Some observations after having walked around for a few weeks with a fixed, 35mm lens camera.

I stopped by the edge of the pedestrian bridge to watch dogs

and their people in this dog park. It's a popular spot for canines and their 

charges at the end of the day. As I was standing with my camera this particular 

dog seemed to notice that I was unsupervised and took it upon herself

to come over and keep me company. She sniffed me and then sat down

on the wall next to me and waiting until I finished looking at the action.

I said "Goodbye" and she nodded and trotted right back to her 

pet human. It was... comforting.

I think I finally figured out why I fought so hard against adapting the Fuji X-100V in one of its prior incarnations. They all seemed a bit tinny and thin when I handled them and the human/camera interface always seemed a kind of clunky and counter-intuitive. But I've decided all of that changed with the current model of the camera. It feels solid and well built. It's nicer to hold and shoot with. And at 26 megapixels, instead of 12 or 16, I actually feel comfortable enough cropping the frame to get a bit closer to a 40 mm angle of view. 

The thing is, my first "real" camera, bought with my hard-earned money, was the Canon Canonet G-III QL (the QL stood for "quick load") and it was a camera that quickly became about as transparent as a camera could be. I bought mine in 1976 and I still have it right here. It's about as solid as I imagine a camera could be, and the 40mm f1.7 lens on the front of it was sharp and at the same time voluptuous. I shot prodigious amounts of black and white film through that little camera and focusing with a bright line rangefinder was as natural as walking. I learned everything I ever needed to know about photography with that camera in my hands, or nearby. 

It's still here in the studio long after a raft of M series Leica cameras and lenses have come and gone. It's my "reference standard" for what a good, all around, affordable street shooting camera should be. I took it to Europe in 1978 for a multi-month backpacking trip and the only bother was replacing the PX 625 battery that powered the meter and made auto exposure (shutter priority) available. But the camera was and is fully functional without its battery; you just have to know how to estimate exposures in your head. And, as to "build quality" it is still fully functional today, forty four years after I bought it brand new from Capitol Camera, here in Austin. Sad though. The camera is still here but one of my favorite cameras stores is long gone.

Subconsciously, I guess I just kept making a comparison between the older Canon rangefinder, film camera and all the previous generations of X100 cameras from Fuji and the Fujis always came out on the losing end of the comparison. I never thought about my affinity for the Canonet until yesterday when I was looking for an old Nikon F camera body in the "film" drawer and stumbled back across it. In an instant I realized why I have always been uninterested in the Fujis. They had a lens that was just a bit too wide for me at the time and a sensor that was just too low res to consider cropping tight portraits at 50mm, 60mm and 70mm. It's different now. The crop is no big deal with the right sensor. I frame tight and a bit of crop adds up to "just right."

I've also found, when looking through the photos I've been taking in the last few weeks that I'm finally learning to come to grips with the 35mm focal length as it is. While I think Fuji "should" have made this line of cameras with a 40mm lens instead I get that I'm a bit of an outlier where focal length choices are concerned. But the camera is wearing my focal length prejudice down; bit by bit. Frame by frame.

One of the things I'm enjoying with the X-100V is that the lens, when used as I like to use it, is wonderfully sharp and holds up well with a bit of cropping. The images that are cropped to a 40 or 50mm frame don't seem degraded or less technically sound to me. 

On another note, I thought after having used EVFs for such a long time now that I would be most comfortable framing and shooting with the EVF engaged but that's not how things have shaken out. I've been using the OVF with the bright frame lines almost exclusively and I love it. There is an emotional connection to the rangefinder aesthetic that I find comfortable and, for me, saturated with a nostalgic and lovely remembering of my first embrace of photography. Can't explain it better than that but every peek through the bright line finder takes me right back to my time first photographing the people who have been most important in my life. 

I haven't begun to dive into the depths of the X-100V's capabilities; I like using the camera in much the same way I used my old Canonet, but I am lowering myself into its clutches the way one sinks slowly and carefully into a really hot bath. I love the Astia profile for color shooting and I've tweaked the Acros profile to get black and white images I like. I have the important controls set up to the buttons that make sense. I can quickly click the ND filter in and out. The aperture ring around the lens is exactly where it should be.

