Woke up in a weird mood and went eccentric on my camera and lens choices today. But it was....fun.

 

I took the day off from everything today. Slept in. Skipped swim practice (there will be hell to pay!). Ate a late breakfast. Rummaged through the gear and decided to spend my late morning and early afternoon moseying around downtown and S. Congress Ave. with what might seem like an odd combination; a Leica CL camera and the intriguing Sigma 65mm f2.0 Contemporary lens. The "equivalent" focal length in 35mm-speak would be about 97mm, so a delicious short telephoto length, which seemed just right for a gray and plodding day. 

I've enjoyed using the lens in the past on full frame and thought it would be a hoot to use it wide open for most of my downtown dalliance. I did get conservative a time or two and stop down to f2.8.

It was a long walk in new hiking boots. A bit dumb. My two outside toes on my left foot were screaming by the time I got back to the high performance studio limo (Subaru Forster). 

The CL is not optimized for the Sigma 65mm, or vice versa, so when you mount the lens and turn on the camera you get a message warning you that the battery meter/indicator/scale will not be accurate and this implies that the combo will burn through batteries quicker...than a bunny. (Couldn't help it...).

I banged away for about three hours with one battery but when the battery tossed in the towel I thought the timing was fortuitous and decided to toss mine in as well. 

Stepping out of character I brought along extra stuff. Not that I ever used it or needed it. But I wasn't sure I'd be happy shooting everything at the long end. I've been getting used to the 28mm lens on the Q2 and bouncing up to a 97mm I thought would be a bit jarring. So I took along a very small backpack packed with a lightweight rain jacket, a handkerchief, an extra hat, my phone (weird to carry that around !!!), a Sigma fp with a Voigtlander 40mm, a Sigma 35mm f2.0 and a Sigma 24mm f3.5. Some bail money...just in case. My Kershaw Leek, Black Wash pocketknife, and my copy of NWP 3.05.2 Naval Special Warfare SEAL Tactics guidebook. Just for some light reading --- if I had to wait on my coffee order. 

I didn't use anything in the backpack but it was nice to know everything I might need was close at hand.

This was basically a day for just getting out and walking with the idea of testing the CL+65mm thrown in as an afterthought.  Still, it was really nice to see how well the Sigma and the Leica played together. It's a great combination for portraits in the APS-C format. I'll need to remember that. 

Electric Scooter Tours. A motley crew today...

checking out the blue response. Not bad. Not bad.

I like most bandit posters that get put up around town.

This one got plastered on a wall at the building that my favorite ad agency, Hixo, used to 

occupy. And a runner up agency after that, The Sherry Matthews Agency. 

Now purchased by someone else and empty. 

No idea who Annie Bing is but not motivated to Google it...

A big thank you to the Yeti store on Congress at Riverside 

for the generous use of their well appointed and sparkling clean 

restroom facilities. And a clean mirror with which to facilitate 

selfie-izing myself. Nice hat.

There were two lines at this location today.

One was waiting to do photographs in front of the "I love you so much" 

grafitti on the wall of Jo's Coffee. 

The bigger line was actually for Jo's Coffee. 

Yes. Jo's Coffee. To go. 

One bystander who found both the coffee enthusiasm and the adoration of wall

grafitti a bit boring... Ready to go do something else....

Selling hats from the back of an old 1969 Chevy pick-up truck. 

Cyclist not looking at the camera.

Cyclist looking at the camera. 

The human fetish for offering strange dogs their hands...

Crossing the bridge over the lake/river that separates downtown from S. Austin.

Angle one. 

Angle two. 

Yes. Of course. Austin is known for the healthy habits of the inhabitants...

Practicing self surveillance. Hard to run an SDR on yourself...

An exceptionally stupid shot in which I try to make the idea of the closest work light being in focus and everything else out of focus seem somehow interesting and poignant. And failing miserably.

Last shot of the day. Why this? Because I think the 65mm was begging for a chance to show me

how much better it is than the other less stellar lenses I've used to photograph exactly the same scene and so that some critic can chime in and tell me he hates my abandoned building shots. 

Can't wait to pillory the perpetrator. 

And that's the afternoon in a nutshell. 

The cure for sore feet? slip into your Birkenstocks and become 

painfree in moments. Wear them with socks to torment 

the fashion fixated. 

Earlier today I showed a gallery of color images from yesterday's adventures in the neighborhood across from the UT campus....

 

...and I mentioned that when I was photographing I had the camera set to record both a DNG file (the  color version) and a large Jpeg file (the B&W version). Instead of using the color controls in Lightroom to make conversions from the color files it was my intention to use the direct-from-camera black and white Jpegs when making a gallery. And that's what I've done here. 

Some of the shots may look familiar because they are captured at the same instant to the camera but each version is representative of either the DNG file or the Jpeg. 

