A Progress Report from San Antonio.

There is an idea that your children are like little Buddhas that teach you so many things. I maintain that your parents are like bigger Buddhas who, in their decline, teach you to embrace patience and kindness; two things I have always seemed to  have been short of supply...

I've spent the last week as the primary caregiver for my father and his dementia can be frustrating, tough, emotional and daunting. I've been battling with the healthcare industries inefficiencies and leaning on the sage advice of older friends (including some here at VSL) and my attorney.

I'm finally seeing light at the end of the tunnel.  We've located and contracted with the most highly regarded memory care facility in San Antonio for you father. He'll be admitted on Monday. I've finished funeral arrangements for my mom. Memorial to come a bit later. I've activated my power of attorney and all the other legal devices necessary to smooth the transition and work as an ongoing advocate for my father.

There are blessings. A wonderful housekeeper who has spelled me for three or four hours a day. Friends (even ones I've never met in person) who call from across the country and across the world to make offers to fly in and help. To fly in and substitute for me in the business until I can retake the reins. Even my good Austin doctor who was quick to call and counsel me through some tough steps.

Another blessing is that my parents worked and saved and we can afford to provide any level of care that my dad might need for the rest of his life. I'm blessed with a brother and sister who are hardworking, honest, kind and pitching in to do their parts without hesitation. We each have our duties and they haven't stepped on my toes nor have I stepped on theirs.

And then there is my own family. Ben and Belinda must come from some other planet where everyone is the personification of compassion, love and dedication. They are relentlessly supportive an comforting. Far in excess to what I deserve.

I'll be back to work next week but my Sundays will be spent with my father; hopefully for years to come.

Now, on to some photography chatter. I was alone in the living room at the end of a tough day and decided that I deserved a little photo treat. I remembered how much I like the Sigma 30mm f1.4 lens when I was shooting the Sony a6300. I looked on Amazon.com and, low and behold, they make it in the m4:3 mount!!! I couldn't get that credit card out quick enough. It's winging its way to my studio as I write. Good thing too. I have a job in January which will really leverage a fast, sharp and agile lens which is slightly longer than "normal."

I was actually a little bit thrilled that I haven't lost my passion for the art we all practice with such joy.

Go and hug someone in your family today. Then go buy a fun lens. Life is short....

Family Life Takes Precedence.

A Momentary Hiatus While I Take Care of Family.

Dad. Eight Years Ago.

We’ve discussed many things here on the Visual Science Lab blog but dealing with family and loss hves never been among them. I consider myself lucky; I’ve made it to sixty-two and have only lost two close friends, and until now, no one in my close family. There have been brushes with mortality but always followed by successful recoveries. I haven’t given enough thought to just how much a death in the family can affect the day to day routines and expectations of a self-employed person’s life —- until now. 

It was the morning of Christmas Eve and family was getting ready to converge on my parent’s house to celebrate. My father has been dealing with dementia for years and, for the most part, my mother was his primary caregiver; keeper of the finances, scheduler of the doctors appointments for both of them, as well as the social director for them both. My sister and brother-in-law were in town and staying at my parent’s house.

Just after breakfast my mother, who has been dealing with C.O.P.D. for many years collapsed, unable to catch her breath. My sister called 911 and off to the hospital she and my mother went in an ambulance with lights flashing. Mother suffered cardiac arrest in the hospital but was revived after six minutes of CPR and other procedures. Once stabilized she was intubated and sent to the intensive care ward under sedation. My brother-in-law (the man is a blessing!) stayed at home with my father.

My little family was still in Austin. Our usual Christmas ritual was to have Christmas Eve dinner with a family we have known and loved for decades. We planned to ring in Christmas with nice wines and better company. One phone call from my sister and I had a bag packed and was heading south on highway I-35 as quickly as I safely could. 

Ben and Belinda could handle anything that needed to be done in Austin. 

When I got to the hospital my mother was sedated and unconscious and there was nothing for me to do there. My sister insisted on staying by her side so I headed to the family home to check on my father. He was agitated and having trouble understanding or processing what was happening. My older brother lives in San Antonio and he was at my parent’s house adding his help in caring for my father and sorting out our next steps. All the grandchildren were arriving in town, there were hams and tamales and holiday food in the refrigerators. None of that mattered anymore. 

My mother got progressively worse. When she was taken off sedation all she wanted was to come home. She was inconsolable. We talked to the doctors who were pessimistic about her chances and they agreed to send her home with hospice care. She died quietly and without pain in her own bed yesterday at 12:52 pm. 

