We are attempting a hybrid approach to self-isolating...

While it's important to stay home and not mix with crowds of potential pandemic carriers there are some occasions which defy commonly accepted restrictions on socialization and travel. To wit, an invitation to Will's house for BBQ'd ribs. Compared to the opera or a day at the mosh pit of SXSW an evening in Will's garden is almost antiseptic. It will be a small gathering; no more than perhaps eight people. We'll keep our distance from each other except when it comes to the passing of heaping platters of perfectly smoked ribs.

Belinda, in the kitchen with sprigs of rosemary. Photo made with a Lumix S1 and the 50mm f1.4 S Pro lens. Horticulture in the time of contagion.

Everything looked bleak yesterday. Today is much better. The difference? Nothing from the government. It was the re-stocking of Trader Joe's and the resilience of normal people.

caregivers. the newly recognized heroes.

Yesterday had me down and edgy. The conflicting and sometimes misinformed flow of "facts" from the government caused me no little alarm. But what really hit me between the eyes were the aftereffects of the pronouncements from national, state and local governments. 

I think we can all agree that social distancing and the cancellation of events where people are in prolonged close contact are good ideas and will help a great deal to slow down the spread of contagion but it was when I saw the way this near total shutdown will affect normal people's daily lives I was depressed.

The first shock was a message from Zach Theatre that all productions would be immediately shuttered, until at least April 1st. The kid's plays have a longer run cycle and if we can get back up and running at the beginning of next month we'll breathe a collective sigh of relief. But we had a one person play called, Every Brilliant Thing, and it's run was only scheduled through March. Suddenly, the actor is without a job and a paycheck. Even though he is scheduled to start in another production in L.A. on the 6th of April there's no guarantee that the L.A. theatre won't also take the step of temporarily closing...

As I read the actor's plea for temporary work on Instagram I started multiplying in my head all the actors in theaters across the country who may be out of work and without a paycheck for weeks, or months. to come. It's a vulnerable segment of our population because most are classified as independent contractors and are not eligible for unemployment compensation. 

The same situation awaits so many currently making it by in the "gig" economy. Legions of graphic designers, delivery people, tour guides, soccer coaches, drivers, and so many others working in these not very secure positions will likely be laid off without benefits as companies gird themselves for a long slide down and then even more months of recovery. It's the same for every single photographer who runs their own business and depends on the support of the interwoven market for existence. 

When the money runs out there is no unemployment scheme waiting them at the end of their cash flow slide. When the money runs out it runs out. 

All this was filtering through my brain when I got the notice that our pool would be closed and masters workouts put on hiatus until the end of the month. Personal tragedy. Doesn't rise to the level of actual 

existential dilemma. I'm sure I could throw money at another pool and be back swimming again in hours. With cash nearly all things are possible... but when humans who are used to grand entitlements are forced to change ingrained habits we tend to be less than gracious about our frustrations...mea culpa.

I came home in a funk and wrote an ill-natured post. Then Belinda came home and told me stories of her trip to the nearby grocery store. The store was out of everything. Bare shelves as far as the eye could see. The only remaining products were the vegan dishes and the gluten free stuff (another litmus test for marketing?). Panic over the week's news and the less than graceful new conference by a very corrupt federal administration had pushed people into the fear zone and they were panic buying everything from toilet paper to coffee ice cream. We'll save the oil and gas industries at any cost but the citizens who pay for everything are now on their own... Belinda was trying to find eggs. She thought she'd make a cake or something. Maybe it was brownies with almond flour... She went to three stores and there were no eggs or milk at any of them. 

I was amazed by this new inflection point and headed over to Trader Joe's to see it for myself. The scene there was as though the store was closing forever and having a going-out-of-business sale. All the frozen foods were gone. Completely sold out. No bread. No milk. No yogurt. No eggs. No beef, chicken or fish. No granola. The only things still in stock seemed to be beer, wine and chips. I was stunned. this was a run on a grocery store like I'd only seen in coastal towns preparing for category 4 and 5 hurricanes. 

When I got home we did the back of the napkin calculations aimed at figuring out how much cash on hand we had and how long we could budget with no work without having to touch our investments or retirement accounts. The good news is that we'll make it through just fine. But having the money and having access to groceries seems to be two different parts of the same equation.