I have applied a basic preset to them because the one thing I think most out-of-camera black and white images need is a bit more contrast --- especially in the middle ranges of the tone scale. That, and a bit of opening for the shadows --- which is handily taken care of with the shadow recovery slider in LR.

I figured that since I was capturing in B&W and seeing the potential images in B&W in the EVF it would be a good idea to share them with you. There's a lot of detail in the files so if you can be sure to look at them on a monitor instead of your phone. It's a better way to see what my actual intention was......

Funny to be able to make three cogent posts out of an hour of photography; and to also come away with a group of images that I like...

How does that CL + 56mm f1.4 work for you? Skycapes, etc. No full frame. No IBIS. No PDAF. No Problem.

 

The last frame of the day...

Are these what they call "Bokeh Balls"?

Black and white camera response. A quick outing to test a theory...

 

The past couple of months have seen a lot of discussions about black and white photography. Michael Johnston is exploring a camera that's been converted to shoot exclusively in monochrome while YouTube is consistently buzzing with trials of the Leica Q2 and M10 Monochrom cameras that are engineered to photograph only in black, white and shades of gray.

On a theoretical level I think I would enjoy a monochrome camera but I'm not yet convinced that they are a must in order to make good, solid black and white images. 

I've been shooting black and white images with three different cameras lately and finding that the in-camera settings are very close to the way I like to see black and white photographs. While many cameras have B&W settings most seem only to strip out the saturation from color files and present that as the finished result. Some allow for filter settings which are emulations of the way some film emulsions reacted to yellow, green, orange and red filters. Fuji cameras are capable of being set up to emulate a number of classic black and white film looks and there is even a website that delivers a free app you can stick on your phone to dial in the settings for a pretty convincing look. Right down to the grain. That was one aspect of the Fuji X100V that I truly enjoyed!!! That camera does a very nice Tri-X imitation.

With the most recent Leicas the engineers seem to have paid close attention to the way in which most people like to see black and white files. When I use the "BW HC" setting on the Q2, the CL or the SL2 there is a boosted contrast but there is also some sort of filter emulation going on that makes the look of the file different from the look I get if I just shoot color and then kill the saturation. Leica seems to have modified the spectral response of various colors to derive a filtered look that I find very pleasing. 

The files above were shot with a Leica CL, equipped with a 56mm f1.4 Sigma Contemporary lens. I shot everything around f2.0 and I shot in DNG+Jpeg with the Jpeg files set to BW HC. 

These three photographs were taken in early evening down on the main street that runs North and South next to the UT campus. The clouds yesterday were beautiful and I wanted to capture that. I also like buildings and skies.

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My real reason for being over by the campus was to offer a counterpoint to a friend's unhappy text. He'd been trying his hand at street photography and decided that the younger generation had become so paranoid about photography, social media, pedophilia, etc. that it is almost impossible to photograph people in the street. He claimed that he got the "stink eye" from dozens and dozens of people just for walking down the street with a camera. He felt their suspicions of him were palpable. And his style is not a wide angle, close-up, in your face style either. 

Even in the diciest of neighborhoods around Austin I've never felt that this kind of reaction is really the case and after I read his text I grabbed a camera and headed over to the same area to walk around the same shops and fast food restaurants to see if culture had really morphed that much. Did everything change while I wasn't paying attention?  My contention being that people have not changed much and that they represent a feedback loop for your own attitude. A mirror.

I photographed for half an hour or so and got about ten photo scenarios in which people knew I was photographing and including them in the frames but either smiled or just went about their business unaffected. I sent the images along to my friend to make my point. 

Then, of course, it dawned on me how different our personalities are and how different our methodologies are. He's an introvert, I'm a far to the edge of the scale extrovert. He's not fond of interacting with people. I live for it. He tried to be a bit secretive when photographing on the street while I'm pretty much continuously broadcasting that I've got a camera in my hands and I like using it. Since this kind of work is really more or less a big mirror I see most people as open and gracious. He sees them as closed and protective. 

But whatever you believe that's what you project. And whatever you project is what you get back.

I think one benefit of having your hair turn white and wearing wool socks with your Birkenstocks is that young college students tend to identify you as a retired, grandfatherly figure whose retirement hobby is photography. Most of the people I encounter are quick to give a (mildly patronizing) smile and nod. It's all about what one projects. 

I'm happy to photograph just about anywhere. Below is a photo I took while taking a break for a cappuccino. I was photographing the two women sitting at the bar. We'd had a quick conversation when I was waiting for my coffee and I liked their energy. The out of focus guys in the foreground were discussing video production when I took the shot. When they saw the camera aimed in their direction they smiled and waved. I walked over and apologized for photo-bombing them into my shot. We all had a chuckle and then, a minute later we were deep into a discussion about which mirrorless system to buy into for general, day-to-day video production. Strangers are just friends you haven't (formally) met yet. 

coffee at Medici, on the Drag.

On the way home I wondered how the same location could yield such vastly different vibes. The answer, I think, lies in what you bring with you.