Earlier in the day yesterday, Belinda, Ben and I had taken my father to a well regarded “Memory Care” facility for evaluation. If you are familiar with the term “memory care” in this context it’s basically an assisted care facility with emphasis on patients with memory loss, Alzheimer’s and dementia. We have a small apartment reserved but it won’t be ready until the end of this week —- and making the reservation will be the easiest part of the battle; dementia patients can have big mood swings and may go from liking a place to having paranoid delusions, anger and panic later in the same day. 

My sister and her family have gone home to the east coast. She needs to take care of herself as she has a serious cancer battle to fight and is overdue for her chemotherapy. My brother and his wife are school teachers handling some student debt for their three children’s recent college work and they need to get back to work as well. 

Many years ago my parents, in their wills, divided up the duties of their children as regards medical directives and estate management. The burden of medical decisions falls to my older brother (he lives in the same city as my parents) and he’s been wonderful in jumping into all kinds of situations with my parents and helping. He’s the one they call at 3 in the morning when my father has ended up on the floor and is unable to get back up. He’s the one they’ve called when the pipes froze or the electricity went out. Proximity ends up meaning “more responsibilities.”

My duty is to take over the financial end. To sort out to whom my parents owe money, from whom they receive money, which insurances need to be changed or renewed, to pay their bills and to be a good enough steward to make sure they don’t run out of money before they run out of life.

My mother kept things running, financially, and never shared information willingly, but in the last few years she allowed me to set up things like a durable power of attorney. Her filing methodology consisted of paying the bills as they came in and then putting the paperwork into shopping bags, trash bags, random desk drawers, under the sink, etc. 

With my sister out of the picture and my brother heading back to work I am currently shouldering the 24-7 task of both caring for my father ( from first coffee and oatmeal to changing adult diapers and repeating (with a smile on my face) the same answer to the same question that he may have asked twenty or thirty times in the last hour. He is sometimes quite lucid and pleasant and as he wears down over the course of the day will sometimes become agitated and disoriented, insisting that “this is not my house! Take me to my real house!” and then deciding that I am a stranger coming to rob him. It’s a tough change from my (last week) previous life which mostly consisted of swimming on my own schedule, having coffee with friends and colleagues along with bouts of judicious napping. 

Last night was a rough one. As his agitation grew it dawned on me that while I might be able to get him checked into the right facility but it might become a big battle or even require me to get legal help to keep him there. I woke up already tired this morning and started doing laundry and making an inventory of the food on hand and planning what I’d make for him to eat through the day. I need to get on the phone to make funeral arrangements for my mom and then I need to find and collect bills and get them paid. 

I get that these are events and situations that nearly every child will face one day. Maybe it’s a warm-up, or training, for our own inevitable demise…

How does this relate to photography? Well, the stunning thing I am beginning to understand, now that my time is being swept away by a resilient and relentless tide, is that I must continue to work and be financially productive in order to get my own child through his last year of college, to keep putting money into my retirement accounts and to pay for the lifestyle my wife and I have created. I never realized that what I saw as “tons of unspecified free time” was really tons of flexible time during which I billed, wrote blogs, wrote books, stayed in touch with clients, maintained batteries and gear, practiced the new or hard parts of my craft, and so much more.

I have my first job of the new year booked for Friday the 5th. Pre-catastrophe I’d be planning out how I wanted to actually produce the video shoot and start gathering and testing the equipment. I’d have a plan. I’d have gotten a great night’s sleep and had a healthy breakfast. Now I’m frantic to line up paid caregivers and some of my parent’s younger friends to cover that day for me and then to have my brother come from his job as a school teacher to handle the “night shift.” I’ll be back in the car (instead of in the pool — newly reopened) heading back down to San Antonio to take the reins from my sibling to give him some respite.

I’m hoping this brutal schedule is as temporary as I imagine it might be but I know there will be the frantic phone calls from the senior living facility, the long weekends of digging through a chaotic melange of paper without a roadmap or logical guidance, and then the sheer drudgery of taking over their accounts with my paperwork in hand and being responsible for getting their taxes done, their bills paid, getting my dad to future doctor’s appointments, and so much more. I can’t shake the feeling that my life will never be the same. 

The next job starts on the 10th. And then more jobs follow. The extra stress of not knowing what roadblocks or emergencies will arise and hamper my ability to commit to work schedules drives my anxiety. The “not knowing” if my dad will go willingly into memory care is a fear the size of a grizzly bear hugging my back.

Thankfully, my brother and sister are logical, kind and caring. We are all a united front. We all like each other and we don’t squabble. Thankfully, my wife is amazing and patient and logical and so very supportive. Thankfully, my son is incredibly responsible, helpful and compassionate (especially toward his father—-me). Another area of gratitude is that my parents leveraged their depression era fears of poverty into enough resources to last for any foreseeable needs my father may have. 