We stayed in last night and watched a movie on a streaming service. Our plans were to figure out how best to stock up for the next two weeks and to figure out the best use of our time. The final straw on the pathway to quiet dismay was to read Ctein's mawkish review (on The Online Photographer) of his new "$100,000" Tesla car. What an ill-timed decision to showcase that bit of braggadocio... Ah, the (in)sensitivity of the nouveau riche... 

New headline: Old man with beard drives new car 100 mph. Attempting "die" transfer...

I woke up late this morning and made a peanut butter and blueberry preserve sandwich, on Ezekiel sprouted flax bread, to have with a cup of instant coffee laced with whole milk. Since I had not figured out a swimming alternative yet I put on some running shoes and headed to the hike and bike trail to run the 4 mile loop. And that's when my mood and attitude started to change for the better.

The trails were packed with people. Earnest runners, whole families, people even older than me. And dogs. Seems like everyone had at least one dog in tow. Or were being towed by at least one dog. And these days all friendly dogs make me smile...

There was no observable panic, no angst, no paranoid actions whatsoever. No one had a mask on. No one was running with latex gloves on their hands. It was recreational business as usual. Multiplied by thousands. On the way back to my neighborhood I drove through Zilker Park and was heartened to see hundreds and hundreds of people on the soccer fields just embracing the Spring weather and enjoying life. (while staying one to two meters away from each other and only ever coughing into their elbow sleeves.

I stopped into our neighborhood Trader Joe's grocery store on the way home on the off chance that I might actually score some fresh eggs. The store was so different from yesterday evening. All the frozen foods were restocked. Fresh free range brown eggs were amply available. All the different kinds of peanut butter and fruit spreads were back in stock. Along with fresh milk. And bread and just about everything else.

Alas, many of their refrigerator cases were broken but the manager assured me that by tomorrow, at the latest, they would be repaired and restocked. Yes. And you could buy paper towels and toilet paper right then and there. Still rationing the hand sanitizer at two containers per customer --- ask your cashier. 

I bought the eggs and a fresh loaf of sour dough bread. I bought some orange marmalade, just for grins, along with some more Greek Yogurt and Muesli. Our refrigerator at home is now stocked with everything we could think of for a short pandemic. Right down to a selection of wines and ice cream. 

Frozen foods galore, and many bagged salads (which don't keep and need to be eaten, serially, in the next few days -- my rookie shopping mistake). 

I think Austin, in general, is dealing with this crisis just as I hoped it would. People are bumping elbows instead of shaking hands, doing curt little bows instead of the usual gushy hugs, but they are getting on with their lives and looking for the bright spots to inform their happiness; along with ample doses of hand sanitizer and a ready supply of wipes. 

By the time I got home I was calmed down and ready to dig in and enjoy my self-isolation. 

How will I spend that time? I've got a back log of cleaning and organizing to do. It's a great time to really, really learn how to make videos with the Sigma FP at the highest level I can. And, it's time to create a quiet, continuous marketing presence so that when the worst is over and the businesses start to wake up and bloom again we won't have disappeared from people's radar or their memory.

And we're donating photo/video services and money where it can do the most good. Food banks. Non-profits. Friends caught a little short. Maybe "giving back" needn't be done in big virtuous bursts but in a daily, sustainable stream. And not to up and coming kids from wealthy families but aimed squarely at the places where it will do the most needy the most benefit. It's a start.

Today's blog images come from a weird assortment of cameras. The top one is from a Nikon D2H camera and a 100mm lens. The one just below was done with a Nikon D810 and some long zoom.. The image of the shielded syringe was done with an Olympus e300 and the kit lens. While the bottom image, in a medical warehouse, was done with the Panasonic FZ-2500. Funny to see such a quilt of cameras.

Out of an abundance of caution and our great concern of the safety of VSL readers we are temporarily putting the blog on hold until such a time as humor, irony and sarcasm become safe again.

Currently AFK.

If you need me you know how to reach me....

I have a "Bingo!" Now all booked events through March are fully and resolutely cancelled because of the COVID-19 pandemic. I now declare March a non-work month.

Channeling my inner-Eggleston.

entitled: Red Chair

The process is complete. All six assignment days for corporate events in March have just been officially cancelled. In polite parlance: rescheduled. Except we don't have a future date so I guess that should be: potentially rescheduled. I knew this was coming the minute I heard that the giant SXSW Festival was cancelled. All the clients were very kind. Each asked if there was some sort of cancellation fee they owed me for holding the dates but, of course, it's part of customer service to say, "No" except in egregious circumstances such as a cancellation from an event that is still happening. Especially egregious when that sort of cancellation happens the day before a show...

