B. At the Galaxy Cafe after a trip to the Blanton Museum. From the archives but recently re-worked.

 Yes, Some times when I say stupid stuff I still get "the look." 

A variation on yesterday's black and white post. Re-imagined in Luminar.

From a session at the Jacob Javits Center in NYC for Samsung. Shot with a Galaxy NX camera and the 85mm f1.4 Samsung lens. They got a lot right...

Anyway, I played around some more with Luminar 4.x and it's actually a great program for quickly retouching and enhancing portraits. You'll have more fine control in PhotoShop (for instance you can control eye size for each eye in P.S. instead of having a combined setting in Luminar) but Luminar is great for fast skin smoothing, detail enhancing and color correction. The filters also work well and you can dial back the effects with sliders.

I'm having fun with it. And it's not too expensive. I'd buy it again.

Not supported or sponsored by Luminar....or any other photo company or retailer. So there.

One black and white portrait photographed for sharpness and clarity.

As photographers it seems we've spent so much time trying to 

get shallower and shallower depth of field; as though that would 

be a process by which to distill beauty...

But if a subject is, indeed, beautiful why wouldn't we want to be

able to look at our photo in all the detail we can see with our own eyes?

Black. White. And all the Gray in Between. 

Re-imagining a portrait in a different way. Post processing to get a softer look.

I'm always trying to get weight into my photos.

That, and shadow. 

This was originally a very sharp negative that I reworked in the darkroom many years ago with a technique that softened edge detail and areas in the frame. It spilled light into shadows and shadows into light areas. I made a print and stored it in a box. 

Recently I pulled out the print and scanned it and then re-worked the 

scan in Luminar imaging software. 

I like the softer look of Lou's face in this now. 

I wish I could have people in the studio now. I miss taking portraits 

more than any privation so far in this crisis. I feel disconnected from my passion. 

Destinations I have on my shortest short list for a time in the future when we are free to travel fearlessly again.

Siena. Italy

I'm a bit frustrated. I think we're all a bit frustrated. I just finished up all my major "adult" responsibilities and was looking forward to doing more traveling with my partner and my camera when the Covid-19 pandemic put us all into lock-down. But, ever the optimist, I am planning and looking forward to a time in the (hopefully) near future when we've all been vaccinated, tested and approved for limitless excursions. In that spirit, and at the suggestion of a smart commenter, I've been working on a list of places I want to go; some to revisit and others to see for the very first time.

Here's my list: 

I want to go to St. Petersburg, Russia in the dead of winter. I was there in February 1995 and I had such interesting adventures there that one of the new novels I'm trying to finish writing is set in that time period and in that city. I think seeing it again would help my writing and I think seeing the Hermitage Museum again would be great just because it may be the most comprehensive and wonderful museum in the entire world. Why winter? To match the season of my last visit during which I found the biting, stinging cold to be refreshing and in keeping with my vision of Russia. 

I desperately want to go back to Rome. I've visiting Rome probably more than any other city in Europe except Paris and I find it, as a photographer, endlessly captivating. The people are as wonderful to photograph as well as the ancient architecture. I love the giant public squares and I also have a favorite hotel and a favorite restaurant that I think about frequently. We'd start at the Borghese Sculpture Museum and who knows where we'd end up. It will probably be the rooftop bar at the hotel.... I don't want much, just three or four weeks and the stamina to shoot endlessly. If I can make it happen it will be my first totally film-less engagement with Rome. I also remember Roman women as being both beautiful and very well dressed. 

Istanbul. When I was very young my father (and by extension, the rest of us) was assigned to work in Turkey for two years. It was near the end of the 1960's and I remember it as one long, exhilarating adventure. In the city where we lived there were still horse drawn carts and many vendors with work worn wooden push carts. Occasionally flocks of sheep would march by front of our five story, downtown apartment building. Our parents purified the drinking water with chlorine drops (or something like that) but when they weren't looking we would drink from the garden hose; we didn't want to waste time going upstairs for a drink. In the two years we lived in Adana we didn't own a TV set and missed out on US trends like, "Gilligan's Island" and "The Brady Bunch" but we didn't know we were missing out, we were too busy having sling shot fights and buying Turkish candy from the cart vendors. 