I bought a small, canvas Domke camera bag last week. I was looking for a small bag and I found this one lightly used at Precision Camera (with which I have no affiliate relationship, all cash goes in only one direction...). It's just the right size to hold one black and one chrome X-100V camera, with their metal lens hoods attached, along with a couple of extra batteries and a little box that contains the original lens rings and lens caps. I can hardly wait to do at a trip somewhere to make photographs with just the "twins" and nothing else. Seems like the perfect cameras for exploring the world. 

All of a sudden I'm not concentrating on small details but I'm actually 

enjoying taking in wider landscapes. Even if they are desolate and cluttered.

I'm not sure why but I'm currently fixated with any sort of back light. 

I was just a little disappointed not to get enough lens flare on this one.

I guess that's the trade off. A better lens cheats you out of 

tasty abberations. I guess a couple fingerprints on the front 

element would fix that right up....

 

Choosing how to get back to work. The contemporary dilemma for a generation of freelance artists.

I've walked across this bridge hundreds of times and never 

experienced the reflected light off an apartment building shining directly 

across the lake this way. It was exciting. I'm glad I thought  to bring a camera.

In a little over a month and a half we'll be coming up on the first anniversary of the pandemic in the USA.

When the news first started breaking we were expecting the first few months to be bad but we calculated that if we all wore our masks and stayed home for a couple of months we'd keep the curve of the spread low and give our health care professionals time to work out live saving best practices to keep deaths at a minimum then, we presumed, we start getting back to more normal routines. Few expected things would be much, much worse nearly a year down the road.

I think many businesses have determined that they now must get back to work, aggressively, as soon as possible, if they are going to survive. It's very much an existential dilemma.

The choices seem to be to shut everything down and watch your business collapse and die or risk going full blast and potentially contracting Covid-19 and then collapsing and dying --- personally. 

I'm old enough not to have to make these kinds of life and death choices. I can decide to retire from the field if I feel the personal risk is too great. I assume most readers here are either retired or have put away enough to do so. But what about the younger photographers and videographers who must work to survive financially?

It's interesting to see the host of "over 60" retirees talk with authority about "making the right choice and "hibernating" until everyone is vaccinated but it's rightly compassionate to realize that, statistically, quite few people can actually choose "the extended vacation" option offered by not working and not having income.

What would I do if I was once again 35, had a recently acquired mortgage, and had recently added a new child to the family? 

Many smart photographers had money in the bank for emergencies but who could have predicted that they would still be hampered from working almost a year later? I would presume, by this point in time, that I would have already used up most, if not all, of my non-retirement savings and I'd be digging into my SEP now. 

In our society, with few and tattered safety nets for the self-employed, I would have made the decision that working would be necessary, not just preferable. I would not consider losing the house or giving up my family's standard of living without a fight. But I want to get back to work as safely and sustainably as humanly possible. 

On the other hand, if I had an enormous trust fund I would begin my new career as a "fine art" photographer or novelist. Ah. If only we could all have been born into families that were comfortably ensconced in the one percent zone!

So, for most of us it would boil down to choosing option #1. Back to work as safely as possible. 

But, how to do it?

I'd say that your first and best move would be to create a sound working safety methodology and write down how your will operate, in the future, with clients. How you would operate in a new environment of commercial engagements.

Having written and shared policies is the best way to avoid slipping back into cutting corners, getting complacent, allowing clients to erode your procedures out of a misplace sense of economics, or for expediency's sake. Being able to fall back on your company's policies is something every business client will at least understand and it could help prevent them from pressuring you to take unnecessary chances. 

I would suggest operating with a healthy dollop of paranoia; along the lines of thinking that everyone I might come across on the job is a potential vector for infection!

This all calls for a re-doubling of your efforts to always follow universal best practices in dealing with Covid. No hand shaking. Control the number of people allowed on your set. Make sure everyone who is not actively in front of the camera being recorded is properly masked. Enforce proper mask wearing: the masks must go OVER the nose (not under) and extend down to the chin. No bandanas, just masks. A we'll bring extras in case anyone "forgets" to bring one. These rules must extend all the way up to the CEO and the company's roster of "heavy hitters." 