No, we are kind to our good customers in the hope that they will actually re-book us when the new dates for the events are put on the calendar. I often say, "we'll need their money just as much then..."

While I think I understand, intellectually, what all this means; the social distancing, the fear of contagion, the desire to stay safe, I'm not sure I was processing it in the part of my brain that understands solid, practical stuff. So I went out for a walk through the city today to get a gauge on the emotions and the general vibe in downtown. Would it be a ghost town? Would everyone have on a mask and latex gloves? Would trucks be driving slowly past the residence towers with loudspeakers blaring, broadcasting the call from medieval times, "Bring out yer dead. Bring out yer dead."? 

I took the little, happy and ebullient Sigma fp with its whimsical companion lens, the Sigma 45mm f2.8. After spending the afternoon with that camera and a cheap, big loupe for the rear screen, I can't imagine why I was thinking of getting a Panasonic GX8. The answer of what to buy next was right at the end of the camera strap. The little Sigma fp kept whispering to me: "Wait until the Dow drops under 18,000 and then buy some more Apple stock...." 

Green Table.

As I walked across the pedestrian bridge into downtown everything was quiet. Looking out toward the west of the lake I thought I'd see the usual dense fleet of paddle boards and kayaks but there were only one or two, drifting aimlessly, their pilots glued to their phones, no doubt watching the minute by minute gyrations of the stock market or the else reading about the conflicting, ever changing and self-serving manipulations of our criminal government. Ah. A halt to payroll taxes...that way, after the election we can strip out social security and medicare with the claim that they will inevitably become insolvent... Another in a series of victories for the robber barons of 2020. 

But I digress. While I saw fewer people rushing around today doing commerce I did see more people out walking their dogs. I saw very, very few people in the restaurants lining 2nd St. and Congress Ave. and I noticed that traffic was so light today that one could find not just one or two but dozens of available parking places around the city. 

I trudged on to what should have been the epicenter of SXSW; the convention center. It was empty. Only the maintenance people remained and they were busy hauling unused signage to the dumpsters. 

I crossed the street to the adjacent Hilton Hotel. Normally, it's packed during SXSW and the lobby is overflowing with coffee swilling tech boys and girls. Today you could chase tumbleweeds through the lobby blindfolded and never chance hitting another guest. The taco restaurant was closed, I think, out of sheer despair, and the loading docks were overflowing with cases of unwanted tequila. 

trying to channel my inner Stephen Shore but I couldn't find any scene boring and mundane enough. 

I settled for colorful chairs. 

What made the eery quiet so strange today was the fact that all the clouds had dissipated and the sky was clear and beautiful. The temperature was in the low 80's which is usually a strong lure for Austinites to be out and about, tanning and preening and enjoying outside. 

It was a comfortable walk. Social distancing was not a problem. The sidewalks were nearly empty and the streets were quiet. As I walked along with my camera clutched in my left hand I found myself daydreaming about what to do for the last half of a month with no obligations, no reservations and no schedule. Looks like I'll start with a trip to the coast followed by a trip to the deserts of west Texas.

The Sigma fp is raring to go. But we might bring along a few extra lenses. That 20mm is begging me to accelerate my dicey learning curve. I need to become a bit more comfortable with wide, wide angles. 

Everything else is a caption. 

The last time it hit 80 with bright sun you could have walked across the packed kayaks and paddle boards to the other side of the lake without getting your Birkenstock sandals damp. Today? Not so much.

Channeling W.E. #2

Spring sprang about a month ago and everything is green and blossoming. 

Shadows and highlights with no intervention from the sliders.

Oh. Yay. Another downtown building. I wonder which Austin landmark they tore down this time to make another posh nest for attorneys....?

A mural at the convention center Hilton Hotel. 

A chair at the convention center just longing to be sat upon by a SXSW attendee. 

Denied. 

the next three photos are the empty venue. 

Even the space around the new library is as empty as in one of those movies where everyone is dead and only zombies remain and all of a sudden they rush out of the crevasses of the city and try to eat your brain. But today the library didn't even play host to zombie hordes....

Scooters went unloved. 

Steps untrod. 

And men were reduced to carrying pink bags for girlfriends who had YouTube programming playing on phones, phones clutched behind their backs like secrets. 

The dogs were the happy ones. No competition from bad bands from Poland and Belgium...

And that's the saga of the immediate impact of COVID-19 on the photo scene in CenTex. 

Photographing through glass. Make sure the position from which you are photographing is much darker than the scene in front of you.

and maybe try to shoot a second angle.

But sometimes reflections are okay.

Fun with portraits. Leaving studio backgrounds behind.

Mark Agro. Former CEO of Ottobock Canada.

After decades of photographing people in front of various shades of gray background paper I'm pretty much ready to call that part of the business over. We still do some shots in front of white or gray seamless for the sake of continuity for our clients but what I want to do, and what everyone seems to like, is going onto locations and finding a spot where I can improve the light while using a background that looks beautiful as it goes progressively out of focus.

In the last seven days I've been asked to do environmental portraits for three different law firms here in Austin. Each law firm has offices in very different kinds of buildings. Yesterday's assignment was at an office park out in the hill country, west of Austin. The space, while nice, had few architectural features that would be conducive to making good backgrounds. But what it did have was nice, big windows that looked out over rolling hills.

As always, there is a need to marry the inside space with the outside views in a convincing way and that mostly depends on both getting the balance of lights right, and also being able to drop the background out of focus enough to separate it from the person being photographed while being mindful not to make the separation so abrupt that it looks as though two images were merged together in Photoshop.

I use a soft light source for my main light and have recently started using a second light source as a soft fill light. My fill light is generally three or four stops down from my main light. I also use a bit of high, soft back light to give the impression that there is light coming in from the background window.

When it's sunny outside I find I need an ND filter to drop the sunlight exposures down and balance them better with interior light.

At another office in the middle of downtown's nest of skyscrapers I preferred using an interior, glass wall that had undulations of light playing over it and through it. That made for a nice out of focus background as well. The set-up also had the advantage of being more controllable over time.

There are few things in photography as frustrating as finding a location that appears just right, getting set up, and then having the arrival of subject delayed. You mood drops as you see the sun move, or clouds move in, and change the whole look of the shot. I scramble sometimes to reverse my camera and light positions to shoot toward the interior of buildings when my view out of a nice window falls apart.

It's Moore's Law that the delayed participant will arrive just minutes after you've decided and committed to changing everything.

Some of my favorite locations are long hallways that are very well lit. The best are those that have frosted glass walls on one side. If the glass walls get sunlight through them they add a very nice dimension to the overall look of the receding background.

In another big change in portraiture we've moved away from verticals being the default orientation and have been working more and more in horizontal orientations, with lots of "air" around the subject. This allows me to show more of the idealized, out of focus background and to get more of sense that the subject is situation in the frame rather than being artificially added to it. And, in a pinch, we can use the huge files to crop to other aspect ratios...

With a horizontal orientation and a looser crop I am able to get more use out of my 85mm lens. I use it mostly at f3.5 to f4.0 but occasionally, when I am willing to take a few risks, I head to f2.5 or even 2.2 but usually this is for more casual "working at the desk" shots.

I am noticing that smaller spaces actually do well with longer lenses and I know that seems counterintuitive but the tight crop helps to isolate a smaller area of the background which is more compositionally controllable. While the 70-200mm f4.0 does a good job in these situations I think I would prefer a fast 135mm lens for these kinds of situations, and also for use in vertical portrait set ups.

I have a minimum charge for location work based on my travel, set up and one person's portrait. We add per person charges for each additional set-up.

When it comes to post production my biggest task is always to get skin tone correct. I find that when I shoot with too much foliage in the background I end up with files that are far too magenta on the skin. This even happens for some reason when I do a custom white balance. The best way I've found to correct this is to go into the hue menu and move the red slider to the right (Lightroom) until the flesh tones are better balanced. In Texas, land of too much sun/tan, it's also good to drop red saturation down a bit too.

I noted during yesterday's shoot that with the otherwise perfect set up, shooting a big set of windows as the background, I ended up with a small reflection of myself in the lower left side of the window. Otherwise everything else was just right. In the film days I would have spent much time trying to figure out how to remove myself and might have put up a big, black gobo. Or compromised on the composition.  But as I was reflected quite small in the frame, and nicely out of focus against a sea of patterned foliage, I decided that it would be much easier just to clone myself out of the shot in post.

