And just like that....we're back. And packing for a hybrid shoot in the morning.

Last week, and all weekend up until the end of Monday, sucked. My dad didn't like being in the hospital and I sure didn't like spending nights and days there trapped in a small room, with bad coffee and worse decor. But we've moved past that now. My dad is home from his stint in observation and, according to my sister, is back to his (recent) old self. Happy and adjusting quickly to being back in his senior living center. I'm now on to other parent care initiatives such as selling the "ancestral" home. We are on schedule to close next week. There goes another day.

But for now I'm happy to have work and I'd rather write about packing for tomorrow's shoot. I'm heading to the Driskill Hotel in the middle of downtown to both photograph and make video of a team building exercise for a national engineering firm. We've got a short time in which to work and lots of stuff to capture.

The client spec'd 1080p video and that's something the GH5 excels at; especially when you set it to do 1080p in 10 bit, 4:2:2, All-I. I don't think I'm going to have much time to dick around with lenses and settings so I've got the camera set up with the Olympus 12-100mm f4.0 Pro lens and I'll most likely spend the morning shooting it wide open at f4. Why not? It's monstrously sharp there, has more than enough depth of field and I'll have a fighting chance in lower light situations. I'm taking a couple fast primes in case the client throws me a curve ball and we end up in a room with next to no light.

We're not doing interviews, just capturing the flow of the team building episode but it's still important to grab some ambient sound during the process. I'm using the Aputure Diety shotgun microphone mounted on top of the Panasonic GH5's audio interface and I'm toying this evening with the decision of bucking best practices and setting the module to use Automatic Level Control (Satan's setting) so I don't have to ride levels while I'm shooting.

I have a small cage for the camera, and the image stabilization in the lens is great, but I know I'm not Superman so I'm going to depend on a Benro video monopod. It's one of those that has the little "chicken feet" at the bottom to help with overall stabilization and it has a nice fluid head on the other end. I practiced with it today for half an hour and I think I've got the hang of it. 

I did the firmware update on the GH5 last week and the AF tracking seems much improved. I may trust it this time for a bit of an assist. So that's it for the video portion of our morning but I also have to capture much the same progression of event with still photographs as well. 

To that end I'm bringing a Nikon D800e and the 24-120mm lens. One lens, one body. I'm also hedging my bets by bringing along a small, shoe mount, electronic flash unit to bounce off the ceiling for the times when I feel like I've just got to have a little more illumination....

Everything packs down into a small backpack (except for the monopod) and I like that because I'm working without an assistant and I want to get in and out fast. I'll shoot raw for the stills and deliver corrected Jpegs but I'm sending along the video as OOC (out of camera) files and letting the client's team in another state incorporate it into whatever project they have in mind. 

I'll head to swim practice first thing in the morning and then see if I can't catch the bus downtown. It's so much easier (and cheaper) than trying to find weekday parking in downtown Austin. For a couple of bucks I have convenience and a nice break from having to pay attention to anything. Should be a nice change....

One reason I am looking forward to working at the historic Driskill Hotel = they have really good coffee...

Young Ben at Asti Trattoria. 

It will be nice to get back to something I am reasonably good at, for a change. And I love having engineers as subjects. Then it's back home to put on my "real estate" hat and get a house sold. We've got some contract stuff to get through but should be closing on the property next week. It's actually fun to keep checking stuff off my list. 

Dad is in good hands back at his memory care facility. The staff is great. The nurses are great, and my little sister flew into town to spend the rest of the week visiting him and catching up. No panicky sub-routine running in the back of my brain while I'm trying to navigate two different system menus. 

I also wanted to write a quick bit about owning one's own copyright. I know a lot of people will tell you that owning the rights to your images and charging additional fees for licensing is extinct or somehow last century, but we still do it. Case in point: we photographed for an architectural firm a few weeks back and we billed them for my time and usage fees for public relations and marketing use of the images. Late last week the multinational construction company which built the project I shot for the architects got in touch with me having been referred by the architect. 

They needed images from the project as well and it dawned on them that our images were real, not future tense or virtual, that they reviewable and that they could have the option of licensing (not buying---just renting) the images individually for their PR and Marketing as well. I checked with the first client and we have no conflict. My offer to the construction company for the use of the images was $125 per image or $1250 for the use of the catalog of images from the half day project. They looked at the galleries and quickly chose the second option. Getting paid twice for the same job is the best way to make this profession profitable. It's not cheating anymore than selling multiple tickets to the same movie is cheating. 

If you aren't currently estimating and bidding based on usage fees and secondary or shared usage you might want to give it a try. Five minutes of phone time for a good fee seems worth learning how to explain this business method to potential and existing clients.

The Summer shooting season is picking up. We've got three theater productions to photograph as well as some fun stuff for several of my medical practice clients. Now, if we can just all stay healthy I think this might work out...

 The rest of the images are just here (below) because I like looking at them. You could stop reading here if you like. ..

back lighting mania.

Crusty old photographer. 

Evening report.

Dad is back at his Memory Care/Assisted Living Facility. My sister is in town handling stuff for the rest of the week. I made it back to Austin late this afternoon in a little over an hour. Can't wait for dinner with Ben and Belinda, with Studio Dog in attendance under the table, leaning on my feet and waiting to see if anything is left over for her. I was only gone since Thurs. but I think that dog used up all her saliva licking my face in welcome when I walked in the door....

Photo of Ben from 20 years ago.

Job on Weds. Stock sale today. Lunch with a best friend tomorrow. Momentary recovery.

Where the heck is Kirk?

Hey. I drove to San Antonio on Weds. for a meeting, got a call from my dad’s cardiologist, rushed dad from assisted living to the hospital. He has a pacemaker/ICD with cellular telemetry that indicated ten cardiac arrests in the middle of the night. The ICD revived him each time. I’ve been  sleeping on a chair in his room since then. Being there makes it easier on him and the nurses because his dementia is exacerbated by the absence of familiar faces and routines. It is taking a toll on me and reduces blogging as a priority. Dad is getting discharged today (finger crossed) and things will return to normal soon. I sure miss swim practice. And I hate writing this on a cellphone. 

I’d very much appreciate any supporting and well intentioned comments.

With a bit of luck you’ll hear more from me soon! Kirk

There are some shots I take that seem meaningless but which I like looking at. I might be the only one but that's okay.

I think I enjoy this one because there is so much blue in this shot that the red construction elevators just seem to come alive by contrast. I see the buildings as large waves and the elevators as small fish. It's kinda crazy but endless building is a topic of art exploration that will become more and more interesting as population growth heads toward geometric and there is an ever mounting pressure to build enough living and working spaces to accommodate everyone. It will be ever more relentless.

Documenting the growth of a city is like taking a long term pulse....

On a different note, I was comparing images taken with the same wide angle zoom on the D700 and D800 cameras. I like the files from the D700 better --- at least if no one is going to blow them up really large. They just seem sharper and more topographically juicy.

After a morning swim what's on tap for a slow day? Well, marketing, of course!

At the Breakers in West Palm Beach.

If I was smart enough to be retired I'd like to think I'd end up somewhere like the locale in the photo above. Next to a beautiful, clean pool which is itself next to a beautifully manicured beach, sitting in a comfortable chair daydreaming as the sun sets and the sky glows impressionistically, and the waiter approaches with my light snack of foie gras on whimsical crackers and my evening bottle of Louis Roerderer Brut Champagne; chilled but not too cold...

Instead I am sitting in my small office watching the heat waves waft over the asphalt on the road outside and wondering why work always slows down in the early part of Summer and how I can compensate for the trickle of engagements with an increase in the frequency and scope of my marketing.

I've found a nice, thick printing paper that works well in my crusty Canon ink jet printer. It's Moab Lasal and it's a matte surface stock in a heavy, 235 GSM weight. I've been getting it in boxes of 13 x19 inches to make large prints for my portfolio and also in boxes of 5 x 7 inches which I use to make small, custom prints for specific clients and potential clients.

It's getting rare to show an actual printed portfolio anymore. It's just not a very efficient path. If you have a great "book" and you can get an appointment with an art director, you'll have a really good chance of nailing down some work but it's a labor intensive proposition and cold calling reminds me lately of Willy Loman in Arthur Miller's play, Death of a Salesman. I maintain the printed portfolio for all those times when agencies or clients call in multiple portfolios from two or three other photographers in order to drill down and decide with whom they'd like to work. Or when someone calls and asks to see work in a different way than via a website.

The marketing that seems most productive to me is to make small prints of beautiful subjects, be they portraits, products, architecture or industrial scenes, writing notes on the reverse side and sending them in hand addressed envelopes to carefully selected people. I've sent along a few downtown shots today to various principals at an architecture firm and I've sent along a few shots of people working on an assembly line to an art director at an agency that just won a similar account.

I try to maintain a list (ever evolving) of 100 people (not companies) that I'd like to work with and, once I put someone on the list I like to mail to them at least four times a year. I intersperse physical mailings with e-mails that show off recent jobs that I think will resonate with the recipients. I also send out letters on stationery to announce things like recent awards, and the addition of new services (different types of imaging or different levels of video production).