My career as a photographer/film maker/blogger/writer? I have to believe that I’ll be back in the saddle by the end of the month. Shouldering some additional obligation but at least able to get back to the work. 

Thanks for your patience and advice. It’s all welcome. Keep it coming; it makes me feel connected...

I have this sinister little lens in the top drawer of the equipment case that's never been satisfying. I think it's because it's hard to get focused right.

I've discussed many of the Olympus Pen FT half frame lenses that I enjoy using but I've mostly glossed over one. It's the 20mm f3.5. When I used it on its intended half frame Olympus film camera my results were always hit and miss. Mostly it looked soft and mushy. I had better options among the autofocus lenses that came along with each generation of m4:3 lenses. The poor 20mm just basically got side-lined. 

But I am nothing if not persistent. I decided to give it one more try on the front of my favorite photo camera, the G85. The Olympus Pen FT 20mm lens is from about 1968 and was the widest focal length lens made for the half-frame cameras (which have a crop factor of 1.4 with ff 35mm and 2.0 with m4:3). 

Each newer generation of Panasonic G cameras seems to be getting better and better at implementing focus peaking. And it's getting easier and easier to enable focus magnification while manual focusing. 

This is all good for older, manual focusing lenses.

As I walked around and shot frame after frame with the G85+20mm f3.5 combo I came to realize just how tricky it was in the pre-EVF days to really focus a slow, wide lens accurately. The visual depth of field on a focusing screen seems to obscure the real limits of the "in focus boundaries." 

No matter how much I love to romanticize older lenses there is a basic fact that their maximum aperture performance falls behind that of more modern lens options. With that in mind I mostly shot the lens at f5.6 since stopping down nearly always improves the performance of any older lens; up to a point. 

When I returned to the studio to evaluate the lens' performance I noticed several things. First, the lens is not particularly sharp wide open and also shows some green and magenta fringing at tonal junction points. Stopping the lens down gains sharpness but it's the old fashion sort of sharpness formula that combines lots and lots of resolution but at a lower contrast and acutance than any modern lens. It's a good candidate for post production, with an emphasis on a good sharpening routine coupled with a liberal use of the clarity slider to add back contrast and edge snap.

Unlike software corrected wide angles of the present the lens is much better corrected for geometric corrections right out of the box. It had to be; there was no firmware correction available when it was designed and sold. 

If you go into this lens with the idea of using it for substantive work you'll need to be comfortable shooting either at f5.6 or f8.0 with m4:3 cameras. Those are the sweet spot apertures for this lens. I should also note that it amply covers the APS-C format as it was originally designed to cover the wider (1.4x crop) area of the half frame film cameras. With a decent adapter and with the caveats I mentioned above it should work well on any of the Sony APS-C mirrorless cameras. It may even cover the full frame, but only at the closer focusing distances.

In all, I like the lens for photographs of people and may use it for something but I'm being progressively spoiled by the wide open clarity of lenses like the Olympus 12-100mm f4.0. It's harder now to rationalize using some of these older wide angles on the smaller format cameras when there are so many better modern alternatives. But it's fun to see that it's still highly usable on the latest cameras. Nice delayed obsolescence. 

Taking a break from a tough week to go to the museum with Ben and Belinda.

My wife and my son decided I needed a break from parent and sibling drama and could use a ration of calmness so my little nuclear family decided they would take me to the Blanton Museum to get a second look at 

The Open Road: Photography and the American Road Trip

Once again the prints were exciting to look at. I have a new appreciation for Joel Sternfeld. His work is beyond great; especially when seen in its 40 by 50 inch, printed glory. 

We each set our own pace through the gallery and then walked together through the contemporary galleries on the second floor. 

After a bout of art we headed over to our favorite Chinese food restaurant and had lunch. We've been taking Ben there since he was three years old and everyone called him by name when we walked in. I've worked on a project for one of my favorite law firms this afternoon.

On a photographic note: the Sigma 60mm f2.8 DN showed up three days after the first promised delivery date and it's as good as I remember. The files are bright and sassy and the focal length is great for my point of view. A nice bargain for $240.

On an off topic note: Does anyone have a successful strategy for getting elder parents to give up the single family dwelling and move (willingly) into assisted living? If so, the suggestion might be worth its weight in gold... I could shoot more if I worried less...

The last of the old Christmas Nostalgia Prints. "Young Woman with Camera."

Shot with a Canon TX camera and an 85mm f1.8 FD lens. Copied from an existing print. My ride on the time machine is over for now.

Back in a few days with something different.

A Photo From the Distant Past. Copied From a Print.

I've been spending some time lately looking through boxes of prints. I have several thousand black and white, 11x14 inch, double weight fiber photographic prints that I rarely look through because everything became digital. Everything is accessed on the web. The prints seem to me to belong to a different age; a different aesthetic.