I remember my mother taking the family camera after we'd all gone off to school and getting a taxi to go to the outskirts of town to a gypsy encampment. She photographed for an afternoon after negotiating with the chief, then things went south. But that's a story for another time....

At any rate, whenever we could catch a free flight mom and dad would take my brother, sister and I to Istanbul --- for some culture. My mom taught herself Turkish and got pretty fluent so she knew how to handle most situations. We ate in so many great Turkish restaurants and were in awe of the incredible mosques. 

I'd like to spend a couple weeks in Istanbul, see how much it's changed and how much it's stayed the same. My memory is that it was a photographer's paradise. We were going to shoot a corporate show there in 1998 but there were some terrorist attacks against western companies and the multi-national I was working moved the show at the last minute to Lisbon, Portugal. I've had it in my mind to go back to Istanbul ever since. 

I want to go to Montreal, Canada again around my birthday in late October. Belinda and I had a great time walking through the old town, taking the metro everywhere and spending time in the museums and open air market. It was relaxing, refreshing and so convenient since it was barely 7 hours away from Austin. This time we will not miss Quebec City and we'll explore in a wider circle outside the cities. 

One trip I really want to take is two trips combined. I want to see Seoul, S. Korea and I want to go to Tokyo, Japan right after that. No sense flying trans-Pacific round trip twice if you can put the time aside to do both in one trip. 

Those are the top spots for my first trips when the world opens back up. There are so many other places I'm anxious to see as well. A winter return to Iceland is in the cards as a solo trip. A vacation to San Miguel, Mexico is high on the general list --- we haven't been there in 34 years... Time rushes by so quickly and there's so much unseen stuff everywhere to uncover. Passport ready, credit cards ready. Now we just need the damn vaccine. 

What did I miss? Where will you go when the restraints are lifted? What will you see next?

Rome. 

austin.

Torture via webcast. Endless failures on YouTube.

So, we're all just a bit bored right now but I sparked up when I saw one of my favorite camera makers was doing a live video presentation about black and white with a 'famous' photojournalist. Biographical fallacy is a vicious thing. When I heard the "experienced pro" speak it was all the hoary stuff you hear from every know it all duffer who shot in the film days and is now fascinated with how easily they can now produce work with a digital camera. Dismissive of anyone who has never touched film...  

"He just sets his camera to black and white and shoots. He loves Seattle because the light is always so flat.... People get too wrapped up in technical stuff (generally translated into: I haven't kept up with lighting or post production = I love shooting Jpegs!)  Look at how easily I can silhouette two people sitting next to a window!!!"

I watched and listened until I just couldn't bear it anymore. Do any photojournalists from the film days ever learn to light? Do they ever make interesting images in these modern times or are they just enamored of the fact that they don't have to go into the darkroom anymore to produce a flat and lifeless monotone print? I guess I learned my lesson = any light is good light, as long as there is enough of it.

Frame after frame was flat, boring, lifeless, hackneyed. And so was the brittle and smug attitude of the interviewee. I give the interviewer a pass; he was trying his best to squeeze something; anything! interesting out of the interview. He just needed some programming with.......real content.

Now I see why so few people are willing to pay for "professional" photography. The pros keep doing stuff the way they did it with Tri-X and number two contrast paper in 1986. They conflate "no color" with "virtuous art." The rest of photography has moved on. Someone forgot to invite them to 2020. 

A bit mean-spirited on my part? You didn't just lose ten minutes of your day to ..... snore....zzzzz..... oh, sorry. I thought I was still learning how to take flat, B&W snapshots with my digital camera. I must have nodded off...

Somehow I thought the program could have been more enlightening than, "I just turn the dial to monochrome, ignore the prevailing light and aim it at boring shit."

Youtube can suck. People need speaker training. Companies need to better vet interviewees and do a better job matching programming to their brand, and to the sophistication of their markets.

I'd rather watch Jared Polin...(kidding, just kidding....).

Writing in overdue praise of the conventional 24-70mm f2.8 lens. Revised thinking now posits that it's a glorified normal lens. Takes me a while...

this was the frame I had the camera set to shoot. And Lightroom honored that choice 

automatically. It's a shot of one of the many boulder fields at Enchanted Rock.

