Learning to enjoy the hot afternoons. Bring comfortable shoes. New 100°F workshops!!! Learn how to suffer better. Sponsored by Gruff and Associates, Experts in Provocation.

 

Finished painting the fence this morning, ate left over Father's Day BBQ for lunch and then got bored with staying indoors. Grabbed some comfortable sandals, the Leica CL with the 23mm f1.4 lens and one of those obnoxious hats and drove downtown. The heat wasn't that bad. You learn to walk on the sides of the streets with the most shade. Seems obvious but it's taken me a lot of tries to get it right.

At the end of the walk I found myself at REI buying my favorite REI t-shirts because they were on clearance sale. Still too expensive but whatcha gonna do? I bought six more. They're soft and cool. They're UPF 50. They wick moisture. They're antimicrobial. And did I mention they were on sale?

Today's exercise was to figure out how I make the skies in my urban landscapes so nice and dark. I didn't set anything special so I have to tell you that I don't have a clue. Maybe I'm generating some sort of electro-magnetic field that makes skies bold and sassy. Or maybe all those "elitist scum yuppie Leica owners" are actually on to something here. Who knows?

We took the day off from "real" work but the week looks like non-stop post production. I guess it could be a lot worse.

Go snap up a Leica CL before they disappear altogether. Or wait five years until everyone decides they've become collector's items and you can snap one up for twice the price. But don't forget to buy the super-cheap TTArtisan lenses to go with yours. That's the secret magic ingredient. 

B. Scolded me last year when I told her I was thinking about Crypto. 

Since she scares me a little because she's so smart I decided not to 

take the plunge. I asked her about it again  in January but she was too

busy shorting the market overall to answer me....

And if you believe in Crypto I'm here to tell you that Lawrence Welk had the 

presidential election stolen from him back in 1956.

no. The sky was not stripped in...

A mannequin with intensity.

Austin City Limits drops the hammer on cellphone addled fans.

and one in color as the "control group".

Seen around town in black and white. Plus...."wealthy" suburbanites painting residential fencing...

 

Seen in black and white on the streets and in the galleries of Austin, Texas.

I'm really enjoying photographing in black and white, in the streets of Austin,  across a selection of fun cameras. The Leicas have the fewest controls or settings for their monochrome settings but seem to do a great job of rendering black and white images with the tones I like best. Who knows why? (And that's not really a rhetorical question...). 

Today is too freakin hot to care about technical details and the "pursuit of perfection" so I'm making do with the little (and lightweight) Leica CL, paired up with a TTArtisans 23mm f1.4. And I may switch that lens out for the Sigma Contemporary 24mm f3.5 just so I don't have to waste the energy focusing for myself. 

Like many other Americans we're currently roasting in place with a high pressure dome overhead and record heat all around us. We're in good shape to "weather"  it if we stay inside but I'm already suffering from permanent cabin fever and I'll go out walking this afternoon; at least for a little while...

In a related story, I did "blue collar" work today. We've been trying to get our wooden fence repainted this year. Sure, the costs/charges have gone up a lot since the times before the pandemic, but our biggest issue is that the labor market in Austin is all screwed up. House repair and maintenance demands are at an all time high and the myriad waiting lists for.....everything are untenable. 

For example. In the Fall we ordered new windows for the house. It took nearly four months to get them built and delivered to Austin but another two months to get on the schedule with the company's installers. Half a year for a dozen windows.  Used to be two weeks. 

I finally got tired of looking out of our new windows at the ever-weathering fence and decided that I'd just do it myself. I've been getting up each morning at 6 a.m. for the past couple of weeks to get in a few hours of painting before swim practice. I finished today. We don't swim on Mondays. The pool is closed for maintenance. So I wrapped up with a marathon painting session and even remembered to clean all the brushes. 

I guess physical labor can be fun. I don't find that to be the case for myself. I'll work harder in the future to sock away more cash to trade for someone else's time doing that kind of work. I think I'm more productive when I'm taking photos. Not when I'm (carefully) sloshing paint on a fence and trying to schedule the work around staying out of the brunt of the heat. 

But someone had to do it. And those waiting lists....

In another related story I discussed with a long time restaurant owner on Friday, the unintended consequences of every economic action. She's had a tough time staying in business. Her vendors are being hit by everything from a shortage of truck drivers to the ever escalating cost of diesel fuel (which has gone up more dramatically than gasoline). The prices they charge her have gone up. Some dramatically.

It's harder than ever to retain employees even if you are paying unskilled people twice the minimum wage and offering some benefits. But on Thursday the city of Austin announced that they were raising the lowest tier city worker wages to $22 per hour + benefits. A good thing for workers but another blow to small businesses.

Most people believe that working for any part of any government is easier and cushier than working in the private sector so now lifeguards, gardeners, parking ticket issuers and many others will start at the new wages with the city and create yet another huge diversion of workers out of the service industries and into "public service." My client's prices will have to go up if she is to stay in business. 

But with all the talk of a pending recession and the collapse of various financial markets the customers she is counting on are tightening belts, learning to cook at home, reining in non-critical credit card expenses and generally becoming highly price raise resistant. It's anything BUT a virtuous circle...

It's at times like these that not having employees seems to have been a wonderfully wise decision. And it seems that even something as droll as painting one's own fence is a decent strategy for capital conservation. And a quick way to ruin a pair of pants...

It's a changing world. 

Finally....Texas Republicans. Really? "Thoughts and Prayers" that Texas survives the colossal vitriol and obvious insanity of the State GOP. Just astoundingly evil. You can't make some of this stuff up!

I've been cleaning out the studio. I looked in some boxes I hadn't gone through in half a dozen years. I found lots and lots of prints.

At one point in my photo-trajectory I had a habit of printing my favorite frame from every job or project. The only exception was the typical "headshots." Nobody really needed to see large prints of modern office workers standing or siting in front of seamless backgrounds. But everything that looked good to me as a print got the treatment. 

My process was simple. I'd select a frame, do a bit of post processing that would make images look better on printing paper and then send them over to my local Costco to be printed on their lustre surface paper at a uniform and mostly uncropped size of 12 by 18 inches. If I was impatient or just wanted to see what variations might look like I'd fire up the inkjet printer and make prints on Canon's Photo Paper Pro Platinum or Lustre. I always had the idea that the process of printing all the work I liked would quickly give me a huge variety of really nice photographs that I could place into custom configured portfolios when needed. 

But over time I realized that I never got around to showing a book anymore and that all the art directors and creative directors I wanted to work with were more than happy to go to my website and look around there. So now I have storage boxes upon storage boxes and hundreds and hundreds of large prints that I can't bear to throw out. I still like most of the images very much. 

It's fun to look through the boxes and shuffle through the prints. I can see the evolution of digital cameras over time but, also the disappointing realization that, in these sizes, the quality differences between the 24 and 36 megapixel cameras and the more "primitive" 6 megapixels cameras comes nowhere near to matching the hysteric promises and marketing of camera makers and their legions of reviewing minions. 

I guess if we all shot everything in very, very dark settings, and needed all of our printed pieces to be made as large 48 by 60 inch murals, you could make a decent case for the constant camera upgrade mania but if you are a rational human being (rare) and you can put images shot decades apart side by side for evaluation you'll most likely be disappointed to discover that every dollar spent after a certain point was just money being tossed onto a hot fire. 

In the images I randomly tossed in to fill out the visual component of today's blog there is an older (2012 era) micro four thirds camera represented, an older Nikon APS-C camera, a Canon 5Dmk2 camera, a Nikon D2X camera, and even a Fuji S5 camera. But laid out on the floor, adjacent to each other, each printed image looks sharp, mostly noise free and aptly color balanced. Much more alike than they are different.

Of the prints here the one of the kids is the one I like best. And it was taken with a camera most would consider the least competent. Sometimes perspective can be both valuable and a bit painful...

And in book publishing news.....

 https://www.kut.org/life-arts/2022-06-13/bringing-us-together-the-ann-richards-legacy-project-releases-new-book-the-one-ann-only

Gov. Ann Richards. ©Kirk Tuck

I appreciated being included in the writer's very short list of photographers along with Annie Leibovitz and Ave Bonar.

A Couple More Indulgent Pix on Father's Day. No text.

 

Happy Father's Day.

 The greatest gift I think a parent; a father, can receive is the success of their children. Raising smart, kind, curious, and bright children into adulthood is a project that is by turns a frightening responsibility and ultimately rewarding. There are always stumbles along the way but it's the aggregate result that matters. 

