. And bleak. But it's still a good excuse to get out of the house and walk the walk. At some point the walks will remain and the camera will become something we leave at home. Picking it up only when something tickles our memory reminding us about the way we used to consume the art we used to love. And the process we admired.

On my walk yesterday I ran into a gallery owner I've known for 40+ years. He only shows photography and represents people like Keith Carter and Jack Spencer. He's 78 years old and still working full time at the gallery. I used to see him walking through town with a Leica rangefinder over his shoulder. Now he just walks through town. We reminisced about the "good old days" when everyone was breathless about a new generation of print-making photographers. And corporations were decorating tall towers with gorgeous prints. Anybody want to buy an NFT? 

Well, that's a day. Here's my take: