An art gallery and other expressions of popular culture in Austin. Oh, and a few images just because we like the pretty colors.... Oh, one or two pix? NSFW. Unless you work from home.

Tired of raccoons, tired of cars, tired of tax accounting, and tired of being cooped up. I took a lightweight camera out on Saturday to see what might be going on outside these days. Here are a few images from a dubious art gallery show called, "Provocateurs." And then a few images from the bar scene. And a few images of questionable fashion photography and then just some nice, bright colors. 

When you don't have anything in particular in mind it's nice to take a small camera like the Fuji X100V along with you. Put that sucker on auto and remember to look up above eye level every once in a while.

Bummed to have the end of the month show cancelled, postponed, rescheduled or whatever. Happy the raccoons seem to be gone.

I've been watching the Canon, Nikon and Sony announcements with some interest since this is and Olympics year and if Japan pulls off the Olympics the three big camera companies will all want to be on site in force. It seems like the new, Canon R3 is a nod toward sports photographers who want to go with a mirrorless option and, I'll be surprised if the Nikon Z9 isn't designed with sports photographers in mind as well. Sony has already shown their hand with the Alpha One. I'm still reeling at the idea of 50 megapixel files shot at 30 fps. And that's raw+jpeg, not just one or the other. I'm still trying to imagine how the poor editors sitting in trailers around the various Olympic venues are going to edit that stuff... Talk about filling up hard drive space. 

The problem for Nikon and Canon, and to a certain degree, also Sony is that there are actually very, very few long, fast lenses available for any of the recent mirrorless systems. I'm thinking about the much used sports optics like 400mm f2.8 or f3.5s, the 500mms, 600mms and 800mms that I saw in use by many shooter in the last two games. When push comes to shove I wonder how many photographers will have to retrench into the D6s and 1DXmk3s to get the job done the way they want it done. And how can Sony retrench? It should be an interesting time.

I'm not sure it matters that much these days. I keep hearing from my younger photography friends who are shooting sports professionally that so many of the resources are being aimed almost completely toward the video crews. Many of whom will be originating in 8K and 6K this year. If they increase the shutter speeds and frame rates there is real potential to pull stills from the video footage that rival the generation of 24 megapixel still cameras still in wide use for events like these. 

When one considers how close a 30 fps in stills and a 30 fps in video are it's largely a toss up except that still photographers can opt to shoot higher quality raws. I can't imagine film crews choosing the shoot raw for events like this. The would need cargo trucks to haul off the storage drives...

Mirrorless for pro sports will have arrived when the long, fast lenses show up...

Another shot just because I wanted to see the difference between Leica color and Fuji cameras. Straight out of the camera? Fuji in first place.

 

Pandemic rescheduling strikes again. New car smell. Fun with dealers. A bad day for walking around taking pix.... (sad).

 

What a whirlwind of a day! My first call of the morning was with the client for our project in Sante Fe. Guess what? Yep. It's been pushed back to the Fall. The CEO decided that the risks outweighed the cost of re-scheduling and pulled the plug. I have a cancellation policy but it wouldn't have kicked in till next week. Besides, I like the client and I'll be working with them on other profitable jobs this year. So now I go from planning overland routes through Roswell, and trying to decide whether to drive or fly, to having more time at the end of the month for playing and swim practices. My cameras will be disappointed. 

This is not really a rare occurence these days. People are bad at predicting the future and I'm guessing when they set up this meeting late last year all the predictions were that Covid infections would be waning by now. Then, this year, after the emergency approval of three vaccines everyone was predicting a quick ramp up in acceptance and wide spread immunity. Ah well. I am so much better at predicting the past...

Now, on to today's obsession. A reader/commenter left a comment that said once a car lets you down it's gone for him. I work the same way. It's all about reliability. The offer to upgrade from a 2019 Subaru Forster to a new, 2021 model (identical trim and finish) came on a day when I noticed the smell of coolant coming from under the hood. I checked and the coolant was half way between "full" and "low." All at once I wondered if the car would fail me with plumes of steam out in the middle of west Texas, hundreds of miles from any service station and further than that to a Subaru dealer. That's when I took the offer more seriously. Yes, the 2019 is still under warranty and I was pretty sure they could find and fix a leak if it existed but just the faint smell of coolant introduced a tiny measure of doubt in my mind.

It's all academic now that the job which required the cross country drive is postponed. But what the heck? 

After a chat on the phone with the dealer I decided I would drive out today and test drive a second car I've also been interested in; the Subaru Outback. It would cost a bit more to upgrade to that but I was willing to spend the money if I liked the ride and the overall feel better. They had an Outback ready for me when I walked up. I drove it around for twenty minutes, hated the lessened visibility, felt like the slightly bigger car just wasn't as nimble as the Forester, and made up my mind. 

I went ahead a bought the new 2021 Forester. No hidden costs or charges. Exactly what they agreed to in the first place. Only hitch? They didn't have one in stock and will have to ship it in from another dealer. They found the exact car I want in Lubbock. It will be trucked here late this week or the first of next week. I offered to sign the papers and hand over a check today but the dealership's administrative office was backed up and I would have had to wait an hour to get it done. Instead they garaged my old car, handed me the keys to a brand new Legacy sport as a loaner and called it a day. And, yes, they are eating the transportation charge to get the new car here. 

They'll have paperwork ready for me to come in and sign on Friday. Once the car arrives they'll take care of having the windows tinted exactly as they were for my last car and then they'll deliver the car to my house and pick up their loaner. Easy as pie. 

Austin Subaru is great to deal with. Both B. and I have bought new cars from them and enjoyed the process and the hands-on service. They are currently the biggest Subaru dealer in the country, by volume. One of the things I like about them is that the first two years or 24,000 of ownership includes all maintenance. You pay for nothing for the first two years. Nice. 

I'm driving a sporty new Legacy right now and while it's a nice car I've decided I no longer really like sedans. The visibility of the Forester spoils you for alert, high visibility driving. That's why it's Consumer Reports top choice this year for its class. 

No camera work today. I'm always a bit distraught when I go a whole day without taking photographs. With swim practice, an early business call, a late morning coffee meeting with a video guy, and then a formal lunch to celebrate an anniversary with another couple whose anniversary falls on the same day, followed by some inefficient time spent at the car dealership, there just wasn't an opportunity to pull a camera out of a bag and click off some well considered frames. Or any frames. 

Sad, because there is a Leica SL with a 50mm lens on it sitting quietly on my desk, looking at me and saying, softly: "tsk, tsk. How could you abandon us for the day?"

gotta go. It's my turn to cook dinner. It's been that kind of day....

More about photography later...

Taking a break from the drudgery of photography to go out to eat at a real restaurant (for the second time in 12 months) with my wife. Yes. I took a camera..... (sigh!).

Salmon with a tomato reduction on a bed of 

shredded Brussel sprouts, cannoli beans and 

bits of prosciutto. Amazing.

Since the beginning of the pandemic we've shied away completely from going to eat at restaurants. Neither of us has gone to eat inside a "sit down" restaurant to dine in over a year. I guess we still haven't. But last night we had something to celebrate and we headed to our favorite Austin restaurant; Asti. They have a beautiful outside patio and their service and attention to detail is impeccable. The restaurant is owned by a close friend of ours named Emmett Fox. He swims with me in our masters program and he's been running wonderful restaurants for the 30 years that I've known him.

It felt strange after 12 months of curbside pick-up, and hundreds and hundreds of home cooked meals, to actually go out to a restaurant, to sit down at a well set table and be waited on by professional restaurant staff. It's something we very much missed. 

As I said, we did reserve our table on the outside patio and not the interior. We would not have broken our restaurant quarantine in the recent past but we were, in part, celebrating that both B. and I have gotten our vaccines and gotten past the two week "afterburner" period during which one ascends to full immunity. Or as full of immunity as any vaccine has the potential to impart. That, in itself, was something to celebrate.

The experience could not have been more pleasant. We arrived during the last light of the day and were seated at a corner table with a nice view. The temperature was perfect and the waning light, sliding into twilight, felt as though Roger Deakins had lit the set for us.

There was a gentle breeze slow dancing around the tables and no one seemed to be in a rush. The diners nearest us (at  socially responsible distances) were happy, calm and quiet.

I brought along a camera so I could take a photo of B. for my personal scrapbook but I also snapped a photo of my entrée just for fun. 

Two hours of pure pleasure. Life how it used to be. 

36.

 

Circling back to photography and raccoons. 2021 portraits. 2021 raccoon resettlement.

studio portrait. tech exec.

 

I've been working on a series of portraits in the studio again. For my main light I'm using a Godox SL150ii shining into a Godox P120L soft box. We used to call these octaboxes but this one uses so many poles inside we might have to call it a dodecahedron box. 

I like dark shadows. I like the contrast. But some clients don't understand the whole "face sculpting" methodology/aesthetic and want faces to be evenly lit, from side to side. Those are generally clients I need to send to other photographers. 

One of my photography friends comes from the video world and doesn't get lighting ratios for photographic portraits at all. He seems to want to light everything in a 1:1 ratio or, at worst (best?) a 2:1 ratio. I don't know why this is but it's his "style." I guess I should be sending the relentlessly high key clients to him...

This (above) is my current lighting style though I have switched to a darker shade of seamless in the background. 

It is done with a soft-boxed light on the right of the frame (even though I usually and compulsively light from the left), a light in a small soft box aimed at the background and a small LED panel above and behind the subject's head as a hair light. I'm always willing to forego the hair light if there's enough contrast between the person's hair and the background. 

The set up is simple and fast. If you or your clients prefer a softer ratio between the main light and the shadows it's easy enough to put a white reflector on a light stand and vary the distance from the shadow side of the face to the reflector until you get the ratio you want. If you need something approaching 1:1 you'll need to add another light source. I rarely ever go there but when I do I use that fill light source directly above the camera position and try never to go beyond a 3:1 ratio. It just looks better to me.

Since I've been shooting with 47+ megapixel cameras I've found that it's delightful to shoot with the camera in a horizontal orientation. I always got a bit frustrated with the weight of a bigger lens pulling a vertically oriented camera around the tripod screw and having the lens droop towards the floor. I like the horizontal format and figure that, if the client really wants a vertical, there is more than enough resolution to crop. 

Lately, with the ease of shooting and post processing 1:1 images with the Leica SL2, I've been shooting all my newest portraits in a square format. Lightroom reads the aspect ratio data embedded in the raw frame and the files show up as squares in the program. The thing I have to keep reminding myself of is the need to crop less tightly in the square. I have to remember to leave enough room in order to make good crops in either vertical or horizontal. Unless I'm shooting just for myself, in which case the square is the finished product. 

On to the raccoons. 

Yesterday evening the service we hired to remove the raccoons came by and put a rag, soaked in coyote urine (I wonder where one buys that...?) into a wire mesh tube, tied it to a stout string and lowered it down the chimney of our house where it settled on top of the fireplace damper. Right where the raccoons have set up camp. The mother hissed at the new package and all the kits made noise. 

This morning the chimney has been absolutely silent. Whether they have already left or not is still up in the air. Being ever optimistic I think they had enough of the coyote smell and left under cover of the night. The most sage and experienced experts (to whom I will listen) tell me that it takes a couple days for the mother raccoon to go out and secure a new place. Then, maybe, another night to move the family. They'll be by on Thursday to check for the signs.

I feel like a bad host to have ejected the baby raccoons without any due process but there it is. 

Once we have confirmation that they've left a crew will come over and secure the chimney against future ingress. They'll also give the house a careful inspection to see if there are any other potential weak points that can be hardened against future intrusion. 

And that's where we are right now. 

I suggested to my spouse of 36 years that we abandon the house and turn it into a raccoon refuge. She has referred me to a specialist. (kidding, just kidding). But she was emphatic in declining my (whimsical) plan. A dream of paying it forward to the raccoons ---- dashed. 

Apropos of yesterday's article about the world economy....

 https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/12/china/china-taiwan-jets-defense-zone-incursion-intl-hnk-ml/index.html

Never presume something can't happen just because it hasn't happened before.

40,000 Russian troops amassing on the border with Ukraine. Repeated Chinese incursions in the Taiwanese air space. 

America stretched across the globe. 

Interesting times.

I don't want to intrude on Michael Johnston's territory but can we change gears and talk about cars for one post?

Getting from rest stop to rest stop in the wilds of west Texas.

 I've usually bought new cars and driven them for a good long while. Most of the them last me up to about 100,000 miles. I do the recommended maintenance and try to keep them from getting too scuffed up. I know there is a school of thought that recommends driving them until they fall apart around you as a way of maximizing your "investment" in a car but since I use my vehicle to get to and from jobs reliability is a big issue for me and I find that 100K mark is where all the sub systems start to go south. 

I'm the kind of car owner that changes the battery at 3 years even if it's cranking strong. I just don't want to be the guy out in the parking lot on the first cold night of the year looking around to see if anyone has jumper cables. I also replace tires long before you get to the tread wear indicator. It's better in my mind to leave some money on the table rather than getting stuck out in the middle of nowhere with nothing but the little, tiny spare and 100 miles to go...

I've owned all kinds of cars but in the last decade the two that make the most sense for my business and my personal life have been the small SUVs. I don't particularly like the "thrill of driving" the way I did when I was a reckless teenager with a 1965 Buick Wildcat and a taste for speed. The roads are so crowded here in Austin - where I spend 95% of my driving time - that the idea of ultra performance is a joke. There  just are no uncluttered roadways with great curves that you can test out the imputed G force capability of your automobile. They no longer exist. Open roads in Austin are at the same level of impending extinction as fax machines. 

My current car is a 2019 Subaru Forester. It's got a modest but adequate 182 horsepower, 4 cylinder engine. It's all wheel drive. It's perfect for tossing in light stands, big cases full of lights and lots and lots of camera gear. It's even got a roof rack for those times when you really need to bring along more gear than you should. I bought the car with great expectations but the pandemic came along and limited my driving.....a lot. I've had the car for two years and three months and I'm just now coming up on 16,000 miles on the odometer. Or an average of 8K per year. 

When you take your new car in for the free two years of service it seems that the Subaru dealer keeps tabs on the condition and mileage of your vehicle. About six months ago I started getting offers from Subaru's guaranteed trade in program offering me a new, 2021 model for about $4000 plus the trade-in of my car. I ran the numbers and that's actually more generous than the private resale value of the car. 

I sat down with my pocket calculator and did some conjecture math. When I hit 20,000 miles with the current car I planned to buy a new set of tires. As I said above, I don't try to squeeze the very last mile out of tires, I replace them when they still have good sidewall flexibility and structural integrity. There's about $1,000. We'll have two routine maintenance visits to the dealer during any given year at about $150 each for $300. We might have to replace other stuff. And there's always the (remote) possibility that something expensive, like the entertainment/control interface electronics could fail. I'd put aside $2,000 over the next two years just to cover the unexpected. We're already close to the difference in cost between keeping the existing car or getting one that's two model years newer. 

Then you might consider depreciation. The older car will obviously have a lower resale value given its age relative to a car that's two years newer and two model years newer. That's not a small amount. 

Finally, the 2019 marked the introduction of a new chassis design and body changes for the Forester line. Nothing ever goes exactly to plan for a complex machine like a modern car and I'm certain that there have been a number of unannounced changes, modifications and improvements that will all have the effect of increasing net reliability in the newer model. While dealers can't fix as much stuff in cars as camera companies can with firmware updates in cameras the trade off is that each new model year car makers can fix the stuff that was found to be "off" in the previous year or years. 

So, here I am with an almost new car in my driveway trying to decide whether or not to go for the trade up. As I understand it the profit for the dealer is more nested in factory to dealer rebates, the ability to order more product to get better discounts, and the fact that recent, low mileage vehicles that are popular are easy to move quickly. 

In effect, I'll spend $4,000 or maybe a bit more to get a car that's two years newer, hopefully mechanically and electronically improved, has a start the clock over again new two year warranty and free maintenance for the next two years. And, as I've said a couple of times before, reliability is a big, big issue with me....

I know that some of you are more informed about cars and car stuff than am I and I welcome feedback. Is there a hidden "gotcha" that I haven't been able to figure out yet? Does this seem like a rational thing to do? It's not as if I'll need a loan or have to make payments; it's my intention to write a check for the amount. 

I really like my current car. I really like the idea of replacing it with the same model, but two years newer. 

If it doesn't work out as projected I really have no problem sticking with the current car. But if it does work then I'll have a big smile on my face for about two more years. Just trying to plan smart. 

Your take?

Why the Leica SL is more fun than the SL2.

 There are two reasons I like playing with the Leica SL more than the SL2. The first is that none of the buttons on the back of the camera, with the exception of the on-and-off switch, are labeled. It's an "art" thing and not a performance parameter. I like the way it looks and I've quickly figured out what the buttons do and where they take you when you do either a long or a short press. I re-programmed one dial to reverse the direction of the aperture control but everything else is just as it comes from the factory. The guys who programmed the camera actually gave a lot of rational thought as regards how some people operate their cameras. Their presumptions match mine pretty well. No button labels is fine because there are only four buttons to choose from. Not having more function buttons means not having to think about taking advantage of more buttons. Easier to remember the functionality of four buttons than seven or more buttons which have white type on them but can be changed to be something else. Now that's confusing.

My second reason to like the older camera better in actual use is that it cost me 1/3rd the price. If I accidentally destroy it I'll only cry one third as much and I'll replace it two thirds quicker.

After using the SL with all my different lenses the one I like best for just strolling and shooting at random is the 45mm f2.8 Sigma. It looks perfectly matched to the camera, creates very nice looking photographs and is small and light. It's a lens made for fun. Bigger, heavier lenses are made for business. Or super serious art. 

As far as aesthetics go I prefer the bare metal front of the SL over the leather trim on the front of the SL2. 

It's all silly I guess, since all the cameras I have at hand are really good photography instruments. Each has its own strengths. From the Fuji X100vs to the S1R. 

But we're still winnowing down the overall inventory. Trying to decide if it makes sense to slim down the camera body selection a bit more.... We'll see. 

Back to thinking about cars for the rest of the day.