Ben is 26. He's happily employed in a job that's near the cutting edge of high technology. He's financially successful and a good steward of his own future. He runs. He bikes. He climbs rocks. He analyzes and writes for a living. He is surrounded by friends.

And on Sunday evenings he comes over to our house for dinner and conversation, and a recap of his week. And many times he makes us all dinner. He is a much better fish cook than his mom or me. He makes great salmon dishes. He's adept at making Brussel sprouts in many different, novel and delicious ways. 

And that's really all I ever dreamed of having on Father's Day.

Let's talk about black and white in the age of digital. It's no big deal to do.

A reader complimented the black and white images I posted yesterday. Another reader asked about my black and white technique. I've always liked black and white photographs very much and spent about 25 years going in and out of my own darkroom, making black and white prints of all the personal work I was making. In one way it was easier to make good black and white work in the "paper" darkroom because so much of the aesthetic heavy lifting was done by the variety and different "looks" of the photo print papers available at the time. And the wonderful and varied tonal renderings of films like Tri-X or Agfapan APX 25. Before the web got popular it seemed, at least to me, easy to lose myself and lose track of time working on a series of nice, double-weight prints. I'd work on images I loved for hours and sometimes would look down at my watch to see that it was 2 in the morning and I had been printing since just after dinner...

I find that it's harder for me to go out now with a camera that's set for shooting raw files, and shooting them in color, and actually visualize how they'll look at black and white images that I'd want to share. My brain really prefers it when I go out with the intention that the final result of my effort will be in black and white. With that in mind, and knowing I have a limited imagination when it comes to previsualilzing things like monochrome results or after-shot cropping, I decide at the outset that I'm going to work in black and white. 

I set the camera to shoot Jpegs and then I adjust the very few controls on my Leica cameras that allow me to shoot the files in black and white. On the camera I used yesterday; a Leica SL, I go into the Jpeg Settings menu and, under saturation, I choose: "monochrome." Then I turn up the contrast. There are only really three settings for contrast in that camera which interest me. There is the null point; the neutral position. There is "medium high" (which is the setting I choose for normal daylight work -- direct sun, etc.) and there is one more step: "high" which I only use on very cloudy and overcast days.

There is also a sharpness setting with the same course choices: Medium, Medium High and High. Again, I default to Medium High almost always.

Now, I understand that most pundits on the web advise photographers and videographers to use low contrast settings and even lower sharpness settings with the idea that all will be fixed and optimized on post processing but I'd rather see it in my camera while I'm making the images. It seems more efficient and, for want of a better explanation, braver to me to try to get close to what you want to see in the viewfinder. 

There is no option to set color filters in the Leicas that I shoot with. That option does exist in the Lumix S1 series cameras and in my (wonderful) Sigma fp but they never seem to have much effect, or more importantly, the effect I want to see when I use them.

I generally import the files into Lightroom Classic to get them into my system and to archive them. To my eye all the images benefit from an increase in "clarity".  I'm liberal with the slider and dial in between 15 and 40 points of clarity for most street scenes and landscapes. I am usually more prudent with portraits. 

I don't have the option to use the HSL settings as I've made my stand to monochrome in the camera. I could only make color channel adjustments with a color file. I can use the color temperature sliders to make the final image warmer or cooler, greener or more magenta. But those are options that are not too useful for the way I like to see my photographs in final form. Though I did play with color temperature on several images in yesterday's batch.

Portraits benefit from a bit more contrast and the addition of some fabricated grain. 

This image was taken several years ago when the big "Sail" buildings was just getting started. This is infrastructure below ground level. I have photos from the inception; from the digging of the enormous pit to the final fitting of door knobs and hand rails on the newly unveiled entrance doors. 

This image has some "clarity" added but is otherwise as it came from the camera. 

The image just above had some contrast added and the exposure was increased from 

the original setting in post production.

Gloomy and rainy days beg for more contrast and clarity. But it's important not to go overboard with contrast to the point where the darker tones block up. A judicious use of the clarity slider and the shadow recovery slider, in tandem, is sometimes called for....

I'm a simple photographer so I try not to make more, and more complicated, work for myself in post production. I also prefer to roam the streets looking for interesting stuff than to spend too 

much time micro-processing every square centimeter of an image. If you didn't get it 

mostly right in camera chances of making radical improvements in the "digital darkroom" are negligible. 

See first. Fix as a last resort. 

Hope this is helpful. 

Happy Father's Day.