Invariably the personal letters work best. Each one is unique because they are written directly to one person. No boilerplate. No over-arching template. When you engage a person directly, and they know it, they appreciate the time and energy you've taken to reach out. You might not nail down a job immediately but the good will accrues over time.

Once, in an unusual moment of despair, I asked my all knowing spouse why no one was calling to book me (this was about ten years ago). Was I over the hill? Had photography vanished as a form of profitably business? Would I ever work again?

She sat me down and was very patient. She reminded me that she had worked for large ad agencies as an art director for nearly 20 years at that point. She pointed out that a lot of "creative" agency work is repetitive, not very creative and, and sometimes built around stock photography or illustration. She remarked that she had the opportunity to generate about 4 or 5 jobs per year that required high end photography services. If I got the five jobs from her in a given year that was about all I could count on. It wouldn't matter if I sent along an extra hundred mailers or blasted her e-mail way too often. The number of jobs just wouldn't change.

Her message was clear: You can't depend on a small handful of loyal clients. There might not be enough work from them to make your bank account happy for the year. You have to remind former clients you still exist and are working well. You need to find new opportunities and start the long process of reeling in new clients (sticking with our literary theme) like Hemmingway's, The Old Man in the Sea, reeling in the big fish and hoping to hold onto it long enough to land it.

It's a matter of providing both a personalized engagement with your current clients and a constant outreach to new clients that makes any business work. Different prints for different purposes.

So, I'll set a goal to knock out ten individualized marketing pieces in a given day. Once I've done that I allow myself to escape the office and work on something that makes me happy. It usually works...

And...yes. I've learned by know that the first few weeks of June are when many people take vacations. I should put this knowledge into next year's calendar and do the same myself.

A growing appreciation for wide angle zoom lenses. The Tokina is proving to be a fun and different lens for me. Especially when paired with the right camera...

Okay. I'm having a blast shooting this big, bulky lens. It's the Tokina 16-28mm f2.8 ATX Pro lens. It's the cheapest of the big, fast wide angle zooms and while nobody is going to insist that the corner sharpness, wide open, is anything to write home about I am starting to understand why so many people like shooting this wide; you can get a lot in the frame and that makes you work harder at trying to pull good compositions from chaos. 

When I stop this lens down to f8 I become fearless about

OT: Securely cleaning up 38 years of haphazard record keeping and filing.

Ellsworth Kelly Installation on the UT Austin Campus.

One of my earliest memories of my maternal grandmother was a visit to her house in the Ben Avon neighborhood of Pittsburg, PA. I was probably five or six years old and I was fascinated that a house could have three floors and an attic and basement. Even more fascinated that every room was filled with newspapers, furniture, housewares, books, lamps, etc. And when I say, "filled" I mean that each room had small walking pathways through the stacks and clutter that occupied the majority of the square footage in each room.  I remember walking into one room on the third floor that had been my grandfather's home office for nearly 50 years. It was filled with IBM typewriters of nearly every vintage. When a typewriter broke my grandfather would put it on a shelf and pull a new one out of a box and continue typing. He never trusted a machine once it failed him. I'm sure he always meant to have the dozens and dozens of typewriters repaired, or at least donated, but he never got around to it.

Once my grandparents filled one house they eventually bought a bigger one nearby. I remember visiting years later to find that the new house was now so full of stuff that the family was storing a mahogany table that would seat 16 under a tarp on the front porch. I don't know where all the stuff came from but it seems that once it entered the house it was trapped their forever...

But this is not a story about my grandparents, it's about my own parents. They bought a modest house in San Antonio about 38 years ago. I never lived in that house as I was already in college and firmly ensconced in Austin, Texas. I would come down for holidays or dinners and I never really paid attention to my mother's tendency to save everything in the event that a greeting card or jelly jar could be repurposed or in case the IRS wanted to see some detail of a return filed 37 years before. 

Most stuff ended up layered in boxes which were layered in closest and in the garage. When I say, "layered" I mean that a box might have old Christmas cards from friends and family, circa 1982 on one layer and under that might be some series EE savings bonds and under those might be a cache of credit card receipts from 1993 and under those might be some photographs from the end of the 19th century. These seemingly endless boxes of stuff were everywhere but since my parents seemed to be competent to handle their own lives the "archives" never hit my radar. 

That all changed at the end of 2017. My mom, the curator and essential content creator for most of the saved material passed away rather suddenly. Then it became glaringly obvious that my mother and her housekeeper had been keeping my dad's progressive dementia and memory loss from the three of us kids. My dad hadn't signed a check, balanced a checkbook or participated in financial record keeping in the better part of a decade. He had no idea what was in the boxes, or, more importantly, where to find important documents and things like checkbooks or bank statements. 

