A few more bizarre shots from the Pentax K-1.

Outside a shop on a street in the Old Town area of Montreal.

Early morning in our suite at the L Hotel in Old Town Montreal.

Highly recommend this property for anyone visiting. 

Get a suite. Roomy, quiet and comfortable.

2019 was the year that I had a lot of fun photographing at a food market in Montreal. I'm not a stranger to food photography and as long as the light is good and the food is high quality it's hard to make a bad image.

When Belinda and I were on vacation in Montreal in October we visited a famous outdoor food market. We don't have anything like it in Austin so we stayed for a long time and looked at pretty much everything. 

I've done a number of food photography assignments for magazines, did my first cookbook (Creative Mexican Cooking, by Anne Lindsey Greer) for Texas Monthly Press in the early 1980s, contributed many, many photographs for the internationally awarded, Fonda San Miguel: Thirty Years of Food and Art, cookbook and art Latin art collection book in 2007. Recently I've done several videos for restaurants that are centered around beauty shots of the food and food preparation. In addition to those experiences I also love to eat food. 

Our photography in Montreal was mostly done with my Pentax K-1 camera and the 50mm f1.4 lens or the 28-105mm f3.5-4.5 Pentax lens. It worked well. The color and the detail in the files are the equal of any 35mm format camera currently in the market. We can argue about usability and lens availability but the ability of the camera to make absolutely beautiful files is argument-proof. The full frame sensor helps with limiting depth of field in order to focus attention on main subjects while the camera's in-body image stabilization is great and provides a good platform for longer than normal exposures --- which help keep the ISO down.

While the Lumix S1 and S1R are at least equal in their sensors' abilities to make beautiful files where the new cameras really shine for me is the selection of lenses I've been able to put together. They transcend most of the available Pentax lenses and let me work right out to the edge. 

That being said, I have a warm spot in my heart for the Pentax K-1. It's definitely designed and built to be one of the most useable and comfortable cameras I ever had the pleasure to shoot with --- even when it didn't quite hit focus....

Two totally different self-portraits. Two different cameras.

Montreal, Quebec, Canada. 

L Hotel mirror. 

Third Street, Austin, Texas, USA.

Downtown building reflection.

My Two Favorite Architectural "Studies" of the Past Few Years....

Both shot with a Sony A7R2 and the 24-105 f4.0 Zeiss zoom.

Corrected in Lightroom. 

Zilker Park. In the Summer. Haze included.

On the way to Barton Springs Pool.

The end of every year is a great time to look through all the folders of images you've curated in the past 12 months to re-see and maybe better appreciate images that got lost in the hustle and bustle of life and work.

I photographed a bunch of material for a play called, "Immortal Longings." I didn't care for the play itself but I did have a great time photographing the ballet dancers who performed in little bursts in the production. These images are from a shoot at the very beginning of the rehearsals; done in conjunction with a TV commercial shoot. 

I grabbed "the greatest hits" at the time and sent them along to marketing but I always meant to circle back and look at the dance images more closely. Yesterday I was cleaning up my physical desktop, which is a boring and mundane task, and to break the boredom I had a Lightroom window open on my computer and I was intermittently browsing through images from 2019. I liked them many of them better than I remembered. 

Mostly photographed in dreadful light (I wasn't able to light the scenes...), and at high ISOs, with a Fuji XH-1 and the very, very, very good 90mm f2.0 lens. 

Photographs always look different after appreciable time has passed since their creation. Sometimes better than we remember and sometimes worse. 

And sometimes they match what I remember. 

This last shot, of the ballet slipper, is my favorite. The texture of the tights and the wonderful out of focus highlight in the background make it for me...

A step up from the point-and-shoot universe but a step down in price. The 16 megapixel GX85 is currently on sale everywhere as a two lens kit. $477.

I read the reviews. I saw the gushing on YouTube. It was 2016 and the GX85 had just been launched. A new shutter mechanism fixed "shutter shock," a condition that reared its head in the much more expensive GX8. The new camera "featured" 16 megapixels on its m4:3 sensor and it was the first Panasonic Lumix camera to forego the anti-aliasing filter on the sensor, which meant it could (and does) resolve more detail than the same sensor as it was used in the GX7 and the Olympus EM-5 mk2.

The camera was never on my radar until about a week ago when my sales pro at Precision Camera, responding to my questions about a $900 point-and-shoot camera, steered me to this camera kit. It's the body and two lenses. One lens is the 12-32mm shown above and the second lens is the venerable 40-150mm kit-ish lens. If you consider the current retail price of the lenses alone the kit is a wild bargain. When you discover that the camera is really, really good it becomes an insane bargain.

I've been playing with the GX85 since yesterday and it's a great "carry everywhere" camera. You might need a couple of spare batteries to get through the day with it but Wasabi Power batteries seem to work just fine and you can get two and a charger for about $20 on the interwebs. Maybe it's just the nutty way I overshoot that makes me so battery sensitive.

If you're toting around a Lumix S1R and the Lumix 50mm f1.4 S Pro lens all the time (or a Nikon D850 and the 24-105mm) you might want to get one of these kits to make leisure time with photography just a little bit less daunting....

But then again, if you are training for the USMS National Swim Championship in San Antonio in April in 2020 then the weight training with the bigger camera, and the lens with the glandular problem, might be part of your training regimen.

I bought the kit partly because of the low price, partly to use as a platform for my beloved Pen FT half frame lenses (from the 1970's) and mostly to have something decent to shoot with while running out for groceries, to the pool, and in situations where discretion is called for.

At least this time it's all in the same (menu) family.

What did you get yourself for the holidays? Just curious....

I don't do links but if you want one of these you might head over to Michael Johnston's site: https://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/blog_index.html
and order one from there. He'll get a small $$$ and that's cool because he does a wonderful job entertaining me with his writing about photography.....and diet....and addiction.....and (sadly) the game of snooker.