I'm loving my presentation process these days. I come back to the studio, edit out the non-keepers, color correct in batches for the rest, make quick crops if that was what I intended in the shooting, and then output high res (47.5 megapixel) minimal compression Jpegs and upload them to a gallery on Smugmug.com. With very fast broadband I can upload 10-20 gigabytes of files in minutes. The new iMac Pro has also cut my conversion time from RAWs to Jpegs by two thirds. My post processing all the way to the point of presenting to a client is now much shorter than each of those many times I used to drive to the lab with film.

A common thread in my engagement with three law firms and one hedge fund in the last seven days: the marketing director or partner in charge of marketing in each company asked me about doing video productions for them. So now I consider executive portraits the new gateway drug for future videos. Nice when your paid work is also part of your marketing....

I need a sign for my studio that reads, "Just Say No To Background Paper."

Just a quick note: Being on time is important. Being routinely late is a business relationship killer. But you already knew that...

The perilous worklife of a freelance artist. Save some $$ while you are working a lot. Everything is cyclical.

And, in an instant, all the big shows were cancelled into the foreseeable future...

Being a freelance artist means riding the financial cycles like a surfer riding waves. Sometimes you wait in the water with your board for hours till a great wave comes by and other times the waves are too choppy and the water too cold to venture off the beach.

The COVID-19 virus, coupled with some tricky Russian oil market shenanigans,  just triggered a sell off on Wall Street which should cause concern for everyone who works for a living. Especially for those who are self-employed and doing something that's (short term) not mission critical for the clients they serve.

The fear of contagion just shut down the biggest yearly event in Austin. SXSW brings in, according to the city of Austin, nearly $355 million dollars to the local economy. That's all gone now and it's not recoverable. For many small businesses there's no way to make it up. Some will tighten belts and some will fade away, buried by bills and salary expenses. 

If the country goes into recession in the next few months then this will be the fifth or sixth recession I will have navigated in my working life as a photographer. Each was different and each was the same. The decline of assignments starts early and then accelerates. After an awkward % of the business dries up and vanishes then the remaining clients start aggressively price shopping and, while some of us dig in our heels and pass on projects with too low a price tag attached, there are generally legions of artists who are scared, panicky and hungry enough to chase the market for their services to the rock bottom. 

I scraped and starved through my first recession and learned just how much more valuable having some money in the bank was than having the latest miracle camera or life-changing lens. We started tossing about 10% of our profits into savings accounts and liquid investments. With each new recession we were in better shape than in the previous ones and the panic around us pounded in the message of how important it is to save for a rainy day. Or year. 

This potential recession might be short. It might be long. But from a business point of view it's already following the traditional pattern: the freelancers are the "canaries in the coal mines." The assignments have started vanishing left and right. We'll be the first out and the last in for the recovery and, for the first part of the recovery we'll probably be struggling to get our pricing back up to a sustainable level against the pushback of clients newly trained to expect more for less. 

I've positioned myself as a portrait photographer for wealthy business people. It's the last market in photography to dry up. I'm still booking portrait work. Event work is more skittish. The cancellations just after the SXSW show cancellation are stacking up. The calendar is becoming more porous, like Swiss cheese. 

So, What will I do???? Well, for starters I think I'll not panic. There are several older cameras I've been itching to try out along with those old Olympus Pen FT MF lenses I keep writing about. I have my eye on a used Panasonic GX-8 but I can't decide if I want one in silver or in black. If you shoot with a GX-8 I'd love to read your mini-review and get your thoughts about it. I know all about the "shutter shock" stuff but I'm interested in learning how the I.S. is and how you like the handling...

Next up, I'm itching to buy a Leica SL2 but they seem not to be shipping at the moment and no one seems to have stock. In the meantime I'd love to hear from people who've shot with the previous model, the SL. I know they are different cameras altogether but I'm assuming that lots of the handling DNA will be similar and I'd love to hear stories about what separates the images from mortal cameras. 

As you know (and part of my huge, sinister plan) the Panasonic Lumix S Pro lenses are interchangeable with the Leica lenses so my total investment, if I want to dip my toe back into Leica-dom, is just(?) the cost of a body. If my ship ever comes in maybe I can cherry pick one or two Leica lenses for the ecosystem. That 50mm Apo Summicron at $8,000+ looks like just the thing to totally disrupt someone's retirement account....

And, if you are dumb enough to take financial advice from a photographer then 

here's my strategy as sketched out on a paper napkin over coffee:

Wait for the Dow Jones Industrials Average to hit 21,000 and then dump

a bunch of cash into a Vanguard Stock Index Fund. 

then, grab my favorite camera, go for walk and ignore the market for a while.