At the time it seemed a herculean task but we were able to find a very good memory care facility for dad. I thought that would be the toughest task to get done in this tumultuous and emotion laden transition... But it paled in comparison to the enormous process of cleaning out my parents house and finding, and securing all their legal documents and financial instruments. 

Belinda and I took on the task of sorting through everything to find all paper with account numbers and social security numbers on it. Anything that could be used for identity theft or information theft. We would head down to San Antonio once or twice a week, from January through May, to both visit my dad and to also sit for hours opening and sorting through boxes, filing cabinets, desks and cupboards. We looked through every nook and cranny. We had a three bin system. One bin was for all things with identifiers on them but which did not need to be saved for legal or financial purposes. This box was called, "Shred." A second bin was for memorabilia. Anything from family snapshots to class rings, old watches, cards from various grandchildren (my brother seemed incapable of tossing anything his kids had made as presents for our parents....) notes, letters, etc. This bin was called, "Memorabilia" and had a note: "to be sorted by Alison and Ned" my siblings being more attached to the nostalgic residue than I.  The final box that Belinda and I worked to fill was for recent tax returns, property deeds, stock certificates, life insurance policies, financial accounts and medical records. All of this material went into a bin called, "Save and File." 

We have, just this week, finished our primary filtering of all the boxes, desks and hiding places. Belinda and I brought the ten moving boxes of shredding up to Austin and called a service that will come to your business or home and shred documents in a big truck fitted with a powerful, industrial shredder. They charge by the pound. We handed over to them 420 pounds of material to shred. It was sweaty work for the technician to pull the boxes out and into the hot interior of the truck but we were overjoyed to get our space back in the studio and in Belinda's office. 

My brother and his wife have taken care to mine all of the memorabilia and to sort it for "keep" and "throw." 

All that's left in the house now is the bulk of the furniture (some rescued by my two siblings and their kids) bedding, kitchen ware and old clothes. We thought of having an estate sale but no one was up for spearheading that so we're working with a charity to have then come and take anything of value.  After that we've found a service that will excavate the house of all trash, unwanted items, unclaimed stuff, pile it all into a dumpster and haul it away. 

So, what is the tangential lesson I've received from the universe by doing this process? First, that most of the stuff we're probably hanging on to is worthless to nearly everyone else in the universe. Second, that over time we spend enormous amounts of money accruing crap we don't use up and don't store well. And, finally, that after we die someone else has to take responsibility to put aside sentiment and radically downsize the ever growing piles of things we thought we'd take out and look at sometime in the future which have laid, untouched, in boxes for decades. In fact, I'm pretty sure my parents had no idea what was finally in most boxes and could not have found anything particular thing which they had not used or seen past two years. 

Two things struck me as odd. One was that my mother and father were fond of Bonne Maman jams, jellies and preserves. I like the look of the jars just as much as the next person but when I opened a cabinet in their kitchen I came across several hundred empty jars which had been used, cleaned out, had the labels removed and were stored with their lids on. There was no sign that my mother had ever reused even one but the collection grew right up until near the end of 2017. 

The second odd thing concerned a chunky collection of U.S. Savings Bonds. Series EE. My mother seemed to collect these as well. She worked for a large insurance company for many years and, in addition to the generous pension that was part of her compensation she also seemed to love the month ly purchase of these government bonds. Since I had been designated as the administrator and executor for both of my parents my mother brought out a thick 9x12 inch envelope on day in 2016 and asked me what she should do with these bonds. It was the first time I knew of them. I told her she should take them to her bank, cash them and put the proceeds into one of her accounts. We never spoke of them again but I called the bank after her passing to see if she'd ever completed the transaction. No. Now the search was on for the envelope. 

We looked in every nook and cranny. Every strong box. Every moving box. Nothing. Finally, I was gathering up clothing and accessories to take to Goodwill or their church's thrift shop as donations. One old canvas bag that hung with some of mom's well used leather purses seemed a bit heavy and bulky so, of course, I looked inside and there was the envelope we'd spent months looking for. 

I can't wait to sell the house. I never liked it. And I'm tired of writing checks for taxes, utilities and maintenance for a house that no one lives in. I'm meeting with a realtor who my elder law attorney has recommended. I hope the sale can be handled with as little intervention on my part as possible. 

I hate projects that go on forever.  I'm stacking up my banker's boxes with old tax returns in a corner of the studio. When I pull out all the old paper from the filing cabinets I'll call the shredding service again. It's cathartic. And it's something you should try not to pass on to your children. Not when they'd rather be walking around testing a new lens....