There was something about being a photographer in my 30's that felt as though we had all the time in the world as well as the ability to block out all the distractions and just do our work. We weren't frantic to churn it out in order to get it up on the web as soon as possible so we could start garnering "likes" and variously disguised "attaboys." I would shoot for the pleasure of shooting and the equal measures of deriving pleasure talking to the interesting people in front of my camera.

Nothing was ever finished or "showable" until it was printed, toned, washed and dried. Once I made an 11x14 print I could go out into the world and show it. The audience was limited but, for the most part, appreciative.

Opening these boxings and carefully shuffling through the prints is, for me, like looking back in a time travel device that doesn't allow you to go back in time but rather to look back in time. 

All those beautiful people in all those prints are now twenty or more years older. Most of the people I still know and see around town. Most of them have aged very, very well. All are still interesting to me.

The more that life changes the more I struggle to figure out how to translate and integrate what we did for our craft, and in service of our vision, into a modern idiom. To translate from a unique and physical treasure into a fleeting mosaic of tiny squares of light and color on a fixed screen. Mostly immovable and in its own way unshareable.

Sure, you can walk around with your phone and annoy people by showing them tiny and compressed images but I rarely see artists walking down the street dragging a cart with computer and a thirty inch monitor behind them, ready to show off their work on the sidewalks. Ready to put a black hood over the monitor to chase off the reflections and glare so the people who assent to view the work can see it in all of its modern glory.

The image above is of my friend of 30 years, Michelle. She has always been wonderfully beautiful.
I photographed her with a medium format camera and a medium telephoto lens. This image started as a color negative and is progressively being re-seen in more and more monotone variations.

As was my custom then the lighting was done with only two lights. One in a small softbox directed at the background and the second in a huge softbox (4x6 feet) and used over to one side. There was no fill and I'm happy with that.

The opening of the boxes and the re-examination of my own past is proceeding, driven by the loss of both family and friends which seems to be the human lot in life after 50. It's also motivating me to start printing again.

Not because I think anyone will notice or care in any productive way but because it seems so much more "real" to me than stacking up images on a magnetic disk. Locked away as potential, but not actual, pieces of art and craft.

Anybody getting something outrageously fun and photographic for Christmas?

Ben Puts the Star up on the Tree. 

For about five minutes on Weds. I was enthralled by the idea of buying a Fuji GFX-50S camera and the 110mm f2.0 lens to go with it. As I have a world class capability to rationalize camera purchases my brain started in earnest to construct the argument I might use with my partner about what a great investment it would be to drop $8200 on a first generation camera along with a largely unproven lens. 

I had a daydream about walking into a client's conference room, setting up my lighting and then pulling the GFX-50s and the miraculous 110mm lens out of some sort of pretentious Billingham bag and listening to my client suck in their breath and marvel at the obviously impressive camera I would have in my hands. Surely they would intuit just how wondrous each photograph would be when taken by such a remarkable camera, backed by such superior technology. 

They would call in their associates from accounting and marketing to see the light sparkle off the enormous front element of the lens. Doris, in client services would swoon when I casually mentioned that the sensor was 50+ megapixels. Chet in I.T. would walk in to see what all the excitement was with his new Nikon D850 hanging down by his pants pocket on a Black Rapid strap. He'd be ready to make the argument that the D850 was so close in performance AND only half the price. But then we'd shoot a test frame and he'd look at it on the rear screen of the Fuji, recognize its awesome superiority, and then cast a crestfallen look at his Nikon and slink out of the room. 

Then I got an e-mail and the cloying beep from the computer brought me back to the present. It was one of my clients and they had a complaint. The files I'd delivered to them "were way too big." They were having trouble making them fit into their website. "Could I re-work them and send the files back over with the longest side being 1200 pixels?" They also wanted to know if they needed to do anything special to the files to use them in a PowerPoint presentation...

It all reminded me that most of our clients don't care about which camera we use to take our photographs with. We could do the job with a Nikon D3300 or a Rebel 7ti. We could use the kit lens. As long as the photo is well lit and the CEO has a pleasant look on his face the marketing guys would be happy as clams. 

I usually buy myself a cool camera for the holidays but this year the "new" has yet to wear off of my GH5 cameras. Maybe our relationship will have cooled by Valentine's Day. A box of candy and a bottle of Champagne for the spouse, perhaps a pleasant little Phase One camera for me....?

I am curious to hear if someone is actually going to go for it over this holiday season and buy something that will make me and the rest of the readers on VSL jealous. If you are I'm pretty sure we'd all like to hear about it, tell you why you screwed up and tell you want we would have done instead. But if you have a thick skin and a good rationale then share away in the comments.

We'd love to know what's trending under your tree...