I can't help it. I started taking photographs in the 1970's and my Leica toting mentors at the time assured me over and over again that..."All zoom lenses are crap." Even though I know that's not the case and hasn't been since the 1990's all those subconscious prejudices die hard. Oh sure, I've bought more than my share of professional caliber zoom lenses over the years but I always compartmentalized and rationalized those purchases as necessary tools for commerce. If I was shooting for The Kirk Tuck Museum of Incredible Contemporary Photo Art and Philosophy it was pretty much a forgone conclusion that I'd be doing so with a "real" lens. A prime lens. And in all probability it would probably be some focal length between 49 and 51 millimeters.

I always saw 28-70 and 24-70mm zoom lenses as compromises; I thought people just "settled" for lesser performance because they were too lazy to carry a bevy of primes and too eager to follow the "herd."

I should have changed my beliefs after using the original Nikon 28-70mm f2.8. It was superbly sharp and, truth be told, blew the doors off the Nikon 50mm f1.1:2 ais lens when one compared both at f4.0 and f5.6. But dogma won't always heel when you want it to.

So while I dutifully carried the holy trinity of zooms around during working hours (20-35mm, 24-70mm and 70-200mm) as soon as I exchanged the Cole Hahn oxfords for flip-flops and the Burberry shirt for a T-shirt with a beer logo on the front I'd pick up my "real" camera with my 50mm OMG-o-flex Prime on the front and do the art strut. I'd poo-poo zooming and announce to anyone who would listen that serious photographers knew how to zoom with their feet...

About two and a half months ago I broke down and bought the Lumix 24-70mm f2.8 Pro lens. (It was all Eric's fault. He used mind control on me when we were at Precision Camera....).  At the time I justified it to myself based on the video friendly features like the fully manual focusing ring (hard stops at both ends) and the quiet focusing motors. And let's be frank; I loved the little line of type on the bottom side of the lens: "Leica certified." 

While the theater was still open I used the 24/70, in conjunction with the 70/200, to make all kinds of show production photographs and videos and was generally very happy with the lens. The constant f2.8 works well for video and the ability to do accurate focus pulls was great too. But it seemed too large, heavy and cumbersome to be an all day, street shooting lens. I left it home when I went out to shoot my artsy stuff and relied on groovy primes instead.

Well, I was grappling with what single lens to bring along on yesterday's adventure at Enchanted Rock and I knew two things: One was that I really wanted to use an S1R camera body so I could get as much fine detail as possible. And, two, that a single, normal lens would be too limiting, given the ever changing subject matter. In my masochistic prime only! days I would have packed a 24mm, a 50mm and an 85mm and spent the whole dusty day trying to change lenses over and over again without getting those lovely diffuse spots on my finished images. It was finally time to join the "lazy herd" and submit to the zoom tyranny.

While in the VSL clean room I carefully inspected the camera sensor and the back of the lens before mating the 24-70mm to the S1R (yes, the same one that came back from repair a few months ago...).  I placed them into a Think Tank Airport Essentials backpack and headed out.

Cutting to the end of story: I was very happy with the performance of the lens at both extremes and in the middle. I knew from my experiences at the theater that the lens performed better than most of my previous primes even at f2.8 but now I was seeing the lens at its optimum apertures of f5.6 and f8.0. It's still big and heavy and brutally expensive but it certainly does deliver high optical performance over all of the camera's full frame. For paid, commercial work, or those times when I can use those focal lengths to get exactly what I want, it's really a fabulous lens.

Were I to get an equipment re-do for yesterday I have to confess that I'd probably choose the 24-105mm f4.0 instead. I didn't really need a fast lens in the bright sun and the 24/105 would have given me a bit more range... and weighed half as much. Still, I'm not sure I would have gotten quite as much clean detail with the slower zoom lens. There's something about the 24-70mm that just screams  = optical performance. At least in its limited focal range envelope. Okay. I'll admit it. I now really like my 24-70mm. I'll keep it around.

this is an enlarged crop from the bottom right corner of the square frame.

this is an enlarged crop from the top right corner of the square frame. 

this is the full frame from the camera with no crop.

this is a the lower left corner of the full frame shot, just above.