The higher most people rise on the corporate "food chain" the higher the probability that they are greater than average risk-takers. You don't want them sharing the results of their risk tolerance with you and your family. 

Have a plan to keep people well separated and make it a rule not to set up in small rooms or work in them for any amount of time. The "plan", written down and shared with clients gives you the authority to enforce your rules. After all, if the client signs off on your plan it becomes part of your agreement, part of your contract with them. If they traditionally relied on you to be responsible for the outcome of each shoot you have a right to rely on them to make each shoot safe. 

Part of my plan, should I go back and start working on commercial projects again is to have the right PPE. The single biggest personal protection device we use right now is the face mask. 

I have three different kinds of masks. I use a three ply, cloth mask when I am "off duty" and walking around outside with a camera. These are for times when I'm outside, walking alone on sparsely populated city sidewalks and quite capable of avoiding coming anywhere near six feet of other people. Low population density in downtown is achievable right now in Austin because the vast majority of the people who worked in the big office buildings are still working from home. Most of the people I see in the downtown space are masked. That's certainly true of the tech workers who have much to lose; if I do see unmasked people they are invariably tourists from less progressive towns. Mostly, I assume, Fox News watchers...

I have boxes of the ubiquitous light blue "procedure" masks that are three ply and meant to be single use masks. I use these for trips to the grocery store (our Trader Joe's is still mandating masks, with no exceptions, and also requiring density control in the stores. You might have to wait in a socially distanced line to get in but you will have the assurance that you are a hell of a lot safer than you would be in a grocery store that's regressed to an all comers group scrum. I also keep a box of these blue masks in the car and provide them to anyone I might be meeting with or working with outdoors. 

Then I have a supply of readily available, non-medical, N-95 masks that fit tight and purport to filer out 95% of...everything, all the way down to 2.5 microns. I stocked them in anticipation of projects where I'll be a client's facility, working on a portrait set up or some sort of environmental imaging. Even though they are well made and fit well wearing on of these N-95 rated masks doesn't obviate the need to follow all the other rules.

There are some clients I don't think I'd want to handle right now. These would include clients bent on doing traditional, convention style gatherings (shows, trade events, etc.) Nor would I want to photograph in occupied classrooms or other tighter, static places. 

If a client or one of their employees violates my company mask policy I'll ask nicely, once, for them to fix the problem and comply.  At the next infraction I'll be packing up my gear and heading out the door.

I'll relax a bit after I get both doses of a vaccine (can I please have the Johnson & Johnson version?) but will continue to mask up to help insure I don't become and inadvertent carrier. 

If we set firm rules and are willing to enforce them with no exceptions I believe we can return to doing certain kinds of work. The biggest rules are to limit the number of people in any area, make sure everyone is suitably masked, and to limit the amount of time spent in any interior space. 

If I were asked to make portraits for a law firm I would want them to schedule one or two people on days when everyone else in the office is working from home. If the firm is closed over the weekends and we want to do environmental shots in the offices then a Saturday or Sunday makes much better sense. 

The thing I dread is clients pushing to do too many people in too big a rush. We're going to have to train them to think more about safety and a bit less about efficiency. At least until everyone is safely vaccinated. 

I think many, many older photographers (over 40) are already economic victims of the pandemic and have or will have to leave the field. When the economy recovers it might be an unwelcome burden to try and rebuild a clientele from scratch. With a huge number of knowledgable workers pushed out of their industry a quick recovery in a year or so will find a vacuum for skilled photographers. It's the ebb and flow of a market disrupted by events beyond our control. 

But if you are going to serve the market right now you owe it to yourself, your peers, your competitors and your families to understand the risks and to minimize them in every way you can. Work healthy by design. It beats the crap out of dying. 

Just a few thoughts I had while waiting for my local Subaru dealer to service my car. I actually went long hand today. I brought a notebook and a ballpoint pen. Refreshing to go "old school" for a blog.