Weird Lenses Can Be Happy Lenses.

 

I went on a vacation last November and I took a deep breath and only took one camera and one lens. It was a stretch; especially for a guy who has enough lenses to outfit a camera club. I wanted to travel light, pay more attention to my best friend and partner, and really just experience the city directly. Sometimes the gear can really get in the way. It becomes a focus and then a burden. 

It all sounds good, the minimalization of gear, when you are discussing it with another photographer/friend over coffee on a rainy and bleak afternoon. But then, the day before you leave, you find yourself packing and re-packing. Pulling stuff out of your luggage and replacing it with something else. I probably did five rounds of choosing the day before we were scheduled to fly out. 

Zooms seemed too big and too wishy-washy. As in "make up your mind already!" And if I chose wide angles I'd spend the trip seeing nothing but long shots. If I took a short telephoto lens I'd spend the trip dreaming of normal lenses. And then there is the whole issue of cameras. If I'd had the Q2 at that point it would have easily been my camera of choice because 30+ megapixels at 35mm and 15+ megapixels at 50mm would have been fine and dandy with me. 

In the end I chose the Voigtlander 40mm f1.4 lens made for Leica M mount. I used an M to L adapter to fit onto a Panasonic S5. It was all just so perfect. 

Having no choice but what I had in my hands my brain stopped wishing for other focal lengths (and other camera bodies) and just got down to business. It was a good exercise in giving up control to a great extent. I'll do it again soon. But I'm still going to go through the packing decision overload trauma drama the night before we leave on the next adventure just for the hell of it. It was kind of fun; in a masochistic sort of way. 

No filters on the lens. Just filter settings in the L. mono. D profile in camera. Juicy skies were my reward.

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...